It was not pity that drew a veil over the ravaged bodies of the girls, but rather the unmistakable fact that those bodies could in no way be garbed in glamour and then sold with morbid objectives, not even to a necrophiliac public.
In the tempest of interpretation of the CR/M, there raged in particular the theory that the rapists had chosen those working-class young women in order to inflict upon them a full-fledged class vendetta, in the tradition of the Roman senator who has his runaway slave crucified. In the binomial “poor girl,” it was rather the adjective that unleashed the punitive violence on the part of the wealthy kidnappers. The punishment they administered, then, was political even more than sexual. There is no doubt an element of truth in this interpretation, as long as you keep track of the fact that it wasn’t a choice, and that there is very rarely a choice in the target of a rape, because the rapist only rarely finds victims that perfectly match his preferences. Except for the ones who murder their wife, or the neighbor whom they hate or the business partner who defrauded them, or else the ones who shoot an armored car guard or rub out an informant, for the most part, criminals take what comes along. They almost always fall back from one target to another or another still . . .
In rape, the targets are interchangeable: it depends on opportunities.
Proof of this is the fact that when it was a matter of abusing well-to-do young women, before the CR/M, the boys certainly hadn’t been shy about it. You can find just as many reasons to rape a rich little bitch as you can to rape a working-class slut. In different but every bit as intense ways, you can feel provoked and challenged by both categories of girls, you can get the same itch on the palms of your hands, the same yearning to crush them underfoot, humiliate them, punish them.
THE LEGENDARY SCENE OF The Shining in room 237. Inexplicable. Two minutes and fifty seconds that are inexplicable. People say that Kubrick edited it in various ways to give it a certain logic, but it has no logic. It does, however, have a meaning. By embracing a nude woman, a man embraces death. The spectacular young woman who emerges from the bathtub, pale, long-legged, high-breasted, is actually a rotting corpse. A living cadaver . . . There are some men who say that when they’re with a woman they feel as if they’re suffocating. They feel as if they’re in a trap, either when they enter a woman or else are simply in her arms or even when it is they who are wrapping her in their arms, when they are hugging her . . . they feel besieged even when it is they who are laying siege. There must be a reason for such a paradoxical feeling. Perhaps they’re just afraid of getting her pregnant and thereby being caught in a trap. Even certain men who forced a woman to have intercourse later accused her of being the one to entrap them. What they said might be a lie or a deplorable self-deception, but it still tells us something deep and strange.
MOREOVER, men fear or are actually terrorized by the expression of feminine feelings because they can sense that, in the dark depths concealed behind layers of tenderness or more-or-less affected fragility, a tremendous rage lies hidden. If rage is the root of all emotions, in the sense that all emotions contain within them at least a certain proportion of anger, and even in joyous exultation you can sense a hint of ill-concealed rage trembling, it’s likewise true that any emotion is ready to be transformed back into rage, that it can conceal or unleash rage, prove to be rage: first and foremost, this is true of love. In feminine love, some men see a temporarily benevolent Erinys, a Fury. They see, in other words, Medea.
Some feel that women’s original sexual task would be that of channeling the disorderly and promiscuous sexuality of males toward the purpose of reproduction and establishing a family order. This aspect, whose significance cannot be denied, is however in direct contradiction with a feminine faculty pointing in the opposite direction: there is in fact nothing that has fewer limitations (which means that it’s potentially unlimited) than a woman’s sexual availability, that is, the potential to copulate with countless males, or, in theory, countless times with the same male, something that is impossible—and therefore deeply upsetting—for him.
AT FIRST MEN complained of women’s lack of willingness to engage in sex; then the fear spread that they might be too willing, and that their drive for pleasure was limitless. At the time when this story unfolds, men could complain of both things. Whatever the case, women are the cause of anxiety and upset for any neurotic man, and if he wasn’t already neurotic, then sooner or later this is bound to turn him neurotic: either because he is convinced that they are threatening him with their now manifest sexual independence and superiority, or else because they might contaminate him with their intellectual inferiority, or because they loudly proclaim their total lack of dependence on him, or else, the other way around, because they trap him, they suck him in, they weaken him, they immobilize him in a spiderweb of seduction. Against such a tricky and treacherous enemy, you have no alternative but to declare a preemptive war, before they succeed in overturning their social inferiority into a state of biological supremacy, by virtue of their inexhaustible erotic potential. And that is when they must be struck, that is the vulnerable target, that threatening arsenal must be destroyed. In that light, the exploit of the CR/M has, as we have previously seen, all the earmarks of a counteroffensive. But if only it was really a war, just a war and nothing more, the classic war of the sexes! Open war, no quarter given, with an official declaration and perhaps at some point a cessation of hostilities, a clear, well-defined front, unequivocal acts, a clearly articulated strategy. Instead the flags are tangled and confused. This conflict manages to intertwine atrocities worse than any civil war, piling up mistreatments and torture with the most delicate tender mercies, the pleasure of spending an hour together with flaming love, reciprocal admiration with the gift of one’s defenseless nudity, continually mingling and blending, so that even the bitterest of enemies won’t stop seeking each other out in search of a hug, since they seem to have a desperate need of each other, the one for the other, and yet, once they have found each other, they can’t seem to do anything but hurt each other. Never has there been such a tangled, confusing war in which the members of the opposing armies continue to couple and mate, producing the children of war, the orphans of war.
WHEN A REPRESSED IMPULSE FINDS AN OUTLET, obtaining a substitute source of satisfaction, it provides not pleasure, but anger or disgust. Vendettas, for example, dictated by resentment, poison those who carry them out, no less than those who are their victims. Vengeance ruins your life. The pleasure that we are convinced we will obtain through a violent and liberatory act instead collapses in on itself, exactly like what becomes of the walls of a volcano during an eruption, with disastrous results, because the materials that plunge down into the raging furnace below only trigger new and violent reactions. What they call a venting or a letting off of steam never really is. Nothing is vented at all, all that happens is more steam gets built up; and then that steam gets amplified, condensed, refined, until it becomes self-aware and theatrical. Once unleashed, a violent impulse can easily be re-created, and then it is again released and again re-created, and once it has been constituted in serial fashion, it demands immediate and continuous satisfaction, in rapid-fire manner. If you abuse a girl and get away with it, the temporary disgust and sense of guilt will quickly be transferred to the victim of the abuse, and as if through some kind of miraculous multiplication, you look around and realize that all women are abusable, the entire female gender is at your mercy, you can stalk any woman at all, kidnap her, torture her, taking advantage of certain times of the day or certain solitary locations with lower risk, and the anger that has by no means been abated or vented, but actually exacerbated by the first abuse, will drive you to replicate it again, time after time. The world has suddenly been populated by potential victims, and what you must do is take a deep breath and hold down in your lungs your enthusiasm for this discovery, your hands start to tingle, your blood pumps quickly through your veins, a foxy cunning suddenly seems to be produced in your imagination, ordinari
ly so lazy . . .
And so the impulses and drives that had previously been so incompatible with the rest of an individual’s personality because of the high-handed arrogance with which they pursued violent and obscene objectives, and which had therefore been only at the cost of great effort restrained to lower levels of development and deprived of satisfaction and attainment, band together into a sort of independent republic, autonomous from the rest of your personality but still capable of attracting certain components of it, breaking away a section at a time, with the revolutionary promise of ever greater satisfactions, exactly like what actually happens during a state of civil war, until they are able to become even stronger than the original personality and triumph over it. By now, this is the dominant personality, victorious over vain scruples, animated by a growing column of anger, striving spasmodically toward its new objectives, while all that remains of the prior persona has been funneled almost entirely into drives that were previously thought unspeakable. And thus a serial rapist is born.
The confirmation of one’s own identity through repetition (in this case, of repugnant acts, but it would be no different if we were talking about pious good deeds) is a source of pleasure, it instills a sense of security. One’s own suffering and that of others procure the same sense of enjoyment.
AH, ANY KIND OF EXPERIENCE that takes you out of the humdrum banality of ordinary life, and lets you float in another dimension, producing a special feeling of giddy intoxication and triumph in defiance of the aridity of the life you’ve broken away from, a crushing victory over the part of you that had flattened against the walls of that life, lurking in concealment, and over those who never escape from it, don’t dare to leave its confines, wouldn’t even begin to know how, can’t even attain a conception of the idea of liberation, prisoners of the humdrum rat race that they believe to be life, without alternatives: for example, in bourgeois families but also in those of many honest blue-collar workers, people who work like slaves for years without ever once lifting their heads, their own parents. This sensation of liberty is so exhilarating that it immediately becomes irreplaceable, and therefore a monkey on your back, an obligation, it demands to be sought out at every moment of the day and at all costs, and it produces a parallel feeling, a sort of vicarious impulse that can accompany that triumphant intoxication or replace it when you aren’t able to achieve it, namely scorn, but a scorn ribbed internally and structurally with reasonings, motivated, ferocious, against the poor and the hypocrites who haven’t the faintest idea of the way you feel when you’re “de fori”—on the outside, to use the Roman slang—and yet recriminate ceaselessly against the dangers and the harm of that condition, who are frightened or scandalized by it. Your parents, of course, are in the front row, followed by all the other representatives and guardians of ordinary existence. If fostered and nourished in a continuous manner, scorn soon consolidates into hatred, while the people it is directed against are soon reduced to a subhuman level.
Once you’ve gone into that corkscrew spiral, it will take a dose of some controlled substance or the exercise of a given activity to allow the excitement to be vented, to release the unbearable tension.
Drugs and sex are the obvious answers to this requirement, and they are given, like medical pharmaceuticals, in doses calibrated to attain the desired effect, which is the achievement of a temporary narcosis: a shot, a shot, a third shot, or else a series of lines to snort, or else a fuck, a second fuck with the same subject or else with another, depending on the variable needs of those who are already high and want to stay high or else come down but, if possible, not in a nose dive.
Then there’s a third activity capable of releasing powerful doses, and in unlimited numbers, because the body suffering its consequences isn’t the body of the person practicing it, who runs no risks, who suffers no damage, who doesn’t plunge into the abyss, neither consumes nor exhausts their own strength, but rather that of other bodies. Here is an activity that will never lead to an overdose: gratuitous violence. In other words, the kind that is unleashed on helpless bodies. The circuit of this addiction involves a frantic stimulation of one’s sensibilities in such a way as to procure at least a brief interval of utter insensibility.
OUR ALWAYS ALERT, unflagging sexual attention by no means derives from a hammering, abnormal physical need, but rather from the fixation on noting everywhere we turn our eyes, encountering, like so many personal provocations, the unmistakable signs of feminine difference, the breasts peeping out of the ice cream vendor’s neckline as she hands you your cone, the slender swiveling hips atop a pair of lanky legs of the young girl in a sweatshirt sent by her mother to take the dog out for a walk before leaving for school, the red lipstick worn by the woman in her fifties to whom you’ve offered the last shopping cart available, and you do it in order to see those shiny red lips turn up in a smirk of gratitude, and her pretty eyes glitter with a wateriness that might be due to an erotic desire repressed too long, just as it might be a result of the irritating fluorescent lights in the supermarket, so that she hastens to put on a pair of dark glasses. Each of these details, which can be found in half the population, is stored away in a mental silo, each one striking the man in question right in the face like a glove announcing a duel, an intolerable transgression, or as confirmation that all the women who emit these signals—signals they cannot help but emit the instant they show themselves in the public street, in school, at home, everywhere and anywhere, creating a massive, frightful interference, a buzzing network of stimuli and provocations—all these women, in short, are nothing but sluts, goddammned sluts, who march down the thoroughfares of the city rubbing their thighs together, the thighs where their perennially damp sex is lurking, and bouncing their breasts, even if they are small, even if they don’t bounce in the slightest, compressed and immobilized by their brassiere as they are, well, that makes no difference, it’s as if they were, it’s as if those breasts were bouncing, up and down, up and down, nodding and winking. The messages that they launch into the air are even more subtle and duplicitous when they deny what they state, when the sources of those messages are chastely dressed women, nondescript, showing off none of their sexual differences, well, sure enough, they’re even bigger sluts than the rest of them, since underneath their modest flower-print dresses and in the filthy swamp of their desires they know that they’re concealing a perverse frenzy, insatiable sex organs, it’s all so clear! The more they act like nuns, deep down the more depraved they are. As for the ones that dress like sluts, with their thighs bared for all to see, well, they’re obviously sluts. Elevenyear-old girls are just future sluts, women in their sixties used to be sluts, and they’re suffering and seething because they just can’t act that way anymore, they can’t show it off (“Well, so, when are the rapes going to begin?” the old women of Cyprus wonder, impatiently, as the siege progresses and it looks like the city is about to be stormed by the Turks . . . Lord Byron, Don Juan).
AT THE TIME, there was a constant pressure on women to say yes, to be “accommodating”; these days that pressure extends down to thirteen-year-old girls, for them to be suggestive and available, if they don’t want to risk becoming outsiders. Young girls whose mothers wear such low-waisted pants that the elastic strap of their thong is visible, T-shirts with slogans like TOMORROW I’LL BE A GOOD GIRL (today, clearly not), or else SAVE A VIRGIN, DO ME INSTEAD, or GAME ROOM with a large arrow pointing below the belt, or else LIMITED TIME OFFER wobbling on the surgically rebuilt tits.
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GOOD LUCK EXPLAINING a murder with the criterion of utility or rational motivation! Let’s take Hagen, who, in the Nibelungenlied, when confronted with reactions of horror at his deed, argues rationally the reasons he betrayed and murdered Siegfried, in political, coldly realistic terms: the elimination of an ally who was too powerful, the cause of continual unrest, the source of endless envy. It was necessary to put an end to Siegfried’s tyrannical sway; and Hagen did it without scruples. “I care very little for the w
eeping.” His speech is crude but concrete, and yet no one listens to him, or gives a sign of believing in what he says. When you kill someone (especially a hero, or a virgin), whatever valid reasons you might have will fade into the background, your motives will pale or appear trivial in context; issues of appropriateness or convenience no longer count; when you kill a symbol there are other motivations, more powerful, profound, tragic, or demented. There is no rational consideration that can hold up. Realism is actually banished from every murder, and not only those committed during a contest for political power. Only Machiavelli, with a special effort at abstraction, was able to reduce murder to the outcome of a rational calculation.
THE PROBLEM WITH PEOPLE like that is that they don’t perceive the limitations of their own person and their own actions. Their fear must be truly great if they are to renounce doing what is prohibited: well, sometimes the frenzy of doing it is even stronger than fear.
WHILE WE MAY HAVE LEARNED how to defend ourselves from others, rarely are we capable of withstanding the sudden shock wave that is generated within ourselves. When we are standing watch, we look forward, away from our encampment, peering into the darkness, not behind our backs. And yet the deadliest sirens are singing into our defenseless inner ears, to which we cannot apply any wax plugs; and when all is said and done, the effort at self-control will prove even more costly and demanding than that involved in defending ourselves from external threats. And that is precisely why it is the first mechanism to break down when overloaded. What’s more, the threatening impulses that rise from within provide tangible proof that we are alive, that in any case a force of some kind inhabits us, if not a good one, an evil one: instead of putting up resistance to these temptations, feeling shame at them, there are some who are happy to feel them awakening, to hear their summons, as if it were the clarion note of a horn blown by an angel, and little does it matter that the angel in question is the angel of death. There are many ways to feel you are a man: one is to spare yourself the neurosis of self-control, allowing those forces to overflow without worrying whether the consequences will be noxious or harmful. To go on a bender, to take drugs, to take random potshots, to steal other people’s property and women, to risk your life for no good reason, idiotically, to rape and ravage, this transgression of the limits allowed to an individual, accompanied by a terrible sense of remorse, or else in perfect indifference, as if you didn’t even notice that you had broken those limits—all this can undeniably unleash moments of the purest joy. I don’t give a flying fuck about the price I pay. First I’ll make others pay, then I’ll pay, sure, I’ll get sick, I’ll wind up in prison, my veins and my brain will both burst, I’ll turn into a walking corpse, everyone will turn their backs on me, and it may even be that some demon will return to flutter through the halls of that dreary ruined castle that was once my conscience, tormenting me. But you know what I say? I still don’t give a fuck. I’ve been to the top of Mount Everest with the devil himself, and from all the way up there, to fall and smash against the rocks after a long drop pumps so much adrenaline into your veins that I wouldn’t trade my inglorious death for any other destiny.
The Catholic School Page 124