Asian American women across the country are outraged and disgusted by the arrest of a Princeton student two weeks ago for harassing fellow Asian women students. Many believe the incident is symptomatic of larger problems, including stereotypes and the exotification of Asian women.

Michael Lohman, 28, a third-year doctoral student, was arrested March 30. He admitted to surreptitiously cutting locks of hair from at least nine Asian women. He also admitted to pouring his urine and semen into the drinks of Asian women more than 50 times in Princeton’s graduate student dining hall and other places. Investigators found women’s underwear and mittens filled with the hair of Asian women at the apartment Lohman shared with his wife of four years, who is Asian. Police believe Lohman stole the mittens from Asian women and then used them to masturbate.

Lohman, a top student in the applied and computational mathematics department, was charged with reckless endangerment, tampering with a food product, harassment and theft. Princeton President Shirley Tilghman has officially banned Lohman from campus, and he is undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Shirley Hu, a sophomore at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, said the incident has made no more than a ripple on campus. “It wasn’t like people were really freaked out about it,” Hu said.

Hu said Princeton’s public safety email about the incident did not even mention that Lohman’s victims were all Asian women. “It seemed like a little thing,” she said. “I didn’t think anything of it.”

Now Hu and her peers are taking precautions. “A lot of Asian American women are probably being more wary,” Hu said. “Before, I would just leave my drink there. Now, to be on the safe side, I don’t leave it unattended.”

Author Helen Zia, who graduated in Princeton’s first class of women, said she was angry by the school’s lack of attention to Asian American students, who comprise 12 percent of Princeton’s undergraduate population.

“Asian American students have been fighting for APA studies for decades — this university has done nothing,” Zia said. “Every Princeton alum should be asking the administration, ‘What are you doing about this?’”

Yin Ling Leung, organizational director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), said this was more than an isolated incident by a psychologically unstable man. “It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last,” Leung said. “Sexual assault of Asian women on college campuses is a major issue. You get a room of five Asian American women together, and they all have stories about sexual harassment.”

“It’s happened on an epidemic proportion,” Zia added. “It’s this image of Asian American women being exotic and passive and won’t fight back and speak up. Predators think they have free rein with Asian American women.”

Part of the problem is a widespread belief that men who have a fetish for Asian women are harmless. “Asian fetish is seen as a tongue-in-cheek thing, like ‘We just happen to like Asian women,’” Leung said. “It’s not as innocent as it looks.”

Yale junior Shannon Stockdale, co-chair of NAPAWF’s Yale chapter InSight, said Asian fetish is cavalierly discussed on campus. “It’s like a benign thing and there’s no stigma,” Stockdale said. “People are very open about it. It remarks on society’s acceptance of it.”

“It goes so deep,” Leung explained. “We have to end the militarization of the sex industry, the proliferation of porn, and the marketing of Asian women as mail order brides and the Internet catalog industry. We have huge work to do.”

“It’s really hard for Asian Pacific American women to come forward because there’s a ton of shame, self-blame and embarrassment,” Leung said. She says campus health and safety groups must also become more culturally competent. “In American and European culture, there’s a lot more of ‘It’s not my fault, and I’m gonna make a big stink about it.’”

“It is a form of hate crime,” Leung said. “There’s racist hate and racist love — this is a distorted form of racist love.”