Intercourse (31 page)

Freud connected the penis itself with feces but not in a way that made the penis dirty, only evocative of an infantile sexual stage of development: “a person’s love of his own penis... is not without an element of anal erotism. ”
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The penis, as a hard, sticklike thing, evokes the hard, sticklike fecal mass in the rectum; and, according to Freud, feces, baby, and penis are related in subconscious sexual meaning. It is true that etymologically baby and penis are related; the word
penis
comes from the Old English for
fetus. Freud insisted on an important subconscious connection between these two phenomena and the turd in the rectum for this reason: “The relationship between the penis and the passage lined with mucous membrane which it fills and excites already has its prototype in the pregenital, anal-sadistic phase. The faecal mass... represents as it were the first penis, and the stimulated mucous membrane of the rectum represents that of the vagina. ”
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In other words, the mucous membrane that the man touches in intercourse with his penis, the vagina, is dirty like the rectum. The penis evokes the turd in the rectum because the man has the experience of touching a membrane just like the rectal wall. The relationship of the penis to the actual turd is evocative and symbolic, distant. The rectum and the vagina are analogous in present time. The vagina of the woman is not phenomenologically distinct from the mucous membrane of the rectum.

For humans, the descent into the excremental is a descent into sadism and death. For women, being excremental is the dimension of inferiority that legitimates and makes appropriate sadistic sexual acts that pass as simple sex, a cruelty in sex, the brutal domination through sexual subjugation of a worthless, essentially scatological thing. The sadism is part of the act of intercourse or an adjunct to it; it is a cruelty of disregard and also a brutality of behavior. The descent into death is held to be synonymous with penile descent into the woman, which ends eventually and inevitably in detumescence. Buried in dirt, the penis strikes, then dies.
Vagina
comes from the Latin meaning scabbard or sheath. The penetration is implicitly conceptualized as a cutting into, a sadistic, slicing entry, through dirt into dirt: the penis is buried, fucks, and dies. “Death is genitalized as a return to the womb, ”
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writes Norman O. Brown, always in celebration of the act. Coitus takes place in “a womb-cave, ” “the grave. ”
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Fornication, he reminds us, comes from the word
fornix, an underground arched vault: as if it, the
fornix, were literally underground, buried. Actually in ancient Rome prostitutes did business under the arched vaults throughout the city—arched bridges over primitive sewers; and fornication meant intercourse with the dirty women in dirty, hidden, secret places under the bridges that sheltered sewers. In the world of psychology, the ecstatic world of Brown or the more tragic, even morbid, world of Freud, the death connected with sex is held to be the death of the penis, trapped in the castrating cave, the vagina. But in the world of real life—and in the subtextual worlds of Brown and Freud and nearly everyone else—men use the penis to deliver death to women who are, literally, in their genitals, dirt to the men. The women are raped as adults or as children; prostituted; fucked, then murdered; murdered, then fucked. These violent degradations are not rare; they are so commonplace that the victims cannot be remembered from one day to the next, so commonplace that the victims remain nameless in a mass of ordinary names from ordinary places. In the normal world of everyday, regular culture, women are dirty: brilliantly articulate men on street corners say so with unmatched eloquence. In the normal but hidden world of everyday, regular sexual exploitation of women as inferiors, the dirty women are sadistically abused because sex itself is used sadistically; intercourse becomes a form of explicit sadism against women. In the heinous, abnormal world of prison and concentration camps, dirt, death, and sadism go wild, there being no limits on what men do to women; yet the elements of sadism, so extreme, so incomprehensible we insist with bland and committed innocence, are not really unrecognizable. They mimic with stunning cogency the norms of disparagement and cruelty that constitute fucking male-to-female. The intensely cruel and ugly acts are not genuinely alien from ordinary practices and meanings. In Treblinka, one sadistic man, twenty years old, “slashed open the bellies of the women vertically with a huge sword, ” this while they were living; after the women, disemboweled, were pulled out of the gas chambers, prisoners were forced “to mount them and simulate the act of love. ”
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Vagina
means sheath. Penetration was never meant to be kind. In pornography, scissors, razors, knives, and daggers are poised at the entrance to the vagina, cuts evident on the delicate skin of the pubic area, often shaved; or a sword penetrates the vagina, the woman smiles and smears the blood from her penetrated vagina all over her own body—eroticized dirt, eroticized sadism, eroticized death—not in a concentration camp but sold in a supermarket as mass entertainment, the evisceration happily simulated; or in a snuff film, real; or in a sex-murder, real, the vagina not infrequently mutilated with a knife. Zola made clear in
La Bete Humaine
that one wanted to slice a woman open with scissors “not because she was resisting him, oh no, it was for the enjoyment of it, because he wanted to... ”
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In painting after painting, speaking for the
chingada, the screwed one, Frida Kahlo paints the woman vividly wounded, dripping blood; in one,
A Few Small Nips, painted in 1935, a naked woman (except for one sock and one shoe) is on a bed, gashed all over; she is alive, wide-eyed, her body animated in curves and subtle, living contortion; a man stands upright next to the bed, he is fully dressed, even wearing a hat, and he holds a knife in his hand; he is aloof, indifferent, blank; and the blood in blotches and smears is all over her body and spreads out over walls and over the floor in spots and smears even past the boundaries of the canvas to the frame. Kahlo shows the unspeakable pain of being
alive
and female, penetrated like this.

Sadism and death, under male supremacy, converge at the vagina: to open the woman up, go inside her, penis or knife. The poor little penis kills before it dies.

Some classy men say that sex is connected to the
awareness
of death; they mean to suggest that sex takes place inside a context of human consciousness of the inevitability of death; that man fucks with the certain, tragic knowledge of death: knowledge, intellection, and sensibility all connoted by the awareness itself. They mean penile sex, human death. Vargas Llosa’s rapist with a political conscience wonders:

Would his penis get hard at the supreme moment, as was said to happen to men who drowned or were beheaded? That belief straight out of a horror show concealed some torturous truth, some mysterious affinity between sex and the awareness of death. If such a thing did not exist, what had happened early this morning and what had happened a little while ago would not have occurred.... Yes, it had been sniffing death close at hand that had made him fall upon this woman and take her with his stiff penis, twice in the same day. “A strange relationship based on fear and semen and nothing else, ” he thought.
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Despite the high aspirations for “awareness of death, ” “torturous truth, ” and “mysterious affinity, ” he smelled her and raped her: twice now. He sniffed and raped, more doglike than human.

Georges Bataille, a philosopher of the erotic and therefore a classy guy, likens what he calls “eroticism”—classy sex—to dissolution or death: “The passive, female side is essentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity. ”
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The whole essence of this classy sex “is assenting to life up to the point of death. ”
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There have been two kinds of rebellion against this conflation of sex and death, this convergence of sadism and sex on the woman’s body. In the realm of philosophy and politics, feminists have rebelled, often in a humane language that seeks to rescue sex and love from what Danish feminist Suzanne Brogger called “the traditional sadomasochistic humiliation ritual”; “only in death have European lovers ever been able to unite in any satisfactory manner... This is truly the damnation of the flesh! ”
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In the realm of real life, under conditions of atrocity or despair, some women have refused to surrender to the callous sex-and-death motifs of behavior and belief that saturate so-called civilization. As Primo Levi described in
Survival in Auschwitz:

All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children’s washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
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Would you not do the same, philosophers of sex and death, Freud, Vargas Llosa, Bataille? Swinburne, Yeats? Nietzsche, Strindberg, Diego Rivera, Eldridge Cleaver, Sartre, Baldwin, Timerman, Reich, Byron, Lawrence, Bettelheim too, forgive me, would you not do the same? Have you ever done the same? “We could not stand women speaking the truth, ” wrote Joseph Conrad in a novel. “We could not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about the most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool’s paradise in which each of us lives his own little life—the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. ”
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Who would not do the same? “Here and now, ” wrote Bataille, “I must emphasize that the female partner in eroticism was seen as the victim, the male as the sacrificer, both during the consummation losing themselves in the continuity established by the first destructive act. ”
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He must emphasize. The imperative is to emphasize, not to do the same; to do the opposite, not to do the same; to have sex, which means creating a victim— not to do the same.

Humans wound genitals in religious rites or for social or sexual reasons, for instance, the great tradition of male supremacy expressed in the scarification of the female body. Adult male circumcision and subincision are frequently ordeals of manhood, tests of endurance undergone during ceremonies that usher in manhood in its most social and significant meaning: the marked phallus signifies the high status of the adult male. Infant males are circumcised, for instance, in Jewish ritual, and as a common hygienic practice in the West.

There is female circumcision—clitoridectomy; and more egregious genital mutilation—labial fusion and infibulation. Male and female genital mutilation are not analogous practices. For the male, the mark signifies a higher civil status; for the female, the mutilated genitals mean civil insignificance and sexual colonialization. In the Freudian West, the female genitals per se are reckoned to be a wound, castrated, mutilated in themselves, as God made them; the woman is born genitally mutilated.

In Hebrew tradition, male circumcision denotes a special bond between man and God; as described by Thomas Mann in
Joseph and His Brothers:

It was the marriage commanded and appointed by God between man and the deity, performed upon that part of the flesh which seemed to form the focus of his being, and upon which every physical vow was taken. Many a man bore the name of God on his organ of generation, or wrote it there before he possessed a woman. The bond of faith with God was sexual in its nature, and thus, contracted with a jealous creator and lord, insistent upon sole possession, it inflicted upon the human male a kind of civilizing weakening into the female.... in other words, a female significance.
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In this interpretation, circumcision made the man to God as the woman was to the man, incomplete, a little butchered. In Christianity, there is an incarnated god with a penis; according to Leo Steinberg in his book on depictions of Christ’s sexuality in paintings, the god with the male penis emphasizes the fragility of the human condition, the vulnerability of being human: “The sexual member exhibited by the Christ Child, so far from asserting aggressive virility, concedes instead God’s assumption of human weakness; it is an affirmation not of superior prowess but of condescension to kinship, a sign of the Creator’s self-abasement to his creature’s condition”; Christ’s circumcised penis “is offered to immolation. ”
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In the contemporary Western world, male circumcision is routinely done for so-called hygienic reasons. The genital is wounded, mutilated, so that it will stay clean as it immerses itself obsessively in dirt.

Female circumcision, which originated, as did male circumcision, in ancient Egypt, is now widely practiced in parts of Africa; but it has been used in modern Amerika, for instance, to “treat” delinquent girls, the excision of the clitoris held to take away sexual drive and behavioral nonconformity. The circumcision of females, unlike the circumcision of males, destroys a capacity for sexual response; and infibulation, whatever its origins, constitutes a sadistic practice of mutilation on a civilly inferior class. “So extensive is the infibulation operation—the clitoris is excised and the surrounding tissue scarified so that the fusion of the labia will occur during the healing, ” writes Sarah Hrdy, “that approximately 9 percent of girls operated on under semimodern conditions (with some anesthesia) suffer hemorrhage or shock. Infibulated women are partially cut open at marriage, and must be fully opened at childbirth—after which they are sewn up again. ”
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