Thoughts on mail-order brides, sexual slavery, and other forms of female exploitation: Can love ever exist when one side holds a

"Thoughts on mail-order brides, sexual slavery, and other forms of female exploitation: Can love ever exist when one side holds all the power?"

Henry Kissinger once said: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” What he failed to mention is that when there is an imbalance in power, having a truly loving relationship all but impossible.

Someone needs to tell this fact to the radio station in a large western Canadian city that this week has been holding a “Win a Wife” contest. The winner will be sent to Russia with one of those businesses that links typically-maladjusted North American men with extremely impoverished Eastern European women desperate to find a man who will get them the heck out of there and into a life of economic prosperity in North America.

The radio station (which plays what can best be described as “music for angry white guys,” and whose website includes a “babe of the day” page that allows viewers to drool over – and then rate! – photos of bikini- and lingerie-un-clad women) quickly became the target of feminist criticism over the contest. It also lost revenue when some advertisers – including the provincial government – were so appalled that they took their money elsewhere. So then the station changed the name of the contest… kind of. They scratched out the word “Wife” and replaced it with “Russian romance.” So now listeners can “Win a Wife Russian Romance.”

(Why did the folks at the radio station leave the old wording visible? I think it was just a hypermasculine “Fuck you!” to their critics – an adolescent tantrum that proclaimed: “We don’t care if it’s wrong. We’re going to do it anyway!”)

And while I suppose on some level “Win a Russian Romance” is less offensive than “Win a Wife” – it is also probably a lot less accurate. Historically (and to this day) “mail order wives” (or, in this modern age, “e-mail order wives”) are just that: wives. Not lovers. Not romantic partners. They are women who, in desperate hope of a better life, throw in their lot with some (hopefully) rich husband who is (hopefully) not too abusive. True romance is not a part of the deal – and it is highly unlikely that it will ever emerge.

What more does she want? Over the years I have seen numerous interviews with North American men who went to very poor areas of Eastern Europe or Asia in order to find foreign wives. And while these “relationships” (arrangements is probably a better word) may occasionally work in the long term, the men I have seen interviewed were not so lucky. (And some of the women, for their part, wound up being terribly brutalized by these men who were essentially their captors in a new land.)

And (shockingly!) it turns out that many of these newly-acquired wives were actually somewhat more interested in a comparatively prosperous life in North America than they were in the man himself. And (also shockingly!) many of these women also wanted to bring their extended families to Canada or the U.S.A. Both of these outcomes tended to leave the North American men feeling terribly used and downright resentful. After all, these guys had spent a hell of a lot of money to participate in these programs, and then they had work hard to sponsor these utterly impoverished women. And what did these men require in return? Only that his new wife be thoroughly submissive, utterly obedient, and continuously sexually available.

Oh, and that she love him.

(Good luck with that last one, guys!)

Is this all really too much to ask after all the money these men have had to spend to acquire their new wives? This is the thanks they get? That she won’t be happy unless he sponsors her family as well? That she actually wants a better life for her whole family??? How selfish can she be???

But seriously… history shows us that the master never has true empathy for his slave. And that remains true today. (Some may argue that the term “slave” is too harsh a term for these [e]mail order brides. So I would be willing to meet those critics half-way: if slave sounds too harsh, let’s just go with the term indentured servant.)

A truly twisted type of love. That horrid radio contest raises a question that I have been mulling over for some time: Can true love ever exist across a large power differential? Can a woman ever truly love you if you own her? If she is not truly free to stay or to leave of her own free will? If you are not willing to let her go – and you might hunt her down, leave her impoverished, or take her children if she tried? Can love even exist in that context? Can the prisoner ever truly love the guard? The slave ever truly love the master?

And, conversely, does the master ever truly love the slave? Does the guard ever truly love the prisoner? Even if he is unwilling to set her free?

The USA’s (Con)Founding Fathers. The failure of the master to empathize with his slave applies to male slaves as well. In 1804 Lewis and Clark set out on a remarkable expedition across what would become the western United States, and they made it all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This journey was sponsored by Thomas Jefferson (more on him, later). After “the Corps of Discovery” came back to the “civilization” of slavery-infested St. Louis, Missouri, every returning member of the expedition received money and land as a reward for his service. Everyone, that is, except for an African-American man named York, who was William Clark’s slave. (York was roughly the same age as Clark, and the two had essentially grown up together – even though Clark actually owned York.) York had accompanied the Corps on the entire journey, and upon their return to St. Louis, York begged to be freed. He pleaded to be able to go to Kentucky to be with his wife. He even offered to send all of his wages back to Clark. Clark refused. And, clearly offended by York’s attitude, Clark wrote that York was being “insolent and sulky.” Clark then had his slave whipped and jailed.

It is uncertain if York was ever given his freedom or not. What is very clear is that Clark resented York’s new-found craving for liberty. How dare a slave want a life that might include something other than service to his master! Historians who refer to York merely as Clark’s “manservant” and write glowingly about how the two were “childhood companions” miss the point. You do not whip, jail, or hold captive someone for whom you have any compassion at all.

Thomas Jefferson himself was quite closely involved with some of his slaves, including a young woman named Sally Hemmings. He almost certainly fathered her six children. (The only people who argue against this probability are the racist descendants of Jefferson who do not appreciate the notion that their family tree includes fruit of more than just one color.) The relationship between Jefferson and Hemmings has often been depicted as a kind of love story. But how could it have been a love story? Can you truly love someone who owns you? Can you truly love someone who has the power to sell you? Or who could at any moment sell your siblings, or your parents, or your children off to someone else, and you may never see them again? Someone who has the right to take possession of you sexually at his every whim?

And can a man who lords that kind of power over a woman ever truly be said to love her?

No easy answers. Wanting to explore this issue further, I picked up a copy of the book Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. This novel places fictional characters at a hotel/resort that actually existed in Ohio in the 1850s, and where southern male slave owners would actually take their slave “mistresses” for “vacations.” Through telling the stories of four different slave women, the book explores the complexities of love across such boundaries, when a man actually owns the woman he is having sex with. (You can find a review of the book here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6751356-wench.)

Wench is a good read, but in it I could find no clear answer to the questions: If I own you, can you ever truly love me? And if I never set you free, can I ever truly say that I loved you? I could not find an easy answer in the book, because there is no easy answer. But the novel does show how these relationships are hopelessly and tragically warped by the unnatural imbalance of power between male master and female slave.

Let’s avoid these imbalances altogether! Love is complex enough even without bringing into it an entrenched imbalance of power. And if you want to avoid these thorny and heartbreaking questions (Does she love me for me? Does he love me if he will not set me free?), it is better to avoid these situations in the first place. So:

Do not order an (e)mail bride. What you represent to her is so much more than who you actually are in the world. Can she love you for you? Without your car, your house, your prosperous life in a relatively safe and civil society? Without the hope that you might someday sponsor her family? And as for you – do you want a life partner – or do you just want a servant you can lord over? If you want a servant, hire one. But don’t try to marry one.

And while slavery and (e)mail order brides might seem sort of extreme to most of us, there are plenty of other power imbalances that exist in society. And we should not date across these boundaries, either:

If you are a therapist or counselor, do not get involved sexually or romantically with a client – ever. Most mental health associations expressly forbid a therapist or counselor from dating (or screwing) a client – at least for a certain period of time after the client has stopped being your client. In some places it is even a criminal act to have sex with a client. And that’s a good thing. Because there is an inherent power imbalance that will probably always distort the relationship. I have a friend whose therapist seduced her. It was unethical on the part of the therapist, and it was a disaster. Research suggests that these events hurt clients! So don’t do it, ever!

If you are a professor, accept for yourself -- and insist for your colleagues -- that all students at your university are off limits! There are some universities that actually bar professors from dating their students. This should be a no-brainer, but unfortunately many institutions still have no such ban on this sort of inappropriate conduct. There is just no good reason to hook up with a student. Find someone else to love. Find someone else to screw. Your role is to broaden their horizons intellectually – not to get horizontal with them. And in my grade book, professors who date students deserve an F when it comes to both ethics and judgment.

Do not date someone you supervise in the workplace. A lot of relationships begin in the workplace. But you must not hook up with someone over whose work you have authority. It is a recipe for disaster. During the workday every decision you make will be seen through a lens of favoritism. And during the evening how is this person who took orders from you all day supposed to suddenly morph into someone you must now treat as a total equal? It’s just a bad idea.

Finally, if someone wants to leave you, let her go! And do it graciously, no matter how much it hurts! Are you her lover or her jailer? Because you cannot be both! And if she decides to stay only because she is afraid to leave you – because you might hurt her, because you will try to ruin her financially, because you have threatened to take the kids – that is no kind of relationship, either. She is just your unhappy captive. In a good relationship, people take their partner’s happiness into account. And if you don’t care about her happiness, then you don’t care about her.

Work for equality. We need to work for equality in our relationships. Only those relationships that are marked by mutual respect, equal power, and shared authority are worth preserving. Only in those relationships can love ever truly flourish.