Thread by @reappropriate

A lot of talk about MRAsians on Twitter today, and one thing that is regaining attention is how a lot of the harassment AsAm women/non-binary folks receive centers on the accusation that they “only date white men”.

https://twitter.com/reappropriate/status/1438361100261548036

In addition to reading @aarontmak’s @Slate piece, you can also get a primer on this from @pronounced_ing’s essay for @TheCut:

thecut.com/2018/10/when-a…

Long story short, this is the frequently visited well for MRAsian harassment. For these harassers, it often begins and ends with trying to shame an AsAm woman for a real (or perceived) white partner.

Facts don’t matter. Some AsAm women who have been harassed do have white male partners. Others don’t bc their partners are Asian/Black/etc — and so they accused of secretly wanting a white man. Others don’t bc they are queer — and somehow still accused of wanting white men.

Either way, this is troubling for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which is through the lens of Asian American feminism, especially once we apply a reproductive justice / bodily autonomy framework. Bear with me.

MRAsians assert that AsAm women effectively owe our sexuality to the project of Asian American masculine uplift, and that we should reserve our sex and wield it as an exclusive tool to affirm straight cis AsAm masculinity. Our job is to empower men by fucking them.

MRAsians assert that we should exclusively date AsAm men to reinforces their sexual desirability. MRAsians assert that AsAm women who partner with a non-Asian do so deliberately to reinforce the undesirability of AsAm men as potential partners.

(Never mind that AsAm men are, as far as I’m concerned, sexually desirable in their own right. I don’t do performative thirst for the masses, in part bc I consider the sexiness of some Asian and Asian American men to be simple fact.)

MRAsian logic is problematic bc it posits each AsAm woman’s body and sex as not her own, but as a public commodity with value mainly because it is the landscape upon which white and non-white masculinity compete.

This is why MRAsians believe that AsAm women’s sexual lives belong to the public sphere and why so much harassment takes the form of microdissection of our private relationships.

This entire framework asserts that AsAm women have no actual privacy rights worth respecting.

Of course, sexual choice is political. The personal is political.

But that isn’t carte blanche to harass and vilify AsAm women en masse in an effort to silence our feminism and exert political control over us.

So yeah, this feels like petty internet arguing. And a lot of this shit hails back to like Asian American Internet 1.0 before Reddit was even a thing.

But the implications of letting these kinds of anti-feminist politics stand unchallenged is scary.

What it really amounts to is decades of normalization of the idea that people other than us are politically entitled to our bodies and have a say over what we do with them.

This undermines some basic tenets of feminism.

So no, this isn’t just harmless internet shit.

AsAm women cannot be full citizens of this Asian American project so long as we can’t all agree with the basic idea that AsAm women should have autonomy over our own bodies and sexualities.

I don’t have to like or agree with other people’s choices in how they live their lives to also believe that I don’t have the right to forcibly restrict how they live their lives, never mind to enforce those restrictions through coercion, intimidation, and harassment.

So before we dismiss this all as fringe nonsense, or worse yet lend MRAsian politics too much credibility, remember that this ideology has its roots in (as Mak reports) the anti-feminist men’s rights movement, and that it exists as an attack on AsAm feminism.

Fundamental to MRAsian thinking is some of the core tenets of the larger men’s rights movement and its asserted entitlement over women’s bodies and politics.

And yet we’ve really just kind of let it all stand largely unchallenged in Asian America.

To be clear, I have always argued that Asian American cishet masculine angst is real and deserving of political attention. The racial pain is real, but shouldn’t be allowed to misguidedly draw some men to harmful anti-feminist spaces.

As I’ve argued like a decade ago by now, toxic masculinity hurts everyone including AsAm men. Rather than embrace the very thing that creates that hurt, AsAm men are well poised to reject all of that and construct a more affirming, inclusive vision of what masculinity might mean.

Liberation isn’t found by recreating the violence and oppression that injured you.

Harassing women to silence feminism will never be a path towards empowerment or uplift. All it does is spread more pain.