One of the big growth areas in tourism has been single women from Europe and North America travelling to the Caribbean for what is politely described as 'love tourism'. Now, here in London, playwrights and filmmakers are putting this issue under the spotlight.

Diane Abbott

In March, I saw a Royal Shakespeare Company production Trade written by Debbie Tucker Green. It compared and contrasted three women. Two were British black women who had travelled to the Caribbean for sex; one an older professional woman and the other a young "hottie". The third woman was the longstanding partner and "baby mother" of the man servicing the two tourists.

Recently a new French language film Heading South opened in
London. It is about rich, white, middle-aged women travelling to 1970s Haiti for "no-strings" sex with young black men. And next week a production called Sugar Mummies opens at the Royal Court Theatre.

The pre-publicity says: "Jamaica: a sensual paradise where sun, sea and sand are free but anything more comes at a price. Welcome to the 21st Century where women travel across the world in search of sex, love and liberation. But the reality is that hard cash equals hard man.

It seems that the type of encounters, that used to be seen as holiday romances, are increasingly described by academics and writers as female "sex tourism". The men involved certainly take a very business like attitude to their activities. A journalist quotes a beach boy in Negril as saying proudly: "We are in business. We sell ganja, coke and good loving".

However the female tourists manage to blind themselves to the reality that they are buying sex. British academics Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor and Julia O' Connell -Davidson bluntly describe the way that the female tourists think.

"Racist ideas about black men being hypersexual and unable to contain their sexuality enable them (the female tourists) to explain to themselves why such young desirable men would be eager to have sex with older and/or overweight women, without having to think that partners are interested in them only for economic reasons". The writer of Sugar Mummies, Tanika Gupta travelled to Jamaica to research her play. She believes that both parties are exploiting each other.

"A lot of the women talked about how big the men are and how they can go all night. But what I found most depressing is that the whole thing is not real. So many of the women think that they have found real love. It is all very delusional. At first I thought it was all about white women exploiting black men. But it is not. It's very mutual."

Men have always gone abroad looking for easy sex. But the rise of female "sex tourism" is a new phenomenon and reflects the increasing income and independence of women in North America and Europe. And on holiday these women do things that most of them would never dare to do at home, such as have sex with black men half their age. Jamaica is not the only place where female tourists go for sex.

In the Caribbean, Barbados and the Dominican Republic are also top female sex tourist destinations. And in Africa Gambia is, apparently, a Mecca for middle aged white women looking for a "holiday romance". When people used to say, "tourism is whore-ism" they were more accurate than they thought.

Perhaps the most famous female "sex tourist" is the American writer Terri Macmillan. I always loved her writing. But I could not connect with her book How Stella Got Her Groove Back. For me, she missed something that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who knew and understood Jamaica.

And this is that the only reason a Jamaican man would have an affair with an American 23 years his senior would be to obtain a green card. Her failure to understand this simple fact ruined the whole book for me.

She went on to marry the young Jamaican lover she immortalised in her book (Jonathan Plummer) and brought him to America. Ten years later the marriage collapsed when she discovered he was gay. In her divorce papers Macmillan said: Jonathan has manipulated me from the very beginning in his scheme to come to the United States, become a citizen and get rich." The baffling thing is that it took her 10 years to work this out.

You could argue that, so long as both sides have no illusions, there is no harm in either male or female "sex tourism". Where you have sea and sand you will always have men and women seeking sex.

But it seems likely that the very high levels of HIV/Aids in Jamaica's resort areas are connected with "sex tourism". If only everyone involved could admit to themselves that what they are actually doing is exchanging sex for cash, maybe they might be more willing to take precautions. But as the poet says: "Mankind cannot bear too much reality".

The fear factor

Feeding the multitude

DANGEROUS PETS