Hello, visitor!

Article:
Meanwhile, black women are routinely snubbed on dating sites. Why do racial stereotypes persist when it comes to sex? 'As a black woman I'm always fetishised': racism in the bedroom.

Click here for african women seeking men




In a Bedfordshire nightclub, white couples queue to have sex with black men. Meanwhile, black women are routinely snubbed on dating sites. Why do racial stereotypes persist when it comes to sex? Illustration: Natasha Law @breedlondon for the Guardian. Illustration: Natasha Law @breedlondon for the Guardian. I t’s past midnight, November 2016, in Dunstable, a small town in Bedfordshire. My friend Miranda has accompanied me here for moral support. We scale a no-frills metal staircase at the end of an alleyway behind the high street, where a weary blond woman is ruling a domain of coats, cash and lists. She has a defeated manner, like the only sober person at a party when everyone is drunk. I’m wearing a too-big red dress stitched together by a very mediocre tailor in Senegal more than a decade ago. I have no idea why I decided to make myself look so dowdy. Miranda is doing much better, she has obediently put on a basque, along with a skirt much shorter than mine, and boots that elongate her long legs. She’s calmer than me, too. I’ve given the organisers fake Jewish-sounding names. It was the easiest way of manipulating our actual names without revealing the fact that we are both black. Had we sounded black, I’m not sure we would have been allowed in. As it’s our first time, Eddie – a solid black man, dressed in the standard-issue suit and a bouncer’s armband – has been asked to show us around. His presence is comforting, he seems like an island of sanity in a sea of grotesque chaos. The first thing I see, once Eddie has led us past the dancefloor and the bar, is a shaven-headed black man on his knees on a large bed, with a white woman on all fours, doggy-style. He is wearing an unbuttoned shirt, and nothing else, she is in a basque, suspenders and boots. Another man is kneeling next to him, waiting his turn. To the left, on the same sateen mattress, a woman is kneeling with her back to us, naked from the waist down. A man has his hand on her ample butt cheeks. Other men hover around the bed, beers in hand, watching. “This is one of our playrooms,” Eddie says helpfully. “It’s not too bad now, but it gets very busy later on.” I assumed men at the club would be sex workers or strippers. But these are unremarkable, middle-class black men. Arousals is like no place I’ve ever been, part nightclub, part seedy brothel and part all-out orgy. As Eddie continues his tour, we pass endless private rooms – locked, for couples who aren’t in the mood for an audience – and toilets, a shower, a cinema where five white men are half watching porn. Soon we are in “the dungeon”. There is a gold throne and a series of skulls that belong in a child’s Halloween party. In pride of place is a swing. “The sex swing is very popular,” says Eddie. Welcome to the Black Man’s Fan Club – a monthly swingers’ night for white women who want to have sex with black men, and their white husbands or partners who want to watch. In the ethnically undiverse world of swingers, the BMFC is marketed as a community of people who “appreciate the extras black men bring”. Tonight’s flyer features an intensely fake-tanned white girl wearing briefs that read, in large letters across her crotch, “I heart black”. Members of the community – both white women and black men – are active on Twitter, where they share pictures of exceptionally large black penises and rough sex in which a black man clearly dominates. BMFC, the punters tell me, is one of a kind, but the sentiment doesn’t end in Dunstable. In an era of mass porn consumption, black male porn actors having sex with white women is a popular subgenre, and BMWW (black man white woman) erotic novels specifically cater to the fantasy of crudely stereotyped black male aggression and sexual domination. It’s as if the online commercialisation of sexual fantasy has globalised racial stereotypes and sent them freewheeling backwards, it doesn’t take any imagination to surmise exactly what swingers mean when they say they appreciate the “extras” black men bring. “There are three reasons why the women come here,” explains Wayne, one of the black men who are here to be “appreciated”. Wayne has just come out of a playroom, and has barely bothered to put his clothes back on – his flies low, shirt open, and tie hung nonchalantly around his neck. He’s a good-looking guy, with a toned physique and neatly twisted locks. “One [reason is], black men have bigger penises.” That’s a stereotype, I argue. “It’s not a stereotype!” he replies. “Black men are built differently. You have to acknowledge nature. Number two,” Wayne continues, “black men have better rhythm in bed. That’s also a fact. And thirdly, they are just more dominant. You know, a lot of these women are not satisfied by their husbands, who want them to do all the work. They want to feel a strong man inside them, dominating them. They want an alpha male. That’s what they get here,” he smiles at me, knowingly. Wayne is leery, drunk, and has a tendency to lean precariously towards me. I can see Miranda looking similarly unnerved.