Woman Hating (5 page)

The thesis of O is simple. Woman is cunt, lustful, wanton. She must be punished, tamed, debased. She gives the gift of herself, her body, her well-being, her life, to her lover. This is as it should be —natural 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 of power which brings with it a commensurate spiritual strength to the possessor. O does more than offer herself; she is herself the offering. To offer herself would be prosaic Christian self-sacrifice, but as the offering she is the vehicle of the miraculous—she incorporates the divine.

Here sacrifice has its ancient, primal meaning: that which was given at the beginning becomes the gift. The first fruits of the harvest were dedicated to and consumed by the vegetation spirit which provided them. The destruction of the victim in human or animal sacrifice or the consumption of the offering was the very definition of 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. An actual death, the sacrifice per se, not only liberated benevolent energy but also ensured a propagation and increase of life energy (concretely expressed as fertility) by a sort of magical ecology, a recycling of basic energy, or raw power. O’s victimization is the confirmation of her power, a power which is transcendental and which has as its essence the sacred processes of life, death, and regeneration.

But the full significance of possession, both mystically and mythologically, is not yet clear. In mystic experience communion (wrongly called possession sometimes) has meant the dissolution of the ego, the entry into ecstasy, union with and illumination of the godhead. The experience of communion has been the province of the mystic, prophet, or visionary, those who were able to alchemize their energy into pure spirit and this spirit into a state of grace. Possession, rightly
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 of his power. Prostitution means for the woman the carnal annihilation of will and choice, but for the man it once again signifies an increase in power, pure and simple. To call the power of the possessor, which he 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 of being prostituted and had, so to speak, sanctified her. ”
⁷
Of 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 of old-world religious prostitution. The ancient sacral prostitution of the Hebrews, Greeks, Indians, et al., was the ritual expression of respect and veneration for the powers of fertility and generation. The priestesses/prostitutes of the temple were literal personifications of the life energy of the earth goddess, and transferred that energy to those who participated in her rites. The 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 of the earth and the well-being of a people be ensured. Sacred prostitution was “nothing less than an act of communion with god (or godhead) and was as remote from sensuality as the Christian act of communion is remote from gluttony. ”
⁸
O and all of the women at Roissy are distinguished by their sterility and bear no resemblance whatsoever to any known goddess. No mention is ever made of conception or menstruation, and procreation is never a consequence of fucking. O’s fertility has been rendered O. There is nothing sacred about O’s prostitution.

O’s degradation is occasioned by the male need for and fear of initiation into manhood. Initiation rites generally include a period of absolute solitude, isolation, followed by tests of physical courage, mental endurance, often through torture and physical mutilation, resulting in a permanent scar or tattoo which marks the successful initiate. The process of initiation is designed to reveal the values, rites, and rules of manhood and confers on the initiate the responsibilities and privileges of manhood. What occurs at Roissy is a clear perversion of real initiation. Rene and the others mutilate O’s body, but they are themselves untouched. Her body substitutes for their bodies. O is marked with the scars which they should bear. She undergoes their ordeal for them, endures the solitude and isolation, the torture, the mutilation. In trying to become gods, they have bypassed the necessary rigors of becoming men. The fact that the tortures must be repeated endlessly, not only on O but on large numbers of women who are forced as well as persuaded, demonstrates that the men of Roissy never in fact become men, are never initiates, never achieve the security of realized manhood.

What would be the sign of the initiate, the final mark or scar, manifests in the case of O as an ultimate expression of sadism. The rings through O’s cunt with Sir Stephen’s name and heraldry, and the brand on her ass, are permanent wedding rings rightly placed. They mark her as an owned object and in no way symbolize the passage into maturity and freedom. The same might be said of the conventional wedding ring.

O,  in her never-ending role as surrogate everything, also is the direct sexual link between Sir Stephen and Rene. That the two men love each other and fuck each other through O is made clear by the fact that Sir Stephen uses O anally most of the time. The consequences of misdirecting sexual energy are awesome indeed.

But what is most extraordinary about
Story of O
is the mind-boggling literary style of Pauline Reage, its author. O is wanton yet pure, Sir Stephen is cruel yet kind, Rene is brutal yet gentle, a wall is black yet white. Everything is what it is, what it isn’t, and its direct opposite. That technique, which is so skillfully executed, might help to account for the compelling irrationality of
Story of O.
For those women who are convinced yet doubtful, attracted yet repelled, there is this schema for self-protection:
the double-double think that the author engages in is very easy to deal with if we just realize that we only have to double-double unthink it
.

To sum up,
Story of O
is a story of psychic cannibalism, demonic possession, a story which posits men and women as being at opposite poles of the universe — the survival of one dependent on the absolute destruction of the other. It asks, like many stories, who is the most powerful, and it answers: men are, literally over women’s dead bodies.

CHAPTER 4

Woman as Victim: The Image

The Image, by Jean de Berg, is a love story, a Christian love story and also a story of Christian love. No book makes more clear the Christian experience of woman after the fall, as we know her, Eve’s unfortunate descendant.
The Image, like the catechism, is a handbook of Christianity in action. In addition,
The Image
is an almost clinical dissection of role-playing and its sex-relatedness, of duality as the structural basis of male-female violence.

It would be an exaggeration of some substance to call the following a summary of plot, but what happens in
The Image
is this: Jean de Berg, the auteur of
The Image, meets Claire, whom he has known casually for many years, at a party; he has always been interested in her, but her coldness, aloofness, and perfect beauty made her lack the necessary vulnerability which would have made her, in the
veni, vidi, vici
tradition, a desirable conquest; Claire introduces him to Anne, Innocent Young Girl Dressed In White, who, it turns out, is Claire’s slave; they go to a bar where Anne is offered to Jean de Berg; they go to a rose garden where Anne sticks a rose by its thorns into the flesh of her cunt; they go to a restaurant where Claire shames Anne, an event often repeated (Claire shames Anne by ordering her to raise her skirt, or lower her blouse, or by sticking her finger up Anne’s cunt); Claire shows Jean de Berg photographs in the artsy-craftsy sadomasochistic tradition for which Anne modeled, except for the last photograph, which is clearly a photo of Claire herself; Claire whips Anne; Anne sucks Jean de Berg’s cock; Jean de Berg takes Anne to buy lingerie and humiliates Anne and embarrasses the salesgirl by exhibiting Anne’s whip scars which are fresh; Anne is given a bath by Claire in Jean de Berg’s presence in which Anne is almost drowned (erotically); it occurs to Jean de Berg that he would like to fuck Claire —which causes Claire to increase the viciousness of her assaults on Anne; Anne is tortured in the Gothic chamber and then ravaged anally by Jean de Berg; Jean de Berg goes home, has a dream about Claire, is awakened by a knock on the door, and lo and behold! Claire has recognized her true role in life (“ ‘I have come, ’ she said quietly”)
¹
— that of Jean de Berg’s slave. He hits her, and she lives happily ever after.

Of course, the above is again somewhat sketchy. I did not mention that Anne was forced to piss in public in the rose garden, or how she was nasty to Jean de Berg in a bookstore (a crucial point —since she then had to be punished), or how she fetched the whips herself, or how she was made to serve Claire and Jean de Berg orangeade before they stuck burning needles in her breasts.

The characterizations have even less depth and complexity, not to mention subtlety and sensitivity, than the plot. Claire is cold and aloof. Jean de Berg describes her:

Claire was very beautiful, as I said, probably even more beautiful than her friend in the white dress. But unlike the latter, she had never aroused any real emotion in me. This astonished me at first, but then I told myself that it was her impeccable beauty, precisely, her very perfection that made it impossible to think of her as a potential “conquest. ” I probably needed to feel that some little thing about her, at least, was vulnerable, in order to arouse any desire in me to win her.
²

He later writes: “Her classic features, her cold beauty, her remoteness made me think of some goddess in exile."
³
Here the female characterization is explicit: vulnerability as the main quality of the human; coldness as the main quality of the goddess. As in most fiction, the female characterization is synonymous with an appraisal of the figure’s beauty, its type, and most importantly, its effect on the male figures in the book.