When your ethnicity is a fetish
Amanda Whitten Maggie Chang Andrew Coppens Samantha Baker Chanté Salick Vivienne Baker
On a summer evening in 2016, Samantha Baker was having a quiet night of “Netflix and chill” with her boyfriend at her Pickering home. As they began to get intimate, he leaned into her ear and whispered how much he loved her “light-skin” vagina.
Um ... gross, Baker winced. When she processed his words later, she becamemore disgusted with the racial remark.
That wasn’t the first time Baker’s South Asian beau had called out her Jamaican-Macedonian background in the bedroom. In fact, aside from sex, she says, he seemed to look down on her race. She began to feel like she was being racially fetishized — that is, sexually objectified as an exotic fantasy.
Baker had previously thought that was just how men were, but her boyfriend’s perpetual racial comments were different. Their four-year relationship didn’t last.
Today, Baker, 24, still encounters men who fetishize her ethnicity. Some have gone as far as to use the N-word around her, thinking that dating a person of colour makes it OK for them to say it. It doesn’t, she says.
She feels like they aren’t seeking a relationship based on an actual personality, they’re basing it solely on race.
“They want to have sex with me because they’ve never had sex with a Black girl,” says Baker.
It’s enraging to be viewed as an ethnic conquest, Baker says.
Racial fetishization exists across genders and ethnicities. According to a 2016 University of Cambridge paper on racial fetishes, the cause stems from a history of racial oppression that indoctrinated our society with racism and negative stereotypes, thereby nurturing a culture of more often men — but
sometimes women — who view ethnicity as a sexual fantasy.
The paper makes the distinction between racial fetishes and unconventional obsessions — for, say, clothing or body parts — because the former reduces the person to a sexual object.
Relationship coach Chanté Salick has heard many stories of racial fetishizing from her social circles and in her practice, where she advises clients on how to handle such situations.
Many of Salick’s Black female clients have lamented dates with men who have no qualms admitting that it was their ethnicity they were really interested in.
“(It’s) disturbing,” says Salick. “That person can’t feel comfortable (thinking) they’re that token Caribbean girl that you get to check off your list.”
To avoid being an unwitting addition to someone’s fetish bucket list, Salick encourages clients to ask first-date questions about ethnicity to get in front of any issue that could arise: “Have you ever dated a Black girl (or guy) before? What types of girls have you dated before?”; and she suggests discussing their experiences with women or men of different ethnicities. Depending on the responses, this can open a more in-depth conversation about that person’s views on race and eliminate dates with bad intentions, she says.
In that sense, 20-year-old Maggie Chang is way ahead. Having only started dating two years ago, she is aware of common Asian stereotypes — Dragon Lady, school girl, submissive Asian woman — that make her ethnicity the object of some fantasies.
Chang is quite the opposite of a meek Asian girl and doesn’t stand for it. She runs a club at the University of Waterloo dedicated to educating about equality. One of her goals is to crush stereotypes.
In her personal life, to weed out unwanted dating attention, she puts disclaimers on her dating app profiles stating she’s a feminist and that those seeking a submissive Asian girl should move along.
“I joke that I’m more likely to punch you than to submit,” says Chang.
She partially blames the perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes on media. A 2017 study on U.S. media from the University of Oxford seems to agree, showing that media can negatively influence people’s perceptions about different ethnicities (even one’s own ethnicity). Where watching negative racial depictions can foster racism and internalized stereotypes in those not being portrayed, those who are can feel shame or anger toward their onscreen representations.
Take films like Aladdin, for example, which offers a fantastical depiction of the Middle East, not to mention the film’s long-criticized portrayal of Arab women as belly dancers and harem girls.
Cultural evidence of racial stereotypes are easily found online, too. A typical example is the YouTube channel Movie Hotties that has dedicated two videos to glorifying the bodies of Latinas and Asian women.
Meanwhile, Netflix’s comingof-age series Chewing Gum offers a comedic portrayal of the micro-aggression that is race fetish culture. In one episode, the main character, Tracey, dresses up as a tribal African woman and dances to please a love interest with a Black girl fetish. When she later calls out his degrading fantasy, the man, Ash, attempts to redeem himself by calling it “positive discrimination.” The scene goes on to explore the emotional turmoil racial fetishes can inflict.
To address this issue, Amanda Whitten, a medical doctor with a master’s in women’s studies, has proposed offering anti-racist sex education in public schools. In her 2014 paper calling for a racially informed sexed curriculum, Whitten discovered that when public schools mentioned race in the curriculum, non-white ethnicities tended to be subtly depicted as poorly educated and closedminded toward sexual health.
Whitten suggests schools educate students on the “historical context of racism, of coloniza- tion and residential schools and how that impacts sexual health.” The goal, she says, is to make future generations more conscious of the costs of racism, in hopes of eliminating it. Andrew Coppens, an LGBTQ man of Latino-Belgian descent, accepts racial bias as a given. He says he’s met men who may have watched too many movies with the “sexy Latinos” stereotype and look to him to indulge their fantasies, but says he sees it as an opportunity to develop a relationship.
However, he admits that can sometimes backfire. Many men have imposed vulgar sexual fantasies on him, often using his race to fuel kinks he’s uncomfortable with.
Despite his open-mindedness, Coppens is surprised at how quickly some men change their tone when he rejects them. “They’ll switch from being so into your race as a sexual toy or whatever it is, and as soon as you turn them down, they become racist.”
However, Coppens accepts that people have racial preferences and sexual fetishes, as long as they’re respectful.
“Everybody has a preference. You’ll never get away from that.”
Samantha Baker’s mother, Vivienne, would agree. A Black woman who tends to date Caucasian men, she says racial preference doesn’t matter as much as an emotional connection.
Her boyfriend, Rob, is a Caucasian man who prefers to date Black women. When he told her his belief that all Black women are nurturing, Vivienne was initially put off. However, once she got to know him, she says their chemistry washed away any sense of race.
“It’s all about love,” Vivienne says. “If you don’t have it, you have nothing.”