One in a thousand people has six toes or fingers. Twenty-six percent of young people lack a gag reflex. And about two in seven dudes, according to my own research as a participant observer, will say something skeevy about women in exclusively male company. Case in point: a recent Saturday after jiujitsu practice, when a panting and sweaty group of guys, some regulars and some newcomers, were gathered at the edge of the mat getting to know each other. A Honduran American with whom I had been speaking Spanish asked why I knew the language, and I told him my wife was from Santiago de Compostela. This excited him more than it should have—maybe he thought I meant Santiago de Chile—and after an approving nod and a That’s what I’m talking about, he detailed his disenchantments with dating in the States and offered a mini-prospectus on the superior female offerings in assorted Latin American countries he had visited. In the ensuing discussion, every conceivable sexual cliché was proffered, from big-butted Brazilians to feisty Colombians to submissive Asians (all 4.7 billion of them?) to sophisticated but spicy Eastern Europeans. A Nigerian acquaintance seated nearby, his expression that of a hungry child with his face pressed to a pastry shop window, expelled an audible sigh and announced to us all, “Man, as soon as I get my citizenship, I’m going full Passport Bro.”
This was a new term to me, and when I asked what it meant, I was told it referred to a man who traveled to meet women in foreign countries. This coy definition hardly scratches the surface: the Passport Bros are one of those phenomena confected at the intersection of rumor and aspiration, lent substance on TikTok and Reddit, consolidated through T-shirts and stickers sold on Etsy, Redbubble, and Shopify, with e-books and conferences and paid consultations over Zoom, until finally they have become what we call a thing. In the most benign version, laid out on the website Knowledge for Men, the Passport Bros
are pioneering a new kind of migration. They seek countries where relationships and societal dynamics haven’t been heavily altered by modern societal shifts. They’re looking for women who value traditional masculine qualities—qualities they feel are overlooked back home. This isn’t about seeking subservience or dodging feminism; it’s about finding a relationship dynamic that celebrates mutual respect and traditional roles.
On social media, Passport Bros content started to appear sporadically in 2021, but its roots in the fantasy of remote work as a gateway to success in exotic locales can be traced back to proto-influencers like Vagabond Buddha and Nomad Capitalist, whose motto is: “Go where you’re treated best.” With more than a million followers between them on YouTube, both peddle visions of a better life in developing countries where the dollar goes further and tax regulations are laxer; they in turn are the latest permutation of the “lifehacking” philosophy first expounded in Tim Ferriss’s motivational bestseller The Four-Hour Workweek, which encouraged readers to “create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.” Ferriss omits the foundations of his own success: embellish dubious accomplishments like “cage fighter in Japan” and “internet supplement entrepreneur” and use them to rook the gullible into buying your book.
Around the World in Eighty Lays
The least bad thing one can say about drop out/work remotely/get rich off passive income schemes is that their applicability is limited, and that, if they are taken seriously, the democratic veneer of the I-did-this-and-you-can-too! approach must give way to a tacit endorsement of economic and status inequalities. Robert Kiyosaki’s perennially popular Rich Dad Poor Dad offers a benign if soporific explanation for why some people prosper and others fail: the poor sop trapped in the rat race works for money, while a winner makes money work for him. This assertion—one more iteration of that jumble of New Thought and American greed that first appeared in Wallace Wattle’s 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich—has necessarily coarsened as readers have taken their quest for financial independence to the internet, where their preferences are not so much catered to as shaped by platforms whose algorithms are optimized to present them with whatever the most idiots will stare at for the longest time. Prime content here centers on sexual, social, and financial anxieties and the desire to see them relieved in the easiest and most extravagant way possible. Hence the anodyne goal of prosperity has yielded to the dream of a 24/7 boats-and-hoes lifestyle for alpha males while the cucks, soyboys, and simps must work shit jobs in the vain hope of impressing subpar emasculating Western femoids.
Whereas sex tourism is seen as the seedy last recourse for losers who can’t get any in their home country, xenophile pickup artists see themselves as incipient alpha males.
Illustrative of the hinge of grievance that unites remote-work expatriate fantasies and the misogyny of the Passport Bros is Daryush Valizadeh, known more widely as Roosh V, a former blogger and self-described pickup artist who detailed his purported sexual adventures in foreign countries in the late 2000s and early 2010s in a series of books with the word bang in the titles: Bang Poland, Bang Colombia, Don’t Bang Denmark, and so on. (There must be, in general, an inverse relationship between a country’s income and gender equality and whether Roosh thinks you should bang there; he’d have probably loved banging in Latvia in the nineties, but since then they’ve elected a woman president and seen immense economic growth, and now the girls there are usually hanging out in huge groups, busy with friends instead of focusing on getting rammed by new cock.) Roosh claimed to have mastered the secrets of cajoling women into sex after graduating from college and shared his rape-curious seduction techniques on a series of blogs and forums. For Roosh, the misogyny of the men’s rights movement doesn’t go far enough, and he has criticized its members as “anti-social, bitter virgins” who are “more focused on begging authority figures for rights and benefits instead of adjusting to modern-day realities.”
What such an adjustment requires, from Roosh’s perspective, is a doctrine of male supremacy that forgoes even the most retrograde negotiated partnerships with women, viewing them as a fundamentally antagonistic presence useful only as status symbols, domestic servants, and a source of sexual pleasure. In his manifesto “What is Neomasculinity,” Roosh presents a concise summation of the beliefs uniting many strains of the contemporary manosphere: an assertion, not only of indelible biological differences between men and women, but of social and familial roles that proceed unavoidably from these differences; the conviction that deviation from these roles is not only ill-guided but represents a civilization-threatening degree of moral corruption; the implication that there is a conspiracy among governments, media, and academia to perpetuate the lie of equality; and a pessimistic view of dating as attempting to sell oneself in a sexual marketplace where the markers of fitness are unfairly distributed. It is with regard to this last point that he presents a picture of contemporary reality essential to the Passport Bros worldview:
The breakdown of traditional sex roles and Christian-style egalitarian monogamy with the promotion of fluid dating has begun to revert society into a harem model currently practiced by Arab royalty in countries like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, where high-status men reap nearly all the highest quality fertile women and maintain concubines on retainer while low status men receive no women and struggle to have their basic survival needs met. In America today, famous and good-looking men are hotly pursued by beautiful women while the majority of “average” men are forced to undergo strenuous efforts to increase their sexual marketplace value (SMV) to compete, just like how any worker must increase their job market value by educating themselves in university and working in low-paying internships.
Evidence for the above is sketchy at best, and much of it seems to be derived from the experience of isolated individuals who spend a lot of time in front of their screens and take pornography and social media boasting as strong evidence of real-world trends. Often cited is the statistic that 20 percent of men are having 80 percent of sex—in incelspeak, these are the Chads that are vacuuming up the Stacies—but the numbers are wrong and the factors behind them complicated. Without diving into the finer demographics of sexlessness, the real trends seem to be that married people have sex more, and people are marrying later; that people are living with their parents longer and that this, too, reduces the frequency of sexual contact; that increasing higher education has cut into time available for sexual pursuits; and finally, that most people are still getting laid.
There does seem to be, though, a real and rising share of involuntary celibates over the past two decades. The latest data I can find, from an Institute for Family Studies report, shows an increase from 2.5 to 4.5 percent of the never-married male population between twenty-two and thirty-five whose stated reason for virginity is not religion, health, or timing. Back-of-the-envelope calculations put this at just over a million people. As a raw number, it’s a blip, but it is one with outsize cultural presence, thanks in part to incel murderers like Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian and in part to its position as a vanguard of the broader ranks of the sexually frustrated and entitled.
ALL-INCLUSIVE Spectacular Singles Events
On October 29, 2023, Roosh V decided to close down his forum, which had become a “hindrance” to the “Orthodox life” he was trying to live after taking the “God pill” in 2019 (he’d also been boycotted and kicked off PayPal, and lost numerous ad partners). In doing so, he put an end to the go-to space for offering each other tips on “SEAmaxxing” and “EEmaxxing” (maximizing one’s sexual capital in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, respectively) and performing “dating market arbitrage” by vacationing in, or emigrating to, poorer countries where feminism had failed to take root and women were unable to resist the lure of American money and a shot at a green card through marriage. What distinguishes this from sex tourism is its repackaging as a personal accomplishment. Whereas sex tourism is seen as the seedy last recourse for losers who can’t get any in their home country, xenophile pickup artists see themselves as incipient alpha males, wings clipped in their decadent homeland but able, if they are brave enough to take the plunge, to realize their destiny in exotic climes.
What, then, can be done about aspiring Passport Bros and the coordinated male resentment they are a small piece of?
The critique of the reduction of love and sex to the logic of mercantile exchange was made eloquently in the writings of Michel Houellebecq in his pre-denture period and might incite one to ask what more humane, more egalitarian models for sexual and romantic coupling might look like; but regressiveness is always easier and a sweeter salve to resentment, and so instead, the ideology of the Passport Bro takes the form of an anti-egalitarianism from below. This explains the contempt showered on “6/6/6 men” (six figures, six feet tall, and six inches) by those who don’t—ahem—measure up and dream of going elsewhere to exploit their own advantages over others. It is the same reason they can disparage women as status-seeking gold diggers and yet boast of bedding them thanks to the status and purchasing power they obtain via emigration.
The best-known Passport Bro is Austin Abeyta, or Digital Bromad, a data analyst who began working remotely in 2020 and now posts videos on TikTok and Instagram on such subjects as “Wild Tinder Travel Story” and “How Far Does Your Money Go in Thailand?” Another, Auston Holleman, started his career as a YouTuber with “how to make a dolphin noise” and moved on to tips for earning six figures as a barber, monologues on whether Western women were forcing men into celibacy, and dating advice for travelers to Colombia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Where Digital Bromad’s demeanor is chipper, lighter on overt sexism, and with a heavier emphasis on fun, hugging llamas in Bogotá, and piloting a helicopter over Rio, Holleman revels in provocation, complaining about “women starting to grow mustaches” and poor feminine hygiene in the United States. In 2023, Brazilian law enforcement opened an investigation into him for the crime of sex tourism in Salvador de Bahía; since then, he has shown up in Lima, Cartagena, Phnom Penh, and Kampala. He refers to Africa as “the last hope for masculinity” and has recently become a booster for Kenya. Though he quickly adds, “I’m just using this as an example,” one of his justifications for doing so, in the video “Should Men Stick to Their Race of Women Abroad?”, is that a man who beats a woman of his own race (Holleman is black) is less likely to face legal sanction or retribution from his victim’s family. Holleman now offers online consultations for other men wanting to move there.
Much Passport Bro content seems like advertising for business ideas that never quite panned out. In early 2024, an author working under the pseudonym Rick Eastman published a half dozen books of what must be computer-generated text within a few days of each other, including Passport Bros! Why Saigon, Vietnam Should Be Your Destination and Women of the Asian Persuasion: Western Man’s Guide to Dating, Romance and Adventure in Asia. Each of them opens with promotional materials for “Sequel Suitors International Dating Coach for Men and Host to ALL-INCLUSIVE Spectacular Singles Events in Exotic Vietnam,” with an address for a website that features an AI-generated image of an outdoor party with the legend Coming Soon! splashed across it. Mohamed Aboshanab, CEO of a possibly real firm called Global Expat that helps “entrepreneurs and investors minimize taxes offshore, attain dual citizenship, safeguard assets, and craft a diversified backup plan for freedom,” manages a dozen Passport Bros-related social media accounts, podcasts, and discussion groups, few of which seem to have gained any traction. The first hit for “passport bros” on Google, not counting the song “Passport Bros” by Bas and J. Cole, is The Official Passport Bros, a company whose actual purpose is impossible to ascertain. Their website hosts page after page of boilerplate about men’s rights, wealth management, and investment in properties overseas; an online business directory lists their corporate offices at “Suite 312” of a UPS store in Plainfield, New Jersey; many of the links on the page are dead, and the three-minute podcasts, last updated more than a year ago, are almost certainly generated and spoken by AI.
I did correspond briefly with an American man who has produced Passport Bros content in South Korea and who had “authored”—again, the specter of ChatGPT looms large—a book encouraging Passport Bros to build strong communities overseas. Its message of self-empowerment, directed at black American men, was hard to decipher, couched in such more or less plagiarized phrases as: “The spatial dimensions of productivity performance are becoming more salient as the global megatrends, in particular globalization and digitalization, affect localities differently along the urban-rural continuum.” But his social media presence was interesting, representing as it does the preoccupations and aspirations of the black American right, a group that receives little media attention outside befuddled electoral-season handwringing. His Substack linked to four accounts: Holleman; Zvbear, a Somali Canadian troll on X who posts about sex between white women and black men and is best known for sharing explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift; The Blacked Pill, which recycles the tropes of cuckold porn to shill an app for designing an AI girlfriend; and Blasian Love, which . . . you can figure that one out yourself. My correspondent’s personal posts consist mostly of antigovernment conspiracy theories, praise for Elon Musk, snipes at Kamala Harris, and the kind of outrage at America as a country willfully gone awry that lies at the core of Trumpism.
If I mention these erotic and political proclivities in unison, it is because they belong together, and the Passport Bro is an aspirational identity that addresses anxieties in both arenas, along with others related to race. Outside a few prominent creators, Passport Bros content is overwhelmingly black, and whereas white Passport Bros complain about Western women in general, black Passport Bros reserve for black women an often shocking degree of ire. Many take their cue from Kevin Samuels, the recently deceased influencer who preached the gospel of the “high-value man” and spent endless hours on YouTube and Instagram Live humiliating black women callers for their weight, their age, or their children from previous relationships. The hosts of the podcast Fresh and Fit, where Passport Bros are a perennial topic, have referred to black women as Shaniquas and boasted that they “don’t dabble in the dark.” Even scientific racism isn’t absent in the black manosphere, where black women with high testosterone are derided as “biological men,” and a 2021 study showing that the reproductive rate of black male/white female couples is significantly higher than that of white male/white female couples is taken as a sign of black racial superiority.
While You Were Circluding
Nicole Iturriaga, a sociologist at UC Irvine, has coined the term “science fan fiction” to refer to the appropriation of scientific idiom in furtherance of hate-based discourse. Her insight dovetails with an obvious fact about the Passport Bros: however many videos one sees of bare-chested Americans cavorting in the water with buxom twenty-year-olds in Medellín, there is no movement, and the promise of sex relations as put forth on social media is a kind of romance novel for men that requires not so much truth as seductiveness. What is weird is that they believe it and make the spectacle of online performers the basis of a life project. In this way, they are like the marks of televangelists and multilevel marketers but with a gospel based on ill-informed evolutionary musings buttressing folk beliefs about race, sex, and tradition.
I doubt we’re on the verge
of decoupling money and status from sex, and social media isn’t going away either, so the clumping together of the bitter and deviant is now a brute fact
of modern living.
If the racial aspect of the Passport Bros matters, it is less for anything special it might reveal about black men in America than as a warning about resurgent chauvinism in general. When sociologist Michael Kimmel states that “the men’s rights movement is the gender arm of the white nationalist movement,” he indulges in a shame-by-association strategy that has overtaken the Democratic Party since the rise of Trump despite its equivocal effectiveness—one it has held to because, rather than examining America’s ethnic minorities in earnest, it has reconstituted them in its own image. This illusion never bore examining so long as the black male constituents essential to the Democratic Party accepted the premise that the Democratic Party was essential to them, but their slow rightward drift (visible as well among the Asians and Hispanics who were supposed to form natural coalition partners) complicates the claim that the choice between left and right is a choice for or against racism.
It must be clear by now that the moral masochism that appeals to Robin DiAngelo readers, habitual privilege-unpackers, and those in academia with vague aspirations to dismantle the United States qua settler project is a refined taste and not a scalable creed; if it’s a hard sell for white men, it’s a non-starter for many of their black counterparts. Whatever vision progressivism is trying to sell men on—and I think Richard Reeves is right here that the script has been torn up for men, and there is no longer a liberal consensus about what men’s value is or what they should aspire to—it is one with vague goals but many strictures, and often ignores a basic human need for self-regard that is no less real for being obnoxious.
In political terms, this may have been tenable when “white male” was the prototypical object of disdain. But as more and more presumptive allies start to misbehave relative to liberal expectations, the franchise of white adjacency has broadened to include conservative black men, Zionist Jews, Miami Cubans, and Asians opposed to affirmative action. All these groups have staked their claim to join the community of the legitimately put-upon; as the franchise of the persecuted keeps growing, the enshrinement of identity politics is proving to be a questionable victory. The casuistry by which privilege and injury in their historical and contemporary facets are traced out or conjured up is, among other things, an effort at damage control, but it is at once too subtle and too woolly ever to sink into the head of Joe Sixpack, who tends to prefer his truth dispensed to him in meme form or in three-to-five-word slogans, heavy on the spondees, if possible. And so Black Lives Matter births All Lives Matter, gay pride engenders straight pride, and even the manosphere has its response to #MeToo, sharing sob stories of spurned advances and paternity fraud with the hashtag #ItsThatBad. In an analog world, these scuffles might have been manageable, fringe obsessions for cranks and bellyachers, but with so many of us living the most important moments of our lives on social media, all of them form the potential basis for new sodalities.
What, then, can be done about aspiring Passport Bros and the coordinated male resentment of which they are a small piece? As a popcorn nosher with a ringside seat to the apocalypse, I don’t feel tempted to do anything. I doubt we’re on the verge of decoupling money and status from sex, and social media isn’t going away either, so the clumping together of the bitter and deviant is now a brute fact of modern living. But we’d do well to recognize there are consequences to exclusion from the community of the put-upon. And this recognition must be something more than an explaining away of the rejected party’s repugnance—this was the mistake made by writers fixated on economic malaise in the heartland, who missed the point of Trumpism because it was too hard to admit that voters breaking right really didn’t like immigrants. We can probably put a nail in most wholesome approaches to maleness: White Dudes for Harris was always meme fodder, the Good Men Project is now a promotional vehicle for classes on marketing and social change given by a female advertising consultant, and most of us still want to fuck instead of “circluding,” to use the term coined by Communism for Kids author Bini Adamczak.
For this “melancholy object,” to quote Jonathan Swift, “I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection”: sex must be made more available or less desirable, or both. Something like this is currently achievable, for the bold of spirit and gadget-unaverse, through a combination of VR porn and a Bluetooth-enabled masturbation toy like the Lovense Max 2 (described as “formidable” by an Amazon reviewer in France). It may not be intercourse, but it may prove a passable erotic refuge for more than one KHHV (kissless, hugless, handholdless virgin). Perhaps, as the tech prophets promise to reverse global warming through geoengineering and forestall death through gene editing, they will spare a thought for beta males, too, expanding upon these as-yet rudimentary stopgaps to inaugurate a digital sexual utopia, with virtual bling and LLM-powered bimbos, leaving the sexual rat race in meatspace. Giga Chad will frolic among buxom 10s in his seraglio in Silicon Valley, a few of us outmoded laggards will continue questing for love and companionship, and the Passport Bros will recline in cyber-loungers sipping cyber-cocktails in cyber-Medellín, where “ascending” (incel slang for sleeping with a woman) will cost a fraction—payment in crypto naturally preferred—of the price of apps and cocktails at Ocean Prime for gold-digging broads in the US of A.
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