Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (56 page)

Relationships also can be a kind of stage to resist racial hierarchies and inequalities based on gender, class, and citizenship. For example, the strategizing of Dominican women can have long-term economic results. Some clients have paid for the education of their “girlfriend’s” children or have helped sex workers get a fledgling business off the ground (such as a clothing store or hair salon). In addition, sex work can be used as a means to achieve privileged schooling, well-paying jobs in the civil service, or access to certain residential quarters.13

Sex workers’ transactional use of marriage is an age-old story. What is new is how marriage-as-transaction operates in a globalized world where legal
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crossing of national borders requires passports and visas. In Sosúa’s sexscape, marriage between Dominicans and western men emerges as an economic strategy as well as a legal route to securing the papers necessary to migrate off the island. Research on so-called mail-order brides vividly underscores how marriage to foreigners is often the only viable option for legal migration for citizens of certain countries. For example, young Chinese women are able to gain the exit visas and passports that most Chinese spend years waiting for—

or never get—by marrying foreign men through marriage introduction agencies.14 Research on marriage-as-transaction, illustrated by these practices, demonstrates that the western feminist critique of marriages based on the traditional division of labor does not consider the calculus of women who have

“worked in fields or a factory for subsistence since childhood.”15 For them, marriage, even those that take the most traditional forms—and are not based on “love”—can be a vacation from backbreaking work and chronic financial crises. With their own workloads lightened, their material comfort improved, and the possibilities to remit money back to their families expanded, marriage for economic security can be good enough.16 Indeed, although some sex workers ideally might hope for love and greater gender equity in a marriage to a foreign man (compared to traditional inequality with local men), most regard these marriages strictly as business transactions.

TH E C L I E NT S

What about the sex tourists? Most of the clients I interviewed initially traveled there based on recommendations of friends, and most had visited other sex-tourist destinations. These seasoned sex tourists told me that they were “bored” with other destinations and decided to “try” Dominican women.

Over the years, the returning tourists get to know the owner–operators of the small hotels, lunch shacks, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs they frequent.

These places might not be grand, but what they offer is warm hospitality by owners who know their customers and go out of their way to make them feel at home. Since German tourists often frequent German-owned establishments that serve German food and beer, and British, Canadian, and Dutch tourists also tend to go to bars or restaurants owned by fellow countrymen, these tourists know they can have conversations in their native language with the owners and other customers. And, of course, returning sex tourists can look for their favorite sex workers, with whom they may have been corresponding.

Just as they enjoy the familiar vibe in the unpretentious bars, hotels, and restaurants that they frequent, sex tourists also see sex workers’ lives up close.

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Once the clients accompany women to their rooms in barebones boarding houses, they see the daily demands of poverty. The unfinished walls and ceilings and lack of plumbing and lighting clash with idealized fantasies of having uncomplicated sexual relationships with these relatively “undemanding” women. As soon as tourists step out of the tourist zone and into the private world of the women, they confront—even if only for an hour—the reality of how the poor live in their tourist destination. Since women usually have photographs of their children on their walls, their clients get a glimpse into these women’s many obligations. Women report that when clients return the next day to take women out to lunch, or the next evening, they bring gifts with them for the women’s children. Thus, clients learn early on in encounters with Sosúa’s sex workers that getting involved with these women could take many forms.

Race plays a central role in how white western sex tourists imagine Afro-Dominican sex workers. Women’s skin color was mentioned again and again in my interviews (and is a recurring theme in tourists’ postings on sex-tourist Internet sites). A group of German men told me, for example, “Dominican women are beautiful, there is a range of skin color.” Others made explicit the connections they saw between skin color and sexual proficiency. German sex tourists and a bar owner laughed about German women, with whom “it’s over quickly.” In contrast, they ribbed one another about how much Dominican women enjoyed sex, and attributed their “natural” sexual skills to the climate:

“When the sun is shining, it gives you more hormones.”

As sites in the developing world become known as sites for sex tourists, sex for sale can come to define these countries—and the women who live there—in the North American and European imaginations. In her description of Thailand, Annette Hamilton, for example, points to the popular image of the “alluring, very young woman” as the “central icon for the quintessential Thai experience,” which cements the “Western identification of Thailand with sex for sale, or ‘play-for-pay’.”17 Associations between nationality, race, and sexual prowess draw sex tourists to sexscapes in the developing world, where they not only buy sex more cheaply than in their home countries but can live out their racialized sexual fantasies. Sex-tourist destinations often depend on racial differences between the buyers and the sellers as well as the men’s fantasies about the local women, rooted in colonial racist discourses and, more recently, influence by media depictions and Internet discussions and photos.

Sex tourists’ girlfriends or wives or ex-girlfriends and ex-wives are imagined points of contrast. Sex tourists in Sosúa, for example, constantly compare Dominican women to European women, and imagine the latter as more sexual, compliant, and as making fewer demands. Misogyny among
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these foreign men directed toward western women “back home” can play a role in the men’s racialized sexualization of women as “Other” in the sexscapes to which they travel. Hamilton describes a “profound misogyny” expressed by western sex tourists toward western women in her research in the sex trade in Bangkok.18 In Jeremy Seabrook’s interviews with male sex tourists, they told him they traveled to Thailand because western women were not as compliant or as feminine as Thai women. They came to Bangkok to “escape into the fantasy of men-as-men and women-as-women, an uncomplicated distribution of roles which provide a refuge from life.”19 In the Dominican Republic it is also common for European men to seek long-term relationships with Dominican women as a break from the “demands” of “liberated” European women. They have fantasies not only of “hot and fiery” sex but also of relationships that reflect more “traditional” gender roles than they might have in their relationships with European women. Sosúa’s sex workers embrace their foreign clients’ misogynist comments about European women as a way to distinguish themselves as better and more exciting lovers, so they too take part in perpetuating racialized and sexualized stereotypes.

These associations between nationality, race, and sexual prowess have been fueled not only by sex tourists and sex workers but also by various commercial enterprises that cater to and perpetuate these associations. In Thailand, for example, brothel owners or sex-tour operators might include fees for foot massages in their bill for sexual services because western men perceive Thai women as being “tender,” “a quality conspicuously absent from the sex industry in the west.”20 Seabrook observes: “Men feel particularly cherished by what they experience as the compliance, eagerness to please, and con-siderateness of Thai women.” Indeed, during their initial contacts with Thai women, the men describe themselves “as being over the moon, being on cloud nine, walking on air, and wondered what they have been doing, wasting their life until now.” Although these sex tourists’ racism and stereotypes about Asians inform their expectations and even their experiences, they “rarely see

[that] this idealization of ‘Oriental’ women is racist.”21 Similarly, many sex tourists hold strong racialized notions about Afro-Caribbean women.22

O UTC O M E S

Despite sex workers’ strategizing, a recurring story seems to unfold: most workers end up just getting by, rather than improving their socioeconomic status or their children’s futures. Women’s migration strategies cannot work, for example, unless the foreign clients follow through on their promises of visa
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sponsorships and marriage. At any time these men could stop sending money wires or decide to withhold help in the visa process. Since the late 1980s, when Europeans began vacationing in Sosúa in significant numbers, only a modest number of them have married Dominican women, let alone sponsored their migration to Europe. And, while stories circulate in sex workers’ circles about women living in Europe with former clients-turned-husbands, nearly every sex worker also recounts stories in which foreign men break their promises to Dominican women. Particularly striking is the impermanence of the women’s

“successes” and “failures.” As unpredictably as foreign men begin sending money wires, they stop sending them. Promises to sponsor a woman’s visa can go unfulfilled. And, of course, marriages can come to an end.

Moreover, the women themselves move in and out of sex work. Sex work is not always a steady activity but might occur in conjunction with other income-generating activities. It can be an activity that some women (and men) take up for short periods or as part of an annual work cycle. Unlike some other places, however, most women in Sosúa’s sex-tourist trade do not simultaneously work in other income-generating activities. However, former sex workers may combine paid work (outside the sex trade) with “love work:”

A transactional approach to romantic and sexual relationships with foreign men as boyfriends. And, of course, since sex work and the relationships that grow out of it—both long-term relationships and marriage—are business transactions, sex workers and former sex workers do not see these relationships with clients as restricting their sexual or romantic lives. Rather, they maintain sexual—and possibly romantic—relationships with Dominican men while they simultaneously build and maintain a roster of transnational suitors.

Only a few women I met during my first trip to Sosúa in 1993 were still working in the sex trade in 2003. Most have long since returned to their families in towns and cities throughout the island. Those who have stayed in Sosúa have moved on from sex work. Some have married Dominican men—

usually men who were their boyfriends while they sold sex. These marriages, the workers explain, are for “love.” Others continue to look to foreign men for resources and visas. I never could have predicted back in 1993 that some of them—who had no ties to men overseas and who were not actively seeking to establish them—would eventually marry foreign men and move to Europe.

And of course the reverse has happened: women whose relationships with foreign men seemed fairly secure have experienced the dissolution of these relationships, resulting in the women’s return from Europe to the Dominican Republic and their associated downward economic mobility.

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VA R I ATI O N I N S E X W O R K

There are a wide range of workers’ experiences within the sex trade, some beneficial and some tragic. Women enter sex work for diverse reasons and have greatly varying experiences within it. Even within Sosúa, conditions in the sex trade are highly divergent: there are Dominican and Haitian workers; women who work with either foreign or Dominican clients; women who receive money wires from foreign clients; women who receive financial help from local, regular Dominican clients; women who live with or are separated from their children; and women who have AIDS, or have been raped or battered, and those who have not. These differences are crucial to shaping a woman’s capacity for choice and control.

The debate about how scholars, activists, and sex workers understand women’s sexual labor centers on issues of agency and victimization, as well as economic empowerment and powerlessness. Some assert that women are forced to choose sex work because of their race, class, nationality, colonial status, and gender and do not have a “choice.” To them, all forms of sex work are exploitative and oppressive. Yet, Dominican women have room for maneuvering within the sex trade. It is not simply a story of women who use sex work as a survival strategy but also of women who try to use sex work as an
advancement
strategy.

Marriage and migration off the island are the key goals. These women see Sosúa’s sex trade and marriage to foreign tourists as an avenue to economic success—a way not just to solve short-term economic problems but to change their lives (and their families’ lives) through migration overseas.

Like feminist ethnographers who explore larger structural forces that contribute to poor women’s oppression while also highlighting how these women try to improve their lives, I consider both the structures of inequality in workers’ lives and their creative responses to them, and conclude that there is a great deal of
intentionality
in these women’s use of the sex trade. Their creative strategizing, the ways they attempt to use the sex trade to move beyond daily survival, presents an important counterexample to claims that
all
sex workers in
all
contexts are powerless victims of violence and exploitation. These women, local agents caught in a web of global economic relations, try to take advantage (to the extent that they can) of the men—and their citizenship—who are in Sosúa to take advantage of them. In Sosúa’s bar scene, foreign sex tourists might see Dominican sex workers as exotic and erotic and pick out one woman over another in the crowd, as a commodity for their pleasure and control, but Dominican sex workers often see the men, too, as readily exploitable. The men are potential dupes, essentially walking visas, who can help the women leave the island—and poverty.