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(I guess this comment may be somewhat low-effort and/or more suited to the Wednesday Wellness thread, but in light of recent discussion I feel that it may still be appropriate for this thread.)
Are racial sexual preferences natural and mentally healthy, or racist, unnatural, and mentally unhealthy? Is a white man who finds himself afflicted with "jungle fever", an Indian woman who feels a desire to become "bleached", or a black man who has succumbed to "yellow fever" suffering from a delusion that has been inflicted upon him by stereotypes in the media (both pornographic and non-porn)?* Or are these preferences inherent and natural? Is a person obligated to find sexually attractive all people who share the same general category of sex/gender, weight, and figure? Or is attraction permitted to hinge on such minor attributes as skin/nipple color, hair texture, and lip size?
*For example, perhaps the aforementioned black man suffering from "yellow fever" actually just finds skinny, demure-seeming women attractive, but has been brainwashed into thinking that the women who fit that role are overwhelmingly East Asian, and there's no use looking for them elsewhere. Maybe the Indian woman thinks that only white men are capable of building attractive levels of muscle, with few exceptions. Et cetera.
I came close to broaching this topic last Wellness Wednesday, when I asked for dating advice, but I decided against derailing that particular thread. For context, I’m an American man of South Asian descent who is near-exclusively attracted to women of East Asian descent.
I’ve long struggled with the question of whether or not I “have” the “fetish” of “yellow fever”. Friends have occasionally asked me about this point blank but for the most part they keep quiet about my (probably fairly obvious to them) dating preferences, at least to my face.
In the first place, the term “yellow fever” is ill-defined. Does any strong preference for East Asian women count as ipso facto yellow fever? IMO such a definition would prove too capacious; it would include, for instance, the romantic preferences of a born-and-raised Chinese man who has only been exposed to East Asian women his whole life and thus is exclusively attracted to them. Most people would say that this is a very normal preference given the circumstances. Some might argue that this man uncritically accepts the cultural milieu of his upbringing, or has failed to Do The Work of deconstructing the factors which led to his romantic preferences, and as a result his preferences are Problematic—that’s as may be, but even those who advance this argument would, I think, not call his a case of “yellow fever”.
So I think a definition of “yellow fever” that matches colloquial usage has to be a bit more nuanced. It must be something like “an abnormal attraction to East Asian women”. Unfortunately this just pushes the thorny definitional question from “yellow fever” to “abnormal”.
What are “normal” reasons for being attracted to East Asian women? As we saw above, one generally-recognized-as-normal reason is having grown up being exposed primarily to East Asian women. Others might argue that it’s only “normal” to be attracted to those of the same race, and any cross-racial preference is abnormal. Still others might argue that the cause of the attraction is irrelevant, and what makes a racial preference abnormal is how essentializing/totalizing/fetishizing it is; for example, if someone can’t achieve an erection from nudes of non-Asian women, or would turn down dates with attractive non-Asians, he is abnormal.
Now, is my preference for East Asian women “normal”?
I grew up in heavily East Asian immigrant communities. Indeed, in almost every school year, I was one of maybe 3 South Asian kids in my class, with a slight majority of my peers being East Asian (primarily Chinese and Taiwanese, some Koreans) and the remainder being white. So, to the extent that having grown up around East Asians is a valid reason for my dating preferences to be “normal” and not “yellow fever”, I’m in the clear.
What about the claim that the only “normal” racial preference is for one’s own race? To this, I ask: how is “one’s own race” determined? Or in other words, how does a “normal” mind/body deduce what race is “one’s own” for the purpose of determining romantic or sexual attraction? One possible answer is that it comes down to biology: different races have different phenotypes—skin color and texture, amount and distribution of muscle and body fat, shape of the eyes and other body parts, perhaps pheromones—and a “normal” person is genetically hardwired to find the traits of his own biological race attractive. If this is the case, then I am guilty as charged of being “abnormal”. Curiously, though, I’ve never heard an accusation of “yellow fever” leveled at me or anyone else by someone who believes that race is a biological fact. Invariably, the charge is made by “social constructionists”.
So what is their argument for what “normally” constitutes “one’s own race”? On some level, it must boil down to nurture/socialization as opposed to biological nature. But as I said above, my upbringing was in heavily East Asian communities, so by “nurture” standards, it’s not clear my preferences are abnormal. Yes, yes, it’s true that my parents and relatives are all South Asian; perhaps that’s the only sort of “nurture” that counts for “normal” determination of “one’s own race”, but I’ve never heard it spelled out in those terms.
Is my preference for East Asians essentializing, totalizing, or fetishistic? Again, we run up against yet another inane definitional shell game. Some facts which may assist us in teasing out the truth of the matter:
I think your peer group in childhood and adolescence plays a greater role in who you are attracted to than your own or your parent's race, though perhaps with some weighting according to the hierarchy observed anecdotally and in the OkCupid dataset i.e. East Asian women and White men being considered slightly more attractive by everyone. Looking at the edge cases, none of the Asian adoptees I knew who grew up in White supermajority communities or the single digit number of Black students who attended my elite high school seemed romantically interested in their co-ethnics.
There is a confounding factor here in many cases though, which is that the kind of person likely to move to an ethnically diverse community or one where they will be a tiny minority is likely higher in openess to experience to begin with, which would correlate with a willingness to date or marry outside their race. To the extent that this trait is heritable they will pass it on to their children who grow up in such an environment.
Absolutely true of me. I do think it’s a weighted average of (a) parents, (b) peer group and (c) whatever factors drive the OKC data (slight bonus for white men and East Asian women, malus for black women)
The specific weights probably depend on how close one is to one’s parents (I have a fairly terrible relationship with mine) and how open (in the Big 5 sense) one is. In my specific case, if I’m being totally honest, a big part of it is also a thirst to prove myself, to prove that I am special and can attract a beautiful, high-status woman on my own terms without settling for an arranged marriage like a typical brown beta chump. Incidentally, my favorite Shakespearean drama is Othello
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