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http://www.rjkoehler.com/2008/09/18/for ... ent-193214


Foreign Boyfriends Are Cool

The Hankook Ilbo looks at the growing number of Korean women with barbarian boyfriends (see also here, in case the Naver link doesnt work).

They dont have biases that women should be like this or that, like Korean men. And they say I love you several times even in a single day

So said 26-year-old Miss Han, who has been dating for a year a Hungarian dude she met as an exchange student in Spain. In August, she came back to Korea, and her boyfriend is coming next month. Because of me, he said hed come to Korea to teach English. Marriage. Well, I dont know.

Then there is 23-year-old Miss Jang, who still cant forget her six-month romance with a Turkish dude when she was studying English in Australia. I told my boyfriend how I got in trouble because of my nail polish at my part-time job. I nodded off, and when I awoke, he had taken off my nail polish. Korean men arent this attentive.

Among young women, getting a foreign boyfriend is all the rage. There are many reasons foreign men aren't patriarchal, they frankly express affection, they have an exotic charm, and they don't come with the burden of marriage.

Internet communities of people swapping foreign boyfriend/girlfriend stories or people looking for foreign boyfriends/girlfriends are skyrocketing. There are dozens of such sites, with communities ranging from 500 to 5,000 members.

Even taking into account cross pollination, the number of people with foreign lovers is something like 20,000 - 30,000. And the thing that's striking is most of the members are women. One cafe with over 3,000 visitors a day, the People lost in love with a foreigner, is open only to women, and has over 400 members.

The administrator of another cafe said most of the couple cafe members are women in their 20s; only about 10% are men. He/she added that most of the women who dated foreigners while overseas find new foreign boyfriends even after they return to Korea.

Once you've got barbarian, you can never go back, apparently.

Why is it that of members of websites looking for foreign boyfriends/girlfriends, there are nine times as many women as men? Well, the women say the reason for this disparity is that women have more advantages in international relationships. Miss Han said, If I were a short skirt, a Korean boyfriend would be mean and say, Is that all youre wearing? Dress decently. But a foreign boyfriend would respect my individuality.

Miss Jang, too, said, Korean men are self-conscience and dont say, I love you or Youre pretty. But my Turkish boyfriend was very frank in his expressions of affection, even with other people watching. This is to say unlike Korean men, who are still patriarchal and authoritarian, foreign men are open, attentive and romantic, making them comfortable dating partners.

31-year-old Miss Choe, who dated a foreigner for three years, said, Now, I'm dating a Korean who lived a long time overseas. I started dating him since I got a similar feeling with him that I did when I dated the foreigner, who was open in everything and spent money liberally.

At a time when the number of women living single is increasing greatly, another advantage to the foreign boyfriend is that you can break up in cool fashion if things don't work out. 26-year-old Miss Kim, who has twice dated foreign men, said, Foreign men almost never talk of marriage In my position, where I still need a lover more than a husband, a foreign boyfriend is better than a Korean one.

Of course, not everything about dating a foreigner is so great. Things have opened up a lot, but still, the stares of average, closed-minded Koreans can be quite burdensome.

Said Miss Han, I braced myself for it from when I started dating my foreign boyfriend, but I still cannot help but notice the hot stares around us This is why we usually date in Itaewon or around Hongik University.

There's also criticism that these women, who count as an advantage that foreign men aren't biased, are in fact themselves racially biased. This is because most of the men they date are white.

Kim Yu-eun, a professor at Hanyang University School of International Studies, said, Getting foreign boyfriends is a natural phenomenon resulting from the expansion of international exchanges, but when dating, there's a tendency to be prejudiced in terms of race or nationality This point, too, must be improved along with social biases about foreign lovers.

Marmots Note: Let the comments begin.

MORE FUEL FOR THE FIRE

Asia Today has a piece on the netizen response to the piece above.

It aint pretty.

Apparently, the male netizens at Nate are getting a tad excited. Ordinarily, I wouldnt bother translating them, but hey, its fun.

One netizen by the ID of Busan Cheongnyeon said, You date foreigners, so why do marry Korean men? Another guy with the ID of Dilleon wrote, Are Korean men some kind of chumps? Why dont you marry the foreign guys, too. Later, he confessed, I heard they call Korean women KFC (Korea f***ing Country) in Australia.

A netizen by the name of meplusu said, One French teacher wrote on his blog that it took a month for him to seduce a Chinese woman, a week to seduce a Japanese woman and just a day to seduce a Korean woman, pointing out how well-disposed Korean women were to foreign men.

Another netizen by the ID of Byakuya said that if he starts dating a woman who has returned from study overseas, he would have to seriously ask her whether shed dated a foreigner. Another one with the rather ironic ID of progressive04? said he could never date a woman who has dated a foreign man.

On the other hand, a netizen with the ID of dearloser called these netizens out, asking whether theyd turn down a night with a foreign girl whod come to Korea to study, pointing out Korean mens self-centeredness.

Another netizen pointed out that there are couples who are really in love and those who arent, so they werent really different from Korean-Korean couples. Another said Korean women dont just date anyone because hes a foreigner.

(Warning: flame bait material alert)

INTERRACIAL DATING FOR DUMMIES by Fred Reed

A Good Thing, Maybe; True Love, Maybe Not

Where I live, the sight of a black guy walking with a (usually blonde) white woman is no longer startling, although many are not at all happy about it. The media celebrate interracial dating as A Good Thing, showing that irrational prejudices are at last dying out and a better world is coming into existence. The national problem is finally going away.

In the long run they may be right. More is involved, though, than boy-meets-girl.

Black men in this country have always been fascinated by white women, at times almost obsessed, because of the forbidden-fruit principle. Until recently, the social message, often explicit, was that blacks weren’t good enough to touch a white woman. Bitterness runs deep in black men over this. (This is hardly a secret. Read the first chapter of Soul On Ice.)

The social order is now changing. While black men enjoy a new world, black women (if the television specials are right) don’t much like it. Although blacks oppose discrimination by color, they have always held to a color code among themselves by which lighter women were better. This preference by their men angers black women — dark women who get overlooked, light ones pursued chiefly for their color, and black women in general, who resent losing, every time. (White women, incidentally, at least some of them, similarly resent Asian women, who charm white men by virtue of their femininity and looks. Asian women, however, are few enough as not to pose a real threat.)

The media and advertising industry understand the color code perfectly. Note how often, when you see a black man and woman on a magazine cover, the woman is lighter. And how few dark women show up at all.

Hostility arises that doesn’t meet the eye. On average, white men hate to see black men dating whites. (So do a whole lot of white women.) In places like Washington people won’t say so publicly. Privately they do.

Human behavior usually consists of rational justification of limbic instincts. A powerful instinct of all males is to protect their women from outsiders. People of other colors are outsiders. In slave days, black men were furious that they could not prevent sexual access to their women by white men. Today, the role is being reversed. Black guys know it, and revel in it. White men don’t like to admit their resentment because to do so underlines their inability to do anything about it.

It’s more than dating. It’s potentially explosive sexual competition.

Instincts involving sex aren’t always obvious, but they are there, and powerful. An example: I like the Japanese, have great respect for their intelligence individually and for their society (extraordinarily productive, unfailingly courteous, almost free of crime.) Yet if my daughter told me she planned to marry a Japanese boy of impeccable credentials, I’d nonetheless feel a visceral resentment. I wouldn’t act on it, but I’d feel it. By contrast, if my son told me he planned to marry a similarly admirable Japanese girl, I’d think he was one lucky guy. The instinct is to protect the women, not the men.

Sex as a weapon of conquest, of struggle for dominance among males, is a dark corner of human behavior that we don’t talk about. It exists. Raping the women of one’s enemies has been a common military practice until recent times — American armies have done it — and still is if one believes reports from Yugoslavia.

White men regularly had their way with slave women, and you can believe that dominance, as well as sex, was involved. Dinesh D’Souza,* the Indian-born scholar now at the American Enterprise Institute, noted in his The End of Racism, (page 408, from FBI statistics) “. . . in 1991 there were 100 cases of white rapists assaulting black victims compared with more than 20,000 cases of black rapists attacking white victims — a result that is especially remarkable considering that rapes are usually perpetrated not just for sex but in order to control, dominate, and humiliate women.� And also, he doesn’t add, their men.

Where white women fit into interracial dating is less clear. Black men are physically more attractive than white, being better built and more muscular — and usually able to beat the stuffing out of white men, which whites of both sexes know. They are also unapologetically masculine (and misogynist, but that can be played down when useful), more assertive, and often charming. White-collar Caucasian men these days tend to be neutered, carefully inoffensive, and in general browbeaten by militant feminism. It is easy to see how a white woman who wanted a masculine man would find a good-looking black guy appealing. Also, given that white women today seem to dislike white men almost as much as blacks do, dating a black guy may be a way of getting even.

There’s a whole lot more going on here than boy meets girl.

The media, particularly television and the movies, have recently begun vigorously promoting interracial liaisons. The number of blacks on television in general has risen sharply. Why, I don’t know, not being privy to the councils of Hollywood. Perhaps it’s just political correctness.

On the other hand, a lot of folk believe that the only way out of our racial impasse is to breed ourselves into one in-between race. Blacks are not going to go back to Africa, say these folk correctly, nor whites to Europe. Therefore we either blend or stay forever divided. The logic to this point is hard to refute.

Our customary division on racial lines isn’t satisfactory, runs this argument. It promotes injustice, and may be dangerous: The country really could go up in flames. Therefore the sooner we intermarry, the sooner our racial antagonisms will disappear. The truth of this theory is much less clear, but is not insane by any means. It seems to be what’s being promoted.

Where are we headed? Certainly toward a whole lot more dating and intermarriage: This is a cork that won’t go back into the bottle. In the long run, if no explosion occurs, the country will probably evolve toward the example of Brazil. Whether the consequence in the short run will be improvement in racial relations is far less certain.

The effects for a long time will be mainly psychological, as statistically significant blending won’t occur soon. Too many blacks live in insular ghettoes, speak Ebonics, and are barely socialized. For them, the prospects of intermarriage are small. The better educated and well-spoken may marry whites, but the vast urban enclaves will remain behind, slowly growing.

Maybe things will work out well. I hope so. But it ain’t just true love.

On Korea and about the foreign boy friend. Anyone in Korea now to verify that?

I imagine the Philippines or even Thailand it be easier for a foreigner to get a local girl friend than in Korea but I don't know.

One thing I do agree about the article if a Korean girl does date out they usually pick white because it reflects the western hollywood fantasy of white men as the romantic image.

chanta76 wrote:On Korea and about the foreign boy friend. Anyone in Korea now to verify that?

I imagine the Philippines or even Thailand it be easier for a foreigner to get a local girl friend than in Korea but I don't know.

One thing I do agree about the article if a Korean girl does date out they usually pick white because it reflects the western hollywood fantasy of white men as the romantic image.

Judging by soldiers stationed in Korea over the years it is becoming increasingly hard to get with a Korean girl and are more likely with a filipina contracted worker. But then worldwide it is the prejudiced thought that any woman with a soldier is a prostitute.

Look at the terms being used barbarian and the wish for the Korean girl for only a temporary boyfriend. It is just a stage she is going through before marrying a proper Korean husband which seems to be the opposite of western/pinay relationships.