Rida Fatima

The Other Side of the Coin

Tired because I exchanged last night’s sleep to mentally prepare for this encounter, I get up from the table in the coffee shop as he walks towards me. Leaning in for a hug; it’s tight and overwhelming as he embarrassedly fumbles his coat around the small chair and shuffles closer. I feel like everyone in this cafe can read what I’m feeling. The rhythm of the conversation is smooth, but muffled by anxiousness. His words seem to reverberate like the hum of the bulbs flickering in the morning mist on the windows of Espresso Lane. There seem to be plenty of laughs floating in the air. Yet, I can’t help but zone out and fixate on one internal thought that crosses my mind : “Am I a phase?”.

This fictional account epitomises the thundercloud of judgement that hovers over most women of colour in Cambridge who find themselves dating or in a relationship with white men or women. In my previous article I discussed the experience of POC women in Cambridge, focusing on the societal standards that undermine their ability to engage with femininity and desirability. This article focuses on the other side of the coin. The fear of being hypersexualised and exoticized. Never really knowing if you’re being pursued as a person or as an experience. 

bell hooks explores this feeling when she describes her encounter of overhearing white, male students outside Yale fantasising about the scoreboard of black and asian women they are yet to ‘score’ over the spring break.¹ Both disgusted and curious about their explicit desire to explore relationships with these different races of women, she finds that these sexual encounters are a way for them “to escape white innocence and enter a world of experience”. They were confident the more “worldy, sensual and sexual” non-white women would satiate this desire because they were different. What differentiates this account from the historical colonial desire established by white structural bodies to “possess the Other,” is that it was more focussing on being “changed by the encounter.”

There is something ‘enticing’ or ‘invigorating’ by being with someone so different from you, challenging the very structures of what you are familiar with. Yet white curiosity can be dehumanising if it manifests like a pattern or orchestrated scheme to infiltrate a certain ‘type of woman’. Superficial interest acts as a guise for gain.

A few weeks ago, at a birthday party, a humdrum of conversation rolled in and as usual people got into stories about exes and relationships for comedic relief and catch ups. “Yeah it was so weird,” a friend comments about her past relationship with a white man, “the last girl he was with was also small, brown, muslim-ish and people said we looked alike. Do you get what I mean?” I instantly understood. I then thought of one of my Nigerian friends who dated a white, Scandinavian man. How over time, he used more strange, and objectifying language that treated her like a spectacle as their relationship progressed. Why is it that so many young women go through the same experiences? 

Historical Roots of Fetishisation 

Caren M Holmes explains the roots of the objectification of black bodies stemming from colonizers depicting the ‘virgin’ land of the New World as something to conquer and make submissive to their conquest and exploration, like the female body.² This is reflected in the literature of the time, through poets like John Donne using lines like “Oh my America, my new found land,” to depict the journey of seducing and sleeping with a young woman for the first time as analogous to occupation. She also refers to Thomas Jefferson’s writing on slaves, and how he hyper sexualised the very nature of black women which “paved the way for rape culture within the framework of American slavery.”³

Anne McClintock picks up on this, explaining how the imagination of colonial domination of non-European lands as “virgin territories” extended beyond the territory to encompass the conquering of indigenous peoples themselves. They were objectified and sexualized in service of proving masculine power through imperial conquest.

Franz Fanon, however, therorised sexualisation of the Other as white projection. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, he argues that Europeans projected their own desires, repressed by taboo and paranoia of sexual transgression, onto the colonised. In psychoanalytic terms, the European superego, which represses incestuous and aggressive impulses in line with the morality principle, casts its repressed id onto black bodies. Therefore, he argues the European unconscious came to view the black body as the embodiment of orgies, rape, and incest as a projection of what had been disavowed within themselves.⁴

The fetishisation of black bodies cannot be understood solely in terms of desire but a deeply embedded mechanism of power, control, and projection rooted in centuries of colonial discourse.

Konkana Ray notes how Tawaifs, sophisticated courtesans who had economic, cultural and political influence in India before colonial rule, were hyper sexualised and reduced to prostitution as a way for the colonisers to minimise their societal influence.⁵ They were leaders of elite art and cultural education, but the pillaging of their narrative has reduced their memory in modern media as merely seductive dancers. The Tawaifs become synonymous with sexual pleasure for these foreigners, rather than fully formed beings, as historian Banjeree notes.⁶

Similarly belly dancers and entertainers from Middle Eastern cultures have experienced objectification by foreigners – seen more as gratifying spectacles than talented performers. 

It’s fucking as a way to confront the “Other”.⁷

Modern Mentalities 

This exotification of ethnic bodies is still rooted in our society but has seeped into the soil in a subtler way. Recent commentary on the ‘Oxford study’ has created a space for generalisation of any East Asian girl’s relationship with white men as fetishisation, reducing her to a so-called kink and homogenising the dynamic of her relationship without giving her the autonomy to perceive this dynamic for herself. 

hooks elaborates how ethnic women are used as props. ‘Liberal white men’ may use black women for their own political, woke agenda, thinking that “if they openly discuss their desire for colored girls (or boys) publicly,” it disentangles them from their guilt of the white supremacist American heritage. 

Beyond the political, ethnic bodies are seen as lucrative trends, and black women’s bodies have been the forefront of this. Many note how white women like the Kardashians have profited off getting surgeries to imitate the fashion styles and body shapes of ethnic women in order to fit into ‘insta baddie 2016 hip hop’ culture. Yet when the ‘heroin chic’ skinny and ‘republican, old money ’ classy aesthetic become more prevalent and desirable, they’ve abandoned these bodies. Mukena stresses how as a result, once revered black creativity gets reduced to tacky “ghetto fabulous”.⁸

A lesser discussed issue is how Muslim women get fetishised in the media because there is this ‘fascination with the forbidden’. Since their religious beliefs are contingent on refraining from sexual intercourse before marriage, and covering their hair and bodies in ways that are consistent with their beliefs on modesty, it becomes a form of sexual frustration for the men who cannot see what they think they have a right to objectify. A sinister need to know what’s underneath. TV series like Elite show how the white saviour complex comes into the everyday – the white male liberates the sexually inexperienced hijabi woman with forbidden lust. It becomes a message – or threat – that white desire dominates even in the face of divine order. A perverse assertion of control. 

The Individual Experience

This piece doesn’t exist to scold white people with political correctness about purifying their intentions when they date people of colour. It’s important to raise awareness towards this sort of dating dynamic, but there isn’t some sort of bingo sheet that you have to tick off. Unfortunately, certain people will always be curious about something they’re unfamiliar with. You can’t kill superficial fascination, even if you shame their fetishisation. 

This article explores the nuanced experience of women of colour who are in this uncomfortable dance, clouded with these doubts and anxious thoughts in coffee shops – wondering if they are women first, or only an experience: “How do I know if he genuinely likes me?” 

The answer to that, I think, is you will never initially know. But it’s not your job to. In life, you’re going to encounter a lot of people who may like you for the wrong reasons. That realization feels exhausting, but it will help filter out the kind of men who you engage with. 

Hypervigilance and insecurity is not always going to protect you from being fetishised – the problem lies within a flaw in their psychology and not yours. You cannot let this fear and doubt of always being the ‘other’ paralyse your desire to find love. 

It’s critical to resist impulsively politicising every interracial relationship. While systemic and historical dynamics have shaped our social realities, each relationship is also personal and contextual. Not every connection between a white man and a woman of colour is a reenactment of power imbalance. Framing it as much can undermine the possibility of deep mutual connection beyond racial identity, which can be reductive to both parties.

You can’t single handedly undo the historical landscape that hypersexualises your existence, but you can stop buying into these narratives that tell you that you are that one dimensional. 

1. hooks, bell (1992) Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance – Black Looks: Race and Representation ↩︎
2. M. Holmes, Caren (2016) The Colonial Roots of the Racial Fetishization of Black Women. ↩︎
3. For example, Jefferson’s writings in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) ↩︎
4. Jean Marie, Vivaldi (2017) Frantz Fanon’s ’Black skin, White Masks [Preprint] ↩︎
5. As read in Brown History (2022) The art of tawaif: A tradition lost to colonial moralities, Brown History. Available at: https://brownhistory.substack.com/p/the-art-of-tawaif-a-tradition-lost ↩︎
6. As read Kumari H. ‘The history of the colonial state and the Unmaking of the Tawaif, Feminism in India’. Available at: https://feminisminindia.com/2022/03/23/the-history-of-the-colonial-state-and-the-unmaking-of-the-tawaif/ ↩︎
7. Holmes, Colonial Roots ↩︎
8. Mukena (2025)  Ghetto Fabulous: Style and Culture of marginalised Black Americans https://alljournals.blog/ghetto-fabulous-style-culture-marginalized-black-americans/
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