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Notes -
SEX AND THE BIG CITY
or
THE LAST UNINVADEABLE THIRD SPACE
In the digital age of escorts on demand and cheap flights to indulge in sex tourism, why would adult entertainment venues that offer sex-adjacent services persist, when one can get your rocks off for a much cheaper price? In observed practice within Asia, these venues exist not for booze and girls, but for establishing membership in the brotherhood: you are in our world now, and the initiation is sin.
This came about after I made a post about the adult entertainment scene in Singapore in a necro'ed thread when I saw @Pasha complain about the lack of visible seediness in one of Singapores premier red light districts. Details about the mechanics therein can be found here for context and to provide a primer for my below.
https://www.themotte.org/post/981/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-28/211124?context=8#context
So what is this brotherhood mentioned up top? Basically it can be summed up as 'I need to know you will not fuck me over when push comes to shove'. This is perhaps foreign to professionalised pseudoacademics where people are best experienced as minimizeable windows on a zoom call, but in professions relating to physical goods and services, human trust is a shorthand for task success: better to get shit done with someone you know has your back than to waste tims searching for the MBA approved 'best fit'.
This is not limited to physical tradespeople like laborers and soldiers, but includes B2B sales professionals, commodity traders, shipbrokers, construction/civil engineering. In these environments, decision makers responsible for multi million dollar trades and projects care less about saving a rounding errors worth of marginal savings in favor of knowing who to yell at when shit goes tits up.
In the KTVs and Indian Dance Clubs and Thai Discos in Singapore, the patrons are often groups of men, usually professionals in the same cluster. Oil traders and refinery site managers, construction project managers and engineers with their lawyers and bankers, shipbrokers with agents. The booze and the women show up, the mens wallets open up, but more importantly their mouths open too. Industry gossip is adjacent to insider activity, and being part of these networks gives incredible insight into the movements and activities of not just the people in that group you are with but those groups they are part of as well. By joining or initiating these activities, an opportunity is presented to quickly establish a bond with the other men present, to immediately let it he known that you can be called upon when needed. There is incredible power to be had when you are one of the first names on the tips of powerful peoples fingers, and for many punters a successful night is not when your dick gets wet but when you get the phone number of a useful contact.
So why the sex revue? Well it is because of the steady decline of third spaces that have been invaded by credentialed professionals, especially women, who dislike legacy networks that are impenetrable. There are legit professional reasons for this, such as contravening of KYC protocols or tender processes, but for the most part the dislike of legacy networks stems from jealousy. There are plenty of women who have successfully entered halls of power, especially in Thailand and Hong Kong where female scions are groomed for succession by their fathers, but for the most part a lack of trust in these women to bother with handshake agreements leads to their exclusion from networks of power. Thus, the networks must be dismantled as much as possible, starting with removing the exclusivity of their assembly grounds. Male only social clubs have steadily been eroded to be female inclusive, from the Knights of Columbus to Freemasons, and other threads have highlighted youth organizations being the starting point of this rot, with the Boy Scouts being mixed gender while girl scouts remain female exclusive. Whatever organizational benefit there is to opening up the genders, it does mean there are less third spaces for men to discuss the ongoings of power.
Therefore, the last venue is the strip club, the sauna, the banya, the KTV. The men say they are going there to be sexual degenerates, and many often are purely socially retarded men seeking base human interactions, but the true sustenance of these places is being the third place that women have zero interest in demeaning themselves to enter. That alone will ensure their continued presence even as the world gets continually anonymized into the homogenous digital soup: the last bastions of human connections will concentrate under the pressure, hardening its borders to continual external forces till they are fully impenetrable.
Can confirm this is still the place of choice for negotiating government-adjacent contracts. I don't know if that's the same in Finland, but perhaps @Stefferi does.
It doesn't even have to do anything with sexual degeneracy, just the shared experience of men baring it all in front of each other and sharing a drink (or dozen) in a relaxing setting.
Country clubs and golf courses in Texas(and probably most of the rest of the south, I’ve just no experience there) have ‘locker rooms’ which have comfy chairs and serve drinks.
I view invitations to hunt and golf being a similar activity, but women in those environs face no barriers to entry. I do not know how this necessarily, if at all, changes the networking dynamics at play.
A relative of mine by marriage works for a bank. He has a banker in his office who doesn't show up to work on Fridays, and upon inquiring why, was informed that this particular banker takes potential clients fishing in his boat instead of going to the office on Fridays, and routinely signs on million dollar accounts by doing so. One has to imagine there are few women on these trips, even for the small business owner world(which realistically most million dollar bank accounts belong to).
All male environs seem conducive to serious business.
As for hunting, hunting trips might be elite display or largess towards poorer male comrades(such as employees or less successful relatives) as often as they are an opportunity for networking among social equals. Exotic game ranches aside, the usual pattern is for one or a very small number of economically successful men(who are already close enough not to need networking amongst themselves) to buy a lease which relatives, longtime friends, employees, etc can use as well. I've not heard of business deals being cut on the deer lease in the same way as on a golf course.
You do it at the bar at the lodge after.
If an actual hunter type businessman invites you on an outing, that's a pretty huge deal. It's also a test. If you can't shut the fuck up for a while, if you get bored and can't focus, if you're cranky in the cold / rain.
Golf Business is much more a direct extension of the boardroom but outside and with beer. Hunting is more.
... Unless they're not actually a hunter and just want to blast away. In which case, you'll be back before lunch.
In the hunting examples I'm thinking about the guy who got shot by dick cheney but still found it worthwhile to go to those retreats after the incident.
I mean ... the game is the game.
You catch a hot one posted up on the corner, you can say "fuck it" and bounce. Or you can step the fuck up and get back in the mix. You do you, playboy. Game gonna stay the game.
--- Dick Cheney (probably)
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I'd be surprised if equal numbers of men and women like hunting and golf. "We have to do this boring and maybe gross thing to network" is still a barrier, if a porous one.
I alluded to it in a previous comment, but I have seen high tea luncheons and to a lesser extent charity committees function the same for Chinese wives who wield their husbands fortunes. There are a large number of management corporations in London and Vancouver where blocks of flats are owned by these wifely consortiums who often rely on a relative staying there to act as the property manager/agent. These also are tens of millions of dollar size deals arrived at over shit conversations men would gnaw their leg off to avoid.
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