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Asian fetish

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The term "Asian fetish" refers to the racial fetishism of Asians, especially Asian women in the western world, especially the United States and Canada.

As a popular term, Asian fetish denotes an intense sexual attraction of a non-Asian, typically a white man, to Asian women, primarily East Asians (such as Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese), to such an extent that it is difficult or impossible for him to form healthy, meaningful relationships with women of his own race, or even non-Asian women in general.

In academic terms, Asian fetish is a popular attempt to make comprehensible the postcolonialist literary theory of racial fetishism of la femme orientale qua the exotic Other, in the context of the reification of cultural stereotypes through commodification of marginalized groups (the subaltern), especially arising in the consumer culture of 19th century Romanticism and thereafter, in a manner analogous to and sometimes conflated with psychoanalytic (or imperial) fetishism, which results in the reinforcement of imperial hegemony and the marginalization of the subaltern.

There is a great deal of controversy surrounding both the idea of an "Asian fetish" and the use of the phrase itself . Some regard the notion as a form of racist love and/or an expression of white supremacy (whether by white men attracted to Asian women , or implicitly by Asian women themselves in rejecting their native culture ). The contrary position is that the term "Asian fetishist" is a racist stereotype of white males , because those who use the term treat all cases of sexual attraction as objectification or fetishism to some degree, and are sometimes accused of being angry Asian men .

Terminology

Asian fetish is not a fetish in the strict Freudian definition of the word, i.e., a situation wherein the object of affection is an inanimate object or a specific part of a person, nor is it usually used to describe a fetish in the medical definition of the word (ie. a person who can only achieve orgasm or sexual satisfaction exclusively from Asians). Asian fetishists are sexually attracted to Asians because of stereotypical qualities they believe to be true amongst the Asians, such as innocence, submissiveness, promiscuity, or sexual prowess (although some qualities are contradictory; the fetishist may not believe in all the stereotypes). Many believe that American popular culture has promoted these stereotypes of Asians and that they would not persist without a mass audience. They consider the alleged fetishization of Asians based on those stereotypes and the generalizations about the physical appearance of Asians to be a form of racism and objectification.

This term is also used as a strictly pejorative label for white men in normal relationships with Asian women in the United States. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there are 2.5 times more marriages between white men and Asian women than between white women and Asian men in the USA. Asian fetish is suggested as an explanation for the disparity. The term "Asian fetish" is usually applied in a gendered sense: white female and Asian male couples are not usually described as examples of Asian fetish. Some suggest that the pejorative sense is used primarily by Asian males, reenfocing the gendered sense.

Some argue that there is a distinction between individuals who are attracted to Asians for those stereotypes and individuals who are attracted to Asian culture, though some Asians do not accept the explanation of a generalized and gender-specific attraction toward Asian women, given the diversity of Asian cultures and different degrees of acculturation among Asians, particularly Asian Americans. Some Asians also argue that the interest among white males in Asian culture is confined to the most palatable aspectsof the culture -- cuisine, mysticism, martial arts, and female sexuality -- and is rarely accompanied by an equally enthusiastic interest in the equality or perspectives of Asian Americans in American politics or society.

Sexuality and stereotypes

From the Yellow Peril to the Model Minority, Asian Americans have been the subject of numerous stereotypes, many that deal with sexuality, which some literary and philosophical theorists claim form the center of the Asian fetish.

These stereotypes can be divided into three categories. In the first category are placed stereotypes that contribute to the sexual desirability of Asian women. In the second category are stereotypes regarding the sexual undesirability of Asian men. Finally, in the third category are the stereotypes of Caucasian men in relationships with Asian women, the so-called counterculture stereotypes that are created as a response to stereotypes of the first two categories, i.e., the stereotypes of Asian fetishists.

Stereotypes of Asian womanhood

Some allege that Western film and literature promotes dichotomous stereotypes of the Asian women. Films and books have depicted Asian women as cunning "Dragon Ladies", such as The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931) (Tong, 1994); or as servile "Lotus Blossom Babies" or "China dolls", "Geisha girls", war brides, or prostitutes (Tajima, 1989). They argue that despite the differences between these two extremes, the stereotypes are actually interrelated and seek to apply characteristics of exotic sensuality and promiscuity with mystery and being untrustworthy.

In addition, some feel that Hollywood has perpetuated the concept of the "unmotivated White-Asian romance". In Daughter of the Dragon, the daughter of Fu Manchu lays her eyes on a British detective and instantly falls in love with him. The Bounty and Come See the Paradise also contain scenes where an Asian woman falls in love with a white man at first sight. Miss Saigon and The Last Samurai are further examples, as well as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, which features an Asian romantic interest named Cho Chang as well as a depiction of two Asian twins, Parvati and Padma Patil, as "the most beautiful girls in the year". These theorists and activists argue that the repetition of this concept sends the signal that Asian women are romantically attracted to white men because they are white.

Lastly, Kim has argued that the stereotype of Asian women as submissive sex objects has impeded women's economic mobility and has fostered increased demand in mail-order brides and ethnic-fetish pornography (Kim, 1984).

Some feminist critics have argued that sexualization of Asian women is a subset of what they believe is a greater media prejudice against women in general. They argue that beauty requirements for actresses are much greater than those for men, and contend that attractive women often get paired on-screen with unattractive men but not vice-versa.

Stereotypes of Asian manhood

Some race and gender theorists and Asian American activists allege that there's a racism-based disparity in how men of different races are portrayed in the mass media: while white men are depicted both as virile and as protectors of women, Asian men have been presented as both asexual and as threats to white women (Espiritu, 1997). While these two allegations may seem contradictory, they argue that both allegations make sense when viewed with an awareness of the historical context. Racist depictions of Asian men as "lascivious and predatory" were especially pronounced during the nativist movement against Asians at the turn of the 20th century (Frankenberg, 1993). But over time Asian masculinity has shifted from "hypersexual" to "asexual" and even "homosexual," as suggested in a controversial 2004 article Gay or Asian in Details magazine .

Historically, between 1850 and 1940, U.S. popular media portrayed Asian men as a military and security threat to the country, and a sexual danger to white women (Wu, 1982). For example, in the 1916 film Petria, produced and distributed by William Randolph Hearst, a group of fanatical Japanese who invaded the United States and attempted to rape a white woman (Quinsaat, 1976). Furthermore, after the attack on Pearl Harbor the "Yellow Peril" gained further momentum when it became a key component in America's war propaganda.

Some Asian American male actors have complained of the difficulty in landing dramatic roles. They allege that there are even fewer roles with Asian men as interracial love interests. It is rare in Hollywood films to find Asian male/white female couples, especially in romantic and sexual situations. However, notable exceptions include Jason Scott Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Russell Wong in Vanishing Son, and Tony Leung in L'Amant.

On the physical level, Asian men are stereotyped as being shorter and less well-built than Caucasian men. Traditionally, this disparity in human height had much to do with endemic malnutrition in Asia. For example, the average height of males in South Korea is 5'8.2" and in impoverished North Korea is 5'4.9", which can largely be attributed to chronic famine. The average male height in the United States is 5'9.6". On the other hand, while the height disparity has narrowed for several Asian countries since World War II, this trend has been slowing recently, owing perhaps in part to genetic limits. At any rate, a common perception is that height differences make Asian men less physically desirable when compared to their white counterparts.

Aside from the issue of height, one of the most controversial topics is the issue of penis size, in which people of Asian descent are perceived as being smaller than Caucasians and men of African descent. The only reliable studies of penis-size commonly cited are the Kinsey study, the UCSF study, and an Italian study, none of which even attempted to correlate size with race. There have been many other studies with claims of varying rigor such as the LifeStyles condoms study, but these are generally flawed by selection bias. Frequently cited is the study of J. Phillipe Rushton (1987), but Rushton's data are questionably fitted to his personal theories of racial behavior, including his claims that blacks are inherently inferior in brain size and are thus prone to criminality. Despite the unproven nature of the penis stereotype, it nonetheless leads to the perception that interracial relations are based more on penis size compatibility than simply on personal attraction, which also parallels the myths surrounding white female/black male relationships.

Sexual crimes

Recently, both Asian Pacific American and feminist organizations have given increased attention to sexual and violent crimes committed against Asian women, centered on fetishism, sexual harassment and violent crimes . Asian American women complain that Asian fetish is considered an annoying but benign phenomenon that does not need to be taken seriously . This section provides a short list of sexual crimes against Asian women, in which the perpetrators are considered to have had an Asian fetish.

In 2000, two female Japanese college students in Spokane, WA, were abducted, raped, videotaped and told that if they told anybody what had happened, the videotapes would be sent to their fathers. The three white assailants admitted targeting Asian women precisely because they had a sexual fetish for "submissive" Asian women, but also because they believed that this same submissiveness and cultural shame would prevent the women from reporting the assaults.

On October 12, 2002, Lili Wang, a 31-year-old computer science graduate student at North Carolina State University, was murdered by her former tennis partner, Richard Borrelli Anderson, who then committed suicide. Anderson was a white classmate of Wang who had become infatuated with her, even though she was already married to 30-year old Yufei Qian, a Chinese American man. However, her marriage did nothing to deter Anderson's advances, which appear to have been racially motivated: according to press reports, Anderson had confided to a colleague that he liked Asian women because "they study hard, and they're very nice, soft speaking." A suicide note found at the scene also indicated that he had a racial infatuation with Wang.

On March 30, 2005, Princeton Borough Police arrested former third-year Princeton University Ph.D. student Michael Lohman and charged him with two counts of recklessly endangering another person, two counts of tampering with a food product, one count of harassment and one count of theft from a person. He later confessed that between 2002 and his arrest, he deliberately and exclusively targeted Asian women by cutting their hair without their knowledge or consent. Lohman, whose wife is Chinese, also admitted to filling small plastic bottles with his urine or semen, in order to spray on unsuspecting women or to pour into their beverages when they were not looking, in almost fifty cases. On June 22, 2005, Lohman reached an agreement with the prosecutor's office to pay a $125 fine and to enter a pretrial intervention program involving psychiatric treatment, which, upon completion, would leave him with no criminal record.

On July 29, 2005, Los Angeles police arrested Tyreese Lamar Reed, an electronics technician from the Koreatown area of Los Angeles, in connection with a series of sexual assaults and robberies in the area. The district attorney’s office alleges that Reed committed a series of 18 counts of sexual assault and robberies between August 24, 2004 and June 15, 2005. According to the LAPD, all of the sexual assaults involved Asian women, between the ages of 17 and 47.

On August 24, 2005, former Oakland police officer Richard Valerga was charged with two counts of false imprisonment and five counts of interference with civil rights, for making illegal traffic stops on Asian women, and then trying to kiss and caress them. The incidents, which were targeted mainly toward immigrant Asians, occurred between January and April 2005. Valerga later resigned from the police force and pleaded no contest to four misdemeanor counts, and was sentenced to a six months in jail. The prosecutor said he didn't believe Valerga had shown any remorse, citing statements he reportedly made saying "these events were a misunderstanding." ,


Criticisms

Some contend that the stereotype of an Asian fetish is a means of discouraging interracial relationships or race mixing. In the past, racial supremacists opposed such relationships, though today in the United States, critics of interracial dating are sometimes Asian males and African American women, who have themselves felt stereotyped. This in turn may be considered hypocrisy or "reverse" racism. Some point to changing demographics and increasing inter-mixture of all races as producing insecurity, thus spawning the controversy. Others claim that these interracial relationships would not be a problem if there were no gender gap.

Others contend that the "Asian fetish" sterotype is a form of social control within Asian or Asian-American communities, intended to discourage Asian women from straying from Asian men. Asian women may date non-Asian men because of unhappiness with certain perceived aspects of Asian culture, whether real or imagined, a scenario presented in the novel The Joy Luck Club, which presents Asian men as sexist and domineering.

Yet others contend that the dating disparity that is an element of the controversy is based not on eagerness of Asian women to date other races, but on the lack of Asian male/white female couples. From this point of view, it is racial exclusionism of either Asian men or non-Asian women which leads to the disparity.

The gendered application of this term is also criticized as sexist. "Asian fetish" is applied almost exclusively to white male/Asian female couples as opposed to Asian male/white female couples. The latter may be tolerated or promoted within certain segments of the Asian American community. Thus, there are accusations supporting one racial fetish while repudiating the other: Asian men are not accused of a fetish for white women, although notably there does not exist much evidence that such fetishes even exist on a societal level. The stereotype being a double standard targeted primarily towards women.

Another criticism is that the concept of race itself is outdated, and that combining heterogeneous ethnicities under labels such as "Asian" or "white", is increasingly outdated. These critics view the opponents of interracial dating as engaging in "identity politics" and promoting racial separation. The key point of dispute is the legitimacy of categorizing people by so-called "race". Thus, in this view, defining a relationship in terms of race itself is the problem; that is, the participants themselves may see each other as individual people, not categories. This view is sometimes called the "social construct" point of view.

Slang Terms

There are a number of slang terms for the Asian fetish, all considered derogatory and/or racial slurs. Asian fetish has also been called "yellow fever." In Gay Slang, a heterosexual man who has an Asian fetish may be referred to as a "rice king" or "rice lover" (a homosexual man, a "rice queen"). More recently, the term "Asiaphilia" (although it could have positive connotations as well) has come to be used as a synonym for "Asian fetish"; and "Asiaphile" for an Asian fetishist. The term "white-worshipping" is a slang term used for the reverse situation, the preference for white males by Asian females, who are called "sellouts", while an Asian American community website coined the slur "CCB" to describe this.

References

  1. Prasso, Sheridan (2005). "'Race-ism,' Fetish, and Fever". The Asian Mystique. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. pp. 132–164. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl=, |coauthors=, and |month= (help)
  2. Bhabha, Homi K. (1983). "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourses of Colonialism". Screen. 24 (4): 18–36. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  3. Lalvani, Suren (1985). "Consuming the Exotic Other". Critical Studies in Mass Communication. 12: 263–286. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)
  4. McClintock, Anne (1995). Imperial Leather. Race Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |coauthors= and |month= (help)
  5. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). "Can the Subaltern Speak?". In Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (ed.). Marxism and the interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. pp. 271–313. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl=, |coauthors=, and |month= (help)
  6. Chin, Frank (1972). "Racist Love". In Richard Kostelanetz (ed.). Seeing Through Shuck. New York: Ballantine Books. pp. 65–79. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  7. Espiritu, Y. E. (1997). Ideological Racism and Cultural Resistance: Constructing Our Own Images, Asian American Women and Men, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.
  8. Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness., University of Minnesota Press.
  9. Kim, E. (1984). Asian American writers: A bibliographical review, American Studies International, 22, 2.
  10. Quinsaat, J. (1976). Asians in the media, The shadows in the spotlight. Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (pp 264-269). University of California at Los Angeles, Asian American Studies Center.
  11. Rushton, J.P. and Bogaert, A.F. (1987) Race differences in sexual behavior: Testing an evolutionary hypothesis. Journal of Research in Personality 21(4): pp. 529-551.
  12. Tajima, R. (1989). Lotus blossoms don't bleed: Images of Asian women., Asian Women United of California's Making waves: An anthology of writings by and about Asian American women, (pp 308-317), Beacon Press.
  13. Tong, B. (1994). Unsubmissive women: Chinese prostitutes in nineteeth-century San Francisco, University of Oklahoma Press.
  14. Wu, W.F. (1982). The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American fiction 1850-1940, Archon Press.

See also

External links

On Asian fetish

On interracial romance

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