Intercourse (5 page)

“Spiritual affinity! Identity of ideals!... But in that case why go to bed together? (Excuse my coarseness! ) Or do people go to bed together because of the identity of their ideals? ” he said, bursting into a nervous laugh.
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People marry, he says, for “‘nothing but copulation! ’”
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Then, he thinks that he is recognized; a notorious man who killed his wife, has been on trial, has been acquitted. The woman and others move to a different car. The narrator, until now an unobtrusive “I, ” stays on; and the killer/husband tells how and why he killed his wife. He is cynical, bitter, overwrought, unbalanced, extreme in his ideas; yet analytical, with a shrewd intelligence. He may be unhinged or not. Was he, when he killed his wife? Is he, because he killed his wife? His ideas are lucid, with no sense of proportion. His antagonism to sexual intercourse is absolute. His social critique repudiates all the sexual commonplaces, the rites and rituals of socially normal sexuality, including the allowed sexual indulgences of unmarried men and the allowed adulteries of married men. His critique is not of superficial conventions or deeper hypocrisies. It is a radical critique of the elements of social life that maintain intercourse as a right, as a duty, or as pleasure, no matter what the cost of intercourse as such, no matter to whom. The violence in his marriage—the violence of feeling and the final act of killing—had for him an internal logic and inevitability, because intercourse distorts and ultimately destroys any potential human equality between men and women by turning women into objects and men into exploiters. He is a political dissident with a social analysis, not a personal psychology. He is tormented by the depravity of the sex act; but
depravity
has a political meaning rooted in a comprehension, almost unique in male literature, of the fundamental simplicity and destructiveness of sexual exploitation:

“the enslavement of woman lies simply in the fact that people desire, and think it good, to avail themselves of her as a tool of enjoyment. Well, and they liberate woman, give her all sorts of rights equal to man, but continue to regard her as an instrument of enjoyment, and so educate her in childhood and afterwards by public opinion. And there she is, still the same humiliated and depraved slave, and the man still a depraved slave-owner.

“They emancipate women in universities and in law courts, but continue to regard her as an object of enjoyment. Teach her, as she is taught among us, to regard herself as such, and she will always remain an inferior being. ”
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Depravity,
debauchery,
dissoluteness
, all connote this exploitation of women, who remain inferior because of it, for pleasure. 

In telling his story, the killer/husband sets out the preconditions for the murder of his wife, the social and sexual experiences that primed him to kill her. He describes himself as typical of his class: landed, gentry, university educated. Before marriage, he lived ‘“like everybody else in our class’”
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— meaning the men, the sex class within the social class (the women with whom he had sex were prostitutes and peasants). He had sex with women regularly, avoided making any commitments to any woman, and considered regular sex necessary to his physical health. This general pattern he characterizes as ‘“living dissolutely, ”’ “‘debauchery. ’”
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At the time, he thought he was moral because “‘I was not a seducer, had no unnatural tastes, and did not make that the chief purpose of my life as many of my associates did... ”’
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The debauchery, the dissoluteness, was not physical, not conduct; instead, “‘real debauchery lies precisely in freeing oneself from moral relations with a woman with whom you have physical intimacy. ’”
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He valued the absence of any moral dimension to sex as freedom. This absence especially signified the inferiority of the woman, because relations with a human on the same level as oneself always have a moral dimension (which does not mean that one is morally good, only that one is morally accountable). Once he worried obsessively because he had not been able to pay a woman with whom he had had sex. He was finally at peace when he found her and paid her. The money repudiated the possibility of any human sameness between him and her; and this put him at ease. It put her in her place as his inferior—the proper closure to sex. It is this superiority, this contemptuous but absolutely normal
 
and unremarkable arrogance, that he now sees as the essence of sexual depravity, and also as a first step toward killing his wife. Having actually killed, he sees the sex he took for granted as murderous in its diminution of human life—how it made women’s humanity invisible, meaningless; but the prerogatives of both sex and class made the exploitation as invisible as gravity, as certain.

Long before he had touched a woman, this depravity, this exploitation, was rooted in his mind, a form of torment. He was tormented by “‘woman, not some particular woman but woman as something to be desired, woman, every woman, woman’s nudity... ”’
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This impersonal something was at the heart of his desire: objectlike, not human and individual; not someone in particular but a body, perhaps a symbol, a configuration of flesh; something to have. The first time he had sex was “‘something special and pathetic, ”’ “‘I felt sad, so sad that I wanted to cry. ’”
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He describes the sex following that first experience as addiction, compares having sex with taking morphine or drinking; “‘To be a libertine is a physical condition like that of a morphinist, a drunkard, or a smoker, ”’
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he says, particularly locating libertinism in how a man looks at a woman, examines her—the behavior most clearly indicating the deep, internal process of objectification. Because the man is compulsive, because he objectifies, because he exploits and is therefore depraved, relations with women as human beings—what he characterizes as “‘brotherly relations with a woman’”
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—are impossible. The loss of innocence—the loss of virginity for a man already socialized to exploit—is a real and irreversible corruption of his capacity to love a woman as a human being. When he marries, he is unable to know or to love the woman as an individual. The depravity of being a calloused exploiter is what he brings to the marriage bed and to the relationship as a whole.

The killer/husband, when engaged, showed his fiancee his diary (as Tolstoy did) with descriptions of women he had known, affairs he had had. He remembers “‘her horror, despair, and confusion, when she learnt of it and understood it. ’”
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On their honeymoon, he felt ‘“awkward, ashamed, repelled, sorry ... '"
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It is necessary for the husband to ‘“cultivate that vice in his wife in order to derive pleasure from it. ’”
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The narrator argues that there is no vice, that sex is natural. The killer/husband maintains that it is unnatural, and contrasts it to eating, which is, he says, “‘from the very beginning, enjoyable, easy, pleasant, and not shameful; but this is horrid, shameful, and painful. ’”
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Asked by the narrator how the human race would continue, the killer/husband says simply that the human race will cease—both religion and science say so and everyone knows that it is true. If the goal of mankind is universal peace, “‘that the spears should be beaten into pruning-hooks, ”’
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then the end of intercourse would be an essential, utterly logical part of achieving that promised peace:

“Of all the passions the strongest, cruellest, and most stubborn is the sex-passion, physical love; and therefore if the passions are destroyed, including the strongest of them—physical love—the prophecies will be fulfilled, mankind will be brought into a unity, the aim of human existence will be attained, and there will be nothing further to live for. ”
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This universal peace, following on the beating of the spears into pruning hooks or plowshares, requires not just occasional chastity on the part of some, but a deep and committed chastity on the part of all—this to achieve a reconciliation between men and women that physical love, with its strong, cruel passion, makes impossible. Repeatedly characterizing intercourse as swinish, Tolstoy’s killer/husband tells how proud he was of‘“animal excesses, ”’ “‘these physical excesses, and without in the least considering either her spiritual or even her physical life. ’”
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We pretend, he says, that love is ideal, exalted, but nature made it shameful and disgusting; we only pretend that it is not. He feels repulsion for the act and for the relationship that it creates, these being two parts of a whole, consistently condemned because they are inextricably intertwined. The sex act and the relationship it constructs cannot be separated in his analysis or in his loathing. At first there were long periods of lovemaking, followed by periods of anger, quarrels. The fights were “‘only the consequence of the cessation of sensuality. ’”
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Their real relationship became “‘cold and hostile, ”’
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but sensuality distorted their perception of it, because the hostility would soon be covered up by renewed periods of physical love. A cynicism begins to characterize their relationship. They would make love until ‘“[a]morousness was exhausted by the satisfaction of sensuality and we were left confronting one another in our true relation... as two egotists quite alien to each other who wished to get as much pleasure as possible from each other. ’”
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The emotions engendered in him by intercourse, during the periods of it, became extreme: rage, hatred of her caused by the smallest movement or gesture—pouring the tea in a certain way or smacking her lips. He felt this grandiose rage and hatred in response to trivialities during the periods of physical lovemaking; and when those periods were over, he felt animosity, hostility, and coldness. As the marriage advanced in years—this passage being in an early version of
The Kreutzer Sonata—“'[t]he periods of what we called love occurred as often as before, but were barer, coarser, and lacked any cover. But they did not last long and were immediately followed by periods of quite causeless anger springing up on most unintelligible grounds. ’”
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In the early years of marriage, he appears to be saying, anger followed periods of physical lovemaking—they had fights inevitably in the aftermath of any such period. But then, as he describes it, the hostility between them got covered over by renewed periods of sensuality. The hostility, then, got interwoven into the times of sex and the sex act (which were already in his view depraved, because he was an exploiter), so that during periods of repeated intercourse, which may have lasted weeks or days, there was always rage and hatred on his part toward her—something quite different from the effortless exploitation he indulged in as an unmarried man. In the early part of the marriage, the anger was intrinsic to the sex act, because it was an inevitable consequence of being finished with it: satiation—not just the climax of one fuck, but being sated from immersion in periods of physical lovemaking—led inevitably to conflict. Later, the rage and hatred were intrinsic to the sex, because the sex had brought him to her and he had contempt for her. He viewed her with hostility all the time, including when he had sex with her. The alternating early experiences of sex followed by coldness, hostility, fighting, synthesized into a relationship in which he hated her all the time and fucked her sometimes.

For women, according to the killer/husband, virginity is the highest state, an ideal; and a fall from virginity is a fall into trivialization, into being used as a thing; one dresses up to be the thing; one does not have a full humanity but must conform to the rituals and conventions of debasement as a sexual object. But this reduction of humanity into being an object for sex carries with it the power to dominate men because men want the object and the sex. The rage against women as a group is particularly located here: women manipulate men by manipulating men’s sexual desire; these trivial, mediocre things (women) have real power over men through sex. Women know, and men do not want to know, ‘“that the most exalted poetic love, as we call it, depends not on moral qualities but on physical nearness and on the
coiffure... ”’
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The immorality of women is stressed: a woman would rather be convicted of any moral outrage—lying, cruelty, dissoluteness—in the presence of a man she wants than to be seen in an ugly dress. In this reduction from fully human (virgin) to sex object (one who exists to attract men), women achieve power over men, because women know “‘that we are continually lying about high sentiments, but really only want her body... ”’
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This dominance of men by women is experienced by the men as real—emotionally real, sexually real, psychologically real; it emerges as the reason for the wrath of the misogynist. The whole world suffers, says the killer/husband, from the domination of men by women. The narrator points out that all rights, all privileges, all laws, are on the side of men and favor men; but the killer/husband, using a pernicious analogy, sees that powerlessness generates revenge, and revenge is what women accomplish in the sensuality he experiences as their dominance, his powerlessness:

“on the one hand woman is reduced to the lowest stage of humiliation, while on the other hand she dominates. Just like the Jews: as they pay us back for their oppression by financial domination, so it is with women. Ah, you want us to be traders only—all right, as traders we will dominate you! ’ say the Jews. Ah, you want us to be merely objects of sensuality—all right, as objects of sensuality we will enslave you. ’”
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