Sexuality and the Asian femme experience
Last night, a friend asked me to contemplate my relationship with sexual attraction.
My reply: ‘I’m a stereotype. I hate that I conform to desiring white, tall men! But, fuck it, the subset of people I find sexually attractive is so small that I have to take what I can get.’
The question I ask myself is: how much of that which I find attractive has been the product of cultural osmosis? In short, the social, goopy soup within which I find myself wading, navigating(and upon occasion, drowning).
In my teens, I flew through historical romance novels as though I‘d run out. Shut in my room with depression as my bedmate, I found solace and freedom in a fantasy world where young women were swept off their feet by handsome, virile, white, rich, blue-blooded masculine men.
As I get older, greyer, wizened, I thankfully find my definition of ‘sexually’ attractive expanding — to encompass a greater array of colours and body types.
I think it comes with my own bodily awakening. The idea that ‘all bodies are good’ (not just beautiful)… the notion that I wear the clothes.
The clothes don’t wear me.
The more I find myself enlivened by my rolls, curves, handles, pockets, skin… the more I find that beauty in others.
If I were to rewrite ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ for the twenty-second century, I would ask Sophie to take her self-actualisation a step further. I’d ask her to tell us in the audience that her hair is beautiful… and then cut it all off because she doesn’t need it. After all, it’s just a trapping.
Your girl don’t need no physical affirmation because the value she offers to the people around her is more than looks.
This gradual awakening comes also with my reckoning with my race. Am I yet proud of my ancestry, the rich tapestry hanging behind me, my almond eyes, my not-pale-enough skin, the strange and ‘foreign’ food I ate at school, ‘uncivilised’ accents, the richer kids poking fun, poverty, the abject exploitation when travelling, difficulty grasping and different customs, values, beliefs? This straddling of at least two worlds and often, more.
I am here to tell you that sexual attractiveness is one facet of who I am. Whom I find attractive now goes far deeper than skin and even bone. It is the whole package — thoughtfulness, conscientiousness, a capacity to say ‘I’m wrong’ and ‘I’m sorry’, empathy and dare I say it — kindness.
