Control Is Not Partnership

I’ve contemplated writing about this for a while now. And well, what better time than now? I heard many men complaining about women. It’s actually quite annoying to me. They keep saying things like: women today are too independent, too strong, too career-focused, too unwilling to submit, too masculine, and therefore undateable. One of the central issues is that these men define femininity as subordination. Everything else is just an excuse to justify that belief. The men making this complaint present it as a reasonable preference, a matter of compatibility, and follow it up with a statement about what they need in a relationship. Once you examine it honestly, that complaint is actually just a confession. It’s a confession that the man making it cannot tolerate being in a relationship with someone who doesn’t need him, because a woman who doesn’t need him is a woman who can evaluate him clearly, and that evaluation is what he’s afraid of.

This essay is about that fear and what it produces. It’s about the psychology underneath the rejection of independent women, the specific dynamic that leads some men to sabotage their partners’ success, and the increasingly visible trend of Western men traveling to economically disadvantaged countries to find women they can position themselves above. All of these behaviors share a common root, and that root is insecurity that has never been examined or addressed, operating through the language of so-called tradition, compatibility, and masculine identity.

To understand what’s being said when a man complains that a woman is too independent, you have to ask what independence means in practical terms. An independent woman pays her own bills. She supports herself. She pursues her own goals and has built her own life before any man enters it. She has standards, and she has the financial and psychological foundation to enforce them, which means she can leave a situation that doesn’t serve her. That last part is the operative detail. The problem is that her independence gives her options, and options give her the ability to hold a man accountable to a standard. A man who is afraid of being measured will experience that accountability as a threat. Saying that a woman is “too independent” is how that fear gets communicated without being named as fear.

The alternative these men claim to want, the woman who is fully dependent, who doesn’t work, who has no ambitions of her own, who defers entirely to the man for financial support and decision-making, is not a woman who is easier to love. She’s a woman who has fewer options. A woman without financial independence, without her own career or social capital, is a woman who cannot easily leave. And a woman who cannot easily leave is a woman whose presence in the relationship can be maintained regardless of how the man behaves. The standard is lowered. He gets to do the bare minimum. That’s the appeal. It has nothing to do with finding a compatible partner. It has everything to do with finding a captive one.

The fantasy goes even further than finding a dependent woman. What some of these men describe, and what plays out in relationships when the dynamic is given space to develop, is the desire to take a powerful independent woman and make her dependent and submissive. And this reveals something important about the psychology involved. If the goal were to be with someone who needs you, there are women in that position already. But the specific desire to find a woman who is capable and then strip her of that capability is about something else. It’s about ownership. A woman who was dependent before she met you is dependent because of her circumstances. A woman who was independent and then gave it up for you is dependent because of you. The distinction matters enormously to the man operating from this psychology, because what he wants is not a woman who needs support. He wants a woman whose reliance on him is something he created and therefore controls.

This plays out in real relationships with real consequences. For example: A woman has a career she’s built over years, one that’s connected to her purpose and gives her financial security and a sense of her own identity. She’s doing well. Then she enters a relationship with a man whose ego cannot accommodate her success. The process of dismantling what she’s built rarely happens through direct demand. It happens gradually, through expressed discomfort that slowly becomes pressure, through the framing of her work as something that takes her away from the relationship, through the suggestion that she doesn’t have to work this hard because he can provide, through the quiet accumulation of small moments that communicate that her success is a problem. Eventually, she makes the concession. She steps back from the work, or leaves it entirely, and the dynamic the man needed is achieved. He is now the provider. She is now reliant on him. The power differential he required is in place. And what’s been lost is a person’s purpose, financial independence, and the life she built before he arrived.

Some men escalate beyond gradual pressure into deliberate action. They sabotage contraception, or refuse to use it while insisting the relationship is committed, or press for children before the woman has decided she wants them, with the specific goal of “trapping” the woman. A pregnancy changes the calculus of a woman’s life in ways that no other event does. Once the child arrives, he demands that she stay home to raise them, which requires the abandonment of her career, her income, and the goals she was pursuing before he arrived. He gets what he was after the entire time. He wanted a housewife who cooks and cleans and raises the children, positioned inside the home in a role of complete financial reliance on him. The pregnancy did the work no argument could have done. She cannot leave without disrupting the child’s life. She cannot return to her career without the infrastructure she no longer has. She is now where he needed her to be, and he can present the outcome as the natural unfolding of family life rather than the engineered result it is.

The story he uses to justify the outcome is that the woman is occupying a “feminine” role by staying home with the child while he occupies a “masculine” role by working and providing. Neither half of that framing is historically accurate. The isolated housewife dependent on a single male income is a mid-twentieth-century arrangement produced by the economic conditions of postwar Western suburbanization, and it lasted for about two generations before economic reality collapsed it. Across most of human history and across most cultures, women worked, contributed materially to the household economy, ran businesses, farmed, traded, and raised children as part of extended family and community networks that distributed the labor of child-rearing across many adults. He calls this arrangement tradition. The claim functions as cover for an outcome he engineered, borrowing authority from a history that never included this arrangement in the first place.

The psychological mechanism driving all of this is what researchers and clinicians describe as fragile masculinity. Fragile masculinity refers to a form of “masculine” identity that is constructed almost entirely in relation to external markers of dominance, and that experiences any challenge to those markers as a threat to the self. A man operating from fragile masculinity does not have a stable internal sense of his own worth that can hold steady when circumstances change or when someone around him succeeds. His sense of himself as a man is contingent on being in a superior position relative to the people around him, and particularly relative to the women in his life. When a woman earns more than him, succeeds more visibly than him, or does not need what he’s offering, the threat is not to his pride alone. It is to the entire structure through which he understands himself. That is why the response tends to be disproportionate. The anger, the pressure, the need to undermine, these are not reactions to a minor inconvenience. They are reactions to what feels like an existential challenge.

The reason those reactions feel existential is what I want to focus on for a moment, because this is where the surface complaint about independent women opens into something much older. In my essay Every Woman Is Eve I explained how many boys inherit a definition of manhood built on control, on the subjugation of others, on the enforcement of hierarchy. A boy raised inside that definition comes to understand power as the meaning of manhood rather than as one possible expression of strength. He believes, at a level beneath conscious examination, that a man who does not dominate is not a man. And because the subordination of women is the oldest and most accessible form of male power available to him, women become the primary arena where he seeks his proof. He does not experience the domination of his partner as a symptom of insecurity. He experiences it as the content of his manhood.

Once you see the belief in that shape, the rejection of independent women stops looking like a preference and starts looking like a survival response. The independent woman does not fail his compatibility test. She fails his existence test. Every time she succeeds without needing him, she demonstrates that his role in her life is optional, and every optional role, in the framework he inherited, is not the role of a man. He requires her subjugation for the same reason a person clinging to a rope requires the rope to hold. Without her beneath him, there is no proof he is who he has told himself he is. His entire self-concept is suspended over that one relationship, and if the relationship refuses to hold him up, he falls into a version of himself he cannot tolerate meeting.

This is also why men in this category experience a high-achieving woman as competition rather than companionship. A psychologically secure man can take pleasure in his partner’s success because his sense of himself is not diminished by her achievements. A man operating from fragile masculinity cannot do that, because in the framework he’s working from, any success she has that exceeds his own is a commentary on his inadequacy. The relationship is no longer a partnership. It has become a competition, and he is determined to win it, or to restructure the situation so that winning is guaranteed.

What happens when that restructuring is not possible, when the woman will not be broken down, when Western culture has produced enough independent women that the pool of women willing to perform total submission in exchange for financial provision is limited, is where the passport bro trend enters the picture. Passport bros are Western men, largely American, who travel to economically disadvantaged countries, most commonly in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, with the explicit goal of finding a wife or long-term partner there. The stated reasoning is that women in these countries are more feminine, more family-oriented, more respectful, and more willing to take on traditional domestic roles than Western women. What this reasoning is describing, once you strip away the cultural framing, is an economic power differential that produces the dynamic that’s harder for these men to find in the West.

In Thailand, the Philippines, Colombia, or Vietnam, an average Western man with a modest income by Western standards is “wealthy” relative to the average local population. That wealth changes his position in any potential relationship. He is no longer competing on equal footing with other men for the attention of women who have their own careers and their own financial security. He is, in many cases, one of the most financially significant individuals a woman in that context has ever encountered. The dynamic he couldn’t construct at home because Western women have too many options of their own is available to him there by default. He does not have to be exceptional. He does not have to be particularly attractive, particularly intelligent, or particularly interesting. He has to show up with a Western income and be willing to spend it. The submission and deference he gets in return is not evidence that he has found a woman who appreciates him. It is evidence that financial desperation produces compliance, and that he has found a place where his money does the work his character cannot.

What he’s buying with his Western income is not a wife. He’s buying the material conditions under which he can inhabit the role of a “man” as he understands it. In the country he traveled to, the economic differential positions him above her by default, and that positioning is what he needed. He can now provide, protect, decide, direct. He can occupy the space above another human being that his understanding of masculinity requires him to occupy. The performance he can now stage was not available to him at home because Western women had too many independent options to serve as the surface for his performance. He needed a surface. He found a country where the economic conditions guaranteed him one.

The transactional nature of these arrangements can be seen from both sides. The woman in this dynamic is frequently making a rational calculation under conditions of limited options. In many of the countries these men target, economic opportunities for women are genuinely constrained. The prospect of a Western husband who will provide financial stability, possibly a visa, and a materially better life is a real consideration that exists against the challenges of real economic hardship. She is not choosing this man because she finds him compelling. She is choosing the life his resources can provide and accepting the man as the cost of that life. She’s settling, and she knows it, and under the circumstances she’s facing, that settlement may represent the best available option. The decision is hers and it’s deliberate, which is why the passport bro’s belief that he has found a woman who genuinely desires him is one of the central self-deceptions of the entire phenomenon.

These men believe they’re winning. They present their overseas relationships as evidence that they’ve seen through the corruption of Western feminism and found women who still understand proper gender roles. What they’ve actually done is paid for a performance of the dynamic they could not earn. The woman is not attracted to him. She’s attracted to what he can provide, and she is skilled enough at the transaction to make the performance convincing enough for him to maintain the illusion. He thinks he is the one who has purchased control. In reality, she made the decision, she set the terms in her own mind, and she is managing him as deliberately as any skilled negotiator manages a counterpart who believes they have more power than they actually do. The man who needed to feel dominant is being handled by someone who has correctly identified his need and is using it.

There is another layer to what the passport bro is doing that becomes visible once you know where to look. I explained how certain men treat every interaction with a woman as a performance staged for other men in my previous essay, He Doesn't Even Like Women. The woman in that situation is not the audience. She's an object.The audience is the male peer group, and every successful pursuit, every conquest, every visible heterosexual gesture becomes evidence submitted to that audience that the man’s masculinity is real and intact. The passport bro operates inside the same architecture, and the stage is larger. He returns from his trip with a wife who is younger, more feminine, more deferential than any woman he could have secured at home, and he displays her to other men as proof. He shares photos and videos. He builds a following. The wife is not the point of the trip. The evidence is. The other men who see the evidence and can now confirm that he found what he claims Western women denied him are the actual object of the performance. His marriage functions as a piece of testimony offered to a jury of men who evaluate his masculinity by the visible submission of the woman standing next to him. What looks like a relationship is a display case.

The racial dimension of the passport bro phenomenon is impossible to discuss honestly without acknowledging the colonial history that precedes it. Western men traveling to poorer, predominantly non-white countries to find wives they can financially dominate continues a pattern that has accompanied Western economic and military expansion for centuries. Colonizers, missionaries, soldiers, and businessmen operating in Asia, Latin America, and Africa frequently took local women as wives or concubines, and the combination of economic power and racial hierarchy that structured those arrangements is structurally identical to what passport bros are doing today. The framing has been updated. The underlying transaction is the same. A Western man with economic advantages positions himself as a provider in a context where his economic advantages guarantee him a level of access and deference he could not command at home, and he interprets that access as evidence of his own desirability rather than as evidence of economic inequality.

The specific rejection of Black American women and Western women more broadly runs through the passport bro discourse as well. The complaint that Western women are too independent, too feminist, too unwilling to submit is disproportionately directed at Black women, who are characterized in this discourse as aggressive, demanding, and undesirable. The particular venom directed at Black women in these conversations is not incidental. Black women in the West have historically had to be self-sufficient out of necessity, because the economic and social systems that were supposed to support families have systematically excluded Black men from stable employment and economic security, while also destroying the Black community, leaving Black women to develop independence as a survival strategy rather than an ideological choice. The man who resents Black women’s independence is, in many cases, resenting the product of conditions his own country and even broader, Western society helped create, and projecting the discomfort of that history onto the women who lived through it.

The claim that the passport bro trend represents a return to traditional values is the primary ideological justification these men offer for what they’re doing. The argument is that feminism has corrupted Western women and destroyed the natural order of relationships, in which men lead and provide and women support and nurture, and that by finding women from less Westernized cultures, these men are recovering what relationships were always supposed to look like. This argument fails on its own historical terms. Examination of traditional family structures across cultures, including the Western cultures these men are claiming to honor, reveals that women have consistently held significant authority within the domestic sphere, that the management of the household economy, the raising of children, the maintenance of family relationships, and the management of resources were understood as forms of power and not as mere service. Women in traditional societies were not passive recipients of male provision. They were active managers of complex domestic systems, and their authority within those systems was recognized and respected.

What passport bros are describing when they say they want traditional women is not tradition. It is a selective fantasy of tradition that keeps the parts where the man has authority and removes the parts where the woman does. True tradition placed women at the center of household power. The version these men want is one where the man provides money and the woman provides compliance, with no corresponding domain of authority for her. That is not tradition. It is a power structure dressed in traditional language to make it more palatable.

But of course, this shouldn't be surprising. The concept of marriage existed long before patriarchy, and in its earlier forms it looked nothing like the institution these men are defending. In more ancient societies, women held positions of authority, were recognized as spiritual and civic leaders, and participated in partnerships that were structured around reciprocity rather than hierarchy. The version of marriage that treated women as property, that assigned rigid gender roles and enforced male authority as the organizing principle of the household, emerged alongside the rise of patriarchy and consolidated during the same period that produced the gender roles these men now call natural. Marriage in that form was developed as a business arrangement that transferred women between families and secured male lineage, and even today it remains a legally binding contract. The "tradition" passport bros are chasing is not an ancient truth. It is the product of a specific historical power grab, and the gender roles attached to it were manufactured in service of that grab.

Another layer to this psychology is the desire for a woman who is entirely reliant on you, who is grateful for your provision, who defers to your judgment and places you at the center of her world. This desire maps closely onto the emotional dynamic of early childhood, specifically the relationship with a primary caregiver, which for most people is the mother. This is not an accusation. It is a psychological observation with substantial clinical support, and it connects directly to the maternal architecture I traced in Every Woman Is Eve. The way a person relates to the first important woman in his life sets the template for how he relates to every woman who follows. When that early relationship left a wound that was never addressed, the wound shapes what he looks for in adulthood. A man who has not resolved the feeling of being inadequate, unseen or not enough in the eyes of his mother will search for a woman whose adoration can close that wound. The search is not for a partner. It is for a repair.

The desire for unconditional nurturing, for a woman whose world revolves around him, for a dynamic in which he is always central and always provided for emotionally, are not the desires of a fully individuated adult. They’re the desires of someone who is still, in some important emotional sense, a child looking for the mother relationship to be repaired or completed through a romantic partner. No adult relationship can fulfill that function. A wife is not a mother, and asking a romantic partner to fill a maternal role is asking for something she cannot provide and that will distort the relationship beyond repair. The passport bro who complains that Western women are cold or selfish is often describing the failure of Western women to serve as maternal substitutes for men who never grew up. The women in poorer countries he flies to are usually not warmer or more loving. They are performing the role his wound demands because he is paying for the performance, and the performance temporarily quiets the wound without healing it. When the money runs out, or when the woman decides the transaction is no longer worth her participation, the wound will resurface, and he will conclude that he chose the wrong country rather than that he chose the wrong strategy.

In He Who Made Me I broke down how subjugation reproduces itself downward through anyone who has been subjugated and cannot confront the source directly. A man who has been diminished by systems he cannot reach does not, in most cases, become an advocate for the end of diminishment as a structure. He becomes a searcher for someone he can position beneath himself so the feeling of being on top becomes available to him by other means. The passport bro is running that pattern with less overt violence and more airline miles. He is a man who could not get the deference he believes he is owed inside the conditions of his own life, and rather than examine why that deference was withheld, he travels to a place where the economic conditions guarantee it. The travel is not incidental. The travel is the mechanism. He has to leave home to find a person beneath whom he cannot go, because at home there is no such person, and he cannot bear a life inside a country where every woman he encounters is his equal or above him in some domain.

The structure of the passport bro’s trip and the structure of the domestic abuser’s household are not two different phenomena. They are the same phenomenon at different scales of resource. A man with fewer resources cannot leave the country to find a woman he can dominate. He dominates the one in front of him and calls it marriage. A man with more resources leaves the country to find one whose economic circumstances will make the domination look voluntary. The domination is the same. The negotiation is different. What both men share is the belief that they need a woman beneath them in order to be men at all, and that belief is the same belief that produced the fire in Is God Is, the same belief that produces the murder statistic of 137 women killed every day by a partner or family member, the same belief that runs underneath every visible expression of male violence in this world. The passport bro looks like a lifestyle influencer. The abuser looks like a criminal. The subjugation is identical.

The relationship is manipulative by nature. It will either be psychologically abusive or physically abusive or both. I know this may be hard for some to admit to but manipulation is abuse, controlling your partner is abuse, any kind of subjugation is abuse. Demanding that your partner be submissive to you is abuse.

What all of this points to is the same thing the men in this conversation most consistently refuse to do, which is look at themselves honestly. If you require a woman to be financially dependent on you in order to feel secure in a relationship, that says something significant about you, not about her. If the success of your partner makes you feel diminished rather than supported, that’s a psychological condition that needs to be addressed, not a compatibility problem to be solved by finding a less successful partner. If you have to travel to a country where your economic advantages purchase you a dynamic you could not earn through your actual character, you have not found a woman who loves you. You have paid for the performance of being loved, and the distinction between those two things is the entire distance between a real relationship and an arrangement.

The men who have what they claim to be looking for, substance, confidence, the capacity to lead without needing to dominate, the ability to provide without needing to control, don’t need to run anywhere. They’re not looking for a woman who’s “coachable”. They don’t need to find women with fewer options or engineer situations where the power differential does the relational work for them. They are capable of building actual partnerships with women who are their equals because their identity does not collapse when confronted with an equal. The passport bro phenomenon is not evidence that Western women have become undateable. It is evidence that a significant number of Western men have not done the internal work required to be in a relationship with someone who does not need to be beneath them.

Control is not partnership. It never has been and it cannot be made into one regardless of how far you travel or how much money you spend. A relationship built on the suppression of one person’s agency for the psychological comfort of the other is not a relationship. It is a transaction with a romantic name attached to it. And the man at the center of that transaction, who believes he has finally found what he was looking for, is not a man who has won anything. He is a man who has successfully avoided the one confrontation that could change something, which is the confrontation with himself. Subjugation is the structure. Once you see it, you cannot unsee where it appears. It appears in the man who burns a woman for refusing him. It appears in the man who beats his girlfriend and calls it a bad day. It appears in the man who moves overseas so his money can buy him the deference his character could not command. And it will appear in the next generation of boys these men raise unless someone in the line refuses to carry it forward.

My name is Saipher Zureti. I am a visual artist and writer. All of the calligraphy in my essays is my original artwork, created specifically for the writing it accompanies.

This Substack is a body of philosophical essays on manipulation, identity, psychology, and the systems that shape how we see ourselves and each other. The essays build on each other deliberately. Each one extends, complicates, or deepens what came before, because these subjects cannot be understood in isolation from one another.

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Until next time, Namaste.

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