“How many white men can treat a woman like a lady and ravish her too?”
By Susan Crain Bakos
Black skin is thick and lush, sensuous to the touch, like satin and velvet made flesh. There's only one patch of skin on a white man's body that remotely compares to nearly every inch of a black man's skin. The first time I caressed black skin, it felt like a luxury I shouldn't be able to afford. I craved it more strongly than Carrie Bradshaw craved Manolo Blahnik shoes. That phrase, "Once you go black, you never go back" is all about the feeling of the skin.
And I had the socially acceptable explanation for my craving. I used that paucity-of-available-white-partners rationale to explain my relationships with black men for several years. A white woman past forty is often passed over by her white-male contemporaries. She goes younger or ethnic or foreign-born or down the socioeconomic scale or darker or she spends lonely nights at home with her cats. Black men are happy to get the babe they couldn't have when she was twentysomething and fertile. The laws of the marketplace do prevail. It's not me, it's them—them being the white guys who weren't after me anymore, or so I claimed.
That's a lie. The truth is, I attract about the same percentage of available white men my age (and far younger!) now as I did when I was thirty—and that's not including the unavailable white men who want to play around anyway.
Enough white men want me that I was hardly facing enforced celibacy, but I don't want them.
I want black men. They want me. We look at one another and exchange a visible frisson of sexual energy in the lingering glances. And our attraction is based first on race. We are not those couples who "happen to fall in love" with someone of a different race or more purposefully come together but out of some greater sense of interracial understanding and respect. Not as politically-correct men and women do we seek one another out. The Internet has made it a lot easier for us to find each other now. Men advertise: ebony seeks ivory. Women write: seeking tall, dark, and handsome. Very dark. We are not the same people who say: Race is not important. It is important to us. We have race-specific desires.
Even in a time when nearly 40 percent of single Americans have dated outside their race, that deliberate seeking of the specific other makes some people, especially black women, damned mad.
We are what they denigrate and castigate: white women and black men who choose one another because of our racial differences. They resent our taking their men. Black men are two and a half times more likely to marry a white woman than a black woman is to marry a white man. Black women can point to that statistic in justifying their wrath. But in truth, black sisters, we're after the sex, not the ring—and these guys aren't the marrying kind anyway.
Yes, the sex!
The woman who goes after black men is a variant of sex journalist Susie Bright's "white b***h in heat," a woman who puts sex first even though women aren't supposed to do that. According to one school of thought, white women turn to black men when their sex drives kick into higher gear and their social inhibitions recede into the rearview mirror. It's a "yes, baby, now I'm ready for you" reaction.
When we get to the "yes, baby" place, they know it, and they are ready and waiting for us. Black men have more energy, style and edge than white men. They know how to flirt, a nearly lost art among the rest of us. A black man is so damned sexy because he knows how to make a woman feel sexy.
Black men have something white guys don't have anymore: confidence in their masculinity, their sexuality. They clearly know they're men. White men appear to be waiting for the latest sociological research study to let them know if they are men or not. Yet black men are gentlemen, something else white men no longer are. They make me feel like a woman, both respected and desired. I can let go of my inhibitions, my need to control, when I am with them. How many white men can treat a woman like a lady and ravish her too?
I often felt in my White Period that only during heated sex does that little layer of air bubbles between me and the world pop and disappear, leaving me open to intimate connection. It takes a lot of friction for two white people to get that close. These black men, so alive with erotic electricity, cut through the bubbles with a touch, a caress, a kiss—and they free me—and I can truly touch them. I am like a pampered passenger in a Porsche with an expert driver at the wheel. I know I could suggest a route change, but I never really want to do that. On the other hand, the last time I had sex with a white man, we slogged along a bumpy road in a really old VW, the driver like the typical bumbling tv husband who would neither ask for nor accept the directions he badly needed.
My current lover, a handsome businessman, seduced me via eye contact at a neighborhood bar while I was eating burgers with a friend. Without saying a word, he paid the compliments, asked the questions with his expressive eyes. He didn't move over to sit beside me and ask if he could buy me a drink until he knew the time was right. Both soft-spoken and assertive, he has impeccable manners and charm. I was kissing him in a cab 30 minutes after that drink.
On another night in that same bar, a different black man, an artist, knelt and kissed my knees.
I am sure there must be some black men who aren't good in bed. Personally, I have not experienced one who isn't. (True, I am not dating down the socioeconomic ladder, but I didn't do that when I dated white either, so the racial comparisons seem valid and fair.) They look better than white men, they touch and kiss and make love better than white men. Statistically, their penises are only a fraction of an inch bigger on average, but they seem bigger and harder.
White men over 40 have lost their waistlines and their zest for life—if they ever had it. They carry resentments, grudges and extra pounds in their basketball bellies. Perhaps a good part of that bloat is unhappiness. Even the thin ones look flabby somehow and deeply aggrieved. They nurse the smallest perceived slight longer than their double shots of Scotch. Surely our culture as much as biology turns them into softer, spongier, less-interesting versions of their youthful selves just at the point where women and black men and other minorities are emerging strong. Society overvalues the white man, leaving him angry and bitter when he realizes, around age 40, that he's not all that.
With the exception of some Italians, white men don't turn me on anymore.
That admission puts me in the same category as the older man only interested primarily or exclusively in young women. While women my age scowl and frown at these aging, Upper West Side Boomers pushing strollers as the hand of the thin, blonde wife 20 years their junior rests lightly on their arm, I feel a kinship with the old goats. We are the same, me and that bald white guy, drawn to the exotic other, not caring that the object of our desire has no childhood memory of a Kennedy assassination or a typical WASP Sunday dinner of over-roasted beef, lumpy mashed potatoes and soggy vegetables.
Analyze the roots of attractions all you want—like scientists have done—and you won't come up with a perfect explanation for why we crave what we do. Desire rises from our depths and is gloriously oblivious to the good opinion of others. Yet until recently, I pretended that my lust was an equal-opportunity craving, because that seemed like the right thing to do.
Halfway through the first glass of wine in my last date with a white man, I realized that little clouds of sadness and self-pity were regularly fluffing off his psyche like the dust clouds kicked up by that dirt-smudged "Peanuts" character as he walks through Charlie Brown's life. This guy was at least mildly depressed, and I wanted to tell him to exercise, lose weight, trim the combover and get interested in something outside yourself. I would have walked out on him immediately, but he seemed to expect that. I couldn't deliver the blow to his ego proffered like the naked neck of a martyr to the ax. My Southern cousins would describe his general demeanor as a "hangdog air." Into the second glass of wine and glancing longingly at the exit, I wanted to hang that dog myself when he mentioned that his face was flushed—I hadn't noticed—because he'd taken a Viagra "just in case."
What did he think would entice me more: That he assumed sex was probable because I'm a sex journalist—or that he would need chemical help if sex did occur?
I cannot even imagine a black man bungling an attempted seduction in such a sad way.
That was my last token white guy. I recently came out of my racial-preference closet and told my friends, "I love black men. I'm not attracted to white men over 40, and I'm not dating them anymore. Really, it's not them, it's me.
Re: A White Woman Explains Why She Prefers Black Men
wtf kind of white men was she going out with? Combover and viagra? Obviously this b!tch is ugly as hell. People tend to make up sh!t when they start to get rejected by the opposite sex so they can feel better about themselves.
She's lying about the black men too. She probably got it once and has been hooked ever since but black men don't give her the time of day either. 2 black men does not count as the whole ****ing race.
The slut has probably ****ed the whole village; gay or not.
Re: A White Woman Explains Why She Prefers Black Men
lol cracked me up. Each to their own, but she does go a bit OTT with the feel of the skin stuff.Having been with my fair share of black asian and white women I havent noticed any difference in the touch of the skin.
Re: A White Woman Explains Why She Prefers Black Men
Quote:
Originally Posted by kingpala
wtf kind of white men was she going out with? Combover and viagra? Obviously this b!tch is ugly as hell. People tend to make up sh!t when they start to get rejected by the opposite sex so they can feel better about themselves.
She's lying about the black men too. She probably got it once and has been hooked ever since but black men don't give her the time of day either. 2 black men does not count as the whole ****ing race.
The slut has probably ****ed the whole village; gay or not.
Re: A White Woman Explains Why She Prefers Black Men
that broad is 50 years old!
anyway:
Quote:
White Sex
"White sex,'' I repeated, for the third time. Not right sex or wide sex or a new drug to do it to— which is what everyone imagined when I announced the subject— everyone being white, of course.
So let me spell it out for you: White sex, as in white people, and how they ****, and is there anything to it?
(I am reprinting this story here, by popular demand and provocation!)
White sex is commonly referred to as simply "sex." Whenever we hear the results of a new survey about how many males over 45 watch porn videos, or the number of women under 30 who have performed fellatio, we can picture the people behind the statistics clearly enough: white men and women responding to each inquiry, scratching their heads and pressing down hard with their Number-2 pencils.
Perhaps that is our first definition; that white sex is about white people being the erotic yardstick, the arbiters of public taste, the bearers of a terribly self-conscious, but largely unspoken, standard. White sex at its most transparent is the product of white Protestant or Catholic middle/working/no-class, absolutely assimilated, English-first Americans.
Now that we're alone, let's let our hair down, even though as white people that's exactly the thing we find so hard to do. The essence of white sex is sexual blandness and rigidity. Straight white male sexuality in particular is an endless source of folk humor as the bastion of **** retention. An anonymous social critic put it perfectly in the 1960s: "You're nothing but an uptight white *******.''
But why would anyone be a tightass, especially a white American male? Perhaps, as we've seen in so many tales about unsatisfied rich (white) Americans, there is something about the work ethic and the American Dream that entails paying an erotic and intimate price for material success. "He who has the most toys wins," reads a popular bumper sticker, but the winner may find he can't get it up anymore. Or he comes too soon. In either case, the winner, the man in charge, cannot relax. And if you can't relax, you can't get ****ed and enjoy it.
What makes white sexuality so dynamic is that, having been strung up as tight as a racket, white lovers are sensitive to the least little provocation. The high watermark of white sex is the white person who loses his or her head, and becomes a bona-fide sex maniac. As the late cookbook author Ernest Matthew Mickler put it, "I can just hear Raenelle and Betty Sue at every Tupperware party in Rolling Fork saying, `Ernie went from white trash to WHITE TRASH overnight.'''
Yes, the path from repressed nerd to bohemian libertine is one bright white circle, and it can lead from the first persona to the second as quickly as a whirl of J. Edgar Hoover's slip. Let's look at a gallery of some of our most stirring White Sex stereotypes:
YANKEE WHORE: The first time I visited Central America, I had a Spanish instructor who was eager to teach me card games and talk about sex. He told me his last Americana student kept a pet boa constrictor that she used as a dildo. He'd heard this was common. He laughed at my protests, knowing I was the voice of reason, but delighting more in the titillation of the rumor.
The white woman abroad is the symbol of feminine amorality. She's like that little kid who'll eat anything— except she'll **** anything. She has no shame, she's sexually voracious, and kinky is her middle name.
GWM: Weak, effete, and elite: that's the old-fashioned caricature of well-to-do whiteness as metaphor for male homosexuality. The recipe for being thin, rich, and lily white seems to have a narcissistic button just waiting to be pushed. It's the "white man gone wrong,'' which he accomplishes by ditching his family's expectations, though not necessarily his social privilege.
Unlike the straight white male version, who can't seem to unclench his jaw or his butt, the out-of-the-closet GWM is pegged as too blatant, too promiscuous, and a blabbermouth besides. The closeted version is just plain scary.
"****ing white ******'' is one of the most pervasive catcalls of the street, but it is also one of the most outdated. Gay fashion has steadily imitated hyper-butchness, rather than yearning for it, ever since Stonewall. Gender****, and consequently gay life, is also getting very unwhite lately, with publicity to boot. The gay diva of the decade is a black snap queen, not a limp (white) wrist.
THE STEPFORD WIFE WHO STEPS OUT: If you read your Winnie the Pooh books carefully, you remember that "James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree" had a notorious mother who declared that she was going down to the Edge of the Town for a couple of things— and never returned. In the old days she probably stopped at a dark lounge where a woman in white bucks offered her a drink.
In the modern version, Ms. Morrison is so bored in the suburbs that she enrolls in a women's studies class. In the third week, her teacher addresses the Case of the Married Lesbian. Now Jimmy's mom is at the Dinah Shore golf tournament weekend in Palm Springs (does it get any whiter than this?) eating ***** and ecstasy. Her husband and children say they "will never understand what happened.''
ONCE YOU GO BLACK, YOU NEVER GO BACK: There are two classic ways for the white girl to lose her snowy facade: lesbianism and sleeping with black men. I remember in the 11th grade my friend Carol had been going steady with the same white teenage Marxist Leninist for six years, and she was in despair. She told me she would be happier with a woman, and confided her lesbian intentions, which was a popular pronouncement in Los Angeles circa 1975. But the next night she wound up in South Central with a black Marxist Leninist man, and she never mentioned the "L-word'' again.
Of course the most porno-typed notion about white women's (and the white homosexual's) attraction to black men is His Enormous Black ****, the body part she worships like a totem, the one thing that could "fill her up" after years of lackluster intercourse.
But ****-worshiping by itself is no more significant to the ******-loving white girl's wantonness, than her lesbian counterpart's purported lust for muff-diving. Miss Anne wants off her pedestal because she can't get off as long as she's stuck there. She wants to be treated like a Real Woman (say this with an ethnic accent); she wants to submit to "perverts" and "savages," and if it all goes according to cliché, she will earn the degrading yet elating title of White ***** in Heat.
When a woman is called a ******-lover, it means that she puts her sexual satisfaction before her racial unity. The crucial thing about this little notion is that white women aren't supposed to put their sexual satisfaction before anything. Of course she isn't going back!
SCARY WHITE GUYS: Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. You name it. They seethe, they plot, and they plan. They are said to find inspiration for their sadism from looking at dirty pictures, but more often than not they find their justification in the Bible. White men get the headlines when one sodomizes 14 children in the neighborhood, mutilates their bodies, and buries them in the backyard. They've got the Psychotic Geek market all wrapped up. In every non-white family, the cry is heard round the television set: "Our people don't do that.'' That's not actually true: every race is capable of unspeakable atrocities. White men's sex crimes capture the media eye, partly because their white victims get more attention. Look how long Dahmer was ignored by the police because his victims were not white. They are the ultimate example of repressed white sexuality gone berserk. Prudery, in these men's hands, is a Texas chainsaw.
LET'S (WEAR ORANGE AND) GET IT ON: I used to live in an apartment below a Rajneesh commune, its New Age members decked out in tangerine and magenta. Every day and night they practiced floor-pounding primal-scream gymnastics, which they called Chaotic Meditations. (I called the landlord). Sex inevitably was part of their chaos and often spilled out into our backyard. Outside my bedroom window, I could see a lot of orange in the missionary position.
For commune members, sex was liberated from traditions of getting married and white-breading it. The men studied massage and vied for Spiritual Leadership, while the women supported the commune through sex work. At one point I recall, every woman working at the Mitchell Bros' strip club downtown was either a dyke or a Rajneesh.
"Eastern'' eroticism and spiritual quests have been one of the great attempts of white baby boomers to get out from under the White Man's Sexual Burden. Sexual guilt and shame in their book are disparaged as ridiculous notions of Christianity and Western Civilization. They are, certainly, but the fact that none of the world's religions is exactly an advertisement for sexual liberation was lost on the new cult followers.
What's interesting about Oriental romanticism is that it allows white people to go wild with spiritual pretensions. The right Kama Sutra manual could send a devotee over the top of sexual bliss and into enlightenment. After all, queer and interracial liaisons can be bad for one's reputation, but with the right guru, you can **** your brains out under the guise of devout prayer and guidance.
White sex is clearly an object of derision both for being hopelessly uptight and completely debauched. The debauchery supposedly comes from outside the white world, but in fact it comes from white lovers yearning to undo themselves.
When white people seek their erotic identities, they become fallen angels, but when non-white people follow some of the same paths, they are criticized by the conservative members of their community for "acting white,'' i.e., having no moral center. It's an equal opportunity for all colors to bash sexual desire and imagination.
What is perhaps the cruelest point of the stereotypes is that they imply sexual freedom is a bad end, because one's erotic yearnings can only be quenched at the price of losing one's family ties, morality, and intellectual respectability. Privately, I might like to be a White ***** in Heat, but publicly— it's a total embarrassment. There's the rub, the hypocrisy, the threat to my status as white lady.
I know I'm not alone in having sex as a "dyke" or a "******-lover." White sex will be eroticized by racism and anxieties about sexual deviance as long as inequality remains a cornerstone of our erotic taboos. We can't easily squirm out from under the effects of institutional white power, or the WASP work ethic, or the white picket fence surrounding the nuclear family.
Lust may be blind, but social appearances are deadly discriminating. White sex has not so much suffered from its stereotypes, as it has been burdened by everyone pretending that they don't exist. A touch of honesty is the only thing that works wonders. Surrender to the debauchery of white sex, and watch the fur fly! The truth is, everyone deserves the chance to be a White ***** in Heat, at least for once in a lifetime.
A White Woman Explains Why She Prefers Black Men
