wonder what the sex is like in interracial relationships

"Hey, listen, did you ever do it with a nigger wench?"
"Sure."
"What was it like?"
"Like nurse shark."

--Ernest Hemingway,
To Have and Have Not *


I was reading a post at Racialicious today by Wendi Muse about interracial relationships, and it reminded me of a common white question that I've heard several times -- "What's the sex like?"

Wendi Muse's post is an insightful argument against double standards that get applied to such relationships. For one thing, those in interracial relationships get asked a lot of questions that those in intraracial relationships don't, even though the answers to those about the latter could be revealing.

At one point, Muse writes,

When the presence of an interracial relationship is noted, its very existence at times solicits a barrage of questions in the minds of onlookers, one firing after the other. The questions range from the simple, “how did they meet?” to the complex, “do they really love each other or are they just together because they wish to rebel against social norms?” to the intrusive, “how is the sex?” Some of these questions are customary when considering any relationship, yet with interracial relationships, there seems to be an exceptional increase in curiosity, one that certainly rivals that of monoracial pairings.

I agree, except that I think the curiosity about interracial relationships far exceeds that about monoracial pairings, especially about what the sex is like. This curiosity no doubt comes from both sides of any white/non-white relationship, but I suspect it usually has particular qualities or features when it comes from a white questioner. And again, I think "what the sex is like," or supposedly like, is often an especially intense curiosity.

I remember, for instance, sitting in a bar a few years ago with two white male friends, Craig and Jack.

Craig had just returned from working with the Peace Corps in . . . I was about to write "Africa," but in light of yesterday's post, I'm going to resist that lazy American tendency, and work my brain a few seconds longer to come up with the specific country. . . okay, I remember. He'd been working in Benin.

I asked Craig if he'd made any friends there, and he said that he had, both local people and other Peace Corps workers.

"Did you find a girlfriend?" I said, knowing that he was, like the other two of us, heterosexual.

"Uh, sort of," Craig answered. "But it didn't last."

"Was she African?" I said.

"Yes, she was."

I honestly can't remember if I wondered about what the sex was like, but I probably did. I probably wondered if he'd found it any different from sex with American white women.

I do remember what Jack said: "So, what was the sex like?"

Craig literally blushed. Then he looked into his beer mug and said, "Well. I don't really want to talk about that."

"Oh come on!" Jack exploded (I almost wrote "ejaculated"). "I mean, was there anything like, different about sex with her?"

Craig just looked away, and then he moved on to other stories about his two-year absence.

I think this American-white-guy curiosity about sex with non-white bodies is common, and I suspect it's a result of something that we learn as children. We learn not only that non-white people are supposedly different from us in fundamental ways, but also that they're more "bodily" than us. That they live in their bodies differently from how we do, and in many cases, somehow more than we do.

We're curious about sex, like all children, but our curiosity about sex and other, darker people is often somehow different.

Do you remember this one?

When I was a kid, I heard something bizarre from other boys about "Chinese" women. Maybe it came up when I was in the backyard with my best friend Brian, literally trying to "dig a hole all the way to China," as my father said we could do, if we just dug for long enough.

I was only six or seven at the time. At some point I was playing outside with Brian, and he said to me, "Do you know what's special about Chinese woman?"

I didn't want to admit that I didn't know, but since I was curious, I did.

"It's their vaginas," Brian said. "They have sideways vaginas."

I knew what a vagina was, but I'd never heard that before. But then I heard it several times afterward, enough that for awhile, I actually believed it. I never did figure out, though, how that made Chinese women special.

I think this white male curiosity about supposed, fundamental differences in non-white sexuality is common. If it is, then where does it come from?

It seems to me that a quick look at the history of race in America provides some explanation. We often like to say that the past is dead and gone, but I don't think it is.

Last week, we lost a great American activist and historian, Ronald Takaki. He's been widely praised as a pioneer of multiculturalism, but his writings have also taught me a lot about white Americans. In regards to sex and the body, for instance, Takaki explains in an early book, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America, that a combination of religious, economic, and cultural influences encouraged white American citizens (which especially meant white men) to think of an individual's body as something in need of control. In need of self-control.

To summarize (and oversimplify) Takaki's analysis of white American male conceptions of bodies, he basically explains that the new, self-consciously "American" citizen felt a need to restrain his body, and to emphasize instead his controlling, rational, and intellectual capacities. White women were conceived of as more bodily -- and as desirable in large part because of that supposed bodiliness -- and less rational and "of the head" (and thus less capable of producing any indepth thought worth hearing about, which was basically why they were considered incapable of the full responsibilities of citizenship, including voting).

In their civic-minded zeal to harness productive energy in various sorts of metaphorical "iron cages," white men also applied the same overemphasis on the body to non-white people, both male and female. Because "Indians," for instance, supposedly failed to properly harness or "cage" their bodies, white Americans considered them lascivious, and un-industrious. Because they supposedly did not restrain their baser instincts and channel their energy into such productive labors as proper land cultivation, and because so many refused to convert to the regulating, disciplining strictures of Christianity, well then, taking their land seemed more than justified -- it seemed like the white man's duty.

According to Takaki (and to subsequent scholars), similar concepts, which constituted white projections of both fears and desires about the body, were also imposed on imported black slaves, and then later, on Mexicans and imported laborers from China.

Remnants of this general white conception, of proper white constraint and "excessive" darker bodiliness, pop up all over more recent American life and culture -- from the 1950s Beatnik fondness for black jazz and Jack Kerouac's romantic fondness for laboring Mexican "fellahin," to today's "wiggers" and "rice kings" and "rice queens" (and there's probably a word now for white people who are sexually obsessed with Native Americans -- does anyone here know of such a term?).

So I think the common white curiosity about sex with someone from another race is more than just mere curiosity about sex with someone who's supposedly different (and I don't mean here that I'm arguing with Wendi Muse's post, which you really should read). The imagined differences of non-white ways of being in the body are often more specific; and yet at the same time, they're more general too, in that they're usually about the more bodily, sexual "nature" of many types of most non-white people in general.

Exceptions do of course exist, such as the de-sexualization in the white imagination of Asian men. In many other cases, though, I think the common white curiosity about interracial sex is fueled by a collective, stereotypical, historically built fantasy about people who supposedly live in their bodies "more" than white people do. And if that's still with us, then it can make us overly curious, and even strangely excited, about what really amounts to our own, dehumanizing fantasies about interracial sex.