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The Sideways Vagina

EXPLORING SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST ABSURD AND OFFENSIVE ASIAN STEREOTYPES

A guy once dumped me because I wasn’t Asian enough. I’m not kidding, that’s what he said. He took a drag from his cigarette and, without really looking at me, said, “it’s nothing personal. It’s just… you’re not… Asian enough.” I hadn’t been aware Asian was a prereq for riding that ride—I may be a fourth Japanese, but I look nothing like it. Just what was he expecting? Did he think my inner geisha was going to pop up at some point and take over?

If I hadn’t thrown my saketini in his face, I might have had a chance to ask him. You don’t blame me, though, do you?

Asian chicks and the pseudonymous dudes who love them

“When was the first time you were with an Asian girl, uh, wait, what are we calling you tonight?” I asked a journalist friend who asked me to keep his name to myself.

“Maurice,” he replied.

“Right. Maurice. When was the first time?”

“Eleventh grade, and this is pre-internet. My dad worked for a computer company, so you did kinda meet people like you do on the internet. I took a bus to her suburbs; she got a blanket, we went to the bushes and went to third base and we never spoke again.”

“Did you know she was Asian?”

“It had nothing to do with her being Asian,” he assured me. “I would do Latin Americans as quickly as I would do Asians.”

“As someone open to a variety of women, you must have noticed—what’s the difference? Is there one?”

“Like most stereotypes it’s bullshit, but then, my last real girlfriend was Caucasian and she wasn’t very spicy, she just kind of lay there and didn’t inspire me to act with ferocity and vulgarity. And the melatonin tone around her vaginal area wasn’t to my liking. It’s either hot or not—”

“What? Her pussy?”

“It’s not like you don’t notice. The first time we got naked it was like, oh! I wasn’t happy to see her… situation. It was a sorry-looking vagina as opposed to—you know sometimes you see a vagina and it’s just… well, why do you like a person’s face? It’s the same.”

It was interesting he’d brought up vaginas. Earlier that week I’d run across a piece by Kenny Tanemura for Asian Week about the e-book “How To Date An Asian Woman” from Love Of Asian Women.com.

The e-book draws information from a study by the University of Western Ontario about the characteristics of different races’ vaginal structures. The e-book paraphrases: “the female genitals of Asians were placed very ‘front and high’ compared to other races. It was also noted that because they are anatomically smaller in general the vaginas of Asian women tend to be much smaller than those of Caucasian and African women. This front and high placement along with what would be a naturally tighter vagina might account for why sex with Asian women is rumored to be so pleasant.”

I couldn’t help but wonder: was it my vagina? Had the Peruvian and European genes ganged up against my Japanese ancestry and ruined the exalted experience of the Asian Pussy?

I needed more information, so I sat down a columnist friend, who was also paranoid about being associated with an article of this nature and begged me to keep his name classified.

“What is my name going to be?” he asked me right off the bat, like demanding a password before granting me top secret info.

“What would you like?”

“Cicero.”

“Jesus, what’s up with you guys and your weird-ass names?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Whatev,” I said, sipping my coffee. “Have you ever dated, been involved with or had a thing for or with an Asian or Asian-American girl?”

“Yeah,” he said, “in college. I used to be very into Asian women.”

“What was it about Asian women that was so enticing?”

“Not sure. Demure, hairless, less chatty—stereotypically speaking, of course.”

“Do you have this thing now? Your fiancée is not Asian.”

“I stopped finding women attractive in accordance with ethnicity after college.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Maturity. I stopped having types.”

“Maturity, huh?”

“Or desperation. Or both. Unclear.”

“What about vaginas? Are they different?”

“Well, we all grew up being told that they had sideways vaginal openings.”

“The vaginas what? You thought Asian girls had sideways vaginas?”

“Yes. That’s what we were told. It seemed to make sense… aesthetically.”

“Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember. Many people—schoolyard stuff and then it was a joke in college but I was never sure until I found out.”

“You’re serious about this? Jesus. When did you find out?”

“After I lost my virginity I slept with an Asian girl. I thought about the sideways slit then. A little part of me thought it could be a possibility. I wasn’t disappointed when I found out it was like other vaginas. I don’t think I was disappointed, anyway.”

“Why would you be? You were getting laid.”

“Right.”

Myths perpetuated by morons

I’d never heard of it, or anything like it, so I called “Maurice” back afterward to get more information.

“Sure I’ve heard that. But this was bullshit locker room talk, college or post-college. It was presented as joking bullshit. I don’t think anyone actually believed it.”

“Huh.”

In 0.12 seconds, Google came up with 51,100 results when I searched “Asian”, “sideways”, and “vagina”. While everyone had something to share about it, no one seemed to be able to pinpoint when the little legend was born.

Urban Dictionary did, however, present the logic behind the concept—or, rather, the lack thereof; under “sideways pussy”, it reads: “The vagina of an Asian female. The slant of the eyes is like the slant of the vagina.”

But surely the “yellow fever” epidemic that rocked my adolescence wasn’t based on a stupid myth. There had to be more to this. I turned to the expert, contributing editor at Fortune magazine and Asia specialist Sheridan Prasso. In her 2005 book The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls and Other Fantasies of the Exotic Orient, Prasso hypothesizes that our ideas of Asian women originate in the fancy of European imperialism and the pity of Christian evangelism.

To imperialist Europe, the Orient was a place of adventure, riches and danger. The women of this world were described as decadent and exotic and, very often, sexually depraved. This notion stuck despite the passage of time and the new experiences of life in Asia by Western missionaries. They saw the ugly side of the famous Orient and the treatment of women as second-class citizens. This idea of the Asian woman as a vulnerable creature without rights was attached to the vision of the Asian woman as a sex kitten and voila!, a cultural obsession was born.

Roll of dimes: myth-busted!

But what about Asian guys? Not one of the items I read about the “Asian fetish” phenomenon discussed men. I asked my girlfriends if any of them had been with Asian guys and was surprised to find only two had been.

“They just don’t seem manly,” another friend told me.

This was idea was confirmed via AOL Instant Messeger by a gay friend of mine in Hawaii.

“I felt inappropriate when I first began exploring the desire,” he wrote, after I asked him when his Asian fetish began. “There are tons of old gay queens here who only want young smooth Asian boys. I did not want to be perceived as that kind of rice queen.”

“Oh my god, rice queen! That’s brilliant. Explain.”

“A rice queen’s a homosexual non-Asian male who is predominantly attracted to Asian males. The professed rice queen does not necessarily project a racist ideal of the submissive Asian onto his desired partner, though cases of this kind of projection do exist. I, for one, never believed Asians were submissive even before I started having sex with them.”

“You’ve had a lot of Asian dick. Is it true their penises are smaller than non-Asians?”

“Nooooooooo.”

“No? Really?”

“I don’t know why people think that. My Vietnamese lover was like the biggest I’ve ever had.”

“Vietnamese dick is big?”

“His certainly was! He was my height and skinny, maybe 120 or 130 pounds and he had this huge fucking cock. He ripped me apart! I hadn’t bottomed in years! I was like, ‘OMFGGETOUT!’ I think the smallest I’ve had has been six or something. But that was just one guy. I don’t know where the stereotype comes from, it’s dumb.”

Just like the sideways vagina thing.

Gender politics and other theories

As soon as I read that about the Asian dick stereotype, I dialed “Cicero”.

“Do you remember that column you wrote about how changes in gender politics in previous generations have almost emasculated men in contemporary American society?” I demanded, in place of a greeting.

He was silent for a few seconds; I don’t know whether he was taken aback or I’d caught him in the middle of a press meeting or what.

Finally, he replied, “Mine? Uh, yeah.”

“Do you think that the boom of the ‘Asian fetish’ phenomenon of recent decades is partly being fueled by an attempt by men to re-masculate themselves based on erroneous stereotypes of Asian women as helpless sex kittens and Asian men as easy rivals with little dicks?”

“Very interesting,” he said. “Maybe.”

I’d asked everyone a million questions, but I was still nowhere near an answer. Riding a deadline and with no conclusion in sight, it occurred to me to ask the man sleeping next to me.

“Re-masculation?” he mumbled, cracking an eye open. “You women complicate everything. Why is it so hard to believe that we’re just fascinated with the idea of a sideways vagina?”

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