Page 372 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

350 Ingrid Piller

which are available simultaneously), women’s magazines, and the advertis-
ing for the English-language-teaching industry. As Takahashi’s (2006) ethno-
graphic research shows it is particularly in situations where Japanese women
experience serious dissatisfaction with Japanese society, and particularly Jap-
anese men, as for instance the experience of severe bullying or divorce from a
cheating husband, that they decide to actively pursue the possibility of meeting
a Western partner.
Dissatisfaction with Western women also emerges as the main reason that
mail-order bride websites give for American men to pursue a partner from out-
side their own culture. I will now shift away from the focus on women that has
previously dominated research in cross-cultural desires (as in most language-
and-gender-related enquiry; see, e.g. Piller and Pavlenko 2004), and explore the
cross-cultural desires expressed by Western men on these sites in greater detail.
There are four aspects to these discursive constructions: representations of what
Western men are like and what they desire in a relationship; representations of
what Western women are like and why these “default partners” are not being
considered; representations of foreign women – I will concentrate on Filipinas –
and what makes them desirable; representations of Filipino men, their “default
partners”, and what makes them undesirable or unsuitable partners for Filipinas.
I will briefly discuss each. To begin with, it is important to bear in mind that
categories such as “Western man” and “Filipina” are member categorizations
(Sacks 1992; Antaki and Widdicombe 1998, Spreckels and Kotthoff in this vol-
ume) on the websites. One site, for instance, has the following slogan: “Western
Man + Filipina = Happiness. You do not have to be good with Algebra to know
11
that is a winning equation!!” In this example, as in numerous others, the cat-
egorization is a member categorization as it is used on the site, and it also pro-
vides evidence for the fact that advertisers on this website (be they Western men
or Filipinas) approach each other (initially) in cultural categories, i.e. as repre-
sentatives of their respective cultures.

Western men

According to O’Rourke (2002: 477), surveys have repeatedly shown the follow-
ing characteristics of US-American men who seek the services of a mail-order
bride agency:

[A] median age of 37, where ninety-four percent were white; fifty percent had two or
more years of college, while less than one percent lacked high school diplomas; fifty-
seven percent had been married at least once before; and seventy-five percent hoped
to father children through the mailorder marriage. Additionally, the men surveyed
were, for the most part, politically and ideologically conservative and financially
successful.