On the Great Ukrainian Bride Hunt

Posted on Jul 24, 2006

From A Foreign Affair

The above personal listing came from the company Foreign Affairs, which arranges tours and introductions between Western men and women from Russia, Eastern Europe and Central America.

A Harper’s reporter goes undercover on a tour designed to introduce Western men to Eastern European and Russian women. The tour company says men are treated “like an alpha-male wolf ...  having the sheep brought in.”

(The picture to the right is a real company listing.)

Harper’s:

“These are not American women,” our guide was telling us. “They do not care about your age, looks, or money. And you are not going to have to talk to them for half an hour and then have your testicles handed back to you! Let me tell you: over here, you’re the commodity; you’re the piece of meat. I’ve lived in St. Petersburg for two years, and I wouldn’t date an American woman right now if you paid me!”

It was three weeks before Christmas, and I was sitting in a Ukrainian business hotel with perhaps thirty men, mostly American and mostly on the later side of middle age, listening as a muscular, impossibly loud radio D.J. who answers to “Dan the Man” promised that our lives were about to change forever. We were all strangers, but I knew at least one thing about these men: each was there because he was frustrated, angry, and tired of being alone. Each had decided that his best chance at happiness was to pay nearly $4,000 to a company called A Foreign Affair, which would ferry him through Ukraine on a two-week bride hunt, “like an alpha-male wolf,” as one testimonial for the tour giddily assured us, “having the sheep brought in.”

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