Asian dating scene vancouver

Sometimes I worry that I’m being too critical. After all, preferences are preferences. When I open up my incognito browser to look at porn, is it not preferences that guide my click path? Is being into smooth skin and almond-shaped eyes not the same as being into freckles and tight butts? The line between objectification and attraction is blurry — and we’re talking about the choices made between two consenting adults.

“What you consider fetishization is maybe just, for the first time you’re experiencing a girl [being] attracted to you for something outside of your control,” said Tran, who made the point that conventionally attractive white men or women won’t usually question why someone is coming on to them. Is my discomfort coming from my unfamiliarity with being seen as desirable?

I brought up this question with my Canadian-born Vietnamese friend Julius Crowe. Last summer, despite his reservations and the discouragement of his Asian American friends, he started to hook up with a white girl whose dating profile explicitly stated her strong preference for East Asian males.

"I did question what I was doing the moments that I was with her,” he said. “I was definitely looking for a hookup. I saw an opportunity. I took it. But at the same time, it made me question my own self-respect.”

“It’s like we're just some sort of experience, like we’re not people behind it,” said Crowe.

The concern is not that women are becoming attracted to our physical features — I’ve had women of my own race admire my eyes and dolphin-slick skin before, and it never felt weird. But when non-Asian girls exclusively date Asian guys and obsess over K-pop culture, I have a feeling it’s about more than how I look.

"You immediately see it in the person’s behavior,” said Crowe, describing the gut feeling he gets when someone’s attraction to him is more about his race than who he is as an individual. It’s the projection of an identity onto the physical traits of a body. When someone is into freckles, they’re not implying a preference for docile, “soft” masculinity — it’s exoticization.

We both don’t really wish to be exoticized. Which is confusing, because we do enjoy being desired. We want to be sexy, and objectified, and lusted over.

Crowe compared the feeling to being chosen last in a baseball team draft: “As soon as we get picked, we're like Do we take this option? Or do we not and then not get any for a while? It's a lot of conflicting feelings.”

These feelings of wanting to be desirable mixed with not wanting to be boxed in by our race are shared by other groups of Asian Americans. Any Asian American woman can show you some snapshots of the multiple racially motivated “pickup lines” she gets when she dares to navigate the online dating space. Heck, there are even Tumblr feeds and illustrated lists showing how women must navigate the space of being targets of “yellow fever.”

Gay and Asian YouTuber Collin Factor spoke about how it felt to be both sexually fetishized and sexually deflated by Toronto’s gay community in his video “NOT INTO ASIANS.” “No fats, no fems, no Asians” is often written right onto Grindr profiles without reserve. According to Factor, guys who date him are immediately pegged as “rice queens.” Others cheapen his relationships by labeling them as being based on preference or fetish, ignoring the real connection he has with his partners. It seems the judgments and perceptions of others are often the things that spoil it.