[ This piece was published in the Sunday Indy last year and caused a minor storm in a small teacup, including on SAfm when I was invited to discuss it. One charming listener sent a text stating "SAfm has run out of healthy topics!" haha. The issue re-surfaced in a chat recently with two good friends of mine - so I thought i'd repost it and provoke further discussion- if anyone cares. Use it. Don't use it. ]
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I drew quite a bit of flak in a chat room the other day. I had expressed a preference for black partners. “I thought we’ve moved beyond such racism!” one self-confessed progressive smarty pants piped up. Others even accused me of having an “immoral” attitude. “What’s wrong with whites?!” insisted yet another. My cheeky “Not much!” was lost on the humourless bugger. After a brief attempt at explaining myself, I accepted defeat. My faceless conversationalists showed no openness to reason. The whole saga has forced me, though, to wrestle with a pretty tough question: are racially exclusive sexual preferences immoral? I date only blacks: does that make me racist?
I always regarded sexual preferences as subjective stuff about which very little can be said. Just as some people like banana on pizza, or can be moved, miraculously, by the jarring sounds of Metallica (yuk!), others enjoy avocado on pizza, and listen to Lionel Richie on repeat (cool!) These are all mere matters of taste. And taste, surely, cannot be objectively evaluated? One person’s ‘bad taste’ is another’s aesthetic heaven - or orgasm even!
And so it is, I always thought, with our choices of who we sleep with. I, for one, don’t ‘get’ my black male friends’ obsession with gigantic booties, for example. But, then again, my near-drooling after tall, well-sculpted black hunks that strut past our lunch table, not only mildly embarrass these same straight friends, but leave them as puzzled about the drivers of my own tastes. Yet, the incident in the chat room tests the foundations of these convictions. Are sexual preferences really so innocent? Or, are they reflections of deeper attitudes, and earlier experiences, which can be morally criticised? In a country like South Africa, in particular, can the potent political sociology of race so easily be divorced from the ethics of sexuality?
A good friend of mine recently challenged my long-held view about the inherent subjectivity and innocence of sexual preferences. He suggested that, in fact, the question of who we sleep with might actually be one of the most interesting litmus tests of how much progress we’ve made in South Africa in terms of race relations. Interracial dating, he argued, is perhaps not as common fifteen years after Apartheid’s demise, as one might have predicted. “There should have been many more coloured kids by now!” he half-joked. Unfortunately, our local academics are not interested enough in sexy social questions, so there isn’t much written, and documented, on these post-democratic behavioural trends.
I am, on second thoughts, inclined to partly agree with my friend – sexual preferences do reflect background experiences, and so might well be a decent proxy for measuring various social phenomena, such as our evolving attitudes towards ‘the other’.
Take a pedestrian example. There was some interracial dating between boys from my Model-C, multiracial high school, and girls from our sister school (gay teens remain invisible). My black friends who attended township schools, on the other hand, continued to date only black girls. This is no co-incidence. Exposure to different languages, cultures, classes, nationalities, bodies, phenotypes and cultures de-mystifies ‘the other’ so that you become socialised into not just ‘understanding’ ‘their’ differences, but also ‘feeling’ (for) ‘them’. The desire for sex, one of those most basic of human drives, suddenly finds itself oriented towards a greater range of potential partners. This, surely, is a sign of successful racial integration, the humanising of black and white folks in each others’ eyes.
There seems to be something to my friend’s hunch that racial exclusivity in sexual choices reflects a psychosexual inability to view ‘the other’ as fully, and basically, human. This thought dovetails our natural impulse to explore things that are foreign. One of the biggest tragedies of ‘growing up’ is that our childhood fascination with exploring stuff (think of the baby, that most intellectually curious of creatures, yanking at every object in its way!) dies before puberty. Throw in the psychological damage caused by Apartheid, a system which criminalised any fascination with difference, and our natural impulses flew into exile.
Against this backdrop, greater interracial dating in post-democratic South Africa would signal the growing impotence of our racist psychologies. Does all this mean that sexual preferences are not all that innocent, then? Should I feel ashamed of, or at least regret, dating only black partners?! An affirmative answer would be hasty, I think, even if we warmed to the idea that sexual choices might reflect the extent of our comfort with others.
We must separate psychological accounts of the origin of our preferences, from the very different issue of whether it matters that those origins might be embarrassing. Imagine, for example, you are an absolute sport fanatic, spending seven days a week at the gym, and taking part in a team sport or two over weekends. You also know that your deeply insecure dad – bless him! – forced you, sometimes near-violently, to participate in sporting activities, just so he could live vicariously through your sporting prowess, having been pretty useless in his day. This sounds like a tragic origin of your adult love affair with health and fitness. Does this mean you should tone it all down, and substitute a few gym visits with trips to McDonalds instead?! Surely not.
Similarly, while it’s true that sexual preferences can reflect tragic earlier life experiences, it does not follow that one has a moral duty to now change one’s preferences. It simply means that we understand where our sexual tastes come from. It is up to us, as individuals, to decide whether we like these tastes we are saddled with, or whether we want to take steps to alter them. Though, heaven alone knows what steps would work - therapy?! hypnosis?! I, for one, would find it difficult to have a pep talk with my sexual hormones, “Friends, PLEASE organise me a few erections when I see white peeps! Please?! In the name of racial integration?!” I’m perfectly happy to remain enthralled with the black body.
Furthermore, what seems like a supposedly healthy and innocent fascination with difference and variety can also sometimes land us in hot ethical waters. There’s a fine line between indulging in interracial bonding, and fetishising ‘the other’. The number of times someone has used the pickup line, “I’ve never been with a black guy!” in the hope of bowling me over, continues to shock me. While I am all for giving substance to the word ‘pluralism’, a word I bandy about every other day, the flip-side is that we must avoid unhealthy obsessions with others.
This is not a warning against interracial relationships. It is a cautionary tale about the danger of trying to turn multiculturalism into something of a normative ethical theory. There are also prudential reasons why we might choose to date someone from a certain group. Almost all of my black American friends on fancy scholarships at Oxford made it clear that they would only marry a black partner when they returned to the States. They left jungle fever experiments for ‘studies abroad’. They thought they’d get greater political mileage out of dating their ‘own kind’. It is interesting to guess, for example, how Obama’s candidacy might have played out if he had a white partner. Would a greater number of white Americans have warmed up to him? Would black Americans have doubted his ‘black credentials’?! One driver of white America’s support for Obama (if you’re into pop psychology theories about voting patterns, like scholar Shelby Steele, who punts this particular view) is that voting for a black President was a form of racial redemption for many whites. If so, an interracial couple running for office might have elicited fewer white votes from those seeking an opportunity to ‘prove’ their non-racism. All this is, of course, speculation – but the truth it speaks to is that choices about who we sleep with, and who we marry, are irreducibly complex, and deeply personal. It is surely ok if I choose Michelle partly because it helps me get to the White House – or, even, because it is easier to introduce her to the family, and mama’s unhealthy ‘soul food’ (unless of course, mama is white, and not into soul anyway!)
In the final analysis, we should think twice about imposing norms on each other for how to pick bedfellows. . Morality does not and cannot dictate to our erotic yearnings or the responses of our privy parts. We don’t need to be equal opportunity lovers. While sexual tastes clearly can betray our deepest anxieties and prejudices, we should also learn to just chill about this issue. Like sin, prejudice can be fun. When the prejudice is innocuous, like my choice of a mommy or daddy for my kids, then we’d all do well to keep away from overzealous moralists trying to take the fun out of loving. Sex, like religion, should not be politicised.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Monday, January 4, 2010
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