So Rush Limbaugh was caught at the Palm Beach airport on the way back from the Dominican Republic with Viagra in his suitcase, for which he did not have a prescription (it was made out by his doctor to another doctor, probably to hide the fact that he’s using it). And while it’s fun to snicker about this little development, here’s something that should give us all pause. From commenter amyc at Tbogg’s place:
The Dominican Republic apparently has a booming sex trade (or rape trade, if you’re like me and don’t believe 13-yr-old girls really consent to be whores for rich tourists). As nightmare-inducing as the answers might be, I think The American People need to ask why an unmarried Christian man would take a suitcase full of dick drugs on a Third-World sex tour. (Although perhaps we shouldn’t rule out missionary work.)
Indeed, the DR is one of the world’s biggest destinations for sex tourism:
“There is always a demand for sex,” said one Dominican prostitute as she lounged at one of the town’s waterfront bars. “Men will always pay for it, especially in here … where they can get anything they want at a discount.”
Indeed, the Dominican Republic is one of the biggest sex tourism destinations in the world, thanks in part to Internet sites that extol the country as a “single man’s paradise.”
I wonder if that’s intended to give it some kind of veneer of consensuality, like it’s just dating rather than exploitation. Hey, a bachelor’s entitled to play the field!
But this sunny vacation mecca has a dark side: The area’s thriving commercial sex industry has given it one of the highest HIV rates of any region in the country, according to the World Bank.
The tourism boom didn’t hit this island nation until the 1990s, when resorts gobbled up miles of virgin beachfront property. Today, men looking for local action can choose from customized love vacations that include room, board, 20 alcohol drinks a day and the company of one or more local women.
Ah, yes. “Love” vacations. How romantic, sharing an island getaway with rented women and copious amounts of booze. The delusions don’t end there:
The pricing schemes vary, but the content is the same. It’s a war of sex-oriented bragging: Members send in their R-rated travel reports in which they boast about the number of women they’ve “nailed,” including naked photographs of their conquests. They share tips and warnings, such as this post from a tourist who visited Boca Chica, a beachside town in southern Dominican Republic:
“If you go there, beware of a girl named Caroline. Bad, bad news: underage, pregnant and on drugs….”
At TSM, one of the busier destinations, a man describing himself as a retired Canadian steel worker now living in Puerto Plata wrote: “(I) love the Latin lifestyle: one wife and as many girlfriends as you can handle…. I would like to pass on my report on these bars in the Puerto Plata area with photos of my favorite girls that work in them.”
Emphasis mine. What escapes me is why they brag about how many women they’ve “nailed,” as if they’re not paying for this. I mean, it’s a canned bird hunt. There’s nothing to be proud of when you pay for sex and you get what you paid for. It’s a simple business transaction. The prostitute is not your wife, or your girlfriend, and there’s a damn good chance she wouldn’t have fucked you if her livelihood weren’t involved.
I mean, is it this fantasy that allows men to have sex with prostitutes and not think about what they’re doing to these women and girls (and boys)? Do they really believe that the prostitutes would “do it for free,” like I’m sure they’re telling their clients?
What’s amazing is that they talk this way about the prostitutes, in such intimate terms, and yet pick out their conquests like melons at the market:
The global reach of the Internet has resulted in a tremendous increase in the sex tourism industry, said Donna M. Hughes, a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island.
“The Web has broken the industry wide open,” Hughes said. “The scope and detail of this exchange is without precedent. These women are viewed as objects and rated on everything from skin color to presence of scars and firmness of their flesh. The guys running these sites are pimps.”
And of course, the women who are in the trade are doing so because they have few options. Problem is, the sex trade is so dominant in the area that women who have managed to escape its clutches are assumed to be available just because they exist:
In Puerto Plata there are so many streetwalkers competing for the attention of vacationers that one hair stylist said she doesn’t leave her home after dark because she doesn’t want to be mistaken for a puta. In the town’s discos, bars and restaurants, solitary women stare suggestively at male tourists or rub up against them like cats.
The industry that has sprouted up to satisfy the sexual desires of rich tourists has taken a terrible toll on the region, even for those not directly involved in the trade.
Its reputation for cheap and easy sex has given the Caribbean the second-highest AIDS rate in the world after sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Bank, which recently announced plans to devote $150 million to fight HIV/AIDS in the region’s islands.
But that sobering statistic hasn’t stopped the flesh trade on this sun-sparkled land. In some areas of the Dominican Republic, HIV infection rates among prostitutes top 12 percent, according to local activist groups.
Public health campaigns exhort men to use condoms with prostitutes to protect their families from the disease, which is the primary cause of death among Dominican men under age 45.
And what, exactly, is the mindset of a man who will fuck a 10-year-old in Thailand or the Dominican Republic but consider someone who does that at home to be a pedophile?
This paper (pdf) gives some background into how the sex tourism trade, particularly the use of child prostitutes, came to be in the Dominican Republic, in part due to loss of arable land and the poverty that results. I’m issuing a call to Chris Clarke to address this issue more thoroughly than I can.