One of the best-known stock characters of white supremacist lore was the Other Man. This character referred to the male outsider who lusted dangerously after white (or white Christian) women, raping and seducing the innocent ones and copulating wantonly with the more lascivious ones. While the most famous example of the Other Man was the black male in the Old South, men from other cultural communities found themselves cast in this role as well: Jews in Nazi Germany, Filipino immigrants to the United States in the 1930s, and South Asian men in colonial India. No less a racist than Adolf Hitler thundered about the "black-haired Jewish youth who lurks in wait [for the German girl]." Whatever the time, place or ethnic group involved, though, one thing about the Other Man remained the same: he posed a sexual threat to decent white women, so they had to be protected from him.

When the civil rights movement rolled around in the 1960s, it seemed that the Other Man -- the stereotype, that is, not the men to whom it was assigned -- would be banished to the realm of the politically incorrect. But not permanently, it turns out. The Other Man is in the process of being revived. This time, however, his resurrection isn't being engineered by pseudoscientific racist publications such as Mankind Quarterly that rant about the purity of the Caucasian gene pool and the white female reproductive system. Now the Other Man is making a comeback in women's magazines like Cosmopolitan, which purport to be liberal and sensitive to race-related issues. Nonetheless, Cosmopolitan's depiction of the Other Man isn't that fundamentally different from the white supremacists': once again, non-white males are being portrayed as sexual threats to American women.

Cosmo's revival of the Other Man occurred in an August 2000 article entitled "Destination: Danger. A Must-Read Report if You Love to Travel" by Andrea Todd. Opening with the words "more and more young American women are setting off to exotic locales and coming back with memories of harassment and sexual assault… if they come back at all," the article describes the dangers faced by American female tourists visiting Third World countries. Such dangers include sexual harassment, rape, physical violence, and even murder. Todd gives examples of American women who have run into such situations. She ends the piece with a number of tips on how women can avoid these experiences.

Few people would quarrel with Todd's attempts to warn women about rape, sexual harassment and worse. But there is something disturbing about her implication that women run a greater risk of such misadventures in non-Western countries than in Europe or America. And she makes the distinction between the West and the Third World quite clear: while women shouldn't worry in a "well-touristed city in Europe," traveling to Africa, Asia and South America carries "some very real risks." In other words, when American women decide to venture outside the so-called "civilized" world, they'd better be careful.

The reason for these risks stems from the fact that American women's seemingly liberated lifestyle puts them at odds with many non-Western cultures' ideas of gender roles. According to Todd, "things that we think nothing of -- traveling alone, remaining unmarried after a certain age, and even having drinks with other women in a bar -- can seem strange and offensive in other countries." As a result, Third World men tend to view American women as "fair game," thus leaving them vulnerable to rape, sexual harassment, and violence. "No one is as much at risk as American women [for these crimes]," Todd explains.

American and other Western women may indeed appear "loose" to Third World men. It's far from clear, however, whether their chances of being raped, harassed or killed are any higher in developing countries than they are at home. For instance, Todd begins by recounting the murder of Emily Eagen, a nineteen-year-old Antioch College student, in Costa Rica. Eagen's death was undoubtedly a terrible tragedy. Yet her sister Sarah's -- and Todd's -- contention that Emily was murdered because she was an American woman in Costa Rica raises a number of questions. After all, throughout the world men are more likely to die violently than are women. Even more significantly, the disparity between male and female homicide victims is much greater than average in the supposedly "macho" areas demonized by Todd and her ilk. Whereas in the United States, for example, nearly four men are killed for every murdered woman; in Cali, Colombia the homicide rate for men is nearly sixteen times higher than that for their female counterparts.

It's also doubtful whether women have a greater chance of being raped abroad than they do in the good old US of A. The Middle East is often portrayed as a danger spot in this regard. One woman in Todd's article describes being groped by a local man in Amman, Jordan, and another was forcibly sodomized by an Egyptian journalist in Israel. While these stories are disturbing and while women should take precautions against unwanted sexual advances, there's no proof that such incidents are any more common in Amman or Cairo than in any large American city, where rape and other violent crimes against women are spiraling out of control. And the women far most likely to be raped in the Middle East are not Americans or Europeans but Filipinas and other Asian women working in the region as domestic servants. But just like the white supremacists who obsessed about black men "defiling" Caucasian women but who ignored the white man's rape of African-American women, Todd shows no concern about the plight of Asian rape victims in the Middle East.

Todd's depiction of non-Western men as sexually out of control in the presence of white women similarly bears an eerie resemblance to the white supremacists' portrayal of black and other minority males as constantly on the prowl for white female flesh. In the Southern United States, for instance, many black men were lynched for "looking" at white women the wrong way. Given the widely held notion that blacks had "such insatiable sexual appetites that they had to go beyond the boundaries of their race to get satisfaction," there was no doubt in white society's mind as to what intentions lay behind those looks. At the end of her article Todd advises American women abroad never to shake hands with a man. It could be seen as an invitation to something more. Yet it seems racist to assume that a gesture as innocuous as a handshake would drive an Asian, African or Latin American man but not, say, my brother's WASP colleagues at the law firm to commit rape.

Cosmo also assumes that all sexual relations between American women and Third World men involve rape or coercion. Evelyn Hannon, the editor of Journeywoman.com, warns her readers about the dangers of socializing with non-Western men: "if you do go on a date, you're really playing with fire," she admonishes them. But what if "you" -- the white American woman -- actually want to have sex with the man in question? God forbid, surely no self-respecting American woman would degrade herself by letting a man of color enter her vagina. Hannon and Todd refuse to even consider the possibility that a woman from the greatest country in the world might wish to sleep with a so-called savage.

Of course women -- whoever and wherever they are -- should be made aware of the possibility of sexual assault and take precautions to avoid it, and in all countries, governments, law enforcement agencies, and society in general should work to eliminate this horrible crime. But it's another thing to demonize non-white men as the greatest threat to Western women's safety. Rape is a human problem, not one restricted to certain cultures. And we should always be wary of resurrecting the Other Man in the name of protecting women.

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