Intercourse (26 page)

For whatever else is in the act, lust, cruelty, the desire to dominate, or whole delights of desire, the result can be no more than a transaction—pleasurable, even all-encompassing, but a transaction—when no hint remains of the awe that a life in these circumstances can be conceived.
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It is, finally, the woman’s potential to reproduce that distinguishes and affirms the real man: with the whole meaning of the fuck—gender—being resolved by its outcome in producing children. Sensual pleasure is not what distinguishes homosexual sodomy from heterosexual fucking: the woman bearing the child does—in religion, in Mailer.

The deep feeling or experience of being a separate race haunts Proust; having a nature that is itself unnatural; alien in existence, in being. The act of sodomy is not the crime against nature; the men themselves are the crime against nature. The law is internalized, a curse on what they
are, a ubiquitous and inescapable social stigma:

A race upon which a curse is laid and which must live in falsehood and perjury because it knows that its desire, that which constitutes life’s dearest pleasure, is held to be punishable, shameful, an inadmissible thing;...
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The men have become “abominable” and “detestable” and “against nature”; a separate race. This is because law creates nature. Nature is not, in this sense, trees or weeds or wind. It is gender: what men and women are; what a man is in intercourse, what a woman is in intercourse.

The sodomy laws have an affirmative side, rich in meaning and persuasive power. Do not fuck men as if they are women; it is an abomination. The imperative is communicated, in the blank spaces as it were, to fuck women as if women are women: carnal chattel of men; proper objects for the lust of domination. The abomination is to do to men what is normally done to women in the fuck: the penetration; the possession; the contempt because she is less, lower in standing before the law or God; the right to use her, which is, inevitably, a right over her. Both Augustine and Mailer describe the lust of dominance in not dissimilar terms: an ecstasy, a frenzy, cruelty, all-encompassing, dominance in the fuck as a supreme and superb pleasure. Men are not supposed to have to endure being the victims of this lust; perhaps there is an implicit recognition that the subordination itself, the carnal experience of it, would change them, their so-called nature—create in them the incompleteness, the low self-esteem, so commonplace in women under male dominance.

The sodomy laws are important, perhaps essential, in maintaining for men a superiority of civil and sexual status over women. They protect men as a class from the violation of penetration; men’s bodies have unbreachable boundaries. A capital crime for thousands of years in the Judeo-Christian tradition, viewed with loathing as an obscene violation of male nature, sodomy suggests a nightmare vision of one kind of sexual equality: men used by men as women are in sex to satisfy the lust for dominance expressed in the fuck. The power of the gender system with men on top depends on keeping men distinct from women precisely in this regard. In sodomy, men can be used as women are used; with real carnal pleasure for the one doing the fucking; and with real carnal pleasure for the one being fucked. The one being fucked also experiences the sensual reality of submission, violation, and being possessed.

The creation of gender (so-called nature) by law was systematic, sophisticated, supremely intelligent; behavior regulated to produce social conditions of power and powerlessness experienced by the individuals inside the social system as the sexual natures inside them as individuals. There were the great, broad laws: prohibiting sodomy; prescribing fucking in marriage; directing the fuck to the vagina, not the mouth or the rectum of the woman because men have mouths and rectums too; legitimizing the fuck when it produces children; each turn of the screw so to speak heightening gender polarity and increasing male power over women, fucking itself the way of creating and maintaining that power. Fuck the woman in the vagina, not in the ass, because only
she
can be fucked in the vagina. Fuck to have children because only
she
can have children. Do not waste sperm in sex acts that are not procreative because the martial aims of gender are not advanced; pleasure does not necessarily enhance power. Every detail of gender specificity was attended to in the Old Testament, including cross-dressing: “A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whosoever doeth these things is an abomination unto the Lord thy God” (Deuteronomy 22: 5). A woman had to be a virgin; or she could be killed: “But if this thing be true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the damsel; then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die... ” (Deuteronomy 22: 20-21). The regime of fear was established through threat of death; and the regime of fear created sex roles, called nature. Laws mandating gender-specific dress as God’s will, gender-specific virginity, vagina-specific fucking, the legitimacy of the fuck dependent on producing a child, shaped the nature of intercourse as well as the natures of men and women. Opposites were created; a hierarchy was created; intercourse expressed both the opposition and the hierarchy. Intercourse became the “natural” expression of the different “natures” of men and women, each pushed away from having a common human nature by laws that prohibited any recognition of sameness; each pushed into a sexual antagonism created by the dominance and submission that was the only intimacy they shared.

There were also smaller laws, in different countries and cultures, created by interpretation; philosophers and scholars took dogma and embellished it; there were customs that operated with the force of law. Many of the smaller rules were designed to restrain men so that they would not be seduced by pleasure from the obligations of power. Maimonides, in his twelfth-century codification of sexual ethics according to Hebrew law, said that a man “should not cohabit except to maintain the health of his body and to preserve his race (literally: his seed)... ”
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Unmarried men were not supposed to hold their penises because they might then have carnal thoughts. Married men were allowed to hold their penises while urinating only. Men were not supposed to have intercourse by artificial light or during the day, except for the scholar who could “envelop himself in darkness by spreading his cloak over himself and then have intercourse. ”
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Men were not supposed to have intercourse with their wives while thinking of other women nor when drunk nor “in the midst of strife or hatred. ”
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There are some warnings against coercing the wife; and there are related passages advising the man to have intercourse in the middle of the night when his food is digested; he “should converse and jest a little... in order to put her at ease and he should then cohabit with modesty and not with impudence, and he should separate immediately. ”
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Maimonides thought that one purpose of circumcision was “to limit sexual intercourse, and to weaken the organ of generation as far as possible, and thus cause man to be moderate. ”
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Coercing the wife is frowned on because it is immoderate—like fucking right after eating.

The limitation and regulation of male lust have always been high on the religious agenda and an implicit part of religious law; but the so-called morality behind the constraints has been brilliantly pragmatic. Male dominance does best, after all, when men do not, generally speaking, fuck themselves to death by fucking whatever moves. Restraint is a key to power.

The immersion in lust without restraint appears to create a burden of distress, the desperate feeling of craving and addiction. Augustine, living with a mistress, “found by my own experience the difference between the restraint of the marriage alliance, contracted for the purpose of having children, and a bargain struck for lust... ”
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Using the woman as he wanted, when he wanted, he felt “sunk in death, ”
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“wallowing in filth and scratching the itching sore of lust. ”
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The itching sore of lust
is an essential standard for determining obscenity in contemporary law; prurience, an element of obscenity, means “itch” in the context of lust. In male-constructed systems of law, men regulate male lust;
the itching sore of lust
is deemed by men antisocial, a burden because it must be indulged but can never be satisfied. Laws have tried, and still try, to protect men from the apparently demoralizing experience of being driven by the itching sore of lust beyond what they can either stand or satisfy. The feeling of being dragged down, compulsive, obsessed, is experienced as a form of degradation or a form of suffering. Restless and driven, the men who have unlimited carnal power find themselves the opposite of free even though they are on top. “Its deadly pleasures, ” wrote Augustine of lust, “were a chain that I dragged along with me, yet I was afraid to be freed from it... ”
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In social terms, male dominance does best when men are not, in Augustine’s words, “more a slave of lust than a true lover of marriage... ”
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Marriage is the legal ownership of women, the legal intercourse that is the foundation of male authority.

The principle that “the personal is political” belongs to patriarchal law itself, originating there in a virtual synthesis of intimacy and state policy, the private and the public, the penis and the rule of men. The regulation of men in intercourse is a prime example. It is not enough to have power as a birthright; power must be kept—over living human beings born to rebellion, arguably a human trait, certainly a human potential. The regulation of men in sex creates a seamless state of being, internal and external; experienced in the world as real and imposed on the body, experienced in the body as real and imposed on the world; in the body and in the world called “nature. ” The restraint on men, operating inside and outside, is efficient, smart about power. Men were not supposed to fuck until they dropped; there would be fewer foot soldiers in the war and the psychological or existential burden of carnality is complex, difficult, tending toward a collapse of personality and self-control. And men had an affirmative obligation to use the fuck to create and maintain a social system of power over women, a social and political system in which the fuck, regulated and restrained, kept women compliant, a sexually subjugated class. Because of how laws organized male sexuality—the sexual practices and feelings of men—men experienced a physiologically real desire to subjugate women through sex; and to the extent that women were or could be formed by men to desire subjugation, the system itself was carried on the backs of women in the doggie position. The legal fuck helped to create compliance by defining the woman’s body as breachable, owned through the fuck. The legal fuck—what a man may and must do to a woman for the purpose of producing children— also kept men safe from the illegal fuck—the fuck that erased a crucial distinction between men and women. And if lust were lawless, not just an ecstatic expression of dominance over women but lawless with respect to gender itself, men would be subject to sexual violation the way women are; and male power could not survive either the indignity or the terror of that.

Men can, of course, break laws for the sake of pleasure. Maimonides suggests flogging as a punishment for men who have “intercourse within forbidden unions, whether by way of the sexual organs, or by way of lustful embracing or kissing, thus deriving pleasure from carnal proximity... ”
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The punishment is both minor and unlikely, because power brings with it prerogatives that must be balanced against the prescriptions and proscriptions of the law. Men can break laws in ways that are foul and repellent, yet remain immune from punishment. For instance, “everyone agrees that he who has sexual intercourse with a deceased forbidden relative does not incur any punishment at all..., ”
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Maimonides declared, in the twelfth-century version of “boys will be boys. ” Men can break sexual laws with the above immunity; or men can break sexual laws with the secret but empirically real sanction of the male-dominant community that establishes social policy as long as that community is not outraged: that is, as long as another man’s rights over a woman are not violated and as long as social policy in general is working effectively to protect gender polarity, male “nature” and female “nature. ” Social outrage is power protecting itself; it is not morality. There is always a tension between the law that protects male power-basic fundamentalism, religious or secular—and men’s wanting to break that law: exercise the privileges of power for the sake of pleasure. And so there are political parties and philosophies that are in social, civil, and religious conflict; men disagree about how much license men should have to break the laws that men make to protect male power.
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How much license can men take without destroying the effectiveness of the laws that formally restrain them in order to protect their power as men? Can men violate the rules that keep gender intact without compromising male dominance: fatally wounding it? Which laws are fundamental, essential, to maintaining the authority of men over women? Which laws are fundamental, essential, to keeping male dominance the basis of how the society is organized, how rights are apportioned, how power is distributed? Which laws can be broken, abandoned, or even repealed, without imperiling male supremacy? Can sodomy, for instance, become a legal form of intercourse without irredeemably compromising male power over women, that power premised on men being entirely distinct from women in use, in function, in posture and position, in role, in “nature”? Or will the legalization of sodomy—making it a legal form of intercourse—mortally injure the class power of men by sanctioning a fuck in which men are treated like women; the boundaries of men’s bodies no longer being, as a matter of social policy and divine right, inviolate?