Sexuality In The U.S.: Are Chickens Coming Home To Roost?
Looking for the devil in others’ houses while refusing to face our own is self-deification
Sexual attitudes and behaviors, written by European colonization and the resulting half a millennium of dominant culture values imposition, have created, and are used to judge, sexuality in the U.S. Therefore, little is surprising about the sexual narratives dogging the Trump administration and others these days.
All things happen in context
Conquest, genocide, and colonization deconstructed and erased the ways tribal cultures had managed sexuality for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Indigenous people, particularly women, who seemingly had status in egalitarian tribal cultures, and children, were subjected to rampant sexual abuse and misogyny. Cultural patrimony has bequeathed this same horrific plague that Robin Wyatt, Professor Emeritus at the Columbia Mailman School, calls “a public health crisis” on Indigenous women. More than half of them experience sexual violence during their lifetimes. Notably, she adds, “Between 86–96 percent of the sexual abuse of Native women is committed by non-Indigenous perpetrators who are rarely brought to justice.” — Violence Against Native Women Has Colonial Roots, March 2, 2023.
Sally Hemings’ life of sexual subjugation at the hands of Thomas Jefferson is a well-documented representation of the lives lived by hundreds of thousands of enslaved women in the U.S. Enslaved women and children were property with no rights. Black women, enslaved or not, were not able to file rape charges against white men until 1861. Enslaved women, for many slaveholders, were breeders of future profits, pleasure servers, and bed warmers on cold nights. For some, children were the same. Caroline Randall Williams’ Op-Ed published by the New York Times, June 26, 2020, entitled, You Want A Confederate Monument? My Body Is A Confederate Monument sheds a bright light upon just how the colorization of sexual violence and abuse of African American women ran rampant in the U.S.
Assuredly, White women and children have not been immune to the treatment which were made a part of African American, Indigenous, and Brown peoples’ lives in general. Even Women’s Suffrage and other liberation movements, principally led by White women, were not able to dismantle what some call the U.S.’s rape culture. Perhaps because these movements try to tie patriarchy to sexual violence and abuse, which, for most white women, as is true for millions of non-White women around the world, is not a system of subjugation and control. Instead, for many, patriarchy upholds meaningful cultural and religious family values and community cohesion. And therein lies the rub! It’s difficult to maintain a half millennium of dominant class privileges while decrying the behaviors and attitudes of those who take care of you, especially when their actions are deified as stewardship over evil others.
To the victor go the spoils
Sexuality (love, lust, intimacy, values, and our gender identities) is a driving force in our existence. By conquest and colonization, Europeans imposed fifteenth-century values and customs upon all who would abide by them or were made to submit to them. To understand why Indigenous people, those who were enslaved, and many others were subjected to sexual violence and abuse, examining what was happening in Western Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is essential.
Between 86–96 percent of the sexual abuse of Native women is committed by non-Indigenous perpetrators who are rarely brought to justice
On the Iberian Peninsula, Raptus (the genesis of the word rapture), the practice of abducting women for ransom, servitude, and marriage, was common. In England, the Catholic Church was exerting control over people’s sexuality. Many sex acts were illegal, if caught, or could not be assuaged by power and class privilege. Illegitimate births and diseases were legitimate fears. And certainly proved to be fatal to many Indigenous peoples.
Sexual violence against children was rarely criminalized, UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) tells us. Consider the stipulation within England’s Westminster Rape Statute of 1576 stating that “vaginal penetration of a girl under the age of ten constituted rape, even when the child was apparently consenting.” Penetration was only verifiable by ejaculation, which would have been difficult to prove, especially as judgments often depended on the social status of the victim, his/her parents, and the accused.
“…vaginal penetration of a girl under the age of ten constituted rape, even when the child was apparently consenting”
These are the mindsets, values, and laws that were unleashed upon the New World and Africa. The remnants of which remain to this day. It’s the reason that class and caste still determine crime and punishment. It’s also the strength found in self-anointed predeterminism that tells us who goes to heaven, who goes to hell, who goes to Harvard, who goes to a community college, who benefits from the greatest country in the world, who wears white on their wedding day, and who can be fucked without responsibility or remorse.
What’s hijabs, burqas, nearly naked natives, and “Two Spirit” people got to do with anything?
When I think of the brilliance of author and activist James Baldwin, I am compelled to empathize, almost to tears, with the torturous life he often allowed us to know. The dominant culture used skin color and sexuality to discredit his candid and often explicit reflections on a culture that beat him down emotionally. So much so that he had to escape it. Mr. Baldwin refused to submit to the marginalization that labels bring. It was an embrace of the rights to liberty and self-determination that should be bestowed upon all of us.
The labels we use today are derived from colonization. Virgins, sluts, metrosexuals, LGBTQ+, gay, straight, queer, trans, binary, non-binary, heterosexual, homosexual, all, and more are ways in which we define our sexuality. They are definers that have been tribalized to give identity within a society that seeks to define our identities for us. As was the case in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe. What Mr. Baldwin was telling us, amongst many other profound societal observations and cultural critiques, is that our existences should not uphold the dominant culture’s hypocritical labeling of anyone as “evil others.” It’s a way of being that distracts us from a culture whose values, attitudes, and behaviors are measured against deeply flawed dogmatic ethics and beliefs.
Al fin: Can we have gender roles without sexism?
In one of the classes I used to teach, I’d ask the question, “Can we have gender roles without sexism?” Reaching a consensus was never the goal; wrestling with a social problem was. One evening, a West African student (I do not remember her country) really got the class going.
To paraphrase, she said,
“We each (men and women) have very different roles in my country. My man can go and be out all night. And when he comes home, I wash his feet, cook him breakfast, and lie with him if he would like before I do my housework.” Her words sent some, mainly women, into an uproar. “What!” a woman, seemingly in her late twenties, said. “And you go for that?” “Yes, of course,” the maybe forty-something West African woman replied. “He takes care of me and the children. Why would I not take care of him?” “Because you don’t know where he’s been or what he’s been doing.” Another woman, a bit older than the first, said, a disapproving look flashing across her face. “It’s not my business to know.” The West African woman replied. “I know that he came home. And that’s what’s important to me.” The first woman who spoke up snickered, shook her head, and said, “If that were my man, he’d be out in the yard picking up his clothes.” To which the West African woman replied, “Yes, and you will trade him in for the next one. And if the next one does something you don’t like, you’ll get another. And if that doesn’t work out, there’ll be another. That’s not my culture. That’s not what we believe is right.”
I have long wondered if the student from West Africa thought, as I often do, how we love to judge others when our house is so very filthy. Which, to me, is the real rub in this Trump/Epstein mess. Sure, other people have their dirt. However, our country’s challenge is more fundamental. Ours is a question of whether President Trump, and others like him, are endowed with certain unalienable rights, as conquistadors and colonizers have been, that lift them above laws and grant them dominion over others. If the answer is yes, then this drama is far more consequential than a Constitutional crisis.
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