'Seeking Asian Female' Takes A Close Look At A Fetish

[Valmy]

  Everyone knows Japanese are not asians. They are honorary aryans!

Gotcha.

[Ed Anger]

No, no, no...keep the striped pajamas on, baby.

That made me wet.

[Admiral Yi]

One suspects that some of these fellows are gonna be dissapointed on the whole "demure and submissive" thing. 

Ain't that the fucking truth.

I'm pretty sure I've already told the story about the time I met a medic at a MASH in Korea who told me that the highest attempted suicide rate among GIs was guys who had just married Korean girls.

Once the ring's on the finger, no need any longer to maintain the facade.

[Jacob]

Strange considering that the only way to eradicate racism is to ignore race as a factor entirely like our foreign friends do.

I'm certainly not saying that there is no racism outside of the US, nor that non-Americans ignore racism.

However, it does seem there is a very distinctly American conception of race and a distinct approach to how that conception is used to filter and approach all kinds of things in sometimes surprising (at least to me) ways.

I've been trying to nail some of those differences down, but it's a complex subject. It seems that maybe one thing is the primacy of expansive racial identification categories - like Asian, Black, White, Muslim, Hispanic etc - and the way they are used to filter and understand all sorts of experiences.

I mean, I think it's pretty universal for people to stereotype members of different groups and lump them all vaguely similar people into large internally undifferentiated groups. Pretty much everyone does that to a lesser or greater degree. What seems to me a peculiar distinction of the American approach is the degree in which those large categories have cultural currency and inform the self-understanding of its members.

For example, there is a huge body of work - formal and informal - inquiring into and documenting what it's like to be Asian American. There's Asian American theatre and literature studies; there are concerns about Asian admittance to universities; there are Asian American caucuses in all sorts of groups and organizations; there is polling and inquiry into the behaviour of Asian Americans when it comes to elections, and when it comes to marketing; there are expectations about how Asian Americans behave, what their dating prospects are like, how they are portrayed in the media, how their relationships between parents and children play out, the obstacles they face in life and the advantages they may have, and so on and so forth.

And in my observation, this is just as much internal to Asian Americans as it is external to them. Asian Americans are supposed to have a number of experiences and traits in common, and this is basically considered that natural way of things.

On the other hand, there is much less focus on on and expression of the collective experience of what it's like to be say, Korean American, a recent immigrant, someone with parents who are academics or of parents who a small shop owners, or any other possible grouping - whether of greater or lesser granularity.

It's like the American melting pot is very successful at melting disparate groups into these larger racial groupings like Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, etc and erasing or minimizing internal differences, but that it's having a much harder time melting those large, differentiated lumps.

When I come across expressions of this - whether it's an American commenting on a relationship or a political analysis or cultural commentary or whatever - it feels a bit like it would if I had an old school Communist applying their analysis to all facets of life even in casual conversation; it's odd.  Like, you'd have stereotypes about what relationships between someone working class and a member of the intelligentsia is like; there'd be a lumpen proletariat caucus of the Writer's Guild; you'd commonly see lists in magazines of 10 great bourgeois dishes to try while cooking at home; dating site entries would include a your social class as standard practice; people would preface a statement with a "as a member of the rural working class..."; and so on.

It's a taxonomy and it is without a doubt grounded in all sorts of realities, but the specifics of it and the way it seems to be used in almost all contexts is distinct to the US in my observation.

[Admiral Yi]

Yakie:

America is one gigantic open-air prison and if you don't join a gang you will get eaten alive.

[Jacob]

Yakie:

America is one gigantic open-air prison and if you don't join a gang you will get eaten alive.

It does seem there are some parallels there.

[CountDeMoney]

Meh, believe it or not, but height has never done me a damned bit of good.

Well, there's tall, and then there's you. 

[Tonitrus]

Meh, believe it or not, but height has never done me a damned bit of good.

Well, there's tall, and then there's you. 

Whaddya mean. 

[Malthus]

Meh, believe it or not, but height has never done me a damned bit of good.

Well, there's tall, and then there's you. 

Whaddya mean. 

Don't let shorty there get you down. 

[MadImmortalMan]

The tall thing is true. Being tall is the number one most correlated factor in attraction for men. I think I saw an OKC trends thing about it. They come up with all kinds of crazy stuff there. Like this. 





Edit: Found it. Seedy's number is right on the money. Pun intended.

[OttoVonBismarck]

FWIW at 5'10" I've always felt like I got in under the wire on an important metric. I know a lot of guys slightly shorter than me that have specifically said they've had problems over women not wanting to date them over their height, an experience totally foreign to me. There are women taller than me, but out of women 5'10"+ that I've personally known or interacted with I'd say less than 2% are women I'd want to date (based on physical characteristics--I do not like large-framed women, even ones who are healthy weight.)

[Tonitrus]

The tall thing is true. Being tall is the number one most correlated factor in attraction for men. I think I saw an OKC trends thing about it. They come up with all kinds of crazy stuff there. Like this. 

(charts 'n stuff)

See, I am in that big "so tall he scares me" drop off. 

[garbon]

Oh, I don't think so at all. I think that we, as Americans, really do have an unhealthy concern over race, and we don't know it because we have very little to compare it to. Most Americans never live elsewhere, so they don't see the difference.

You're preaching to the choir. But if you wipe all race consciousness from your mind you'll get into some awkward situations, unless you can get all other Americans to do so as well simultaneously.

I also don't think it's a "chip" on their shoulder at all. I think it's confusion on why we place so much emphasis on something so unimportant.

Completely misread me I'm saying foreigners lack that chip that gets implanted in our American brains to make us overly concerned about race. And that I get amused with some of the things that happen with naive foreigners who lack that chip.

Yep, totally misread you.

Agree on all points.

Yeah colorblindness works out wonderfully.

[garbon]

But you have asked what is creepy about it - and it is this: the concern that someone expressing "yellow fever" is some sort of Lettowish fetishist, rather than simply expressing a preference like "I like redheads".

I am sure there are plenty of creepy guys with a preference for redheads.  But the way I hear the 'fetishize Asian women' thing is that this is a common thing that is a symptom of vile western racism rather than just a few sociopathic creeps being creepy.

I like red hair but I think it'd be creepy if someone would only date redheads.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Anyway, to respond to Jake's stupid pussy-bleed post.

America has a unique history that has lead to racial groups developing unique communities while also being part of the greater American whole. There aren't any immediate parallels in most other countries. The United States is really the only country I can think of that has had successive waves of immigration in which immigrants in numbers large enough to be a substantial portion of our population have come in and ultimately made up a large portion of the American demographic. I certainly know basically all countries in Asia, and Europe have simply never experienced such a thing. Europe, due to a combination of a declining or stagnant native population and increasing immigration from low income Muslim and Eastern European countries are now getting a taste of it but I think it takes several generations to see how it will play out.

In the rest of the Americas probably the only country with close to an experience like ours would be Brazil.

But I see things at a greater scale than Jake, so to me I see a long history of remarkable Americanization, the likes of which I've never heard of anywhere else in history. After the Revolution the two big immigrant waves in the 19th century were the Germans and the Irish. Both came and out of necessity established their own, separate communities. Irish-American and German-American became identities just like Jake is talking about in his post. They were at first widely disliked. The German-Americans were, despite initially retaining their native tongue, the most accepted. This is because overall they were a wealthier immigrant group that settled throughout the Midwest, often with enough money to start their own farms and communities so they were not interfering in the established WASP culture.

The Irish, being poorer, overwhelmingly Catholic, and by necessity having to live basically in the slums next to the established centers of WASP America engendered great prejudice and hatred. In a sense, this made the Irish-American community stronger. By the early 20th century most German Americans no longer spoke German, their church services were conducted in English and there was little institutional racism directed against them. When WWI came and anti-German sentiment spread, it was all too convenient for them to spread the last vestiges of Germanic heritage and Anglicize their names, the few remaining German newspapers and German-language churches became essentially unheard of after that point. At that point German-Americans were totally assimilated.

The Irish even into the 50s it was hard for them to find work in many cities, with lots of institutional bias against them. But over time, both their Catholicism and their Irishness became accepted. Aside from random binge drinking in March there is little left to mark any true "Irish American" community, and they are now completely assimilated.

The Italian Americans followed a similar path as the Irish, they came later and in large numbers, faced extreme prejudice and while it's happened a bit after the Irish, they are now basically entirely Americanized. But this was not a fast process. Large scale German and Irish immigration started in the 1840s and earlier and the Irish-American community wasn't fully integrated into America until the 1970s and even a little later in some pockets of the country. Italian Americans came heavily from the 1890s-1920s, and arguably assimilated faster as they made that transition to fully Americanized by the 70s-80s.

Black Americans came in large numbers very early on, enslaved, after emancipation they faced the most discrimination of any of the non-WASP groups. This continues today. That discrimination is what keeps the community distinct, it demands it, really. But over time we have softened our discriminatory position toward blacks. With the black community, their experience is so distinct and their segregation so complete for so long that I think they've actually developed a "parallel American culture" that shares a lot of stuff with the rest of American culture but is distinct, probably permanent, but just as validly American as the rest of mainstream American culture.

Asian Americans had a few aborted waves of immigration (the Chinese in the 1800s for example--but most of them went back to China) and now in the last 30 years a more sustained wave of immigration that will see them becoming an ever larger portion of the American demographic. By and large, while Asian-Americans have somewhat formed a culture distinct to itself like the Germans/Irish/Italians before them, for several reasons I doubt it will persist as long or be as distinct. For one, the Irish/German/Italian immigrants who came over all had shared language, religion and etc values. This allowed them to form very tight-knit, highly insular communities. "Asian-American" covers people from a continent that is most of the world's population and land mass and a place of extremely diverse family values, cuisine, language, religion and etc. So while they have some shared culture based on "being from Asia and living in America", it's nothing like the distinct communities history saw with the "big three" I've mentioned. For that reason, and because institutional and cultural racism against Asians is quite mild and unremarkable compared to that prior groups (and blacks even today) face, I doubt after a few generations if Asian Americans will be anything but fully Americanized. Unlike the Germans/Irish/Italians in the past they don't even seem to have any real desire in most cases to maintain a persistent, distinct community.

But it's shocking how anyone can be surprised race is so important in America. We're a country built on massive accumulation of different racial groups over time that have each been important parts of building the country. There's also been, in living memory, extreme legal discrimination that makes race relations and incredibly important part of American culture. I find this "shock" akin to someone going to South Africa and being shocked there might be some focus on race.