Women like me are handcuffed to a double bind. We have to fight off men who infantilise us because of our small bodies, and who also believe the Asian face carries some special gene that makes us soft-spoken, gentle and non-confrontational. I continue to be astounded by the number of white men who still see me and immediately assume I am "submissive, docile, compliant, accommodating, sweet in the kitchen, tiger in the bedroom".
My body is viewed as a literal and symbolic site upon which to construct their fantasies of the perfect Asian lover. The pernicious perception that most young Asian women have petite, child-like bodies is not necessarily untrue. Equally painful is realising the extent to which the very narrow representations of Asian women in the West have created the idea in the minds of these men that because of our perceived submissiveness, they can be afforded a sense of ownership and possession of us.
I recently entered my 30s. Sometimes, I have felt I have found a person who loved my body as a carrier of the person within, only to realise that, to him, my body was simply a fetish and a curiosity.
I am never sure how to respond. Beneath what is projected onto me, is my relationship to my Asian heritage; I have to fight against the Taiwanese cultural indoctrination that to be self-sacrificing and selfless is the ultimate way of being for a woman. I have found these men unwilling to confront their own bias and prejudices. They operate under a system of racial stratification themselves as superior , leaving Asian women to take on the disproportionate burden of fulfilling, resisting, or negotiating their stereotypes.
A more conservative standard is disapproving of any sex before marriage, even in a serious relationship. The graph below shows that South Asians are the most conservative in believing that premarital sex is wrong, while Whites are the most liberal, with Latinx students very close to Whites.
Unlike beliefs about whether love is necessary for sex, where Whites and Blacks were very close to each other, these beliefs about whether premarital sex is wrong show Black students to be substantially more conservative than Whites and Latinx students.
On the issue of premarital sex, Blacks are closer to the conservative views of Asians, who are the most conservative. Now we move to behavior, starting with the simplest measure—the percent of students who are still virgins. The group with the next highest rate is East Asians.
Next, we look at the number of hookups since the start of college each group reported. We use the median the number that the man or woman at the 50 th percentile had rather than the mean the average because the median is less influenced by the few students who reported extremely high numbers of hookups. Among men, Asians have the lowest number of hookups, with a median of one hook up, Latinx men are next with a little above two, and Whites and Blacks are the highest with almost identical medians at approximately three hookups.
Among women, we Black and East or South Asian women have hooked up little, Latinx women are in the middle, White women have hooked up the most.
Of course, knowing the rate at which students are hooking up does not tell us how much they have casual intercourse, because not all hookups involve intercourse. To get at whether students had had casual intercourse, the survey asked if they had ever had sex outside of an exclusive relationship.
As the next graph shows, Asians are the least likely to have had sex outside an exclusive relationship. Black, White, and Latinx students have had more casual intercourse, and within-sex, race differences are fairly small in these three groups. In every group other than East Asians, men are more likely to report sex outside a relationship than women. Another behavioral indicator is the number of partners with whom one has ever had intercourse.
In this analysis, virgins count as having zero partners, and we limited the count to the number of partners of the other sex, ignoring any same-sex partners. We examine medians rather than averages because there are some extreme outliers with many partners, which affect means more than medians. The graph below shows that among both women and men, Asians have had the least number of partners. Among women, there is little difference between Whites, Blacks, and Latinas, all of whom have had between 1.
Among men, however, Blacks have substantially more than other men, with a median slightly more than 4, compared to between 2 and 2. We have shown that racial groups are virtually identical on whether and when they want to marry and have children. However, there are some group differences in attitudes about students having sex, and in their sexual behavior.
Where we see differences, Asians, especially South Asians, appear the most conservative in attitudes and behavior, Latinx students are in the middle, and either Whites or Blacks are generally the most permissive, depending on the issue.
We speculate that the relatively conservative attitudes and less active sexual behavior of Asians result from the influence of their immigrant parents from Asia. See the technical appendix for more details on this.
As for differences between Blacks and other racial groups, the patterns differ strongly by gender. As many race and gender scholars have argued, an intersectional approach is often needed when the way race affects men and women is very different.
Let us start with men. Black men have had more sexual partners than White or other men. What explains this? Prior research has shown that youth of any race who grow up in poverty or with less educated parents are more likely to have first intercourse earlier and Blacks are especially likely to grow up disadvantaged. Consistent with this, past research on the age of sexual debut among US adolescents , has shown that Black youth have an earlier age at first intercourse than Whites, which is likely to lead to more sexual experience by the age of most of the college respondents.
The survey question asks about number of partners ever, not only during college, so having started during or before high school could lead to a higher lifetime number. To test how much of this is explained by Black men having had an earlier age at first intercourse, we re-estimated the regression analysis controlling for this factor and created adjusted medians assigning the age at first intercourse for the sample as a whole to all races of men.
The new adjusted median number of partners is only. Thus, the White-Black differences among men may reflect less about different behavior at college and more about the early effects of disadvantage leading to early first sex.
However, if the explanation we offered for Black men were just about socioeconomic disadvantage, we would expect to find it applicable to Black women too. Instead, we found that Black women students are significantly more likely to be virgins than White women, they have had about the same number of intercourse partners as White women, and they have had substantially fewer hookups than either White women or Latinas.
Moreover, they are more likely to think premarital sex is wrong than any race-gender group other than South Asian women. Why are Black women more conservative than other racial groups on many indicators, while Black men are more liberal? Asian American masculinity has been linked to the model minority myth and a hierarchy of racist stereotypes. I used to believe it myself.
Until I moved to Korea when I was 23, visiting for the first time since my adoption at age two, I dated only white women. As an adoptee with white parents, whiteness was the model of desire I knew.
During my childhood, my parents insisted that we were the same as any other family — which, because they were white, I took as saying I must be as white as them to be their son. I mean this literally. One day, I stood at the mirror and suddenly realized that I was Asian.
I used to wonder what took me so long to see myself. Now I wonder what I saw before that day. A white boy with white skin? Or did I simply assume that the image in the mirror was white, because it was normal and normal was whiteness? I saw who they wanted me to see. That is the thing about desire: it comes from the outside.
Desire is a story in which you are a character. The most difficult sequence to watch is a montage that switches back and forth between shots of Kumail — the main character — courting a white woman, Emily, and shots of him tossing images of brown women into a cigar box one after the other, each deemed unworthy by comparison.
He hides his relationship with Emily from his parents, and when he finally tells them about her, he is the one who connects his love for Emily to his nationality.
As an isolated case, the film would still be problematic, but what really frustrates critics like Tanzila Ahmed and Amil Niazi is how frequently stories about Asian American masculinity rely on sex with a white woman.
As early as , scholar Elaine Kim noted this trope in Asian American literature, where the symbol of the white woman indicates an Asian American male character has been accepted into society or not. If the terms of masculinity are white, women of color are excluded. In fact, Kim found that one other group of writers also symbolized white women as access to American masculinity: straight white male writers writing about Asian male characters. In other words, the story of how we view Asian American masculinity can be understood as a story about white male insecurity.
P erhaps some history is necessary.
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