Why Do Guys Like Abgs Why Do Guys Like Asian Baby Girls
It started with the Facebook event: "Observe Your BAE Before V-Day." It was an alluring proposition, just at that place was a catch: all attendees were supposed to be Asians. The decree wasn't explicit merely rather unsaid through the issue's sponsors, a Facebook group called Subtle Asian Dating (Pitiful) . They collaborated with the community organisation, Asians Afterwork , and the mobile app, Get Apollo , to host the outcome.
I kept saying to my friends: "Wouldn't it be interesting if we went to this?" I was single. I was Chinese. I was also a reluctant but curious participant in Subtle Asian Dating (SAD). A friend had invited me to the group a few months back, but I establish the interface disorienting. It was filled with intra-customs identifiers and mannerisms I had trouble deciphering: "wholesome fuccboi," "halfie," "Lambda brother."
Truthful to its proper name, Subtle Asian Dating involves match-making: users "auction off" friends past writing detailed posts containing biographies, photos, and pros and cons lists. A Slate article described the page as a "virtual union market for millennials of the Asian diaspora."
I waded through a morass of dating "applications" when I first visited the page. My eyes blurred confronting descriptions such as: "great with parents," "Ivy League," "loves math," "makes $$$$." The tone of the page was satirical, just the comments department besides included suitors that seemed genuinely interested. Every few posts, I stumbled beyond the word Asian Babe Daughter (ABG), only no one bothered to define what it meant.
I barbarous downwardly an internet rabbit pigsty. Even though SAD users oftentimes throw around the term, online definitions for ABG are circuitous. They evade personality traits in guild to emphasize physical attributes or community activities: fake eyelashes, revealing clothing, dyed hair, tattoos, high booze tolerance, and a propensity towards going to raves. Urban Lexicon describes it equally a "girl…[who] parties all nighttime long. Puts a lot of makeup on and is usually a slut." Only the post concludes with the statement: "Nearly Asian girls do not appreciate being called an ABG." On Subtle Asian Dating, young women are proudly calling themselves Asian Babe Girls.
The origin of the term is elusive. Simply online theorists on Reddit link the etymology of the word to Asian Baby Gangster, a term popularized amongst the Asian diaspora in the tardily 1990s to the early 2000s. During that period, Asian Baby Gangsters subverted the Model Minority stereotype, but in dissentious and disavowed means. Co-ordinate to posters, the term was reductive more than than radical, a pejorative referencing: "gangbangers, "sex workers," and "drug dealers." Somewhere forth the line, however, a gender divide was erected and "baby" replaced "ganger," peradventure as a nod to the petite stature that many Asian women are said to have. Information technology is a perception critics telephone call the "infantilization" of Asian women.
Despite the amorphous nature of the term, media about ABGs grow. On Youtube, popular creators such as Jenn Im and Sarah Cheung have posted "ABG Transformation" videos, in which they demonstrate the ABG aesthetic, complete with a makeup tutorial, a temporary tattoo application, and clothing options. On TikTok, Melissa Gan (@melganyay) created an "ABG" anthem, with the lyrics "You desire to hit up a rave? / I can totally get you in / My boyfriend is the DJ / His name's Kevin Ngyuen."
Similarly, in the music video, " ABG (Asian Infant Girl ," rapper Chow Mane conceptualizes the term through his lyrics: "Fake lashes, faux Gucci (that's my Asian baby girl) /And she love to drop that lil' booty (that's my Asian baby girl) / My lil' mama v human foot iii (that'south my Asian babe daughter) / And she love to popular that E (that'south my Asian baby girl)." Featured in the video are three young Asian women, all of whom were students and sorority sisters at Berkeley when they were called to be function of the filming. Equally Mane raps, a montage of the girls wearing revealing vesture flashes beyond the screen. The video went viral briefly subsequently it debuted but is now unlisted.
Before it was unlisted, however, Junyi Zheng, 25, one of the music video leads, worried about the consequences of having something similar this online. She's aware of the potential criticism surrounding the video, which features hypersexualized depictions of a minority grouping of women that are already fetishized with terms such as "xanthous fever." Nonetheless, for Zheng, the song and video were clearly satirical, a "self-aware" way for Chow Mane–an Asian American artist–to poke fun at the culture of ABGs through exaggerated visuals, lyrics, and acting. In Zheng's opinion, criticism virtually the video misses not simply its sardonic nature only also its central strength: it broke from the Model Minority stereotype to depict Asians in a dissimilar, assuming calorie-free. "Should Charles [Grub Mane] have written a song nigh the immigrant story featuring three Asian girls who had poor, immigrant parents and studied really difficult, went to Harvard and Yale and became lawyers, doctors, and astronauts instead?" Zheng asks. For her, the sexualization of women in the video is no different from how women are sexualized in the media at large, and "at that place will always be criticism most how women choose to show their trunk." Despite this, she admits that the term Asian Baby Daughter oftentimes carries negative connotations and is "a civilisation I no longer acquaintance myself with every bit much anymore."
Michelle Fang, 23, who is likewise featured in the video, feels similarly estranged from the term, though she admits in college she "probably" was equally ABG. While at Berkeley, Zheng and Fang were both sisters of the Asian American sorority Sigma Omicron Pi, and Fang describes sisterhood bonding activities that involved putting on fake eyelashes and ownership group orders of circle lenses, contacts that change a wearer'south iris colour and size. "I don't want to use the term 'indoctrinated,'' she says, " merely everyone around you is dressing like this and interim similar this, then it becomes your reality about what is desirable and what yous desire to wait like." She pauses before standing. "At this point, I don't even know if information technology'south a cocky-fulfilling thing or if it's just by take a chance."
The possible self-fulfilling nature of ABGs is what most intrigues Peter Lee Hamilton. "There's no ABG system that says, 'this is how you become an ABG,'" the 23-yr-old explains. "It's more that people alter themselves to go more like ABGs…And then what does that say near the ABG community and the authenticity of it?"
Hamilton was one of the early on rising stars of Subtle Asian Dating, with a mail service that amassed over almost three thousand "likes". But he views the group mainly as a lens to examine the ABG and Asian collective at large. "[The page] tin can tell you what a lot of [Asians] discover attractive, and that'southward interesting for determining what the values of the customs are," he says. He sees all these differentiating terms on Subtle Asian Dating every bit an attempt to answer the question: "What blazon of Asian are you?"
On Subtle Asian Dating, archetypes propagate in response to such a question. There'south the Asian Baby Daughter, only there'due south too her inverse, the Asian Bible Girl, who is described as "innocent," wholesome," and "wifey material." As Stephanie Zou, 21, a SAD member, explains, "The near pop girls [on SAD] are either the really fragile [ones] with, like, large optics or the ABG who is actually out there and loves to rave and talk about bubble tea."
In essence, Asian Baby Girl is another cultural stereotype entrenched in a legacy of descriptors used to describe Asian women. From "China Doll" to "Dragon Lady, " most of these terms are regressive designations foisted upon Asian women and perpetrated through Western media. Asian Baby Girl, still, fills a unique vacuum–an intra-customs term that is likewise oftentimes self-identifying.
In that example, is calling yourself an ABG a destructive deed, a shedding of the "whole" Asian girl stereotype? Is information technology a rallying cry against the infantilization and subjugation of Asian American women? Are ABGs actually just young Asian American women who are open almost their correct to desire and to feel desired?
That's what Fang once believed, though she's now re-adjusted her perspective."Any label you create may commencement off every bit subversive, but then it might be re-appropriated by the hegemony and become repressive once again," she says. She describes the term as "on the whole progressive rather than regressive." Merely Fang admits that "In many ways, the term ABG is still very misogynistic—even in the proper name itself: Asian Baby Girl." She adds: "The patriarchy is very much embedded in information technology because the heart of what defines an ABG is in reference to a male person."
Peradventure the difficulty in discovering a articulate definition for ABG stems from that conundrum.
If immature women have been self-identifying as ABGs to reclaim a sense of autonomy and distance themselves from the prevailing "Asian Bible Girl" stereotype, then the responses of their male peers–like Mane who folded the term into a sexualized hip-hop video– demonstrate a primal schism in this deed of reclamation. Peradventure Asian Babe Girls wanted to be diametrically opposed to Asian Bible Girls, but they ended up adjacent instead. As Fang said, reclamation became reappropriation, which in turn became repression. Ultimately, wasn't the Asian Baby Girl vs. Asian Bible Girl partition just a modern update on Renee Tajima-Peña's hypersexual Dragon Lady vs. submissive Lotus Blossom dichotomy ? The epithets shifted, just the essence stayed the aforementioned.
***
I thought a lot about Dragon Ladies and Cathay Dolls earlier I decided, finally, to nourish the Sorry effect. None of my friends agreed to join me. "I'thousand going and so I can figure out, once and for all, how to describe an ABG," I texted ane of them. "Lol," she responded. The gathering is hosted in Chinatown Square, a squat black building in Philadelphia that houses a pan-Asian food hall. I enter through glass doors stickered with peeling advertisements: Happy hour four-6 on weekdays! Ask nearly our bubble tea loyalty bill of fare!
Inside, the men in attendance vastly outnumber the women. I spy suede skirts, knee-high boots, fur vets, dyed hair, but zippo that distinct, nix at all like the "ABG Transformation" YouTube videos. The term ABG feels more amorphous than usual, similar an Instagram filter rather than an identifier. It is analogous to calling yourself a nerd or a jock in loftier school–a default to group recollect for simplicity, to avoid nuance.
People eye each other from across the room simply refuse to diverge from their fortress of friends; information technology's like a middle school trip the light fantastic, except almost everyone is E Asian. I'm one of the only unpaired people in the room. A boy wearing khaki shorts and a push-down approaches me and points to the notebook in my mitt. "Are you lot existence antisocial tonight?" He smiles in a way that indicates he thinks he'due south existence charming. His proper name is Jake Moon. He is 25 and he laughs when I inquire what his definition of an ABG is.
"An ABG is just an Asian girl who's basic," he says. "She follows the cultural stereotypes almost out of social obligation." A group of girls passes, and Moon'south gaze lingers on one of them. Her dyed blonde hair ripples equally she tosses her head. I ask if he would call her an ABG, and he contemplates for a moment. "Hard to say." He tilts his head. "Why? Do you lot think yous're an ABG?"
The question surprises me. I look at what I'thousand wearing, the not-heeled boots paired with the cardigan and skirt. I laugh and shake my head. But dorsum at home, I think of Moon's question again while I printing play on Chow Mane'due south music video. The scene bursts to life: three Asian women sitting at a table littered with champagne flutes and Greyness Goose bottles. Betwixt taking selfies and biting into strawberries, the girls wave their long acrylic nails and gossip. Mane sits behind them, half-watching and half-preening to the camera as he raps: "All black when she go out / Chocolate-brown pilus turned blonde at present / Eyeliner with the wings on 'em / Tattoo somethin' Chinese on 'em / Last weekend in Vegas, this calendar week in Koreatown / Next calendar week got a festival, calendar week after that she got me in town."
The video ends, and I'm left staring at my reflection on the laptop screen. Maybe my respond to Moon actually should have been: "No, I wouldn't telephone call myself an ABG, but somebody else could."
Source: https://culturas.us/2021/02/14/sad-sexualized-the-renaissance-of-the-abg/
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