Full moon in Scorpio: Sex, race, and stereotypes
Why I suppressed my inner Miranda July
After my first marriage ended in the early 2000s, many a friend harangued me about getting out there and “hooking up”, something that I didn’t even do back in my 20s. Doing it in my 40s sounded desperate. Hooking up meant I’d have to do things like stop shaving my head, learn how to flirt, and get my parts waxed.
Side note: Have you ever had to help an aesthetician pry your butt cheeks apart because the one she was holding slipped and the wax glued them together? Fun times.
In any case, I signed up for a popular dating app here in Switzerland. Because I was new to the whole thing and naive, I described myself honestly: petite, fit, and Black.
Like I said, naive.
My inbox filled up quickly with messages like “I love black women!”, “I’ve always wanted to f*ck a black woman!” “How much?” and the pièce de résistance follow-up from one interested party when I didn’t respond, “PLEASE!”
Granted, language was probably an issue because I wrote my bio in English and stated that I was a native English speaker, so maybe some of the potential suitors took to Google Translate to craft their introductions. But it was pretty clear to me what was happening; because I’d shared in my description that I was Black, visions of exotic, sexualized, and stereotypical scenes started dancing in their heads. There was no talk of getting to know each other. No talk of partnership. No talk of “let’s have dinner”.
I’m sure they even wondered if I had a bone in my nose.
Here was my dilemma. On the one hand, I was a newly divorced woman in her 40s, slowly, and I mean slowly, becoming open to a sexual awakening of sorts. On the other, by possibly embracing and acting on that sexual awakening, I felt like I was in danger of activating the racist, colonialist fantasies white Swiss men had of Black women. Note: I must say not all white Swiss men, but there was a particular segment of the population who - at least back during that time - only had contact with Black women through sex tourism and / or sex work (which is legal here). Within the framework of how closed off Switzerland was and still is in some areas, you can sort of understand how they formed their opinions. I guess.
Also: sex work is work. It’s a job. My issue was with the assumption held by some white Swiss men that all Black women were either sex workers or highly sexualized by default, and how dishonorably these men treated Black women - including Black women who happened to be sex workers - because of this.
The character in Miranda July’s All Fours probably didn’t have to think about these things.
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July’s best-selling novel tells the story of a 40-something perimenopausal person who has an affair in the midst of a sexual awakening. It’s the most straightforward but complicated, beautiful, irritating, and squishy unfolding of emotions, thoughts, longings and neurotic tendencies I’ve read. I loved the book and wanted to toss it out of the damned window at the same time. This was probably because I saw a lot of myself in it, except for one thing: race wasn’t involved.