Sex Tourism- Alexa Campagna

This past spring break, I travelled to Madrid with a friend. Each night, we would intentionally lose our bearings and amble down hidden side streets teaming with quaint restaurants and bars and patrons consisting mostly of local Madrileños. After my friend and I decided that we had spent a sufficient amount of time on our ritual nighttime walks, we would take the same path home every night, forcing us to cross a large, highly populated pedestrian-only street that was fraught with English-speaking tourists. This street was the red light district of Madrid, with prostitutes soliciting sex and standing in nearly every doorway in seductive dress, ready and willing to exchange their goods (i.e., their bodies) for the goods of the consumers (i.e., money). Similar to Amsterdam and Havana, these exotic prostitutes were entirely women and their clientele, judging by the fact that they were working in a populated densely populated by tourists, mainly consisted of wealthy male tourists looking for some “danger” and adventure on vacation.

             What was most interesting to me about this reading were the ways in which the same global forces impact sex work in both Havana and Cuba, yet in vastly different ways. Through an “open embracement” of sex tourism by the Dutch government, a large presence of migrants for whom sex work is the only viable source of employment, a boom in the sex industry and an accompanying boom in sex-seeking tourists, and an increase in regulation to “improve the situation of sex workers,” Amsterdam seems to legitimize and minimize the immoralities of sex work. Amsterdam’s economy is heavily reliant upon and stimulated by money that is being spent by tourists that seek the tolerance for prostitution and narcotic use that their home countries lack. Sex tourism in Amsterdam successfully expanded and globalized through the immigration of female migrants who, due to ethnic discrimination, had little choice but to find employment through demeaning sex work. Although much of this sex work takes place in more private settings like “private houses, escort services, and street prostitution,” nothing is as commodifying as the way in which sex workers try to sell their services in the more visible and public settings. Sex tourism in Amsterdam is merely window-shopping for “otherly” bodies.

            In Havana, however, sex tourism is a more “subtle trade,” in which local women seduce wealthier male tourists who provide them with money in exchange, not only for sex, but for short-term companionship, friendship, and a date for the evening. What shocks me the most about this concept of “emotional labor” is that men begin to believe that these women truly enjoy working in this field and that they care more about pleasing the customer than getting paid at the end of the night. This type of outlook, in my opinion, fuels sex tourism, giving the illusion that men are in a relationship with these women and not simply engaging in sexual acts with a stranger that they barely know, making the whole transaction seem less commodifying. Instead of the globalization of sex tourism through a mass influx of migrants desperate for work and lenient policies facilitating the sex trade as seen in Amsterdam, Havana’s rise in sex tourism is due greatly to an increase in the number of hotels in the 1950s and the mid-1990s. An economic downturn in the late 1990s encouraged many women to partake in the lucrative business of sex tourism. Unlike the female migrants in Amsterdam, who had little choice but to take on this line of work, the local Cuban females were lured into the field of sex tourism due to their “rising material desires” and the possibility of massive profiting.