British Expat Newsletter:
2 February 2005
Hello, and welcome to those who have joined up since our last newsletter.
In this issue
- This week: Sex, drugs and rock and roll
- Virtual Snacks
- Sponsor
- Bizarre Searches
- Joke and quotation
This week
This week’s newsletter is all about… sex, drugs and rock and roll.
And before you get all excited, I mean sex as in passports, battle of, girls and boys, all that sort of thing – which is what the word really means anyway. (Or so Dave says.) Gender’s what you come across when you’re learning nouns in foreign languages like French or German.
Being in Thailand is generally pretty good if you’re a foreign woman. About the only thing you can’t do that a man’s allowed to is touch a Buddhist monk, and as I’ve got no interest in doing that I don’t feel as if I’m missing out.
If there IS ever a time I run into sexism, it seems to be when I’m around other Brits. For instance, I’m on our favourite bar’s quiz team in a league which is played every Wednesday. Pattaya’s a very male-dominated place, so there aren’t that many women on the teams. But I’ve lost count of the number of times that the quizmaster of whichever bar we happen to be playing in precedes a question with “Right, gentlemen…” or some other such saying. I take great pleasure in calling them “Madam” when this happens. (Our own quizmaster, John, is a bit more clued up, as you’d expect.)
Even so, the “old-fashioned” male approach to women can still work in my favour. Not so very long ago Dave and I went on a fishing trip for the day, setting off from Pattaya’s New Pier at sunrise and returning at sunset. It was something I’d been wanting to do for some time but hadn’t been able to get round to, so I was pleased to be able to do it at last. What made me even more pleased, though, was that I didn’t have to pay for it – ladies go free. You can read more about the day here:
Pattaya Fishing Trips
Going back to the whole sex thing, some people seem to confuse sex with nudity. Just before Christmas I was highly amused to see a story on the Digital Spy website about the complaints which had come in to America’s NBC television network, over their coverage of the Athens Olympics last year. One of the complainants claimed that her children had seen an exposed breast. Another wrote about “when the giant white mask that broke apart into a statue of a nude man”. Apparently they were talking about statues rather than living human beings. What made it particularly funny was that they were complaining several months after the event. Did they tape the whole thing and analyse it frame by frame?
Digital Spy, 23 December2004: “Genitalia, f-word spark Olympics complaints”
Mind you, the Brits are relatively hung up too. Take the time when I was working in Northern Iraq and living with a bunch of Danes. I didn’t know where to turn when, one morning, one of my housemates strolled casually into the kitchen at breakfast time, wearing nothing but the last drops of water from the shower he’d just had, and grabbed something out of the fridge. My other Danish housemates thought my embarrassment was hilarious and asked if I expected him to wear clothes while he was having a shower!
Funnily, this prudish approach to the human body seems to go hand in hand with an obsession with improving it. If the sheer volume of spams offering small blue diamond-shaped pills is anything to go by, it’s the number one concern of most men. (You’ll note that I didn’t use the name – just in case some overzealous spam killer decides to junk this newsletter.) And there’s a thriving retail industry offering the same product in Pattaya.
Which brings us neatly onto drugs. Legal drugs are readily available here in Thailand without too much fuss. That’s good news for people like me who’ve had to self-prescribe in more primitive surroundings in their career. I’m used to finding what I believe I need, buying it, and treating myself – I don’t want Nanny to tell me what I may or may not take. Illegal drugs are another thing – many South East Asian countries, Thailand included, impose the death penalty for drug smuggling, and possession of even very small amounts can lead to stiff prison sentences.
Other countries have taken a different attitude in the past. We’ve had a discussion on the Community Forum recently about the massive donor response to the tsunami disaster, compared to the endemic problems of Africa. The argument’s been made there that some countries’ economies have been brought down by seeking to supply the developed world rather than looking after their own development; some have grown drug crops, seeking to reverse the flow of exploitation but leading to military oppression. A sobering thought.
British Expat Forum: Opinions/Politics: “aid?”
And rock ‘n’ roll… well, you’ll just have to wait until next time!
Virtual Snacks
Just a couple of suggestions if you have a little time to spare:
[Obsolete content and links removed]
What sex is your writing? Try running some of your letters through the Gender Genie and find out if you write like a woman or a man! (I’ve just run a few past newsletters and BE articles through it. Rather worryingly, it can’t make up its mind whether I’m a man or a woman!)
http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html
Sponsor
With this week’s theme, what other sponsor could we have but our very own British Expat Sex Shop? Everything from vibrating rubber ducks for bathtime fun, to psychosexual counselling, to occasional furniture! If you’re going to buy online, please support this site by buying through our links. (BTW, we don’t get any info about who buys what – that’s all dealt with by the merchants, and they all have good privacy policies.) The sites listed all require that you are over 18 years of age before viewing them. BE receives commissions on all sales. Thanks!
Bizarre Searches
Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat so far this month – and that’s just during the first 24 hours of it!:
- what to say to find a fairy (1)
- dulux pain (1)
- buddhist polecats (1)
- ex-girlfriends pictures revenge (1)
- cats are not often turds (1)
- do makeovers on virtual humans (1)
- lesbians on british soaps (1)
- how to chitted potatoes for uk (1)
- tortious lifestyle (1)
- why don t british circumcise (1)
- buy soju online (1)
- scots tits (1)
Till next time…
Happy surfing!
Kay
Editor
http://www.britishexpat.com
Quotation
“In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact.”
– Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992)
Joke
Be on the lookout! Police warn all male clubbers, party-goers, and unsuspecting pub regulars to be alert and stay cautious when offered a drink from any woman. A date rape drug on the market, called “beer”, is used by females to target unsuspecting men. The drug is found in liquid form, and is now available almost anywhere. “Beer” is used by female sexual predators at parties and bars to persuade their male victims to go home and have sex with them. Typically, a woman needs only to persuade a guy to consume a few units of “beer” and then simply ask him home for no-strings-attached sex. Men are rendered helpless against this approach.
After several “beers” men will often succumb to desires to perform sexual acts on women to whom they would never normally be attracted. After drinking “beer”, men often awaken with only hazy memories of exactly what happened the night before…usually with a vague feeling that something bad occurred.
At other times these unfortunate men are swindled out of their life savings in a familiar scam known as “a relationship”. Apparently men are much more susceptible to this scam after “beer” is administered and sex is offered by the predatory female.
Please! Forward this warning to every male you know. However, if you fall victim to this insidious “beer” and the predatory women administering it, there are male support groups with venues in every town where you can discuss the details of your shocking encounter in an open and frank manner with similarly affected, like-minded guys. For the support group nearest you, just look up “golf courses” in Yellow Pages.
Leave a Reply