Sex Tourism

Travel and tourism are major venues for modern consumption. Together, these sectors employ close to 8 percent of all workers and produce 9.4 percent of the world's gross domestic product (Brents et al. 2010). Sex tourism, a multibillion dollar industry, refers to travel through tourist sectors and structures for the primary purpose of sexual relations with residents at the destination. It can be categorized as domestic (within a country) or international (across borders) and divided into commercial (prostitution) or noncommercial activity (acquaintance sex). Globalization and the interconnection of world markets combined with an international environment conducive to commodified sexuality have aided its growth. So have online technologies, air travel, ground transport, and supportive business infrastructures such as hotel and hotel-related industries.

Tourism, in general, provides the opportunity to blend desires to escape ordinary time and familiar space and geography with consumption. Thus, tourism fits squarely into a globalized consumer culture as it allows the modern traveler to travel to a new locale to purchase adventure, leisure, exotic location, sun, fun, food, drink, goods, and services. In sex tourism, consumption is extended to the purchase of an affordable person(s) for a single or prolonged interlude. Importantly, the international commercial sex industry also promotes the person for purchase as a particular commodity, a gendered and raced exotic and erotic “other.” To be a sex tourist, therefore, is not only to purchase a sexual service, but to consume a person (“a sex worker”) outside of one's experience and locality. For instance, Peter Chow-White's review of the discourse of sex tourist websites and discussion forums shows that international sex workers are marketed as dependent, submissive, and sexually available, in opposition to so-called liberated Western women. Furthermore, the race/ethnicity of international sex workers is advertised as part of their supposed “natural” and “instinctive” sexuality. Finally, to purchase a sex worker is also to purchase the visceral experience of a landscape, or what Jessica Jacobs and others have called an “emotional geography.”

Sex tourists may be men or women, although research indicates that typically men are tourists and, typically, women or girls are the sought commodity. Tourists and workers may be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or transgendered. Their “tastes” and motivations vary—some seek women, some seek men, and some seek children. They share the fact that their travel involves the purchase of sexual and/or relational services.

Some sex tourists make arrangements in advance through online industries or social networks. For instance, through websites they can access promotional videos, guidebooks, and discussion forums where “consumers” discuss how to organize sex tours, how to choose and interact with workers, and where to experience the sexual encounter. Others organize services at the destination or encounter them situationally (e.g., on the beach). Importantly, these transactions involve different power relationships: tourists have more socioeconomic power than workers to purchase experiences, define their terms, and leave the destination location. Indeed, Sheila Jeffreys advocates the use of the term prostitution tourism in place of sex tourism, saying that sex tourism “normalizes” the phenomenon as “mutual fun and entertainment” while hiding the “gendered nature of the behavior” and the “harm done by it” (2009, 131).

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