France Nuyen made quite a splash in the late fifties in movies like South Pacific and In Love and War. While I’d trace American men’s fascination with Asian women back to Terry and the Pirates’ 1934 introduction of the Dragon Lady, Hollywood started exoticizing them over 20 years years later.
White women I know get really put off if I indicate an attraction to Asian women. It’s kind of the guy version of a white woman attracted to black men.
There’s a telling scene in the 1963 film 55 Days in Peking between Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner. Heston’s character asks Gardner’s why she’s involved with a Chinese man (This is during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in Peking). She asks him if he can’t imagine himself falling in love with a Chinese girl, and he gives her an incredulous glare.
Actually, the reason western guys tend to have good luck in Japan because the women here are looking for submissive husbands.
I deleted a long, thought-out thesis responding to the OP because I realized I was talking out my ass. Basically though, is it really that asian women have become the new “standard” for beauty, or is it just more common to see asians in everyday media roles (newscasters, TV\movie roles for “ordinary” people (as opposed to specifically asian roles), models, athletes, etc), so that it’s correspondingly more common to see asian women put forward as “beautiful”?
Wild-ass alternate theory #2: the west prizes “beautiful”, while Japan prizes “cute”. If you’re a guy who’s into “cute”, Japanese women are more likely to stand out since they’re the ones most actively pursuing that niche look.
Note I said by the ‘exotic’ factor (Y chromosome thing you mention re avoiding recessive genes) AND the other. If it was just the exotic factor alone then why as the OP suggest does it seem that (east) Asian women in particular seem so popular with some men these days rather than any women who are African say or Indian or European otherwise noticeably from a different genepool to their own?
Oh and Koxinga - I was quoting Mississippienne there! Her (?)words, but I do think there’s an element of truth to them. Basically any guy who has a thing for any specific ethnic group of women most likely has some sort of preconception about how they will behave due to their culture. At least, I think it’s not that wild a suggestion!
Why does there have to be a deep psychological explanation beyond simple physical attraction? I like Asian women but also really appreciate (for example) Bjork, Ashley Judd, and Audrey Hepburn in the same way. I have no idea how any of them would behave*, but yowza, boss! Whereas Pamela Anderson, Brittney Spears, or Lindsay Lohan just don’t do much for me at all.
I think it might have to do with our standards of beauty changing from “good mother to my children” (which went from chubby in the Renaissance to booby in more modern times) to “young and healthy” (which now means petite and skinny).
Asian women tend to be smaller and thinner and are thus more in line with the “young and healthy” ideal.
I think there’s been a back-and-forth between those two body types. See the young, boyish flapper of the 20s, followed a generation or two later by busty dames like Rita Hayworth and later Marilyn Monroe, only to be gradually phased out by the slim Audrey Hepburn and then the positively androgynous Twiggy and Mia Farrow. Maybe Asian females just fit into the latest swing of that pendulum.
Seriously, though - I was attending a Seattle Mariners game with my sister a few years ago, and it happens that the Mariners draw a large number of Japanese fans (probably a combination of local Japanese-American residents, Japanese college students attending the U. of Washington, and Japanese tourists) to their games. I was admiring a pair of cute young Japanese women who were standing in the aisle a short distance from me, and when my sister noticed she gave me a sharp elbow to the ribs and said, “They’re thirteen!” I said, “No, they’re in their twenties.” She didn’t believe me until the pair passed us as they walked back to their seats carrying the beers they’d just purchased from a vendor.
Why are tall, dark men attractive? Asian girls are cute because they are.
On average, they are slimmer and have more delicate features (two of the qualities that made Audrey Hepburn perhaps the most beautiful woman ever).
In terms of behavior, I do think there is something to the “submissiveness” myth (for lack of a better term). But I don’t see anything wrong with it.
In my experience, Asian girls are more likely to be closer to my own level of “submissiveness.” That is a good thing, because it means I can be playfully teased for being quiet or indecisive, instead of being ignored or completely dominated. I don’t want to be loud or forceful, so I prefer a girl who is only slightly more dominant than me.
Another thing is that Asian girls are overrepresented by far in math and engineering. I had many classes in which all the girls except maybe one were Asian. Since liking math/engineering is something I look for in a girl, my choices are almost limited to Asian girls. I don’t know how common this reason is, but I wouldn’t discount it. Of course, I am all for a wider variety of girls taking math and engineering! The more the better.
My theory is that there’s probably a lot of situational behavior.
E.g. if you were to go to Japan, Japanese women would act in accordance with that culture’s expectations. If you brought such a woman to the U.S., she would become more Americanized. True, some of the Japanese norms would hold but she’d become more outspoken. In fact, I’ve known women from oppressive cultures who came here precisely because they could be more outspoken.
And during courtship or dating stuff, they’re likely to revert to a comfort zone of how it’s done in their native culture. I was reading a story in a blog about a guy who married the head cheerleader in high school, but he couldn’t keep up with her high maintenance. So he married this type, divorced, then that type. Eventually he decided that it would be nice to have a submissive Asian type. She was submissive up until about six months after the marriage. Then she started making all kinds of demands.
I’m not trying to pick on Asian women or anything. I just suspect that unless the woman is in some batshit insane place like Iran (where they publicly hang women for minor transgressions), I bet they have ways of expressing what they need and making hubby’s life unpleasant if they’re unhappy. And part of getting that wedding ring may be not making waves till it’s official. If you’re in a culture where sons get the education and opportunity instead of daughters, getting that “Mrs.” degree is nothing to sneeze at.
I think it’s unlikely that a Japanese woman who wasn’t already fairly outspoken or strong-willed would move to the US or date a Western man in the first place.
An old-fashioned Japanese girl is going to stay in Japan and marry a nice Japanese boy and make her parents happy. Japan isn’t the third world, she’d have nothing to gain in terms of quality of life by getting involved with a foreigner. It’s non-traditional Japanese women with modern views who are most likely to be interested in foreign men.
I am American and (very seriously) dating a girl of Taiwanese heritage; we met when we lived on the same floor our freshman year of college. Frankly, I wish she’d be more assertive a lot of the time. There are many, many things I love about her, but in terms of physical beauty? I tend to like relatively skinny girls with dark hair and pretty faces, shrug. I can say from experience this applies to pretty much all ethnicities that have skinny girls with dark hair and pretty faces (which is to say, all of them); however, this is a particularly common set of qualities among Asians. You could definitely say that I am a “white guy into Asian chicks”, but this would sort of miss the point of the whole thing . . .
That is probably another important issue. The media have made an effort to include more Asians and they have a certain bias for pretty. This means we are more commonly exposed to pretty Asians (and ditto for all other ethnicities, btw).
If you followed the Olympics, you may have noticed that there is no shortage of ugly Asians. The pretty ones were few and far between, the norm in a group that is not selected for facial beauty (even if they all have the initial advantage of body fitness). Ditto for factory workers, etc.
