“I want to absolutely dominate your small, Asian body"

An Instagram account is exposes the fetishisation of Asian women on Tinder.

Instagram account @thefleshlightchronicles exposes how Asian women are fetishised on Tinder. Lillian, who runs the account signed up to Tinder in 2017 and was inundated with abusive messages.

Racist and sexist messages that flooded her inbox include, “I’ll eat your pussy like shrimp fried rice” and “I want to try my first Asian woman.” Another read, “I want to absolutely dominate your small, Asian body,”

Lillian then began to document her experience through memes on Instagram. Speaking to Broadly, Lillian said, “I began to realize that these interactions on Tinder matched up with my lived experience of being an Asian woman and I realized I could use this platform to talk about those experiences—and help others find validation through them, too.”

The Instagram account is comprised mostly of memes with pictures of Lillian. On the pictures, screenshots of the vile Tinder messages are shown.

In one meme, Lillian is shown sitting next to a title that reads “Man Sets Record for Amount of Stereotypes Sent in One Tinder Message.” Below the title, ‘Jon, 25’s message is displayed: “Explicitly, I want 7 half Asian children, 4 boys, 3 girls, all highly skilled in geometry and athletics.” Another of Jon’s messages reads, “Implicitly, I want someone to watch sports and drink beers with me because I’m a boy, right?”

More vulgar messages on other Instagram posts include, “I’ll eat your pussy like shrimp fried rice”, “Never been with an Asian before so banging you would be a dream come true, I need my yellow fever cured” and “Im going to be hones with you i want to choke you while ramming you. [sic]”

“Memes condense down a common or shared experience into a few words and a picture,” Lillian says. “With the increased use of social media, it makes them easily consumable which many people enjoy.”

She added that the images function “as a way to make information accessible, especially with a format like Instagram.”

Lillian often laughs at the messages she receives and doesn’t take them to heart. “To be honest, you can’t not laugh at the shit that happens on Tinder,” she says. “It is content that writes itself!”

However, Lillian also revealed that some of the messages are actually frightening. “To be honest, sometimes I get very scared. I have got threats in the past but not from people that I actually know. It has always been strangers on the Internet.”

“Of course, it shocks you and you do get worried for your own safety. It can be overwhelming but my account is also a coping strategy to make something out of it and to share with others who are going through similar things.”

For Lillian, most of the harassment stems from white supremacy. “The West has an extended history of exploiting and penetrating Asia for profit and gain,” she says. “I believe that this power dynamic, combined with stereotypical and shallow representations of Asian women in the media, causes this global power dynamic to be replicated on a smaller scale with women of color. Men genuinely seem to think that Asian women are submissive and are desperate to be dominated.”

Lillian has tried to block her abusers on Tinder but has often seen them appear with different profiles.

“Instagram and other digital media platforms seem quicker to shut down feminist accounts that show nudity,” she says. “They censor them but they aren’t so quick to respond to harassment claims or when people are receiving racist abuse.”