Gender, Sex, and Hypersexualization Theme Analysis

Alongside exploring racial stereotypes, The Sellout also confronts stereotypes relating to race and gender. In particular, it explores the hypersexualization imposed on black people—meaning the racist stereotype that black people are aggressively or excessively sexual—and the way this affects their experience of their own sexuality. As a black man, the narrator is perceived as sexually aggressive by the outside world. While the only woman the narrator has sex with in the novel is Marpessa, his childhood sweetheart, he does at times appear to have internalized stereotypes about his own hypersexuality and sexual aggressiveness. At other times, his behavior directly contradicts these assertions, for example when he calls himself “frigid.” Overall, the novel subtly critiques both the hypersexualization of black people and the sexual aggression often associated with masculinity.

In parts of the novel, the narrator acknowledges and even appears to embrace sexual stereotypes about black men. The prologue is filled with phallic imagery, and in the first paragraph the narrator refers to “my gigantic penis.” Elsewhere, he notes that in Dickens, “penis envy doesn’t exist because sometimes niggers just got too much dick.” This suggests that perhaps sometimes people are happy to embrace stereotypes that are positive or advantageous to them. On the other hand, there is certainly irony in the narrator’s tone here. Rather than truly embracing stereotypes about black men’s large penises, he is arguably making fun of these stereotypes and taunting those who feel threatened by them. After all, stereotypes about black men’s penises arguably reveal far more about the insecurities and fantasies of nonblack people than they do about black men themselves.

However, stereotypes about male sexual aggression are sometimes shown to be more plausible. The narrator’s father, for example, is presented as a lothario who had a habit of sleeping with his students. The narrator’s mother, Laurel Lescook, remembers his father as a creepy man who harassed her. Similarly, Foy Cheshire is said to have blown all his money on drugs and women. For both the narrator’s father and Foy, fame and success are ways of getting women to sleep with them. Indeed, the narrator’s father has a particular penchant for young women, including his own students and teaching assistants. In this way, the narrator’s father is shown to be rather predatory. Similarly, at one point in the novel the narrator admits: “like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I'm bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages.” Even Hominy, who is otherwise meek and emasculated (he even requests that the narrator cut off his penis and stuff it in his mouth, as was sometimes done during lynching), enthusiastically flirts with Butterfly, the sorority girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Almost all the men in the novel display some kind of sexually aggressive behavior, often directed at women much younger than them, and these details suggest that there may be some truths in stereotypes about male sexual aggression.

At the same time, masculinity is subject to critique in the novel, through the book’s depiction of how masculinity forces the narrator to conform to a way of being that feels alien to him. Toward the end of the novel, he admits to being “frigid,” using this word in the same “obnoxious way men in the free-love seventies projected their own sexual inadequacies onto women.” This sentence shows how society’s idea of masculinity can be an oppressive force that attempts to mask “inadequacies” through the imposition of negative stereotypes about others. By applying these sexist negative stereotypes to himself, the narrator embraces his own “inadequacies” while suggesting that there is no room within masculinity for him to admit these openly. The only way to express his feelings of insecurity is by comparing himself to a woman.

Despite the narrator’s self-deprecating analysis of his frigidity, Marpessa assures him that she likes that he is not as aggressively masculine as other men. She confesses that she fell in love with him when they went out to eat together and, unlike the other black men she knows, the narrator did not insist on sitting facing the door. Marpessa finds it appealing that the narrator does not feel the need to aggressively assert his own masculinity and appear tough and dangerous. Furthermore, her love of the narrator’s satsumas and her use of his childhood nickname, “Bonbon,” indicate that she prefers the sweet, nurturing side of the narrator, qualities that are typically associated with femininity more than masculinity.

Both sexual stereotypes about black people and masculinity are under critique in the novel. As a result, it can sometimes appear that the narrator accepts stereotypes about black men as true—however, the reality is more complex. Sometimes the narrator embraces such stereotypes ironically in order to lampoon the insecurities that created the stereotypes in the first place. However, at other points the novel critiques black masculinity not as a specific phenomenon but as a part of masculinity in general, showing how the demands of masculinity can have a constricting, damaging effect on both men and women.