Sex Tourism

Sex Tourism is when someone visits another area - typically another country - to get laid. Squicky examples include men who go to various Asian countries for sex with children, or try to pick up kids over the Internet and fly out to where they are to take them to a motel.

In some cases, the sex is arranged as part of the package, e.g. as pre-arranged prostitution, or you just go somewhere and you hook up with someone as an ordinary pick up. In the movie 48 Hours (which does not have sex tourism) Nick Nolte refers to the process of someone going out to hook up with someone to have sex as a trim hunt.

In the United States, the PROTECT Act allows US citizens who engage in "illicit sexual conduct" outside the country to be fined and/or imprisoned - if the victims are children.

Sex-oriented travel to places where adult prostitution is lawful (such as Amsterdam's red light district) or loosely regulated may still fall with the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) definition of "trips organized from within the tourism sector, or from outside this sector but using its structures and networks, with the primary purpose of effecting a commercial sexual relationship by the tourist with residents at the destination" even if it is not inherently a crime.

No real life examples, please; tell your local police force, not us.

Examples of Sex Tourism include:

Advertising

• The European railways organisation who sell youth-aimed "Inter-Rail" international European rail passes got into trouble with a magazine advert showing yellow condoms on a blue background as a parody of the European Union flag, suggesting a little too overtly that holders might engage in this trope.

Comic Books

• As much of a Crapsack World as Sin City is, it still gets tourists from other parts of the US and even other countries who want to visit Old Town.

Film

• How Stella Got Her Groove Back is the quintessential example of female sex tourism. A woman visits another country and hooks up with a hunky young man.
  • Which is based on a book BTW, which is again based on the Real Life experience of the author. The relationship didn't work out however, since said young man came out as gay when in the US, and they had a nasty breakup. Just so you know.
• Brokeback Mountain has a scene with one of the cowboys going to Mexico to anonymously hook up with a local man, presumably to release the stress of having to live in a heterosexual marriage and limit his contact with the other sheep herder to only once a year.
• This is the initial plot in the first Hostel. At least before things get bad. Fast.
• In Dogma, a member of the Board of Directors for the Mooby Corporation is killed by Loki (the Angel of Death) because he flew to Thailand to have sex with an Eleven! Year! Old! Boy!
• Pretty much the entire plot of Eurotrip.
• Heading South with Charlotte Rampling is about middle-aged Western women who go to the Caribbean for sexual encounters with local men.
• Holly is about an American expatriate in Cambodia who tries to rescue a 12-year-old Vietnamese girl from the world of child prostitution.
• In Love Actually, Colin goes to America because he figures American girls will go crazy over his cute British accent. It works.
• In Stealing Beauty, Lucy goes to Italy and has sex for the first time. Oh, and looks for her father.
• In The Prince And Me, Prince Edvard makes his college choice based solely on seeing it featured in a Girls Gone Wild video.

Literature

• The novel Exit to Eden is about a BDSM sex-fantasy island.
  • Also its film adaptation.
• The backdrop of Peter Straub's novel Koko is the sex-tourism fueled underbelly of Bangkok.
• Michel Houellebecq's novel Platforme deals extensively with sex-tourism when it's not busy insulting Islam.
• Time Scout features Sex Tourism to the past. Some people go downtime to have sex with downtimer whores. This is viewed very negatively and explicitly referred to as rape. They're called "zipper jockeys".

Live-Action TV

• In a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode, Munch goes undercover to bust a travel agent who secretly runs a sex-tourism business for male pedophiles. "We have an arrangement with a local orphanage" in a Third-World country.
• The Office (USA): Jim asks for vacation advice from the other employees. Kevin suggests Hedonism in Jamaica: "It's like Club Med, but everything is naked."
• On The Wire, McNulty (Dominic West) pretends to be an Englishman in Baltimore in order to infiltrate a sex slavery ring.
• My Name Is Earl had an episode where a former Foreign Exchange Student named Pierre wanted to stay in America to get girls, it works for him.
• Some of the characters on M*A*S*H have, jokingly, remarked their only/main reason for being in Korea/joining the war is for the (female) nurses (with sex implied).

Western Animation

• Bonnie of Family Guy while away from her paraplegic husband, goes to France to sex it up with a ... paraplegic French man
• In episode 140 of South Park, the Super Adventure Club is revealed to be an organization which travels to the most exotic places in the world so they can be the first explorers to have sex with the native children.