“Important question for science. Is this man Sexy?”
This is the kind of question perimenopausal women ask their sisters and close friends when they’ve been too sick to do anything except watch cheesy action flicks on Netflix for a week.
This man is so fancy he can look good in one of the dumbest fantasy action costumes I have ever seen (Into the Badlands-Gaius Chau)
This is Lewis Tan, an Asian American Actor in his 30s. To be clear, I think he is hot. And I am certain I am not the only person who thinks so. LT is sexy–in the way mainstream masculine pulchritude is “sexy”. This includes People Magazine’s 2020 sexiest man of the year (Black Panther and Creed actor Michael Jordan), and a large number of white men named Chris (Hemsworth aka Thor, Evans aka Captain America–2022 Sexy Man).
These are all men whose professional persona includes marketing unattainable polished physique in ways designed to provoke Warm Thoughts in people who fancy the masculine flavor of human. But I had to do a qualitative survey about LT because he freaked me out.
What is this “sexy” of which you speak?
Tan, like me, is the son of an east Asian father and a mother of western European ancestry. Spoiler alert: my sisters, peers, and my teen daughter all wanted to yuck my yum and thought he was weird looking, needed a shave, too muscly, and “looks like he’s trying to be sexy and dangerous when he’s clearly a Natural Addle-pate”. I agreed about the shave thing. I mean sheesh dude, you’re Asian. If you can’t grow a better beard by your age, you just have to quite trying.
I followed Lewis Tan down a sad and hilarious rabbit hole because I was genuinely startled to find a man of Asian extraction served up as a sex object. I’m a middle aged mixed race woman who has grown up in the shadow of sexualized ethnic stereotypes, and I have to check with all my people to see if I’m crazy or just traumatized when I see a hot guy. (Google image searches of LT produced non-pornographic cheesecake pics, featuring a goofy look presumably meant to be sultry, with or without a shirt).
Let’s rapidly rewind about 100 years of pop culture, during half of which I’ve been alive. When I was born, Bruce Lee was the hot Hollywood flavor. He is credited with being the man to convince Hollywood that you could have an Asian leading man, and Asian men weren’t creepy, sexless, dorky, or all three. Bruce Lee died when I was two and I guess Hollywood figured he was a one off, because in the 80s all we had was Mr. Miyagi or Long Duc Dong in John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles.
If you doubted someone could be creepy AND sexless AND dorky all at the same time, fear not, Hughes had you covered. Imagine growing up, if you were Irish or Italian and the only people you saw on screen who looked “like you” were Micky Rooney and whoever is currently being typecast as an incel, or if you’re lucky, Steve Buscemi. No Paul Newman, no Steve McQueen, no Harrison Ford, no Harry Styles. If your sexuality was developing, you might wonder how anyone got laid, ever, and speculate your co-ethnics reproduced by budding off clones.
Fun fact, in the early days of Hollywood silents, there was a Japanese man—Sessue Hayakawa—who actually did play romantic roles. But apparently he was also portrayed as creepy. Not surprising if you consider the extreme anti-Asian racism in California in the 1920s and 30s. In the 50 years between Hayakawa and Bruce Lee, I’ve been able to find pretty much one Asian or Asian American romantic leading man. I’m not counting Yul Brynner who was Russian, but had some east Asian (Mongolian) ancestry via his mother. That said, it was more legitimate for Brynner to get famous playing the King of Siam, than for Mickey Rooney to don the gross yellow-face in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
More fun facts, Yul Brynner was born in almost the same year and the same part of the world as my own father (the Russian far east, versus north eastern China). This may explain why my mother thought Yul Brynner was sexy. He may possibly have been the only man I ever heard my mother use that term to describe. Which is probably why my mother went to the literal other side of the world to get laid.
Yul Brynner in the 1950s; my dad in the 1950s; my mom in the 1960s
Some time when we were all in our 20s, my brother said to his three Asian American sisters: “you know how there are those guys who want to date Asian women”. We all shuddered. We knew. It’s a thing Asian American girls learn in middle school. “Well…Mom was that kind of guy. Except a woman.” Our collective jaws dropped. Now, it’s a very different thing for a white American guy to perv on Asian American girls because he has a weird geisha/exotic/submissive/Suzy Wong fetish, mostly because of power dynamics and sexualized presentation of women generally, but my brother had a point.
Mom was born in a part of the world where there were zero Asians, and the general marital patterns were such that I have a straight face when I qualify my grandparents’ marriage by saying they “were not related”. In junior college Mom met a boy of Lebanese extraction, whose parents ran a restaurant down the mountain in Roanoke. She dated him. In college she met a Japanese American man, probably a resettled Nissei from the WWII internment. She dated him long enough for him to ride his motorcycle up into the mountains to visit, thoroughly shocking my Great Aunt Irene. In graduate school she met a Pilipino graduate student, but their affair was doomed because he was Catholic.
After that she was off to what was then Formosa in the Far East to marry the international man of mystery, twenty years her senior. When she got back to the U.S. with her family in tow, at least some of her kin were gracious about Mom’s audacity at breeding with the yellow man. When I was a newborn, Mom and Granny took me to church and one of my Great Granny Trudy’s cousins looked at me and said “We love ‘em all! No matter how mixed they are!”
Mixed me spent the next 20 or 30 years coming to terms with what it meant to be exoticized and fetishized, while at the same time having no credible objects of desire in popular culture who reflected my own mixedness. I’m the generation whose bedroom walls were covered with posters of Shaun Cassidy or Leif Garrett, followed by Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe. Of course there was Prince and Michael Jackson, but when I looked for the face like mine, the closest I could find was George Takei, who was old (and wouldn’t have wanted to grope girls, even if the Star Trek writers wanted to give him some of those scenes). Lou Diamond Phillips (half Pilipino) was the closest there was to diverse heart throbs.
What’s a gal to do, if she likes the butch flavor of dude? Martial arts movies? Chow Yun Fat and Jackie Chan started making a mark in the 1990s. Chan’s brand is pretty much asexual. And balletically violent action movies and badly dubbed kung fu flicks aren’t everyone’s cup of sexy sauce. All during the eras of Ethan Hawke, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney, I went about my business, dated dysfunctional but very masculine white guys, cultivated my neuroses about sexual attraction, and then to my considerable surprise, abruptly married a man with a white mother and a Chinese Taiwanese father. Hot hapa guys are a thing. Who knew?
Now I am aging out of the demographic whose romantic and sexual interests are remotely culturally relevant. There’s all kinds of ways that’s silly and unfair. Without getting wrapped up in a Real Rant about double standards or even actual pedophiles like James Woods, I’ll just say that in a world where Jack Nicholson was considered dateable any time after 1985, women my age should be able to appreciate the Lewis Tans and Chris Hemsworths of the world with no guilt whatsoever.
But here’s the thing, I’ve spent decades responding to the notional charms of men who look a bit like posters for Aryan manhood. The available array of mainstream hotness has certainly expanded to include the likes of Idris Elba, but the only time a man of Asian-Pacific extraction has been People’s Sexiest Man of the Year was Dwayne Johnson (African American and Samoan heritage).
So there I was, checking to make sure a (sometimes shirtless) action movie star is sexy. Is it just me? Did I miss something? Is this a trick? Would I think this guy was sexy if he was part of a decent data set? Wait—there actually is a data set. There is more than one hot hapa dude, so I can actually compare. Lewis Tan is prettier (to me) than Henry Golding. Golding in Crazy Rich Asians was mighty fine but he was also literally the first creature of his kind I had ever seen (unless you count Brandon Lee, who died in 1993 and was thus mostly a special effect in his only mainstream movie).
Now there’s crop of hot young actors closer in age to my children, which makes commenting on their “sexiness” a touch awkward (Charles Melton or Archie Reynaux). But there are swarms of young or youngish Asian actors of diverse backgrounds (south Asian, east Asian, Pacific Islander—hello Jason Momoa!) who are out there being unapologetically sexy. Many of them are of mixed race, so their names don’t signal their ethnic identity. I’m watching these beautiful creatures, of all genders, come bursting out into movies, television, magazine covers and waiting for the other shoe to drop (type casting, fetishizing). At the same time I am happily envious of my children and others who can come of age learning that people like them are gloriously appealing, even in silly heteronormative ways (and they don’t have to go to another continent to hook up).
rage. creation - joy 