Sixteen Volts

It might be surprising to most people that these days in America, the biggest opposition and resentment towards interracial dating and marriage does not come from some redneck klansmen, who are so rare that most people live their lives without ever even meeting one, but from perfectly ordinary black women and Asian men. This is not surprising, since these two groups tend to lose badly in interracial marriage, as is explained by the old article "Is Love Colorblind?" by Steve Sailer. The numbers and massive disparities simply don't lie, even if you disagree with the evo-psych explanations offered after examining the data.

Especially black women, who already suffer from a massive man shortage even without losing their best men to white women, really grind their teeth with anger when they see successful black men dating white women. Asian men tend to be pretty angry too, since they tend to lose to white men in competition over Asian women. For example, Hugo Schwyzer's posting "A Wednesday reflection on race and sexuality" contains the following paragraph:

I remember the rage of my Japanese-American roommate my sophomore year. He had a twin sister with whom he was reasonably close, so I saw quite a bit of them together. His sister had a series of white boyfriends, which her brother didn't mind. What he did mind was that he -- and many of his Asian male friends -- were victims of a double standard. "You white guys all think my sister is so exotic and sexy", he complained, "But very few white girls think Asian men are hot. We are always seen as asexual nerds, while our sisters are these incredibly desirable geishas." I'm told that in the last few years, this has started to change, and we are seeing more white female/Asian male relationships flourishing on college campuses and elsewhere, but in the mid-1980s when I was at university, the disparity was overwhelming.

You know, I am so old that I remember a time when leftists would have felt more sympathy towards a minority man complaining how he is unfairly being discriminated against because of his race, but that may have been a different time. (And a very different discriminator. And discriminatee.) For black women, the similar man shortage is very real, since right now in American colleges there are about twice as many black women than black men, and most of these women still want to marry up. But I guess that the way things are heading right now, white women will soon get to experience pretty much the same situation. All the better for men in the upper half of the Bell curve, I guess.

For all their supposed racism and reactionary and bigoted attitudes, white men are significantly more tolerant, inclusive and accepting towards Asians than white women. Whereas white men consider Asian women beautiful and would happily date and marry them, white women just don't seem to find Asian men all that attractive. Of course, it somehow follows from the feminist logic in this situation that white men are racists. Whenever men and women do something differently, they way that men do things is the wrong way. When white men discriminate against minorities, leftists call for all kinds of new laws and affirmative action programs, but when white women discriminate against minorities, hey, they are just freely exercising their preferences. I guess the old feminist-socialist principle of "to each according to his needs" doesn't apply to the sexual needs of Asian men.

A common feminist complaint is that white men prefer Asian women since they are "submissive", unlike the "strong" and "independent" white women. Again we note the double standard in feminist theory: women should be perfectly free to look for a mate that best suits their needs and preferences without any kind of concern about the larger social effects of these choices, but men are not free to do the same. And of course it just can't be that Asian women were physically attractive and just plain old made generally better wives. If men wrote a list of attributes they consider to be good for a wife to have, I bet that Asian women would on average score higher than white women on this list. So why exactly do the white men have a duty to go against their preferences, ignore the Asian women and marry only white women? On the other hand, if women similarly wrote a list of attributes they consider to be good for a husband to have, I honestly wonder which group of men would score highest on average for the attributes on this list. Black men, probably.

In any case, in reader comments of his article, Sailer punctures this submissiveness myth quite nicely:

First, are Asian women more traditional and/or submissive? This sounds reasonable, yet it is surprisingly hard to confirm with statistics. According to the Statistical Abstract, compared to American women of other races, Asian-American women (especially Chinese and Japanese) on average have the highest labor force participation rates, are the best educated, delay marriage and childbirth the longest, and have the lowest illegitimacy and teen pregnancy rates. Does this make them feminist role models? No, feminists tend to disparage Asian women as suffering from anti-feminist upbringings. Similarly, Asian-American women seem to have a reputation for not being much interested in feminism. Many white men think they would make better wives than white women because aren't as riled up and confused by feminist theory about what they want out of life.

So, we have a paradox. Asian women tend to be less exploited by men than white or black women, despite not taking feminism very seriously. Some possible explanations might be:

1. A disciplined upbringing in an Asian family, with its emphasis on deferment of gratification and responsibilities rather than rights, better equips a woman to take advantage of all the career possibilities now open to her in America. In contrast, the current mainstream American emphasis on freedom, feminism, self-expression, self-esteem, etc., might be responsible for the huge increase in the white illegitimacy rate, and other problems afflicting white females. For instance, feminism tends to endorse illegitimacy (e.g., Murphy Brown) as exemplifying female independence. A more realistic view would suggest that illegitimacy exemplifies male exploitation of women.

2. It could be Asian women tend to be smarter than white women, and thus are better able to foresee the consequences of things like getting pregnant outside of marriage.

3. Asian cultures tend to be more pragmatic, more skeptical of the latest political theories about individual rights. I suspect that Asian women tend to have a firmer grasp on what they really want out of life than white women, who these days tend to be confused, and often turn their confusion in resentment toward men. Asian women seem to understand better that each of us, man or woman, are more likely to fulfill our life goals in cheerful cooperation with a member of the opposite sex.

4. Asian women may not think highly of the feminist emphasis on equality within a marriage (e.g., equal sharing of household cleaning), because it is inefficient. As Adam Smith pointed out on the first page of The Wealth of Nations, the key to efficiency is specialization and differentiation of roles.

I also have heard the argument that Asian men have a hard time finding wives in America because Asian men tend to be highly chauvinistic. Once again, I really don't know if that's true about Asian men. Further, it seems questionable whether Asian men are more chauvinistic than, say, black guys, who generally don't have much trouble attracting women. Further, it's not clear if being chauvinistic necessarily makes you unattractive to women. For example, Charles Barkley is an outspoken male chauvinist, but I doubt if he greatly lacks for female companionship. At most, it would appear that Asian men have a harder time than black men getting away with being chauvinistic, so we're right back where we started.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 10:50 AM