[m2c] Andrea Dworkin on the "Story of O."

[usman x]

http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WomanHating.html

CHAPTER 3

Woman as Victim:
Story of O
The Story of O, by Pauline Reage, incorporates, along with all literary
pornography, principles and characters already isolated in my discussion of
children's fairy tales. The female as a figure of innocence and evil enters
the adult world--the brutal world of genitalia. The female manifests in her
adult form--cunt. She emerges defined by the hole between her legs. In
addition, Story of O is more than simple pornography. It claims to define
epistemologically what a woman is, what she needs, her processes of thinking
and feeling, her proper place. It links men and women in an erotic dance of
some magnitude: the sado-masochistic complexion of O is not trivial--it is
formulated as a cosmic principle which articulates, absolutely, the
feminine.

Also, O is particularly compelling for me because I once believed it to be
what its defenders claim--the mystical revelation of the true, eternal, and
sacral destiny of women. The book was absorbed as a pulsating, erotic,
secular Christianity (the joy in pure suffering, woman as Christ figure). I
experienced O with the same infantile abandon as the NEWSWEEK reviewer who
wrote: "What lifts this fascinating book above mere perversity is its
movement toward the transcendence of the self through a gift of the self . .
. to give the body, to allow it to be ravaged, exploited, and totally
possessed can be an act of consequence, if it is done with love for the sake
of love." 1 Any clear-headed appraisal of O will show the situation, O's
condition, her behavior, and most importantly her attitude toward her
oppressor as a logical scenario incorporating Judeo-Christian values of
service and self-sacrifice and universal notions of womanhood, a logical
scenario demonstrating the psychology of submission and self-hatred found in
all oppressed peoples. O is a book of astounding political significance.

This is, then, the story of O: O is taken by her lover Rene to Roissy and
cloistered there; she is fucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and
tortured on a regular and continuing basis--she is programmed to be an
erotic slave, Rene's personal whore; after being properly trained she is
sent home with her lover; her lover gives her to Sir Stephen, his
half-brother; she is fucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and
tortured on a regular and continuing basis; she is ordered to become the
lover of Jacqueline and to recruit her for Roissy, which she does; she is
sent to Anne-Marie to be branded with Sir Stephen's mark and to have rings
with his insignia inserted in her cunt; she serves as an erotic model for
Jacqueline's younger sister Natalie who is infatuated with her; she is taken
to a party masked as an owl, led on a leash by Natalie, and there plundered,
despoiled, raped, gangbanged; realizing that there is nothing else left for
Sir Stephen to do with her or to her, fearing that he will abandon her, she
asks his permission to kill herself and receives it. Q.E.D., pornography is
never big on plot.

Of course, like most summaries, the above is somewhat sketchy. I have not
mentioned the quantities of cock that O sucks, or the anal assaults that she
sustains, or the various rapes and tortures perpetrated on her by minor
characters in the book, or the varieties of whips used, or described her
clothing or the different kinds of nipple rouge, or the many ways in which
she is chained, or the shapes and colors of the welts on her body.

From the course of O's story emerges a clear mythological figure: she is
woman, and to name her O, zero, emptiness, says it all. Her ideal state is
one of complete passivity, nothingness, a submission so absolute that she
transcends human form (in becoming an owl). Only the hole between her legs
is left to define her, and the symbol of that hole must surely be O. Much,
however, even in the rarefied environs of pornography, necessarily
interferes with the attainment of utter passivity. Given a body which takes
up space, has needs, makes demands, is connected, even symbolically, to a
personal history which is a sequence of likes, dislikes, skills, opinions,
one is formed, shaped--one exists at the very least as positive space. And
since in addition as a woman one is born guilty and carnal, personifying the
sins of Eve and Pandora, the wickedness of Jezebel and Lucretia Borgia, O's
transcendence of the species is truly phenomenal.

The thesis of O is simple. Woman is cunt, lustful, wanton. She must be
punished, tamed, debased. She gives the gift of herself, her body, her
well-being, her life, to her lover. This is as it should be--natural and
good. It ends necessarily in her annihilation, which is also natural and
good, as well as beautiful, because she fulfills her destiny:

As long as I am beaten and ravished on your behalf, I am naught but the
thought of you, the desire of you, the obsession of you. That, I believe, is
what you wanted. Well, I love you, and that is what I want too. 2

Then let him take her, if only to wound her! O hated herself for her own
desire, and loathed Sir Stephen for the self-control he was displaying. She
wanted him to love her, there, the truth was out: she wanted him to be
chafing under the urge to touch her lips and penetrate her body, to
devastate her if need be. . . . 3

. . . Yet he was certain that she was guilty and, without really wanting to,
Rene was punishing her for a sin he knew nothing about (since it remained
completely internal), although Sir Stephen had immediately detected it: her
wantonness. 4

. . . no pleasure, no joy, no figment of her imagination could ever compete
with the happiness she felt at the way he used her with such utter freedom,
at the notion that he could do anything with her, that there was no limit,
no restriction in the manner with which, on her body, he might search for
pleasure. 5

O is totally possessed. That means that she is an object, with no control
over her own mobility, capable of no assertion of personality. Her body is a
body, in the same way that a pencil is a pencil, a bucket is a bucket, or,
as Gertrude Stein pointedly said, a rose is a rose. It also means that O's
energy, or power, as a woman, as Woman, is absorbed. Possession here denotes
a biological transference of power which brings with it a commensurate
spiritual strength to the possessor. O does more than offer herself; she is
herself the offering. To offer herself would be prosaic Christian
self-sacrifice, but as the offering she is the vehicle of the
miraculous--she incorporates the divine.

Here sacrifice has its ancient, primal meaning: that which was given at the
beginning becomes the gift. The first fruits of the harvest were dedicated
to and consumed by the vegetation spirit which provided them. The
destruction of the victim in human or animal sacrifice or the consumption of
the offering was the very definition of the sacrifice--death was necessary
because the victim was or represented the life-giving substance, the vital
energy source, which had to be liberated, which only death could liberate.
An actual death, the sacrifice per se, not only liberated benevolent energy
but also ensured a propagation and increase of life energy (concretely
expressed as fertility) by a sort of magical ecology, a recycling of basic
energy, or raw power. O's victimization is the confirmation of her power, a
power which is transcendental and which has as its essence the sacred
processes of life, death, and regeneration.

But the full significance of possession, both mystically and mythologically,
is not yet clear. In mystic experience communion (wrongly called possession
sometimes) has meant the dissolution of the ego, the entry into ecstasy,
union with and illumination of the godhead. The experience of communion has
been the province of the mystic, prophet, or visionary, those who were able
to alchemize their energy into pure spirit and this spirit into a state of
grace. Possession, rightly defined, is the perversion of the mystic
experience; it is by its very nature demonic because its goal is power, its
means are violence and oppression. It spills the blood of its victim and in
doing so estranges itself from life-giving union. O's lover thinks that she
gives herself freely but if she did not, he would take her anyway. Their
relationship is the incarnation of demonic possession:

Thus he would possess her as a god possesses his creatures, whom he lays
hold of in the guise of a monster or bird, of an invisible spirit or a state
of ecstasy. He did not wish to leave her. The more he surrendered her, the
more he would hold her dear. The fact that he gave her was to him a proof,
and ought to be for her as well, that she belonged to him: one can only give
what belongs to you. He gave her only to reclaim her immediately, to reclaim
her enriched in his eyes, like some common object which had been used for
some divine purpose and has thus been consecrated. For a long time he had
wanted to prostitute her, and he was delighted to feel that the pleasure he
was deriving was even greater than he had hoped, and that it bound him to
her all the more so because, through it, she would be more humiliated and
ravished. Since she loved him, she could not help loving whatever derived
from him. 6

A precise corollary of possession is prostitution. The prostitute, the woman
as object, is defined by the usage to which the possessor puts her. Her
subjugation is the signet of his power. Prostitution means for the woman the
carnal annihilation of will and choice, but for the man it once again
signifies an increase in power, pure and simple. To call the power of the
possessor, which he demonstrates by playing superpimp, divine, or to confuse
it with ecstasy or communion, is to grossly misunderstand. "All the mouths
that had probed her mouth, all the hands that had seized her breasts and
belly, all the members that had been thrust into her had so perfectly
provided the living proof that she was worthy of being prostituted and had,
so to speak, sanctified her." 7 Of course, it is not O who is sanctified,
but Rene, or Sir Stephen, or the others, through her.

O's prostitution is a vicious caricature of old-world religious
prostitution. The ancient sacral prostitution of the Hebrews, Greeks,
Indians, et al., was the ritual expression of respect and veneration for the
powers of fertility and generation. The priestesses/prostitutes of the
temple were literal personifications of the life energy of the earth
goddess, and transferred that energy to those who participated in her rites.
The cosmic principles, articulated as divine male and divine female, were
ritually united in the temple because clearly only through their continuing
and repeated union could the fertility of the earth and the well-being of a
people be ensured. Sacred prostitution was "nothing less than an act of
communion with god (or godhead) and was as remote from sensuality as the
Christian act of communion is remote from gluttony." 8 O and all of the
women at Roissy are distinguished by their sterility and bear no resemblance
whatsoever to any known goddess. No mention is ever made of conception or
menstruation, and procreation is never a consequence of fucking. O's
fertility has been rendered O. There is nothing sacred about O's
prostitution.

O's degradation is occasioned by the male need for and fear of initiation
into manhood. Initiation rites generally include a period of absolute
solitude, isolation, followed by tests of physical courage, mental
endurance, often through torture and physical mutilation, resulting in a
permanent scar or tattoo which marks the successful initiate. The process of
initiation is designed to reveal the values, rites, and rules of manhood and
confers on the initiate the responsibilities and privileges of manhood. What
occurs at Roissy is a clear perversion of real initiation. Rene and the
others mutilate O's body, but they are themselves untouched. Her body
substitutes for their bodies. O is marked with the scars which they should
bear. She undergoes their ordeal for them, endures the solitude and
isolation, the torture, the mutilation. In trying to become gods, they have
bypassed the necessary rigors of becoming men. The fact that the tortures
must be repeated endlessly, not only on O but on large numbers of women who
are forced as well as persuaded, demonstrates that the men of Roissy never
in fact become men, are never initiates, never achieve the security of
realized manhood.

What would be the sign of the initiate, the final mark or scar, manifests in
the case of O as an ultimate expression of sadism. The rings through O's
cunt with Sir Stephen's name and heraldry, and the brand on her ass, are
permanent wedding rings rightly placed. They mark her as an owned object and
in no way symbolize the passage into maturity and freedom. The same might be
said of the conventional wedding ring.

O, in her never-ending role as surrogate everything, also is the direct
sexual link between Sir Stephen and Rene. That the two men love each other
and fuck each other through O is made clear by the fact that Sir Stephen
uses O anally most of the time. The consequences of misdirecting sexual
energy are awesome indeed.

But what is most extraordinary about Story of O is the mind-boggling
literary style of Pauline Reage, its author. O is wanton yet pure, Sir
Stephen is cruel yet kind, Rene is brutal yet gentle, a wall is black yet
white. Everything is what it is, what it isn't, and its direct opposite.
That technique, which is so skillfully executed, might help to account for
the compelling irrationality of Story of O. For those women who are
convinced yet doubtful, attracted yet repelled, there is this schema for
self-protection: the double-double think that the author engages in is very
easy to deal with if we just realize that we only have to double-double
unthink it.

To sum up, Story of O is a story of psychic cannibalism, demonic possession,
a story which posits men and women as being at opposite poles of the
universe--the survival of one dependent on the absolute destruction of the
other. It asks, like many stories, who is the most powerful, and it answers:
men are, literally over women's dead bodies.


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Introductory note to Part Two and "Woman as Victim: Story of O" chapter, pp.
53-63, from Woman Hating, copyright © 1974 by Andrea Dworkin. All rights
reserved. Grateful acknowledgment is due for permission to quote from
Pauline Reage, Story of O, copyright © 1965 by Grove Press. Reprinted by
permission of Grove Press, Inc.

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"The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely
the oppressive situations which we seek to escape,
but that piece of the oppressor which is
planted deep within each of us." Audre Lorde
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