Things are awful. They have been, objectively, for a really long time, and God knows our social media feeds are constantly flooded with all the things that make the world heinous. 

In light of the events of March, our aforementioned feeds have been focusing on how awful things are for women and the AAPI (Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders) community. Unfortunately, this focus seems to be on these acts of violence as two separate, distinct horrors, as though acts of violence occur either because the victim was a woman or was Asian.

It gives us peace to imagine them as disparate. It puts fewer people on the hook. But that isn’t true. 

A rundown of recent events. Trigger warnings abound. On March 3, a white Londoner named Sarah Everard went missing on her walk home. Seven days later, police found her remains in a body bag hidden in a garage. Those same police then arrested Wayne Couzens, a police officer himself, and charged him with her murder. She was 33 years old.

On March 16, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Kim, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue were all shot dead by Robert Long in 3 different Asian-owned Spas in the Atlanta area. Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz is the sole surviving victim. Of the eight people the shooter murdered, six were women of Asian descent. They were 33, 54, 49, 44, 74, 51, 69, 63, and 30 years old, respectively (1). 

According to reports, the shooter’s parents had recently kicked him out of the house for excessive amounts of pornography consumption. Having allegedly received treatment for sex addiction, the shooter was also known to visit traditionally Asian-owned erotic massage parlors. When discussing this information in a press conference, the sheriff of Cherokee County expressed sympathy for the “really bad day” the shooter was having, and explained that the shooter murdered 6 people in order to “take out [the] temptation.” It is unclear what the sheriff is referring to, as none of the 3 spas targeted are currently known to offer sexual services. Unless, of course, the temptation was the sheer existence of Asian women. 

Those are the facts. Here are others. 

Due to the trade barriers that existed before the Opium Wars, military men were the first white people to engage with Asian women. The camp prostitutes (and often, sexual slaves) were paid and/or forced to submit to the whims of these soldiers, who in turn came home and reported that all the women they had met in Asia were strange, submissive, and wildly sexual. Thus began the idea of the China Doll – the porcelain, dainty, made-to-play-with, born-submissive Asian female archetype. 

One hundred fifty years later, in 1997, Lucy Liu appeared in Ally McBeal as Ling Woo, who was quite literally the only AAPI character on television at the time. Ling Woo, as described by author Celeste Ng, was, “icily beautiful, flagrantly sexual yet emotionally cold, fierce to the point of being cutthroat, villainous almost to the point of caricature.” A modern-day Dragon Lady who used her exotic feminine wiles to trick the men of America. The exact opposite of the China Doll prototype, made for the men who wanted an evil dominant.

Ten years before Ling Woo, Full Metal Jacket featured an unnamed Vietnamese woman whining the phrase “me so horny” at American soldiers,  perpetuating the idea that Asian women constantly burn with desire for white men. In 2004, Tina Fey’s Mean Girls depicted Trang Pak, a teenaged “cool Asian,” as having a “consensual” affair with her white male adult gym coach. And in the midst of all this media, there is America’s military history, constantly invading Asian nations physically and politically, constantly raping huge numbers of Asian women, and constantly reinforcing the perception of Asians as those to dominate.

Media does not just represent reality. Often, it constructs it. When enough TV shows portrayed Asian women as promiscuous porcelain dolls, people believed it. In 2019, “Japanese” rose 4 ranks to become Pornhub’s most popular search term. “Hentai,” a type of anime pornography that hails from Japan, kept its place as the 2nd most popular search. “Korean” was 5th after rising 5 spots. “Asian” became 6th. “Chinese” fell 3 spots to 18th. Of the top 25 searches, 6 center around AAPI. 

Statistically speaking, Asian women are sexually desired. Asian women are flagrantly portrayed as sex objects. And Asian women are hated. 

After the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese women were completely banned from immigrating to America from 1882 to 1943. Roughly 58,000 Japanese-American women were forcibly taken from their homes and made to stay in Japanese Internment camps, a gross human rights violation that was upheld by the Supreme Court.  The sheriff of Cherokee County (who, as mentioned, called the massacre of eight people a “really bad day”) urged his friends to buy shirts that called COVID-19 a virus “imported from CHY-NA.” There were 3800 cases of anti-Asian violence during the year of the pandemic, 68% of which were perpetrated against women.

In America, you can screw Asian women as much as you want. But you cannot love them. They are, according to almost all media representation, too busy conspiring to harm you and your country. They are viewed by society as dangerous, evil, too naturally smart, too naturally gifted, sexual but not sexy, domineering but not worthy of respect, submissive but not worthy of care. They are too different to require anything of you. 

Bang, screw, nail them. Even our words for sex are violent. (2)

No Asian love interests. Only sex objects. Never the heroine, or the girl the hero gets. Never cherished, or flirted with in the latest teen show on Netflix. Perhaps in this historical discussion we’ve forgotten the most important facet of AAPI women of all; they are women right now. They are socialized to want the same heinous things every other woman is socialized to want. They are beholden to the same wretched need to feel the sickly glow of male attention, and they are told again and again that they will never receive it, unless in the form of violent desire.

And here, I get back to Sarah Everard. Sarah, who is not a martyr or a point for me to make. So instead, I point out the white feminist outcry after her murder. The reopening of the age-old truth, plastered all over social media. All women are constantly at risk for unavoidable violence. The same four infographics reposted, again and again, ridding anyone of the responsibility to combine any thought with their activism. Sarah’s murder coincided with International Women’s Day on the 8th, which meant that discussions on how policemen can’t protect women when they’re the ones doing the murdering were pushed aside in favor of future is female graphics and reminders that shaving is optional. Very similar graphics and swirls of Instagram calligraphy are being used in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, as though the massacre was yet another instance of expected sexual objectification. The messages all get more and more watered down as the days go by.

But white girl Instagram posts fail to acknowledge a pivotal truth: sexual objectification of white women is abjectly awful – but it is fundamentally different from the fetishization of many AAPI women. Though also heinous, the murder of Sarah Everard is fundamentally different from the murder of the 6 women in Atlanta. 

The question of male violence is vast and horrifying, and I can’t pretend to be able to parse all of it. But in cases like Sarah Everard’s, the issue at hand is not sex, but power. Some men desire control over white women, and when they cannot get it, they are violent. But in cases of fetishization, there is an inextricable link between sex, shame, and violence. Certain men desire AAPI women and are fundamentally, deeply ashamed by that desire itself, because they have been societally trained to fear and hate AAPI women. So, if their desires are refused, they may lash out with violence; if their desires are granted, they are filled with shame over what they have done, and that deep-seated shame devolves into violence. 

For AAPI women, there is often no way to win. Trained to desire male attention, as all women are, AAPI women are very often denied such attention due to Eurocentric centric beauty standards and abject racism. And every time a man does desire you, you must wonder – how much will he hate himself once this is over? How will he treat me after this is done? 

A huge amount of modern feminist discourse centers on the effects of being a woman who is not defined as sexually desirable. Very little feminism – especially the kind spoonfed to people on Instagram – discusses how the experience is different for non-white, non-cis women. 

This experience – be screwable or face injustice, or be screwed and face violence – is not a new phenomenon, nor one that is unique to Asian women.  

I live in North Carolina. In 2016, we passed HB2, a transphobic disgrace of a bill that mandated people use the bathrooms that match the sex on their birth certificate. Suddenly, successfully “passing” as a cis woman became almost legally necessary for trans women, lest someone demand to see their genitals as proof that they belonged in the women’s bathroom. Trans women were legally forced to “seem” like cis women – ie, fulfill the abusive ideals of womanhood bought into by powerful men – in order to safely use the bathroom. Pass well, or suffer.

On the flip side, many, many murderers in America have been declared not guilty due to the trans panic defense – the argument that it’s reasonable for a man to, upon learning that the woman he’s having sex with is trans, be so filled with shame and rage that murder becomes the logical next step. If trans women pass too well (or even just “well enough” as deemed by a singular wrathful man) they must also fear violence. 

And the same year HB2 was passed, porn distributor GameLink’s most popular titles sold in North Carolina were “Sh*male Shenanigans” and “My Tr*nssexual Teachers.” The vast majority of trans-centric porn positions women in positions of extreme dehumanization and abuse (as you might have already figured that out from the slur-filled titles) (3). It seems as though men in North Carolina were thrilled to wake up, masturbate to videos of trans women being hurt, and then work to legally marginalize them. Trans women in North Carolina experience several of the hallmarks of fetishization-- being extremely sexually desired in a very violent way, having that desire be openly shameful, and having that desire exist in the same men who wish to subjugate them. These are not the experiences of every woman, and it is a lie to present them as such.

Society, at least in part, defines womanhood by its proximity to male desire. All women struggle with that definition. But when trans women, AAPI women, and other marginalized women specifically attempt to garner such attention, they truly must fear violence if they succeed. Fetishization means that, often, men are disgusted with themselves for wanting you in any way that is not violently sexual. And that is not the case for the vast majority of cis white women. 

Instagram feminism is failing you in a lot of ways, but it is especially failing you with its inability to distinguish between the plight of all women and the plight of AAPI (and other fetishized) women. March was a month of extreme, worldwide violence against women. But that violence was not all the same, and interpreting it through the same lenses (and same diminutive Insta infographics) is not only incorrect, but lessens your ability to combat the violence. It is also incorrect to view the Atlanta shootings as only a racial issue. It’s not enough to “Stop Asian Hate” without also stopping Asian-specific misogyny and violent sexism. 

Lived experiences under the shadow of white supremacy and misogyny are all wildly different, and you prevent problems from being solved by assuming they are all the same. Sarah’s problem wasn’t just “female violence,” it was a policing system that enables (and protects) horribly violent men. The victims in the Atlanta shooting didn’t need nail polish that changes colors when their drinks were drugged – they needed a nation that didn’t feed violent ideas about Asians to a violent man.

The only universal truth is the universal need for the people in power to understand these nuances, rather than blithely ignoring them. And for you to stop believing that reposting a flat slogan means that you have done your part in dismantling these systems. 

By Anna Muthalaly

Current female health advocate, over-analyzer, and Duke Student.

(1) Throughout this article, I am choosing to refer to the shooter by his name only once, to decrease the notoriety given to the hundreds of white men who commit gun violence yearly in the United States.

(2) bang, screw, nail me/ everything is so violent is a direct quote from Rhiannon McGavin and Belissa Escobedo’s poem “Rape Joke”

(3) The entirety of this analysis is taken from trans YouTuber Natalie Wynn’s video essay “Are Traps Gay?”)