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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

The fetishization of Asian women is insane. If you search for "asian" on Reddit, the vast majority of results are porn subreddits.

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According to Pornhub[1] their top searches world-wide were:

Lesbian

Teen (18+)

Ebony

MILF

Anal

BigDick

Hentai

Arab ...

[1]https://www.inverse.com/article/26011-pornhub-post-popular-p...

Asian was way at the bottom (and was the most pop term in Hawai'i, I guess that's expected). It looks like fetishization is an exaggeration, never the less, even if it were, who cares? People can prefer what they want, so long as it's legal.

Here’s the same chart for 2019: https://cs.phncdn.com/insights-static/wp-content/uploads/201...

1. Japanese

2. Hentai

3. Lesbian

4. Milf

5. Korean

6. Asian

If you look at the stats, "Japanese" is driven by Chinese/Central Asian viwership. N-Am and S-Am still prefer lesbians (primarily driven by women viewers, btw).

Honestly, JP porn is unwatchable. Squeaky sounds, just quite "unique" as they say. It's the porn you'd watch if you want to quit watching porn.

Pornhub is blocked in China.

That’s great, I’m going by what they have on their graphic. Maybe they mean HK + the renegade province. It does not specify.

Which graphic are you referring to?

Here[1] I suppose it's more accurate to say Central Asia (inc China), and SEA and some smaller areas.

Bulgaria and Spain are in a class of their own with "Mature".

[1]https://www.joyscribe.com/pornhub-has-revealed-what-everyone...

In that graphic, the Anglosphere, particularly the US, make up the vast majority of the traffic.

Could be, but who's to say it’s never the less representative of those local preferences?

The issue is that china and korea banned porn so you have no other choice if want a pornstar who looks east asian. I'm ethnically chinese and I've been jerking it to japanese porn on mute for decades now.

I am asian but I never use that to describe myself. There's always a narrower adjective that doesn't lump culturally distinct groups like chinese/korean/japanese/etc together.

Except when I am describing how I look.

So I don't see this a bad thing. I basically expect the same results when you search for other descriptor of appearances like blonde or big boobs. There's no other reason for subreddit communities to form around appearances other than look at gifs of them. (though there are exceptions like when you want to form communities specifically to complain about problems caused by said appearances: /r/bigboobproblems /r/ABraThatFits)

Perhaps, but Reddit ≠ the internet.

In the earlier days of the internet Russian/mail-order brides seemed far more visible than asian porn/fetishes to me.

I wonder when the tides shifted and what was responsible for it. Now if you search "russian" the results are dominated by politics.

I also just tried this and didn't get any NSFW content. Most of it is coverage on hate crimes against East Asians. Maybe there's a filter to disable somewhere.

At what point does attraction cross the line and become fetishization?

The fact that machine learning or statistical methods find that the word "asian" is so highly correlated with porn that it is basically synonymous enough to be blocked is a problem.

That is a problem, but with the algorithm or its flawed application.

I don't think it's too far-fetched to expect one of the largest and richest tech companies worldwide to be able to tell with decent accuracy how the word "asian" was used. The sophistication of their blocking method is basically on par with a basic word filter that doesn't even attempt to avoid the Scunthorpe problem.

I mean, we're not talking about reaching 99% accuracy or really advanced linguistic detection. When a company sells smart home voice assistants surely they can be expected to tell "asian food" from more lewd content apart. Keep a list of naughty websites, track what web searches regularly return those as result and then target those specific queries. Or throw some Machine Learning at it, might as well put their enthusiastically marketed AI processing unit to use.

Accurate content filtering is hard. But completely blocking anything using one of the most common words in the language just because it frequently links to porn sites? Come on.

Yes, the algorithm is definitely inappropriate and too basic. However let's not overlook that it is a societal problem that a large amount of the US population does not care about Asians at all apart from porn. When there is 100x more searches for "asian hotties" than for "asian history", you can get 99% accuracy just by blacklisting the word "asian".

These claims seem pretty far fetched. Do you have any evidence that American's mostly only care about Asians because of porn, or that there are 100x more searches for Asian porn than other Asian topics? Seems pretty unreasonable to me

The fact that Reddit's search algorithms and Apple's filters find a strong correlation between Asians and porn suggests that to be the case. The 100x was just a rhetorical example.

Your point about correlation with porn shows absolutely nothing.

Every site hosting pornographic content finds a strong correlation between anything and porn. I literally just searched "foo" on Reddit with NSFW turned on and the results are 100% porn, ranging from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to Foo Fighters related...content.

Do people watch porn with asians? Yes, and also with about every second noun that appears in a dictionary. I highly doubt Apple's filters are applied in a fair way. Do they block queries containing gingers? Germans? Japanese? Which continents, ethnicities and countries does Apple find too sexy? I don't think a company should be in a position where this kind of question has to be asked.

What? Searching for "foo" had no porn results. "German" only had two porn results out of the top 50. "Asian" was almost all porn. I did all three searches with the same logged-in user with "show NSFW" enabled in the user settings.

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/bjtDEfG

> However let's not overlook that it is a societal problem that a large amount of the US population does not care about Asians at all apart from porn.

Why is this a problem? The premise was hate, but now the goalposts have moved to indifference.

Have you studied Romanian history or are they beneath you racially? Or, do you disagree with the premise of the question?

I would be fine with people not caring about Asians if at the same time they didn't watch so much Asian porn.

I would also be fine if people watched a lot of Asian porn if at the same time they cared about Asian culture and history.

But the fact that people disproportionately watch Asian porn while not caring about Asian people is pretty weird and racist to me.

Why should these things be related? Novelty is actually one of the things that sexually attracts men so even if porn viewers were all amateur historians these would probably be anti-correlated.

But why does it matter anyway? Is it bad to like pierogis without having an in-depth understanding of the holodomor? Should we stop listening to foreign music until we ensure we have a "proper" understanding of the political issues the artists grew up under?

> But the fact that people disproportionately watch Asian porn while not caring about Asian people is pretty weird and racist to me.

Actually, incest porn appears to be the most watched. What does that say about the exploitation of the incestuous?

This is intellectual misdirection. Not knowing the precise moment an X becomes a Y does not prove the non-existence of Xs or Ys. For example, when does a small pile of rocks become a big pile of rocks? Regardless of the answer, there are both small rock piles and big rock piles.

There may however never be an answer because humans will never agree on the veritas of the matter. E.g. the debate on when the small human life becomes a human life worth protecting.

The meaning of small and big is relative to some context. In the context of porn, almost any word designates a fetish. If it refers to a group of humans, one could call it a stereotype or objectification. In the context of Porn [Rule 34](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34) applies, and it affects everything.

Does it become a problem if people do cross that line anyway?

Say Tiger Woods or OJ who seem to prefer blondes, or Nick Cage and Soros who seem to recently prefer East Asians. Does it matter?

Marrying an Asian person is different from sexually fetishizing Asians as a category, so I don't think Cage or Soros are relevant here.

But we can’t be certain they did not entertain a fetish before their marriages...

Question is, does it matter? What if someone likes BBW and fetishizes it, do we care? If they then marry a BBW is it no longer a fetish?

Personally, I don't care about other people's sexual preferences ans I don't see why anyone should.

The one argument you can make against fetishizing a group of people is that it's reducing members of that group to fetish objects.

So if you're an Asian woman trying to date seriously, you'll get a bunch of white men who only care you're Asian and nothing else.

I don't know how much of an issue that is in practice (and I'm sure it's different in diff parts of the world).

Hang on, presumably you're now framing this as a US thing. How do we know the demand in the US comes disproportionately from white men, is that in the stats[1]? OKCupid seems to tell a diff story.

[1]https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/howyourraceaff...

Just tried this and did not get a single NWS result. Skin care was #2

Maybe if you enabled "show nsfw content" in your settings. Screenshot for search results of "asian": https://i.redd.it/9jbms02e3mn61.png

Also try that on pornhub.... Half of reddit is a porn.

I think you're misusing the search. If I enable nsfw by adding `nsfw:yes`, both 'asian' and 'european' show ONLY porn results both for content and communities. If I omit the `nsfw:yes`, but allow my profile to view nsfw content, both 'european' and 'asian' don't show any porn in the search results.

The search filter is either a binary, or there's just so much porn for everything that it doesn't matter.

There was no "nsfw:yes" in the search box. It was literally just "asian". I am using the search feature on the new reddit design on web: https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=asian&type=sr%2Cuser

Other ethnicities, also show up with some porn results, but not nearly as extreme as for "asian". e.g. for "white" and "black" it was about a third of the top 20.

I have 'Enable to view adult and NSFW (not safe for work) content in your feed and search results' enabled in my user profile, and this is what I'm seeing when I click that link: https://imgur.com/gm9PZqZ

Here's what I see: https://i.imgur.com/VMTdfDk.png

If you just recently enabled the setting in your user profile, probably there is just some caching on reddit's side so it is still serving the old results from before you enabled that.

Won't that bias the search towards showing you NSFW content? Since you specifically made it clear that that's what you are interested in.

What other things do you expect to find from the word Asian?

Food? Try Thai, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.

Same goes for anything else I can think of except porn.

I don't think it's higher up than many other "types" it's just a broader group, like ebony, compared to all the searches that would mostly result in (or believed to result in) white women. Blondes, redheads, brunettes, cowgirls, cheerleaders, etc. all defaults to mostly white women in the results. Besides you are searching a site that is almost a SoMe version of PornHub.

Exactly that. I bet most people looking for "redhead" aren't after makeup or hair care advice.

"White is the default" is still racism, and its existence doesn't make "Asian == porn" any less racist.

:s in this context does that make any sense? Specificity of porn query/popularity of query/result?

And would racism not imply that people would dislike and therefore not search for this term/produce this content?

First of all I didn't say if it were racist or not. Secondly the default of mostly white women is because most movies/clips are of white women. There's nothing racist in the way the results are distributed. You could argue that there are more white women in porn because of racism but that is another topic. I'd like to hear how you see returning mostly results with white women on a search of "redheads" as racisme though.

What is the problem? I am a white dude and I like Asian women. Nothing wrong there.

I do not see it as fetish at all. In fact, it is easier to date Asian girls for me. Hence, the preference formed.

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