Tag Archives: masculinity

A Female Take on Invisible Asian American Heterosexual Men

"Evil. Not hot and horny."

Akrypti from 8Asians wrote a piece in response to my International Examiner article called The Perfect Villain: Straight Asian Men. In her piece, she talks about her perspective as an Asian American woman. It’s a great piece. She argues that Asian women often don’t see Asian men as invisible, but instead often see us as evil or take us less seriously than other groups.

There were a few points that I really appreciated.

1. Akrypti mentions Frank Chin and Minority Militant, and how people didn’t take their points seriously. She also mentions that the same thing takes place with the IR issues.

Posted in Activism, Asian American, Knowledge | Tagged , | 309 Comments

Asian American Manliness and Becoming Men

Welcome to the longest post in the history of bigWOWO.  The Post Teaser plugin has been activated.

We’ve been having a long discussion on Asian American masculinity on those other two blog posts (1 and 2). We originally began talking about masculinity in order to understand emasculation and how it relates to interracial dating, but in the course of the discussion, we realized that masculinity and manliness are not the same thing. Masculinity is a frame of mind characterized by fast aggressive action, a yang frame of mind. It’s a self-contained description. Manliness, on the other hand, combines yin and yang, feminine and masculine, to embody what society thinks a man should be. Becoming a man is a rite of passage where the values depend entirely on the culture in which one lives.

Posted in Asian American, Features, Knowledge | Tagged , | 110 Comments

Asian American Masculinity

Li Bai

Thanks to Kobukson for posting this:

Masculinity is a more fundamental concept. There’s a really simple test for it. It’s called the “hand test”. You see, you take your hand, reach between your legs, and if you notice something that feels like a sac with two balls in it, then Nature has ordained that you need to be masculine.

It is clear the discussion has devolved to a point where now we have to define what “masculinity” really is. But that’s part of the bigger problem, isn’t it? No one is clear what it is apart from our bastardized, poop culture understanding of it.

Posted in Asian American | Tagged , | 206 Comments

Mr. Hyphen tomorrow, the quest for masculinity

mrhyphen08-stage

As some of you know, Mr. Hyphen is tomorrow.  Check it out if you’re in Oakland.  It’s a male pageant, something which I wrote about before.  I’m not crazy about the idea of male pageants for Asian American men.  It’s in a feminine context, and I’ve felt that men must make a hard impact in order to find their power.  But I’m not going to oppose it either.  They raise lots of money for causes, and you can’t fault them for that.  If I were in town, I might go myself.

Posted in Activism, Asian American | Tagged , , , , | 15 Comments