Intercourse (21 page)

Looking paler than usual in this book advances the plot.

She has been made female and Dracula is already drinking her blood. Later he will taunt the men: “‘Your girls that you love are all mine already... ”’
¹¹⁴
He especially wants Mina because she is ‘“their best-beloved one’”; she will be his ‘“bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper. ’”
¹¹⁵
She, unlike Lucy, is able to be a partner: to Dracula as well as to Jonathan. It is an early rendering of feminist as sex object as long as the sex is predicated on the complete destruction of her integrity.

Dracula
is a new narrative of intercourse and the phenomena associated with it: lust, seduction, penetration, possession, decadence and decay, death. With the creation of a new dimension of carnality for intercourse in literal cannibalism, virginity too takes on a new aspect. Being untouched by carnality now means any earthly existence in which sex is not predation and violence. Sex and slow murder become synonyms: a prescient heralding of the twentieth century three years before it began.

The sexual predator is murderous, a parasite that kills the host through sex, draining its body of blood; Dracula asleep “lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion. ”
¹¹⁶
The real sexuality—eternal, inescapable—is primitive and animal, killer-animal: “and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. ”
¹¹⁷
The humans are passive, waiting, female. Even the approach of the vampire—in this instance, an anonymous female vampire setting upon Jonathan Harker when he is trapped in Dracula’s castle—is inexpressibly thrilling:

I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart.
¹¹⁸

Mina’s first time with Dracula showed her reluctance, her only appearance of Victorianism—or is it resistance to rape? “I lay still and endured; that was all. ”
¹¹⁹
But soon after, with her husband asleep, Mina and Dracula couple right next to him:

With his [Dracula’s] left hand he held Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night-dress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare chest which was shown by his tom-open dress.
¹²⁰

The pull of Dracula’s sex is not possible to refuse; one becomes a carnivore; the sex is a permanent physiological and spiritual transformation, through dying, then death, into eternal, absolute lust. The lust is bloodlust, sex as murder. Mina feels the pull, and she also fights back, knowing herself to be contaminated, “unclean. ”
¹²¹
Lucy, the compliant female, could never resist—not man, not beast. Her virginal beauty is her femininity in life; in apparent death, this beauty is intact. A worker in the funeral home comments that she “‘makes a very beautiful corpse, sir. It’s quite a privilege to attend on her. It’s not too much to say that she will do credit to our establishment! ”’
¹²²
One former suitor notes that “[a]ll Lucy’s loveliness had come back to her in death... I could not believe my eyes that I was looking at a corpse. ”
¹²³
Buried, she begins her quest for blood, humans to feed on. She molests children. A newspaper reports on missing children who, when found, “have been slightly torn or wounded in the throat. The wounds seem such as might be made by a rat or a small dog... ”
¹²⁴
The carnage of her sexuality transforms her; being sexed transforms her— “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness. ”
¹²⁵
Caught by the men at the throat of a child, feeding on it, it was Lucy—“but Lucy’s eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew. ”
¹²⁶
When they go to destroy her in her coffin they find her “like a nightmare of Lucy... the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth... the whole carnal and unspirited appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity. ”
¹²⁷
Her evil makes her horrible and her evil is sex: but all sex less cruel than this sex does not count as sensation or experience. Lucy’s virginity would not have changed with human marriage; even sexual submission or sensual greed on the human scale would not register as sex here. One is an innocent if sex is not murder.

In
Dracula, vampirism is—to be pedestrian in the extreme— a metaphor for intercourse: the great appetite for using and being used; the annihilation of orgasm; the submission of the female to the great hunter; the driving obsessiveness of lust, which destroys both internal peace and any moral constraint; the commonplace victimization of the one taken; the great craving, never sated and cruelly impersonal. The act in blood is virtually a pun in metaphor on intercourse as the origin of life: reproduction; blood as nurture; the fetus feeding off the woman’s blood in utero. And with the great wound, the vagina, moved to the throat, there is, like a shadow, the haunting resonance of the blood-soaked vagina, in menstruation, in childbirth; bleeding when a virgin and fucked. While alive the women are virgins in the long duration of the first fuck, the draining of their blood over time one long, lingering sex act of penetration and violation; after death, they are carnal, being truly sexed. The women are transformed into predators, great foul parasites; and short of that, they have not felt or known lust or had sex, been touched in a way that transforms being— they have not been fucked. As humans, they begin to learn sex in dying. And the men, the human suitors and husbands, cannot give the good fuck; instead, they are given a new kind of sex too, not the fuck but
watching—watching the women die. And with the great wound, the vagina, moved to the throat, there is the harbinger of what has become a common practice of sexual assault now: throat rape, deep thrusting into the throat as if it were a female genital, a vagina, in the manner of the pornographic film
Deep Throat.
But
Dracula, the book, the myth, goes beyond metaphor in its intuitive rendering of an oncoming century filled with sexual horror: the throat as a female genital; sex and death as synonyms; killing as a sex act; slow dying as sensuality; men watching the slow dying, and the
watching
is sexual; mutilation of the female body as male heroism and adventure; callous, ruthless, predatory lust as the one-note meaning of sexual desire; intercourse itself needing blood, someone’s, somewhere, to count as a sex act in a world excited by sadomasochism, bored by the dull thud thud of the literal fuck. The new virginity is emerging, a twentieth-century nightmare: no matter how much we have fucked, no matter with how many, no matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freedom) or passion or promiscuous abandon, no matter how often or where or when or how, we are virgins, innocents, knowing nothing, untouched, unless blood has been spilled—ours; not the blood of the first time; the blood of every time; this elegant bloodletting of sex a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty, and despair. Trivial and decadent; proud; foolish; liars; we are free.

chapter seven

OCCUPATION/COLLABORATION

Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you’d have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more. Roaming around all that time with a bunch of men, fishing: and sermons-on-the-mount. Abandoning women. I thought of all the women who had it, and didn’t even know when the big moment was, and others saying their rosary with the beads held over the side of the bed, and others saying, “Stop, stop, you dirty old dog, ” and others yelling desperately to be jacked right up to their middles, and it often leading to nothing, and them getting up out of bed and riding a poor door knob and kissing the wooden face of a door and urging with foul language, then crying, wiping the knob, and it all adding up to nothing either.

Edna O’Brien

Girls in Their Married Bliss

T
HIS IS NIHILISM; OR THIS IS TRUTH. He has to push in past boundaries. There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied—physically, internally, in her privacy.

A human being has a body that is inviolate; and when it is violated, it is abused. A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. The discourse of male truth—literature, science, philosophy, pornography—calls that penetration
violation. This it does with some consistency and some confidence.
Violation
is a synonym for intercourse. At the same time, the penetration is taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use; it is appropriate to enter her, to push into (“violate”) the boundaries of her body. She is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include physical privacy. She is, in fact, human by a standard that precludes physical privacy, since to keep a man out altogether and for a lifetime is deviant in the extreme, a psychopathology, a repudiation of the way in which she is expected to manifest her humanity.

There is a deep recognition in culture and in experience that intercourse is both the normal use of a woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a violative abuse, her privacy irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable. And it is recognized that the use and abuse are not distinct phenomena but somehow a synthesized reality: both are true at the same time as if they were one harmonious truth instead of mutually exclusive contradictions.

Intercourse in reality is a use and an abuse simultaneously, experienced and described as such, the act parlayed into the illuminated heights of religious duty and the dark recesses of morbid and dirty brutality. She, a human being, is supposed to have a privacy that is absolute; except that she, a woman, has a hole between her legs that men can, must, do enter. This hole, her hole, is synonymous with entry. A man has an anus that can be entered, but his anus is not synonymous with entry. A woman has an anus that can be entered, but her anus is not synonymous with entry. The slit between her legs, so simple, so hidden—frankly, so innocent—for instance, to the child who looks with a mirror to see if it
could
be true—is there an entrance to her body down there? and something big comes into it? (how? ) and something as big as a baby comes out of it? (how? ) and doesn’t that hurt? —that slit that means entry into her—intercourse—appears to be the key to women’s lower human status. By definition, as the God who does not exist made her, she is intended to have a lesser privacy, a lesser integrity of the body, a lesser sense of self, since her body can be physically occupied and in the occupation taken over. By definition, as the God who does not exist made her, this lesser privacy, this lesser integrity, this lesser self, establishes her lesser significance: not just in the world of social policy but in the world of bare, true, real existence. She is defined by how she is made, that hole, which is synonymous with entry; and intercourse, the act fundamental to existence, has consequences to her being that may be intrinsic, not socially imposed.

There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonialized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag. There is nothing exactly the same, and this is not because the political invasion and significance of intercourse is banal up against these other hierarchies and brutalities. Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence. There is nothing that happens to any other civilly inferior people that is the same in its meaning and in its effect even when those people are forced into sexual availability, heterosexual or homosexual; while subject people, for instance, may be forced to have intercourse with those who dominate them, the God who does not exist did not make human existence, broadly speaking, dependent on their compliance. The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people—physically occupied inside, internally invaded—be free; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self-respect?

There are many explanations, of course, that try to be kind. Women are different but equal. Social policy is different from private sexual behavior. The staggering civil inequalities between men and women are simple, clear injustices unrelated to the natural, healthy act of intercourse. There is nothing implicit in intercourse that mandates male dominance in society. Each individual must be free to choose—and so we expand tolerance for those women who do not want to be fucked by men. Sex is between individuals, and social relations are between classes, and so we preserve the privacy of the former while insisting on the equality of the latter. Women flourish as distinct, brilliant individuals of worth in the feminine condition, including in intercourse, and have distinct, valuable qualities. For men and women, fucking is freedom; and for men and women, fucking is the same, especially if the woman chooses both the man and the act. Intercourse is a private act engaged in by individuals and has no implicit social significance. Repression, as opposed to having intercourse, leads to authoritarian social policies, including those of male dominance. Intercourse does not have a metaphysical impact on women, although, of course, particular experiences with individual men might well have a psychological impact. Intercourse is not a political condition or event or circumstance because it is natural. Intercourse is not occupation or invasion or loss of privacy because it is natural. Intercourse does not violate the integrity of the body because it is natural. Intercourse is fun, not oppression. Intercourse is pleasure, not an expression or confirmation of a state of being that is either ontological or social. Intercourse is because the God who does not exist made it; he did it right, not wrong; and he does not hate women even if women hate him. Liberals refuse categorically to inquire into even a possibility that there is a relationship between intercourse per se and the low status of women. Conservatives use what appears to be God’s work to justify a social and moral hierarchy in which women are lesser than men. Radicalism on the meaning of intercourse—its political meaning to women, its impact on our very being itself—is tragedy or suicide. “The revolutionary, ” writes Octavio Paz paraphrasing Ortega y Gasset, “is always a radical, that is, he
[sic]
is trying to correct the uses themselves rather than the mere abuses... ”* With intercourse, the use is already imbued with the excitement, the derangement, of the abuse; and abuse is only recognized as such socially if the intercourse is performed so recklessly or so violently or so stupidly that the man himself has actually signed a confession through the manner in which he has committed the act. What intercourse
is
for women and what it
does
to women’s identity, privacy, self-respect, self-determination, and integrity are forbidden questions; and yet how can a radical or any woman who wants freedom not ask precisely these questions? The quality of the sensation or the need for a man or the desire for love: these are not answers to questions of freedom; they are diversions into complicity and ignorance.