Comments

1. Marsha wrote:

   I have met several men (and women) like the guy on this show. I’d be willing to bet my right arm that those people are the same people that pulled their eyes back in elementary school and made fun of their Asian classmates for having “chinky” eyes. Now, they just want to look sophisticated and cool. As soon as they learn I’m 1/2 Peruvian they are oohing and aaahing over me and bending over backwards trying to prove how “international’, “traveled”, and “well educated” they are when in fact, I’m just as American as they are. I think that type of attitude comes from Bourgeois Americans who associate travel with being cultured and the rich who they aspire to be like. The funny thing is that most people I know who are rich don’t act like that… Pathetic.

   Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 8:48 am ¶

2. Francis wrote:

   There is a big difference between vacationing, partying it up, doing nothing but outdoor “experience” activities and actually submersing, engaging yourself in the area, the community, the culture in the day-to-day experience. The latter only comes with staying in a location for more than, oh say 2 weeks.

   That’s exactly what I’ve found out! A lot of people wrongly assume that going on holidays = experiencing a culture, implying that in a week you can get the full grasp of a culture.

   Living abroad I’ve seen first hand that experiencing a culture involves:
   studying the basics about the Hirsoty and the geography of a countrylearning enough of the language to be able to communicate with localsunderstanding body language (distance when speaking, gesture, display of respect, etc…)tasting some local food

   Someone once said “Every experience of travel is an experience of humility“. Could’nt be more true. I met some families in the military who have been stationed in Europe for decades. The sad thing is they never befriended locals or even bothered to lean the basics of the language.

   Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 9:02 am ¶

3. mtevc wrote:

   sadly, the woman of indian descent called herself exotic…i would say she isn’t exotic…she’s indian…what the heck does exotic mean anyway, when referring to people??? someone get her head examined…

   Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 9:54 am ¶

4. dcase wrote:

   Craziness! It is ironic but yesterday I had coffee with a woman of Indian ancestry who referred to herself as “exotic and sensual” during a casual conversation about problems going out in a college town. I could only laugh because I was speechless and could not believe a scientist would say something so absurd. Then,my friend (a male) who was also at the table agreed with her with a grin and complimented the blond highlights in her black hair. WTF? I had to get up for a second after that.

   Seriously, it reminds me of earlier discussions here concerning the stereotyped internalizing ostensibly “positive” stereotypes about their group.

   Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 10:36 am ¶

5. mtevc wrote:

   hey dcase, sounds like your white and indian friend were prepping for a bit of tawdry, taboo ridden interracial exotic sex…oh goodness…as long as people keep up these fantasies about the “other” and as long as some of us see ourselves as the “other” then we will always be lost!

   Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 2:53 pm ¶

6. mr guy wrote:

   Question.Is there ever a time when a (non white) woman can describe herself as exotic and not be bad?I mean some women descible themselves as that even without bringing race into it.I’m just wondering.

   Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 5:11 pm ¶

7. tmk wrote:

   i guess for some people, exotic is a compliment and something to compete for.

   On the other hand, there are other people who condemn the word, because it reminds us of colonialist mentalities.

   Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 5:33 pm ¶

8. Merq wrote:

   Mr. Guy,
   In its most basic, the word “exotic” means “foreign, not indigenous, intriguingly unusual or different.” Of course, by that definition, anyone can be considered exotic to someone else (from a different locale).

   I think it gets especially troublesome when:
   1. One “type” of person is constantly referred to as exotic.
   2. A person actually describes herself as exotic.

   After all, is it really possible for one to consider herself “intriguingly unusual?” Thus, exoticism moves dangerously close to being seen as an essentialist phenomenon. If you’re from this place, or belong to this race, you’re born exotic.

   Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 8:01 pm ¶

9. Merq wrote:

   In other words, a woman saying she’s considered exotic is a world away from actually calling herself exotic.

   Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 8:02 pm ¶

10. Charlette wrote:

    hahahahahah. Exotic to white people is dark skinned with fine hair. But the wimp whimped out and chose the Russian. He couldn’t walk the talk because his buddies would make him an outcast for sleeping with a dark woman. Yep, I agree it was the old white man’s fantacy of dark meat.
    what a blow job that nut. and the poor stupid women who defame themselves on television and for what a few dollars. Ladies please!
    What the hell is cultural experience when he is alone on a mountain. I was laughing so hard. it also reminded me of this class I took with some military people and they believed if they knew where the chinese, japanese and thai restaurants were they were crossing cultures. ahahahahah.

    Posted 29 Jun 2006 at 10:03 pm ¶

11. candy wrote:

    i hate that term exotic…it’s just another word for strange.
    everybody is different, no one is strange.

    exotic is not synonomous with the word beauty, so the media should stop calling girls from different nationality, “she has that exotic beauty”

    Posted 30 Jun 2006 at 7:27 pm ¶

12. Susanna wrote:

    From my German perspective, this dialogue is bewildering in many senses: Living in Berlin, I cannot perceive that American travellers are getting the “authenticity” they are looking for. This is not because they are not trying to, but because there is no more of that “authenticity”. American travellers are easily - and frequently - fooled, because it is so easy to fake what they want to see as “authentic”.
    Having an American cousin whose husband was stationed in Rammstein (Germany), I cannot but aggree to the comment stating that sadly, people from the military hardly get a hint of the country they’re stationed in.
    Most Americans travelling to Germany for whatever reasons do have preconceptions and expect us to meet their ideas.
    I do not understand how this guy expects to be regarded as “exotic”.
    I do not understand how he expects to be regarded as any different of the white mainstream when acting as arrogantly as anyone else of his kind. Although I do not think it is wise to label oneself “exotic” - who is he to make a statement about how American an Asian woman has to regard herself?
    Racial arrogance is the same in the whole world. Being visibly bi-racial (Sephardi - oriental Jewish - and mainstream German), I am often being labelled Afro-German, curiously maybe for the Americans among you. Since I have no influence on how I am being perceived, I use the error of their choice for my own atvantage.

    Posted 03 Jul 2006 at 6:38 am ¶

13. Stephanie B. wrote:

    This is deja vu all over again. First, it was Susan Crain Bakos fetish for black men, now this moron’s fetish for Asian women. It’s amazing that white people want people of color as experiments while maintaining their white privilege. This is white privilege written all over it.

    Stephanie

    Posted 03 Jul 2006 at 5:49 pm ¶

14. Stephanie B. wrote:

    Here’s a reply to Susan Bakos’ sickening racial fetish by E. Johnson:

    Here’s the response to the above article by ebonjonson:

    I have to say, if one were so inclined as to let this corny hag’s frothy prose air out in the sun a bit, after a while one might find there are indeed a few grainy bits of something rattling around the confines of her ridiculously general and largely put-on comments. These are not so much grains of truth as coins and crumbs of conventional wisdom, the kind of thing that sticks to a naked buttock after a romp on a heavily trafficked couch. Bakos’ basic aim with this crap essay isn’t to wax about interracial sex, it’s to vent about what she sees as the sorry state of white masculinity. Why she needs to bring the Blackman into this bit of white-on-white violence, the Blackman minding his business as he is, is beyond me. That “sorry state” bit about the genus Americanus Whiteboyus is such a commonplace that on any given Sunday no less an authority on received cultural wisdom than the NYTimes will have some or another arch dumbshit going on about it. Man-dates. Violent “good” guys on TV. That hardy new perennial, the metrosexual. Viagra suppositories. There’s so much anxiety about whether or not the assimilation of feminism into the mainstream’s DNA produces men who don’t act like “men” that racist fantasy like Bakos’ can now be deployed in polite company, this as part of a tendentious side-argument about like, female emancipation.

    Even shorn of its canned, whole-body dick fetishism, and even when reduced to corollary evidence about the “what’s wrong with white men?” thing, Bakos’ rather banal reveal of her proclivities illuminates little beyond her - wink wink you rascal! - proclivities, that and her deep racism. The barrier to understanding that is Bakos’ white privilege has been left intact despite the gaping ruin that is her racial hymen. This half-deflowering leaves her unable to appreciate how her vision of the other and his proper, laborious role in her life is just a flat, cable TV anachronism, as transgressive as Springer or Girls Gone Wild “catching” two drunk coeds rubbing their girlish nips together over winter break. I mean, of course Bakos has noticed that black and white men don’t have the same dating heebee jeebee’s. Despite great gains and growing oases of inclusion we’re still largely born and raised in parallel universes, get interpolated as subjects in different ways. Forget about the games, hustles, issues, gambits and conflicts that will come to fore when the average brother is confronted with a snooty 40+ “sex journalist” who by her own printed admission likes it up the “a” pipe. So tell me something I didn’t know, Susan.

    Despite her piece’s blatant, built-in absurdities, I can’t get particularly mad at someone for pursuing their bliss, no matter how stupid said bliss is. What I can do, though, is take the dudes who’ve been fucking her silly to task - not for turning her out, but for failing to complete her sexual education. Although there is a part of me that wants to pat these gents on the back for having so completely bamboozled old girl with the mandingo-schtick, I have to fault them for their lack of social responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility, so any privilege that accrues from the continued belief in totemic, black cock requires brothers wield their dicks judiciously, ensuring that any white women they fuck know better than to believe and traffic in this kind of idiocy. (To believe this kind of thing and to say the dumb shit AND to get paid for it outside of the porn biz is just unforgivable. Her ex-lays should put together some kind of petition disavowing her.) I mean, I’ve known (biblically) my fair share of white women, and while modesty forbids I sing my own sexual praises, I can say with great pride that I have always left them better as white people than when I found them - more, like, wry and ironized if nothing else. Apparently this call to honorable service wasn’t heard by the brothers who’ve been kissing Susan Crain Bakos’ knees (yeech!), leaving all of us that much more the poorer and skeeved out.

    Bakos pats herself on the back for being a “sex journalist” but she’s really just the rankest sort of payola eater, her discussion of black male sexual “confidence” just product placement for which she shamelessly boasts of receiving payment in inches, milliliters, stuttering orgasms, what have you. It’s not bad work if you can get it, but that doesn’t mean Crain isn’t a racial hack stealth marketing that certain, arriviste strain of post-civil rights self-hatred that infects some classes of black men like a cycline-resistant social disease. New York City is full of this kind of brother: single, middling-but-successful I-bankers and corporate lawyers, all of them the same soul age (45+) regardless of what their clocks say. These are men who disassociate from any black people they aren’t related to, and unlike the true scions of the black bourgeoisie (who have been schtupping wan Gwyneth Paltrow clones since prep school), their social status is inextricably linked to their access to white social circles.

    Bakos’ yen for such men isn’t an accident as these are basically the only dudes who will have her. She finds her level in this particular Other, a soft-focus mirror where her ignorance, age and class pretensions blur into a matched trio of assets – reciprocal desire, seasoning and sensibility. It’s clearly an expedient put-on though. If she was younger and not hung up on her class position – is she was Lindsay Lohan, for example - she’d be jocking rappers or ballplayers with a quickness instead. Too bad most of those guys, the crown princes of contemporary American sexuality, wouldn’t touch her with a 12-inch pole. They’re too busy stalking more exotic and attractive prey to settle for a Bakos.

    Instead of singing an ode to her own black-cock-hungry sexuality, Bakos is actually eulogizing her own generation of generic white women as pop sex symbols. These are the kind of “smart,” largely gentile, congenitally Manhattan white women Woody Allen has long been fascinated with, and their cultural sun will likely set with him. In the ugly, Darwinian game of sex for sex’s sake, a flavorless non-chica like I’d imagine Bakos to be is SOL with each passing multicultural year, her only recourse those poor, schmucky brothers out there who couldn’t get the “babe” when she was “twentysomething and fertile.” She derides white men for clinging to “every little slight” without appreciating how pathetic it is - of her - to exclusively cruise grown adults still in sad thrall of poon forbidden them in junior high.

    (This is just a stretch aside, but Bakos’ exuberance unintentionally retraces an arc Judith Butler identified in the career of transsexual tennis player Renee Richards, where an ageing, mediocre white male player becomes a minor star after sex reassignment surgery. There’s always power in crossing the border, right?)

    Since this piece appeared in the generally odious New York Press, Bakos can’t resist taking a smug swipe at black women who frown on brothers with jungle fever. Her blithe, particularly white female sense of entitlement in spite of her plummeting sexual value is the thing that just drives black women crazy, and really, why shouldn’t it? I mean, have you guys looked at the dating profiles BlackPlanet.com or Interracial Dating Central recently? There isn’t a fat white girl in America - two kids, ten credits shy of her associates degree - who doesn’t believe that under the right circumstances any black man from Tyson Beckford to Colin Powell will gladly get down on all fours to eat her out till her nose bleeds. (I couldn’t find a pic of Bakos online, so can’t really speak to her charms, but I’d put money on it that she’s a dog - or barring that some kind of Anne Coulterish, anorexic skank.) If white women with little to offer except creamy epidermal goodness can be accused of harboring a racially derived sense of entitlement, one can only imagine what a published author with a piece of Upper East Side real estate is thinking she deserves.

    Me, I believe in true love and all, and I am also all down for the unimpeded doing of sexual dirt, but predictability is not a turn on for me. If Bakos wants to come at us like she’s on some kind of esoteric sexual shit, she should, like, be on some esoteric sexual shit instead of faux black-white “frisson.” There are great, tectonic shifts going on in how and why people who are different from each other fuck, but you won’t hear about that from Susan Crain Bakos.

    Posted by ebogjonson

    Read it, then apply to the above situation of the young white man on elimidate, for they are similar.

    Posted 03 Jul 2006 at 5:51 pm ¶

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