Caddyshacked
Another week, another expat marriage ends. “Go east, young man,” many an expat is told, “but beware the charms of the women of the Philippines.” Some of the multinationals’ human resources departments—as well as the CEOs of certain companies—have been known to be blunter: “Keep your dick in your pants, my boy, and don’t fuck around with the local lassies, or that will be your undoing.”
The “island souvenir”
Because many such men, young or old and generally white, tend to cling to orientalist views of the Filipina, the subtext in those words of warning usually pertains to a certain stereotype—sometimes called the “island souvenir.”
While the term perhaps conjured dusky-skinned and long-haired “native” women amidst tropical palms and white sandy beaches, it essentially objectifies and demeans such women, reducing them to exotic playthings to pick up from a holiday, ready to fulfill the sexual fantasies of leery men with an Asian fetish.
There are more uncharitable terms bandied about to refer to the women—hooker, puta, prostie, pokpok, among them. I’ve also heard the word “tarsier” used to describe the tiny, wide-eyed Filipina clinging onto the arm of a foreign man, often white, often clad in shorts, and often referred to as AFAM, an acronym for “a foreigner assigned in Manila” that has since gained currency as a blanket term for any boyfriend, husband, or date of foreign extraction.
A transactional relationship
Implicit in the island souvenir-AFAM relationship is its transactional nature: The woman embodies the man’s orientalist fever dream of a woman who is silent, subservient in and out of the bedroom, and super grateful in return for the promise of a better life for herself and her family with a foreigner who earns in dollars.
But there is, of course, a disparity here. It’s rarely a union of equals.
It is, in effect, an extension of the same imperialist structure that allowed the military-sexual industrial complex to flourish during the Vietnam War, when American soldiers—on R&R in the Philippines after indiscriminately bombing Vietnamese men, women, and children with napalm—swarmed all over the bars of Olongapo and Angeles City. The kind who forgot, intoxicated by alcohol and atop the pliant body of a bar girl who was gyrating on a pole just minutes before, that they were mass murderers.
One group of people they killed; in the arms of another, they sought atonement for their sins. In this cathedral of wantonness, it was Asians that they fucked, one way or another.
And so it continues. The soldiers have been replaced by tech bros, entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, hotel managers, bank executives, diplomats, logistics officers… They’re not necessarily strapping young men with toned physiques. Many are overweight, with bellies folded over their waists, hardly the picture of male pulchritude. They burn instead of tan.
Tale as old as time
More often than not, their attractiveness is predicated on the delusion of the superiority of their passport, their intelligence, and their earning capacity, with only the last one being largely true.
