"White sex,'' I repeated, for the third time. Not right sex or wide sex or a new drug to do it to— which is what everyone imagined when I announced the subject— everyone being white, of course.
So let me spell it out for you: White sex, as in white people, and how they fuck, and is there anything to it?
White sex is commonly referred to as simply "sex." Whenever we hear the results of a new survey about how many males over 45 watch porn videos, or the number of women under 30 who have performed fellatio, we can picture the people behind the statistics clearly enough: white men and women responding to each inquiry, scratching their heads and pressing down hard with their Number-2 pencils.
Perhaps that is our first definition; that white sex is about white people being the erotic yardstick, the arbiters of public taste, the bearers of a terribly self-conscious, but largely unspoken, standard. White sex at its most transparent is the product of white Protestant or Catholic middle/working/no-class, absolutely assimilated, English-first Americans.
Now that we're alone, let's let our hair down, even though as white people that's exactly the thing we find so hard to do. The essence of white sex is sexual blandness and rigidity. Straight white male sexuality in particular is an endless source of folk humor as the bastion of anal retention. An anonymous social critic put it perfectly in the 1960s: "You're nothing but an uptight white asshole.''
But why would anyone be a tightass, especially a white American male? Perhaps, as we've seen in so many tales about unsatisfied rich (white) Americans, there is something about the work ethic and the American Dream that entails paying an erotic and intimate price for material success. "He who has the most toys wins," reads a popular bumper sticker, but the winner may find he can't get it up anymore. Or he comes too soon. In either case, the winner, the man in charge, cannot relax. And if you can't relax, you can't get fucked and enjoy it.
What makes white sexuality so dynamic is that, having been strung up as tight as a racket, white lovers are sensitive to the least little provocation. The high watermark of white sex is the white person who loses his or her head, and becomes a bona-fide sex maniac. As the late cookbook author Ernest Matthew Mickler put it, "I can just hear Raenelle and Betty Sue at every Tupperware party in Rolling Fork saying, `Ernie went from white trash to WHITE TRASH overnight.'''
Yes, the path from repressed nerd to bohemian libertine is one bright white circle, and it can lead from the first persona to the second as quickly as a whirl of J. Edgar Hoover's slip. Let's look at a gallery of some of our most stirring White Sex stereotypes:
YANKEE WHORE: The first time I visited Central America, I had a Spanish instructor who was eager to teach me card games and talk about sex. He told me his last Americana student kept a pet boa constrictor that she used as a dildo...
Contined in Sexwise, "White Sex"
Illustration: Robert Crumb, Zap Comix #1
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