Tryst Troppo: Sex, Tourism, and Relationships on a Philippine Beach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.25.2.2026.4293Keywords:
Philippines, sex tourism, critical tourism, Tristes Tropiques, sex tourism ethnography, anthropology of tourism, tropical island paradiseAbstract
The village of Aplaya, Puerto Galera, on the Philippines island of Mindoro is renowned for its beach and scuba diving. Despite its reputation as an isolated tropical island paradise, Aplaya is also infamous for sex tourism––a legacy of a colonial and military history. Following imperial rule by the Spanish, the US colonized the Philippines and established military bases which expanded during the Vietnam War along with the rest and recreation (R & R) offerings in the base areas, including go-go bars and sex for hire. When the bases closed in the 1990s the sex clientele transferred from military to tourist, and red-light go-go bars opened up in Aplaya. In my ethnographic work on sex tourism, foreign male sex tourists narrate their desires for a Utopian paradise, a tropical beach that is imagined as uninhabited except for the welcoming natives and sexually available women. They nostalgically recount yearnings for a paradise that, lost in the West, is found in the sultry tropics. Colonial and military histories are elided in these imaginaries about the natural access and excess of the tropics. This cultural landscape of the complex relations of sex and tourism call up Lévi-Strauss’ reverie in Tristes Tropiques or Sad Tropics, of the degradation entailed in temperate and tropical encounters and the desire for a pure tropics. However, male sex tourist’s nostalgic imaginaries in reality are also a story of trysts gone troppo.
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