Let’s add to that differences of class.
A GROUP OF MEN and one woman alone, or perhaps we might put it better: isolated. That’s the same technique, elementary and effective, as a pack hunting a flock of sheep: the prey is targeted among the many potential individual prey and then stalked and scattered with a series of tactical moves, at the culmination of which the target stands alone. Or else it’s enough to just watch and wait until she, of her own initiative, leaves the more populous and closely monitored locations: at that fatal time of the day, at that crucial moment that marks the end of work or the end of amusements, which for an unaccompanied woman marks the peak of apprehension in urban life: night, darkness, leaving a club, a gym, walking home, a narrow, empty street, a bus stop, a poorly lit lobby . . . All of these are dangers and threats compared with which the offer of a convenient ride from smiling people seems like a good solution.
The fact that in the case of the CR/M the prey was two women instead of one is due to the fact that one woman alone was less likely to have trustingly accepted the young men’s invitation. It was therefore a shrewd move on their part, and it resulted in a double scoop.
IF YOU PLAN TO ROAM the city looking to pick up girls in order to rape them, you need to have time on your hands, and that is why gang rapists tend for the most part to be young, unemployed layabouts, petty and midrange criminals, soldiers stationed in foreign countries, illegal immigrants, misfits and renegades of various sorts, in other words, people who don’t know what to do with their days. All right, let’s throw in students, too, university students, the children of that singular method we have of running our universities in Italy which consists, or at least consisted in the days when this story unfolds (and I was a perfect specimen of the genre), in attending lessons more or less infrequently and then, back at home, grinding out long and grueling sessions of study to prepare for some major hurdle of an exam, say pathological anatomy or business law. Free time is the curse of the man without purpose, or the man whose purpose lies too far afield and who is looking to find a few other objectives in the meantime.
All right, then. What do these layabouts talk about all day long with their friends? Women and sex. What do they think about? About how to get even for all their time spent dangling aimlessly in that void. Put a knife in their hands and point out to them that 99 percent of the population around them is defenseless, and that half of that 99 percent is made up of women. What do you think will occur to them to do, now? Where are they going to get started?
THE CR/M CAN BE LISTED as a “recreational murder,” that is, the kind of murder that allows you to spend a Saturday with your friends, or even an entire weekend. In some parts of the world, it would appear to be a typical pastime of men’s days off: build up an ample stock of liquor and drugs, kidnap a young woman, have your kicks with her until you’ve had enough, and then she dies.
DURING THESE SESSIONS a ceremony of homosexual initiation takes place, consisting of extracting one’s member and displaying it to the other men before inserting it into the same woman in whom they have inserted their own.
“Sharing a girl among friends.” A homosexual erotic contact attained through a third body.
As is stated in no uncertain terms in “La Marseillaise”—in fact, sung at the top of one’s lungs—the value of brotherhood is expressed at its maximum intensity when the time comes to kill someone, when you are united in spilling that person’s blood: it is the impure blood of the enemy that cements the pact of brotherhood. It is the blood of the adultress that bonds together all those who, as one, as a mob, stoned her to death.
You are blood brothers if you were brought into the world by the same woman, or when, together, you kill the same woman.
By attacking a woman together, males subtract themselves, at least temporarily, from reciprocal violence. The woman cushions and absorbs the aggressivity that the men would no doubt otherwise unleash against one another, and so they turn that violence into a form of complicity. A male’s blade loses its edge: by brutalizing women, he forgets how badly he is brutalized and subjugated by other men.
The erotic bond that joins together the men who commit a rape is far stronger than the one that links them with their victim, in fact, we might say that a gang rape is perpetrated with a view to affirming that former type of bond and entirely deleting the latter. There are also nonviolent versions of that same brotherhood, where the male libido focuses for a fleeting instant on a female figure, and then is refracted back at those who first projected it: in a striptease show, the male spectators are much more in contact with one another than they are with the girls who are taking off their clothes. Aside from the exchanges mimed with various obscene gestures, each sex remains segregated, in perfect solitude, to share their excitement.
Raping the same woman is a way of getting closer to the sex, the genitalia, of your buddies, of seeing it and touching it indirectly, wallowing in the semen of your friends, inside a woman.
IT’S A FELLOWSHIP CREATED by mysterious forces, “to which it is pleasurable to give in, in part while experiencing or causing pain.” Hence the myth, indeed the enchantment, of friendship, its sacred mystery set against the banality of other relationships, beginning with family ties. Usually, in a family, emotional excesses are unwelcome when they upset the ties of kinship, which have been established once and for all, without any possibility of choice in the matter. You can never desire, nor revoke or reject, the fact that your mother is your mother. The only family tie that can be revoked is the one with your spouse: you cannot cease being a son or daughter or brother or sister or mother. These are ties that prevent all enthusiasm: not just Lenin or Goebbels, but even Jesus encourages the cutting of those ties.
The new bond, instead, is struck by something that lies outside of that bond entirely, the communion of spirits and bodies is aimed at a distant object, to be venerated, a god, a leader, an ideal, a master; or else, every bit as forcefully, as something to be hated, an enemy to be fought. In this virile union there is no personal privacy, no counterpart to one’s own initiatives; there is only sharing. In that bond, all the cases are extreme, and if they aren’t, they are taken to extremes. Loyalty, the chief surrogate of love.
The more compact and cemented together the group, the more its members will be willing to direct their bellicosity toward those who are not members of that group.
If a male’s yearning to copulate with a woman is a sexual desire, no less sexual and no less powerful is his desire to aggregate with other males. Sometimes the two desires can be confused or can even merge. The feminine element consequently becomes totally extraneous, the object of desire and hostility, each more scathing than the other.
LET US IMAGINE a virile universe that feels it has been encircled by enemy forces: indeed, that these forces are already in our midst, that they have infiltrated us. The enemy is a spreading stain, it filters into our social fabric like a liquid. Its infection is spreading, by means of women, foreigners, Jews, and pederasts. What is so dangerous about these categories? What does their threat consist of? Fundamentally, in their lasciviousness. In their potential erotic disorder. And yet it is fascism’s erotic impulse that unites it as a body, a corps, a sect.
Just yesterday, while taking a stroll around the Stadio dei Marmi, at the Foro Italico, I realized it as I took in, at a single glance, those sixty nude athletes.
Taken individually, perhaps there would be nothing homosexual about those statues: but it is the way they parade, the circuit of giants that creates a sort of virile enchantment. You are subjugated by that procession of muscle-bound males. Desire is always misguided, both heterosexual and homosexual desire: the latter is only more evident, more spectacular, as is the male nude with respect to the female nude. Once that becomes clear, it’s a matter of directing it instead of dispersing it. Dispersion is dangerous.
In the period I’m writing about, young right-wing men brought together a nebulous array of uncertain desires and angers and fears and en
thusiasms, forcing them all to converge toward a single monolithic ideal, fascism, which however was composed by those very same pieces, compressed and fused together in the crucible of action; for young left-wing men, on the other hand, who did not for the most part seriously expect the advent of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the near future in the West, communism was a preliminary and generic ideal of justice, against the background of which they could attain far more immediate dreams, to name a few, independence from their families, music, fucking, giving free rein to their instincts, one and all, whether joyous or beneficent or murderous. A liberatory ideal, while the right-wing counterpart was an effort of concentration. To scatter energy madly or collect and accumulate it madly: that was what lay behind the terminology that once pointed either to the left or the right.
It is not so much the homosexual content of fascism that strikes the observer, as much as the virulence with which that content is denied and repressed. The exasperated cult of virility and the resulting scorn toward everything that is feminine tend to create an entirely male universe: even Goebbels noticed it, and expressed his concern about it!
A masculine, mannish society, formed of equals as only males aspire to be, where all individualistic or familistic impulses, dictated by female demands in the name of a collective that transcends the male-female relationship, are eliminated: the state is ideal, masculine, spiritual; the family is biological, feminine, material. And that is exactly how the good Greek soldier of antiquity rolled: hetero for the family and homo for the fatherland. Intercourse not as a way of dedicating oneself to one’s fellow man, but rather as a way of setting him aside: a chore to be gotten out of the way before going back to the one and only virile pursuit, that of the quest for glory.
In the very idea of heroism there lies an implicitly homosexual model, though explicitly disavowed and, indeed, rejected in disgust.
The unmistakable but unusable proof lies precisely in the fact that so many great men were homosexuals, proof that only greatness of soul is able to overcome prohibitions; these men, therefore, were great not because they sublimated their sexual energy thanks to the prohibition, but rather because they overcame the prohibition by means of that energy. Only genuine heroes of thought and art or action are successful in this. Therefore, the hero, too, is fundamentally homosexual: a glorious queer who triumphs over mediocrity and conventions, over the claustrophobic prohibitions of a society of half-men and half-women.
SOME BIOLOGISTS HAVE EXPLAINED rape as the last-ditch strategy of losers who, unless they resorted to violence, would be cut out of the race to hand down their genetic inheritance.
Other scholars have viewed it as a peculiar way that males have of communicating with one another: to establish a friendship or sanction a competition or, as we have said, camouflage a homosexual contact experienced through a proxy, or else, as in the case of wartime rape, to make it unmistakably clear who has won, appropriating for oneself the bodies of the women of the losing side. It is to the latter party, the defeated men, that the message contained in the rape is directed, a message for which the female body is merely a context or a medium.
IT IS RARELY UNDERSTOOD how authentically and powerfully men need to obtain tenderness and love from other men, and how often this unsatisfied need is then brutally turned to women; and likewise how brutal the exhibition of virility can be, when it is directed against women, and perpetrated with the sole objective of winning the respect and admiration of other men, once it becomes clear they will never be able to obtain their love.
Males bond in one of two ways: either by affinity and unresolved love, or else after an initial rivalry, in which case the bond of friendship serves to limit the degree of aggression by turning it toward the exterior. If you don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you; if anything, by joining together, we can hurt others—that is the implicit rule in every gang. What we call brotherhood results from the fusion of these two elements, love and aggression, detoured from their actual objects and redirected into political action, war, positive or negative ideals of every kind, or criminality. This is how men court other men. Even when they’re flirting with a woman, they’re considering the effect it will have on other men whether their seduction proves successful or fails.
IN COMPARISON WITH the madness of women, the male universe appears simpler and more predictable. For that reason, there is a temptation to abandon the skirmishes with the opposite sex and take refuge in the reassuring community of one’s peers: at least with them, everyone understands one another, everyone supports one another, and they all feel the same things. They create fewer illusions, fewer deceptions.
The homosexual truce, the nonaggression pact in an all-male club, calls for all hostility to be rerouted outward, toward specific groups of men and all women, without distinction. This pact can also be described as friendship, and it lies at the foundation of many male communities, including the literary community: just think of the Italian writers of the twentieth century and their almost exclusively homosocial environment, with an almost religious cult of “amici”—male friends—and their scorn for women, or vice versa, their formalized cult of women, and their aggression toward all rival groups. In their epistolary exchanges, they employ a hyperbolic phraseology of admiration and devotion far more emphatic than was used toward the idealized ladies of courtly love.
We have the impression, then, that the generous cult of the amici and the myth of friendship so celebrated in Italian literature (with a continuous appeal, nostalgic or vibrant or resentful, to comradeship, spiritual brothers, brothers in arms on both the left and the right, with whom were founded movements and groups and artistic schools), as well as the relationship never fully or adequately investigated between so-called masters and pupils, might really have been a form, not even all that well disguised, of erotic relationship, sublimated and translated into less reprehensible behaviors.
THE RITE OF MALE INITIATION entails pain and loneliness: in order to be admitted to the gang, a young man or boy has to show not only that he is capable of putting up with discomfort and suffering, but also ready and willing to inflict them. Upon whom? Upon the enemy. And who can be the enemy of a male group, if not other male groups, which are also competing for a specific territory, or else, in far more general terms, for women? All women? The other males are concrete adversaries, the females are symbolic ones. Women, with their provocative presence, obstruct both the real lives of male groups, on the street, in the schools, in dance halls, and their oneiric and imaginative lives: because there is no place on earth more overrun and infested with women than the brain of someone who is a member of a youth gang. And it is a symptom of very serious insecurity that a young man should be willing to subject himself to painful and exhausting ordeals, or else show himself willing to commit cruel acts in order to gain recognition of his own masculinity, and be officially proclaimed “a man.”
When men associate, aggression is released in more substantial doses. It is in fact a rare thing for violence to be an exclusively individual factor. The reasons for committing a crime, or a murder, are almost always directed toward the exterior of the persona. People want to take revenge on others, or attract their attention, or win their approval. Or else they frequently feel obliged to imitate them. It is right that the individual should be the unit of measurement upon which to reckon and attribute guilt and punishment, but in reality, nearly all murders, nearly all crimes have a collective foundation: they originate with a group and their objective lies in a group. This is especially true for the CR/M.
PROTECT EACH OTHER, and strike out. There is no need to swear oaths, because everyone knows deep down that this is the foundation of a friendship. Outside of friendship you live in cold and in danger. Having friends means having a shield. Sometimes a sword as well. If you have no friends, you are naked to the world. If, instead, by friendship you mean knowing people you can chat with at a cocktail party, sure, that’s human interaction, too, but it offers damned little protection, and wh
en the time comes to act, you’ll find yourself operating solo.
Just as some theorize that the biological reason men make war has to do with the instinct to protect everything they hold dearest, “women and children, land and ideals,” likewise you could maintain that they make war in order to take possession of or to destroy their adversaries’ women, children, land, and ideals. They never fight for themselves, for themselves alone, but in order to protect what they consider to be their own possessions, and to acquire or destroy the possessions of others. Rather than merely trying to kill your adversary, you must take his wife, burn his cabin, poach his flock, and finally, force him to disavow his dearly held principles. Then he will truly be defeated.
If he was forbidden to rip off his armor and steal his concubines, the Greek would have no incentive to challenge the Trojan . . .
The event can be said to be consummated when it gives rise to a victory or a defeat: the aggressive lunge subsides when the prey has either been killed or has managed to escape. The unconcern with which the young men of the CR/M parked downstairs from their home and went off to get themselves a gelato leaves no doubt about the fact that they were certain they’d killed both girls. That they had two corpses in the trunk of the car.
I’ve wondered what would have happened if that had actually been the case, if both girls really had been dead. How would the rest of the story have played out? Probably the defendants answered questions of this sort in court. But the defense, at least in the early phases of the trail, was based on their conviction that the girls were still alive. So what would they have done afterward, that same night or the following morning? Would they have freed them?
The Catholic School Page 97
