Sex with Timaree

Question to the Sexpert:

“My best friend and I have been friends since college. He’s smart, funny and makes good money. He has never had a hard time getting girls. He has better luck than I do, actually. But after his last girlfriend of over a year broke up with him, he started talking about Russian mail order brides. I thought he was joking. I didn’t even know that was real or at least not anymore. But he has found some companies online that will introduce him to a bunch of women if he flies over there and pays them tens of thousands of dollars. He keeps saying he “might as well,” and that “he could really change some woman’s life for the better.” I think it’s messed up, he’s on the rebound, taking advantage of desperate women when he could easily find an American woman. Am I wrong? Isn’t this prostitution?”

I’m going to ask you, for a moment, to pretend your best friend is a mouse.  Yes, I know; bear with me here. Your best mouse friend, like all mice, naturally seeks out yummy mouse food like cheese or microwave burritos.  Now imagine that after acquiring a particularly yumtastic microwave burrito and popping it into his little rodent microwave, he takes a giant bite and is shocked with an awful bolt of electricity that sends waves of pain all through his furry little body. Maybe it turns out that he was part of a big laboratory experiment or maybe it just happened to be one of those new-fangled electric burritos you’ve read so much about, either way, your best mouse friend is not going to be terribly interested in taking big bites out of burritos any time soon.

Your friend is like a lot of people who, after experiencing the extreme mental anguish that can accompany a breakup, wants to do everything they can to not feel that way again. We all know that humans suck at this, opting to change everything except the actual behavior that caused the breakup in the first place. Your friend, grasping vainly for an explanation of what went wrong and desperately wanting to avoid the same outcome, has probably decided a nice, subservient lady from an impoverished country who is grateful for every ounce of opportunity granted her from her benevolent beau will be substantially less likely to drop his ass.

He also knows that getting a mail order bride carries a lot of skeazy connotations and tries to rationalize his decision to take the mystery out of romance by arguing he’s actually doing a good deed for a stranger. And frankly, if he really is the smart, funny and prosperous gent you think he is, he may very well be the greatest thing that ever happened to a woman named Ludmila.

I’m actually not prepared to say he shouldn’t get involved in this whole deal, considering I don’t know him and I’ve heard tales of highly successful pairing that started with two people seeking mutually beneficial arrangements. You might even recall an America’s Next Top Model runner-up who adored her substantially older husband for rescuing her from the hopelessness of the Russian economy.

That said, you’re also right for getting that icky feeling in your gut when you think about someone you respect so much forgoing standard social interaction in favor of shopping online for a human being. Despite the claims made on the myriad of websites hawking Asian brides, the industry is full of scam artists, sex slave traffickers, violence and terribly disappointing realities.

Depending upon the setup of the particular company, your friend may be engaging in a service not wholly unlike match.com or he may be paying money to people who mislead desperate young women into signing over their lives. Let’s be honest here, we know how much money is poured into international sex tourism every year because scumbag American men with money feel entitled to have sex with women and children who can’t escape due to physical or financial restraints. This industry is the first cousin of that deplorable industry.

The guys who tend to acquire mail order brides are older, white, conservative, resentful of feminist advances and desirous of a relationship where they will be revered and honored by a woman who has been raised to be more submissive and grateful to be rescued. These young women often end up alienated and alone, unsure of the culture and far away from their entire support system. Does that sound like the place to start a healthy relationship: deferential gratitude? Don’t even get me started on the racial component to the whole deal!

So, overall my thoughts are this: your friend might very well meet a lovely woman with whom he has a genuine connection and through their loving and caring relationship, she may find a standard of living that would have otherwise been a pipe dream. Or, he may shop around for a hot piece of young tail, and be sorely disappointed to find she’s not giddlily overjoyed to be stuck in a country where she doesn’t speak the language with a husband who expects her to be his servant. Or, he may send a bunch of money to a fake company that doesn’t have to obey U.S. law.  His best bet is to proceed slowly, giving himself time to recover from the breakup and to think about this matter in a calm, rational matter. If he still wants to go forward, I recommend he do plenty of research into the business before sending any money.