WHAT DO DON IMUS and GQ editor-in-chief Jim Nelson have in common? Let’s see. Both are pasty white men in powerful media jobs. Each used a sexist and racist slur in a completely gratuitous fashion. But only the radio shock jock has paid a price.

Imus, as we all know, lost his lucrative TV and radio gig last month after calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” and getting his ass handed back to him by Sharpton et al. Nelson, as far fewer people know, used the term “Asian whore” twice in an editor’s letter in the May issue of GQ.

In discussing the New Agey self-help DVD “The Secret,” Nelson tells readers to “visualize what you want (an Alfa Romeo? Leather pants? An Asian whore?),” think positively, and “the universe will … make it happen for you.” Did he really need to specify the race of said “whore”? Maybe it was just a very bad word choice, maybe he was trying to be edgy, like his laddish competitors at Maxim. But then, at the end of the piece, he gives props to any reader whose wishes are met. “If it’s an Asian whore, congrats. But please don’t make a DVD about it.” Thus linking porn to Asian women and revealing his own unhealthy dedication to the concept.

While Nelson has been taken to task by the Asian American Journalists Association (not quite as powerful as ADL, but hey), he’ll probably slide with his flaccid rationalization (“I’m skewering a Western attitude that one ought to find noxious,” he told Page Six).

Why will Jim Nelson, um, get off so easily? Because “Asian whore” is not as offensive as “nappy-headed hos”? We think not! Sexual bondage (think Korean comfort women) and slavery are close contenders in the Oppression Olympics.

Is it because the Asian-American community doesn’t make a big stink about this kind of stuff? That may have been true back in the day, but now Asian-Americans are just as sensitive to ethnic slights and are just as vocal (not as much as African-Americans maybe but at least as much as the gay community). Just look at the flap over Rosie O’Donnell’s fake Chinese. All this activism seems to be having an effect, too.

On April 13, only one day after Don Imus started an avalanche of criticism with his “nappy-headed hos” comment, CBS Radio New York DJs Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay did their part to advance cultural understanding by making a prank call to a Chinese restaurant.

Vandergrift and Lay, of WFNY’s “The Dog House with JV and Elvis,” phoned the restaurant and in a six-minute segment ordered “shrimp flied lice” and “some old dung.” According to the Organization for Chinese Americans, one of the DJs also said to a woman on the phone, “Should I come to your restaurant so that I can see you naked … that way I can see your hot Asian spicy ass.” They called one employee “faggy” and told another “you probably can’t drive for shit.”

For weeks, Asian-American gadflies kept the pressure on CBS to send the same message to their broadcasters who insult Asian women that it sent to Imus for slighting African-American women. This week, Vandergrift and Lay were fired. As far as we know, their dismissal is the first time broadcasters have lost their jobs in such a high-profile way for anti-Asian slurs. The renewed vigor of Asian-American anti-defamation and civil-rights groups is an exciting development.

So, no, Jim Nelson did not get a pass because the Asian-American community has no ethnic pride or cohesiveness. It’s because it’s hard to get upset about a pathetic display of machismo that is so utterly unconvincing—coming as it does from a metrosexual mag desperately trying to pretend it has readers who are straight. Hello, leather pants? •