which all other forms of social domination were derived.
The atrocity of male domination over women poisoned the
social body, in Amerika as elsewhere. The first to die from this
poison, of course, were women—their genius destroyed; every
human potential diminished; their strength ravaged; their bodies plundered; their will trampled by their male masters.
But the will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are
never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger.
Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life
around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.
Every married man, no matter how poor, owned one slave
— his wife. Every married man, no matter how powerless
compared to other men, had absolute power over one slave—
his wife. Every married man, no matter what his rank in the
world of men, was tyrant and master over one woman— his
wife.
And every man, married or not, had a gender class consciousness of his right to domination over women, to brutal and absolute authority over the bodies of women, to ruthless
and malicious tyranny over the hearts, minds, and destinies of
women. This right to sexual domination was a birthright,
predicated on the will of God, fixed by the known laws of
biology, not subject to modification or to the restraint of law
or reason. Every man, married or not, knew that he was not a
woman, not carnal chattel, not an animal put on earth to be
fucked and to breed. This knowledge was the center of his
identity, the source of his pride, the germ of his power.
It was, then, no contradiction or moral agony to begin to
buy black slaves. The will to domination had battened on
female flesh; its muscles had grown strong and firm in subju
gating women; its lust for power had become frenzied in the
sadistic pleasure of absolute supremacy. Whatever dimension
of human conscience must atrophy before men can turn other
humans into chattel had become shriveled and useless long
before the first black slaves were imported into the English
colonies. Once female slavery is established as the diseased
groundwork of a society, racist and other hierarchical pathologies inevitably develop from it.
There was a slave trade in blacks which pre-dated the English colonialization of what is now the eastern United States.
During the Middle Ages, there were black slaves in Europe in
comparatively small numbers. It was the Portuguese who first
really devoted themselves to the abduction and sale of blacks.
They developed the Atlantic slave trade. Black slaves were
imported in massive quantities into Portuguese, Spanish,
French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish colonies.
In the English colonies, as I have said, every married man
had one slave, his wife. As men accrued wealth, they bought
more slaves, black slaves, who were already being brought
across the Atlantic to be sold into servitude. A man’s wealth
