Like a Virgin: Madame B. and Lady C.

Illustration of Gustave Flaubert and Mme. Bovary

from online arts and culture magazine Salon

http://www.salon.com/2005/08/21/flaubert/   

According to Andrea Dworkin, the modern era of rebellious married women who seek freedom via adultery and sexually transgressive acts begins with Madame Bovary (1856): she is the first in a long line of female characters for whom heroism consists in taking a lover and experiencing a genuine orgasm; i.e. in being fucked and fucked good.

But, somewhat paradoxically, Emma Bovary also redefines virginity as well as heroic rebellion. For according to Flaubert, a woman who has not been overwhelmed by sexual passion, not broken the law in order to be carnal - who has been fucked by a husband, but never been truly touched or transformed by her experiences in the marital bedroom - remains essentially a virgin and a type of slave who leads an unfulfilled life of domestic boredom and impoverished fantasy.

Of course, poor Emma's story ends tragically; she mistakes illicit romance for action in the real and wider social world and fucking becomes for her a "suicidal substitute for freedom", as Dworkin rightly notes. This, however, has not prevented a long line of writers finding inspiration in her sorry tale and inventing their own virgin wives whose only hope lies in what Lawrence describes as a phallic hunting out and which involves anal as well as vaginal penetration by the male.

In fact, it might be argued that Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is the ultimate example of this phallocentric and phallocratic fantasy in which a woman, if she is to be liberated, must be repeatedly stripped and penetrated (or pierced, as Lawrence writes - as if it were a knife or sword rather than a penis forcefully entering and occupying her body). 

Connie risks her life, but she is happy to die a poignant, marvellous death just so long as she is fucked; the one thing she really wants regardless of consequences and despite the fact that during her night of sensual passion she is almost unwilling, a little frightened, and obliged to be but a passive thing. 

It's over eighty-five years since Lawrence wrote his last and most notorious novel, but the model of female sexuality based upon a metaphysical virginity which he helped shape is one which continues to grip the pornographic imagination and continues to exercise a real effect over the lives of real women as an obscene form of categorical imperative.

As Dworkin writes: "no matter how much [women] have fucked ... no matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freedom) or passion or promiscuous abandon", it's never enough; these dumb bitches never learn! And so they must keep consenting to penetration, being desirable, looking hot (the pressure to do so being exerted across an ever greater age-range; from pre-pubescent girls to post-menopausal grandmothers).

Surely it's time to notice that whilst more girls and women are freer than ever to get fucked, they are still unable to share "a whole range of feelings, express a whole range of ideas, address [their] own experience with an honesty that is not pleasing to men, ask questions that discomfit and antagonize men in their dominance".      

And surely it's time to admit - without denying the great beauty and brilliance of their work - that dead male novelists, poets, and philosophers might not be best placed to help us all move forward into a world after the orgy.


Notes

See Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, (Basic Books, 2007). The lines quoted are on pp. 140, 151 and in the 1995 Preface, pp. xxxiii-iv.

See also D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter sixteen. The italicized words are Lawrence's own.   

    

Suna no Onna (Sand Woman)

The Woman in the Dunes (1964), dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara

I've always been fascinated by the thought of desert sands and the radical indifference of shifting dunes to any form of moist life, including human life; an unceasing flow of countless particles overwhelming everything in their path.

Baudrillard has provided some lovely descriptions of the desert as an ecstatic form of disappearance and pure geometry. He speaks of their grandeur deriving from negative aridity; places where all high hopes evaporate and the artificial scruples of culture are rendered null and void, leaving only silence.   
 

For other writers, the desert is intrinsically feminine and to be fatally lost in the sand is like being sexually enveloped and suffocated by the love of a good woman. The Japanese author Kobo Abe, for example, explores this erotic-fetishistic theme in his short novel The Woman in the Dunes (1962).

This strangely beautiful and disturbing book tells the tale of an amateur entomologist, Niki Jumpei, who goes on a brief holiday to collect insects that live among the sand dunes, but ends up quite literally trapped in a deep hole alongside a woman whose only task in life is to dig sand. His attempts to escape end in failure and so he learns how to love the woman and accept his fate as a type of human sand-bug. In other words, he learns how to go with the flow and transform a hole into a home.

Abe provides some nice descriptions of the woman, a young widow, the surface of whose skin "was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand ... attractive to look at but hardly to touch."

That said, of course the man does eventually touch her; sometimes with savage violence and at other times with tenderness, as he helps brush or wash the sand from her naked body, from under her breasts, from her buttocks and thighs, and from the dark lips of her vulva. The sex between them is mostly impersonal and as crushing, shapeless and merciless as the desert. As Andrea Dworkin notes:

"The sand, because it is relentless and inescapable, forces an abandonment of the abstract mental thinking and self-involvement that pass for feeling, especially sexual feeling, in men in civilization. It forces the person to live wholly in the body, in the present, without mental evasion or self-preoccupied introspection or free-floating anxiety. ... What [Niki Jumpei] feels, he feels physically. The sand is so extreme, so intense, so much itself, so absolute, that it determines the quality and boundaries of his consciousness ..."

It even gives him an erection, as it trickles in a little stream over the base of his penis and flows along his thighs.  

Towards the end of the novel, the man attempts to rape the woman whilst the villagers who have imprisoned and enslaved them both in the pit watch from above. But just like his attempts to escape, his attempt to publicly violate the woman (and thereby secure a promise of freedom made by his captors) fails. She physically not only fends him off, but, like the sand, she overpowers him and obliges him to make a final capitulation:

"The man, beaten and covered with sand ... abandoned himself to her hands ... It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body." 
  
Dworkin again provides the best (somewhat romantic and profoundly Lawrentian) reading of this scene:

"In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand - to life moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to the necessities of the woman's life in the dunes - work, sex, a home, the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminated by voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerously unsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions. The superiority of the woman, like the superiority of the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patient endurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthless simplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in her body, not in his imagination."

  
See The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe, trans. E. Dale Saunders, (Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 44-6 and 232. And see Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin, (Basic Books, 2007), pp. 33-4 and 36.

Love, Hate and Intercourse

Intercourse: The Life and Work of Andrea Dworkin, 
dir. Pratibha Parmar.
Presently being filmed in San Francisco and 
scheduled for release in January 2015

According to Rawdon Lilly, the Lawrentian persona in Aaron's Rod (1922), hate is a form of love on the recoil which invariably results in destructive violence, be it on a personal-individual or an impersonal-collective level: It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.

I've long accepted the logic of this and still think it's a crucial insight. But might we not turn it around and suggest that rather than hate being an extreme reversal of love, love is actually a sublimated and disguised form of hate? That, essentially, even the highest and most celebrated expressions of love are coercive forms of spiritual and/or sexual abuse based upon the threat of violence.

This rather more disconcerting and pessimistic view is perhaps where Andrea Dworkin was coming from in her radical feminist study Intercourse (1987).

Although Dworkin doesn't actually write that all heterosexual intercourse is rape (this oft-quoted line was invented by her critics in an attempt to disparage her sophisticated argument by reducing it to a crass slogan), she does suggest that the male lover is more often than not in a position of power over the female object of his desire and that penetrative sex therefore invariably involves some degree of violation and all the flowers or boxes of chocolates in the world don't alter this fact, even if they serve to mask it and somewhat sweeten the deal.

Extending her own analysis developed in earlier works, Dworkin argues in Intercourse that the eroticized subordination, exploitation, and abuse of women within a phallocratic society is central and determines the behaviour and beliefs of both sexes.

This is increasingly apparent within a pornified culture, although the hatred, contempt and revulsion for women is reinforced by and throughout the arts, media, law, politics, science and religion (i.e. all of those discursive practices which between them produce the truth of our engendered human condition). You can read many classic works of literature or watch almost all films to see this; pornography is by no means exclusively to blame and is ultimately just another symptom of a far more serious disease: misogyny.     

And this is why what we need is not more censorship or attempts to outlaw extreme pornography, but what Nietzsche terms a revaluation of all values.


Note: this post is dedicated to KM and all those like her sensitive to the issue of invasive male penetration and the internal occupation of their bodies; those women who, like Dworkin, realise that the question of intercourse is fundamental to feminism and women's freedom.