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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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