I previously had some brazilian friends, while working in Rio. The women loved foreign men, particularly northern european men and explained it to me as not only an economic thing but also that brazilian men treated them with disrespect which I witnessed. While, of course, you cannot generalise, its true that many mail order brides come from societies where women are treated very unequally and they do not have the same economic opportunities. Women who enter international marriages are more vulnerable than usual to abuse and control from abusive men.

Of course many people have successful international marriages. I am happily married, but I cannot imagine being married to someone whom I could barely communicate with, who was 20 years older than me and physically repulsive and upon whom i depended for a visa for my economic survival. My marriage is a partnership among equals, and while we depend on each other its a mutual thing and we take care of each other. I think that for a psychologically healthy and happy marriage, it has to be based on mutual respect and equality. I think that in a mail order situation, that would simply not work.

You forget to mention that personal ad columns in newspapers and magazines were a very popular way of meeting eligible singles before the Internet. These venues are the predecessor to modern online dating sites.

The line gets blurred when many of the “type” of women who “fit the profile” of the “mail order bride” also advertise in a more traditional dating column or site. For example, I used to see a lot of Filipinas advertise in the Sheela Wood column, a newspaper personal column published in supermarket magazines. They also advertise in Christian Singles International, a religious matchmaking service that features Christian introductions without any mention of race or ethnicity. They were a magazine personals column before they went online in the mid 90s, and are still online today.

Furthermore, all of the abuses and other issues that so-called “mail order bride” services have been branded with exist across the spectrum of dating venues. In 2007, Jana Claudia Minendez of Peru was murdered by her American husband whom she met through Match.com. Her husband, William Tricket Smith, had a history of violence and a criminal record. You can read the story and comments here: http://www.livinginperu.com/news/4627

In short, you can’t separate “mail order brides” or the services that feature them from the rest of the dating world as easily as you think. To try to regulate or ban one to the exclusion of the rest would create too much controversy, and to restrict all online matchmaking or personals advertising would create the kind of police state that no one would go for. Including, I hope, you!

Constantly referring to this activity as “ordering” women would be like me referring to you as a “writer”.

Your mention there are no “mail order groom” websites as a means of suggesting that only the men do the choosing shows your ignorance of international dating. Many men do indeed post their profiles on websites seeking romance abroad. One woman who responded to my ad and who I spent time with on two continents was an Asian with an Australian MBA who directed an arm of the World Bank. Later I chose to marry a woman – who also answered my ad – engineer and project manager of multi-million dollar construction projects all over Central Asia and the Middle East. Unfortunately, those who analyze and condemn international relationships never even consider men like me or women like these, prefering instead to claim – always without experience or scientific studies – that the women are desparate and impoverished and the men some sort of losers/abusers. Frankly, I have never dated an American woman as intelligent, educated and bilingual as the women I have dated abroad. And my wife immigrated here with a six-figure bank account. But it would be too radical a concept for some to imagine that we married out of love.

One of the scientific studies always ignored by those who criticize this is a 1999 INS study written by Robert Scholes, himself a feminist, who found that the abuse rate in international marriages fomented by the internet is 1/7 the abuse rate of domestic marriages. And this study also found that the divorce rate is 20%. That fact alone is reason that, if people would consider this issue rationally and not emotionally, international marriages should be supported.

I am always disappointed that those who analyze this activity rely on reports of feminist groups and other ersatz authors (I think some humorist was quoted above), most or all of whom have never even met a happily married international couple, instead of relying on unbiased academic reports by researchers (and feminists) such as Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jennifer Patico of the University of Georgia or Professor of Anthropology Nicole Constable of the University of Pittsburg, each of whom has independently interviewed hundreds of foreign women, American men, dating company owners, women’s group representatives and government officials and written extensively about their findings. (Note: 100% of the womens’ groups attacking international marriage NEVER interview the men involved, happily-married women or dating company owners.) Here’s a few quotes from Constable’s book “Romance on a Global Stage”.

“Men and their perspectives, I learned, are – like the women – often misunderstood or glossed in stark and stereotypical terms.”

“I have come to see the men involved in correspondence relationships as a very diverse group of people; many are decent and well-intentioned human beings who have learned a great deal in the process of their relationships.”

“Many went to great lengths to ensure their partner’s comfort and happiness in the United States.”

“Troubling to some critics is that many women who opt to marry US men express a preference to remain at home and not to work if there is no financial incentive to do so, and a willingness to define themselves primarily as wives and mothers.”

“Mail order brides are often depicted as buying into images of their own subservience and marrying out of economic depression. These views are seriously flawed for their orientalist, essentializing and universalizing tendencies, which reflect many now-outdated feminist views of the 1970s.”

“Anti-trafficking NGOs often include mail order brides among the ranks of trafficked women. Definitions of mail order brides, as discussed below, are often so broad as to be meaningless.”

“Women may quite literally put their best face forward, but the market metaphor [that women are being sold] should not be taken literally in this context. Would this metaphor be applied to western women and men who use dating services or place personal ads, or does it reflect more pejorative assumptions about foreign or Third World women?”

“Assuming that Asian women are objects who are bought and sold…is not only a bad feminist argument, but it is one that fits with the most demeaning and essentializing images of mail order brides. Such images rob women of their ability to express intelligence, resistance, creativity, independence, dignity and strength.”

“Overall I argue that women involved in correspondence relationships are not merely pawns of global political economy or the victims of sexual exploitation, nor are men simply the agents of western sexual imperialism.”

Thank you for your response. I think the key is that if “mail order bride” sites were banned, as some feminist and left-wing groups have called for, the sites would bill themselves as dating websites, with maybe a few changes along the way. So in that way they’d be harder to either ban or brand as racist.

I suppose one difference between a mail order bride site as opposed to a dating site is that mail-order bride sites “offer” women exclusively (I’ve yet to see a serious mail order groom site!) and that they often bill the women featured as “subservient” or “wifely.”

Well, maybe dating websites have taken the place of church events, schools, etcetera, but even before these came about there were “matchmaking” services, even though they were generally informal.

Emilia Liz

So can you condemn one without condemning the other? Are both racist? If not, why not?

I was reading something recently about the rising percentage of wedded couples who met through dating websites. I put it down to the breakdown of more traditional methods of meeting… through church events, through schools, etc… but I didn’t give it much thought…

You do like tackling different subjects, Emilia Liz!!

I myself like Russian classical music and literature. Maybe that is one thing that might attract Western men to Russian culture and from there its people.