A review by lpm100
Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America by Scott Poulson-Bryant

medium-paced

0.0

Book Review
"A Meditation on The Measure of Black Men In America"
Scott Poulson-Bryant
1/5 stars
"How many silly tropes can be stapled together into a book?"
*******

I'm glad I didn't pay more for this book than I did, and really upset that I paid more than $0.25.

The whole thing can be read through in several hours, and in that way it is worth it because it helps maintain a book count (it would be ideal if I could do 61 books this year).

I thought that this book was going to be some historical discussion about black men getting lynched because they were thought to be sexual threats/predators. (It was published on the Doubleday label, which was heretofore credible--but not after this book.) 

The book started out talking about--and was book ended by-- Emmett Till (the classic example of such an event).

It was all downhill from those couple of pages.

The whole book instead reads like a lllooonnnggg, stream-of-consciousness Dan Savage column, and it also has ZERO references/bibliographic citations. (For instance, when the author mentions [p. 70] that the average black guy's endowment is somewhere between 6.25"-8" (?!?!), There's no way for us to know where it came from; I do remember reading the exact same statistic in JP Rushton's "Race, Evolution, and Behavior," but Rushton has been so thoroughly discredited / ignored that the only way I could know that that statistic was false would be because Rushton was the primary author thereof.)

Who, but an academic, could make a connection between sexual endowment and lynching in the South because the same word is used to describe two things? (He went even further, creating the new word "hangature.")

1. The completely unrealistic tone of the book starts from the beginning where the author starts out with his story about being "objectified" by Some White Girl.

∆∆∆ IF there was a black guy who was interested in White Ladies (like a huge fraction are--with varying degrees of success because demand outstrips supply), and

∆∆∆ IF the mechanism of action of getting access to this Hypothetical White Lady's Tender Bits was being "sexually objectified"

∆∆∆ THEN it's almost certain that he would play whatever role he needed to play to get to where he wanted to be. ("You can call me 'Mandingo' and I can call you 'Blanche' if it makes it more realistic for you.")

2. Why is there so much anguish about this? Is there any straight man anywhere who would give enough thought to this topic to write even a single sentence, let alone an entire book? (The author refers to himself as "sexually expansive" in the last 1/5 of the book, while rejecting the labels "gay" or "bisexual." So, I guess not.)

3. Is there an issue at all here? 

The author characterizes a black guy by the name of "Simon," who grew up in some lilly white environment and somewhere/ somehow inadvertently became famous for having extra large equipment.

This character also has the same feminine, emotional anguish about being "objectified."

Do we really believe that such a person exists? There are SO many Reddit, Twitter, and Chaturbate accounts with guys who are apparently abundantly eager to broadcast their own nude pictures all over the internet as far and wide as possible--complete with live measurements/comparison stills/ruler stills.

4. This guy does not appear to be too well educated, in spite of going to the Ivy league.

Let's count the clichés, shall we?

Cliché 1: The Alex Haley book "Roots." (You know, the one that was found to be substantially plagiarized and also completely ahistorical? That one?)

Cliché 2(p.113): "Karen" wants "Mandingo" because of the virility and the BBC. (And the author even references The 1975 film which is a hammy/overdone 2-hour riff on just that.)

It's like the author doesn't even notice that in the REAL WORLD it's nearly NEVER top shelf "Karens" that want "Mandingos." It's more like Bottom Line Baby Elephants being able to date one tier up if they can convince some black guy that "if you move the gut aside, there is some good 'product' down there." (Even somebody like Kim Kardashian is not all that great; even though more of her fat has been injected into the right places, there's nobody in the world that has not seen her, um, "product.")

Cliché 3 "United States is built politically, economically, culturally upon A continual reinvention of uses and misuses of the black body."  If this is the case, I really don't understand why places like Detroit and Baltimore and Inkster (or, really almost all self-governed black cities) turn into cesspools--in spite of an abundance of black bodies!

Cliché 4: He references insane Eldridge Cleaver's "Omnipotent Administrator and Supermasculine Menial"--you know, the one who joined the Mormon church and became a Republican after a lifetime of black panther activism? That guy? 

 (p.49).  Translated into plain English means that "you white guys are just Green With Envy because of our famed BBC" (p.59)

Cliché 5: Women base their self-image on what *other women* think to be attractive. (And that would have to be the case because I don't think any man anywhere has reported being turned on by waxed eyebrows or shoulder pads.) Men also base their self-image on what *other men* seem to notice. (A baseball bat sized todger is impressive in the locker room, but otherwise: I don't think any lady is excited at the prospect of being torn/ ruptured during a sexual encounter.)

Cliché 6: Black ladies like to imagine that all races of men are after them (p.57), and that in the antebellum South they were the hottest commodity (to explain the significant infusion of white blood into black Americans); meanwhile, the price for female black female sex workers is lower than for everyone else, and there are exactly ZERO black regions/countries that function in the way of Thailand or the Philippines-- 'cause ain't nobody going out of their way in pursuit of black trim.

Cliché 7: Freudian psychology. (All kinds of envies here--how to obvious to need a liberation.) Also, the psychiatric hack Frances Cress Welsing (p.153).

Cliché 8 (p.72): Norman Mailer's "White Negro." White guys who act like black guys (in spite of not knowing or dating any black people) in order to get White women.

Cliché 9: The "dialectic of the 'house ni**er' vs. 'field ni**er'," seemingly unaware that: 

1. The largest number of interracial relationships/ progeny came after slavery; 

2. Almost all of them were voluntary. (And these are facts that I've read that were written by a former slave, BT Washington. I'm going to believe him more readily than the made-for-TV movie that has been showed so many times that it has taken on a life of its own.)

Cliché 10: Everything "intersects" with something else. Too much to get into.
*******
Other WTF quotes: (p.137) "And rather than appreciate them as art, I felt culturally violated." OR (p.137) "... Around the time I was studying art and its relationship to cultural politics..."

(I wonder if he changed his personal profile status from "sexually expansive" to "100% queen, total bottom.")

*******

√√Correction #1

Since this book is also about lynching (p.18), I thought I might add that: Depending on the source, between 1882 and 1964, somewhere between 2017~3446 black people were lynched. (For those of you that were counting: that is a period of 82 years. 24.6~42.0 lynchings per year--one every 8.7~14.8 days.)

I might also add that it was over an area of about 750k sq. miles.

For the record, there were 2,570 homicides of black people killing each other just in the last YEAR, and that's just in the cases where the race of the assailant was known. 

World War II lasted 2,191 days. At the rate of 6 million Jewish souls lost, that is 2,738 people PER DAY.

√√Correction #2

(p.143) No, it is not that female talent in the adult industry are kept away from black guys by their husbands or managers.  It is that these women just don't particularly like black men (most white ladies don't!).  I've read some autobiographies of adult actresses, and many of them say that they save interracial for somewhat later in the career because they can command an interracial fee premium. (For the record, I have also listened to interviews with black actresses and they say that 90% of the guys that they work with are white but they do not get an interracial premium.)

Some of the current big actresses are conflicted: Mia Khalifa is either 1st or 2nd ranked, and she does work with black guys, but does not allow them to go raw. (No such problem with the white coworkers.)

Abella Danger is also either 1st or 2nd ranked--and has been for a long time. She goes with guys and girls of all types, bare.

Ditto for Riley Reid. 

Those three are so popular that they could turn down any amount of work that they wanted and still be working every single day.

I'm not sure why this author is worried about Some White Girl who tricked her way from Utah to California (p.151) so that she can be mounted by strangers and recorded in order to make a living when all of the best and most popular talent in the industry does work with black guys.

√√Correction #3

Since this book is about BBC, I might mention that for every Jack Napier (retired)/Mandingo/ Rico Strong that's out there working, there is another John Holmes (retired)/ Danny D/  Bruce "Two-Tone-Malone" Venture. 

I'm not sure what difference it makes in any case: the sample set of female talent available to black guys is ALWAYS a subset of that available to white guys because a significant fraction of white/non-black female talent does not work with black people--but it is never true the other way around.

So, the fabled BBC is not even as well-exercised as (presumably) fewer-in-number (by the lights of this author) BWCs.  

√√ Correction 4

This guy's numbers are WAY off, and by several sources:

-LPSG has sponsored a $10,000 challenge for somebody who can prove 10" with properly measured photographic evidence, and to date the challenge has not been collected.

-There are forums both on Reddit ("measured porn stars")  and LPSG that deal with using image meter to measure approximate objects and then back calculate the endowment of these stars. 

These things are very heavily crowdsourced, and hundreds and hundreds of people have come up with measurements that are nowhere near close to what this guy is claiming. (For the record: That is saying that Lexington Steele is 11"x7")

The author also creates a "Beyond 10" list for people who are nowhere near that: and michaels, Jack Napier, Jake Steed, Byron Long, and Justin Slayer.

√√ Correction 5

I know at least one evolutionary biologist who has "demonstrated" the connection between endowment and IQ. (JP Rushton.) 

If the author really wants us to believe what was written in the journal (that the average black guy is between 6.25 and 8"), then there's somebody who will come up right behind him and say that that is fine because it corresponds to lower general cognitive ability.

Do we really want to open up that hornet's nest?

*******

Verdict: save your money.