willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his
sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice
of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and
redeem the masculinity of her lover.
In pornography, we see female love raw, its naked erotic
skeleton; we can almost touch the bones of our dead. Love is
the erotic masochistic drive; love is the frenzied passion
which compels a woman to submit to a diminishing life in
chains; love is the consuming sexual impulse toward degradation and abuse. The woman does literally give herself to the man; he does literally take and possess her.
The primary transaction which expresses this female submission and this male possession, in pornography as in life, is the act of fucking. Fucking is the basic physical expression of
male positivity and female negativity. The relationship of sadist to masochist does not originate in the act of fucking; rather, it is expressed and renewed there.
For the male, fucking is a compulsive act, in pornography
and in real life. But in real life, and not in pornography, it is
an act fraught with danger, filled with dread. That sanctified
organ of male positivity, the phallus, penetrates into the female void. During penetration, the male’s whole being is his penis— it and his will to domination are entirely one; the erect
penis is his identity; all sensation is localized in the penis and
in effect the rest of his body is insensate, dead. During penetration, a male’s very being is at once both risked and affirmed.
Will the female void swallow him up, consume him, engulf
and destroy his penis, his whole self? Will the female void
pollute his virile positivity with its noxious negativity? Will the
female void contaminate his tenuous maleness with the overwhelming toxicity of its femaleness? Or will he emerge from the terrifying emptiness of the female’s anatomical gaping hole
intact—his positivity reified because, even when inside her, he
managed to maintain the polarity of male and female by maintaining the discreteness and integrity of his steel-like rod; his masculinity affirmed because he did not in fact merge with her
and in so doing lose himself, he did not dissolve into her, he
did not become her nor did he become like her, he was not
subsumed by her.
This dangerous journey into the female void must be undertaken again and again, compulsively, because masculinity is nothing in and of itself; in and of itself it does not exist; it has
reality only over and against, or in contrast to, female negativity. Masculinity can only be experienced, achieved, recognized, and embodied in opposition to femininity. When men posit sex, violence, and death as elemental erotic truths, they
mean this—that sex, or fucking, is the act which enables them
to experience their own reality, or identity, or masculinity
most concretely; that violence, or sadism, is the means by
which they actualize that reality, or identity, or masculinity;
and that death, or negation, or nothingness, or contamination
by the female is what they risk each time they penetrate into
what they imagine to be the emptiness of the female hole.
What then is behind the claim that fucking is pleasurable
for the male? How can an act so saturated with the dread of
loss of self, of loss of penis, be pleasurable? How can an act so
obsessive, so anxiety-ridden, be characterized as pleasurable?
First, it is necessary to understand that this is precisely the
fantasy dimension of pornography. In the rarefied environs of
male pornography, male dread is excised from the act of fucking, censored, edited out. The sexual sadism of males rendered so vividly in pornography is real; women experience it daily.
Male domination over and against female flesh is real; women
experience it daily. The brutal uses to which female bodies are
put in pornography are real; women suffer these abuses on a
global scale, day after day, year after year, generation after
generation. What is not real, what is fantasy, is the male claim
at the heart of pornography that fucking is for them an ecstatic experience, the ultimate pleasure, an unmixed blessing, a natural and easy act in which there is no terror, no dread, no
fear. Nothing in reality documents this claim. Whether we
examine the slaughter of the nine million witches in Europe
which was fueled by the male dread of female carnality, or
examine the phenomenon of rape which exposes fucking as an
act of overt hostility against the female enemy, or investigate
impotence which is the involuntary inability to enter the female void, or trace the myth of the vagina dentata (the vagina full of teeth) which is derived from a paralyzing fear of female
genitalia, or isolate menstrual taboos as an expression of male
terror, we find that in real life the male is obsessed with his
fear of the female, and that this fear is most vivid to him in the
act of fucking.
Second, it is necessary to understand that pornography is a
kind of propaganda designed to convince the male that he
need not be afraid, that he is not afraid; to shore him up so
that he can fuck; to convince him that fucking is an unalloyed
joy; to obscure for him the reality of his own terror by providing a pornographic fantasy of pleasure which he can learn as a creed and from which he can act to dominate women as a real
man must. We might say that in pornography the whips, the
chains, and the other paraphernalia of brutality are security
blankets which give the lie to the pornographic claim that fucking issues from manhood like light from the sun. But in life, even the systematized abuse of women and the global subjugation of women to men is not sufficient to stem the terror inherent for the male in the act of fucking.
Third, it is necessary to understand that what is experienced
by the male as authentic pleasure is the affirmation of his own
identity as a male. Each time he survives the peril of entering
the female void, his masculinity is reified. He has proven both
that he is not her and that he is like other hims. No pleasure
on earth matches the pleasure of having proven himself real,
positive and not negative, a man and not a woman, a bona
fide member of the group which holds dominion over all other
living things.
Fourth, it is necessary to understand that under the sexual
system of male positivity and female negativity, there is literally nothing in the act of fucking, except accidental clitoral friction, which recognizes or actualizes the real eroticism of