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, traveling alone, I appear to fit the clientele perfectly.

Marmaris is a classic Turkish resort: green mountains tower over the blue waters of a large harbor. 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 travelers. 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 parlors 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 harbor. “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.”

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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 realize 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. 

Anja, runs a support and advocacy service for women wishing to escape window prostitution in Amsterdam, and she sees the devastating effect that legalising prostitution has had on women, locals — and on punters. It has been an unmitigated disaster.

Trafficking and pimping has increased, organised crime is rife, and women are not protected from violence. Research from 2018 found that 97% of those involved in prostitution in the Netherlands had experienced some form of serious physical and/or sexual abuse from pimps and punters. Residents, politicians, police and prostitutes are all up in arms. And the sex tourists keep coming.

Yet the government, as I have discovered from 20 years of reporting on the Dutch sex trade, tends to favour the head-in-the-sand approach. Politicians are reluctant to openly criticise the industry because they make a lot of money from it. “Sex clubs, sex shows, sex shops and coffee shops all have a vested interest in keeping window prostitution going,” says Else Iping, a retired politician who lives locally, “because the windows act as an advertisement for the whole district.”

“The neighbourhood is going down the drain because of the window prostitution,” she says. “And it is not safe for the women. The windows themselves are now just as much of a tourist attraction — so thousands of people come to walk through. It’s humiliating: the women are like animals in the zoo.”

The progressive female Mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is trying to compromise. She describes the situation as the paradox of tolerance: “People come to Amsterdam because of the tolerance but show behaviour we cannot tolerate, behaviour we should call immoral, that they wouldn’t show at home.”

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Having legalised prostitution, however, and opened its arms to sex tourists, the city is now trying to put the genie back in the bottle as residents complain of the noise, crime and expense. New rules have been introduced regarding the brothels: they will have to close at 3am at weekends instead of 6am. And there are plans to relocate 100 of De Wallen’s 249 famous window brothels to an “erotic centre“ on the outskirts of the city. Somewhere “chic”, says Halsema.

But this is to close a blind eye to the fact that the entire city is promoting “prostitution on an industrial scale”, says Anja, a former prostitute. “The government wants to shove the women out of the way to keep the residents happy, but it is just moving the problem elsewhere.” And while the women are there, the sex tourists will still come.

It’s hardly surprising that a particularly problematic group of tourists — British men aged 18-34 — sees the destination as an attractive one. In a rather naive attempt to put them off, a “Stay Away” video campaign was launched last month. Those using internet search terms such as “stag party Amsterdam” or “pub crawl Amsterdam” will be diverted to a video campaign that details “the risks and consequences of nuisance and excessive alcohol and drug use”.

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A 30-second video shows a very drunk man being arrested on the streets of Amsterdam. He is handcuffed and warned that coming to Amsterdam for a “messy night” and getting trashed will add up to a €140 fine plus a criminal record, so: Stay Away! Another shows a hospitalised man on a heart monitor, getting IV fluids. “Coming for drugs to Amsterdam? Stay Away!”

But I have interviewed dozens of British punters, including many in Amsterdam, and let’s face it, a video of a bloke being thrown in jail isn’t going to register, let alone act as a deterrent. One interviewee who paid for sex in Amsterdam told me, in harrowing detail, about his transaction. “She told me her pimp watched every punter leave the joint, and if he looked unhappy, she got a leathering,” he said.

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Men in De Wallen have no respect for the women they ogle. They take photographs of those perched behind the window, despite the many signs telling them that it’s prohibited. They flash their genitals at the prostituted women and shout obscenities towards women walking through the area. A 2018 campaign to stop sex tourists urinating, defecating and vomiting in the streets was deemed a failure by local politicians. “Nothing seems to deter them,” a city prosecutor told me at the time.

Renate van der Zee, a journalist and feminist activist, tells me there’s a Dutch saying that describes this campaign perfectly: dweilen met de kraan open. It means “mopping the floor dry while the tap is still running”. The Stay Away campaign is too little, and far too late, she says. “You can’t deal with sexual exploitation and excess tourism by warning the men they will be put in prison,” she says. “But at least if window prostitution was abolished, you will get rid of most of the sex tourists.” Legalisation, she explains, has been a huge mistake. “Almost all of the women are exploited.”

The mayor holds, at best, a disingenuous position. She talks of “sex entrepreneurs” and their business model in one breath, and in the next: “What we do not welcome is people who come here on a vacation from morals.” Meanwhile, the Dutch government clings to its legalised regime despite knowing that the situation is becoming increasingly dangerous for women: the Netherlands was forced to close an increasing number of its window brothels after it became clear that organised criminals were running them.

As Diederik Boomsma, leader of the local Christian Democratic Appeal Party, points out: “What I have tried to achieve for many years is to close down the red light district. It’s quite bizarre that you can defend it. People are still attached to this faux romantic idea that prostitution belongs in Amsterdam, and it is quaint and old, but at least we should all agree that prostitution should not be a tourist attraction?” He believes that nothing will change unless serious steps are taken to close down the industry. “Men come here and they think that they are able to behave as though they were at a sex festival… So if you really want to do something about it, then you shut the window brothels, and the sex clubs, and return the oldest part of the city back to the citizens.”

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Obviously, there are those in Amsterdam who are against the restrictions. At a meeting about the mega brothels at the weekend, angry locals who don’t want a “sex club” on their doorstep found themselves on the same side as PROUD, the Dutch “sex workers’ union” who want the women to stay in their red neon booths, where they can “work safely”.

PROUD, along with the progressive Left, insists that selling sex is a “job like any other” and that reforms against sex tourism are increasing stigma towards women. Its website has a front page devoted to a quote from Xaviera Hollander, one of Holland’s most notorious pimps who coined the term “happy hooker”. “You can call me mercenary, or call me madam, but, as I always tell my customers — just call me anytime!” Presumably with that in mind, PROUD opposes earlier closing times for brothels as well as the Stay Away campaign on the grounds that this is bad for business. They insist that they are being unfairly discriminated against and “used as a scapegoat for the city’s problem with mass tourism”.

I ask Anja whether sex tourists in Amsterdam are being unfairly vilified. “These men are the worst, and they have made Amsterdam into one big brothel,” she tells me. “Most of them act as if they are buying a burger, and quite frankly they would treat one better than they treat the girls in those windows.”