Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  On the other hand, most of us have never been beaten up, have no idea what broken bones, black eyes, bruised legs, anything like that imposed upon us by someone we are supposed to love would feel like. Playing with violence is all fine and good until someone gets hurt, until someone forgets that the gun is loaded. “We measure his desire by what he’s willing to do to her, and we celebrate the force he’s willing to show,” Andrea Dworkin said of wife-batterers in a speech at a Texas conference on domestic violence. “Then, when she shows up as a pile of bleeding bones in a hospital emergency room, we say, ‘Oh, that wasn’t so romantic after all.’ ” As is often the case, Ms. Dworkin is right about the sharp divide between ravishing fantasy and ugly reality, but this is an issue that feminists have struggled with for a long time, with most of us finally accepting some sort of psychic split in the realm of desire as surely as so many monks and priests and nuns obey a vow of celibacy—looking sexless and deflated in their shapeless religious garb—though underneath they must surely quash their fleshly urges every day, every hour, every minute even. None of this was ever supposed to be easy. Whether you believe in feminism or Jesus Christ or Mary Magdalene or all of the above, you will always be forced to reconcile what you want with what you know is right. I think a lot of leading free-speech feminists who are against the censorship of pornography because they believe in the First Amendment are actually reluctant to admit that they like X-rated movies and dirty magazines themselves: it’s not that they don’t want to live in a world that bans pornography, but rather that they don’t want to live without pornography, period. Even right-thinking chicks have dirty minds full of impure thoughts.

  In an Esquire column from 1972, reprinted in her collection Crazy Salad, Nora Ephron admits to “this dreadful unliberated sex fantasy,” one so ugly she can’t share it with her consciousness-raising group (ah, the seventies) or even with her readers, except to say, “It has largely to do with being dominated by faceless males who rip my clothes off. That’s just about all they have to do. Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It’s terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.” Ms. Ephron doesn’t elaborate much on this, though she does suggest that some harsher and rougher rape and battery follows all this ocular objectification. At any rate, I think it is a safe categorical rule—like the five years you add on to the given age of any woman over fifty, or the ten pounds you add on to the admitted weight of any woman at all—that whatever sexual fantasies someone is willing to divulge amount to maybe a tenth in degree of debauchery of what they really dream up. The only thing that we know for sure is that most of us have reveries about rape from one or another perspective, and almost none of us act on them (I shudder to think what actual rapists fantasize about).

  And it’s a funny thing about sexual fantasies of all kinds: unlike other types of fantasies—those flights of fancy about winning the lottery or showing the town bully who’s boss or rescuing your dream girl from a car wreck—which we would love, without reservation, to experience in reality, most people really would not like their sexual desires fulfilled. It’s not just that a man who wins the Penthouse sweepstakes and is granted command of a harem will learn the hard (and sore and not so hard) way that making love to twenty women at once is more exhausting than enjoyable—it’s that most men don’t even want to test-drive this daydream in the first place. And most women do not wish to be raped, maimed, bruised, choked, whipped or battered. But that doesn’t mean the thought does not make them hot and soft and wet.

  You see, many of us like a little bit of violence, or the fierce and fearsome possibilities implied by a domineering man whose touch is less than tender. Plenty of us have had some unnerving and unexpected sexual encounters where we’ve been hit, thrown on the floor, pushed against a wall, held down or shaken up, and many of us have found ourselves on all fours or thrown across some man’s lap getting spanked like a bad, bad schoolgirl who is made to feel even naughtier as something warm shoots up between her thighs, as a tense ticklish quiver coruscates deep inside of her. The majority of us who’ve had such experiences can enjoy feeling dirty and debased and interested in what was happening, because despite date-rape hysteria and domestic violence media saturation, we ultimately have some sense that nothing too bad is going to happen. Somewhere in the apocrypha of the social compact, it is decreed that a spanking does not translate into a beating.

  But I know this is slippery logic. If we condone this little bit of brute force from men—and by definition, by asking them to just be men and be different from women, we kind of do—should we not consider it part of our opportunity costs in dealing with these creatures that it will sometimes get ugly, that it will occasionally get real? If only feminism or any other philosophy or moral code could come up with something so luscious that it could conquer these base impulses that fuel heterosexual love. If only it could outsmart the will to power, he with his strength, she with her sexual snare, and both with the rape fantasy—sublimated into the push-and-pull, the resistance-yield-conquest of common courtship—that is almost a necessity in every romantic relationship, for it is only in the saying no and playing hard to get that the tease and tension and titillation is born, even for healthy people. If feminism could snuff all the dark stuff out of sex and we could all just enjoy the edenic love that has the family-entertainment feel of a trip to Disney World, then sexism will be completely eradicated. But not until then.

  So it’s basically never.

  And that’s why there is a part of me that understands why Mike Tyson or members of the Dallas Cowboys assume that if a woman comes up to their hotel room late at night, it’s because she means to stay awhile. And it doesn’t mean that she’s crashing on the couch. Or that she’ll stay for tea and crumpets, clean her hands in a finger bowl of rose water, put her white gloves back on and then go home. It’s not that it ought to be assumed that a woman who joins a man in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton after 11 P.M. is there to get laid, but if you happen to be dealing with preverbal professional athletes, it’s a good idea to be careful. And be prepared. And, quite frankly, before you make the trip up the elevator to one of the top-floor rooms with VIP services like delivery of The Wall Street Journal each morning, it might be a good idea to be willing. Because late at night, in hotel beds with their cold, crisp sheets, in front of hotel TVs with their six choices of Spectravision, what people like to do is fuck. And who can blame them?

  I believe Mike Tyson committed rape on that fateful beauty-pageant night in Indianapolis, and I am glad he was convicted and incarcerated for it. But I also think Desiree Washington was an idiot to be alone with Mike Tyson in any room with readily available horizontal surfaces—especially a hotel, whose utilitarian value is infused with sexy implications—if she wasn’t wanting to get down and dirty. Because that’s what people do. And because no does not always mean no. It does, often enough, mean: I’m not easy, try a little harder, or: / want to but don’t think I’m a slut, or: I really do want to, but I’m uncomfortable with the enormity of my sexual desires, so only if you force me will I be able to ignore my guilt. Now, for the sake of the law, a line must be drawn, and no must mean no. But the mixed messages, not just in that little two-letter word but in all the rites of dating, will not be decoded and destroyed until we raise a generation of infants in perfectly appointed little Skinner boxes so that their brains are programmed from the earliest point to enjoy clean, Utopian sex, the kind we had before the serpent, before we partook of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and opened our eyes and saw that we were naked and felt the shame which begot suspicion which pervaded everything. And bad as this was supposed to be—the Fall, the one with a capital letter—my guess is that before that day it was all procreational sex, it was mating season activity, it was animal—and by animal I mean bunny rabbits, not felines. But once we tasted forbidden fruit—from the only tree in the whole Garden of Eden that had been proscribed—we were given the gift of vision,
and instead of seeing light, we discovered darkness.

  And we thought it was good

  Now here we are: All these years later, and no one is exactly running to yank the string and get the lightbulb back on.

  Still, no one wants to be date-raped and no one wants to be physically abused. But it is such a thin, fine line. When a rape or beating occurs between a man and woman who have just met—whether at a beauty pageant, a bar or a bar mitzvah—it’s tough enough to make sense of how flirtation and a few drinks turned to aggravated assault. But with married couples, with longtime boyfriends and girlfriends: the mind boggles. A friend of mine, who is now an attorney, spent a couple of years between college and law school working for Linda Fairstein, head of the sex crimes unit at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. My friend’s entire job was interviewing women who had filed rape charges—these were cases where the situation was not desperate, the lines not so clear, no one was in the hospital—just to make sure that they hadn’t then had sex the next night with the same guy voluntarily, or they had not since married him—or if, in fact, the woman’s decision to go to the police to report the crime was not, in the first place, part of an escalating destructive dynamic the couple functioned in. When Pam talked to me about the women she dealt with, she never seemed to doubt the sincerity of their claims—she was quite sure something very bad must have happened; but there seemed to be real frustration with how the situation changed from minute to minute, how in a single conversation both the objective recall of events and the subjective interpretation of their meaning could vary wildly, how substance abuse blurred behavior, how love or what passed for it had the power to mess everything until it was beyond the limits of the law.

  These situations may also be beyond the purview of psychology, psychiatry, social work and its various subgroups. Mediation and marriage counseling might help, but little can make the bonds between these couples either sensible or severable. In a paper for the December 1990 volume of the journal Family Process, several therapists from the Ackerman Institute in New York City wrote about their findings in counseling couples with domestic violence problems. One of their conclusions was that it was best to approach these pairs with the assumption that their union could remain, that somehow it could be made to work—basically, that the goal did not have to be to get the wife to leave. This decision was partly philosophical—there was usually real love based on some sound and long-standing ties—but it was also practical: these couples could not be kept apart. They seemed to thrive on the break-up-and-make-up process too well. “In the wake of the irrefutable logic that compels the couple to separate, the next wave of that logic breaks, and they are caught in the powerful tides of reaffiliation. This redemptive moment in the couple’s cycle … is as complexly structured as the violent tide that produced it,” the therapists write. “The strength of this bond has the potential to defeat the most persuasive shelter or antibattering program: The more outside forces try to separate the couple, the more the bond binds them together … Since the nature of attachment is often a mystery, even from the protagonists themselves, they will remain caught in its grip, common-sense injunctions to separate notwithstanding.”

  The therapists’ tolerance of these insane relationships—which is really quite smart, I think, certainly more reasonable than advocates who try to take a woman away from what she won’t leave, and definitely saner than Andrea Dworkin’s call for lengthy prison sentences—says as much about the times we live in, and our view of the function of all long-term relationships, as it does about domestic violence. Because it is a fact of post-sixties America that no one is ashamed of much, lots of people grew up in broken homes, in sterile suburbs, without much family, and the end product is a generation of adults who find themselves unusually willing to cling to relationships long past their point of usefulness; they find themselves wanting to make it work with rare determination—and with about as much methodology as a person who bangs on a television set to get the screen to stop rolling—as a corrective to the laxity of their parents, and because they just plain don’t want to lose another person that they love. Another loss, one more loss, so many losses: Did you say all my pretty ones? Not all? For as long as they can remember, they’ve been losing parents and stepparents and Dad’s live-in lover and Mom’s old boyfriend, and they really want to make a stable, solid life for themselves that is not about people going away. They want to make a life about staying. So while feminism ought to make a woman feel free to leave a man who makes her unhappy in any way, these more primal forces and needs keep it going. On and on. Think about it: When in the history of human events has it ever been possible to date someone for seven years? And then finally break up.

  The notion of the long battle—of: we tried, oh how we tried, and these are people who are not even married and don’t have kids—is part of our way of thinking about love. Of course, personal dramas are patiently accepted. People who have nourished their need to stay intertwined and enmeshed can spend years in a damaging relationship, and then spend years getting out of it: divorcing, suing, seizing, whatever—basically going from the drama of the bad relationship to the melodrama of the ugly breakup. This, in our world, passes for normal. Simone de Beauvoir, who enjoyed and endured a fifty-year nonmarriage to Jean-Paul Sartre—which was, it seems, a triumph of mutual respect and separate apartments over infidelity, insanity, existentialism and Nelson Algren—has no patience for those who admire the persistence of participants in difficult relationships, dismissing them as boring and bored. “[T]he middle class in recent years has taken on an epic style of expression in which routine takes on the cast of adventure, fidelity, that of a sublime passion; ennui becomes wisdom, and family hatred is the deepest form of love,” she writes, with rare disgust, in The Second Sex. “The truth is, however, that when two individuals detest each other, while being unable to get along without each other, it is not of all human relations the truest and most moving, but rather the most pitiable.”

  Just the same, as her own paramourdom with Sartre shows, all love is coded and contractual in its own particular way. Even in healthy, nonviolent and nonoppressive relationships that don’t get their start in Paris between the wars, the couple lives by the laws of its own constitution, and usually it’s not written out, it’s not discussed, they don’t know what magnetism has kept them together for so long, they probably don’t want to know. After a while, it is clear that physics, Einstein’s theories, his law of relativity and the way it explains how particles in the universe are drawn to each other, must surely guide human emotions as well. E = mc2: I knew—really knew, could have explained it well—what the equation meant when I was in high school, when I still took science courses, before I stupidly began to think I could learn more about the world from the poets than the physicists.

  I learned from reading a cover story on sadomasochistic sex clubs in New York magazine, a publication catering to the consumer habits of yuppies, that if you’re into being chained and whipped or having candle wax dripped on your testicles or worse, there is an agreed-upon word you can say that means stop for real (as opposed to the random cries of “stop! stop!” that one might make at those moments as part of the fun). So in a world where they know that no doesn’t always mean no, they’ve come up with the notion of the super-no.

  Now when I think of s & m or b & d, as these practices are initialized in personal ads, I tend to think of pasty, pale men with oddly distributed body hair, women in the kind of outfits that Versace turned into dresses (could that have been his sin against humanity?), with crispy crunchy hair, dyed orange or a heavy black that looks like it may just be an oil slick. Everybody is very unclean-looking, like they don’t have parents, like they were never babies who were cuddled in somebody’s arms. As a result, anything that might be associated with that world—handcuffs you buy at the Pink Pussycat Boutique, a gag like the one in Pulp Fiction—is something I wish to avoid, and that would include the artifice of the whole situation. I am told that I am
missing one of the great thrills in life, but I think if a boyfriend tied me up, I’d be more inclined to laugh at the theatrical absurdity of the situation. And then there’s been so much that’s been done in movies that everyone wants to try in real life, forgetting that in the privacy of your own home, there is no expert lighting and no clever camera angles. Forgetting also that there is nothing a man could do to a woman with a stick of butter that wouldn’t make her think, / hope you haven’t mistaken yourself for Marlon Brando; and there is really nothing any man could do to a woman’s nipples with ice cubes that would not make her worry that she had mistakenly ended up with Mickey Rourke; and forget about gas masks and Bobby Vinton. Do you see what I’m saying? What was once the danger of sexuality has actually become a parody of itself, personified by a big fat man sitting in a Jacuzzi surrounded by runners-up from the Miss Hawaiian Tropic contest. This is not Hugh Hefner or even Larry Flynt; it’s Al Goldstein.

  And it’s all just too damn laughable.

  Sex, when dealt with as the kind of pursuit that requires regular visits to a club called the Vault; that goes from a no-equipment-necessary kind of human activity to one that involves metallic machinery which resembles nothing so much as the stuff that stocked an exercise room at a Catskills resort, circa 1953; and finally, when sex is so silly that you have fantasies about RuPaul that don’t involve killing her/him or at least getting VH1 to cancel the show: if this is what sex is like when you are a thrill-seeker about it, then I am proud to be boring. I’m proud to be the most ardent proponent of the missionary position outside of turn-of-the-century China. I’d much rather live in the real world where no one needs to wear leather for the frisson of sexual heat to make itself felt, in a world that is not a game, that actually takes sex seriously, that cannot create a super-no, a word for no when you really mean it, a world where you trust the person you’re with to make his own judgments or you trust yourself to leave or you trust nobody and nothing at all but go on anyway: a world where everyone knows there can be no word to stop a runaway train, where we all accept that violence just kind of erupts, that it might not stop where we want it to stop.