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143. Commodification and Fetishization in Romance Writing with Tasha L. Harrison

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Summary Title

How do we refer to people? Are those words they would use to refer to themselves?

Food comparisons are commonly used in writing when describing black and brown skin tones for humans. But how does it feel to be talked about as if you were a commodity?

Romance author Tasha L. Harrison returns to discuss problematic -isms and word choices that show up in writing and how those choices condition you to take those unconscious attitudes out into the world with you.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

  • Examples of how problematic language and tropes illustrate the -isms in romance

  • How whiteness shows up as the default in media

  • Why readers struggle with “unlikeable” heroines

  • Taking publishing’s problems with race public


Romance Author and Community Builder

Tasha L. Harrison is a purveyor of filthy fiction with feelings and creator of the Wordmakers Writing Community and the #20kin5Days Writing Challenge.

The -Isms in Romance

On the Pause on the Play® Podcast, Erica Courdae opens her conversation with Tasha L. Harrison with an observation about several articles and conversations she’d seen online on the common use of food comparisons to describe the skin tones of Black people and people of color.

Erica says, “we are actually categorizing people based on goods that they were traded and sold for, or the goods that they literally had to crop in order for other people to keep them as enslaved individuals while the masters made their money off of them.”

These problematic shorthand descriptions of skin tones in terms of commodities show up all over literature and are still a particular problem in romance writing, along with other -isms in the treatment of Black people and people of color in their pages.

She asks Tasha for insight into how this shows up in romance writing.

Tasha says it’s a multi-layered issue, but the two primary -isms at play are racism and sexism and that these problematic descriptors and depictions in romance are most often written by white authors.

Some of this, she says, may stem from the popularization of using the term African-American instead of Black, and how many white people were taught not to describe or address anyone as Black.

“And then when you start talking about how do you describe someone…to make them sound enticing or attractive?...It always starts with making them food, coffee colored complexion, caramel complexion, chocolate skin, that sort of thing.”

Sexism comes into play, she says, because in romance it is most often women’s skin that is described in terms of food and commodities, regardless of race.

“It always seems like we’re talking about these people as if they’re consumables, not as if they’re real people, like they’re just something to be consumed.”

People have started pushing back against those descriptors. “Black people come in a variation of colors, and I feel like y’all just keep leaning on these two descriptions…like there’s only two versions of being Black, light skin and dark skin, when we come in every color on the spectrum.”

Erica adds, “when you use the word consumables, the fact that if you are referencing us in being consumables, there was a point to where we didn’t have any say in whether or not somebody chose to consume us.”

Tasha continues that in the romance world, colorism is also the norm, particularly with Black heroes being given light skin and green or blue eyes, “which happens, but it’s not so common and it’s not even that common on white people for them to have blue eyes or green eyes.”

Erica observes that it’s a form of fetishization to “pick the most exotic version of somebody, and this is what everybody is.”

Tasha agrees and adds that it extends to white authors often defaulting to writing mixed race heroines with light skin, curly hair and blue or green eyes. “There’s definitely a lot of fetishizing going on with how they are written, how they’re depicted, who gets to be on the cover of a romance novel.”

White As Default

Erica says she sees these problematic descriptions in many other areas, from dating sites to image descriptions on social media. She asks, “Why is it that we’ve hit this point that this is the norm?”

Tasha answers, “When it comes to describing the skin color of people of color, they want to depict it in a way they feel is positive, right? So what could be more positive than something delicious? They’re not taking into consideration that, you know, you’ve made this whole person into a chocolate bar…[And] they won’t describe the white characters nearly in as much detail as they described the Black character.”

Where much of media assumes whiteness as the default, a lot of writers go over the top describing every detail of any non-white characters and have very limited descriptions of their white characters. “It's almost kind of like an overcorrection…and then all the creepy weird descriptions come into play after that.”

Unlikeable Heroines

The unequal levels of description is also how sexism shows up in romance. Female characters tend to be described in great detail, while their male counterparts get far less detail. And readers and writers tend to be much harder on female characters than on male characters.

Tasha says, “The male character can be a complete, disgusting waste and he can be redeemed. Female characters have to be perfect.”

Readers will knock heroines if their actions don’t perfectly line up with what they would do in that situation, if they’re too ambitious or had too much sex before meeting the hero.

“There’s this assumption that the woman is there to be consumed, to be taken, to be…forced to submit to this man in this story,” Tasha says, and that assumption extends to the reader, in that the heroine is theirs to consume.

Erica asks if romance would still exist as a genre with the sexism were stripped out of it.

Tasha says it can and it does. She says there is a distinct difference between what traditional publishers put out and what self-published authors are writing.

“Traditional publishers want…something that could, if you stripped the sex out could be on the Hallmark Channel…[The heroine] can’t be a woman who is showing up on the page as her whole self…She has to show up in service of the hero.”

Tasha takes the opposite tack and invests in writing her heroines and giving them journeys, while her heroes are “there for her to work her issues out against, that’s it.”

Taking It Out of DMs

Tasha says that when she first started writing, she pursued traditional publishing, and got rejections that literally said things like “we already have a Black author,” or the note that “I really didn’t connect with the character, which is one of the things that white people say then they feel like, oh, well, this is a Black story…so I’m never going to be able to find anything in common with them.”

Those experiences, she found, were common among Black romance authors, even those who had been published for a long time, but no one was talking about it publicly.

“I can’t keep quiet about stuff like that. Like, I’m not going to keep running into the DMs or being in some private Facebook group talking about things that are happening in a wider publishing platform.”

Her willingness to be noisy about those issues has hindered her progress, she says, but, “being vocal about diversity has always been my thing because part of the reason why I started writing romance was because I wanted to see more romance with not just Black people, but with diverse casts.”

Take Action

Tasha says the number one action people can take after this conversation is to be more aware of the media they consume, and who is producing that. Are the books you read primarily written by men? By white people? Because of the way suggestion algorithms work everywhere from Amazon to Netflix, “you have to make a conscious effort to step outside of the norm and then the algorithm will feed you something different.”

And she says, when you notice descriptions of people in what you’re reading, “pay attention to how people are being fetishized or othered in books and try to do the exact opposite in real life…be more aware of the language you use to describe people, how you interact with people especially when it comes to how they look.”

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