Dating apps can feel dehumanizing. You’re reduced to a few pictures and some short prompts (which most people probably aren’t reading), and someone with his hands down his pants in Bushwick can swipe left without giving you a second thought.
For people of color, that feeling can be compounded by the ways race shapes who is considered desirable, who gets overlooked, and who becomes the target of someone else’s fantasy. Being on a dating app is one of those experiences that can make you hyperaware of your race—not necessarily because you want to think about it, but because potential matches often find ways to remind you of it. Sometimes, that means being exoticized by white users. Other times, it means encountering the same racial stereotypes from people who share your background.
Race becomes a kind of shorthand that allows strangers to project their fantasies onto women they barely know.
Tanjeela, 27, tells Cosmopolitan that she feels fetishized by men she matches with, regardless of which app she’s using. Potential matches often lead with comments about her body, sometimes before even offering a “hi.” And while more than half of women on dating apps have reported receiving sexually explicit messages or photos, Tanjeela believes her Bengali background influences the kinds of messages she receives. She recalls a date who told her she reminded him of Yasmina Khan, a Bengali porn star.
“I look nothing like her, and I never saw him again,” she says.
For Kayla, 25, who is Latina, the assumptions are different but no less reductive. She says potential matches often treat her ethnicity as shorthand for her sexuality, approaching her with preconceived ideas about what a Latina woman should be like. “Anytime you say you’re Latina, they think ‘easy,’” she says. “I’ve literally had someone comfortable telling me, ‘I’m looking for a big booty Latina... You’re just my type.’”
In these cases, race becomes a kind of shorthand that allows strangers to project their fantasies onto women they barely know. Rather than getting to know Tanjeela or Kayla as individuals, these men approach them through stereotypes about their ethnic backgrounds and bodies. I remember being on dating apps years ago and having a man tell me it was his fantasy to “eat Pakistani pussy.” That was his first message to me—and his last, of course.
But the effects of race on dating apps aren’t limited to fetishization. It can also shape how people see themselves and whether they feel desirable in the first place. Nikita Fernandez, a South Asian sex therapist who has spent nearly a decade on dating apps herself, says she often sees clients of color struggle with perceptions of attractiveness, particularly when comparing themselves with white people. “I see this specifically with men of color who compare their features, like their height, to white men and reject themselves before really giving themselves a chance to be on these apps and be open to the experience,” she says.
Those comparisons don’t exist in a vacuum. Research suggests that racial disparities in online dating extend beyond individual experiences and into broader patterns of who receives attention, despite usage rates being comparable across all demographics. A 2014 study published in the American Journal of Sociology, which examined interactions on a large U.S. dating website, found that Black women received the fewest unsolicited messages among the women studied. Asian women received the most, followed by white and Hispanic women. Among men, white men received the most unsolicited messages, followed by Hispanic and Black men, while Asian men received the fewest.
These findings offer a glimpse into how race can shape who gets attention on dating apps—but they’re not a definitive ranking of desirability across every platform (or a reflection of anyone’s actual worth).
For Nikita, this echoes her own experience of trying to find connections. “I noticed that a lot of people that I was swiping on were white, and it was hard to really connect with people of color,” she says.
It’s a confusing and head-spinning contradiction: People of color can find themselves navigating both sides of the same problem, feeling overlooked in some contexts and objectified in others. These feelings can then go on to affect their own self-esteem and how they view themselves.
And while no two experiences of dating as a person of color are identical, race can influence everything from the messages that land in your inbox to the assumptions someone makes about you before you’ve even met.
Sure, these issues plague people of color in their everyday dating lives outside of the apps—but something about the idea of being at other people’s fingertips intensifies these situations and the feelings that come with them. Dating as a person of color is hard enough. Logging onto my own phone and having to choose between getting fetishized or outright rejected just because of my ethnic background in the pursuit of a romantic connection or hookup? It just doesn’t feel worth it, really.