Desirability politics - what is it?

Desirability politics. What is it? A fairly new term that I have heard being spread about the media and one that links well into the notion of diet culture that western ideals have imposed on us. According to an article by everyday feminism in 2016, desirability politics deals with the questions of how social ideals for attractiveness can have a pull, and how one can also pull back. It deals with the idea that desire is political - both affected by and shaping systems of power and oppression. 

Desirability politics are at play throughout our daily lives and many benefit from it. We can easily maintain an attitude that says that we alone define ourselves and our preferences but the reality is that we are influenced by our surroundings and the content we consume daily. We have to stop and take a minute to think why we believe what we believe, the influences that surround us and the ways in which they shape our understanding and desirability. 

Narratives in society about beauty, intelligence and kindness have mostly been centralised on white people. People of colour, with disabilities, fat people, people who are low income and others with a myriad of culturally oppressed identities have historically been underrepresented in the media, which has worked to construct these identities as inferior. This is the politics of desirability. The idea that we are constantly exposed to these harmful stereotype of who deserved to be loved. 

We can even look in our own perspective of who we are personally attracted towards. Those preferences are not developed in a vacuum. It is impossible to separate one's desires from the culture and society in which they were formed. Therefore, we need to be critical about this. We have a blind spot that is shaped by our privilege and privilege has everything to do with dominant culture. We subconsciously deem people desirable in life by what the media tells us - an individual who is able-bodied, conventionally attractive, wealthy financially and socially and comes from a first world country. The time now is to deconstruct this narrative in our head. 

I hear so many people saying: "It's not my fault that I am attracted to x". OR "Attraction is personal and there is nothing I can do about it." But this idea of only being attracted to one race of people or only people who are a certain size is something that people are apprehensive to debate about. But that is what encompasses desirability politics. The fact is that who you choose to be friends with or to date is political and it falls in the category of desirability politics. 

Desirability politics is something that we will all fall victim towards. It is when we look at the level to which someone is seen as desirable because of their social position. This social position is constructed by their economic class, their social class, their sexual orientation, their race and ethnicity, whether they are cisgender or transgender and whether they are disabled or not. It takes into account the ways in which you are privileged and marginalised before considering physical appearance. Therefore, for black disabled, low income women, desirability politics has already deemed them unattractive just by harmful societal stereotypes before we even look at their features. 

According to systems of oppression, the most desirable partner is one that fits in every single box, meaning that they are White, middle-class and thin and able-bodied. By being attracted to only these kind of people, we have to be critical of ourselves and ask why. The issue comes in desirability politics when people believe someone is superior due to these categories and if they believe that these categories make a person objectively more attractive. For example, if you have a White partner and you believe that them being White makes them more attractive because you think non-White people are unattractive. It is true that we all have a 'type' but we need to deconstruct it and understand why we have one to begin with. 

In the patriarchy, for women the objective is beauty and for men it is women. Men will date around more than women, feeding into the narrative of desirability politics more than women. They can have casual relationships with many women but a lot of them they would never date due to these women not being desirable. Dating is therefore even more political because it is more public. The person you walk hand-in-hand with in the streets does say something about your desirability politics. 

We live in a society where all a woman can bring to the table is her body, and if that is not considered desirable then they are classed as useless. We are socialised to fall into the trap of linking our value as a human to the attention we get from men. But our value must come from within and from breaking those harmful stereotypes of desirability. Knowing that you are not at the top of the hierarchy when it comes to attractiveness and desirability can make you vulnerable to abuse because it often makes you insecure. 

If you are someone who is at the top end of the hierarchy because you are White, cisgender or able-bodied and you are dating someone who does not have these privileges, do not prey on their vulnerability. If you are seeing someone and believe you are superior than them because of your wealth or race, then please leave them. Be critical in your life about your biases and prejudices that can cloud judgement. 

In order to truly tackle the desirability politics, ask yourself: Is your vision of beauty narrow? Do you believe that someone's race, size, abilities or gender identity affect their worth? Desirability has to be more than your social situation and the harmful stereotypes that society imposes in order to deem who or what is attractive.