I don't disagree with that. But I don't think you can ever have a real way of separating aesthetic preference from those associations. People often aren't even conscious of the associations they hold, why something is or isn't attractive to them etc on a conscious level, and they certainly aren't in control of the things they are attracted to on a subconscious level.

The thing is fundamentally all dating preferences are going to be due to associations we've built up in our mind. They are discriminate between people in a bunch of arbitrary ways, but if we're going to treat people with respect for their autonomy we have to treat them as valid. Now if we're talking about long term cultural changes to make things racially egalitarian, I'm on board, but for the time being it's no one's place to treat people's personal preferences as in some way invalid.

Which brings me to the thing I've been wondering since the jump. Why did you post this? What prompted you to? And what do you, on a personal level, plan on doing about it?