Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality Read online

  Roissy are distinguished by their sterility and bear no

  resemblance whatsoever to any known goddess. No

  mention is ever made o f conception or menstruation,

  and procreation is never a consequence o f fucking. O ’s

  fertility has been rendered O. T here is nothing sacred

  about O ’s prostitution.

  O ’s degradation is occasioned by the male need for

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  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

  o f 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 o f 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

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  other through O is made clear by the fact that Sir

  Stephen uses O anally most o f the time. T h e consequences o f misdirecting sexual energy are awesome indeed.

  But what is most extraordinary about Story of O is

  the mind-boggling literary style o f 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

  o f 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.

  T o sum up, Story of O is a story o f psychic cannibalism, demonic possession, a story which posits men and women as being at opposite poles o f the universe — the

  survival o f one dependent on the absolute destruction

  o f the other. It asks, like many stories, who is the most

  powerful, and it answers: men are, literally over women’s

  dead bodies.

  C H A P T E R 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;

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  Woman as Victim: The Image

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  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 A nne’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 o f Claire herself;

  Claire whips Anne; Anne sucks Jean de B erg’s cock;

  Jean de Berg takes Anne to buy lingerie and humiliates

  Anne and embarrasses the salesgirl by exhibiting A nne’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 o f 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 o f Jean de B erg’s slave. He hits her, and she lives

  happily ever after.

  O f 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.

  T h e characterizations have even less depth and complexity, not to mention subtlety and sensitivity, than the

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  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

&nbs
p; 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.

  Anne, who is, according to Pauline Reage, the other

  half o f Claire, is sweet, modest, vulnerable, young,

  demure (“Anne, for her part, had resumed the modest

  demeanor of an object of lust” 4), and wanton. Claire

  says that Anne creams at each new humiliation, at even

  the thought o f being whipped. Anne appears to be Beth

  from Little Women but is, in fact, a bitch in heat, her cunt

  always wet—just like the rest of us, we are meant to

  conclude. (Beth, remember, died young of goodness. )

  Jean de Berg, representing the male sex, is—wouldn’t

  you know it—intelligent, self-assured, quietly master-

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  ful and self-contained when not actually in the act o f

  ravaging, powerful and overwhelmingly virile when in

  the act o f ravaging. One has no idea o f his physicality,

  except to imagine that he is graying at the temples.

  T h e relationships between the three characters are

  structured simply and a bit repetitively: Claire, master —

  Anne, slave; Jean de Berg, master —Anne, slave; which

  resolves into the happy ending—Jean de Berg, master —

  Claire, slave. T h e master-slave motif is content, structure, and moral o f the story. T he master role is always a male role, the slave role is always a female role. T h e

  moral o f the story is that Claire, by virtue o f her gender,

  can only find happiness in the female/slave role.

  Here we are told what society would have us know

  about lesbian relationships: a man is required for completion, consummation. Claire is miscast as master because o f her literal sex, her genitalia. Jean de Berg is her surrogate cock which she later forges into the instrument o f her own degradation. The Image paints women as real female eunuchs, mutilated in the first

  instance, much as Freud suggested, by their lack o f

  cock, incapable o f achieving whole, organic, satisfying

  sexual union without the intrusion and participation

  o f a male figure. That figure cannot only act out the

  male role — that figure must possess biological cock and

  balls. Claire and Anne as biological females enact a

  comedy, grotesque in its slapstick caricature: Claire

  as master, a freak by virtue o f the role she wills to play,

  a role designed to suit the needs and capacities o f a

  man; Claire as master, as comic as Chaplin doing the

  king o f France, or Laurel and Hardy falling over each

  other’s feet in another vain attempt to secure wealth

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  and success. After all, The Image forces us to conclude,

  what can Claire stick up Anne’s cunt but her fingers —

  hardly instruments of ravishment and ecstasy. Biology,

  we are told, is role. Biology, we are told, is fate. The

  message is strangely familiar.

  Pauline Reage, the major promoter of The Image as

  a piece of metaphysical veracity, sees the function,

  or very existence, of the man-master, as the glorification of the woman-slave. Her thesis is that to be a slave is to have power:

  . . . the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the

  ground at her master’s heels, is now really the god.

  The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling

  of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the

  various ceremonies that center around the sacred object. 5

  With the logic indigenous to our dual-role culture, the

  slave is here transmuted into the source of power. What

  price power, one asks in despair. This is truly the source

  of the male notion of female power—since she is at the center

  of his obsession, she is powerful; no matter that the form

  her power takes is that she “drag herself along the

  ground at her master’s heels. ”

  The man, Reage instructs us, has the illusion of

  power because he wields the whip. That illusion marks

  for Reage the distance between carnal knowledge and

  what is, more profoundly, true:

  Yes, men are foolish to expect us to revere them when,

  in the end, they amount to almost nothing. Woman,

  like man himself, can only worship at the shrine o f

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  that abused body, now loved and now reviled, subjected to every humiliation, but which is, after all, her own. The man, in this particular affair, stays in one

  piece: he is the true worshiper, aspiring in vain to

  become one with his god.

  The woman, on the contrary, although just as much

  of a true worshiper and possessed of that same anxious

  regard (for herself) is also the divine object, violated,

  endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy,

  achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in

  contemplation of herself. 6

  Having noted in the last chapter Reage’s extraordinary

  facility with the double-double think, which she uses

  here with her usual skill, I must take exception to her

  conclusions. It is surprising that the worship o f the

  divine object, the woman as victim and executioner,

  should involve any external mediation, especially that

  o f a male priest. Surely if woman is so willing to be the

  giver and the offering, if as “the divine object, violated,

  endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn” her “only joy. . .

  lies in contemplation o f herself, ” a man is extraneous.

  Surely, with such divine endowments and attendant

  satisfactions, she need not be coaxed or seduced into

  whipping or mutilating herself (“And yet it is usually the

  men who introduce their mistresses to the joys o f being

  chained and whipped, tortured and humiliated. . . ” 7),

  or initiating other women, who serve as a substitute or

  mirror image or other half. Men often insist that women

  are self-serving, and indeed, Claire is Anne’s priestess.

  Both execute their roles effectively. No male figure is

  required mythologically unless Jean de Berg would play

  the eunuch-priest, that traditional helpmate o f the

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  priestess, an honor no doubt not intended for him here.

  Conversely, only men have been permitted to serve

  male gods; eunuchs and women, synonymous here,

  have been strictly excluded from those holy rites. The

  proper conclusion therefore is that man, not woman, is

  the divine object of The Image: he is the priest; he serves

  a male god in whose image he was created; he serves

  himself. Were that not the case, woman, as the worshiped, would serve herself, instead of serving herself up like turkey or duck, garnished, stuffed, sharpened

  knife ready for the ritual carving. That a man becomes

  the master of the master means, despite Reage’s assertions
to the contrary, that women should serve men, that women are properly slaves and men properly masters, that men have the only meaningful power (in our culture —that power allied to and defined by force and

  violence), that men created in the image of the Almighty

  are all mighty. Single-single think brings us closer to

  the truth in this instance than double-double think.

  The Image is rife with Christian symbolism. One of

  the more memorable sequences in the book takes place

  in a rose garden chosen by Claire as the proper proscenium for Anne’s humiliation. In the rose garden, Claire directs Jean de Berg’s attention to a specific

  type of rose, special in its perfect beauty. Claire orders

  Anne to step into the flowerbed and to fondle the rose,

  which Anne handles as though it were a moist, ready

  cunt. Claire orders Anne to pick the rose and to bring

  it to her, which Anne does, though not before she feebly

  protests that there is a prohibition against picking the

  flowers and that she is afraid of the thorns. Anne’s

  hesitation necessitates punishment. She is ordered to

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  lift her dress while Claire first strokes Anne’s cunt with

  the rose, then jabs the thorn into her thigh and tears

  the flesh very deliberately. Claire kisses Anne’s hands as

  a poetic drop o f blood flows. Claire then pushes the

  stem o f the rose into A nne’s garter belt. T h e thorn is

  caught in the lace, and the flower is fastened, an adornment fraught with symbolic meaning. Even Jean de Berg finds the performance a bit overdone:

  I answered that it was indeed a great success, although perhaps rather overburdened with symbols, in the romantic and surrealist traditions. 8

  T h e rose as a symbol has powerful occult origins.

  Eliphas Levi says o f it:

  It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppression

  o f spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like grace,

  she was a daughter o f God; it was love refusing to be

  stifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt against

  sterility; it was humanity aspiring towards natural

  religion, full o f reason and love, founded on the