I was fetishised, and I liked it. Until I didn’t.

8 years ago, I walked into the London office of one of the world’s most prestigious law firms, eager to begin my career as a commercial lawyer. It had been a long, difficult road to get to this point and my attitude was exactly what one would expect of any budding professional; I was keen to impress, wonderfully naive and nervous.

I was nervous about many things, but somewhat surprisingly, I was not nervous about being a young black man from a working-class background, now having to operate in an overwhelmingly white upper-middleclass environment. By this point, I had learned several tricks for navigating this type of terrain; such as being excessively friendly and smiley would help make white people feel safe around me, or that projecting as much confidence as possible would steer white people towards the idea that I was there because I deserved to be, and not as a personal apology for racism. So, if you would have asked me back then if I had any worries rooted in race, I would have said no. I would have told you that I had ways and means of turning any resistance in that area into harmless background noise. See... wonderfully naive.

Racism wears many different faces, and although I had come across a few, I had never come across fetishisation. The thing about fetishisation is that it looks near identical to earnest attraction and at times it can be just as flattering. My initial response to my colleagues somehow equating me being a confident and chatty black man, to me also being someone who was very successful with women, was confusion and then flattery. Confusion because they knew nothing about my personal life, yet they were so sure that this was who I really was, and flattery because… well it’s not hard to see what’s flattering about being considered attractive.

My peer’s perception of me was likely fuelled by various stereotypes concerning black men, but I ignored this as I leaned in to my new role. I became even more chatty and confident at work. I tried my best to be particularly charming with my feminine colleagues, and I answered whatever “how to” questions concerning women that my male colleagues meekly asked me in more private moments. I ignored the warning that some of my friends at work – who were all black women – voiced, which was that this kind of attention was inherently bad and so would eventually turn on me, and of course it did.

The first turning point was when rumours about the different women that I was sleeping with began to circulate. For the sake of transparency, I had two relationships during my time at this prestigious firm. The rumours were about multiple different women, and none of them touched on the two women that I had actually dated. Whenever asked, I denied the rumours but my honesty did nothing to deter them. My reputation quickly changed from friendly ladies’ man to womanising rake.

The second turning point was when a personal friend – a lawyer from another firm – told me that a young man who I worked with had told several people at a party that I was a predator. What was my reaction to this? Shock, embarrassment and the kind of deep hurt that quickly turns in to anger.

At first, I wanted to calmly confront my colleague, but being wary of how racial stereotypes could affect how that was perceived, I decided to talk to HR. After a speedy HR investigation, it was revealed that this young man had called me a predator because his female friend had lied to him about having had to repeatedly reject my advances. She later claimed that I made no such advances and that her friend had just “misunderstood”, and with that HR was satisfied.

HR may have been satisfied, but I was not. I had found out from others that she had told multiple people this lie, many of whom had just presumed that it was true. At this point, there were multiple stories about my alleged appetite for women, and it made perfect sense to some that at the heart of that appetite was a fundamental misogyny.

At the time, I told myself that I felt angry, but really, I felt helpless. The harmful stereotype that lived at the heart of my fetishisation had crystalized itself as fact in the minds of at least some of my peers; I was the sex hungry black man that women should be weary of, perhaps in their eyes I always had been.

Now let me be clear, that has never been nor will it ever be how I see myself, and I quickly learned not to feel trapped by someone else’s idea of who I am. The take away should be that fetishisation is fundamentally harmful, because it’s about being attracted to society’s idea of a person, rather than the actual person, and when it comes to race that idea is rarely flattering.