Romance on the Road describes the heretofore-neglected topic of women who travel to find love with foreign men, with significant implications for the study of mating behavior, the dating war, feminism and the globalization and commodification of affection. The author describes her own experiences in Greece, the Bahamas, the Caribbean and Brazil, and resulting book became a high-spirited examination of how adventurous women are redefining sexual geography.The table of contents for the five units of this study guide appear below.

1. Female sex tourism and implications for feminism

• Feminism and unintended consequences
• Mate shortages created by marriage patterns:
  First World and Third World alike
• Sex and the divorced Baby Boomer woman
• Mate selection in throes of a revolution
• Widespread involuntary celibacy: Female and male

2. People

• Female sexual pioneers:
  — in Southern Europe, Africa, Asia, Polynesia
• Gay men: Common motivations with Victorian women
• Lesbians: Special destinations and strategies

3. History

• Veiling laws, agricultural development and female sexual freedom
• Cleopatra, Babylon’s sacred priestesses, Turkish free spirits and Native American single women
• History’s first sex destinations: Italy and Greece
• Victorian female adventureresses: Rome, the Near East, India
• Spain, the Caribbean, West Africa and the 1960s explosion in female sex tourism
• Erica Jong, Terry McMillan and how novels accelerated trends
• Princess Diana, Osama bin Laden and the Middle East
• Predictions of the future of female sex tourism and its social impact

4. Theory

• The first sexual geographer: Sir Richard Francis Burton
• The female participant: Anne Cumming, Fiona Pitt-Kethley
• The novelist as theoretician: Paul Theroux, Michel Houellebecq
• The skeptical social scientist: April Gorry

5. Places

• Overarching geographic patterns governing sex tourism destinations for men and women
  • The world’s two leading emporia for sex tourism: Thailand and the Dominican Republic
  • Men’s destinations: Southeast Asia, Latin America
  • Women’s destinations: Mediterranean, Africa, Caribbean
  • Gay destinations: Sitges, Cape Town, Bangkok, Brazil
  • Lesbian destinations: Lesbos, Bali
  • The Zone of Sexual Freedom: Africa
  • The Zone of Sexual Winter: East Asia
  • The Zone of Sexual Violence: Melanesia
  • The Zone of Abandonment: Oceania
• Femininity, masculinity, sex warfare and geography
• Exclusive immigration data on foreign wives and husbands of Americans
• Emotional geography and the commodification of sex