For Asian Women, Racism and Sexism Are Inseparable

That suggestion was met with incredulity by many Asian American women, for whom racism and sexism have always been inextricably intertwined. For them, racism often takes the form of unwanted sexual come-ons, and sexual harassment is often overtly racist.

With reports of anti-Asian attacks surging after the Trump administration repeatedly empasized China’s connection to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is evidence that most of the hate, unlike other types of bias crime, has been directed at women.

Flowers and signs are displayed at a makeshift memorial outside of the Gold Spa in Atlanta, Wednesday, March 17, 2021. (Photo: Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

“People on here literally debating if this was a misogynistic attack against women or a racist attack against Asians,” Jenn Fang, founder of a long-running Asian American feminist blog, 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 is white, had been having “a really bad day,” which many women took as yet another way of excusing violence against them. His comments were widely criticized, and he was found to have promoted 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,” said Helen Zia, an activist and author who has tracked anti-Asian violence. “So the instant reaction is generally to discount and dismiss it.”

Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, an advocacy group, said that when she first came to the United States to attend college in 2000, she was “stunned, dumbfounded, horrified” by the way she was frequently approached by male strangers who professed to love Korean women.

“It is the ‘Me so horny, I love you long time,’ in like weird accents, and ‘Oh, are you Korean? I love Korea,’” she said, adding that she began to wonder if American men were crazy. 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 men, she said, ranged in age from the very young to the very old, and seemed never to understand that their attention 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 said many Asian American women viewed Tuesday’s shooting rampage as the culmination of this racialized misogyny.

“I’m telling you, most of us didn’t sleep well last night,” she said. “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 data suggest that across the country, the victims of most violent hate crimes are men. Yet a recent analysis by a group called Stop AAPI Hate, which collects reports of hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, said that out of nearly 3,800 incidents recorded in 2020 and 2021, more than two-thirds of the reports came from women.

Hate crimes against Asian women are almost certainly undercounted, and Zia said one reason is that those with a sexual dimension tend to be classified as sex offenses, in effect erasing the racial aspect. Stereotypes of Asian women as submissive may embolden aggressors, she said. “We’re seen as vulnerable,” she said. “You know — the object that won’t fight back.”

Very little is known about the motives of the Atlanta gunman, but organizations that track hate crimes have paid increasing attention to misogyny as a “gateway drug” to other types of extremism, such as violent racism, in the wake of mass shootings at yoga and fitness studios frequented by women and the slaughter of 10 people in Toronto in 2018 by a self-described “incel,” or involuntary celibate.

Kyeyoung Park, a professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Asian immigrants have historically been viewed exclusively through the lens of their labor or businesses.

In the case of the spas in Georgia, she said capitalism based on racial exploitation has been intertwined with the sexualization of Asian women, and particularly Korean women, over many decades. The police have not said whether any of the three spas had ties to sex work.

“I think the origin of these massage parlors can be traced back to Korean War brides and military wives,” Park said.

Overseas, poverty and the privations of war gave rise to a prostitution industry that provided inexpensive sex to U.S. servicemen in Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, compounding stereotypes of Asian women as exotic sex objects or manipulators trying to entrap American husbands.

Sexual imperialism was not limited to Americans; the Japanese also forced Chinese, Filipino and Korean women into prostitution as so-called “comfort women” in the 1930s and ’40s.

Many women who were in the sex trade were brought to the United States as brides, and some of them who were later separated or divorced from their husbands started massage parlors, a history that likely helped shape a perception of all Asian-run spas as illicit and the women who work in them as sex workers, Park said.

The fetishization of Asian women was reinforced in popular culture, most notably with the lines spoken by a sex worker in a scene in “Full Metal Jacket,” a Vietnam War movie, as two soldiers try to bargain down her price: “Me so horny. Me love you long time.”

Divorced from their origin, those lines have become a come-on used in what Ellen Wu, a historian at Indiana University Bloomington and author of “The Color of Success: Asian-Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority,” called a “racially specific type of catcalling.”

“A few words pack an entire history into a sentence,” she said.