The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

Racist ideology in popular media has facilitated the decline of heterosexual monogamy and the rise of no-commitment “fuccboism,” to the detriment of all women, but especially Black women, according to this strident debut from sociologist Strings. She begins by defining two contrasting ideological outgrowths of the 18th and 19th centuries: courtship rituals derived from earlier European romantic tales of noble love, and the concurrently developing trope, under the slavery system, of Black women as ugly and hypersexualized. She argues that these ideas persist today as racialized opposites, with Black women portrayed in pop culture as sexually available “side pieces” while white women are depicted romantically. She traces this dichotomy through analyses of such stereotypical personas as the “gold digger” featured in increasingly misogynist rap in the 1980s and ’90s; the “welfare queen” invented by the Reagan administration; and the “pimps” of 2000s hip-hop. Strings comes down hard against pornography, contending that mid-20th-century Playboy magazine promoted the cultural “whorification” of women who did not meet elite white beauty standards, and blaming porn today both for men’s sexual dysfunction and their involvement in a “masturbatory sex cult.” Strings’s personal testimonies about terrible dating situations and experiences of sexual assault are impactful, but her solutions—embracing queerness and nonromantic love—feel underdeveloped. The results are more provocative that persuasive. (Jan.)