Sex tourism inverted

Posted By Christine Y. Chen Monday, December 17, 2007 - 11:45 AM Share

When you heard the words "sex tourism," one image usually comes to mind: a sleazy, older white man with a beer in one hand and an underage Asian girl in the other, strolling along some beach in Thailand. But now a new kind of sex tourism is on the rise. According to a recent Reuters story, older white women are now flocking to Kenya to seek out sex with younger African men. There are no official statistics, but locals in Mombasa tell Reuters they estimate one out of five single foreign female tourists are in search of sex.

Some argue that this is more acceptable than traditional sex tourism. As one commentator at Salon points out, the men are usually physically stronger and able to dominate their female "escorts" if necessary. Besides the swapping of gender roles, there's one other key difference between these women and the typical male sex tourist—what the women are doing is not illegal. That's because the guys they hook up with are adults, and the sex is consensual. As one 56-year-old British woman told Reuters:

It's a social arrangement. I buy him a nice shirt and we go out for dinner. For as long as he stays with me he doesn't pay for anything, and I get what I want -- a good time. How is that different from a man buying a young girl dinner?"

Well, yeah, I suppose it's not that different; it's equally unsavory. No matter what, it's incredibly stupid to have casual sex with strangers in a country with a 6.9 percent AIDS rate. Moreover, there's still a major power differential. It's still about wealthy Westerners preying on the poor.

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