Likewise, in the film Leaving Las Vegas, Elisabeth Shue, playing a streetwalker on the Strip, not only willingly bends over to be spanked by her pimp but actually hands him the knife he’ll need to beat her but good. In the movie Love Games, written and directed by feminist filmmaker Lizzie Borden, a prosecutor goes to find out why no one is willing to press charges against a serial date rapist, and finds herself similarly seduced into enjoying the experience of surrendering her body and will to this man. In Gone With the Wind, by many accounts the greatest romance ever made for the big screen, the most commonly replayed clip shows Rhett Butler slapping the impudent and impertinent Scarlett O’Hara in pent-up frustration and then grabbing her aloft, to head upstairs and meet her fate, whether she wants it or not.
Like most schoolgirls, I first came across the perverse sex appeal of the SS guard, the Nazi in his jackboots, in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” the angry daughter’s rant at her putatively German dead father: “Every woman adores a fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.” In Sherri Szeman’s 1994 novel The Kommandant’s Mistress, a story told alternately from the points of view of both a young Jewish woman and the concentration camp commander who takes her as his sex slave, it seems an unintended effect of this miserable coupling that it is extremely, uncomfortably erotic. In Schindler’s List, almost the identical relationship is set up between the camp overlord played by Ralph Fiennes and the young Jewess, portrayed with sheer terror by Embeth Davidtz, whose work detail involves maid service in the commander’s house. In the scenes where Fiennes contemplates just how far he wants to take his lordly prerogative to do whatever he wants with this poor chambermaid, the result was so sexy, the feelings of arousal conveyed by these two attractive young actors—no doubt, in marked contrast with what any real Nazi and any real starved and tortured concentration camp victim would look, feel and be like—that the erotic effect of her fear of him, alternated by, strangely, his fear of her, his belief that her Jew-charms are seducing him even as she cowers, shivers, frightened on the ground, the fact that this whole dynamic is powered by all the tricks that make the pornography of domination and submission such a turn-on, is almost offensive in a movie that otherwise does its best to stick with the horror of the Holocaust, to deny anyone the opportunity to indulge fantasies of captivity.
In the Broadway show (and movie) Oliver!, based on Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, the kindly prostitute Nancy (in modern terms “the hooker with a heart of gold”) is punched out by her boyfriend-pimp Bill Sikes, falls on the ground and then, in a showstopping ballad of devotion and heartache, pulls herself up off the floor and insists that she will stand by her man, bruises and all, “As Long As He Needs Me.” Carousel is a musical set among Lowell’s textile-mill working girls, depicting troubled lives in an atmosphere of grubby-gray tedium that is indigenous to New England, and is meant to signal a show more gritty and heart-wrenching than the usual Broadway fare (this in spite of the fact that Shirley Jones, a.k.a. Madam Milquetoast, starred in the movie version opposite the cloyingly blue-eyed Gordon MacRae). Maybe it’s because the residue of hard knocks and hardships is immunity to pain, or perhaps it’s because Carousel is just plain dated, but for whatever reason, what we would now think of as domestic violence is defined in the show as a sweet “love tap.” Toward the end of the play, the teenage daughter Louise—who appears to have fallen in with a bad crowd and is heading in the wrong direction—encounters a strange man as she frolics along the road. He turns out to be the revenant of her deceased dad, Billy Bigelow, the bastard who got her mother pregnant and never got around to marrying her before getting himself killed in the manner of all bad boys who live fast and die young. Billy’s purposes back on earth involve the usual reparations that, left unmended, are said to keep lost souls floating in Dante’s Purgatorio. So in trying to impose some paternal discipline on his unruly wild child of a daughter, Billy rebukes her with a hard smack. But here’s the funny part: afterward, after the pink impression of the blow has been drained of its blood rush, Louise dazedly declares that “it felt like he kissed me.” She rushes home, reports this visitation to her poor beleaguered mother—who is, apparently, like most single mothers, beyond astonishment—and then asks, “Is it possible for someone to hit you hard like that—real hard and loud—and for it to not hurt at all?” To which her mom replies that something like that can happen, that it is possible, but only if the person who hits you loves you very, very much.
Now, let us remember that Carousel, whether Broadway-bound or rehashed by community-theater amateurs, is a heartland enterprise, and not some beatnik expression of alternative values. If everything about Carousel is solidly middle-class and middle-American, then there’s nothing particularly outré about the notion that when someone you love smacks you, it doesn’t hurt at all. And the party line for so many years, even in something as innocuous as a Broadway musical, was that nothing could be more innocuous—gentle, affectionate even—than a smash across the cheek from the man you love. Of course, a slap across the face usually does not lead to full-fledged battery, and yet, nowadays it would be impossible not to see the potential connection. And yet, the examples of glorified romantic violence that I just mentioned come from all different eras, and of them only Carousel seems dated—though it was revived to great fanfare and promises of true grit at Lincoln Center—and that is simply because the schmaltz and pomp and circumstance of musical theater is always atavistic.
In an essay for the Los Angeles Times, later republished in her collection Life and Death, Andrea Dworkin describes a series of rapes—by several doctors and other assorted keepers, by hands and fingers and specula—during her incarceration at the Women’s House of Detention in New York City, after an arrest for attending an anti-Vietnam rally in 1965. She describes a bruised uterus and a ripped vagina and bleeding that would not stop. And she also describes how the writer Grace Paley somehow became involved in all this and encouraged Ms. Dworkin, then a Bennington College freshman, to tell her story, to take it to newspapers, to give her miserable experience a voice against the surrender of silence. So she diligently goes about the task, finding every broadsheet and tabloid listed in the Yellow Pages, she contacts them all, alerts them to her jailers’ crimes, and sensational as her accusations are—College Girl! Rape in the Lockdown! Speculum Rips Cervix!—Ms. Dworkin gets a lot of ink. There are public hearings to follow, and eventually the prison gets torn down.
All this could ultimately read as a victory of sorts, but one of the more mesmerizing and outstanding facts of this experience for Ms. Dworkin seems to be the way so many men lavished her with pornographic letters, taking perverse and prurient delight in the detailed accounts that she gave of her rapes. “I didn’t know the facts about my imprisonment were sexually arousing—to me they were an anguish,” Ms. Dworkin writes. “I didn’t know that in the public eye I became living pornography for men who liked to watch a frightened girl tell the story. I got hundreds of letters from men, taunting, obsessive letters. The man would say what he wanted to do to me or what he was going to do to me when he came and got me and how he masturbated to what the prison doctors had done.” Now, thinking back to a time when the now thoroughly outspoken Andrea Dworkin was a young college girl in the midst of this trauma, it is plain to see that this is just awful, about the worst imaginable violation. But thirty years hence, I read her shock and I am shocked—shocked!—that the persistence of rape fantasies and other prison-house dreams that delight in abuse, and which are so prevalent in our society, don’t inform her understanding of these wretched men and their hideous behavior. Because there are so many socially acceptable contexts in which we are allowed to indulge our icky, uncomfortable fantasies at this point—we don’t even need real pornography in a world that gives us the director’s cut of 9½ Weeks at any video store, or that shows Charlotte Rampling in the pasty, unwholesome decay and naked imprisonment of The Night Porter—that it seems like everyone ought to have caught on to the
fact that rape might be a crime of power, but it is plainly a fantasy of sex. A man’s hopeless, hapless hard-on as he feels himself aroused while reading someone describe her sexual debasement, the hot shot of something electric and filthy and exciting that the most sane and stable woman might feel while being spanked: this is the human mind doing its dirty work on the pathetically compliant human body. Just as I am certain that the creators of Carousel would be astonished to hear that there are elements of politically incorrect abuse in their innocent little play about the big top, Andrea Dworkin cannot come to terms with the idea that what caused her such pain to experience, when transferred onto the cold black and white of written memory, can become some other person’s cheap thrills.
So while Andrea Dworkin was utterly turned off—ruined, in fact—by her own experiences, in yet another permutation of the law of unintended consequences, she found herself with an audience of newspaper readers who were completely turned on. When you consider the kinds of things made available via middlebrow pornography outlets—that basic cable TV can lead you to 970-PEEE, that there are other fantasy phone lines where, depending on whether you press 1, 2 or 3 on the dial, you can specify incest of the brother-sister, mother-son or father-daughter variety—the idea that some men got their kicks reading about a woman’s torture while incarcerated some thirty years ago seems almost quaint.
“Nobody likes to say this but we all know it’s true. Sex is just so bizarre,” says a detective in the novel To Die For, Joyce Maynard’s fictionalized account of the Pam Smart case, in which a sexually over-stimulated teenage boy is driven to murder his lover’s husband. “Here we all are, walking around going to the supermarket, making bank deposits, shooting the breeze with someone over at the barbershop about our car. Acting like we’re all normal. Everybody keeps up the act. How’s it going? Just great. How about you? And the whole time we’re doing this we’ve got this whole other life going on—the life you live behind closed doors, alone, or not alone, in the dark, when you’re just a naked body burning up with animal desires. Am I the only person in the world who thinks this is strange? Am I the only one who notices?” After contemplating whether the woman who renews his license at the DMV likes being handcuffed or wears cutout panties or masturbates with Frank Sinatra records playing in the background, he concludes that you never can tell what will turn anybody on. “Let’s face it, once you throw sex into the equation, anyone out there can become crazy. We’re all capable of bizarre behavior. Who follows the rules? What are the rules anyway?”
Ask yourself: What turns you on? How unnerving is it to find out that sportscaster Marv Albert likes to wear garter belts and ladies’ panties while biting his sex partners’ backs? Wouldn’t it have been preferable to have just had him be the garden-variety date rapist? Was it more lurid and damning that, during her 1982 divorce proceedings, Palm Beach housewife Roxanne Pulitzer—who was splitting up with Herbert, heir to the prize-giving family—was accused of having sex with a trumpet or alleged to be having an affair with her best friend Jackie Kimberly, wife of the tissue man? Or is the truth that if we found out how many of our friends participated in three-ways, owned nipple clamps, played with bondage gear and had custom-fitted dildos we might all be horrified? Or comforted? Does it make you happy to know that a tacit quid pro quo apparently existed between the White House and the FBI during the Kennedy administration, an understanding that went something like: J. Edgar Hoover would keep quiet about alleged mob involvement in electing JFK—and would not be too concerned about the possibility that Judith Exner was a cervical connection of sorts between the President and Sam Giancana—so long as no one in Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department let it be known that the corpulent head of our domestic secret police liked to wear flowered ladies’ dresses with ruffled sleeves? And this is only a high-level example of the mutual blackmail, the conspiracy of silence, that all of us participate in when it comes to our erotic antics. Because the strangest things do go on in people’s bedrooms. It’s the big unknown. Clearly there is nothing we can’t make exciting. Sol Wachtler famously posited that a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich if he really wanted to, and the long shelf life of books like Portnoy’s Complaint with its forays into liver and apple halves, and Story of the Eye with its childhood games involving egg yolk and the cat’s milk, make it plain that it would be an effort to produce a work of popular art that fails to arouse someone. And misogynistic violence, as Andrea Dworkin seems to have discovered, is at least as erotic as, well, any of the foodstuffs of Philip Roth’s or Georges Bataille’s masturbatory dreams.
In fact, offhand I can think of only two instances of movies that portrayed situations of domestic violence as absolutely miserable and painful, without any kind of redemption. The first is the New Zealand film Once Were Warriors, which tells of inner-city Maoris and their lives of brutal desolation and drunkenness. When the husband of the lead character gives his wife a “tanning,” all the black and blue, as well as yellow and magenta, that mark the bruises on her face, along with the disfiguring flaps of loose skin and mottled flesh, make it absolutely clear that an ugly, unsexy thing has occurred. And in the Robert Altman take on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, the girlfriend of a gangster gets her face smashed with a Coke bottle after the guy has made a speech going on and on about how beautiful she is, how she could be a cover girl, how her features are perfection. Later in the movie, when we see her covered in bandages, with a nose cast and a mouth brace, when we see how scared she still is of the gangster, and how she has no ability to get away from him because she’s so damaged: a disfigured and defaced invalid, this woman cannot escape her attacker, because he has ruined her for the rest of the world. But there is no moment of tenderness in her entrapment—if the injuries she’d sustained were mere bruises, we could envisage the standard scene of a penitent man attending to her aches, icing her black eye, making nice, begging forgiveness, begging for just one more chance. But this was clearly not a lover’s quarrel highlighted by some right jabs and left hooks: this was brutal torture, the woman could not have been into what happened, and she’s stuck and petrified. But these two films aside, most of the intimations of violence against women that are shown on-screen are as stylized and pretty-looking as 9½ Weeks, infomercials for handcuffs and garter belts.
What on earth can slogans like “no means no” and “against her will is against the law” possibly mean to us, or at any rate how can they put up any sort of challenge to a society in which the most powerful cultural images are telling us that “he hit me and it felt like a kiss”? What is anyone going to say to the many of us out there who have been confronted by some version of a man’s violent temper and have found ourselves excited, pulled in, taken in, turned on? How can we deny the draw, the obsessive grab of images of pain, whose force has no equal and goes unopposed in a society that has denied us the ecstasy of a god, of a religious explosion of delight, so that happiness has come to seem ho-hum and only our pain—our deep, bloody, undeniable pain—gives us the sense that we can feel at all?
It is a commonplace recounted in almost comic tones that Scandinavia—with its liberal sex education policies, its enviable public health system, its socialism of the spirit combined with a capitalism of creativity that has produced Volvo, Saab, Lego, Bang & Olufsen, Ericcsen, Ikea, Dansk, Georg Jensen and many other internationally coveted brands—is still impoverished by depression that has resulted in an astonishingly high suicide rate (although in the most recent survey New Zealand’s self-inflicted death toll was highest). Meanwhile, in Egypt and other miserable African nations and emirates and petty dictatorships with gross discrepancies between rich and poor, with—in some cases—slavery still as legal as rape and wife-burning and the like, and every kind of bad darkening life as resolutely as the Nordic winters blacken the skies in Oslo and Stockholm and Helsinki and Copenhagen, the suicide rate is always quite low.
This difference should not be seen as an indication that blonde values are bad and Third World countr
ies are good, or even explained away by weather conditions. Even if it’s true that sun makes you sunny and snow makes you sad, I’d still prefer to read this as proof that happiness is about something else, something different from life conditions, and it does have something to do with a feeling for God, an emotional connection with our Maker that is greater and deeper and bigger and fiercer than anything anyone will get from reading The Celestine Prophecy or from going to synagogue twice a year or to church for Christmas Mass. If any of us living in the Western world were truly able to conquer our Promethean awe at all that we have built, all the ways we’ve trumped evolution, dueled with God and apparently won—if we could transcend all this stuff that we live for and love so much—we might experience profound joy. But with comfort a given, it is only pain that registers as profound, as the emotion worthy of poets and painters and somber rock stars with short life expectancies. With acute lack of affect its only apparent alternative, pain has been worshipped and bound up in our sexuality in recent years as never before, as a pathetic substitute for real feelings. “I think our generation loves our pain, and if you dare take it away from us, we’re going to kill you,” Tori Amos said in Rolling Stone in late 1994. “We like our pain. And we’re packaging it, and we’re selling it.”
Consider this: Sensory overload turns to sensory deprivation when, in 1986, David Lynch can make a movie called Blue Velvet and show Dennis Hopper in a gas mask sexually abusing Isabella Rossellini to the tune of a Bobby Vinton song while a thousand critics can’t trip over their own feet fast enough to praise this denatured version of sexuality in suburbia, and English lit and cultural studies departments at universities are suddenly swamped by at least ten thousand dissertations that deal with that scene, Lynch’s oeuvre and all kinds of other groovy postmodernist issues. For some reason, it takes this weirdness, this coldness, this incongruity to get us excited. Yes, we like our pain: it is the only thing we know.
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