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

In an article from the Montreal Gazette, Jeff Heinrich exposes the hypocricy men face. Indeed, no intelligent man would admit being interested in sex with women from another country.

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.


Email to a friend

Printer friendly
Font:****Sex tourists, they're called. Or as some prefer it, "romance travellers" looking for "love" and a little tenderness in the tropics.

This is the season -- building to a peak in February and March -- when business in Jamaica, Barbados and the Dominican Republic heats up.

THE SEX TRADE IN THE ISLANDS IS BOOMING, BUT IT'S WOMEN WHO ARE LOOKING TO SCORE

Unlike most years, though, this winter's parade comes with a heap of advance media publicity. In 2006, there was lots:

On the screen and DVD, two movies dealt with the subject: Vers le sud, a French film based on stories by Quebec author Dany Laferriere, starring Charlotte Rampling as a British sex-seeker in late-1970s Haiti; and Rent-a-Rasta, a 45-minute U.S. documentary about women who flock to Jamaica in search of the "big bamboo" and the young Rastafarians who cater to them.

On the stage, there was Sugar Mummies, a much-reviewed play in London's Royal Court Theatre in August that starred Montreal-born Lynda Bellingham as a midlife hedonist in Negril, the Jamaican sun resort.

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."

and here is rest