Letters to the Editor
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Can we go back to articles about Jen Aniston?
Some poor soul actually spent time writing this book..?
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Gordon
The intellingence, racial and gender sensitivity of Gordon's commentary, uncovers miles. . .
Gordon, You are a Dick.
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Re: Buttocks Augumentation
I don't think all Africans would laugh at buttock augumentation - when in lived in Kenya in the 1980's the Giriama women, who lived near coastal Kenya, had a custom of wrapping Khangas/Lesos (colorful cloths) thickly around their hips to make them look wider -
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Good article, ruined by last paragraph
"In the simultaneous lasciviousness and curiosity we've lavished on Jennifer Lopez's posterior, have we never stopped searching for that scantily clad totem goddess after all? We can pat ourselves on the back and feel disgusted by the story, and yet what made people leer at Baartman has the same effect on us today."
Actually we ARE far superior to those who abused, enslaved, and gawked at the Hottenhot Venus. You're trying to make us feel guilty about being attracted to big butts. Sorry -- won't work.
This was a good article, until the last paragraph, a shallow attempt to make the Hottentot Venus story relevant to today. But it just isn't.
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bilogical roots of beauty/fertility
The evolved biological functions of male/female beauty/fertility are well established and shouldn't be a mystery to anyone. The female hourglass figure goes back to prehistoric times even to privative fertility figurines. Greek goddesses were hourglass shaped. Many of the same proportioning rules apply to men.
Wide hips are necessary for child birthing.
Large breasts are needed for breast feeding children which increase in number in proportion to infant mortality. In men greater upper body muscularity is useful for manual labor.
Fat stored on the butt or breasts is a lot healthier than fat stored in and around the gut. The hourglass figure full/narrow/full is a good visual indicator of health. (Same goes for men, obviously with smaller hips.)
Round, but not overweight, forms are often associated with health and vitality.
Today, healthy, curvaceous women rarely have any problems. They're even preferred by many for timeless reasons.
Truly overweight butts however are gawked at, and for good reason. They always have been. Even Reuben painted idealized large women whose fat was incredibly stylized.
In the age of gyms and McDonalds, of Hagendaas commercials and health education, big butts are an unhealthy spectacle and weighty commentary on our times.
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Moral Equivelancy
...between Jennifer Lopez and the Hottentot Venus? What BS. This reads like one of those really bad Time magazine book reviews desperately trying to tap into liberal guilt for some sort of contemporary relevance.
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racist speech act ? in what language ?
"calling the -tjie diminutive suffix a "racist speech act" "
well in Dutch, the -tjie diminutive has nothing to do with racism. People add this ending out of affection or for children's names ord childish words.
I am not saying her treatment was not racist, but that part of it does not strike me as racist. The people who hired her spoke Dutch and she was a nursemaid, meaning working with children. This ending means nothing more in Dutch as adding a "y" to dog to make doggy.
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Diminutives in Dutch
Just a minor note to this interesting article: hearing racist tones in the diminutive of the name "Saartje" (or Saartjie) seems to me, as a Dutch national, a bit far-fetched. It is by no means uncommon for Dutch names to have the diminutive, and Saartje would not have been an unusual name for a Dutch girl or woman of that period. I wouldn't, though, be surprised if research would show that this would happen more with female names than males, and Dutch society still is rather sexist, though I've known adult men familiarly called Jantje (little John) in my time as well. In general, the Dutch attach diminutives to just about everything - it's one of the most curious idiosyncracies of the language and culture.
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Not Dutch - Afrikaans
I think you have to understand the diminutive not in a European Dutch context, but in the context of Afrikaans and colonial Africa. Remember, infantalizing language was one more tool in the arsenal of disenfranchising black agency and autonomy. Just as the English word "boy" may sound quite innocous in one context, it takes on a whole 'nother meaning in the context of black-white race relations in the U.S. My guess is that, to the Khoisan, that kind of diminunization and infantalization is never innocent.
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Right.
You were doing fine until the last sentence. Your credibility went out the window when you compared an actress--a paid performer, free to do what she pleases--with a prisoner forcibly put on display.
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Interesting article
If as the review states, the author of this book never explains why this woman's story appealed to her, and more importantly, if Saartjie had no agency in her own life, is this interesting or enlightening? I'm sure it is, but for some reason, looking at the drawing on the cover of the book really disturbed me. The expression of this rendering is one of total disinterest and blankness, while she is outfitted to provoke. I agree with the poster who said you can't compare Jennifer Lopez or other paid performers to this woman. They can be coy and flirtatious in their performances to sell more of themselves. You can kind of imagine that the subject in this book had no incentive, other than to please others, to be coy or flirtatious. I'm not judging the review, the book, or Saartjie (or even J. Lo) when I say my gut reaction to this whole thing is just yuck. What comes to mind is Bill Maher's reasoning when he talked about preferring younger women to older women by saying he liked the "new car smell." It's gross.
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But she was a prisoner!
>>In the age of gyms and McDonalds, of Hagendaas commercials and health education, big butts are an unhealthy spectacle and weighty commentary on our times.<<
I'm sure Venus's captors never considered giving her fae for the journey back home. It was her captors who found themselves in financial disrepair and used their servant for lurid performance art to save them from bankruptcy court. I reckon that Venus didn't know the full scale of the English language, of disavantageous situations, and being a child herself (she was a young teenagager for God's sake)didn't possess the where-withall to break assess the dire situation she was placed in. She trusted her captors and she got screwed.
How would you like to be placed on public display for someone's elese profit and career? White America always seems to avoid this question. "How would you feel...".
Oh, and those scientists and anthropologists that displayed her genitals in pickle jars? They're straight-to-hell-assholes that knew what they were doing and knew better for doing it. Venus's treatment was RACIST AS HELL, INHUMANE. Proof: they never did this to any Caucasian woman (and like today there are tons (no pun intended) of Nordic honeys with huge asses and hanging labias that could have been on display. Why didn't they go out and find a white Venus to treat like this?
Venus was chattel, like anyone else of her race.
"The best work God ever did was put a black woman's ass on a white woman". I saw that quote written on a Illinois Central train depot wall in Chiago in the 70's when I was twelve years old. I'll bet it was written by some deranged white guy.
Fat women represent fertility, a proper life mate("she can eat, so she can cook"), a sign of comfort that the world is not so bad off and one can still cop a meal.
Yep, padding extra weight around - we can all do something about that - and we should. But Venus is a cautionary tale, her lesson is that we haven't changed much at all since she lived. We prostitute the female form, the more outrageous it is, the more we lear. Nicole Ritchie? Kira Knightley? I doubt if these girls even have menustral cycles anymore, they're so bony. But we lap them up. Both are probably far more unhealthy than the comedian Monique.
Fat-bottomed girls really do make the rockin' world go 'round.
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Hottentot Venus in Science Fiction/Steampunk
If the story of the Hottentot Venus appeals to you, I highly recommend Paul Di Filippo's science fiction novella collection, "The Steampunk Trilogy." One of its three stories is about the Hottentot Venus.
Paul Di Filippo is one of my all time favorite science fiction writers... See: Ribofunk.
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It Also Happened in the 20th Century
Read "Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo" by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume.