Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband: Russian-American Internet Romance
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Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband: Russian-American Internet Romance
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Overview
Each chapter presents one woman’s story and then links it to a discussion of gender roles, the mail-order bride industry, and the severe economic and social constraints of life in Russia. The transitional economy has often left people, after a month’s work, either unpaid or paid unexpectedly with a supply of sunflower oil or toilet paper. Women over twenty-three are considered virtually unmarriageable in Russian society. Russia has a large population of women who are single, divorced, or widowed, who would like to be married yet feel that they have no chance finding a Russian husband. Grim realities such as these motivate women to seek better lives abroad. For many of those seeking a mail-order husband, children or parents play significant roles in the search for better lives, and they play a role in Johnson’s account as well. In addition to her research in the former Soviet Union, Johnson conducted interviews in the United States, and she shares the insights—about dating, marriage, and cross-cultural communication—of a Russian-American married couple who met via the Internet.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822389750 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/13/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 204 |
| File size: | 601 KB |
About the Author
Ericka Johnson is a researcher in the Department of Technology and Social Change at Linköping University in Sweden. She is the author of Situating Simulators: The Integration of Simulations in Medical Practice.
Read an Excerpt
Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband
Russian-American Internet RomanceBy Ericka Johnson
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2007 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4029-4
Chapter One
A Catalogue of Women
One afternoon, early in my stay as an exchange student in Russia, I had been invited back to a new friend's apartment for dinner. We chatted in the sitting room, looking at pictures of her childhood and talking about her hopes to land a job as a singer, while her mother made dinner in the kitchen. The smells that started wafting out to where we sat were making my stomach rumble, and when we were finally called in to eat, I was both hungry and excited to be treated to a home-cooked Russian meal. The food was already dished up when we sat down at the little table, and Natasha's mother smiled warmly as she encouraged us to eat. I said "thank you," picked up my spoon, and looked into my bowl only to realize that the "chicken" in my chicken soup consisted of one boiled claw standing straight up out of the broth. Natasha and her mother both had bowls of broth with little pieces of onion floating in them, but I, as the guest, had been given the claw to chew on. It was the first time I had been invited home with Natasha; I knew they didn't have very much money, and I understood that I was being treated as the guest of honor. So, I delicately picked up the claw, smiled my appreciation at both of them, and ate what I could of it.
Natasha was one of the first women I met in Russia, and she had impressed me with her self-confidence, her talent, and her determination. Because of this, I had been more than a little surprised when, after we had finished our soup and were drinking tea and eating teaspoons of jam, she confided that she was listed with a matchmaking agency offering Russian women to American men. She seemed so independent and ambitious that I found it difficult to reconcile her personality with the desire to be an imported housewife. But she was serious about her chances of finding a husband that way.
This was in the mid-1990s, before the Internet had really taken off, and Natasha's picture had been printed up in a black-and-white catalogue and mailed out to interested men. Because of that one picture, she had received letters from about fifteen men, and when I asked her about them she eagerly put her teacup down to dig the letters out of her drawer and show them to me. We spent the next hour poring over photos and words from men who were interested in Natasha, and she asked for my help pinpointing where they lived on the map of North America in her mother's atlas. As she opened up to me, it became clear that Natasha was no longer attractive to local men, having reached the ripe old age of twenty-three. This surprised me at first, but as the year wore on, I gradually realized it was true. Women in Russia, at least in the provincial town where I was studying, were expected to have been married by her age. There were not that many men who would want to marry a devushka as old as Natasha. She was constantly being approached by married men, but because she wanted more than a romantic affair, she thought an American husband might be a better solution.
I had tried to ask her why she felt it was so important to get married, especially since she was busy building her career, but I could tell she thought it was odd I would even formulate a question like that. To her, it was essential she find a husband, and she was very serious about the possibilities her American letters contained. I was not overly impressed with the men who were writing to her, and several of the letters were so poorly put together that even Natasha could see that she wrote English better than those men did, but she was nonetheless willing to give most of them a chance and had started correspondence with several of them. During the rest of the evening I helped her formulate a couple of letters, translated some of the colloquialisms the men had used, and then just listened as she told me her daydreams about life as a wife in the United States.
That was more than ten years ago, but I was reminded of Natasha a few years later when I was working on a research project about the spread of information technology in the former Soviet Union. I was trying to gather some preliminary data about Internet usage in a certain city, and I had typed the city's name into an Internet search engine, hoping to find listings of service providers, cyber cafes, and possibly even it courses at the local university. But the search results gave me none of those things. Instead I found a short page of CIA facts about the region, a personal home page by someone who had recently visited the place, and page after page of biographical details from Russian women who were trying to find husbands in the West. Instead of the names and prices of local e-mail service providers, I found "Ludmila, 24, I want a kind, serious, honest, caring, well-off man who loves children"; "Irina, 30, I am kind, good-mixer, cheerful, romantic, honest, humorous, and loyal. I can only speak a little English"; and "Svetlana, 20, cheerful, soft, faithful, humorous, loving woman. I like music and sports. I especially like knitting and sewing. I also like pets."
For a brief moment, sitting there at my computer, I smiled wryly at the irony that the city's cyberspace identity was made up of women who were trying to leave it. My smile disappeared quickly, though, as I started surfing through the women's pages and the other parts of the "International Matchmaking" site to which they belonged. I soon started feeling queasy. The section of the site I had surfed into was just one of many for the various regions of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and there were thousands of pages listing women like Ludmila, Irina, and Svetlana. And as I surfed around a little more, I realized that the company I had found was a small part of a large industry listing available women around the world. I knew that Russian mail-order brides had become more common in recent years, but until I came across those pages, I had no idea that there were so very many of them on the Internet. Or that the women were literally being presented as potential wives to be "purchased" from the companies which were marketing them.
But aside from my shock over the sheer quantity of women on the sites, my repulsion was stirred by the obvious objectification and commodification that the pages contained. I was surfing through a veritable catalogue of goods. And I mean literally. One typical site let me search its databases of women in different ways. I could view listings of the women whose pictures had just arrived that week or of all the women from a certain city or region; I could run a query against the database and find the women who met my demands for specified physical and social characteristics-all women under twenty-five with blonde hair and no children, for example. And regardless of how I refined my search, I was presented with page after page of small thumbnail images of women who were waiting to write to me. Or, more precisely, who were waiting to write to a future husband in North America, Europe, Australia, or New Zealand. Next to each image was the woman's first name, her age, height, and weight, and when I clicked on one of these headshots, the woman's individual page appeared with a larger photo and her personal details. I could see a full body shot, read her biographical description, and, if I was still interested, I could click on the button which let me "add number 90541 to my shopping cart."
The "shopping cart" button was only one indication that the women were being presented as objects for sale. In "satisfied customer" testimonials sprinkled throughout the site and on separate pages dedicated to the virtues of Russian brides, this consumption rhetoric was rationalized by saying that the women, as such, were not for sale, it was only their addresses that were being sold. And to be fair, this was literally true. But the overwhelming impression given by the site was just the opposite. The way the women's identities were presented for potential husbands also helped the process. Each woman's page was dominated by a large picture of her, taking up the entire left side of my screen. In some cases it was a snapshot, an amateur photo of the woman peeking out between two birch trees, or on a lake shore, posing in a swim suit. But most of the photos looked like studio portraits, showing women who were professionally made-up and standing in obviously choreographed poses like shop window mannequins.
Below each woman's main photograph was a link that took me to another page of three or four additional images. Here the women were shown in different outfits, usually a swimsuit, a revealing dress, and another more matronly outfit, plus a close-up of the woman's face. The impression these images gave, along with the larger, first-page picture, was of women who were consciously and successfully balancing on the tenuous line between madonna and whore. I remember, for example, one image of a woman in a long pink floral dress with a button-front, puffy sleeves, and a white lace collar, a dress that would be appropriate at a Sunday service in any conservative church in the American Midwest. But in this picture, the dress happened to be unbuttoned from the hem to the upper thigh, with two shapely calves seductively peeking out of the slit, displaying legs and stiletto heels that would be more appropriate for Saturday night.
However, despite the obvious double entente in the photos, the personal descriptions of the women tended to tip their virtual identities toward ideals of domesticity and motherhood. Next to the photograph on each woman's page was a written summary of her identity, or at least those characteristics which were deemed important in helping the men judge her relative market value: physical details like age, weight, height, hair and eye color, and measurements in inches and centimeters, social details like university degrees and job descriptions, and whether the woman smoked, had children, and went to church.
Beneath all this, at the bottom of the page, were personal descriptions of the women: fifteen to twenty words that the women used to describe themselves and their interests, along with fifteen to twenty words explaining what kind of man they were hoping to find. There were recurring themes in these descriptions-ideas about family life, domesticity, and loyalty, both given and received. A typical self-description could read: "I am intelligent, kind, faithful, tender, loving, caring, romantic, cheerful and I love children. I have a son age 10." Many of the women listed their hobbies, the type of literature they liked, or their passion for classical music. And suspiciously many of the women mentioned a love of cooking, knitting, and aerobics, as if there was a rumor circulating that those hobbies garnered a positive response from the audience they were addressing.
The descriptions of what type of men they wished to meet were also fairly homogenous, though what they were describing seemed to be generally desirable characteristics for any person to have, as a husband or otherwise: "I would like to meet an honest, sociable, strong and caring man (aged 25-40) with whom I can enjoy life"; or "I wish to meet an honest man, courageous, faithful, sincere, and kind. Up to age 43." An age limit appeared quite frequently in these descriptions, and I wondered if the women were aware it was likely they would be approached by even older men and were trying to dissuade letters from unwelcome candidates.
It was in these descriptions that I found the glimmer of a counterbalance to the commodification that was so glaring in the rest of the site. Everywhere else the women were voiceless images to be clicked on, evaluated, and placed in shopping carts. Yet in the personal descriptions and lists of characteristics they wanted to find in a man, the women seemed to be whispering about their dreams and hopes, flagging their uniqueness as individuals. But that whisper was hard to hear through the sheer number of clickable, consumable images smiling loudly on the screen.
Apart from being disturbed by the sites I had surfed, though, I did not really know what to make of the phenomenon my search had presented. I had a faint suspicion that I was seeing the public face of a shadow industry for trafficking women. What I had read on the subject supported this, since mail-order brides are often listed along with other forms of human trafficking. I also had the feeling I was probably viewing something that involved at least elements of the infamous Russian mafia, with their leather coats, "imported" Mercedes (stolen in Western Europe), and violent business tactics. And, not least of all, after reading the plethora of home pages lauding the benefits of "having" a Russian bride, there was little doubt I had come across a forum for an awful lot of not-so-very-enlightened, or not even socially competent, Western men who were keen on importing these women. But there was something else that made these sites unique. While using computers to find a partner is becoming more popular, as a concept it is not really that new. As early as the 1960s computers were being used to match individuals with potential mates, and today's Internet dating services are not limited to mail-order bride sites and international relationships. The Internet is also a way of meeting potential partners locally, not just across international borders. The United States leads the ranks in terms of sheer numbers of dating sites and users, and as in the online Russian mail-order bride databases, the criteria for finding a partner on the North American dating sites tend to be centered around physical characteristics like age, height, weight, and some social signifiers such as career choices and personal likes and dislikes. Just as I later found out that Russian women prefer Internet sites to paper catalogues, North American users also find the flexibility and available space for their personal descriptions on the Internet preferable to the limited word-counts newspapers and magazines allow. And despite the limited space given, even in paper media, people find ways to personalize their information and creatively present their human sides. However, one way in which the mail-order bride sites differ significantly from other dating services is that they give the impression that there are literally thousands of beautiful, smiling women who are breathlessly waiting to meet the single man who is surfing alone at his computer, a knight in shining armor who can sweep his bride away to a future of love and economic stability. This is not a situation most men encounter on a regular basis otherwise.
It was then, as I was clicking through those pages, that I remembered what had happened to Natasha a few months after she had shown me her letters. I had not seen her for most of the fall semester because she had taken a singing job on a cruise ship and was gone for long stretches of time. When we finally met up again, early in the winter, it was a different Natasha I spoke with, one who was not at all as interested in the possibility of finding a man in America. After a couple of cups of tea the reason came out. She told me that one of the men I had helped her write to had flown to Russia. He had asked her to come to Moscow to meet him, which was an expensive, overnight train trip, but she was interested in him and happy he had flown to Russia at all, so she had traveled there willingly.
What the man had not told her, however, was that he had also asked three other women to do the same thing. When she arrived in Moscow, Natasha realized that she was not the only candidate vying for his affections. She said she felt humiliated and misled, but she really wanted to be the one he chose, so she tried not to show her disappointment. She had spent the week going to museums with him, sharing romantic dinners, and then following them up with romantic nights, all the time aware that he was doing the same thing with other women on the evenings they were not together.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband by Ericka Johnson Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
1. A Catalogue of Women 7
2. Olga: Feminism or Femininity 22
3. Vera: A Catalogue of Men 49
4. Valentina: Searching for Companionship 66
5. Tanya: Trafficking in Dreams 88
6. Marina: Culture Shock 107
7. Anastasia and John: Making a Marriage Work 128
8. A Catalogue of Hope 146
Notes 163
Bibliography 183
Index 191
What People are Saying About This
“Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband is a pioneering work of broad interest and significance. It fills an important gap in information about the burgeoning ‘traffic’ in mail-order brides from Russia.”