Rules of attraction

Today's situation
1. "Yellow fever": White men finding Asian women attractive
2. US: 529,000 white male – Asian female married couples, 219,000 Asian male – white female married couples (2010 U.S. census). Black male – white female marriages is 2.3 times bigger than the number of white male – black female pairs. Asian female – African male marriages five times Asian male – African female marriages.
3. 2013: Cognitive psychologist Michael Lewis asked 20 females and 20 males to rate 600 Facebook pictures of British, sub-Saharan Africans, and East Asians. The participants consistently voted black men and Asian women as the most attractive representatives of each gender; Asian men and black women were seen as the least desirable partners.
  1. Lewis: “Darker skin is always associated with more masculine faces”, "Difference in height can also partially explain the observed results", "Society imposes a “male-superior norm” that a man should be taller than his partner; and blacks are on average taller than whites, who are taller than Asians"
4. Stereotypes
  1. Black men are aggressive and hyper-masculine – “walking penises” – and Asian women are the perfect wives – docile, submissive, obedient, shy and waiting to be saved
  2. Asian men have been de-sexualized as small and weak brainiacs excelling at math but unable to get the girl, while black women have been seen as too aggressive, independent and outspoken to be proper wives
  3. Whites are in a position of power and “globally desired,” a key to gaining a higher social status.
  4. Popular culture – movies, TV, cartoons, books – aim to reflect reality and end up reinforcing it as well. “This is not a matter of brainwashing,” Sharma says (Nitasha Sharma, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University who researches difference, inequality and racism in Asian-black relations). “It’s how people make sense of their position in society.” Stereotyping puts people in categories and helps us explain a complex world with oversimplification.
5. Media portrayal
  1. On screen, black characters use profanity 89 percent of the time, versus white characters who use profanity 17 percent of the time.
  2. Blacks are depicted in physical violence 56 percent of the time, while whites play violent roles just 11 percent of the time, according to Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki’s 2000 book “The Black Image in the White Mind.”
6. Forty-five years after the U.S. Supreme Court found anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, just 8 percent of all U.S. marriages are interracial and only 0.3 percent of all interracial marriages are between an Asian man and a black woman, according to the 2010 U.S. census. But as new generations do not buy old conventions, the normal is quickly changing.
7. Pew Research Center’s 2010 report on racial attitudes found that nine out of ten Millennials (the demographic cohort aged 18-28) will approve if a family member marries someone of a different racial or ethnic group. In contrast, just 55 percent of 50-to-64-year-old and 38 percent of those 65 and older will support such an union.
Perceptions
1. Feminization of Asians (Ji-Yeon Yuh, an Asian-American history professor at Northwestern University)
  1. East
    1. In Confucian societies – China, Korea and Japan – the masculine man is intelligent, wise, respectful, abiding by the rules of society and caring for his parents and extended family; he is a filial son, good husband and a good brother
    2. The closest translation of the word “masculine” to Korean would be namja-daeun, which literally means “characteristics of a man” and connotes someone who “has integrity and loyalty, keeps his promises; he does what he says he does, and achieves it,”
  2. West
    1. America’s epitome of masculinity is the cowboy riding a horse with a gun, a father protecting his family with a gun or a soldier doing his nation’s duty with a gun
2. Masculinization of blacks
  1. Thriving online community called Asian Men and Black Women Persuasion (AMBWP). The club is a venue for black females to meet Asian males. It has a Meetup page, chapters in major American cities and 2,000 members in a closed group on Facebook.
3. Desirability of white skin (Northwestern anthropologist Sharma)
  1. “The social order with white males on top in this country is alive and well. A white male can marry anybody he wants and he will never be subject to the same kind of social and societal disapproval a woman would,” says Cheryl Judice, a Northwestern University sociology professor
  2. YouTube video that shows how 15 out of 21 black children prefer a white doll when asked to choose between identical white and black toys. When the interviewer asks why the other toy looks bad, kids overwhelmingly respond, “Because it’s black.” (New York-based African-American filmmaker Kiri Davis 2005 documentary “A Girl Like Me,” examines why the physical appearance of blacks does not conform to society’s standards of beauty)
  3. Davis’ experiment is a remake of the famous 1939 test of psychologist Kenneth Clark who helped persuade the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that separate public schools for whites and blacks were damaging to society. Clark showed that children who went to segregated schools were more likely to pick the white doll as the nicer toy rather than the black doll.

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Rules of attraction

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