VICTORIA'S SECRET "RACIST" LINGERIE LINE REMOVED

I mean when It comes to lingerie I say anything goes. I say to each their own. This just seems ridiculous, but you be the judge of this excerpt from a ecent yahoo story.

It takes hundreds of employees, thousands of hours and millions of dollars to launch a mass market lingerie line. And apparently only one blogger to take it all down. 

"I never thought they would pull the Geisha outfit off the market," Nina Jacinto tells Shine. "I imagine there were a number of factors that went into that decision." 

Two weeks ago, Jacinto, a 26-year-old Bay Area blogger and non-profit development manager, most likely became one of those factors. 

It all started here. "I saw a link to [Victoria's Secret's Go East] line on the blog, Angry Asian Man," she says.

"Hooray for exotic orientalist bull----," wrote the blogger who included a link to the "Asian-inspired" lingerie line's centerpiece: "The Sexy Little Geisha," a mesh teddy that comes with an obi belt, chopsticks and a fan.

Immediately Jacinto sat down to write a post on why she found the outfit, and the line in general, offensive. "It's the kind of overt racism masked behind claims of inspired fashion and exploring sexual fantasy that makes my skin crawl," she wrote in article published September 6 on the blog Racialicious, a site for commentary on the intersection of culture and race.

"There's a long-standing trend to represent Asian women as hypersexualized objects of fantasy," wrote Jacinto. She also took umbrage with the lingerie description as "your ticket to an exotic adventure" and the fact that none of the models for the collection were of Asian descent.

"The lack of Asian women here simply exposes the deep-rooted nature of the Orientalist narrative, one that trades real humanness for access to culture," she wrote. "Besides, it can only feel sexy and exotic if it's on an "American" body—without the feeling of accessing something foreign or forbidden, there can be no fantasy."

One week after Jacinto posted her piece, the feminist website Bust picked up on the story. When the Bust reporter went to check out the teddy described in Jacinto's story, it had disappeared from the site. According to Bust, a Victoria's Secret rep suggested the teddy had simply "sold out." A week after that, The Frisky's Jessica Wakemen wrote about the offending and mysteriously missing teddy in question. "Considering the complicated history of geishas, repurposing the "look" for a major corporation to sell as role-playing lingerie seems a bit tasteless," she wrote. 

By the afternoon, major news outlets like the Huffington Post began calling blogger backlash to Victoria's Secret a "controversy." The Daily Mail noted that the teddy and the Go East line in its entirety had been removed from the company website and replaced with the main product page.