[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.
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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.