the third sex

A ladyboy friend had turned up and was waiting for me at the reception area of the apartment. I went down to meet her. She was wearing a very cute short red dress, and with her long hair looked gorgeous. There were a couple of Thai maintenance workers sitting nearby, and they were eyeing her appreciatively. As I approached, I heard one of them say to her: “Doot sooay.”

The phrase means “beautiful bottom” and the worker was complimenting her. This reveals something of the Thai man’s attitude to the third sex. If a man finds a ladyboy attractive, he will probably have no qualms about saying so and, with a bit of luck, having sex with her. The fact that she is biologically male won’t put him off. He won’t feel any remorse or guilt afterwards, he won’t go into an “am I really gay?” agony of self questioning. He would have had an enjoyable experience, and been on to the next thing.

There is something essentially healthy in this approach, or at least I find it so. It also helps explain why young Issan farmboys are happy enough to work in the gay bars of Bangkok and Pattaya. Why do backbreaking work planting rice and mucking out the pigs when on a good night you can earn the equivalent of half a month’s wages by spending the night in a foreign tourist’s hotel room. Gayness doesn’t really come into it. Guilt certainly doesn’t. The need to earn money does. But essentially it is an openness of mind, and self analysis doesn’t really figure.

As I have mentioned here before, the polite Thai phrase for a ladyboy is “sauw prapet song”, which means “second type of woman.” That is how the Thais regard ladyboys. And as ladyboys are in general far more open to a sexual approach than a genetic girl, given that they still have the sex drive of a male, a Thai man will often turn to a ladyboy simply for enjoyment.

So the maintenance worker probably wasn’t gay. He was simply voicing an honest opinion. He thought the ladyboy had an attractive figure and a pert rear. In the elevator, I asked her if she received many compliments like that.

“Yes!” she said. “All the time! If a Thai man like me, he say so! No problem!”