Heaven forbid someone be attracted to a member of a different race.
That’s okay, but when it’s quite clearly fetishization, it’s shallow and dehumanizing.
How does one tell the difference between someone who’s legitimately more attracted versus someone fetishizing them?
Fetishization is a form of objectification. When you stop seeing a human as a person and just as an object for your own attraction and lust, you’re fetishizing them.
Right but how do you tell how someone sees other people unless they actually say it out loud? Don’t get me wrong, there are loads of white guys like this (especially on the internet) but you can’t infer someone is like this just from their dating history.
I think it’s especially an issue in tech because the demographics are already heavily skewed male (and white, Asian, or South Asian) and for some reason women in tech are much less likely to be white (more tolerance for awkwardness?)!
Usually these people will give it away through an accumulation of subtler behaviors, or they just kinda out-right say so.
These things are often subtle. Noticing the many ways they never really talk about/to you in any other way than that one aspect of you they fetishize. In this post there is the dating history, how she is just there, quietly, on his arm, because he isn’t actually doing anything to interact with her outside of her being there to be his asian woman. You may say that it is her responsibility to socialize, and that can be true, but more often than not this is a learned behavior. They have come to understand he doesn’t really want them being anything but his arm candy, and has a history of making things bad if she does otherwise.
A lot of this easily deniable, which is why so many people fall into it. A lot of abuse, and objectification, isn’t going “hey, you are my asian fuck doll, don’t try to have autonomy”. Much like how racism can be expressed in a bunch of much more subtle ways, like women taking direct hold of their purse when a black man walks on the elevator, but the strange white men didn’t illicit the same response. It could just be a shift of position, or a million other things that aren’t racism. However, when you are a black man, and see it happen every time this situation comes up, you realize it is a response to you, and what makes you different from those she was around to that point is? You are black. Hell, people might not even be aware they are doing it.
There are some people that make it clear though, for reference see the incel community obsession with asian women.
Another Lemmy thread where people get weirdly defensive…
Is it yellow fever if you also have various other variants that attract you to multiple different races?
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I once saw a nerdy Taiwanese (Chinese) SWE and his smoking hot white girl wife and I gave him a fist bump. Bro is doing the impossible.
I don’t think it’s “yellow fever.” I think there are power dynamics at play that both sides are happy to participate in.
Yikes…
The first time I heard about yellow fever I was really confused what a commonly Central American illness had to do with dating.
Partly because I’ve literally never seen a yellow Asian.
I have seen a yellow Hispanic though. They had jaundice.
Speaking as a middle aged cishet white dude who only knows some basic HTML:
I help fill the quota of transfems with thinkpads at tech parties :3
Min 20% transwomen and 20% furries. Overlap acceptable.
Im not personally a furry, I am a catgirl tho :3
Furry LiteTM
Im a furry but replace the fursuit with catears, and replace everything non cat with cats, also :3
