verging_on_random

Giving

December 23, 2007 on 4:04 pm | In Uncategorized |

Since I came out as a gay man earlier this year I’ve been making tentative efforts to meet other gay people. It’s difficult to explain why … just a desire to feel part of a broader social group I suppose. What Maslow called the need for belongingness.

Anyway I don’t know any gay people around where I live – or to be more accurate I know one who I can’t stand – so I started to make some friends online. This was more difficult than you might think. To make contact with actual real human beings one has to hack through an almost impenetrable thicket of pay porn sites … my advice to anyone who wants to do it is to skip the first 50 Google pages no matter what word combination you search with.

I persevered, however, and over the months met a few people who are enjoyable to talk to and who I care about, which is a pretty good working definition of a friend for present purposes. In this post I want to concentrate on those I met in one particular way. Apologies that it’s going to be a long post but I can’t trim it I’m afraid. It’s the holidays, you have plenty of time.

One site I found in my searches was euphemistically called a ‘chat room’. In fact it was a pay site where people pay by the minute to go into private sessions with ‘models’ (*cough*), many of them women but also a substantial number of attractive young men. In the chat, the models will do pretty much anything you ask them to on webcam. Sample extract from a model’s profile:

What turns me on:
cocks and toy.

My expertise:
dildo show linky cumm

Yes well, you get the idea.

Anyway the idea of paying somebody $2 a minute to perform for me on a crappy webcam struck me as an erotic treat for every bit of eight seconds but I have to admit that although some of these guys look like archetypical soft-core whores, others are extraordinarily attractive. So I started to talk to them (you can do that for free once you register with the site). These initial conversations followed a well-worn formula, which consisted of them trying to persuade me to ‘go private’, which means authorising a charge to my credit card as we go into a two way chat not visible to anyone else.

Sometimes, if I liked the guy, I would agree to go private. The results were often hilarious. Once we were by ourselves, so to speak, they would start a performance that usually consisted of a horrible gyration while they stopped every now and then to type stuff like “You like my … bb? You want to … bb?” I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks. It often took a little while to attract their attention enough to read what I was writing. When they realised I was paying them to put their clothes back on, not the opposite, they were a bit nonplussed. But many of them were happy to talk frankly and this is their story.

Most of these guys are from either Colombia or The Philippines. Their willingness to take me at face value was a bit frightening – what they do is illegal in The Philippines (not sure about Colombia – is anything illegal in Colombia?) and I could easily have been a policeman. Anyway the Filipinos were usually very friendly and generally suggested that we talk on Yahoo instead of the pay site. Indeed, a couple got quite concerned that we do that once they realised I wasn’t paying for a performance. No show, no pay was their attitude.

I suppose by now I’ve chatted to eight or 10 young Filipinos who do this work. Some were really only interested in asking me for money so I didn’t talk to them for long. I still have five, however, who I talk to frequently on Yahoo and who I consider to be friends.

I suspect that one or two people reading may already be thinking “Ah these guys are just shrewd and devious, they are too smart to come out and ask for money so they are playing a long game.” I’ll come back to that thought later, because not being totally naive, it occurred to me too very early in the piece. But first let me describe these Filipinos’ lives.

Much I am sure to the disappointment of the free market fundamentalists, they are not self-employed contractors taking their first baby steps into the exciting world of capitalism. No, even in the unregulated Philippines IR system they are employees. They get this work on the friend-of-a-friend system. The employer provides them with a room and the IT facilities and pays them about 30% of what the clients pay (or is supposed to … disputes with their bosses about alleged underpayments seem to be chronic). Most of them actually live in these rooms. They go online when they feel like it but following good contemporary HRM practice they have performance benchmarks to meet.

From my observations, they work seven days a week and anything from six to 12 hours a day. Most of this time they sit staring at the wall, or trying to persuade ‘freeloaders’ (as they call them) to ‘go pvt bb, you take me pvt I show you everything’.

They all come from poor families and have limited education – middle school generally. Much of the money they earn goes to support their families. Yes I know some cynics would also say “Well they would say that wouldn’t they?” but everything I have read about Filipino society supports the idea. I believe these guys are simply doing a job, because it’s the only way they can make money to survive.

Moreover, they uniformly dislike their work. I’ve talked to them at length about this and they all have hopes of moving on to something else if they can. I have to say I don’t think this reflects any deep internal confliction about the morality of what they are doing (although there might be some, I’m just not in a position to judge); it is more that the work is intensely boring and many of their clients behave like pigs. I’m pleased that in the comparatively short time I’ve known them, two of the five have quit the work and are looking for something more … ummm …. mainstream.

Once I got to know these guys, I did give them money, and that’s what this roundabout post is about. I haven’t given them huge amounts by Australian standards but it’s a lot to them and their families - $50 might be a week’s earnings for them. What has intrigued me has been their reaction to the gifts, and even more so, my internal feelings in making them.

For my part, I found myself wondering:

• · Will they start asking for more all the time?
• · Will they ask what they have to do in return?
• · Will they resent it, as some sort of patronising relic of the colonial era?

The answers are interesting.

Will they start asking for more all the time? Well yes and no. No, they never come out and ask directly. They hint occasionally that they are have no food, or that their brother’s school tuition fees are due, or that they wish they could buy gifts for their family at Christmas. There are two observations about this: one is that I don’t believe these stories are made up just to tug at my heart strings (I’ve had a couple verified by coincidental subsequent events) and the other is that there is nothing whining or calculated about the way they mention them. They are completely artless … just like a child would be asking a parent for a favour (and let me hasten to add that I am NOT suggesting that these guys are childish or immature; they are neither).

In fact, it’s actually quite charming, or at least I find it so. It’s the way you wish all family members would ask for favours or gifts; there’s an oblique statement of the wish, coupled with an earnest assurance that if I say no there will be no hard feelings. And if I do say no – which I frequently do – the matter is dropped and there is absolutely no ill-will or sulking.

Will they ask what they have to do in return? Never. Not once has any Filipino suggested that there must be a catch to my gift, or that they will be expected to provide a quid pro quo at some time in the future. Nor has anyone ever expressed the ritual Australian sentiment of “Oh I feel awful because I don’t have anything for you.” In The Philippines, apparently, a gift is a gift and creates no obligations on the part of the recipient. It’s an atmosphere in which I find that giving provides much pleasure, free of all the calculated symbolism that it has acquired in our society.

Finally, do they resent my gifts? Well I guess I answered that in my previous paragraph. The answer is “No”. They express sincere spontaneous pleasure and then move on. The gift is simply an expression of our friendship. I have little doubt that if they were ever in a position to do something for me, they would not hesitate, but that would not be on account of a feeling of obligation. It would be because I am their friend, period.

I hoped you might enjoy that long tale. It seems to me a reminder of how joyous and uncomplicated friendships can be when one can do something from the heart that genuinely makes a friend’s life better, free of imbecile notions like ‘stocking fillers’ and the anxieties of “Oh my god I have NO idea what to get Justin and Bree”.

Oh yes … is the gay thing at all a factor in our friendships? Well we flirt outrageously and they all tell me nonsense like I am handsome macho Australian. So maybe I’m getting value for money after all.