Addressing the Pervasive Misogyny of Asian Men
CW: harassment, rape, abuse
Recently, the star of Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Simu Liu, came under fire for a multitude of comments he made on his old Reddit account, including but not limited to admitting he’s an asshole to his female volleyball teammates, and equating pedophilia with homosexuality. Outside of that Reddit account, he’s also had a history of antiblackness, defending racists he’d previously called out once securing roles with them, and just generally being an unpleasant person to work with. I’ve actually heard about that last grievance personally—a friend informed me about friends of friends’ experiences working with the actor back in August 2020, a whole year before Shang-Chi was released.
However, what drew the most attention and ire was the Reddit account’s interactions with a subreddit called aznidentity. Long story short, Aznidentity is comprised of Asian men who refer to themselves as MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists/Asians) who spend their days online shitting on Asian women for dating non-Asian men and just generally saying the most vile things about women and Black people under the guise of activism. In fact, Asian women have been harassed, abused and doxxed by members of the subreddit for being viewed as traitors to the Asian community.
The scariest part is the fact that these doxxers and abusers are not the basement-dwelling incels you’d like to imagine they are. These are blue and white collar workers—artists, actors, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Respectable people. The seemingly nice and normal men you might casually interact with outside a bus stop, or at a coffee shop, or in a classroom. But behind their pleasant exteriors lies a bigotry and hatred that actively endangers others.
This may be a surprise, particularly to non-Asian people, but it isn’t to me. Growing up, my first taste of misogyny was not from the all-evil white man, but from the Asian men I was surrounded by. My dad. My brother. The sons and fathers and brothers of their friends. There’s a very clear power dynamic present in the way Asian men treat Asian women like they are subservient, like they are objects, like they are lesser, and it isn’t talked about enough.
“No matter how feminine (or untraditionally masculine) these men appear, at the end of the day, they are still men.”
Many people are almost under the impression that Asian men cannot be prejudiced in their own right because they face racial discrimination and desexualization from the media. In particular, it’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed among K-pop fans who stan male idols; they isolate their faves from misogyny, joking that these people don’t count as the men they refer to when they say they hate all men. And I think that’s dangerous. No matter how feminine (or untraditionally masculine) these men appear, at the end of the day, they are still men. Take the recently disgraced Chinese-Korean* pop star Kris Wu for example, who was accused of raping as many as 30 women, the vast majority of whom were minors and unconscious when the incidents happened. The amount of comments I’ve seen on Twitter and TikTok in disbelief that such a feminine-looking man could’ve committed these atrocities is concerning. Others deflect, claiming that “[their] faves would never.” While I obviously don’t believe that every Asian man is a rapist, we should not be so confident that our favorite Asian male celebrities will never slip up and say or do something sexist—especially when you consider the violent history of misogyny in Asian countries.
At the end of the day, all cisgender men, even men of color, benefit from the patriarchy. It is important to recognize this intersection of race and gender in activist movements, and for men to defer to the voices of their female and nonbinary counterparts. Asian men in particular are just as capable of being misogynistic, antiblack and generally horrible as white people, and the simple act of acknowledging this, I think, could do wonders for our community.
* Kris Wu is Chinese, not Chinese-Korean. For the sake of transparency (as this writer has graduated) we will leave the error here.