ABSTRACT
This chapter presents interview data collected with women tourists, and explores the extent to which they understand the sex industry to be an authentic cultural product, and how they make sense of their entree into the sexual spaces. A number of tourism scholars have highlighted activities such as excessive drinking, taking drugs, or engaging in unusual sexual activity in relation to inversionary behaviours in the liminal location of tourism. Engaging in unusual behaviours that cross over the limen may involve some element of ontological insecurity, and risk-taking has been understood as part of inversionary behaviours by a number of tourism theorists. Gendered tourism scripts in both Thailand and the Netherlands seem to go against the grain of the cultural interpretations of femininity and 'appropriate' feminine behaviour. Lupton suggests that in the context of tourism: Women's bodies are culturally represented as more prone to chaos and disorder compared with men's bodies.
