" “Can you please help me get a wife from India?” was a question asked by a bus driver in Copenhagen, who happened to be a white ethnic Dane. In some local towns with a population of a few thousand, most people have a car and there are few passengers in the buses, leaving room for an honest conversation. And I love to talk to ordinary people.
I asked, “Why a woman from Asia, it is so far away and then there are so many women in Denmark?” He replied, “Look, I am a bus driver, women these days are highly educated and no one wants to marry an uneducated bus driver. Not even a handsome one like me. Time and years are flying by and I want a family.”
After all, a nice guy, who said he was not looking for a housewife who would cook for him, but someone who would be ready to have a family. I wished I could help him. Unfortunately, I do not run a marriage bureau.
Some years ago, a website where Scandinavian men search for wives, thailoveliness.com, declared Sweden to be the country with the highest percentage of local men with Thai wives or life partners. Over 80% of Thai immigrants to Sweden are coming as a result of family reunions of Swedish men marrying Thai wives.
The magazine The Economist published an article on 3rd September this year with the title, “I don´t”, describing how most Japanese who want to get married find it hard to accomplish their goal. There are many similarities between Japan, an advanced post-industrial society, and the western countries in general. The Economist concludes that women in Japan and other rich western countries are better educated, career minded, are financially independent and do not see the traditional family as the only way to lead a fulfilling life.
Is my bus driver friend right in saying that more and more women are taking an education? Well, this may be entirely true of many prosperous western countries. Let us take the example of Dartmouth College, one figuring in the American list of Ivy League schools, which announced this year that it had more women than men graduating from its engineering course this year. Let me reiterate, it is an engineering college of very high reputation, and if you take the highest reputed medical colleges in Scandinavia, for several years almost two-thirds of all students have been women. The number of girl students at the Department of Veterinary Science and The Dental College in Denmark amounts to nearly 75% and more in some years of the recent past. More women graduate from American universities than men and are increasingly succeeding in post-graduate studies, as well.
The leaders of the most successful political parties in Denmark, Sweden and Norway are women. If there was an election today, Mette Frederiksen, a former young Danish employment minister from the Social Democratic party, could become the second female prime minister of the country.
Women are not just getting an education, they are successfully employed, sometimes earn more than their husbands, and employment statistics of the last decade pinpoint that the post-modern, post-industrial society is more suitable for women. Boys in Denmark and Sweden are increasingly dropping out of schools, with no academic education, becoming plumbers, electricians, construction workers, truck drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, in short, doing essential but dangerous jobs.
More Western men commit suicide or end up as homeless, unemployed, and very often they lose contact with their children after a divorce. More than half of the marriages end up in divorces here. Women, on the other hand, are not necessarily seeking marriage with the purpose of getting children, as they can go to sperm banks. We are all getting accustomed to a new concept, ´solo mothers´ and they are not single mothers, but mothers who decide to have a child with an anonymous donor. Mind you their numbers are exploding these days. So you basically do not need a man today to get a child.
Whereas men in western countries are increasingly finding themselves rejected and unable to fit into this role where you have to try a lot of dating without much success, the easy way out is, of course, to look for a wife from abroad. And astonishingly, most of these marriages are successful. In 1950, interracial marriage was illegal in 29 states in the US. Today it is legal in all states. Interracial and international marriages are on the rise. It is not only Asian men but also Western men who want to marry Asian women. So the competition is on the rise. Statistics also shows that the marriages of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian men marrying Thai or Indian women tend to last longer than those of Indian men marrying Danish, Swedish or Norwegian wives. Please don´t ask me why.
In this changing sociological scenario, I feel at ease. Why should a Danish bus driver not get an Indian wife when he is willing to cook food and ready to learn a new language and, most of all, willing to accept her for her original skin color? He said, “You know what, I love the brown color, it is the best color”.
While we in India love our Bollywood stars to go through a skin color change, want them to look fairer, whiter, and after marriage we put pressure on women to give birth to boys and are less accepting of girl children, then what is wrong when someone who lives a few thousand kilometers away wants to marry someone from India without any precondition and pressure of giving birth to a son? Doesn’t he deserve a chance? I have met several Indian girls who are happily married to Danish men and seem to be living a good life here.
I find it amazing, though, that those looking for happy conjugal life in the West increasingly look towards the East, whereas we are looking towards the West for living a comfortable life. Inter-caste marriages, inter-state marriages in India and at the global level, international marriages have come to stay, and they will be transforming the world and the way we perceive countries and cultures at a faster rate than we imagine.
When we see the gathering of world leaders, EU leaders and especially leaders of Asian countries on TV, you see men overrepresented, and then we tend to erroneously conclude that men still dominate the world as they did some 50 years ago. It gives a false image.
Men as a gender has become a polarized concept. It is true that men dominate the ‘top’ of society, but gradually they have started to represent the ´bottom´ of society as well. They are doing the dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs, dying significantly earlier than women. A homeless drug addict living on the streets of a European capital has just a few years to live before he becomes yet another statistic of a person found dead in the street.
This is a dark and hidden side of being a man. There are men who are successful and we see them frequently represented, as talk show hosts, as political leaders, as professionals, but there is a growing group of marginalized unsuccessful, invisible men living a hazardous life, and no attention is paid to them. Even among the successful white community in the USA, the number of suicides committed by middle-aged men has risen to unprecedented levels.
When Hanna Rosin wrote an excellent article six years ago, “The End of Men”, in The Atlantic, people thought it was an exaggeration. I read the article when it was published then and when I read the article today, it not only reflects the new development in American society but the European as well.
Men at the top are not interested in helping the men at the bottom. The paradox is that Hanna Rosin is a woman, so is Christina Hoff Sommers who wrote a piece in 2000, again in The Atlantic, “The war against Boys” to explain that girls are thriving in schools and boys are not.
I have every reason to believe that just as the marginalized European men want to show solidarity towards Asian women, who are still marginalized, paradoxically it is the women at the top who will eventually do something to improve a lot of men who are racing to the bottom of society.".
This is brutal, any ethnic who thinks that "White men have it easy", White men objectively have it bad and no White man is as bad of as the Swede and the Dane.
I asked, “Why a woman from Asia, it is so far away and then there are so many women in Denmark?” He replied, “Look, I am a bus driver, women these days are highly educated and no one wants to marry an uneducated bus driver. Not even a handsome one like me. Time and years are flying by and I want a family.”
After all, a nice guy, who said he was not looking for a housewife who would cook for him, but someone who would be ready to have a family. I wished I could help him. Unfortunately, I do not run a marriage bureau.
Some years ago, a website where Scandinavian men search for wives, thailoveliness.com, declared Sweden to be the country with the highest percentage of local men with Thai wives or life partners. Over 80% of Thai immigrants to Sweden are coming as a result of family reunions of Swedish men marrying Thai wives.
The magazine The Economist published an article on 3rd September this year with the title, “I don´t”, describing how most Japanese who want to get married find it hard to accomplish their goal. There are many similarities between Japan, an advanced post-industrial society, and the western countries in general. The Economist concludes that women in Japan and other rich western countries are better educated, career minded, are financially independent and do not see the traditional family as the only way to lead a fulfilling life.
Is my bus driver friend right in saying that more and more women are taking an education? Well, this may be entirely true of many prosperous western countries. Let us take the example of Dartmouth College, one figuring in the American list of Ivy League schools, which announced this year that it had more women than men graduating from its engineering course this year. Let me reiterate, it is an engineering college of very high reputation, and if you take the highest reputed medical colleges in Scandinavia, for several years almost two-thirds of all students have been women. The number of girl students at the Department of Veterinary Science and The Dental College in Denmark amounts to nearly 75% and more in some years of the recent past. More women graduate from American universities than men and are increasingly succeeding in post-graduate studies, as well.
The leaders of the most successful political parties in Denmark, Sweden and Norway are women. If there was an election today, Mette Frederiksen, a former young Danish employment minister from the Social Democratic party, could become the second female prime minister of the country.
Women are not just getting an education, they are successfully employed, sometimes earn more than their husbands, and employment statistics of the last decade pinpoint that the post-modern, post-industrial society is more suitable for women. Boys in Denmark and Sweden are increasingly dropping out of schools, with no academic education, becoming plumbers, electricians, construction workers, truck drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, in short, doing essential but dangerous jobs.
More Western men commit suicide or end up as homeless, unemployed, and very often they lose contact with their children after a divorce. More than half of the marriages end up in divorces here. Women, on the other hand, are not necessarily seeking marriage with the purpose of getting children, as they can go to sperm banks. We are all getting accustomed to a new concept, ´solo mothers´ and they are not single mothers, but mothers who decide to have a child with an anonymous donor. Mind you their numbers are exploding these days. So you basically do not need a man today to get a child.
Whereas men in western countries are increasingly finding themselves rejected and unable to fit into this role where you have to try a lot of dating without much success, the easy way out is, of course, to look for a wife from abroad. And astonishingly, most of these marriages are successful. In 1950, interracial marriage was illegal in 29 states in the US. Today it is legal in all states. Interracial and international marriages are on the rise. It is not only Asian men but also Western men who want to marry Asian women. So the competition is on the rise. Statistics also shows that the marriages of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian men marrying Thai or Indian women tend to last longer than those of Indian men marrying Danish, Swedish or Norwegian wives. Please don´t ask me why.
In this changing sociological scenario, I feel at ease. Why should a Danish bus driver not get an Indian wife when he is willing to cook food and ready to learn a new language and, most of all, willing to accept her for her original skin color? He said, “You know what, I love the brown color, it is the best color”.
While we in India love our Bollywood stars to go through a skin color change, want them to look fairer, whiter, and after marriage we put pressure on women to give birth to boys and are less accepting of girl children, then what is wrong when someone who lives a few thousand kilometers away wants to marry someone from India without any precondition and pressure of giving birth to a son? Doesn’t he deserve a chance? I have met several Indian girls who are happily married to Danish men and seem to be living a good life here.
I find it amazing, though, that those looking for happy conjugal life in the West increasingly look towards the East, whereas we are looking towards the West for living a comfortable life. Inter-caste marriages, inter-state marriages in India and at the global level, international marriages have come to stay, and they will be transforming the world and the way we perceive countries and cultures at a faster rate than we imagine.
When we see the gathering of world leaders, EU leaders and especially leaders of Asian countries on TV, you see men overrepresented, and then we tend to erroneously conclude that men still dominate the world as they did some 50 years ago. It gives a false image.
Men as a gender has become a polarized concept. It is true that men dominate the ‘top’ of society, but gradually they have started to represent the ´bottom´ of society as well. They are doing the dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs, dying significantly earlier than women. A homeless drug addict living on the streets of a European capital has just a few years to live before he becomes yet another statistic of a person found dead in the street.
This is a dark and hidden side of being a man. There are men who are successful and we see them frequently represented, as talk show hosts, as political leaders, as professionals, but there is a growing group of marginalized unsuccessful, invisible men living a hazardous life, and no attention is paid to them. Even among the successful white community in the USA, the number of suicides committed by middle-aged men has risen to unprecedented levels.
When Hanna Rosin wrote an excellent article six years ago, “The End of Men”, in The Atlantic, people thought it was an exaggeration. I read the article when it was published then and when I read the article today, it not only reflects the new development in American society but the European as well.
Men at the top are not interested in helping the men at the bottom. The paradox is that Hanna Rosin is a woman, so is Christina Hoff Sommers who wrote a piece in 2000, again in The Atlantic, “The war against Boys” to explain that girls are thriving in schools and boys are not.
I have every reason to believe that just as the marginalized European men want to show solidarity towards Asian women, who are still marginalized, paradoxically it is the women at the top who will eventually do something to improve a lot of men who are racing to the bottom of society.".
This is brutal, any ethnic who thinks that "White men have it easy", White men objectively have it bad and no White man is as bad of as the Swede and the Dane.
