The Butterfly

Every monger with even modest credentials knows all about the butterfly label. Hookers will ask him at some point--when the suspicion arises as to whether or not he’s going to return for round two or three or be a worthy investment: Are you a butterfly? Or in the Philippines, if they have reason to think you might be that and a bit more, they will ask: Are you a helicopter? (I’m not quite sure of the image they have in mind. A warship? Lots of territory to be covered, or already covered?)

The “smart” butterfly will never admit to being one, and for good reason. The hooker, with even a little experience, if told she is with a butterfly will conclude one or all of the following: a. He’s just like that asshole Thai or Filipino boyfriend or husband I once had who got me pregnant and as soon as I got fat in the belly and turned my back he was out chasing another girl, and this I don’t want more of and therefore this customer is a bad bet for being a long-time boyfriend or husband; b. I better try to get as much as I can from him as soon as I can, including—and most of all—a shopping trip tomorrow, and perhaps I’d also better give him a good story about a sick and dying father or an operation I need for a nonexistent tumor on my left breast; and c. I’ll do what I have to do to earn my money, but damn if I’m going to give him the full Girl Friend Experience or a good blowjob, or one at all unless he demands it.

So, then, no true butterfly with any brains will reveal his hand, a hand that rests on two fundamental premises: Novelty is more important than knowing or expecting that going a second time with a hooker will be as good as it was the first time; and all hookers are losers in the arena of long-term relationships and therefore it is foolhardy to get emotionally involved with them.

As committed as a true butterfly is to never going with the same hooker a second or third time, he knows how they think about butterflies and, dumb as they might be in other ways, how they rationally reason. He adamantly denies that he is a butterfly, and in fact he behaves as if this lovely Thai or Filipina marvel of a thousand bed tricks and unbeatable charms that he chooses for a night or two is someone he simply cannot do without. To the extent that he says anything to her about this rather sensitive issue of butterflying, he addresses the issue by indicating that their relationship—brief as it has been for the one or two days (and the last day he will be with her)—is headed down a road that spells seriousness and commitment and, of course, the real possibility of marriage. A blatant and bold lie? Of course he’s lying, but so what? He knows if he knows anything at all that he’ll have to crawl a country mile using his nose as locomotion to be as good a liar as any Thai hooker, and though the Filipinas aren’t nearly as wily and clever and convincing at the art of lying as their Thai sisters, plenty of them have lying down to what might loosely be called a science.

In all of this, there is a small irony in that a great many hookers (most?) will get indignant if they are in turned called butterflies. Their response is usually: I am not a butterfly! What I do is just the nature of my business. Which is true enough—and there’s no need to get into fine distinctions about those few cases where one monger will take a hooker for a week or two. Hookers aren’t really butterflies, I suppose. They are, rather, the nectar that mongers are drawn to and so often can’t resist, in exchange of course for a known quantity of the local currency.

Even the dedicated butterfly who lives by the rule of not taking a hooker more than twice or three times finds himself being tempted in Thailand and the Philippines—in a way very rarely possible in the West—to fall into that trap called love where he becomes blinded to what she does and he does and the demands that will soon be placed on him and cannot be easily resisted because of dramatic changes in brain chemistry in those same loci where all serious addictions are chemically expressed. The savvy and wily hookers embrace all these changes that they cannot articulate and in fact do not understand because, among other things, it gives them the prospect of something long-term and even permanent, and, in addition, a welcome release from all the mindless dancing and blaring music and the uncertainty of whether the day’s return will be small or predictably good—good meaning at least getting paid the local going rate for going all night.

Lastly, the true or dedicated butterfly, consumed by a desire for novelty (bringing into play those “promiscuous genes” that are the products of natural selection and the “wired” desire to maximize one’s fitness or reproductive success), knows, because of that burdensome thing in his head called consciousness, that there will be plenty of moments of indecision when the hooker for the night proves so charming and so great in bed that he feels almost compelled to take her for a second night. The question he faces again and again, and sometimes struggles with mightily, is this: Will the novelty of a new experience, “bad” or unwelcome as some of the novelty will surely be, outweigh the pleasures and good moments of the sure bet and the predictable behavior that quickly and inevitably brings on boredom? With rare exception, the true butterfly answers in the affirmative. The true or dedicated butterfly, then, is a man not just committed to novelty, and with a clear vision that all hookers are losers in the arena of long-term relationships, but also a man who loves to gamble and is willing to take his shares of losses that accompany almost all novelty.

The author can be contacted at:  korski1@cox.net

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