I feel his eyes on me before I acknowledge him. It is a damp Saturday evening in Covid-era Manchester and I have nipped into my local supermarket, running errands in my pandemic uniform: cheap black leggings, a baggy jumper and ankle boots. I am not here to be attractive. Not dressed to be ogled. I’m here to restock on tampons, crackers and cheese. Maybe a bottle of rosé, if there’s an offer on.
Not in the mood to converse with anyone, I tug my basket to the self checkout bank of tills and begin scanning each item and placing them in the scaled packing area. He stands opposite me, his back to the plate glass window. As far as men go, he is nondescript. Easily overlooked, not because he doesn’t have the potential to be handsome, but because he looks like so many of the other men in the shop. I accidentally catch his gaze, meet his eyes and that brief mistake gives him the ammunition he needs to launch his manoeuvre.
“Take your mask down,” he says.
I do. It’s the parrot response you become accustomed to making, the code of conduct we live by as women: random guy makes a request? You oblige for an easy life.
Mask down, he flashes a gap-toothed grin. “Yeah,” he says, “you’re beautiful. Are you …” he pauses, losing nerve for a brief moment. “Are you married?”
“Yes,” I say, not mentioning that I’m currently separated, grateful for the relief of an implied lie. But something in him sees through me. “Happily?” he pries. Before I can answer, he speaks again. “I like Black women, me. More meat on their bones.”
There it is. For a moment, I stop scanning my groceries. I am not exactly surprised by his admission, this isn’t the first time I’ve been told a stranger likes Black women, but this feels different. His explanation is a stereotype masquerading as rationale. Women of every skin colour can be curvy. So what is it exactly that he likes? The contrast of my skin against his? The idea of difference? The thrill of wanting something he feels he shouldn’t? Things have shifted and in my head, sirens wail. I feel my shoulders rise in tension, my heartbeat quicken. I am prepared for being hit on in public. I have a secret fake number memorised that I rattle off to any unsolicited, unwanted would-be suitor to satisfy their request and also ensure I’m able to leave the situation unscathed. But this has rattled me.
“Things have shifted and in my head, sirens wail. I feel my shoulders rise in tension, my heartbeat quicken”.
He has commoditised me. Placed me in a category to be selected off a shelf. A selection he is somehow entitled to make. Suddenly, it feels more charged, more dangerous. I’m not just a woman. But a Black woman. Brown woman. Thing.
He asks if I would meet him at the door of the shop, suggests he would like to keep talking with me. He gestures to a set of doors nearest to us. “I’ll wait for you outside,” he says. I nod and cover my mouth again with my mask. I watch him head toward the exit, his back to me. My brain races, devising a plan: finish scanning, pay, exit the shop through the farthest doors, closer to where I parked. Speed away.
I speed-walk to the opposite exit, glancing back over my shoulder every so often to make sure he hasn’t spotted that I’ve left the tills and have headed in the wrong direction. There is a couple a few feet ahead of me, exiting the shop too. If it comes down to it, I coach myself, you could go up to her. Ask her to pretend to know you so you could avoid the man. She’d get it. She’ll have been in this situation before, the subject of unwanted, persistent attention. Plan set. We are approaching the doors and will soon be outside. One last glance back and I cannot see him behind me. I scan the forecourt and do not see him outside either. My car is close and if I sprint, I can make it in and lock the doors. On this occasion, I leave without incident. I spend the first five minutes of my drive glancing in the rearview mirror, looking for his grey eyes. When I am finally convinced he has not followed me, my shoulders drop, my head meets the headrest and I drive home.
When my skin colour is the focus of a conversation, it doesn’t always feel like this. A few years after this incident, I find myself lying in bed with a Black woman. We are naked and cuddled, the duvet askew on the bed, Manchester traffic rushing silently outside her flat window. Her head nests on my shoulder and I can feel her breath warm and sweet on my neck. She travels her fingers across my collarbone, skates them down to my exposed breast and sighs.
“Our colours are beautiful,” she says. I noticed it too. Where my skin tone is darker, reddish-brown mahogany, hers is more caramel, yellow-brown. Different, but complimentary. Beautiful. “I love your chocolate skin,” she says and kisses me.
I do not feel threatened or awkward by her assertion. I don’t feel the need to grab my clothes scattered from the floor, dress and drive home. I lean into the kiss, lose myself in her wet mouth, and when she shifts and pulls me on top of her, I let the weight of my breasts fall against hers. Chocolate and caramel mixed in her sheets.
She is not the first partner to have commented on the contrast of our skin tones. In fact, I cannot think of a single partner I’ve had who didn’t make some comment about it in bed, in that vulnerable intimacy after sex. Everything exposed, you have been in someone or someone has been in you — no topic feels off limits. If I am to be fair to each instance, it is worth noting that every comment about my skin or theirs, our skin, has been positive. If I am to allow fairness to bleed into honesty, I must admit: each positive comment was also well-received.
There have been times when it was clear that my Black skin was the prize. In conversations on dating apps, people have made comments such as “I cannot wait to feel your Black skin on mine.” Or “Send me a picture of your juicy Black tits.” In kink spaces, I have been asked to call a white partner master. In each of those moments, I felt my shoulders rise in tension, my heartbeat quicken, a slick layer of sweat fur my palms.
“There have been times when it was clear that my Black skin was the prize”.
Someone using my Black skin as a reason to pursue me feels frightening, because I am instantly forced to internally negotiate: is this admiration? Preference? Fetishisation? Racism? Am I being genuinely desired, or reduced down to a category someone wants to experience? Since the line between attraction and dehumanisation is unstable, constantly decoding intention whilst assessing safety is exhausting.
The people who’ve said they like Black women have often done so under the guise of being complimentary. I imagine they believed they were putting me at ease. Yet in those moments, my Blackness stops belonging solely to me and becomes something they feel entitled to define, pursue and interpret on their terms. While their words may not land with the same acidic punch as a racial slur, I am reduced to a single dimension. A mere smear of colour. All of the things that previously combined to make me — degrees and achievements, relationship status, motherhood, my job, even my height and weight — are erased and I am, amoebically: Black.
“The people who’ve said they like Black women have often done so under the guise of being complimentary. I imagine they believed they were putting me at ease. Yet in those moments, my Blackness stops belonging solely to me and becomes something they feel entitled to define, pursue and interpret on their terms”.
I once hailed a Hackney carriage in a small northern town from the train station to a primary school where I would deliver a writing workshop. My driver was chatty and friendly. We listened to the Oscar Pistorius verdict on the radio and discussed our opinions. When I reached the school, he handed me a business card and offered to be my ride back to the station. We agreed on an approximate time and as I exited the school gates, I saw his idling taxi waiting for me. He waved, his arm extended through his open window. The compliments began almost immediately. He told me I was beautiful and that he had hoped to be able to pick me up. He said he was single and that he’d always wanted to be with a Black woman.
There it was again, but this time, there was no easy way out. I was in an unfamiliar town, locked in the back of a taxi. I smiled politely and tried to change the subject, relieved that we were just a few blocks away from the train station. When he turned down a side street before reaching the station, my shoulders huddled around my ears in tension, my heart beat faster. On this quiet side street, the cab rolled to a stop and he turned to proposition me through the plexiglass. “I thought maybe you’d be open to getting to know each other?” he asked, a slight quiver in his voice. I closed my eyes, lifted my hand to reveal my wedding ring. “I’m married,” I said, “I’d really like it if you took me to the station, please.” He continued to stare for a moment and I clenched my fists in my lap, willing him to turn around and drive. I heard the ignition turn and exhaled a shaky breath. As soon as the doors unlocked in the taxi rank, I bolted from the cab, taking my money with me.
What if the supermarket guy and taxi driver saw me as beautiful, not because of my face or body, but because of the otherness of my Black skin? Is fetishisation synonymous with desirability or does it exist outside it? Do we fetishise what we are told not to like, or what we are told we are not allowed to have?
Perhaps fetishisation has very little to do with desirability at all. Maybe otherness alone is enough to provoke pursuit. This is where fetishisation aches: I want desire to play some part in why I am pursued or chosen for intimacy. Without it, sex becomes novelty, as though I am not a person being wanted but a curiosity being sampled — a notch in a bedpost, an itch to be scratched, an item ticked off a scavenger hunt list.
In an essay on colourism, Candice Brathwaite cites now deleted research from the dating site OKCupid that showed that in 2014, Black women were considered the least desirable by all races of men. I have to wonder: do strangers who impulsively defend their appreciation of Black women do so because it feels taboo? Is their fetishisation a type of craving — involuntary, unable to explain, justify or resist?
But what of the people who choose to be in mixed race relationships? Is it possible for fetishisation not to be at play in those dynamics? I asked my white British partner, someone I have dated on and off for the last 10 years, if he felt he fetishised me. I waited anxiously as he typed a reply:
“When we first met and started hooking up, I definitely feel I fetishised you somewhat as a Black woman. I’d only slept with one other person of colour before you. I find it hard to draw the line between fetishisation and curiosity, though. I am curious by nature so I’m always curious to be with people of different races/body types etc. I feel now if I were to sleep with another Black woman, it wouldn’t be fetishisation?”
His answer surprised me and I thought back to the early days of our hooking up and couldn’t remember a single instance where I felt fetishised. There were no conversations disproportionately focused on my skin, in fact, the only thing I could remember was him asking if I consented to hair pulling. I remember his explanation being something along the lines of not wanting to dislodge a weave. Let me be real, this was a sexy consideration on his part. Having paid upwards of £100 for a weave, having it yanked out during sex would be unacceptable!
Perhaps fetishisation can only be classed as such when its intentions are made known to the person being fetishised. Ignorance is, allegedly, bliss. When not accompanied by discomfort, anxiety and fear, is fetishisation just curiosity? Perhaps it simply boils down to whether or not someone sees beyond what is being fetishised. Whittling someone down to a single element that holds all their value or worth is where preference bleeds into objectification and fetishisation.
I still don’t know whether fetishisation begins in desire, curiosity, taboo or ignorance. I suspect the answer is a Venn diagram of all these states. But it arrives the moment a compliment narrows into categorisation, when admiration hardens into entitlement, when a person stops speaking to me and begins speaking to the idea of me. That is the moment I cease to be fully visible and become something to be acquired.
