Intercourse (15 page)

The seduction of Rechele was through mystic voices, an elaborate visitation, visions and sounds created by Reb Gedaliya; and when Rechele went to confide in him, he greeted her “with outstretched arms”
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in God’s name. She is taken, possessed, surrounded; at first, “[a] bright red flow surrounded her; flames seemed to overwhelm the house... ”
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She answers the voices the way a man might, remembering as she does some biblical text that, as a woman, she should not know, and so she mimics it, as if a legitimate messenger of God would come to her, a woman; a delusion that shows implicitly the corruption of the visitation. Visited a whole night by the voice, left in a swoon, in the morning she rose and washed, as after a sex act, “rinsing her breasts and thighs as though performing a ritual. ”
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She runs to the synagogue in such a state of possession and ecstasy, to Reb Gedaliya, making the relationship between them a public one; and in a state of sexual and religious transport, an ecstasy, she interprets passages of the Bible. The sex act between them virtually takes place in public but it is rendered as religion:

Reb Gedaliya bent over Rechele, listening to the voice and trembling with fear; his body had to be supported by two strong men, for his legs had failed him, and he shook as with fever. Only when Rechele lay as though dead, did Reb Gedaliya gesture for a prayer shawl to cover her face. Then he bore her in his arms to the dais.
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Then he carried her to an anteroom, and public celebration began, with men and women dancing, kissing, embracing, in various states of undress; and “the curtain of the Ark was hung on poles as a kind of canopy and borne aloft over the heads of Reb Gedaliya and Rechele. ”
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He took her to his house to live; and possessed her. She was a prophet, enshrined in a special room painted white, dressed in white satin; an Ark and Torah were put in the room, and ten women were there with her as a minyan to pray, and women read from the Torah (all forbidden). Rechele was veiled. She stopped eating and ignored all physical needs. Her skin became translucent. Her body lit up in the dark. And at midnight each night the rabbi came in, uncovered her, woke her up, kissed her feet. He told her that “'The Divine Parents are coupling face to face... This is the hour of union. ’”
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Then he fucked her. She went in and out of comas.

In this possession, Rechele is honored by the community. Reb Gedaliya gives her an identity in which she can know things and talk and pray and in which she is respected as holy: only by belonging to a man can she have a social identity; and the full meaning of belonging to a man—for the community—is in the fuck without which she is socially erased. The cost to her is literally her mind, her body, and eventually her power to be conscious on the simple biological plane: she becomes comatose. Her social identity—contingent on being carnally possessed—is at the cost of her human existence—a paradigmatic contradiction for women under male dominance.

The degeneracy of her new husband is progressive; so that, for instance, he brings a prostitute into their home, engages in group sex and other debauchery, and aggressively commits acts of sacrilege.
Possessing
is ambitious, imperialistic, always extending its range;
being possessed
tends toward death—an end of self altogether, a sexuality in which the woman is in a state of exile from the human condition as such. There is nothing personal left to her, no personality, no individuality, no sovereignty over herself, no self. She is used as female, used up, but the using of her does not stop; and sex is a mortification of her flesh. Comatose or not,
that same place, the point of entry into her, is what she is reduced to in this cruel magic act of metaphysical decomposition. In a world of socially sanctioned sexual possession, the meaning of possession escalates to include being passed from man to man, or being dumped then used again; and each time a woman is possessed inside this social dynamic, she is pushed into a deeper level of coma, the aggregate effect of possession being to turn her into a thing of sex, “ravished... so many times that she was powerless to move. ”
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Powerless, inert, with no voice of her own, more dead than living, she enters into a new realm, a new dimension of possession: an impersonally apprehended thing to be used, she becomes social pornography; an impersonally possessed female used as female with no remnant of a human life animating or informing the use of her in sex. She is used by men impersonally with no reference to her as human and no comprehension of her as an individual. As social pornography, she is a living corpse, existing for sexual use. When life is breathed into her by the
dybbuk, the evil spirit that gets inside her, she becomes a sexual monster, a gross caricature of a putative female sexuality, pushed by the
dybbuk
to public display of herself as a violated and foul thing of sex.

The
dybbuk
is an outstanding emblem for this impersonal possession; an immortal rapist, forcing himself inside the woman. Rechele would sleep, and when she would wake up “her legs would ache from so much climbing about in the celestial sphere. ”
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She could not eat or pray, her mouth was dry, her stomach distended, she was cold, she could not lift up her head: “Often her heart palpitated like a living creature; something contracted, coiled, and twisted like an imbedded snake in the recesses of her being. ”
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Rechele’s new lover was Satan; and he tormented her, repeatedly raping her, injuring her, humiliating her:

Pulling the hairs singly from her head, he wound them about her throat; he pinched her in the hips and bit her breasts with his jagged teeth. When she yawned he spat down her throat; he poured water on her bedsheet and pretended she had wet her bed. He made her show him her private parts and drink slop.
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Impregnated by Satan, she is abandoned by Reb Gedaliya; and she then experiences the total debasement of impersonal possession, in which the injury done to her is what gratifies the possessor. She is tortured, tormented; has abscesses on her thighs with worms in them; vomits reptiles. She is in bondage, her body a sadist’s playground. The humiliation and torture of her is the sex. She has no voice of her own. The
dybbuk
speaks through her: using vile and obscene language. She has no physical strength of her own (having been nearly dead when possessed by mortal men). The
dybbuk
inside her gives her a supernatural strength but for only one purpose: to hurt herself. Lifting with ease a rock that three men could not move, “she smote her body with the stone from the top of her head to the tips of her toes time and again... ”
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Part of the sexual charge of impersonal possession for the possessor is to force her to exhibit herself in public; to destroy any privacy of the body. The
dybbuk
transforms Rechele into a public slut, a public shame, a public disgrace; he publishes her, as it were; turns her out; exhibits her, possessed and lewd, in public. In public, the
dybbuk
made Rechele uncover her body,

and she spread her legs to show her nakedness and to bring men into thoughts of transgression: And she passed water and befouled the holy place... Her left leg she twisted around her neck and the right she stuck out stiff as a board and her tongue rolled like a hanged man’s... And many righteous women did testify that a stink issued from
that same place...
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The public perception of this possession is that it is obscene. The community regards this exhibition of a woman’s raw sexual derangement and debasement as filth; her genital display becomes a synonym for dirt. There is a social repudiation of this possession—an attempt, eventually successful, to exorcise the
dybbuk—because the community, organized to maintain male dominance (and therefore to protect it even from its own worst excesses), cannot ultimately withstand the unmodified exposure of the real substance and final meaning of male dominance: the meaning of possession without the consolations of privacy, romance, or social regulation (law, marriage). The power of men over women—including the power of men to possess women in the fuck—is endangered by a social reality of impersonal possession. The potency of mortal men cannot compete with the potency of an immortal rapist, always the pornographic hero; nor can the potency of mortal men meet the challenge of female sexual provocation unregulated by their own rules and patterns of desire. For other women possessed more privately, possession tending toward coma, the devastation of being the public whore, of being used to the limits of sadistic greed, suggests—perhaps inevitably, if humans have any intrinsic dignity—the necessity of resistance; a resistance springs up to eroticizing possession.

The community asserts its right to insist on the fuck; and the community asserts its right to keep the ultimate meaning and consequence of possession secret; known to men, not to women—not publicly visible to women; known especially to the men who take particular pleasure in the real and final destruction of the possessed: this final destruction best done in secret, in hiding, in the great prisons and brothels of esoteric pornography; not in the public square, not in the synagogue. The community has rules; and the rules of the community protect male power. The fuck is legitimate sexual possession, effective in taking over the woman’s insides; but the impersonally possessed and pornographized woman in public goes too far, especially in exposing to women the real cost of male dominance, the real meaning of possession, a destiny down the road. Rechele dies. Goray sets limits again, goes back to being holy and religious and law-abiding; so that those who do the fucking can maintain their social and sexual power; so that their potency will be sustained, not threatened, by the interfacing of public order and private reality. In a world of male power—penile power—fucking is the essential sexual experience of power and potency and possession; fucking by mortal men, regular guys. Alone together, a man fucks a woman; he possesses her; the act is an act of possession in and of itself; the man and the woman experience it as such. Neither appears to know that the community participates in the fuck, giving it its power as possession: shades cheering at the bedside, checking the sheets in the morning for blood. The sex act virtually stands in for the community; the man a good soldier, advancing his side over tricky terrain. Fucking is an exemplary sex act, an act of possession, intimate, private; the community’s imperative to fuck and regulation of the fuck invisible in the fuck itself.

part two

THE FEMALE CONDITION

You mention the tribulations of women. I’m now in that milieu. You’ll see that I’ve had to dive deep down into that sentimental well. If my book is good it will gently caress many a feminine wound; and many a one will smile as she recognizes herself.

I’ll have known all your sorrows, poor dim souls, damp with pent-up melancholy, like your provincial back-yards, the walls of which are covered with fungus.

Gustave Flaubert

chapter six

VIRGINITY

J
OAN OF Arc, soldier, military strategist, virgin, was born in Domremy, a parish in the province of Lorraine, circa 1412 (perhaps on January 6). She was female, illiterate, a peasant. In Rouen in 1431, at the age of nineteen, she was tried and burned as a witch. By the time of her arrest (taken prisoner in a military action) and imprisonment in 1430, she had routed the English from much French territory and established the military and nationalistic momentum for their eventual expulsion from French soil; and she had gotten Charles VII crowned King of France, creating a head-of-state so that a nation might emerge around him. Her will, her vision, and her military acumen provided the impetus and groundwork for the emergence of a French nation-state, heretofore nonexistent; and she was, for better or worse, the first French nationalist, a military liberator of an occupied country that did not yet see itself as she clearly, militantly, saw it—as a political and cultural unity that must repel foreign domination. The English, using the machinery of the Inquisition, got her convicted and killed; the Catholic Church did the actual dirty work. But no invader yet, including the Nazis, has killed what she created: France. At her trial,

Asked why she, sooner than another,
She answered: It pleased God so to do, by means of a simple maid to drive back the king’s enemies.
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The Church, in ongoing if not particularly credible remorse, issued a series of apologies for burning her. In 1456, she was “rehabilitated” by papal decree—essentially the Church conceded that she had not been a witch. Charles needed her name cleared once he won, because of her prominence at his coronation; * the Church cooperated with him as it had with the English when it burned her. In 1869, the case for canonizing Joan was placed before the Vatican: a hiatus in reparation of over four hundred years. In 1903, Joan was designated as Venerable. In 1909 she was beatified. In 1920 she became Saint Joan. The Church that killed her may now identify her as a martyr; but for women inspired by her legend, she is a martial hero luminous with genius and courage, an emblem of possibility and potentiality consistently forbidden, obliterated, or denied by the rigid tyranny of sex-role imperatives or the outright humiliation of second-class citizenship. Women have many martyrs, many valiant pacifists, sung and unsung; few heroes who made war. We know how to die, also how not to kill; Joan inexplicably knew how to make war. At her trial, Joan insisted that she had never killed on the battlefield, improbable since the combat was hand-to-hand; but she was known among her own men for standing against the commonplace practices of sadism on the battlefield. It is hard to believe that she did not kill; but whether she did or did not, she was an exemplary martial liberator— nearly unique in the iconography and history of the European female, that tamed and incomprehensibly peaceful creature. Joan’s story is not female until the end, when she died, like nine million other women, in flames, condemned by the Inquisition for witchcraft, heresy, and sorcery. Precisely because she was a hero whose biography brazenly and without precedent violates the constraints of being female until the terrible suffering of her death, her story, valorous and tragic, is political, not magical; mythic because she existed, was real, not because her persona has been enlarged over the centuries. Her virginity was not an expression of some aspect of her femininity or her preciousness as a woman, despite the existence of a cultish worship of virginity as a feminine ideal. She was known as Joan the Maid or, simply, The Maid (“La Pucelle”). Her reputation, her declaration, preceded her, established her intention and her terms; not in the context of being a holy or ideal female but in the context of waging war. Her virginity was a self-conscious and militant repudiation of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status, which, then as now, appeared to have something to do with being fucked. Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebellious and intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female. Being female meant tiny boundaries and degraded possibilities; social inferiority and sexual subordination; obedience to men; surrender to male force or violence; sexual accessibility to men or withdrawal from the world; and civil insignificance. Unlike the feminine virgins who accepted the social subordination while exempting themselves from the sex on which it was premised, Joan rejected the status and the sex as one thing—empirical synonyms: low civil status and being fucked as indistinguishable one from the other. She refused to be fucked and she refused civil insignificance: and it was one refusal; a rejection of the social meaning of being female in its entirety, no part of the feminine exempted and saved. Her virginity was a radical renunciation of a civil worthlessness rooted in real sexual practice. She refused to be female. As she put it at her trial, not nicely: “And as for womanly duties. She said there were enough other women to do them. ”
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