Desi Men’s Love for the Elsas: A Love Story of Colonization.

I don’t even have to preface this because everyone knows what I mean by this title. But for those not familiar, let me give you some background. In this hellish age of attempted procreation of the human race, I want to discuss male’s preference for women, and women’s subsequent internalization of that preference as a meter of their worth. In the South Asian community it is widely observed that blondes with blue eyes are the most attractive to the men of the South Asian community and thus seemingly worthy of positive treatment that is not bestowed on their female counterparts. Desi women, from this observation, understand that they are unattractive and therefore unworthy of positive treatment and subsequently become pick-me’s and doormats (besides the training that they get to serve everyone but themselves). This is also a relic of colonization, known as colorism, that is prevalent in the colonized African cultures (all colonized cultures basically) where proximity to whiteness is the means to being treated as a full human.

Frankly, it’s not that deep. Well, it is, but not in the way that one might think it is. Men literally just like what they think they can’t have or don’t have. If you’re surrounded by a billion people that look like you and then see something different or novel, of course you’re going to be attracted to it. Even more so if you have an unconscious self-hatred due to 500 years of unacknowledged colonial trauma.

Ask any man what the fastest way to be accepted by the men of another group, and he will tell you it is through seducing one of their women. Because, as we know, women are possessions in games of men.

Furthermore the theory of being attracted to opposites holds true of men without 500 years of recent colonial trauma. As someone with black hair, dark eyes and brown skin, I can’t tell you the number of Scandinavian-looking men, Elsan’s, if you will, that I’ve been approached by.

Either way, the issue is still , women, as a collective, measure their individual self-worth in relation to how men see them (which is based on completely arbitrary standards of individual attraction, when in reality, men actually measure individual women’s self-worth strictly by how much she values herself. An unfortunate reality when women barely value themselves. (I personally don’t think that men as a collective value women as a collective at all, much less as people, but that's for another essay.) This patriarchal understanding of humanity is a product of our colonial globalization where the norms of the dominant group become the standard through the imposition of foreign tongues and values and culture.

The current norm of the feminine ideal is a manipulative helplessness that is deemed “feminine” because it panders to imagined hero instincts of whatever man is in proximity.

Feminine ideals, as defined by any other standard, whether that be by the rageful South Asian goddesses or matrilineal African tribal societies are not considered feminine, but are defined as masculine to justify the raping and unworthiness of those women and cultures and their ideals as a whole, both by the colonial intruders of the past and the current colonized minds of melanated men and women.

Instead of letting the patriarchy define our worth and the standards by which our worth is measured, let’s all enter a self-worth arc that is completely unrelated to the closest dick in proximity. Please? Maybe? Possibly? Just a thought really.