the third sex

I found an interesting article the other day about tastes in internet porn. It was based on a new book by two academics named Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, entitled A Billion Wicked Thoughts. I don’t know how scientific their research was, but they have come up with some interesting facts.

One is that men, even straight men, like looking at pictures of dicks. I think this might go back deep into adolescence. When you are very young and everything is just springing into life, you don’t mind flashing your new manhood around in the changing room, and you are curious to see how your mates are doing.

That doesn’t mean that you are potentially gay: it is only a natural interest. But the feelings of emerging sexuality are so strong that it is likely that the intense curiousity and the excitement of the moment stays with you. Consequently, although you would never even consider a sexual encounter with another man, the sight of a big erect dick still arouses interest and admiration.

Which brings me onto a second point the researchers make, which is that T-girl sites, as they call them, are the fourth most popular category of website porn.

This to me is no great surprise. I have watched over the years, since the earliest days of the internet, as the popularity of the third sex has increased. In the long-ago days of the mid 1990s, you could have counted the number of ladyboy sites on the fingers of one hand. But a few years later that number had grown, and a handful of photographers, yours truly included, had discovered the potential of Thailand as a source for models.

That in turn has helped spur the growth of the ladyboy scene in Thailand, because so many visitors now come here either specifically for ladyboy companionship, or to go to ladyboy bars and cabarets.

So in that brief period of time, the ladyboy has emerged as a sexual force in her own right. Before the internet, few people knew of the ladyboys of Southeast Asia. Only those who had travelled to this part of the world, and I would venture to say that even they probably weren’t that interested: it was genetic girls they were after.

No one knew of the beauty of the ladyboy, the sheer seductiveness. It was only the photography that brought this out to a mass market. Beforehand, a ladyboy would have been regarded as a joke, or a freak. But suddenly, their true beauty was revealed.

I remember in the very early days when I was taking photos, I would take my laptop into the room in which I was working and because the camera memory chips had only a small capacity I would pause halfway through a shoot to download onto the hard drive. The model would come and look over my shoulder, and time and time again I would hear a little gasp as she saw how she looked on the screen. She quite possibly would never have seen clear photographs of herself in full makeup, and certainly not in the nude. Don’t forget – digital cameras were a rarity then.

Ladyboys of course quickly realised their own potential, and the potential they had for making a living. More and more youngsters decided to follow the course. The demand for hormones grew, and the prices fell. Soon it became so easy and so cheap to buy hormones that youngsters just entering adolescence were able to buy them. A whole new generation of ladyboys began to spring up. The number of websites continued to grow. The number of visitors in search of ladyboys grew. The number of ladyboy outlets grew. The supply of ladyboys grew in proportion.

I think I deserve a medal from the Tourism Authority of Thailand. But somehow I don’t think I’ll get one.

I had the following missive from Sargent Shameless a couple of days ago, the precursor to a series of others detailing his most recent adventures which I am afraid I’m going to inflict upon you shortly. I think you begin to see how he acquired his soubriquet.

I am in Soi 6 in Pattaya right now having bolted out of Hanoi for a ladyboy refresher course. I am a bit tipsy and on a ladyboy high…something really funny just happened that I  think you would like to hear about so I came to the internet shop to write it right away while I give my tonsils and dick a rest. 

Something like four years ago I was in Pattaya for a couple of weeks of the usual debauchery, even though I was supposed to be in Bangkok on company business.  Since I was on a hotel expenses paid gig, I was in a bit of a conundrum as I was expected to present hotel receipts to be refunded, but if I turned in a Pattaya hotel receipt everybody at work would know exactly what business had brought me to Thailand.
 
This did not stop me from getting on with the main event, and on my first night in Pattaya I hooked up with a wonderfully hung ladyboy and on the next day her more modestly endowed but perfect little rosebud of a butthole ladyboy roommate was joining in for the horizontal Muay Thai.

The following morning, after I indulged with my sleep buddies in an invigorating farang sandwich, I began to worry what I was going to do about the hotel receipts.  I asked the ladyboys if they knew of a Bangkok hotel that might pass me a receipt for a fee, but understandably they did not.  So I decided to fabricate a receipt right there and then in Pattaya. Again, I asked my ladyboy companions if they knew of a store where I could buy blank printed receipts on which I could write a made-up Bangkok hotel name and charges.  This time they said they could help me and we all got on motorbikes and went to some kind of general store that had a very well stocked stationery section.  I bought a good quality book of receipts printed in Thai and also two commercial ink-stamps, one of which said “PAID” in English, and the other said “THANK YOU” in Thai.  I thought the stamps would lend more credibility to the receipts.
 
Back at the hotel, one thing led to another and before long I was using the stamps on the ladyboys’ nubile naked bodies. I especially enjoyed stamping “PAID” on their soft butt cheeks and “THANK YOU” on the foreskins of their sweet cocks.  But I also stamped them on more visible parts of their bodies like their foreheads and arms, so when we went back out for a night on the town other ladyboys saw and admired, and some asked if they could be stamped also (it was of course a clever way to offer to come to the Sargent’s room and play with the artillery pieces…).
 
For the rest of my stay in Pattaya, I used the stamps on all the ladyboys I had the pleasure of having pleasure with and it became sort of a running joke but at the same time a badge of honour for those ladyboys complimented with your Sargent’s affection and/or cash.  When I got back to work, not only did I present and got refunded for the made-up receipts but I also inflated the made-up hotel charges so that my employer actually paid for most of my ladyboy companion fees (Captain’s note: It doesn’t get more Shameless than that!).

Fast forward the clock to four years later (now!) when I am back in Pattaya, and after a night of wild passionate lovemaking I was saying my morning goodbyes to a newly met ladyboy cutie, but I could sense that something was bothering her.  I knew I had rewarded her appropriately, so I asked her what was wrong and told her to speak up. With puppy eyes, she mustered the courage to ask me: “But are you not going to stamp me?”
 
At first I had no clue what she was talking about.  But after she started making the gestures of stamping her buttocks and forehead it all came back to me.  I could not help but feel like a god.  I smiled, slipped her an extra 100 baht and promised to stamp her all over next time. It really made my day to know that a ladyboy who I had never met (and who was still in high school in northeast Thailand four years earlier) would have heard, presumably from another ladyboy who had recognised me, about the Sargent Shameless stamping spree. There is nothing for a man like knowing he has left his mark for the future generations…in my case, for the future generations of ladyboys!

Regular readers of this blog and the main site will know about my maid. She is a real girl, a middle-aged lady, and has worked for me for years. Although I use the word “maid”, the Thai word more fully describes what she does: the term is “mare bahn”, which translates as mother of the house, or housekeeper. She keeps everything running, does the shopping, makes sure all the bills get paid, and so on. In a life that is frequently tumultuous, she is a reassuring constant.

She is also a colourful character whose adventures I watch with keen interest. She lives not far from me, in the Suan Plu market area, opposite the old immigration department building. Her husband is a chronic boozer who gets plastered every day, which leaves him little time for his job at a local printing company. “Husband no good, dlunk,” is her usual refrain along with “yeh mark!” (totally irresponsible!).

Yet my maid is herself probably the perfect partner for her husband, able to match him in alcohol consumption, quite capable of swinging the occasional right hook (”last night I boxing him!”), and of kicking him in the rear end (”Thai man no good!”). She blacked his eye once, and split his lip on another occasion. A few weeks ago she threw him out of the house, and they were both so miserable that I was really glad when they got back together again.

A ferocious card player who organises illegal neighbourhood card schools, she has seen the inside of the monkey-house on more than one occasion. She narrowly escaped the attention of Bangkok’s Finest recently when she got into a fight with a neighbour: naturally, she won. She lives a sprawling, rumbustious, Dickensian life, but she turns up for work every morning and no matter what her own problems she always has a beaming smile. She is a typical Issan Thai: warm-hearted, humourous, and always ready for the next good time.

She also has a ladyboy son, who a couple of years ago became my assistant. Between them they know every ladyboy in the locality, and this is where many of my models come from. From them I myself gain a lot of insights into the ladyboy way of life. And my maid is interested in the pictures and videos I shoot, frequently standing at my shoulder as I flip through the pictures on the Mac. “Ooh, very big. If she cut off tell hospital give my husband. No good. Always dlunk.”

I mention this because the other day I had yet another ladyboy asking me if I had a “wife house”, and if not could she have the job. I told her that if she was my maid, she would never get any work done as I would be continually dragging her into bed. She laughed, but I could see she was looking for a regular job. But even if I did not already have a maid who was such a vital and happy part of my life, I would not have employed a ladyboy.

The fact is that ladyboys do not have the female house-making instinct. A few do, I suppose, but a house needs a woman, a real one, to make it into a home. Those ladyboys I have observed in domestic situations have generally done all the cleaning and cooking solely because they had to, not because they had the inbuilt instinct.

A friend who lives in America but who rents an apartment in Bangkok for his frequent visits emailed me recently to say that the ladyboy friend he had installed there on the basis she would look after the apartment when he was away had let the place reach such a stage that the landlord was threatening to terminate the lease. I myself, when I installed a ladyboy mistress in an apartment some years back, found that I was doing much of the housework myself, because if I didn’t it would never have got done. When I lived with ladyboy Dew, back in the late 90s in what was a formative period of my life, I was driven out of my mind by her mad attempts to tackle the housework at 1 am in the morning, when I was trying to sleep after a conventional day’s work and she was just coming alive after having spent the day lazing in bed, watching TV, and gossiping with friends. To those people who email me saying that they yearn for a regular ladyboy companion who they can take back to their home country and “marry”, I’m afraid I do not offer much encouragement.

The Thai ladyboy is not a domestic creature. She is a creation that is pure sexuality. She is not a genetic girl, she is not even like one. She is the third sex. She is a fantasy made true, but only under very limited circumstances. Do please bear this in mind. Most men who like ladyboys are heterosexuals who have nothing against women and who simply enjoy the explosive sex of a ladyboy relationship. Do not make the mistake of thinking they really are women.

Sargent Shameless and I were talking during the week about a ladyboy we had both known a few years ago who worked at Hi!Boss in Pattaya. She was not only one of the cutest ladyboys I have ever seen, with real star quality, but she was also a smart little cookie. I remember going with her once when she wanted to draw money out of her bank account, and peeping over her shoulder at the ATM screen I saw she had almost a quarter of a million baht in her account. And she was still only 19. 

She had always refused to have her photograph taken, by me or anybody else, which was a great pity because she really was a girl, and nature, as a joke, had stuck a willy on her. She would have been fabulous to photograph. 

Talking to the Sargent about this natural beauty she had, I mentioned that she had told me she began taking hormones at about the age of 12. She said that at her school in Pitsanulok there had been as many as a third of the boys in her year who were experimenting with becoming ladyboys. The Sargent was shocked (he is hard to shock, believe me). If that is the case, he said, then there really is a third sex emerging in Thailand.

We went on to speculate about the effect that adolescent ladyboys have on the other male members of a school.

We all remember what it was like to enter adolescence and to suddenly become aware of girls, and the obsession one develops about them. But how would we have reacted if some of our schoolmates had begun to develop into a third sex?

Okay, for those of us from the West the idea is derisory. The nasty, stinky little kids in my school were already grotesque enough as males. And when I go back to London these days and see the feral youth that the country is breeding I doubt even their own mothers find them attractive.

But transfer this prospect to Thailand where ladyboys are, and have long been, part of the culture. Where ladyboys can be far more beautiful than genetic girls. Where a boy taking female hormones and wearing girls’ clothing can look like a little doll. The memory of my little friend from Hi!Boss comes before me as I write this.

So, what does that do to your emerging masculinity, if you are a straight kid, given that ladyboys are by their nature sexually provocative and not demure like genetic girls? When you are literally bursting for sex, but the girls in your school and neighbourhood are off limits? When the fledgling ladyboys are taking female hormones and looking for boyfriends?

I’m sorry, but I don’t really know.

The Sargent told me of a ladyboy friend of his who, so she told him, would regularly entertain the local lads after school, and that she would often find an easy way of earning some cash when she was walking home through the fields. A lot of Thai men enjoy going with ladyboys. Many keep a ladyboy mistress. There is no stigma about having sex with ladyboys. All I can think is, they learned this at an early age.

A sure sign that the hot weather has arrived: out of the past half dozen ladyboys I have photographed, three of them had shaved off their pubic hair. I asked each of them if a customer had asked them to do it, and they all said, no, I did it myself.

For those of you who haven’t experienced Thailand’s summer heat, it is not just the sun but the humidity. This is especially the case in Bangkok, which is as flat as a pancake and only a little over 4ft above sea level. During these months you do all you can to keep cool, and if your occupation happens to be in the sexual services industry, personal hygiene is doubly important.

The visual effects of shaving off the pubes vary immensely. A good, big, strong cock will look even more impressive, but a little underpowered one will look even more mournful. Good skin and a close and careful use of the razor will leave an attractive and smooth pubis, but poor skin will look spotty and blotchy, and let’s face it, pubic stubble is not attractive. So on balance I tend to prefer a good strong growth of pubic hair and I do find myself enthralled by some of the more spectacular bushes I see.

Pubic hair growth is one of those rather neglected areas of interest, left to the genuine connoisseur to appreciate. The growth varies tremendously, from a tiny V-shaped patch through to a light and fluffy sprinkling with no real form, to a fetching heart-shaped tangle of tight curls, all the way through to a great fragrant black mass of hair that marches up towards the tummy button.

Looking through some of my earlier sets recently, when I was doing some long overdue filing, I was struck by the immense difference in types I have seen over the years. I had at the time been compos mentis enough to linger over photographing the hair, often getting up really close with a macro lens if the growth was remarkable, and even amongst the tangle with a particularly impressive model, and as a consequence I had a large collection of pictures showing pubic hair in all its glorious forms.

I noted how the growth was often thicker at the sides and relatively sparse over the cock. Sometimes the delta-shape grew crookedly, so that one corner was higher then the other. On some models the hair grew outward to form a rather attractive covering for the first inch or two of the dick. Some had hairy bottoms but a not particularly hairy pubis, while others had a mass of hair over their cock but a completely hair-free bottom. Few had any hair on their balls. And very few had hair on their legs, I’m happy to say, although I did find one instance of this in which it was actually quite attractive, the model being only just 18 and with an otherwise very feminine appearance.

With some of the girls that I had photographed on several occasions I had managed to record their own changing needs and tastes. Some had shaved the hair off at certain times, or had trimmed it right back, or simply let it grow wild so that it became shaggier and shaggier over a period of a couple of years. One of the models, Jenny, had died her pubes blond, which was distinctly original. Ton had a naturally heart-shaped growth when she was younger, but in more recent sets that seemed to have grown out. Cherie, tiny and neat in body, also has a naturally tiny, neat growth of pubic hair. The great Talisha, whose pubic hair was unremarkable, had taken to shaving it off to make her cock look even bigger than it already did. Bea, with her cute little Chinese willy, had fluffy hair so light that she had at various times shaved it off without my noticing.

On some the hair is soft and on others, wiry. Some hair is coarse and frizzy. Ice, for example, who I have been photographing for years, has a rough little pubic patch above her sweet little cock. Honey, also a long-time model, has long, silken pubic hair that is not unlike the hair on her head in terms of texture. Golf has an untamed jungle of fine hair growing up towards her tummy. Apple, who is very light-skinned and almost European in appearance (to me she always looks French) has pubes that are light brown. As I worked my way through the sets, I decided that unshaved in general made for a far better set of pictures, especially when there was a puddle of creamy white cum on the hair. But then I have to admit I like just about everything.