Angry Thai Female

Since I have tomorrow (Friday) off to compensate for attending the first of 4-Saturday QuarkXpress program courses, I figure I’d stay up late and rant.

Uh oh! OakMonster is about to post a rant about the plight of Thai women. Close the blinds. Hide your children. No one is safe!

What is the cause of my rage today? A relationship article in The Nation called A question of relationships: Angry, alone and writing furiously Click on the link and read the article first before you proceed.

The writer criticizes the new genre of books that recently hit the shelf in Thailand, the Angry Woman literature. I guess that would be a companion category to the increasingly popular Chick Lit(erature) in the US. So I hereby dub this Thai Angry Women stuff, the Bitch Lit.

Now that you know what you’re getting into, please, I beg of you, finish reading the entry before getting your panties in a bunch. Please.

It’s about gosh darn time Thai women show their anger in public! It’s about time Thai women voice their opinion on and their dissatisfaction about Thai men!

Of all the things Thai society presses upon us, we decide to pick raising our voices and expressing our anger in public as our grand scale defiance. And some guys apparently got bent out of shape about it.

The male-dominated voice speaks through this columnist at the Nation, condemning the Bitch Lit to nothing but emotional sewage spewing from women who are “First, all the female writers appear to be close to or over 30. Second, they are desperate. Finally, their lives are void of both love and dates.”

This writer continues that the Bitch Lit writers “…can probably count the relationships they’ve had on the fingers of one hand and base their judgements on highly limited encounters with the opposite sex,” and that they’re writing advice column about relationships. Well, duh, Sherlock. Who sets up the rule that the more dates/love experience the girl has would lessen her worth?

Brother, please. These are arguments befitting an over-confident 16-year-old pimpled boy whose proposal for a date was rejected by the cheerleading captain.

But if that is a representing voice of Thai men, then the article gives Thai women another reason why the Bitch Lit should continue.

This is the 21st century. With all due respect to other aspects of Thai cultures, the cultural view on women must change to allow women to be all that we can be.

We don’t want to stay at home to keep the house, or spend hours in the kitchen. (Not that Thai women these days have to, anyway.) We don’t want to be treated as soft, dainty object that should only be seen and not heard. We don’t want to keep our emotions bottled up so we can appear pleasant to you men at all time, so you would love us and won’t go frolicking into the arms of another women. We don’t need to be married by 30 to be considered “successful”, or to have any value to our lives.

I must admit, yes, us women do have our flaws. We are only human. Then again, so do men. Now that Thai women are pointing things about Thai men out to the world at large, venting their anger in public, Thai men are not happy about it. In such a male-dominant society, hearing criticism from women seems to have blindsided men, shook them off balance, and lost control. Men, in general, don’t like not being in control, and now they feel like they’re losing control on the women. That really shakes things up.

Thai women today are smart and independent. They don’t feel the need to pine for men’s attention as much, and certainly they could easily make their own living. They feel they are entitled to their opinion, and their rights to have their voices heard. And they’d go out and do it. More than half of my graduating class is not married, and some of them couldn’t care less. Seriously.

There are definitely changes in the air. And some men think it just stinks. These are men who are not as open minded, who do not have the same respect for Thai women, who don’t think Thai women can be more than just the silent, pleasant, subservient fragile flower.

Tough luck, brothers. Tough. Luck.

A Thai male reader may just be saying, no kidding this OakMonster chick couldn’t find a Thai guy. She’s too damned opinionated.

Good riddance, dude.

My point exactly. This is probably also why many young Thai women these days went looking outside of the Thai circle. Thai men just don’t appreciate the “modern” Thai women and their having an opinion and saying it up front and center.

Anyways. I digress.

Of course, not ALL men are like that. Better yet, not ALL Thai men are like that. Kudos to you “modern” men who are not afraid of my and younger generations of sass, who love us for our minds as well as our bodies, and who let us truly be ourselves.

My hopes lie with the younger generation of Thai men. I have already seen some changes with boys of my generation. You certainly can’t teach old dogs new tricks, but the younguns are catching on.

There are real gentlemen out there in the world as well as I’m sure you lads on Thai-Blogs are. For that, I thank you.

And to all, thanks for letting me rant. Now I can enjoy my day off.

P.S. Thai and non-Thai sisters (and perhaps brothers too) out there who feel outraged about this article, I encourage you to write to the Nation at either relations@nationgroup.com or letters@nationgroup.com.