THE THING THAT THE MALE WORLD most fears, at first glance, is dependency. That is because pure masculinity ought to consist in that quality’s diametric opposite, that is, autonomy, fierce independence: to have and preserve jealously within oneself one’s beginning and one’s end. In contrast, a woman seeks those things elsewhere, in the Other: in her encounter with a man, but even more, with her children, which are a significant shift of the center of gravity of one’s life outside oneself. This schema corresponds to the idea that the ascetic impulse is typically male while sexuality, understood as the regime of desire and dependency and procreation, is a feminine characteristic. This line of reasoning, then, concludes with an inference: if a man so frequently abandons his ascetic path, the only path that could keep his masculinity safe from the mortal threat of dependency, it happens because he has been drawn into the maelstrom of sexuality, feminine in nature. He therefore plummets into amorous and family-oriented sexual dependency, thus abdicating the very principle of masculinity. By abandoning himself to the arms of a woman, he will be lost . . . happy, satisfied, contented, but lost.
(There is no other explanation of the celibacy of Catholic priests.)
And so the man seeks retribution for this loss, a certain compensation: if I’m going to have to fall, and lose my dignity and even my male identity in this fall, then she who’s dragging me down with her will have to pay dearly for that of which she might boast, namely, the fact that she has stolen my independence, left me chained, bound to the stake, sucked me dry of all strength. Once enslaved, I can no longer regain my liberty and control over my own life, but I will at least do my best to destroy the one I consider guilty for what happened to me. If Samson must die, etc., but the ones dying with him won’t be the Philistines, rather it will be that woman who was capable of making me as weak as a woman. A part of the hostility that the man brings with him into intercourse, in some cases exasperated to the point of cruelty, is due to this complex of the fall. A complex that does not seem to expect to reinforce a domination; quite the contrary, it takes on the connotations of revenge exacted by someone who feels that he has been dominated. (But this vision of feminine domination exercised through passivity remains very mysterious . . .)
Not long ago, I finished writing this tirade and then went to the beach for a dip in the water. It’s late September and the weather is uncertain, but between one cloud and another the sun shines warm. The beach was deserted, except for five young Germans, who had camped behind the dune. Farther down the beach, I laid out my own towel. The young men were hulking and unsightly, relaxed, wearing multicolored swim shorts that hung down below their knees. Just a couple of yards from the water’s edge they had built an enormous sandcastle, which was still wet. If you looked closely, it wasn’t as much a castle as it was a fortress, a bunker, squared off, massive, with turrets at the corners and high enclosure walls. For no special reason, except that it, too, had been built by Germans, I was reminded of Spandau Prison. Spandau, in Berlin, where Rudolf Hess had been held prisoner, the Nazi with the small eyes and the massive jaws. The biggest of the group of young men, a true lardball, strolled with a bored step down toward the water, loitered lazily around the walls of the sand prison, extended a foot toward the tip of one of the turrets, and let it hover just above its conical roof, fanning all five toes. He seemed to be meditating on an important decision. Then he lowered his foot and the rest of his substantial bulk onto the sand tower, crushing it. Again, he grew meditative. He began performing a series of strange pirouettes, spinning around in place. Then he moved on to the next turret, and I expected him to do the same work of careful demolition with that one, but this time he threw all caution to the winds and jumped into the fortress with both feet, excavating a large hole where he landed. Once inside the walls, he looked back at his friends, laughed, and began a sort of frantic dance. He jumped and kicked, and his pale fat rings bounced above his waistline, while the walls of sand collapsed one after another. But the fortress was so large and solid that it would take some time for him to raze the whole structure: they’d built it painstakingly, using hundreds of pounds of wet sand. And so his friends came running to his aid, and in short order there were five German teenagers leaping like lunatics, without a word, on their own project of beach engineering, leveling it to the ground. They were expressing every sign of happiness. I watched them for a while and then, lost in thought, I went to dive into the water. I swam out far from shore. From where I was, I could see them still hard at work on the ruins of their sandcastle . . .
Then when I got back home, I started writing again. What did I write? The following chapter.
6
THE PROMISCUOUS WOMAN seduces the man because she is promiscuous, the shy and modest woman because she is shy and modest. Whichever angle you want to look at it from, the outcome remains the same, so that one begins to suspect that the man is attracted quite independent of whatever a woman may or may not do, may or may not be, much like the moth with the lantern. All that is required is for the lantern to be lit, for the woman to be alive. Philosophers who tend to explain all behavior in an antiphrastic manner, glimpsing in it some hidden wisdom of nature, an instance of cunning or some biological trick, maintain that feminine modesty is by no means designed to drive men away, but rather to excite them. Woman’s show of reserve, then, has little if anything to do with purity and chastity, seeing that it only serves to kindle the flames of masculine desire, to select among her suitors those who are better equipped with the energy necessary to overcome the obstacle of that reserve. Which is thus not a shield but a magnet. It seems to protect and repel, while it actually seduces. Once explained in these terms, the feminine unwillingness to engage in coitus can be read in reverse, that is, as an invitation, however cunningly masked, camouflaged as its opposite, as a way of seeing how the man will react, whether he will be discouraged in the face of that no, which has actually been set out there only to test his capacity to vault over it. The hypothesis that the no actually does mean quite simply and definitively that “no” can be taken into consideration only in hindsight, or else ignored entirely. Erased. A woman who says no without at least some tiny part of her twisting and writhing in the desire to say yes is quite inconceivable. With women, you only need to insist. It is the level of persistence, the kind of pressure, and the spiritual or physical surface upon which that persistence is applied that makes every case different from another, in successive gradations, or nuances, which range from obstinate courtship to molestation and onto rape, all of them unified by the idea that the reluctance is strictly ritual and need only be won over, or at least that one ought to give it a try, and see if you can win it over. Otherwise, you’ll never know how it might have turned out. I don’t have the certainty that this point of view is entirely false. Indeed, you can’t say it’s untrue in any other walk of life where you truly desire to obtain something—satisfaction, recognition, money, justice, success, even love, yes, even for love this is the way it works: insistence is capable of knocking down any barrier, reversing any initial position and declaration. The path that leads from a no to a yes can be crooked and uneven but that doesn’t mean that that path doesn’t exist or that it is, in and of itself, immoral to try to travel it. I see no reason why, out of all the various human pursuits, sex and sex alone ought to prove an exception to the logic of negotiation. How did a man win a woman’s favors (such a delightful vintage expression, which I intentionally choose to use here)? By the use of seduction, persuasion, gifts, payment (a noneuphemistic variant of the gift), by means of marriage, by means of coercion. Even after the revolution in sexual customs, those same methods remain valid, perhaps in a less overt form or under some different name. People struggle to keep the path of abuse wide open: if the coercion exercised through arranged marriages is abolished, then the same impulse will take the form of rape.
IN EFFECT, passivity and inactivity do have their advantages. Those who remain immobile, those who can afford to maintain their immobility,
are sovereign; while those who instead are forced to bestir themselves to work are subjugated. While they may give the impression of great vigor because they take the initiative and guide activities, in truth they are slaves to those activities, that is, servants of the purpose that they’ve set themselves. Male erotic entrepreneurship resembles the duties of a mere workman, executing the plans of others, obliged to struggle to hit the target, neurotic and as stressed out as any salesman who has to bring home that contract, make that sale, at all costs. It is therefore fair to say that the well-known proverb that, in love, he wins who flees is largely inaccurate: in love, in reality, he wins who does nothing. Or who does as little as possible. The desired one, not the desiring one, who is entirely taken up in the vortex of his initiatives. He’s no different, in the end, than a delivery boy who takes on a vast number of packages. The only ones to benefit, in the end, are his lazy female customers. He hurries from place to place, he exhausts himself, he scurries in and out of imperially immobile pussies, which in the end—according to the notorious verdict of Tiresias, the only one capable of judging from both points of view—take nine-tenths of the pleasure to be harvested from all that effort and energy.
The struggle between the rich and the poor, between old and young, men and women: these battles have been waged for millennia, and the last named is perhaps the least spectacular, but it’s also perhaps the oldest one. While other wars experience moments of truce or stagnation, this war does not, unless we are to consider love as a sort of armistice or interlude of peace, which is quite absurd if you remember that what is causing the conflict is precisely the reciprocal attraction and need, and in the twists and turns of love that conflict can attain high points of the maximum virulence. (Let’s say that, in love, the war between the sexes experiences its greatest epic splendor and, however it may turn out, creates episodes of heartbreaking beauty.) If men and women could live and ignore each other, then not the slightest violence would be unleashed between them, and it is highly unlikely that men would ever have decided to subject women to slavery exclusively for their own convenience, something that happens only in the aftermath of sex, as a secondary, albeit stubborn, effect of the fatal attraction that binds men to women.
Most important of all, while the poor and the rich run into each other much more rarely, almost only by accident, and lead separate lives, since wealth is, by definition, nothing other than the very possibility of enforcing that distinction, that separation, which keeps the poor out of the enclosures surrounding the guarded mansions, armor-plated cars, residential gated communities, deserted beaches, “exclusive” lounges and clubs and restaurants (the term itself designates a regime of segregation), and while old men and young men generally don’t want to have anything to do with each other, men and women in contrast meet and clash and mingle and couple constantly and ubiquitously. The way they incessantly rub up against each other produces an imperceptible music like that of the celestial spheres, which spin one within the other. If only we could hear the sound of this constant friction, it would be a roar loud enough to shake the earth! Naïve to think that it is copulation that will put an end to all conflict, which instead takes on different forms, it is so to speak fixed and sublimated, regulated and rendered endemic, whereas it is within that copulation that the clashes take place, the harshest battles. Copulation can actually render the conflict permanent, perpetuating it at a level of low intensity. In those cases the dose of torment to be inflicted reciprocally is maintained just a millimeter beneath flash point, the level of explosion, where it would be lethal, and it serves to cement together the members of the couple with the adhesive of a bland but durable sadomasochism.
In some cases, rare but not exceedingly so, and very significant, sexual intercourse takes on the pure form of the clash, brief and violent: and this is rape. But there is no bright line distinguishing between the various forms of contact between the sexes: each one has much in common with all the others, each leads in a few moves to its opposite, from the gentlest to the most brutal.
“AND RAPE FOR HER is like a gift.”
IN TRUTH, only love, when it doesn’t exacerbate it, can obviate the primordial hostility between the sexes. Love offers at the same time the best opportunity for clash and identification, conflict and attraction. People often wind up getting married in order to stop fighting, or in order to go on doing so under the auspices of an institution that regulates conflicts and fixes them in conventional forms, which wind up going straight into the repertory of jokes about married life.
(One of the most implacable forms of these jokes is the one about the monk and the nun who, for reasons there is no need to go into, and which form the basis of any joke, find themselves obliged to spend the night in the same bed. Good night, good night, they say to each other, and they turn their backs on each other. But the nun gets cold, and so the monk gets up to fetch her a blanket, he drapes it over her. After another little while, the nun complains again: “Brother, I’m freezing . . .” and he gets up to bring her another blanket. But she still can’t get warm, “I’m cold, I’m still so cold,” and he very kindly brings her yet another blanket. The nun won’t give up, and this time she offers another suggestion, “Brother, I’m still so terribly cold in this bed . . . what do you say, why don’t we act like husband and wife?” Whereupon he replies: “Ah, you want to act like husband and wife? In that case, go get your own damn blankets!”)
AT SCHOOL, studying ancient Greek was challenging and dull, and I never learned it well, but luckily there was always the mythology. I’d developed a passionate love for it ever since I was a child. That is why I cite it so frequently, and its teachings are the only ones I believe. Among the Greek gods, the most virile personage is unquestionably Athena, followed closely by Artemis. At a considerable remove comes Ares, who nonetheless represents only the death-dealing aspect of the male character, then Zeus, who may appear very macho with all his amorous adventures and lovers, whereas in truth he is very much compromised by the feminine side of things, going so far as to reproduce it, to include it in himself: for that matter, if his power must be free to deploy itself in all directions, then it stands to reason that it cannot be limited and constrained by the boundaries of a sexual identity, which is why Zeus actually gets pregnant. And he gives birth to Athena, who issues from his brain, and Dionysus, born of his thigh, just to show that he is capable even of that: bringing a pregnancy to term. His energy is so overabundant that it can reproduce or incorporate within him feminine virtues. A male who is far more typical in his fashion is Hephaestus, whose virility is constantly being excited and frustrated: by his unhappy sham marriage with Aphrodite, the farcical struggle to possess the armed virgin Athena, which ends with a spurt of sperm in the dust. A cuckold and an onanist, Hephaestus is the emblem not of how males ought to be, that is, valiant warriors, irresistible seducers, unquestioned family authority, etc., but rather how they actually are. Desperately in need of a crumb of sensual tenderness, not only a cripple in his legs but also in his ability to love and be loved, the poor man takes it all out in his work, forging with mighty mallet blows thunderbolts not his, those symbols of power, too, having been expropriated from him, rejected by his mother, mocked by his father, abandoned on a nightly basis by his wife, and with a monster brat for a son, born with a serpent’s tail out of his father’s grotesque, inept act of pollution . . .
On the feminine side, immediately after Aphrodite comes Dionysus, dancing, with hair and rounded hips like a young girl. Here, too, we are dealing with a power that can’t be confined sexually, in contrast with Apollo, the god of clear separation, who in fact suffers and inflicts suffering with the cutting, painful clarity of his initiatives. Dionysus is liquid like a beverage, he slithers like a snake, he steeps the virtuous adherents of the authoritarian, that is, male principle, with himself and his folly. When the pirates who had kidnapped him as a boy decide to fuck him, everything aboard their ship suddenly turns twisted, serpentine, soft and swaying, the shro
uds become liana vines and field bindweed, and the oars turn to snakes . . .
Then there’s Demeter, perfectly symmetrical to Ares in giving shape to one and only one of the aspects that characterize their sex. Both of them accentuate the difference between masculine and feminine to the point of exasperation: every bit as much as Ares is obtusely violent, so does Demeter play the mother in an exclusive and possessive manner, the Great Mother, the uterus ready to welcome to swell to germinate, the generous and disconsolate mother, the fecund and afflicted matrix . . . By no means interested in any other games, she has nothing in mind but her destiny of becoming pregnant, only to be deprived of her fruit. If young Ares plays with his weapons, in ferocious and solitary manner, Demeter from when she was a young girl rocks a cradle. They both have an autistic tendency and are possessed by a fixation: the one with procreation, the other with destruction.
The Catholic School Page 21
