Are you a “Western” man looking for your perfect Asian girlfriend?
A new invite-only dating platform is offering to help in that search, using AI to find compatible matches and help create "families that start here, and friendships that last a lifetime."
The site is called WMAF Meet. The acronym usually refers to a “white male, Asian female” coupling; the use of “Western” by the site is a deviation from the norm online.
It is unclear if only white men qualify as “Western” for the website, but it suggests that it is a place intended for people searching for the “the most common pairing in this city.”
WMAF Meet is currently in a pre-launch stage, with no set date for a full unveil, according to the site. The site does not name any founders or operators, but a lookup of the website’s domain name found it was registered on May 19.
So far, there are allegedly 2,431 applicants in a “Cohort 1” waitlist of up 8,888. (Intentionally or not, the number 8 is a lucky number in many East Asian cultures.)
You have to pay to access the service, but the cost is hidden until after sign-up. The first cohort of applicants will get a “reduced rate,” according to the site. In order to join, applicants have to verify their identity and submit a short written application. (This reporter did not get an application invite by press time.) No other gender identity besides "male" and "female" are offered in the sign-up process.
WMAF Meet insists that the entries are initially reviewed by humans to allow only “good-faith” applicants and weed out “fetishistic applicants”; the site does not go in-depth on what kind of review or criteria is used for this selection process. No other gender identity beside "male" and "female" are mentioned in the application process.
Then, the applications are reviewed by AI. “Our matching model analyzes applications for compatibility, intent, and lifestyle fit — surfacing matches that a swipe would never reveal,” the site states.
The site also acknowledges the risk of racial stereotyping, but its makers claim WMAF Meet actually helps prevent that.
“The pairing is already one of the most common in the city. Naming it plainly and screening for intent is how people get met as individuals rather than as a type,” the site states.
San Francisco is a hotbed of interracial relationships, but the white male-Asian female pairing is a very visible and joked-about trope in the Bay Area dating scene. A Pew survey in 2017 found that 26 percent of respondents in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area were intermarried, 10 percentage points more than the national average. In the Bay Area, significantly more white people in the survey were married to non-white partners — 22 percent versus 10 percent of white people in the national average.
The WMAF pairing has also been the subject of an online culture war that has often dipped into prejudice and misogyny. The phrase “Oxford Study” went viral in 2024, born from social media comments that wrongly suggest that the phenomenon of Asian women being attracted to white men has some scientific backing, or otherwise needs to be studied. The viral moment stirred up discourse that criticized fetishes, systemic racism, and the historical emasculation of Asian men in America. However, the debate also devolved into criticism from men’s rights-focused Asian men on platforms like Reddit and TikTok, who shared anecdotes of being rejected romantically by Asian women who prefer white men.
The complicated intersection of race, sex, and romance is why Jennifer Noble, a Los Angeles-based psychologist who specializes in interracial relationships and mixed-race families, told *Gazetteer *that she has some serious concerns about the framework of WMAF Meet.
The limitations on who can join and the hyperfocus on one racial and gender configuration can lead to problems like fetishization and exploitative behavior, Noble said. She pointed to a history of white America sexualizing Asian women as exotic, submissive beings, and acknowledged that some communities of color “glorify” a relationship with a white man as a sign of upward mobility and assimilation, Noble said.
“I think being drawn to something is different than a conscious intentional preference, and I don’t know that everyone can distinguish the two. The thing that worries me most, from my expertise, is the children that come from these partnerships,” Noble said, adding that people who select a partner based on race can still believe in racist tropes and incite conflicts about identity in the family.
This isn’t to say that interracial relationships always have problems, Noble stressed, but rather that the context and risks in these relationships are worth knowing. Many WMAF pairings are fulfilling and positive, she said, with a caveat: “I feel like those relationships grow more organically than it would for someone who purposely goes on a site to look for a race.”
WMAF Meet did not respond to Gazetteer’s questions — about their operations, how human employees weed out “fetishistic applicants,” how AI is used in matchmaking, the future cost of joining the site, and who the founders are — by press time. We will update the story if we receive a reply.