Other beauty queens and actresses have played the same game. According to Asiaweek, Ladawan Wongsriwong, at the time a Member of Parliament, was disturbed by how ‘agents’ went to ministers with photos of the winners of a beauty pageant in her home district, touting the young women as possible mia noi. “Some ministers were very angry” when she brought it to public attention, she said. “The parliamentarian came close to naming philandering colleagues, but settled for listing the minister’s initials.” One former cabinet minister, found to be “unusually rich” by the National Counter Corruption Commission, in court testimony reported by The Nation (May 7, 2003) was said to have “squandered money on gambling and minor wives, prompting his wife to salt away some of his assets in case of divorce.”
Is it any wonder the Thai public is enchanted by such goings-on? Or that the “other woman” plays a key role in many television dramas?
How does this work? The answer actually is in the law. In Thailand, there are two kinds of marriage. One calls for a ceremony with a blessing by a Buddhist monk, and the other is officially registered with the government. Although many couples do both, many don’t bother to register, settling for the Buddhist ceremony. Thus, the union is sealed with a cherished and honored religious ceremony, and no law is broken because registration isn’t required by law. Of course, in many instances, religious rites are also ignored.
Which leads us into the thorny garden of women’s rights. Although the situation is changing, and gender equality is enshrined in the 1997 constitution, in Thailand today, as in many other places, women are in many ways regarded as second class citizens, the under-educated and disadvantaged result of an entrenched double standard. There is no law forbidding marital rape and the number of sexual assaults against women has doubled in the past decade; domestic violence is so common, it is rare that police will answer a call. Abortion is illegal except in cases of rape or where the pregnancy endangers the woman’s health. Men may claim compensation from any men who had sex with their fiancées, but not vice versa. As is true elsewhere, discrimination in the work place is pervasive: the higher the level, the fewer the women, and women earn less than men in all levels.
In addition, suing for divorce is a flimsy option for Thai women. Mee choo, the Thai term for “infidelity,” applies only to women, thus for a man to divorce his wife he has only to show a single liaison between his wife and another man, while the male is free to roam without legal consequence; under the Civil Code’s regulation for termination of marriage, the woman must prove that her husband not only had sex with another woman but also that he lived with her as her husband. As more and more women, and their supporters, were elected to Parliament, attempts have been made to change the law, but so far there are too many male legislators with mia noi or sympathy for those who have them to think any new law is likely soon.
Nor is it clear that all mia noi are unhappy. Supatra Ratananakin, speaking for the Friends of Women Foundation, was quoted both in The Nation and Asiaweek as saying one out of every five counseling sessions she had with women seeking advice on family problems were about husbands taking a minor wife. Nonetheless, she said, “Today’s mia noi is not always someone who is living with a man just for the money. A lot of minor wives are financially independent women who choose to live with married men because they love and understand one another.”
Others are content to be No. 2 because they believe it’s better than being No. 0, which is what they were perceived to be, and thought themselves to be, before Mr. Big came along. Studies on the subject are few, but there’s general agreement that the minor wife more often than not comes from a social class beneath the husband’s, with less education and few if any marketable job skills. In this fashion, becoming a minor wife may be regarded by some as not only a way out, but up.
Venus Envy
After putting on my operating room “scrubs”—a paper garment that came to below my knees and tied in the back, a hat, and mask—I was led into a brightly lit operating room at the spanking-new Bumrungrad Hospital, where a friend of mine, Kelly Lynn Deloito, lay on her back, anaesthetized, covered almost entirely by a leaf-green, cotton sheet. Her arms were supported at her sides as if on a cross (and strapped down to prevent movement), only her manicured nails on show; her legs spread widely and hung in slings at the knees (also belted into place, while still another strap held her waist). Except for her hands and her head, with a plastic pipe fitted into her mouth, to help her with her breathing, all that could be seen was her groin, where a penis lay limp on her abdomen.
Dr. Preecha Tiewtranon briskly entered the room, fresh from a mammoplasty (breast enlargement) in a nearby operating room. He was helped into a clean surgical gown and latex gloves. He called a cheery hello to me and slipped onto a low, stainless steel stool on wheels, rolled into position between the patient’s legs, and lifted her genitals to examine them. Seeming satisfied, he sketched a few lines on the flesh on either side of the penis in purple ink and then was handed an electric scalpel, with which he began to cut, initiating what was to be his five-hundred-andsomethingth sex-change operation.
In recent years, Bangkok had become a sort of Mecca for SRS, or “sex reassignment surgery.” This fitted the government’s campaign to make the city a destination for all types of health care and in the years following the region’s 1997 economic collapse, the city’s excellent hospitals were aggressively marketed throughout Asia and the Middle East as if they were five-star hotels. Bumrungrad even offered cybernet cafes on several floors, a McDonald’s, and a Starbucks, to make everyone feel at home, and the original building was converted into apartments for the patients’ families.
I’d met Dr. Preecha several times in his office, with transsexual friends or friends-of-friends, like Kelly, who came to Bangkok to complete their trans-gender metamorphosis. Before moving to Thailand, I’d had a live-in relationship with a transsexual in Hawaii and since then several of her “sisters” called me when they came to Thailand for the final cut.
Dr. Preecha, an Assistant Professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Chulalongkorn University, said he didn’t know how many of these procedures were performed in Thailand yearly, but said he did one or two a week, on average, with patients coming mainly from Japan, Taiwan, and the U.S., but also from Europe and Australia. Thailand’s indigenous katoey population— the word is a generic for the cross-gendered and more obviously gay—provided another patient base. The largest density of transsexuals was in Pattaya and, increasingly, in Phuket, where katoey cabarets were an entertainment staple. Dr. Preecha said his former students performed SRS in those cities, too.
Most transsexuals—people who actually make physical changes to their bodies, as opposed to transvestites or cross-dressers, who merely dress up convincingly (or not convincingly)—don’t have their genitals surgically removed, satisfying themselves with hormone therapy, which tends to discourage body hair growth and adds a layer of fat to cover masculine angularity. They get breast implants, let their nails and hair grow long, and try to learn how to walk and talk and live as women. Some keep their male genitals because they can’t afford the surgery, others because they don’t want to give up orgasms; many because they don’t want to take a step than cannot be reversed.