[CW: Fetishization on the Basis of Identity (Race, Transness, Etc.)]
I'm mainly talking about this in the context of race, but it applies to other categories such as trans people as well. My main issue with this is that this type of openness to accepting fetishization on the basis of identity enables toxic tendencies.
What I mean is that, for example, I'll sometimes see black men play into disturbing tropes like the "BBC" shit and this idea that they can tie their race into the notion of being some kind of sex god. And it's worse when you get white women who unironically identify as "snow bunnies" as a way to entertain this trope (which is just racist), and these black men who don't realize the problem with this will eat it up.
This isn't pleasant; it's just dehumanizing. This isn't just a problem for straight people either. Gay men, for instance, can have this toxic shit going on too. I understand that, especially when you're a part of a marginalized group, it can seem tempting to celebrate what seems to translate to you being a desirable person, even if it's on the basis of a creepy fetish, but that will ultimately do more harm than good.
I just hope these people come to realize that they're not taken as being a desirable "person" in these circumstances, but rather, a desirable object. These fetishists do not care about their humanity, and it is, first and foremost, their fault that this is a problem to begin with.
Fanon even mentions this in Wretched of the Earth.
Side note: I also hate it when people talk about how good looking biracial babies are like they're fucking dog breeds.
Side note: I also hate it when people talk about how good looking biracial babies are like they're fucking dog breeds.
Out in crackkkerland the only biracial people they see are on the TV and so they mistake “TV showing me good looking people because that’s what TV does” for “all biracial people are attractive.”
It's even worse when an entire community is dedicated to this under the guise of being a safe haven for a minority group.
A prime example of this is Reddit's 196, and its adjacent communities. They built their entire modus operandi around *supporting" trans and GNC people, but in reality that support consists of lots of fetishization. Plenty of trans people will sadly join in on it, because they think they found an environment that isn't hostile to them. But whenever one of them steps out of line and actually points out the blatant fetishization, they get surprised that those who pretend to be their allies will suddenly attack them.
It's the classic mistake of thinking fetishization means that you're being seen as an equal. Fetishization and oppression often go hand in hand. It's been a common theme throughout history.
196 and "genocides are bad when I am not the one doing it". I could tolerate other bullshit but "I will vote for my fuhrer Joe Biden until he comes to kill me" was really bullshit. Does anyone know any other active(extremely online) leftist shitpost places?(I still miss you r/cth my beloved)
/r/gamingcirclejerk has a similar culture and is much more aligned with Hexbear's politics. /r/sharkpark is basically 196 but they never post about politics at all so it's just the same kind of meme with no libs but also no based posts. /r/thedeprogram is also a bit similar but because the community is explicitly political and most of the memes are about economic topics I think it's just inherently less humorous. Not to mention that the demographic is so young that it often devolves into childish things and people posting about getting banned from other subreddits. /r/TrueAnon is the best subreddit left IMO but it's not as active as the others. /r/acidmarxism, /r/blackwolffeed, /r/blackepsteinfeed are out there if you wanna look at the comments for leftist discussion. If you really are a content hog then there's also /r/theadamfriedlandshow and /r/redscarepod but those subreddits are full of straight up chuds and are just generally even worse than 196.
oh no
I should've just recommended /r/tankiethedeprogram
I'll do better next time
It's the classic mistake of thinking fetishization means that you're being seen as an equal. Fetishization and oppression often go hand in hand. It's been a common theme throughout history.
Seeing this was perfectly timed with that ruffled person posting the hexbear trans poll and being like "they're not the safe space 196 is the safe space"
https://hexbear.net/post/2663078
I hadn't seen that post yet, but yeah.
That's another aspect of the fetishizing "ally". They think they get to make the call on who is real and who is fake. Because surely the real ones would not only believe in the same things as I do, but they would also be grateful for all this acceptance I'm showering them with!
What I mean is that, for example, I'll sometimes see black men play into disturbing tropes like the "BBC" shit and this idea that they can tie their race into the notion of being some kind of sex god.
I knew a black guy once who said the problem with the well-endowed black man stereotype is that if you take it out for a girl and it doesn’t hit the floor, she’s disappointed.
And it's worse when you get white women who unironically identify as "snow bunnies" as a way to entertain this trope
is that what that means? I saw some recommended video about a guy meeting his ideal snow bunny and I thought “oh she spends a lot of time on the slopes, he’s into skiers I guess.”Which, besides the dehumanizing of marginalized groups, devalues earnest interracial couples. Like it makes it look like the relationship must be about fetishizing and not, oh hey maybe these people actually care about each other and love each other.
is that what that means? I saw some recommended video about a guy meeting his ideal snow bunny and I thought “oh she spends a lot of time on the slopes, he’s into skiers I guess.”
Having spent a brief stint living in a ski town, everybody always used "snow bunny" to mean "white woman who can't really ski, but goes to the ski lodge to hook up with the cute rich white guys."
But in recent years, I guess The Youths have decided it means "white woman who exclusively dates black dudes." Language is weird.
Yeah this is the moment i had to update my internal urban dictionary too. Im having a bit less trouble than with the asl update (at least that one made sense) but its like how come we can't just make a new name for this? Dagum kids ruinnnnnnnin
with the asl update (at least that one made sense)
American... Sign Language??
oh are you a 10k'r? Lucky! Besides sign language (lol) ASL was age/sex/location for early chat rooms but is now used to mean "as hell" like "i'm mad asl right now".
At first i was mad at the change (yaarghlebargle hell doesn't start with L) but then i thought the original A/S/L was truly obsolete and ready to be appropriated. Go youts!
I remember a/s/l being used on Omegle as a teenager, but I've never seen "asl" being used to mean "as hell".
yaarghlebargle hell doesn't start with L
But yeah that reminds me of how I'd make my mom mad as a kid, when I would make this one TTS program say "bloody L"
Uh... I followed your link and didn't understand a thing in there. Can you explain like I'm an idiot?
Try scrolling to the top of the page.
In any case I was just making sort of a "the more things change" type joke, that even Romans in the days of Late Latin were complaining about the ways that youngsters would speak and write.
Snow bunny has had the "white woman who only likes black men" meaning for at least 30 years or so. I'm 40 and recall hearing it as a kid, but it was in Alabama
Fair enough. I guess it's taken a few decades to spread to places that actually have snow.
Could you elaborate on that a bit? I haven't heard of blahaj.zone having a large amount of chasers.
Mostly the 196 comm. I honestly am not sure that the comm itself is gonna have many examples of chaser behavior, but if you go to /r/196 on reddit you'll always see a bunch of chaser posts on the front page, and the comm was meant to be a lifeboat for the subreddit. The weird thing about them IMO is that there used to be some pushback against chasers, but eventually there was a bad faith tactic of painting chasers as puritans who just didn't want to see any horny posts, so now anyone who points out the chaser behavior in that community is accused of being a transphobic puritan or something to that effect.
Sorry I wasn’t aware of the origin of that phrase and I removed the comment.
Othello is referring to Lenin's Cat calling "pick me" an "awful term" — the term "pick me" originated in AAVE, as do probably way more words and phrases than you're consciously aware of. AAVE words and phrases start getting used by whites, this leads to semantic shift as the words are used outside of their original context and purpose, and this in turn leads to the actual histories of these words becoming completely forgotten by whites.
Frankly, I had never given a moment's thought as to who exactly might've first coined the term "pick me", so literally as I'm writing this I'm becoming aware of the term's actual history.
I also was never aware that the term "pick me" originated in AAVE. That's something new I learned today.
Unless you simply are not around Black people I guess.
i was the only black kid in my school and there was an assembly where they announced the banning of bandanas and durags
so excited to leave this suburban hellscape
Random story of my childhood cuz tangentially relevant:
I grew up in buttfuck suburbia, bout 50/50 black white. A lot of white flight was going on in my 'hood and the caps were gettin nervous about it. We had a HyperMart (the first Walmart super stores) that banned durags, all red or blue outfits, blasted country music loud enough that you had to raise your voice to talk to your buddy. Oh of course this had nothing to do with race, just "gang violence". Anyway punkracka highschooler me decided to test that theory.
So i head down to the place with a roll of quarters for aladdin's castle in my tommy hilfigers and a black bandanna on my dome like a cap and ride my bike over.
There were pigs at the entrance to check compliance and one of em stopped me saying "the rules are no gang colors or rags". I said "but this isn't gang colored" and it's just my fav bandana and he just... let me go in.
Anyway i had planned to make it in and flaunt how cool i was getting around the rules (or something? I dunno i was a dumbass) but the black people inside were not amused. Two or three separate cats came up to tell me i was gonna get in trouble, and got pissed when i told em i had permission.
I still didn't get it back then, but i took off the bandana
I was only aware of the original meaning of the word (women who shit on other women to try to be more attractive to men). I'm not American, so that probably explains why I didn't know it originated in AAVE. Thanks for the history! Personally I disagree with Lenin's Cat that 'pick me' is an awful term. It's a very self-descriptive term that gets the concept across very easily - more words in the English language should be like it.
Yeah, I was going to ask how you'd define "pick me" yourself, but I see you've already done that in other comments. When trying to look up the original meaning of "pick me" I was met with some amount of contradiction, so I wasn't sure what to think.
But yeah, we have already a myriad terms for "appealing to the fantasies/expectations of the oppressor", so the only upside of using "pick me" with that meaning is how evocative it is of specifically putting others down for one's own sake... And yeah, it's not inherently a bad thing for a word to be used only for its evocation, for a word to spread and change meaning — but it becomes a bad thing when the context of this exchange is one of inequality between groups.
I largely agree but my only hesitation is ive seen lots of examples lately on the shitty bird app of trans women and other femme presenting people being accused of "self-fetishizing" and thereby damaging the rest of the community for totally innocuous things. Or for posting sexy selfies or for being sex workers.
Things like PhilosphyTube posting an old screenshot of her character from some video game in some vaguely fetishistic costume and saying she should have known at the time she was trans, and people shitting on her until she deleted it because that was apparently like playing into stereotypes and shit.
That... uh.... that bothers me that people will shit on innocuous forms of self expression and self exploration like that.
On a related note. Anybody know why this recent wave of fetishizing "femboys" (not sure if that is the best term for it) comes from? Maybe I was not online enough, but it feels like this fetish wasn't so common before covid. I actively saw subs and feeds I was in going from having nothing to do with that stuff to over the years becoming softcover porn essentially. I have a hypothesis that covid combined with the intensification of oppression in the us is the cause.
Also, I am now feeling horrified at the thought that Germans during nazi times might have fetishism Jews similarly.
A lot of transfems credit the "lockdown" as giving them space to explore and experiment with gender expression.
I see you as less if you think someone like me is actually hotter than actual hot people. You are fucking pathetic. I take pity on your ailment. No place for hate in this heart, just pity. You should be crushed like the bug you are.
I fear everyone I encounter that shows some sort of interest is a chaser, which makes me less keen to stick around since I start double (and triple, quadruple, etc) all our interactions looking for the dehumanizing edge that shows them mask off, they don't see me as a peer but entirely as an object.
Bit idea: instead of giving a blowjob, picking it up like a big microphone and doing a newscast for BBC News
Nobody is telling you what type of porn you should consume. This is a discussion forum and not a church.
This is just a spin on the "I'm entitled to my opinion" fallacy. I'm not telling anyone what they're "allowed" to do or like, but I'm speaking on legitimately problematic implications of certain forms of fetishization. Quite frankly, this just reads as someone who engages in this nasty kind of behavior trying so damn hard to cope with the criticism of how problematic it is. It wouldn't surprise me. Equating being ABLE to do something with it being RIGHT to do that something is a very common cope, hence me referring this to a form of the "I'm entitled to my own opinion" fallacy, a fallacy that serves that exact purpose.
Fetishes are not something to be applied to an entire group of people, it's between the consenting parties in a relationship. Basically, it's private and not something you do to a non-consenting public.
So, yeah in theory you could be a good partner with the fetishizing mentioned in the post when it's in the context of consenting adults... But these types of fetishes have some questionable roots to say the least. If your thing is that you like black people because they're black, then it calls into question your care for them as genuine.
Sigh i think I'm having a hard time distinguishing between fetishism and preferences. Like where is the line?
Does the person come first or the object of attraction?
If the person does, then you hopefully see them as a person and you're willing to be with someone who lacks that object or you're open to passing on that person despite the presence of the object if their personality is not a match. The object of attraction only enhances the person. That's preference.
If the object of attraction comes first (Black skin, Asian ethnicity, blonde hair, etc.), then you objectify attraction based off the object and you are only willing or strongly prefer to be with someone with that object despite maybe not matching with them in other qualities. The object of attraction supersedes the person. That's a fetish.
I don't know if I fully agree with this myself, just taking a stab at it.
I keep getting stuck on the object of attraction. Like assume for this example I exclusively want Asians cause I think they are hot and my SO is Asian. Universally I think we agree that if I just chose the first Asian that looked my way and it would be a fetish thing even though we are both happy. Now If I chose my specific partner because I like their cooking and makes me laugh is that still fetishist cause them just being the hot Asian I wanted gets me off?
not the person you replied to but: This hypothetical isn't as useful as you think it is. There are of people of any ethnicity who have a good sense of humor and cook good food. If you are only attracted to asians then you value that equal to or above everything else. Instead of connecting with the person they are that person is connecting with the fact that they are asian.
Something I believe very strongly is that our ideas of beauty and attraction follow our values. People who are only into Asians have reasons for that. For some people it is that they are of the same culture as them. For others it is because they see Asians as demure, submissive, and dutiful, or non-threatening. People don't "just like Asians" in a vacuum. There are always other reasons supporting that worldview. Nobody is going to constrict their dating pool without good reason.
Race in particular is a sensitive subject. There is danger in someone fetishizing race. Its a highly socially constructed category. When someone is exclusively attracted to Asians it probably means they are projecting racist stereotypes onto them.
Another point of evidence is the experience of fetishized people. In the trans community we call them chasers. Generally speaking, when a trans person dates a chaser, it doesn't go well. When a trans person hooks up with one the sex isn't as good. People who are hyperfocused on peoples bodies and social category/standing generally don't really fuck, and generally aren't very cool. Its best to avoid them.
When you don't allow yourself to connect with people based on themselves your connections will be shallow and stunted. This can create a downward spiral where you forget what its like to connect with people outside of your fetishes. This can fuel things like porn addiction and rape culture.
For my cousin, she just liked Koren facial features. Nothing really deeper about thier culture. She would have loved a kpop looking dude who happen to line up with her beliefs and her babies to have that look. I don't think she needs any other reason to limit her pool.
People focusing on perception of their culture for chosing a partner always seem to be creeps. Could be a bias but I keep seeing that fail to no shock of my own.
Thats how everyone with a fetish describes it. "I'm just into x." It almost always sounds innocuous when they describe it. But, in her case she could just like cheekbones, clean shave, soft skin, thick straight hair, feminine features. Thats fine, it would also describe a lot of non-korean men. Especially Japanese and Chinese men. A lot of non-asian men too. I know white guys who fit the description I just laid out. Lot of native guys and latinos too. Their line of weirdness is based on, is it Korean specifically, or features more generally. Similar to fetishizing black women versus wanting a full, feminine figure.
We agree there. Using nationality/ethnicity as a replacement for personality is entirely misguided.
Sure, but is your partner a good partner to you if all you are to them is a fetish?
Though I think the OP's referring more to structural things instead of individual interactions and how that skews everybody's opinions around a couple.
Hmm that's the thing I guess I needed to hear. It's All I am is the festish. That is where was I confused. I'd like to Believe the fetish thing was like a door to thier heart kind of thing. But if that's it then not really a relationship.
I can see it being nice to have roles you can play and not have to worry about stuff. Especially for people who are used to being outside thr normal social order.
Wait, it's all AAVE?
