You’ve all seen the ads directed at single white males: “Get your Asian wife, your Thai darling, your Philippine dream girl, your Chinese fortune cookie, your Japanese cherry blossom.” They all feature a pretty thirty-ish Asian woman smiling radiantly for the cameras, exuding the good old-fashioned values of motherhood, well-scrubbed floors, dish-pan hands, and economic security. They might not directly speak of sex-on-demand or docile submission, but there is definitely a not-so-subtle message to take advantage of the opportunity to get a girl ‘unspoiled by feminism’. Apparently many men still appreciate the old-fashioned stay-at-home wife, guardian of the kitchen, keeper of the keys. Apparently many women do, too. Similar ads tell women to “get your Farang husband,” though the pictures tend to still be of women, since they’re probably better looking. Of course problems do arise sometimes. That Asian wife may not be so submissive after all and that smile may be little more than window dressing, and even serious problems such as spousal abuse and virtual slavery have occurred. This prompted the newly enacted ‘feminist endorsed’ International Marriage Brokers Act in the US, which attempts to monitor and regulate the booming business. This requires potential wives to be supplied with a background check of their foreign ‘dates’ before the relationship can proceed.
The practice of local women marrying foreigners is so wide-spread in Thailand now that the society is being transformed in the process. If it was taboo for a Thai woman to be seen with a foreigner twenty years ago, it’s certainly not now. It’s not only open, but encouraged. My wife’s mother even told her, once upon a time, that she ‘wanted a Farang son-in-law.’ The rest is history, and a new generation of Siamese is being created, whiter and brighter. If that was something once limited to sleazy settings and GI bars, now it takes place on the Internet, the world wide web of social intercourse without borders. Live cameras have revolutionized the process, allowing potential couples to ‘chat live’, more or less in jerky motion, building new lives and healing broken hearts with broken English. Peasant girls in the Thai countryside get up at three in the morning to meet potential suitors in Europe and America, gradually settling on mutual favorites and mutual favors, like ‘going steady’ on the world wide web. The men pay the company for this service, not surprisingly, while women join free. If a potential couple hit it off, then he’ll come visit, and see what happens. Many a happy marriage has resulted, and more than a few dollars have changed hands, lonely men with plenty of money joining hands with women poor in finances, but with lots of love.
The story can get complicated, of course. Many times couples are mismatched by age or life-style, economic or emotional incentives failing to close the gap between cultures. Sometimes the men are abusive or the women are manipulative. Sometimes the companies themselves are little more than outright frauds. One company takes the customer’s money with promises of hassle-free Czech girls, educated and daring, with US entry privileges only accorded EU citizens. Once the middle-class middle-age Americans pay their money, they see girls in tattered newspaper clippings, and arrive in Prague to find equally tattered women who’ve been promised a nice meal. No refunds, no exchanges. East Europeans, in fact, dominate the marriage brokerage transactions, especially Russians, perhaps because their white skin mixes easier in pockets of Europe and America where that still matters. Thai companies seem the most aggressive, however, their ads showing up on Google searches for brides of any nationality, whether Russian, Latina, or any other Asian country. Thai commercial instincts don’t hesitate to find the back door into any market.
Of course web cams have revolutionized more than marriages. Telephone sex was rendered obsolete the day that they hit the market. Now web cam cuties line the honeycomb rookeries of the Net like girls in the windows of Amsterdam’s red light district, scantily clad with little more than a laptop, ready to perform for you in their ‘private room,’ jerky camera but an appropriate little side-joke snicker. Some of the backgrounds look suspiciously like cheap apartments in Thailand, with sparse and uninspiring furnishings. In reality, not surprisingly, most of them are probably in the Philippines. Problems arise when customers for these sites expect similar responses from good girls in legitimate dating services. Kinda’ makes you wonder what’s next. I think the Thai government’s given it some thought, hence recent attempts to make visa applications stricter and 'restore social order' by closing nightspots well before daybreak. I doubt that girls are the number one export in Thailand yet, but, like the slaving period in Africa, you have to wonder if they’re aren’t some profound sociological repercussions in the works as social demographics become shifted. The Philippines, for one, has outlawed the marriage brokerage business locally, though that hasn’t stopped other companies from ‘out-sourcing’ to the Philippines. Pinoys do speak good English, after all. Personally I wonder what happened to the good old days when you could meet women in bars. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be, after all?
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