Like a lot of feminists - I suppose like a lot of people, generally! - I'm morbidly fascinated by sex tourism. This article in Harpers about chick-quests to the Ukraine is pretty fucking creepy. It's not the 'finding a woman through an agency' bit that's gross - I mean, anything that helps you to connect with someone, whatever - but the uneven power relationships inherent in the whole scenario that makes it so squicky. The women have no money and no prospects and are dolling themselves up in the hope of being taken to a 'land of opportunity'; the men are touring these places specifically *because* the women there are desperate to please. So this underlying inequality, which is gross in itself, is then overlaid - on the men's part, at least - with this bizarre combination of misogyny and romanticism which I think stems from an inability to understand one really basic concept: women are people too. So it's impossible to generalise about 'all American women' (bitches!) or 'all Ukrainian women' (horny 50s housewives!). You can't judge what someone will do in the future based entirely on them having a uterus. Approaching a relationship as a partnership seems so utterly foreign - more foreign than the Ukraine! - to these guys, because they're seeing women as some kind of alien species - a species they seem to love and hate in equal measure - who exist across a great gender divide which can never be truly breached. It's crazy as shit.