The west stereotypes Asian men as weak, subservient, effeminate. No wonder they’re fighting back
BODY LANGUAGE
Tania Branigan
‘Hitler has only got one ball, Goering has two but very small. Himmler is very sim’lar, and Goebbels has no balls at all.”
When World War II troops sang that ditty, the words were tongue- in-cheek. Sixty years on, we appear to be taking these matters rather more seriously. For as recent tabloid stories tell us, we should blame Osama bin Laden’s career on his similarities to Goering.
“He grew up with minuscule sex organs due to testosterone deficiency,” the News of the World informed its readers last week, tracing his anti-Americanism to a Yankee girlfriend who saw him naked and laughed. Medical treatment allowed him to father 42 children, but did little to salve his sense of inadequacy.
Impugning the enemy’s sexual prowess is as common in warfare as guns and tanks. But the state of Bin Laden’s testicles is particularly important, and not just to their owner. The rumours about their size, shape and effectiveness belong to a wider story about race and masculinity, giving an unpleasant edge to otherwise laughable playground taunts.
In popular racist mythology, Arab and Asian men are weak, effeminate, unmanly. If the black “crime” is to be aggressively and uncontrollably male, the Eastern equivalent is to be insufficiently so. Ask a bigot to describe their enemy and you can be pretty damn sure that the black man will be the thuggish mugger lurking in the shadows, while the Asian man will be the pliant, servile owner of the corner shop.
Only last month the military historian Sir John Keegan told Daily Telegraph readers that Western armies fight “face-to-face in stand-up battle” (a suitably manly form of combat), while orientals prefer “ambush, surprise, deceit” and “shrink from pitched battle” (like big girls’ blouses, one infers).
Such stereotypes were in play long before the war and apply far beyond Afghanistan. The explorers and administrators of 19th-century imperialism saw the oriental world as everything the Occident was not. The traits they thought typically Eastern were those they also ascribed to women: emotional not rational; subservient rather than commanding; devious instead of straightforward.
Now, as then, race is entwined with sexual identity. Western culture cannot comprehend that other people can be differently, not less, male. We cannot understand that masculinity could be about loyalty, or grit, or devotion to hearth and home, rather than brute force. The result is that Asian men in Europe have been emasculated, not by feminism but by white society’s insensitivity and aggression. That most are thriving is a testament to their resilience, not our understanding. We treat them as eunuchs and are confused when they have the balls to complain.
There are few male Asian images in the mass media, fewer that are positive, and none that are sexually powerful. Imran Khan did his best for a while, but soon tired of the burden and fled back to Pakistan. And it is no coincidence that Asians have failed to prosper in football, the sport that now epitomises masculinity for British men.
The small screen is equally unflattering. The last high-profile television character was Sanjay in Eastenders, and even by Albert Square’s standards he was pitiful: a weak-willed gambling addict and hen-pecked husband. Incidentally, he turned out to be infertile.
The predictable upshot of our disdain is that young men are becoming increasingly macho and expressing it through general hostility, physical assertiveness, or, more worryingly, religious fundamentalism.
Prince Naseem Hamed, one of the few Arab men to prosper through physical strength, took up boxing because his family was harassed by racists. The National Front stopped calling when they learnt that the Hamed boys were handy with their fists.
Fundamentalism is equally potent in its symbolic force. We know that the growth of Islamism in the west has little to do with the merits of Islam. It is, in part, about racial pride: rejecting a society that rejects you and embracing your status as an outsider. But it is also about sexual identity, about being a man in a world that treats you as a boy. And it works. We understand its unashamed aggression and, because it scares the hell out of us, we take the time to stop and listen.
In White Teeth, Zadie Smith describes a group of Asian teenagers travelling to Bradford to burn copies of The Satanic Verses.
“Allah featured more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary.
“People had fucked with Rajik back in the days when he was into chess and wore V-necks. People had fucked with Ranil when he carefully copied teacher’s comments into his book. But no one fucked with any of them any more because they looked like trouble.”
We offer young Asian men contempt or fear, but deny them true respect. No wonder many are growing impatient, spelling trouble for us all. Never mind blaming Bin Laden’s testes. We in the West are pretty good at managing to balls things up by ourselves.