Why Chinese Men Are Seen As Feminine

Are Asian men and particularly Chinese men more effeminate than Western men? And is there a historical context for it? This YouTuber seems to think so, David. Andrew, today we are reviewing a video called Exploring Chinese Masculinity and China's Ban on Effeminate Men. It is by a brand new YouTuber called Aini, like, well, Aini, I love you. I think that she is a girl that I want to say was raised half in China, half in Australia, and she's dropping a lot of stuff that is relevant to Chinese dudes. And I know a lot of like fellow Chinese diasporic, you know, international students are commenting on it. But Andrew, we're here to give the ABC perspective. All right, everybody, we're going to break down our video. We're going to tell you what we agree with and what we also disagree with and also give you our perspective. So let's get into it. Last year, China decided to ban effeminate men from TV. What does this mean and why might they have done this? With the recent popularity of East Asian media, I think the divide between East Asian masculine ideals and Western ideals are becoming more and more apparent. The ideal man from the West is often represented through Captain America or Jason Momoa. And in East Asia, the ideal man is reflected through celebrities and idols like BTS, Chanyeol and Luhan. Now, this. Oh, my gosh, Aini, why do you make us look like that? You compare a guy who put on makeup with like The Rock and Jason Momoa, Aquaman. It's not a fair comparison. Why don't you compare him to Timothy Chalamet, David Bowie? Yeah, I mean, I think when she says ideal Western man, she's actually saying like the extremely Western man, like the man who almost only exists in the West. I mean, actually, there's buff guys like that in China, but they're not really movie stars. There's probably not as many of them. That's not as big of a percentage. Well, they just exist in like pro lifting or like pro fighting. Let's just say more guys in America want to be like Jason Momoa than as than guys in China, I would say that. No. So basically, you know, to her point, there's some truthiness to it. But I think her examples were a little bit too extreme and handpicked. Hey, is it kind of funny that The Rock and Jason Momoa are like kind of Asian? All right. Moving on to the next clip, that it is penetrated, silenced and possessed because of what we said above and how often when we look at masculinity, we're always using the Western ideal as a norm. We're always thinking about default masculinity as men who are really macho, who are really aggressive or assertive. They're bold, they're dominant, especially amongst other men. We need to kind of step back from that sort of thinking and really look at masculinity specific to different cultures because masculinity is a cultural construct. Andrew, I made a pretty general statement here that I think actually a lot of people like in a way agree with in the most general sense. What do you think about it? She said right now the globe is going by Western male standards. And that's the only reason why I juxtapose against that. Chinese men seem more effeminate. Yeah, I mean, it kind of makes sense because the Western culture has kind of dominated the world, you know. And also right now, as we speak, we are in a Western country. And she's, I believe, also in Australia, which is also a Western country. It's an Anglo country. So, of course, it makes sense to go by those standards, of course. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, should it always be like that? I do think even the standards in America are changing, right? You got Timothee Chalamet. You got Tom Holland. You got kind of these softer guys who are also very desirable. And like we said, what about David Bowie? What about Prince? What about Lionel Richie? Before hip hop came in, they had all these black guys dressed in like crushed velvet suits with like perms. Mick Jagger is like the skinniest rock star ever. Right, right. But those people, I guess, to be fair, they were being juxtaposed. I think at the same time, those guys were popular. Stallone was popular. Arnold Schwarzenegger was popular, popular. So America has always had like a hyper wide spectrum. And I think that that's something that we're going to address. It is true. China in particular, even more than Japan and Korea, has a very, very narrow spectrum that they're willing to accept. But the whole spectrum has always existed in both societies. I will say this, though. One thing that I do not like is saying that testosterone fueled masculinity never existed in Asia. How was Genghis Khan? How were the Manchurians, the Jurchens able to conquer China? You know what I mean? But like China always had more advanced like poetry and like, you know, soft skills. But at the end of the day, wars back then were fought on horseback by sword, by arrows and the conventionally testosterone filled nomadics like the Mongolians, they had it. No, I mean, at the end of the day, listen, there's always been like masculine farmers in China. They're just not getting the media coverage. They're not getting the stories, the movies or even the poems are not about them. Yeah. And you could argue in 2022, Andrew, guys like Pong Tai, you know, we follow some like masculine farmer gnomes, you know, that are hilarious. They're getting their like day in the sun more than they ever had. Because if you guys know about Chinese history, it is very scholar centric due to the language being so complicated and a lot of people being illiterate. Like it's not like the lower class people could like tell their own glorious stories. All right. So in this next clip, she actually introduces the two main types of masculinity in China, which is actually something we've talked about on our channel before. I mean, like totally opposite things. When is like the literary side referring to cultural attainment. So I think scholars and the second masculine ideal is relating to martial valor. So this is in a classical sense all about military achievements. So we can think soldiers here. Straight away, we can see that these two ideals are pretty much on opposite sides of the spectrum. One side, it's all about being cultured, well versed in the classics and educated through books, poetry and the likes. And the other is related to martial valor and military achievements. And so we can see already the existence of a masculine ideal that we don't really see in the West. Yeah, Andrew, this is a subject that we brought up before. And I think it's really, really difficult to cover in a short period of time. But Wen and Wu are like she described. One is more like Q from James Bond and one is like James Bond himself, even though James Bond has some suave aspects of him. Like one is like the brute guy who carries out the gadgets IRL and the other guy is the genius who invented it. Yeah, and I do think that great leaders and great generals, you need both in Chinese society, that's what they say, right? You should have both Wu and Wen. But I think that it's not as simple. And I think people get Wu and Wen mixed up with like Wu just being Jason Momoa and then Wen being Timothee Chalamet. Like it's actually not so much based only in physicality, because like, you know, if you look at, you know, old Chinese leaders, they weren't always like the most cut buffest, biggest guys. Like you didn't need to do that to win wars. You just had to have that mind for dominating your opponent. And that could happen in so many different ways rather than just like arm wrestling. Yeah, it's very difficult to compare it to the Western image because you've got like Conan the Barbarian and all these guys with like eight packs that look like bodybuilders, but also good at fighting. Whereas like obviously in the older Chinese era films, I believe it's called Meng Fu. These guys actually kind of have like pot bellies. And they actually more represent like if you look at up photos of actually how real Navy SEALs that go on a lot of missions and like nowadays look, they don't necessarily look all super cut like fitness models. They look more like beefy dudes. Yeah, they're super foofy dudes, but they're not like aesthetic. Yeah, they're they're some thick dudes. Yeah. So it's already becoming kind of like difficult to compare the East and the West because they've never had like the lifting culture over there. To look at the early years of the People's Republic of China, you have Liu Shaoqi being the administrator, representing Wen, and Zhu De being the general, representing Wu. And above the both of them was Mao Zedong, the chairman. So even though Chinese masculine ideals can be split between Wen and Wu, what's interesting is that the leader is usually said to possess both. So we can see that the idea of Wen and Wu are crucial to understanding traditional Chinese masculinity. But what's interesting about this is that though well documented, these ideals only represent what men thought the ideal man was. So does this change if we bring women into the picture? So, of course, Andrew, the most successful person in anything is a guy who got both bars up, right? It's kind of like LeBron. LeBron is revered for his physicality, but there's a ton of other players who have had somewhat similar physicality in his life, right? In the NBA careers. However, they have never had the skill and basketball IQ that LeBron has. LeBron almost has the IQ of like a John Stockton, but he got the body of Karl Malone and the hops of Jordan. That's why LeBron is by considered like a top three player of all time. And one thing I always find interesting is like Chinese culture, man. It's always about the balance, right? Like, oh, you got to balance Wu and Wen and then you're the greatest. You got to balance your yin and your yang. And, you know, it's like all about balance. And I think that is something that is not always talked about as much in the West. I think the West understands it, too. It's kind of like a general idea, right? That you want the Renaissance man, right? Renaissance kind of indicating you have no real weaknesses, almost like Kobe's game. Kobe had no weaknesses. But I almost feel like like what's the ideal percentage breakdown? Like, is it 50-50, 50% Wu, 50% Wen? Is that the best guy? Or is it like some people are like, oh, yeah, for a leader, you want 70-30? I don't know. Maybe it's 50-50. That's how Chinese kind of see it, in my opinion. And don't really reflect what females thought the ideal man should be like. However, this all changes in 1978 when China's economic reform happens. Two things became different. First, China went from a centrally planned economy to a market based one. And second, women joined the workforce. So they actually have purchasing power now because they have money. And so there are entire markets out there now with just the female demographic in mind. So what happens to depictions of men when there are genres that are targeted to women and made by women? One such genre that took off was a portrayal of Bishonen from Japanese mangas. Bishonen, meaning beautiful youth, generally featured boys that were, as the name suggests, beautiful. Now, this whole idea of beauty and men wasn't a foreign concept in China. In the Beijing opera, First off, I got to give Aini props because she really knows a lot about history, clearly reads way more books than I do, way more books than a lot of people. I will say this. The sort of the connection between the cultural revolution and then the economic reopening and then the catering of the economic market and then the influence with the Bishonen from Japan. I'm not saying all those things didn't happen, but the connection to like Chinese women liking the real flower Bishonen pretty boys. It seems like kind of a reach to me. Yeah, I mean, I get what you're saying. I think that a better comparison between Western masculinity and Eastern masculinity is actually just British and French masculinity versus instead of American, right? More of the imperial societies that have maintained the royal families. Also, very old countries. A love of the Xinhua and the love of the Bostonian. Guys, we're talking about societies that had emperors and kings. I think you have to look at those kind of societies because what who was the most sought after man that was a bachelor, the prince and the princes always generally. I mean, at least in media, in our minds was like soft looking. I think a lot of the appeal of this effeminate look is that they look rich and they look like royalty, like they look like upper class, because maybe if you're buff and you got a beard and stuff like that, then you're probably from a blue collar family, you know? And then obviously these societies are very hierarchical and based around dynasties and royalties. I will say that one thing that I noticed and I'm not criticizing Aini, like I said, she knows a lot more about Chinese history than I did. She did a great job. But like there is a certain level of inevitable hyper clunkiness when you compare China, the oldest country in the world, to America, the newest country in the world. And America is like a really crazy mix of a lot of things with a lot of rebel spirit and a lot of hyper diversity in thought and religion and everything layered on top of it. China essentially like has very little of that in comparison on a per capita ratio basis. So any comparison, I'm just like, yeah, it's tough. Like you said, much better to compare it to other ancient imperial civilizations around the world, because America is like a new country. It's almost like an expansion team. You can't compare that to like the legacy of like the Celtics and the Lakers. This next clip is about whether we should blame Japan and Korea for this effeminate image. This really shows the transnational trends that are forming and the crossover of different ideals. So with the rise of Bishonen and Flower Boys in the 1990s, we saw a softer, prettier masculine ideal emerge. Two quick notes on this. First, though Japan and Korea had a big influence on this portrayal of softer masculinity, it's not like this ideal didn't exist in China before. Depictions of Caizi from the Caizi Jiaren literary genre popular in the Ming and Qing dynasties would feature this sort of softer masculine ideal. And second, because we've been talking about beauty so much, it's not that beauty has always been separate from masculinity, but rather it's just a more important trait now than it was before. And this sort of beauty is part of a transnational trend coined as the Pan East Asian soft masculinity. And this period of time was when depictions of masculinity across China, Japan and Korea was viewed as exceptionally feminine to the West. I mean, I would essentially agree with her theory right here that there was a historical basis to like really flowery, pretty boys, even dating back to the Peking opera. Like she said, the Ming and Qing dynasties. I mean, we could point back to paintings from various dynasties. I think it shifted. Somebody told me actually that Wen and Wu shifted every 500 years. And it had to do with like whether you are at war with the nomadics from the north, which are obviously, you know, the Mongolians and stuff like that, that are way more conventionally masculine. So it kind of like made everybody boss up at that moment. It also varied per province. I know she didn't mention that the northern provinces typically have been more masculine than like Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Watertown regions, because they're more like, I guess, free from war or whatever. Anyway, that's like a bunch of other crazy stuff that we can get into. But yeah, I generally would agree with her. Like there was a historical basis. And then obviously China economically lagged behind Japan and Korea. So when they were able to import their stuff, it like filled the gap that China wasn't even able to fill, but they had the desire for. Right. And then also, I think something that you have to realize is like, man, if you were an artist back in like the Ming dynasty, you were probably educated on some level. So it's a lot of the a certain class of person is creating all this media back then. It's not necessarily like we said, like the poor, athletic, strong farmer is not painting and writing his own history. We're talking about the educated scholar class that is writing and painting history. So, of course, they're going to paint people probably more in their image, which I don't fully blame them because the winners or the educated class always write history, whether it's the people who can actually write Chinese back then, which not everybody could. I would say people who had the skills to paint. So who had the skills to paint? It was the painters and the artists and the painters and artists. They're not the most maybe typically masculine. And I've read about this before. Chinese history specifically does have a strong bias towards the scholars and the learned class. And Chinese a very difficult language. So at a time like, you know, it's it's more opened up over time. But for the most part, it was more like the top end people writing history for everybody. All right, let's play. Post was making was that the men in this picture were both 19 years old, but somehow there was such a big difference because Mbappé being a real man led France to victory, whilst in China you have youths like the TF boys. And that just leads to an effeminate China or a weak China. You know, something tells me that the original commenter was just salty that China hasn't made a single World Cup since 2002. But yeah, sure. Blame it on effeminate men. What's most interesting about these nationalist remarks, though, is how paradoxical these sentiments are. You're fueled by nationalism. You're making a post on wanting to make China great again. But there's a clear sense of self-orientalism because in the same post, you're making Western masculine ideals as the norm and you're pitting Chinese masculinity or yourself against it and posing it as inferior. So that's just one side of the coin, with the government straight up denouncing effeminate depictions of men. However, on the other side, as you might have already picked up on, has a lot to do with nationalism. So I agree and disagree with Aini here, but I'll just start with what I disagree with, because that's, you know, how you do an analysis of something. Basically, she's saying that that juxtaposition of Mbappé and TF Boys is wrong. Obviously, we get this unfair. It's unfair because you should compare Mbappé with the horrible Chinese national soccer team, where they probably look way more masculine than the TF Boys, but they still suck at soccer because soccer is very teamwork centric. But like it's more about how a society values something. It's not about the existence of this thing. It's about what's getting props and what's getting props is a mix. Andrew, when an archetype of a personality set or aesthetic sets gets props, is it the government pushing it or is it more market driven from the citizens? Right. I don't know. But I will tell you this. If China wants like guys to weightlift more, they need to promote and pay more money to the Olympic weightlifters because China had a lot of great weightlifters, men and women. And they probably need to focus on the guys that are like maybe a weightlifter is particularly like good looking. So he kind of has the Wen face, but like a Wu body. That's going to be like the transition point. Like I'm not, by the way, I'm not supporting this. I'm just saying if the government was really interested in increasing, like shifting it from Wen to Wu because, you know, it splits every 500 years and they're feeling like they're entering a period when they're going to need more Wu. You would like want to incentivize it with people who are hybrids. Yeah. And also you want to incentivize people with money. Let's be honest. So I'm saying like Su Bing Tian, the Chinese sprinter, who's kind of a stocky dude, no more Wu. You got to make him a star. I'm just saying these are the types of things that I think America already did partially because America already saw the blue collar market in America. And America is kind of a blue collar country. Anyways, they saw that's blue collar, even though the money is very white collar here. Yeah, the money's white collar. But actually the audience for entertainment is often very blue collar. So they saw like the blue collar market and they were like, oh, we'll give a Mark Wahlberg. Oh, we'll give them like Chris Pratt. Like these are guys who kind of appeal to both sides who are blue collar. Yeah, more blue collar. But I'm saying, you know, they have a little bit of appeal. Yeah, because Mark Wahlberg, for example, he runs all his businesses. A white collar guy can appreciate how empire minded he is. Exactly. All right, everybody. This is going to be our last clip from her video. If you guys want to watch the whole thing, I'll leave a link down below. But we're about to give you our final analysis and takeaways after this. Not really not the be all end all at all. So I thought that was a really good comment to keep in mind and also a great kickstarter to this conversation. Next, we have a comment from Yin who says true, but I also think that feminine type men are becoming more popular in the West like Timothee Chalamet. I think women in general feel more safe than being with this macho type of guy that could kill you with one strangle. I mean, if we look at all the assaults done to women, we want a more kinder, softer looking guy. And there's a lot to unpack there, but it's a great comment. First of all, we're seeing more diversity in terms of how masculinity is expressed in the West as well. Yin is spot on by saying that there are more feminine depictions of masculinity come through. And some great examples are celebrities like Zayn, Harry Styles and Timothee Chalamet, who kind of embody a softer masculine appeal. I think the West has always been hyper diverse and like what it liked and what it didn't like. There's always been a lot of lanes open. Honestly, I even think Korea and Japan being more modeled after the West, whether organically or by, you know, concerted effort actually have a lot more lanes than China does. China has like the most strictest look standards and only like one or two lanes for both genders, despite being a country of like one point four billion. It's almost like you don't fit this thing and you're a boy. You don't fit this thing in your girl. You suck. Whereas in other countries, it's like, hey, man, get in where you fit in. So it goes to show you it is different. But I do think in the West, with the rise of all the identity fueled movements, for sure, it's opened up as it should. I welcome more diversity in the West, but I would always say that it was always more diverse here. Like we said, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Prince. And then you add that juxtapose with Stallone, Mr. T, all the WWE, NFL, hockey. Like America has always had like everything because America is like not a country of one group of people. It's actually of like thousands of different people. You know, you want to hear this theory that I got about China? I think that China for a few decades in the age of media was promoting only one depiction of beauty for each gender, right? Right. They were like, you know, Fuxua women got to look like this. Gao Fuxua men got to look like this because they wanted all of their citizens to follow suit and be like classy and clean and become like these people. However, now you're starting to see, I guess, in their opinion, the extreme effects of that, where now they think that men are getting too effeminate. So now there's like this pushback in a reverse going to like, hey, guys, let's promote some athletic guys versus they wanted to all like promote like the royal look. So so now it's kind of like they're just making pivots. And you can even say that the reverse of that, Andrew, shout out to our homies higher brothers like higher brothers ran like as an antithesis to that like princeling thing, because those dudes are kind of like almost just some like crazy trap rappers. I mean, they're the Chinese Migos, essentially. Yeah. Overall, it was a very good video from Aini. Obviously, we can't go through every single point, every single little detail. It just take way too long. Overall, I have a couple of thoughts. One, I totally get where she's coming from. I do not in the macro big picture sense fully disagree with her premise. I do, however, think she left out a lot of nuance about a lot of different types of archetypes of guys. Also, I don't think she addressed that. You can just look like a pretty boy and think like a woo like masculine guy or you can look like a woo guy and like have the personality of a soft pretty boy. I think she was assuming that a personality set automatically comes with an aesthetic set where obviously there's correlation. But it's not like a hundred out of a hundred times somebody who looks soft is soft, right? There's like humans are nuanced in 2022. Yeah, I would also say like the whole woo versus when thing kind of you can boil it down to if I had to in other Western terms, like a man's man and a man's woman, like a lot of women are going to lean towards the one guy even in America today. Like I'm not saying it's more than the buff guy, but or the woo guy. But I think that that's where society is shifting, right? That's why there's actually a rejection from the man's man side of things. And that's where you get the man's fear because they're like, what? Like women, right? You're saying the existence of the man's fear is indicative of a backlash counter movement to the movement moving towards the wind side. It's tied to it for sure. It's not like one for one directly. But of course, those things are tied together. Of course, when society is starting to value more effeminate men in American society or, you know, whatever. And then, yeah, the man's man's like Andrew Tate or whatever. They're going to come up and be like, what? Like you guys don't want men don't want to work out and learn how to fight. So I guess there's that whole conversation. So I guess it is interesting that this whole conversation of who and when can actually. Yeah, it can lead back to even why the man's fear even exists in America. Yeah. I mean, I just think it's a very clunky comparison. Anytime you are directly one for one trying to compare China, which is a very old country, 5000 years, that it's just gone through so many ups and downs and crazy system shifts. And then you're comparing it to an expansion team that is actually a patchwork quilt of a lot of different races and religions living under some Anglo-Saxon principles. Right. Which is America. But so there's only 250 years old, 5000, one group of people versus 250 years, like 100 groups of people. It's just very, very difficult. And that's where I guess I disagree with. I was on some of our assertions of like, well, yeah, maybe Easter masculinity is femininity. And I was like, no, I don't think that's true. I just think that Han Chinese culture has always leaned more towards the poetic. Like what we view modern day is like metrosexual. That it's always just lean that way. But they always had everything and they always needed everything. I will say this, though, and to defend Aini's point, I do think there's something about Chinese culture in particular that like weighted it towards the when like 80, 20, like pro like poetry, Wang Lihong, Jay Chou guy. You know what I mean? Like I just think for whatever illustrious history man ended up 80, 20. That way, I think even Koreans and Japanese and Viets even have a little bit of a better balance. Like let's say, for example, it even leans towards the soft boys. There's might be like 55, 45 pro soft boy, whereas like China's like 80, 20. I just think for a country that big, they can't like be so lopsided one way or the other. Like, you know, you can argue Mongolia is too lopsided the other way. Right. It's all pro-masculine men. 80, 20 pro-masculine. That's not good either. Maybe it was a rejection from the maybe it was a rejection of the toxic masculinity of Genghis Khan, where he came to take over and he wrecked stuff. He didn't build governments as well. He didn't really build like new language. He's just a good fighter. And he was just a good like destroyer and dominator. Oh, yeah. You know, I got to say, even after a thousand years, China, we're still experiencing some PTSD from the Mongolian empire. So, you know, we just wanted the opposite of that. So, yeah, pretty boys is what we came up with. So we kind of went with the guy, the guy that Genghis will never accept in his horde. It's a theory. I got theories, people. Anyways, you guys let me know in the comments down below what you think of that theory, guys. I also wanted you to answer the question. Maybe like should we as Eastern people value Western masculinity? I mean, it makes sense if you are in the Western world or not, because maybe Western or not, because maybe Western masculinity is also changing. But let me know in the comments down below, guys. We are the Hot Pop Boys. Shout out to Aini for a great video. And until next time, we out. Peace.