the third sex

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I was shooting a video of Jeuw a few days ago, and I asked her what she was doing nowadays. The last time I had met her, a year ago, she had been working in a Patpong music bar as a singer. She told me she was now a sales promoter and demonstrator in a large department store: one of those girls who hands out product samples and then offers you the product at a bargain price. “But I still go Patpong sometimes,” she said with a big smile.

This in turn made me smile. I could well imagine her, nicely made-up and very feminine, being an efficient sales promoter. Jeuw is slightly built and she looks and sounds good, and could easily pass as a genetic girl. What, I wondered, would shoppers think if they discovered that underneath that neat little corporate dress she had a neat little dick that was very active? Or that the previous evening she had been stripping in front of me and wanking off for my movie camera, and that her video would be seen all over the world?

I do like the idea of having a secret life. I have one myself. Very few people other than the ladyboy community know what I do, and to most people I am just an ordinary bloke who seems at times to be feverishly busy for no discernible reason.

Jeuw’s own secret life has her sneaking off to Patpong after a hard day schmoozing shoppers, where she hopes to entice a wealthy farang to give her a quick one up the rear entry. Come to think of it, her sales technique is equally invaluable in both jobs.

Taking this idea of a secret life even further, I bet there aren’t too many people who know that you are reading this. Or that you like ladyboys, or at least that you like the idea of ladyboys. We are, after all, very sensitive about the impressions others form about us. This is particularly the case with our sexual preferences. I remember, after first discovering ladyboys, making an unwise mention of my experience in a London pub. After that, I kept my lip buttoned for years until the internet came along, when to my great surprise I discovered there were a lot of other people around who had similar experiences, and tastes, as myself.

I remember too a few years ago a wealthy friend organising a party in his Bangkok penthouse, to which he invited a select number of friends and a whole bar-full of Nana Plaza girls (genetic girls, I mean). The evening predictably turned into an orgy, with most of his guests quite willing to be seen by their friends doing what comes naturally with the girls.

My wealthy friend, who was also heavily into ladyboys, as were a significant number of his party guests, next announced that he was going to hold a similar event the following month at which he would employ only ladyboys. Despite the personal inclinations of most of those invited, no one wanted to attend. The party was cancelled.

Lesson: Guys are quite happy for their friends to see them fucking a genetic girl but are distinctly shy about being seen playing with a ladyboy’s cock. We all have our little secrets, and are quite happy to see them remain that way.

Following on from Sargeant Shameless’s posting last week, I thought I would add my two bahts’ worth on the increasing popularity of ladyboy bars.

They date back only to the early-mid Nineties. KC3, which had been the original King’s Castle girlie go-go bar, became a ladyboy bar round about 1993-94. I had used it as my regular Patpong watering hole for many years before that, when it was GGs only, and it was a good bar. I used to make a habit of calling in directly after work, walking up from the office on Silom Road and plonking myself down by happy coincidence just as the girls were arriving. I would sit in the bar, which would be almost empty, while they got changed: there wasn’t enough room in the toilets, which doubled as their changing rooms, so they peeled off in the bar. They certainly weren’t shy, and it was the best free show in town.

I used to enjoy chatting and joking with them, and I also got to know about technicalities, such as the fact the girls actually had to clock in. There was a clock in one of the neighbouring restaurants, I think it was the Derby King, and they had to punch a card before they went into the bar. It might well be there still: some things don’t change much in Patpong.

King’s Castle was the most popular bar, as it had the most and the best girls. The King’s Castle group expanded, opening King’s Castle I and II on the other side of the soi, and the original was switched to ladyboys. At around the same time a ladyboy bar named Limelight opened up in Patpong a few doors down. These were the first two bars in Thailand to go ladyboy-only. Before that time, if you wanted some third-sex company the girlie go-go bars generally had a couple they could produce if you asked. The drinks bars sometimes had one or two on the payroll. Other than this, you waited for the freelancers to arrive in Patpong, congregating outside Foodland shortly before midnight.

In these early days there wasn’t much happening over at Nana Plaza. It was a shopping complex that didn’t work out, and I don’t know when it became a bar area. My own first visit there was about 1992, when it was beginning to become popular. I’ve no idea when Casanova opened. Soi Cowboy, meanwhile, was a homely, shabby kind of place with homely, shabby girls and you seldom found a ladyboy there.

The next big ladyboy bar venture was at Clinton Plaza, on Sukhumvit, not far from the Asoke Junction. This was about 2001. A hotel is now being built on the site, although it hasn’t progressed that much over the past year and I’m wondering if there are problems with the funding. The Crack House in Clinton Plaza was one of the best ladyboy bars ever. It had a nice decor, for one thing. For another, it had a whole stage-full of gorgeous ladyboys: so many they had to cram together and there was barely room for them to dance. Many former freelancers were drawn to this place, enticed by a regular salary and congenial surroundings, rather than the hardness of the streets.

Sadly, Clinton Plaza closed down in the style that is so familiar in Thailand, with owners locked out of their premises, and staff literally out on the street.

Obsession opened at exactly this time, and drew many of the Crack House ladyboys into its employ. I never went much on the atmosphere of the place: it always seemed so glum and cold. But there was no doubting the quality of the girls, and Obsession has arguably become the benchmark of the city’s ladyboy bars.

Nowadays, as the Sargeant points out, you are spoiled for choice. Patpong’s two most popular bars are ladyboy. At Nana Plaza there are four ladyboy bars, employing between them a huge choice of very attractive girls. All these bars do very good business: they would soon close if they didn’t. But if you look at the girlie bars, the situation is different.

Walk into any of the go-go bars in Patpong or Nana, and although they have good nights and bad nights, the girls and the mamsans there will tell you the business is right down. This is especially so in Patpong: Nana still does relatively well.

Why is this happening? The Sargeant puts his own opinions forward. I would add that there are several other factors. Whereas once you could go into a GG bar in Patpong and be overwhelmed by the beauty of the girls dancing, nowadays you see only a few attractive ones and a lot of real clunkers. The music is almost invariably bad: only the Safari plays decent music, the rest play the kind of stuff that gives you a headache and if there are only a few customers they will play Thai music if they think they can get away with it.

Then there is the soullessness of so many of the bars. I gave up going to one GG bar because every time I walked in I would be greeted by the same girl with the same “hellowhatyournamewhereyoucomefromyoubuyonedrinkforme” schtick. There was nothing going on behind the eyes, no form of recognition. I had started to steel myself against this as I entered the place, and that was a sign it was time to take my business elsewhere.

Ladyboy bars, especially the go-go bars, offer the frisson of excitement that the girlie bars used to offer. The sense of the unknown, the forbidden, the exotic, even the dangerous. And, let’s face it, many of the ladyboys you see up on the stage dancing are heartbreakingly beautiful.

Customers who go to ladyboy bars behave in a different way to those who visit girlie bars. The latter are out to get drunk, ogle the girls, and possibly, maybe, end up with one at the end of the night, if they remember to do so. Those who go to ladyboy bars are going for a very specific reason. They quite positively do not want to get drunk. They want to take a ladyboy out, and they want to do so as quickly and as discretely as they can. They may themselves have only one drink but they will readily splash out on a few drinks for the gaggle of ladyboys that comes up to their table, mainly to get rid of them. They will be generous with tips to the mamasan who offers advice and help, and to the cashiers. Having made their choice of companion, they pay the bar fine and off they go. Probably only for a short time, allowing their escort time to get back and repeat the cycle while they themselves go out and get blissfully, solitarily drunk.

Although the ladyboy bar customer would appear to be a less lucrative proposition than the beer-swiller, he is not. Weigh up the profit margin on a girlie drink as against a beer. The retail price is about the same, but the girlie drinks, usually a Coke or an orange juice, will cost almost nothing in raw materials and give almost 100 percent margin. I don’t know what the profit margin on a beer is, but I would hazard a guess at 25 percent. Add the bar fine into this, and the ladyboy bar customer is a profitable one. 

That might sound modest, but how many customers does a bar have during the course of one night? I don’t know but say it’s a hundred. Each spending 1,000 baht, most of which is profit. How many ladyboys on the payroll, at 8,000 baht a month? Say fifty. So your payroll is covered in less than a week, your rent, supplies and squeeze in another two weeks. You have a week’s income in clear profit. Twenty-five percent. A healthy margin for most restaurants and bars. Hence the increasing number of ladyboy venues.

As I’ve said before on this page, the fame of the ladyboy is spreading far and wide. I now know of people who visit Thailand purely for the ladyboys. That was not happening 15 years ago. This kind of business is going to increase, and believe me, the huge number of ladyboys now available in Thailand is ready, willing, and able to meet the demand. We can cheerfully expect more ladyboy bars to open, in Bangkok and elsewhere, and I for one am very happy indeed at the prospect.

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I consider myself to be a normal, heterosexual male. I like to think that in appearance I am conventional enough (albeit devilishly handsome) and that my mannerisms, speech and so on are all those of an ordinary Englishman of a certain age.

I’m not gay, and as far as I know I don’t have any characteristics that might indicate that I am. I’m not effeminate, not camp, not prone to hissy fits or bitching. I have an obsession about Thai ladyboys, that’s all. I’m an ordinary bloke who loves girls and who especially loves girls who have something a little extra. And quite frankly, given the beauty of some of the Thai third sex, I don’t blame me.

But a few days ago, something happened that made me pause to think.

I was shooting a video of a ladyboy, Jane. Jane was very nervous and when we started the shoot she was chattering to me, trying to overcome her nerves. That was okay by me. But then she asked me if I was a man.

I laughed, and if you watch the clip here you can see the camera shaking. I thought at the time she may have mangled her words and that she was telling me she was a man. But when I played the video back on the screen, there she was asking quite distinctly, in Thai and then in English: “Khun pen pu chai labao? You a man?”

What on earth prompted the question? I couldn’t figure it out. If I was a more insecure soul I might have started worrying.

I wrote about this on the log page on the main site, and in addition to some predictably ribald emails I had one member contact me with what seems now to be the likely meaning behind Jane’s question.

He said that perhaps she was asking me if I was straight. In conversation with a couple of Thai genetic girls recently, he said that they were referring to straight men as “men” and gay men simply as “gays”.

This should have occurred to me, perhaps, and in the inverse logic of the ladyboy it makes sense.

Ladyboys regard themselves as female. Any man who is attracted to them, if you follow this line of reasoning, is therefore straight. A gay man is not interested in ladyboys, because ladyboys are feminine. Gays are interested in masculine qualities.

Ergo, by being attracted to Jane, I was a man.

It does bear out my inner feelings. And it does seem accurate when I think of the gay friends I have, none of whom have ever expressed any interest in ladyboys.

I found all this reassuring. Until I read another email from a member who had been in Phuket, and had spent time with a beautiful post-op. During the course of their relationship, he said he had told her that he actually preferred pre-op ladyboys. In that case, she had replied, you must be a homosexual.

You really can’t win. But as I said on this site a long time ago, when it comes to ladyboys, conventional logic goes out the window.

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Sargent Shameless really can be a thoughtful, intelligent kind of fellow. Oh yes he can! Alright. ALRIGHT! You wouldn’t trust him with your household cat! But he is capable of deep thinking and analysis. Sometimes. He has just sent me the following email, and I’m reproducing it here because it’s a subject that I myself have touched on before but not at length. And he does put it so well.

My first trip to Bangkok was in 1993 and I was not looking for sex. Still I was in awe at the high numbers of semi-naked (and fully naked) girls dancing and waiting to be bar-fined in any of the establishments of Patpong, Nana, or Cowboy.  Dance shifts of 20 girls were the minimum, which times two, plus waitresses, doorgirls and mamasan meant 50 plus prospective lays the moment you crossed a go-go door.  Ladyboy bars were the opposite: there were only a couple that I knew of with no more than a dozen staff each.
 
My impression over the past few years is that things are fast changing in Bangkok.  When I peek into the girlie bars in Patpong I often see as few as three girls on stage, and the same for Nana.  Also, there is little chance of finding a stunner or an 18-year-old fresh from the farm like in the old days. Completely naked girls dancing the night away are the exception (although they still exist!). 
 
Not sure why this happening…Probably economic progress like how Hong Kong up to the 1950s used to be like Bangkok and then it changed to what it is today: few bars, expensive drinks and ugly women, who will not agree to sex or, if they do, charge princely sums. 

Demographics may be at work too: birth rates have fallen sharply in Thailand over the last two decades, which means fewer girls around to go into the sex industry.  Another possible explanation is that Thai girls who do go into the sex industry prefer other venues like the Pattaya beer bars that are as well staffed as ever.
 
In contrast to the girlie go-go bars, Bangkok ladyboy bars are flourishing.  Patpong´s greatest hits are its two ladyboy go-go bars, Nana has at least four, with one of them showcasing 50 plus gorgeous ladyboys every night.  Not to mention that some of the remaining girls in the girlie bars are actually…post-op ladyboys.
 
The underlying trend in all of this is that more and more male foreigners seeking sex in Bangkok will end up doing it with a Thai (lady)boy whether they are so inclined or because available girls are fewer and less attractive.  In Pattaya as well there are more and more ladyboy venues, even if its classic beer bars with all-female staff seem to be at an all-time high.
 
In view of this, the questions I ask myself are: how long do we have left?…  If indeed the flow of girls into Thailand´s sex bars comes to a trickle, how long before Thailand becomes like Hong Kong?…And if it does, will our cherished ladyboys step in for the disappearing bargirls and fuel the dreams and libidos of yet another generation of foreign male visitors?