One of my favourite things about Medium’s comment system is that it acts as a time machine. If somebody happens across a comment from years ago, and “claps” it, I get a notification that allows me to see what I was talking to people about back then. Like “Look Back” but for debates. If you cast your minds back around a year and a half, you’ll remember Robert Long, who carried out a mass shooting in a massage parlour in Atlanta. Six Asian women and a white man and woman were killed, and a Latino man was wounded.
Steve, can we explore together why it matters whether there was some element of "racial bias" involved in this case?
Suppose we could magically scan his brain and find that 18% of his motivation was indirectly linked to an Asian fetish (as in, without that fetish, he might have chosen a slightly different set of parlors to shoot up and thus killed only 3 Asians and 4 non-Asians).
How would that knowledge help us improve the world? (I AM NOT suggesting that you or any other reader think it would, I am asking whether you or they have any mechanisms for improving the world which have not occurred to me).
For the vengeance oriented, they might use it to add a racial hate crime to his charges and consider that in itself a positive. I doubt his punishment would be any worse tho, so I don't even see how that accomplishes anything.
But do we imagine that knowing that a hate crime charge might be added (based on the magic brain scanner), is going to inhibit somebody who is ready to kill a dozen people (the 8 he did and others in the porn industry he didn't get to) and who already knows they are likely to die in the process or through execution if caught? Does anybody think that there would be a deterrence effect?
Would knowing that this statistically infinestimal sample of deeply warped humanity (1 person) did or did not have a racial bias component lodged among the catastrophic dysfunctions of his mind going to help us prevent future occurrences in some other way? Would it inform a policy which would improve the world? Would "don't fetishize Asian women" signs in every classroom of America have a measurable effect on the frequency of such deranged crimes?
And that's the best case - with the magic brain scan. The real world will be a lot more ambiguous.
We have the killer saying it was not about race. What is his incentive to lie? It's not like we're going to say, "OK, then you are not in any serious trouble then, we'll treat this as a minor crime" if we believed him. But your correspondent is speculating that even if the killer didn't consciously commit the crimes because of racial hatred ("hate crime"), perhaps some kind of lesser racial bias was unconsciously involved. That's a nearly unfalsifiable hypothesis and again - how does it help society to promote an unverifiable speculation?
Other than being used to reinforce some ideology, I don't see any value to the kind of speculation your correspondent wants to make. I don't see any mechanism by which society could be materially improved.
It was a horrible crime, and we'd all like to see it never happen again over the next century; or more realistically, for such crimes to become even more rare than they are. We could talk about gun restrictions, or more mental health support, or easier routes to involuntary commitment, or various other ways to try to accomplish that.
But trying to parse out how he might have unconsciously have had some iota of indirect racial bias influencing his choice of victim (say, if he fetishized Asian sex workers rather than just being attracted to them), seems closer to debating how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, than to rational discussion of improving society in meaningful ways. I see nothing actionable and helpful therein.
"Steve, can we explore together why it matters whether there was some element of "racial bias" involved in this case?"
I think it's just a question of degree. I mean, there's likely some degree of racial bias (along witho countless other biases) in everything we do. So I think SC's certainty that because these women were Asian, he must have had some Asian bias (fetishistic or otherwise) is both ridiculous and irrelevant. But I think it's far more relevant if there were evidence that he killed them *because* they're Asian.
When Dr. Aruna Khilanani spoke at Harvard about her fantasies of killing white people, the "white" adds a layer of shock and revulsion, no? It certainly did for me. Specifying "white" adds an intentionality to the crime that is different from somebody saying they think about shooting a gun indiscriminately. Both are bad, but one feels *worse*.
As for *why* we feel this way, on a certain level, I don't think it matters. I don't think there's any problem with our added horror at the irrational targeting of a group, purely because of their membership of that group. In fact, I think that added horror is a good thing.
But I guess it's because we recognise the harm this tribalistic thinking can have. And the danger it poses if it's turned upon one of our groups one day. Life is dangerous enough, and we're all aware that we might die because of something we do or a choice we make. The idea that we might also die for something we had no choice in, or responsibility for is more than any of us want to deal with.
And the more likely we are to face that danger for things we have no choice in or responsibility for (ethnic minorities, women, LGBT people, etc) the more likely we are to be concerned about that mindset.
I agree that it's emotionally horrendous to contemplate murder or assault based on involuntary group membership - whether based on "race", sex, sexual orientation, age, or whatever. I'm not sure that I find it any more excusable if it's based on things like being a Catholic, a Democrat, or polyamorous, though (voluntary group membership).
I think we need to distinguish between thing which we find emotionally disturbing, and things which need to be punished more stringently.
George Lakoff and Johnathan Haidt both mention research regarding responses to a scenario where an immigrant family cooks and eats their dog, after the dog is accidentally killed by a car. In that research, (traditional) liberals tended to say "yuck, but there is no harm involved so there is nothing that needs to be punished even if I wouldn't do that", while (traditional) conservatives tended to more think "yuck, that's wrong, they should face sanctions". In that regard, I am on the side of the (traditional) liberals. Imposing punishment should mostly be limited to cases where it can be expected to have a net positive effect, not just because we have an emotional reaction.
We humans often have a stronger emotion is an attractive young mother of three is killed (in an accident or by murder), than an unattractive 40 year old single mechanic. That doesn't mean the the punishment for murder (or vehicular homicide) should differ, though.
So I'm find with our sharing an additional "horror" at some killings, but I don't want to automatically translate that into increased punishments; for each circumstance, a individual case needs to be made for each proposed special punishment, and evaluated based on all anticipatable results, not just on one immediate emotions.
For an example, having federal civil rights laws to prosecute racial violence, may be needed if an especially biased local community is not willing to enforce local laws.
So I am distinguishing between socially castigating Khilanani, and using criminal law, as different tools for shaping society, with different realms. We can be discerning in how we shape policies, considering far more than the factor that something feels bad to us.
"I agree that it's emotionally horrendous to contemplate murder or assault based on involuntary group membership."
I don't think you can (or should) separate the concept of justice from emotion though. The reason we care about a mass shooting or a rape more than tax fraud or insider trading is largely emotional. I don't believe that should change.
If a man beats up a child or a disabled person, for example, I don't want him simply to be tried for assault. The vulnerability of his victim and the danger somebody with his mindset poses to other similar victims should be taken into account.
Similarly, if somebody attacks somebody because of their membership of a particular group, I think the danger they pose to other members of that group should be taken into account. I don't see how we're worse off for doing this. I'm all for live and let live. I'm not talking about being gross out by somebody else's decision to eat a dog. I'm talking about somebody who poses a danger to a specific group of people.
Also, I think one of the legal system's most important functions is to be an expression of the society we aspire to be. We aspire to be a society where there's no murder, so murder is outlawed. But we recognise that there are different degrees of wrongness for murder, so we nuance self-defence and pre-meditation and crimes of passion and crimes against children. We don't just say they're all murder and so should be treated equally. We don't second guess our sense that the circumstances and motivations of the crime matter. What would be the benefit of doing so?
> "I'm talking about somebody who poses a danger to a specific group of people"
This is the kind of rational concern that I consider vital, so we are strongly agreed. I never said that emotion can play no part, I'm just saying that emotion alone is a poor guide.
My point was that we should rationally explore such dangers and choose strategies which have traction on reducing them, rather than rely in immediate emotional reactions, which can produce both counterproductive policies which undermine our goals, and collateral injustices.
Note my screen name begins with "passion", but does not end there. I'm not trying to extinguish all emotion, just balance it out wisely.
I suspect we are essentially in agreement in this regard. Cheers.
"I never said that emotion can play no part, I'm just saying that emotion alone is a poor guide."
Oh yeah absolutely agreed. I'd never advocate blind emotionality. I'm often accused of not being emotional enough😅 I just meant that I don't think we can understand why it matters whether there's a racial element to a crime without allowing emotion to play its part.
Just scanning headlines, race would be a defensible presumption. Had Long gone into a shopping mall that was 95% Caucasian and killed eight Asian women then racism would be conclusive. But this was a business where presumably the women came from the same culture and spoke Tagalog or whatever and it was where Long snapped.
And as you already noted, this was during the peak of the pandemic with Trump tossing out "China virus" several times a day and a lot of people resenting masks and seeing mind control monsters in vaccines were attacking Asians in some perverse sort of revenge.
Yes we should be careful with our presumptions but not knowing details it's not exactly frivolous to at least initially ponder a racist motive.
"Just scanning headlines, race would be a defensible presumption"
Absolutely! Practically inescapable in fact. I wouldn't have blamed people for not even realising that anybody but the Asian women had been killed if they just scanned headlines or even read some of the articles. The erasure of the other victims was truly shocking.
Based on the headlines, it would have been silly not to ponder a racist motive. But we had other information so quickly afterwards that made a racist motive unlikely. Though we also had people like Trevor Noah outright lying about what Long had said, which didn't help matters.
I wonder sometimes if reading is going to be one of those phenomena like the middle class, a brief flowering that dies out.
Before the printing press books were copied by hand, wasting thousands of lives in the priesthood copying texts by candlelight. Then came printing, and newspapers and magazines and glorious books. Literacy went from almost unknown to common.
Now it seems to be fading. A brief care about grammar is giving way to pidgin speech and emoji, sentence structure is seen as effete. Your and you're are interchangeable.
In my industry most workers and much smarter than average and now most of them don't read. In the late 19th century writing was much more sophisticated than it is now. That we are losing ground in literacy is something I don't need to detail.
That most people read about this mass shooting and never read past the headline is no longer surprising. I confess that I thought it a racist crime for a few seconds but then I read the actual story and the rest and knew that presumption to be artifactual.
The number of people who never read a book after their formal education is astonishing. When my granddaughter told me that "the book is always better than the movie" it was one of my happy moments.
I can't imagine who I would be without the influence of reading. We may be part of a dying breed.
The "Silence of the Lambs" movie was much better than the book. The book had too many distracting subplots that the movie chopped out. For example, Clarice's boss at the FBI, played by Scott Glen, had a wife dying of cancer while Clarice pursued Buffalo Bill. It added nothing to the story.
But, yeah, I've read that the average American reads one book per year. So for someone like me who reads about a hundred there are 99 people who don't read books at all.
This is pretty obvious on social networks, and on signs at Trump rallies.
I saw a picture from a rally on the other side; one sign read
"Look at all the correctly-spelled signs." I howled.
All true. There are always exceptions. But in general, we clearly agree.
I am mildly dyslexic. I often don't notice misspellings since I have no difficulty reading misspelled words. It probably contributed to my tendency to not noticing typos or my own words that end up misspelled. In the case of signs carried in rallies and marches, you'd think that someone in the group would say, "Dude, that sign makes us look like dumb shits!" (In some cases, justifiably).
I almost envy you that. A lot of reading is painful for me. I've mentioned the singular "they" many times. I'll see something like "brutalness" and I get mad and want to email the writer, "it's BRUTALITY, dammit!"
And I am tired of being lectured that "language evolves," as if there is no such thing as a mistake.
I initially wondered about that. It seemed that his primary target was Asian women and the others he killed were bug splat.
Was he an incel who wanted to kill the object of his shame if they represented his only sexual experiences? If so, it could have been the place where he had found them, rather than race unless he associated their ethnicity with their occupation. I've known guys who hypersexualized Asian women (probably the most common fetish) and got yellow fever, but I don't think that they wanted to kill the object of their lust.
While my wife was concerned about "Chinese Flu" violence because it could occur anywhere, this story was outside her environment and just another tragedy of violence in America. The "just" sounds awful, but it's life in America. If it bleeds it leads in the news media and then at the scuttlebutt. It usually, quickly becomes lost in the noise.
All that to say that my wonderment was short lived because I was not likely to know the cause, and what good could come of knowing it? Asians aren't assumed to be primed to loot and burn in protest of perceived racism. That is also a racist assumption with a value judgement that is different from assumptions about to non-Asians (a curse on the majority of black Americans who are not inclined to that). But people worry about what they perceive to be a threat to them.
One of my father's Navy friends was married to a Japanese woman. Their sons were about my age and we hung around a lot.
That American men preferred Asian wives for their personalities was one of those presumptions that nobody questioned; I never heard "subservient" but American women were regarded as too demanding, too (what we would call today) "high maintenance." It was not that Asian women were easier to boss around.
Over here (Vietnam) I get along fine with women of middle years but I don't like the girls, they are painfully superficial and fake (they *beam* at air because they're instructed to smile all the time), though there have been a few I regarded as friends.
That family my father knew ended up moving to Hawaii when the father retired, because they experienced too much bigotry in the USA.
I just engaged in comments on Medium pertaining to a man who moved to Europe because he had no interest in American women. Race was not even the issue. It had to do with men who perceive American women as wearing a chip on their shoulder that they don't want to deal with. While a monolithic view of a subset of women has issues, there is often "some" justification for generalities, averages being what they are.
My wife's father was a violent alcoholic. Before we married, she blew something I had accidentally done out of proportion. Looking back, it was a test. She was not about to marry a man prone to domestic violence and put herself in a situation that could have led to that (once) to see who I might be beyond my courtship self. She was also revealing who she could be to me. Eyes wide open, her understanding of human nature is orders of magnitude beyond my often-clumsy cluelessness. Who we are in the face of conflict with those we love is huge and probably a primary cause of the failure of relationships. Was that because she is Asian? I don't think so. That childhood circumstance is shared by people in all cultures, having nothing to do with race.
I won't turn this into a discussion about Asian women, but I will say that SC lost a ton of credibility with expressed belief in that myth.
This is one of those discussions that hold a lot of meaning to me. My first awareness of unfounded assumptions of racism was in the 60s in the way that the U.S. Marine Corps logged fights. Two light green Marines or two dark green Marines could get in a fight, and it was a fight about whatever. But if a light green and dark green Marine got in a fight it was logged as an interracial incident. The idea that it was about race was implicit, rather than explicit, but it was what it was. Was there racism? Sure, but assuming that negative interracial incidents were about race was often untrue. It was a bad seed in a government organization thinking.
Derek Chauvin's conviction for the murder of George Floyd was widely seen as justice against racism. To the best of my knowledge, no evidence was given in the trial that racism played a role. That kind of thing happens when race cannot be blamed.
Tony Timpa was restrained in a "controversial position" similar to the position former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin held George Floyd in for 14 minutes before he died. [𝘈𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘫𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘥𝘰 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢, 𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘴. 𝘓𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳, 𝘢𝘴 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘮𝘣𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦, 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘥, “𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘦 𝘐 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘩𝘪𝘮,” 𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘥 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘦𝘥. 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘮𝘣𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘥, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘥.] https://youtu.be/_c-E_i8Q5G0
Would it have been about race if he had been black? Draw your own conclusion. When race is involved, assumption-based opinions fly like bullets in a platoon sized firefight.
Is the fact that most of Robert Long's victims were Asian women reason to jump to a conclusion about it being a racially motivated mass killing? Not in my opinion, but I understand how people jump to them. My Asian wife expressed concern about violence directed at her because of news about blame for the "China Virus" early in the covid-19 pandemic. The media sells controversy and if it resulted in fear in Asian women who are perceived to be easy targets for violence, too bad, who cares? If it leads to an actual case of violence, the importance is in being first to report it. $$$
I am old and traveled and have seen all sorts of racism but leaping to assumptions about racism flies in the face of my logical nature. I'm human, so my logic is sometimes flawed both by bad input data and my own shortcomings, but good hell, who is served by peddling that stuff?
"I won't turn this into a discussion about Asian women, but I will say that SC lost a ton of credibility with expressed belief in that myth."
😄 His credibility was already shot by that point for me. But yes, I hate this myth too. In fact, I hate all these myths that are founded on mind-reading and weak correlations. Even if I'd only ever dated Asian women in my entire life, there is no reason to assume that I'm attracted to them because of some fantasy of subservience.
More importantly, it's racist to assume that they're all subservient because they're Asian. What if each of those women had been particularly assertive, as many Asian women obviously are? So often I find that people who accuse others of racism for things lke this don't realise that the racism is happening in their own minds.
I don't think George Floyd 's murder was substantially, if at all, about race. But I don't think Tony Timpa is good evidence for that one way or another. The fact that a white person has experienced a similar injustice to a black person doesn't mean that the black person's problem wasn't caused by racism. Timpa's death is an excellent refutation of the idea that racism is the only or even a good explanation for police brutality, as well as a very revealing commentary on how the news reports events depending on how much racial angst they can wring out of it.
We need to get past this knee-jerk assumption that an interaction becomes "racialised" the second two people with different skin tones are involved. It's built on the exact same stupidity that all racism is built on.
The industry that feeds on it is served by peddling that stuff.
If ‘racism’ can be ascribed to a crime irrespective of any evidence found to date it gives a curious sense of closure and ‘rightness’ to the world view of those that peddle that stuff.
More chance to fundraise off ‘stop Asian hate’.
Frankly it’s despicable. As noted by the earlier responder it adds not one iota to human joy and understanding to layer on these attributes of motivation without evidence - but boy does it give a few jollies to those convinced we are steeped in infamy.
In a country clearly divided by lots of racism - not all of it white - it just seems 'natural' to ascribe racially, at least partially, to the Atlanta narrative. I haven't followed the story since what, last year, I think, when it happened? I remember opening an article I wrote on Medium with the story, the article being how we have to start calling out misogyny in religious and ethnic cultures and name names. (Ironically, Medium published that fine but I'd have never gotten it passed by the approval team at Vocal.media which once rejected a story for 'hate speech' because I'd made a snarky reference to Catholic priest pedophilia. Removing the specificity got it passed.) Problem is, as you point out, at least at that time there wasn't much to point to racism rather than religious nuttiness, esp how typical it is for conservative men to blame women for their own inability to control that troublesome little dangly thing between their legs.
I remember SC, she's got, I believe, two profiles on Medium - she writes about crime and writing under the other one. 'SC' is the one who challenged me to stop bitching about victim feminism and start offering solutions, which I've been doing since. Bright lady, but I'll note she may not understand religious fundamentalism as well as those of us who've lived with American fundamentalism, even if outside it as you and I have. She's from the UK, and I find people from other countries don't always quite understand what these people are like. Margaret Atwood got it wrong for The Handmaid's Tale, too.
The left does like to racialize everything, and did long before George Floyd. There's a great book I read earlier this year by a black sociologist called Hate Crime Hoax: How The Left Is Selling A Fake Race War. He works his way through many so-called race hate crimes in the media and argues that many turn out to be hoaxes (he analyzed over 400 of them). The book's about ten years old, so no Jussie Smollett.
It got me to thinking about the debunking of other 'hate crimes' like Stephen Jiminez's pretty persuasive "The Book of Matthew" arguing that Matthew Shepard wasn't killed because he was gay (esp as he and one of his killers, who was pretty famously in Laramie bi-curious, at the least, had had sexual contact with each other before) but for a drug deal gone bad. Shepard knew something was coming because he spoke of how scared he was in the weeks before his murder, but man, do people *not* like you to talk about how it wasn't about homophobia!
Because the Atlanta shooter is white, and his victims were Asian, I'll agree with her there may have been a bias there from the beginning (they were Asian and perhaps he fetishized their compliance) but that's a big diff from racism and I also felt, from the beginning, that this was more about religious nuttiness than racism. I don't know where the racism motive stands today.
"Because the Atlanta shooter is white, and his victims were Asian, I'll agree with her there may have been a bias there from the beginning"
Yeah, I wouldn't dispute that there "may" have been bias, my issue is the certainty that there *was*. It's fascinating to me how many people assume that a non-Asian man can't be attracted to Asian women without some degree of fetishisation. I can't decide if it's more offensive to Asian women or to non-Asian men.😄
It's this weird situation where nobody (I presume) would assume fetishisation if the shooter had been an Asian man, but some are assuming it because he's white.
But yes, I think you're right that given the amount of division over racism in America, there's a "natural" instinct to blame it during any racially mixed encounter. I guess my point is, in any number of instances, maybe this instinct is completely wrong.
Well actually...if someone seems to have a preference for another race...including one's own, one might wonder if that person had a fetish. Or even a fetish for a particular look. My last dating partner had a thing for blondes. I guess I didn't see it coming because I'm used to being fetishized by Indian & Middle Eastern men, not white dudes :)
And I was fetishized here by brown Asian dudes for several years after I moved here...interestingly, we had a lot of Indians around where I lived in CT but they didn't seem much interested in me. Brown dudes *here*? It took me awhile to realize I was being fetishized, I wasn't quite sure why mostly brown dudes were reaching out on dating sites...and fast...but there it is. Then I went blonde and had to learn how to walk fast past Indian guys and make no eye contact.
As for whether the Atlanta shooter fetishized Asian women, it's an interesting idea but yes, it would need to be supported by other facts like, "It was the only rub 'n' tug in Atlanta featuring Asian women," and "He had the biggest collection of Asian porn on the planet."
Dudes do fetishize, and the left fetishizes race, LOL!
Sure, but do you make a distinction between fetishisation and attraction? Or preference? I think a fetish is a wildly different thing to somebody who likes blonde hair or even who likes typically Asian features.
"Fetish" is one of those words that's escaped its cage. It refers, explicitly to achieving sexual arousal from an object or from a part of the human body other than then accepted arousals, like woman's breasts or men's muscles or genitalia. To be aroused by feet is a fetish; to be aroused only by members of a certain race is not a fetish, it's a preference.
If you are sexually aroused by the sight of leather straps, you have a fetish.
The gray areas are secondary sexual characteristics like body hair.
The guy last year definitely exhibited a fetish for blonde women, and VERY much so for something else which I won't get into here, but it came out that he was very into porn which would explain both. A conversation about what we found attractive in others found him almost exclusively attracted to blonde women. So yeah, I'm gonna call it a fetish because I'm sorry, the human race is way too varied and good-looking to not be able to find *anyone* of another race and type attractive.
Yeah, I hear you. I'm definitely not saying there's no such thing as a fetishist. But this is a version of the "if you don't sleep with tarn people you're a transphobe'" argument, right?
Are you a penis fetishist because you sleep with "cis" men but not trans men? Or are the vast majority of women "height" fetishists because they aren't attracted to shorter men?
But more to the point, a man who is attracted to Asian women isn't necessarily *only* attracted to Asian women. Nobody is claiming as far as I'm aware that Long was only attracted to Asian women. He just went to an Asian massage parlour.
I get what you're saying. I think my ex fetishized blonde women because the reason why we split up was over his wanting to move to southern California, and I said I didn't want to move to a fucked state in a fucked country. He was definitely not into women of other races although he'd gone out with a few; blondes came up over and over again in his conversation, and we split up over California. Furthermore, it came out early that he watched a LOT of porn and he had two very strong desires for a certain look and a certain sexual practice, to the exclusion of everything else. He would do other stuff, but he really had a big thing for this one practice which wasn't offensive or harmful to me, but it definitely didn't do anything for me. I call them fetishes because of how much they came up in conversation when we talked about sex - blondes, this particular look and this particular practice. I wondered if he actually knew what he really liked in bed because it struck me (I could be wrong about this) that he everything he thought he liked he learned from porn. It's why I've gotten so interested in the past year in porn and its effect on men. Because I had no idea how common it is, and now I understand why men ask more often "Do you do anal?" That's now a big red flag for me that he likely watches a lot of porn, and I wonder if he's capable of emotional connection with a woman. My answer is now, "No, I don't do any of that porny shit." And I promptly lose interest.
Yeah, I'm sticking to calling him a fetishist.
BTW, he got REAL defensive in the earlierst convo we had about porn - BEFORE I knew he watched it - when I brought up a book I'd read that talked about how many women and girls are sex trafficked on YouPorn, PornHub, and other popular sites. Which led me down another rabbit hole - the resistance of men to so-called 'progressive' and 'feminist' women when it threatens male sexual pleasure. Denial really *is* a river in Egypt for them.
Pretty sure this was the exact Medium article that got me following you in the first place! Still good work. Thanks for your ongoing dedication to deeper, more nuanced thinking.
Steve, can we explore together why it matters whether there was some element of "racial bias" involved in this case?
Suppose we could magically scan his brain and find that 18% of his motivation was indirectly linked to an Asian fetish (as in, without that fetish, he might have chosen a slightly different set of parlors to shoot up and thus killed only 3 Asians and 4 non-Asians).
How would that knowledge help us improve the world? (I AM NOT suggesting that you or any other reader think it would, I am asking whether you or they have any mechanisms for improving the world which have not occurred to me).
For the vengeance oriented, they might use it to add a racial hate crime to his charges and consider that in itself a positive. I doubt his punishment would be any worse tho, so I don't even see how that accomplishes anything.
But do we imagine that knowing that a hate crime charge might be added (based on the magic brain scanner), is going to inhibit somebody who is ready to kill a dozen people (the 8 he did and others in the porn industry he didn't get to) and who already knows they are likely to die in the process or through execution if caught? Does anybody think that there would be a deterrence effect?
Would knowing that this statistically infinestimal sample of deeply warped humanity (1 person) did or did not have a racial bias component lodged among the catastrophic dysfunctions of his mind going to help us prevent future occurrences in some other way? Would it inform a policy which would improve the world? Would "don't fetishize Asian women" signs in every classroom of America have a measurable effect on the frequency of such deranged crimes?
And that's the best case - with the magic brain scan. The real world will be a lot more ambiguous.
We have the killer saying it was not about race. What is his incentive to lie? It's not like we're going to say, "OK, then you are not in any serious trouble then, we'll treat this as a minor crime" if we believed him. But your correspondent is speculating that even if the killer didn't consciously commit the crimes because of racial hatred ("hate crime"), perhaps some kind of lesser racial bias was unconsciously involved. That's a nearly unfalsifiable hypothesis and again - how does it help society to promote an unverifiable speculation?
Other than being used to reinforce some ideology, I don't see any value to the kind of speculation your correspondent wants to make. I don't see any mechanism by which society could be materially improved.
It was a horrible crime, and we'd all like to see it never happen again over the next century; or more realistically, for such crimes to become even more rare than they are. We could talk about gun restrictions, or more mental health support, or easier routes to involuntary commitment, or various other ways to try to accomplish that.
But trying to parse out how he might have unconsciously have had some iota of indirect racial bias influencing his choice of victim (say, if he fetishized Asian sex workers rather than just being attracted to them), seems closer to debating how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, than to rational discussion of improving society in meaningful ways. I see nothing actionable and helpful therein.
"Steve, can we explore together why it matters whether there was some element of "racial bias" involved in this case?"
I think it's just a question of degree. I mean, there's likely some degree of racial bias (along witho countless other biases) in everything we do. So I think SC's certainty that because these women were Asian, he must have had some Asian bias (fetishistic or otherwise) is both ridiculous and irrelevant. But I think it's far more relevant if there were evidence that he killed them *because* they're Asian.
When Dr. Aruna Khilanani spoke at Harvard about her fantasies of killing white people, the "white" adds a layer of shock and revulsion, no? It certainly did for me. Specifying "white" adds an intentionality to the crime that is different from somebody saying they think about shooting a gun indiscriminately. Both are bad, but one feels *worse*.
As for *why* we feel this way, on a certain level, I don't think it matters. I don't think there's any problem with our added horror at the irrational targeting of a group, purely because of their membership of that group. In fact, I think that added horror is a good thing.
But I guess it's because we recognise the harm this tribalistic thinking can have. And the danger it poses if it's turned upon one of our groups one day. Life is dangerous enough, and we're all aware that we might die because of something we do or a choice we make. The idea that we might also die for something we had no choice in, or responsibility for is more than any of us want to deal with.
And the more likely we are to face that danger for things we have no choice in or responsibility for (ethnic minorities, women, LGBT people, etc) the more likely we are to be concerned about that mindset.
I agree that it's emotionally horrendous to contemplate murder or assault based on involuntary group membership - whether based on "race", sex, sexual orientation, age, or whatever. I'm not sure that I find it any more excusable if it's based on things like being a Catholic, a Democrat, or polyamorous, though (voluntary group membership).
I think we need to distinguish between thing which we find emotionally disturbing, and things which need to be punished more stringently.
George Lakoff and Johnathan Haidt both mention research regarding responses to a scenario where an immigrant family cooks and eats their dog, after the dog is accidentally killed by a car. In that research, (traditional) liberals tended to say "yuck, but there is no harm involved so there is nothing that needs to be punished even if I wouldn't do that", while (traditional) conservatives tended to more think "yuck, that's wrong, they should face sanctions". In that regard, I am on the side of the (traditional) liberals. Imposing punishment should mostly be limited to cases where it can be expected to have a net positive effect, not just because we have an emotional reaction.
We humans often have a stronger emotion is an attractive young mother of three is killed (in an accident or by murder), than an unattractive 40 year old single mechanic. That doesn't mean the the punishment for murder (or vehicular homicide) should differ, though.
So I'm find with our sharing an additional "horror" at some killings, but I don't want to automatically translate that into increased punishments; for each circumstance, a individual case needs to be made for each proposed special punishment, and evaluated based on all anticipatable results, not just on one immediate emotions.
For an example, having federal civil rights laws to prosecute racial violence, may be needed if an especially biased local community is not willing to enforce local laws.
So I am distinguishing between socially castigating Khilanani, and using criminal law, as different tools for shaping society, with different realms. We can be discerning in how we shape policies, considering far more than the factor that something feels bad to us.
And I hope we are agreeing.
"I agree that it's emotionally horrendous to contemplate murder or assault based on involuntary group membership."
I don't think you can (or should) separate the concept of justice from emotion though. The reason we care about a mass shooting or a rape more than tax fraud or insider trading is largely emotional. I don't believe that should change.
If a man beats up a child or a disabled person, for example, I don't want him simply to be tried for assault. The vulnerability of his victim and the danger somebody with his mindset poses to other similar victims should be taken into account.
Similarly, if somebody attacks somebody because of their membership of a particular group, I think the danger they pose to other members of that group should be taken into account. I don't see how we're worse off for doing this. I'm all for live and let live. I'm not talking about being gross out by somebody else's decision to eat a dog. I'm talking about somebody who poses a danger to a specific group of people.
Also, I think one of the legal system's most important functions is to be an expression of the society we aspire to be. We aspire to be a society where there's no murder, so murder is outlawed. But we recognise that there are different degrees of wrongness for murder, so we nuance self-defence and pre-meditation and crimes of passion and crimes against children. We don't just say they're all murder and so should be treated equally. We don't second guess our sense that the circumstances and motivations of the crime matter. What would be the benefit of doing so?
> "I'm talking about somebody who poses a danger to a specific group of people"
This is the kind of rational concern that I consider vital, so we are strongly agreed. I never said that emotion can play no part, I'm just saying that emotion alone is a poor guide.
My point was that we should rationally explore such dangers and choose strategies which have traction on reducing them, rather than rely in immediate emotional reactions, which can produce both counterproductive policies which undermine our goals, and collateral injustices.
Note my screen name begins with "passion", but does not end there. I'm not trying to extinguish all emotion, just balance it out wisely.
I suspect we are essentially in agreement in this regard. Cheers.
"I never said that emotion can play no part, I'm just saying that emotion alone is a poor guide."
Oh yeah absolutely agreed. I'd never advocate blind emotionality. I'm often accused of not being emotional enough😅 I just meant that I don't think we can understand why it matters whether there's a racial element to a crime without allowing emotion to play its part.
Just scanning headlines, race would be a defensible presumption. Had Long gone into a shopping mall that was 95% Caucasian and killed eight Asian women then racism would be conclusive. But this was a business where presumably the women came from the same culture and spoke Tagalog or whatever and it was where Long snapped.
And as you already noted, this was during the peak of the pandemic with Trump tossing out "China virus" several times a day and a lot of people resenting masks and seeing mind control monsters in vaccines were attacking Asians in some perverse sort of revenge.
Yes we should be careful with our presumptions but not knowing details it's not exactly frivolous to at least initially ponder a racist motive.
"Just scanning headlines, race would be a defensible presumption"
Absolutely! Practically inescapable in fact. I wouldn't have blamed people for not even realising that anybody but the Asian women had been killed if they just scanned headlines or even read some of the articles. The erasure of the other victims was truly shocking.
Based on the headlines, it would have been silly not to ponder a racist motive. But we had other information so quickly afterwards that made a racist motive unlikely. Though we also had people like Trevor Noah outright lying about what Long had said, which didn't help matters.
I wonder sometimes if reading is going to be one of those phenomena like the middle class, a brief flowering that dies out.
Before the printing press books were copied by hand, wasting thousands of lives in the priesthood copying texts by candlelight. Then came printing, and newspapers and magazines and glorious books. Literacy went from almost unknown to common.
Now it seems to be fading. A brief care about grammar is giving way to pidgin speech and emoji, sentence structure is seen as effete. Your and you're are interchangeable.
In my industry most workers and much smarter than average and now most of them don't read. In the late 19th century writing was much more sophisticated than it is now. That we are losing ground in literacy is something I don't need to detail.
That most people read about this mass shooting and never read past the headline is no longer surprising. I confess that I thought it a racist crime for a few seconds but then I read the actual story and the rest and knew that presumption to be artifactual.
I'm a reader. I feel like a dying breed.
The number of people who never read a book after their formal education is astonishing. When my granddaughter told me that "the book is always better than the movie" it was one of my happy moments.
I can't imagine who I would be without the influence of reading. We may be part of a dying breed.
The "Silence of the Lambs" movie was much better than the book. The book had too many distracting subplots that the movie chopped out. For example, Clarice's boss at the FBI, played by Scott Glen, had a wife dying of cancer while Clarice pursued Buffalo Bill. It added nothing to the story.
But, yeah, I've read that the average American reads one book per year. So for someone like me who reads about a hundred there are 99 people who don't read books at all.
This is pretty obvious on social networks, and on signs at Trump rallies.
I saw a picture from a rally on the other side; one sign read
"Look at all the correctly-spelled signs." I howled.
All true. There are always exceptions. But in general, we clearly agree.
I am mildly dyslexic. I often don't notice misspellings since I have no difficulty reading misspelled words. It probably contributed to my tendency to not noticing typos or my own words that end up misspelled. In the case of signs carried in rallies and marches, you'd think that someone in the group would say, "Dude, that sign makes us look like dumb shits!" (In some cases, justifiably).
<snip> putting that in an email.
I almost envy you that. A lot of reading is painful for me. I've mentioned the singular "they" many times. I'll see something like "brutalness" and I get mad and want to email the writer, "it's BRUTALITY, dammit!"
And I am tired of being lectured that "language evolves," as if there is no such thing as a mistake.
I initially wondered about that. It seemed that his primary target was Asian women and the others he killed were bug splat.
Was he an incel who wanted to kill the object of his shame if they represented his only sexual experiences? If so, it could have been the place where he had found them, rather than race unless he associated their ethnicity with their occupation. I've known guys who hypersexualized Asian women (probably the most common fetish) and got yellow fever, but I don't think that they wanted to kill the object of their lust.
While my wife was concerned about "Chinese Flu" violence because it could occur anywhere, this story was outside her environment and just another tragedy of violence in America. The "just" sounds awful, but it's life in America. If it bleeds it leads in the news media and then at the scuttlebutt. It usually, quickly becomes lost in the noise.
All that to say that my wonderment was short lived because I was not likely to know the cause, and what good could come of knowing it? Asians aren't assumed to be primed to loot and burn in protest of perceived racism. That is also a racist assumption with a value judgement that is different from assumptions about to non-Asians (a curse on the majority of black Americans who are not inclined to that). But people worry about what they perceive to be a threat to them.
One of my father's Navy friends was married to a Japanese woman. Their sons were about my age and we hung around a lot.
That American men preferred Asian wives for their personalities was one of those presumptions that nobody questioned; I never heard "subservient" but American women were regarded as too demanding, too (what we would call today) "high maintenance." It was not that Asian women were easier to boss around.
Over here (Vietnam) I get along fine with women of middle years but I don't like the girls, they are painfully superficial and fake (they *beam* at air because they're instructed to smile all the time), though there have been a few I regarded as friends.
That family my father knew ended up moving to Hawaii when the father retired, because they experienced too much bigotry in the USA.
I just engaged in comments on Medium pertaining to a man who moved to Europe because he had no interest in American women. Race was not even the issue. It had to do with men who perceive American women as wearing a chip on their shoulder that they don't want to deal with. While a monolithic view of a subset of women has issues, there is often "some" justification for generalities, averages being what they are.
My wife's father was a violent alcoholic. Before we married, she blew something I had accidentally done out of proportion. Looking back, it was a test. She was not about to marry a man prone to domestic violence and put herself in a situation that could have led to that (once) to see who I might be beyond my courtship self. She was also revealing who she could be to me. Eyes wide open, her understanding of human nature is orders of magnitude beyond my often-clumsy cluelessness. Who we are in the face of conflict with those we love is huge and probably a primary cause of the failure of relationships. Was that because she is Asian? I don't think so. That childhood circumstance is shared by people in all cultures, having nothing to do with race.
"𝘈𝘴𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯. 𝘐𝘵’𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘣𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘶𝘣𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦."
I won't turn this into a discussion about Asian women, but I will say that SC lost a ton of credibility with expressed belief in that myth.
This is one of those discussions that hold a lot of meaning to me. My first awareness of unfounded assumptions of racism was in the 60s in the way that the U.S. Marine Corps logged fights. Two light green Marines or two dark green Marines could get in a fight, and it was a fight about whatever. But if a light green and dark green Marine got in a fight it was logged as an interracial incident. The idea that it was about race was implicit, rather than explicit, but it was what it was. Was there racism? Sure, but assuming that negative interracial incidents were about race was often untrue. It was a bad seed in a government organization thinking.
Derek Chauvin's conviction for the murder of George Floyd was widely seen as justice against racism. To the best of my knowledge, no evidence was given in the trial that racism played a role. That kind of thing happens when race cannot be blamed.
Tony Timpa was restrained in a "controversial position" similar to the position former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin held George Floyd in for 14 minutes before he died. [𝘈𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘫𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘥𝘰 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢, 𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘴. 𝘓𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳, 𝘢𝘴 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘮𝘣𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦, 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘥, “𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘦 𝘐 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘩𝘪𝘮,” 𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘥 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘦𝘥. 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘮𝘣𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘥, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘥.] https://youtu.be/_c-E_i8Q5G0
Would it have been about race if he had been black? Draw your own conclusion. When race is involved, assumption-based opinions fly like bullets in a platoon sized firefight.
Is the fact that most of Robert Long's victims were Asian women reason to jump to a conclusion about it being a racially motivated mass killing? Not in my opinion, but I understand how people jump to them. My Asian wife expressed concern about violence directed at her because of news about blame for the "China Virus" early in the covid-19 pandemic. The media sells controversy and if it resulted in fear in Asian women who are perceived to be easy targets for violence, too bad, who cares? If it leads to an actual case of violence, the importance is in being first to report it. $$$
I am old and traveled and have seen all sorts of racism but leaping to assumptions about racism flies in the face of my logical nature. I'm human, so my logic is sometimes flawed both by bad input data and my own shortcomings, but good hell, who is served by peddling that stuff?
"I won't turn this into a discussion about Asian women, but I will say that SC lost a ton of credibility with expressed belief in that myth."
😄 His credibility was already shot by that point for me. But yes, I hate this myth too. In fact, I hate all these myths that are founded on mind-reading and weak correlations. Even if I'd only ever dated Asian women in my entire life, there is no reason to assume that I'm attracted to them because of some fantasy of subservience.
More importantly, it's racist to assume that they're all subservient because they're Asian. What if each of those women had been particularly assertive, as many Asian women obviously are? So often I find that people who accuse others of racism for things lke this don't realise that the racism is happening in their own minds.
I don't think George Floyd 's murder was substantially, if at all, about race. But I don't think Tony Timpa is good evidence for that one way or another. The fact that a white person has experienced a similar injustice to a black person doesn't mean that the black person's problem wasn't caused by racism. Timpa's death is an excellent refutation of the idea that racism is the only or even a good explanation for police brutality, as well as a very revealing commentary on how the news reports events depending on how much racial angst they can wring out of it.
We need to get past this knee-jerk assumption that an interaction becomes "racialised" the second two people with different skin tones are involved. It's built on the exact same stupidity that all racism is built on.
The industry that feeds on it is served by peddling that stuff.
If ‘racism’ can be ascribed to a crime irrespective of any evidence found to date it gives a curious sense of closure and ‘rightness’ to the world view of those that peddle that stuff.
More chance to fundraise off ‘stop Asian hate’.
Frankly it’s despicable. As noted by the earlier responder it adds not one iota to human joy and understanding to layer on these attributes of motivation without evidence - but boy does it give a few jollies to those convinced we are steeped in infamy.
In a country clearly divided by lots of racism - not all of it white - it just seems 'natural' to ascribe racially, at least partially, to the Atlanta narrative. I haven't followed the story since what, last year, I think, when it happened? I remember opening an article I wrote on Medium with the story, the article being how we have to start calling out misogyny in religious and ethnic cultures and name names. (Ironically, Medium published that fine but I'd have never gotten it passed by the approval team at Vocal.media which once rejected a story for 'hate speech' because I'd made a snarky reference to Catholic priest pedophilia. Removing the specificity got it passed.) Problem is, as you point out, at least at that time there wasn't much to point to racism rather than religious nuttiness, esp how typical it is for conservative men to blame women for their own inability to control that troublesome little dangly thing between their legs.
I remember SC, she's got, I believe, two profiles on Medium - she writes about crime and writing under the other one. 'SC' is the one who challenged me to stop bitching about victim feminism and start offering solutions, which I've been doing since. Bright lady, but I'll note she may not understand religious fundamentalism as well as those of us who've lived with American fundamentalism, even if outside it as you and I have. She's from the UK, and I find people from other countries don't always quite understand what these people are like. Margaret Atwood got it wrong for The Handmaid's Tale, too.
The left does like to racialize everything, and did long before George Floyd. There's a great book I read earlier this year by a black sociologist called Hate Crime Hoax: How The Left Is Selling A Fake Race War. He works his way through many so-called race hate crimes in the media and argues that many turn out to be hoaxes (he analyzed over 400 of them). The book's about ten years old, so no Jussie Smollett.
It got me to thinking about the debunking of other 'hate crimes' like Stephen Jiminez's pretty persuasive "The Book of Matthew" arguing that Matthew Shepard wasn't killed because he was gay (esp as he and one of his killers, who was pretty famously in Laramie bi-curious, at the least, had had sexual contact with each other before) but for a drug deal gone bad. Shepard knew something was coming because he spoke of how scared he was in the weeks before his murder, but man, do people *not* like you to talk about how it wasn't about homophobia!
Because the Atlanta shooter is white, and his victims were Asian, I'll agree with her there may have been a bias there from the beginning (they were Asian and perhaps he fetishized their compliance) but that's a big diff from racism and I also felt, from the beginning, that this was more about religious nuttiness than racism. I don't know where the racism motive stands today.
"Because the Atlanta shooter is white, and his victims were Asian, I'll agree with her there may have been a bias there from the beginning"
Yeah, I wouldn't dispute that there "may" have been bias, my issue is the certainty that there *was*. It's fascinating to me how many people assume that a non-Asian man can't be attracted to Asian women without some degree of fetishisation. I can't decide if it's more offensive to Asian women or to non-Asian men.😄
It's this weird situation where nobody (I presume) would assume fetishisation if the shooter had been an Asian man, but some are assuming it because he's white.
But yes, I think you're right that given the amount of division over racism in America, there's a "natural" instinct to blame it during any racially mixed encounter. I guess my point is, in any number of instances, maybe this instinct is completely wrong.
Well actually...if someone seems to have a preference for another race...including one's own, one might wonder if that person had a fetish. Or even a fetish for a particular look. My last dating partner had a thing for blondes. I guess I didn't see it coming because I'm used to being fetishized by Indian & Middle Eastern men, not white dudes :)
And I was fetishized here by brown Asian dudes for several years after I moved here...interestingly, we had a lot of Indians around where I lived in CT but they didn't seem much interested in me. Brown dudes *here*? It took me awhile to realize I was being fetishized, I wasn't quite sure why mostly brown dudes were reaching out on dating sites...and fast...but there it is. Then I went blonde and had to learn how to walk fast past Indian guys and make no eye contact.
As for whether the Atlanta shooter fetishized Asian women, it's an interesting idea but yes, it would need to be supported by other facts like, "It was the only rub 'n' tug in Atlanta featuring Asian women," and "He had the biggest collection of Asian porn on the planet."
Dudes do fetishize, and the left fetishizes race, LOL!
"Dudes do fetishize"
Sure, but do you make a distinction between fetishisation and attraction? Or preference? I think a fetish is a wildly different thing to somebody who likes blonde hair or even who likes typically Asian features.
(donning wordcop hat)
"Fetish" is one of those words that's escaped its cage. It refers, explicitly to achieving sexual arousal from an object or from a part of the human body other than then accepted arousals, like woman's breasts or men's muscles or genitalia. To be aroused by feet is a fetish; to be aroused only by members of a certain race is not a fetish, it's a preference.
If you are sexually aroused by the sight of leather straps, you have a fetish.
The gray areas are secondary sexual characteristics like body hair.
(doffing wordcop hat)
Yeah, agreed. I think maybe *arousal* that is *only* caused by members of a certain “race” could reasonably be described as a fetish.
But *attraction* to the typical features of a particular race, especially if this doesn’t exclude others, seems to me to be just a preference.
What would you call it if a person is ONLY attracted to a very specific type?
The guy last year definitely exhibited a fetish for blonde women, and VERY much so for something else which I won't get into here, but it came out that he was very into porn which would explain both. A conversation about what we found attractive in others found him almost exclusively attracted to blonde women. So yeah, I'm gonna call it a fetish because I'm sorry, the human race is way too varied and good-looking to not be able to find *anyone* of another race and type attractive.
Yeah, I hear you. I'm definitely not saying there's no such thing as a fetishist. But this is a version of the "if you don't sleep with tarn people you're a transphobe'" argument, right?
Are you a penis fetishist because you sleep with "cis" men but not trans men? Or are the vast majority of women "height" fetishists because they aren't attracted to shorter men?
But more to the point, a man who is attracted to Asian women isn't necessarily *only* attracted to Asian women. Nobody is claiming as far as I'm aware that Long was only attracted to Asian women. He just went to an Asian massage parlour.
I get what you're saying. I think my ex fetishized blonde women because the reason why we split up was over his wanting to move to southern California, and I said I didn't want to move to a fucked state in a fucked country. He was definitely not into women of other races although he'd gone out with a few; blondes came up over and over again in his conversation, and we split up over California. Furthermore, it came out early that he watched a LOT of porn and he had two very strong desires for a certain look and a certain sexual practice, to the exclusion of everything else. He would do other stuff, but he really had a big thing for this one practice which wasn't offensive or harmful to me, but it definitely didn't do anything for me. I call them fetishes because of how much they came up in conversation when we talked about sex - blondes, this particular look and this particular practice. I wondered if he actually knew what he really liked in bed because it struck me (I could be wrong about this) that he everything he thought he liked he learned from porn. It's why I've gotten so interested in the past year in porn and its effect on men. Because I had no idea how common it is, and now I understand why men ask more often "Do you do anal?" That's now a big red flag for me that he likely watches a lot of porn, and I wonder if he's capable of emotional connection with a woman. My answer is now, "No, I don't do any of that porny shit." And I promptly lose interest.
Yeah, I'm sticking to calling him a fetishist.
BTW, he got REAL defensive in the earlierst convo we had about porn - BEFORE I knew he watched it - when I brought up a book I'd read that talked about how many women and girls are sex trafficked on YouPorn, PornHub, and other popular sites. Which led me down another rabbit hole - the resistance of men to so-called 'progressive' and 'feminist' women when it threatens male sexual pleasure. Denial really *is* a river in Egypt for them.
Pretty sure this was the exact Medium article that got me following you in the first place! Still good work. Thanks for your ongoing dedication to deeper, more nuanced thinking.