Published on June 23, 2025 3:57 AM GMT
Note: This is a linkpost from my personal substack. This is on a culture war topic, which is not normally the focus of my blogging. Rationalist friends suggested that this post might be interesting and surprising to LW readers.
Summary
- People widely exclude romantic and sexual partners on the basis of race. This is claimed not to be racism by those who have these attitudes, but it is.Certain groups, such as Black women and Asian men, are highly excluded by all other groups. These cases also exhibit within-race asymmetries in racial preferences across gender:
- Black women exhibit the highest endophilia (i.e. they most desire to date within race), but this is strongly not reciprocated by Black men.Asian women exhibit the highest endophobia (i.e. they most refuse to date within race), but this is strongly not reciprocated by Asian men.
A Note on Language and Scope
I am going to talk about racial and sexual groups using broad terms like “Asian woman”, “Black gay men”, “Whites/Jews”, and so on. I am aware that this language can be reductive, and may not operate on some desired level of granularity. I am aware that there are important, relevant differences between South Asians and East Asians, and that it is weird that Jews are sometimes lumped into “White” and sometimes not. I am using these terms because we need to have some language that allows us to talk about broad trends. These are the groups used in most of the studies I will discuss, and reflect generally how demographics is studied and measured in the West. When it comes to this topic, I find that demands for greater precision in language are often veiled attempts to bury conversation in a mire of obscurantism.
The studies I will discuss are about dating dynamics in “the West”, meaning that they were mainly conducted in the United States or Europe, and you should expect these results to generalize across the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and so on.
My Motivation
This is a controversial topic, and those who talk about it are typically accused of being resentful or of having bad intentions. I don’t think either of those things are true about me, and I would like to provide some color on myself to possibly ward off some accusations. Feel free to skip this section if that seems tedious.
I am a mixed-race Indian and Korean male. I grew up mainly in New York City. My elementary and middle schools were somewhat representative of the demographics of the city (“somewhat” here means there was non-epsilon headcount of African Americans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans), which is where I woke up into the consciousness that I found people attractive, and moreover that I found most people attractive and plausible. Due to this, later in life I made the assumption that most people’s racial dating preferences were anchored on the racial distribution they were exposed to during early puberty (we will see later in this post the many ways in which this is not true). As I got older I tested into institutions that were increasingly dominated by Whites/Jews and Asians. Concurrently, as a teenager I was a drummer in NYC’s punk scene in the late 2000s, which at the time was very white. Now, as a programmer in California there are epsilon African Americans in my social circles (except for first and second generation Nigerian and Kenyans immigrants).
My dating history reflects these facts. I have had a basically unbroken chain of romantic and sexual partners since I was 13, mainly White women, some Asian women, and the occasional man. I was very unsympathetic to male friends complaining about how dating is difficult or unfair, because I found it easy to date attractive and interesting people despite being myself not that attractive, charismatic, nor even particularly kind. You just try to pursue a large number of genuine friendships, and some of them naturally convert into relationships of a different type. As an undergraduate, I entered into what would be a felicitous 10-year relationship with a half-Jewish, half-Mexican woman. This allowed me to exile from my mind all considerations of “dating discourse”. My friends were allowed to complain about dating around me, but only for a maximum for five minutes before I started berating them for being whiny, anti-agentic sad-sacks. Additionally, my long relationship allowed me to entirely side-step dating apps. I would note— but not really absorb— how miserable and humiliating these apps are to so many people— how alienating it is to try to flatten your life down to the perpetual dog-and-pony show that is one’s dating app profile.
I am in no relationship now, and still do not have first-hand experience of the “dating market” in the 2020s. Perhaps unfortunately, my last relationship reshaped my preferences so much that I don’t really find people romantically or sexually interesting any more. I joke with friends that I have become a volcel, but I do not think that I am cynical, bitter, nor black-pilled— rather, I’ve been set adrift on the placid seas of self-reliance. This change though has made me more attentive to phenomena I’d previously chosen to ignore. I always knew there was a strong racial component to dating outcomes, but I thought this was mainly due to wider sociological factors outside of any individual’s control. Whites and Asians date in a cluster apart from Blacks and Latinos in the US, but these racial strata have less to do with racist beliefs than with broader economic divisions that effectively segregate the country. But I started reflecting on stories that I would hear from friends and acquaintances that suggest socioeconomic segregation cannot be the whole story. Here are some representative stories:
- A White male friend and his Asian female partner are into swinging. Sometimes at clubs or parties they play a game where he points out random men in the room and she tells him if she finds them attractive. He eventually stopped pointing out Asian men at all once he realized that her answer for Asian men is always “no”.An Asian female friend living in SF goes out to lunch with her boyfriend and three other couples. The girls arrive first and they are amused to find out that they are all Asian. The boys arrive later, and they are slightly less amused to find out that all the boyfriends are White.I am orbiting different conversations at a party and slowly realize that all the pairs of men and women who are flirting are White men and Asian women.
I began to think I’ve poisoned my mind, and started looking into whether there’s any empirical basis whatsoever for what I seemed to be observing. It turns out the literature documenting this is enormous.
Empirical Literature
Let’s start examining the empirical literature.
Internet Dating and Racial Exclusion (Robnett & Feliciano)
We’ll start with Belinda Robnett and Cynthia Feliciano’s 2011 paper Patterns of Racial-Ethnic Exclusion by Internet Daters. They look at ~6000 Yahoo Personals dating profiles from heterosexual daters in 2004-2005 living in large, multiracial American cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta). The below table captures the stated racial preferences of this cohort.
I’ll quickly note some conspicuous features of this data:
- Within each group, the majority have stated racial preferences.58% of men have stated racial preferences, whereas 74% of women have stated racial preferences. (The percentages I’ll discuss after this are limited to those who have stated racial preferences.)Endophobia (i.e. own-race exclusion) is in general low. Some notable asymmetries is BM-BW exclusion (11.47% vs 7.76%) and LM-LW exclusion (5.74% vs 16.47%). The most anomalous asymmetry is AM-AW exclusion (9.69% vs 39.96%)!Whites are least excluded. BM and BW are exceptions to this, both excluding whites at around 70%.Black men and black women are both extremely excluded, with exclusion rates being >90% across all out-race groups except Latinos who drop black exclusion by ~15 percentage points.Asian men (but not Asian women) are extremely excluded, with exclusion rates being >90% across all out-race groups, in addition to uniquely being 40% excluded by Asian women.
Here is some analysis from the authors, identifying the ways in which their data support and in turn contradict leading theories of racial preference in mate selection.
Our study clearly shows that race and gender significantly influence dating choices on the internet. Consistent with the predictions of social exchange and group position theories, among those who state a racial-ethnic preference, whites are far more likely than minorities to prefer to date only within their race. Our analyses of minorities’ racial preferences show that Asians, blacks and Latinos are more likely to include whites as possible dates than whites are to include them. Acceptance by the dominant group is necessary for boundaries and social distance between minority groups and whites to be weakened, yet this study shows that whites exclude minority groups at high rates.
The results support the predictions of classic assimilation theory and social distance research, as Asians, and to a lesser extent Latinos, have racial dating preferences similar to those of whites with both groups more exclusive of blacks than of whites and one another. This may be because Latinos and Asians are less segregated from whites, feel less social distance towards whites (Charles 2003; Frey and Farley 1996; Massey and Denton 1993), and distance themselves from blacks in the classic assimilation pattern (See Calavita 2007). However, we also find that, to a lesser extent, Asians and Latinos distance themselves from nonblack minorities, including one another. Asians are even more exclusionary of Latinos than are whites. From social exchange or group position perspectives, they have far more to gain through interracial relationships with whites than with others. Social distancing, then, is not only directed towards blacks, but operates between nonblack minority groups as well.
…
We also argue that gender is central to the acceptance of some racial groups within the domain of intimacy. Our results show that black women, Asian men, and to a lesser extent, Latino males, are more highly excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts. These findings may, in part, be explained by sexual strategies theory because men are more open than women to a variety of partners. However, this explanation does not shed light on why all men, except for black men, are the most exclusionary of black women, or why all groups are more accepting of Asian women and Latinas over their male counterparts. Especially perplexing is that women prefer to date black men over Asian men. This is completely contrary to the claims of social exchange and sexual strategies theories that women should prefer to date men with higher socio-economic standing.
…
Finally, our results challenge social exchange and sexual strategies theories in that the relatively high income enjoyed by Middle Eastern, East Indian and Asian men do not correspond to increased acceptance in the domain of intimacy. Like whites, Asians and Latinos are highly exclusive of blacks, but also of higher earning groups, such as Middle Easterners and East Indians. White women and Latinas exclude Asian, East Indian and Middle Eastern men more than black men, and East Indian and Middle Eastern men are among the most excluded by black women and Asian women. These results suggest that race-ethnicity dynamics shape racial exclusion more than structural integration does.
Online Racial Dating Preferences among Asians (Tsunokai, McGrath, & Kavanagh)
Asian women’s endophobia is such an important counter-example to so many theories of racial preference that it is worth examining in detail. Turning now to Glenn T. Tsunokai, Allison R. McGrath, and Jillian K. Kavanagh’s 2014 paper Online dating preferences of Asian Americans, we find similar effects as Robnett & Feliciano, but now extended to also include Asian homosexuals. This study looks at 1270 Asian American dating profiles on Match.com from 2006. They find:
As highlighted in Table 2, heterosexual women and gay men were more likely to want to date a White person than were their heterosexual male counterparts. The odds of stating a preference to date Whites were 4.1 and 2.4 times greater for gay males and heterosexual females compared to the reference group, respectively. This pattern was not displayed when it came to one’s willingness to date African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and individuals who were some other race/ethnicity. Compared with heterosexual males, heterosexual females and gay males were less willing to indicate a preference to date someone who was nonwhite. For example, among Asian females, the odds of wanting to date an Asian, Latino, someone who is racially/ethnically ‘‘other,’’ or a black man, were 75, 66, 61, and 53% less than their heterosexual male counterparts, respectively. Similarly, gay Asian males were also less willing to express an interest to date nonwhites. As a group, they were 85, 35, and 33% less likely to state a preference to date other Asians, people who were some other race/ethnicity, and Blacks compared with heterosexual males within the sample, respectively.
This is a really dramatic table. Asian heterosexual women are 2.41 times more likely than Asian heterosexual males to be willing to date Whites. Asian homosexual males are 4.11 times more likely than baseline! Asian exclusion (Model 4) is also extreme, with Asian women at 0.25 and Asian homosexuals 0.15 times the baseline. Women and homosexuals in every model exhibit much more sexual racism than Asian heterosexual men.
The “Preference” Paradox (Thai, Stainer, & Barlow)
Race preferences are very common, but it would be wise to not disclose them explicitly as this results in one being seen as more racist, less attractive, and less dateable. This effect occurs even when the person judging you says that they believe that racial dating preferences are not racist. So are the findings of Michael Thai, Matthew J. Stainer, and Fiona Kate Barlow’s 2019 paper The “preference” paradox: Disclosing racial preferences in attraction is considered racist even by people who overtly claim it is not.
The study was done on 1956 Australian gay men who were asked to look at modified dating profiles of White men and rate the profiles based on how racist the subject seemed, how attractive they were, and how dateable they seemed. Subjects were also asked to give binary answer to the question “Do you believe it is racist to have exclusive racial preferences when it comes to sexual attraction?”, which split the subjects into two cohorts. Most of the subjects were White (65%-75%, depending on the experiment), with Asians (9%-15%) and South Asians (3%-5%) forming the largest minorities.
The dating profiles were modified across different experiments to include various racial preference disclosures. Study 1 involves targeted exclusion (e.g. “No Asians or Blacks”); Study 2 involves general exclusion (e.g. “White guys only”); Study 3 adds general soft exclusion (e.g. “Prefer White guys”).
There are a number of notable results here. Men perceive racial preference disclosures as racist, even when they explicitly claim that they believe that such disclosures are not racist. This suggests that people are fundamentally confused about their attitudes towards sexual racism. Attractiveness and dateability are also affected (though the effects on attractiveness are clearly quite small). This carries a nasty implication: online daters are incentivized not to explicitly state their racial preferences even when they do have them, so strong racial preferences may be even more common than they may appear.
Many reject the idea that racial dating preferences are actually racist. A similar study came out in 2015 which examined this question more closely called Is Sexual Racism Really Racism? Distinguishing Attitudes Toward Sexual Racism and Generic Racism Among Gay and Bisexual Men. The study’s abstract states:
Sexual racism is a specific form of racial prejudice enacted in the context of sex or romance. Online, people use sex and dating profiles to describe racialized attraction through language such as “Not attracted to Asians.’’ Among gay and bisexual men, sexual racism is a highly contentious issue. Although some characterize discrimination among partners on the basis of race as a form of racism, others present it as a matter of preference. In May 2011, 2177 gay and bisexual men in Australia participated in an online survey that assessed how acceptably they viewed online sexual racism. Although the men sampled displayed diverse attitudes, many were remarkably tolerant of sexual racism. We conducted two multiple linear regression analyses to compare factors related to men’s attitudes toward sexual racism online and their racist attitudes more broadly. Almost every identified factor associated with men’s racist attitudes was also related to their attitudes toward sexual racism. The only differences were between men who identified as Asian or Indian. Sexual racism, therefore, is closely associated with generic racist attitudes, which challenges the idea of racial attraction as solely a matter of personal preference.
Parsimony suggests that it makes most sense to consider racial dating preferences as part of the “racist cluster” of human belief-space.
On The Streets of The Culture War
I’m now going to step away from the academic literature and talk more about this issue as it appears in dating discourse and in the culture war. I am going to be more opinionated and inflammatory going forward.
Black women and Black men are clearly horrendously wronged by all of this. The levels of sexual exclusion are so extreme that they seem unjustified even if you are a sort of race realist, “crime stats” guy. Asian men are also wronged by the racial preference distribution, being both highly excluded by everyone, and occupying the unique position of being highly rejected within-race.
Common Arguments Attempting to Explain Asian Women’s Endophobia
I’ve collected some common arguments, sourced from women I know and from online discourse, about why Asian women avoid dating Asian men.
- “Asian men are more patriarchal and less romantic than White men”: Karen Pyke calls this the “egalitarian knights” phenomenon. Indeed many Asian men are quite patriarchal (my mother left Korea because she could not tolerate being controlled by a Korean man— hilariously, she chose to marry an Indian man instead), and perhaps many Asian American women look at how their fathers treat their mothers and do not want that for themselves. But we do not date our parents’ generation, we date within our own generation, and Asian American men of the relevant generations are not more patriarchal than White men. Asian Americans are significantly more liberal than the national average (only Vietnamese-Americans are majority conservative), with about 40% of white men associating with the Democratic Party compared to 60% for Asian men. Research on attitudes towards gender equality do not suggest that White men are more feminist than minority men.“White men fetishize Asian women and pursue them more aggressively”: There is a large literature about the history of “Yellow Fever”, but this is not sufficiently explanatory. This explains White men’s elevated preference for Asian women, but does not explain the other direction, nor does it explain the elevated exclusion of Asian men.“Asian men have been emasculated by colonialism and white supremacy”: Again, there is an extensive history of this, but it does not seem to me sufficiently explanatory. This point and the previous two points could all (to equal if not greater effect, in my opinion) be raised about Latinos. Latinas are also fetishized; Latino men have also been emasculated in American media; Latino immigrant culture is also patriarchal — but the gender asymmetries observed in Robnett & Feliciano are not the same within Latinos as within Asians.
Surely there must be some cultural story about how these preferences form and persist. Tsunokai tries to explain this in terms of legal and cultural history. They cite this 1842 entry from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
A Chinaman is cold, cunning and distrustful; always ready to take advantage of those he has to deal with; extremely covetous and deceitful; quarrelsome, vindictive, but timid and dastardly. A Chinaman in office is a strange compound of insolence and meanness. All ranks and conditions have a total disregard for truth.
They also suggest that newspaper stories, pulp novels, and movies caused all of this:
Although these restrictive laws were eventually deemed legally problematic, the regulation of Asian sexuality has continued to go unabated in the media; movies and television programming constantly depict Asian men as being asexual (Larson, 2006). From effeminate characters, such as Chinese detective Charlie Chan, to action heroes who rarely have any onscreen romantic interests (e.g., Jackie Chan), Asian males are essentially stripped away of any sexual desirability—a process referred to as ‘‘racial castration’’ (Eng, 2001). These unflattering images have the ability to produce negative outcomes. For example, Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica, and Simonson (2008) found that when it comes to physical attractiveness or sexual desirability, Asian men receive the lowest ratings; their study also revealed that Asian women find White, Black, and Hispanic men to be more attractive than Asian males.
…
Asian women have also had their image negatively shaped by the dominant group. Rooted in the early days of colonialism, the image of the ‘‘Oriental’’ was created by Whites who sought to distance themselves socially and culturally from Asians. Asian women were frequently depicted as seductresses who sought to corrupt the morals of White men (Uchida, 1998). For example, in the 1870s and 80s, newspaper stories and magazine articles exaggerated the notion that Chinese or Japanese prostitution, if left unchecked, would erode the nation’s morals and physical well-being (Lee, 1999). By characterizing Asian women as lecherous heathens, the dominant group was able to justify discriminatory actions that targeted Asians (e.g., anti-immigration laws). This ‘‘controlling image’’ has not faded over time. Although Asian women are still underrepresented in the media, when shown, they are habitually stereotyped as being submissive, exotic, or sexually available for White men (Larson, 2006). Regarding the latter, popular movies such as The World of Suzie Wong (1960), Year of the Dragon (1985), and Heaven and Earth (1993) have consistently emphasized the notion that the sexual and emotional needs of Asian women are successfully satisfied by White males (Kim & Chung, 2005).
It is very possible that these factors matter, but I am not satisfied. Apart from its questionable explanatory value, I particularly dislike this line of thinking as it removes agency from minorities and absolves women of taking any ownership over their racialized desires. Time and time again, I’m asked to believe that this is all the fault of White men. But European colonialism did not invent the phenomenon of race factoring into sexual matters (see for example Razib Khan’s wonderful overview of the genetics and sociology of India’s Jati/Varna system).
Let’s look at an example of the abnegation of responsibility I’m worried about. Steffi Cao writes for The Guardian: “Trolls are citing an ‘Oxford study’ to demean Asian women in interracial relationships. But it doesn’t actually exist”. The article talks about the social media phenomenon of Asian women with White boyfriends getting yelled at about the so-called “Oxford study”, which is supposed to be some sort of study showing how Asian women fetishize White men. In reality, the “Oxford study” is Balaji and Worawongs’ 2010 paper The New Suzie Wong: Normative Assumptions of White Male and Asian Female Relationships, which presents an analysis of the history of Asian female and White male relationships in media in the 20th century. Steffi Cao makes a lot of hay about how the study, and by implication the phenomenon it supposedly describes, is not real:
In most cases, the use of “Oxford study” takes on a ugly tone. Commenters use it to signal a rabid interest in the personal lives of Asian women, informed by entrenched stereotypes around race and gender. They cite the study as a shorthand to criticize the romantic and sexual choices of Asian women in interracial relationships. Many of these commenters are men, often Asian men, and they want to make Asian women the butt of their bad joke.
However, the study they’re so eager to cite doesn’t actually exist – at least, not in the way they think it does. But that hasn’t stopped “Oxford study” from fueling Asian women’s anxiety about dating or affecting their sense of self.
…
The phrase “Oxford study” has been attributed to a TikTok user who in April 2023 reacted to a video of an Asian woman and white man together by crudely joking: “the power of the Caucasian [male] over the Asian female subconscious needs a full Oxford study”.
“Oxford study” reached its most outrageous zenith a year later. In April 2024, Cherdleys, a comedian and troll, posted a TikTok of him sitting on the back of a pickup truck with his arm slung proprietarily over the influencer Lydia Ren, who kneels on her hands and knees in full-body black latex, a muzzle over her face and dog ears on her head. She is Asian. “Me and my dog were wondering if you and your dog want to go on a date,” says Cherdleys, who is white.
Commenters swarmed. “Naw you Asian women love being humiliated by white men,” one wrote, while others frequently, persistently, posted “Oxford study”. “What level of Oxford study is this?” asked one. “Oxford study final thesis,” and “Oxford study final boss,” wrote others. The video – surely intended to stoke outrage about Asian women and white men in provocative situations – now has 1.5m views.
Emily was unnerved to learn that this so-called “Oxford study” had been made up to legitimize scrutiny of Asian women’s personal lives. “A chill just went down my spine,” she said.
It is very cringe to try to humiliate random people online, but there is something preposterous about all the deflections in this piece. The “Oxford study” people could have been shouting about the two papers I discussed above describing Asian women’s outsized enthusiasm for White men (or they could have chosen from dozens of related studies not discussed in this post). It seems to me that the “Oxford study” is an instance of the “toxoplasma” phenomenon described by Scott Alexander in his piece “The Toxoplasma of Rage” — namely that rage-inducing bad arguments outcompete available good arguments because the former are more memetically stable.
Steffi Cao closes her article with a revealing passage:
Sophia has some level of empathy for Asian men who feel rebuffed by modern dating culture, despite how invalidating it feels to be on the receiving end of their outrage. “I agree that that’s unfair, but I also think it’s unfair to take it out on Asian women who are just dating whoever they choose,” she said. “It’s just weird to take it out on us instead of people in society who are being racist towards Asian men.”
“I’m a victim of this too,” she added.
We are all equally victims. White men are victimizing us. We are not racist — we have internalized racism (which has been stuffed into us externally by White men). We watched The World of Suzie Wong in the 1960s and never recovered from this. We had Bruce Lee, but we need another one. White men desire us so intensely, they fetishize us. We desire them too, but only because we’ve been tricked by them.
This sort of low-agency mentality should be rejected by thinking adults. Again, it seems clear to me that American women should take more responsibility towards their own desires, if only to facilitate building a better understanding of themselves. American women are much more progressive than American men, and increasingly so — at least when it comes to their stated views. I return again to reflecting on the consistent result in the literature showing that racial preferences are more prominent among women than men. In this all-important aspect, women are objectively more racist than men. Ultimately, what is more consequential than our romantic and sexual choices?
Some women have told me that racialized sexual desire is a part of immutable human nature. Indeed, Buss and Schmitt’s Sexual Strategy Theory gives us an evolutionary model that suggests women will by nature be more conservative about interracial mating. Surely this matters, but it cannot be all that matters, as human sexual psychology is not so rigid. There is no conservation law of racial-sexual preference across time and culture (refer again to Razib’s discussion of how exceptional India’s caste system is). But fine, let’s say that “being into White guys” is human nature, and therefore it is “okay”. I think liberals who say this are playing with conceptual fire. All racism is natural in this sense. The low-status racist attitudes you condemn, are they not also rooting in immutable “human nature”? If not, why not?
Dating Advice For Asian Men
So what should be done? People who say that we need to “do the work” to dismantle internalized racism might be correct in some generic sense, but what exactly is the theory of change? More minorities in Marvel movies? Scolding people on the internet? Humans have narrow fertility windows, none of us have time to wait for society as a whole to be fixed.
Millennials everywhere are lonely and having very little sex. This suggests that we are not at the Pareto frontier of the intimacy curve, so perhaps we can side-step the consequences of racialized sexual preferences until we do arrive on the frontier. So maybe the best advice is some form of my old recommendation: go out and make more friends than you would otherwise want to have. Or, for men in particular, maybe the best advice is to go collect a lot of money and status to compensate for your race.
I’m not sure though that this “advice” is substantive. Who would be helped on the margin by hearing this? You already know that you should collect money, status, and friends, and someone telling you to get more won’t actually help you get more.
I instead think that low race-status men should be encouraged to do strange things that high race-status men would hesitate to do. Asian men are effeminate? Fine, take steroids, take HGH during critical growth periods, lengthen your shins through surgery (also do the obvious: take GLP-1 agonists). Alternatively, consider feminizing. Schedule more plastic surgeries in general. Don’t tell the people you’re sexually attracted to that you are doing this — that’s low status and induces guilt and ick. Don’t ask Reddit, they will tell you you are imagining things and need therapy. Redditoid morality tells you that it is valid and beautiful to want limb lengthening surgery if you start way below average and want to go to the average, but it is mental illness to want to go from average to above average.
Don’t be cynical or bitter or vengeful — do these things happily.
Addendum 1: More Resources on Racial Dating Preferences
- Thai et al. (2025) - “No Asians” Because “No Femmes”? Racial Preferences in Gay White Australian Men and Their Relationship with Preferences for Masculinity and FemininityBalistreri at al. (2015) - Relationship Involvement Among Young Adults: Are Asian American Men an Exceptional Case?Aldana & Salazar (2024) - Racial preferences in dating apps: an experimental approachCurington et al. (2020) - Tipping the Multiracial Color‑Line: Racialized Preferences of Multiracial Online DatersWhite et al. (2014) - Race-Based Sexual Preferences in a Sample of Online Profiles of Urban Men Seeking Sex with MenFisman et al. (2008) - Racial Preferences in DatingRobinson (2015) - “Personal Preference” as the New Racism: Gay Desire and Racial Cleansing in CyberspacePotârcă & Mills (2015) - Racial Preferences in Online Dating across European CountriesChappetta & Barth (2022) - Interracial Dating: A Closer Look at Race and Gender Differences in Heterosexual Dating PreferencesChen & Liu (2019) - On ‘never right-swipe whites’ and ‘only date whites’: gendered and racialised digital dating experiences of the Australian Chinese diasporaKornrich & Robbins (2024) - The rise of online dating and racial homogamy in marriage
Addendum 2: Q&A
I received some nice feedback from friends on this post, and I think the back-and-forths we had will prove useful to interested readers. I’ll present some of these conversations here (edited a bit obviously, but mainly for formatting reasons), with some additional commentary from myself.
What is actually being seen as racist by the subjects in the ‘“Preference” Paradox’ paper?
Friend A: Re:
Men perceive racial preference disclosures as racist, even when they explicitly claim that they believe that such disclosures are not racist. This suggests that people are fundamentally confused about their attitudes towards sexual racism.
I have a different interpretation, I think these men are reacting to the public disclosure of those preferences in the profile rather than their mere existence. I think it strongly signals something about the character of the person that they would put "no ___" directly in their profile rather than simply swiping past themselves.
More broadly I think cultural norms have evolved to where people see proclamation of racist attitudes (especially publicly) as fundamentally more racist than holding those attitudes and keeping them to oneself.
Vishal: This is possible, but I think the author's methodology plausibly minimizes some of that. From the paper:
At the end of the survey, participants responded to the question: “Do you believe it is racist to have exclusive racial preferences when it comes to sexual attraction?” on a Yes/No scale. This question was asked after, rather than before, participants rated the target, to ensure ratings of the target would not be influenced by answers to this question. If exposed to the question before the rating task, participants may have felt compelled to rate the target in a way that corresponded to their own answer to the question, defeating the purpose of using a person perception paradigm to get at what participants are unwilling to personally admit."
Presumably, the men answering this had in their minds the notion of stating a preference on a dating profile when forming their answer to this question (if this question was asked before the study, then it seems more plausible to me that subjects could think "racial preferences are okay— woah not like that!"). But yes, the question as stated does not ask whether it is racist specifically to state your racial preferences on a dating profile, so it is believable that they are mismeasuring.
Friend A: Oh good point, I agree that should help. I'm not a social psychologist (paging Friend D) but personally I would hypothesize that the publicly-stated vs. private racism effect is so strong it would still show up in the data.
On a different note:
…steroids, take HGH during critical growth periods, lengthen your shins through surgery (also do the obvious: take GLP-1 agonists). Alternatively, consider feminizing. Schedule more plastic surgeries in general.
Unironically some cis people should consume more gender-affirming care. I was literally wondering earlier today if any good model for gender dysphoria wouldn't include cis people as well.
What do you mean by “racism”?
Friend B: Very good article overall, though I have a moderate quibble with the very first bullet point in the summary (and with the general thread of commentary that I think is intended to support it):
People widely exclude romantic and sexual partners on the basis of race. This is claimed not to be racism by those who have these attitudes, but it is.
I think what you mean by "exclude romantic and sexual partners on the basis of race" is something like "decide to not date or have sex with people of race [x], even if they happen to run into someone of that race who they end up finding attractive (and otherwise suitable as a partner, based on criteria that don't ultimately bottom out in their race)". And if so that seems like a reasonable though somewhat noncentral kind of "racism".
But you might also mean "in practice are attracted to people of race [x] much less often than other races", which might also be described as a "racial preference"... this, of course, has a very different causal structure than "is racist, so decides to not date people of race [x] even if they find them attractive". Maybe you would successfully argue for calling that racism, as well; certainly if you substitute "attractive" with almost any other instinctive judgment of a meaningful quality people would nod and agree, "yes, of course, instinctively thinking that all people of race [x] aren't smart/trustworthy/etc. is racist", and, uh, fair. Sometimes this is screened off by those judgments not being cashed out in their behavior, because the differences are marginal, or because they're only relevant in lower-stakes contexts, or they don't have any decisions to make about other people that rely on those qualities at all. (And sometimes they aren't screened off, and then, well, I guess that's what all that implicit racism business is about, huh?) But when it comes to dating, you sure gotta make some decisions based on some perceived qualities of people.
Or maybe some secret third thing. But clarify, please?
Vishal: So I guess my model of racism is that it is a big cluster of correlated tendencies in belief, rather than one big dichotomous thing that the Bad people have and the Good people don't have. I'm not sure the causal structure of racist belief carves up in the way your two examples are trying to carve them up.
So when I say racial sexual preferences is sexual racism, which in turn is just a subtype of racism, I mean that the quality of having pronounced racial sexual preferences is much more central to the racist cluster than one might think. I think many normie libs have decided, semi-axiomatically, that they themselves are not racist, and that their desire to not date Black women >90% of the time cannot be racist (because that's just a preference, can't help it, don't yuck other people's yum, etc.).
I did not post many of the studies that made me think that racial sexual preference is more centrally clustered than you might think. The only one I explicitly mentioned is "Is Sexual Racism Really Racism?" which showed (I think convincingly) that the degree to which you think sexual dating preferences are non-racist is positively correlated with having other generic racist attitudes.
Others that I didn't write about are for example “Gendered Black Exclusion”. This is a study of the reasons college students give for not dating Blacks. A lot of those reasons seem to be pretty flimsy stuff, at least when compared with how much sexual exclusion they’re meant to support. Even if your worry is something like "there's a cultural problem with Black women, they're really bossy, etc." the actual distribution of those qualities is surely Gaussian, but the enormous amount of sexual exclusion that is built upon this is not Gaussian.
So for the two mentalities you're describing— if I'm understanding correctly— the first does seem like a central instance of sexual racism, and is only non-central insofar as it is perhaps a nontypical scenario (the more racialized your attitudes are, the more likely you are to find certain people unattractive). The second mentality is more what I'm addressing. And I guess I'm saying, what you find attractive is sometimes genetic in important ways, but in other ways there is a lot that didn't just fall out of the coconut tree.
Friend B: Yeah, ok, very reasonable, I was eliding many third possibilities/spectrum-y/correlation-y things. Like, people are bad at introspection and could easily meme themselves into believing that they're not attracted to race [x] people, and then actually substantially change how much they're attracted to those people, etc.
(I expect other people might have a similar confusion re: "racism" pointer).
I’d like to expand a bit more on the points discussed here. We are beleaguered by a cultural discourse wherein the words “racism” and “racist” are dichotomous labels. Either you are Racist (Boo!) or Non-Racist (Yay!). This is not truth-tracking because it is an instance of what Sander Greenland calls “dichotomania”. Additionally, discussions of ground-truth get replaced with a whole lot of signaling and faction-building (see all of Robin Hanson’s work).
I think readers assume that I am putting them in this sort of discourse when I say “racial dating preferences are racist”. I seem to be saying that a thing more-or-less everyone has is racist, therefore everyone is racist, therefore everyone is a Bad Person. So, I’m either saying something dilute and vacuous, or I’m tilting at windmills and effectively asking people to feel bad about themselves forever.
This is not what I’m doing. The optimal amount of racism is not zero. I’m not saying that as a part of a Hananian “Based Ritual”. I’m saying that I’m not expecting there to be a future where mating outcomes are completely uncorrelated with race, and I’m not saying the only moral future is one where we do Rawlsian, veil-of-ignorance style dating, wherein group tendencies are omitted entirely from all our decisions in love and sex. Rather, I’m saying what I said to Friend B: racial dating preferences are closer to the center of the racist cluster than you probable think, and there is some individual-level and society-level agency that can plausibly affect how strong our own racial dating preferences are; therefore we should reflect a bit more, as we do have good reasons to chisel away at these preferences.
And yes there is some actually some agency slack here. Racial dating preferences do change over time (as I said earlier, there is not a conservation law), and perception of attractiveness does have some culturally subjective inputs. For some reason, some people seem to think there are only two choices: accept that the current distribution of racial dating preferences is natural and inevitable, or struggle forever in vain trying to make people have exactly zero racial dating preferences.
People seem committed this dichotomania. It is very hard to get people to understand that you are merely saying that there are good reasons to go down a particular gradient. I saw a lot of this in online discussions of political philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s book The Right To Sex. When doing her press tour for the book, she gave a short interview in El Pais. Here are the top comments on Reddit’s r/philosophy about this interview:
Contrast this with what Srinivasan actually said:
Q. One of your essays, motivated by the appearance of the incel movement [involuntary celibacy: online forums of men who are angry about being sexually ignored], raises a provocative debate: is there a right to sex? What happens to all those to whom it is denied?
A. This is incredibly well documented, the way in which people of certain races are effectively discriminated against on dating apps. We also all know that women beyond a certain age are no longer considered desirable to men, even of their same age, this sort of thing. The sexual marketplace is organized by a hierarchy of desirability along axes of race, gender, disability status and so on. And so what do we do? Although it’s worth pointing out that some feminists in the 1970s experimented with this sort of thing. They would enforce celibacy among the women in their group, or require them to be political lesbians, to no longer have relations with men. Those projects always go badly. I think what I would like is sort of two things. One is for us to kind of create a sexual culture that destabilizes the notion of hierarchy. And what I want to do is remind people of those moments that I think most of us have experienced at some point or another, where we find ourselves drawn to (whether sexually, romantically or just as a friend) someone that politics tells us we shouldn’t be drawn to, someone who has the wrong body shape, or the wrong race, or the wrong background, or the wrong class. I think most of us have had those experiences.
Q. Is it a matter of reeducating our desire, then?
A. I don’t mean something like engaging in a kind of practice of self-discipline, but rather, you know, critically reminding ourselves of those moments when we felt something that we then just denied. That’s an experience that’s very familiar to any queer person, right? Because most queer people have grown up with the experience of having desires that their politics, their society tells them not to, and then they silenced them. And so that act of remembering the fullness of one’s desires and affinities, I think it’s a good thing to do.
She very, very clearly is not saying that it is desirable or easy to totally eliminate social hierarchies from sex. Maybe people are getting thrown by the “woke” language of “destabilizing the notion of hierarchy.” I am struck by how epistemically modest her recommendations are: she rejects the “self-discipline” and “reeducation” mentalities, and instead say merely that it is good to be more critical and aware about the internal workings of a quite narrow set of cases of attraction (namely cases were we do feel attraction, but can feel ourselves tamping this down semi-consciously due our political and racial socialization). My attitude is less modest than this, but is similarly on the gradient.
So what is going on with Asian women? You only told us what isn’t going on.
Friend C: I found the ending of the essay a bit unsatisfying but that’s because reality’s kind of unsatisfying. There was no real good answer for WHY we see these racial dating preferences.
Vishal: I can only go into detail about why existing theories seem to fail. The socioeconomic ones fail (they don't predict the undesirability of Asian males, who are in general very wealthy), the evo-psych ones fail (they predict mating based in similarity, and consequently do not predict Asian women's endophobia), the postcolonial theories fail (they don't predict that Black Women and Latinas wouldn't be endophobic while Asian women would be), objective attractiveness theories fail (Asian men are short, but so are Latinos). The folk theory that white men fetishize Asian women doesn't work (due to Asian women's racial preferences), the folk theory that Asian men are objectively not masculine also doesn't quite work (it seems like if Asian men are objectively under-masculinized, then Asian populations would have crashed a long time ago).
What do you want from me?
Friend C: I want answers. More seriously it would be interesting to see how long these trends have been around.
Addendum 3: Giving Objective Attractiveness Theories Their Due
Friend D: You’re dismissing existing theories disjointly, but perhaps the truth is in a combination of these models.
Vishal: That’s a lot of degrees of freedom and feels like overfitting.
Friend D pushes me to think more about how masculinity differs across races.
Friend D: I don’t think you’re paying enough attention to masculinity and attractiveness in explaining the racial dating preference data. This is not my specialty, but there are a lot of studies showing that Asian male faces read under-masculine to women and that Black female faces read over-masculine to men.
Vishal: If masculinity in male faces has a straightforward relationship to attractiveness and dateability, then why are Black men seen as unattractive while being rated so highly in masculinity?
Friend D: They are seen as over-masculine.
Vishal: So Asian men are under-masculine, Black men are over-masculine, but White men are chef’s kiss just right? This is how Asian women think and this is just an objective, non-culturally-mediated reaction to secondary sexual characteristics?
Friend D: Laughs Yes it is suspicious, but maybe it’s true.
Vishal: I guess I’m not seeing it. Surely if Asian men’s faces are objectively under-masculinized, then fertility in Asia itself would have suffered, leading to population collapse a long time ago.
Friend D: No it’s not noticed in Asia, the under-masculinization is only noticed in the West when Asian women have men from other races to chose from. It’s only when there are available comparisons that non-White men are penalized.
Vishal: I’m not seeing how objective masculine attractiveness could work that way. Let’s say the faces of every man in the whole world became 10% less masculine overnight. Wouldn’t fertility suffer enormously?
Friend D: No, perception of masculinity would re-anchor on the new distribution.
Vishal: What?? There’s no way. If there was, say, an 80% decrease in masculine features, nothing would happen?
Friend D: No that’s probably too large an effect for re-anchoring to occur, but I don’t think that’s a good argument for why anchoring couldn’t occur for lower magnitudes. What would women be doing, in your mind in the 10% case?
Vishal: They would be volceling more, because less attraction leads to less drive to form relationships and have sex at the margin.
Looking at the facial attractiveness literature, I find I am confused. The foundational paper seems to be Perrett et al. (1998):
Testosterone-dependent secondary sexual characteristics in males may signal immunological competence and are sexually selected for in several species. In humans, oestrogen-dependent characteristics of the female body correlate with health and reproductive fitness and are found attractive. Enhancing the sexual dimorphism of human faces should raise attractiveness by enhancing sex-hormone-related cues to youth and fertility in females, and to dominance and immunocompetence in males. Here we report the results of asking subjects to choose the most attractive faces from continua that enhanced or diminished differences between the average shape of female and male faces. As predicted, subjects preferred feminized to average shapes of a female face. This preference applied across UK and Japanese populations but was stronger for within-population judgements, which indicates that attractiveness cues are learned. Subjects preferred feminized to average or masculinized shapes of a male face. Enhancing masculine facial characteristics increased both perceived dominance and negative attributions (for example, coldness or dishonesty) relevant to relationships and paternal investment. These results indicate a selection pressure that limits sexual dimorphism and encourages neoteny in humans.
Averaged faces from Perrett et al. (1998). Caucasian faces on top, Japanese faces on bottom.
Japanese people and British Caucasians were asked to judge which faces they preferred. They all preferred feminization for both men and women. Within-race they like feminization even more:
The result that feminized faces are preferred was replicated a year later in Rhodes (2000). A much later Japanese study, Nakamura & Watanabe (2019), summarizes the subsequent literature and reinforces these results about feminization and facial attractiveness, while also providing some color on which masculine features matter universally, and which are more culturally-scoped:
Given the pervasive influence of facial attractiveness, it is natural for psychologists to try to determine the features that make a face attractive [7]. Previous studies have identified multiple facial cues related to attractiveness judgements [8,9]. In general, such cues are identified in terms of facial morphology (facial shape) and skin properties (facial reflectance). For facial shape cues, averageness, symmetry and sexual dimorphism (masculinity for men and femininity for women) are well documented as influential determinants of facial attractiveness [7,10,11]. More specifically, faces with an average-looking shape, size and configuration [12] or a symmetric shape [13] are perceived as being more attractive than faces with a distinctive or asymmetric shape. Furthermore, shape differences between the sexes that emerge at puberty (i.e. sexual dimorphism) are related to attractiveness judgements; sex-typical facial characteristics are often associated with attractiveness [14,15]. Across cultures there is a general consensus that female-looking female faces with larger eyes and pronounced cheekbones are preferred to male-looking female faces, irrespective of the sex of the evaluator [16,17]. However, a preference for the masculinity of male faces, with features such as larger jawbones and more prominent brow ridges, is not consistent [16,18,19]. Facial reflectance cues such as texture, colour, and contrast also affect attractiveness judgements, independently of facial shape cues [20–23]. For example, exaggerating yellowness, redness or lightness on a face increases perceived attractiveness [20,24]. The above-mentioned shape and reflectance characteristics may perhaps be preferred because they act as reliable predictors for potential physical health or fecundity, possibly leading to higher rates of reproductive success [15,25]. Consistent with the idea that facial attractiveness signals heritable fitness and physical health, the preferences for these facial features are biologically based and thus observed across Western and non-Western cultures [14,17,26].
…
Our findings are also consistent with previous hypothesis-driven studies showing that feminine-looking male and female faces are preferred over masculine-looking faces across cultures [14]. Whereas the masculinity of male faces signals a high genetic quality in terms of potential mating and health [25], it can also be associated with negative personality traits and behaviours. For example, masculine male faces are perceived as less emotionally warm, less honest and less cooperative than feminine male faces [14]. Moreover, it has been reported that highly masculine men are more likely to be subject to marital problems and divorce when compared to more feminine men [45], and that masculine men are insensitive to infant cries, feeling less sympathetic than feminine men [46]. Preferences for a feminized male face might be derived from an avoidance of such a man as a long-term partner and may reflect desired personality traits [47]. Together with previous findings, the current results indicated that Japanese people prefer femininity when judging the facial attractiveness of both male and female faces.
It is not clear to me why this does not result in Asian male faces being perceived in the West as more attractive, because they certainly are seen as less masculine. Some of the researchers on facial attractiveness suggest that the feminization methods they use in their image manipulation studies also de-age the face, causing increased attractiveness. Perhaps Asian male faces in real life are directionally less masculine than White men, but not directionally more youthful.
Revisiting the above section Dating Advice for Asian Men, it seems like the body needs to be masculinized (through exercise, weight-loss, hormones), and the face needs to be feminized (through plastic surgery, skin-care). As Friend A suggests, cis-men should consider more gender-affirming care. Male discourse around masculine faces seem to emphasize face shape quite a lot, specifically things like jaw-line augmentation, but it seems that there is strong evidence that this is not actually attractive. Men should consider following trans-women in undertaking facial-feminization surgery.
Discuss
