![]() “A lot of this is really shocking to people who didn’t grow up in Asian-American circles, but type of discourse has existed for decades,” she adds. It’s a mentality that she says actively leads men to lash out her ongoing research, for example, details how “MRAsians” have attempted to harass feminist Asian activists who are assisting sex workers and domestic violence victims. But DeCook, now an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago, argues that there is great harm in how online voices twist this history in chat rooms and forums, ultimately blaming women while battering their own self-worth. There is no doubt that Asian men have been the subjects of historical oppression, again and again. For these “ MRAsians,” blame is easily laid upon a “woke” culture that champions feminism and focuses on the plight of other minorities. They’ve continued to hone and spread the narrative that their lack of sexual and dating success is an indictment of their emasculation in America, symbolized best by Asian women turning toward men of other races. These grievances didn’t end at r/Hapas, of course, and over the last half-decade, a vocal contingent of extremely online Asian-American men have migrated elsewhere on Reddit and beyond. “I’d heard about this kind of stuff, especially being mixed, but the extent of this intense self-hatred and projecting it onto women, that’s what shocked me more than anything else.” These comments were dead giveaways about how toxic this community could be,” DeCook tells me. “There was just so much of a victim complex, especially believing that any Asian woman who’s with a white guy is a self-hating, white-supremacist whore. It had hues of the “ men’s rights activist” community, but with a fixation on racial hierarchy. ![]() One of those voices included EurasianTiger, a frequent poster and moderator of the r/Hapas (a term for mixed-Asian people) subreddit who gained notoriety for his screeds against women, including with his incel-favorite “ Redpill Comics.” Snippets of his comics were a popular share on r/Hapas, which has roughly 26K subscribers, and DeCook noticed the group’s toxic fascination with Asian women who dated white men. Instead, she found thread after thread of angry, resentful narratives about the social oppression of Asian men, and fractious complaints that they were unattractive to women - including Asian women, who seemed to draw the ire of the most extreme voices. In 2015, while researching extremism and online subcultures, Julia DeCook stumbled onto Reddit’s Asian-American forums. “Apparently, the Reddit algorithm figured out I was mixed Asian,” she jokes.īut what she discovered was more than cordial discourse around Asian identity and experience.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |