Friday, 29 September 2006

A-go-go boys, coyote girls (part 2)


While a-go-go clubs have been around since the Vietnam War, when they sprang up to cater to American GIs, coyote dancing is much more recent.

The coyote dancing phenomenon, in fact, is taking Thailand's nightlife by storm, as club owners look for new ways to hook customers.

The promise of big earnings as coyote dancers is also helping lure a new generation of young people into the night entertainment industry.

A tacky club in Thon Buri Plaza, a huge barn-like 'entertainment complex' close to my place, now employs young women as coyote dancers in its 'lounge bar'. It has put up a large tarpaulin to lure in customers, where women are pictured wearing black crop tops and skimpy denim miniskirts.

It is just one of many nightclubs investing in this form of entertainment. Some are big business. The Manager newspaper recently profiled the main coyote dance spots in the Khao San, Ratchada and RCA nightspot areas.

As you can see from the pics, some look as big as the most lavish cabaret shows. Customers sit around revolving stages on which troupes of scantily dressed women perform. In some places, they can't touch, but they can buy them drinks.

In more intimate clubs, the young women perform on the bar top. When they are not up there, they sit with customers...pouring them drinks, waiting for tips, and 'developing customer loyalty,' as bar owners like to say.

The name, of course, comes from the 2000 Hollywood movie, Coyote Ugly, set in a New York saloon, where women bartenders danced coyboy-style for customers on the bar-top.

In Thailand, girls and boys need not dance cowboy style, or even particularly well — though many young women interviewed for the Manager piece say they entered the industry because they wanted to dance.

Coyote girls come in different stripes, depending on the image the nightspot wants to convey. Some coyote girls will strip-tease, or sit with a customer, if he is willing to buy them drinks.

Most insist they do not sell themselves for sex, though even here outlets adopt different policies. Where one threatens to deduct the wages of any dancers it discovers have gone home with a customer, others will say that after-hours liasons are the dancers' own affair.

Some clubs draw conventional dancers from sources such as modelling agencies — but once they have finished dancing, that's it. They pay the modelling agencies (B800 to B1300 per model, per night, in one case) rather than the dancers themselves, and no contact between customers and dancers is allowed.

Coyote singers are different, though they insist they are not paid to join customers willy-nilly. He must be willing to buy them drinks first.

Bangkok folk saw coyote dancers in action just the other day, in a radio station promotion, where women dressed in military fatigues danced beside tanks and handed out roses to soldiers. The coup makers have since put a stop to such displays, saying they are in danger of distracting the troops.

Whatever the elaborate excuses offered by the clubs or dancers, most Thais tend to view coyote dancers as a mere extension of the sleazy night entertainment industry. They suspect customers go to see how sexily these women dress and move, rather than how well they have mastered dancing technique.

Coyote dancers may not sell their bodies for sex, but nor are they on stage (or the bar counter) just for their dance skills. As the Manager piece said, while Thais do not condemn it, they do not encourage it, either.
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I have met a few young women who work as coyote dancers. A few months ago, a straight guy friend took me to one such bar in Silom, which caters to Japanese tourists. The owner sent three young women over to sit at our table. They were tertiary students by day, who worked as coyote dancers by night.

'Do they have coyote dancers like this in the West?' one asked. At first I did not understand. It took me a while to recall the Hollywood movie, which my young friend herself had not seen.

'At first I couldn't stand the noise or the smoke, but after a while you get used to it,' another said.

None accepted invitations from customers to go elsewhere after work. The night ended at the same time as their shifts, though they could still be dancing up to 3am.

Normally the girls danced in roatation, four or five at a time. But if a customer liked the look of a particular girl, he could buy her a drink, which includes a tip. Sometimes everyone at a table chips in, and the girl is presented with a garland of 100 baht notes.

The girls I saw that night did not dance well. They looked awkward and nervous, as if they were there under sufferance. Their go-go contemporaries — some of whom are skilled with a pole, but in the pecking order of the dancing industry earn much less — would probably view them with scorn.

The young women told me they study in Bangkok, but come from the provinces. Any extra money they earned, they sent home to their parents. None had told their parents they worked as coyote dancers.

Wiki has a Thai-language entry on coyote dancers. It says the slang phrase 'coyote ugly' refers to someone, often a man, who wakes up to discover that the woman he took home to bed the previous night was not as attractive as he first thought.

He will try to escape at all costs, in much the same way as a coyote wolf, when trapped in a cage, will chew off its own limbs if necessary to regain its freedom. Some of the girls I saw dancing that night looked just as unhappy to be there - but the customers, of course, couldn't care less.

now, see part 3

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