Why The Toxic Fetish Of Asian Women Is Getting People Killed

The dehumanizing of Asian women by the global community is getting people killed

“And you got to have your little Miss Saigon cosplay, so why don’t we call it a draw.”

— Bojack Horseman, A quote from Diane’s (A Vietnamese character) bad date with a White American.

Yellow Fever. Asian Persuasion. Bad Yellowbone. Dragon lady. Submissive. Tiger Mom. Geisha.

Throughout my life as a man, I have heard these words in one form or another. Even at a young age, I had already developed an understanding of what these words meant and the underlying definitions behind them. I have seen other men go coo-coo for cocoa puffs over the sight of Asian women.

While many women struggle with objectivity due to the male ego, there is a special poisonous stigma that exists within the realm of Asian women. Women of Asian descent also live with a certain history that invites exoticism. More often than not, the sexual fetish of their features and culture is rooted in deeply disturbing racist undertones. As the male ego often prides itself on dominance, too many men view them as symbols of sexual objectivity and an easy target for asserting themselves. Why struggle with feminist white American women when you can date an “easier” Asian woman?

It’s frankly, really creepy.

“Yellow Fever” Is Not Attraction, It’s Dehumanizing

The term “Yellow Fever” is steeped in racist connotations that undermine the humanity of women of East Asian descent. According to its Wikipedia page:

In the afterword to the 1988 play M. Butterfly, the writer David Henry Hwang, using the term “yellow fever”, a derogatory pun on the disease of the same name, discusses Caucasian men with a “fetish” for (east) Asian women. The pun refers to the color terminology for race, in which persons of East and Southeast Asian heritage are sometimes described as “Yellow people”. The term “yellow fever” describes someone who is inflicted with a disease, implying that someone with an Asian fetish has a sickness. Hwang argues that this phenomenon is caused by stereotyping of Asians in Western society.The term yellow fever is analogous to the term jungle fever, an offensive slang expression used for racial fetishism associated with Caucasian women whose sexual interests focus on black men. Other names used for those with an Asian fetish are rice kings, rice chasers and rice lovers.

However, I prefer the Urban Dictionary definition of the term, Yellow Fever:

Sexual obsession felt by a non-asian (Usually white, usually male) towards asians of the opposite gender. Symptoms of yellow fever include stalking, halfhearted attempts to learn Japanese/Mandarin/Cantonese/Korean and whacking off to Sailor Moon video’s.

There is nothing good about reducing someone to their physical attributes. At best, it turns them into a sex symbol for the world to worship. At worst, it becomes an extreme justification for racist behavior and ignoring their humanity. Regardless of beauty, when you reduce someone to an object, they are no longer a person to you — they're your personal power fantasy. An ego trip for you to indulge your personal desires at the cost of someone else’s decency.

While Black and Latina women are often hypersexualized for their aggression, Asian women have become hypersexualized for submission. And any attempt to rebuke that only invites more misogyny and harassment.

Think about it.

At a young age, as a woman of Asian descent, you learn quickly that men view you as “exotic”. That more often than not, it’s not your character, personality, or achievements that compel men, but the feeling of being “othered”. As a black man growing up in America, I can relate on some level. That insidious feeling that being “abnormal” is one of your most attractive qualities is just terrible to live with. It’s less that she is beautiful because of physical attraction and more that she’s beautiful on the simple basis that she’s “Asian”.

It’s not even about pretty privilege anymore — it’s just fulfilling a perversion of male fantasy.

On top of that, is the outright ignorance of Asian culture. It’s one thing to show respect for the culture of other people, but it’s another to make a mockery out of it. A vast majority of American men wouldn’t know the difference between Indonesian, Hmong, Mandarin, Japanese, and the many cultures that make-up Asia. To be honest, I, the author, don’t even know the many nuances either. However, we have to do better as men, and see beyond physical beauty, and acknowledge the whole person behind it.

A History Of Dehumanizing Asian Women

However, this worship of Asian beauty doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Over the course of many decades, hell centuries even, we have become conditioned to view Asian women as objects of male desire. The stereotype of the “submissive, docile, sexual, petite” East Asian woman didn’t happen by itself.

• The Angell Treaty permitted the United States to restrict, but not completely prohibit, Chinese immigration. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which, per the terms of the Angell Treaty, suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers (skilled or unskilled) for a period of 10 years. The Act also required every Chinese person traveling in or out of the country to carry a certificate identifying his or her status as a laborer, scholar, diplomat, or merchant. The 1882 Act was the first in American history to place broad restrictions on immigration.

This act would not be repealed until 1943…at the beginning of World War 2. At that point, the damage was done. Not only did it further push Anti-Asian sentiment, but it also pushed the narrative of Asian (in this case, Chinese) women being viewed as hypersexual and immoral. Another unfortunate side-effect of this terrible law was the rise of anti-sex worker sentiment that came with it. As the law pushed Asian women into prostitution due to the difficulty of finding work, it further increased Anti-Asian rhetoric and pushed the narrative of the hypersexualized Asian woman. And even then, they were scapegoated even harder when compared to their white peers.

• When the U.S. gained a military presence in Asia beginning in World War II, soldiers visited sex workers, and more hackneyed stereotypes about Asian womanhood sprouted up. (Think: the Vietnamese prostitute shouting “I love you long time, me sucky-sucky” in broken English to GIs in “Full Metal Jacket” and longstanding racist jokes about Asian women possessing sideways vaginas.)
• Movies like “Madama Butterfly” and “Miss Saigon” have become infamous for their portrayal of the White Male, Asian woman power dynamic. In both movies, there’s a portrayal of a very masculine American white male with the submissive, feminine Asian woman. These were some of the earliest examples of Yellow Fever in media, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Some people directly blame these movies for the lasting legacy they left behind.

History has a bad habit of repeating itself. And no matter how hard we try to educate those around us, ignorance still finds a way to prevail.

This brings us to our sad, present-day reality.

The Terrible End Result Of Dehumanizing Women

Recently, Robert Aaron Long, killed 8 people, including 6 Asian women, in a mass shooting rampage. The deadly shooting took place at 3 different massage parlors.

His reasoning for this sudden act of violence?

As reported by Rolling Stone magazine, Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office said:

He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations [massage parlors] as something that allows him to go to these places and — it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Baker later attempted to shed more light on the shooter’s motivations: “He was kind of fed up and at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”

(Emphasis mine)

He had a bad day and didn’t want to be tempted anymore.

Are you fucking kidding me?

This is what happens when you stop treating women as people and view them as objects in a twisted male power fantasy. This narrative has reached its problematic conclusion in justifying the death of other people to fulfill the fantasy of another. In this case, the all too common power trip of “white male has a bad day” and takes it out on women….because he has the privilege to do so apparently.

Made even worse that the police officer, another white male, is making excuses for the shooter in what was obviously a blatant hate crime. A nasty mix of misogyny and racism has led to its tragic conclusion.

Not all that different from the struggles of Black people, really.

Conclusion

I say this in every article I write about female empowerment, but we have to do better as men.

Those six victims had a rich culture, they had hobbies, they had goals, and they had fulfilling lives of their own that carry on independently of the men around them.

Yes, Asian women — like any woman — can be very beautiful, but when that beauty is warped into a male power fantasy, it means nothing in the end. And we have no one to blame but ourselves, the guys that fetish them.

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Dayon Cotton is Active Duty US Navy and Freelance Writer. I write dope articles about social issues, life lessons, and advice on how to live a better life. Stay safe out there!