Venus, Venus, everywhere

Wow, so yesterday Deb sends me this link to "Sara Baartman (The Original Video Vixen)" (I see where she was going with it, but seriously, why are none of the images in focus?); then I get my Bitch magazine and read about feminist porn director Venus Hottenot; and then today Stephanie send me this (thanks, Deb & Stephanie):

Commentary: The Media, Aided by Sisters in Hip-Hop Videos, is Creating Hottentot Venuses for a New Generation

Date: Wednesday, March 05, 2008
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com

I learned something last week. And it's still troubling me.

Tim Reid, the actor and director known for his roles in the 1970s series "WKRP in Cincinnati" and later in "Frank's Place" and "Sister, Sister," recently walked an audience at North Carolina A&T State University through a presentation on how film and media has been used to keep black people mired in stereotypes to assure white audiences of their otherness.

He started out talking about "Birth of a Nation," that 1915 film that put white America on a perpetual red alert about black men by portraying them as "violent, wild-eyed bucks" whose only hope of being controlled rested with the Ku Klux Klan.

He moved on to the mammy and coon characters that reassured white audiences that despite the savagery that was ever-present in black people, most were really happy, docile types eager to serve up food or laughs.

Then Reid brought up the Hottentot Venus.

I'd always known about her, but I thought she was an "it." I thought she was a piece of African sculpture with exaggerated buttocks and breasts.

The Hottentot Venus had a name -- Saartje Baartman. She was a descendant of the Khoi Khoi tribe in South Africa who found work in the home of a Boer farmer whose brother, Peter Cezar, took a fascination to her protruding buttocks and exotic skin.

Not unlike the male rap provocateurs of today, Cezar and a British surgeon, Peter Dunlop, decided that her posterior could turn big profits for them. So in 1810, they took her to London, dressed her in a revealing silk sheath and, as one would do with an animal or object, put her on exhibit in a cage at the Piccadilly circus. Crowds came six days a week to leer at Baartman and touch her backside, as her handlers billed her as being "sex incarnate."

Baartman ultimately wound in Paris, where she drank herself to death by age 26. But her death led to more indignity.

When she died, her body was cast and dissected. Baartman's brain and sexual organs -- which scientists used to craft racist theories comparing black people to apes -- were immersed in formaldehyde and displayed in Paris' Museum of Natural History until Nelson Mandela brought her remains back to South Africa in 2002.

The idea of any woman being reduced to the sum of her parts to the point where even death isn't enough to end her exploitation troubled me.

But what troubles me more is how the media today, with the help of single-minded black women blinded by the lure of money and their ignorance of history, is creating a new generation of Hottentot Venuses.

There's Buffy the Body, whose videos show her preening and smiling as a man rubs her enormous buttocks in baby oil, and she claps her butt cheeks, seemingly in gratitude. There's Lola Luv, whose disproportionately large derriere seems more the stuff of a side show than a display of sexiness.

They are the new Hottentot women. And while some may argue that their decision to display their bodies for money is the same as what Playboy centerfolds or Sports Illustrated swimsuit models do, I disagree.

Playboy centerfolds and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models tend to be put on pedestals and treated like goddesses. The Buffys and Lolas of the world are treated like freaks. Like the Hottentot Venus, they are viewed not just as oddities, but as convenient reminders to racists that black women are naturally filled with savage, unbridled sexuality; the kind that's aggressive, not submissive -- and therefore, the kind that can only be kept in check by constant sex.

Whether they want the sex or not.

It is that kind of thinking that gave slave owners the excuse to sexually exploit black women. But there are no more slave owners. There's only slave thinking.

That's the kind of thinking I imagine must be involved when women like Buffy and Lola -- women who have far more opportunities than Baartman ever had -- decide that their buttocks is the only asset on their body worth developing.

It's sad to see them relishing being part of a freak show than rejecting it and, with the help of Black Entertainment Television, reviving racist thoughts about sexual wantonness in black women. That so many young black women shrug at performing in videos in which they are called freaks, bitches and ho's; titles rooted more in misogyny than in endearment.

All black women ought to read up on Saartje Baartman. So the next time they look at Buffy the Body or Lola Luv or any other scantily clad, large-bottomed sister gyrating in a rap video, they should picture whether, when it's all said and done, all that self-denigration will land them atop a media pedestal.

Or, like the Hottentot Venus, in a cage.