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Abstract
The mating behavior of Western women tourists visiting Greece, Indonesia, East Africa, Jerusalem, Jamaica, Ecuador, Barbados, Hawaii and Belize poses a problem for scientific and intuitive models of human sexual psychology. Many of these women enter into sexual relationships with low status local men they barely know. The phenomenon of romance tourism violates adaptationist expectations that women will prefer to mate with men they have had time to assess and who are resource-rich, in the Western sense.
This dissertation presents the results of 12 months of field research on romance tourism in Belize. A survey of highly popular romance literature is included to test the validity of male attractiveness criteria nominated by my romance tourism informants. Romance tourism and romance novel literature are important test cases for commonly held assumptions concerning female sexual psychology, because both involve a removal of factors that normally constrain female mating behavior, such as the quality of a woman's mating opportunities and the presence of community members and kin.
Ultimately my explanation for romance tourism relies on a combination of general and specific causes. I propose that tourist women, who lack cultural knowledge of the places they visit, are relying primarily on universal indicators of male mate value to judge the attractiveness of local men. They are typically more impressed by the skill (as expressed in a natural setting), social ease, laid-backness, and sexual and romantic expressiveness displayed by island men than local women are, because the larger scale industrialized societies the women originate from do not tend to encourage as strong expressions of these traits. Lack of exposure to the more expressive style of tropical island settings, conditions at home that lead some women to seek a sexually and socially affirming experience abroad, and the evolution in women of strong preferences for acts of sexual and romantic interest on the part of men are further offered as explanations for why so many women travelers “fall” for islanders who are good at “acting in love.”
