ABSTRACT
The psyche of the broad masses is accessible only to what is strong and uncompromising. Like a woman whose inner sensibilities are subject to a vague emotional longing for the strength that completes her being, and who would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling so the masses prefer a ruler to a suppliant and are filled with a stronger sense of mental security. In most Western countries, there is a less direct relationship between sexual and political potency, and careers can be endangered by sexual scandals. But even in Protestant and Puritan cultures, in which sex and politics do not mix publicly. Thus one key historical question, inseparable from our understanding of totalitarianism, is how to explain the responses of Nazi women to the male-dominated phenomenon of National Socialism. Connections between sexual passion and political power are there, however, in the form of the strong man's sexual dominance of the submissive woman.
