Female Sex Tourism & Severance

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #197. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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A guest in foreign queer spaces.

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One of the most hated figures in the 90 Day Universe is Angela Deem. There are the obvious reasons. Angela is the kind of person almost perfectly crafted for a reality TV audience to despise. When we meet her, she’s a slovenly, obese woman in her mid-50’s from Georgia. She is a caricature of American inferiority. The kind of person who joins Reddit discourse for a reality TV show? They love to engage in all the different kinds of socially acceptable disgust that Angela represents – ageism, fatphobia, hatred for the poor and the South. She screams things like “you better get outta my Georgia ass face” and announces every episode that she is done with the relationship.  TLC casting likely took themselves out for celebratory drinks when she joined the show alongside her 30-year-old Nigerian beau Michael Ilesanmi.

In Severance, Helena Eagen is the daughter and heir apparent to an incredibly wealthy conglomerate – Lumon – with a cult-like following. Apple with a family dynasty. She is everything that best represents her family in the public space – poised, beautiful and precise. She has even sacrificed a part of herself for the cause. To showcase how much she believes in the titular severance project, she has participated, and there is now a version of her working alongside fellow employees as Helly. She is the perfect corporate daughter. Helena Eagen is a model-like corporate creation, as practical and crafted as any sleek design ad.

Helena Eagen is Angela Deem.

If you haven’t seen Severance – which is possible since like most good television it is tucked away in obscurity on Apple TV, though it is a bit of a cultural juggernaut – Severance is a show about the concept of separating yourself completely between your work and home self. Through a procedure, normal office workers choose to carve themselves into two people, leaving their baggage and personal issues at the literal door of the office building. In the fiction of the Severance universe, these are two separate people, typically delineated as “innie” and “outtie.” Helly is the “innie” to Helena’s “outtie.”

Most of the way through Season 2, we find out that Helena has overtaken her innie’s life. She has copied the mannerisms of a person who shares her face and body, but is not her, someone who she has deduced from watching on CCTV is loved and cherished in the childlike way that the severed frequently act. These are things that she desires, and since she does not view Helly as a person, it is easy for her to simply slot herself into that life. To become a tourist where no one knows who she actually is (their corporate overlord) and become a part of the fantasy. A fantasy where she is loved. During this play acting, she also takes advantage of the romance that is brewing between her innie and another, Mark. She has sex with Mark, because he is interested in her (Helly) and because she can. Helena is engaging in a kind of sexual tourism, where she is able to go on vacation, be a new person, and seek out the desires that are not being met in the “real world.”

Sexual tourism is typically defined as people who go to another country, typically one in the developing world, for the specific act of sexual contact. Most commonly you see this represented as men who go to Thailand, with a popular refrain online that “you should not trust any man who goes to Thailand without his family.” In more recent years, people have begun to contend with the fact that this is not a gendered act. Women also engage in sexual tourism, though it’s frequently reframed as “romance tourism.”

In her article “Female Sex Tourism in Barbados: A Postcolonial Perspective,” Joan Phillips cites this as going all the way back to the 1960’s, where “Scandinavian, British and German women began to travel to other European destinations – particularly in Italy, Spain, and Greece – in order to engage in situational sexual relations with local men.” Over time, these dalliances have moved further afield with women traveling largely to the global South to find romantic partners. Most of the research I found on this phenomenon focuses on how it differs from what most people consider as traditional sex tourism. These women and their partners rarely view these relationships as being an act of sex work. In their work covering the “rent a dread” men in Jamaica, Suzanne Pruitt and Deborah Lafont write: “The actors place an emphasis on courtship rather than the exchange of sex for money.” These relationships almost always have a form of financial compensation, but it’s packaged as gifts for a romantic partner. The relationship is transactional – these men are frequently of a lower socio-economic status, in impoverished countries with limited options. Appearance is highly subjective, but generally speaking they are also younger and more attractive than their female companions. In one documentary about sex tourism in The Gambia, a man says that his soon to be wife is in her 80’s. It’s ultimately revealed that she’s a woman in her 60’s, but it doesn’t feel out of the question that she would have been at such an advanced age.

You see this also in relationships in 90 Day Fiancé. The show has Flanderized itself over the years from being a fairly reasonable portrait of people participating in the K1 Visa process to an extended universe of shows, largely about undesirable Americans and their overseas partners. A hidden aspect throughout is how many of the participants found each other through sex work, like Mike and Ximena from Season 5, who met while she was working on a cam site, or series mainstays Jasmine and Gino, who met through a sugar daddy website. Generally speaking, TLC tries to hide these origins, but even without that there’s a clear transactional element to a lot of the relationships.

This goes back to Angela and Michael. It is generally assumed, in part because of her boorish behavior and also because when Michael finally made it to the United States he apparently disappeared, that Michael is sticking with Angela so that he can come to the United States. A desire for a green card. He’s a fan, specifically of Donald Trump, but also of the promise of a better life. Angela is interested in having sex with Michael. This seems to be the only aspect of Michael that she is interested in –his ability to meet her needs sexually. Any of his needs are secondary to this –be it his desire to be a father (laughable considering her age) or simply to not have cake thrown on him at his birthday. Throughout the series she belittles and berates him, but also sets up elaborate sexual play for them to participate in, buying him Donald Trump boxers to wear when they are reunited in Nigeria. When he finally gets to the US, she shows him her home (where she resides with 6 grandchildren) and the mess inside and talks about how he has to take on cleaning duties now that he’s in the US. To be her maid as well as her sexual outlet. She treats him as though she owns him. To her, this seems like the case.

This is not an isolated incident in the 90 Day Universe. In Season 2 of 90 Day Fiancé, Danielle is a woman who brings Mohamed to the US from Tunisia. She has an obvious and intense lust for him physically, while he seems to be repulsed by her and cites religious reasons for not engaging with her sexually. After the wedding, Mohamed almost immediately departs and in a made-for-reality-TV moment blames his leaving on the inappropriate sexual acts she wanted to participate in as well as the smell of her genitalia. Throughout it all there is one clear thing – Danielle believes that she is owed Mohamed physically. That he must appease her sexually. This feels far more grotesque considering that he is shown to be repulsed by her. It doesn’t seem to matter in the face of her desires, which again, are the only thing that matters.

The objectification is the point – these men are the attractive Other. In Severance, Helena does much the same. She does not view the innies as people, as many of the women in 90 Day Fiance seem to treat their partners as though they are lesser. In the real world, sexual tourism frequently occurs between ethnic boundaries and there is an extensive racial component to it. In his report on Gambian men and romance tourism, Seyi Rhodes says, “You’re a 70-year-old woman from the UK, there’s plenty of black men around and you’ve never had any interest in them and you’ve never shown any interest to them. Then why is it suddenly happening here?” But the power differential is a part of the attraction. Helena has power over Mark, she has the knowledge and the authority, even though he is not entirely aware of it. In a real way, his life is something she can dictate out of existence. In the real world, these relationships are frequently built on less metaphysically distressing but no less intense power discrepancies – keeping your partner happy is the difference between being housed or a chance at a new life in the United States.

In their writing on Jamaica, Puritt and Lafont write that the “exotic Other has been constructed as more passionate, more emotional, more natural and more sexually tempting.” To Helena, Mark is several aspects of this even though he’s shown to be a bit of a simpleton. As a byproduct of the severance process, the innies exhibit a certain childlike quality, which is not inherently attractive to Helena. What is attractive is that Mark is passionate, emotional, present. He is distinctly “Other,” someone that she is unlikely to meet in real life, especially considering her fame. She craves a level of obscurity, an escapism that she cannot attain in the real world, and the level of true friendship and affection that she sees her innie receiving through CCTV footage.

She wants to participate in that fantasy. She does. But like all trips, all vacations, you eventually must return home. This is a fantasy because Mark does not know Helena – he knows Helly. He is in love with Helly, and he would sacrifice quite a bit for Helly. But to him, Helena is effectively taking the controls over for the person he is attracted to, for all that they share a body.

In the episode where we see Helena’s perspective, she goes to visit outtie Mark in the real world. But the spark, the attraction is not there. He doesn’t understand her the way that innie Mark seems to. Pruitt and Lafont write about this in relation to the women who romance Jamaican “beach bums” long term, including bringing them back to England or Germany.

The relationship which extends beyond the casual vacation romance often loses its bloom and leads to disappointment and conflict. The fact that each partner has come to the relationship with a different agenda becomes more apparent as the economic dependency within the relationship becomes more evident.

When confronted with her identity, innie Mark is horrified. There is no way for her to integrate her fantasy – one in which she is loved – with the reality of who she is. Helena Eagan is not the person that Mark loves, for all that she has created a facade where she is. A recurrent problem in 90 Day Fiancé is similar. The relationships that they had on a cruise ship or online, as fantastical or fulfilling as they seem at that moment, fall apart when they face the scrutiny of their real life and the integration of these two realities.

Helena is a sexual tourist, even if she never actually pays Mark for the service that he is providing for her. She has commodified his innocent love for her counterpart into a release for her own ill-ended sexual and romantic desires. It’s a fantasy for her, transactional in the way that she does not meet his needs in any capacity, and one that ultimately harms him far more than it ever will her.

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Amanda Hudgins makes things and writes some times. Find them on Bluesky.