EXAMINING THE AMBIGUOUS ALLURE OF THE
FARANG -
THAI MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN AND FARANG MEN
By
CHRISTINE WESTER
MSc Contemporary Asian Studies
Graduate School of Social Sciences
University of Amsterdam
2016
Student No. 11129158
christine.wester@googlemail.com
Word count: 25,194
Dr. Olga Sooudi
Supervisor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is not the thesis I thought I was going to write and my endeavour turned out to become challenging on both the academic and the personal level. I have been interested in transnational relationships - not only romantic relationships - for a long time and by starting this study I was able to commit myself to this topic for many months. Soon after engaging in academic literature and numerous conversations with people in the field, I changed my approach and began rethinking my own conceptions about people´s relationships and gender orders. Writing this thesis about transnational relationships would not have been possible without the work of other researchers on whose work I relied and who I mention and quote throughout this thesis. I owe special debt to the following people whose support is crucial to this study and the completion of my thesis: my thesis supervisor, Dr. Olga Sooudi, for her academic guidance, dedication, and mentorship much needed throughout the process, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom for its financial support without which I would not have been able to finish my studies, but also for the valuable network it provided me, and my mother for her steady support in various ways during my studies.
My biggest "thank you" goes to the women and men who shared their experiences of Bangkok city dating life with me and to the many people who introduced me to these wonderful places and sources of information and inspiration. I was often surprised and deeply touched by their stories. My hope is that this thesis does them justice.
LIST OF FIGURES
1 Sky Train station Chong Nonsi and Empire building ...10
2 Textbook I used during my Thai language course ...14
3 Girls taking selfies in front of Siam Paragon ...15
4 Bargirls in Sukhumvit Soi 11 ...20
5 Sririta Jensen, a Danish-Thai model ...33
6 How to behave like a lady as taught in schools...44
7 Vocabulary chart teaching children that dark skin is ugly ...51
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION ...1
Motivation and relevance ...1
Research question and objectives ...4
Thesis outline ...5
Methodology ...5
Interviews ...6
Participant observation ...6
News articles, blogs, and online forums ...7
Research site ...8
Research population ...10
The researcher as the "Other" ...13
II. GENDERED EXPERIENCES IN A METROPOLIS ...15
Class is in everything and everywhere ...17
"Women are like candy" ...19
"My family puts pressure on me" ...21
"They don´t treat women with respect" ...22
Discussion and conclusion ...26
III. FARANGNESS AND FARANGIZATION ...28
The imperialism of gender and sexualities ...30
IV. COURTSHIP IN BANGKOK ...35
Relationship status and idioms of practice ...35
Don´t eat fruits before they are ripe ...39
Discussion and conclusion ...43
V. BEING SINGLE - CHOICE OR FATE? ...45
Women´s expectations toward a partner ...46
Society´s expectations toward women ...50
Not all farang are good ...54
VI. THE MIA FARANG DILEMMA ...53
The origin of mia farang ...56
Strategies to avoid stigmatization ...62
VII. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION ...65
REFERENCES ...70
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION Motivation!and!relevance!
I was already in Bangkok for my field research when I found an article on the thaivisa.com forum1, which incited a lively discussion within the community. A member of the community
posted the findings of a Thai researcher, which indicated the emergence of a trend of young, educated women marrying white men. “Before I conducted this research, I thought that Thai women marry white men from economic necessity, but after I studied the situation, I changed my mind,” said Supichaya, who studied the trend through matchmaking websites, targeting Thai women and white men. Supichaya2 further elaborated that these women are well educated and
financially quite independent in comparison with the former generation, which mostly came from the working class in Isan3 (Thaivisa: website 2016).
Popular opinion about Thai women entering relationships with white men from a Western country4 have been dominated by a set of stereotypes, which are that marrying a
foreigner is primarily motivated by economic security concerns, the desire for upward mobility (hypergamy), and is the product of structural inequalities between different parts of the world (Constable 2003:13). Moreover, stereotypes are derived from what scholars traditionally refer to as "Orientalism" (Said 1978), which is an entrenched structure of thought and a pattern of making certain generalizations about the part of the world known as the Orient. In the colonial period, images of the Orient were largely aimed at depicting the people as inferior and backward in order to explain the righteousness of colonization. These images persist in the post-colonial era although in more subtle forms and may not directly be recognized as the legacy of colonial !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1 thaivisa.com is probably the biggest expat website in Thailand with a mailing list of more than 300.000.
2 I tried to get in contact with the researcher, the faculty that was mentioned in the article, and her supervisor, but was not successful 3 The Isan region is in the northeast of Thailand. It is one of the poorest regions in Thailand. I will give a more detailed description of its relevance in chapter 5.
4 In this thesis, the term "Western countries" includes Europe and countries of European colonial origin with European ancestral populations (North-America, Canada, and Oceania).
attitudes (Pissa-ard 2009:8). Furthermore, Mohanty (1988) outlined in her study "Under Western Eyes" the ways in which Euro-American scholarly studies of Third World women tend to reduce them to essentials in a way that deprives them of agency and that reasserts superiority of Western countries. One of the most prominent features of Thailand´s global image concerns the prostitution industry, which has inspired a disproportionate amount of literature on women in Thailand and dominates Euro-American scholars´ perception of gender analysis (Cook and Jackson 1999:12), which is offensive to both Thai women and men, and reveals one of the failings in these narratives as they neglect the experiences of a substantial proportion of the population in Thailand.
The interest in the topic of my thesis had been in my mind long before I began my studies at the University of Amsterdam. It was conceived after a series of conversations I had with Thai women I met at events while living in Bangkok temporarily in 2014. They disclosed that they viewed farang, as more desirable than Thai men. The term farang is used in Thailand to refer to white people of European descent without specifically referring to any nationality, language, or culture (Thongchai 1994, 4-5) and to the exclusion of other races. In this thesis, I will use the term
farang accordingly, although my informants also used the terminology "Westerner"
interchangeably.
According to Sunanta and Angeles (2012), marital relations and romantic and intimate actions take place on the personal level involving a complex combination of factors, which cannot be reduced to simplistic explanations around poverty or necessity, force or compulsion, and agency or free will alone. They are more than personal or private affairs as social, economic, and political worlds are built around them (Pratt and Rosner 2012: 8). Situating the trend in the context of Thailand´s industrialization and globalization, reveals an often-omitted connection between a crisis in intimacies and the global gender order. With the economic and political expansion of European states and by the creation of colonial empires, hegemonic masculinities were constructed in relation to subordinated masculinities and have globalized as part of a "world gender order" since colonial conquest and settlement (Connell 1987: 39,183-186). Within the past 40 years, Thailand has been drawn increasingly into the global economy, which spurred an influx of transnational investment, multinational corporations, products, and ideas. Appadurai (1996)
calls flows of people, technology, finance, mass media, and ideology "-scapes". Ideas as "ideoscapes" (Appadurai 1996: 33-36) travel into nations, carried by migrants and media, facilitated by new technology, and financed by recently generated wealth. Because the cultural flows also unlock imagination, ideoscapes become a source of inspiration. Some studies have documented the importance of these gendered images, meanings, and values. For instance, Kelsky (2001) found that professional Japanese women drew heavily on ideologies and imagery to esteem white men as the globe´s most desirable men. In a similar vein, in studies about women in Thailand, women define white men as treating women better than Thai men (Esara 2009). Yuh (2002) found that between the 1950s and 1980s, many of Korean military brides did not marry white American soldiers solely to escape poverty or prostitution but because of their idealization of them as prince charmings and derision of Korean men as patriarchs.
This study looks at two interrelated parts of the phenomenon of Thai women being interested in Western men and focuses on the local meanings and circumstances that foster and legitimate certain preferences for relationships. In chapter two to five, I attempt to answer the questions relating to the women´s choices: Why do some Thai middle-class women favor farang men? What role do the constructions of sexuality and gender play in their choices? How does the concept of farang inform them throughout their choices? The second part (chapter six) deals with possible consequences of Thai women choosing a farang boyfriend or husband. My findings suggest that urban middle-class women hold certain convictions about white Westerners´ Thai wives (mia farang) and how society views women in relationships with farang men based on historical connections to the sex industry, the historic origins of mia farang, and stereotyping of
farang men that emerge from a body of knowledge of Thailand´s interaction with the West.
Middle-class women acquainted with a farang man risk moral compromise. They attempt solving the problem at hand given their definition of class boundaries and gender at play. Considering Thai middle-class femininity, the concepts of class and gender entail a broadening of the notion that one´s gender is constructed through one´s own repetitive performance of gender (West and Zimmerman 1987; Butler 1990). Borrowing from Liechty (2003), I argue that middle-class-culture in Bangkok can be best understood as a sociocultural project, wherein class, gender, and consumerism are interactive and mutually constitutive. The project encompasses a wide range of beliefs and behaviors that allow middle-class people to define social and moral boundaries,
inclusive of all who "perform themselves into cultural existence" (Liechty 2003:265) and to the exclusion of those who cannot perform accordingly. In this vein, Thai middle-class women strive to construct and maintain a sociocultural space on their own that locates them in contradistinction to class others.
In conversations and interviews, middle-class women often placed the current generation of Thai middle-class men in a direct confrontation with their idea of an ideal husband, whereas images of farang men depict them as better for Thai women. However, Thai society stereotypes women dating Western men. This situation elucidates the problem at hand for Thai middle-class women. I argue that their choices to pursue a relationship with a farang are a result of images and occur through the exercise of agency.
Research!question!and!objectives!
Initially, I began my research with the question "What are the motivations of Thai middle-class women to pursue a relationship with a farang?" In preparation for the fieldwork I engaged with migration and globalization theories since scholars, for example, Constable (2005) have noted that such relationships have become increasingly common due to new expanding forms of globalization and increased time-space compression. Harvey (1990) coined the term "time-space compression to refer to the way the acceleration of economic activities leads to the destruction of spatial barriers and distances. Such marriages are especially interesting because they do not represent a global free-for-all in which all combinations, regardless of class, nationality, ethnicity, or gender, are possible. The majority of international marriage migrants are women, and most of these women move from poorer countries to wealthier ones, from the less developed global "south" to the more industrialized "north" (Constable 2005). When I first arrived in the field, I realized that couples consisting of a farang and a Thai woman are a rare sight in downtown Bangkok. After a few interviews, I found that the women constructed farang masculinity in direct relation to Thai masculinity and, although many of them embraced the idea of being in a relationship with a farang, they rejected the idea of moving to another country. Another peculiar feature of our conversations was that women emphasized the need to distance themselves from the mia farangs, revealing attitudes of the middle-class towards lower class women (and men) complicating Thai middle-class women´s desires to marry a farang. The evidence presented makes
it necessary to give due consideration to the globalized and localized imagery of gender and class. Global flows of images, ideas and people reinforce and extend old colonial hierarchies structured by the ideology of white supremacy (Persaud 2005). Within my research, it was salient how masculinity and femininity are determined by class and ethnicity and informs men´s and women´s strategies towards sexuality within and outside marriage. In this sense, this thesis combines methods and perspectives of race, feminism, and cultural studies. The overriding theme is that gender (both masculinity and femininity) takes shape in different and overlapping webs of power. I address three interrelated issues: How do Thai women construct farang masculinities in relation to Thai masculinities and how does this reveal larger hegemonic contexts? How is Thai middle-class femininity constructed and in what ways are women discriminated against? How does the belonging to the middle-class affect Thai middle-class women´s marital choices and strategies? Thesis!outline!
The thesis is organized into three main sections: Chapter 2 and 3 provide the context of this thesis. Chapter two outlines the urban life of middle-class women in Bangkok and discusses in which ways gender identities are lived and experienced by middle-class women in Bangkok. Chapter three will provide an overview of the history of farang and Thailand´s interaction with the West. In postcolonial Thailand, the construction of the "new male" reveals the entanglement of gender in larger hegemonic contexts and how images about farang are shaped. Chapter four explores how young women in Bangkok act out courtship and chapter five will describe women´s imagination of foreign and local men. Chapter 6 demonstrates that social stigmatization of mia
farang is embedded in gender, ethnic, and class bias and how middle-class women have to navigate
class-based lines to avoid stigmatization when they pursue a relationship with a farang. In chapter six I revisit important concepts elaborated throughout the thesis.
Methodology!
This thesis is the result of a one-year master program Contemporary Asian Studies with a fieldwork period of three months in Bangkok, Thailand. The fieldwork was conducted between the 16th of December 2015 and the 26th of March 2016 with small breaks for visa renewal every thirty days during which I left the country. The data that can be found in this research are either derived from interviews, casual conversations, and observations conducted in the field and
scholarly books from secondary literature, and online sources, such as online newspapers, blogs, forums, and youtube-videos.
Interviews!
My primary source of information were semi-structured interviews with topics I wanted to talk about, but I found it important to listen closely to what my informants had to say and react on it. All interviews were planned in advance and took place in an informal setting. I used a voice recorder to record the majority of the interviews and transcribed them afterward. The majority of the interviews were between 60 and 90 minutes long, some were up to two hours long. All interviews were conducted in English and most of my informants spoke English on a high level as the result of their education or their work in international companies. Nonetheless, I feel that had I had the ability to conduct the interviews in Thai, I would have probably generated rich and productive notions and expressions Thais use in the realms of sexuality, which I could not do in English. Thai speakers are confronted with multiple ways of addressing people and the self, each with particular resonances and connotations of deference, social status, intimacy, formality, and similar interrelated factors and the use of certain notions could give more useful insights about themes of identity, dominance, and even aggression, and their relationship to gender issues (Chirasombutti and Diller 1999). Especially, in urbanized and educated circles, subtlety in the Thai language is valued and refinement constitutes a class marker (Sunanta 2009, which became an important theme in this thesis.
Participant!observation!
I used participant observation as a method to gain a better understanding of the experiences of middle-class women in Bangkok. By accompanying women to events, shopping, dining, and watching movies, I could observe consumption patterns and their interactions with other people. Dancing events, to which another fellow researcher I met in Bangkok invited me, proved to the most successful source for acquiring informants. I attended several Salsa and Swing events that were held in different locations in downtown Bangkok. At the beginning of each event, organizers would give dance lessons free of charge and encourage the participants to change their partners every few minutes. In this speed dating like environment, participants quickly lost their inhibitions and I was able to talk to a variety of people I would have otherwise not met.
Furthermore, I conducted a small part of my participant observations online and, for this, created accounts on Tinder, meetup.com, and internations.org. The latter two have several subgroups dedicated to dating and singles. While I mainly used the sites to acquire informants, I also received messages from Thai men and women with which I interacted and met up on a few occasions for interviews and casual conversations. The huge majority of my informants have never used dating websites or smartphone applications, if they did, they would use English speaking websites and apps. One woman used OKCupid.com and another one tried Thaifriendly.com. I decided against creating accounts on these websites because I met these women at the end of my fieldwork when I scheduled and conducted my last interviews and thus would not have had enough time to incorporate these media in my fieldwork. In prior interviews, the women denied having used any websites or applications and reported that they would rather not be acquainted with such a service. The other reason is that Thaifriendly.com is for Asian women interested in foreign men. I am not an Asian woman and did not want to set up a fake account. In all my interactions, I was upfront about my status as researcher and intentions in order to let people decide whether they would like to interact with me.
News!articles,!blogs,!and!online!forums!
During my fieldwork, I read different English language newspapers, blogs, and forums, such as the Bangkok Post, Asian Correspondent, Bangkok Coconuts, thaiwomantalks.com, mythai.org, thaivisa.com, stickmanbangkok.com, and the Thailand forums on reddit.com. These sources were useful to keep me updated and several articles became subjects for discussions and questions in my interviews. It was also an effective way to discover how the Thai media present subjects relating to gender and how readers view theses issues since online sources can be commented upon. Many English language blogs translate the contents from Thai-language newspapers and forums, therefore, I believe that the most pressing issues were brought to my attention; nonetheless, being able to read the Thai language would have been valuable since I assume that the selection of articles reflected the interests of its readers, of which the majority might be male foreigners living in Thailand. Howard (2009) estimated that there were 100.000 Westerners in Thailand in the mid-2000s, with the largest proportion coming from the UK, Germany, the USA, the Netherlands, France, Canada, and Australia. In his survey, he found that virtually all were men (96 %). This thesis is concerned with opinions of women.
Research!site!
Before the kingdom came into being as it is today, an ethnically diverse population of Thai, Lao, Malay, and numerous hill tribes lived in independent states in the north, northeast, and south. These formerly autonomous territories were colonized by and integrated into Siam, as Thailand was called until 1935, in the 20th century (Loos 2006: 2). Thailand´s capital Bangkok was originally the site of a French fort in the mid-seventeenth century and a largely Chinese trading and customs post until the late eighteenth century (Smithies 1986:4-5). One hundred years ago, the city began to reflect modernizing policies of King Chulalongkorn who created the preconditions for Bangkok´s contemporary modernity. Canals were filled in to make roads, brick buildings replaced floating houses and many new buildings were constructed which reflected a blend of European and Thai sensibilities (Hamilton 2000: 462). As Thailand industrialized, migration to industrial sites occurred rapidly, especially to the Bangkok metropolitan area and adjacent provinces. Subsequently, Bangkok has undergone vast transformations and in the process manifested more dominant and exaggerated elements in the economy, society, and culture compared to other urban areas in Thailand. The city dwarfs other urban centers like Chiang Mai and Surat Thani with its population of more than eight million (or more, considering illegal immigrants and circular immigrants) making it more than twenty times larger than any other urban settlement in Thailand. At a first glance, Bangkok may seem like a metropolis defined by spatial chaos. Bustling markets, smelly canals, shiny shopping malls, gracious temples, tall buildings and twisty sois (minor roads) seem to constitute a conglomeration of features without an identifiable pattern. Yet, as O´Connor (1990:61) observes, Bangkokians see their city more as a patchwork of places defined by activities, communities, and historic events, rather than a grid of streets. Vorng (2011) argues that Bangkok consists of two centers: the old city center located on Rattanakosin and the modern downtown nexus radiating outwards from Siam and Ratchaprasong. Central to the old centers are the palaces, temples, and ceremonial grounds, which remain important as the material and symbolic embodiment of the monarchy and religiosity. Central to contemporary urban life are centralized nodal points in Bangkok´s new "downtown". The emergence of new middle-class sectors of society affected urban space in various ways, with two main spheres being the intense development of commercial consumption and residential enclaves catering to the elite and the new middle-classes.
The choice for Bangkok as my fieldwork destination was based on six considerations: 1) Bangkok is the most cosmopolitan city in Thailand in which a large number of advanced industry professionals are employed in national and multi-national companies (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Since I began my research to find out about women´s motivations to pursue a relationship with a Western man I suspected that Bangkok rather than any other metropolis in Thailand would be an ideal setting to meet middle-class women in relationships with farangs. 2) The growing mobility and independence of a younger generation of women who migrate to Bangkok to pursue higher education or for work who live autonomously from parents, kin, and village elders. This modifies traditional gender expectations. As youth migrate away from their families and communities of origin, parental involvement in children´s marriages is reduced and parents have less control over the sexuality of their adolescent children (Esara 2009). 3) Thailand´s reputation abroad as "sex capital" colors Western perceptions of Thai sexuality and obscures cultural ideals of female sexual modesty (Bishop and Robinson 1999:191-204). 4) Thai women´s preferences for farangs rely upon particular expectations and idealized assumptions about farang men. These men, in turn, bring their own expectations about Thai women and sexuality (Esara 2009). 5) Amidst the height of nationalist sentiments after the ouster of Prime Minister Thaksin in 2006, national initiatives and policies around women marrying foreigners have turned into teaching morality to women (Sunanta 2009). Although theses teachings are aimed predominantly at rural women, initiatives are carried out nationwide. Furthermore, Thailand´s current military government attempts to control (female) sexuality through ideological campaigns linking morality, national identity, and marriage.
During the nearly four months I stayed in Bangkok, I rented a small condominium in Sathorn, which is the financial business district and one of the "better" addresses in Bangkok with upscale hotels, condominium, and office buildings. The house was located in a small soi (minor street) close to the Empire building and the BTS station. One of my friends helped me with the process since the manager of the building did not speak English and my Thai is not useful for complex negotiations. In order to get around, I used mainly the Sky Train (BTS) and the metro (MRT).
! !
Research!population!
Besides the sampling criteria of Thai ethnicity, "educational level" (university or above) and "social class" (middle), the rest of the sampling criteria was left to be relatively open to ensure that concepts could emerge from the data. I was able to gather 24 Thai middle-class women and six males with different backgrounds as informants. I met 14 of the women on more than one occasion, most of the times they would invite me for some activities, such as going for dinner, watching a movie, or shopping. With two exceptions, the women shared similar strategies for and outcomes of intimate relationships. The majority of my informants was single and had a positive attitude towards getting married; few had settled with the thought of remaining single because no suitable mate was available. The minority of women was actively searching, either with the help
of online sources or through friends or family. Some women were looking for a progressive Thai man, with a "westernized mindset" and others rejected the idea completely to date a Thai man, while other women would either date a Western man or a progressive Thai man. One of the women has been in a relationship with a "traditional" Thai man but mentioned that she did not plan on marrying him soon because he did not live up to her expectations of a responsible partner. In her opinion, Western masculinity was superior to Thai masculinity within certain realms, which did however not translate into her wanting to date a farang. One of the women had been in relationships with men and women. Another woman vocalized adamantly that she was interested in black men and actively pursuing them on dating apps. Our interview, held in a highly frequented Starbucks cafe close to her workplace, was at times a bit awkward for me. Although I found her opinions very interesting, she spoke loudly about her desires and experiences with black men. I was a bit concerned for her reputation and wondered whether she was aware that people were listening in on our conversation. The mentioned stances towards intimate partners are interesting since they highlight to what extent white masculinity is idealized and whether the notion of white masculinity is central to Thai women´s "plan of action". Even the women who were looking for a Thai man stated they were looking for someone with a "Western mindset", however, favored a hybridized form between a farang and a Thai man.
The largest group of interviewees (17) had migrated to Bangkok from adjacent provinces or provinces further away from Bangkok. All of them migrated to Bangkok because of better educational and professional opportunities than offered in their home provinces. Within this group, most people (23) lived alone and some with their kin (5) - all men lived with their kin. One of the women lived together with her Australian boyfriend to whom she got engaged during the time I was there. The second largest group comprised of people who were born and raised in Bangkok and whose parents were either Bangkokians or had migrated from other provinces. The third group was return-migrants from Australia, Canada, and the USA. They grew up in Thailand and had moved at some time to another country for education or work. Each of them got married to a foreigner abroad, two of them were divorced or in the process of getting divorced and one woman was living together with her foreign husband who was a stay-at-home dad and cared for their 5-year old daughter. Education levels were from currently in tertiary education to master’s degree and some were in the process of relocating abroad for further studies. The ages
ranged from 22 to 45. The majority was in the 24 to 32-age bracket. The informants were sourced through personal contacts, by recruiting women on professional networking and cultural events, and via social online networking groups. This ensured the diversity of the sample. According to Herzfeld (2010: 175), anthropological studies in Thailand have been rural in emphasis, devoted to the Thailand´s sex industry and neglected the middle-class (Cook and Jackson 1999: 13). Due to limited knowledge of Thailand´s middle-class women and the fact that women do not constitute a homogeneous category, I do not claim that their experiences described by my interviewees can be generalized to Thailand´s middle-class women. However, based on data collected from in-depth interviews, my first-hand experience and observations, interaction and conversations with countless people in the field as well as local press coverage, I can reasonably assert that the accounts of my informants presented here are illustrative and typical of experiences and perspectives shared by many middle-class women in Bangkok today. For confidentiality reasons, I will use pseudonyms. Appendix 1 depicts the full demographic information relating to all informants.
!
The!researcher!as!the!"Other"! !
"I would call you an alien; someone who does not belong here." (Bart, 305)
As Bart´s statement indicates and my explanations in chapter three describe in more detail, as a
farang I represent the cultural other in the Thai imagination and my farangness is surrounded by a
set of stereotypes that shaped and influenced my research. I am a German woman. I was born into a farming family in a rural, Catholic enclave, close to the border of the Netherlands. Religion and patriarchal family values played an important role in my upbringing until my apprenticeship in a governmental department allowed for a new form of freedom by moving out of my family´s influence, both spatially and financially. At the time I am writing this thesis, I am in my thirties and traveled and worked in several countries around the world. During this time and through conversations with locals and other travelers, I was introduced to differing concepts of dating and relationships, characterized by misunderstandings, varying values, and differing idioms of practice. I believe that my upbringing and my experiences have provided me with valuable insights for this project and enabled me to empathize on various levels with my informants.
During each interview, I gave my informants the opportunity to ask questions about me. Although all of the women knew that I was a researcher from the Netherlands who would eventually write about their lives, this did not seem important to them. They cared more about my family history and my life in Europe, probably wanting to situate me in their mental universe, but also ask pressing questions about their observations of farang men and farang customs. Even though some of my informants concluded a bit astonished that my life was not so much different from theirs, my "otherness" has had an impact on the outcomes of this research in various ways. To begin with, I had issues in acquiring informants. I discussed this with several of my Thai contacts and they mentioned two possible reasons: many Thais feel intimidated by farangs and thus try to avoid too much contact, and they are afraid of the questions I might ask since relationships and love are highly personal. For instance, Kaew, an informant who is mentioned in chapter two said:
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5 Interview 13.02.2016: Bart is a 30 year old Thai-Chinese man. He worked in a property company in Bangkok at the time I interviewed him.
"When you are white and come from a foreign country, people think that you are probably smarter and probably richer ... in some cases that´s true but not always. I usually tell my staff they should not be scared of white people."
Moreover, my farangness might have had a big impact on the answers of my respondents. For most Thais, I belong to a culture6 that is viewed as "sex mad" (Cook and Jackson 1999:19) and I
believe that some of the answers I got are an expression of racialized expectations within the realms of relationships, rather than an expression of the kind of questions I asked. I provide an example in chapter 4.
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6 I am aware that "West" is not a culture, but the homogenized category of the farang conflates "Caucasian race" and "Western culture" and Thais would usually use the notion "Western culture" in conversations with me rather than talking about nationalities or ethnicities.
Figure 2 Textbook I used during my Thai language course. Foreigners are called "aliens". Source: own photo
CHAPTER II
GENDERED EXPERIENCES IN A METROPOLIS
"Buzzing, humid and exotic, Bangkok is the larger-than-life city where magnificent temples, historic markets, skyscrapers and rooftop bars create an intoxicating vibe that’s hard to resist." (Worldtravelguide: website 2016)
! Figure 3 Girls taking selfies in front of Siam Paragon, a Bangkok shopping mall that was the world´s No. 1 spot for Instagram posts in 2013 and the No. 1 spot for my interviews. Source: Asian Review
On a Wednesday evening, around 8 o´clock, I am waiting on the second floor of the Siam Paragon mall in front of a Starbucks for one of my informants who asked me to meet here. Two months into my field research I have become very familiar with many of the locations of this multi-national coffee chain that always seems to be busy no matter what branch. Since I made this arrangement via the Line app7, I have only a vague idea what my informant looks like.
Therefore, I am looking around nervously, watching the passing people for some sign that someone in this crowd might also look out for someone. Most of them stroll around in groups, chatting, and gazing at the offers of the various food stalls. It is a bit chilly so I am reaching for my cardigan that I am carrying around in my bag for the many occasions I am indoors with air conditioning cooling down the building to what feels to me like the wintery weather in Amsterdam I left shortly before. Like always, I had messaged my informant what I look like and what I am wearing, hoping that it will make it easier for us to recognize each other. I don´t have to wait long until I see a Thai woman separating out of the mass of people and smiling at me.
This snippet from my fieldwork is revealing of some of the themes I identified when looking back at my field research: I spent much of my time in the Sky Train traveling to and from meetings with women who chose to meet up in one of the modern malls connected to the Sky Train, usually not far from their workplaces. Most of the interviews took place late in the evenings or on the weekends because the majority of women I talked to work long hours. At the beginning of each interview, I would ask them about their life in Bangkok: Where do they come from? Where are they going? What are their professions, daily routines, and aspirations? How do they perceive life in Bangkok? These questions served two purposes: firstly, I wanted to make them warm up to me and feel comfortable while talking about themselves and their lives. Secondly, I wanted to know what it means to be a middle-class woman in Bangkok.
My research reveals that higher education and work outside the family household helped to empower women to realize their potentials and generate incomes with which they are gaining access to cultural forms that have been shaping their lives in various ways. Spending time shopping and eating in shopping malls away from the overpowering heat, crowds, and traffic fumes of the wider city have become an intrinsic part of the modern urban experience of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bangkok middle-class. In an overcrowded city with few venues for recreation, shopping malls have become the predominant spaces for leisure and recreation (Wilson 2004: 106). Shopping was largely carried out in formal and informal open markets and Chinese-owned shops until recently. Nowadays, the air-conditioning in the shopping malls adds comfort and a sense of luxury that represents modernity for many (ibid: 29-67). Consumption played a key role in the lives of my informants. This must be seen as much more than simply the act of purchasing some product; as Liechty (2003:31) states, middle-class culture is uniquely embedded in the social trajectory of things. What things people desire, the meanings they attach to them, and the class-cultural practices they construct around consumption becomes the primary mode of cultural production of the middle-class. Despite considerable material and social gains, women struggled against gender inequality. In the following, I show women´s views on middle-class life in Bangkok and revealing the common imbalance between men and women which manifests in everyday life. I chose the stories of by four women in which they are talking about class, fashion choices, and their work in the professional and domestic sphere. Their stories are exemplary for the women in my study.
"Class!is!in!everything!and!everywhere"!
Khem is a 24-year-old student at Chulalongkorn University and had nearly finished her studies in Political Sciences. She planned on commencing a Master Study program in Women´s Studies in Europe at the end of the year and had been awaiting a positive answer from the chosen institution when we first talked via skype and then met for a short tour around the Sala Daeng area8 and
later sat down in a cafe in a shopping center. American-style shopping centers represent a relatively recent development in Bangkok and have since become a defining space for contemporary urban experience. Malls, which have mushroomed throughout the city in the last three decades, are designed as a one-stop complex, in which Thais might spend hours to meet people, shop, work, run errands, or spend leisure time alone or with family and friends. A footbridge system connects several malls in the downtown area with the BTS (Sky Train) stations and the areas around Lat Phrao, Chatuchak, Phrom Phong, Ekkamai, Asok, Ari, Surasak, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8!Saladaeng!is!located!close!to!Silom’s!shopping,!dining!and!nightlife!scene!at!Patpong,!a!famous!red!light!district.!Some!of!the!minor! streets!are!known!for!their!"massage"!parlors!catering!to!the!gay!men´s!scene.!Since!prostitution!is!officially!illegal,!much!of!the!sex! services!are!provided!in!restaurants,!massage!parlors!and!karaoke!bars!(see!Bao!1999).!
Victory Monument, and Chong Nonsi train stations are packed with condominiums, apartment blocks, and homes. Shopping complexes and department store chains generally target specific class ranges of consumers, demarcated into upper, middle, and lower segments (Vorng 2011). Many stores such as Zen Central and Siam Paragon target the upper segment of wealthier Thai or foreign customers. However, as one of my taxi driver remarked, upscale malls like Siam Paragon are a place where the rich shop, the middle-class people go to eat and working class people go to escape the heat. Over coffee, Khem explained how she would describe a middle-class person:
"Here in Thailand, if you don´t have a bachelor´s degree then you are considered lower class. (...) and it is also about the products that you use, for example, Thailand is crazy about brandings and shopping, (...) and if you go on holiday in Europe, Japan or some kind of civilized country once in a while. Middle-class people have the passion for something international and kind of denounce themselves as being Thai, I mean it´s not that they say they are not Thai but they try to live the lifestyle that makes them different like the lower class or rejecting what the grassroot class is."
Her elaborate statement evidences many significant issues concerning class membership, which have been mentioned in a similar way by all my informants. Khem defines class-membership not only based on wealth and material standards but also based on social performance in everyday life. As Vorng (2011) argues, most Bangkokians would agree that a white-collar occupation could sufficiently define an individual as being of middle-class status, however, there are status and lifestyle differences between members of the middle-class. Giddens (1991:81) argues that consumption gives material form to particular narratives of self-identity while Young (1999:71) contends that consumption practices are repetitive and concrete manifestations of people´s visions of modernity and their own place in the social order. One´s position in a status hierarchy in Thailand is linked with the consumption and adoption of prestige markers of cosmopolitanism and modernity, many of them European and North-American, including cosmopolitan lifestyle, education in an international school with a European or North American curriculum, and schooling abroad, preferably in an English-speaking country (Thongchai 2000). Within Bangkokian status relations people tend to relate to one another based on external attributes - from personal presentation to the mode of speech, to manners and behavioral conduct. In this
regard, it is interesting that all my informants chose an air-conditioned café for our meetings. Mills (1997) found that these venues and the beverage, hot coffee, reflect distinctive signs of urbanity and middle-classness. When looking at Khem´s statement, she further stresses out is that it is important to distinguish oneself from a lower-class person by rejecting what is considered lower-class lifestyle. According to Bourdieu (1984), social classes display different patterns of cultural taste and consumption and also of distaste and aversion as part of their characteristic lifestyles, along with closely related patterns of material consumption, for example in food and dress.
"Women!are!like!candy"9!!
In fact, for members of the middle-class, wearing the right clothes and the right brands are a big deal and constitute a big part of their claims to membership in the urban middle-class. Clothes and accessories are a sign of being civilized and are used to preserve and show status. Conversations with many women in Bangkok indicated that there was a set of shifting and ambiguous rules that guided middle-class women´s decisions about how to dress. They had to pay attention to how they display their bodies or risking to be morally compromised. One´s dress could show too much skin or be deemed too casual, which was associated with the lifestyle of a lower class woman, especially when accompanied by farang men.
Kaew´s experience with fashion choices is a rather insightful example of these struggles. I first encountered her at a cultural event where she gave a presentation about what it means to be a Thai businesswoman in Thailand and in which she talked about that she had to deal with lots of stereotypes because of her ethnicity and gender. We met in a French café close to her office in Soi Sukhumvit 1110. She is a 29-year-old business owner and focuses on two connected business
segments; one of her companies publishes a magazine directed at hotel businesses in Asia; the other company provides hospitality businesses with uniforms. She is a very feisty person who constantly fiddled with her phone to answer incoming messages, regularly cursing and railing against people who sent her messages during our interview. She is aware that her appearance not !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9 Quote from Thailand´s Prime Minister Prayuth. Full quote: "During Songkran (Thai New Year), I ask that women wear proper clothes, Thai style, so they would look good and civilized (...) women are like toffee or candy, which people would not like to eat if already unwrapped". I see similarities between the administration of Prime Minister Prayuth and that of other state regimes, which have attempted to control female sexuality through ideological campaigns linking morality, national identity and marriage (see Ong 1995) https://asiancorrespondent.com/2016/04/thai-pm-prayuth-compares-skimpily-dressed-women-to-unwrapped-candy/ 10 Soi Sukhumvit 11 is a popular hangout for expats with many bars and restaurants that cater to expats
only reflects on her business, but her fashion choices are important to protect herself from being stereotyped and discriminated against. She became visibly upset when she elaborated on incidences where she felt disrespected because people assumed that she was an escort of one of the
farang males when attending business events. Interesting was that she perceived Thai people to be
more condescending than Western people. "I get that from Thai ... from my people!" On elaborating on her fashion choices, she made remarks that she needed to distance herself from women working in the loosely structured sex industry in Bangkok.
"When you dress like a prostitute, you will be treated like one." She set forth that she wears heels in order to appear taller, however, the right type of heel is important and she illuminates that she avoided those heels that were too "slutty". While trying to explain what "slutty" means, she mentioned the shoes of the working girls in the bars we passed earlier as an example. The type of shoes these women wore was so-called stiletto heels or platform shoes. She said she wears shoes with more elegant heels that are available in international shoe stores in downtown Bangkok. Furthermore, the right type of suit is important as well. She said that most of her clothing items are black. While she did not give an explanation for the choice of the color, she showed me a photo of a recent meeting
with hotel managers to demonstrate her fashion choices. Earlier, she had remarked that the industry was male-dominated, which was reflected in the picture; she was the only woman in the picture next to a couple of farang males who all wore dark suits. For her, it was crucial to wear business-like clothes to prevent people from thinking that she was with one of the men who "picked her up in a bar". Her preferred suits consist either of long trousers or a skirt that reaches the knees with a blouse. Although her clothes were body conscious, they did not reveal much skin, especially not the shoulders and cleavage, unlike the women in the bars, as she pointed out to me.
Figure 4 Bargirls in Sukhumvit Soi 11. The woman in the front wears shoes that are "too slutty" and her dress is too "showy" for women like Kaew. Source: Thailand Redcat
"My!family!puts!pressure!on!me"!
Noon´s story highlights that Thai women are living within a sociocultural environment in which extended family, society, and the state continue to strongly emphasize the role of women as being primarily responsible for nurturing and maintaining a happy family. 11 The gendered image of the
"good daughter" entails obligations of respect and gratitude owed by all children to their parents, which is especially significant for women. Unlike their brothers, they cannot serve as a Buddhist monk to earn religious merit and are raised to express their gratitude and loyalty by attending to the day-to-day needs of household members (Mills 1997). Most of the women I interviewed lived alone and were not married; nonetheless, they had something to report in this area. Noon is a 28-year-old woman who was born and raised in a city in the south of Thailand; she has an older sister and has been working in a marketing office in Bangkok since her return from Japan where she studied. She is a very lively and open-minded person and talked about how much she liked her life in Bangkok, how much she enjoyed living together with one of her friends, and overall was very content with her job. Nonetheless, she contemplated leaving Bangkok to attend to her father. She explained that a few years ago, her mother became very sick and at that time, members of her extended family began putting pressure on her to move back to take over the household. "But I had just gotten a new job. My dad told me not to quit it and that he would take care of her." Unfortunately, her mother died shortly after. Noon´s father reassured her that he could take care of himself "but I get the pressure from the rest of the family to live with him and care for him."
Noon explained that the influence her extended family had on decisions that affected her nuclear family has always been rather high, although her mother had attempted to reduce it when she married her father. Her parents both worked as police officers and her mother agreed to a marriage on the condition that they would not move into his parents´ house12, but rather buy one
further away from the extended family. The insistence of Noon´s mother for a neolocal residence is similar to a phenomenon observed by Kyung-Sup and Min-Young (2010) who found in their research among South Korean women a tendency to restructure family relations and thereby !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11 The Prime Minister mentioned in speeches during the time of my field work that men and women cannot be equal and that a woman´s role is centred around the household: "Women are the gender of motherhood (...) women take care of the kids and everything else in the household" https://asiancorrespondent.com/2016/02/tongue-thaied-prayuth-and-the-ladies/ 12 patrilocal residence is found to be most prevalent in the urban South, the Central region, and Bangkok. This reflects a large proportion of the Chinese in the areas. On the other hand, living with the wife´s mother (matrilocal residence) is more common in other urban areas (Limanonda 1995).
reducing the effective scope of family relations. Families in South Korea become functionally overloaded attributed to compressed modernity, which has become a universal feature of contemporary national societies due to globalization. It is a civilizational condition in which economic, political, social, and/or cultural changes occur in an extremely condensed manner in respect to both time and space (Kyung-Sup 2010). Such familial burdens and risks are particularly onerous to women as a result of the fundamentally gender-based structure of family relations and duties in South Korea and Thailand.
Noon remembered that family members would often argue with her mother and that her father was merely a bystander who never defended decisions her parents had made together. For instance, she remembered that her mother had been criticized much before Noon went to the USA to attend high school. "The whole family wanted me to stay in the south and go to college here, but my
Mom told me that if I want to go I should go." Traditionally, daughters leave their natal family one by
one through marriage. The last daughter usually stays on, looks after the parents, and inherits the land and house after the parents´death (Limanonda 1995). Noon was the youngest daughter and it would have been her duty to stay and care for the parents, especially after her sister got married.
Not all women encountered the conflicting expectations of familial obligations and having their own aspirations in the same fashion as Noon, but many were confronted by similar dilemmas and recognized the moral force of family obligation either from their own family or that of (possible) boyfriends and husbands.13
"They!don´t!treat!women!with!respect"!
Work represented a large portion of the lives of most of the women in my study and almost all of them revealed being concerned about issues in the workplace. I met Somchai through an organizer of an event I attended. She is a 45-year-old return-migrant from Canada where she was married to a Canadian man. She had left Canada 10 years before and since then had no contact with her husband. Her husband was her neighbor during the time she studied in Canada and when he asked her to marry him she agreed. She confided in me that she only got married because she had reached an age where she thought it was the right thing to do and that it was !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
expected from her. Marriage is considered a woman´s natural path in Thai society and a proper woman has to get married (Bao 2008). However, they did not get along well shortly into the marriage and, therefore, she returned to Bangkok. She never got formally divorced but assumed that her husband had terminated the marriage in Canada, as this is possible after two years without contact. Upon her return, she opened a shoe retail business with one of her friends, which was successful and growing. They expanded and opened several stores throughout Bangkok. Nonetheless, she wanted to try different things and looked for a job in an office first and then became a freelance language trainer for corporations later. She said:
"I feel uncomfortable when I go and work in Thai corporations. I usually work with a company for three months and I must say I don´t like that much. They don´t treat women with respect and women have to pretend to be stupid and keep a low profile. Women are expected to be nice and not speak up. I believe in equality and that is why I prefer to work with Western companies."
All women I talked to felt to be in a double-bind dilemma when working in Thai companies. Femininity and competence are defined as exact opposites creating unrealizable expectations for them (Jamieson 1995: 18). Women in Thailand are expected to be silent because women, who speak up, are considered too bold (Hobbs et al, 2011) and most women said they needed to "dumb-down" when interacting with men to not be perceived as a butch (mannish woman). According to Somchai, Thai companies cling to traditional gender relations making it impossible for many women to thrive, meaning being taken seriously and being promoted into higher positions, and thus it would be better to work for a Western company. Most women assumed that Western companies do not discriminate against women and that women will be treated as well as men when working in one. Something similar was observed by Kelsky (2001:114). Japanese women believed that foreign affiliated firms would bring with them allegedly non-discriminatory hiring policies of their home companies in the West. Most women, however, concluded that companies that have been too long in Thailand begin assimilating and adopting "the bad attitudes of Thai managers" towards work and women rather than remaining true to their conception of the gender-egalitarian Western company.
Another example for a double-bind situation was reported by Duan. She was one of the women I met on several occasions and who helped me with some translations. She is 34 and single and we would sometimes meet up for lunch and dinner and discuss "women stuff". She works as a manager in a transnational company. The CEO is a farang man, the lower level manager and other employees are Thai women, which is a composition found in many of the companies my informants worked for. In our discussions, she talked often about her relationship with her co-workers that soured over time. She had worked for the same organisation for a couple of years, but was only recently promoted to the position of a manager, which she blamed on "office politics". As an example, she mentioned being called into her boss´ office after a networking event her organization hosted. Her boss, a British man, told her that someone in the office had mentioned she would use these events to "find a Western boyfriend", which he asked her to refrain from. Such events require mixing and mingling and employees are expected to attend them in the evenings after their regular work. "It was my job to talk to people and how ironic that 90% of
the attendees are Western males!" Noticeably upset, she suspected that one of her female colleagues,
who she described as "backstabber", had talked to her boss to tarnish her reputation. She said she was not her first victim. Earlier, one of her other colleagues had caused her trouble by disclosing something she jokingly said about her CEO in a private conversation. She viewed this as an attempt to make her appear in a negative light among her work colleagues and supervisors and began reducing contact to them to a minimum. Seeing no other possibility to not get acquainted with farang males in a work-related environment, she would also stay away from thee networking events they organized. This was not received positively either as she was expected to grow her business network. Female rivalry is a theme in many women´s lives (Barash 2006) and women often perceive other women as a more direct threat to their advancement in the workplace than men (Sills 2007). Moreover, women bully other women at work more than twice as often as they target men. Ludgen-Sandvik et al (2012:61) situated gender centrally in the study of. They argue that a failure to conform to traditionally gendered roles could trigger bullying at work and Tannenbaum (2003) points out that women are conditioned to view each other as rivals rather than allies. As few women rise in masculine hierarchies, they will, as Freire (1970: 29-30) suggests, "almost always... instead of striving for liberation become oppressors or sub-oppressors of others similar to them." Such examples were brought up strikingly often in my conversation and were
one of the reasons some women were unwilling to work with or for Thai companies and why they decided to quit their jobs to either become self-employed or, as one of my interviewees told me a few months after we first met, to consider getting married.14 "At least I would not have to worry about paying my bills if I were married", she said in a bitter tone. She had just lost her job because of
bullying and struggled to find a new one.
Some women in my study brought up another issue; they reported feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place when it came to sexual harassment. Prae was one of the women who talked about enduring harassment at the workplace:
"There is a lot of verbal and physical harassment at the workplace ... but women would not talk about it because they do not see the point of talking about it. I talk with you about it, but I would not talk to my colleagues about it.... in Thai society it is not only the guy who would look bad but also you as a woman would look bad too."
Studies have documented that sexual harassment is generally directed toward women and perpetrated by men. This situation conforms with social norms about sex roles in general and thus appears to be "natural". The phenomenon of blaming the victim in sexual harassment cases rests upon differences in perceptions and differences in power between women and men in organizations. Men are more likely to subscribe to the view that sexual behavior at work is "only natural" and to believe that women simply overreact to that natural behavior (Baugh 1997). Violence against women in Thai society is pervasive not only in the workplace but also in intimate relationships. According to a study, 41% of ever-partnered women in Bangkok had encountered physical or sexual violence by their male partners (Archawanijakul et al., 2003) and most of the problems concerning sexual assault, sexual harassment, and date rape were rarely reported. Chinlumprasert (2001) views this issue as a deeply hidden problem embedded in Thai society because of patriarchal structures. A patriarchy, as noted by Gamache (1998), is "the institutionalization of male dominance over women in both public and private spheres". Women learn that men have greater power and greater access to resources and ability to define and control social rules and accept these as normal and natural. Thus, Thai women have few perceptions of inequality in social activities. Through gender role socialization, they learn to obey !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the authority and "rules" that reflect the social norm and perceive it as important for them to stay out of trouble, to ensure their own survival and to be accepted as "good" women (Chinlumprasert 2001). That sexual harassment has been normalized in the everyday life of women became obvious in nearly all of my interactions during my fieldwork. For instance, most women provided unsolicited advice on how to deal with catcalling ("pretend you did not hear them") and how to avoid situations in which I could get harmed by men, especially when traveling by taxi or public transport or when passing groups of men sitting outside and drinking since "boys will be boys, right?".15
Discussion!and!conclusion!
In this chapter, I have focused on what can be learned about women´s experiences as middle-class women in Bangkok through their consumption practices, more specifically through their fashion choices, and their encounters with patriarchy. My research reveals that higher education and work outside the family household helped to empower women to realize their potentials and generate incomes with which they are gaining access to cultural forms that have been shaping their lives in various ways. Consumer society plays an important role in defining what it means to be an urban middle-class woman. Their consumption is not simply a reflection of material interests but a cultural process, and constitutive of young women´s sense of themselves as a middle-class woman. However, the increased importance of consumerism and class-hierarchy burdens middle-class women significantly more than their male counterparts. For women, there is more at stake when failing to locate themselves in contradistinction to lower-class women, who are believed to be culturally distinct and morally compromised.
The purpose of this chapter was not to argue that urban middle-class women have bad lives, most women felt quite the contrary and reported feeling content with their lives. They were adamant in their wish to stay in Thailand, even if they would find a foreign husband. Nonetheless, many women thought about settling outside of Bangkok in smaller cities or closer to the place of residence of their families. Bangkok was described as "mentally draining", but it offered the best job and leisure time opportunities when compared to other urban areas in Thailand. I found a lot !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15!There were many reports (and videos) of women being raped or masturbated to when taking a taxi and the public transport during the time I did my fieldwork. The uncounted numbers of sexual assaults might be substantially higher than the official statistics, because women fear stigmatization when reporting incidents. Unfortunately there have been many incidents where women lost their jobs or were publicly shunned because they became victims.!
of pride among the women for their achievements in education and in their professions and many of them had very ambitious goals, such as starting their own businesses or aiming for higher education at prestigious universities in foreign countries. They often mentioned they "deserved" to be admitted to high-ranking universities or getting a promotion because they worked hard and achieved good results. Nonetheless, they often encountered obstacles that held them back from advancing in their careers and in their private lives, which can be indirectly and directly attributed to patriarchal structures.
My purpose here has also not been to argue that urban middle-class men in Bangkok had it easy, so to speak. Feminist scholars, such as hooks (2000:ix) point out that maintaining the apparatuses of patriarchal systems is work that comes with its own negative effects. Some societal standards are detrimental for men as well and men who do not live up to the expectations of Thai masculinity risk being ridiculed. Bosson & Vandello (2011) argue that manhood is a social status that is both elusive and tenuous. The elusiveness of the status lies in the fact that the transition from boyhood to manhood is not a given, but instead must be earned and is conferred by a given society. The tenuousness of manhood lies in the fact that this status can easily be lost. Men have historically occupied social roles that involve status-seeking and resource acquisition and thus have become associated with competitiveness, defensiveness, and a constant struggle to prove worth and status. One of my male informants reported that he did not like the expensive drinking sessions with his friends, which often ended in brothels. He did not like to have sex with prostitutes, but if he would not participate, his male peers would belittle him as not manly enough. Moreover, not only ethnic men put pressure on them and their identities. In the next two chapters, I will elaborate more thoroughly on the world gender order in which Thai masculinity is constructed as inferior. Men also do not live worry-free and it would be unfair not to acknowledge that modernity and globalization put pressure on them as well.
In the next chapter, I will describe how colonialism, imperialism, and globalization influenced traditional gender roles and how the farang became an object of desire for a substantial number of Thai women.
