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Thailand: For Men Only


They have much further to progress in their quest to attain Nirvana. Buddhist monks are treated with a fierce respect. Nuns are not considered to be holy. (Steinfatt, Thomas M. Working at the Bar. 85). Monks are forbidden the temptation of innocently touching a female body (not even bumping into a female on a crowded bus). They must remain pure. This is true and active in present day Thailand. During my stay, my Thai friend Toh became a monk for six months, as most young Thai men do. He told me before he began that he would not be permitted to converse with a woman unless other people were present. The simple presence of a woman was too much enticement for a man to be expected to resist thinking sexually of her. This same sort of ideology is strongly held by Thais on many different cultural levels. .
             Thais often have several wives, called Mia Luang Mia Nouy, or major wife, minor wives. Thiphak'orawong, author of a late 19th-Century defense of polygamy, wrote "[it is] the role of man to initiate sexual contact while the role of women is to passively acquiesce- (Barme. Bangkok. 158). Yet the concept of polygamy has far from died out. In 1999, one of the most popular programs on Thai television was an adaptation of a novel called Mia Luang, about a Thai man's major wife dealing with her philanthropist husband (Barme. Bangkok. 157). Thai people of both sexes generally believe that a man has stronger sexual desires than a woman, and his right to satisfy them in a variety of arenas usually goes unchallenged. Scholar Thomas Steinfatt describes Thai men's promiscuity as "understood and expected- (Steinfatt. Working. 93). With these concrete and established social constructs, it becomes easier to understand bar-work and prostitution as a form of sexual liberation. The prostitution in Thailand is a reflection of the prostitution of women in Thai society.
             While undoubtedly, the prostitution industry in Thailand is largely based on economics (it is one of Thailand's largest industries), the issue that I am focusing on is how prostitution relates to the status of women in a gender-oppressive society.


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