[Orig­i­nally posted at Hyphen on Feb­ru­ary 11, 2009]

That Asian Fetish Myth thing is mak­ing news again…though this time no one’s debunk­ing it.

Jaemin Kim has a piece up exam­in­ing the dan­ger­ous impli­ca­tions of the “Asian Fetish,” in which she shrewdly links media rep­re­sen­ta­tions of inter­ra­cial dat­ing with sex­ual vio­lence against Asian women.  It’s a must-read if you hate see­ing Asian women por­trayed as the exclu­sive purview of middle-aged, bald­ing white men and/or hentai-watching com­puter geeks.

The Onion also recently pub­lished a piece on this topic, albeit with a much sim­pler objec­tive: a lam­poon of the fetishiz­ers them­selves. In an arti­cle titled “Asian Teen Has Sweaty Middle-Aged Man Fetish,” the Onion attempts to put a satir­i­cal spin on the Asian Fetish Myth. But, while the premise has poten­tial (even if the tar­get is an easy one), the exe­cu­tion is less than consummate.

Here’s an excerpt:

At first glance, 17-year-old Mis­aki Naka­jima seems like any other shy and sub­mis­sive Japan­ese school­girl. She loves shop­ping, text mes­sag­ing, and the color pink. But beneath her whole­some exte­rior lies a wicked secret: Mis­aki Naka­jima is con­sumed by sex­ual fan­tasies involv­ing sweaty, middle-aged Amer­i­can men.

“I can’t explain it,” said Naka­jima, dressed in a pleated miniskirt and pure white knee socks. “There’s just some­thing about Amer­i­can men who are at least twice my age and nearly three times my body weight that totally dri­ves me wild.”

Sure, we get the punch­line — how clever to point out the absur­dity of “bald­ing Mid­west­ern­ers who carry most of their weight in their stom­ach” enter­tain­ing some strange sense of enti­tle­ment over women so obvi­ously out of their league.

But for a par­ody of pervy old white men, we sure don’t get much of the pervy old white men… Instead, we get a pretty intense col­lec­tion of hyper-sexual descrip­tions of 17-year-old Misaki’s miniskirt and “alabaster” skin. In fact, after a few para­graphs expound­ing on the bizarre sex­ual fan­tasies of this “vir­gin nymph,” the arti­cle starts to read less like a par­ody and more like the begin­ning of Asian-fetish erot­ica writ­ten specif­i­cally for “bald­ing Mid­west­ern­ers who carry most of their weight in their stomach.”

Maybe the Onion writ­ers just can’t keep track of their own punch­lines anymore…or maybe this fetishized image of the sub­mis­sive Asian woman is so per­va­sive that even satire intended to crit­i­cize it becomes, itself, a source of the objectification.

I can just imag­ine what Jaemin would say about this, given the way her arti­cle takes other jour­nal­ists to task for their bor­der­line racist (and unde­ni­ably reduc­tive) rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Asian women and the men who date them.

Thoughts?

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