Mercy (102 page)

sense o f emblematic. But certainly one need not labor to describe

the muck or the person indistinguishable from it. We affirm

sexually active women, yes. We will not explicate either the

condition or the lives o f sexually annihilated women— they

achieved nothing that requires our attention. The crime o f rape is

not an issue o f sex. It is an issue o f power. To recast it once again,

in a revisionist frenzy, as an issue o f freedom is painfully and

needlessly diversionary. O f course, there is a tradition in

existentialist philosophy o f seeing rape as an expression o f

freedom, a phenomenon o f freedom incarnate as it were, for the

rapist o f course, presumed male, presumed the normative

human. But certainly by now the psychological resonances o f

rape for the raped can best be dealt with in a therapeutic forum so

that the individual’s appreciation o f sex will not be distorted or

diminished— a frequent consequence o f rape that is a real

tragedy. The mechanics o f the two, rape and intercourse, have

an apparent likeness, which is unfortunate and no doubt

confusing for those insufficiently sex-positive. One is the other,

exaggerated, although, o f course, we do not know
—pace
St.

Augustine— which came first. St. Augustine contends that there

was sexual intercourse in the Garden but without lust, which he

saw as debilitating once he stopped indulging in it. O f course, we

all get older. The philosophical problem is one o f will. Is will

gendered? Clearly Nietzsche’s comprehension o f will never took

into account that he could be raped. Sade postulated that a

woman had a strong will— to be raped and otherwise hurt. It is

the governing pornographic conceit, indistinguishable from a

will to have sex. The problem o f female freedom is the problem

o f female will. Can a woman have freedom o f will if her will

exists outside the whole rape system: if she will not be raped or

potentially raped or, to cover Sade’s odd women, if she will not

rape. Assuming that the rapist qua rapist imposes his will, can

any woman be free abjuring rape, her will repudiating it, or is

any such will vestigial, utterly useless on the plane o f human

reality. Rape is, in that sense, more like housework than it is

like intercourse. He wants the house clean. She does not want

to clean it. Heterosexual imperatives demand that she bend her

will to his. There is, o f course, a sociology to housework

while there is only a pathology to rape. I am dignifying the

opposition here considerably by discussing the question o f

rape at all. Housework, as I showed above, has more to do

with wom en’s daily, ordinary bending o f will to suit a man. I

object to tying rape to wom en’s equality, in either theory or

practice, as if rape defined wom en’s experience or determined

w om en’s status. Rape is a momentary abrogation o f choice.

At its worst, it is like being hit by a car. The politicizing o f it

creates a false consciousness, one o f victimization, and a false

complaint, as if rape is a socially sanctioned male behavior on a

continuum o f socially expressed masculinity. We need to

educate men while enhancing desire. For most men, rape is a

game played with the consent o f a knowledgeable, sophisticated partner. As a game it is singularly effective in amplifying

desire. A m plifying desire is a liberatory goal. We are stuck, in

this epoch, with literalists: the female wallowers and the

feminist Jacobins. It is, o f course, no surprise to see a schizoid

discourse synthesized into a synthetic rhetoric: “ I” the raped

becomes “ I” the Jacobin. As the Jacobins wanted to destroy all

aristocrats, the feminist Jacobins want to destroy all rapists,

which, if one considers the varieties o f heterosexual play,

might well mean all men. They leave out o f their analysis

precisely the sexual stimulation produced by rape as an idea in

the same w ay they will not acknowledge the arousing and

transformative dimensions o f prostitution. To their reductive

minds prostitution is exploitation without more while those

o f us who thrive on adventure and com plexity understand that

prostitution is only an apparent oppression that permits some

women to be sexually active without bourgeois restraints.

Freedom is implicit in prostitution because sex is. Stalinists on

this issue, they see the women as degraded, because they believe

that sex degrades. They will not consider that prostitution is

freedom for women in exactly the same way existentialists

postulated that rape was a phenomenon o f freedom for men—

striking out against the authoritarian state by breaking laws and,

in opposition to all the imperatives o f a repressive society, doing

what one wants. They w on’t admit that a prostitute lives in

every woman. They w on’t admit to the arousal. Instead, they

strategically destroy desire by calling up scenarios o f childhood

sexual abuse, dispossession, poverty, and homelessness. Even

the phallic woman o f pornography has lost her erection by the

end o f the list. Rape as idea and prostitution as idea are o f

inestimable value in sexual communication. We don’t need the

Jacobins censoring our sexual souls. Meanwhile, in the academy

our influence grows while the Jacobins are on the streets,

presumably where they belong if they are sincere. I will keep

writing, applying the values o f agency, nuance, and ambiguity

to the experiences o f women, with a special emphasis on rape

and prostitution. I have no plans to write about the Holocaust

soon, although, I admit, I am increasingly irritated by the

simple-minded formulations o f Elie Wiesel and his ilk. Kvetch,

kvetch. After I get tenure, I will perhaps write an article on the

refusal o f Holocaust survivors to affirm the value o f the

Holocaust itself in their own creative lives. Currently I want

those who are dogmatic about rape and other
bad things
to keep

their moralisms posing as politics o ff my back and out o f my

bed. I don’t want them in my environment, my little pond. I

w on’t have m y students reading them, respectfully no less, or

m y colleagues inviting them here to speak, to read, to reproduce

simplicities, though not many want to. I like tying up my lover

and she likes it too. I will not be made to feel guilty as if I am

doing something violative. I was that good girl, that obedient

child. Feminism said let go. Y ou can do what a man does. I like

tying her wrists to the bed, I like gagging her, I like dripping hot

w ax on her breasts. It is not the same as when a man does it. She

and I are equals, the same. There is no moral atrocity or political

big deal. I like fantasizing. I like being a top and I like bringing