Skip to main content. You're using an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer. Log In Sign Up. Costa Rica as a global tourist destination is bifurcated along gendered and ethnic lines with regards to sexu- ality and tourism, where white North American and European men travel to the Pacific Coast for sex with local women Ticas , and white female tourists tend to prefer the Caribbean coast known for sexually appealing local Caribbean men.
Others have written about Western women traveling to Ecuador Meisch , the Gambia Ware , Indonesia Dahles and Bras , Egypt Jacobs , and Japanese women travel- ing to Nepal Yamaga taking advantage of local men who make themselves sexually available to women for a variety of reasons including erotic desire, social status, economic benefit, and emigration.
As a social group of gendered, sexualized, racialized, national subjects mobile on a global scale, women tourists affect local prac- tices of sex, sexuality and gender through embodied relations. In many places of the world, the presence of foreign women as tourists with economic, racialized power profoundly influences how local men negotiate masculine identities and subjectivities. Not all vacation sex is ethno- sexual tourism therefore nor is all ethnosexual tourism the same. Within the global economy, women from First over local lovers World countries can and do exert their relative economic power over local lovers and others in the communities to which they travel in Third World countries, but power associated with mascu- linity complicates this schema.
I will analyze female sex tourists through a consideration of intimacy beyond sex acts as central to ethnosexual tourism. Male tourists, for the most part, are bracketed out of the scene with regards to sexual tourism. More prevalent to the tourist-local modes of sexual socialibity in the town are a variety of sexual and intimate relationships between foreign women and local men in which economic exchange is markedly ambiguous. As Phillips and others show to be the case in many ethnosexual tourist destinations where men avail themselves sexually for foreign women, local men in Puerto Viejo do not see themselves as pros- titutes or gigolos, but rather as players and boyfriends.
Some men hustle the women upfront for cash or stuff. Other men want only sex but nevertheless hope to gain some material benefits , while some want to impregnate foreign women. While I have heard of women who arrive with cash in hand to pay willingly for sex with a local man, all of the women I interviewed conveyed anxiety, confusion, or even anger when the mention of money by their local partner tainted what the women viewed as a developing romance or intimate connection.
