I don’t know where I’ve heard this before, but, to the white man (or the dominant racial and gender category in the US), Asian men are sort of viewed like women. This is promising because most white men, at least the heterosexual ones, like women. I think about this from a cinematic perspective and, seeing that there are very few Asian actors, you can sort of insert an Asian man metaphorically in any movie where there’s a white girl.
I think of the movie Legally Blonde, for instance, and that’s certainly the case. Legally Blonde was the first movie I pirated using whatever movie-downloading software kids used back then. I think I was eleven or twelve. I knew it was illegal, but I was really bored as an only child whose English wasn’t very good, and it seemed like a petty enough crime that I could probably get away with.
Everything about that movie, from the lead female protagonist’s desire to score a perfect LSAT score to her desire to go to Harvard, shot at USC (or maybe UCLA), spoke to me. The only thing that didn’t really appeal to me was the color palette of the character’s fashion. Yet even the character’s interest in fashion spoke to my own endemic penchant for dressing up nicely.
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