postal scrotum: for you to ponder

Before I went to the States, my brother Sean emailed me the following:

Dr Bigglesworth,

Here's something to address on your blog that bothered me when I was in Korea.

I have come up with a theory that many (not all) male foreigners working in Korea are there just to get a date. I remember seeing a disproportionately large proportion of ugly white men with pretty Korean girls. It's obvious that so many of these men could never get a date with someone as pretty in their own home countries so they come to Korea to get a date with women from a culture that is predisposed to liking western things and finding them exotic. Any self respecting korean-american girl would never be caught dead with these men. This really bothered me because the men were taking advantage of this cultural predisposition and it also bothered me that the pretty korean girls would fall for it. I also think that a lot of these ugly men just have yellow fever and want a more submissive woman (which is obviously the western stereotype of asian women).

What do you think of this theory?

I know that this sort of question provokes lengthy comment threads at places like The Marmot's Hole. Anything of a "they're here to fuck our women!" nature does that. My own take is that, yeah, a lot of foreigners are here to scope, but that there's nothing inherently wrong with being a guy on the lookout for chicks. The cultural problem you refer to-- the one about the "submissive Asian woman" stereotype-- is less of a problem than it might seem at first blush, because Westerners who go into the game with the wrong conception about Asian women usually get straightened out pretty quickly by the women themselves: they're anything but submissive for the most part. That might explain why some Western losers, unable to deal with that reality, turn to the hos. But as I'm sure many expat commenters will point out, Koreans can't really blame foreigners for the bustling sex industry: the sex business is fueled primarily by Korean clientele. Blaming foreigners for a systemic internal problem is an easy way out. Not that these foreigners are helping the situation, of course...

For my part, whenever I see a pretty Korean lady with an ugly-ass Westerner, I think: Woman, how can you not see what a freak that dude is? But the funny thing is that this works in reverse: by Korean standards, many of the girls who date Western men seem not to fall into the Korean notion of what counts as pretty. A big international example of this aesthetic disconnect is Lucy Liu, whom many Western guys find beautiful, but whom East Asians mostly regard as plain. Some veteran expats here, whose senses have been recalibrated more along Korean lines, might agree that Liu is plain. I, too, agree she's no big shakes (though I think she's a great actress), but I do believe she's blessed with a fine, fine ass. It will never be mine, alas. I'm the wrong income bracket, belt size, and sperm motility level. Anyway, my point is that this aesthetic disconnect cuts both ways.

Notions of beauty and ugliness are globalizing, but we're not totally globalized by any means. So maybe it's appropriate that a guy who's ugly by Western standards should meet up with a girl who's not that pretty by Asian standards. The black sheep from both sides of the cultural fence can meet up, get busy, and produce racially superior hybrids who will eventually take over the planet and rule forever.


_