February 18, 1999
On February 17th, Asian American Association held a program about sex. There were three different topics about sex and I attended two of those sessions.
The first session was about Asian sexuality. Speakers from Cal B Gay and other gay, lesbian, bisexual groups came and talked about their experiences being gay. The first topic that was brought up was if there was any pressure to hide their sexuality. Most of the representatives had the same type of answer. They said that there is a lot of pressure on them to be straight and it was hard on them mostly because of their strict cultural environment. Their parents expect them to be hardworking and to eventually raise a family. I didn’t know how they felt like about being gay until one person made a metaphor about seeing some attractive person of the opposite sex walking down the street and you had to keep your feelings all bottled up. I think that keeping anything inside can literally destroy you and that is what being gay is like.
The second session that I attended was about Asians in the sex industry. The speaker, Richard Lee, talked about three different fields of the sex industry. There was the porn industry with magazines and videos, the prostitution industry with the street prostitution and massage parlors, and finally the internet. He told us that although Asians comprise of only about 10% of the population, 35% of the top porn videos featured Asian women. That is a staggering statistic. We discussed the main reasons why Asian women and Asian gay men are featured in these videos. The main reason why that we discussed was the fact that Asian people are known to be submissive and they are featured in the videos as submissive people. I would agree to that stereotype and I feel sickened that so many Asians are treated with that stereotype.