December 22, 2006
Female sex tourism: Critics and ethics
It's interesting how people hear what they want to hear. You write a book that attempts to capture all aspects, good bad and middling, of love journeys.
You have an interview on the radio.
What people hear -- on the radio -- is that you are defending wealthy women going to Jamaica and breaking up families.
Or that you are a disgusting person who deliberately travels overseas to seduce minors.
Case in point, this blog entry by Brad Gagne, who listened to my show on CBC Radio's "The Current" with host Anna Maria Tremonti on Monday (audio link here, uses RealPlayer), discussing my book, 
Romance on the Road.
Brad writes:
Jeannette Belliveau disgusts me.
Well hey! That certainly grabbed my attention when my Google alerts for sex tourism rolled in this morning. And on the principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity ... and my corollary, the worst thing that can happen when you publish a book is that it is ignored and sinks like a stone .. I was actually pretty happy to disgust Brad, because at least he paid attention to the interview.
More from Brad:
But what shook me out of my daze was when the author started relating a story of how she (in her forties at the time) hooked up with a boy who "looked about 15, but was probably 16".Jesus cabinet-making Christ.
Now really ask yourself what I just asked above. Switch the genders involved and reconsider the scenario: a 40-or-50-something man deliberately traveling to a foreign country to have sex with a girl who "looks 15". Even the interviewer did at this point: isn't that kind of like... uh... sex tourism? You know, where men travel to places like Thailand to have sex with young girls?
Well aparently if you have breasts it's called Romance Tourism. I kid you not. And dirty old Jeannette Belliveau dodges the question and continues on about what a great experience it was.
OK Brad, hang on a minute. Who ever said I deliberately traveled to Brazil to have sex with anyone?
And rather than dodging Tremonti's question, I instantly answered the question about my encounter with a Brazilian youth with three words: "He initiated it."
To elaborate: The Brazilian youth took off my muddy sandals, and swished them in a stream. I thanked him, put the sandals on, and WALKED AWAY. At which point, I heard (from behind me) what is clearly a sexual overture, and had to quell a momentary stab of uncertainty as to whether I might come to harm.
In my book, this is not quite deliberate sex tourism.
My three-word answer on the radio, I elaborate upon in my full reply, posted as a comment on Brad's blog:
"Hi, Axe #3.
The author here. I get Google alerts on sex tourism and your blog came up.
Let's see, if you are disgusted with me, you must also be disgusted with:
1 -- A woman who, while hiking near a bird sanctuary, and upon being followed on a path by a marsh by a fully aroused Brazilian youth making suggestive comments, fights the fear of rape in an isolated part of a strange country.
2 -- A woman who, in coastal Brazil with its astronomical HIV rates, does some creative quick thinking and steers the above-mentioned youthful stranger into a bit of sex play that falls short of the intercourse he wanted, thus avoiding HIV risk, and rape.
3 -- Remote colonial towns in Brazil where quite evidently, sex is as natural a part of life as breathing. Where youths have no fear of demonstrating, to an older woman no less, their talents of virtuoso foreplay. Where this youth had evidently already had some level of female coaching on what women do and do not like, and rather amazingly took a very generous and unselfish approach to foreplay, as though it was important to always be on good form even with a stranger. In other words, he had more respect for the passion of our activity than those in North America who go for impersonal "hooking up."
4 -- Sexual precocity, in Latin America, and in general, as witnessed in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In 
One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Buendia boys are quite ready to go at it with the housemaid by the age of 14.
5 -- Adventure travelers who visit most of the world post-divorce, do not rule out sex as a means to cultural knowledge, and who possess a certain curiosity to see what might happen if all inhibition might fall away beside a stream in scarlet-ibis country, as well as willingness to write truthfully about a moment of abandon.
6 -- Anyone who doesn't demand ID before sex. For all I know, this youth was 18.
7 -- Radio hosts who apply a reductio ad absurdum to the above singular set of circumstances, which travel exposes the traveler to, and which are difficult to judge fairly from the vantage point of a radio studio in Ottawa. Let alone, the injustice of describing this encounter so incompletely. So, what happened to me in Brazil was no better than when Gary Glitter goes to Vietnam, rents a house, pays a complicit family to have his way with two underage girls, so that the girls' parents can buy a moped?
There weren't touts at the bird sanctuary saying, "Female sex tourists, right this way!"
In fact, just a wee note of reality here, it's not exactly time-efficient to fly to Brazil, buy an air-pass to five cities, visit a colonial ruin with exactly three tourists rattling around it at the time of my visit, go watch scarlet ibis, and then stand around a marsh, no money anywhere on my person, no comfortable place to lie down, waiting impatiently for a poor, exploited sex worker to come address the whimsy of my desire.
Especially in Brazil, where men and women have knowledge in their eyes rather early, and they are happy to share even outside a pagan marsh setting.
Jeannette Belliveau, author, Romance on the Road"
- posted by jbelliveau at 8:25 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
