Masters and Slaves

Mary Malone writes;

In his book Casa Grande e Senzala, the Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre comments on how writers and ideologues have blamed the African for the sensuality of Brazilian life in the time of slavery.
As Freyre points out, the writers and ideologues casting the stone of blame were white, male, and from the overseer and owner classes.
Freyre points out that in a patriarchal slave society the slave women were frequently raped by their white masters.
The white women were frequently married off to their cousins at the age of 12 or 13, mere breeding cows, riddled with the disease they caught from their husbands, dying from the complications of child birth when little more than children themselves.
Freyre points out that it was the European Brazilian who spread the syphilis in the slave quarters.
He points out that folk wisdom had it, that if a European syphilitic male had sex with a pubescent African virgin he would be cured of his ailment.
In Freyre’s opinion it is not the nature of the African that leads to a libidinous slavocratic society. It is the brutality and degradation of slavery itself.
According to Freyre, the Africans who remained in Africa showed a much lower level of sexual activity, that special ceremonies were needed to encourage copulation, that sexual union required ceremony and retained its sacred nature.
Unlike the Brazilian, unlike the European, the African was not ‘up for it’ all the time.
In a patriarchal society the senses are blunted, passivity and despair prevail, and sexual relations  become warped by concepts of power, domination, and conquest.
In such a hyper patriarchal society Master and Slave are both degraded.
Excess is the inevitable consequence.