Intercourse (30 page)

She painted the suffering, enraged; she created an iconography of the
chingada
that was resistance, not pornography; knowing herself to be the screwed one, she made an art of passionate rebellion that shows the pain of inferiority delivered into your body—the violence of the contempt. Her rebellion, not in words, is less accessible than the capitulation of many female writers, exemplified by Marguerite Duras in
The Lover, a novel about a female child and her adult lover, male, rich, cruel, told from the point of view of the child who loves it, who celebrates being the screwed one:

He becomes rough, desperate, he throws himself on me, devours my childish breasts, shouts insults. I close my eyes on the intense pleasure.... His hands are expert, marvelous, perfect. I’m very lucky, obviously, it’s as if it were his profession, as if unwittingly he knew exactly what to do and what to say. He calls me a whore, a slut, he says I’m his only love, and that’s what he ought to say, and what you do say when you just let things say themselves, when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes...
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Internalizing the devaluation of self fundamental in being the screwed one, the slut, the whore, celebrating it, not rebelling one bit, female complicity does not even have the dignity or the insight of world-class misogyny; for instance, Nietzsche writing to Strindberg, “I read your tragedy twice with deep emotion; it has astounded me beyond measure to find a work in which my own conception of love—with war as its means and the deathly hatred of the sexes as its fundamental law—is so magnificently expressed. ”
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The ones who hate women outright know they are waging war; the complicitous women, awed by the intensity of that war on top of and inside of their own bodies, celebrate being the screwed one. The misogynists are eloquent in condemning the rebels: “Emancipated women, ” wrote Strindberg, using this euphemism for feminists, “are like an army of whores and would-be whores— professional whores with abnormal inclinations... ”
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The rebellion itself is the abnormal inclination pluralized by Strindberg’s great hatred of rebel women. The complicitous women are flattered by the homage shouted during the fuck; flattered or not, the homage is inevitable, an essential and defining element in identity and sexuality for women, a compliment impossible to escape in a woman-hating society where women are sex and dirt in one human body; the screwed one; “passive, inert, and open... ” In the more humane and sophisticated view of Graham Greene, certainly as compared with Nietzsche and Strindberg, sex with women, in an early novel, brought on “a terror of life, of going on soiling himself and repenting and soiling himself again. There was, he felt, no escape. ”
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Having had sex, the fictional antihero “longed with a ridiculous pathos for the mere physical purification of a bath. ”
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The woman, a kept woman though not by him, tells him: “Tor a day we are disgusted and disappointed and disillusioned and feel dirty all over. But we are clean again in a very short time, clean enough to go back and soil ourselves all over again. ’”
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The self-disgust, feeling dirty, is an outcome of sex often remarked on in literature; being clean means being chaste. The character feels himself to be trapped in “slime”; he has “wallowed”; he feels “dirtier. ”
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Slime is used as a metaphor for corruption, but its meaning is literal too, not specifically in Graham Greene though also in Graham Greene. The man is pulled down and in, the woman’s sensuality being, in the words of the Bible, a narrow pit, a deep ditch; “How can he be clean that is born of a woman? ” (Job 4: 4).
Pudendum
comes from the Latin
pudere, “to be ashamed. ” In Jewish and Islamic tradition, the word for uterus means grave:

The phrase, “her grave is open, ” refers to the woman’s body, and to the uterus in particular. According to an early Muslim tradition, Muhammad made the following statement to Ali: “A woman, when she gives birth, goes apart with the child. Her shame is open thus... ”

The expression “grave” for uterus occurs in the Mishna and the Talmud. When a child is being born, the “grave opens, ” that is to say, the womb of the mother opens. The “grave” begins to open when the woman is placed on the birth stool, or when blood begins to issue from her body...
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Inescapably, a woman’s body incarnates shame, her genitals especially signifying dirt and death: whether referred to in a
Playboy
party joke as “gash”
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or expounded on by Freud:

Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a consequence of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain.
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Just seeing those genitals turns a man gay or makes him rub up against rubber for a lifetime; to “surmount it, ” this great fear caused by these monstrous female genitals, means to mount her successfully, unintimidated by the wound, her castration, the blood, the slime, the filth. “Oh yes, ” wrote Freud to Jung, “I forgot to say that menstrual blood must be counted as excrement. ”
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Women are also wittily rebuked for having filthy genitals. Restif de la Bretonne, who was famous in the eighteenth century for sophisticated literary pornography, not overtly sadistic but astonishingly condescending, wrote in one of his fictions (a priest giving advice to a new courtesan):

“And, most important of all, you must observe frequent ablutions in the torrid zone of your anatomy! A woman, like the rooms of houses in the city of Amsterdam—which are washed three or four times a day—must observe the most careful hygiene in these parts. ”
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Amsterdam being frigid, not torrid, he has mixed his metaphors: or not.

Sexologist C. A. Tripp, recently in vogue, finds a material basis for the pervasive and longstanding conviction that women are genitally dirty: “fishlike vaginal odors. ”
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Because of this stink, the belief that women are unclean “has invaded one religion after the other in the form of charges of defilement. ”
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Van De Velde before him found that “extremely disgusting results occur when, owing to neglect of personal cleanliness where it is most needed, the natural local secretion becomes mixed with the products of urination, menstruation, and even with excrement! ”
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For Yeats, “... Love has pitched his mansion/in the house of excrement”;
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and Strindberg, his opposite in virtually every way, too gynophobic to say what he meant, put the filth on the other end—“I could, I suppose, get girls, but where sex is concerned I am an aristocrat. I demand that they use soap and a toothbrush. If I fuck once I shall have to pay the slut a hundredfold. And I don’t want to sow my seed in bad soil ... ”
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Vagina dentata
is vivid in Strindberg’s displacement to the mouth.

The filth of women is a central conceit in culture: taken to be a fact; noted, remarked on, explicated, analyzed, poetized, pornographized, satirized: genital filth, menstrual filth, excremental filth, filth down there, between the legs, in the hole, the wound oozing blood and slime, dirt and smell; the dirt inherent in the genitals or in her bad character—wash, slut, wash. She is dirt and what she touches is dirt because she contaminates, makes unclean; her dirt is a contagious dirt, defiling whatever she touches. As Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote in the nineteenth century: “Everything connected with woman was held to be unclean. It is stated that Agathro desired the Sophist Herodes to get ready for him the next morning a vessel full of pure milk, that is to say which had not been milked by the hand of a woman. But he perceived as soon as it was offered to him that it was not such as he desired, protesting that the scent of her hands who had milked it offended his nostrils. ”
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This is a contaminating smell, it spreads like a disease, epidemic; women, sexual lepers, the penis that should be there rotted away by the disease of being woman; a smelly, dirty gash, diseased, contagious. Men go there for sex, for love, believing it is a place of filth; finding it dirty and liking it dirty, wanting it dirty and needing it dirty. The dirt, the smell, bring on sex for the man, even if he has to force it on the woman. In
The War of the End of the World, a novel about a fundamentalist revolution in the backlands of Brazil, Mario Vargas Llosa describes a rape:

He smells the odor of her, and the thought dimly crosses his mind: “It’s the smell of a woman. ” His temples pound. With an effort he raises one arm, puts it around Jurema’s shoulders. He lets go of the revolver that he is still holding and his fingers awkwardly smooth her ruffled hair.... She begins struggling now to free herself from Gall’s grasp, but he will not let her go... Jurema lashes out at him with both fists, scratches his face... kicks at him...
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The rapist, a political man of the idealist left, recognizes the rape as oppression, himself as the oppressor. He is deeply disturbed by having raped: “It was that sudden, incomprehensible, irrepressible impulse that had made him rape Jurema after ten years of not touching a woman that was troubling his sleep”; the ten years of chastity the result of a vow made with a political comrade who “could take his pleasure with a woman only by inflicting punishment on her ... make love only when he saw a battered, bruised body. ”
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The friend used prostitutes whom he brutalized. To stop the brutality, they made a pact that neither would touch a woman again, an oath of political brotherhood around sex, comprehended as oppression of the poor. Now he himself had committed a violent rape, provoked by the smell of a woman, not the perfume of a lady but the flesh smell of a woman. Her smell triggered the violence, foreshadowed the sex, announced the genitals hidden from view, created for him the urgent necessity of penetration. In the ten years he had not needed sex. Now he recognizes that he needed rape; the oppressor needs to commit the oppression—not tepid consensual sex but violent sex. The smell of the woman is direct contact with her inferiority, her dirt in relation to his worth; as the oppressor, he expresses his need for her inferiority through rape.

One endearing aspect of male supremacy is that while men are persistently traumatized by the filth of women, the wounded and dirty genitals, the dirty menstrual blood that “must be counted as excrement, ” women are supposed to have a good attitude: accepting, even rejoicing in, these vile anatomical inevitabilities that are herself. As Bruno Bettelheim wrote, typical of those who will make women accept these physical devaluations of self:

The ambivalence of the girl’s feelings about her sex organs and about the lack of a penis has been repeatedly pointed out. Hope that a penis may be acquired in and through menstruation is an example of the positive aspect of this ambivalence. Many emotionally disturbed girls express its negative side by considering the penis horrible and ugly.
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It is fair to say that men are not ambivalent about “her sex organs. ” There is, therefore, for them no “negative side”; they do not consider the penis “horrible and ugly”; they are not “emotionally disturbed, ” no. The men are prick-proud, having no gash-envy, no filth-envy; a lust for immersion in dirt, but no envy, no mental illness, no maladjustment that particularly sticks out. Women who are so emotionally disturbed that they have a political analysis of the ways in which the penis is used, ways often horrible and ugly, are not beaten back into line by the psychiatrists but by the pornographers, as in this elegant rejoinder from
Playboy:

For the past decade, the penis has been getting a lot of bad press. One feminist wrote derisively: “We can stimulate ourselves or be stimulated by other women as well as men can stimulate us, because that unique male offering, the phallus, is of peripheral importance, or may even be irrelevant to our sexual satisfaction. ” Well, sit on my face, bitch.
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A man, despite the trauma and difficulty, immerses himself— for love, for sex, for children—in this mixture of secretion, urine, blood, and shit; he does it not just for himself but also for her—out of the most desperate sexual love, e. g., Swinburne: “He would have given his life for leave to touch her, his soul for a chance of dying crushed down under her feet... Deeply he desired to die by her, if that could be; and more deeply, if this could be, to destroy her”;
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or because she needs it, e. g., Van De Velde: “It is significant that the clitoris, in common with the rest of the female genital apparatus, only attains its full development and dimensions with regular and constant sexual intercourse. ”
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The styles of love and health change but never their imperatives: submit; do it. The dirty women are supposed to keep doing it; and the brave men, attracted to the filth, will keep going in, risking castration and death or risking the simple paralysis of masculinity that can result from just seeing the mutilated genitals that are the woman. He has pride in his penis to pull him through; his semen is “the strength of the body and its life, and the light in the eyes, ”
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according to Mai-monides. He can use semen to make her dirty but it ennobles him (being the source of life, cf. Aeschylus to Mailer). “You may be holding back, ” the Playboy Advisor says, “because you subconsciously think that coming in a woman’s mouth is somehow dirty or wrong. (You are absolutely right. That’s what makes it so much fun. )”
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In some pornography and in some sex murders, semen is spread all over the woman’s face, a man or men ejaculate all over her body; in literary pornography, to ejaculate is to
pollute
the woman. Women’s magazines sometimes recommend spreading semen on the face to enhance the complexion, pushing women to submit to a practice from pornography without any knowledge of its source or meaning. Getting women to accept semen and eroticize it in some regard—by swallowing it or spreading it on oneself— while having it remain violatory of the woman for the man in sex is the game plan; accomplished now through pornography and the collusion of woman-hating women’s magazines and in the old days, not so long ago, accomplished through the sex-manual advice of a medical doctor; Van De Velde wrote that “the odour of semen is exciting and stimulating to women, and unpleasant, even nauseating, to men. ”
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This gives semen its double-edged meaning and an intrinsic heterosexual power and significance. The possibilities of excitement for the woman and a simultaneous violation of the woman by the man are then explicated in a framework that appears on the surface to be moralistic: “For a woman (in coitus) the odour of the beloved man’s semen is delightful and excites her anew; but that of an unloved mate fills her with loathing. ”
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Even in the time of
Ideal Marriage, there were many unloved mates; the loathing she was filled with was literal—the loathing in the form of semen driven into her to dirty her or make her more dirty or make her dirty by him.