Bangkok Go-Go bars : interpretation of sociocultural world of Thai bar girls and their customers

Abstract

The researcher conducted an in-depth, long-term research of go-go bar industry, that is one of the most famous and large segment of Thai tourist-oriented prostitution. The researcher's aim was to understand and illustrate social reality of bar girls and their customers, especially concerning human relations among them. The extensive one-year participatory fieldwork yielded certain findings on bar girl-customer relations in the bar scene and those findings provided the empirical basis and logical framework of this thesis. In the case of bar girls, the strongest motivation to get into the industry is financial needs. Desire for personal consumption, not for helping parents, is often principal factor of their decision. Many bar girls act as a skillful workingperson and play a positive role in the relationship with their customers in order to maximize their benefit. Hardly is the relationship between bar girl and customer pure economic. Bar girl-customer relationship usually starts as economic interchange but tends to become more complicated. The characteristics of each bar girl-customer relationship are to considerable extent conditioned by sociocultutral backgrounds of both bar girl and customer sides. The research results suggest that human interchange observed in the bar scene is not only of the sex/money matters. Social reality of bar girls and their customers is not as simple as conventional image of "prostitution" and should be studied in many aspects.