Odds Favor White Men, Asian Women On Dating App : Code Switch : NPR
He tells me he likes my tattoos and asks how my parents feel about them. Where ya going, baby? One study conducted across four U. However, there are those sly fetishists who can appear innocuous on the outside but have yellow fever vibes brewing beneath the surface. They all managed to white-splain Chinese or Asian culture, whether in the form of travel stories, pop culture, anime, or tales of the Asian communities they immerse themselves in while simultaneously putting me on a pedestal for, well, just being Asian.
These casual relationships have been short-lived. I only got into them because I was not fully aware, at first, that I was being fetishized.
Your 'thing' for Asian girls is not a compliment
Perhaps these men are looking for an Asian woman who fits the stereotype of being submissive and quiet, but I am hardly that. I grew up in a largely white city in Ohio, and I always have been and always will be vocal about mistreatment of people of color and backwards politics. So why have my partners all been white? The first was with a classmate from my predominantly white high school. The next two were also Ohio boys with whom I had mutual friends and a past. I met my current partner online, and we immediately hit it off over our shared interests.
My race is not one of them. An Asian fetish is distinct from an interracial partnership. Interracial relationships may occur for reasons distinct from race. Asian fetishes have been criticized for treating the fetishized person as an object rather than an equal partner. A Western fetish for Asian things developed out of a European tradition of fascination with the East, and a history of othering the inhabitants of those regions. Middle Eastern women were fetishized in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, [11] and after the First Opium War in the s and the opening of the Chinese treaty ports to foreign merchants, East Asia became the focus of Western commercial and imperial interest.
Western powers, including the United States, established a presence in the port cities of China , Japan and Korea and made substantial profits from the lucrative trade routes. One result of this was a developing appetite amongst the Western middle class for Asian goods and art; for example, Chinese export porcelain. Some of this art, such as postcards and fans, featured sexualized depictions of geishas , portrayed as petite, heavily made-up and richly dressed women. The prominence of this provocative geisha image on trade goods fostered, in the eyes of Western men, the idea of the geisha and East Asian women as decorative, sexual objects.
The image of the sexualized Asian woman in the United States was further solidified by the presence of the U.
Brothels formed in towns surrounding U. American men who may not have had preconceived notions about Asian women were drafted and sent to fight in Asia where they saw Asian women working in the sex industry. A well known stereotype of Asian women is that they are subservient , passive and quiet.
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This image persists today, along with the idea of Asian women being exotic and submissive. In the afterword to the play M. Butterfly , the writer David Henry Hwang , using the term "yellow fever", a pun on the disease of the same name , discusses white men with a "fetish" for east Asian women. The pun refers to the color terminology for race , in which persons of East and Southeast Asian heritage are sometimes described as "Yellow people".
The term "yellow fever" describes someone who is inflicted with a disease, implying that someone with an Asian fetish has a sickness. Hwang argues that this phenomenon is caused by stereotyping of Asians in Western society. The slang term used for a gay man, usually white, who exclusively dates men of Asian descent is " rice queen ". In a two-year study on dating preferences among Columbia University students, researchers did not find evidence of a general preference among white men for Asian women. The study took data from "thousands of decisions made by more than daters from Columbia University's various graduate and professional schools".
Asian fetish places a psychological burden on Asian women, who are forced to cope with constant doubt and suspicion that men who find them attractive have an Asian fetish. Another effect of Asian fetish is that it causes its targets to feel like an Other, because they are isolated and held to different standards of beauty. Men with an Asian fetish are also affected by the stigma that accompanies the term.
NPR correspondent Elise Hu offers that this can be a source of insecurity in Asian women's dating lives, asking: Writer Agness Kaku believes the mainstream white culture undermines efforts to combat sexual harassment based on Asian fetish. Noting how frequently women of Asian descent are subjected to verbal and online harassment, Kaku argues that Asian fetish "thrives on double standards that make light of racial bias against Asians" and states this downplaying leaves women vulnerable to stalking and violence.
After World War II, overly feminized images of Asian women made interracial marriage between Asian American women and white men popular. In preparation for a documentary on Asian fetish called Seeking Asian Female , Chinese-American filmmaker Debbie Lum interviewed non-Asian men who posted online personal ads exclusively seeking Asian women. Things that the men found appealing in Asian women included subtlety and quietness, eye-catching long black hair , a mysterious look in dark eyes , and a propensity to give more consideration to how their partner feels than to themselves.
Lum described the stereotype associated with an Asian fetish as an obsession with seeking "somebody submissive , traditional, docile Asian women are viewed by white men as "good wives" [25] , as in they are perceived to be able to properly take care of their children during the day and fulfill their partner's sexual desires at night.
In interviews done by Bitna Kim, white men explain their fetish for Asian women. They all believed that Asian women have submissive sex. A white woman is seen by white men to lack the same femininity that an Asian woman has to offer. Since , marriages between Eastern European men and Asian women have become increasingly common. Historically, the number of Thai women marrying westerners began to rise in the s and s as a result of Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat 's economic policies which attracted foreign investment and western men to Thailand.
There is a social stigma in the country against Thai women marrying white men, but research published in indicated that an increasing number of young middle class Thai women were marrying foreign men.
Odds Favor White Men, Asian Women On Dating App
A generation earlier, Thai women marrying foreign men had mostly been working class. Sources indicate that Sri Lanka is popular among Western "marriage bureaus" which specialize in the pairing of Western men with foreign women. An estimated , to , German men annually travel abroad for sex tourism , with the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong as their main destinations.
This idea is based on the stereotype of "the Oriental woman" who is considered to be beautiful and sexually exciting as well as caring, compliant and submissive. In her essay "Hateful Contraries: Media Images of Asian Women", British filmmaker Pratibha Parmar comments that the media's imagery of Asian women is "contradictory" in that it represents them as "completely dominated by their men, mute and oppressed" while also presenting them as "sexually erotic creatures".
Asian women have traditionally been stereotyped in mass media in the United States.
In her essay Lotus Blossoms Don't Bleed: