Among the Passport Bros

When one thinks of Bangkok expats, there’s a pretty standard image – the cadre of elderly creeps and potential 90 Day Fiance subjects. You don’t have much trouble conjuring that up, do you?

But for a long time, I’ve noticed a second, younger, less internationally renowned category. Rather than meeting women on the wrong side of 35 in neon minidresses at beer bars with Harley-Davidson signage and rawk-and-roll cover bands, they meet their partners free of charge and on the apps. Fewer Hawaiian shirts, more streetwear, or if there is a Hawaiian shirt, it’s very much of the Zoomer maximalist persuasion than the Saigon R&R variety.

For years, I’ve found them more moderately annoying than anything else. Some are socially awkward gamers, others have the douchey aspect of aspiring campus date rapists, and quite a few manage both. I knew that this was not a purely localized phenomenon – over the past several years, I’ve seen the prospering of a class of digital nomads in the throes of satyriasis emerge over the past several years, in Bali, in Chiang Mai, on the Iberian Coast, and in every other Coney Island of the mind that promises chill vibes. Wherever there are smash burgers, craft beer, and custom neon signs, they are sure not to be far behind.

But then on a rainy Saturday afternoon I discovered the term “passport bro.” And found their forums. Woof.

Think of it as the manosphere-ification of the sexpat phenomenon. A large number of (mostly) young-ish, extremely online men who had been posting misquotes of interviews with primatologists have decided to take their ideology out into the real world, in search of comely tradwives, their figures not deformed by the Five Guys diet. Being thoroughly online, they were unable to accept that they simply want someplace to park their peepee, and like to travel around, neither of which is objectionable in and of its own right, and so had to transform it into an identity tag. Furthermore, an awful lot of them give it a pseudo-political valence of standing against some form of “Western degeneracy.” Because nothing is less degenerate than booking a flight just to get laid.

As for how that manifests, its varies. Some of them seem dopey to the point of gee-golly, praising their inamoratas’ cooking and cleaning prowess, while others are more to the point (one highly upvoted commenter inquires as to which country has girls “most down to do butt stuff,” with remarkably sincere responses). In all cases, this is a phenomenon that could easily have been predicted, and when I first heard rumblings about incels “SEAmaxxing” in Southeast Asia, I was informed but not surprised.

There is also a racial dimension, of course, although it’s not necessarily the obvious one you might imagine. Because this is actually a pretty diverse demographic in my experience. Among the usual and expected crowd, you get an army of desperate dudes of East and South Asian descent, which upon reflection is rather unsurprising, given the common feelings of sexual and romantic devaluation among those populaces within the metropolitan core. And so they ask which countries are they less likely to be scoffed at in, and so off it is to Manila, where their passport holds more sway than their skin tone.

If I’m being empathetic, I could point out the many ways in which the Sexual Revolution has failed to live up to its promises, or if it has, they were very much the promises of a bourgeois realignment. The ways in which the apps have even further subjected dating to the cruel logic of the free market, the ways in which desire is constantly being redefined with a remarkable number of people having trouble catching up to how the process works, the ways in which gloomy economic horizons and broad-scale cultural pessimism have led to new varieties of romantic desperation, the ways in which social media and infinite free porn present a vicious hologram for the sexual desires of adolescents, the ways in which love is, in our reality, contra Lennon, something that can indeed be bought.

But that empathy fades with every Instagram reel of a sigma-coded influencer in some gray Slavic city or sun-dappled Colombian beach, every Youtube thumbnail with a shitty AI pic of a coy and demure Vietnamese maiden.

Whether I have met any self-described passport bros, I’m not sure – it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that people go around advertising. However, I live in fucking Bangkok – the type is everywhere, and I encounter them more often than I would like, and I have certainly spent time among them in practice.

When I meet a member of this approximate class at a party or event, they quite often assume that I am One of Them. Which to be fair is not unreasonable. I am an American dude living abroad in his 30s, and they are quite often also American dudes living abroad in their 30s, so it’s not difficult to imagine them projecting. To give an example, years ago, before such a term was ever coined, I ran into a young American at the club whom I knew but had never much cared for, who looked a bit like a white version of Yoshi and acted like Johnny Drama. I guess he’d struck out with the girl he was attempting to wrap his arms around, because before even saying hi, he slapped me on the shoulder and barked “bro, she’s not feeling me, go try your luck.” A bit like he was having trouble with a particularly tough GTA mission.

Then I have to then go out of my way to make it obvious that I am not on their team in any meaningful way, and if I am feeling drunk and ornery enough, I wind up mocking them until they leave me alone (something which often backfires, as there is a tendency to assume my actual contempt and allusions to their shriveled penises is really just friendly ballbusting among bros). I have a tendency to then feel terrible, feel like a shitty and judgmental person, before I look over to see them attempting to kino-escalate with a Singaporean girl too shy to push them away. I feel no happier having been correct.

But it is irrelevant I am not One of Them, I am, by default thought of as One of Them. Salt in my stubble, forearm tattoo, bourbon on the rocks in hand, and a certain psychogeography of the soul, and I know that there will be people who meet me – there have been people who have met me – who will logically apply their knowledge base of tropes and memes, and come to that conclusion.

I’ve never put much stock in the ideas of Freud and Jung – psychoanalysis was always a bit too disconnected from the ground, a bit too akin to religion in the ways it which it posits this detailed and almost mythological system of narratives and metaphors that it then uses as a read on the human condition as a whole. But damn, those narratives and metaphors can be compelling.

And the idea of the Shadow in the human psyche, there being this thing within you that the ego cannot reconcile, is to me the most compelling of those. The idea that there is this part of you that you try to tamp down that can still haunt you in moments of anguish, or what is worse, comes out of nowhere in the carefree reverie of an afternoon stuck inside.

On a bitter and overheated Sunday morning, with five hours of sleep, I might look at my face in the mirror with the same repulsion, along with the adipose tissue around my waist, the failures to meet my goals, a bit dehydrated, reaching for the half-empty bottle of sparkling water gone flat, the messages deliberately left unread.

And I have to wonder what's lurking behind my back.