Out & About

Published on January 18, 2008

It's often said that Westerners talk about sex a lot but don't get to do it enough, while Thais have plenty of sex but don't like to talk about it. Now at least that last part has been recently proven wrong by the heavily attended sexuality conference held recently in Bangkok - Thailand's first. As it turned out we do like talking about sex, but only when it's under the blessings of Foucault, apparently.

While Victorian values are said to maintain a firm grip on the minds of Thai society, the French intellectual's writings seem to tightly capture the fascination of Thai academia (although many will agree that his "History of Sexuality" must rank among the unsexiest of all books about sex.)

Rather than his concepts and conclusions derived from Western civilisation, it may be more fruitful for Thai scholars to use his meticulous methodology to study sexuality in the Thai context. In addition, throughout the conference there were constant reminders from the audience that Thailand isn't only about the middle-class youngish Buddhist living in the central region. Apart from Bangkok-speak, there are diverse varieties of sexual "dialects" to be discovered in the regions, among factory workers, the elderly, the disabled, Muslims, and hill tribe Thais, for example.

With some notable exceptions - I will discuss some gay-related ones in another column - the shortcomings in term of depth and breadth reduced most papers to snapshots, leaving us with little to use as a tool to better understand sexuality in Thailand, but they will no doubt serve as a springboard for more sophisticated studies of the future.

Having said that, the organisers must be congratulated for a brave effort. We finally got to hear the elephant in the room being discussed (as opposed to sensationalised about in the media), from porn mags on flea-market stalls to hi-tech Camfrog on the Internet, from coyote girls to gay medical students.

Most academic discussions of sexuality - homo or not - almost always shortchange one most ubiquitous factor in the Thai context: the family. For that reason, I was delighted to note the paper on maternal acceptance of katoey sons and hope there will be more

next year.

These two areas, namely the family and the "dialects", are just the two most obvious ways - I'm sure others can suggest more - towards the understanding of sexuality as located within our own culture. It may also help bridge the sharp divide within the audience between the scholars (who decry the uneven standard of the presented works) on one hand and the practitioners/ social workers/ NGO people (who complain about the incomprehensible jargon) on the other.

As a metaphor about truth, there's an ancient Indian story (also included in the Buddhist canon) about six blind men who each describes an elephant differently, depending on which part of the animal he has felt. Thus a knowledge based on any theory or "-ism" du jour is essentially incomplete (if knowledge can ever approach truth).

As he himself would reject claims of discovering the truth, let's first deconstruct Foucault. And the next time we talk about sex, rather than employing sterile Western neologism, let's make more use of our colourful dialects: as raw and dirty as sex should be.

YOR