The Odd Couple

The Curious Case of Asian Men and White Women

Allow me to begin by explaining why I decided to write this article on a topic that is so decidedly outside my wheelhouse. The other day, I was over at my friend’s place for dinner and his roommate told me that “I have never seen an Asian man and a White man together, only the other way around.” This statement, which another roommate present in that room emphatically corroborated, shocked me. After all, as a Chinese-descended guy, I fit squarely within the category of an ‘Asian man’. And yet, nearly all the women I have ever dated have been white. When I told them about my experience, they expressed only incredulity in return.

The Odd Couple

I approached various other friends and they all testified to witnessing the same thing. I consulted Pew Research and the data there astonished me! The combination of Asian men and White women constituted just 4 percent of interracial unions in America, compared to 11 percent for Asian women and White men. In other words, Asian women are nearly three times as likely to intermarry with a White spouse as Asian men are. As it so happened, the day I discovered this to be the case, I had a date with a White woman. While the date went very well, I will confess to being eerily conscious about how others viewed us, given how much of an odd couple we apparently constituted in this country.   

The relative infrequency (AMWW) unions has a long history in America. In the 19th century, the ratio between men and women in Chinatowns was a staggering 20:1 because the Page Act of 1875 effectively banned Chinese women from immigrating to America. As Chinese-descended Americans represented a very small proportion of the total American population, the imbalanced gender ratio among Chinatowns would not have been that acute of a problem if White women were willing to marry Chinese-descended men. But since this was 19th century America, that was obviously not the case. As a consequence, Chinatowns across the nation were known for the violence, gangs, and lawlessness, as is the case for most demographically male-dominated societies throughout history. 

Small Dicks

Today, thankfully little of this outright prejudice and hostility towards Chinese and other Asian Americans persists in this country. But the empirical evidence strongly suggests that Asian men are considered among the least desirable groups in America. On his talk show, Steve Harvey, the famous comedian, did a segment where he introduced a fictional book entitled “How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men”. He asked the laughing audience, “’ Excuse me, do you like Asian men?’ ‘No.’ ‘Thank you.’” 

An entire mountain of empirical evidence supports Harvey’s crude assertion. A 2014 study by Christian Rudder, the co-founder of OkCupid, showed that Asian men are the least desirable racial group to women. A study by the University of Chicago revealed that Asian men received the fewest unsocialized messages on dating apps relative to any other ethno-racial group. Another study showed that among non-Asian women, 90 percent of non-Asian women excluded Asian men from their dating preferences. Even Asian women are not immune to this phenomenon, nor the perceptions of Asian men that lead Americans at large to have that preference. A book published by the UC Berkeley Press called The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance, showed that Asian women were more likely to respond to messages sent by White men than those sent by Asian men

A Chinese-born woman I went out with once insisted, with complete solumness, that it is a simple fact that White men have much larger penises than Asian men. There is a general perception among Americans at large that Asian men are sexually undesirable because they aren’t manly, they have small dicks, they are asexual, they’re just awkward and geeky programmers who don’t know how to please a woman. As one of my friends once said “I’m completely straight. But I would fuck Korean men because they’re basically women to me.” He also added that “what the Asian man lacks in testosterone he makes up for in his refusal to be a burden on his society”, a reference to our economic success and our low rates of welfare utilization. 

The Yellow Fever

By contrast, when it comes to Asian women, there is, in this country, a ‘yellow fever’. Data from a 2005 Gallup poll showed that 28 percent of American men claimed to have dated an Asian woman, compared to the 8 percent of American women who testified to having dated an Asian man. A 2015 study found that among young adults, Asian American women were twice as likely as Asian American men to be in a relationship. While most studies of desirability on dating apps find that White women as the most desirable racial group, a study of 187,000 participants in 4 US cities with substantial Asian populations found that Asian women were the most sought-after group for men.  

The ‘yellow fever’ phenomenon, in which hoards of White men favor sexual or romantic relationships with Asian women because of perception of Asian women as these submissive and feminine ideal housewives, is a real thing. I have had Asian American women tell me that they do not date white men on this basis alone. It has a long history in America, beginning after World War II Japanese women were featured in American beauty pageants, and large numbers of Japanese war brides entered the United States. 

For decades, the trend of Asian women marrying white men was one that was easy to understand. Women traditionally place a great premium on wealth and status in a potential partner. In the affluent San Francisco Bay suburb where I went to high school, so many of my classmates were produced by White-Asian parents who met when the White guy was the boss and the Asian woman was his secretary. Many of these Asian women were foreign-born immigrants who came to America with poor English skills and ‘marrying up’ jives with social exchange theory, the notion that lower caste individuals trade wealth and education for a higher caste partner. But in our age, the whole Asian women fetish thing is extremely dumb in light of the fact that Asian women actually make more than White men. And therefore, as the Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker would say, White men ought to be the housewives while Asian women work, according to the laws of comparative advantage and specialization of labor. 

The K-Pop Boom

In recent years however, I have anecdotally observed an exogenous shift in consumer preferences among women, especially White women—76 percent of American K-pop fans are White—that has increased the demand for Asian men in the dating market. When I lived in Paris, a French woman who was among my closest friends, started dating a Vietnamese-descended French guy. She told me shortly after they started dating, that the first thing he asked her when they began their relationship was whether she was with him to project her K-pop fantasies onto him. A column on Teen Vogue went as far as to claim that East Asian men were now being fetishized by young women.

She’s Out of My League!

For Asian American men out there who are despairing about their chances of wooing a White woman, there is still more good news. Some of the rarity of Asian man-White woman partnerships seems to be driven by the tendency of Asian men themselves to not pursue White women. 

Some of this may have to do with the desire of Asian men to date other Asians, a preference consistent with that of most racial groups in America. But it is easy to  imagine that it may also have to do with a widespread and pervasive belief among Asian men that White women are ‘out of their league’ and that it is thus not worth shooting their shot. An Asian American columnist wrote on CNN, “As a kid, I never saw Asian men dating outside of our race, or with white women especially. Non-Asian women felt inaccessible.” In The Dating Divide, the authors find that Asian men also message Asian women at twice the rate as women of any other race. If my hypothesis is correct, then it seem eminently conceivable that the currently low rate of WWAM romantic unions will tick up when Asian men realize that especially in light of the K-Pop boom, it is within their capacity to pursue even White women, should they find one attractive—that White women do not regard them as yellow peril. Perhaps the practical guide for Asian men on how to date White women is to just shoot your shot. Perhaps the moral of the story is that there remains great wisdom in the old truth that you miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take. 

Decolonize Your Mind

All in all, there is nothing fair about the dating market. Many of you readers in the audience will likely read this article and arrive at the normative conclusion that the racial preferences I detailed were socially constructed by manifestly an unequal history of race relations. And during the heady days of 2020, when Black Lives Matter was all the rage, many dating apps removed racial filters on that very basis. But my personal view on the subject of ethnic or racial preferences, in the context of sexual or romantic relationships, is that we are all entitled to hold and practice them. The notion that it should be regarded as racist for a woman to find one man more attractive than another on the basis of his race is every bit as dystopian as it is stupefying. After all, no reasonable person would say that a gay man is a sexist for prefering sexual relations with men over sexual relation with women. When it comes to a matter as intimate as sexual or romantic relationships, individuals ought to be entitled to a sphere of autonomy that neither the state nor coercive social mores should encroach upon.

Returning to my personal propensity for dating White women, if I were to ‘decolonize my mind’, as it were, I would confess that it is likely a unique confluence of social conditioning that all point me in that direction. To start, I grew up in America, a White majority country and thus I internalized standards of beauty that are associated with the majority, dominant group in that society. Moreover, my immigrant family impressed upon me in early childhood the importance of getting ahead in life. As a toddler, I watched numerous Chinese TV shows which favorably portray people who marry people from higher classes as a means of facilitating upward mobility. And since White Americans, being both the founding ethnic group of America, and the numerical majority group, are clearly at the top of America’s social hierarchy, being with a White woman is a form of upward mobility (even though my ethno-racial group now makes more money than hers on average). It demonstrates assimilation into America's dominant group, and an almost braggadocious symbol that I am attractive enough to pull someone from “above my class”. The point of exercise is not that my thoughts are so uniquely interesting (except perhaps to my friends). The point is to show that it is impractical and wrong to place such a strong ethical demand on others to “decolonize their minds”—-even if it would benefit me if they did.