Okay, I'll bite. I've lived in Thailand and I speak okay Thai.

I can't speak for all of SEA but I can tell you that the girls come looking for jobs in the sex industry in Thailand. People don't have to traffic them or anything like that.

It's a f'd up socioeconomic situation there. According to Thai tradition it is the job of the children to take care of the parents. Many Thais have children the same way people plan their retirement.

If you're lucky, your parents are good people who have modest wants and needs and are happy if you go to Bangkok or Chiang Mai or Phuket and get a job in a factory or in a restaurant and send home a few hundred baht a month.

That's if you're lucky.

Chances are, one or both of your parents are either alcoholics, problem gamblers, or morally bankrupt (often you hit the trifecta). They send their daughter down south to make some money. Oh, but then the problems start coming in. Daddy punched a cop and they're going to kill him unless he comes up with 3,000 baht. Mommy owes the local mafia guy 30,000 baht in gambling debt. Surely someone needs a new motorcycle back home.

That puts the pressure on the girls to find ways to make more money that can ever possibly be made working a legit job. So they start calling old friends from back in the village that they remember coming home for Songkran dressed like a whore and asking if she can help her get a job.

Initially, she goes into it thinking that maybe she'll meet a nice white guy who will solve all her money problems. But that dream gets dashed pretty quickly and soon she learns that it's all about the baht. She starts learning all the tricks. How to rotate five or six tourists making them all think that she's in love with them and she's got all of them sending her money to take care of her family.

Pretty soon she's clocking 5x - 10x what a university educated Thai makes. She has the newest iPhone, is spending money like it's going out of style to impress all of her friends, and when she goes home there will certainly be grand gestures involving her giving large amounts of money to her family.

Because money equals power in Thailand in a way most foreigners don't quite understand, many times this is the girl's way of gaining respect. Everyone in her village or on her soi will know she bought her mother a beautiful gold chain and everyone will pretend that she's not a whore.

Eventually, she'll age. The number of guys willing to send her money will decline. She'll start looking around for someone to bleed for as long as they'll keep giving her money. BTW, these girls know most young guys are broke. I don't care if you look like Brad Pitt, they want the old geezer who's playing the back nine of his life. That's the guy who they want to con into moving up to Issan and buying a huge house for the two of them. And since in Thailand, foreigners can't own land, it's really her house which she'll get when the geezer kicks the bucket. And if he doesn't die soon enough, she'll just have some family members boot him out of the house since he has zero legal rights to it even though he paid for it.

Oh, and the other reason they like old guys, old guys are less likely to trade up in a few years. Young guys have a reputation for being less than faithful and that threatens the money supply. So, many of them reason that they would rather get an old guy, take care of him sexually, and not have to worry about him deciding to wander in a few years when she's starting to age a bit.

I mean, would they love a rich Brad Pitt that was 100% faithful? Of course. Come on. But they're very pragmatic as well. Marriage and relationships are just as much about security as they are about love.

How do I know? I go up country every year for Songkran. I can spot the Bangkok whores a mile away in Big C. We have a hi-so whore who lives down the soi from my wife's family. She's hi-so because she works in Singapore, not like the regular prostitutes. Oh, every Songkran their family goes up and down the soi showing off everything their daughter has given to her parents. She's bought them cars. Gold. Motorcycles. And everyone on the soi oooohs and aaaaahs over how rich they must be.

Meanwhile, me and my wife keep our mouths shut. Well, she does. I laugh my ass off.

And when we drive around her hometown, my wife will point out the large extravagant houses and say "Baan Farang" (foreigner home). Not that a foreigner lives there (anymore) but it was built with foreigner money.

And yes, in my younger and wilder days before I met my wife, I spent some time talking to gals of this profession. I had many friends in the expat community so knew many of the bar, restaurant, and other business owners. I got to know the girls over many years. I saw how it was all one big circle. Girls would land a big fish and never be seen again. And another girl would be right behind her just starting her career.

The reality is that it's way too lucrative for most of them. It's like if a prostitute in the US could make $250,000 a year. How would you ever convince her to give it up and work for $25,000 a year once she's (and her entire family) got the taste for the money?

And lest anyone think I'm, disrespecting these gals, I'm not. I just find the whole thing rather comical. Literally, you can take a girl working the bars 20 years ago and walk into a bar on Soi Cowboy today and their life stories are almost identical. I've met multiple generations of the same family in the business.

Regardless of how much money they make it never feeds the beast. They waste it on stuff full of immediate gratification and the wheel keeps going round and round.

A few make it out. They make some money. They buy a house. They find a nice guy who takes care of them and pays for private school for the children. But those are the exceptions.