An Attraction Preference Is Never An “Ism”

Rarely do I venture into the culture conflict that plagues our social landscape with political correctness and the “blank slate” concept of human development. Attraction and dating information for post-divorce singles is my usual haunt and it’s a passion of mine. Sometimes, however, the small and pointless world of the social justice warrior (SJW) attempts to intrude into the fiercely realistic world of attraction, desire, and dating.

Through Twitter, I was informed of this recently published dreck from The Daily Beast. The article in question focuses on the gay community. But over the past few years, there has been discussion about individual’s attraction preferences in the context of dating between heterosexuals and gays.

If you’re a gay man, phrases like “no blacks” and “no Asians” aren’t just words that you’d find on old signs in a civil rights museum, they are an unavoidable and current feature of your online dating experience. On gay dating apps like Grindr and Scruff, some men post blunt and often offensive disclaimers on their profiles such as “no oldies,” “no fems,” and “no fatties.” Among the most ubiquitous are racial disclaimers like “no blacks” and “no Asians,” which are most frequently posted by white men.

A gay man defending himself from potential charges of misogyny because of his clear desire to not have sex with women provided a reasonable response:

Those who deploy these disclaimers defend themselves from accusations of “racism” by claiming that they merely have “preferences” for certain races over others. Wrote one gay blogger, “Don’t tell me I can’t have a preference! I don’t want to have sex with women. No hard feelings. Does that make me a misogynist?”

Naturally, a feminist in another article says much the same thing:

Claiming that someone is unworthy of associating with you because of race and hiding behind the flimsy excuse of sexual tastes or lack of hypothetical romantic chemistry is racist.

This is shame, pure and simple. The authors of those essays are using an old method to manipulate our attraction and dating behavior. It’s “attraction preference” shaming. Shame is crude, but fundamentally effective in the public sphere. Thankfully, online dating preferences are only barely public, much like an iceberg is mostly underwater and not visible. This ultimately saves dating from the horror of political correctness

The author of the second essay goes on to claim,

Race in itself has absolutely no bearing on a person’s effectiveness as a partner or their impact on a relationship.

It just doesn’t.

Well, if a potential partner’s race is sexually undesirable to the partner, that’s an extremely large impact on the potential relationship. Put simply, social shame can do nothing to increase sexual ardor and blood flow to the genitals. Desire is something that happens between our ears, not in the messy and dysfunctional world of social expectations. In effect, initial desire for another person is private, only manifested publically when an online dating profile is created and those preferences are readable by many.

Of course, the unintended consequence will be simply to drive people away from freely expressing their desires and words and using their actions instead. A man or woman eschews writing honest preferences and simply doesn’t send messages to, or reads messages from, those individuals whom they don’t find desirable for whatever reason.

There’s something else about these articles. They focus on the racial element of dating attractiveness preferences. All singles looking for love (or nookie) have a wide variety of preferences. At a basic level, heterosexuals prefer the opposite sex. Yet there is so much more involved. Height, weight, religion, personal habits, employment, status, are all of the many factors that are blended into attraction.

There are many articles and opinion pieces about this subject. They all reach towards the same conclusion, that attraction preferences, whether gay or straight, are somehow “crimethink” that go against a particular ideology. Will such an attitude lead to a whole raft of new shaming because all the preferences we have regarding potential romantic partners?

Dating is already challenging enough. Most people complain about the process. Such articles only heap ideological garbage on top something that is, fundamentally, a very private effort. Who we kiss is no one else’s business, especially not ideologically driven busy bodies trying to shame singles to fit into a cultural agenda. The actionable advice is this – ignore such attempts at shaming. Maintain your preferences as much as reasonably possible based on the economics of dating attractiveness, not the ideology of dating attractiveness.

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