Of the millions of lonely men in the world, some are willing and able to resort to unusual means to secure a wife. The cliché solution for the otherwise unmarriageable is the "mail order bride." But although there probably is no way to just fill in a coupon and have a "wife" delivered to your door, spouse-finding services do exist. And though they require time, money and travel, the first step is as simple as a click of the mouse.

An Internet search for the keywords "mail order bride" will bring up hundreds of sites run by private agencies which offer women for marriage. The site featured on the cover (www.heart-of-asia.com) is typical in that men can select by age and nationality, whether it be an 18-year-old "Japanese Princess" or a 30-something Latina.

Virtually none of the women offered are from the U.S. or western Europe. Most of them come from the former Soviet Union or the Philippines, where poverty and links with western culture create the export product: a large supply of women intent on marrying some guy from a rich country.

The women themselves seem to have little else in common: some are old and ugly, while others are young and gorgeous. And they have surprisingly different backgrounds. Many of the Filipina women listed have professions such as manager, editor, business school graduate--as well as the housekeepers and factory workers one might expect. But their photos all smile eagerly out of the computer screen at thousands of lonely men.

Why are the men so lonely? Cyd, a Filipina woman from Montreal who works as a domestic said, "I know of one woman in New Orleans who is a mail order bride. She weighs about 90 pounds--and her husband is over 400, no joke. But he's a fabulous person."

Some guys just have a hard time getting hooked up. One male contributor to an online forum rants, "It always amazes me how women just don't realize how difficult it is in our society to be a man. So many women play the 'I don't see you game' where she looks at everything else except the guy who is trying to make eye contact. The mail order brides thing is completely the opposite. Not only are there interested women, but they seem to be more than the guy dared ever dream of finding. Also, on the surface these women seem so easy to please."

The same site also has a note which states: "It is a fact that you will have a much better chance of marrying a much better wife this way, than by hassling with Modern Western women."

Oriental butterflies

"This is how the women are marketed--as the 'oriental butterfly'--a traditional wife from a traditional culture where the man is the centre of the family," said May Farrales, from Vancouver's Philippine Women Centre (PWC). "Mail order brides are part of the international trafficking of Filipino women. In the U.S. last year, 5,000 Filipina women became mail order brides. We don't want this trend to catch on in Canada."

The PWC did a preliminary study of Filipina mail order brides in Canada last year, identifying 40 women. "But there are probably a lot more. We focused mainly on rural isolated areas," said Farrales.

According to her, the mail order bride industry can't be separated from Canada's live-in caregiver program, which offers women a chance to immigrate here if they work as a domestic for two years. "Men see the Filipina domestics working in homes and form an image of them as these soft, docile hardworking women," she said. "But they don't see behind the smile to the women's worries about their families back home." In one segment of the study, the PWC found that the number of Filipina mail order brides in one area of B.C. was much higher than anywhere else in the province. They linked that to the fact that there had been an agency for Filipina nannies in the area for years.

"Almost 10 per cent of the world's 70-million Filipinos live outside the Philippines, as overseas contract workers (OCWs) in places like Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Japan, the U.S. and Canada," said Farrales. "About 2,000 leave the Philippines every day."

She says that the reason they leave is because of poverty in the Philippines, and the labour export policy of the Philippine government, which sees OCWs as people off their unemployment lists. And they also send money back home. "It's a lot of money too-- about 7-billion U.S. dollars last year," Farrales said.

More than half of the OCWs are women, who usually work as entertainers--some of whom are coerced into prostitution--or as domestic servants. The same economic factors propel thousands of women to marry abroad.

Western pigs?

But what about the men who marry these women? Farrales said that all of the women in the PWC study told the researchers they had suffered from some sort of abuse--from emotional to physical--from their husbands. "They were not treated with respect. From the beginning they were considered to be commodities," said Farrales. The PWC did not attempt to profile the type of men who used mail order bride services, or their psychology but said, "You can see their attitude from the Web sites."

Indeed, the sites make little jokes about their brides being "Y2K" compliant, have links for "ordering info" and have symbols for credit cards accepted for the fees involved in getting the women's contact coordinates.

But they also include other indications. A contributor to mailorderbride.com's online forum, who identified herself as a female researcher, said, "In my opinion many of the marriages do seem successful because the women are traditional and the men want a traditional wife."

Another man said: "My Thai wife and I met through correspondence. We have now been happily married for over 10 years. I highly recommend this approach."

While anonymous online information is often inaccurate, the PWC's study--and its conclusions-- is also hard to verify. The group has a definite leftist and anti-globalization bias, and sees itself as an extension of politics in the Philippines. Their answer to the problem is to somehow change the economic management of the Philippines so that working--or marrying--abroad is no longer necessary.

But in the meantime, all indications are that the mail order bride industry is a growing phenomenon, enhanced no doubt, notes Farrales with dismay, by the Internet. :

The Purple Rose Campaign

The huge community of dispersed Filipinos also provides the raw material for an extensive global activist network, which is unified by the Internet. The largest women's network is called Gabriela--after an 18th-century heroine of the Philippines' war against Spanish rule. A local group PINAY is part of this network, which is intimately connected to the politics and economics of the Philippines. PINAY (unlike the PWC) supports the "struggle" of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and has reading groups which study the works of Mao and other socialist writers.

One of PINAY's projects will be to raise funds and supplies for a Montreal transition home for Montreal's roughly 750 Filipina domestics when they are between jobs.

Gabriela's main project against what the group terms "the international trafficking of Filipino women" is the Purple Rose Campaign, so named because "Purple roses were bred, made exotic by human will. The purple rose exists not for its own purposes but for the pleasure and profit of others." : --J.E.

For more information, call Cynthia Palmaria at 739-6515.

-- Images from www.heart-of-asia.com