July 7, 2006
Heading South (Vers Le Sud)
Here is an interesting review in The Guardian of the new Charlotte Rampling film, Vers Le Sud (Heading South), about a French professor's affair with a Haitian man in the 1970s.
Film reviewer Peter Bradshaw writes:
The globalisation of the sex industry, and the creeping sense that, like pornography, sex tourism will shrug aside moral objection through the sheer weight of its profitability, is a hot-button topic. ... Michel Houellebecq's novel Platform proposed a startlingly plausible vision of a holiday firm offering hypocrisy-free sex tourism in Thailand, a commercial adventure whose fictional catastrophic sequel prefigured the Bali bombings. That novel was much more shocking and more powerful than this movie, however, despite what the two have in common, because it tackles head-on the tougher reality: sex tourism is - of course it is - about men exploiting women.
If there is one thing that Houellebecq's
Platform (see my capsule review here) does not express, it is that sex tourism is about exploiting women. To the contrary, the novel finds that the Thai prostitute visited by Michel, the protagonist, looks into his soul and serves as a doctor of his wounded psyche. Further, Platform notes the ways sex tourism also serves Western women, and does not assert that these women are exploited by men in the developing world.
The writer continues:
The role-reversal in Heading South is interesting, and certainly no fantasy. Lucretia Stewart's classic travel memoir The Weather Prophet touches on the gigolo market for white visitors to the West Indies, though Stewart made it plain that resentful male violence was a possibility that the moneyed female clientele would always have to negotiate. In Cantet's film, by contrast, the Haitian men are all sweetness and gallantry.
The Weather Prophet: A Caribbean Journey (again, see my capsule review here) does touch briefly on the gigolo market in the West Indies. I do not recall any resentful male violence directed at female tourists in this travelog; I do recall Stewart getting involved (as a journalist, more so than a tourist) with some edgy characters herself. The motif of female sex tourism in the Caribbean is not replete with sordid, violent endings; many of the gigolos would not be in business if they did not offer the attentiveness and affection unavailable to visiting women in their home countries.
Bradshaw also writes:
So how would Rampling's character look if things were turned around, and her character was a man in search of young girls? What was daring and transgressive and exotic would suddenly, I suspect, become sordid and repulsive. Her sang-froid, her elegant refusal to conform to the pleasure-fearing squeamishness of the middle classes, might all just look coldly predatory and selfish.Or would it? There might be a way of challenging the moral assumptions of bought sex and making a male customer in the sex-tourism marketplace look merely human. It would be a tough sell. Maybe finding a story from the distant past, as Cantet has done, in a hazily imagined developing-world country, with women at its core, is an efficient way of upending the moral apple cart. It's difficult to avoid the feeling, though, that this is a fundamentally evasive way of representing the power relations of prostitution.
Well, it's a good question whether female sex tourism makes male sex tourism look "merely human." That is the compelling message of Platform, for sure -- that people in the cold West trade money for love throughout the developing world, in relationships that are of mutual benefit.
I make the point in 
Romance on the Road that perhaps 600,000 Western women have engaged in sex or romance tourism from 1980 to the present.
The reality of this film Vers Le Sud is not something "from the distant past ... in a hazily imagined developing-world country," it's omnipresent. A film director in the Azores has contacted me for a copy of Romance on the Road, with a view toward possibility making a documentary on female sex tourism. And my book was also discussed earlier this week on a Dutch radio show, again in conjunction with Vers Le Sud. I will have to get my friend Rachel to translate parts of the show that I captured on a Web broadcast!
- posted by jbelliveau at 7:14 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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