The students in a remedial composition class I'm teaching are reading aloud and commenting on fables they've written over the weekend. The prose is awkward and ungrammatical, but I'm impressed with the imaginative effort some have made. There's a modernized version of Little Red Riding Hood, set in an upper class neighborhood with the most sought-after senior boy in the local high school taking the part of the wolf. There's also a gender-reversed Sleeping Beauty, in which Princess Charming turns out to be the homeless woman who sleeps in the park. I'm about to move on to the next part of the lesson when Walter, who'd announced when we began that he wasn't going to read, asks if we'd like to hear his story. Of course I say yes.
At the center of Walter's narrative, which takes place far in the future, is a very powerful drug lord whose organization has been infiltrated by a top female narcotics agent posing as a prostitute. When the dealer's lover, who also works for him as a prostitute, learns that the operation has been compromised, she tells him immediately. The dealer conceives of a plan that uses his lover to expose the spy, who is then tortured slowly and painfully to death. To express his gratitude, the dealer takes his lover to bed, giving her, in Walter's words, "the literal fuck of her life, pounding away until she was no longer breathing." The story ends with a description of the lavish funeral the dealer gives her.
When Walter finishes reading, he looks around the circle with a sarcastic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent, no one except me willing to meet his eyes, and I'm hoping that one of his peers will speak first, condemning what he's written not in the voice of authority—which my voice will inevitably be—but in the voice of his peers. A minute passes in silence before it becomes clear that his classmates don't intend to respond, and so I call on a few students by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say that the story is "sick," while the women tell me they think it's not even worth responding to. Yet it has to be responded to, and so I ask Walter if he really believes that fucking a woman to death could be an expression of gratitude.
"Of course," he says. "For the woman it's the ultimate fulfillment, and for the man it's the ultimate proof."
"Of what?" I ask him.
"Of manhood." His tone indicates that he's surprised I even have to ask. "Women would buy tickets and stand in line to be with a man powerful enough to fuck them like that." He says these words with a conviction I at first can't think how to counter, but then I wonder aloud if he would include his girlfriend or his future wife in that line of women.
"I'm not talking," he says, "about doing this to someone I love. I'm talking about the pieces of trash you can pick up at the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hookers who do it for money, women who are asking for it."
"Why do they deserve to be murdered?" I ask.
"They're whores," he responds, "No one cares about them."
I take a different tack, asking him if he's ever killed anything other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he realizes that he's talking about using his own body, his penis specifically, as a murder weapon.
"Yes, I do," he says.
So I ask if he makes a distinction between the sex he would have for pleasure—presumably with a woman he loves—and the power he says he would like to experience of using sex to kill. Walter looks at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. "Power," he says, "is pleasure."
Class ends. As I'm putting my papers in my briefcase, Walter steps up to my desk. "Now that everyone else is gone," he says, his voice full of conspiratorial camaraderie, "come on, be honest. Wouldn't it feel great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your buddies later and tell them you'd killed her with your dick?"
"No," is all I can think to say.
"Sure, okay maybe now that you're older and you can't get it up like you used to, but when you were younger, when you were an undergraduate, wasn't fucking something you did so you could share it with your buddies, and impress them, and wouldn't they have worshipped you if you told them you'd fucked someone to death?"
Since it's clear that Walter is interested less in reflecting on what he has to say than in "outing" me as "one of the boys," I decide that monosyllabic answers are the best way to deal with him. "No," I say again.
Walter waits a few seconds for me to say more. When I don't, he mutters something under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathetic and excuse, and then he walks out, and that's the last I see or hear of him until I get my final roster with a W for withdrawal next to his name.
Over the years, I've shared my encounter with Walter with friends and colleagues, male and female, and I've always found it interesting that their responses fall, for the most part, into the same two groups as the responses given by my students. On the one hand are those who dismiss Walter as "crazy," whatever they mean by that term; while on the other hand are those who see him as not worth taking the energy to respond to in the first place. The ease with which these responses are almost always given, however, never fails to make me uncomfortable. It's as if the people I'm talking to assume an a priori understanding of who Walter was, dismissing as irrelevant the question of how his life brought him to the point of feeling as he did. Yet it's precisely this question of how that continues to haunt me, not because I think answering it lets Walter off the hook, but because the interior experience that Walter claimed to have of his own genitals as a weapon feels as inaccessible to me as the interior experience of femaleness.
One of the letters from Penthouse magazine—I think it was from the "Happy Hooker" column—that has stayed with me since I first read it at least 20 years ago was written by a woman who claimed to be describing how she and a friend took revenge on a man who'd tried to rape the friend. The writer of the letter arranged to meet the man at a disco, invited him to her apartment, and seduced him into being tied spread-eagled to her bed. Then the woman's friend, who'd been waiting in another room, came in, and the two women teased the man sexually until he was begging them for release. In response, the women took out a razor and shaving cream, telling him that, if he ejaculated while they rubbed his penis, they would shave all the hair from his body. The letter went on to describe in great detail first the man's pleading with them not to do it and then his efforts to keep himself from coming while the women took turns masturbating him. Finally, of course, he came, and the women shaved him, threatening to slice off his testicles if he didn't lay still.
The woman's letter describes a rape. She didn't present it as anything else—except to make clear that it was motivated by revenge—and she never implied that the man enjoyed what she and her friend did to him. Nonetheless, my sexual imagination was drawn to the story. For months, for years afterward, I fantasized about women tying me to a bed and creating in my flesh an arousal so all-encompassing that I too would be willing to beg for release. Yet no matter how hard I tried to imagine a conclusion other than the one in the letter, I always ended up the victim of some version of the revenge the writer and her friend took. What I most identified with in this story, I think, what led me always away from the scenario I began with of trust in my imagined lovers and the pleasure they wanted to give me, was the man's experience of having the pleasures of his body turned against him, for I knew I could be shamed in that way as well, that my body was always the potential source of my own defeat.
A similar theme is played out in an episode of the long-and-deservedly-defunct TV series She-Wolf Of London: A very old man is brought into the hospital dying of unknown causes. The doctor on duty believes the old man is either senile or insane because he keeps insisting he is actually twenty-seven years old and that he was turned into an old man by a woman. As the doctor leaves, he orders a nurse to give the old man a sedative. Once the nurse and the old man are alone, however, she unzips her uniform to reveal black-lace lingerie, and the old man recognizes her as the woman who has aged him—one of what the viewers will later learn is a group of succubae who have opened an escort service in England's capital city. As the old man looks on in helpless terror, the succubus begins to climb into the hospital bed where he is laying. As she does so, she reminds him in the voice of a predator enjoying the powerlessness of its prey that all he has to do is not want her and he will be able to live. All he has to do, in other words, is not have an erection and she will not be able to fuck him to death.
The story Walter told can be understood as a kind of pre-emptive strike against the fear of women expressed in this scene, as well as in my response to the Penthouse letter I described above. This understanding, however, is not the same thing as knowing how Walter and I—or at least I, since I cannot speak for Walter—came to feel this fear in the first place, and I'm focusing here on the question of how rather than why because it seems to me that why has already been answered, authoritatively and at length, by the women's movement: Men fear the power of women's freedom, sexual and otherwise, because the power of women's freedom, sexual and otherwise, represents the undoing of male dominant power and privilege and the corresponding collapse of the illusion of male invulnerability and the manhood men are expected to achieve in order to perpetuate that illusion.
I do not want to defend this fear because that inevitably means defending a cultural and socioeconomic and political pillar of male dominance, and yet I cannot help but ask, when you consider that pain, humiliation and/or subjugation are almost always the consequences for a man who has failed in his manhood, how it is any wonder that so many of us strive to use our bodies so that they can never be used against us?
