DAT!NG ETHN!CALLY: [({“Who You Truly Are” is probably quite boring.)}]

Dating Ethnically: “Who You Truly Are” is probably quite boring, or it’s no more interesting than anyone else.

Having grown up as an Honours student has two advantages: one sees delicate matters such as race very differently from the average person, and one also sees a LOT of Asian women.

Honestly, who knows how old they are? Not I.

Before I lead you to believe otherwise, allow me to assure you that this article has little to do with praising Asian women in an elitist fashion. So much of what makes East Asia beautiful in general defies verbal classification, and it would be an affront to the Spiritual traditions which helped to form these nations to elaborate.

What this article responds to is a deeply troubling term: “yellow fever”. I’ve grown up with this expression in the back of my mind, and while its proto-Fascist implications have dissuaded me from fearing it, thinking that at a certain age I would transcend it, I am reaching an age wherein I’ll have come to accept that some people never “grow up” by my standards, and neither will I “grow up” by everyone else’s. 

What “yellow fever” implies is a sort of bizarre phobia. Predominantly, it is the fear of white men dating Asian women, and, as the term implies, it puts the blame upon white men for even CONSIDERING the possibility.

Horn-rimmed glasses are optional but preferred.

Every civilized nation in the World of Men tends to idealize its own women, and universally each nation tends to hold its women to some standard of Beauty. Some of these standards are certainly superficial, though the admiration of them is indicative of refined taste, as one admires a flower. 

Let’s keep in mind that a truly environmentally conscious society not only takes steps to preserve the environment but takes time to appreciate it; human beings are no better than plants, so admiring a woman as one admires a flower is deeply progressive. Yet even on the strictly human level, or perhaps the mammalian level, beauty is reflected in upbringing. National identity is, for instance, very important in Japan, wherein outsiders are often satirized by the media. In particular, I think of Asuka from Evangelion, a German girl who is a sort of misfit owing to her domineering, competitive temperament. Obviously, the Japanese nationals in that show demonstrate more tact. 

In short, the notion of what it means to be a beautiful woman depends upon where you happen to be. Yet this is not entirely RELATIVE. If we were incapable of escaping our own cultural conditioning, human beings would never have REACHED the civilized state to begin with. Some standards for beauty, in other words, carry universal weight, not so much in the sense that All Rational Beings must agree to these standards, but rather in the sense that even outsiders can appreciate them to the point of veneration.

It’s not simply a natural phenomenon, since even genetics are a cultural process of evolution derived from the selection of mates. Yet this is where I stand on (the topic of) Asian women: everything which is stereotypically beautiful about them, alongside the rest of their culture, is beautiful to me, not because I have some skewed, Western conception of them (a presumption so prejudicial that I can’t believe it passes for politically correct) but rather because I am not bound to a strictly American aesthetic standard. The same drive which inspires me to avoid Russian women compels me to explore women of other nationalities with other standards for beauty and behavior. I don’t simply keep the Other at a distance with the passive-aggressive intent of assimilating Her into some global standard. I respect the Other AS an Other, and instead of trying to “get to know her as a person” (depending upon what brand of American television she watches, what gym she attends, or what her favourite household pet is) I actually want to know what it is like to be an Asian woman, and I see no reason to apologize for that in a progressive society. 

Besides: my dog is a Pekingese, and I love him unconditionally. I also practice Buddhist meditation and play Japanese video games. There is simply no way around the fact that Asian culture saturates society. “Who you are as a person” is largely the product of your identity as a Consumer; very few people alter the very course of human history, and yet we can respect people if we know WHERE THEY ARE COMING FROM. Hence that English idiom which refers to someone’s origins also represents that person’s point of view.

In 2018, Kim P. of creditdonkey.com reported that a meager seventeen per cent of married couples were “interracial”. One would expect, of course, that most monoracial couples would be Asian, since Asians account for a majority of the world’s population, whereas most black people, for instance, would be involved in interracial couples, since it’s simply improbable that the person you fall for according to who he or she “truly is” will just HAPPEN to be black, especially considering that many African Americans celebrate the life and teachings of Martin Luther King. As it turns out, only eighteen per cent of African Americans marry a non-black, whereas Asians lead the world in terms of biracial coupling, with twenty-nine per cent of their population marrying non-Asians. Clearly, “yellow fever” has some historical precedent as well as some teleological value, and the sentiment is not entirely one-sided.

Why, then, do women continue to feel “fetishized” by men for being Asian? Simply put, the same force that drives black people into isolation is that force which drives Asian women away from white men, etc. Every nationalist wants to believe that his women are the finest in the World, but he refuses to agree with an outsider who could not possibly understand True Beauty. It’s not just that white men tend to keep people segregated. Human beings segregate themselves. Those few of us who lower our blinders and fall in love with another culture’s standards lead the way progressively.

Norman Reedus (left, obviously.) plays also the titular role in Hideo Kojima’s new game, giving “players” in every sense someone to root for.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]