When you lose your job, you stop producing testosterone.
With their minds infested by the nightmare of that outlook, some have decided that it was necessary to hang tough when it comes to women, resist uncompromisingly. Resistance. That’s right, die-hard, relentless resistance: to those who are mythically anchored to that term, considering it a synonym for progress when, by the same token, it can be a synonym for conservatism, if not even for reactionary impulses, we should point out that “resistance” can also be the refusal to give up a privilege.
The end of segregation always creates paradoxical effects. Having long excluded them, kept them in separate classes, watched over their personal movements, to a certain extent men had been protecting women from other men; by including them now, there was an increase of the risk they would be mistreated or abused. With sexual liberation, which was supposed to work in their favor, women had actually been handed over to the spirit of male domination. In a freer society with looser restrictions, threats and dangers actually increased.
AS LONG AS PHYSICAL STRENGTH was crucial to survival, man subjugated woman. When it no longer was, women began to emancipate themselves, but physical supremacy continued to be used by males to keep them from doing so: both as a general theory and as a rough brute practice. It is a vain effort, but it continues to be attempted: physical strength remains menacing even after it is outlawed. Society does all it can to stigmatize it, but cannot eliminate it entirely. Strength has no option, then, but to specialize in minor bullying and mistreatments: otherwise it would have nothing left to it but the occasional opportunity for manual labor and the hamster wheel of gymnasiums. Strength is useless, outmoded, and even a little ridiculous in its claim to matter nowadays, to constitute a boast or an achievement worthy of note. It manifests itself in the form of a caricature, in the muscular figures of bodybuilders, whose physiques are a sort of archaeological museum of strength, the exhibition of its embalmed image, designed only to prompt astonishment. It’s one thing to have to go out and hunt a wild boar or a lion, it’s quite another to host a television show or to teach at a university. In the first case, the shortcomings of being a woman are considerable, in the second they are nonexistent.
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FOR THAT MATTER, what should the “respectable” young men of the CR/M have done with a couple of young working-class women who were not, however, prostitutes, but themselves perfectly “respectable”? They couldn’t reach for their wallets, and neither could they invite them to dinner to meet their parents. There was room neither for a money-based interaction nor for a traditional courtship. They feigned the latter strictly as a tactic, overlooking the class differences, instead taking advantage of them to lure the young women into the trap. When the means of the profit motive and the call of disinterested love are excluded from interactions between men and women, the temptation, nonetheless, arises to enliven them with violence. Violence provides meaning to a relationship that is otherwise devoid of it. It represents a way out of sterility. Gratuitous violence awakens one from the torpor of empty, sleepless nights. After the idle chitchat that served only to reel them in, what else were the young men and the young women of the CR/M going to have to say to each other?
IT WORKS LIKE IN A SORT of ongoing military service: you are terrorized and brutally hazed by the “old-timers,” to the point that you find yourself hoping and wishing with all your heart for the time to come when you too will become an “old-timer,” and you can start terrorizing and brutally hazing other newcomers. The best-oiled mechanism of transmission is that of abuse and mistreatment: in order to make it bearable, I identify with whoever is inflicting it on me, preparing myself in the meantime to take their place. In the old days, the role of father, the virile role, the role of authority in general was handed down according to this tried-and-true script. At the time our story unfolds, this schema had entered into a full-blown crisis; it was caught in a quagmire but it had by no means faded out of existence; it is a well-known fact that when it senses a threat or even realizes that it is on the verge of waning out of existence, a social law grows rigid, and it is applied in an even more inflexible fashion, laboring under the illusion that by so doing it can arrest its decline and reverse the course of time. It is when white supremacy is called into question that the Ku Klux Klan does its worst. The protagonists of the CR/M can be called Italian members of a KKK that was targeting not blacks (in Italy at the time there were still very few blacks) but women, half of the population. Woman is the nigger of the world.
BRUSQUE MANNERS AS A WAY of creating a hierarchy among males—acts of bravado, bullying, drag racing and motorcycle duels, beer-drinking contests, escalating rounds of drug-taking, diving off cliffs, rocks tossed off overpasses, massed charges against the police outside the soccer stadium. Skill, but especially readiness in the use of violence have always been valid indicators in the selection of chiefs, from the Stone Age at least up until Achilles, but afterward as well. What now brings only chaos to society once contributed to holding it together, in the days when its survival was guaranteed by such violent activities as hunting and war. Back then being aggressive was more or less a social service.
The primitive hunter that lurks in the depths of every male, then, is unhappy and underemployed. Consigned to the want ads since time out of mind. He sits there twiddling his thumbs, with no idea of what use to make of his natural backlog of aggressiveness, instinct, physical strength and prowess. And he doesn’t know what to do with his cruelty and his ferocity, for that matter, which still lie there, available even if unutilized: at the very most, he can hope to play with them in his spare time. He whiles away his time with the violence that once served to ensure his survival and that of his community. He wastes that precious resource on pastimes, and if he wants to make it pay off in any fashion, he has no alternative but to turn to criminal activities. When a war finally breaks out, offering an opportunity to make use of violence without facing legal sanctions—in fact, receiving encouragement and gratitude from those in whose name he fights—who do we find on the front lines but common criminals and soccer hooligans, that is, the ones who kept themselves in training during peacetime. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, they lined up to enlist. A way of transforming reprobation into honor.
If he wishes to survive in a world that has become hostile to the displays of ferocity it once admired, that archetypal hunter must transform his violent exuberance into cunning, his physical cruelty into its mental counterpart, and he must turn his zeal and fury for the hunt against his fellow man in such a way that it becomes profitable, no longer for the entire community, but solely for himself. Instead of the wild stag, he must now hunt women or pharmacists or armored car guards. Or immigrants. He must unleash his killer instinct in squash courts and television political debates. He must tear his adversaries to pieces with legal briefs instead of clubbing them over the head. His war is almost always individual now.
WHAT EXPERIENCE NOWADAYS can take the place of the spectacular deeds of shattering your enemy’s skull and raping his wife and daughters? Can we simply delete such an act from our atavistic memory, or does it still have to be substituted, sublimated, surrogated by something else? In what direction must the forces and the strength that once served for hunting large prey or other human beings now be channeled?
IN NATURE, males are predisposed to make use of violence in order to be able to mate, or at least to prove themselves ritually capable of doing so. A biological legacy ensures that they are ready to fall back on it if necessary. Violence remains as an implicit content of coitus, just as the compulsion toward death is intertwined with the vital impulse toward life. The siren song of sex arouses aggressiveness toward those rivals who stand in the way of mating, and in some cases toward the object of competition herself. Since there are no rivals in rape, however, or if there ever were, they have since been vanquished, or else instead of competing they have chosen to form an alliance, creating a gang that operates on consensus, in which case
all the aggression is turned against the victim. She is overwhelmed with violence, at least some of which had originally been meant not for her, but for other males. Most of the time, rape is a hunting party that comes to an end all too soon, with the almost immediate capture of the prey, leaving the hunter frustrated, still in need of a way to vent all the energy built up for the chase and with a view to dodging attendant dangers. Rape is a ridiculously simple crime to commit, and the criminal is able to commit it while still in full possession of his physical resources, his strength and all his savagery. The risks to his own safety are almost negligible, the struggle with the adversary is brief. The ratio of strength is unequal. So much adrenaline has been pumped into his blood that he has to find a use for it. To calm down, there is nothing left, nothing remains for him to do but lash out.
I’VE SAID IT BEFORE, but I’ll say it again. The objective of sexual violence would be to obtain by force what one is unable or unwilling to work to obtain through courtesy charm or sentiment, or else with a cash payment. The gratification is obtained by other means, with the display of power, the humiliation of the victim, brutality as an end in itself, the application of what is considered a righteous punishment of a woman, of this woman and, at the same time, of all women: coitus is incidental, secondary, when not actually impracticable, because the rapist is in point of fact impotent, in which case the intercourse itself is surrogated with all manner of torture and abuse. The woman in that case will be penetrated with various facsimiles of the malfunctioning male member.
TO SOME, rape is not simply one of the possible forms of interaction between male and female, but rather its basic substance, its essence, rooted in history, in myth, in the metaphysical configuration of relations between the sexes. The men who view it like that, who think about it that way, more or less lucidly, are at the antipodes of society: either learned scholars or hulking brutes. The former think about it endlessly, the latter not even an instant. This short circuit between those who theorize violence and those who practice it is a recurring phenomenon in twentieth-century culture. Anyone who says that culture has no influence or is separate and detached from what ordinary people think and do, especially in the lower sectors of the population, fails to consider just how hard the learned and the expert have devoted themselves to corroborating, with an extensive deployment of reasoning and studies and sources and evidence, the most brutal ways of operating and the crudest and most simpleminded belief sets. Paradoxically, this doctrine of rape as foundational to relations between man and woman is also at the center of a number of the more intransigent theories of feminism.
Certain radical declarations manage to be at once a revelation, an obvious banality, and a falsification. Feminist thinkers have set records for appearing equally brilliant and deranged. Nothing could be less an act of love and more an act of violent appropriation than a man fucking a woman. Nothing could be less an instrument of pleasure and more a symbol of oppression than the penis. Nothing could be less an expression of affection and more a manifestation of dominion than traditional man-woman intercourse. And so on. The reliance on paradoxes is an integral part of all radical language, simplifications as brutal as they are suggestive, which at first offend, then seduce, subsequently appear true and just, and in the end, disappoint. The hidden truth that is revealed after the unmasking turns out to be nothing but yet another mask.
The shared trait lies in the perception of an absolute, unyielding female difference, as if women belonged to another species (this is the so-called pseudospeciation).
THE THRILL OF POWER IS UNEQUALED. Sexual domination is a primary or secondary aspect of it, a symbol, the most classic example of it, or else a caricature. Sex then is merely the ambit or the language through which the domination is illustrated. The contrary evidence is that what gives enjoyment to the masochist is not so much the suffering itself as it is the submission. To have a master is a delicious, almost poetic sensation . . .
MULTIPLE MURDERERS OF WOMEN are interested in sex only to a relative extent. Since it usually represents an intermediate station on the victim’s journey toward death, sex might be rocketed through without even stopping. Like a stop on a tourist itinerary, you may just decide to put that attraction off till the next time you return. Having a woman at your mercy, let’s say, during an armed robbery, always includes the option of raping her: even when there is another objective, say jewelry and cash, it is the sheer availability of another person’s body obtained with the threat of weapons that leads one to take their pleasure with it, ravaging and raping. If you limit yourself to beating the master of the house, say in a home invasion, then both treatments might very well be meted out to his women. It’s as if when the criminals are asked about torture and mistreatments, they were to say, Fill ’er up! or I’ll take it all: the economic objectives of their enterprise are momentarily set aside to scoop up some lesser prizes. There must be a paralogism that makes it hard not to take it out on the defenseless. Since it happens regularly and it has been confirmed by a myriad of studies, then it must be taken as a certainty that when a person has a chance to do harm, he will do so (see the story of the Ring of Gyges). Not always, but most of the time; not everyone, but certainly a majority. So it is not so much the will to do evil, as the mere opportunity that unleashes it. And then, of course, the habit.
For some people, it becomes a habit to use violence as a tool to obtain the things they want, whether those things are property or power or sexual satisfaction. Once you’ve contracted this habit, it becomes very difficult to break the nexus of I want/I take.
IN THE CR/M, the rape in the narrow sense of the term, the sexual violence itself, had a very limited duration; all the rest of it was torture that had to do with the kidnapping, and served to amplify to the greatest extent possible the sensation of domination that the kidnappers exercised over their victims.
GIRLS WHO ACCEPT INVITATIONS from boys don’t realize that they’re taking part in a game. The rules of this game aren’t clear, but the sanctions against those who fail to respect them are very harsh. It’s like looking for a fifth corner in a room: the room is square, there is no such thing as a fifth corner, but if you fail to find it the guards will beat you brutally. Where’s the fifth corner? You don’t see one? Very bad. And the beatings begin. This is a story told by survivors of the Soviet prison system. The same thing happens to girls: by now they’re in the game, they’re inside it, and from inside, nothing is ever clear. Things happen, but you can’t understand them. A moment after they get into the car, here we go, the game has begun. In the end, they pay with their lives. But what could have allowed them to be spared? No one knows that. Not even their kidnappers. Refuse from the very beginning? Play dead? Resist in some way? Beg and plead? What is the right move, if there even could be one that is better than another? This is certainly not a classic boy-girl courtship, they must have understood that from the very outset, nor is it a reckless adventure, much less a typical kidnapping of the kind that were common in that period, strictly for ransom. They don’t have any money. So what do they have, what can they bet, what can they lose? Their virginity, sure, but once that’s been taken away, all they have is their lives. They don’t have anything else to ante up, they’ve sat down at the table and now they can’t get up and leave. There is nothing preestablished about the game these girls are now taking part in, neither the objectives nor the rules, nor the pleasure of playing it, nothing but what’s at stake: their lives. (It later became clear that also at stake in this game were the lives of their kidnappers, at least a good long stretch of those lives: for that matter, the kidnappers hadn’t figured it out either, perhaps they thought that they were the referees, rather than the players . . .)
BUT THAT’S HOW SOCIOPATHS ARE, indifferent to pain: they tolerate it, they suffer it, and they inflict it, all while maintaining an attitude of ostentatious nonchalance: “Is this all there is?” they seem to say. They may take pleasure in it, or pretend to, out of a pure spirit of defiance, of
contrariness. They want to feel free of the conventional constraints (good, evil, right, and wrong) that are binding upon others.
Included in the concept of punishment as it is commonly understood, is the fault or transgression of which the punishment is supposed to be the juridical consequence. The very fact of a punishment implies a fault: retroactively, the punishment creates the crime itself, it implies it. It therefore follows that every time one is taught a lesson, there must have been a reason for imparting that lesson. Otherwise none of this would make any sense, and the human intellect vacillates in the absence of meaning, of sense. If you don’t find a meaning in events, then you conjure it up out of nothing. Often, then, it is the punishment that fabricates the fault from which it is supposed to descend. The positive fact—positive, that is, in the sense of effective, documented—that women suffer violence becomes the very reason they suffer it. The reason for the punishment consists of the punishment itself: it’s the greatest possible realism. Feminine weakness serves both as the fault and as the condition of the punishment: it is at once the why and the how.
The Catholic School Page 107
