You guys are better off meeting women through normal everyday contact.
Amazing numbers of people meet their partners through work.
Then there's normal social contact: going to parties, going for a drink, meeting friends of friends, sports activities, philosophy circles, book clubs, interest groups, political activity, gosh even the church/synangogue/mosque/temple if that's your thing, hell even singles bars.
If you've tried all that and failed then there are the "normal" internet dating sites where you meet local people as equals.
But really guys, if you need to buy a Russian gold-digger or fly all the way to fecking China, you need to ask yourself why you're so woefully inadequate and get help. Don't waste your money on a Russian peroxide blonde. Better spent on a psychologist.
This guy was just very stupid. And gullible.
Dating sites are actually becoming a very normal way to meet a partner for my gen and younger, and I can see why. I was a long-time hold-out on the internet dating thing. I finally gave in, and it was way better than I expected, and nowhere near as creepy.
If you actually want a relationship, online dating has a number of distinct advantages over meeting people at random. A big one is that most of them include things that indicate a person's long-term goals, and as a childfree person who has had people lie to me about the kids thing MANY, MANY times, this is huge for me. It's on their profile, so I know they aren't just saying it in the hopes of convincing me further down the line.
You can get a general sense of a lot of things from a dating profile that you just can't when you meet someone at random.
That said, I have absolutely zero interest in wasting my time talking to someone in another country, or even another city. I've done long-distance by necessity before, and I am never going to do it again unless it's guaranteed short-term. I live in a city of 8 million. There's no reason I should go to Brazil or where ever to find someone I like. When I'm on a dating site, I won't go more than a couple weeks chatting without meeting. I wanna live in a real world, and I ain't got time for that.
Actually, I'd say at least half the younger people I know met their partner, or most recent partner, in some form of online contact (in some cases things like Meet Up events, social networking sites, etc -- even with that, you get a sense of their interests in advance).
It's not due to trying and failing in the meat-space world. It's because it really does have some big plus sides.
I'd say in online dating, it's possible you might have more first dates that are just a fail (the chemistry aspect can't be accounted for online). But in meat-space dating, I'd say you have more instances of things progressing to a relationship, and then failing, because you found out there was some kind of deal-breaker somewhere down the line.