Something I’ve learned about us Panamanians is that we love attention. We have too many online mags for the population density in the capital we currently have, and all of them seem to be the same thing, but with different skins; I’m part of a forum spawned from the now-defunct Panama Sex Guide message board. I don’t post or anything, but I do get a weekly email with links to the most popular threads and, as you can imagine from an adult-related message board, there are a lot of galleries that get posted there. Every other week there’s a thread showcasing the “hottest” Panamanian girls, the pics hoarded from these said online magazine sites and well, they always give me sort of a bittersweet feeling every time I, out of curiosity, click the links.

Outside of the totally superficial notion that I check out the pictures because I like hot girls, after a bit the focus expands to me realizing how boring the whole thing is. Panama is a small big town, and a good way of remembering that is to see these pictures roll out every week, with the same girls posing the same way in the same clubs, and the same stewardesses standing and looking pretty in their skin-tight outfits as they promote the same beer, vodka, tequila or cigarette brand. Sure, they’re hot at first glance, but it’s all repetitive. Suddenly, big fake tits and colored contact lenses don’t do it for me anymore, and there’s so much of it out there that it pretty much turns me off from the whole thing. The girl I used to go out with, drop dead gorgeous in her own right, shows up in these picture sets often and, even though you might look at her and want to shove your unit in between her mammary glands so fast and hard it would seem you wanted to start a fire, I get the (somewhat unfortunate) other side of the picture, the side that demystifies all of these ladies and pretty much deflates the willingness of any smart, thoughtful person to want to get to know them.

I’m sure you have this caste of person in your neck of the woods, dear reader: about 75% of the total time I spent with this woman, it was at a club or a bar. We would go out to other places, sure, and we’d be alone ocassionally, but the times where I had a real chance of spending time with her was when she went out clubbing with her equally-stunning girlfriends. At first, the prospect seemed like a dream come true: Playboy-type girls that like partying hanging out with a guy that’s all about the debauchery. It quickly dawned on me that the scenario was not for me, though. Panama is a place where, in terms of nightlife, men usually get the shaft. As a guy, you’re mostly ignored by everyone that works at any of these places unless you either know them personally or are a woman, which isn’t as common as I would like. Lack of quality service industry aside, your odds of getting some attention increase dramatically when you are with women; suddenly you can skip paying for cover, get discounts on the overpriced bottles and you’re actually treated with some degree of decency… but, at what cost?

I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking about the intricacies of the number Pi, when penguins will fly or what you might be wondering is how can a guy complain about being surrounded by hot girls that infiltrate his sorry ass into places and offers many of us mere mortals dare to only dream about? Call it age. Call it a sense of self-respect or what have you, but in my personal experience I very quickly felt like what was behind the curtain of this Oz-like scenario was severely disappointing. Everybody wants to date someone infinitely better-looking than ourselves to parade them around like a trophy of sorts; it’s only human, a social benchmark that happens everywhere in the world. Your threshold for this kind of thing might be different than mine then, but as I stood and danced with this girl, her body rubbing up against mine while the others shook their stuff like if we were all in a rap video, after a while the cracks of this seemingly picture-perfect image began showing. I saw that the girls approached this “clubbing” thing as one big game of attention whoring. I’ve always been of the belief that if you go to a club is to drink, dance, have fun and meet new people; the function of clubs in Panamanian society, at least some of them, consist of them being playing grounds for people to doll up and perfect their picture posing stances just to post said pictures on social networks and, if they’re hot enough, show up on internet magazines. This is not a local problem as there are, in fact, tons of superficial people all over the globe, but since Panama is my beautiful stomping ground I gotta stick to what I know: every time I’d go out with these girls, there would always be a sub-current of dominance establishment, from the moment they get to the door to the moment they hopped in their cars and left the club. How long of a line can a girl skip in order to get in (+1 point for every 5 people in the line), and how many people (females score her +1 points, while males are a +2) can she bring in without having them pay? Once inside, can she get a table (+1) or VIP seating (+2)? Getting the males to pay for alcohol is also accounted for (+1 because in our society women aren’t supposed to pay for anything yet they complain when a man says his woman should be in the kitchen making him a sandwich, where she belongs. Geez.), as is getting noticed by online website/club website photographers for pictures (+1 for every photographer). Finally, receiving a free drink is considered a bonus stage (+3) as is getting called out by a performer if there is one that night (+1). Girl-on-Girl action gives you some points just for the lengths they’d go to get noticed (+2), and ironically those points get revoked if they’re really lesbians. Bummer.

Do the girls really tally up a score at the end of the night, or have progress reports when they go en masse to the bathroom? That is a trade secret my kind will never know, but I like to think that this whole thing is absurd enough for it to actually take place. These girls would always be on a hyper-aware state, checking out who was noticing them and callibrating their actions to have control over their attention level. It was cute while we were clubbing because I appreciated the free alcohol and lack of cover that it garnered, but when it came to having any sort of normal life outside of the club, the girl I was dating out of the pack seemed to lack the ability to turn that skill off. And that, folks, is a deal-breaker; if you’re 18 and all about getting drunk and fucking girls, then superficiality can be easily ignored. I’m sad to say though, as time passes you start to wish that the size of that girl’s deliciously huge breasts where an indicative of her depth as a person. Girls like that are out there, and this one in particular, deep down inside has a precious heart that I always wished she would let out to breathe more often. Alas, after some more clubbing, me jumping out of her window wearing one sock and forgetting my underwear, I decided my fun with her had ran its course.

I moved on to other exciting adventures I’m sure I will tell you someday, but in present times I look at these pictures week in and week out, realizing that it’s all cyclical and the hot girls of right now will be replaced by the hotter girls of tomorrow; no one should pass judgment on people by simply seeing a picture of them, but more often than not a picture says more than a thousand words. In this particular instance, my primal side instinctively wants to perform sexual acts on these girls so hardcore they would get me banned from at least five countries, but after the initial impulse for skull-fucking is gone I realize I really enjoy pillow talk (or a great conversation, rather) and someone who goes out to a club every weekend just to see how much she can be noticed by putting on a show with her physicality is simply not the kind of person I could have a conversation with. A girl who’s confident, knows about the farce of the game and turns it on its head, though? That’s definitely sexier than any girl I’ll ever see in those picture sets.

But I digress. Here’s a small university documentary touching on the subject of clubs by a man named Ivo Carrión. It’s an interesting thesis (in Spanish):

Many men and women in Panama see clubs as popularity contests. Personally, I like to go because dancing and bump-n’-grindin’ is boss every once in a while, as is having some fun with friends. Taking part in this “popularity” equation is also part of the appeal as the girls are hot and it’d be a little pretentious not to notice, but I like to think that every now and then these people go home, realize what they’ve worked so hard for and, in a moment of introspective clarity, they’ll shed a single tear. A tear of what is lost in them, and something they hope to recover once again. In the meantime, if you keep strutting your stuff, I’ll keep lookin’ at you. We all will.