Beau Monde Press: Women's studies classroom guide

Romance on the Road describes the heretofore-neglected topic of women who travel to find love with foreign men, with significant implications for the study of mating behavior, the dating war, feminism and the globalization and commodification of affection. The author describes her own experiences in Greece, the Bahamas, the Caribbean and Brazil, and resulting book became a high-spirited examination of how adventurous women are redefining sexual geography.

The table of contents for the five units of this study guide appear below.

1. Female sex tourism and implications for feminism

Feminism and unintended consequences
Mate shortages created by marriage patterns:
First World and Third World alike
Sex and the divorced Baby Boomer woman
Mate selection in throes of a revolution
Widespread involuntary celibacy: Female and male

2. People

Female sexual pioneers:
-- in Southern Europe, Africa, Asia, Polynesia
Gay men: Common motivations with Victorian women
Lesbians: Special destinations and strategies

3. History

Veiling laws, agricultural development and female sexual freedom
Cleopatra, Babylon's sacred priestesses, Turkish free spirits and Native American single women
History's first sex destinations: Italy and Greece
Victorian female adventureresses: Rome, the Near East, India
Spain, the Caribbean, West Africa and the 1960s explosion in female sex tourism
Erica Jong, Terry McMillan and how novels accelerated trends
Princess Diana, Osama bin Laden and the Middle East
Predictions of the future of female sex tourism and its social impact

4. Theory

The first sexual geographer: Sir Richard Francis Burton
The female participant: Anne Cumming, Fiona Pitt-Kethley
The novelist as theoretician: Paul Theroux, Michel Houellebecq
The skeptical social scientist: April Gorry

5. Places

Overarching geographic patterns governing sex tourism destinations for men and women

The world's two leading emporia for sex tourism: Thailand and the Dominican Republic
Men's destinations: Southeast Asia, Latin America
Women's destinations: Mediterranean, Africa, Caribbean
Gay destinations: Sitges, Cape Town, Bangkok, Brazil
Lesbian destinations: Lesbos, Bali
The Zone of Sexual Freedom: Africa
The Zone of Sexual Winter: East Asia
The Zone of Sexual Violence: Melanesia
The Zone of Abandonment: Oceania

Femininity, masculinity, sex warfare and geography
Exclusive immigration data on foreign wives and husbands of Americans
Emotional geography and the commodification of sex