It's capitalism run amok. Via a moving New York Times story, in South Korea, the government has decided that the 2,000 to 3,000 marriage agencies that trade in foreign-born wives for South Korean men are so abusive toward women that they must be regulated by the Department of Health and Welfare. As is so often the case, as ambitious women in more developed countries make progress, ambitious women in less developed countries struggle to catch up by trading on traditional femininity: whether as contract wives to foreign men, sex workers catering to wealthy tourists, or childcare providers for working women abroad:

“Nowadays, Korean women have higher standards,” said Lee Eun-tae, the owner of Interwedding, an agency that last year matched 400 Korean bachelors with brides from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand, Cambodia, Uzbekistan and Indonesia. “If a man has only a high school degree, or lives with his mother, or works only at a small- or medium-size company, or is short or older, or lives in the countryside, he’ll find it very difficult to marry in Korea.”

Critics say the business demeans and takes advantage of poor women. But brokers say they are merely matching the needs of Korean men and foreign women seeking better lives.

If you're interested in these issues, I highly recommend a book I just finished, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. This collection attacks head-on the issue of the unequal distribution of feminism, and the ways in which men's unwillingness to take on traditionally "feminine" tasks, such as childcare and domestic labor, create a global migration of women workers relegated to the lowest status jobs in our societies.