I’ve never heard that one. I mean, white women don’t have white men singing about…er…well…
Do black women just grow out of it? All of the black girls (at least, the ones that aren’t painfully shy or some outlier) act like this where I’ve taught. It’s teenager speak. Apparently the women you were with didn’t grow out of that.
Based on my observations, the conclusion I draw is that (some) black women aren’t attractive to white men because they aren’t “open” to it.
[ol]
[li]The flirty giggly demeanor is really not present as much as in white women.[/li][li]Many blacks have traditionally had 2 ways of presenting themselves - “keepin’ it real” when around their own, and adjusting around general society. This is in effect closing themselves off. Others sense this, and for me at least, someone who is closed off to me is less attractive.[/li][/ol]
Status.
Men want what they think will make other men envious. They want things that give them status.
What we consider as “attractive” has always been directly tied to status. In areas where the poor are skinny and bony, we like rotund, chubby women. In areas where junk food and sit-down jobs are bountiful among the lower classes, we want a woman who looks like she spends all day at the gym rather than at a desk. When the poor are farmers under the hot sun, we want a woman with the fair skin of someone kept indoors. When the poor work under fluorescent lights all day, we want someone who is tanned from laying on the beach.
We do all kinds of crazy things to show off how much our women don’t have to work (and thus show off the status of their men)- manicures that get destroyed washing or typing, shoes that are useless for standing in for more than a half hour at a time, handbags that are either enormously unwieldy or uselessly tiny…the list goes on. It’s basically all about showing off how much money you can have.
For any number of reasons, black women have a low status in our society.
Heh. In Spain that gets dropped on… well, pretty much any immigrant group except north-Africans, but I think that’s because most north-African women come here to live with their husband.
Where I come from, that’s called etxekoandre (the mistress of the house, it’s Basque) and in combination with the above, forms the traditional model of “a woman who will kick her husband out of the house, where he is underfoot, by sending him to the bar to play cards”. Other cultures call it scary, we call it strong.
I think this is it. Now, as I personally have very little contact with African-American women, my impression of them mainly comes from the media - so this may be a mass media issue more than it is a real life issue - but to me, black women seem standoffish, or “sassy”. It’s the whole “Hell no!” thing. They’re portrayed as not liking me that much, or anyone else for that matter.
(FTR, I live in the urban South US; so yes, I do have contact with Black people.)
So salvaging the stereotypes that hold water from among what the thread describes as Black women but who I’m thinking of as Yvette, Brenda, Monica, etc., I’ll make two points:
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Compared to white women, Black women come right out and say what they have to say. And they value sex for its own sake. Here are the women who think like men whom men are always wishing existed.
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But they don’t date because whites and Blacks still look at each other across a gap, with plenty of distrust and resentment in it.
I don’t think we all know you, so how are we not going to like you that much? 
Black women do try to “keep it real”, but I don’t understand why this is seen as a negative. We tend (sorry for the generalizations…I know I might be making some big sweeps of the brush here) to have a no-nonsense way in our interactions. We seem to have big bull-shit meters. If someone is blowing smoke up our skirts, we instantly know it. If someone–especially another woman–is acting in a way that seems fake or trying too hard (like my co-worker with the cookies and the phone-flirting), we frown up and roll up our eyes. We don’t like fake.
We like trivialities, and we get sucked in soap opera-esque dramas as well. Don’t get me wrong. But rarely are we going to let ourselves be perceived as weak in the face of perceived hostility or unfairness. We’re going to stand up for ourselves, or at least let it be known that we are not happy with the state of things. Whereas it seems like white women will put on a happy face and then slither back to their offices to cry. That kind of vulnerability is endearing to some people (especially men). On her first week at work, my white coworker did this. She got chewed out by her boss and went back to her cubicle to cry. Everyone heard her and was like, “Oh, you poor thing!” I have no idea what I would have done if my boss had chewed me out, but crying at my cubicle wouldn’t have been it. I probably would have gone for a walk and talked myself down from whatever emotion I was feeling. Being caught crying at my desk would have been more humiliating than actually having been chewed out. (I can hear my mother now: “Girl, why are you letting that little comment bring you down? You have to grow a thicker skin and be STRONG if you’re going to cut it!”)
I don’t know if white girls get the “BE STRONG!” thing thrown at them all the time, but from my experience, black girls–black people, in general–do. That strength may be off-putting to people, but it is protective. A white woman can cry, scream and holler, throw things…and no one is going to say, “Yeah, these people just can’t handle stress. Let’s not hire anymore.” A black person, period, is not afforded the same luxury. Or at least, it is perceived by an individual black person that they can not afford to lose it.
As a human being, I respect that immensely. As a male, though, what I look for in a women is warmth, compassion, empathy and vulnerability *in addition *to the toughness and honesty. Guys want to feel needed, so women who act like they don’t need anyone are a bit of a turnoff.
- I’m pretty sure that women look for the same thing in men, too.
This point deserves a thread all its own, but as this thread seems to have faded into dormancy, I’ll just post my comments here.
Two weeks ago, my wife and I, while grocery shopping, saw an average-looking black man with a very unattractive and morbidly obese white woman; she wasn’t simply fat, she was huge, and must have weighed at least 300 pounds. He held her hand while walking down the boxed cereal aisle and, as we approached to pass, brought his hand up to her neck in a strange sweeping gesture and reached in to kiss her in a way that was obviously for our benefit. We paused a bit, looked back at each other and continued shopping. When we got back to the car, I counted the seconds waiting for my wife to mention it. She didn’t disappoint. The moment I started the engine, we both lost it. Fighting to speak with tears of laughter flowing down our faces, we realized that we’d witnessed this phenomenon, and I’m convinced it is a phenomenon, over the years in many places we’ve visited throughout the US, but had never spoken about it to each other.
Once we were over the initial shock, which was exacerbated by the over-the-top public expression of affection, our laughter subsided and we had a somewhat serious discussion. We both came to the conclusion that the only explanation that made sense, to us anyway, is a serious lack of self worth by both parties in the relationship, the man having a more pronounced case.
I’ve seen this so often that I’m convinced that certain black men, for whatever personal reasons (my wife considers it mental illness), believe that being with a white woman, any white woman, is preferable and more prestigious, for lack of a better word, than being with the most attractive woman of any other race, including his own.
I fully understand being attracted to someone who happens to be of a different race than oneself; my mom and dad are not the same race. However, I’m pretty confident my dad didn’t date and ultimately marry my mom, in the '60s, and in Kansas, because she was black. I do, however, believe that race is the primary motivation for the set of black men I mentioned above.
Back to the OP…
I’m not sure the case has been made that white men are generally not attracted to black women, or to a significantly lesser extent than white women are attracted to black men. In my opinion, the disparity in the numbers between the sexes of those who actually date someone of an alternate race has more to do with confidence than anything else. Some white men simply won’t approach a black women regardless of how attracted to her he is because of imagined fears of inadequacy, or a general unease stemming from latent, ingrained prejudices.
Although my dad was not the most compassionate and understanding person in the world as I was growing up, I am glad that when he met and realized he was attracted to my mom, he was man enough to go after what he wanted, despite the difference in their races, or the denigration and castigation he suffered because of it…otherwise I wouldn’t be here and the world would be a little less wondrous as a result. 
He could have been a chubbie chaser…
I guess anything’s possible, and had I witnessed it once or twice I’d be right there with you, but I find it difficult to discount race as the motivating factor behind as many fairly normal looking black men with extremely obese white women as my wife and I have seen over the years.
Ah but black men (and Latin Americans) like their women larger than their white counterparts (in general). The scale of too skinny, thin, just right, pleasantly plump, fat, and obese is moved up about 30-40 pounds from white to black. Where you see an unattractive obese woman, they see their fat cutie.
Well, if they go missing, there’s a better chance of it being publicized. So there’s that.
34 posts into the thread, and the issue of facial features has not yet come up? 
Looking back at the history of miscegenation in America (long before the evil and objectifying TV), it is usually mixed race black women that are described as being chased as sex objects by white men. E.g. see here Plaçage - Wikipedia . It stands to reason that white men like women with facial features closest to the white ideal, not to the African one.
I think it’s impossible that there is any ‘African ideal’, since the people of that continent have much more vast variation in facial features, coloring, etc as well as at a genetic level, than any other area of the world.
fine, West African ideal :rolleyes:
I would agree if these women were simply a little overweight, but I’m not being hyperbolic when I say obese. These women are not 30-40, or 50, or even 100 pounds over weight. I’m talking at least 200 pounds, unhealthily overweight. I’m talking so overweight they need canes, scooters, or motorized wheelchairs to support themselves, while their male partner is of normal weight and build. Perhaps you haven’t witnessed what I’m talking about but, believe me, you’ll know it when you see it.
Also, I don’t know if, even generally speaking, black men like women 30 to 40 pounds heavier than white men. I certainly don’t. Other black men and Latinos I know don’t, or if they do, then they must be miserable with their slim, trim wives/girlfriends. I’m going on a tangent here, but I suspect black men who are better educated than average, i.e., masters degree and above, will be in relationships with women who are as well and who tend to be appropriate weight and build for their height. The converse, it seems, holds for poorly educated black men, i.e., high school degree or below, whose partners do tend to be between 30 to 60 pounds overweight. This doesn’t, however, have any bearing on the phenomenon of black men with extremely obese white women.
I believe less black women and white men hook up, because when they do, there tends to be more of a real connection and chemistry between these couples as opposed to the average black man and white woman hookup, which tends to be a more superficial/trophy/status type of connection, though not always.
I’m a black girl and have dated more white guys in the past 6-7 year than black guys but I’m absolutely the exception to the rule. From what I see among my black girlfriends, most of them are so turned off by how many black men chase white women for what seems like all of the wrong reasons, that they aren’t open to dating outside of their race themselves. Black girls in general are pretty loyal to dating black men and stubborn when it comes to dating outside of their race, regardless if the men around are white, Hispanic, Asian, European, or whatever. Most black women simply aren’t interested. Most of my black girlfriends are also very suspicious that white guys only see them as dates and not marriage material.
Most of the white guys I’ve dated are similar in the fact that they ONLY date black and Asian girls and generally aren’t attracted to white girls, especially blondes. Also you’re very unlikely to see an overweight black woman with a white guy though we’ve all witnessed tons of black guys with overweight white women. Again, black women and white men don’t force the connection as there is little to no superficial reasons to hook up, and a real attraction and connection have to be present for either one to pursue a relationship.
I must admit, I have seen the “ordinary-looking black guy coupled with a hugely-obese white woman” several times in the past few years. At the same time, I have also seen a number of extremely-skinny white men with morbidly-obese white women, as well, so I don’t know if this is really a racial thing or not.
I dated a black girl in college, way back in the early 1980s (I am white), but it wasn’t a racial thing; it was a “we both like each other, and are attracted to each other” thing. There wasn’t any cultural divide that I could discern – we had the sames tastes in music, etc.
She said that she had some problems with other blacks when she was in high school, telling her that she wasn’t “black” enough; but she didn’t take it too seriously, she was too busy being herself to think “racially” about everything.