Deep in our psyches, men harbor a vision of beautiful, tropical island women, adoring and submissve. Could this paradise still exist?
-Henry Makow, A Long Way to Go for a Date
(This is the first post in a series on international sex tourism)
In recent years, there has been increased visibility of Western tourists embarking on sex tours to non-Western countries. The Internet has made information about and opportunities for sex tourism highly accessible, as both men and women travel in search of sexual liaisons with ‘exotic’ peoples. While it doesn’t always involve sex with minors or trafficked people, the latent economic imbalance implies some degree of exploitation. The problem has received increased scrutiny and criticism in the last ten years (mostly due to growing attention on the issue of human trafficking), but the phenomenon of sex tourism is constructed from a long, complex global history of economic, political, and sexual conquest.
Many modern sex tourists seek out experiences in other cultures in order to fill what they perceive to be a deficiency in themselves or their home culture. Consequently, the long-racialized bodies of foreign men and women provide an apt escape—the joint legacies of colonialism and Orientalism have influenced Western consciousness to perceive these peoples as exotic, authentic, and refreshingly “other.” Anne Stoler, in her study of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, notes,
The history of Western sexuality must be located in the production of historical Others, in the broader force field of empire where technologies of sex, self, and power were defined as ‘European’ and ‘Western’ as they were refracted and remade.
Global economic inequality, largely inherited from colonial histories, allow what tourism critic Dean McCannell terms the “leisure class” to travel to and exploit developing countries. The citizens of these countries often have few economic alternatives to work in the sex industry. The globalized, and racialized, economy allows tourists to map desire onto foreign bodies in the developing world, consuming exotic difference and perpetuating cycles of Western identity and domination.
The Colonial Imagination
Stoler suggests that “no political story is more relevant to the production of Western desire than colonialism.” Stoler, citing Foucault, emphasizes that desire, rather than springing from the Freudian assumption of natural impulse, is socially learned. Western cultures looked to cultures of the Orient as a projection of their desires, often seeing eastern cultures as being pure, innocent, childlike, and different – a commonly held longing for a pristine, pre-industrial world.
The escapism offered by travel and exploration literature was one of the directions this colonial gaze took. These discourses produced exotic desire as much as they reflected it. McCannell points out, “Self-discovery through a complex and sometimes arduous search for an Absolute Other is a basic theme for our civilization, a theme supporting an enormous literature.”
One example of literature’s rendering of a desirable Other comes from Denis Diderot’s 1773 Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage, critiqued by Ryan Bishop and Lillian Robinson. Diderot imagines an exotic utopia on the island of Tahiti. According to Bishop and Robinson,Tahiti is conveyed as an island of “sexual plentitude … reflected in the sheer number of wiling and accessible women – a virtual cornucopia of sexual partners.”
In contrast, Diderot expresses frustration with Europe as a place of claustrophobic, unnatural moral laws constraining sexuality. Compared to the apparent freedom of “native” peoples, European sexual mores feel cramped and unimaginative. Tahitian society, in Diderot’s view, is amoral rather than immoral. The people’s supposed inherent innocence exempts them from “sinning” the way Europeans think of it. The childlike Tahitians simply give in to nature with a sexual urge that necessarily lacks corruption. Diderot points out that taking advantage of sexual opportunities in amoral societies is an equally guiltless indulgence, though when at home one should abide by the oppressive moral code. Stoler sums up this classic interpretation of “Oriental” sexuality, describing how the East was imagined as a “place where one could look for sexual experiences unobtainable in Europe.”
This example depicts how sexuality was put forth in narrative as a marker of racial difference. Indeed, racialized sexuality is till very much present in modern sex tourism (not to mention regular tourism, or regular sex for that matter.) The bodies of Asian women were considered categorically desirable, and discrepancies among them were largely ignored – more significant was how they differed from European bodies. European women’s bodies were envisioned as white and clean, while Asian bodies were exoticized as earthy and associated with dirt. White Europeans = cleanliness and morality. Non-white Asians are closer to nature and thus more familiar and free with sexual urges. This is the dichotomy that has been inherited by the post-colonial sex tourist.
Polar Economics: ‘In the Third World, a man has no age’
Men and women from the affluent nations of Europe, North America, and Australia frequently travel thousands of miles for the purpose of having unfamiliar sexual encounters. Popular destinations include Thailand, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Phillippines – although no developing country is fully excluded. There is an obvious movement from wealthy countries to developing countries in this exchange, with economically powerful Western tourists flying to poorer countries for sex (although sex tourism is also a problem in rich Western countries and is similarly fraught with economic inequalities). Economic stratification spurred on by globalization has an explosive alchemy with the inherited Orientalist gaze as objectified visions of empire become objectified desire. The global disparity of wealth perpetuates the subjugation of Third World peoples in unfair power relationships by promoting sex tourism as a fun and cheap way to score a hot body. Because of this radical imbalance of power, the wealthy leisure class tourist is able to say “In the Third World, a man has no age” (quoted in Julia O’Connell Davidson’s Prostitution, Power, and Freedom). But it’s not that women don’t care who their lover is – his age, what he looks like, how he treats them – it’s just that they cannot really control it. A sold or trafficked woman from the developing world usually has no say over what form her economic support takes.
But what else do tourists get besides a sense of economic and sexual power? As Stoler keenly observes of the colonial world, “Sexual desires were structured by desires and discourses that were never about sex alone.” J.T. Sanchez, in “Sex Tourism in the Carribbean” contends that it is far more than exotic sex that men, and women, pursue in these transactions. The tourist, Sanchez argues, has the deeper – perhaps even subconscious—objective of restoring gender and racial hierarchies that have been broken down in the West: “Women and girls are at their command, Blacks and Hispanics and Asians are serving them …” This points to a deep nostalgia for colonial order, a sense of natural rights and entitlements afforded to the Western man that have been destabilized by civil rights and feminist movements. Sex tourists themselves have expressed feelings of alienation from traditional Western constructs of masculinity that they feel can be reclaimed by sexual exploits in the Global South.
Reclaiming Masculinity
One of the most valuable commodities for the modern tourist (sexual or not) is experience itself. McCannell notes that the quest for specific, memorable, and extraordinary experiences is modeled after cultural examples (which proliferate in the West to the point of saturation). Common notions of masculinity, including strength, ability to dominate, access to multiple sexual partners, economic superiority, etc., cannot always be realized in the West. In order to satisfy cultural expectations, male sex tourists have looked elsewhere for playgrounds on which masculinity can be reconstructed. While culture provides representations of sexual idealism, men infrequently mirror these representations in their everyday lives. Nevertheless, the idealization of masculine sexuality remains. McCannell writes,
The discipline and resources required to organize sexual activities n the model provided by pornographic motion pictures exceed that required by mere individualistic sexual expression. And the cultural version [porn] promises greater pleasure to those who would follow it.
Hence, one could argue that the dissatisfaction, anxiety, and disappointment on the part of the sex tourists, as well as the exploitation experienced by the woman, are just further fallout from an idealized dream promoted by an overmediated world – what author Thomas Pynchon would call a ‘dream of annihilation.’
Apparently, a major obstacle in the sexual lives of Western men is the sexual liberation of Western women. Not everyone can exercise total control at the same time. Greater female economic independence in the developed world has diminished the necessity for women to marry early in life and devote themselves fully to their husbands and children. Sanchez observes a growing tension over women’s ability to reject romantic and sexual advances. In Thailand, Cuba, the Ukraine, or Brazil, chances of a white European or North American man being rejected by a poor woman are slim – even when unconnected to the sex trade. Thus, it is common for sex tourists to view their countrywomen as spoiled by entitlement, wealth, and feminist propaganda.
Henry Makow, in a personal narrative of his journey from Canada to the Phillippines in search of a bride, complains, “Why should I feel guilty about wanting to rule my own roost? Feminists have brainwashed us with crazy notions of equality. What does equality, a political and economic concept, have to do with love?” Fifty-something Makow, despairing of finding a ‘traditional’ woman at home whose first priority is her husband, turns his gaze to Southeast Asia. This would perhaps feel more acceptable if his requirements for a ‘traditional’ didn’t also mean young and beautiful (in his case, teenage).
Sex tourists often lament that women in their own countries don’t consider them because they are “ugly,” “fat,” or “bald.” O’Connell Davidson cites a British tourist saying, “In Canada, a seventeen-year-old would spit in my face just for looking at her, but here [Thailand] thirteen-year-olds smile at me in a come-on way.” O’Connell Davidson points out that this fifty-two-year-old tourist pitches himself as a sympathetic case, but he is utterly uninterested in fifty-two-year-old women who might be interested in him:
It is only when they attempt to win powers of sexual command over young and beautiful women that their own physical characteristics become a burden to them.
According to Makow, “A traditional woman is like a pet. She won’t leave you.” Upon meeting his intended, Cecelia, an 18-year-old with whom he has corresponded from Canada after selecting her from a catalogue of other Filipinas, he asks her what she is in the mood to do. Her response proves for him that Asian women can offer him the submissiveness and docility required to complement his masculine rights:
Then she says those three magic words I have been waiting a lifetime to hear …
I love you?
Nope:
You’re the boss.
Slender, sunburnt, and sweet
Makow is not unique in his conception of Southeast Asia as a haven of sexual availability and freedom from the rules of the developed world. As already shown, these ideas have long been romanticized and inculcated into the Western imagination.
Bishop and Robinson identify the discursive tradition that accuses Western civilization as corrupting the “erotic impulse” explained earlier in colonial narratives. Asian women are just more erotic and have more intense proclivities when it comes to sex. They just like it more. One tour advertisement described them as girls who are
slender, sunburnt, and sweet … [who] love the white man in an erotic and devoted way … masters of the art of making love by nature … little slaves who give real Thai warmth.
Thailand is advertised as a sexual fantasyland in which women will do whatever Western men desire—from sex to laundry. Some compare Thai prostitutes to Western ones, claiming that Thai women will do all the extras willingly because they are members of a country that is little more than a pleasure cult. On the other hand, Western women are frigid, selfish, and conniving. One anonymous tourist admitted, “It is literally impossible to pay for this level of affection in the West, not for ten dollars, not for a hundred, not for a thousand… Because the American woman is a hooker and you are a john.” Many tourists feel that they can obtain some level of intimacy with Thai women that is impossible with women at home, whether wives, girlfriends, or sex workers.
Bishop and Robinson refer back to Diderot’s conception of “Natural exotic others [who] are so relaxed about sexuality that they merrily share it with all and sundry, but when they will it, instead, the uniform tone suggests that the transaction apparently has no effect on the merriment …” One of the results of this is that financial transactions are often veiled, legitimizing the relationship in the eyes of the buyer so that it feels less like business. After spending a day or a week, sometimes even a month, with a woman, the money paid to her is considered a gesture of generosity. He acknowledges the economic hardships of her country and that her trade is not her fault, and rather than viewing himself as a sleazy man who pays for sex with teenagers, he can understand himself to be the noble benefactor of a woman who genuinely esteems him.
Guidebooks and the post-colonial sex tourist
One of the spaces in which these desires and masculinities arise is in the guidebook. Wade Wilson’s Fantasy Islands: A Man’s Guide to Exotic Women and International Travel is one example. Formations of desire in colonial travelogues like Diderot’s are ancestors of modern guides written to help the tourist navigate the exotic worlds that await him. They contain many of the same preconceptions and representations of Other sexuality. Like their colonial precursors, the readers and writers of these texts are able to pursue these dreams because of their superior capital, as Bishop and Robinson point out:
“Cultures with the power to travel and encounter (not to mention conquer) other cultures have customarily provided a representation of ‘the others’ that they encounter. ‘Exotic,’ that is, non-Western, sexual values have often played an important role in such representations, and these representations have helped to create the beliefs – the sense of entitlement, and the cultural mythopoeia which, in turn, have made for a sexual subjectivity alienated enough to motivate its possessor to board a jumbo-jet seeking its commercial realization.”
Indeed, men flock to Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the former U.S.S.R. and Eastern Bloc countries in droves. Wilson’s guide advertises “Lust Worldwide” by describing which kind of women can be wooed, obtained, and conquered in which countries. If you want a good lover try Latin America, but do not expect her to be a submissive wife, which can be better gotten in the Phillippines. Russian women will prefer you to their countrymen because they come from an abusive culture from which European and North American men provide an erotically-irresistible escape. So the book assures.
However, the guide is also saturated with reassurances for the tourist: “Asian women are as attracted to Western men as we are to them … they think we make good husbands.” “You could influence her to become a baseball fan, an opera aficionado, a gourmet cook, a tennis buff – you name it.” “Asian, Latin, and Russian women are more impressed by stability and sincerity than money and good looks.” As a final reassurance, the author cites an example of a personal friend:
Joe couldn’t believe there were so many pretty smiles among the Filipinas. He didn’t have to be handsome, outgoing, dynamic, or a great dancer to find a girlfriend. The women looked for men who were sincere, friendly, and fun to be around. If you were fat and bald, fine.
While there are undoubtedly large volumes of tourists who seek unattached, unemotional, degrading, even violent interaction with foreign prostitutes, there are also many who seek close, intimate, and prolonged encounters. The company Love Tours offers the option of going as a group of men to have sex with as many women as possible, as well as another option: “The Girlfriend Experience.” This popular option allows a tourist to spend his entire vacation with one woman who will act like a girlfriend, traveling with him, sightseeing, cooking, washing, and providing sex. Many tourists return to Asia to marry these women. (Watch the video below for a Thai woman’s side of the girlfriend experience story).
Bishop and Robinson critique sex guidebooks as “advice on how to avoid being exploited while engaged in the act of exploitation.” Wilson’s guide indeed directs where to get the best deals on sex and how to know if a certain woman might rob you. However, also evident are the insecurities in the tourist voice, gradually accumulated through life in the West, which are just as much a push factor as the Orient is a pull.
So …
Stoler observes that “sexual desire in colonial and post-colonial contexts has been a crucial transfer point of power, tangled with racial exclusions in complicated ways.” Indeed, this is no more evident in the modern world than the multi-billion dollar sex tourism industry. The roots of the racial, sexual gaze can be traced to colonial discourse and the projections of Western fantasies of pre-industrial utopias onto non-Western , colonized subjects. This racial imagination continues to drive the engine of sex tourism.
However, it is interesting to note that touristic motivations run deeper than the hunger to consume. In Hello My Big Big Honey: Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls, a French tourist writes,
I think you are very good looking (very pretty) and, first of all when I see you dancing, I am very attar cted to your lovely, young body (very sexy!) … But as we spent more time together, I start to think darling is a lovely person. You are fun to be with and have a good heart. I really enjoyed taking you places and you make old Hubert feel very young again. I say old Hubert. Please understand darling that Hubert is in his forties. Old enough to be your father! What do you think of that? Perhaps you think Hubert is a ‘dirty old man’ to have sex with a young lady … Hubert felt very good to make love to you… But there is more to life than making love. I think we became very good friends and I hope I will always stay a good friend to you. You speak only a little bit of English and I speak only a little bit of Thai, but I think we are very good for each other.
Consider the psychological process in which the tourist engages. He praises the natural and youthful body of the woman, but after indulging in that fiercely consumptive gaze, professes that he has come to think of her as a real person with attractive qualities: a friend. He apologizes for his own shortcomings, identifying with his own culture’s criticisms of him. But in his new liaison, he seeks a lifelong friendship without the judgements he has long internalized. The deeper point is, perhaps, that his alienation, his insecurity, and his longing for something validating is not unsympathetic, and perhaps a criticism of this trend requires a deeper reading of Western culture itself: Why are so many men (and women) imbued with such malaise? And here a very tricky cultural mechanism kicks in: The alternative to the loneliness, helplessness, and isolation is produced by the very same force that stirs up the malaise in the first place. The alienation and insecurity is aggressively propagated in culture, and turning your gaze on desirable Others is also a deeply programmed response. In choosing the other option—looking to the exotic for your sexual fixes and emotional connections—you perhaps unwittingly inhabit a dream predicated on domination, exploitation, and control. A dream—as steamy and sexy and affectionate as it is—of annihilation.
Note: Sex with children is prohibited by federal U.S. law even when it occurs outside of U.S. jurisdiction. It’s illegal for Americans to even engage in international travel for the purpose or effect of having sex with a minor. Facilitating the travel of others for such purposes is also illegal — even before the sexual activity has taken place. While this is obviously a difficult law to enforce, in 2005 there was an attempt to prosecute a tour operator called Big Apple Oriental Tours by, um, Eliot Spitzer, New York’s Attorney General at the time. The case was twice thrown out. There have, however, been sincere efforts to prosecute individual child sex tourists, although the number of arrests comes nowhere near the number of perpetrators worldwide. Watch ECPAT’s awareness raising video below, which is screened on some international flights.
The next post on sex tourism will explore the phenomenon of female sex tourists
Democracy Now! interviewed 
