First of all, please let me apologize for the occasional “Asian Dating” or “Find an Asian bride” type ads on this website’s sidebar. I get annoyed of them too.

The reason these ads continue to show up is because Google’s Adsense program (Content Network for advertisers) targets and serves ads based on the content on any given page. Since all I do here is rant about Asian-American societal matters, Google picks up my frequent use of terms such as Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc… and then sells advertising space for pages related to these themes to advertisers. Anyway, I digress…

Onto Yellow Fever…

As I review the large number of dating/bride-services advertisers that continue to target this site, I can’t help but think that this growing list of advertisers is only indicative of the overall growth in Yellow Fever amongst Americans. Everyone is going after Asian women these days. As an Asian male, sure, I noticed a disparaging amount of white guys that date Asian girls.

But I never actually took the time to think about which way causality was for this phenomenon. Is it that white guys like to pursue Asian girls? Or is it Asian girls that like to pursue white guys. Obviously with the coining of Yellow Fever as a commonly accepted phrase to describe the former, I actually think we should revisit this assumption.

I recently came across a  London School of Economics study, that finds supports against an actual Yellow Fever phenomenon amongst white guys:

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. Men don’t seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman’s race had no effect on the men’s choices. (Full article)

“Men don’t seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating.” I so want to disagree, but I can’t. Toushe London Fancy Pants School of Economics, I’ll give you this round.

After reading the article and the study, I realized this whole time what yellow fever actually was. We Asian-Americans coined the term Yellow Fever. Caucasians coined Yellow Peril in the 19th century to incite fear of massive Asian immigration to the US, and now we Asian-American males just did the same with Yellow Fever to incite fear that Asian women our vanishing. Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison (bad things never happened to people because of “Yellow Fever”), but I just like to make analogies.

But you know what, let’s put an end to this yellow fever mumbo jumbo. Because well, as it turns out, it’s all a figment of our imaginations.

Appendix

And if you’re curious, here’s the list of sites I’ve already blocked. I advise you to not check any of these sites out