When Asian Women Are Harassed for Marrying Non-Asian Men
October 14, 2018 1:07 PM   Subscribe

The men who harass me know three things: I’m Chinese-American, my husband is white, and our son is multiracial. You hate Asian men, they insist; you hate your own child. You hate yourself.

They are linked by a common ideology: a belief that Asian women shouldn’t date outside their race–and that as Asian men, they have the right to voice this opinion through toxic harassment.
...
Despite fear of reprisal, however, many Asian women have begun to speak about the targeted harassment they’ve experienced, and several prominent Asian men, such as Phil Yu of the blog Angry Asian Man, writer Jonny Sun, Eddie Huang, and Arthur Chu have recently denounced this behavior, too. With no official recourse, the best way to combat this type of harassment may be bringing it into the open — with the entire Asian community, men included, speaking against it wherever it occurs. Asians are not a monolith; we will inevitably disagree on particular opinions or pieces of work. But empathy and thoughtful conversation must be the goal, and the entire Asian community must work together to end the misogynist harassment that prevents it.
posted by cynical pinnacle (91 comments total) 56 users marked this as a favorite
 
As a S. Asian man, I want to recognize how important this issue is. To call out this kind of toxic behaviour as it happens both in the community and outside of it. To support women who are facing this kind of harassment and abuse is necessary. It lets everyone know that this is not something that should be tolerated, and that there is a larger problem with how our otherness is perceived and how men specifically internalize this otherness and the social/political conversations that surround masculinity and sexuality.

I guess the heart of what I'm wanting to say is that men need to take responsibility for this kind of awful shit. I'm glad that Phil Yu, Jonny Sun, and others are used their platforms to amplify this conversation and denounce what is happening.

There's so much happening here with this article and the conversation surrounding it. I'm struggling to really articulate what I want to say. I hope I'm not making this all about men, and if I'm taking a way from a conversation and not letting space for others to speak, I apologize.

Thank you for posting this.
posted by Fizz at 2:52 PM on October 14, 2018 [35 favorites]


Several women had hesitated to speak publicly about the harassment, fearing it would make Asian men look bad. “It’s family matters,” several said.

She points out that these men use logic identical to the logic used by white supremacists, MRAs, incels, etc. It's (not) funny that in any community that thrives on hatred or violence and justifies itself by its supposed superiority and/or imminent extinction, the common trait is always the preponderance of men.

It's ironic that in our (men's) desperation to reinforce cultural or racial distinctions, we obviate them by being identically repulsive across the board.
posted by klanawa at 3:27 PM on October 14, 2018 [22 favorites]


It's such an awful thing, and something the author doesn't call out, but I've observed in my wife's Viet-Australian culture and been told by a number of my Asian women friends is also that in many cases "traditional" (Viet, in this case) attitudes towards women and relationships are fucking awful for women.

I've seen some truly horrendous shit that women are told both subtly and overtly to deal with cause "that's just the way it is/men are". And many "traditional" men (and women) totally have the expectation that a 'good' wife will just deal. I've also observed this in the way sons and daughters can be treated. Sons can often be babied to ridiculous levels, whilst daughters are held to higher standards in every way. Traditional Viet culture can be extremely patriarchal and gross, and I would imagine some of the entitlement the author calls out is a product of this.

This, of course, is not to say every Viet-Australian family is like this - far from it. But it's depressingly widespread here.
posted by smoke at 3:56 PM on October 14, 2018 [6 favorites]


They are linked by a common ideology: a belief that Asian women shouldn’t date outside their race–and that as Asian men, they have the right to voice this opinion through toxic harassment

In fairness, man of many cultures and races, dare I say most, feel this way. It's fractal- right down to "you- woman in this city and this neighborhood over here should not date a man from this city but that neighborhood over there". In general, men just like to know that women do not have a lot of choice and remain available to them with little effort. One of the easiest ways to do that is to form a group with other men and forbid the females in the group to mate outside it, backing up the threats with violence against the women and the outsider men. Tribes, gangs, castes, political parties, music scenes, high school cliques- all the same. I think all women experience the men they are close to feeling like they get to dictate who you date: not just fathers but brothers, co-workers and friends all feel better if you date a guy just like them in whatever way they are most sensitive to feeling othered in- race, union affiliation, handsomeness, fitness, socio-economic class or whatever.
posted by fshgrl at 4:31 PM on October 14, 2018 [58 favorites]


She points out that these men use logic identical to the logic used by white supremacists

Which is ironic, because the fault of all this is ultimately white supremacy. Who created the cultural stereotypes that emasculate Asian men and exoticize Asian women? By harassing Asian women, those men are only being puppets of white supremacy. Those Asian men should not direct their toxic harassment at women, but really at white men who agree with those views.

Yet, I think I also carry some of this baggage myself. I remember in the early days of dating profiles how it was not uncommon to see minority (including Asian) women who ONLY were interested in white men. And a lot of folks would say that it wasn't racist to do that, but it was more of a "preference". I guess at the time I was lucky that I just kind of accepted it, instead of falling into the AZN crowd that would turn my bitterness into hate.
posted by FJT at 5:00 PM on October 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


I've witnessed another form of this here in NZ where white males express extreme racist views towards other white males with asian-lookinhg wives - and in the process show their extreme willful ignorance that Chinese were common amongst the earliest settlers here. Racism is such a horrible toxic thing, and unfortunately a thing we must all night daily.
posted by unearthed at 5:06 PM on October 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


First of all, I want to make a plea for us to treat this very, very fraught topic with care and respect. Conspire's list of things to be mindful of in race discussions is old and was written on a completely different and somewhat orthogonal topic, but may be worth reviewing.

So. My heart dropped into my stomach when I read this article a few days ago, and I'm feeling some very real panic at the prospect of discussing it here. It's very much the feeling of "family matters" described in the article (and quoted by klanawa above), and of airing dirty laundry. I have witnessed everything she describes in the article. It's rarely been directed at me personally (at least as far as I can remember at the moment), but much in the same way that garden-variety incels lump all women into the category of "sluts," misogynists in the Asian American community tend to assume all Asian American women are only interested in white men, and treat us accordingly. (It should not matter, obviously, but I have only been in romantic relationships with Asian men.) So even though I'm not technically part of the group that they're angry with, I can feel the waves of contempt radiating off them, and I don't feel at all immune to them (much as a woman who's never had a sexual relationship shouldn't necessarily feel protected from the attacks of incels). And as this article points out, all this has obvious implications for the children of Asian women and white men - people like me.

I'm on record here as caring about the concerns of Asian American men with regards to masculinity, and it's still something that matters to me. But some of the discussion around Crazy Rich Asians and (especially) To All the Boys I've Loved Before lately has sort of brought me to realize that I've been carrying water for the misogynists in a way that's not really in line with my values. This sentence -- "But though these women still felt some solidarity with their harassers — family matters — that feeling is one-way" -- hurt to read.

Contrary to what smoke says, the form all this takes strikes me as very, very American. Whatever gender problems may exist in "traditional Asian cultures" (and personally, my community -- third- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans -- is very far removed from such traditional cultures), online mob harassment is as American as apple pie.
posted by sunset in snow country at 5:14 PM on October 14, 2018 [50 favorites]


Which is ironic, because the fault of all this is ultimately white supremacy

No. Misogyny predates white supremacy by thousands of years. Stop it with this. White supremacy and colonialism and a bunch of other things intersect with misogyny in ever increasingly toxic ways, but they did not invent misogyny. That one is the original sin.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:27 PM on October 14, 2018 [77 favorites]


Maybe this isn't the place to decide which form of oppression is the worst? FJT had a good point that's worth engaging with.
posted by sunset in snow country at 5:31 PM on October 14, 2018 [21 favorites]


Agreed. But a blanket and obviously incorrect statement like “this is all the fault of white supremacy” is not a benign statement. It seems to obscure, rather than illuminate, what’s going on in situations where white supremacy and misogyny intersect, and to the extent that it erases the harm that misogyny does, and propagates a worldview in which misogyny is not worth consideration — which is something that’s out there, right now — it’s actively harmful to women in general. To that, I will object.

I will back out of the rest of the thread now, and say only that this seems very painful, and I hope it can become less so.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:52 PM on October 14, 2018 [17 favorites]


Can I respectfully suggest that maybe white people shouldn't do the whole "race isn't actually important; this is all about misogyny; it's really the same for everyone" routine? It's boring and it's predictable and it makes Metafilter a worse place. And I think maybe this is a place where our input isn't actually needed at the outset, and we could just listen for a while rather than feeling the need to explain other people's lived experience to them.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:55 PM on October 14, 2018 [40 favorites]


So, being hapa, I once went on some hapa forums to see about experiences of others like me, since in my own life I don't know very many other hapa besides myself and one sibling. And I found that they tended to be full of guys like the ones described in the article. I think some of them had some very real life experiences that I wouldn't gaslight. There are absolutely racist white dudes who fetishize asian women, and if they marry an asian woman and have a kid you can guess what kind of awkward tensions that can produce.

Also, it is real that in our society, Asian men are stereoyped as being unsexy, effeminate, etc and there are women who buy into that. I once had a discussion with some younger female classmates in college who guffawed when I said I had no racial preferences and had dated men who were Chinese/Korean/Indian/etc. Like they could never see them dating asian men themselves.

There are many other races that have sex-related stereoypes that interfere with their love life (see: gay black men who are really not into being fetishized as big-dicked macho men and have trouble with overt racism on grindr). But it is apparent to me that the anger of these asian/hapa incel guys are misplaced. This is the stuff of white supremacy, and some of these guys even acknowledge it, yet they dump all their anger onto Asian and hapa women anyway and even feed into the very culture that produced their woes. Like a lot of them cannot see themselves dating black or latino women, and they just accept that being a white man is The Best and that their self-worth is dependent on their ability as men to get laid with culturally approved attractive women.

It's also been my experience on dating sites like OKC, tinder, etc that a sizeable segment of Asian dudes had unreal expectations of wanting a virginal, thin, submissive asian housewife. It basically made them no different to me than the fetishizing white dudes who want an exotic asian waifu. And I can't help but look at these incel Asian dudes and think, well, of course I won't date you if you think that way?
posted by picklenickle at 5:56 PM on October 14, 2018 [37 favorites]


I apologize. I wasn't trying to obscure or hide misogyny. This is a failure on my part and in the future I will be more careful with my thoughts and my comments.
posted by FJT at 5:58 PM on October 14, 2018 [6 favorites]


But a blanket and obviously incorrect statement like “this is all the fault of white supremacy” is not a benign statement.

His point was pretty obviously that men who harass women like this are acting as puppets of white supremacy -- the "this" refers to the specific situation where Asian men feel emasculated, not to all misogyny. And it's really not helpful to the Asian women who are trying to have their voices heard to come in here and crank up the temperature right off the bat and attack men who are supporting us.
posted by sunset in snow country at 6:22 PM on October 14, 2018 [15 favorites]


I'm the white-passing, Asian-identifying daughter of one of these marriages. I've been lucky enough to avoid the kind of harassment described here, but I'm hyperaware of its possibility pretty much, uh, every time I say anything about being Asian online, and it's had a silencing effect on what I say in public, unmoderated spaces like Twitter for sure.

I'd like to strongly second sunset in snow country's request that people take a look at Conspire's post, and particularly these three comments that were part of that thread, on the subject of white men married to Asian women dominating conversations: 1, 2, 3. I'm frustrated that discussions about misogyny against Asian women in the context of white supremacy derail to, "Well, aren't Vietnamese/Indian/Chinese/etc. men more conservative than white men? And isn't the real underlying problem misogyny?" the moment a white person feels the need to chip in. And I certainly don't need to hear more second- and thirdhand accounts of other Vietnamese women's experiences as filtered through the assessment of white men.

MRAsians don't care about the traditional values of their culture of origin, except as a rhetorical tool to use against Asian women. If anything, their anger is directly linked to their assimilation into white Western culture -- they're mad that assimilating hasn't given them access to the same position of dominance as their white cohorts. It's useful to them to be able to shame women in their communities for not conforming to their parents'/grandparents' standards, but they have zero interest in doing so themselves. That would mean curbing their own behavior the way they want to curb Asian women's.
posted by bettafish at 7:10 PM on October 14, 2018 [51 favorites]


My wife, who is Cuban and of Ibero-Cuban heritage, is ambiguously ethnic in appearance and on the west coast looks possibly Hawaiian or Filipina. As younger people, when we would attend an event reasonably associated with a pan-Asian ethnic identity, it was not uncommon for random dudes to say things like "stay with your people" to her as they walked by. We mostly found it funny, but, yeah, this is a thing.
posted by mwhybark at 7:28 PM on October 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


this is ultimately white supremacy. Who created the cultural stereotypes that emasculate Asian men and exoticize Asian women? By harassing Asian women, those men are only being puppets of white supremacy. Those Asian men should not direct their toxic harassment at women, but really at white men who agree with those views.

Help me connect the dots here. If these guys are puppets then they're serving the interests of white supremacy and I don't really see it.

I can see harassment being a reaction to feeling less dateable than a white man due to the damaging cultural steoeotypes white supremacy has given us
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 8:13 PM on October 14, 2018


I think it's just about not putting blame where it's due. I don't know if white supremacy wants these guys to attack me specifically, but it sure doesn't mind having me around as a decoy.

Oh, and getting a bunch of people deeply on board with policing racial boundaries -- that's definitely handy for white supremacy.
posted by sunset in snow country at 8:29 PM on October 14, 2018 [7 favorites]


Oh! And buying in to the whole racial hierarchy that white supremacy has created (the article goes into some detail about anti-Black and brown racism among these dudes).
posted by sunset in snow country at 8:30 PM on October 14, 2018 [9 favorites]


It's also not just an Asian thing.

There are definitely unique aspects to the Asian part, but yes, this is a more general phenomenon. My partner is a visible minority (not Asian) and from the week we started dating to now she has gotten nasty comments from dudes. “Sell out” is as nice as it gets, and it goes way downhill from there.

Nasty comments from women happen but are less common, mostly it is men, and frequently politically engaged “conscious “ men.

Interestingly almost no one says those things to me. Gross and ignorant stuff, yes, like versions of the sideways vagina thing, but not the boundary policing she gets.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:00 PM on October 14, 2018 [6 favorites]


Yep. See also what harassers said about Jenn Fang's interracial relationship. They don't like Ranier Maningding either because he blogs about his relationship with a Black woman and doesn't fall into standard MRAsian talking points.

This kind of policing isn't unique to the Asian-American community (certain communities of white people don't like white women dating interracially either), but that doesn't mean it isn't an Asian-American problem.
posted by storytam at 9:01 PM on October 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


"It's not misogyny from the old country which suggests to women that Asian men are misogynists by their very nature."

Nor is it a traditional value from the old country that Asian men are weak, timid, and passive. That this is linked to U.S. culture should be evident from the way it's happening in the U.S. rather than in Asia. Whatever their other faults, I've never heard men back in the old country freak out about women marrying white men like we do in the U.S.

"Help me connect the dots here. If these guys are puppets then they're serving the interests of white supremacy and I don't really see it."

I see how you might object to "puppet". A puppeteer has consciousness and intention. These Asian men aren't getting orders signed, sealed, delivered. Is that why you propose "reaction?" Maybe we can agree on "effect" or "consequence".
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 9:08 PM on October 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


Getting back to the article for a minute: wow, those messages are despicable.

I'm in a mixed marriage myself. I have a lot of feelings and confusion and uncertainty about it. As in choosing where to live, or in which school to enroll one's children, this is a choice which I would like to be left to each person's own discretion. As in choosing where to live, or in which school to enroll one's children, this is a choice which lots of people make in uncoordinated but strongly correlated ways that cumulatively produce ugly and powerful trends. I have no idea how to balance the public and private interests here. I completely understand why this is an important issue that produces strong feelings in lots of people.

But, wow, those messages are despicable.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 9:17 PM on October 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


Mrs w0mbat is nth generation Japanese American & I'm a pasty English bloke, and we have a cute hapa kid. None of us has encountered even a hint of this, in real life or online. Maybe if any of the 3 of us were famous? If we didn't live in the SF Bay Area?
posted by w0mbat at 9:24 PM on October 14, 2018


Also, how did the stereotype of Asian men in the west go from Attila, Tamerlane, and Genghis to Long Duk Dong?
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 9:31 PM on October 14, 2018


I'm frustrated that discussions about misogyny against Asian women in the context of white supremacy derail to, "Well, aren't Vietnamese/Indian/Chinese/etc. men more conservative than white men? And isn't the real underlying problem misogyny?" the moment a white person feels the need to chip in. And I certainly don't need to hear more second- and thirdhand accounts of other Vietnamese women's experiences as filtered through the assessment of white men.

Oh I do most sincerely apologise if that's how my comment came across, it's not at all what I intended, and I certainly wasn't presuming to lecture any Asians or women in the thread about 'what it's like for them'.

Indeed, on the contrary I really just wanted to highlight that Viet-Australian men, at least, can be just as shithouse and gross as white Australian men - and the latter can be very poor.
posted by smoke at 10:02 PM on October 14, 2018


I’ve experienced this both in Asia and America. I’ll never forget my wife being called a traitor for not letting her white mother-in-law be taken advantage of by a salesman in Beijing. I’ll also never forget the advice she received in America about the need for her to to take her Asian appearing daughter and leave her white appearing son and husband in America for a Chinese family. I don’t know if the root cause is racism or misogyny, old country or America. I just know it sucks. I wish I could find a place where my family was not judged by its appearance, but it doesn’t seem to exist.
posted by wobumingbai at 10:07 PM on October 14, 2018 [7 favorites]


"These harassers frequently brand me “self-hating” and accuse me of “hating Asian men” — because I have a white husband, and because of a tweet I posted years ago in which I acknowledged I wasn’t always attracted to Asian men.
Tweet excerpt: "...to be honest, I do not often find Asian men attractive. (They remind me of my cousins.)"
...Growing up, the only Asians I knew were my cousins — so, as I admitted, when I see Asian men, my first instinctive feeling is often kinship rather than sexual attraction."


One of my closest friends since high school is hapa (British-Chinese Canadian) and he's expressed exactly that sentiment. The majority of Asian girls and women he encountered in day-to-day life as a child and adolescent were related to him in some way. To him, Asian women looked like family and it was hard for him to get past that.

(I've been trying to write something coherent about the r/AZNidentity guys - their attitude towards women like my friend's Mom, their racist beliefs about mixed race families and the hapa kids who are my friends and family - and I'm failing because I'm just so furious. I keep picturing my niece and nephew and realizing that their existence is some asshole's idea of "cultural genocide".)
posted by Secret Sparrow at 10:55 PM on October 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


The dual of that is standing next to an Asian American in a ticket or checkout line, and literally being assumed by a white person that you're family or in the same party. So for an Asian American to internalize that to the extent of seeing another person as more kin than warranted is an example of how white hegemony functions.
posted by polymodus at 11:33 PM on October 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


I once stumbled into a certain hapas forum, thinking I might find some insight into what sorts of things my young kids might face as they grow older. The hatred I found there for people who look like me and especially my wife was eye-opening. Incels and MRA culture, mixed with a heavy dose of racism. I have thought a lot about that experience.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:03 AM on October 15, 2018 [3 favorites]


lol this is so depressing.

I'm an Asian-American woman married to a white British man. With the exception of one white-passing mixed-raced boyfriend, I have only dated white men. Is it because I'm a self-hating race traitor? No, it's largely because I have lived most of my adult life in lily-white places where everytime I walked into a room, the Asian demographic went up by 100 percent. I grew up in the Seattle area where there are hella Asians but I wasn't allowed to date in high school so them's the breaks.

Yeah, white supremacy influenced my views on attractiveness when I was younger. It influenced the way I saw myself -- attractive only as an exotic object, unattractive in relation to white women. It influenced who I found attractive. When it's only floppy-haired white boys on TV, who else was I supposed to fancy? But I learned more about decolonising my mind and I got over my boner for the Shawn Hunters and Jordan Catalanos of the world. Did that change the overwhelming whiteness of Germany or Holland or Yorkshire? No. I wanted to date people and these places were not hotbeds of diversity. It was white boys or nothing. By the time I lived in a more diverse place, I was already married. What am I supposed to do, exactly?

Being an Asian woman (or really any POC) in a relationship with a white person is such a clusterfuck of other people's baggage. There's the abuse detailed in the post, abuse from my own people who are themselves burdened by their own pain. There's the abuse from white people, unsurprisingly. My husband is a journalist and sometimes gets hate mail. One message commented on his FB profile pic. We had taken a photo together outside a cafe in Vienna. Someone wrote to him and said, "You're not enough of a man to get a real woman so you had to order yourself a £10 Thai bride."

Presumably, real woman means white woman. This comment didn't offend me because it implied I'm a sex worker (because I don't think sex work is offensive). It hurt because it implied that I am not enough, that I am a lesser alternative to whiteness.

For years and still ongoing, I have been the subject of both racial and misogynistic abuse. Being married to a white man doesn't protect me from that. Being married to a white man doesn't stop me from resenting the overwhelming whiteness of the place we live. People wanting to fuck me as their exotic, Oriental experience doesn't protect me or benefit me; it turns me into a box to tick.

I'm just so uneasy about this all. It is right to question white supremacy and it is right to unpack how our "preferences" are shaped by white supremacy. But abusing Asian women for dating outside of their race isn't the right way.
posted by quadrant seasons at 2:06 AM on October 15, 2018 [69 favorites]


Haole hobo, here.

There is a certain type of White Guy who will try to play guess-the-ethnicity with Mrs. Hobo in front of everybody. There's that check-the-exits moment where you're trying to work out why is this interrogation happening and then he says "My wife is $EAST_ASIAN_ETHNICITY!" as if that explained/excused everything.

Every time this happens, I just can't help but think "Wow, you must have very different conversations with your wife than I do with mine?"
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:46 AM on October 15, 2018 [5 favorites]


Being an Asian woman (or really any POC) in a relationship with a white person is such a clusterfuck of other people's baggage.

This. Times one million. And like - something someone said once that really stuck with me is that people sometimes find it easier to lash out, when they feel powerless, at the nearest thing they can reach - which is often inside their own community. It’s way easier for men to attack women of color for not dating the “correct” way than it is to deal with both actual racism and the lie of white assimilationism - because the people responsible for creating that aren’t near at hand and can’t be hurt by that anger.
posted by corb at 3:21 AM on October 15, 2018 [27 favorites]


Feels a bit weird for non-Hawaiians to call themselves 'happa' but maybe that's just because I learned the word from Hawaiian friends?
posted by Space Coyote at 5:29 AM on October 15, 2018 [5 favorites]


Also, how did the stereotype of Asian men in the west go from Attila, Tamerlane, and Genghis to Long Duk Dong?


The United States was involved in multiple wars in Asia -- WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Part of preparing people for war involves dehumanizing your enemies. If you are old enough, you may remember a shift in popular culture from the 80's ("The people of Afghanistan are a noble and peaceful people, bravely fighting against the Communist invaders") to ... well, whatever it is today.

Stereotypes of far off lands are less about what those people actually are and more about what people need those stereotypes to be. This is why the stereotype changes.
posted by Comrade_robot at 5:39 AM on October 15, 2018 [11 favorites]


I've been having a pretty heavy conversation with my partner about race/identity/culture/inter-racial dating/marriage and I wanted to just hash some of it out here.

My dating mostly white women as a brown south asian man is a thing that I've often thought about. Am I betraying my own culture? How has growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood/community shaped my preferences for what I find attractive or what I idealize in a partner? How does my family view my dating white women?

Dating outside of my culture/race is going to bring a bunch of baggage for both me and my partner. That being said, dating inside of my culture is also going to bring its own different type of baggage, so I've made peace with the idea that no matter what I do, it's going to be complicated because relationships and family are complicated things. What's important to me is that I love the person I'm with and that they love me for who I am. And I know that my partner does.

These are all complicated questions that do not have an easy answer. And they're not just complicated for me, but my partner too. There's not really an answer that I'm hunting for that will truly satisfy these questions. It's more of a process of having these conversations and discussing how they impact us. Of just being able to air them out.

That we call out toxic behaviour from racist trolls. That we allow space for people who feel disenfranchised to share their thoughts and their concerns. That we listen and believe them when they express these thoughts. And we try to change the future in better ways.

I know I sound kind of corny with all of this, but I don't know. I'm glad this post is happening and I'm learning and listening to the whole lot of you. Thanks MetaFilter community.
posted by Fizz at 5:46 AM on October 15, 2018 [14 favorites]


Something this makes me think of is articles I read from Black women around the time the movie Straight Outta Compton came out where they were grappling with how to support their community publicly and avoid giving ammunition to racists while dealing with the fact that some of the men being celebrated were extremely abusive. One of the many terrible terrible ways race and misogyny intersect is that it puts women in this position, where you don't want to speak out about ways in which members of your race are hurting you because racists, who do not in fact care about you at all, will use you as a cudgel against your community (and also shitty men will probably then blame you for that too). It's awful that this situation is something women are forced to navigate when they're already in pain.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 6:15 AM on October 15, 2018 [37 favorites]


So, taking a step back for a second,

The problem being discussed in the article is WOMEN (not just Asian - the pornification of non-Asian women who are with Asian men noted in the article) being harassed BY ASIAN MEN.

Why is this discussion thread full of "white supremacy emasculates Asian men"? You all are making excuses for Asian men by pointing the finger at white supremacist tropes as the "true" cause of their behavior.

Which, to be fair, it might be. But I have begun to wonder whether Asian men can ever be held accountable for their shit, like, EVER? Can we talk of Asian women's experiences without making excuses for Asian men's behavior? I know there is such a thing as white supremacy which factors into things but is there EVER a time when we can focus squarely on Asian women's pain at the hands of Asian men and hold Asian men fully responsible for their actions? Are Asian men big boys or not?

> It's not misogyny from the old country which suggests to women that Asian men are misogynists by their very nature.

I submit to you that it is. Asians cultures (both native and diaspora) are WAY more misogynistic than mainstream American culture today. A lot of the reputation Asian men have for being misogynistic asshats is well and truly earned.

Of course this is a generalization that's not true for every individual case. But it IS true as a generalization.

I'm an Asian woman, most of my friends are Asian women, and the common refrain among all of us, right after "AVOID WHITE BOIS", is "NEVER TRUST ASIAN MEN WHO HAVE GOOD RELATIONSHIPS WITH THEIR PARENTS." We've all learned from experience after painful experience what it means when an Asian man does not roll his eyes but instead is reverent when he talks about his parents. The rule is fucking infallible for women my generation and older. INFALLIBLE.


It's true that this conversation is probably not for white people. So, ya know, white people should sit this one out. Most of us would appreciate not being whitesplained to about how it's racist for us to single out Asian men for their singularly awful traditions of misogyny.
posted by MiraK at 6:24 AM on October 15, 2018 [43 favorites]


Would anyone here be cool if an article that talks about white women's racism towards non-white women resulted in a thread filled with comments about how patriarchy is the true root cause of white women's behavior?

I think what's going on here is like a reverse oppression olympics - maybe oppression round robin? - where no one form of oppression is ever cleanly the oppressor's fault but actually the fault of the oppressor's oppressors. And if straight cis white men are the only ones who don't have oppressors, then why, all oppression is always and forever the fault of cis straight white male supremacy. Even if the oppression in question is ASIAN men tormenting women or white WOMEN tormenting non-whites.
posted by MiraK at 7:16 AM on October 15, 2018 [9 favorites]


Back around 2000, my first boyfriend who was Chinese (I'm Korean) expressed a resentful sentiment towards white guys who dated asian women. It wasn't expressed as long rants, but throwaway comments that happened frequently enough that I know he held this belief.

Now, it was a while ago so I may be remembering incorrectly, but his resentment was directed at white guys, not at the asian women who dated them. But the sentiment is no less gross as it framed asian women as the rightful goods of asian men who should get 'first dibs'.

I eventually broke up with him because this viewpoint inevitably trickled into how he treated me - rearranging my hair in a way he thought looked better, touching my back to remind me to sit up straighter, sometimes criticising my speaking style as being too "valley girl" ("because I know you're smarter than how you sound"), etc... Subtle but toxic treatment that eventuallly wore down my self-esteem.

So that's one personal data point but from where I stand he was a case of straight up misogyny.
posted by like_neon at 7:17 AM on October 15, 2018 [15 favorites]


IME the resentment men of color feel about women of color dating white men comes from a sentiment of wow aren't their superior women enough, do they have to get ours as well?

Which is both misogynist and racist, as by their own admittance women of color are nothing more than second rate property. I got that from a few guys back home, in particular one of my exes when he found out I was marrying a white guy. He accused me and my family of being racists.

In a way he had a point, though. Sometimes I do think my standards of attractiveness were shaped by media and racism back home, and my husband does fit the mold of what we would see on TV as an attractive guy when I was growing up. By the same token, I am sure men of color back in my country would overall prefer white women and their disapproval of racism wakens only when it doesn't work to their own advantage.
posted by Tarumba at 7:32 AM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]


Aren't... there already a lot of articles about that? I'm not sure what you're asking.

Sorry, my sentence was stupid convoluted.

Here's a restatement:

Step 1. An article by a WoC about the phenomenon of "white women's tears" posted on MeFi.

Step 2. The resulting discussion on MeFi is mainly comments along the lines of:

-- "the fault of all this is ultimately male supremacy. Who created the cultural stereotypes that infantalize white women and objectify WoC? By harassing women of color, those white women are only being puppets of male patriarchy."


-- it is real that in our society, white women are stereoyped as being delicate, frail, etc. and there are women of color who buy into thst. ... But it is apparent to me that the anger of these white women is misplaced. This is the stuff of male patriarchy ..."

-- "White women who harass women of color like this are acting as puppets of male patriarchy -- the "this" refers to the specific situation where white women feel infantalized, not to all racism."


-- > But a blanket and obviously incorrect statement like “this is all the fault of male patriarchy” is not a benign statement.
"Yes. But in this particular context, patriarchy does have an enormous effect ... White women were once viewed as manipulative, predatory and corrupting influences on men, and after, as delicate and frail. It's honestly only been since maybe the first Buffy that one saw any white woman as strong. Now imagine growing up as a white woman, knowing subconsciously and consciously how the rest of America sees you: useless, airheaded, frail. ... And think about how that might fuck with your self-image, through the cruelties of puberty to the nightmare that is your early twenties. ... You wouldn't have, for lack of a better term, white female KKK appearing if being a white woman were truly acceptable in American society, and you wouldn't have as many white women who believe that being female is in and of itself a deleterious condition for white people either."

... And so on.

This hyperfocus on the victimization of Asian men at the hands of white supremacy in a thread about how Asian men victimize Asian women is just fucking awful to sit through, as an Asian woman. Does the buck EVER stop with these oppressors, or are Asian men supposed to be magically immune to being held accountable WITHOUT simultaneously needing us to keep for their poor souls which were basically tricked into oppressing us by the evil whites?
posted by MiraK at 8:06 AM on October 15, 2018 [14 favorites]


One issue that hasn't been raised yet is the gap between Asian Female and Asian Male interracial couples, which by no means excuses misogynist actions, but may help explain some of the problems. From a 2017 Pew Social Trends report:


A significant gender gap in intermarriage is apparent among Asian newlyweds as well, though the gap runs in the opposite direction: Just over one-third (36%) of Asian newlywed women have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, while 21% of Asian newlywed men do. A substantial gender gap in intermarriage was also present in 1980, when 39% of newly married Asian women and 26% of their male counterparts were married to someone of a different race or ethnicity.


and


However, more notable gender differences emerge for some of the other couple profiles. For instance, while 11% of all intermarried couples involve a white man and an Asian woman, just 4% of couples include a white woman and an Asian man.

posted by jasonhong at 8:14 AM on October 15, 2018


One issue that hasn't been raised yet is the gap between Asian Female and Asian Male interracial couples, which by no means excuses misogynist actions, but may help explain some of the problems

In what way does this gap "explain" Asian men harassing Asian women?

It's very very hard not to be sarcastic in the face of such statements, but I'm trying, I swear.
posted by MiraK at 8:21 AM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]


> It's not misogyny from the old country which suggests to women that Asian men are misogynists by their very nature.

As a Korean I feel very comfortable describing Korean culture as pretty misogynistic and there is definitely a certain flavour of toxic masculinity amongst these men. I don't even know where to start. Like there's times my dad berated me for playing school sports because they made me develop unwomanly muscles. Him questioning the stability of my relationship with my husband because I earned more than him. My younger cousin behaving violently towards me when they first moved to the states because he just could not deal with the fact that I wouldn't take any shit from him just because he was the only son of the family. My Korean ex-boyfriend who insisted that his future wife would eventually be a stay at home mother (lol boy, bye).

It's not everyone, for sure. But the woke ones are swimming against the tide, for sure.
posted by like_neon at 8:57 AM on October 15, 2018 [15 favorites]


It seems like there’s this tacit assumption that because there are identifiable causes to shitty behavior that makes the behavior not shitty, and that it is impossible to simultaneously be the victim of and perpetrator of oppression. There’s no magical “one asshole rule” that says that being the victim of oppression somehow makes someone not accountable for their actions toward others. It can be simultaneously true that Asian men are the targets of some seriously fucked up stereotypes and that they can react to that in ways that are massively problematic.
posted by cirgue at 8:57 AM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]


I guess personally I just don't think the conversation has to break down into either IT IS 100% THE FAULT OF EVIL WHITES or IT IS 100% THE FAULT OF ASIAN MEN. Can't it be both? Isn't it both?

Like yeah, at some point Asian men have to be goddamn adults and take personal responsibility for their own thoughts and beliefs. But there's also clear value in understanding and verbally acknowledging the roots of how bias and racism have created/fostered the environment that shaped those beliefs.

To me this is the same conversation we have all the time about white people realizing that white privilege is a Real Thing (a conversation I have had with my white father!), or men realizing that patriarchy is a Real Thing (a conversation I have had with my husband! And my father!). It is frustrating AS F*CK to have the same conversation over and over and feel like nobody's ever held "accountable." But for me it's also still valuable because I do think those conversations have had some impact on the non-minorities in my life. (Although I totally respect anyone's right to opt out of them--it's not your job to educate the majority.) Nobody springs from the womb fully-formed and fully-woke.
posted by alleycat01 at 9:15 AM on October 15, 2018 [8 favorites]


As an Asian-American woman I think it is bullshit to claim that Asian-American men are somehow uniquely more sexist/misogynist than white men. "Misogynist Asian culture" is not an excuse for American men who have chosen to buy into toxic masculinity, and it is not something we can generalize to all Asian-Americans, nor indeed all Asians. It is a horrible narrative that paints the West as automatically more enlightened and egalitarian than the backwards East, which is just not true.

A lot of people have stories about sexism they've faced from their family and community, which I understand and empathize with. But guess what? White girls have those stories too! But somehow it's seen as more accepted to generalize about Asian-Americans. And hey, if we're talking anecdotal evidence, I've gotten less shit about my career, intelligence and sexuality from Asian men than I have from white men.
posted by storytam at 9:18 AM on October 15, 2018 [12 favorites]


While we're talking about misogyny in the "old country"... here we are again collapsing Asians into a single identity. Like, I've found huge differences between the way it's expressed by families from Hong Kong vs Mainland China, and those are presumably two parts of the same country. And the differences between, say, Chinese families and Korean families are greater still, and those are two Confucian-influenced cultures in the same geographical area. Where does the misogyny come from? Well, it really depends.
posted by airmail at 9:19 AM on October 15, 2018 [5 favorites]


Hey MiraK, I hear you. I am in no way trying to excuse the behavior of misogynist Asian men by saying that they're acting out because of white supremacy. My point in saying that stuff is that they're fools and stooges (which is something that these Very Smart Superior Freethinking Men really do not want to be) in addition to harassers and misogynists. But I want to hold them accountable for being harassers and misogynists, one hundred percent. Because the vast majority of the many Asian American men I know, who have all grown up under the conditions of white supremacy, don't do this shit.

As for your gender and race swapped comments - I actually have written more or less exactly that comment elsewhere on this site. Not everyone liked that so much, but I do believe white women jockeying for their place under patriarchy plays hugely into the racism of, eg, white women supporters of Trump.

I really do believe that misogyny and racism are not only intertwined, but the same thing. (Misogyny predates our current notion of whiteness and therefore white supremacy by several millennia, so it wins out in that regard, but it was tied to other kinds of racism and tribalism before that.) Because control of women and control of bloodline purity are the same thing. And nowhere does this play out more clearly than in situations like this.

The question of which culture the misogyny originates with - I admit I have a knee-jerk reaction to that. I would never want to deny an Asian woman's experiences of her own culture of origin, and I apologize if I've done that here. But when a white person starts to tell me how misogynistic Asian men/Asian culture are, I know from experience that it's almost always followed up with A) another generalization, this time directed at me (like that I don't rock the boat, maybe - conveniently racializing me and blaming me at the same time), and/or B) so isn't American/Western culture just the best for women! It's like a feminist paradise! (Which... no.)
posted by sunset in snow country at 9:20 AM on October 15, 2018 [19 favorites]


+1, sunset. I also do think that while white supremacy is not an excuse for buying into misogynist myths, it definitely is a risk factor. The same demographic of angry and isolated young men we've seen with the alt-right is at hand here, and white supremacy is definitely a factor in that isolation. I've found that Asian dudes who grow up in areas with significant Asian populations are, while not all magically woke, less likely to go for racialized grievances.

But then again, everyone's experience is different. The difficult thing here with intracommunity discourse is that we're all speaking from our very personal experiences, and there's a lot of variation even if two people have the same demographic group. That makes it even more imperative that we don't generalize "Asian culture" or "all Asian-Americans."

My experience with Asian (Taiwan/Hong Kong) culture is that it gave me the space to prioritize my education and figure out my sexuality without being pressured to date men (while many of my white friends' parents pushed makeup and boyfriends on them). My experience of Asian-American men is one where we are often in solidarity with each other based on common background. I'm not trying to refute anyone else's anecdotes, but I do want to reinforce that there are a ton of different perspectives here.
posted by storytam at 9:42 AM on October 15, 2018 [5 favorites]


One issue that hasn't been raised yet is the gap between Asian Female and Asian Male interracial couples

I always assumed* in a sort of low-key baseline way that this was a direct result of racial and gender power imbalances. Like because in the (current, Western, majority etc) culture for many years, women had a lower place in the power hierarchy, and of course POC had a lower place than white people in the power hierarchy -- so therefore it was less disruptive to prevailing social norms for an Asian woman to marry a white man since she was already "below" him on both of those fronts. The same motivator (albeit much much less intense in practice obviously) behind the fact that while it wasn't socially acceptable for white men to be romantically linked with black women during the Jim Crow era, lynchings happened when you started talking about white women with black men. POC-woman-with-white-man "mattered" less because it was less threatening to the power structure.

So in practice that means that even today when most interracial couples are worrying less about lynchings and more about other real consequences, there're still just fewer frictions in a minority-woman-marrying-into-majority-culture than vice versa. (Women are already expected to be more adaptable, flexible, fewer demands in their identities etc etc.) The more frictions, the fewer people take that path. This is all changing esp in cosmopolitan areas of course, but that's what I always thought.

In what way does this gap "explain" Asian men harassing Asian women?

A million % agreed that this doesn't "explain" anything. Symptom not cause, etc.

*of course if there is anything that years on MetaFilter have taught me, it's that I should examine my unexamined assumptions.
posted by alleycat01 at 9:53 AM on October 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


Understanding the motivations behind bad behavior can be useful in fixing it. Forgiveness doesn't need to be implicitly given in understanding bad actors. If we choose to minimize the race angle in this story, we can still approach it as a "women are being harassed, toxic masculinity, how do we fix it" issue, but then it loses the context and specifics that distinguish it from any other front in this very very big war of online bigotry that has been rapidly escalating since August 2014. Harassment and oppression should be universally denounced and combated, and we should also examine the specifics behind what motivates these attacks.
posted by Apocryphon at 9:56 AM on October 15, 2018


IDK, I think my frustration stems not from an inability to understand intersectionality (the idea that someone can be the oppressor and the oppressed at the same time) but from constantly seeing my oppressors sympathized with rather than condemned by people pleading intersectionality on their behalf. It rankles.

I see everyone here doing their best and I'm grateful for it. Please see my comments not as an indictment of any of you but as my own effort to do my best in such conversations. Sorry about being pissy earlier, tho.
posted by MiraK at 10:00 AM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]


But understanding doesn't have to mean sympathy.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:05 AM on October 15, 2018


Yeah, even with people from the same background, it also depends on where you end up living. I don't relate to a lot of writing about the "Asian-American experience" when it's written by people who grew up, or move, in heavily-white communities. But anecdotally, I find a lot of longform writing is from this perspective, and I think it colours our perception of what it means to be "Asian", especially in places like Metafilter, where we love thinkpieces.

---

By the way, I get why this topic is "family matters" - because as soon as outsiders get a whiff of it you get people coming in like iT's bEcAuSe AsIAn CuLtUrE iS sExIsT. (I'm not talking about people who are speaking from personal experience, with full awareness of the nuances - I'm talking about "my friend's dog walker's babysitter is Vietnamese and I had a layover in Singapore once, here are my thoughts on an entire continent").
posted by airmail at 10:08 AM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]


It is a horrible narrative that paints the West as automatically more enlightened and egalitarian than the backwards East, which is just not true. .... A lot of people have stories about sexism they've faced from their family and community, which I understand and empathize with. But guess what? White girls have those stories too!

Listen, the day a white American girl can tell me a story of how she narrowly escaped sex-selective abortion and female infanticide, grew up hearing her parents receive commiserations on her birthday rather than congratulations, was forced to act as her brothers' (but not her sisters'!) domestic servant through her school years, had to adhere to a 6 pm curfew even after she graduated college (but her brothers' never did), watched her parents pay a dowry to get her married to a guy who can LEGALLY rape her even if she gets a divorce from him, etc? THEN I will put up with this bullshit minimization of misogyny in Asian cultures without comment.

PS: these experiences I listed above are common among very privileged upper caste and educated middle class Indian diaspora families like mine. Heaven knows what less privileged girls and women from my background endure.

It might offend some people's sensibilities to acknowledge the reality that mainstream Asian cultures are more misogynistic than mainstream American ones in general. Your offendedness doesn't make it less true.
posted by MiraK at 10:13 AM on October 15, 2018 [18 favorites]


MiraK, sorry I got pissy too earlier. There's so much history and trauma behind this topic that it's hard for any of us not to bring our hurt to the table. It seems like we come from very different backgrounds, and I'm sorry about the misogyny you've had to face.

The most frustrating part is that it feels like there's very little I and other Asian-American women can do about it, too. We can call it out, hold non-hostile Asian-American men to account (Celeste Ng's article sparked statements that I don't think would've happened otherwise), create spaces where we can talk through our experiences with each other... but I don't know how to make people listen. It feels like this kind of Asian guy only respects whatever other Asian guys are in their shitty echo chambers. (And much of me also thinks it's the responsibility of woke Asian-American men to do the work of cleaning up their own communities.)
posted by storytam at 10:19 AM on October 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


Storytam, whenever I have thought of this, I've thought that "Asian American" as an identity is inherently flawed. There needs to be a distinction between "sourcelander" and "diaspora" - and maybe even distinctions between first gen diaspora and later generations.

I think these distinctions go to the heart of the contentiousness inherent in your and my comments on this thread. I suspect that as a "native-to-America" Asian American person, your primary oppressor has been white supremacy. As a sourcelander and first gen immigrant, my primary oppressor has always been Asian patriarchy. On the surface we are both labeled Asian American women, but underneath that our experiences are so very different.

I, as someone who grew up with racial and caste privilege, have to constantly remind myself not to erase the influence of race in American society and politics. Growing up with racial privilege imbued me with an invisible shield down to my bones, I sometimes think, where the racial lens is not one I reach for most naturally. It's always swimming against the current for me to pause and consider race.

But by the same token I suspect that gender just hasn't been much of a battlefield for women who were born in America or other first world countries (including Asian first world countries - things are different in Singapore!)... Not in comparison to anyone from third world Asian countries or first gen immigrant/children. Like, my parents threw me out of their home repeatedly during my teenage years, basically every time they read my diary and found out I had a crush on some boy. I spent my childhood and young adulthood being forbidden from wearing tight jeans, and then my late 20s and early 30s being told what to wear by my inlaws. My experience is common among sourcelander Asian women and j suspect pretty alien to people who have looser ties to the "home country." I just can't help feeling viscerally attacked when my experience with Asian misogyny is equated to what the average white American girl experiences.

I'm rambling but there's some kind of point in here somewhere, I hope, that people with less Tylenol in their system can decipher.
posted by MiraK at 10:33 AM on October 15, 2018 [19 favorites]


Ah yes I remembered my point and realized I didn't put it in the comment before. Stupid flu brain.


Point: storytam asked how we can solve the problem in the article. I think one of the ways is for Asian American women of various differing experiences to support and amplify each other. I'm gonna do my very best to keep white supremacist racism at the forefront of my analyses of American social relations and you do your very best not to minimize, erase, or excuse the misogyny of Asian men and Asian cultures. Deal? :)
posted by MiraK at 10:44 AM on October 15, 2018 [4 favorites]


If anything, parts of this conversation are reminding me why we often feel the need to circle the wagons, and how said wagon-circling ends up silencing women. But I feel you, MiraK -- part of what this article made me realize is that I've put the good of the community above my own interests as a woman at times. I'm still deeply invested in the community and Asian Americanness, but I also think it's time to start putting myself first.

For me, this kind of thing reached a peak in college when I minored in Asian American studies. There I was, having my mind blown every day, learning about the history and literature of my people and openly critiquing racial beliefs I'd held unexamined my whole life and even taking a class on Asian Americans of Mixed Heritage. And somehow in every single class, That Guy (or a number of them) would bring up Asian women dating white men (and media portrayals of same) as if this was the #1 most pressing issue facing Asian American communities. Bless the AAs of Mixed Heritage prof, because she was the one to most openly call out the bullshit in such views and make it clear that none of it made mixed-race people less valid. But also my Chinese American Lit prof thought Asian American men were the most oppressed and had a serious hate-on for Maxine Hong Kingston, so in terms of messages coming from figures of authority it was kind of a wash. I'm a lifelong feminist and smart enough to push back on the most blatant expressions of misogyny from Asian American men, but I think having these views repeatedly introduced in that specific context, where I was finding my community and discovering wonderful art and literature and forming my view of what it meant to be Asian American, really went a long way towards my deeply internalizing them. (Also, w0mbat's comment was quite a while ago, but I feel I must point out that this all took place at San Francisco State University.)

By the way, has anyone read any of Celeste Ng's novels? James, the dad in Everything I Never Told You, is a chillingly accurate portrait of this kind of guy, so much so that I found it intensely uncomfortable to read. There were various other things I disliked about the book, and I haven't read her latest, but the relationship between the parents was unbearably well-written.
posted by sunset in snow country at 10:54 AM on October 15, 2018 [15 favorites]


That's definitely fair! I'm a little more sourcelander than you might think (I spent five years in Shanghai and now live in Taiwan), but those are also very much developed countries. Even in the 80s, when my parents would have come of age, Taiwan and Kong Kong were doing pretty well gender-wise. There's a huge breadth of difference based on country and age group and socioeconomic status and so many other factors.

Asia is just so fricking big and diverse that the cultural variability makes it hard to say that anything is completely Asian or Asian-American. I definitely got knee-jerk defensive about gender relations in my parents' home countries (Taiwan ranked ninth worldwide in the UN GII index this year) and the Asian-American community in California. I assumed that your experience was closer to the diasporic one (where for example both I and my last partner, who is Gujarati-American, came out to our families without repercussion), but I shouldn't have. I'm sorry for that, and I definitely didn't mean to minimize what you've suffered.
posted by storytam at 10:54 AM on October 15, 2018 [7 favorites]


Thanks for the discussion, guys. Gonna take me a little while to like... get my head around things.
posted by nogoodverybad at 12:02 PM on October 15, 2018


I'm thinking of a recent problematic encounter I had with a young Asian American male at a social gathering in a West Coast city and was caught off guard by his casual misogynistic classism towards me. Being the recipient of his behavior was a different experience than my reflecting on that interaction and developing an understanding of where that instance of oppression was coming from. Once I came to an understanding, my reaction to recalling that has not been of sympathy but rather pity.
posted by polymodus at 12:26 PM on October 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think I've found a good way to articulate why comments here saying "it's an explanation, not an excuse!" and "understanding the motivations behind bad behavior can be useful in fixing it" feel wrongheaded to me.

1. Some of the explanations offered just make the aggressor look worse, as in the case of the "look at the interracial relationships gap, Asian men get fewer white women!" thing. This is like if I got caught stealing a car, and I said, "I stole that car because it was pretty," and MeFi came along with data and statistics proving cars are, indeed, pretty. No matter how much MeFi may preemptively cover its ass by reiterating that explanations are not excuses, such an explanation does indeed come across as an excuse for the bad behavior in question. Why else would anyone go through the trouble of collecting data about cars being pretty, if not to suggest that the prettiness of cars is a valid excuse for stealing it?

2. Other explanations are actually decent explanations without being excuses, but when they are brought up in the context of articles like this, they act to silence the victim and excuse the perpetrator, regardless of the intent of the commenter. Like bringing up the role of poverty in driving crime, you may be right, but if you have a criminal who deliberately targeted people poorer than themselves, that is the wrong place to bring this up!

In this case both 1. and 2. are happening at the same time. If Saudi Arabia man living in USA steals a car belonging to his female Saudi Arabian neighbor because he believes she shouldn't be driving, then our reaction CANNOT be to dissect the thief's valid rage as the result of his experiences with American Islamophobia, goddamnit. Not in the context of THIS event. Islamophobia did not make him steal her car, misogyny did. Similarly here, **racism did not make Asian men attack Asian women.** The explanation is bad and also serves to silence Asian women.
posted by MiraK at 12:28 PM on October 15, 2018 [14 favorites]


My take on discussions like these in wider-demographic venues, and why I find them so frustrating, is "misogyny in the west vs. asian cultures" always pops up and dominates, and it isn't even particularly relevant as a topic-

asian american: so this happened in my community and it’s really fucking horrible
white person listening in: wow. asian culture is so misogynist in comparison to white culture
asian am: I’m literally not talking about nor do I care about white culture right now
white person: but I’m white and I compulsively compare everything to white culture
asian am: great?

There's so much noise like that to filter through. Stop contributing noise! This is why it's so tempting to keep the discussions within the in-group rather than spreading them out. Ask yourself, 1) is this about me? 2) If not, am I making it about me?
posted by naju at 1:54 PM on October 15, 2018 [21 favorites]


Space Coyote (space scavengers represent!):
Mrs. Hobo also grew up in Hawaiʻi, so it wasn't until we went to an Asian-American independent film festival in the late 90s and Tamlyn Tomita used the term during a panel discussion that I realised it was kind of mainstream in the Japanese-American community more generally. I don't even think Mrs. Hobo expected to hear someone speaking Mainland English say it at that point.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:31 PM on October 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


I have to say that while naju's point is dead on, I do love Andrew Ti's reaction to complaints about misogynistic lyrics in hip-hop: he just changes the subject suddenly to analysis of misogynistic lyrics by the Rolling Stones.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:38 PM on October 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


> I emphatically did not mean to suggest that misogyny isn't one of the roots of why so many Asian-American men are so awful when it comes to these sorts of things; rather, I've been trying to point out that race is one of the roots as well.

That's just the thing, though: it isn't. In the context of this specific article, how is white racism against Asian men relevant - as an explanation or excuse or any other way - to Asian men harassing Asian women? I'm trying to connect the dots and I'm failing.

White racism against Asian men can explain why Asian men are angry. But only Asian male patriarchal asshattery explains why they choose to turn their anger against Asian women. They could have chosen to channel their anger in any other way but they choose the misogynistic way. Racism didn't make them choose it.

White racism against Asian men can explain why Asian men emasculated and desexualized. But only Asian male patriarchal asshattery explains why their internalized sense of emasculation and desexualization manifests as abuse against Asian women. They could choose to deal with it in many other ways but they choose the misogynistic way. Racism didn't make them choose it.

White racism against Asian men is not only no excuse for what's going on in the article, it is also no explanation. Unless you consider "I stole the car because it's pretty" to be an explanation.
posted by MiraK at 2:44 PM on October 15, 2018 [4 favorites]


I think it bears mentioning that the group of harassers first organized on Reddit, and their form of harassment is quintessentially Reddit in nature. In addition to talking about how race and/or misogyny affects the mentalities of these men, I’d say that it is also highly relevant that a site that is extremely well-known for radicalizing young white men is now teaching those same tools to men of other ethnicities for use in their own communities and online interactions. Perhaps the reason the language they use is right out of the alt-right playbook is not just because misogyny and racism are global phenomenons, but because the alt-right/incel/Elliot Rodger universe has an extremely prominent culture on Reddit.
posted by Autumnheart at 2:59 PM on October 15, 2018 [5 favorites]


This did not start on Reddit. It certainly solidified on Reddit (and through Twitter) but Asian men obsessed with Asian women who marry white men is something that I found in message boards going on far before Reddit. Also, a big part of the harassers are boys and men born to white father/Asian mother pairings, so while there is some alt-right stuff going on for sure, they also hate white alt-right guys who marry Asian women. There are a lot of venn diagram overlap among the manosphere, but it's not as easy as saying it's all overlap.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 3:08 PM on October 15, 2018 [11 favorites]


In the context of this specific article, how is white racism against Asian men relevant - as an explanation or excuse or any other way - to Asian men harassing Asian women?... White racism against Asian men can explain why Asian men emasculated and desexualized. But only Asian male patriarchal asshattery explains why their internalized sense of emasculation and desexualization manifests as abuse against Asian women.

I think this is where we differ - I don't think the misogyny that leads these men to turn their abuse to Asian women is necessarily* Asian, in the sense of traditional cultural values. Other commenters have articulated this more clearly, but my impression of a lot of MRAsians is that the misogyny seems rooted in an American framework of racial and sexual oppression - I feel like these guys are more driven by 80s nerd revenge fantasy movies than Tradition.

*as in true in some cases - definitely true - but not all
posted by airmail at 3:17 PM on October 15, 2018 [4 favorites]


If Asian men are attacking Asian women (who marry white men) in a super specific way that is very much related to the harasser and victim both being Asian (as it seems to be the constant among victim selection), does the conversation need to revolve around white people/white supremacy? It seems to be hand waving the experiences of the Asian women targeted in this way. Framing it as "take that up with American White Supremacy" doesn't seem to be illustrative or helpful.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 3:31 PM on October 15, 2018 [6 favorites]


Some excellent points being made here - I see how racism plays into the objection specifically to interracial relationships and also how the objection to asian women pairing up with white men seems to be happening in the context of American society which is a white supremacist society.

So I stand corrected: there are shades of race at play here, for sure.

What I still don't see, however, is how any of the specific forms of racism against Asian men mentioned earlier in this thread - such as the idea that Asian men feel emasculated or desexualized by popular media - is relevant here. I think all of that IS handwaving Asian women's experiences away and saying "take it up with white supremacy" as Not Even Supposed put it.
posted by MiraK at 3:38 PM on October 15, 2018 [4 favorites]


I guess the question is: what do you see the outcome of the discussion being, if any? Do you primarily want to have everyone acknowledge that these men are doing bad, indefensible things and have lots of people condemn them in as many forums as possible, hoping it curbs the behavior (or at least supports the women who are these men's targets)? Or do you want to have people understand the motivations for their actions and the multiple intersecting issues that form the big picture mess, and in so doing risk having some people sympathize to some extent rather than condemn, leading to less prescriptive actions to curb the behavior but more understanding of the complex whole of the situation, all actors involved, and of three-dimensional Asian-American identity including how it can manifest in toxic behavior?

I think the former is more activist/action-oriented at the expense of a multi-perspective awareness of racial identity issues, and the latter is more philosophical/theory-oriented at the expense of not sending any clear message and possibly being counter-productive to allyship. Tough question, and not easy to strike a good balance to get the best of both, imo.
posted by naju at 4:00 PM on October 15, 2018 [7 favorites]


I mean, if we want to distill these many many internet-driven subcultures of radicalized (usually) young (primarily) men, we can compare them all to the driver of the big culture war of the last decade: Islamic fundamentalism. Grassroots subcultures of disaffected young men embracing hateful, violent ideology. You see enough of these different conflicts of people being harassed, persecuted, attacked, and they all start to exhibit the same patterns. Call it a patriarchal resurgence, maybe.

In the 2000s there was often calls from the left to understand the roots of Salafist jihad and anger that leads to terrorism; no one equated understanding to sympathy for terrorists, nor to their goals.

Understanding the perpetrators of crime should not diminish the experiences of their victims. But without understanding, what are we left to do? Declare that some men are bad and irredeemable monsters and seek to combat them? Build systems that will better wall them off and protect society? Both can be done, but there's also the matter of addressing root causes to prevent future radical patriarchal subcultures from forming.

In the meantime, by all means we can and should focus on the victims' experiences.
posted by Apocryphon at 5:43 PM on October 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


Maybe it's not the responsibility of the victims to understand the one causing harm (other than to find ways to protect themselves and avoid being harmed). Is it enough to repeatedly point out bad behavior and ask if that's the kind of person they want to be until it sinks in and they do the work to understand their own behavior and change it?
posted by kokaku at 5:45 PM on October 15, 2018 [6 favorites]


Amy Chua, please report to the white courtesy phone in the main lobby.
posted by MidStream at 6:10 PM on October 15, 2018


I've been in the "trying to understand this" camp and the reason I am is that my brother is an Asian dude and at the prime age for MRAsian recruitment. He is sixteen now and already seen so much alt-right garbage through YouTube's crappy algorithm. Right now he's still a sweet kid who likes to send me cat videos, but if possible I'd like to inoculate him against this line of thought forever.

I agree that it's not the victims' responsibility to fix anything, but Asian-American women seem to be the only ones who care about fixing things. Any Asian-American men reading this who want to prove me wrong, please do so! Have a conversation with your buddies. Write a blog post in solidarity with Celeste Ng or something.
posted by storytam at 6:55 PM on October 15, 2018 [9 favorites]


Over on r/aznidentity and r/hapas they're taking this article as well as you'd expect, by insulting Celeste Ng's looks, saying she should be arrested, devolving into further conspiracy theories about Brandon Ho, how there is no actual harassment against Celeste Ng (or other WMAF women) because they are the ones harassing Asian men...and a little bit of good old fashioned standing up for white supremacists through explaining away why Asain men can be seen in the proud boy pictures from recently. It just gets worse if you start hitting the websites that are linked out from the subs. At the same time brand new twitter accounts are linking into those subreddits while @'ing Celeste Ng and other Asian women/their allies straight up lying by cherry picking about what content is contained there.

I'm not linking to any of this (for obvious reasons) but if anyone doubts the issue, it's all on display.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 7:32 AM on October 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


There needs to be a distinction between "sourcelander" and "diaspora"

At some other discussion in Metafilter, there was a really interesting and thought provoking article that was referenced, talking about how immigrants and the children of immigrants understood ethnic identity, that made a point that I think is super relevant, and related to your statement - that this stuff is all really different according to generations removed from point-of-immigration, and also that cultural aspects are really different when things hit America.

One thing I've been also thinking about is specifically how immigration is in many ways a pause button on culture.

So, for my family, how things were when they left is What The Culture Is. And that is decades ago. I understand from talking to more recent immigrants that things have shifted very much over the last decades. Their image of the 'home country' and my family's image of the 'home country' are just not the same. It is rather a time-travel look at the 'home country' and what it means to be someone who came from there.

And I think that you do have this really weird mix of what it is to be X-American, where you are contrasting not just two different cultures, but two different times. You can't just split the difference and wind in the middle, because that leaves you with a far more conservative outlook than you would have had if your family had stayed and you would have been the one to come.

And I think that absolutely affects these issues of culture and misogyny, too. How close to the misogyny are you? Is it current or time-travelled? Do you relate to it as the heritage that was stolen from you? Do you double down on misogyny because that's what your parents did?

tl;dr this is all complicated but people need to be able to talk about it.
posted by corb at 9:47 AM on October 16, 2018 [24 favorites]


corb, what you wrote above is absolutely spot-on. my parents were raising me in the US in the 1950's taiwan that they had grown up in. meanwhile, after they left taiwan, there was a sexual revolution and women entered the workforce, but they never saw it with their own eyes.
posted by honey badger at 4:16 PM on October 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


I'm just posting here to thank all the Asian and Asian-American folks, especially the women, who have offered their perspective on this article. Reading this has been enlightening.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 7:23 PM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Hi everyone. 1.5 gen Korean-American cisgender mostly-straight man here.

I saw this article a few days ago and thought to myself ("I wish this was on MeFi"). And behold! I'm excited to join the convo (and sad that I'm a few days late). I'm very grateful for the conversation here, because it's the best conversation I've seen online about this.

--

I've been thinking about this article a lot for the past few days. There's so much I'd like to say it's difficult to start.

First of all:

Yes, Asian men should absolutely be accountable for their shit (re: MiraK)
AND
Yes, white supremacy, misogyny, emasculation are active factors that curdle the souls of Asian-American men. (re: anem0ne)

For the Asian-American women in this thread: I hear you. I totally see the ways how shitty the objectification/exoticization/sexualization of asian women by White America and white men is. It's so so shitty. I also understand how this is compounded with often-inherited misogyny from the "old country", which is very different in origin, yet mixes together with white supremacy's shit in a horribly intersectional way. Harrassment/sexism perpetuated by Asian-American men on top of this all -- is horrible.

As an Asian-American man, I feel like I can see exactly where it comes from. I don't mean that I excuse this behavior, but rather that it's something that I grapple with every day.

I do have a lot to say about this. I really don't want to decenter this conversation away from Asian-American women's experience, especially since that's what the original article was about. None of what I say is meant to imply that "we have it bad too so don't be hard on us", et cetera. None of this means that Asian-American men should be held any less accountable. It's more like: White supremacy and the patriarchy is fucking us all over, surely some of us more than others, but all of us none the less. Please be in solidarity with us.

I will risk sharing a bit, mostly because I'd like to ask for solidarity. Please call me out if you think I'm not doing so in a helpful/respectful way. (Also, my viewpoint is pretty cis-straight-oriented and binary-oriented - I know that asian men within gay communities or queer communities have related but very different experiences; same with non-binary asian folks. I'm sharing the lived experiences I know.)

--

As an Asian-American man,
- I can see the way white supremacy has shaped how I think about my sexuality, my body.
- I can see the way I've internalized forms of racism
- I can see the ways in which I feel like, as a man, I am (correctly) assumed to embody sexism and to be full of toxic masculinity -- while at the same time feeling like, in America, I have been the target of toxic masculinity in ways in which I find difficult to communicate. Pushing against toxic masculinity to me means pushing back against both forces, but I feel like only form of pushing back is often visible and understood.
- I can see the ways in which casual emasculation and the desexualization of asian men manifests in not being validated through a context of dating and perceived physical attractiveness -- and how, even though this shouldn't bother me, I know that it does.
- I can see the ways in which my asian-american male peers respond in toxic, unhealthy ways -- either finding ways to perform traditional forms of masculinity (working out, becoming asian-bro), hanging in a pack of asian men, or finding ways to evade the issue altogether (performing whiteness, becoming white-adjacent). I probably fit into this latter one.

Oh man. There's so much more. Such as: when two As-Am men in white-ish spaces meet and deliberately ignore each other. Or the strange distance and stand-offishness (especially in white spaces) between As-Am men and women. Or: Asian bros who reinforce masculinity because they align themselves with it in an attempt to avoid emasculation.

Or: how difficult/guilty this is to talk about, because, Asian-American men think that in the scheme of things, "Asian men don't have it that bad" (this comes up regularly in my convos with other Asian-American men, like 90% of the time), and while that may be true, how it effectively manifests as silence or non-solidarity or a non-capacity to address issues.

Or: How (rightful) criticism of masculinity and maleness dominates our ability to talk about issues pertaining to asian-american men, even though these issues are intersectional. (Perhaps this is because, in white spaces, discussions easily move towards sexism than racism, which has the accidental effect of postponing discussion about race for asian-american men in favor of pointing out how asian-american men (correctly) benefit/amplify harmful gender roles.)

Or: how Asian misogyny (not asian-american) plays a part in this all, and how the gender roles and societal norms of the parents of 2nd generation Asian-Americans factor into this, especially for Asian-American woman dating/marrying Asian-American men and facing expectations of gender norms from the man's parents.

And how Asians, either visiting or living in the US, participate in different ways because they may be okay performing those same gender norms (i.e. happy playing along to the submissive asian woman stereotype) and not being part of others, which makes it difficult for Asian-Americans to push against these things, especially for a non-Asian(-American) audience who might not really understand the difference between Asians and 1st gen, 2nd gen Asian-Americans, etc;

And also the sometimes antagonistic relationship between Asian-American and Asians and the myriad ways in which it plays out differently across countries in Asia.

--

I don't really have a point. I see all these forces acting on Asian-Americans, and I see the distorted and unhealthy and toxic ways in which we all respond to this. I see all the ways in which Asian-American men could and should talk to each other about this, but don't. I'm not some enlightened being; I'm part of this all myself.

I AM really excited by the growing solidarity between Asian-American women and queer folks. (recently, in NYC, Asian American Feminist Collective, Yellow Jackets Collective). This is so amazing to behold.

But: where are all the Asian-American men talking about this? Where are the spaces to talk about how this issues affect Asian-American men?

I know one answer: As an Asian-American man, it starts with me. It does. If I haven't created spaces for that it means that I'm not part of an active solution in figuring things out.

And also. In my dream of dreams, Asian-American men would feel solidarity from Asian-American women -- who are not responsible for our issues, but who could support us in our own task of fixing our own issues. How does this happen? Where are the spaces for this? How do I dream of this without decentering/eclipsing the experiences of Asian-American women?
posted by suedehead at 2:01 PM on October 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


In my dream of dreams, Asian-American men would feel solidarity from Asian-American women -- who are not responsible for our issues, but who could support us in our own task of fixing our own issues. How does this happen? Where are the spaces for this? How do I dream of this without decentering/eclipsing the experiences of Asian-American women?

This is kind of the problem and what I've been dancing around in some of my comments, imo. I think men are already getting that support from women. The tricky thing is that Asian Americans are so diverse and decentralized that inasmuch as there is a "community," there are a lot of people who are isolated from it and are doing their own thing (and so you get men who are unaware of the discussion, and women who do things like tweet about finding Asian American men unattractive). But in my little world of Asian American studies and online and print spaces like Hyphen magazine, Angry Asian Man, 18 Million Rising, and what have you, the desexualization of Asian American men has been and remains a huge topic of discussion, one that women have been taking quite seriously. Certainly more seriously than the community has taken harassment against us.

The thing is, I want to continue to take it seriously, not (I think) because I am brainwashed but because the Asian American community has given me my voice and my wings in so many ways, and men have absolutely been a part of that. I find it relatively easy to tell harassers to get fucked (if not to get others to take it seriously), but the tricky thing for me is the softer stuff - which, in fact, mostly consists of men telling me (implicitly or explicitly) that it's my job to support and champion them and their concerns.

As I mentioned before, To All the Boys I've Loved Before and Crazy Rich Asians helped bring this home to me. I read the first two Lara Jean books (of which To All the Boys... is the first) and absolutely loved them - I loved that they were real quality YA romance with an Asian American girl on the cover and three great Asian American female characters, and that they weren't Immigrant Struggle (tm) stories, but that they let Asian American girls see themselves in a fun, light, romantic setting. But I worried about the love interest(s) being white. I worried what Asian American men would say, whether they'd tear down these wonderful novels because the Asian American heroine falls in love with a white boy. And then I kind of started to think, if Asian American men have such a problem with this why don't they write something with an Asian American couple, and Crazy Rich Asians really brought that home because here we have an Asian guy who DID write some fabulous chick lit with like eight smokin' hot Asian guy heartthrobs and now it's on film and we have all the abs and I love it. But so much of the time it feels like Asian American men want to dictate what Asian American women fantasize about, but it's not like they'll deign to concern themselves with romance and chick lit, they just want us to fantasize about them. I started to type "I have way more respect for guys who put together stuff like the Haikus With Hotties calendar" and then I checked to see who was behind it and it's put together by three women! How can you say we don't care? I feel like when Asian American men do write on this subject, they come out with stuff like Shortcomings and The Collective that depicts Asian American men with white women and is just nasty to Asian American women. Which, sure, could be considered fair turnabout for how plenty of media treats Asian American men, but it makes calls for solidarity seem empty.
posted by sunset in snow country at 3:25 PM on October 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


And also. In my dream of dreams, Asian-American men would feel solidarity from Asian-American women -- who are not responsible for our issues, but who could support us in our own task of fixing our own issues.

I mean, the first link in the post specifically addresses solidarity with Asian men.
"In their messages, these harassers often claim Asian women don’t care about the issues facing Asian men, or even that they believe the stereotypes. But for the women I interviewed, the opposite was true. Nearly every woman acknowledged how hard it was to be an Asian man.

“I will fight anyone who wants to emasculate Asian men,” YA author Ellen Oh wrote me. “But I won’t do it at the expense of misogynistic hate toward my sisters. There are many enlightened Asian males out there who are able to see that Asian women who promote women’s rights, including the right to date and marry whoever the hell they want, are not the enemy.”"
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:25 PM on October 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Crazy Rich Asians is a great example of solidarity here, because Kevin Kwan not only wrote a big fancy romance novel but also refused to film it until the studios stopped trying to replace Rachel with a white woman. I'd also put Ken Liu there too, for taking the criticism of his female protagonists in his first Dandelion Dynasty book into account and writing someone great female scientists and a queer female love story into the second.

Re: To All the Boys I Loved Before, I really liked Lara Jean's voice and her character... but I had a problem with every single one of her crushes being white. The book is set in Virginia and they still had to racebend Lucas to have a single Black character in the movie, let alone other Asian guys. I mean, that's standard for YA, whiteness is the cultural sea we all swim in and I don't blame the writer for wanting to put herself into the standard white American rom-com fantasy, but is that really something that we should position as an Asian-American aspiration?

I don't think Asian-Americans, women or men, should be excused from having to unlearn white supremacy. Same goes for the criticism of Mindy Kaling and Aziz Ansari's shows. I think we should have the cultural imagination to try and aspire to dismantle whiteness instead of yearning to be accepted by it. But then at the same time, I don't want to police what writers want to explore, especially when it comes to writing their own experiences... it's complicated.

In terms of feeling solidarity from each other, I think that's also a matter of perception and community. Asian-American guys like suedehead don't feel like there's solidarity coming from Asian-American women, despite the efforts of Asian-American female activists. And I don't often feel a ton of solidarity coming from Asian-American men as a community, either, despite there being (as seen on Twitter and here) Asian-American guys willing to talk about this and tackle this with us. Why are we talking past each other?
posted by storytam at 8:24 PM on October 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


How can you say we don't care?

Hi! Just to clarify: I am absolutely not saying this. I am not saying that Asian-American women do not care. I am NOT saying that "it's [your] job to support and champion them and their concerns". I tried to clarify this above. It's the responsibility of Asian-American men to examine our own sense of misogyny and sexism.

--

Maybe one way I’d like to frame it is:

This thread started from an article about an Asian-American woman enduring harassment from Asian-American men. So it makes sense to me that the lived experiences of Asian-American women take center stage, here, in this thread.

I’d like to help. I’d like to share what I see. If MRAsians is a symptom, then I can see some of the underlying causes that make this happen.

Yet - most of what I’ve read and seen discussed about the causes are true but simplistic, like Asian-Am Maleness/Toxic Masculinity 101. In 101, things are often explained as stemming from misogyny. This is correct, but it feels so much more complex, though, and I really want to get into the 201, 301, 401-level discussions that involve white supremacy, internalized racism, toxic masculinity, and more. But I rarely get to, because maybe I consider that Asian-American Feminism 401 is more urgent than Asian-American Men 201. Is this right? I don’t know.

I think about Gayatri Spivak talking about being wary of “white men saving brown women from brown men” narratives - “colonialist feminism” narratives, and wishing that we could talk about how the vilification of PoCmen is a systematic part of this all. I think creating/working through Asian-American feminism would benefit us to understand the condition of Asian-American maleness.

I think a space for this kind of understanding discussion is often given to black men. Sometimes even to white men. Maybe I’m looking for more writers like bell hooks, or Audre Lorde, but especially like Ta-nehisi Coates. Asian-american men talking about asian-american masculinity to asian-american sons. But then I think: “how do I dare compare what I go through to the history of black American experiences? Am I taking up space?”

The form of solidarity that I seek is where I listen to everyone's experience and get to really understand where they're coming from. I would like to be heard and help through what I know.

And. For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about storytam's Asian brother, how there are so many precarious kids -- and know that this MRAsian shit doesn't come out of a vacuum, isn't just created from bog-standard misogyny (whatever that is), that it comes from a specific cauldron of shitty factors. The factors that strengthen this cauldron include an unwilling silence and an inability for one's experiences to be heard and understood with forgiveness and understanding. If only we could wash it out instead of bottling it up.
posted by suedehead at 8:37 AM on October 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Where are the spaces to talk about how this issues affect Asian-American men?

Well, I remember in the past when it was mentioned to others that Asian American men were emasculated and were seen as the "worst version" of men, a lot of people were incredulous or even dismissive of the idea. It seemed it was mostly only other Asian American men that really believed it and created online spaces to talk and write about it. And part of the reason I actually started to remember all this was because since Reddit and specifically r/aznidentity has been pointed out in the article and here, I decided to take a look. And I saw the resemblance to those forums and online spaces in my past, but it seems to be worse in terms of snarky hate, misogyny, and connecting to other social media (like Twitter) to bring attention to things and harass others. Everything feels amplified.

I definitely was not around when r/aznidentity got started, but I'm curious as to whether in it's beginning it was always this terrible, or did it begin as an attempt at creating a supportive community but somehow changed or was even co-opted by forces that pushed more hateful, misogynistic, and conspiratorial ideas? And it it a similar situation that I mentioned where an Asian male felt that this was the first or even only space that listened/believed in them, and because of that they started to stick around and pick up worse ideas?
posted by FJT at 9:03 AM on October 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Hey, sorry - I didn't mean to accuse you of saying Asian American women don't care; I got kinda overwrought while writing. And I do see that you specifically said it's not our job - I was more talking about general expectations that I feel from the community, there.

Okay, lots to untangle here. I like your college class metaphor, but I don't think that "it's misogyny" is 101 and "it's misogyny + white supremacy" is 401 - I think that different people want to focus on different things in this discussion, and like I said, in my experience Asian American men have a lot of attention paid to their concerns, so I think we do need to make space for women to talk about the effects on them. But I also think you're right that those discussions of Asian American maleness rarely transcend a 101 level, where everyone agrees that they're vilified and desexualized in American culture, and everyone agrees that it sucks, and that's about as far as you ever get. And I want to say that it's up to men to make those 401 discussions happen, but like, it seems like that's how we got MRAsians, so I don't really know what to do about that. And it's also really hard to separate out these discussions because like it or not, the fates of Asian American men and Asian American women in this country are intertwined.
posted by sunset in snow country at 11:40 AM on October 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Here is an article by an Asian-American woman that is writing about her marriage to a White man. I hope it can add to the discussion. I don't think it's been linked here or in the article from The Cut:

I Didn't Surrender My Asian-American Identity When I Married A White Man by Louise Hung
posted by FJT at 12:30 PM on October 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


« Older Foreign charity to predator's hunting ground   |   "The heart and soul of the Roches" Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments