Fetishized Audiobook By Kaila Yu cover art

Fetishized

A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty

Pre-order: Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Fetishized

By: Kaila Yu
Pre-order: Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Pre-order for $18.20

Pre-order for $18.20

Confirm pre-order
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

A deeply personal memoir-in-essays, reckoning with being an object of Asian fetish and how media, pop culture, and colonialism contributed to the oversexualization of Asian women—from Kaila Yu, former pin-up model and lead singer of Nylon Pink.

No one fetishized Kaila Yu more than she fetishized herself. As a young girl, she dreamt of beauty. But none of the beautiful women on television looked like her. Growing up as a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s, Asian representation was scarce, and where it existed, the women were often reduced to overtly sexual and submissive caricatures—the geishas of the book turned film Memoirs of a Geisha; the lewd twins, Fook Mi and Fook Yu, in Austin Powers films; Papillon Soo Soo’s sex worker character in the cult Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket; and pin-up goddess Sung-Hi Lee. Meanwhile, the "girls next door" were always white. Within that narrow framework, Kaila internalized a painful conclusion: the only way someone who looked like her could have value or be considered beautiful and desirable was to sexualize herself.

Blending vulnerable stories from Yu’s life with incisive cultural critique and history, Fetishized is a memoir-in-essays exploring feminism, beauty, Yellow Fever, and the roles pop culture and colonialism played in shaping pervasive and destructive stereotypes about Asian women and their bodies. Yu revisits the formative moments that shaped her identity. She reflects on the women in the media who influenced her, the legacy of U.S. occupation in shaping Western perceptions of Asian women, her own experiences in the pin-up and import modeling industry, auditioning for TV and film roles that perpetuated dehumanizing stereotypes, and touring the world with her band in revealing outfits. She recounts altering her body to conform to Western beauty standards, allowing men to treat her like a sex object, and the emotional toll and trauma of losing her sense of self in the pursuit of the image she thought the world wanted.

Raw and intimate, Fetishized is a personal journey of self-love and healing. It’s both a searing indictment of the violence of objectification and a tender exploration of the broken relationship so many of us have with beauty, desire, and our own bodies.

©2025 Kaila Yu (P)2025 Random House Audio
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Fetishized

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.