Getting tired of this No asians No black etc.

It's manipulative and narrow-minded to say that whites are most desirable. I don't even know how one can get to that conclusion. Through statistics or ? How do you meassure desire? And to blame media and colonialism is just ... Most modern shows show nothing but interracial couples, as if it is the media's agenda to be politically correct. Which in this case doesn't trouble me.
Then there are also TBytes of interracial porn videos which might not be the best example, but still shows that seldom people pay attention to race nowadays.

 

I wouldn't reject anybody because of their race. I don't exactly understand what race is; it's not the same as skin color. Finding a particular skin color more attractive is no different than liking a certain eye color, hair color, deeper voices, big muscles, certain jaw lines, etc. They are qualities of who are you. And people care about looks, whether you like it or not.
Straight women reject men all the time because of things like no six pack, bad breathe, bad hair, being too short, etc. Lots of these qualities (such as bad breathe) simply depend on the day and time you meet him. Others (including, but not limited to, race and skin color) are completely outside one's control. They say a straight women decides within 10 seconds of meeting a man if she would date him. If this isn't judging a book by its cover, I don't know what is.
If you complain about racism with people who don't want to date particular races, you have a boatload of other things to complain about too in this area. My only hope is that you find all of them equally bad, or have a pretty good darn reason to pick out certain ones.

 

As a white guy if I see someone say no asians or blacks. Then I don't message them. Just think of it as an indication of an arsehole.

 

If you have the background in sociology and anthropology try reading about white supremacy and how this has affected colonised countries and their perceptions of beauty. In countries that have darker skin tones, there are skin lightening products and they sell fast because having fair, lighter skin tones are considered "beautiful".

In the country where I work, I've listened to the locals talk about how they desire lighter skin tones, it is mostly based upon the ideals that were brought by western colonisers. Even religion was one reason. Jesus Christ is portrayed as a caucasian male. Now when you present these images to an indigenous group of people who look completely different from these colonisers who are supposedly bringing their white saviour, how would they feel? Not to mention, these peoples were made inferior by being given roles that were socially demoralising- slavery for example. Also, there is a common conception that having dark skin was "dirty".

I've read a book on iconography and it is quite sad that most of the images on it that depicted tribal people/indigenous peoples/natives were very ugly with features that wre almost monkey like while those who were white were dressed in flowing robes and flawless skin.

If you follow simple logic:
Fair, white skin = good, superior, upper class
Dark, brown skin = not good, inferior, lower class

In East Asian (China, Japan, Korea) cultures though, they are different. Brown skin means poor because their skin was made brown due to constant exposure to sunlight from doing manual labour. Note that two of the countries mentioned have never been colonised by western powers.

And for your information, it is media's agenda to shape people's perception of various issues. I studied media and communication at university and to be honest, media does a lot of things to shape people's opinions about matters. In journalism, it's just looking at the story from different angles. In entertainment media, it isn't a matter of just being politically correct, it is also "appealing" to the modern audience.

So no, it is not narrow minded nor is it manipulative.

 

This is completely unsubstantiated and not true. You admit it indirectly in later part of your post (see quote below). There is tons of literary and pictorial evidence that preference for lighter skin is nearly universal and that it predates colonialism by millennia. Ancient Egyptians, Persians, Aztecs, Chinese, Indians, you name it, have all preferred lighter skin. The reason? Well, you actually mentioned it yourself. Darker skin implies manual outdoors labor which means lower societal level. Lighter skin implies indoor work which more often than not meant upper class administrative or scholarly work. This was true when the Europeans arrived to these countries and it has remained in place in the colonized and uncolonized countries alike. The same whitening products can be found in China, Thailand and Korea which were never colonized by European powers. Arabs have long traditions of keeping black slaves and shunning dark skin predating Islam. Is that Western induced too?

So why would you think this cannot be the reason in all the other countries?

 

Well, I was speaking of gay hook up apps, specifically, but even then, plenty of folks disapprove of interracial relationships (yep, in 2015), and many worry what their friends, family, etc. will think.

I'm also not sure if interracial relationships alone should be used as a benchmark for determining how far we've come in terms of racial equality. It's a positive step, but only shows one part of the picture.

@Euler, true as that may be, I have a hard time believing East Asian countries *haven't* been influenced by The West, in terms of beauty standards. It might have strengthened an already prevalent bias.

I know white people didn't exist in Mexico a thousand years ago, but now you mostly see blue and green eyes, blonde hair, European features on Mexican media. No way that's down to Pre-Hispanic traditions. Many actors and other entertainers are from places like Argentina and Spain.

 

I think I explained it fairly well on my last post and with regards to countries, I think I did mention that it was different with East Asian cultures. You did add a few examples more so that is a good thing. While it is very valid that it could also be the case, you also cannot disprove that the west has made this belief all the more detrimental to those who belong to these societies- especially societies that have been exploited and used by western colonisers. (African Slavery)

Also, you cannot discredit my experience as untrue because you weren't the one who spoke to the individuals. If it's only one thing I learnt from doing research in the humanities, it is that if you have a respondent who tells you something and you can prove this data through triangulation, then it cannot be false because it is a phenomena for that selected group. Whether it be relevant or not depends on the type of study you do. From those that I spoke with, they found women from outside their race more beautiful. Some of there reasons were blue eyes, thick eye brows, fair skin, and bone structure. They also cited that those who had European/White ancestry were more beautiful. Where do you think did those ideas come from? These women were certainly not around 100 or 200 years ago but they got it from the telly, the movies, their mixed actors and actresses. It is what they see.

My mum has worked with different indigenous peoples in the pacific for her PhD in the 80s and in some of their oral legends, their gods were always fair-skinned people in which according to one of her sources might have been exploited by the earliest European colonisers because they were bringing in Christianity. Those who had lighter skin were superior because they resembled the Gods they worship. (I tried to search for some academic books but I do not have time to read them all, you might want to search for "South East Asian History" and "South East Asian Religions Pre-colonisation")

By now, you should notice that I am mostly talking about places that have been colonised and what I am trying to say is that, there really is an effect on how people view skin colour.

I think that this has drifted too far from the main topic. On top of that, I suggest you read on European colonialism, white supremacy, and racial ideology. Although I wasn't very clear earlier about colorism being cultural and at the same time acquired through other means, to say that the west has nothing to contribute to it is ignorance.

 

All this talk of skin colour is really alien to me. I'm British and South Indian, but I've never heard a gay white guy talk about skin colour in my entire life - even once!

The only place where people talk about skin colour is in Asia (and maybe some British Indians and British Pakistanis). A lot of the East Asian guys, and probably most North Indians too, tan to a brown skin colour and you see a lot of British Whites tanning when they go abroad.

I don't look at skin colour but I do look at face shape and ethnicity:
I prefer certain face shapes, and generally find the face shapes of certain ethnicities to be unattractive (e.g. a lot of Arabs just look like ugly whites).

For me, certain ethnic groups are cooler than other ethnic groups (one one side there's the Nordics, on the other side there's Pakistanis and Blacks).

I understand that a lot of people look at skin colour, but in the context of gay culture, it just ends up looking like anti-indian racism, especially when you look at the state of gay porn and real-life gay relationships (I know blacks are marganilzed but look at the number of Latinos and South-East Asian who wear brown skin).

I also don't personally see anything attractive in white skin as an attribute of a human. I find white skin ethnicities attractive, but I find several brown skinned ethnicities more attractive than several white skinned ethnicities. I take for example the number of South Indians, who grow up in western culture and drop North Indians (some end up dating blacks too).

+ White skin is considered to be a sign of prosperity in all of Asia, except in isolated parts of South-East Asia and Southern India. The concept originated with the idea that people who looked "tanned" were laborers who spent all-day outside in the sun; unlike western culture, it was expected that men stay indoors most of the day and shelter themselves from the sun.

++ A major difference between Blacks and Asian Indians is that an interracial couple between a South Indian and a White or East Asian, will produce a white-skinned offspring. So there's a drive in Indian culture to make sure one's child has white-skinned offspring so that they get better life chances.

 

Somehow missed your reply earlier. You are right that this is far off topic and I'm not going to press on continuing it any further. However, I just have to add a couple of remarks.

There are a lot of things that I cannot disprove, including this. I cannot disprove there is an Invisible Pink Unicorn or that there are aliens. I don't know about humanities but at least in the actual sciences the burden of proof is on the one who is making the claim. You make the claim that European colonialism had this effect and it's your job to prove it, not mine to disprove it.

I'm sure you have had such conversations with actual people but that says nothing about the phenomenon in general or that your questions and interpretations are not biased to some direction.

As a matter of fact I have and most of the "research" I have encountered in these fields does not meet even the basic and primitive tenets of what constitutes scientific investigation. Sure interviews with handful people can be interesting and reveal some important insights but if the participants are not even randomly selected no inferences about the population in general can be made.

OK, I don't know your particular country (like a small Pacific island) where you are but even if your observations were accurate in there it says nothing about situation in the rest of the world in countries such as India or Thailand.

 

I do have racial preferences but I wouldn't reject anyone I was attracted to. I know it is technically racist but I don't see it as that big of a deal since it is just a preference. Preferences can be overridden if I like the person enough. It's one thing to have a preference but it's another to discriminate and be a jerk about it.

As for dating apps, like I said before I am not a fan of them. Dating (hook-up apps) aren't really intended to look for long-term relationships. Most of the people on them are looking for shallow relationships or one-night stands. They're intended to be shallow ways to look for people.

 

Look, you have to just take these things in a stride, some people will just be that way. It used to bother me a lot too, but now I realize that bigots will be bigots.

Now I don't think it's wrong or racist not to be sexually attracted to people of certain race or whatever the factor is. But there's a way of expressing that in a respectful way, and when someone posts something like "no fems, no asians, no blacks" then it's just a sign that you're better off with someone else.