Thoughts on #HyperMasculAZNs

Part 1. The primary reaction of anger

My primary concern about this discussion is that the discussion was not representative enough of actual cis-gendered, heterosexual men such that it actually alienates them and turns them away from discussion. Almost all of the invited speakers (aside from Shinaah Thao and Sean Miura) were either women or represented women’s interests groups or LGBTQ groups. Now, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with representing a women’s interest group or LGBTQ groups, but when the group of people you think that mostly causing the problem is not represented in a discussion about them, I think it’s a little strange. Effectively, everyone invited already had a preconception that masculinity in it’s current state is bad.

Suppose you are a masculine expressing person, and you have enough issues going through your daily day. You struggle to pay rent, you struggle to find love, you may struggle to find identity as an Asian American. However, you hold yourself to standards. You think that you respect others, especially women. You don’t do misogynist things, you aren’t hyper-masculine, you’re just a dude who’s living his life. You come across a discussion about masculinity that is most people telling you how masculinity is shitty and how it harms them.

The first reaction to this is an identity crisis.

Without reading much more, and without background knowledge about the effects of patriarchy, what does this discussion tell you? Since you associate with the masculine, and these people are saying that masculinity is shitty, that’s already an attack on your character and your identity. The point is, it is a natural response to look at this and be angry, to feel unwanted, unrepresented, and shit on. Not only that, you feel as if they are strictly targeting you because the topic is about Asian hyper-masculinity. As if there is an effort to strictly target Asian men, and that Asian men are bad because they’re hyper-masculine.

Actually a lot of problems appear because of implicit associations. Here’s how the logic works. The discussion focused primarily on two facts:

1. Some Asian men choose to adopt toxic forms of masculinity
2. The Asian American community, especially women, LGBT, and queer people are hurt by toxic masculinity.

An inference to be made here is to suggest that the speakers also implies a 3rd point. I think this point logically follows from the two points. However, if it was said, it would have been considered racist.

3. Therefore, being an Asian man makes you susceptible to toxic masculinity. Asian men are therefore potentially dangerous to women, LGBT and queer peoples.

A further assumption that one can make from this point is that this conversation are trying to bring about that not only are Asian men potentially dangerous to women, LGBTQ folx, etc. but that they are likely to exhibit these trends. One Redditor summarizes his feelings as such:

[I]f you talk about “toxic Asian masculinity” without defining what it is or how it is different from race-neutral “toxic masculinity,” you are telling readers to make racist generalizations. This is my biggest criticism of the #HyperMasculAZNs discussion.

Here is a Reddit post that goes more in depth on implicit associations, but also highlights the anger towards this discussion. The point here is not to chastise him for being angry but to understand why he is angry and how can we phrase the discussion to avoid this.

Now, this discussion is not really trying to claim these implicit associations.

Here’s a few highlighted tweets from Jenn from Reappropriate, towards whom a lot of hate was spilled for this discussion in Asian American men’s groups. Some of her tweets are buried a bit deeper that explains things a bit better.

There are a few things to learn from this:

1. Twitter is absolutely ass for this kind of townhall discussion because you don’t see posts with enough context.
2. We have to be careful that our points do not make implicit associations like this. The root of it stems from a disconnect from the two main points from the discussion. One is about toxic masculinity showing up in some Asian men. One is about the effects of race neutral toxic masculinity. The context that is missing is that the toxic masculinity that women are hurt most by is the race neutral toxic masculinity. More on this later.
3. When discussing a sensitive topic about a group of people, you have to consider how these people are going to react to it if your purpose is to get them to listen. Being patient is sometimes not enough.
4. You should actually involve more masculine expressing people if you’re going to talk about masculinity. Have them talk about their own stories instead of making generalizations about what you’ve seen.

Part 2. Asian Toxic-masculinity v.s. White Toxic-masculinity

The difference between Asian toxic masculinity and white toxic masculinity is extremely important, and was not discussed enough. In fact, I think a discussion on this should have been it’s own question from 18 Million Rising. Masculinity is is the masculine form of expression, and is a social construct. But where that is socially constructed is important. As Asian Americans, we come at a culture clash. Our parents or ancestors come from Asian cultural backgrounds, where the context of what masculinity is differs largely from white masculinity. In the US, the default masculinity is white masculinity, and thus many Asian American men seek to replicate this white masculinity. Now, I’m not going to make blanket statements about whether one form of masculinity is inherently better (from an ideological standpoint), but in the US since white masculinity is the norm, it has more power. And since it has more power, it is disproportionately affecting the Asian American community. Therefore, it is apt to make a statement that white toxic masculinity is more dangerous to the community. How white toxic masculinity and Asian toxic masculinity affect the Asian American community is very different.

Here’s what I mean. Much of the toxic masculinity exhibited in the US can be seen in your Asian frat house. There is a concept that some AAs, because they feel so emasculated by society, feel a need to appear more masculine than normal to fit in and to be seen as masculine. They want to be seen as masculine because they believe (with supported evidence), that being masculine = being attractive. So they adopt white masculinity. If it isn’t clear yet that toxic masculinity is rampant in fraternities, perhaps this story of how Michael Deng died as a result of “proving his belonging” by being hazed caused his death just last year will shove the issues into the light. Here is another article highlighting these problems. As fraternities are largely a construct created by the white patriarchy, this is an issue about Asian American men giving into toxic white masculinity.

Asian toxic masculinity is a different issue altogether, which should be discussed. Asian toxic masculinity is more cultural, and more tradition rooted. For example, the subservient relationships under Confucian teachings (which is tremendously impactful on nearly all East-Asian cultures) is toxic in and of its own.

Now on to why this is important. This is important to focus the blame more so on to what it ought to be focused on. Simply talking about toxic masculinity in Asian Americans has a connotation that there is something inherently toxic about being Asian. However, if the discussion was more focused talking about how white toxic masculinity affects us, or how Asian toxic masculinity is still embedded in our every day thinking focuses the discussion a lot more and provides a greater depth of introspection.

The discussion should have explicitly made a distinction between the following discussions:

1. “How does race neutral toxic masculinity affect women, LGBTQ people, and men themselves?” — This was talked about and featured as a large part of the discussion.
2. “How is the manifestation of Toxic Masculinity in Asian men different from that of white men? Is this toxic masculinity from Asian sources or white sources?” — This was talked about briefly
3. “What are toxic components of Asian sourced Masculinity?” — Not discussed whatsoever.

Addendum:

Based on feedback, I would like to add a section on WHY talking about Asian sourced masculinity matter. When we are talking about how Toxic Masculinity affects the Asian American community, there are really two components that absolutely need to be kept separate: how are AAPIs affected by Toxic Masculinity as a whole, and how AAPI people, especially men display Toxic Masculinity. This is incredibly important to distinguish, as a failure to do so would be be failing to acknowledge that the perpetrators of Toxic Masculinity are very rarely Asian men.

However, when we are talking about how Asian Men acting in toxic masculine ways, we must only be talking about the unique experiences of Asian men, because otherwise, we’re just talking about how MEN in general act toxic masculine. Unless there is a reason to single out the Asian in Asian men, we should not, because it creates unrealistic representations. This is also why Asian men representation in the conversation is so important as well.

Part 3. Elliot Rodger and Daniel Hortzclaw are not part of the Asian American community.

Ok, they’re half Asian and they live in America. But to use these two as examples of toxic masculinity manifesting in the Asian Community is something I absolutely condemn. I do not understand why 18 million rising sought to uses these two as examples of Asian toxic masculinity when the example of the death of Michael Deng is so much more of a manifestation of a problem inherent to the Asian American community.

Elliot Rodger and Daniel Hortzclaw are both half Asian born to white fathers. Neither of them neither identify with the Asian community, nor were raised with any Asian male figures. As a result, 100% of their misogyny is stemming from white masculinity, not Asian masculinity. Elliot Rodger spoke about hating his Asian side. He wanted to bleach his hair blonde. He literally wrote “How could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them?” For a person who wanted to distance himself as far away from being Asian as possible, why are we focusing on him being an example of an Asian misogynist? Are we trying to say “look how bad Asian American men can get?”

Perhaps the 18 Million Rising chose Rodger Elliot and Daniel Hortzclaw to highlight how Toxic Masculinity hurts women, especially minority women. (Even though Elliot Rodger killed more men, and especially more Asian men…).

This problem of racializing when you shouldn’t be racializing is prevalent everywhere. When a white man rapes a woman, it’s a problem with Masculinity as a whole; but when an Asian man does the same, it turns into an Asian Masculinity problem. Is it not apparent the normalization of whiteness and the othering of Asianness?

So please stop claiming Elliot Rodger and Daniel Hortzclaw are evidence of Asian American toxic masculinity. While anyone is at it, stop using Peter Liang as evidence of Asian American police brutality too.

Part 4. The Irony of the Request to Change Masculinity

Here’s a little part that feels weird to me. Social Justice has always been pushing for freedom of identification of gender, sexual orientation, and who you love. Asian women are constantly telling other Asians to stop criticizing them for their dating choices. Yet the same group not only desires, but demands that men change their gender expression. It’s a bit rude for non-masculine expressing people to push their interpretations of masculinity and to tell masculine expressing people what they’re doing and how it’s wrong. It’s slightly insulting even to ask that not only do men decry masculinity but to actively rally against it.

I get it. Women, and non-binary/non-hetero/non-cis people are hurt by the actions of individual people because of their expression. Some of them are physically hurt or even killed because of extreme cases. But you’d think there would be a little bit more respect and attempt to understand the core issues that men are dealing with that turn them towards toxic masculinity?

Take a look at a few tweets here.

There’s pretty good reasons why men are uncomfortable in womxn dominated spaces. It’s hard enough to speak without being corrected about your vocabulary. Hard enough to say things without being called out for “transphobic speech” when there was no intent of it, but rather internalized speech patterns that manifests in what could be considered “transphobic speech”. For example, I call my friends dude because that’s simply how my friends call each other. If I were to call anyone “dude” in a womxn dominated space, I’d be immediately shot down for “normalizing maleness,” even though it isn’t my intent.

It takes a LOT of work to reach a point where you can participate in womxn dominated spaces without being shouted down on every single post. It took me a while to realize what things I was saying was transphobic when participating in feminist club discussions in college. I still get shouted down for things where I thought I said one thing, but was interpreted as another in /r/asianfeminism. But it’s hard, it’s frustrating.

Let me emphasize. It is not the job of feminist or womxn dominated space to change their speech patterns to be more inclusive of men. However, I think it’s important to be wary of the fact that a lot of discourse is not inviting or comfortable whatsoever to man. If education of men, and attempt to bridge gaps between cis-het-men is the goal, then a change in tone (and a lot more patience) is required to get things done.

Sean Miura hits the nail on the head here.