Thailand’s super-pretty girls living in their own heavily guarded paradise, paragons of stated beauty, saturated in their own divine significance, floating around Siam shopping malls with their shoulders strapped by bags full of so often someone else’s baht; scratching the pavements with the sharp side of their spiked footwear, exceptionally unfeeling as they scuff the street, leaving their signature where petite girls with dirty faces still don’t realise the importance of those coins in their Big Gulp cups. These pretty girls deflect glances of the normal folks, including hordes of desperate men who have instantaneous ten second day dreams in which they have the starlet screaming in rapture for a little bit more of his manhood…or for many a fractured guy whose got a point to prove the disarmed femme’s unmade face is drenched in his wayward semen, and she’s innocently recoiling from the world’s deadliest weapon.
An enviable position? Perhaps, for many young girls in Thailand it’s not only enviable, it’s the apogee of existence, to live the high-life, click-clacking down the sidewalk alongside the hawkers who as a juxtaposition to her dream-world look like black rotten apples fallen just a little too close to her lustrous pale skin.
So often the prettiest girls are the unhappiest for the simple reason that they never find love due to the restrictions imposed upon them by their good looks, or their beauty has disabled them to the point that they cannot even understand love. The objectified become objects, and the commoditized lose their humanity after enough acquisitions and resells. These poor pretties, what will become of them as they are tossed around the marketplace like a prize pig’s trotter? Commoditized and objectified, the stars of the shopping malls so often have everything they want, except for the one thing they really, really need.
The aggressive men, with their charters, maps, machinations, and plans, swipe these impressionable chicks usually before they leave university where most of the high-end girls ditched books in view of what their good looks would inevitably afford them. They basked in their popularity during the summer years, made most men crazy with envy, jealously, they played the game well, and for a while they wore the shorn and sharpened expressions of a consummate and unforgiving femme fatale…until she makes her grand mistake, the inevitable fuck-up, ‘cos time runs out, and value recedes, and so she readies herself, poised to grant some lucky man, usually the highest bidder, his wish. And for all his laboured efforts, for the emasculation that tortured him all the way through his conquest of her precious ©***, when he had to beg, borrow, and bow for the acquisition of her beauty, he’s now harbouring hours of resentment, resentment that will manifest once he’s bashed her pelvis against the conjugal low-bed enough times and is sufficiently bored, and his ego and sex-drive more than just satiated. Now he can get his own back, and she will fill an operational role, she will blend into the boring background of his new dream, master becomes slave, and rising up against her now fragile mind is a legion of negativity her life has never had to battle with. If it happened that the price of her body was just the gold in his pockets, his meanness will know no bounds, and for every penny she earned, he’ll spend an hour breaking her heart.
These disabled girls, in their heart of hearts, strive for love and affection, just like all of us, but the power they wield, along with the pay-offs, seems too good a thing to waste on something like love and affection. It’s likely that only when near to their use-by-date that these female human commodities will grasp the sentiments sang by their favourite TV poets, but by then their charm has all but been disfigured, and no amount of restructure can save them, and so the once famed femme of the gilded mall is a lonely ageing lady stuffing her face with Valium while necking gallons of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. At the same time her husband appreciates Thursday and Sunday hand-jobs at the 5-star karaoke bar where all his suited pals treat young nervous girls with the utmost disrespect.
And so here I am, watching the pretties pass me by as I sip coffee in the paragon of shopping malls, wondering if one day their beauty will mean that they will carry the weight of the world on their skinny shoulders. I want one, too…this one, no that one, no, the one over there…it’s so hard to decide which one I want. Sat among these beautiful people, in a shopper’s paradise, we’re all moving into the future like ADHD kids spiked on caffeine, running through the brightly lit walkways of the present wanting this and wanting that, and ignoring everything else. Who cares? I mean that literally.
The fake applause and ephemeral adoration you receive from the biggest buyers in town may one day become your prison sentence, girl. Your perfect features could turn out to be crimes against your own humanity. Not only have you become the object of their desires, but you’ve become the object of your own desires. That’s a big mess you’ve created….Oh, poor pretty girl, I feel so sorry for you. Come and embrace me…and I won’t use you, oh no, me, I wouldn’t do that… I’m not like all the other men… Sit down next to me and tell me about your woes…I’m a good listener, me… No, I can’t pull it off, I’m also obsessed by your beauty, sorry, it feels hardwired. I guess I’m a caveman, too. Maybe we’re all victims of necessity, our faces fated, designed for life. Beauty is certainly difficult. It’s too easy to fall into that master/slave paradigm, and to abuse, satisfy desire, rather than share, expend love and affection…I’m trying to be a better man…
I won’t be writing for a while.
Namaste