Soulmates?

I hope not.

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If only I were less bossy.

My Race-Based Valentine., by Jenée Desmond-Harris, Time via Yahoo! News. Emphases mine.

This Valentine's Day, more of us than ever will be looking for love online. And if recent studies are any guide, relatively few women on mainstream dating sites will bother to respond to overtures from men of Asian descent. Likewise, black women will be disproportionately snubbed by men of all races. Yes, even though America has been flirting intensely with a postracial label for some time, color blindness is not upheld as an ideal in the realm of online romance. On some sites, it's not even an option. (See the 25 most important films on race.)

Chemistry.com requires users to identify their ethnicity; like eHarmony, it considers members' racial preferences when suggesting matches. Match.com lets users filter their searches by race. The site's profiles include space to indicate interest (or lack thereof) in various racial and ethnic groups. But after Jennifer House, a black woman in Los Angeles, perused one too many profiles only to find the guys had checked off every box except African American, she changed her strategy. "Now I look at that section first so as not to get my hopes up," she says.

[ . . . ]

. . . a study published last year in Social Science Research examined 1,558 profiles that white daters living in or near big U.S. cities placed on Yahoo! Personals, which, much like Match, lists 10 racial and ethnic groups users can select as preferred dates. Among the women, 73% stated a preference. Of these, 64% selected whites only, while fewer than 10% included East Indians, Middle Easterners, Asians or blacks. (See a nerdy Valentine's Day guide on Techland.com.)

The story is a little different for the men, 59% of whom stated a racial preference. Of these, nearly half selected Asians, but fewer than 7% did for black women. Why? One theory offered by the study's lead author, Cynthia Feliciano, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, is that men's choices are influenced by the media's portrayal of Asian women as being hypersexual and black women as being bossy.

I keep explaining this phenomenon to my friends. I express to them that it affects me personally and how unhappy it makes me feel. Yet half of my friends still deny that the above situation is an actual problem. So I doubt that they will ever be convinced, even with an 87-year-old American institution acknowledging that racism continues to be a problem in 2010.

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So, it's not just me?

Dating 101: Dealing With the Race Factor, by Arnold Chao, Yahoo! Personals.

Internet love is not colorblind, UC Irvine study. Emphases mine.

[UC Irvine sociologists] Cynthia Feliciano and Belinda Robnett collected data from Yahoo personals between September 2004 and May 2005, randomly selecting profiles of people ages 18-50 in the Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Atlanta metropolitan regions. While white men were more open to dating outside their race than white women, both had specific racial preferences. White men preferred Asian and Latino dating partners to African Americans; white women were more likely to exclude Asian men.

According to Feliciano, negative portrayals of African American women and Asian men in popular culture could contribute to these preferences.

"Stereotypical images of masculinity and femininity shape dating choices and continue to be perpetuated in the mass media," says Feliciano, sociology and Chicano/Latino studies assistant professor. "The hyper-feminine image of Asian American women contrasts greatly with that of Asian men, who are often portrayed as asexual."

In comparison, the image of the strong African American woman is at odds with idealized notions of submissive and frail women. This may explain why African American women faced high levels of rejection among men, researchers say.

"Cultural portrayals of African American women in the media continue to stress traits seen as negative, such as bossiness," Feliciano says.

[...]

Researchers' analysis of minorities' racial preferences showed that Asians, African Americans and Latinos are more likely to include whites as possible dates than whites are to include them. This suggests that whites, as the dominant group in the U.S., remain in the privileged position of being able to facilitate or hinder the full incorporation of minorities.

Or maybe I'm a crooked pot without a crooked cover due to my "bossiness." I'm sure that's it.

Also, way to be timely, Yahoo! and UC Irvine. I re-reported this phenomenon two years ago, and Racialicious still reports on interracial relationships regularly. Their Craigslist personals article from two years ago is still my favorite. I also enjoyed the open thread on dating that followed a year and a half later.

Furthermore, the survey should have examined same-sex relationships as well. Way to be heteronormative, sociologists.

Ooh! I liked this post, too, by the Frog Princess. I have been saying the same thing for years, yet it is so hard for my friends to comprehend my outlook and my situation. As the Frog Princess says about the open thread on Racialicious, "The article and the comments really validated what I’d been feeling my whole life but that I’m not allowed to say in public because it makes some people uncomfortable."

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I'm not an expert, but I play one on the interwebs.

Ever since I was a little kid, my friends have asked me for advice on relationships and dating. I'm not sure why, since I don't exactly have guys knocking down my door. That is, sane guys my age. I'm still attracting the old and/or crazy. Just today I had a relative stranger asking me if I was married, if I was hiding a ring on my hand, and did I have any plans for the weekend. The man was 50 if he was a day. Seriously, I do not know what possesses people. At least he didn't think I was a gas station prostitute.

Back to my friends. In the past few weeks, four separate friends have asked my opinion on online dating. This isn't that weird, considering we live in the 00s and my friends and I are in prime childbearing age. I guess I'm not the only one worrying about my vajayjay closing up from lack of use. Instead of going back to each of my friends and telling them about the article I read on Racialicious today, I've posted the link here, along with an excerpt: Craigslist Personals: Desperately Seeking Diversity Training, by Wendi Muse.

Some themes I noticed early on include:

1. Nicknames and food references are excellent ways to allude to race.
For example, white women are referred to as “vanilla” or “snow bunnies,” black women are referred to by a myriad of names involving “cocoa” and “chocolate,” and Latinas are almost always referred to as “spicy” or “exotic.” I haven’t seen “geisha” just yet used as a reference to Asian-American women, thank goodness, but I’m sure it’s next.

2. People like using juxtapositions a lot to imply stereotypes about certain groups. For example, I see a lot of things like this: “I am looking for a woman who is slim, drama-free, intelligent, and who has no children. No black or Latin women, please.” Though sentences like that are not connected, you can clearly connect the dots on your own.

I have neither drama nor children. Hmph.

There is more hilarity in the actual article, as well as in the numerous ads Wendi could not include for matters of, shall we say, poor taste and explicitness. (I hope that's a word.)

At the end of the comments that followed, I found the video below, explaining why asian guys can't get white girls.



I don't see why Phillip is having such difficulty finding a girlfriend. He's way cute. And much better looking than his white roommate with the "hairy arms" that mesmerize all the Asian girls. Maybe Phillip could contact one of my many pale single friends, since he's into the white ladies.

#

Now, from the "someone needs to pee on him" files, R. Kelly Says He's One of the Great Ones.

R. Kelly, the embattled bad boy of R&B, made it clear this week that he is much, much more than a suspect in a notorious child pornography case. In fact, the prolific soul singer and songwriter told Hip-Hop Soul magazine that he’s the Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali of today.

Huh?

That’s right. Robert S. Kelly, who is awaiting trial for allegedly performing the most unseemly sex acts with an underage girl (for which he has pleaded not guilty) and catching it all on tape, told the magazine:

“I'm the Ali of today. I'm the Marvin Gaye of today. I'm the Bob Marley of today. I'm the Martin Luther King, or all the other greats that have come before us. And a lot of people are starting to realize that now," according to The Chicago Sun-Times.

Mmhmm. I liked the response posted by YaDezire1 at the BET.com boards:

i cannot do anything else other than laugh when i read something like this. i am starting to think that r. kelly is not in his right mind at all. he hasn't done anyhting [sic] other than make some good music and have sexual relations with many underage girls, and now he wants to go and compare himself to people who actually made a difference in this world!!! crazy!!

Crazy indeed. I'm still laughing at the idiocy of the self-described Pied Piper of R&B. What a doofus.