Racial preferences in the dating world

One of the more delicate areas I dealt with while running a dating service for more than two decades was the issue of race, and more specifically racial stereotyping by prospective members.

Stereotyping in itself is a volatile issue, and at some point during intake interviews, I often repeated the phrase “While there is some truth to all stereotypes, there are certainly many exceptions to every single one.”

However, when one is dealing with a sample of more than 20,000 single, divorced, and widowed men and women, I feel confident and comfortable making certain statements in a column titled The Truth about Dating.

Yet I was still hesitant to write this column, until a reader sent me an article from The New York Times, in which the author, John Tierney, published a story about racial preferences in the dating world.

Moreover, the article cited a study titled Racial Preferences in Dating that documented the preferences of more than 400 participants in speed dating sessions at Columbia University. A quick reading of both the Times article and the Columbia study seemed to support my own anecdotal findings.

(Unfortunately while reading the Columbia study I was overcome by the academic verbiage that authors of such studies feel compelled to use. Do they teach “Boring Writing 101” at Ivy League institutions of higher learning? I found it impossible to read more than a few pages without getting a headache. Here is a sample sentence: “Rates of inter-racial marriages thus capture both preferences and socio-geographic segregation.” Huh?)

Anyway, here is what I found in 23 years of interviewing singles, and I will attempt to communicate in my best “non-academic” language. When we interviewed prospective members, we always asked what their preferences were in terms of meeting people of different races.

Overall, women of most races preferred to meet men of their own race. Most Caucasian women wanted only to meet Caucasian men, the exceptions being women who were more educated and well-traveled, who considered themselves somewhat “worldly.”

Of all the races, African-American women were the most insistent about wanting to meet only African-American men. But most of those women excluded black men who had recently moved to New England from Africa or the Caribbean.

The one major exception to the finding that women wanted to meet men of their own race was Asian women, a vast majority of whom stated that they strongly preferred meeting non-Asian men.

The primary explanation offered by most Asian women was that they wanted to be matched with tall men, and they insisted that practically all of the Asian men they knew were short. But when I would ask if they would be willing to meet an Asian man if he were tall, most would simply shake their head and say they would rather not.

And what about Indian women? To be honest the sample of Indian women who joined my dating service more than 23 years was too small to determine any general statements about them.

As for men, overall they were far more open to meeting women of other races. In fact, and I find this especially interesting, the race of women most in demand were, you guessed it, Asian women. Therefore, almost all of the Asian women in my dating service had a very high Dating Quotient.

When I asked men to explain their preferences for Asian women, many shrugged and admitted they were just extremely attracted to them. But I also believe that many of these men, consciously or subconsciously, wanted to meet women who fit the stereotype of the submissive “Geisha girl,” whose primary purpose is to entertain and please men.

Interestingly enough, though, most of the Asian women we interviewed could not have had personalities more opposite than that passive stereotype. Many had Ph.Ds., M.D.s, or law degrees, and were extremely assertive. (Especially when I tried in vain to persuade them to consider meeting Asian men!)

Unfortunately for African-American women, most of the African-American men who joined stated a strong preference for meeting either white or Asian women. Many expressed the identical view, “I don’t have to join a dating service to meet women of my own race.”

The two groups of men who were the most difficult to match (and therefore had the lowest DQ) were Asian men and Indian men. Like African men, this was especially true of Asian and Indian men who had grown up overseas and relocated to New England, usually to pursue careers either in computer science or medicine. In a few cases I could persuade women to meet men of different races, IF the men were totally “Americanized.”

Of course Asian men were difficult to match because, as I previously stated, the one group of women who did not want to meet men of their own race was Asian women.

As for Indian men, they were the hardest people to match of any group of men or women of any race. And, with so many Indian men moving into the Boston area for jobs in high tech, rarely a week passed without several inquiries from men from India or Pakistan.

One reason they were difficult to match is that only a handful of Indian women joined over the decades, compared to hundreds of Indian or Pakistani men. But another is that many women, even the self-described “worldly” ones, expressed the stereotypical belief that Indian men had antiquated views of women.

To some extent, these women were correct. For example, of all the men I spoke with who wanted to meet women much younger than themselves, the largest group was, in fact, Indian men. Many told me that it was quite common back “home” for men to date and marry women at least a decade younger than themselves. And they wondered why they could not do the same here … which further lowered their DQ.

So that is the story from my own anecdotal experiences. Again, I am sure there are exceptions to every statement I made in this column. On the other hand, if you want “scientific” proof of what I am stating, just Google and download a copy of Columbia University’s Racial Preferences in Dating study.

Why White Men Prefer Asian Women

The View From A Sushi Bar

There is near me an Asian sushi-beer-and-dinner establishment that I’ll call the Asia Spot. The region is urban, so the clientele is a mix of some of just about everything, but the waitresses are all Asian, principally Japanese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai.

The Spot is a neighborhood bar. A large after-work crowd, many of them regulars, gather at happy hour. The social dynamics are curious. It would be an exaggeration to say, as someone did, that the black guys come to pick up white women, and the white men come to get away from them – but it would be an exaggeration of an underlying truth. The waitresses are a large part of the Spot’s appeal.

A common subject of conversation among male customers is how very attractive these women are when compared to American women. It is not a thought safe to utter in mixed company. It is a very common thought. American women know it.

Why are the Asians attractive? What, to huge numbers of men, makes almost any Asian more appealing than almost any American? The question is much discussed by men at the Spot. (I should say here that when I say “women,” I mean the majority of women, the mainstream, the center of gravity. Yes, there are exceptions and degrees.)

American women of my acquaintance offer several explanations, all of them wrong. For example, they say that Asian women are sexually easy. No. American women are sexually easy. The waitresses at the Spot are not available. They date, but they cannot be picked up.

Another explanation popular among American women is that men want submissive women, which Asians are believed to be. Again, no. For one thing, submissive people are bland and boring. In any event the waitresses aren’t submissive. Many compete successfully in tough professions. Among Asian waitresses I know I count an electrical engineer who does wide-area networks, and a woman with a masters in biochemistry who, upon finding that research required a Ph.D and didn’t pay, went back to school and became a dentist. Both of these wait tables to help out in the family restaurant.

At the Spot I know a woman waitressing her way through a degree in computer security, a bright Japansese college graduate making a career in the restaurant business, and the manager of the Spot – not a light-weight job. Submissiveness has nothing to do with their attractiveness.

Why, then, are they so very appealing?

To begin with, look at the American women in the Spot. Perhaps a third of them are stylishly dressed. The rest of the gringas run from undistinguished to dumpster-casual: baggy jeans, oversize shirts — often male shirts — with the tails out. They seem to affect a sort of homeless chic, actually to want to look bad, and do it with more than a touch of androgyny. A high proportion are at least somewhat overweight. (So are the men, but that’s another subject.) The Asians, without exception, are sleek, well-groomed, and dressed with an understated sexiness that never pushes trashy.

Further, the Asians are what were once called “ladies,” a thought repellant to feminists but very so refreshing to men. Listen to the American women at neighboring tables, and you will frequently hear phrases like, “He’s a fucking piece of shit.” In what appears to be a determined attempt to be men, they have adopted the mode of discourse of a male locker room and made it their normal language. The Asians, classier, better students of men, do not have foul mouths. They presumably know about body parts and bathroom functions, but do not believe that a woman raises her stature by referring to them constantly in mixed company.

Men at the Spot, I have noticed, instantly understand that cloacal commentqry is not wanted, and don’t engage in it: In the presence of the civilized, men adopt the standards of civilization. Men also tend to think of women as women think of themselves. The Asians, without displaying vanity, clearly think well of themselves. And ought to.

All in all, they give the impression that they do not want to be one of the guys. They want to be one of the girls. Here we come to the core of their appeal. Let me elaborate.

The default position of American women is what men refer to as “the chip,” a veiled truculence, mixed with a not-very-veiled hostility toward men and a shaky sense of sexual identity. The result is a touchiness reminiscent of hungover ferrets. There is a bandsaw edge to them, a watching for any slight so that they can show that they aren’t going to take it. They are poised to lash out in aggressive defense of their manhood.

As best as I can tell, they don’t like being women. Here is the entire problem in five words.

The Asians at the Spot show every indication that they do like being women. They do not seem to have anything to prove. Being happy with what they are allows them to be comfortable with what they are not – men. They are not competing to be what they can’t be with people who can’t be anything else. They don’t have to establish their masculinity because they don’t want it. They do not assume, as American women tend to, that femaleness is a diseased condition to be treated by male clothes, gutter language, and bad temper.

I’ve spent many dozens of hours chatting with the gals at the Spot, and never seen a sign of the chip. For a man, the experience is wonderful beyond description – smart, pretty, classy women, who are women, and are not the enemy. As long as American women carry the chip, the Asian gals will eat them alive in the dating market.

Note that the espousal of hostile obnoxiousness as a guiding philosophy appears to be an almost uniquely American horror. It certainly isn’t requisite to independence oe self-respect. I recently met a quite attractive blonde who, among other things, was smart, a long-haul motorcyclist, a student of the martial arts out of sheer athletic enjoyment of it, and an excellent marksman. She was also heterosexual, feminine, delightful company, and had no trace of “the chip.” I was astonished. How was this possible, I wondered?

She was Canadian.

http://www.fredoneverything.net

You’ve basically nailed it, Vet. I think it boils down to this: Asian — and, I would add, Latin American — women generally haven’t been spoiled by feminism or by the more cynical aspects of American culture. Among other things, American culture has a lot of aggressiveness and a lot of overstated individualism — a need to prove oneself. American women have always had more of this toughness than women in other cultures, including macho cultures. Faced with non-American, or not-typically-American, choices in recent years due to the breakdown of racial taboos, white men very often go for Asians and Latinas. Both love being woman and acting like women. Asian ladies, at least, also tend to be rather slender and are rarely awkward in their body language. Both Asian and Latin women are more likely than white women to have even features and attractive skin.

In this new world of interracial dating, the winners are Hispanics, blacks, and whites among men, and Asians, Hispanics, and whites among women. Black women and Asian men are screwed in terms of quality partners — unless they really have a lot going for them, or are lucky enough to be in love with what others would find to be a low-quality partner.

All in all, the breakdown of racial taboos in dating helps the best-looking, those with charisma or great social skills, and those with money. It doesn’t necessarily do much for the rest of us. All in all, the old “racist” rules may have been more fair in this respect. You don’t create equality by elminating racism. You just shift inequality into new channels. Racism is wrong, but anti-racism doesn’t always create optimal outcomes either.

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