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The horrifying side to the 'mail-order bride' industry — some men aren't exactly looking for love.

These marriages aren't always a bad thing, but when they are, they really are.

Oksana thought she'd met a kind man when Carl came to see her in the Ukraine.

But by her third month with him in America on a fiancee visa, Oksana Makarova was starting to suspect she'd made a big mistake. He'd begun tracking her ovulation during those first months she'd moved to be with him. He was hell-bent on impregnating her as soon as possible. He dyed her toddler son's blond hair black without her consent. He wouldn't give her a key to the house, reminding her when she asked for one that she had no one to visit and no reason to leave the house.

 "Oksana, I thought you'd be obedient. This is the impression you gave me in Ukraine."


 

Image via iStock.

That's the line he would break out whenever he needed to put her back into her place. And as you can guess, he soon turned violent. Luckily, Oksana's story (told originally and in its entirety in Marie Claire) ended fairly well. She and her children safely moved out on their own, citizenships attained, and with primary custody given to Oksana. But it's not always the case for women who suffer the worst outcomes as "mail-order brides," as they're commonly (if somewhat insultingly) referred to.

The international marriage industry may inadvertently produce circumstances that can position a person as an ideal victim.

As mentioned in the first installment in this look at the international marriage industry, there are some very legitimate, understandable, and downright sweet love stories that can emerge from the practice. But what happens when a disturbed kind of man, put off by what he perceives as independent or hard-to-get women in America, turns to services where he thinks he can procure and isolate a "subservient" woman to yield to his more harmful tendencies?

Before heading to mixers where men assemble with the bride-finding company, hopeful women spend time beautifying. GIF from "Love Translated."

First, let's consider the motivations involved in how men and women meet in these kinds of matchmaking services. In some cases, the women, like Ekaterina from the first installment, can be already in a good place in life and generally happy; they're just seeking love, travel, and adventure. But sometimes, like in Oksana Makarova's case, there are women drawn to the matchmaking services because of a desperate need to provide for themselves and their children or to escape a dire situation in their home country.

 That's the first indicator that major power imbalances between the two people are afoot.

That uneven distribution of power comes into focus again when the men and women meet at mixers planned by the matchmaking agencies. The agency Oksana used had the women line up to be evaluated and maybe chosen for an interview by a man.

The courtship, if it proceeds, may continue for awhile with the "bride" communicating long distance from her home country, or she and her suitor may apply for a fiancee visa so that she can go to America. Often, once she is in America, she is quite dependent on a guy she may not know very well and who may very well have been spurred to seek her out in the first place because of misogynistic tendencies.

This is the second obvious marker of that aforementioned power imbalance. There are language barriers, deportation worries, and financial concerns that all serve to place an international bride-to-be in a pretty precarious position.

Furthermore, in a place far away from home, if she's been successfully isolated by her new fiance or husband, it's very difficult for her family and friends abroad to verify her well-being or to report her missing in a worst-case scenario.

These situations have all the precursors to produce the perfect victims for the kind of person who looks to victimize — and like all of us, it's really just a roll of the dice if you will find yourself matched and then entangled with such a person.

There is the story of Gary Swierski, a California man who repeatedly reeled in foreign women through pen pal services and dated immigrants already living in America, serially and savagely abusing one after the other. He was finally turned in by his daughter, whom he'd forced to help dispose of the body of his second wife, Reina Swierski, after he killed her. It caused investigators to reopen the case of a former girlfriend of his who suspiciously drowned during a night out with him more than a decade earlier.

L: Gary Swierski. R: Reina Swierski, Gary's second wife and murder victim. Image from Sunnyvale Police Department/public domain.

After a string of disturbingly similar murder cases involving marriages started through international marriage brokers, the United States passed the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA) in 2005. It stipulates that background checks must be run on U.S. citizens before they communicate through the services to potential women. But the law is easy to circumvent — all the company has to do is base itself outside the United States to not have to comply.

The gray area between international marriages and human trafficking gets murky sometimes.

National Organization for Women's Sonia Ossorio told Bloomberg in 2011, "The mail-order bride industry is a softer version of human trafficking."

"You take a beautiful woman from the Czech Republic and you bring her into your home, she does all your cooking and cleaning and ironing. At the end of the day, the [wife's] service is free."

And national experts agreed. In 2004, before Congress passed IMBRA, John R. Miller (then-director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons) clearly connected the dots between human trafficking and international marriage practices:

"I want to focus, if I can, on the worldwide perspective here. When you look at the slavery issue, we now have reason to believe that 80 percent of the millions that are in slavery, internal or external traffic victims, 80 percent are women and 50 percent are children. The two biggest categories are sex slavery and probably domestic servitude. I think these are two of the categories of slavery that you frequently have... What do we know about trafficked victims in general? Well, there are two or three characteristics. There is the vulnerability of the victims. ... There is the deception, the key tool of the traffickers, and often there is government complicity and corruption. Well, if you look at marriage brokering, you have these features, particularly the first two features, the vulnerability of the women and the deception involved. These are features that we have to deal with."

 Pair that testimony with this excerpt and quote from an international marriage agency founder featured in Bloomberg, and the connection really begins to emerge:

"For some companies, such submissiveness is a selling point. Hand-In-Hand's website trumpets the fact that its females are 'unspoiled by feminism.' Company founder Weiner argues this form of chauvinism — like the mail-order bride business itself — is economically motivated. 'You take a beautiful woman from the Czech Republic and you bring her into your home, she does all your cooking and cleaning and ironing,' he says. 'At the end of the day, the service is free.' Hand-In-Hand estimates the potential savings of a homemaking wife at $150 per week."

 And then there are the times would-be brides (and potentially their children) are duped into sex slavery. John R. Miller told of one such case in his 2004 deposition to Congress regarding IMBRA.

"Pou was 17 when a man came to her village and arranged through her sister to marry her. Shortly after the marriage, the man took Pou to a fishing village and sold her to a brothel. After years of abuse and torment, Pou was released by the brothel. Today her body is ravaged by disease, and this woman in her 20s looks decades older than her real age. Yet she wants her story told."

 Clearly, there is a very real concern about the welfare of women who participate in international marriage arrangements.

And to be fair, there are also cases reported of the seemingly perfect, caring woman bilking lonely bachelors out of significant money and property and then disappearing. But since that's money, and not physical safety, again the risk-to-reward ratios are highly skewed between them.

Even in the less egregious, non-abusive situations, there is a lot to explore in the dynamics of modern society that cause some men to look to a more transactional, surefire method of selecting a life partner. Some bride-seekers are decent guys with extenuating circumstances that necessitate going outside of traditional dating. But...

Some men really just don't like how feminism is changing their world and all it entails for them.

As noted previously, some men are seriously averse to feminism and the shifting paradigm (or at least the effort to shift paradigms) to more equitable relationships.

To men who may struggle with that shift, the cultural dissonance manifests itself in various ways. There are countless OKCupid and Tinder horror stories from women who "swiped right" on a guy's profile only to have him go from seemingly nice to combative and bitter in minutes, all because she didn't display the desired level of enthusiasm at his advances.

Photo by Paul Zinken/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images.

There are also "pickup artist" (PUA) forums, where men who don't hold with that "feminism crap" convene and share tips for getting women to respond to them.


The prevailing attitude in such virtual meeting places is that women are all similar enough, and universal reactions can be provoked from them if only you employ the right tactics, as if you're entering code into a computer. They even organize in-person events, where they hire marketers to recruit young women to attend, often under the guise that it's a free networking event. All the while, it's really a training ground for men who've paid good money to try out their newly acquired "skills" in manipulating women, with an experienced "guru" to encourage them in the wings. You just have to learn the right combination of psychological buttons to push on a woman to get them to comply with your wishes! It's a sadly reductionist coping outlet for the subsection of men who seem to struggle with one concept: Women are human beings who are complex and don't come with a guarantee — they're not vending machines and love isn't transactional.

None of this even touches yet on the way that toxic and twisted misconception of masculinity manifests when the Elliot Rodgers of the world shoot innocent people because girls reject them, and jilted high schoolers stab girls for saying no to being their prom date.

It's easy to see how a man who hasn't been taught that interacting with women is like interacting with any other human could progress through the various stages of frustration at his ever-calcifying ineptitude. And he might be attracted to a transactional kind of arrangement with a woman he perceives as powerless — his path of least resistance.

 A few thousand dollars is easier to pull together than untangling decades of one's societal misogynistic programming, after all.

There's no easy answer to whether the international marriage industry is a net positive or a net negative.


In the end, an online tool or agency of any kind is only as good as the people using it and the safeguards it implements to protect regular users from the worst. In a world where hatred toward women isn't always actively discouraged, and companies don't always play by the rules, it can be a high-risk gamble to look for a love connection across the world in a place where one has no support system.

For some, like Ekaterina and Josh, it pays off and produces a beautiful new life together. But when enough people get unlucky matches with the worst outcomes, we have to evaluate where things went so devastatingly wrong and how it can be changed for the better.


Pop Culture

'Wicked' author says one line in 'The Wizard of Oz' inspired Elphaba and Glinda's backstory

Gregory Maguire says he "fell down to the ground" laughing when the idea hit him.

Public domain

The two witches in "The Wizard of Oz" clearly had a history together.

Have you ever watched a movie or read a book or listened to a piece of music and wondered, "How did they come up with that idea?" The creative process is so enigmatic even artists themselves don't always know where their ideas come from, so It's a treat when we get to hear the genesis of a brilliant idea straight from the horse's mouth. If you've watched "Wicked" and wondered where the idea for the friendship between Elphaba (the Wicked Witch) and Glinda (the Good Witch) came from, the author of the book has shared the precise moment it came to him.

The hit movie "Wicked" is based on the 20-year-old hit stage musical, which is based on the novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" written by Gregory Maguire. While the musical is a simplified version of the 1995 book, the basic storyline—the origin story of the two witches from "The Wizard of Oz"—lies at the heart of both. In an interview with BBC, Maguire explained how Elphaba and Glinda's friendship popped into his head.

 

Maguire was visiting Beatrix Potter's farm in Cumbria, England, and thinking about "The Wizard of Oz," which he had loved as a child and thought could be an interesting basis for a story about evil.

"I thought 'alright, what do we know about 'The Wizard of Oz' from our memories,'" he said. "We have the house falling on the witch. What do we know about that witch? All we know about that witch is that she has feet. So I began to think about Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West…

 glinda, elphaba, wicked,  In "Wicked," the two Oz witches met as students at Shiz University.  Giphy GIF by Wicked 

"There is one scene in the 1939 film where Billie Burke [Glinda the Good Witch] comes down looking all pink and fluffy, and Margaret Hamilton [the Wicked Witch of the West] is all crawed and crabbed and she says something like, 'I might have known you'd be behind this, Glinda!' This was my memory, and I thought, now why is she using Glinda's first name? They have known each other. Maybe they've known each other for a long time. Maybe they went to college together. And I fell down onto the ground in the Lake District laughing at the thought that they had gone to college together."

In "Wicked," Glinda and the Wicked Witch, Elphaba, meet as students at Shiz University, a school of wizardry. They get placed as roommates, loathe each other at first, but eventually become best friends. The story grows a lot more complicated from there (and the novel goes darker than the stage play), but it's the character development of the two witches and their relationship with one another that force us to examine our ideas about good and evil.

  - YouTube  youtu.be  

 

Maguire also shared with the Denver Center for Performing Arts what had inspired him to use the "Wizard of Oz" characters in the first place.

"I was living in London in the early 1990’s during the start of the Gulf War. I was interested to see how my own blood temperature chilled at reading a headline in the usually cautious British newspaper, the Times of London: 'Sadaam Hussein: The New Hitler?' I caught myself ready to have a fully formed political opinion about the Gulf War and the necessity of action against Sadaam Hussein on the basis of how that headline made me feel. The use of the word Hitler – what a word! What it evokes! When a few months later several young schoolboys kidnapped and killed a toddler, the British press paid much attention to the nature of the crime. I became interested in the nature of evil, and whether one really could be born bad. I considered briefly writing a novel about Hitler but discarded the notion due to my general discomfort with the reality of those times. But when I realized that nobody had ever written about the second most evil character in our collective American subconscious, the Wicked Witch of the West, I thought I had experienced a small moment of inspiration. Everybody in America knows who the Wicked Witch of the West is, but nobody really knows anything about her. There is more to her than meets the eye."

 wizard of oz, wicked witch of the west The Wicked Witch of the West has a story of her own.  Giphy  

Authors and artists—and their ideas—help hold a mirror up to humanity for us to see and reflect on who we are, and "Wicked" is one of those stories that makes us take a hard look at what we're seeing in that mirror. Thanks, Gregory Maguire, for launching us on a collective journey that not only entertains but has the potential to change how we see one another.

This story originally appeared last year.

via Josie Bowers / TikTok

Josie Bowers, a 19-year-old woman from Canada, shared the story of how she thwarted an intruder when she was 15. The viral TikTok video is a harrowing tale and a valuable lesson for everyone to learn. Josie was staying with her family at the Ocean City Hilton in Ocean City, Maryland, when the incident occurred.

She went to her hotel room alone to take a shower while her family was on the beach. After getting out of the shower, she was alarmed when she noticed a long wire with a hook at the end wiggling its way out of the crack at the bottom of the front door. The hook was waving around, trying to catch the handle to open the door. It's amazing that no one in the hallway noticed the incredibly suspicious activity.

The intruders eventually caught the handle with the wire and pulled it down to enter the room. Without hesitation, Josie slammed the door shut and put on the deadbolt. "My main thought was holy sh*t, I'm in a towel right now and someone is about to break in and get me," she said on TikTok. "So the door opens a crack, and I just slammed it back shut and put the deadbolt on."

After the door was shut on the intruders, they pretended to work for the hotel. "So they tell me your keycard is broken and we need to get into the room and fix your keypad for you," she continued. "And so I open the door a tad bit, to see if it was a worker. It clearly wasn't, they were in jeans and a T-shirt. Hilton keeps it pretty classy, not the attire."

@josiebowers10

Reply to @emmade1rey #part2

Josie then remembered a trick that her stepfather, who's a police officer, once told her: Never let people know you're alone.

"I yelled 'Hey dad, there's someone here to fix the door.' As soon as they thought that I wasn't alone – and potentially my dad was there – they ran, they were gone," she said. A lot of people freeze in such a stressful situation but Josie was able to remember her stepfather's advice and it made all the difference.

Given their reaction, it's pretty clear that the intruders must have followed her up from the beach or had some inside information to know that she was alone. They didn't want anything to do with her father. "So I think I'm very smart for this one, my stepdad is a police officer, he taught me never to let people know you're alone. I yelled 'Hey dad, there's someone here to fix the door.' As soon as they thought that I wasn't alone, and potentially my dad was there. They ran, they were gone," she said.

@josiebowers10

Reply to @lionacreates #part3 #oceancity

The TikTokker shared the video to show others what they should do in a similar situation and to remind them to never let anyone know they are alone.

"I'm glad I had this experience so I can teach people about it. Obviously, I'm safe but it could have ended up a lot worse," she said. "Be safe, you can get door stoppers, always put on the deadbolt."


This article originally appeared four years ago.

via James Breakwell/X

All parents have had similar convos with thier kiddos.

Raising kids is tough, but there's a lot of laughs along the way. Especially when actual conversations start, as kids begin trying to make sense out of the world around them, ask questions, and test mommy and daddy's resolve.

Back in 2018, comedy writer and children's book author James Breakwell, with four daughters who were all under the age of eight at the time, shared their hilarious conversations on X. From these tweets, it looks like comedy runs in the family. Here's a sampling of some Breakwell's funniest kid-inspired tweets.

 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

While Breakwell's 7-year-old wasn't as heavily featured, when she was quoted, the sarcasm was palpable. Which makes sense, considering that kiddos begin understanding this mechanism around that age.

 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

Kids really do say the darnedest things, and we love them for it. It one of the many, many ways then bring so much joy to the world. It almost makes up for the headaches and sleepless nights, doesn't it.

This article originally appeared seven years ago.

Remember things being built to last?

Americans are well aware of shrinkflation, where food companies reduce the sizes of their products while the price remains the same at the grocery store. You see this in fast food restaurants when you pick up a burger and feel like your hand has grown a few inches, and at the supermarket when you buy a box of cookies, it weighs less than it did a few weeks ago. Companies use this strategy when they think you’ll be less likely to notice a dip in quantity than a hike in the price.

We see something similar in the world of retail, particularly fast fashion. Fast fashion offers cheaper garments made from low-quality materials that last about as long as the trend does, so people can throw them away and buy the next hot thing. This can be a real problem because fast fashion harms the environment and leads to exploitative labor practices. And the tough part is—even for the most conscious of consumer, it's hard to escape from.

Here's a prime example of what this looks like in the real world. A few months ago, a TikTokker named Tom (@SideMoneyTom), popular for making videos about consumer products, went viral for a video where he called out shoe manufacturers for dropping their quality while keeping prices high. “So many of you guys want to shoot the messenger, but look, it's not my fault shoes are made out of Styrofoam and oil now,” Tom says in a TikTok with over 528,000 views. “It's literally every shoe you look at now. It's not even just the cheap ones. I can find hundred dollar plus pairs of shoes all day long with glue squeezing out of their Styrofoam cracks.”

 
 @sidemoneytom Replying to @Oscar Magaña shoes are done #fyp #shoes #foryou ♬ original sound - SideMoneyTom 
 
 

Tom notes that recently, shoes have been made with foam soles instead of rubber. Both have pros and cons. Foam is a little more comfortable, but rubber lasts a lot longer. Rubber shoes keep shape and support over time and are much more durable. Conversely, foam shoes compress over time, losing their support and comfort. When companies sell cheaper shoes that wear out more quickly, they make much more money because you must keep replacing them.

In the video, Tom adds that many companies that used to have shoes made with rubber heels, such as Carhartt and Timberland, have switched to foam. This is an interesting choice for brands that pride themselves on selling durable products.

Cora Harrington, a writer and lingerie expert, says that companies aren't entirely to blame. Americans don’t want to pay higher prices. “People don’t exactly want to pay more for all that stuff,” Harrington told Vox. "So what has to happen if everything is more expensive and the customers still want to pay the same price, something has to be cut and that’s often going to be the quality of the garment.”

“There is an entire generation of consumers at this point that doesn’t actually know what high-quality clothing feels like and looks like,” Harrington continues. “It gets easier, I think, for consumers to just not know any better.”

Many commenters have noticed the decline in shoe quality and praised Tom for pointing it out. "I am so happy I’m not the only one who is baffled by shoes being made of styrofoam and then being upcharged for them," one commenter wrote. "When shoes started being named some version of 'Air Light Cloud float,' my thought was it was because they went from quality rubber to cheap foam and less materials,” another commenter added.

Tom believes the decline in shoe quality is an example of a more significant trend affecting American consumers' products: quality is decreasing while prices remain the same. “The quality of everything is going to hell, and the prices are going up," Tom concludes his video. "The problem is, so many of us have just become used to it that we keep buying it, and we basically allow them to dumb down the quality of everything. Everything in our lives. These shoes are just the tip of the iceberg. Start thinking about it in your life. What are you gonna allow to be garbage quality?"

This article originally appeared in March.

Boomer panic is real.

In a video posted in September 2023, TikToker @myexistentialdread used the phrase “boomer panic” to explain how baby boomers (1946 to 1964) can quickly become unhinged when faced with the most minor problems. It all started when she visited a Lowe’s hardware store and encountered a boomer-aged woman working at the check-out stand.

“I had a dowel that didn’t have a price tag on it, whatever, so I ran back and took a photo of the price tag. And as I was walking back towards her, I was holding up my phone… because I had multiple dowels and that was the one that didn’t have the price tag on it,” she said in the video. “And she looks at me and she goes, ‘I don’t know which one that is,’ and she starts like, panicking.” The TikToker said that the woman was “screechy, panicking for no reason.”

 older woman upset, boomer reactions, boomer panic Older people can become frustrated over seemingly small things.Photo credit: Canva

Many people raised by boomers understood what she meant by "boomer panic." "Boomer panic is such a good phrase for this! Minor inconvenience straight to panic," the most popular commenter wrote. And while there was some unfortunate boomer-bashing in the comments, some younger people tried to explain why the older folks have such a hard time regulating their emotions: “From conversations with my mother, they weren’t allowed to make mistakes and were harshly punished if they did.” The TikToker responded, “A lot of people mentioned this, and it breaks my heart. I think you’re right,” Myexistentialdread responded.

A follow-up video by YourTango Editor Brian Sundholm tried to explain boomer panic in an empathetic way.

 

“Well, it's likely that there actually was a reason the woman started panicking about a seemingly meaningless problem,” Sundholm said. “Most of us nowadays know the importance of recognizing and feeling our emotions.” Sundholm then quoted therapist Mitzi Bachman, who says that when people bottle up their emotions and refuse to express them, it can result in an "unhinged" reaction.

TikToker Gabi Day shared a similar phenomenon she noticed with her boomer mom; she called the behavior “anxiety-at-you.”

Day’s boomer mother was “reactive,” “nervous,” and “anxious” throughout her childhood. Now, she is still on edge with Day’s children. “She's immediately like gasping and just really like exaggerated physical reactions, and then, of course, that kind of startles my kid,” Day said. “Again, I know that this comes from a place of care. It's just a lot,” she continued.

@itsgabiday

It comes from a place of love but it is exhausting 🫠😬 #millennialmomsoftiktok #boomergrandma #reparenting #gentleparenting

 

There is a significant difference in emotional intelligence and regulation between how boomers were raised and how younger generations, such as Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z, were brought up. Boomers grew up when they had to bottle up their feelings to show their resilience. This can lead to growing anger, frustration with situations and people, chronic stress, and anxiety—all conditions that can lead to panicky, unhinged behavior.

Ultimately, Sundholm says that we should sympathize with boomers who have difficulty regulating their emotions and see it as an example of the great strides subsequent generations have made in managing their mental health. “It may seem a little harsh to call something 'boomer panic,' but in the context of how many of them were raised, it makes a lot of sense,” Sundholm says. “It also underlines the importance of emotional regulation skills and teaching them to future generations. And maybe most important, having compassion for those who never had a chance to learn them.”

 older person's hands holding a younger person's hands, compassion for elderly Having compassion for older generations can go a long way.Photo credit: Canva

This article originally appeared in March.