The marketing for beach-related vacation destinations often capitalizes on the association of foreign beaches with (partly) naked bathing beauties. This intersection of race, gender, and sexuality that positions the “ethnic” woman as particularly sexually accessible have deep roots in our colonial past in which foreign lands “open” to conquest by the Western world were conflated with foreign women “open” to conquest by Western men.

I offer the following food for thought (please comment because I’d love to know more about this):

Hawaii was colonized by the U.S. and, when the islands became a tourism destination, the Polynesian women were transformed into Hawaiian babes ready and waiting to please tourists from the mainland.

One transformation was the hula. Widely understood to be an “authentic” Polynesian tradition, the hula was actually originally mostly a man’s dance. It was religious. It involved chanting and no music. There were no hip movements, just gestures. Basically, it was story-telling.

Today, the men take a back seat to women, who are scantily clad in grass skirts (not authentic, by the way), and perform exaggerated hip movements to music. So the hula is an invention, designed by colonizers and capitalists, to highlight the appeal of “foreign” women.

Here is an image of hula girls sent back to the mainland way back in 1890:

And from the 1950s:

And the 1970s or 1980s (can’t tell):

[This one is topless, so not safe for work.]

She says “aloha,” by the way.

The 1990s:

What I love about this one is how generic it is. You could use ANY beach destination, change a tiny bit about the images, and the postcard would work. This reveals how thoroughly we accept the association of beach-destinations with sexually available and uninhibited women… In this case, not even a “foreign” one. (And I’d be open to speculation as to what that’s all about. Some of the 1950s ones have non-Polynesian women, too.)

And this picture was snapped by my friend Jason at a Trader Vic’s restuarant just last week: