King Kong Theory

by Virginie Despentes;Stephanie Benson

  Summer 2005, Philadelphia. I am sitting opposite Camille Paglia, recording an interview. I nod enthusiastically at her words. "On campus in the 6os, the girls were shut into their dormitories at ten p.m., whereas the guys did whatever they liked. We asked, `Why should we be treated differently?' and they explained, `Because the world is dangerous, and you might get raped,' and we replied, `Well, we want the right to risk being raped."'

  One of the many reactions to my story has been, "And you carried on hitchhiking, after that?" I hadn't told my parents, for fear of being put under lock and key for my own good. And yes, I did hitchhike again. Less dressed up, less attractive, but yes, I did it. Until some punk friends told me about skipping train fares, I knew of no other way to get to Toulouse for one gig on Thursday and then to Lille for another on Saturday. And at that time, going to gigs was the most important thing in my life. Worth putting myself in danger for. Nothing could be worse than staying in my room, far from life, when so much was happening. So I carried on traveling to cities where I didn't know a soul, waiting alone in train stations until they closed so I could spend the night there, or sleeping in between nearby buildings waiting for the first morning train. Acting as if I wasn't a girl. And although I wasn't raped again, I risked it a hundred times just by being outdoors a lot. What I experienced during that time, at that age, was unique, so much more intense than shutting myself up in school learning to be docile, or sitting at home reading magazines. Those were the best years of my life, the richest, the noisiest, and I managed to find the strength to deal with all the shit that came with them.

  But I have also avoided telling my story, because I already knew that people would say, "Well, if you carried on hitchhiking after that, if it didn't make you more sensible, thenyou must have liked it." Because with rape, it's always up to you to prove that you really didn't give your consent. It's as if guilt obeys an unspoken moral pull toward the one who got hit, rather than the one who did the whacking.

  When the film Baise-Moi was banned from the screen, lots of women (men didn't dare comment on that subject) stood up to publicly declare, "How revolting, we absolutely must not consider that violence is an answer to rape." Why not? You never see news items about girls alone or in gangs-biting off the dicks of men who attack them, or trailing their attackers to kill them or beat them lifeless. This only happens, for the moment, in films directed by men: Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, Ferrara's Ms. 45, Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave, for instance. All three films open with more or less horrible rape scenes (rather more than less, in fact), and go on to depict in a second part the ultraviolent revenges inflicted on their attackers bythe women. When men create female characters, it is rarely an attempt to understand what the characters are experiencing and feeling as women. It tends instead to be a way of depicting male sensibility in a female body. I'll come back to this later on the subject of porn, which follows the same logic. So in these three films, you see how men, if they were women, would react to rape. A bloodbath of merciless violence. Their message is clear, "Why don't you defend yourselves more fiercely?" And it is in fact strange that we don't react in that way. A powerful and ancient political strategy has taught women not to defend themselves. It's a double constraint, as usual-at the same time making sure we know that nothing worse could happen to us, and yet that we must neither defend nor revenge ourselves. Just suffer, the sword of Damocles between our thighs.

  But women still feel the need to say that violence is not the answer. And yet, if men were to fear having their dicks slashed to pieces with a carpet knife should they try to force a woman, they would soon become much better at controlling their "masculine" urges, and understanding that "no" does mean "no." I wish I'd been able to escape the values instilled in my gender that night, and slit each of their throats, one by one. Instead of having to live with being someone who didn't dare defend herself, because she's a woman and violence is not her domain, and the physical integrity of the male body is more important than that of the female.

  During that rape, I had a switchblade knife in the pocket of my red and white varsity jacket-a gleaming, black-handled, perfect action, long, thin blade, polished, shining, and sharp. A switchblade I used to pull out at the slightest provocation, in that muddled time. I was attached to it, in my own way, I had learned how to use it. That night, the blade stayed hidden in my pocket, and the only thought I had about it was, "Please don't let them find it, please don't let them decide to play with it." I didn't even think of using it. From the instant I realized what was happening, I was convinced they were the stronger ones. A question of focus. Looking back on it, I am convinced that if they'd been trying to steal our jackets instead, my reaction would have been different. I wasn't rash, but often reckless. But at that precise moment I felt female, disgustingly female, in a way I had never felt, and have never felt since. Defending my own body did not allow me to injure a man. I think I would have reacted in the same way if there had been only one man against me. It was rape that turned me back into a woman, into someone essentially vulnerable. Little girls are trained never to hurt men, and women are called back in line each time they don't respect the order. Aileen Wuornos's death sentence was a message to all of us. I am not furious with myself for not having dared to kill one of them. I am furious with a society that has educated me without ever teaching me to injure a man if he pulls my thighs apart against my will, when that same society has taught me that this is a crime from which I will never recover. And I am most of all utterly enraged that, faced with three men and a gun, trapped in a forest from which we could never have escaped on foot, I still feel guilty today for not having had the courage to defend us with a little knife.

  In the end, one of them finds the blade. He shows it to the others, sincerely surprised that I hadn't taken it out. "She liked it, then." Men genuinely have no idea of the power of this mechanism of female emasculation, no idea how everything has been so perfectly arranged to ensure that when men attack women, they will triumph without any real danger. Gullibly, they think that their superiority is due to their great strength. They have no scruples about fighting gun against switchblade. The blessed fools think it's a fair fight. That's the secret to their easy consciences.

  I find it strange that today, when so many people walk around with tiny computers in their pockets-cameras, phones, personal organizers, iPods-there exists no object at all to slip into your pussy when you go out for a stroll that will rip up the cock of any fucker who sticks it in there. Perhaps it isn't desirable to make female genitalia inaccessible by force. A woman must remain open, and fearful. Otherwise, how would masculinity define itself?

  Post-rape, the only acceptable response is to turn the violence inwards, onto yourself. Put on forty pounds, for instance. Withdraw from the sexual marketplace because you are soiled goods, take yourself out of the realm of desire. We don't kill women who've been raped, but we do expect them to have the decency to show that they are damaged goods, that they have been polluted. They may become hookers, or ugly, whatever, as long as they spontaneously exit the marriage market.

  Because rape creates the best hookers. Once opened by force, they sometimes retain as a sort of skin-level burnish an edgy, blemished quality that men like, some thing desperate and seductive. Rape is often initiatory, it cuts into the flesh to create the available woman, who can never quite close back up again. I am sure there is a kind of scent, something that men can smell and which excites them even more.

  We insist on behaving as if rape were extraordinary and isolated, outside of sexuality, avoidable. As if it only applied to a few people, to attackers and victims, as if it were an exceptional situation that had nothing to say about anything else. Whereas it's quite the oppositeit's at the center, the heart, the foundation of our sexualities. It is a central, sacrificial ritual, omnipresent in art since the beginning of time, represented in texts, statues, paintings-a constant throughout the centuries. Public gardens in Paris as well as museums are full of images of
men forcing women. Ovid's Metamorphoses implies that the gods spend their time trying to catch women who don't want to be caught, trying to satisfy their desires through force. Easy enough, when you're a god. And when the women fall pregnant, they then have to bear the brunt of the gods' wives' revenge. The female condition, its code. Forever guilty of what is done to us. Creatures held responsible for the desire we provoke. Rape is a well-defined political strategy: the bare bones of capitalism, it is the crude and blunt representation of the exercise of power. It designates a ruler, and organizes the rules of the game to allow him to wield his power without restraint. Steal, snatch, extort, impose his will is obeyed without hindrance and he may enjoy his brutality, without the other party being able to show resistance. Enjoy the crushing of the other-her words, her wishes, her integrity. Rape is civil war, a political organization through which one gender declares to the other, I have complete power over you, I force you to feel inferior, guilty, and degraded.

  Rape is the exclusive male domain. Not war, hunting, raw desire, violence, or barbarism, but rape, which women-until now-have never taken possession of. The masculine mystique must be created as intrinsically dangerous, criminal, and uncontrollable. As such, it must be rigorously controlled by the law, kept in collective order by the group. Behind the web, policing female sexuality appears the fundamental goal of the political: to educate the virile personality to be antisocial, instinctual, and violent. Rape serves firstly as a vehicle for this perception. Man's desire is stronger than his will; he is powerless to control it. You still often hear people say, "Prostitutes reduce the number of rapes," as if males couldn't control themselves, as if they had to unload themselves somewhere. They would have us believe this is a natural-instinctual-fact and not the created political belief it is. If testosterone really did make men into animals with uncontrollable instincts, they would kill just as easily as they rape. Which is not the case at all. The discourse on masculinity still contains leftovers from the dark ages. Rape, this condemned act that must never be mentioned, brings together a whole raft of fundamental beliefs about masculinity.

  There's the rape fantasy. Asexual fantasy. If I really want to talk about "my" rape, I will have to go through this. It's a fantasy I've had since I was a child. I would say it's a remnant from the bit of religious education I indirectly received from books, television, kids at school, and neighbors. The women martyrs-those female saints who were tied up and burned alive-were the first images to provoke an erotic response in me. The idea of being handed over, forced to, made to, was morbid and fascinatingly arousing for the little girl I was at the time. Those fantasies have never left me. I am convinced that lots of women prefer not to masturbate-claiming it does nothing for them rather than admit to what arouses them. We aren't all alike, but I'm not the only one to have this fantasy. These rape fantasies, these fantasies of being taken by force in more or less violent situations, which have been present throughout my masturbatory life, didn't come to me out of the blue. It's a powerful and precise cultural mechanism that predestines female sexuality to climax from its own powerlessness-which is to say from the superiority of the other-and women to orgasm against their will, rather than as sluts who enjoy sex. In Judeo-Christian morality, it is much better to be taken by force than considered a bitch in heat; we have been told that often enough. There is a female predisposition for masochism, which stems not from our hormones, nor from prehistoric times, but from a specific cultural system, and this predisposition has disturbing implications for the way we exercise our independence. It may be voluptuous and arousing, but it also handicaps us; being attracted to that which destroys us keeps us away from power.

  In the specific case of rape, it poses the question of guilt. Since I have often fantasized about rape, I am in part responsible for this attack. And to make things worse, these fantasies are rarely spoken of. Especially if you've been raped. There are probably lots of us in this situation, who have endured rape while having frequently fantasized about it beforehand. And yet on this subject, there is only silence, because what is unsayable is also completely undermining.

  When that boy turns round and yells, "OK, the ride's over," as he hits me for the first time, it isn't penetration that's terrifying me, but the thought that they are going to kill us. So that we won't be able to talk about it afterwards, won't be able to press charges or bear witness. Because, basically, that's what I would have done, if I were them. I can remember very precisely that fear of death. A white fear-time stopping, no longer existing, already not existing. According to the books I've read this is nearer to war trauma than to rape trauma. It's the possibility and nearness of death, and our forced submis sion to their inhuman hatred which makes that night so indelible. For me the most striking thing about rape is its obsessive quality. I constantly come back to it. For twenty years now, every time I think I'm done with it, I come back to it again. With different, contradictory things to say about it. Novels, stories, songs, films. I always imagine that one day I will be done with it. Will have gotten over the event, emptied it, exhausted it.

  Impossible. It is a founding event. Of who I am as a writer, and as a woman who is no longer quite a woman. It is both that which disfigures me, and that which makes me.

  The paradigm of women serving/men paying corresponds to an unequal social exchange-an exchange I have decided to label "prostitutional" so as to render more explicit the concrete material basis of heterosexual conventions. Whether they are publicly sanctioned by the marriage ceremony or covertly negotiated in the sex industry, heterosexual relationships are socially and psychologically built on the premise that men have the right to women's work. Even those men who denounce denigration of and towards women rarely question male privilege in the sexual, domestic and reproductive domains.

  Gail Pheterson, The Prostitution Prism, 1996

  DOING WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE DONE: ASKING FOR MONEY for what must remain free. The decision does not belong to each adult woman, but is imposed by collective laws. Prostitutes are the only workers whose alienation moves the upper class-to the extent that women who have never lacked for anything are absolutely, smugly convinced that prostitution should not be legalized. The types of labor done by poor women, and the wretched wages for which they sell their time, are of no interest to anybody. It's simply their fate as women born poor. Sleeping in the street at the age of forty isn't unethical; becoming a beggar is a bearable degradation. Demeaning work, likewise. Selling sex, on the other hand, is everybody's business, and every "respectable" woman has something to say on the matter. Over the last ten years I have often found myself in stylish living rooms in the company of ladies who have always had their bills paid for them by the marriage contract, often divorced women living off substantial alimony agreements, and these same ladies explain to me, without the shadow of a doubt, that prostitution is in itself a bad thing for women. They know, intuitively, that that work is more degrading than any other. Intrinsically. Not "if practiced in particular circumstances," but "in itself." The statement is categorical, rarely qualified with conditions such as "if the girls aren't consenting" or "if they don't get to see a penny of the money they earn" or "if they are forced to work the streets on the outskirts of town." Whether they are high-class whores, occasional hookers, street girls, old or young, talented, dominas, crackheads, or mothers with kids, doesn't at first sight make the slightest difference. Exchanging a sexual service for money, even in good conditions, even of your own free will, is an infringement of female dignity. The proof is that if they had the choice, prostitutes wouldn't do it. Talk about an argument! As if a beautician applies wax or bursts blackheads out of pure aesthetic vocation. Most people who work would well do without it if they could. No kidding! And yet, in certain circles, they keep on saying that the challenge is not to remove prostitution from rough areas where prostitutes are heavily exposed to all kinds of assault (in which conditions, even selling bread would qualify as a dangerous sport), nor to create the legal work environments that sex
workers are calling for, but to ban prostitution. It's difficult not to wonder whether what these respectable women are saying through their concern over the fate of hookers, is that they are in fact scared of the competition. Unfair competition because it's too direct and appropriate. If the prostitute were to ply her trade in decent conditions similar to those of the beautician or the psychiatrist, if all the current legal pressures she has to deal with were removed from her work, the position of the married woman would suddenly become much less attractive. Because if the prostitution contract became part of everyday life, the marriage contract would be shown up more clearly for what it is: a market in which for a bargain price the woman agrees to carry out a certain number of chores-notably sexual-to ensure a man's comfort.