We need to talk about Asian American Women
By Shinhye Park
A 21 year old White male in Atlanta went on a violent rampage across 3 massage parlors, killing 8 people, 6 of whom were of Asian descent on March 16th. The man described his actions as a way to get rid of his “temptation” that comes from a “sexual addiction.” According to the New York Times, the man had made frequent visits to massage parlors before the attack, meaning he knew exactly who his victims would be. It’s also said that he had previously attempted to commit similar crimes at places related to the sex industry before his parents alerted the police to stop him.
A man with a sexual addiction trying to release his vengeance by going to massage parlors after visits to other places related to the porn industry— this series of events is missing just one piece that completes the puzzle, which is the hypersexualization of Asian American women rooted in both sexism and racism. It’s no surprise that asian women are fetishized (or at least it shouldn’t be), but such fetishization expanding itself into hatred and leading to the murder of 8 people is both shocking and something that desperately needs to be dug into further. It needs to be because there is a root to the murderer’s association of massage parlors run by Asian women with sexual temptation, and if that root isn’t exposed properly, the devastating night may just repeat itself again.
Image By Emme Song
Since Asian immigrants started coming into the United States, the stereotypes of Asian women as submissive, sexually available, exotic and manipulative have outweighed any other, deeper inspection of the individuals. Many have probably heard about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, but before that was the Page Act of 1875 which banned Asian women’s entrance into the U.S. on the basis that they may bring prostitution into the country. After the Asian military brides and sex workers arose during wartime, the sexual perception of Asian women as docile and submissive were reflected onto diverse forms of media. In a scene of the vietnam war movie “Full Metal Jacket,” a vietnamese sex workers tries to bargain her service’s price with American soldiers by saying, “Me so horny. Me love you long time.”
In the present day, such sexualization shapes itself into different forms. Asian musician and writer Christine Liwag Dixon shares her Asian woman experience, speaking out about how she’s “been cornered on the street as men say "me love you long time…, offered money for a "happy ending massage" and even “hit on because I'm Asian and told it's a "compliment.” In the indirect form, porn site searches of Asian women result in video titles of recurring themes: innocent, petite, tiny, crushed, dominated, pleasing tourist clients and more. The privacy that is characteristic of porn reveals the raw foreign, especially white, point of view of Asian sexuality as something accessible yet filthy. To them, Asian women are nothing more than a sexual fantasy. In the more casual form of fetishization, women are sent uncomfortable messages from white men being sexually interested in their skin color. In the drastic form, a man shoots down massage parlors and murders Asian women, who he only views as sexual objects that need to be rid of to ease his soul. It’s time to talk more, much more, about this problem. If we stay silent, Asian women will continue to live in a society where their racial identity is viewed as an invitation for sexualization and degradation of their worth.
