There's a well known phenomenon among straight women (especially Caucasian and Latina women) and gay men who love black men, and as of yet there is no term to describe that social trend ("Jungle Fever" is more associated with black men that love white women). I have a theory why this is. If you give a name for something, it's an acknowledgment something is going on and exists.
One great contribution by the playwright David Henry Hwang to the language was the term "Yellow Fever" to describe white men that have a thing for Asian women. I remember I burst out laughing the first time I heard the term, because it was something I saw going on around me. For instance, when I first read the ultimate "airport" paperback, "Meg" by Steve Alten, the moment he described his heroine with the magic word "Asian" I knew just what was going to happen next!
I was always amused by Yellow Fever because it seems to happen with men that are unfamiliar with or have close contact with actual Asians. As astonishing as it seems to me at times, not everybody is from New York City. I remember once meeting a guy cousin of mine from Arizona that had a bad case of Yellow Fever, and it came up that I had a Vietnamese friend that had acne.
He was a little astonished. "I didn't know Asians had acne."
I couldn't stop laughing. "Of course they can get acne. They're not some kind of magical elf."
The website Stuff White People Like, in addition to painfully unfunny humor about Starbucks Coffee and the TV show "Friends," has a few gags about Asian women. You know, I can't stand that website. It's a funny thing about self-deprecating parody: it very quickly becomes a coy kind of self-admiration.
Likewise, I'm startled by how many of my gay friends have an extreme (dare I say it?) blackfantasy. I don't even pretend I have enough readers to possibly do something like make a contribution to the English language, but hey, who knows, I just put it out there! In fact, it seems shockingly all-but universal, but almost no one is talking about this phenomenon.
What I find interesting is that, despite the fascination for black men among white gay males, there seems to be a lot of conflict between the two groups. African-American culture, even more so than Latino culture, is notorious for homophobia. Likewise, there's a lot of conflict in New York City between middle and upper class homosexuals and blacks as a result of the "gentrification" of many traditionally black neighborhoods. Many black residents of these neighborhoods see the loss of their neighborhood's identity, and find themselves pushed out by higher housing prices.
Unexpectedly, female sex tourism is a big market, especially in places like the Caribbean, where you have institutions like the so-called "Rent-a-Rasta." Because female sex tourism is practiced by women on men, it shouldn't receive a free pass from criticism as a fundamentally exploitative relationship. It happens in any third-world or developing country there are beaches and lots and lots of underemployed men.
A good place to start for anyone interested in the phenomenon of female sex tourism is with the movie Heading South with Charlotte Rampling, about female sex tourism in Haiti in the 1970s. If you want a double-bill, follow this up with Wes Craven's best movie, The Serpent and the Rainbow, about Haiti in the 1980s, where apparently secret police officers were regularly moonlighting as zombie-creating voodoo priests.
Another good choice would be How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which did for the tourism industry of Jamaica what "Crocodile" Dundee did for Australia. Stella was almost the Disneyfied version of sex tourism.
Read this Reuters article, written about older white women tourists to Africa:
Some choice quotes:
They are on their first holiday to Kenya, a country they say is "just full of big young boys who like us older girls."
Many of the visitors are on the lookout for men like Joseph. Flashing a dazzling smile and built like an Olympic basketball star, the 22-year-old said he has slept with more than 100 white women, most of them 30 years his senior.
Incidentally, I hope everyone forgives me for the totally gratuitous images of the hunky Brazilian Orso Orfeo. But jeez, I'm a size queen, I can't help myself!
5 comments:
You've been pitching some good, thought provoking posts today! Gay white men who like Asians are called "Rice Queens", which made me laugh the first time I heard it.
The "Mandingo" effect is something Freud would have loved. Sexual dominance and submission, master and slave, plenty of subconscious gold in that mine.
Cheers, Michael
No way! I've heard "Rice Queen" before but I thought it was a joke-term, sort of like when the Onion created the anti-Scandinavian epithet "Fjord Nigger."
Incidentally, David Henry Hwang also wrote "The Lost Empire," a full-on parody of the Western views of Asian culture, which features Greg from Dharma and Greg getting it on with Bai Ling. I've been struggling to figure out if that miniseries was a joke or not.
"The Lost Empire" features the most comically hilarious line of all time, when an angry Confucius gives Greg his comeuppance. He says it with a Schwarzeneggerian dead-seriousness:
"Confucius says...it's payback time."
Based on my extensive research on female sex tourism, I've concluded that it is neither exploitive in most cases or revealing of a fantasy with black male sexuality. Many holiday flings are mutually beneficial; about 1 in 30 lead to long-term relationships; and many black American women also pursue relationships with foreign (Caribbean and African black men) and well as white men (in Italy, the former Yugoslavia).
I explore this in my book Romance on the Road: Traveling Women Who Love Foreign Men.
I'm of the opinion that all relationships are exploitative one way or another, holiday flings just put some of those elements out there where they are easily recognizable. : ). I've been told that's a cynical way of looking at things..
As for "rice queen", I heard of that way back in high school. Leave it for gay men to spice up the lexicon is new and outrageous ways.
Hey Doc -
I'll be sure to check out your book for some light end-of-summer reading, thanks for the recommendation.
While individual relationships may not be exploitative, the institution itself is fundamentally based on exploitation: women from wealthy first world countries going to places where there are lots of jobless men eager to please.
Fabian -
I wouldn't mistake the usual give-and-take and compromises that make up relationships for exploitation. Only unhealthy relationships, where one partner (usually the man, but not always) has a stronger personality than the other and the other person has to adjust themselves entirely for the OTHER person's desires and ambitions exclusively.
Shockingly enough, there are even some women that thrive in relationships like this, that enjoy sublimating their wants and needs to their man's. It's one of those situations that are more often created accidentally, as most people don't set out to crush another person's dreams, it just creeps in little by little and the longer the relationship goes the more one expands and the other contracts.
Alice Walker made an entire career writing about the extremes of relationships like this. I have no idea where she gets the utterly evil men in her novels.
Usually, things don't reach Color Purple levels, but as someone who has seen a lot of these very abusive relationships going on around me, I find this is one of those areas where pity very quickly becomes contempt, because in many ways, by remaining in this situation the woman is responsible for it continuing.
That said, maybe you're on to something. Part of the reason I've avoided relationships for the past two years is because of a terror of losing my self-sufficiency.
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