This post has been contributed by Tristan Laurent, administrator of
www.onlinedatingrights.com.
I am aware that there was a discussion here recently regarding Jenifer Patico, who introduced herself as a "researcher" but who is in fact a professor of anthropology. The "researcher" who authored the book that I review here is not in the same league as an academic like Jenifer Patico and does not do the same kind of research as an anthropologist. I make this distinction because some people on this board did not know how to regard Prof. Patico when she first appeared. If, after reading my book review below you go back to the thread where Prof. Patico was introduced and read one of her works posted online, you will see the difference in the quality of the research and the assumptions behind her work and the author reviewed below. It is the difference between night and day.BOOK REVIEW
Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband, by Ericka Johnson
Ericka Johnson’s thinking is so thoroughly colored by kneejerk feminism that at times she is incapable of rational analysis of her subject. Even after spending time abroad interviewing six Russian woman seeking foreign husbands of their own accord, three of whom later end up happily married to American men (two stay in Russia, one loses contact with the author), she concludes that (1) they have been “purchased” by the men (2) from dating companies that “presented them as objects for sale,” (3) by American men who are “not-so-enlightened or not even socially competent,” (4) that this constitutes “trafficking” in brides and (5) that the Russian mafia controls this whole rotten, exploitative mess.
Worse, even though Johnson is a US–schooled “researcher” with a PhD in technology and social change at a Swedish university, she makes false statements of fact about critical issues involving international relationships.
For instance, using one of the classic feminist-activist methods of propaganda to denigrate international marriages of American men and foreign women by linking them falsely to sex trafficking, she claims that such a connection exists in the US and abroad and she footnotes it. On page 88 she writes, “Stories abound in the former Soviet Union of women who are promised waitress or nanny jobs in the West but end up raped, beaten, stripped of their passports and identities, and “sold” to brothels in America, Europe, and the Middle East.” So I ran down her two sources for this line, both British newspapers, and both are stories about sex trafficking in the UK. Neither article mentions anything about dating companies being used for trafficking anywhere in the world or about any kind of sex trafficking to the US!
She continues in the very next line: “Trafficking of human beings is a huge and [sic] sordid business.” Her sources for this include the famous propagandist tool “experts agree,” which is another way of saying “my opinion is.” (By the way, I am not questioning that human trafficking occurs or that it is a very bad thing, I just want people who write books about it to do so with intellectual integrity so that the scope of the problem can be comprehended, not imagined.)
Later she discusses the US fiance visa, and very erroneously informs her readers that the visa “allows the woman to live in the United States for ninety days to get to know her future husband better.” Any woman using that line of reasoning in her fiancé visa interview will be thrown out of the consulate with a “Denied” stamp on her visa application faster than she can say “Ericka made me do it” because the only legally acceptable reason to obtain a fiancé visa is to become married during the 90 days.
Johnson misinterprets the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA), a draconian and unconstitutional federal law that took effect in 2006 and which makes it a felony for a dating company to provide an email address of a foreign woman to an American man unless the American man has first had a criminal background investigation performed on him and he has provided a detailed list of any previous marriages, any children and any states he has lived in since he was 18. (He also has to provide a copy of any arrest records, so if one of the three innocent Duke University boys ever wants to meet a Canadian girl, good luck getting her to respond after faxing her his arrest record for rape.) The author seems not to comprehend that the law regulates communication, not marriage. She opines that IMBRA can help avoid abusive relationships, but logically this is absurd as one cannot physically abuse another with emails.
Now, here’s another example of Johnson’s deeply-held feminist beliefs and how they can even trump her considerable training and education as an expert in technology. She researches the way men meet foreign women by viewing a number of dating sites. Many of these sites are mom and pop dating sites that barely make enough money to pay the bills (I don’t need to footnote this as I know some of them personally.) They buy a domain name, pay a fee to a web hosting service and buy some off-the-shelf package software to run the site. This package software contains a “shopping cart” into which a man can put a woman’s name when he wants to buy her contact information, similar to, say, Amazon.com. These little companies cannot afford to hire some programmer to design special software for them at thousands of dollars, so they use the package software.
But Erica Johnson, who is an expert in technology and who might know this, instead sees that: “The ‘shopping cart’ button was only one indication that the women were being presented as objects for sale.” She objects to the software’s ability to allow men to seek partners based on age, kids, hair color and through her kneejerk feminist eyeglasses sees it as more evidence that the women are being commodified, when in fact every human being selects dates and mates on these categories, and many more. Later when she reviews the advice that some of the dating companies give to men to help them make their wives more comfortable and help them adjust after they make the move, she says that the advice is similar to advice about “what to feed your new puppy” and she says the women are discussed like pets. So no amount of goodwill on the part of the dating companies to help the men or the women they marry will satisfy this author as she sees all of it as exploitative and condescending.
I thought it was absurd when the author indicated she was disturbed by what she interprets as blatant racism: two of the Russian women said they would not marry a black American. Wow! This is news to me. If a white woman wants to marry a white man she is a racist? Unbelievable.
Johnson does do something right: she explains in detail on both a macro and micro level the economic and political upheavals in the former Soviet states and their attendant social changes. So, in analyzing the reasons a Russian women might consider marrying abroad, she discusses the fact that many woman cannot get jobs that match their education – or any but the most menial jobs – due to structural changes in the economy, discrimination by the republics (if they happen to live there), discrimination by the government, lack of quality Russian men and even the fact that women are sometimes raped on job interviews. But despite this fine analysis (spread throughout the book) listing a host of compelling reasons to emigrate, Johnson’s feminism gets in the way of common sense when she questions one of her subjects about why she felt it was so important to get married since she is building her career when the young women to whom she was speaking was unemployed and hoping to be a singer, two
more good reasons to move.
This book is good for kneejerk feminists who want to read more false facts and phony logic about international relationships from someone who really didn’t study them. I note that she interviewed exactly one man, no dating companies, no government officials. It is also good for those who want to learn about the changes that the former Soviet Union has experienced and how those changes have affected life in that part of the world. The book does also help in understanding the motives of Russian women who choose to seek a mate abroad and the author does a good job in describing the ways in which they experience culture shock upon moving. And in all fairness the author is conflicted about international marriages and at times says so in the book and at times details the good that results from such relationships.
