Читать книгу Gender and Sexuality - Stevi Jackson - Страница 33

A British man, a sex tourist, travels to a resort in Thailand. He arranges his trip through a western company, flies on a western airline and stays in a hotel belonging to a large international chain. While in Thailand he can have his pick of young Thai women sex workers and can hire one for the night for less than the cost of a brief encounter with a British street prostitute. It is estimated that at least 60 per cent of what he spends goes to international conglomerates, based in rich nations, and that the many women with whom he has sex during his stay share about 10 per cent of his expenditure among them (see O’Connell Davidson, 1995).

Julia O’Connell Davidson’s study of British sex tourists in Thailand was conducted in the 1990s, but the situation she describes persists to this day. The phenomenon of sex tourism is indicative of patterned or structural inequalities surrounding gender and sexuality and the ways in which these are interwoven with other inequalities: those between rich and poor countries and those of class and race. It is primarily men who purchase sex (whether from women or men), and the vast majority of the world’s sex workers are women and girls. This reflects a long history of male dominance in which men have historically enjoyed sexual rights to women. That a British man travels to a distant land to buy sex, however, is a consequence of the relations between rich and poor nations and of the existence of a global marketplace. These global relations enable a man from a wealthy western country to take advantage of opportunities for travel and recreation in a country where the cost of living – and the cost of sex – is far cheaper than at home. Local economic conditions, such as rural poverty and the lack of alternative means of making a decent living, lead many young, uneducated women to enter the sex trade. Thus both the demand for prostitution and the supply of sex workers are a consequence of complex and intersecting local and global inequalities. This situation also raises questions of culture, of the meaning of sex and gender and beliefs about them in different cultures, and of the western racialized image of Thailand in general, and Thai women in particular, as exotically other. There are also questions of agency and identity: our male sex tourist makes a choice to go to Thailand, and his choices reflect his masculine identity; the women who service him have fewer choices, but are not necessarily lacking in agency and may be acting in terms of their own identities, for example as filial daughters sending money back to their rural families. These issues will be addressed in Parts III and IV. For now it is worth noting that in any social situation, structural, cultural and subjective aspects of sociality are all in play.

In Part II, however, we are concerned with social structure and systematic gendered and sexual inequalities. These include not just those evident in our example, but the inequalities within our own modern western societies, which are so much part of our social landscape that they are frequently taken for granted as ‘just the ways things are’. We will also be considering the social institutions that shape and regulate gender and sexual relations, from the global commodity market that features in our example to institutionalized heterosexuality. We will therefore be dealing with sociological perspectives that seek to analyse the structure of societies, explain how particular structural arrangements arise, persist and change, and how they have shaped gender and sexuality.