Cultures of Fetishism (18 page)

There are certain kinds of body mutilation that are less socially ambiguous. They are self-inflicted, usually performed in secret, and are not socially approved. The person who performs such secretive acts of self-mutilation is fanatically devoted to the performances. When the urge comes upon her,
the delicate cutter
, so named to distinguish her from the
coarse cutter
who is usually a male, cannot wait to be alone to begin the cuttings or slicings or perforations of her skin. These desperate acts of self-mutilation slide comfortably into the standard definition of fetishism, “an excessive devotion to an irrational practice.”

But, how would these acts qualify as illustrations of the fetishism strategy? It would have to be shown that these irrational practices of self-mutilation were inspired by a culture that breeds and nourishes the fetishism strategy. If, for example, a person lives in a social environment that encourages her to behave like a humanoid, an automaton rather than a flesh and blood human being with ordinary human desires, she might cut into her skin as a gesture of stirring up a spark of life beneath her skin. Or she might despise her skin for having a mind of its own and coming between her desire and its satisfac- tion. What better way to achieve satisfaction than to cut through the skin to the nerve endings, so that they might knock at the door of the dulled and stupefied brain and bring it to life? The performance of
delicate self
-
cutting
might be an instance of hatred masquerading as love, and
/
or an example of, destruction painting itself with an erotic tint Either way it is an expression of the fifth principle of the fetishism strategy.

The act of self-cutting can also be interpreted as a way of controlling the dangerously unpredictable vitalities of the body.
The more dangerous and unpredictable the threat of desire, the more deadened or distanced from human experience the fetish must be
. Self-cutting, therefore, can be either a way of enlivening the body or a way of deadening it.

So far as we know, only a minority of adolescent girls are
delicate self-cutters
. Nevertheless, almost every adolescent girl is struggling, consciously or unconsciously, with the same emotional and physical conflicts as the
delicate self-cutter
, among them separation from her parents. At the same time, she is trying to come to terms with the uncontrollable physiological effects of puberty that are changing her irrevocably into an adult woman with sexual and procreative urges and capacities. These urges and capacities frighten the girl, for reasons that elude her. To compound these conflicts arising in con- nection with her changing body she now also is suffering the loss of her childhood illusions and with them the waning of her childhood fantasies of perfection and self-perfectibility.
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She may at times, and for a while, force these awesome anxieties and mortifications to the background of her mind by becoming preoccupied with bodily sensations that verge on pain but still seem tinged with pleasure. She tears at the skin of her cuticles, rubs the skin off the bottoms of her feet, plucks her eyebrows and the hairs on her arms and legs, splices the split ends of her hair, pulls out chunks of her hair, even occasionally pricks the skin on her arm until a small spot of blood appears. Or, she might, if the anxieties threaten to emerge from the background of her mind, make a tiny, barely visible,
very
delicate cut into her skin.

Though these actions give her a twinge that she is doing something not quite right, perhaps even sinful, the girl is able to lose herself in these bodily preoccupations and forget about the worries that would otherwise come into the foreground of her mind. The little mutilations take up her mind and enable her to temporarily escape from the frightening implications of being transformed physically and emotionally into a woman with the sexual and moral responsibilities of adulthood. Her self-mutilations are a way of taming and controlling the mysterious promptings of an awakening genital arousal.

The adrenal and ovarian estrogens that brought out the initial stages of puberty, like the elevated nipples and downy pubic hair, have been silently at work effecting changes over the entire skin surface and also the inner surfaces and organs of the body. There will be a rapid fat accumulation on the hips and thighs, a dramatic increase in the size of the wrist, the pelvis, the heart, the abdominal viscera, the thyroid, the spleen, and especially the long bones of the legs, arms, and torso. The expansiveness of the growth spurt is alarming to the adolescent girl, who is already afraid that she will be unable to contain excitement or relieve tension or find comfort.

Delicate self-cutting is a symptom that expresses a resistance to socialization, a resistance to Nature, a resistance to saying farewell to childhood, a resist- ance to growing up into adulthood. The child-becoming-an-adult does not leave her growing up to Nature. Nor can the elders of her social order tell her

what kind of woman she must become. The girl who cuts into her skin is enacting a personal rite of passage And, though no one is there to witness her enactment, the cuts into her skin leave scars as witness to her troubled soul. Later on, she may exhibit these scars as signs of her triumphant defeat of Nature, Society, Civilization, Mother, Father—and the Therapist who is trying to help her to understand the inner meanings of her gestures of self-multination. However, as most therapists of delicate cutters soon dis- cover, cutting is also a resistance to Interpretation.

The girl does not interpret her acts of cutting or her scars as anything more than what they are. In this respect, she is like a “savage,” who feels that her identity is fixed on her skin. The mere suggestion that there is an “inside” with depth and psychic meanings is enough to set the girl off on a binge of self-cutting. Those mysterious insides are her major enemies.
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Cutting is primarily a resistance to the body. The girl does not have a Mobius strip image of the body, where outside twists around to become inside. Inside is inside. Outside is outside. Only cutting can release what is trapped inside and bring it out into the open. The sight of the blood pouring out of the cut skin brings instant relief from the tensions and excitements that emanate from inside the body.

As she approaches womanhood, the delicate-cutter is unable to anticipate any relief from the menstrual tensions or the sexual excitements induced by the bodily changes of puberty. She is possessed by a desperate need to define and protect the boundaries of her body. Menstrual blood is experienced as an ugly, demonic substance that could leak out of the body and cover the entire world if it were not tamed and controlled. Similarly, emotions like depres- sion, anxiety, sadness, anger, joy, and love are imagined as demonic sub- stances that must be brought under control and then expelled from the body as though they were tears, vomit, nasal mucus, urine, feces, or menstrual blood.

“I felt mad and I couldn’t take it anymore.” “I was frustrated like I couldn’t do anything about anything.” “Everything was getting all fucked up; my mother, my father, my teacher, my friends, everybody was really fucking me up.”
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“I felt shitty.”
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“I felt so tense, I thought my body would burst wide open. I had to do something.”
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Without the cut into the skin to put an edge on the boundaries of the body, everything might leak out—the tears, the feces, the menstrual blood, the rage. As an infant and young child, the girl did not learn how to express her emotions except in the infantile experiences devouring or of a leaking out of bodily substances. As an adolescent, the delicate self-cutter continues to associate any kind of inner arousal with devouring or leaking-out experiences. Moreover, she confuses one kind of inner arousal with another. She confuses rage with sexual arousal. She confuses sexual arousal with rage.

Since the
typical
self-cutter does not anticipate care or help from anyone, she does not seek therapy until either she or her parents have been made frantic by her escalating and increasingly coarse skin-cutting. Her cry for help has to become a shriek before anyone pays attention.

From the self-cutting girls who gradually learned to trust that they might safely have feelings and then safely communicate them to their therapists, we learn something about why self-cutting has the power to provide relief from menstrual tensions and the inner genital arousals that accompany the changes of puberty: “I felt the badness inside me go out.”
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Or, “It’s like vomiting— you feel sick and you spit out the badness.”
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Another delicate cutter told her therapist that the trickling of the warm blood, the sight of it oozing through the gap in the skin,
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was like a calming voice saying, “It’s all over now honey. Don’t worry, dear. Everything is going to be all right.”
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Still another patient likened the blood that oozed from the “self-made zipper”
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to a voluptuous bath, a sensation of delicious warmth, “which as it spread over the hills and valleys of my body, molded its contour and shaped its form.”
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The delicate self-cutter is also expressing the haunting complexity of her con- fused identifications with her mother. She is relieved when the “mother-blood” warmly flows over her. The deadened mother and the deadened daughter are resurrected and reunited in the act of self-cutting. As the bad, dirty blood flows out, the daughter rids herself of her internal “bad” mother. At the same time she becomes a bleeder in an identification with the denigrated, castrated, bleeding mother. The anticipated passively experienced “castration” of menstruation is transformed into a controlled, delicate cut into the skin.
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The delicate cutter thinks of her skin as a container for the dangerous body substances and organs and all the insupportable arousals emanating from inside her body. Whereas the orifices of the body—nose, mouth, eyes, ears, anus, vaginal hole—are vulnerable to attackers from outside and inside, the skin can hold in or fend off the dreaded attacking arousals in a controlled and manageable way. In the place of a cannibalization of the entire inside and outside of the body, there is a localized, focused,
delicate
mutilation.
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Shortly after her first menstruation, one delicate cutter used a knife to scratch the letters L O V E on her thigh. The cuttings were neat, precise, and shallow, but nevertheless quite deep enough to allow the blood to color L O V E a violent red. She told her therapist that she had actually had the impulse to carve right down to the bone.
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As she dramatized the gestures that described her original impulse, her usually sweet, innocent face was clouded over by “an almost palpable hatred.”
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The girl confessed that she had really wanted to carve H A T E into the bone of her thigh. She had restrained herself because H A T E was not a nice thing to feel or think, much less put into words.

It would seem that the male self-mutilator, most often a
coarse cutter
, suffers more extensively from the bodily anxieties that afflict the female deli- cate cutter and usually, therefore, he inflicts on his body more extensive and devastating damage.
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Though he might never engage in extreme forms of skin-cutting, many an adolescent boy will engage in self-mutilating activities such as tying strings around his fingers and toes until they turn blue, tearing away at his cuticles until they bleed, plucking at his acne pimples until he creates open wounds and sores, self-tattooing or otherwise scarifying his arms and

legs. And these mind-absorbing body preoccupations, as much as they are visible expressions of the boy’s fears of mutilation, are also the means of taking his mind off some of the other expectable adolescent anxieties such as mourning the loss of his childhood illusions, separating from his parents, expiating guilt, and becoming a man with adult sexual and procreative capacities. Coarse cutting, in which a knife or other large sharp instrument is used to penetrate through the skin surface down to tendons, veins, arteries, and bones, sometimes advances to severings or amputations of body parts, in which cases the diagnostic label is adjusted to
self-amputation
.
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Any body part may be chosen for amputation. The least anxious of the self-amputators will limit the mutilation to the hands, fingers, and toes. Some finger and toe severers make a hobby of their self-mutilating activities and eventually trade personal secrecy for joining a secret society devoted to the practices and ideals of amputation. Here, in the safety of these “therapeutic communities,” fellow “hobbyists” can trade memories of their first experiments with self-amputation or recall the childhood origins of their current lust for female amputees.
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They are able to share, without shame, the imaginary amputations that figured in their adolescent masturbation rituals: the fake peg leg that enabled them to hobble toward orgasm, the masturbatory excitement of cut- ting off arms and legs from photographs of women. In the letters columns of various girlie magazines, fellow hobbyists can solicit sexual partners, exchange ideas, and share specific preferences with others who have a “mono- pede mania.”
Amputee Love
, an erotic comic book with a limited circulation and a highly select readership, is devoted to love among self-amputees and

amputees.
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Hobbyists particularly enjoy reminiscing about the unwitting doctors who gave them their first lessons in the techniques of proper surgery. How excit- ing it had been to observe as the doctor applied his scalpel to the botched “small” half-hearted, incomplete, experimental self-amputations and carried them through to the “ultimate” professional amputation.
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These days, young men and women share many forms of writing on the skin. Piercing different parts of the face and body—ears, nose, cheeks, lips, brows, tongues, navels, nipples. The favorite shared enthusiasm is tattooing, a writ- ing on the skin that in the past had been the exclusive territory of young men. The author of
Ink: The Not-Just-Skin-Deep Guide to Getting a Tattoo
, introduces the section on the one-point tattoo technique used by most