“I love beautiful young women like you.” I had been in the bar for no longer than it took to order a drink before a youthful waiter approached me and turned on the charm.
It’s a steamy evening in downtown Marmaris, a popular resort town in southwest Turkey. The bar is packed with women young and old, mainly from the UK. We’re being “entertained” by locals known as “bar boys”: men in their twenties with muscular physiques and raunchy dance moves. At 64, travelling alone, I appear to fit the clientele perfectly.
Marmaris is a classic Turkish resort: green mountains tower over the blue waters of a large harbour. The long stretch of golden sand attracts more than 1.5 million tourists each year, including around 700,000 Britons. Some holiday companies promote it as an easy, safe, sociable option for lone female travellers. But that also has a downside, encouraging the flourishing of a distinctive form of sex tourism.
“I would never behave like this at home,” says Kay, a 45-year-old woman from the North of England. “But these men come up to you, massively flirting, bare-chested, and seriously gorgeous. What am I supposed to do?” The men in question are on low salaries, and often don’t have much paid work in the winter. I ask if the men Kay dates ask her for money. “All the time,” she says, without hesitation or embarrassment, “but it’s not like prostitution. They just want nice things, and I am glad to treat them.”
The nightlife here revolves around flirtatious evening entertainment. The male staff thrust their groins towards female tourists, tell them they’re “sexy” and “beautiful”; and ask for kisses. “It is part of the job,” says Ali, one of the waiters, a tall and slim young man with glossy black hair. “And it means we get good tips if we do it right. I had one English girlfriend who was older than my ana [mother]. She bought me new trainers and gave me money to pay my phone bill.”
We’re all well aware of why men head to Thailand, with massage parlours and brothels on every corner, hotels charging by the hour, and women prostituting themselves on the street corners of beach resorts. All this results in a well-documented problem of trafficking and sexual exploitation, with thousands of underage Thai girls migrating from impoverished rural areas to meet the demands of male tourists.
But the issue of older women paying for sex with young local men while on holiday is widely misunderstood. Academics tend to describe the women as “romance tourists”, writing about “transactional sex” or the search for “sexual intimacy”. Tabloid journalists often write about “grannies” looking for “toy boys”. But what would we call these relationships if the holidaymakers were older British men and the locals poorly paid young women?
Valerie*, 60, travels to Marmaris at least twice a year, where she “dates” younger men, all of whom work in the tourist trade. “I never see the same man twice,” she admits, when we meet in a cafe by the harbour. “And I worked out [that] I have bought at least half a dozen mobile phones for my boyfriends in the past three years.”
Does she think the men are attracted to her? She looks taken aback by my question. “I know I’m a bit older than some of them, but a lot of these men like that. It’s different from at home.”
To be sure, some of the women here are very open about why they travel to Marmaris. They know that sex is on the menu alongside the cocktails. But most women, like Valerie, have convinced themselves that they were engaged in legitimate relationships — rather than transactions.
Talk to the men, however, and a different story emerges. One older waiter told me the women are “seen as dirty, and as totally without morals. They are looked at with disgust, and everyone knows which ones are here for sex. It’s the old ones, or the women who come here on their own.”
Yet for many young men, flings with British women allow them to buy meals, a new phone, or send money to their families. “These women want sex, and I am happy to give it to them, even the old and ugly ones,” says Ali. “I take a Viagra and close my eyes. When they fall in love with me, I can ask for anything.”
The film Shirley Valentine (1989) fed British audiences a winning fantasy of a middle-aged woman escaping domesticity and finding herself through Mediterranean romance. On the surface, Marmaris is selling something similar. But that fantasy leaves out the cultural and economic chasm between the woman on holiday and the many serving the drinks.
Many of the young men working in Marmaris have migrated here from poor and conservative parts of Turkey further inland. They come for summer work, where they can expect to earn between £425 and £535 per month working at a bar, far more than they would at home. “It’s a route out of poverty for many,” says Dilek, a campaigner for Fethiye Kadın Dayanışma Grubu (FKDG), an NGO that advocates for women’s equality and human rights. She also tells me that the men who come to Marmaris are mainly Kurds, many of whom feel deep shame about what they are doing.
Ali, a Kurd from east Turkey, tells me he lives in fear of any of his family members or friends back home seeing one of the numerous videos circulating online, featuring him and his colleagues simulating sexual moves with the women and dancing in nothing but a thong. “If my mother ever found out what I am doing, she would die of shame.”
Yet young male waiters are not the only victims of this sordid system. I also heard stories of female tourists being threatened. “When the women realise they are being used, which some of them do,” explains Yonca, another member of FKDG, “and refuse to give them any more money, that’s when the violence starts. He fights back against all the humiliation he feels, having to dance like a puppet for the women, and being treated like a sex slave. They can get very nasty.”
In videos that went viral last year, male staff members (reportedly not professional dancers) at a bar in Marmaris performed invasive and sexually suggestive moves towards women, often without their consent. Women were also seen being forcibly pulled into bars. The Turkish authorities, who for a long time turned a blind eye to the indecent tourism in Marmaris, only cracked down when this footage of harassment circulated internationally — anxious to protect the reputation of their tourism industry. But when I visited, it seemed to be business as usual. It is ironic that Turkey, which under an increasingly patriarchal President Erdoğan promotes family values and morality in many areas of social policy, allows this situation to continue.
Prostitution apologists continue to insist that no harm is being done either by or to female tourists. Yet Marmaris does not feel very safe for the women being dragged into bars and sexually harassed by young men desperate for work. Nor does it seem fair for those men caught up in an ugly system that trades their dignity for a monthly wage and the fantasy of escape.
Shirley Valentine went to the Aegean, had a holiday romance and came home transformed. The women flying home from Marmaris leave someone else to bear the cost of their transformation.
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