Asian fetish

The term "Asian fetish" is a colloquialism used in the English-speaking world, which represents 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.

This situation can 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"). More recently, the term "Asiaphilia" (although it could have positive connotations as well) has increasingly come to be used as a synonym for "Asian fetish"; and "Asiaphile" for an Asian fetishist. The term "white-worshipping" is the main colloquial term used for the reverse situation, the fetishism of white males by Asian females, who are most often called "sellouts." All these terms are considered highly derogatory when used seriously.

There is a great deal of controversy surrounding the issue. The main proponents of the term "Asian fetish" regard the underlying situation as a form of racism and an expression of white supremacy on the part of white men who are attracted to Asian women, and partly even of the Asian women themselves (racism against their own cultures). On the other hand, the contrary position is that the term "Asian fetishist" is a racist stereotype of white males perpetuated mainly by angry Asian men, in which they regard all possible cases of sexual attraction as a form of objectification or fetishism to some degree.

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 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.

Yellow peril

Some race theorists see the notion of "Yellow Peril" as a perfect exemplification of binary thinking between Eastern and Western culture. This concept, which achieved some popularity in America and other parts of the Western World, was the idea that Asians would one day unite and conquer the world. The form of this threat not only included 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 they argue, 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). They cite as example the 1916 film Petria, produced and distributed by William Randolph Hearst. This movie featured a group of fanatical Japanese who invaded the United States and attempted to rape a white woman (Quinsaat, 1976). They contend that after the attack on Pearl Harbor the "Yellow Peril" gained further momentum when it became a key component in America's war propaganda.

Some gender theorists contend that a key to manufacturing fear against Asian culture and people lies with how the yellow peril defines Asian men and women differently. Specifically, Espiritu has argued that race and gender relations do not parallel but intersect and confirm each other in a way that enables U.S. elites to justify and maintain their cultural, social, and economic power (Espiritu, 1997).

Asian American 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. White men, they say, are depicted both as virile and as protectors of women, while Asian men are stereotyped as both asexual and as threats to white women (Espiritu). While many see these two allegations as contradicting each other, some argue that, despite the irony, both allegations make sense when viewed with an awareness of the historical context. Racist depictions of Asian men as "lascivious and predatory", they say, were especially pronounced during the nativist movement against Asians at the turn of the 20th century (Frankenberg, 1993). But they say that over time Asian masculinity has shifted from being "hypersexual" to "asexual" and even "homosexual". While others dispute this, they cite examples such as the controversial 2004 article Gay or Asian in Details magazine [1].

Asian American womanhood

These same theorists and activists allege that Western film and literature promotes dichotomous stereotypes of the Asian women. Again citing cinema and literature, they point to some films and books which they say show Asian women as cunning "Dragon Ladies", such as The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931) (Tong, 1994); and others which they say show them 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 to this, they feel that Hollywood has often perpetuated the concept of the "unmotivated White-Asian romance". For example, they cite Daughter of the Dragon, where 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. These theorists and activists arugue that the alleged repetition of this concept sends the signal that Asian women are romantically attracted to white men because they are white.

Theorists such as Kim have 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).

Model minority myth

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

Some activists and sociologists say that this amounts to labeling all Asian Americans as a special "yuppie class" that is young, single, college-educated and on the white-collar track, and that it hides harsh truths about poverty, oppression and the racist treatment that many still experience. While some Asian Americans do achieve, or come from middle and upper class status, they argue that this stereotype does not accurately portray all Asian/Pacific Islander people.

Negative stereotypes

Some theorists and activists argue that a conflation of various negative stereotypes is what gave rise to the "Asian fetish". These stereotypes, they say, are interrelated and apply to both Asian men dating Asian women and to white men dating Asian women. On the one hand, they say, interracial relationships between Asian women and white men are sometimes justified through negative stereotypes of Asian men, but on the other hand, they say, these same relationships are criticized using negative stereotypes of the same white males. They contend that the stereotypes exist on several levels.

Physical

On the physical level, they argue, 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 they contend that human height does not vary that much among nations, and that more affluent Asian countries are rapidly approaching first world norms in this regard. For example, they cite the difference in the average height of males in South Korea (5'8.2") and in impoverished North Korea (5'4.9"), which can largely be attributed to chronic famine. The average male height in the United States, for reference, is 5'9.6". But many others still contend that compartive statistics often show that much of the average height difference between different nationalities is in fact due to genetics. For example, they might cite that the average female height in prosperous Asian countries like South Korea (5'3.3), Singapore (5'2.7), and Taiwan (5'2.9) are still considerably less than the average height of women in Northern European countries such as Norway (5'5.9), Germany (5'6.3), and the Netherlands (5'7). . They further argue that these differences are evident even in spite of the fact that many of the European countries, such as the Netherlands and Germany, have Asian minorities as much large percentage of their population that would be included in the statistics than the populations of European minorities in any of the Asian countries.

Some argue that a height stereotype makes Asian men seem less physically undesirable when compared to their white 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.

Aside for the issue of height, 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 men of African descent, despite the lack of conclusive evidence. The only reliable studies of penis-size commonly quoted in the literature 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, 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. 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.

Emotional

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.

Cultural

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.

Alleged social consequences of "Asian fetish"

No statistical evidence has yet shown that relationships between non-Asian men and Asian women are any less likely to be healthy and functional than relationships with any other race and gender combination. But some theorists and activists point to recent cases which they alledge 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, 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." [6],[7]

Supporters of the "Asian fetish" theory see these cases as clear evidence of the harmfulness of what they see as a serious social problem. But critics question whether or not this annecdotal evidence really shows a pervasive societal trend.

Alleged perpetuation of "Asian fetish" by the media

Other criticisms revolve around the Western media, which some theorists and activists contend helps perpetuate "fetishistic" stereotypes of Asian women. In brief, they believe that the general tendency in Western film, television, and books is for Asians to be typecast into certain roles. Asian men, they say, are usually shown as martial arts masters and academians. And they contend that 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 which they commonly refer to. They also point to white male/Asian female pairings appearing in prominent children's books, such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, which features an Asian romantic interest named Cho Chang. [8]

In addition to the alleged hypersexualization of Asian women, many of these activists and theorists also say that there is an apparent exclusion of Asian men in roles of romantic interest. Some Asian American male actors have complained of the difficulty in landing dramatic roles.[9] 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. However, European films, interestingly, have little reservations of portraying Asian male/ white female relationships.

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. For example, they argue that beauty requirements for actresses are much greater than those for men. They contend that attractive women often get paired on-screen with unattractive men but not vice-versa.[10]

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 and not impurify their own race. The irony is that in the past, racial supremacists opposed such relationships as race mixing. Today, in the United States, the biggest critics of interracial dating are generally Asian males and African American 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 white male/Asian female couples as opposed to Asian male/white female 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 racial fetish (that some see as harmful) 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, although notably there does not exist much evidence that such fetishes even exist on a societal level. 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; 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.

However, it remains undisputed that differences between races exist, even beyond simple appearences. Interestingly enough, there appears to be a sub-population of non-Asian, typically Caucasian, women with a fetish for Asian men. However, this is more pronounced in Central and Eastern Europe, and less so in North America. In Canada and the UK, there seems to have been a shift over the last decade for Caucasian men to fetishize South Asian women, as opposed to East Asian women. This is prevalent in the Canadian media, where East Asian women are no longer the dominant "non-white" females portrayed in the Canadian media. In the UK, the presence South Asian female anchors have been the norm for decades. In Canadian television news stations, virtually all of the female anchors of East Asian descent, who were somewhat numerous a decade ago, had been completely replaced by female anchors of South Asian descent.

While this appears to many to be a refutation of the main argument behind the stereotypical Asian fetish, others argue that it may in fact be due to the desirability of stereotypical Asian male traits among this sub-population.

Classical anthropology deciphering Asiaphilia ?

There have been anthropolgical claims since the beginnings of anthropology that the Asian races and especially the Nesid race from the Philippines and Indonesia are the most pedomorphous of the about 40 races, i.e. more childlike both in physique and in character (e.g. stated in the Martin-Saller-Knußmann anthropological manual,setting the world standard since 1914,unparalleled in the Anglo-American world, 4. rev.ed. 1996,Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart).As very masculine men are attracted by very feminine women (cf. Max Hartmann's world-famous and widely accepted three laws of sexuality concerning e.g. the attraction of feminine men by masculine women),this could explain Caucasian men's potential Asiaphilia. Caucasians or Europids have relatively masculine features and are prone to Asiaphilia according to this explanation. It can be assumed that the misandric feminism in the West and the masculine physical and psychical character of Western viragos will surely fuel Asiaphilia in the foreseeable future.

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 1850-1940, Archon Press.

External links

Supporting the contention of pervasive "Asian fetish" in Western society

Dubious about the existence or pervasiveness of "Asian fetish"

Multiracial activist
AznLove.com (dedicated to Asian-males, by non-Asian females)
AsianWhite.org