For Asian Women, Racism and Sexism Are Inseparable

Written by Shaila Dewan
After eight folks, six of them Asian ladies, had been fatally shot this week in a rampage close to Atlanta, a regulation enforcement official stated that within the gunman’s personal phrases, his actions had been “not racially motivated,” however brought on by “sexual addiction.”
The official, Capt. Jay Baker of the Sheriff’s Office in Cherokee County, the place one of many three therapeutic massage companies focused by the gunman was positioned, cautioned that the investigation of the shootings at three therapeutic massage companies was in its early phases. But the implication was clear: It needed to be one motive or the opposite, not each.
That suggestion was met with incredulity by many Asian American ladies, for whom racism and sexism have at all times been inextricably intertwined. For them, racism typically takes the type of undesirable sexual come-ons, and sexual harassment is commonly overtly racist.
With studies of anti-Asian assaults surging after the Trump administration repeatedly empasized China’s connection to the COVID-19 pandemic, there may be proof that a lot of the hate, not like different forms of bias crime, has been directed at ladies.
Flowers and indicators are displayed at a makeshift memorial outdoors of the Gold Spa in Atlanta, Wednesday, March 17, 2021. (Photo: Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution through AP)
“People on here literally debating if this was a misogynistic attack against women or a racist attack against Asians,” Jenn Fang, founding father of a long-running Asian American feminist weblog, Reappropriate, wrote in a scathing Twitter thread. “What if — wait for it — it was both.”
Baker’s briefing on Wednesday included an assertion that the accused gunman, who’s white, had been having “a really bad day,” which many ladies took as yet one more manner of excusing violence towards them. His feedback had been broadly criticized, and he was discovered to have promoted gross sales of an anti-Asian T-shirt.
“Law enforcement and society in general tends to really not understand how racism and hate and prejudice is directed toward Asian Americans, and certainly not understand how it’s directed toward Asian American women,” stated Helen Zia, an activist and creator who has tracked anti-Asian violence. “So the instant reaction is generally to discount and dismiss it.”

Sung Yeon Choimorrow, government director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, an advocacy group, stated that when she first got here to the United States to attend school in 2000, she was “stunned, dumbfounded, horrified” by the way in which she was incessantly approached by male strangers who professed to like Korean ladies.
“It is the ‘Me so horny, I love you long time,’ in like weird accents, and ‘Oh, are you Korean? I love Korea,’” she stated, including that she started to surprise if American males had been loopy. They would “go into this whole thing about how they served in the military in Korea and how they had this amazing Korean girlfriend that was just like me. And will I be their girlfriend?”
The males, she stated, ranged in age from the very younger to the very outdated, and appeared by no means to know that their consideration was not flattering. “I’ve experienced racism. I’ve experienced sexism. But I never experienced the two like that as I have when I came to the United States.”
She stated many Asian American ladies seen Tuesday’s capturing rampage because the fruits of this racialized misogyny.
“I’m telling you, most of us didn’t sleep well last night,” she stated. “Because this was what we had feared all along — we were afraid that the objectification and the hypersexualization of our bodies was going to lead to death.”
Federal information recommend that throughout the nation, the victims of most violent hate crimes are males. Yet a latest evaluation by a bunch known as Stop AAPI Hate, which collects studies of hate incidents towards Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, stated that out of almost 3,800 incidents recorded in 2020 and 2021, greater than two-thirds of the studies got here from ladies.
Hate crimes towards Asian ladies are virtually actually undercounted, and Zia stated one motive is that these with a sexual dimension are usually labeled as intercourse offenses, in impact erasing the racial side. Stereotypes of Asian ladies as submissive could embolden aggressors, she stated. “We’re seen as vulnerable,” she stated. “You know — the object that won’t fight back.”
Very little is understood concerning the motives of the Atlanta gunman, however organizations that observe hate crimes have paid growing consideration to misogyny as a “gateway drug” to different forms of extremism, reminiscent of violent racism, within the wake of mass shootings at yoga and health studios frequented by ladies and the slaughter of 10 folks in Toronto in 2018 by a self-described “incel,” or involuntary celibate.

Kyeyoung Park, a professor of anthropology and Asian American research on the University of California, Los Angeles, stated Asian immigrants have traditionally been seen completely via the lens of their labor or companies.
In the case of the spas in Georgia, she stated capitalism primarily based on racial exploitation has been intertwined with the sexualization of Asian ladies, and notably Korean ladies, over many a long time. The police haven’t stated whether or not any of the three spas had ties to intercourse work.
“I think the origin of these massage parlors can be traced back to Korean War brides and military wives,” Park stated.
Overseas, poverty and the privations of conflict gave rise to a prostitution trade that supplied cheap intercourse to U.S. servicemen in Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, compounding stereotypes of Asian ladies as unique intercourse objects or manipulators attempting to entrap American husbands.
Sexual imperialism was not restricted to Americans; the Japanese additionally compelled Chinese, Filipino and Korean ladies into prostitution as so-called “comfort women” within the Thirties and ’40s.
Many ladies who had been within the intercourse commerce had been dropped at the United States as brides, and a few of them who had been later separated or divorced from their husbands began therapeutic massage parlors, a historical past that seemingly helped form a notion of all Asian-run spas as illicit and the ladies who work in them as intercourse staff, Park stated.

The fetishization of Asian ladies was strengthened in common tradition, most notably with the traces spoken by a intercourse employee in a scene in “Full Metal Jacket,” a Vietnam War film, as two troopers attempt to discount down her worth: “Me so horny. Me love you long time.”
Divorced from their origin, these traces have grow to be a come-on utilized in what Ellen Wu, a historian at Indiana University Bloomington and creator of “The Color of Success: Asian-Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority,” known as a “racially specific type of catcalling.”
“A few words pack an entire history into a sentence,” she stated.