Asian Chick/White Dude Ads Examined in Washington Post

The recent explosion of commercials pairing Asian women with White men receives a critical examination in Friday’s Washington Post as reinforcing the ages-old stereotypes about Asian men as well as women.

Among the commercials cited are those by Ruffles potato chips, Chevrolet, Heineken and Apple seen as drawing on hoary stereotypes pioneered by everything from Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly to movies like The World of Suzie Wong to broadway plays like Miss Saigon to TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and Elementary.

Such depictions reinforce stereotypes of Asian women as being sexually available while relegating Asian men to the converse stereotype of being sexual non-entities, according to Asian Americans quoted in the article.

Of course, all this is nothing new to most Asian Americans, both men and women, who have had to struggled to remove the distorting lens of stereotypes from the eyes of their fellow Americans in order to be seen for who they actually are.

While condemning the glib use of these stereotypical pairings, the article also notes signs of positive change. At least the recent pairings in ads depict “normal” American couples in which the women aren’t cast as submissive geisha types or hookers, says one of the Asian Americans quoted in the article.

Another commentator points out that some recent movies and shows have reversed the pairings. Among them are Harold and Kumar, Shanghai Kiss and The Walking Dead AMC series which features a romance between a young Korean American man and a white woman over the objections of her father.

An instance of anti-stereotypical commercial casting is a recent McDonald’s spot. An Asian American man blurts “I love you” to his white girlfriend. The surprised girl calls him “the Egg McMuffin of boyfriends” — a winking allusion to the way Asian Americans use “egg” to refer to people who are deemed white on the outside but yellow on the inside.

Dimensions of the Asian woman/White man pairing not touched on by the article is the fact that far more Asian American women than men pursue careers in acting, journalism and modeling and the fact that using an Asian woman is a way to include a minority person in a way that isn’t threatening to the white male corporate executives signing off on most advertising creatives.