It's been years since we've stopped watching NBA basketball. It was useless to try with the Seattle Sonics being such a crappy team, so much that we ended up selling them. It was made much more sense for us to follow the WNBA's Seattle Storm. They actually bring home our state championships. Go Storm!
So we never heard of Jeremy Lin until a friend asked what we thought about the Linsanity hype. We did a quick online search and sure enough there were all of these articles about how Jeremy Lin was this hot new Asian American basketball player. And there was a lot of coverage about the inappropriate comment Fox news columnist Jason Whitlock made after a win Lin's team had against the LA Lakers:
“Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple of inches of pain tonight.”
The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) quickly responded, demanding an apology for the obviously racist comment, which subsequently resulted in an
apology from Whitlock. They have also published a
media advisory which includes:
“ME LOVE YOU LIN TIME”: Avoid. This is a lazy pun on the athlete’s name and alludes to the broken English of a Hollywood caricature from the 1980s.
What we at LesbeAsian wanna know is:
What about the heterosexist nature of Whitlock's comment and the 1980s movie quote?
Not surprisingly this went unnoticed and unaddressed. It was imperative to come to the defense of Lin's penis, but nobody cared about the fact that Whitlock's comment also references some woman getting "pain" from being fucked by Lin. Disgusting. And apparently the original "love you long time" Full Metal Jacket movie quote was just offensive because of the broken English portrayal. Never mind the geisha white male serving role that caricature embodies.
So although we applaud the AAJA in demanding an apology in regards to the racist comment by the columnist, we are disappointed that the sexism in the comment was not also acknowledged. It is a narrow and limiting perspective. Asian American also includes womyn. No matter the size of one's penis, it is not okay for the media to perpetuate rape culture messaging. When the sexism is overlooked, you are also condoning it. AAJA we hope you do better next time in representing Asian Americans - which includes womyn - when you speak out against injustices like the comment made about Jeremy Lin.
