Intercourse (13 page)

It is this first real experience of being loved—not doing it but being the beloved—that helps to enable him, later, to face Ida, who is being destroyed by his refusal to face hard truths, his inability to give the gift of himself because he does not dare know himself. In particular, this act of communion helped him to understand in precisely what way, and at what cost, he had abandoned Rufus: “
^;
I loved Rufus, I loved him, I didn’t want him to die. But when he was dead, I thought about it,... and I wondered, I guess I still wonder, what would have happened if I’d taken him in my arms, if I’d held him, if I hadn’t been—afraid. I was afraid that he wouldn’t understand that it was—only love. Only love. But, oh, Lord, when he died, I thought that maybe I could have saved him if I’d just reached out that quarter of an inch between us on that bed, and held him. ’”
⁵²
That quarter of an inch, in this vision, is the great expanse of fear and ignorance that must be crossed bravely and with integrity to human hope.

chapter five

POSSESSION

I
NTERCOURSE IS COMMONLY WRITTEN ABOUT AND comprehended as a form of possession or an act of possession in which, during which, because of which, a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overwhelming her and at the same time penetrating her; and this physical relation to her—over her and inside her—is his possession of her. He has her, or, when he is done, he has had her. By thrusting into her, he takes her over. His thrusting into her is taken to be her capitulation to him as a conqueror; it is a physical surrender of herself to him; he occupies and rules her, expresses his elemental dominance over her, by his possession of her in the fuck.

The act itself, without more, is the possession. There need not be a social relationship in which the woman is subordinate to the man, a chattel in spirit or deed, decorative or hardworking. There need not be an ongoing sexual relationship in which she is chronically, demonstrably, submissive or masochistic. The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation: colo-nializing, forceful (manly) or nearly violent; the sexual act that by its nature makes her his. God made it so, or nature did, according to the faith of the explainer of events and values. Both conceptual systems—the theological and the biological—are loyal to the creed of male dominance and maintain that intercourse is the elemental (not socialized) expression of male and female, which in turn are the elemental (not socialized) essences of men and women. In
Ideal Marriage, a sexological marriage manual of vast and ubiquitous influence before the epidemic breakout of so-called sexology as a profession, Theodore Van De Velde summarized what men and women who were married should know about sex:

What both man and woman, driven by obscure primitive urges, wish to feel in the sexual act, is the essential force of
maleness, which expresses itself in a sort of violent and absolute
possession
of the woman. And so both of them can and do exult in a certain degree of male aggression and dominance—whether actual or apparent—which proclaims this essential force.
¹

In other words, men possess women when men fuck women because both experience the man being male. This is the stunning logic of male supremacy. In this view, which is the predominant one, maleness is aggressive and violent; and so fucking, in which both the man and the woman experience
maleness, essentially demands the disappearance of the woman as an individual; thus, in being fucked, she is possessed: ceases to exist as a discrete individual: is taken over.

Remarkably, it is not the man who is considered possessed in intercourse, even though he (his penis) is buried inside another human being; and his penis is surrounded by strong muscles that contract like a fist shutting tight and release with a force that pushes hard on the tender thing, always so vulnerable no matter how hard. He is not possessed even though his penis is gone—disappeared inside someone else, enveloped, smothered, in the muscled lining of flesh that he never sees, only feels, gripping, releasing, gripping, tighter, harder, firmer, then pushing out: and
can he get out alive?
seems a fundamental anxiety that fuels male sexual compulsiveness and the whole discipline of depth psychology. The man is not possessed in fucking even though he is terrified of castration; even though he sometimes thinks—singly or collectively in a culture—that the vagina has teeth; but he goes inside anyway, out of compulsion, obsession: not obsessed with her, a particular woman; but with it, getting inside. He is not possessed even though he is terrified of never getting his cock back because she has it engulfed inside her, and it is small compared with the vagina around it pulling it in and pushing it out: clenching it, choking it, increasing the friction and the frisson as he tries to pull out. He is not possessed even though he rolls over dead and useless afterward, shrunk into oblivion: this does not make him hers by virtue of the nature of the act; he has not been taken and conquered by her, to whom he finally surrenders, beat, defeated in endurance and strength both. And for him, this small annihilation, this little powerlessness, is not eroticized as sexual possession of him by her, intrinsic to the act; proof of an elemental reality, an unchanging relation between male and female. He experiences coitus as death; and he is sad; but he is not possessed.

Men have admitted some form of sexual possession of themselves by women in the fuck when they can characterize the women as witches, evil and carnal, and when the fuck occurs in their sleep at night. The witches have sex with men while they sleep; they use a man against his will, especially at night, when he is asleep and helpless. He ejaculates: proof that, by magic, a woman came to him in the night and did something to or with his penis. In Europe, women were persecuted as witches for nearly four hundred years, burned at the stake, perhaps as many as nine million of them—untold numbers accused of coming to men, having sex with them, causing them to ejaculate: at night, when the men slept. In these instances, then, the charge of witchcraft was a male charge of rape: the man claimed to be taken against his will, used in sex against his will; certainly without his consent and in a way violative of his male prerogatives in sex over women. In Europe during the Inquisition women were slaughtered for this rape of the male that took place in his own mind; for possessing him by making him fuck, twist, turn, tormented, in his sleep; for making him have sex or want it or experience it imprisoned in his own isolated body, sex that was not the issue of his will or predetermination. In many cultures and tribes, men can be similarly possessed; and the key to the possession—the dreams, the sex, the physical reality of desire, the obsession—is that the woman herself is magical and evil; through wickedness and magic she exerts illegitimate (therefore magical; therefore wicked; therefore originating in Satan) power over men.

For women, being sexually possessed by men is more pedestrian. Women have been chattels to men as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of women. He owns you; he fucks you. The fucking conveys the quality of the ownership: he owns you inside out. The fucking conveys the passion of his dominance: it requires access to every hidden inch. He can own everything around you and everything on you and everything you are capable of doing as a worker or servant or ornament; but getting inside you and owning your insides is possession: deeper, more intimate, than any other kind of ownership. Intimate, raw, total, the experience of sexual possession for women is real and literal, without any magical or mystical dimension to it: getting fucked and being owned are inseparably the same; together, being one and the same, they are sex for women under male dominance as a social system. In the fuck, the man expresses the geography of his dominance: her sex, her insides are part of his domain as a male. He can possess her as an individual—be her lord and master—and thus be expressing a private right of ownership (the private right issuing from his gender); or he can possess her by fucking her impersonally and thus be expressing a collective right of ownership without masquerade or manners. Most women are not distinct, private individuals to most men; and so the fuck tends toward the class assertion of dominance. Women live inside this reality of being owned and being fucked: are sensate inside it; the body learning to respond to what male dominance offers as touch, as sex, as love. For women, being possessed is the sex that has to meet the need for love or tenderness or physical affection; therefore, it comes to mean, to show, the intensity of desire; and being erotically owned by a man who takes you and fucks you is a physically charged and meaningful affirmation of womanhood or femininity or being desired.

This reality of being owned and being fucked—as experience, a social, political, economic, and psychological unity— frames, limits, sets parameters for, what women feel and experience in sex. Being that person who is owned and fucked means becoming someone who experiences sensuality in being possessed: in the touch of the possessor, in his fuck, however callous it is to the complexity or the subtlety of one’s own humanity. Because a woman’s capacity to feel sexual pleasure is developed within the narrow confines of male sexual dominance, internally there is no separate being—conceived, nurtured somewhere else, under different material circumstances— screaming to get out. There is only the flesh-and-blood reality of being a sensate being whose body experiences sexual intensity, sexual pleasure, and sexual identity in being possessed: in being owned and fucked. It is what one knows; and one’s capacities to feel and to be are narrowed, sliced down, to fit the demands and dimensions of this sentient reality.

Therefore, women feel the fuck—when it works, when it overwhelms—as possession; and feel possession as deeply erotic; and value annihilation of the self in sex as proof of the man’s desire or love, its awesome intensity. And therefore, being possessed is phenomenologically real for women; and sex itself is an experience of diminishing self-possession, an erosion of self. That loss of self is a physical reality, not just a psychic vampirism; and as a physical reality it is chilling and extreme, a literal erosion of the body’s integrity and its ability to function and to survive. The physical rigors of sexual possession—of being possessed—overwhelm the body’s vitality; and while at first the woman is fierce with the pride of possession—he wants her enough to empty her out—her insides are worn away over time, and she, possessed, becomes weak, depleted, usurped in all her physical and mental energies and capacities by the one who has physically taken her over; by the one who occupies her. This sexual possession is a sensual state of being that borders on antibeing until it ends in death. The body dies, or the lover discards the body when it is used up, throws it away, an old, useless thing, emptied, like an empty bottle. The body is used up; and the will is raped.

In
Satan in Goray
, a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, possession is literal: a
dybbuk
, an evil spirit, enters the body; and the entry itself is coital and literal:

AND REB MORDECAI JOSEPH said to the spirit, Through what opening didst thou force thy way into the woman, and the
dybbuk
spoke and said Through
that same place.
²

In the end, the possessed woman dies, but the supernatural possession is a phenomenon on the far end of a continuum: an intensification, an extreme exaggeration, of the sexual possession the woman has already experienced at the hands of mortal men, leaders of the community; what they have done to her, how they have used her, their sexual possession of her, has worn her down, left her vulnerable to supernatural possession, itself a form of rape:

It was stifling and the Thing pressed her to him, leaned against her. The Thing was a male; he tried to force her legs apart with his bony knees. He spoke to her rapidly, hoarsely, breathing hard, imploring and demanding:
“Rechele! Quick! Let me! I want to defile you! ”
“No, no! ”
“Rechele, you are already defiled! ”
He threw her down, and entered her.
³

Rechele, in the course of her short life as a woman on earth, had belonged to her father, who owned her without fucking her; her uncle, a ritual slaughterer who raised her and wanted her for his bride; a husband, Reb Itche Mates, who was impotent and fanatical and thought she was the demon Lilith; a lover, Reb Gedaliya, who took her from her husband and eventually, in a profane ceremony, forced her husband to divorce her, and, in a profane ceremony, married her; and the
dybbuk, who took her from Reb Gedaliya. The religious community of Jews eventually exorcised the
dybbuk: “The next instant the congregation beheld a flash of fire from
that same place
and it flew through the window burning a round hole in the pane. ”
⁴
Rechele soon dies.

This story of sexual possession takes place in Poland, in a city named Goray, “the town that lay in the midst of the hills at the end of the world. ”
⁵
In 1648 a butcher of the Jews, Bogdan Chmelnicki, executed vicious pogroms, mass slaughters; he and his followers “flayed men alive, murdered small children, violated women and afterward ripped open their bellies and sewed cats inside. ”
⁶
Jews ran away; were baptized; were sold into slavery. Goray was deserted. Still, the Jews studied holy texts, and the cabalists—the mystics of Judaism—studied the mystic texts. In them, they found a promised end to this persecution of the Jews, a time when the Messiah would come; and many concluded that “Chmelnicki’s massacres were the birth-pangs of the Messiah. ”
⁷
Magical thinking distorted the austere, literal religion of the Jews; laws were transgressed; false Messiahs abounded.