Thailand’s worst chat-up line
“Are you a ladyboy?”
Have you ever been asked that old chestnut? Luckily, nobody has ever queries my gender, but then, I don’t happen to be a pretty Thai girl.
Picture the scene: You’re a Thai girl, out with your friends, drinking, dancing, enjoying yourself, when two drunk farang tourists approach you and start talking to you. Out of nowhere, one of them asks if you are a man.
It sounds like a far-fetched scenario, but it’s one that I’ve come across too many times in Thailand. The two guys I saw in Patong last night were just average kids, but they thought it was hilarious to ask a cute girl if she was a ladyboy. One of the guys went so far as to examine the straightness of the girl’s arms as “proof”. And then after all of that he started hitting on the poor girl.
To her credit, she took it all without getting angry, but she was clearly bemused at this guy’s drunken approach to coupling. This isn’t an isolated incident though; it’s happened to friends of mine.
What is it with some tourists and this bizarre way of chatting up girls? I think the Internet is part of the problem. There are entire web pages, no, websites devoted to ways to tell if a girl is a ladyboy and other curious topics. People must read these websites before they come to Thailand and think it’s some sort of real-life quiz show that everybody here plays.
I don’t have a problem with tourists for the most part, but it’s the yobs-on-tour I dislike. The level of disrespect shown to the locals is inhuman. Most of the time, the Thais just brush it off with a smile.
In Patong, disrespecting the locals (no matter who is in the right) is the sort of thing that can, in some circumstances, get tourists beaten up. Patong can be a scandalous place. The more I see of it, the more certain aspects of it disgust me. I wouldn’t go so far as saying everybody in Patong is a scumbag, but there are some real lowlife locals serving some real lowlife tourists. From the tuk tuk mafia to the ruthless Jet Ski operators, this place is a real carnival by day and night.
For cheap drinks and late-night parties, it’s about the only place I’ve found on Phuket that’s consistent.
October 1st, 2007 at 6:38 am
There is a right way and wrong way to approach this situation. The way you described what this FOB did is obviously the wrong way. A few weeks ago I was at Slim with some friends and a group joined to share our table. 3 guys, 2 girls. One of the girls was quite stunning, then she started dancing. The dancing set off some alarm bells and my friends and I started discussing whether or not this gorgeous girl was, in fact, a ladyboy. Did we ask her? No, of course not. We asked the Thai guys next to us who we had befriended and they confirmed our belief. This girl was the best looking girl we had seen all night. Amazing Thailand.
October 1st, 2007 at 7:00 am
100% right, Matt. Almost all of the blog posts you can find about thai ladyboys on the internet are in one way or the other about how to tell if a ladyboy is a ladyboy. I am pretty sure, that some of our sisters working in the redlight district are trying to get a customer by not telling the truth about themselves but that are just some. And: All those features described in these blog posts are so ridiculous.
I think there is a lot of homophobia in there. People claim to be understanding and tolerant about thai culture, but in actually they are not. Sometimes you can really read the hate for ladyboys between the lines. I am very sorry about that.