Beautiful Russian Women Singles Personals

The Web Sites

It is estimated that there are over 10,000 links to sites on the World Wide Web
featuring mail order bride services.2 The sites generally feature a large color
picture of a woman next to information such as her age, weight, height, eye and hair color. Below this list is often a button that says, “Add to Shopping Cart” or “Order Now.” Then for an average of ten dollars, the customer can order the woman’s contact information. Some Web sites also host trips to Russia where the men can meet the women in person and choose which one they would like to take home.

One Woman’s Story

Lora Shcherbakova, a mail order bride from Ukraine, married New Jersey postal worker Randy Heisey. Their courtship and wedding was chronicled in an eight-part series in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In the series, Lora was characterized as the answer to Randy’s dreams. He was looking for a woman who was attractive and spoke English and he found Lora, a lithe, blonde, English-speaking gymnast. He met her while in Kiev on a “romance tour” sponsored by an online mail order bride company. She was one of two thousand women who flooded into a Kiev hotel conference room hoping to be chosen by one of ten American men. She soon traveled to the United States for her wedding and The Philadelphia Inquirer described their wedding day in detail.

Randy and Lora were married for less than six months when she filed for a
protection order against him, citing ongoing physical, emotional, and economic abuse. In response to Lora’s allegations, Randy’s lawyer said, “there were no witnesses to his wife’s allegations”.4 Legally, this is a perfectly legitimate argument.

Lora’s situation was well chronicled, but most mail order brides have little
access to the outside world and have too much to risk by making their story
public. Thus it is difficult to know how many of the marriages turn out like hers. While there are some success stories in which couples do develop real love for each other, stories of abuse and
mistreatment abound.

Women’s Lives in Russia

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, capitalist entrepreneurship has been encouraged in Russia but inflation and unemployment have skyrocketed. Despite the fact that 47% of Russian women versus 34% of Russian men have completed higher degrees, men’s businesses are thriving while women’s are not.5 According to the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, in 1995, Russian women earned only forty cents for every dollar earned by men. In some
regions of Russia, women make up more than 85% of the unemployed.6

Because there are no sexual harassment laws in Russia, women searching for jobs face imminent
harassment and bribery. Women must explicitly state on their employment applications, No Intimate Relations. A sample of an advertisement placed in 1996 in a local newspaper for people seeking employment reads:

Add to these factors the following bleak statistics gathered by Joni Seager in her book The State of Women in the World Atlas: In 1995, nearly half of all murder victims in Russia were women killed by their male partners. In 1993, fourteen thousand women were murdered by their partners. Fifty-four thousand were seriously injured, and almost none of the perpetrators have been prosecuted.8

The Groom’s Motivations

Many of the Web sites offering mail order brides call themselves match-making services.” It might be alluring to consider such terms accurate and to then conclude that these companies are simple international cupids. But when analyzing customer motivation and cultural differences, it is difficult not to notice trends suggesting that American men seek Russian women because Russian women are easier to dominate than American women. Henry Makow, author of the book A Long Way to go for a Date, is currently married to his second mail order bride. In his book, he wrote, “I had told myself that I wanted a ‘traditional’ woman. I did not dare to consider the word ‘submissive.’ But damn it! That’s exactly what I want!”9 As Gayle Rubin says in her essay “The Traffic in Women,” “The ‘exchange of women’ is a seductive and powerful concept.”10 If this man can’t find his submissive, beautiful dream girl at home, he is lured by the idea that he can purchase her abroad.

The Bride’s Motivations

It would be unfair to consider the woman the persistent loser in all mail-order bride scenarios. While the practice of trafficking women is deplorable, it seems some brides also have poor intentions. In January of 1997, the popular television show “60 Minutes” produced a segment on the mail order bride industry.11 Dan Stein, head of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), was interviewed and said, “Immigration is the goal in many of these marriages. It’s not to live in marital bliss. (The man) is the sucker. She knows what she’s doing and he gets hurt, and she walks. Except now and then, something really bad happens.”12 Stein is referring to situations like Anastasia Solovieva’s, a mail order bride murdered by her husband. She was his second Russian bride; the first filed for divorce citing severe physical abuse. Another man, Jack Reeves, is now serving a life sentence for the murder of his mail order bride. While these seem to be extreme cases, often the women who are abused are afraid to seek help because the husband threatens further abuse and deportation.

Immigration Laws Complicate the Matter

In 1986, amidst a fearful frenzy over citizenship-seeking marriages between American citizens and foreigners, Congress passed the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendments (IMFA).13 These laws, still enforced today, say that the spouse who is a U.S. citizen must petition for “conditional resident status” for his foreign spouse. The couple then has to stay married for two years at which time they can jointly petition the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to adjust her conditional residency status to permanent residency. To do this, they must sit through lengthy interviews during which INS officials decide whether their marriage is fraudulent or genuine love.14 If the marriage does not last two years, the woman becomes a deportable illegal alien. The law’s fine print reads that the foreign spouse cannot petition for her own immigration status. This leaves a mail order bride completely dependent upon her husband’s benevolence for her citizenship.

Final Thoughts

Imagine an American woman going to Russia. She sees terrible poverty, rampant sexual harassment and
discrimination, and brutal wife beating and killing. She discovers that the messy advent of capitalism in Russia has created a chaotic “free-for-all” for sexist and abusive men where employment discrimination by sex is encouraged by law. It might be easier for an American woman to imagine then, why a Russian woman might want to become a mail order bride.

The Internet has created what bell hooks aptly titled a “neocolonial cyberspace.” Mail order brides are bartered and traded women, attractive because of their submissive nature, their natural beauty, and their potential naiveté. An American man, perhaps disillusioned with American women, turns to the Internet to find a woman who will fit these requirements. Thus it seems that the problem might not rest squarely in the proliferation of mail order bride Web sites. Perhaps the source of the
problem is the motivation of a man who seeks to buy a bride. And conversely, that there are no other choices for Russian women but to take a blind leap into a potentially terrible marriage is indeed a sign of severe cultural and economic emergency.

1. Narayan, Uma. “Male-Order Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence and Immigration Law.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. Jan 31 1995: p. 104
   
2. “MOBS” on the Net: Critiquing the Gaze of the ‘Cyber’ Bride Industry.” Diversity Folio (Race, Gender & Class). 31 Jan 2000: V.7; N.1; p.57
   
3. Drake, Donald C. “To Russia For Love.” Philadephia Inquirer. November, 1998.
   http://www.philly.com/packages/bride
   
4. Ibid, 3. Drake, Donald C.
   
5. Holmgren, Beth. “Bug Inspectors and Beauty Queens: The Problems of Translating Feminism into Russian.” Genders. 31 Dec 1995: Vol. 22, p.15
   
6. Young, Katherine E. “Loyal wives, virtuous mothers” Diversity Folio (Russian Life). 31 Mar 1996: Vol.39, N.3, p.4
   
7. Ibid, 6. Young, Katherine E.
   
8. Seager, Joni. Women in the World Atlas: Women’s Status Around the Globe: Work, Health, Education and Personal Freedom. London: Penguin Reference, 1997. p. 27
   
9. Shackleton, David. “A Long Way to go for a Date.” Everyman: A Men’s Journal. 31 Mar 2001, Vol.47; p.62
   
10. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Orig. Pub. 1975. Feminist Theory. London: Mayfield, 2000. p. 232
    
11. “RP mail-order brides in demand.” Diversity Folio (Filipino Reporter). 23 Jan 1997: V.25; N.4; p.1
    
12. Ibid, 11. “RP mail-order brides in demand.”
    
13. Narayan, Uma. “Male-Order Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence and Immigration Law.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy Jan 31 1995: p. 104
    
14. Ibid, 13. Narayan, Uma.