Silence and the Word (17 page)

For the record, not a single response, not
even the ones which admitted that race may have been a factor in
their desire for me, made me feel in any way damaged by my old
lovers. Rather the opposite, as you’ll see.

Question 1. I’ve never had sex with anyone
who had darker skin than mine, oddly enough. When you have(had) sex
with me, did you ever think about our skin tones? If you did, what
did(do) you think about them? Does the contrast appeal to you or
excite you? Did it ever bother you?

Some claimed that they didn’t notice, or
barely noticed my skin tone:

ES: I can’t say that skin color ever had much
of an impact on my feelings

about you.

GD: I definitely noticed the differences in
our skin tones (especially when at one point, we held our arms
against each others’), but the experience…had the same emotional
quality as comparing hand sizes… .

These seem similar in their response, or at
least in their assessment of their response, to those who responded
only by claiming that these questions didn’t really apply to them
at all. I could have written back, questioning this response; I am
not sure if it is possible, in modern American culture, to not
notice skin tone, to not have it influence cultural and aesthetic
judgments. Were they merely hiding from themselves the possibility
that in choosing to date a brown-skinned girl, they had traveled
into politically problematic waters, set loose on a raft of dark
desires?

Perhaps they were hiding the truth from
themselves, but I found myself unwilling to press them further;
there was a good chance that they would simply continue to deny any
relevance in my questions to their situation, and in the end, what
right did I have to claim that they were wrong? I can’t claim to
have any objective lock on the truth, any certainty—and even if
their perception of color-blindness is an illusion, a
self-delusion, it’s a lovely one in its own way, a dream of sanity
and wholeness. Who am I to try to tear it down?

Besides, there was plenty of meat to consider
in other responses:

EL: I enjoy the differences, between my skin
tone & someone else’s, as well as between the various tones of
various lovers I’ve had. I find the contrast pleasing. I find the
contrast between my skin tone & paler white women pleasing,
too. “Excite” is probably too strong a word.

WS: Well, you have a lovely skin color…I was
surprised at the contrasts in the coloring of various kinds of
skin, areolas, lips, and nails. I noted it as part of your beauty,
and part of the unique traits each new lover shares… .

KP: I did think of our skin tones, I always
loved the contrast and the contrast never bothered me. I have
always found your skin tone strongly appealing.

While these of my lovers did notice the
contrast, and enjoy it, they appeared to do so in a fairly
value-neutral way; as a purely aesthetic point of interest, much as
one might appreciate the plane of a man’s stomach or the curve of a
woman’s hip. Interesting, perhaps, but hardly problematic. Again, I
could have pushed them further, asked if it was only the aesthetic
contrast at work, if there might be some deeper (colonialist)
reason why the contrast excited them, a buried awareness of the
history of oppression, of white men taking their pleasure from
non-white women. That should have been a disturbing thought, an
upsetting one, when considering people I had once allowed intimate
access to my body (and in some cases, my heart). Most people would
find it creepy, at least, to discover that a sexual partner was
experiencing a racialized fantasy while they were making love. But
what surprised me, when I considered those possibilities, was that
I didn’t find it creepy—in fact, I wasn’t distressed at all by the
idea.

Rather than being disturbed by their answers
(and their potential for darker undertones), I found myself quite
pleased—and realized, in that pleasure, that I had been
disappointed by the previous responses.
That
was the real
reason why I hadn’t been interested in pressing them
further—because I didn’t want to hear those old lovers insisting,
in more detail, that my skin color hadn’t attracted them. It was
becoming clear that I actually wanted my old lovers to admit to a
desire based on my darker skin color—but why? Why did I want them
to desire the differences?

DA: With you, the dark skin, and especially
dark nipples, were a turn-on because they connoted “exotic”.

Ah, and here was a thrill, a rush. It pleased
me, that he found me exotic. It turned me on, to know that he found
my dark nipples exciting. I wanted more of them to respond that
way, to exoticize, to objectify my body. Unfortunately for me,
instead of finding more exciting evidence of my intoxicating
difference, I was reminded of my assumptions.

RT: Although I’ve had sex with a few people
with darker skin tones than mine…most of the people I’ve slept with
had lighter skin: 1/4 Sicilian is still on the dark end of the
category of “white guy”

…
So most of the time, when I notice skin
tones, it’s because mine is darker, which I (and several of the
women I’ve been with) have always found sort of appealing; there’s
still something erotically charged about dark hands on white
breasts, and dark hips pressed against creamy ones.

I was no longer the dark-skinned one—he was,
and the erotic attention wasn’t being directed at me at all—it was
focused entirely elsewhere, on the white woman. (In fact, when I
thought back, I realized EL has made a similar comment, but I had
blithely ignored it, in my pleasure at EL’s response to me.) I felt
deflated, uninteresting. But I kept reading, and RT redeemed
himself:

RT: With you, the feeling was different. Part
of it was simple aesthetic pleasure in the contrast; my tan arms
against your darker ones, your glossy dark hair spilling over my
hips and legs, the sweep of your chest and belly down to our black
pubic hair when you rode me. I found our skin together incredibly
appealing, I think because it played into two related sets of
fantasies: submitting to a sexually vigorous man (or woman), and
dominating a dark-skinned woman.

Ah, and there it was—dominating a
dark-skinned woman. The others had aroused me, but this one, the
post-colonial bogeyman of many interracial relationships, cranked
the heat up. If my lovers had imagined, as their white male bodies
bent over my supine dark female body, that they
were
the
colonialist, the oppressor, free to take their pleasure as they
chose—how charged that moment must have been! I took pleasure in
the dominant/submissive energy of that image—but even more, I
reveled in the sheer force of forbidden desire. In his words, my
fantasy was laid out, bare and vulnerable for all to see—a dream of
tremendously powerful desire, powerful because it was so very
wrong, desire tangled up with twisted race relations, with a warped
cultural history of violence, and of course, with a particularly
perverse male/female power dynamic as well. This admission was what
I had been looking for; what I had hoped my lovers were feeling all
along.

I had asked nine questions in my
survey—surely more than needed to answer a simple question. I
hadn’t just wanted to know that they had desired my dark skin—I had
wanted to know exactly how, why they had desired me. I had wanted
to understand the way their brains worked, to dwell on what they
saw when they looked at my naked body. I had wanted details.

Question 2. In general, do you find people
with darker skin to be attractive? Or, more precisely, do you think
a darker skin tone is ever a factor in how attractive someone is to
you?

As we’ve established, I had no interest in
those who said no, it didn’t matter. Others only noted that they
preferred tan skin to pale, and pointed to current cultural
conditioning in that regard. Undoubtedly an accurate assessment of
their own desires, but not what I was looking for. My attention
fixated on those who respond positively, who admitted to a
fascination with darker skin.

KP: Yes I do find darker skin attractive.

RT: Yes, this is certainly the case: except
for redheads (whom I certainly find attractive), I find darker skin
attractive in women. People who are very pale look sort of
unhealthy to me; among white women, I like tan ones, and I
certainly find darker skinned women of other racial groups very
attractive.

Those were the answers I had been looking
for. The answers that I had been (unconsciously) expecting, the
ones that had led to my asking questions like these:

Question 3. If you answered yes to the
previous question, is darker skin just one of many features you
find attractive (like red hair, or blue eyes, or large breasts)? Or
is it more than that for you? Is it a strong enough factor that you
could call it a fetish?

Question 4. If it isn’t a fetish, do you have
any other fetishes? If so, what? 

My respondents were, understandably rather
reluctant to claim that their desires fell into the category of
fetishes—especially since I’d been unclear about my definition of
fetish. What they didn’t understand, and what hadn’t been evident
to me when I was designing the survey, was that I really was
looking for a particular set of answers (the peril of every
survey-designer). I wanted my ex-lovers not just to desire me, but
to strongly desire me, as a brown-skinned woman. To desire me even
to the extent, or especially to the extent, of the fetishized
object. That was why I was asking the questions in the first place,
why I’d wanted to write this essay. I wanted to hear them admitting
that they had desired my brown skin.

Which leaves me with the question of why I
wanted that. It could have been a racial/ethnic thing—that I had
political reasons for wanting them to admit to their subconscious
colonialist desires. In someone else’s essay, that would
undoubtedly be the reason for asking the questions. But I come to a
different conclusion—that the primary motivation was vanity.

Like many other people, I am insecure. I am
perpetually wanting to lose weight, to dress better, to walk down
the street and turn heads. More than that—I want to be desired. I
want men to get turned on when they walk by me, to have to turn
away and adjust their crotches. I want women to cream their panties
at the touch of my skin, the smell of my hair. I want to be the
object of desire, up on a pedestal, an untouchable perfect icon—and
then I want to be dragged off that pedestal and ravished. I am a
reasonably attractive person, young and healthy, but I am certainly
not any kind of sexual icon of ultimate desirability. I know that.
And yet, I don’t want to know that. I want to be the fantasy. And
if there is any area where I can hope that there is something that
sets me apart, that makes me a little bit more sexually attractive
than I should be, it is in my color of my skin. (And of course,
this little mental game would never work with a dark-skinned man,
be he Hispanic or Asian or black. Another reason why I started with
the white guys at sixteen, and stayed with them.)

In writing to my old lovers, in asking these
questions, I wanted to hear that they had found my skin beautiful,
desirable—ideally, that they found it incredibly, impossibly
desirable, an unmanageable fetish. And of course, in writing to
them and asking them (in the guise of an academic essay about
race/sex politics) to consider why they were once attracted to me,
I was undoubtedly hoping to arouse some spark of desire again, to
prove to myself in their responses that they wanted me, on some
level, still. To seduce them, all over again. I owe them a small
apology for using them so.

There probably was a South Asian insecurity
complex at work as well—it is the East Asian woman who is generally
held up as the exotic target, the ideal of fragile femininity. The
South Asian woman may come from far away, but aside from a certain
association with the Kama Sutra, she has relatively little erotic
weight for white culture. In contrast with the East Asian woman,
the submissive geisha, I felt like a second-class exotic, barely
exotic at all. And if I weren’t exotic, then I would have to rely
on my own separate, unpoliticized attractiveness—hardly a reliable
fallback position.

And wasn’t there an even larger attempt at
seduction in progress? I drafted this essay and showed it to my
classmates, my teacher. I wrote it to send out to editors, who
might publish it, and then put it in front of readers. And in this
essay so far, I have dwelt on my skin, have even gone so far as to
tell you flat out how others have praised it (and my hair—let us
not forget the long black hair, which serves to complement the
skin, at least, when it is not a fetish object in itself). I have
shamelessly attempted to seduce my readers as well, to co-opt them
into this selfsame project of assuaging my insecurities, of
reassuring myself that I am sufficiently attractive, sufficiently
desirable.

Question 5. If you fetishize anything—does it
bother you that you do? If so, in what ways?

Question 6. Does it bother you that I’m
asking these questions? If so, why?

Question 7. Are you at all worried that I’ll
think less of you if you admit to fetishizing/objectifying my
skin?

Since, by and large, my old lovers didn’t
claim to fetishize, they had little to say in response to these
questions. Should I be bothered by my own desire to be fetishized?
When I first framed these questions, I was thinking in terms of
politics, of potential damage. Post-colonial politics would tell me
that as a woman, a South Asian, a feminist and a good liberal, I
should be disturbed to find myself admitted a desire to be
exoticized, that this is allowing myself to be co-opted into the
oppressor’s imperialist project. But I cannot find this desire in
myself disturbing, except in the embarrassment of admitting to such
vanity and insecurity.