Race and neurosis

Eugene Robinson doesn't seem too worried about Tiger Woods' affairs. His main concern is that Woods goes for the "Barbie" type, meaning that his mistresses are uniformly blond, thin, and busty. Is Robinson put off by Woods's failure to be attracted to something a bit unusual (say, his failure to find himself a Lewinsky)? Does he not understand why a man would bother cheating with women who resemble both one another and his own wife? Or is the issue more that Woods seems to prefer white women to women of color? I tend to think it's that last one, which means that I agree, it seems, with some folks at the National Review. (Good to know, by the way, that the author of Liberal Fascism likes 'em Aryan. And by the way, if you go for "crazy-hot Swedish swimsuit models," that makes your tastes conventional, not "bourgeois" - bourgeois leanings or lack thereof don't enter into it.)

Anyway. Who knows whether Woods goes for this type (assuming that's even true - I haven't really been following this story) out of self-hatred, or if he enjoys the prestige that being able to score such partners implies, or if he found something special about each of these women individually who each just happened to look a certain way, or if, boringly enough, he's seen the same ads and billboards as everyone else and his tastes were shaped accordingly. It seems clear enough, though, that Robinson projects neurosis onto Woods without a whole lot of evidence.

The neurosis, though understandable, is that of the author, not Woods. It's a bit like how part of my ambivalence towards this personal-style blog comes from my awareness that if its author was an unabashed, unambiguous Jew, as opposed to a delicate-featured Texan belle, she would, let's face it, be called a nouveau-riche 'JAP' at every turn, in that her blog largely consists of photographs of designer shoes and clothes purchased, it appears, with her parents' money. Simply put, while Jewish girls can and do blog about fashion, a Jewish girl could not have this blog, because it would fit the stereotype too perfectly. So when I look at the blog, I'm bothered not only, as everyone else is, by the obscene display of privilege, but also by the specifically Gentile privilege that's evidenced by the blogger's free-and-easy announcements of consumption. Now I realize both that I can't prove what I just feel I know in this case, but also that on some level that I'm projecting my own anxieties onto a blog that has nothing to do with Jews. Which is sort of how I see the Woods situation. Mistresses or not, blonde or not, whatever's going on with Woods, it's unclear why his racial identity would be relevant here - if race enters into it at all, it's only insofar as beauty standards in our society favor not so much white women as a subset of white women who resemble that particular doll.