admin @ Tue, 2006-09-19 11:01
Pardon my disdain, but I just finished reading the September Essence magazine piece about black men who go on sex vacations to Brazil. Yes, I know sexual tourism is nothing new.
Men of all races and nationalities have been willing to travel long distances in search of cheap sex since, well, forever. Lately, though, inspired perhaps by and 's 2003 video, "Beautiful," there reportedly has been a significant increase in the number of black men visiting Brazil. Essence, which has a black female readership, cites statistics from the Inter-Agency Consultation on Race in Latin America showing a 16 percent increase in black American tourism to the South American nation since 2004.
"I can remember back in the early '90s that it first came to my attention. At first I thought it was just the thong bikinis they were so wild about," said , editor of Pathfinders Travel, a Philly-based magazine for people of color.
But now, William Jelani Cobb, an assistant history professor at Spelman University, has gone and told it, so to speak. In the Essence article, he writes, "One 69-year-old from Baltimore who has been traveling to Brazil for 21 years brags about bedding two women nearly every night, and then having a grand finale with six bisexual women on his last night in town.
"He cuts short the conversation because he has a date with a menage a trois set for 10 p.m. As he leaves, you're thinking, 'This dude wouldn't score a menage a anything back home.' But this is Rio."
Rio de Janeiro is where men of diverse economic backgrounds can experience the high-rollin', baller lifestyle that they could never afford stateside. And, interestingly, the lure isn't so much about being with exotic, light-skinned women (roughly 40 percent of the population is mixed-race) as some might imagine. And it's definitely not about the glorious beaches.
"The sex is almost secondary," Cobb told me last week. "Absolutely. Some men said to me that they were as addicted to the ego-stroking and the deference and the never-ending stream of compliments as they were to the sexual possibilities."
Needless to say, the piece sparked an angry outpouring from Essence readers, many of whom were offended by how the interviewees characterized them as "materialistic gold-diggers."
The article quotes one tour operator who said, "Five minutes after meeting you, African-American women want to know how much you make. Here they want to know you as a person."
Yeah, whatever. Think that if you must. But you should also ask yourself: If American women are such gold-diggers, what does that make the impoverished females who're willing to sleep with a tourist for money? What kind of game might these poor women be playing if it isn't pay to play?
To believe that the women who pursue American visitors to their country are truly into them, there must be some kind of crazy disconnect taking place in the minds of these men.
But then again, maybe there needs to be a disconnect so these men can sleep at night - especially with a woman-for-hire sleeping on the pillow next to them.
This is cache, read story here