Is having a laugh perpetuating a sterotype? The culture of “ABG’s and ABB’s”

Illustration by Stephanie Cheng

If you’ve ever seen your friends or classmates screaming ”ABG” and running around making a fool of themselves, you’ve experienced the epidemic that is the surge of the self-inflicted Asian stereotypes in South Californian culture.

The term Asian baby girl (ABG) has been surging in popularity over the past year primarily because of videos on TikTok that willfully promote its usage. Various creators on the app are completely dedicated to humiliating themselves over their obsession with “ABGs” and it has even become an entire genre on TikTok to create these videos.

According to the Asian American Research Journal at University of California, Berkeley, the idea of an ABG was originally conceived in order to directly oppose the stereotype of submissive or reserved Asian women in the 1980s. They were defined as Asian women with associations to gang violence and became a symbol of beauty and boldness, but also promiscuity and aggression. Gradually, this definition has been weathered down to what we can see in the TikTok videos.

The concept of gang violence within the definition has been almost completely lost to time, but even the ideas of boldness or indignation that originally came tied to the idea of an ABG have become lost to stereotyping. Now, any young Asian-American girl with thick eyeliner or a cat eye are possible recipients of the ABG label.

Unlike some of the more common attacks that Asian-Americans could be exposed to, this one is completely self-inflicted. As a group of people we have boiled an originally self-empowering and avant-garde idea within our community down to another device to form stereotypes and create harmful images.

Ironically, the current pop culture idea of an ABG could be simply defined as any pretty Asian girl. In contrast to its original contradictory definition, the term ABG has become yet another perpetuating factor of the treatment of Asian women in a subservient and dismissive manner. Through the usage of this term it objectifies and demerits Asian women to solely this concept of an “ABG” rather than an individual.

From the male perspective, these stereotypes have become so generalized to an idea like “pretty,” that it simply serves as a catalyst for the perpetuation of even more harmful ideas like Asian fetishization or simply harassment.

You might say that the term has simply been resurged to create comedy and in many ways this is true. I’ve definitely laughed at a couple of those TikTok videos or when my friends use the term in a joke. But I urge you to think about it longer than the comedic effect lasts – do you think that Asian Americans should be deprecated to such a simple and belittling concept? I would say no.