Sex Tourism

Marginal People and Liminalities

Michael C. Hall, Chris Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415195096
• eBook ISBN: 9781134646975
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Sex Tourism examines the issues which emerge from sex worker-client interactions and from tourists visiting 'sex destinations'. It is a comprehensive summary of past research by academics and original primary and secondary research by the authors and has examples from Asia, Australasia and the USA.

The authors have generated new models to show different dimensions of sex tourism, which normalise at least some components of the sex industry, and represent a new way of looking at sex tourism by challenging the preconceived perceptions that some people have of sex tourism or confirm the impression of others. Sex Tourism looks at issues of importance to those working in tourism, women's studies, gender studies and social change.

1
Holidays, sex and identity

A history of social development

If this book is be more than yet another description of sex tourism, illustrated by vignettes of tourist–sex worker interactions, it is necessary to generate a conceptual framework within which such encounters can be understood. The approach selected is an adaptation of what Turner (1982) has termed ‘comparative symbology’, that is, a comparative study and interpretation of symbols, but one within a wider socio-economic and political framework. It will be argued that both tourist and prostitute are symbols of, and actors seeking, needs generated by a wider social context formed by the modern era ushered in by the Industrial Revolution. Essential to this argument is the contention that both are marginal or liminal people. As marginal people, both tourists and prostitutes have had, at least in Western societies, their roles defined by hegemonies of power, and unless regard is paid to those structures, then at best any description of sex tourism remains but that – a description. Thus this first chapter seeks to establish tourism and that part of tourism known as ‘sex tourism’ within a historical context and a specific discourse. Within this explanation a number of themes are expounded, implied and hinted at, and in due course throughout this book, these facets will be elaborated and brought to the foreground. First, it will be argued that being a tourist is to occupy a liminal role within a temporal marginality. It will subsequently be argued that this is important in our understanding of sex tourism as in the western world the prostitute is also marginalised. The act of sex tourism can therefore be explained as an interaction between two sets of liminal people – but with a difference. The one, the tourist, is enacting a socially sanctioned and economically empowered marginality, while the second, the prostitute, is stigmatised as a whore, a woman of the night, as the scarlet woman. Yet, as will be described, such stigmatisation is now being challenged, made ambiguous and respectability sought by emphasising the role of female labour within the terminology of being a sex worker. Additionally, any analysis which focuses on women alone as prostitutes is but partial as male strippers and prostitutes are an emerging sector of the sex industry, while homosexual and lesbian holiday markets utilising sex for reasons of relaxation and self-identification are also of growing importance.

Thus, a second theme will be hinted at within this historical review, and that is the process of the holiday as a source of self-identification. Thus, for MacCannell (1976:4) the tourist seeks to find the ‘structures of modernity’ and uses leisure, and holidays, as arenas in which the fragmented modern may recover his or her sense of structure. But the question has to be asked, why is there a necessity in the modern world to use these demarcated periods for such purposes? A neo-Marxist analysis is provided which answers the question by noting the changing modes of production and the commodification of many things in our lives, and the emergence of the tourist as a consumer. Again, links between tourism and prostitution will be noted in this introduction for later analysis. If our periods of escape from the role of worker are commodified, so too, it has been often argued by feminists, sex work is about the commodification (and degradation) of female sexuality (for example, see Dworkin, 1988). Both processes are thus linked to wider social change. But, just as both forms of commodification are reactions to these wider processes of industrialisation – processes which incidentally devalue the non-paid work roles assumed by many in our society – notably those of house-bound women – so too both tourism and sex work contain potentialities to confirm the sense of self that Marx ([1844] 1964) saw as being alienated by modernism. The third theme incorporated within this review attempts to include descriptions of sociopolitical order in terms of dominant hegemonies that have implications for the development of tourism in general and sex tourism in particular. It will also be apparent from such a viewpoint that both tourism and prostitution possess dangerous forces; forces that, while subordinate to the mainstream of society, by their very presence challenge the norms of the dominant. Their existence continues to represent alternative lifestyles. From a positive stance, in the one case of non-work against work, and in the other, the unwillingness of some women to accept low incomes and thus use their sexuality as sources of income and self-image. However, it is readily recognised that these marginalities also represent the reinforcement of consumerism and the exploitation of women – but, then, ambiguity is inherent in the very nature of liminality.

It may, at first sight, seem strange to begin a book concerned with sex tourism with reference to, however briefly, the wider societal transition from pre-industrial patterns of leisure and work to contemporary situations. But the existing patterns of tourism and prostitution, and their inter-relationships, have common roots in the evolution of our society. It is true that the stigmatisation of prostitutes as fallen women existed before the Industrial Revolution, but it was this period of modernity that legalised, yet made ambivalent, the concept of the prostitute as a diseased woman – an attribution arguably made all the easier because the object vilified was female. Yet, simultaneously it was this same period that created a discourse of sex that fantasised and objectified women – it is for example interesting to compare the works of a Zola with their social intensity and descriptions of courtesans or the anonymous Victorian English author of My Secret Life with the bawdy tales of a Geoffrey Chaucer, Rabelais or the adventures of a Moll Flanders or Tom Jones. Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution was also a period of empire building and a perceptual construction of an exotic other which engaged the sensual and sexual senses of Victorian England and the Anglo-Saxon world if not nineteenth-century Europe. In short, many of the attitudes that exist today towards sex, tourism and sex tourism have their historical antecedents in movements of the last two hundred years, and to ignore these is to only partially understand how we have reached the current position and why within prostitution and tourism there lie responses of coping with and challenges to the status quo. It is a status quo born of complex socio-political-economic power structures, and thus any summary of a holistic over-view will be selective, incomplete, but hopefully sufficient to show that the themes of marginality, self-identity and economic-political hegemony are important in any analysis of sex tourism.

As tourists and prostitutes are both real in themselves, but symbolic of the consequences of industrialisation and the later commodification of services and values associated with postmodernism, it may be advantageous to define some terms. As Turner (1982) notes, comparative symbology is narrower than semiotics but wider than symbolic anthropology. Semiotics incorporates three branches of study of the nature and relationships of signs in language, namely:

1 Syntactics – the formal relationship and organisation of signs and labels within language, the syntax of language.

2 Semantics – the relationship of signs and symbols to the things to which they refer.

3 Pragmatics – the relationship of signs and symbols with their users.

The concern of this analysis is not with the technical aspects, the syntactics involved with symbology, but with the relationships between users of touristic and sexual services. Its concerns lie with the symbols they represent within a wider society, the way in which they are represented by power structures within that society and the ways in which interactions between prostitutes and tourists are played out within these relationships of power and symbolism. It has already been stated that sex tourism within this analysis is perceived as an interaction between two marginal groups, tourists and sex workers, and thus this analysis develops that commenced by Ryan and Kinder (1996a, 1996b). They concluded that conventional descriptions of deviancy were not sufficient to explain either the behaviour of the tourist who sought the services of prostitutes, and neither do such concepts fully explain the role of the prostitute in contemporary society.

What then is meant by liminal or marginal people? Liminal people are threshold people existing betwixt and between. They exist in an ambiguous position between ‘positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (Turner, 1969:95). Turner notes that liminal entities may be disguised, wearing only a strip of clothing, or even going naked among preindustrial societies, thereby signing that they have no status, property, or insignia. How pertinent is it that the tourist sunbathes with little clothing, and the discerning symbol of the prostitute is the short, figure-hugging mini-skirt and low-cut dress? Boyle describes the ‘work gear dictated by clients’ demands and the environment’. Writing about ‘Maria’ she says:

If she is street walking, she opts for either a red leather mini-dress and thigh-length boots or black four-inch stiletto-heeled shoes, stockings and suspenders. They are carefully positioned to show just below the dress or a black stretch skirt which barely skims her thighs. Accompanying the skirt will be a lacy, gravity-defying basque which attempts to encompass her magnificent bosom.

(1994:131)

In an earlier period Mayhew ([1851] 1999:416) draws our attention to the power of undress, dress and their significance as signifiers of the marginal. He cites one prostitute who says of herself, ‘I have good feet too, and as I find they attract attention, I always parade them. And I’ve hooked many a man by showing my ankle on a wet day.’ In the next paragraph Mayhew refers to ‘black silk cloaks or light grey mantles – many with silk paletots and wide skirts, extended by an ample crinoline’, but just as Odzer (1994) was to note a century and half later, a hierarchy existed wherein at the bottom in the Haymarket were ‘wornout prostitutes or other degraded women, some of them married, yet equally degraded in character (Mayhew, [1851] 1999:417).

Lodge (1992), in his novel, Paradise News, describes tourists dressed in shell suits and shorts – signs of being a tourist. Both representations are concerned with a display of the body and nakedness or near nakedness are involved. Yet, the realism of the display is that it is not the appearance of glamourised bodies seen in pin-up calendars. The short, the fat, and the skinny are revealed and both tourists and prostitute have to come to the truth of their bodily appearance even while both hide and display the body at the same time. Annie Sprinkle’s list of reasons as to why whores are heroes contains, at numbers 13 and 37, the reasons ‘Whores wear exciting clothes’ and ‘Whores are not ashamed to be naked’ (Sprinkle and Gates, 1997). Thus again the ambiguity, the dialectical tension of opposites is evident within this marginal behaviour. In conversation with the first author, Michelle, a former sex worker in New Zealand, commented that there were many ambiguities in the dress worn by prostitutes. The point of dressing was to enhance the body, but one dresses to become naked, but naked in a flattering environment. There is, she commented, ‘the sensuality of undressing – one dresses to undress’.

Within marginal groups, states Turner (1974), there exists a sense of communitas, of homogeneity and comradeship – they possess an area of common living. This is almost literally true for sex work. Areas of prostitution, termed ‘red light’ areas, offer mutual support systems for their inhabitants. Women on the street take down the number plates of cars that their fellow women get into in case there is any trouble. Clients, pimps, workers and drug pushers mark out territories so as to more easily sustain social relationships. It is consistent with the theories of liminality that the safety of such areas is fragile and what, at least for the client, they offer is the opportunity for anonymity (Ryan and Kinder, 1996a). So too with tourism. As is noted below, tourists are found in purpose-built tourist spaces. It can be objected that these relate solely to mass tourism, but in response two viewpoints may be held. One may hold to the position of Boorstin (1963) that these are the epitome of tourism, and not to be present at such a place means that one is a traveller. Boorstin defines the modern experience of tourism thus:

[But] the experience of going there, the experience of being there, and what is brought back from there are all very different. The experience has become diluted, contrived, prefabricated.

The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks, and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.

(Boorstin, 1963:88)

For Boorstin these facts described the very character of modern tourism – from the perspective of an analysis of tourists as marginal people it seems to describe an essence of liminality. The tourist exists in an irregular world that is both strange and familiar. At the other extreme even Cohen’s (1979) ‘drifters’ are notable by their style and by their tendency to drift towards certain roles and places. Travellers too are marginal persons, members in but not part of the crowd. For Bauman (1994) and the concept of tourist–traveller as flâneur, the tourist is one who

[goes] for a stroll as one goes to the theatre … (in the crowd but not of the crowd), taking in those strangers as ‘surfaces’ – so that ‘what one sees’ exhausts ‘what they are’, and above all seeing and knowing them episodically … rehearsing human reality as a series of episodes, that is events without past and with no consequences.

(1994:27)

Marginality assumes further importance by reason of temporality and transition. The tourist assumes the role of non-worker. The holiday trip is characterised by stages of preparation, absorption into the tourist role and then re-entry to the mainstream world. Each stage may be characterised by small rites – the process of checking in for flights, the purchase of holiday clothing, and the development of the photographs after the trip. The prostitute occupies other roles besides being a ‘working woman’. She is mother, student, partner. As noted she dons the costume of the night – an act of ritual wherein the dress conveys power. Kasl (1989:154) writes ‘[the] addiction part is the ritual of getting dressed, putting on makeup, fantasising about the hunt, and the moment of capture. To know that you go out there and they would come running. What power!’ Thus Kasl demonstrates another paradox about the state of marginality, and that is the dialectic between powerlessness and power. The woman who is disdained is the woman with power over men. Likewise the tourist as hedonist, someone apart from the Puritan work ethnic, is pampered by an industry that recognises such hedonism as the reward of work. The non-worker, normally a position of powerlessness, possesses power over the worker. The reality, as Marx would have pointed out, is that such power is exercised by cash. But the differences of each respective marginality, sanctioned or condemned by society, again become evident. The working girl exercises a power to earn cash; the tourist exercises a power due to the possession of money. Hence the possibility that the tourist may purchase the services of the prostitute or other sex workers. There...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Holidays, sex and identity
• 2 Tourism and prostitution
• 3 Paradigms of sex tourism
• 4 Bodies, identity, self-fulfilment and self-denial
• 5 Bodies on the margin
• 6 Sexual slavery
• 7 The role of the state
• 8 Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index