Urban tourism vs. sex tourism

I have a lot of thoughts to sort out today, namely which approach I want to take (or if I need to even choose) between the idea of urban tourism, which would build upon the obvious slumming tours of the downtown area led by guides like Chuck Connors, OR the idea of sex tourism, which would build upon whatever research I gather from the Committee of Fifteen/Committee of Fourteen files and the like. Or would sex tourism simply be a chapter of the dissertation? I mean, how far can I go with it?

Let's examine that. So, of course, people don't seem to have called visiting the Lower East Side for the purposes of finding prostitutes "sex tourism" at the turn of the last century. Indeed, the term conjures more images of trips to a 20th or 21st century Thai brothel than it does gentlemanly excursions to the slums. On the other hand, my investigations of the Committee of Fourteen records a few years ago suggested that people definitely came to the city, visited prostitutes, and then returned to their banal lives in the country. It wasn't simply a local phenomenon with prostitutes servicing their neighbors. Evidence of this consisted of letters to the Committee, business cards, the testimony of "steerers" who worked on behalf of pimps and prostitutes to "steer" business toward them. In my research yesterday on the Committee of Fifteen papers (that committee was around from 1900-1902), it appears that the impetus for the formation of the committee was the distribution of prostitutes' business cards on the steps of a Lower East Side Episcopal church. In other words, it's not so far-fetched when one considers the incredible underground economy of prostitution on the Lower East Side to examine it in the same terms anyone would examine any other tourist industry.

On the other hand, sex tourism, like all tourism, is about consumption -- consuming products, consuming the Other. So taken with the language of consumption that permeates the other sources I've read, is it important to distinguish between this kind of sexual exchange and that of slummers who really just want to watch opium smokers, light joss sticks, buy well-made overcoats, and eat "authentic" Jewish, Chinese, or Italian food?

And that's really the question: is this about slumming as a mode of consuming the Other, in which case sex tourism is a chapter and slumming tours are another? Or is there so much about sex tourism (not just prostitution, but nightclubs, bathhouses, opium dens as locations for the "white slavery" trade, the fascination of people like Hapgood with "free love" on the Lower East Side) that I should just stick with that? If it's the former, then there are several books I need to consider: Cocks' Doing the Town, Erenberg' Steppin' Out, more guidebooks, etc. If it's the latter, then I really think I need to think about this in terms of narratives, as in Walkowitz' City ofDreadful Delight.

What's more, I need to dig in and figure out what my larger question is, as well as how it fits into a larger historiography. Is this about modernity, ethnicity, sex, the creation of a 20th century middle class, what?