We Are Not Your Fetish
By: Diana 수미 Klatt
Tags: Feminism, Racism, Asian American, Hate Crimes, Women

We Are Not Your Fetish

Growing up, I used to help my mom during the summers around her day spa. I have a distinct memory of this one summer day I spent there when I was in my early teens. I was sitting quietly, reading a magazine when a man stormed up the stairs to the front desk demanding a refund, shouting “this isn’t what I paid for!” at my mom. After he’d left, the masseuse came upstairs, red-faced and upset, telling us how he’d asked her for a “happy ending” and she refused because that’s not what she does — she’s not a sex worker, she’s a masseuse. I shrugged it off as something that commonly happens and we never talked about it. But we should have talked about it then and we all clearly need to talk about it now. Why do these men feel so entitled to sex when they get a massage — that this is a service owed to them because the spa is Asian-owned?

When I think of spas, I think of my mom and my friends’ moms, many of whom either owned or worked in day spas. I think of overworked women spending early mornings and late nights to give massages, facials, manicures, and pedicures. I think of women who never get to spend time at home to make sure clients feel as relaxed and pampered as possible. The employees work grueling hours, from 6 am to 11 pm, just to accommodate the clientele’s 9–5 work schedule. They work 17+ hour days to make you feel comfortable and relaxed, they make these places their homes outside of home with small kitchens and places to rest out of sight, and for some, it may actually be their home if their commute is too demanding. All of this to make you, the client, feel comfortable and to provide for their families back home. Customers don’t see what goes on behind the walls, the physical labor, the sacrifices made to ease their tensions and pains; they look for the best deals and a shocking amount look for something that isn’t even on the menu, the “happy ending”. I would like to say that I don’t know where this idea comes from, but I do — it’s an idea so deeply ingrained in society.

While hate crimes continue to rage on in the Asian community, I cannot help but think of how the spotlight finally shone on us when the narrative became about sex workers. People looked away as our elders were beaten while going on walks or taking the bus and while Asians were spat on and called “Kung flu” but when an event combined misogyny with racism, they finally noticed us. It took a hate crime in Atlanta targeting women working in a day spa to get people to pay attention to what is happening in the Asian community. This narrative reduces Asian lives to the fetishization of Asian women and the model minority myth, where we are only seen as the physical embodiment of these stereotypes, where we are only seen in the light of compounding misogyny against our women or as the perfect perpetual foreigner that seamlessly blends in.

After the Atlanta shootings, I found myself conflicted — upset, but not surprised — “oh, more Asians were killed… nothing new” I thought to myself, exhausted from seeing so many of my own attacked and killed, and went to bed. The next morning I woke up to see many news articles coming out about how it wasn’t a “hate crime” and how the murderer had pinpointed Asian spas because of his fetishization of Asian women. Fetishization is sexually objectifying someone or a group of people based on their racial identity and, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, the definition of a hate crime is a bias-motivated crime in which the perpetrator attacks someone based on what group of people they belong to. The shooter clearly stated that he went to Asian-owned spas to kill Asian women because of his sex addiction and attraction to Asian women. How is that not a hate crime? But that’s not the narrative the media went with, instead of discussing the racism and misogyny of this crime, the media homed in on the idea that Asian women working in a spa must be sex workers. How did this go from a man killing women that work at spas to the assumption that this man killed sex workers?

As the daughter of a Korean woman, an immigrant, a businesswoman, and a spa owner, I am livid that the media has decided to take this white man’s narrative and impose it on these people. They’ve decided that Asian women working in a spa must be sex workers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a sex worker, and this marginalized community deserves to have their voices amplified, but it isn’t part of these women’s stories yet it is all that was talked about. There is an implication that massages from an Asian day spa must end in a “happy ending.” This isn’t reality and it is not the norm.

This narrative that men are owed sexual favors from Asian women is deep-seated in military history and dates back to the 1870s when Asians began to migrate to the United States of America to build the railroad and to mine during the Gold Rush. In 1875, the Page Act was the first federal law implemented to limit immigration and it targeted Asian women specifically. It was written to prohibit prostitution and sex work but in practice it barred all East Asian women from migrating to the United States, equating them to sex workers. Fast forward to the 1930s, women from all over Asia, but predominantly Korea, were abducted or tricked into becoming comfort women in military brothels during Japanese and American occupation during WWII. These women were coerced into this work and it was widely normalized as officials said it would “prevent wartime rape”. They may have said it was for prevention but it sure sounds like rape to me… Fast forward again to the 1970s, to the re-popularization of Asian “mail-order brides”. Mail-order brides were the white man’s solution to finding wives that they believed would be submissive, docile, and obedient, the opposite of what they saw in the women in their home country as feminism was on the rise. Fast forward to 1987, when Stanley Kubrick equates Asians with sex workers in “Full Metal Jacket” and popularized the phrase “me love you long time”… and again to 2021, a hate crime occurred in Atlanta where the shooter targeted Asian women because he associated them with sex work.

Asian women can’t seem to catch a break and they clearly still haven’t. History makes us believe that Asian women exist for the white man’s pleasure but the reality is, Asian women are just people. But we so easily accepted the assumption that Asian women working in a spa were sex workers. These Asian women were immediately reduced to a sexual fetish and it shows that we have not come as far as we think. But we can learn and we can dismantle these constructs so embedded in our history.

Put yourself in the shoes of the families of the women who were murdered. Put yourself in the shoes of these women. Would you want this white man’s narrative to be your legacy? I am not asking you to learn about these women but rather to respect them and to understand the history of these stereotypes. Asian cultures are highly protective of their elders, privacy, and family legacy. Rather than shining the spotlight on these women, reducing them to fetishization, and putting their lives on display, we should show respect by honoring these women as people.