It's sexist and racist anytime women or men are expected to hold themselves to standards that are unrealistic. This is the same as Asian women widening their eyes to look more caucasian. It strikes me as a waste of time to pretend to be someone you're not.

It's odd though. If you look at classical art you can generally see that men are depicted with dark skin and women with skin so pale it borders on translucent.

I don't think that's quite right -- if you look at old Asian paintings, or read old Korean poetry, you'll see that light skin has always been praised -- and this is long before the culture became influenced by Caucasians. It had to do with class issues -- if you were light skinned, you didn't have to work outside. After all, many Asians are very light skinned to begin with -- and light skinned Asians don't look "white" -- they just look like lighter skinned Asians.

The interest in being lighter-skinned is problematic even if it is class-based, but why insist that it must be racial? It's just not the case that everyone wants to look white -- and it's unproductive, and wrongheaded, to insist otherwise. Thousands of white women have their lips plumped to make them fatter, but no one says that they are trying to look black. That people don't have a tizzy about white women trying to look "black," while assuming that Asian women *must* want to look "white" says more about the observers' racial biases than anything else.

Were geishas trying to be anglo? No. Dark skin was the mark of the peasant. If anything, this is classist, not racist.

Take a look at clothing from that era - everything was designed to distance the woman from physical labor (overlong sleeves, long nails, tiny feet, pale skin, elaborate hairstyles).

Similarly, large eyes were associated with beauty, youth and virtue.

Early art from many Asian cultures shows this trend - and considering the racist attitudes that China and Japan held towards outsiders, I doubt that their women would be encouraged to emulate them.

You also see this in ancient Egyptian art, where wealthy women are depicted as being very light-skinned compared to their darker husbands. And I second Jean, I read a fair number of translated Asian fairy tales when I was a kid and you'd see this same motif. Part of their traditional cinderella tales in (IIRC) China involve the virtuous and dark peasant girl/maid being transformed into a pale beauty.

The custom of foot-binding was similar. Lower class women had to work and needed unmangled feet, but if you had aspirations for your daughter, the standards of upper class beauty demanded that their feet be bound and permanently crippled. It sounds barbarous, but not that much more so than Victorian corsetry.

Also wrt the distinction being class-based, it isn't much different than the classical European standard of feminine beauty tending towards the heavy. Only someone from a wealthy family would be that well-nourished.

uhhh... foot binding was a lot worse than corsetry. Seriously bad stuff.

Yes, I think I clearly see The Patriarchy's hand in this. There must be a conspiracy of men in China forcing women to bleach their skin.

And, if that is not the case, then at least we can blame it on men not making enough money for their women. These women feel the need to bleach their skin in order to look more wealthy than they are. It's definitely the man's fault.

Iguana's right. Foot-binding and corsets were actually feminist conspiracies to get women out of work. And FGM is a feminist conspirarcy to make sex so painful for women that they can get out of that too. And skin whitening creams are a feminist conspiracy to.....damn, well, probably to make men look bad somehow.

I don't know that much about the class history of Asian countries, but I don't think we can just cut out the race factor in this issue.

In the past, for white Americans having fair skins was also a sign of being higher class (just like in Asia, I suppose), as opposed to those darker skinned "red necks" that worked outside. In more recent decades, however, this has somewhat switched. Being upper class means having the leisure time to get a tan.

So my question is, given that there arent' that many Asian-Americans working out in the fields here in the states, why isn't it the opposite -- i.e. why aren't they interested in having "tans" instead of bleaching?

I don't really have the answer. But I really think race plays into this. Its similar for most people of color - they don't want to be darker (which is the opposite of white people). Ideas?

I see a lot of the younger Asians into tans and the like. But, on a daily basis I see older women with umbrellas and big hats to sheild themselves from the sun. Also, and this is an ethnic/racial thing, it depends on where you are from in Asia. It is one thing to be Korean/Japanese/from certain places in China ... but being from Vietnam/Cambodia is different.

Being Chinese-American myself, I remember my mother telling me to stay out of the sun. As typical of Chinese parents, she did not explain the reason for her instructions.

The reason being that pale skin is not only associated with the upper classes, but also with female virtue and spiritual refinement. A quick look at the popular Hong Kong actresses of any generation will show you that they are all overwhelmingly pale, with only one or two token dark-skinned actresses allowed per generation. It's part of the virgin/whore dichotomy: pale-skinned skinny models and actresses are put on pedestals and given highly paid contracts and starring roles (they can get any type of role, especially "good girl" roles), while dark-skinned buxom actresses are marginalised into playing "bad girl" roles (gangster moll, demoness, prostitute) or porn.

Perhaps one reason that Asian women try to avoid tanning is a fear of being stigmatised as disreputable. For them, I think the motivation is not so much racism as classism and sexism.