I really resonate with the message of this post politically but I'm always dubious when I see social media make definitive claims about the historical origins of modern problems. So does this hold up?
Here's a dirty transcript of the post:
*picture of several hunky filipino men with a white woman
"There's a reason why Asian men in television and film are portrayed as sexually awkward and emasculate... and it has a lot to do with this picture. In the early 1900's, a massive wave of Filipino men (aka, Manongs) immigrated to California to work on farms, canning factories, and fishing boats. The pay was shit but the allure of owning a home in America was too tantalizing to pass up. Since Filipina women were prohibited from immigrating with men, towns all around California quickly filled up with single, sweaty, and good lookin' Filipino men. These Manilatowns were packed to the brim with stylish Filipino bachelors who spent their money on new suits and their time at taxi dance halls #AmericasFirstFuckboys #JustKidding #SorryGrandpa Taxi dance halls were immensely popular among Filipino bachelors which provided both entertainment and sexual attention. For only ten cents, Filipino men could dance with first-generation European immigrant women, show off their outfits of the day, and romance their way to secret relationships that were illegal under anti-miscegenation laws. Despite racist laws, these interracial relationships continued to blossom and included relationships between Filipino men and Italians, Irish, Mexicans, and Black women. Word spread about the Manongs and white men were (for lack of a better term) TRIGGERED AS FUCK: "Some of these [Filipino] boys, with perfect candor, told me bluntly and boastfully that they practice the art of love with more perfection than white boys, and occasionally one of the [white] girls has supplied me with information to the same effect." The reality of Filipino men -- who were seen as small, weak, and inferior to white American men -- falling in love with white women become such a problem that mobs of masked white men started to raid, brutalize, and even kill the Manongs. Many of their assaults were directed at Filipino men's groins: "Another man, the one called Jake, tied me to a tree. Then he started beating me with his fists... A tooth fell out of my mouth, and blood trickled down my shirt. The man called Lester grabbed my testicles with his left hand and smashed them with his right fist. The pain was so swift and searing."
So the next time you hear one of those bullshit stereotypes about Asian men, look back in American history and ask yourself, "WHY was America so obsessed with emasculating Asian men?" or "Why do they constantly talk about Asian men's penises?" You'll quickly realize that it has nothing to do with stereotypes being true or false, and everything to do with white male insecurity."
I felt as though I had to make a second comment because there are sources to back up the claims made in the post, and I didn't want them to be lost in the multiple edits I made in my reply to /u/WuTangGraham.
I was able to track down sources that verify the post of the original Facebook poster A reverse image search of the image posted leads us to PositivelyFilipino which was sort of the online continuation of a print magazine entitled Filipinas Magazine that began publication in 1992. A February 1995 article by a former associate professor of history on the Philippines wrote an article that the Facebook poster seems to have replicated, albeit less gracefully. The online article was well written but didn't have a source list and wasn't peer reviewed. We dig further! The image was sourced form Letters in Exile (1976), a collection of primary texts and images on the history of Filipinos immigrating to the United States which the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History called a "landmark publication." It would be difficult to get your hands on the book, but if we follow the contents of the collection, we find reports on anti-Filipino race riots in California, short novels on Filipino sexuality in Chicago, and official state reports on the perils of Filipino immigrants. So we can date the image at about 1930, show its context in broader worries about Filipinos and explicit mention of Filipino sexuality and the fears of some white Americans as they felt their manhood was challenged. But wait there's more! Part of the article published at Positively Filipino talks about racial confrontations in Exeter (evidenced in Howard Dewitt, Violence in the Fields: California Filipino Farm Labor Unionization During the Great Depression 1980) and a race riot in Watsonville (evidenced in Michael Showalter "The Watsonville Anti-filipino Riot of 1930: A Reconsideration of Fermin Tobera's Murder" 1989). The Facebook post also mentioned violence towards Filipinos because of these fears, but never mentioned the specifics. I think we can infer that they are one and the same. The beginnings of these riots are slightly ambiguous, but the Facebook poster inferred that they were a result of the growing Filipino bachelor clubs. We can find the existence and prevalence of these in Rudy Gueverra Jr. "'Skid Row' Filipinos, Race and the Social Construction of Space in San Diego" 2008. I really would have preferred if the facebook poster had been able to track down or cite this proof, but nevertheless it exists. Hopefully that clears up questions about how factually true the post is. The rest of this is what I posted earlier.
The Journal of San Diego History released an article in 1976 on the experience of Filipino immigrants to San Diego, entitled "Filipino Migrants in San Deigo 1900-1946" (written by Adelaida Castillo, a professor at San Diego State University). Prior to 1930, Filipino's had been migrating to California, but were not included in official U.S. census data, but instead lumped into the "Asian" category. Most of the early Filipino immigrants worked on short term contracts. Options for Filipinos looking to temporary immigrate to the United States included students, members of the navy, farmers, and a mix of other workers, all of which were underpaid, and short term. Farmers wages were 10 cents an hour, much lower than national averages.
In 1930, Richard Welch (Congressman from San Francisco) sponsored the Filipino Exclusion Bill, which sought to reduce the amount of Filipino immigrants coming to California. Here is his reasoning:
Practically all of them are males between the ages of 17 and 25. Less than four percent are females. These Filipinos do not come as colonists. They seek transient labor and their wages are far below those on which an American, particularly a white man with a family, can live. At the present, unemployment is a very serious problem on the Pacific Coast as well as in other parts of the country.Many employers of labor have turned thumbs down on the white applicant who is over 40 years old and, as I have said before, the Filipino immigrant is under 25. His physique is adaptable to light industry, the only occupation which remains for our great surplus of white workingmen who have passed the age of 40.
There are clear concerns over the influx of Filipino men that are pushing white American men out of work.
Anti-Miscegenation was in fact a large problem in California. California statues from the mid-1880s, 48th Session, Section 60 stated that:
"All marriages of white persons with negroes, mongolians, or mulattoes are illegal and void." (taken from Congressional records, 1929)
where Filipinos were classified as mongolians. Between the law's induction and 1945, Filipinos women made up 4% of the Filipino immigrant population. Marriages between Filipinos and white American women is also documented. After failing to secure marriage licenses in Los Angeles and San Diego, a Filipino man took his wife-to-be to Guadalajara for a civil wedding instead to legalize his bond with her.
It doesn't even matter if that particular photo in the Facebook post was the image that sparked agitations against Filipino men, since it was part of a larger program of defending the manhood of white Americans. If we couple this evidence with the growing concerns about American manhood in the late 19th C. in E Anthony Robunto's and Kristin Hoganson's work, and cultural products that attack Filipino manhood after 1898 which are available as primary sources online, it is not hard to see that the message of the Facebook post was founded in historical evidence.
EDIT: Added new evidence that clears up the validity of the original Facebook post. Also formatting.
What the poster states is true in its broad outlines, although he torques the facts in a way that is misleading. The context was the mass migration of Filipinos to California in the 1920s, largely to work as farm laborers: Japanese migration was restricted under the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which led farmers to see alternate supplies of labor. Because the Philippines were an American possession at this time, Filipinos could be brought over to work on American farms - by 1930, 30,000 had come to the United States. While these Filipinos were technically American nationals, they did not have the full rights of citizenship and were also subject to informal discrimination in jobs and housing - which typically meant that the migrants (about 3/4 of them men) were ghettoized in the red-light district of the towns and cities in which they lived.
Many of the men in these districts did frequent taxi-dancing establishments, where they had a reputation as skilled and elegant dancers who quickly learned the latest American dance moves. In her "Confessions of a Taxi Dancer," Jeanne de La Moreau declared that "Filipinos as a rule are splendid dancers," and noted that one Filipino patron was nicknamed "God's Gift to the Taxi-Dancers!" The male Filipino dancer was "seldom guilty of sensual dancing, and is much more the pursued than the pursuer in his contacts with taxi dancers," concluded a sociologist who studied Los Angeles dance halls in the early 1930s. "The Filipinos are the dandies of the foreign colonies," opined the Los Angeles Times in 1937.
The often sexualized relations between white working-class taxi-dancers and male Filipino workers did indeed cause a great deal of anxiety among white American men. There were a number of anti-Filipino riots in California in the 1930s, most notably the Watsonville Riot of 1930. The riots were largely caused by competition for jobs in the context of the Great Depression, but the supposed sexual aggressiveness of Filipino men was often targeted by the white rioters. It was also a problem raised by those who wanted introduce restrictions on Filipino migration: in his testimony to Congress in 1930, David Prescott Barrows asserted that the problems of the Filipino community were caused by an "aroused sexual passion and a natural tendency for vice and crime."
Ultimately, these concerns led to the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act, also known as the Philippine Independence Act or the Filipino Exclusion Act, in 1934. It declared the Philippines independent, thereby changing the legal designation of Filipinos from nationals to aliens and, consequently, limiting Filipino immigration to the United States to fifty people per year - effectively ending the wave of migration that began in 1924.
So there definitely was a good deal of white anxiety over the putative hypersexuality of Filipino migrants in the 1920s and 1930s - Filipino men during this period were also skilled boxers, also highlighting their masculinity and physical skill. On the other hand, as other posters have noted, the stereotype of Asian effeminacy and asexuality long preceded this period of migration - and in fact, in the 1920s and 1930s this was still the stereotype that most white Americans held in relation to the Japanese and Chinese.
Sources: Linda Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s; Rhacel Parreras, "'White Trash' Meets the 'Brown Monkeys': The Politics of Interracial Gender Alliances between White Working-Class Women and Filipino Migrant Laborers in the Taxi-Dance Halls of the 20s and 30s," Amerasia Journal 24 (1998): 115-34; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects; Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, "'Splendid Dancing': Filipino 'Exceptionalism' in Taxi Dancehalls," Dance Research Journal, 40 (Winter, 2008): 23-40.