I think TGGP has posted before that Black men do better at white or asian men in online dating (that more women have a preference for black men) -that seemed wrong to me. I think he or his peers made up that statistic to put a neat bow on their theory of perfect inverse correlation between testosterone levels and IQ (with the built in idea that women prefer high testosterone males).
My apologies if the above paragraph is an inaccurate representation of TGGP and his cohort's theories.
Well this might be a long overdue empirical entry into the topic of dating and racial preference. The results are classically counterintuitive (Middle Eastern women are the most preferred? Who would have guessed?) but there is one clear intuition match for me: White men are the most preferred as dating partners. I think that appears obvious to anyone who has browsed the racial preferences of women of different races in online dating sites. I'll see lots of women of all races preferring white men, fewer women of all races preferring any type of non-white man.
I don't recall ever making that claim. Women penalize men from other races, and that includes black men. The exception is that asian women don't give asian men much of a racial bonus. Black women seem to have especially high same-race preference. The gender ratio in the black community means men have greater ability to choose and women have to compromise, as Tim Harford has discussed.
The result of the penalty can be seen in that black men who date white women typically being more educated than their partners, despite blacks and men (and particularly black men) being less educated than whites & women. n/a frames it by saying that among white women the miscegnators are the lowest quality. n/a also claims that blacks have lower testosterone.
Posted by: TGGP | November 14, 2009 at 07:52 PM
TGGP, thanks for the correction.
Do you see anything in these results that counter Harford's and n/a's claims?
I don't know about white women miscegenators being the lowest quality -at an anecdotal level I've moved in more culturally elite settings where white female interracial daters tended to be elite, higher quality alpha females -where it was almost a signal that their social status was so secure that they could date black men and not lose status --they also tended to have strong white male figures in fathers or brothers that gave space for them to date interracially without disalignment for white male hierarchies --so it seemed to me. A similar thing with white female lesbians.
As such I feel like to a degree promoting the narrative "white women miscegenators are among the lowest quality of white women" serves as a macrosocial strategy to reduce miscegenation by increasing its stigma and reducing its glamour.
Part of the larger "secret wars" of trait subpopulations for status and, somewhat separably, perhaps part of the larger genetic competition.
I see different races, genders, and phenotypes promoting narratives to cock-block and seduce each other, and to promote macrosocial norms to gain microsocial advantage on the status and reproduction playing fields.
Which isn't to say that everything in your post isn't true. Just that I intuit this stuff is also going on in conjunction.
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | November 14, 2009 at 08:15 PM
"n/a also claims that blacks have lower testosterone."
To clarify, I've pointed out that blacks in sub-Saharan Africa have lower testosterone. In the US, black and white men have similar circulating testosterone levels. Black men in the US may have slightly elevated levels, but any differences which may exist can't explain black crime rates, for example (contra the claims/assumptions of many who have read or heard about Rushton).
re: black women, I went back and looked at the numbers in the speed-dating paper. Black females say yes to white males 48% of the time, while white males say yes to to black females only 41% of the time, which tends to support my impression that white male-black female relationships are limited more by distaste for black women by white men than distaste for white men by black women. Black females gave yeses to black males 89% of the time (8 out of only 9 cases), which is why they seemed to show greater same-race preference.
In the okcupid data, which I assume Hopefully Anonymous is referring to in this post, black females respond to white male senders 38% of the time, while white males respond to black female senders 32% of the time (despite the fact that, overall, females respond less often). In this sample, black females are more likely to respond to white males than black males, though of course that's probably not representative for American black women in general.
Posted by: n/a | November 14, 2009 at 11:38 PM
n/a prioritizes preserving the genetic purity and/or quality of some subset of the white race, so I think you are right about the narrative.
Apologies for bungling your view of testosterone, n/a
Posted by: TGGP | November 15, 2009 at 08:04 PM