A mixture of lust and jaded experience marks the faces peering from the darkness in the Queen's Castle II club in Patpong. Under harsh stage lights six women gyrate in bikinis or less, one doing a trick with a ping-pong ball without using her hands.
Other smiling young women sit beside male tourists, ask to be a bought a drink and wait to be taken to a hotel in exchange for cash.
It is a well-rehearsed, centuries-old performance in the red light districts of Bangkok -- but within weeks it may be a dying trade.
Thailand's government has dared to think the unthinkable by proposing a midnight curfew on the go-go bars, massage parlors and nightclubs to help rebrand the country as a land of beaches, temples and sunshine. But critics warn the "Cinderella rule" would cost a million jobs, devastate tourism and "take the Bang out of Bangkok."
"If we have to close at midnight it will cut my staff in half -- and my salary," said Somsak, manager of Queen's Castle II, one of more than 100 neon-lit Patpong bars. "The club might not even be able to stay open. I have been here for 26 years and I don't know what I would do with my life.
"The government is being stupid. Tourists want to spend here and the girls are desperate for the money to take care of their children and mothers."
Somsak is among the owners of 36,000 establishments awaiting the government ruling, expected on March 1. They currently have a curfew of 2am and insist that anything earlier will send sex tourists seeking their kicks elsewhere. Some clubs are already planning to relocate to rival party cities in Malaysia and Singapore.
There are fears that mainstream tourism, which attracts 600,000 Britons a year, will also be hit. Discos in beach resorts such as Phuket and Koh Samui often do not open until midnight and run until dawn.
Internet cafes, karaoke bars, restaurants, snooker halls and video game arcades are dreading the anti-vice backlash whose seeds were sown in Asia's 1997 economic crisis and the rise of conservatives with hardline ideas for recovery.
It is Thai men rather than tourists who keep the sex industry alive. Surveys have found that between 75 and 96 percent admit to having had sex with a prostitute, and half lost their virginity to one.
The domestic market concentrates on high turnover. In "tea-houses" women are expected to service 15 or more clients a day for a few pounds each. They wear everyday clothes and plastic discs, color-coded to indicate their price.
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