Strap-ons and Fascism
Strap-ons and Fascism:
Or to gain a limb and still feel the tingles
That is to say, this is about desire and dissolution
Or why we know the lyrics to that Sarah McLachlan song.
An essay for Ryan Hawk.
“Always bear in mind that primal fear of dissolution.”
Barbara Ehrenreich
Have you catastrophized about your extremities? Have you imagined your toe getting caught in a door or on a splinter, the nail being split or damaged, the appendage’s smallness always making it vulnerable to being cut or scraped or mangled, pierced or torn apart? Have you played that imagined moment over and over in your mind, sickened and aroused by its strangeness? And if that appendage extended impossibly out along the floor, curling around itself and reaching far in front of its body, would that make this uncomfortable pleasure greater? I.e. can vulnerability be scaled, compared, somehow measured, enjoyed?
(At the gym, I find a pool of blood in the steam room. When I tell the front desk staff about it, I think maybe this is not the first pool of blood reported in the steam room. I don’t mention that I stayed there for a half hour after I saw it, wondering if the particles from the blood were being absorbed into my lungs in the damp, hot air, and what it might mean to breathe in some-body else’s bodily fluids. Our particles are, after all, always pushing up against one another, mingling, dissolving together.)
The word dissolution can be a closing down—an end of something—or a decomposition of flesh. It can mean either death or “debauched living,” the line between those things ever so thin. The word seems to signal that one’s point of falling apart can be both a site for pleasure and for discomfort, and that these things sit alongside one another, overlap, and careen wildly into each other. Broadly, we assign dissolution to specific bodies and naturalize it among certain communities. That is, a community can sit (or be imagined to exist) on a tender line between pleasure and complete disintegration. And, historically, when communities in power face dissolution they lash out, fighting for a return to an imagined past, a mythic oneness that never existed: they fight the dissolve.
Writing about our cultural relationship to technology, Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes that “In a condition of hyper-stimulation, the cognitive organism cannot process the emotional content of the stimuli… Stimulation frequency and diffusion, the speed of exposure of the self to the erotic stimulus have accelerated to a point that it is more and more difficult to decode consciously emotional messages or to process them with the needed tenderness.”[1] I think of Gertrude Stein and her Tender Buttons and how a Twitter-hungry president requires flashcards in order to mimic the gestures of empathy.
“Are you an angel / Am I already that gone,” Sarah McLachlan sings. “I only hope / That I won’t disappoint you / When I’m down here / On my knees.” The man with the third leg can’t find the words, and we see him hitting the moment of almost, being thwarted somehow by something we can’t see. Why can’t he sing this song of surrender? Has he never fallen to his knees?
Writing about the loss of her leg and its replacement with a prosthetic, Vivian Sobchack describes the phantom feeling she experienced at a leg’s absence: “That is, I had no formal sense of a knee and only the barest sense of narrowing that might have been an ankle and, of course, did not proprioceptively, feel the weight of my thigh or sense some equivalent of my calf against the sofa cushion. The leg’s connection to my bandaged stump was also ambiguous; there seemed to be a certain auratic area around my residual limb, a sort of vaguely bounded band of ‘unfilled’ space, a no-man’s land separating two different perceptions of my body that would admit no trespass…”[2]
(Of course a middle-aged white man would get a prosthetic leg when he already has two functional ones. Those who already have seem to always be the ones to receive more. I want to also write that of course he still would sing Sweet Surrender badly or not at all, when he knows no surrender, has not been taught to be less-than, only more-than. And yet, that erases the tenderness here, too, as we watch him face failure and its attendant confusion: this is a new sensation for white masculinity, and I want to watch it, over and over.)
German fascists, argues Klaus Theweleit in his book about the Freikorps, were disgusted by the sticky moisture they associated with the female body.[3] Mud, muck, slime, blood, piss, pus, milk: excretions were an assault on the male erection/erectness/militant-straightness that signaled righteous nationalism. Dissolution was the enemy, to be assaulted with all manners of violence, especially—paradoxically—by sexual violence. Drain the swamp and lock her up.
(Sometimes you don’t even know something is assault because it is so culturally accepted as a form of control. That is not hysteria, that is facts.)
When someone loses a limb, they often become aware of it in a way that perhaps they weren’t before it was gone, writes Sobchack. “Indeed, the more I focused and consciously tried to ‘figure out’ the limb’s contours, the less successful I was—experiencing, instead, what felt like nothing being given a shape by the geometrically rigid and horizontal compression of what seemed like an externally imposed plexiglass block.”[4] This sense of the limb can manifest itself in tingling sensations; our minds want to animate what is gone. To counteract this disorienting feeling and pain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran developed something called a mirror box. An amputee places her remaining, partnerless, limb to the side of the box and does a series of mirrored symmetric movements (like clapping). The mirror reflects the limb in reverse, creating the mental impression that the missing piece is still present. The tingles go away.
What would it be like to be convinced that all the things that have been cut out of us could be brought back, that we could be made whole again and not tingle with their absence? Or does that tingling mean we understand something important about surrender, have a constant reminder of it? Is that tingling the physical manifestation of empathy?
(In the end, that third leg is a strap-on, isn’t it, and countless popular women’s magazines caution that they may provoke male insecurities, even while giving pleasure. The dissolve can be terrifying before you relax into it.)
And yet, these silicone pink fleshy tattooed and pierced sculpture skins wiggle and flop and are limp and luminous all at once. There is what Hawk describes as a “multiplicity of desire and discongruity” here. There is pleasure in these incongruous bodily things. Loose, flabby, fleshy softness can also hold a deep and knowing strength.
(We might imagine empathy to be a generous meeting of bodies, in patience, with lubricant.)
Bifo roots contemporary fascism in the “aggressive loneliness of the male body” and, in attempting to imagine a future in which we survive, he finds in femininity a “magmatic sphere of possibility.” Imagine magma—molten liquid rock matter—as a feminine superpower that would rain down on us, burning away this ugly place in which we’ve lost our compassion, melting us into a sticky, viscous, empathetic puddle of something impossibly new.
Laura August
December 2018
[1] Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (London: Verso, 2017): 52.
[2] Vivian Sobchack, “Living a ‘Phantom Limb’: On the Phenomenology of Bodily Integrity,” Body & Society 16, no. 3 (2010): 57.
[3] Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
[4] Sobchack, 58.