But the Other Man concept wasn't limited to the United States or even to non-whites. Jewish men in Nazi Germany, for example, were often portrayed as lusting predatorily after Aryan women. In Mein Kampf, Hitler thundered about the "black-haired Jewish youth who lurks in wait [for the German girl]" (then again, Hitler's rant about Jews' purported sexual prowess may have been spurred by envy, as the Fuhrer himself was impotent). Even in Canada, a country that prides itself on being non-racist, anti-Semitic remarks like Hitler's were not unheard of. One 1910 Canadian account from Quebec described Jewish immigrant men as "corrupters of our women" (i.e. of white Christian women). As well, Canada at one time had a law that forbade white women from working in stores owned by Chinese men.

The Other Man couldn't have come into being, though, without a flipside stereotype: the lily-pure white female. According to this philosophy, white women were innately asexual. They saved any sexual feelings they did have for the white men they married and whose children they bore as part of their duty to reproduce Fortress Caucasia. The average white woman would be expected to shun sexual contact with men of any "race" but white (and even with white men other than her lawfully wedded husband), and so couplings between white females and minority males were in general assumed to be rape.

But such a woman trod a fine Madonna (Madonna in the sense of the Virgin Mary, not the modern-day songstress)/Whore line. If she were sexually assaulted by a non-white man or, in the case of consensual intercourse, presumed to have been "of previously chaste character" and thus seduced, society would pity her as an innocent victim. On the other hand, women who refused to play the innocent victim or deny their involvement with minority men fell off their pedestal as fast as you could say "slut." These women indeed descended to the level of the Slut (described in my essay Interracial Sex), where, being considered beyond moral repair, they usually remained.

Lynchings, the castration of minority men involved with white women, and the demonization of entire ethnic groups as sexually deviant -- it's tempting to think of these things as relics of a distant past. Nonetheless, incidents such as the 1989 murder of a young black man accused of dating a white girl in Bensonhurst, New York remind us that perhaps we haven't evolved as far as we'd like to think. Like the Slut, the Other Man has faded but not gone the way of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Jezebel

As with her male counterpart the Other Man, Jezebel wasn't confined to the United States or to blacks. Filipina women, for instance, were blamed for causing Spanish priests to break their vows of celibacy in Philippine colonial times. In the words of chronicler Sinabaldo de Mas, "[the] garb of the native women is very seductive and girls, far from being unattainable, regard themselves as lucky to attract the attention of the curate, and their mothers and fathers share that sentiment. What virtue and stoicism does not the friar need to possess!" De Mas, like European explorers and colonizers in Africa, associated indigenous women's wearing of light clothing -- a practical, not to mention hygienic, habit in the tropics -- with sexual immorality.

While Spanish-Filipina unions were probably more consensual than the outright rape of black female slaves in the American South, Filipinas' supposed enthusiasm for coupling with Spaniards was undoubtedly facilitated by a racist and classist colonial structure. Like their native sisters in Spain's American colonies, Filipina women -- and their family members -- understood that mixed-race children enjoyed social and economic privileges not given to their full-blooded brethren, so it was in their best interest to produce them.

Enthusiasm doesn't appear to be a factor in modern-day relationships between Filipinas (and other Asian women such as Sri Lankans and Thais) and men of lighter color in the Middle East. Dozens of Asian female domestic workers in that region have reported being raped by their employers. The best-known example of such a woman is Sara Balabagan. A teenager from the Philippines working as a maid in the United Arab Emirates to support her family back home, she stabbed her eighty-four-year-old employer to death when he tried to rape her (talk about a dirty old man!). She was originally sentenced to death for the killing but later acquitted following international protest.

That the Jezebel role has been assigned to Asian domestic workers in the Middle East as it was to black slave women in the Southern United States is evident in a remark quoted in Saudi princess Sultana's bestseller Princess. On explaining her sons' rape of their Thai maid, one Arab woman stated that Oriental [sic] women didn't care who they slept with. Whereas in the West, Asian women are viewed as conservative compared to their Occidental counterparts (which may account in part for the former's appeal to white men disturbed by their own women's sexual freedom), in the Middle East Asians are seen as more "available" than the local women.

The Geisha

The Geisha refers to the Asian woman who does everything in her power to please her man. While Webster's Dictionary defines the term, which stems from the Japanese words "gei" (art) and "-sha" (person), as "a Japanese girl who is trained to provide entertaining and lighthearted company esp. for a man or a group of men," the Geisha as a stereotype has been expanded on one hand to include women from other Asian countries and narrowed on the other to mean entertainment provided to white men in particular. The Geisha was immortalized in movies like The World of Suzie Wong, plays such as Miss Saigon, and Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. The mail-order bride business too has made use of the Geisha, emphasizing the wifely devotion that Filipina and other Asian brides-to-be can bring to their Western husbands.

It's easy to dismiss Suzy Wong, Madama Butterfly, and the mail-order bride racket as examples of white racism and sexism. More difficult to understand is the perpetuation of the Geisha by some Asians themselves. In an essay published in Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology, Filipina-American activist Karin Aguilar-San Juan describes Asian female partners of white men as "[splaying] themselves at the feet of white men - having rejected Asian men as too effeminate" -- a statement that essentially portrays such women the same way The World of Suzy Wong and Miss Saigon do. Aguilar-San Juan's attitude is also puzzling (not to mention inconsistent, given that as a lesbian, she admits to having slept with white women) in that many other Asian-American activists have been up in arms over the Geisha's appearance in mainstream works like Miss Saigon.

The Geisha's major defect, though, is that she just doesn't measure up to reality. As I've mentioned in previous articles, scientific studies have found that Asian women who marry white men aren't necessarily any more subservient or traditional than their sisters who marry within their race or than white women, for that matter. And far from "having rejected Asian men as too effeminate," as Karin Aguilar-San Juan implies, some Asian women seek out white partners because they find them more egalitarian than men of their own "race." For example, one Filipina interviewed in the June/July 1998 of A. Magazine: Inside Asian America states that "when Filipino women of my generation date American men, it's because they don't want the spoiled, conservative Filipino… most of the American men treat you as an equal." It therefore seems unlikely that Asian women are flocking to white men in search of an ideal of hypermasculinity.

Thus ends my series on miscegenation stereotypes. There are undoubtedly others I'm not aware of. For example, all those I've covered deal with heterosexual relationships. It might be interesting to see whether the gay community has its own gallery of archetypes regarding interracial relationships. Arab-Canadian journalist Kamal Al-Solaylee reports in the Toronto weekly Xtra! that some white gay men have internalized the Geisha image in reference to Asian men. Since I'm not gay, however, I don't feel I have the knowledge to comment on issues within that community. My articles have also largely focused on Western societies, with the exception of the portrayal of Asian women in the Middle East, though other cultures too must have their own ideas about interracial unions and the individuals who engage in them.

Stereotypes serve a variety of purposes. At the most basic level, they provide us with an easy way of categorizing people superficially rather than examining them as individuals. In addition, throughout history societies have used stereotypes to maintain the status quo. Jezebel, for instance, allowed white men to justify their dalliances with and even rape of colonized and/or enslaved women of other "races." The Other Man on the other hand served as a tool to keep white women and non-white men apart, while the Slut was used to punish women who consorted with men of color nonetheless.

In modern North America, the fading of past sexual and racial taboos has diminished the power of popular images of miscegenous men and women. Nonetheless, it is interesting and in some way socially useful to examine these stereotypes, because they tell us not only about our history and society but our psychology as well.

1. Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985), p. 38.