This is what it’s like to talk to Bond (real name: Steven Mapel), a self-described “digital nomad,” who’s made a career traveling across Asia, creeping on women, and posting the videos to YouTube. He goes to great lengths during our interview to defend himself from accusations that he’s a racist, a sexpat, and a trollish pick-up artist with an Asian fetish, then he ends up telling me about a video where he’s “jet skiing around with a girl with 700cc tits bouncing around.”

David Bond is busy telling me that everyone has it all wrong, that he’s not some kind of creep, when he decides it’s a good time to try his hand at some awkward attempt at flattery: "you have nice lips btw. very cute."

“I don’t like white girls at all,” he tells me. “I make fun of Western women. I’m fucking Muslims [instead]... I’ve always been attracted to Asian/Latina [women] and the city I’m from has almost none. Plus, I was shy. I don’t think it’s that weird [to like Asian women]. Some girls like black guys...”

I reached out to Bond because I wanted to understand where this was all coming from. What is it about Asian women that makes the men who haunt the dark underbelly of the internet so obsessed with us? What could Bond, a man with a history of lusting after Asian women and a libertarian streak, tell me about why men like him keep trying to bed women like me?

But the thing is that Bond is just the tip of the iceberg here. And I'm not just talking about men with an Asian fetish. That shit's been going on forever. No, I'm talking about this intersecting venn diagram of men’s rights activists, incels, pick-up artists, and alt-right white nationalists that seem to have more than a thing for Asian women.

It’s like there’s a disconnect between his words and his actions. Bond is the kind of man who tells everyone he’s not a racist and then travels to Indonesia, takes a woman in a hijab on a date, and edits the footage to a soundtrack of explosions and shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” (This video has been removed from his YouTube page after it set off a firestorm of criticism in Indonesian media.)

He was soon successful enough to stay in Asia, visiting new countries, hitting on Asian women, and selling it all to an eager audience of the kinds of lonely (and often misogynistic) guys who post on subreddits like r/incels, a forum for men who describe themselves as " involuntary celibates " that's full of a particularly toxic strain of masculinity that aims to cut down and degrade women at every turn.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Bond is also selling travel guides to aspiring pick-up artists and charging fans for premier access to private videos on his website. The whole venture is built around his own personal story, one that seems hand-crafted to appeal to the nebulous men’s rights crowd: at the age of 27, he was an unhappy, overweight guy in a relationship with a “chubby white girlfriend,” that left him feeling unsatisfied. So he lost the weight, quit his job, dumped his girlfriend, and moved to Asia where he branded himself as some kind of pick-up artist cum travel vlogger.

“I’m just a guy who likes to document my life,” he says. “I was doing this before I even had a YouTube channel. I wore a GoPro on my head for Thanksgiving once. I like to document things. So the way I see myself is: a single guy who likes Asian girls, who also likes to record his life.”

I ask Bond how he sees himself. Is he a pick-up artist? A men's right's activist? A sexpat? Bond tells me that he's more of a big brother to men who can't get laid, the kind of bro who offers a helping hand to those struggling to attract the opposite sex. The whole YouTube thing just comes from an innate love of documenting his own life, he tells me.

“A lot of Indian guys love white girls,” he responds. “There’s no reason. I love Muslim girls lately—hijab wearers only. I’ve never seen hijabs in the USA. It’s just kind of hot. Did you see the video where I went on a date with a girl in a full burqa? My heart was fuckin’ racing.”

“I know that I’m really attracted to incel guys,” Bond tells me. “Because I can relate a little bit with the guy who is clueless. I have an overwhelming desire to help him.”

Spend any time on subreddits like r/MensRights and you’re bound to learn two things: 1) these men love Asian women and 2) they hate “Western” women. Here’s an excerpt from r/incels where one guy tries to convince his fellow incels that their key to salvation lies in Southeast Asia:

In Thailand it's MUCH easier to find a non-hooker girl who is happy to be your girlfriend than it is back in the West. To give you an idea - if you download Tinder and swipe right until the app won't let you anymore, you might get one match in the West. If you're lucky. In Thailand you'll get an average of 10. I started arranging meetups with these girls, and in the end started to make progress. Had my first non-hooker kiss a month after landing in Thailand, and a month later my first non-hooker sex. And the girl in question was an 18 yr old virgin, so I sorta hit the jackpot there - but that would have NEVER happened back in the UK at all.

Basically, if you ever want your fortunes with women to change, GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WEST. No other advice comes close to this, it's the single major thing every incel must do to really improve his chances. Forget all the bullshit self-help books and PUA strategy, it's totally useless. Get out of the West and it's 100x easier to get women.

This kind of shit is everywhere. It's on misogynist subreddits like r/TheRedPill, PUA ones like r/seduction, and from racist posters on r/InterracialDating. The general idea here is that these guys think there is something wrong with women in the West—especially white women. The Reddit user quoted above later goes on to capture this sentiment exactly, writing:

You know what I find really funny? When white girls arrive in Asia, and gradually get more and more desperate as THEY are not the ones worshipped. Really hilarious to see these girls who were previously top of the tree back home, suddenly having no men interested in them at all (as they're all going off with the local women instead).

These (usually white) fantasies of "dominating" Asian women have given rise to an entire industry of globe-trotting pick-up artists like Bond who make money off this same community of men by selling how-to guides and posting aspirational YouTube videos that tell other jaded, dateless men that they too can be living the good life in Asia, as long as they PayPal $20 USD for exclusive access to some website.