A new SF-based dating site called WMAF Meet, short for “Western males and Asian females,” is drawing backlash online over its narrow focus on pairing white men with Asian women, whom the site describes as the “most in-demand” pairing in San Francisco.
WMAF Meet says it's designed for "serious daters" in the Bay Area in their late 20s through 40s, with applicants screened by humans for “good-faith intent,”
. as SF Gazetteer reports, the site says its five guiding principles include being “screened against fetishism” and “AI-curated, human-verified.”
__According to KRON4__WMAF Meet appears to be using “Western” as a stand-in for “white,” which is notable since there are, of course, many Western men who are not white.
The premise has generated skepticism online, with some commenters questioning how the creators can ignore the racism and fetishism behind the premise.
“As an Asian woman married to a white man... can you ask them to explain how/why dating with the intention of meeting someone of a specific race isn't racist..? ” one Reddit commenter wrote.
Another commenter noted that the monetization of interracial relationships was troubling.
“All sorts of things happen that are fine individually that only become an issue in disproportionate aggregate,” they said.
Jennifer Noble, a Los Angeles-based psychologist who specializes in interracial relationships and mixed-race families, backed up this sentiment, noting to Gazetteer that narrowly limiting membership to one racial and gender pairing can create opportunities for fetishization and exploitation. The problem is also complicated by white America’s portrayal of Asian women as exotic and submissive, in addition to how proximity to whiteness is associated with upward mobility or assimilation.
“I think being drawn to something is different than a conscious intentional preference, and I don’t know that everyone can distinguish the two,” Noble said.
The concept has also been mocked by content creators including Eric Ou of Los Angeles, who referred to WMAF Meet as an “Oxford study” dating site, a reference to a viral internet meme about Asian women dating white men.
Gazetteer reports that the pairing has long been frequently joked about in the Bay Area. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey reportedly found that 26% of people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area were in intermarriages — 10 percentage points higher than the national figure. Among white people surveyed locally, 22% were married to someone of another race, compared with 10% nationally.
WMAF Meet currently has around 3,153 applicants on its first “cohort” waitlist, which is capped at 8,888, and it plans to begin matching members sometime this year.
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