I’ve just had an article published over on Men’s News Daily. It’s a great publication for people interested in gender politics and the growing men’s rights movement. Some of you will know that I have been working on a book on gender politics (see the gender equivalence subsite site for more info)for the past few years. It’s also the first time that I’ve written for a website rather than a print mag in over a year, and it’s a funny feeling to get back into the fast paced dynamic of web publishing. I hope that I’ll be working with MND a lot in the future.
[update: a bit of discussion about the article here on the antimisandry.com]
The subject of the article is the rather unpleasant practice of rich middle aged women travelling to third world countries in order to have paid-for sex with young men. In case you’re wondering, yes, Haiti is a top destination for these women, or was until recently. The most infuriating aspect? Feminist writers have long condoned this in newspaper articles that spin things around so that the women are the victims in the situation.
Excerpts:
…consider the growing number of middle-class young women in places like the UK and Japan who are reportedly paying their way through college by doing sex work. Most people would agree that there is a qualitative difference between that and the lot of a crack-addicted street hooker.
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However, astonishingly, there are sympathetic voices to be found, and in mainstream publications too. Try it yourself, do a search for “female sexual tourism” and prepare for some Olympic-class mental gymnastics.
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The hypocrisy of this double standard is aggravated by the fact that the group that write the articles, feminist journalists, typically espouse a disparaging and zero tolerance view of prostitution.
Michael Reed, specialist technology, gender, and geek culture freelance writer. Articles published in/on 
Interesting and well-reasoned article. It’s a shame that a fair proportion of the discussion on both sites seems to come from a rather misogynist viewpoint (eg, accusations that articles like yours are bringing down MND, and the gentle soul who described women as “worthless” on antimisandry) though, since this does those who promote an egalitarian model no favours. Then again, perhaps if you’re annoying feminists AND anti-feminists, you know you’ve pitched things correctly.
Hi Michael,
Your comment on my blog got me interested, so I thought I’d take a look. I read your piece on female sexual tourism and found it quite thought provoking. These articles regularly turn up in women’s mags, too, which you don’t mention (perhaps not your preferred reading material!) I’ve just had a leaf through my housemate’s pile of mags and can’t find any examples, but I definitely have read some before and it’s usually in a bit of a confessional tone – “ooh look what I did!” and with a kind of disclaimer at the end saying guess what, this might not be a very safe thing to do.
I’m just speaking off the top of my head here, having not really thought about the subject until now. But it seems to me that people will often behave in the way that we expect them to behave – we generally conform to expectations. So the more we tell women that their emotions entitle them to behave in ways that we would not expect men to, the less responsibility they take for those emotions and their ensuing actions. I see this all the time among my friends, with PMT. You’re expected to act irrationally, therefore it’s ok if you do. But… really… it’s still you that chose to hit your boyfriend, PMTor no. And if we present men who visit prostitutes as monsters and perverts, does it influence them to act the part? That’s probably too strong – I mean something subtler and more hidden in the subconscious.
If society were already condemning me for one thing – paying a high price for safe sex with a consenting and unpressured woman, for example – perhaps it would be less of a leap to a worse thing – a potentially enslaved, forced, or just plain penniless and hungry woman – than if not. My, that’s a convoluted sentence – I hope it makes sense!
Thanks to Jim and Cathy for the kind and thoughtful comments.
Interesting article. Here’s a perfectly matching piece by La Bindel, originally perpetrated by the Guardian, to add to your collection:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/11/1057783358449.html