Photo via Shutterstock
As of August 26, 2026, over 3,500 people are on the waiting list for WMAF Meet, a somewhat clunkily-named invite-only dating app that specifically intends to pair up single white men in San Francisco with local Asian women. Though the copy on WMAF Meet’s homepage strongly suggests the W in the abbreviation stands for “Western,” it's easy to imagine that WMAF Meet's intended market would consider “Western” as a synonym for “white.”
Unsurprisingly, there has been a backlash online. A screenshot of WMAF Meet's homepage was posted on X.com with the caption "What’s wrong with SF …?” and quickly accumulated over a million views.
On that same thread, one X.com user commented, "Imagine changing the W from White to Western to be inclusive, while still promoting the fetishization of Asian women and indirectly saying that 2nd gen+ Asians can't be westerners."
Another wrote: “Since when [do] you start to date people as “ethnicities” instead of as just “humans”? Online dating is already cringe enough for me.”
Other online commenters have called WMAF Meet an “Oxford study” dating site, referencing a misogynistic and spurious internet meme that cites a non-existent study alleging that Asian women primarily prefer to date white men.
In the Asian community, responses have been mixed. Katie Chen, a tech industry worker who co-hosted a viral looksmaxxing event for Asian men and women, told KRON4 that she laughed when she first saw WMAF Meet's website and even remarked that she wanted to host an event with the creators.
“I don’t think there is a problem with [WMAF Meet.],” she said. “For me, I have a Filipino boyfriend, so I don’t really care if I’m dating a white man, Filipino man, Vietnamese, I don’t care. I think everything extends beyond the color of our skin. People are just really sensitive online.”
Chen also bluntly called the Oxford study “fake.”
On the other hand, Charles Jung of the Asian Justice Movement raised concerns about white men stereotyping and fetishizing Asian women.
“Asian American women deserve to be wanted as people as not as a racial idea,” he said. “To me the question is, what happens when a profit-seeking business turns that into the product itself?”
Jung also stressed, “The line is whether you’re encountering a person as an individual or are you assigning characteristics to her because she’s Asian?”
A comment on a Reddit thread from an Asian woman married to a white man got straight to the point. “Can you ask them to explain how/why dating with the intention of meeting someone of a specific race isn't racist?” she asked.
She went on to discuss how she and her husband were drawn to each other through shared interests and found themselves too much in love with each other for race or culture to be an issue for either one of them. Finally, she stated, "It's shit like this dating site and "Oxford study" that keeps racism and sexism alive and well."
