The Taxi Driver in a Netflix Show
By: Anonymous
Bodies. Breathing. Diverse. Sun touched. Tanned and stretched, marked yet bare. Born from the earth, flowing from the womb. Burning with the warmth of a lingering touch. A kiss. Entangled in unison, the feeling of want. A want to navigate your lonesome vastness, a desire so deeply seeded within you but slowly festering every open wound of your body, edging its way to your heart. A heart that pumps for him, a mind that yearns for her.
I was never conscious of my looks. I grew up in a homogenous nation, a land rich in dark skin and colored faces. Brown. The color of wet sand, of wooden bark. The colour of a glorious land that rose from the mud, one my people called ‘Bhoomi’. Everyone around me was like me and looked like me. Thoughts involving my features, their uniqueness, my skin, its dejection or fetishization had never occurred to me.
Upon coming to the states, it took me a while to familiarize myself with the beauty standards of the West. At a simple glance, white skin and blonde hair. On further inspection, high cheekbones, small noses, and a jutting jawline. On the outside, I had always been this social warrior of equality. A champion of self-love, of tanned skin, of big bodies. But suddenly, on the inside, I started hating myself. I hated the big nose my ancestors had left me, the expansive lips that sculpted my chin, and the dark muddy eyes and skin that reminded me of home.
Why couldn’t I have just been born – white? To have snow-like skin, soft golden locks, and ocean-blue eyes. To be “conventionally attractive”. To be society’s type. Colonization had taught me to hate my color. Products like Fair and Lovely had taught me to hate my color. Now, college was also teaching me to disassociate from my identity. Indian men are not often made to feel wanted in the American sexual context. Talking to several girls in college, I realized that I just wasn’t their “type”. And yet I would see them get with a different white guy party after party. Cyclical. A pattern of rejection of brown skin, and the idealization of white. I would go to parties every weekend as girls skimmed me up and down and moved ahead to the next white guy. Being in a frat exemplified this – the ugliest white guy in the room usually “pulled harder” than the “hottest” coloured guy. And this wasn’t an isolated feeling – a lot of my fellow brown brothers, and even sisters, felt the same. Invisible. We yearned to be seen. To be wanted. To be the object of someone’s desire. To be made to feel like our body mattered, that it had worth.
America has been taught to only like white men. Asian, Indian, and Black people have no space here, and racial biases have been cloaked and marketed as sexual preferences. All the men the Western media calls heartthrobs, all the hottest men lists, all the men who get the girl at the end of the Netflix show, and all the men who sit at the top of collegial hookup culture are white. And what are people like me? The best friend, the nerd, the scientist, the taxi driver, and the grocery store owner. There is also a culture of demasculinization of Asian men in Western society – the projection of an image that they are weak, small, short, and of course, an appropriation of Asian penis size. And in the case that a white person does like people like me, we label it as an Asian fetish. Because the idea of a white person liking a non-white seems so outlandish that we choose to stigmatize the notion.
I too was a part of this system. I fiended for the white touch, for the validation of a white person to make me feel seen. I even started getting with people I wasn’t attracted to, just to feel loved, and wanted. To once be the object of a white person’s desire. To feel sufficient. To feel like I had trumped society’s rules. I had fallen out of love with myself, based on the ideals of a Western society. I yearned to be uniform and monotone. To blend in. It wasn’t an appreciation of their features, but a repulsion from my own. This society dictated what I considered desirable. It decided that white meant attractive, and other skin tones did not.
Men often don’t talk about body image issues. I never knew I had them. Basing self-worth off your body or looks is never a good idea. But a lot of physical things from which one may face discrimination are things that can be changed. Skin tone and ethnicity, however, are inherent. And when you feel racially alienated from the sexual diaspora in your environment, you tend to try to change the things that can be changed to make yourself slightly more palatable. It took a long time for me to grow out of the ‘colonial mindset’. To accept myself as beautiful. And mostly, to stop deriving pleasure from what others think of me. I needed to find myself beautiful. The number one person who could make me feel wanted, and loved, was me. I had to love myself. I now look back at some of these thoughts, and feel disgusted with who I was, but mostly with how I felt. How I was made to feel. And how so many people of colour who live in this country feel every single day. Un-wanted. Whether it’s due to jobs, citizenship, society, or the realm of beauty and sexuality. I can only hope all of us can move towards a more inclusive society, and break down the beauty standards that would ever make a small 10-year-old brown kid feel ‘less’.
Very moving- well done