I’ve wanted to write about tolerance for a while, so I figure as we’re preparing to leave for Bali tomorrow, where there will be, no doubt, a totally different bar girl situation, now’s the time.

Ostensibly, the States is the land of tolerance. Not that the US is somehow the most tolerant place, but because we’re obsessed with tolerance as a moral principle. Particularly those on the Left, where the basic idea is that tolerance (often known otherwise as empathy) is all we need to create a more just society.

Except I don’t buy it. Not just because the Left is pretty regularly intolerant, particularly of the ideas coming from the Right, but also because they don’t follow through as far as the principle of tolerance needs to go for it really to be effective.

Tolerance has to go all the way.

But don’t worry. I’m not about to get into American cultural politics or even political politics, both of which I find to be, frankly, pretty tiresome. I want to write about two forms of intolerance that are pervasive in the US, but which I don’t think are a part of the cultural political discussion at all. So, yes, this is a post about bar girls. And the problem of loneliness.

First off, though, I want to be clear that I am not lonely: My wife who still loves me still loves me, and we spend most of our time together. Also, I do not go home with bar girls. But I get the appeal. Because I am empathetic.

My point is that even the most liberal Americans—you’ve seen ’em: They have stickers that say “coexist” on their electric vehicles—tend to be intolerant of sex workers. They tell themselves sad stories about sex workers that bolster their senses of themselves as empathetic people, but I don’t think they make much effort to understand them. And understanding is crucial for tolerance, no?

Likewise, ageism is freaking rampant in the States. Rampant. Particularly when it comes to the sexuality of older people. We have a name for older men who still want to be in the sexual-viability game but who have maybe aged out: “creepy old man.” This term is thrown around with almost total carelessness while other similar terms—”slut,” for example—are pretty much verboten by this point. Not that I’m claiming that the term “slut” doesn’t get used, just that I think good, tolerant, well-intentioned people don’t use it very much. The equivalent terms for women of a certain age who are still on the playing field sexually—”MILF” and “cougar”—are much lighter than “creepy old man.” “MILF” and “cougar” are practically compliments. “Creepy old man” suggests deviance if not criminality.

Except “creepy old men” are rarely actually creepy. Rather, they’re just men. And it’s a basic evolutionary fact that men tend to want attention from younger women, particularly when they’re lonely. I’m not sure what women want when they get older and are lonely—because who knows what they want?—but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t resemble what you find when you Google “MILF fantasy” with SafeSearch disabled. But I can sympathize with the loneliness older women might have to contend with when they are, well, alone and older.

“So what’s your point, Kampff?”

My point is that in Thailand, for example, there’s a solution to the male desire and loneliness problem: bar girls. They’re not in every bar, but they are in a bunch of them. Their job is to be sexy, to talk to the men, to entertain, and sometimes to go home with them so they can . . . write poems for each other. Going home and writing poetry is totally optional. You can, if you like, just have a regular conversation. This is what I opt for because when you’re traveling in Southeast Asia with your wife who still loves you and she’s basically the only person you regularly say more than two words to a day, conversation with someone else is needed. And with the bar girls this is okay. No problem. If the bar girl arrangement weren’t in place and I just started chatting up the ladies who happened to be in the bars, this would definitely not be okay. And Gina gets to have a conversation too, usually with an older, lonely chap or with the matron of the bar.

And the conversation is good. You get to hear the bar girls’ stories. And these will be unique and real and totally unlike the sad stories you might be inclined to project onto them because they are real people with families and interests and lives that don’t involve you at all. You can start to understand that the girls who work in the bars are there for all sorts of reasons. The most compelling for me was the one given by my friend who explained why she works in the bar to save money: “Because it is my right.” In other words, she doesn’t have to explain herself.

I appreciate the bar girl situation in Thailand. The culture seems to take young women and older men for real people rather than what we might want them to be, which is a total fantasy. I’m not claiming that this place is some sort of liberal utopia sexism and ageism-wise, but the arrangement seems to be on the right track to my mind. And it’s clearly so much better than the sexual and ageist neuroticism we’ve got going for us in the States.

Of course, this is a post about older men and young women. I’m unsure if there’s an equivalent solution to loneliness and sexual desire in older women. My wife who still loves me and I were talking about this the other day and she suggested that a lot of women would just be happy living in communes with other women. This sounds viable to me . . . as long as I’m invited to the party.