Dating apps are designed to keep you swiping – the more you swipe, the more money they make. This has resulted in the normalisation of a plethora of problematic behaviours. The idea of whittling down thousands of potential suiters into a shortlist of people you might fancy feels less like romance and more like unpaid admin. And, like most jobs under capitalism, some of us are valued a lot more than others. Dating apps reveal this phenomenon through racial preference – where desire is influenced less by chemistry, more by old racial scripts and wrapped up warm in a capitalism-shaped blanket.
There are two points to be made when understanding the problems with racial dating preferences: the fetishisation of women of colour (WOC), and the racial hierarchies that place white women at the top based on perceived “fuckability”.
Firstly, what do we mean by fetishisation? I have heard countless hinge horror stories of my WOC friends who have been compared to chocolate or caramel and assumed to be overtly sexual. Dare I recount the time a friend of mine was called a “Dark skin Nubian Queen”?
All these examples have one significant thing in common: they sever us from our humanness, reducing us to our physical attributes. They objectify us, thus fetishising us – designing a dating experience, particularly for Black women, so abhorrent that a lot of us avoid the apps all together.
What is most interesting, however, is that these stereotypes that objectify and hypersexualise Black women are provocations with roots in colonial history. They were used to legitimise the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by white men, while simultaneously allowing their white wives to divert attention away from their husband’s infidelities.
To put it simply, Black women were scapegoated – their bodies and sexualities no longer theirs to define. Their existence was reduced merely to the object of the white man’s fetishisation. This objectification was not simply a cog in the machine of Black commodification but actively singled out elements of the Black body to be consumed. Our hair, our lips, our noses, our behinds all compartmentalised and dissected so the white man could savour every bit.
The persistence of the assumed hyper-sexualisation of Black women in contemporary online dating determines Black women’s desirability through the lens of fetishisation. So, when a man sends uncomfortable messages about our skin or our bodies, or when he sexualises all our conversations assuming that sex is all we get out of such interactions, he is perpetuating long-standing stereotypes under the innocuous guise of just loving Black women so much.
My second point on the problematic nature of racial dating preferences are racial hierarchies which focalise whiteness as the epitome of desirability. Aria Srinivasan’s Right to Sex critically analyses these hierarchies, contextualising them within the politics of desirability. She uses the term “fuckability” to capture the unspoken criteria used – oftentimes by white men – in deciding who they swipe right on. The resulting hierarchy, as explained by Srinivasan, leaves white women at the top, alongside East Asian women (who are often infantilised), while Black and Brown men and women’s comparative “unfuckability” leads them to the bottom of the hierarchy.
While these findings are rooted in colonial ideology, as with Black fetishisation, it surreptitiously slithers its way into contemporary online dating. There are countless videos on Instagram and TikTok where members of the public will say “I don’t date Black women” or “I wouldn’t date Asian people”. This is further exacerbated on dating apps where there are options to exclude certain races from appearing on your feed. This dating market – actualised on the apps – continues to perpetuate racial hierarchies, commercialising (and normalising) exclusionary love and sex. Love and sex should be a part of life left strictly untouched by capitalism’s insidious reach.
Both issues I’ve discussed around racial dating preferences reveal how colonial ideologies shape online dating and invite us to reflect on how we each play a part in upholding exclusionary hierarchies that marginalise anyone who falls outside archetypal Eurocentric beauty. It is important to remember that stereotypes and fetishisations aren’t reserved for Black women only; these experiences are shared by disabled, trans, plus-sized and many other racialised communities. And it’s not just white men who sustain these harmful systems. These patterns exist across and within communities, sometimes internalised by people of colour and other marginalised groups themselves.
The challenge isn’t just recognising these problems, it’s about holding those who perpetrate them accountable, whether it’s individuals, algorithms, or the platforms. It’s about demanding more responsible design and use of dating apps. Ideally, we would avoid them all together and succumb to the sweet sweet awkward eye contact of an organic meet-cute. Alas, capitalism’s strangling grip means love too often gets reduced to another marketplace, where desire is mined for profit and affection is commodified (oh capitalism, she is but a cruel mistress).
Ultimately, you can swipe whoever you like – but at the very least, leave colonialism and capitalism out of the bedroom.
