Victim

He should be an alien. But he isn’t. I would like to think they are but a fabricated species of mutants called ‘The Sex Tourists’ stomping around some post-apocalyptic B-Movie set. I can hear the reverberations now of their big Birkinstocked feet, the sputtering special effects of the 50s making everything kitsch. Here they come! A gang of Godzillas in Bermuda shorts, feigning the enlightenment of world travel but, in reality, grunting the primitive mantra of:

“Me-have-lots-of-sex. What-I-want-when-I-want. How-I-want. My-right-as-man.”

“Get-laid-by-young-desperate-women. Best-deal-only-$3.”

But it’s not a movie, a bunch of guys in Hawaiian shirts screeching a cult film joke. They are very real, this mutant breed of Sex Tourists, and, there are so many of them, they could be anyone.

“Yes, he goes to prostitutes in Third World countries,” a male friend said, oblivious to the effect that would have on me.

I was horrified. I became hysterical. There is a sex tourist in my social circle! A holiday rapist who partakes in and upholds the torture of women and children! Arrogant. Oblivious. Inexcusable. Across the table from me!

I don’t know if you have ever been hysterical. I mean, really hysterical where you whirl up into a tornado of freaking out and can’t make it stop. I felt like my entire being was flying apart and I wasn’t going to be able to put it back together again. Grief, confusion, anger tore out of me. Every time I tried to stop, I stood as a husk, gasping, and it wound up again. Afterward, when I finally did succeed in making it stop, I was depleted and ashamed that I had lost it by feeling too much. Some people have told me that they worry about me because I feel too much. Isn’t the not-enough more worrisome?

Even though the extreme majority of sex tourists are men,88 I am not demonizing men in general. I want you to know this. Really know this. I am demonizing sex tourists, punters, and johns, that is, anyone who goes to a Third World country and to the Third World that exists in the first (like Vancouver, Canada’s Downtown Eastside, for example) and exploits desperate human beings for their sexual gratification. And selfishness. And greed. To fulfill their biological rights as men. If you don’t do this, I am not talking about you. And if you do, yes, please: take this very personally.

As I have said, the extreme majority of prostitutes are women, and the extreme majority of johns are men; the extreme majority of rapists are men, and the extreme majority of victims are women. Men cannot take this indisputable fact personally. This is the most important thing men can do to make the world a better place for everyone. Again, ‘everyone’ being the keyword. And, no! Thankfully, the majority of men are not sex tourists, or johns, or punters, or rapists. But every man exists in a system that makes it possible for him to become one who exploits. The same way every woman negotiates a system that makes it possible for her to be assaulted.