Content area
Full text
A reporter once asked Lucy Liu what would make her run screaming from a man's bedroom.
"Anything indicating an Asian fetish," she said. "I've seen guys who had a shoji screen and fan over the bed. That would make me run screaming, and then I'd probably come back and burn his house down."
I can't really determine the definitive horror of that scene, but I could with a few more lively set pieces: hentai porn videos, an original Miss Saigon poster, a koi fish swimming beneath the glass top of a coffee table.
The underlying spook of Liu's nightmare is that the man's attraction for the material ornaments of an exotic Asian culture - which invariably comes with an awareness for the historical, political and societal relationships between his racial group and the one he's dating - has somehow crept into his sexual desires. The objectification can be insulting because many of those relationships harbor resilient Asian stereotypes. In the bedroom, feminine submissiveness (for straight men) and boyish-youthful slightness (for gay men) are common turnons for people looking for an Asian bedroom fantasy. My Asian American friend was once asked to wear a kimono during a sexual encounter with a white man. She now rarely dates white men.
On a different occasion, Liu also said, "If a man had dated an Asian woman before me, I would probably never consider going out with him. Because I think Asian women are addictive. Once you've gone out with one, you get attracted to them and kind of have an Asian fetish after that. We do have soft skin."
I have a difficult time understanding the potential problems of this scenario, simply because there's nothing insulting about being known for having soft skin. I also have no problems...