Intercourse (29 page)

The influence of the racially inferior on the culture is pernicious, debasing; as Hitler wrote,

Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?

If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!
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The charges against blacks in the United States follow the same form: the men are rapists of white women; they are physically dirty, having a racially specific stink; they want to destroy the white race through miscegenation; they are a cultural blight, involved in every vice, in the Amerikan pathology genetically less intelligent, destroying language and public education.

In
The Mass Psychology of Fascism,
Wilhelm Reich comprehended that “the Jew and the black man are not differentiated in the mind of the fascist. ”
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The swastika itself, he maintained, represented clearly “two interlocked human figures, ” on its side “a
sexual act
lying down, ” upright “a sexual act in standing position”; therefore, “the swastika represents a basic living function. ”
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This recognition and its emotional impact “does not account for the success of fascism’s mass propaganda, but it certainly contributes to it.... we can assume that this symbol depicting two interlocked figures acts as a powerful stimulus on deep layers of the organism, a stimulus that proves to be that much more powerful, the more dissatisfied, the more burning with sexual desire, a person is. ”
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The sexual meaning of the swastika can be traced back to ancient Indo-European cultures, a fact used by contemporary sadomasochists when trying to dissociate their use of the swastika from its Nazi meaning even when the point of the sex they are having is to inflict pain on a Jew.

The humiliation rituals of racism are overtly sexual even when not genital. In the concentration camps, the disintegration of a human identity was accomplished by a harrowing assault on every aspect of the body’s dignity; as Fania Fenelon wrote in
Playing for Time: “I see us now, under the icy shower, arms pressed to our sides, then back in the room again, demoralized, shivering, tattooed, and hairless. It was odd, but that was the real humiliation: having no hair. ”
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The immersion in filth, including death by filth, an immersion in the scatological, an assault on any self-conception of human cleanliness and any possibility of being clean, was an integral part of the punishment for being inferior, for being filth:

Who could have dreamed up such a place as the latrine hut? It was an enormous hole dug out of the earth, about forty feet deep, surrounded by an irregular border of large stones, plank walls, and a roof. This enormous, funnel-shaped sewer was ringed with wooden bars. No sooner was the door open than, breaking ranks, the girls rushed forward to sit on these bars, buttocks exposed. Some, with dysentery, didn’t make it and relieved themselves where they stood, under the blows and insults of the latrine blockowa.

... Perched in this roost about fifty girls were packed together like sick old hens, skeletal, shivering, clinging to their dung-stained bars. Those with long legs could touch the ground with the tips of their toes, but the others, the smaller ones like me, their legs dangling, had to grip the slippery round bar with both hands with all their might. To fall into the pit must have been a most terrible death.
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These concentration camps are emblematic of socially created conditions—artificial, vicious—in which racially degraded people are forced to live in racist societies of many descriptions: the Soweto shacks, urban ghettoes in the United States, Palestinian refugee camps. The conditions imposed on the people are conditions of squalor; physical filth; a social reality embodying the degraded sexual reality of those devalued as dirt.

Racially degraded women are specially targeted for sexual abuse and exploitation. That targeting is often systematic, the underbelly of societies that say those women are racial dirt. They are found concentrated in brothels, on street corners, used in sex under slave conditions, prostituted on plantations or in concentration camps, prostituted in prison camps or under prison conditions, prostituted to sexually service military enclaves, transient soldiers or occupying armies. In some racist societies, sex with them is legally forbidden; this makes them especially appealing and at the same time invisible when they are sexually exploited in rape or prostitution. The dirt of race added to the dirt of sex makes them the most sexed creatures; they are, disproportionate to their numbers, forced, violated, bought and sold. They have no legal or social remedies. In the prisons of Argentina, for instance, Jacobo Timerman discovered that “between 1974 and 1978, the violation of girls in clandestine prisons had a peculiar characteristic: Jewish girls were violated twice as often as non-Jewish girls. ”
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The rapes, in common with many racially based rapes, were held to be innocuous, but the logic that led to this incomprehension was especially pernicious: “There are no gas chambers in Argentina, and this leaves many with a clear conscience”;
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“I was never able to understand how the horrors of the Holocaust could diminish the significance of the violation of Jewish girls in clandestine Argentine prisons. I was never able to accept how recalling and recording the activity of the Holocaust industry could render it seemingly unnecessary to confront openly the publication of anti-Semitic literature in Argentina and the fact that such literature is studied in the military academies of Buenos Aires. ”
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Racially motivated rape is considerably protected by the misogyny that finds the rape of women as such no atrocity at all. The violation of a whole people gives the most irrefutable evidence of what is otherwise hidden: the rape and the racism combined and inflicted on a woman. With a mass-murder atrocity, the rapes are drawn big in blood; the sadism in the rapes is unavoidable because the intention of the rapes—to destroy—is irrefutable; rape cannot be explained away by personality; it is not an individual event or tragedy; the woman did not bring it on herself as a distinct personality or as a metaphysical slut; the great justifications for raping and prostituting women are not credible even to those who blame women for rape and prostitution. The
racism
of the sexual assault is clear because a people is being attacked; the presence of men, massively, in the carnage as victims is the proof. Once the rapes are, for the most part, gender-specific and on a smaller scale, the misogynist, who embodies the normal mentality in a culture that accepts rape as normal for women, cannot see the rapes at all; he is visually impaired—there is nothing big enough for him to see; he is hearing-impaired—there are not enough screams; he cannot hear. The women in the clandestine prisons, Jews or other racially degraded women in other places, are raped the way women are by men who rape the way men rape. The bad motives of the men—their
racist
motives— are a matter for moral indignation, yes; but there is no atrocity. Atrocity—and rape recognized as atrocity—is committed against a whole people, men too, unmanning the men, hurting them. Otherwise, rape does not count: not as torture; not as intolerable and unconscionable violation. The crimes against Timerman were crimes: keeping him in jail with special insults and special malice because he was a Jew; terrorizing his family because he was a Jew; punishing him extra and worse because he began to fight as a newspaper editor for
the disappeared
in Argentina and he was a Jew. The “girls” were “girls. ” None of the “girls” who were raped has brought a book to international attention; not yet. The anti-Semitism against him mattered when it did matter—and that was a fight—because he was a man; he existed, despite anti-Semitism, recognizably as an individual. Women get raped anyway because they are women: all the same in that regard. The rape of a woman by a racist excited and incensed by her race is in the realm of ordinary sexual desire, the kind all men feel, part of a continuum of sexual desire in which hostility always plays some part; the hostility is usually seen as innocuous; even when identifiable as racism it is not distinct from normal kinds of sexual arousal. As Sartre wrote in
Anti-Semite and Jew:
“In Berlin I knew a Protestant in whom sexual desire took the form of indignation. The sight of women in bathing suits aroused him to fury; he willingly encouraged that fury and passed his time at swimming pools.

The anti-Semite is like that, and one of the elements of his hatred is a profound sexual attraction toward Jews. ”
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In the so-called voluntary situation of prostitution, Ida, a black woman in
Another Country, knows that the white men come to Harlem “‘because they wanted to do something dirty and they knew that you knew how. All black people knew that. Only, the polite ones didn’t say dirty. They said real. ’”
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Women have no remedy; men sometimes get revenge. Eldridge Cleaver mapped the territory in
Soul on Ice:
“I became a rapist. To refine my technique and
modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto... and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically... Rape was an insurrectionary act. ”
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Sometimes a more muted rebellion, less overtly violent, takes place in using white women as prostitutes; as Piri Thomas described in
Down These Mean Streets, “We got on a high and I asked my newfound
amigo
if he knew a cathouse, a white cathouse. I wanted to break out against this two-tone South; I wanted to fuck a white woman in Texas. ”
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Violent or more superficially civil, the revenge was in fucking white women under the conditions most degrading, most debasing, to women: rape and prostitution. The white women, elevated by race in Texas, were in the white cathouse to fuck.

The obliteration of being racially devalued is described by the man without a face in Abe’s
The Face of Another,
seeing the Harlem riots on television he sees “thousands of men and women, like me without faces, gathering together. ”
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He identifies with Harlem blacks; and he also identifies with Koreans who in Japan are often discriminated against, viewed as a lower race. The Koreans, having different faces, are treated as if they are faceless. Without consciously realizing it, he had come “to have a feeling of closeness with them” because they were “frequently the objects of prejudice”
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The
dispossession
of being faceless is likened to the radical devaluing of Koreans by the Japanese, longtime and hated imperialists in the Asian world. Inferiority is, in fact, dispossession: having no face is the perfect emblem for that dispossession because it is a dispossession from individuality, identity, and belonging. The sexualization of what is left once the face is taken away destroys any identity the inferior person might have stubbornly retained.

Justifying racial devaluation, keeping the racially devalued faceless, almost always involves the complicity of scientists— doctors, research scientists—who provide the biological facts on which distinctions of worth in race can be made. The body is sexualized and in the body one finds the sexual evidence of a hierarchy of worth. “The seminal odour of Orientals is stronger and more acrid than that of the ‘Caucasian’ West, ” wrote Dr. Theodore Van De Velde in his scientific sex manual,
Ideal Marriage. “The semen of the healthy youths of Western European races has a fresh, exhilarating smell; in the mature man it is more penetrating. ”
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The scientists with their biologically based facts on race and sex remove any legitimate sanctuary for a pride in self, in the equality of self, that might somehow, in ways not yet understood, survive a potent system of inferiority. One is taught inferiority by learned men; by rapists; by sadists; by torturers; by murderers. At the center of the pedagogy is the fuck.

Women qua women are the rightful victims of that pedagogy, the inevitable casualties of the fuck.
Macho
has made its way into common English—prideful masculinity, the essence of virility, action and strength rooted in the sex of a man. Frida Kahlo, the great painter of primal female pain, used its female counterpart in language and in her paintings. According to her biographer:

Indeed, the painting presents stereotypes, the
macho
and the
chingada, his victim.
Chingada, literally the “screwed one, ” is Mexico’s most familiar curse and a word used frequently by Frida.
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Octavio Paz is then quoted to explicate the meaning beyond any possible ambiguity or sentimentality:

The verb [chingar, “to screw”] denotes violence, an emergence from oneself to penetrate another by force.... The verb is masculine, active, cruel: it stings, wounds, gashes, stains and it provokes a bitter, resentful satisfaction. The person who suffers this action is passive, inert and open, in contrast to the active, aggressive and closed person who inflicts it.
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Kahlo, whose paintings are the most vivid renderings by any woman of the female screwed, gashed, wounded, precisely the
chingada, was married to Diego Rivera, considered Mexico’s greatest modern painter. He painted socialist art, a brotherhood of dignity in work, a romance of the proletariat, epic murals of the working class. She painted what it was like being fucked by him; he himself said it,

If I loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait.
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