Christelle decided to uninstall her dating apps. Until she did, when the 26-year-old Parisian opened them and started a conversation, she couldn't disconnect. "More than half the time," she says, she would receive racist messages right from the beginning of the conversation. Sometimes they would be explicit; often they were veiled behind pseudo-compliments, which were in reality loaded with stereotypes. "Sometimes people say to me outright, 'I don't want to date Black girls' because we're 'too aggressive,' or sometimes they say, 'I prefer lighter girls.'" And then there are the others who say they "only" want to meet Black women, "and that's not much better," Christelle said as she explained how getting a "match" on an app can quickly switch to sexual innuendo, even though she doesn't do anything to encourage it.
"For no reason at all, I've had guys tell me, 'I've always dreamed of sleeping with a Black woman, I know you're wild in bed,'" she said. "We've all heard that sentence. It comes up a lot." On face-to-face dates or on Tinder, many young people perceived as "non-White" told us that they very regularly come up against this type of degrading stereotype. It's the bane of their lives, especially when they're at an age when their emotional life is still being shaped. Clichés and racist behavior slip so easily into the language of dating, as they can easily be passed off as a simple personal "preference."
On the apps, the ethnoracial biases that influence a user to "swipe left" or "swipe right" are beginning to be well documented. In the book The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (University of California Press, 2021), the American researchers Celeste Vaughan Curington, Jennifer Lundquist and Ken-Hou Lin analyzed a large amount of data from a major dating site. They show that while online dating had the potential to make the dating pool larger, its impersonal and anonymous aspect actually amplifies racist behavior and reflexes.
'Fantasies'
Their survey shows White people's clear "advantage" on this type of site – they are contacted much more often, no matter the skin color of the other users. On the other hand, some groups are rejected more often. Black women come at the top of the list and are frequently excluded from the dating app market. In 2014, another study of the American dating site OkCupid found similar results and revealed that the profiles of Black women and Asian men were almost systematically ignored on the site.
Damien (not his real name), a gay Asian man in his 30s, has always felt outside "standard beauty criteria," especially the ones promoted on the apps he uses. "No matter what, I feel like I'm considered an option. I feel like I'm always dependent on people who say they 'love Asians': as an object of clichéd fantasies," he said, adding that the first topic of conversation is almost always the massages he would supposedly do better because of his ethnic origin.
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