From Traveling for Enjoyment to Traveling for Eroticism: Tracing the Negotiation Between Sex and Tourism with Reference to some Famous Non-Asian Films

Abstract

Tourism is not only a form of short-term migration that involves excessive consumerism in a colonial setting, where the paying client is served in the way in which colonial elites were served, by servants whose mobilities tend to be far more limited. There’s more than this, as there is religious tourism, business tourism, intellectual tourism and some other types. However, tourism bears in its consumerist excess the urge to engage in sexual experiences. Sex has been a part of tourism for a very long time. As Martin Oppermann says, ‘‘While some countries may be more renowned for the availability of commercial sex, sex tourism exists everywhere”. Men (predominantly) travel from more developed countries to less developed ones in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean for sex that is either not available or more expensive or qualitatively less pleasurable at home. But this is not restricted to men, because there is now a stream of discreet travel by affluent western women to places in the Caribbean and Africa, where sex with local men is explicitly anticipated. However, Heidi Dahles and Karon Bras also note similar relationships developing between local beach boys (who develop an ‘entrepreneurial romance’ style) and western women tourists in Indonesia. According to many recent analysts, sex is not motivated purely by the “consummation of commercial sexual relations”, and there are “complex processes by which individuals choose to seek sexual gratification, first within prostitution and secondly as part of the tourist experience”. Whether characterised as “sex” tourism (commercial sex with the locals) or “romance” tourism (commercial sex with the trappings of a “real” relationship), this practice has inspired a good deal of academic research in the social sciences and popular literature as well. This paper offers, therefore, a critical analysis of the selected films focusing on the varied motivations that contemporary popular culture passionately pursues in its quest to gratify sexual impulses, even within the context of tourism.