"MAIL ORDER BRIDES" DO *NOT* EXIST!

[ROGUEAGENT]

Okay, that's it. It is time, once and for all, to take a dagger and stab through the heart the phrase "mail order brides" until the phrase finally dies once and for all the horrific death it deserves. "Mail Order Brides" do NOT exist! There are some writers who claim that businesses which promote so-called "mail order brides" - and those who use their services - may be guilty of racism or sexism. On the contrary I believe that those people who merely use the phrase "mail order brides" are unwittingly promoting the same racism and sexism they proclaim to oppose.

There are derogatory terms used by some people to describe blacks and people of other races. It could be argued that these terms communicate meaning because other people know what race is being to referred to. I say that if a term is essentially derogatory it should not be used unless of course your sole purpose is to insult the group referred to. "Mail order brides" is derogatory. Worse yet, it is meaningless. There may have been a time in some countries where women could have been selected and then brought into another country without any direct personal contact but instead merely on the basis of photographs. Well, those days of lax or non-existent immigration standards are long gone. You must see in person the future spouse. Nobody can be ordered like merchandise. Nevertheless the phrase "mail order brides" still persists.

"mail order brides" is a meaningless, inaccurate phrase

It could be argued that the phrase refers to women interested in future matrimony whose pictures are in a photo catalog. There are several problems with this. First of all, if a western woman has her photo in a catalog we don't call her a "mail order bride". We just say she is a woman whose photo is in a matrimonial publication. Second, it is a fact that introduction agencies in Russia, South America, and other places have long offered services of putting men's photos into catalogs, magazines, and newspapers. Perhaps these methods are less publicized or less popular but the fact remains they have existed for many years. Nobody has called these men "mail order husbands" because the phrase would be shown for how derogatory and meaningless it is. Finally, in the Internet age there are websites where women's photos and profiles are shown online and the contact information - not the women - is available to be sold. But this is nothing more than online dating. If a foreign woman (or man) uses Love@AOL, Match.com, Friendfinder.com, Amigos.com etc. nobody calls these "mail order bride" services. It is merely online dating gone international. And once again, when men use these services to meet women (foreign or otherwise) nobody calls them "mail order husbands". Probably over 90% of all international dating and introductions are web-based. Most of these services never used physical "catalogs" as the chosen form of media. Many of these services make equal provision for providing the photos and contact information of men.

"mail order brides" is a derogatory phrase

It goes without saying that if "mail order brides" is a meaningless and inaccurate phrase it is on its way to becoming derogatory as well.
It doesn't take much research about women who get the courage to post personal photos and information with introduction or dating services to discover that they dislike the connotations of the "mail order brides" phrase and disavow being one. Of course they say they aren't "mail order brides" because "mail order brides" do NOT exist! And if they did exist, the phrase is still inherently insulting. Why is it that if you are from Europe or an English speaking country you are a foreign bride but if you are from Russia, Phillipines, Colombia or various other poorer countries you are a "mail order bride"? Is it that people who use the phrase "mail order brides" have a secret disdain for women from those countries? The connotation is that if you are from a poorer country you are desperate, otherwise you are not. Women aren't given credit for the huge sacrifice of leaving their culture, language, friends, family and work to come to another country because of a man they are in love with. Some are desperate, others are not, just like in western countries. Regardless of whether good or bad the desire for women to "marry up" (marry men of higher socio-economic status) is hardly confined to women in poorer countries nor women who use dating/introduction services, foreign or otherwise. I question the assumption that a foreign bride from a poorer country is automatically *assumed* to be desperate (in other words a victim ready to be exploited or ready to scam her future husband), rather than a woman looking for love, a willing participant in a process that will hopefully improve her life in important ways. The vast majority of foreign brides have reason to be insulted by this assumption. By inference, this assumption is insulting to the men because it implies they are exploiters or fools, or that they (the men) are the desperate ones. In this way, the "mail order bride" term is insulting to men too.

Conclusion

"Mail order brides" do NOT exist! The term is meaningless, inaccurate, insulting, and misleading. Even writers who use the term freely often put it into quotes because they realize the term has no clear meaning. Unfortunately, well-intentioned people (including those who are looking for foreign brides as well as those who run introduction services) sometimes stumble into using the term because of laziness or lack of awareness. Now you are aware. I call upon the people who read this forum to stop using the term "mail order brides" and instead refer to "foreign brides". "Mail order bride agencies" therefore don't exist either. There are only foreign introduction or matchmaking services. Or just call them online dating services.

[surfscum]

... in response to "MAIL ORDER BRIDES" DO *NOT* E..., posted by ROGUEAGENT on Nov 13, 2005

even in your own language. Your post makes more since, especially when it was in response to one of Clay-doh's posts. But you're right, mail order brides don't exist: it's just such a catchy phrase for those with an axe to grind. Even CSI had an episode where the bad guy married some teenage korean cutie and had locks on all the cabinets in the kitchen so she could keep her figure.

As Rush says: Symbolism over Substance

[Spanky]

... in response to "MAIL ORDER BRIDES" DO *NOT* E..., posted by ROGUEAGENT on Nov 13, 2005

[This message has been edited by Spanky]

All these "facts" you are throwing around are only your opinions.  You offered no pertinent information as to why the term "Mail order bride" is racist.  The term is mostly a catch-phrase used by those who are in the dark about anything related to marrying women outside their country.

[ROGUEAGENT]

... in response to huh?, posted by Spanky on Nov 15, 2005

Ok, I now understand why I am getting some (or much) apparent resistence to what I thought was [otherwise] a well-intentioned, on-point, well-written post. I did the "Mail order brides do NOT exist" posting (a rebuttal, actually) in response to a posting by PHOENIX on the subject on Nov. 13, 2005 at the worldlovecollege dot com website. PHOENIX's post gave the web address of a negative essay on so-called "mail order brides" by a Canadian writer named Emily Monroy. After posting my response/rebuttal at WLC, I then posted virtually the same thing at Planet-Love. Unfortunately, I did not also repost the web address of the essay I was rebutting (nor even say I was responding to such an essay), and this has led to some confusion with some of you. (The Planet-Love website software/filter apparently won't allow anyone to show web addresses in a new posting. But it didnt even occur to me I could still post the Monroy essay itself.) Monroy seems somewhat ambiguous about what exactly is racist as she refers more to the attitudes of other writers as to her own. I didn't intend to focus on the "mail order brides" term as being racist; what I said was only one sentence within a long posting and even then was meant only to respond to the Monroe essay, using that as a launching point to discuss many other things.

So what do *I* think is racist about the term? Probably all I can say is that the term brings up negative and insulting connotations about women from third world countries (and then, by extrapolation, about the men who look for such women). By repeatedly using the term Monroe and others confuse international matchmaking agencies with those same negative connotations. For writers like Monroy the term is used like a reflex. It is possible she really doesn't know any better. (I know, I know, some writers out there are so focused on keeping men from discovering foreign women that they will spread negative images regardless. Obviously I don't expect to influence such people.)

For those of you who don't want to hunt down the web address of the Monroy essay as shown at the WLC website, here is the essay itself:
==========================================================

Guest Editorial

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Mail Order Brides
By Emily Monroy
During the first large wave of Asian immigration in the twentieth century, many Japanese and Korean women came to the United States as picture brides. The picture bride system, according to author Yen Le Espiritu, was a form of "arranged marriage facilitated by the exchange of photographs."1 A Japanese or Korean immigrant man would look at a photograph of a potential wife back home and, if he "liked what he saw," send for her to join him in the United States. Some Japanese and Korean women volunteered to become picture brides, seeing migration to the States as an adventure as well as a chance to escape the restricted life women frequently led in their homelands. As one Korean woman put it, "then I could get to America… that land of freedom with streets paved with gold!"2

Nearly a century later, picture brides have been replaced by mail order brides. But the two practices diverge in a substantial way. Whereas Korean and Japanese picture brides generally married men of the same national background, the mail order bride system involves men seeking wives, and women seeking husbands, from ethnic groups other than their own. The homelands of modern mail order brides also differ from those of yesterday's picture brides. The majority of the former come from the Philippines, Thailand, Latin America and the former Soviet Union, with a smattering of women from North and sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the men who "order" these women live in developed regions, such as Australia, North America, Western Europe, and Japan.

Feminists and minority activists have attacked the mail order bride system as racist and sexist. That it is sexist seems beyond question; after all, the only "mail order groom" site on the Internet turned out to be a joke, featuring one man who wanted a wife between the ages of seven and fifteen and another who couldn't use the family car without his mother's permission. Some women's rights advocates point out that mail order brides are vulnerable to domestic violence. The case of Susana Remerata, a Filipina in Seattle who was murdered by her American husband, is cited as an example.

The charge of racism is not far behind, especially as most of these women come from the Third World. White men who seek mail order brides are often accused of subscribing to stereotypes about the supposed "submissiveness" of non-Western (particularly Asian) women. In her essay "Recipe," Chinese-Canadian writer C. Allyson Lee gives a humorous description of a fictional client's search for a submissive Asian woman. She writes: "Attractive Straight White Male, middle-aged business executive looking for that special little China Doll, preferably short, petite and obedient. Object: to fulfill typical fantasies of the stereotype of Oriental ladies anxious to marry a Canadian in order to get out of Hong Kong or the Philippines and willing to do anything to pamper and please her man."3

Mail order bride agencies on the Internet frequently do have something to say about the ethnic traits of the women they feature. For instance, one venue declares that unlike modern-day American women, Filipinas are completely devoted to their husbands and families. The same characteristics are attributed to Latinas on another website. An agency based in Italy states that Filipinas are still "good Catholic girls" -- which Italian women apparently no longer are. Some organizations play minority women against each other, touting the superiority of one group. According to an American outfit, women from the Philippines are more beautiful than their counterparts from China and Japan, so much so, the site adds, that Filipinas are often hired to play Chinese and Japanese roles in the movies.

While it's easy to condemn such pronouncements as sexist, many mail order bride agencies don't shy away from commenting on the men from these women's homelands. But they don't paint a very flattering picture of them. One site featuring Filipinas purports that Asian men, in contrast to their Western peers, don't hold doors for women (this certainly wasn't true of the Asian students at my old university). Another claims that Latin American husbands typically come home drunk and beat their wives. The purpose of such bad-mouthing, of course, is to convince potential clients that by choosing an American (or Australian or Western European) husband, these women are getting a far better deal than what they'd find in their country of birth and will be grateful as a result.

In the end, however, the mail order bride racket can't be boiled down entirely to race. A good portion of the women signed on with these agencies are white, generally from the former Soviet Union, and some of the men who "order" brides via such venues are not. Among the frequent destinations of Filipinas, for example, is Japan. As well, some American clients who seek wives from the Third World and Eastern Europe are black or Hispanic. The movement of mail order brides is less a flow of women from non-white to white countries than from poor to rich ones. There probably aren't too many mail order brides going from Japan to Romania, for instance. Though Romanian men may very well hold the same stereotypes of the "passive Oriental lady"4 that other white men do, the fact that at the moment Romania is a poor country and Japan a rich one effectively stops the flow of brides between the two nations in its tracks. The predominance of economics over race can also be seen by looking at individual countries. When the mail order bride phenomenon first caught the public's attention in the 1980's, most of the women in question were Asian. Yet a glance at any mail order bride website's headings for industrialized Asian nations such as Singapore and Japan will show that the women featured are primarily Filipinas working there as domestic servants. Japanese and Singaporean women don't need to go abroad as mail order brides.

In addition, the fact that a mail order bride transaction is intraracial rather than interracial doesn't mean that ethnic stereotyping isn't involved. Some agencies supplying Filipina women to Japanese men, for example, contrast the former's traditional devotion to home and hearth to the modern Japanese woman's supposed rejection of marriage and motherhood. Others depict Russian women as uncontaminated by the militant feminism that has allegedly infected America's female population (why Russian women would be considered June Cleavers is somewhat curious, as at least during the Soviet regime most of them worked outside the home). And just as mail order bride venues often portray Latino and Asian men as boorish compared to their white American counterparts, Eastern European men are described as slobbering drunks who don't know the meaning of the word "provider."

In the same way I'm hesitant to reduce the mail order bride business solely to the issue of race, I'm also sceptical of labeling potential or actual brides themselves as deluded victims of racism and/or patriarchy. That's the viewpoint of many feminists and minority activists. But Carlos Butalid, a Filipino community leader living in the Netherlands, points out the dangers of treating such women as victims. He cites an incident in which Philippine feminist associations berated Filipinas for corresponding as pen pals with European men and asked them how much they were being paid to marry Europeans. The women in question took offense, feeling that "after struggling so hard to earn the respect of their colleagues and their community, all of a sudden they [were] portrayed by Philippine progressives as cheap playthings."

The feminist groups' behavior reflects in some sense the general attitude of some progressive Asians toward Asian women becoming involved with white men, mail order brides or not. As I've mentioned in previous essays, well-known Filipina-American activist Karin Aguilar-San Juan speaks of Asian female partners of white men as "splaying themselves" at the latter's feet. She essentially portrays them as C. Allyson Lee's fictional white male in "Recipe" does. Undoubtedly some Asian women might find Aguilar-San Juan's description of them insulting, even if it's meant in their best interests, in the same way I would take offense at Spanish so-called feminist Ana Perez del Campo's statement that by trying to keep their children, divorced women are driving them into a life of poverty. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Some Asian women feel compelled to explain their choice to go the mail order bride route, and their reasons for doing so aren't necessarily that they want to act as geishas for white men. In some cases, they actually perceive Western men to be more egalitarian than their own male compatriots (whether this perception is correct or not is another story, of course). One Filipina who runs her own marriage agency explains that "in the Philippines, a man can beat his wife." In a similar vein, a report on Brazilian women allegedly exploited by European sexual tourism claimed that these women's European husbands treated them better than their "macho" boyfriends at home.

I nonetheless don't take an entirely benign view of the mail order bride business. For one, many women get involved in it because of unfavorable economic and/or social conditions in their homelands. Feminists and minority activists are also right to say that women who go abroad as wives of men whom they may hardly know and who wield such enormous economic and often psychological power over them are easy targets for abuse. Finally, I do believe race, and racial stereotyping, play a role in the mail order bride system. Yet the left's reduction of the system to racism is not necessarily the whole story either.

Endnotes
1 Le Espiritu, Yen (1997). Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
2 Ibid, from Sunoo, H.H., & Sunoo, S.S. (1976). The heritage of the first Korean women immigrants in the United States: 1903-1929. Korean Christian Scholars Journal, 2, 149-163.

3 Lee, C. Allyson. (1994). Recipe. The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women. Toronto: Sister Vision Press.

4 Strossen, Nadine. (1995). Defending Pornography. New York: Scribner.

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Emily Monroy is of Sicilian and Irish descent and lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

[Hamlet]

... in response to "MAIL ORDER BRIDES" DO *NOT* E..., posted by ROGUEAGENT on Nov 13, 2005

ANDREA DWORKIN
September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005

Intercourse is a “means of physiologically making a woman inferior”

Romance is “rape embellished with meaningful looks.”

“Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.”

Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free.

Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.

[Hoda]

... in response to Re: "MAIL ORDER BRIDES" DO *NO..., posted by Hamlet on Nov 14, 2005


WTF happened in her life, to make her soooo ugly & bitter. I'm willing to wager, that the ONLY smile to grace her face, was the one they had to shape on her face, when she passed....

"Intercourse is a “means of physiologically making a woman inferior”"
- This woman obviously never, ever experienced an orgasm. Tis a shame to go through life sooooo dayyum unhappy!

[Bob S]

... in response to With all due respect, to A.Dworkin....., posted by Hoda on Nov 16, 2005

Supposedly she had a lot of sh!t in her life (abusive ex-husband, experience of rape, and so on), plus the fact that she was so darn grotesquely obese and ugly, you'd rather masterbate with a cheese grater than get your penis anywhere near her probably contributed to her bitterness and hatred of anything with a Y chromosome.  (Heck, even the hairy-legged butch carpet lickers who worshipped Andrea wouldn't want to get close to her.)

Here's a darkly humorous eulogy of her from a sympathetic lefty writer:
http://www.exile.ru/2005-April-22/exterminate_the_men.html

[Pete E]

... in response to "MAIL ORDER BRIDES" DO *NOT* E..., posted by ROGUEAGENT on Nov 13, 2005

Thats 5 days.A little communication por favor.I need some stuff.Lets not wait untill the night before to decide whats going on.

Pete

[maggiemtnman]

... in response to "MAIL ORDER BRIDES" DO *NOT* E..., posted by ROGUEAGENT on Nov 13, 2005

Oh no not again ..

[Bob S]

... in response to Is this new guy Gringo Loco again or a f..., posted by maggiemtnman on Nov 14, 2005

The hard core feminists wouldn't object to use of a derogitory term if it discourages international marriages since they are in principle against ALL marriage.  Why?  Because marriage leads to sex and baby-making, and according to orthodox feminism, all sex that involves a man is by definition rape.

Even if we should get rid of the term MOB, can I still be a Mail Order Husband since my wife and I started as e-mail friends and were eventually married in _her_ hometown?

[Pete E]

... in response to Is this new guy Gringo Loco again or a f..., posted by maggiemtnman on Nov 14, 2005

No,he is a friend of mine,for real.I agreee about the name,but for this site at least it won't be changed.

Pete

[ROGUEAGENT]

... in response to Is this new guy Gringo Loco again or a f..., posted by maggiemtnman on Nov 14, 2005

Awww come onnnnn, you have to be kidding me, right? I am not 'Gringo Loco', nor has anybody ever mistaken me for a "feminazi" (to use your word.) Do I even want to ask out of morbid curiosity how my posting which was meant to encourage eliminating the use of a negative slur against foreign brides has resulted in the conclusion I might be a "feminazi"?

I am a friend of Soltero and Pete E and am a member of the loosely associated fanclub of the illustrious Calipro. And finally, for awhile I have been mostly a lurker with Planet-Love since 1) for a long time I couldn't get past problems getting the forum software to remember my password, and 2) I was too busy living life and meeting women in Cali, Colombia to spend much time on the Net talking about it. I hope this forum welcomes thoughtful, sincere postings from new members. If so, you should see more of me.

Thanks for the warm reception everyone ;-)

[beenthere]

... in response to Re: Is this new guy Gringo Loco again or..., posted by ROGUEAGENT on Nov 14, 2005

I can vouch for ROUGEAGENT, I met him in Cali at Pete's place last July...he's a good guy and has spent alot of time in Colombia...some of you should listen to him.

But then again, maybe I'm Gringo Loco...lol

[Snoopy]

... in response to Re: Re: Is this new guy Gringo Loco agai..., posted by beenthere on Nov 14, 2005


I am ....SNOOPY LOCOOO COCOOO!

GGGrrrrrgghhh.......

[Hoda]

... in response to Re: Is this new guy Gringo Loco again or..., posted by ROGUEAGENT on Nov 14, 2005

Cuba Libre for me sir.....