A few miscellaneous questions/points (would love it if koreindian responds! Others obviously also welcome to share thoughts ;) )
Let me preface this by stating a couple obvious things that bear repeating when discussing such a touchy subject. People’s value is not determined by their physical attractiveness. I wish for the flourishing of all people.
Have you read Halwani’s piece “Racial Sexual Desires”, or any of the other literature in applied ethics concerning this topic (e.g. Robin Zheng’s paper, Stephen Kershnar’s response)? Do you and Halwani just define racism differently, or do you have substantive disagreements?
Regarding the racial×gender disparities in interracial romantic pairing, what is wrong with the theory that it comes down to physical attractiveness? You ask “Asian men are under-masculine, Black men are over-masculine, but White men are *chef’s kiss* just right?” Whether white men are “just right” is in the eye of the beholder, but in aggregate, based on the data, they are preferred (in the countries where these studies are done), and I see no reason this preference could not be based on holistic physical attractiveness.
I would describe the “masculinity/femininity” axis as just one (albeit important) axis among many axes along which people might differ in attractiveness. Height, strength, blemishes, symmetry, and averageness, are a few others, but that list is still not exhaustive. Even if (as is true) the psychology literature doesn’t provide a strong answer as to whether masculine faces are more attractive in men, that alone would not invalidate a physical-attractiveness-based account of racial×gender disparities.
You may find interesting Ting, Takahashi, and Wu’s paper “Incipient speciation by sexual isolation in Drosophila”. The authors find that “When given a choice, D. melanogaster females of the Z race (from Zimbabwe and southern Africa) mate only with males from the same race, whereas females from the cosmopolitan M race (M for melanogaster of the common type) mate with males of both races indiscriminately.” This strikes me as similar to, albeit more extreme than, what we see between different human populations. I take this as a proof that culture, stereotypes, bigotry, racism, etc., are not necessary for asymmetric physical sexual preferences to arise among semi-isolated subpopulations of a species. (Or, we could bite the bullet and accept that the Z-race D. melanogaster females are also bigoted!) The authors even explain, at a genetic level, how this race×sex asymmetry arises. What I suspect is that a similar explanation, perhaps involving a few more loci, underlies human asymmetries.
A few miscellaneous questions/points (would love it if koreindian responds! Others obviously also welcome to share thoughts ;) )
Let me preface this by stating a couple obvious things that bear repeating when discussing such a touchy subject. People’s value is not determined by their physical attractiveness. I wish for the flourishing of all people.
Have you read Halwani’s piece “Racial Sexual Desires”, or any of the other literature in applied ethics concerning this topic (e.g. Robin Zheng’s paper, Stephen Kershnar’s response)? Do you and Halwani just define racism differently, or do you have substantive disagreements?
Regarding the racial×gender disparities in interracial romantic pairing, what is wrong with the theory that it comes down to physical attractiveness? You ask “Asian men are under-masculine, Black men are over-masculine, but White men are *chef’s kiss* just right?” Whether white men are “just right” is in the eye of the beholder, but in aggregate, based on the data, they are preferred (in the countries where these studies are done), and I see no reason this preference could not be based on holistic physical attractiveness.
I would describe the “masculinity/femininity” axis as just one (albeit important) axis among many axes along which people might differ in attractiveness. Height, strength, blemishes, symmetry, and averageness, are a few others, but that list is still not exhaustive. Even if (as is true) the psychology literature doesn’t provide a strong answer as to whether masculine faces are more attractive in men, that alone would not invalidate a physical-attractiveness-based account of racial×gender disparities.
You may find interesting Ting, Takahashi, and Wu’s paper “Incipient speciation by sexual isolation in Drosophila”. The authors find that “When given a choice, D. melanogaster females of the Z race (from Zimbabwe and southern Africa) mate only with males from the same race, whereas females from the cosmopolitan M race (M for melanogaster of the common type) mate with males of both races indiscriminately.” This strikes me as similar to, albeit more extreme than, what we see between different human populations. I take this as a proof that culture, stereotypes, bigotry, racism, etc., are not necessary for asymmetric physical sexual preferences to arise among semi-isolated subpopulations of a species. (Or, we could bite the bullet and accept that the Z-race D. melanogaster females are also bigoted!) The authors even explain, at a genetic level, how this race×sex asymmetry arises. What I suspect is that a similar explanation, perhaps involving a few more loci, underlies human asymmetries.