No, I meant “Please tell me you’re kidding and don’t really believe that rubbish.”
But I guess not.
John W. Kennedy’s phrase “vulgar stereotype” should have been the tipoff. Oh well.
Whoops. I really hijacked that one, didn’t I?
Just goes to show you what a bunch of overeducated men sitting around their computers REALLY want to discuss…
BTW, Nametag, I don’t think you have to worry about anyone here at the SDMB being QUITE that far gone. Check in at the Starwars.com message boards, though, and I’m sure you’ll find it the subject of a raging debate.
I’m pleased to report that my own investigations um, delving deeply into this…territory…have cleared up any ambiguity I may personally have been subject to in my unenlightened youth. My rigidly scientific, uh, mind…demanded that I make this study a priority when in college, and I encourage others to, ahem, envelop themselves in this highly rewarding area. Of study.
Godalmighty, does it need to be in short words? OK, fine.
JWK thinks the horizontal vagina myth is somehow related to the “slant-eye” stereotype. That’s rubbish. The slant-eye stereotype is a generalization based on the observation of the epicanthic folds present in most East Asians; they’re not slanted eyes or slitted eyes, but that’s the way it got labeled by Western Europeans, who have no such structure. Take-home point: the stereotype is a product of observation.
The vagina myth, on the other hand, is a product of imagination – the people who believe this have never seen the actual item. They speculate because they do not know. They speculate because the women seem exotic and mysterious to them. Maybe the epicanthic folds contribute to that, but the processes are not related.
Nametag, there is a difference in a generality and a stereotype. Observation led to a reasonably accurate generalization about Asian eyes. A stereotype would be a generalization about Asians and not necessarily accurate.
Don’t pay any attention to that. I just made it up.
Welcome, wildbill! Talking dirty in your first post! Tsk! Tsk! 
Have any of you heard the expression “Fuckin’ A Tooche”? My husband is from Alabama and I don’t think I had heard it until I met him.
The hijack is complete.
Sorry to have missed the thrust of your protest, Nametag (omigod, I’m still doing it! Help!) but to be fair, your questioning of J.W. Kennedy’s intent WAS a little vague.
Two things with your statement that “the horizontal vagina myth is somehow related to the ‘slant-eye’ stereotype…[is] rubbish.” trouble me:
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As asinine and ignorant as the “idea” of the horizontal vagina is, it doesn’t get repeated about OTHER exotic, mysterious women whom white Americans have not, in large numbers, gained carnal knowledge of. South Asians; Inuit women; Aboriginal Australians; all are far-flung, exotic, and probably mysterious to U.S. men. But none of them are claimed to have orthagonally rotated…equipment. Why not? Why does one group of women find themselves the focus of such specific speculation? What other conclusion seems more likely than that the process of as you said “observing” one obvious physical difference led directly to “speculating” stupidly about another? Dumb, yes, but the process itself is, unfortunately, the most likely candidate for the silliness described above.
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Um, why do you refer to the epicanthal folds of East Asians as a “stereotype”? Is there a large enough East Asian population WITHOUT this feature to make its use as a descriptor of Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, East Siberians, Southeast Asians, Pacific Islanders, et al a false assumption? Would it be a “stereotype” for me to presume that almost any Aboriginal Amerindian we might find ourselves discussing would, for all intents and purposes, be genetically predisposed to having black hair?
I mean, come on; why would a physically-consistent feature present in almost all of a group of BILLIONS of people be a “stereotype”? That’s a little out of hand. There are lots of REAL stereotypes out there in need of stamping out. This isn’t one of them, from what I can tell. Ease up, my friend.
I don’t think Nametag was making a value judgement about the “slant eye” concept. Just looking for a word for that thing. It’s John W. Kennedy that labeled the slant eye thing as a “vulgar stereotype”.
Sigh.
I didn’t say epicanthic folds are a stereotype; they are, however. They are a common feature in the population, but they are most definitely not present in every individual. Thus, the “stereotypical” East Asian has epicanthic folds – a largely accurate stereotype, but still a cliché.
“Slant-eyed” is also a stereotype. It isn’t true in any case; it is a misconception based on poor observation. The “slant-eyed” stereotype is also a route for caricature and insult, and is a far more pernicious stereotype than the first. But both are still stereotypes.
Shawnbbrad: Unlike Inuits, Australian aborigines, and other “exotic” populations, East Asians existed a-plenty in the U.S. – San Francisco, for instance, had a thriving Chinese community as far back as the Gold Rush. But there wasn’t a lot of sexual congress between the two – not that many women came over, y’see. Thus, there was a group of exotic women who were right there to be speculated, fantasized, and lied about. Blacks are arguably even more exotic than Asians, but there’s a long history of sexual congress between them and Europeans and Americans, so that no such myth existed (or if it did, it didn’t last into recent times).
Nametag:
Please don’t patronize: I’m well-versed in Asian immigration patterns in the western U.S. up to, during, and subsequent to the Gold Rush, as I did work in this area under Ronald Takaki during my years at U.C. Berkeley. And what you skipped over, in your discussion of “exotic” female emigres to California, was that there was a major influx of SOUTH Asians–men and, to a lesser extent as always, women–into the Golden State during the first half of the 20th Century–mostly working as field laborers in the Central Valley. So there were lots and lots and lots of South Asians around, for a time. Very similar total number of females to that of the East Asian population (1965 immigration policy helped to change that). Virtually no miscegenation between these South Asian women and the white so-called locals took place. Yet no ridiculous rumors seem to have circulated about the morphology of THEIR genitalia.
What’s the difference, then? There were two groups of “exotic, mysterious women” available to be speculated about. Neither group was available to the Caucasian, Black, or Latino locals for the purposes of sexual congress, to any significant degree (in fact, of the two groups, East Asian women were cast in the unfortunate role of sex worker in FAR greater numbers than the South Asian women, thereby making their physiognomy more well-known and ultimately LESS mysterious). So it’s a draw. Except that one group had noticably different facial structures than did the whites, for instance, while the other group simply did not. Voila; rampant speculation about cuffs and collar “matching” commenced.
In other news, Nametag, I once again fail to see how ethnic East Asians having epicanthic folds–or “slanted eyes” as the vulgarians among us would have it–is a “stereotype.” Unless you’re referring to the occasional person with ethnic origins in London or Sao Paolo or Cameroon setting up shop there. But then, as an argument goes, that would be just obstinate nit-picking, wouldn’t it, and missing the point, to boot? Maybe you mean the handful of Ainu who until recently still existed in Hokkaido and Northern Honshu? But they’ve been assimilated, physically and culturally, and their genes are now all but irrelevant in any discussion of modern asian ethnicity. Are there other similar groups out there? Yes? Do they make up even ONE PERCENT of ETHNIC East Asians? No.
To wit; what the hell are you talking about?
May I point out that I actually said “slit eyes”?
The issue of the eye stereotype is more complex than you might think, though. Take a look at the “Pokémon” cartoons, made in Japan for the Japanese market.
Hi John W. Kennedy.
I actually meant the vulgarians at large in the culture around us, who coined that phrase and its cousins, and who use it without irony or an awareness of its assaultive nature. You seemed only be referencing the term at arm’s length, so I never considered that I might be casting YOU as the vulgarian. But I wasn’t clear. Sorry for the unintentional slight–hope you’ll understand.
And we can all agree with you that the SOCIAL and PSYCHOLOGICAL issues surrounding eye shape, structure, color, etc in East Asia are dizzyingly complex, what with the popularity of manipulative eye surgeries, colored contact use, fantasy characters drawn with outlandishly westernized eyes, et al. You want risky socio-psychological territory, you’ve got it right there, and I don’t want to get on THAT ride. But the basic fact is that East Asian peoples, by a ridiculously stunning margin, have as a DEFINING trait the epicanthic fold. This isn’t really up for debate. So why do we have to tiptoe around it and call it a “stereotype”? An arbitrary racial marker, yes; a stereotype, no.
Epicanthic fold, yes.
But it does not always (though it does sometimes) result in eyes that apparently slant down toward the nose, and it never results in eyes that are mere slits.