An attractive woman sips a cocktail under a bamboo shade. The sand is dazzlingly white, the sea aquamarine. A handsome young man approaches her and showers her with compliments: she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, he says. For the first time in years, she truly believes she is desirable. But this holiday romance is not all it seems. The woman is white, in her late 50s; the man, black, 18 - and paid for his attentions. The scene - from the controversial new French film, Heading South, which opened this weekend, starring Charlotte Rampling, makes us confront uncomfortable truths about sexuality in a globalised world, and the legacy of colonialism. In the film, an intelligent, provocative take on sex tourism in the lates, Rampling plays Ellen, an American professor, who spends every summer at a private resort in Haiti, where beautiful, muscled black boys are available to the female clientele, mostly affluent single women in their forties, who despair of finding mates through more conventional means. Fast-forward 30 years, and the reality of sex tourism is anything but tender. Tour companies even market package deals as sex holidays for single and unaccompanied women.
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Image from the film Vers Sud. A month shy of my 40th birthday, I clicked on an email with the subject line: Female Sex Tourists. I usually mark messages like this as spam, but I'd written a piece about DIY sex tourism for McSweeney's a year earlier, so I figured the sender probably just wanted to know where she could find a Mexican Milk Massage like the one I'd described in my story. Instead, she introduced herself as a producer for ABC's Nightline. We later talked on the phone, and I explained that my story was meant to be humorous—although I had engaged in international romantic trysts once or twice, I never sought out local fee-based sex services while traveling. That was fine, the producer assured me. The network simply wanted to feature a smart, fun woman who would take her sex life into her own hands—or rather, the hands of a hot foreign sex worker—while vacationing in the Caribbean. I was flattered, so I spoke to her co-producer. I sent them both photographs of myself. The conversations continued.
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The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday July 30 The article below describes the Jamaican flag as bright green, red and yellow. This is Ethiopia's flag, favoured by Jamaica's Rastafarians. Jamaica's flag is green, yellow and black. We're businessmen,' says Leroy proudly. It's a traditional male Jamaican greeting expressing good wishes, friendship and respect. Sean responds, bumping his closed fist atop Leroy's. It's 10am on Jamaica's breathtaking Negril beach. Bleached white sand, swaying palms and crystalline Caribbean waters stretch into the distance for seven miles.
By Julie Bindel. The men are invariably from impoverished families, have little or no education and are sometimes illiterate. According to the beach boys, there is little shame or stigma in selling sex to older white female tourists, and some claim earning money this way affirms their masculinity photo from the film Paradise Love. Most of the women are white, middle-aged or older and come from Europe and North America.
