It was further shown in studies conducted in 2004 by Assumption University that Thai teens were having sex at a younger age, with one survey claiming that twenty seven percent of those aged thirteen to nineteen had had sexual experiences, and the average age was fifteen. More and more female university students admitted selling themselves by the hour in order to buy cell phones, clothing and other fashion accessories.
This was rarely reported outside Thailand. Instead, international media wrote almost exclusively about foreigners, thus it was the Western customers and pedophiles who got the headlines, not the Thai ones, who outnumbered the farangs exponentially. Because the media had clients to satisfy, too, and newspaper readers and TV watchers back home couldn’t have cared less about what Thai men did with Thai women, they wanted to hear about the bargirls of Patpong and Nana Plaza and the juveniles. So they became the subjects of countless “exposés” and news reports and documentaries and tedious academic tomes, and the hundreds of thousands of sex workers who served Thai truck drivers, fishermen and the military, three of the occupations that drove what surely was one of the nation’s biggest service industries, went largely ignored.
Meanwhile, in a quiet little side street not far from several five-star hotels in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit district, there was a bar that offered blow jobs starting at ten a.m. A couple of blocks away there was another where the women stood in a line against the wall; those on the left were available for anal sex and those on the right were not, and customers were encouraged to take two in any case; if you ordered a second drink it would not be served, because this was not a bar for drinkers. While in southern Thailand, in an attempt to win back tourists from Malaysia driven away by insurgent violence, open-air restaurants, cafes and go-go bars announced a new policy, allowing male customers to touch any part of the female employees’ bodies, including intimate areas, for up to ten minutes for fifty cents.
Shadow Wives
It’s probably a good thing that Thai soap operas don’t have English subtitles, because if they did, attendance at the Grand Palace and other tourist attractions might fall as visitors remained in their hotel rooms to watch the daily ration of domestic theater. Because however badly plotted and awkwardly acted these dramas may be, they offer a look at Thai society that is closed to outsiders and confirms quickly just how amazing the country can be.
There are numerous unusual aspects of Thai culture and life revealed on these programs—with ghosts and katoey, the term used for transvestites and over-the-top homosexuals, just two of the more obvious. Still, the one that intrigues me most and I think would entrance many visitors is Thailand’s peculiar take on marriage: the taking of multiple wives.
“What we have in Thailand is legislated monogamy but institutionalized polygamy,” Natayada Na Songkhla wrote in The Nation. “A man should only have one wife but often ends up with more. People in Thailand are obsessed by the concept of multi-wife households. The fact that we aren’t supposed to have them just makes the subject all the more compelling.”
This is not to imply that the all men have more than one wife. In a story published in the same newspaper (Feb. 5, 2001), it was claimed by Prof. Nongpa-nga Limsuwan, head of the psychiatry department at Ramathibodi Hospital, that research studies showed that “only one-quarter of Thai male adults keep minor wives.” Only twenty five percent? As I write this, I can hear Western jaws hitting the floor.
“Thirty five percent of the Thai men surveyed said they saw nothing wrong with having more than one wife, while fifty five percent longed to have minor wives,” the professor said. How many of these might, by some, be termed adulterers and self-styled swingers was not revealed. Nor is the good professor saying Thai polygamists live with more than one wife, as usually is the case in Muslim societies, where the Koran (4.3) says, “Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two, three or four,” so long as the man can properly care for them. In Thailand, usually there are separate residences. Although Asiaweek, in a 1999 story on Thai “concubines,” identified a meatball factory owner from Nakhon Patho who said he and his seven wives and twenty children lived under the same roof, this type of arrangement is extremely rare.
As with so many things defining the social order in the Land of Smiles, in affairs of the heart, it pays to be first. Because it is the first wife and the children she bears who get the most respect from society at large and, significantly, all of the man’s estate when he dies, unless he has made other agreed upon or secret arrangements. Usually, the mia noi, or minor wife (the words translate “little wife”), may have to content herself with stolen evenings and weekends, an apartment or condo, possibly a car, a mobile phone, a reasonable allowance, and whatever gifts and luxuries the man can afford.
Polygamy has been practiced by mankind for thousands of years. Many of the ancient Israelites were polygamous, some having hundreds of wives; King Solomon is said to have had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Up to the seventeeth century, polygamy was practiced and accepted by the Christian church and more recently, the Shakers, Mormons and the Oneida utopian community permitted plural marriages in the United States. And while polygamy is banned by law in all fifty states, The Salt Lake Tribune (Apr. 23, 2000) estimates there are thirty thousand such families in the West. And as recently as March, 2004, the U.S. dropped its ban on polygamy as a condition for the resettlement of some fifteen thousand displaced Hmong people, refugees from Thailand. Earlier, male refugees who had several wives were asked to choose only one to accompany them to the U.S..
Polygamy in Thailand was practiced openly hundreds of years ago, when kings, aristocrats, feudal lords, and wealthy merchants kept young, lesser wives as a symbol of their status. Customs changed with time, of course, and in 1935 the concept of marriage licenses was introduced and further multiple marriage was banned. However, almost seventy years later, the practice of taking more than one “wife” remained solidly in place and its illegality was, like many laws in Thailand, almost never enforced, as it continued to be popular with many military strongmen, powerful politicians, and leading businessmen.
Asiaweek (June 6,1997) told a story about Sanoh Thienthong, one of the most influential men in Thai politics—head of one of the largest political factions and for a time an advisor to the current prime minister—when he was the Minister of the Interior in another administration. He was visited unexpectedly in his Government House office by his mistress Jitra Tosaksit, a former beauty queen who had raised three children by the minister. Although she had stayed in the shadows for many years, she was quoted now as saying she now wished some recognition. When Sanoh was told she was in his outer office, he fled the scene.