Sarah was never exhibited naked, nor did she allow French surgeons to examine her genitals when she was sold to be shown at the Palais Royal, in 1814. But after she died of alcoholism in 1816, aged just twenty-six, Georges-Frédéric Cuvier (1773–1838) dissected Sarah’s body and published a detailed account of her anatomy. His report is well known, as is his lengthy, voyeuristic description of Sarah’s vulva, buttocks and brain – which he likened to that of a monkey.{11}
Cuvier preserved her brain and skeleton, and put her genitalia in a specimen jar. Several body casts of Sarah were made, as was a wax mould of her vulva, which were put on display at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle until 1974. In 2002, the president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, secured the repatriation of Baartman’s body and the various plaster casts from France to South Africa, and she was finally laid to rest in Hankey, in the Eastern Cape province.
The nineteenth century was the golden age of physiognomy, a thankfully debunked practice of ‘reading’ a person’s character through their physical appearance. Early criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) theorised criminal tendencies could be predicted by studying physical features. One ‘criminal’ trait that physiognomists believed they could read in a person’s body was prostitution. Considerable research was undertaken by scientists such as Adrian Charpy (1848–1902) to examine the genitals of sex workers, which were directly compared to those of black women to deduce a highly sexed woman.{12} Charpy claimed that both the prostitute and the ‘Hottentot’ had hypertrophied labia, which signified a base sexuality. In his 1893 book La donna Delinquente, Lombroso directly compared images of the body of the black woman with that of the prostitute in order to ‘prove’ the deviant, animalistic nature of both.{13}
Although this chapter is primarily concerned with the colonising of black women’s genitals, it’s important to acknowledge that Europeans were equally fascinated with, and threatened by, black men’s genitals. The mythology of the ‘big black cock’, or ‘BBC’ as it is categorised on porn sites today, also finds its roots in earliest colonial propaganda that black men are sexually savage, animalistic and dangerous.[17] Just as the black woman’s genitals and buttocks were read as ‘evidence’ of her promiscuity, the black man’s penis was also considered proof of a hypersexual, bestial nature. In 1904, Dr William Lee Howard published ‘The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization’ in the journal Medicine. Here, Howard claimed that the ‘large size of the African’s penis’ would prevent him from ever being ‘civilised’ or ‘moral’ like the white man. Howard suggested that the black man’s cerebral development stopped at puberty, and that ‘genetic instincts [become] the controlling factor of his life… He will walk the alleys late at night with a penis swollen from disease, and infects his bride-to-be with the same nonchalance that he will an hour later exhibit when cohabiting with the lowest of his race.’{14}
The effect of this pseudoscientific racism was far reaching and served to justify the brutalisation and sexual exploitation of black men and women well into the twentieth century. Military propaganda campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s actively drew on entrenched sexual stereotypes of women in the colonies in an attempt to lure European men into the colonial armies.
The colonial postcards of the time emphasised the breasts, exaggerated buttocks and nakedness of women of colour in order to signify their sexual availability to European men. The women in these postcards are simply window dressing – props to affirm colonial power. They are reduced to their physicality, just as Sarah Baartman was: consumables for a white audience. And it was not just black bodies the Europeans sexualised. As Africa, Asia and the Americas were colonised by Europeans the same process of sexually othering non-white women as ‘exotic’ took place.
We have no record of Sarah Baartman’s own voice. Many people spoke for her, or about her, but her own voice has been lost to us completely. We will never know her thoughts on her life, her body and her treatment. Sadly, all the evidence we have is mediated through white writers. Her experience may be shocking, but it is part of a wider history of sexualising women of colour – and of using women’s bodies to justify their oppression. We will never know what Sarah’s choices were, but women today can at least choose to be part of a narrative that fetishises them. Many women find reclaiming sexuality on their own terms empowering and work to redefine their stories on their own terms. But it is important to fully understand the history that frames such choices today.
‘As Easily Made as a Pudding’
A History of Virginity Tests
In 2017, researchers at the University of Minnesota published a systematic review of all available, peer-reviewed research into the reliability of so called ‘virginity tests’ where the hymen is examined, as well as the impact on the person being examined. The team identified 1,269 studies. The evidence was summarised and assessed, and this was the conclusion:
This review found that virginity examination, also known as two-finger, hymen, or per-vaginal examination, is not a useful clinical tool, and can be physically, psychologically, and socially devastating to the examinee. From a human rights perspective, virginity testing is a form of gender discrimination, as well as a violation of fundamental rights, and when carried out without consent, a form of sexual assault.{1}
The following year in 2018, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Human Rights and the United Nations Women issued a statement calling for the elimination of virginity testing; stating that ‘“Virginity testing” is a violation of the human rights of girls and women, and can be detrimental to women’s and girls’ physical, psychological and social well-being. “Virginity testing” reinforces stereotyped notions of female sexuality and gender inequality.’{2} There is no reliable virginity test. You can no more tell if someone has had sex by looking between their legs than you can tell if someone is a vegetarian by looking at their belly button. However, the fact that virginity cannot be proven, tested or located on the body has not deterred people from claiming otherwise.
17
For a detailed history of race and the penis, see David M. Friedman,