The concept of “the girlfriend experience”, the colloquial term for when a customer, typically a man, expects an emotional connection with his hired sex worker, is one that stuck out across the three readings this week. In Alexander’s piece, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: Feminism, Tourism, and the State in the Bahamas,” tourists to the Bahama’s want not only the benefits of the island itself, but the emotional labor of the native Bahamians to make vacation more enjoyable. Similarly, the emotional labor of miches, Brazilian male prostitutes, is expected by the middle-class to wealthy gay male Americans that visit Brazil, in Mitchell’s, “TurboConsumer in Paradise.” Schaeffer-Grabiel, in “Planetlove.com,” writes about American men who find wives from Latin American online wanting more than just a committed sexual partner. These three pieces connect the idea that what constitutes transnational pleasure for tourists, particularly wealthy male Americans, is more than just physical sexual fulfillment, and in fact demands a total commitment, a total domination of, the foreign national that is constructed as a “sex” object. The sex is not the goal of these tourists – pleasure is about taking as much as possible from whomever they desire.
When the Bahamas became independent from the United Kingdom, the Bahamian state made tourism the main economic activity on the island, encouraging natives to set aside whatever emotions they feel about tourism or about their own economic conditions in order to portray the island as a “paradise” for those visiting. Writing specifically about lesbianism on the island, Alexander writes, “I want to argue here that heteropatriarchy functions in ways that supersede the sexual. At this historical moment, for instance, heteropatriarchy is useful in continuing to perpetuate a colonial inheritance...and in enabling the political and economic processes of recolonization” (24). The heteropatriarchy that exists in the Bahamas asks its victims to put more than their sexuality aside for the sake of tourism, but that Bahamain victims of heteropatriarchy become dedicated participants in its quest to turn the island into a place that benefits tourists rather than natives. Heteropatriarchy wants Bahamians to give the tourists “the girlfriend experience,” wanting natives to fit more than just the sexualized narrative of Bahamian women, to fit the colonial narrative of tourists being economic beneficiaries graciously visiting poor victims and using their American dollars to uplift natives. Complete with tourists being “promised ‘warm and genial Bahamians,’” the sexual comes second to the emotional, the total, domination of the local by the tourist, but the two also exist simultaneously and reinforce each other (55). The “girlfriend experience”, in the Bahamas, is about tourists, who in Alexander’s opinion are neocolonialists egged on by the state, getting everything they want from Bahamians, getting more than what they paid for.
For tourists to Brazil, a similar, but even more direct, experience links tourists to natives. Miches in Brazil are highly sought after by gay sex tourists, specifically for their more masculine looks and demeanors. Already, by financially incentivizing a form of self-presentation, tourists expect more than just a body from their paid escorts, and Brazilian sex workers must now put more labor than just the sex into the transaction between themselves and the customer. Beyond the unspoken requirement of retaining a “machismo” presentation, “micheˆs willing to indulge those tourists who wanted to top or who were willing to kiss and cuddle became highly sought after and found providing these services quite lucrative and a potential ticket into a long-term relationship.”. Here is perhaps the most direct example of “the girlfriend experience”. The emotional connection the tourists want means miches must caricature themselves emotionally in addition to sexually. Miches know this, and one even “used his advanced knowledge of Euro-American homosexuality to maximize his own profits” (Mitchell 12). As gay identity within the states has become so associated with economic activity, even economic subjugation when looking at gay American contributions to gentrification, Mitchell acknowledges “a kind of event horizon—the point at which gay identity inescapably and permanently collapses sexual- ity and consumerism into one another” (5). Gayness is no longer solely sexual, it is now economic. This spillover between sexuality and class then traverses borders as gay men leave the country, eventually turning the economic activity in Brazil into one that necessarily ties up sexual and emotional labor, that neccessarily ties up miches from being anything other than the entire person a gay tourist expects them to be.
Finally, Schaeffer-Grabiel connects online marriage websites from Latin America, used primarily by United States men, with a domination that originates in the sexual but becomes total. Again, like the integration of gay identity with economic activity, straight men from the United States also see their sexuality bound to their economic condition. The fact that it is even possible for these men to seex wives from Latin America stems from their class; “it is this need to work unfathomable hours that affords men the ability to travel, own computers, and accumulate the surplus capital that solidifies their affiliation with a dominant heterosexual national identity”, Schaeffer-Grabiel writes (351). Thus, as the sexual within the straight man’s body and borders becomes inextricably tangled with the economic, what the man wants out of sex becomes more than sexual, too. One woman who was married to a man who sought her out from one of these dating websites explains that, “men prefer Internet por- nography than to make love with us. They’d rather watch perfect women than normal and real women. All of us agree that we can’t compete with these unreal bodies, that don’t fight, that don’t get angry, who don’t veer from the norm. . . . It’s easier for los gringos to masturbate in front of the computer” (Schaeffer-Grabiel 353). A sexual desire is not what drives these men to seek Latin American wives. The sexual is almost entirely divorced from the other forms of engagement and identity these men want from these women. Men do not want women to be sexual objects, but objects of total domination, objects of violence. “The girlfriend experience” demands that these women come under total control, not just sexual control.
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