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apologies ahead of time...i am just getting cabin fever:
how come whenever i come here and i get a moment of freedom, the men here who want to take me out, only want to show me that they are "adults," by showing me to patpong-like places; the exact places that i don't want to see or frequent. a nation of children in men's bodies.
the government has put such an extreme of a sense of censorship on entertainment and the other visual medias, that when puberty hits, males(and females) have no clue how to react. guns and sex are blurred on daily television, american lifestyle and programming and slang, and movies are readily available, technology has become the latest trinket both replacing family and interpersonal communication. and is it really that different from any other country that is struggling to define itself in the wake of the american corporate hegemony? and who can blame the thai people? every other nation has cool shiny new crap, why can they not? but it is not okay. am i the only one who feels like this?
just like the "goods" you can purchase on the street, in the weekend markets, or even in established malls, these items of desire are poor copies of what america has for sale, and the trendy have the ability to purchase. what sense then does it make to see a family of four barely even being able to survive comfortably, wearing dkny knock-off clothes and carrying around all of their belongings in prada totes?
i know of men and women here around my age totally lost (this is all saying based on my americanized life, but feeling that the moral structure and humanistic values are pseudo-universal)in the fray of trying to both find a sense of themselves and a sense of cultural identity in this modern age.
you end up with boys in the bodies of men, and little girls playing little girl games in the bodies of full-grown women. no i don't want to go see underage kids being fondled by old sweaty smelly sex tourists. no thank you. no i don't need to end the night with a seedy bar filled with smoke from horrible sub-standard cigarettes and watered down swill to drink. it's not what i'm looking for. i don't want to be berated and made to feel dumb, or stupid, or homosexual, or anti-homosexual, or bad, or belittled, or any of these embarassing shameful senses of being.
yet am i now out of the loop then, if i don't want to go to a place like that? is that the standard of what makes a man here? and how come when i say to them that i don't want to go see some sexy nubile young girl get all sexed up and paraded around, i automatically am defined as a gay lover or something more stupid. it's so juvenille, and it's this seedy undertone that everyone sees exhibited in films and underground stories of thailand. it sickens me.
here i am, only wanting to explore my other culture, reconnect and explore the people, the city, the history, the fruits, the language. all i would like to find, from locals and tourists, is an interest in what the people have deemed a normal night out. no wonder everyone thinks that all thai men do is drugs, have sex with underage prostitutes, and drink crazy. some of them do.
the others that i know and have seen, do not. and are they now on the "outs" because of that activity (or lack therof)? again this is not to say that all thai people should be put into the same category all together as if everyone is the same. i haven't travelled here much. it doesn't matter because whether i care or not, whether i want it to be or not, it's a reality and a present problem and observation, and i have no idea how to attempt to fix it.
talk about lost in translation, they made the movie about the wrong f-ing country.
what's the answer?
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