Mandingo and Jezebel: Myths that hurt

Hello, classmates!

On this entry, I’m going to start from fiction to reality; you’ll see…

I was watching “Masters of sex”, a TV show that tells the history of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the pioneers of sex research in the early 60’s; when a particular scene called my attention:

A black woman journalist is interviewing Masters and Johnson about their work. When she asks if they have demystified the human sexual response of black people, the research team doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The journalist insists, convinced that the survey could clear the stereotypes of “Mandingo” and “Jezebel”.

Probably no one knew a lot about sex at that time, but what are a “Mandingo” and a “Jezebel”? Why those myths were hurting so much and for so long the black community? I investigate those terms, first of all, to figure out if they were real or an invention from TV, and second, to find out what they really mean.

Turns out that a Mandingo is a stereotype for black men. It says they’re all sexual beasts. According to this term, black males are “oversexed” beings, with a primitive and furious sexual instinct that blocks everything else.

The same goes for Jezebel, but with and even worse connotation: If a Jezebel is a woman full of lust all the time, she is also a woman who can’t be raped, because sex is all that she wants.

Since the course started, we have learned that stereotypes are not wrong but incomplete. This premise sounds fair and impulse us to be critical about what we see, read or listen to, but also, we have learned that sometimes stereotypes are completely wrong. And those are the ones that hurt the most, because they only help to maintain the violence. 

P.D: All pictures are from scenes of the TV show.