subject: Hot Halle Berry Sex Actress | Hot Hollywood Sex [print this page] Sometimes, this weariness comes over you that's got nothing to do with tiredness. It's part contempt, part boredom and part real revulsion at the totally predictable. (I realise I've set myself up for the quip you're now making, but go ahead and snigger at my expense, anyway.) When I read recently that the 1967 film Guess Who's Coming To Dinner was to be remade, "with a twist", I knew at once what it was going to be. "Oh nooo," I moaned to myself, "it's going to be a black family this time, and their daughter's going to bring home a white man!"
How did I figure that, you might wonder. Why didn't I think that the twist might be the young black son of a middle-class family bringing home a white girl, say? Well, for one very simple and extremely unwholesome reason: that currently in Cinemaland, white men are allowed to have sex with black women until the sacred cows come home, but white women certainly aren't allowed to have sex with black men - or even to indicate, by thought, word or deed, that they find them attractive. This isn't a unique situation - it's happened before. During slavery.
Think about it. Look at Halle Berry: when was the last time she had sex with a black man for the benefit of the paying public, despite having been married to two of them and never, so far as I know, been romantically linked to a white man in her (real) life? She just doesn't. She's there to show her breasts to John Travolta in Swordfish, her butt to Billy Bob Thornton (as the racist prison guard in Monster's Ball who killed her black husband, no less) and heaven knows what to Pierce Brosnan in the forthcoming Bond film.
And thus it has been for a long, lonely time - from Pam Grier with a sob and a sneer in Jackie Brown to Beyonc Knowles with a knowing smile in Goldmember. Black women exist on screen for the eyes of white men, be they the stars with their swimming pool eyes or the wankers in the cheap seats. On the other hand, when did you last see such fine specimens of manhood as Will Smith and Denzel Washington romancing white leading ladies? Film insiders were nervous when, a decade ago and red-hot off Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer insisted on making the interracial love story (and much more) Love Field. And although, in the opinion of the world's greatest film writer, David Thomson, it was "astounding... her best work yet", the film failed to achieve major distribution both here and in the US. Commercially at least, Pfeiffer's career has never bounced back - America's sweetheart defiled by Jungle Fever. Denzel Washington, on the other hand, has consciously avoided black/white romance in his films.
The few occasions when white women and black men do dare get horizontal on screen tend to be treated as suitable cases for treatment, rather than celebration. In Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, such unions were deeply destructive and alienating, taking the white racist line so far as to adopt the slang for such unions. Imagine Monster's Ball being called Jungle Fever - or even the next James Bond, come to that. But a white man and a black woman? That's "real". A white woman and a black man, however, that's either sick and exploitative (Selma Blair in Storytelling) or shallow and trendy (Claudia Schiffer in Black And White). Or just go all the way and remake Othello.
Black men are a problem for white racists. With the other racial types, they can use un-manning language to put them down because, stereotypically, they're smaller, frailer, more feminine or bookish - Asian, Oriental and Jewish men have all come in for their share of this faint praise. But you can't dismiss the average black man like that. Indeed, as the hourglass white blonde woman can seem the perfection of her gender, so can an athletic black man - think Marilyn Monroe and Sidney Poitier, or the young Cassius Clay. More often than not, they make white men look not quite finished. This may not be fair, but - just as most white women can't live up to the ideal of Monroe - it is a fact.
