Woman Hating (6 page)

Anne, who is, according to Pauline Reage, the other half of Claire, is sweet, modest, vulnerable, young, demure (“Anne, for her part, had resumed the modest demeanor of an object of lust”
⁴
), and wanton. Claire says that Anne creams at each new humiliation, at even the thought of being whipped. Anne appears to be Beth from
Little Women
but is, in fact, a bitch in heat, her cunt always wet—just like the rest of us, we are meant to conclude. (Beth, remember, died young of goodness. )

Jean de Berg, representing the male sex, is—wouldn’t you know it—intelligent, self-assured, quietly masterful and self-contained when not actually in the act of ravaging, powerful and overwhelmingly virile when in the act of ravaging. One has no idea of his physicality, except to imagine that he is graying at the temples.

The relationships between the three characters are structured simply and a bit repetitively: Claire, master — Anne, slave; Jean de Berg, master —Anne, slave; which resolves into the happy ending—Jean de Berg, master — Claire, slave. The master-slave motif is content, structure, and moral of the story. The master role is always a male role, the slave role is always a female role. The moral of the story is that Claire, by virtue of her gender, can only find happiness in the female/slave role.

Here we are told what society would have us know about lesbian relationships: a man is required for completion, consummation. Claire is miscast as master because of her literal sex, her genitalia. Jean de Berg is her surrogate cock which she later forges into the instrument of her own degradation.
The Image
paints women as real female eunuchs, mutilated in the first instance, much as Freud suggested, by their lack of cock, incapable of achieving whole, organic, satisfying sexual union without the intrusion and participation of a male figure. That figure cannot only act out the male role —that figure must possess biological cock and balls. Claire and Anne as biological females enact a comedy, grotesque in its slapstick caricature: Claire as master, a freak by virtue of the role she wills to play, a role designed to suit the needs and capacities of a man; Claire as master, as comic as Chaplin doing the king of France, or Laurel and Hardy falling over each other’s feet in another vain attempt to secure wealth and success. After all,
The Image
forces us to conclude, what can Claire stick up Anne’s cunt but her fingers — hardly instruments of ravishment and ecstasy. Biology, we are told, is role. Biology, we are told, is fate. The message is strangely familiar.

Pauline Reage, the major promoter of
The Image
as a piece of metaphysical veracity, sees the function, or very existence, of the man-master, as the glorification of the woman-slave. Her thesis is that to be a slave is to have power:

... the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the ground at her master’s heels, is now really the god. The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the various ceremonies that center around the sacred object.
⁵

With the logic indigenous to our dual-role culture, the slave is here transmuted into the source of power. What price power, one asks in despair.
This is truly the source of the male notion of female power—since she is at the center of his obsession,
she is powerful;
no matter that the form her power takes is that she “drag herself along the ground at her master’s heels. ”

The man, Reage instructs us, has the
illusion
of power because he wields the whip. That illusion marks for Reage the distance between carnal knowledge and what is, more profoundly, true:

Yes, men are foolish to expect us to revere them when, in the end, they amount to almost nothing. Woman, like man himself, can only worship at the shrine of that abused body, now loved and now reviled, subjected to every humiliation, but which is, after all, her own. The man, in this particular affair, stays in one piece: he is the true worshiper, aspiring in vain to become one with his god.

The woman, on the contrary, although just as much of a true worshiper and possessed of that same anxious regard (for herself) is also the divine object, violated, endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy, achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in contemplation of herself.
⁶

Having noted in the last chapter Reage’s extraordinary facility with the double-double think, which she uses here with her usual skill, I must take exception to her conclusions. It is surprising that the worship of the divine object, the woman as victim and executioner, should involve
any
external mediation, especially that of a male priest. Surely if woman is so willing to be the giver and the offering, if as “the divine object, violated, endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn” her “only joy... lies in contemplation of herself, ” a man is extraneous. Surely, with such divine endowments and attendant satisfactions, she need not be coaxed or seduced into whipping or mutilating herself (“And yet it is usually the men who introduce their mistresses to the joys of being chained and whipped, tortured and humiliated.... ”
⁷
), or initiating other women, who serve as a substitute or mirror image or other half. Men often insist that women are self-serving, and indeed, Claire is Anne’s priestess. Both execute their roles effectively. No male figure is required mythologically unless Jean de Berg would play the eunuch-priest, that traditional helpmate of the priestess, an honor no doubt not intended for him here. Conversely, only men have been permitted to serve male gods; eunuchs and women, synonymous here, have been strictly excluded from those holy rites. The proper conclusion therefore is that man, not woman, is the divine object of
The Image:
he is the priest; he serves a male god in whose image he was created; he serves himself. Were that not the case, woman, as the worshiped, would serve herself, instead of serving herself up like turkey or duck, garnished, stuffed, sharpened knife ready for the ritual carving. That a man becomes the master of the master means, despite Reage’s assertions to the contrary, that women should serve men, that women are properly slaves and men properly masters, that men have the only meaningful power (in our culture —that power allied to and defined by force and violence), that men created in the image of the Almighty are all mighty. Single-single think brings us closer to the truth in this instance than double-double think.

The Image
is rife with Christian symbolism. One of the more memorable sequences in the book takes place in a rose garden chosen by Claire as the proper proscenium for Anne’s humiliation. In the rose garden, Claire directs Jean de Berg’s attention to a specific type of rose, special in its perfect beauty. Claire orders Anne to step into the flowerbed and to fondle the rose, which Anne handles as though it were a moist, ready cunt. Claire orders Anne to pick the rose and to bring it to her, which Anne does, though not before she feebly protests that there is a prohibition against picking the flowers and that she is afraid of the thorns. Anne’s hesitation necessitates punishment. She is ordered to lift her dress while Claire first strokes Anne’s cunt with the rose, then jabs the thorn into her thigh and tears the flesh very deliberately. Claire kisses Anne’s hands as a poetic drop of blood flows. Claire then pushes the stem of the rose into Anne’s garter belt. The thorn is caught in the lace, and the flower is fastened, an adornment fraught with symbolic meaning. Even Jean de Berg finds the performance a bit overdone:

I answered that it was indeed a great success, although perhaps rather overburdened with symbols, in the romantic and surrealist traditions.
⁸

The rose as a symbol has powerful occult origins. Eliphas Levi says of it:

It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppression of spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like grace, she was a daughter of God; it was love refusing to be stifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt against sterility; it was humanity aspiring towards natural religion, full of reason and love, founded on the revelations of the harmony of being, of which the rose, for initiates, was the living floral symbol.
⁹

The rose became for Christian mystics “a rose of light in the center of which a human figure is extending its arms in the form of a cross. ”
¹⁰
However, the official Church, in its unending struggle against carnality and nature, posited the rose as a symbol of both in opposition to the lily, which represented purity of mind and body.
The Image
takes a stand on the side of official Christianity by using the rose as an instrument of pain and blood-letting.

The photographs which Claire shows to Jean de Berg are also overflowing with symbolic importance. The photographs are a series of conventional sadomasochistic poses. They chart the torture and mutilation of a victim, in this case Anne, and culminate in what is apparently the brutal stabbing, the actual death, of the victim. Together they reveal a woman’s preoccupation with her own body, a narcissism which is concretized in the last photograph, which is of Claire herself, faceless, caressing her own cunt. This narcissism is a flaw which defines woman, and to atone for it a woman must, in the glorious tradition of O, consent to and participate in her own annihilation. Such is the scenario which permits her a Christian salvation, which redeems her of the sin of Eve and the subsequent sin of her own self-love. The photographs are “really nothing more than religious pictures, steps along the way of a new road to the cross.”
¹¹
The road, however, is an old one, well traveled, and if the cross is difficult to reach via this particular road, it is only because the bodies of martyrs other than Anne and Claire lie piled so deep.

It is only too obvious that the tortured, mutilated woman who appears first as Anne, then as the more impersonal victim of the photographs, and finally in a dream of Jean de Berg’s as a dead body “pierced by many triangular stab wounds in the most propitious areas”
¹²
is the secular Christ of cunt and breast, Eve’s fallen, lustful, carnal descendant, the victim who, unlike Jesus, is suffering for her own sins, the criminal whose punishment scarcely equals the horror of her crime. That crime, of course, is biological womanhood. Jesus died for us once, the crucifixion he suffered sufficed, we are told, for all time. Anne, Claire, O, all will be forced spread-eagle on the cross until death releases them, and then again. No cruelty will ever be proper atonement for their crime, and thus set the rest of us free.

Christianity has one other image of woman, Mary, the Madonna, the Virgin Mother. Jean de Berg dreams of Claire as the Madonna shortly before he beats and fucks her. Surely that demonstrates the psychic significance, in a sexist culture, of the Madonna figure. Just as Anne on the cross was a profanation of the sacred nature of women, so is the concept, the Lie, of a virgin mother, separate from her cunt, separate from nature, innocent by virtue of the abandonment of her real, and most honorable, sexuality.

The worship of virginity must be posited as a real sexual perversion, crueler and more insidious than those sex models condemned by the culture as perverse. The Christian institutionalization of that worship, its cultivation and refinement, have aborted women in the development and expression of natural sexuality by giving credence to that other: woman as whore. The dualism of good and evil, virgin and whore, lily and rose, spirit and nature is inherent in Christianity and finds its logical expression in the rituals of sadomasochism. The Christian emphasis on pain and suffering as the path to transcendence and salvation is the very meat of most sadomasochistic pornography, just as the Christian definition of woman is its justification. Lenny Bruce expressed it very simply when he said this:

I understand that intellectually — that a woman who sleeps with a different guy every week is a better Christian than the virgin. Because she has the capacity to kiss and hug fifty guys a year. And that's what that act is —kissing and hugging. You can’t do it to anyone you’re mad at. If you’re just a bit bugged with them, you can’t make it.

So that chick who's got that much love for all her fellowmen that she can make it with fifty guys a year— that’s intellectually; but emotionally, I don’t want to be the fifty-first guy. Cause I learned my lesson early, man. The people told me, “This is the way it is, Virgin is Good, Virgin is Good. ” Yeah, that’s really weird.
¹³

As the most obvious male Christ figure of our time, he should know.

CHAPTER 5

Woman as Victim: Suck

We move from the straight literary pornography of our forebears, represented by
Story of O
and
The Image, into another realm, that of the sex newspaper, born of the hip culture (or, as we like to think, counter-culture), post sex revolution (Freudian, Reichian, Mailerian, Brucean, Ginsbergian), post pot, post acid, post pill: post Them and into the world of Us. We move into the realm of here and now, our own turned-on, liberated time and space, into the social world for which we are responsible. Since we seek in that world freedom as women, defined in radical terms, achieved through a concretely lived lifestyle, newspapers like
Suck,
Oz,
and
Screw
are important.
Playboy
is Them —no doubt Kissinger and Sinatra sleep with it tucked under the pillow. But the counter-culture sex papers are created by people who inhabit our world (freaks, drug users, radicals, longhairs, whatever the appropriate term might be), people who share our values, our concerns — people who talk of liberation. The counter-culture sex papers would be a part of our community and so we are obliged, if we are a community, to approach them critically and seriously, to ask what they bring to us and what they take from us.