Men and women are different, absolute opposites.
T he good father can never be confused with the bad
mother. T h eir qualities are different, polar.
W here he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake,
she is asleep. W here he is active, she is passive. Where
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she is erect, or awake, or active, she is evil and must be
destroyed.
It is, structurally at least, that simple.
She is desirable in her beauty, passivity, and victimization. She is desirable because she is beautiful, passive, and victimized.
Her other persona, the evil mother, is repulsive in
her cruelty. She is repulsive and she must be destroyed.
She is the female protagonist, the nonmale source of
power which must be defeated, obliterated, before male
power can fully flower. She is repulsive because she is
evil. She is evil because she acts.
She, the evil persona, is a cannibal. Cannibalism is
repulsive. She is devouring and magical. She is devouring and the male must not be devoured.
There are two definitions of woman. There is the
good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman.
She must be destroyed. The good woman must be
possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished.
Both must be nullified.
The bad woman must be punished, and if she is
punished enough, she will become good. To be punished enough is to be destroyed. There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse.
Women strive for passivity, because women want to
be good. The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces
women that they are bad. The bad need to be punished,
destroyed, so that they can become good.
Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity
Onceuponatlme: The Moral of the Story
49
convinces her that she is bad. T h e bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good.
T h e moral o f the story should, one would think,
preclude a happy ending. It does not. T h e moral o f the
story is the happy ending. It tells us that happiness for
a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or
asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who
is good —inert, passive, victim ized—and that a good
woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.
Part Two
THE PORNOGRAPHY
Among my brethren are many who dream
with wet pleasure of the eight hundred
pains and humiliations, but I am the other
kind: I am a slave who dreams of escape
after escape, I dream only of escaping,
ascent, of a thousand possible ways to
make a hole in the wall, of melting the
bars, escape escape, of burning the whole
prison down if necessary.
Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre
Bookshop shelves are lined with pornography. It is a
staple o f the market place, and where it is illegal it
flourishes and prices soar. From The Beautiful Flagellants of New York to Twelve Inches around the World, cheap-editioned, overpriced renditions o f fucking, sucking,
whipping, footlicking, gangbanging, etc., in all o f their
manifold varieties are available — whether in the supermarket or on the black market. Most literary pornography is easily describable: repetitious to the point o f inducing catatonia, ill-conceived, simple-minded, brutal, and very ugly. Why, then, do we spend our money on it? Why, then, is it erotically stimulating for masses
o f men and women?
Literary pornography is the cultural scenario o f
male/female. It is the collective scenario o f master/
slave. It contains cultural truth: men and women, grown
now out o f the fairy-tale landscape into the castles o f
erotic desire; woman, her carnality adult and explicit,
her role as victim adult and explicit, her guilt adult
and explicit, her punishment lived out on her flesh, her
end annihilation —death or complete submission.
Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It
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is the structure of male and female mind, the content
o f our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and
mile o f our oppression and despair. Here we move beyond childhood terror. Here the fear is clammy and real, and rightly so. Here we are compelled to ask the
real questions: why are we defined in these ways, and
how can we bear it?
C H A P T E R 3
Woman as Victim:
Story of O
T h e Story of O, by Pauline Reage, incorporates, along
with all literary pornography, principles and characters already isolated in my discussion o f children’s fairy tales. T h e female as a figure o f innocence and evil enters the adult w orld—the brutal world o f genitalia.
T h e female manifests in her adult fo rm —cunt. She
emerges defined by the hole between her legs. In addition, Story o f O is more than simple pornography. It claims to define epistemologically what a woman is,
what she needs, her processes o f thinking and feeling,
her proper place. It links men and women in an erotic
dance o f some magnitude: the sado-masochistic complexion o f O is not trivial —it is formulated as a cosmic principle which, articulates, absolutely, the feminine.
Also, O is particularly compelling for me because I
once believed it to be what its defenders claim — the
mystical revelation o f the true, eternal, and sacral
destiny o f women. T h e book was absorbed as a pulsating, erotic, secular Christianity (the joy in pure suffering, woman as Christ figure). I experienced O with the same infantile abandon as the Newsweek reviewer who
wrote: “What lifts this fascinating book above mere
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perversity is its movement toward the transcendence
o f the self through a gift of the self. . . to give the body,
to allow it to be ravaged, exploited, and totally possessed can be an act of consequence, if it is done with love for the sake of love. ” 1 Any clear-headed appraisal
of O will show the situation, O’s condition, her behavior, and most importantly her attitude toward her oppressor as a logical scenario incorporating Judeo-Christian values of service and self-sacrifice and universal notions of womanhood, a logical scenario demonstrating the psychology of submission and self-hatred found in all oppressed peoples. O is a book of astounding political significance.
This is, then, the story of O: O is taken by her lover
Rene to Roissy and cloistered there; she is fucked,
sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a
regular and continuing basis —she is programmed to
be an erotic slave, Rene’s personal whore; after being
properly trained she is sent home with her lover; her
lover gives her to Sir Stephen, his half-brother; she is
fucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a regular and continuing basis; she is ordered to become the lover of Jacqueline and to recruit her for
Roissy, which she does; she is sent to Anne-Marie to be
branded with Sir Steph
en’s mark and to have rings with
his insignia inserted in her cunt; she serves as an erotic
model for Jacqueline’s younger sister Natalie who is
infatuated with her; she is taken to a party masked as
an owl, led on a leash by Natalie, and there plundered,
despoiled, raped, gangbanged; realizing that there is
nothing else left for Sir Stephen to do with her or to her,
fearing that he will abandon her, she asks his permis-
Woman as Victim: Story of O
57
sion to kill herself and receives it. Q . E. D., pornography
is never big on plot.
O f course, like most summaries, the above is somewhat sketchy. I have not mentioned the quantities o f cock that O sucks, or the anal assaults that she sustains,
or the various rapes and tortures perpetrated on her by
minor characters in the book, or the varieties o f whips
used, or described her clothing or the different kinds o f
nipple rouge, or the many ways in which she is chained,
or the shapes and colors o f the welts on her body.
From the course o f O ’s story emerges a clear mythological figure: she is woman, and to name her O, zero, emptiness, says it all. Her ideal state is one o f complete
passivity, nothingness, a submission so absolute that
she transcends human form (in becoming an owl). Only
the hole between her legs is left to define her, and the
symbol o f that hole must surely be O. Much, however,
even in the rarefied environs o f pornography, necessarily interferes with the attainment o f utter passivity.
Given a body which takes up space, has needs, makes
demands, is connected, even symbolically, to a personal
history which is a sequence o f likes, dislikes, skills,
opinions, one is formed, shaped—one exists at the very
least as positive space. And since in addition as a woman
one is born guilty and carnal, personifying the sins o f
Eve and Pandora, the wickedness o f Jezebel and Lucre-
tia Borgia, O ’s transcendence o f the species is truly
phenomenal.
T h e thesis o f O is simple. Woman is cunt, lustful,
wanton. She must be punished, tamed, debased. She
gives the gift o f herself, her body, her well-being,
her life, to her lover. This is as it should be —natural
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Woman Hating
and good. It ends necessarily in her annihilation, which
is also natural and good, as well as beautiful, because
she fulfills her destiny:
As long as I am beaten and ravished on your behalf, I
am naught but the thought of you, the desire of you,
the obsession of you. That, I believe, is what you
wanted. Well, I love you, and that is what I want too. 2
Then let him take her, if only to wound her! O hated
herself for her own desire, and loathed Sir Stephen
for the self-control he was displaying. She wanted him
to love her, there, the truth was out: she wanted him
to be chafing under the urge to touch her lips and
penetrate her body, to devastate her if need be. . . . 3
. . . Yet he was certain that she was guilty and, without
really wanting to, Rene was punishing her for a sin
he knew nothing about (since it remained completely
internal), although Sir Stephen had immediately detected it: her wantonness. 4
. . . no pleasure, no joy, no figment of her imagination
could ever compete with the happiness she felt at the
way he used her with such utter freedom, at the notion
that he could do anything with her, that there was no
limit, no restriction in the manner with which, on her
body, he might search for pleasure. 5
O is totally possessed. That means that she is an
object, with no control over her own mobility, capable
of no assertion of personality. Her body is a body, in
the same way that a pencil is a pencil, a bucket is a
bucket, or, as Gertrude Stein pointedly said, a rose is
a rose. It also means that O ’s energy, or power, as a
woman, as Woman, is absorbed. Possession here denotes a biological transference o f power which brings
Woman as Victim: Story of O
59
with it a commensurate spiritual strength to the possessor. O does more than offer herself; she is herself the offering. T o offer herself would be prosaic Christian
self-sacrifice, but as the offering she is the vehicle o f
the miraculous— she incorporates the divine.
Here sacrifice has its ancient, primal meaning:
that which was given at the beginning becomes the gift.
T h e first fruits o f the harvest were dedicated to and
consumed by the vegetation spirit which provided them.
T h e destruction o f the victim in human or animal
sacrifice or the consumption o f the offering was the
very definition o f the sacrifice—death was necessary
because the victim was or represented the life-giving
substance, the vital energy source, which had to be
liberated, which only death could liberate. A n actual
death, the sacrifice per se, not only liberated benevolent
energy but also ensured a propagation and increase o f
life energy (concretely expressed as fertility) by a sort
o f magical ecology, a recycling o f basic energy, or raw
power, a power which is transcendental and which has
as its essence the sacred processes o f life, death, and
regeneration.
But the full significance o f possession, both mystically and mythologically, is not yet clear. In mystic experience communion (wrongly called possession
sometimes) has meant the dissolution o f the ego, the
entry into ecstasy, union with and illumination o f the
godhead. T h e experience o f communion has been the
province o f the mystic, prophet, or visionary, those who
were able to alchemize their energy into pure spirit
and this spirit into a state o f grace. Possession, rightly
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defined, is the perversion of the mystic experience; it is
by its very nature demonic because its goal is power,
its means are violence and oppression. It spills the blood
of its victim and in doing so estranges itself from life-
giving union. O’s lover thinks that she gives herself
freely but if she did not, he would take her anyway.
Their relationship is the incarnation of demonic possession:
Thus he would possess her as a god possesses his
creatures, whom he lays hold of in the guise of a monster or bird, of an invisible spirit or a state of ecstasy.
He did not wish to leave her. The more he surrendered
her, the more he would hold her dear. The fact that
he gave her was to him a proof, and ought to be for
her as well, that she belonged to him: one can only
give what belongs to you. He gave her only to reclaim
her immediately, to reclaim her enriched in his eyes,
like some common object which had been used for some
divine purpose and has thus been consecrated. For a
long time he had wanted to prostitute her, and he was
delighted to feel that the pleasure he was deriving
was even greater than he had hoped
, and that it bound
him to her all the more so because, through it, she
would be more humiliated and ravished. Since she
loved him, she could not help loving whatever derived
from him. 6
A precise corollary of possession is prostitution. The
prostitute, the woman as object, is defined by the usage
to which the possessor puts her. Her subjugation is the
signet o f his power. Prostitution means for the woman
the carnal annihilation o f will and choice, but for the
man it once again signifies an increase in power, pure
and simple. To call the power o f the possessor, which he
Woman as Victim: Story of O
61
demonstrates by playing superpimp, divine, or to confuse it with ecstasy or communion, is to grossly misunderstand. “All the mouths that had probed her mouth, all the hands that had seized her breasts and
belly, all the members that had been thrust into her had
so perfectly provided the living proof that she was
worthy o f being prostituted and had, so to speak, sanctified her. ” 7 O f course, it is not O who is sanctified, but Rene, or Sir Stephen, or the others, through her.
O ’s prostitution is a vicious caricature o f old-world
religious prostitution. T h e ancient sacral prostitution
o f the Hebrews, Greeks, Indians, et al., was the ritual
expression o f respect and veneration for the powers o f
fertility and generation. T h e priestesses/prostitutes o f
the temple were literal personifications o f the life energy
o f the earth goddess, and transferred that energy to
those who participated in her rites. T h e cosmic principles, articulated as divine male and divine female, were ritually united in the temple because clearly only through
their continuing and repeated union could the fertility
o f the earth and the well-being o f a people be ensured.
Sacred prostitution was “nothing less than an act o f
communion with god (or godhead) and was as remote
from sensuality as the Christian act o f communion is
remote from gluttony. ” 8 O and all o f the women at