April 22, 2008
The art of making up quotes
The Daily Mail, above, quotes me in its article today, "Sun, sand, sex and stupidity: Why thousands of middle-aged women are obsessed with holiday gigolos." Or more accurately, my name is used as a prop for the reporter to warn and scold women about chasing younger guys on foreign beaches.Does anyone remember when journalistic charlatan Jayson Blaire wrote an article about Jessica Lynch, the soldier rescued in Iraq? He pretended to go to her home in West Virginia and described a view of "tobacco fields and cattle pastures" from the family porch.
He'd never been to Lynch's home, and it had no view of any such thing.
The fascinating detail that came to light after his fantasy article was published was this: No one complained to his editors at the New York Times! They just assumed journalists make everything up.
I'm reminded of this as I ponder whether to contact an editor at the Daily Mail regarding an interview their reporter, Diana Appleyard, conducted with me three weeks ago, the results of which appeared today.
Or actually, some parallel interview appeared with another "Jeannette Belliveau" who wrote a book identically titled to my own "Romance on the Road." She doesn't live where I live, she wasn't divorced when I was divorced, she doesn't speak or think like I do, but there she is, right in print!
I'm more bemused than bothered and am just intrigued with this whole notion of making up stuff they have in the U.K. tabloids. Maybe I'm just vain, or as a long-time copy editor, sort of in love with the idea that words have precise meanings that don't survive radical alteration and accuracy is worth pursuing.
My first clue that our interview was published today was when I came down this morning to an e-mail box full of requests for interviews with other members of the UK press.
That is the Faustian pact involved with publicity: As long as they spell your name and book title correctly, there's no such thing as bad publicity, right? Especially as I watch "Romance on the Road" zoom up the sales rankings at Amazon.co.uk, and realize there are two sides to this devil's bargain.
Still, I am still innocent enough to be somewhat amazed by the lip service UK journalists pay to pretending to interview the subject of an article. This is apparently done tactically to avoid having to admit to the world that no, they never even contacted the person quoted. At least when they call, they can pretend their madeup quotes are some sort of misunderstanding.
Anyway, here's a blow-by-blow of what I told Diana in our interview, and how it came out in the article.
It was fun to hear from Diana. I mentioned at the start of our interview, fittingly conducted on April Fool's Day, how pivotal Daily Mail articles on female sex travelers were to compiling 
Romance on the Road.
By way of intro, I told Diana, "I'm not really a sex tourist at all. I think of myself more as a world traveler who was open to intimate encounters during my travels. Because few women are willing to publicly disclose such affairs, I tend to serve as a proxy for actual sex tourists in interviews with the BBC and other media."
This came out as:
"Writer Jeannette Belliveau, a self-confessed former 'sex tourist' " ...
OK, let's start maybe color coding the errors. I will put errors in red, and accurate material in blue, and we will see how this sorts out. One more time:
Writer Jeannette Belliveau, a self-confessed former 'sex tourist' " ...After my name, things fall apart a little bit, with two major errors in five words: I'm not really a sex tourist, now or formerly, and the opposite of a self-confessed one.
Next I am quoted as saying "the problem is becoming endemic and that these women are deluding themselves about the dangers such flings present."
I never simply describe sex tourism, either in this interview or others or my writing, as a "problem," it is more of a natural human response to loneliness and the ability of travel to bring farflung men and women together.
Nor do I call it "endemic." It is worldwide and ubiquitous, found in all the world's resorts and even non-resorts, such as the Nepalese Himalayas. "Endemic" is a loaded word that suggests a disease, one I would not use for sex travel by women.
Nor did I say women are deluding themselves about the dangers of such flings. I said the media focused on supposed exploitation of poor men, rather than genuine risks to health and safety.
What I really told Diana: "Critics tend to focus obsessively on fears of exploitation of the men of the Caribbean by wealthier tourists, and they ignore the real potential risks, which are rape, murder and HIV or AIDS."
This came out as:
"The ultimate risk is death," she says, bluntly. "In the past two years three Western women have been killed for their money by their foreign 'toy boys'."The first phrase, "the ultimate risk is death," is accurate. The sentence that follows, "In the past two years, three Western women have been killed for their money by their foreign 'toy boys'," is pure fantasy. What I told her was the Experiences chapter of "Romance on the Road" describes four apparent murders, and these occurred from 1975 through 2000, and NONE involved MONEY!
Further, the expression "foreign toy boys" has never once crossed my lips. Nor has the more semantically accurate "boy toys."
At this point, this article is really losing me with its ratio of fiction to fact.
Next we have these passages:
Statistically, a third of all cross-cultural "marriages" end in divorce, and Jeannette says the naivety of the women involved is unbelievable. "Most of them are middle class and intelligent, which makes their behaviour even more baffling," she says. "These guys are after their money, pure and simple, and the ultimate goal is marriage so they can get a visa and move to the UK. The fact that they can fall for lines such as 'You are so gorgeous' is ridiculous."I cannot even speculate how Diana came to put those words in my mouth. Here I am fairly convinced that she may have misattributed a chunk of text where perhaps she meant to quote Jacqueline Sanchez-Taylor, or someone else she interviewed?
We discussed the fact that she planned to interview Sanchez-Taylor, who has been very helpful to me in my research, but who tends to look at the phenomenon of women's sex travel in a far more negative light than I do.
The entire point of my book, "Romance on the Road," is to look at the entire spectrum of Western women who travel to meet foreign men, and a major premise is that sincere love comes out of some proportion of these seemingly random holiday encounters.
Next we have:
Fifty-three-year-old Jeannette, from Surrey, divorced in her early 30s.I am not from Surrey. I am from Maryland in the United States. I lived in Surrey from 1981-85. I've been back in my home state, and nowhere near Surrey, for 22 years, since 1985.
I divorced when I was 27 years old, not my early 30s. How did the authoress pick "early 30s," I wonder?
Why not just write, "She was abducted by an alien spaceship when she was 47 and had sex with younger, repeat younger, darkskinned, repeat darkskinned, Romulans under the triple moons of Alpha Centauri, prior to joining the middle class and renouncing such plebian activities with a brisk, 'Wise up!'"
It's interesting, it's random, why not?
Next sentence:
A few years later, despairing of the lack of dates in the UK, she began to travel the world and had numerous sexual encounters with young, foreign men.A few years later? No. My first encounter with foreign men was when I was 27, and I was separated at the time. Here are the opening words of my chapter on my experiences in Greece:
"At the age of 27, I made the first of three visits to Greece."
I guess Diana did not quite make it to page 16 of the pdf I e-mailed her of "Romance on the Road!"
"A lack of dates in the UK." No. I also make it clear in that chapter that I had a boyfriend in England at the time of my Greece trip. My estranged husband made some attempts to reconcile, and in addition to the boyfriend, other men made clear their interest in little flirtatious visits to my office and my home.
"Numerous" sexual encounters. More like "some" or "a few."
"Young" foreign men. I think a fair number of them were my age or older.
Next, note a completely accurate paragraph (pops open champagne!) followed by a more shaky one:
"In countries such as the Gambia and Kenya, there is both a surplus of men and the fact that women there tend to marry men at least ten years older than themselves, which is the culture. So for 18-year-old and 20-plus men, there is no one to date.I would not describe poverty in the Gambia as "rife," I tend to speak very precisely on poverty, which I devoted a chapter to in my first book, "An Amateur's Guide to the Planet," and note in "Romance on the Road" that the Gambia is wealthier than nearby countries, quite possibly due to female tourists providing capital to start local businesses."Poverty is rife. Then, over the past ten years, planeloads of mature single British women have started arriving, their handbags full of cash. They're fit, good-looking men and it didn't take them long to realise that there are rich pickings here."
The "10 years of mature British women" reference is made up ... I note in "Romance on the Road" that Scandinavian women began arriving in the Gambia in the late 1960s, and that is not British women, and more like 40 years ago.
"Handbags full of cash" is an utter fabrication out of Diana's imagination.
I would be highly unlikely to describe Gambian men as "fit," they are strong and buff, not "fit" as in yuppies who go to a gym.
"Rich pickings" is a phrase that has never passed my lips. I might well say that a woman can take her pick on the beach, that is certainly a fact.
Reading on:
Sex tourism by British women is not a new phenomenon. As far back as the 1890s, [As Romance on the Road notes, more like the 1840s,] there are recorded incidents of single British women becoming involved with dark-skinned Italian and French men ["dark-skinned" Italian and French men? BWA HA HA HA!] on their cultural 'tours' of Europe. [I write much more of the early travelers to Syria and Tunisia and Egypt, not France!]This is a mangling of the research in "Romance on the Road," which describes numerous instances of India's rajas and nawabs becoming smitten with Englishwomen, often maids. Diana has some sort of obsession with older women with younger men, that she overlays onto the dynamic of India, where age differences had zilch to do with intercultural romances.During the British Raj, it was not unknown for English matrons to fall prey to the darkeyed charms of young Indian men.
But in the past two decades, the phenomenon has escalated. Author Jeannette says that since the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of western women have had affairs with much younger foreign men.See earlier point about Diana's obsession with age differences. My estimates are that 600,000 Western women have engaged in travel sex (not just with younger men) from 1980 (not "since the 1990s) to 2005.
"These are respectable middleclass women ...The phrase "respectable middleclass women" has never passed my lips. Good lord, have I morphed into Miss Jean Brodie? The hectoring Scottish schoolmarm played by Maggie Smith?
"Not all of them are unwitting victims to these sexual conmen," she says. "On top of the fact this quote is made up, I have no idea what point is being made here.
"I have spoken to many women who fly to the Gambia or Jamaica specifically for the purpose of recreational sex."Never said this, I haven't spoken to more than a few women who happened to have sexual experiences in the Gambia and the French Caribbean, and in these cases, romance and tenderness and even marriage were part of these women's stories. Here's a giant chunk of made-up quotes:
Jeannette agrees. "Wise up," she says.The phrase "wise up" has never passed my lips.
"At the very least you will be fleeced out of hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds.Not only did I never say this, who in their right mind would claim traveling women automatically lose thousands of pounds to conmen every time they have a casual shag? The reference to "pounds" rather than "money" is another giveaway that this is a madeup quote attributed to an American who doesn't automatically talk about pounds sterling.
"Kenya and Africa generally, Aids is endemic and you are putting yourself at serious risk."This sentence is remotely similar to what i actually said, which is that Kenya has the highest HIV rate of any country known for visits by women seeking sex tourism.
"Some of these guys are so poor they have nothing to lose, and they may turn violent. if you go off alone with them and change your mind, they may well rape you anyway."Oh Lord up in Heaven!! This sentence is complete fantasy or perhaps delusion. This is what I actually told Diana:
"I note in my Ethics and Etiquette chapter that it's important to be careful in going off alone with your guide, which is close to an automatic presumption that sex is likely to occur. So you either should not go off alone together or be prepared to fight him off if you don't want an advance."
"I know i have been guilty of sex tourism in the past, but there is no way i would take those risks now, knowing what i know."The sentence above is just insane. "Guilty of sex tourism"? Those words have never crossed my lips.
This is a colossal mangling of what I told Diana, where she takes remarks not by me, but from A WOMAN I INTERVIEWED, mangles them, and attributes them to me directly. What I said:
"I interviewed a woman for my Africa chapter who had traveled in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and enjoyed sexual encounters with men there, who said she would not recommend anyone engage in this behavior today, it's just too risky."
Well, finally, many minutes later, I am at the end of this article ... no more misquotes.
I'll polish this up and send a link to a Daily Mail editor and see what happens, as sort of a lab experiment to see if the folks in West Virginia were correct to not waste their time with contacting editors about fabrications.
Here's the oddest oddity: Yesterday Diana asked me for some women to talk to about their experiences.
I replied:
Hi Diana, Possibly Fiona Pitt-Kethley, the poet who now lives in Spain ... google her you might find her details for contact, or the Guardian might have them, I believe she writes for them intermittently.Someone in the wee few hours between midday Monday U.K. time, when I was contacted, and Diana's Monday night deadline, we have full-blown profiles of two women, "Sarah Jarvis" and "Nicky Jardine," who ostensibly had affairs in Turkey and Egypt respectively.I have a contact in Germany who is willing to discuss these things with the media. (You'll find that usually media have to find women not in their home country to interview ... due to the delicate nature of the story ...)
There are some women quoted in an article in Woman magazine, see link here:
http://www.beaumonde.net/pdfs/womanmag.pdf
Assuming they aren't made up, the author might share the names with you! she was I believe Anna Kingsley: annakingsley@hotmail.com
Juliane Stokes in Nottingham is writing a dissertation on female sex tourism, you could see if she ever found anyone, I know she found it an uphill battle:
jstokes085@aol.com
Yvonne wrote an article in Eve magazine, you can try her too:
yvonne.illsley@btconnect.com
good luck -- Jeannette
And both read straight out of a romance novel.
So far, a good number of Diana's UK colleagues are hot on the heels of "Sarah Jarvis" and "Nicky Jardin" and asking me (not sure why) how to get in touch with them. Since their names have been changed, this will not be easy!
I have a feeling the closest they will get is in the pages of Diana Appleyard's romance novels, "Too Beautiful to Dance," "Playing with Fire," "Out of Love" and "Every Good Woman Deserves a Lover."
They act fictionally and implausibly.
This would just be more humorous examples of Tom Stoppard's adage that there should be a journalist doll -- "Wind it up and it gets it wrong" -- except that I try to operate in the world of responsible, factual journalism.
And I relied on the Daily Mail for some of my anecdotes in "Romance on the Road." And now, frankly, they are suspect, and I may have to drum my fingers and think about revising them out of the picture.
P.S. -- Want to read a 100 percent accurate interview with me on female sex tourism? Try Emily McCoombs "Ticket to Ride" that appeared in Bust magazine, link here.
March 7, 2008
How Americans view the world
Click on the image to see it at full size.This tickles me as someone who wrote an entire book about what Americans could learn from foreign countries.
I laughed out loud at the depiction of Alaska and Hawaii, the thrill of "More America!!" in two great vacation spots.
One of the better jokes is the complete absence of Africa, which I touched on in my first book, 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet
The chapter was subtitled "Our Love-Hate Relationship with Africa," and a subtext was "our hefty ignorance about Africa," born of the tiny trickle of American tourism there.
Hat tip to my friend Blaire for sending me this image.
January 2, 2008
Female sex tourism video on YouTube
Anyone wanting to see the terrain explored in the film Heading South and the book How Stella Got Her Groove Back in documentary form -- albeit brief -- might want to take a peek at this video, Rent a Dread, on YouTube.This shows some of the action in Negril Beach, Jamaica and on Dominica.
What I notice is that we have the local men willing to participate in the video, as well as expatriate white women, but not the female tourists themselves, who, to date, have only been interviewed in any depth by UC-Santa Barbara's April Gorry, who devoted months living in Belize to an interview project for her doctoral dissertation.
Rent-a-Dread video, click arrow to play
During the time from July to December of last year when my blog was broken, I wasn't able to keep up with my occasional roundups on news in sex tourism and dissociative mating. Let me try to catch up a bit now.
• The big tidbit is probably the marriage of a 51-year-old English grandmother to the 27-year-old son of Osama bin Laden in wake of a holiday romance. Here's The Times version of the story, and a photo of the couple:
Mrs Felix-Browne, who has been married five times previously, met (Omar Ossama) bin Laden in Egypt in September while undergoing treatment for multiple sclerosis. She says that their fairytale romance began when her future husband saw her riding a horse near the Great Pyramid. They were married in Islamic ceremonies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and are awaiting permission from the authorities in Riyadh to make their marriage official.This touches on a number of themes in Romance on the Road, including how Arab men, emulating Mohammed, often find older women attractive, as well as an examination of the possible role of sexual frustration experienced by young Arabs with few mating options in contributing to world terrorism.
• From the U.K.'s Daily Mail, the world champ on chronicling tabloid-y travel romances, we have a related story: "Our nightmare daughter: The teenage girl who keeps running to Egypt for her men."
I have no idea if any word of this is true, but for what it's worth:
Holed up in a £60-a-night hotel room in the Egyptian resort of Hurghada, 17-year-old runaway Amy Robson cuts a rather forlorn figure.• From Mangalorean.com, "Goa Tourism: Love knows no borders," comes an article noting that Indians from elsewhere and Nepalese men are flocking to Goa for jobs -- with marriage to a foreigner considered the ultimate success.Her pillow is wet with tears over what might have been and she doesn't know what to do with herself.
This desolate scene, she tremulously explains, wasn't how it was supposed to be. When she secretly sneaked out of her home in the Cumbrian village of Beaumont last week, her pretty little head was filled with romantic images of being reunited with her 29-year-old "fiance" Mohamed El Sayed.
During the arduous 24-hour journey to the Red Sea resort - involving three flights via Gatwick, Amsterdam and Cairo - she'd been sustained by the thought of being swept up in her handsome lover's arms before dashing off to get married and live happily ever after.
Love they say knows no boundaries and what better way to epitomize the feeling in the case of Raj, Prabhakar and Bharat. The trio's love for their partner's and now wife's has transcended the boundaries of colour, religion, nationality and religion.• From the International Herald Tribune: "Letter from Thailand: Variations on a Theme: Thai Women and Foreign Husbands:"The former waiters present the other side of the Goa shining example materialisng through the tourism platform. Goa, which served as a spring board for them, a life beyond taking orders from hotel guests. Love and marriage has opened new doors for the trio as they now live and work in Europe along with their wives.
Raj would not agree with anyone who argues that holiday romance, remains an affair confined to the holiday season and no further than that. Typically in most cases the holiday fling and Goa included, the romantic liaison is all over after the holiday ends. As one of the partner packs his bags and leaves to head home to his home country.
But for Raj and for two of his colleagues, working at Dominic beach side seasonal restaurant in Benaulim, in South Goa, the holiday romance was not just fleeting moments, but a long lasting relationship which has been solemnized in marriage.
About 15 percent of all marriages in the northeast, a study published by Khon Kaen University found, are now between Thai women and foreign men. Most of the men are Europeans, but there are upwards of 300 or so Americans, many of them veterans of the Vietnam War who were based in Udon Thani in the 1960s and early 1970s and are living here, most of them with Thai wives as well.• Here's a blog entry from Koren Shadmi, who came up with a delicious illustration for Bust magazine for an article, "Ticket to Ride," mentioning me and Romance on the Road:There is a sort of calculated redemption on both sides of these marriages. Many of the women have painful stories, of working as prostitutes, of abandonment by Thai husbands and boyfriends, of children they couldn't afford to take care of. They make no secret of the fact that marrying some nice, older foreign man saved both them and their extended families from poverty and unhappiness.
I was asked to do an illustration for BUST magazine for an article about sex tourism, from a female point of view. Apparantly there are over 25,000 women in the US who travel abroad on a regular basis to have sex with some of the locals. Its not often that you get such a fun subject to work with. I got the job a day after I landed from my visit to france, so the whole intercontinental atmosphere combined with the jetlag created good grounds for an illustration.Koren, like Lamont, apparently graduated from New York's School for the Visual Arts.
• From the Associated Press, as run in USAToday, "Interracial marriages surge across the U.S.:"
NEW YORK — The charisma king of the 2008 presidential field. The world's best golfer. The captain of the New York Yankees. Besides superstardom, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter have another common bond: Each is the child of an interracial marriage.The 1967 Supreme Court decision mentioned is significant. Lamont's parents could not get married in Maryland -- it would have been illegal -- so they went down to Howard University in D.C. to tie the knot.For most of U.S. history, in most communities, such unions were taboo.
It was only 40 years ago — on June 12, 1967 — that the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying non-whites. The decision also overturned similar bans in 15 other states.
Since that landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, the number of interracial marriages has soared; for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures. Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7% of America's 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2% in 1970.
• And finally, here's an article, again from the Daily Mail, that links highly intelligent women to low emotional IQs that lead to romantic failure, a possible reason for some women to explore travel sex as a pick-me-up, Anna Pasternak writes: Why are intelligent women such fools in love?
However, recently it has struck me that I am not alone in my ability to have made the right career choices - but hopelessly wrong choices in love.This similarly is examined in Romance on the Road, which notes the presence of female university professors in sex tourism zones.I know of at least seven girls in my year at school - I went to St Paul's Girls' School in London, one of the most academic schools in the country - who are single mothers, while my female friends from Oxford, who are also divorced or single mothers, runs into double figures.
The most high-profile casualty of those is Earl Spencer's ex-wife, Caroline Hutton, who was famously left with two children by her first husband, PR guru Matthew Freud, and then left again with two more children by her second husband, Earl Spencer. Not, it seems, the perfect judge of men.
So what does all this mean? Well, I believe that at the root of all this is the fact that many women with a high IQ have a perilously low EQ (that's their emotional intelligence quotient). Put more prosaically, this would explain why bright girls are often fools in love.
Last year, American writer Michael Noer created outrage when he wrote a piece in Forbes Magazine warning men off marrying career girls. He claimed that recent studies had found that clever, professional women were more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat and less likely to have children.
Simultaneously, the American Journal of Marriage And Family cited studies that claim the divorce risk rises when women out-earn their husbands. Evidence, everywhere, seems to point to the fact that thousands of bright women can't sustain meaningful relationships for a plethora of reasons: they are too controlling, they can't tolerate less successful men and equally, men resent higher-earning partners.
- posted by jbelliveau at 4:03 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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December 13, 2007
Hello, any female sex travelers out there?
This is a fairly sincere question.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.
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.
- posted by jbelliveau at 6:13 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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December 8, 2007
Stephen Hunter captures Baltimore ... and sex tourism, and more
OK! Here is an older post -- and much revised and I hope improved post -- from just before my blog got broken back around July 25, when my Web host moved from California to Ohio and my shopping cart also got wrecked in the process. I've finally got the wonderful Richard Kersey at SlickRicky.com to get me up and running again, with this entry lost however. Now I will figure out this newfangled Movable Type 4.0. To resume ...
That image of Baltimore, changing merrily, became the Baltimore of record: so unhip it was hip, so uncool it was cool. Long forgotten is the fact that in the beginning many Baltimoreans hated Waters for his trick of processing an elegant, intellectual city with powerhouse financial, advertising and shipping chops into a kind of Happy Valley U.S.A. of mild, funky rebels and hair enameled lifeless and piled to the stars. Soon the Waters view prevailed, not necessarily a bad thing, and everybody bought into it. "Hon," that exemplar of down-home Bawlamore charm (and not mumbled, embittered Baltimore condescension), became so positive an identifier it was featured on a welcome-to-Baltimore sign on the B-W Parkway.
It's okay. That's the way it goes. When the legend conflicts with the truth, print the legend, as John Ford knew. Waters is not a documentary filmmaker; he's a mythmaker, a parable-spinner, an illusion merchant. But you can't forget what's there, too, a vast, flat, hot tragedy, where young men pop each other at record pace and nobody seems to know why or what to do. In a few happy glades -- Federal Hill, Homeland, Canton -- one can live as elegant an urban life as anywhere in America, enjoying a Georgetown at Patapsco River basin prices. But go out on Federal Hill at night, and you see before you the Inner Harbor all agleam, the bold new downtown skyline, and have the sense of a town that seized on the fame and momentum Waters and Ripken lent it, and did its best to become what it seemed to be.
But don't listen to the sirens that blaze into the dark night, or pay attention to the blinking police and emergency service vehicles that look like blood-red pulsing pinpricks in the dark seen from the sleek buildings around the harbor far from where the real dying happens far too frequently.
(Baltimore)'s a place of funky neighborhoods, populated by happy peasants, some of them cross-dressed. The defining mark is the hairdo, a kind of individual tower of protein, a high-rise lacquered in place by aerosol droplets so that the ziggurat is as motionless as if built by slaves on the Mesopotamian plain. As for the men, the hair is weighted with glowing unguents that play sparkle games with the light.
I think the wildly individualistic hairdos that once defined Baltimore are disappearing as the older set dies off. What you now have to visit the Honfest to see, used to be just everyday Baltimore. We seem to be getting more homogenous as time goes on.
I suppose if you're shooting three movies back to back on the other side of the world and it's one of the biggest gambles ever in the entertainment industry, a detail might have slipped your mind. In Jackson's case, that little detail was shampoo. He either couldn't afford it or he forgot all about it. The result is that you never saw so many greasy, tangled, thorny, wet, lusterless protein brambles as are on display in this movie. Viggo Mortensen, with a haircut that looks like a drowned swamp rat floating belly up in a bayou, leads the troop.
(Director Wolfgang) Petersen is an old pro. His is a narrative sensibility, and he's capable of keeping the story moving and subplots straight. He's got an eye for beauty too, though mainly of the male kind. He so loves the image of the helmeted, husky warrior boys, bulgy of bicep, lean of loin, aglow of sweat, eyes feral and fierce in the slits of their art-deco steel pots, that he hits it over and over and over. Many a gay man will consider this the ultimate date movie.
One morning -- the portents have been over-dramatic -- the Mayans arrive in force. And why, you wonder, would the Forest People not even have heard of them and made no preparations, as they are about two days' march from a Mayan urban center? The only answer is that it suits the political agenda of the picture, which is to subvert notions about the "innocence" of native peoples and the "guilt" of usurpers from the outside. In other words, in Gibson's worldview, the Mayans are to the Forest People exactly as, sometime later, the Spaniards would be to the Mayans. It's all a question of empire prerogative.
The results are not pretty.
, titled "The Job Of Sex in the Third World." Here is possibly one of the best ever examples of Hunter owning his topic:You see it all over the Third World, anywhere poverty and beauty converge under balmy skies, and the liquor is sweet and hits hard. A Westerner, north of 45, with fallen arches, hair, belly and spirit, clearly no longer sexually competitive in the meat markets of the big city, shows up, hunting an arrangement.
The arrangement will be with a younger, suppler body, owned by a younger, duller, more beautiful person. The two will share not an hour of anonymous sex, a la the streetwalker and her beau, but something tangentially more dignified: a kind of ersatz relationship, with life narratives exchanged, laughs and drinks sampled to lubricate the awkwardness, day trips to the mountains or the monuments to eat up the afternoon hours, and then discreet nights of sweat and bliss. Finally, certain monies will be quietly exchanged, "gifts," not payments, addresses passed between the two for the letters that will never get written, the photos that will never be sent, and ... that's it.
Hello, Monday morning, back in the office. Hmm, you look so refreshed. Have a good time down south? That glow in your face? You must have gotten good weather. Meanwhile, you are thinking, Good Lord, I didn't even notice the weather.
Weyman Swagger: He's actually a photo editor on my old paper, The Sun, and a grizzled old truck-driver looking man, without college education and a little rough and hilly in his ways. He's also a brilliant natural editor, who has helped me immeasureably; he knows things the pros in NY don't and my books are much the better for his ideas. I don't always use them but they are usually so provocative that they jigger me into something that works. He's also a very smart perceptive line reader, who's got a sense of voice and timing and colloquialism bar none. It's a privilege to have him help me.
- posted by jbelliveau at 6:09 PM in Culture
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June 5, 2007
Awesome wildlife video: Battle at Kruger
Lamont found a Youtube video of this amazing three-way battle at a waterhole at South Africa's Kruger National Park:
I would rank this video awfully high on the list of wildlife videos I've ever seen. It's probably even more dramatic in some respects than a National Geographic video we saw once where an orca whale came up on a gravel beach in if memory serves Antarctica and grabbed a penguin and tossed it in the air.
This shows that the axiom that amateur digital photographers somewhat threaten the pros because they can capture so many images that some are bound to be good is also beginning to occur among amateur wildlife videographers.
It's probably more fun for readers of this blog to just take a look at this video first and then read the rest of my blog, because it will contain some ** spoilers.**
Our traveling party had the great good fortune to witness a lioness kill a hartebeest on a visit to the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. The account below is taken from my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet.
Would that I had camera footage of this hunt, but a verbal description will have to do. The hunt we observed was different from the one captured above in that a single lioness conducted the actual kill, she attacked a wildebeest rather than a much stronger water buffalo, and she quickly bought it down with a powerful paw swipe to the spine.
From my chapter: "Giraffes by the roadside: Kenya and Tanzania … and lessons on our love-hate relationship to Africa:"
From our vantage on the roof of the Land Rover, we could see only the flat tops of their heads and a bit of their haunches. From the lower angle of the wildebeest, the lionesses would have been invisible in the grass.Our guide, Mr. Jeffir, put the Land Rover into park and switched off the engine. Although our driver seemed for the most part disengaged and verging on somnolent, even he perked up for the drama about to unfold. Rembeaux, Carly, Jim, Steph and myself were electrified by the possibility, squeezed into the waning moments of our visit to Africa, of lionesses demonstrating how they killed their prey.
“I have been here 20 times, and never seen this,” said Mr. Jeffir, with relative vigor.
Foot by foot, for 30 minutes, the lionesses advanced. “Exactly how my cats stalk birds,” Jim said.
Lionesses, faster and more agile than lions (a fact women seem to love), can reach speeds of up to 35 mph. Still, they lack the upper range of speed of many of their prey, such as wildebeest, which can attain 50 mph. So the lioness must approach closely and lunge before its target can bolt.
We watched a wildebeest, heedless, walk calmly away from the larger group toward the hidden huntresses. “Uh oh,” I breathed.
The end game unfolded. The lead lioness tore toward the isolated wildebeest. A nearby hartebeest, terrified, bolted for its life. The panicked wildebeest ran two steps and made a desperate, tight U-turn.
The lioness, reversing field swiftly in reaction, caught up in two gallops to her prey and raised a mighty right leg toward its shaggy withers. The attacker, probably weighing 300 pounds, swept her huge right paw towards the wildebeest’s middle spine. In a display of might, she dug her spread claws into its back and pulled her giant foreleg to earth, bringing along the entire wildebeest. The victim toppled, its back crashing to the ground. Its four hooves flung once in the air and then fell. Resistance ended, and the animal lay still. The final chase had lasted perhaps 10 seconds.
We swung our cameras at the commotion in another direction. Just as the wildebeest met its end in front of us, two other lionesses behind our vehicle nearly felled a zebra. The herd stampeded, hundreds of hooves raising a reverberating thunder and a cloud of dust. Jim’s photos later revealed the surging head of a lioness above the haunch of the targeted zebra, who somehow barely escaped. Jim and I agreed that the family sheltie, Conan, would last perhaps five minutes out there.
Back at the downed wildebeest, eleven lions and cubs began to eat simultaneously. The killer stood quite near our Land Rover, perhaps three yards away, panting heavily like a struggling train engine. Long scars from past battles ran along her ribs. Too exhausted to eat, she shuffled wearily away.
As we photographed her and the feasting pride, another lioness from the failed zebra maneuver strolled up, unnoticed, inches away from our rear bumper. Had she wanted to jump up, she could have clawed us more easily than the slowest of wildebeest.
The exhausted huntress pants with fatigue near our safari vehicle in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater after bringing down a wildebeest.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:38 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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May 22, 2007
Leslie Blanch passes on
The author of "The Wilder Shores of Love" died May 7 at the age of 102 in the South of France, as noted in this L.A. Times obit, Lesley Blanch, 102; author and adventurer. Hat tip: Pamela Barrus.
The obit notes:
The Wilder Shores of Love, Blanch's first book, became an immediate success when it was published in 1954. In it she profiles four women who left convention behind. One, Jane Digby, became the wife of a Syrian tribesman and lived a Bedouin lifestyle.Another, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, was kidnapped and sent to live in an Ottoman sultan's harem. Isabelle Eberhardt roamed North Africa alone, dressed as a man, and Isabel Burton traveled with her husband, Richard, who explored Africa and the Middle East.
I first read "The Wilder Shores of Love" at the undergraduate library at the University of North Caroline-Chapel Hill, while visiting to give a couple of cultural travel talks there and at neighboring Duke.
It was fascinating for me to learn especially the story of Lady Jane Digby, who was a revelation in that her behavior placed the first instances of especially hedonistic travel sex by women far before the 1960s, more like 1850 in fact. Sometimes when researching a book you almost vibrate with excitement at finding such forgotten pieces of the puzzle. It's interesting that "Wilder Shores" was a pretty big book when it came out, but its message slipped beneath the waves over time.
As I wrote in Romance on the Road:
The year was 1847, and the place, appropriately, was Rome. Massachusetts-born feminist writer Margaret Fuller fell in love with a Roman marchese a decade younger than herself. She became pregnant, later married him and had his son.Two years later, again in Rome, Lady Jane Digby romped with an
Italian artillery officer, an army captain and a diplomat’s son over the
course of a brief visit (Lovell 137). This oft-married, sexually adventurous Englishwoman appears to have led the way in what was likely the first
instance of casual travel sex.
Here's something from the obit that I didn't know about Blanch, the author:
(Romain) Gary's popular novel, "Lady L," in 1958 was said to be inspired by Blanch. In it, a worldly grand dame works the social circuit, telling captivating stories along the way. Sophia Loren starred in a 1965 movie version of the book.
Sounds like Lady L needs to go on my movie list.
- posted by jbelliveau at 1:26 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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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
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April 26, 2007
Baltimore for budget travelers
Baltimore is sufficiently offbeat and off the beaten track to be of interest to foreign backpackers.
I'm going to take a stab at looking at lodging, things to do, media and guidebooks in this blog entry. Let's start first with the prospective reopening of Baltimore's youth hostel.
Fortunately for those on a budget, Baltimore long-closed youth hostel looks like it is on the verge of reopening.
A Baltimore Sun story on April 10, entitled "Volunteers prepare their hostel takeover: Group renovates mansion so tourists can visit Baltimore without breaking the bank," tells about the revival of the hostel:
After eight years without one, Baltimore is close to welcoming a hostel back to town.The opening, a rare occurrence for the languishing national hostel scene, means travelers to the city will once again be able to find safe lodging that costs less than most hotels' continental breakfast.
MacLeod and about 10 volunteers have been working for years to raise money from private sources and renovate a deteriorated Mount Vernon brownstone. They say the hostel, at 17 W. Mulberry St., could open as soon as May.
It will be the only hostel in a major Maryland city - the only other Maryland hostel is in Knoxville, near Harpers Ferry, W.Va.
Baltimore's last hostel, which operated from the same location, closed in 1999, shut down by the local branch of Hostelling International because of poor management.
I was spurred into researching the question of Baltimore for budget travelers by an excellent e-mail from Ryan, a member of the Travelerspoint Travel Community, who e-mailed me:
I'm hoping to get your advice on Baltimore.There is a group of three of us coming to visit Baltimore for three days in early May from England -- we are flying into BWI airport.
I must say I'm having real difficulty finding accommodation of the budget variety and am quite reluctant to pay the exorbitant prices that the chain hotels are requesting in the Inner Harbor area.
Do you know of any hidden gems or what areas to perhaps look towards? Just to let you know we won't have a car.
Also, what would you recommend doing with our time in Charm City?
Hi Ryan, I would start with the youth hostel -- see if they can accommodate you specially, even though they aren't open yet -- try them at Friends of Baltimore Hostel, 410-576-8880, acknowledge that you know they aren't open yet but can they help you?
Other lodgings
The Mount Vernon Hotel would be the next place I would check. Then The Tremonts --ask for the business rate.
Other options for essentially freeloading with other travelers are these:
Hospitalityclub.org
Couchsurfing.com
Globalfreeloaders.com
It's a long shot, but you could put a notice on Baltimore's free Craigslist, in the sublets-temporary section, seeking help with cheap accommodation for a few days.
Here's a list of Baltimore area hotels, with addresses and links, compiled by the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Here's Expedia's list of discount hotels in Baltimore. They start at around $126. They also list a Best Western outside town at $76 a night, but that would require a car.
Here's the TripAdvisor list of discount hotels. These start at about $129.
Where did Ryan eventually end up staying? Well here's what he told me:
I certainly had a look at the Mount Vernon hotel, however I finally managed to get a room at the Days Inn in the Inner Harbor area. By securing an online special advanced rate, plus the fact that three of us will be sharing this room, as well as taking advantage of a particularly healthy pound-dollar exchange rate -- we have managed to offset the amount to roughly $50 a night each. This is not too bad for three nights but would not be pleasant for someone looking to travel the length and breadth of the country over an extended period of time.
Ryan also asked about things to do and see. Let's look at some ideas now.
Things to see
Most everyone agrees on this list of things to see:
For kids
National Aquarium
Maryland Science Center
Port Discovery
Fun stuff
Cool neighborhoods
Mount Vernon
Upper Fells Point
Sports
Arts
Center Stage
Music
Events
CityPaper Daily Highlights
Places to eat
CityPaper Online Eats.
The current hotspot for the beautiful people is Pazo. Do try to check it out!
Guidebooks
Media
Local chat
Sunspot forum-Local news, take a look here to see what local people on this lively and friendly forum think about Things to do in Baltimore, Best Place to eat crabs in Baltimore and Best cheap eats in Baltimore area.
Here's a discussion on things to do in Baltimore on the Lonely Planet Thorntree -- Baltimore.
Traveling to D.C.
Miscellaneous
Lonely Planet guide to Baltimore
Please contact me if you have any suggestions on cheap places to stay in Baltimore or other recommended updates to this blog entry.
Update
May 22, 2007: Here is an article in the New York Times, 36 Hours in Baltimore, with a roundup of places to see and visit.
The article lacks a list of budget hotels and notes incorrectly that"
Discerning locals go to Obrycki's (1727 East Pratt Street, 410-732-6399; www.obryckis.com), known for a homemade peppery crab spice that, pardon the blasphemy, rivals Old Bay. The faux-fancy décor (stenciled brick walls and fake windows) is not why you came. It's the freshness of the crabs ($43 for a dozen mediums), in an establishment that commendably shuts down for the winter when the local catch is lean.
Obrycki's (a half-block from our house) is not visited by locals, who consider it expensive and the food oversalted.
- posted by jbelliveau at 7:21 PM in The Neighborhood
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February 24, 2007
A free packing list for travelers
Today I would like to offer travelers a customizable packing list based on one my friend Jane Burtnett originally developed two decades ago.
Hers was typed on a sheet of paper. I saved it, used it, and shared it with my mother, who really loves using it.
To update the packing list, I have entered the items into an Excel spreadsheet, which you can download and customize -- add or subtract items or categories, add yellow highlight columns for stuff you really want to remember.
I am going to upload a PDF version too for those correctly concerned about macros in Excel spreadsheets (believe me, there are none in mine, but I realize this is a concern in this Internet age).
� Created by Jane S. Burtnett, 1985; Revised Jeannette Belliveau, 2007. Used with permission.
PDF version (opens in new window)
Original Excel version (downloads to your download folder)
All suggestions for improvement welcome, please feel free to contact me.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:22 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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February 13, 2007
Where women choose the men they wed
"Love comes first into the heart of the woman. Once it's in the woman, only then can it jump into the man."
Isn't that a wonderful quote? It was relayed to me last week by Rukmini Callimachi, a reporter for the Associated Press in Dakar, Senegal.
Rukmini had some questions for me on European and American women who visit the Gambia for affairs with local men. I provided her information on Africa from my book, Romance on the Road. We had a wonderful, warm conversation, and she said, "I have to send you a link to an article I wrote on this island off West Africa. It's matrilineal, and women pick men they like by giving them a plate of food."
What better topic for Valentine's Day? Here is a link to Rukmini's article, Where women alone choose whom to wed:
ORANGO ISLAND, Guinea-Bissau � He was 14 when the girl entered his grass-covered hut and placed a plate of steaming fish in front of him.Like all men on this African isle, Carvadju Jose Nananghe knew exactly what it meant. Refusing was not an option. His heart pounding, he lifted the aromatic dish, prepared with an ancient recipe, to his lips, agreeing in one bite to marry the girl.
"I had no feelings for her," said Nananghe, now 65. "Then when I ate this meal, it was like lightning. I wanted only her."
In this archipelago of 50 islands off the western rim of Africa, it's women, not men, who choose. They make their proposals public by offering their grooms-to-be a dish of distinctively prepared fish, marinated in red palm oil. Once they have asked, men are powerless to say no.
To have refused, explained Nananghe, remembering the day half a century ago, would have dishonored his family � and in any case, why would he want to choose his own wife?
"Love comes first into the heart of the woman," he explained. "Once it's in the woman, only then can it jump into the man."
We laughed after Rukmini told me about this quote. She also recently broke the story of Whoopi Goldberg getting her blood tested and finding out that her ancestors arrived from Guinea-Bissau (West African Nation Lays Claim to Whoopi). Rukmini told me the letter from Guinea-Bissau to Whoopi called her "Your Excellency Hoppy" Goldberg.
I don't think I've laughed so much ever when being interviewed for the first time over the phone by a journalist.
Rukmini, in her earlier assignment for AP covering New Orleans, broke the story of the Big Easy selling its flooded buses on eBay. It sounds like she is doing a bang-up job covering West Africa now, too. Good luck Rukmini and let me know if you need a research buddy on your Gambia trip!
- posted by jbelliveau at 6:32 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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January 10, 2007
One of National Geographic's travel experts
It's time for a little brag, but here goes ... I was invited by National Geographic's sustainable tourism director Jonathan B. Tourtellot to be one of 419 experts on world travel to help National Geographic Traveler rate World Heritage destinations.
Probably I was nominated to participate based on my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet.
The results of the survey are found at World Heritage Destinations Rated.
Some background, from Tourtellot:
The World Monuments Watch List is compiled biennially in order to �call international attention to cultural heritage sites around the world that are threatened by neglect, vandalism, armed conflict, or natural disaster.� An independent panel of experts reviews the nominations, and a final �World Monuments Watch: 100 Most Endangered Sites 2008� list will be released.The World Monuments Fund defines a monument as any of the following: archaeological sites; residential, civic, commercial, military, or religious architecture, including vernacular architecture; engineering or industrial works; cultural landscapes; historic city centers; and townscapes.
I filled out extensive questions on the following places, all of which I have visited:
Minor difficulties
United Kingdom: City of Bath
France: Versailles and environs
Italy: Siena
France: Loire Valley
Brazil: Pantanal
Italy: Cinque Terre
In moderate trouble
Italy: Florence
Tanzania: Serengeti National Park and environs
Brazil: Historic center of Salvador (Pelourinho)
China: Suzhou town and gardnes
Indonesia: Borobudur and environs
China: The Great Wall
Mexico: Chichen Itza
Greece: Acropolis, Athens and environs
Belize: Barrier Reef
- posted by jbelliveau at 10:29 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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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
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November 30, 2006
"Romance on the Road" available as an e-book
A month or two ago, I loaded an e-book copy of Romance on the Road on my Web site shopping cart, here.
It has proved handy for the steady requests by undergraduate and graduate students writing about female sex tourism who have a paper due in a week and need a copy of RotR quickly.
I am also happy to help any purchaser of the e-book who needs additional reference materials (a bibliography, citations, my saved online discussion forum chats) on a particular of women and love journeys. For example, I helped a student just before Thanksgiving with her paper on women who visit Cuba, providing her with an amazing discussion from the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forum where tourist women raved about Cuban men -- a discussion from some years ago, long gone from the site, but saved in my files. I also helped direct her to some little-known essays on Cuba from anthologies.
Similarly, I helped a professor who was just returned from Costa Rica, and was pretty amazed at some of the citations I had that were helpful to her study of female tourists.
This is my favorite topic of the moment, so if you are studying women, sex and travel, do contact me.
- posted by jbelliveau at 4:38 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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November 19, 2006
Child sexual abuse in Pitcairn -- and many other places
Probably we shouldn't be surprised at the constant thinness of social science research in newspaper articles. Here's another example in The Independent (London), in a story entitled: Pitcairn: The island of fear, which describes a TV documentary entitled Trouble in Paradise: The Pitcairn Story:
Jacqui Christian grew up on an island paradise in the Pacific. The childhood she describes sounds like every over-stressed family's fantasy in her adopted city, London: a serene tropical haven, with no cars, little contact with the outside world, where everyone is a neighbour, or family. "After school we could go riding our bikes or kite-flying anywhere on the island and not worry about being mugged," she says.But that wasn't the whole story. "There was this other side that we never talked about, where being a