Perhaps some of the more long-term members here will be surprised to learn that I am the unnamed party to whom Pieterjoke is referring in his post; or perhaps they will not. I shall now put my side of the story, because
Rashomon is a wonderful movie.
But I want to preface this reply by saying that I feared that what I had to say would be misconstrued in this way, and taken by Pieterjoke as a personal attack, rather than in the more nuanced, context-specific way that it was intended. I do not believe Pieterjoke to be some out-and-out racist or to have acted maliciously in any way; but I
do perceive (on a daily basis) certain shortcomings in much of the current education system within Europe (and doubtless not only on this continent) which can lead perfectly well-educated and well-rounded people to arrive at making crass racial generalizations and divisive statements without even being aware that they are doing so.
I'm only taking this serious because someone with who I had nice conversations with suddenly don't speak to me anymore, put me on ignore
The context here was crucial in my choice to place Pieterjoke on 'ignore'. He and I had exchanged precisely three PMs, before he commenced the fourth one with the line, "Why don't the blacks accept they don't have bigger dicks?"
Perhaps the clumsiness of the wording got to me, perhaps the underlying divisiveness of 'white
versus black' which implicitly informs the sentence aggravated me, perhaps the image of the patrician 'white bwana teaching the poor blacks about their own bodies' crept into my mind a little too long. At any rate, what led me to reach my decision to reach for the 'ignore' button (some 24 hours later, after a certain amount of contemplation) was primarily the fact that this was a guy with whom I'd exchanged
all of three PMs, and who felt comfortable to write a sentence like this to another white-guy-whom-he-barely-knew so early in their shared communication.
Ultimately, I decide to 'bail out' at that early stage, because I
personally felt uncomfortable to pursue communication with anyone who would
consider writing such a sentence to me when he barely knew me in the first place. That is the specific context here, and I might well have spent more time discussing the matter with a long-term friend or acquaintance; in that regard, I will readily put my hands up to having taken the (illusorily) 'easy option' of choosing to 'ignore'.
he thinks:
- I have lacking powers of critical and analytical thinking
This is a
very broad comment relating to "placing all one's belief in a single source," and relates to the fact that this entire thread was predicated on one single assertion within the pages of a glossy 'popular science' magazine. However, it was also an articulation of the concern I feel
in general for an entire generation that has all too often been allowed to take 'single source data', often drawn from Wikipedia or similar online one-stop shops, as gospel, without feeling the need to analyse the data more deeply, or to undertake their own original research.
- I'm indicative of a general shortcoming within the education system
Again, this is a remark which was intended in a very broad context, both in terms of the comments I made above, but also in relation to what I consider to be the foremost shortcoming of race-related education throughout almost all of Europe at the current time, even at university level on much of the mainland continent. Namely: the inability to make white people realise that 'being white' is
not just a biological marker, but carries with it all kinds of sociocultural baggage, placing one automatically in a position of privilege, due to the society and culture that we live in having in essence been created 'by whites for whites'; that is to say, we live in a society that sees and constructs 'whiteness' not as a racial marker, but as 'normality', and everything else as 'racial otherness', and as such 'abnormality'.
- I have shortsitedness, lacking empathy, and (intended or unintended) cultural divisiveness
To my mind, the phrase "black guys don't have larger dicks than white guys" is inherently divisive, since it is predicated on an unspoken notion of race as being structured in terms of "them
versus us". Which is connected directly with...
- a lacking knowledge of the history of the stereotype as the creation of a white-led hegemony
...which, once again, was intended as a
very broad criticism about the kinds of thinking and knowledge which are not addressed within general education in Europe at this time. What I was referring to here is the fact that, within white-centred discourse, the stereotype of 'blacks having big dicks' was historically used for a very specific purpose; to promote notions of disgust in whites towards interracial relationships and so-called 'miscegenation'; one finds the stereotype most strongly represented in popular and institutional sources alike in the US context during the era of segregation and anti-miscegenation laws, and in the European context, during the colonial era, when whites were settling in Africa and elsewhere, and immediately after World Wars One and Two, when it was presented in relation to 'marauding black American soldiers'.
The white-led mythology of 'black hypersexuality' came hand in hand with two particular stereotypes: the notion of 'oversized' black penises, and the notion of 'oversized' black babies. The latter has already fallen into the realm of seeming beyond archaic, even though one can find it evidenced in the British context (by way of example; it was equally prevalent elsewhere) as early as the reign of Elizabeth I (as a consequence of the presence of black sailors at English ports) and as late as the 1950s (as West Indian immigrants came to Britain in larger numbers).
But in both cases, the unspoken 'message' was that
daring to 'mix blood' could be dangerous, exposing white women to fearsomely large black cocks, or to death in childbirth while attempting to give birth to an 'unnatural' baby.
Any socially dominant group, or hegemony, shapes the world after its own image. As I wrote above, much of our current society was made 'by whites for whites', shaping 'normality' as effectively a synonym for 'whiteness'. The myth of (abnormal) 'hypersexuality' residing in 'racial otherness' can be traced throughout various contexts at various times, but the white/black context remains the most potent.
With this kind of negatively-charged history of the 'hypersexuality myth' in the hands of white people over the centuries, it makes me feel
highly suspect towards any new attempt by someone white to dictate to black people what the "truth" is in regard to black cocks.
Indeed, the whole question of 'which race has the biggest/smallest dicks?' is so laden-down under the weight of history and unspoken sociocultural prejudices as to
always be a 'loaded question'.
The assertion of black and white men having essentially the same cock size is something that found popularity, on the basis of Kinsey's rather small and
self-measured (i.e. not under clinical conditions) sample, in particular within hippy-trippy kinds of sociological texts written during the 1960s. These texts typically had a focus on what might be termed racial 'color blindness', that is to say, they tried to promote notions of 'equality' by ignoring all signs of 'racial difference' and instead 'making everyone the same'. It's easy to see how the idea of blacks and whites having 'identical dick size' would play well within such a context.
However, there really is a lacking basis in scientific research to make such an assertion; and I can't help but feel that all one sees here is a
shift in the stereotype. Whereas the old myths, in white hands, asserted that "black dicks are too big to be normal", this new pseudo-scientific assertion seems implicitly to say: "white dicks are normal, and I guess we can allow black men to have 'normal' dicks too.. but
don't they even dare think they have anything better than we do!".
And that's
my real bone(r) of contention over this repetition, some forty years on, of a pretty much unfounded assertion based on one piece of questionable research; it seems to be based in a misguided notion of equality that is in fact a mask for continued
covert racism. As things stand,
any attempt to generalise dick size along racial lines carries far too much historical baggage to ever serve a merely 'innocent' purpose; indeed, what purpose could it
ever truly serve, other than one of divisiveness in this imperfect world we inhabit? Maybe black guys do have larger dicks, maybe they don't; but the only dick that really matters to me is the one attached to the guy in my bed on a given night of the week. To even
want to make a new stereotype just to replace an old one seems like the apex of fruitlessness to me.
What would you do. I'm mad, because it is so mean to think that.
I will apologise here unreservedly, because I know that you took everything I had to say personally; and that always hurts. I can only say that I was looking at the situation in much broader terms, as I've tried to outline above. Yes, I made a bit of a snippy decision to place you on 'ignore', but after just 3 PMs having been exchanged between us, I hardly thought it would be taken as such a huge issue; however, again I apologise. I ought to have taken more time to outline my thoughts as I have done above here; but writing "War and Peace" takes
such a long time.
