Calling B*llsh*t (Updated)

At least in my level of tolerance for public confrontation, I’ve mellowed out quite a bit in the last years. So, it feels a little out of my current character, but I have to call bullshit on this article: The Mia Noi or Minor Wife in Thai Culture: Having a Mistress in Thailand is Actually Quite Common (Don't click yet; I posted the link a little further down so you can read it when I want you to.)

This title, which is true, is of an article that was posted on facebook by a friend and fellow Thailand PCV and it showed up in my newsfeed a couple of days ago. The link was accompanied by her assessment, “I absolutely don't agree with this woman but this article is worth a read.” Since I was on a facebook / Internet binge (i.e., between classes with nothing to do except pretend to study for that Stats MOOC I signed up for), I clicked the link. In a minute, I’ll tell you to do the same, but first, a brief note:

As anyone who writes about culture knows – and as anyone who has lived in a culture, especially one so diametrically opposed to their own has come to understand relatively quickly – representing, discussing, critiquing, and dissecting cultures other than our own is very tricky territory. As I see it, whether we engage with other cultures as peripheral observers, participant observers, community members, academics, journalists, or ex-pats, there are three major mistakes we can make, any of which severely curtailing our ability to represent the culture to others who don’t experience it like we do.

The first mistake is simply that of complete misunderstanding. There is always the possibility that we just completely don’t get something that’s going on. It can happen if we don’t have the language, miss the underlying cultural, religious, or personal significance of a moment or a monument. It can happen if we get our research wrong, misunderstand our history, or misinterpret our history. These mistakes can be great or small in magnitude, but they stem from a fundamental misalignment of our interpretation with the reality of the culture or practice that we’re trying to assess. Oops. In my own case, I’ve realized t hat more time in the culture helps to correct and shed light on earlier misunderstandings and egregious mischaracterizations.

The second mistake happens when we forget that we’re wearing our own cultural lenses, when we can’t put aside our biases, and when we simply judge an aspect of a culture to be WRONG because it doesn’t measure up to the morals or standards that we take for granted from our own culture.

The third mistake happens when we blissfully accept that just because a cultural practice exists, we shouldn’t judge it, and so it must therefore be good or RIGHT and acceptable.

Assuming that the first type of mistake is an honest mistake that we might all make, but that vigilance, keeping an open mind, heart, eyes, and ears, will help mitigate, most writers and others who study culture thus need to find a way to walk a middle path between the first and second mistakes, to find their way between absolute absolutism and absolute relativism, if you will. It is a difficult line to walk; how can you criticize a culture objectively, without your own biases getting in the way? Well, you can’t. But you can acknowledge your biases and the framework within which you’re working. And you can realize that making principled objections to certain cultural practices is a necessary step in progressing toward a world that is more equal, more just, and more peaceful.

So back to that link: The Mia Noi or Minor Wife in Thai Culture: Having a Mistress in Thailand is Actually Quite Common Go ahead. Read it. I’ll be here when you get back.

Back? You thought it was bullshit, right? Okay, great. Oh wait, you just thought it was interesting and neat to learn about another culture? Please read on.

The author of this piece seems to me to be a little far into the cultural relativism territory: Because it’s been around in Thai society for a long time, because some people think it’s either inevitable or acceptable, the author finds a way to normalize the “mia noi” or “minor wife” that is so common in this culture, even going so far as to call the widespread practice of men taking mistresses a “win-win” for everyone.

I am a liberal. A progressive, feminist liberal. I tend to agree with what another friend commented in response to this link, that I don’t have general a problem with any of the consensual, safe relationships into which adults enter knowingly and of their own free will. But my relatively open view toward adult sexual relationships is based on a couple of assumptions: that those relationships should be mutually beneficial, that those relationships should be consented to by all parties, that those relationships should be safe, and especially that they are not based on lopsided power dynamics and unequal social status.

Unfortunately, in Thailand, the mia noi relationship is a social institution that generally tends to preserve unequal gender dynamics and the greater power of men within familial and social relationships. Let’s just say that the acceptability of mistresses isn’t the product of a liberal progressive sexual revolution that allows men and women in equal numbers and with equal freedom to explore their own sexuality and identities in safe, judgment free zones. In a society in which public displays of affection like hand holding are frowned upon, teenage pregnancy is an issue in rural provinces, and sex education is still a little bit taboo, these and other extra-marital relationships that are also generally accepted can even be dangerous.

First, mia is a word that is used to describe an animal of the female sex. It is not, generally used to describe women. It’s an impolite, but it’s an acceptable way of referring to your wife, or to someone else’s wife. Pua is the equivalent term for a male animal. It is not often used to describe a man or even a husband, although it can be, in which case it is considered vulgar, though can be employed to comic effect in certain situations. If you want to get really hinky about it, you could argue that linguistically, on getting married, a woman loses some of her social status, while a man doesn’t.

So, then the mia noi. The author implies that sometimes the wives know about the women, and sometimes they don’t, and she’s willing to let it slide as a “win-win” that some women’s husbands are having sexual relationships outside their marriage without their knowledge. That’s gross. Even if the women do know about it, however, their knowledge is not derived from a few conversations with their husbands in which the couple mutually decides that it would be best if the man went elsewhere for sex. Sex-wise, mia noi aren’t the only game in town; geeks are described as being more like sex toys and flings. Whereas some men might stay with a mia noi for years, and perhaps create the intimate relationship that the author describes in her piece, the geeks fall into what in Thailand is a large gray area between consensual sex and prostitution. They exchange their bodies and their presence for trinkets of varying value, and are often casually tossed aside. In training, we were told that growing numbers of college girls regard this kind of relationship as a way to keep up with the consumerist culture that’s fast outpacing the incomes of the more rural populations.

So, how do women recognize that their husband has a mia noi or a geek if he doesn’t tell them? They usually start noticing some of the following signs: The man takes a lot more trips than usual; he gets a second cell phone; he starts spending more money on unnamed things that never end up in the house; he stops being attentive to his children; he starts drinking more or spending more time at parties to which she is not invited; he stops spending money on household items that are necessary; he stops having sex with her and distances himself. Or else she gets tested for an STD after a routine gynecological exam or as part of antenatal care, and discovers she’s got herpes. Or HIV. Some of the highest rates of new HIV infections in Thailand occur in populations of women in “monogamous” relationships. Hmmm. Oh, or else someone just tells her that they saw him at some place with some woman.

At this point, the woman has a pretty good idea of what’s going on. Most often, her friends already know, her family knows or suspects; often, the kids also know. She can stay with him either for financial reasons or in order to hold something together for the children; she can endure the gossip and the direct inquiries of her friends, neighbors, and family members; she can make ends meet with her own earnings so the household does not suffer from the dalliances of her husband. She can do all this and decide either to confront him or not to. Many women do, and they watch their marriages dissolve out from under them whether or not they instigate a discussion or confrontation. Or, she can leave him. Often, this means being the object of more gossip and shame, enduring great financial hardship to split up possessions, move back to her family home, fight for custody of her children.

I know a woman who left a job and a community she loved because her husband became abusive after she confronted him about his mia noi. He paid her tens of thousands of baht and gave her the car that was hers, but in his name, so that she would divorce him. She moved 6 hours away, back to her family home rather than be the object of pity and have to endure the pain as his girlfriend moved into the house and bore her husband of 20+ years his second child. The baby was born last month. All of the teachers, her former colleagues, say it’s very cute.

Another woman I work with had to confront her husband about the money he was spending on his minor wives, unenroll one of her children from a good school because they could no longer afford the costs of sending him there, and endure being the object of gossip for two years while her husband sowed his wild oats. Their marital strain affected her relationships at work, with her students, and with her family, and of course, with her children, who are old enough to know exactly what’s going on. Now, she says things are better, but I haven’t seen them together in over a year. Come to think of it, I’ve barely seen him around at all.

Another woman I know just divorced her husband of 14 years because his priorities changed. He’d had a mia noi for a couple of years; she described the end of their marriage as “not sad, because when you get to that point that you just can’t endure it anymore, what’s there to be sad about if it ends?”

Another woman, whose husband moved to a neighboring province to take a job he was assigned to for two years, is waiting out the separation, hoping that when his contract runs out, he’ll be able to come home and she can stop worrying about which of his female colleagues he’s doing extracurricular activities with.

Another woman we know reunited with her husband and the father of her children after he spend years courting a mia noi who also works in our community. The mistress slandered the woman in the community, confronted her at her house on a number of occasions, and had to be reprimanded by her boss before she stopped bothering the wife, who had insisted that her husband leave the mia noi or leave her.

One of our neighbors spends a few nights a week lonely while her husband takes his mia noi out for dinner or drinks or other diversions. He took her to a work function that my husband also attended.

Speaking of my husband: Married men have suggested stopping in at brothels on more than one occasion, assuring him that the girls are nak suksa (college girls) and not locals, as if to entice him. A teacher I work with, who still lives with her cheating husband and feels that their relationship is more or less over despite their continued co-habitation, propositioned my husband at a work function, saying yak len (I want to play) as she bid him goodbye, after telling him that she was more or less single now that her husband is with his mia noi.

More than once, I have been asked (sometimes directly, sometimes in more suggestive, annoying, and roundabout ways) whether or not my husband has a mia noi. When he has travelled without me, people have asked why I am not calling or texting him RIGHT NOW to find out what he is doing and where he is. They are alarmed when he does not call or text me every day, or when I do not know where he is at 6 p.m. Josh yang mai dai glap, lawww? (Josh hasn’t come back yet, huh?) my neighbor inquires, with mixed equal parts pity and curiosity. Josh bpen jao chuu mai?  (Is Josh a playboy / cheater?) is a question women I don’t know well have felt completely comfortable asking me.

The principal of the school I work at once told me that he had heard a rumor that Josh did have a mia noi in our village. I laughed. Mai huang giao gap rueang nii, ka. Chan mai bpen kon heung. I’m not worried about that. I’m not a jealous person. I tried explaining that men and women can have friendships, non-sexual relationships, that Josh works with a lot of women, that I also know them, and that I trust him. I thought I had dispelled the issue, but months later, a teacher I work closely with, a man, apparently felt the need to repeat the information to my host mother, who confronted me about it abruptly one evening as we made dinner. No, he’s not a jao chu, I said. No, he doesn’t have a mia noi. People don’t understand our relationship. I don’t know if she understood all of the same things I tried to explain to her, but she ended with a diatribe denouncing Thai women who try to steal other people’s husbands. At the end of that conversation, I don’t think she was entirely convinced.

She told me in snippets about her own marriage. I raised four kids on my own; he worked abroad for the better part of seventeen years, she said. And I never had anyone else. She never screwed around. Not brave enough to ask if she thought he had, I asked, and did anyone gossip about you while your husband was gone? She looked up sharply and the knife she’d been peeling the onion with seemed to hover in mid-air. I never gave them a reason to, she said sharply. Of course not.

A few weeks later, Josh spontaneously decided to pull out pictures of our wedding party and show them to our neighbors. Just then, our host mom walked up. After seeing a few of the pictures, including a few totally inappropriate kissing ones, she got my attention and asked me if I had told Josh about what she had said. Yes, I said. What did he say? she asked. He thought it was ridiculous, I said. She started laughing. Dton tii mee daai-yin kao nii, mee saao jai maak mai. Mai dtong yaek-gan. Di-jai maak man mai jing. When I heard that news, I was very said, she said. Don’t split up. I’m very happy it’s not true. Me too, I said.

Girls break up with their boyfriends because they are jao-chu; they get into long distance relationships and then these men conveniently find other girlfriends. The women feel deceived and cheated, and they also lose trust in all men. Or else lose trust in their ability to find a man who isn’t a jao-chu. A good friend, about my age, wants kids, but she doesn’t want a husband. I just need someone to get drunk and get me pregnant, she joked. (She’s just about the most conservative nearly-30 year old single woman I can imagine. Saying this out loud is about as risqué as she’ll ever get.) She doesn’t want a husband because all men are jao-chu in her mind. Even on her wedding day and in the weeks after, another woman asked Josh and I whether we thought her new husband was jao-chu or not. I’ve never heard discussed the stress that distance puts on relationships, never heard women talking aloud about working to alleviate situational stresses that might increase the likelihood of cheating (which isn’t to say that they don’t talk about this stuff when I’m not around, or in front of me, and I just don’t understand it!) Rather than seeing it in their power to discuss with their husbands the parameters that they find acceptable in a marriage, women seem to feel that all the power in the relationship rests with the man; their fate as a wife or girlfriend is determined by whether he has jao-chu predilections or not.

Update: Today, my male co-teacher and I were discussing the behavior of the boys in the sixth grade class. There is a contingent of boys in both the fifth and sixth grade whose behavior belies the fact that they are angry, in desperate need of attention and more care and love. In short, they are rude, mean, bully other kids, and are NOT interested in learning. They got in trouble on a recent field trip for smoking cigarettes. My teacher said, today, about three boys in particular, They come from broken families. This one lives with his father's new wife. This one and that one, their fathers have many wives and children with more than one wife. Their fathers are sometimes here and sometimes they are not. They do not have anyone to take care of them. Which reminds me, two weeks ago, one of the sweetest girls in my class completely spaced out for about two days. Wouldn't do work. Wouldn't look at anyone. Her mom came to school to talk with the teachers. It turned out her father had just left for another province, to go live with his mia noi, and he had left his actual wife and children in debt and without a vehicle. No wonder she couldn't concentrate.

I could keep going, but I hope what you’re seeing in these examples is that the mia noi system is hardly a win-win. It’s a vestige of a mentality that values men over women, that sees female sexuality as being at men’s service, rather than as a function of female pleasure, and of a society in which women’s fortunes were historically tied to whether or not she managed to remain tethered to the financial and social unit of her husband’s family. It is part of a cultural system that reveres wealth, status, and beauty, and in which the acquisition of a beautiful young female enhances a man’s estimation not only in his eyes but in the eyes of other men. It is a system in which mia noi or a geek can gain access to a man’s resources and time and status in exchange often for sex and public companionship.

Ultimately, I see that the acceptance of the mia noi in Thai society has far less to do with its supposed value as a cultural or social institution, and more to do with the value of kwam sammakkee, or social harmony and unity, that guides most of Thai life. I am not surprised that people would simply laugh at it, or just say that that’s the way it is, when discussing what is really an uncomfortable and enduring ossification of the different roles of men, women, and wives in Thai society with a foreigner. Thais don’t like to talk about uncomfortable subjects, and will often shrug something off before discussing its ramifications in their own lives, let alone to speak on a subject that might shed their culture in a poor light. It’s an understandable tendency that it leads a lot of systemic problems to be laughed off or swept under the rug.

Nevertheless, this discomfort around how relationships work and the lack of clarity about how they’re supposed to function, leads many young women I have talked with to more or less expect that their husbands or long term boyfriends will turn out to be jao-chu. They are predisposed toward jealousy and insecurity, and similarly predisposed not to respect the relationships between men they desire and other women. Men, meanwhile, don’t necessarily seek to build strong relationships with the women they eventually marry, or else let these relationships break down because it’s acceptable for them to find intimacy with other, more interesting prospects. In the end, this means that the foundations for building good intimate relationships between men and women are weak to begin with, and this is compounded in an economic climate that forces couples split up all over the country (and sometimes the world) for extended periods of time as they save for their weddings or raise their children and try to navigate the beginning stages of starting lives together—all at a vast distance, not only measured in kilometers, but also in experience and expectations. Relationships that could be intimate, loving, and meaningful may instead crumble because of suspicions, refusal to discuss problems, and the existence of an easy out for one party.

Perhaps there are women who have managed to successfully and happily navigate the position of the mia yai or the mia noi and situations in which the husband’s seeking his own pleasure and fulfillment outside the marriage has actually led to a net increase in happiness all around, but I haven’t seen it.

This isn’t to say that all men have mia noi or that all men are jao-chu, as many of my girlfriends here would claim. On the contrary, I have seen many examples of close, loving relationships between married men and women, and these relationships thrive with the support of friends, family, and extended communities. All relationships regardless of their cultural habitat are difficult, rocky, and scary at times. There are plenty of extramarital affairs wreaking havoc in my home country as well, and our views on sex and marriage and relationships could certainly use an update. But that doesn’t change the fact that this mia noi business just isn’t a win-win.