The punishment of a woman turns into the reward of a man. If he isn’t impotent, the man is rewarded. If instead he is impotent, the woman is punished. She is punished for her own impotence, her helplessness to resist the punishment. Anyone who isn’t strong enough to resist a punishment deserves it for that very reason. Therefore, since the woman is physically weaker than the man, she’ll be punished precisely for being weaker, and that is a fault in and of itself, a sin to be expiated; in the second place because, weak as she is, she won’t be able to defend herself from the punishment. The punishment is a mechanism that self-activates and then goes in search of a fault to punish, and you can rest assured that it will find one, no doubt it will find one, no one but Jesus and the Virgin Mary can consider themselves safe. It’s never happened that the weak one punishes the strong one, it’s always the other way around, unless in her or his turn the weak one is protected by a strong one (model: The Seven Samurai). The reward given to the strong one is to be able to punish the weak one at his pleasure. From this point of view, Jesus’s much touted “Turn the other cheek” might prove to be a much less paradoxical and revolutionary precept than it appears at first glance, indeed, nothing more than a realistic adaptation to the world as it is, almost Confucian in approach: tolerate the violence that is done to you without dreaming to returning it, because you would only pay the price in any case. If you have taken a slap, prepare yourself to receive another one, and another after that: then someone far more powerful than you will see to a final reckoning in the afterlife. And it is no accident that for many centuries that is exactly how it was interpreted.
When violence is pure, and it uses sex as the medium through which it expresses itself, women become its targets for a banal reason, even drearier, if possible, than the reason provided by libido, and that is, that their attacker isn’t strong enough to be able to face up to a physical struggle with more powerful victims. Women are chosen only because they offer less physical resistance. You might say of certain rapists or serial killers that they raped and murdered women solely because with nine men out of ten they would have gotten the worst of it. In Angelo’s case, this is unmistakable. A considerable part of the hatred that he nurtured toward the female sex sprang from his scorn for their physical inferiority, for the ease with which they could be overpowered.
Out of cowardice or guile (which often trace their roots back to the same source) one chooses to direct violence against those least capable of defending themselves. This inability to defend themselves, in turn, often exacerbates the violence being inflicted. Nothing stirs to violence quite as much as the weakness of those suffering it.
And if there is any uncertainty or competition between impulses, the one that prevails is likely to be the impulse that leads one to do harm, to wound, to kill. Rather than raping a woman, the assailant might choose to stab her. Even if she has put up no resistance. In fact, resistance is almost never the reason that violence is unleashed. To the contrary, there is a tendency to inflict greater cruelty on cooperative victims. Giving in offers no assurances that no harm will be done, contrary to what a widespread legend maintains; indeed, it may only trigger further cruelty. A supine person only reinforces the impulse to brutalize, and in a certain sense, justifies that impulse, offering proof that the punishment inflicted wasn’t entirely undeserved after all. The dehumanization of the victims allows you to have reasons afterward to denigrate them.
THERE IS NO GAME, for that matter, that doesn’t call for a punishment: a sexual game necessarily includes sexual punishments. That is why erotic fantasies so often consist of a punishment. The first form of abduction is oneiric in nature. We dream of kidnapping someone or of being kidnapped. In effect, we sense that there is something wrong about rape, an error, which lies however with the victim. Those who submit, who succumb, are at fault for submitting, for succumbing. The wrong that the victim suffers becomes one with her, it is classified with her, it’s even imputed to her. There are countless nuances of the punishment inflicted according to whether the women dream of it, desire it, deserve it, provoke it, need it, suffer it, or delight in it. One theory holds that women aren’t moral because they have no fear of castration. In order to punish them, then, it will be necessary to dream up sterner or more painful chastisements, seeing that women seem incapable of recognizing the law, and by breaking that law they have deserved their punishment. Perhaps the sentence itself should be etched in the flesh of the condemned woman, as in Kafka’s famous short story.
IT WORKS LIKE THE LAW of the contrappasso in Dante’s Inferno. If she is unwilling, and insists on being unwilling, then sex serves to punish her; if instead she wants to, and then wants more, and can’t be satisfied (“she just can’t get enough”), then she’ll be punished by satiating her with a deadly dose of exactly what she asked for. The typical threat “I’m going to bust your ass!” makes it clear how the first thing that comes to mind to punish someone is sex. And then if the person to be punished is a woman, the idea becomes clearer and more precise, the punishment more appropriate. The reasons may vary, but the method is standardized.
If a girl puts on airs, rape will unmask her.
If a woman gets uppity, if she denies or concedes herself to too many men, then rape will put her back in line. If she likes solitude, or fun, or books and concerts, or if she goes around without an escort in the illusion that she is independent, autonomous, or if she is too demanding because she wants to be loved and understood, then rape will make it clear to her just where she was wrong. When it’s time to give her a lesson, rape is always handy, within reach.
WITH THE ADVENT of so-called sexual liberation, it was discovered that the poets had lied. For centuries. All of them, or nearly all of them. Women want sentiment? They want love, pure, eternal love? No, women want pleasure. They want to fuck their brains out. They clamor for cock the way males clamor for pussy. No more and no less. The sexual emancipation of women and the claim of their right to pleasure led to the same conclusions that misogynists of all time had already come to: that they are by no means fainting lilies, but instead they are tremendous sluts, exactly the same way that males are tremendous swine. Many misogynists believed that they had just been offered clamorous vindication by none other than their very adversaries.
And after all, even homely women want cocks. It may sound brutal, but after all, every discovery is brutal to some extent. And the more brutal it is, the more fundamental. The hypothetical link between a woman’s beauty and her sexual availability or ability exists strictly in the heads of certain men of whom we can only say that they’re either naïve, or aesthetes, or incurable romantics, or else that they’re just too ambitious—and maybe I was all those things at once. Committing a logical error, I assumed that those girls were most lascivious who aroused the most lasciviousness in me, confusing object and subject. It was a mistake, but I was warned against it with sage brutality by a friend of mine, a painter, Rodolfo Cecafumo, when he scolded me for snubbing a homely young woman who had expressed an unmistakable interest in me, stubbornly preferring to lavish my attentions on her pretty girlfriend who clearly didn’t like me one bit. The homely girl, Maria Elisa, was drooling after me, while the pretty girl, Cristina, couldn’t have been any more indifferent. How to emerge from this impasse? Cecafumo fell back on an outside argument, the way philosophers do in their disputations. “Don’t start thinking about how homely Maria Elisa is. Instead, think about what fantastic blow jobs she would give you. Often that’s the way real dogs are: they know they aren’t pretty, so they make an effort to bridge the gap by becoming first-class cocksuckers.” I wouldn’t know whether this theory is true, I have gathered far too little evidence to be able to build a statistical model. But it was in any case impossible for me to separate Maria Elisa’s physical appearance from her claimed skills, at least to a sufficient extent to take instrumental advantage of those skills, and instead I preferred to go on being ignored by Cristina, sighing after her, dreaming of her at night, following in
vain the clues that she scattered around the city.
IT SHOULD MOREOVER BE POINTED OUT that penis envy, so central to the theories of psychoanalysis, is something that men experience, not women. Even though they have a penis, they envy another, an imaginary penis, bigger, more powerful, the insatiable cock of the well-known joke, a magic wand that will open all doors, and not only the one between women’s legs . . . which solves your problems, procures money, chases away thieves and enemies, and guarantees success. Every man dreams of being endowed with this fantastic organ. The procession of worshippers of this phallus winds around the block and out of sight. In pornographic mythology, the male sex drive seems unstanchable: a brute force that nothing and no one can stem, which sweeps away every obstacle that it finds in its path, morality, decency, feminine modesty, the penal code, even the credibility of its own exploits, until it has vented its load, which by the way, it never seems able to fully and thoroughly vent . . .
And yet, in point of fact, there is nothing that needs encouragement as much as this formidable desire for fornication—it needs encouragement, instigation, support, aid, cuddling, lulling with an endless stream of words, pictures, chemical substances, and complicated ceremonies, because otherwise it will deflate. The slightest trifle is enough to halt this ferocious war chariot in its tracks, to make the uncontrollable urgency that had set it in motion just vanish like the morning dew.
Whittled down to bare essentials, pornography stages the two ways in which men interact with women, namely desire and conflict. The bodies act out attraction and violence, sometimes separately, often together. When only violence is exercised, the sexual context is clearly shown to be a trivial pretext, it is reduced to a stage setting appropriate to the dramatization and, however crude, the story line spools out, with women for victims and a generally male audience. The throughline is a commonly accepted one, given that its only purpose is aphrodisiacal in nature. Once sexualized, the violence becomes attractive. You stop questioning the sense of any of it and you limit yourself to letting the excitement sweep over you. The relationship between sex and pornography is suddenly overturned: you don’t excite yourself with the latter in order to complete the former; you practice the former in order to imitate the latter.
4
IT’S TIME TO SAY IT, or say it again. When a dilemma is debated for too long, maybe that means it’s false, and that the real problem and its potential solution lie elsewhere. Far more than the generic opposition between the right and the left so often trotted out in order to provide an insignia to power groups battling to attain hegemony, the most original and enduring political discourse of the twentieth century is feminism. It has changed the lives of those who believed in it and followed it, those who didn’t follow it, but to an even greater degree, those who are opposed to it: just as the whirlpools produced by a river that flows around the piers of a bridge spin, not in the direction of the current, but in the opposite direction, and instead of dragging objects that they seize downstream, they tend to suck them under. Among the most interesting phenomena of any era are in fact those that oppose resistance, the backlashes, the recoils, the ricochets, the counterthrusts, the anachronisms, the blowbacks, which can attain greater power than the change that generated them. At the point where time warps bump and rub against one another, pushing up ridges and plunging deep into abysses, an incredible state of uncertainty is created, where meanings change places, and the glow of sunset can be confused with the glimmer of dawn. The chief political issue of the twentieth century, then, isn’t communism, which originated in the heart of the nineteenth century, nor is it the reactionary alchemies that fought against communism, more or less mingling with it. Much less is it capitalism, which has far more distant origins.
The most innovative political movement of the last hundred years or so, as well as the one that is most starkly relevant, is the women’s liberation movement.
As soon as we look more closely, we realize that the societies in which there are strong calls for equality of the sexes and effective improvements in the status of women are the same ones in which the exhibition of masculinity, however rare it may become, is exasperated to an extreme of violence in order to highlight the residual difference, so as to prevent it from shrinking any further. When hierarchies begin to be shaken from below, their reaction is to become even more rigid, and the moderation that they showed when their dominance was unquestioned gives way to the ruthless and even terroristic use of any means necessary. The same thing happened a century and a half ago with the workers’ movement. As long as they behaved themselves, there had been no need to mow them down with rifle fire. The difference lies in the fact that the reprisals against the women’s liberation movement strike at single individuals, and they can do so at any time and place. At home, on the street, by day, at night, in the workplace or in places of amusement and entertainment. There is no occupied factory to be cleared, no public square to be swept with a cavalry charge. The target of the reprisal, that is, a defenseless individual woman, can be found anywhere. In any house, or out in the world.
MORE THAN AN EVENT out of the ordinary, something exceptional or pathological, rape can be viewed as one of the not particularly numerous modes of interaction between men and women: a “canonical” relationship. In contrast with the theory of the raptus, the fact remains that at least three quarters of all rapists plan out the violence that they then proceed to commit. And the fact that violence is inherently at the heart of relations between men and women can be demonstrated by another statistic, namely that almost half of all women murdered were killed by their husband or their boyfriend, or by someone who was one or the other at some time in the past and could not accept the fact that they no longer were.
ASIDE FROM THE EXAMPLES TREATED at length in this book, let me offer as a further and unique case the killing of a fourteen-year-old girl by a group of boys led by an adult (a certain Erra, someone whose destiny was written in his name: “erra” means “goes astray, does wrong”) in Leno, in the province of Brescia, in 2002. They wanted to rape her to punish her for having rejected their propositions, they’d targeted her, peppering her with a hail of texts, and in the end they had lured her to an isolated farmhouse, with the excuse of wanting to show her a litter of newborn kittens.
THE BOOK THAT YOU ARE READING, then, treats an episode on the outskirts of this conflict, this long war of liberation that is far from being concluded, with the victory of one side in the struggle: an episode of reprisal. In German, of Vergeltung. I know that as I talk about it, I will be repetitive, obsessive, but I can imagine that the same obsession, the same morbid curiosity may pulsate in the head of whoever is reading these pages. To write them, I consume shelves full of books and a plethora of cases that actually happened: nearly every paragraph from here to the end of Part VII of this book will be a condensed version. But anyone who has had enough, and is impatient to return to the adventures of Arbus and company (I’d understand it, I’d like to do the same myself . . .), can take a look at chapters 8 to 12 (maybe chapter 24, too, about Angelo, which is very brief, and chapter 18, with the story of a German girl named Bettina, and the battle that we fought together against her virginity) and then hurry on to Part VIII of the book, The Confessions, where many of the characters we’ve met previously return, Jervi, my teacher Cosmo, Leda Arbus, and, obviously, her ineffable brother.
WHEN YOU TRIGGER A CRISIS in a social order based on a low-intensity but diffuse violence, generalized, and by and large accepted by common opinion, like that of the domination of man over woman, then as a reaction there may be episodic bursts of extreme violence that have the value of full-blown retaliations. The latent violence condenses and is channeled toward individuals with an exemplary character of some kind, based on a pretext or a fiction, perhaps, but perceived as such. These interventions are attempts to patch the leaks that have sprung in the system. By attempting to conceal the crisis with spectacular and exemplary acts, they wind up emphasizing it. The violence that
was supposed to hold the system together, preventing it from crumbling, instead contributes to its liquidation. The reprisal almost never obtains the effect of restoring things to the way they were, resurrecting the order that existed prior to the crisis, and in fact it only accelerates its dissolution.
THE SIMPLEST METHOD, primal and direct and at the same time symbolic, available to a man to disarm a woman is to subjugate her sexually. Once he has performed this inaugural act, and thereby founded and secured the relationship of domination, he will be able to proceed to extend it onto the social and economic plane, in the form of exploitation, discrimination, and segregation. In those years, the most militant feminists were assembling a theory that was interesting precisely because of its radicalism, which is that the sexual oppression of women was oppression by definition, the original form of violence, the model of exploitation that begat all others: war, class oppression, authoritarianism, racism. Sexuality is the sphere in which the dynamics of power are developed and calibrated, ready to be used elsewhere; it’s not erotic language that is borrowed from the language of warfare, but the other way around.
The Catholic School Page 108
