In a fit of nostalgia, I recently watched Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). Though I’d seen the film years before, I noticed this time that the plot turns on an Asian woman: Mark’s Japanese ex-wife, the thorny source of his and Daniel’s decades-long conflict. Yet she is both nameless and faceless: The only shot we glimpse of her is of her naked back arched over Daniel on the floor. Simultaneously erased and hypervisible, she exists solely to be a two-timing whore.

I wish Bridget Jones’s Diary were an outlier indicative of a former era. But like a stubborn rash, this phenomenon refuses to die out. In other beloved films and TV shows written, directed, and/or produced by white women, the figure of the Asian woman might be hypervisible or erased, but she is always a whore. I noticed it again in Netflix’s Senior Year, released this past May, and in media across the time span of the two films—media created not, as you might expect, by white men but white women. Under their gaze, Asian women are either invisible or slotted into one of five categories:

In Tina Fey’s Mean Girls (2004), Trang Pak and Sun Jin Dinh are underage high school students groomed into an abusive relationship with authority figure Coach Carr. But instead of being painted as his victims, they are written as all-knowing sluts. Fey’s transgressions against Asian women continue in 30 Rock with loaded lines like, “[S]he makes Jack very happy. She’s like a white geisha!”—said by Fey’s Liz about her boss Jack’s new girlfriend, Phoebe, in season one (2007).

Inherent in the “hypersexual woman” trope is the belief that Asian women aren’t simply women: They are an alien category unto themselves. This is echoed in season one of Girls (2012), when Marnie’s boss tries to warn her off from avant-garde artist Booth Jonathan because he’s sleeping with an Asian woman, Koi Scharf. “I do not approve of you fucking Koi Scharf! You know what I say about men who fuck Asian women?” she scolds Booth, before being interrupted; we never find out what she says, but we can guess.

A subcategory of this trope is when a white nerd finally gets laid—but only by a scheming Asian slut. In 30 Rock, we see it in the form of Kenneth and a kidney-stealing woman in Beijing; in a 2010 episode of The Big Bang Theory, it’s brought to life by Leonard and his North Korean spy girlfriend, Joyce Kim.

In the first episode of Weeds (2005), suburban mom Celia sees her husband joyfully betraying her with a tennis coach, Helen Chin, on a nanny-cam recording. But elsewhere, the “other woman” trope rears its head without any outright cheating. In season two of Sex and the City (1999), Samantha grows suspicious of her new beau Harvey’s sexual-seeming setup with his jealous domestic housekeeper, Sum (an awful “dim sum” joke is made at her expense). While Jess is away in season five of New Girl (2016), her will-they-won’t-they love interest, Nick, sleeps with tourist Kumiko, who spends much of the episode in a bath towel dripping with sexual innuendos. In Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019), manipulative assistant Soo-Lin wedges herself between Bernadette and her husband, Elgie. And in the second offense committed by Bridget Jones, the 2004 sequel, The Edge of Reason, has Bridget on the cusp of getting back together with Daniel in Thailand. Who gets in the way? A Thai sex worker Daniel has hired for the night.

In not one but two Rebel Wilson films, her sexual competition is an Asian woman. Isn’t It Romantic (2019) has Wilson’s Natalie facing off with yoga instructor and model Isabella (Priyanka Chopra) over Josh, which comes to a head during a surprisingly tense karaoke dance battle. In Senior Year, Zoë Chao’s Tiffany steals Blaine from Wilson’s Stephanie while she’s in a coma, one Tiffany cruelly induced. To twist the knife in further, she marries Blaine and moves into Stephanie’s dream house. Besides the contrivance—what are the odds that the Asian woman is once again a backstabbing whore?—it’s equally unbelievable, and more than a little insulting, that in both films, the women compete over achingly mediocre white men.

Consciously or subconsciously, we’re meant to understand that the new Asian girlfriend is a downgraded version of our beloved white protagonist. Culprits include Fleabag (2016) (Fleabag’s ex-boyfriend, Harry, is now dating Elaine); The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2019) (Midge’s ex-husband, Joel, is with Mei); season two of Friends (1995) (Rachel is devastated to discover Ross has a new girlfriend, Julie, a former classmate whom he reconnected with in China); and even family-friendly Parks and Recreation (2012) (Ben’s father, Steve, is having a baby with his new girlfriend, the much younger, much-detested Ulani). Season one of New Girl (2012) skips the subtext entirely: When Jess finds out her ex-boyfriend Paul is in a relationship with Jenn Toyoji, she whines, “She looks like an Asian me.”

This trope can manifest with seemingly well-meaning undertones, like Ilana declaring on Broad City (2014) that “to be an Asian girl” is on her bucket list. Or it can be as blatantly toxic as Amy Schumer claiming in her stand-up special Mostly Sex Stuff (2012), “It doesn’t matter what you do, ladies. Every guy is going to leave you for an Asian woman,” because, according to her, they have “the smallest vaginas in the game”—spewing a lie that exotifies, others, and butchers us into pieces. More examples abound, but the message that threads through them is the same: Our fetishization is a compliment at best, a deserved punishment at worst.

If a film features a sizable cast of Asian actors, what I’m describing is a nonissue; we are, after all, allowed to be as flawed and complicated onscreen as we are in life. But given that repeated images affect our perceptions of reality, it’s especially damaging when the only Asian woman character is a whore. As proof of how film translates into reality and vice versa, Asian women continue to be haunted by lines from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Full Metal Jacket. And yet the film itself, set during the Vietnam War, speaks to how the real-life sexualization of Asian femme bodies is steeped in colonialism and war. Offscreen and on, white men have long been responsible for engineering the presumed competition between Asian women and white women via the “local girlfriend”-versus-“wife back home” narrative (see: South Pacific). Why, then, has this mantle been enthusiastically taken up by white women in recent years?

The truth might be clearer if the offenders in question were conservatives. Instead, they lean left on the political spectrum, which speaks to another phenomenon: how liberal white women are reluctant to come to terms with how they hurt us. Our oppression by white men is persistent and obvious; our oppression by white women is just as persistent, only better concealed under the false assumption that because white women also live under the patriarchy, they are incapable of causing harm. I can’t help but wonder if this specific and obsessive fear of Asian women is bound up in our perceived proximity to whiteness via another myth that won’t die out. What they think but don’t dare say: We tolerate you—as long as you don’t take what’s ours.

The imagined sexual scarcity and competition between Asian women and white women, categorically over white men, bleeds into real life too. In college a white woman complained to me, “It’s not fair all the white guys here have yellow fever. You’re so lucky.” Other Asian women I’ve spoken to share frighteningly similar experiences. When young Tiffany appeared on the screen in Senior Year, I automatically bristled; I knew that the mix of unwarranted suspicion and hatred in film and TV directed toward women like me was not a thing of fiction but rather a fact. And yet here, I’ve offered up piles of evidence as if I’m on trial, because I’m aware that, for those who haven’t felt it in their body, each instance reads like a coincidence rather than a symptom.

No, I don’t think these white women sit in their offices cartoonishly cackling and twinning their fingers together as they concoct fun new ways to oppress us. More often than we’d like to admit, our choices are subconscious, shaped by what we see reflected back to us. Hollywood’s well-intentioned insistence on “increasing diversity” also allows more opportunities for these subconscious beliefs to leak through.

Asian women—stalked, assaulted, raped, and murdered because of centuries-old lies about our bodies, our sexuality, our behavior—cannot unbind ourselves from these lies if they’re propagated by not only white men but white women. In mainstream feminism’s so-called fight for all women’s rights, why does our suffering fall so low beneath the line of sight that it’s turned invisible? Though variations of this issue are not new, the collective anger of Asian Americans in this country is still treated as negligible, an annoying fly to be flicked away in service of an easy punch line.

When I think of how to eradicate this phenomenon, the word that comes to mind is consent. I was born into this world with these lies alive and well, yet I never consented to them. How many more generations of Asian women will be damned before they’re even born, seen first and foremost as a type in someone else’s story? Why is our humanity seen as something to be earned, as Tiffany’s awkwardly is in Senior Year, rather than as a given? And when will Asian actresses finally have access to roles that respect their talent rather than waste it?

I could end this essay with a plea to white women: Please consider my humanity before you write down that line, because there is more at stake than you could ever know. But white people can’t save us, and I don’t want them to. They can’t dream big enough to see us for who we are, if these films and TV shows are any proof. And even if they could, I wouldn’t want my dreams to be in the care of someone else. That beautiful, hard task? It falls to us.