Before we get into the meat of this article, let me share a story about racism that is relevant to the rest of the article. I like to think of myself as something of a social activist. I’ve protested in the streets of our nation’s capital. I hand out bottles of water and cheeseburgers to homeless drug addicts in Los Angeles. I ruthlessly shut down a group at my university that advocated for the racial profiling of Arab-Americans and I campaigned for the inclusion of an LGBTQ support group at the conservative Southern campus. That’s why I was stunned early last year when a tumblr by the name of “Creepy White Guys” started to make the rounds on Facebook. If you’ve never heard of it before, a picture is worth 10,000 words in this case. Behold one of their finest examples:

Jesus H. Christ!

Creepy White Guys is a collection of the most embarrassingly bad messages sent in by white men suffering from yellow fever, the dreaded disease that causes white men to melt into barely comprehensible pools of racist stereotypes poorly disguised as sexual fetishes. Asian women are so docile. Asian women just spoil their men. Asian women are so virtuous. Asian women are so obedient.

It’s disgustingly offensive.

And I was determined to get to the bottom of it. If you’re familiar with me, you know that normally I campaign on behalf of Asian men, but every Asian man was made by an Asian woman and I couldn’t ignore it. I started out by creating two identical female profiles on OK Cupid, one white and one Asian, to see what I got. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. In Los Angeles it seemed like creepy white men were well-behaved.

But then I had a stroke of genius. I have myself been on the receiving end of vitriolic hatred and profuse racial stereotypes, not because of my own race, but because of the race of men I typically choose to date: Asian. There’s something about seeing the girl you want on the arm of an Asian man that sends the creepy white guys into overdrive.

When I switched the profiles over to having a preference for Asian men, I struck racist gold:

That’s actually the tamest message I got, and it still made me hang my head in disgust.

But even more disturbing than the messages my inbox was getting flooded with was when I noticed that suddenly I was getting contacted by 3000% more Asian men than before. I’m not even joking.

I asked a friend of mine to give me some insight.

“Do you even know how many times I’ve been turned down just because I’m Asian? It doesn’t matter that I played basketball in college and I’m going to law school. Girls will drop you like a hot potato when they find out you’re Asian. So what’s the point in even trying in the first place just to get shot down?”

It makes sense. I don’t want it to, but it does. After centuries of being typecast as weak and asexual, it’s no surprise to anyone that Asian men aren’t exactly being snatched off the shelves like Furbies in the late 90s. Who wants that?

I didn’t have anything to do that weekend, so what started out as an underground experiment to uncover racial fetishes about Asian women evolved into a massive, year-long project for the sole purpose of figuring out what it would take to even the playing field for Asian men in online dating.

Online dating is great. It’s a quick and easy way for busy men and women to meet more people than they ever could in a weekend spent partying. But you’d have to be a fool to not admit that it works the same way for everyone. Women do little to no work at all; men are more than happy to flood our inboxes. And according to OK Cupid itself, Asian men have one of the lowest rates of response from women, an abysmal 22.2% (Figure 1).

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t bet on those odds.

I did eventually find something that not only leveled the playing field, but actually made Asian men’s chances better than any other men. I took that 22.2% and raised it up to a whopping 40%, which is a higher response rate than even the gold-standard white guys were getting.

I spent a MONTHS tailoring my male profiles, tweaking the pictures, testing the openers, and figuring out which pictures boosted the response rate, which kind of profile got men ignored, and which women were the most likely to reply before I found the holy grail of online dating for Asian men.

But I’m not going to bore you with statistics and graphs here because this isn’t college and I’m not your professor. Instead, I’m going to give you a cold, hard truth:

White men don’t let a woman’s racial preferences hold them back. They soldier on ahead. Yes, they get rejected, and so will you, but whereas the majority of Asian men are sitting back and waiting for permission before approaching a girl, white men are approaching anyway. THAT is why they’re so much more successful.

But there is hope, there’s even a holy grail, and here are a few tips on how to find it:

Tip #1: Use an Indirect Opener

“Hello, my name is _____!” just isn’t good enough.

By now you’re probably asking yourself, what exactly IS an indirect opener and why does it work so well? In the professional dating world, approaching a woman using any line that is unrelated to your interest in her is known as an indirect opener. The idea is to break the ice and have her warm up to you before you drop the bombshell of direct interest into her lap. When you approach women with attraction first, their defenses may rise; approaching with an indirect opener lowers their defenses.

Overall, indirect openers had the best response rate out of any of the messages I picked out and on their own they leveled the playing field. The possibilities are endless, but the one I ended up going with asked a woman’s opinion on whether it was appropriate to wear jeans to a wedding after losing airline baggage. Simple. Easy. Quick. We women love discussing our opinions with you, and if you can get her talking then you can get her dating. See Figure 2 (next page) for an example.

OkCupid Openers

Tip #2: Write a Good Profile

Write a good profile. It doesn’t have to be long and detailed. It’s actually better if your profile is short, sweet, and to the point, because most people won’t scroll down to view it. Be funny. Don’t be afraid to tell a blatant lie and try to convince her that you’re a lion tamer; she knows you’re full of shit, but also that you’ve got a big sense of humor. This is all a bit vague, but ’ve saved the details for my book (including info on HOW to be funny, etc, etc), so keep reading for more information on that.

But above all, don’t be this guy:

Tip #3

Leave the Cheetos stains and torn Superman underwear out of your profile picture. This should go without saying, but if you’re a slob or doing nothing interesting in your profile picture, you’re not going to motivate her to give you a second glance. Let your profile picture show who you are as a man. Do you go rock climbing? Ride a motorcycle? Wrestle bears? Jump rope with live cobras? Let her see it.

Tip #4

Learn how to embrace women’s racial diversity. Believe it or not, black women will respond at higher rates than women of any other race. White women don’t fall that far behind. Other minorities actually have very low response rates. By holding back from talking to women of other races because you’re not sure that they’ll like Asian men, you’re actually restricting yourself to a crowd of women with a lower chance of replying to you.

So how did I manage the holy grail of 40% of women responding to one of my profiles, beating the odds of even the most attractive white guys? I wrote a funny profile, I used an exciting picture, I stuck to my trusty indirect opener, and I didn’t restrict my profile to Asian women like most of the Asian men do.

BOOM.

It. Was. That. Simple.

No Jedi mind tricks. No crazy, convoluted sequences. You don’t have to have six-pack abs and look like a Greek statue. You can be an average, normal guy doing average, normal things. You just have to put your puzzle pieces together in the right order.

As much as I’m sure this relieves a lot of your worries about that OK Cupid profile you’ve been trying to convince yourself to set up, there’s a lot more to my research than what I’ve shown here. I figured out the quickest way to get a girl’s number, how to use being a nerd to your advantage, and even how to set up 3 dates a day, 7 days a week, with only 30 minutes of work.

I answered my friend’s most burning questions:

What happens if you’re unattractive?

What happens when you directly ask a woman out on a date?

What happens when you DO go direct and tell her she’s gorgeous?

What happens when you use the classic advice of talking about something she mentions in her profile?

After more than a year of running experiments, I had FINALLY cracked the code of online dating for Asian men. I know you’re probably going crazy right now waiting for me to tell you that I wrote everything down in a book you can go pick up in stores, and you’re in luck: with the help of JT Tran, the entire year’s worth of REVOLUTIONARY research was packaged into one place, and that place is known as Online Dating Secrets for Asian Men. Check it out. Now.

Look, I know it’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that race is a factor in a woman’s decision about which men she chooses to date. Anyone who denies that fact is a fool. Even for me race is a factor; I love Asian men! But using that as an excuse for sitting back and doing nothing only makes the situation worse. We know that women are open to dating Asian men. We even know that with the right openers, Asian men have BETTER chances than white men.

Written by Alice Zindagi