Context: I go on sites like Bustle and Allure quite regularly to keep an eye on new releases and the occasional review. Once in a while I'll see something marginally more political but recently these publications have been really picking up the pace and almost all of the articles are focused on Asian women, more specifically the various toxic/racist/misogynistic standards that get imposed on us by abusive parents. Right now Bustle is running some kind of series on "All American women" that is almost entirely stories like these and a while ago Allure had a series about "fakeness" that included the infamous "asking me to have short nails for lesbian sex is femmephobia" article and an article by an Asian woman defending her desire for bigger eyes/longer lashes.
First impression: it's incredibly fucking draining to have to watch children like me get tormented for no reason and growing up with major self-esteem issues, over and over and over again when I'm just trying to look for cute nail art ideas. At this point I don't even click links mentioning mothers or nationalities because I know that's going to be another child abuse story. I do not understand why otherwise fluffy/upbeat media outlets think it is normal to insert these stories in between listicles and clickbait about celebrity perfumes. People are more accepting and enthusiastic about the concept of trigger warnings (which I love!) but they still don't have a good sense of what can be triggering or just generally upsetting to trauma survivors.
Related to that point, it's very disheartening to see that Asian women's trauma and childhoods are being treated like a free stash of "woke" web content. There's little variation in each story: they usually follow the general structure of "my mom told me I was an ugly shit as a kid because of X, I felt bad, now I am grown and know better" and the repetitive nature of these stories would be funny if these weren't all 100% real events and also things that happened to me.
It does not help that a lot of non-Asian people seem to take a lot of pleasure in recounting these stories and using them to justify treating Asian people as "basically white" or inherently backwards savages, when Asian people are the ones who suffer the most as a result of these beliefs. Asian parents are not snatching random people at the mall and telling them they're worthless: they're talking to their own kids. Racist people and media in the Western world further reinforces these ideas and I have yet to see a SINGLE article on Asian beauty standards that addresses this instead of putting all the blame on immigrant mothers who aren't "woke" enough to uplift their daughters.
I don't know. Sorry about how long and ranty this is, I'm just tired of how I can't even enjoy the simple hobby of rubbing colors on my face without racism interfering. The struggles that Asian women (and all WoC in general) have when trying to navigate beauty and desirability shouldn't be treated like a cautionary fairy tale or a spectacle at the zoo. Most of us in the diaspora are already dealing with violent childhoods and identity crises every other week, gawking without addressing the root of the problem does nothing to help.
Submitted July 18, 2018 at 07:41AM by grossestimmung https://ift.tt/2zVj4um
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