You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [19]
“That girl’s on to something,” says the husband, but thinks, for the first time in his life, that when he is not thinking of fucking white women—fantasizing over Jiveboy or clucking at them on the street—he is very often thinking of ways to humiliate them. Then he thinks that, given his history as a black man in America, it is not surprising that he has himself confused fucking them with humiliating them. But what does that say about how he sees himself? This thought smothers his inward applause for Gardner, and instead he casts a bewildered, disconcerted look at his wife. He knows that to make love to his wife as she really is, as who she really is—indeed, to make love to any other human being as they really are—will require a soul-rending look into himself, and the thought of this virtually straightens his hair.
His wife continues:
Some Black men, full of the white man’s perspective and values, see the white woman or Blond Goddess as part of the American winning image. Sometimes when he is with the Black woman, he is ashamed of how she has been treated and how he has been powerless, and that they have always had to work together and protect each other. [Yes, she thinks, we were always all we had, until now. He thinks: We are all we have still, only now we can live without permitting ourselves to know this.] Frantz Fanon said about white women, “By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. I marry the culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.” [She cannot believe he meant to write “white dignity.”]
She pauses, looks at her husband: “So how does a black woman feel when her black man leaves Playboy on the coffee table?”
For the first time he understands fully a line his wife read the day before: “The pornography industry’s exploitation of the black woman’s body is qualitatively different from that of the white woman,” because she is holding the cover of Jivers out to him and asking: “What does this woman look like?”
What he has refused to see—because to see it would reveal yet another area in which he is unable to protect or defend black women—is that where white women are depicted in pornography as “objects,” black women are depicted as animals. Where white women are depicted at least as human bodies if not beings, black women are depicted as shit.
He begins to feel sick. For he realizes that he has bought some if not all of the advertisements about women, black and white. And further, inevitably, he has bought the advertisements about himself. In pornography the black man is portrayed as being capable of fucking anything…even a piece of shit. He is defined solely by the size, readiness and unselectivity of his cock.
Still, he does not know how to make love without the fantasies fed to him by movies and magazines. Those movies and magazines (whose characters’ pursuits are irrelevant or antithetical to his concerns) that have insinuated themselves between him and his wife, so that the totality of her body, her entire corporeal reality is alien to him. Even to clutch her in lust is automatically to shut his eyes. Shut his eyes, and…he chuckles bitterly…dream of England.
For years he has been fucking himself.
At first, reading Lorde together, they reject celibacy. Then they discover they need time apart to clear their heads, to search out damage, to heal. In any case, she is unable to fake response; he is unwilling for her to do so. She goes away for a while. Left alone, he soon falls hungrily on