Jeff Yang’s Asian Pop column and a post by The Black Snob at The Dregublog last week broach a familiar topic for Asian Americans: dating and sex. Who Asian American men and women are and aren’t doing it with is always good fodder for Internet chatter. If anything touches a nerve, it’s when you mix race and sex. Not much new ground is covered by Asian Pop or The Black Snob.
More Asian American women date or marry outside their race than their male counterparts. Asian American men and black women are viewed as undesirable and share many of the same obstacles. As such, they could be a good match for each other if nobody else will have them.
I was intrigued by the by the social networking sites for Asian men and the non-Asian women who love them, such as AznLover.com, that Jeff talks about, although this subject made a blip on the radar a few years ago with Newsweek’s “Asian men are on a roll” article.
I’ve got articles filed away from the early 1990s that deal with these subjects and have written about it myself, though this was a long time ago when I was single and full of angst. Asian-Nation.org slammed me, and in retrospect, I don’t disagree entirely with the criticism. I don’t know if I would write that column now, at least the conclusion. I’m not as insecure today as I was in 1998.
It has been 10 years, and we’ll probably still be talking about this 10 years from now.
This post can also be found at Hyphen magazine’s blog.