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
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
