Race and sexuality
Concepts of race and sexuality have interacted in various ways in different historical contexts. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race is understood by scientists to be a social construct rather than a biological reality. Human sexuality involves biological, erotic, physical, emotional, social, or spiritual feelings and behaviors.
United States law has a complex history regarding race and sexuality. In the 1800s, resistance to mixing between blacks and whites led to the passage of laws banning their intermarriage. At the same time, a fear of Asian women's sexual appeal led to the complete ban of Chinese women from migrating to the United States, as it was believed that they would seduce married White men.
Studies of online dating and physical attractiveness have indicated that race may be "gendered", as it was repeatedly found that East and Southeast Asian women were considered more attractive than other groups of women. Gendered racial stereotypes exist within the LGBT community, which have been described as both alienating and empowering.
Race has historically been a factor in sexual fetishism, with the Asian fetish, a preference for women of Asian descent, and the fetishization of Black men being prominent examples.
Attitudes towards interracial relationships
In the United States before the Civil Rights Era
After the abolition of slavery in 1865, white Americans showed an increasing resistance towards racial mixing. The remnants of the racial divide became stronger post-slavery as the concept of whiteness developed. There was a widely held belief that uncontrollable lust threatens the purity of the nation. This increased white anxiety about interracial sex, and has been described through Montesquieu's climatic theory in his book The Spirit of the Laws, which explains how people from different climates have different temperaments, "The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave." At the time, black women held the "Jezebel" stereotype, which claimed black women often initiated sex outside of marriage and were generally sexually promiscuous. This idea stemmed from the first encounters between European men and African women. As the men were not used to the extremely hot climate, they misinterpreted the women's lack of clothing for vulgarity.After the opening of Japan by Matthew Perry, word began to spread in the United States about the seductive femininity of Asian women. A fear that Asian women would seduce White men and destroy White families led to the passage Page Act of 1875, which prevented Chinese women from entering the United States.
There are a few potential reasons as to why such strong ideas on interracial sex developed. The Reconstruction Era which followed the Civil War started to disassemble traditional aspects of Southern society. Now, the Southerners who were used to being dominant were no longer legally allowed to run their farms by practicing slavery. The Southern Democrats were not pleased with the outcome of this reformation. This radical reconstruction of the South was deeply unpopular and it slowly unraveled, leading to the introduction of Jim Crow laws, which legally discriminated against African Americans, There was an increase in the sense of white dominance and sexual racism among the Southern people, Tensions heightened after the end of the civil war in 1865, and as a result, the sexual anxiety which existed in the white population intensified. The Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1867, an event which triggered violence and terrorism which targeted the black population. When Jim Crow laws were eventually overturned, it took years for the court to resolve the numerous acts of discrimination.
Allegations of sexual harassment were often used as justification for the lynching of African Americans. Emmett Till was an African American teenager who was lynched by two white men. Till was lynched because his assailants believed that he had whistled at a white woman, but in actuality, he had whistled for his own reasons.
Challenges to attitudes
After World War 2, a large number of Asian women were married to US servicemen. Marriages to Asian women initially faced legal obstacles due to pre-existing laws against interracial marriage. However, the determination of American servicemen to marry Japanese women resulted in widespread defiance of the law. The high reputation of Japanese war brides generated sympathy from the general public about the difficulties faced by interracial couples, leading to increased tolerance for interracial marriage. In 1947, the War Brides Act was amended to give citizenship to the children of American servicemen regardless of race or ethnicity. Ultimately the effort to normalize interracial marriages involving Japanese women led to the passage of the McCarran-Walter act, which repealed the Immigration Act of 1924, thereby loosening restrictions on immigration and citizenship requirements for non-Northwestern European immigrants.The prevalence of interracial couples may demonstrate how attitudes have changed in the last 50 years. A case that received heightened publicity is that of Mildred and Richard Loving. The couple lived in Virginia yet had to marry outside the state due to the anti-miscegenation laws present in nearly half of the US states in 1958. Once married, the pair returned to Virginia, and were both arrested in their home for the infringement of the Racial Integrity Act, and each sentenced to a year in prison, a sentence which was ultimately overturned by the United States Supreme Court.
Racial preferences
Heterosexual community
Online dating
Race affects how likely a person is to receive responses on online dating websites, however this varies greatly by gender and race. Research has indicated a progressive acceptance of interracial relationships by white individuals. The majority of white Americans are not against interracial relationships and marriage, though these beliefs do not imply that the person in question will pursue an interracial marriage themselves. In 2007, fewer than 5% of white Americans wed outside their own race; however this does not imply that whites are less likely to enter interracial relationships, because the larger size of the white population means that intermarriages do not make as large of an impact on white marriage rates as they do on non-white marriage rates. By 2017, the rate of outmarriage among whites had doubled to 11%.In 2021, the University of California published a comprehensive analysis of online dating trends in the United States. The authors posit that the rise of online dating has exacerbated underlying racial biases in dating.
The data from this research show that heterosexual White men are more likely to be messaged by Black, Asian, and Hispanic women than men who match their race; yet when men respond to women, White women do not have the same advantage. The authors attribute this difference to socioeconomic status being important to women, and physical attractiveness more important to men. Same-race preference is more common among White people than non-White people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
The authors show that Black daters and especially Black women are especially disadvantaged in online dating. They also show that straight White women and gay White men are less likely to message Asian men compared to their own race, but Black and Latina women are equally likely.
In most countries, certain racial groups are often perceived as more physically attractive than others, and this often varies by gender. Black women and Asian men are among the least desired demographics in heterosexual online dating, with their opposite gender counterparts being more likely to date interracially. In the United States, several studies have found that East Asian women are the most desired group of women, while East Asian men are less desired. Some view this to be the result of the hypersexualization of Asian women in popular media, while other studies attribute the higher rate of interracial marriages to a simple preference for the physical features of Asian women.
A 2009 study analyzed online dating trends among white men and white women. The authors found that black and Asian men faced high rates of exclusion from white women, while white men were more likely than white women to exclude blacks, but were otherwise more willing to date interracially.
Yancey, et al. report African American preferences: the most preferred partner belonged to the Hispanic group, followed by white individuals and then Asian Americans. Both Hispanic and Asian Americans prefer to date a white individual, and both are least willing to date African Americans. In all significant cases, Hispanic Americans are preferred to Asian Americans, and Asian Americans are significantly preferred over African Americans. Hispanic Americans are less likely to be excluded in online dating partner preferences by whites seeking a partner, as Latinos are often viewed as an ethnic group that is increasingly assimilating more into white American culture.
Asian men and black women face more obstacles to acceptance online than their opposite sex counterparts. According to Kao, et al., the dating disadvantage of Asian men persisted even when they had advanced educational backgrounds and significantly higher incomes. Increased education does however influence choices in the other direction, such that a higher level of schooling is associated with more optimistic feelings towards interracial relationships. White men are most likely to exclude black women, as opposed to women of another race. A 2009 study found that a subset of white male online daters were open to dating women of all races except black women.
High levels of previous exposure to a variety of racial groups is correlated with decreased racial preferences. Racial preferences in dating are also influenced by the area of residence. Those residing in the south-eastern regions in American states are less likely to have been in an interracial relationship and are less likely to interracially date in the future. People who engaged in regular religious customs at age 12 are also less likely to interracially date. Moreover, those from a Jewish background are significantly more likely to enter an interracial relationship than those from a Protestant background.
A 2015 study of interracial online dating within multiple European countries, analyzing the dating preferences of Europeans, Africans, Asians and Hispanics, found that most races ranked Europeans as most preferred, followed by Hispanics and Asians as intermediately preferable, and finally Africans as the least preferred. Country-specific results were more variable, with more diverse countries showing more openness to engage in interracial dating. The researchers noted that Arabs tended to have higher same-race preferences in regions with higher Arabic populations, possibly due to more traditional cultural norms on marriage.
Currently, there are websites that target specific demographic preferences, such that singles can sign up online and focus on one particular partner quality, such as race, religious beliefs or ethnicity. In addition to this, there are online dating services that target race-specific partner choices, and a selection of pages dedicated to interracial dating that allow users to select partners based on age, gender and particularly race. Online dating services experience controversy in this context, as debate is cast over whether statements such as "no Asians" or "not attracted to Asians" in user profiles are racist or merely signify individual preferences.
Non-white ethnic minorities, mostly Indians and East Asians, who feel they lack dating prospects as a result of their race, sometimes refer to themselves as ricecels, currycels, or more broadly ethnicels, a term related to incel. Racial preferences are sometimes considered as a subset of lookism.