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Miss(ed) Representations, Part One: ‘I’m a Culture, Not a Costume’ Campaign

Andrea — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:01:55 +0000

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid

Longtime Racialicious readers know this time on the calendar has prompted the R to read someone (or several folks) about their racist costumes or some other Halloween-related foolishness. Well, this year, Ohio University’s Students Teaching about Racism in Society (STARS) put on posters what we’ve been putting into words for quite a while.

I think that, for the most part, the campaign deserves the accolades, coverage, and support it’s been getting around the web, from Angry Asian Man to the 17,575 (and counting!) responses on the STARS president’s Tumblr to The Root to Bitch to the former Racialicious owner Carmen Sognonvi .

Of course, we can argue, among other things, that phenotypes don’t equal culture and cultures aren’t static or even talk about the historical-religious appropriation of Halloween itself.

My only quibble with the campaign is that I may have chosen photos where the models conveyed different body language. Not that the models didn’t pose how they wanted, being a student-driven campaign. What I do think is quite a few photographers rarely get The Shot in one shot; in fact, several photographers submit several photos for clients/collaborative partners to choose from.

I would have chosen, say, the Latino looking down at the photo, the East Asian woman giving the “geisha” picture the side-eye. Or all of the models giving their respective photos the side-eye. Or all of them looking out at the viewer. Or all of them looking down. As is, the photo of the East Asian woman looking down may suggest non-confrontation (“meek Asian girl”)

juxtaposed with the men of color (the photo at the top of the post and this one)

and the Black woman

may inadvertently suggest stereotypes of anger and aggression (“angry Arab,” “Latino with a temper,” “aggressive Black woman”). Just a thought if and when STARS decides to tweak this incredible campaign.

But, again, that’s my only quibble. STARS did a wild-applause-and-rose-tossing job with this campaign.

Others, however, have taken this serious and timely message and parodied—if not downright attacked–it. (Color me unshocked by this, Racializens.) Now, some of the parodies made me chuckle, like this Avatar-based one

and the zombie one

mostly due to the ideas of the creatures being symbols for people of color.

The ones about white people, especially poor whites, produced mixed results mostly because the parodies don’t quite grasp that, yes, poor white people do have a mitigated privilege via their skin color and that white people of various class standings making fun of poor whites may be viewed as “inside joking,”

but white poverty is also thoroughly ridiculed and dismissed—and, therefore erased–in US society by that very same mitigated privilege.

Oh, and let’s not forget the sexism and the fatphobia in these parodies.

As we’ve witnessed in our posts about racism in costuming, people have rushed to defend their choice to dress up in racially offensive Halloween garb in some of the comment sections about the campaigns, with the usual mixture of the “I got my rights!”, “my best [insert race and/or ethnicity here] friend/partner/co-worker/neighbor didn’t find my costume offensive,” (bonus points if the person saying this is a person of color wears the stereotyping costume of a PoC culture), “y’all are being oversensitive/overemotional/hostile,” “you’re the racist for calling out my racism,” and other derailing techniques.

Some of the Derailing/Apologist/Other-Blaming hits and remixes?

From “Jerry Stein” at Autostraddle

OMG, get a life. This is pathetic. Would an Asian woman be OK to go as a Geisha on Halloween? If not why not? And if so are we now saying that only people of the exact origin or race can have fun dressed as a CHARACTER on Halloween? Stop being so sensitive. If America is to get passed all of this nonsense then it needs to get some perspective and start smiling again.
Watch any movie or TV show and you will see a racial stereotype. Are all stereotypes negative NO! Why is it that this campaign only sees that.
This country is dividing itself. Nobody wants to be American. Everyone is so narcissistic and self important it makes me sick to my stomach. Bring back people with humility and a sense of humor before we all end up selfish deluded idiots thinking the world owes them something.
Based on this all costumes which feature Cowboys, Irish Leprechauns, Michael Jackson, Lady GaGa, Bin Laden, OJ Simpson, Madonna, Jersey Shore cast members will all now be banned because they offend the Irish, African Americans, Italians and Muslims. Thats pretty much Halloween cancelled.
This country is becoming a laughing stock for the wrong reasons.

Mohamhead from GOOD

I am not white myself but I don’t see what’s wrong with people doing that kind on stuff on Halloween. I might even dress up as a white guy. Is that racist too? Or is it only racist if white people do it? Hypocrites.

didimydoe3, also at GOOD

I don’t mind stereotypical costumes of my race because I’m mature enough to know it’s a costume.
Sometimes it is offensive. Mine is. It’s the only reason I’m doing it. I’m going blackface.

Oh, I could go on and on and on with these kinds of comments–because these comments are out there ad nauseum–but you get the jist.

But see, here’s the thing, People Who Defend Racist Costumes: you all are proving STARS’—and Racialicious’—point…and quite well. You’re welcome.

As Bitch’s headline says, don’t mess up as you dress up, and have a Happy Halloween!

Image credits: Uproxx and Hard to Be Humble When You Stuntin on a Jumbotron

Quoted: Jeff Yang on David Sedaris’ Anti-Chinese Racism

Andrea — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:00:01 +0000

So look, David: Chinese people eat weird food. There is a saying that “Chinese will eat anything with its back to the sky,” and another that says “Chinese will eat anything with legs but a table and anything with wings but an airplane.” These are Chinese sayings, I might point out — a sign that Chinese aren’t exactly unaware that the “delicacies” that send prim Westerners to their fainting couches are a little off the beaten path.
But Chinese are far from the only culture that eats weird food, and fuck, given that you’re from North Carolina, have you looked at what American Southerners traditionally eat? No? Chitlins! Possum! Muskrat! Bull testicles! Oh wait, you’re from suburban Raleigh, so probably not, given that most of the more exotic dishes in Southern cuisine, like in many culinary traditions, was the offspring of necessity — invention midwived by destitution. If you’re hungry enough, rodents will start to look tasty, as will chicken claws, stray innards and balls. And once you’ve eaten them long enough, all these things evolve into nostalgic signifiers — especially after you’ve pulled yourself out of poverty. They go from things you have to eat all the time to things you choose to eat once in a while, to remind yourself you don’t have to eat them all the time.
And this is what’s truly ugly about your piece, David: For someone who’s spent a lot of your career puncturing middle-class aspiration and self-delusion, your essay is unpleasantly blind to the fact that all of China is just a few generations removed from dire, desperate want, and that many people, like the peasant family you had such a bad experience sharing a meal with, continue to subsist on an annual income that’s a tiny fraction of what a sophisticated awesome American literary superstar like you loses in his sofa. And in a country of 1.3 billion people, even having braised pig’s stomach to occasionally go with your daily rice is a fucking luxury.

–From David Sedaris Thinks Chinese People (and Food) Are Repulsive, Which Makes Me Sad, Because I Used to Like David Sedaris

Go After the Privilege, Not the Tits: Afterthoughts on Alexandra Wallace and White Female Privilege

Andrea — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:00:48 +0000

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid

As soon-to-be-former UCLA student Alexandra Wallace packs her stuff and leaves the university due to fear for her life, I’ve watched how some people and the press reacted to her. As Colorlines and other blogs noted, combating her anti-Asian racism with life-threatening misogyny really wasn’t the best social-justice idea:

Nor combatting racial stereotypes with…racialized sexual stereotypes:

and

Or even having a “yeah, you’re racist, but I’d still fuck ya” vibe, a la the guitar-strumming crooner, in an otherwise witty comeback song:

As blogger and GRITtv ‘s senior writer/web manager Sarah Jaffe said, the move of some Asian American men who “stereotypically not seen as sex objects, putting the white woman in her proper place AS sex object or, ‘Shut up bitch, you’re just there to be fucked’ in essence…”–which the Black woman expounds on in her clip–is just a kyriarchal pile-on.

I do believe is Wallace could have been criticized in terms of one of the most taboo—yet most needed—conversations: white female privilege.

Of course, when this phrase is put into the public square of ideas, quite a few white women, both feminist and non, will storm in with their vociferous exceptionalizing to this privilege—more specifically, how their individual selves are the exceptions to this because of mitigating identities and circumstances: they aren’t able-bodied; they don’t fit the blonde-and-blue phenotype; they aren’t slender and/or or buxom; they are poor or come from poverty; they are not educated and/or hipsters; they are in interracial relationships; so on and so forth. Usually, the exceptionalizing derails the conversation into silence. But for a person without that privilege, especially if the privilege is based on that person’s degradation or erasure, the mitigated advantage is still an advantage. The mitigation(s) shape(s) the privilege as that of gradation, not kind.

But, as Audre Lorde said, silence doesn’t protect … in this case, the privilege getting read.

So, if I had to unpack the White Female Privilege, it would look something like this (and I’m citing and paraphrasing heavily from Alienation, Peggy McIntosh, Mary Dee Wenniger, Nsenga Burton, and ballgame, and this list isn’t exhaustive):

Can benefit from their association with white men as a wife, daughter, sibling, and mother.
Have all their faults and flaws into perfect imperfections.
Easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring women like them.
Can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer any communications without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of their race.
When told about our national language or about “civilization,” they are shown the people of their color made it what it was.
Can turn on the television, open a newspaper, or go online and see people of their race widely represented.
Can remain oblivious of the language and of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in their culture any penalty.
Are feel free to exhibit a wide range of emotions, from tears to genuine belly laughter, without being told to shut up.
Can use the “sheer fear of tears” to their advantage. (Sarah Jaffe calls this “White Lady Tears.”)
Are not compelled by the rules of their gender to wear emotional armor in interactions with most people.
Are allowed to be vulnerable, playful, and “soft” without calling their worthiness as a member of their race being called into question.
Are seen as the embodiments of value and purity and, due to their phenotypes (especially if it’s close(r) to the blonde-and-blue-eyed ideal), be considered worthy of protection—including having nations go to war over this purity and piety–and instantly become the objects of universal desire.
They are seen as the default and the ideal embodiment of physical beauty and sexual attractiveness. This idea(l) is replicated, despite the efforts of visual diversity, in all form of media, from paintings to plays to porn.

But don’t just take my word for it. As a couple of people pointed out on Tumblr a while ago:

we here on tumblr have found every single way imaginable to admire white girls. soft white girls, fat white girls, dreadlocked white girls, naked white girls, bicycling white girls, hairy white girls, clean white girls, white girls in shower, white girls catching butterflies, white girls cooking, white girls cooking naked, white girls with babies, white girls with kittehs, white girls with tats, white girls in catholic school girl dresses, white girls with hippy clothes….what fucking other ways in heavens green earth and jesus can we find to admire white girls?
… and yet i still see a whole lot of “admire my hotness” white girl shit. and a whole lot of it involves white girls appropriating ish and acting innocent while doing it.

Or, in Wallace’s case, post a virulently anti-Asian rant (complete with her “innocent” claims of having hometraining and how her rant isn’t about her “Asian friends”) on YouTube then fauxpologize with some nonsense about “not knowing what possessed her to do it.” To that, I’ll say here what I said in a comment section regarding this: “At some point, even the Devil would roll up and say, ‘That one’s on you, homie.’”

And what’s on her is her unchallenged white female privilege. To me, Wallace’s tirade pivots on Jaffe calls the Sarah Palin Thing, “where you can say more outrageous shit because you’re a pretty white lady.” Wallace visually presents as the physical and sexual ideal of the “all-American” blonde white girl-next-door doing something so not-PC, the “pretty white lady” who thinks she can get away with this verbalized racism—which Wallace attempts to get across as some sort of racial “truth-telling”–because it would be more “palatable.” I also wonder if she thought—since she seems to deeply believe in some anti-Asian stereotypes, like they function in “hordes” bent on “taking over” her beloved UCLA with their familial “ways”—that Asian Americans wouldn’t push back because of the stereotype of their being “quiet.” (She found out quite differently.)

Combine all this with, at the time, what Wallace may have perceived as having a platform for more of her racist views due to her newfound “internet fame” with her first clip and the revealed bikini photos—her father admitted on his Facebook page that she was creating a vlog of similar rants–probably reinforced something Arturo observed about the photos: “After all, there’s a certain sector who’s perfectly willing to forgive/accept her views because she’s ‘hot.’” Again, Wallace found out quite differently, with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block speaking against it in a video as well as in an email along with other people responding to it with sometimes life-threatening viciousness.

At this point, though, this particular saga seems over: even though UCLA stated Wallace was within her free-speech rights as a student, she is gone. But that doesn’t mean that white female privilege left with her.

Image courtesy of You Offend Me, You Offend My Family

Quoted: Hisaye Yamamoto, Short-Story Author, Dies

Andrea — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:00:58 +0000

From LA Times:

Often compared to such short-story masters as Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O’Connor and Grace Paley, Yamamoto concentrated her imagination on the issei and nisei, the first- and second-generation Japanese Americans who were targets of the public hysteria unleashed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Yamamoto was 20 when the attack sent the United States into war and her family into a Poston, Ariz., internment camp. Her most celebrated stories, such as “Seventeen Syllables” and “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” reflect the preoccupations and tensions of the Japanese immigrants and offspring who survived that era. Among her most powerful characters are women who struggle to nurture their romantic or creative selves despite the constraints of gender, racism and tradition.
….
Yamamoto was born in Redondo Beach on Aug. 23, 1921. The daughter of immigrant strawberry farmers from Kumamoto, Japan, she was a voracious reader and published her first story when she was 14. At Compton College, where she earned an associate of arts degree, she studied French, Spanish, German and Latin. She wrote stories for Japanese American newspapers using the pseudonym “Napoleon.”
During World War II, she wrote for the Poston camp newspaper, which published her serialized mystery “Death Rides the Rail to Poston.” She briefly left the camp to work in Springfield, Mass., but returned when her 19-year-old brother died while fighting with the U.S. Army‘s 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Italy.
After the war ended in 1945, she returned to Los Angeles and became a reporter and columnist for the Los Angeles Tribune, an African American weekly. Her experiences there deepened her awareness of racism to a point of nearly unbearable anguish. She wrote a story about the intimidation of a black family named Short by white neighbors in segregated Fontana. She attempted to hew to journalistic standards of impartiality, cautiously describing the threats against the family as “alleged” or “claims.”
After her story ran, the Shorts were killed in an apparent arson fire. Yamamoto castigated herself for failing to convey the urgency of their situation.
“I should have been an evangelist at Seventh and Broadway, shouting out the name of the Short family and their predicament in Fontana,” she wrote decades later in a 1985 essay called “A Fire in Fontana.” Instead, she pronounced her effort to communicate as pathetic as “the bit of saliva which occasionally trickled” from the corner of a feeble man’s mouth.
She left the newspaper and rode trains and buses across the country. “Something was unsettling my innards,” she wrote of her dawning multiethnic consciousness. “I continued to look like the Nisei I was, with my height remaining at slightly over four feet ten, my hair straight, my vision myopic. Yet I know that this event transpired within me; sometimes I see it as my inward self being burnt black in a certain fire.”
She drew from this well in the burst of writing that followed. Her breakthrough came with the 1948 publication in Partisan Review of “The High-Heeled Shoes, a Memoir,” a shockingly contemporary story about sexual harassment. She weaved intercultural conflicts and bonds into “Seventeen Syllables” (1949), in which a nisei girl’s blooming romance with a Mexican American classmate offers an achingly innocent counterpoint to her issei mother’s arranged marriage. “Wilshire Bus” (1950) explores a Japanese American woman’s silence during a white man’s racist harangue against a Chinese couple on the bus they are riding.

Image credit: goodreads.com

Princely Tails

Andrea — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:00:52 +0000

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid

(WARNING: Totally NSFW)

Reader Grace nearly caused a pearl-clutching moment amongst us Special Correspondents with a link to these, ahem, enhanced drawings:

I look at these images as I do hentai and plushies: some people getting off on the frisson of (hyper)sexualized ideals of taboo images and items connoted to belong to the kiddie world, like Disney cartoons and stuffed animals. So, I do understand the squick with seeing these resemblances of lust-inspiring Calvin Klein and Armani underwear images because it’s like fucking with someone’s childhood. And childhood, regardless of quite a few people’s realities about their early years on this earth, is held as sacrosanct in its idyllic innocence—especially sexual innocence– in US culture.

Quite a few of these images are sort of the contemporary versions of some cisgay male drawings of idealized dudes that served as counterimages of the “sickly” man with HIV/AIDS that gained traction in the 90s–that’s also why going to the gym was a big thing within some cisgay male communities back then and that aesthetics spilled in the wider popular culture–as well as the hypermasculinity that Disney’s been kicking out anyway.

Where my anti-racism sex itch gets going is demarcating the Black characters as “some dark chocolate” when none of the others are:

Dr. Atlantis’ “overbulge” (working that whole “Black men have bigger dicks than everyone else” meme),

the “underdeveloped” Kuczo,

Kocoum’s kitschy “noble savage” pose (all that was left out was a coyote, an eagle, a dreamcatcher, or a bear faded in the background),

John’s appropriated gear and markings,

and Shang’s “martial arts” stance.

So, for even growing these guys up, the artists didn’t really grow away of Disney’s racialized images.

When Racefail Meets Playboy: The John Mayer Interview

Andrea — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:45:37 +0000

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid

My gut-honest reaction to finding out singer John Mayer admits that he doesn’t romantically or sexually like Black women is like finding out Tom Cruise saying doesn’t dig us sistahs: I’m not shocked because I didn’t get that vibe from him.

Mayer’s highlighted history of dating the crowning White women of Hollywood, like yeah-folks-think-she’s-doornail-dumb-but-00000-her-blonde-hair-and-big-tits Jessica Simpson and always-wronged-Golden-Girl-by-Golden-Boy-Brad-Pitt-on-the-sexual-strength-of-coded-as-“colored”-superfreak-temptress-Angelina-Jolie Jennifer Aniston—along with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Friday Night Lights’ Minka Kelly, and gets-coded-as-White Cameron Diaz–just tipped me to his preference. And, no matter what I feel about/think about/hold a moral stance on racial preferences in dating, the unpleasantly hard reality is people seem to have them. Mayer, being human, really isn’t that different. That’s not a justification, mind y’all; that’s just my facing the facts about folks. I mean, I get it. I may not agree with it—I’m definitely more of the rainbow-dating-and-fucking kind–but I get it.

But did Mayer have go into full racefail about his preferences—and in Playboy no less? (Warning: this and the very next link are NSFW.)

Hold that thought.

Mr. Wonderland goes into all sorts of fail in this interview. And, being human in an ism-filled world—which, as quite a few of us know here at Racialicious, no one is exempt from them due to the kind of music they like or like to play, with whom they collaborate, at whose funeral they performed, or which school they attended–Mayer has them….and decides to vent to them. As an ex-friend once said, -isms and -phobias tend to come in bundles.

There’s the ageism, in that “too old to get it” sense:

MAYER: If Jennifer Aniston knows how to use BitTorrent I’ll eat my fucking shoe. One of the most significant differences between us was that I was tweeting. There was a rumor that I had been dumped because I was tweeting too much. That wasn’t it, but that was a big difference. The brunt of her success came before TMZ and Twitter. I think she’s still hoping it goes back to 1998. She saw my involvement in technology as courting distraction. And I always said, “These are the new rules.”

The slut-shaming:

MAYER: I feel like women are getting their comeuppance against men now. I hear about man-whores more than I hear about whores. When women are whorish, they’re owning their sexuality. When men are whorish, they’re disgusting beasts. I think they’re paying us back for a double standard that’s lasted for a hundred years.

And misandry:

MAYER: Because I want to show her I’m not like every other guy. Because I hate other men. When I’m fucking you, I’m trying to fuck every man who’s ever fucked you, but in his ass, so you’ll say “No one’s ever done that to me in bed.”

Followed by some full-on homophobia:

MAYER: The only man I’ve kissed is Perez Hilton. It was New Year’s Eve and I decided to go out and destroy myself. I was dating Jessica at the time, and I remember seeing Perez Hilton flitting about this club and acting as though he had just invented homosexuality. All of a sudden I thought, I can outgay this guy right now. I grabbed him and gave him the dirtiest, tongue-iest kiss I have ever put on anybody—almost as if I hated fags. I don’t think my mouth was even touching when I was tongue kissing him, that’s how disgusting this kiss was. I’m a little ashamed. I think it lasted about half a minute. I really think it went on too long.

Circling back to the racefail, there’s some offhanded anti-Semitism:

MAYER: I’m half Jewish. People say, “Well, which side of your family is Jewish?” I say, “My dad’s.” And they always say it doesn’t count. But I will say I keep my pool at 92 degrees, so you do the math. [Emphasis mine.] I find myself relating to Judaism. One of my best friends is Jewish beyond all Jews—I went to my first Passover seder at his house—and I train in Krav Maga with a lot of Israelis.

With a side of “how-do-these-two-things-even-go-together?” East Asian stereotypes:

I want to get on an airplane and be like a ninja.

Some gawd-awful inverted-shoutout to us Negroes:

MAYER: …I am a very…I’m just very. V-E-R-Y. And if you can’t handle very, then I’m a douche bag. But I think the world needs a little very. That’s why black people love me. [Emphasis mine]
PLAYBOY: Because you’re very?
MAYER: Someone asked me the other day, “What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?” And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood pass if you really have a hood pass? But I said, “I can’t really have a hood pass. I’ve never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, ‘We’re full.’”
PLAYBOY: It is true; a lot of rappers love you. You recorded with Common and Kanye West, played live with Jay-Z.
MAYER: What is being black? It’s making the most of your life, not taking a single moment for granted. Taking something that’s seen as a struggle and making it work for you, or you’ll die inside. Not to say that my struggle is like the collective struggle of black America. But maybe my struggle is similar to one black dude’s.

And then there’s the now-infamous money-shot exchange, which got the blogosphere and the Twitterverse into roiling upset all day yesterday:

PLAYBOY: Do black women throw themselves at you?
MAYER: I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.
PLAYBOY: Let’s put some names out there. Let’s get specific.
MAYER: I always thought Holly Robinson Peete was gorgeous. Every white dude loved Hilary from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And Kerry Washington. She’s superhot, and she’s also white-girl crazy. Kerry Washington would break your heart like a white girl. Just all of a sudden she’d be like, “Yeah, I sucked his dick. Whatever.” And you’d be like, “What? We weren’t talking about that.” That’s what “Heartbreak Warfare” is all about, when a girl uses jealousy as a tactic.

By the end of the interview, my mouth was agape, and my brain couldn’t even start to unpack it all—and I promised our editor Latoya Peterson to keep this post (relatively) short. So, my deputy-editor-in-giggles-and-struggle, Thea Lim, will soon write a post here about Mayer’s, ahem, self-entitled “pass.”

However, I can’t let Mayer’s money-shot statements pass without comment.

When I heard about it on Twitter, I heard a million Room for Squares CDs shattering against walls and a couple millions downloads of “Wonderland” getting deleted. As my tweetvo pal @llpen and I commented:

@llapen: the amount of discussion abt [John Mayer] betrays the levels of unwarranted endearment [(Black)] women have bestowed on him.
@CruelSecretary: @llapen True….but you know how it goes with celebrity and attraction. Some Black women thought….they just thought, ya know?

I can easily see–and relate to–Black women, cis and trans, who envision themselves as the “you” Mayer wanted to make love with on “a deep sea of blankets,” considering that he really doesn’t give any explicit racial signifiers stating otherwise. (And for those who want to argue about “porcelain” and “falling hair” as not talking about Black women–just don’t. Porcelain can come in a variety of colors–including black–and Black hair can fall down, depending on the style, texture, and length.) Mayer, though he feels he’s being honest with his interviewer about the probability of not dating Black women, just shattered the fantasies of those Black female fans who dreamed of exactly that…and the (hopefully) attendant sex.

To that, @llapen responded:

@CruelSecretary hahahaha. yeah, I bet they thought lots of ish, the way they rocked “Wonderland”. Reality is a bitch.

The bitch of it is Mayer’s comment is–yet again–another pop-culture “confirmation” that Black women are undateable, which translates to utterly undesireable and unfuckable. He made that abundantly crystal with his “Benetton heart/David Duke dick” comment. His disingenuous rejoinder of stating the Black women in Hollywood he wanted to get with–and then broke out with some wack-ass stereotypes of Black and White women and our dating styles just underscores his racially essentialized hot-mess-with-flies ideas about Black women. And Mayer says all of this in a publication that is still considered a brand name in assigning cis women’s fuckability factor and, even for its (spotty) efforts at visually racial diversity, serves as one of the main echo chambers of melding and perpetuating the meme of White cis women’s idealized beauty and fuckability.

Honestly, I (and several folks I know on- and offline) hope Kerry Washington gives Mayer the what-for at a red-carpet event—preferably on the carpet itself– for coming out of his neck like that, fantasy or not.

And let me know if Robin Thicke or Jon B turns away from the sistahs.

Photo Credit: WZPT

Bound Japanese Women: Violence or Sexual Liberation?

Thea Lim — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:00:54 +0000

By Deputy Editor Thea Lim

Last night while I was browsing the Sociological Images website, I saw this:

Sociological Images explains that the ad is for Swiss company Max Shoes, to advertises its sturdy laces. The ad made me immediately think of these cell phone charms that my bf’s friend brought back from Japan:

Called Oshibari Girls (does anyone know what “oshibari” means?), the cell phone charms come in six different styles, including school girl, office lady and police officer.

The sight of a bound East Asian woman hanging from a cell phone upset me deeply, but I didn’t know how to articulate that to my bf’s friend in a way he would understand, especially not over Saturday drinks on a summer night.

But the commenters on Sociological Images’ shoe post had an interesting take on the tied-up Japanese woman thing:

Some people enjoy bondage, and she has a stereotypical but realistic come-hither look on her face. The Kimono is a bit much, but I don’t find this violent at all.

it IS sexualized, but the reason the woman is represented as Japanese is because I think it’s supposed to be Kinbaku, a type of bondage done with light ropes. Of course, that still doesn’t explain why the woman is in a kimono.

Even the copy on InventorSpot where I found the Oshibari Girls online (evidently neither an anti-racist nor feminist site) had this to say:

At least [the Oshibari Girls'] little round faces aren’t twisted in terror – on the contrary, with eyes closed and lips pursed they almost seem to be thinking “So you’ve got me where you want me… whatever will you do??”

I came away from my internet research puzzled. It is true that both the Oshibari Girls and the Max Shoes model look to be enjoying themselves. Truth be told I was so disturbed by the Oshibari Girl my friend brought back that I didn’t notice the look on her face. In both cases, I simply saw a woman tied up to sexually titillate men- it didn’t occur to me consent could be involved. So maybe I was being thoughtless and sexually backward by totally overlooking the possibility of happy, healthy sex play between consenting adults.

What was the intention behind the creation of these images, and what are we meant to see in them? Within our own North American culture, where knowledge of both BDSM and Kinbaku is limited – and Asiaphilia and sexualised violence against East Asian women are distressing trends – how do people view and understand these images?

Maybe this is a lesson in the vast differences in racial and sexual context from culture to culture, and how much those differences can completely reconfigure meaning.

Potentially the Oshibari Girls are meant to gain credence for Kinbaku/BDSM – forms of sexual relationship that are more often than not ridiculed and abhorred in mainstream culture. The Oshibari Girls are “girly” enough to make the argument that they are actually manufactured for sale to women, not men. God knows a lot of women in North America would like to see submissives celebrated and accepted. See the blog Pro-SM Feminist Spaces, which is one of many voices on the internet confronting the prejudice that BDSMers face, well, everywhere.

This is just conjecture, I actually have no idea who wears Oshibari Girls. The only context I’ve seen them in was as a gift from one straight man to another.

But. When you take the Oshibari Girls and translate them into a shoe ad for men in a Western country, the image totally changes. Because at the end of the day, I am only comfortable with the iconography of bound women of colour when it is for the consumption of women of colour.

And it’s evidently clear that the Max Shoes ad is not for East Asian women, but for someone else.