The Race Race
I didn't really need Sitemeter to tell me that the internet(s) is (are) the home(s) of every sort of depravity tangentially related to sex and fetishism. There are whole courses on the reduction of all things to their value of exchange in modern capitalist society at the hippie ashram enclave I studied at in my early/mid-twenties, including not only possessable (new word? yes I think so) objets de crap but people (indirectly via services) and even thoughts, so long as they can be expressed as desire.

Somehow somewhere this always came back to pornography. I'm not sure how. The history of whatever the name is of the modern American intellectual paradigm that runs unchecked through many universities wraps up race, gender and shame all together as new students are channelled into finding oppression and resistance to said oppression in every corner of the globe. Personally I think it's all a dodge to avoid having to remember a bunch of dates when stuff happened, but that's probably why I'm not in grad school anymore.

The interdisciplinary approach fuses history with sociology and anthropology and economics and women's studies (the blurry catch-all of the non-penis set), all of which have pornography as their object of study and (ultimately) condemnation. Something to do with patriarchy and hegemony and lots of other intellectual buzzwords that have to do with people secretly making other people do what they want by accidentally exerting some kind of super-powerful control they don't understand.

Fetishism and exploitation are supposedly all bound up in this little circle of self-reference and feedback, like a snake swallowing it's tail. Incidentally, snake-swallowing-tail fetish websites are huge business these days.

Being out of graduate school and completely out of other ideas to blog about (come on Ashlee Simpson, do something already!), I have decided to do an in-depth internet study about fetishism on the internet. The original idea came (with lots of torturous permutation and overthinking added on) from a recent post by Steph featuring pictures of her and some of her friends. The pictures are perfectly innocent, but I thought "You know what, some dirty fucker is out there right now looking at these in completely the wrong way because he was out on the internet trolling for pictures of 'hot asian babes'."

Once the heebie-jeebies passed, I decided to exploit Steph and her friends for blog post material. (Side note to Steph: sorry kid, it's sink or swim.)

So I will be limiting my enlightening, intense research regimen to ethnic fetishism for several reasons a) it limits the over-developed desire to humans instead of things which b) helps me not accidentally look at pictures of people shoving inanimate objects where they expressly do not belong and c) I can do it without trying too hard.

My high-quality, fool proof method will involve using the flawless modern super-research tool Google. The search string will include the word 'hot' and then a national and/or generically ethnic category (e.g. 'hot asian' or 'hot bulgarian'), record the number of hits and then list them. This will tell us once and for all, beyond a shadow of a doubt, which ethnic group people the world over find the most masturbatorily satisfactory, thus bringing the races of the world closer together.

Not sure about that last part, but it's a lofty goal to cover for the fact that I'm about to do a list as a blog post.

Ready? Begin the Exploitation and Fetishization Derby! May the hottest ethnic stereotype win.

hot black: 26.2 million hits
hot guys: 24 million
hot asian: 11.5 million
hot russian: 9.76 million
hot african: 8.08 million (most of these seem to be about hot sauce of some kind)
hot australian: 7.87 million (most seem to be weather related, believe it or not)
hot european: 7.76 million
hot latin: 7.73 million
hot indian: 7.47 million
hot greek: 6.3 million
hot latina: 4.34 million
hot arab: 3.19 million
hot polynesian: 490,000
hot uzbek: 94,400
Other: 903 million

some I was just curious about:

hot chocolate: 4.82 million
hot hot heat: 12.2 million(!)
hot damn!: 3.42 million
hot carl: 2.09 million
charlize theron: 983,000
boobies: 546,000

Well, there you have it. Once again Americans of African descent win the exploitation race. I don't know if that means they come in first or last, but there it is. As I thoroughly scanned each page('s very top line in order to find the number figure I wanted and move on) for their intrisnsic socio-historical value, I did get the vague impression that perhaps I was not returning 100% ethnic pornography results. I could go back and somehow fix it, sifting through all the data to get a result that skews more toward the "accuracy" side of things, but I think I've beat this premise to death and I desperately want to get away from it before I say something horrendously insensitive and offend myself.

Apologies to my Asian sisters and brothers out there (the research search criteria did not discriminate by gender). I know you've probably been laboring under the misconception that you were the most fetishized American ethnic minority out there, but that turned out to be just another urban legend like razor blades in apples, Richard Gere's ass gerbil and President Bush's bondage dungeon.

No, I'm totally kidding. I'm pretty sure that Richard Gere thing is true.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 2.0 (I give and I give...)



Pops

- posted by Pops @ 1:23 PM