[UPDATED] Full disclosure: I still get cracks from my longtime friends about a fairly pronounced string of Asian girlfriends in high school and college. (Ask Scanner Sarah. Yeah, don't.) In my defense, I was something of a nerd, which meant a) I didn't actually date that much, so it's a pretty small group of girls to extrapolate any meaning from, and b) I was hangin' with a more racially integrated bunch of kids in the honors classes since white people are mostly dummies. (Ha ha, I kid. Some of my best friends are white. Ha! See how it feels, Snowflake?)
Anyway, I bring this up only because what we're talking about here is not a young man growing up in a world where most of the girls who liked Depeche Mode too happened to be first-generation. No, we're talking about that one white guy friend of yours who, as an adult, has chosen to pass perfectly good white women over in favor of Japanese art students. Is it really his choice? Or is he maybe the victim here?
Why would we ask? Because buried in a recent Beautiful Mind-type "Economists Take On Speed-Dating" article in Slate, just near the end, one can find this hot, little shard of raw, uncut fact:
We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference.
Ya see? Your honky friend goes into dating with an open mind and finds himself beset by racist she-dragons! Can't argue with science, people.
Next up, a couple of biochemists figure out why female alcohol allergies must be constantly tested.
UPDATE: Nicolas Cage seems like he went through a phase like this, but there's no evidence that he actually did, so the original picture for this post has been replaced with someone who not only did so, but wrote, like, whole records about it. My deepest regrets for not having thought of the painfully obvious Rivers Cuomo first.