May 10, 2007
Bust magazine article on female sex tourists
It's nice to be able to point to a good, balanced article on female sex tourists, such as the one this month in Bust magazine (pdf version available in my media kit, under the Articles section). I wrote the following letter to the editor today:
As the author profiled in BUST's article on female sex tourists ("Ticket to Ride," Apr/May '07), I was delighted at the balanced and intelligent coverage provided by your writer Emily McCombs.A good number of magazines and radio shows have interviewed me since my book, Romance on the Road: Traveling Women Who Love Foreign Men, came out.
While it's always fun being asked to talk about sex, sometimes the results in print have been fairly comic.
Airheaded writers for British publications are especially deft at making quotes up out of thin air that make one sound like, surprise, an airhead.
Bust magazine quoted me accurately. That is rare. Emily asked great questions, summarized the information well, and found rare and exclusive sources for conflicting viewpoints on female sex tourists.
Well done.
Jeannette Belliveau,
Baltimore, Md.
Bust magazine is available at Barnes & Noble, where I purchased my copy.
This letter was prompted by some amazing errors that have cropped up in other coverage of 
Romance on the Road in the media.
Here's an article in Britain's Eve magazine said my first marriage lasted nine years. It lasted less than two. This fact is significant, nay crucial. The brevity of my first marriage is quite central to what later happened to me on my travels, and clearly described in print in my book, and clearly expressed (I thought) during my interview witih the author. If she is confusing the length of my first and second marriages (the second one is now on year 11), you still don't come up with "nine" years.
The Eve article goes on to say that in Athens I was "sitting in a bar looking at postcards." No, standing in Syntagma Square. Next it says I met a man and "that evening he took me to a secluded bay." No, it was a few hours later, in the early afternoon.
What is strange about the rate of about three mistakes per sentence in this article is that I sent the author a PDF of my book. If she can't quote me accurately, she could have accurately reconstructed every incident we discussed from the text. Oh well.
Similarly, I had a start when I read the original version of this review at PerceptiveTravel.com (scroll down to third item), which said I was twice divorced. Believe me, no one once divorced wants to be thus misdescribed. Fortunately I e-mailed the author, who got the editor to fix this gross error of fact. No explanation for how the error occurred. Again, the first chapter of Romance on the Road is fairly clear, I thought, on my marital history.
It's always a curious exercise to add new articles to my online media kit (here), when they are generally error riddled, barely mention my book itself, full of airheaded misquotations, or rip off giant chunks of the research in my book and pass it off as original reporting, without attribution.
I almost feel I should take a red pen and mark up the magazine pieces before I post them. But since there is supposedly no such thing as bad publicity, they get added to the kit.
Anyway, the article by Emily McCombs was a wonderful exception to the rule.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:32 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
1 Comments
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Jeannette - I've had the same experiences with inexperienced
writers/interviewers looking for a negative twist on positive events,
apparently looking to sell more copies of their magazine or newspaper. It's frustrating for sure. I, too, loved the coverage in Bust and am so happy to have recently discovered this awesome magazine.