Asian fetish

"Asian fetish" is a slang term in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland, used to describe the attraction of non-Asian, primarily (but not necessarily) white men, to Asians, particularly East Asians such as Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese. This phenomenon has also been called "yellow fever," and 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"). There is a great deal of controversy surrounding the issue: some would regard the term "Asian fetishist" to be a racist stereotype of white men; others regard the underlying phenomenon itself as evidencing racism on the part of white men who are attracted to Asian women, and possibly on the part of the Asian women themselves (racism against their own cultures).

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). Individuals with Asian fetish are supposedly sexually interested in Asians because of stereotypical qualities the individuals believe to be true amongst the Asian people, such as innocence, submissiveness, promiscuity, or sexual prowess (although some qualities are contradictory, presumably the individuals do not believe in all stereotypes at the same time.) Many Asians and some non-Asians accuse that American popular culture, Hollywood in particular, has promoted such stereotypes of Asians, and that such stereotypes would not persist if there were not a mass audience for them. 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 has also increasingly come to be used as a strictly pejorative label for white males in any relationships with Asian females 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 huge disparity. Therefore, the term is usually applied in a gendered sense: white female and Asian male couples are not usually described as examples of Asian fetish. On the other hand, it is thought this pejorative sense is used primarily by Asian males, therefore is why this gendered sense persists.

Other people, particularly those accused of having Asian fetish, argue that there is a distinction between individuals who are attracted to Asians for those stereotypes and individuals who are attracted to Asian culture. Many Asians find that to be a dubious explanation of a generalized and gender-specific attraction toward Asian women, given the diversity of Asian cultures and different degrees of acculturation among Asian, particularly Asian Americans. 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.

Yellow peril

The "yellow peril" is a perfect exemplification of the binary thinking between Eastern and Western culture. Simply put, the yellow peril was popularized in America as the idea that Asians will one day unite and conquer the world. The form of this threat not only includes military invasion and foreign trade from Asia, but also competition to white labor and the potential miscegenation between whites and Asians. Between 1850 and 1940, U.S. popular media constantly portrayed Asian men as a military and security threat to the country, and a sexual danger to innocent white women. (Wu, 1982) For example, in 1916, William Randolph Hearst produced and distributed Petria, a movie about a group of fanatical Japanese who invade the United States and attempt to rape a white woman. (Quinsaat, 1976) With the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, the entire yellow peril stereotype fueled the nation's war propaganda and became widely prevailed.

The key to manufacturing fear against Asian culture and people, lies with how the yellow peril differently defines Asian men and women. As categories of difference, race and gender relations do not parallel but intersect and confirm each other, and it is complicity among these categories of difference that enables U.S. elites to justify and maintain their cultural, social, and economic power. (Espiritu, 1997)

Asian American manhood

Whereas white men are depicted both as virile and as protectors of women, Asian men have consistently been negatively stereotyped in the media as both asexual and as threats to white women. (Espiritu) While this may seem impossible, it is truly just ironic and important to note in historical context. The 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) Over time, Asian masculinity has shifted from being "hypersexual", to "asexual" and even "homosexual". Take, for example, the controversial 2004 article Gay or Asian, in Details magazine. [1]

Asian American womanhood

Western film and literature promotes dichotomous stereotypes of the Asian women: Either she is the cunning "Dragon Lady", as seen in the 1924 film The Thief of Baghdad and the 1931 publication of Daughter of Fu Manchu (Tong, 1994); or the servile "Lotus Blossom Baby", reincarnated over the years as the "China doll", the "Geisha girl", the "war bride", or the "Vietnamese prostitute". (Tajima, 1989) But, in connotating these two extremes, these stereotypes are actually interrelated and seek to apply characteristics of exotic sensuality and promiscuity with mystery and being untrustworthy. While the yellow peril denies "manhood" to Asian men, it endows Asian women with excessive but impugning "womanhood".

These stereotypes of Asian women as submissive sex objects not only has impeded women's economic mobility, but also has fostered increased demand in mail-order brides, and for the pornography industry to cater to ethnic stereotypes. (Kim, 1984)

Model minority myth

In contemporary America, the exclusive Black-white framework of considering race is sustained by the "model minority" myth, the stereotype of generalizing all Asians as being a model minority: people who work hard, obey the established order and therefore prosper. This perspective distances Asian Americans from other minority groups like Blacks and Hispanics, downplaying their many similarities, while making them seem more "white friendly". (Martinez, 1998)

Labeling all Asian Americans as a special "yuppie class" that is young, single, college-educated and on the white-collar track, hides harsh truths about poverty, oppression and racist treatment many still experience. While some do achieve, or come from middle and upper class status— raising another important issue of class privilege— the myth does not accurately portray all Asian/Pacific Islander people.

Negative stereotypes

The conflation of various negative stereotypes give rise to Asian fetish. These stereotypes, which exist on the physical, emotional and cultural levels, are interrelated and apply to both Asian men dating Asian women and to white men dating Asian women. On the one hand, interracial relationships between Asian women and white men are sometimes justified through negative stereotypes of Asian men. However, on the other hand, these same relationships are criticized using negative stereotypes of the same white males. These stereotypes are at the heart of the Asian fetish.

On the physical level, Asian men are stereotyped as being shorter and less well-built than Caucasian men. Traditionally, this stereotype had much to do with endemic malnutrition in Asia, which had stunted growth for generations. Given equal conditions, however, human height does not vary that much among nations, and more affluent Asian countries are rapidly approaching first world norms in this regard. The average male height in South Korea, for example, is 5'8.2", whereas North Korea is noticeably shorter at 5'4.9", largely due to chronic famine. The average male height in the United States, for reference, is 5'9.6". The persistence of the height stereotype, however, can lead to a perception that Asian men are physically undesirable when compared to their Caucasian counterparts. For example, Asian women who exclusively date white men often claim that white men are more sexually appealing than Asian males. Ironically, white men who exclusively date Asian women are often tagged with the same stereotypical qualities. They are often characterized as nerds and geeks, physically weaker and less socially capable than other white men, who “settle” for Asian women because White women reject them.

Furthermore, one of the most controversial topics of the stereotype is the issue of penis size, in which people of Asian descent are perceived as being smaller than Caucasians and Africans, despite the lack of conclusive evidence. On one hand, as tourists easily discover, the condoms sold in Asian markets are smaller than those sold in America or Europe, reflecting market demands. But no scientific study has proved the conclusion one way or the other, likely due to its scientific irrelevance. No public policy decisions are ever going to be based on racial penis correlation. The Kinsey study, the UCSF study, and an Italian study did not attempt to correlate size with race, and unscientific studies like the periodic Lifestyle and Durex studies which suffered from selection bias are done mainly for marketing purposes, as they set up tents at places like Ibiza and Cancun to "collect data," and then report their "results" to get their brand names in the newspapers. J. Phillipe Rushton's data were 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. On the flip side, white men who date Asian women are also sometimes stereotyped as being sexually inadequate. Note that these penis-size stereotypes also parallel the myths surrounding the white female/black male relationship.

On the emotional level, Asian men are stereotyped as being less capable than white men of certain emotions such as love and joy, which are necessary for developing and maintaining relationships. This leads to the stereotype that Asian men are emotionally undesirable as dating partners. One justification of this stereotype is that Asian culture is more stoic than Western culture, causing Asian males to be less capable of expressing emotion. A second argument is that Asian culture emphasizes harmony over individuality, whereas the concept of love is a specifically individualistic experience. This reasoning is simplistic, conflating not only different Asian cultures as one homogeneous entity, but also Asian and Asian American identity as a whole. It is also flawed and racist, as similar stereotypes of foreign mentalities have lent ideological justification to centuries of colonial domination. See Orientalism.

But in contrast, white males who date Asian females exclusively are also sometimes stereotyped as emotionally inadequate in comparison to other white males. This directly relates to the stereotype that they are less socially capable than their colleagues, who have no physical or emotional hang-ups deterring them from pursuing women of the same race. In another sense, this can even be viewed as a result of sexual competition between Caucasian women and Asian women: by rejecting their Caucasian counterparts, white males who date only Asians can come to be regarded as inferior, unworthy, or even in extreme cases, genetically flawed.

Finally, on the cultural level, Asian men are stereotyped as being too domineering and patriarchal. This can lead to many Asian women who date white men to claim that they have more freedom, and therefore feel more comfortable with white men than with Asian men. In extreme cases, the white man is even portrayed as liberating the Asian woman from the tyranny of her Asian male oppressor. This again conflates different Asian cultures.

Moreover, others have noted that such a view is one-sided and ignores the past actions of the Western world. The argument, admittedly extreme, proceeds as follows. The Asian fetish is essentially rooted in white supremacist imperialism, and white men revisit hundreds of years of oppressive behavior by exoticizing Asian culture in general and the Asian woman in particular. Imperial discourse, of course, is a manichean game of white against dark, of civilized against savage. It is the expression of the "white man" in his quest to render the world his own. It is also an expression heavily burdened with sexual symbolism, in which the masculine colonizer penetrates and tames a feminized colonial host. Thus, there is no liberation--only a reaffirmation of the white male's masculine dominance. (For more on this sexual component of imperialism, refer to Edward Said's Orientalism). One would find it interesting to note that major periods of past racial and cultural fetishes roughly coincided with major periods of colonial activity. The mulatto fetish of the eighteenth century, for example, occurred at the height of West Indian colonization. Similarly, the Islamic fetish, which generated many fine paintings of harems and harem girls, occurred during a period of heavy European intervention in Near Eastern affairs.

In essence, negative stereotypes pervade every level of the Asian fetish and affect Asian men, Asian women, and Caucasian men in profound ways.

Negative social consequences

Although most relationships between a non-Asian man and an Asian woman can be healthy and functional, recently there have been occasional cases that raise red-flags about the continued fetishization of Asian women:

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. [2]

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. [3]

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 program involving psychiatric treatment, which, upon completion, would leave him with no criminal record. [4]

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. [5]

On August 24, 2005, veteran 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 alleged incidents, which were targeted mainly toward immigrant Asians, occurred between January and April 2005. Valerga, who joined the department in 1999, has been on administrative leave since May 2005, when accusers began coming forward. [6],[7]

Effects of media

Other criticisms revolve around the Western media, which helps perpetuate "fetishistic" stereotypes of Asian women. In brief, the general tendency in Western film, television, and books is for Asians to be typecast into certain roles. Asian men are usually shown as martial arts masters and academians. Asian women, in addition to being cast in martial arts- and academia-related roles, are also typecast as the romantic interests of usually-white protagonists, or as prostitutes. Miss Saigon and The Last Samurai are among the films in which this is the case. White male/ Asian female pairings have also appeared in prominent children's books. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, for example, features an Asian romantic interest named Cho Chang. Commentators of Asian ethnicity have noted that "Cho" is Korean and "Chang" is Chinese, making the combination very improbable in real life.[8]

Along with the hypersexualization of Asian women, there is also the apparent exclusion of Asian men in roles of romantic interest. Asian American male actors have complained of the difficulty in landing dramatic roles.[9] The relatively few Western films with Asian men as love interests and even fewer with Asian men as interracial love interests offers some proof for this accusation.

Critics have pointed out that the stereotyped sexualization of Asian women is a subset of a greater media prejudice against women in general. For example, beauty requirements for actresses are much greater than those for men. Very often, an attractive woman would get paired on-screen with an unattractive man.[10] This is an important factor that cannot be dismissed, for despite generations of social progress for women, the mainstream media still caters more to male tastes. However, at the same time, critics also point out that the race condition specific to Asian fetishization is built upon Orientalism and its associated colonialist discourse of masculinity and conquest. In this sense, the usually-white male protagonists in Western television shows and films seem to take adventure in sampling the exotica of the world's peoples and cultures, with the women of other cultures being there to serve their needs. Thus, in addition to objectifying Asian women, there is the added condition of exotic interest in them based on a perceived foreignness.

Criticisms

Some critics contend that the stereotype of an Asian fetish is a means of discouraging interracial relationships or "race mixing", with the intent of making everyone date "their own kind". The irony is that in the past, white supremacists opposed such relationships as race mixing. Today, in the United States, the biggest critics of interracial dating are generally Asian males and African women, who often complain about being stereotyped themselves, resulting in charges of hypocrisy and/or racism. Some people point to changing demographics and increasing inter-mixture of all races as producing insecurity, thus spawning the controversy [11]. Others, however, adopt a more egalitarian viewpoint, by claiming that these interracial relationships would not be a problem if there were no gender gap.

Another frequent criticism is that the target of the notion of Asian fetish is really Asian women themselves. In other words, it is a form of social control intended to discourage Asian women from "straying" from Asian men. Many Asian women themselves resent attempts to dictate who they date. Indeed, some Asian women appear to date non-Asian men because of unhappiness with certain perceived aspects of Asian culture, whether real or imagined. This view is perhaps best exemplified by the Joy Luck Club, a book by Amy Tan that presented Asian men as sexist and domineering, and which is strongly disliked by many Asian organizations.

Some point out that the issue of dating disparity which is at root of the controversy, is based not on supposed 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.

A related criticism involves the gendered application of this term, which many accuse of being sexist. Asian fetish is applied almost exclusively to WM/AF couples as opposed to AM/WF couples. The latter is usually tolerated and even promoted within certain segments of the Asian American community. Thus, there are accusations of hypocrisy--supporting one face of a harmful racial fetish while repudiating the other. For example, one notable Asian American community website, the Fighting 44s, coined the term CCB [12] to describe Asian women with a racial fetish for white men. No such term exists for Asian men with a fetish for white women. The collective ire is targeted primarily towards women who are thought to have "sold out." To many, this is evidence of a double standard.

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, whereas the participants themselves may see each other as individual people, not categories. This view is sometimes called the "social construct" point of view.

Interestingly enough, there appears to be a sub-population of non-Asian, typically Caucasian, women with a fetish for Asian men. While on the surface this appears to be a refutation of the main argument behind the stereotypical Asian fetish, on further examination it may in fact be due to the desirability of stereotypical Asian male traits among this sub-population.

References

Espiritu, Y. E. (1997). Ideological Racism and Cultural Resistance: Constructing Our Own Images, Asian American Women and Men, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.
Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness., University of Minnesota Press.
Kim, E. (1984). Asian American writers: A bibliographical review, American Studies International, 22, 2.
Martinez, E. (1998). Seeing More Than Black and White, De Colors Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century, South End Press.
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.
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.
Tong, B. (1994). Unsubmissive women: Chinese prostitutes in nineteeth-century San Francisco, University of Oklahoma Press.
Wu, W.F. (1982). The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American fiction 1950-1940, Archon Press.

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