By VIJAI
MAHESHWARI
Sexpats’ disappearance is
symptom of perceptions of war and chaos, and not universally welcome.
KIEV, Ukraine — In 2012,
Ukraine briefly became gripped by hysteria over “sex tourism.” The country was
preparing to host tens of thousands of football fans for the Euro
championships, leading many to predict a sharp rise in prostitution. The high-profile
sporting event would “promote sex tourism in Ukraine, and demean women here
even more,” Anna Gutsol, the founder of the radical feminist group FEMEN, said
at the time, as she led a group of topless activists in protest in Kiev. “In
Europe, Ukrainian women have the unfortunate reputation as beautiful, cheap sex
dolls,” she said. “And when the fans get here that image will only be
reinforced.”
When carousing the bars during
those impassioned times, women often asked me point-blank whether I was a “sex
tourist.” Expat friends refrained from wearing bright clothes or strong cologne
for fear it would mark them out as predators. It didn’t help our cause that the
cafés in downtown Kiev were packed with aging Western men on “dates” with their
potential Ukrainian brides. At the height of the hysteria, roving gangs of
vigilantes even beat up foreigners who ordered prostitutes, and posted the
videos online.
Fast-forward four years and
the pejorative term “sex tourist” has gone out of vogue. Wracked by a fierce
economic downturn and a slow-burning war with Russia in the East, Ukrainians
have bigger things to worry about than priapic male tourists.
Even FEMEN has given up the
fight, and moved its headquarters to Paris. The group now focuses on more
global issues, like abortion rights and the denigration of women in Islamic
culture. With downtown Kiev’s hipster cafés and speakeasy bars packed with
visiting NGO staff, journalists, military advisers and anyone trying to cash in
on Ukraine’s brief moment in the international limelight, girls in bars are
more likely to out you as a “spy” than a “sex tourist.”
“Sex tourism is no longer an
issue as it was four years ago,” said Volodomyr Paniotto, director at the Kiev
International Institute of Sociology. “We’re now much more concerned about
homophobia, which is hampering our efforts to join the international
community.”
With gay pride marches
frequently attacked by right-wing thugs, Ukrainian society has turned its focus
inwards. Under pressure from the EU, parliament passed a law last November
banning companies from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.
A script I wrote years ago
with a high-profile Ukrainian director that initially included a FEMEN demonstration
now features a violent gay pride march instead. The director feels that we now
have a better chance of receiving state funding.
Gay rights, not sexual
tourism, is the new cultural lodestone of the post-revolutionary era in
Ukraine.
If Ukraine’s gaze has shifted,
it’s also true that the sex tourist geezers of yore have headed for the exits
in the wake of the war with Russia. In cafés, I almost never see those
bright-eyed, gray-haired men communicating stiltedly with stunning young women
through bored translators anymore. Though Ukraine has become a lot cheaper in
dollars after the currency collapsed in the wake of the 2014 Maidan Revolution,
and its major cities are as safe as their counterparts in the West, fear has
kept the sex tourists at bay.
Online forums are chock full
of posts warning punters to stay away from Ukraine. One post claimed visitors
would be “kidnapped by separatists and tortured, or ambushed by right-wing
thugs.”
Julia Omelchuk, a Ukrainian
model who works in Milan, noticed that Italian men are afraid of visiting
Ukraine. “They think it’s all war and chaos,” she said with a touch of sadness,
as we chatted outside the well-organized Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in Kiev
last week. The fashion week was held in a brand new glass-and-steel business
center on the embankment of the Dnieper that was once a helipad for the
ex-President Victor Yanukovych. The complex includes a swanky pan-Asian
restaurant that wouldn’t be out of place in New York or London.
The contrast between the
cosmopolitan feel of Ukraine’s ambitious capital, which has set its sight on
becoming a “European” city under the leadership of its charismatic mayor,
former boxing legend Vitaly Klitschko, and outsiders’ negative perceptions
couldn’t be greater. With the media focused on casualties of the war in the
East and car bomb attacks against dissenting journalists, most Westerners still
see the country as an “unstable black hole.”
It’s this fear that has
stanched the flow of sex tourists to Ukraine: They’re not an adventurous bunch,
after all. They don’t have the grit of war correspondents or even foreign NGO
workers. The ideal older sexual predator — whether seeking a wife or a Lolita-esque
girlfriend — now prefers to book his holiday in a cheap, friendly, safe country
like Thailand — or even Russia, perhaps.
For long-term expats in
Ukraine like myself, that’s a good thing. We were tired of our love for our
adoptive country being mistaken for sex addiction. It’s also a relief not to
have to watch grizzly plumbers from Marseilles, or hoary truck drivers from
Ohio prey on young women with few options in life.
While the sex tourists are
gone, for the most part young women, unfortunately, have an even harder time in
post-revolutionary Ukraine than before. Salaries have plummeted, while
inflation has skyrocketed. Many are still keen to seek a more stable future in
the West, and are awaiting visa liberalization with the EU with bated breath. A
recent survey by a major newspaper indicated that 65 percent of Ukrainians
would emigrate to the West, given a chance.
That’s a depressing statistic,
and indicates that the demand for a “Western husband” might still be strong,
even though the supply has dried up.
When the country stabilizes
and Kiev eventually makes peace with Russia, the sexpats may well return.
Ukraine, after all, still has some of the most beautiful — and traditional —
women in the world. Plenty of newspaper articles, including in London’s Daily
Mail and the Independent, make this claim. They’re often praised for being
feminine and passive, and for respecting the dominant role of the male in a
relationship. For those reasons, many claim that they make ideal wives. That
aspect of Ukrainian women hasn’t changed since the revolution.
“Our women still have very
traditional ideas about sexual roles,” said Paniotto. “The revolution hasn’t
changed the mores of society yet, as some had expected.”
But while Western men wait for
Ukraine to stabilize, Kiev, and cities like Odessa, on the Black Sea, have
become a hunting ground for another group of less skittish sex tourists: the
Turkish Romeos. Locked out of Russia after the public spat between Putin and
Erdoğan over the downing of a Russian jet in Syria, Turks with a predilection
for Slavic women have focused their energies on Ukraine. They’re a ubiquitous
presence these days in the city’s few bright and shiny nightspots.
Having weathered a violent
coup and terror attacks by ISIL, the tough Turks — unlike Westerners — aren’t
afraid to travel to Ukraine. Visiting Ukraine for sex tourism is such a cliché
in Turkey that there’s even a popular film “Sev Beni” (“Love Me”) about a
Turkish man who falls in love with a Ukrainian girl during a stag weekend in
Kiev.
While Turkish men were once
reviled for being uncouth and lacking respect for women, their star has risen
now that Europeans have stopped visiting. It’s sad that having fought so hard
to join Europe, Ukrainians are still locked out of the Continent, and seek some
solace in relations with Turkey, that also feels similarly shunned by Europe.
It’s a bitter irony of the heady Maidan Revolution, which neither the gung-ho bride
hunters of yore or the topless warriors of FEMEN could have predicted.
Vijai Maheshwari is a writer
and journalist. His novel “White God Factor,” about Moscow in the 1990s, was
published by London’s Coptic Press. He also publishes a magazine, B.East, about
trends in the East and was editor-in-chief of Playboy Russia.
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