So this is Spac3man’s latest video for “Greetings (Intro)” off his upcoming Beyond The Stars EP. The track was produced by Sportn’ Life labelmate Nissm and the video was directed by Travels Through Images. There’s a rapper, with a half-naked Asian girl, in a hotel room, blah blah blah.
The casual depiction of women as sex objects in music videos is a rampant practice in the music industry. Hopefully you already know this and agree. The convention doesn’t really discriminate along racial lines, but for the purposes of the statement I’m about to make — and because I’m the lone editor and sole voice of this blog, who also happens to be an Asian man — I’m comfortable in doing so, at least in this particular moment.
To all the casting agents, directors, screenwriters, novelists, television show runners, and rappers (like Spac3man) who persist in exhibiting Asian women as casual accessories to male sexual fantasy: FUCK YOU.
The practice is cheap, lowest-common-denominator, racist bullshit. These folks must not fully understand the damaging history of Asian fetishism. It becomes especially curious when the perpetrators of this device are fellow men of color who seem to lack even a passing understanding of how women of their own shared skin color are marginalized. Aren’t you offended when women of your ethnicity — women who resemble your sisters, your mothers, your cousins, your friends — are reduced to sexual decor? Apparently you are not.
White America tends to portray its brown, male citizens as emblems of criminality. That’s a straight-up injustice. Men (of all colors) have a tendency to portray women as objects of sexual desire and conquest. Rappers: Are you so dense as to not see the disconnect?
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