People imagine that a rapist pines after sexual intercourse, finds it so desirable that he’s willing to break every rule in order to obtain it; in reality, though, that act disgusts him, he perceives it as something filthy and abject, so why shouldn’t he replace it with an equally deplorable act? Torture instead of fornication. Or else merge them into a single act. Coitus is a peculiar act that is at once replicable and substitutable. We are perennially engaged in a search for its equivalents. There are those who find them in the amassing and display of money and clothing, or automobiles; others, in power, some in art or violence, which can all be a surrogate or a support: we gain access to sex through its substitutes, you take someone to bed after impressing them with a display of the collateral attributes of sex, first and foremost, power. There are others who find substitutes for sex in self-sacrifice and altruism, or else in perversion, that is, by doctoring coitus until it can only be practiced in the form of submission, outrage, punishment, affirmation of one’s power, or erasure of the world. From the fairly simple and basically repetitive act that it is, no different from eating and sleeping, coitus lends itself to any transmutation, and it is not uncommon to find it camouflaged or transferred into other ordinary acts and situations. Except for playboys (forgive me the anachronism, I know that there is no longer any such thing as a playboy, or that if there is, that’s certainly not the term we use, but I don’t know the present-day term for it) and for prostitutes and gigolos and porn stars, coitus occupies a very limited portion of the time available in a person’s life, almost laughably small, a few minutes a day, or a month, or even less . . . and is consequently far more present in substitute acts than in real ones.
Its specter haunts our everyday lives, but it is rarely embodied. Preparatory acts, substitute acts: ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we limit ourselves to those.
IN IMAGINARY SHAPES, it was present in our minds when we were boys.
SEXUAL THINGS ARE PANTOMIME. Comedies, farces, melodramas, mystery plays, interludes, blackout gags, grim dark tragedies, the Oresteia, Romeo and Juliet, A Streetcar Named Desire, No Sex Please, We’re British, Il magnifico cornuto, Senso, On ne badine pas avec l’amour, The War of the Roses, La mandragola, Othello . . . Pure theater. Disguises. Betrayals. Women dressed as men. Men transformed into beasts. The Dresser. The Servant. Les bonnes. Macbeth. Desire and impotence and vengeance. Murderous fantasies, suicidal, delirious, romantic. The Queen of Sheba and Vlad the Impaler. The death of Procris. The man who didn’t know how to love, the man who knew too much, the man who loved women, the French lieutenant’s woman, the woman who lived twice, the sign of Venus, the gentlemen who prefer blondes. Last Tango in Paris and elsewhere. It is only in these forms codified by theater and film and novels that we can begin to express a certain number of narrative lines in that extremely tangled thicket. Who can claim to have revealed their own sex life in its entirety? What they have done, and what they have yearned to do, dreamed of doing, attempted, feared? In the spectrum of an ordinary life, and even of a chaste life, there’s more passion and obscenity than in any Emmanuelle + Werther + Portnoy + Wuthering Heights + the complete works of Henry Miller Bukowski Erica Jong and Tinto Brass. It’s a vast, endless field, and not even the individual who lives there knows it thoroughly. The most ardent confession, the most out-of-control novelistic invention will not be up to the task of revealing it in its entirety. Artists, therefore (so many blind Tiresiases with withered dugs), devote themselves to one of these lines and reconstruct it, extracting it from the welter. They know everything, and they have either a presentiment of it or have actually seen it, but they tell only a tiny sliver of it.
THE SIMPLEST of these lines is rape.
WHATEVER EFFORT IS MADE, you always fall short of the mark, or else you push past it in a programmatic, hyperbolic, exponential manner, that is, in the mode typical of pornography. In order to cover a boundless field, you must divide it up into quadrants like a land office, composing a textbook of perversion that is to the reality of an individual’s sex life as a book of grammar is to the language that person speaks.
COERCION CANNOT BE ELIMINATED from the concept of intercourse and in the very hypothesis of pleasure: even where there is no violence to be detected, if there has been pleasure, that is because a temporary domination has been established, an illegality has been committed, a forcing open has been perpetrated, one will has surrendered to another. Or even surrendered to itself. The loss of dignity is a crucial condition of any sexual enjoyment.
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RAPE STANDS ROOTED IN SEX like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil at the center of the Garden of Eden. We are not allowed to lift our eyes and gaze upon it; to taste of its fruit would reveal all at once the true nature of all that surrounds it. Of sex, rape constitutes the unspeakable secret that, if it were once made public, would degrade the world, blighting for all time relations between men and women, between humankind and Nature.
OBJECTS AND HUMAN BEINGS have for us the value that our imagination attributes to them: this is true of love, friendship, fidelity, and of the vilest ideas and fantasies, so that a person, the dignity of their life and the integrity of their body, lose all importance in comparison with the pleasure that we can experience as we caress the notion of torturing them. From a fantasy to the actual attainment of that fantasy, the path is usually long, so long that almost no one ever really travels it even once in the course of a lifetime, even though when you stop to consider it more carefully you discover that it’s a relatively easy tight spot to get through, as is shown by the CR/M; in truth, nothing could be simpler to undertake and complete than the kidnapping and rape of a girl or young woman on the part of a group of men; it’s a crime that demands only a minimal effort and entails at most a trifling risk to one’s personal safety, if you compare it with the risk entailed, say, in robbing an armored car.
However you calculate the take from a rape—far more difficult to establish than the plunder, say, from an armed robbery, where the loot is tangible—the cost of committing it is practically zero. It is precisely that minimal outlay of effort required that gives some the impression that, deep down, it’s not really a crime at all: Why should there be any punishment at all for an act that can be committed with such nonchalance? Against which there are no safeguards of any particular nature? It’s practically like finding a wallet lying in the street: can it seriously be considered theft to pick it up and pocket it? The same thing as taking a woman against her will. Once you’ve established that her wishes are secondary or exist specifically to be overruled, what else is stopping you? And an act that won’t run into any obstacles, isn’t it therefore basically legitimate? Where are the steel bars, the armored doors, the alarm systems, the guard dogs, and the firearms that are usually set to guard whatever it is that criminals generally venture to steal?
Just about anybody could attack an unaccompanied woman. One paradoxical consequence of women’s emancipation is that, taking as a given women’s right to freedom of behavior, and understanding that they have won the full and peaceful possibility of exercising that right, the defenses provided by a more traditional social conception have been reduced or eliminated entirely: a repressive system of precautions and controls over women which, though by and large ineffective, nonetheless, by limiting their freedom of movement, also limited the occasions in which they were in danger. Women, then, are now more exposed than they used to be; and so they remain, in spite of the growing awareness that they’re on their own now.
That period was, in short, a dangerous limbo in which the old social protections had been dismantled and swept away, the age-old precautions now considered so much garbage, and the culture of self-defense had not yet become widespread.
Twenty years earlier the young men of the CR/M would never have dreamed they could invite a couple of young women out without first being put through a meticulous family screening process. Twenty years later many doubts would have stood in the way of the fatal outing, and the techno
logical means necessary to report the dangerous sideshow would have been available. The rape and murder could certainly still have transpired, of course, but not with the same modality. I therefore have the sensation that I’m telling an age-old story that happens over and over again, but which that one particular time happened the only way it could, the way that the times dictated it had to.
Anyone is capable of attacking an isolated woman. And erotic ideation often circles around that very image, the rape sequence, it embroiders countless active or passive fantasies on the theme: it is a theme with a limitless array of variations, perhaps there is not a single person in the world who hasn’t imagined being a protagonist, either as rapist or rapee, there is no body of erotic literature that doesn’t feature rape, as a fantasy, dream, nightmare, terror, or unconfessable desire.
In particular, a woman’s pubic area can be viewed as provocative—not of erotic impulses but rather of irritated and violent reactions. It is its incongruity, its shapeless appearance, undefined, that prompts what is often a sort of angry curiosity, an astonishment that is transformed into rejection (and it is no accident that the term used in vulgar Italian to describe the female sex organ is the image of an animal that arouses the same type of reaction: the mouse. Some say that the fear triggered by such a small animal is due to the unpredictability of its appearance, its dark color, the odd way it has of moving around . . .).
The feminine sex organ sits there, anonymous, dark, concealed beneath layers of fabric but, so to speak, always present, always perceptible in its hiding place between the thighs, another hole just an inch or so from the hole that everyone has, even men. There are those who go crazy at the thought of that hole, but then there are others who go crazy at the sheer thought that that jagged hole must be honored, revered, that we must lavish attention on anyone who possesses one, that it is necessary to ask permission to enter it, that a particular woman so arrogantly acts as a guard and custodian of that piece of nothing as if it were something that only she has, when in fact all women have one, and they’re all identical, and in this detail, all women are the same, and they’re all proud as punch to have that piece of nothing and show it off or hide it, promise it or deny it to men who lose their heads over it, willingly subjecting themselves to a series of stupid rules and conditions, when all it would really take is a couple of good hard slaps to . . .
That is why it seems necessary to punish that sex, for its obscene reluctance and shyness and its even more shameless exhibition, when it opens up, displaying the forbidden interior of the body, its slimy channels: it must be forced, pounded, stabbed, surgically removed. Considering that it already looks like a wound, let it become one for real. Those who violate it seem to be trying to find something in it that’s not there, like certain burglars who rampage through houses, wrecking the place only to find that there was never any loot in the first place; the angered astonishment in the presence of a woman’s genitalia is perhaps similar to that which Emperor Titus must have felt when he penetrated into the Sancta Sanctorum of the temple of Jerusalem: and found it empty. There was nothing inside, neither a god nor a spirit, nor gold or precious stones, not a statue—nothing. Nothing to worship, nothing to plunder. In that case, in the name of what had he even fought? When the rapist discovers this, he really can lose his mind, if what had guided him up to that point was a sort of practical reason bent wholly on obtaining that which he desired; at the moment in which he discovers that a woman’s sex is not the garden of delights he’d dreamed of, a place it was worth committing a crime just to enter, his rage is vented upon that which is there, whatever projects and can be seized and yanked and crushed and upon which he can take out his fury, which is to say the face, the hair, the breasts, the buttocks, the delicate or fleshy and in any case defenseless, and therefore provocative, feminine forms. The same anatomical part that for a lover is the source of excitement is the same for a sadist, except that in his case it is an angry, resentful excitement: instead of admiring that part, he detests it, instead of celebrating it and blandishing it, he considers it to be his enemy. There is no difference, in terms of the nervous system, in the buildup to excitement, while there is a great deal of difference in its many possible outcomes, in its consequences and conclusions. Nerves stretched to the breaking point give rise to comparable gestures and deeds but of inverse polarity. Instead of caressing a pair of breasts, one crushes or punches them, instead of lightly slapping the buttocks one claws them or cuts them. The hands reaching out toward a woman’s body are always filled with either tenderness or violence. In an unstable equilibrium. An underlying misunderstanding persists. Even the lover most wholeheartedly devoted to his sweetheart’s pleasure might imagine heightening it by having recourse to brutality. Even the woman who has most confidently abandoned her body to the attentions of her lover may be swept by the lingering suspicion that, at the high point of these pleasurably solicitous efforts, he might just go a step further, transforming himself into another man, forcing her into positions or coercing her into acts that might prove disagreeable or painful, going so far as to hit her or wrap his hands around her throat . . . or even headlocking her into a position from which she can free herself only by satisfying his frenzy. And sometimes even that’s not enough, and it doesn’t do a lot of good to protest or beg. Domination always lies latent in a sexual relationship, it’s there even when it’s not, all you need to do is shift the weight of a gesture by a gram in either direction and redirect by a degree or two their intention, and before you know it a caress has been transformed into a brutal blow. Lucky are they, men and women, who have never experienced that equivocal moment of finding themselves teetering between one and the other: even though in all their good fortune, they may still lack the fundamental experience of amorous ambiguity, knowledge of the dark side, the implicit battle that unfolds in the shelter of love, when the bodies are joined and they compenetrate, and yet still, deep down, they are battling. And you can just imagine when there is no love! When what is running the games from the very outset is deception and hatred. Rape is merely a dogmatic, unilateral, literal interpretation of one of the possible meanings, a way of destroying any ambiguity by consigning coitus to a clear and simple significance. Old-school feminists and rapists of all ages come together on the idea that penetration is a violent act in and of itself. You have to do something to that body, you can’t just leave it the way you found it and took it, it must necessarily emerge transformed, transfigured by pleasure or, otherwise, disfigured. How many options, how many modalities of interaction present themselves, once you get your hands on a feminine body! Strip it naked, explore it, cover it with kisses and saliva, cuddle it, experiment with different instruments to determine how it experiences pleasure, reacts to stimuli, writhes in agony, trembles in fear at the sound of threatening words, and allows itself to be deceived by reassuring ones: in other words, anything to keep it from lying there inert, indifferent, anything to make it correspond to your own excitement. Sometimes, however, the rapist is not even slightly excited or paroxysmal, instead he is calm, icy: in this case it will be his victim’s nervous excitement that will fill the emotional void. If the victim suffers, then her tormentor gets proof of his own existence, even if he is incapable of feeling and thought: it will be the victim who feels them and thinks them for him, in his place. To behave in an inhumane manner in order to feel that you are alive, to prove that you exist, is a contrivance as old as the world, and it can be found in countless situations, it is the underlying foundation of a great many experiences, war, criminality, authority, education, even respect itself, even honor itself, even so, the so-called inviolable rights of the individual emerge out of that individual’s potential to turn violent. A helpless creature has no rights, or else yes, it does, but only on paper, so really, it has none. It begins to have them only in the course of a struggle, when in fact it proves that it exists, perhaps associated with other creatures like it, capable of reacting to brutality with equal brutality, proving itself at
the very least able to return the blows. What we nowadays pompously refer to as rights, as if they’d always existed, there at our disposal from the very outset, nicely assorted, a nuptial dowry laid away in a drawer where you go to get clean linen, but instead they are the result of battles, tests of strength, rebellions, bloodshed. I exist because I, too, can hit, overwhelm, demand retaliation. Therefore, nothing could be less surprising than the use of violence as an affirmation of self: to offend, to defend yourself. Let me say it again: the very inviolability of the domicile originally means that on the threshold of his home stands a man armed with an axe, and with his children backing him up. The specific element of the story that I’m telling is, nonetheless, the private use of brutality: the story of single individuals who bring out a latent tendency and train its fire in exemplary acts. The conflictual character circulating in relations between the sexes bobs to the surface in its entirety in a few clamorous episodes that cast light on countless other insignificant episodes of that same conflict.
If all men hate women, well, there are certain men who hate them more, much more than those who hate them a little or perhaps a fair amount can even distantly begin to imagine.
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