I’ve been reading a book about Henry Fonda’s life, The Man Who Saw A Ghost by Devin McKinney. Over the course of his five marriages, the women only got younger, though the author seems to think Fonda was ashamed of this somewhat. I can’t help wondering if this was partly his way of avoiding “getting older” – the race away from death, the thing that gets us all in the end. Some of the women he married were looking for a “father figure.” I guess all of these cases are different.

Another writes:

I think Christopher Ryan got the wrong end of the stick re: Hugo Schwyzer’s argument. I’m currently in Thailand and the streets are overflowing with old – not simply older a la Johnny Depp, but plain old – white men clutching the hand of some hot young Thai girl. Not women, girls. Just yesterday I saw a man with rheumy eyes, snow white hair, jowls and extremely wrinkled skin walk hand-in-hand with a beautiful young woman who had her student metro card out. But he wore expensive clothes and was coming out of a 5 Star hotel. Maybe she was an escort, or perhaps he has “friends” who introduce him to local women. I don’t know. I just know that this is a very common sight here.

Talking to the most stereotypical of these men is a fascinating experience.

They are defensive but feel they’ve gotten away with something; some of them are just happy to be with a woman who would have been completely out of their league in their home country; others use the freedom of living in a foreign country to insist that the women conform to stereotypical gender roles they can’t enforce back home. For example, one man told me that he “kicked out” his girlfriend because she secretly kept a job that ruined his “standing” among his fellow expats because it implied he couldn’t afford to take care of his woman. He replaced her with another woman who was much better because she did his ironing. It sounds like a bad novel, but it’s life as usual in Thailand. Anything you read about this country doesn’t compare to the reality smacking you in the face when you get here.

Anyway, the point is this: these women know exactly what they’re doing. Dating a falang, or white foreigner, is perfectly socially acceptable because it means you can now help improve the financial situation of your family – perhaps even your whole village if you find a falang who is rich and dumb enough. Everyone here knows at least one Western man who was madly in love with a local woman and a couple of years later found himself broke and alone while her family got rich and she was nowhere to be found.

I can’t turn my nose up at these women who are making use of an outdated stereotype (the servile, exotic woman of color) to their own advantage. And I can’t really blame the men who seem to actually understand that this is a transaction. A lot of them are married, with children they dearly love, but talking to them you can immediately tell who is a newbie and who has been around for a while. The newbie is the one who thinks he is in control; the oldtimer is the one who sounds vaguely dissatisfied but accepting – he was searching for something and for a while he thought he had it, but now he can feel its incomplete promise. Yet he feels this is the best life can offer.

This is a fascinating country. It’s like a social experiment lab.