Sex Tourism Essay

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Sex Tourism Basic dilemma Canada’s National Post newspaper reports that the Outdoor Life Network, also in Canada, has recently come under fire for airing a new TV show in 2003 called Red Light Districts. The show highlights some of the many sex tourism destinations around the world by exposing viewers to ‘adventurous activities that stimulate the human spirit’, as well as depicting ‘intriguing people, places, and subcultures’, as described by Blackwell (2003: A5). One of the initial shows was of the sex tourism industry in Bangkok and Pattaya in Thailand. While offering no criticism of the practice of sex tourism in these areas, the show unabashedly illustrated young girls in school uniforms who openly negotiate sexual services for money. More explicitly, the show recorded, in an electronically distorted set of images, a Scottish man having sex with two women. The host of the show explains that tourists need only negotiate, be friendly and have a good time. Spokespersons for the network claim that the show is nothing more than a documentary, which reflects reality in the region, but does not promote prostitution in any way. Blackwell quotes a spokesperson for Beyond Borders, an organization that fights child prostitution and pornography, who was outraged at the show. She suggests that ‘Presenting young women and young men . . . as sexual objects, as people you should come and be sexually involved with it because they’re good at it, they’re cheap and they’re Asian, is positively, not only offensive, but un-Canadian’ (Blackwell, 2003: A5). A major concern to Canadians was that the show received funding from the Canadian Film/Video Production Tax Credit programme, and features the Canadian-flag logo at the end of the show. At the heart of the sex tourism issue is the power and control that dominant parties have over children, women and families, compelling these
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