Going Too Far (38 page)

The class is on “The History of Women.” I wonder what exists in the universe that would not come under that heading. Or should we merely retitle it “Suffering and Endurance 101”? As we balance rice sacks on one hip and a baby on the other, dodging shells in a city gone mad? As we plan a Wiccean Beltane Sabbat ritual in the teeth of a culture which worships despair? As we dare write poems with the ink of our blood? As we mourn men we have loved or love—one killed for his politics, and one slowly, mercilessly muzzled for
his
politics? As we answer letters to prison from women we've never seen, or read poems aloud to women we'll never see again—a fragile but real thread of communication spun throughout what can appear even to oneself as dutiful or, worse, hypocritical gestures? As we pen desperate midnight letters from Galesburg, Illinois, to Muncy, Pennsylvania?

“We are Attica,” rants Ti-Grace in her denunciation of you—choosing an all-male conclave for her identification. Poor soul, that she cannot realize you and I know better than that.
For we are Vietnam
.

And Auschwitz. And Cologne. And Hiroshima. And Como—where one thousand witches were burnt in a single day. And Harlem. And Galesburg. And China. And South Africa. And Williamsport. And the open seas where the great whales are slaughtered, spuming red geysers. And the dying forests, where the eggs we lay in our birds' nests have thin pesticide-rotted shells. We are this whole agonized weeping grieving heaving anguished furious mad-with-pain planet crying out against the insupportable burden we have borne for so long.

Revolution, triumph, winning—too small, too minuscule, such
words. We must rediscover the older, larger words: life, creativity, love. And, simply,
change
. Somehow.

You are much with me tonight, in this vulgar little room, in the immensity of this vision, where we are both weeping together, as if the tears of women could save a world.

My love,

Robin

THE POLITICS OF SADO-MASOCHISTIC FANTASIES

The apocryphal story goes like this: At one of the earliest conferences of this feminist wave, during the late 1960's, a curious confrontation-and-avoidance maneuver was executed in the workshop on sexuality. About eighty women were gathered together in the room, and the discussion had been open, supportive, warm, and truly consciousness-raising. During a lull, one woman ventured in a quavering voice, “I wonder, uh, could we maybe discuss—I mean, it's odd, as feminists, I know, but, uh … well, I, um, sometimes have these sexual fantasies which are kind of, uh, masochistic—and … I, well, wondered if anyone else here had that experience. Uh … maybe they could just raise their hands if they did, or … maybe we could figure out what it meant, uh, I mean …” She trailed off. A thundering hush ensued. Then, slowly, every woman in the room, one by one, raised her hand. This pantomine, performed in complete silence, was followed by yet another more prolonged stillness, which in turn was broken by some hearty comment on an unrelated subject. Everyone's relief was palpable. The subject of fantasies—particularly
such
fantasies—was dropped, and rarely has been picked up again in the Women's Movement until now.

There are, to be sure, various books recently published on the fantasy lives of women. These books range from the pseudo-scientific to the soft-core-porn in their approach. Here we can encounter the virulently anti-feminist thought of such Freudians as Marie Robinson, whose book
The Power of Sexual Surrender
is to women what a tome called
Why You Know You Love It on the Plantation
would be to blacks or one titled
How to Be Happy in Line to the Showers
would be to Jews. Here too we may gag at that fake sexual-liberation approach so popular with men in the sixties—with its parallel implication that if you are “turned off” by something (
any
thing) or someone (
any
one) you are a hung-up prude. These books usually are non-written
by a person claiming to be female who bears a name which consists of one supposedly titillating initial. The double-whammy of Marie Robinson and “J” (not to mention “O”) has spun more than one woman into vertigo. In sum, the new crop of books on female fantasies seem to be lecturing us that (1) all women are masochistic anyway, ergo it's in your nature so don't fight it and if that makes you somehow uncomfortable it shouldn't, or, (2) “anything goes” and if you don't like it you should. Do you sense in this a rather consistent message of Whatever It Is, It's Your Fault, Lady? Ah.

The point is that salacious descriptions of made-for-the-market fantasies, or patronizing psychiatric analyses of the same, or hip pressure to get with it and “be groovy” are not, any of them, helpful approaches to the woman who wishes to
understand
her condition, her feelings, her desires (or who simply cherishes her own sense of good taste).
Feminism is about precisely such understanding
, and this can be gained only through slow and hazardous work
by
ourselves, the ultimate experts
on
ourselves—aided perhaps by that rare leap of consciousness that can make the connections through myth, art, revelation.

The following essay is an attempt to begin such work on this interestingly ignored subject. Because of its content and the requirements of personal honesty in writing about it, this is possibly the article included here which could tempt me to fear the greatest embarrassment, despite my having already dealt with the subject matter more than once in my poetry. But then psychology, sexuality, dreams—these are more at home in a work of art than in a work of political analysis; what is nude in a poem seems so naked in prose. Again, the feminist imperative is to surmount the barrier between those forms; hence, my adopted device of the parable.

One can still sense the forbidden quality of the topic in the careful omission of it from most discussion in the Women's Movement. This is doubtless because despite the, I have learned, widespread shared occurrence of such fantasies among feminists, we all wince at what appears to be the inconsistency: “What? A feminist, a fighter for women's rights and power—a
feminist
having fantasies of being dominated, humiliated, forced into submission? Intolerable.” I can hear the male voices even now, finding in our search for understanding merely a confirmation of their worst stereotype: “I
knew
all these feminists needed was a good rape. Women need to be struck regularly, like gongs. All women love the cave-man approach, no matter what they pretend.” This was one predictable if sickening reaction to such a line as “Every woman adores a Fascist”—despite the very point that Plath was making. Irony's ultimate irony may lie in its capacity for making itself invisible.

One should not care about the reactions of such willfully brutal and clodpated persons, of course. Yet the certainty that they wait like spectators in the arena drooling over their ices and settling down on their cushions
is
unsettling for those who, no matter how well trained for the encounter, emerge to confront and wrestle with newly uncaged beasts. Most absurd of all is the notion that one is engaged in such an encounter for—oh hilarious thought—their entertainment. But too much consideration already has been given to such an audience. It is time they were forgotten. The spark glowing like an impatient insight in the eye of the wild adversary throws everything else into shadow. It is here that one must begin.

I: THE BACKGROUND

I
BEGAN WORK
on this subject—sado-masochistic fantasies—before I knew such a name for it. I was less than ten years old, but intelligent, curious, and self-respectful enough to be irritated by feeling a vague sexual stimulation at the thought of someone dominating me. I do know that by the time I was thirteen or so, I was consciously trying to combat such thoughts—not because I thought them “perverted” (yet) but because it perplexed me that what
worked
in fantasy was so different from reality. I knew already that when, in real life, anyone had power over me (as all adults do over all children) I liked it not at all; I also knew that if anyone laid a punishing hand on me (exceedingly rare in my family) I hated their guts and found it utterly
un
exciting. So what in hell was this fantasy stuff I was getting off on? I had an active masturbation life as a child and a fittingly wide repertoire of fantasies to go along with it—but the set and costume changes all revolved around the same plot. By early adolescence, then, I set myself the task of trying to understand this. Naturally, I had no way of knowing that I was not alone in both my tendency and my search for an understanding of it. It would be many years before I would have an inkling that this experience was shared at all—let alone so widely, and even among my feminist peers.

I can't recall the exact chronology of my theories, but I do know that during my teenage years I read widely on the subject and at one point or another came up with various explanations, some of my own making, others personal versions patched together from ostensibly expert theories—each time hoping that
this
one would be the magic key which would liberate me from these damned fantasies.

One theory explained it all as Longing for the Absent Father-Figure; that is, I yearned for his nonexistent attention and care. Since fatherly attention and care most often expressed itself as authority and
discipline (classic patriarchal role), it must follow that I longed psychosexually for such discipline—i.e., for the father.

Another theory was that the entire theme was simply one of Flesh-Loathing—fantasy punishment linked of necessity to flesh-enjoyment. Another was
Self
-Loathing; I must hate myself to wish such release via humiliation.
¹

There was the Sexual Guilt Theory: “I'm afraid of sex and must be relieved of responsibility for sexual enjoyment by the projected forceful figure who rapes.” There was of course the Helene Deutsch-Marie Robinson theory: “It's in my nature, it's natural to all women to be sexual and emotional masochists—we love pain.”

There was the Physical Reality Theory, based largely on my reading of Karen Horney's work. Horney, grappling with the subject as an early feminist psychiatrist, rejected the Freudian notion that female sexuality perforce was masochistic, although she did note that women were socially pressured to act passively, and she suggested that various objective realities might bolster this conditioning—factors such as women's being generally of less weight, height, and physical strength than most men, and of women's vulnerability to greater bodily changes (sometimes painful ones): menarche, defloration, childbirth, and menopause. Horney posited, too, that masochistic fantasies in women could be tied in with feelings of repressed rage and guilt about the mother—a reverse projection in which a daughter fantasizes violence done to herself rather than to that archetypal female figure with which she so identifies and about which she is so passionately ambivalent. This theory, touching as it does on the emotional and sexual cathexis between mother and daughter, has held my interest for a long time, and its influence can be spotted in quite a few of my poems, including “Matrilineal Descent” in
Monster
²
and “The Network of the Imaginary Mother” in
Lady of the Beasts
.
³

There was even the Self-Indulgent Theory, also known as the
Will-Power Approach: “This whole thing is ridiculous and overanalyzed; if I wish these fantasies to cease then I simply must stop having them
and
dissecting them.”

Each of the above hypotheses was far more intricate than I have space or concern for here. But the difficulty was that none seemed satisfactory, none rang true, and none, in terms of exorcising the fantasies
or
making me feel comfortable with them—
worked
.

In my late adolescence and early twenties I got even more sophisticated about the fantasies. For one thing I began to write about them. “The Improvisers,” a long poem written in 1962,
⁴
was the first time I had dared, in print, to deal with the subject so graphically. During this period I encountered the work of Frantz Fanon, the black Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary who was among the first to place certain aspects of the psyche in a political context. His studies of psychoses in colonized peoples, his theory of an evoked and required identification with the colonizer, his charting of this process—all this work seemed to open up a whole new approach to analyzing my fantasies. It was necessary to “translate,” of course. Fanon's unflinching consciousness positively cringed when it came to the subject of women. But women develop the skill of such translation (for Algerian, read female—because the author assuredly will not extend his insights in your direction) and I was already fairly accomplished at reading my invisible self into the “mankinds” of everyone from Confucius to Sartre. From this translation emerged a number of absorbing questions. Were masochistic fantasies in women, then, a sexual “psychosis” evoked and required by the patriarchal system? Was this a response—in a deliberate code of “madness”—to oppression? Was it then capable of transformation through varying the characters, i.e., the symbols of political power and powerlessness?

I began to recast my fantasies, to play at an intentional reorganization of them. At first I did the obvious: I tried to reverse the roles of dominant and submissive—I would be the master and the faceless male figure the slave (or: teacher/student, parent/child, sultan/favorite, rapist/victim, etc.).
⁵
No flicker of interest there, despite repeated
attempts to will such a response. I felt stymied. Then I thought of lifting the scene whole-cloth into the area of homosexuality, which hitherto had played only a small part in my fantasy life; it was a piquant condiment for now and then, but not a staple, like bread.
Aha
. Here, with an all-woman cast, the reversal (myself as dominant character) worked! Startling. So it was considered by my subconscious permissible to dominate another woman but not a man! Did this mean that an all-female context provided me with an organic freedom of possibility, a lessening of general inhibition? That would be a positive gain. Or did it mean that basically I had contempt for my own people, that I saw women in effect as submissive inferiors, and could project myself as such onto another woman but never onto a man? A debasing insight, that.