apples of gold in settings of silver

To clear up my opinion on a few comments on my tag-board recently, which started off with one comment on the image of Asian women in Western literature/media as sultry vixens. There definitely is a fantasy in the West which features Asian women as exotic, submissive sex objects. I've even read in Time that in Africa, if you're an Oriental lady you get a lot of rude, lascivious comments - the Africans perceive Oriental women as sex fiends because of the rife distribution of Japanese pornography there. Conversely, we may perceive Western women as sex fiends here in Singapore because of the image portrayed in popular TV shows and movies. But that's just what they are - fantasies and stereotypes. Speaking as a psychology major, we do learn that stereotypes are very powerful 'cognitive shortcuts' - when you don't have a lot of time to analyze a situation, you take a shortcut and make assumptions and judgments based on the stereotypes you have about a situation or type of people. For example, you behave in a very stereotypical fashion to board the train, you don't have to think about what you do, you perform a series of complicated actions very automatically because of the stereotype of the situation. But all of us must be careful to avoid stereotypes when it comes to forming opinions about other people.

 

Anyway, Sean, maybe you're right to say women shouldn't become too rebellious and difficult just because that's the way things seem to be swinging in these politically correct times, influence from the West or whatever. By "rebellious" I'll take it to mean being negative just to be contrary, and not for objective, justifiable reasons. Very few women I know are negative just to be contrary. Some of course (yours truly included) could definitely learn to be more tactful. But it's not an ideal to be submissive either. Submit to what? All of us, women or men, should have a good reason to do what we do, and we should choose what we do, not just go with the flow of whatever seems alright at the time. That's my main gist: the ideal is not just to embody someone's 'ideal' of a woman or man, but to develop your own idea of who you are, what your principles are, what's important to you, and then go about sticking to that.

 

If I have been very circular, feel free to let me know. *grin* Anyway, it's not an attack, Sean, I'm not saying you want us to be submissive and brainless. Just wanted to clarify what I felt on the subject  =)