At eleven, I am the youngest of eight boys lined up along one row of lockers in the otherwise empty men’s room at the swimming pool to which the day camp we are attending takes us every other day. Normally, I’d be changing with boys my own age, but a mix-up back at the camp grounds landed me on the bus with these guys, who are all twelve and thirteen. I turn my back to them to hide the erection that has taken hold of my body and which I am having difficulty fitting into my bathing suit. Despite my best efforts to remain inconspicuous, however, my movements attract their attention and one of them sneaks up behind me and looks over my shoulder. “Hey,” his voice rings out metallically, “look at the size of Newman’s boner!”
Like a pack of dogs that has been thrown a single piece of meat, the group surrounds me in a tight circle, while I stand there not moving, body pointing me into the air above the middle of the room, wishing I could vanish, that it would vanish, but no matter how much I will it, the damned thing will not go down.
“What are you, a homo!?”
“Other guys’ dicks must turn him on!”
“Wanna suck mine, queer!?”
The taunts continue for what seems like hours, though it is probably only a few minutes, and then the head counselor comes in and ushers us all out to the pool. I can’t believe he didn’t hear what the other boys were saying, but he acts as if he didn’t, barely looking at me as he shows me where the boys in my group have spread their towels.
Later that evening, while I’m getting ready for bed, I stand naked before the full-length mirror inside my door and tuck my penis out of sight between my legs. I’m not trying to imagine myself as a girl, but I am intrigued by the possibility of a body that does not have erections.
///
When I was a teenager, I read in Penthouse magazine a letter–I think it was in Xavier Hollander’s “Happy Hooker” column–in which a woman described how she and a friend took revenge on a man who’d tried to rape the friend. The writer of the letter arranged to meet the man at a disco, invited him to her apartment, and seduced him into being tied, spread-eagled, to her bed. Then the woman’s friend, who’d been waiting in another room, came in, and the two women teased the man sexually until he was begging them for release. In response, the women took out a razor and shaving cream, telling him that, if he ejaculated while they rubbed his penis, they would shave all the hair from his body. The letter went on to describe in great detail first the man’s pleading with them not to do it and then his efforts to keep himself from coming while the women took turns masturbating him. Finally, of course, he came, and the women shaved him, threatening to slice off his testicles if he didn’t lay still.
Now, of course, I understand not only that the letter might have been, that it most probably was, a complete fabrication, even that it might even have been written by a man, but also, assuming for the sake of argument that the events it relates actually happened, the fact that is was published in Penthouse means that its sole purpose was to feed, to shape and even to create the desires and fantasies of the boys and men like me who read the magazine. At the time, though, I read the letter naively, assuming it to be true–why, after all, would someone publish a letter that wasn’t?–and so it was clear to me that it described a rape. The woman who ostensibly wrote it didn’t present what she and her friend did to the man as anything else—except to make clear that it was motivated by revenge—and she never implied that he enjoyed it. Nonetheless, my sexual imagination was drawn to the story. For months, for years afterward, I fantasized about women tying me to a bed and creating in my flesh an arousal so all-encompassing that I too would be willing to beg for release. Yet no matter how hard I tried to imagine a conclusion other than the one in the letter, I always ended up the victim of some version of the revenge the writer and her friend took, and what I remember most about this now is how fully this ending short-circuited the fantasy, and when I say “fully short-circuited,” I mean fully and completely. If I was masturbating, I found it very hard to continue; if I was simply daydreaming, I’d have to stop and think of something else, not because I felt and was trying to avoid, or deny, the guilty, shameful pleasure that often accompanies “forbidden fantasies,” but rather because I was scared. I simply did not trust the women I imagined not to turn into the women described in the letter. More than that, though, I identified with their victim’s experience of having the pleasures of his body turned against him, and the knowledge that I could be shamed just as he had been shamed taught me only one thing: my body was always the potential weapon of my own defeat.
///
We’re sitting in a circle in a remedial composition class that I’m teaching. The students are reading aloud and commenting on fables they’ve written over the weekend. The prose is awkward and ungrammatical, though I am impressed with the imaginative effort some of my students have made. There’s a modernized version of Little Red Riding Hood, set in an upper class neighborhood with the most sought-after senior boy in the local high school taking the part of the wolf. There’s also a gender-reversed Sleeping Beauty, in which Princess Charming turns out to be the homeless woman who sleeps in the park. I’m about to move on to the next part of the lesson when Walter, who’d announced when we began that he wasn’t going to read what he’d written, asks whether I’d like to hear his story. Of course I say yes.
Walter’s narrative takes place in the future and involves a very powerful drug dealer whose organization has been infiltrated by a top female narcotics agent posing as a prostitute. When the dealer’s lover, who also works for him as a prostitute, learns that the operation has been compromised, she tells him immediately. Armed with this information, the dealer exposes the spy and has her tortured slowly and painfully to death. To express his gratitude, he takes his lover to bed, giving her, in Walter’s words, “the literal fuck of her life, pounding away until she was no longer breathing.” The story ends with a description of the lavish funeral the dealer gives her.
When Walter finishes reading, he looks around the circle with a sarcastic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent, no one except me willing to meet his eyes, and I’m hoping that one of his peers will be the first to speak, condemning what he’s written not in the voice of authority—which my voice would inevitably be—but in the voice of his own community. A minute passes before I realize that his classmates don’t intend to respond, and so I call on a few students by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say that the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they think it’s not even worth responding to. Yet it has to be responded to, and so I ask Walter if he really believes that fucking a woman to death could be an expression of gratitude.
“Of course,” he says, “For the woman it’s the ultimate fulfillment, and for the man it’s the ultimate proof.”
“Of what?”
“Of manhood,” he responds, “Women would take tickets and stand in line to be with a man powerful enough to fuck them like that.” He says these words with a conviction I at first can’t think how to argue with, but then I wonder aloud if he would include his girlfriend or his future wife in that line of women.
“I’m not talking,” he says, “about doing this to someone I love. I’m talking about the pieces of trash you can pick up at the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hookers who do it for money, women who are asking for it.”
“Why,” I ask, “do they deserve to be murdered?”
“They’re whores,” he responds, “No one cares about them.”
I take a different tack, asking him if he’s ever killed anything other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he realizes that he’s talking about using his own body, his penis specifically, as a murder weapon and that the murder he says he would like to commit is not simply one in which his victim dies in his arms, but is also one in which he would feel against his own flesh the internal process of her dying.
“Yes, I do,” he says.
Trying again, I go back to what he said about not wanting to fuck to death a woman he loves and ask if he makes a distinction between the sex he would have for pleasure with that woman and the power he says he would like to experience of using sex to kill. Walter looks at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. “Power,” he says, “is pleasure.”
Class ends. As I’m putting my papers in my briefcase, Walter steps up to my desk. “Now that everyone else is gone,” he says, his voice full of conspiratorial camaraderie, “be honest. Wouldn’t it feel great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your buddies later and tell them you’d killed her with your dick?”
“No,” is all I can think to say.
“Sure, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to–I was in my thirties–but when you were younger, when you were an undergraduate, wasn’t fucking something you did so you could share it with your buddies, and impress them, and wouldn’t they have worshipped you if you told them you’d fucked someone to death?”
I decide that monosyllabic answers are the best way to deal with this line of questioning. “No,” I tell him again.
Walter waits a few seconds for me to say more. When I don’t, he mutters something under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathetic and excuse. Then he walks out, and it’s the last I see or hear of him until I get my final roster with a W for withdrawal next to his name. Of course there are many reasons why he might have had to withdraw from the class, but it’s hard for me not to think he did so because I wasn’t “man enough” to be his teacher.
///
In an episode of the long-and-deservedly-defunct TV series She-Wolf Of London, a very old man is brought into the hospital dying of unknown causes. The doctor on duty believes the old man is either senile or insane because he keeps insisting he is actually twenty-seven years old and that he was turned into an old man by a woman. As the doctor leaves, he orders a nurse to give the old man a sedative. Once the nurse and the old man are alone, however, she unzips her uniform to reveal black-lace lingerie, and the old man recognizes her as the woman who has aged him—one of what the viewers will later learn is a group of succubae who have opened an escort service in England’s capital city. As the old man looks on in helpless terror, the succubus begins to climb into the hospital bed where he is laying. As she does so, she reminds him in the voice of a predator enjoying the powerlessness of its prey that all he has to do is not want her and he will be able to live. All he has to do, in other words, is not have an erection and she will not be able to fuck him to death.
Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.
Your description of Walter in your composition class is what has prompted me to come out from lurking and say, unequivocally, that you are a better man for trying to engage and educate what the others could not or would not do to get involved.
Reading this piece and the previous one is bringing up all kinds of memories and a sense of understanding of what I have found perplexing in the past.
It was this line I reacted to emotionally, first disbelief; I read it again, and the anger came, then outrage, and now as I write this and read the line again, sadness that someone could reduce life and relationships to this. My heart hurts to think of all the people damaged by this attitude.
Coming to grips that the mind that creates such a thing was shaped and formed by the same forces that shaped and formed me as a man is sobering.
“Your description of Walter in your composition class is what has prompted me to come out from lurking and say, unequivocally, that you are a better man for trying to engage and educate what the others could not or would not do to get involved.”
I find myself having mixed feelings about this… I think it might have been very difficult to be a sexually active female student in this class, particularly one who had once been a victim of violence, listening to one man trying to persuade another that he doesn’t *really* want to kill you.
I’m not saying you should have done anything differently, Richard. I was powerfully impacted by this story when I first read it, and still find it very powerful.
I just found my perspective switching this time. And I thought I’d mention it.
I also found my perspective switching here–“I am intrigued by the possibility of a body that does not have erections.”–I think it’s because of recently reading discussions about Dix Poppas that I want to protest that women’s bodies *are* capable of erections, and I worry that pretending that they aren’t is part and parcel of the culture that wants to deny their bodies as being capable of pleasure. I know you mean big, visible erections. I understand the content. But I think the technical inaccuracy, while petty, has ramifications… and since these pieces are very careful discussions of socially constructed sex… well, yeah, anyway, I thought perhaps my reaction would be of interest.
Conrad:
Thanks.
Mandolin
It’s interesting that you read it this way, because, I was not trying to set up women’s bodies as bodies that do not have erections, in opposition to the erections of a male body. First of all, even when the event in question happened, I was not thinking about a penis-less body as being a female body–in other words, I was not thinking in terms of gender polarity (though of course the technically inaccurate binary that you point out would have been beyond my knowledge at the time)–but rather about what it would be like to have a male body that didn’t have erections. Second, precisely because I was thinking about the fact that women do have erections, and I wanted to try not to deny that fact, I prefaced the sentence you quote with “I am not trying to think of myself as a girl.” Now that you have pointed out to me that the technical inaccuracy can still be read into the prose, though, maybe I should revise the sentence to read, “I am intrigued by the possibility of my body without erections.” Or some such thing.
Aha. I understand now.
I wonder whether the “I am not trying to think of myself as a girl” sentence backfires in a way. On the one hand, obviously I read and understood it. On the other hand, I wonder if it left the word “girl” in my head as a sort of echo, which might have influenced how I read the next sentence about erections.
@ Mandolin –
On a somewhat lighter note, I imagine it would’ve been difficult too, to be a bit like the sort of person that this guy seems to be claiming to be, and to’ve restrained laughter at the absurdity of it.
For what it’s worth, and to explain the above, I very much suspect that if he was the sort of person who actually has the urges he’s expressing (rather than being just a fairly normal (if stupid) guy, who’d been socialized to believe that manliness and sociopathic sadism are synonymous), he’d know damn well not to friggin’ say it in public.
So I don’t think he was a guy who’d actually want to kill you if you were a sexually-active female student there; just one who for some reason thought that saying otherwise would impress you.
(Though perhaps no less dangerous; that same level of stupidity might make him actually try it, because he obviously thinks it’d impress people, and has demonstrated willingness to do really stupid things to do that.)
“Now, of course, I understand not only that the letter might have been, that it most probably was, a complete fabrication, even that it might even have been written by a man, but also, assuming for the sake of argument that the events it relates actually happened…”
I’m curious. What leads you to be suspicious of this story?
“, the fact that is was published in Penthouse means that its sole purpose was to feed, to shape and even to create the desires and fantasies of the boys and men like me who read the magazine.”
I think I may be getting confused here but I’m a bit lost on how exactly such a tale of revenge would serve the purpose of feeding, shaping, or creating desires and fantasies. For the most part men/boys are socialized to take pride in their sexual prowess so how could a tale of man having that sexual prowess attacked lead to fantasies and desires? Unless of course you are implying a setup of getting off on humiliation. Not sure…
Assuming that’s it.
Don’t know if it’s relevant that, if I recall (it’s been maybe two decades, so I could be wrong), the Xaviera Hollander column was supposed to be an advice column.
Motley wrote:
[BLOCKQUOTE]For what it’s worth, and to explain the above, I very much suspect that if he was the sort of person who actually has the urges he’s expressing (rather than being just a fairly normal (if stupid) guy, who’d been socialized to believe that manliness and sociopathic sadism are synonymous), he’d know damn well not to friggin’ say it in public.[/BLOCKQUOTE]
You would think so, wouldn’t you?
I have never interviewed someone in custody for exactly what Walter was fantasizing about, but I have interviewed people in custody for sex crimes. It’s true, some won’t admit to anything. But a surprising number will. And even more surprising is that some of them will volunteer it proudly.
I can easily imagine a student like Walter.
There is evil in the world. Fortunately, a lot of it is stupid.
Grace
But I’d think, with good reason, that such a person would’ve spent his whole life up to that point learning to hide what sort of person he is, learning to pass for normal. As such, he’d be unlikely to go into a non-anonymous public forum and tell everyone. Which suggests that he’s a relatively normal stupid person, who’s learned really the wrong things, likely due in no small part to his dazzling stupidity.
Either that, or he’s simply somehow failed to learn that it’s not okay to share thoughts like that, but I have real trouble imagining somebody making it to college age without figuring that out. It becomes pretty obvious very early on.
So if he actually thinks that power and pleasure are the same thing, and doesn’t know not to say that to people who know who he is, then he’s so stupid that I have no idea how he’s stayed alive that long; so stupid as to strain plausibility.
Oh, I know. Trust me, I know. :)
A man who reads his story about raping a woman to death and continues to defend his fantasy, in public, as acceptable because he wants to do this to “whores”, should be taken seriously as a possible rapist/murderer. Never mind that he may “appear normal” – most violent sexual offenders are seen as ordinary people by their neighbors and acquaintances. Psychopaths can be very plausible, adaptable people, and may be able to express their grandiosity and simultaneously defuse the situation by implying that the desired act is “just make-believe”. The non-psychopath lay public is prone to thinking that a man such as this student is just an asshole (as he may well be). Bragging about a desire to rape-murder a woman is entirely in line with behaviour of actual rapist-murderers, who may enjoy “getting away with it in plain sight” of the authorities, who taunt police in anonymous messages. Rapist-murderers also target women they regard as “whores”, who may be women who provide sex for pay or who may be women who resemble some woman that “humiliated” the rapist-murderer in the past. Killing an actual prostitute is seen correctly as a low-risk, low-consequences murder (less likely to be considered “priority” case by police or public, less likely to receive maximum sentence). At any rate, rapist-murderers tend to either regard all women as subhuman sluts, or divide women into 1. their sainted _____ (fill in the blank) 2. all other women, who are subhuman sluts.
The rapist-murderer type described above is not the only type. “Normal” non-psychopathic men can do these abominations in wartime, when there is a group dynamic of proving masculinity and getting revenge on the enemy, and a general regard of the enemy as less than human. The dehumanization of the enemy may be a precondition or a result of learning to kill enemies face-to-face in wartime.
I would consider notifying the college security department and the city police about this individual “Walter”, giving details of the conversation. Chances are good that the police will shrug and ignore the story, unless they are in the middle of a rape-murder investigation.
NancyP,
Not sure if you mean this to a statement of what you would do in a similar situation or if you are suggesting I should do this now. If the latter, I should make clear that the story took place many years ago. I wish I had thought then to notify security or someone–but I was inexperienced and didn’t think about it.
[ETA:] Danny,
I once met someone who was a writer for Penthouse Forum and she told me that the letters, or at least her letters, were in fact fabricated.
Also, in answer to your other question, someone who read an earlier version of this section on my website sent me a link to a sex blog/website for men who want to be dominated and humiliated by women in the way that the women in the letter dominate and humiliate their victim. The person assumed that I was expressing a hidden desire and was just too afraid to name the desire outright. She thought that the website would be a place where I would feel welcome and more free to express myself and my desires honestly. At least that’s what she said in the email.
” he’d know damn well not to friggin’ say it in public.”
I’ve met people with consent issues who also brag about things like fantasizing about killing women during sex (that fantasy exactly, as it happens).
Sure, but should also be poked fun at for being a dumbass.
But out of curiosity, the next time a college feminist advocates gendercide, how seriously should she be taken as a possible murderer? If my college years taught me anything, it’s that college kids say stupid things.
@ Mandolin –
Wouldn’t happen to know how many of ’em went on to become rapist/murderers, would’ya?
As Grace Annam pointed out, there is evil in the world. Getting distracted by stupid shit that college kids say probably doesn’t help you spot it.
That said, though, it’s probably a good idea to mention it to the police anyway, because they just might be in the middle of a rape-murder investigation. (And, in a large enough city, often are.)
I think the Walter dynamic is not at all just a “stupid thing a college kid said.” It wasn’t a one-off, off the cuff statement. It was a crafted story, purposefully read to make others uncomfortable, and to assert a particular kind of manhood in that group. (The fact that he said he wasn’t going to read it, but then did in the end also suggests an attempt to make someone ASK him to read it, or pressure him to read it, so that he could further deflect responsibility if necessary “I didn’t want to read it but you made me”). Sounds to me all around like a very manipulative person with very scary fantasies and attitudes about sex and masculinity. It would have been reasonable to report him, though I don’t know if I would have thought of it either. I would certainly have made sure to stay the hell away from him. (I was thinking about it more as being in the other students’ positions, since I’m not a teacher, but as a female it’s hard to say “if I were the professor” since the dynamic would have been totally different).
I don’t think the second sentence is a requirement for the first. Plenty of college students put a lot of thought into their stupid shit. Not that I’m disagreeing with your reading of the situation; I think I’m using “stupid things college kids say” pretty broadly. (Part of the benefit of college, I think, is in getting exposure to the broader world before actually joining it; that’s how people like Walter get to learn that that sort of thing isn’t okay.)
Guy probably wouldn’t have done that with a female professor teaching the class; that’s just my guess, though. Seemed to be relying a lot on the idea that the prof would back him up, because “that’s how guys really think.”
Motley:
Like Emily above and for the reasons Emily suggests, I think that Walter’s story was not simply an instance of a college kid saying something stupid. More, though, I find the parallel you draw above troubling, not because I think there can’t be female parallels–or perhaps analogs is a better word–to Walter; I have had women in my classes who have expressed similarly, if not quite as extremely, violent fantasies towards men; and I am for now, for the sake of argument, going to proceed from the assumption that such women might be just as dangerous to men as Walter was potentially dangerous to women. It’s just that those women have rarely, if ever, been self-identified feminists advocating gendercide, rhetorically or otherwise, as part of what they believe the feminist agenda to be. I recognize the impulse, given the content of Walter’s story and the feminist nature of this blog, to posit a feminist as Walter’s opposite number, but I think that is both unfair to feminists and feminism and obscuring of the reality that I, at least, have observed.
What the fuck do you think “consent issues” means?
Can you stop lecturing women on how we just can’t figure out when to be scared as well as you can? Jesus.
Well, you were there and I wasn’t, so I’ll respect that. But by that same principle, I should point out that I have never heard anyone who wasn’t a feminist advocate gendercide (or even espouse fantasies of gendercide); my experience is the opposite of yours. It’s a very small sample group, though; but then, I don’t recall many instances of hearing a man mention sexual murder-fantasies, either.
Thinking about it right now, I can recall only a couple of men saying they have fantasies of sexually murdering women (I’m here not counting things like “I’d like to strangle my boss,” even if the boss in question is female, because in that case it seems like gender is incidental and it’s usually not an actual fantasy about murder, just an expression of frustration); and in those cases, like Walter above, it was about murdering specific subsets of women (“whores” and whatnot). I can, by contrast, recall a very large number of women fantasizing about murdering similarly-specific (or similarly-unspecific, either way) men; I can even recall a recent video game about murdering men who holler at women on the street. Can’t think of a male gender-based-murder-porn game, or any equivalent. I also can’t recall any man, either in my personal experience or that I’ve even heard of, fantasizing about the murder of all women, to say nothing of actually advocating it. But I’ve read posts by maybe a half-dozen different self-described feminists doing that, though, and I know a little about who Valerie Solanas was.
(There’s probably some selection bias going on here; I read some feminist blogs, but I don’t really read any blogs of the type where someone could declare that all women would be exterminated and not get banned for it*)
(*In fact, that’s probably self-reinforcing truth: a site where that sort of thing happens is probably not a site I’d keep reading.)
Tangent: I mean, I’m not positing “a feminist” as Walter’s opposite number, any more than I’d posit “a man” as Valerie Solanas’ opposite number. But a specific feminist (such as any of Solanas’ defenders over at Feministing, or Solanas herself), or a specific man (such as Walter), then yes.
I’ve also seen that openly calling for gendercide in a feminist space usually doesn’t result in being expelled from that space. But I’d very much suspect that Daran, f’rex, would ban anyone calling for extermination of women over at his blog. There are a lot of things about feminism I agree with, and a lot of things about it that I don’t; the fact that it seems (even somewhat) tolerant of gendercide-enthusiasts isn’t one of the former.
(There might be another selection bias going on here too, in that I’m likely to assume that if someone uses feminist terminology, that she’s likely a feminist; I’m not sure to what extent that assumption is accurate.)
What on earth are you talking about? I have no idea what you mean by “consent issues.” And I’m not lecturing anybody about anything. Obviously.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/03/30/japan.video.game.rape/index.html
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Motley,
I was not arguing that no feminists have ever advocated gendercide, just that it is not fair to posit a feminist, as opposed to a woman, advocating gendercide in the parallel you were drawing above. I don’t have time right now to engage the points you raise in the rest of comment 18, though I kind of hope someone does, since they need to be addressed.
Oh. That’s a good point.
Motley–you are presuming your common sense deductions of how people behave are more accurate than women’s actual experience dealing with men with predatory behavior. You’ve swept away several examples.
Problems with consent means an individual who has problem respecting the boundaries of consent, and therefore harasses and/or rapes.
And the link above is a video game in which the presumably male player earns points by kidnapping, brainwashing, and raping women.
Mandolin– I’ll quote myself.
If this looks to you like “presuming” what you say I’m presuming, or sweeping away any examples, then I can’t really help you. Should I have bolded the sentence in the original, so that people would have a harder time ignoring it?
Response 1: At risk of getting myself banned, I have to ask: Is this one of the places where it’s not okay to know that rape and murder are both specific things, and aren’t the same thing?
Response 2: Friend of mine said a while ago, “There’s nothing so fucked up that there won’t be a Japanese video game about it.” At the time, I didn’t believe it.
Motley, nearly all of the last 10 or 15 comments on this thread are either by you, or in response to you. Please back off this thread for two or three days so we can see if some other conversation develops here. Thanks.
I have met two female students (one in an English as Second Language class, and one in a SF writing class) who wrote stories about killing men en masse. In both cases it was revenge fantasies, and in both cases the targets were uninvolved in the original crime.
In the ESL class, no one, including the teacher, challenged the student.
In the second case, the student pretty much advocated gendercide. She was challenged by a guy, not on the murderous intentions, but on her ignorance on the subject of weaponry and engineering. She was a BU student in an MIT class and we WAS quite condescending… but his points were all 100% valid. She responded by telling him how the human race was doomed unless the male gender is decimated and kept only for the purpose of breeding. She quoted ‘scientists’ who actually ‘proved’ that. According to her, people in BU were actually working on research like this. At this point (supposedly) he sneered at her, and she flew into a rage. She threw her pen at him, and started screaming invective…
The funny part is that he left the class, and she stayed. Until the end of the term, she was treated as invisible and too quiet to be heard by everyone but the professor and another BU student. At the end of the term she stood up, and told us all, including Joe Haldeman, that we were a waste of human DNA.
I have to say that at the time I saw this more of a MIT vs BU students issue, but this discussion made me wonder what would have happened if the genders were reversed.
I assume the narrators seemed to be projections of the author?
In RJN’s example, “Walter” confirms that he sees the character as a projection of self, at least in terms of the sexual actions, in what he later says to RJN.
In your example, the “waste of DNA” statement seems to support that she wasn’t, for instance, writing a story about someone she thought of as a villain.
I’d say the stories were inappropriate.
> I assume the narrators seemed to be projections of the author?
No, I would not go as far as that…
I do not remember the first story as much more than a rape revenge fantasy with all males as the targets. I remember I felt sad, and wondered whether there was something I should do FOR the student who wrote it, and decided (wisely, I think) to shut up and look somewhere else.
The SciFi story was not in the first person, and the character was not particularly fleshed out. But the author certainly did not have the character as a villain. She had been raped, and then started a unlikely successful campaign to eliminate most males from a post-apocalyptic world and reduce the survivors to cattle. The author most definitely made it sounds as this was the way to build a better world.
Guess you’ve never heard of Grand Theft Auto then…
The comments so far have focused on the very disturbing (and I suppose, potentially triggering) Walter story, but when I read the original post my thoughts went to a different theme. The 3 vignettes RJN presents have something to do with the problems of involuntary erections. As a boy, I can remember struggling with embarassing, seemingly random erections that I couldn’t control. I think a lot of men have had similar experiences, and perhaps also the intense sense of shame that accompanied it.
Traditional concepts of masculinity have at their core a concept of the male body as one under complete volitional control. Whereas the female body is often described as mysterious, irrational, prone to acts attributed not to the will or the mind but “hormones” or “cycles”, nothing is supposed to happen to a male body that isn’t a result of a decision, conscious or unconscious, by the mind residing in said body; to lose control over one’s body is, in a sense, to fail as a man, and for such a failure one is bullied and ostracized.
When I was a teenager, often during discussions of rape my male peers told me that a man can never be raped by definition, since “if you get hard that means you want it” or some such argument. Basically, according to them, no erection could be involuntary. I suppose the concept of any part of the male body, especially the penis, being outside volitional control was so alien, so unthinkable to them that they would rather deny the possibility of a male being raped than admit the frightening possibility of their own bodies being able to turn on them at times.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. As a related thought to conclude with, I’ve always been skeptical of the use of the term “phallic” to describe the male, conscious, volitional exercise of power. It evokes the ideas of the penis being used as a weapon just like in Walter’s twisted fantasy. But in reality, the phallos is a very unreliable weapon (prone to random discharges or misfires), and just like the female body has been imprisoned by the discourse of its mystery, irrationality, and “instinctual nature”, the male body has been impoverished by the insistence that it cannot be anything but a machine, performing exactly to spec and ready to execute the user’s commands at any time. The “phallos” being invoked in, for instance, Lacanian theory is just another expression of this male-body-as-industrial-robot fantasy.
This also seems like an apt time to reference the excellent article “Meet the Predators” which I think has been posted here in the past…
Listen. The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact.
I agree with areanimator @30: the male body is seen to be under control at all times, and it’s pretty scary/devastating to the person when its not. Another great post, RJN…the honesty you use in your writing always reminds me not to fall for the stereotypes about men’s thoughts and feelings.
RJN:
“[ETA:] Danny,
I once met someone who was a writer for Penthouse Forum and she told me that the letters, or at least her letters, were in fact fabricated.
Also, in answer to your other question, someone who read an earlier version of this section on my website sent me a link to a sex blog/website for men who want to be dominated and humiliated by women in the way that the women in the letter dominate and humiliate their victim. The person assumed that I was expressing a hidden desire and was just too afraid to name the desire outright. She thought that the website would be a place where I would feel welcome and more free to express myself and my desires honestly. At least that’s what she said in the email.”
Cool. Just wondering.
areanimator:
” As a boy, I can remember struggling with embarassing, seemingly random erections that I couldn’t control. I think a lot of men have had similar experiences, and perhaps also the intense sense of shame that accompanied it.”
I can attest to that as well.
“When I was a teenager, often during discussions of rape my male peers told me that a man can never be raped by definition, since “if you get hard that means you want it” or some such argument. Basically, according to them, no erection could be involuntary. ”
And I find it, well less than pleasing, that that mentality has made it from the locker room (or whereever you had those talks) to the halls of power and enforcement and into the minds of a lot of men and women.
@Elusis
I think that levelling that accusation at GTA is unfair. I’ll admit that GTA is a morally questionable game for a lot of reasons… but the game does *not* require you to go out and kill hookers and take their money (which, I’ll note, is the same amount whether they’ve serviced your character first or not). It *allows* you to do that, just like it allows you to kill anybody else in the game. The only people it requires you to kill are the mission targets, and they’re almost exclusively male crime-bosses.
I’ll be blunt: GTA is the videogame equivalent of a Frank Miller Sin City book. From a feminist perspective it’s generally pretty vile… but the “kill the hooker and get your money back” trope people love to talk about in the game is actually a complete misrepresentation of the gameplay.
The game industry has reached a level of teen-boy pandering I’d never imagined possible (http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer.html), so I’m quite sure that there does exist somewhere a mainstream game (I don’t count the Hentai market) that glorifies sexual violence and murder… but GTA isn’t it. Maybe Silent Hill? Not a fan of horror games, but apparently one of the more popular monsters – the Pyramid Head – is usually shown raping the various female monsters of the game.
Off topic but quick:
If I’m not mistaken the monsters in Silent Hill, even Pyramid Head, are supposed to be representations of for lack of a better word the f’d up minds of people. So even in that case Pyramid Head is doing those things for the sake of doing those things but is meant to show just how f’d up that person it. And I certainly agree that is seems that people have gone into misrepresentation territory with GTA.
“I wonder whether the “I am not trying to think of myself as a girl” sentence backfires in a way.”
I certainly think it does, although for a different reason. It sort of says (on one particular interpretation), “I don’t want to be physically a girl, but I want their attribute of not having erections.” I didn’t read the ambiguity before, only in the context of Mandolin’s comments, but I’d concur that in hindsight there’s something a smidge difficult with the phrasing, albeit unintentionally.
Motley, I sort of see what you’re getting at, that his behaviour might have been more posturing/attention-seeking than some sort of genuine self-expression, but frankly anyone who persists in the way that this guy did is a genuine danger. Stupidity does not make him any less dangerous or twisted. I actually find your attempts at minimising his attitude somewhat bothersome too for reasons that I can’t fully articulate. However, I would attempt to address one or two (perhaps minor) points:
1. “in those cases, like Walter above, it was about murdering specific subsets of women (“whore” and whatnot)” — no women, even prostitutes, are “whatnots”. Walter essentially desires any sexual active female, all of whom he counts as “sluts”, and believes that such women are not worthy of love, but only of rape/murder/abuse. That is starkly and painfully misogynistic and in no way excusable, even for a college “kid”.
2. “I can, by contrast, recall a very large number of women fantasizing about murdering similarly-specific (or similarly-unspecific, either way) men” — that suggests possibly that those men have taken on board your message and do not mention their desires in open speech. Or, possibly, that your attention is not attracted to such statements by men, but you notice and remember gendercide statements that you hear. (This latter would go to the fact that you probably aren’t quite such an objective observer as you might like us to think, and that, as mandolin points out, your “common sense” shouldn’t trump women’s experiences of sexually predatory behaviours.) In any event, it’s likely that your (admittedly anecodotal) ‘figures’ may be inherently misrepresentative.
3. “I can even recall a recent video game about murdering men who holler at women on the street. Can’t think of a male gender-based-murder-porn game, or any equivalent.” — I’m not entirely clear on why “male gender-based-murder-porn game” is what you think of as an equivalent. Why is the “porn” bit in there, for starters?
4. “I’ve also seen that openly calling for gendercide in a feminist space usually doesn’t result in being expelled from that space.” — Calling for the rape and murder of women doesn’t generally result in expulsion from a misogynist space, though. That’s evidently what Walter expected to find, and if he had happened to be in a space that conformed to his expectations (many of which exist), I’m sure he wouldn’t have departed from it in the way he did the class in this example.
5. “And I’m not lecturing anybody about anything. Obviously.” — This comes off as a pretty condescending comment. Again, you get to define things (either when women should be scared, or when something is a ‘lecture’), and your use of “obviously” implies that your interlocutor is foolish and ignorant. Hardly conducive to convincing anyone that you’re not lecturing or, even, proselytising.
My thoughts, anyway…
Yeah, I should’ve made it more clear that the “whatnot” was referring to the terms, not the people to whom the terms were being applied. (i.e., that I was referring to words like “whore” and whatnot, meaning “other similar terms”).
Yeah, that’s what I was saying. The (very small) percentage (I believe conventional wisdom has it that it’s about one percent, though I personally think that’s a lowball estimate) of people who actually do have these desires generally do, I believe, learn not to mention these desires in open speech.
I was referring to the fact that there’s a gender-based murder-porn game in which the (presumably female) protagonist murders an endless stream of defenseless male victims. I’m aware of no reverse-gender equivalent. (No, that’s not what Grand Theft Auto is. There’s apparently a Japanese game that’s pretty similar, if we don’t differentiate between rape and murder. Thinking about it now, though, I’m not sure how much value there is in making that difference, though, for our purposes)
The “porn” bit’s in there because, well, it’s murder-porn. I’m using “porn” in the sense of being purely there to satisfy urges, rather than to enlighten, educate, interest, or even really entertain. (Yeah, this is a fairly broad use of the term; in this same sense, Hostel is torture-porn, and Van Helsing is movie-reference-porn. You could make a case that some posts on 538.com are just statistics-geek porn, and I’d have to admit you’re right. That make more sense?)
I guess I’m not sufficiently familiar with misogynist spaces. (I was using Daran’s place as a contrast, since it seems to be generally taken as such; I think it’s closer to a midpoint, though, so you’re probably right).
And yeah, it looks like Walter thought he was in a misogynist space (despite apparently having women in the class), and that he thought that just because his professor was male. That says a couple of things right there, yeah.
Yeah. When someone claims that a person who says this:
is telling anybody when they can or can’t be scared, it has a negative effect on my inclination to avoid condescension. When somebody makes it clear that they’re reading what I write as hate-stim rather than as a conversation, they kinda win; the conversation’s effectively over. Once one party decides that it’s an adversarial process instead of a friendly chat, they make it so; so no, I wasn’t really trying to convince Mandolin of anything, just pointing out that what she was saying is false.
@ Silenced is Foo, tangentially:
Pyramid Head isn’t the protagonist. The point of the game is to kill Pyramid Head, if I recall correctly.
@ Elusis –
That’s a good point from the Meet the Predators post; there’s a populace (maybe 5% of men, since I’m excluding the 1%-psychopaths estimation) that I haven’t been thinking of, that falls somewhere between the “monster” and the “ordinary person” category; not psychopaths, but still rapists. Your average psychopath, I’d posit (to the extent that such a thing as an “average” psychopath exists) learns not to say anything about it; a the average rapist might have gotten the impression that it’s okay to talk about things like that. (Which probably is part of why he’s a rapist, since I’ll wager that anyone who thinks it’s okay to talk about being a rapist probably also thinks that rape is societally condoned/very easy to get away with.)
You know, Motley, I am not a moderator, but this is my thread, and I am finding your contributions here to be increasingly convoluted, self-involved and, frankly, poorly reasoned and supported (you throw an awful lot of statistics around without citing any of them), and so–even though it seems like discussion here has pretty much closed itself down–I am going to ask you to stop, and I am going to ask people please to stop responding to your points. Please note: I am not banning you from the thread–I don’t have the authority to do that anyway–just not to pursue this line of discussion any further. Thanks.