5 ms·

Don't forget the anti-asian racism implicit to the belief that soy, a food eaten widely in asia, makes you weak and feminine (whatever that means). The backlash

Don't forget the anti-asian racism implicit to the belief that soy, a food eaten widely in asia, makes you weak and feminine (whatever that means). The backlash to soy is inextricably tied to old stereotypes of asians as weak and docile.

lupusreal 3y ago
Soy has long been grown in America but it isn't a traditional part of western diets and was generally considered animal feed (more so in the past than now). This isn't because Asians did eat it, but because westerners didn't in the first place.
philwelch 3y ago
No, it isn’t. The stereotypical “soy boy” is a white vegan polyamorous hipster from a West Coast city, and most of the backlash to soy is targeted at processed foods than Asian cuisine. It’s more adjacent to the sort of right-wing hippie natural food scene that likes to slonk raw eggs than to any sort of anti-Asian racism.
- Klonoar 3y ago
  Yeah, no, the person you’re responding to is not wrong. “Soy boy” as an insult has never been about processed foods - what are you on about?
  - philwelch 3y ago
    It's never been about anti-Asian racism, either. It's largely targeted at vegans but soy is also an extremely common ingredient in processed foods, and is probably associated more with them because of Soylent and the movie Soylent Green. More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. It's not about Asian people. It's about a specific type of white person.
    - Klonoar 3y ago
      > More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. No shit. The person you're responding to wasn't even remotely suggesting this. ;P Their entire point is that by acting as if soy is this problematic ingredient, but failing to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems, is inherently racism-tinged/backed. It has always been an attempt to decry non-meat-eating as effeminate by attempting to attribute a poorly drawn study from well over a decade ago that people seemingly barely read through.
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        People in North America lacked exposure to soy consumption because in most of the continent they lacked exposure to Asian culture in general. Soybeans spread across the continent as animal fodder, much faster than asian culture did. They didn't reject all the various forms of tofu, most of them never heard of tofu in the first place. And when some tofu finally became commercially available in North America, most people dismissed it as a bland and inferior alternative to meat because that's essential what is was as presented to them. Furthermore the premise of soybeans being feminizing, the claim made up thread that prompted this sub-discussion, is a 21st century meme that cannot possibly explain why 18th, 19th and 20th century farmers in North America grew soybeans for their livestock but not themselves. Nor is the reason for this because they hated Asian people, the reason is because they were never well exposed to Asian culture in the first place. Even if you want to blame that on the Chinese Exclusion Act (at the end of the 19th century) and therefore racism, the production of soybeans for animal feed was already established generations earlier. The large expanse of the Pacific Ocean and the slow permeation of culture prior to the information age has more to do with it that anything else. We're talking about an era in which North American coastal communities thought lobster was a shitty food despite Mediterranean Europeans knowing it to be delicious since at least the Roman era. Food culture didn't travel fast, it took people several generations to figure out foods new to them even when those foods were well understood by people who looked like them and with whom they had relatively high cultural exchange.
      - philwelch 3y ago
        The person I’m responding to claims “the backlash to soy is inextricably tied to old stereotypes of asians [sic] as weak and docile.” You are claiming that it “[fails] to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems”. These are two different claims.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent. Its not about edamame. Furthermore this meme/insult is new while soy has been grown but not consumed by most people in the west for many generations. The meme cannot explain soys status in the west because it came late.
    - philwelch 3y ago
      Soy has been a filler in processed foods for some time.
    - Klonoar 3y ago
      > The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent. No, it has been around for longer than that. Soylent is a tertiary at best aspect to this.
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        Earliest archived use of the term on 4chan was from 2017, several years after soylent meal replacement shakes hit the market. Soy was also being used in various other vegan and/or processed foods at the time, but soylent was particularly conspicuous due to it having soy right in the name. Regardless of which particularly product prompted this, the point is the meme is new but westerners not eating soy is not new and cannot be attributed to the meme, nor is the meme even about asians. The memes mocked white guys in the west who eat soy products, particularly soylent. As for the general aversion to eating soybeans, read the Wikipedia page for soy. It has a short history of soy consumption in North America since the introduction of the beans here in the 18th century. For most of their history in North America they were raised almost exclusively as animal feed. This wasn't because of a meme that didn't then exist, nor because anti-asian racism; it simply wasn't considered very good to eat. America got the bean itself from Asia but not the culture of tofu production and consumption. In the 20th century methods of processing soybeans for human consumption started to be developed in North America, but it would take several decades to gain any appreciable traction. The "soybeans are effeminizing" train of thought only came about very recently in response to soybeans actually being consumed now in North America. The memes about "soyboys" exclusively featured white men who were usually skinny or skinny-fat, office workers who lacked physical strength, not laborers, usually with thick-rimmed glasses and an enthusiasm for immature interests like video games or saturday morning cartoons. The memes were about these sort of white men, not about Asians. Tldr: these memes weren't about Asians and neither were they the reason it took so long for soybeans to catch on. That's completely ahistorical, wrong by centuries.

lupusreal 3y ago

Soy has long been grown in America but it isn't a traditional part of western diets and was generally considered animal feed (more so in the past than now). This isn't because Asians did eat it, but because westerners didn't in the first place.

philwelch 3y ago

No, it isn’t. The stereotypical “soy boy” is a white vegan polyamorous hipster from a West Coast city, and most of the backlash to soy is targeted at processed foods than Asian cuisine. It’s more adjacent to the sort of right-wing hippie natural food scene that likes to slonk raw eggs than to any sort of anti-Asian racism.

Klonoar 3y ago
Yeah, no, the person you’re responding to is not wrong. “Soy boy” as an insult has never been about processed foods - what are you on about?
- philwelch 3y ago
  It's never been about anti-Asian racism, either. It's largely targeted at vegans but soy is also an extremely common ingredient in processed foods, and is probably associated more with them because of Soylent and the movie Soylent Green. More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. It's not about Asian people. It's about a specific type of white person.
  - Klonoar 3y ago
    > More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. No shit. The person you're responding to wasn't even remotely suggesting this. ;P Their entire point is that by acting as if soy is this problematic ingredient, but failing to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems, is inherently racism-tinged/backed. It has always been an attempt to decry non-meat-eating as effeminate by attempting to attribute a poorly drawn study from well over a decade ago that people seemingly barely read through.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      People in North America lacked exposure to soy consumption because in most of the continent they lacked exposure to Asian culture in general. Soybeans spread across the continent as animal fodder, much faster than asian culture did. They didn't reject all the various forms of tofu, most of them never heard of tofu in the first place. And when some tofu finally became commercially available in North America, most people dismissed it as a bland and inferior alternative to meat because that's essential what is was as presented to them. Furthermore the premise of soybeans being feminizing, the claim made up thread that prompted this sub-discussion, is a 21st century meme that cannot possibly explain why 18th, 19th and 20th century farmers in North America grew soybeans for their livestock but not themselves. Nor is the reason for this because they hated Asian people, the reason is because they were never well exposed to Asian culture in the first place. Even if you want to blame that on the Chinese Exclusion Act (at the end of the 19th century) and therefore racism, the production of soybeans for animal feed was already established generations earlier. The large expanse of the Pacific Ocean and the slow permeation of culture prior to the information age has more to do with it that anything else. We're talking about an era in which North American coastal communities thought lobster was a shitty food despite Mediterranean Europeans knowing it to be delicious since at least the Roman era. Food culture didn't travel fast, it took people several generations to figure out foods new to them even when those foods were well understood by people who looked like them and with whom they had relatively high cultural exchange.
    - philwelch 3y ago
      The person I’m responding to claims “the backlash to soy is inextricably tied to old stereotypes of asians [sic] as weak and docile.” You are claiming that it “[fails] to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems”. These are two different claims.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent. Its not about edamame. Furthermore this meme/insult is new while soy has been grown but not consumed by most people in the west for many generations. The meme cannot explain soys status in the west because it came late.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    Soy has been a filler in processed foods for some time.
  - Klonoar 3y ago
    > The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent. No, it has been around for longer than that. Soylent is a tertiary at best aspect to this.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      Earliest archived use of the term on 4chan was from 2017, several years after soylent meal replacement shakes hit the market. Soy was also being used in various other vegan and/or processed foods at the time, but soylent was particularly conspicuous due to it having soy right in the name. Regardless of which particularly product prompted this, the point is the meme is new but westerners not eating soy is not new and cannot be attributed to the meme, nor is the meme even about asians. The memes mocked white guys in the west who eat soy products, particularly soylent. As for the general aversion to eating soybeans, read the Wikipedia page for soy. It has a short history of soy consumption in North America since the introduction of the beans here in the 18th century. For most of their history in North America they were raised almost exclusively as animal feed. This wasn't because of a meme that didn't then exist, nor because anti-asian racism; it simply wasn't considered very good to eat. America got the bean itself from Asia but not the culture of tofu production and consumption. In the 20th century methods of processing soybeans for human consumption started to be developed in North America, but it would take several decades to gain any appreciable traction. The "soybeans are effeminizing" train of thought only came about very recently in response to soybeans actually being consumed now in North America. The memes about "soyboys" exclusively featured white men who were usually skinny or skinny-fat, office workers who lacked physical strength, not laborers, usually with thick-rimmed glasses and an enthusiasm for immature interests like video games or saturday morning cartoons. The memes were about these sort of white men, not about Asians. Tldr: these memes weren't about Asians and neither were they the reason it took so long for soybeans to catch on. That's completely ahistorical, wrong by centuries.