Thursday, November 08, 2007

No Such Thing as Yellow Fever

Oh, now this is rich. Like a bad joke, an economist goes into a bar, and discovers there is no such thing as yellow fever:
"The white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference."
Oh, so now it's all the Asian woman's fault? --the STEREOTYPICALLY PASSIVE Asian woman's fault!?! Those poor men caught with their preferences down....

If there were only a documentary refuting this research ....

6 comments:

Unknown said...

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daddy in a strange land said...

Oy. And then check this out:
http://www.racialicious.com/2007/11/09/jezebel-asian-women-are-hot-smart-thin-and-tell-you-your-skin-is-bad/

water sign said...

I hate to disagree with you, because I'm a fan of the blog (and Asian, female, and a psychologist, so this was very interesting to me) but I'm a bit confused by your ire.

I read it and was all prepared to be outraged by some racist article about interracial dating (a topic I'm very sensitive about) but it's just a report on some research I'm familiar with and the sentence you quote is one very tiny piece of the article.

And there just isn't any implication that Asian women are passive - it says that Asian women didn't discriminate against white men in terms of viewing them as dating partners. This really isn't a case of the researcher trying to reinforce the stereotype of Asian female passivity.

So I'm pretty confused as to the outrage and have to respectfully disagree with you that this is something worth deriding.

thisislarry said...

Watersign: no worries, I was just being a dork.

It is interesting to see how an effect (asian female + white male being the most prevalent inter-racial combo) can be popularly attributed to one cause (male preference) while completely missing the real cause (female lack of preference).

Viva science!

daddy in a strange land said...

Check this on feministing.com:
http://feministing.com/archives/008083.html

Anonymous said...

water sign,

i think the outrage for Asian American men is what the article or study leaves unsaid: that white women and some women of color discriminate against Asian American men as potential dating partners. It's never fun to be reminded of that.