[Orig­i­nally posted in Hyphen on Feb­ru­ary 16, 2009.]

Since writ­ing my last entry on the Asian Fetish Myth, I’ve received some inter­est­ing responses. Most of them have implied that, while Asian women are fetishized by white men, Asian women per­pet­u­ate the fetish by favor­ing white men in the dat­ing game (I believe Neela com­mented on this as well).

One per­son even asked if I was, while writ­ing the post, reminded of my own par­ents (an older white man with a much younger Fil­ip­ina wife) — as though the cir­cum­stances of their rela­tion­ship some­how under­mine my ini­tial claims about the ways in which the Asian Fetish plays out in the media.

To that, in par­tic­u­lar, I respond: Cer­tainly, I had that in mind. But my mother’s mar­riage to my father (like other inter­ra­cial rela­tion­ships) doesn’t under­mine my asser­tion that the Asian Fetish is one per­pet­u­ated onto, rather than by, Asian women. In other words, it is char­ac­ter­ized by the sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of Asian women by non-Asian men due to the latter’s (mis)perceptions about the former’s nature and cul­ture (not the other way around).

My father was an excel­lent exam­ple of this as he was, admit­tedly, attracted to Asian women because he believed that they are sub­mis­sive and gen­tle (fyi: my mother’s a fire­cracker so… don’t think he really knew what he was get­ting into there…).

My mother did marry my father will­ingly and so, I sup­pose, one might be tempted to make the case that she is liv­ing proof that the Asian Fetish is per­pet­u­ated by Asian women who like Cau­casian men. Thing is, she didn’t marry a white Amer­i­can because of of some mis­guided, dominance-driven infat­u­a­tion with older white men (unlike my father, whose attrac­tion to Asian women was really a sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of Asian women; in other words, she’s no Mis­aki Naka­jima). Rather, my mother’s desire to marry a white Amer­i­can was pred­i­cated on the belief that doing so would grant her a level of per­sonal and  finan­cial secu­rity that oth­er­wise might not have been pos­si­ble, given the level of inequal­ity and inop­por­tu­nity prevalant in her home coun­try. Was she sim­ply a gold dig­ger, look­ing for a sug­ar­daddy? Or is her rev­er­ence of West­ern soci­ety the result of cen­turies of colo­nial­ism and for­eign occu­pa­tion which “benev­o­lently assim­i­lated” its cit­i­zens into a belief sys­tem that debased the local cul­tures while exalt­ing those of the West?

Obvi­ously it takes two to tango — but, if you’ve ever taken ballroom-dancing lessons, you know that the dance depends on a very rigidly-defined power rela­tion­ship between dancers. The notion of the Asian fetish is sim­i­larly built upon a unequal bal­ance of power, in which one party has license to define the other, while simul­ta­ne­ously being regarded as a benev­o­lent bene­fac­tor for hav­ing done so.

Yes, Asian women par­tic­i­pate in the sytem. But Asian women didn’t cre­ate the system.

[I feel the need, at this point, to make a dis­tinc­tion between Asian women (as in: from Asia), and Asian Amer­i­can women, as my com­menters seemed to be con­fused about the dif­fer­ence. Every­thing I have thus far described per­tains the former.]

Now, as for why Asian-Americans date white guys: I wish I could say that it’s sim­ple, that — duh — there are a lot of them. Cau­casians do out­num­ber Asian Amer­i­cans by over 200 mil­lion. But it really isn’t so sim­ple.… And that really isn’t the right ques­tion. Instead of ask­ing why so many AsAm women date white men, we should be ask­ing why so few AsAm women date AsAm guys. I know a lot of Asian Amer­i­can women who, admit­tedly, pre­fer not to date Asian men because they think that
they are “effem­i­nate” or “too short” (never mind that we are, on aver­age, even shorter). And I just want to say that this pref­er­ence (or lack thereof) is not based on the  objec­tive or sub­stan­tive obser­va­tions about the mas­culin­ity or physique of Asian men, but rather is based on the way in which Amer­i­can (i.e. white) soci­ety has stereo­typed Asian men
since the mid-1800s (read: rel­e­gat­ing them to jobs tra­di­tion­ally held by women and then con­demn­ing them for hold­ing jobs meant for women, etc.). Tak­ing this into con­sid­er­a­tion, the appar­ent AsAm pref­er­ence for white guys doesn’t seem to be grounded in a sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of white guys, but actu­ally seems to be under­pinned by a socially con­di­tioned aver­sion to Asian men. Funny how we get all bent out of shape about being objec­ti­fied based on west­ern per­cep­tions of our race but have no prob­lem dis­crim­i­nat­ing against our male coun­ter­parts on the same basis.That’s right ladies: If you say you don’t date Asian guys because they’re less than (or date white guys because they are, by com­par­i­son, more than)…well, you’ve just bought into over a cen­tury of racism and anti-Asian sen­ti­ment, and are per­pet­u­at­ing it in your own life on a daily basis.

Obvi­ously the Asian Fetish exists, and obvi­ously it isn’t sin­gu­larly per­pet­u­ated by old white guys. Asian/AsAm women def­i­nitely play a part — but our part doesn’t have any­thing to do with a white man fetish, as some of my com­menters have sug­gested. Rather, our part in per­pet­u­at­ing the Asian Fetish is grounded in our desex­u­al­iza­tion of Asian/AsAm men, as doing so 1) rein­forces white men’s posi­tion of sex­ual power, and 2) bol­sters the asy­met­ri­cal power dynamic between white men and women of color.

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