Yves here. I find it hard to know where to begin with this piece from my vantage in Asia’s sex capital. It’s stunning to see this author appear to believe that the biggest problem with “international dating” is that it caters to men with what the author sees as having retrograde gender role expectations and therefore helps perpetuate them. How much of this “international dating” is flat out sex trafficking?
Here, more or less same aged Asian woman with non-Asian man pairs are vanishingly rare. The typical age gap looks to be 20 years or more, including apparent settled couples.
Foreign men (which here includes Chinese) picking off comely local ladies (and boys) may also contribute to what would be an understandable culture of resentment. Even the farangs call them “sexpats”.
I have long-standing expat friends who complain that the government puts them through more hoops than other countries do for similarly-situated immigrants (for instance, a mandatory every-90-day check-in at Immigration even for very long-term visas). There are also many many many sad stories on YouTube and in agony aunt columns of women succeeding in getting a man to fall for them, suddenly making money demands that keep escalating (typical pretexts are health or business emergencies in the family). When the man can’t or won’t pay, the woman dumps him.
And even when the boyfriend/husband proves to be well off enough to be a keeper, few foreigners adequately understand that the woman’s loyalty will always be to her family first. When an (actually very nice and good looking) local bloke realized that after having his local lady who seemed genuinely attached to him dump him on the orders of her family for a very wealthy Austrian, he resolved to date only orphans after that. His partner is a very attractive Myanmar woman who was sold into slavery by her family and one of the very few to escape on her own.
So shorter: the Disnification of this phenomenon really bugs me. It’s as if the author chose to focus on the prettiest-looking manifestation of this phenomenon so as not to have to consider the depth and range of exploitation that routinely occurs.
By Julia Meszaro, Associate Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University-Commerce. Originally published at The Conversation
Fifteen years ago, when I started studying the international dating industry, few people took the subject seriously. The term “mail-order bride” was treated as a punch line – something outdated, associated with lonely men and poor women who migrated from Eastern Europe, Asia or other places to meet their new husbands in the United States.
But I’ve seen firsthand how ideas about gender, intimacy and global mobility have shifted. In 2025, a man going abroad to look for love might call himself a “passport bro” – and celebrate his lifestyle on TikTok.
This new generation of young men may have rebranded international dating, but they reflect an age-old theme. Social and economic changes shape how people negotiate love and labor across borders, as I explore in my 2025 book, “Economies of Gender.” In a chaotic world, some men and women turn to traditional gender roles as a source of seeming stability – and that often leads them abroad.
Old Industry, New Look
The term “mail-order bride” dates back to the 19th century, when so-called frontier brides advertised themselves in newspapers to single men in the American West. After the Civil War, when large numbers of men had died on the East Coast, some women saw migrating to the frontier to marry someone sight unseen as a way to secure stability. That narrative still lingers today in Western novels and films.
The modern international matchmaking industry, however, took shape in the 1970s, when catalogs of mostly Filipino women’s photos and addresses were sold to American men. After being pen pals, men would travel to the Philippines to meet and decide whether they wanted to get married. Some scholars consider this a form of human trafficking, but that has been challenged by other scholarship.
These catalogs emerged as more U.S. women were entering the workforce and earning their own money. Some men sought wives abroad who they believed would embody more traditional values – prioritizing domestic work and devoting themselves to men and children.
Over the next few decades, large numbers of stable, well-paying factory jobs disappeared, further challenging some men’s view of themselves as breadwinners.
By 2010, the catalog system had moved online and expanded into a global industry that generated US$2 billion dollars per year. Today, it takes many forms. Most of the industry is online, with email and chat correspondence that charges men but not women. Some agencies provide in-person tours for male clients, and there are higher-end, more personalized matchmaking services as well.
From Taboo to Televised
What was once stigmatized has become more normalized through reality TV. TLC’s hit series “90 Day Fiance,” which came on air in 2014, has transformed international dating into a lucrative entertainment franchise.
The show and its numerous spin-offs show couples navigating the K-1 visa process, which gives 90 days to marry after a partner enters the country. If the wedding is called off, the foreign fiance or fiancee must return to their country of origin.
Many of the featured couples met randomly, in person. A significant number, however, connected through online dating or language-learning sites. Numerous couples’ storylines highlight family and friends of the American partner who question the girlfriend’s or boyfriend’s motives, accusing them of faking love for financial gain and access to a green card.
Audiences might watch the show for drama or love stories, but the underlying themes mirror what I’ve seen in the field: relationships shaped by economic inequality and migration, with women often exchanging emotional, domestic and sexual labor in return for financial stability.
Rise of the ‘Passport Bros’
In recent years, the mail-order bride industry has gotten a cultural revamp, with younger and more diverse men who identify as “passport bros.” This crowd is typically younger than men participating in the commercial international dating industry and more likely to identify as men of color.
These men are less likely to pay for formal dating and introduction services. They travel on their own, using free dating apps such as Tinder to meet local women – mostly in Colombia, Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
Passport bros say they travel abroad to meet women who are more traditional than the ones they meet at home. Many of the American men I interviewed between 2010 and 2022 talked about Western women as too focused on career, which challenged their idea of themselves as financial providers.
Similarly, my research in Ukraine, Colombia and the Philippines shows that many men using international dating services are motivated by more than just love or cultural curiosity. They are responding to a changing world in which women’s financial independence has challenged traditional male roles. For some, traveling abroad is a way to reassert control and to find relationships that reaffirm a sense of masculine identity.
In my interviews, American men looking abroad talked about feeling empowered and having choices, while being ignored in the U.S. dating market. Some recognized that their relative wealth is the cause of this. As one man on a romance tour in Ukraine told me in 2012, “I am here to exchange my financial stability for some Ukrainian woman’s youth and beauty, and I am OK with that.”
Appeal of ‘Tradition’
Together, many of these daters illustrate the global pattern I’ve seen across my years of fieldwork: anxiety fuels a longing for traditionalism.
What appears to be a return to the past is, in reality, an adaptation to the present. The romance tours, the “90 Day Fiance” phenomenon and the passport bros speak to how people use relationships to navigate the economic instability of the modern world. Gender roles become a way to reestablish order and identity.
In the past two decades, rising inflation, stagnant wages and housing shortages have left many people, especially younger generations, feeling economically trapped. The COVID-19 pandemic deepened these inequalities, forcing millions out of the workforce and amplifying the strain of unpaid caregiving, particularly for women.
In times of uncertainty, societies often retreat to familiar narratives. Traditional gender roles offer an illusion of stability and order, even if they reinforce inequality. The fantasy of the dependable male provider and the nurturing homemaker resurfaces because it seems to resolve anxieties that the modern economy has made harder to bear.
As a sociologist, I study these dynamics not just to understand dating trends but to trace how societies reproduce inequality through intimacy. Until our society addresses stagnant wages, rising costs and the erosion of social safety nets, I believe nostalgia for a clear, gendered hierarchy will continue. In this hierarchy, men are guaranteed women’s labor, and women hold out hope for economic security – which is often seen as romance.
Typos are usually not my thing – but the last name of the author is Mészáros not Mészáro_, which means “butcher” in Hungarian.
And thanks for the other kind of topic.
p.s. An older flick on this subject – also mentioned in the footnotes of above linked study – with a Nicole Kidman and a Ben Chaplin, “BIRTHDAY GIRL” (2001)
trailer 2 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRHxEY8O2GY
I copied and pasted from The Conversation, so those errors are in copyrighted text that I cannot change.
Been happening forever, from both genders:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/08/meet-middle-aged-women-who-are-britains-female-sex-tourists
https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/sex-on-the-beach-channel-4-documentary-gambia-holiday-british-women-tourism-seyi-rhodes-664083
A friend of mine calls herself a ‘passport ho’. She is Viet-EU citizen and married a close friend who wanted easier visa access for his business in Vietnam. In return, she gets half his property if he falls off a scooter in HCM (a high likelihood). It operates all all sorts of levels.
I’d also add to that the phenomenon of the Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking festival, well known as a home of vice for American women with a strange attraction for Irish farmers.
Here comes the dating singularity. How much do strong and independent Western women still require “sprinkle sprinkle” dependency, and whatever else? There will be much to be bugged about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j3NC3RYKLw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmGITQjf95A
So the NY Times in the past 6 or 9 months had a story about these passport bros, not using the name, that were getting lured in by women on Tinder, and getting robbed or killed in foreign countries. Oops.
You gotta be doubly wary!
I agree that this short discussion does not go deep enough, and truly ‘Disnifies’ the problem. Mara Hvistendahl, in ‘Unnatural Selection’ showed that one of the consequences of the one child policy in China was sex-selective abortions. That created a sex imablance in China given the extant social preference for boys.
Fast forward, and women from Vietnam and other places in Asia are being trafficked or moving voluntarily to China. Since the one child policy had been in effect for sevreal decades, I think this is a well-established phenomenon. IIRC, Hvistendahl documented how the trafficking/movement had been formalized. So it isn’t even just ‘passport bros’ from nominally Western nations that are engaged in this. Perhpaps Meszaros’ book dives more deeply than a short op-ed essay. You would hope so.
The Myanmar woman I mentioned had been taken in by an aunt after her father died and her mother had then shacked up with father’s best friend, which was apparently considered so scandalous that the aunt’s family succeeded in running the mother out town, which allowed them to seize the house.
The niece was treated badly, not just by virtue of having been taken in but also being comparatively dark-skinned, which is taken as ugly. She was sold as a day-time worker, night time sex slave to local Chinese. Had she been considered to be prettier, she might have been sold as a garden-variety sex object to China.
My first reaction was, “Why is Yves sharing this trivial piece?”
Then it dawned on me that the latest Epstein email dump confirms that the biological and psychological imperative suffered by most men (and some women) to f*ck anything that will hold still is at the core of all economic and political activity. Pathetic men seeking money and power in the forlorn hope that a series of feckless gold-diggers will expose their dewy bits appears to be the theme throughout.
It’s all sex-trafficking. We are indeed nothing but a pack of naked apes…
You pretty much summed up what I was going to say. Humans are still subject to their evolutionary, biological and instinctive drives. Human mentality, biology, and instincts are in many ways incompatible with modern mass society (but that is a whole other can of worms).
When small groups of humans are given obscene levels of power and resources, it drives them mad. (hubris, pleonexia etc.) This appears to be almost universally true.
Some might say this sort of outlook is cynical and dark, but that is based on a cultural myth that humans are created in the image of a deity, different from and superior to, the rest of the animal kingdom. Destroying the rest of the natural world for the service of god-like men, is somehow justified.
Calling humans what they are: animals, uppity apes, and victims of their own silliness is just being accurate and humble – not cynical. We humans “aint all that”, The ancients tried to teach us this: figures like Narcissus, Icarus etc. come to mind. Certain Roman emperors believed that they became “gods” only to find that they turned into a pile of dust just like everyone else. But who reads history anymore?
My word, David and Jonny summed up my long time thoughts and observations on this subject very articulately. Thank you for your comments!
Quoth Yves, “…[T]he woman’s loyalty will always be to her family first.”
My Taiwanese wife of nearly two decades calls her mother every night, and travels back to Taiwan* every year for winter break and summer break. Fortunately her family is satisfied – and even interested – in the American branch of the family.
Can confirm on the “getting used” bit – I’m constantly bombarded with demands to help her edit and rewrite various bits, including the English-language synopsis that was a required part of her Masters thesis in Taiwan. Took some time to convince her that “feral” was not really a good synonym for “wild” when it came to discussions of yam monocropping. But to this day the phrase “feral yams” pops up in conversation now and again.
*Can we go back to “Formosa,” since I’m tired of trying to explain to Americans that it’s the island in the NE Pacific, not the nation in SE Asia.
Yves, your onsite anecdata was far more informative and interesting than the professorial bunkum it introduced, restating the age-old obvious. Like everything else, sex in action is ever more brazen on both sides. Like the olden days.
Has anyone else noticed that the US media is obsessing about sexual antics of Epstein, and is quietly ignoring the Mossad connection? Or is that just me?
The San Francisco Standard article from today’s links is excellent. There are 20 000 e-mails in the latest dump and I have yet to hear or read the first reporter to claim “I have read them all.”
You mean just like the US media ignores that both Epstein and Trump were in the business of facilitating money laundering and tax evasion in order to fund their predilections for women of negotiable affection?
I’d assumed it was general knowledge, but over the weekend I was talking to two very clued in and well read leftist friends of mine in England, and both of them seemed genuinely shocked when I pointed out the obvious mossad connection (well, obvious to anyone who knows anything about Ghislane Maxwell).
As a sociologist, I study these dynamics not just to understand dating trends but to trace how societies reproduce inequality through intimacy.
Hmmm. I suspect that author Meszaros hasn’t spent much time reading the timeless writer Colette, whose understanding of emotion and sentimental education is still unsurpassed.
And as Yves Smith points out, the factors involved are more than complicated. We are talking about human beings who may want to marry, about opportunities for change, about situations in which the man, too, may have limited choice.
A fascinating part of U.S. history as pertains to Hawaii:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_bride
I hesitate to recommend Liza Dalby’s wonderful memoir (and doctoral thesis) Geisha to Meszaros. In the world of geisha, it isn’t always clear who is equal and intimate with whom. And sometimes people want to or have a need for a love affair (without the sociologist taking notes): I’m thinking of Yasunari Kawabata’s remarkable novel Snow Country.
“few foreigners adequately understand that the woman’s loyalty will always be to her family first” — but if she is married and has children with her foreign husband, that’s her family too… how is that solved then? She could be a tool of her parents, but the parents of her husband also become her “parents” to whom she needs to be filial, no? They must be also loyal to their husbands (whether this upheld strictly or not is a different topics, at least it is a strong expectation) — which maybe what is the attraction to the western men. That “local bloke” who dates orphans does not seem to be interested in forming a family, so why should those women whose goal is to form a family be loyal to him? Life is short, beauty is fleeting and so is the childbearing age. I hazard to guess that even orphan ladies will dump him given another bloke interested in marriage. Marriage is still valued there — which is another attraction to the western men.
It is human to form a family, seek companionship and — yes — sex. I hazard a guess that exploitation is a small part of the overall phenomenon, reserved for the wealthy and bored. A majority is looking for true connection, perhaps in a hopelessly pathetic and incoherent way.
I guess what western men may not understand is that in the East his wife’s parents become his parents and he has a filial duty to them, just like his wife has a filial duty to his parents. If she is taking care of her parents, she will take care of his parents and him (health and wealth permitting). The East is focused on the family and ancestors, the West has little cross-generational connection (except for superwealthy families and royals) and raises its eyes to the divine entity that has no familial or other connection to us whatsoever — in this way we are always alone…
We watch a lot of Korean TV drama, and of course you don’t know how much is caricature or stereotype played for amusement, but story lines often involve the woman getting married and her father telling her now she is on her husband’s family register so don’t think about coming back here. A common theme is the wife of the first-born son is essentially a slave to his parents (the redeeming grace is that the younger sons’ wives have lower “rank” in the family and must cater to the first son’s wife).
Another common theme is that for the elite/chaebol, marriage is a business, nothing personal.
In the US Navy, back when we had our bases at Subic and Clark it was not unusual for enlisted to marry Filipina women. For officers at least in my day there was somewhat of a “Madame Butterfly/South Pacific” vibe about it.
Thai TV shows are very different from Korean TV dramas — much less hand holding… There are also YouTube channels. One interesting one is Dianna in Korea — an African American woman married to a Korean Samsung engineer and living in Korea with her husband and their two children. His family is majorly involved in their lives.
No, if there is a conflict between the family and the husband, the family comes first. And this is not duty to parents. The duties extend to other family members.
The family is the safety net, no matter what. The husband can die or be wiped out financially. This is very well understood.
You are right. Even the official divorse rate (which is likely an underestimate) in Thailand is raising rapidly and is now near those in the Western countries. One of the reasons — economic difficulties in the resent years.
When in doubt, marry an electrician.
I think it’s more objective to look at the issue through genetic anthropology. No one remembers whether the Neolithic passport bros who rode into Europe on horseback and wiped out 16 out of 17 male lineages were culturally out of step (pun intended) with the more egalitarian sexual mores of their time. It happened, and we are their progeny.
The question is why these migrations happen. I think there are two types of males: the LBH’s (Losers Back Home) and the sugar daddies (harem seekers). If there is a sudden rise or appearance of both abroad, it’s likely due to high competitive intrasexual competition in the West and rising sexual inequality as a result. Young Western men go abroad for fairer competition, and the older men go abroad to exploit the opportunities their fathers never had.
If these pairings fail to produce offspring, then it is relatively inconsequential and just another feature of modern indulgent consumerism. That is, they are more transactional than relational, more of a concierge service than the formation of a social unit. Could we call it Third Wave colonization? Far more atomized and thus far less consequential.
That reminds me of the probably apocryphal story of the South American who visits Spain and upbraids a local for having ‘invaded my land and enslaved the people’. The reply was ‘nope – it was your ancestors who did that, mine stayed at home’.
One curiosity to me about the overall dynamic is that it is clearly not a purely economic or opportunistic phenomenon. For example, if you go back to the later 20th Century, there was a very strong economic dichotomy between the core countries of Europe and the poorer peripheral ones, and yet while it certainly happened, there was no major phenomenon of, say, Germans going to Greece to find wives, or vice versa.
I think a much underlooked element is female preferences. Asian women I’ve talked to about this have talked openly about wanting western partners because they feel it would help them escape the more restrictive aspects of Asian culture (in particular, the very impenetrable levels of family/income hierarchies). As one Thai woman said to me ‘In Thailand I’m the third daughter of a poor farmer from the north, when I go to the west, I’m just a woman’.
It may not be familial. I do not even remotely speak Thai, but I can hear the difference between a “hi so” Bangkok accent, versus Issan (near Laos, seen as downclass) and non-Issan country accents.
Many years ago, on my first trip across SE Asia, I cycled across north Thailand through Laos. On the quiet roads there was a constant ‘Sawadee/Zapadee’ refrain from the children as I cycled past. It noticeably changed gradually in an arc over many miles – at the time I was unaware of just how linguistically connected north Thailand is to Laos (I’d assumed they were entirely different languages). I assume locals have a finely attuned ear for accent cues and what it means for someones status.
This, of course, applies to all countries and cultures, but its easy to forget as few foreigners in any land have the ability of a native to subconsciously label people according to very subtle linguistic cues.
I use the “polite” form of Korean because I find the conjugation somewhat easier. It’s also generally what Korean women use.
Korean (like Japanese) is also a monotone language, but different regions will have different “patters” to the speech. The further south you go, the more pronounced the patter. Pusan, naturally, has a very noticeable up and down.
As a native English speaker I don’t do the monotone very well, but I still tend to intonate words, making it sound like I have a patter.
In short, despite being a Very Old American Male …. I sound like a girl from Pusan.
The current demographic and mating dynamics suggest that the competition factor is overrated. Focusing only on the very best phenotypes does not invite competition, really. Migrations happen when there is not much to compete for, for both sides:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zWBPAtvg1dA
This was a reply to Palaver.