States of Arousal/Fantasy Islands: Race, Sex, and Romance in the Global Economy of Desire Joane Nagel

https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/3107/3066
States of Arousal/Fantasy Islands: Race, Sex, and Romance in the Global Economy of Desire
Joane Nagel
In 19861 was teaching an undergraduate course in the Sociology of Deviance in which students conducted research projects on a group or activity that was socially defined as deviant. An international student in the class asked to write a paper on Korean prostitution in Junction City, Kansas. I looked at him blankly, thinking I had misunderstood him, that we were having a communication or language problem, that he had not understood the assignment, or that I did not understand his description of his project. What could Koreans, especially Korean prostitutes, be doing in a small town 150 miles west of Kansas City? It turned out that the answer to this question had to do with the geopolitics of superpower competition, the Cold War, and the global economy of desire. As we discussed his project further, I discovered what this Korean student already knew.that both South Korea and Junction City are "ethnosexual" sites where the global meets the local in the pursuit of racialized sex and romance.1
By "ethnosexual" I refer to the intersection and interaction between ethnicity and sexuality and the ways in which each defines and depends on the other for its meaning and power.2 The territories that lie at the intersections of two or more ethnic, racial, or national boundaries are "ethnosexual frontiers".erotic locations and exotic destinations that are surveilled and supervised, patrolled and policed, regulated and restricted, but are constantly penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic "others" across ethnic boundaries. Just as ethnic communities are held together by social, cultural, economic, and political ties, they are also united by "libidinal bonds."3 Ethnosexual frontiers mark the edges of ethnosexual social control and constitute a sensual space on both sides of the
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ethnic divide for sexual contact. Some of this sexual contact is by "ethnosexual settlers" who establish long-term liaisons, join and/or form families, and become members of ethnic communities "on the other side." Some of this sexual contact is by "ethnosexual sojourners" who stay for a brief or extended visit, enter into sexual liaisons, but eventually return to their home communities. Some of this sexual contact is by "ethnosexual adventurers" who undertake expeditions across ethnic divides for recreational, casual, or "exotic" sexual encounters, often more than once, but who return to their sexual home bases after each excursion. Some of this sexual contact is by "ethnosexual invaders" who launch sexual assaults across ethnic boundaries, inside alien ethnic territory, seducing, raping, and sexually enslaving ethnic "others" as a means of sexual domination and colonization.
The global system is a marked by a variety of borders, frontiers, and bridges among states and other entities such as corporations, organizations, and diasporic communities. There are the political boundaries of states and regions, treaty agreements, defense pacts, international alliances; economic boundaries of states and regions, trade agreements, production, commodity, and labor mar-kets, transnational corporations; cultural boundaries of states and regions, material and ideational cultural production and distribution systems, formal and informal cultural exchanges, export and indigenization of cultural forms and notions; social boundaries of states and regions, norms and conventions of everyday life, organizations and communities of interest, religion, language, leisure, purpose, formal and informal associations and interactions; legal boundaries of states and regions, laws governing political, economic, and social life, law enforcement cooperative agreements, extradition treaties, national and international law and courts.
There is an "intimate substructure" that underlies these realms and dimen-sions of the global system that I am referring to here as "the global economy of desire." This sexual economy seems to operate beneath the surface of the global system. The economy of desire is generally ignored or winked at, and it often only surfaces in the form of scandals or moral crises. Although sexuality is a major site of commercial exploitation, and is a constantly supervised, surveilled, and socially controlled feature of formal and informal social life, its systematic study tends to be left to the specialists: sexologists, sexual rights advocates, queer theorists, market researchers, and pharmaceutical companies, among others.
In this paper we will travel to one sector of the global sexual economy of desire.sex tourism. I have two goals here. First, I wish to show that sexuality is not only a gendered system, but that it is also racialized, ethnicized, and nationalized, that race and sex are intimately intertwined, mutually constitutive systems that I refer to as "ethnosexuality," and that the processes of racing sex and sexing race are widely practiced in the contemporary global system both as legacies of colonialism and as ongoing aspects of postcolonial processes of globalization. Second, I wish to trace the commercial exploitation of ethnosexuality to a convergence of macro global systems: geopolitical, military, cultural, and economic. My objective is to show how an intimate relationship between geopolitics and global economics has worked together to sexualize international migration and economic development and to produce today's large-scale global sex tourism industry. To begin this exploration, I'll return to the presence of Korean prostitutes in Junction City, Kansas.

Fighting Men and Comfort Women
Since the Korean War (1950-53) thousands of U.S. military personnel have been stationed on several bases in South Korea.4 Some of these troops are based in Junction City, Kansas, home of the U.S. Army's First Infantry Division."The Big Red One." American GIs stationed in Korea have frequented the hundreds of brothels set up and inspected by U.S. and Korean authorities, sating their sexual desire and spreading their sexual seed among the thousands of mainly Korean women prostitutes servicing these servicemen. Katharine Moon estimates that "since the war, over one million Korean women have served as sex providers for the U.S. military. And millions of Koreans and Americans have shared a sense of special bonding, for they have together shed blood in battle and mixed blood through sex and Amerasian offspring."5 GIs in Korea don't simply have sex with local women; some marry Korean women who return with them to the United States when the men complete their tours of duty. Moon estimates that "from the early 1950s to the early 1990s, over 100,000 Korean women have immigrated to the United States as wives of servicemen."6 Some of these marriages are, no doubt, convenience marriages arranged for profit, and some are matches made for love or romance. Some marriages last, some do not.
Once in the United States, Korean women from dissolved unions often find themselves with limited knowledge of English and few job skills, often in small-town labor markets primarily oriented to providing services to the military base. These women have easy access linguistically and culturally to already estab-lished Korean businesses catering to soldiers. Thus, many of the Korean women working as waitresses, bargirls, dancers, masseuses, and prostitutes in Junction City were once themselves or are the relatives of women married to GIs stationed in Korea who accompanied their husbands back to the United States. The result of this combination of the military, marriage, and migration ac-counted for, what seemed to me at first glance in 1986, the unlikely presence of Korean prostitutes in Junction City, Kansas. My student's patient efforts to educate me about his planned research project gave me a first glimpse into the global economy of desire.
The number of Korean prostitutes in Junction City is small. No doubt it is a tiny proportion of the number of American prostitutes surrounding U.S. military bases all across the United States, or the number of Korean prostitutes working outside U.S. military bases in Korea, or German and other European prostitutes outside U.S. military bases in Germany, or Japanese, Okinawan, and other Asian prostitutes outside U.S. military bases in Japan,7 or Filipino prostitutes whose numbers are declining following the closure of U.S. military bases in the Philippines in 1992, or the now underemployed Panamanian and Latin American prostitutes who worked the former U.S. Canal Zone before the Panama Canal was turned over to Panama in 1999. These are to name but a few of the ethnosexual zones surrounding U.S. and other military bases around the world.ethnosexual frontiers that were created as part of the U.S. global defense and warfare system.
An important aspect of Korean prostitution both in Korea and in Kansas involves the place of Asian women in the images and mechanics of Western erotic meaning systems. Lynn Thiesmeyer argues that the imaginary construction of Asian women's sexuality is accomplished by "discourses of seduction." The Asian female body is a spoken site of servile sexual availability. Such speech resonates with longstanding Western sexual stereotypes of Asian women to drown out dissident discourses of physical abuse, forced servitude, and sexual exploitation.
The western image of the Asian female, the Asian body, and Asian sexuality has been reproduced, yet scarcely updated for centuries. As a late twentieth-century representative body of cultural feudalism and exoticism, the Asian/Asian-American woman has no parallel in the fantasies of the West. Wendy Chapkis points out that "advertisements using Asian women, for example, are evocative not only of the sexual mystery but also the docility and subservience supposedly 'natural to the oriental female' These women thus become metaphors for adventure, cultural difference, and sexual subservience."8
Thus, the brothels and bars surrounding U.S. (and other national and interna-tional) military bases and regional military "rest and recreation" zones become ethnosexual sites where Western fantasies of Asian female sexuality meet material manifestations of Asian women, and where the marriage of geopolitics and racial cosmologies is consummated nightly.
The link between making war and doing sex is nothing new. Sexuality has always been an important aspect of military operations. Throughout history women have been among "camp followers," providing services such as laundry, nursing, companionship, and sex to soldiers during peace and war. Sometimes these women have been wives, relatives, or girlfriends, but among their ranks have always been prostitutes, and on many occasions local women have been involuntarily "enlisted" in the sexual service of armies as rape victims and sexual slaves. Susan Brownmiller documents the commonplace nature of rape, espe-cially gang rape, in war.9 Moving or occupying armies use the rape of "enemy" women and girls as both a carrot and a stick: as a spoil of war for the troops to enjoy and as a technique of terror and warfare to dominate and humiliate enemy men by sexual abusing "their" women. Rape in war is best understood as a transaction between men, where women are the currency used in the exchange. Sexually taking an enemy's women amounts to gaining territory and psychological advantage. In countries around the world, rape often is seen as a polluting action, a way to soil the victim actually and symbolically, sometimes extending beyond the moment of violation when victims are mutilated or when pregnancies or births result.
Sexual slavery in war turns the use of rape as a short-term reward and tactic of a military mission into a permanent feature of military operations. Perhaps the best known twentieth-century use of sexual slavery was by the Japanese Imperial Army, which established camps of so-called "military comfort women" (Jugun Ianfu) in Japan and other countries where Japanese troops were stationed. While there were some mainly lower-class Japanese women forced into sexual slavery, most of the estimated 200,000 women enslaved by the Japanese army were ethnic or national "others" brought from Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines to "serve" the troops.10 Kazuko Watanabe reports that a woman ' s worth as a sexual commodity was based on her class and ethnicity. "The Japanese Imperial Army divided comfort women into a hierarchical order according to class, race, and nationality Korean and most other Asian women were assigned to lower-class soldiers. Japanese and European women went to high-ranking officers. Most of the European women were Dutch who were imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp in the Netherlands East Indies."11
Use of non-Japanese women by the Japanese army as sexual slaves illustrates another aspect of the ethnosexual character of warfare.12 The Japanese were not the only army engaged in ethnosexual assault and terror during the Second World War. The Nazis used concentration camps in Germany and other occupied countries for more than industrial and war-related labor or for their program of genocide directed against the Jews, and their mass killings of Gypsies and other "non-Aryan" peoples. Sexual labor was also demanded of women interned in the camps. Whether to submit to German sexual demands or be killed were the only choices open to many women in Nazi concentration camps.13
The Allies were also involved in ethnosexual violations and exploitation during the Second World War. Some was in the form of mass rapes, others in the more time-honored form of capitalizing on the vulnerability of women who faced economic hardship, malnourishment, or starvation. Many of these women found sexual liaisons and/or prostitution preferable to the grim alternatives available for themselves and their dependent families.14
Documentation of rape in war extended into major and minor conflicts during the second half of the twentieth century, in civil wars, wars of indepen-dence, military invasions and interventions in Algeria, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iraq, Kuwait, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone. The logic was always the same: rape was used by both sides for the familiar time-honored reasons.to reward the troops, to terrorize the enemy, and as a means of creating solidarity and protection through mutual guilt among small groups of soldiers.
It is important to note the prominence of racial, ethnic, and national boundaries in these many instances of mass rapes and "rape camps."15 Military rape is at its core an ethnosexual phenomenon. Whether a war is fought across national borders or inside state boundaries, the military front is typically an ethnosexual frontier. Differences in nationality, race, or ethnicity separate the combatants and identify the targets of aggression. Whether the violence is from combat or sexual assault, and whether it is guns or bodies that are used as weapons, those who are physically or sexually assaulted almost always are different in some ethnic way. Men at war do not, as a rule, rape their "own" women unless, of course, those women are suspected of disloyalty, especially sexual disloyalty or "collaboration."16
A state of war is not a prerequisite for ethnosexual military encounters. The presence of military troops, operations, or bases creates a convenient and lucrative market for the sex industry. The scale of military operations, not the occurrence of actual combat, determines the size and vigor of the sex trade on military ethnosexual frontiers. During the Cold War, the creation of a global network of military bases and military alliances by the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies expanded the number of military stationed around the world, and generated unprecedented demand for many products and services for military operations and personnel, including sexual services. During the half century following the end of the Second World War, prostitution became a large-scale, stable industry around military bases in many parts of the world.
The global militarization that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century also institutionalized prostitution on an unprecedented scale in the many countries around the world that served Northern Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Eastern bloc military operations. It survived the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War. United Nations (UN) and NATO peacekeeping operations have expanded, as has the U.S. military's involvement in peacekeeping. Thus, the international circulation of soldiers remains an important feature of the global system and generates ongoing demand for sexual services. Judith Stiehm reports that
[In Namibia] some male peacekeepers moved local women into their quarters, UN vehicles were parked in front of brothels, and even high-ranking officials were believed to exploit local women hired by the UN... . [In Cambodia] the abuse of local women and children by UN troops and civilian police was brought to public attention Apparently the fear of AIDS made "virgins" highly desirable, and younger and younger girls were being recruited for prostitution.17
In contrast to the historically casual, even approved, links between national armies and sexual service suppliers, Stiehm found that international peacekeep-ing troops and officials' sexual excursions into local towns and countrysides became controversial during the 1990s. She attributed this questioning of the taken-for-granted "boys will be boys" attitude of UN senior officials to the presence of women UN workers and peacekeepers and religious NGOs (non-governmental organizations, such as charitable or relief organizations) who challenged longstanding military sexual perquisites.18 Thus, for the first time, serious questions were raised about UN troops' ethnosexual appetites and practices, and the UN-designed new policies to restrict such behavior, though their effectiveness remained to be seen.
An important aspect of military-related prostitution is that it illustrates very clearly the links among globalization, race/ethnicity/nationality, and sexuality. Sexual transactions between military personnel and local people are almost without exception ethnosexual encounters since the women and men providing sexual services to the troops are invariably racial, ethnic, and national others.19 These ethnosexual encounters often are the only real interactions that occur between local people and foreign soldiers. As a result of this limited, distorted relationship, the commercial sexualized image each has of the other adds to the stereotypes and prejudices that so often characterize views that groups hold of one another as they peer across racial, ethnic, or national boundaries. The hypersexualization of local women, the commercialization of sexual culture, and the presence of an entrenched sex industry, all of which stem from the militari-zation of sexuality, often persist long after the wars have ended.

The Global Commerce in Sex and Romance
Despite the end of the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Cold War, the sex industries they helped to generate and expand have remained permanent niches in many national economies. Besides continuing to service ongoing military operations around the world, a central legacy of the militarized global sex trade is sex tourism. As a point of clarification, I note that the sex industry and sex tourism are, of course, related, though the sex industry is a much broader category of sexual services in which researchers include all kinds of sex-for-profit activities such as pornography, nude and exotic dancing, and prostitution. Sex tourism is a narrower category that can include these and other sex services, but which involve destinations that provide a wide array of establishments and services to which consumers travel for sex. Specialized agencies often promote sex tours, drawing clientele from local areas or from more distant national and international venues. Both sex tourism and the broader sex industry are organized commercial operations with legal and illegal components depending on the laws of the countries where they are sited. Sex tourism is distinct from the general sex industry in that it is the sector of the trade that goes beyond simply advertising to actually provide organized tours to deliver sex consumers to concentrated sex service destinations.
The strategy of delivering large groups of consumers to commercial sex districts.the defining feature of sex tourism.turns out, in part, to have been a military tactic for entertaining the troops. Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson argue that there is an historical connection between sex-for-sale operations catering to soldiers and sex for sale to tourists: "sex tourism builds on an infrastructure established for military R&R [rest and recreation] and extended through corporate recreational contracts. . . ."20 They detail a fascinating link between the U.S. military and the World Bank in the development of the most notorious sex industry in the world.in Thailand:
In 1967, Thailand contracted with the U.S. government to provide "Rest and Recreation" .. . services to the troops dur-ing the Vietnam War. Today's customers at the go-go bars spawned by those contracts are not only white Americans but also European and Australian.allfarangs [foreigners] to the Thais.... It was in 1971, while the war in Southeast Asia still raged, that World Bank President Robert McNamara, who had been U.S. Secretary of Defense when the R&R contracts with Thailand were signed, went to Bangkok to arrange for the bank's experts to produce a study of Thailand's postwar tourism prospects.21
Because of the presence and profitability of the wartime sex industry, the Bank's advice to specialize in tourism, which Thailand followed, resulted in the sexualization of the tourist trade. In this way, the U.S. military and the World Bank became partners in making Thailand synonymous with sex tourism.22
Watanabe also forges a link between sex in warfare and sex tourism. She argues that there are historical, political, economic, and cultural parallels between Japan's wartime use of comfort women and its current role as a consumer market for the sex industry, in particular, for sex tourism:
Both groups of women have been tricked, imprisoned, raped, and then forced against their will to work as prostitutes Sex tourism to other Asian countries by Japanese men is a contem-porary version of the Japanese Imperial Army's sexual exploi-tation of Asian women. Symbolically, the difference lies only in the way the men dress; instead of military uniforms, they now wear business suits.23
Sex tourism has become controversial in some destination countries and in consumer countries as well. In Thailand, "Empower" and "Friends of Women" work with women in the sex tourism industry to teach them about AIDS prevention, and "Daughters Education Programme" provides educational oppor-tunities for village girls to find employment outside of sex tourism and to enhance their local status.24 Other international anti-sex trade/sex tourism organizations sponsor programs for public education, prostitute support, AIDS and STD awareness and prevention, and national and international legal initiatives include the Asian Women's Human Rights Council, ECPAT (End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism), the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.25 Women's organized opposition to sex tourism has resulted in de facto consumer boycotts as well; for instance, David Leheny notes that large increases in Japanese women's tourism to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s and their avoidance of countries reputed to be sex tourist havens, such as Thailand, have encouraged some official rethinking of sex tourism as a development strategy. For instance, in the 1990s the Thai govern-ment initiated some changes in its policies to attract more women tourists.26 Julia Davidson reports more dramatic forms of protest:
There have been instances of direct action against clients.for example, that organized by Japanese feminist groups at air-ports, which involved ridiculing and insulting men arriving home from sex tours, and that proposed by the Filipino guer-rilla group that adopted the slogan, "Kill a sex tourist a day." Public humiliation has also been used as an instrument to control Taiwanese businessmen caught using prostitutes while in mainland China.27
Co-founder of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Kathleen Barry, also links the economics of the sex trade to the economics of development. In many Third World countries struggling with international debt, such as Tunisia, Haiti, Nepal, or the Gambia, tourism has become a larger industry than many traditional exports. While all tourist destinations are also sites of sex commerce, in major sex tourist destinations such as Thailand, the Philippines, Belize, Jamaica, or Sri Lanka, selling local and imported sexuality is an important component of economic development, and some governments advertise sex tourism. For instance, Patrick Larvie reports that "Brazil's tourist industry promotes the country as one which offers sexual attractions as part of the nation's natural and cultural resources."28 Tour guidebooks also promote sex tourism. For instance, F odor's, Frommer's, Rough Guide, and Lonely Planet, especially in the late 1980s before widespread publicity about the AIDS crisis, included sections on night life and gay tourism that covered the sex trade and offered varying levels of advice. Bishop and Robinson cite the first two issues of Insight Guide (1988, 1991) to Thailand, that explained "how to negotiate the transactions in a massage parlor and how to buy a bar dancer out for the night, advising against taking a prostitute to a first-class hotel."29
Bishop and Robinson link sex tourism and tourism in general, comparing sex workers in sex tourist destinations to wildlife and other exotic tourist attractions. They point out that sex tourism produces a "consumer approach to local natural and cultural resources including.semiotically and literally.the sexuality of local women." They also link sexuality to the global spread of consumer culture, commenting that "shopping increasingly [is] understood as the moral equivalent of sightseeing for the tourist." For many tourists local exotic sexualities are both major sights to see and commodities to consume.
The sex tourist industry attracts not only consumers but also workers. Tourist consumer sex generates international hard currency and offers wages unmatched in other wage sectors. Bishop and Robinson interviewed sex industry workers in Bangkok; a dancer there reported making four times her monthly salary as a maid, and prostitutes could earn ten times that amount and more.30 Promises of high wages and that many workers' salaries support their entire families, pull sex workers from many countries. According to Pasuk Phongpaichit, "the economic boom in Thailand in the 1980s and early 1990s led to a rapid increase in demand for skilled and unskilled labor" which was filled by poorer neighboring countries, especially Burma, Southern China, Laos, and sex workers constituted one type of this immigrant labor.31 International migration into Thailand complicated the ethnosexual landscape of the sex industry there. Not only were sex consumers and sex workers from a variety of countries, often sex workers from the same country were ethnically diverse. For instance, many migrants from Burma who become sex workers in Thai border towns and in Bangkok were Burmese ethnic minorities such as Mon, Karen, and Shan people who escaped Burmese repression by migrating to work in Thailand.32
Ethnic similarity and ethnic diversity are both hallmarks of the sex industry and sex tourism. Ethnic similarities can work to facilitate the recruitment of sex workers through ethnic networks that aid in communication and trust. Ethnic differences tend to separate sex workers and sex industry managers and owners and can make exploitation more palatable, as it is not one's own people who are being mistreated or coerced. Ethnic differences also characterize the sex worker/ client relationship, because sex with an exotic other is one of the chief attractions for sex tourists, just as dreams of being rescued from poverty is a central fantasy of sex workers.
Noy is 33 and living in Pattaya with an Englishman. She left her village in Roi-et with her sister They began as go-go girls in a bar. They had no intention of becoming sex workers, but changed their minds because they wanted gold jewelry like other girls there. Noy's sister went to live in Switzerland with her boyfriend, and she sent money home. Noy will take her English boyfriend to visit her home in Roi-et, in the hope he will build her a new house there.33
Male sex customers also have dreams and fantasies, often imagining that women sex workers find them especially attractive or exceptionally skilled sexual technicians: It's funny, but in England, the girls I fancy don't fancy me and the ones that do fancy me, I don't fancy. They tend to be sort of fatter and older, you know, thirty-five, but their faces, they look forty. But in Cuba, really beautiful girls fancy me. They're all over me. They treat me like a star. My girlfriend's jet black, she's beautiful. . . . Cuban girls don't expect so much. . . . English girls ... don't want someone like me.... If you take a Cuban girl out for dinner, she's grateful.34
Kamala Kempadoo' s study of the sex trade in Curacao, where the government suspended local laws against brothels and pimping, locates articulations of desire and desirability in colonial racist hierarchies of superiority and subordination:
.. . women who command the better working conditions and pay on the island work as escorts for "VIP's" and are more often than not white European women, mainly Dutch. . . . Migrant sex workers from Columbia and the Dominican Re-public are predominantly "light-skinned," mulatto (mixed African-European) women, while "local" prostitutes who in-variably work the streets and ill-paid sectors, are far more likely to be of Afro-Caribbean descent As one man simply put it, "if she's light-colored, then she is sexually attractive to the population."35
Kempadoo links the presence of Curacao's extensive sex industry to global processes.first to colonialism. "In 1944 this island was established by the [Dutch] colonial government as a center in the region for prostitution by migrant women." These patterns have been recently reinforced by World Bank and International Monetary Fund economic restructuring programs under which both migrating and local "women are increasingly more active in informal economies, which includes sex industries."36
Sex workers are global migrants who enter the industry through a variety of routes, some legal, some illegal, and others ambiguous in their legality and morality. Some women knowingly become sex workers, although they may not be aware of the conditions under which they will work. Others are more naive or lured by recruiters' promises that they will be simply hostesses, waitresses, or entertainers and will not be asked to have sex with clients. Still others are promised non-sex industry work, presumably in factories or as domestic workers, but then find themselves facing large debts to recruiters or are forced to pay off loans their families obtained when they were essentially sold into service. Finally, some sex workers are coerced by "traffickers" in human beings who assist illegal refugees or migrants.
Gilliam Caldwell and associates define trafficking as "the recruitment or transportation of persons within or across borders [involving] deception, coer-cion or force, abuse of authority, debt bondage, or fraud for the purpose of placing persons in situations of abuse or exploitation such as forced prostitution, sweat-shop labor, or exploitative domestic servitude."37 Traffickers often charge fees for transport and then deliver their cargo to staff the massage parlors, clubs, and brothels of countries around the world. The trafficked workers are then required to do sex work to repay transport fees. Once they have become sex workers, these migrants are "soiled" symbolically or as a result of contracting diseases such as AIDS, and thus become unfit for other work even after their fees are paid.38 As Cynthia Enloe summarizes:
To succeed, sex tourism requires Third World women to be economically desperate enough to enter prostitution; having done so it is made difficult to leave. The other side of the equation requires men from affluent societies to imagine certain women, usually women of color, to be more available and submissive than the women of their own countries. Finally the industry depends on an alliance between local governments in search of foreign currency and local and foreign business-men willing to invest in sexualized travel.39

In the Privacy of Your Own Home
Sex work, sex tourism, sex workers, and the trafficking in human beings do not take place only in developing countries; the richest and most powerful national actors in the global system are sex tourism destinations. For instance, Japan is both a consumer and aproducer of sex tourism. According to Phongpaichit, Japanese men visited other Asian countries on organized sex tours in the 1960s and 1970s. However, in the 1980s Japanese sex tourism became a home-based industry when "agents began importing southeast Asian women.many from the Philippines.to Japan for sex services." When Philippines Prime Minister, Corazon Aquino tried to stop the export of Filipinas to Japanese brothels, Japanese acquisition activities then moved to Thailand; despite Aquino's efforts, Phongpaichit found that in the 1990s, although half of the Filipinas working in Japan had legal visas to work as artists or entertainers, many were employed in the sex industry.40
Caldwell and associates report that since the break up of the Soviet Union, "Russia and the Newly Independent States, including Ukraine and Latvia, have become primary countries of origin [for sex workers] supplementing and some-times replacing previously significant sources of women from Asia and Latin America."41 Eastern European and Russian women's destinations are sex indus-tries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. Their entry into the sex industry is the result of the same combination of forces pushing and pulling Asian women into sex work.economics, exploitation, and exoticness, the latter because these white women are "a relative novelty in the sex market." The economic collapse in many former Soviet republics has been especially harsh for
42
women.
Gerben Bruinsma and Guus Meershoek' s study of Eastern European women working in the Netherlands' sex industry report similar economic motivations, unrealistic expectations, and patterns of exploitation:
In 1996, in a brothel in the southern part of the country, Dutch police discovered 15 women from Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, and Latvia. Many were recruited, most of them under false pretenses. Their average age was 21; three of them were minors. The brothel was part of a series, owned by a couple.. .. The prostitutes were not allowed to leave the building and were working 9-19 hours a day . . . [and] sleeping in a dirty, damp cellar.... [They] were promised only 25 percent of the earnings. In practice, they did not receive anything. .. . If a woman somehow succeeded in acquiring a surplus, she was sold by her pimp to another pimp in the same brothel and had to pay back to her new owner the money he had paid for her.43
The United States is also a destination for sex workers from the former Soviet Union and from around the world. In November 1999, the U.S. Central Intelli-gence Agency (CIA) completed a two-year study of illegal trafficking and enslavement of human beings, mostly women and children, and mostly in the sex industry, and in spring 2000, presented its report to Congress, "International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery." The New York Times obtained a copy of the unreleased report, "the government's first comprehensive assessment of the problem," and summarized its contents, which estimates the number of women and children trafficked for sexual slavery to the United States to be as high as 50,000 per year. According to the New York Times, the CIA report "describes case after case of foreign women who answered advertisements for au pair, sales clerk, secretarial or waitress jobs in the United States but found, once they arrived, that the jobs did not exist. Instead they were taken prisoner, held under guard and forced into prostitution or peonage. Some of them were, in fact, sold outright to brothel owners."
Latvian women [were] threatened and forced to dance nude in Chicago Thai women were brought to the United States but forced to be virtual sex slaves. Chinese-Korean women were held as indentured servants. And Mexican women and girls, some as young as 14, were promised jobs in housekeeping or child care but, upon arrival, "were told they must work as prostitutes in brothels serving migrant workers."44

Men at [Sex] Work
Male sex workers share some of the same motivations, desires, and despera-tion as women working in the sex trade, though they are much less often reported to be enslaved.45 Like their female counterparts, most male sex workers hope to escape poverty by hustling or through a rescue relationship. There are also some important differences between men and women working in the sex industry. Unlike their female counterparts."daughters of joy, sisters of misery"46.male sex workers sometimes use prostitution to gain access to same-sex sexual contact in a context of forbidden homosexual desire. In fact, researchers report that the question of sexual orientation is a central topic in the discourse surrounding male sex work: is the sex worker really gay or straight?47 Although both straight and lesbian women work in the sex industry, extensive discussion of sexual orienta-tion is not a feature of the research on women sex workers, although it is a far larger literature. Because most sexual consumers are men, sex workers, both men and women, heterosexual or gay or lesbian, can find themselves engaged in sexual relations inconsistent with their own sexual orientations or identities.
Despite a long-held assertion in the literature on male prostitution that most men selling sex are heterosexuals,48 many recent studies of men sex workers find that they do not consider themselves to be straight and/or they have both same-sex and opposite-sex sexual relationships on and off the job. For instance, in 1991,
G. Kruks found that 72 percent of males engaging in "survival sex" (for money, food, shelter, protection) in Los Angeles identified themselves as gay or bisexual, and Morse et al., reported that 60 percent of their U.S. sample of male sex workers identified themselves as gay or bisexual.49 Even in those studies in which male sex workers report that they are heterosexuals providing services to men simply because that is where the money is, many researchers find that homosexual activity outside the workplace is more common than respondents report. For instance, Amine Boushaba and associates divide male sex workers in Morocco into gigolos and prostitues homosexuels. Both groups had mainly male clients; the gigolos mainly defined themselves as heterosexuals and often "mentioned female partners as well as male clients... a few, however, were more ambivalent . . . because sex work allowed them a means of expressing their sexuality [because] society is more tolerant towards a man who has sex with other men for economic need."50
The distinction between sexual behavior and sexual desire helps to maintain heterosexual self-conceptions among male sex workers in a variety of settings. In Costa Rica, male sex workers define themselves as heterosexuals or cacheros although they have sex with men for money; the rule seems to be: "as long as sexual desire continues to be shown towards the opposite sex and behavior is masculine at all times, one is still a man."51 Sometimes the attribution of homosexuality is made on the basis of who is the active (penetrator, i.e., heterosexual) and who is the passive (penetrated, i.e., homosexual) partner in the sex act. In fact, Shivananda Khan raises questions about the whole hetero/ homosexual binary's applicability to non-Western cultures.
In India and Bangladesh (as well as in other countries of the south Asia region), there is a high degree of amorphousness in indigenous frameworks of sexuality and identity. Here identi-ties are mostly based on family and community, as well as to a lesser extent on participation in particular sexual practices, most notably those of penetrator or penetrated. Identity is not based so much on who you are but on what you do, and in what context(s) your social life is constructed.52
Ana Louisa Liguori and Peter Aggleton found that although male sex workers in Mexico City made the distinction between heterosexuals and homosexuals, somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of men working any given shift in a brothel might allow themselves to be penetrated; interestingly, penetration was reported by respondents about other sex workers, not about the respondents themselves.53
Other aspects of male sex work both parallel and diverge from studies of women sex workers. Male sex workers report combining "cruising" and recre-ational sex with prostitution much more frequently than female sex workers. Dennis Altman quotes a gay male respondent in Lima who reflects this mixing of business with pleasure: "When I'm there it's to meet people, and when I meet them I don't think about whether they will pay me or not.... If they give me a tip, it's very welcome."54 Both male and female sex workers are quick to define a sexual interlude as a friendship, dating relationship, or something more intimate. Fantasies of living a better life, of paid sex developing into a friendship or loving relationship characterize both male and female sex work. One French transvestite gigolo (a category unlike Moroccan gigolos who do not cross-dress, but similar in that both French and Moroccan gigolos considered themselves primarily heterosexuals), reported a long-term intimate relationship with a client:
He's married. He's a grandfather and lives in the countryside. He's very well known. He comes up once a month to Paris in order to see me. He pays the rent, he pays for the telephone, he gives me 4000 francs a month, jewelry, things like that. He's good luck for me, there's an emotional relationship between us of course I love him a lot and if we ever broke up, it would make me very upset. .. . He's the father I never had.55
Crossing ethnosexual boundaries is a hallmark of male sex work as it is with both women and children. The racial, ethnic, and national differences between male sex workers and their clients are most clearly revealed by the international character of the trade. For instance, Boushaba and associates report that 67 percent of the 172 male sex workers they interviewed in Morocco "sold sex primarily to a non-Moroccan clientele"; Tan identifies sex tourism as closely associated with various forms of adult and child male prostitution in the Philip-pines; Larvie argues that "despite the preponderance of negative images of male sex workers, [hyper-masculine] miches are an important attraction for residents and tourists in search of nocturnal diversions in the 'red-light' districts of large Brazilian cities;" Antonio de Moya and Raphael Garcia describe Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic as a burgeoning gay sex tourism destination for North Americans and Europeans during the 1980s before the AIDS epidemic led the government to close down gay hotels and "organized tours stopped coming to the country."56 These accounts of international sex tourism reveal the importance of tourism as a component of the larger sex industry, the importance of sex in the tourist industry, and the importance of the ethnosexually exotic and erotic to both tourism and sex industries.

"Romance" Tourism
While most male sex workers have male clients, not all men sell sex to men. Some sex consumers are women, and their transactions are also likely to involve crossing ethnosexual frontiers. Researchers have found that although some women sex consumers' attitudes challenged traditional passive female sexual stereotypes, they have also found that many women sex tourists were engaged in "romance tourism," looking more to be swept away by men than to assert strong control over their paid male partners. They also report that it is not uncommon for women romance tourists to establish long-term liaisons with the men they meet on holiday, corresponding, sending money, and returning year after year to spend time with their "boyfriends."57 De Moya and associates, in studying male sex workers in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, in the early 1990s, found that female sex tourists also viewed local men through a racialized lens, as exotic others. For instance, most male sex workers "claimed that for foreign women 'black skin color is the most relevant feature'... long, kinky, and trenched hair, as well as youth, fitness, manliness, and sexiness" were the most sought after traits in Dominican male sex workers.58 Amalia Cabezas summarized this view: "The men capitalize on the demand for racialized fantasies of erotic encounters." She describes one group of men once involved in the Dominican gay sex trade, so-called, "sanky-pankies," who switched clientele after the AIDS epidemic and began to "work mostly with white middle-aged foreign women who seek romance and adventure during their holiday Body fitness, brown or black skin color, long bleached dreadlocks, and the company of sexy blonde foreign women became their insignias."59 Deborah Pruitt and Suzanne LaFont's study of Western women's sex or "romance" tourism in Jamaica noted the same exoticization of male sex workers, where Jamaican men, especially "Rasta" men wearing dreadlocks "are constructed [by both white and black women tourists] as more passionate, more emotional, more natural, and sexually tempting" than the men back home, and, in particular for white women, where "stereotypes of black men and their sexuality" combined with Jamaican "men's displays of machismo drawn from their cultural gender scripts" led them to see Jamaican men as "archetypical masculine" men.60
Although I refer to the local men with whom women tourists enter into sexual liaisons as "male sex workers," this label would be challenged by many of these men, just as women sex workers might argue that they were simply "dating" men who paid them for their sexual company:
... male sex workers in the Caribbean do not necessarily self-define in the same way as women who are in the same position. Instead of being identified... as [a] prostitute,... the men tend to be identified as "beach boy," "island boy," "player," "gigolo." ... Sex with a female tourist who holds the economic dominant position in the relationship appears not to threaten or disrupt this culturally approved expression of masculinity but rather to enable feelings of personal worth and self-confidence.61
Nandasena Ratnapala observed a similar fiction being played out in Sri Lanka among men who offer sex for money to women tourists: "Such men are found in or near tourist hotels, often operating as tour guides or such innocent-looking jobs ... in the hotels as bell-boys, waiters,... taxi drivers [T]hey often conceal their real work beneath a more socially acceptable role."62 And in Peru and the Philippines, women find sex for sale not in the typical venues frequented by male sex customers (e.g., in brothels or massage parlors), but in more "legitimate" spaces such as ballroom dancing studios or discotheques.63
Kempadoo argues that not only does the social and sexual transaction between male prostitutes and women clients tend to uphold the gender order, but that First World consumer and Third World supplier sex commerce exchanges tend to reproduce hegemonic racialized and sexualized views of those with dark skin as hypersexualized and subordinate:
Racialized male and female bodies in the region provide .. . a stage for First World gendered performances.for European and North American men to reenact traditional masculine roles and to reassure themselves of their dominance over women, for European and North American women to experiment with, confirm, or expand their gender repertoires.64
Instances of these racialized/sexualized North/South narratives easily can be found in Vron Ware's skilled recounting of a spate of reports during the 1990s in a British tabloid newspaper and women's magazine about the "seduction" of European women by African men.65 The stories centered on white women traveling to tourism destinations in West Africa, falling in love with local men, and leaving their English husbands. Britain's Sun newspaper carried sensational headlines suchas, "Mud-Hut Rat Stole My Wife!" "Gambian Rat Stole My Wife, Too!" and "Love at First Sight." The Sun ran a three-day series, beginning with the saga of 39-year-old Sandra Anderson who "set up home in a mud hut with a tribal prince after husband Frank took her on a Gambian holiday." Sun articles were accompanied by photos of African men and European women engaged in various fun-in-the-sun activities. One article began: "They're tall dark and handsome.and British women just can't resist the magic of Gambian beach boys. The hunky charmers spend their days chatting up the holiday makers and their nights making love to them in the sand."66
Ware reports that the women's magazine Marie Claire also focused on African sex tourism, but emphasized not so much racial differences as age differences between the men and the women. A photograph accompanying an article entitled, "Seeking Sex in the Gambia," showed "three white women each entwined with a black man" and described them as "a 58-year-old art dealer," "a grandmother," and "62." The article asserted that it is "common to see women in their fifties and sixties strolling hand in hand with beautiful young men, and on Gambia's long palm-fringed beaches the women go topless and flirt with handsome teenagers."67 If this image seems something of a "spectacle" to some readers, it serves to remind us of the ways in which race, gender, age, and class serve hegemonic constructions of sexual desirability, respectability, and seemly sexual demeanor.

Searching for Sex in the Global System
In the past decade or two researchers have become increasingly attuned to the sexual dimensions of economics, politics, and everyday life, searching for sex in places not always thought to be fruitful sites for the study of sexuality. For instance, Sherry Ortner's research on women mountaineers in Nepal represents a richly detailed study of gender, race, and class in the construction and maintenance of sexual boundaries, reputations, and normative systems.68 Begin-ning in the 1970s mainly Western women joined the ranks of men who had for decades launched numerous assaults on Mount Everest and other high peaks of the Himalayas. These Western men had always been accompanied by local climbers referred to generically as "Sherpas." These were Nepalese men who also summited the mountains, but whose names have only recently been included in accounts of historical or contemporary climbs. Ortner's research examined what happens when gender gets thrown into this historically exclusively male domain. One thing that happens is that Western women begin having sex with Sherpa men, and all hell breaks loose.
It should be no surprise that the world looks different when gender roles are reversed. And while Western male climbers were not reported routinely to have had sex with their Sherpa guides, many did have sexual relationships with local women in nearby towns. The entry of Western women into this scenario, and their sexual contact with local men in town and on the slopes, created a great deal of disruption. For example, Ortner describes a deterioration in Sherpa indigenous sexual etiquette. There was a greater denigration of all women.Western and local.and increased disrespect for Western women in general, not just those having sex with local men, including sexual harassment. Ortner also reported that there developed problems of morale and discipline on the climbs. For instance, Sherpa men seemed less likely to follow women team leaders' orders, and tensions developed among Western team members.both between women and men and among women.partly because all women's reputations were seen as damaged when some were sexually active.
Some feminist groups restricted teams only to women climbers, but Sherpa women guides were not available, so teams tried to control gender/sexuality issues by agreeing that none of the women would have sex with Sherpa men. Sometimes this worked, but sometimes it did not, and when sexual contact occurred, Ortner reported the same problems of discipline and morale. Since Sherpa women were never on climbs, there is no basis for comparing what would have happened had Western men been having sex with Sherpa women on climbs. For instance, would the Sherpa women have balked at following Western male team leaders' orders after sleeping with one of the men? Or would the local women have lost respect for the Western men? How would Sherpa men have responded to Western men having sex with local women? Ortner's research reveals that ethnosexual frontiers are nuanced settings with many factors in addition to race, ethnicity, and nationality complicating interactions.
Ortner's work also shows that sexuality represents a powerful intimate substructure that can rear its head in surprising places, if not always in surprising ways. Other researchers have found sex and ethnosexual frontiers in a number of seemingly wrong places.in World Bank and International Monetary Fund-sponsored export processing zones in Asia, Special Economic Zones in China, maquiladoras on the U.S.-Mexican border, meatpacking and processing plants in the U.S. midwest, domestic labor arrangements in private homes around the world, plantations in Asia and Central America, and of course on the Internet.69
Although it often goes unacknowledged, sexuality both underpins and undermines all kinds of processes and institutions in both local and global systems. Sexuality underpins gendered, classed, raced, and aged power relations and privileges, and lubricates their smooth operation and reproduction. Sexuality can also undermine these same processes and institutions when rules and assumptions about heteronormativity and heteroconventionality are violated. As globalization continues to link populations in denser, faster, and more complex ways, the political economy of desire will continue to complement and compli-cate the constantly unfolding global order.
Notes
My thanks to the editors for their thoughtful and detailed responses to an earlier draft of this paper.
1.
For a discussion of "ethnosexual" sites and frontiers, see Joane Nagel, "Ethnicity and Sexuality," Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000), 107-33.

2.
By "ethnicity," I refer to differences between individuals and groups in skin color, language, religion, culture, national origin/nationality, or sometimes geographic region. Ethnicity subsumes both nationalism and race. Today "race" is centered exclusively on visible (usually skin color) distinctions among populations, although its historical origins and usage were broader. "Nationalism" is commonly viewed as a particular kind of ethnically-based social identity or movement generally involving claims to statehood or political autonomy, and most often rooted in assertions of cultural distinctiveness, a unique history, and ethnic or racial purity. For discussions of historical and contemporary conceptual formulations of race, ethnicity, and nationalism, see Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, 1985); Walker Connor, "When Is a Nation?" Ethnic and Racial Studies 13:1 (1990), 92-103; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York, 1994); Anthony D. Smith, "The Origins of Nations," Ethnic and Racial Studies 12 (1989), 340-67; Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley, 1978).

3.
For discussions and applications of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic notions of libidinal bonds in two very different social settings, see Jeff Goodwin, "The Libidinal Constitution of a High-Risk Social Movement: Affectual Ties and Solidarity in the Huk Rebellion, 1946 to 1954," American Sociological Review 62 (1997), 53-69 and Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock 'n 'Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, N.H., 1994).

4.
For instance, in 1991,40,000 U.S. troops served in South Korea; see Katharine H.S. Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York, 1997), 36.

5.
Ibid., 1.

6.
Ibid., 175, fn. 42.




7.
U.S. military bases were established in Japan during the Allied occupation of the country following the end of the Second World War; 75 percent of U.S. military bases in Japan are on Okinawa Island. Kazuko Watanabe reports that controversies and demands that the United States close its military bases in Japan are the result not only of public opposition to the large sex industry on the island, but also because of the history of sexual assaults against Okinawan women by U.S. soldiers; see Kazuko Watanabe, "Trafficking in Women's Bodies, Then and Now: The Issue of Military Comfort Women," Peace & Change 20 (1995), 501-14.

8.
Lynn Thiesmeyer, "The West's 'Comfort Women' and the Discourses of Seduction," in Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture, and the Public Sphere, ed. Shirley G. Lim, Larry E. Smith, and Wimal Dissanayake (Urbana, 1999), 81; see also, Wendy Chapkis, Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance (Boston, 1986), 53-4.


9. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York, 1975).
10.
For discussions of Japan's system of brothels and "comfort women," see George L. Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York, 1995); Keith Howard, Three Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (London, 1995); Seth Mydans, "Inside a Wartime Brothel: The Avenger's Story," New York Times (November 12, 1996), A3; Sayoko Yoneda, "Sexual and Racial Discrimination: A Historical Inquiry into the Japanese Military's 'Comfort' Women System of Enforced Prostitution," in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington, 1989), 237-50.

11.
Watanabe, "Military Comfort Women," 503-4. Despite indicting the Japanese military and Japan's patriarchal Confucianist traditions of treating local women and racist view of non-Japanese women, Watanabe finds men are also victimized by sexual commodification, and not just as prostitutes:

Men's bodies and sexualities are also victims of militarist and consumerist capitalist societies. Men are, supposedly, unable to control their sexual impulses and are in need of prostitutes. Male soldiers were dehumanized to make them good fighters, then stimulated by sexual desire that was fulfilled by comfort women Both the soldiers who were forced to die for the emperor on the battlefields and today's businessmen who die for their companies from karoshi (overwork) have often been rewarded with prostitutes. (506-7)

12.
Both sexual and non-sexual labor were also demanded of women enslaved by the Japanese (Ibid., 503). The Japanese also used rape as an instrument of terror and domination; most infamous


is the "rape of Nanking" in which thousands of women were raped and killed (see Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 53-60).
13.
Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 61-2.

14.
Ibid., 63-78.


15.
As the reports of human rights organizations document every year, it is not only enemy women who are the targets of sexual assault and torture in war. I have not seen documented the establishment of rape camps with men as sexual slaves. Men often are sexually assaulted, however, as part of torture, combat, and intimidation in international conflicts and wars, as well as in military or paramilitary operations against internal political or ethnic insurgents. In international conflicts, national, racial, or ethnic boundaries by definition separate combatants and the targets of violence, including those selected for rape. In civil conflicts, race or ethnicity are often the bases for determining who are enemies, and thus which women and men will be raped or tortured, although sometimes political ideology, not ethnic differences, serves as the dividing line between hostile camps.

16.
For example, the punishment of French women identified as sexual collaborators with German soldiers during the Nazi occupation of France in the Second World, see Margaret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940-45 (New York, 1995), 276-85.

17.
Judith Hicks Stiehm, "United Nations Peacekeeping: Men's and Women's Work," in Gender Politics in Global Governance, ed. M.K. Meyer and E. Prugl (Lanham, M.D., 1999), 50-4.

18.
Stiehm attributes the "boys will be boys" comment to Yasushi Akashi of Japan, the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Cambodia; the comment was in response to "a letter signed by more than 180 women [that] was sent to Akashi charging sexual harassment of staff by UNTAC personnel and harassment of women on the street and asserting that there was no channel for redressing this behavior" {Ibid., 54).

19.
For a discussion of gender relations in UN peacekeeping, see Stiehm, "United Nations Peacekeeping," 41-57.

20.
Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (New York, 1998), 248; David Leheny also notes the link between Thailand's agreement to provide R&R for U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam war and its burgeoning sex industry, but he also cites earlier agreements and legislation, in particular "the Bowring Treaty of 1855 which opened Thailand to foreign laborers. Most immigrants were young men from rural South China, planning to earn money for their families by mining tin in Phuket. A large number of Chinese prostitutes accompanied the men, establishing the largest sex centers Thailand had experienced at that time. .. . A 1909 law to prevent the spread of venereal disease effectively legalized prostitution" (David Leheny, "A Political Economy of Asian Sex Tourism," Annals of Tourism Research 22 [ 1995], 373).


21. Ibid.,%-9.
22. Other researchers concur with Bishop and Robinson's summary of this military-industrial connection: "The importance of Thailand in the global sex industry, for example, is generally traced back to the late 1960s and the use of Thailand as a place for 'rest and recreation' for American G.I.s in Vietnam. The recommendation by the World Bank in [the 1970s] that Thailand develop 'mass tourism' as a means to pay off its debts, encouraged what became, in effect, the peacetime institutionalization of the sex industry in Thailand" (Phil Williams, "Trafficking in Women and Children: A Market Perspective," in Illegal Immigration and Commercial Sex: The New Slave Trade, ed. Phil Williams, (London, 1999), 154); see also Lisa Law, "A Matter of 'Choice': Discourses on Prostitution in the Philippines," in Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, ed. L. Manderson and M. Jolly (Chicago, 1997), 233-61.
23. Watanabe, "Military Comfort Women," 506.
24. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. (Berkeley, 1990), 38; June Kane, Sold for Sex (Hants, 1998), 122-3.
25.
See Siriporn Skrobanek, Nattaya Boonpakdee, and Chutima Jantateero, The Traffic in Women: Human Realities of the International Sex Trade (London, 1997), 81,110-6; Kane, Sold for Sex, 4.

26.
Leheny reports these changes to be mainly cosmetic, but still a recognition of the role of consumer disdain as well as demand for sex tourism ("A Political Economy of Asian Sex Tourism," 378-80).

27.
Julia O'Connell Davidson, Prostitution, Power, and Freedom (Ann Arbor, 1998), 198; see also Xin Ren, "China," in Prostitution, ed. Nanette J. Davis, (Westport, Conn., 1993), 102-3.

28.
Patrick Larvie, "Natural Born Targets: Male Hustlers and AIDS Prevention in Urban Brazil," in Men Who Sell Sex: International Perspectives on Male Prostitution and HIV/AIDS, ed. Peter Aggleton (Philadelphia, 1999), 163 ; Enloe, Bananas, Beaches andBases, 32; Kamala Kempadoo, Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean (Lanham, M.D., 1999).

29.
Bishop and Robinson, Night Market, 83; see also Thiesmeyer, "The West's 'Comfort Women' and the Discourses of Seduction," 73-4; both Bishop and Robinson and Thiesmeyer, among others, note that the Internet is fecund with websites offering advice to ethnosexual consumers.


30. Ibid., 157, 165.
31.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, "Trafficking in People in Thailand," 74-104 in Williams, Illegal Immigration and Commercial Sex: The New Slave Trade, 89.

32.
Ibid., 90; see also Pasuk Phongpaichit, From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses (Geneva, 1982) and Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thailand: Economy and Politics (Kuala Lampur, 1995).

33.
Skrobanek et al., The Traffic in Women, 40; see also Lisa Law, "A Matter of 'Choice': Discourses on Prostitution in the Philippines," in Manderson and Jolly, Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure, 233-61.

34.
Davidson, Prostitution, Power, and Freedom, 169. Researchers find that a central fantasy for many sex tourists and for some sex workers is that they are "friends" and "dating" rather than engaged in a commercial transaction.

35.
Kamala Kempadoo, "The Migrant Tightrope: Experiences from the Caribbean," in Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, ed. K. Kempadoo and J. Doezema (New York, 1998), 131; see also Helen I. Safa, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean (Boulder, 1995).


36. Kempadoo, "The Migrant Tightrope," 124, 129.
37.
Gilliam Caldwell, Steve Galster, Jyothi Kanicks, Nadia Steinzor, "Capitalizing on Transi-tion Economies: The Role of the Russian Mafiya in Trafficking Women for Forced Prostitution," 42-73 in Williams, Illegal Immigration and Commercial Sex: The New Slave Trade, 42.

38.
See Sietske Altink, Stolen Lives: Trading Women into Sex and Slavery (London, 1995); Skrobanek et al., The Traffic in Women. The term "trafficking" is somewhat controversial because of its historical baggage (see Emma Goldberg, The Traffic in Women and other Essays on Feminism (New York, 1970) and its implication of total victimization of those people who are "trafficked;" for a challenge to this totalizing view, see the essays in Kempadoo and Doezema, Global Sex Workers.


39. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 36-7.
40.
Phongpaichit, "Trafficking in People in Thailand," 82-3.

41.
Caldwell et al., "Capitalizing on Transition Economies," 44-7.


42.
Researchers report that in the mid-1990s nearly two-thirds of Russia's unemployed were women, including 70 percent of women graduating from institutions of higher learning (Ibid., 44-50); see also Human Rights Country Reports, Russia (Washington, D.C., 1997); Human Rights Watch, "Neither Jobs Nor Justice: Discrimination Against Women in Russia" (March, 1995), 6.

43.
Gerben J.N. Bruinsma and Guus Meershoek, "Organized Crime and Trafficking in Women from Eastern Europe in the Netherlands," 105-18 in Williams, Illegal Immigration and Commercial Sex: The New Slave Trade, 105.

44.
New York Times, "Once-hidden Slave Trade A Growing U.S. Problem" (April 2,2000); the CIA report prompted the introduction of federal legislation in the U.S. Congress; see The Humani-tarian Times, May 11,2000). My thanks to my colleague Norman R. Yetman for bringing this report to my attention. There is a large literature on the trafficking in children for the sex trade and sex tourism; see Heather Montgomery, "Children, Prostitution, and Identity: A Case Study from a Tourist Resort in Thailand," in Kempadoo and Doezema, Global Sex Workers, Kevin Ireland, Wish You Weren't Here (London, 1993); Kane, Sold for Sex; Williams, "Trafficking in Women and Children."

45.
An exception is Nandasena Ratnapala's discussion of male children procured "by local pimps catering for European paedophiles. Houses are rented out and children are brought there by cheating them, or by using force. In 1995-96, an estimated 1500 children were involved in this kind of work. Of them, nearly two-thirds were boys. . . . Local pimps provide boys according to the particular client's taste. Sometimes, drugs are given to these children in order to arouse them" (Nandasena Ratnapala, "Male Sex Work in Sri Lanka," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex, 216-7).


46. Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90 (Urbana, 1987).
47. See, for example, the papers in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex.
48.
For instance, see Albeit J. Reiss, Jr., "The Social Integration of Peers and Queers," Social Problems 9(1961), 102-120; Jacobo Schifter, Lila 's House: Male Prostitution in Latin America (New York, 1998).

49.
G. Kruks, "Gay and Lesbian Homeless/Street Youth: Special Issues and Concerns." Journal of Adolescent Health 12 (1991), 515-8; Edward V. Morse, Patricia M. Simon, and Kendra E. Burchfiel, "Social Environment and Male Sex Work in the United States," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex, 88.

50.
Amine Boushaba, Oussama Tawil, Latefa Imane, and Hakima Himmich, "Marginalization and Vulnerability: Male Sex Work in Morocco," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex, 269-70.

51.
Jacobo Schifter and Peter Aggleton, "Cacherismo in a San Jose Brothel.Aspects of Male Sex Work in Costa Rica," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex, 143; see also Schifter, Lila's House.

52.
Shivananda Khan, "Through a Window Darkly: Men Who Sell Sex to Men in India and Bangladesh," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex, 195.


53.
Ana Luisa Liguori and Peter Aggleton, "Aspects of Male Sex Work in Mexico City," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex, 116; see also Matthew C. Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (Berkeley, 1996).

54.
Dennis Altman, "Foreword," xiii-xix in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex, xv; Wim Zuilhof, "Sex for Money between Men and Boys in the Netherlands: Implications for HIV Prevention," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex.

55.
Lindinalva Laurindo da Silva, "Travestites and Gigolos: Male Sex Work and HIV Prevention in France," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex, 51 ; this respondent's closing line suggests that although they were having sex, he chose to emphasize the paternal rather than the sexual dimensions of the relationship, perhaps to protect the heterosexual component of his identity.

56.
Boushaba et al., "Marginalization and Vulnerability," 266; Michael L. Tan, "Walking the Tightrope: Sexual Risk and Male Sex Work in the Philippines," 241 -61 in Men Who Sell Sex: "Natural Born Targets," E. Antonio de Moya and Rafael Garcia, "Three Decades of Male Sex Work in Santo Domingo," in Men Who Sell Sex.

57.
See Deborah Pruit and Suzanne LaFont, "For Love and Money: Romance Tourism in Jamaica," Annals of Tourism Research 22 (1995), 437; Davidson, Prostitution, Power, and Freedom; Kempadoo, Sun, Sex, and Gold.

58.
De Moya et al. ' s research is cited and quoted in Cabezas, "Women's Work Is Never Done," 101; see E. Antonio de Moya, Rafael Garcia, Rosario Fadul, and Edward Herold, Sosua Sanky-Pankies and Female Sex Workers (Santo Domingo, 1992).

59.
Amalia L. Cabezas, "Women's Work Is Never Done: Sex Tourism in Sostia, the Dominican Republic," in Kempadoo, Sun, Sex and Gold, 100-1; see also Boushaba et al., "Marginalization and Vulnerability," 266; Michael L. Tan, "Walking the Tightrope: Sexual Risk and Male Sex Work in the Philippines," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex; Larvie, "Natural Born Targets," 163; E. Antonio de Moya and Rafael Garcia, "Three Decades of Male Sex Work in Santo Domingo," 127-39 in Men Who Sell Sex, 133.

60.
Pruit and LaFont, "For Love and Money," 437; they also found that Western women, especially white women, occupied a niche as an "exotic other" for some Jamaican men: "Light skin, straight hair and Caucasian facial features are highly valued, and women who are considered overweight in their own cultures are appreciated by many Jamaican men. Thus, foreign women who may not satisfy standards of beauty at home find themselves the object of amorous attention by appealing to local men" (426).

61.
Kempadoo, Sun, Sex, and Gold, 24.

62.
Ratnapala, "Male Sex Work in Sri Lanka," 217.




63.
Carlos F. Caceres and Oscar G. Jimenez, "Fletes in Parque Kennedy: Sexual Cultures among Young Men Who Sell Sex to Other Men in Lima," in Aggleton, Men Who Sell Sex, 190; Tan, "Walking the Tightrope," 244.

64. Ibid., 27.

65.
Vron Ware, "Purity and Danger: Race, Gender and Tales of Sex Tourism," in Back to Reality: Social Experience and Cultural Studies, ed. A. McRobbie, 133-51 (Manchester, 1997); the article's author reported that she was "one woman who did not fall under the black magic spell... the photographer and I had a job to do," 139.


66.. Ibid.
67. Ibid., 146-7.
68.
Sherry Ortner, "Borderland Politics and Erotics: Gender and Sexuality in Himalayan Mountaineering," in Sherry B. Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston, 1996), 181-212.

69.
Rolando B. Tolentino, "Bodies, Letters, Catalogs: Filipinas in Transnational Space," in Transnational Asia Pacific, 43-68; Kathleen Erwin, "Heart-to-Heart, Phone-to-Phone: Family Values, Sexuality, and the Politics of Shanghai's Advice Hotlines," in The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, ed. Deborah S. Davis, (Berkeley, 2000), 145-70; James Farrer, "Dancing through the Market Transition: Disco and Dance Hall Sociability in Shanghai," in Davis, The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, 226-49; Shu-mei Shih, "Gender and a New Geopolitics of Desire: The Seduction of Mainland Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong Media," Signs 23 (1998), 287-319; Zaragosa Vargas "Rank and File: Historical Perspectives on Latino/a Workers in the U.S.," in The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society (Maiden, Mass., 1998), 243-56; Colleen Greer, "Ethnicity.It Won't Just Go Away: The Resilience of Ethnicity through Practices of Assimilation: Lao Refugees in a Midwest Community," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 1998; Arlie Russell Hochschild, "The Nanny Chain: Mothers Minding Other Mothers' Children," The American Prospect (January 3, 2000), 32-6; Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, "The Global Servants: (Im)Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers in Rome and Los Angeles," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1998; Laura Ann Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979 (New Haven, 1985); Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases; Thiesmeyer, "The West's 'Comfort Women' and the Discourses of Seduction;" Joane Nagel,/toce, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (New York, 2001).