To dislike men who seek out foreign brides

[Hartley99]

There are quite a few documentaries about this on YouTube. The guy is usually ugly or boring or nerdy (usually all three). He claims to be ‘looking for love,’ when in reality, of course, he’s looking for a sexual partner. So he goes online and searches for girls in poor countries - often Thailand or Russia. In almost every case the girl is younger and/or much more attractive than him.

Recently, there was a documentary on channel 4, and I ended up having an argument with someone at work about it. They thought the whole thing was ‘sweet’ and funny and couldn’t see anything wrong. To them it made sense. The guy got to have sex with a girl out of his league, and the girl got to move to a richer country with more opportunities. To me it just seemed revolting. However you spin it, they are taking advantage of her poverty. They know that she wouldn’t look twice at them in any other circumstance. Apparently, after the invasion of Ukraine there was a massive spike in men looking for Ukrainian brides online. I mean that says it all. Or am I being uptight and judgemental?

How is it exploitation or abuse for somebody that hasn't found love/relationship in the UK to travel to another country and seek it there?

I went to Indonesia on business. A colleague stepped off the plane and updated his tinder to say he was there for a week on business. His phone didn't stop buzzing with matches.

My H had a coworker who married a woman from the Philippines, H made a nasty joke about it once and I reminded him coworker is a very decent guy but def not attractive. He and his wife have been happy together for years now. This man would never attract a local woman half as attractive as his wife.

Both had ulterior motives I guess but in the end they’ve been happy, have wonderful kids and she runs a small business so together they built a nice life. It seems icky at first glance but in their case its not imo. They are close in age so I don’t get a pervy vibe from him.

I’d say its not gross in every case, some are but many are genuinely nice guys who can’t meet women, our culture is so focused on looks its tough for a really short or ugly man (and woman) to date.

why did his phone not stop buzzing with matches? Why was he so unlucky at home, but oh so popular there? Was there some kind of cosmic event on the plane that made him extra attractive? Or did he attempt to capitalize on his relative privilege?

He was there for a week. He said he was there for a week.

Maybe some girls simply wanted a bit of short-term fun with a westerner?

It's a conservative country and westerners are probably a safe bet in terms of anybody finding out what you're up to in your private life.

Why is everything seen through this prism of poor passive victim? Why do you not credit these women with any agency whatsoever?

You can believe that if you wish.
Since you've edited, who said women are always the victim? Two things can be true. Men can fly all over the world to take advantage of women. And women can choose to let them. One of those choices is obviously more free than the other.

@5128gap

As I said, I couldn’t be bothered, no one else questioned my comment and a lot actually agreed so you really need to accept that you are not very open minded and cannot see all sides of a situation….this back and forth with you is getting quite boring now so I’m going to leave it there as It would take too long to explain to you

I've lived in the Far East and there's definite cache to being 6'1" with blonde hair and blue eyes. That's a fact.

Having more female attention than I got in the UK wasn't abuse or exploitative.

Was your colleague also 6'1" with blonde hair and blue eyes? Or is the common denominator something else?
Being in receipt of female attention isn't exploitative, no. What you do with the attention often is.

Searching online as the OP describes is very different from a holiday romance, if we can call it that. I think there is a seediness involved.

I'm a man and this is exactly how I feel, to the extent that I feel bad for being so judgmental of these guys.

They probably feel sorry for me and think I must be lonely and frustrated. I would feel more lonely in a relationship with someone I couldn't really chat to. Let's face it, sex lasts fifteen minutes including taking your socks off. What do you do for the rest of the evening? Go into separate rooms and watch TV / internet in different languages? You would get more companionship from a flatmate.

At the risk of lowering the tone and giving an entire website the ick, in my experience men invest more of their pride in having sex with another person. The idea of being (ahem) "self-sufficient" in that regard is more of a stigma than it is for women. Men who subscribe to that belief think that other men will be impressed with and jealous of their much-younger partner from a poorer country.

My colleague was around 5'10" with auburn hair. That's still tall by Indonesian standards and a 'non-standard' hair colour.

I think you need to accept that in a lot of Asian countries Western men are considered attractive just for being Western.

I don't really blame men, that lack female attention in the UK, going out there to try their luck. If they find love, good luck to them.

(Again, i must emphasise that I'm not talking about creepy men looking for a very young bride/servant)

Surely these men must sense that the woman isn’t attracted to them. No doubt in some cases the men are OK looking and the women do develop an attraction or affection for them, but I’m sure in a lot of cases (if the men in the documentaries are anything to go by) the women find them repulsive. In an earlier post, someone mentions being in Thailand and watching a chubby 60-something with his young Thai wife. She writes that they seemed happy, but then he leant in for a kiss and she caught a momentary look of disgust on the girl’s face. Now surely these men must sense that. They must catch their pretty young Ukrainian wife out the corner of their eye as they prepare for sex. I would feel such self-loathing. I’d much rather be lonely and sexually frustrated than live like that. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror.

Thats interesting @PaperDoIIs because I despise the sex industry. Every single aspect of it. You comparing every woman from Southeast Asia or any other non western country, and the choices they make to a 'happy hooker' says far more about you than my opinion says about me. Yet more misogyny.
Edited due to spag!

I think you are missing one key thing - it's not just that they are lonely and frustrated, it's that they desire status and respect.

Some of these men genuinely believe that by walking around with a 25yo babe on their arm they will be admired. And of course their friends and family, if they are well-meaning and kind, will compliment his new partner and mention her beauty because it's the one thing you can sincerely praise in someone with whom you've got nothing in common.

I compared the arguments .

Which are identical.

It's a choice.
Who are you to judge?
Everyone gets what they want.
It's a choice.
Poor men and their needs.( there's support for men who can't have relationships due to disabilities to use prostitutes , and for their carers to facilitate that).
What about the ones that like/want it?
It's a choice.

And so on. Identical.

A lot of the comments on this thread just seem like schoolyard bullying IMHO.

Yes, and unbelievable sense of knowing all about something you know nothing about.

Who knows the truth about any relationship/marriage outside your own?

It's all assumptions, prejudices, racist tropes. Fucking awful.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe I overestimate these men. I assume that they all know people either laugh at them or despise them, but maybe they’re so deluded they think that we admire them. Maybe some people do admire them.

@Abhannmor Yes.

I agree that many relationships are transactional or at least have a transactional element to them, but what I think is disturbing in these cases is the absence of palatable alternatives. A woman in a wealthy country with a decent social security system may choose a relationship with someone older and better off for financial reasons but at least if she chooses not to do so there are other ok choices available to her.

You’ve said what everyone thinks but is unwilling to admit.

I know several men who have married Filipinas. The men tend to be unattractive, older, and want a housemaid/easy sex. As a bystander it is icky.
It’s off-putting when one party is so poor that they would do anything to get out of it, and the other party is so unattractive that local women wouldn’t give him the time of day. Interestingly it’s mainly Filipino mail order brides that I know of.

I think Northeast Asian and South Asian women tend to be too conservative and generally wealthier/more educated and don’t tend to fall into this category.

Ukrainian women it is hard to tell, unless you personally know the couple. Repulsive to take advantage of women fleeing war zones!

If the couple are similar in age, finances, education and ability to speak in a common language, I doubt people would find the situation repulsive. (E.g. White/Asian uni student couples who happen to be of different ethnicities).

I love when the men come and announce their presence on these threads, with declarations of how they are oh so different and us women just don't understand.

Strange that no men have done that, then.

Agreed.

Yea it’s really odd. Very common the other way round too. Mostly, older white women from the UK or America, going to the Caribbean and Africa in search of a ‘toy boy’. It can be really exploitative but from both sides tbh, very transactional as someone said. Sad for everyone really

I the case of the women you reference, why is it often Caribbean and African men they go for?

If it's that they're poor and 'easy prey' is that not the same for Thai men, for example?