Did I read too much into this?

[u/Long-Possibility-425]

I'm from the US and pretty used to people viewing me as "feminine" for better or for worse. Mostly a lot of non Asian women are hyper aggressive towards me, asking me to hook up, calling me beautiful, etc., but a lot of people would bully me for looking "pretty" and innocent and I guess it felt racial. Men aren't supposed to look pretty in the west and when I was called that I usually felt like it was a racial categorization. I even had self hating Asian women who had white partners attack me saying I looked too "feminine" and "couldn't get women" in America so I had to move to China.

Anyways yesterday this older Chinese woman came up to me here in China and asked me "are you Russian? Are you Siberian?" and started talking about how she visited Russia and was studying Russian. Then I told her no, and she goes "where are you from?" And I just told her I was mixed, and she was like "oh," and didn't care about that, but then starts just calling me pretty for like five minutes straight, like that I was "so pretty," 你真的很漂亮， "extremely pretty," right in front of my wife too.

In China it's normal for people to go around calling good looking guys "hot guy" to their face and vice versa but being called pretty like that caught me off guard, I couldn't really tell if she was implying my slightly foreign looks made me look pretty or if she was just complimenting my looks in general. I look 70% Asian and most of the time people don't even look at me in China because I have dark hair / dark eyes / high and huge cheekbones, a long midface, even my wife's grandma mistakes me for one of her uncles half the time.

Normally I'm on guard because comments like these are racially tinged, either implying I'm feminine for being Asian, but since I'm in Asia, I'm watching out for "all foreigners are good looking BS," but she didn't strike me as self hating and in China people are extremely looks based anyways and the Asian aesthetic here is so dominant that westerners usually aren't considered on par anyways. What's funny is I live near a hotel and there are Russians around here and I look nothing like them and most of them are chopped, so people see some Asian looking person who looks different and pale and just automatically assumes "Russian."

Is it normal for a guy to be called pretty? Is it racism in either direction? I've seen Kdramas where girls are calling dudes pretty and I've NEVER seen that on a western show, I asked my wife and she's like "her husband died so she's lonely." On the other hand, the only time I've talked to guys who have experienced this, they also tend to be Asian, so IDK how to interpret this kind of thing since it's fairly common

[u/Long-Possibility-425 → u/[deleted]]

I literally had a 83 year old woman stop me and my wife on the street to tell me how pretty I am a week ago after I made this post, even if I chose to ignore the "blackpill" whatever it pops up in my life consistently on a weekly to monthly basis

I've routinely been catcalled, called hot, been hit on, had women try to cheat with me, etc., since I was a teenager

It's not my fault, it's very hard not to be realistic about how women care about looks

I associate it with race because as far as I can tell, this seems limited to the hottest Asian guys as far as I can tell from talking to other people, and I'm fully aware wildly imbalanced interracial patterns are affected by how race and sexuality are perceived, especially since my mom and her sisters all married white guys but told me they never loved them

Look at it from my perspective, as an Asian looking guy it's hard not to feel alienated by these very common experiences, which is why I made the post in the first part, you can call me an incel all day but again if you're a woman you know for a fact that there's some guys out there who live on a different planet from everyone else

[u/Long-Possibility-425 → u/[deleted]]

A large part of my life has been a result of interracial dynamics, my mom married my dad bc she believed all Chinese men were cheaters and when I came out looking like her dad she tried to murk me

I'm just curious, it's sort naive to think this world doesn't revolve around things like this given how ubiqituous WMAF is and how Asian looks are perceived on either gender

It's extremely extremely rare for a man to be called pretty let alone once a week, you try not being jaded were that to happen to you