Dear Hillary,
I read Marie’s letter to you with a smile (two weeks ago). She is not the only person – there have been numerous television documentaries shown in Europe portraying the shocking “goings on” in the Pattaya area where old men brazenly go out in the company of young women. What a sin to humanity! What they all fail to consider, is the reasons why this is happening.
In the West, when an older woman flirts with a younger man, she is seen as feisty, still full of life, and everyone wishes them good luck. But if an older man so much as glances at a younger woman, he is openly vilified as a “dirty old man” who is not entitled to have any sexual feelings. I am in my mid sixties and I have a loving, caring Thai wife, twenty years younger than me. When we went to visit the UK two years ago, the amount of hostile stares I received from women was amazing. I felt like going up to them and shouting “For god’s sake she is 43! Just because she looks after herself and she looks 10 years younger is not our fault. Unlike you, you over privileged, overfed, chain smoking bigot.”
So yes, we older men come to Thailand, where we can have the same rights to enjoy ourselves as everybody else and we can escape the anti old men bigotry we are subjected to in the West. I say to Marie the same as my wife often says to me “If you have a problem, first look to yourself.”
Peter
Dear Peter,
Some days I wonder where we are headed? Reading your letter, it obviously isn’t the UK. I honestly don’t know why we human beings have to be so judgmental. If 65 year old Jim has Noi, a 25 year old girlfriend when he comes here for holidays, whose business is that other than theirs? You have correctly called it “old men bigotry”, but you shouldn’t stop there my Petal. We human beings have a remarkable ability in the bigotry department, be that age, race, religion, tattoos or nose hairs. In fact we are so good at it we make laws banning descriptions of our fellow humans by any of the terms I just mentioned, or it is racial intolerance, or not “PC”. We have made jokes about age, race, religion, tattoos and nose hairs for hundreds of years. So just what is wrong with it? Have you heard the one about Ivor Legov, the one legged Lithuanian …
