Romance on the Road [Paperback]

Author Jeannette Belliveau is right on the button in her finely researched -- and steamy -- exploration of why women travel to find sexual satisfaction in the arms of strangers from cultures other than their own.

While Belliveau's scholarship is rigorous and quite sufficient alone to compile this first-of-its kind treatise on the topic, she nevertheless includes her own personal experiences as a veteran "sex pilgrim" on three different continents to provide her readers with first-hand revelations of intimate, anonymous sex.

Women traveling specifically in search of casual sex is by no means a new phenomenon. Belliveau points out that female adventurers began enjoying foreign love affairs in 1840s Rome and that today an estimated 24,000 women annually hit the road and seek men for carnal pleasures.

Interestingly, for a topic -- sex -- that commands attention so easily, most folks remain ignorant of the lifestyle encountered in Belliveau's book. It's publication is nicely timed, however, with the release of the movie, "Heading South," director Laurent Cantet's surprise summer indie hit featuring Charlotte Rampling, which details the lives of three lonely women cavorting with foreign men and engaging in uninhibited sex.

The spector of AIDS and other sexually transmitted illnesses, always hovering in these scenarios, and the need for stringent measures to protect against such infections, is acknowledged by Belliveau, but the subject is not touched upon in the movie, set in 1970s Haiti, where AIDS would surface by the end of the decade.

Romance on the Road explores a little-understood phenomenon -- love journeys by lonely, bored or adventurous women -- providing a wealth of new material on the history and social catalysts for these affairs. The book's tone reflects sympathy for women scarred by dating wars and mating stalemates in their home countries who are brave enough to seek affection and companionship on distant shores.

--Joan Peterson, Ginkgo Press, publisher of the EAT SMART series of culinary travel guidebooks

Creating what she calls a geography of sex and love, a newspaperwoman from blue collar Maryland - a self proclaimed sex pilgrim -- examines a social phenomenon that may have involved more than 600,000 Western women in the past 25 years: travelers who engage in flings or long term affairs with foreign men, vaulting over cultural boundaries. While intercultural love and marriages are a subtheme, the book's focus is hedonistic sex with virile strangers.

Does the mix of scholarship and memoir provide a compass for the heartbroken (or hot-and-bothered) globetrotter looking for a distant cure? Prurient interest will soon be dampened by the charts, graphs, survey results, and MLA-style citations of more than 800 bibliographic sources from Henry James' Daisy Miller to a British newspaper feature entitled "My Toyboy Tours". There's a global chronology of the trend, a summary of related books and movies, and basic ethics and etiquette ("remember the man is real, not an actor in your fantasy"; and "do not use him as a sperm donor"). It's probably of more use to social scientists than the general reader.

Belliveau has done an admirable job of combining veteran intelligence on each locality with a profile of an adventurous Western woman and a timeline of foreign female exploits in the region but it's unfortunate that her concentration on ecstasy abroad overwhelms her scholarship on ethical and economic questions as well as cultural and social ramifications in sex-host cultures. One forgettable fling has the power to affect systems far larger than the person, family, village or region which witnessed and absorbed the behavior.

Without apology Belliveau admits a detrimental byproduct of her Shirley Valentine amusement (or was it healing?): "At first I was appalled at the smothering level of harassment I encountered in Athens. Then I succumbed to these temptations, with the likelihood that my sex partners became further convinced about the ease of seducing any lone Western female tourists to later cross their paths."

The resulting heightened environment of sexual predation should come as a nasty shock to thousands of traveling women hoping to explore the world unmolested.

"Romance on the Road: Traveling Women Who Love Foreign Men" is a personal study of sexual experimental behavior by western women while traveling. A sort of a sexual odyssey with charts, maps, footnotes, and handy geographical timelines that encapsulate women's sexual behavior historically. It is a combination feminist sociology report and love diary. Actual sexual adventures and adventuresses are interviewed extensively. Many theories about women's and men's sexual behavior and preferences are presented and explored, sometimes catalogued by region or area. Author, journalist and world traveler Jeannette Belliveau recounts: "Wild, shocking, yet tender and hopeful love journeys by women tell a story of a worldwide Attention Defection Disorder, a revolution in mating behavior, and a poignant search for traditional romance (from Travel)." Areas and countries in which sexual encounters are analyzed include Italy, Spain, Greece, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, Brazil, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and the Far East. In addition to accounts of sexual encounters, the author includes history, reasons, sexual ethics, etiquette, and thoughts for the future. "Romance on the Road" is far from a clinical, cold book, despite its objectivity. Indeed, Jeannette Belliveau met and fell in love with her husband, Lamont Harvey, on her own sexual odyssey. In a way, "Romance on the Road" is the author's personal tribute to brave sexual adventuresses and to the traveler's possibility for romance and fulfillment.