King Kong Theory Read online

  The collective body works much like an individual body: if the system is neurotic, it will always create selfdestructive patterns. When the collective unconsciousvia instruments of power such as the media and the entertainment industryoverestimates motherhood, it is neither out of love for the feminine nor general kindness. The all-virtuous mother prepares the collective body for fascist regression. Power bestowed by a sick state is suspect by nature.

  These days, one often hears men complaining that feminist emancipation has emasculated them. They hark back to a previous era, when their strength was rooted in the oppression of women. They forget that this political advantage they were given always had a cost: the female body belonged to men only to the extent that the male body belonged to industry in times of peace, or to the fatherland in times of war. The confiscation of the male body happened at the same time as that of the female body. The only winners were a few men up at the very top.

  One of the most famous soldiers to have fought in the Iraq war is a woman. These days, governments send their poor to the front line. Armed conflict has become a mixed territory. The real polarization is increasingly along class lines.

  Men fiercely denounce social and racial injustice, but are indulgent and understanding when it comes to male domination. Many of them try to explain that the feminist struggle is ancillary, a luxury sport of little relevance or urgency. You would have to be a moron, or else horribly dishonest, to think one oppression insufferable and another full of charm.

  In the same way, women would do well to consider the advantages of men becoming active fathers, rather than simply to content themselves with having power bestowed on them politically through the exaltation of maternal instinct. The father's gaze on his child constitutes a potential revolution. For instance, it can show a daughter that she exists in her own right, outside the sexual marketplace, that she is capable of physical strength, has an enterprising mind, is independent; it can help her value these strengths without fear of imminent punishment. It can show a son that chauvinist conventions are a trap, a brutal restriction of emotions in service of army and state. Traditional masculinity is just as crippling a venture as the summons to femininity. What, in fact, is required of a real man? The repression of emotions and the silencing of sensitivity. Being ashamed of gentleness or vulnerability. Leaving childhood brutally and definitively behind, overgrown boys get bad press. Neurosis about the size of his dick. Being able to make women come without their knowing or being willing to share what makes them feel good. Not showing weakness. Gagging his sensuality. Dressing in dull colors, always wearing the same pair of drab shoes, not having fun with his hair, not wearing too much jewelry, or any make-up. Always having to make the first move. Without the slightest sexual education to improve his orgasm. Not knowing how to ask for help. Having to play brave, even while being a coward. Valuing strength, whatever his personality. Displaying aggression. Limited access to fatherhood. Being a success, so he can seduce the best women. Fearing his homosexuality, since real men must never be penetrated. Not playing with dolls when he was a kid, having to make do with little cars and ugly plastic guns. Not taking much care of his body. Subjecting himself to the brutality of other men without complaint. Knowing how to defend himself, even if he is a sweet person. Being cut off from his femininity, just as women abandon their masculinity, not in response to situation or personality but because society demands it. Thus ensuring that women continue to provide children for war, and men continue to be willing to get themselves killed to protect the interests of three or four shortsighted idiots.

  Unless we step into the uncharted territory of the gender revolution, we know exactly where we will be regressing, an all-powerful state that infantilizes us, interferes in all our decisions for our own good and under the pretext of protecting us-keeps us in a childish state of ignorance, fear of punishment, and exclusion. The special treatment until now reserved for women, with shame as the primary tool for ensuring their isolation, passivity, and lack of protest, could now be extended to all. To understand the mechanics of how women have been made to feel inferior, and induced to willingly maintain themselves in this state, is to understand how the entire population is kept under control. Capitalism is an egalitarian religion in the sense that it demands general submission, making everyone feel trapped-as all women are.

  In the United States and other capitalist countries, rape laws as a rule were framed originally for the protection of men of the upper classes, whose daughters and wives might be assaulted. What happens to working-class women has usually been of little interest to the courts; as a result, remarkably few white men have been prosecuted for the sexual violence they have inflicted on these women.

  Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class, 1981

  JULY 1986, I'M SEVENTEEN. THERE ARE TWO OF US, BOTH wearing miniskirts, I have on stripy tights and red Converse. We're on our way back from London, where we've spent all our money on records, hair dye, and a mass of studded accessories, so we are broke. Not a penny left for the journey home. Hitchhiking to Dover takes all day. Standing in front of the ticket office, we beg the cost of the ferry. Night has fallen when we get on the boat. During the crossing, we look for people with cars who would give us a ride. Two good-looking, weed-smoking Italians give us a lift to the outskirts of Paris-a gas station, somewhere on the highway. We decide to wait for dawn and the truck drivers to come along, so we can find one who'll take us all the way to Nancy. We hang about in the parking lot and in the shop. Summer night, it is not too cold.

  A car. Driven by three white guys, classic 8os suburbia types, they offer beers and spliffs. We start chatting about music. We refuse to get in because there are three of them. They joke, talk, and make an effort to be nice. Convince us we'd be idiots to wait here, west of Paris, when they could drop us off on the east side where it would be easier to get a lift to Nancy. So we get into the car. Of the two girls, I'm the one who has been around, the loudmouth, the one who decides if it's OK. And yet, as soon as the doors close, we both know it's a crap idea. But instead of yelling, "We're getting out now!" for the few yards we still can, each of us quietly tells herself to stop being paranoid and seeing rapists everywhere. We've been chatting with them for more than an hour, they're just classic wankers. Not a bit aggressive. Since then, this proximity is logged in amongst those indelible things: men's bodies in a closed space, and us shut in with them but not the same as them. Never the same as them, with our women's bodies. Never safe, never equal. We belong to the gender of fear, of humiliation. The other gender. Masculinity, that legendary masculine solidarity is formed in these moments and is built on this exclusion of our bodies. A pact based on our inferiority. Guys laughing, sharing male jokes, the laughter of the crowd, of the strong ones.

  While it's going on, they pretend not to know exactly what's happening. Because we're wearing miniskirts, and one of us has green hair and the other orange, we must "fuck like rabbits" and so the rape they are carrying out is not actually a rape. As with most rapes, I suspect. I don't imagine that any of those three guys now considers himself a rapist. Because what they did was something else. Three of them with a gun, against two girls they'd beaten to the point of drawing blood: not rape. Because if we'd really been determined not to get raped we would either have preferred to die, or managed to kill them. The assailants succeed in persuading themselves that the girls this happens to, if they get out alive, must not really mind all that much. This is the only explanation I've been able to find for the following paradox: since the publication of Baise-Mott I keep meeting women who tell me, "I was raped, at this age, in these circumstances." This has happened so often it's disturbing, and for a while I even wondered if they weren't making it up. In our culture, the testimony of a woman accusing a man of rape has been systematically called into question fromthe Bible and the story of Joseph in Egypt onwards. But I ended up accepting that it does happen all the time. It's a widespread act, across all classes, all ages, all levels of beauty and even all kinds of
personalities. So, how shall we explain the fact that you hardly ever hear the other side of the story, "I raped so and so, on this day, in these circumstances"? Because men are still doing what women learned to do centuries ago: call it something else, euphemize, beautify it, above all not using that word to describe what they've done. They may have "pushed her a little," or "fucked up a bit," maybe she was "too drunk," or else a nympho just pretending not to like it. If it ended up happening, then the girl must have, at some level, consented. Never mind if they had to hit her, threaten her, get several guys to hold her down, never mind if she was crying before, during, and after. In most cases the rapist comes to an agreement with his conscience-there was no rape, just a little slut who didn't know what she wanted, and for whom a little persuading was all that was needed. Unless it's as hard to bear from the other side. But we don't know, since they won't talk about it.

  To be called a rapist one has to be a total psycho who ends up in prison, a serial rapist who slices up cunts with broken bottles, a pedophile who attacks little girls. Because men condemn rape and despise rapists. What they do is always something else.

  It is often said that pornography increases the incidence of rape. Hypocritical and absurd. As if sexual assault were a recent invention, which had to be suggested to people through films. On the other hand the fact that French males haven't been to war since Algeria in the i96os has certainly increased the number of "civil" rapes. Military life provided regular opportunities to practice gang rape "for the cause." This military strategy to enhance the sense of virility of the assaulting group while weakening the other through dilution of their race has been happening since the beginning of war. It's no good trying to convince us that sexual vio lence against women is a recent phenomenon, or limited to any particular group.

  For the first few years, we avoided talking about it. Then, threeyears later, a friend of mine got raped onthe kitchen table of her own home in the Croix Rousse area in Lyon, by a guy who had followed her in from the street. The day I found out, I was working in an indie record shop in the old town center. Sunny day, pale orangey-yellow summer light on the walls of the narrow streets of the old town, on the burnished old freestone. On the banks of the Saone, the bridge, the bright colors of the old buildings. Fucking beautiful, it has always struck me, and that day more so than ever. Rape doesn't disturb the peace, it's already part and parcel of the city. I lock up the shop and take a walk. I was more outraged than I had been when it happened to us. Through her, I realized rape is something you catch, and can never get rid of. Infected. Until then, I had told myself it was something I'd dealt with, that I was tough and had more important things on my mind than to let myself be traumatized by those three assholes. Realizing that I was considering her rape as something after which nothing would ever be the same again, I was suddenly able to touch what I felt for us. The wounds of a war which must be fought in silence and darkness.

  I was twenty when that happened to her. I didn't want anyone to talk to me about feminism-not punk enough, too straight. After she was attacked, I changed my mind and took part in a weekend's training run by the phone line, Stop Rape, which helps people talk after an aggression, and get legal advice. The course had barely started and I was already muttering away in my corner, why bother advising anyone to press charges? Going to the pigs for anything more than sorting out an insurance claim-I can't see the point. My instinct told me that declaring yourself a rape victim in a police station was like puttingyourself back in danger. Cop law is man's law. Then the facilitator says, "Most of the time, a woman who speaks about her rape will start off calling it something else." Inside, I am still grumbling, what a load of nonsense. This sounds damn improbable, why wouldn't they say the word, and anyway, what does this chick know? Does she think we're all the same or what? Suddenly, I see the light. What have I, myself, done up till now? The few times-mostly very drunk-when I have wanted to tell this story, have I used the word? Never. The few times I had attempted to talk about it, I'd skirted around the word "rape": "assaulted," "mixed up," "in a tight corner," "hassled" ... whatever. As long as the aggression is not called "rape," the attack loses its specificity, can be compared with other attacks, like getting mugged, picked up by the cops, held for questioning, beaten. This shortsighted strategy does have advantages, because as soon as you name your rape as a rape, the women-controlling mechanisms suddenly swing into action: Do you want everyone to know what happened to you? Do you want everyone to see you as a woman who has been subjected to that? And, in any case, you must be a total slut to have escaped alive. Any woman who values her dignity would rather die. My very survival incriminates me. The fact of being more terrified by the possibility of being murdered than traumatized by the thrusts of those three idiots starts to seem monstrous; I have never even heard it mentioned. Luckily, being a punk, I wasn't too concerned about my nice girl reputation. You're supposed to be traumatized by a rape-it brings with it a whole range of obligatory, visible scars: fear of men, of the night, of independence, disgust for sex, and all kinds of other delights. People keep telling you this: it's serious, it's a crime, if a man who loves you finds out, it will drive him crazy with pain and rage (rape is also a private conversation, in which a man declares to other men, I will fuck your women whenever I please). But the most sensible advice, for a whole slew of reasons, remains, "keep it to yourself." And therefore suffocate between the two commands. Die, bitch, as they say. And so the word is avoided. On account of all it conceals. The attacked, as well as the attackers, skirt around the word. Silence on both fronts.

  Those first post-rape years brought with them a painful surprise: books could do nothing for me. This had never happened before. When I was hospitalized for a few months in 1984, the first thing I did when they let me out was read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, When I was Five I Killed Myself, and AntoninArtaud's texts and essays on psychiatry, mental institutions, control, and adolescence. Books were there to keep me company, to make things bearable, sayable, shareable. Prison, illness, abuse, drugs, abandonment, deportation: all traumas have their literature. But this crucial and fundamental trauma-the very definition of femininity, "the body that can be taken by force and must remain defenseless"-was not part of literature. Not a single woman who had been through the process of rape had taken to words to craft a novel out of her experience. No guide, no companionship. Rape wasn't allowed into the symbolic realm. Women don't discuss rape with young girls, don't pass on any knowledge, or survival instructions or simple practical advice. Nothing.

  199o. On the train to Paris for a Limbomaniacs concert, I am reading Spin magazine and come across an article by Camille Paglia. It attracts my attention and initially makes me laugh. She describes the effect footballers on the field have on her fascinating, sexy, aggressive animals. She starts her piece by describing this warlike rage and how it turns her on, this show of sweat and muscular running thighs. This leads her, gradually, to the subject of rape. I have forgotten her exact words. But it was something like, "It's an inevitable danger, a danger that women need to take into account and run the risk of encountering, if they want to leave their homes and move around freely. If it happens to you then pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and move on. If that's too scary for you, then you'd better stay at home with mommy and manicure your nails." At first, I was disgusted. I felt sick with refusal. After a few moments, a sort of great interior calm, I was dumbfounded. It was already dark when I arrived at the Gare de Lyon. Before heading toward the north of Paris to the gig, I called Caroline, that same friend, really excited. I had to tell her about this Italian American-and she had to read the article and tell me what she thought. It blew her mind, just as it had mine.

  After that, nothing has ever been compartmentalized, sealed off as it was before. Thinking of rape in a different way for the first time. Until then the subject had been taboo. Rape is a minefield where no one dares to enter other than to say "how awful" or "poor girls." For the first time, someone was valuing the abili
ty to get over it, instead of lying down obligingly in the anthology of trauma. Someone was devaluing rape, its impact and consequences. This did not invalidate any part of what happened, or efface anything of what we learned that night.

  Camille Paglia is one of the most controversial American feminists. She was inviting girls to look at rape as a risk worth taking if you want to leave the house, an inherent part of being a girl. Wild freedom of playing things down. Yes, we had been outside, in a space that was not intended for us. Yes, we had lived, instead of dying. Yes, we were alone in miniskirts, unaccompanied by a man, at night, yes, we were stupid, and weak, unable to smash their faces in, weak as girls have learned to be under attack. Yes, that had happened to us, but for the first time, we understood what we had done: we had gone out into the wild because nothing much ever happened in Mommy and Daddy's house. We had taken the risk, and paid the price, and instead of being ashamed of being alive, we could choose to get back on our feet and get over it as best we could. Paglia helped us think of ourselves as warriors-no longer personally responsible for something we had asked for, but ordinaryvictims of what you have to expect you may endure if you're a woman and you want to venture into the wild. She was the first to represent rape as something other than absolute, unspeakable horror, that which must never happen. She made it into a political circumstance, something we had to learn to cope with. Paglia changed everything: it was no longer a matter of denial or collapse, but of dealing with it.