Naughty or Nice...

The Internet knows precisely who I am, and it scares me.

I'll take that back, the Internet has taken a wild guess about who I am and it's hit fairly close to the mark. As I wasn't scouring a Web site for streams of television programs that aren't on Hulu (and there are really so many, from House the day after to whatever particular flavor of Law & Order gets your motor running), I was invited to make a particular choice.

Did I like my Asian women naughty or nice?

Why can't I choose C?Now, I'm normally a thorough investigative journalist. Willing to sneak through the door into the Holy of Holies in order to find out what's happening in there and expose it to the world, possibly using sarcasm and ridicule. However I stopped here for a moment, confident in my quickly formulating assertions.

Also the model was in leather pants, you have to applaud the kind of daring it takes to stuff yourself into those, it's certainly something I could never do without a crane, two very strong men, and a tub of vaseline. Just try getting that out of your mind without trepanation.

There's something slightly unseemly about the obsession with Asian women in the dork community. In the end you love who you love but the subset of nerds that fall in love with some idea of "oriental" culture (generally Japanese) seems to be significant. I'm not saying that it's all unseemly and unsavory, there are admirable things about many cultures, but sometimes appreciation becomes escapism.

Recent cultural trends aside (where attractive dorks are paraded around like the latest and greatest things on television), being a nerd has never been the best way to be popular in America. That may have something to do with valuing knowledge over physical prowess, or merely all around dorkiness (autism spectrum disorders, plus a lack of hygeine and a dash of Dungeons and Dragons really don't make for a compelling Saturday night).

Escaping isn't all that uncommon, everyone wants to be a lot cooler than they really are (which for me would involve a song and dance number and a cast of thousands... of dinosaurs). Please take note of the aforementioned Dungeons and Dragons, the collected works of Jane Austen, musical theater (really theater of any sort) and of course obsessing over foreign cultures.

Japan holds a natural appeal for nerds for three reasons. The first two are undeniable, ninjas and giant robots. The third point, the breaking point, is Orientalism - the feeling that this other place must be the opposite of where they are, and that if they could just appropriate that culture they'd find a place where they could belong. I can't say that the urge is totally foreign to me, to run away and find a real home (and I'm not alone since that theme sold about 8 billion Harry Potterbooks).

That escapism, I think extends to women of that exotic other world. That Asian women, whether naughty or nice, are objectified as mysterious and subservient and look for things that caucasian women don't in a man. Never mind that the core of the problem never lay with the ladies failing to appreciate his overwhelmingly special specialness. This is the kind of thing that makes me feel a little bit disappointed in my fellow nerds, the kind of hubris of the underdog that says if you suffer enough in high school you deserve whatever your heart desires.

It's a poisonous pattern of thought, in the same way that The Secretcan be but that's a discussion for another time.

Here those sneaky marketers were, on a site combed over by dorks looking to snare them in by playing on their fantasies about Asian women and the promise of true love at the click of a button.

I checked out the rest of the Web site, and found an endless string of redirects for new services that I could sign up for at just 99 cents a text message or $19.99 a month. It appeared to be turtles all the way down, with nary a naughty or nice asian woman in sight.

Those sneaky bastards.