We will never know how many clitorises have been cut, cauterised and circumcised throughout history, but we do know that virtually none of these procedures were necessary. The clitoris is a truly magnificent organ, and one that is still mysterious – why can some women orgasm through penetration and others can’t? Exactly how does all the equipment work together to produce an orgasm? But here is what we do know: the clitoris is the only organ on the human body that has no other purpose than to bring pleasure. It has 8,000 nerve endings, double the amount in the glands of the penis, and almost 75 per cent of women need to have their glans clitoris (the external part) stimulated to orgasm. It has taken us a long time to get here, and there is still work to be done, but we are finally beginning to see just how important the clitoris is in sexual fulfilment.
Colonising the Cunt
A History of Racial Fetishization
Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 smash-hit ‘Baby Got Back’ hit the airwaves as a tongue-in-cheek celebration of black women’s bodies – an auditory fuck you to the super-thin, white women that dominated Western beauty narratives. The video opens with two white girls criticising a black woman’s appearance and likening her to a ‘prostitute’.{1} Although ‘Baby Got Back’ has often been dismissed as novelty rap, it succeeded in raising numerous issues around race, sexuality and women that remain unresolved twenty-six years later: the whitewashing of the beauty industry, the marginalisation of the black voice and the hyper-sexualisation of women of colour, particularly black women.
The main focus of this chapter is on the historic sexualisation of black women by white colonisers. I am a white woman and I am in no position to speak for the black woman’s experience. I do not know what it is like to be a black woman in a world that fetishises black bodies. But I am a historian, and I see parallels in the language white colonisers historically used to talk about – and disempower – women of colour, and modern ‘bootylicious’ narratives. This is not a chapter that further fetishises women of colour, or offers any kind of comment on black culture. This is a history of how white people have viewed, talked about and claimed ownership over black women’s bodies, specifically their genitals.
When Europeans first arrived in Africa, they encountered a culture vastly different from their own in almost every single way. But something that immediately struck the sexually repressed Roman Catholic explorers was that Africans did not share their doctrine of ‘thou shalt not’.
When Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) arrived at the coast of West Africa from Portugal in 1441, he came from a deeply repressive culture where women could be put to death if their husbands accused them of adultery.{2} By comparison, African women danced, wore clothes that exposed their bodies and were not shamed sexually. To the buttoned-down Europeans, this could only mean that they were highly sexed. Black women were not only heavily eroticised, but also held up as sexually savage and therefore in need of controlling – presumably by white men. In A New Voyage to Guinea (1744), William Smith described African women as being ‘hot constitution’d Ladies’: ‘They miss no Opportunity and are continually contriving Stratagems how to gain a Lover. If they meet with a Man they immediately strip his lower Parts, and throw themselves upon him, protesting if he will not gratify their desires they will accuse him to their husbands’.{3} A British report on the African slave trade dated 1789 blamed the poor fertility rates of black women on the ‘prostitution of all the women in the young part of their lives, going from one estate to another during the night, and thereby contracting disorders…’{4} Such texts understood black women as being promiscuous by nature, and their very bodies seemed to offer all the evidence that was required for white colonisers to accept this as a scientific fact.
The sad case of Sarah (Sara, or Saartje) Baartman (1789–1815) has come to represent the epitome of the white West’s obsession with, and ultimate commodification of, the black female erotic body.{5} Baartman was a South African Khoikhoi woman who was taken to London in 1810 by William Dunlop, a Scottish military surgeon, and her employer Hendrik Cesars, and exhibited in sideshows as a ‘Hottentot Venus’.[16] Baartman was one of several Khoikhoi women put on display around Europe for white audiences to gawk at, though she would become the most well known. As late as 1840 a black Englishwoman by the name of Elizabeth Magnas was exhibited at Leeds as a ‘Hottentot Venus’ for six years before she died of chronic alcoholism.
What was it that white Europeans found so fascinating about these women? It was their bodies, specifically their buttocks and genitals. Steatopygia is a genetic characteristic frequently found among the Khoisan of southern Africa, whereby substantial levels of fat build around the buttocks and thighs. To white European eyes, women like Sarah Baartman and Elizabeth Magnas had excessively large buttocks, and this was enough to warrant placing them in a freakshow.
As if to justify claims that black women were promiscuous, travel writers such as François Le Vaillant (1753–1824) and Sir John Barrow (1764–1848) described African women as having large buttocks and hypertrophied, protruding labia, which they called ‘the Hottentot apron’. François Le Vaillant wrote at length about his efforts to persuade South African women to show him their genitals: ‘confused, abashed and trembling, she covered her face with both her hands, suffered her apron [tablier] to be untied, and permitted me to contemplate at leisure what my readers will see themselves in the exact representation which I drew of it’.{6} In his Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa (1806), Barrow described a Khoisan woman’s buttocks and thighs as being a ‘protuberance consist[ing] of fat, and, when the woman walked, had the most ridiculous appearance imaginable, every step being accompanied with a quivering and tremulous motion as if two masses of jelly were attached behind’.{7}
It was to audiences like this that Sarah Baartman was exhibited. Onstage, Sarah wore tight, flesh-coloured clothing, necklaces of beads and feathers, and smoked a pipe. In 1810, The Times recorded that ‘she is dressed in a colour as nearly resembling her skin as possible. The dress is contrived to exhibit the entire frame of her body, and the spectators are even invited to examine the peculiarities of her form.’{8} Even at the time, the prospect of a woman being exhibited for her buttocks caused an outrage, and many petitioned for Sarah’s freedom. Anti-slavery activist Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838) and the African Association succeeded in taking Sarah’s case to court in 1810, where she was cross-examined for several hours by an attorney to ascertain if she consented to her treatment. William Dunlop was allowed to remain in the court as Sarah testified, and even produced a contract signed by himself and Sarah agreeing to her working conditions.{9} We will never know if his presence prohibited Sarah from saying otherwise, but she told the court she was ‘under no restraint’ and was ‘happy in England’.{10} The case was dismissed.
16
The word ‘Hottentot’ dates to the late seventeenth century and was the name white Europeans gave to the Khoikhoi people of South Africa.