macaroni21

@abidismaili - I hope you're not thinking that somehow boys treat some other forum members better (by quickly shedding their clothes) than they treat you 🤣 It varies depending on the shop's policy, and also may vary depending on the boy. Most Type 2 shops, e.g. those in Silom Soi 6, want to maintain an image of real massage, and the boys negotiate inside the room. Obviously, it won't make sense for them to strip until negotiations are successful. The Type 4 shops such as Prince and Arena are "all-inclusive" and so there's less need to maintain any image of wholesomeness. It can also vary with the boy, or with how familiar with boy is with you. My regulars, even at Type 2 shops, strip from the start because they know that that's where we're going.

Like @Vessey and @vinapu said, I think the most likely explanation is that the shop manager wanted to charge the boy for the extra half-hour of room use. It was fortunate that the boy had your number and could ask you to reimburse him. But as @zazzu said, the shop should have realised it then and there and spoken to you directly rather than take it out on the boy. It annoys me when businesses make a mistake and still expect customers to pay for their mistake. It's like "Oh the advertised price mentioned the wrong date for the special offer, so since it's not today, please pay the full price," or "We stuck the wrong price tag on the shelf, this product isn't $48, it is $75. Please pay $75." Such businesses do not deserve any respect and should be shamed. I would encourage @kentguy2025 to name the shop.

This can be misread. I think you mean 500,000 journeys cancelled. Airlines don't operate as many as 500,000 flights.

At last, somebody agrees 🤩 I have been saying the same for years, From a business perspective, bars should choose between being a showbar or an offing bar. The conflict between the two business models is such that any bar that tries to do both will have to walk a very narrow line with a high risk of failure. A showbar needs volume because putting up shows is costly. The nature of the shows also tends to feature drag queens who bring no erotic value to gay men (with only rare exceptions). They attract straight audiences, and the bars get addicted to the straight audiences because they need volume (it gets into a vicious cycle). It doesn't take long to drive away gay customers who are the backbone of any offing business model. Show bars also need floor area because they need to accommodate a surge crowd at show time (how else to monetise the hoped-for volume?), backstage space, maybe high ceilings too. Rent costs become significant as a result, yet outside of showtime, you're paying rent for under-utilised space. Banana bar is one such bar teetering on the edge. It succeeds as a showbar but I wonder how many offs the boys there get... and if they don't get enough offs, why work there any more? An offing bar doesn't need a show. It just needs a small, intimate space (e.g. the size of Thantawan bar) with a small stage in a corner. It needs a good slate of boys carefully selected to suit the tastes of whatever customer/market segment the bar is aiming for, from twink to twunk to chunk to hunk. I would recommend that boys go up to the stage one at a time for a 5-minute sensual striptease act (without going "all the way") -- so that customers can see what the physique is like in order to decide on an off. Without a show, there is no need to cater for any surge crowd, so a small bar will do, keeping rent low. There is no need to hire waiters or staff associated with show production. The business focus of such a bar is to get the boys off'd. The above (a pure offing bar) is actually a proven model. Toy Boys operates something similar except that they still have boys standing on stage bored to death. And clearly Toy Boys has staying power. The latest post on ShamelesssMack describes a pure offing bar in Tokyo, King of College. It is a successfull, long-running business. It doesn't even have a strip show. Many of the Sunnee bars were like Toy Boys too, with a primary focus on boys on offer. When they had dancing, my best memories were the bars where the boys moved around the room, dancing right at your table (or on it) thereby creating a personalised experience for the customer. Sunnee bars' demise was not because the model didn't work, it was because their selection of boys skewed strongly to the tasts of a particular generation of western customers and didn't evolve with demographic changes. When that generation of western retirees began dying off, the bars failed to tap into the huge growth in Asian customers in Thailand's tourism profile (which would have necessitated a revamp of the type of boys that bars had). Granted, it's a lot more complicated than that in that Asian gay males have been staying mainly in Bangkok and are much less interested in going to Pattaya. So it is a chicken-and-egg question too. But even this tells us something else - the utter lack of any marketing. Asian gay males will go to Pattaya if businesses would only advertise. But of course, they also need to understand carefully what type of boys Asian customers like and ensure the bar has the desired type. Look at Bangkok's massage parlours, from low end to high end. They're in rude health! They advertise furiously. If only the bars would learn from what they're doing. I have also previously said that an offing bar can add to its sales revenue (and the boys' earnings) by offering private dances in a cubicle: Ten minutes of stripping all the way, gyrating and inviting groping for a reasonable fee, say 500 - 600 baht. This is akin to the sort of personalised fun experience that the best Sunnee bars offered. Through private dancers, boys can earn extra income in addition to being off'd. Customers can "buy" 2 or 3 private dancers to check out 2 or 3 boys before deciding which one to off. Right now, the boys' earning model is more or less an "all or nothing" game. They're either off'd and earn big money, or they earn next to nothing during the evening. Forum members here on gayguides may say that the boys also earn drink tips or "you look handsome" tips, but boys can't earn enough from such tips alone. Furthermore, always bear in mind that fact the customer profile is mainly Asian. Look carefully and the truth is that most Asian customers don't tip as liberally. An Asian customer sees far less value in calling a boy down for a drink because it is unlikely that the boy can speak Chinese, Korean or Japanese. It's a rule of thumb: customers need to see value before they spend, and a private dance is one way of offering value. It's a mystery to me why it is so rare for bars to think about the value proposition for the customer. They do more of the same unthinkingly, without asking themselves how to ensure that customers see value in patronising my bar. More tricky perhaps, they don't know how to analyse value conflicts. What is value to one type of customer (the straight couple that want either a drag show or a gawk show) is disvalue to the gay customer who is prepared to off a boy (but is put off by the heterosexual vibe and the very public exposure he has to endure in a bar with gawking customers).

I can confirm that. In fact, I mentioned the sign in my post of August 2022, The screaming bar.

We probably have to accept that the idea of a muscle bar with boys who can be rented out are over. Even the non-muscle bars on Patpong 2 and the massage parlours I know, have increasing difficulty getting Thai staff. Where will new muscle boys come from? Not Thailand. But is it realistic to expect bodybuilders from neighbouring countries to come to Thailand to sell their bodies? Somehow, I think not.

Given how excessive numbers of Chinese tourists have in recent years annoyed the local Japanese, I have a feeling many locals think fewer Chinese will be a good thing; never mind the stock market.

@London Bear Sounds like you enjoyed Saigon mightily. Just one question, assuming you don't speak Vietnamese. How did you manage language-wise? If you used Google Translate, how accurate do you think the translation was? How did the Vietnamese communicate back to you?

Funfifties is probably right. Just put in the escort agency's address. I don't think anyone will check anyway.

Agreed! I could do four of the five in the front row.

I find it difficult to parse what you're saying. Could you rephrase your question? For example, what is a "Japan Web form" with those capital letters? What do you mean by "staying at a private room"? Do you mean AirBnB?

This is an excellent review and analysis of mass tourism in Thailand from its early beginnings around 1960 to the latest funk in 2025. The issues discussed here are definitely not what any Thai government would want to hear, because the two booming side industries featured (property investment via nominee companies and sex tourism) can only exist and thrive through hypocritical non-enforcement of laws, which the narrator minces no words about. I especially like his mention of how the whole sex industry has become a social safety net for large swathes of the Thai population, juxtaposing it with the relatively poor record of "formal" tourism filtering down to benefit working people (as opposed to the elites).

There's a laundry shop on Saladaeng Soi 2. Google reference: https://maps.app.goo.gl/weKZVc9kEbGPiEsi8 Easy walking distance from the Raya Hotel. Their Facebook page has not been updated for a long time though.https://www.facebook.com/s.t.laundryandalterations/ Here's what it looks like from Google Streetview.

I don't know what happened in my brain, but when I read "introducing iPads to the seats", I pictured every seat being cushioned with absorbent anti-incontinence pads. Might not be a bad idea considering the client profile in some bars.

I wonder who inherits the X-boys now. It would be a shame if the bar changes its business model under the successor.

One more: whilst Prestige Massage's rooms are on the upper floors, they have a lift. No need to climb stairs. Prestige is on the pricey side though, and I'm not certain if all the staff are willing bodies.

The Avarin shop that is not next to Tarntawan Hotel has massage rooms on the ground floor just behind the foot massage lounge. Chaichana on Patpong Soi 1 has massage rooms in the basement, just one floor below its foyer. The stairs down aren't difficult. Prime has ground floor rooms in its third building, though Prime is not known for offering a milking service to conclude a massage. There is also one shop on Silom Road under Saladaeng station that has ground floor rooms but unfortunately I can't remember which one it is. But you could easily walk that 100-metre stretch and ask the boys out front of each shop if their rooms are on the lower floor. Further afield from Silom, Prince has ground floor rooms as does Jey Spa. The above is based on memory which may be a little faulty, so please double check my information with the shops themselves.

Trump's condolence statement on Truth Social (may God forgive me for even quoting it) was terse to an extent that it seemed forced and insincere. “Rest in peace Pope Francis! May God bless him and all who loved him!” Whereas other leaders referenced Pope Francis' values, none of that from the orange man. BTW, anybody watched the film The Conclave? Did you like the twist at the very end?

A one-hour look at the work of the Australian embassy in Bangkok and the consulate in Bali. This may interest especially expats living in Thailand.

There's a usually a long gap between production and upload to Youtube, and this one is no different. The 59-minute documentary "Fairytale Of Kathmandu | A portrait of a fallen idol and the murky world of sex tourism" was made around 2007, but only uploaded this month. It opens with a charming and cheery tone: the celebrated Irish poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh makes regular trips to Nepal. He loves the exotic and simple life there, and over the years he has acquired many young men as friends who dote on him. But as the film maker follows him around, she captures scenes that raise many questions. And like the ominously dark monsoon clouds that come rolling in over the valleys of Nepal from the south, the tone of the film changes. The Irish police undertook an investigation starting from 2006 (see https://archive.ph/20130217192154/http://www.independent.ie/national-news/boys-were-damaged-by-sex-trysts-with-poet-1286378.html) but nothing came of it. Apparently there was no investigation by the Nepali authorities since no complaint had been filed and all the boys were reportedly of legal age.

I too would believe that the Thai system will go relatively well, it is after all, not a complicated software to write or implement. As for mention of Cambodia, I am reminded of a conversation I had with an acquaintance last year. Involved in healthcare systems, he was in Cambodia for some reason and had an opportunity to interact with hospital and Health Ministry people. He told me how impressed he was with some software that he was shown. Only later did it make sense. The Chinese built the system for the Cambodians.

By all indications, the decoupling of US-China trade and economies is surely going to go the full distance and the economic pain on both sides will be bad. I would caution against underestimating how much disruption this will also cause to China, even though much of the media is talking about the costs to the US. However, the key difference is that China has a leadership that is good at planning. Like Canada, it has a people that is united about the external threat. On the other side, the US has an incompetent leadership and fractious internal politics. In the medium term, this difference in leadership will make a big difference even if in the short term, the pain and disruption are similarly acute on both sides. Yet, despite the looming costs to come, pro-Trump voters remain solidly behind him. MAGA is a sort of religious cult. As with most cults, members of a cult rarely allow empirical facts or logic to shake their beliefs. Also, suffering is seen as a rite of passage, easily explained away as due to persecution by outsiders, and never the fault of the cult's own teachings. So what lies ahead? We've been through this before! The next two decades look likely to be a reprise of the 1930s, with no single dominant power nor any global trading system. In politics and economics, the world was in distinct blocs. As a result there were countless points of friction, any one of which could blow up into military action as bloc-leaders sought to expand or defend their interests. I don't intend to sound alarmist, but let's not forget that World War II might not have flared up in East Asia in December 1941 (more than two years after Hitler invaded Poland) if not for the US trade embargo on Japan. Japan (which many people have forgotten was on the side of US-Britain-France in the First World War) felt in the late 1930s that it was being deprived of access to oil and other raw materials because of the embargo imposed by the US and its West European allies (then fighting Hitler), and so it sought to carve out its own bloc in East Asia. If the above was news to you, it may be because, like many westerners, you might have thought of World War II as a single war across the globe. Actually it was two different wars that happened to occur at the same time (with different initial sparks), but which happened to involve a few (not all) of the same players – the US and to a lesser extent Britain. France and the Netherlands were initially involved but soon disappeared from the Asian theatre after Hitler marched into Paris and The Hague. Many countries were only involved in one war, not both. For example, Germany, Italy, Canada and the Soviet Union were major participants in the European war but not in the Asian war (right at the end, after Germany had been defeated, the Soviet Union did turn its attention to the east, in order to grab some advantage). China, Australia, NZ and Japan were participants in the Asian war but not the European war....but I am going off-topic now.

To the OP: Thai attitudes to same sex relationships are social constructs; only loosely related to religion. You would find, for example, very different atttudes in other countries that are as Buddhist as Thailand. You probably come from a country where the dominant religion is that of an Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and societies founded on Abrahamic religions tend ot think (not entirely true) that the teachings of religion are or should be the source of social/moral attitudes. In particular the Abrahamic religions are more sex-obsessed than non-Abrahamic religions – they have a lot to say about sex. It may surprise you that about half the world's population do not subscribe to an Abrahamic religion, and as a general rule, those other religions have little to say about sex or sexually-related relationships. Yet, these societies do have attitudes (and widely varying ones too) about same-sex relationships. And they may well have one attitude to male-male relationships and a very different attitude to a female-female relationship. It is a Western construct to see male-male and female-female relationships as somehow two eggs in the same basket. So whatever attitudes these non-Abrahamic societies have towards gay male relationships (I shall set aside what they think of female-female relationships) don't so much spring from their religion, but are hand-me downs from social conditioning. Another feature that is worth mentioning here is that Thai culture – as with all other traditional Southeast Asian cultures – see gender more than sexual orientation. If your lover is gatoey and you're a cis-gendered male, it is one thing. If both of you are cis-gendered males, then it is seen as a completely different kind of thing. Generally, southeast asian cultures tolerate and to a degree accept transgender identity and they are more familiar, from their socio-historical legacies, with relationships where one partner is transgendered. Doesn't have to be fully transgendered. Effeminacy is similarly tolerated. There are far less socio-historical underpinnings to attitudes towards cisgendered male-male relationships. Historically southeast Asian societies tended not to see these relationships so they haven't built a corpus of social attitudes towards them. What attitudes they hold today are of more modern genesis, which is to say those attitudes have a large dollop of Western influence if one is speaking of urban Thai communities exposed to contemporary Western culture. If one is speaking of rural or small town communities, or even of communities rooted in the shantytowns around Bangkok, then I suspect one may find quite different attitudes, due simply to less exposure to contemporary Western culture. Note: I speak of contemporary western culture. Large swathes of urban elite Sri Lankan society (also a predominantly Buddhist country) have also had their attitudes to cisgendered male-male relationships shaped by exposure to western culture, but in their case, they were largely shaped by western culture of decades ago, resulting in a significant degree of homophobia. Ditto with Korea which is about 50% Buddhist. Arguably Korea is more homophobic than Sri Lanka. Even among the Thai elite that have exposure to contemporary western culture, it is just one strand out of many that meld to form their beliefs. Bear in mind that perhaps half of the Thai elite in Bangkok are ethnically Chinese, and many of their social attitudes are deeply rooted in Chinese social expectations. And here, the strong belief in the traditional family and the responsibility of bearing sons for future generations in order to carry on the family name will likely override whatever crazy western ideas they come across about accepting homosexuality. I speak with some experience on this matter since I have over the years had many local Thai friends who are professionals and business leaders. There have been plenty of opportunity for them to educate me on the very complicated attitudes they encounter. I have no experience with Thai rural or small-town communities in this regard, so I really cannot say how cisgendered male-male relationships will be seen by them. There are some on this board who have boyfriends from Isaan or other small towns, and might have received a warm welcome from the boyfriends' families. However, I would caution that we shouldn't read too much into their particular experiences, since those farang-thai ex-moneyboy relationships are hugely coloured by economics. One characteristic of Thai society (again, nothing at all to do with Buddhism) that may obscure their honest opinions is the tendency to avoid confrontation – fights along Pattaya Beach Road and Soi 6 notwithstanding – and their acute awareness of the need to save face for all around. So even if one encounters a performance of gracious welcome and acceptance, one should always remember it could be just that: a performance. But perhaps that is good enough. If everybody around is placidly polite, does it really matter what they really think? By the same token, you will need to become "Thai" to receive this consideration. That means, you will need to learn to behave their way and not do anything that undermines "face". So you will almost surely have to restrain yourself from overt displays of same-sex affection; if you don't, you won't be seen as giving them due respect, and consequently, they won't feel obliged to return respect to you; which means their polite smile and silence will vanish in a flash, and you may be featured in the next viral video of a farang beaten up by irate Thais.

I am not speaking from all that much experience and I have never bottomed in a Japanese shop, so please do not take what I am about to say as the gospel truth, just as semi-educated gues: The agencies' websites typically display alongside photos (sometimes with faces blurred) what the boys will or will not do. I think you will find that the majority of them will top, and many will only top. The locations of shops' private rooms vary; sometimes a shop will have rooms in the same building, sometimes they rent rooms in nearby buildings. If in a room within the shop, you can assume the walls to be paper thin, Even in off-site rooms which are typically studio apartments in separate buildings, the walls can be thin. There was one time when I could hear the neighbour flush the toilet and run the shower. Muffled voices too. If you're the type who sing opera as you climax, consider wearing a mask when you're entering or leaving the building, so curious neighbours won't be able to see your face. Japanese places are very strict about the time. So if you have booked 60 minutes, it is 60 minutes from the moment the boy meets you. If you spend 10 minutes washing yourself, those 10 minutes would be counted within the session's overall duration.