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BLOND_AMBITION


                                                           May 1, 2018


I want to say some stuff about feminist
attitudes toward ethnic fetishes, so I'm
picking just one to start with-- consider
the case of a white girl/black guy couple.
Just to cut out some potential side issues
for now, let's imagine that they're both      The point here is that it's
good-looking by conventional standards: a     likely they both have other
slim blond woman, a tall muscular black       options-- they're together
guy.                                          because they really want to be,
                                              not because they've "settled".
It's not a given that the attraction
between them has anything to do with               (Oh: and their can't be a
ethnic fetishes, but it could be.                  big difference in wealth.
                                                   Funny, I forgot about
It could be that they both get some sort           money as a motive.)
of charge at going against convention
and yet simultaneously going in the
direction of common ethnic fetishes--       Spike Lee called this
they are each other's "forbidden fruit".    "Jungle Fever", though
                                            that seems like a pretty
                                            weird name for it.

Or alternately, it could be that
they're both people who have wisely
risen above any sort of ethnic                         HETEROPHILLIA
biases, and their choice of each
other was completely "color blind",
and it's based entirely on
each-other's qualities as a person.

Or it could be that it's some complicated
mixture of the two, and that's actually
what I would expect-- but let's go with
this toy model for now, and presume it's
one or the other.


Now what do *you* think when you see such a couple?

Just speaking for myself, it
makes me think more highly of the
woman-- and it doesn't actually        I don't think it changes
matter to me which of the two          my opinion of the man--
kinds of motivations is involved.      why not might be an
                                       excercise for later.

Either she's risen above ethnic             It could simply be that I care
prejudice entirely, or she has              more about women in general...
the courage to indulge her ethnic           or it could be that it's because
fetishes-- either one reflects              the woman in this example is
pretty well on her to me.                   "stepping down", and the man is
                                            "stepping up", so it doesn't show
If she'd avoided getting into this          anything remarkable about him.
relationship, for fear of public
condemnation, and perhaps went off              She's made an unconventional
secretly nursing an interest in                 choice, he hasn't.
black men but avoiding doing
anything about it-- that would not
be any sort of improvement.

There are some left-wing critics
for whom fetishes are the                (But now that color-blind
flip-side of prejudices, who might       posturing has become popular with
object, and try to guilt-trip            some conservatives, maybe they'll
people for caring in any way about       drop this.)
ethnicity.


   For someone like Amia Srinivasan there's a sort
   of condrum here: she recognizes that she has to     BEYOND_THE_BLUE
   recognize the right of this pretty blond woman
   to go out with a black guy, Srinivasan worries
   deeply that this may let racism get "into the
   bedroom through the seemingly innocuous
   mechanism of 'personal preference'".

   Amia Srinivasan is emphatically not the kind of
   person who would do something like tell this blond
   woman what she should do or how she should feel
   about doing it-- but Srinivasan keeps looking for
   something *like* that that might be an acceptable
   move, she's really looking for some way some
   enlightened agency could step in and play desire
   cop and make *sure* that this woman is not doing a
   black guy just because on some level she likes the
   idea of doing a black guy.

      My question is: how, by what stretch of the
      imagination, could that possibly help?
      What would make you think that the right
      way to combat racism is to play desire cop?

      Now, I might conceed that a fascination with
      ethnicity is (or often is) bound up in
      racism, that fetishes really are the flip-side
      of prejudices, and hence, in a truly post-racial
      world, ethnic fetishes might really fade away...

      But if so that's simply a consequence of
      achieving a post-racial world, in itself it
      is not a particularly desired consequence and
      it's by no means one of the motivations for
      trying to get beyond racism.


      It seems to me that there's a confusion between
      cause and effect underlying this style of thinking--
      going after the symptoms, not the disease.


                           And as should be obvious by now:
                           the reason I selected a white girl/
                           black guy couple is that it's unlikely
                           anyone with a liberal/left orientation
                           could even imagine speaking out against
                           them-- historically that's been the
                           province of some of the worst and most
                           blatant of racists.

                              Perhaps oddly, it's a little easier to
                              find feminists complaining about asian
                              woman fetishes among white guys than
                              white woman fetishes among black guys.

                              
                              
                                                           (Oct 06, 2022)
                              
                              But my example doesn't work as well as I'd like,
                              because *many* people looking at this white
                              girl/black guy couple would begin speculating
                              about economic motives: a succesful black guy
                              with white girl friends has been a cliche at
                              least since the mid-90s when there was a
                              Boondocks comic strip about it.
                              
                              I can try to specify "same economic levels"
                              as part of the premise, but *those are hard      
                              to see*, which undercuts the way I framed        
                              this-- "how do you react when you see a        
                              couple like this?"                         
                              
                                                  




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