I know I'm not supposed to say this as a privileged whitey (or rather, my gut tells me I shouldn't be saying this), but whenever I read ethnographically-oriented posts about sexual racism the frame always makes me think about how I find parallels in my own life re: gender (masculinity) and body images and desire in the gay male community. Lots of thought about oppression of other (why don't people find me attractive despite X?) and positioning of the self (why don't I just naturally date more of X type of guy?).
This isn't to say that sexual racism isn't less serious than other kinds of discrimination through desire. But it makes me think, a sociologically-minded person, that in order to address all of these issues it's about something bigger than both of us, it's about how desire is organized in our society and how we internalize desires in our psychology and our value system.
Curious.
This was a good real-life example of a larger social issue. I haven't read part 1 yet, but look forward to more examination of this subject!
So in different circumstances, your analytical framework left you feeling judged... Maybe a different framework -- one that sought to explain and understand, rather than judge/blame and assign responsibility -- would be more useful. I am a white man who is attracted to asian men, and I second-guess that desire constantly, searching for the tiniest sign of fetishisation, while my white-attracted white male friends will happily confess their fetish for blond and blue or facial hair or a big barrel belly... I think we might do better to accept that desire, in all directions, whether white-asian or asian-asian or white-white, is inherently fetishistic; and desire is only the beginning of a relationship -- usually in what follows we work towards equality and a non-fetishistic understanding.
Commenting by HaloScan
