The Friday Sex Blog [Sex, Domination, and Resistance]

Hola Everybody,
An unfortunate consequence of all the attention being given to Trump for his crude admission of sexual predatory behavior, is that it trivializes misogyny. His admission, which is the norm for “locker room” talk, should spark a national dialog on rape culture, looking at it as a systemic societal issue rather than to simply call out one man.

We’re all implicated in Trump’s pathetic attempt to grab some poosie.

Sex and The Other

Today’s cover photo, fetishism in its purest form, was taken by photographer Jean-Paul Goude. Known for his fascination with “ethnic minorities” and “black girls” -- “I had jungle fever,” he once admitted in an interview -- The photograph is a not so subtle reincarnation of imagery of Saartjie Baartman that is steeped in centuries of racism, oppression, and misogyny. Goude is famous for his photos of his girlfriend Grace Jones. On the cover of the book Jungle Fever, Goude poses Jones in a cage next to raw meat.

I bring this up because when you mix racism, capitalism, and sex, you start wading into complicated waters. I hope to tease some of this out in a very brief, thoroughly inadequate blog post. LOL

The term miscegenation was first used in the 1860’s when American journalists invented the word in order to discredit the Abolitionist Movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of white-black intermarriage (tangentially, there are interesting parallels between miscegenation and the current gay marriage “debate”). In any case, miscegenation refers to sex or marriage between two people of different races.

Let me start right off by stating that I am of Puerto Rican descent, a people that has one of the highest rates of interracial marriage. The funny thing is that Puerto Ricans don’t see it as “interracial.” There’s no “white” Puerto Rican as opposed to a “black” Puerto Rican. We are Puerto Ricans first. In fact, we don’t even adhere to a black/ white dichotomy. This is not to imply that racism does not exist among Puerto Ricans, it does. However, how we view and construct race is drastically different from the way gringos conceptualize it. But that’s a subject for the last part of my racism series...

This post was inspired by an online interaction I had with some neocon rube and he submitted that because he married someone who was “half black,” that meant he was incapable of being a racist. I don’t follow that at all. I mean, there are misogynists (men who hate women) who marry women -- does that make them all of a sudden enlightened men? In fact, there’s a long and ugly history of the fetishizing of the “other.” I consider myself a feminist and someone who works against racism, but that doesn’t mean that I’m exempt from my social conditioning. I’m sure if I look close enough, I can find prejudice and sexist bias. I think being open to that possibility is what serves as a liberatory force. Whenever I hear someone say, “I am not a racist,” or “I am not sexist,” I am reminded of the family values guys who are in actuality man-whores. 

According to a survey done in the 1970’s an average of one in five Americans have dated someone of a different race. Most interracial relationships are not based on difference, but in the same way other relationships are formed. However, those that deliberately and consistently select a partner of another race do so for reasons such as sexual novelty or the appeal of submissive women from other cultures. In the United States, there are white women to seek out black boyfriends as part of a larger pattern of breaking away from their parent’s values. This is especially true if the parents were controlling and/ or racially prejudiced. My personal observation is that this dynamic is widespread on the internet, where both girls and women can seek lovers from other races free from the prying eyes of their neighbors and families.

Conquerors have always used sex as both a weapon (i.e., rape) and an excuse to justify their barbaric practices. That inhabitants of the “New World” ran around practically naked served as a rationale to label them brutes and an abomination to the Christian ideal. They were not seen as human and were

subjected to some of the most barbaric acts in the history of humankind. This tendency reached its low point between the 16^th and 19^th centuries, as wave after wave of European colonial expansion was followed by violent, often genocidal, campaigns to convert the heathens and save them from their own ignorance.

White Americans have disapproved of most types of miscegenation since its colonization. Marriage or sex with Indians, Jews, Catholics, and Asians, for example, was discouraged. But it was sex with blacks that incited the greatest violence. Blacks, in contrast to slaves of other eras, were discriminated against solely because of the color of their skin. This was in part due to Christianity’s interpretation of Ham’s curse of his descendants being turned black and made to serve as slaves.

This misinterpretation, not surprisingly, “coincided” with the desperate need for new labor in the production of molasses (molasses being the first foundation of the economy in the New World). Later, the theory of evolution was perverted to condemn blacks to a lower developmental status. Despite these prejudices against blacks, white slave owners were very much sexually attracted to their black slaves. For hundreds of years, the legal system supported the rape, sexual harassment, and subjugation of black women, not only during slavery, but also after their emancipation. One of the laws passed during the 17^th and 18^th centuries by the English colonists pronounced mulatto offspring between slave and freeman to be slaves. In contrast, the Spanish colonies granted children of mixed unions their freedom. One author wrote, “If he [the white man] could not restrain his sexual nature, he could at least reject its fruits and thus solace himself that he had done no harm... by classifying the mulatto as a Negro he was in effect denying that intermixture had occurred at all.”Well, I’m being facetious, of course, but one area of study I would love to see is an exploration into how the centuries-long legal sanctioning of the rape of women of color has impacted the sexual psyche of the white men... 

The 19^th century saw a continuation of the practice of black lynching. However, now instead of accusing black men of fomenting rebellion, they were charged with rape. This charge was often leveled at consensual unions because it was believed a white woman would never freely succumb to a black man.

Frantz Fanon did a much better job than I ever could of exploring the connection between hate and the eroticization of the other, and I definitely don’t have the room or time to give it a proper treatment here, but I’ll give it a try. Western colonizers were often attracted to the people and practices they claimed to despise. Late 19^th century Anglican missionaries in Papua, New Guinea, for example, complained

incessantly about the low morals of the “natives.” but the Papuans themselves maintained that the worst morals were found in mission houses. In Africa, it was not unusual for men who preached chastity to father children by native women. One such reverend had so many daughters that in 1874 he turned his mission into a brothel in which to prostitute them.

Another example of the sexualizing of the other was the aforementioned Saartjie Baartman, the famous Hottentot Venus, who was admired in Europe for her beauty. The Nama or Khoihoi (Hottentots) of southern Africa typically have a lot of fat on the buttocks. Europeans were enthralled with the Hottentot Venus’ ass (shades of J-Lo). If you ever get the chance read up on her story. The Hottentot Venus was celebrated -- fetishized, actually -- during her life. When she died, her body was dissected in an attempt to “scientifically” document her “otherness.”

Ultimately, colonialism was in reality sexual in nature. The New World and its inhabitants, as illustrated by the art

of the time, was depicted as a woman, naked and vulnerable, before the conqueror. The metaphor emphasizes how new lands were seen as virgin territory to be plundered by male explorers from “civilized” Europe.

Well, that is all for now. I think I need to come back to this and make it more substantive. But right now I need to go to an interview.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…