Nine years ago, Tinder reported a study that revealed Asian men were among the least swiped-right user profiles. It was a piece that quickly went viral and attracted much discussion about racism on dating apps. In 2023, however, my TikTok feed is a barrage of content of Asian features, Asian content, and Asian men. Who is the It boy of fourth-generation K-pop? Aren’t the TikTok filters in Japan just so much better? Is it a good pose, or are they just Asian?
The same year of Tinder’s study, dating app OKCupid founder Christian Rudder published a book of user profile statistics and visualizations corroborating the same trend. “We looked at who people messaged, who they matched with, who they responded to,” Rudder told The Daily Show in 2016, during an episode inspired by the viral data. “Asian men get the fewest messages and worst ratings of any group of guys.”
The data solidified a conversational truth about the systemically racist dating world we exist in: per the stereotype, Asian men are undesirable, emasculated. They work in IT and have small penises. They can teach you How to be Ninja. Jericho Asis, 25, tells Teen Vogue that it’s something that has impacted him in his personal dating life.
“I have gone on a couple of dates, when they feel more comfortable with me, they’ll be like, oh, like I’m not usually very attracted to you,” he says. “I’ve gotten that a few times. I don’t know how to respond to that.”
But over the past nine years, much has changed in mainstream culture. The internet evolved from a floundering entity to the core of our society, bringing in fresh content for fresh eyes. We watched viral stars like Ryan Higa, KevJumba, and VanossGaming become some of Gen Z’s most recognizable YouTube celebrities at the turn of the 2010s. The Hallyu wave took hold of the Western world, pushing K-pop and K-drama to the tops of American streaming charts. Government initiatives like the Cool Japan rebranding effort have influenced the likes of gaming, animation, beauty, and more. The hashtag #douyinmakeup, referencing the Chinese geminus of TikTok, has since amassed over 3.1 billion views on the Western side of the app. Industry bastion JYP Entertainment even debuted their first American/Canadian girl group last month, VCHA, formed out of their competition show America 2 Korea.
Asianness has a newfound currency, and Asian men especially can feel it in the way they live online. Current Asian masculinity is no longer fused to unf*ckability, but an idealistic fever dream of a respectful boyfriend, who showers and brings you Instagrammable bouquets. Content creators have capitalized on the Asianness of their romantic relationships, emphasizing it in the titles of their videos. Acronyms like AWMF (Asian Man White Female) and RCTA (Race Change To Another) have sprung up as trademark digital terminology for weeaboos, koreaboos, and transracial spokesperson turned conservative mouthpiece Oli London. Popular YouTubers Jin & Hattie, a couples’ vlogger duo, amassed 9.6 million views on a video entitled “[AMWF] I CAN'T STOP KISSING YOU *Gone too far...* (Korean & British),” while vlogger PrinceCheech titled their most-watched vlog “I finally met my KOREAN MILITARY BOYFRIEND *emotional*.” Subliminals posted promise epicanthic folds overnight, while “Korean Boyfriend ASMR” audios have garnered millions of views. The subject of the content is very clear. It’s laid out in caps.
Creators are beginning to notice the change in their comment sections, too. Lucas Lee Ho, a TikTok influencer with over 726,300 followers, first went viral for his quiet pottery spinning videos. But predominantly, the comments under his videos are thirst ones. “I'm looking respectfully,” one viewer wrote. “Watching him make the clay ❌️. watching his arm and hand ✅️,” said another.
Ho says that the videos were not meant to be thirst traps, so he was fairly surprised by the response to his content. “I mean, nobody really goes up to you in real life and tells you those things,” he tells Teen Vogue. Those comments don’t bother Ho all that much, he says, but many comments also compare the ceramicist to various figures of Korean media.
“You so look like Mark Tuan from GOT7,” one noted. “is this nevertheless irl 😳,” commented another, referencing the 2021 Korean drama.
“I think there is a degree of fetishization to my content, because most of my comments are, at least half the time, about my Asianness or comparing me to K-pop stars,” Ho says. “That's always been something I noticed, because I make pottery, and that’s not the same as K-pop. The music I post isn’t similar to K-pop. So it’s kind of like, well, the similarity that’s drawn is because of my physical features.”
It’s not the diversity of Asianness that has seen a renaissance in the cultural eye; it’s simply a genre of Instagram face representing Asianness on a global scale. Pale skin, dark hair, dark eyes. Epicanthic folds and low button noses, mostly peddled out by and largely connoted to East Asian content creators and conglomerates. Thinness and heteronormativity have become the de facto qualities of aspirational Asianness. And it doesn’t matter if the person is actually East Asian or not, but rather how well they fit into the umbrella of digestible Asianness.
Internet culture reporter Ikran Dahir notes that the development and characterization of modern Asian masculinity online can be hugely influenced by social media. “The wider narrative of social media can really shape public opinion of a racial group,” Dahir says. “I think people forget how powerful the internet can be in changing public opinion as a whole. Movements like Black Lives Matter in 2020 were shaped by social media, as people spoke out in support of the cause. At the beginning of the pandemic, people would hear one rumor or piece of misinformation, and it just grew legs and began to waffle.”
Asis, the 25-year-old based in Boston, says the effect can be twofold. The rise of East Asian representation on social media bolstered his self-confidence — “that's when I really started to just see myself as almost worth loving,” he says — but it also taught him to fine-tune his fetish radar over the years.
“When I do match with someone who’s not Asian, I can usually tell they’re fetishizing me if they have pictures of them in Asia, or any sort of indication that they like anime, or any sort of Asian interests,” he laughs. “If I’m looking at someone’s Instagram and I look at who they’re following, sometimes it’s just like a bunch of Asian guys and I can be like, okay, there's a pattern here.”
Jennifer Whang, a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in identity and intersectionality, tells Teen Vogue that this phenomenon is something she’s noticed both personally and among her clientele.
“It’s fascinating now that since K-pop has exploded, Asian men are becoming idolized and fetishized, yet for so long the narrative was, ‘they’re unattractive,’” she says. “It’s teetering between two extremes — emasculated or fetishized [...] then adding in the social media element, I think stereotypes and expectations can be reinforced and show a glorified image of Asian men which can perpetuate fetishization and fascination.”
Dahir emphasizes that the development of these cultural products have been highly shaped by grassroot social media efforts, by fans who are genuinely invested in seeing a more globalized digital world. “A lot of K-pop’s makeup now is due to the internet,” she explains. “Fan-led movements to make the content accessible to non-speakers, translating news stories and features, dedicating accounts online that pump out information, subtitling shows, movies, and songs, even romanizing the pronunciations. Initial fandom efforts have led to the content’s success online.”
While there is room for nuance that has led to positive impacts from these user-led movements, the trap of flattening the worth of Asian men into yet another fetishistic stereotype is an easy one to fall into, particularly with the way digital virality prizes hyperbole.
“I think the benefit is that now Asian men are placed in a desirable light,” Whang muses. “Yet the drawback is to what cost? I can see the drawbacks being on the individual themselves and feeling alone, misunderstood, and stuck even. Again, an image or expectation is created of Asian men. And if the reality doesn’t meet that, how will people treat them and respond then?”
Of course, not everyone is equally impressed by the alienating content. As the internet continues to build its cultural history, users’ abilities to identify cringe content are increasingly more fine-tuned. Dahir says that while tabloid-style videos about Asian boyfriends were en vogue years ago, they’ve since been discarded as cringe by young people who have learned to know better. “There will always be the AMBW couples, the people that fetishize individuals based on a music video,” she says. “That predates K-pop — social media has just blown up their visibility. But I think the fans who grew up alongside the content are unlearning those biases. And as time has gone on, I think people have started to see the fetish for what it is.”
Over the past two years, Asian-identifying influencers like Vlad Hoshin, Kai Lee, and the North Star Boys collective, have all faced criticism for being corny after building their followings by making thirst traps with a romantic storytelling element, whether it’s offering you roses, playing soft music, or constructing elaborate sketches positioning themselves as a love interest or romantic encounter. “[SIC] i dont think hes as attractive as he thinks he is, i just think he’s fetishized by white women,” one user wrote on Lee.
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It’s not to say it’s all bad. “People just need to see more representation. That’s it,” Dahir says. “It’s like immersion therapy, in a way.” We’ve since fractured a long-held truth about what makes a man attractive and brought stars without Eurocentric features to the foreground of the zeitgeist. But it’s still a rather narrow reevaluation, conceptualizing Asian men as one specific brand of new masculinity, rather than a total upheaval of our cultural viewpoint.
That’s a problem. To only consume a certain subset of Asian people as desirable negates the community as a whole, particularly when those aspirational beauty standards continue to uphold the ideals of whiteness, thinness, and heterosexuality. East Asianness in the way it is consumed and accepted in the digital eye today still continues to perpetuate those prejudices. A few weeks ago, members Taemin and Key of K-pop group SHINee apologized for making colorist remarks on a vlog. Meanwhile, dark-skinned influencers continue to face backlash for participating in trends like cottagecore. And the impacts of that don’t end with the visual inundation on our feeds.
“The dominant narrative within the gay community is that of the white man,” Asis says. “Representation within the LGBTQ+ community is lacking sometimes, and that is a little discouraging. But if I look out into the real world, I know that those romantic stories are happening. There's just not that representation just yet. But I'm hopeful.”
Ho says he wishes the comparisons between him and Korean media would change. “It takes the focus away from what I’m doing,” he says. “It also just makes me aware of my appearance in a way that I would prefer not to. It makes me think that anything I post will always be somehow connected to K-pop culture, even if it’s not really related at all.”
To be non-white in a white system is to be inherently boxed into a corner. And as the digital grounds continue to shift under our feet, recalibrating our positions of power, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by objectification and dehumanization, particularly in spaces as personal as dating.
“When it comes to online dating, it’s important to have a good sense of self and be proud of your identities, whatever they are,” Whang recommends. “When you’re not the majority, and everyone around you doesn’t look like you, it can reinforce negative beliefs about yourself and negatively impact your esteem. My hope is if you’re online dating that you’re proud of you and your uniqueness.”
