A white guy on Sniffies asked me to pretend I had “escaped from prison.” WTAF?!

Hi Jake,

I had an experience on Sniffies the other night that still has me shook. I met up with this white guy whose profile said he was into “role play.” I didn’t really know exactly what that meant, but I’m pretty open-minded, so I figured I’d give it a go.

In hindsight, I definitely should’ve asked! The first thing he did when I showed up was comment on my race. He told me I was a “really strapping Black man,” which immediately made me feel uncomfortable, but I was already there so I let it slide. (It wasn’t the first time I had ever heard this unfortunately.)

Then he told me he wanted me to pretend that I had just escaped… from prison?! I thought he was joking, but he insisted I act out being an escaped convict on the run who had stumbled to his house looking for a place to hide and would do whatever he asked in return. When I looked back at him in disbelief, he was like, “What? It’s just a fantasy.”

How about we take this to the next level?

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This really did NOT sit well with me. I’ve spent my whole life dealing with negative stereotypes that paint Black men as thugs, criminals, or low-lifes. It felt like he was seeing me in that same light and I hated it.

Long story short, I excused myself and left. Now part of me wonders whether I was reading too much into it all. Did I overreact? Was there some other way I should have handled this?

Wrongfully Convicted

Dear Wrongfully Convicted,

Um, no, you did not overreact.

I think you handled this exactly the way people should handle sexual situations that suddenly stop feeling sexy: You listened to yourself.

One of the strangest things about dating and hookup culture is that we often feel pressure to justify our discomfort as if we’re presenting evidence in court. We start asking ourselves questions like: Was he really being racist? Was he fetishizing me? Did he mean it that way? Sometimes those questions matter. But they aren’t always the most important questions.

The more important question is whether you wanted to participate. You didn’t. That’s enough.

Could this guy have viewed the whole thing as an innocent fantasy? Sure. Human sexuality is weird. People fantasize about all kinds of things that have little to do with what they consciously believe in everyday life.

But here’s where I think he made a mistake. The moment he invited another person into that fantasy, it stopped being just about him.

Whether he intended to or not, he asked a Black man to participate in a fantasy that drew on stereotypes carrying a whole lot of baggage. Once another human being is involved, their experience matters too. You don’t get to tell someone that a fantasy is harmless after they’ve already conveyed that it isn’t.

And let’s be honest: the prison fantasy wasn’t the first thing you heard. Before that, he was already commenting on you being a “really strapping Black man.” Then came the escaped-convict storyline. It’s not hard to see why those two things felt connected.

We’ll never know exactly what was going through his head. But I don’t think that’s the real issue. The real issue is that the entire encounter left you feeling more like a character than a person.

You showed up looking for a connection, however casual. Instead, you felt like you’d accidentally walked into somebody else’s bizarre casting call, a role that had way less to do with who you are and more to do with what he wanted you to represent. That’s not a great foundation for intimacy, even the casual kind.

I also want to point out that leaving doesn’t automatically mean you’re condemning someone as a bad person. Sometimes it simply means you’ve discovered that the two of you have very different ideas about what’s sexy, playful, or acceptable. You’re allowed to decide that a particular fantasy isn’t for you without needing to prove that the other person had malicious intentions.

And for what it’s worth, I think you handled this situation with a lot of grace. You could have shamed him, started an argument, or demanded an explanation, but you didn’t. You simply decided that this wasn’t a situation you wanted to be part of. That’s called having self-respect.

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