Revisiting the Race Issue

I wrote a little bit about race and dating six months ago, dealing with the notion of preferring to date within your own racial background being inherently racist.  The topic is relevant again with this lovely article written by Tiffany Wang over at The Bold Italic.  It's not necessarily about dating per se, but more about the kind of people one finds attractive and the stereotypes of Asian men in particular.

I will start off by saying that I had no idea Asian men were stereotyped or felt stereotyped before I started posting on internet forums around 2010.  Perhaps being white means I don't notice such things, I don't know.  In any case I understand the frustration, a lot of women who say they are not attracted to Asian men may be doing so because of the perception that Asian men are undesirable.  The whole "small penis" stereotype, the femme way Asian men are sometimes presented, and the lack of strong Asian male portrayals in popular culture.

But, on the other hand, is it possible for an individual woman to not be attracted to Asian men in general?

One of the key themes of this blog is my unusual attraction (some may say fetish, but I should hope that's not what it is) to women of South Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds.  In general I'm not attracted to white women, despite being white myself.  It's much more common for me to find an Asian woman, or Hispanic woman, or a black woman (like Iman, I mean damn) attractive than a white woman.  But almost every woman I've ever been into was South Asian or Middle Eastern.  I don't know why this is, perhaps it's because one of the first Disney movies I watched as a kid was Aladdin.  Maybe it's something else, I don't know.  But I am pretty sure that my lack of attraction to white women has zero to do with popular culture, otherwise I'd be fantasizing about Megan Fox instead of Sherlyn Chopra, et al.  And this doesn't mean that I've never met or seen a white woman that I was attracted to, we're talking about generalities though.

So at the end of all of this, I don't really know what to say.  Perhaps many have been socialized to find Asian men unattractive.  Maybe some women were never going to be attracted to Asian men in the first place.  It's really hard to say.