Red Fever

A Mort Sahl joke from the ‘70s:

In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you've got to be a girl.

He left out Indians — big in the ‘70s with Little Big Man, Jeremiah Johnson and other mega box office flicks. Again in the ‘90s with Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans and Black Robe. Funny how it was always some fish-outta-water white dude as the big hero. //snark//

I was volunteering at The Mass Ctr for Native Americans during the ‘90s and all the girls, my fellow white volunteers, wanted to date an Indian dude. This seemed, to me anyway, due to having spent too much time in the movie theater/too little in reality, pervasive insecurity about their own heritage along with a yen for the exotic — a tumble with the other.

The fetishizing of another culture.

The women who felt they didn't have a grand cultural tradition invariably complained of being ‘mutts’ as though this meant they had no history at all. Muttness just wasn’t interesting, focused or exotic enough for them — they weren’t able to see or appreciate the vast wealth of their thickly woven familial histories. In'dins however — well, boyhody, anyone could see that they had it all going on!

Happy Friday, Boy and His Cat pic

Two fellow volunteers in particular, peeved me clean out. Each had, or claimed to have, a scintilla of Cherokee ancestry. (That’s nice — I have the tiniest smidgen of French ancestry. That’s where Nf2 entered my family’s pic. What? France not exciting or beguiling enough?) These two went as far as dying their light brown hair black and spending time, on the sly though the rest of us found out, in tanning beds.

Sheesh, how sad! They both got what they were after though — In’din husbands and an adopted, more tantalizing history. I hope they’re happy now. I truly do but the fetishizing of an entire race just squicks me right out, pisses me off and annoys the ever livin’ fuck outta me.

From Womanist Musings:

Fetishizing someone because of their race is not a compliment.  It assumes a monolithic identity and evidences that what is truly desired is not an equal relationship, but a caricature of what is understood to be natural based in race.

The idea that another culture holds the keys to romance heaven isn’t limited to women of course. I’ve known my share of men who would only date folks from foreign lands or, at the very least, who rocked a different shade of Crayola flesh tone.

You want adventure, to have exotic experiences, to be rescued from your dreary existence? Travel, join the Peace Corps, volunteer, read, get outta the house and meet a lot of different, new folk. Get past assumptions and find real life.

OK, off my soap box now. Sorry and happy Friday!