I love movies.
I like a TV series with who-dun-its.
I simply love a good story therefore I hate reality T.V.
For most of the years I was coming up, I didn't have much of a choice but to read, watch, and watch white people in books, movies, and television. I sprinted to the books, movies, and television when black people were showcased, as many black people did prior to the turn of the century. But mostly what I was reading, watching, and watching was white people.
I don't know when I stopped watching stuff with all white people. The one exception is period pieces. For some reason my mind accepts that black and brown people don't exist if the show is about rich white people who are not in this country.
Other than Kinsey Millhone, somehow at some point I must have gone cold turkey on the white woman novels years and years and years ago and just didn't mark the occasion. I must have. Because I just read this novel by a white woman about a central white woman character and there were a few things that seemed shockingly familiar.
I ran out of beach reading material while on a vacation so I went to a used bookstore. Tons of books, not much selection for a black woman like myself. So I chose the book based on the fact that the author has sold 60 million books.
I should have known it was a semi-romance novel with a murder or two. I should judged the book by it's back cover as it had a picture of the older white woman author. Usually, older white woman author + 60 million books sold = formula romance novel.
White female character A --let's call her Jane-- is frail just having awakened from a coma and in need of rescue from a bad guy who put her in that coma. Jane the frail white woman doesn't want to impose on the big, handsome white guy who already has a girlfriend, female B (lets call her Becky) who is white-beautiful TOO but BIGGER and athletic, who is missing.
The first thing handsome white man notices about Jane is that she is "frail" and that she looks to be about 12 pounds underweight (not 10 pounds, not 20 pounds, "12 pounds") like he put mental calipers on every inch of her body. No wonder teenage (white?) girls are worried about thigh-gap?
Jane (woman A) feels overprotected by competing strong men and stomps off in one scene. Eventually she does something stupid and gets kidnapped as "smart" as she's supposedly been throughout 3/4s of the novel. More than one of the men in the story acts like he may be in love with Jane but is really a brother/father figure --so nobody gets hurt by the end of the novel when she falls in love with the main white guy who rescued her.
Her white physical features not being like mine at all and her tendency to think anxiously about the conversations grown ups(men) are having in front of her instead of saying anything out loud until she is gently coaxed over and over aside, the thing there were a few things that bothered me about this Kay Hooper book written in 2000 not 1960:
A) RACE - I've read this story 1000 times if I've read it once no matter which author wrote it over the last few decades which means I've been told that my looks are no good 100 different ways 1000 times.
B) RACE and GENDER - The frail, must be rescued woman thing seems as exclusive to white women as baby-talking your way through an adult argument which means I've read that my femininity is wrong 1000 times as well. (Of course all white women don't do this but it appears that all the women who get away with this are white -- if books, TV, and movies are to be believed. Black women can't even get away with this in fiction. That black female frog princess of Disney's didn't get to be frail and wilting and fainting for one minute, and she was a cartoon)
C) GENDER - When Becky's body is found, white guy's law enforcement buddies tell him his girlfriend Becky was:
1) beat up badly
2) tortured, fingers broken, face a mess
3) she had barbed wire around her wrists that maybe made her bleed to death
4) but if she didn't bleed to death she was in a room under a construction site, she smothered to death as she was basically buried alive.
The law enforcement buddies tell white boyfriend all of this while they stand outside the room where her body lay, and the stuttering question the white guy has about his dead girlfriend Becky is,
"Was she....Was she...(gulp) Was she...um...raped?"
The law enforcement buddies say, "No" she wasn't but give one another the look that says she was indeed raped.
Got it? No? Let us review:
- face disfigured from torture, days worth of beatings for information
- fingers broken
- bleeding enough to have bled to death
- buried alive
- burns on her too, I think
- raped
Out of this list of things, the thing too horrible for the boyfriend to even contemplate happening to the woman he was planning to marry is the rape?
Really? What is that about? More importantly, how many times have I read something that communicated the same thing and NOT noticed it.
Is this reflective of virginity worship in patriarchal society?
The dead girlfriend wasn't a virgin or virginal when she was alive. But in patriarchy world, if a man has sex with a woman for four months does she grow a new virtual virginity?
Does he imagine the kitty is his, has always been his, and will always be his?
Is it a kitty ownership thing? White guy is going to sleep better knowing she was beaten, broken, and bleeding for days on end before she was put in a place with no air, so long as he doesn't find out that other men touched his kitty before she went into the great beyond?
Is this about his honor rather than ownership? Is his manhood damaged because somebody else touched his kitty and he didn't defend her? Dead is okay. Raped before dead is not okay and impugns manhood?
How many times have I read something like this and not noticed what it's saying to me?
How many girls, and especially black girls, are being brain damaged by this?
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