Stella’s Not the Only One Who Got Her Groove Back on a Tropical Isle

In the 1998 movie “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” the heroine, Stella Payne, played by Angela Bassett, sees a TV commercial promoting travel to Jamaica. It features a phalanx of handsome young Jamaican men and this caption: “Call 1-800-JAMAICA. We’ll be waiting for you.” (The phone number actually works.)

Never mind the balmy weather or the beaches or the rum punch, it seems to suggest. Jamaica’s big attraction is its men.

In the movie, Stella goes to the island and meets a charmer half her age. An affair ensues, as well as the obligatory Hollywood happy ending.

Sound like an escapist fantasy?

Not quite. There’s reason to believe that a small but significant number of women travel to meet and have sex with men.

Anthropologists and sociologists have been studying the phenomenon for at least a decade. Moreover, several beach resorts in developing countries, such as Kuta in Bali, Negril in Jamaica and Boca Chica and Sosua in the Dominican Republic, have become known as pickup spots for women tourists.

Just how many women go to such places chiefly for the purpose of forming liaisons is unknown. But a recent poll of 240 unaccompanied women tourists in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, conducted by researcher Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor and reported last August in Sociology, the journal of the British Sociological Assn., showed that a third of the women surveyed had one or more sexual relationships with local men during their vacations.

“From the early days, Jamaica was very popular among young European women as a place for sexual experimentation,” says Christopher P. Baker, a guidebook writer for Lonely Planet Publications and Moon Handbooks who has been traveling to Jamaica for 20 years. “They fell for locals.”

After the release of “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” Baker says there was “a very obvious influx of middle-aged, middle-class women from North America” in Jamaica for sex, along with the sun and sand.

Still, by all accounts, women sex tourists are rare compared with the number of men who travel to countries like Thailand and the Philippines for sex with prostitutes, some of whom are children sold by impoverished parents into the skin trade. Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now, a New York-based women’s rights organization, says that about 25 companies in the U.S. offer organized sex tours for men.

Such companies, Neuwirth says, create a demand for sex travel. “But you can’t equate [women’s holiday romance] with sex tourism,” she says, “because it doesn’t exist as an organized industry.”

The phenomenon of women traveling for sex differs from male sex tourism in other important ways. “Often there isn’t the same sense of money exchanged. That would insult both parties. Sex and a good time is the currency,” says Lynn Meisch, an anthropologist at St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga who has studied relationships between Western women travelers and local tour and trekking guides in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.

Although 60% of the women in the Sociology journal poll said their holiday affairs in the Caribbean had an economic element, payment to the men took various forms. Sometimes the women bought them gifts and meals and subsidized them for the duration of the affair.

Holiday affairs for women often last longer than the brief cash-for-services encounters common among male sex tourists. Sometimes the women don’t travel specifically for sex but simply find attractive opportunities for it along the way. And Meisch says that the local men who form liaisons with Western women tourists in South America would never consider themselves prostitutes or gigolos. Along with spending time in bed, they are the women’s guides, protectors and companions. “Women don’t just want sex,” she says, “but a full cultural experience.”

Such distinctions have led experts like Meisch to use the term “romance tourism” for female sex travel, separating women who go abroad for a holiday relationship from their male counterparts, who go for sex only. Equality Now’s Neuwirth says the two are so different that, far from being considered sex tourism, the women’s version of the phenomenon could be called “courtship”--in other words, that in paying the way for a local lover, women tourists are doing what American men do for their girlfriends.

It’s as if, by traveling to certain Third World beach resorts, women have the opportunity to reverse the romantic roles they’re generally forced to play at home. As Deborah Pruitt and Suzanne LaFont, the authors of “For Love and Money: Romance Tourism in Jamaica,” a paper published in Annals of Tourism Research in 1995, write, “These women are able to explore more dominant roles in the tourism relationship. The economic and social status the women enjoy provides them with a security and independence that translates into power and control.”

Clearly, the incidence of female sex-or-romance tourism reflects the increased freedom of Western women, which, in turn, affects the places where they vacation and the local people they get to know. In established sex tourism spots, a cadre of local men well understands the “Stella syndrome” and offers services, from snorkeling instruction to sex, to female tourists. On Bali they’re known as “Kuta cowboys.” In Jamaica they grow dreadlocks, which earn them “substantially more attention from foreign women than ... Jamaican men without locks,” write Pruitt and LaFont.

Meisch has studied the attractiveness to tourist women of Ecuadorean men from the Otavalo Valley, about 65 miles north of Quito. Interestingly, those favored by tourist women have long braids. But few women travel to Otavalo specifically for sex and romance, and the area hasn’t become a sex mecca, though Meisch sees it as a danger. “Young men get the idea. Romance tourism can lead to sex tourism and prostitution,” she says.

I’d hate to see that happen in the high, green Otavalo. And though I acknowledge striking differences between male sex tourism and what is known as female romance tourism, both seem to me part of the same phenomenon, wherein (relatively) rich people pay poor people for sex, short or long term, with no emotion and no strings attached. “Most women don’t think of it as sex tourism,” says Marilyn Byfield, chairwoman of the International Federation of Women’s Travel Organizations, based in Torremolinos, Spain, “but if they examine it, it is.”