“Is adultery natural? Of course, of course….” (Fons Jansen, Conference 'The Electricians')

For quite some time I toyed with the idea of ​​writing a story about sex in Thailand. Always a popular topic, also on this blog. Not strange, because nothing human is foreign to the expat. But not a story about Pattaya, the go-go bars, ladyboys, tomboys, the entertainment districts in Bangkok, the gay saunas or the karaoke bars in the countryside. No. A story about thinking about sex and marriage in Thai society, and the changes therein.

There must always be a reason for me to delve into a certain subject. In this case, the basic reason is my amazement at what I see and hear in my own environment. Let me give a few examples:

1. my (divorced) neighbor has three sex (love?) relationships and also a few casual contacts. Those loose contacts in my condo building have led to many quarrels and a few divorces. The three men are all married;
2. Thai men who threaten their wife or gig with violence if she wants to leave him while he is "cheating" in our terminology;
3. Thai women who constantly move out of fear of their ex-husband and take a new telephone number;
4. a top Thai politician who – as a member of the advisory board – scans the overview photos of new female students at a private university to assess which young lady(s) he would like to have as a new sex toy, of course at a very attractive price periodic payment with a one-off luxury car;
5. famous, sexy Thai actresses (married and unmarried) who spend exorbitant amounts of money per day (and night) 'hanging out with' men from the international jet-set;
6. wealthy Thai men in a bar offering increasing amounts to a Thai lady for sex services until she finally succumbs to the money;
7. sex and relationships (mia-noi, gig) between partners from a limited network of politics, military, business world, not primarily for the sake of sexual pleasure but much more for the forging of mutual, closer and emotional ties and for information exchange (a soft form of espionage). In the upper classes in Thailand, there are children who live with parents, one of whom is not the biological parent. And the other parent knows that. And that child will also hear that later: I would like to call them socially legitimized bastards.

With Thai eyes

I think you can easily add to this list of examples yourself from your own Thai environment or if you read the Thai press daily. And that comes out because it is illegal (sex with minors, trafficking in women, linking it to drug trafficking or corruption) or if someone flips out as happened two years ago with a 30-year-old male bachelor Thai movie star. A photo of him appeared on Facebook with a bare leg of the lady he had spent the night with. At first he denied it in all tones but after a few days he came on TV with his mother crying (really) and told it was true.

He'd had sex and wasn't married, so he'd been naughty. The fact that as a wealthy bachelor he might do that weekly (perhaps leave that out, I think), is irrelevant. Now it was public. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg. I can already hear you thinking: all disgusting, double standard (aka hypocrite) and decadent. But then you judge too quickly and too much from a Western perspective.

A perspective that starts from the thinking of the Thais says the following. When it comes to sex, masculine, macho-like behavior is more important, more valued, more accepted than feminine behavior. As long as the guy takes good care of his mia-noi and his gig, he's more or less forgiven for having them. I get the impression in the cases I personally experience that it is worse for the 'cheated' wife that her husband gives another woman money (and she does not know exactly how much and how much she therefore misses every month) than that he has sex with her has. Men are hunters, after all.

Concubines

I know, this is changing under the influence of the Western world, but also in the Western world the married man who has a girlfriend or mistress is not always approached negatively. Examples include the undisclosed mistresses of French presidents Mitterand, Chirac and most recently Hollande. Chirac even wanted to share a suite in a luxury hotel with his mistress, the movie star Claudia Cardinale, when he was on a state visit to Thailand, but that was going too far for the Thai government or perhaps international protocol.

But also royal highnesses (past and present) are not real role models when it comes to monogamous marriage relationships: Prince Bernhard, King Juan Carlos, Prince Albert (Monaco), King Albert (Belgium), Prince Charles, Lady Di. What else applies to all royal highnesses (Middle East, Asia, Africa) who are Muslim because as a Muslim they can/may be married to more than 1 wife.

Polygamy

Being able to be married to more than 1 woman was still valid in Thailand until 1935, when polygamy was banned by law. This means that some older Thais (from the higher social classes) may still remember that their father legally had more than 1 wife. And Thai kings also had more wives in the past and consequently a large number of children. For example, King Mongkut married when he was 47 and at the end of his life (in 1868) had 32 wives and 82 children. And we are not talking about the Middle Ages here, but about the 19th century, about 150 years ago.

Children of King Mongkut

It is therefore not surprising that an English diplomat in Bangkok at the time lamented that 'the king was not well able to rule because he was exhausted by women, stress and drugs'. The enactment by the Thai king of the law that banned polygamy took quite some effort. On the one hand, the king had to be convinced that polygamy was barbaric, uncivilized and an expression of the lack of control over sexual urges. Several kings were sensitive to this criticism because they wanted to be taken for granted in the West. However, the elite did not want this. She even found the discussion about polygamy critical of the course of events at court. You could say a form of lèse-majesté.

The critical remarks therefore did not come from the Thai elite, but from outsiders, in particular Western diplomats and missionaries. The Western, romantic ideal of love played a not insignificant role. Thailand, Western diplomats claimed, would not be considered a civilized world until polygamy was outlawed. A form of forcing Western values ​​and norms on the Thais, isn't it?

Finally

I have not written this posting to encourage you (as an expat or future expat) to commit what we in the West have come to call adultery. You just have to do and keep doing what you feel most comfortable with (with or without a partner or partners). Well, to show you the relative nature of the romantic marriage ideal (between two partners with the exclusion of sex with others: the current Western model, which, however, shows considerable cracks; I don't have to tell you that). This ideal is neither the ideal nor the norm of the majority of the world's population and, in my firm conviction, will not become one. Just look around in countries like India, Japan, South Africa and Thailand. There is more under the sun and in the bedroom than sex with the same partner. Some in this world are thinking about officially marrying their sex doll or their robot man or woman, I recently read. So don't be surprised (for the future) about anything. And if you are monogamous and want to remain: realize that you belong to a minority on this planet.

Source: Leslie Ann Jeffrey (2007): Sex and Borders: gender, national identity and prostitution policy in Thailand.