In a guest post over at TNC‘s place, Adam Serwer points to a problematic little paragraph tucked in the middle of Tracy Clark-Flory‘s takedown of John Mayer‘s assholery.
And what of Meyer calling his Johnson a racist? (Insert here: Tasteless joke about hooded Klansman.) Look, as a general idea, I don’t object to people having racial preferences when it comes to sex partners; it’s only human to imprint on certain physical traits and gravitate toward particular “types.” (Although I think it’s a great idea to challenge the limitations of your personal “love map,” as psychologists like to call it.) That said, it is one thing to state an enduring preference for, say, Asian women and another to pronounce: My dick hates black women!
I’m not sure the delineation she’s drawing here is so clear cut, and that the former (“a preference for Asian women”) is as harmless as she seems to be making it. I’ve known many women of color who have expressed ambivalence toward interracial dating for a host of reasons, but one that always comes up in conversations about these hypothetical couplings is a deep suspicion of being fetishized. (A good friend once said she would never date a non-Asian dude who had previously dated other Southeast Asian women, or “rice daddies.”) There is an implicit dehumanization of the person being “admired” that the admirer misses out on; a “preference” for wo/men who are _______ because someone feels that such people are “strong”/good in bed/easier to deal with/submissive is implicitly dehumanizing, and it’s a dehumanization that the admirer misses.
This is a point Latoya hits on over at Jezebel:
Race and where it intersects with love and sex is incredibly difficult to discuss. The line between preference and fetish is very thin, and often, many people accept stereotypical narratives about dating and race as truth. Mayer expresses bafflement at his own preferences, as if some magical fairy smacked him with a wand and suddenly they just aren’t attracted to entire racial groups. Don’t pull the “I don’t know why that is” shit – it’s internalized racism. We all have some. Groups of color internalize prejudices and enact them through colorstruck ideas about light-skin being more attractive than dark skin, or keen features being more attractive than broader ones. And society is full of programming waiting to inform people that Asian girls are submissive while Asian guys aren’t worthy of consideration. This type of racism manifests itself in phrases like “you’re pretty for a black girl,” or in all the times where the person you want to date doesn’t want to bring you home to meet the family.
Preferences aren’t benign forces – they have real impacts on the perception of desirability of certain groups of people, and Mayer willingly perpetuates this in his interview, alongside giving his black female fans a verbal smack in the face. Does it really matter who John Mayer wants to date or sleep with? In the grand scheme of things, no. But considering his deployment of well trod stereotypes about the undesirability of black women (complete with the “but I’d do her” exceptions), it isn’t just an issue with Mayer.
It’s hard to overstate just how much racialized dating preferences are freighted with essentialist ideas about masculinity and femininity — ideas they don’t become untethered even when someone is discussing a preference for dating intra-racially exclusively.
Adam, again:
But making the blanket statement that you aren’t attracted to an entire race of people strikes me as complete bullshit, because it reduces entire category of human beings to a set of assumptions drawn from a necessarily limited set of experiences. For the same reason, I don’t see how expressing “an enduring preference from Asian women” is any less problematic. If I was on a date with someone who expressed “an enduring preference” for biracial black Jews, I’d tip my Kangol hat, pick up my Kiddush cup and bounce–and not just because that’s mad specific.
Part of sexual maturity, I think, is learning the difference between what you’re attracted to and what simply validates you. This is why the stereotypical adolescent crush falls on people of certain social standing– the quarterback, the prom queen, etc. Blanket declarations of what races you are or aren’t attracted to strike me as tied to the same question of what kind of person does or does not validate you, and are therefore a question of immaturity. I don’t know any men or women–Asian, black, white, or otherwise–who want to be someone’s “validation” rather than their partner.
