Exploited exports

Planning a spot of winter sun? Seduced by brochures displaying a bronzed couple strolling hand in hand across a beach?

Beware. You have fallen not only for sea and sun but for sexual stereotyping.

A paper delivered to a tourism conference at the University of Northumbria this week accuses certain travel brochures of depicting men and women "in clearly defined gender roles which tended to reinforce a traditional, patriarchal division of labour, leisure and power".

But this is just the tip of the sand dune. Going on holiday at all could mean surrendering to sexism.

The authors continue: "Tourism is an area of social and economic life in which prevalent gender roles and gender relations are not simply reflected, they are established and reinforced, made and re-made, distorted and exploited."

Shirley Valentine, eat your heart out.