I was persuing this (zombie) thread, and the part that interested me was drowned out by the denunciation of the OP of that thread, his rampant sexism, his poor attitude towards women in general, etc. and I couldn’t soldier on cheerfully through it very far, but I did wonder at his basic premise: are there cultures whose women (and whose men, though they may not be the same cultures for each) are very open or very closed to dating, bedding, marrying outside the culture? Or is the question itself offensive, smallminded, unanswerable, stupid, and given to cultural stereotype?
One way in which the question might be all of the above relates to the religious or moral teachings of a culture: if the culture is founded on such beliefs, then it tends to be restrictive, and if not, then not. American culture, whatever that is, tends to be secular, fairly openminded, and its population tends to be encouraging of cross-cultural matches, as opposed to, say, “Persian” culture in the thread I’m referencing. Is this observation simply the extent to which one culture is based on a single set of religious or moral beliefs and the other is not?
The OP of this thread is, I suppose, “Can any intelligent but not completely obvious generalizations be made on ethnocentric cultures and non-ethnocentric cultures in regard to dating and such?” Are there clear tendencies of some cultures to be open to dating people outside the culture?
Personally, I’m curious because of an amusing friendship I struck up with a colleague last summer (2011) when I was between relationships–I kept bumping into an attractive woman who, it turned out, was an observant Orthodox Jew, and who seemed much taken with me when I revealed to her that I spoke Hebrew (fairly fluently, a few decades ago), that my native tongue was Yiddish (in a technical sense), that I was raised in a passably religious household, and that I knew the Torah fairly well. She did not seemed too discouraged by my admission that I had not had held a religious thought in my skull for decades, and that I was opposed to religion in general as a scourge upon mankind since adolescence. Because she was attractive and open to the idea of having dinner with me, we went out a few times (in Kosher restaurants, naturally ) and I slowly persuaded her that I was not a suitable prospective mate for her, as I revealed my secular side, which is pretty much my front, back, and both sides. But from this experience (and others) I would say that Orthodox Jewish women are open to the idea of dating at least non-Orthodox Jews, unless they are persuaded that the man is only nominally or arguably Jewish at all. I doubt she would have gone out with me at all if I hadn’t been able to present my bona fides, such as they are, but maybe I’m wrong. I would place Orthodox Jewry as somewhere to the end, but not AT the end, of ethnocentricity–all I would have needed to do, I think, was embrace some kind of religious belief and we might have gone forwards, but that was OOTFQ for me.