Stop fetishizing Asian women

By Megan Harding Assistant Opinions Editor

Like any other minority group in the United States, Asian Americans are victims of hate. They were subjected to over a 70% increase in hate crimes from 2019 to 2020, which some may attribute to the COVID-19 pandemic that originated in China.

In addition to the increase in hate crimes, there are common stereotypes is to tell human stories, good journalists are those who are impartial and objective. The focus should be on the stories they tell, while the storyteller has the stoic responsibility of staying out of it. I have the privilege of being both partial and subjective in my writing, but this is a luxury I do not share with my fellow editors.

Part of the reason why we write editorials at all, at least in my opinion, is to remind readers that there are humans behind the articles that they read. Careers in journalism give you the opportunity to learn about all kinds of people — living in circumstances different from your own — and the struggles they have endured.

Editorials are a way of taking off that mask of impartial journalistic integrity and saying, “We hear you. We empathize.” Every editor becomes an opinions columnist at the editorial discussion.

Acknowledging personal identities is so important to opinion writing. It is my personal identity as a minority — being a Filipino Asian American at a predominantly white university — that enables me to empathize with the marginalized groups that we have supported with our editorials. This is something that my predecessor stressed, who is South Asian herself.

It’s this solidarity that allows me

Asian people are grouped into such as having small eyes, eating dogs or being geniuses.

While these are more glaring examples of unfair treatment to those who are Asian, there are intersections between race and gender that are more covert.

One specific hate crime in 2021 in which eight women were killed, six of whom were Asian, was supposedly done because the perpetrator had a “sex addiction” and wanted to eliminate his “temptations.” While some people tried to write it off as a coincidence, it is apparent that Asian women were a target of this crime.

While this may appear to be a standalone occurrence, American culture fetishizes Asian women and paints them as “exotic,” which is a harmful description with underlying tones of racism.

Asian women have been portrayed in a sexual light for decades. It was seen in old-timey movies where they were often portrayed as sex workers, and this myth of sensuality or docility to elevate the quality of my writing and, hopefully, prevents the tone of our editorials from feeling corporate and disingenuous, which can be a slippery slope.

Our Editorial Board this year is diverse and comes from a variety of different backgrounds, from the Philippines to Mexico to Georgia, the country. The quality of an editorial is only as good as the quality of the dis - in Asian women is prevalent in Japanese animation, otherwise known as anime.

Anime can be a symbol of diversity in American pop culture, but with that comes the harmful side of the cartoons that both infantilize and sexualize the young characters.

The issues with this do not just stop at finding Asian culture attractive or sexy. A whole culture of pedophilia has emerged — sometimes thinly veiled under the guise of a character being hundreds of years old, and sometimes blatant — depicting Asian women to be childlike and docile that was born from these seemingly harmless shows.

The sexual stereotypes about Asian women that circulate around American media ultimately make these women more likely to be victims of stereotypes and crimes.

If cartoons portray women in a certain way, it becomes normalized for viewers to take a nonexistent character and apply it to the people they know in real life. Women in general are victims to being objectified by cussion that precedes it, and thankfully, we have a diversity of voices in the newsroom, allowing for some productive conversation. That’s something that ChatGPT could never mimic: The underlying level of humanity that is required of an editorial.

Raphael is a freshman in LAS. rrano2@dailyillini.com men in the media, but Asian women are especially targeted. mhard6@dailyillini.com

Unfortunately, these stereotypes are not easy to correct. They have been present in the media for such a long time, that people do not even realize the extent to which women are sexualized. Admittedly, even I did not realize anime was harmful until I read more about it.

And it does not end with anime either. At this point, the harm stemming from the portrayal of Asian women in anime has been done, and that harm has been done for over a century, way before anime was popularized in the U.S.

The harm done by unfair depictions of women can be mitigated by sensibility and media literacy. Americans need to examine the way current and past pop culture has created these stereotypes and recognize this phenomenon for what it is: a form of prejudice against entire ethnicities.

Megan is a freshman in Media.