When I was in Bangkok, I knew I wanted to visit a go-go bar. Not because I had some fantasy about it, but because as someone who talks about sex and sexuality for a living, I felt like it was something I needed to see firsthand. You hear so many different things about these places — from people who have never been and are just projecting their assumptions, and from people who have been and either romanticize or demonize the experience. I wanted to form my own opinion.
So I went. And what I found was far more nuanced, more human, and more complicated than I expected.
Walking In for the First Time
The first thing that struck me was the energy. It is loud, it is bright, and it is overwhelming in a very specific way. The music, the lights, the density of people — it is a lot to take in. There are dancers on stage, there is a bar area where you can sit and drink, and there is a general atmosphere that is equal parts party and performance.
I noticed immediately that the clientele was diverse. It was not just the stereotype of older Western men that you see in documentaries. There were couples, there were groups of friends, there were tourists who looked like they stumbled in by accident and were not quite sure what to do with themselves. And there were regulars who clearly felt at home in the environment.
The Performers
What caught my attention most was the women on stage. They ranged in energy from genuinely enthusiastic to clearly going through the motions. Some were chatting with each other between performances, laughing, sharing snacks. Others seemed more withdrawn. It was a reminder that behind the spectacle, these are real people with real lives, and their relationship to this work is not monolithic.
I think one of the biggest mistakes people make when talking about go-go bars and similar establishments is flattening the experience into a single narrative. Either every worker is a victim who needs saving, or every worker is an empowered entrepreneur who has freely chosen this path. Reality, as always, lives somewhere in between, and it varies dramatically from person to person.
The Uncomfortable Questions
Being there raised a lot of questions for me that I did not have neat answers to. Questions about the economics of desire — who gets to sell it, who gets to buy it, and what that exchange really means in a context where there are significant power imbalances related to wealth, nationality, and gender. Questions about what it means to be a spectator in a space like that, and whether my presence as an observer was any different from the presence of someone who was there as a customer.
I also thought a lot about cultural context. Go-go bars in Bangkok exist within a specific historical, economic, and cultural framework that is very different from the Western lens through which most outsiders view them. Coming in with Western moral judgments and applying them wholesale to a completely different cultural context felt reductive, but so did ignoring the real concerns about exploitation and agency that exist within the industry.
What I Took Away
Leaving the go-go bar that night, I felt a mix of things. Fascination, because the experience was genuinely unlike anything else. Discomfort, because some of what I saw was hard to sit with. And a deep sense of humility, because I realized how much I did not know and how easy it would be to oversimplify what I had witnessed.
What I can say with confidence is that these conversations deserve more nuance than they usually get. The people who work in go-go bars are not a monolith, and neither are the people who visit them. If we want to have meaningful discussions about sex work, about travel and sexuality, about the global economics of desire, we need to start by listening to the actual people involved rather than projecting our own assumptions onto them.
Watch the Full Story
In my video, I go into much more detail about what I saw, how I felt, and the bigger questions this experience raised for me. If you are interested in an honest, thoughtful take on a topic that is too often reduced to clickbait, I think you will find it worth watching.
