TAIPEI — Men are beginning to line up in front of a McDonald’s in Taiwan like never before. Not for a burger, but for WeiWei an adorable local employee.
The young worker pretty much looks like a porcelain doll, has big eyes and clear, smooth skin. She’s petite and her beauty meets the Asian standards of a “kawaii”, or cute, girl down to a T.
Because of her looks, photos of her have collected more than 87,000 likes on Facebook and she’s slowly becoming a bit of a minor celebrity in Taiwan.
WeiWei isn’t all that extraordinary, though as it’s quite common for McDonald’s and businesses in Taiwan to harness the “cuteness” of female employees to attract customers. Sometimes employees are even asked to literally dress up like dolls.
If this doesn’t reflect the beauty standards of most men in Asia, it certainly has something to say about what the market thinks is perceived as attractive: a child-like, adorable, innocent-looking girl.
A kind of of beauty that, based on the comments netizens have been posting next to photos of WeiWei, seems to be perceived by many Western men as unattractive and not feminine enough. Some netizens even see WeiWei as more like a child than a woman and have gone as far as accusing those attracted to her of pedophilia.
Yet, plenty of Western expats in Asia are also going specifically, if not only, for women who are either adorable little kawaii girls or geisha-like sexual objects. Is this attraction based on a chauvinist need to infantilize and disenfranchise a woman of her right to be perceived as a mature, independent, respected individual? Probably!
But WeiWei, who keeps posting selfies to her social media accounts and has appeared on several Taiwanese TV programs, doesn’t really seem to care.
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