When your ethnicity is a fetish
Dating is hard, especially when some view your race as another item to check off on their sexual bucket list
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 became even more 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 Nword 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 are not seeking out a relationship based on an actual personality, they are basing it solely on race.
“They want to have sex with me because they’ve never had sex with a Black girl,” Baker says.
It’s enraging to be viewed as an ethnic conquest, Baker adds.
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 simply 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.
Toronto-based relationship coach Chanté Salick has heard many stories of racial fetishizing from her social circles and in her practise, 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,” Salick says. “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 her clients to ask first-date questions around 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 up 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 fully aware of common Asian stereotypes — Dragon Lady, schoolgirl, submissive Asian woman — that make her ethnicity the object of some men’s 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 any 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, who moved to Toronto from China when she was 7.
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 and feelings 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. The latter video has almost 200,000 views.
Meanwhile, Netflix’s raunchy comingof-age series Chewing Gum offers a comedic portrayal of the microaggression that is race fetish culture. In one episode, the main character, Tracey, dresses up to resemble 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 at the University of Ottawa, has proposed offering anti-racist sex education in public schools. In her 2014 paper calling for a racially-informed sex-ed curriculum, Whitten discovered that when public schools mentioned race in the sexed curriculum, non-white ethnicities tended to be subtly depicted as poorly educated and closed-minded toward sexual health.
Whitten suggests schools educate students on the “historical context of racism, of colonization 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 historically and presently, in hopes of eliminating it completely.
“Fetishism and racial stereotypes didn’t happen yesterday. It’s important to know where they came from because … it can help us in some ways undo those biases we have.”
Andrew Coppens, an LGBTQ man of Latino-Belgian descent, accepts racial bias as a given in our society. He acknowledges he has encountered men who may have watched too many movies featuring the stereotype of “sexy Latinos” and look to him to indulge their fantasies, but says he finds it flattering and 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 not comfortable with. And being able to pass as Caucasian opens him up to even more uncomfortable advances. Where white men are usually attracted to his Latino culture, Coppens says Asian and Filipino men often fetishize his Caucasian appearance.
But despite his open-mindedness, Coppens is surprised at how quickly some men change their tone when he rejects their advances.
“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.”
This has lead him into a distressing cycle of giving up on dating and then going back to it — hoping he’ll find a good partner.
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.”
But Salick says sexual preference is not an issue in itself.
“Sometimes (preference) has nothing to do with being biased. It’s more of just their upbringing,” she says. “It only becomes a problem when someone is using a stereotype to” project their ideal of your race onto you.
Samantha Baker’s mother, Vivienne, would agree. She is a Black woman, who tends to date Caucasian men. She believes that growing up in a primarily white neighbourhood and a bad experience with an older Black man as a child likely influenced her personal choices. But Vivienne believes racial preference doesn’t matter as much as a true emotional connection to the other person.
Her boyfriend, Rob, is a Caucasian man who prefers to date Black women. When he told her his belief that all Black women are very nurturing, Vivienne was initially put off. However, once she got to know him, she says their undeniable chemistry washed away any sense of race.
“It’s all about love,” Vivienne says, glancing at Samantha. “If you don’t have it, you have nothing.”