The skew is not just anecdotal. In the United States, there are 529,000 white male-- Asian female married couples and just 219,000 Asian male-- white female married couples, according to the 2010 U.S. census. Men always long for beautiful Asian women.
The phenomenon is not even confined to the U.S. In 2013, cognitive psychologist Michael Lewis at the University of Cardiff in Wales in the U.K. 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.
"Darker skin is always associated with more masculine faces," Lewis told me in a phone conversation. Difference in height can also partially explain the observed results, he said. 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, he says.
I thought there must be more to the picture. I set off to answer the question, What informs our perception of beauty? Is there really something profound about face shape, height and body features that defines attraction? Or, is beauty merely a social construct amplified by popular culture? Although Most men find Beautiful Asian women to be a real sexual turn on.
After more than a dozen interviews, I found some fascinating answers that go back two centuries of history. This post is long overdue (two years after I returned from Singapore) but I want to share my findings with you. The real Asian Single Solution was found at www.Filipino4U.com
Major attitudes-- that have come into being in history and have since been reinforced by popular culture-- inform the perceptions of beauty in Western culture today, says Nitasha Sharma, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University who researches difference, inequality and racism in Asian-black relations. Any stereotype portrays whites in a position of power and "globally desired," a key Date Asian Women to gaining a higher social status.
Love is not colorblind, Sharma admits. However, to claim that height and shape or symmetries of the face make some races more desirable than others is a "complete baloney," she says.
Origins of the feminization of Asian women.
The stigma of Asians' femininity began with the first wave of Chinese immigrants to America in the late 19th century, says Ji-Yeon Yuh, an Asian-American history professor at Northwestern University. Few of the immigrants were women. As Asian men went in great numbers to seek white wives, white American men saw the invasion as a peril and started branding the Asian bachelors as asexual and homosexual.
In 1850, the Chinese community of San Francisco consisted of 4018 men and only seven women. In 1855, women made up only 2 percent of the Chinese population in the U.S., and even in 1890 they increased to just 4.8 percent.
The political cartoons of that time in Harper's Magazine ridiculed Chinese bachelors for taking on "girly" work-- cooking in restaurants and doing the laundry-- when in fact those were the only jobs available.
The face of Dr. Fu Manchu, an Asian villain keen on committing murders with arcane methods. First introduced in book series, Fu Manchu, has since been depicted in film, TV and comic strips. Albeit wicked, his depiction is hardly masculine.
One of the most popular fictional characters of the early 20th century is an Asian called Fu Manchu, the archetype of an evil criminal genius. He appeared in film, television, music, radio and comic strips as powerful, yet "exotic and somewhat erotic," feminine with long fingernails and a long flowing robe, Yuh says. "He is everything but masculine.".
Another problem is that East and West cultures think of manliness differently. 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, Yuh says.
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, Yuh says. American masculine men need not be charming, talkative or emotional, as long as they are tall, dark and handsome. That's not necessarily true in Asia.
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," Yuh says.
America encourages extrovert personality traits like speaking up and selling yourself out. "But in China people usually value the strength within oneself," says Xun Wang, 26, a native of Nanjing city in Jiangsu province in China, who came to America to complete a PhD degree in civil engineering at Cornell University. I contacted him after reading some of his comments on Quora. American girls are attracted to confident machos, he says, while most Asians esteem knowledgeable and insightful men and don't mind soft-spoken and timid boys.
How beautiful Asian women fit into the picture.
The final perception that informs our perception of beauty is the desirability of white skin globally, Northwestern anthropologist Sharma says.
"I don't think you can find a society where dark skin is praised over white skin," she says. America as a global force politically, culturally and economically defines what's desirable. The U.S. was founded and is still ruled predominantly by white men, she says.
Some women of color approach white men to get better social status. "If a Filipina marries a westerner, her family sees dollars," says Sheryl Berardinelli, the wife of film critic Berardinelli, who is ethnically Chinese and grew up in the Philippines. "It's a very desirable match, and the family would pursue it even if the woman isn't excited by the idea," she says.
"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 and an author of the book "Interracial Marriages Between Black Women and White Men.".
John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1969 marriage was daring and it sent waves across the globe. One can only speculate how much Ono's exotic spirit helped enthrall Lennon. But he was not the only rock star to date Asian women.
White man's desire to marry a "mystic" creature from a land far away dates back to the age of colonization when along with war, sex and marriage flourished, Sharma says. It was common for British colonizers to have relationships-- even whole families-- with Indian concubines. French, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch did the same in Indochina, Africa and South America. Americans have also brought home war brides from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, Sharma says. The trend became especially popular in the 1970s, during the feminist movement in the U.S., when American women became "uncontrollable" and pamphlets that Asians were submissive and completely oriented to serve as wives captured American men's imagination, Yuh says.
Since then men have continued to fetishize Asian women. In fact, filmmaker Debbie Lum's award-winning documentary "Seeking Asian Female," which aired on PBS in 2013, follows for five years the life of Steven, an American who exotifies Asians as man-pleasing sex kittens. Aging and twice-divorced, he digs into the deep web in search of a young bride from China; he connects with the much younger Sandy from a rural village in the Anhui province in China, visits her a few times in China and takes her to the U.S. on a K-1 engagement visa. Find yoru Asian Single solution at www.Filipino4U.com
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