There’s been a big increase in peoples’ interest in Asian women in the last few years, starting around the time the movie “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” came out, picking up steam with Lucy Liu on the hit TV show “Ally McBeal”, and with flareups from time to time when some celebrity gossip or news comes out, such as the marriage of media mogul senior citizen Rupert Murdoch to the much younger Chinese Wendi Deng. Since then, many high-profile Westerners have taken Asian wives, often after first leaving their own non-Asian wives. This is the case with Woody Allen, who left wife Mia Farrow to marry her adopted daughter, 35 years his junior.

These are two of the more extreme examples, and there are others which are just normal marriages. These women, far from being just “Asian Babes”, are also in many cases quite accomplished, ranging from newscasters to professional violinists.

On the flip side of the same coin, an overwhelmingly majority of the interest in Asian women takes on less savory forms, as when you have those who are Asian fetishists and only interested in Asian women for one thing. This is evidenced by the large number of websites and internet forums dedicated to Asian women photographed in compromising, semi-nude, nude, and downright pornographic situations. Clearly Asian women are an exotic species for such men, and the popularity of Asian females as sex object has earned them a wide range of derogatory names, much of it due to the jealousy of other, non-Asian women. It’s understandable that these women would feel threatened by the popularity of their Asian counterparts, especially if they have heard the stories or have the experience of their men leaving them for a younger female of Asian ethnicity.

The good news is, most Asians are just normal people who don’t need to fit into one of the above categories. These women could just be called “Babe”, or preferably “women”.