©2004, UrbisMedia and 1652, Gian Lorenzo Bernini
The girl on the cover of the Hawaiian Air inflight magazine wears an expression somewhere between Bernini’s St. Theresa in Ecstasy and the leer of a porn queen. She is also wearing a swimsuit because she’s in a palm and fern-lined pool with a waterfall splashing over her ebony hair. The muscular coverboy, oozing testosterone from every suntanned pore, holds her in his arms in a posture of imminent ravishment.
Romance and travel are reciprocals. Open a newspaper’s travel section, or survey the ads in a travel magazine or cruise brochure and the photos of beautiful, young, active couples (or somewhat more mature in the cruise brochure), betray the travel industry’s dirty little secret: travel is a “turn on”. Frolicking in the surf, lounging in sumptuous hotel suites, smooching at the rail of the Love Boat, and gazing longingly at each other through wine glasses at dinner—these are some of the relentless libidinous themes of travel advertising. There are other images promoting nature, adventure, art and culture, but the top three are sex, sex, and sex.
So what else is new? Sex sells a lot more than just travel.
Yes it does, but it is travel’s rather special ingredients that give its libidinal attractiveness something more than the pitch for a sportscar or deodorant. When we launch ourselves into cultures with other customs and mores and so we become strangers in strange places, far removed from the everyday sanctions that govern our moral lives. There is an air of unreality to the circumstance of being in a foreign land, one that becomes confounded with the novel and the film. If for only a while, it seems we might become the lead in that romantic film, the character in that Harlequin romance, or half of that couple on the cover of the inflight magazine.
As with many things in life there is a continuum; and so it with romance and travel. At one level is the much-touted sentimental romantic interlude for the young courting couple, or the married couple seeking escape and rejuvenation. At the other there is the blatant “sex tour” in which First World moral defectives charter jets to Bangkok, Eastern Europe or other venues where the surplus of mistreated women constitute the vector for a global game of HIV roulette. It is simply a jet age version of the love ‘em and leave ‘em approach to out-of-town sex that predates even Hernando Cortez, or the boys from the Bounty.
The romantic end of the continuum is perhaps less dangerous; at least more interesting. The romantic traveler is looking (maybe not looking, but open to finding ), more than sex. Travel is a plunge not only in to far away places, but also into mental recesses that harbor fantasy lives that might-have-been, and hanker for the chance encounter that might open the door to an epiphany. If the transient experience of the sex tour is serologically perilous, the romantic’s vulnerability is existential. Either can be life threatening.
Travel long enough and far enough and you will encounter someone who falls within these parameters. And there’s always the chance that the someone could be yourself. [to be continued]
___________________________________
©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 10.14.2004)