skin color

[Uneunsae]

As for who I like, well I happen to like Asians with medium or darker skin. Which is a shame because many of them try to stay as fair as possible. Because I'm mixed, I'm olive, but very fair and I would absolutely love to have typical Asian colour.

[ChadCoxRox]

As for who I like, well I happen to like Asians with medium or darker skin. Which is a shame because many of them try to stay as fair as possible. Because I'm mixed, I'm olive, but very fair and I would absolutely love to have typical Asian colour.

You were not rude in being honest Uneunsae. I hope you find more and more peace with each day that passes. You are certainly deserving and I imagine your beauty rests in that acquisition, especially in your bringing a treasured perspective to GS!

[Uneunsae]

Thank you for valuing my point of view.

[Adam]

I was always attracted to fair-skinned blond guys --- until I met my BF. He's Black, Hispanic and Caucasian (Irish)..

I was attracted to him for reasons having nothing to do with his appearance. I mean, I didn't just look at him and think YES!! like I used to do with those sexy blond dudes. But the more we talked, the sexier and more attractive he got.

I think that when we decide we have a "type", we're limiting ourselves.

[Bluelight]

That's totally normal. Personally, I prefer guys within my own race, but there are exceptions. It's not "racist", it's just the way I'm wired. Some people don't have any preference in regards to race, and others strictly prefer their own race while some are exclusively attracted to people outside their own race. Contrary to the tendency of people to slap labels on everyone else, this does not make anyone racist. It's just nature at work, everyone has their own unique set of preferences, and skin color plays a role in those preferences more often than people are willing to admit.

[Buzzer]

That's totally normal. Personally, I prefer guys within my own race, but there are exceptions. It's not "racist", it's just the way I'm wired. Some people don't have any preference in regards to race, and others strictly prefer their own race while some are exclusively attracted to people outside their own race. Contrary to the tendency of people to slap labels on everyone else, this does not make anyone racist. It's just nature at work, everyone has their own unique set of preferences, and skin color plays a role in those preferences more often than people are willing to admit.

I do not think people having preferences or types is racist. I do think that those preferences and types are heavily influenced by a lifetime of messages and images in our culture which tend to reinforce ideas of attractiveness towards the look you see over and over again in TV, magazines, ads, media. And I think the legacy which created those notions of attractiveness very frequently was racist.

I don't believe we simply tumble out of the womb only liking one thing, or hard wired to. If anything, especially for men, our genetic predestiny is to want to not be picky and spread our code pretty far and wide. There's massive evidence of early man breeding heavily with neanderthals, a different species altogether (let alone race!), and that's even possibly the reason they disappeared. We simply aren't wired to be incredibly selective by our genes.

No one has an 'obligation' to re-think the influences that contributed towards what they're attracted to, but I definitely do not think it's simply inborn and just a coincidence that these tendencies very strongly mimic the dominant beauty standard we're presented with in our respective cultures.

[Bluelight]

I do not think people having preferences or types is racist. I do think that those preferences and types are heavily influenced by a lifetime of messages and images in our culture which tend to reinforce ideas of attractiveness towards the look you see over and over again in TV, magazines, ads, media. And I think the legacy which created those notions of attractiveness very frequently was racist.

I don't believe we simply tumble out of the womb only liking one thing, or hard wired to. If anything, especially for men, our genetic predestiny is to want to not be picky and spread our code pretty far and wide. There's massive evidence of early man breeding heavily with neanderthals, a different species altogether (let alone race!), and that's even possibly the reason they disappeared. We simply aren't wired to be incredibly selective by our genes.

No one has an 'obligation' to re-think the influences that contributed towards what they're attracted to, but I definitely do not think it's simply inborn and just a coincidence that these tendencies very strongly mimic the dominant beauty standard we're presented with in our respective cultures.

I have no doubt in my mind that the media influences what we find attractive, but I feel that genetics has something to do with it as well. All that aside, what I was really getting at is that no one should be made to feel ashamed for their preferences.

[Buzzer]

I have no doubt in my mind that the media influences what we find attractive, but I feel that genetics has something to do with it as well. All that aside, what I was really getting at is that no one should be made to feel ashamed for their preferences.

Oh I definitely agree. There are traits we associate with strength, good birthing survival (in women), powerful mates, good providers, etc. etc. That's all true. I just think these will have, at best, a slight differentiation as far as how frequently they appear in given individuals within a certain race. There is after all more genetic diversity within any given race than there is difference between one racial group and another. (That is one of the primary reasons that, scientifically, we do not actually have 'races' at all, and our socially widely understood concepts of race are socially and politically created.) I just don't think there's any gene for "I only like blond-haired blue-eyed people." Such a specific exclusion will almost undoubtedly be created by exposure, upbringing and culture.

[Virge]

I don't really know that I'd qualify that as a 'culture' really, certainly not in the sense we'd think of in terms of what tends to overlap with race or ethnicity.

I don't know any of these, at all. There are white people from parts of the South or Appalachia I have far more trouble understanding than the accent of any minority group I know of who has been here for "centuries." I'm hard put to even think of a group that has been here that long that still has any defining accent at all. Maybe you are confusing ethnic/cultural minority with (recent) immigrants?

If you're including something like "Ebonics", I've never regarded that as any more exotic or mysterious (or difficult to understand) than an urbanized variant of a southern dialect. That's more or less what it is.

It is completely unclear to me from your post who or what you feel is guilty of not understanding the difference.

I was intentionally vague trying not to widen this out to a huge scale... I had to think long and hard before settling on the words I chose trying to not point fingers and LO and behold fingers went to pointing exactly where I was hoping they wouldn't!

I was trying to apply that in the B_R_O_A_D_E_S_T way without mentioning religions and the cultures that some of them have.... while also including all those who don't even attempt to speak or write a form of English that would short circuit a spellchecker. Include urban ebonics if you want, and rural white southern protestants also. Up here blacks speak better English than I do. Thanks to my room mate being from the South, I've learned to distinguish Hillbillies from Southerners, from Old Money accents from even Southern Jews from Cajun from "PWT" ....... I can barely understand Hillbillies and PWT.

Mastery of a common language is a primary tool in social mobility --- like it or not.

I spent almost a half hour on the phone with tech support for my phone Sunday with a young guy in Bangladesh who was a pleasure to talk with and I made sure I took time to give feedback about him after the call was done.

Last week I spoke with a woman, an American citizen, with a required college degree, calling from the Veteran's Administration. I needed a translator for the conversation and ear bleach when it was over. "I has your doctor's report..." "has you got email?..." There was hardly a sentence without a version of a word that does not exist in any known dialect of English. I corrected her after about the fifth time she called my surgeon Na-GOU-en to tell her it was pronunced like Nu'win (Nguyen) but then she corrected me, "we pronounces it Na-GOU-en"
EAR BLEACH.

There's no such thing as a Lakota native American who doesn't pronounce English like a college graduate... but you need to meet some Hutterites just once in your life and wonder how they can ever hope to function in the real world.

As for "recent" immigrants to the US..... I stand in awe of almost all of them for their use of English --- and their American spirit.

Nothing racist was intended. I was just addressing the reality of the situation without trying to offend anyone...

[Buzzer]

I was trying to apply that in the B_R_O_A_D_E_S_T way without mentioning religions and the cultures that some of them have.... while also including all those who don't even attempt to speak or write a form of English that would short circuit a spellchecker. Include urban ebonics if you want, and rural white southern protestants also. Up here blacks speak better English than I do. Thanks to my room mate being from the South, I've learned to distinguish Hillbillies from Southerners, from Old Money accents from even Southern Jews from Cajun from "PWT" ....... I can barely understand Hillbillies and PWT.

Mastery of a common language is a primary tool in social mobility --- like it or not.

I spent almost a half hour on the phone with tech support for my phone Sunday with a young guy in Bangladesh who was a pleasure to talk with and I made sure I took time to give feedback about him after the call was done.

Last week I spoke with a woman, an American citizen, with a required college degree, calling from the Veteran's Administration. I needed a translator for the conversation and ear bleach when it was over. "I has your doctor's report..." "has you got email?..." There was hardly a sentence without a version of a word that does not exist in any known dialect of English. I corrected her after about the fifth time she called my surgeon Na-GOU-en to tell her it was pronunced like Nu'win (Nguyen) but then she corrected me, "we pronounces it Na-GOU-en"
EAR BLEACH.

You wouldn't get any argument from me that communication skills have degenerated quite a bit in the age of text, internet shorthand, smartphones and all the other questionable ways that people today are growing up learning to regard as proper communication. Nor that there are tremendous gaps in not just the quality of educations people receive but, being blunt, the degree to which many Americans care to get anything out of school or apply what they've learned to reflect that they received much of an education at all in how they express themselves.

I'm just really not sure that we could tie either of those things as having a clear relationship with people identifying with a different culture or cultural heritage, hence my confusion as to why it was coming up and to what specific groups you were referring to.

With the specific example you gave, it'd frankly be impossible for me to believe she was not a first generation immigrant and a relatively new English speaker. If she wasn't, then she had a learning disability or a speech impediment. Vietnamese Americans born and raised here certainly don't share en masse any sort of incomprehensible accent or dialect when speaking English. If anything, Asian Am's raised here are routinely mistaken as white over the phone. The new arrivals with thick accents certainly aren't hard to understand out of any sort of willful refusal to learn English or defiance of the mainstream culture -- which, just being honest, was the implication I was picking up in your original post.

There's no such thing as a Lakota native American who doesn't pronounce English like a college graduate... but you need to meet some Hutterites just once in your life and wonder how they can ever hope to function in the real world.

As for "recent" immigrants to the US..... I stand in awe of almost all of them for their use of English --- and their American spirit.

Nothing racist was intended. I was just addressing the reality of the situation without trying to offend anyone...

Just for the record, I never believed anything racist was intended. I was just honestly mystified what groups you were hinting at as far as cultures who've been here a long time but still somehow maintain trappings or accents that make it impossible for them to operate in the mainstream.