Woman Hating (8 page)

The main body of
Suck
is pornographic fiction. It is in the fiction that we find a repetition of events, situations, images, and attitudes which most effectively reinforce conventional sexist values. “Congo Crystal Hotel, ” a story by Mel Clay, is typical of
Suck
fiction. Two men watch a pornographic movie. They have a sadistic sexual encounter. One of the men, Beno, goes off to meet Carol, a woman he has known previously. He forces her to fuck and suck two Blacks, who violate her in every way. Carol’s husband intrudes. Beno forces Carol to suck her husband’s cock and as her husband comes, Beno shoots him. An example of the purple prose:

In a sudden spasm the man clutches her head and arches his back and as the beginning sensations of orgasm overtake him Beno pulls the trigger, the explosion drowning out the sound of Carol gulping on his come and his brains splashing against the ceiling.
⁵

Carol is announced: “he could smell her even before he saw her. ”
⁶
The rape which Beno forces on her is, of course, the vehicle of her recognition that she loves him, because only he could do that to her. The story contains incredible violence. Beno whips his male lover, Carol is beaten and raped, the husband is killed. The cocks of the Blacks are, of course, gigantic tools of pleasure and pain. There is little to distinguish “Congo Crystal Hotel” from straight pornography, except for the awful quality of the writing. The vision of woman is precisely the same: insatiable cunt, to be violated and abused; the sadomasochistic content is the same; even the exaggerated genitalia of the Blacks participate in the worst of the pornographic tradition.

“Sex Angels, ” a story by Ron Reid, chronicles the adventures of Helen and Tony, that is, a gangbang arranged by Helen with a bunch of tough bikers. Helen is “high class cunt who was soon to be stuffed with their working class cocks. ”
⁷
The class analysis is central to the story: “the social gulf accentuated the mounting thrill already high with the knowledge that the young husband was to observe his wife’s gangbanging by the pack. ”
⁸
The culmination of the event, after Helen has been thoroughly used, is described like this:

now hot wet fuck tube —hot slit, go on let see you fuck your wife now. we’ve all been through her.
⁹

Helen, whose resemblance to that other well-known sex object, Helen of Troy, will not be overlooked by the acute observer, is a “hot wet fuck tube —hot slit. ” Indeed, one must ask, in the world of
Suck
fiction, who of us is not?

The overwhelming fact which emerges about
Suck
fiction is that it contains and expresses the traditional male fantasies about women. Helen and Carol differ little from O and Claire. Their needs can be articulated in precisely the same way: cock, lots of it, all of the time, rape, violation, cruelty. If only our needs were so simple. If only our needs had anything to do with it at all.

Men have always known, in that existential-accord-ing-to-Mailer way, that women not only need IT but want IT, rape-brand-whip orchestrated. It was always obvious to them —a woman's “virtue” is merely facade, her reluctance is merely tactic. What matters is that she wants to be fucked —she is defined by her need to be fucked. We find in
Suck
these sacrosanct male fantasies applied with true counter-culture egalitarianism: to all beings “feminine, ” whether women or gay men. Projection has come home to roost and cock is crowing like never before —but, like the cult of cunt before it, the cult of cock is colored with the washes of unresolved guilt and pure sadism. The onus and hatred of male homosexuality is heavy in
Suck —
ugly, heavy, and ever present.

Suck
has in some ways aligned itself with the cause of gay liberation.
Suck
4
printed the “Gay Guide to Europe, ” a list of gay clubs, bars, pissoirs, etc., to alleviate the chronic need for information felt by the traveling gay man.
Suck
6
has a story entitled “A Week in the Fondle Park, ” in which a man extols the quantity of cock sucked in one idyllic week in Amsterdam’s central park, which had been turned over to longhaired dopers and freaks in the summer of 1971. But in
Suck, as in the parent culture which maligns any deviation from the ole hetero norm, the hatred attached to the queer is very apparent.

“The Suction Game” is the story of two men, one dark-skinned, one light-skinned, one overt, one latent — a typical colonial situation, ripe for exploitation. The acknowledged (overt) queer has the typical misogynist point of view:

Carlos explained that the male body was nature’s perfection and how clean men were compared to women.
¹⁰

To the normally) self-enhancing John Wayne male, the above is self-evident and always has been. In the context of the homosexual encounter it has added significance. It reinforces the maleness of both partners. It makes the homosexual act an affirmation of manhood. The insecurities which a homosexual identity conjures up in our culture, however, are hardly resolved through the putting down of women. “Cocksucker” is a term of insult and abuse —it means queer. Yet it is obviously absurd for a man to believe that what is pleasurable to him when done by a woman is disgusting when done by a man. The distinction here is not so very subtle: the political meaning of the two acts, heterosexual fellatio and homosexual fellatio, is different. The former makes the man clearly the master —the woman kneels at the foot of the sheikh. The latter makes the man
queer— ours is not to reason why, or is it?

Carlos (overt, dark-skinned), having unzipped the hero’s pants, has started kissing his glorious equipment:

Here I was standing in this tiny YMCA room, naked as the day I was born, with a pretty boy queer, kneeling in front of me playing with my cock. The whole thing was sickening, but the worst part was that I was enjoying it.... Suddenly I didn’t give a fuck if he was queer. I just relaxed and surrendered to his sucking mouth.
¹¹

The resultant orgasm is fantastic, mind-blowing, as aren’t they all in
Suck.
Yet the imminent slander is too much to bear. Being sucked by a queer is one thing. Reciprocity is something else. Could it be reciprocity that makes one queer?

He was a fucking queer but I wasn’t. If he had hot rock that was his problem not mine. He’ll just have to find some other queer to suck his cock.
¹²

Hot Rock Carlos is undaunted. After much patient persistance, our supermale hero succumbs, with reservations: “The idea was repulsive to me, but I wanted to make him happy. ”
¹³
The moral of the tale is simple. Says our hero:

Funny I do not consider myself queer, just damn lucky to be able to attract so many good looking young boys so they could have their rock inside me.
¹⁴

Only now does the definitive definition of queer seem to emerge. Cocksucking isn’t the definitive experience after all. One must conclude that anal intercourse, the closest corollary to female penetration, really defines the queer. One must conclude that being fucked in the ass separates the queers from the men and places them squarely among the women. One must conclude that being penetrated is queer, not to mention debasing, disgusting, and humiliating, which one had already guessed.

Homosexual men are not only penetrated like women —they also lust after pain and degradation. The author of “The Suction Game” has given us another example of homosexual pornography, this one engagingly entitled “Tough Young Dicks for Hot Kicks. ” Five young toughs are cruising; they pick up a longhaired boy, shove him in the back seat of the car and order him to blow them all; the boy considers refusing, since he’d love to be beaten then and there, but instead submits since greater abuse can always be had through submission than through resistance; the young toughs brutally rape the long-haired boy, then piss and shit all over him. He is, of course, ecstatic:

Gee did I smell of come and teenage sweat and urine and I had two more toss-offs myself thinking about their tough young faces and dicks enjoying me for hot kicks.
¹⁵

The stereotype of the homosexual which emerges from the general run of
Suck
fiction is not very different from the stereotype of woman. The homosexual is queer, asshole, cocksucker, faggot; the woman is hole, hot wet fuck tube, hot slit, or just plain ass. He thrives on pain and so does she. Gangbanging is their mutual joy. Huge, throbbing, monster, atom-smashing cock is god and master to them both. The parts they play in the sadomasochistic script are the same: so are costumes, attitudes, and other conventional cultural baggage. It is not hard to see that the struggle for gay male liberation and women’s liberation is a common struggle: both mean freedom from the stigma of being female. The fantasies (indicative of structural mental sets) which oppress male homosexuals and women are very much alike. Women and male homosexuals are united in their queerness, a union which is real and verifiable — affirmed by
Suck,
which contributes to the cultural oppression of both.

The pages of
Suck
have, sadly, nothing to do with sexual liberation — there is no “counter” to the culture to be found anywhere in them. They are, instead, a catalogue of exactly those sexist fantasies which express our most morbid psychic sets. They chart the landscape of repression, a landscape that is surprisingly familiar. As women, we find that we are where we have always been: the necessary victim, there we are, the victim again; the eternal object, there we are, the object again. Through the projection of archetypal sadomasochistic images, which are the staple of the sexist mentality, we become more a prisoner, robbed and cheated of any real experience or authentic communication, thrown back into the intricate confusion of being women in search of a usable identity.

Part Three

THE HERSTORY

We are a feelingless people. If we could really feel, the pain would be so great that we would stop all the suffering. If we could feel that one person every six seconds dies of starvation (and as this is happening, this writing, this reading, someone is dying of starvation) we would stop it. If we could really feel it in the bowels, the groin, in the throat, in the breast, we would go into the streets and stop the war, stop slavery, stop the prisons, stop the killings, stop destruction. Ah, I might learn what love is.

When we feel, we will feel the emergency: when we feel the emergency, we will act: when we act, we will change the world.

Julian Beck,
The Life of the Theatre

The rapes, tortures, and violations of O, Claire, Anne,
Suck's
Helen, et al., are fiction, documenting the twisted landscape of male wish-fulfillment. Here we have her-story, the underbelly of history, two acts of gynocide committed against women by men, their scope and substance largely ignored. One is not surprised to find that they document that same twisted landscape.

I isolate in particular Chinese footbinding and the persecution of the witches because they are crimes which equal in sheer horror and sadism the extermination of Native Americans and Hitler’s massacre of the Jews. Those two horrendous slaughters have found a place, however tenuous, in the “conscience” of “man. ” Acts of genocide against women have barely been noticed, and they have never evoked rage, or horror, or sorrow. That sexist hatred equals racist hatred in its intensity, irrationality, and contempt for the sanctity of human life these two examples clearly demonstrate. That women have not been exterminated, and will not be (at least until the technology of creating life in the laboratory is perfected) can be attributed to our presumed ability to bear children and, more importantly no doubt, to the relative truth that men prefer to fuck cunts who are nominally alive. I except here necrophili-acs, those pure and unsullied princes, whose story begins where ours ends.

In addition, in any war, in any violence between tribes or nations, a specific war crime is perpetrated against women —that of rape. Every woman raped during a political nation-state war is the victim of a much larger war, planetary in its dimensions —the war, more declared than we can bear to know, that men wage against women. That war had its most gruesome, grotesque expression when Chinese men bound the feet of Chinese women and when British, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, German, Dutch, French, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, and Amerikan men had women burned at the stake in the name of God the Father and His only Son.

FOOTBINDING EVENT

Instructions Before Reading Chapter

1.     Find a piece of cloth 10 feet long and 2 inches wide
2.     Find a pair of children’s shoes
3.     Bend all toes except the big one under and into the sole of the foot. Wrap the cloth around these toes and then around the heel. Bring the heel and toes as close together as possible. Wrap the full length of the cloth as tightly as possible
4.     Squeeze foot into children’s shoes
5.     Walk
6.     Imagine that you are 5 years old
7.     Imagine being like this for the rest of your life

CHAPTER 6