Some people have interpreted my recent posts on rice queens as being too harsh.

I’ll paraphrase one particularly poignant comment that made me think:

How dare you say that rice queens “don’t care about you”? My love of younger Asian guys is a kind of orientation, just like being gay in the first place. I don’t have any control over who I’m attracted to. And I deeply care about and love the young Asian guy I’m with. I would never “trade him in for a younger model.”

I don’t doubt that rice queens can and do care deeply about the Asians they’re with. There are many kinds of “orientations” or fetishes that seldom draw much scrutiny, like straight men who only date blonde women who are younger and shorter than them. No one accuses them of not caring about their blonde women. Yet it’s just as targeted as the fetish rice queens have for younger Asians – racially, physically, and age-wise.

Besides, the elephant in the room is the fetish that gay white men have for each other, which we rarely think of as a problem.

So why should I give rice queens such a hard time?

It’s not that I don’t think rice queens should be allowed to have their fetish. My libertarian side believes that everyone has a right to have whatever fetishes they want, even if they creep me out.

What bothers me is the perverse power dynamic that lets rice queens exploit their position for immense pleasure at the expense of gay Asians.

I happen to know the man who made the comment at the beginning of this post. He’s a fifty-something white man who complained of being rejected by an Asian man in his twenties. The fact that he even has a realistic chance with Asians less than half his age is a result of this power dynamic. Despite his claims of ignorance, he’s reaped huge benefits from from this dynamic – he’s been with several twenty-something gay Asians, the latest defeat being but a brief interruption in an otherwise enviable hitting streak.

What’s behind this power dynamic in the Asian-white dating market? Supply and demand, of course!

Gay Asians love white men. Lots of supply. Only 12% of gay Asians would only date another gay Asian – the overwhelming majority are open to dating white guys. White men prefer to date each other. Low demand for Asians. No other race comes close to white men in how much like they to date each other – 43% of white men would only date another white man.

What this means is that there’s vast pool of gay Asian men chasing a relatively small number of white men willing to date them. Gay Asians reply to white men 55% of the time, compared to 35% for the other way around.

This phenomenon is especially pronounced in cities like San Francisco where there’s a high proportion of Asians. San Francisco is a rice queen’s paradise.

In any relationship, the party with more choices holds most of the power, and an attractive gay white man has far more choices than a similarly endowed gay Asian.

Rice queens can and do exploit this advantage to no end. Obviously, the exact degree of power enjoyed by a rice queen varies based on the situation. A relatively unattractive rice queen could land in a city like Taipei without any plans or even a hotel reservation and expect to be treated like a king. In such a situation, it would be hard for the rice queen not be a jerk. With so many prospects out there, why should he put up with the slightest physical or personality defect?

Rice queens outside of Asia need to be of a much higher standard to engage in such behavior. Yet they generally still enjoy a much higher degree of power in their relationships than their age and attractiveness would otherwise command.

This dynamic can be harmful to both rice queens and gay Asians. Rice queens, at least during their prime dating years, have a hard time settling down because they have too many suitors to choose from. Potato queens have a hard time keeping rice queens in their clutches. Non-potato queen gay Asians suffer too, as most other gay Asians are too busy pursuing white men to notice them.

In the end, the market settles into a sort of equilibrium where a given rice queen can score a gay Asian significantly younger and/or more attractive than himself. One might say that gay Asians sell at a very heavy “discount.” Such is the way the market works.

Rice queens enjoy out-sized dividends as a result of being born white and being open to eating rice. I have nothing against rice queens. If anything, the world needs more of them to satiate the throngs of potato queens out there.

The gay Asian dating market is screwed up. Until such time as gay white men fall in love with Asians en masse, or gay Asians snap out of their collective potato obsession, rice queens will rule the Gaysian dating world.