<\/p>\n
One Good Pat Deserves Another<\/b><\/p>\n
Did you all notice the blurb in the Chronicle\u2019s<\/em> Personals column, the one about Patti Davis, ex-First Daughter, being interested in s\/m?\u00a0 According to New York<\/em> magazine, Ron Reagan\u2019s own renegade daughter wants to be the voice that puts onto tape Anne Rice\u2019s three classic s\/m novels — The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty\u2019s Punishment<\/em>, and Beauty\u2019s Release<\/em> (written under the pseudonym A.L. Roquelaure).\u00a0 Seems that Davis is writing an “erotic book” of her own, titled Bondage<\/em>, and wants to study the genre.\u00a0 Now doesn\u2019t this speak well for the quintessential all-American family?<\/p>\n Takes me back to that exquisitely Dadaist moment in contemporary American history when that other heiress to the unique pomp and privilege of the American high elite, Patty Hearst, embraced her nefarious kidnappers (in more ways than one) and converted to the twin causes of violent revolution and feeding Oakland\u2019s poor.\u00a0 Am I the only one in the neighborhood old enough to remember the Symbionese Liberation Army?\u00a0 The Patty Hearst saga outdid the most outrageous Gilbert and Sullivan satires, complete with Patty falling madly in love with one of her captors, renouncing her family and her wimpy fianc\u00e9 as capitalist pigs, and exhilarating in the thrill of protecting her adopted family of outlaws with her very own machine gun during at least two robberies.<\/p>\n Amazing what a little taste of passionate existence will do to the protected hothouse flowers of the upper gentry!\u00a0 Don\u2019t be fooled by the latter-day revisionists who want us all to believe that the 60s and 70s were nothing more than an aberration, a national bad dream.\u00a0 Debutante Patty Hearst most definitely took in the words (not to mention the flesh) of the SLA, and generated some pretty fine revolutionary rhetoric of her own once she experienced her own liberation as Good Girl Gone Bad.\u00a0 I always thought the turning point must have come when her father — William Randolph Hearst, jr. — decided to risk her life while he took precious days setting up a non-profit corporation so that the food he distributed to the poor as ransom for his daughter would be tax deductible.\u00a0 This is a man who knows how to play all the financial angles!<\/p>\n Picture it:\u00a0 Daughter Patty sitting in bondage (sic), in a locked closet, day after day, knowing that she may be killed at any moment, a group of revolutionary zealots propagandizing her about her criminally bourgeois parents, and her father takes the time to turn the situation to his tax advantage.\u00a0 Not exactly father-of-the-year material.\u00a0 Imagine the look on Patty\u2019s face (“Just you wait, you bad people!\u00a0 My father is a very powerful man who loves me very much!\u00a0 He\u2019ll save me!\u00a0 He\u2019ll call the police!\u00a0 You\u2019re going to pay for what you\u2019re doing to me!”) the moment they showed her the story revealing her father\u2019s financial\/familial priorities.\u00a0 I mean, I don\u2019t think any further verbal communiques to the prisoner were necessary to demonstrate the evils of heartless racist capitalism, no ma\u2019am.\u00a0 The girl just picked up her gun, ditched Patty to become reborn as Tania, and was damned ready to spill whatever blood might be necessary for the people\u2019s revolution.\u00a0 No two ways about it.\u00a0 And didn\u2019t Tania look just fine<\/em> in her battle fatigues, knees bent, eyes flashing, machine gun ready to do business, in the portrait snapped by the bank\u2019s own anti-bandit video camera, the portrait that made every front page in the country, that made Patty-turned-Tania a heroine and role model for every rebellious daughter in America.<\/p>\n Of course they claimed that Tania had merely been brainwashed by Cinque & Co., but the real brainwashing didn\u2019t happen until later.\u00a0 Even when Patty was captured and hauled away to jail she was fiery and unrepentant.\u00a0 It was only after they got her into isolation and worked her over psychologically for I don\u2019t remember how long — weeks, wasn\u2019t it? — threatening to send her to the slammer for life if she didn\u2019t renounce her venal tryst with the Devil, that her resolve began to falter.<\/p>\n And yes, I do remember, they did manage to break her spirit\u00a0 — parents, psychologists, and priests working her over in tandem, performing the grand exorcism — and then they got to put her on tv, Patty once again — proper, privileged, prodigal daughter, the fire obviously gone out of her — to publicly renounce the vibrantly blazing woman she had been so insane as to become.\u00a0 It was just the stress of the situation that made her do all those things, they had been saying all along.\u00a0 It was just the stress of the situation, she contritely affirmed.\u00a0 It was a case of temporary insanity, they had been saying all along.\u00a0 It was a case of temporary insanity, she acknowledged.\u00a0 They made her do it, the Hearsts had been wailing.\u00a0 They made me do it, Patty agreed.\u00a0 In the meantime, of course, the SLA holdouts had been firebombed to ground zero in a military attack that makes the assault on David Koresh look positively genteel, so there weren\u2019t any voices of protest about to be heard from that part of town.<\/p>\n And damned if the country didn\u2019t swallow the entire charade whole, this little piece of rewriting history as complete as anything George Orwell ever imagined for those baddy-baddy totalitarian type states.\u00a0 Why, it was just another innocent girl led astray by the wiles of the Devil and those who do his sinister work.\u00a0 (See why we need to keep pornography and all those other Bad Ideas out of the hands of innocent women and children?\u00a0 People are so easily misled!)\u00a0 In a perfect little metaphor, Ms. Patty went so far as to marry one of her jailers, elaborating the theme of mixing romance with the oh-so-peculiarly delicious thrill of being held captive.\u00a0 (You see, she didn\u2019t renounce everything<\/em> she learned from her affaire<\/em> with the SLA.\u00a0 “Oh, honey, tie me to the chair again, put me in the closet, stand close to me where I can smell your sweat, and tell me how you\u2019re going to make me come six more times, whether I want to or not, if my father doesn\u2019t come up with the money by midnight….”)<\/p>\n What is the moral of the story? you may ask.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t this column supposed to be about sex?\u00a0 But I say that the kind of crack-me-open transformation that turned Patty Hearst into Tania is the same sort of leap we all need to make to release the full power and liberation that comes from becoming unrepentant sexual beings.\u00a0 The fire in Tania\u2019s eyes between the time of her self-discovery and her capitulation was the same fundamental aliveness that is available to any of us when we break through the given sense of The Way It\u2019s Supposed To Be and dare to embrace the unruly hot passion which is one of the elemental forces at the heart of the sexual urge.<\/p>\n We have all been raised to be Good People — to play by the rules, to win the approval of parents and friends, to follow the dictates of the proprieties of a neatly arranged social order. \u00a0 Unfortunately, the social order does not have our best sexual interests in mind.\u00a0 Full sexual existence — a combination of light and darkness, order and chaos — is often at odds with being obedient, commercially productive, manipulatable, controllable citizens.<\/p>\n People who have access to the full range of their sexuality are empowered people, and empowered people are more likely to be troublemakers — to ask for what they want in all aspects of their lives, to reject the notion that they should thank their lucky stars just to have gotten through another day without getting mugged or fired.\u00a0 Sex is revolutionary; to give people the right to be truly sexual would require a restructuring of the entire society.<\/p>\n Could it be that Patti Davis\u2019s Bondage<\/em> is really a retelling of the erotic adventures of Patty Hearst\/Tania, sort of an homage to one out-from-over woman to another?\u00a0 It would explain why Davis wants to “study” the captivity-turn-on genre by talking her way through the Beauty<\/em> trilogy.\u00a0 But, hey, let\u2019s be realistic and keep the sublime away from the ridiculous — probably not.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Dworkin the Theory, Bobbitt the Practice?<\/b><\/p>\n Since the moon seems to be in Lunacy, with Turgis rising, I\u2019m just going to have to say something about the adventures of little Lorena Bobbitt and her most obnoxious husband, John Wayne.\u00a0 (Yes, you\u2019ve got my number:\u00a0 I\u2019m an ambulance chaser, a lover of the lurid absurd.\u00a0 But I tell you true:\u00a0 These moments when the crust is stretched thin and the lava spills over, when the Emperor forgets to zip up the fly of his non-existent trousers, these are the precious passing prisms through which we get to see the nation\u2019s sexual soul for what it really is, and for what it really isn\u2019t.)It\u2019s hardly surprising that this elegant off-with-his-cock! morality tale has captured the fascination of the press, not only in this country but around the world as well.\u00a0 I mean, we have here not only the archetypal vengeful severing itself, but also the dramatic pre-dawn search for the Holy Grail, and of course its miraculous reattachment by two charmingly humble small-town surgeons who will never receive any payment for their work (Bobbitt didn\u2019t have health insurance).<\/p>\n Step right up, folks, see it all:\u00a0 The wife screaming in her car when she discovers a severed penis in her hand, the husband giving his surgeon a jovial high-five before succumbing to anesthesia, male science (aka<\/em> sophisticated microsurgery) battling to undo the consequences of the reptilian urges of female impetuosity.<\/p>\n “America, I love you, you are always putting your glasses in your pocket, forgetting they\u2019re there, and sitting on them; America I hate you,” e.e. cummings once said, much more eloquently than that.\u00a0 What\u2019s been most amazing and delightful to me in the national convulsion over the Bobbitts is the truly inspired (dare I say poetic) language that the story has sprung from the normally hackneyed typewriters of the working press.<\/p>\n Take, for example, the syndicated story by Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post, “Behind the Surgical Feat of the Year: Doctors Who Performed Penis Reattachment Emerge as Story\u2019s Heroes.”\u00a0 How\u2019s this for purple prose:<\/p>\n “It arrived in a Ziploc bag, inside a brown paper lunch sack.\u00a0 \u2018It was an intact penis, very cleanly cut,\u2019 recalls Jim Sehn, the urological surgeon.\u00a0 \u2018It was not crushed.\u00a0 It was not visibly soiled.\u2019<\/p>\n “He had feared the worst.\u00a0 Gravel.\u00a0 Dirt.\u00a0 Run over by a car.\u00a0 Chewed by an animal.\u00a0 Instead, he was amazed by the excellent condition of the organ….<\/p>\n “He could not help but react both as a skilled urologist and as a man — the doctor compelled to act, to proceed in an orderly fashion, washing the member with Hibiclens surgical scrub and then submerging it in a stainless steel bowl of saline ice, even as the man is wincing, squeamishly handling a human organ that he had touched countless times but never while detached.”<\/p>\n Move over, Barbara Cartland!<\/p>\n Equally lyric is the almost pornographically fetching portrait of Lorena Bobbitt as glistening, wide-eyed waif that appeared in the November issue of Vanity Fair<\/em>, the work of world renowned photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark.\u00a0 Mark, whose work often focuses brilliantly on the marginalized and downtrodden (like inmates at a women\u2019s mental ward, or prostitutes and circus performers in India), presents us with an image of utter innocence to document Kim Masters\u2019s description of Lorena as a “childlike [woman who] has a way of asking you, even compelling you, to take care of her.”<\/p>\n But this photograph of Lorena is more than a portrait of innocence, it is a strongly erotic photograph as well, whether or not the photographer has made it so intentionally.\u00a0 What does it mean to eroticize Lorena Bobbitt in this way?\u00a0 Are we being offered a Fatal Attraction Lolita to tickle our senses and sensibilities?…<\/p>\n For the record, for whatever reason (or none), my heart and my gut are with Lorena.\u00a0 For whatever reason (or none), I believe that husband John Wayne abused and raped her.\u00a0 Let\u2019s just say he\u2019s not my kind of guy.\u00a0 On the other hand, as Anna Quindlen notes in an article about something else entirely, “sometimes bad things happen to bad people… it is possible to be both victim and victimizer.”\u00a0 Lorena, by her own admission, shoplifted dresses from Nordstrom, stole money from the wallet of a visiting friend, and embezzled $7,200 from Janna Bisutti, her employer, the one friend and protector she had in the world.\u00a0 She did this partly to pay bills, but also to put in a satellite dish.\u00a0 This is, after all, a woman who came to the U.S. because she watched the Flintstones and decided, “Oh my God, this is the place I want to be.”<\/p>\n “The victim mentality,” Anna Quindlen notes, “may be the last [seemingly] uncomplicated thing about life in America.”\u00a0 But these are the 90s and nothing is free of the complex touches of irony and paradox any more.\u00a0 Among the many twists of the Bobbitts\u2019 story, scuzoid John Wayne has already been acquitted, and properly so, I reluctantly admit — not because Lorena is less than an angel, but because you can\u2019t really put somebody away on no evidence, just because someone says they did something bad.\u00a0 Maybe and probably just aren\u2019t good enough for this system of law, as the jury of nine women and three men quickly agreed.<\/p>\n Lorena has not yet had her turn on the docket, but I\u2019m guessing that she will be convicted, and properly so, I reluctantly admit — not because the penis is sacred, but because you can\u2019t really allow taking a knife (or gun or fist) to someone because they\u2019ve done you wrong, even very wrong.\u00a0 (In her statement to police the morning after the incident, Lorena said that she “did it” because “he always have orgasm and he doesn\u2019t wait for me to have orgasm.\u00a0 He\u2019s selfish.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think it\u2019s fair.”\u00a0 Well, I don\u2019t think men who could care less about women\u2019s orgasms are fair either, but I\u2019ll stick my neck<\/em> out here and say that I do think there\u2019s some virtue in having the punishment fit the crime.)<\/p>\n The biggest irony of all is that, wrong as it may be, the Cut Heard Round the World will probably have a bigger impact on the obscene realities of marital rape and general male sexual arrogance than a hundred well-intentioned public awareness campaigns, even if J.W. Bobbitt is already having reflex erections and peeing without difficulty.\u00a0 Let all the John Wayne Bobbitts in the world think of 24-year-old, 95-pound, child-woman Lorena and cover their crotches with both hands before they slap or force themselves on their wives tonight.<\/p>\n Martin Luther King, commenting on the urban riots of the summer of 1967, said that while no one wants to condone violence, when collective oppression and anger get to the boiling point, violent outbursts are going to happen.\u00a0 Remember, too, that it was only after the riots in Watts and Detroit and Washington, D.C. and Newark scared the hell out of all the tongue-cluckers and made it clear that life as usual could be disrupted for the Comfortable Ones, that Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights bill.<\/p>\n One final thought:\u00a0 Maybe Lorena Bobbitt should take a cue from Ted Bundy and mount an Andrea Dworkin defense at her trial.\u00a0 She could say she read Intercourse and got so aroused that she just couldn\u2019t help herself.\u00a0 She could plead for banning such inflammatory material, to save other women from succumbing to the same antisocial urges.\u00a0 We could have demonstrations.\u00a0 We could chant, “Dworkin is the theory; dismemberment the practice.”\u00a0 We could pass a Dworkin-MacKinnon What-Me-Censor? law.\u00a0 Then John Wayne Bobbitt could sue Dworkin, her publisher, her publisher\u2019s distributors, and Lorena\u2019s favorite bookstore, for the harm they collectively caused her to do to him.<\/p>\n I mean, once we\u2019ve gone this far into the land of the absurd, why stop now?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n December 10, 1993<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1993 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n One Good Pat Deserves Another<\/p>\n Did you all notice the blurb in the Chronicle\u2019s Personals column, the one about Patti Davis, ex-First Daughter, being interested in s\/m? 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