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Cross-cultural communication in intimate relationships 345

people may actually engage in international travel with the express aim of en-
tering an intimate relationship as is the case in travel for sex and romance.
Travel for sex and romance is not in itself a new phenomenon: the scarcity of
women in the American West in the 19th century, for instance, saw many Chi-
nese women migrate to the US for relationship reasons (White-Parks 1993).
They either came as “picture brides” of Chinese men, where the marriage had
been arranged by their families back in China, or they came as prostitutes, often
having been sold or forced into the sex trade. Old as the practice may be, travel
for sex and romance has exploded in recent decades. It is useful to make a dis-
tinction between travel for sex, or, less euphemistically, “prostitution travel”,
which is illegal in many contexts and oftentimes involves slavery and human
trafficking, and romance travel, which centers around the mail-order bride in-
dustry and where both partners choose to enter a cross-cultural intimate rela-
tionship under legitimate circumstances. At the same time, there is a fine line
between the two, as has become apparent, for instance, in cases of internet rela-
tionship scams. Given that the demand and supply countries for both sex and ro-
mance travel tend to be the same, it could also be argued that sex and romance
travel are two sides of the same coin.
The extent of international prostitution travel can be gleaned from websites
devoted to the fight against the sexual exploitation of women and children. 3
These show that throughout the 1990s the international mobility of both prosti-
tutes and their clients increased tremendously. For instance, approximately
500,000 women annually are trafficked as prostitutes into Western Europe
(Hughes et al. 1999). In many Western European countries, migrant prostitutes
significantly outnumber local prostitutes, as for instance in Germany, where
75% of prostitutes are foreigners (Hughes et al. 1999). At the same time, an es-
timated 200,000–400,000 German men annually travel abroad as prostitution
tourists, with the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong
as their main destinations (Hughes et al. 1999). Figures for other industrialized
countries show a similar picture of high demand for international prostitution,
both as regards in-bound prostitutes and out-bound clients: Japan, for instance,
has about 150,000 foreign women in prostitution, and Japanese men constitute
the largest group of prostitution tourists in Asia (Hughes et al. 1999). The sup-
pliers in this global division of sexual labor come from impoverished nations in
Asia and Latin America, and, since the end of the Cold War, Russia and Eastern
Europe.
Global economic inequality similarly underlies the legitimate side of the
business od romance travel, which centers around the mail-order bride industry.
Kojima (2001) analyses the mail-order bride industry as a system for the global
division of reproductive labor. Women in industrialized countries have on an in-
dividual level been successful in freeing themselves from the imperative to
marry and have children, but they have not succeeded in changing the underly-