SKOUTING FOR BOYS

I hadn’t been desperately seeking an online “friend” since I first started using ICQ on my mother’s old Macintosh in the 1990s. Remember that? The green flower icon?

And now that I’m a woman in my twenties there’s Skout — one of the country’s most popular locationbased social networking and dating apps for meeting new people, the other being Tinder.

You would think that the people who use these apps for dating are freaks who are always out of luck in love, but sometimes it’s actually the opposite.

I have two close friends who use both apps, and they are far from unattractive.

My friend Pear uses both extensively and said that while Skout has “nicer” people, Tinder has more handsome men. I decided to try out Skout, since it is more popular on the iPhone’s App Store.

The app can either be set up by linking a Facebook account or by setting up a new account from scratch.

It then asks for general information such as name, gender, age, ethnicity, and also whether the user is interested in men or women and if he or she is looking for friends, flirting, dating or a relationship. I decided to call myself “Tangmo”. I said I was 28. Thanks to a picture I borrowed from my attractive friend Pear, I was able to attract 81 men within three days.

Skout lets you choose the age, sex, ethnicity and age range of the person you would like to talk to. It also lets you choose the location based on the same city, state or country.

If you want something completely random, there’s a “shake to chat” function, which allows you to literally shake your mobile phone to find someone random to chat with.

For a certain number of “points”, which are purchased using real money, you can also get “featured” for a limited time on the first page of the app along with dozens of other people.

Ash, a Malaysian who has been in Thailand for three weeks, asked to meet me on the second day we talked. “I think it’s too soon,” I told him. “That’s fine, we’ll just meet, have some coffee and have some fun,” he replied. “But I still think it’s too soon,” I reiterated. “So when do we meet?” After realising that he wouldn’t stop pestering me, I decided to ignore him.

Others weren’t as pushy. Many of the men I talked to asked to meet me only after a few sentences, but would stop asking me when I told them I didn’t feel comfortable with meeting a stranger unless I knew the person better. Fortunately, none would explicitly talk about sex.

Exactly where I lived in Bangkok was one of the first questions everyone would ask, followed by compliments such as, “Your beauty can make any man have an instant crush on you”, to which I would reply with a thank you.

I talked to people in their late twenties up to early fifties, although only one Caucasian man approached me. The majority were Thai, Asian and African.

Even though I indicated that I was single and looking for a date, a lot of men still asked whether or not I had a boyfriend, and some asked if I was married or single.

My phone kept buzzing whenever I received a message or when someone “checked me out”.

At one point, I was talking to 15 men at the same time, which was a pretty daunting task, even for a multitasker like me.

I was relieved when I found out that they had a website which had the same features as the mobile app. That made typing much easier, and it didn’t come with the advertisements that kept popping up at the bottom of the mobile screen.

The faint hope that I would meet someone who I at least enjoyed talking to came when I met King, a 30-year-old business owner living and working in Kuala Lumpur. “Tell me, what makes you happy?” I told him I enjoyed reading. He said he used to read a lot when he was very young, and has 48 Laws of

Power at home. I told him I read The Art of Seduction by the same author, which he happened to own as well.

But then, on the second day, he started calling me “cutie”. That turned me off. I decided to delete the application for good.