All I know is that the cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish short-hand. Tell me you’re going to the doctor, and I’ll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you’ve fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn’t necessarily wanted to be cured. But I was out of places to write, slicing myself between my toes—bad, cry—like a junkie looking for one last vein. Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the next, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in.6
It’s fitting that Camille, who from childhood can depend on so little, would obsess over the possibilities of endurance—the things we can keep. The conditions of her upbringing render her perpetually bereft, with a mother who does not love her, a father she has never met and whose identity is impossibly smudged, and a stepfather who is uninterested in cultivating their relationship. The younger sister she adored also slips through her fingers, dying in childhood. There is “safety” in wounds and the scars they breed because they supply evidence—that we are here, that we can act, that we can, at least sometimes, choose what we feel.
In the miniseries, Amy Adams delivers a performance as Camille that is both tender and unyielding. Her character’s history of self-harm is not applied as a hackneyed narrative device, diminished to allegory as is so often the case with women’s suffering. Instead, viewers are confronted with the gut impulse to fling oneself toward violence. Through Adams, we witness, albeit through the indirection of theatricality, the yen for one’s own blood, the inexorable urge to visit physical destruction upon oneself because the mere act of living in the world is, often, too much. To the extent that self-harm is a punishment—and I would not presume that everyone sees it that way—it illuminates a visceral fact of patriarchy: to exist as a woman or femme can feel untenable, but we are taught that every difficulty demonstrates our own insufficiencies and weaknesses. We are instructed, through every possible sociocultural channel, to hold ourselves accountable for the slog of matriculation in a country that doesn’t especially care about or respect us. When ensnared in a trap, an animal, left with no other recourse, will eventually gnaw at its own limb in a bloody ploy for freedom. Here’s the paradox: sometimes we cut ourselves in order to survive.
* * *
With the exceptions of Prozac Nation, Sharp Objects, and Girl, Interrupted—Kaysen makes reference to her inclinations toward self-harm late in the memoir—nonclinical writing on female masochism is sporadic. We have seen these narratives surface in the early aughts, but their entrance has been halting and timid. Yet, in The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison tenderly and tenaciously considers the subject while supplying one potential reason for this dearth: it’s a dilemma of representation. How do we authentically depict female pain in a milieu that has long fetishized it? “The hard part is that underneath this obscene fascination with women who hurt themselves,” she writes, “…there are actual women who hurt themselves.”7 Young adult literature has also engaged the topic, with conspicuous titles like Cut by Patricia McCormick and Scars by Cheryl Rainfield. Research has indicated that self-mutilation serves as a form of punishment for girls more often than for boys, and that, in the meantime, girls are more likely to perform stability and competence. To be sure, my aim was foremost to mete out retribution, whether motivated by an unfriendly mirror or a B-plus. This inclination to absorb one’s own rage bears out in studies on prisoners: women are more likely to harm themselves—men, each other.8
And so bearing witness is our recourse, our one tool to chisel through our own myopic self-absorption. Pain grows like fungus; it insists on our company. “You can’t live without me,” it chides, and I suppose it’s right. We won’t eradicate suffering—it’s a consequence of breathing—and we almost certainly cannot eradicate self-injury. I’ve not fully extinguished my own inclinations; I doubt if ever I will.
But I am better, and I am happier—not always, sometimes only barely. Although nearly dormant, the urge to self-harm will find its open doors. When I grow angry, my first impulse is to strike myself against the side of my head as hard as I can, again and again and again. Paul rushes to stop me before I grow too violent and unwieldy, before the slaps begin to feel ludicrously insufficient and I must seek severer methods. Years ago I might have fought him, wildly; sometimes even now I struggle against him at first, before I realize that I feel something else: relief.
It saddens me at times that after over twenty years, I haven’t managed to fully relinquish my long-held ritual. A confession: I cut myself in the midst of writing this chapter, old habits quickened, I suppose, by the barb of memory. I am still learning that self-harm is not narcissism. A woman who is cutting is not indulging; she is carving out a route to survival, the only one that’s perceptible to her. And although she is no culprit, although she owes neither defense nor apology, she is already ashamed.
Chapter Eight
Horny
One humdrum winter afternoon, during winter break of my freshman year of college, I sheepishly tucked myself into bed, accompanied by a woebegone McDonald’s Happy Meal toy. This plaything—a small car—held no emotional significance for me; on the contrary, I had seized it in a fit of sexual desperation: when packing for vacation, I had forgotten my vibrator, which was, as a result, sitting uselessly—maddeningly!—inside my dorm room. At first, I suffered only minor concern: surely I could survive a month of fumbling with my bunglesome fingers. But two weeks of gravely unsuccessful endeavors into digital masturbation rendered me bereft—bereft, and very, very horny. I was single, but while relatively free with my kisses, I was, at the time, less inclined to become intimate under casual circumstances. I also didn’t have my driver’s license, so I couldn’t drive independently to Nancy’s Nook, Virginia Beach’s trusted source for erotic paraphernalia—and while my mother and I were close, asking her to accompany me was decidedly out of the question. Besides, in my state of erotic derangement, I required immediate satisfaction.
I had seen American Pie, and I knew that in the quest for an orgasm, necessity often bred creativity. Surely there was a tool somewhere in my family’s house that I could repurpose, one that wouldn’t be missed or ruined by my meddling. And so I rummaged through bins of cheap old toys, primarily the spoils of yesteryear’s kids’ meals, all long abandoned by my sisters and me. I examined each one, contemplating their respective capacities for clitoral stimulation. Mostly, I was disappointed. And then, finally, I happened upon a toy car with rubbery, rotating wheels: it wasn’t much, and yet, perhaps, just perhaps, if I were inventive and patient, ecstasy awaited.
But let’s not tarry on delusions: it won’t surprise you that my efforts were an utter failure, and that after roughly thirty minutes of masturbating with a Happy Meal toy, I was forced to abandon the project. Thankfully, one male friend was in town with whom I’d shared a couple of very casual interludes, and I determined that the urgency of my carnal requirements outweighed the embarrassment of asking him to drive me to Nancy’s Nook. He kindly agreed, and at last, I was delivered to my trusted hanky-panky retailer, where I surveyed their vast and comprehensive wall of dildos and vibrators. Preferring simplicity, I selected a violet and white striped dildo with modulated speeds. I’m happy to say that we enjoyed several years together before she ascended to the sex toy shop in the sky.
* * *
My forays into the wide world of battery-operated stimulation, while eager, did not start until late in teenhood, when I received my first vibrator as a gag Christmas gift. Until then, I indulged in fantasies of my own design, navigating sexual desire as a preadolescent through erotic world-building. I fantasized while skating at the roller rink, adopting a ritual wherein during each excursion I requested that the DJ play “Slide” by the Goo Goo Dolls. Then I zipped along, my thoughts efflorescing into a twelve-year-old’s version of sexy musings. Too naïve to understand the song—that it narrates a man’s reaction to his girlfriend’
s pregnancy—I fixated on a scrap of lines from the chorus: “Oh, May, put your arms around me / What you feel is what you are and what you are is beautiful.” To feel beautiful, to understand it as personal truth, was a sensation so foreign as to seem exotic—and as for being told that a beloved someone found me so, well, I couldn’t fathom it. But music provided the soundtrack to my burgeoning erotic awareness, and when I glided through the rink in my plastic Rollerblades, speed and melody transported me from my gawky pre-adolescent body; I became an airborne essence capable of inhabiting another reality—one in which I was May: who was beautiful and, according to the man who loved her, could, however faintly, perceive that beauty as her own.
In junior high, what struck me as most climactic was not intercourse, the mechanisms of which still confused me, but instead the possibility of reciprocal, lustrous longing, of being touched—anywhere—and the passionate kisses that illuminated the desire for so much more than my uninitiated mind could comprehend. In the dark of night, huddled under the covers with my Walkman, I began touching myself, but with the bashful timidity of a girl intimidated by her own depths. When I discovered Sarah McLachlan’s album Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, the title seemed a canny summation of my circumstances.
I think that I sensed, in my early adolescence, that sexual yearning, like my other physiological experiences, would be, for me, something both colossal and untamable. I sought out music that expressed my wellspring of longing, glomming onto sweeping, womblike melodies and self-serious, nearly liturgical instrumentals. I taped Sarah McLachlan singles off the radio: “Possession,” of course, as well as “Sweet Surrender” and “Building a Mystery.” I swiped my mother’s Loreena McKennitt album The Book of Secrets (1997) so that I could act out the part of the sacrificial lover in “The Highwayman,” and I lay prone on the floor as “Dante’s Prayer” swam inside my ears. I imagined losing my virginity to half of the Pure Moods compilation, and could hardly listen to Enigma’s “Sadeness” for fear that the rapid breaths at its middle—heady and urgent—would unspool me like thread. At age twelve, sex’s significance lived in its proximity to mortality: in fantasizing about it, I was imagining a love so tectonic it knocked you to your knees, a person so adored that you would sacrifice yourself to spare them. These, of course, were the fancies of a spoiled girl who, because of her penchant for melodrama, tended to imagine her first sexual encounter taking place inside of a temple, preferably on an altar of some kind.
Over the course of teenhood—after I had kissed boys and begun to understand the rapture of mutual arousal—the oceanic pull of desire continued to rise up in my chest and throat, unwieldy and, I feared, hazardous. Still a virgin, and still relatively inexperienced, I was never concerned about what I might do, but instead what these feelings implied. My fantasies were imbued with the shame of too muchness, by then a familiar and diligent attendant. By senior year of high school—after I had been gifted my first vibrator—worrying over being too much meant, for me, fretting over my avid masturbation habit and my enjoyment of pornography, which I would download on the trusty and legally dubious platform Kazaa and then, after satiating myself, delete in embarrassment. Would lovers find me grotesque? Would they think my carnality indelicate and, thus, unfeminine? To this day, I have difficulty invoking the word “horny”; it is so contextually tailored to male desire, to say nothing of its phallic imagery, that it seems to condemn any woman to whom it is applied.
Of course these insecurities are culturally manufactured. Women, after all, are not supposed to be “horny”—at least not in ways deviating from the illusions proffered in heteronormative, male-directed pornography. The word, crass and imperious, connotes a desire that is, fittingly, unselfconsciously demanding. Even now, Western culture condemns these experiences when made manifest by women. Significantly, the word also calls to mind the term “cuckold,”1 a mocking name for a man whose wife has been unfaithful. In both art and literature this disgrace was sometimes designated with a set of horns to be worn by the unlucky husband. To be a “horny” woman, then, is to be sexually unruly, with an appetite so excessive it yields crimes of infidelity and perversity—and, most notably, male sexual humiliation.
For women to celebrate their horniness nakedly, and on their own terms, is an act of necessary sexual resistance, but one that stigmatizes and even endangers its practitioners. American culture mystifies female self-pleasure and even intense sexual longing, occasionally essaying a vibrator joke, but pussyfooting (no pun intended) around feminine erotic desire. Most women need to get off, and some more often than others. Centuries of misogyny have normalized the perspective that women who engage frequent sexual partners and—crucially—do not conceal it are sluts. And now, as we navigate the brambles of the #MeToo movement, conservative obsession with female purity virulently persists, an organizing principle for continued efforts to manage women’s desire. But sexual too muchness does not merely comprise the resulting action; it also includes the originating drive: we’re just as fidgety when women speak openly about wanting to fuck. A horny woman is always a desperate woman, a figure of fun and a punch line. Sometimes, if we squint, it may seem as if we’ve traveled miles from the intense Victorianesque slut-shaming of previous decades, but the conversation has in fact taken the form of a false binary: a woman is either a slut or she is a joke—and in many cases, she is both.
* * *
The myth of Victorian prudery is one of the prevailing misconceptions about nineteenth-century culture. We’ve adopted an understanding of Victorian culture as systemically excising sex from every corner, muffling sensuality into repressed silence. French philosopher Michel Foucault refers to this theory as “The Repressive Hypothesis.” But as he explains, this notion of prudery is an illusion—the Victorians were always talking about sex; they were simply doing so in accordance with very specific and regimented provisions:
Yet when one looks back over these last three centuries with their continual transformations, things appear in a very different light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable discursive explosion. We must be clear on this point, however. It is quite possible that there was an expurgation—and a very rigorous one—of the authorized vocabulary…[But there] was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex—specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.2
For Foucault, whose philosophy was rooted in the study of power structures and how individuals are shaped by the larger forces that control them, the “proliferation” of sex talk in Victorian society is less significant than the matter of who had the authority to speak about it, the positions and viewpoints from which people spoke about it, and the institutions that prompted people to speak about it, as well as how that information was dispersed. The motivations for power and knowledge, he claims, cannot be extricated from one another—power is amassed through knowledge, and in accumulating knowledge, we become more powerful.3 But make no mistake: for those who possessed power—members of the church, medical doctors, the criminal justice system—there was pleasure in having the authority to control and monitor sex, and in coming to possess knowledge about it too. For example, different hegemonic structures scrutinized sexual “perversities”—same-sex desire, for example—because they were attracted to the possibilities of seizing that knowledge and enticed by the very content itself. Foucault also explains that those who fled from these multifarious, searching entities gained pleasure through that act of circumvention or, in other circumstances, by confessing their so-called sexual perversities. Both parties, the seeker and the sought, found satisfaction in their role within this coiled game of cat and mouse, a self-reiterating process that Foucault refers to as the regime of “power-knowledge-pleasure.”4
Alas, Foucault didn’t have much to say about patriarchy or where women fit into this paradigm, which, while limited, is a useful one. But it will be no surprise that it was men who wielded pow
er in terms of sexual discourse, including writers whose work fell under the so-called realm of perversity. Between 1879 and 1880, Victorian pornographer William Lazenby published the underground erotic magazine The Pearl: A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading,5 which included titles like “Miss Pokingham; or They All Do It,” not to mention a prodigious amount of flogging content (it was shuttered by authorities due to its obscenity). Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne is thought to have contributed to the periodical and to have authored the anonymously published Whippingham Papers (1887) which, as the name suggests, is entirely devoted to flagellation. Female characters were present in this literature, with names like Miss Tickletouch and Miss Latecome and Miss Switchem, but their exploits, however lusty, were almost certainly penned for male pleasure. A brief play, entitled “A Visit to Miss Birch,” opens with the impressions of a young voyeur, Sally, who is titillated by the sight of one woman whipping—or “birching”—another:
Where is my spying-hole? Oh, here it is. Now for a full view of the exhibition that is going on. Oh, there stands the mistress, with rod in hand, ready for the attack, and my little blubbering lady is lifting up her petticoats. There they are tucked up about her waist—and now she is loosening her drawers. I declare—down they go, sure enough. Now she is horsed! The mistress takes up her shift, and shows as pretty a bottom for a girl of fifteen as could well be seen. Now she begins to give it to her…I am delighted with it. Oh! Dear, quite delightful. How charming it must be to give a pretty girl like this a good whipping. I should like it of all things in the world.6
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