The commercial sex encounter that occurs under the purview of international sex tourism
is a completely alienating experience, in both material and psychological senses of the
term. For the sex-worker, the work itself is alienated labour in the material sense, in that
its value is appropriated, and also in the emotional sense, in that it is separated from and
causing separation from authentic feelings, giving rise to isolation and revulsion.
To Robinson and Bishop, sex tourism bespeaks a hollow human existence, an
“international sexual alienation … as part of the global system of exchange, domination,
and exploitation that functions on the economic level.”
Bishop and Robinson are troubled by “the necessity of ‘faking’ or of making the
representation resemble the ‘real thing’—an experience that places the sex worker in a
position to commodify her own as well as her client’s pleasure as part of the economics
By constructing a binary between a “fake” (and thus tainted and
alienated) commercial sex and a “real” (true, pure, innocent) loving sex, Bishop and
Robinson commit to the dichotomy between the fallen body of the whore and the
privileged body of the wife or Madonna. But while Bishop and Robinson see faking in
sex as alienating, some sex workers interpret it differently, seeing faking as a necessary
skill in the trade to get by the customers. As S/M professional dominant Liz Highleyman
points out, “It’s a skill to make a client think he’s getting what he wants when he’s really
not …”
Like Dworkin and MacKinnon, Bishop and Robinson’s writing is full of graphic
imagery of the violated and degraded bodies of Thai prostitutes, and thus, in Brown’s
sense, represents a mirror of pornography. In examining sex tourists’ traveling tales and
reports from the World Sex Guide on the Internet,
and in recounting how an American
tourist showed them how to “have a good time” in Bangkok,
focus on white males’ Orientalist perceptions of the racialized sexual others by
reproducing, pornographically, detailed accounts of what these tourists wrote and thought
29
Convention