Ethnic-Fetishism
Photo by Matt Gunther for Details
Jezebel’s Irin Carmon takes Details to task for its increasingly misogynistic tone, focusing primarily on the sexual trend story about Jewish women in its recent issue. Carmon’s article makes several strong points and I recommend reading it, but I was more interested in the comments.
There was a lot of talk about the “You don’t look” (in this case, “Jewish”) back-handed compliment. Tchotchke writes:
I think what bothers me about this so much is that aside from the obvious ethnic-fetishism, there is also a heavy dose of stereotyping. So much of the article seemed to hinge on the idea that it is a revelation that there are attractive Jewish women. The subtext, therefore, is that Jewish women are not attractive in general and so this trend is new and exciting.
I am not Jewish, so my words may not carry too much weight, but hearing comments like, ‘Bar Rafaeli is so hot because she’s Jewish, but doesn’t look it!’ really piss me off.
I imagine that every woman that doesn’t look like some variation of the Nordic ideal resents the discovery by white magazine editors that her ethnicity can be attractive. And of course, for a woman to be attractive, she must still be a variation of that ideal. The media has made it pretty clear that a woman cannot be considered beautiful if she has more than one “ethnic” trait. In other words, a woman with Naomi Campbell’s skin color, Giselle’s nose and Jennifer Lopez’s curves would probably not be modeling swimsuits and lingerie.
Clearly Details is only written for (certain kinds of) men. Interesting that it is also, apparently, only written for white Protestants.
