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I’M TAKING THIS PATH for the first time, with all of you. Follow me if you can, if you have the willingness, the time, the patience . . .
ALREADY IN THOSE DAYS, masculinity was considered to be in crisis, threatened, since it seemed necessary to rescue it, vindicate it in the face of the danger constituted by women homosexuals and hippies.
It was urgent to react. We couldn’t stand by, twiddling our thumbs. We couldn’t bear witness to the collapse indifferently. React, react, react against the degeneration of civilization that had made men look more and more like women, suffice it to think of the fashion of long hair, equally detested by the Fascists, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and by old factory workers. The Fascists wanted a crop of healthy, vigorous young Italian men, ready to fight, Pasolini wanted them with the napes of their necks shaved clean and bangs hanging over their foreheads, and the factory workers were old-school, they wanted things the way they used to be. The permissive culture, in contrast, measured its advancement by the degree to which it had succeeded in feminizing males. I remember the sheer disgust with which the average adult watched longhairs on TV (singers, etc.). I myself wore my hair long, and I would have let it grow longer, but the fact is that it tended to grow upward instead of hanging down, puffing out at the sides, like the hairstyle of a female host on some show on RAI TV, especially if I tried to brush it. As a result, it never hung down over my shoulders, the way it did for those blessed with smooth, silky hair.
The obsession was always with masculine identity: to confuse it and bring it closer to the identity of the opposite sex (hair, earrings, etc.) or, on the contrary, to believe that you could safeguard it with a pair of scissors.
There were back then (and still exist today) the custodians of the virile myth. In their eyes, femininity softens a male, inducing flaccidity. They see femininity as an infection, they fear being contaminated with it, they guard virility as a closed, compact system, impermeable to the softness that contact with the feminine evokes and provokes. The fear, in other words, of being taken back to the nursing baby’s condition of dependency. The cock is hard until, after sexual intercourse, it softens. In truth, it was soft before intercourse as well, but what is most striking is always what comes after, just as the question of what there will be after death is always more frightening than what there was before life. However you choose to put it, sex is enervating. It is considered not as proof of potency, but quite to the contrary, as the main cause of potency’s loss. It is therefore undervalued or feared. All this has a plastic obviousness: with love, from stiff and strong, the body turns languid, tender, relaxed, and soft, just like a woman’s body, come to think of it . . .
Sex, then, would be nothing more than a trap laid for the man by the woman to debase and thereby subjugate him. To make him her slave by using a magic capable of causing weakness, of draining the energies or rerouting them into a bestial life, like that of the men transformed into wild animals by Circe (it’s interesting that Ulysses should use sex in a preemptive manner to prevent that from happening to him: he subjugates the sorceress by forcing her to engage in intercourse, which, curiously, weakens her, not him! This is a very rare case of a reversal of the rule, which instead applies inflexibly even among the gods, for example Ares and Hephaestus, one the lover, the other the husband, are both knocked out of combat by Aphrodite’s amatory arts). Sex is the means but at the same time the end of the project of seduction: it is what the man obtains as playful reparation for having accepted female domination, a gratification that actually enslaves those whom it renders happy, at least to the untrained eye. They believe that they have won, but what they receive is a consolation prize. Feminine allure is therefore a particular and, so to speak, very flexible variation of strength. It manifests itself not as a banal form of hardness but rather according to subtlety and invisibility.
Along with attraction, males always feel a vague terror of or repugnance toward intimacy, they fear intimacy with females and, to an almost equal degree, they fear it with other males, a scandalous impulse that must be repressed. The fact of desiring and inhibiting one’s desire can recur in each instance, or it may have happened once and for all during adolescence, when, in a more or less conscious manner, one makes one’s own sexual choice. During their first sexual experience, arms wrapped around a woman, young men are unable to breathe, they feel as if they’re suffocating, trapped. A very different matter from possessing, conquering, dominating! A man feels he’s enveloped in coils, wrapped tight in tentacles, buried in the yielding softness of the shape of a female body, and when he enters her, it is as if he had just entered his own grave. To his immense pleasure and upset, the disconcerting novelty of softness.
IT’S NOT EASY TODAY to distinguish what makes sex different from sports, from the purchase of luxury goods, and from violence. What boundaries separate it from these other practices, seeing that the way it is depicted is no different from athletic or commercial performance, or a rape. Sports, consumerism, and violence form a single category these days, and the only things that conventionally divide them are the thematic channels on satellite TV. Sports, consumer purchases, and pornography, the great contemporary surrogates for experience, the substitutes for war: strain and effort, limitless physical appropriation of goods and bodies. The objective of an athletic competition is simple and unequivocal: to win. The rest is just talk. Either the ball goes in the net or it doesn’t, there’s no point in arguing about it, even if the frustrated sports fans will go on doing so for weeks or even years, relitigating the disallowed goal, the ball that missed the net by a fraction of an inch . . . the result remains the same. It remains the law of the strongest and the best, and that means the team or the athlete who wins. Something very similar to this brutal, categorical spirit, as unfair as you please, but at least crystal clear, can be applied to courtship: So when it’s all said and done, did you fuck her? Did you fuck her or didn’t you? The rest is so much empty chatter.
Once you have grasped this erotic-athletic nexus, it isn’t hard to see the link between the twin worlds that, revolving with all their numerous satellites, occupy so much space in the male imagination, until their orbits coincide, now that sports, once an almost ascetic practice with overtones of elitism and puritanism, is the most highly eroticized and popular domain in the world. That said, I remember without the slightest twinge of regret at least a couple of non-fucks, in fact, probably more, at least three or four episodes among the many in which my soccer ball hit the upright, the penalty shot was misjudged or not even kicked, out of laziness or awkwardness or lack of perspicacity or a curious lack of interest that surfaced at the last minute: the culmination of a singular desire to play, yes, but only a little, to play a friendly exhibition game, so to speak, without anything at stake, without anyone winning anything. Without necessarily getting kinged, without dipping your biscuit, to use the explicit rhetorical figures of tradition (Roman, thuggish). There was a time when I believed that this spirit was exclusively feminine. A little provocative, slightly capricious, naturally inclined to make sure that nothing happened, just interested in seeing what might shake out, what might turn up. Women often like to sprinkle a little magic dust around the place, flap their wings, raise the temperature, without really looking for anything in particular . . . and then stop at a certain point for no particular reason, without explanation, pushing the game all the way along and then calling a halt all at once, and good night, Irene . . . the kind of thing that drives lots of men crazy and in certain cases has made me come close to losing my grip. Wait, what? You were willing to come over to my house, and now you’re already half-naked, and blah blah blah.
And yet I can say that I’ve done more or less the same with certain women, and that certain other women have done the same with me: shift from pedal to the metal to slamming on the brakes, or perhaps on the clutch, so that the engine races frantically: you can still hear the roar but the car slows down and comes to a halt . . . the excitement is at its peak, i
s it really necessary to go any farther? There is a wonderful and carefree moment, a senseless instant, in that suspension . . . Or perhaps it’s a profound fear, who can say . . . But fear of what?
And so, if I’ve experienced the same thing myself, does that mean that men and women are more similar than we suppose? That the whole rhetoric of getting to home base whatever the cost is false? Or that it’s not exclusive to males? Or that once you’ve hurled yourself headfirst into the enterprise of seduction, the actual fucking is actually only relatively important?
TO COUNTERBALANCE THESE, there have been other episodes when I wound up determined to fuck at all costs, practically in spite of myself, as if with my eyes closed, just to honor the principle of not doing without. Fleeting, senseless instances of intercourse in which, if I raped anyone, I raped myself, and like an athlete clenching his teeth on the last lap, thinking only of the finish line, managed to break the ribbon only to collapse immediately afterward into a heap of utter indifference.
PERHAPS WE DON’T EVEN realize to what extent much (these days, almost the totality) of our sexual experience is indirect and vicarious. However long and however many times we might have kissed, touched, and made love, we’ve seen, read, peeped at, spied on, eavesdropped on someone else who was doing it or talking about doing it a millions times more. In a single screenshot on any old site on the Internet there flashes more sex than we’ve had or will have in our entire lifetimes. I’m not just talking about pornography, though these days pornography is the world’s most important medium of communication, and at the same time, the most widespread message; I’m talking about the thousand channels via which sex reaches us. Our direct experience of coitus, the experiences of it that we’ve personally consumed, is nothing compared with the indirect experience, and we can therefore say that the latter is far more substantial and important than the former. Even if we’re just talking about kisses, however many of them I may have given (something that I found repugnant when I was kid but now like it better than all the rest), it’s still just an infinitesimal percentage of the kisses I’ve seen given: by other people in flesh and blood, on TV, at the movies, on the street, at parties, between men and women, and men and men, and women and women, in museums, in snapshots, many of them anonymous and many of them memorable, as memorable if not more so than the ones I’ve given and received with my own lips . . .
Even if we grant that a guy has only ever known the woman he married, well, from the very outset that’s not true: there have been at least a thousand or ten thousand different women, that is, as many as have filled his eyes, naked, since he was a boy. And many of them he will have shared with vast numbers of other men. Along with that crowd, he will have formed an image of sexuality that is far more vast than that experienced in his conjugal observatory. The disproportion between your real and imaginary activity, that is, made up of images, but no less concrete than the former, is almost enough to make your head spin. The same thing could be said of the relationship between the life you are obliged to live and the alternative existences lived by proxy when reading novels or watching movies.
Back in the days of elementary and middle school, the stars were Ursula Andress and Raquel Welch, in their skimpy bikinis or skintight jumpsuits or animal pelts. In the period when this story unfolds, less explosive female stars were triumphing, ones that were more complicated, morbid, and ambiguous, such as Charlotte Rampling or Sylvia Kristel.
FOR THAT MATTER, pornography and the novel were born together and they spread in parallel. They are two tools that are basically similar in the way that they amplify the individual experience in a fantastic manner, by collecting a series of adventures, which could only rarely be lived in person, through fictional characters. A difference that may amount to mirror images of each other, complementary roles: while the audience for novels par excellence was feminine, pornography targeted almost exclusively men.
The most common image—and the most commonly visited image—on the web is of a woman without clothing. What can explain the fact that yesterday I spent at least an hour online searching for photos of a skinny Belgian model with big tits? Why does sexual freedom so closely resemble slavery? This story unfolds at the apex of the curve of a great change, exactly a quarter of a century before the end of the millennium, long before sexual liberation—which a number of people before us had fought for—came to resemble a form of sexual oppression, with its unprecedented prescriptions and persecutions, and the pillorying and shaming and banishments . . . How can it be that the good thing which others before us battled for should transform itself so rapidly into the evil against which we now have to battle? The more my freedom grows, the more I become a slave. Sexualization of domination. A sexualization that affects every corner and aspect of life, especially those of a commercial nature: from food and work and how little girls and brides dress to the way they sell a package vacation . . . Power is sexualized, soccer is sexualized, infancy and old age are sexualized, war is hypersexualized . . . Politics is pure pornography. And then journalism, or what remains of it, is an unbroken erotic message, a thoroughgoing eroticization with here and there, scattered throughout, the occasional fact or even a flood, a revolution, an earthquake . . . crashing airplanes . . .
And yet true sexual freedom ought to include freedom from sex as well. More than pedagogy, it’s a full-blown dictatorship: even back then, at the time when this story unfolds, the main source and authority in the sexual education of young males was pornography. Aside from personal confidences from some older friend with more practical knowledge and fewer illusions, and specialized magazines full of specious descriptions that you had to read and reread, like assembly instructions, the basic laws of sex were crudely imparted by porn films but, especially, pulpy porn magazines. A rudimentary but effective pedagogy, useful at least in scraping away the worst forms of ignorance. It was pornography that showed us, albeit after its own fashion, that is, in a hyperbolic, inimitable manner, the things that happen between men and women, the positions in which they couple, what’s underneath the clothing, how the various parts of the body are to be employed.
FOR INSTANCE, let’s take the sealed supplements that came with the magazine Due +. I remember, from those exhausting readings, a brief chapter on a special technique of oral sex known as the “butterfly kiss” or maybe “butterfly wings”: you put your face between the girl’s open thighs, and then you shake your head from side to side, slowly at first and then faster and faster, and faster still, as if you were saying no a thousand times over, running the tip of your tongue as stiff as an arrow over the girl’s clitoris, just barely grazing it, the way the wing of a crazed butterfly might do. There, I put it in my own words, and I’m a little ashamed to have done so, but in the magazine it was all more technical, and long-winded: they seemed like instructions for operating an electric appliance of some sort, or performing a rehabilitation exercise for deaf-mutes. If correctly performed, with the right degree of delicacy and rapidity, it was supposed to take the girl to the heights of ecstasy.
(Auxiliary sexual metaphor: like a pick on the strings of a guitar . . .)
AFTER SEX, nowadays the vast revenue and allied industries of the world of crime are far more extensive than the criminal activity itself; the exploitation extends to countless TV series and networks dedicated to the investigation of techniques of killing, a vast branch of the publishing industry, with dictionaries of crime, the biographies and confessions of murderers, and more or less novelized versions of true crime stories. There are judges who, after undertaking judicial investigations on the activities of criminal gangs, have written screenplays and articles about them for TV and the press, making their protagonists incredibly popular; murderers who tell the story of their killings in written form, in search of human understanding or fame; the incessant creation of inspectors and detectives, speaking dialect or proper Italian, with a side gig as gourmets or philosophers or lotharios, who—between fine lunches and dinners—solve the mysteries of some m
urder or other; the flourishing of a brand-new school of noir or detective fiction whose authors gained their knowledge about the underworld firsthand, working with it in careers previous to their rebirth as writers, and whose suspense novels, someone commented, aren’t worth reading because you always know in advance who the killer is: the author. This book of mine also belongs to the genre of true crime exploitation, though at arm’s length, as we’ll see later on. Now more than ever, crime pays.
THE ABUSE AND TORTURE inflicted upon a woman can always be retailed as entertainment. The Rorschach blots of violence give reliable, unvarying answers. If you see a naked man being tortured, what comes to mind is either political persecution or a criminal vendetta. If you see a naked woman being tortured, what comes to mind is sex. If the most unspeakable taboos are violated within the context of some pornographic intent, instead of triggering indignation they will stir feelings of excitement, or else both indignation and excitement, the excitement barely concealed beneath the overlaid veil of indignation. In the prose employed by the popular press, a diction and tone are deliberately trotted out for descriptions of sex crimes that are designed to titillate the reader. That’s to say nothing of TV, which has, if possible, an even more morbid relationship with its viewers, supplying them from dawn to dusk, in its various formats, ranging from news broadcasts to TV series—adjacent in style and content but often mingling and even overlapping one with another—an ongoing celebration of eroticized crime, the most powerful stimulant on earth, since it’s an intertwined embodiment of the most fundamental impulses. There is nowadays only one degree of separation between a flesh-and-blood criminal and an imaginary one on TV, and often not even a single degree, since it has been clearly established that real criminals provide excellent raw material for creating fictional ones, or can even take their place entirely. The most prosperous and ubiquitous industry on earth, the flesh trade, continues to expand limitlessly until it constitutes an unbroken pornographic continuum that takes in the territories of crime reporting, given that these territories are where excitement runs most unbridled, expertly camouflaged behind the moral condemnation that we customarily reserve for true stories and events that actually occurred. In tune with the universe of sexualized fiction, a sensation of continuity propagates busily through space and time. The oil that glistens on the ass cheeks of porn actresses has been smeared over the world at large, enveloping it like a translucent patina, its tremulous reflection illuminating the still watches of the night and the daylit boredom of millions of viewers at their computers. It takes no special effort to translate real events into pornographic fantasies, and vice versa: the most objective, barebones exposition of the facts concerning sex crimes can be transformed into an erotic short story, where the same morbid features that trigger indignation and horror also serve to stir up excitement. It is by communicating in this way that imagery which is sadistic and disgusting becomes pornographic, that is, every bit as sadistic and disgusting, and yet exciting as well. Pornography in fact consists of the arousal and excitement that an object manages to deliberately trigger in a given individual, whether consciously or passively: an excitement that can be calculated in advance and calibrated according to fine-grained standards capable of predicting the effect of a certain word, or an image, and even a fragment of that image, a half-inch of flesh photographed a half-inch higher or lower than usual . . . We find it in newspaper headlines, product advertising, scenes of violence, objects arranged in a shop window, in the incessant stream of double entendres that constitutes 90 percent of all TV comedy, in locker-room humor.
The Catholic School Page 19
