Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Manner of Speaking]

Sex tourism: When women do it, it's called 'romance travelling'

Jeff Heinrich, The Montreal Gazette


In winter, a tourist woman's fancy lustily turns to thoughts of sex.


By the thousands they descend on the Caribbean every year, women driven by one urge: to spend a week or two sleeping with local "beach boys" and paying them back in drinks, meals, gifts and cash. And it is Quebec women -- with reputations for being financially generous and uninhibited -- who are among the best established in the island flesh trade.


On radio last month, female sex tourism was the topic of a long segment on the national CBC morning show, The Current. Host Anna Maria Tremonti interviewed, among other guests, Jeannette Belliveau, a Baltimore travel writer of Acadian origin who's written a provocative new autobiographical book called Romance on the Road.


All the coverage prompted an essential question: Is sex tourism by women any better or worse than sex tourism by men? Does it just represent a new twist on exploitation of the Third World poor -- in other words, prostitution with the roles reversed, the woman paying the man? Or is it simply a case of women exercising their right to choose what to do with their bodies?


There is no single correct answer, just points of view coloured by politics and morality. But scholars agree on one thing: Female sex tourism is common enough and big enough to merit serious academic attention. By some estimates, 600,000 western women have engaged in travel sex some time during the past 25 years -- many of them as repeat customers, returning to the tropics every winter for some sun and some action.


"Seeing it in operation, it's quite a phenomenon. There's a whole system," said Kamala Kempadoo, a global sex-trade expert who teaches at York University in Toronto. Of Guyanese descent, she did field work on female sex tourism in Negril in 2000 and 2001. "It's not just women on the beach, it's the night life. You go to a party and see couple after couple of older, quite substantial -- I mean overweight -- white women with very young, very lithe black men," Kempadoo said. "It's quite a curious thing."


The men go by many monikers. In Jamaica and other former British colonies they're called rent-a-gents, rent-a-rastas, rent-a-tutes, the foreign service. In the Dominican Republic, they're sanky pankys (a play on "hanky panky"). The tourists get nicknames too. British ones go by "Shirley Valentine" (from the 1989 hit movie about a Liverpool housewife finding liberation in Greece). In Bermuda, they're "longtails" or "yellowtails."


In Jamaica, the name depends on the woman's colour: "Milk bottles" if they're white, newly arrived and, to put it crudely, "in need of filling" (as one Negril man put it to British writer Julie Bindel in 2003). If they're black, the women are called Stellas (from the popular 1998 film How Stella Got Her Groove Back, about a black San Francisco stockbroker on holiday in Jamaica).


Canadians have made it into the slang lexicon, too. In Barbados, female sex tourism has been dubbed "Canadian secretary syndrome." In Martinique, locals refer to incoming flights of Air Canada as "Air Coucoune" -- French for "Air P u s s y."


Full article here:
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/arts/story.html?id=6f1d0124-af59-431a-b9eb-f75a5aa47882&p=2

[igotthisguitar]

Was an interesting similar expose on Yahoo the other day focusing on independent older western women & their romantic excursions with Kenyan boy-toys

Hmmmmm ... wonder why this is so suddenly becoming a "hot" topic?

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Manner of Speaking]

Because it's more interesting to discuss than JFK conspiracy theories.

[Fishead soup]

I'm just wondering if there are any good books about this subject.

Its a very interesting subject. I've read Hello, my big Honey
This is a collection of letters written to bargirls in Thailand. The Kenya version would be really interesting.

[twg]

Canadians are the biggest hos on the planet. Why they gotta go over-seas to get some?

[Fishead soup]

[Ya-ta Boy]

Just an idle thought passing through...don't take it too seriously: If Canadian women are so randy that they have to travel thousands of miles to get laid, are Canadian men spending too much time playing hockey and not enough time tending to business?

[Faunaki]

Canadian men are too fat. Duh.

[Hanson]

[PGF]

two words

pou
tine

[Manner of Speaking]

[peppermint]

[Manner of Speaking]

[The Bobster]

No one's yet addressed the idea, though : IS it different if women do it?

Is it "getting your groove back," or is it economic exploitation in Third World countries.

I think MOS is trying to get at the notion that some forms of behavior are considered exploitative if done by men, but not so much so if done by women.

One difference I might cite is that prostitution of women is often mafia-controlled, or otherwise involving pimps, and hence is quite frequently nothing more or less than slavery, and slavery of women by men. I don't think organized crime is interested in what the young men in the Carib are doing with the middle-aged cougars from up north, so maybe I'm wrong.