Are Mongers Sex Addicts?

It’s not an easy question to answer, and there may well be as many different answers as there are mongers and others who are presented with the question. Herewith some thoughts on the matter, thoughts that might well bring forth ideas and ways of looking at the issue that I’ve missed or not considered.

Consider some possible ways of thinking of sex addicts in the context of whoring in Southeast Asia.

A sex addict is someone who makes two or three trips a year to Southeast Asia, each trip for a period of two to three weeks. The sole or overriding purpose of such trips is to have sex with as many different women (hookers or “good girls” or some combination) as possible, and yet leaving open the possibility that in one or all of these trips the monger will spend some significant amount of his time with one or two women. For whatever reason, he has found them highly desirable, enough so to decide that being a dedicated butterfly, moving from one woman to another every day or two, is a pattern of behavior to be put on hold.

But, surely, merely behaving in this manner, or in some similar manner (going more frequently or staying for shorter or longer periods of time) cannot in itself constitute “addiction,” where addiction refers to a “need” for more, and not only a need for more sex, and perhaps more sex with different partners, but a need in which other aspects of one’s life are being significantly affected. The monger is going into debt, and at some point, crippling or debilitating debt to finance these trips. The monger is in a relationship in his home country and the relationship begins to suffer as a direct result of these trips, and then at some point the relationship fails largely because of this constant mongering activity. If either or both of these conditions exist, and the person also thinks frequently, and perhaps obsessively, of these trips, to the point of literally counting the days and hours until the next trip, and perhaps also continually bringing to mind the women and the exploits of previous trips, then there is yet more reason to see the monger as a sex addict. Perhaps there is more. These mongering trips, though constituting less than fifteen or twenty percent of a year, are becoming such a financial and emotional drain that one’s very job performance suffers, and suffers to the point where he is in danger of losing his job, and therefore the very means of financing his mongering trips to Southeast Asia.

What I have suggested here in brief is the kind of “addiction” that very often in varying degrees characterizes drug addicts, those hooked on cocaine, or heroin, or meth. Such drug addictions so completely take hold of an individual that they rather literally destroy his (or her) life.

But do many mongers—more than a very small handful—fit the characterization I have suggested? I honestly don’t know, and I’m not sure that anyone who has thought about it and has made frequent visits to Thailand and the Philippines—the two major destinations for mongers—has any firm data on this kind of a question. Nor would those--I would guess--who have been long resident in Thailand and the Philippines and have spent a significant amount of time around expat mongers and those who come frequently to monger but live abroad. So in one sense, and even assuming mongers fit the “addict” profile I have outlined, it is simply an open-ended question. Indeed, open-ended enough, I would argue, that it’s quite possible—and this is what I in fact believe—that the number of “sex addicts” among that population of mongers who year after year find themselves in Southeast Asia for the girls is very small. And indeed may be a largely nonexistent population.

There are, no doubt, plenty of people about who would want to argue that even if we relax or eliminate the three or four traits I’ve pinpointed that would allow one to bring some definitional refinement to the word “sex addict,” there are more than a small handful of mongers who are, well, sex addicts. And hardcore sex addicts at that. This category would include all of those sex tourists or mongers who show any kind of consistent pattern of returning to Thailand and the Philippines for the principal purpose of having sex with any number of women.

But is this really an “addiction?” I don’t think so. In fact, with all of the “damaging” aspects of the behavior absent, I don’t think that f**king thirty or forty different Thai and Filipina girls year after year is anything like an addiction. It is not even in the same category as the addiction to cigarettes and alcohol that a very large percentage of mongers have, and would have more difficulty getting rid of than their two or three yearly trips to Thailand and the Philippines.

Why would anyone even want to call the mongers of Southeast Asia in all of their many guises and tastes sex addicts? Well, for the simple reason that by the standards of the societies from which the mongers come, their behavior is abnormal, indeed quite aberrant. Aberrant not just because of the number of different sexual couplings they have over any given period of time, but equally—even more so, perhaps—for the fact that sex is being paid for up front. Paid for in ways that nearly everyone recognizes as payment for the services of a prostitute, which nearly everyone sees as different that the much more expensive outlays for sex, and very often boring and infrequent sex, in a socially sanctioned marriage. The expected societal norm is to be, if not perfectly monogamous, then more or less so—perhaps cheating on one’s partner on an infrequent basis, but not, even in this, having sex with anywhere from a dozen to a couple of dozen different women every six months or a years.

Among mongers, of course, the verdict on this issue might be quite different. They’re a self-selected lot, and, as far as I can tell, fundamentally unconcerned, or little concerned, about the moral nature of what they are doing. Very few seem to give a rat’s ass about what the vast majority of their countrymen (and women of a thousand stripes) think about their sexual behavior, and whether or not they are going with prostitutes. Looked at this way, one would be much more likely, I would think, to conclude that the words “sex addict” are little more than the heavily freighted words of those who disapprove, who cannot abide their moralizing, and who are often eagerly insistent to make it known that any kind of mongering behavior is not only an addiction but a genuine sickness. One, indeed, far more serious than addictions that they themselves embrace and fail to recognize: addictions to food, to nicotine, to alcohol, to shopping, to conspicuous consumption, to loud moralizing, to the need to insistently intrude themselves into the private and personal lives of others. Lives that are not in any sense any of their business.