Trigger warning for sex tourism
PARADISE: LOVE – TRAILER
On the beaches of Kenya, they’re known as “Sugar Mamas:” European women who seek out African boys, selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise. She goes from one Beach Boy to the next, from one disappointment to the next, and finally she must recognize: on the beaches of Kenya, love is a business.
So are we supposed to feel bad for the white lady or nah?
why does the media keep tryina make me feel sorry for rich, amoral white ladies? I can’t do it…
I see these women a lot when I go to Mombasa. They’re literally just sex tourists and I side eye this film for trying to humanise them
ugh
I AM SO ANNOYED right now. I am so annoyed right now.
wow.
this is disgusting
but
also a good reminder that it isn’t only white men who engage in sex tourism
WHITE WOMEN ARE AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN COMPLICIT IN WHITE SUPREMACY
This stuff is very rampant all over Africa and the Caribbean. In Jamaica, they call it “rent a rasta” or a “rent a dread”. Divorced white women are blowing their alimony payments on “rent a rasta” in Jamaica. See a trailer for a documentary of it here.
In Nigeria, there are small pockets of women from the UK who have “rent boys” in cities like Port Harcourt, Uyo and Calabar. They prefer those places because they are very hospitable to foreigners, and it isn’t as congested or hectic like Lagos for instance. They can come and go as they please, and the likelihood of them getting scammed is much lower. They have boys the posted up in flats, and they visit them several times a year.
Make no mistake about it though, these women are predators. Their rent boys are usually young, around 18 and 19. You will rarely see them with men over 25. The younger ones are easier and cheaper to maintain, and they have high sex drives, which is why they are there. It’s a commodification of a taboo; sex with a black person. They get to live out their wild fantasies, and then they go home to their mundane, boring lives.
I’m always weary of white people in Africa in general. Be it ex-pats, vacationers, NGOs, UN peacekeepers, church groups or anyone else. There always seem to be ulterior motives with them, no matter how benevolent they appear on the surface. They will find a way to impose their sexual will and desires over people who are less fortunate. In the DRC, UN “peacekeepers” were violating young girls. Child prostitution was rampant, and many were leaving girls pregnant. See here. This type of thing is widespread.
When white folks go to some tropical getaway where only black and brown folks are, the impetus for a lot of those trips are cheap thrills and cheap sex. They didn’t fly half way around the world just to lie down on a beach. Especially if it’s a solo trip. They could have done that in locales much closer to home. 50 year old white men don’t go on solo trips to Kenya, the Dominican Republic or Thailand to take in the culture and to see the beach. They go for cheap sex, often with minors. White women are following their lead.
Anyway, what irks me about documentaries that focus on white women who partake in sex tourism is that they always try to humanize them, or make them out to be helpless women looking for love. No, these women are predators who are exploiting young men for sex. These dudes are poor. These white women aren’t going after the movers and shakers in society, or people with money in the countries they visit. They know what they’re doing and their targets are the poor and vulnerable. They wave a few bucks in their face so they can have their way with their bodies. This is what it is.
Be weary of white people in general in Africa? There are white people who live in Africa who are not looking for cheap thrills but were simply born there and had no choice. I understand what you’re intending to say but your wording needs to be adjusted slightly.
Towards the film, I don’t understand who in their right mind sides with offending party. Just because it makes a better and lighter film? Completely against how the film makers decided to frame this movie.
re: the bold
Anytime I’m remotely critical of white people in Africa, someone always makes this point. I usually ignore it, but I won’t today. This is the first thing that this person had to tackle and comment on. Out of all what I typed, this is was what they needed to address first. Ok then.
I’m an African. From the Niger Delta to be exact. It has been destroyed and exploited by white people, so my lived experiences tell me I should be especially wary of them. Places I visited regularly to see extended family have been destroyed and polluted. My people can’t fish and they can’t grow crops. It was their livelihood for generations. All that is left is ruin. Some of the white people responsible were born, bred or resided there because Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, Willbros Group, Exxon Mobile (btw Bill Gates is the largest shareholder in this company. Don’t believe his philanthropic BS. Exploitation is always at the root.) and other multinationals have been sending white people there to rob and exploit us for a very long time. Many of these white people live there and raise their families there. They are there eating good food, dancing to African music and fucking (literally and figuratively) African people, while their parents plunder the minerals in the country. These are the sons and daughters of a colonizing and brutal force who are only there because of unmerciful might and massive greed. There is no other reason. None. They didn’t emigrate to Africa at the behest or with approval from the locals. The driving force has always been greed. They came, they saw, they conquered. They seized lands that weren’t theirs. I won’t ignore that, or the history of white people in Africa.
The history of white people in Africa has a repeating theme, and it always ends with them propping themselves up at the expense of indigenous Africans. Usually in some kind of imbalanced relationship where they get to exploit the indigenous and claim the mineral wealth and assorted treasures for themselves. That’s when they aren’t sexually exploiting the locals, imposing their religious beliefs via missionary work, blindly working with unscrupulous NGOs who do more harm than good, claiming the rights to land that isn’t theirs, participating in slum tourism and exploitative photojournalism, or supplying the instruments of warfare to militias and warlords that will exacerbate unrest and civil wars, which makes it easier for them to further exploit the land and the people. We need to think about who facilitates the flow of weaponry used in African conflicts in the first place.
White people don’t go to be humble residents or to respect their host African nations. Not in the past, and not in the present. They don’t go to Africa to take a back seat to indigenous Africans, they go to commandeer and control. Often with bought and paid African leaders they use covertly, so that they can work behind the scenes and shift blame when the shit hits the fan. They impose their ideologies on unsuspecting people. They don’t look at the indigenous Africans as their equals. There is always paternalism, and Africans are always their subjects. They always go to Africa to take something. Even the white person who goes to Africa on a self-discovery trip to find themselves also takes. The people and the lands become a tool and a backdrop for whatever self-discovery crisis they are going through, and they will usurp the culture and land for their own benefit. It’s always about them and how they can benefit. Even when they appear benevolent, it’s always about them. The Africans are their backdrop. They cannot help it. This is how white supremacy works. It is systemic. It doesn’t matter if they have good intentions. Power dynamics will overrule intentions.
The children of white African nationals don’t get a pass because they had no choice in their place of birth, or because they don’t realize that they are part of an occupying force. Being citizens of an African nation by virtue of birth changes nothing. You need to think hard on how those Europeans ended up in Africa in the first place. Wherever there is a sizable population of white people in Africa, ask yourself how they came to be and how white lineage started on those lands. Once you come to terms with those findings, realize that those findings don’t get wiped out because those white people gave birth to kids on the continent, or because they have been there for several generations.
What kind of point is ‘someone didn’t have a choice in where they were born’ anyway? Does anyone have a choice in where they are born? That’s quite an irrelevant statement to make, and I’m not sure why people continue to make it as if it matters. Even when black people are being exploited by white people on their own lands, someone has to chime in to defend white people. It’s very unbecoming, and it lets me know what your priorities are.
(settlers are never native)
It’s interesting through all the comments it always assumes that going to a sex worker is somehow intrinsically exploitative. Like a person can never choose that occupation or even enjoy it. Yes, the colonization of Africa and other places is real and ongoing. Yes, some of the people working the sex trade do it because they have no choice. But some do choose to do it. Is going to a place that allows this to happen wrong? Or is it the Western nation’s attitude towards prostitution? I am not discounting anything said here, only pointing out there’s more to it.
Ave Babalon