harp | Beta Question; Answer if you see this or Break my Heart

When I was in Women’s Studies class, I did an assignment that had me studying the advertising in porn magazines- not Popular ones, but ones that were... what do you call it, independently owned? They weren’t published locally (probably?), but I did go to school in the Midwest in a town that had about 800 people, so I’m guessing that the customers were predominantly white men. Maybe a few college students.

I recall that day well. My friend Dan Norris drove me to Book World and said that he wasn't going in with me.

"Because I don't want to be standing next to someone who looks like a twelve year old while looking at porn." he said.

He had a point. He was also 6"10 and I needed someone that could reach the magazines. It makes me laugh to think about it now. Women's Studies was in the Winter semester, see, and I flew to and from Wisconsin in an airplane so small that there was no flight attendant. That very trip to Northland, the pilot walked down the aisle, sort of hesitantly paused at me, looking uneasy before he went. On his way back up, he said, sounding like he had to hype himself up in order to do it, "I'm sorry, but I have to ask, are you fifteen? You have to be fifteen to sit there." Exit row.

"Yes," I said, surprised, "I'm nineteen..."

He said "Oh! Oh, tha.. I thought you were eleven..."

The thought of me standing on tip-toe to try and reach the pornography magazines, all the while looking like an eleven year old is just great. I didn't have to reach, though. A guy was standing beside me reading one that looked interesting. Petite I think, with a girl playfully holding up a hose and standing in front of a car.

I said "Hey, mister?" and he actually looked up and over, then down (lawl) to see me. "Could you get me one of those please?" I asked him, indicating the one he had. He looked like he didn't know what to think.

"He probably thought 'hey, didn't I see you in May?'" was what Dan said later.

Anyway, the advertisements in the backs of all five magazines were very similar. Mostly there were white women, one or two squares of “specialty” ads (usually for pregnant woman porn), and always, always a special section with one or two pages of squares with das hot blooded ethnics.

Next time you get a chance to look at a porn magazine, look at the advertisements in the back. Look for the section where they ~~ghettoize~~ crowd all of the porn with non-white actors. It’s always the same- the black women have adjectives like “wild”, “raw” “raunchy” “crazy” and words that generally mean “rrraw, come and tame me or maybe don’t, but either way I’m an animal and I’ll shag you in a manner to indicate such!” while the ones featuring Asian women all say “sweet” “cute” “petite” “adorable”, and other "ooh, don’t hurt me mister big white American man! I’m just a little girl!” words for quality submissive little geisha.

I don't remember if Latino women had any adjectives different from the African American women, but I do remember that "fiery" and "spicy" came up a lot.

I know this is all in the name of fantasy, but isn’t it interesting how these tropes that follow us around? When you start to look at them, you’ll see them everywhere. Personally, I’m not offended unless I think about it for too long. Oh, and irritated when meeting people who have whole-heartedly bought into tropes, never actually met an ethnic person, and decide to let me know that they "totally see me" by clumsily using a term for whatever ethnicity they think I am.

Mostly, though, it’s funny. Literally, brings a smile to my face. "O Rly?"

Anyway, here’s my fun beta question: Chances are you have something... oh... fetishizable about you. What is it? Yes, yes, I know that anything can be fetishized, but I mean something in the niche market- big feet, bear-like, ethnic background, height, something. And how do you feel about the fact that you're fetishized for this? How do you feel about the hypothetical person who is all "unf" for you and what do you think of them (remember- they aren't the same thing!)?

I want to post this up in a discussion community, but I want to beta it here first so that someone can tell me how to re-word it.

I suspect, on reflecting a little, that it might be off-putting question to some people. I say "suspect" and "some people" because I honestly don't see a problem with it. Is that because it's not offensive or because I'm desensitized to being fetishized? In the case of the latter, do people have a right to get angry with me for asking, or is it like the human getting offended by the talking dog from the puppy mill asking "which one of your kids do you think would cry the most pitifully if they were taken away from you suddenly and without warning as infants?"

If you know what I mean.

I think I've got... two? Three glaringly obvious things to be fetishized for? I look like a loli/shota, I wear glasses, and I'm a vampire.

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Big lips as a fetish; I didn't realize that! I wonder if there are magazines for it... probably. There are magazines for feet, right? I think there are.

My friend Jeff and I were sitting around and I asked "What's foot porn look like?" And he said he didn't know, but he was at his computer, so he looked it up. The first one was just three boys, fully clothed, sitting in a circle on a patio around a plate of grapes and pineapple chunks and stuff and the camera man asked "So what're we doing today?"

One answered "We're crushing fruit with our feet!" And the started doing so and picking up grapes with their feet and feeding it to one-another, and laughing. It didn't seem like porn at all, just like people being cute and having fun. I'd watch that- I love seeing "candid" videos of people just being silly and having fun with friends.

So someone needs to start a site featuring nothing but men in business suits eating ice cream cones. Seriously.

o someone needs to start a site featuring nothing but men in business suits eating ice cream cones. Seriously.

I'd watch that for days.

(deleted comment)

You guys do know that they wouldn't be naked, right?

The "in business suits" was a hint, yes.

Looking at feet is ok, but there has to be actual foot worship going on if I'm gonna get a charge out of it.

I have a pet who does this for me. XD

Man, I totally see you as an extreme mixed-race Guyanese Indian who has some admixture of American Indian and black African ancestry, and possibly some white ancestry, while being a transsexual!

Anyway, you should know damn well who would fetishize me and that, generally, I'd be flattered but uninterested in any advances they care to make, while not especially caring about any fantasizing they'd do.

Not transsexual- a vampire!

Bwuh? Wait? I'm confused...tell me a bit more about you?

Nyahahahahaaaa! It's a lo-o-ong stupid story!

LJ community- Trans_Rage.

Poster: Why did this transman make an event for women and invite me?!
Me: Maybe he was thinking "Women bodied or brained people?'
Snakey: What do you mean women bodied or brained?
Me: *Makes long explanation clarifying that I was speaking as how the guy might have been thinking* I was going to say "women bodied" (to explain why poster got invited) but then I saw he invited Transwomen and I realized not all Transwomen have women bodies.

Mod: ALL TRANS MEN HAVE MALE BODIES BECAUSE THEY ARE MALE.
ALL TRANS WOMEN HAVE FEMALE BODIES BECAUSE THEY ARE FEMALE.

Me: *not posting* We "ALL" have male bodies and brains? Doesn't that make us cis?I'm a transman and I have a f**king female body, thank you. Hence the problem.

Harp = Transman
Transman = Women body, male brain
Women body, male brain = non-existent
Non-existent = Vampires
Omg Harp = Vampire?!?!

(Hence my username "Snakey and the other Baws call me vampire)

wow, that is a bit complicated. lol

Porn stereotypes kill me since it all plays up to making that person sexually pleasing as possible with the most simplistic and weirdest descriptions of said fantasy-fodder, but it gets on your nerves after a while. Funny, yes... but annoying.

Don't even get me started on those "Help! I'm a white women who secretly lust after black men because they are packing in that special way ifyouknowwatimean. *wink* ".

Being a Black girl who is a fatty and has a huge rack, I'm already three categories of fetishes in one. Well, if you count me spanking grown men and flogging and tying up women and other such perversity, I think it's more than six.

(My Syoran icon is best friends with your MLK one because that's where we met on B_Lulz)

No, I do not know! They really go "Halp!"? Where?

(MLK + Syoran= OTP FO LYFE)

Funnily enough, there ARE titles of black man/ white woman porn with "help" in the title.

Also "Dark meat" And "Chocolate monster" but that's another story.

I asked this smut-writer on my flist (who loves writing lotsa big black guy/twinky white guy porns) if there was any such thing as big muscly white guy dominating a little twinky skinny black guy. I think he said yes because there's porn of everything, but I do not remember.

Dude, if there is just a thing, then I have yet to see it.

Also, rare on the porn scale, Black women/Asian men.

Rare as a diamond-covered unicorn.

Now I'm really, really sad having been informed of this/having thought of this pairing.

People are such boring, predictable, unadventurous, stuck-in-their ways, boring-as-white-bread fuckers. Which is fine as far as likes go, but then they start to think that it's ok to judge us based on their schemas.

Glad I do not associate with them. The net is more fun.

Word.

This is why I spend time being non-boring as possible. Also, why I dress in in victorian wear during a heat-wave.

Good times.

YAY INTERVEBZ

Yes, you never did put up all the pictures up.

I just do what pleases me and then I happen to find out later on that my interests are not relevant to the interests of the majority of people.

I just do what pleases me and then I happen to find out later on that my interests are not relevant to the interests of the majority of people.

Story of my life.

(no subject)

From:

androgyneninja.livejournal.com - Date: Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 05:47 pm (UTC) - Expand

Me, I don't care what color/gender/sex/weight/etc you are. I just care if we have chemistry.

Preachin' to the choir, sug. BELIEVE me.

oh, a winking Picard! *drools*

According to TLAvideo: "The lead, Daniel Fox, looks like an art student, a bit nerdy but still ruggedly masculine. A sex scene between him and his girlfriend shows off his nicely formed butt."

He's also a cricket player.

Edited Date: Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 02:54 am (UTC)

It's hard to be offended by porn advertisement. Well, at least for me. Especially online, because on top of all the incredibly stupid adjectives, there's bad grammar galore. So really it's more funny than anything.

As for what could be fetishized about me...um. I'm not ethnic or anything. I am chubby, though. THERE IS NOTHING PARTICULARLY SPECIAL ABOUT ME, haha. Especially appearance-wise. I am white and I guess average-looking (and I do look my age), with brown hair and blue eyes.

But you've got a girlfriend! That's fetishized like woah!

Actually I don't? Haha.

I... could have sworn you and

turtle_goose were...

Waow. I really, really, really... perhaps I am late?

Edited Date: Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 12:47 am (UTC)

I mean if I had a girlfriend, she would be it. We're both (shockingly?) heterosexual. Don't worry, though, we used to joke about our ~relationship~ all the time, so it's easy to get confused. We're heterosexual lifemates, like Jay and Silent Bob!

PLUS I just realized that I say she's my girlfriend in my userinfo. Haha. Uh. Sorry for the confusion.

Aw, darn. I know all about those. The non-me commenter right above you? I've got a picture of him and his heterosexual lifemate holding a harmonica between their mouths as they unbutton their shirts (and there's a youtube video to go with it). I carry it in my wallet.

The world needs many more hetero lifemates very badly, just like it needs boy-girl friendships so that people can stop seeing two people alone and automatically thing "Closeness = teh sex!!" right away.

It fucking disgusts me that people probably would fetishize the fact that I am obese and have large tits- mainly becuase I would rather rip off my tits with a chainsaw and toss them at cars than let someone touch or acknowledge them, and because I find relaxed acceptance or even love of obeseity disgusting- it's an unhealthy state of being, WHY WOULD YOU BE OKAY WITH IT. If someone openly ever said that to me, my foot would be so far down their throat it would come out their fucking ass.

And there are the people who love the androgynous-nyss of you.

Like you ;-; <3

Well, I'm bi. And poly. Which automatically means "TTLY HOTT 3SUM," apparently. (To which my response is normally "Hahaha NO." Unless they're hot.)

I also got the "gamer chick" and "glasses chick" thing going.

And you're also "petite"! That's a thing for people, right? It... I think it is.

Wow, if someone with a thing for "petite" people visited Northland and saw our friend group*, that person would be like

:D :D :D

*The Cult of the Townhouse, the Holy Rollin' Empire, TH4, Basement Dwellers Inc, The League of Dweebs

Hm. Good question, I'll habe to think on it.

"Dorky-looking fellow with glasses" is probably one of them. "British" is another, even if that's not strictly (read: at all) accurate. Uh. Curly hair? I tend to not pay much attention to fetishes, so I'm really not sure.

Oh! Almost forgot the first one that came to mind before I started writing: Voice. And vocabulary, I guess. I've been compared to having a voice like Alan Rickman and whatnot, and I know for a fact that people are turned on whenever he speaks. (I cannot confirm or deny if I am one of them).

I've been informed that the way I 'talk' is also quite appealing online. In AIM. With just text. It is, and I quote, 'Mmf!'

When I saw you replied, I thought "I bet the British thing" actually. You probably have an accent. I say probably because I can't hear it because my mom supposedly has one, too (she grew up in England) but I can't hear it. A "strain" of accents I am immune to! And part of what I had in mind when I posted was "I wonder what Graham'll reply?"

Heck, you don't needa pay attention to fetishes! I basically asked "what makes you different/fall outside of the norm" and added that it can't be a personality thing. You see what I did there.

And yeah, your voice is cuh-razy deep.

Well. *puts on linguistic glasses*

Technically speaking, I don't have a British accent. And it should be 'British English' or 'British Dialect,' and we should also be discussing the dozens of different sorts of 'British Accents,' but we'll skip over that for simplicity's sake.

Anyway. No British accent! I do have a Minnesotan accent--which is, of course, characterized by the long 'o' (As in Minnesota). Otherwise, I grew up with three speech impediments--a lisp, a stammer, and a very nasty case of rhotacism (difficulty in pronouncing the letter 'R.' In my case, it was when an 'r' came after a vowel, like in 'car' or 'bird' or whatever. Also bled into things like 'bell' or 'till,' when an 'l' came after a vowel). The lisp is almost completely gone--you can hear the remnants of it if you know what to look for, but the rhotacism is pretty strong, and I stammer all over the place.

But yeah. All of that, combined with my crazy low voice, general style, and vocabulary, lead a lot of people to think I'm a Brit.

Huh, I chalked it up to <url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foreign_accent_syndrome">foreign accent syndrome, although, strictly speaking, I suppose it is, as FAS describes symptoms, not the underlying cause.

I think people's feelings about being fetishized (not a word, but y'know,) depend on their own liking of these features in them. Like the commenters above, who feel differently about their weight, and that makes them react differently about their weight being someone's fetish. Or in my case, I look like an ukeboy and I goddamn hate it, and every time someone so much as comments on my cute leetle shoe size or my cute leetle height or my cute ANYTHING I grit my teeth and try not to punch them in the eye with my cute leetle fist. And it doesn't matter if it's teasing or actual liking, because I hate it, and I wish people would be able to see me as a person, not a cute leetle someone with personality traits they expect a cute leetle someone to have, too, aww, no matter that I don't even have them. While plenty of other people happily call themselves "bois", and plenty of other people would've loved being bois and have awesome strong semes court them ~~and fuck them really hard all day~~ and all that. And I suspect the latter wouldn't even care that they're objectified and it's "I always wanted a short thin feminine looking young man just like that and now it's MINE" more than any interest in their Incredibly Deep Inner World. At least, they wouldn't care at first.

Hope I make any sense here.

Edited Date: Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 06:54 am (UTC)

The funny thing is that I realised some time ago that I fit the general descriptions of the porn-image that seems to be the most basic one for young guys on the internet: blonde, bisexual, Swedish (ethnically and nationally) woman. Oh yeah, and wearing glasses and liking nerdy things. And I cross dress sometimes, and I know for my part that I fetishize that myself. Of course, an extensive list of what a person might fetishize about you could be a mile long, if rule 34 has taught me anything.

I'm a goth. Everyone thinks we're total sluts. No, I am a *selective* slut, thankyouverymuch. lol.

I believe it!

Saffie was a "selective slut" too. Not so much a slut, just that when she lets herself register the arousal, she's fecking ravenous, voracious, and damn near insatiable.

LATE COMMENT. (By the way, I am a UNICORN! Hello there vamp. :))

I'm bisexual - and a relative girly-girl (dresses, jewellery, mascara) and twenty years old. When I went round my uni freshers' fair handing out LGBT Campaigns leaflet I had a man tell me about how hot I was and would I consider a threesome - that's a definite theme. He was hot, but I was just - no. No, because this sort of reaction shouldn't be socially acceptable. >:(

And I'm submissive and kinky - well, fetishise that all you like because that's kind of the point, I totes fetishise the dom/me-ness of the hot dom/mes I meet :) And then again I've had a few people fetishise the bisexual submissive thing as a specific combo - which is not necessarily a problem but some people have said stuff related to it that made me unhappy.

Glasses, big breasts, round arse - none of these are a problem because they're not associated with ugly social stuff. Also, um, and I feel weird about this but in the spirit of honesty - with men, my 'type' is most often tall black men. (These men also tend to be the ones who appreciate my figure most.) I worry that I'm fetishising and it's kind of a stereotype - black men appreciating big/round arses - but it's also been almost universal so... I dunno. It's never seemed a problem within a relationship (or, alternatively, a snogging session at a party) but there is a... vibe, I guess, that comes with my very pale, curvy, English Rose self and my six-foot black rugby-player ex getting down to it. I dunno, there was never anything like that between us because we'd known each other so long, nor consciously with other blokes, but I'm aware of and not happy about how much the whole sub-white-girl-gets-done-by-big-black-dom thing fits in certain porn tropes. /ramble

Late comment is ok! <3!

Don't be sad that your tastes just happens to mesh with a lot of people's. It's nothing bad. I think it's actually pretty adorable. (And I've always thought that those in the UK were more enlightened anyhow, so I severely doubt your fetishizing!)

Hmm. There have been black guys who have told me they want to get with me because they've never been with a white guy. I'll tell them I only look white as my dad is from India. I'm a mutt. And they'll say they've never tried someone from India either. Actually, I can think of at least one white guy who wanted to "try" an Indian as well. I've had one Jewish guy want me to jump him because he thought I looked like a rough Arab who would use him, but he had me all kinds of wrong.

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