Nerve Studies The History Of Becoming Ethnic By Injection

Anonymous sex online dating site Nerve is still attempting to legitimize itself with “articles” about “relations” between “people.” (Sorry. Quotation marks are addictive.) Their latest effort is a 1000-word essay about sex with the “erotic other”. Or what some folks might call “jungle fever”. Turns out there are all sorts of scientific reasons why we humans are fascinated by foreign tribes:

Studies indicate we’re turned on by people who smell different than we do [!]And sex across racial lines is a natural safeguard against inbreeding. Delving a bit deeper, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss theorized that human civilization is based on kinship via the “exchange of women” between family groups.

Charming. But despite the historically racist [Ed. Note: And, uh, sexist.] colonialism we so easily point a finger to, Nerve writer Ken Mondschein says there is a more practical (and, aw, more romantic) history behind it:

Sex with the Other as cultural acclimation is a far older practice than sex with the Other as colonial exploitation. Besides the fact that the explorers and conquerors who circumnavigated the globe hadn’t usually brought along women, the advantages of a cross-cultural sexual relationship for the newcomer were many: He learned the language, legitimized his place in the local power structure by marrying the bigwig’s daughter, appropriated indigenous survival techniques, and his children grew up bilingual and bicultural, able to explain and interpret one side to the other.

[…] European colonizers — from the Spanish in the Canary Islands to the French fur traders in Quebec — found it strategically advantageous to take native brides. Alexander the Great had Roxanne, Cortez had La Malinche, John Smith had Pocahontas.

And we have Clive Owen! Yes? No. Damn.

The Erotic Other [Nerve]