Detail from cover of Bold Moment, aka The Horncasters, a “novel of the present-day South” first published in 1947
By David Futrelle
As The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer noted on Twitter earlier today, the right-wing fake-news site The Gateway Pundit “is extremely into calling the caravan migrants ‘virile.'”
Indeed, in four separate posts on the caravan of migrants and refugees currently making its way from Honduras to the United States, the Gateway Pundit writer Cristina Laila has tried to present the caravan as consisting mostly of men she describes variously as “military-aged, virile male Hondurans,” “military-aged, virile mostly Honduran males” and “military-aged virile males.”
Laila insists that “the women and children [in the caravan] are being used as media props and human shields,” obscuring the fact that this is a manly man “invasion.”
This is hardly the first time that paranoid racists have portrayed young male refugees of color as sexual interlopers trying to “invade” mostly white nations. For the past several years, similar complaints about “virile” male refugees of African and Middle-Eastern descent have been all over Twitter.
And where Twitter trolls go, elected GOP officials are sure to follow. Indeed, in remarks during a House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing on refugees in 2015, California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher raised the specter that “trainloads” of “very virile young men” from the Middle East were trying to sneak into Western Europe by pretending to be “desperate refugees,” something he said was “frankly very upsetting to me.”
But if you want to see the far-right in full psychosexual meltdown over too-sexy refugees, you have to turn to the virtual pages of The Daily Stormer, which regularly portrays brown and black refugees as sex-crazed “rapefugees” bent on the sexual conquest of white women.
While the Stormer’s attacks on refugees drip with racist hatred, the site’s writers direct much of their vitriol at white women whom the Stormer deems insufficiently racist towards the non-white “invaders.” As the Stormer sees it, this friendliness towards refugees is the result of the illicit hunger of white women for hunky men of color. Not that anyone at the Stormer would phrase it quit that way. They are a bit more, er, salty.
In a 2015 post titled “The Greasiest Cuckolding of All,” Daily Stormer head boy Andrew Anglin declared that “[t]he White European female’s craving for Black dick threatens to collapse civilization itself.”
And he was just getting started.
White women across the Western world have been put in control of Western societies, and they are using this control to ensure an endless supply of Black and Arab men to satisfy their depraved sexual desires. …
White women – an undetermined percentage of them, but apparently most – are calling for Europe to be flooded with Black and Arab men so they can have sex with them. They are using the resources of White men to feed and clothe these objects of their sexual desire.
German women regularly get all up on men in refugee camps and attempt to have sex with them publicly.
Angela Merkel is said to require “dicks numbering in the hundreds per week” to satisfy her terrible urges.
Psychologists are uncertain about the nature of the drive of these White women to engage in bestial sex with unevolved monkeymen, but the running theory is that they do this because White men have become cowardly f**gots, incapable of arousing sexual desire in their own females.
He goes on like this for several hundred more words, but I think you’ve probably gotten the gist of his argument already.
“Black dick” — and brown dick, and indeed virtually every kind of dick that is not of a predominantly pinkish hue — has loomed large in the imaginations of white racists for centuries. Sometimes the white obsession with black and brown sexuality was about fear: Lynchings of alleged, usually falsely accused, black “rapists” were as much about reassuring sexually paranoid whites of their cultural virility as they were about terrorizing the black population.
Other times it was mostly about titillation — as in the countless mid-twentieth century movies and pulp novels about “taboo” interracial relationships. Most of the time, though, fear and fascination were so intertwined it was impossible to separate the two emotions; for countless vivid and horrifying examples, see the pop culture imagery of the “black brute” posted online by the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University.
Now the Gateway Pundit is directing a very similar sort of mingled fear and fascination at the, er, “military-aged, virile mostly Honduran males” who make up part of the caravan marching north through Mexico, still more than a thousand miles from the US border. As the caravan heads further north, I suspect, the uglier the rhetoric on this side of the border will get, and the more we’ll hear about the allegedly dangerous “virility” of young Honduran males.
So congratulations to the Gateway Pundit’s Cristina Laila — for being many decades behind the times, and yet somehow also ahead of the curve.