We went through a whole slew of topics at tonight’s panel on Asian American women and sexuality. Some of the interesting points of discussion:

* The origin of sexual stereotypes: I attributed the image of the meek, submissive Asian woman to the history of Western colonization and occupation in the East, where forced and “voluntary” sex trade was rampant.  Since the majority of encounters were transactional, women occupied subservient roles. Prostitution aside, interactions between Asian women and male foreigners nonetheless tended to be inherently unequal due to the economic privilege of the latter group.
* Campus social scene: The presence of MIT frats in Boston allows for a much more diverse social atmosphere. When I went out to Halloween parties with Christine, we danced alongside students from Emerson, Northeastern, and BU. Harvard is completely insular (a bad thing, in my opinion), and Harvard girls are wary of outsiders, especially if they’re Wellesley students, who are viewed as potential competition. I also pointed out that at Harvard, like at many colleges, people speak of a pervasive hook-up culture, even though the numbers don’t add up. (A 2003 survey by University Health Services found that half of Harvard students had never had vaginal sex.)
* Yellow fever and Asian fetishes: The panelists were in agreement that the large Asian populations in schools like Harvard and MIT meant that non-Asian guys would be more likely to come into contact with and date Asian women. We talked about the difference between a fetish and an aesthetic preference and discussed whether Asian women have reverse fetishes on White men. I imagine I’ll be discussing this topic more in-depth on Friday (see below).
* Family, parents, and sexual instruction: Christine aside, the rest of the panel and audience commenters indicated that their parents had told them very little about sex beyond saying that they should not have it under any circumstances until marriage. I told everyone that my mother was slow to come around, but once I moved away from home, she had to deal with the inevitable (and I wasn’t about to maintain an illusion for her sanity). Recently, I mentioned to her that the Pill was killing my sex drive and she expressed concern that Patrick would become dissatisfied. So, things change.

There was a great turnout and audience participation (always better than just letting speaker ramble). Since I already knew the other panelists, alum Vivien Wu and MIT’s Christine Yu, I felt a bit less of a super senior out of touch with the rest of Harvard. It also helped that my friends came — all, uh, five of them. At least they’re loyal.

This event was part of Asian American Awareness Week, which culminates with a charity dance on Saturday. There will be events throughout the week, and I’ll also be a panelist for Friday’s Interracial Dating Discussion happening at 4:30pm in Lowell House’s Junior Common Room. I’ve written about my thoughts on intra- and interracial dating in the past, but it’ll be interesting to share these ideas in the context of a conversation. Send me questions if you can’t make it!

“I mean, look at all these rich nerds with fetching Asian ladies on their arms. We don’t want to sound “offensive” but it’s just a thing, you know?”

—Gawker: Following Hallowed Nerd Tradition, Michael Phelps Dates Asian Chick

And in the comments:

“Asian is the last stop before Gay.” #

“My wife already knows when she’s tired of me and kicks me out that my next wife will come from Korea or Sri Lanka.” #

“Mr. Butterfly Champion gets his Madame Butterfly*.” #

“He so horny**!” #

“White nerds dating Asian girls is a trend. I don’t think it’s offensive to point it out.” #

SERIOUSLY?!

- My friends and I make plenty of offensive comments about each other’s race/sexual orientation/etc. but we do so in private. So though I’ve been referred to as a Madame Butterfly, these things are said in jest and directed toward me specifically by my friends specifically, not directed at an entire group of people by anonymous commenters who don’t know them.
- Some argue that there’s truth to some stereotypes like “Asians are the last stop to Gay”. However, I can think of lots of stereotypes out there (”Blacks are thugs,” “Gays are diseased,” “Fat people are lazy”, etc.) that shouldn’t ever be said out loud. Why? Oh, that’s right. Because they’re stereotypes, which by definition, means that they have no empirical basis.
- Interracial relationships are not “trends”. Trends go out of style. I’m pretty sure this isn’t just a hot commodity for the season.
- People have no filter on the Internet, especially not on websites like Gawker, because they mistake “being offensive” for “being controversial”. A racist remark isn’t snarky humor, it’s just racist.

Call this an overreaction, but I’m seriously disturbed by some of these comments. The Gawker article is offensive, sure, but considering the website’s habitual outrage at other people’s displays of ignorance, I’m going to chalk this up to a poor attempt at humor. The commenters, though? I guess they demonstrate that some people out there — educated or not — clearly need a crash course on racism and its seemingly harmless manifestations.

* For those unfamiliar with the opera, Madame Butterfly depicts the relationship between a condescending American and a self-sacrificing, exoticized Japanese woman, who gets abandoned (after marriage, mind you) for a new and improved American wife.

** A reference to the Vietnamese prostitute in Full Metal Jacket. Everyone’s heard “Me so horny. Me love you long time”; no one ever knows where it’s from. Now you do.

(reposted from Tumblr)

So according to this article off Slate, there is apparently “no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women.” Of course, this is a study done via speed-dating events with subjects who attend Columbia grad school in New York fucking City. Maybe not totally representative, perhaps?

Jezebel disagrees with the findings too. According to Moe:

“There are a few reasons some dudes prefer Asian women, and it starts with the fact that they are very rarely unattractive, and they are even more rarely stupid, and they are even more rarely than that fat. They have really nice skin and they’re not afraid to tell you yours looks bad.”

Well, I won’t argue otherwise, but I will say that there are a whole boatload (full of refugees!) of reasons why an Asian fetish definitely exists, starting with cultural representations in American media. Whether it’s across-the-board hotness (something I kind of doubt to be honest) or notions of subservience (more likely), this is not just a made-up phenomenon. I don’t need to recount every instance of being asked “Where in Asia are you from?” or each instance of being hit on via a “ni hao ma” to prove my point.

I’ll post more on how annoyed I get by all this ridiculous stuff later, but any reader thoughts on the topic of yellow fever? Sometimes I question whether I’m being overly sensitive but even most of my non-Asian friends seem to agree that it exists.

I don’t know if there is a happy medium between meritocracy and diversity, but I hope that this is indicative of its possibility. I’m a pretty staunch proponent of affirmative action, especially when it comes to race (and to a lesser extent socioeconomic status, which is great for low-income kids but not fantastic in terms of racial diversity). Surprisingly, my opinion on the subject is more controversial than my support of mandatory HPV vaccination or same-sex marriage, and I find myself having to justify this viewpoint all the time, even at Harvard and even to my liberal-minded friends. As an Asian American, it seems particularly contradictory for me to take on this view since it’s against my self-interest. So here’s an explanation:

When I started high school, my mother had a plan in mind. That plan involved straight As, perfect SAT scores, and eventual admission to UC Berkeley. Surprisingly, I managed to deliver on the latter without either of the former. But while scores of second-generation Chinese teenagers would’ve killed for my position, I would’ve killed my mother if she forced me to go there. Berkeley’s population, with 42% of students identifying as Asian, was too similar to my alma mater where the student body was 48% Asian. I already lived in a city with the highest proportion of Asian residents in the country. The prospect of spending college in the same minority-majority illusion of my first 18 years was hardly appealing.

Besides, while the children of my mother’s friends were mostly science or engineering majors (stereotypical but reality), I aspired to freelance for New York magazine, toyed with the idea of a sex column, and dreamed of attending journalism school. I wanted to write for the American public — and the public was white, black, and brown, in addition to yellow. And so Northwestern was in, Berkeley was out.

But I never made it to either. Though I initially gave Cal a chance, our love affair (some would call it an arranged marriage) ended abruptly when my 14-year-old self first saw the campus during a February downpour and decided that flipping burgers at In-N-Out would be preferable to the gray prison before me. Four years later, I’d be at another prison — not Northwestern but one that was brick-fortified and ivy-covered. Harvard, however, was redeemed by an inmate population as colorful in personality as it was in skin tone. Best of all, my mother couldn’t argue. I got a plane ticket out of California; she got the pride that came with Crimson parentage.

Nowadays, there are a lot of things I miss about the San Gabriel Valley, where signs came in both English and Chinese (not that I could read the latter) and dim sum was just a short drive or walk away. Boston couldn’t be more different from home. Besides Sunday morning conversations with my mother, I hear Cantonese maybe twice a year here — each time because I’ve made a rare venture into Chinatown. With only one other undergrad hailing from Monterey Park, California — a good friend of mine, thankfully — I find myself in the new position of a minority. But I don’t mind. At Harvard, just about everyone is a minority in some respect.

As much as I complain about how unhappy Harvard makes me sometimes, I question if I’d be more satisfied at a place like Cal. Berkeley is a fantastic academic institution — one I’d recommend to just about anyone, but it’s not the place I’d go to meet people different from myself and it’s not somewhere I’d like to see my little sister at, if only because I think she needs to escape the same high school bubble I was caught in. Admittedly, Harvard is in the enviable position of having an abundance of applicants who are both diverse and equally qualified. Not every school is quite so fortunate, but that’s not an excuse as to why diversity should be lacking, especially since the initiatives at UCLA seem to bring about very tangible results.

Maybe I underestimate how much I would’ve ventured away from the familiar had I gone to Berkeley. Still, for all the autonomy I may have over who I become acquainted with, I doubt that my groups of friends there would be as diverse as they are at Harvard. And though I don’t value my relationship with JB because he’s gay any more than I love CK because she’s black, race — like everything else — still matters. I am positive that my relationships with people of different colors, sexual orientations, religions, etc. shape and influence my world view for the better and that I will be better off when I graduate for having known and loved people who are not mostly white, Asian, or Californian. Perhaps I would’ve met some of them (or their equivalents) anyway, but I know that at Berkeley, it would’ve been much harder to forge a bond with a tongue-ringed five-foot wonder with a Southern drawl and skin several shades darker than my own. And wouldn’t that have been a shame?

I’m walking down Fifth Avenue at 1am in a Chaiken denim skirt and low-cut black top. Not the wisest decision I’ve made in recent memory, but give me a break: cabs on the East Coast don’t take plastic. I’m trying to hurry to the train station as quickly as possible, when a guy — exactly what I want to avoid — starts walking alongside me and chatting me up.

It’s 1am. He’s at least 35. I am so not in the mood to even deal with guys my own age.

After throwing out the typical “you look beautiful/sexy/like the perfect candidate for fertilization”, he asks me to get a drink. I nervously smile, turn him down politely, quicken my pace, and keep refusing as he gets more persistent. Mind you, he is following me the entire time. So maybe three or four blocks into this, he asks, “You don’t like Mexican guys?”

Uh, wow. I almost slapped him. Five times over, since he repeated the question at least five more times. But obviously, there is a limit even to my rashness.

No, dude. It’s not because I don’t like Mexican guys. It’s because I don’t like assholes who follow me at 1am for SIX BLOCKS after I repeatedly turn down their offer for “a good time” where “we both win”.

Is this some sort of trendy tactic to get girls to agree to dates for fear of seeming racist? Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t give my number to a black admirer on the train and he actually asked me “What do y’all Asian girls have against a brotha?” while I was on my way to meet up with a black guy. There is some major irony here.

Look, I know it’s easier on your ego to fabricate a racial bias on my part, but really, please refrain. Superficial things I do care about include: sperm count, net worth, number of Facebook friends. Things I don’t care about: melanin.