You’re reduced to a few pictures and some short prompts (which most people probably aren’t reading), and someone with his hands down his pants in Bushwick can swipe left without giving you a second thought. For people of color, that feeling can be compounded by the ways race shapes who is considered desirable, who gets overlooked, and who becomes the target of someone else’s fantasy. Being on a dating app is one of those experiences that can make you hyperaware of your race—not necessarily because you want to think about it, but because potential matches often find ways to remind you of it.
Sometimes, that means being exoticized by white users. Other times, it means encountering the same racial stereotypes from people who share your background. Tanjeela, 27, tells Cosmopolitan that she feels fetishized by men she matches with, regardless of which app she’s using.
Potential matches often lead with comments about her body, sometimes before even offering a “hi.” And while more than half of women on dating apps have reported receiving sexually explicit messages or photos, Tanjeela believes her Bengali background influences the kinds of messages she receives. She recalls a date who told her she reminded him of Yasmina Khan, a Bengali porn star. For Kayla, 25, who is Latina, the assumptions are different but no less reductive.
She says potential matches often treat her ethnicity as shorthand for her sexuality, approaching her with preconceived ideas about what a Latina woman should be like. You’re just my type.’” In these cases, race becomes a kind of shorthand that allows strangers to project their fantasies onto women they barely know. Rather than getting to know Tanjeela or Kayla as individuals, these men approach them through stereotypes about their ethnic backgrounds and bodies.
I remember being on dating apps years ago and having a man tell me it was his fantasy to “eat Pakistani pussy.” That was his first message to me—and his last, of course. But the effects of race on dating apps aren’t limited to fetishization. It can also shape how people see themselves and whether they feel desirable in the first place.
Nikita Fernandez, a South Asian sex therapist who has spent nearly a decade on dating apps herself, says she often sees clients of color struggle with perceptions of attractiveness, particularly when comparing themselves with white people. Those comparisons don’t exist in a vacuum. Research suggests that racial disparities in online dating extend beyond individual experiences and into broader patterns of who receives attention, despite usage rates being comparable across all demographics.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
