Silence and the Word

by MaryAnne Mohanraj

  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 pri
mary 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.

  I am too aware that this fantasy is only a fantasy, one which bears a certain weight, a sexual charge lent it by a dark period of history. It is possible, even likely, that I would resent such a fantasy if it came from people I did not care for—these fantasies of exoticization and the dreams of colonial domination, are safe primarily because I do know these people. I trust them to keep any such fantasies in an appropriate mental space, and to not allow them to infringe overmuch on our interactions outside a sexual arena. If I felt that any of these white men actually felt they had a right to dominate me and my brown body in the world outside the bedroom, if I believed they thought less of me, as a person, because of such fantasies, then I’m sure my reaction to the whole idea would be very different.

  Frankly, I’d want to slap some sense into them.

  I could try to avoid engaging with such fraught material at all, but I find it more rewarding, personally, to take what pleasure I can in it, even to (carefully) play with the power dynamics, push them further, and see where they take me and my lovers (and while I have talked primarily about race/ethnicity in this essay, I would apply the same argument to what I find even more fraught issues of gender politics). I admit, engaging with such dangerous material poses risks, and is certainly not the approach for everyone—but it is the only one which feels honest for my own sexual life. I am tired of ignoring issues, problems, desires, and hoping they go away. And despite what some may argue, it seems naïve to imagine that such a subtle internal sexual exploration can in any way legitimize or justify actual discrimination or oppression in the world.

  But even if I can justify my own deep desire to be exoticized (or, if not justify it, at least be willing to work/play with it), can I justify my racialized attraction for others?

  Question 8. It is almost certain that at least in part, I desire(d) you *because* of your pale (to me) skin. Did you know that? Does/did it bother you that your skin color is/was a factor?

  Question 9. Does it matter *why* your paleness is a factor in my finding you attractive (i.e., pure aethestics vs. American cultural conditioning vs. South Asian desire for whiteness aka colonialist remnants vs. the appeal of difference, etc… .)?

  I did desire their white skin, because, as I’ve said above, it allowed me to indulge in the fantasy of being the exotic Other, the object of desire. Undoubtedly for other reasons as well—because white skin is a cultural norm for beauty, and I am in part a product of my American culture. Even more, because as I mentioned earlier, dating white was simpler than dating brown-skinned men, since it doesn’t come with the same cultural weight, the expectation that dating will inevitably and quickly lead to marriage. And I admit, I probably even desired these men, when I was young, because it would upset my mother. I desired my lovers’ bodies because they were white, even if I didn’t realize or acknowledge it at the time. And for the first time in this essay I have discovered something I find upsetting—because as it turns out, it upsets some of them:

  EL: I never really thought that my pigmentation had much of anything to do with why you were/are attracted to me, so that is news to me. Does it bother me? I suppose it depends on the reason(s). Certainly the notion of being reduced to set of physical characteristics (or one particular one) is not an appealing notion. Just as I don’t want to objectify people, I don’t want to be objectified myself.

  WS: I have noticed that you almost avoid dark male lovers. I have noticed that you have had levels of conflict over the years about your “Sri Lankan” and family identities with your sexuality…Does it bother me? It makes me feel weird… .

  I find it distressing, the idea of myself with racialized desires, as someone who might make decisions of the mind and heart based on what should be irrelevancies, like the color of skin. I find it hard not to feel like a racist, just as many of my old lovers, when I first sent them these questions, were distressed to think that I might consider them racists in their responses. I am particularly upset that these people I have cared for might now feel injured, damaged, seen as less than themselves, as a result of my openly exposing my desires to them. I want to protest, to explain to them that I never thought less of them, never saw them as only icons, representations of a desired ideal.

  I would argue that racial aspects are not the only elements in my attraction, or the most significant. When I think back to t
hese people now, I do not simply picture their white skin. I remember everything else that aroused me as well—the curl of GD’s silky hair, the strength of EL’s hands, even the faintly possessive look in RT’s eyes when he finally had me undressed—which remembering now again makes me want to laugh—but in a good way. Fondly. I remember the aspects of their personality that made me desire them, and care for them—one person’s shy vulnerability, another’s sweet openness, a third’s impetuous and delightfully greedy assault on my body. If their whiteness was a factor in my desire for them, and I admit it was, it was not the deciding factor.

  RT: I’d hate to think of your attraction to me coming from some buried core of discomfort with your own racial identity. But even this works out to a big maybe

  …if being attracted to whiteness was your (possibly subconcious) way of working out internal issues of South Asian-ness vs. white culture, and it helped you to do so, I don’t think it would be a bad thing (or even would bother me).