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December 13, 2007
Hello, any female sex travelers out there?
This is a fairly sincere question.
I received a call last week from a producer at ABC's "20-20" program. They are doing a series of investigations on the topic of taboo behaviors that are just becoming barely known and a little more acceptable.
They want to look at female sex tourism. The producer asked me did I know any women that they could interview.
This is always a stumper. The BBC and other British television production companies call me and ask this question steadily. I may have to put up a forum to try to create a community that could be tapped for these sorts of questions.
I do have one correspondent in Germany who has made herself available for interviews. In the United States, most of my informants are the sort of friend who you really couldn't even ask if they would go for an interview -- high school classmates, soccer teammates -- and their experiences are in the past, whereas ABC wants women who plan to go seek travel trysts.
So, I said there was a woman from D.C. on the
Baltimore Sun's "Open Mike" chat forum I would try. This woman -- she and I have led some boisterous forum discussions of women, travel and sex -- is thinking about helping. I e-mailed another rather trusted colleague and am receiving a loud silence.
Update, Dec. 29: The trusted colleague has gotten back in touch with me to note that her friends, even the most adventurous, are not willing to be interviewed. This is exactly what I would have predicted.
Their reluctance is telling.
I've posted the question of "can anyone help this media person talk to some women sex tourists please" with permission of site owner Drew Curtis of
Fark.com in the past, as well as on the
Lonely Planet Thorntree. All it gets is a lot of snarky comments and funny but made-up stories.
Anyway, please
contact me if you want to know more about this producer and her plans. Confidentiality assured.
I had a fairly indepth discussion with the producer and e-mailed her a pdf of
Romance on the Road. I said she had to imagine for a minute that a woman was someone who had engaged in a holiday romance. If she was single, she would certainly not broadcast it on TV, radio or print. If she was married post-fling, she couldn't let her husband know about it.
I said I was in a sort of unusual position in that I am not single and my husband is very encouraging of me writing about this topic ... it's like a Venn diagram that excludes almost all women, barring myself and possibly a few other either brave or exhibitionist writers, from talking about these affairs. In other words, travel romances remain fairly taboo.
There is also the angle of, What exactly is it the TV producers want you to confess to? Being an older white woman chasing young Caribbean islanders? Well, good luck there. For women in their 20s, who are fairly attractive and have a boyfriend/husband in the wings, yet still find themselves steppin' out on vacation ... well, they aren't going to have much to say, either.
I did suggest she tap into her friends ... she might be surprised who had done what. She said her circle comprised women with young children, not a promising demographic for sex travelers. I said, "Well, often the women you need to talk to are all around you, start saying you are researching this topic and watch how people react."
Another wise colleague suggested when told of this dilemma that it is assumed of almost all single women traveling that they may be open to overtures from foreign men. This is quite true and one way to discover the intended interviewees would be to talk to single women travelers.
I suggested to the producer that she simply had to send a reporter down to Jamaica's Negril Beach and win some of the visiting women's trust using whatever means might prove workable, and this would be far more direct than trying to find women stateside. I've since sent her some more ideas on strategy and nightclubs to visit.
To my surprise, the writer did not contact me in advance (Google seems to lead 99 percent of sex travel researchers right to my door), and I couldn't readily find how to contact him to offer any followup information he might need. I have an entire chapter on Africa in my book,
Romance on the Road, including information on white women in Kenya, and lots of information on female trailblazers there.
My favorite blogger in terms of her comments on this article, Echidne of the Snakes: Sex Tourism Reversal, noted shrewdly that following:
... how I would feel about the article if the older women went to, say, Florida, for their sex tourism and if the younger men working in the industry were of the same race and with other alternatives to escorting as a way of making a living. Would the arrangement then be just fine? After all, it is mostly viewed as just fine when it is older white men who do this by paying for mistresses or casual sex. I'm not sure.
My final thoughts had to do with wondering about how all this would be explained by the misogynistic section of evolutionary psychologists. Women aren't supposed to do this kind of stuff, and certainly not older women.
She drew this response from me:
Echidne, I deal with many of the ethical questions you raise in my book, Romance on the Road: Traveling Women Who Love Foreign Men, and spent six years researching this topic.
What bothers me about the Reuters report, aside from the fact this is very old news, is the focus on the racial aspects.
Just because the media focus obsessively on travel by white women to Africa and the Caribbean, doesn't mean that this is representative of what is going on.
Black and Asian women also travel in search of love on foreign shores. And they visit Nepal, Thailand, Latin America, Oceania and most of the world's travel destinations in search of it.
So, this is not a simple case of neocolonial exploitation or immorality, as many try to make it to be.
As you point out, if this would be just fine if it were occuring in Florida, then what is the problem? Is there some rule that women cannot seek love and affection outside their own race and age? That foreign men in countries with rampant unemployment cannot seek to better themselves via their winning bodies or personalities?
I personally know of a young man in the Caribbean, with limited prospects otherwise, whose college tuition is being paid for by his foreign girlfriend.
And you are correct in noting that the evolutionary psychologists are completely buffaloed by female sex tourism. I write in my book about wretched social science study designs where women are asked by men on their own college campus whether they would go for a quickie with an attractive men if there were no repercussions. This fails to account for the fear of the slut label, which can only be avoided by travel far from home. Once that fear is removed, we see an openness by women to what outsiders would call hedonistic behavior, and the women might term acting on a hunch that this new guy they met on the beach really is all about some uncomplicated fun without pre-judgement.
Two prominent exceptions to the blindness of the social scientists are Donald Symons of UC-Santa Barbara and April Gorry, whose doctorate at UC-Santa Barbara correctly notes the search for romance by traveling women and the lack of racial fetishism by participants. Gorry found that women traveling in Belize simply admired the daily competence of the local fishermen and tour guides, which seemed so much more appealing than the beat-down office men in their orbits at home.
The distressing thing about the Reuters article is that it depicts a preference for socially competent men met while traveling as freakish, as though a black man cannot be perceived as an attractive or in fact preferable dating partner by anyone. This type of writing is neocolonial exploitation, not the behavior of the women interviewed.
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