One of the more delicate areas I dealt with while running a dating service for more than two decades was the issue of race, and more specifically racial stereotyping by prospective members.

Stereotyping in itself is a volatile issue, and at some point during intake interviews, I often repeated the phrase “While there is some truth to all stereotypes, there are certainly many exceptions to every single one.”

However, when one is dealing with a sample of more than 20,000 single, divorced, and widowed men and women, I feel confident and comfortable making certain statements in a column titled The Truth about Dating.

Yet I was still hesitant to write this column, until a reader sent me an article from The New York Times, in which the author, John Tierney, published a story about racial preferences in the dating world.

Moreover, the article cited a study titled Racial Preferences in Dating that documented the preferences of more than 400 participants in speed dating sessions at Columbia University. A quick reading of both the Times article and the Columbia study seemed to support my own anecdotal findings.

Regular visitors to Thailand will know the sight well: a wealthy, older Englishman arm in arm with the attractive Bangkok bar girl for whom he has fallen. Unfortunately, for 41-year-old, Marlborough-educated Toby Charnaud, his Oriental fantasy ended in bloody murder, according to reports now emerging from a Thai court.

Among the accused is his ex-wife, Pannada Laoruang, whom Charnaud met - yes - in a Bangkok bar, having sold his £2.5 million estate in Wiltshire to go travelling. The couple married in 1997 and lived for a time with his parents in England. When this didn't pan out, they returned to Thailand, where Charnaud bought two bars in the resort of Hua Hin.

Not long ago, I ran into an ex-boyfriend’s brother. This particular boyfriend — let’s call him Marvin — had moved to Japan five years ago, midway into our relationship. Things were never quite resolved between us, and I’d bitterly cut off all friendly relations after he backed way out after leading me very deeply in. Now I wanted to know what had become of him.

I panicked, but smiled. I managed to ask about the brother’s job, his music, his wife, their dog. Finally, heart pounding, I got up the nerve to ask him about Marvin. "Oh," he said brightly, as though he’d just remembered. "Marvin actually got married last week!"

Thank goodness Michelle Yeoh is on the scene in that new James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. Extreme feminists might say they should have made her James Bond and ditched the hair-helmeted, spy mannequin, and all his techno-gizmos.

But honestly, isn't giving Yeoh the Bruce Lee part revolutionary enough? Please, one major paradigm shift at a time.

Frankly, to this Asian American male observer, the thought of Yeoh as "Bond Girl," kicking some white male ass in the Battle of the Sexes, is oddly satisfying.

Daniel Hong’s piece came off as inflammatory. At the same time, I agreed with many of its points.

The following is long, but try to suffer through it and honestly think about its points.

It often boils down to this:

White men enjoy a “halo effect” due to western global domination in economics, entertainment, etc., derived from the lands and resources (which their ancestors stole from indigenous peoples). Some then exploit this power in unequal relationships.

I had never paid attention to the arrangement of the evening news anchors, a young Korean woman paired off with an old white man, at my local TV channel in Seattle until I heard Sheridan Prasso's lecture at the University of Washington the other day. "Have you seen an Asian man teamed with a white woman on the news?" she prodded. Prasso, a former Business Week Asia editor, in her new book, "The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient," asserted that the Westerners' misconstrued perception of Asian women made it impossible to create the odd pair.

Although Asians are the largest minority group at the University, making up approximately 12 percent of the student population, many students and faculty say they are oftentimes marginalized in the typical dichotomy of black and white race relations.

Coinciding with Asian-Pacific-American Heritage Month and Take Back the Night, two facebook groups about Asian women have had attention called to them by various students. One group was formerly called "Americans for the Increased Importation of Asian Women" and the second was titled "People for the Propagation of Asian Fetish."

In the latter part of the 20th century, hegemonic North American masculinity has come under both ideological and institutional attack. Despite the steady, incremental erosion to male privilege that the women’s movement have brought upon men, some gay and feminist theorists continue to link heterosexual, mainstream masculinity with power and “the exercise of power in its most naked forms,” asserting that masculinity is organized for domination, and hence, resistant to change because of power relations” (Connell 1995:42). [1]  These ideological assaults on heterosexual masculinity have occurred at the same time that global capitalist practices have altered the positioning of the male protector/provider. With American manufacturing moving off shore and targeting a predominantly female labor pool (Nash 1983; Ong 1987, 1991), jobs that once marked working class American masculinities have been reassigned, both re-located and re-gendered. [2]  Not only has decentralized production rendered once-secure blue collar jobs almost extinct, over the past 15 years, wages for men in the unskilled-labor market dropped over 25% (Swoboda 1992). The number of male white collar workers has also declined, and in the American employment frontier, growing service sector jobs increasingly target women whose lower wages undercut men’s employment opportunities. [3]  Indeed, statistics indicate that in 1984 only 42% of men between the ages of twenty to twenty-four could keep a family of three out of poverty compared to the 60% in 1963 who could do so (Pfeil, 1995). So despite women’s lagging wages, material conditions no longer permit men to construct and valorize a protector/provider masculinity for themselves.

Task Force, Asians groups team up on groundbreaking report aimed at dispelling invisibility

Americans of Asian and Pacific Island descent are among the fastest growing minority groups in the nation and among them an increasing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people are coming out of the closet.

Nevertheless, say community activists, Asian and Pacific Islanders living in the United States, even in major metropolitan area like New York City, still confront issues of cultural isolation and racist stereotyping, even within the queer community.

Marsha doesn't want to be known as the woman who used a dating service.

The 29-year-old Jersey City resident felt even more uneasy about the potential pool of guys that she would meet through a dating service.

But after 10 six-minute "speed dates" she had a list of potential suitors.

"There were a lot of surprises," said Marsha, who did not want to give her last name.

Like other minorities, many Asian-Americans feel pressured to marry within their culture. But meeting potential dates can be difficult when ethnicity is a factor, even in areas with large Asian-American communities.

And why has the administration taken the decidedly un-Christian approach of measuring our foreign aid in terms of absolute dollars rather than relative to our nation's ability to contribute? Recall: [Jesus] looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury; and he saw a poor widow put in two copper coins. And he said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had." (Luke 21:1-4)

Take a real pro-life position. Shame the Bush Administration with your copper coins. Give to Oxfam.

(Editor's Note: After a week of sustained criticism of U.S. contributions to the relief effort, Bush announced a further commitment of $315 million on Dec. 31.)

By Anita Pleumarom
©1997 The Nation (Bangkok)
March 9, 1997

Equipped with the concept of sustainable development and Agenda 21 - the central document of the Rio Earth Summit - it has become possible to turn virtually every development activity into an environmentally friendly venture. With the arrival of sustainable industrial and agricultural production, sustainable logging, and sustainably managed wood plantations, hydro-power dams and golf courses, we seem to have made a big leap forward to save the Earth.

Help the worst-off. Give to Oxfam.

©2003 MensAsia.com

Phuket

Phuket is still tying to find its place in the tourism market of Thailand. It was known in the past by foreigners as the place for beautiful beaches, backpacker heaven, and where they filmed James Bond's famous beach scene in The Man With the Golden Gun. It does have incredible beaches and little island hideaways where you could spend weeks without ever seeing another living person. But increasingly it is becoming known as the second Pattaya both by foreigners and Thais alike.

The local economy has seen a large increase in sex tourism and a large decrease in "normal" tourism. The Phuket government is attempting to bring back "normal" tourism (as is all of Thailand) by really cracking down on the sex industry. They have made some major closures of well known establishments and deported some well known expats. All this lends itself to looking over your shoulder to see what's next.

The majority of research on romantic relationships has tended to focus on marriage, with relatively less attention paid to dating. This study examined the relationship between Asian American dating, both interracial and intraracial, and a variety of factors thought to be associated with dating in this population, including acculturation, ethnic identity, attractiveness, interracial dating experience, ethnicity of friends, parental influence over dating, and density. Participants were administered measures of these variables and were asked questions regarding their likelihood of dating both Asian Americans and White Americans. An interesting pattern of results emerged when the variables were put into regression equations to predict both interracial and intraracial dating. Findings are presented and implications discussed.

The United States population is increasingly becoming more racially and ethnically diverse; indeed, a special issue of Time magazine (Jamieson & Seaman, 1993) spoke of "The New Face of America: How Immigrants Are Shaping the World's First Multicultural Society." This special issue addressed not only the changing demographics of the United States but also the way members of this multicultural society have increasingly interacted with one another in different facets of life, including marriage. Interracial relationships have been discussed in a number of forums, from scholarly journals and books to mass market magazines and newspapers, where the topic has ranged from the academic to the emotional. A general conclusion is that interracial marriage in the United States is increasing and that Asian Americans make up a significant proportion of people who are involved in such relationships.

This is in response to the column, "Stereotypes of Asian Americans limit dating scene" (Viewpoint, March 2). I'd like to comment that although Annalisa Burgos begins by mentioning how the stereotypes of Asian American females and males are analogous, she ends by stereotyping Asian American males herself.

Burgos implies that the lack of interracial dating by many Asian American males is due to their lack of intelligence and character. For example, she writes, "If more Asian American men would approach women outside of their race in the first place and prove that they are intelligent and worthwhile boyfriends, maybe there'd be more of these types of couples."

Several years ago I saw an article but now can't recall the name of the author, except that it was an Asian American woman who was married to a Caucasian male, and she was writing to defend the integrity of inter-racial marriage. I have tremendous respect for those who are willing to speak their minds thus admire her a great deal for her courage.

I have nothing against romance, be it inter-racial or not. It's only natural, in my opinion, that romance often starts with some physical attraction that ends up with marriage. In terms of mating and sex, we humans haven't really evolved away from the animal kingdom yet. Or have we? If two kids grow up and gain their maturity through their love and marriage, it's nothing but a beautiful story. If an a woman falls in love with a man with passion and live happily thereafter, I wish them the best as I do to everyone. Love shouldn't have any skin color or cultural boundaries.

But before you start complimenting my open-mindedness, I have to tell you that there was one sentence written by that woman that has lingered in my mind for quite some time: the most beautiful aspect of her marriage, I am paraphrasing her, is that her husband "John thinks that I'm exotic." If I remember it right, she also said that was also the beginning or almost of the basis of their marriage. To be frank with you, I did not like the message conveyed in that sentence.

'Love Boat' tour program is about more than study

Jay Su had to travel 12,000 kilometres to find his true love.

At first, the Oakville resident refused to visit his native land, where his parents were born. But at their insistence, he went on a summer study tour to Taiwan in 2001 to reacquaint himself with a culture that was always present but still somewhat foreign.

Little did he know that he would end up with his girlfriend of three years and a realization of just how Canadian he was.

Parents Often Care More About Race than Teens Do

Celeste Acain had a steady boyfriend for nearly half a year. It didn't matter that he was white and she was Filipino -- neither really cared.

To his parents, however, their relationship was unacceptable.

``They pretended to like me, and I seriously thought they did, until he told me that they hated me,'' said Acain, a junior at Santa Teresa High School in San Jose. ``I was astonished, not only because they lied and tried to hide what they really felt about me, but because they didn't like me for a really stupid reason.''

Although Acain and her boyfriend eventually broke up, they are part of a growing trend in the United States. According to a USA Today poll conducted in the late '90s, almost 60 percent of teens have dated outside of their race.

While this figure suggests the nation's teens are becoming more open to interracial dating, some parents have yet to reach the same level of tolerance. Many still insist their children find ``a special someone'' of the same ethnicity.

I think the dating imbalance, i.e. more Caucasian males with Asian Females versus Asian males with Caucasian females, is caused by a racist media in America that portrays Asian male as undesirable, asexual, nerdy, and so on, and Asian female as the ready toy for any white guy, no matter how dorky, as Wayne's World or Star Trek amply illustrate for us.

For instance, there are eight hundred Asian female anchors, one for each major metropolitan area in the United States. But there is only one Asian male news anchor in the entire United states. There are eight hundred thousand films and movies with Asian female love interests with white guys; there are about three films with Asian guys as the love interest of any ethnicity. Usually, if Asian males appear in films, he usually comes out as the dorky underling of a white man. If you are puzzled by what I mean, go rent the video tapes of Gung Ho, Mr. Baseball, and others.