[Icarus]

Gents,

I have posted before several articles by Mark Ames of the eXile, such as his Whore-R stories and his adventures in Minsk. One of my favorite articles of his is Meditations on Misogyny (2003), which is remarkably personal and did resonate with me:

Quote:



At my book presentation party two weeks ago, a Russian journalist in her mid-twenties told me, "When I first read your columns in the eXile, I hated you because I thought you were anti-Russian women. I wanted something really bad to happen to you. I wanted you to just suffer something awful. Then I became a lesbian and I realized, you were exactly right. I hate Russian women too. I really, really hate them."

"But I don't really hate Russian girls," I said. "I don't know why people think I do."

"No, you don't understand, Mark. I agree with you. I hate them. You know? Their stupid fucking games. It's not just that they play games, they believe in them and their whole lives become those stupid drama games."

"But that's why I like them," I said. "American women can't even come up with an interesting game. They're too ironic, too 'down-to-earth.'"

"I don't know, I've never slept with an American woman."

"They go, 'Really? Great!' while shaking their heads up and down and smiling. It's a real turn-off."

"I like young, really young Russian girls," she said. "They have energy. They don't have problems like older women. I hate older Russian women. Once they get into their twenties I can't stand them. Teenage girls haven't been disappointed. They still believe things will be good."

"Their meat is tighter," I said.

"They're fun to be with. You get their energy."

"We're like vampires," I said. "So what's it like being a lesbian? Is it satisfying? I mean if you hate women, why take them?"

"Well I'm not really a lesbian. I still prefer men."

"I slept with a pair of dykes, and I didn't like it," I said. "You feel useless, like a pair of tonsils, sitting there while the girls get off. It made me angry in a bad way."

"You get something you can't get from a man. It's a different experience. There is a lot of touching and it's more intimate."

"Ee-gads!"

A week later an extremely, er, shall we say, pre-nubile "journalist" came over to my house to interview me about my book.

"Do you hate Russian women?" she asked.

"No, not at all! Why do people think that? I love them!"

"I hate them."

"Well, I've been accused of being a misogynist," I corrected myself.

"I hate women," she said, in her tiny voice in that tiny mouth. "I thought your book was boring at first, until the second half when you wrote about how much you hate women."

"But I...don't..."

"I like that part, Mark. Why don't you talk more about how you hate women, about sex? This interview is boring."

She was right. I gave the worst interview of my life because my spine turned to Jell-O at the sight of her on my divan. I was tongue-tied, like the fat guy in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: "Ch-ch-ch!...Ch-ch-ch!...Chick!... Look, Chick! On the couch! I'm tellin' ya, she's right there!... WoooOOO!"

"You're not like how you write," she said. "This is a disappointment. I was expecting more."

She was expecting ice-cold misogyny. She told me that she was a zhenonenavistnik, but she no longer believed that I was. The truth is that I wasn't. I couldn't have even faked ice-cold misogyny that night, not to a beautiful young Russian punkette.

I still remember the first time I was called a misogynist. I was 20, a student. She was a clinical psych major whose specialty was castrating mice and observing the results. We'd slept together once or twice, but she always made me nervous by how advanced she was.

"I've got you figured out, Mark," she told me while we were drinking on my roof. "You're a misogynist disguised as a misanthrope." I had no idea what the fuck she was talking about. So I pretended to agree with her. Later, when I looked up the word "misogynist," I panicked. How'd she know? Who invented that word? Would I be arrested?

I only spoke to her once more after that. It was to tell her that I may have given her crabs. If you want to end a relationship painlessly, call your date and tell her you got crabs and you wanted to be responsible and warn her. (Pretend you're embarrassed by offering obviously lame excuses: "I may have caught it in an airplane" or "I think I got it in a sleeping bag at my friend's house" -- if you admit boldly you got it from boning a skank, she might admire your bravery).

I note this to illustrate my point: that my "misogyny," if that's the right word for it, comes not from ice-cold, cinematic antisocial tendencies, but rather, from fear. Fear and pain. Way too much fear and pain. I ain't like those other assholes, the axle-grease-on-the-arms misogynists. That kind of misogyny, the cool kind, the misogyny of a crocodile, is completely alien to me.

Misogyny born of sociopathic coolness may be attractive, but it isn't interesting. It's just a reaction, like gas or sweat. Misogyny born of fear and pain is what makes Eraserhead, Louder Than Hell, Death On The Installment Plan, "Pretty Girls Make Graves"... It's rich because it's true, born of experience, a truth too dangerous to be admitted into middle-class discourse.

Women are scary on all sorts of levels. They're not dumb and weak, they're scary. It's that simple. If you don't understand that but you still hate women, you have no right to be a member of my misogyny club. You're just a common jerk. I've known all kinds of jerks in my life. Real jerks aren't interesting; however, a stylized, literary sort of jerk is. Most women I've met through my writing expect that from me: stylized antisocial misogyny, cigarettes and rape with Link Ray soundtrack. Many of the male friends and writers I've known since starting the eXile have tried to ingratiate themselves by affecting their own sham misogyny. But real misogynists can sniff out the phonies: our pain-radar is flawless. The fake misogynists saw that my columns got me an audience, that it seemed cool, so they affected it, wore it like a beat-up leather jacket. They didn't pay for it, though. (Misogyny has even become a chic stance for a certain faction of urban hipsters in America, although it's mediated through some kind of anti-PC backlash that is itself rooted in a bourgeois major premise.) So the fly-by-night misogynists call women "stupid bitches," brag about fucking and dumping them, about how much they "hate women," about how they made them cry and didn't care...It's a lie. They didn't pay for that, you can tell by the ease in which they move in and out of the stance.

The other kind of misogynist, the sociopath type, they don't show off their misogyny. It means nothing to them. They just step on women once in awhile. And that's what makes sociopathic misogynists so attractive... to women. Which is as good a reason as any to hate women.

If you paid hard for your misogyny, then you want to make the others pay too. You HAVE to make them pay, to transfer at least some of your pain back to the source. I've been doing that for years now, getting payback. It's calmed my demons down to the point that I can live with it. I'm not even into the "S" of the "&M," at least not like before.

Man used to equalize his fear of women by using a knout, a mule switch, or just bare fists. But you can't really do that anymore. Even when you do get violent, it has to be stylized. No matter how edgy and debauched you are, there's no way that even the wildest S&M experience you ever had wasn't, on some level, consensual. These are bad times for misogynists.

Which kind of brings me back to the issue at hand: this week's whore. I didn't want to take one. I wanted to be alone. I've been alone, I mean all alone, without even a dugout bitch for garbage sex, for a few months now. And these have been the most peaceful few months I can ever remember. Most people cannot handle being alone. But for me, loneliness is nirvana. I suppose it all goes back to one's childhood: my happiest childhood moments were when I was alone in my bedroom, after school, my mother at work, my brother out with friends. You could hear things rustling, smell things, imagine things when you were alone that you couldn't when people were around. They interfered with the reception.

One of the most memorable things ever said to me, by an American writer I knew years ago, was his reason for marrying so young: "I figured that either way I was in a jail. If you're always chasing girls, you waste all that time and you're trapped. If you're married, you're also in a jail, but at least you're not wasting so much time and grief. I just wanted to get writing."

His assumption was that one way or another, every man needs a woman (or a twinkie if homosexuality is your thing) in his life. In that way, I'm damaged. For me, grief comes from the physical presence of a woman in my time-space. It spoils the view. If love is involved, then you're really fucked. You may as well get a job at a bank because your inner world has just been bombed, razed and occupied by love. Every emotion, every thought, is mediated, damaged. Just knowing she might call is enough to sprain the imagination. Nothing is pure, everything is framed. Purity is very underrated these days.

My whore experience came during this striving-to-purity. I ordered her from the Moscow Times classifieds. She was tall and thin. Her face was long, narrow and knobby, not very Slavic. I didn't speak to her. The second I let her inside my apartment, I ordered her straight into the shower. She must have been there for 15 minutes. When she appeared in my TV room wearing a towel, I pointed to my bedroom. I was very gentle with her. All this talk of misogyny, the cold, kewl, antisocial kind, had me annoyed. So I spent the first 20 minutes caressing her, petting, not saying a single word. And no kissing: no snowballs for me. At one point I guess I got too rough, twisting and pulling her nipple. She yelped and said "Ow!" and backed away. I apologized. I was trying not to do that. As Samuel Jackson says in Pulp Fiction, "I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' reeeeal hard to be good."

I don't know her story because I didn't ask her. I don't even know where she was from. I wasn't interested. This story is about me, not her.