How did Asian Girls Become Cute?

Cafe Society
1

This is submitted as darn near a General Question, I hope it will not descend to a Great Debate or a Pitting.

When I was a kid (say in the 1970’s) Scandinavian girls were the standard for feminine beauty. Think Farrah Faucet-Majors, think of the stereotypical Playboy pinup. Nowadays, Asian girls seem to be the media-designated template for beauty.

A couple of questions,

  1. Am I clear in communicating my thesis? Am I off-base in its description of a shift in standard societal ideals?

  2. When did these ideals change?

  3. Who changed these paradigms?

2

Well… I’ve seen some months ago an interesting documentary about the erotic appeal of Asian women. Really, I don’t remember any detail, but :

The point was clearly made that this erotic interest vastly pre-dated the 70s. Basically they stated it went back to the early 20th century.
Besides, I don’t think that Asian women displaced Caucasian blondes. The latter are still very present, and I would even say quite dominating as a standard of beauty and sex-appeal. I would dare to say that Asian women are a “niche market”, and that a significant part of their appeal is assumptions about them not related to their physical beauty.

3

Only my subjective opinion:

I think a lot of it has to do with greater Western exposure to Asians and the Asian culture. When people weren’t traveling so much and the media didn’t cover the world instantaneously, Asians were seen as very different and as living “way over there”.

Many soldiers that went to Japan, Korea or Vietnam never thought they would find an Asian woman attractive. After being there awhile, and letting their hormones to a number on them, they start to see and appreciate the subtle beauty.

The paradigm of beauty changes with the times. It used to be that the ideal was the soft, dainty, blond. Now that women are more athletic, the stronger, more confident woman is “hot”. It’s often a matter of what you are used to.

There are beautiful women in every culture. Sometimes you just have to develop a taste for them. Westerners are much more attuned now to Asian beauty. You can’t walk down a street in New York without seeing an Asian woman and I’m sure it’s getting more like that in other cities. Once you get to know it, you get to love it.

4

Before my time, but wasn’t there still something of a taboo against inter-racial relationships in the early 70’s, at least in some parts of the US?

5

I don’t think Asian women are more attractive in general than any other race. What I find odd is there are plenty of Asian women who, in my opinion at least, have very unattractive facial features that are seen by many as beautiful. Lucy Liu is one of the more prominent examples, but she’s better looking than that chick on Grey’s Anatomy who I’d think would be dog-ugly to anyone.

6

I think Lucy Liu is hideous, and yet…if pressed, I’d venture that she is the first and only Asian actress that any average person would be able to name. If they were pushed harder, some might be able to say “that chick from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

Compare that to the number of blonde actresses that are major stars. There’s no way in hell that Asian has replaced blonde or anything else non-white as the standard for attractiveness in the mainstream. What has happened is that the niche of guys who like Asian girls has expanded more and more. Why this is, I don’t know.

7

I think your core assumption’s… well, it sure isn’t true in North America.

Almost all famous actresses noted for their beauty are white. A few are black, and a very few are Asian.

Most fashion models are white, too.

8

Asian women are born that way. Just like white women.

“Scandinavian” does not equal blonde. Or vice-versa.

You’re the fellow who doesn’t have sex, correct? That’s probably screwing with your perception.

Name any well-known Asian actress or model. Besides Lucy Lui. They are not the template. Neither are blondes. Heck, the Playboy Playmate of the Year is a brunette with more of an “olive” complexion. The “media” is a fickle thing. One moment it’s a Latina like J-Lo, a blonde like that chick off of Grey’s Anatomy, a mixed-race woman like Halle Berry…or fill in the blank.

So, where did you get the idea that Asian women were today’s “media” standard of beauty? Unless you’re talking about porn, in which case that’s hardly standard.

9

Does “dog-ugly” mean “strikingly beautiful” now? That’s the only way I can parse that sentence to make any sense (assuming you’re talking about Sandra Oh).

10

I don’t get her facial appeal either, unlike most female celebs guys drool over. If she was a friend of mine, and I was trying to set her up with someone, I’d be spending a lot of time talking about her quirky sense of humor, and how entertaining she was…

Anyway, I though much as Argent Towers said, that there was a certain segment of guys who are wild about all things asian, that are these women’s biggest fans, not that all guys are crazy about them.

11

I don’t find Liu or Oh particularly attractive, either. Neither is ugly, but the fomer’s features are way too severe and the latter looks like a roughneck. I think Ming-Na Wen is very classically beautiful, though.

As for the OP’s thesis, I do not agree at all. The beauty standard is still very much thin blonde Caucasians with big breasts in North America.

12

Asian women have been labeled ‘exotic’, but sort of a safe exotic. White guys have been drooling over black, Indian, Native, and any other kind of ‘ethnic’ woman for centuries, but they were also usually taught that these were ‘lesser’ women, one (or more) steps down the humanity scale from them. Asians are far from being treated as equals by whites, but they’ve become an ‘acceptable’ minority, and it’s ‘acceptable’ to fuck, or date, or marry them, or just jack off to porn about them. All of that petite, submissive, traditional mail-order bride geisha girl shit has also had an influence. Latinas (especially Brazilians, at least judging by porn) have also become a safe exotic, and they have those stereotypes about being passionate, sexual, and wild attached to them. In reality, of course, each woman is unique, and while culture influences us, you’ll find wild and crazy Asian women and gentle and quiet black women and Latinas who can’t dance and white girls who you wouldn’t want to take home to mother. But the realm of male fantasy has precious little resemblence to reality.

13

Well, if you recall, during the 40s, 50s, 60s and early 70s Asia sort of fell out of favor. The wars in Japan, Korea and Vietnam and all.

I think it wasn’t until you started seeing movies about the Vietnam war that everyone else started to realize what American servicemen knew for a century - Asian chicks are hot!

14

I’ll throw out a possibility. People in Asia are adopting a more western diet (more meat), and hence developing more western-looking body shape and facial characteristics. Also, there seem to be more Asian Americans (also eating a western diet).

In short, there may in fact be more good looking (to western eyes) Asian women available.

I don’t have any facts to justify this, but it’s at least plausible.

15

Yeh, Sandra Oh has a man-face. ::shiver::

Ming-Na is really attractive. So is Yunjin Kim from Lost.

16

Maybe I’m missing something, but, um, duh? Take a look at the image results right at the top of the page. I’ll lay a bet that even in a dynamic content search like Googles, the women you see are drop-dead gorgeous, though they may be different from the ones I saw when I ran the search for Japanese actresses. Those aren’t <cough, cough> “actresses” either, but mainstream actresses. I’ll bet there are a ton of asian women of other nationalities who are also very physically appealing.

As for your enumerated questions:
1. Am I clear in communicating my thesis? Am I off-base in its description of a shift in standard societal ideals?
Yes, it’s clearly stated, but I don’t think that your thesis is accurate. There are a greater variety of women in various media than I remember from even my relatively recent point of view (my teens were about 20 years back).

2. When did these ideals change?
There hasn’t been a complete shift in ideals, there’s just been more acceptance of colored and mixed-race people. Asians are still different looking enough to hit that “exotic” button, while at the same time there has been more exposure from a boom in Japanese and Chinese media and movies in the late 80s and early 90s. That boom was preceded by the asian fascination of the late 60s and early 70s, fueled in part by Bruce Lee and other Hong Kong-produced Kung-Fu films. Like fashion, these cycles seem to happen once every 20 years or so.

3. Who changed these paradigms?
No one. Tastes and trends change all the time for no particular reason. Besides, there are still tons of hot blondes, brunettes, and blacks around. You may just be noticing asians more, personally, because they stick out to you. Or because of drooling Nipponophiles who think Japanese anything is “teh bestest!”, or guys with generalized asian fetishes, etc.

If you look at men’s magazines like Maxim (http: // maxim.com/girls_of_maxim/) [link broken because it may be NSFW] you’ll see an assortment of women. When I checked it, they had one photo feature on, “The Cheerleaders of the Beijing Olympics,” which is topical, but the rest of the women on the top page were all non-asian, many of them blondes.

For what it’s worth, most Japanese don’t think Japanese women can aspire to the kind of glamor and sophistication that people of European descent can. Mori Riyo, who was only the second Japanese woman to win Miss Universe in the pageant’s history, was more or less ignored in Japan after the first buzz of her win died down. Some people even scorned her as not being a good representative of Japan because she has spent so much time overseas and has shed most of the distinctly Japanese mannerisms.

17

Not to me it isn’t… (at least, not the business about diet. The part about there being more Asian American women available is presumably reasonable.)

18

I can only say what did it for me.

Several years ago I ran a Web site to distribute the desktop wallpapers I made. I started out making wallpapers featuring well-known American and European supermodels, actresses, and singers. My source material was JPEGs that I found on the Internet, mostly scanned from mainstream magazines. Using these photos presented a challenge, in that most magazine photos are small and of low quality (very grainy, print from the other side of the page showing through, etc.). Enlarging these small photos would only degrade the quality further, so of necessity I found myself limited to creating photo collages of the women rather than full-screen, single-image wallpapers. Also, the fact that the same photos appeared over and over again on every site I checked meant I only had a very limited selection of photos of each woman.

One day I stumbled, quite by accident, upon some photos of a Japanese model named Kimika Yoshino. The first thing I noticed (okay, the second thing) was that the photos were large, sharp, and very high-quality. In other words, excellent source material for creating my wallpapers. I did some exploring and discovered two things:

• Japanese female celebrities are promoted in print not only through traditional magazines but also through something called “photobooks” — perfect-bound magazine-sized books printed on high-quality glossy paper, with many full-page and even double-page photos. A photobook is usually devoted to a single celebrity, and as such includes many photos.

• There is something of a cottage industry consisting of talented individuals scanning the photos from these books and posting them on the Internet. These “scan artists” are guys who are experts at scanning photos and enhancing the scans.

The result was that I found myself with literally hundreds of large, very-high-quality photos of each Japanese celebrity.

I said all that to say this: I was amazed at how stunningly beautiful all these Japanese ladies were, and I wondered why I found them so much more attractive than the Western women whose photos I’d been working with. I finally figured it out. Where the Western models seemed to always look serious, even grim, or at best have blank facial expressions, the Japanese women were almost always smiling in their photos. They looked like they were having fun, not like they were “working”.

I don’t think I’ll get any argument when I say that a smiling woman is always more attractive than an unsmiling woman. A smile can make even the most plain woman attractive. A smile also makes a woman more approachable. If you see two women in a bar, one a gorgeous, statuesque blond who looks at you like you’re wasting her time, and the other a pretty Japanese woman who smiles and says “Hello!” when you approach her, which one would you keep trying to talk to?

19

I don’t suppose the “Me so horny…” movie scene had any influence?

Seriously, to try and answer RT, I think the niche has been grown a little by the increasing prevalance (and increased resolution) of video games, where the proportions of scantily-clad Asian- or Eurasian-looking women are way out of demographic reality (hell, I can’t even think of a single Black videogame hottie). And videogames are popular with just that set of males hitting their hormonal peak. Can you say “imprinting”?

20

I meant AT, not RT