The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

I've never really liked Asians.

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Pretty inflammatory title, isn't it? Hints at more than simple sexual preference, if you want it to.

I get what Jenn was talking about, though. I think most people tend to have a 'type', a specific look to the person they might want to canoodle with, and it's rarely intentional, it just is. Now, maybe she might have done better to express her general indifference to Asian men outside of a Chinese restaurant, but she was just being honest, though she might have been a little more delicate in the delivery.

When it comes to sexual attraction, I have to admit that I am basically white bread. It's not something I put a lot of thought into, though. My 'type' tends to be tall, sometimes long-haired, sensitive, artsy, with a love for heavy guitar. More often than not, it's a white thing, this type of man, and it's just what I'm into. It isn't learned, it isn't conditioning, I'm fairly certain. My sister's boyfriend through high school was Filipino, and even though she lovingly referred to him using derogatory nicknames which he often encouraged, we rarely thought about the fact that he was Asian. He was a part of our lives for three years, often had dinner with us and also had long, terrific bouts of anger over the phone with my pouty, attention-seeking sister, but it never was an issue, his Asian-ness. That we thought he was secretly gay was a different issue altogether. No confirmation on that just yet.

I also don't often find myself attracted to black men, or Middle Eastern men, or Hispanic men. There are, of course, exceptions, but I only recently noticed this about myself, that I don't usually experience attraction to men of different ethnic backgrounds. There is a newscaster on the CBC with an impossible Indian name that I sometimes find myself staring at, because his face is like some kind of art, and I have experienced a slight tingling in the nether region when looking at Blair Underwood and Taye Diggs, but I can't recall any others. Even while watching the Jane Campion movie 'The Lover' in which a young girl embarks a journey of sexual discovery with an older Asian man, I couldn't get into it. I just didn't find him to be especially attractive, I suppose, though it only occurred to me now why I didn't find that movie to be particularly sexy.

I find it equally strange when people of one race become preoccupied with yearning for a mate in a very specific, alternate race. Like this guy I knew in my twenties, who only would date Asian women. He thought they were so exotic, so naturally beautiful, and, more than likely, subservient. Like little dolls, he used to say, and it never made sense to me, that forced attraction, almost like he couldn't think about any other kind of woman because he would betray his agenda. Also, my cousin, who developed this strange fascination with black men, a loud and deliberately intense one, and I always felt like it was an insult to black men everywhere, this attitude that she was going to revere them because no one else she knew did. For the record, she married a white guy, but she still regularly updates her Facebook page with photos of her favourite black men. Today is Prince. I just checked.

What I think, though, is that if I were often in the company of black (Do we capitalize black? Isn't it an incidental fact, rather than an ethnicity? Where are we on this now?) men, or Hispanic men, or Middle Eastern men, or Indian men, or Inuit men, I might eventually develop an attraction based on the intimacy of conversation. I have no doubt I would begin to find myself interested in someone I could relate to intellectually, that their physical appearance would begin to mean nothing once an emotional relationship was established. Case in point is M. It never occurred to me when I was younger that I'd one day be in love with a man with short blonde hair and blue eyes who wears socks with shoes in the summer. It was the connection that did it. Once that was established and I was squarely in the middle of love that I began to understand that his looks didn't matter much to me. Of course, when I saw the photos from his youth in which he had the washboard abs, the waist length hair and the lanky legs I was unable to separate the image from the man. That said, my former 'type' was always dark-haired, and dark-eyed, and slightly reckless. M. was a different kind of cat, altogether.

So, to this point, I suppose I am saying that I don't really think anyone could ever state with absolute certainty that they aren't attracted to Asians. You'd have to live in China or Japan or the Philippines, or some other Asian country for years without ever experiencing attraction in order to be able to say that. I think, what we're essentially getting at when we say something like 'I've never been attracted to black men' is more likely in the vein of 'I haven't spent a great deal of time with many black men, haven't gotten to know many on an intimate level, so I haven't had the opportunity to develop an attraction to one. It's highly probable that if I ever got to know a man of a different ethnicity on an intellectual level that an attraction might develop.'

We are attracted to what we do not fear and what we know, more or less. Unless it's vampires. Chicks dig vampires.

Me, I've never really liked vampires.