July 17, 2006
Female sex tourism: Basic facts
Here's my entry in Wikipedia on female sex tourism. I wrote this starter article in response to an interview by a New York Times writer last week, when it became clear to me from her questions that basic information was lacking. Since Wikipedia is a collective encyclopedia, participants and administrators may change this. Meanwhile, I will keep the original here for enquiring minds, members of the media, etc.
Female sex tourism
Female sex tourism is travel by women, partially or fully for the purpose of having sex. It differs from male sex tourism in that women do not use bars, sex shows and formal tours to meet foreign men. There are "de facto" tours, however, such as airplanes bound to the Gambia in West Africa full of British and Scandinavian women seeking affairs with beach boys.Often relationships with a high component of mutual affection are called "romance tourism."
Women sometimes give clothes, meals, cash and gifts to their holiday boyfriends. In some destinations, there are "going rates" for male companionship, ranging from $50 to $200. In other destinations, especially in Southern Europe, Bali and the French Caribbean, men do not expect to be compensated.
Destinations
While men tend to go to Asia for sex tourism, women tend to head to the Caribbean, Southern Europe, and Africa. These geographical patterns reflect a search by Western men for traditionally feminine women, and a search by Western women for traditionally masculine men. The patterns have been explored by Michel Houellebecq in Platform and in the non-fiction work
Romance on the Road, and are important in that they support the idea that sex tourism by both men and women reflects serious problems in the tourists' home countries, including a dating war, or profound conflict between the sexes.
Thailand, the Dominican Republic and Cuba are exceptional in that both male and female sex tourists find these places all-purpose sexual emporia.
The primary destinations for female sex tourism are Southern Europe (mainly Greece and Spain), the Caribbean (led by Jamaica, Barbados and the Dominican Republic), the Gambia and Kenya in Africa, and Bali and Phuket in Thailand. Lesser destinations include Nepal, Morocco, Fiji, Ecuador and Costa Rica.
Lesbian sex tourism is nascent but evident in Lesbos (Mytilini) in Greece; Bangkok and Pattaya in Thailand, and on Bali in Indonesia.
Terms used for female sex tourists
Tourist women are called Shirley Valentines (if British), longtails (in Bermuda), yellow cabs (Japan) and, in Jamaica, milk bottles if newly arrived or Stellas if black. Female sex tourism in Barbados has been dubbed "Canadian secretary syndrome."
The men who chase tourist women are kamakia ("fishing harpoons," Greece), sharks (Costa Rica), rent-a-dreads, rent-a-rastas, rent-a-gents and the Foreign Service (Caribbean), Kuta Cowboys or pemburu-bule ("whitey hunters," Bali), Marlboro men (Jordan), bomsas or bumsters(the Gambia), sanky pankies (Dominican Republic).
History
Barring some isolated cases of women traveling for sex among North American Indian tribes and within Turkey, female travel sex (involving American and English women) began in Rome in the late 1840s, at the same time as feminism's first wave, which encouraged independence and travel.
Affairs and intrigues, particularly between American heiresses and down-on their luck European aristocrats, continued steadily until World War I and inspired Henry James's Daisy Miller, Joaquin Miller's The One Fair Woman, and much of the early output of E.M. Forster.
Female sex travel declined from the time of the Depression until the 1960s, with the exception of India, Nepal and Thailand, where intrepid women from England, France, Czechoslovakia, the United States and elsewhere continued to attract the attention of maharajas and other Asian royals, despite the uproar of World War II.
Coincident with the explosion of leisure travel in the 1960s and feminism's second wave, sex tourism by women re-ignited, first via French Canadian women traveling to Barbados and Swedish and Northern European women to Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia and the Gambia. Female sex travel became ubiquitous throughout the Caribbean, from the tiniest islands through the big destinations of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Barbados.
In the 1990s, women from Japan and Taiwan began to appear on the beaches of Bali and Phuket in Thailand.
Today, many other destinations are popular, including Morocco, Nepal, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico -- everywhere with beaches and a surplus of underemployed men.
Reasons for female sex tourism
Female sex tourism's first and second waves coincided not only with feminism but with Victorian-era man shortages that began in England and later cropped in continental Europe and the United States.
Other societal reasons for women seeking intimate companionship abroad include the dating war, as typified by extreme competition between the sexes in schools, the workplace, while dating, in marriages, and even in contentious divorces. The dating war appears to especially drive sex tourism by Australian and Japanese women, and to a lesser extent, German and Scandinavian female tourists.
Another factor in women engaging in holiday romance is identity loss. Many women behave while traveling in a way at odds to how they behave at home, where fear of the "slut" label curbs the kind of hedonistic behavior seen on holiday. Traveling and expatriate women often try on a new, more experimental identity when away from family and friends.
Additional reasons include:
- sexual connoisseurship -- an interest in experiencing a variety of men
- a search for healing after a divorce or breakup (see Michelle Thomas, in Major academic publications, below)
- prolonged involuntary celibacy
- the commodification of sex, whereby affection is now something that can be purchased by women, as well as men, as well as the globalization of sex and affection markets.
Depictions
Non-fiction books include Anne Cumming's The Love Habit and The Love Quest, Fiona Pitt-Kethley's The Pan Principle and Journeys to the Underworld, Cleo Odzer's Patpong Sisters and Lucretia Stewart's The Weather Prophet.
Female sex tourists have been notoriously difficult to find and interview on the record (see de Albuquerque, 1998, in Major academic publications subhed, below). Thus some observers have turned to film and fiction to examine the motivations of women who travel for sex, love and affection. Movies include Heading South (Vers le Sud), with Charlotte Rampling, which depicts three Western tourists in Haiti in the 1970s, taking their pleasure with local men. Earlier film depictions include How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Shirley Valentine.
Fiction includes, in addition to Michel Houellebecq's Platform, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying.
Major academic publications
- Bloor, Michael, et al. "Differences in Sexual Risk Behaviour between Young Men and Women Travelling Abroad from the UK." [Contains only random survey of young sex travelers.] The Lancet 352 (1998): 1664-68.
- Cohen, Erik. "Arab Boys and Tourist Girls in a Mixed Jewish-Arab Community." International Journal of Comparative Sociology 12 (1971): 217-233.
- de Albuquerque, Klaus. "Sex, Beach Boys and Female Tourists in the Caribbean." Sexuality & Culture. Ed. Barry M. Dank. Vol. 2. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998. 87-111. 2.
- de Albuquerque, Klaus. "In Search of the Big Bamboo: How Caribbean Beach Boys Sell Fun in the Sun." The Utne Reader, Jan.-Feb. 2000: 82-86.
- Gorry, April Marie. Leaving Home for Romance: Tourist Women's Adventures Abroad. Doctoral dissertation, Univeristy of California, Santa Barbara, 1999. Ann Arbor: UMI 9958930, 2000
- Herold, Edward, Rafael Garcia and Tony DeMoya. "Female Tourists and Beach Boys: Romance or Sex Tourism?" Annals of Tourism Research 28.4 (2001): 978-997.
- Meisch, Lynn A. "Gringas and Otavaleños: Changing Tourist Relations" [a description of sex and romance tourism in Ecuador]. Annals of Tourism Research 22.2 (1995): 441-62.
- Pruitt, Deborah, and Suzanne Lafont. For Love and Money: Romance Tourism in Jamaica. Annals of Tourism Research 22(2): 422-440.
- Thomas, Michelle. "Exploring the Contexts and Meanings of Women's Experiences of Sexual Intercourse on Holiday." Clift, Stephen, and Simon Carter, ed. Tourism and Sex: Culture, Commerce and Coercion. London: Pinter, 2000. 200-20.
- Vorakitphokatorn, Sairudee, et al. "AIDS Risk in Tourists: A Study on Japanese Female Tourists in Thailand." Journal of Population and Social Studies 5.1-2 (1993-94): 55-84.
- Wagner, Ulla. "Out of Time and Space — Mass Tourism and Charter Trips." Ethnos 42.1-2 (1977): 39-49. (This article describes sex tourism in the Gambia, West Africa, as does a followup article: Wagner, Ulla, and Bawa Yamba. "Going North and Getting Attached: The Case of the Gambians." Ethnos 51.3 (1986): 199-222.)
External links
Dr. Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, Lecturer: Dollars are a Girls' Best Friend? Female Tourists' Sexual Behaviour in the Caribbean
Sex tourism: do women do it too?
Rose Kisia Omondi: Gender and the Political Economy of Sex Tourism in Kenya
Ticos and Tourists: Cross-Cultural Gender Relations in Quepos, Costa Rica
Dominican Republic Sanky Panky
Interracial Sex: The White Woman Abroad
Kenya Cracking Down on Beach Boys, Gigolos Serving Tourists
Phuket Thailand a Newbie Guide: Women Sex Tourists
Single women travellers to Cuba - warning
Jamaican beach boys a tourist temptation
Romance on the Road: Traveling Women Who Love Foreign Men
- posted by jbelliveau at 5:21 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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