This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Sentenced to 1000 Pages of Contemporary Diaspora Literature Written by Asian-American Women
Here's a link that's not login-walled.
Asian-American women are not OK, at least if you go by what they write about.
All the books the author read feature a difficult mother-daughter relationship, with the author giving a hilarious quote of "Chinese mothers spent a thousand years binding their daughters’ feet, so maybe there is some deep need to torture their female offspring, which can nowadays only find an outlet in forcing them into piano lessons and telling them they are getting fat. "
They all mourn being unable to speak their mother tongue, but make no significant attempt to actually learn it.
The books are mostly portraits of neuroticism. "Neurotic about not being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about only being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about being too Asian. Neurotic about not being Asian enough. Neurotic about taking after their mothers. Neurotic about not living up to their mother’s expectations. Three of the books feature visits to therapists."
They're largely obsessed with white people, but in the worst ways possible. They think white society is a hair's breadth away from putting them all in concentration camps. They all have white boyfriends, which presumably fill the same niche that orcs do in hentai, with their physical characteristics (especially their height) always being brought up.
They think white people are just as obsessed with them. What might seem like a casual conversation to the white person feels like an intense struggle for racial supremacy that both people are obviously aware of to the Asian woman.
Any Asian-American man would have told you this without you torturing yourself with Asian-American women diaspora books. Asian-American men are not OK either, but no one cares.
This is actually not even really gendered. Family dynamics in Asia (China specifically, since I'm Chinese) have always been like this. I myself, when visiting family, often go through the "You got fat," "Why aren't you married," and "When are you going to have kids" waterboarding, and without being female. I even went through ~7 years of piano that my parents tricked me into.
This is actually just Asian women in general. I've found through personal experience that Asian women, as a group, are some of the most neurotic people I've ever met. Obviously, being a part of any diaspora does not help, but it seems that it merely gives them more topics to be neurotic about. Chinese women (especially southerners, I've found) and Koreans are especially prone. I have less experience with Japanese women, so I can't speak on them.
Asians in Asia are also obsessed with white people, but more as a curiosity than the neurotic fixation that you find in the West. And to try to disentangle the sexual psychosis present in the Asian-American community would require an amount of effort that I cannot summon up. The simple gist is that Asian women hunt for white men like a tiger hunts for deer. The average white man is obviously defenseless against such a pursuit, leading to an above average number of WMAF pairings in Asian heavy population centers like the SF Bay Area and LA. It obviously doesn't help that Asians are more neotenic in general, giving Asian women a leg up in terms of sexually selective traits while simultaneously giving Asian men a large disadvantage. This, in turn, causes a deep psychological disturbance in the Asian-American men population. This disturbance is amplified by the type and amount of Asian-American dating content available on social media (IYKYK). Each population deals with this differently, depending largely on their country of origin and where they ended up in America.
See above.
Overall, the article just confirms my suspicions about all of these Asian-American diaspora books, and Asian-American women in general. The entire thing makes me sad.
ID, in fact, K; could you explain?
I swear this example is pertinent. In porn, there is a specific genre of race fetishism videos, where the main draw of the video is a woman of a certain race glorifying and fetishizing men of another race. The woman is generally of a minority race and the man is generally either white or black. This obviously humiliates the men of the woman's own race while elevating the fetishized race.
Asian-American dating content is essentially a softcore version of those videos on repeat. Asian girls are quite open about their preferences, and even if they weren't people have eyes and can see for themselves in real time. So much so that "Oxford Study" is a well known meme at this point. As noted before, Asian-American men are disturbed by the fact that Asian-American women both prefer and are preferred by whites (for an extreme example of this just go to /r/asianmasculinity). Based off of the videos I linked, there has been a lot of discussion, at least among Asian-American men themselves, about this and how to deal/cope with this phenomenon. It's also quite difficult to even discuss this topic as an Asian-American man without coming off as bitter and emasculated so discussion generally remains within our own circles.
As an Asian-American man, I personally feel the effects of this dynamic as well.
I briefly dated an Asian girl (from Asia) in college and I was really baffled at how she would talk about Asian men. I thought I was well acquainted with internet racist humor and shit-posting at the time and this made me realize that no, I actually get quite uncomfortable with this sort of racism in person. Eventually broke up because even though she was really pretty and willing to commit, she was also batshit insane in many ways.
I thought about this experience a lot later on and I get the feeling that having such a vicious view of your own father/brother/future sons really cannot be healthy for someone. It has to bleed heavily into your own self perception somehow. I am guessing that Westernized Asian women normally won't be so frank about their feelings due to local norms but clearly they feel somewhat similar.
I am curious what you mean with this.
If I were to intellectualize my feelings, I'd say that when this topic comes up, I feel a sense of inferiority and shame. The feeling is especially intense when I have to explain the WMAF phenomenon to a friend who is not in the know, and I end up sounding like a race fetishist. It is doubly humiliating if the friend is white, for obvious reasons. Generally, I've come to terms with it. I'm not going to pretend that I don't get a gut feeling sometimes when I see a WMAF couple. I made the comparison to race fetishism content earlier, and I'd say that if you were aware of the dynamic, it's just living in that world every day. You just have to accept it and move on. Like I said before, there's no real way to explain it without sounding completely pathetic, bitter, and emasculated. I can only imagine the mental picture you'd have of me if you judged me purely off of these posts.
There's also the specifically racial component. As we all know, Asians are "White adjacent" when it comes to racial politics, so it's perfectly acceptable to be openly racist toward them. One thing that bothers me is the nonchalance that you see in the Asian women when they say "I don't date Asian men." As if that's just no big deal. But that's just normal racial politics in The Year of Our Lord 2026.
Like I said, Asians can get really deranged and about it, and to be honest, I understand. Men are already suffering intensely in the current dating market, and to add a racial component to it definitely does not help. I might have even fallen into the rabbit hole had I been less successful with women. There but for the grace of God go I.
Just as a side note, you noticed the views that Asian women have toward their own father/brother/future sons. A lot of ink has actually been spilt on this. Believe it or not, there's actually intense discussion in some parts of the internet about the effects of having WMAF parents, as opposed to AMWF, with one theory postulating that the Asian female in the WMAF relationship would actively start to feel disgust toward the Asian part of their children, especially sons. For example, there are some that believe that if Elliot Rodger had been born to AMWF parents instead of WMAF parents, he would not have turned out the way he did, and that part of his psychosis came from the deep rooted self hatred instilled by his mother. Obviously it's all conjecture (and quite tasteless at that), but I can see why such a theory may be attractive.
I have known a few AMWF Wasians and I think because fathers play a smaller role in childrearing than mothers the consequence is that the place they grow up in makes all the difference. For example, two common AMWF pairings are a pretty Russian woman and an affluent or cool Chinese/Korean man in an East Asian mega city, and a successful professional East Asian man in a big Western city like London or New York or San Francisco and his white wife (disproportionately middle or Northern European if from Europe, generically white if American).
Those who grow up in the West tend to grow up wholly in generic PMC culture, there is pretty much zero chance of them speaking their father’s ancestral language (whether he’s first or subsequent generation). I suspect an additional factor is that the, say, Chinese-American guy with a white wife is probably less interested in cultural continuity, the Chinese language and culture, connection to those traditions than the Chinese American man with a Chinese[-American] wife, for the same reason that would be true of any mixed pairing. Because their white moms will have predominantly white mom friendship groups, it’s likely the children will be in primarily white social circles and will not be in hyper striver extracurricular focused must-go-to-elite-college environments, although it can still happen. While Asian dads are often very ambitious for their kids, my understanding is that the actual ground-level tiger mom stuff is distinctly tiger mom, not dad.
Those who grow up in Asia can be like the above if the mother and father are part of tightly knit European or American expat circles, have no or limited local family etc. But in cases where, say, a Russian woman lives with her Chinese husband and kids in Hong Kong, and his entire extended family is there, and they are not solely international school types (they may still be private school types, but there are private schools that are predominantly expat and those that are predominantly native), it is likely the children will grow up more immersed in the paternal side culture.
There are other popular AMWF categories, I think in Australia the Filipino man - white woman pairing is apparently common. But I’m less familiar with them.
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting. I was going to ask how these dynamics play out when the woman in question is wasian herself vs. 100% Asian. Do they still act the same, have the same preferences, racism, etc.?
And I wonder if as you point out that WMAF daughters are different from AMWF daughters. I only know one of the latter and for all intents and purposes she basically seemed like any other white girl, but the WMAF daughters seem to act and associate more as Asians.
Curious to get your thoughts here.
I’d guess a WMAF daughter would be more unlikely to date Asian men than an AMWF daughter.
A WMAF daughter’s very own existence is an example of an Asian woman choosing a white man over an Asian man, thus heightening the status of white men and lowering the status of Asian men in her eyes, increasing her attraction toward white men and her ick felt toward Asian men. Vice versa for AMWF daughter, with it generalizing for daughters of mixed-race pairings in general.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link