Arrests highlight female sex tourism

     Last week's detainment of 28 "beach boys'' in Bali on suspicion of selling sex to women tourists has turned the spotlight on female sex tourism.

    Freya Peterson of GlobalPost, a Boston-based foreign news website, refers to the practice as "a surging global phenomenon.''

    The arrests in Bali came after release in South Korea of a documentary called "Cowboys in Paradise'' about female sex tourism on the Indonesian island. The film, made by Singapore-based director Amit Virmani, features interviews with some beach boys, who refer to themselves as "Kuta cowboys,'' for the Kuta Beach tourist area where they hang out, and foreign female clients.

    
Peterson reports that GlobalPost journalists have witnessed this thriving brand of tourism "in many corners of the world, including Jamaica, Jordan, Senegal and elsewhere.'' Typically, these foreign tourists, predominantly western women, get together with young men and sometimes boys in exchange for gifts or cash.

    Many of the women say that they are merely indulging in a practice pioneered long ago by middle-aged men.

   While the phenomenon of female sex tourism is not as publicly acknowledged as that of men there is a growing body of  work by writers and filmmakers on the subject.

     Besides "Cowboys in Paradise,'' Peterson points to J. Michael Seyfert's 2006 documentary "Rent a Rasta,'' the popular 1980s American book and movie, "How Stella Got Her Groove Back,'' which also takes place in Jamaica, and the 2006 film "Heading South'' about a group of  American and European women who travel to Haiti in the late 1970s.