woman assumed that all women played kind of the same traditional back seat role to men in our society. This has been encouraged since the slave trading days. The interest with the buttocks. I mean Jennifer Lopez is mostly famous due to her rather voluptuous backside. You don’t see the same focus with white women and some have butts too. In our reading this week Why Black Sexual Politics the way women of color are portrayed is startling. The fact that they need to be depicted as physically valuable to gain attention, ie. Destiny’s Child CD cover of them in animal print bikinis showing their animalistic nature, thus alleviating some human regard.
We also watched a movie that I felt, was the foundation of what added to this stigma we have today. The film of the famous “Hottentot Venus” whom was a young lady ripped from her family in South Africa to England to be a side show. Her name was Sarah Bartmann and I believe this is one of the first inclinations as to how women of color are viewed today. They viewed the Venus as a freak because of her large buttocks but yet they were intrigued by her none the less. The white travelers were enchanted by the mysteries of Sarah Bartmann’s people the Khoi tribe. The fascination with these women I believe, had a hand in leading to the hypersexulization associated with women of color today.
I thought what we talked about in class with Halle Berry being the first African American women to win an Academy Award for “Best Actress” held bearing in this article. That sounds great and all but this came with a price, she did a very raunchy sex scene in which she was fully naked to win this award. In this article the author compares the TV screen to that of a slave auction block when slave women were made to show themselves to prospective buyers. She claims that the scene played by Halle Berry is essentially the same thing. The author maintains that this raping and controlling of black women in past times for sexual use has led to the sexualizaion in the media today.
There is this stigma of the black women as a animalistic wild sexual being. I don’t understand this, I mean I suppose I get it but this kind of thinking to me is old school and ignorant as hell. The view coming from a long time ago that black people are less than civilized and that they are pretty much “wild” has laid the foundation today. At least that is what I got from the reading on Black Sexual Politics. I thought that this article covered what we talked about in class fairly well and the whole week has just really opened my eyes more to this most horrible and untrue stigma.
Posted by meghanpowell14 
