Читаем Right-wing Women полностью

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 18 3 8 -18 3 9 (New York: New

American Library, 1975), p. 129.

sexuality has taken hold, fear of homosexuality is a terrifically

powerful tool in the social manipulation and control of men: pitting

groups of men—all of whom agree that they must be m en, higher

and better than women—against each other in the futile quest for

unimpeachable masculinity. Hatred of homosexuality makes possible astonishing varieties of social blackmail and male-male conflict.

In racism, the racially degraded male is sexually stereotyped in one

of two ways. Either he is the rapist, the sexual animal with intense

virility and a huge and potent member; or he is desexualized in the

sense of being demasculinized—he is considered castrated (unmanned) or he is associated with demeaning (feminizing) and demeaned (not martial) homosexuality. It is the relationship of the dominant class to masculinity that determines whether males of the

racially despised group are linked with rape or with castration/

homosexuality. If the dominant group insists that the racially

despised male is a rapist, it means that the dominant males are

effeminate by contrast; it is they who are tinged with homosexuality in that they are less manly. They will climb the masculinity ladder by killing or maiming those whom they see as racially inferior but sexually superior. The Nazis transparently craved

masculinity. It was the Jew who had stolen it from them by stealing the women they should have had. According to Hitler in Mein Kampf:

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth

lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his

blood, thus stealing her from her people. 8

German men unmanned by their own recent history (World War I)

and a host of social and psychological inadequacies, as exemplified

in their leader, found a savage redemption: the annihilation of a

racial group of men perceived as being more male *—which, in this

*The racist perception of the Jewish woman “as a harlot, wild, promiscuous, the sensuous antithesis of the Aryan female, who was blond and

setting, means more animal, less human, not the human husband

but the animal rapist. This annihilation was an act of mass cannibalism by which one group of men, lacking m asculinity, got it from a mountain of corpses and from the actual killing as well.

In the United States, the black man was characterized as a rapist

after the end of slavery. During slavery, his condition as chattel

was seen to unman him entirely. His degradation was as a sym bolically castrated man; a mule, a beast of burden. (His use as a stud to impregnate black women slaves to increase the slave wealth

of the white master does not contradict this. ) Vis-a-vis the white

man, he was unmanned; and vis-^-vis the white woman he was

unmanned. * Early in Reconstruction, M ay 1866, a fairly optimistic

Frederick Douglass wrote that, though sometimes he feared a genocidal slaughter of blacks by whites, the movement of the former slaves “to industrial pursuits and the acquisition of wealth and education”9 would lead finally to acceptance by whites. He recognized that even in success there was danger,

for the white people do not easily tolerate the presence among

them of a race more prosperous than themselves. The Negro as

a poor ignorant creature does not contradict the race pride of

the white race. He is more a source of amusement to that race

than an object of resentment. Malignant resistance is augmented as he approaches the plane occupied by the white race, pure” (see Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women [New*

York: Perigee Books, 1981], p. 147) also exacerbated the conviction that

the racially superior men were not man enough: she provoked them endlessly with her savage eroticism, but they could not tame or satisfy her—