Intercourse (6 page)

The woman appears to control sex. The man needs it. This causes his rage at her perceived power over him. The objective proof of this power is in the various industries that exist to provide ornamentation and consumer goods for women:

“Millions of people, generations of slaves, perish at hard labour in factories merely to satisfy woman’s caprice. Women, like queens, keep nine-tenths of mankind in bondage to heavy labour. And all because they have been abased and deprived of equal rights with men. And they revenge themselves by acting on our sensuality... ”
⁵²

This dynamic of revenge of the powerless through sensuality makes women dangerous to men: “‘dangerous, ’” “‘illicit, ’” “‘the peril, ”’ “‘the dangerous object. ’”
⁵³
Any woman who acts on a man’s sensuality by provoking it—which she does just by being a sexual object in looks and behavior—makes him intoxicated, deranged, stupified; he wants to call a policeman and have her put away. She is this danger, has this power, dominates him, directly as a consequence of her inequality, the meaning of which is in her reduction to a sexual object.

Implicit in the killer/husband’s emotionally charged analysis, with its rage and revulsion toward women for having such a strong, seemingly unalterable hold over his body and mind, is a recognition that equality is the antithesis of sensuality when the sensuality is intercourse per se. The woman must be reduced to being this sexual object to be pleasing to men who will then, and only then, want to fuck her; once she is made inferior in this way, she is sensual to men and attracts them to her, and a man’s desire for her—to use her—is experienced by him as her power over him. But equality does not have this danger of intoxication or derangement or obsession. Equality means physical wholeness, virginity—for the woman, equality requires not ever having been reduced to that object of sensuality in order to be used as a tool of men’s desire and satiation in sex. What is lost for the woman when she becomes a sexual object, and when she is confirmed in that status by being fucked, is not recoverable. Just as the man is depraved, that is, an exploiter, so too the woman is depraved, that is, an object.

According to the killer/husband, the inferiority of women in society, including the civil inferiority of women, originates in intercourse, because in intercourse the woman is not, and cannot be, the equal of men. She "'has not the right to use a man or abstain from him as she likes—is not allowed to choose a man at her pleasure instead of being chosen by him. ’”
⁵⁴
His solution is not an equality of sexual access, because intercourse by its nature requires the woman’s inferiority as a sexual object. Instead, men must not have the right to intercourse. Women will not revenge themselves on men through sensuality, acquiring "'a terrible power over people, ”’
⁵⁵
if men stop creating women’s inequality because they want intercourse. Men need inequality in order to fuck; and equality means that men also need to be chaste.

Marriage through sexual attraction, that is, so-called love, is also an institution of inequality, because of what women must do to attract husbands: the woman is “a slave in a bazaar or the bait in a trap.’”
⁵⁶
Because she is “‘a means of enjoyment, ”’
⁵⁷
she will always be used as such, and her inferiority will be created and maintained through that usage of her for enjoyment. No rights to hold government office or other public positions of civil or professional power will change her status as long as she is exploited in sex. The analogy the killer/husband makes is to slavery,
^*
where the institution can be legally invalidated but people are kept and used as slaves anyway, being exploited because others profit from the exploitation. Slavery is in the exploitation itself, any kind of forced labor that is done because people who are stronger want it done, including forced sex labor by women simply in response to male desire: “‘Therefore to get rid of slavery it is necessary that people should not wish to profit by the forced labour of others and should consider it a sin and a shame. ’”
⁵⁸
As long as men desire women for intercourse, and women are used as sexual objects, regardless of laws and other public reforms women’s real status will be low, degraded.

*Serfdom in Czarist Russia.

For the man, this right to use a woman’s body, to exploit her in intercourse, has a nightmarish dimension originating in his absolute arrogance, his sense of total possession, which the woman, as an object, must not suborn or he will suffer—the recognition that finally her body is not his being an agony to him, causing him real and unbearable anguish:

“What was terrible, you know, was that I considered myself to have a complete right to her body as if it were my own, and yet at the same time I felt as if I could not control that body, that it was not mine and she could dispose of it not as I wished her to. ”
⁵⁹

This anguish ended only with killing her, because only in death was she incapable of defying him, defying and defeating his use of her body as if it were his own. Her death ended his pain, because death ended her rebellion against her object status and her assertion of will in this body that belonged to him. Death ended longings she had, including a desire for affection from, even intercourse with, another man. Death ended her desire, put her back in her place, not wanting, incontestably an object, because objects do not will and want and search and are not subjects in a human quest for love or affection or sex. His wife, in wanting another man, had her own quest for love, her own heart and will and desire, and so he killed her, because he could not stand it. Here is the heart of the contradiction, the internal tension at the center of this sexual system of value and cognition: alive, in rebellion, flesh he is near and inside of, she is not human; with her dead, more objectlike than human, his pain is ended and he recognizes her, for one moment, as human—perhaps because she is now someone he no longer needs to fuck.

But the killing, according to the killer/husband, was not one gross act of physical and violent rage. Instead, the killing was slow, over the long years of their marriage, a consequence of the sex he wanted from her. In the first month of their marriage she became pregnant; he kept fucking her during her pregnancy: “‘You think I am straying from my subject? Not at all! I am telling you
how
I killed my wife. ’”
⁶⁰
There were continuous pregnancies, but he kept fucking her despite her suffering and despair: “‘so many children! The torments exhausted her! ”’
⁶¹
She learned birth control and became young and energetic and vital again, but then she wanted someone else—she wanted love from someone not “‘befouled by jealousy and all kinds of anger. ’”
⁶²
But the husband kept fucking her anyway, no matter what she wanted, no matter how angry he was. In one violent fight, he wanted to beat her, to kill her; he threw a heavy paperweight at her; she sobbed hysterically and ran from the room, but by morning ‘“she grew quiet, and we made peace under the influence of the feeling we called love. ’”
⁶³
All this sexual use of her was the killing. The physical act of killing—stabbing her with a dagger—is sexual too:

.. I felt, and remember, the momentary resistance of her corset and of something else, and then the plunging of the dagger into something soft. She seized the dagger with her hands, and cut them, but could not hold it back. ”
⁶⁴

The woman is physically real during this act of violence for the first time. She is never real in his other descriptions of her behavior, or her person, or his sexual intercourse with her. Then the dagger plunges into something soft and she resists, cutting her hands. When she is dead, bruised, disfigured, inert, a cadaver, he calls her human. The cost of the recognition is death.

In this story of killing, the killing begins when the man starts using the woman up; pillaging her physical resources of strength and sex. He is calloused to her well-being because her well-being is not compatible with his fucking—and it is the fucking he wants, not the woman as a person.

Tolstoy himself wanted to give up wealth and power—his estates, his monies from his books, eating meat, his position in society; he wanted to be simple, nonviolent, and poor. In this renunciation of power he included sexual intercourse in principle though not in practice. In
The Kreutzer Sonata
he knew, as artists often do, more than he was willing to act on in real life, especially about how women (and one woman in particular) were part of the wealth he owned; and especially about how intercourse was implicitly violent, predicated as it was on exploitation and objectification. He wanted to beat spears into pruning hooks, this phallic imagery being as close as the nineteenth-century author could come to talking about explicit genital violence—the penis itself as a weapon in intercourse with a social inferior. In art, he articulates with almost prophetic brilliance the elements that combine to make and keep women inferior, all of them originating, in his view, in sexual intercourse, because sexual intercourse requires objectification and therefore is exploitation. In life, he blamed and hated Sophie, feeling antagonism and repulsion, because he wanted to fuck her and did fuck her. Satiation did not lead to calm or harmony; it simply produced a hostile indifference, a stylistic modification of actively expressed repulsion. More than any other form of privilege, intercourse kept Tolstoy rooted in earthly, arrogant obsession—not poor and simple at all; having the right to use another person for pleasure and exercising that right at will; certainly not nonviolent. He experienced the obsession as internal violence, violating him, not her. The intensity of wanting was violent—stubborn, cruel, as he called it. The intensity of the act was violent, including in later years sex that by modern standards was clearly forced. The distaste after satiation was hostile, a passive violence of antipathy and indifference. He hated intercourse because of what it did to him, how he felt wanting it, doing it, being done with it. He hated Sophie because he fucked Sophie. For Sophie, being used, being hated, being fucked, meant loving him as a wife was supposed to. To her diary only she confided that “the main thing is
not
to love, ” because it is “so painful and humiliating, ” and “all my pride is trampled in the mud. ”
⁶⁵

chapter two

SKINLESS

S
EXUAL INTERCOURSE IS NOT INTRINSICALLY BANAL, though pop-culture magazines like
Esquire
and
Cosmopolitan
would suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation. The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too close.

Sometimes, the skin comes off in sex. The people merge, skinless. The body loses its boundaries. We are each in these separate bodies; and then, with someone and not with someone else, the skin dissolves altogether; and what touches is unspeakably, grotesquely visceral, not inside language or conceptualization, not inside time; raw, blood and fat and muscle and bone, unmediated by form or formal limits. There is no physical distance, no self-consciousness, nothing withdrawn or private or alienated, no existence outside physical touch. The skin collapses as a boundary—it has no meaning; time is gone—it too has no meaning; there is no outside. Instead, there is necessity, nothing else—being driven, physical immersion in each other but with no experience of “each other” as separate entities coming together. There is only touch, no boundaries; there is only the nameless experience of physical contact, which is life; there is no solace, except in this contact; without it, there is unbearable physical pain, absolute, not lessened by distraction, unreached by normalcy—nearly an amputation, the skin hacked off, slashed open; violent hurt. “My heart was open to you, ” says a man obsessively in love in
The Face of Another
by Kobo Abe, “quite as if the front of it had been sliced away. ”
¹
This skinless sex is a fever, but
fever
is too small. It is obsession, but
obsession
is too psychological. It becomes life; and as such, it is a state of being, a metaphysical reality for those in it, for whom no one else exists. It ends when the skin comes back into being as a boundary.

The skin is a line of demarcation, a periphery, the fence, the form, the shape, the first clue to identity in a society (for instance, color in a racist society), and, in purely physical terms, the formal precondition for being human. It is a thin veil of matter separating the outside from the inside. It is what one sees and what one covers up; it shows and it conceals; it hides what is inside. The skin is separation, individuality, the basis for corporeal privacy and also the point of contact for everything outside the self. It is a conductor of all feeling. Every time the skin is touched, one feels. All feeling passes through it, outside to inside. The skin is electric, hot, cold, opaque, translucent, youth, age, sensitive to every whisper of wind, chill, heat. The skin is our human mask; it is what one can touch of another person, what one sees, how one is seen. It is the formal limits of a body, a person, and the only bridge to human contact that is physical and direct. Especially, it is both identity and sex, what one is and what one feels in the realm of the sensual, being and passion, where the self meets the world—intercourse being, ultimately, the self in the act of meeting the world. The other person embodies not one’s own privacy, but everything outside it: “To lose you would be symbolic of losing the world, ”
²
says Abe’s man in love.