IMO, the cited article is not best described as racist, but a personal rant. The author seems to have some chip on her shoulder, perhaps due to some personal experience that turned bad, which she has rightly or wrongly attributed to race.
Some of her comments were good and some bad, but when someone pitches a fit like that, you shouldn’t try to over analysis each word or sentence.
Why does this have to be a ‘fetish’? If a white guy only dates blonde white girls, does he have a blonde white woman fetish? Is he a 'serial White dater?
I have never understood why liking certain characteristics that mean you date in your race are ‘preferences’, but liking certain characteristics that take you out of your race are suddenly ‘fetishes’.
When I was in high school and through early uni, I loved girls with short hair. Don’t know why. Just did. So most of my girl friends had short or medium-length hair. Doesn’t mean that was the only condition I wanted filled before dating someone. Doesnt’ mean that non-short haired girls weren’t up for consideration <g>. I didn’t consider it a ‘short hair fetish’.
Nowadays I find myself rather partial to long hair. So of course the LOML cut her hair really short about a month before we actually met 
This may be semantics as to what we consider a fetish, but here’s why I made the comments I did:
The Asian girl’s criticism - “he wanted someone who was totally submissive” - suggested that he is seeking out and desires submissive women. Asian women have frequently been stereotyped as submissive and docile, a characteristic not usually associated with females of other ethnic groups. The guy is white, and there are white men who actively seek out and date only Asian women for a variety of reasons, many of them having to do with fairly offensive but pervasive stereotypes about Asian women (submissive, wild in bed, etc.) We call those “serial Asian daters.” (There are other, more perjorative terms, but that’s neither here nor there.)
A white guy who associates certain characteristics (e.g. low intelligence, promiscuity) with blondes and seeks out blonde women as a result has the same kinds of issues as the guy who exclusively seeks out Asian women because he views them as submissive. I would view our blonde dater as a serial blonde dater and as having blonde woman fetish. There’s no real difference between our blonde dater and our Asian dater except . . . that a white man who exclusively dates blonde white women is not seen as meaningfully reducing the dating opportunities for other white men, whereas a white man who only dates Asian women is seen as reducing the dating opportunities for Asian men. (A feeling that is not entirely unjustified given the relative outmarriage rates.)
The lingo comes up less in relationships where both parties are of the same race or ethnic background because those relationships are generally accepted.
Isn’t that the truth!
I’ve occasionally commented that Asian men are at a severe romantic disadvantage in today’s society. I’ve said that Asian women are in great demand among non-Asians, but very few non-Asian women are willing to date Asian men. People usually react with, “Really? I didn’t notice” or “That can’t be true, can it?”
On one occasion, I heard someone respond, “I can’t believe you said that. Asian men are every bit as popular as non-Asian men.” Obviously, this guy had no clue.
I even heard one woman say, “Oh, no, no! You’re wrong. There are plenty of interracial marriages,” after which she rattled off a list of interracial pairings that she knew. After listening to her rattle on, I interjected and said, “Wait a minute. Listen to yourself. Every single one of those couples you mentioned involves an Asian female. Not a single one involves an Asian male.”
So yes, I think that most people don’t notice how Asian men are marginalized in terms of romance.
Some food for thought:
In Asian-American households of various flavors, how is the desireability of cultural assimilation of boys viewed differently from that of girls?
(Or is it?)
Would your “average” (and I know, it’s hard to define “average” in any meaningful way here) set of Asian parents be more upset at their son marrying a white woman, or at their daughter marrying a white man?
jeevmon, you kinda said what i was trying to say, the building on stereotypes thing wasn’t helpful to anyone, and the third girl has it about right.
and no, i’m not asian and male, but i’m not “white” either.
being somewhat racially ambiguous i’ve got a fair amont of the “gook bitch”, “me so horny” comments in my time, so i can at least empathise.
most of the southasian males I have known in America had the opposite experience of jeevmon and had only dated white females… some cited it as a matter of location and others said it was their preference (something about blondes being more desirable to them) but never did they complain about not being able to date asian girls, if they wanted any one of them could of had an arranged marriage to an asian girl whenever they wanted…, but I guess there was a cultural expectation that they should but it was not really enforced because they were guys and could get away with dating whomever they wanted.
Just a thought, even if it might be controversial…
I think we should make it clear that there’s nothing wrong with wanting a submissive girl, any more than there is with wanting a take-charge sort of girl, or with wanting a roughly equal partner. I see no reason why any of those three styles of relationships won’t work, as long as they aren’t abusive. Some people like to lead, others like to follow. As long as the followers don’t feel coerced into following and are free to speak their own interests and desires when they choose to do so even though they may prefer not to do that usually, if submissiveness is just an attribute of their own nature, there’s no problem with it.
That being said, I think there’s a certain practical reason for looking to date within or without a particular race. If in your experience the type of girls you are looking for tend to be of a particular race, it’s only expedient to give a little more attention to people of that race in seeking a relationship. Race is of course not a determining factor in the absolute sense, but you can theoretically play the percentages and guess that a person of a certain race is more likely to have grown up in a certain environment or with certain cultural attitudes shaping their youth, and those things are somewhat legitimate predictors of a person’s nature. Not foolproof or absolute, but a predictor. You will of course find that not all women of that race, even if you guess right about cultural upbringing, have the qualities you’re looking for (unless it’s physical attraction, nothing wrong with finding some attributes more attractive than others, and that would justify dating one race exclusively, as someone said it’s just like dating only blonds.)
Race is no hard and fast rule for predicting a person’s attributes other than the physical ones. Still, if you’ve found that women of race A tend to have the qualities you’re looking for and women of race B tend not to, it only makes sense to at least focus more attention on race A. There’s only so much time in the day, after all, and there are alot of girls you could put your attention towards, and most of them are going to turn out to be unavailable or otherwise unwilling to pursue a relationship. It’s simply impossible to ascertain the true nature of every single person you meet. Racial features are an easy characteristic to identify for the most part, you can narrow the subset of women in any group you encounter to those of that race with relative ease and thus increase your chances of finding a woman who will be what you want. You may very well miss out on a more perfect woman by doing so, but you would be playing the percentages. You are trying to minimize the likelihood that you will spend a couple months dating someone and then realize they are incompatible with you. It will still happen, but considering the percentages it will happen less often.
In short, I think the motive behind choosing a particular race to date is what’s important. If the motive for excluding a race is the belief that people of that race are, in the entirety, inferior to others, that’s a bad motive. If the motice for dating only those within your own race is “racial purity” or “racial pride” or the desire to avoid “betraying” one’s race, that too is a bad motive. If it’s just a benign choice based on an accurate formulation of possibilities, I see nothing wrong with it. It’s recognizing a correlation in a certain percentage of cases, which is not the same as racist reasoning which identifies race as a cause and therefore universal. We have decided as a society that we can’t let corporations play the percentage game with race in their hiring, because everyone deserves a fair shot to prove their worth. With dating, nobody deserves a chance in the same fundamental way, the only person potentially hurt by your act of overlooking somebody on basis of their race is you yourself. You’re just gambling to achieve an objective. It may not be the method I would adopt, but I don’t begrudge anybody else his privilege to do that.
I think the article in question was racist. As an admittedly white (oh so white) male, I have absolutely no experience with racism or not having women date me because I was white. My lack of experience in this matter does not change the fact that this women argued for (though she danced around it) race segregation if only in the romantic sense. She also made some broad generalisations about a group of people based on the behavior of a few.
Speaking personally, neither myself or any of my white male friends have done anything to keep any race or gender down (excepting the filthy irish, but nobody likes them:p ). What I find mildly disturbing is the fact that this has become a debate. If a white man wrote this article, it would be racist without question. Since it is an asian woman…
My thought is that by paying such extraordinarily close attention to something like this, we give it power. Maybe if we stopped paying attention to what color is dating what color, we wouldn’t have to deal with crap like this.
Thank you everyone. This may be the most mature board that I have participated on. Very thought provoking
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid http://www.killermovies.com/s/sammyandrosiegetlaid/ was released in the 1980’s and the backdrop was an Indian male and white female who were both English.
Just wondering if what is being discussed here is largely an American phenomenom? Would the same hold true in England or France?
In my close to 20 years in Asia, certainly the majority of inter-racial pairings are white men/Asian women. There are enough that fall the other way so that I don’t think them the exception, but certainly it’s probably 80-90% white male/Asian female. There are some ladies on this board married to Asians and living in Asia.
I’m not sure if there are Asian women in the US that simply say absolutely they will never date an Asian men. I personally believe that the majority that fall into the white male attraction camp would say their preference is for white males, but that it is not an exclusive condition.
My gut feel is that the experience may be different for first generation asians growing up in the US versus second, third or fourth generation.
You just described my wife and I. I dated white and Hispanic women before meeting Mrs. Six. She, on the other hand, never condsidered dating any man other than a white guy, though in actuality she never dated anyone but me.
On Lois and Clark, Clark was played by a half Japanese All-American football jock, and he dated only white women. I have no point to make here, just found it an interesting contrast.