Try naming a famous Asian hunk

McCarthy. Kidd. Rosenzweig. Berman. Williams. Oh yeah, and, Nieh.

These are just a sample of the last names of half-Asian students at Penn.

See a trend?

According to Wayne State University Asian-American Studies expert Frank Wu, 72 percent of Asian-white couples in the United States consist of an Asian wife and a white husband. Apparently, not so many white women have Asian fetishes.

"Growing up, I thought I'd date white girls ... but I began to realize that I wasn't attractive to the white community," College senior Wes Nakamura, a panelist at a forum on interracial dating held last Thursday. "I discovered that wanting that is setting yourself up for a lot of pain."

Nakamura touched on a serious issue in American sexual culture: the marginalization of Asian men. You know the stereotypes. They're small, bookish and geeky. They're good at math, ping pong and PlayStation.

And they're not very sexy.

These preconceptions about East Asian men have not been around forever. White Americans perceived late 19th- and early 20th-century Chinese and Japanese railroad workers as virile, intimidating and sexually potent. In other words, Asian men were stereotyped in much the way black men are today.

But in contemporary America, East Asian men produce cars, televisions and semiconductors -- not railroads -- and the rest of America sees Asians as intelligent and industrious (read: nerdy).

Unfortunately, the "model minority" label does not come with vaunted sexual categorization.

But we must not ignore the role the media play in eroticizing East Asian women while desexualizing East Asian men. For example, nothing says "cultural imperialism" like silver screen interracial relationships -- just think Sideways or The Last Samurai. Now think of the last time you saw an Asian man kiss a white woman on screen.

Really? Me neither.

Jackie Chan, Jet Li -- and even Bruce Lee, who married a white woman -- have never had an on-screen kiss with anyone.

Where are the male counterparts for Lucy Liu, Kelly Hu and Sandra Oh?

"Very rarely are Asian men portrayed as sexual beings with normal sexual desires and behaviors," Penn Graduate School of Education professor Vinay Harpalani said.

The marketers who set the agenda in mass media have determined that, while Asian women are exotic and sexy, Asian men are nerdy, funny or, at best, ninjas. These same people put Beyonce Knowles -- light skin, red lipstick, Farrah Fawcett hair -- on one magazine cover and 50 Cent -- tattooed muscles, no shirt, optional firearm -- on another.

This selling of stereotypes creates the white-male oriented standards of beauty that define contemporary American sexual identities: black female (conformist), black male (predatory), East Asian female (submissive) and East Asian male (none). And, of course, the tall, thin white females; minorities aren't the only groups that suffer under these standards.

I won't suggest that an Illuminati group of influential white men gets together and decides how to portray beauty in the media. These sexual stereotypes sell, and businesses using them are just maximizing profits.

And they will continue to do so as long as we continue to buy.

Unfortunately, the marketing of these sexual identities is resulting in ugly consequences. According to Wu, Asian women are marrying at twice the rate of Asian men. Even sadder than the white men and women who buy into these stereotypes are the Asian women who begin to see themselves as submissive and the Asian men who begin to see themselves as unwanted.

"Knowing that Asian men aren't seen as attractive by society at large," Nakamura said, "I often don't consider dating white women as an option."

So what's to be done? The first step lies in recognizing that we see each other through the tinted glasses of our preconceptions. "I don't buy the whole argument that you just love who you love -- our sexual and romantic decisions are influenced by a larger context," said Ed Brockenbrough, who co-instructs a Graduate School of Education seminar on Cross Cultural Awareness.

Even with our Ivy League enlightenment, we at Penn have yet to transcend stereotyped sexual identities.

And until we recognize the pervasiveness and gravity of sexual stereotypes, we won't be seeing too many half-white Tanakas around campus.

Daniel Nieh is a senior East Asian Languages and Civilizations major from Portland, Ore. Low End Theory appears on Fridays.

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