Fight the New Drug (00:00)
Kaila, thank you so much for being here with us today on Consider Before Consuming. We’re here today to talk about your new book, Fetishized, and hear a little bit about your story. And I’m so grateful for this opportunity to get to speak with you today and share the message that you’re sharing. So for any of our listeners who might not be familiar with you yet, can you start by sharing a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?

Kaila Yu (00:23)
Yeah, I’m an author and a writer. And my book Fetishize is about the fetishization of Asian women and kind of my experiences with it. I worked as a pinup models in my early 20s and got into some dangerous situations. And then the book also covers like media that influenced me during the time, such as like Memoirs of a Geisha and Fast and Furious and the Harajuku Girls and Austin Powers. That turned out to be pretty fetishy now that we look back on it.

Fight the New Drug (00:57)
Yeah. Thank you. This book is so powerful and so important and so needed. Your book was just recently released on August 19th. What made you decide that now is the right time to tell your story in this way?

Kaila Yu (01:14)
Honestly, it was very much accidental. I never had any intention of writing a memoir. I had never had any intention of sharing some of the things that happened to be shared in there. But I feel like, you know, after I got sober, I kind of just look to where I’m guided to.

And then what happened was I was working as a travel writer and I was in love with that career and doing it and having a lot of success with it. And then the pandemic happened. So all my work was canceled. And I kind of still like saw it as an opportunity to work on projects that I didn’t have time to otherwise.

And I started social media is so important, even as a writer. And I always wanted to learn tech talk, but I never had the time, but now I had plenty of time. So I just started posting all kinds of content, trying anything that would work. And finally, when I started posting about my early years as a pinup model in the Asian American culture scene, those really started to take off.

And I started to talk about that time, like for a year, reflecting on this period of time I didn’t think about anymore. And then the Atlanta spa shootings happened. And what happened was that a sex addicted man went into, I think three different spas and shot eight people dead. And six of them were Asian women. And when we heard about that, all the Asian Americans knew this is like, what his motive was, you know, because we just know we’ve experienced this thing in our lives. But the media painted it as not fetishization and not sexually motivated, which later it came out from interviews that he did have a sex addiction. He was trying to get rid of it by taking it out on human beings. But yeah, ultimately, everybody was talking about that, then I started reflecting back on like how I might’ve contributed because I leaned into Asian fetish tropes when I was younger and I sexualized myself for validation. So that ultimately caused the ruminating that inspired the book.

Fight the New Drug (03:34)
And I want to come back a little bit to your experience when you were younger a little bit later that kind of inspired this as well. just, know, in the work that we do, we’re obviously familiar with how fetishization of, you know, many different groups of people affects the way that people see other human beings and function in our societies. But for someone who’s maybe less familiar with the term and might just associate it with attraction, can you

Kaila Yu (04:03)
Mm-hmm.

Fight the New Drug (04:03)
How would you describe fetishization to someone who’s never heard of the term, and how is it different from simple attraction?

Kaila Yu (04:11)
Yeah, that’s the big question. Whenever I post about fetishization, there’s like tons of men in my comments being really defensive and saying like, it’s just a compliment. And it’s a very nuanced and individual, like I can’t just point at someone and say you have a preference and you have a fetish. But here’s like how you can really break it down. Like I consider a fetish someone like the shooter who dehumanizes, treats women as interchangeable, disposable and like any Asian woman works. It doesn’t matter who she is. A good example was, did you watch White Lotus 3?

Fight the New Drug (04:52)
I haven’t seen it yet, no

Kaila Yu (04:53)
Well, there was a viral moment on there, which anyone can watch even if you because it’s viral clip of Sam Rockwell plays this guy who he’s like trying to find himself and he’s lost in drugs and alcohol. And he goes to Thailand and his like choices to sleep with thousands of Asian women, all kinds, whatever kinds to like find himself. So, yeah, that literal just treating women as tools and objects for pleasure.

Fight the New Drug (05:24)
In your book, a little bit when you talk about this definition, you mention how fetishizing Asian women is really teaching people that any Asian woman would do, right? It dehumanizes the person away from being an actual human being to just someone who checks some boxes. And I think that is really kind of a big differentiating factor as well. We did an interview several years ago with a woman who was the director of a center that was focused on combating human trafficking. And she said, when you dehumanize someone, it becomes easier to commit acts of violence against them. And I think that’s really something that is, you talk about quite a bit throughout your book, and it’s something that we really see as people are fetishized through the content that you’ve spoken about a little bit.

Kaila Yu (06:12)
Yeah, it’s, it’s people don’t always draw the line between it leading to violence. I didn’t even, I was experienced it myself and I didn’t even draw the line to like, this leads to violence. Like not a little bit of the time, you know?

Fight the New Drug (06:26)
Yeah, absolutely. I want to go back a little bit to something you mentioned a moment ago about how you sexualized yourself, right? How growing up you saw messages about Asian women in media and culture. How did they affect you personally?

Kaila Yu (06:44)
Well, there was no Asian role models growing up. I mean, it’s so different now. There still needs to be more representation now, but it’s exponential now. Like so many, you know, K-pop and K-dramas and everything. But when I was growing up, there was nothing. I don’t remember. I think like Connie Chung was popular as a newscaster, but I, you know, was looking for my Britney Spears of Asians and there was nothing like that. You know, as a teenager, that’s what you’re looking to idolize. And

Fight the New Drug (07:07)
Right. Right.

Kaila Yu (07:14)
So I wanted someone, but I didn’t find anyone. And then the internet was just kind of starting with AOL. And I went online and I discovered that there was a woman who was famous online already, even at the inception, you know, maybe a couple years in the internet. And her name was Sunghee Lee. She was a Playboy model. And I was like, my God, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen a beautiful woman that looks like me in this way. And I want to be her.

So from early on, I was like already headed in that direction. I was inspired by that into that direction.

Fight the New Drug (07:51)
So it really sounds like there was some influence in kind of the lack of representation that you had overall growing up. And then when there was representation, even you talk a little bit about some of the stereotypes that you saw in that representation. What were those like?

Kaila Yu (08:09)
Yes. So this was coming up at a time, I guess, when I was in high school, it was like Baywatch and Victoria’s Secret models. And we would get the catalogs and they were so sexy for, you know, beautiful, but quite sexy for female shopping catalog. And Sports Illustrated models were all over the TV. Those were like our huge iconic models. And then, then enter into the 2000s when I became like a older teenager and younger 20s. That was, I referenced this book called Feminist Chauvinist Pigs in my book. And she talks about how the early 2000s were like kind of a raunch era, which we were post-feminist and we celebrated embracing our sexuality as power. And then there were the sex tapes of like Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton and all of that.

Fight the New Drug (09:06)
So really in this time where we’re teetering on the cusp of women generally being hypersexualized or owning sexuality and calling it empowering, even if the industries they’re doing that within are designed to exploit women to a degree. How did that kind of influence your direction toward pinup modeling? What led you into

Kaila Yu (09:30)
Well, I just thought I was empowering. I, okay. So growing up, I was, you know, the boys ignored me and I, I never had a boyfriend. I wasn’t asked any dances and I was boy crazy. Like a lot of girls my age were, and boys didn’t pay attention to me. And it’s devastating, you know, when they’re paying attention to your friends or whatever. So I deeply, deeply wanted that validation.

And when I got that validation by being a little sexy and then a little sexier and a little sexier, it felt like love, know, like some empty hole that I had. It was never as fulfilling as love, but you know, for those hits, it felt like it was filling some hole inside.

Fight the New Drug (10:19)
Checking the boxes, right? Kind of getting that external validation and then needing a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more to kind of sustain that same feeling. In the work that we do at Fight the New Drug, we look at the harmful effects of pornography.

In your book, you speak about the fetishization of Asian women in pornography and how porn search terms like Japanese and Asian, these are portrayals of women often presented in stereotypes that can strip away the individuality. So we mentioned that a little bit earlier with kind of the objectification. But can you talk about what you discovered as you looked into that for your book about the representation of Asian women in pornography.

Kaila Yu (11:00)
Yeah, it’s often like orientalized. with like, you know, features that signify that they’re Asian or in situations where they’re submissive, which is a stereotype and also an inordinate amount of violence, especially kind of like rape scenarios were really popular for Asian women. And I think there was a study I quoted in the book where they had like found statistics that it was higher for Asian women.

And the other thing that was interesting is that like, say the top 10 Pornhub searches had a lot of Asian, like you said, Japanese, Hentai, Asian themed terms that were listed on the top. But when you looked on the top of the Pornhub porn stars, there were none, no Asians in the top 10. So to me, that signifies that like, again, any Asian woman, because there’s like not a star.

And then another thing that was disturbing was that during this time in the 2000s, a publication came out with a list of like, I forgot how many, but like say top 20 Asian porn stars. And at that time you couldn’t even name one Asian singer. So you have 20 porn stars. You couldn’t even really necessarily name five actresses you could know off, you know, one whatever.

Fight the New Drug (12:22)
Yeah, and I mean that has such a big impact, especially on you as a young person growing up with this influence culturally. After doing the research that you did for your book and then also with the experiences that you’ve had, what role does pornography play in reinforcing those sexual and racial stereotypes? And how do you see those narratives impacting real life attitudes and behaviors from porn consumers?

Kaila Yu (12:49)
I mean, there’s been so many studies. Like something I read recently was that young men who’ve grown up on porn, luckily my generation didn’t like grow up on it because it wasn’t available until we were teenagers. But young men who’ve been watching porn since a young age have trouble with real women because they don’t look like the women in pornography. There’s a certain look that’s very popular.

There’s also like, like choking is normalized now, but that wasn’t normal when I was growing up. Like that wasn’t even a thing, but now it’s like just kind of expected. cause it’s so common and like cum shots on the face, which that wasn’t a thing before, I don’t think. So I think it’s the whole, with the popularization of pornography, like when I was growing up, it was like Jenna Jameson and like these other

porn stars and there’s these elaborate sets where they would at least act out a storyline and like put some effort into it. But then Gonzo style pornography came out, which is like a first person held camera where the guy just films everything and it looks and there was just a deluge of that. And I think like the more violent that got, the more hits that we get. So it’s gotten really violent.

Fight the New Drug (14:08)
And I think it’s important that you’ve noted that because I think there’s tons of research to show that pornography fuels sexual violence, that it teaches consumers to expect or participate in a particular level of sexual violence. It especially teaches women to submit to a high level of sexual violence generally. But again, going back to that dehumanization, and as you mentioned, you said any Asian woman would do, or with other racial stereotypes, there’s this

level of dehumanization that makes it easier to commit these acts of sexual violence and pornography, which fuels the attitudes and perceptions that people go out into the world with, right? That fuels the way that they operate in society, which is concerning and something we should be talking about.

Kaila Yu (14:49)
Mm-hmm.

And I think with the pornography, it’s teaching young men that women enjoy this. Like this is what they want. It’s not like they want this violence even. It’s not as if it’s non-consensual in the way it’s presented, I think.

Fight the New Drug (14:59)
Yeah, absolutely. Over the years, how has your perception on the fetishization of Asian women and on what empowerment really looks like, how has that shifted over the years?

Kaila Yu (15:23)
Well, it’s like when I was growing up, I didn’t know about the Asian fetish because it just wasn’t, I guess, present in my high school or whatever, or even so much early college. But once I started to realize this was a thing, I was doing pinup modeling and then obviously a lot of my followers would naturally be people with a preference or a fetish. And then I would court them a little bit more like, I’ll wear a Chinese dress or whatever. School girl is always particularly popular amongst men, not just Asian women, I guess, which is like something else to unpack.

Yeah, I would lean into it when I was younger. And I didn’t consciously think I’m gonna lean into the Asian fetish. was just like, when I wear a cute Chinese outfit, that gets way more views. That’s all you’re really thinking at that age. But as I’ve gotten older, I just, I don’t lead with any of that. I don’t lead with my ethnicity, first of all, but like.

And I’m still a sexual person obviously and sex positive, but I don’t lead with sex with my interactions or relationships with men.

Fight the New Drug (16:40)
Yeah, and I think there’s so much important about what you said. One piece of that is in the same way that, you know, pornography, you mentioned with the rise of the internet, this generation that’s grown up with internet pornography is, it is different. It’s a different beast, for lack of better term, than pre-internet pornography, right? It is escalating in violence. It is more extreme and… and more hardcore and that’s being normalized in so many ways. But in the same way that that’s teaching consumers of pornography to accept that, we’re in a society that as young women often we’re not taught to question the role that is expected of us, right? The stereotypes that are expected of us. And so I love that you were able to note how that maybe influenced you of just you didn’t question it. This was what brought in money, what brought in clicks, what brought in…

Kaila Yu (17:21)
Mm-hmm.

Fight the New Drug (17:34)
the perception of fame or celebrity or whatever it is that someone’s looking for.

But we are influenced by the content that we have.

You mentioned that you’re not leading with your sexuality now and you’re still a sex positive person. And I think that’s an important piece of this conversation because often when we’re talking about the harms of pornography, it can sound like we’re demonizing sexuality. And healthy sexuality is natural and normal and what we’re fighting for in the work that we do is healthy relationships and healthy intimacy and helping people know what actual empowerment without objectification looks like. So I love being able to hear that that’s kind of been part of your journey through processing your story and now telling your story in your book.

Kaila Yu (18:16)
Yeah, I think that’s important too.

Fight the New Drug (18:19)
Yeah, Okay, so in your book, you acknowledged feeling both victimized and then, victimized by, and then also kind of complicit in perpetuating certain hypersexualized tropes.

Kaila Yu (18:31)
I did not feel victimized at the time. That wasn’t like a conscious thing. I felt as in like, I, this is what we do. You know, like this is what everybody’s doing. now looking back, I would say all the women were, you know, victims of just following, falling into the patriarchal trap. But I don’t think any of us thought of ourselves as victims at the time.

Fight the New Drug (18:34)
Right, and that’s, you know, goes back to what we were just talking about of existing in the system as it was built and how are you able to look back now with so much self-compassion on this time and on these experiences and be able to have that perspective shift?

Kaila Yu (19:12)
I mean, it’s just a lot of therapy, honestly. But yeah, I’ve gotten sober for 11 years and that whole time I’ve been doing a lot of recovery work and therapy and all of that. And a lot of reading about things and a lot of inner child work. So I think that is so important for anyone who feels victimized.

Fight the New Drug (19:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, and for all of us really. For all of us.

Kaila Yu (19:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be all women probably. I mean, what’s disturbing is when I bring up like the things that have happened to me, it’s literally how many women say me too. Like it’s more the minority of women who hasn’t been assaulted in some way.

Fight the New Drug (19:45)
Yeah, which is devastating and is also the world we live in, right? So we can all pretend that it’s not happening or we can acknowledge these are the statistics. One in four women, I believe, is where we’re at, they experience sexual violence, and we can say, let’s do something about it. Let’s have these conversations. Let’s look at what is upstream that’s affecting attitudes and perceptions that’s fueling this crisis of sexual violence and exploitation that we can address so we can have a positive downstream effect. So with that, I do want to ask you about in your book, you share about an experience you had with sexual assault that was recorded and then shared without your consent. Are you comfortable sharing a little bit about that with us?

Kaila Yu (20:36)
Yeah, basically, when I was in college and I was trying to pursue modeling for the first time, I was just looking at ads in the school newspaper and the local paper and I found an ad for models and I went to a couple auditions and some of them were totally fine and I showed up at one and that’s not what it was. I showed up, and it was me alone with this man who was decades older and very smooth and skilled at what he was doing. I don’t wanna like get into the details of the room, cause it’s like triggering, but what I will say is like another photographer, more than one photographer, had tried to get me into more hardcore work. I was always totally comfortable with Playboy and soft, like beautiful photography work, but I never like I was very, very anti anything hardcore. And several people had asked me or showed me like, I do this, you can make a lot more money. And I said, No, absolutely not. And I feel like I said that maybe two weeks before this situation. But I got there. And another notable fact is that I was a virgin. I had a boyfriend at the time who I had not even done I was madly in love with and I hadn’t done anything with. And I think we had been together six months and there’s no way. Well, I told this predator guy that I was a virgin and like certain things I didn’t know how to do. So he backed off on certain things. But other things that he coerced me into doing were things that I never experienced before.

So what I want to stress and why I’m sharing my story about this event is that I didn’t know it was assault for many years, because he didn’t like hold me down and like put a knife to my head or anything. What I believe what happened, because I don’t remember a lot of what happened in the room, I’ve watched the video since I don’t remember entire scenes like at all.

I believe I disassociated and there’s four responses which are fight, flight, fawn and freeze. And I think I did some combination of freeze and fawn. And then people are like, why didn’t you say no or like scream or do something? You never know what you’re gonna do in that situation. You also don’t know if you say no, if he’s going to then become violent. Nobody knew where I was.

I could have died and disappeared and just disappeared from the world. So I considered myself actually very lucky. But yes, I want to share this because not all women, some women might have experienced something similar. Maybe it’s not with a video, but with just a regular person and not considered it assault.

But to me, I’m considered assault because I was there under false pretenses. I was told I was going to be there for a photo shoot. And when I showed up and was already vulnerable by myself, much more was pressed upon me.

Fight the New Drug (23:54)
And I mean, also, first of all, I’m so sorry that happened to you and thank you for sharing that experience with us. I think it’s something that, you know, some people hear about and think it happens sometimes, you know, it’s an infrequent thing that happens over there. And it’s something that’s happening often and to a lot of people where they enter into a situation under, you know, one pretense thinking they’re getting into something and find themselves in something else. And, you know, I think it’s important to know you were so young. You’re a vulnerable woman with, alone with a much larger man who could become violent, as you said, or, know, you have no idea what could happen, and that’s out of circumstances.

Kaila Yu (24:36)
And what happened, maybe like 10 years later, was something happening in San Diego where a lot of pornographers were there for some reason. But there’s a really huge and famous girls do porn case where it was a little more dramatic than mine because they were like traffic.

It becomes trafficking because they were sending girls, young college coeds from like say Florida would fly in and be told they were doing a modeling shoot or whatever. And then it would turn out to be much more. And they sued successfully. Unfortunately for me, I’m pretty certain that my statute of limitations passed by the time I realized it was assault, but those women at least were able to file a class action suit and get all those guys arrested, actually.

Fight the New Drug (25:24)
And it’s such an important case. We were able to speak with one of the women who was in that situation. And again, it’s something that it is happening more than people realize. And so it’s important to make sure people are aware of it. So thank you again for sharing your story to help bring some attention to this. Something, you know, this doesn’t happen with every instance of sexual assault, but in your case, this was filmed and put on the internet. How did living under the weight of that for years, affect you, you know, personally and emotionally?

Kaila Yu (25:58)
Yeah, I mean, the assault was terrible, but I think the publication was maybe the worst because it’s lived on for decades. Like at least you can stuff it down and pretend it didn’t happen. But the strange thing was that I went home after the assault and never told a soul.

I didn’t tell my boyfriend, I didn’t tell anyone. And I fell into drugs and alcohol pretty deeply after that, so much that my grades got so bad I had to drop out of school. And I moved back to Los Angeles and it was a year later when one of my friends, one of my best friends called me and said, I saw you in a video. And then I was like, I had forgotten about it or stuffed it down.

Fight the New Drug (26:45)
Which, I think, is again normal. People experience this, and it’s why didn’t you tell someone? But you can’t know how someone will respond in that situation and what felt safest to you and the coping mechanisms that you chose it sounds like to be able to sustain getting up every day even after that had happened. I’m so sorry that this happened to you and I’m so sorry that this happens to a lot of men and women, boys and girls are victims of sexual violence every day.

You’ve obviously come so far in your journey with this, and that’s so apparent in the way that you’re able to tell this story in your book. What hope would you have to offer someone who’s maybe experienced something similar?

Kaila Yu (27:30)
It’s just that there are people who believe you because I still have that coming up. Like, I brought up the situation to another podcast who’s in the space and then they asked for like my lawyer’s approval to speak about this. And it was kind of like you’re asking me to prove that this happened. So my words are not enough again. And that’s why it took me 27 years to come forward because women are not believed. But for the victims, I’m like, there are people that believe you, but you have to go to the safe spaces because not every space, you know, just putting it out onto the internet without a team of friends or people you trust, people don’t understand.

Fight the New Drug (28:15)
And I think that’s something important to note as well for any listeners. We often hear the argument that even if, you know, I was sure that the pornography I was consuming, it came from a site that said it was all ethically produced. There’s really no way to guarantee that the person on the other side of the screen is experiencing what you think they are. You know, so often in pornographic content, whether it’s actual filmed

sexual exploitation or whether it is consensually made, in that are made to look like they’re enjoying what’s happening to them, the violence, the degradation. That’s part of the production of it, right? Things are cut and spliced and edited together in a way that you really have no idea what someone was experiencing. And so I think just a reminder as well that everything is not what it seems in a video. And some…

Something else, if you’re comfortable talking about it, in your book, you speak a little bit about, with some of the content you started producing online, how you would get comments, often sexualized comments, violent comments about, and those are things we experience as well, comments about rape, rape culture. Are you comfortable speaking about your experience with that at all?

Kaila Yu (29:34)
Well, yeah, I think that’s like what any woman experiences online, just like hateful, sexual or unwanted advances. like for my, was in a Yahoo groups at the time. And I didn’t go into them for this reason. A lot of the statements copied in my book are passed along by my manager’s assistant. But there was a lot of like, I dream of raping her, I wanna like stick chopsticks into this part or I want to have her eat my cum with chopsticks, like really vile. Besides the typical, know, I wanna do this and this and that, there was just a lot of violence in there also.

Fight the New Drug (30:20)
Yeah, and speaking to even bringing the chopsticks into this, even the racial piece of this, the sexualized racism really that is coming up. Is that something that as you’ve put out your new book, Fetishized, which I would recommend to any of our listeners to be able to hear your story and learn more, is that something that you had any fear about in putting this book out of what
attention you would you would get from this or has it only been positive as you’ve recently kind of pursued this?

Kaila Yu (30:56)
No, absolutely. I’m having a week for sure. I posted a video about the topic and now I’m getting really paranoid. Like what if it’s my word against his right. And I don’t believe that this person would come forward because I guarantee you there’s like probably dozens more victims, but who knows where these victims are 27 years later. But

Fight the New Drug (30:59)
Yeah.

Kaila Yu (31:25)
It’s like, what if he finds me, you know? There’s all kinds of paranoid thoughts, especially at like 3 a.m. in the morning. And then there’s the, what if people don’t believe me? there’s already people posting this morning right before I got on the call. Somebody posted like, well, you posed in Playboy. So like, how is this not consensual? So there’s men that will never understand either.

Fight the New Drug (31:53)
Yeah, and I just want to commend you for still, you know, it takes so much courage and bravery to still come forward and share your story, especially with the internet growing increasingly unashamed to say the most awful things and to really continue to dehumanize people who’ve already experienced some of the worst things. And I think, you know, that’s why it’s important to share these stories. It’s important for people to know that.

Someone can consent to one thing and not consent to something else. you know, sexual violence and assault can happen within a marriage, right? Just because someone consents to spend their life with someone does not mean that they consent to every single thing someone is going to do to them. you know, consent matters and these conversations matter. And I want to thank you for being brave enough to share this. I’m so sorry you’ve had to experience so many of the things that have happened to you that

Kaila Yu (32:25)
Mm-hmm.

Fight the New Drug (32:44)
gave you enough to write a book about this, but it’s so important to have each and every voice in this space really elevating this message. And we know that our platform of listeners will be inspired by this and hopefully this can help affect some change for others as well. If listeners take away one thing from your story, what do you hope it will be?

Kaila Yu (33:07)
That objectification of women isn’t harmless, which we kind of know, but we don’t realize that it often leads to violence. Same with fetishization, because that’s a common thing that men will say is like, it’s a compliment. Like, stop being so serious, you know? But I’ve experienced direct violence and many others have, so. It’s not harmless.

Fight the New Drug (33:33)
Yeah, and I think that’s something to note that if, you know, someone is telling you something is causing harm, perhaps the response should be to listen and affect change rather than to say, it’s just a joke, or it’s just a fetish, or it’s just, you know, a compliment. If the person you intended it for is telling you it’s not a compliment, then it’s good to take another look at that and take a step back and see.

Fight the New Drug (34:00)
Especially men, you know, obviously again, men and women can both be perpetrators, but statistically, men are perpetrators most of the time of sexual violence. Men and women can also be victims of sexual violence, but women are disproportionately victims. And so I think it’s important in this conversation to say, you know, women can shout from the rooftops, the things that we experience, but we also need men to step up and say, Hey, maybe we can do better. and.

And all of us, societally, can step up and say, maybe we can do better and affect change.

Kaila Yu (34:32)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, because when we say we have a problem with the patriarchy, we aren’t saying individual men. I think many men would not like to live under this, you know, they’re expected to be detached and unemotional and shamed for perhaps showing what’s quote unquote more feminine emotions. So it hurts everyone.

Fight the New Drug (34:56)
Yeah, and I think that’s so important, maybe to end on even is the systems that are set up, the normalization of pornography in society, these systems that are set up are harming everyone, right? They are inhibiting our abilities to have the most healthy and most fulfilling lives that we can and to take care of each other and humanity. so again, I’m so grateful for your work and you taking the time and capacity to share your story in Fetishized. We will make sure that our listeners are able to access this with the link in the show notes. Is there anything else you wanted to share about your book or any of your experiences before we wrap up today?

Kaila Yu (35:36)
No, but like any victims can feel free to reach out to me if you don’t have a safe space and someone to talk to I will believe you.

Fight the New Drug (35:44)
Thank you.

And we’ll be sure if you’re comfortable with this as well to link your social profile, maybe is the best place for them to reach out. Amazing. Well, Kaila thank you so much again for joining me today on Consider Before Consuming. I’m so sure that this incredibly powerful story will help affect change in this space. I’m so grateful and honored to be able to speak with you today.

Kaila Yu (35:53)
Yeah, that would be great.

Fight the New Drug (36:10)
And I’m excited to see your journey as your book continues to readers over the next several months and years.

Kaila Yu (36:11)
Yeah, thanks so much.

Thank you so much for having me. I think you guys are doing important work, also.

Fight the New Drug (36:23)
Thank you.