White Sex
The high watermark of “white sex” is the white person who loses their cautionary head and becomes a bona fide sex maniac.
“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 in a Village Voice newsroom. Everyone being white, of course.
They asked me to write a story for their 1993 “White Issue,” which was framed along the lines of, ““When did whites come into the world? When was the first time that Europeans, faced with otherness, looked at each other and said, ‘We’re white’?”
Good question.
I was eager to dig into the hot mess: What is “white sex”? As in, white people and how they fuck— is there anything to it?
I laughed when I got the assignment, but then I couldn’t let stop turning it over in my mind.
First, “White Sex” is commonly referred to as: “sex.”
Whenever we hear the results of a new survey about “how many males over forty-five watch porn,” or “the number of women under thirty who have performed fellatio,” we 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 No. 2 pencils.
Perhaps that is a first definition, that white sex is about white people as an unspoken erotic yardstick, the assumed arbiters of public taste, the bearers of a terribly self-conscious but largely unspoken standard.
White sex is understood as the product of white Protestant or Catholic, absolutely assimilated, English-first Americans.
But once we’re alone, let’s let our hair down— though for white people that’s apparently the thing hardest thing to do.
The essence of “white sex,” the legend, is sexual blandness and rigidity. Straight white male sexuality in particular is an endless source of folk humor, the bastion of anal retentiveness. An anonymous social critic put it perfectly in the 1960s: “You’re nothing but an uptight white asshole.”
But why would anyone want to be a tight-ass, specifically a white American male?
Perhaps, as we’ve seen in 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 fucked and enjoy it.
What makes white sexuality dynamic, is that having been strung up as tight as a tennis racket, white lovers are sensitive to the tiniest provocation. The high watermark of white sex is the white person who loses their 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 whip from the first persona to the second like J. Edgar Hoover’s slip.
Let’s look at a gallery of some of America’s most stirring White Sex Nightmare Stereotypes:
The 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 that his last American student had kept a pet boa constrictor that she used as a dildo. He’d heard this was common. He laughed at my incredulous 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 fuck anything. She has no shame, she’s sexually voracious, and kinky is her middle name.
GWM Seeking Same
Weak, effete, and elite: the 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 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, 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.
“Fucking white faggot” is one of the most pervasive catcalls of the street, but it’s also one of the most outdated. Gay fashion has imitated hyper-butchness, rather than yearning for it, ever since Stonewall.
Genderfuck, and consequently gay life, has became very un-white in the 21st century, with publicity to boot. The gay diva of the era is a Ru Paul, not a limp (white) wrist.
The Stepford Wife Who Steps Out
If you read your A.A. Milne poetry carefully, you will remember that James Morrison Morrison’s notorious mother declared that she was going down to the Edge of Town for a couple of things— and never returned. In the old days, she probably would have stopped at a dark lounge where a woman in white bucks would offer 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. The next thing we know, Jimmy’s mom is at the Dinah Shore golf tournament weekend in Palm Springs (does it get any whiter than this?), eating pussy and ecstasy.
Her husband and children say, “We will never understand what happened.”
Once You Go Black, You Never Go Back
There are two classic ways for the white gal to lose her snowy façade: lesbianism and sleeping with black men.
To sheltered white people, the pornographic notion about the attraction of white women (and white homosexuals) to black men is the burden of being a size queen. They carry the fantasy of Black Cock (capitalized) like a lead weight , an objectified floating object. The supposedly frigid femme worships like it like a totem. It’s a homage for the anti-clitoral — the idea that you need to be “filled up” like a hole.
But colorist cock-worshipping is no more significant to the white girl’s wantonness than her lesbian counterpart’s purported lust for muff-diving. Miss Anne wants down off her pedestal because she can’t get off, as long as she’s stuck there. She wants to submit to “perverts” and “savages,” and if it all goes according to planned cliché, she will earn the degrading, yet elating title: White Bitch in Heat.
When a white woman is insulted with the epithet “nigger-lover,” it means that she puts her sexual satisfaction before her racial unity. Heavens.
The interesting thing about this 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, the plot, they plan. They are said to find inspiration for their sadism from looking at dirty pictures, but more often than not, they say they find their justification in the Bible.
Only white men seem to sodomize fourteen children in the neighborhood, mutilate their bodies, and bury them in the back yard. They’ve got the Psychotic Geek market all wrapped up. In nonwhite families, 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 mean’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. White male serial killers 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 in 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 saw a lot of orange in the missionary position.
For commune members, sex was liberated from traditions of getting married and whitebreading it. The men studied massage and vied for Spiritual Leadership, while the women supported the commune through sex work.
At one point in the 80s I recall, every woman working at in the San Francisco downtown strip theaters was either a dyke or a Rajneeshee.
“Eastern” eroticism and spiritual quests were one of the great attempts of white baby boomers to get out from under the White Man’s Sexual Burden. To these spiritualists, sexual guilt and shame were 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.
Orientalist romanticism 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. Queer and interracial liaisons may be bad for one’s reputation, but you could fuck your brains out under the guise of devout prayer and guidance.
Whither Whitey?
White sex is an object of derision, both for being hopelessly uptight and simultaneously debauched. The debauchery is portrayed by bigots as coming from outside the white world. No. It comes from within, white lovers yearning to undo themselves.
When white people seek their erotic identities, they are fallen angels. 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.
Perhaps the cruelest point of the stereotypes is this: they imply that 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, one might aspire to be a White Bitch in the Heat. Publicly, it’s an embarrassment. There’s the rub, the hypocrisy, the threat to one’s status as White Lady.
I know I’m not alone in my history of suffering white sex cliches. I’ve been caricatured as a Yankee Whore, Nigger Lover, Dyke, and of course, the baseline Uptight White Bitch. I contain multitudes.
“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 painfully discriminating. White sex (™) has not so much suffered from its stereotypes as it has from everyone’s pretending that the stereotypes 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 Bitch in Heat, as least once in a lifetime.
James James Morrison Morrison... I loved that poem as a kid and haven't thought of it in years. Never imagined it in quite this context, though.