366 - Desirability
What is desirability politics?
The term ‘desirability politics’ is a framework for understanding why we find certain traits sexually and/or romantically desirable, and challenges us to consider how larger social forces shape our world view and what we desire.
“...[Desirability politics is t]he methodology through which the sovereignty of those deemed (conventionally) attractive/beautiful/arousing is determined. Put another way, the politics of desire labels that which determine who gains and holds both social and structural power through the affairs of sensuality often predicated on anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, (trans)misogyny, cissexism, queer-antagonism, and all other structural violence.”
Da’Shaun Harrison
When talking about desirability politics, it’s important to:
Position yourself explicitly when talking about desirability politics:
What kinds of identities do you occupy? How do they inform what you experience and what you don’t experience?
Your experience of desirability politics can shift depending on what room you’re in.
Center the experiences/analyses of those who have experienced the negative sides of desirability politics:
Those who are fat, trans, disabled, darker complexioned, etc. offer really astute analyses of what these social forces do to their bodies, which is why we should listen to their observations.
Desirability politics in polyamory
In polyamory, desirability politics may show up like the following:
Being in a situation where your partner gets a lot of attention from others and you don’t, or vice versa.
This could happen in monogamous relationships as well, but having other partners is a more pressing reality in polyamory, so that attention takes on a different meaning.
Having conversations around desirability: what you personally find desirable, what your partner finds desirable, and then how that translates into partner selection/metamours.
These conversations can prompt managing doubts and insecurities, especially if you tend to compare yourself to the people that your partner is dating.
When navigating these politics across relationships, remember that there are major limitations to the “your insecurities are your own to manage” framework. This framework does real violence to the partners that have less beauty capital, especially when they are seeking support from partners in challenging moments.
Having more productive conversations about preferences might look like:
Asking ourselves some questions:
Why do I desire/like what I desire/like?
Who am I not seeing as Beautiful, as "desirable" and why is that the case?
Do my preferences exclude entire groups of people? If so, what kinds of assumptions or beliefs do I have about them? Are they based in reality?
When supporting partners, keeping in mind that ”jealousy” and “insecurity” can actually flatten the magnitude of what your partner is experiencing.
Reclaiming desire for one’s self:
Check out “How I Reclaimed Desirability as a Black Woman After a Break Up” by Sarah Githugu.
Listen to the full episode to get all of Keyanah’s insight on the topic of desirability politics!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about desirability politics and preferences. We all have preferences when it comes to what and who we like. What might we find when we analyze where those preferences come from? Especially within the context of sexual and romantic connections, we may find that they tell us a lot about society as a whole rather than just an individual person's choices. We're joined today by our researcher, Dr. Keyanah Nurse, as we unpack how all desire is political, how these politics play out in dating and partner selection, and how they may show up in managing multiple partners in polyamorous relationships.
Dedeker: Personally, I'm super excited to dive into this topic. This is something that has been bouncing around in my brain, something that I've chewed on for several, several years, something that I've had a lot of, frankly, very annoying and irritating conversations about in my own personal life. I've just been really excited to give this a Multiamory treatment of actually doing a deep dive into, not only people's lived experiences with this, but also what the research says and just how we can understand this topic a little bit more. Of course, most of this topic is being carried by our researcher, Dr. Keyanah. Keyanah, what made you want to do an episode on this topic in particular?
Keyanah: I've also had a lot of frustrating conversations about this topic in my personal life and on online forums. I really wanted to tackle this topic of preferences and desirability politics, because like I said, I see them play out in polyamorous spaces, particularly all the time. When it comes to vetting potential partners, assessing compatibility across different relationships, or even determining which style of polyamory best suits you, we all have to make choices around what we desire and what we don't.
I've always wanted to have a bigger conversation around the why behind those choices because usually the common refrain that people respond to when you ask them about their preferences, they say, "Well, these are just my preferences". It's exactly that kind of response that actually shuts down any critical conversations around what we desire and why. Even though these desirability politics and preferences are related, I also wanted to talk about how they're not necessarily the same thing. We can start by talking about desirability and desirability politics.
Jase: I guess just to start off, clearly, Dedeker and Keyanah have, but have we heard this phrase before, "desirability politics"? What do you think of when you think of desirability politics?
Emily: I've heard the two words separately, but putting them together is a separate thing entirely. It makes a lot of sense because I think as the two of you said, having these more critical conversations often just doesn't happen. When you look at the words, desirability politics together, you have to question and ask yourself, "Okay, I have my own internal desires or things that that I'm attracted to, but really, where does that attraction come from? Where did those preferences or whatever you want to call them come from?"
Then I guess looking deeper back into your family of origin, or the way in which you were raised, or the people that you were exposed to, or the kind of media that you were exposed to, there's so many different things that can probably come into play when we're talking about things that we desire or not. I think that is a political thing in and of itself.
Dedeker: I know for myself, I think in my personal life, I didn't even really start thinking about desirability politics as a concept until there was the advent of dating apps like swipe style dating apps. I suppose Tinder was probably the first. Before that, I would go on dating sites, I was active on Okay Cupid, and stuff like that. I think it wasn't until this entered our cultural conversation where there was this very addictive, very quick decision making around partner selection in an app where, in a split second, you're going through a big stack of people's profiles, in a split second, it's right, left, left, left, left, right, left, whatever it is, and started getting really curious about, that's such a short amount of time to make a decision.
You're clearly not necessarily maybe sitting and really chewing on what's going into whether I think this person is someone that I want to date or not. There's definitely some forces underneath what's driving that decision-making for myself.
Emily: It feels so visual too in a lot of ways, especially when it's on a medium like that.
Keyanah: I definitely do not swipe on people who don't have anything written on their profile. For me, I try to get around the solely visual aspects of the dating apps, but I definitely take your point for sure.
Emily: What do we mean when we talk about desirability politics? It's not simply a description of what we desire sexually and/or romantically, but it's also a framework for understanding why we find certain traits sexually and/or romantically desirable. When we look at this further, we perhaps can be challenged to consider how the larger world, kind of what I talked about before, shapes what we desire, how maybe macro-social forces, things like racism, or capitalism, or ableism, transphobia, things along those lines, how that may shape our desire, or just, like I said, our family of origin or what we were exposed to or not. There's all of these different things at play when we talk about desirability politics. We're going to get into that a bit today.
Dedeker: There's some important things to bear in mind as we're talking about this. It's important to pay attention to yourself and then to position yourself explicitly when we're talking about this. What this means is having some critical thinking and asking yourself some questions about what sort of identities do I occupy? What sort of labels do I ascribe to? Do those identities inform not only what I do experience, but also what I don't experience? That one's a little bit trickier. Sometimes it's harder to connect to.
It's like the whole you don't know what you don't know phenomenon where sometimes it's really hard for us to be aware of all the things that we don't experience as a result of the identities that we have. Again, your personal experience of how desirability politics plays out in your life can shift depending on the room that you're in, the people that are around you as well. It's also important for us to center the experiences and the thoughts and analyses and opinions of people who have experienced, particularly the bad side of desirability politics, the negative side.
Basically, the people who, I think, because of certain social forces, often are cast as "undesirable". People who are fat, trans, disabled, people with darker complexions, these speakers and these thinkers tend to offer some very poignant analysis of what these kinds of social forces do to them, do to their minds, do to their bodies, which is why it's also important to listen to these observations.
Emily: One of these great thinkers is just Da'Shaun Harrison, who is a Black, fat, queer and trans theorist and abolitionist based in Atlanta. They're the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. They're a really great person to learn from when we're thinking about desirability politics, and also how they're informed by anti-fatness and anti-Blackness. They wrote an article called Desirability: Do you really love fat people when you cannot see us beyond the political?
Harrison defines desirability politics as, "The methodology through which the sovereignty of those deemed conventionally attractive/beautiful/arousing is determined. Put another way, the politics of desire labels, that which determines who gains and holds both social and structural power through the affairs of sensuality, often predicated on anti-Blackness, anti-fatness transmisogyny, sexism, queer antagonism, and all other structural violence."
Keyanah: Obviously, there's quite a bit to unpack in that quote, but I love Harrison's writing because it's so incisive in describing exactly what is happening in our social world, how these forces shape our understanding of what constitutes a desirable body. One of the things that's so great about this quote, I think, is how Harrison describes how we collectively as a decidee decide what is attractive, beautiful, arousing, et cetera, but highlighting very explicitly how that process is neither democratic nor arbitrary. It's informed by these larger things, like anti-Blackness, like anti-fatness, like transmisogyny. The history around these larger forces determined what this process looks like.
I definitely recommend anyone to check out their work, as well as some of the shorter pieces they have on their website and follow them on Twitter as well, because I've certainly learned a lot from them. As sharp as their writing is, I also appreciate the ways that it provides a call to action, of it's not enough just to simply highlight these things, but to also provide us some guidance on what we can do to move forward. Another quote that I pulled from this piece reads, "Calling your friends who show no interest in fat people. Cut off your fat-phobic partners unwilling to see through their own anti-fat biases. Do the introspective work necessary to always be pushing beyond your own biases.
This is necessary work too, and it must be done. This is no plea to be fucked. This is an attempt to point out the harm within people's hypocrisy and how necessary it is to move away from such insincerity if liberation truly is the goal." I just really appreciate the integrity that's really at the heart of this and the honesty that's at the heart of this, because if I'm honest with myself, obviously, as we talked about earlier, your position in terms of if you are desirable or not always shifts and changes depending on what room you're in.
I've often had conversations with myself around internalized fatphobia and how that shows up for me, how that shows up in my partner's selection and also how that shows up with respect to how I view myself. I think the call to action here is really wonderful because in unlearning anti-fatness, it can be a way for you to accept yourself and love yourself more fully. That's something that I really appreciate about Harrison's work.
Dedeker: Yes. I think just as a side note, the whole fatphobia and anti-fatness piece of all of this, we've been wanting to get someone on the show to specifically talk about that, to dedicate an entire episode to that. I've been trying to get Virgie Tovar on here in particular for a while. If any of y'all listener out there got any hookups in particular and your recommendations, definitely feel free to hit us up. From this quote, we can see Harrison really highlights where this particular work of unlearning those things and deprogramming those things, and also being really critical and interrogating these desirability politics needs to happen.
There is this really important caveat that this goes beyond just choosing to date someone that maybe you would have overlooked beforehand. Especially if it's in the pursuit of just feeling like a good person, choosing to date someone just for the purpose of feeling like a good person is really not great in any context. Again, it goes beyond that particular type of work. It is really interesting because, and we may discuss this a little bit later on, I've definitely found that when you start to go down this road of talking about doing this work with people, people get really anxious and really scared.
It seems like it cuts to this place of you're going to force me to have sex with someone I don't want to have sex with. Is like, it feels like that's what it cuts to the people when you're starting to have this conversation. Has that been your experience in having these conversations with people Keyanah?
Keyanah: In a way, yes. The thing that I'd like to highlight is that the reason why it's more complicated than just dating people you may have overlooked in order to feel like a good person or feel woke or whatever is because when you do that, you actually reinforce the notion that there's some prize to be one when you're desired by someone considered conventionally attractive. Which itself just reinforces all of these things that we're talking about. It's condescending, to put it in a generous way, but the non-generous reading of that is that you're actually perpetuating the very thing that you're hoping to intervene in by making different kinds of dating choices.
The real challenge, the real work is to sit in that visceral guttural feeling of why don't I find this attractive? What narratives have I been exposed to that have made me to believe that this is not attractive and to really sit in that, and it can be really scary, ugly internal work.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely.
Jase: We're going to talk later in the episode about some things that you can actually do to introspect this a little bit, but I would say maybe just to put in here, a place to start would even just be letting go of the identity attachment that you have to your preferences. I think that somehow there's this, we somehow conflate our preferences with our identity. When we say things like, "Well that person's not my type" or something, it's it's as if like I am a certain sort of person who likes this certain sort of other person.
That's really ingrained in us culturally and societally. That's just a normal thing to say and a normal way to talk about stuff. I would say maybe a place to start even is just letting go of saying things like that. Letting go of holding onto this identity of, oh, well, this is my preference and that's somehow important to who I am and instead, letting go of that grip a little bit so that you can look at it with a little more distance.
Kayanah: I think also a little more nuance too, because when we allow identities to overdetermine your "preferences", you erase all the nuance of people who may have that identity. If I say that I have a preference not to date fat people, it's like, first of all, what does that category even mean to you? What does that look like? Where is the threshold for what counts as fat and what doesn't?
Dedeker: I've tried to have this conversation so many times
Kayanah: Also, why does that identity or that marker, that label, "fat" overdetermine absolutely everything else about someone that you could also find desirable? Not even getting to the part of unpacking why fat itself is considered undesirable, but why does that then become the thing that covers up everything else that you could possibly find desirable?
Jase: As we go on, we want to take a quick moment to talk about, when we're discussing desirability politics in general, and we discuss things like those who are considered "undesirable", we're not actually making a statement about any specific person or whether or not some people find them attractive or appealing or beautiful, sexy, handsome, whatever, we're not talking about those people being unlovable or unable to have romantic or sexual connect, but about these larger social forces that impact our world, they impact who has access to resources, who is assumed to be attractive simply because of the meaning that we have attached to certain characteristics.
Like you were just saying, like you happen to fit this category that we've decided is attractive or not. That's what we're talking about. Not saying like, oh, well, if someone's in this category, they're not lovable and if you point out, ah, but look, here's a fat person who's loved. That's not the conversation we're having here. It's not about the individual, but about these pervasive cultural value judgements that are out there and that access to resources and social capital, you could say.
Keyanah: I think that fatness is certainly one avenue of having this discussion. There are obviously plenty others and I just want to take a moment to fangirl a little bit as we talk about the work of Tressie McMillan Cottom, who, as far as I'm concerned is the greatest thinker of the 21st century. That is a hill that I'm absolutely willing to die on.
For those who don't know, Tressie McMillan Cottom, is a MacArthur genius and a sociologist. One of the works that has had the most impact on just my intellectual formation, the way that I see the world, is her essay called, In The Name of Beauty, which is part of her thick anthology.
The anthology is called thick. She describes this phenomenon really well, this idea of thinking about desirability politics as particular social forces that do things to us. In this essay, In The Name of Beauty, she actually talks about the backlash that she received from other Black women, because she's a dark-skinned Black woman. She talks about the backlash that she received when she argued that as a Black woman of a darker complexion, that she was ugly. She also argued that beauty and she writes about it as Beauty with a capital B is not for Black women.
The thing that's so ingenious about her argument in the way that she positions herself within it, is that she wasn't talking about herself as being unattractive, and she certainly doesn't believe that she's not attractive. She, instead uses what she calls the social fact of her "ugliness" to talk about what desirability politics have done to her and the way that beauty operates much like capital in so far as it's not evenly distributed. As she says, beauty is "a structure of patterns, institutions and exchanges which some folks have more access to than others."
Beauty is always a system that excludes and in our current one, it does so via race, class, gender, and I would also argue ability, which she doesn't say explicitly, but the argument certainly extends as far enough to include that. I think her framework is so wonderful in terms of thinking about how things like fatness or anti-Blackness or ableism or transphobia, all coalesce within this system of beauty that distributes beauty capital unevenly, and how that itself forms what we think of as desirability politics. There are certain types of beauty that are deemed more valuable or desirable for no real substantive objective "reason."
Cottom gives us the tools to ask where that value comes from, but also the impact that this difference in value has on what we consider desirable, beautiful, or attractive. I think she gets us to a place where we really interrogate whether or not these things can ever be just chalked up to "just preferences."
Dedeker: It's really interesting to me that she draws that line between beauty and also between capital or money in something that's not evenly distributed, because when I look at, let's say very specifically the traditional American attitude towards capital and money, we're still living under this narrative that says, if you have money, if you're "successful", there's this implication that you must be more moral, or you must have deserved that, you must have earned that, therefore, you have a right to be holding onto this amount of money or this amount of capital.
I feel like I see that sometimes with the beauty and attractiveness thing as well, that we still have a little bit of this story of someone who is more beautiful-- It's the whole halo effect, that cognitive bias, someone who is more beautiful must be more moral, must be more accomplished. Maybe we even have a sense of, oh, they must have earned that sense of attractiveness maybe because, oh, they're so on top of working out or whatever it is that we want to say that it's almost like these attitudes spill over into each other in an interesting way.
Let's move on to talking about the big P-word that always pops up in these discussions, or when you start to challenge people on these discussions, which is preferences. Let's just go on the service level. What are preferences? When I say the word preferences, what do you think of?
Jase: I guess what do you like.
Emily: Cats or dogs, I don't know.
Dedeker: I have a preference for natural fibers in my clothing.
Jase: I have a preference for acoustic music over electronic music or whatever it is. It seems harmless when you talk about it that way, and yet as we've been hinting at leading up to this, that when it comes to how we view other people and who are even willing to entertain the thought of being attracted to, or being romantic with, or sometimes even being friends with, then it gets a lot messier and a lot more political, which is where the desirability politics part comes in, because it's so tied up in our culture and what our identity is and what theirs is, and all these things we've been getting into here.
Dedeker: Keyanah, you put a note in here about preferences versus requirements. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Kayanah: I think that oftentimes, and again, this is always within the context of romantic and sexual conversations, there seems to be this conflation between preference and a requirement such that people say, it's just my preference to have X, and they don't entertain Y at all. To me, that seems like a misuse of the word preference because-- and this is a silly analogy, but I think about the fact that I prefer steak over pork, but I like pork. Sometimes I'll have pork, but I do prefer steak. Does that mean that I never eat pork? No. It just means that depending on my mood, depending on the day, depending on inflation and if I can't afford steak, those are going to dictate my choices.
Sometimes it seems that when people talk about preferences when it comes to romantic or sexual characteristics in a partner, they're really talking about requirements, precisely because they would never entertain someone who doesn't have the particular characteristics that they desire. More often than not, as I've noticed, those characteristics tend to be related to appearance, they tend to be related to gender expression, they tend to be related to income or educational level. That's when I think there is a deeper discussion to be had around whether or not something is "just a preference" or if something bigger is at play.
Of course, Cottom, always coming with the fire words, has a great quote to this effect where she says, "I just like what I like is a capitalist lie. Beauty would be a useless concept for capital if it were only a preference in the purest sense. Capital demands, that beauty be coercive. If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you can make, then beauty must also be a structure of patterns, institutions, and exchanges that eats your preferences for lunch."
I love this quote because it really highlights how the language of preferences can sometimes be used to cover up the ways that desire is political. When we talk about something being just a preference, it actually makes desire apolitical, I think, by boiling it down to just innocent individual choice when in fact, there are these larger issues at play that determine why you like something or why you don't like something.
Emily: I had a conversation with someone recently a little bit about this and they're like, "Nobody can tell me what I like or not, or don't like", essentially. I think exactly what Cottom is saying that you have to look at the bigger picture and the questions about why it is that this is occurring within you and not just boil it down to something as you said, that's just innocent, because I think there's so many other things that play there, and it's easy to just brush it off and say, oh, I just like what I like and that's it, and so I don't have to think about it any further.
Jase: I think something that's really enlightening about that too, just thinking for our listeners listening at home or when you're in these kinds of conversations, is if you ever have a reaction like that to a question about a preference, and it is this like, "you can't tell me what I like or don't like", or this like, "but they're my preferences, you can't tell me that's wrong", I think that right there is a clue that this is not the preference, that this is falling more like Keyanah was saying into this requirement or like I was mentioning earlier, this sense of my identity is tied up in this preference.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be defensive about it. Like I prefer Hawaiian pizza, and someone else is like, "Really, you should consider anchovies on your pizza" and I'd be like, "Oh my god, you cannot tell me what pizza I should try". That's a completely irrational response to your preference for a flavor of pizza. Just to point out this, that's good evidence right there that this is more than just a preference.
Kayanah: I have never had pineapple pizza, and I don't know that I will.
Dedeker: Oh boy, we're getting into controversy now.
Keyanah: This is the real controversial conversation. Just to insert a little bit of seriousness back to that conversation, again, I see this a lot with, as I said, gender expression where people talk about, "Oh, it's just my preference. I don't date trans men". Again, I ask, what does a trans man look like in your mind? What idea do you have of what constitutes a trans man in order for you to feel like this is not a preference for you, because to me that highlights certain ideas of what masculinity visually presents as, that don't really map onto reality.
I think precisely because these characteristics, we put them on, or they're part of us and they impact how we have to navigate the world, how people treat us, what spaces we have access to and which we don't, that's why these conversations around preferences are tied to these larger issues because they don't just exist in a vacuum. They do actually have material consequences on how people have to live their lives. I think that's also something to consider when you're asking yourself, is this "just a preference" or is there something more here?
Dedeker: That's a good segue to talking about taking this type of actual consideration. We're looking at the work of Mary-Hannah Oteju, who's a Black American writer living in the UK. She's written on how the language of preferences does get in the way of being able to look at these things. In particular, we looked at her article called Desirability politics and why I’m no longer talking about it (for now). The main argument of that piece is that, again, just this conversation is lacking because very rarely are any of us actually employing this practice of introspection around it, of even asking the question, why do we want what we want? Why do we find certain traits desirable over others?
You can ask yourself that question and maybe the surface level response that comes back is that, I don't know, I just like what I like. I don't know, I just like it. It's like it requires that extra step to drill down even further, and not really just accept that for an answer. Most importantly, in her piece, she's asking how do we have these conversations that can bridge the gap between perceiving ourselves as just this individual in a vacuum with this collection of preferences versus understanding yourself as this social being, as this social animal, as someone who has been formed and shaped by the water that you swim in like a fish. Acknowledging that you aren't just this little individual island floating through space, that you affect other people and other people affect you.
Then we have this great quote from that article where Oteju says, "Until we are ready to interrogate our so-called preferences and tastes, the modes of media and social environments that inform them will remain on the not so merry go round of desirability politics."
Jase: I love that as just this reminder to maybe start from this place of trying to let go of some of that attachment to these things and some of that identity. Again, we'll talk about this a little more later in the episode, but I think also as something worth keeping in mind, when you are calling in your friends or yourself to say, "Hey, let's question this, let's examine this", is to focus on introspection rather than on getting to an answer because I think sometimes if we're focused on getting to an answer, then we get into those like, "Oh, okay, well it's not about transmen, it's specifically this trait of them."
You're going in the wrong direction. You're just trying to find a different rule that somehow feels better or something like that, or this different identity that feels better rather than loosening up that grip and being able to look at these things and just see how they might evolve if you held onto them less tightly and did start to look at them and examine them.
Dedeker: We're going to be taking a quick break. We're going to be continuing this conversation talking about desirability politics and how that influences partner selection, as well as how that shows up in the polyamory community. First, part of helping keep this show distributed for free, and part of helping us to keep on paying the people who help us to create this show, means listening to and supporting our sponsors so thank you so much.
Emily: Now we're going to talk about desirability politics and partner selection. Just to give a little recap, before the break we talked about the fact that desirability politics are informed by larger social issues like capitalism, White supremacy, and fatphobia. Then also we discuss the rhetoric of preferences and how that can get in the way of us understanding the political nature of our desires. To get more into that, all of this is demonstrated in things like empirical studies of how people go about dating and how that is informed by things like desirability politics and this idea of preferences.
Researchers analyze trends on dating apps and I'm sure many of you out there have found the infamous OkCupid analyzer trends. It's something that we've talked about on the show before is this really infamous and it's now deleted. It was a blog post from the founder of OkCupid and it analyzed user trends on their website, I guess, across the whole spectrum of OkCupid and it found things like the fact that Black women and Asian men were rated the least attractive by users. This really feeds into our conversation about desirability politics, preferences, things like that and so we're going to go further a little bit into that study and talk more about it.
Dedeker: It is really interesting that now we have this treasure trove of data from dating now moving to online and onto apps where we can actually look at these things instead of it-- I don't know if there was a lot of studies of this before app-based dating. Are you aware of any Keyanah?
Keyanah: No. I think in a lot of ways, researchers are now very much excited about this because you have just a wealth of data points to analyze in a way that we didn't necessarily have before.
Dedeker: Case in point, we're looking at this study that was called, Is Sexual Racism Really Racism? Distinguishing attitudes towards sexual racism and generic racism among gay and bisexual men. This was published in Sexual Behavior Scientific Journal in July 2015. This was a study where they surveyed 2,177 gay, bisexual and other same-sex attracted men who were in Australia in order to assess their thoughts on online sexual racism and whether or not they viewed it as actually racist or if it was a matter of preference. The researchers specifically define sexual racism as "discrimination between potential sexual and romantic partners on the basis of perceived racial identity."
The research questions of the study included what attitudes do gay and bisexual men hold towards sexual racism as it's expressed online? Is there a consensus among men about whether or not this practice is acceptable and then the ambiguity around whether or not sexual racism should be considered a form of racism? Are there differences between men's attitudes toward this concept and their racist attitudes more broadly?
Emil: Additionally, they looked at to what extent does sexual racism differ from broader racist attitudes. This is something that was discussed slightly before we took our break but some people out there just argue that because you don't find someone of a certain race or a certain body type or a certain whatever sexually attractive, that doesn't mean that you exhibit other racist behaviors such as not wanting to work with them or live with them et cetera.
Dedeker: I think the reason why we keep harping on the word preference is because I think the way this manifests is it's, 'I'm not blank', whether it's racist or sexist or transphobic, or fatphobic, 'I am not blank, it's just a preference'. I think that's the context that this is all used in is that when people express these things, there's often a very strong push to differentiate basically my sexual racism from my regular racism, I suppose. Wanting to distance or feel like it's okay for me to have these preferences because it's separate from something that I perceive to be more bigoted.
Emily: The other side of this argument is this idea of sexual freedom and it's essentially used to argue against the idea of sexual racism and that's to say that people have the individual right to select a partner of their choosing. Then that, I guess, in their minds potentially negates this idea that potentially they exhibit racist behavior or have ingrained racism within them of their "preferences."
This is a quote from the study and it says, "These arguments invoke the libertarian ideal of choice, which is a key ideology of the Western democracies in which these debates typically take place. Indeed the freedom to choose one's sexual and romantic partner is especially poignant for gay and bisexual men and other sexual minority groups for whom the repression, exclusion, and marginalization of sex and sexuality is both unhistorical and ongoing reality. The idea that an individual should feel shame of their desire is in many ways a challenge to the ideals of sexual freedom, which is exactly what the concept of sexual racism does."
Dedeker: I think this speaks to what we were talking about earlier about there's something about this conversation about even wanting to interrogate or apply some critical thinking about this that really activates that knee jerk, "but I have freedom". What about my freedom? Are you trying to say that you're going to force me into some particular choice that I don't like?
Keyanah: I think also it calls to mind the idea of not yucking someone's yam in a sense. I definitely see parallels with that, but at the same time, the reason why I always have such problems with this framework that centers on individual choice is that it doesn't take into account reality or rather the history that informs the world that we live in. It's one thing to think about choice as it exists in a vacuum given all options being otherwise equal but we know that that is not the case because if you're choosing between options A, B, and C within a context that's informed by colonialism and White supremacy, that it's going to also be a factor that influences the choice.
I think when you focus too much on these arguments that center on individual freedom and individual choice, you certainly miss that.
Jase: It also reminds me of getting caught up in moving a debate from, "Hey, let's examine this thing and look at how we're treating other people and why we think the things we think", and we get it mixed up with rights and like what I'm allowed to do and what the laws say I'm supposed to do. It reminds me--
Emily: That feels very much in the van of what many people are going through currently. I think with just current political debates, I guess, regarding the pandemic, et cetera.
Jase: It reminds me of my freshman year of college, they assigned us all a book to read over the summer and I think maybe 5% of people actually did it, but I was one of those rule-followers who read it. They assigned us this book called Civility by Stephen L. Carter, who is fairly conservative writer and pundit and whatever. At least was at the time, I don't know if he's still writing things.
They intentionally gave us this book to read because we were going to like a super liberal arts college and they wanted to challenge us and have some discussion and things like that, but anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that at one point in it, he tells this story about historically there's this moment where someone burned an American flag as part of a statement, and it sparked this whole debate about was that right?
Like, "Oh, this is wrong that they did that thing, that's really disrespectful and dishonorable," and then people on the other side arguing, "Well, she had the right to do that, this is not illegal, she had the right to do it," and he kind of pointed out, like we're not talking about the same thing. Talking about whether someone has the right to do something is not the same as whether it was a good thing to do or the right thing to do, regardless of what you think about that, they're two completely separate arguments, and it kind of makes me think of that where you're able to kind of derail the argument by making it about this other thing.
By making it about rights or freedoms instead of "Hey, let's examine why we might think this thing and how people might be hurt by this system that we live in." Going back to the study, though, in this, the way that the survey worked is they asked participants to respond to certain prompts on a Likert scale, which is that scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. I know we've all taken studies or surfaced with those sorts of questions, and some of these questions were sort of broad to assess general attitudes about multiculturalism, and then others were specific to online dating practices.
Like we mentioned, trying to tell the difference between how they feel about racism sort of more generally versus how they feel about it when it relates to dating profiles and dating, sexual practices, things like that. An example of one of the questions there would be, "Is it okay to indicate a racial preference when looking for sex or online dates? And then rate it from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
Keyanah: I have to say the findings of this study were not necessarily surprising to me, given a lot of, I guess, advertising rehabilitation that apps like Grindr have had to do in recent years, given how pervasive the sexual racism is on the platform, but in this particular study, they found that 96% of the respondents recalled viewing a profile or profiles that engaged in some form of racial discrimination, and I just want to take a moment to reflect on the significance of that, that 96% of people from this study said, "Yes, I have encountered this in some capacity, as I use these dating apps," and just to have your, I guess, experience of online dating be so determined or so informed by sexual racism as its masquerading as preferences.
I think that that is really disheartening to say the least, and I recall my own experiences on platforms like Tinder and OkCupid, and I come across profiles as well that will say, "I don't prefer to date trans women or no black women" or things like this, but now, people have to use more coded language because apps are kind of regulating that language a little bit more closely in a way that they have it always, and again, people feel okay doing this because they say, "It's just a preference."
Some other findings from the study include that 64% of the survey respondents agreed that it was okay to indicate a racial preference online, 43% reported being bothered by seeing racial exclusion in online profiles, but then, 46% reported not being bothered. A similar number of people reported being bothered and not being bothered by seeing these things, and I think that is really reflective of this, the way that preferences kind of do this work of covering up the desirability politics at play here and making these displays of sexual racism more innocuous because we're just calling them preferences, and so it's not surprising to me, but those who had never experienced racial exclusion were less bothered by seeing it online than those who had.
If someone kind of occupies a normative identity in some capacity, if they're white, if they're able-bodied, whatever the case may be, those people were less likely to be bothered by seeing these forms of sexual racism online, and I don't know if that's just a lack of empathy, understanding other people's experience, or whatever the case is, I don't know what does everyone else think of these findings, I'm very sad and then enraged by the--
Dedeker: I don't know. I mean, my assumption would be if you're white and probably haven't experienced a ton of racial exclusion, yes, you probably just don't even connect, like the empathy gap is real. Right?
Keyanah: Yes.
Dedeker: Combined with historically I think there's just been a lot more permission for white people to have preferences in a such away.
Emily: Hand-wave away.
Dedeker: Yes, the hand-wave and kind of smokescreen away a lot of these things.
Jase: I think it's an example of what we mentioned earlier of just you don't know what you don't know, right? You haven't experienced what you haven't experienced, and I think that sometimes if you're someone who has more social capital in terms of these cultural beauty standards and things like that, or just more privilege in general, it's easy to think, "Oh, well, I've had people who didn't want to date me because I play video games or I smoke or because I drink or whatever it is."
It's like, "Yes, that sucked, but like that's normal. That's fine." It like, "I think I can relate to that, but I don't actually have the experience of what that would be like to have it be much more pervasive," and I think that kind of, again, the study doesn't surprise me, but it is unfortunate and disappointing. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. I think that's what I have to say.
Dedeker: There's a lot more from this study that we're going to talk about more in a bonus episode, but we're moving along to talking about specifically how this intersects with polyamory and polyamorous relationships. Of course what happens in a non-monogamous situation is chances are you are witness to your partner or partners also dating, also seeking partners, also getting a lot of attention from other people while you're not getting a lot of attention or vice versa, you may be the one getting a lot of attention or being considered to be attractive in particular spaces and your partner is not.
Of course, this could happen in monogamous relationships as well but again, directly having that experience of both myself and my partner or partners are essentially in the dating pool or actively seeking for partners, it takes on a little bit more of a pressing reality, that attention maybe comes across a little bit more acute then maybe if you're monogamous.
You may also have conversations with your partner or partners around desirability what you personally find desirable, what your partner finds desirable, and then how that translates into partner selection or into metamour relationships or things like that.
It is interesting because I do find that polyamorous folks and non-monogamous folks in general, there's so much emphasis on communication, there's so much emphasis on figuring out what you want, it seems like that sort of yet another piece of low-hanging fruit of when people are first starting to explore alternate relationship styles is figuring out what do you want? What do you desire? What do you fantasize about? What sounds nice? Like, what are you intrigued by? There is much emphasis on let's unpack what's underneath that. I've found on average less emphasis on let's unpack what's underneath your attraction, which is kind of funny for a community that does seem to generally value the sort of--
Emily: Internalized racism and transphobia and fatphobia, et cetera.
Dedeker: Yes and having these conversations, though, it can prompt ways to manage doubts and insecurities, especially if you tend to compare yourself to the people that your partner is dating and now, comparison of course is something that we can cognitively tell people, "Oh, you shouldn't compare. Comparison is the thief of joy," or whatever it is, especially if you're trying to avoid jealousy or envy or things like that, but it's also something that happens almost in a knee-jerk subconscious kind of way. It's just something that our brains do and then when you throw desirability politics into it as well, especially if you perceive that, maybe your metamour, the person that your partner is dating, has more of this social capital or this beauty capital or attractiveness capital, that can just change the way that things feel.
Jase: Yes and before we get into some kind of actionable takeaways about how to have some more productive conversations about desirability politics, one thing that we want to talk about real quick is something that, I actually think this is becoming less prevalent in non-monogamy circles, which is a good thing, but especially when we started this podcast eight years ago or nine years ago, whenever that was, that this was kind of more of a common refrain, which was your insecurities are your own to manage.
That idea of like if you're feeling, what's the word I'm looking for? If you're feeling jealous or insecure, like you just got to deal with it. That's not something that your partner needs to fix for you. One of the big problems with this is going back to Tressie McMillan Cottom's idea of beauty capital, is that this idea that your insecurities are your own to manage just completely negates and even does violence to the partners who have less of that beauty capital, especially when they're seeking support from partners in these really challenging moments.
I think that this is something that I have noticed in online communities, especially in our own Patreon group, that people have really moved away from that way of just kind of like, "Oh, yes, you just got to deal with it," and that that's it, and instead to having more compassion and realizing that everyone plays a role in this, that you're able to ask for what could help.
If you're trying to be attuned to how these power dynamics and discrepancies are showing up across your relationships, instead of focusing on well, whose responsibility is this or like is this something they need to get over or do I need to change, instead to put our focus onto what is the best way to show up in a loving partnership when this happens, especially if you're aware of the deeply racist, classist, ableist, desirability politics that may have granted one partner or metamour or whoever more beauty capital and the other less.
Keyanah: Yes, I think that's such an important and powerful question to ask, especially if you're partnered with people who have different kinds of marginalized identities that you don't share. I've had similar conversations with one of my partners who's white whenever he has wanted to socialize in predominantly white polyamorous spaces.
I experienced this bizarre paradox of being either hypervisible and fetishized or being rendered completely invisible as a Black woman in these spaces, and so it impacts how I feel about myself because intellectually I know that I don't have the same beauty capital despite not making any statements around like how I look physically or anything like that, but it's tricky to navigate because I often am so frustrated by how to even ask for support because the ask can feel so vague and useless in a sense and so overwhelming because I just sit there and I think, "Well, how do I ask for support from someone within a system that definitionally excludes me from it in a sense."
Even in those moments, my partner is telling me that I'm really beautiful and attractive and he loves me and all this other stuff, like that support is great, but it still feels inadequate because it's essentially trying to go up against these macro forces making others see me as less equal so to speak.
In my case, I think I experienced this in Black polyamorous spaces as well but from the other side because I am a lighter skin Black person with curly hair, I have these desirable physical attributes, which is just another way of highlighting my genetic proximity to whiteness because colorism is a thing everywhere and it's a conversation that happens a lot in Black spaces, and so I think that sometimes my presence in those spaces or my experience has been that my presence in those spaces highlight that discrepancy in this beauty capital that we've been talking about.
Of course, there are spaces where people intentionally try to work against those things, but they're special, and I think that because they're special and intentional, it kind of proves the overall point, but it is to say that in terms of how I think about my own way of navigating the world and how I navigate where I fall within desirability politics, it's constantly shifting depending on what room I'm in and also depending on what partner I'm with and what kinds of support I can or can't ask for, and it's just ongoing conversations that I've had in my own relationships around, like I'm going to try my best to put some language around how you can support me in this moment.
Dedeker: I'm curious, have you found what are the things that feel like they offer you more support versus less, because this is also a whole other topic that when we're in relationship where we hold very different identities, maybe very different levels of privilege. Again, that in itself can also shift depending on what kind of space you're in, that again it's like this weird big ask. I really appreciate you talk you saying the word sometimes it feels like a useless ask because it's so hard to know even what to ask for there when we're in the face of something so big.
Keyanah: Yes. I mean, again, it depends on the room, because if I'm at a play party and most of the people there are white and have a much smaller body type than I do and I feel like I am kind of being ignored. My partner showing me affection actually doesn't land, like it reminds me of what's happening in the room. In those moments, I'm like, "Can we just step outside?" and like, "Can you tell me a joke to make me laugh" so that I can be reminded of the glue that holds us together, and I know that it doesn't exist in a vacuum obviously, but I think those moments that get at the specificity of the connection that I have with the person, whether it be like our sense of humor or other commonalities, that has usually helped me get through those difficult moments even when I know that when we go back into the room, it's like all of those social forces will be pressing down again.
Emily: That's challenging. We, I think, unpacked a lot today, and there's still more work to be done, and so with all of that, we want to give you some actionable takeaways for how to have productive conversations about desirability politics. The first one is just to have some reflection and have some conversations, and sort of we wanted to provide some questions to consider in framing your conversations or reflections with yourself and maybe even with your partners or people that are close to you.
Some of those questions can include why do I desire or like what I desire and like? Who am I not seeing as Beautiful-- And then Beautiful with a capital B as we talked about earlier, seeing as Beautiful or desirable and why is that the case? Then, also do my preferences exclude entire groups of people? If so, what kind of assumptions or beliefs do I have about them and are they based in reality?
Jase: I would say this is also the opportunity to take that step back from, one, I think identifying with those preferences of just let some space there. I know I keep saying that, but just allow yourself to look at those and realize it's not like, "Oh, I'm going to ask this question and I'm going to change overnight but rather that I'm going to start separating from these a little bit. I'm going to start questioning these and maybe do some work and start changing this." This isn't something you're just going to fix in one moment, and I think when we try to, is when we get into that like fetishization or exploitation of people to try to prove that we've fixed this problem or something.
Just to take your time to let go of those things slowly, and then on the flip side of it too, when you do ask these questions, if the answers come up that's like, "Yikes, I'm kind of upset that this is the answer, that I am maybe being influenced by these cultural factors to know that that's great." The fact that you saw that is great. It's not like, "Oh, I saw this, and I'm therefore a bad person and I'm damned." It's like, "Okay, this is great, this is an opportunity" because we're all growing, and that's the point of this.
Keyanah: Yes, I think, to reiterate Dedeker's point earlier about we're all swimming in the sea. If you finish questioning yourself and you come up to the conclusion that you're perfect and you have absolutely no flaws and you're not suffering at all from any of these internalized isms, start over, revise and resubmit, because you did it wrong. That's why these kinds of exercises are challenging but also ultimately rewarding because you do have to sit in the fact of like, "Well, here's where my work is."
For myself, I have a lot of internalized misogyny to work through and how that shows up in my polyamory. I have a lot of internalized fatphobia to work through and even getting to that point is better than just shoving this underneath the bed or putting it at the back of the closet and saying like, well, these are just my preferences or this is just how I see the world and moving on from there.
Dedeker: This is also important when we're thinking about supporting our partners or supporting people who come to us who maybe are experiencing the negative side of this or maybe are disproportionately impacted by the way that desirability politics aren't currently playing out in our culture. Now, when people do ask for support, like in the way that you described, Keyanah, what I've often seen the way that people tend to blow this is their partner comes asking for support about this or expressing that they're having this kind of really difficult experience regarding this that people either tend to go the route of, like we said before, a little bit of like, "Oh, that's just your insecurity."
Either that means you need to work on it on your own, or that means I have the power to just reassure you back into feeling totally fine about this, it's really just about kind of this individual level of reassuring you, or the other way that I've seen people tend to blow this is they get overwhelmed by the scope of it I think quite naturally and end up in a place of, "Okay, I hear you. What do you want me to do about it? What can I even do about this? This is so big, what can I even do about this?" I wouldn't recommend either of those approaches because they do flatten the magnitude of what your partner is experiencing.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution here for this, but what I've seen work most frequently or at least head in the best direction with this is to just bring your curiosity about your partner's experience and your willingness to understand, whether that means asking them a lot of open-ended curious questions about what they're experiencing, how this is impacting them, how this has impacted them before in their life, or really being gung-ho about wanting to understand, like, "I'm going to go read some books.
I'm going to go listen to a podcast. I'm going to go find some resources," this may be a little bit of my personal bias. I find that kind of stuff real sexy, especially in the face of these big, big questions where you can acknowledge I know that my individual choices impact this and also there are these macro forces that are maybe a little bit too big for me to just change overnight but I can still take steps towards understanding. That would be my recommendation here.
Keyanah: Yes, I agree. Reading books, doing the reading is certainly a love language for me as well, which is why the partner I referenced earlier has a little budding library of Black feminist texts in his apartment. I love that. I love that for him. I take my cue from an article by Sarah Githugu called How I Reclaimed Desirability as a Black Woman After a Breakup.
This author describes how she went through a breakup and sort of coming to terms with it really reinforced a lot of the larger societal messages about her being undesirable, but the way that she found herself coming out of that was to reclaim what she found desirable in herself. I know that sounds a little woo-woo, but the reason why I really like it, again, is because she encourages readers to really evaluate the frameworks we use to determine what things are desirable or not and to divest from them.
Obviously, that's easier said than done, but when you start to divest from things like patriarchy, from white supremacy, and create your own standards of what constitutes what you find desirable and then apply them to yourself, start treating yourself as someone that you find desirable, then you become a much lighter person just existing in the world. She has a great quote that says, "For me, reclaiming desirability meant detaching desire from external validation and its impact on my self-worth.
Reclaiming desirability meant not wanting for a man to choose me, but to choose myself. It was reclaiming autonomy." Again, I think that's just such a wonderful, if daunting and hard, it's a hard task to do, but it's such a wonderful message to end on, because, again, so many of these frameworks that dictate who's desirable, who's not desirable, how to exclude so many of us, once we do the work of divesting and unlearning those frameworks, what do we find in terms of how we look at other people, but also what do we find when we look at ourselves through these new frameworks?
Dedeker: I think that's a wonderful note to end on.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Yes. Thank you so much, Keyanah, for joining us for this episode. It's exciting to finally have you here on the show with us too in addition to helping us out with research for our episodes. Before we wrap up, where can people find more of your writings or stuff that you're thinking about or anything like that?
Keyanah: I think people can find me ranting on Twitter @KeyanahNurse. If you want to follow me, I just talk about vacations my plants that die and polyamory sometimes.
Emily: You have great stuff on polyamory. I love following you on Twitter. Yes, alrighty, well, this was amazing. Thank you again so much, Keyanah. We are going to continue our discussion with Keyanah in our bonus episode for patrons. Also, we're going to talk about some additional information from the study that we referenced earlier. Our question for this week's Instagram story is where do your romantic and sexual preferences come from?