From: baindur@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (Satyen G Baindur)
Subject: Re: IA double standard (was Re: age of "control"?)
Organization: HAC - Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Distribution: na
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 05:00:11 GMT


I came across this in soc.culture.asian.american.  I thought it said 
a lot of things that are (or will soon be) relevant to this thread, 
and a few more besides. A few specifics may not apply to the II/IA 
and IAM/IAF discussions, but almost all the generalities do. 

( As an aside, I'd like a sense of whether we, the South Asian 
community are willing to let ourselves be referred to as Desis - 
by non-South Asians, as you will find here. Or, like the infamous 
n-word and some African-Americans, if South Asians exclusively, in an 
appropriate context, can legitimately use the word. Personally, I've 
never been comfortable with the term at all, used by either 
group. But almost everyone I know continues to give it currency.
The connotations change with context and emphasis, but this is almost 
always lost on non-South Asians. Are we ready to be referred to as 
Desis by non-South Asians in the American context ? )


=============================================================================


ajh@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Alan Hu) writes:

>In article <2186@usna.NAVY.MIL> wdw@math2.sma.usna.navy.MIL (Wm. Douglas Withers -- math  FACULTY <wdw@sma.usna.navy.mil>) writes:
>>I am not Asian-American, but I have been following this group for a while
>>trying to get some insights.  Now from the commentary on the Montel Williams
>>show and from other remarks made here recently I get the impression that
>>there is frequently some resentment on the part of Asian-American men
>>towards Asian-American women having to do with interracial relationships.
>>
>>Why should there be such a sentiment? Then again, am I misreading something?
>>Anyone care to enlighten me?
>>-- 
>>Els Withers                   email: wdw@math2.sma.usna.navy.mil
>>Department of Mathematics     phone: (410)267-3192 / fax: (410)267-4883
>>United States Naval Academy
>>Annapolis, MD  21402-5002     Senri no tabi mo ippo yori...


>OK, let's try to nip this in the bud...



>This is a subject that refuses to die, and it always brings out all sorts of
>racist stereotypes, demeaning prejudices, obnoxious comments, and
>brainless posts (as well as wonderful, reasonable people like myself :-) ).

>OK so, here's a first crack at what will probably become my standard
>response to these questions.

>0.  Glossary of Abbreviations:  AAM = Asian-American Male,
>	AAF = Asian-American Female, CM and CF are similar for Caucasians.
>	Note that we are talking about Asian Americans, since this
>	is soc.culture.asian.american, so we won't worry about things like
>	Third World economic development here.  (Note to Ron Hira, and
>	other Desis who dislike the common American usage of "Caucasian"
>	as synonymous with "white":  Sorry, I haven't had time to rewrite
>	this yet!)

>1.  What do you all think about interracial relationships?  (Frequently,
>	this is a polite phrasing of "Don't you think it sucks that all ____
>	only go out with _____?")

>	OK, let's spell this out.  There is nothing wrong whatsoever
>	with an interracial relationship, as long as the relationship
>	is healthy in general.  It's far, far more important that the
>	participants are honest, trustworthy, loyal, etc., etc., that
>	they care about each other, that they communicate, and so forth.
>	Race should be an irrelevant triviality, as irrelevant as the
>	number of letters in a person's name or the Mersenne-primality
>	of one's birthdate.  If two people are really into hockey,
>	ancient Chinese literature, and neo-Marxist theology, why should
>	their respective races matter at all?

>2.  So why do people always make a big deal about interracial relationships?

>	People make a big deal because people are racist.  People
>	make all sorts of assumptions about culture and personality
>	based on superficial ethnic observations.  Furthermore,
>	nothing brings out racism the way interracial dating does.
>	My experience, both first hand and indirect, indicates that
>	it's usually men of the same race as the woman in the interracial
>	relationship that get the most upset.  A plausible explanation
>	for this behavior is that American (and Asian and Latin and
>	European and Islamic) culture is VERY male-dominated, so much
>	so that men are socialized into thinking of women as property
>	to be obtained, kept, and used.  Thus, interracial dating
>	pisses people off because one of THEM is stealing OUR women.

>3.  Wait a second, you (the author of this post) are always whining about
>	interracial relationships.  So you're admitting you're racist?

>	Well, yes, I'm still racist, but I'm trying hard not to be.
>	But interracial relationships is not an area that's problematic
>	for me.  See Question 1.  What many of the old-timers on s.c.a.a
>	are talking about is the disparity between the number of AF/CM
>	couples versus AM/CF couples.  According to the San Francisco
>	Chronicle/Examiner (Sunday _Image_ supplement, December 2, 1990)
>	[Look folks!  Real live hard data, not just someone's anecdotal
>	evidence.] AF/CM marriages outnumber AM/CF marriages by 4 to 1
>	in San Francisco.  In Sacramento the ratio is 8 to 1.

>	So what, you may ask.  Well, anyone with statistical training
>	knows to look for explanations anytime something deviates from
>	randomness.  If someone reports that a whopping 86% of people
>	born on Tuesdays marry people not born on Tuesdays, I don't
>	go looking for birthdate-based-self-hatred problems among
>	Tuesday's children to explain this outmarriage rate; one seventh
>	of the population was born on Tuesdays, so an outmarriage rate
>	near 6/7 = 86% suggests no birthdate-based influence.  Similarly,
>	if a community has a 10% Asian-American population, you'd expect
>	to see an outmarriage rate of around 90%.  The actual rate appears
>	lower, suggesting that Asian Americans are not well-integrated into
>	the rest of society, that Asian Americans prefer to stick together,
>	or that being Asian American correlates with some other causative
>	factor, like shared life experiences, for example.

>	Given that the male/female ratio in the population is roughly
>	1 to 1, the 4:1 and 8:1 ratios cited above deviate significantly
>	from randomness.  Thus, we reject the null hypothesis and search
>	for explanations.

>4.  That's easy to explain -- Asian guys are too sexist, or Asian guys
>	look feminine, or Asian guys have language and social-skill
>	problems, or Asian guys are geeks, or Asian guys are wimpy, or
>	Asian guys have small penes.  Besides, it makes sense that
>	Asian girls are in heavy demand, since they're oh so sexy
>	and nice and, like ultra-feminine, and they know how to treat
>	a man right, and if there are any hot Oriental I mean Asian
>	babes out there, please send me some email, 'cause I'm a really
>	nice guy.  Right?

>	Wrong.  These are some of the standard lame things people
>	say whenever this topic comes up.  Let's deal with these one
>	at a time.  "Asian guys are too sexist."  Well, granted Asian
>	culture is more overtly sexist than modern American culture,
>	but we're talking about Asian Americans here, so this is irrelevant,
>	except that the general confusion between Asians and Asian Americans
>	means that these stereotypes haunt Asian-American men.  Personally, I
>	know plenty of sexist and non-sexist men.  They come in all sizes
>	and colors.  The real problem is that MEN are too sexist, but
>	that doesn't explain the lopsided dating ratio.  "Asian guys look
>	feminine, or Asian guys are geeks, or Asian guys are wimpy."
>	Caucasian guys who look "feminine", geeky, or wimpy abound.
>	Anecdotally, the CM I see in CM/AF couples are not usually body-
>	building testerone-crazed types anyway.  And there are plenty
>	of Asian-American netters who are huge, muscular, and have threatened
>	to beat the shit out of anyone who insults them like this.
>	Again, it appears that these are not real problems, but the
>	*perception* of a problem may be.  "Asian guys lack necessary
>	language and social skills."  Again, this is irrelevant, since
>	we're discussing Asian Americans.  "Asian guys have small penes."
>	Sex researchers have repeatedly documented that penile size has
>	no relevance to sexual satisfaction.  Fixation on penile size
>	appears to be more of a trans-pubescent adolescent male fantasy,
>	rather than anything significant in social settings.  "Oriental
>	girls are meek and submissive and treat a man right and know
>	all sorts of exotic Oriental sex secrets to keep their man happy."
>	This is the classic stereotype.  It needs no further refutation
>	than going out and actually meeting some real Asian-American women
>	and being willing to see them as human beings rather than as
>	sex toys that also cook and do your laundry.  "I'm looking for
>	an Asian-American penpal."  These usually come from men with
>	non-Asian-appearing last names.  Some people are direct enough
>	to ask "Where are the women?"  I've actually responded to a couple
>	people who weren't overt in specifying the gender of the replies
>	they were searching for.  None has even bothered to acknowledge
>	my email.  I wonder if they'd be really friendly if my name had
>	been "Ellen Hu" instead.  Given that I'm root on my workstation,
>	I might run an experiment someday...

>5.  OK, those are stupid things.  What are some reasonable explanations?

>	There's two I remember offhand as liking.  The first is
>	that since we're living in a sexist, male-dominated society,
>	with sexist, male-dominated dating rituals, the males of the
>	socially dominant ethnic group (Caucasians) have a built-in
>	advantage.

>	The second (my personal favorite) I've hinted at already.
>	If you believe that AAM are more sexist, for example, you
>	will never give one enough of a chance to disprove your
>	stereotype.  Whether or not an AAM is actually sexist won't
>	matter; the stereotype has already poisoned the interaction.
>	These problems go all directions and can even have second-order
>	effects:  if I believe all AAF hate their ethnicity and only
>	want to date CM, I'm committing the exact same stupidity.

>6. So how do people end up with these warped perceptions that
>	have no relationship to reality?

>	People seem to form stereotypes as heuristics to guide
>	their behavior based on past experience.  What we actually
>	experience first hand, though, is fairly small compared
>	to the amount of information we receive through books,
>	magazines, newspapers, radio, the net, etc.  Furthermore,
>	our current stereotypes further color our perceptions,
>	influencing even how we perceive first hand experiences.
>	Now, let's suppose that the media has a pervasive bias.
>	Something like, say, "Women are dependent and not very
>	smart," or "Blacks are criminals."  Wouldn't this have
>	an enormous effect on our perception of reality?

>	Well, it just so happens that the pervasive media bias
>	about Asian Americans coincides exactly with many of
>	the problems Asian Americans face.  To a first-order
>	approximation, in the media, Asian Americans do not exist.
>	This belief generates many of the Asian-Americans-as-foreigners
>	racial problems that we face.  At a more detailed level (with
>	Asian Americans lumped with Asians, since that's what the
>	media does), we finded a marked gender-based difference in
>	stereotypes.  Asian men are portrayed as:  asexual martial
>	arts masters, asexual viet cong guerillas, asexual servants,
>	and asexual geeks.  Asian women get to be prostitutes, geisha,
>	prostitutes, repressed-daughters-named-May-Ling-of-cruel-oppressive-
>	emporers-(there's another male role)-waiting-to-be-sexually-liberated-
>	by-a-real-(white)-man, and recently, newscasters.  Strange, there
>	seems to be some similarities between what we observe here and
>	the stupid explanations given in question 4.  As another data
>	point, look at the (infrequent) interracial couples in films:
>	the man is almost invariably white.

>7.  Media bias shmedia bias, that's just for weak-minded people.

>	What is the circumference of the Earth?  How do you know?
>	Who is the president?  How do you know?
>	Who first invented movable-type printing?  How do you know?

>	If you were able to answer all of these questions based
>	entirely on first-hand knowledge and your acute mental
>	powers, I'll be thoroughly impressed.

>	My point is that everything we know is shaped by the media.

>8.  You seem to harp on media bias a lot.  Why the personal vendetta?

>	Confession time.  My name is Alan Hu, and I'm a media-slave.
>	From the time I started dating in high school until half-way
>	through undergrad, I exclusively dated Caucasian women.  In
>	my high school in rich, white suburbia, you could attribute
>	my dating preference to my lack of interest in the two available
>	Asian-American females.  But at Stanford (where the Asian-American
>	percentage was floating between 7 and 9 percent thanks to racist
>	bias in the admissions process), there were plenty of intelligent,
>	assertive, articulate, artistic, athletic, beautiful, and successful
>	(traits I find attractive) Asian-American women.  Somehow, I still
>	only dated Caucasian women.  It wasn't until Junior year, when
>	my (militantly Korean) roommate jokingly called me a twinkie
>	for my dating preference that I started wondering.  At first,
>	the knee-jerk answer, "well, I just find white women more
>	attractive" popped up.  But the key question became "Why do I
>	find attractive what I find attractive?"  After considerable
>	soul-searching, I realized I had internalized a standard of
>	beauty that excluded all but Caucasian women.  (Charlie's Angels
>	had been the definitive standard of beauty in my formative years.)
>	I had been swimming in media bias all these years without realizing
>	it.  I consciously examined my standards of attractiveness,
>	considerably broadened my dating behavior, and became much
>	happier.

>	So I have little patience for people who say "I just find X
>	attractive; it's like ice cream flavors."  People are NOT
>	ice cream.  I only ask that you ask yourself WHY you find
>	attractive what you find attractive.

>9.  Well, that may be a fine analysis, but don't just sit around and whine.

>	Excellent point.  On a societal level, look around you and
>	look into yourself.  Recognize media bias and attempt to
>	counteract it.  If you see something egregious, point it out,
>	write a letter to the editor, do something.  If you see
>	racism and prejudice in yourself, attempt to eliminate it.

>	On a personal level, if you're happy with your social life,
>	great, more power to you.  If you find yourself having difficulty
>	forming relationships, here's a few suggestions I've found
>	helpful over the years:
>		1.  Love yourself.  If you don't love yourself, how
>			can you expect someone else to?
>		2.  Take good care of yourself.  This is a corollary
>			to number 1.  Be happy.  Do things you enjoy.
>			Be actively involved in life.  A study on
>			loneliness indicated that married people are
>			as lonely as single people.  Being with people
>			doesn't cure loneliness; enjoying your own
>			company does.
>		3.  Improve yourself.  Honestly evaluate yourself.  If
>			you don't like something, don't feel bad about
>			it, but consider working on improving it in the
>			spirit of self-improvement and self-esteem.
>		4.  Don't fear rejection.  People have different tastes.
>			If someone is racist and rejects you, that's
>			his/her problem.  If someone can't appreciate
>			your virtues, that's his/her problem.  The right
>			person for you will love you for being you.
>		5.  Have a good time.  Life's too short to waste time moping.
>	A relationship book I particularly like is Intimate Connections
>	(yeah, I know it's a hokey title) by David Burns, MD.

>	May all of you be happy in your relationships...
>						--Alan J. Hu

-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Satyen Baindur  (baindur@eta.pha.jhu.edu)
Physics and Astronomy
Johns Hopkins University
Newsgroups: alt.culture.us.asian-indian