August 29, 2019

Sexualized hatred against female activists: beware, Vagina

topic:	Women's rights
by:	Thomas Osten-Sacken

There has been a lot of talk about the old white man recently. He is definitely not a sociological category, but rather an attractive identification and role model in times of confusion. However, a look into the respective posts on Social or other media platforms shows that if you define yourself this way – be it with lame irony or bitter seriousness – you are probably experiencing first and foremost one thing: incredible fear.

Two words surely make the top of the list of threats that inspire the greatest fear among this group – and which are therefore the most fiercely opposed: Refugees and Feminism. It is therefore hardly surprising that women who help refugees – not out of motherly concern which would still fit the desired image – particularly trigger the fears of the ‘white man’.

Had there been a man at the helm of the Sea Watch 3, the turmoil would probably have been only half as big. For instance, an adapted version of an online entry on the Captain of a vessel of Mission Lifeline, who was arrested in 2018, would sound absolutely inappropriate: Claus-Peter Reisch (born 1961) is a German captain driven by the Great Phallus. When the Great Phallus commands him to, Reisch sails towards the Libyan coast to pick up fake refugees.

But when it comes to Carola Rackete, this suddenly becomes possible. After all, she is a woman and thus commanded and driven by the Great Vagina. This can actually be read on the website Wikimannia, which prides itself on “10 years of Feminism-free information”. This tongue-in-cheek entry expresses what apparently happened in countless minds when the crisis off the coast of Lampedusa intensified. A woman, who is even said to prefer their own sex when it comes to love, and who claims she became engaged because she is “white and privileged”, tries to sassily challenge the Italian interior minister, having refugees – most of them men from sub-Saharan Africa – on board.

RAPE PHANTASIES

Then, Rackete illegally entered the port of Lampedusa with her 50-metre-long ship, even ramming a police boat on the way, and accepted her imprisonment. And when one Italian man at the harbor’s pier shouted he hoped Rackete would be “raped by the niggers aboard”, he expressed in his brute words a wish that apparently many others shared. For instance, Wolfgang Ackner, author for the conservative blog Achse des Guten (‘axis of the good’) commented via Facebook on the same day that he hopes Rackete would be visited by a group of guests with “ficki ficki” desires. On websites which usually cater to the so called German ‘Wutbürger’ (furious citizen) with somewhat better manners, commentators also shared their chain of associations: German woman – black men – illegal refugees – forced sex.

These reactions are strikingly reminiscent of mechanisms described by Klaus Theweleit in his book Männerphantasien (Male Phantasies): whenever fragile male identities are felt to be threatened, they devalue the women perceived as a threat and reduce them to their sexuality. 

Only when one has convinced oneself, and one another, that women like Carola Rackete do not act out of noble motives and rational calculation but are driven by impulses/instincts and an “inner emptiness”, do their fears temporarily diminish. The defense has thus worked somewhat – until the next time. Even better - in the shadow of the German Nazi past one feels suddenly free to make a very absurd reversal of facts and declare Carola Rackete an incarnation of the “ugly German”, as it was done in Achse des Guten, thus basically hinting that a kind of female Nazi returned – just without the helmet and the Swastika. 

Following through with this crooked mindset, anyone in Germany of the year 2019 wishing for Rackete to be raped (or something similar) actually wants to feel as a protector of all the other white women from the threat the terrible and misguided Carola Rackete helps to bring into Europe. In the case of a frustrated old left-wing German male, he might even feel like a mixture of Anti-Fashist and Anti-Islamist. 

Image credit: faz.net