Abstract
This paper redefines sex in tourism by introducing cyber-sexual leisure – digitally mediated and emotionally ambivalent erotic engagements that unfold through platforms like Grindr during travel. Drawing on interviews with queer male tourists, we examine how fragmented, gamified, and affectively ambivalent interactions produce symbolic erotic pleasure, even in the absence of physical sex. Moving beyond outcome-oriented and corporeal understandings, sexual experience is conceptualised as a processual continuum encompassing anticipation, interaction, and emotional aftermath. A recursive model is proposed comprising four stages: digital engagement, affective and erotic investment, emotional and/or physical outcomes, and re-engagement or withdrawal. These dynamics are intensified by tourism conditions – mobility, anonymity, novelty, and compressed time – while also shaped by inequalities structuring visibility, desirability, and vulnerability in contemporary tourism.
•Rehumanises sex in tourism through emotional ambivalence and affect.•Moves beyond physical sex via digitally mediated intimacy.•Introduces a processual model of cyber-sexual leisure.•Shows how tourism conditions intensify digital erotic experience.•Positions platforms as infrastructures of intimacy and desire in tourism.