By desireability, I'm speaking in purely a sexual capacity. As in, someone's sexual capital, or how sexually valued they are. Personally, I've documented a trend of black and Asian men having considerably lower sexual capital than white men, even when the said men were rated more attractive than their white counterparts.
I certainly can't speak for everyone, but these findings have mirrored my own as a gay black male.
Well, online atleast. Allow me to elaborate.
You see, when I go out to the bars, clubs, and other predominately gay establishments in my city, I don't seem to have a problem. In fact, quite the opposite--I seem to be the center of attention quite often, with men and women alike praising and complimenting me on my "beauty" (their word, not mine).
Online, however, my experiences have been in stark contrast -- that despite my apparent attractiveness in person, I am not desireable, or sexy, or sought after. That I am in fact, to be avoided, unengaged, and otherwise ignored.
I had always felt this to be the case, so to test my hypothesis, I made a number of profiles on gay oriented sites -- some social-oriented, others sex-oriented. I made two profiles -- one of myself, with a number of pics, some shirtless.
The other, a fake profile, of course, of a white male who looked to be about my age and had similar stature and musculature. To make it ultra-scientific and unbiased, I had friends of mine seek the advice of a number of random people on his attractiveness, and as how it related to mine (with headshots of us both), and almost all agreed that I was more attractive.
Then, I repeated the process with an Asian guy and another white guy (except this time, both were fake). Again, most people polled agreed that the Asian man was more physically attractive than the said white man.
My question is, if the two minorities were deemed more attractive, then why on all of these sites did the white profiles receive more activity, more e-mail messages, more compliments, more offers for sex, and more friend requests, than the non-white ones, respectively?
And no, the interest wasn't just confined to other white men either, the white profiles were more popular among blacks, Asians, and Latinos as well.
Just to clarify, I'm not asking why whites are preferred almost exclusively over minorities by many gay men -- I think that's been adequately explained in a number of other race-related threads.
What I'm asking is why in the hell are average white guys preferred over highly attractive minorities? It seems as though many gay men are so indoctrinated, enthralled, and bound by Eurocentric standards of beauty that they are unable to appreciate the physical attractiveness or sexiness of non-white minorities.
The ironic part is that the white men in these experiments were not even beautiful, they were at worst average, and at best attractive, but nothing extraordinary. So the trend here seems to be, in US gay circles atleast, that a white man, any white man, is almost always preferred to a black or an Asian man, even when the minorities are much more attractive.
I've always contended that people express their true selves over the anonymity of the internet -- while gay men might "appreciate" a good looking black or Asian man, it's quite clear they'd rather, collectively, hook up with the average white man.
And don't even get me started on the alarming number of profiles which made it clear that the person was not interested in blacks. More alarmingly, was the number of profiles from BLACKS themselves with these "preferences", while stating a specific interest in white men.
Seriously, can someone please explain to me what the hell seems to be going on here? I'm going to sleep with the BEST looking guy, regardless of his ethnicity.
Apparently, for many gay men, this is just not the case.
What are your thoughts?
*** To note, these experiments took place in Austin, TX