Men Seeking Foreign Women Online

By Tom Glaister @ ConsumerAffairs.com

August 15, 2008

bar scene I was in an internet café in Thailand last year, trying to work out which continent I should fly to next, when my attention was entirely absorbed by an attractive Thai girl who sat down next to me and logged in. She gave me one of those Thai smiles that could mean anything at all and then concentrated on her correspondence. I was beginning to wonder if Thailand had its merits after all and couldn’t help stealing repeated glances at her.

She was totally absorbed in her online conversations with four messenger windows going at once, however, and in each of them I could see the photo of a Western guy. The youngest had to be 45 at least.

I miss you.
When you coming back?
I wait for you but I no have money for my rent.

I looked at her again and realized she was wearing too much makeup and revealing clothes for the average Thai girl. She almost certainly worked in a bar as a hostess for Western guys looking for Eastern romance and now that their holidays were over, her "boyfriends" were back home at work, dreaming of the month or two they’d spent in Thai heaven. They’d be coming back as soon as they could afford it — if their "girlfriend" didn’t drain their bank accounts dry in the meantime.

Thailand, like Brazil or the Philippines, is full of Western guys trying their luck with women half their age. With terrible dress sense that betrays the serious lack of a woman’s touch, it can be pitiful to watch them trying to mend their hearts under flashing neon signs, sharing a common vocabulary of maybe 500 words with the women they meet.

It’s not easy getting old. Along with worrying about balding, beer guts and prostate cancer, many American men suffer the flip side of the national individualistic character — they end up feeling quite alone.

As school friends move away and get married, opportunities to make new social contacts tend to diminish with age. And our modern lifestyles often dictate that we work alone in front of a computer, shop alone in a supermarket and go home alone to apartments where neighbors don’t talk to one another.

Until the Internet came along, the natural desire to meet the opposite sex did much to boost the attendance at bars and evening classes in the hope of meeting that special someone. Drinking too much beer and pretending to be interested in learning Italian were the only options left open to the millions of Americans who simply didn’t know how else to meet anyone new.
Out of the bars

photo of dating siteBut then the advent of online dating sites meant the American guy could go hunting without having to get out of his dressing gown. Unshaven and unwashed he could woo any number of women by complimenting them on their profile photo and including the right kind of charismatic emoticon in the message to show his sensitive side. It made the first step in dating safe, voyeuristic and cheaper than buying drinks all night while searching for the courage to approach the blonde on the other side of the bar.

Which explains why some 40 million American men logged onto dating sites last year.

Yet there remained the fact that most of the women on American dating sites were … well, American.

“They’ve lost their femininity!” an American expat once told me when explaining his choice to move south to Mexico. “American women these days dress like men, talk like men and call you a chauvinist if you ask them to make you a cup of coffee.”

I thought of the aggressive, sexless look of the supermodels and the passing of the days when men tipped their hats to women in the street. Then the expat's Mexican wife came in, brought us each another beer, wiped the table and went off to calm the crying children and prepare lunch.

Talk to American men who have married foreign women and 90 percent of them will have been attracted to the old-fashioned values of another culture. Dinner on the table, clean clothes in the cupboard and strong maternal instincts.

“Western women have been campaigning for equality for so long that happiness went out of the picture long ago.” another friend married to a Thai wife told me.

I initially thought this was a bit over the top until I learned that even complimenting a female co-worker can be considered grounds for sexual harassment. Have feminism and political correctness taken all the fun out of American love?

Well maybe. But there’s also the fact that, for many, exotic is erotic and there’s nothing like a foreign accent or complexion to hide the personality faults that stop domestic relationships getting off the ground.