The portrayal of black women as lascivious by nature is an enduring stereotype. The descriptive words associated with this stereotype are singular in their focus: seductive, alluring, worldly, beguiling, tempting, and lewd. Historically, white women, as a category, were portrayed as models of self-respect, self-control, and modesty - even sexual purity, but black women were often portrayed as innately promiscuous, even predatory. This depiction of black women is signified by the name Jezebel.
K. Sue Jewell (1993), a contemporary sociologist, conceptualized the Jezebel as a tragic mulatto - “thin lips, long straight hair, slender nose, thin figure and fair complexion” (p. 46). This conceptualization is too narrow. It is true that the “tragic mulatto” and “Jezebel” share the reputation of being sexually seductive, and both are antithetical to the desexualized Mammy caricature; nevertheless, it is a mistake to assume that only, or even mainly, fair-complexioned black women were sexually objectified by the larger American society. From the early 1630s to the present, black American women of all shades have been portrayed as hypersexual “bad-black-girls.”
Jewell’s conceptualization is based on a kernel of historical truth. Many of the slavery-era blacks sold into prostitution were mulattoes. Also, freeborn light-skinned black women sometimes became the willing concubines of wealthy white southerners. This system, called placage, involved a formal arrangement for the white suitor/customer to financially support the black woman and her children in exchange for her long-term sexual services. The white men often met the black women at “Quadroon Balls,” a genteel sex market.
The belief that blacks are sexually lewd predates the institution of slavery in America. European travelers to Africa found scantily clad natives. This semi-nudity was misinterpreted as lewdness. White Europeans, locked into the racial ethnocentrism of the 17th century, saw African polygamy and tribal dances as proof of the African’s uncontrolled sexual lust. Europeans were fascinated by African sexuality. William Bosman described the black women on the coast of Guinea as “fiery” and “warm” and “so much hotter than the men.” William Smith described African women as “hot constitution’d Ladies” who “are continually contriving stratagems how to gain a lover”(White, 1999, p. 29). The genesis of anti-black sexual archetypes emerged from the writings of these and other Europeans: the black male as brute and potential rapist; the black woman, as Jezebel whore.
The English colonists accepted the Elizabethan image of “the lusty Moor,” and used this and similar stereotypes to justify enslaving blacks. In part, this was accomplished by arguing that blacks were subhumans: intellectually inferior, culturally stunted, morally underdeveloped, and animal-like sexually. Whites used racist and sexist ideologies to argue that they alone were civilized and rational, whereas blacks, and other people of color, were barbaric and deserved to be subjugated.
The Jezebel stereotype was used during slavery as a rationalization for sexual relations between white men and black women, especially sexual unions involving slavers and slaves. The Jezebel was depicted as a black woman with an insatiable appetite for sex. She was not satisfied with black men. The slavery-era Jezebel, it was claimed, desired sexual relations with white men; therefore, white men did not have to rape black women. James Redpath (1859), an abolitionist no less, wrote that slave women were “gratified by the criminal advances of Saxons” (p. 141). This view is contradicted by Frederick Douglass (1968), the abolitionist and former slave, who claimed that the “slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master” (p. 60). Douglass’s account is consistent with the accounts of other former slaves. Henry Bibb’s (1849) master forced a young slave to be his son’s concubine (pp. 98-99); later, Bibb and his wife were sold to a Kentucky trader who forced Bibb’s wife into prostitution (pp. 112-116).
Slave women were property; therefore, legally they could not be raped. Often slavers would offer gifts or promises of reduced labor if the slave women would consent to sexual relations, and there were instances where the slaver and slave shared sexual attraction; however, “the rape of a female slave was probably the most common form of interracial sex” (D'Emilio & Freedman, 1988, p. 102). A slave woman explained, “When he make me follow him into de bush, what use me to tell him no? He have strength to make me” (p. 101). At the same time, black men convicted of raping white women were usually castrated, hanged, or both (Winthrop, 1961, p. 157 and n44).
People make decisions based on the options they have and the options that they perceive. The objective realities of slavery and the slaves’ subjective interpretations of the institution both led female slaves to engage “voluntarily” in sexual unions with whites, especially slavers, their sons, and their overseers. A slave who refused the sexual advances of her slaver risked being sold, beaten, raped, and having her “husband” or children sold. Many slave women conceded to sexual relations with whites, thereby reinforcing the belief that black women were lustful and available.
The idea that black women were naturally and inevitably sexually promiscuous was reinforced by several features of the slavery institution. Slaves, whether on the auction block or offered privately for sale, were often stripped naked and physically examined. In theory, this was done to insure that they were healthy, able to reproduce, and, equally important, to look for whipping scars - the presence of which implied that the slave was rebellious. In practice, the stripping and touching of slaves had a sexually exploitative, sometimes sadistic function. Nakedness, especially among women in the 18th and 19th centuries, implied lack of civility, morality, and sexual restraint even when the nakedness was forced. Slaves, of both sexes and all ages, often wore few clothes or clothes so ragged that their legs, thighs, and chests were exposed. Conversely, whites, especially women, wore clothing over most of their bodies. The contrast between the clothing reinforced the beliefs that white women were civilized, modest, and sexually pure, whereas black women were uncivilized, immodest, and sexually aberrant.
Black slave women were also frequently pregnant. The institution of slavery depended on black women to supply future slaves. By every method imaginable, slave women were “encouraged” to reproduce. Some slavers, for example, offered a new pig for each child born to a slave family, a new dress to the slave woman for each surviving infant, or no work on Saturdays to black women who produced six children (Rawick, 1972, p. 228; Gutman, 1976, p. 77). Young black girls were encouraged to have sex as “anticipatory socialization” for their later status as “breeders.” When they did reproduce, their fecundity was seen as proof of their insatiable sexual appetites. Deborah Gray White, a modern historian, wrote:
Major periodicals carried articles detailing optimal conditions under which bonded women were known to reproduce, and the merits of a particular “breeder” were often the topic of parlor or dinner table conversations. The fact that something so personal and private became a matter of public discussion prompted one ex-slave to declare that “women wasn’t nothing but cattle.” Once reproduction became a topic of public conversation, so did the slave woman’s sexual activities. (White, 1999, p. 31)
—Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia: The Jezebel Stereotype
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This hurt to read
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Why do most things have to be promoted as sexy to be considered a good thing? “Confidence is sexy” “Eating healthy is sexy” “Being yourself is sexy”. Does my entire life and everything I do have to be based around making your genitals tingle?
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pssst
there are lots of posts going around that say “women don’t wear makeup or dress just to appeal to men”
and while that’s true
don’t ever feel bad for wanting to look good for someone.
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See Theo and Tati next season on America’s Next Top Model.
“Okay, so here’s why girls don’t get flattered when guys comment on their bodies.”
Fast food workers “occupying” Wall Street. #imlovinit
If you can’t fucking survive on fucking $7.25 go to fucking school and get another fucking job. Those people who run the fucking restaurants and shops who fucking give out minimum fucking wage need to make a fucking profit too. Get off your lazy fucking ass and make way for the fucking high school students and college students who fucking need that job that pays $7.25.
Funny thing: the workers who are stuck in minimum wage jobs (many of whom have degrees… and huge amounts of debt racked up getting them, because of the myth that going to school is THE path to a high-paying job) are also the biggest single customer base for these sorts of corporations, and most other ones.
You know the thing that’s really going to imperil corporate profits?
The way they pay their workers.
The news keeps saying things about “consumer confidence” being low. Supposedly, it’s low “confidence” that is depressing sales of big ticket items like homes and cars, and if the current trends continue, it’s taking bites out of things like… eating out. Going to the movies. And other things that drive the minimum wage sectors of the economy.
Funny thing: people have to have money to spend money. Right now, most revenue goes straight into the accounts of the major stakeholders in the company. What does it there? It… accrues. It… adds up. What doesn’t it do? It doesn’t circulate. It doesn’t get spent. It doesn’t do anyone any good.
If you gave everyone working at McDonald’s another dollar an hour out of the profits that are currently just being pocketed, those dollars… well, they’d be spent. Almost immediately. And in the end, they’d probably end up being stuck in some millionaire’s low risk, steady return, not-at-all entrepreneurial portfolio, which is where most money ends up.
But just by the magic passing through more hands before it comes to rest, those same dollars would each be spent several more times. MAGIC, right? Same dollar, getting spent again and again and again. And every time, someone benefits. In effect, every time, everyone benefits.
When money goes to the top, it stops moving. Money that isn’t moving isn’t really money any more. It’s as useless as the high score of a video game.
This is why the places in the world—even just in this country—with the best minimum wage and the best social safety nets also have the lowest unemployment, and why unemployment grows or stays stable the more we “tighten belts”. This is just how the world works. This is how the world has always worked. If conservatives would give up their fairy tale fantasyland logic and join the rest of us in the real world, we could have the economy on its feet in no time.
And you are living in a fantasy land. You are. What jobs? What jobs are these people supposed to get? If they had no job, you would tell them “McDonald’s is always hiring.” and act like that’s an answer. Well, they’re working at McDonald’s. And they had to beat ten applicants to get those jobs, because only in your magical fantasy land does “always hiring” mean “has enough job openings to magically accommodate everybody who applies”. Your logic literally requires magic to work.
What are you doing with your life? What are you doing that is so noble and great an endeavor that you can tell people who bust their backs to do a job you probably couldn’t do and definitely wouldn’t want to that they’re lazy for working for $7.25. Would you take $7.25 an hour to do what they do? No? Then they’re being underpaid. The invisible hand of the free market is apparently taking a vacation.
Let me tell you how things work in the real world. In the real world *everyone has to* make a living wage. Has to. If businesses aren’t paying living wages, then they should inevitably go under since no one could afford to work for them. Fortunately or unfortunately, the economy… like an ecology… is all interconnected. So instead of these businesses suffering alone for what should be a fatal decision on their part, they drag everyone else down with them in a slow death spiral that poisons the whole economy.
See, if these business owners aren’t paying their employees a living wage but they’re not going out of business, then their incompetence or greed (pick one, or both) is being subsidized by everyone else. Their incompetence or greed is being paid for by everyone who pays ABOVE a minimum wage so that their employees can afford to eat out and shop and see movies, and by everybody who pays the taxes that go to the public assistance programs that allow their employees to keep scraping by.
Of course, the employees themselves are bearing the brunt of the death spiral, because they’re trapped between an immovable object—a job that against all real-world logic expects full time employees to accept wages that won’t get them through the week—and an inexorable force—the fact that human beings have basic needs that require more money than they’re getting to meet.
Since we actually do live in the real world, it’s inevitable that a system that is unsustainable will fall apart, and this one will… it will reach a breaking point where we’ll either have to acknowledge the problem and fix it, or… well, it will just break. It would be better to fix it sooner rather than later, especially since there are actual people being literally worked to death while smug jerks like you who don’t understand how the world works and who wouldn’t be able to do what they do lecture them about how their plight is somehow their fault.
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Effects Of Thinking White People Are “All Like That”:
- Literally nothing other than white people having their feelings hurt on the internet
- I’m not joking there is no real world consequence of this
Effects Of Thinking People of Color Are “All Like…
season 2 episode 8 - The Dark Age
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Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s Street Art Confronts Sexual Harassment
There has been a terrible lack of posts recognizing the Philippine Typhoon and that’s why I’m making this post. The Philippines just had the WORST typhoon in history called, Haiyan. Now if you have no idea about the severity, the wind speeds of this typhoon was about 250 mph, which is THREE AND A HALF TIMES THE SPEED OF THE WINDS OF HURRICANE KATRINA. imagine the damage Katrina did to the US, a developed country. The Philippines is a Third world country. Most of the people in this country live in SHACKS MADE OUT OF TRASH. It is estimated that about 10,000 PEOPLE DIED. Dead bodies literally litter the streets and are STUCK IN TREES. IF YOU GIVE ANY SHITS TODAY ABOUT FELLOW HUMANITY YOU BETTER REBLOG THIS. IM NOT ONLY DOING THIS BECAUSE MY FAMILY IS FILIPINO BUT BECAUSE THIS STORM WAS THE WORST IN HISTORY. GOD BLESS THE SOULS LOST THERE. My parents were seriously almost on the verge of tears and almost screaming. We didn’t lose anybody in our family, but it has got to hurt to know that the place you came from is IN SHAMBLES. Pls spread this if you care
I have a lot of Filipino friends and people I cherish a lot! If you could donate to the cause that would be great!
PLEASE HELP! Here are some links to donate:
HOW THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY CAN HELP
- donations via the Philippine Red Cross (including PayPal)
- donations via Habitat for Humanity
- donations via ANCOP Foundation USA
- eta: donations via UNICEF Philippines
- eta2: donations via CARE Australia
- eta2: donations via Caritas Internationalis
- eta2: donations via GMA Network (credit card, cash, check)
- eta2: donations via World Vision
- eta2: donations via AmeriCares
- eta2: donations via Samaritan’s Purse (Canada)
- eta2: donations via Canadian Red Cross (or you can text REDCROSS or ROUGE to 30333 to donate $5)
FOR THOSE IN THE PHILIPPINES
- text donations via Globe
- Red Cross and DSWD relief operations (infographic)
- list of ongoing relief operations via Rappler
- donations via ABS-CBN News
- eta: relief operations via University of the Philippines
- eta: relief operations via the Department of Education
- eta: pick-up locations for donations via Air 21
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season 3 episode 16- Doppelgangland
Well then it’s a good thing I hate sports *slams button*
The year is 2027. It is Super Bowl season. The football players that have been selected for this year’s culling huddle in a sad, discontented mass in the middle of an overgrown stadium. The stink of fear mingles with the smell of fresh earth, an unholy bouquet for a terrible day.
Then they begin arriving, singly and in groups. Their claws glint in the harsh stadium lights, and there is blood matted into their fur. The football players put on their game face, but the hollowness of their eyes betrays their true hopelessness. There is no use fighting, other than to make a brave showing.
After all, everyone knows the bears always win.
Years pass. Teams deliberately lose games so they won’t be against them. Eventually, the Goverment starts a programme, to lessen prison overcrowding. Prisoners are selected at random, or so they say, to put on the jerseys and play the bears. None of them ever come back, and crime drops to almost zero. All is well, until there are no more prisoners. The goverment does not know how to choose, but they know that the Super Bowl must go on, and the bears must always win, and choose they must.
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