This week, shortly after finishing Tong's chapters on multicultural/postcolonial feminism, ecofeminism, and postmodern/third-wave feminism, I saw a commercial that caught my attention. It was a tourism ad for Puerto Rico that highlighted two main attractions: Golf (advertised by a fully-dressed, light-skinned man) and beaches (advertised by a brown-skinned woman in a yellow bikini).
I thought immediately of Maria Mies' classic essay "The White Man's Dilemma: His Search for What He Has Destroyed." (I can't find the full text of the essay online, but it is in Ecofeminism which she co-wrote with Vandana Shiva; the whole book is amazing.) I don't know if I can do the essay justice via synopsis, but I will try: In this essay, Mies deconstructs how historical Western colonial practices have created wealth in the Global North, but how the very process has resulted in widespread alienation from the land and natural processes. As a result, Northern people feel acutely their alienated despair and feel a drive to re-develop connections to "nature." She writes, "Part of this reaching out towards nature in all its manifestations is the search for beauty, for aesthetic pleasure. Obviously, the cities’ consumer paradises, the abundance of man-made commodities fail to answer this desire."
However, because "connection" is in many ways a lost value in a world riven by gender, race and class hierarchies, this despair often leads people (and specifically men, as the dominant social class) to reentrench systems of domination in their search for what they have lost. Mies writes about how nature is romanticized, and because women (particularly third-world women) are perceived as being "closer" to nature by virtue of geography, their bodies are also eroticized and represented as consumable objects that will help men overcome their own alienation. Women in formerly-colonized lands are especially viewed as "wild terrain," "dark continents," and viewing them in this way reentrenches deeply-historical racial interactions.
This helps explain how women's bodies can be represented as tourist attractions, can be placed alongside beaches and images of pristine, "virgin," "untouched," "unpenetrated" lands. Of course, this connection isn't purely metaphorical; globally there is a burgeoning sex tourism business where wealthy Westerners (almost always men) travel to other countries to obtain sexual "products" from women, children, and teenage girls and boys. The biggest sex tourism offenders are men from the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, and Australia. The biggest sex tourism destination is Southeast Asia, though it happens all over the globe. The power dynamic of wealthy men from the industrialized Global North purchasing "services" from poor women and children in the Global South gives weight to Mies' critiques.
This long quote from Mies is included in Tong's book, too:
"The growing sex-obsessing apparent in all industrial societies is... a direct consequence of alienation from nature, the absence of a sensual interacting with nature in people's work life. Sexuality is supposed to be the totally 'other' from work, sexuality should not interfere with work, should be strictly separated from the work life. Sexuality is the 'transcendence' of work, the 'heaven' after the 'valley of tears and sweat' of work, the real essence of leisure... The tragedy is, however, that this 'heaven' is also a commodity, to be bought like any other. And like the acquisition of other consumer goods, ultimately, it disappoints... Therefore, the constantly disappointed striving to attain this 'heaven' transforms need into an addiction."
I looked online but couldn't find the precise commercial that I saw this week, although I did find this 2008 Puerto Rico tourism commercial that is also an interesting study in how women's bodies are used to sell destinations. For me, it is disturbing to see ads like this in the context of how much I know about sex trafficking and sex tourism in Puerto Rico. I think it's important to think about who is attracted by ads like this, and why, and how realities are constructed by ads like this, and what the implications are. In this example you can see how the camera (that typical tool of the male gaze) focuses on parts and pieces of women's bodies, dancing and engaging in other forms of performative gendered spectacle:
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