Posting and reblogging random stuff from a bored, sometimes crazed twenty-two year old college girl from NYC. I Love--- korean dramas, vintage clothes, indie music, anthropology,
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 spacecraft (OCO-2) was launched into space Wednesday and we will get "space readings" of CO2 on Earth. We all know about the carbon cycle and the role CO2 has in global warming. But we don't know exactly their sinks "places on Earth's surface where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere".
Who knows, maybe there are unique regions where CO2 is absorbed more, or maybe special plants are the ones that absorb more CO2. With this two year NASA mission, we will learn more intricate details of the carbon cycle and maybe global warming.
Many of us have heard of the Asian fetish. But I just learned about this concept a few months ago. One of my best friends is a researcher on Asian American mental health. When she finished explaining the idea, complete with relevant examples, my response was captured in a singular exclamation, “Whaaat?!”
For those of you also in the dark ages: In a nutshell, the Asian fetish is commonly ascribed to White males who serial date Asian women. Why Asian women? This is where things get complicated. Few researchers have ever tread that bumpy terrain. We like to think of ourselves as enlightened and racially conscious. We have inter-racial relationships, marriages, and the number of biracial and multi-ethnic children are growing at exponential rates. We have even elected a Black president. Then what is the problem?
In my previous post, I explored the idea of racial microaggressions, and how the notion of an exoticbeauty is an example of this. Yet when the research moves into examining racial microaggressions toward specific ethnic minority populations, the landscape becomes complex. The notion ofexoticization enters the picture, and in some cases specific groups such as Asian women may become targets.
Harvard researcher Mahzarin Banaji’s research on implicit associations indicates that explicit and implicit racial attitudes are often not congruent (Devos & Banaji, 2005). In other words, just because you say you are not racist, this does not mean that when tested on implicit racism, you won’t come up with biases and prejudicial attitudes. Which brings us back to the issue of the Asian fetish. If a man has an Asian fetish, does this make him appreciative of diversity, or quite possibly racist?
In my review of the literature, I was only able to locate two studies explicitly examining the Asian fetish. In the first study, an economist examined dating preferences of Columbia University students and found no evidence for such a phenomenon. Instead, East Asian women were discriminating against Black and Hispanic men, but not White men, hence accounting for a possible increase in the number of White male-Asian female pairings. But multicultural researchers have suggested that to get to the real heart of the matter, qualitative research approaches may yield more descriptive data.
The second study was in fact a qualitative analysis. Conducted by Korean-American Bitna Kim, who had witnessed the common pairing of White males and Asian females among family and friends, she set out to understand the phenomenon. In her interviews with non-Asian males, she found many held positive stereotypes of Asian women (though they were still stereotypes nonetheless). These women are intelligent, educated, successful, family-oriented, and beautiful. Some males had a loving and fulfilling previous relationship with an Asian woman that they hoped to recapture by finding another Asian female.
However, Kim (2011) noted, “Almost all of those interviewees started with a sentence that negates Asian women as submissive, but, nevertheless, they all mentioned, in one way or another, that Asian women are submissive: ‘Women serve the men; they do things for him that the western culture has long forgotten. It’s hard to pinpoint, and I’m not saying that western women don’t take care of their men, it’s just the way Asian women go about it. The presence, the mannerism, the movement of their bodies that are attractive to some of us. And again these things I am speaking of don’t pertain to all Asian females, but this is the general belief or idea, I think that … we men want a princess in public and a whore in the bedroom. Simple as that….’” (p. 237)
In her analysis, Kim notes that the interviewees were making broad sweeping statements about Asian women based on a handful of experiences. And the most shocking realization was the fascination of non-Asian men with Asian women fetishes and fantasies. She writes, “That Asian women are submissive in the bed, I think, is a misconception, and I do not think the misconceptions are limited to this issue. It is pervasive: Asian females think westerners are superior to Asians. Asian women are intelligent. They are family-oriented. They enjoy kinky sex.” (p. 238)
In her initial quest for participants, Kim came across one male who explained Asian women are commonly paired with unattractive White males who cannot acquire beautiful White women. Hence, Asian women are implicated to be substitutes. The man used this analogy: “If you don’t have enough money to buy BMW or Mercedes, you buy Lexus or Toyota” (p. 235). Further, he explained that Asian women go for White men because they symbolize power and dominance.
For those who may argue this was a singular study and sample, acclaimed multicultural researcher Derald Wing Sue also found evidence for the Asian fetish. In a study headed by Sue, researchers found multiple instances where Asian women were being exoticized and sexualized (Sue et al., 2007). Women spoke of White men approaching them and explicitly communicating their “fetishes” of subservience and sexual pleasing. The researchers noted, “Nearly all members of the focus groups interpreted these microaggressions as: Asian women are only needed for the physical needs of White men and nothing more” (p. 76).
As a multicultural researcher, I am not entirely surprised by these findings, nor am I surprised that we are inclined to sweep them under the rug. We are all prone to flawed thinking, biases, stereotypes, and prejudices. But we are also inclined toward questioning. In fact, in Kim’s (2011) study, one male asked why it is okay to be attracted to blonde women, without a “blonde fetish” label. This is a fair question. Yet she explains that one of the primary issues with the Asian fetish is the objectification of women, and devaluation that occurs as a result.
So does this mean that we can’t appreciate or be attracted to something that is different from ourselves? Am I positing that true love does not occur bi-racially? Of course not. It simply means that that complacency with the status quo can be potentially harmful. Not questioning why such a term as an Asian fetish even has a place in our society is problematic. Or for that matter why Jersey Shore is still on despite its obvious misrepresentation of Italian-American youth. But let’s just leave our discussion of Jersey Shore for another time.
Devos, T. & Banaji, M.R. (2005). American = White? Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology,88, 447-466.
Kim, B. (2011). Asian female and Caucasian male couples: Exploring the attraction. Pastoral Psychology, 60, 233-244.
Sue, D.W., Bucceri, J., Lin, A.I., Nadal, K.L., & Torino, G.C. (2007a). Racial microaggressions and the Asian American experience. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 13, 72-81.
Former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade has just published a book about race and genetics that has stirred up debates over scientific racism that go back over 250 years. Where did his ideas come from? Here are nine major works of scientific racism that are still influencing thinkers today.
“You Bring Out The Mexican In Me” by Sandra Cisneros
You bring out the Mexican in me.
The hunkered thick dark spiral.
The core of a heart howl.
The bitter bile.
The tequila lágrimas on Saturday all
through next weekend Sunday.
You are the one I’d let go the other loves for,
surrender my...
[TW: Sexual Assault, rape culture, victim blaming]
His lips crushed mine, stopping my protest. He kissed me angrily, roughly, his other hand gripping tight around the back of my neck, making escape impossible. I shoved against his chest with all my strength, but he didn’t even seem to notice. His mouth was soft, despite the anger, his lips molding to mine in a warm, unfamiliar way.
I grabbed at his face, trying to push it away, failing again. He seemed to notice this time, though, and it aggravated him. His lips forced mine open, and I could feel his hot breath in my mouth.
Acting on instinct, I let my hands drop to my side, and shut down. I opened my eyes and didn’t fight, didn’t feel… just waited for him to stop.
Twilight: Eclipse p. 331 (Bella and Jacob’s first kiss)
This is rape culture.
Young women are taught to think of this passage - which describes sexual assault - as erotic. Young men are taught to force their will on young women, regardless of any (non)verbal cues, because sex is conquest and women are objects - not something to be done between two consenting individuals because it’s pleasurable for both people.
The most frightening thing about this excerpt is that many survivors of sexual assault who have disclosed to me describe stories that sound exactly like this one.
(via profeministbro)
tumblr user clockward submitted this to us. read at your leisure.
(via robert-pattinson-hates-his-life)
Vomiting everywhere
(via arilyn-anson Well shit, i didn’t know it was this bad. Wow. (via fuckthacistem)
The lines before that:
He still had my chin—his fingers holding too tight, till it hurt—and I saw the resolve form abruptly in his eyes.
“N—-” I started to object, but it was too late.
And after he assaulted her she punched him in the face but due to his “super human strength” she broke her hand, said “Don’t touch me!” and then:
“Just let me drive you home,” Jacob insisted. Unbelievably, he had the nerve to wrap his arm around my waist.
I jerked away from him.
And then:
When he got in the driver’s side, he was whistling.
AND THEN while he was driving:
“…There is so much I can give you that he can’t. I’ll bet he couldn’t even kiss you like that—-because he would hurt you. I would never, never hurt you, Bella.”
I held up my injured hand.
He sighed. “That wasn’t my fault. You should have known better.”
And then:
He grinned over at me. “You kissed me back.”
I gasped, unthinkingly balling my hands up into fists again, hissing when my broken hand reacted.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I did not.”
“I think I can tell the difference.”
“Obviously you can’t——that was not kissing back, that was trying to get you the hell off me, you idiot.”
He laughed a low, throaty laugh. “Touchy. Almost overly defensive, I would say.
I took a deep breath. There was no point in arguing with him; he would twist anything I said.
Then when she gets home, to where her father, Charlie, the police officer, is:
“Why did she hit you?”
“Because I kissed her,” Jacob said, unashamed.
“Good for you, kid,” Charlie congratulated him.
(via wejustkeepswimming)
I didn’t read the citation first. I read the quote. I thought I was reading a woman’s account of how she was about to be raped, not a fucking passage from a romance novel.
(via karenfelloutofbedagain)
Oh FUCK I thought this was a survivor’s story at the beginning. What the fuck, Meyer?!
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