Book Review | Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating, by Apryl Williams (Stanford University Press, 2024)
University of Washington
gmowens@uw.edu
At several points in Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating, sociologist and multidisciplinary scholar Apryl Williams refers to a comment made by Christian Rudder, cofounder of the dating app OkCupid: “If your matches are ugly, then you are ugly.” Interrogating the flippancy of Rudder’s words, Williams demonstrates the inherent racism, sexism, and transphobia of his statement by revealing one simple truth: What is considered “ugly” by dating app algorithms is constructed according to normative, whiteness-based standards of attractiveness, masculinity, femininity, and overall value.
Examining how online dating platforms privilege whiteness at the expense of marginalized people, Not My Type explores the concept of sexual racism, which Williams defines as “personal racialized reasoning in sexual, intimate, and/or romantic partner choice or interest” (28). Williams asserts that sexual racism has been automated by online dating platforms via algorithms that filter who daters see by who algorithms think individuals will find attractive, based in part on users’ own looks and in part on the proliferation of white beauty standards. Discussing how these sites reinforce racial hegemony and sexual racism through whiteness-centering algorithms, Williams asserts that online dating companies should be held accountable for their role in automating and digitizing eugenics via their automation of “sexual racism, transphobia, and violence against marginalized people” (6).
Chapter 1 examines the myth of neutral personal choice, highlighting that despite users’ seeming ability to select whomever they want on dating apps, their selections are always already impacted by whiteness. Discussing how users’ evaluation of desirability is influenced by “a society that relies on racist thought to uphold White normative belief systems” (30), Williams contends that people “make choices about potential marriageability and desirability based on whether the person on the screen before them can conform to societally constructed racialized and gendered expectations of masculinity, femininity, desirability, and attractiveness” (29)—expectations that uphold whiteness as the paragon of these categories. Chapter 2 details how sexual racism is automated by dating platforms, highlighting how the companies behind these platforms have “formulated an imagined user who is highly attractive and would prefer to only be shown other highly attractive users” and created algorithms designed to determine attractiveness in a manner that perpetuates sexual racism (55).
Chapters 3 and 4 examine how sexual racism impacts online daters, incorporating interviews from twenty-seven white users and seventy-three users of color, respectively. Chapter 3’s interviews demonstrate how online dating algorithms and white users’ internal sexual racism work together to perpetuate this racism on dating platforms; Chapter 4 interrogates how sexual racism has damaged daters of color, leading to dating discomfort, feelings of unsafety, and internalized racism. Chapter 5 examines how safety can be enhanced for all dating app users through attendance to the safety needs of users of color, calling for greater safety measures for all users and asserting that only through making specific, anti-racist plans can users of all backgrounds be truly protected. Williams concludes Not My Type by reiterating that “automated sexual racism helps to normalize the way we do race” (165), warning that users should not trust dating companies if they continue to obfuscate their access to and use of our data. She further contends that dating companies must be held accountable for “creating environments where racial bias thrives” (177).
Williams’s book offers a compelling and convincing articulation of sexual racism, the ways it is automated, and how it harms marginalized users. In detailing how sexual racism “connotes a set of beliefs, practices, and behaviors at the intersection of what is considered acceptable racialized gendered performance” (6), Williams thoroughly excavates how sexual racism has come to dominate web-based dating platforms, how it situates whiteness as “the normative expression of sexuality, healthy desire, and acceptable gender role tropes” (28), and how it unambiguously impacts minoritarian users. Additionally, Williams provides intriguing discussions about dating platforms and social media, highlighting how the content users engage with can be used to filter users recommended to them on dating sites—a discussion that further highlights how sexual racism operates on these platforms and within the biases held by their users.
While the book is successful in its examination of sexual racism and its impact on marginalized people, there are several areas that could have benefited from further exploration, including Williams’s discussion of gender and gender performance. Though she marks gender as central to sexual racism, marking this form of racism as “a convergence of beliefs about acceptable performance of masculinity and femininity scripts at the intersection of gender and race” (74), her discussion of this performance mostly focuses on perception, rather than on performance itself—on how people’s gender is perceived by others, rather than on how gender is itself performed by individuals. While to some extent this is useful, demonstrating that individual gender performance is less important than users’ opinions about it, a discussion of how users perform gender could have amplified this discussion. Additionally, though Williams states early on that “how we view gender and race are both central to understanding sexual racism” (28), she spends considerably less time focusing on gender than she does on race: her discussion of gender in relation to race is mostly limited to Chapter 1, beyond which it appears mostly in a list of terms (e.g., “race, gender, attractiveness, and desirability”) or in women of color’s discussions of racial fetishization. That Williams includes interviews from several women and nonbinary folx does flesh out some of this gender discussion, but there is comparatively less emphasis on how gender impacts individual experiences of sexual racism, perhaps due to online dating systems’ own flattening of gender and gender dynamics.
Furthermore, there are a couple inconsistencies between Williams’s stated goal for the book and its actual contents. Despite Williams’s repeated assertion that her ultimate goal is “to amplify the voices of marginalized users and help readers to become more informed about their own biases” (177), the chapter wherein she interviews users of color (Chapter 4) is one of the shortest. While she does include sections of some interviews in some other chapters, it is still noteworthy that the majority of the book focuses less on the actual voices of marginalized people and more on how the platforms she discusses, and their societally biased algorithms, enhance their marginalization. Additionally, Williams notes in the Introduction that she interviewed “Indigenous/Native” users as part of her study (25), yet no such interviews appear in the text or in the appendix wherein she lists the demographics of interviewees. This inconsistency raises questions as to why Indigenous voices were excluded and why their exclusion is not referenced. And while Williams professes to amplify all marginalized users, she predominantly explores the impact of sexual racism on Black women, dedicating significant space in Chapters 4 and 5 to discussing their struggles specifically. While I appreciated this emphasis (as a Black woman myself), this focus is not directly addressed in the book aside from Williams’s assertion that she is employing a Black feminist lens, which she marks as “actively work[ing] to dismantle inequality for all people groups—not just Black feminists” (14). As such, Williams’s focus on Black women specifically could have been better foregrounded for readers who may have desired a more in-depth discussion of other marginalized groups, whose voices are notably less prominent.
Williams does excel in her use of scholarship, beautifully weaving Black feminist ideologies and science and technology studies in a manner that provides a unique lens on race, gender, digital technologies, and bias. Her incorporation of work by scholars such as Ruha Benjamin, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Yarden Katz successfully intervenes into scholarship about racism in/on online platforms: Her use of Katz’s argument that “the history of computing and the internet are deeply tied to eugenics and racialized science” (83) and her reading of Benjamin as articulating how “tech companies make decisions about their community guidelines and terms of use that support the expression of racism and sexual harassment” (140–41) particularly highlight how race and the digital are always already interconnected, a theme that pervades Not My Type. In the future, I would recommend that Williams engage with scholars such as Wendy Chun and Lisa Nakamura, both of whom have written extensively about race, performance, and bias in digital spaces, especially in works such as Programmed Visions (Chun 2011) and Cybertypes (Nakamura 2002).
Overall, Not My Type is an intriguing work that compellingly examines the importance of excavating the inherent Othering enabled by and proliferated through online dating platforms. The book’s Foreword, written by Noble, cogently describes the text as “an important work that looks at the granular, specific ways that online dating companies practice algorithmic (and human) sorting” and “helps us better understand the particulars that inform a broad set of digital technologies that are remaking human interaction” (xi). I am interested to see how future scholarship might further Williams’s work on racism in online platforms and the concept of sexual racism as an understudied form of racism, and hope that readers will be inspired to evaluate their own internal biases when it comes to sexual racism and the digital realm.
References
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT Press.
Nakamura, Lisa. 2002. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Routledge.
Author Bio
Golden M. Owens is an Assistant Professor in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching interests include representations of race and gender in American media and popular culture, artificial intelligence, and racialized sounds.