Women and Sex Tourism: Cougars Prowl for Underage Sex Partners

You drain the last of your tropical drink and walk off down the beach with an attractive local. You area a "cougar" on the prowl, and the guy nuzzling against you is young enough to be your son or grandson.

Are you committing a crime? That depends.

Sex Tourism received a tacit endorsement from the chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board recently.

In recent years sex tourism has been attacked by various NGO organizations and governments as exploitation and addressed as criminal activity, but this has been mainly when it has involved young women, often children, being bought and paid for by men who live in the Europe and North America and who travel to third world countries to buy sex. Often criminal action is only pursued when pressure and negative publicity outside the victim country is brought to bear.

What if you are a white woman, between the ages of thirty-five and sixty, a so-called "cougar" and you trade "gifts" for "company"? Are you helping the local economy and maybe fulfilling wishes and desires of your own and the young man or boy that you are with? Is this so bad, where the locals are cash starved and every little bit of foreign earnings and exchange matter?

Not in Kenya, and not in some other areas of the world. In a recent New York Post article, the chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board said that "It's not evil. But it's certainly something we frown upon."

It's a double standard that has the more thoughtful and concerned government officials concerned. And it's a growing situation as more women in developed nations remain or become single and have ample means to support a hedonistic lifestyle once thought to be the sole province of men. Most governments will not address it on the record, and will turn a blind eye, much the same as they often do for men hunting for young sex partners in their land.

The US Department of Justice web site advises that about between 2 and 14 percent of the gross domestic product of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand is calculated from sex tourism. Further, it states, that Mexico and Central America are growing markets for this type of travel.

This is not a matter of Stella getting her groove back, meeting a local of age and consent; it's more a matter of a perversion of established patterns of life and psychological battering of young male minds. Young males won't always be young, and the "work" they may engage in with their rich white female friends will distort their expectations in life and may even keep them from further schooling and professions. Many are not of legal age by any standards.

Usually, a young man being involved with an older women is snickered at, and dismissed with a wink and thought to be harmless, but it is quite disruptive to that young man's development and life.

Very often, the rich white woman who go looking for some erotic company when on holiday are helping to break down the morals and standards of the local community and create disharmony within families.

When these woman land in the foreign countries and seek out company, they do not ask for ID. Often they will be entertaining young men that could be their children or grandchildren's age. The men (boys) will always say they are older.

I have witnessed personally in the Caribbean white woman gladly accepting younger men's company, and I do say advisedly that they were "men". These same woman, respected in their professions and good family women, then go back to their own family and husbands. I have never overhead any of them saying they will test for HIV or other STDs upon return.

A number of organizations address the abuse of young woman who fall prey to rich white men traveling abroad, but woman doing the same activities are not looked upon in the same way --that is, as criminals at worst and cradle robbers at best.

Even if the local man is in his late teens or early twenties it is a good chance that he already has a a wife and family. So the "work" that he is doing on the side can disrupt and perhaps destroy his family life as well. Little thought seems to be given by these women to that aspect of their tourism, which puts them into the same lurid camp as the dirty white men that scour the earth looking for selfish sex satisfaction.

Because it is unlikely that women's sex tourism will be addressed in any serious way, it is sure to continue to grow, and will receive little negative pressure in Europe and North America and in the victim countries.
In the Western countries it will not be addressed because it is not a "politically correct" subject, as it questions a woman's right to choose. In the victim countries it is a cash cow.

Ironically, this comes at a time when negative pressure on men, and more arrests, is growing in Western countries. Often they are arrested for the same crime that goes unpunished for their female counterpart.

Cougars are likely to have free range in Kenya and elsewhere for some time to come.