“They just want to have sex”
The body as interactive medium in heterosexual interactions between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men on the beaches of Bali
Article manuscript: “They just want to have sex”, the body as interactive medium in heterosexual interactions between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men on the beaches of Bali
Research Master Social Sciences Supervisor: Dr. Patrick Brown Second reader: Dr. Rachel Spronk Student: Nienke Schlette (6043151) Email: nienke.schlette@gmail.com Wordcount: 7744
“They just want to have sex” 2
“They just want to have sex”: the body as interactive medium in
heterosexual interactions between Western female tourists and
young Indonesian men on the beaches of Bali
The bodies of Western women and local men who engage in heterosexual intimate interactions in tourism have often been discussed along a ‘sex – or romance tourism’ continuum with a focus on what
is done to the body, or from a more subjective approach with a focus on what the body does. In this
article, I argue that we should try to combine both approaches. Based on ethnographic research in Kuta, I discuss how the bodies of Western female tourists and young Indonesian men function as interactive media through which they shape and give meaning to their interactions.
Key words: romance tourism, sex tourism, sexuality, the body, phenomenology, Bali, Indonesia.
Introduction
A long line of umbrellas covered the beach in southwest Bali, stretching from ‘Hard Rock Café’ in Kuta to the ‘Pullman Hotel’ in Legian, about 1.5 kilometres further north. They stood in the sand close to a strip of trees that provided visitors of the beach with much welcomed shade. From here you had a good view of the beach, the waves and the surfers. Every umbrella came with a few plastic chairs, some surfboards, at least one large box filled with ice, Coca Cola and Indonesian ‘Bintang’ beer and functioned as informal bar.1 During the day, many tourists frequented these bars; they wanted to rent a board or take a surfing lesson with one of the young Indonesian men working there. It became even busier later in the afternoon, when the tourists not only came to surf, but also to drink beer, chat, play games, watch the sunset and make music together with the young men. Most of them lived in Kuta and were able to inform the tourists about the best places to eat Balinese or Indonesian food, drink a nice cocktail, or where to go dancing. Often, they were more than willing to accompany the tourists to these places to make sure they had a good time and came home safe.
1 During my stay in Bali, it was still legal for these informal bars to sell alcoholic beverages. From April 2015
“They just want to have sex” 3 The young Indonesian men who worked in these bars were not Balinese, but mostly migrants from Java, Sumatra and Borneo. The majority were in their mid to late twenties, although I have spoken to quite young (16) and older (35) men too. They said they have come to Bali because “there is no work in Java, you can just sleep and eat”. In Bali they could work in tourism as local guide, driver or as a surf instructor in one of the informal bars on the beach. For my research, I have mainly spoken with tourists and young Indonesian surf instructors in and around the bars on Kuta beach. These young men all have migrated from Sumatra; some have been in Bali for years, others only for a few months. They seemed to have a lot of fun working together, teaching surfing, selling drinks, making jokes and surfing themselves if they did not have a customer. From their chairs underneath the umbrellas they kept an eye on every tourist who entered the beach and approached him or her as a potential client by asking whether they could offer a surfing lesson, a drink, a chair, or perhaps just some company. The men told me that they enjoyed this contact with tourists from all over the world and that they in particular were drawn to the beautiful, tall, white skinned Western female tourists.
These tourists were young women who travelled alone or with a friend from Europe and Australia and visited Bali for two to three weeks while they were on a larger trip throughout Asia. They wished to see more of the island than a resort and some touristic highlights and wanted to engage with people who live in Bali. As they entered the beach in Kuta, many happy, tanned, muscled, young Indonesian men were smiling to them, calling them ‘Babe’ or ‘Darling’, offering them a chair, a drink, a chat, a surfing lesson, and some even offered upfront to become their ‘local boyfriend’. One of these Western female tourists was Angela (21), an Austrian woman whom I met on the beach in Kuta in September 2014.2 She and her friend were enjoying the shade of an umbrella, when both young women told me that they were in Bali for the first time in between visiting Sri Lanka and Australia and that they very much enjoyed the company of the young men working on the beach. Angela said: “they really care”. She felt that their interest in her was not only based on the fact that she was a paying customer in their bar, or maybe even a potential wealthy girlfriend, but that the young men working on the beach truly cared for her on a personal level.
In this article, I discuss initial interactions between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men who work on the beach in Kuta. Instead of trying to understand the phenomenon as either sex- or romance tourism, I argue that we should analyse the interactions
2 Angela is a synonym, just as all the other names of Western female tourists and young Indonesian men that
“They just want to have sex” 4 in a more dynamic way and view the bodies of the men and women involved as interactive media through which the interactions are shaped and given meaning. First, I will give a brief overview of studies on heterosexual encounters in tourism which describe the phenomenon as either sex- or romance tourism and also describe a few studies that analyse the phenomenon in a more dynamic way and have inspired my approach. Then, in order to come to a closer understanding of the phenomenon, I will propose an approach to heterosexual interactions in tourism in which the body is put centre stage and analysed as interactive medium. Subsequently, I will use this to analyse initial contact between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men on the beach, in the club and in the hotels and homestays in Kuta, and show how these interactions take shape and are given meaning through the bodies of the men and women involved. I argue that, in order to come to a closer understanding of these heterosexual interactions, we should understand the bodies of the Western female tourists and young Indonesian men involved as interactive media through which the interactions take shape and are given meaning.
‘Sex’ or ‘romance’?
The beaches of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Indonesia and The Gambia are, among others, (in)famous for Western female tourists and local men who work in tourism to engage in sexual relationships. Pruitt and LaFont (1995) describe how in Jamaica relationships develop from interactions between Euro-American female travellers and ‘dreads’ the women ‘rent’ to be their personal cultural broker (Ibid.: 430).3 They discuss how in these relationships, a clear exchange of money for sex is lacking and that for the female travellers as well as for the ‘dreads’, not sex but courtship is most important (Ibid.: 428). In a similar study in the Dominican Republic, Herold and colleagues (2001) argue that the relationship a female sex worker has with a male tourist client stands in sharp contrast to the relationship a ‘dread’ has with a female tourist. The ‘dread’, in contrast to the female sex worker, presents himself as a friendly, well-mannered and attractive man who knows his way around and can provide the female tourist with a good time and a total relationship (Ibid.: 985-987). The authors of both studies conclude that the relationships they have studied between Western female tourists and local men should be understood as different from the relationships between female sex workers and male tourist clients, which are understood as ‘sex tourism’. Women are mostly motivated by the romance end of a continuum and men by
3 Pruitt and LaFont use ‘dreads’ to describe young Jamaican men with dreadlocks, who are assumed Rastafarian
“They just want to have sex” 5 the sex end of it (Ibid.: 995). Hence, the relationships between Western female tourists and local men are best understood as ‘romance tourism’.
Kempadoo (2001) however, argues in her discussion of relationships between Western female tourists and local men in the Caribbean that the Western female tourists wrongly define their experiences as ‘romance’. She says that the women deny their powerful position within international relations and the experience of the sex worker if they do so (Ibid.: 51). Because for the local men, engaging in a relationship with a female tourist is foremost an alternative way of generating income, not a romantic experience (Ibid.: 46). Taylor similarly argues that the Western female tourists who engage in a relationship with local men in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic live a ‘fantasy of courtship’ (Taylor 2001: 758). The men contribute to this fantasy by, for example, using a seductive approach to make contact with the Western female tourists to give them a feeling of being preyed upon, instead of being a sexual predator (Ibid.: 758). Taylor also explains that the racist ideas the women hold of the black men as hypersexual and unable to control his sexuality, enables them to explain to themselves why such young and desirable men would be eager to have sex with them without having to think that the men where only interested in them for economic reasons (Ibid.: 760). Dahles and Bras (1999) too emphasise in their study foremost the economic aspects of the relationships between Western female tourist and local guides in Indonesia and argue that the relationships have to be understood “within the context of their [the local guides’] subsistence categories” (Dahles and Bras 1999: 281). The authors of the studies cited here conclude that not the fantasy of courtship and romance, but implicit racial and economic power are the real definers of relationships between Western female tourists and local men (Taylor 2001: 758-759). Therefore, these relationships are best understood as ‘sex tourism’, just as the relationships between female sex workers and male tourist clients.
Put short, it seems that the literature is divided. Some studies on sexual relationships between Western female tourists and local men conclude that the phenomenon is best understood when framed as ‘romance tourism’ (Herold and colleagues (2001) and Pruitt and LaFont (1995)) while others suggest that we should place it at the other end of the continuum and understand it as ‘sex tourism’ (Dahles and Bras (1999), Jennaway (2008), Kempadoo (2001), and Taylor (2001)). I argue that despite these seeming differences, studies on relationships between Western female tourists and local men who work in tourism situated on both ends of the continuum actually do have a lot in common. They predominantly approach the men and women involved as objects; they highlight what is done to the body (Crossley 1995: 3) and discuss it as a site where regimes of power can inscribe themselves (Spronk
“They just want to have sex” 6 2014: 6). This critical engagement with issues of power enables us to see how structures intertwine and implicitly influence the interactions and relationships between Western female tourists and local men. But an exclusive focus on these dimensions has the potential to externalise the ‘doing’ agent from the body (Crossley 1995: 43), to analyse it as an “empty vessel that can be filled with social meanings of sex” (Spronk 2014: 6) and to miss the subjective experiences of the actors involved. In what follows, I would like to discuss a few studies on ‘transnational intimacies’ (Constable 2009: 58) that use a more subjective approach and focus predominantly on what the body does (Crossley 1995: 3).
Instead of framing heterosexual intimate encounters in tourism as either ‘sex’ or ‘romance’, Faier, among others, uses a more dynamic approach. She describes how the relationships between Filipina migrants, who work as a hostess in a bar, and their Japanese male clients develop from a worker – customer relationship into one of husband and wife. She does not analyse the relationships as a result of Filipina financial hardship, Japanese societal pressure to marry or the bride shortage in the rural areas of Nagano (Faier 2007: 151). Instead, Faier focuses on how the women experience and make sense of their relationships through personal narratives of ‘love’. “[W]hen professing love for their husbands, Filipina women I knew in Central Kiso were claiming a sense of humanity, countering the stigma associated with their work in bars, and articulating a sense of themselves as cosmopolitan, modern, and moral women who possessed an emotional interiority” (Ibid.: 149). Karkabi uses a similar perspective in his discussion of the relationships between older Western women and younger Egyptian men in South Sinai, Egypt. He describes how the Egyptian man, through navigating global and local forces, is fulfilling traditional social order and enjoying romantic liberty of late modernity at the same time (Karkabi 2011: 93). He argues that we should take into account “individual aspirations and subjective actions” (Ibid.: 79). Finally, Dragojlovic discusses marriages between Dutch women and Balinese men in a similar way. She refers to the study of Pruitt and LaFont and suggests that “the boundaries between romance and courtship and casual sexual encounters are far more blurred and contested” than implied (Dragojlovic 2008: 335). She analyses the relationships as “cross-cultural exchanges” that “create fluid spaces of ambivalence, struggle and negotiation based on the interaction of bodies historically inscribed with particular meanings of gender, race and economy” (Ibid.: 342).
By acknowledging that the men and women involved are subjects and that the relationships are dynamic, the authors of the studies discussed above have moved their analysis beyond a ‘sex- or romance tourism’ continuum. This approach enables us to discuss
“They just want to have sex” 7 the problematic delineations between ‘sex’ and ‘romance’ in the experience of the relationships and how those two phenomena are both emergent and interwoven. However, as Faier’s study shows for example, a predominant focus on what the body does (making sense of the relationships through narratives of love) overshadows structures of power which are done to the body (Filipina financial hardship, the Japanese societal pressure to marry and the bride shortage in the rural areas of Nagano) and has the potential to externalise the body as object. This predominance is less present in the other two studies cited. Dragojlovic analyses the relationships as ‘cross-cultural exchanges’ (Dragojlovic 2008: 342) and views the bodies of the men and women involved as “historically inscribed with particular meanings of gender, race and economy” (Ibid.: 342). In Karkabi’s study, the body is “navigating global and local forces” (Karkabi 2011: 93). Both authors analyse the men and women involved as subjects who actively shape the interactions and try to bring together what the body does and what is done to the body in their analysis. Inspired by these studies, I would like to propose an approach to the relationships between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men that similarly acknowledges the active role the subjects involved and their bodies play in shaping and giving meaning to the interactions.
The body as interactive medium
To begin to understand the heterosexual interactions taking place on Kuta beach, I suggest that it is important to view the Western female tourists and young Indonesian men involved as active constructors of these interactions and to acknowledge the active role the bodies of the young men and women have in interpreting and giving meaning to their sensuous experiences and subsequently, in shaping these interactions. Heiko Henkel (2007) and Linn Sandberg (2013) both have done inspiring studies in which they focus on how subjects actively shape their religious (Henkel) and sexual (Sandberg) identities by studiously placing actions and activities in a particular narrative. Henkel describes how Hakan and Emine inhabit Istanbul in a Muslim way. “With their ways-of-doing, they continuously inscribe their daily activities, their individual lives, and their social relations into this Islamic narrative” (Henkel 2007: 63). Sandberg describes how the men and women involved in her study make sense of later life sexuality through narratives of intimacy (Sandberg 2013: 261). I believe that the Western female tourists and young Indonesian men similarly inscribe their actions and activities in specific narratives and subsequently shape and give meaning to the relationships and that their bodies play an important role in this process as interactive media.
“They just want to have sex” 8 Spronk (2014) argues in her study on young professional’s sexualities in Nairobi how for them ‘good sex’ relates to “the pleasurable corporeal experience of engaging in sexual encounters”, but also that it “augments a gendered sense of self that expresses particular meanings of being young, ‘modern’ and ‘Kenyan’” (Ibid.: 3). She shows how the bodies of these professionals play an important role as medium through which their sexual experiences are “organised, classified and interpreted” (Ibid.: 19). In short, the body in Spronk’s study is not an empty vessel that can be filled with social meanings of sex, or a site where regimes of power can inscribe themselves. Rather, it is an “active medium through which those meanings are brought into the world” (Ibid.: 6 – 7). In other words, our embodied being is not just a location for society and culture, but forms a basis for and shapes our relationships and creations (Shilling 2012: 15), or as Crossley puts it: “[t]he body acts and by its actions it constructs a world of social, intersubjective relations. In the context of these relations however, it is acted upon” (Crossley 1995: 60). I argue that, in order to come to a closer understanding of the encounters taking place on Kuta beach, we should understand the bodies of the Western female tourists and the young Indonesian men as interactive media through which (erotic) sensuous experiences are interpreted and given meaning.
The methodological approach I have taken in my study is a combination of ethnography and phenomenology with a sensuous focus. The two have been combined by, among others, Ronald Hitzler, Anne Honer and Michaela Pfadenhauer in an approach they have called Lifeworld Analytic Ethnography (Eberle 2010: 135). They supplement an ethnographic approach with a phenomenological inspired analysis of the personal subjective experience of the researcher’s co-participation in the field (Ibid.: 135). I believe that we can gain very valuable insights on how young Indonesian men and Western female tourists generate intimate heterosexual interactions by indeed complementing an indirect understanding of the phenomenon with an “existential view from the inside” (Ibid.: 136).
I conducted fieldwork in Bali from August 2014 until December 2014. In order to come to a closer understanding of the heterosexual encounters in Kuta beach, I have observed the interactions between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men, both on the beach and in the bar. Furthermore, I had about a hundred and fifty informal talks, and conducted five more formal interviews with both tourists and Indonesian men in English. I told all the participants of this study upfront about my interests in the relation(ships) between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men before I asked any questions about their experiences. Both the young Indonesian men and the Western female tourists on the beach saw me as a Western female tourist, because of my age, gender, skin-colour and the fact that I
“They just want to have sex” 9 was travelling alone. This facilitated the contact I had with the young Indonesian men. It enabled me to participate more easily and to complement my ethnographic data with an ‘existential view from the inside’ to a certain extent, for the young men always knew I was doing research. But it furthermore facilitated the contact I had with the Western female tourists. My social position enabled me to build relationships of trust with them, much more quickly, easily and more profound than would have been the case if my age, gender or skin – colour had been different. Embracing this subjective positionality, I have chosen to approach the generation of heterosexual intimate space between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men on the beaches of Bali, mostly from a Western female tourist perspective.
In what follows, I will use a phenomenological inspired approach to describe initial interactions between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men on the beach, in the club and in the hotels and homestays in Kuta and analyse the men and women involved as active constructors of the interactions. I will focus in particular on the role their bodies play as interactive media in interpreting their experiences and giving meaning to actions and interactions.
‘Doing romantic’
“Girlfriend!” said Joko loudly when he saw me at the beach. He smiled and walked towards me with his arms wide open, ready to give me a hug. I patted his shoulder and laughed: “No, I am not your girlfriend! I already have a boyfriend.” “Yes, but you need a local boyfriend!” answered Joko. It was quiet at the beach that day. It was the middle of November and the holiday season had not started yet. Joko, a migrant from Sumatra in his late twenties, was working together with Danny, who was a little younger but also a migrant from Sumatra. Both men had been working as surf instructors at a bar on the beach of Kuta for some years. Joko was not the only young man working at the beach who addressed me as his ‘girlfriend’. There were several other young Indonesian men working at the beach who jokingly called me their ‘girlfriend’ too, and alongside me, numerous other Western female tourists were addressed in a similar way. Emily, a 22 year old Dutch female tourist, was one of them. When I met her at a bar on the beach early in September 2014, she had already spent a week or two in Kuta and described to me what happened the first time she entered the beach. She told me how many young Indonesian men called her, approached her and tried to convince her to buy a drink at their bar. She said that one of them walked up to her, started chatting and guided her to a chair. Two other Western female tourists and a couple of young Indonesian men were sitting there as well. The men joked about Emily being the ‘girlfriend’ of the young man who had
“They just want to have sex” 10 guided her to the chair, and that she maybe could get a ‘girlfriend price’ if she wanted to surf the next day.
‘Girlfriend’ is only one of the words the young Indonesian men use to address Western female tourists on the beach. Cathy (18) from Australia often visits Bali for a week or two. She lost count, but believed it was her seventh time on the island when I spoke to her on Kuta beach on a cloudy afternoon in December. She brought her friend Karen (18) with her, who was in Bali for the first time. Both young women told me how they enjoyed being called ‘Babe’ and ‘Darling’ by the young men on the beach: “It radiates positivity” said Cathy. It was exactly this positivity that attracted both of the young women to the beach. Karen added: “The guys working on the beach always make sure I’m comfortable. They are taking good care”. Cathy explained: “They are real gentlemen. On the beach, you are overwhelmed with attention. It makes you feel loved.” Both women found that the young men were positive, caring and happy to talk, which was quite different from their experience with young men back home. Both the young Indonesian men and the Western female tourists actively constructed the initial interactions as something more intimate than a casual interaction between customers and staff in a bar. The way the young men addressed the Western female tourists, the way they made sure the women were comfortable, the way they listened to their stories, the way they talked, smiled and made jokes, gave Karen and Cathy a feeling of being ‘taken care of’ and being ‘loved’. Both women interpreted the actions of the young men in narratives of ‘care’ and ‘love’.
Sometimes the initial interactions between Indonesian men and Western women evolved beyond ‘taking care’ into a more intimate relationship. This happened to Danny and Angela. A few days before I would meet Angela and her friend on the beach, she visited the bar Danny was working at for a surfing lesson. Angela liked Danny from the moment she saw him and spent the rest of the day at the beach. That night, they all went out and Danny and Angela danced together, they kissed and she even ended up spending the night in his room. They enjoyed spending time together, but it was not very visible from their interactions on the beach that they were having an intimate relationship. They barely held each other’s hand, for example or kissed, cuddled and touched in another way. He was often too busy working or trying to find customers, while Angela enjoyed her time on the beach with her friends. I asked her what she thought of this apparent distance when we were walking back to our towels from a swim on a Thursday afternoon in September. She answered that she did not find this a problem. To the contrary, she even found it nice and charming, it made her feel special. She explained how Danny only very delicately touched her on the beach. She said that he, for
“They just want to have sex” 11 example, carefully stroked his finger from her lower arm over her hand when she handed him the noodle soup she had bought him, and that he secretly gave her a kiss when she sat at the back of his scooter the other night, but only when they had driven around the corner and where out of sight. When we reached our towels Angela asked: “Did you see that? He blew me a kiss!” Apparently, Danny, who was sitting on a plastic chair underneath the umbrella, had just blown her a kiss, but I had not seen anything. I said to Angela that I had not seen it and by giving that answer, I confirmed Angela’s choice to interpret that kiss similar to the one she had received from him at the back of his scooter, namely in a series of nice and charming secretive attention and delicate touches that made her feel special.
The young Indonesian men who work on the beach refer to the attentive actions and words described above as ‘doing romantic’. Ari, a migrant from Java who has been in Bali since 2002 and works on the beach in Legian, told me early in November that if he wants to do romantic, he introduces himself as: “Alex, Alex you-very-much”. He described that ‘doing romantic’ means watching the sunset together, saying things like: “You look like an angel” and “your eyes are like the sunset”, then maybe have dinner together, and “taking care from sleep until she wakes up”. He told me he did this because it was what the Western female tourists liked, making them feel comfortable. Consequently, ‘doing romantic’ helped him to enter into a heterosexual intimate relationship with one of the Western female tourists and to earn some money. Ari said: “If you have a girl, you can get free everything”. Ari explained that the young men working on the beach in Kuta are engaged in relationships with Western female tourists only for money. He said: “Because they live a luxury life, they need the money. They need the money if they want to have their own motorbike.” The Western female tourists I have spoken to did not pay the young Indonesian men for their attentive and/or sexual services. Instead, they paid for meals, drinks, petrol and sometimes for motorbike reparations. The Western female tourists bought the young Indonesian men gifts, meals, drinks, petrol and paid sometimes for motorbike reparations instead of physically giving money. But money was not the only thing that motivated the young Indonesian men to enter into an intimate relationship with a Western female tourist. Laura, a Swiss woman in her mid-thirties who had been commuting between Bali and Switzerland for business and leisure for about ten years, told me in November when we shared a table in a crowded restaurant “if they have money, they are fine.” A few days later, she told me in a more formal interview that during one of her first trips to the island, there were rumours going round at the beach about Japanese female tourists being ‘screamers’ during sex. Laura heard many of her Indonesian friends who worked on the beach saying that they wanted to try this, to see whether it was
“They just want to have sex” 12 true. Following Laura’s story, we see that some young Indonesian men are interested in gaining sexual experience from engaging in a heterosexual intimate encounter with a Western female tourist. For others, the time for ‘making fun’ was over. Joko for example, told me after he had called me his ‘girlfriend’ that he was looking for a more serious relationship now. He was one of many young men working on the beach who said that the most important thing they were looking for in a future relational partner was a ‘good heart’.
The young Indonesian men working at the beach presented to the Western female tourists a package of actions and activities of which they assumed the female tourists would interpret them as ‘romantic’ and use them to construct heterosexual intimate interactions with them. In these heterosexual intimate interactions, the young men could earn money, gain sexual experience or find a serious relational partner. Karen and Cathy indeed chose to place the actions of the young men in narratives of ‘care’ and ‘love’. Angela similarly interpreted Danny’s attentive touching and secretive kisses as being ‘nice and charming’, actively constructing her interactions with Danny.
‘Doing romantic’ not only takes place on the beach, but also in the many clubs and bars of Kuta and Legian. In the beginning of December I spoke to Ray, one of the more recent migrants from Sumatra who worked at the beach with Danny and Joko. He said: “slow music is good for doing romantic”. In Kuta there is one bar in particular known for this ‘slow’ (reggae) music, and although it is not Ray’s favourite bar, he believed it was a good place for ‘doing romantic’ and that visiting that bar with a Western female tourist would enhance his chances of entering into a heterosexual intimate relationship with her. In the following section, I will analyse more thoroughly what it means to ‘do romantic’ in the club, how it feeds the generation of heterosexual intimate space between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men and I will look more closely at the role the bodies of the young men and women play in this process.
“I could feel that he was horny”
It was late in December when I joined Angela, Danny and their friends on one of their last nights out in Bali. Soon Angela and her friend would continue their trip and travel on to Fiji. Tonight was one of the last nights they could go out together with Danny and his roommate, who had had a few sexual encounters with Angela’s friend. Just as any other night, we started with a few drinks in one bar and agreed on moving to the other one, the reggae bar, later to dance. Dancing was Angela’s favourite part of the night. She told me on a lazy afternoon on the beach in September, a few days after we had met, that her most favourite thing to do
“They just want to have sex” 13 together with Danny was dancing. She said to me that she got goose bumps all over her body when she only thought about it. Sitting in the shade of a tree, she described that she loved to dance with her body really close to his. That she enjoyed the way he held her or touched her hair and that she loved to hear him sing. Sometimes, when they danced, he sang along a few sentences of a song the band played, like “Marry that girl, marry her anyway”, from ‘Rude’ by Magic!, or “Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I’m feeling?”, from ‘Is this Love’ by Bob Marley. She concluded that it made her feel special and that, when she danced with Danny, it felt as if they were in their own world, despite all the other people present in the club.
Danny returned with the five beers he had bought us, he took a seat next to Angela and started chatting with his roommate. Angela pushed her chair towards me and her friend, and leaned towards us. Her eyes sparkled a little as she started to tell what had happened the night before. She and Danny had been alone in the reggae bar, it was already quite late and Danny’s roommate had gone home with Angela’s friend. The band was still playing and Danny and Angela had been dancing real close together on the slow reggae music, with his hands all over her body. They had been dancing so close together that she felt he had a ‘special secret’. “I could feel that he was horny” said Angela in a soft voice. She giggled, laughed and took a sip of her beer. Danny’s body moving to the rhythm of the slow music close to hers, his hands holding and touching her and his voice singing lyrics of ‘love’ in her ear gave Angela quite literally the feeling that she and Danny were in their own, heterosexually intimate, world. While dancing with Danny, Angela used her body to interpret and give meaning to her sensuous experiences. It was an interactive medium through which Danny’s hands on her hips, his erect penis pressing against her body were organised, classified and interpreted as heterosexually intimate. Through her body, Danny’s ‘special secret’ got meaning as a sign of his sexual attraction to her. She could feel that he was horny.
One of her last nights on the island, Angela decided to book a room in a hotel, so she and Danny could sleep together in a large bed instead of sharing a mattress in his room or sleeping together in a single bed in the homestay where they had no privacy as Angela’s friend slept in that room as well. Angela was quite excited about the whole idea. When I saw her on the beach the next morning and asked her how her night had been, she smiled. We sat down in the shade and she told me how they had gone out together and had a few drinks before they went to the room. She told me that when they went to bed, Danny seemed a little reserved. He was just lying at his side of the bed. Then, said Angela they started “touching and kissing”, but it was only until later that night that “suddenly two hands grabbed me”
“They just want to have sex” 14 described Angela. She smiled and concluded: “It was a nice and romantic night”. In telling me this story, Angela navigates between interpreting Danny’s actions as ‘romantic’ and ‘sexual’. Angela interpreted and gave meaning to her erotic sensuous experiences with Danny through her body. She found his two hands that suddenly grabbed her very sensual and interpreted her experience of sleeping together with Danny in one bed in a hotel as ‘nice and romantic’. In Angela’s experience of the night, ‘sex’ and ‘romance’ were very much interwoven, she used her body to navigate between the two in giving meaning to what happened that night.
It was Danny’s birthday when Angela was in Australia in between her visits to Bali. She had recorded a video message for him and asked me to show it to Danny. It was a sunny November morning and Danny was working at the bar on the beach. We sat down under the umbrella and I showed him the video Angela had made for him on my phone. He smiled and said that he thought Angela was a nice woman. We continued talking about his work on the beach and about Angela’s plans to visit Bali again. Danny said that he wanted to be honest with me, and that he had also been honest with Angela. He really liked her, he said, but “I meet a lot of new people on the beach everyday”. Although Danny really liked Angela, working at the beach meant that he met many other tourists on a daily basis. And it was possible that, while Angela was in Australia, he would meet another Western female tourist and engage in heterosexual intimate interactions with her. He could not just wait for Angela to return to Bali; he had to continue working in the meantime. The night before Angela left for Australia, something unexpected happened between her and Danny. It became clear that they both experienced the heterosexual intimate interactions they had in a different way. Angela described to me what happened in a long message on the social medium WhatsApp.
“They just want to have sex”
“Soooo, he was so different after we spend more and more time together. He invited me for a dinner, we were printing lyrics for the wedding he was going to play at, and we went to a Balinese temple together, it was awesome!!! BUT THEN, the last day, he was so strange: he didn’t talk to me, didn’t touch me/hug me… He just ignored me! And when I tried to talk with him he just said: “hmh ok hmh”. Then my friend asked him if he wanted to join us for our last dinner, I didn’t want to ask him, so she did that, and he said YES! […] But at the dinner, he was just talking to his roommate [Angela’s friend boyfriend]. I started to become really angry! After dinner, we went to the surfer’s bar and I asked him why he ignored me all the time, he said: “I don’t know!” Oh, come on! Fuck you! I was so angry that I went to dance alone, hahaha […]. Half an hour later he said that he was going home, and I just nodded:
“They just want to have sex” 15 “Ok, bye!” I had tears in my eyes. He saw that and said: “Let’s go to another place, I‘d like to be alone with you, ok?” Then we went for a drink in another bar (he paid again), and his mood was changed! It was unbelievable! I told him I was sad because I had to leave and he treats me like that on the LAST day! Then he asked: “How can you be sad?” Well, because I like you and I will miss you! “But how can you like me after this short time? I hear this so often from the girls, but they just want to have sex!” Then I was so shocked: I am not that kind of girl, I am honest and I am DIFFERENT! Then he said: “Ok…, however, I don’t trust you!” Then I was shocked again… I told him again how I am, and that he should FEEL AND SEE IT IN MY EYES that I am not lying…, WTF!”
- Angela, September 29th 2014
A few hours later, Danny apologised. Angela said that he was very sorry, that he did not mean it and they went to his room together. Angela described to me that he used the flashlight of his phone and his hands to project the shadow of a heart on the wall for her, and that she gave him a letter in which she had written down her feelings for him. The next day, Angela was supposed to fly to Australia with her friend, but when the young women arrived at the airport, they found out that their flight had been cancelled. Angela described that they went back to Kuta beach and that the few following days were very romantic. She said that she had a great time with Danny at the beach, that he sang for her and that she had met his sister. When the day arrived she really had to leave for Australia, Angela was quite sad. She described to me that she cried, hugged Danny goodbye and gave him a necklace she had since her birth as goodbye gift. He sang her one last song and brought her to the airport. Angela said that she and Danny stayed in touch while she was in Australia. That he wrote her messages on the social medium Facebook in which he said that he thought she was a ‘nice girl’, that he missed her and that they would meet again if they were meant to be together. She also received a message from him that said: “I never meet girls like you”.
Both subjects gave meaning to their sensuous experiences through their bodies. The fact that these bodies were culturally and sensuously different informed (Howes 2006: 144), could have caused Danny and Angela to experience the heterosexual intimate space they had generated through the conversations they had, through delicately touching each other on the beach, through secretly kissing, dancing with each other and sleeping together, in a different way. Their bodies formed a different basis for and shaped their heterosexual intimate relationship in a different way. Their experiences were so different from each other that it caused friction between them. Angela described in her WhatsApp message that Danny said to
“They just want to have sex” 16 her that he had experienced their heterosexual intimate interactions not very different from the other interactions he had had with Western female tourists. Although I have never seen him being intimate with other girls, he had to continue working and I have seen him being attentive to other Western female tourists who were his clients. He made music with them, talked to them, offered chairs and drinks to them and gave surfing lessons to many other Western female tourists. For Danny, Angela’s main motivation to engage in a heterosexual encounter with him was sexual. She just wanted to have sex, just as the other Western female tourists at the beach. But for Angela, the heterosexual intimate interactions they constructed together were not only about ‘sex’. In her conversations with me, she actively interpreted some of the experiences she had with Danny, for example the last few days she spent on the island after her flight was cancelled, as ‘romantic’. And there were other activities, such as the night they spent together in the hotel, she interpreted as being both ‘romantic’ and ‘sexual’ when she described them to me.
Joana (22), a female tourist from Sweden who was for the second time in Bali, was sitting under the umbrella of the bar Danny and Joko worked in on a warm afternoon in November. When I asked her what she thought of the young men working on the beach, she started to tell about a recent trip she made to Java with a Javanese migrant she had met on the beach two weeks earlier. She said that she enjoyed the trip, because he was very funny, he made her laugh and he had shown her beautiful spots in Java. But, she told me that during the trip, she more and more had to pay for his expenses. She bought for example new tires for his motorcycle, which she found fair for she used it for two weeks, but she had also given him money to repair the roof of his parents’ house and to go with his mother to the hospital. She concluded that she liked the young men she had made the trip with and that she had enjoyed the trip but that she had a strange feeling about the money she had spent. In her description of the trip, she navigated between ‘sex’, ‘romance’ and ‘money’ as defining factors for her experience and as motivational factors for the young Javanese man she had made the trip with. She concluded her story by saying that she was not sure what to think. The three factors overlapped in her experience in such a way that she was not sure how to define it and how to explain it to me.
Spending money on Danny was never a topic Angela would bring up in a conversation by herself. I have seen her doing it many times, but she did not talk about it often. Whenever I asked her about it, she said that she liked to do it. She found that she had enough money, especially in comparison to Danny and she wanted to give something back to him for being so nice, kind, welcoming and attentive. She frequently bought him lunch on the beach, a beer
“They just want to have sex” 17 and sometimes he joined us for dinner. When we were going out, Angela often paid for his club entrance and for his drinks. By means of a Christmas gift, she bought him a ticket to fly to his parents in Sumatra. Whenever I was alone with Angela’s Austrian friend, she said that she was concerned about Angela. She saw how much money Angela spend on Danny and said that the relationship was foremost about money, and not about ‘romance’ or ‘sex’. But following Angela’s interpretations, this is not the case. She actively interprets her experience of her relationship with Danny as ‘romantic’ and ‘sexual’, using her body as interactive medium.
Concluding thoughts
A focus on the role of the body in shaping and giving meaning to everyday practices of heterosexual intimate interactions between Western female tourists and young Indonesian men who work on the beach in Kuta, revealed that either a ‘sex tourism’ or ‘romance tourism’ label does not capture the complexity of the lived experience of engaging in such a relationship. The Western female tourists I have spoken to for my research interpreted some activities and interactions in their experience as being simultaneously ‘sexual’ and ‘romantic’. The delineations between ‘sex’ and ‘romance’ are both emergent and interwoven in the experience of the relationships. Second, by understanding the body as interactive medium through which the interactions are shaped and meanings are brought into the world, we can “conceptualize embodied subjects as simultaneously social and biological phenomenon possessed of emergent properties and capacities that are both shaped by but irreducible to contemporary social relations and structures” (Shilling 2012: 215). This approach enables us to analyse agency amidst structure and make an attempt in bringing together what the body does and what is done to the body.
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