In recent weeks and months social media and television media has given me a lot to think about in terms of the sexualization of the black body. From Lena Dunham’s ignorant comments about Odell Beckham Jr. on social media to my own experience watching a television show on Netflix to the sexualization and villainization of Patricia Brown (who sparked #teacherbae), and finally to thinking about the ways that we see women (and men) of color reduced to the role of animals of the sexual or violent type.
Lena Dunham met all the wrath of Black Twitter for her statement in a Lenny Letter interview with Amy Schumer where she insinuates that Beckham seems to owe her some kind of sexual attention (because that’s what Black men do right, lust after white women?).
I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, “That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.” It wasn’t mean — he just seemed confused.
The vibe was very much like, “Do I want to fuck it? Is it wearing a … yep, it’s wearing a tuxedo. I’m going to go back to my cell phone.” It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, “This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes.”
And Beckham was confused, not at the Met, but after when she spoke of perceptions. Dunham later issued an empty apology for the statement and made it all about her. Dunham is a racist train wreck that turns her sexualized racism on men who have historically suffered most in terms of sexual stereotypes. Asian men who have had their sexuality diminished and African American men who have been hyperseualized since the antebellum days and have had that stereotype lead to their torture, castration, and murder. In a world where, in my mother’s lifetime, a 14 year old child, Emmett Till, was murdered, mutilated, and beaten beyond recognition because it was thought that he had flirted with a white woman in Mississippi.
A world where Black boys, like Tamir Rice and Tyre King, still have their bodies read as adult male bodies. Where 12 year old Black boys are murdered in parks while playing alone less than 10 seconds after police pull up to “investigate” a call of a guy playing with a gun that was “probably fake” because they are not allowed to be children. Where 13 year old Tyre King was shot multiple times in an alley in Columbus, OH last week for having a toy gun and “matching the description” of a Black boy in a hoodie who may have held up a white man for $10.
This is the world that my mother lived in, the one that I live in now, and the one that I am raising my daughter in. A world where Black bodies as animalized (sexually or violently) and where ill thought out words can instantly end a life. So Lena Dunham doesn’t get a pass, she’s done too much before. She hasn’t learned and Black people have died and continue to die because of inane comments and sexual fantasies.
And Dunham is not alone in those fantasies. We see them broadcast and re-labeled as sexual freedom. I am not much of a television watcher, if it weren’t for the shows that I watch with my daughter I’d probably watch no television at all. I don’t have cable and living in the sticks guarantees that we get no local channels, but I do have Netflix and Hulu Plus because my kiddo likes TV. And having Netflix means that I occasionally watch some fairly well curated content like Jessica Jones, Stranger Things, and recently Miss. Fisher’s Murder Mysteries because friends told me how much I would love this show with an outspoken, sexually free, feminist protagonist.
I was only 2 or 3 episodes into the show when I took to social media and asked all of my recommenders how the hell there was a show that took place in Australia but was, at that point totally devoid of people of color…not one that I had seen. Folks told me that this was one of the shortcomings of the show, but that there were specific storylines about the indigenous folks in season 2 so I jumped ahead. In the first episode there was an aboriginal boxer who was murdered and likely involved in some shady business…but for some reason I kept watching. Watching as, what other folks were calling Phryne Fisher’s sexual freedom unfolded as sexual tourism wrapped in stereotypes of Asian, Jewish, and Black men. Most notably, the episode featuring the nameless, muscled, shirtless Black movie extra (credited in the episode only as “Slave Leader”) dressed as a slave whose only line was to offer Phryne a seat on the set. The same actor who we never see her interact with again until the end of the show when we see him, naked and asleep this time…except for a pair of leg irons, in Phryne Fisher’s bed. Phryne slaps his bare ass and takes herself (already clad in a robe) down to the parlor to wrap up the details of the case that she has been working on. That ass slap signaling that she is finished not only with the case, but with her little slave fantasy.
Black bodies are still something to be consumed. Sexualized, exoticized, and commodified for the purposes of others. This is nothing new. We can trace this back to whore and mammies in the antebellum period. Breeding stocks, sexual sirens, and the mystery of the Hotentot Venus. These Black bodies are only seen as being acceptable when sexual or maternal. In the past week we have seen Patricia Brown, a paraprofessional in the Atlanta public school system, dragged through the social media mud for posting pictures of herself posing in the classroom. Ms. Brown is a curvy young woman who would find it nigh impossible to hide said curves in anything less than a burlap sack. Brown’s character and intentions when it came to her job were brought into question, but no one actually asked about the work that she was doing with the children or the joy that she seemed to experience in the classroom space. People were more concerned with her sexualization and vilification. The trending of the hashtag #teacherbae has since led to a statement from the school system, her reprimanding, and her removing some images from social media and locking down her Instagram account. Again we see a life (and possibly livelihood) affected by careless utterances. Utterances steeped in sexualized racism. Her body was inappropriate. Her clothing was inappropriate. Her sexuality is something that must be tamed.
It is this same vilification of sexuality that we see at play in video games today. It is this sexualization that becomes the baggage that these characters carry and the history and information that game designers and writers are either ignorant of hold in blatant disregard.
Sheva Alomar who plays African sidekick to white savior Chris Redfield in Resident Evil 5 who has come to save the Black people from themselves….by murdering them all. In story mode, she has a number of unlockable alternate outfits with names like Clubbin’, Tribal, and Fairy Tale which are all sexualized, but Tribal is one that is not only sexualized but exoticized based on a history of African women being more sexually “animalistic”, more “savage”. It is the same stereotype that led to the belief that African slave women were bred for pleasure and breeding (see also Saartjie (Saartje) Baartman/Hottentot Venus).
On the opposite side of the coin (at least at the beginning of the story) we have Cassandra in the upcoming Mafia 3. Looking at what Take-Two has released concerning both the game’s backstory and actual gameplay we see Cassandra as the VooDoo Queen who is the mother figure of the The Hollow. And like the proper Mama Bear she comes back for revenge after the mafia hit that kills many of her compatriots (and almost kills Lincoln Clay). Even the early marketing materials for the game illustrate this transformation as one that moves her from an almost mammy like figure to one of the stereotypical 1970’s sex symbol. She representation does a 180 degree turn from mammy to jezebel and neither representation is a positive one.
The binary representations of women of color as whore-madonna/mammy-jezebel and men of color sexual bucks or violent thugs (or a combination of the two) are ones that we continue to see in games. Sheva and Cassandra are but two of many. These people are always present to literally serve, in a platonic or sexual capacity, and typically to serve a narrative that is not their own. This is something that see see carrying over from a loaded history of racism and sexism in the culture that surrounds both the game and the gamer.
