Master S Thesis - S. Spiteri; Mcmaster University Department of Sociology

Master’s Thesis - S. Spiteri; McMaster University – Department of Sociology

FEMALE SEX TOURISM IN JAMAICA: AN ARENA FOR ADAPTATION AND RECREATION FOR MARGINALIZED MEN

By

SUZANNE SPITERI, B.A. (HONORS)

A Thesis

Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies

in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements

for the Degree

Master of Arts

McMaster University

ABSTRACT

Using semi-structured interviews, this research brings to light the lived experiences of thirteen men informally employed as sex workers in Jamaica and concentrates on both determining the motivations of Jamaican men involved in the informal sex trade and understanding the men's perceptions and understandings of the tourist women with whom they become involved with.

Female sex tourism is found to be used in partas a mechanism for escaping poverty, allowing men to provide for their families, an important area for male identity in Jamaica. The sex tourism of Western women also allows Jamaican men an arena to both secure sexual access to women as well asassociated social status.

The link between sex tourism and racism, and the racial stereotypes that precede black men are very familiar to the male sex workers who regard racial motivations, ranging from the desire to experience 'something new' to wanting to engage in sexual relations with 'real black men' to be the primary motivating factor for women who travel to Jamaica to engage in sexual relations with local men.

Using the conceptualizations of the Rude Boy and Rasta performances of masculinity, it is found that local men have cultivated the ability to deploy their masculinity and sexuality in ways that maximized their desirability to tourists, allowing them to perform the stereotyped roles of Jamaican masculinity in ways that accord to tourist women’s expectations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my thanks and gratitude to everyone who made this possible.

To my mother - you are the reason that I was able to finish this project. Thank You.

To my children, Wesley and Isaiah- You two really didn't help at all, but without you there would be no point.

To Albert- Thank you for your continued support and readily available criticism.

To my supervisor Dr. Tina Fetner – thank you for all of your help and candid feedback.

To my committee members Drs. Melanie Heath, and Philip White – thank you

for your patience, guidance, and helpful suggestions. Your contributions have improved my

thesis in countless ways.

Lastly, and most importantly, thank you to the men who bravely volunteered their time to

share their experiences and ultimately made this project possible.

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………. ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………..………………...iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS ………………………………………………………………………iv

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION...... 1

Background on Jamaican Sex Tourism....... 1

Jamaican Masculinities...... 8

Research Goals...... 13

Methodology ...... 14

Being a Female Researcher...... 20

Sample...... 24

Recruitment...... 25

Data Management...... 31

Terminology...... 32

Ethical Considerations...... 32

CHAPTER TWO: STUDY PARTICIPANTS PERSPECTIVES ON MALE SEX WORK...... ,,,,,...... 33

Motivations for Involvement...... 33

The Economic Power of Female Tourists ...... 44

Sexual Motivations for Involvement...... 46

Pursuit of Women Depending on Goals...... 48

Three Levels of Economic Gains...... 54

Obtaining Payment...... 58

Chapter Conclusion...... 62

CHAPTER THREE: STUDY PARTICIPANTS PERSPECTIVES ON FEMALE TOURISTS....... 66

Perspectives on Female Involvement with Local Men...... 66

To Experience Something New...... 69

Sex with Black Men...... 71

Compliments and Expectations...... 73

Exaggerated Difference...... 78

The Rude Boys...... 82

Rastafarians ...... 89

Chapter Conclusion ...... 100

CHAPTER FOUR DISCUSSION...... 102

Reference List ...... 115

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Background on Jamaican Sex Tourism

The beautiful island country of Jamaica, situated in the Caribbean Sea, like most nations of the Caribbean is economically reliant on tourism. While travel to the Antilles was at one time considered to be quite “unwholesome”, due to the rampant spread of disease, the turn of the nineteenth century ushered in immense growth in travel to the Caribbean as a whole (Taylor, 2003). With the industrial revolution engendering the need for periodic relief from the “psychological stresses and strains of the factory system” , the development of the jet aircraft, the increase in disposable income and leisure time, the Caribbean Islands emerged as a “rich man’s paradise” as far back as 1873 (Taylor, 2003, p. 5-6). Today, Jamaica welcomes an average of 1,951,752 foreign travelers a year, with a travel and tourism industry that employs 284,000 people, which amounts to one in every four jobs. It also accounts for 27.7 percent of the island's Gross Domestic Product, or US$3.7 billion. While Jamaica boasts a year-round temperate climate and unblemished white sand beaches, recent scholarship indicates that sex may be as significant in luring tourists as the sand and the sun.

Reports of a new form of prostitution in the Caribbean began to appear in Western news media by the early 1990’s (Kempadoo, 1996). The accounts reported a “new” phenomenon of young men and women exchanging sex for material gains with tourists to the region. While media reports suggested that sex tourism (as it was by then known) was a new happening in the region, it was not completely novel to the Island of Jamaica. Despite the lack of historical analysis detailing the emergence of tourist oriented sex work, early references suggest that an inextricable relationship between sex work and tourism exists in the regions past (Kempadoo, 2001), with indications such as Frantz Fannon’s (1968) concern that the region was becoming the “brothel of Europe”.

The term sex tourism, a protean term that attempts to capture varieties of leisure travel that have as part of their purpose the purchase of sexual services (Wonders, 2001), typically invokes stereotypical images of white Western men traveling abroad to affirm their supposed dominant position within a hierarchy of gendered, sexualized, racialized, and economic power. With few topics relating to tourism remaining more emotive and controversial, the relationship between sex and tourism is often conceptualized as a social arena in which class, gender, race and power intersect to reinforce the inequalities between rich and poor, white and non-white, and men and women. The majority of research pertaining to sex tourism as a whole and in the Caribbean in particular involves a central focus on male sex tourism and the interpersonal power dynamics at play between the tourist and the sex worker.

Informed by deeply inscribed discourses around the natural licentiousness of men and an apparently natural lack of sexual agency amongst women (Weeks, 1996), for the most part, sex tourism is analyzed as an expression of male patriarchal power and of female powerlessness (Taylor, 2001), and often, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary, analyses of sex tourism often dismiss the possibility of female sex tourism. While the majority of sex tourism in the Caribbean is defined by heterosexual relations between male sex tourists and female sex workers (Kempadoo, 2004), there also exists a significant amount of female sex tourism between wealthy white European and North American women and young males indigenous to the Caribbean island of Jamaica (Herold, Garcia &DeMoya, 2001), with one study asserting that almost one third of the single or unaccompanied female tourists to Jamaica engaged in one or more sexual relationships with local men (Taylor, 2001).The scale of female sex tourism in Jamaica is significantly smaller from that of male sex tourism however, with even those researchers who argue that women should be included in the ranks of sex tourists acknowledging that the numbers concerned are diminutive by direct comparison (Pruitt & LaFont, 1995). Jamaica has nonetheless come to be regarded as a popular travel destination for female sex tourists, with authors claiming that “when white women flock to Jamaica for a little fun in the sun, the R&R they're often looking for is not "Rest and Relaxation" but to "Rent a Rasta"” (Kempadoo, 1999). “Rent a Rasta” or “Rent a Dread”, being the popular colloquial terms constructed by Jamaican locals to refer to the local men who cater to the search of many women from the United States, Canada and Europe for an extraordinary sexual experience with an "authentic" Rastafarian man (Kempadoo, 1999) while the white female buyers are referred to as “milk bottles” due to their pale skin and black women are referred to as “Stellas” ( after the release of the popular film “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” after which there was reportedly a measurable increase in trips to Jamaica by single female buyers seeking young Jamaican "boyfriends") (Shared Hope International, p.24). The Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) reports that Jamaica welcomed 1,951,752 foreign travelers in 2011, with the main visitor producing countries being the United States of America and Canada. The gender mix of visitors from Canada in 2011, was 173,856 males (45.9%) and 205,082 females (54.1%), demonstrating that Jamaica has become a popular tourist destination overall, and for women in particular. One report from Negril, Jamaica explains, “Negril is not as dreamlike as it looks. It is no longer visited primarily for sun, sea and sand. Instead it is the destination of choice for an increasing number of female sex tourists. An estimated 80,000 single women, from teenagers to grandmothers, flock to the island every year and use the services of around 200 men known as ‘rent–a–dreads’, ‘rastitutes’ or ‘the Foreign Service’ (Shared Hope International, p. 24)While until recently sex tourism has been most commonly understood to be a leisure activity of men who visit tourism destinations to engage in commercial sex (Hall & Ryan, 2001), since the mid-1990s, however, there has been a developing interest in the issue of ‘female sex tourism’ amongst researchers of tourism and prostitution (Jeffreys, 2003). While few studies refer to the phenomenon of ‘female sex tourism’, preferring instead the term ‘romance tourism’, the phenomenon of ‘First World’ tourist women who travel to poor countries in general and Jamaica specifically, for sex with local men, is often discussed with a clear focus on Jamaican masculinity.

Guided principally by the testimony of tourist women, academic studies concerned with both Jamaican masculinity and female sex tourism tend to focus on the motivations of Jamaican men for involvement with Western tourist women.

The majority of scholarship, informed by traditional notions of essential gender identity view tourist women as passive innocents, ‘used’ by local men who are actively seeking sexual conquests, money, a ticket off the island and maybe love (Taylor, 2011). Using Jamaican displays of machismo drawn from their cultural gender scripts, ‘beach boys’ or local men who engage in sexual relations with tourist women, according to this view, are seen as extortionists praying on the vulnerability of tourist women while actively pursuing their next money making venture or sexual conquest (Herold, Garcia &DeMoya, 2001), with being a beach boy being perceived as allowing for the ability to earn a prosperous living far beyond basic needs for survival (Pruitt & LaFont, 1995). ‘Beach boys’ are seen as slick working men, who make their living scamming tourist women (Reimer, 2002).

The Jamaican conceptualization of masculinity, which is denoted by the number of sexual exploits as well as the number of children a man has (Gayle, 2002) has led researchers to agree that men gain superior masculine status amongst their peers according to their number of their sexual conquests. Accordingly, men who engage in transactional sex are assumed, from this view, to do so in accordance with the gendered cultural script that privileges men to engage in a variety of types of sexual relationships. Chevannes (2001) indicates that the hegemonic construction of African Caribbean masculinity privileges a man to engage in a variety of types of sexual relationships. This ranges from the very casual to a steady multiple partnering arrangement , and that a man is not considered a “real” man unless he is heterosexually active. In Learning to Be a Man, (2001), Chevannes notes that approximately 50 percent of Jamaican men engage in polygamy or multiple relationships, a sexual practice that is seen as enhancing their masculinity as long as all activity is strictly heterosexual. Typical male sexual behaviours include the early onset of sexual intercourse, concurrent multiple partners, and extramarital affairs; sex with women being the foundation of such behaviour. This hypermasculinity is equivalent in many ways to the sexual behaviours associated with machismo in Central and South America. (Ramírez, 1999). The concept of machismo is of crucial importance here. Lancaster (1992) states that "machismo" is not only about relations between men and women, but that machismo is about power relations among men too. Lancaster (1992) argues;

Like drinking, gambling, risk taking, asserting one's opinion, and fighting,

the conquest of women is a feat performed with two audiences in mind:

first, other men, to whom one must constantly prove one's masculinity

and virility; and second, oneself, to whom one must also show all the

signs of masculinity. ( p. 236)

In Jamaica machismo has traditionally been a correlate of power demonstrated by the number of children and wives a man has, but it is also linked to the protection of and provision for such wives and children. Homosexual intercourse and identity are not tolerated within the dominant discourse on masculinity. Chevannes (2001) argues that Jamaican men are often compelled into early adolescent sexual activity and multiple sexual partnerings in adulthood to avoid appearing or being perceived to be homosexual. Gayle (2002) note that the Jamaican male “exhibits his manhood through sexual exploits and the higher the number of women with whom he is involved sexually, the greater his achievement. He provides evidence of this through the number of offspring he produces” (Gayle , 2002, p. 1995)

Virtually all existing scholarship on Jamaican ‘beach boys’ indicates that one of the main motivations given by “the professional ‘beach boys’ for their involvement with female tourists is economic” (Herold, Garcia & DeMoya, 2001, p. 983). Citing an extreme “pressure to establish one’s maleness through the abilities to disperse case” (Hoope, 2004, p. 108), ‘beach boy’ masculinity is redefined to encapsulate a “masculine identity founded on conspicuous consumption, ostentatious costumes and exaggerated performance, and not on the preferred markers of status and personhood that traditionally inform social relations in Jamaica” (Hope, 2004, p. 108).

In addition to the focus on the motivations of Jamaican men for involvement with Western tourist women, Jamaican masculinity is also discussed in regards to the attraction to and connection developed between white Western women and black Jamaican men. For example, Pruitt and Lafont (1995) who contend that while sex tourism as practiced by men serves to perpetuate conventional gender norms and “reinforce power relations of male dominance and female subordination, romance tourism as practiced by women provides and arena for change” (Pruitt and Lafont , 1995, p. 423), argue that while women travel to Jamaica and around the world free of men and their own society's gender constraints for more control in defining their relationships they are simultaneously drawn to Jamaica by conventional notions of masculinity. With ideas about Jamaican masculine power being central to women's attraction to local Jamaican men, Pruitt and LaFont (1995) argue that female sex tourists in Jamaica are drawn to the strength and potency of a Jamaican masculinity even as they experiment with the power they acquire through racial and financial superiority. From this perspective, the connection a Western woman develops with a Jamaican man is generally based on her idealizations of the embodiment of manhood, “idealizations fueled by the discourse of hegemonic relations constructed through ‘race’ in which the exotic and the erotic are intertwined (Pruit and Lafont, 1995, p. 430).There is a well-documented link between sex, travel, and the eroticisation of the ethnic ‘Other’, (Montgomery, 2008) and it is often argued that various forms of racism are pivotal to sex tourism. Female Western sex tourists, are seen as being driven into relations with Jamaican men by racist sexual stereotypes that include fantasies wherein the exotic ‘other’ is more passionate, more emotional, more natural and sexual tempting (Pruitt & LaFont, 1995). Women are driven into relationships with Jamaican men, from this interpretation, to feel as though they are able to ‘tame’ a man who is reputed to be the raw, highly sexed ‘other’, a real man with a primitive manhood (Taylor, 2006).Stereotypes of black men and their sexuality and differences between the tourists’ cultures and Jamaican cultures, and the Jamaican display of machismo drawn from their cultural gender scripts, promote the belief that Jamaican men represent the archetypal masculine (Pruitt & LaFont, 1995). While the stereotypes about black men and their sexuality extend to all Jamaican men and perhaps all black men in general, they are particularly prevalent for the black man who stands closer to his “Affrican heritage”, in this case embodied in the Rude boy and Rastafarian identity (Pruitt &LaFont, 1995).