Content warning: This work contains references to explicit material, including sex and pornography.
I grew up under the shadow of America’s perception of Asian women.
I first noticed it in the eyes of my classmates, blinded by the blue light from their devices, who saw in me the anime-style caricatures they had gazed upon online. Over time, these classmates grew into adults with self-professed Asian fetishes, unable to see Asian women as anything other than objects of desire.
Once, while having dinner with my mother, I heard a woman speak eloquently about the issues at hand.
“Not all men like Asian women, but all creepy men like Asian women,” the woman said.
This offensive comment was full of ignorance, but it didn’t come out of nowhere: The fetishization of Asian women in American media has been a problem for years, but it’s been amplified by the Internet, and especially the porn industry.
In its 2023 annual report, leading online porn platform Pornhub announced that the most searched term last year was “hentai,” an anime porn genre originating from Japan that is notorious for its predatory and even pedophilic nature.
“Asian,” “Japanese,” and “Korean” were also among the most commonly searched terms.
That same year, Pornhub averaged a staggering 100 million visits per day. Indeed, pornography is consumed in great volume, and pornography that fetishizes Asian women in particular, perpetuates narratives that ultimately cause harm in real lives.
The porn industry has cultivated content that champions a fictional version of Asian women who exist solely for men’s pleasure. We are portrayed as submissive, submissive, and vulnerable, like the lotus flower.
This depraved and pervasive characterization is internalized by viewers of pornographic material, leading to viewers being unable to distinguish between real people and personas and tending to take out their sexual frustrations on innocent people.
In 2021, a white man shot and killed eight people at three spas near Atlanta. Six of the victims were Asian women. During questioning, the man admitted to a “sexual addiction” and claimed his actions were an effort to rid himself of “temptation,” according to The New York Times.
This incident is neither unique nor surprising: cases of sexually motivated violence and aggression against Asian women, whether through murder or offensive remarks, are far more common than is often discussed.
But for Asian women, this is an unavoidable and brutal reality.
In general, pornography has consistently been criticized for being addictive and having a negative impact on the viewer’s psyche.
According to the National Library of Medicine, a 2019 survey found that 11% of men in the United States reported being addicted to pornography.
Not only does pornography fetishize individuals based on race, it also normalizes sexual abuse and illegal behavior. This is partly due to viewers’ addiction: once the dopamine rush from repeatedly watching regular porn wears off, users tend to seek out more non-traditional and abusive genres.
With greater access to the internet and a younger audience as restrictions ease, pornography’s influence is only growing.
The seemingly ubiquitous nature of pornographic content establishes and confirms the notion that Asian women are purely objects of desire, dehumanizing them in the eyes of viewers. Our culture is beautiful and porn takes that away.
As long as the production and availability of pornographic material continues, the Asian American community will continue to be harmed. The first step in breaking this cycle is to stop porn altogether. No matter how corrupt the industry is, titillating porn only makes the problem worse.
Now is the long-awaited time for the lotus flower to be subdued and for true Asian womanhood in America to blossom.
