AND SO, yes, behold, the whole world appears to be, the whole world unexpectedly reveals itself to be masochistic: the whip lashed by the carriage driver, the pinch on the chin that the teacher gives the pupil, the sight of imposing women, with large breasts and swaying hips, who crowd the streets teetering on platform stacks; yes, women, though on average they may be smaller than men, can nonetheless appear immense, towering, and can instill an enjoyable yet morbid sense of inferiority, not so much because of their overall bulk and heft as much as certain elements that go to make up that figure, and which the male gaze is accustomed to disincorporating and examining separately, such as, for example, the ass. Perhaps it is only for this reason that the sight of women’s large breasts and large bottoms awakens admiration mixed with something approaching terror, and the need to react, that’s right, to react one way or another, by letting yourself go, with vulgar or hyperbolic or ecstatic comments, or else by turning your gaze elsewhere, as if trying to avoid a dangerous sight, or else by taking hastier and even brutal initiatives; the bigger they are, the more convulsive the reaction of enthusiasm, terror, hilarity, and excitement will be, not because they’re beautiful, in fact, those breasts and those bottoms, not because they’re especially pretty (and if they’re really big, only rarely are they pretty), it has nothing to do with beauty, because what attracts and arouses male excitement is merely the size, in the face of which males, displaying an illusory confidence that they will easily be able to possess them, dominate them, actually experience a masochistic sense of submission and inadequacy. That is what their vulgar comments actually signify: impotence, a hysterical signal of impotence masquerading as virility, which may proudly talk a good game, promising who knows what sexual exploits, but in reality takes pleasure in being utterly disqualified in an outmatched encounter with those phenomena. There is no male on earth who can genuinely take them on, certain large sets of tits on women, contain them in his own hands, heft them, gauge them: they are measureless and in fact, ideally, they just keep on growing in scope and volume. That is why (brilliant intuition, this one), young Federico in Amarcord, instead of sucking on the enormous boobies that the female tobacconist pushes toward him, or rather, we should say, covers him with, submerges him in, instead of sucking on them, he blows. He blows to push them away from him, to resist that feminine immensity that is lowered upon him, descending out of a male fantasy but taking it to extremes, as in a nightmare. He blows to make them get even bigger. What with all the huffing and puffing and inflating of breasts in erotic fantasies, it becomes clear that those masculine projections pushed well beyond the bounds of caricature, those outsized shapes, really do exist, and they return from the realm of wishes, in a sense, to take their revenge on those who first imagined them, like the monsters in Forbidden Planet, and that they were invented by nature (which already has its own intrinsic tendency to veer toward the monstrous) long before they were invented by any manga illustrators. As with the different silhouettes and sizes of the various breeds of dogs, and with the decisive contribution of human design, which is bound and determined to bring its sketches to life, no matter how demented, there exists an incredible variety of female anatomical shapes, vast enough to form categories independent of the bodies that, so to speak, host them, and of whose profile they are a distinctive trait. The male eye, aside from any matters of erotic interest or disinterest, remains astonished by the feminine body. “Astonished,” yes, perhaps that is the right word. By what the feminine body lacks, certainly, as psychoanalysis textbooks now a century old tell us (and this is perhaps why in recent years so many regular patrons of prostitutes have begun to become affectionate frequenters of transsexuals, and find themselves so comfortable with them, because they certainly don’t lack a thing . . .), but especially what they have extra, those phenomenal forms, better if they’re big, really big, enormous (when I read in certain classified ads that a young lady promises “pneumatic bliss” with a 42-inch bra, my head starts to spin . . .), because they are proof of a genuine monstrosity. More than an object of desire, hyperdeveloped breasts are a smoking gun, evidence for the prosecution. For those who are attracted to women while detesting them, that is, who are attracted to them precisely because they detest them and find detestable the extortion of the attraction they feel, and who therefore wish to punish those who cause it, and whatever the shape of their breasts, that shape becomes a provocation, triggering rage or mockery; if they are small, you can only laugh at them, if they are normal, you would like them larger, if they’re beautiful they intimidate and one is tempted to deform them, in order to make them stop their insolent, dazzling beauty, if they are large and heavy then they seem ideal to mistreat and crush, thus mortifying the woman who has to carry around with her those two soccer balls of flesh . . . It is the breast per se that signals the abnormality of the female body, its excess. A diversity that can attract, intimidate, annoy, make one wish to steer clear or latch on tight, to merge with it, take out your anger on it, delete it, destroy it . . .
(A SHORT WHILE AGO, on the beach, I watch a short middle-aged woman walk by, bowed over by the weight of her shapeless breasts, which the straps of her bra sagging from her shoulders struggle to hold up, and the cups as large as serving plates can barely contain, and suddenly I smile at the thought of how much happiness that pair of tits brought to how many, not all that many years ago. That the breasts she now carries around with her like an inconvenient suitcase, making young boys wink and snicker, were long ogled and yearned after and served as the content of fantasies and the object of strenuous negotiations with a view to squeezing and fondling them, and I imagine how various men had spurted their semen onto the bathroom tiles or into their wives’ vaginas as they merely dreamed of those breasts naked and bouncing. That thought could so easily depress me, instead I find it amusing and a consolation.)
(AS I HAVE SAID BEFORE, I have never understood the classical theory, that is, the idea of women somehow being mutilated and the envy that they are supposed to feel for what they do not possess: a feeling that I, myself, have never, let me repeat, never encountered in any of them, while I personally have experienced and have shared with many men the sensation of being brought face-to-face with a feminine overabundance, a volume, a power expressed first and foremost in their physical form . . . the ample architecture of the pelvis, the generosity of the bosom, the hair . . .)
So let’s face it: the coitus that women were once obliged to say they were obliged to take part in, that they insisted they didn’t do for their own pleasure, etc. (and many of them really thought that, so profoundly rooted was the commandment), is also a duty for many males, more often than not. A task to be performed. Instead of doing it to please God, as the old litany ran, men do it because they fear the cruel judgment of their own woman, of women in general, and, writ large, of their entire society.
An impotent male or, perhaps almost worse, one who is uninterested in sex, what kind of a man is he?
“Don’t let anything come between you” is the slogan of a TV commercial that depicts erectile dysfunction as a barrier separating a couple in love at dinner in a chic restaurant, who aren’t even able to look at each other because there is an enormous basket of flowers on the table, while in another commercial two matches are in bed together, they rub against each other a little bit but before you know it, one of them has burst into flame, burns up in a flash, and then, completely charred, bows its little head, saddened by its premature ejaculation. The shame of being unable to satisfy a woman (“Three million Italians suffer from problems,” etc. . . .) is thought to be second only to the shame of not even wanting to.
At the time in which this story takes place, a young man who wasn’t interested in women received only the scantiest of consideration from either sex, from men and women, boys and girls: everyone felt sorry for him, or even held him in contempt. Even those who were most reluctant to venture out into the open in that arena, even if they felt within themselves no stimulus more lively than th
at of trying to go along with the behavior of their contemporaries, still had to hurl themselves into it, in what might perhaps be an awkward and ill-advised manner, like someone who is shoved from backstage out onto the boards, even though they knew only a couple of lines for their role by heart. I could see this behavior in operation at parties, I’ve been watching it and studying it ever since then and, to some extent, I impersonated it myself: and that is how I learned the rudiments of a science of sexual behavior, from the way, that is, that I could see the bodies standing up from settees and sofas to go out and dance in the middle of a room, from the phrases that I heard in the misty atmosphere overheated by cigarettes and music. Records that you had to get up and change every three minutes . . .
PEOPLE IMAGINE THAT WOMEN, being the weaker sex, faint more frequently than men. That is not true. Likewise, people have theorized that the feminine gender is masochistic by nature. Again, completely false. Masochism is spread equitably among the sexes and it is not hard to convince women to play the dominant role in cases where they might not be inclined to do so by their personal character. It is a typical request that men make of them in private, even when they’re keen to make it thought in public that they, as men, maintain control. Women are used to this. They’re so used to it that their bullying and abuse becomes subtle and invisible. To see this in action, just carefully observe any couple chosen at random: in couples that have been together for many years, the dynamic can be glimpsed in transparency behind the codified roles of male and female, even after those codified roles had been shattered precisely in the period in which our story unfolds. Perhaps some men, by allowing themselves to be subjugated individually, were unconsciously convinced or attempted to make up for centuries of general male domination of women. Male masochism, far more widespread than is often thought, might then be seen as a form of reparation in psychic terms for all that has been taken from women in economic and social terms. But I believe that there is something far deeper at play here, and that it is bound up with human relations per se. All human relations, independent of gender.
Masochism, in fact, is one of the great load-bearing structures of the world, and perhaps of the entire universe, but certainly of human society, which is thoroughly based upon masochistic acts. Beat, prick, scold, or caress: actions that differ by degree and are based upon one another. Whether literally or metaphorically, an incalculable number of people enjoy being oppressed, violated, subjugated, and tortured, with the proviso that this treatment is alternated or mixed, from time to time, with the occasional caress. The concluding caress inverts the governing sign of the beatings from negative to positive, transforming them into gestures of care and attention. Thus, people willingly get themselves into pitiable situations, coupling, marrying, joining political parties, and becoming part of groups where the members are ruled with tears and blood by charismatic leaders, who sometimes claim the title of teachers or masters; others happen to wind up in these situations through no intentional doing of their own, in spite of themselves, by sheer chance, because life is like that, but they soon adjust to it, and by adjusting to it they end up enjoying the mistreatments they suffer, and in the end, find that they love them and desire them. If you took those mistreatments away all at once, they would suffer. The burden of bullying and abuse, if lifted away all at once, might be perceived as an intolerable vacuum. And so there are those who seek out for themselves masters, teachers, doctors, guides, persecutors, prophets, trainers, and dominatrixes, and when they chance to lose one, they replace them with another. But the sweetest pressure to tolerate, the most pleasurable pain to feel applied to one’s body and one’s spirit, is the one that everyone inflicts upon us and that everyone stands ready to inflict upon us. Nothing could be as delicious to a masochist as an all against one.
. . . DANTE AND PETRARCH WERE MASOCHISTS, but even more so Guido Cavalcanti and the whole school of poets kneeling before their cruel, beautiful lady, their belle dame sans merci, moaning at the punishment that she inflicts upon them, even as she maintains at times a sweet and gentle demeanor. Dominatrix. Stern. Dispenser of murderous glares. She crushes her lovers beneath a sovereign wrath and an indifference remote by light-years. The entire Middle Ages, and we’re not just talking about ascetics and hermits, should be reexamined by the light of masochism, here, and right away. How lovely it is to let your heart bleed, have it ripped from your chest, allow yourself to be flayed alive! And we are by no means dealing with metaphors here. The highest aspiration is to become a beast of burden, a servant of the glebe, a doormat to be wiped underfoot: which will give us, along with the pain, “gran piacimento”—great pleasure. Pleasurable pain, delighting in torture, high above, on the cross. Consider, if you will, the extremely pure masochism of nearly all love poetry (I’d say, with the exception of Ovid: frosty Ovid), where the poet is unfailingly mistreated, only to delight in it, how he enjoys himself! The entire armamentarium of S&M torture is already complete in the very language of love, abounding as it is with enslavement, bonds, chains, our cross and our delight, suffering, sores, wounds, fire, burns, and imprisonment . . . Among the openly avowed masochists were Rousseau and Baudelaire and Pascoli, and even T. S. Eliot was a masochist, after his fashion, which is to say, both active in nature and passive and submissive. Who among the great men of history didn’t relish his own suffering? Doesn’t being crucified constitute the highest form of greatness? Isn’t being swollen with love a condition in which you experience the irreversible dissolution of the boundary between pleasure and pain? Equally so, the renunciation of it, the disavowal of one’s passion? What else could abnegation be, but this? Always and inevitably, the dependence of one individual on another is masochistic. This submission leads those who find themselves under its yoke to perform dolorous acts that go against their own interest and health, and often drive against all morality and every law. Obscene, degrading, destructive and self-destructive acts. Once again, it’s a question of intensity: we all feel an identical sentiment of dependency, the feeling that you cannot go on living unless a certain person exercises upon you a certain influence that might be benevolent but also severe, brutal, authoritarian, and to keep this influence from being taken away, we’d be willing to do anything, nay, actually, almost anything.
The next step is to abolish that almost.
ONE NEED ONLY TAKE a single step to lose one’s balance and plunge into absolute, pathological submission. Slaves of love of whatever gender become literal expressions. Anyone who finds themselves in this state experiences it in a masochistic manner. For that matter, it would also be a form of masochism to reject love. The love that accepts the tyranny of the beloved becomes a love of tyranny itself, the emotion that you feel toward the person who dominates is transferred entirely to the exercise of domination per se, and a linked pleasure derives from being dominated: it no longer matters who or what that person is, but only what they do, or perhaps we should say, what they do to us. If the person hits and humiliates us, then we love the blows and the humiliations. Thus, the original masochism is little by little and day by day cultivated. Any noble tradition, be it self-sacrifice, martyrdom, or chivalry, can transform itself, intensifying into perversion, transmuting physical suffering into emotional enjoyment.
TO COMMAND IS EXCITING, but never as much as it is to obey.
VIEWED FROM THE OTHER SIDE, the impulse to make an impression upon the object of one’s desire, or curiosity, in the most profound and enduring way—that is, to change them, to stimulate them, to overwhelm them—so typical of all sexual impetus, can then degenerate into the temptation and, eventually, into the frenzy to inflict pain upon them: pain, which of all the stimuli is the most violent but, more important, it is the one that can be provoked with the least effort and the paltriest degree of inventiveness. I can’t be certain that my witticism will make a girl laugh, or that my gaze will fascinate her, but for sure, a slap or a punch will make her cry. Pain is a guaranteed effect of certain actions, while pleasure cannot be generated
with anything like the same mechanical likelihood, because it comes only as the culminating product of an elaborate procedure that offers no assurances it will succeed. It takes no special effort to hurt someone, on the other hand: a razor blade, a cigarette stubbed out on their arm, and the reaction will be immediate. It may be that people opt for pain for this reason alone: it’s a shortcut, it’s a simple, tried-and-true way of interacting, to draw a response from one’s interlocutor’s nervous system, or even a surrogate. If I am incapable and I’m too impatient or in any case for whatever reason I’m unsuccessful or uninterested in getting another individual to feel pleasure (after all, why all this solicitous concern, why all this altruism?), then I can just make them suffer, and there’s no need to be a Chinese torturer to succeed. While you must gain mastery of some technique in order to engender pleasure, whether it is the skill of a great violinist or that of an expert lover, causing your victim to shriek in agony and terror is child’s play. Within reach of anyone. Once again, the positive things prove to be more articulated and complex than the negative ones. I’ll hurt you, then, because it doesn’t cost me anything to do so. Here, see how you like this—and I haul off with a smack to the face. Rip out your hair, twist your nipples: easy to do, now or later. It’s plausible that in the context of the cruel crime I am soon going to talk about in this book, as in all situations in which someone has full dominion over someone else, it was the extreme ease and simplicity with which harm could be done to helpless young women that induced their captors to inflict that harm. It’s like with a stereo amplifier: even if the music is never going to be listened to at the speakers’ maximum volume, because it would simply be deafening noise and nothing more, there is always the temptation to turn that knob all the way, as far as it will go. It’s an experiment. Let’s see how far we can take it. We can certainly take it a long way. But you never know how far until you try. No one can say, until you put it to the test, just what level your own brutality can reach, and how intense someone else’s suffering can become, how loud a young woman can scream. And how loud can she scream before she stops screaming for good?
The Catholic School Page 49
