Going Too Far (40 page)

But Man does forget (or deliberately blurs or ignores) that the pretense is not the reality, that it is merely a game. Because he forgets this, he therefore
does
see it as degrading to Woman.
This
was what she meant by the complement, the equal partner? How shallow of her! Such judgment after such mis-memory begins to be in Man's self-interest. He sees this both in confusion and in clarity. In confusion, he thinks it the best way to win her interest (“being sexy”). In clarity, he understands that this is a way to relate to her without ceding—in fact while gaining—a new-found power, one she did not intend him to have. That is, he can still claim to be trying to satisfy her requirement (the pretense) but can afford to be lazy about the intricate difficulty of her real demand.

Woman notices this change and chafes against it, beginning to learn fear in this either-way-you-lose dynamic: she can give up all hope of Man's really “knowing” her, hope of finding her consort, of being able to rest her burdens without it being seen as weakness, of encountering her complementary equal; but this ceding of hope would clearly be a real defeat. Or she can acquiesce to his pretense
as
the real and concede
that
as the best excitement available. This is surely another defeat. She begins to feel something alien to her. She begins to feel degraded.

This was not necessary …

Man has three choices in reaction to this, each of which mirrors three phases in history, as well as what we might characterize as three types of men:

1. He notices the shift in Woman (as she begins to learn how to feel degraded) and finds that he gets heightened pleasure from her
realization
of her degradation. We can represent this choice as early, vengeful patriarchal revolution in an historical sense, and we can recognize it as the quintessential sadist in an individual sense.

2. He doesn't even notice the shift, so immersed is he by now in his own version of reality. We can characterize this phase as middle patriarchy consolidating itself and reigning in confidence. In the individual it appears as the “normal” masculinist male whose dullard mentality has cleverly developed the nonresponse (silence and passive-aggression) into a loudly articulated technique.

3. He secretly begins to despair that Woman, after eons (
decades of her life, decades
) of striving to teach him the real thing, is now giving up and settling him, dooming him, into his own pretense, with no hope from her of transcending it. He misses the excitement of the battle, but misses even more the loss of hope. This tendency might characterize the man in struggle, although it may be optimistic to expand that into a symbol of late, dissolving (?) patriarchy. It would be more reasonable, perhaps, to say that the approximations of the present period (effeminism and other sincerely supportive male replies to feminism, few as they are)
presage
such a reality—an actual surfacing of already subconscious tendencies in men.

But now Woman
is
degraded—in her view of herself, and in her view of his view of her.

How can he think I would settle for this?

To survive this realization, she must convince herself first of its irrelevance and then even of its inevitability, and construct an effective pleasure out of that very situation. This is the only way she can retain any pride. She even feels an echo of some ancient, almost forgotten, freedom, power, and creativity in the way she has instinctively known how to divert her pain into pleasure.

I remember this. My cells remember this
…

All along, Man has not known her, not understood any of her real unshameful free unsullied desires. Now that he has corrupted his own attempts to fulfill them, he must castigate her for accepting such a cheapened solution as that which he offers. This
he
begins to enjoy, but even more important, to
mean
. He has forgotten that there ever was a game.

He glimpses that only she holds the key which can unlock them both from these postures. Yet all of his energies are bent on convincing her that, while she indeed holds the key, she has no power to use it.

Because she may be wrong. Because I may not be as she is. Because I may not be capable …

This construct, of remembering and refeeling her own power but being unable to act on it, drives Woman literally mad with longing.
The one connective route along which she actually can exercise her
power now is to demand degradation from Man
. She is certain that this at least will be a “successful” exercise of that power.

Thus her ultimate shame contains within it some pure act risked in disguise of her ultimate power. She celebrates this gift with orgasm.

Simultaneously, his ultimate triumph contains within it some dread act attempted in disguise of his ultimate defeat. He mourns this loss with orgasm.

He has not yet learned an old lesson she has tried to teach him for ages.

She has learned a new lesson, and will find in it an ingenious strengthening, enabling herself to continue trying to teach him the ancient game she has never really forgotten.

In her refusal to release him into his own destruction she exercises over him that power of which he has been afraid from the beginning. His sole power exists in not seeing this.

This I remember
.

What if she is wrong?

Years. Decades. Eons. History
.

¹
A variation on this is the hypothesis of Signe Hammer as put forth in “The Rape Fantasies of Women: Up from Disrepute” (
Village Voice
, April 5, 1976). Ms. Hammer, in an intelligent but too-brief essay, posits that “Our basic rape fantasy reflects our anxiety about asserting ourselves in
all
areas—in work, sex, and relationships” (italics mine). This is a refreshing advance beyond the Freudian-influenced strictly sexual interpretation. It also provokes the startling thought that assertive women in general and feminists in particular might be especially prey to such culturally implanted self-punishing devices. Molly Haskell, in an essay in
Ms.
(November 1976) analyzes rape fantasies as they have been exploited and distorted by the film industry, and reaches an interesting set of conclusions directly related to Signe Hammer's theory.

²
Monster
, p. 33.

³
Lady of the Beasts
(Random House, New York, 1976), p. 61. First published in
American Poetry Review
, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1976.

⁴
In
Monster
, p. 3. First published by
The Sewanee Review
in 1965.

⁵
It is more direct to simplify all the plots into a verbal shorthand for which we may use the words “dominance” and “submission.” If this disappoints some readers I am sorry, but they must look elsewhere for their pleasure. The silly—or gory—details are of little consequence here, because even if there is a differing of intensity in the various fantasies (I learned that mine were quite tame compared to the branding irons of other imaginations)
the quality, the message, the politics are identical
. It is generally more useful to focus on the
connectives
among oppressed peoples, and leave emphasizing the differences to the oppressor. He does it so well, anyway.

⁶
I do not use this term pejoratively, but rather in accordance with the express wish of most radical anti-sexist homosexual males. By calling
themselves
“faggots,” they affirm those homosexual males persecuted in the Middle Ages: “When a woman was to be burned as a witch, men accused of homosexuality were bound and mixed with the bundles of kindling (faggots) at the feet of the witch, and set on fire ‘to kindle a flame foul enough for a witch to burn in.' So the enemy has always seen that strong women and gentle men are a real threat to masculine domination.” This quote is from
Double-F, A Magazine of Effeminism
. See footnotes on
Double-F
in “Lesbianism and Feminism,” above.

⁷
Ironically, during 1976, and with the sudden intensity of a fad, sado masochistic
practice
erupted as a political issue in lesbian-feminist circles. Articles in the so-called mixed-gay media, as well as in women's newspapers such as
Big Mama Rag, Hera
, and
Off Our Backs
extolled or condemned these practices, yet repeatedly failed to probe for an
analysis
, taking sides, instead, on whether such acts were (1) politically correct, (2) inherently classist or racist, and (3) permissible for lesbians but not for anybody else. No one seemed particularly concerned with the implications of radical-chic in this new issue, or with its echoes of the current Decadent Camp fashion, the Punk Image, the Mick Jagger message, and other such related themes already mentioned in “Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape.” Further, no one seemed to question whether this controversy was linked to a recent reidentification with male homosexuals (among whom such practice was more openly affirmed by a larger number for a longer time)—a possible by-product of the new “bonding” within the “gay community,” a way of gaining male approval from many homosexual “brothers.” In other words, no one appeared to wonder whether this S-M proliferation was a lesbian copy of a faggot imitation of patriarchal backlash against feminism.

⁸
When I speak of “patriarchal heterosexuality” I mean just that—the current institution of heterosexuality
as defined in our androcentric culture
. I see no reason to assume that heterosexuality under other conditions, in which women had free choice and self-determining power, would be oppressive. On the contrary, I believe it could become Edenically joyous again.

⁹
I refer the reader to Gertrude Lenzer's essay “On Masochism” and to Julia Sherman's “Commentary” in reply, in
Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society
, Vol. I, Nos. 2 and 4, respectively. Lenzer has written an interesting paper connecting male masochism with the German sensibility between the wars; Sherman, in her reply, questions Lenzer's emphasis (like so much of the psychiatric literature) on masochism in
men
when the culture generally considers masochism female. Sherman points out that Kinsey's statistics show males to be more masochistic than females, yet notes that the term itself has come to be generalized and more “naturally” applied to women for, we might well gather, reasons more political than scientific.

¹⁰
This concept was perfected in its expression by D. H. Lawrence's “character” John Thomas in
Lady Chatterly's Lover
—the penis as a separate self with “a will and a mind of its own.”

PARANOIA: THE PARADIGM AND THE PARABLE

A twofold initiation was central to the mysteries the sixties and the early seventies taught me. During that time I discovered the reality of my own suffering as a woman, and I began to comprehend how that suffering was related to, by, and in, the historic world. This process one could call Feminism. Further, I discovered my own reaction to that reality and how
that
was related to, by, and in the world. This revelation one might call Paranoia.

Many of us are familiar with the poster which shows a drawing of a haggard but still vigilant face beneath which the legend reads, “Even paranoids have real enemies.” Just so. And how to differentiate? Can madness be “political”? Fanon, the Algerian revolutionist-psychiatrist, devoted more than one book to the subject, observing that “What is madness to the mother country is sanity to the colony—and the reverse.” (As women, we must translate again:
father
country is simply more accurate—
men
run patriarchy.) Later, purportedly radical psychiatrists (R. D. Laing, David Cooper, and Thomas Szasz, among others), began to analyze madness anew from these psycho-political perspectives. Szasz, for example, has questioned which was objectively more insane: the so-called witch hysteria of mass hallucinations which swept parts of Europe during the Middle Ages, or the “sane” response of church and state—mass persecution, torture, imprisonment, and burning? Szasz, who cannot see witchcraft in its religio-political dimensions, does note that the word “hysteria” is itself a misogynistic one, from the Greek
or
hystera
meaning
the womb;
incredibly, this suggests not much more to the good doctor, who emerges with his sexist blinders intact, seeing no further connections.

Other, more drastically experimental psychiatrists have carried their political analysis to an extreme, almost to an
adoration of madness as the only sane state in existence. At first this appears refreshingly intelligent, but a closer examination of the practice which follows this theory is less salutary. It can give madness a quality of radical chic, and create the inverse effect of another correct line similar to that of “sexual liberation.” This last, you recall, was: “If you don't screw everyone in sight, you're hung up.” The sanity version goes: “If you don't hallucinate continually, you're crazy.” (Or: This is the way the world ends—not with a Laing, with a Cooper.)