Senate Race and Sexual Attraction

Good for you.

I for one definitely can't. Hell, I have enough trouble telling some caucasian people apart from someone from Asia. My girlfriend is mistakenly assumed to be at least part Asian pretty frequently. And I'd be willing to bet internet good-boy-points on most white people in America not being able to tell them apart by originating country. So, my default is to use "Asian" as an overall identifier, just like i'd use "Caucasian" instead of "Irish" or "Australian".

 

No it hasn't. To clarify, I mean it has never been individual in regards to the object of attraction.

We've been having quite a robust discussion over whether it is acceptable to label whole ethnicities "unattractive."

You, by contrast, keep circling back to the idea of trying to pressure someone into liking a particular individual. That's not the same thing. There's a world of difference between arguing "Maybe you shouldn't make an a priori argument that all people of Caucasian ancestry by necessity ugly, regardless of their actual appearance or anything else" and arguing "How come you didn't take Jennifer to the Sadie Hawkins Dance?!"

Can you really not see the difference? For one, if you're talking about individuals, then unless we're literally scanning through Google image search, other factors would come into play in deciding whether you feel attracted to that person or not. The slippery slope you're trying to warn against doesn't even exist.

EDIT: Apparently this thread has become deeply bizarre. I don't have enough relevant experience to reliably distinguish between those three ethnic groups, no. But I know people that can do so. It's neither a magic trick nor some innate talent. This whole undercurrent of its suggested impossibility strikes me as about as bigoted as anything in the thread thus far.

 

You can do it @solojones ! after the Scottish accent thing, I will never doubt.

 

Why do people doubt her? I've no issue with it either - you racists literally cannot tell?

If you know and take the time to differentiate it isn't hard. Just because you can't doesn't mean nobody can, or she can't - it just means you don't care enough to learn. Lao wei bai chi.

 

Wocky, I thought you and solojones both claimed no one race/ethnicity is made up of one set of traits that apply to all members? So how could anyone really tell?

 

Koreans aren't a problem but I had a couple of good Korean friends growing up and lived near the big Korean diaspora.

I do like how a bunch of JC'ers just played the "all Asians look the same" card without any irony at all.

 

CT, I don't take her as literally making the claim that she could inerrantly identify any one of those three ancestries on sight flawlessly.

I am interpreting the claim more generally to mean "I can recognize some of the most common phenotypic features in each group well enough to distinguish them from one another." Because not everyone share these traits, you're absolutely right that no one is going to be perfect at it. There are too many possible variations, for too many different reasons, not the least of which being the artificiality of the groupings in the first place.

 

They don't all look the same.

I just can't spot the differences.

Like how someone that hasn't played a lot of video games wouldn't be able to distinguish between Battlefield and Call of Duty.

 

No, so, this is actually a good guide:


It's a composite of several other features, but from our left to our right it goes:

Korean, Chinese, Japanese - if I am not mistaken.

 

I do think there's a difference between "I don't find [racial group] attractive" and "[Racial group] are not attractive". The latter construction is racist, IMHO, because it purports to present a universal truth rather than a personal preference. But that's not what I understood this discussion to be about.

 

Ok so since we seem to be getting bogged down in technicalities regarding the meaning of “innate” I’ll try another approach.

If a child got marooned on a desert island and was able to gather enough food to survive but obviously was never brought up within any cultural or social environment, would that child not develop a sense of pleasure or pleasant disposition towards certain foods over others based upon their taste and texture and without the social/family frame of reference?

And if that child then grew into adulthood and eventually came into contact with other people,would he or she not feel sexual attraction towards some of those people moreso than others without the baggage of specific social norms regarding beauty ?

Absent any socialisation or cultural learnings, a human being will still develop and experience attraction towards others surely. Sexual attraction and sexual arousal are not purely products of our social environment.

 

Holy turds! I have the power too! I was able to pick out each.

 

Someone fetch me a boat and a child. I have an experiment to conduct.

 

Honestly, yeah. I'd agree. I think it's faulty to say that every single individual is formed by, say, nature more nurture, or vice versa. When I was a 16-year-old back in 2003, I was like, "Every individual is formed by genetics, environment, experience, and choice, and the most important are the latter two." It's a bit faulty to make blanket statements about any collective of humans, and I've learned we shouldn't do so. It's like saying that all humans are bisexual and they just get lazy or some crap like that. Lol. Society doesn't change people that much, I think. Even if people don't act on it, they will love whosomever they love in their own minds, whether that is compassionate love...or something out there and terrible. In other words, some people are loving sweet kids (young and old), while most people are selfish-posterior jerks.

To keep it real, I long for the day that the real world is like Zion in the Matrix sequels. People just love each other based on personality and skin color preferences become a thing of the far distant, primordial past. Whether a person is monogomous or polyamorous or whatever, they just love people, and the skin color (fair or dark) is all beautiful.

 

sorry to go down this subtopic rabbit hole. Because I grew up in a university town, my high school graduating class included a lot of other faculty kids, including a first generation Japanese-American, a first generation South Korean-American, and several first- and second-generation Chinese-Americans.

Should I have known where they were from by looking at them? What happened instead was that I met them, found out where their families were from, learned their names, thus finding out more about Japanese, Chinese and Korean names. Where I live now I have a Chinese-American neighbor and a Vietnamese-American neighbor. When I met them and found out their names, I found out the basics of their ethnic/cultural backgrounds.

I'm trying to figure out why I would ever want to be able to type anyone I know racially by their physical appearance rather than by getting to know them and finding out their name?

I recently went to a wedding with a Croatian-American bride and a Serbian-American groom. I had no idea at times who was with which group. Which guests at the reception were the Croatians and which were the Serbians? I had to listen to which language they were speaking when not English, or I had to ask, and I don't feel bad about it.

 

My wife is Japanese. Yes, I'm sure.

 

Lol @Rylo Ken not being able to tell Croatians apart from Serbians. Solojones could tell the difference with her eyes closed just by sniffing their body odor.

 

Someone fetch me a blindfold and some sweaty east europeans. I have an experiment to conduct.

 

Good job you guys letting Ender derail the topic. He's the one by the way you bragged that zero other westerners besides himself know any difference between Japan, China, or Korea. All I said was this is ridiculous bluster. Plenty of people know each look but also culture.

 

Rylo: It's not a meaningful or necessary skill. The only thing I think was objectionable was the way people reacted to sj's claim. I don't know whether it was personal animus against her, or incredulity about the skill in the abstract, but neither is pleasant. The latter is pretty nakedly racist for reasons I will come to momentarily below.

LOH: I think you've come at this from a very flawed direction. Yes, there are certain predilections in human behavior that precede meaningfully structured thought. Young babies prefer faces/face-like configurations, and people are more attracted to humans than non-humans. Humans are in fact pretty well pre-dispositioned to pick up on subtle differences in faces and use those to distinguish between individuals. They have a harder time doing so with other creatures (which is why "they all look the same" arguments dovetail neatly into arguments about animality/subhuman status, my earlier point of concern in the thread). But that's not really what we're getting at.

This discussion emerged out of two specific, related claims. The first is that it is inappropriate to make cultural critiques on the basis of attraction since we don't consciously decide who to like. The second is that it is inappropriate to ask that individuals reflect on the meaning of what they find attractive, for precisely the same reason. You are essentially asking that not only the individual, but society writ large be absolved of all responsibility in this process.

I don't see where that argument holds. It doesn't suffice to simply say there is a component of innate disposition. One would have to argue that the innate component is the major or controlling one. I see no evidence of that, whereas we have ample evidence of the profound influence of culture. Following the same family across time, Africans born and raised in indigenous African societies seemed to find themselves beautiful, whereas we know from the Jim Crow Era doll experiments that a significant fraction of those same people in a society that aggressively enforced the notion of black inferiority found blacks deficient or unattractive, whereas after significant liberalization and legal reforms, the pendulum has again swung and the younger descendants of that same family my now report, as CT shares, that they not only find blacks attractive but find others unattractive. If this were primarily heritable, there would be no accounting for these wild swings in preference. Whereas it correlates very neatly with the broader society.

You may not enjoy reflecting on the meaning of attraction. And whether one should attempt to modify what they find attractive--let alone if that's even possible--is a completely different debate. But there's pretty clear evidence for strong influence from experiential/environmental factors, and as creatures that can exert control over their environment, it's not all illegitimate to think about what that means.

 

and I also backed you up on it, when they called you out, if you care to read. There's a reason I'm not being called out on it, you should meditate upon that.

EDIT: @Rylo Ken - I guess because walking up to a Japanese or Korean and saying "Duìbùqǐ - cèsuǒ zài nǎlǐ?" would not only yield no results at a point where time may be of the essence, but also would be considered rude.

 

Why would “time be of the essence?” Are you pretending to be James Bond? Is there a ticking time bomb? What exactly is going on?

I was equally confused about why he wouldn’t just speak to someone in a language he knows, instead of assuming someone is, at a minimum qudarilingual.

Glad you called out sj’s supposed showboating though.

 

It can be difficult to tell whether or not you're being flippant or sarcastic. The reason nobody called you out is likely because your tone was ambiguous.

 

yeah no how is me simply not knowing the features of a nation racist? when at the same time you claim that you can't put all people of a race in the same box cus they will have different features? i really, honestly don't get what's so wrong about this.

people mistake me for a swede all the time when i'm travelling. is this wrong of them too? cus i honestly don't expect people to tell the difference (and i don't either, between norwegians and swedes).

please enlighten me if this is ****ing clueless of me cus i really don't get it.