boston progress radio

Hey nerds! You all may have noticed that the Internets have been buzzing with news of a recently published book by Richard Bernstein called East, West, and Sex. Laura Miller took him to task in her review; then over at Hyphen, Claire took her to task for her review.

I been talking with folks on and off about this, and am surprised how often the feedback comes down to: well, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a white man/Asian woman couple, so we shouldn’t judge – because that’s not at the heart of this at all. It’s not my business to go around judging other people’s relationships – and what’s more, I really don’t give a sh!t about anyone else’s relationships. Yall feel free to do whatever you want.

Oh, but if only it were so simple. According to Miller’s review, Bernstein uses European imperialism as the frame to explain why these types of couplings are so popular; he says “Eastern” (generally a span from North Africa to East Asia) women are influenced by European/American imperialism to come to depend on relationships with white men to bring them happiness. Miller disputes this and argues that Asian women choose white men simply because they prefer them. Nary a word about how American and European exploitation of Asian women throughout history have resulted in the “Asian sex kitty” stereotype so pervasive in our society that has done damage to countless people’s psyches.

Both the book and the review seem to assume that in a world that is governed by racist, sexist, capitalist, colonialist values, that relationships between 73-year-old white men from America and 23-year-old prostitutes in Thailand can be healthy. Or at the very least cost-efficient. According to Miller, “Westerners” in poor parts of Asia “makes commercial sex pretty much inevitable. A dollar goes much further there, whether you’re buying hours of someone’s labor at a sweatshop sewing machine or sexual services.”

“Pretty much inevitable,” she says, and leaves it at that. Where’s the critical analysis? Most of the reason why these areas are so poor is tied directly to the presence of these foreigners – the European diplomats, the American GIs, etc – to pretend the prostitute/client relationship anywhere is simply a business one rings false to me. But to claim such a thing as it relates to geopolitics is insulting to those of us with even a little bit of historical perspective.

But that’s not all: the review uses an example from the book of how a Thai prostitute scammed an American man into buying her a house, then she dumped him and moved her Thai boyfriend in. This is to show how these women are empowered now, and not damsels in distress…but absent in that analysis is all the decades of exploitation of Southeast Asia (militarily, economically, geopolitically, resources-wise) that has led to sex work being one of the primary ways a woman can earn a living in some parts of the region. Are we to believe that this woman’s preferred path to home-ownership was to become a prostitute and scam an American? Sure, the guy might have felt bad about himself after it happened, but who was the real powerful one in that relationship?

Throughout the review, Miller uses a loose argument to prove these women are not influenced by colonialism to be with white men, but are choosing white men based on their own free will. But conveniently forgotten in this is that these women are not college-educated middle-class women from Diamond Bar, California. Let’s not pretend we’re talking about two people who met at the gym or in class or at a Starbucks.

The book also argues that “Western” men are preferable because they treat women better than “Eastern” men do. The review counters this – not by stating this is a baseless point rooted completely in stereotype and hearsay, but by saying this is a recent development, and that in years prior, white men treated Asian (and Arab and North African) women just as bad:

Eastern women didn’t enjoy substantially better treatment from Western men until fairly recently. If, as several of the Asian women Bernstein interviews seem to think, Western men treat women with more respect than Asian men do, it’s because Western women have demanded baseline changes in Western attitudes, customs and laws.

Miller then proceeds to ignore that so much of that ill-treatment was based on the fact that those white men who treated the local women so poorly were colonialists – whose lives and well-beings revolved around the exploitation of darker-skinned people. So no wonder they treated these women badly, they were essentially their slaves! (Not mentioned in the review.) Maybe treatment of women has been improved by the struggles of past decades, but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that these “Western” men see “Eastern” women as women at all.

There is a tendency to romanticize these relationships, and take ostensibly healthy ones (say Maury Povich and Connie Chung, who are both wealthy and successful and educated) to prove the unhealthy ones (say, American soldiers stationed in Okinawa or ex-Pats in Bangkok) are just fine the way they are. This is akin to saying Phil Jackson coaching Kobe Bryant to an NBA Finals MVP award shows us that white masters and African slaves probably both benefited from that relationship. Idiotic, right?

This is the kind of attitude that allows someone to see Miss Saigon as a beautiful story about the strength of true love, as though the backdrop of the American war in Vietnam were incidental.

Of course there are plenty of “Eastern” women who have “Western” men as partners who have healthy relationships. But we should not do ourselves or our world the disservice of pretending that this is what always happens, or even what usually happens. And certainly, a book – or a book review – that upholds the aforementioned 73-year-old white man/23-year-old Asian woman as an example of a mutually beneficial “relationship” is far far far off base.

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Tags: Books, inter-racial dating, Sex.