I am from So Cal and 68 yrs old. I think the term goes back to at least the 70's.
No. Yellow fever is an actual disease. Besides, there are a billion plus non-“yellow” Asians.
To my knowledge, there’s no derogatory term for when whites boink Asians.
If anything, it would be the Asians that think up a derogatory term since it seems a step down for them?? (Speculating)
Chinese and other Southeast Asians aren’t actually yellow, not even slightly.
I’ve also heard the “yellow fever” term to refer to white men who wanted Asian women. But IIRC I heard the term “jungle fever” first, and assumed “yellow fever” was an extension of that.
Slang isn’t usually clinically accurate. The term refers IME to attraction to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean women.
White people are pink and black people are brown. Like I said, you won’t find mathematical precision in slang like this.
Welcome to the SDMB, by the way.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, I know that. It also refers to fetishization of Asians, as I said in my post.
Once again, I know, but people using terms like this don’t care. The way I’ve heard “yellow fever” since the 90s it didn’t matter what part of Asia they were from. Anything from Chinese to Japanese to Thai to even sometimes Filipino.
That would be my guess, as well, that “jungle fever” came first.
Actually, I should not say it didn’t matter what part of Asia they were from, as it referred to what Americans think of as “Asians,” which usually does exclude South Asians and Central Asians. (I’ve at least once heard “curry fever” for South Asians.)
I had never heard the PHRASE “jungle fever” prior to Spike Lee’s movie, but the concept is quite old. There have LONG been bourgeois white women who’ve fantasized about sex with black men who (they IMAGINED) were barely civilized savages, and would be aggressive animals in bed.
Ralph Ellison’s protagonist deals with this in “Invisible Man.” There are hints of this in "Othello. "
In the UK, I’ve heard the phrase ‘a taste for bamboo’ to describe someone who likes chinese or japanese women. Not totally derogatory, but not exactly PC either.
I see one answer that suggests this. But it has no citations and the book it refers it is from 2002 and is about India. I’d say it’s just another wild guess.
As has previously been noted, before the mid to late 1900s “jungle fever” referred to actual tropical diseases. Words and phrases can mean more than one thing.
Irrelevant.
Your knowledge is lacking. As has been documented here, the term is “yellow fever.”
There may well be one. But that’s also irrelevant.
And Caucasians aren’t white, either, nor are most sub-Saharan Africans really black. But East Asians are conventionally referred to as "yellow.’
Cassell’s didn’t look hard enough.
[QUOTE=Music by Walter Donaldson Lyrics by Howard Dietz]
i got that fever that jungle fever
you know the reason that i long to go
dusky maiden dark haired siren congo sweetheart
[/Quote]
This clip of the Mills Brothers is from the 1934 film Operator 13. In that particular context, the song wasn’t about a black/white relationship, but it isn’t a stretch to see where it could go.
I have no doubt the phrase can be found before the 60s, but it seems to have acquired the specific inter-racial meaning around that time. That’s kind of an important detail.
Nice find, kunilou.
Am I the only one who thought that ‘jungle fever’ was basically the Europeans catching the various jungle diseases (malaria, yellow fever, the various nasty hemorrhagic fevers, dysentery and just about everything else that killed folks when they went into the jungle)? I think that’s the origin, and later it was morphed to mean what the OP is getting at. I mean, I’ve seen references to ‘jungle fever’ in stories and books set long before the 1970’s (hell, before the 1870’s) and they weren’t implying some sort of forbidden lust between the ‘races’, but instead just stuff you caught in the jungle that the doctors at the time had no idea what it was and lumped it together in one term. Or do I have that wrong? Certainly a Google search seems to indicate that at least the first 3 pages are about what the OP was talking about, but that seems to be how Google works these days, with what you REALLY want to know being 100 pages in. 
Yes, I can find cites back to the early 1800s that use “jungle fever” in the disease sense. I would say, yes, “jungle fever” was a set phrase referring to jungle-related diseases, and then got morphed into a euphemism about interracial relations because, well, the jungle has been associated with dark-skinned people.
I would also like to bring into view as related-but-different and preceding the Spike Lee movie: Morris Day and the Time’s 1983 hit “Jungle Love”. The lyrics refer to the singer wanting to show the object of his affections his jungle love. Although I was young in 1983, most people at my very diverse school understood it to mean a Black man trying to seduce a non-Black woman by hinting at the stereotypical African-American sexual prowess/endowments.
What the heck? I see 3 quoted responses to CheaderHeddar but I don’t see the actual post from said user. ctrl+F confirms it.
I notice this fairly regularly and I don’t get it either. A thread will contain quotes from a poster but it won’t contain the original post being quoted.
I think sometimes a sock account is cornfielded and its posts vanish with it. I think the missing poster from this thread was a recent joiner, so that’s my guess.
Correct. Disappeared sock.
Black men may have VERY different reactions to being perceived by white girls as animalistic, super-virile, hypersexual jungle savages in the bedroom. Some, like Morris Day (apparently) revel in that stereotype, and are only too happy to tell white women, “I’ll rape and ravage you in a way your tame, boring white husband never could.”
But as I mentioned earlier, in “Invisble Man,” Ralph Ellison’s protagonist is horrified and insulted (and a bit amused) by the married white woman who tries to seduce him, since she doesn’t really know or care abut HIM, per se. Rather she fantasizes about being taken against her will (but not really!) by a savage black male, and regards him as the fulfillment of that fantasy. To Ellison, that kind of stereotyping is exactly what makes his hero “invisible.” NOBODY sees him as a real individual- only as the embodiment of an idea they already had.