I keep seeing threads on this over and over.
Well, I can't speak on your question directly, because I don't pay attention to
any of those girls. I'm mostly northwestern European, not the lightest there is but certainly not what some here call "ethnic", and I am insanely attracted to black women. I'll preferentially go for the darkest, (and tallest,) girl possible, with distinctly African looks. Natural type-4 hair, all the better. It's quite automatic; if a group of 3 white girls and 1 black girl is walking towards me, the black one catches my eye instantly, and I've been known to not even
realize (until a black friend later pointed them out) that a group of white girls passed right in front of us. So, if I use myself as evidence, yeah, most definitely, opposites attract!
For me, it
seems to be reciprocated, in that I get a lot more attention out of black girls than white girls or anything else. But I highly suspect that's just a case of "you get what you give", as well as obvious selective observation, and so wouldn't give that much weight.
I'm certainly not alone. However, there are also tons of guys of basically my phenotype who would not touch my preferred phenotype with a ten foot pole! So, it's obvious that there must be
individualistic factors at play as well, which I think you might be overlooking.
I strongly suspect that ethnicity, and certainly ethnic heterogamy, is far from the most important attraction factor in females. Thinking back on the black women who have shown or reciprocated interest in me, there's a handful of them who had an obvious tendency towards white guys (one later had a mixed child), but with the majority of them, most or all the guys I saw them with before or after were black. You'd expect a much different pattern here if they were prioritizing outbreeding very highly.
Generally I think you can probably find people who fit "X prefers Y" for just about any ethnic makeups X and Y, and a whole spectrum of people for whom this is of anywhere from zero to extreme importance. If the effect you're describing exists at all, I suspect it's either weaker and/or more localized than you think. Confirmation bias is going to be a thing until you do some kind of systematic study, and even if you did that, it would be impossible to eliminate the
observer-expectancy effect if you were the one approaching the women.
I can't comment much on the "dark white women want to be lighter" theme in your newer thread, except to say that women who are
actually dark-skinned have it a lot harder in that they get a lot of hate and endure beauty standards that have systematically excluded them. The women you're interested in have it fucking easy. Now, a lot of
actually dark-skinned women have internalized hate to the point that skin bleaching is endemic in certain places such as Nigeria and Jamaica. However, it's important to realize that women are individuals! They are varied in their responses to societal pressures; the model I linked below has (nicely) told haters where to get off and makes a point to flaunt her dark skin. I could be wrong, but I have a lot of trouble believing that the vast majority of the Catherine Zeta Joneses of the world have some huge insecurity over pigment.
And my ideal girl being something like
this, I find it almost comical to make such a big deal over light white people vs. darker
white people. The differences you're talking about don't even make a blip on my girl radar! lol.
Scientific Perspective
Imagine some species has two populations, A and B, that are separated by some geographic barrier. Suppose population A has endured some environmental stressor, S, through an adaptation that is coded for by allele X. Suppose that population B has not been exposed to S and allele X is absent from their local gene pool. Suppose also that population A and B have been separated long enough that environment and/or genetic drift has led to them having a somewhat different physical appearance, though not long enough for speciation (formation of a separate species by loss of reproductive compatibility).
Now, suppose some lone female from population A wanders into the geographic barrier and somehow manages to make it across and enters population B. (Well, it could be a male just as easily; just my personal bias here.) If a few centuries later, population B becomes suddenly exposed to stressor S, whether this wandering female bred into the population or not could make the difference between population B surviving or being wiped out. So it would be adaptive for some fraction of population B's males to (like me) be driven towards mating with exotic females. (There should also be some fraction of population B's females driven towards mating with exotic males, since the wanderer could have been male instead.)
Note however that it would not be a necessary condition of population fitness that
all individuals would prefer exotic mates - just some fraction of them having that preference would suffice.
It is a well-known effect that offspring from matings between isolated populations may be stronger and healthier than average; see
hybrid vigor. I seem to recall that livestock semen is sometimes shipped across continents for this very reason.
There's a particular region of Africa, the Upper Nile Valley, some of the women from which are so fucking beautiful to me that if on the rare occasion I run into one I manage to get her in bed, I seriously see myself throwing caution to the wind and nutting in her until she's pregnant. Just the other day I happened to see an SNP analysis (single nucleotide polymorphism - gene markers) showing that people in this region have among the lowest levels of Eurasian admixture in Africa. Didn't surprise me in the least.
Now, I was once told by a friend who is a research microbiologist that they had anecdotal evidence that pair genetic compatibility and ethnicity were uncorrelated. However, their work was isolated to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) on chromosome 6, which mutates much faster than normal. (Disassortative mate selection on this complex in humans and other mammals has been demonstrated fairly robustly.) I suspect that most races in our country being somewhat admixed could also have contributed, and also note that this wasn't the topic of their research and thus this observation lacks systematic robustness.
Nature thrives on diversity. That is the very reason for sexual reproduction. Almost all the planet's exclusively asexually reproducing species are unicellular and all are remarkably simple compared with plants and animals; they simply weren't capable of evolving to our complexity, because they could not generate and test genetic combinations at a high enough rate. If the aim of sex was to find your identical clone and have sex with her, there would be no point to sex - you may as well just divide like a bacterium, which is less risky in that you're not dependent upon finding a willing partner.
So, obviously there will be some tendency towards "disassortative mating".
Now, there is an opposite force as well. Sticking your dick in a dolphin is not going to accomplish anything. There are also some situations that may disadvantage hybrids. Classic example is a hare with black and white patched fur, that becomes incapable of camouflage if there are only light or dark rocks around and no marble rocks.
So, there's also a tendency towards "
assortative mating".
I would imagine that these two competing factors probably achieve some balance, and that this balance is likely to be
different in different individuals.
There is evidence that (except for MHC) humans tend to mate assortatively (thus, similars attract rather than opposites attract), but I can attest to this being far from universal. Some study found that males preferred photos of a female whose facial features were manipulated to look more like the surveyed male, but I'd be one hell of an outlier - much as I think I'm reasonably attractive, I find women with strong facial similarity to me (and indeed to a lesser degree, most white women) kind of repulsive.
One theory on the mechanism of humans mating assortatively is that we use our opposite-sex parent as an ideal model mate. This has been subject to debate, though. In my own case it would almost make sense, because I'm highly disassortative in preference and I was isolated from my mother from an early age, which may have left the disassortative side of that aforementioned balance to take over.
I suspect that social pressure plays a role and that we might not be as assortative in our mating strategy in the absence of such pressures. I have personally observed a huge increase in the last 5 to 10 years of black women and white men dating in my city, and probably this relates to younger generations being less bigoted.
Be Pragmatic
Anyhow, hopefully if nothing else I've helped you to see that this is a very complex and multi-faceted matter, which you really can't make sweeping generalizations about.
Most importantly, if you're not attracting the women you want to, you're obviously going to be better served by concentrating on the things you
can change as opposed to the thing you
can't. Chances are, what you
can change will prove more important, anyway.
