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I am a big believer in the idea of revealed preferences—which is fancy econspeak for “Watch what people do, not what they say.”
I also used to be a lurker in various manosphere-adjacent internet subcultures. I just couldn’t help myself: the combination of surprisingly erudite references to Ancient Greek philosophy & evolutionary psychology mixed with highschool-lockerroom levels of pent-up sexual frustration made for some quality threads. And the one thing the manosphere loved to do—above all else—was complain about Western women: how third-wave feminism ruined them, how modern women are masculinized, hypergamous, promiscuous, etc. etc.
Despite all of the complaining, I couldn’t help but notice that the men of the manosphere were devoting the best years of their lives to analyzing how to sleep with the exact people they claimed to despise. They would create Excel spreadsheets for every date that they went on so they could track whether getting the Rocky Road flavor instead of the chocolate correlated with getting to third base at the end of the night. They would write multi-thousand-word “field reports”, detailing in excruciating and anthropological detail, the outcome of their most recent seduction attempt. They would pick up new hobbies, change jobs, buy new clothes—all to get laid.
So on the one hand: their explicit beliefs were that Western women are the worse. But their revealed preferences were that the validation of Western women is the single most important and valuable thing in the world.
Granted, even back then, there were a couple oddballs who would advocate for foreign women, praising their femininity and their “obedience”. There would be a thread like “Struggling with date-closing a flaky HB-9” and a foreign-bro—serene and graceful among the herd of sexually-frustrated chumps—would talk about how stress-free their life was with their Thai wife who cooks and cleans and knows not to talk too much when the Redzone is on. But these men seemed to be a minority. Most of the men of the manosphere were young urban professionals trying to win the affections of their young urban co-eds.
And when I looked at the young couples I knew in real life, most were of similar social class, intelligence, and broad cultural background. They had met in college or on OKCupid or through a friend of a friend. There certainly didn’t seem to be an abundance of men booking roundtrip flights to Caracas to seduce the Latina minx of their dreams.
Maybe all of that talk about “third-wave feminism” was overblown?
But in the past year or so, I’ve been seeing threads pop up on reddit about “passport bros”. A passport bro is a man from a first-world country who goes abroad to look for women, believing foreign women to be more traditional and conservative. It even has a page on Know Your Meme.
Suddenly, the old manosphere advice had become a Discourse-worthy phenomenon.
A lot can be said about the rise of the passport bro: how it's yet another indicator of the decay of our social values, how it represents the arbitraging of sexual market value differentials between Western men and their third-world counterparts, even how passport bros are not something entirely new, going by other names like 'sex tourists' in the past.
But I want to focus on one particular element that has caught my attention: how black the phenomenon of the passport bro is.
An important aspect of the passport bro movement is that not only do they praise foreign women, they dump heavily on black women. From black-manosphere.org:
Before researching for this post, I wasn’t even aware that the Black Manosphere was a thing. Like most Very Online people, if you asked me to draw a caricatured sketch of a denizen of the manosphere, he would invariably be white: perhaps of a Charlottesville, vaguely-Appalachian phenotype. For one, the text-based internet just feels white. Another reason is that the manosphere is closely associated with other rightwing internet subcultures where white nationalism is frequently celebrated by way of dank anuran memes. The surprising diversity of the Internet Right continues.
I’m not interested in wading into the debate about whether or not the passport bros are justified in their behavior. There are many threads about passport bros and all of the arguments are the same. Detractors of passport bros accuse them of being predatory incels who will get scammed out of a green card. Supporters of passport bros call them heroes who are brave for fighting the Leviathan that is third-wave feminism. (The internet is so tiring sometimes.)
But unfortunately, we can’t just ignore the passport bros either. The story of the last sixty years of America is that if you want a glimpse of the future of White America, there is no better place to look than Black America. Starting in the 60s, there were a set of broad changes—both legally and culturally—in American gender relations that are lumped under the umbrella of “second-wave feminism”. As Arctotherium explained in “The Baby Boom”:
These changes hit Black America first and hardest. Black people, whose natural inclinations are adverse to lifelong monogamy, quickly devolved back into their ancestral mating patterns when released from the straitjacket of traditional Christian morality. White people, being more “genetically monogamous”, didn’t react immediately to the change in incentive structure. But fastforward to the present and marriage is increasingly less common among the lower classes, now being reserved for upper-middle and upper class families who have the foresight, the ability to delay gratification, and the cultural upbringing to know the importance of raising children in a traditional nuclear family.
It’s interesting that passport bros tend to be black because, theoretically, black men should have an advantage in the dating market. Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races. This bears out in interracial dating statistics where BMWF couples (excuse the porn-inspired abbreviation—it’s just efficient and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel here) are well over-represented compared to WMBF couples who are under-represented. And this is not even accounting for the fact that if, instead of looking at stable couples, you look at people’s most recent sexual encounter, the disparity grows even further.
It will be interesting to see if this trend spreads to White America or if it stays confined to Tiktok and Black Twitter.
I recall a far-right talking point 'black on white rape 20,000, white on black rape 0'.
This link goes into detail on that and provides a fair few charts that show black women are generally considered unattractive: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/02/white-on-black-vs-black-on-white-rape-statistics/
Personally I don't know why we'd need charts to show that black women are unattractive but they're there! The OkCupid and reply rate data is pretty clear, if gut instinct wasn't enough.
Kierkegaard also argues that black women who date white men are smarter than white women who date black men, which also makes sense. https://twitter.com/wayotworld/status/1789038821981495741/photo/1
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What is it with spicy race rambling as top level posts today?
OK. On to the contribution. Passport bros are not primarily a reaction to the shortcomings of western women. They're a reaction to the brokenness of western dating markets, where some fraction of people- both male and female, simply cannot find a reasonable match for structural factors. In an ideal world these people would be matched up together because, and I repeat myself, femcels are a thing. This is not an overwhelmingly male group and in an ideal world the redpillers and female dating strategy crowd would get over themselves and find their way together. Alas, we do not live in an ideal world, and neither do the denizens of the third world, who find the USA irresistible.
Nor does it surprise me that redpillers are much blacker than average; gender relations seem much worse in the black community and redpilling is much more common as a reaction to broken down gender relations than it is to endogenously hating women.
Except this is partly just because no one likes black women very much, including black men. Either as attractive in themselves('men do not find African features attractive' is a statement at least as true as 'men don't like fatties' and 'men prefer younger women'), nor for their stereotypes(nobody is going to describe their ideal woman as bossy, demanding, and lazy. Precious few will describe her as strong and sassy, either, if you're trying for more positive stereotypes), nor for their individual characteristics which tend towards obesity, single motherhood, etc.
White men with Mexican wives are everywhere. White men with filipina wives are almost as common. It's not like no one knows this one weird trick. Whites just bluntly refer to mail order brides(or 'Russian brides') instead of using terms like passport bro.
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Black Americans want to date above their social rank, and lighter skin is normally preferred for female mates. So these are big factors that also explain the phenomenon of black Americans wanting a mate from a foreign country.
All of these could be true, while white American women are still preferred generally for other factors (eg beauty, status). I highly doubt the online cohort you are speaking of would be averse to marrying a Western European or southern European woman. But I think they look at Jordan Peterson’s daughter and think, “even he couldn’t stop his daughter from sleeping with celebrities and getting divorced?”. Then they look at Lauren Southern and say, “even this ‘trad’ paragon married a foreign police agent who divorced her and left her as a single mom?” And then you look at, like, any given devout first gen Muslim student or a raised-Mormon girl and see how different things are as a product of adolescent environment.
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I've been happily married to a woman from SE Asia for over a decade. Admittedly we're not a typical wmaf couple insofar as she's three years older than me and brings home a bigger paycheck, but I find it interesting that in my decade or so of dating, the most satisfying relationships I had tended to be with non-Anglo women. Probably the biggest difference I encountered in dating Asian/SE Asian women compared to Americans/Brits was a generally more pragmatic attitude towards relationships and coupling. Anecdotally, the cult of the individual is stronger in the West, with many Western women I dated seemingly focused on my narratological contribution to their spirit journey rather than bread-and-butter relationship issues. But also, if I'm completely honest, a big part of it for me was always that I'm a thoroughly xenophilic polyglot and people from countries culturally remote from my own are just more interesting.
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In my more "woke" lurking days it was hilarious to see the tensions here. A common refrain was AWALT - all women are like that. It's just the science bro. But when the WN/HBDers started applying the same judgment to blacks, TRPers had to scramble for some reason it didn't apply to them or their comrades in arms.
A real shame the YT era seems to have more message discipline and people like Fuentes can apparently hang around with black manosphere types for clout without similar drama.
I have a simpler theory for why black men do better than black women in interracial dating.. This doesn't run into the problem faced by the theory above: "higher muscularity" as an unalloyed good requires not knowing a lot about the US and how groups are perceived.
I'm not going to get into the distribution of passport bros by race (I come from a country where this is so bad old white women are in on it, whites have sheer mass going for them). But, granting for the sake of argument, it seems like there's a simple explanation here too: black men gain more in status being American outside of America than other groups.
I would have thought typical social attitudes prevalent in the sorts of places passport bros target, like SEA, would be sufficiently unkind towards black people to counteract this relative status increase.
Asian racism cannot compare to the promise of being with an American, and even if 90 out of 100 girls view your black skin as pure vileness there will be 10 girls who want to get their freak on with what daddy hates most.
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"Murphy marries bush bitch"? The idea's what, almost 40 years old now?
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The status increase going from America to actual Africa is pretty extreme.
Examples:
I had a friend whose father was an exchange student from Ethiopia to the US. The father remained in the US for obvious reasons and became a professor of African studies or something. When the family returned to Ethiopia as tourists they had a private audience with the president of the country.
I traveled to Tanzania to walk up Kilimanjaro. (Quick aside: this is not an impressive accomplishment. It is quite doable by anybody with money and a modicum of fitness). Our hotel, average by American standards, was like staying at the Ritz. Anyone who was anyone stayed there. Middle class Americans wearing cargo shorts mingled with the top 0.1% elites wearing bespoke suits. And honestly, we were probably much richer than them.
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...balanced out, mind you, by higher rates of obesity, lower educational attainment (manosphere takes it as a given that women won't seriously date someone who doesn't have equal or greater credentials than she), more of them in prison (i.e. out of the dating pool) and of course less wealth in general.
And this is only to lead into my point about "Passport Bros" as a class. The literal main thing they have going for them in the foreign dating market is the ability to offer a quick path to American Citizenship.
That's it. Beyond anything else, they are a golden ticket to getting established in the States.
So for black males in particular, who would struggle otherwise with competing for a high quality mate, they are on an much more equal playing field when the only question is how quickly they can transplant the new lady to the states and marry her so she can move along towards citizenship.
Now, I don't think this explains the full phenomenon, but I've seen enough foreign wives using marriage to an American male as a fulcrum to gaining citizenship (and, if the husband is particularly old, getting access to his wealth when he dies) that I have no illusions about what ACTUALLY attracts foreign women to American males.
There's also exoticism. There's definitely a subset of women attracted to the exotic, and in a very white country, a black foreigner is pretty damned exotic. So a black foreign man has an advantage with that group.
Yes, and dating an obvious foreigner seems like a universal way to rebel against the overculture/go "fuck you, dad."
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