entremet
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The story begins with a woman named Suzanne. Suzanne met her boyfriend "John" on OkCupid. They’d been dating for six months. Suzanne describes John as sweet, loyal, and spontaneous: one of the best boyfriends she’d ever had. John offered Suzanne keys to his apartment, they went furniture shopping together, they even made a date out of a trip to the DMV. Suzanne was happy. Until one day, she discovered a stash of photos on John’s computer. The images were of John and another woman, kissing. And they were take recently. Just as Suzanne was clicking through the photos, messages meant for John popped up on the screen. They were from other women. Several other women. Suzanne scrolled through the conversations. They were flirty, jokey messages.
When Suzanne left John’s apartment she was determined to warn every Asian woman he knew in case John was secretly dating them too. She sent out a mass message to John’s female Asian Facebook friends telling them what she learned. A few women responded who had also been deceived by John. And what she found was that John did this. A lot. He built up a cadre of several women — all Asian — and then he would get found out, they would all go their separate ways, and he would begin anew.
Suzanne and the other women who met due to John’s dishonesty decided to take action, to warn future victims of John’s true character. They created a fake OkCupid profile, with John’s picture and a slight variation on his username. The profile was filled with warnings: "I’m a serial cheater." "If you see me on here don’t date me."
This is Stephanie’s nightmare scenario. But she says that she’s always on high alert with online dating, because of what she calls "yellow fever" — the tendency of guys to fetishize her for being Asian. She says her OK Cupid inbox is full of guys emailing her about how “exotic she looks, or about her "almond eyes," and how it all seems to feed into particular stereotypes about Asian women. That they are exotic, that they are submissive. It makes dating, especially dating online very difficult.
And it is not just nightmare scenarios like John that make her nervous — Stephanie received warnings about men herself. A lot. A few months ago, a woman that she didn’t know saw an innocuous interaction Stephanie had had with a guy on twitter. She wrote to tell her to watch out--that the guy had yellow fever and would try to hit on her.
More here, including audio:
http://digg.com/2015/fighting-yellow-fever