'WHAT'S A NICE girl like you doing in a place like this?' It's a line Sheridan Prasso must have heard in dozens of girlie bars, strip joints and hip-hop clubs in Asia. And she may well have replied: 'I'm working.' Because Prasso was researching her book, The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient. No, it's not a guide for sex tourists seeking Asian flesh. Quite the contrary. 'In the bars of Bangkok and elsewhere in Asia, western men who may find traditional notions of masculinity diminished by modern cultural expectations can find restitution,' Prasso writes. 'They can experience feelings of dominance, wealth, power, and masculinity - at least temporarily. Here, any man can experience feeling attractive again - even loved.' Depending on your point of view, the balding and paunchy white men escorted by nubile Asian women seen throughout Asia are either winners or losers. In support of her book's underlying notion - the idea that an Asian mystique (that is, an exoticised view of Asia) prevents westerners from clearly understanding Asia and Asians - Prasso talked to scores of Asian women, from political leaders to investment bankers, students and homemakers. The interviews most pertinent to her investigations were those with women who had the most contact with Caucasian males: mail-order brides, bar girls and prostitutes at one end of the spectrum and Cathay Pacific flight attendants at the other end. Her field work in fleshpots from Pattaya to Manila notwithstanding, Prasso describes herself as 'the shy writerly type'. Now living in New York, the petite, blonde author spent 15 years as a journalist in Asia, chiefly with Agence France-Presse in Phnom Penh and Business Week in Hong Kong. From the time she left her job with Associated Press in Chicago in 1990 to come to the east, Prasso says she began developing her Asian mystique theory and collecting information for the book she knew she wanted to write. 'Growing up in America, I had no idea what Asia and Asians were really like because the reality is so distorted by the media and culture,' she says. 'But once I got here I saw how much we get wrong and that the reality of Asia has little to do with our fantasies.' Prasso remembers the moment when her own illusions about a 'mystical Orient' were shattered. 'Shortly after moving into a Mid-Levels apartment, I would regularly hear a man shouting in a sing-songy voice outside my building. Because I'd heard that the Cantonese believed gods were everywhere, I'd somehow decided this man was chanting to appease the gods that inhabited the mountain just behind my building. I indulged this fantasy until a Chinese-speaking friend told me his 'chant' was a call for scrap metal.' After that, Prasso says she was unable to look at anything in Asia 'with the same eyes'. Again and again, she found that 'the impressions I had brought from America didn't match what I saw. The true Asia, I found, was largely misrepresented by the fantasy-fuelled images I'd absorbed from western culture.' What she calls the geisha versus dragon-lady dichotomy is an example of the most enduring of these myths. 'The Asian mystique defines Asian females as passive and sexually obtainable geishas and exotic China dolls on the one hand or cruel, domineering dragon ladies on the other,' she says. 'Between these two polarities, Asian women don't exist.' Asian men fare no better. Western films and popular literature portray them as weak and emasculated - when they aren't being sneaky or evil Fu Manchu types who, despite their martial arts skills, are always defeated by the forces of western good. And on screen, they never get the girl. In the realms of business and foreign policy, the consequences of the Asian mystique can be - and have been - devastating, Prasso says. US paternalism may have blinded it in Vietnam to the determination of Ho Chi Minh, for example, who was physically small and seemingly frail. A more timely example is North Korea's Kim Jong-il. 'By lampooning him as a goofball and playboy in bouffant hairdo and platform shoes, the western media does a disservice because we don't give him the credit of being the shrewd leader that he really is.' Similarly, western businessmen frequently mistake Confucian reserve for weakness. 'They come out of meetings with their counterparts in Hong Kong or Japan to exclaim, 'Those Asian negotiators were really tough', as if they expected them to roll over like the phalanxes of incompetent, karate-chopping men that Uma Thurman blows away in Kill Bill.' Fantasies, no matter how destructive, aren't easily surrendered, Prasso acknowledges. 'People love the idea of the exotic Orient and how different their customs and psychology are from ours. That's why Memoirs of a Geisha became a best-seller. They reinforce all our fantasies, and of course there's the geisha who steadfastly devotes herself to the chairman, her man. 'I know that giving up our fantasies means feeling loss,' she says. 'Certainly I felt a loss when I understood that the scrap metal collector outside my apartment wasn't calling out to the mountain gods. But I'm glad that experience happened early on because it enabled me to see Asia realistically. 'I don't care whether the object of our fantasies is a person or a culture. But it stands to reason that relationships are much more rewarding, deeper and richer if you have a fuller and better understanding of who or what you're dealing with. Otherwise, your understanding is superficial and the relationship potentially hurtful - even if to no one but yourself.' The Asian Mystique (Public Affairs, $218)