Let’s Talk About Sex Tourism

Sex tourism has existed for hundreds of years, and with the rise of globalization, it's become a booming industry that exists in most corners of the Earth.

Sex work and sex tourism is very complex.

This kind of work intersects with history and power and race and economics and global inequality.

So in today's episode.

In this episode, I'm speaking with Dr.

Christopher Ewing, a professor and researcher who spent years studying the queer politics of race and sex tourism.

We're going to unpack the history, the misconceptions, the impacts of sex tourism on local communities, and we'll also talk about how tourists can think more critically about this side of the tourism industry.

This is Curious Tourism, the podcast focused on making travel better for people and the planet.

I'm Erin Hines, travel writer and content creator, and I'm joined by my producer, Katie Lohr.

That is me.

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So first, you can make sure that you're actually subscribed to the show on your favorite podcast app right now.

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And on that note, you can also get in touch with us directly on social media or by email.

All our contact info is in the show notes.

Aaron, you have some very exciting news to share, and that is that you were recently in Saskatchewan.

Okay, that's not the exact.

Actually the exciting news, but please tell everyone and myself why you were in Saskatchewan recently.

Well, because you kind of commented on this.

It is a thing that people call Saskatchewan the Big Empty.

Like the Northern Plains are known as the Big Empty.

And probably my biggest lesson in visiting Saskatchewan and Saskatoon is that Saskatchewan is not the Big Empty.

There's so much going on up there.

It's such a beautiful and important place with really beautiful history.

I think that Canadians should be going to Saskatchewan.

I will definitely be going back.

But, yeah, I was there for a travel conference for which is called tmac, which stands for the Travel Media association of Canada.

And yeah, it's an annual conference that is always hosted by a different location or city within Canada.

And it's the one time a year that all of Canadian travel media gets together.

So to go to the conference, you do need to be part of the association, and you do have to apply to Be part of it.

So they vet you to make sure that you are an active member of travel media.

So they'll look at work that you've published.

You have to submit references.

But it's really worth it because the conference was so much fun.

I got to meet people that I've worked with and interacted with over the last few years.

And it's also an opportunity to meet with industry members that you might work with.

That's sort of like the main focus of the conference is that you have 24 meetings.

So I'm media, so I had 24 meetings with industry.

So I would meet with different tourism boards and basically pitch myself.

So yeah, it's where people go to sort of work on new partnerships, come up with new ideas for work.

And it's interesting too, because it's a big mix of people.

There's a lot of the social media crowd, I guess was there.

So there are creators, bloggers, but there's also a lot of traditional media.

So it was really cool because I got to meet travel writers that have been writing about travel for 30, 40 years.

It was really fun.

I'd never been to travel conference before and people have always said to me to do it, that it's like really worth it, if not just for the community aspect.

And that's definitely true.

I'm very glad.

It sounds like it was really well curated.

Just comparing it to some of the podcast conferences that I've been going to recently.

Like, I would love that type of organization of just like setting people up to network with.

I think that's so, so interesting.

I think what it is, and this does set it apart from other travel conferences because it's the association and people have to be vetted to join, has more of that serious angle.

It's not open to anyone.

So it is really built around creating these important connections, especially within Canada.

And I do think that's really nice to see because we're not the U.S.

like, we're a smaller media landscape and having those connections in that community is really, really important.

So I appreciate that this association put so much effort into to fostering that amongst people.

Oh, so cool.

Okay, what would you say was like the ratio then of like traditional media to digital creators then?

Because I imagine it must be pretty low on the traditional media front.

But I'm not too sure.

That's just my perception of sort of travel content creators.

I don't know for sure because I've only been in the association now for a year.

But I have heard through other people that it's pretty new that content creators and bloggers are joining the association.

And that's because it used to be that the vetting system.

So not to get too into the weeds, but the vetting system is a point system where they assign points to, to the type of work that you do and like content that you create.

So it used to be that it was very hard to join the association if you were just a content creator.

Like, I know that when I applied this podcast counted for a lot of points.

So different, there's different weighting depending on the type of travel media that you create.

And it definitely used to, it used to prioritize traditional media.

But over the last few years, from what I've heard in talking to people, it is starting to shift.

I don't know what the travel industry would look like without digital creators.

It's a big piece of it.

But I don't want to downplay the importance of traditional media either because I do find like, what I love about traditional media is that it's not playing into SEO and organic traffic and virality.

I think what I love about traditional media and I would love, that's something I've thought about, is refocusing my work more into traditional because you can tell really great stories and you're not forced to shape those stories around what's going to perform.

And I think that is a really important thing.

And I don't, I don't want the travel media space to lose that because, yeah, I met amazing writers at this conference that are telling incredible, in depth, nuanced stories and there's definitely a big place for that these days.

Still, on the note of compelling storytelling, you recently won an award at tmac.

Tell me all about it.

Because it was for a piece of short form content that you put out on Instagram, which I didn't even think was like a thing that you would get an award for like one piece of content.

It was like, what, 60 seconds or something.

I would think that these types of awards would get awarded to like a creator in general or a writer in general, but it was specifically for this content.

So first of all, congratulations.

And second of all, tell me all about it.

How are you feeling?

And Talk to me about the content.

I feel good.

The video, that one was a real.

That I created and published last year about my experience at Barang Homestay, which is just outside of Pokhara, Nepal.

And I'm really glad that it was recognized because that was such a meaningful experience.

And making that video, there's certain things that you just feel more passionate about.

And that was a story that I was really excited to share with my audience.

And so I'm really glad that it got that recognition.

And yeah, overall, I would say this is something that TMAC does really well.

They.

They have a, like a whole slew of awards that are handed out and they're quite balanced.

Like there are awards for photography, there are awards for video content, there's awards for traditional writing.

You can tell that they're really trying to acknowledge that there is quite like a diverse landscape now of travel media and making sure that people are recognized across the board for different types.

So, yeah, it's really nice to see that.

But like, the category that that video won in, it was video content under 10 minutes.

Could, like submit a YouTube video, for example, into that category.

A lot of them aren't quite flexible.

The one gap I will tell you is there's no category for podcast.

Just gonna ask this.

I was like, but wait, wait a second, where's the podcast?

Next year?

Next year I think you.

I could probably submit things like within other categories, like submit episodes within categories and it would work.

But I don't believe there's a dedicated podcast category.

Well, it's time for us to write a strongly worded letter aside from the.

Conference, because the conference was all travel media, obviously our host city, Saskatoon, arranged for everyone attending to do lots of touristy things.

We were brought to restaurants, we went to different tourist sites.

And so I went one day to a site called Wannesguen, which is just outside of Saskatoon, and it was incredible.

If you are ever in Saskatoon, you need to go.

It is basically like a heritage center, I guess, but it's located in a place that has been a sacred gathering place for over 6,000 years.

And so now the center that is there is dedicated to sharing the story of the northern plains.

And it's also one of the longest running archaeological dig sites in Canada.

Like, they find all sorts of artifacts and fossils.

There's.

But what made it really special is that it is home to a growing herd of bison.

I had never seen bison before, so this was like my first experience seeing them in real life.

So they are native to North America.

And at one time, there were 60 million of them roaming the plains of North America, which is just wild to think about.

Crazy.

Like, they would have been everywhere.

Like, everywhere you look, you would have seen bison.

And these animals had really deep cultural and spiritual connections with Indigenous communities.

Here's where it goes dark, because it's Canada.

150 years ago, bison nearly went extinct.

And that's because the government deliberately killed bison as a tactic to harm and starve Indigenous people that relied on bison.

And we almost saw bison go completely extinct.

Something that one Askewan has done is bring bison back to the land that they originally were on.

And so they took a couple from that herd and transported them back.

This is part of an ongoing effort to restore the endangered prairie grasslands.

So when you're at one Askewin, you can view them from a distance, but then there's also educational exhibits and art galleries.

There's different trails around the area.

There's also a lot of Indigenous experiences that are very immersive that you can participate in.

So overall, I was just like, blown away by my experience there.

I think we were there, like, four hours, and I could have spent, like, the entire day there.

If you're ever in Saskatoon, one Uskewan is a place that you absolutely need to visit.

I have no other words to share.

All right, well, I guess we can get into it.

Yeah, let's do this.

Hey, Chris, thanks so much for joining us on Curious Tourism.

Thank you so much for having me, Erin.

I'm really excited to talk to you about sex tourism.

I wanted to tell you I'm really excited for this because Katie and I have been talking about doing an episode on sex tourism, literally, for, like, more than three years.

Yeah.

And we just, like, couldn't find the right.

Like, we're kind of picky about who we bring on, and we were just like, we can't find the right person.

And then I read that article, and I was like, this is the person.

Oh, my God.

Well, I'm honored.

I mean, it's something I've been thinking about for forever, honestly, just trying to, like, define what is this and why is this now?

Everywhere that I look.

Yes.

Yeah.

We are a travel podcast.

I started this podcast because I travel a lot.

I write about travel, and I have spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia, which is definitely a hotbed of sex tourism.

And it's something that I have very complicated feelings about, which we're going to get into.

But I wanted to start by asking what inspired you to focus your research on this?

And so I was like, oh, this is a progress narrative, isn't it?

Those don't exist anymore.

But I did my due diligence, and I started with homophile magazines.

The 50s and 60s.

Right.

That's sort of the moniker a lot of men who would define as gay now use to describe themselves.

And I was digging through these magazines, and they were just riddled with exoticizing images of men of color.

You know, black men in obviously fake, like, animal prints set against the African bush that were then paired with stories about white same sex desiring European men, going abroad, primarily to North Africa, sometimes like South Africa, sub Saharan Africa, and engaging in sex with men of color and eroticizing racial difference.

And nobody was really talking about it.

Nobody had really published too much about it at that point.

I was like, this is important.

This is doing something.

This is doing something politically.

And it really sort of stood out to me because there was this one assumption that sort of undergirded a lot of travel to North Africa, and that was that Islam was somehow conducive of homoerotic opportunities.

Right.

In a way that sort of runs counter to our ideas today and certainly the ways in which the right and the radical right are now trying to talk about Islam as a threat to LGBTQ rights in Europe.

Right.

So if we think about Germany, the head of the radical right wing party, Alice Weidel, she's not a lesbian.

She's actually not a lesbian, but she's married to a woman.

Right.

And they live in Switzerland with her two kids, and her wife is from Sri Lanka originally.

And it's like, what are you doing?

None of this actually makes sense.

And so it was sort of a dissertation that became a book trying to explain how we get sort of to a moment where the radical right could be headed by a woman who's married to another woman.

And the answer seemed to lie in sex tourism.

So that kind of exploded a new world of questions, like, what is sex tourism?

What does it do?

What does it do politically?

And how do we make sense of it in our contemporary world?

Yeah.

And I'm curious, like, this is a weird question I guess, to ask, but, like, what is your relationship or experience with sex tourism and travel?

Like, have you been on travels yourself where you've seen sex tourism, like, happening in front of you or, like, maybe suspected that it's happening.

I'm just curious about that personal experience with it.

Most of my travel takes place in Europe, and I go to Berlin every summer, which is its own kind of very sexualized space.

So the scenes that I'm in, the nightlife that I'm in.

You will meet a lot of primarily North American men who are there because they see this as being an opportunity to express themselves, to engage in sex, to meet a hot German guy.

They talk about that a lot.

And that's sort of like, one kind.

Just one of my friends and I went down for a birthday trip, and we're in Puerto Vallarta.

And, you know, just sort of, like, you'd walk up and down, and there would be guys who were sort of soliciting.

And I encountered this one group of guys who were staying at our hotel, and they were all from San Diego.

A lot of them were born in Mexico or grew up in Mexico.

And they come back and we're talking about the really fun time that they're having with, like, the sex workers there.

And I was like, oh, this is interesting.

I need to, like, conduct an oral history here, because you have sort of, like, this group of gay men who see Puerto Vallarta as a sexual playground and are having sex with sex workers or using kind of similar exoticizing language that you'll see elsewhere.

But, you know, they themselves have roots in Mexico.

And so that was sort of really interesting to me.

And sort of through those different kinds of experiences, it becomes really clear that this is an expansive phenomenon.

It's one that's really hard to categorize.

And it's also one that's really complicated.

When we think about questions of labor, when we think about questions of desire.

Right.

Nothing kind of fits into a neat little box, as we might sort of, like, expect or kind of have an idea of what sex tourism is, that being sort of like white European, North American men traveling to Southeast Asia in search of women.

Like, it looks like all these different kinds of contradictory ways.

And that also itself kind of opened up more questions like, well, like, how do we make sense of this?

How do we define it?

How do we talk about racialized desire when it's people of color who are articulating this?

How do we talk about sexual markets within sort of these broader circuits of travel?

Yeah, because I was going to say, I think many of us are familiar with the very classic examples of sex tourism.

Like what always comes to mind for me is a foreign tourist going to the red light district district in Amsterdam and then hiring someone for transactional sex.

But like we also saw a representation of it in the most recent season of White Lotus.

In the show, it's brought up that the middle aged white men who go to Thailand to have relationships with young Thai women are called LBHs by the locals, which stands for losers back home.

This is like something that I personally have seen a lot of.

I was in Thailand last year and saw this everywhere.

These are like very common examples.

But, but like you were saying, I think there's such a broad like spectrum of what sex tourism could be because like you mentioned going to Berlin and wanting to meet a hot German guy.

Like, this is something that like I have experience with my friends.

Like we're traveling abroad, we want to meet like hot people from that country.

It's not necessarily the transactional sex that like people always think about when they think of sex tourism.

I think it could also include these like less transactional relationships that sometimes happen when you're traveling.

Like you're in a hostel and you just meet like a hot foreigner and just have a one night stand with them.

Like, would you call that sex tourism?

I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I had a debate about this with one of my Swedish friends and you know, she was pushing me and pushing me and pushing me and she was like, by your definition, like everything could be sex tourism.

And I was like, well, maybe kind of.

And you know, that sort of like led me to write a whole article about it.

About how like, I think sex tourism itself is kind of a useless category of analysis.

Right.

Because it can be so expansive.

We can sort of talk about them in like, you know, the ways that you're describing in Southeast Asia.

I think those are practices that a lot of us would say, like, oh, that seems bad or weird or like kind of exploitative in different ways.

In large part because of like the global inequality that's at play and certainly kind of like the racism that might inflect desire.

And you can only really get at that if you're going to like go and interview these men, but then you have friends and they want to go to Amsterdam or they want to go to Berlin and just have sex with some hot guy.

It's like that doesn't seem bad, just sort of our instincts about this I don't think are necessarily that great guides when we're trying to define this nexus of Sex and leisure travel.

So for me, I'll use sex tourism kind of just as a shorthand to talk about all these different kinds of practices.

But when I'm trying to write about it and define what it is that I'm seeing and what I'm trying to explain, then sex tourism holds a lot less utility.

And you just have to get precise and be like, all right, I'm talking about sex tourism.

But here what I mean is more transactional sex that's happening in Bangkok.

Or here what I mean is it's a different kind of transactional sex that's happening in Casablanca.

Money isn't being exchanged, but instead different kinds of goods are being exchanged.

So we can see transaction itself also being complicated and also carrying lots of different forms depending on where you are and who you're talking to.

Yeah.

So I know that in your writing and your teaching, you've emphasized that sex tourism has existed for a very long time, as far back as the 18th century.

I am a bit of a history nerd, so this was very intriguing to me.

Could you talk us through maybe, the Cliff Notes of the history of it and maybe some pivotal moments that you think are worth noting in the development of this phenomenon and maybe how it shapes, like, the landscape of sex tourism that we have today?

Yes, absolutely.

I'll try to get the Cliff Notes.

My poor students, my lectures just go on and on and on.

I teach a whole class on international sex tourism.

But this is also sort of the beginning of the expansion of European empires and kind of their modern form.

And it's those structures that really enable a lot of white European men and also women to travel abroad and pursue kind of racialized fantasies and write about them.

And it develops new kinds of markets that then also cater to those fantasies.

So we see this really developing in the 18th into the 19th century as colonial spaces simultaneously become sites of erotic fulfillment, either in practice or in the imaginations of Victorians who want to imagine kind of like more sexually liberal world than the one that they might be experiencing in Great Britain at the end of the 19th century.

So we kind of like chart those developments and what those look like and really sort of turning points then start to hit us.

Of decolonization.

And so newly independent states, they start to institute new laws regarding sexuality, but then also simultaneously see tourism as being a possibility for economic development.

Right.

In the aftermath of decolonization.

So a lot of white Europeans, they'll travel to former colonial spaces.

Morocco is a really big one, Tunisia is a huge one.

Right.

And sort of take advantage of these new economic practices.

And then also a lot of my work is about same sex, desiring white men like myself.

Right.

It's a lot of navel gazing.

These are men who are traveling specifically because they see Morocco as being more sexually liberal than Switzerland or Great Britain.

And so they have that kind of experience.

One, Morocco and Tunisia start to institute new restrictions where no, you can't just come and do this.

This is where we get sort of like the era of Thai sex tourism.

A lot of it has to do with sort of economic and technological development.

Right.

Suddenly it's a lot more affordable to go.

And there's a whole new infrastructure there because of the Vietn war.

Right.

Where are American GIs going when they're on shore leave?

Well, they'll go to Thailand and that's where these new sex industries start to spring up.

So sort of like in the aftermath of these global conflicts, plus new infrastructure, plus the ability to kind of travel to farther and farther away places, you then have new sites that start to emerge, like Thailand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka.

Right.

So let's say the age of consent in the US is 18.

So I don't know if that's Cliff Notes.

Okay, that's so interesting.

I did not know that there was international law around this.

Does it ever get applied?

Do people ever actually get charged or, I don't know, does it lead to real things?

I don't know how you would do.

That, but it's really, really hard.

Especially because I think it's currently being debated in the House and might have passed very.

You used to have to prove intent in the United States, at least that, okay, somebody is going abroad with the intent to have sex with somebody under the age of 18.

And that's a really narrow definition.

And you're right, that's really hard to do.

So you have these stories.

I've been watching a lot of law and svu.

And they'll talk about this, they'll bring this up.

But I think in practice, it really does a lot more to kind of quell the minds of legislators of people who are living in the United States rather than actually criminalize sex practices effectively.

Because, yeah, it's really, really hard to do.

You have some notable cases, but I would say probably the vast, vast majority of people who break that law are never caught and never prosecuted.

So it's not a very effective tool.

Right.

If we think about sort of like national criminal law for combating international sex tourism and the many forms of exploitation that exist well beyond age of consent.

Right.

So if we're talking about, okay, women who are then, like, forced or coerced through different means into sex work because there's demand, like US Criminal law isn't going to do much about that.

It's going to take a much broader structural change.

And at the same time, criminalization of sex work within those countries is then also not going to do much to end that either, because most of what those laws do is they kind of push it into the underground.

So, yeah, it's really, from what I understand, which will generally make it more unsafe for the people that are participating.

So it's not necessarily a good thing because I know people have argued that about red light districts in the Netherlands, that having them out in the open makes it more safe because it can be regulated better.

I don't know the ins and outs of how well, that is working.

But, yeah, yeah.

I mean, and this is something.

The European context is really kind of cool because one thing Europeans do really well is they run studies.

I love them for that.

So there have been, like, studies that have come out of a lot of these different European contexts where they've instituted either some form of decriminalization or partial legalization to kind of see how it's working.

And the results are usually mixed.

In the Netherlands, yeah, there are a lot more professional sex workers who say, this is good, this is useful, because not only do I have legal recourse if something happens, I don't have to fear going to the police.

But they also have access to Social Security benefits.

They also have access to different kinds of labor benefits.

That's one of the things about decriminalization or partial legalization that is really beneficial to professional sex workers or freelance sex workers.

They can access the welfare state in ways that they couldn't if it were criminalized.

So in terms of safety, yes, that's something that's been working.

In terms of economic security, which I think is really closely tied to safety, that is something that's beneficial.

But it hasn't really fully escaped kind of like the purview of moralizing campaigners who will use laws like red light districts are so interesting because in some senses, it makes sense, right?

It makes sense to be like, all right, this is where this is going to happen.

These are sort of the parameters of it.

But different towns across Europe, like, Germany's been doing this a lot.

In Bavaria, which is really conservative, have been setting up these kind of, like, really broad, like, okay, sex work can't happen here in these zones, which will then start to push sex workers to the edges of cities and away from commercial centers.

And in so doing, then also make it kind of unsafe.

So, like, the geographies of sex work or something that are really closely regulated and are often dependent on kind of the individual morality of different legislators.

I'm really curious.

This is, like, a very broad question, but I'm just curious if, like, anything pops into your head or, like, stands out.

But what are the most common misconceptions or surprising things about sex tourism that you've encountered in your research but also in your teaching?

Because you engage with a lot of young students about this, and I'm curious what their reactions are.

Yeah, let's see.

Probably, I think the most surprising thing that I've encountered about just sex tourism generally is kind of what we were talking about earlier, just how messy and diverse it is and how hard it is to say, okay, these two things are alike.

I want to call, okay, gay men who are traveling to Amsterdam.

I want to call that sex tourism.

I also want to call gay men who are traveling to the Philippines.

I want to call that sex tourism.

But those are really different practices.

So that's also been kind of surprising.

And it's also been surprising, too.

And other folks have been doing this research, I think, really well.

There's a guy called Gregory Mitchell.

He did ethnographic work with male sex workers in Brazil, and he conducted interviews with them.

And he conducted also interviews with mostly North American men who were traveling to Rio and trying to figure out, okay, what are the dynamics of racialized desire.

And this was something that a lot of sex workers were pretty aware of.

They kind of played into the different fantasies that North American men have.

And then he also conducted interviews with black American men who wanted to go to Brazil to pursue this kind of, like, Pan African solidarity through sex, right?

Through encounters, through transactional sex.

And it became sort of like, really kind of messy to parse.

And I think for him and for a lot of researchers, okay, a lot of kind of our instincts about what kind of, like, good sexual practices are aren't that useful because the ways in which people articulate them are really messy and sometimes kind of run counter to what we expect from our sources.

So, like, there's that, right?

Just the messiness of DES is always surprising.

That's why I keep researching it, because it's just a font of really interesting stuff.

My students.

I love teaching this topic precisely because my students are always going to come in with really, really different perspectives from me about what this looks like.

And the last time I taught it, the first thing my students said was like, oh, no, this is just 90 Day Fiance.

It's like, oh, yeah, I guess it is.

And so they educated me.

They're like, go home.

Go watch the show.

What you're describing is really just 90 day fiance.

So I did.

I'm like, okay, great.

I'm going to have to find a way to incorporate this into the class, which I did.

But I'll have students who will sort of approach it through these different kind of media forums and make sense of it.

It's like, oh, wait, this kind of actual visa system that we have is about sex tourism is great.

That's really helpful.

I'll have other students who will have experience in different kinds of sex industries and will bring that to bear on their readings.

So all of students who are sex workers are like actually we need to talk about decriminalization in a serious way in this country.

And then I have other students who will come and be like, trafficking is a huge problem.

What do we do about it?

And that becomes sort of like its own kind of can of worms.

But I think for students what I really enjoy about that is that they bring in sets of priorities that are often different from mine.

And through those discussions we can then start to understand the history not only better, but we can develop different kinds of solutions through conversations that exceed the scope of what we might have on the table right now in the U.S.

yeah.

I will tell you one of my own, albeit anecdotal observations which I mentioned at the top has been a very obvious form of sex tourism and that's been in Southeast Asia.

Mostly white, typically western men who are clearly there seeking out sex workers.

And it's typically in lower income countries.

So for example, I was in Bangkok last November and I noticed it literally everywhere.

There were whole like pockets of the city dedicated to this.

And you do notice this dynamic of like these middle aged men with very, very young women who may or may not speak very good English.

And it just makes you wonder about what their relationship really is.

To be honest, it made me uncomfortable to, to see it.

Like I would make eye contact with these men and just, it was just like weird.

And it's not at all that I'm anti sex work, it's that I worry about the power dynamic that exists in these contexts.

So I worry a lot about fetishization of Asian women.

And this is something you've already like motioned towards.

But I'm curious to hear your thoughts about these dynamics that are at play in sex tourism.

Like how colonial histories have influenced the patterns and perceptions of sex tourism and how it's intersecting with issues of race and gender and sexuality and class and all of that.

Like ultimately I want to get at like is there a responsible way to like engage with sex tourism?

I don't know.

But like we're going to try to answer that.

Yeah.

And I'm really curious actually I'm curious too about your experience in Europe as well.

Kind of like with red light districts and like what your friends reactions to that have been.

Because I think that might even be.

Sort of a useful starting place.

I'll tell you.

I'll tell you.

I lived in the Netherlands and I have family there, so I'm there often.

And a lot of people don't know this but there are red light districts like all throughout the Netherlands.

I've also been in red light districts in other countries, like in Japan.

I would say I have a curiosity about this.

When I was in Osaka, I specifically went to walk through the red light district because I wanted to observe it.

It's not something that I want to participate in, but I do find it interesting to see the dynamics of this and how they present themselves in different countries.

But while in Amsterdam, I was there once with my brother and a friend and we walked through the Amsterdam red light district.

Not even by like on purpose, just because we needed to transit through there to get where we were going.

And one of my friends was very upset about it.

It made him really, really upset because the way he saw it was that like, this is just exploitation of women.

This is all this is.

Whereas I had a more neutral feeling towards it because, like, I don't know, I think I just understand that sex tourism can be something or not sex tourism, that sex work is something that women like do often voluntarily participate in and get joy out of and get enjoyment out of.

And so I don't want to make a call.

Like I can't look at a woman in the red light district and like decide for her whether she wants to be there or not.

So I guess, like, that's how I felt about it.

But it was interesting to me that he was.

Was so deeply upset about it, like for days afterwards too.

Yeah, that is really interesting and I think also mirrors the reaction that a lot of feminist activists and feminism of course is really diverse also on this issue.

And so began to bring forward kind of what we might call abolitionist legal frameworks where their goal is to try and get women out of sex work.

Right.

So that's kind of how you get the so called Nordic model, where you don't criminalize the sex worker, you criminalize the consumer and you also criminalize intermediaries.

And that kind of seemed to be like, okay, we're going to help, help sex workers get out of sex tourism.

We're going to then crack down on consumers, on Johns.

And you know, that has been met really not with a lot of success, both in terms of eliminating sex work as a profession, but then also in terms of eliminating those kinds of desires which are really messy.

And there's a market for it.

Even if you criminalize it, there's an underground market for it.

But, you know, that kind of reaction, I think is very understandable.

But also what you're kind of alluding to, Erin, I think is really useful that you can't sort of be in that space and make that call for somebody else and be like, oh, you want to be here and you don't.

And I can see that just sort of by looking at you.

No, the only way to actually develop policy that is going to be helpful is to do so in collaboration with sex workers and organizations that consist of and represent the interest, interests of sex workers.

So that's where you see, I think, the most effective policy.

And Amsterdam, European cities, in some ways are a good jumping off point for that because you're not quite dealing with the same levels of global inequality.

Right.

There are different options on the table that might not necessarily exist in Thailand or the Philippines to the same degree.

You can then start to talk about, okay, how do we do decriminalization in a way that provides sex workers access to the benefits of the sexual welfare state?

Right, right, right.

How do we talk about policing in a way that might be more protective and might provide some kind of resource for sex workers if they do run into a client who is violent or, you know, who just kind of takes advantage of them.

Right.

Who kind of like, steals from them?

That becomes sort of like more of a conversation that we can have.

And then those practices, when we think about, like, individual tourists who might then visit those spaces there, I think then is the possibility for those kinds of actions to be mutually consensual, to be beneficial.

Right.

And then we have to think about that much more in terms of labor than in terms of sex.

But, you know, Thailand, then.

And it's not like, okay, you can't have a social safety net in Thailand.

No, sorry.

It's interesting because you just made me realize, like, analyzing my own responses to this from.

I felt more comfortable with it in Amsterdam than I did in Thailand.

And I think that's because I assume that in Thailand there aren't as many options for women.

And so there may be a power dynamic at play that leads to them participating in sex work.

But I'm just projecting this, like, I don't know, like, if I take the argument that I make for Amsterdam, which is that, oh, like, women could.

Could enjoy this and be voluntarily participating, if I plot any.

That same argument to Thailand, like, technically I'm wrong to assume different in that context.

I don't know.

I'm getting like, super into the weeds now.

No, but you're right.

It's really.

It's hard to assess.

But the thing that is useful, and you pointed out, is the dynamic of racial fetishization that is going to exist in Thailand in a way that tracks colonialism and the legacies of colonialism in a way that isn't necessarily going to happen in Amsterdam, unless we're talking, of course, about sex workers of color.

And then there's also kind of this longer history of migration.

And what does that mean?

But in Thailand, if we think about, okay, sort of this trope of white North American and European men going to Thailand, seeing like, okay, they have access to resources, cash, they have access also to citizenship of different countries, then that gives them an element of.

Of power.

And I think we do have to take that seriously.

And we can have our cake and eat it too.

We can talk about power, we can talk about global inequality, we can talk about racial fetishization, which is a word I can never say, that many white European and North American men might be bringing to those scenarios and then simultaneously recognize the agency of sex workers.

And how do you then kind of like, better allow sex workers to make choices?

Make choices that.

That put them in safer positions, allow them to benefit from tourist economies in more equitable ways?

A lot of that is challenging because it has to do with structural change, but I think that it's both.

Right.

We have to pay attention to power.

However, there are options on the table in Thailand or in the Philippines that can improve sort of the lives and a lot of sex workers that we might sort of within our own kind of, like, perspective that sort of sees this and has some kind of level of discomfort with it, then makes things a little bit better and also does so in collaboration with sex workers who are living there, who are experiencing this, who have their own stake in it.

Right, Right.

So in the context of Thailand, what would that look like?

What do you think a better structure would look like?

So Thailand right now operates mostly on a criminalization model.

So sex work itself isn't illegal, but it is illegal to live even in part on the proceeds of prostitution.

Right.

So it's like, oh, you can do sex work, but the money has to go under the mattress and you can't spend any of it.

So, in effect, also establishments are criminalized as well.

So like brothels, you can't have those.

I mean, you do, but you're not supposed to.

And then consumption itself too is criminalized as well.

And so what that's kind of done.

And this is something that Thai sex workers are trying to change.

Right.

Now what that has done is meant that it's really sort of dependent on local police departments whether or not sex work can exist in a particular space.

Right.

It becomes very discretionary and that puts people at risk and that allows for exploitation to happen, I think, more easily.

So in the case of Thailand, I think moving away from a strict criminalization model and implementing forms of regulation or decriminalization that are then defined by what sex workers in Bangkok, in Pattaya think are useful and helpful for them also within kind of like their local context, their local urban contexts.

So at least for the case of Thailand, I would see that as being maybe sort of a useful way towards moving away from some of the dynamics of exploitation that we might witness even just casually, right on the street.

Like, we see this and it's like, wait, what is there to be done?

Like, there are things that we can do sort of even within the constrained context of neoliberal global capitalism as we are understanding it now.

And then, second part to this question, what are your thoughts on the colonial fetishization aspects of these dynamics that we see happening in Asia but also in Africa?

Because like, you're talking about sexual desire and it was interesting what you said about this, this person who's interviewing people in Brazil about their desire.

Are people aware that there could be a colonial undertone or an air of fetishization, like in their desire to go to a specific country and sleep with a specific person of that country?

I just.

Do you think people are cognizant of these structures and like how it's impacting what they pursue?

I think some of them are.

But what I keep finding when I talk to people or what's in the historical sources are kind of discursive gymnastics to talk about the ways in which, oh, this isn't about colonialism or exploitation.

In fact, it's like valuing people of color.

It's expressing desire for people of color, which is a good anti racist practice.

And so that was one of the surprising things for me when I started researching this, is that that a lot of people in the 50s and 60s, this moment where the US is experiencing the civil rights movement, South Africa is under an apartheid regime, colonialism is not only ending as just a way of doing global politics, but anti colonial thought is reaching Europe.

A lot of people who are then traveling to these spaces and who are carrying with them deeply colonial forms of desire, of beliefs in racial difference are arguing, no, what they're doing is anti colonial, it's anti racist.

Because desire for somebody on the basis of their perceived racial difference.

Well, you know, that can only be a good thing.

Right.

And no, it's a bad thing.

Right.

It perpetuates different kinds of racial exploitation, both abroad and then also at home.

People carry those ideas with them back to Europe as they talk about migration in Europe.

And so that's kind of how we get the link from sex tourism to fascism.

It's about racial knowledge and what that looks like and how that gets deployed.

Right.

This is something that like Frantz Fanon talks about already and he's like, look, colonialism is sexually exploitative.

And that's something that's been kind of at the foundation of that.

People are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're anti colonialist.

Racialized desire is a good thing.

And even to this day we have this conversation going on in gay scenes and have had for a while about Grindr and hookup apps where people will put list in their preferences race and Grindr sort of removed those categories, but people can still put in their profiles, no fats, no femmes, no black people.

Or people can then sort of do the opposite it and search for particular kinds of racial groups with the argument that, no, this is just desire, I can't control it.

How can that be an expression of racist beliefs?

And so there are a lot of ways in which individuals will recognize that and then defend it using these different reference points, whether it's anti racism or whether it's the inherent nature of desire in order to defend and justify desires and practices in ways that I don't really find that convincing.

So a lot of my work has been to look at the ways in which racialized desire will then shore up different kinds of colonial hierarchies and recast them and remake them even in the aftermath of formal decolonization.

Yeah.

Do you think it's like people are doing these mental gymnastics to justify to themselves their behavior?

I think so.

Or their desire?

Yeah.

Because I mean, this is sort of the thing like they're getting called out on it, Right?

Yeah, yeah.

There are men of color on Ghana who are like, no, you're being racist.

What are you doing?

This is really racist.

And they're trying to defend themselves.

So it's about doing that for themselves.

It's about doing that, I think also for their environs to say, no, I'm not a racist person.

This is just who I am.

These are Just my desires.

And they're trying to push back on what others, what people of color are saying, no, this is actually bad person practice.

That there are ways to think about desire that can both affirm the goodness of sexual desire.

I think sexual desire itself is a really good thing and should be preserved, but that also then start to dismantle the colonial undertones that still pervade sexual desire even as it exists on hookup apps.

Yeah, it's interesting.

So I guess it just boils down to questioning how much our colonial frameworks are shaping our desire.

Yeah, exactly.

It really, really does.

And in ways that can also be unpredictable, too.

So desire itself is really, really messy.

And it's taken generations of psychologists, psychoanalysts, from Freud to today to try and figure out, what is it doing?

And the answer is, we still don't really know.

But you can sort of, especially when you do kind of like language analysis, you can see colonial undertones cropping up and the ways in which people articulate desire.

And then when they go abroad and they actually engage in that, they're bringing with them sort of racial preconceptions, which can be really, really dangerous.

Right.

So it's like, okay, desire is one thing.

It's messy nature we can't really access.

But we can know that these different kinds of racial preconceptions are going to inform how you behave in a different kind of environment.

So if you go to Thailand with an understanding that Thai women are sexually available, that Thai men are supposedly effeminate, these kinds of ideas that were used to justify colonial intervention, primarily French colonial intervention into Southeast Asia that afforded Thailand some form of independence, then they're going to behave in that space in that kind of way and not go to Bangkok and not respect the city or try to encounter people on their own terms.

They're going to see it as a sexual playground, which I think can be really harmful.

Yeah, you definitely see this play out in the most recent season of White Lotus.

Oh, yes, you do.

Oh, my gosh.

I was so excited when I learned that it was going to be set in Thailand.

I was like, finally.

Because the thing that made me uncomfortable about Hawaii and also Italy, the first two seasons was I was like, wow, a show about sex tours.

And this is what's happening.

This is what it is.

Now people are going to talk about it, and then everybody on Instagram is like, like, on my way to Hawaii.

What are you doing?

So I'm kind of curious if we're going to see that phenomenon.

I think we will.

But if we're also going to see more of an engagement with sex tourism as kind of an idea, as something that maybe we have to contend with, I don't know.

I'm curious about your thoughts on this.

What do you think the most recent season is going to produce?

I don't think that the show has ever critiqued it in the way that I would like it to.

The last season definitely did not.

And we, Katie and I have talked about this on this podcast quite a lot.

Like, the show has had this backfiring effect where, like, it's critiquing things like over tourism, and yet, like, the bookings for these places just, like, skyrocket because at the end of the day, not everyone who watches these shows will watch it with, like, the layers of critique that are needed sometimes for that kind of media.

And so they just see it and they think, oh, like, like, beautiful place, I want to go now.

Exactly.

And that's so frustrating.

And also then enters sort of the market space too, where different companies, like clothing companies will be like, ooh, get on your.

Your Thai chic, your Hawaiian chic, whatever.

Get ready for your White Lotus vacation.

Like, I don't want a White Lotus vacation.

Somebody always dies.

Like, why do I want to go?

But yeah, I think that that's entirely right, that we are going to continue to see this backfiring effect.

But at least for those of us who are interested in different kinds of sexual.

Sexual exploitation, what does that look like?

How are the legacies of colonialism still with us?

It's a useful jumping off point to start those conversations as well.

So that's something that, you know, I'm an insufferable person.

I do this with all my friends.

I'm like, oh, have you seen White Lotus?

Let's talk about sex tourism.

Right.

So for me at least, it's been helpful in that regard.

Yeah.

Well, I'm curious your thoughts, because I don't want to talk too much about the show in case people are listening.

Didn't watch it, but I did feel like they motion towards it, but they don't really ever unpack the colonial undertones.

And I felt like that was a big missed opportunity in the Thailand season because there was so much reference to it and it was often almost a joke.

There's scenes where I forget her name, but, like, the drugged out mom is like, literally sitting next to women saying, like, Victoria, she's like, making a joke of it.

And it's like they kept motioning towards it, but they didn't really like, grab it by the head and unpack it.

And I find White Lotus does this a lot.

Like, they feed it to you, but they don't explain it.

I don't know.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Because there is sort of this whole.

I mean, because we have it right?

We have the content there.

With Piper's journey into Buddhism and her family's reaction to it does then create the space to think about, okay, this is something that is pretty long standing.

And so with that storyline, I think that you're entirely right.

There is that possibility to be like, wait, both of this.

Both sides are messed up.

Both sides are rooted in colonial approaches to Thailand, to East Asian religions, where Piper's pursuing it maybe out of a degree of fetishization, coming from her own privileged background, and her parents are having a reaction to it then also because of their own colonized understandings of what that means and what the monastery is supposed to look like.

And it is played for laughs.

Parker Posey's reaction to the monastery is very, very funny because it's supposed to be a comfortable place, but she's like, oh, she'll spend one night there and she'll want to come back.

And so that's enjoyable.

But there is a little bit more that could be said there.

I'm not a screenwriter, so I don't really have creative thoughts to that.

But, yeah, I think that's right, that it's all there, it's laid out for us, and it's just like, all right, let's dive just a little bit deeper because something really interesting is happening.

Yeah.

All right.

So to wrap up, I'll tell you an ongoing theme on Curious Tourism is how important it is to understand how tourism is impacting communities.

This is often in bad ways, but there are good ways that tourism impacts communities as well.

There's probably a lot to unpack about this.

When it comes to sex tourism, broadly, like we've talked about, there is the risk of colonial undertones, of exploitation, of fetishization.

But at the same time, we want to acknowledge that people have a right to their agency, and we should not Moralize about sexuality.

So on that note, what would you say is the most common impact of sex tourism on local communities?

Are there examples of positive impacts?

Is there a way to like leverage it in a positive way?

So I think kind of across the board, I mean, certainly sexual exploitation is something that is with us when we're thinking about sex tourism, but we can also treat this as an economic force.

And for many communities, this will have kind of a detrimental effect.

Like many different kinds of, of tourist practices and tourist infrastructures as they set up, as they're set up, they're deeply inequitable and require sort of cheap local, local labor.

And this was a really radical form of decriminalization of sex work, not only in that country, but around the world.

In part because this was something that happened in close collaboration with the New Zealand Sex Workers Collective, who were involved not only in the development but also the implementation of that law.

And so kind of with government backing, with decriminalization playing out in a also non punitive way, like we do then see sort of travel to New Zealand maybe in search of sex work.

Right.

I know New Zealand isn't like a hot destination for that in the way that we might imagine Southeast Asia is.

But that money then can sort of go not only into the pockets of sex workers, but its taxable income.

Right.

It can then sort of like feed into the wider economy in a way that isn't necessarily exploitative.

The law does have its problems and there are critiques with that.

Like one of the biggest ones being that, okay, immigrants to New Zealand are not eligible to be sex workers.

And so those who do then do it in a way that is going to be sort of off the grid or underground.

And I think a lot of countries do this.

Actually, when I moved to Canada, my work permit, it said, you can engage in whatever kind of form of work you want, except you cannot be a sex worker.

And it's like, damn it, okay, there goes my plan.

So a lot of countries that are doing this, they're trying to do it in order to stave off human trafficking, which I think is noble, but the policy is kind of misplaced.

But looking at those models, there's no perfect model.

But New Zealand, the Netherlands, different countries that are trying out decriminalization have been doing it for several decades.

We can start to chart the economic impacts as well as the safety impacts as well.

You know, those I think are good places to start if we want to broaden out new approaches to how we might think about sex tourism in a way that isn't exploitative, that dismantles structures of economic and racial oppression and simultaneously allows like, sexual desire to play out in like the messy ways in which it does.

And do you have any words of wisdom for travelers who want to avoid inadvertently supporting exploitative sex tourism?

Or just like words of wisdom for people as they travel?

How should we be engaging with this when we come across it?

Yeah, I think that's right.

Keeping your eyes open as you're doing, it's kind of interesting.

And I think it's sort of like any kind of tourist practice.

Right.

Pay attention to the local dynamics, dynamics of what's happening.

What are the laws that are on the books?

How is sex work regulated?

How is tourism regulated?

There's actually this new phenomenon.

It's not that new.

Sorry.

It's like 20 years old.

It's called lifestyle resorts.

I don't know if you've heard of it.

I have.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, Right.

So you can go.

And it's just like sexy fun time in this resort in Jamaica.

And that all seems very good because you're not engaging in transactional sex.

So that is, you don't have to worry about that, that you're going and maybe having sex with other tourists.

So these different dynamics that we might worry about in other spaces aren't present.

But that doesn't mean that, okay, this is inherently going to be non exploitative.

If you're going to those resorts, look at labor practices, how are staff being paid, what's local reaction like?

So you can kind of carry those different approaches.

And this is something that you all talk about in many different contexts, just kind of paying attention to what's going on on the ground.

What are people talking about, what do they need?

What are they looking for?

What are the dynamics of local law?

And how do you encounter a space in a way that isn't going to feed in to the exploitative dynamics that I think any form of tourism can have?

And would you say it's important to think about, say someone is looking at going to one of these resorts?

Is it important to consider your own intent, examine your own reasons for why you want to engage with this?

Absolutely, yes.

So if we're thinking about the nature of racialized desire, that's something that is absolutely worth interrogating.

Is one of the reasons that I want to travel to any space based on my preconceived notions of racial difference and the way that I might eroticize that.

That's an interrogation that people should always be kind of having with themselves because that can have really kind of harmful effects sex.

And at the same time, I think that also when we're thinking about any kind of consensual sexual practice, yeah, being honest with yourself and honest with your partner is only something that is going to be beneficial.

So if you are going abroad for the purpose of exploring sort of like a different kind of sexual side of yourself, you know, just being honest with yourself, with yourself about, like, why you're doing that and what you hope to gain from that experience can then also just be individually beneficial.

Well, thank you so much.

You have convinced me that I should take your class.

Great.

Absolutely.

I will let you know the next time it's running.

So, Chris, if people are interested in reading your work or learning more about you, where can they find you?

You can find me on bluesky, Christopher Ewing.

It's my handle.

And you can also, if you want, read my book, the Color of Desire.

It came out with Cornell University Press.

It links sex tourism to contemporary forms of queer fascism.

How do we make sense of it?

So you can also find out more about the kinds of stuff that I do there.

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Curious Tourism is written and hosted by me, Erin Hines, and it's produced and edited by Katie Lohr in Canada's Toronto area.

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Ra Sam.