If you want to find the next billion-dollar tech company, look at its white, male founder and see if his wife is Asian.
At least, that’s what a viral tweet on X claims. The post, by user @123skely, is part of a string of tweets in an X blog post titled “The Rise & Decline of the White Male-Asian Female Couple in America.” In it, the writer provides optics: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase and Angela Meng.
This sensationalized pairing isn’t exclusive to tech bros. There’s Yoko Ono and John Lennon and The Summer I Turned Pretty. The joke has taken heat online for years, all under the umbrella of what’s often dubbed “the Oxford study.”
If you see any online discussion about interracial coupling, you’ve likely encountered the term. Somewhere between TikTok comments sections and internet forums rose claims that a study from Oxford University found that white men and Asian women are more attracted to each other than to other races. Online, this myth has metastasized into comment sections beneath teenage couple photos and been spliced over clips from Past Lives.
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A viral post on X may have suggested the best date idea of the yearBut the truth is simpler and less sensational. There is no Oxford study and no such findings. What’s often misattributed actually traces back to a 2010 study by researchers Murali Balaji and Tina Worawongs titled, “The New Suzie Wong: Normative Assumptions of White Male and Asian Female Relationships” that evaluates how Asian women have historically been fetishized in Western media. The authors have since expressed dismay at how their work has been distorted online.
So is the so-called Oxford Study phenomenon a thing? Natalie Lin, a New York City-based comedian, lets out an exasperated sigh when we meet. “Anything involving race becomes sensational on the internet,” she tells InsideHook. Lin, who balances stand-up with social media content, has occasionally joked about the Oxford study herself, but she’s not a fan. “It sucks because it performs well,” she adds. “But I don’t want it.”
Part of her discomfort is that much of the humor punches down at women. The joke’s axis is consistent: The Asian woman must be brilliant and conventionally attractive, while she’ll settle for almost any white man simply because he’s white. Online, these women are accused of self-hatred, derided as “race traitors” for chasing proximity to whiteness.
Lin points to the topic’s recurring language of “mate value,” a framework borrowed from psychology that ranks desirability through status, age and appearance. Comics also fixate on “maxxxing,” or self-optimization through fitness, wealth or aesthetics. Throughout our conversation, the most glaring ideology about gender and power becomes impossible to miss: We’re staring straight into the manosphere.
For Lin, especially within comedy circles, it’s hard to ignore that many of these jokes come from single men. “You listen to people make fun of women, and that alone tells you everything,” she says. “The joke hates women for existing. There’s a direct pipeline from self-improvement content to incel culture.”
A quick scroll through Reddit confirms it. It’s unsettling how easy it is to stumble upon threads with comments like, “white men seek Asian women because they’re submissive.” The Oxford study reinforces the same submissive, hyper-sexualized stereotypes Asian women have long been forced into. These narratives are rooted in colonialism and white supremacy, and their persistence flattens relationships into ideological talking points where accountability rarely falls on men, white or otherwise.
In the big old year of 2025, it feels embarrassingly dated to reduce how migration, displacement and history have shaped a world where relationships form across cultures. “The joke says less about the women and more about the people who make the joke — and what they’re choosing to believe to be true,” Lin says.
We can theorize endlessly about the model minority myth and racial upward mobility, but flattening love into data — or worse, dubious studies — misses what actually happens between two people. Love and partnership require agency, and it is harmful to suggest that women are incapable of it, whether or not you’re joking.
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