Sex Column: Crossing cultural boundaries with sex

Are you racist? How about transphobic? Or maybe just a little bit classist? No? Are you sure? Take a look at your sexual history, then decide.

Consider this famous – and offensive – quote from John Mayer: “My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock.”

Mayer made these remarks in an interview with Playboy. People were rightly pissed off, because Mayer was being deliberately provocative. But if your sexual attractions are solely for one colour of the human rainbow — is that racist or just personal preference?

It’s probably a bit of both. Sexual chemistry can seem irrational. It’s not entirely – but it does certainly happen, in part at least, at a subconscious level.

Research into body odour and pheromones suggests that each of us has a unique “odourprint” which may give potential partners information about our fertility, health and immune systems. Scent tests suggest that we prefer the natural smell of people who are immunologically dissimilar to us. It is thought that this gives any potential children the best chance of survival. However, even if we accept that this is a genuine factor, it is only one part of the puzzle.

On any given day you probably walk by hundreds of people that would make a great genetic match, but most of us end up with significantly fewer partners than that. Pity! Nor it is acceptable behaviour to give someone a sniff before getting your flirt on. Nope, it happens the other way around. We are normally in the process of seducing someone before we get close enough to smell them.

What’s more, if we chose sexual partners solely on their ability to give us healthy bouncing babies, there would be no same-sex couples, or older couples, or relationships between people who don’t want to have children. Whatever the conservatives and religious types say, sexual relationships are not simply for the begetting of children – they are for pleasure, excitement and companionship too.

LESS LIKELY TO RESPOND

The funny thing about personal preferences is that they are not all that personal. Culture, the media, our family and our peers all help define what we find attractive. Certain characteristics are coded as desirable – height in men, slimness in women – and we are repeatedly told that this is what we want – or at least should want.

Beauty is a cultural construct, not just a physical ideal, with standards set by the dominant group. In Western culture at least, blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skin is widely seen as the epitome of beauty in women. Men, on the other hand should be tall, dark and handsome. However, most of us don’t look anything like Scarlett Johansson or Jon Hamm…

Our families and our peers unconsciously help to stream our desires too. We are, for the most part, sexually attracted to people who are similar to our social groups. That means you are most likely to date and mate with people who come from a similar socio-economic background, share your ethnicity, and have similar political and religious beliefs. They’d better love the same bands too!

Our desires are also shaped by the kinds of people we see around us. This is particularly true during your sexual awakening. If you developed a crush on a neighbour, a teacher, an older cousin, an actor, singer, or indeed a porn star, you will find characteristics that remind you of them attractive – consciously or not.

If you grow up in a culture that is racist, transphobic and has inflexible ideas about ideal gender roles and presentation, these can potentially (and frequently do) get baked into your ideas about what is attractive – and what is not.

As a culture, we assign social value to different types of bodies. Some are seen as more worthy of sexual desire, as well meriting the emotional labour involved in finding and maintaining a relationship.

In 2014 OKCupid looked at the racial preferences of their users. Women largely preferred men of their own race. However, whatever their ethnicity, all women were less likely to respond to messages from black or Asian men. Black men were the most egalitarian and had very little racial preferences. However, all men who weren’t black were less likely to respond to messages from black women. (This was only, obviously, a survey of the kind of people who use sites like OKCupid).

YOU CAN’T FORCE YOURSELF

Interest from others on a dating site does not necessarily mean that one will have an easier time finding a satisfactory relationship. For one thing, Asian women tend to get more messages than any other group, but these messages are often from men who fetishise Asian women as both docile and hypersexual.

These findings suggest that your race impacts your dating life and your ability to elicit desire, as well as your experiences of commitment and respect from others. It also suggests that there is something more than personal preference going on. It seems likely that cultural stereotypes about certain races makes us overlook people as viable romantic or sexual partners.

Now I am not trying to suggest that you should date someone you don’t fancy simply to be a more open-minded person. For one thing, you can’t force yourself to be sexually attracted to someone. Nor should you. Sexual chemistry may be the most important ingredient for a long-lasting and happy relationship.

You don’t need to take my word for it. Sex educator and scientist Dr Carol Cassell believes that sexual chemistry is the key to long-term love. But it is still worth remembering that our desires can be narcissistic and narrow-minded – and may well be at odds with our conscious ideological positions.

What you can do is interrogate your sexual desires. This may not mean you find more people sexually attractive, but you could uncover deep-seated prejudices, work on them, and become a better person as a result. It might not give you a more varied and exciting sex life, but it’s a start.