vaginapagina | MMMMonday! Exotification of the POC community

It's MMMMonday! Each Monday, we bring you special, maintainer-curated content intended to enrich your VP experience. Please note that you can find past MMMMonday posts using the mmmmonday tag.

Also, a quick reminder about the other places you can find VP: vp_bulletins for local announcements; contact_vp for questions and feedback on the way VP is run; the Vulvapedia for basic questions; and don't forget about our sibling community over on Dreamwidth!

This week's MMMMonday post is by Erika Harada. Reach out to her online at erika.koga.harada@gmail.com, on her website, or via her Etsy shop.

As a person of color, navigating the dating scene is rife with all sorts of obstacles. Not that white people have it great, either, of course, but there tends to be an extra added layer of fail that we have to deal with...and it’s called exotification and fetishism.

It seemed like when I was dating around, every other conversation would be about how my eyes are so beautiful or how much they love sushi. Oh, and don’t let me get started on how often I get asked where I’m “from.”

But as annoying and problematic as those conversations were, they didn’t anger me quite as much as when an older (white) gentleman started going on and on to me with the same old spiel about how Asian women make the best wives because they’re submissive and love pleasing their man. I’d come to expect such ridiculous nonsense in my OK Cupid messages, but the fact that someone actually had had the nerve to say that to my face was pretty shocking at the time.

Of course, we Asian folk are not the only ones who have to deal with fetishism; plenty of people seem to seek out others of certain races exclusively for all the wrong reasons.

But is it really that bad? You may ask. Doesn’t everyone have preferences when it comes to dating?

As much as that’s true, having a racial fetish is not exactly the same thing as being attracted to blondes or redheads. Preferences might attract someone to a potential mate, but is likely something that is negligible when it comes down to actually getting to know someone and forming a bond. Fetishes, on the other hand, are things that can override all other things that one is attracted to in a person -- a race fetishist would only ever pursue people of that certain race, and would not consider having a partner of any other race. The person is reduced to an object, like a high-heeled shoe or sexy stockings, and nothing more.

Also, just because the attention placed on us is built on a positive stereotype (Asian women are sweet, Black women are strong and independent, Latinas are fiery and good in bed, etc) does not make all that generalizing OK. A stereotype is a stereotype, and you’re making assumptions about someone based purely on their ethnic background which are likely not accurate at all.

Let’s take the “model minority” stereotype placed on we Asian folk, for example. There is the prevailing idea among non-Asians and Asians alike that we are highly successful, both academically and in the workplace. While it is true that overall, East Asians are likely to be high income earners with post-secondary degrees, it is a gross oversimplification of the real Asian American experience for many of us. It erases our identities as individuals, and paints us all with the same brush -- when in reality, we are all of very different and diverse backgrounds, from Chinese to Taiwanese, Indian, Cambodian, Korean, Malaysian...and in between. We can be first generation, or our great-great-grandparents might have been the first ones to emigrate. Some of us do, indeed, live in poverty and struggle to survive. We deal with issues faced by other POC communities like hate crimes and police brutality -- but due to the myth of the collective Asian experience, those stories are erased and not taken very seriously. Worst of all, such myths work to drive a wedge between Asian-American communities and other Communities of Color; conservative politicians certainly seem to enjoy looking to Asian-Americans as being the “good immigrants,” constantly berating other POC communities as not working “hard enough.”

On top of all that, fetishes work to Other-ize POC, most commonly women of color, by treating us like we’re exotic and a prize, something “out of the ordinary”. This is evident in all the words commonly used to describe us: “China doll,” “geisha," “lotus flower”...rather problematic, considering how often we are perceived as not really a part of mainstream society.

As with any stereotype, peoples’ perceptions are shaped through the media and the lack of interaction with other cultures or minorities. Despite the fact that things are getting better these days regarding media representation, there is still a lack of nuanced and complex characters of color, and especially women of color. Oftentimes the same old set of tropes are trotted out and used to turn characters into one-dimensional caricatures, used as a backdrop to white protagonists. No wonder people are getting the wrong impression about us.

POCs of VP -- have you felt fetishized by potential/current partners or random people in the past? How did you deal with it?
Everyone else -- did you realize this was an issue? What can be done to combat this?