THAT OLD INTERRACIAL DESIRE CHESTNUT
White male seeking sexy Asian women | Salon Books
Ronnie sent this over to me this morning asking for the ol' Poplicks opinion.
Salon.com's Laura Miller reviews a new book by Richard Bernstein, The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters, and highlights the myriad shortcomings in Bernstein's attempt to defend the historical tradition of White Western men lusting after Eastern/Asian women. To be honest, I don't have much to add onto what Miller does here - her critique is incisive and thorough though, it must be said, based on what Miller quotes, Bernstein's book hardly seems to make a convincing argument about the benefits of this arrangement for both sides of the racial line. One imagines that Bernstein is one of those that insist Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings were in love despite the inconvenience that he was her slavemaster. However, given that I haven't read Bernstein's book, it's probably unfair to saddle him with such a weighty assumption (maybe not though).
As usual, it's the *comments* section that is far more fascinating - and maddening. God forbid one should ever raise some important questions about equality or power in relation to sexual desire - you'll find a thicket of apologists sprout up instantly. There's quite a few "I have a thing for Asian women and I'm loving it!"-types (boring self-aggrandizement) and an unfathomable number of people trying to deploy a biological diversity argument, i.e. "we're 'naturally' attracted to people different from us" which I find especially disingenuous since one only need point out the rather low number of White male/Black female couplings to suggest this "biological imperative" argument holds no water in the face of social realities. The sexual entanglements of West/East are inextricably linked to history. And economics. And war. Et. al.
Perhaps in an *ideal* society, one free of such nuisances as racism and colonialism, ethnic difference could be a more innocent part of romantic/sexual attraction, but unless one is being willfully ignorant of history (and Salon's commenters seem to have this particular affliction), you can't claim that sex and desire exists in such a world.
I'm not - at all - claiming that cross-racial love/sex/desire always enacts unequal relations of power. However, you can't possibly remove that context either, which is the problem Miller has with Bernstein (who seems to brush such concerns under his (Oriental?) rug) and the problem I have with the apologia in the comments section. After all, aren't entire realms of sexual fantasy predicated on variations of inequality, whether you're talking about dominance/submission role play or even something more basic, such as the dynamic of selfishness vs. selflessness during lovemaking? So long as such inequalities are consented to and fulfilling for all partners, I don't have a problem with it but to refuse to acknowledge that inequality is part of what's being eroticized is dishonest as best and imperial at worst.
One last thing: as 1) Asia rises in geopolitical and transnational economic prominence during this century (thanks, in no small part, to America's ballooning debt) and 2) contemporary feminism takes root and expands in Asian societies, I wonder how this all might impact sexual relations both in Asia and between Asians (women and men alike) and non-Asians.
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