"They're All So Beautiful", a documentary on race and dating

[Glaurung]

This thread is about yellow fever because the documentary is called Seeking Asian Female and the discussion forum is called They're All So Beautiful. Feel free to open another thread about people who objectify others based on their race. That means people with jungle fever, Latin fever, or the disparity in rates of interracial couples.

There are so many body types among Asians. Perhaps here in the US you see only the slender or petite ones. I can assure you that petite is not a word you'd describe me with. There are Asians who are tall, skinny, fat, obese even, short. Every body type is represented among Asians, who number in the billions.

There are many reasons why Asian women will go for white men that have nothing to do with two people having common interests and falling in love - colonialism, media portrayals, immigration status (for American white men), family rules (where Asian women are allowed to marry outside the race but Asian men are not). This thread isn't about those things.

Fair enough. I just have several friends who date a lot of Asian women and it bothers me that their motives may be questioned unfairly, so I guess the topic of the thread was frustrating to me, but I understand your frustrations and you have every right to them.

[Sci-2]

I've seen this thread before and I've never understood the need to single out white men here. What about black men who date ONLY white women. And what about asian women who date only white men or white women who date only black men?

It's an interesting question. I suspect it has to do with maintaining what another poster has called the coalition of unidentity -> non-white + non-straight + non-male is the least privileged group, the most disadvantaged barring things like class and disability.

I actually have seen an interesting reversal of this among at least some minorities. As my one Afghani ex put it, "Why is there an Asian fetish? No one ever says if you're a white guy who primarily dates white girls you have a white girl fetish?"

Now, I think there is a distinction between attraction toward a group and fetishization of a group. There might be a grey area there, but you can sometimes tell when someone is simply attracted to your race/ethnicity and when someone has an unhealthy obsession of getting with one of your kind and/or expectations of what they want you to be.

[Glaurung]

It's an interesting question. I suspect it has to do with maintaining what another poster has called the coalition of unidentity -> non-white + non-straight + non-male is the least privileged group, the most disadvantaged barring things like class and disability.

I actually have seen an interesting reversal of this among at least some minorities. As my one Afghani ex put it, "Why is there an Asian fetish? No one ever says if you're a white guy who primarily dates white girls you have a white girl fetish?"

Now, I think there is a distinction between attraction toward a group and fetishization of a group. There might be a grey area there, but you can sometimes tell when someone is simply attracted to your race/ethnicity and when someone has an unhealthy obsession of getting with one of your kind and/or expectations of what they want you to be.

Unless you're a straight white male who grew up dirt poor. Then you get all of the shame/guilt/blame, but none of the benefits :).

I've had people before accuse me of jungle fever(extremely offensive term btw) because I'm married to a black woman and have dated several black women. I just like women in general. I've dated white girls, hispanic girls, Native American girls, etc .... I'm attracted to all. I am a quiet guy though and in my experiences black girls are much more forward in the dating scene and will take it upon themselves to make the first move if I'm afraid to make the first move. This may have been an unintended bias that led to me dating a lot of black girls.

[Sci-2]

Unless you're a straight white male who grew up dirt poor. Then you get all of the shame/guilt/blame, but none of the benefits :).

Sorry, to be clear I was suggesting the political coalition is flawed. It also leads to melodrama, though I think Eponine's post makes clear the issue of Asian fetish doesn't fall under that charge.

I've actually been accused of having an Asian fetish despite being non-white because of my interest in two Korean girls and one Japanese girl simultaneously and ended up carrying those torches for a bit. It was actually annoying, as if I'd been interested in three white girls no one would care.

Just happened to be the case that I met them all around the same time. But note they all had different personalities and since it was college there were other girls who were non-Asian as well.

I think your case is different than some people who really want to "hook up with a black girl" or whatever, which is where you start getting into fetishization.

[Eponine]

I actually have seen an interesting reversal of this among at least some minorities. As my one Afghani ex put it, "Why is there an Asian fetish? No one ever says if you're a white guy who primarily dates white girls you have a white girl fetish?"

Two questions about demographics - do white men who seek out Asian women for racist reasons typically belong to a more specific demographic? Education bracket, income bracket, etc.?

And second, are there any differences between men and women among Asians living in America in how quickly or how much they become integrated in American culture?

My personal but entirely anecdotal observation has been that I've known a lot of female Asians, particularly the ones who've received a lot of attention from American men, who have been very integrated in American culture - and significantly fewer men. And maybe Americans tend to be more inviting and accepting toward Asian women than men, making it so they integrate quickly. As far as I've seen though, Asian women who I've known who were more "invisible" to American men didn't receive nearly the same attention.

It makes me wonder about the experience of Asian women in America who are not heavily involved in American culture and do not speak English very well with regards to men wanting to date them for their Asianness. I admit that right or wrong, it makes me much more uncomfortable to see a couple where they seem to be almost unable to communicate because of language and cultural differences. I had a roommate who had a Japanese boyfriend whose English was very poor, and she did not speak Japanese. They spent a lot of time in the common area not really communicating. If she'd be a different person, I would have suspected that it was about sex, but being as she was a super Bible thumper and AFAIK didn't even bring him into her room, I think it was probably about a conversion attempt. Now I know that not everyone is as concerned with verbal communication and there are a small number of people who make such a connection with someone else on a different level that inability to speak easily with each other doesn't matter as much to them, but I really have trouble believing that's the case with a lot of times I see a white American with a woman who barely seems to understand him.

[Isalie]

Two questions about demographics - do white men who seek out Asian women for racist reasons typically belong to a more specific demographic? Education bracket, income bracket, etc.?

In Sweden they generally live in rural, depopulated, areas and import their women from Thailand.

[Sci-2]

Two questions about demographics - do white men who seek out Asian women for racist reasons typically belong to a more specific demographic? Education bracket, income bracket, etc.?

Can you elaborate on "racist reasons"? Also, do you think Asian fetish is a solely white phenomenon?

[Eponine]

Can you elaborate on "racist reasons"? Also, do you think Asian fetish is a solely white phenomenon?

Racist reasons - believing that Asian women have qualities of personality inherent to race, or that any given Asian will fit a cultural stereotype or something about Asianness makes them "better" girlfriends. Did you REALLY need that spelled out?

Also are you trying for a cheap gotcha or are you just dense? I never said anything about Asian fetishes only being a white thing, but any subset is going to have different approaches and experiences, so I wanted to know about one specific group.

[Happy Ent]

It’s a fair question.

Hypothesis: yellow fever is merely an aspect of assortive mating. Ormond can correct me, but as far as I understand, IQ is highly stratified among successful marriages. (Certainly more than the other factors that spring to mind: income, education, height, beauty, etc.)

Race is a good proxy for IQ. Hence what is perceived as racist is merely a good approximation of “I want an IQ 105+ wife, just like myself”. Since women, alas, don’t get their IQ stamped in their forehead, ethnicity is a useful marker. (You could use others, such as “Membership on Westeros.org” or “Has read X books on goodreads” or “Plays an instrument” etc.) Human brains are faulty measuring devices and easily fall into dichotomic thinking and pattern-matching, so to my uneducated mind it makes perfect sense that “Woman with IQ 105” gets replaced by “Asian woman” in somebody’s brain if you’re surrounded by a large population of Asian women. (Where I live, I’ve never heard of this phenomenon.)

Add to that reasonably correct stereotypes about agreeableness and conscientiousness and body fat and you have yourself an irresistible cocktail.

—

Could be completely wrong, so that’s why it would be interesting to see the IQ data of creepy men who have yellow fever. Or an IQ proxy such as income level or education. If I’m right then the mean IQ of yellow feverers is 105. There you go: Falsifiable prediction.

[Sci-2]

Racist reasons - believing that Asian women have qualities of personality inherent to race, or that any given Asian will fit a cultural stereotype or something about Asianness makes them "better" girlfriends. Did you REALLY need that spelled out?

I think if you read my above posts you'd see I'm trying to find the point at which attraction becomes fetishization. Merely curious what you consider "racist" reasons as this seems to vary among posters.

Also are you trying for a cheap gotcha or are you just dense? I never said anything about Asian fetishes only being a white thing, but any subset is going to have different approaches and experiences, so I wanted to know about one specific group.

It isn't a gotcha at all. There isn't a correct answer. I just notice most people usually ascribe "yellow fever" as something primarily an issue with white males. It seems odd that many people keep alluding to whiteness being part of the problem.

[Eponine]

It’s a fair question.

Hypothesis: yellow fever is merely an aspect of assortive mating. Ormond can correct me, but as far as I understand, IQ is highly stratified among successful marriages. (Certainly more than the other factors that spring to mind: income, education, height, beauty, etc.)

Race is a good proxy for IQ. Hence what is perceived as racist is merely a good approximation of “I want an IQ 105+ wife, just like myself”. Since women, alas, don’t get their IQ stamped in their forehead, ethnicity is a useful marker. (You could use others, such as “Membership on Westeros.org” or “Has read X books on goodreads” or “Plays an instrument” etc.) Human brains are faulty measuring devices and easily fall into dichotomic thinking and pattern-matching, so to my uneducated mind it makes perfect sense that “Woman with IQ 105” gets replaced by “Asian woman” in somebody’s brain if you’re surrounded by a large population of Asian women. (Where I live, I’ve never heard of this phenomenon.)

Add to that reasonably correct stereotypes about agreeableness and conscientiousness and body fat and you have yourself an irresistible cocktail.

—

Could be completely wrong, so that’s why it would be interesting to see the IQ data of creepy men who have yellow fever. Or an IQ proxy such as income level or education. If I’m right then the mean IQ of yellow feverers is 105. There you go: Falsifiable prediction.

But are these men actually seeking out specifically Asian women? It seems that Asians make up a significantly larger proportion of the female graduate student population (especially in STEM subjects) than their proportion in the overall population. In the program I'm in, if you were a grad student hoping to get a date with a female classmate and you were completely oblivious to race, you were simply going to pick a woman at random, you'd have over a 50% chance of asking out an Asian. That to me doesn't ring the creep bell - because I recognize that if you are in an environment with a larger than average proportion of race X, you're going to have a larger than average chance of dating someone of that race, and if you are in a diverse environment, it's highly likely that you'll at some point date someone of another race or culture. A lot of my fellow grad students have dated an Asian at some point. The creepiness here is the creepiness of ONLY seeking out Asian women, or seeing an Asian woman as some kind of prize that a woman of another race would not be. It's a little vague, but seems like it would be easy to see if the man in question had interest in smart women of other races, or he was frequently seeking out less educated, less intelligent Asian women.

[Ravenhair]

In reading this thread, I found Terra's posts regarding the stereotypes associated with Asian males to be very accurate. Before I read Terra's posts about these stereotypes, I discussed the topic of this thread with a guy I know who is Filipino. Of course, we first talked about the fact that some people don't consider Filipinos to be Asian because they don't realize that much like the idea of "American," which encompasses all sorts of ethnicities, cultures, and backgrounds, "Asian" does as well. He also described a number of the experiences about which Terra later posted, and they were, perhaps not surprisingly, very similar. He talked, as Terra did, about the irritation at there being no Asian male romantic leads in Hollywood and no one in television being remotely close to him. I thought about that for awhile. It's not my experience; there are plenty of white women in entertainment, as long as they stay a certain age (which is another awful thing for another thread). I think, though, that growing up in the US, it must be very affecting not to see anything in entertainment that resembles you or your experience. Even more frustrating is that just by sight someone would automatically think "good at math, martial arts, and must have a small dick." To encounter repeatedly such nonsense must be difficult to a degree I cannot even comprehend.

I also think Minaku was treated rather unfairly by some people in this thread. Her comments about facial hair just do not in any way match up to the fetishitic behavior demonstrated by the men in that video. Facial hair can be shaved off, groomed, or kept in a certain way. To compare that to one's ethnicity is just so wrong-headed that I think she was right to suspect certain posts of being trolling. It is clear that some men don't want a woman who encompasses a number of wonderful qualities and who just happens to be Asian. They want an "Asian" woman for qualities they think she must represent, and both Eponine and Minaku have described so well in their posts the creepiness in that.

Strangely, and I admit I may be wrong on this point, the online world, IMO, actually can work to combat these stereotypes in a way. For example, most of the people who meet the guy I describe above as his online persona think he must be a tall blond because after all, he is charming, funny, and intelligent. ;) Then, they learn he is Asian. I think there are still some people who have the "huh? wow!" experience when they discover this information, and perhaps their pre-conceived notions change just a bit.

[Galactus]

In Sweden they generally live in rural, depopulated, areas and import their women from Thailand.

There's a bit of an economic issue there, jobs are scarce in rural areas, but they're often rather well-paid. (in mining, logging etc. requiring you to live in the boondocks and work a lot) since the jobs are scarce most people (women and otherwise) can't find a job unless they already have one. So we get women (and young people except those with very specialized skills) moving away in order to get jobs, while leaving some relatively well-paid men with no women around.

The end-result is these men looking for women who are willing to be stay-at-home wives. (since there are very few jobs for them) that tends to mean mail-order brides (either from eastern europe or Thailand) and opens up all the usual scope for abuse etc. that this implies.

[Yoadm]

Well this thread cought my eye. For the simple reason that I've been living in Beijing in the past two years and have had (still have) a preference for Chinese women. It wasn't always so, and in all honesty I don't think I was even mildly attracted to them in the past, but my orientation changed. Maybe because of the change of scenery, or because sometimes we have a preference for something different. Do I have yellow fever? No idea, definately not in the way some people here described it (liking submissive women, certain sexual fantasies). In fact, the local women I don't like are specifically those who are submissive, or hound me just because I'm white. Sometimes, what people here portray in such negative terms, is just a preference for a certain look, and its natural, and there's nothing wrong with that if its just that.

[Eponine]

Well this thread cought my eye. For the simple reason that I've been living in Beijing in the past two years and have had (still have) a preference for Chinese women.

Did you move to Beijing BECAUSE you had a preference for Chinese women?

[Yoadm]

Did you move to Beijing BECAUSE you had a preference for Chinese women?

No.. Embassy job.

[Happy Ent]

Can you elaborate on "racist reasons"? Also, do you think Asian fetish is a solely white phenomenon?

E-Dating sites have super interesting data about these things. There was a book a few years ago, but I can’t find the reference right now. 20 seconds of googling found me this: http://dating.loveto...l_Relationships

From that I learn that the B-W relationship is reversed: apparently, in the subtle rhetoric of this thread, Black males are creeps who suffer from white fever, but not from yellow fever. (This is, of course, predicted by the hypothesis from stratification of IQ, which again seems to be a superior explanation to racism.)

Razib at GNXP had a nice blog post some time ago http://www.gnxp.com/...e-and-asian.php with more detailed data, and here’s Steve Sailer’s take: http://www.isteve.com/IsLoveColorblind.htm . The explanatory frameworks are informed by population genetics. (Which isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, so don’t read it then.)

[Eponine]

No.. Embassy job.

In that case, it seems like having a "preference" for the women who are the majority of your environment doesn't need any other explanation. Can't imagine moving to another country with a fairly homogenous population and NOT finding anyone there attractive or datable.

[TomBadgerlock]

This is interesting. There is quite a large Asian population where I live in Melbourne. And Asians are greatly overrepresented at the University of Melbourne, where I go.

Personally, for reasons unknown to me, I do not particularly find Asian women attractive. That is not black and white, obviously, there are some Asian women that are attractive to me, but I find them less attractive on average. I always figured it was the whole being attracted to people that look like us thing. But I'm not sure how much that holds because I find Indian/black women fine.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this has been discussed but could this growing trend relate to the fact that Asia has had a population burst recently? And being attracted to Asian women increases ones chance of creating progeny and so on?

[straits]

snip

Those are pretty interesting links.

What's fascinating, however, is that in recent years a startling number of nonwhites -- especially Asian men and black women -- have become bitterly opposed to intermarriage.

This one needs some back up, not sure how true it is.

In the 1990 Census, 72 percent of black - white couples consisted of a black husband and a white wife. In contrast, white - Asian pairs showed the reverse: 72 percent consisted of a white husband and an Asian wife.

...

The 1992 Sex in America study of 3,432 people, as authoritative a work as any in a field where reliable data are scarce, found that ten times more single white women than single white men reported that their most recent sex partner was black.

...

In other countries: In Britain, 40 per cent of black men are married to or living with a white woman, versus only 21 per cent of black women married to or living with a white man.

...

Black-man/Asian-woman couples are still quite unusual, but Asian-man/black-woman pairings are incomparably more rare.

Like most guys, though, Asian men are reticent about admitting any frustrations in the mating game. But anger over intermarriage is visible on Internet on-line discussion groups for young Asians. The men, featuring an even-greater-than-normal-for-the-Internet concentration of cranky bachelors, accuse the women of racism for dating white guys. For example, ``This [dating] disparity is a manifestation of a silent conspiracy by the racist white society and self-hating Asian [nasty word for ``women''] to effect the genocide of Asian Americans.'' The women retort that the men are racist and sexist for getting sore about it. All they can agree upon is that Media Stereotypes and/or Low Self-Esteem must somehow be at fault.

There's also a lot on correlating body fat percentages across gender and ethnic background, as well as height and 'musculature', but I'm not sure about the conclusions drawn from that.

Understanding the impact of genetic racial differences on American life is a necessity for anybody who wants to understand our increasingly complex society. For example, the sense of betrayal felt by Asian men certainly makes sense. After all, they tend to surpass the national average in those long-term virtues -- industry, self-restraint, law-abidingness -- that society used to train young women to look for in a husband. Yet, now that discrimination has finally declined enough for Asian men to expect to reap the rewards for fulfilling traditional American standards of manliness, our culture has largely lost interest in indoctrinating young women to prize those qualities.

The frustrations of Asian men are a warning sign. When, in the names of freedom and feminism, young women listen less to the hard-earned wisdom of older women about how to pick Mr. Right, they listen even more to their hormones. This allows cruder measures of a man's worth -- like the size of his muscles -- to return to prominence. The result is not a feminist utopia, but a society in which genetically gifted guys can more easily get away with acting like Mr. Wrong.