Mongers, trip reports, and representations of the masculine (self) of North American sex tourists to the Philippines in online communities

Sex tourism is a captivating arena in which to examine men’s performances and expressions of masculinity. North American men who travel to the Philip-pines for sex tourism have also found ways to further undergo constructing their masculinities in online communities where they and others can write and share ‘trip reports,’ or written accounts of their experiences for others to read and post comments on. This research examines the ways in which North American sex tourists – who specifically refer to themselves as ‘mongers’ – construct and perform their masculinities through the trip reports they write and self-publish to online sex tourism community forums. This study employed narrative analyses of twelve of these ‘trip reports,’ within theoretical frameworks considers theorizations on hegemonic masculinities and constructions of male sexual desire and behaviours. This research’s findings propose that through personal narratives, these men used both their mongering and the strategic retelling of their experiences to construct masculine identities through certain representations of Filipina women, themselves, and their interactions with other men. Positioning Filipina women as the consumable sexualized other allows men to occupy consumer and appraiser roles, the dichotomous masculine opposite. Representations of self provide space to exhibit their masculine abilities and expertise as a form of self-affirmation, and situate themselves within the online mongering community’s masculine hierarchy. Overall, these men not only use their mongering to construct their masculinities, but their trip reports provide a way for them to bolster feelings of masculine achievement.