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
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
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,
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—
they could not satisfy their craving for what they took her to be.
