Experiencing Soft Masculinity in Thailand

By Stephanie Yang

Dredge Kang, in “The Softening of Butches: The Adoption of Korean “Soft” Masculinity among Thai Toms”, discusses the evolution of queer culture in Thailand through his focus on Thai toms. Kang also investigates how the rise of soft masculinity, as exemplified by Korean flowerboys and gender-bending tropes in K-media, has led to a flourishing and growing production of queer cultural products in Thailand and “queered effeminacies” in the country. Kang coins the term Asian Regionalism to explain how Thailand is both consumer and producer, “increasingly recognized for its role in “inter” (international) queer popular culture areas such as film and music,” (Kang 23). I experienced these new “queered effeminacies” and the manifestation of such “cutesy boy” representations on my first trip to Thailand this winter break.

For the very first time, I got to meet my distant cousins who lived their entire lives in Thailand. While my cousins and I share great-grandparents, we seemed to lead extremely different lives. Leading up to the actual trip, my mom’s sister, Chinese, was explaining to me what my cousins were like. She said men in Thailand are very girly, and that my male cousins were no exception. While I was skeptical at what seemed to be ignorant comments in my head, I kept an open mind and hopped on the plane to Thailand not thinking much of her description of my cousins.

My first stop in Thailand was a small city called Khon Kaen, where I met my two cousins, brothers. Popo is a recently-married trauma surgeon, and Yong works at an exotic zoo, both in their twenties. At dinner, I couldn’t help but notice their somewhat “cute” mannerisms, towards even their much older father, as well as their high-pitched voices. Interestingly, Popo’s middle name on Facebook is “Kittycat”, a cute nickname that one would never see from a straight, married trauma surgeon in the United States. While both my male cousins are heterosexual, they exuded a “soft masculinity” through their mannerisms and behavior I saw so rarely in the United States from straight Asian men.

After meeting Popo and Yong, I headed to Bangkok to meet another set of relatives for the first time. During my stay with my cousins, two males and one female in their twenties and thirties, another difference stuck out to me: their morning routines. Both my male cousins and my female cousin took almost an hour to get ready before work, applying different creams, powders, and cosmetics to their faces–many of them Korean brands or K-beauty knockoffs.

My experience meeting my Thai cousins makes it clear that soft masculinity manifests so differently from person to person. My cousins in Khon Kaen do not wear makeup or use beauty products, but act “cute” through physical gestures and language. On the other hand, my male cousins in Bangkok diligently apply layers of makeup every morning, but show no attempt to act cute or feminine in how they behave.

By reading Kang’s article on the convergence of heterosexual soft masculinity and Thai tom culture, I can better understand why male cousins choose to don makeup every morning, or act like “cutesy boys” in-person and online. Whether my cousins believe that Thai women view desirable men as those embodying feminized masculine aesthetics, or just plain enjoy wearing makeup and acting more cute–makes little difference. At the end of the day, the normalization of these non-traditional masculine aesthetics demonstrates the influence of flowerboy tropes in Korean pop culture–either directly to Thai viewers of K-dramas, and indirectly to everyday Thai men who may not even consume Korean cultural products.