 |
|
| Don't have an account yet? You can create one. As a registered user you have some advantages like theme manager, comments configuration and post comments with your name. |
|
|
|
| |
|
| | The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content. |
|
|
|
No Comments Allowed for Anonymous, please register |
|
Re: Women on the Verge (Score: 1)
by figaruna on Friday, March 19 @ 09:25:25 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) | I went to check out the reviews on Amazon totally ready to laugh/cry in indignance of two more examples of haughty white male privilege but came out of the experience decidedly ambivalent.
Indeed, the two less-flattering reviews are by academics (one an anthropologist and the other an actual ethnographer), but unlike what sugarshark said, they weren't both WM's. One was actually an AM (the anthropologist) who's married to a Latina, and while the other *is* a WM, I would not immediately write him off as the "typical asiaphile WM in Asia" as he is in a relationship with a BF.
Unlike what I had assumed, their reviews seemed more objective than subjective (i.e. resentment-driven). For one thing, neither of them to disavow the reality of "bad" AF/WM relationships. They went further, however, by pointing out some weaknesses of Kelsey's study as well as other social phenomena that *are* true (whether we like it or not) that Kelsey seemed to overlook...
I haven't read the book, but if Kelsey did indeed, according to one of those reviews, intimate that *all* AF/WM relationships were "impure," and that *all* AM/WF relationships are "admirable" in that they were "intrepidly fighting against patriarchy" (WTF??), then I'd have to agree that Kelsey's mind was a little clouded in the writing of her book... I mean, I haven't read it yet, so she might not even have said those things, but if she did... um, wow.
Secondly, one of the disappointed reviewers pointed out that Kelsey seemed not to acknowledge the influence of the global "whites on pedestals" media portrayals on Asian MEN, for just as white men are portrayed as the ideals of masculine beauty in the media, it would be ludicrous to deny that white women, too, are seen as standards of feminine beauty.
There was an article by an AM posted on MM a while back, in which the AM honestly spoke about how the constant media images of beautiful white women that he was exposed to growinf up affected who he was attracted to as an adult (i.e. mostly white women).
http://www.modelminority.com/article459.html
The global media is a little more diverse now, but it'd still be hard to argue that white women aren't portrayed strongly as "very beautiful" in the media anymore.
Finally, I would have to say that I still think that it was very important that Kelsey's book, a little simplistic or not, was published considering the veritable dearth of serious scholarly literature studying how the globalized (Western) media portrayals lead to the emergence of Asian women with "white knight" fetish and white men with "yellow fever." These are real social phenomena that not only deserve, but NEED scrutiny. Hopefully, Kelsey's book will open the door to such sociological study on this topic. |
| Parent |
|
|
