Foreign tourists sunbathe on Kuta beach on Indonesia's island of Bali, March 25, 2010
BOSTON — The arrests this week of 28 "beach boys" in Indonesia —
accused by the authorities of selling sex to female tourists —
highlights a surging global phenomenon.
GlobalPost correspondents and editors have observed this brand of
female sex tourism in many corners of the world, including Jamaica, Jordan, Senegal, Ukraine
and elsewhere. There is a growing body of work by film documentarians
and authors chronicling what appears to be a thriving subculture. At
resorts, beach communities and tourist attractions from Egypt to
Indonesia, women with disposable incomes are negotiating with local men
who are in the business of offering the service of convenient coupling
for female tourists on holiday.
The recent arrests, on the island of Bali, coincided with the release of
a documentary on the resort's "gigolos." The film, "Cowboys in
Paradise" — which contains candid interviews with local men and the
foreign women who fall for them — had gone viral on the internet but has
since been removed from the official website by its makers. Here's a
YouTube trailer.
It's by no means the first attempt to describe a phenomenon that,
according to Jeannette Belliveau, author of a book exploring the subject
— "Romance on the Road" — is "going on everywhere from Fiji to Peru,
well outside of the Caribbean and Africa and southern Europe."
GlobalPost correspondents Tom A. Peter in Jordan and Anne Look in
Senegal report that business for the local men — and in many instances
boys — who seek out foreign women, usually on vacation, has never been
better.
Peter, based in Amman, traveled to Jordan's south,
where many foreign women — particularly Europeans — test the definition
of tourism by becoming sexually, even romantically, involved with local
guides and other tourism industry workers.
Look, meantime, found the beaches of Senegal
to be rich pickings for European women "of a certain age" who
proposition young men, invariably trapped in a cycle of relentless
poverty, for sex in exchange for "gifts" like electronics and often
cold, hard cash. Many of these women claim they're just doing what
middle-aged men have been doing for centuries: taking up with someone
half their age and giving them an all-expenses-paid ride in exchange for
sex.
Female sex tourism, though certainly less pronounced than the male
equivalent — and arguably more taboo — has provoked ongoing debate as
the subject of writers, filmmakers and researchers for decades.
J. Michael Seyfert in his recent cult hit film "Rent-a-Rasta,"
follows the lives of Jamaican men who offer their "services," be it
companionship or sex, to foreign women in exchange for money, gifts or
even the promise of a better future abroad. The 2006 film's opening even
quotes a popular 1980s American movie, "How Stella Got her Groove Back":
"Sex tourism, a product of slavery, is not new to the Caribbean. Every
year, over 80,000 middle-aged women flock to Jamaica to get their groove
back."
The 2006 film "Heading South," focuses on a group of middle-aged
American and European women who visit dirt-poor Haiti in the late 1970s
and link up with local boys (few are out of their teens) eager to
provide sex to middle-aged female guests who lavish them with money and
gifts. In the film, the 55-year-old American "Ellen" speaks
matter-of-factly about the practice: "I always told myself that when I'm
old I'd pay young men to love me."
The reasons Western women travel and engage in liaisons, brief or
otherwise, with local men are also the subject of non-fiction. In
"Romance on the Road," Baltimore native Belliveau pulls together an
impressive array of statistics and writes of her own and other women's
experiences as single travelers.
"I look in my book ... at how conquering soldiers through time have
taken local women as part of the spoils of that clash of encounters.
Today, the conquering hero is the Western woman who has a good job as a
nurse or professional or writer or whatever. And she can have her pick
of men," she said. "The transaction isn’t just simple money for sex at
all. I’m 1,000 percent sure none of the women I talked to [for her book]
paid for anything. "Their story was: 'I made love with a Fijian guy in
the surf in Maui.'"
Laughing, she continues: "It was always in water. Another was in a
bathtub with a Maori in New Zealand. A third one was in the Red Sea in
Egypt.
"And it was all very much heat of the moment. It wasn’t, 'I’m going to the Dominica Republic to pay Pablo the going rate.'"
Source
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar