From the Insomnia Archive of Unbelievably Wretched Drivel...

I collect strange, unpleasant and morally dubious books. Someday, when I’m a doddering old man, I’d like to have an entire library of sick and awful texts that I can bequeath to my alma mater as revenge for forcing me to live in a tiny, fetid dorm room with an unsufferable rich prick who told a whole bunch of girls that I was on a chronic masturbator on the second goddamn day of school even though he was the one who crashed our computer after downloading six trillion pictures of Cindy Crawford’s nipples. Don’t worry: I buy all these books second-hand so that their evil pervert authors won’t get any money out of it. I keep them hidden in a secret chamber in my apartment so that my more delicate-constitutioned guests won’t happen upon them and think I’m some kind of sicko. I’m not a sicko. I’m just interested in sickos. There’s a fine line there, I think.

Anyway, one of my prize possessions in this line is a sex tourism guide, or, as the cover pretentiously puts it, “Sexual Paradises of Earth: A Single Man’s Guide To International Travel” (written by the obviously pseudonymous Bill Bronsen). I feel like I’ve done a public service by keeping this thing out of the hands of some desperate fiend. To give you the flavor of the book, here’s a quote from Chapter 2, “Why Go To A Foreign Country For Sex Or Love?”:

For some men, the thing that counts is to beat the generation gap. In this country, we are pretty youth oriented in general, and no one is more youth oriented than the young. If you are over 40, or even over 30, an 18 year old woman in your home town is not likely to see you was a romantic opportunity. Instead, she is likely to see you as some boring old guy, a guy who isn’t with it, who doesn’t have a cool haircut or cool clothes, and who listens to music recorded before she was born. She would be embarrassed to be seen with you...

What a drag! Luckily, there are places where boring old guys with lame haircuts and lame clothes aren’t so viciously dismissed by 18 year old vixens:

For an American tourist, especially a man, Thailand is one of the top sexual destinations in the world...Thai women are often poor. Being Buddhists, they generally respect those who appear wealthy in their eyes, for wealth is a sign of prosperity and merit. The fat are respected, for fatness is also a sign of prosperity and therefore merit. Old people are respected, and many young women see an older man as being the perfect partner...

But what if this old and shabby bastard with a bad hair and no chance of getting a date in his home town can’t afford to fly halfway across the world for a hook-up? Isn’t there some place closer to the good old U.S. of A. where he can find oodles and oodles of girls to exploit? Well, just read on:

Young Jamaican women often do not live in stable family environments. The children of a mother will often have different fathers. Young Jamaicans tend to live a life without a strong sense of responsibility or planning for tomorrow. Teenage girls bored with home life, or forced out by poverty, or violence at home, are drawn to tourist areas in hopes of meeting generous, rich foreign men who will not beat them...

Wait a second! Suppose that you’re a morbidly-obese, tragically-balding, creepy freak shitbag who wants to travel to the Carribean not only to ogle impoverished girls a third your age, but also to be beaten, drugged, robbed, and left for dead on a remote beach somewhere? Well, the book is once again ready with some great advice:

The real thing that makes the Dominican Republic so special is what you find in Santo Domingo. If you go there, you are in for the experience of a lifetime. In this wonderful city, there are a number of establishments that are a lot better than a mere pickup bar, but you will not find them by yourself. If you find a friend or a cab driver, as him where to go...

Because, God knows, the best thing for a dumb and horny gringo to do in places like this is to hop in a cab and ask the driver to bring him someplace off the beaten path so that he can get laid. I suppose if you’re really drunk or incredibly stupid or some combination of the two, this might sound like a good idea. It isn’t, though. Even as amateur a world-traveler as me knows that this is the quickest way to wind up a) dead, b) bloody and broke, c) in the scariest jail you’ve ever seen, or d) all of the above. Not that this concerns me too much, though. If your travel itinerary revolves around fondling as many third-world women as possible, you probably deserve whatever you get.

But “Sexual Paradises on Earth” doesn’t trouble itself with all that business. It’s too busy giving it’s toothless, hairy-backed, dumbfuck audience pointers on how to appeal to those hot island women:

Although the Dominican Republic is a poor country, the women are very style conscious and love beautiful sexy clothes....Unfortunately for the women, they have only a few nice things because they can’t afford more...If you were to go so far as to buy a nice outfit for the size of woman you want to meet and bring it with you, you are very likely to see it filled on your trip...

Now, when I was in New York City, many of the young women I worked with were Dominican. Most of them were pretty poor, at least as poor as I was, and some of them were indeed interested in fashion and nice clothes. However, I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that if I ever tried to buy any one of those kind and lovely women an outfit so that they could “fill it for me”, they would laugh their lungs out. And then they would castrate me. So this book isn’t just morally repugnant, exploitative and inexcusable, it’s also full of shit.

How do you know when a book is aimed at an audience of morons? Well, you can be pretty sure of it when that audience needs to be explicitly told things like these:

The Netherlands is located in Europe.

If you go out of your way to insult a person or his culture or his race you are asking for trouble.

Brazil has millions of very friendly and nice people.

Your interest in sex with local women will not win you any popularity in the many countries where the majority of people follow Islam.

If you go to Mexico people will not wonder at your very presence there, will not gather in groups of awe-stricken people to gape at you. They will not act that way in the Netherlands either.

In all seriousness, this book is both the most appalling and the saddest thing I own. Sad because it seems aimed at lonely, miserable men who believe that their lonely misery is because American women think they’re too good for them. Appalling because it urges them to treat the poor women of the world as their sexual playthings. Sad again because it wants to excuse this as an almost noble, mutually-beneficial sort of behavior that only puritans or prudes would quibble with. Appalling once more because its wretched advice is put forth with that naive sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for 4-H Manuals and holiday cards.