Stereotypes and hate driving Asian women off dating apps

Using profile pictures with Asian pagodas and temples in the background. Listing sushi as a favorite food or displaying an intense snobbery about ramen. Bragging about speaking Asian languages. Noting dream vacation destinations in Asia. Going on about a love of anime.

When surfing dating apps, many Asian and Asian American women say they generally recognize the red flags of men who might fetishize Asian women. Still, sometimes they get through.

It won’t take long after that for the comments to reveal that a potential date is specifically looking for an Asian woman based on stereotypes regarding looks and behavior that can be demeaning, expecting them to be hypersexual or subservient — or both.

In the four years that Kami Rieck, 21, has been on dating apps, mostly Tinder and Bumble, she says she’s had a crash course.

She says she’s been thrown insulting comments and questions like, “Where are you really from?” or “I’m really into Asians,” among other more unsavory comments

Rieck, an adoptee from China, was raised by Anglo parents in the Midwest in what she describes as a very white area. She found herself unprepared for such comments on dating apps, even though she says she was constantly bullied for being Chinese American growing up.

She says she was raised in a very Christian home, and the explicit comments she saw shocked her, she says.

“We didn’t talk openly about sex and dating. It’s a thing where white men have yellow fever and fetishize Asian women. That was never talked about — I had to experience it,” the Boston University student said.

But after the Atlantaarea spa shootings March 16 in which eight people were killed, including six Asian women, many Asian American women are on heightened alert in their everyday lives and on dating apps.

Attributing stereotypes to women of Asian descent is hardly new, said Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociologist and author of “Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism.

“It’s long been used for political purposes and associated with misogyny, she said.

“Asian women are more likely to be fetishized and harassed due to the longstanding stereotype of the exotic Asian woman who is simultaneously docile and hypersexual,” she said. “These images come from U.S. law — the Page Act of 1875 that banned Chinese women on the fabricated premise that they are all prostitutes —-U.S. military occupation and access to sex workers in Asia, and popular cultural representations of Asian women as sexual objects.”

Filmmaker Kyoko Takenaka chronicled some of the more familiar microaggressions into a short film by using audio clips of real pickup lines that men have used on her in bars in the past seven years, kicking it off with a man telling her, “Your face is very beautiful, very Oriental.”

In the background, you can catch glimpses of some of the crasser messages she has received on her phone.

But for Rieck, it’s all new for her, especially after the shootings, has made her even more wary of potential matches.

“I had never made that connection . . . before people started talking about it,” she said. “I’m going to be very cautious going forward. You’re always going to be questioning people’s motives on why they’re pursuing you.

“Shouldn’t (dating) feel good?” she said. “You have to remind yourself it’s not you that they’re into. It’s an idea of an object. They’re really not into you. It’s purely them looking at you as not a human.”

Rachel Leyco, a 28-yearold filmmaker and actor in Los Angeles, also said recent events have turned her off dating platforms.

“I’ve definitely changed my behavior on the apps recently after Atlanta. I’m not using it as often. I’m definitely not engaging or swiping right on a lot of white people,” said Leyco, who is Filipina American.

Leyco, who dates men and women, said she has also heard from women who fetishize her.

“There was a girl I matched with and the first thing she messaged me was, ‘I have a thing for Asians,’ ” Leyco said “At the time, I kind of shrugged it off, but of course it bothered me. Not the first time I’ve heard that, but I heard it from mainly men. So hearing it from a woman was something new to me.”

She said the experience left her disappointed and disheartened.

“Just being a woman and assuming we have this common experience with misogyny made me expect better.”