Young British men are soliciting sex for ‘as little as £23’ in Thailand, with some choosing to ditch the UK altogether and settle down with these ‘bar girls’, a new documentary has revealed.
This ‘fantasy’ lifestyle where ‘men are encouraged to be men’ by their ‘traditional’ Thai girlfriends is being peddled online by content creators like British YouTuber Mac, Zara McDermott discovered while filming her new documentary about the Southeast Asian country.
The former Love Island star’s new BBC show Thailand: The Dark Side of Paradise follows Zara, 28, as she tries to reconcile Thailand’s ‘two conflicting sides’ – its idyllic beaches against the seedy underbelly of drugs and cheap sex’.
During the second episode of the three-part show, Zara travels from Bangkok to Pattaya to try and understand why so many young male British tourists are flocking to the ‘sex capital of Asia’.
There, she meets 30-year-old Mac, originally from Staffordshire, who puts together virtual ‘guides’ to Thailand’s sex industry – including how to negotiate with the women and the top ‘mistakes’ to avoid in these bars.
Zara also interviews 23-year-old Loukas, a chef from Manchester, who travelled to Pattaya in search of a good party, paid £23 for a night with one of the 60,000 workers employed by the trade, and eventually started dating her.
‘It feels like some young Brits are behaving in Thailand in a way that they would never behave in the UK,’ the presenter said. ‘They can come over and live by an entirely different set of rules, and they quite like it.’
After landing in Pattaya, Zara enlists the help of Mac, who has lived in Pattaya for two years, to try and navigate Soi 6 that the host describes as a red light district ‘on steroids’.
Mac, 30, said he lives ‘around the corner’ as he pointed out the different kinds of bars in the district, including a ‘blowjob bar’, while skirting around the subject of prostitution in Thailand.
The pair’s meeting is cut short when police officers shut down filming and ‘escort them off the premises’ after bar owners in the area ‘forced us to stop filming’.
‘We’re stopping everyone spending money,’ Mac explained, adding the crew was a ‘distraction’.
Zara’s next stop is a meeting with Loukas, one of the young British men drawn to Thailand after watching videos created by YouTubers like Mac to understand the appeal.
Loukas is a 23-year-old solo backpacker from Manchester who embarked on an eight-week adventure in Thailand after he ‘saw a load of things on Instagram’ and decided ‘I need to party there’.
He told Zara that he met a sex worker at a bar in Pattaya during a night out before taking her back to his hotel room after paying 1,000 bahts or £23.
Loukas said: ‘She explained that I pay the bar 1,000 which was £23. You get to take them out of work and you’ve kind of got the night with them.’
‘The first night, it’s funny, we didn’t sleep together. I don’t want to call it a date, because it wasn’t,’ Loukas continued, expaining that he found the girl ‘kind of funny’.
The next night, he paid £46 for ‘boom-boom’ he tells Zara before clarifying: ‘She wanted to f*** me.
‘For an extra £23, let’s give it a go, I guess,’ he added, sharing he’d never engaged with a sex worker before.
When the girl reached out to Loukas for a third consecutive night, he reportedly told her he didn’t want to pay for sex – but she insisted on meeting him anyway.
He suggested that the ploy was to get tourists from the UK ‘hooked’ so that ‘you kind of accidentally fall in love with the girl, you go back home, and end up sending them money every month, so they can live a better life’.
Loukas admitted he would never do this sort of thing at home, adding it was ‘very, very flattering’ that the sex workers approached him outside these bars.
‘If you was to walk past a bar in the UK, you wouldn’t see a girl hanging outside, going, “Ah, you handsome man! Come here!
‘That’s why you act a bit differently.’
The sex workers in Pattaya have a different story to tell Zara when she meets Annie (name changed) who revealed their stark reality of trying to escape a life of sex work through any means.
Annie was 17 and working in a factory when her boyfriend cheated on her with her sister when their child was only two months old.
Annie, whose face is never shown while the camera stays positioned on her hands, said she swore off Thai men and turned to sex work in Pattaya to ‘meet foreigners’.
‘I want to have a foreign boyfriend, I want a better life,’ she continued.
However, it’s rare that British men who engage these women follow through on their empty promise of rescuing them from sex work, as Annie said dejectedly: ‘I was the unluckiest, that’s all.’
She described falling in love with a customer who told her he didn’t want her to be a sex worker and even agreed on a monthly stipend – before she found out he had impregnated a Thai woman in England.
‘And it was like the world had stopped rotating,’ Annie’s voice cracked as she revealed her dream was shattered.
The next time Zara met Mac was at his house to meet his girlfriend, a Thai woman named Panida who goes by Beverly Hills after one of his followers gave her the nickname.
Beverly Hills is featured prominently in Mac’s YouTube videos, including one in which he gloats he has a ‘beautiful Thai woman’ cooking bacon and eggs for him.
When Zara confronted him about selling a ‘fantasy’ while ‘ignoring the reality that women are being exploited here’ and actually ‘feeding the beast’ that is the sex work industry by promoting his lifestyle, he replied: ‘If anything, I’m helping this place.’
‘There’s a lot of guys that come here because of me. And, ultimately, they’re putting money into these bars, they’re putting money into Thailand and helping the economy,’ he spun his brand of content.
When asked why he decided to date a Thai girl, he said ‘it’s more fun’ than dating English women ‘barking’ at him or nagging him.
‘I feel like there’s lots of expectations that English women put on men, and they feel a lot of pressure from that.’
The new show joins a list of thought-provoking and critically-acclaimed documentaries Zara has made for the BBC in recent years.
The new programme, made by South Shore Productions, looks at what draws Brits to Thailand – as well as the darker side of the country, including the access to drugs and the sex work industry.
It opens in bustling Bangkok before heading to some popular party islands and will feature a lively cast of characters.
Zara’s main aim for the documentary is to discover why thousands of young Brits flock to the exotic location every year.
From backpackers to those who are seeking longer-term roots – the new documentary will unearth the secrets of the vast and varied country.
Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday, Zara said of the time she spent speaking to sex workers in Thailand: ‘My work in the violence against women space allowed me to have some difficult and emotional conversations with sex workers.
‘My aim is for these women to feel completely seen and heard, because I truly believe that sharing our stories helps give us women power.
‘I have a huge amount of empathy for the women who are pressured to work in such an unpredictable and at times unsafe industry.’
Thailand: The Dark Side of Paradise is currenly streaming on BBC iPlayer.
