  In flavored dark matter models, dark matter can scatter off of nuclei through
Higgs and photon exchange, both of which can arise from renormalizable
interactions and individually lead to strong constraints from direct detection.
While these two interaction channels can destructively interfere in the
scattering amplitude, for a thermal relic with equal abundances for the dark
matter particle and its antiparticle, this produces no effect on the total
event rate. Focusing on lepton-flavored dark matter, we show that it is quite
natural for dark matter to have become asymmetric during high-scale
leptogenesis, and that in this case the direct detection bounds can be
significantly weakened due to interference. We quantify this by mapping out and
comparing the regions of parameter space that are excluded by direct detection
for the symmetric and asymmetric cases of lepton-flavored dark matter. In
particular, we show that the entire parameter region except for a narrow Higgs
resonance window is ruled out in the symmetric case for fermion dark matter
when the coupling to the Higgs dominates over the coupling to leptons, while
large portions of parameter space are still allowed for the asymmetric case.
The same is also true for a dark matter mass above 8 GeV for scalar dark matter
when the coupling to leptons dominates over the coupling to the Higgs.
