Last Days at Hot Slit Page 12
In pornography, men express the tenets of their unchanging faith, what they must believe is true of women and of themselves to sustain themselves as they are, to ward off recognition that a commitment to masculinity is a double-edged commitment to both suicide and genocide. In life, the objects are fighting back, rebelling, demanding that every breath be reckoned with as the breath of a living person, not a viper trapped under a rock, but an authentic, willful, living being. In pornography, the object is slut, sticking daggers up her vagina and smiling. A bible piling up its code for centuries, a secret corpus gone public, a private corpus gone political, pornography is the male’s sacred stronghold, a monastic retreat for manhood on the verge of its own destruction. As one goes through the pictures of the tortured and maimed, reads the stories of gang rape and bondage, what emerges most clearly is a portrait of men who need to believe in their own absolute, unchangeable, omnipresent, eternal, limitless power over others. Every image reveals not the so-called object in it but the man who needs it: to keep his prick big when every bomb dwarfs it; to keep his sense of masculine self intact when the world of his own creation has made that masculine self a useless and rather silly anachronism; to keep women the enemy even though men will destroy him and he by being faithful to them will be responsible for that destruction; to sustain his belief in the righteousness of his real abuses of women when, in fact, they would be insupportable and unbearable if he dared to experience them as what they are—the bullying brutalities of a coward too afraid of other men to betray or abandon them. Pornography is the holy corpus of men who would rather die than change. Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated, every vile prison or dungeon brought into the bedroom and celebrated, police torture and thug mentality brought into the bedroom and celebrated—men reveal themselves and all that matters to them in these depictions of real history, plasticized and rarefied, represented as the common erotic stuff of male desire. And the pictures and stories lead right back to history—to peoples enslaved, maimed, murdered—because they show that, for men, the history of atrocity they pretend to mourn is coherent and utterly intentional if one views it as rooted in male sexual obsession. Pornography reveals that slavery, bondage, murder, and maiming have been acts suffused with pleasure for those who committed them or who vicariously experienced the power expressed in them. Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.
PORNOGRAPHY
The word pornography, derived from the ancient Greek pórnē and graphos, means “writing about whores.” Pórnē means “whore,” specifically and exclusively the lowest class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut available to all male citizens. The pórnē was the cheapest (in the literal sense), least regarded, least protected of all women, including slaves. She was, simply and clearly and absolutely, a sexual slave. Graphos means “writing, etching, or drawing.”
The word pornography does not mean “writing about sex” or “depictions of the erotic” or “depictions of sexual acts” or “depictions of nude bodies” or “sexual representations” or any other such euphemism. It means the graphic depiction of women as vile whores. In ancient Greece, not all prostitutes were considered vile: only the porneia.
Contemporary pornography strictly and literally conforms to the word’s root meaning: the graphic depiction of vile whores, or, in our language, sluts, cows (as in: sexual cattle, sexual chattel), cunts. The word has not changed its meaning and the genre is not misnamed. The only change in the meaning of the word is with respect to its second part, graphos: now there are cameras—there is still photography, film, video. The methods of graphic depiction have increased in number and in kind: the content is the same; the meaning is the same; the purpose is the same; the status of the women depicted is the same; the sexuality of the women depicted is the same; the value of the women depicted is the same. With the technologically advanced methods of graphic depiction, real women are required for the depiction as such to exist.
The word pornography does not have any other meaning than the one cited here, the graphic depiction of the lowest whores. Whores exist to serve men sexually. Whores exist only within a framework of male sexual domination. Indeed, outside that framework the notion of whores would be absurd and the usage of women as whores would be impossible. The word whore is incomprehensible unless one is immersed in the lexicon of male domination. Men have created the group, the type, the concept, the epithet, the insult, the industry, the trade, the commodity, the reality of woman as whore. Woman as whore exists within the objective and real system of male sexual domination. The pornography itself is objective and real and central to the male sexual system. The valuation of women’s sexuality in pornography is objective and real because women are so regarded and so valued. The force depicted in pornography is objective and real because force is so used against women. The debasing of women depicted in pornography and intrinsic to it is objective and real in that women are so debased. The uses of women depicted in pornography are objective and real because women are so used. The women used in pornography are used in pornography. The definition of women articulated systematically and consistently in pornography is objective and real in that real women exist within and must live with constant reference to the boundaries of this definition. The fact that pornography is widely believed to be “sexual representations” or “depictions of sex” emphasizes only that the valuation of women as low whores is widespread and that the sexuality of women is perceived as low and whorish in and of itself. The fact that pornography is widely believed to be “depictions of the erotic” means only that the debasing of women is held to be the real pleasure of sex. As Kate Millett wrote, women’s sexuality is reduced to the one essential: “cunt… our essence, our offense.”1 The idea that pornography is “dirty” originates in the conviction that the sexuality of women is dirty and is actually portrayed in pornography; that women’s bodies (especially women’s genitals) are dirty and lewd in themselves. Pornography does not, as some claim, refute the idea that female sexuality is dirty: instead, pornography embodies and exploits this idea; pornography sells and promotes it.
In the United States, the pornography industry is larger than the record and film industries combined. In a time of widespread economic impoverishment, it is growing: more and more male consumers are eager to spend more and more money on pornography—on depictions of women as vile whores. Pornography is now carried by cable television; it is now being marketed for home use in video machines. The technology itself demands the creation of more and more porneia to meet the market opened up by the technology. Real women are tied up, stretched, hanged, fucked, gang-banged, whipped, beaten, and begging for more. In the photographs and films, real women are used as porneia and real women are depicted as porneia. To profit, the pimps must supply the porneia as the technology widens the market for the visual consumption of women being brutalized and loving it. One picture is worth a thousand words. The number of pictures required to meet the demands of the marketplace determines the number of porneia required to meet the demands of graphic depiction. The numbers grow as the technology and its accessibility grow. The technology by its very nature encourages more and more passive acquiescence to the graphic depictions. Passivity makes the already credulous consumer more credulous. He comes to the pornography a believer; he goes away from it a missionary. The technology itself legitimizes the uses of women conveyed by it.
In the male system, women are sex; sex is the whore. The whore is pórnē, the lowest whore, the whore who belongs to all male citizens: the slut, the cunt. Buying her is buying pornography. Having her i
s having pornography. Seeing her is seeing pornography. Seeing her sex, especially her genitals, is seeing pornography. Seeing her in sex is seeing the whore in sex. Using her is using pornography. Wanting her means wanting pornography. Being her means being pornography.
WHORES
The best houses do not exhibit the women in cages.
—The Nightless City or the History of the Yoshiwara Yukwaku, 1899 report on a red-light district in Japan
Male sexual domination is a material system with an ideology and a metaphysics. The sexual colonialization of women’s bodies is a material reality: men control the sexual and reproductive uses of women’s bodies. The institutions of control include law, marriage, prostitution, pornography, health care, the economy, organized religion, and systematized physical aggression against women (for instance, in rape and battery). Male domination of the female body is the basic material reality of women’s lives; and all struggle for dignity and self-determination is rooted in the struggle for actual control of one’s own body, especially control over physical access to one’s own body. The ideology of male sexual domination posits that men are superior to women by virtue of their penises; that physical possession of the female is a natural right of the male; that sex is, in fact, conquest and possession of the female, especially but not exclusively phallic conquest and phallic possession; that the use of the female body for sexual or reproductive purposes is a natural right of men; that the sexual will of men properly and naturally defines the parameters of a woman’s sexual being, which is her whole identity. The metaphysics of male sexual domination is that women are whores. This basic truth transcends all lesser truths in the male system. One does not violate something by using it for what it is: neither rape nor prostitution is an abuse of the female because in both the female is fulfilling her natural function; that is why rape is absurd and incomprehensible as an abusive phenomenon in the male system, and so is prostitution, which is held to be voluntary even when the prostitute is hit, threatened, drugged, or locked in. The woman’s effort to stay innocent, her effort to prove innocence, her effort to prove in any instance of sexual use that she was used against her will, is always and unequivocably an effort to prove that she is not a whore. The presumption that she is a whore is a metaphysical presumption: a presumption that underlies the system of reality in which she lives. A whore cannot be raped, only used. A whore by nature cannot be forced to whore—only revealed through circumstance to be the whore she is. The point is her nature, which is a whore’s nature. The word whore can be construed to mean that she is a cunt with enough gross intelligence to manipulate, barter, or sell. The cunt wants it; the whore knows enough to use it. Cunt is the most reductive word; whore adds the dimension of character—greedy, manipulative, not nice. The word whore reveals her sensual nature (cunt) and her natural character.
“No prostitute of anything resembling intelligence,” writes Mencken, “is under the slightest duress…”1 “What is a prostitute?” asks William Acton in his classic work on prostitution. “She is a woman who gives for money that which she ought to give only for love…”2 Jane Addams, who worked against the so-called white slave trade, noted that “[t]he one impression which the trial [of procurers] left upon our minds was that all the men concerned in the prosecution felt a keen sense of outrage against the method employed to secure the girl [kidnapping], but took for granted that the life she was about to lead was in the established order of things, if she had chosen it voluntarily.”3 Only the maternal can mitigate the whorish, an opposition more conceptual than real, based on the assumption that the maternal or older woman is no longer desired. Freud writes Jung that a son approaching adulthood naturally loses his incestuous desires for the mother “with her sagging belly and varicose veins.”4 René Guyon, who argued for male-defined sexual liberation, writes that “[w]oman ages much sooner. Much earlier in life she loses her freshness, her charm, and begins to look withered or over-ripe. She ceases to be an object of desire.”5 The mother is not the whore only when men have stopped desiring her.
Guyon, in whose name societies for sexual freedom exist today, held that women were defined exclusively by their sexuality, which was essentially, and intrinsically the sexuality of the prostitute. “Women’s sexual parasitism,” writes Guyon, “is innate. She has a congenital tendency to rely on man for support, availing herself of her sexual arts, offering in return for maintenance (and more, if she can get it) the partial or complete possession of her person.”6 This propensity for exchanging her body for material goods is her sexuality, her purpose, her passion, and consequently “[s]ale or contract, monogamy or harem—these words mean little to her in comparison with the goal.”7 For this reason, Guyon contends that even the so-called white slave trade—the organized abduction of lone or young or destitute women for the purposes of prostitution—cannot be construed as forcible prostitution:
How hypocritical it is to speak of the White [sic] Slave Trade only as a means for recruiting the ranks of prostitution. The White [sic] Slave Trade is universal, being carried on with the consent of the “slaves,” since every woman has a specific sexual value. She must sell herself to the highest bidder, even though she cheat as to the quality of the goods.8
Like most male advocates of sexual freedom (the unrestrained expression of male sexuality), Guyon theoretically and repeatedly deplores the use of force; he simply never recognizes its existence in the sexual use of women.
Typically, every charge by women that force is used to violate women—in rape, battery, or prostitution—is dismissed by positing a female nature that is essentially fulfilled by the act of violation, which in turn transforms violation into merely using a thing for what it is and blames the thing if it is not womanly enough to enjoy what is done to it.
Sometimes “consent” is construed to exist. More often, the woman is perceived to have an active desire to be used by the male on his terms. Great Britain’s Wolfenden Report, renowned for its recommendation that legal persecution of consenting male homosexuals cease, was also a report on female prostitution. The Wolfenden Report stressed that “there are women who, even when there is no economic need to do so, choose this form of livelihood.”9 The Wolfenden Report recommended increasing legal penalties against prostitutes and argued for more stringent enforcement of laws aimed at prostitutes. Male sexual privilege was affirmed both in the vindication of consensual male homosexuality and in the advocacy of greater persecution of female prostitutes. At the same time, women’s degraded status was affirmed. The whore has a nature that chooses prostitution. She should be punished for her nature, which determines her choice and which exists independent of any social or economic necessity. The male homosexual also has a nature, for which he should not be punished.
This desire of the woman to prostitute herself is often portrayed as greed for money or pleasure or both. The natural woman is a whore, but the professional prostitute is a greedy whore: greedy for sensation, pleasure, money, men. Novelist Alberto Moravia, like many leftist writers seemingly obsessed with the prostituted woman, writes in an assumed first-person-female voice to convey the woman’s pleasure in prostitution:
The feeling I experienced at that moment bewildered me and, no matter how or when I have received money from men since, I have never again experienced it so clearly and so intensely. It was a feeling of complicity and sensual conspiracy … It was a feeling of inevitable subjection which showed me in a flash an aspect of my own nature I had ignored until then. I knew, of course, that I ought to refuse the money, but at the same time I wanted to accept. And not so much from greed, as from a new kind of pleasure which this offering had afforded me.10
The pleasure of the prostitute is the pleasure of any woman used in sex—but heightened. The specific—the professional whore—exists in the context of the general—women who are whores by nature. There is additional pleasure in being bought because money fixes her status as one who is for sex, not just woman but essence of woman or double-woman. The professional pro
stitute is distinguished from other women not in kind but by degree. “There are certainly no women absolutely devoid of the prostitute instinct to covet being sexually excited by any stranger,”11 writes Weininger, emphasizing both pleasure and vanity. “If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her,” writes D. H. Lawrence, “she’s a dry stick as a rule.”12 The tininess of Lawrence’s “streak” should not be misunderstood: “really, most wives sold themselves, in the past, and plenty of harlots gave themselves, when they felt like it, for nothing.”13 The “tiny streak” is her sexual nature: without a streak of whore, “she’s a dry stick as a rule.”