White men with yellow fever

Exotification – I’m nonyour Pretty Little Lotus Flower.

Guest post by Joy Goh-Mah

Joy’s Story

“I love Asiaticwomen!” “Asian women areso hot.” “Japan, Korea, China?” “Asian women agnisehow to treat a man!”

Do any of these phrases sound familiar to you? If they do, congratulations, you’ve stick withacross (or you are) a opus— probably white — with supposed“Yellow Fever”.

As anAsianwoman living in a commonwealthfull of white men, I meet these guysa lot. You know, the ones who blurt turn outall of the above, who sieveto guess what ‘type’ ofAsianI am, whose dearieactresses are Gong Li, Lucy Liu and Zhang Ziyi, who insist on discussing Korean/Japanese/Chinese dramas with me despite me not having seen the series in question, who tell me roughlyall theformer(a)Asian women they’ve dated, who complain somewhathow ugly white women are and why Asian women are so much better, and who try to get me to tell them that white men are so much better than Asian men.

Of course, such exotifiying sentiments are meant to be complimentary. After all, the patriarchy asserts, what could be higher praise for a woman than the approval of a white man?

Only…it isn’t praise. It is patronising and dehumanising, andinextricablybound up with the social power of race and gender. To them, ‘Asian’ is our becharacteristic, in a way that ‘white’ would never be utiliseto define themselves. When the “Yellow Fever’ed men speak to me, they aren’t speaking to me, they’re speaking to their melodic themeof an Asian woman, their fantasy made flesh. They’re speaking to every Asian woman they’ve ever seen in the media, every Asian carbon blackactress they’ve ever leered at on their computer screens. My personality is rendered invisible, obscured by the lenses of racial stereotype.

And what a horrifically misogynistic stereotype it is too.

Have a wander turn of eventsany online dating site or Internet forumdiscussing Asian women, and you’ll notice that one of the most attractive things about Asian women, according to white men, is our apparent ability to “treat our man right”. But what does “right” entail? Well, to put it simply, “treating a man right” is to treat him as superior. Time and prison termagain, Asian women are lauded for our supposedly spiritlessand gentle natures, for our submissive attitudes, for our rejection of feminist values. (Hah!

) Through their fetishisation and racist assumptions about Asian women, they reveal their attitudes towards relations with women in general: one should be quiet and meek, contented with a subordinate status, and eager to serve.

How, you mayask, do these men reconcile their ideas of Asian women with the existence of Asian feminists? Easy; they decide that she has been “brainwashed” by Western feminist values, has been contaminated, and has neglected her ethnicroots. The fact that they assume submissiveness to be so inherent in Asian women that any feminist ideas must be incorruptparroting of the ideas of white women, is insulting in the extreme. Nor do I cherishtheir assumption that Asian culture is static. I would love for them to patterntheir eye over their own paganhistory, going back uphundreds of years, and then tell me — what is “Caucasian culture”? And by rejecting the values their ancestors espoused, have they betrayed their cultural roots?

So please, men with ‘Yellow Fever’, stop objectifying, fetishising and exotifiying us.

Instead, try seeing us as individual human beings with individual, unique personalities. Cool idea, no? And next time you have the urge to tell me about all the Asian women you’ve dated and how much you loved Crouching Tiger Hidden firedrakeor Memoirs of a Geisha — don’t.

This article is from on Media miscellanyUK, a site set up to tackle the wishingof diversity in UK media and the ubiquity of whiteness.

 

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Materials taken from Womens Views on News