Asian fetishes, myths, and social science
First, there was the Slate article in which economists look at speed dating, which my sister forwarded me and which I linked, but didn’t have time to comment on, last weekend. Then, a post by Moe at Jezebel taking the economists to task, specifically on the question of whether white men fetishize Asian women, got criticized in turn by Carmen at Racialicious and by Samhita at Feministing, for itself perpetuating stereotypes about Asian women. Then Amanda at Pandagon took up the discussion, leading to a lengthy thread of debate, of which Stentor summarized the issues in Do You Have the Bad Kind of Asian Fetish?
Starting with Slate:
Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race … But men don’t seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman’s race had no effect on the men’s choices.
Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men …
To which I call, “bullshit.” (Remind me to tell you about my “Asian” phone sex persona one time!) …
I’m skipping the part Carmen called her to task on, where all the Asian women are smart, skinny, and unafraid to tell you your skin looks bad. Because Moe’s disbelief actually was my initial reaction to the business about white men preferring East Asian women being a myth. What do they mean, a myth? I know white men who prefer East Asian women. Men talk about this openly, both in real life and online. Since when did all these men become mythical?
At the same time, you know, I don’t want to just say my personal experience trumps somebody else’s study. Studies, if well designed, should call our anecdotal experience into question; lots of us are drawing conclusions based on skewed samples and minds which, even for the smartest of us, tend to find patterns that just aren’t there, unless we make ourselves follow careful procedures, as well designed studies do. Not that some random study reported in a paper can always be trusted, either; studies get reported regardless of whether they’ve actually made it into a peer reviewed publication, get misreported, get cherry picked, etc. You know the drill. Echidne of the Snakes makes a regular blog theme of taking apart this kind of thing. But still, I like to ask why these economists are reporting something so counter to what I’d expect.
And, once I ask myself that question, it’s not hard to see why they might. How many people, of any sex and race, have a fixed preference for dating people of some particular other race? How many will only date (or at least heavily favor) their own? How many pretty much date anyone? I think it’s safe to say that groups two and three outnumber group one. If you do phone sex, sure, white men seeking Asian women may loom large. If you go looking specifically at people putting up ads on Craigslist or wherever for some race other than your own, you might well find it the most common interracial preference. If you go looking at shelves of interracial porn, you’ll likely find no shortage for this market niche. But if you’re running numbers on the entire dating population? Not so much. It may be, as Amanda Marcotte suggests, that the speed dating population is skewed in some way, here, from the larger dating population. But it doesn’t have to be. “Asian fetish” may just be too small a set to show in this sample (especially when countered by all the people who have preferences in other directions), or be dwarfed by the “dating your own race” bias.
Now, here’s Samhita at Feministing:
I find most conversations with people about the fetishization of Asian women mind numbing. Even when people have the best of intentions with comments like, “you can’t help who you are attracted to,” or “Asian women are hot,” …
Well, to a large degree you can’t help who you’re attracted to. I mean, maybe sometimes you can. People’s attractions shift over time, and some people may even succeed in consciously broadening who they look at. But mostly, I take as a given that who you’re attracted to is involuntary. And also irrelevant. To the extent that “fetishization of Asian women” has any ethical meaning, surely it’s about how you actually treat other people, and not about who privately gets your hormones going?
… you begin to realize that often people are just trying to explain away their own or someone else’s racism. Myths such as Asian women are hotter, or they are more docile and therefore better wives, are not only mythical and generalizing, but they hinge on essentialist stereotypes that silence the voices of Asian women and Asian feminists that have been shouting for years about how they are not your fantasy.
If a woman feels men are approaching their fantasy, docile image of her, responses about how you can’t help who you’re attracted to aren’t really to the point.
But there may be reasons other than defense of racism that people show up on threads about the whole “Asian fetish” thing to protest. Because two things are true. One is that there really are people who go after race X for all the wrong reasons, because they want all the stereotypes that go with race X – people who are quite open about wanting a hot-blooded person of this race, or a “so nice” person of that race, who knows how to treat men just right. The other is that there are really are people (even when you get beyond the declining minority who outright think interracial dating is wrong) who don’t want to give interracial relationships much benefit of the doubt, people who tend to assume “fetish” first and only see two people in love once they’ve ruled out the seedier ways of looking at the couple.
In general, if the people you’re actually trying to date complain you’re fetishizing them, or if you realize that the things you’re doing when trying to get dates match the kinds of things Asian women complain about when they start talking about the bad kind of fetish, you should stop and listen. But if some couple is happy together, and you, from outside the relationship, want to worry about fetishes, the default assumption should be to give other people’s relationships the benefit of the doubt, and to assume that supposedly docile women have enough minds of their own to pick up on, and reject, men who want them to be more docile than they care to be.
November 16th, 2007 at 10:00 am
I think that the feeling that someone is interested in you for reasons that have more to do with their hangups than with the real you is not by any means limited to interracial dating. I have often felt it, but not felt it most from the men who were in fact most different from me in background and personality. Anecdotally, based on personal experience, I’d have to say there’s something to the Jewish men/shiksa thing. I used to think of it as I’m Not Annie Hall and Your’s Not Woody Allen. I’ve no idea whether there’s any research on that.
Probably if you are an Asian woman in a milieu where you meet a lot of white men, you are going to get hit on by the ones who do have an Asian-woman thing more than the ones who don’t, and if you’re a natural blond in a milieu where you meet a lot of Jewish men, same deal. But that doesn’t mean those men aren’t still a relatively small minority.
I did end up marrying a Jew, and he has never in any way shape or form given me the feeling of fighting to get out from behind some superimposed, imaginary me, or the idea that he has a significant “type” that draws him.
Jean
November 16th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Not large enough to be a sample, but heard an awful lot of comments about Asian women from Vietnam vets while I was in the service an afterward. I think many of those could be considered an Asian fetsish, and for many a reality, not myth. Came out of conversations about whats wrong with American women.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
I’ve only twice personally felt I was in the “imaginary me” situation where the difference was ethnic. One was an “I’m Not Your Annie Hall” situation with an otherwise nice Jewish man, and the other was an “I’m not your white woman” situation with an otherwise not all that desirable black man. But generally, like you, Jean, I haven’t really had any sense that the men who were different from me in background were any more likely than the men who were like me in background to pursue me more for their hangups than for the real me.
Hathor, yes, I’ve run into that kind of guy, too, though in my case it’s mainly been on the Internet, where racists of all varieties seem more blatant; I haven’t actually run into that kind of talk from the white men I’ve known in real life who were married to Asian women.