How the ‘Passport Bros’ Movement Reveals the Ugly Truth About Western Men

Their pursuit of ‘traditional’ women in impoverished countries couldn’t be more telling

If I had to rank manosphere subcultures from bad to the absolute worst, I’d definitely put incels at rock bottom. But not that high above them, I’d put ‘passport bros.’

If you haven’t come across this term yet — lucky you — it refers to a breed of men from the US and the UK who roam countries in South America, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe in search of ‘traditional’ women.

Yup, it’s essentially a reverse of the mail-order bride industry.

And just as it’s the case with men who reach for online catalogues in hopes of finding a wife, the main reason why passport bros want to pursue foreign women is that they’re fed up with the ideals and lifestyles of the Western ones.

Because unfortunately for them — and thanks to the feminist movement — the days when women had little to no choice but to be subservient baby incubators who obeyed men are mostly long gone.

Or, as passport bros claim, feminism has ‘corrupted’ women by convincing them they can do exactly what men do and deserve to demand the impossible, which is — checks notes — being treated as an equal.

Well. As a woman born and raised in one of the countries these bros are now gleefully fleeing to — Poland, to be exact — and who’s spent the last decade living among those ‘corrupted’ women in the West, I have a lot to say about this phenomenon.

But more than anything else, I think it speaks volumes about the hypocrisy, delusion and misogyny of some men in the West.

The rise of passport bros

It’s been just over half a year since the passport bro lifestyle started trending online.

However, there are already several podcasts, Youtube channels, Facebook groups, Reddit forums and Discord channels dedicated to this topic which are now followed by thousands of men frustrated with their life and the ‘values’ of the society they’re living in.

‘Feminism ruined everything here’, wrote one man under a post ranting about Western women. It’s an ‘insanely dangerous ideology’, wrote another, adding that men ‘need a way out’ as ‘this society isn’t right.’

But if they could only find a submissive, agreeable and eager-to-please woman — yup, these are the adjectives they use to describe their ‘ideal’ partner — who’d unquestionably wipe their bums on command — well, that bit is my dramatisation — they’d finally be happy.

It’s pretty clear that the passport bro movement borrows most of its rhetoric straight from the incel culture. Just like the incels, passport bros blame feminism and women’s empowerment for their personal struggles and failures. And just like the incels, they believe they’re entitled to a woman who essentially acts like a Stepford wife.

Perhaps more worryingly, they also seem to share incels’ fascination with purity and very young girls — I came across quite a few posts compiling countries with the lowest ages of consent, some of which, like the Philippines, set it to just 12 years old.

But for all passport bros’ talk about the importance of traditional values, they don’t seem to have any themselves. Despite being disgusted by ‘what feminism did to the West’ and ‘gold-digging, morally loose Western women,’ these men are arguably far more materialistic and promiscuous than the women they claim to despise.

The whole online persona of the most popular passport bro on Tik Tok, who goes by the nickname of ‘Digital Bromad’, is just showing off the scantily-dressed women he presumably sleeps while partying and enjoying a jet-setting lifestyle.

There’s also no shortage of tips and tricks on all these forums and pages on which nationalities are the ‘easiest,’ where to find women to hook up with and how to trick them into falling in love with you so that you can take advantage of them for as long as you want.

Even the so-called ‘king of toxic masculinity,’ Andrew Tate, has a few things to say on the topic. In one of the videos reposted by his fan accounts, he encourages men to go South America, impregnate women, leave them there, and come back anytime they feel like playing a ‘family man.’

But hey — it’s definitely feminism and this unholy idea of gender equality that’s ‘corrupting’ the Western world, right?

This is hardly a new way of thinking

Passport bros might be a relatively new term, but this fantasy of a Western man playing saviour — or at least pretending to — to a beautifully exotic and helpless foreign woman is certainly not new at all.

And that’s because the Western world has a long history of stereotyping, fetishising and hyper-sexualising women from developing countries, frequently done in juxtaposition to ‘angry and ugly feminists’ back home.

Here’s how an article published in GQ in the 1990s described the Western man’s fantasy of the Asian woman:

When you get home from another hard day on the planet, she comes into existence, removes your clothes, bathes you and walks naked on your back to relax you …She’s fun you see, and so uncomplicated. She doesn’t go to assertiveness-training classes, insist on being treated like a person, fret about career moves, wield her orgasm as a non-negotiable demand…. She’s there when you need shore leave from those angry feminist seas. She’s a handy victim.

Sounds awfully familiar to what passport bros are saying today, doesn’t it?

Three decades later, and clearly, not much has changed.

In the eyes of many Western men, we still aren’t people. No, we are perfectly submissive and docile and dutiful and yet always sexually available and insatiable blow-up dolls existing solely for their consumption and satisfaction.

But it’s precisely this disgusting and reductive stereotyping that then creates demand for women from Southeast Asia, South America and Eastern Europe.

That’s why there’s an over-prevalence of certain ethnicities in pornography — particularly Asian women. That’s why mail-order bride industry, described by some as ‘a softer version of human trafficking,’ even exists, to begin with. And that’s why some Western men now want to travel abroad to use financially disadvantaged women for their own needs.

Unfortunately, all of this often also results in large-scale sexual violence and exploitation.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, erasing the divide between the East and West, the trade in Eastern European women — also called the ‘Natasha Trade’ — has quickly become a booming business. By the early 2000s, it was estimated that as many as 120,000 women and children from the former Soviet bloc were sex trafficked to the West yearly.

Meanwhile, Asian women living in the West, especially in America, have long been at higher risks of sexual harassment and violence inextricably tied to their gender, race and the amount of fetishisation they experience. Asian women, in general, also remain one of the most trafficked groups worldwide.

And while there are hardly any statistics on the reality of the mail-order bride industry, there are several accounts of mail-order brides being abused, raped, held captive, and even murdered by their spouses or boyfriends.

It’s then not really surprising that police in some countries like Brazil have already started warning women of passport bros, isn’t it?

There’s a good reason why passport bros struggle to date back home

Before I moved abroad, I came across quite a few Western men with a passport bro mindset, as my hometown, Wrocław, has always attracted many foreigners.

The men who came there with one very obvious goal in mind were some of the most aggressive, rude, entitled and misogynistic men I’ve ever met. These were the type of guys you definitely wouldn’t trust to leave your drink with. Or want to bump into in a dark alley.

I met several of them when I moved, too.

And if there’s one thing they all had in common is that they stereotyped the absolute crap out of me. As soon as they heard where I was from, they’d immediately ask me if I wanted to go back to their place or if I’d be down for a foursome with their friends.

On one occasion, I was literally offered money to have sex even though I’ve never as much as hinted that’s an option.

It’s really not rocket science to understand why these men have little success in the dating marketplace in their home countries — they don’t respect women at all. It’s also unsurprising that they feel feminism ‘robbed’ them of something.

Women in the West — and not only here — no longer need to be with men in order to live, as it used to be not long ago. And even if they want to be in a relationship, they won’t settle for someone who can’t at least meet the bare minimum of respecting and treating them like human beings.

But, of course, passport bros fail to acknowledge that they are the problem. Or that it’s precisely their attitude towards gender equality and female empowerment that’s a massive part of it.

This is only made worse by the fact that instead of listening to what women actually want, they’d rather listen to other misogynistic bros. And instead of working to become better people, they’d rather leverage global economic inequality and pay women in vulnerable positions to submit to them.

It’s a disgusting, predatory and heavily misogynistic practice that only further fuels the already widespread fetishisation of women from developing countries.

There’s no other way to put it, really.

I’d like to think that the existence of passport bros and other manosphere creatures are just growing pains of a changing world. And some of the very last spasms of a dying patriarchy.

For now, though, it feels like while women in Western countries have managed to progress quite a bit in recent decades, many men here are still stuck in the fantasy land of the 1950s.

But although they might think that women in all those countries they’d love to go to aren’t ‘corrupted’ by feminism yet or aren’t educated enough to know better than to trust random men, well, I doubt that.

And I’m pretty sure many will see right through all of these passport bros the same way we have.

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