Eroticizing the orient.

The western trope of the “erotic exotic female” is exploited as a fetish desire for the white man in the film Losin it (Curtis Hanson, 1983). This Tom Cruise film exploits the idea of the “erotic exotic” as an escape from the bustling busy city life into a nostalgic primitive time of pleasure. In Michael O’Shaugnessy and Jane Stadler’s reading Ethnicity, Ideology and the Media, they point out the prevalent stereotype of the “non-white woman as powerfully sexually attractive”. O’Shaugnessy and Stadler further describe the erotic exotic orient as dangerous and as more daring than white women. This idea is conjured from historically powerful oriental figures such as Delilah and Cleopatra who portray powerful fetish oriental women in earlier films.

In Losin it there are four young teenage boys that cross the US border into Tijuana, Mexico. The three older boys are on a quest to lose their virginity while the youngest of the four is heading into Tijuana to obtain illegal fireworks. The scene where the three older boys arrive to a block of brothels, the brothels all seem to be designed with oriental themes from different ethnic cultures. There was an overwhelming emphasis on the exotic oriental exploitation with sexual innuendo to arouse young white males.

There was generally white females working at the brothels but yet were performing a form of blackness or oriental culture to convey the eroticism of exotic cultures. This sort of makes reference to earlier films when white people used to paint their faces black to play devious or evil black men. Also in minstrel shows of the 60s white people painted their faces black to perform black comedy skits. This to a great extent has to do with the Eurocentric performance of other ethnic groups through their own eyes which is completely distorted and most of the time negative.

References

O’Shaugnessy, Michael and Stadler, Jane (2002). Ethnicity, Ideology and the Media. In Media and Society: An Introduction. Second Edition. Pp. 260-283. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Print.