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My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist

Tupac Shakur: Final 24 Hours

Sex tourism is the practice of traveling to a different nation or area for the primary purpose of engaging in sexual activity. In many cases, this practice seeks to indulge tastes or appetites that are considered unacceptable at home, or else simply to avoid prostitution laws in the tourist’s home country.

My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist provides a raw, unflinching look at a new development in the sex tourism industry: the growth of the “24-hour girlfriend”. The documentary focuses on the sex tourism industry in Venezuela and Thailand, where visiting tourists (typically men) can essentially “buy” a woman to act as the love of their life for the duration of their stay.

The documentary tells the story of the women who are bought and sold and gives them a voice to tell their own version of the vacation that these foreign men crave.

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My Boyfriend, the Sex Tourist

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Monica Garnsey

A look at global sex tourism, focusing on the situation in Venezuela and Thailand.

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British women are travelling to The Gambia for relationships with black men — I have learnt to not judge them

Seyi rhodes was intrigued by the british women he met when first visiting gambia in 2007. now, he's returned to investigate those looking for sex.

I first visited The Gambia over ten years ago. It was my last stop on a short backpacking adventure around West Africa and I never forgot the experience. So much so that I wanted to unpack some of the things I saw when I first visited the country, so this year I went back to make a documentary for Channel 4 called Sex On The Beach .

Back in 2007 The Gambia was becoming known as a tourist destination for Brits looking for cheap holidays with guaranteed winter sun. Nobody told me the other bit: The Gambia is a place where an older white woman could easily have sex with a young black man, as long as she showers him with gifts and money. It’s a sex tourism destination, but this time, for women.

In Gambia, the bars are full of white women mingling with black men half their age. When a white woman walks down the beach, muscular young men in tiny shorts ‘jog’ alongside her, smiling and trying to make eye contact, begging her to, “Let me be your friend, let me take you out, show you a good time.” It doesn’t matter how old she is – in fact, the older she is, the more attention she gets.

On my first trip I was treated like a local – and not just any local. People thought I was a “bumster” – local slang for a beach boy who chases white women. I was stopped from entering certain hotels and restaurants as the security guards were always conscious that their establishment was a place where women would come to escape the male attention they get outside. So if I was allowed in, it would only be at a white persons request. Even showing my British passport didn’t change that. I’d be told the hotel was for ‘guests only’. Of course my white friends weren’t guests, but they would stroll in and be greeted with massive smiles.

The British tourists I met on my trip were brazen. At one point I was standing in a bar and a pair of hands pulled me backwards by the waist. I fell into the lap of a drunk British woman in her late 50s. She was giggling to her friends, “I like this one!” I was frozen in place, wondering what the hell possessed this woman to think she could grab at me like that. Within seconds her hand was up my t-shirt, having a grope, and then she offered to buy me a drink. This happened years before #MeToo , but I knew what had just happened.

The Gambia was once a major slave-trading port and The British Empire used this region for its people. Black people could be bought, sold, shipped abroad, raped and forced to work – legally. By British standards at the time, slavery was already seen as morally wrong and was outlawed in the UK, but it was still allowed in Gambia. In many ways the same convention still applies. Women from Britain – where there are thousands of young, single black men – choose instead to come to Gambia looking for sex and a relationship with a black man. In Gambia, a British woman’s money and power buys her things she could never have at home.

In the years since my first trip the phenomenon of female sex tourists in Gambia has become a staple of British tabloids. The focus is always on the women: their sex lives, their finances and their feelings. The men are never interviewed, but they are described as love-cheats, rats and scammers.

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I went back to make a documentary about all this because I wanted to meet those men and find out what motivates them, without letting myself think I know their lives better than they do. I’m now old enough to know what it feels like to be lonely and to get older but still feel young at heart. I can see how women over 50 become almost invisible to society and appreciate what that must feel like. I’ve met male sex tourists in places like Thailand and I’ve heard their stories: divorce, loneliness, feelings of inadequacy all ‘solved’ by a relationship with a local woman half their age.

Some of the people I met might look like they fit neatly into a box – ‘sex tourist’, ‘scammer’ or ‘victim’ – but once I’d taken the time to understand them I could see that they’re were all works-in-progress. From the woman who got engaged to a man she’d known for three months to the 34-year-old man who says he’s proud to be engaged to an 86-year-old. People don’t always know if they’re looking for love, sex, money or power. In reality they’re all interlinked, and you can only see that by diving into peoples lives and looking – with no judgement.

Sex on the Beach airs on Channel 4 tonight at 10pm

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Inside Thailand’s Child Sex Tourism Trade

101 East investigates Thailand’s sex tourism trade and how vulnerable children are exploited.

Thailand’s multibillion-dollar sex tourism trade is thriving again after its shutdown during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

With the country’s borders open again, tourists are flocking from around the world.

Despite prostitution being illegal, bar girls in the coastal city of Pattaya can earn triple the average wage, drawing workers from the country’s poor rural provinces.

But police say children are increasingly targeted in the city’s red-light district.

101 East investigates Thailand’s sex tourism trade and how it exploits vulnerable children.

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10 Movies on Sex Tourism that You Shouldn’t Miss

From the book the impact of tourism in east africa.

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‘It’s paradise’ – How older European women are ‘preying’ on young Gambian men in sex tourism

A new documentary on the UK’s Channel 4 network that was broadcast on Monday reveals how the West African nation of Gambia has become a hotspot for older European holidaymakers, usually women, looking to show romantic love to young men in exchange for money and/or gifts.

An ever-increasing phenomenon and vice in the tiny nation, an elderly White female tourist who spoke with British journalist, Seyi Rhodes, on the Sex on the Beach documentary, attested to how easy was to hook up with the young men, who are locally referred to as “bumsters”.

“It’s paradise,” she said. “You could have a different man every night.”

Alka, a 32-year-old Gambian who is married to a Belgian woman twice his age, told Rhodes some of the women come to the coastal nation in search for love while others come for flings – referring to the latter group as “holidaymakers.”

“Sometimes they’re not good tourists, they’re holidaymakers,” he said. Asked to elaborate, Alka said: “Someone who comes to f**k you and leave you.”

“It really, really hurts me,” Alka added, referring to the sex tourists and how wealth disparities puts some of the cougars in positions where they can prey and take advantage of the young men. According to the young Gambian , it has never been about money for him.

“I don’t like it. I am looking for a good relationship,” he claimed, adding that the women he has been with always offered him money though he never asked for it.

Though some of the local men have also been accused of exploiting the older women on the grounds that they are vulnerable , a local rapper told Rhodes it goes both ways.

“Why don’t the headlines be that the older women were exploiting the younger men?” Killa Ace, who is outspoken on sex tourism in the country, asked. “The young Gambian following her is probably desperate for an opportunity, and the party on the other side is also desperate for something.”

There have been stories of elderly women who claimed they were tricked into marriage by young Gambian men and then abandoned after emptying their accounts. However, Alka, who revealed his 65-year-old wife sent him around $70,000 to build a house for them in Gambia , debunked that assertion.

“Many men?” he asked. “Those are the people that spoil the name of Gambia.”

Writing about the documentary in a feature for iNews , Rhodes said he has learnt “not to judge” both parties after his experience and interactions.

“Some of the people I met might look like they fit neatly into a box – ‘sex tourist’, ‘scammer’ or ‘victim’ – but once I’d taken the time to understand them I could see that they’re were all works-in-progress,” he wrote.

“From the woman who got engaged to a man she’d known for three months to the 34-year-old man who says he’s proud to be engaged to an 86-year-old. People don’t always know if they’re looking for love, sex, money or power. In reality they’re all interlinked, and you can only see that by diving into peoples lives and looking – with no judgement.”

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