Blue light district: a digital ethnography of an online forum for male sex tourists.

This study aims to better understand the worldviews expressed within an online forum community of male heterosexual sex tourists. Whilst virtual all-male groups, collectively known as the “Manosphere,” are increasingly studied, online male sex tourist communities are not. Such gaps can miss the potentially harmful consequences of these platforms. This study applies a Thematic Analysis (TA) to 300 postings and measures the levels of misogyny over 21 years. The findings indicate that expressions of misogyny were more extreme in this forum community than most expressions of misogyny documented in face-to-face interviews with sex tourists. Levels of misogyny (27%) were high and stayed consistent over time. We argue that this sex tourist forum contains hostile misogyny that has not been documented in traditional ethnographic studies of sex tourists, and that has not either been established as a part of the main field of intellectual inquiry into online misogyny, known as the Manosphere. Our experience suggests that digital ethnography can grant researchers new information about stigmatized groups of people who may be difficult to recruit as research participants and that the current body of literature on online misogyny might miss the ethical implications of sex tourist forums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]