Why It Matters That the Producers of Netflix’s ‘Beef’ Aren’t Talking About David Choe
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Netflix
Content warning: This newsletter contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence and misogynoir.
Update: Ali Wong, Steven Yeun and Beef showrunner Lee Sung Jin released a statement regarding David Choe’s resurfaced comments about raping a masseuse on the afternoon of Friday, April 21. The trio called Choe’s story “undeniably hurtful and extremely disturbing,” but continued to express support for him, claiming that he has “put in the work to get the mental health support he needed.” As The RepresentASIAN Project and I explained on Instagram, it was definitely not worth the wait.
In case you haven’t been counting, it has now been a full week since Aura Bogado, senior reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and culture writer Meecham Meriweather began tweeting about Beef’s David Choe, who bragged about sexually assaulting a Black woman in a March 2014 episode of the podcast he hosted at the time, and no one official—not Choe, A24, Netflix, Beef showrunner Lee Sung Jin or executive producers/stars Ali Wong and Steven Yeun—has said a word. Not even after journalists reached out for comment.
That’s not to say they’re ignoring it completely; Choe, at least, has been weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, sending takedown requests to people who post clips from the episode via his foundation in a clear attempt to suppress the story—and the growing backlash. And according to Meriweather, Twitter listened, locking the writer’s account in response to the takedown request. This inspired tons of conversation about Choe’s comments, whether he should have been cast in the show, and a whole host of other issues, including misogyny, anti-Blackness, representation and solidarity… But while the discourse has been running wild on social media, there has been radio silence from the people and companies who are responsible for giving Choe a platform.
Earlier this week, I teamed up with The RepresentAsian Project on an IG explainer about what Choe said and why this matters, but it will surprise no one to hear that I still have more to say about the logic behind this (lack of) response, why it’s so insulting—and the issues the situation is bringing to light.
Who is David Choe and what did he actually say back in 2014?
In case you weren’t already familiar with him (I wasn’t) Choe is a controversial artist who’s friends with Yeun and Wong. He famously became super-rich when he painted murals for Facebook’s first HQ and accepted stock options as payment. He’s also known for being a provocateur, a persona that informed his character, Isaac, in Beef, A24’s super popular dark comedy about a failed contractor (Yeun) and unfulfilled entrepreneur (Wong) who begin an escalating feud after a road rage incident. Most relevant for this conversation, though, he used to host a podcast, DVDASA, with adult film star Asa Akira, and back in March 2014 he told a very disturbing story about going for a massage and masturbating on the table, touching his masseuse without consent and eventually forcing her to perform oral sex on him.
According to Buzzfeed’s reporting at the time, he told Akira he got an erection during the massage and decided to begin masturbating in front of his masseuse, a Black woman who he calls Rose. I’m including the transcript here because I think it’s important to engage with what Choe actually said, especially when we talk about why these comments weren’t enough to disqualify him for this role, but just to reiterate, it’s pretty disturbing:
“It's dangerous and it's super self-destructive. I'm at a place and there's potential for a lawsuit... and she has given me no signs that she's into me or that this is appropriate behavior. In my head I go, Do you care if I jerk off right now? and it sounds so creepy in my head that I go I can't say that out loud ... So I go back to the chill method of you never ask first, you just do it, get in trouble and then pay the price later.
... So I just start jerking off. So then her hands gets off my leg and she just stops ... I go 'Look I'm sorry I can't help myself — can you just pretend like I'm not doing this and you continue with the massage?' And she's like 'All right' and she does ... I'm like ‘Can I touch your butt?’ and I reach out and touch her butt and she pulls away. She doesn't want me to touch her butt.”
As Rose continues the massage, he grabs her hand and places it on his penis, then asks her to spit on it and kiss it. She says no; he responds like this:
“She's definitely not into it, but she's not stopping it either. I say, ‘Kiss it a little,’ she says, ‘No, all the massage oil is on it,’ and I take the back of her head and I push it down on my dick and she doesn't do it. And I say, ‘Open your mouth, open your mouth,’ and she does it and I start face-fucking her.”
According to xoJane writer Melissa Stetten, who brought this story to light a month after the episode was initially released, while Akira was the only person in the room to say the word rape, Stetten read her tone as ‘kidding.’ I’m not sure if that’s fair; the podcast doesn’t seem to be available online and I have only been able to find a few video clips, so it’s hard to tell if Akira is shocked or entertained or what. But I do give her credit for being the only person that actually said what was going on. (And it’s worth acknowledging that she might not have felt safe or comfortable enough to use firmer language.) Anyway, Choe’s response? “I just want to make it clear that I admit that that's rapey behavior. But I am not a rapist… I mean, I would have been in a lot of trouble right now if I put her hand on my dick and she's like, ‘Fucking stop I'm gonna go call security.’ That would have been a much different story. But the thrill of possibly going to jail, that's what achieved the erection quest.”
Of course, if this all happened like he says it did, he absolutely is a rapist. According to California law, “rape is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a person… where it is accomplished against a person's will by means of force, violence, duress, menace or fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on the person or another.” Also, rape is not dependent on context; it didn’t become consensual just because he didn’t face legal ramifications.
Choe’s comments are a perfect example of rape culture
Despite everything he said on the podcast and, you know, the legal definition of rape, Choe posted an apology on DVDASA’s site after Stetten’s article was published, which said in part: “I am not a rapist. I hate rapists, I think rapists should be raped and murdered. I am an artist and a storyteller and I view my show DVDASA as a complete extension of my art. If I am guilty of anything, it's bad storytelling in the style of douche… [The show is] not the place to come for reliable information about me or my life… I'm sorry if anyone believed that the stories were fact. They were not!”
Here's the thing, though. It doesn’t actually matter whether Choe was telling a story for laughs or recounting an actual interaction, uh, also for laughs. Either way, the entire episode is an example of how rape culture—“a culture in which sexual violence is treated as the norm and victims are blamed for their own assaults,” as a 2014 Vox article explains—normalizes, excuses and encourages sexual violence. As feminist blogger Melissa McEwen wrote in 2009, “rape culture is encouraging male sexual aggression. Rape culture is regarding violence as sexy and sexuality as violent. Rape culture is treating rape as a compliment, as the unbridled passion stirred in a healthy man by a beautiful woman, making irresistible the urge to rip open her bodice or slam her against a wall, or a wrought-iron fence, or a car hood, or pull her by her hair, or shove her onto a bed, or any one of a million other images of fight-fucking in movies and television shows and on the covers of romance novels that convey violent urges are inextricably linked with (straight) sexuality” (emphasis mine).
That bolded bit is important; what Choe implies with this entire story is that Rose’s beauty was just so affecting that he couldn’t control himself, she actually did want him, even though she did not enthusiastically consent and, contradictorily, that her not enthusiastically consenting was part of the appeal for him. After the massage ended, Choe says he asked Rose why she wouldn’t have sex with him and she replies that she has too big of a crush on him and she’s afraid of falling in love with him. According to Stetten, “everyone, including Choe, seems to chalk the incident up to Choe trusting his ‘instincts’ that despite giving every indication that she doesn't want to be sexual with him, the girl actually likes him. And ‘I was right,’ he says, which is why he refers to himself, again jokingly, as a ‘successful rapist.’”
Whether or not Rose is real or not, whether or not he actually raped her, the story plays into the problematic idea that women will say no when they mean yes, that they’re ‘asking for it’ or ‘playing hard to get’ and that all men have to do is be persistent—that is, coerce women into having sex with them. And, since Choe describes Rose as a Black woman, it also plays into ideas of these particular women as hypersexual beings who are, in essence, ‘unrapeable,’ despite the fact that Black women are actually at disproportionate risk of sexual violence. According to the America Psychological Association, one in four Black girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18, while one in five Black women are survivors of rape. And for every Black woman who reports rape, at least 15 Black women do not report.
FYI, this did not fly under the radar
I know 2014 was a long time ago, the internet’s memory is short and this wasn’t an internet-breaking story, but I want to be clear: Choe’s comments definitely made waves at the time. Stetten’s article prompted further coverage in Gawker, the Guardian, LAist, the Daily Mail and feminist blogs including Feministing and Reappropriate. There was also a whole new wave of coverage in 2017, when he was commissioned to paint a mural for the Houston Bowery Mural Wall. Curator Jasmine Wahi organized an anti-rape protest in response, and according to Artnet, upon completion Choe’s “piece [was] vandalized several times. The artwork was defaced with the words rapist, and tagged twice by graffiti crew Big Time Mafia, as reported by Time Out New York.”
All of which is to say, this wasn’t a secret. You and I might have missed this but his social circle, including his buds Wong and Yeun, would have known about these comments. They just decided they weren’t disqualifying factors in Choe’s casting. In fact, they decided to seek him out to play the role of Isaac, even though he’s not even an actor. As Beef showrunner Lee Sung Jin told Today.com, he “[saw an episode of Choe’s FX show, The Choe Show, where he] was talking about being abandoned by his family and I was like, ‘The way he’s talking about it just feels so Isaac. And so I texted Steven and Ali and asked, ‘Hey, like, do you think David would ever act?’” In fact, Lee didn’t just hire him to play the role of Isaac; he also used Choe’s art in the title cards for each episode.
It’s troubling enough to realize that Choe’s friends didn’t see joking about raping someone as a dealbreaker in their personal relationship, but it also strikes me as deeply irresponsible in a professional context. I genuinely wonder if they took any steps to ensure that the cast and crew that they hired would be safe around a person who has no problem with admitting to rape and seemingly likes to be on the winning end of uneven power dynamics. From a business perspective, I’m also curious whether they did any sort of risk assessment around hiring Choe.
Why is the (lack of) response so problematic?
Because they were certainly willing to capitalize on that provocative persona, right? As Jeff Yang explains in an op-ed for CNN this week, “Asian Americans [are] constantly burdened by the perception that we’re hard-working, conformist, basic and boring. Against that backdrop, the David Choes of our community pop. They remind people: Not All Asians. And so it’s easy to see why the creators of a show like Beef might find it so tempting to cast him in a role that mirrors his unhinged and unrepentant public image—in a show that seeks to explore and illuminate dark, desperate, shameful and shameless elements of our Asian American reality. Choe is the show’s broken bad-boy mascot, infusing its branding—his artwork surrounds every episode—and lending it a dangerous authenticity.”
But now that their decision to work with him has backfired in ways they didn’t intend or foresee, they’re keeping quiet, hoping it’ll blow over—and declining to take accountability for their actions. Like… isn’t it wild that Wong and Yeun would opt to protect Choe by staying silent on his behaviour rather than release even an anemic statement saying they don’t condone rape or jokes about rape. Is that not the bare minimum?
This isn’t just about Hollywood nepotism. It’s about what we’ll ignore in our quest for representation
My frustration also stems from the fact that if they won’t address these obviously, objectively awful comments, I know they won’t go any deeper into any of the other issues that this situation has highlighted. For example, people have been writing about ‘MRAsians’(Asian men who are obsessed with Asian women who date white men) for years. It is a brand of misogyny specific to Asian American communities that Choe’s comments (and overall brand) play into, and the decision to include him in their project implies that they are okay with that. Also, while white supremacy is the reason for historical and contemporary tension between Black and Asian communities, that doesn’t give individuals a pass for their anti-Blackness—and that’s absolutely part of what informs Choe’s behaviour, which is not just misogyny but misogynoir.
This is why representation can’t be our final goal; we shouldn’t conflate more opportunities for racialized people with the actual dismantling of white supremacy. Racialized people can absolutely perpetuate racism against other racialized people… and that goes for audiences, too, who might want to ignore the impact of Choe’s casting to protect Beef’s power and legacy.
But we all need to reject this urge. As Soleil Ho writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, “it behooves us all the more to pause and ask if separating this art from its artists is something that would truly benefit the ‘community’ or something that would solely benefit Choe and his enablers. I see it this way: To uncritically embrace Beef for what it gives to the Asian American community shows that we’re on board with rape culture and with misogyny, especially against Black women. To embrace it shows that we’re willing to let others pay the price for our feelings of validation and belonging.”
That is to say, it actually doesn’t matter how good art is, how much it makes us feel seen, or whether it constitutes a ‘win’ for representation if it contributes to harm against a real person, or contributes to the systemic harm to, and negative stereotypes, about a group of people—and whether Choe’s story was accurate or something he said to make himself seem more masculine, that’s what he did.
This is not the type of representation any of us should strive for, or even want.
✨ Episode 5 of Making Our Own Way: Toronto Star Food Reporter Karon Liu ✨
Episode five of Making Our Own Way features Karon Liu, Toronto Star food reporter and all-around lovely person. Liu fell into food writing after graduating from journalism school and interning at Toronto Life, where he began writing for its then-new food and restaurant blog. But he quickly discovered how much he enjoyed covering not just what we’re eating now and the restaurants large and small that are worth trying, but also issues like tipping, how colonization shaped his favourite comfort food and what’s missing from Toronto’s Michelin Guide. This week, he chats with Friday Things about the food story he never wants to read again (hint: it involves smelly lunches), the state of Canada’s food writing scene and the benefits and responsibilities that come with being one of the few full-time, unionized food journalists in Canada.
And Did You Hear About…
Ishani Nath’s super-smart piece on how reality shows are portraying therapy—not to mention using stars’ sessions as content. (Related but not: this week Insider published an article about what it’s like to film Love is Blind, a process that some contestants described as hell on earth.)
This affecting New York Times essay about the reality of organ donations by a woman whose heart transplant led to terminal cancer.
The mystery behind that AI-generated song ‘by’ Drake and The Weeknd, which went viral before it was taken down from streaming services earlier this week.
Nicole Chung’s excellent Esquire essay from a few weeks ago about the price we—that is, anyone from marginalized groups, but especially racialized women—pay for pursuing writing as a career.
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