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Julia H. Meszaros, "Economies of Gender: Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women’s Labor" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Julia Mazaris about her book titled Economies of Gender Masculinity, Male Order, Brides and Women's Labour, published by Rutgers University Press in 2025. Now, as the subtitle suggests, this book helps us understand what's going on with the international dating industry, and international is important here. We're going to be talking about a number of countries and interactions between people from different countries as part of this and the dating industry as well. Right. This is not a book that's about one particular couple or even two or three. This is really looking, with obviously some specific examples, but giving us a pretty broad picture of what this industry looks like. The result of quite a lot of research and fieldwork. So we have quite a number of things to discuss. Julia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:03]
C
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Miranda. And I'm excited to talk about this project with you and your audience.
- [02:10]
B
Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could we start off with some big picture introduction, foundational things like you introducing yourself a little bit and telling us about the origin story of this project?
- [02:22]
C
Sure. I AM Julia Mazaros. I'm an associate professor at East Texas A and M. We're part of the larger Texas A and M University system. So I live outside of Dallas. I've been working on this project for, gosh, it was about 15 years almost. And I started being interested in the topic when I was in graduate school. I read an article about mail order brides in the Philippines and how they were portrayed online. And I became curious to know more about it. And I went to an actual seminar ran by the company that I followed, A Foreign Affair in the Miami area where I was based at the time. And the owner was so generous with me. He's like, you can come to any country, any tour, anytime, any. And so I decided, you know, I think it would be interesting kind of to see inter across regions, what happens. A lot of the other books written about the topic had focused either on Asian women or Latina women. And so I thought it might be interesting to see kind of what draws people to different regions of the world and why.
- [03:50]
B
Yeah, well, it definitely seems like you managed to pursue that curiosity successfully because there's not just one country discussed here. And obviously from that starting point of just kind of what is going on. Many projects start with kind of a big picture question like that. But then as you find out more about the topic. Right. We all sort of narrow it down and end up with a bunch of additional questions. So what are some of the particular questions you ended up asking in this book?
- [04:17]
C
Yes, so I was really looking at how migration and is impacted through these kinds of marriages. I was looking at how does race and gender play a role in people's understandings of this industry. I was interested in looking at how does this industry commodify different types of intimacy and what does that mean in a larger global economic setting. I was also interested in thinking about masculinity. What does kind of what our gender roles looking like here in the US and how do people imagine gender roles being different in these other places and how they imagine that might be a better fit for what they're looking for. So these were the kind of questions that originally kind of inspired what's happening in the book.
- [05:28]
B
Got it. Okay. So that definitely helps us narrow down sort of within the big topic. And then I did mention fieldwork a little bit at the beginning. And you've talked about kind of the amount of time that you've invested in this. So can you tell us more about the methods you've used to investigate those questions?
- [05:44]
C
Yes. So during my time in graduate school, I attended romance tours with a foreign affair in Colombia, in Medellin and in Ukraine, I attended a multi city tour. And in the Philippines, I attended a romance tour in Davao City. And so now a romance tour, for those who are unfamiliar with this industry, is where they get a group of guys together, typically from Western countries, mostly American, and they go to a place like Ukraine or the Philippines. And it's an organized set of introduction. So how they would frame what they're doing, right? This business would frame itself as doing introductions. So they, you know, you're paying to be introduced to a bunch of women. They don't guarantee anything, right? So it's not sex tourism or anything like that. They can't guarantee you that a woman is going to marry you by the end of your tour, right? But what they can guarantee is that they're going to introduce you to a number of single available women. And so that romance tour setting is kind of what I followed. So I was able to be a participant observer in these romance tours. And I would often hang out after, because some men would stay after the tour. And also for me to get to know kind of the inner workings of the local offices. Because the industry itself is interesting in the sense that A Foreign affair is based in the United States, but they have local offices in these different countries. Sometimes they own those local offices, but sometimes they subcontract them out to local matchmakers that are based on the ground in those countries. So all of that kind of stuff. You know, I was really trying to talk about how this, this industry is really diverse in that sense. It's not necessarily how you would think a lot of. There are a lot of local matchmakers who partner with the larger umbrella agency in the United States. So the local partnership will often recruit women and do that kind of on the groundwork of hosting these tours. So I followed these tours and I finished, you know, my initial project as a dissertation. And then as I was rethinking about writing into. Into a. A book, I was starting to think more about how does this industry work outside of a foreign affair? Because they are one of the main companies. But I was curious to see how other companies and agencies operated. And so from there, I kind of went to a few conferences where they had matchmakers, mostly Ukrainian matchmakers. And from there I kind of got an idea of what the local, more matchmaking side of the industry looked like versus like a tour setting. So I have all these different snapshots of being in person between tours or hanging out in the local offices or these matchmaking agency offices, but and then kind of following people through the years as well on social media. So when I met people in 2012, they got engaged and then kind of following their story via Facebook, like, are they still married, do they have kids, Are they still living in the U.S. all of those kinds of things. So it became this very long term project where I was trying to get like different facets of the industry that hadn't necessarily been so focused on in previous research.
- [10:20]
B
Yeah, that's a lot of work. So thank you for giving us a sense of the scale and the scope of what you pursued. I think that lets us get then into some of the things you found. As long as we cover. I think probably one other key foundational aspect that goes across all the different places you examine, which is maybe more theoretical. So terms like heteromasculinity or femininity capital. Can you make sure we have a good understanding of what these terms are and how you're using them?
- [10:50]
C
Yes. So when I'm talking about hetero masculinity, a queer scholar friend of mine pointed out, because at first I was saying masculinity, but queer men are not basing their masculinity on access to women's labor. So it's more hetero, you know, heterosexual men who are basing their masculinity on access to women's labor. And so that's why I use the term heteromasculinity to differentiate, because there are men who are not motivated by women's labor and then femininity capital. And I talk a little bit about heteromasculinity as a form of capital too. Is that in sociology we often talk about gender as a type of performance that we are constantly performing our gender in our day to day lives, in our day to day interactions to make our gender legible to other people. And I kind of wanted to think about gender more as an outcome of work that we do or labor that we do. Being beautiful, being considered feminine is an outcome of a lot of labor that often we don't recognize or necessarily think of as work and labor, but it really is, and it's a lot of investment and money. And so I really wanted to show that I think gender is not just an outcome of performances, but these performances are based in a type of work and labor.
- [12:32]
B
Yeah, I think that's definitely very important to highlight as we continue. So thank you for clarifying both of those terms to make sure we can use them as needed. Going further into discussing the book. So thinking then about this femininity capital and the way in which you've just described, it's like a lot of work that's to benefit, to come up with certain benefits. Right. For the women doing it, but also, as you said, for the heterosexual men kind of looking for that sort of thing. Can we talk a little bit more about that relationship? Like the ways in which that femininity capital is benefiting men in the current dating industry, but also in the dating industry, if we go back a bit in time as well.
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C
Yes, for sure. So what I kind of realized as I was doing research on these things is that a lot of times civilization really depends on women being part of it. And you really see this come through when you look at the history of mail order brides. They originally started off as frontier brides, right? Where places where men set were trying to set up society. But they needed women. Right? You need women to have children. You need women to kind of take care of all these reproductive functions in society. And so a lot of the times, what I kept hearing men complain about in dating in America was that women here were not interested in performing a lot of types of labor that they associated with being feminine or a woman. So things like women not wanting to have kids, not prioritizing a family life, not maintaining their physical appearance. Right. A lot of the guys would complain that Western women are fat and unkempt and don't wear sexy clothes and high heels, and they don't dress feminine and they don't maintain these feminine small bodies. And a lot of them were complaining, right. That a lot of contemporary women want men to share in the household labor and responsibilities. So they often were having a hard time navigating gender here in the US in the dating market, because they were looking for this kind of labor that a lot of women are less likely to want to give in a more wealthy society.
- [15:14]
B
That's a really key part of this. Right. What is the purpose of looking pretty and who's kind of creating those ideas of what the purpose is? Is this something like. It sounds like these are things that men were like, quite explicitly talking about when you were doing your fieldwork. Is that right? This isn't sort of a theoretical thing you're adding on top?
- [15:35]
C
No, no. I mean, they were definitely quite explicit in talking about why they were looking abroad for what they felt was the femininity that was missing in women in their home countries, typically Western countries. And men. There is a reason why men admire other men's wives. There's A reason why there's the term trophy wife. Men get a boost in their own masculinity and their masculine identif identity through the appearance of their partner. Oftentimes, right. If she's a very good looking woman, other men will be jealous and think that that man has something going for him in order to score this woman who may be more attractive than the guy. Right. I, I often to think of, you know, Donald Trump and Malachi Trump as a prime example of this industry, right. Where you have an older gentleman looking in Eastern Europe for a significantly younger woman who in theory, right. Is out of his league in terms of physical appearance, but he has other things to make up for it, like financial security, which is what a lot of the women I talk to in this industry, which they're not as much in the book because I didn't have as much in depth access to the women. But like the typical thing women talked a lot about was looking for this kind of financial security. And so a lot of these guys were able to feel more masculine also abroad because relatively their money went a lot further.
- [17:27]
B
Hmm. We're talking a lot then about money in this sort of calculation. Is it an accident that femininity capital as a term sounds like something we'd find in an economics textbook? Like this all sounds very sort of, I don't know, supply and demand.
- [17:44]
C
It is very economic in many ways. And I think a lot of that comes from the men themselves. A lot of them talked about the sexual value of people within a mating dating market and a lot of them took a very market based approach to romance. Right. They thought if they had more money that they would be able to access the kind of women that they were attracted to who weren't necessarily going to give them attention in the US because they didn't have what they felt weren't enough resources to access, you know, the really attractive women in the US and so they feel like they can engage in what I call this kind of like global arbitrage. Right. Where you are taking your dollars and going to a place like the Philippines where your dollar goes a lot farther is more impressive and therefore you have access to a better quality of woman in these men's opinion. Right. In terms of looks and being younger, et cetera.
- [19:04]
B
Okay. That's really interesting to kind of get a peek inside the mindset going on here to get to some of the specific places that you looked at for this. Why is the Philippines such a leading place for these kinds of trips? But also from what you found in terms of successful marriages that come out of it.
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C
So there's a lot going on in the Philippines. First of all, the Philippines and the US had a, you know, a 50 year colonial relationship. And so a lot of folks speak English in the Philippines, and that is a huge driver of interest because there isn't this language barrier that a lot of people face in Ukraine or Colombia. Then number two, you have a lot of military bases that were based in the Philippines, and so a lot of former military men like to retire in the Philippines, and a lot of them have these positive memories of their time in the Philippines and, you know, want to go back. And then I think third, the Philippines was materially the poorest country at that time. I don't know now with the war in Ukraine, how that has shaped people's economic situations in comparison. But during the time of my research, the Philippines, a lot of the women I met were already internal migrants, meaning they had already come from the provinces, rural areas where people didn't have a lot of money or resources. And a lot of these young women were already remitting money or sending money back to their families in the provinces. And so I think a lot of them viewed migration as, first of all, not that big of a deal because they were already internal migrants. So. And I think, you know, that past colonial relationship with the US means that they have this cultural understanding of American culture that maybe some of the other countries don't have as much. And I think the serious poverty, though, really does influence the fact that many more women are willing to migrate out, I think because in Colombia and in Ukraine there are problems, economic problems, but people are a little more hesitant to migrate.
- [21:43]
B
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- [22:26]
C
I think so, yes. And I think that the Philippines also, out of the three places, has the most conservative culture. When it comes to marriage, technically, divorce is illegal in the Philippines. And so people take marriage pretty seriously and tend to kind of stick it out once they reach the U.S. i think they just kind of want a decent life and to be able to, to remit money to their families back in the Philippines. And yeah, from what I've seen, I've still not really seen any divorces from the couples that I follow on Facebook. They, even the ones with large age gaps are still together. So. Hmm.
- [23:14]
B
Very interesting indeed. You mentioned, though, Ukraine a moment ago, and obviously there's some ways in which that's very much an ongoing situation. But one thing that you do talk about in the book is that it has kind of more recently become another top choice for these men you were telling us about, in addition to the Philippines. Why is that, Effy?
- [23:36]
C
So the Ukraine has always been a top choice, actually, since the fall of the Soviet union in the 90s, that whole region, like Russia, Ukraine, mostly Russia and Ukraine, have been very popular with the industry. And you know, they will even tell you the, the people in charge of the industry, right. The owner of afa, that a lot of that has to do with race. Right. And so the fact that Ukrainian women are white women, they're more likely to blend in. People don't necessarily want it to be quote, unquote, obvious that they married a mail order bride or someone from a different country through an agency. And people, for whatever reason think that that becomes more obvious if the woman is Asian or Colombian. But yeah, a lot of that is that people want the blonde, tall, Slavic, stereotypical Ukrainian woman as being the most desirable in terms of appearance. A lot of the guys who prefer Colombia or the Philippines either have a specific attraction to women in those countries or didn't do well in Ukraine and then start going to other parts of the world on tours, which I'm at both.
- [25:14]
B
That's interesting to think about kind of relative rankings. Then can we talk a little bit more about Colombia? You mentioned it briefly, but what is the sort of draw for these men there?
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C
I think for Colombia there is this allure of danger and kind of this idea of a passionate Latina. Colombia, you know, has had this long time reputation of being dangerous with narco trafficking and people like Pablo Escobar and things of that nature. But Columbia has been, I would say.
- [25:56]
B
Since.
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C
Probably the like the early 2000s, really been working on trying to clean up its reputation and attract more tourists. And so it's really been interesting to see the development in Colombia of tourism. When I first started Going. There was a lot of people who were going, but not like it is now. There's been actually major gentrification in Medellin. A lot of people, locals can no longer afford to live there because so many foreigners have moved there and bought up local property. People tended to fall in love with Colombia, whereas people were less likely to fall in love with the Philippines or Ukraine people. A lot of the guys I met talked about retiring in Colombia or wanting to buy a place in Colombia. And so. But I think Colombian women have this association with sexuality and sensuality that comes out of, you know, these colonial narratives of Latina women, those being kind of like spicy, etc, and so for that reason, Colombia has gained in popularity. It is all. I will also say that all three of these countries are popular sex tourism destinations. And I think that also plays into that. Where men find women to be sexually attractive.
- [27:33]
B
Yeah, no, that overlap I don't think is coincidental. Now, we mentioned that in the Philippines case, kind of the transition from the tourist to marriage. Is there anything further we want to discuss in terms of the trips to Ukraine or Colombia or other countries and the links between those prospective trips and marriage?
- [27:53]
C
So a lot of the guys who actually do end up getting married tended to go on multiple trips in order to kind of cultivate these long distance relationships. In the Philippines, though, when I was there, people would get engaged by the end of the tour. So when I was on tour in the Philippines, there were 19 men participating and by the end of the tour, 12 men were formally engaged. That is unusual. Like most of the other countries, I saw maybe one engagement on a tour. So the Philippines tended people tended to move a lot faster and be much more formal in their courtship practices. Whereas I would say the men in Ukraine and Colombia who tended to be most successful and maintain their relationships had the money and the flexibility to travel there frequently. And especially Ukraine, it was much more difficult because it's so far. That's why a lot of actually men also were interested in Colombia was geographic proximity. Right. So going to the Philippines or Ukraine is 8 to 12 hour flights we're talking about, whereas flying to Colombia is within this hemisphere, especially from Miami, it's like four hour direct flight. So a lot of the guys talked about also choosing, you know, where they were interested in going based on, like the feasibility of being able to kind of travel back and forth in order to cultivate these relationships. Most of the time in Ukraine or Colombia, people kind of did multiple trips. But like I said, in the Philippines, there were a lot of, of Immediate engagements, which was kind of unusual.
- [29:58]
B
And in the Colombian or Ukraine cases where there were engagements and marriages, how did those relationships then tend to go? You mentioned with the Philippines ones that you really haven't seen, for example, divorces later on. What about the other ones?
- [30:11]
C
The other ones I definitely saw divorces later on. So I have one interesting story about a Colombian marriage and a Ukrainian. So I met a Ukrainian woman in California who had worked as a translator in the Ukrainian office in Kiev in for afa. And she met her husband through her translating work. She married this guy. They lived in California and he was financially abusive. When they would have arguments, he would cut off her credit cards so that she couldn't spend any money or leave really. And they had all these issues. And eventually she ended up leaving him and getting a divorce. And, you know, she was pretty unhappy because by the time they got divorced, I think she was like 35 or 36. And she kind of felt like she had missed out on her opportunity to have children. And then the last I heard from her, this guy was kind of like a doctor and her ex husband. And then he was creating his own Botox in his house and injected it and ended up dying from it. So that is one of the more exceeding. Yeah, more crazy stories. Yes. And then another kind of random story is I was visiting Colombia again and one of the translators that had used to work at the foreign affair office worked at a different company and she had met a guy who married a Colombian woman through the same agency I followed, and he had moved back to Columbia with this woman and she ended up divorcing him and he ended up actually staying in Colombia and working at this like, call center with like, local Colombians.
- [32:15]
B
All right, well, definitely some intriguing outcomes there. Probably not things you could have expected going into this. Was there anything else that really surprised you?
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C
Um, I was also surprised. There were definitely guys who were there for, you know, ostensibly a romance tour, looking for a serious dating, etc. Etc. But then they would often engage in sex tourism, Right. With women who were not part of the dating agency. They would go to strip clubs, etc, and hire local sex workers. And so I think one thing that I learned was that you can't really necessarily separate these different groups of tourists, whether they're sex tourists or international dating tourists. A lot of times those things overlap. And then I also realized a lot of things that also overlaps with guys who are trying to be expats a lot of times or they want to be retirement romance retirement migrants. Where I met a Lot of guys in the Philippines who would retire there because it was so much cheaper. And they would often, you know, do the whole sex tourism thing until they met somebody. And then they would try to settle down with like a local woman in the Philippines who kind of would act like a wife and, and take care of him and all of those things. Sometimes legally he, they would get married, sometimes not. But that was also a common thing. So what I saw was a lot of times these guys over or intersect, overlap, however you want to say that, right between sex tourism, trying to find like a legitimate partner, maybe even trying to retire in the country. Because a lot of these guys like the median age was like 53. So a lot of these guys were you know, retirement age and look, or soon to be retirement age and looking for somewhere where their mother once again their money would go further and again.
- [34:39]
B
Really comes back there to money. So that's quite a bunch of interesting things that you figured out there. Thank you for telling us about them. Is this the kind of thing you're continuing to research now? I mean obviously you've invested a massive amount of time and energy in investigating these questions. Are you still on this? Are you moving on to something else?
- [34:58]
C
I am still in touch with a lot of local matchmakers in Ukraine and I'm thinking about doing a project kind of how is this industry being reshaped during the war and kind of seeing how the Ukrainian war has impacted this industry because Ukraine was the hub of most of, I would say a foreign affairs business. The Philippines are close second. But you know, they made a lot of money in Ukraine because first of all, when you would go on tour in Ukraine it was often a multi city tour, whereas in other countries it was typically one city, seven days. Whereas in Ukraine it would be three cities, 10 to 14 days. And right now they cannot do organized group tours. Obviously because of the conflict it's not safe to fly there. But the owner of the agency did tell me that they are still doing individual tours in the sense that they will get the guy. I guess they fly them to Poland, bus them to Kiev and, and from there they can do their own like individualized tours. But I know that that would be kind of hard for them to sell as much as obviously during non war time having these large group tours that were much more frequent. I'm not sure if they're making, I don't know. But as they industry would point out itself that 90% of these guys actually never go in person. So 90% of this industry is actually online. Through or online correspondence. And so I think that they are still obviously using Ukrainian women's photos and, and having them be in conversation with these guys. But I can imagine that their tour side of the equation has definitely taken a hit with this war. And so I was just kind of curious to see how are the smaller matchmakers who are actually Ukrainian, typically Ukrainian women who are based in Ukraine, how have they been kind of handling and navigating these big changes? Some of them have actually left Ukraine. One's living in Germany, one's living, I think, in Romania at the moment. And kind of how does one do matchmaking in a third country? Right. Or are you focusing on refugee women who've already left Ukraine or so kind of how are they navigating all of this wartime stuff and its impact on what the industry kind of looks like on the ground because it's been ongoing now for four years.
- [38:07]
B
Certainly sounds very interesting to investigate given what you were able to figure out kind of before the war, you know, having a baseline in some senses to compare. So best of luck with that investigation.
- [38:17]
C
Thank you so much.
- [38:19]
B
While you are, of course, doing that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing, Economies of Gender Masculinity, mail Order Brides and Women's Labour, published by Rutgers University Press in 2025. Julia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [38:33]
C
Thank you so much for having Miranda and I hope the audience will be interested in learning more and pick up the book, which is available at any bookseller.