Why do Asian women love white men?

14 06 2008

C1: Why do you Asian women love white men?

C2: I don’t love “white men”. In fact, I am suspicious of white men.  When white men express interest in me, the first thing I look for is if he displays signs of Asiaphilia. It’s usually obvious, but the question is whether or not it was just a “coincidence” that he acted that way.

C1: How can you tell if a white man is an Asiaphile?

C2: Racially-segregated white men who are Asiaphiles or have Asian fetishes believe that I will automatically fall in love with them because they are white. The way they behave towards me is disrespectful and patronizing. They behave as if white men are God’s gift to Asian women. They think they are doing me a favour by expressing sexual interest. They think that they are “above” me and that I am “below” them, and that they are giving me the privilege of being with a white man. Racism and sexism are major turn-offs, not just for potential partners, but for anyone you meet.

C1: What do you mean that it’s racist and sexist? How is it racist or sexist?

C2: How is it racist? White Asiaphiles treat me with less respect that they would treat a white woman. White men don’t normally go up to white women and “expect” that they will be accepted.  I’ve had white men that I’ve talked to only a few times suddenly invite me to spend the night at their place. White men aren’t so bold with white women. These white men obviously don’t see me as a full person or a real woman.

C1: Well, you can’t say that. You don’t know what they are thinking. You don’t have any proof that they are racist and that they don’t think of you as a “full person” or a “real woman”. How can you read their mind?

C2: This is not about reading somebody’s hidden thoughts.  If somebody treats me with disrespect, then they don’t respect me. If somebody expects that am willing to sleep with them for absolutely no reason, then they don’t consider me fully human. It’s like they think I’m an anime character or other fictional person.

C1: Yeah, I’ll give you that. Nobody likes otaku and Japanophiles anyway.

C2: I don’t think it’s just white men who watch anime and consume Japanese media that are like that. Mainstream, Western entertainment often show romances between white men and Asian women, and in these fictional stories, the Asian women automatically fall in love with white men because they are white. Many white men who watch this think that this is reality.

C1: Only very stupid and uneducated people think that TV is the same as real life. Normal people can tell the difference between fiction and reality.

C2: It’s not just especially stupid and uneducated people who are influenced by the mainstream media. Those white men who I interacted with were university students.  Just because you are smart in one thing does not mean that you are smart in all things. White people rarely think about race compared to non-white people, so they are generally mentally undeveloped in that area.

C1: Isn’t the problem that they are thinking about race? They treat you differently from a white woman because they think of you as Asian. If people stopped thinking about race, then there would be no more racism.

C2: No. People’s minds are going to register visual attributes of a person whether or not they are conscious of it. The brain processes race and gender at a very low level of perception. When people try to be “color blind”, what they are doing is simply being not conscious of how their actions are influenced by their perceptions of race. This, in turn, results in racist behaviour. However, the targets of this unconscious racism are very much conscious of the “color blind” person’s perceptions of the target’s race.

C1: How can the brain process “race” if there is no such thing as race? The article you linked says “ethnicity”, not “race”.

C2: Race exists as a social construct. Different races are not different subspecies of human, but phenotype differences are real, and the racial categorization is determined socially. So your brain processes skin colour and facial features at a low level of perception. I’m referring to this as “race” because I can’t think of a more appropriate word. It doesn’t make sense to say that the brain can visually process “ethnicity”, because ethnicity has less to do with how you look. “Asian” is not so much an ethnicity, as most Asians would not think that their “ethnicity” is “Asian”.

C1: I’m tired of debating right now.

C2: Me too. Let’s take a break.