What Color is Your Orgasm? Sex-Positive Advice in Black and White
The reality is—as it has been played out in other controversies around race and publishing, especially in feminist blogosphere lately—the overwhelming number of these sexperts are white. Taormino—who has collaborated with authors of color for her erotica anthologies—has her own film production company whose DVDs are a staple in women-friendly , women-owned sex shops. Savage is a regular correspondent on Real Time with Bill Maher. Zane—whose bluntly graphic writing style matches Savage and Taormino–established herself as an erotic fiction writer about a decade before releasing Dear G-Spot. According to the Wikipedia entry about her, a casting call went out in 2007 for a series based on her writings, but there’s no premiere date.
So, that reality brings up the interrelated issues of voice and authority and the sexual underpinnings of racism in this society: who is considered an expert and why, who awarded the microphone and the camera’s gaze and why, who listens and why, and which race is considered the yardstick and the bottom-line of sexual attractiveness and normalcy and why.
And I’m not the only person thinking this way.
One of the things that really irks me about sex-bloggers is that they really aren’t dealing with race enough. It’s pretty much a bunch of white people, or minorities who don’t talk about being minorities…I’d forgotten the world wasn’t a bunch of white people fucking!
~~C.S. Lewiston, commenting on Susie Bright’s blog, October 4, 2007
I also thought this answer, though true, wasn’t fully fleshed out. I mean, it’s not all about white folks’ racism and white-skin advantage. As Latoya posted while back, women of color in the US have had a long and undocumented history of activism in the reproductive justice movement. As quoted from Kimala Price:
Drawing from human rights and social justice principles, women of color activists have re-defined “reproductive rights” into what they now call “reproductive justice.” Reproductive justice is not just about the individualistic right to have an abortion (i.e., the right not to have children) but to include the right to have children and to raise them in healthy and stable families. Accordingly, these activists have broadened reproductive rights and freedom beyond abortion rights, the rights to privacy and “choice” which are normally associated with the movement. In sum, reproductive justice encompasses many other issues such as economic justice, immigration rights, housing rights, and access to health care.
My reaction to that quote is “isn’t giving sex-positive advice part of that platform, too?” To me, giving non-judgmental, supportive counsel to newspaper-reading and ‘Net-surfing audiences of color (and, yeah, raunchy—for the sake of relating to people and giving information in a plain-spoken way) about, say, anal sex or sex toys is just as much about access to healthcare as being financially and physically able to get to a women’s clinic. That is a point of activism, too. (One sex activist , Dr. Carla Stokes, does exactly this. Check out her website and her Alternet interview.)
I posed my question about sex-positive sex advice to my staunchly Baptist, up-from-segregated-Mississippi, baby-boomer mom. I told her about writing this post, and we hashed out four major reasons why, at least, some African Americans in particular might shy away from the position—and I do mean “hash” because we went ‘round and ‘round about stereotypes about white women’s promiscuity, The Post-Bellum Black Community’s monolithic dignity, the Post-Desegregation Black Generations’ monolithic waywardness from that dignity. The reasons:
1) Historical sexual exploitation and its legacy, such as many white slavemasters and overseers raping enslaved African and African-American women. My mom recalled stories of white men in the Jim Crow South “who walked into the homes of Black men and had sex with whichever woman in the home he wanted, and the man could do nothing about it or else he would be killed.” These sexual situations bolstered and justified–and were justified by:
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