What Rests On the Bodies of Foreign Women

Men often like to
criticize how those other
men treat their women.

Many female volunteers (and some male volunteers, too) complain that they are subject to sexual harassment or sexually inappropriate comments in Indonesia. I haven’t lived in enough places around the world to know if Indonesians really sexually harass people more than any other group of people, and such a statement would be nearly impossible to prove one way or another. I would argue however that foreigners, especially foreign women (and minorities) are sexually harassed and objectified more often than local (or majority) women in nearly every country around the world. Not only that, but much of how one culture views another culture can be gleaned from how that first culture speaks about and treats the other culture’s women.

When I was living in South Korea, I often passed by underwear and lingerie shops. After a few months I began to notice something odd; the models wearing the lingerie were almost always white people. Even when the pictures changed, they would all be replaced with more pictures of white men and women. I asked some Koreans why they never featured Korean models. I received a range of answers including, “I don’t know,” “white women have bigger boobs or butts, and white men have bigger muscles” “white people are prettier,” “it’s just a poster,” “it’s not important,” and “because white people aren’t Asian like us. We can look at their bodies like statues and not like real people. If we used Asian models the pictures would be too erotic.” Regarding the first few comments, there are Korean actresses and actors that have large chests and backsides and read any magazine about Korean Pop Stars, and there are many pictures of Korean men with muscular and toned bodies. So those comments aren’t exactly true. The interesting thing about the last comment is its specificity and that when I shared this story with other foreigners, sometimes they would recall hearing a very similar thing from their Korean friends.

I was reminded of this when talking to a different Peace Corps volunteer, who is Indian American. She shared with me that she gets a lot of comments about her clothing and how she is dressed, and I commented on the fact that it seems that she gets more than I do. 

[you can read more about her personal experiences in Indonesia here: http://peacecorpskruti.blogspot.co.id/2015/10/special-brownie-pros-and-cons-of-being.htm] 

This could be the result of a variety of factors: she is in East Java, I am in West, she is at a madrassah (an Islamic high school) while I teach at a public vocational high school where the rules for female dress are a bit more liberal. It could also just be her specific village or the specific people that work at her school. Alternatively, it could have to do with the fact that she is brown, slender, and short, and I am white, tall, and “so big,” as the people in my village tell me. In other words, her body is more similar to theirs while mine is different. It’s possible that her body is more real and erotic to Indonesians than my body, which is more foreign and strange.

But if a more familiar body is more erotic, then why are foreign women more often sexually harassed? Well as smarter people than me have pointed out, sexual harassment and rape usually really isn’t about sexual attraction or desire; more often, it’s about power. When a middle aged man I occasionally talk to near my local convenience store starts shouting at me one day and asking me if I want to “mate” with him, he’s not doing it because he really wants to sleep with me. He’s doing it because I am big and foreign and intimidating, and to reduce me to a sex object that he can obtain and control makes him powerful and accomplished. The “friend” who texted me in the middle of the night asking me to sleep with him in a hotel so he can try having sex with a white person doesn’t really want me, he wants to get something he is told he isn’t supposed to have, of accomplishing something his friends will never be able to. When I am grabbed on the street or followed by men or asked about my virginity or sex habits, this is not out of attraction to me; this is out of a desire to control and shame me.

 For four hundred years much of modern Indonesia was colonized by the very tall and very white Dutch people. I am very white and very tall compared to most women in my village. I am American, a country known as the richest, most powerful in the world. But I also have a vagina, which gives me weakness and vulnerability in their eyes. Add to this the idea the in the West sex is “free.”  Women aren’t controlled. They have multiple partners. I am wilder, perhaps, than an Indonesian women. I am something to be caught and tamed. My sex is so obvious because it is the thing that makes me approachable and less scary than a white male. It is something to be grabbed for, to contain, to ogle without fear; there are no social repercussions, no angry mothers, no pissed off brothers that will come get you if you do not treat me properly. I am not Muslim, so I will not call on your God to punish you, either.

One of my counterparts was watching an Indonesian music video and it featured women in tight dresses and men with open shirts. “This,” he said to me, “this is all Western influence. It’s not from our culture.” And yet, Indonesia (like many countries around the world) has a long history of prostitution, child marriages, teen pregnancy, ancient highly sexualized dances, polygamy, extramarital affairs, and parties in which men pay to touch women and dance provocatively with them. Of course the West (so has India, Arabia, Africa, China, and all the other waves of migrations that have gone through these islands) has likely had an effect on sex in Indonesia. However, to totally blame the West for all forms of sexual “deviance” is ridiculous and ignoring both Indonesian history and human nature. 

I had a Korean female friend once tell me about her Korean friends who lived in Canada: “they were good Asian girls. They weren’t like those white girls who just sleep with everyone.” While watching a Korean music video once in which the female lead singer pretends to masturbate and is fawned on by attractive male dancers, a male Singaporean friend rolled his eyes and said “this poor girl being abused by the music executives who make her act like this.” I suggested that perhaps it was her idea; the video was sexually empowering and she seemed in control of her feelings, her body, and her male lovers. My friend told me that she is a good Asian girl and wouldn’t have those feelings on her own. In this view point, the foreign white woman becomes a thing to blame and be jealous of. She is both something that has been sexually corrupted and sexually liberated. She is something to compare “good” and “proper” Asian women to.

Sexually harassing, objectifying, or idealizing foreign women is not unique to Asian cultures. Websites are filled with Asian women (either from Asia or of Asian ancestry) posting rude, objectifying comments that they receive from non-Asian men stereotyping and objectifying them. Most Americans are familiar with the stereotype of the Asian prostitute who says “me love you long time” in broken English. Even when I lived in Korea, I would meet many Western men that would insist that Asian women were more docile, subservient, feminine, and less feminist, shallow, or materialistic. Many countries in Asia including South Korea and Thailand have long histories of colonial occupation or near colonial histories with the West. Some Asian governments actively encouraged young women to sell sex to American and other foreign soldiers as a way of boosting the economy. So Asian women became viewed not as equal partners and lovers, but as polite, refined servants.

Black women in the US are simultaneously hyper-sexualized and treated as sexual objects or props while also neutered and depicted as too aggressive, free, or strong willed. The US has a long history of experimenting on the bodies of black women—even gynecology began with the poking and prodding of black female slave bodies. In this case black women are seen as good for sex, and the onus of blame for fact that their bodies have been historically sexually abused is placed on them instead of on the men who have abused them by calling their actions or dress too sexually free and aggressive. They are fine as sex partners but not as relationship partners.

In France, much has been made of the decision to ban headscarves in school, and even more recently in Canada there is national debate about whether or not women should be allowed to wear the Niqab, a form of Islamic dress in which the woman covers everything but her eyes. As many Canadian Muslim women have pointed out, the Niqab is worn by less than 1-2% percent of all Muslim women in Canada, however an issue that affect so few people has taken up a huge portion of the national media and debate at the expense of other women’s issues. In the case of Muslim women in the West, so much is made of the idea of rescuing women from oppression and oppressive clothing, whether or not a woman chooses to wear it or at the expense of issues that women might say are more important to them. 

Although on the surface this is a debate about clothing, it is essentially a critique of how the Muslim world asks its women to deal with and present their sexuality and reflects the viewpoint that many Westerns hold that somehow the Muslim world is less modern. I might add, however that this focus on clothing goes both ways; I can remember being told during my first months of teaching in Indonesia that I wasn’t allowed to wear a bikini if I went swimming with the students, and I had to explain that even in America a teacher wearing a bikini while swimming with a bunch of teenage boys would also probably be considered inappropriate.

The more I travel, the more it seems that when I hear people (especially men) complain about how a different country or culture treats their women, it isn’t really a comment on the actual happiness or welfare of those women, but an attempt to depict the other culture as less civilized. There are, as mentioned above, Westerners that obsess over the dress of Muslim women. One of my Korean landlords told me that Vietnamese men didn’t treat their women properly when he was a soldier in the Vietnam War. When I visited Malaysia and told my Chinese Malaysian guide that I was living in Korea, he immediately said that he didn’t really like Korean tourists and that they didn’t treat women well. When my white English female friend began dating a Korean man while living in Korea, the reaction of many of the older white men that we met was to immediately tell her that she was going to be beaten or abused and to disapprove of the relationship despite the fact that they themselves were married to 

Korean women.

It is not only men that fetishize and stereotype foreign or minority women. As I have mentioned, some of the comments I’ve gotten about white women in South Korea and in Indonesia have been from women. Another Peace Corps Volunteer in Indonesia wrote a blog post about how she feels being treated as a “Barbie.” 

[you can read her post here: https://prairiestateofmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/01/barbie-girl/] 

In Korea, some white women would bitterly insist that all Korean girls were materialistic or childish. The difference in how men usually talk about foreign women versus how women usually talk about foreign women is that for men they are resource and a tool, while women seek to neutralize them or use them to prop themselves up. A white woman who is called “Barbie” by her community is allowed to be beautiful but de-sexualized; she is a doll without actual sexual parts. When my Korean friend compared white and Asian women like that, it was to insist that Asian women are somehow exceptionally pure or proper compared to white women. When white women in Korea compare themselves to Korean women, it is usually to insist that they are somehow more adult and independent.

In other cases, foreign become ideals and alternative for men frustrated in their own societies. Type in the words “Foreign Women” into Google and one of the first websites to pop is a blog by an American man living in an unspecified foreign country with the title “Ten Reasons Why Foreign Women are Better than American Women.”  You can find it by yourself. I’m not comfortable linking to it because the content is so insane. The entire article and comments are a confusing illogical rant. The first issue, of course being that “foreign” in this case refers to any woman who is not American, an extremely diverse and large group of people. One of the strangest things that the author claims is that American women put pills in their vaginas to stop bleeding over themselves. 

According to the author, American women are also too fat, lazy, materialistic, aggressive, and feminist. But the foreign woman is kind, not extreme, not materialistic, and she will never get angry at you. The people commenting on the article also cannot seem to agree about what makes a good woman; one the one hand, there are people complaining that American women are so lazy and do not want to work and will stay home all day, and yet there are others complaining that American women won’t stay in their place at home and raise children as they are supposed to. I have met American black men that say they won’t date black women because they are too aggressive or mean or put too much pressure on them. A Korean Taxi driver told my friend that Korean women were no good because they wore too much make-up and hide their faces. In South Korea, North Korean women are often fetishized as being more pure, beautiful, and naturally Korean than her corrupted Southern sisters. They are foreign and native in a unique way that causes a very specific kind of objectification. These wonderful, magic "foreign" women don't actually exist.

 They are the fantasies of men that have not had luck securing sex or a partner in their home communities. They are the frustrations of men that do not have as much power as they feel they they should. They idealize foreign women not because any of those things reasons why foreign women are better are universally true but because foreign women do not have the same cultural capital that women from one’s own culture do. They do not always know if someone is saying something inappropriate or rude because they are unfamiliar with the culture. If they are living in a different country than their birth country, they do not have the same networks of family and old friends living around them that can help push men to behave more responsibly or more in the woman’s favor. She perhaps also does not know enough of the man’s language (or the man doesn’t know enough of hers) for her to make her more complex thoughts or ideas known. These factors make it harder for foreign women to hold men accountable when they behave badly or negatively towards them.

Most societies are dominated by men. The foreign women represents a foreign culture or an imagined foreign culture that is more accessible and vulnerable. She can become however a community imagines and wants her to be because she does not represent the public face of a culture. She does not have the same social power, network or cultural understanding as a local woman, so men and women can get away with treating her and describing her however they like with less fear of any social backlash. She is not as threatening as a man. She is a warning. She is an ideal. She represents all the things that local women are not (or imagined to not be). For women she is a rival that must be put down. For men she is a way of ignoring and avoiding responsibility for bad behavior towards local women. I am not the problem, he says. It is the women here who are the problem. You want too much from me. How can I be unfair or cruel says the man in Culture A—I can’t possibly be that bad when those women over in Culture B are treated so much worse.