Asian fetish
- This entry is specific to sexual attraction. For the broader discussion of deep interest in Asian cultures see Asiaphilia
"Asian fetish" is a slang term in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland, used to describe the sexual attraction of non-Asian, primarily (but not necessarily) white men, to Asians, particularly East Asians such as Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Koreans. 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" (a homosexual man, a "rice queen"). Many regard the term as a racist stereotype.
Terminology
This term has come to describe the large number of White male and Asian female couples 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.
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. 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.
Other people, particularly those accused of having Asian fetish, argue that there is a distinction between individuals who are attracted to Asians for those stereoypes 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 in politics or society.
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, the Asian man is stereotyped as being shorter and less well-built than the Caucasian man. 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. The only reliable penis-size studies 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.
On the emotional level, the Asian man is stereotyped as being less capable than the white man 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. Thus, both Asian men and white men dating Asian women can suffer from the stereotype of being “emotionally flawed.”
Finally, on the cultural level, the Asian man is 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, it ignores the simple fact that women in Asia have made tremendous gains in the twentieth century, even rising to become heads of state. What may have applied to cultures during feudal times is no longer true today.
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 rougly 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. But the three cases given above cannot provide a full picture of the depth of harm which an Asian fetish can do to both Asian-American identity and to interracial relationships. Nevertheless, the dangers of exclusionary dating and of generalizations rooted in racism are real and immediate, and such preferences are anything but innocent and harmless. Asian men, Asian women, and Caucasian men are all affected in profound ways.
Effects of media
Other criticisms revolve around the forces that perpetuate "fetishistic" stereotypes of Asians. Notably, a great deal of criticism is directed towards the Western media and its tendency to present Asian women in objectified, usually sexualized roles. In brief, the general tendency in Western film and television is for Asians to be typecast into certain roles. For Asian men, it's usually martial arts masters and academians. For women, there is the additional role of a sexual object, often serving as the romantic interest of the protagonist, a white, presumably Euroamerican male (when not a romantic interest, the role often degenerates to that of a prostitute). From Miss Saigon to The Last Samurai, the preponderance of white male/asian female on-screen and on-stage pairings is hard to miss. This pairing has become so ubiquitous that it even appears in 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 the name was seemingly picked at random for its exoticism, as "Cho" is Korean and "Chang" is Chinese, making the combination nigh impossible in real life.[1]
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. 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. The media, after all, is a reflection of society, and racist images and stereotypes that permeate society naturally affect the media.
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 a homely or even ugly man. The King of Queens, for example, features an overweight slob of a man together with his very attractive wife.[2] 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, one must also not lose sight of the race condition specific to Asian fetishization. It is a race condition built upon centuries of Orientalism and its associated colonialist discourse of masculinity and conquest. In this sense, the usually-white male protagonist of western television and film seems to take adventure in sampling the "exotica" of the world's peoples and cultures. In this representation, women of other cultures are there to serve his needs. Thus, for the objectification of Asian women there is the added condition of exotic interest based in a perceived foreigness.
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 [3]. 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 controvery, 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.
Another criticism is that the concept of race itself is outdated, and that combining heterogenous 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.