Slavery’s Assault on Sexuality and Gender Roles
An extreme manifestation of gender roles and sexuality was imposed on Black slaves in the United States; stereotypes of Black sexuality provided a justification for the institution of slavery and White power.[2] Europeans’ ethnocentric reactions in their first encounters with black Africans set the stage for the denigration of Black sexuality during slavery. Europeans reacted to African customs with disgust and fear, comparing the sexual habits of Africans to those of apes. Dehumanizing Blacks as animalistic, oversexed "heathens" gave many White slave owners a rationale for exploitation and domination (Moran, 2001).
The Madonna-whore dichotomy was drastically exaggerated in the case of female slaves. The dominant image of Black womanhood was the Jezebel—a treacherous seductress with an insatiable sexual appetite. White men (including some Union soldiers who raped slave women as they plundered towns and plantations) used these prejudices to exempt their sexual abuse and exploitation of Black women from questions of their own
Slaves had no rights to physical privacy, protection from bodily harm, or reproductive autonomy.
immorality (Guy-Sheftall, 2003). Enslaved women lacked clothing to cover their bodies "properly," and their work in the fields and the house often required them to raise their dresses above their knees—nothing a "decent" woman would do. Slaves had no rights to their own bodies (Block, 2006). During slave sales they were stripped naked so that prospective buyers could closely examine their bodies, including their genitals, as if they were cattle. The irrational logic that no self-respecting woman would allow herself to be put on such display was used by Whites to confirm Black women’s wanton nature. Slave owners publicly discussed female slaves’ reproductive capacity and managed their "breeding" (often by the slave owner and his sons), forcing promiscuity on them (Solinger, 2005). The economic benefit of rapid births of slave children was clearly expressed by Thomas Jefferson: "I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm; what she produces is an addition to capital" (Davis, 2002, p. 109).
The stereotype of "Mammy" provided slave owners with a counterbalance to the Jezebel and represented the slave owners’ successful civilizing of Black women, including their sexuality. Mammy was supposed to be loyal, obedient, and asexual. She cooked, cleaned, and cared for White children, often even nursing infants. Her labors enabled many White women to maintain their delicate, ladylike images.
The male complement to the Jezebel was the stereotype of the highly sexual, potentially violent "buck." Whites considered him a powerful animal and exploited his ability to work and to produce offspring with his mythical, larger-than-White-sized penis. On the one hand, slave owners depended economically on Black men’s physical strength and sexual virility. On the other hand, they feared those same qualities. The fabricated threat of sexual seduction of White women and racist logic sanctioned the tools necessary to control Black men and to assuage the slave owners’ insecurities that their own stereotypes created. During the slavery era, Black men were beaten, whipped, castrated, and lynched with impunity. After emancipation, people freed from slavery had greater opportunities to shape their own lives, but the lynching of Black men and raping of Black women continued as a means of maintaining social control over those who challenged the norms of White supremacy (Douglas, 1999; Wyatt, 1997).
The historical events and their surrounding controversies discussed in the previous sections show that the sex-for-procreation and gender-role issues are legacies of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, of the Victorian era, and of slavery. These legacies are with us still, found in the complex conflicts between the values of personal pleasure, practicality, and tradition in 20th-century Western life (Jakobsen & Pellegrini, 2003).