Intercourse (28 page)

chapter nine

DIRT/DEATH

I
NFERIORITY IS NOT BANAL OR INCIDENTAL even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view” that some people with soft skins find “offensive. ” It is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments— scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never be made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what is normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt her—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as a consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences and perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferior in the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologically pejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she is needy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in and of itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Her personal experiences or perceptions are never credited as having a hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never loved enough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never loved enough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “I doubt if it is possible to feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior. ”
¹
There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language. There are dirty names for every female part of her body and for every way of touching her. There are dirty words, dirty laughs, dirty noises, dirty jokes, dirty movies, and dirty things to do to her in the dark. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime. Her genitals are also dirty in the metaphoric sense: obscene. She is reviled as filthy, obscene, in religion, pornography, philosophy, and in most literature and art and psychology. Where she is not explicitly maligned she is magnificently condescended to, as in this diary entry by Somerset Maugham written when he was in medical school:

The Professor of Gynaecology: He began his course of lectures as follows: Gentlemen, woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, parturiates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity.

I thought it a prettily-balanced sentence.
²

Were she loved sufficiently, or even enough, she could not be despised so much. Were she sexually loved, or even liked, she and what is done with or to her, in the dark or in the light, would not, could not, exist rooted in the realm of dirt, the contempt for her apparently absolute and irrevocable; horrible; immovable; help us, Lord; unjust. She is not just less; she and the sex she incarnates are a species of filth. God will not help, of course: “For a whore
is
a deep ditch; and a strange woman
is
a narrow pit” (Proverbs 23: 27).

This dirt in which women are buried alive is not a matter of attitude; it is not in the eye of the beholder. There is a woman. She lives in a world, this world, in which power is real. Men have it, generally speaking; she does not because she is a woman. She is devalued not only in people’s thoughts but in the way she is treated: by individuals because she is not their equal; by institutions of the society—law, religion, art, education. She is poorer than men in money and in rights; she is poorer in the freedoms she can actually exercise, including freedom of movement and freedom of speech. She must dress in ways that distinguish her on sight from those who have power. Her behavior must be categorically different from the behavior of those in power. She is segregated in the job market and often in social life, but sexual intimacy is forced on her— individuals rarely escape forced sex in a lifetime. The dirt she is buried alive in is real because the power that devalues her is real. The ways in which she is devalued are concrete, material, real: sexual, economic, physical, social. They happen to her: not as a disembodied spirit but as a corporeal being, flesh and blood. Inferiority is done to her: it is real and she is real. Attitudes do not establish her lower status; institutions and practices do. Nice attitudes toward her as an individual, while perhaps a welcome respite, do not change her status. That status is established by a distribution of power that excludes her from both equality and self-determination because she is a woman. Because she is a woman, she is impoverished, poor in power, poor in worth. Being dirt, dirty, is one dimension of her worthlessness, the mark of a base inferiority. The devaluing of her is intense, committed, obsessed; organized spleen; emotional, often brutal and enraged. She is an object of hate: an impersonal, collective hate directed against her kind, including her as an individual but insensible to her individuality. Hated and inferior, she is dirt, dirty. Hate is not an attitude or an opinion; hate is a passion, the fuel of murder and terrorism. There is slow murder in which terror and assault are mixed: rape, battery, prostitution, incest. There is fast murder: sex-murder; killing her, then fucking her; serial murder or sadistic murder. Changes of attitude or opinion do not change systems of power fueled by hate.

The dirty words themselves are not a superficial phenomenon, their meaning changed easily by an effusion of liberal goodwill on the part of those who use them. Power, in this case power fueled by hate, also determines the meaning of language. The dirty words retain their obscene meaning because that is the low value put on what they name. There have been radical efforts to make malignant words take on an innocent or benign meaning. In
Paradise Now, The Living Theatre, in scenarios invoking a revolutionary desire for a freedom outside the domain of humiliation or violence, chanted: “Fuck the Jews. Fuck the Arabs. Fuck means peace. Fuck means peace. ”
³
Even with the consent of the flower-child generation to the revision of meaning, the meaning of
fuck
did not change. D. H. Lawrence tried to reinvent the use of so-called obscene words; he believed that the use of sexual euphemism created the dirty connotation of the more direct language: “If I use the taboo words, there is a reason. We shall never free the phallic reality from the ‘uplift’ taint till we give it its own phallic language, and use the obscene words. ”
⁴
The phallic reality
he intended was ecstatic, not dirty, a sacrament of fucking, human worship of a pure masculinity and a pure femininity embodied in, respectively, the penis and the cunt (another word favored by Lawrence). Lawrence himself was forced to recognize “how strong is the will in ordinary, vulgar people, to do dirt on sex. ”
⁵
Even regular working men, whom he had idolized, “have a disgusting attitude toward sex, a disgusting contempt of it, a disgusting desire to insult it. If such fellows have intercourse with a woman, they triumphantly feel that they have done her dirt, and now she is lower, cheaper, more contemptible than she was before. ”
⁶
Dirty words stay dirty because they express a contempt for women, or for women and sex, often synonyms, that is real, embedded in hostile practices that devalue and hurt women; as Lord Byron wrote in a letter—“I rather look upon love altogether as a sort of hostile transaction. ”
⁷
Dirty words stay dirty because they express a hate for women as inferiors, that hate inextricably, it seems, part of sex—a hate for women’s genitals, a hate for women’s bodies, a hate for the insides of women touched in fucking. Dirty words stay dirty because they express a true dimension of women’s inferiority, a forced inferiority, the dirty words part of the ongoing force; the penis itself signifying power over women, that power expressed most directly, most eloquently, in fucking women. Lawrence’s
phallic reality
meant
power over
, and his “ordinary, vulgar people” had the same religion. Women stayed dirty because women stayed inferior. Lawrence wanted to reform an attitude and a vocabulary, but he wanted to keep the power relations between men and women the same. Worshipping “cunt” and hating women were not, in real life, exactly distinguishable anyway— as Freida, Lawrence’s own wife, battered, might have testified had she not valued his life, as he did, more than her own. Change requires a change in power relations, a redistribution of power, an equality of worth that is socially true. The meaning of words that express derision of inferiors does not change until or unless the hate and power they signify change. Current dogma is to teach by rote that sex is “healthy” as if it existed outside social relations, as if it had no ties to anything mean or lowdown, to history, to power, to the dispossession of women from freedom. But for sex not to mean dirt—for sex not to
be
dirty—the status of women would have to change radically; there would have to be equality without equivocation or qualification, social equality for all women, not personal exemptions from insult for some women in some circumstances. The next question—a real one and a fascinating one—then is: with women not dirty, with sex not dirty, could men fuck? To what extent does intercourse depend on the inferiority of women? Racially degraded people—women and men—are also devalued as dirt: experienced as deep-down filthy; sexualized as dirty; desired as dirty for fucking and for genocide. Racist ideology spells out how the degraded race is filthy and intensely sexed, dirty and sensual, contaminating.
Dirty
provokes the sexual interest, the fuck itself, the sexual humiliation, the sexual exploitation, the sex-murder of the racially despised.

Inferiority—sex-based or race-based or both—seems to be the requisite context for fucking. James Baldwin reminds us:

When the loveless come to power, or when sexual despair comes to power, the sexuality of the object is either a threat or a fantasy. That most men will choose women to debase is not a matter of rejoicing either for the chosen women or anybody else; brutal truth, furthermore, forces the observation, particularly if one is a black man, that this choice is by no means certain. That men have an enormous need to debase other men—and only because they are
men—is a truth which history forbids us to labor.
⁸

The sexual abuse and humiliation of racially despised women blends into the commonplace abuses of women as such, inferior and dirty as women. When the acts of insult and injury are recognized as abuses, the reason is that the acts are seen to be assaults on the integrity of the racially despised men—attempts to unman them by taking their women. The abuses of women are not so much sexual crimes against the women in their own right as misappropriations of them, thefts filled with racist malice against the men to whom the women are supposed to belong. The sexualized hatred of racism appears to single out the man, focusing on him to destroy him, perhaps because to devalue a man as sexualized dirt at all is to unman him, feminize him by giving him something real in common with women. Unmanning the man is a primary goal of racism, the institutionalized rapism of the continuing assault on his manhood resembling nothing so much as prison rape, the only common form of man-on-man rape. As described in a study of Philadelphia prisons:

A primary goal of the sexual aggressor, it is clear, is the conquest and degradation of his victim. We repeatedly found that aggressors used such language as “Fight or fuck, ” “We’re going to take your manhood, ” “You’ll have to give up some face, ” and “We’re gonna make a girl out of you. ” Some of the assaults were reminiscent of the custom in some ancient societies of castrating or buggering a defeated enemy.
⁹

The rape is literal in forced sex acts, castration, and murder. For instance, Jewish men were castrated in medical experiments in the concentration camps; black men were castrated in terrorist attacks in the Deep South. There was secret forced sex and open murder. The rape is also metaphoric: stripped of dignity and selfhood, invaded, culturally defamed, civilly inferior, powerless to advance his own honor, pornographized as if gang-banged and left to die.

The racist program has unfailing ideological landmarks. The racially despised male is stigmatized as a sexual savage, a rapist by nature; as Hitler wrote,

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.
¹⁰

The race that is despised is physically filthy; as Hitler wrote,

The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, I must say, is a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell that these were no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers.
¹¹

The racially despised men pollute the superior race, lowering it, through miscegenation; as Hitler wrote,

And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level by a continuous poisoning of individuals.
¹²