John Mayer and The Hollywood Code

Who knew that one’s sex organ could posses the capacity to discriminate?

Popular singer/songwriter John Mayer’s recent uncouth revelation (http://blog.zap2it.com/thedishrag/2010/02/john-mayer-playboy-comments-about-black-women-racist-sexist-or-a-joke-gone-wrong.html) that his penis does discriminate when it comes to sex partners, while rude and crude, also echoes the old Hollywood Production Code prohibiting sex between blacks and whites which existed for more than two decades during the middle of the 20th Century (Courtney, 2005).

Mayer, in addition to being a talented musician, is known for dating Hollywood celebrities Jennifer Aniston and singer Jessica Simpson. When interviewed by Playboy about his amorous-life as a Hollywood rock star, Mayer was asked, “Do black women throw themselves at you?” The answer which followed grabbed headlines and subsequently led Mayer to breakdown during an on-stage performance where he apologized to the African-American members of his band for his outrageous comments in which he noted, among other things that his penis is “sort of like a white supremacist” in terms of racial preference (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/10/john-mayer-jessica-simpso_n_456566.html).

I believe Mayer’s comments reflect America’s legacy of repressive ideology regarding the regulation and racialization of sexualized bodies in the entertainment industry. Some might argue that this regulation still exists in Hollywood.

Susan Courtney explores the ideology of miscegenation in her book, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967 (2005). Courtney describes the ways in which the Hollywood Production Code restricted the portrayal of intimacy depending on the perceived race of characters, and at the same time inflamed interracial desire while at times promoting an ethos of white supremacy.

Was John Mayer self-policing when he informed the world that a part of his body does not prefer sex with women of color? This question assumes that Mayer, himself, is falling victim to the ideology of separation that was the basis for the Code when it was enforced during its fullest prior to the 1960s social movements.

Although it might be argued that the code governing sex and race on-screen, and one might assume off-screen, in Hollywood has always been breeched, restrictive racial codes governing on-screen intimacy involving white characters and characters of color have created cinematic racial tropes that are still with us. For example, Hollywood has mythologized both the black male rapist and the black female whose body is always available and on display.

Regarding Mayer, I wonder if his comments not only reveal a tendency toward bigotry, but also do something more insidious – reify the stereotype of the hypervisible black woman that Courtney writes about (217). Or, conversely, maybe Mayer’s comments reverse the stereotype of the hypervisible black female body. For instance, is it really demeaning to women of color when Mayer insists that his penis does not have a preference for them?

Who knows what John Mayer really meant by the comment he made relative to the racial preference of his sexual organ? I am interested in knowing why the Playboy magazine journalist asked Mayer the question in the first place.

Could the answer be because Hollywood still perpetuates an ideology of separation when it comes to black/white intimacy?