|
Western, white, male sex tourists have been travelling to ‘Third World’ countries for many years and there is nothing new about the sexual exploitation of local women in this context. Indeed, there is long history of sexual exploitation of women under colonial rule and western men have long projected racist fantasies onto the ‘primitive’/natural Other. But the long haul tourist industry is turning this kind of post-colonial fantasy into an item of mass consumption. Sex guides written by white western men, such as Travel and the Single Male by Bruce Cassier tap into the idea of ‘difference’ to justify the sexual exploitation of Black women in these countries. They tell tourists that prostitution does not have the same meaning in the Caribbean as prostitution in the West. The sex guides say that Caribbean women are not really prostitutes but ‘nice’ girls who like to have a good time. A key component of sex tourism is the objectification of a sexualised racialised 'Other’. As author and self-confessed sex tourist Bruce Cassier says: "You think of those incredible....women, ranging in colour from white chocolate to dark chocolate, available to you at the subtle nod of your head or touch-of-your-hat." The racist stereotype of the exotic and erotic Black woman is also an image that is used to sell sex tourism in countries like the Dominican Republic and Cuba. ‘Blackness’ and the ideology which constructs it, is part of the commodity that sex tourists are buying.
Sex tourists are not an homogenous group: they may be women or men, Black, Asian or white, homosexual or heterosexual, middle class or working class. Numerically, the main group of sex tourists are Western, white, heterosexual men. However it is important to recognise that even amongst this group, there is diversity in terms of sexual interests and attitudes towards prostitute use. Although it is necessary to recognise differences between sex tourists in terms of their sexual practices, I want to tentatively suggest that sex tourism offers all of them opportunities to affirm a particular ‘racialised’ and gendered identity. So far as white male sex tourists are concerned, it is not just cheap sex that they pursue. They also like travelling to ‘Third World’ countries because they feel that somehow the proper order between the genders and between the ‘races’ is restored. Women and girls are at their command, Blacks and Hispanics and Asians are serving them, shining their shoes, cleaning their rooms and so on. All is as it should be.
Back home, Black political activism and feminist politics have challenged and undermined the unquestioned power which gave some white men a sense of self from their gender and racialised
identity. In this sense, sex tourists find that their masculinity and racialised power is affirmed in ways that it is not at home. For
example, sex tourists described how they loved the Dominican Republic because as white
Westerners, they were placed at the apex of the social, economic and racial
hierarchy. Two Canadians explained that in Canada, the welfare system penalised hard working individuals like themselves and rewarded the idle and
"lazy" Blacks who lived off the state.
As we talked, two shoeshine boys aged eight and ten, approached offering to shine their shoes. We were in a bar and it had gone midnight, yet these children were walking around barefoot looking for tourist shoes to shine in order to earn money for their families. One of these sex tourists said: "In Canada, those kids would be sat in front of cable TV. Their parents’d be on welfare, and the whole family would be just watching TV. I know. I’m a real estate dealer, I see those people, how they live. They don’t want to work. They just get their welfare, and it’s the tax payer who gets the bill." Like many other sex tourists, these men were resentful of Blacks having even basic rights in Canada and prefer to see women and children
prostituting themselves instead of "sponging" of the state. "At least they do something in return," they remarked.
But sex tourists can also give expression to more subtle forms of racism. Some also want to believe that they are inverting the hostile ‘race relations’ in their own country by mixing with Blacks in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Their sexual relations with prostitutes become part and parcel of learning about the ‘real culture’, promoting racial harmony and reversing fears about ‘race’ conflict. While in their own countries they feel unable to approach Black men and women, when they travel they ‘get close’ to ‘Others’ and really bridge differences. A photographer from London complained that in London, "Coloured people keep to themselves," and that Black girls "won’t go out" with him. However in Cuba his economic power meant that he was approached by Black people, something which he took to imply that in "Cuba there is no racism."
It is not only anxieties about racialised power that are calmed, but also anxieties about gender. Sex tourists are also very resentful of women’s perceived power in the West. They fear Western women’s ability to reject their sexual advances and are alarmed by their demands for equality. A 37 year old market trader in Cuba argued that British women demand too much from men:
"It's
funny, but in England, the girls I fancy don't fancy me and the ones that do fancy me, I don't
fancy. They tend to be sort of fatter and older, you know, 35, but their faces, they look 40. But in Cuba, really beautiful girls fancy me. They're all over me. They treat me like a star. My girlfriend's jet black, she's
beautiful. She's a ballerina. She's so fit it puts me to shame
really. I don't get much exercise... Women in England want too much
nowadays... I'm a market trader, but I've done quite well for
myself. I bought a house on the Isle of Dogs before the property boom, and I made a lot of money on
that. So I'm residing in Wimbledon now. But English girls, they want someone with a good job as well as money. They don't want someone like me. They want a lawyer or a doctor or
something, they want to move up in the world, and I can't blame
them... Cuban girls don't expect so much. If you take a Cuban girl out for
dinner, she's grateful, whereas an English girl, she's grateful but she wants more
really."
Prostitute women in the Hispanic
Caribbean, by contrast, neither challenge nor demand anything very much from male sex
tourists. Another sex tourist, a policeman from the US told me he liked going to the Dominican Republic because there he became a desirable object much in
demand. "In the States," he said, "there are 20 men for every girl, here there are 20 girls for every man, and all of them eager to
please." A couple of Yorkshire miners also enthused about how the girls they were with had not only had sex with
them, but also washed their feet on the beach, put sun tan lotion on their
backs, cleaned their rooms and fought over them, all for a mere $US25.
Having conducted interview research with male sex workers in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, in August 1997, I conducted preliminary research on female sex tourism in
Negril, Jamaica. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 45 individuals involved in the informal sex industry and female sex
tourists. Data was also gathered from a questionnaire administered to an opportunistic sample of 86
tourists. The survey found that almost half of single women had entered into one or more sexual relationship with Jamaican men while on holiday. Although this was a non-random
sample, and generalisations cannot be advanced on the basis of
it, what one can conclude is that some women travel for sex in much the same way that some men do.
Moreover, it seems that female sex tourists are very similar to male sex tourists in terms of their attitudes and motivations and the narratives they use to justify their
behaviour. Just as male sex tourism can be understood as an attempt to affirm a given racialised and gendered
identity, so female sex tourism appears to reflect a concern to reverse and restore a particular order and to ensure their own position and power within that
order.
Women have traditionally used travelling as a way of masculinising their identities rather than as a way of affirming their femininity. Today, some female sex tourists are travelling in order to penetrate traditional male domains, claiming traditional male powers to reaffirm their femininity. It is important for many female sex tourists to affirm their sense of 'womanliness' by being sexually desired by men. Women who feel rejected by men in the West for being ‘sort of fatter and older, you know, 35, but their faces, they look 40’, find that in Jamaica all this is reversed. Here they are chased and ‘romanced’, sweet talked and 'loved' by men and once again find that they exist as sexual objects. Sex tourism allows some Western women to sexualise their bodies in ways that would be difficult to achieve back home and to be desired by highly desirable men .
When asked to describe 'boyfriends' in the questionnaire most of the female sex tourists emphasised how for them Black Jamaican men possessed bodies of great sexual value. One woman described her lover as ‘sweet, friendly, gorgeous-great body’, and another as ‘Handsome, physically fit, 27 year old, honest, proud, serious, family man, excellent lover’. Black bodies become commodities which allow affluent Western women (both Black and white women) to experience an alternative form of embodied power. In this case they are allowed to be in control of masculinities which are ‘Black’, ‘hypersexual’ and ‘dangerous’. This type of female sex tourist does not want to establish a loving relationship with a Jamaican man and take him back to meet her parents nor does she challenge racism back home. Rather such women accept the notion of a racial hierarchy and welcome their position in it. Tourist destinations become a safe environment within which female sex tourists can enact control over a masculinity which is imagined stereotypically as aggressive and violent.
Even Western women who live up to Western ideals of beauty participate in sex tourism because they can use their greater economic power and/or racialised identities to exercise control over the relationships into which they enter with Jamaican men. One Jamaican in his 20’s who sold tour boat rides to tourists and also approached tourist women for ‘friendships’ told me of one relationship he had with an older, attractive white American divorcee in her 40’s: "Well, she tell me straight up front she start that she have three kids and she don’t want to get involved. We could do this, we could do that. She don’t want no personal relationship. One day you don’t hear from me, things happen, you must take it just like that because it’s not a long term relationship, ya know."
Such control means these women can limit the risk of being rejected or humiliated. As a woman remarked about the end of one such relationship "I got more out of him than he got out of me." They can also transgress sexual, gendered, racialised and age boundaries. Where at home they would be stigmatised for having legitimate or casual relations with Black men, younger men, ‘womanisers’ or for having many sexual partners, in holiday resorts such as Negril they are permitted to ‘consume’ the Black male, the younger boy, the playboy or as many men as they desire while maintaining their honour and reputation back home. Their sense of racialised superiority in Caribbean countries, together with their economic power also puts them on a level with white men and for once they can experience feeling more powerful than a man.
At a theoretical level, the most interesting feature of sex tourism is how locals involvement rests on using their ‘Blackness’ as part of the commodity that they are selling. For along with the actual services, whether it be acting as a guide, fruit seller, artist, or gigolo/prostitute, they are selling part of their personal self.
So long as it remains acceptable to use 'difference' as the Caribbean's unique selling point, the tourist industry will continue to provide a framework which permits (even encourages) sex tourism. This in turn serves to entrench not only inequalities between the West and developing countries, but also the very forms of racism and sexism which structure patterns of exclusion and exploitation. |
