Gender and Sexual Experiences of Tourism

“Although prostitution may involve an immoral exploitation of human beings (Hirschman 1991; Truong 1990), and sex slavery certainly does so (Aisbett and Malan 1993; Hornblower 1993; Sherrill 1993), the patronage of prostitutes is plausibly the oldest form of consumer behavior. Nevertheless, prostitution has been studied to a very limited degree by consumer researchers (Ostergaard 1993)” (Belk, 1994). Belk, 1994). The growth of sex work reflects the power of increasingly globalized flows of capital, policy, directives and information to draw places that were once “off the map” into very closer networks of commodified trade and exchange. Men’s and women’s experiences of tourism have been understood very differently, especially their experiences of sex tourism. This is partly due to a rather commonly held assumption about sex tourism that suggests western men travel to foreign countries to engage in sexual relations with (younger, Other) local women (Cohen, 1982; 1986; Enloe, 1989; Cohen, 1993; Seabrook, 1997; Phillip and Dann, 1998; Jeffreys, 2003). There has been some acknowledgement that western women can also engage in sexual relationships with foreign men as part of their holiday experience. However, discussions around women who engage in similar sexual activities have been much more debated within the social sciences and strikingly absent from our field -although research on gender in consumer research is established and its dissemination widespread through ACR and ACR gender conferences. Why do foreign women go “crazy” about local men? This is a question much heard among tourists and local townspeople during my long ethnography in the Dominican Republic. This question in itself contains a set of assumptions about the incongruence of situations where female sexuality might be seen as unusual and even problematic. In this research, I try to map the plural female consumer representations and lived experiences of heterosexual desires outside their cultural group and mediated by the global tourism industry, especially in the context of a third world country where local men are definitely seen as questionable sexual partners for foreign women. This is to move from the biological deterministic explanation of female sexuality to material and social conceptualization of sexualitya construct much lacking investigation in consumer research.