kevin, why don't you date asian women anymore

[erf_]

What do you see in the face of a local white American woman?I see swaying maples. I see hazel in her irises, and hair the color of warm earth, and gentle, soft skin. I see memories of Saturday morning cartoons, of the prick of rocks and shells in the sand along a hot July beach, of the sweet tang of varnished libraries and ancient drywall. I see

Comments

[retch]

That was powerful, and very disturbing.

[persistent_sun]

Now I'm curious. What do you see in the faces of American women of Taiwanese (or other East Asian) descent?

[cougarfang]

[erf_]

It depends. Sometimes I see the same thing as a Taiwanese or mainlander woman, merely one generation removed. Sometimes I see a woman of another ethnicity (not necessarily white) trapped in an Taiwanese woman's body. And sometimes I see nothing at all. Just an empty doll, filled with numbers and piano lessons until there's no room left for a person.

In any of those cases, my heart is moved but my dick is not. So deeply ingrained is my sexual aversion to Asian phenotypes that I barely even remember the last time I wanted to have sex with an Asian woman. (Probably freshman year of undergrad?) It would be like having sex with a fourteen year old girl.

Half-Asians belong to a different category entirely. They tend to look so different that I doubt I'd have any psychological hangups about dating one.

[soullessthinker]

You're an amazing writer.

[user_undefined]

I'm curious as to why you specified "white." There are lots of races that aren't Taiwanese. Do you not find yourself attracted to any others?

[erf_]

I specified white simply because that's the race by which the majority of people in America identify (and, for whatever bizarre reason, the baseline by which Asian-Americans on the East Coast are usually compared). My sexual perception of other races is not well formed, mostly due to lack of exposure. This is gradually changing, but it's too soon to say how that will turn out.

Case in point: One Latina woman I never paid much attention to at Oberlin is incredibly hot now. Another I used to find physically attractive doesn't seem all that attractive to me anymore. Neither woman has changed an awful lot, physically, nor do I know either of them all that much better personality-wise. It's me who has changed. I think my dick just still doesn't understand what a Latina woman is. It's like....second puberty?

[user_undefined]

How is a Latina woman different from any other woman? I'm lost.

[erf_]

Unique range of eye, skin, and hair colors? A different range of body shapes? Dating scripts that are foreign to me? A very different median position on the class spectrum than an Asian-American baseline, and with it, a vastly different set of life experiences?

You might think none of those differences matter, and you'd be completely right. But I have about as much rational control over what races I'm attracted to as I do over what flowers I'm allergic to. (Which, bizarrely, has also been prone to unpredictable, sudden, and irreversible changes after continued exposure.)

[elentiriel]

I thought this was strange the first time I read it, but more than a 1.5 years later, I'm now realizing how visceral this is and so well written that it hurts. Culture is so ingrained into me that it takes a piece like this to make me realize that there are Asian men out there not interested in Asian women, even if the opposite is very well known.

I maintain the cultural/physical preference for Asian(-American) men, but hey, I'm probably a bit strange in that respect. Being an Asian-American woman means either fighting or accepting social norms from all sides. American women are finally getting their voices heard, but Asian women aren't, not even if they hold high political office. Being both means having to be better than everyone else, having to submit to Asian patriarchy at home yet forging your own way in the workplace. Some days I'm tied to the homeland, some days I am part of the new world. And I can see why being tied to homeland with bad memories would turn you away.

[erf_]

I'm incredibly flattered that this entry stayed with you after all this time. I think my feelings about our ethnicity are a little different now, but I'm still not attracted to Asian women at all

[erf_]

That said, the American patriarchy is also real, and sucks. And if you ever move to San Francisco or Detroit, you have to deal with stereotypes created around previous generations of Asian-Americans as well. :/

But you do have a degree of control over your own fate over here that we could have never dreamed of back at NEHS. And with that control comes the opportunity to move beyond how we were raised, rather than perpetuate it.