And indeed on screens, which are mirrors to real life, the mirror of the desires and fears that make up our lives, all we see people doing is fucking or murdering, murdering or fucking. In detective movies, crime flicks, horror, romance, police, psychological, erotic, war, and adventure films, characters kill or have sex as if these were the two fundamental activities of human existence, the only ones worthy of being depicted. Lovers and murderers; bare-naked ladies and bullet-riddled corpses. Nothing could be more obvious than to connect the two themes and reduce them to a single act, an unbroken succession of fucking and killing, all in perfect continuity.
RAPE IS CONTIGUOUS or intertwined with other acts of violence, war, robbery, vendetta, of which it can represent the culmination, the initial purpose or else a secondary objective, after the fact, a garnish or side dish, a transfer, a variant, or even an improvised invention. If an armed robber comes up empty-handed, he can always rape the lady of the house. If he rapes her, he can always kill her. If he had planned to rape her, he can always change his mind and simply beat her senseless. Or else he can do all these things combined. Rape and plunder always go hand in hand. When there isn’t much to plunder, you can just rape instead: the principle of appropriation can be applied more or less indifferently to inanimate objects and living beings. These various eventualities are like adjacent keys on a piano. The scales may already be written in the musical score or else improvised on the spur of the moment, depending on the occasion and the mood: and in any given harmonic chord, you may choose to let resonate the dominant note of rape, or mute it, keeping it as a minor chord, or even choose to leave that key unplayed entirely. As in wartime, the line of conduct will vary according to the minute-by-minute changes in the situation, with the tactics best suited to the terrain and the adversary; or else, contrarywise, the mission might be pursued in single-minded fashion: a man goes out in search of a woman to rape, and in the end, a woman will be raped. Roughly two-thirds of all rapes are planned in advance, like the one I am going to tell you about farther on in this book, a crime that developed out of the setting that I’m describing here. Far from being a crime committed under the urgent impulse of uncontrollable instincts, rape is often worked out at the drawing board, especially when it’s not an individual but rather a group doing the planning, choosing a target and taking all necessary steps to ensure that one is in an advantageous position with respect to that target, thus assuring that the victim can neither fight back nor oppose resistance without risking her life. Though she may still be risking her life even when she puts up no resistance.
THE EVENT THAT GAVE rise to this book is the so-called Circeo Rape/Murder, September 29, 1975: hereinafter the CR/M.
What can be rightly asked about the case of the CR/M is whether the murder was a continuation of the sexual violence, one further step, more or less planned out on a continuum with the abuse and torture and rape, or whether instead the rape was nothing more or less than a prelude to the murder, a preparatory phase. Before killing the girls, they wanted to have some fun with them. Or else: having raped them, they therefore decided to kill them.
THE PURPOSE OF WAR is the utter domination and defeat of the enemy, right? Which can take place in one of two ways, either through killing or appropriation. War, in other words, basically consists of a series of violent acts designed to kill the men who have been declared enemies and to possess their women, thereafter either to kill them, too, or else to let them live as slaves. Depending on your point of view, these killings and these rapes can equally justifiably be considered as means or objectives, or as incidental casualties of war itself. And even if no war is under way, the rapist still behaves just like the soldier of an invading army. He has the same mind-set, guided by thoughts of vengeance and plunder. The man whose women (wives, mothers, daughters, sisters) are raped is thus forced to admit his helplessness, his impotence, and therefore his substantial lack of manliness. Instead, that term can rightly be applied to he who can show that he is both capable of protecting his own women and ravish with impunity other men’s women. If you carefully follow the twists and turns of this line of thought, you can see how many acts of violence against women are actually not directed against them at all, or not only against them, but should instead be taken as acts of outrage or defiance or contempt toward their men. It is other men that rapists want to hurt, by ricochet. The bodies of raped women are nothing more than the physical medium used to send a message to their men: a clear, brutal, mocking message. That is the reason that so often the woman’s husband or father or boyfriend is immobilized and forced to witness the woman’s rape: that’s not an extra dose of sadistic violence, an afterthought. It is, rather, the true objective of the rape. A quintessential affirmation of supremacy. By inflicting violence on one person, you lash out at two. Virility, then, is measured by the ability both to protect women and to assault them.
THE AFFIRMATION OF MASCULINITY would seem to imply the submission of the female counterpart. So, one sex affirms itself by subjugating the other? That’s a simplification of the schema whereby every living being, in order to affirm itself, must subjugate other living beings. One expresses one’s own vital will only by bending the will of others. If we imagine, then, a specific essence of masculinity, it manifests itself in the dominion of femininity, but the reverse might equally be the case, that is, in its turn, the feminine element might manifest itself in all its power and its authentic nature when it is able to dominate the male principle: only, instead of availing itself of physical force, which it possesses to a lesser extent, it makes recourse to cunning, seduction, the sapping and undermining of the opposing force, by weakening it, feigning submissiveness and compliance only to gain the upper hand through duplicity. It’s the typical strategy, the last-ditch resource available to those who are subordinate, the age-old school of the oppressed that teaches how to reverse the power relations, not by some spectacular act, destined to failure, but instead with a slow, invisible, and silent conquest . . .
That is why, as a counterstroke, the sword of force slices through the cloud of seduction. Like Alexander the Great, who slices the Gordian knot in half—no more dilemmas, no more complicated issues and subtleties and feints and courtships and skirmishes. Instead, an overt act. That is the ethic of virility that Fascist activism took as its emblem: a club to be wielded against the ambiguities and sophistries, a mace to be brought down on the head of those who would stall for time, raise objections, slow-walk, fend off, recoil or nitpick or play. This is how a man justifies his competitiveness: he overwhelms the woman, he is duty-bound to overwhelm her, lest he be subjugated by her instead. It’s a preemptive move: unless the feminine element is fought to a standstill, it will ultimately enslave its male counterpart—either with sexual love or else the mechanisms of family life. The man in either case will end up in chains. In any case, to defy and master femininity requires not just any ordinary individual—it takes a hero. Capable of dominating the woman and defanging her, rendering her helpless. But even a hero can sometimes lay down his arms, bowing to the unmistakable fact that the woman possesses and exercises a power greater than his, greater than all other powers, unequaled, the power of conception. Impossible to subdue that enigmatic might, that earthshaking force. The hero can combat femininity like any of the monsters that block his path—giants, dragons, dragonesses—we forget how often those superhuman creatures are female, Medusa, the Sphinx, the Hydra, Giambattista Basile’s enchanted doe, Grendel’s mother in Beowulf, the pythoness that Apollo killed, to say nothing of the Sirens and the Harpies, filthy and seductive. The hero struggles to master this subject, in the name of (male) spirituality in defiance of the (female) corporeal, and for that reason he must either kill or succumb, if he is to eradicate all and every material residue.
The truth is that a male is generally unwilling to tolerate feminine sexuality in whatever form it expresses itself: every attitude displayed by a woman can cause resentment or contempt or fear in a man: whether she is rejecting the
offered relationship, or giving in too easily. Chastity and erotic licentiousness are both seen as equally disagreeable and fearsome, two deviant forms of behavior. He can’t tolerate a woman being hostile to sex or being a sex maniac. But even so-called normality has a disquieting side to it. A man deplores and at the same time envies feminine sexuality in that which is supposed to be its most obvious faculty, namely maternity, even when it’s regimented and legitimized within the context of matrimony: he’s frightened by it, intimidated, he obscurely fears the development of something that is entirely outside his control. Certainly, as a father he’ll be able to enjoy his children and feel pride in them: but he will still in a certain sense have to adopt them, even if they really are his own offspring, he’ll somehow have to make them his.
Thus, whatever form feminine sexuality may take is bound to hurt a man, attracting him at the same time that it irritates him, frightening him and subjugating him, or driving him mad. He is either abjectly dismayed or driven into a furious rage by any woman who denies her own femininity by declining to have relations with him, and has the same reaction to the woman who, at the opposite extreme, gives in promiscuously to anyone who asks, and last of all, to the woman who behaves in a perfectly ordinary fashion, in the innocuous context of monogamy, who by the simple contingency of becoming pregnant chains the man to his fatherly responsibilities and duties. This places a ball and chain around his ankle for good. In this sense, marriage can be even more deadly than chastity, promiscuity, and prostitution. Needless to say, men traditionally perceive the family as a feminine invention and demand. An enterprise that immediately proves to be exhausting and expensive to run. Whether she is a church lady, a young woman of loose morals, or the mother of a family, a man is invariably troubled by the sexual faculties of any given woman, which constitute a challenge to him, a provocation: the woman must be defeated, or protected, saved, or held at arm’s length, but in any case she cannot be trusted, her lures and wiles must be outwitted, he must not be taken prisoner by her maneuvers, and he must gird himself against her menace. But what can there be about a woman that is so terribly threatening? The overabundance of life implicit in her nature. Life, a dangerous matter. If the poet writes that April is the cruelest month, he means that this vital overexuberance is a threat and a source of suffering. It never leaves the man in peace, it is bound to torment him. Against this uncontrollable exuberance of the feminine element, a man wages an ascetic battle.
Even if they will never confess to it, males experience an atavistic fear of sex, of contact with the opposite sex; the original terror that they have of sex is at least equal to their curiosity and desire. The fear and trembling and recoil of the virgin in the presence of the erect phallus is, after all, much easier to explain than the male hesitation and reluctance to venture into a woman, literally, to go inside her. What awaits a man at the end of this journey of initiation? Is it really advisable to undertake it? Perhaps what they fear most of all is their own pliability, that is, the possibility that they might abandon themselves to the influence of the feminine element, which has come to unsettle their already intrinsically precarious equilibrium. And so they must behave in a far more hostile fashion toward women than they actually feel like doing: this performance of hostility is meant for other males lest they feel betrayed by any male who might devote too much attention to women and too little toward his pal. That is why any male who gets engaged and breaks away from a group of friends and isolates himself in the dreamscape of love is so often looked down upon and considered lost, someone who—poor fellow—has really gone around the bend. He instantly becomes the target of wisecracks inspired by pity and envy.
It is unlikely that, in one form or another, in reality or on the symbolic plane, a man, even an independent and vigorous man, will fail to bow down before the inexplicable power that a woman exercises over him. However much he may manifest his strength and claim his independence, a slender but strong chain will bind him at last, and what is even more unpredictable, almost always with his tacit consent, producing in him a curious sobbing happiness. He luxuriates in the dominion established over him: which suggests that happiness in its purest state consists of this, an abandonment, giving oneself up to something mysterious, portentous, and yet which can be perceived at the same time as natural. No longer recalcitrant, therefore . . . Abandoning oneself, surrendering. It is thought that women do this, by their nature or in the face of persistent courtship, the pressure of a man’s advances, the pulsation of male desire, capable of sweeping away any and all obstacles in the blind stampede toward fulfillment. I believe, in contrast, that there is nothing that can be compared with the almost infantile relief of feeling that one has been defeated, expropriated of a strength that it costs nothing to lose because, in reality, one never really possessed it in the first place, nothing could ever be as authentic and sweet as a man’s abandonment of himself onto the bosom of what he feels existed before, after, and in spite of him: the feminine element. “That blessed sensation verging practically on stupidity,” Turgenev calls it; he was one of its most intimate and precise narrators. Something like a cause of which we are merely the effect. To which we can look back with gratitude, like all the times in which we experience the feeling of truly being in the presence of a principle, an absolute principle, past which we cannot track back, an originating matrix: in the presence of ancient monuments, hearing a forgotten language being spoken, yielding to sleep, floating in the ocean, acknowledging the death of a beloved person or an animal that we have lived with and held dear.
Yes, something desirable. To feel oneself to be in the throes, dispossessed, pure instruments of someone else’s will and pleasure is at once the most sinister of sensations yet also a fundamental element of the amorous experience, without which there can be no opening, no relation, no knowledge. Every passion arises from a kidnapping, it is itself a kidnapping, that is, the loss of actual mastery over oneself, one’s body, one’s identity, which will be turned inside out like a glove, subjected to exalting and mortifying ordeals, and then abandoned like some useless burden. Passion consists of abolishing all rights, all guarantees, all the laboriously conquered insignia of individuality, once considered inalienable: ideas, sentiments, convictions, property, physical and moral integrity, even one’s name, the last surviving residue of personal definition, will be set aside in that rush of passion, to be replaced by embarrassing and generic pet names, childish or grotesque, and obscene. Anyone who proudly cares about his own name must steer clear of these passions and their undermining infection.
And yet our envy of the feminine remains very powerful, and there is no way to remedy it. The only thing you can do is avail yourself of a brutal piece of compensation. It’s a law we’ve glimpsed before: when the angel of God takes the soul, then the devil will declare himself master of the body. Since it is always a woman who is at the source, a man out of spite will usurp the right to put an end, thus placing himself at the far extremity of life, where the ancients nonetheless imagined that female deities stood watch. The reasoning is simple: if I can’t go down in history for having built the Colosseum, then I’ll go down in history for having destroyed it. If I can’t give someone life, then my only option is to take it from someone else.
IN REALITY, the universe is asymmetrical; everything is asymmetrical, unbalanced; the most deceptive symbol, the Taoist symbol of the perfect equilibrium between yin and yang, between light and dark . . . give me a break! Everything in life, life the way it really is, is asymmetry and unbalance, crushing forces that are never, let me repeat, never equal to one another. Equilibrium, suspension—they last for an instant . . . then an implacable gravitational force makes it all teeter and fall in one direction. When people nowadays talk about armed conflict and use the term “asymmetric warfare,” I have to choke back my laughter: Why? Are you saying that there was ever such a thing as balanced, symmetrical warfare? When it’s always been three against one, ten against one, David against Goliath! Always! In all
the great and legendary battles I’ve ever read accounts of, one side of the forces in the field was always outnumbered. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the side with the most troops always won, of course, but it means then that the asymmetry was attained in other domains, in armaments, in the perspicacity or the cowardice of the generals, in the way the soldiers were nourished . . . or how many days it had been since they’d eaten on the day of the battle. Not even Chip ’n’ Dale are symmetrical, not even Castor and Pollux, or twins in general: there’s always one who leads, one who commands.
The Catholic School Page 20
