This isn’t the first, or anywhere near the last, time I will write about sexual racism. What separates this article from others is the more recent series of events that show the horrifying and fatal effect this phenomenon has.
According the the National Library of Medicine, sexual racism is defined as a specific form of racial prejudice in the context of sex or romance. In dating, an example of this can range from a dating profile specifically stating which races of people they wouldn’t date to a person only romantically dating/sexually desiring a specific race of people. In this case, many Asian/Asian-American women have experienced sexual racism in their daily lives. In conversations with my own girlfriends, many of them have complained about men only being attracted to them because of their race or throwing racist pick-up lines their way.
In the Atlanta shootings that took place at several massage parlors, eight women were shot at, six of whom were women of Asian descent. When asked about his actions, the attacker, a Caucasian man named Robert Aaron Long, claimed that he has a sex addiction and wanted to “eliminate temptation”.
The idea that women of Asian descent are a “temptation” has an unfortunately long and extremely twisted path in U.S. history. For example, with the Page Act of 1875, passed by Congress, East Asian women were essentially stopped from entering the U.S. as they were seen as prostitutes. Western media has certainly helped contribute to this problem, with racist and fetishizing depictions of women of Asian descent in films like Full Metal Jacket, Madame Butterfly and many more.
There’s a haunting line from the first film mentioned in which a female Vietnamese prostitute says “Me love you long time”, a line which has been hurled at women of Asian descent for a despicably long length of time.
The over-sexualization of Asian and Asian-American women in Western media has been going on for such a long time that to a certain point it’s become almost normalized. Except to the very people this extreme stereotype is hurting. To the Atlanta shooter, women of Asian descent were a “temptation” for sexual deviancy. To this attacker, these women were exoticized, fetishized and dehumanized.
The original cop who was placed in charge of this case Captain Jay Baker stated that the attacker was“pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
Baker called what the shooter did as simply having a “bad day”, and in doing so failed to call out this incident for what it was, a sexually-charged hate crime.
My last article on Global Glam regarding the topic of sexual racism, titled “Are Our Dating Choices Just Preferences…or Racist?” was published February 2020… When I wrote this article then, I had no idea how much brutality the Asian/Asian-American community would experience as a result of this pandemic. For those who say that stereotypical jokes are harmless or don’t see racist fetishes as problematic, I would ask them to look at the events of the last few weeks and see if they would say the same thing.
Written by: Nicole Kirichanskaya
