Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  Hey, I thought to myself gently, at least it’s over.

  From the front seat, my mother announced: “I’m going to do it again when we get home.”

  Twenty minutes later, I was sitting on the floor of our kitchen, my butt pressed into the three-way protection of the corner and floor, while my mother beat me with her hairbrush on my arms, which I had wrapped around my head, and the sides of my body.

  That was much better for me, by the way. At least my butt, that big clitoris on the back of my pelvis, was safe.

  Several hours later, my mom told me to come out of my bedroom, where I had been crying, sulking, and indulging in maudlin revenge fantasies. She was sitting on a couch in the living room.

  “Take down your pants,” she said coldly. “I want to see if you’re bruised.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s my body.”

  “Do what I say, or I’ll spank you again,” she replied.

  That was the shibboleth; the magic words that overpowered my fierce declaration of bodily integrity and self-determination. Simmering with rage, I pulled down my pants and underwear and showed her my butt.

  She touched one cheek with the tip of her finger.

  “You have a bruise there,” she said.

  She moved her finger to the other cheek.

  “And there.”

  I would not speak about this memory—not to anyone, not even to myself—for more than a decade.

  But for the next eighteen years, when I was alone, I would have flashbacks to this day, usually in cars. For no apparent reason, I’d start to cry: violent, choking sobs that always forced me, for safety’s sake, to pull my car onto the side of the road. Then a fist of nausea would punch up through my stomach, and I’d spill out of the driver’s seat, throwing up onto the asphalt. What couldn’t come out in words came out in vomit.

  Roughly a year after that incident, when I was eleven, I found a text brochure in a doctor’s office. It listed, in titillating words like “bruises” and “welts,” the warning signs for child abuse. I took it home and tucked it into a space between my bed and the wall.

  That brochure didn’t stay in the dark space. It came out—a lot.

  I was a masochist, but didn’t know it yet. I was confused. The closest reference points for my emerging sexual identity were things that had happened nonconsensually, and at my mother’s hands. I was a child. I spoke to myself in the only language I’d been taught.

  When I was twelve or thirteen, I went to a pool party. I hadn’t done a good job putting on sunscreen, and my back and thighs burned fire-engine red in the sun. When I got home, my mom was, as usual, furious.

  “Get on your stomach,” she ordered. It’s a loaded phrase.

  “Please, no,” I begged, in that tone of voice exclusive to scared kids in trouble.

  She left the room. I thought she was getting something to spank me with, but she returned with a bottle of aloe vera. She just wanted to put it on the backs of my thighs, where the burns were worst. She wanted to help. But to this day, I can still recall the sickening crush of fear that washed through me when she told me to lie down.

  As I entered early adolescence, my mother went through a phase where she sometimes patted my butt, lightly, while we were walking. It disgusted me. Every time she did it, I seethed with rage and growled at her to keep her hands off me. Once, when I was roughly thirteen, she did it while we were walking in a mall.

  I spun around to face her. I grabbed her wrist and squeezed it, as tight as I could, in my fist. It felt small and vulnerable. I was getting bigger. Suddenly, I was the one with some physical power.

  I let go of my mother’s wrist.

  “Never touch me there,” I roared.

  “What?” my mom said—laughing, I presume, at what she perceived to be the adolescent extremity of my reaction. “It’s just a love pat!”

  I felt nauseous.

  That night, I dreamed I was kicking her in the face. I kicked until I felt the bones give way and the tip of my shoe crashed into wet, bloody tissue. I woke to discover I had been crying in my sleep.

  As an adult, when I confronted my mother with those memories, she cried. That reaction surprised me.

  “Why are you upset?” I asked her.

  “Because it’s gruesome,” she said.

  I felt cold and compassionless. This story has two victims.

  None of this caused my fetish, but I’ve learned to tolerate skepticism of that fact. What I do know is that these memories left me vulnerable to a self-defeating fear, which would haunt me for years to come, that my sexuality was “sick.” What could have been—should have been—a source of pure pleasure had been poisoned.

  I felt, in the pit of my stomach, that my fetish was not, as conventional psychiatry would have me believe, the result of childhood trauma. But how could I deny that theory with such certainty when my own life seemed to confirm it?

  When Cordelia refuses to tell her father how much she loves him, she puts her own life in danger. What would have happened to the newly disowned and disinherited Cordelia if the King of France hadn’t rescued her with a marriage proposal? (If France hadn’t offered Cordelia that domestic lifeboat, then she, not her father, would be forced out onto the stormy heath. How would that story end?) Shakespeare did not write stupid women. So why does Cordelia refuse Lear’s demand that she perform love for him, even at the risk of dangerous banishment?

  Something is very wrong with this family.

  When Lear orders his daughters to display their “love” for him in a perverse competition for land, it’s obvious that he misunderstands love. (The King of France, an outsider to the situation and to the family, points out that “love’s not love when it is mingled with regards that stands aloof from th’ entire point.”) Lear thinks that love can be purchased—and his eldest daughters, Regan and Goneril, are familiar with this transaction. They don’t hesitate. Lear snaps his fingers, and they perform for him on cue. They declare that they love their father more “than eyesight, space, and liberty,” and that their love for him is so paramount that it is, in fact, “enemy to all other joys.” Regan and Goneril are often criticized for the gushing insincerity of these replies, but I think that’s unfair. They’re only doing what their father has ordered them to do.

  Cordelia, on the other hand, tells her father: “I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more nor less.” Then she zeroes in on a specific objection to her sisters’ speeches:

  Why have my sisters husbands, if they say

  They love you all? Happily, when I shall wed,

  That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry

  Half my love with him, half my care and duty.

  Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,

  To love my father all.

  In Cordelia’s rebuttal, and indeed throughout this first scene, Shakespeare draws uncomfortable parallels between the kind of love that Lear expects from his daughters and the kind of love that exists between spouses.

  It’s important to consider that in Cordelia’s famous first reply, she doesn’t actually say nothing. She says, “Nothing.” She makes a firm declaration of her unwillingness to participate in this forced demonstration of love. Why does Cordelia feel the need to be so explicit in telling her father about the fact that her love is nothing more than natural filial affection? Why doesn’t that go without saying?

  The interpretation that most fascinates me is also the darkest. What if Cordelia suspects that the kind of love her father demands is unnatural? What if she believes that her father has sexually abused her two older sisters, and she fears that the same gruesome fate awaits her? (I am not the only person to sense an ominous sexual edge in King Lear: the idea is perhaps best explored in Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, which transplants Lear and his abused daughters to an Iowa farm.) The possibility that King Lear is a sexual predator transforms almost every aspect of the play and all of the characters in it. From this perspective, the insincerity of Regan
and Goneril’s forced declarations of love seems more like self-defense—and Cordelia’s refusal to obey, even at the risk of her own safety, makes sense.

  A number of textual clues hint at this possibility. The King of France is immediately suspicious of Lear’s motivations and behavior toward Cordelia:

  This is most strange,

  That she, whom even but now was your best object,

  The argument of your praise, balm of your age,

  The best, the dearest, should in this trice of time

  Commit a thing so monstrous, to dismantle

  So many folds of favor. Sure, her offense

  Must be of such unnatural degree

  That monsters it, or your fore-vouch’d affection

  Fall into taint; which to believe of her

  Must be a faith that reason without miracle

  Should never plant in me.

  The King of France recognizes what so many people miss: this is not healthy parental love. The words that he chooses—monstrous, unnatural, offense—paint a dark frame around the entire scene. Did Lear, perhaps, organize this strange test of love in the specific hope that Cordelia would fail it, lose her dowry, and therefore lose all of her marriage prospects? Was this scenario designed to remove any rivals for Lear’s most prized daughter? Is that the “darker purpose” Lear hints at in his second line of the play?

  In King Lear, Shakespeare uses phallic and sexual language to an extent that seems extreme for a political and domestic drama. When Kent, a nobleman, tries to intervene to protect Cordelia from Lear’s wrath, for example, the King warns him: “The bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft.” (Shaft seems to have been a favorite phallic pun of Shakespeare’s; he also described “Cupid’s fiery shaft” in Midsummer.)

  There are ominous sexual innuendos in Regan and Goneril’s conversations, too. After Cordelia’s banishment, Goneril approaches Regan to discuss “what most nearly appertains to us both”—that is, a secret they share that cuts close to the bone—as they list which nights they expect Lear to spend with each daughter. Goneril confides in Regan that she fears their father, empowered with a band of knights, will “hold our lives in mercy.” She concludes, “Let me still take away the harms I fear, not fear still to be taken. I know his heart.” Soon after, she tells Oswald, a servant, to deliver a letter to Regan, which will “inform her full of my particular fear.”

  As I’ve said, whenever a word appears multiple times in a single scene, it’s worthy of consideration. In that scene, the word fear appears six times. Goneril is scared.

  With good reason. Earlier in the play, Lear makes an ominous threat to Goneril that he might “resume the shape which thou dost think I have cast off for ever.” Later, when Lear tries to talk his way into Regan’s house, he warns her, “’Tis not in thee to grudge my pleasures.” He adds that she shouldn’t try to “oppose the bolt against my coming in.”

  But the most damning lines of all are the ones Lear speaks in a fit of madness:

  Tremble, thou wretch

  That hast within thee undivulged crimes

  Unwhipt of justice! Hide thee, thou bloody hand;

  Thou perjur’d, and thou simular man of virtue

  That are incestuous!

  In this moment of vulnerability, is Lear speaking to himself? Is the “bloody hand” Lear describes a manifestation of his own guilt, as a similar vision is for Lady Macbeth? Is he the “incestuous” man who breaks under the weight of “undivulged crimes?” At the end of the play, Cordelia tries to heal her ill father with a kiss, saying: “Restoration hang thy medicine on my lips.” Why do those words—and that kiss—feel so similar to Juliet’s final kiss with Romeo, when she tries to suck poison from his lips, saying, “I will kiss thy lips. Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, to make me die with a restorative?”

  CAN SPANKING CHILDREN be a sexual violation?

  Of course it can. In 2006, a businessman in Tennessee was convicted of sexual battery for spanking employees without their consent. Why would the same nonconsensual physical act cease to be sexual battery merely because the target is a child?

  For obvious reasons, there isn’t much funding for scientific research into the origins of fetishism. But it really doesn’t matter what causes it. It doesn’t matter whether I was born with my sexuality intact, as I believe, or whether my fetish was imprinted early in life by events I can or can’t remember. What does matter is that sexuality—even nonnormative sexuality—exists in children far earlier than most people want to admit. By the time I was three years old, I was a fetishist, and spanking, to me, was a sex act more penetrative than sex. From that point on, for me, nonconsensual spankings were unintentional sexual assaults. I experienced them as such.

  Winston Churchill supposedly said: “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.”

  So I have three things to say.

  Children have emerging sexual identities.

  Children have emerging sexual identities.

  Children have emerging sexual identities—and if even 1 percent of them perceive spanking as a sex act, we are sexually violating too many kids.

  Not every child feels that the butt is the most erotic part of his or her body, as I did. But bottoms are widely understood to have sexual potential. That’s why if most adults saw a teacher patting a child’s ass, for example, they would react considerably differently than they would if they saw that teacher patting a child’s shoulder. Our widespread cultural denial of the fact that the same body part that is so erotic for many adults might also be sexual for many children is not only willfully obtuse, it’s dangerous.

  My opinions on the relativity of sexual assault do not come from a position of inexperience. I have those memories of being molested as a toddler—it’s how I learned to name my body parts—but I also acknowledge that memories from early childhood can be unreliable. I have felt frustrated and confused by these memories, but I have never felt traumatized by them. They’ve never caused a nightmare, let alone a flashback. Years later, when I was a teenager, a man held me down, as tears ran down my face and I said, “I don’t want to have sex,” and had sex with me. That upset me.

  But that did not traumatize me, either.

  Many other people, without a doubt, would have, and have had, traumatic reactions to the same events. Their reactions are fully justified—but so are mine. Just as there is no “correct” way to be a sexual creature, there is no “correct” emotional response to sexual assault. And there is no easy definition of what sexual assault can be. The fact that most people with normative sexual identities did not feel sexually violated by childhood spankings no more disproves my experience than the fact that I was relatively unbothered by being forced to have vaginal sex against my will disproves the experience of traumatized rape survivors.

  Most smokers don’t get lung cancer. That doesn’t make cigarettes safe.

  As I’ve said, my butt has always been, by far, the most erotic part of my body. (I’ve wondered if that might explain why I wasn’t nearly as shaken by those nonconsensual violations of my vagina.) If being nonconsensually assaulted on an erotic body part doesn’t qualify as sexual assault, what does? Parents have to touch their children’s bodies, of course. But there is a big difference between the kind of touch that keeps a child healthy, like putting on a diaper, and the kind of touch that is explicitly nonconsensual and makes a child scream.

  PEOPLE WILL INSIST that childhood spankings have no sexual intent. (My mother, of course, did not imagine that being repeatedly hit on a “private” body part might make me feel sexually violated.) I have two responses to that. The first is that intent doesn’t matter. The man who had sex with me while I begged him to stop, for example, did not intend to sexually violate me; according to him, he merely intended to show me how “irresistible” I was. Intent is irrelevant.

  My second resp
onse to the claim that childhood spankings can never be sexual assault because they have no sexual intent is: Are you sure? Are you certain there are no repressed spanking fetishists out there—working as principals in schools that administer corporal punishment, for example, or writing books about why parents should dare to discipline their kids? How much would you gamble on that certainty?

  But things change slowly, most of all minds. The best thing I can do—the only thing I can do, really—is talk about my experience so that people who also felt sexually violated by childhood spankings will know, at least, that they weren’t alone.

  Two years after I first started to write about spanking, I described the physiological reasons that spanking children is sexually problematic in an article I wrote for Slate. The reaction from readers was immediate and overwhelming. I got emails with subject lines like “Thank God someone finally said it!!!!” and “You Just Saved Me.”

  A few emails came from people who aren’t fetishists, but still felt damaged by the sexual perversity of childhood spankings, such as this one:

  I suffered physical and sexual abuse as a child and that act [spanking] was a part of both. And in fundamentalist Christian homes, like mine, there is more than a little sexualizing in those acts. That’s part of the draw of it. They love it and it turns them on in a big way. It took me a long time to untangle this. Thanks for articulating what I felt. I do not have that fetish, but I know it is sexual behavior.

  I got emails from fetishists who told heartbreaking stories about otherwise good parents who left them with decades of trauma symptoms, such as this one:

  When I was 7 years old, my dad lost his temper with me and spanked me—and because he lost his temper, he hit me very, very, very hard. I had never been spanked before. My dad was not a bad man at all; he loved me very much. He also never spanked me again. Sadly, that one time did a great deal of damage. My best friend knows this. She also knows I have had a spanking fetish (that I can’t engage in at all) since I was five years old. (It started with a dream.) So she sent me your two articles on spanking. I read the one about not using spanking as a punishment first. Learning about the physical aspects—such as the nerve tracks and the artery in the butt/groin—caused a profound revelation in me. My entire life, I have carried about 40% of the markers of a rape victim—uh, survivor—but I have never been raped. As a result of this great mystery, of my inability to explain or make connections, no therapist has ever been able to help me. But now I finally, finally, finally understand what happened. Or rather I understand what my body experienced. . . . You just enabled one suffering adult to finally make the right connection to go get help and take back her life.