Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (66 page)

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AG.MNST OUR WILL

century defense brief that appeared to take its cue from the Legal Aid Society. G.
L.
Kittredge of Harvard, the dean of Malory scholars, took to himself the role of an F. Lee Bailey and scoffed, "The double charge of rape was manifestly absurd-a mere legal formula." Edward Hicks, the embarrassed scholar who found the indictment, did as much as he could to make amends. He was convinced, he wrote, that Malory had been a faithful husband and the awful rape charge was probably no more than "piling on the agony." Hicks could not resist a parting shot at the reputation of the woman who five centuries earlier had caused his Malory such grief. Seeking to leave the court of public opinion with reasonable doubt, he wrote, "Whether Joan Smyth of Monks Kirby played the part of Potiphar's Wife it is impossible to say."

Another chivalric fif teenth-century figure whose personal life style was so truly shocking that history gave him a new identity and modified image is Gilles de Rais, the original Bluebeard. A French nobleman and soldier extraordinaire who served as Joan of Arc's lieutenant on the field of battle, in his later life Gilles indulged a fondness for small boys to extravagant proportions. He abducted, raped and murdered between forty and one hundred ( estimates vary ) peasant youths at his Brittany castle. Af ter a notorious trial
.
he was executed in 1440. In his final confession Gilles admitted to having been influenced by the life of Caligula and other Caesars who "sported with children and took singular pleasure in martyring them." The most amazing part of the Gilles de Rais story is that the legend of Bluebeard's Castle that we know today has metamor phosed from a terrifying account of a sex-murderer of small boys to a glorified fantasy of a devilish rake who killed seven wives for their "curiosity."
It
is almost as if the truth of Bluebeard's atrocities was too frightening to men to survive in the popular imagination-but turned about so that Bluebeard's victims were acceptably female, the horror was sufficiently diminished ( but not, of course, to women ) . Charles Perrault, who included the heterosexual version in his tales of Mother Goose, probably deserves the credit for the turnabout of the Bluebeard legend, which had its most recent incarnation in the form of a Richard Burton movie widely adver tised with the pictures of seven pretty, young women, each in the throes of a diff erent, terrible and violent death.

Gilles de Rais, the original model and not the transmogrified Bluebeard, made a brief return to the public consciousness in the

summer of
i
973 when the grisly story of Dean Allen Carll came to the surface in Houston along with the plastic bags that held his victims' remains. In a three-year spree of undetected evil, Carll and two disciples had lured and made captives of more than a score of teen-age boys, torturing, sodomizing and finally killing them for orgiastic pleasure. Some bright researcher at
Time
had made the appropriate connection, for when I turned to that magazine's ac count of the Houston boy murders, there, right at the top of the page, was an archive portrait of Gilles himself. It set me to wonder ing. How will history remember Carll? His cultish rituals, his disregard for law and human life-this is the stuff of which the legends
.
of sexual Uberrnenschen are formed. For less ambitious crimes Charles Manson has already won deification as a Satan of Sex. In one night of evil Richard Speck secured a permanent spot in the history of infamy. The Boston Strangler and Jack the Ripper are icons in an international chamber of horrors. But Dean Allen Carll, I suspect, will be conveniently forgotten as quickly as pos sible. Not that his acts of violence were too disgusting; canoniza tion of a sex killer depends on a plethora of lurid details. Dean Allen Carll must fall in the dustbin of unremembered villains because of the homosexual nature of his crime. Carll raped and killed his own kind, and what heterosexual man with a rich, imagi native, sociaIIy acceptable fantasy life could safely identify with Carll without at the height of his fantasy slipping a little and becoming for one dread instant that cringing, whimpering naked
.
lad manacled wrist and foot to the makeshif t wooden torture board? What a turnoff that would bel What a short circuit of the power lines!

Within the heterosexual world that most of us inhabit by choice, sexual violence is exalted by men to the level of ideology only when the victims are female and the victimizers are male. Hard-core pornography is the most extreme manifestation of this destructive principle. By longstanding tradition based on sales experience, run-of-the-mill pornography geared to the heterosexual taste has one big no-no: scenes in which men "do it" to men are verboten. But we needn't look to the extreme example to prove the point. The popularity of quite ordinary books, movies and songs that depict violence to women and glorify the man who perpetrates the violence is so entrenched in our culture that an entire book could be devoted to the subject. How women perceive these mes—

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AGAINST OUR WILL

sages from the culture and how men perceive them are obviously worlds apart. In another chapter I attempt to deal with the lasting eff ect on women; here I shall restrict myself to the male end of the fantasy.

Jack the Ripper's grip on the masculine imagination is so out of proportion to the case of an unknown man who stalked, muti lated and murdered five prostitutes in London's East End in the autumn of
1888
that we must wonder precisely what his attraction holds. I have seen a couple of Ripper movies on the Late Late Show, and the only emotion they inspired in me was terror. As a woman I could not help but identif y with the female victims who walked the fogbound streets unaware of imminent death, and I imagine this would be almost every woman's reaction. Not so for men. "Hero" is the surprising word that men employ when they speak of Jack the Ripper. No less an impeccable critic than Noel Annan ( Provost of University College, London ) , writing in the New York
Review
of
Books,
called him "the hero of horror in Victorian times." ( Annan's article was an abstruse roundup of some recent books on Victorian crime and his paragraphs on the Ripper were tangential, yet the acute editors of the
Review,
know ing their audience, emblazoned
"JACK THE RIPPER"
among their cover lines. )

Charles McCabe of the San Francisco
Chronicle
once devoted a full column to the Ripper, calling him among other superlatives "that great hero of my youth, that skilled human butcher who did all his work on alcoholic whores." McCabe's rave-he likened the Ripper to a British "national treasure"-off ered some insights into the Ripper cult. "The Ripper's greatest historical importance," he wrote, "is that he probably founded a new school of murder, the motiveless crime, usually tied up with sex." This is hogwash, of course, since mutilation murders of women are never motiveless. Elsewhere in his column McCabe ventured that "the Ripper is . . . the only important murderer in history whose name we do not know." This, too, is ridiculous, but it does contain the germ of an idea. Jack the Ripper became an important murderer and mythic figure precisely because his identity remained unknown.
In
other words, he got away with it. Every time a new theory is raised as to the Ripper's identity ( current speculation identifies him as a wastrel member of the Royal Family; all seem to agree that he was "exceptional" and "a gentleman") , there is fresh opportunity to

drag out the gory facts of his mutilations and the terror he inspired. Terror to women, we must remember, and not to men.
If
the mystery of Jack the Ripper's real name is ever solved to everyone's satisfaction-a highly unlikely occurrence-the Ripper myth will be severely damaged, for his power over the minds of men lies in his remaining unknown, something the Ripper himself played upon in his taunting catch-me-if-you-can letters to newspapers and local vigilance committees.

I cannot leave the Ripper without paying my respects to the always interesting English writer Colin Wilson, author of
The Outsider,
who expressed his attraction to male slayers of women in his provocative A Casebook of Murder. Wilson posited that the Ripper clearly belonged to the talented, dominant, top 5 percent of the population, and he was much taken with "the propaganda of the deed." In his sprightly compendium of sex slayings Wilson finds only one that truly disgusts him, a lesbian murder of two small children. Of this particular murder and why if fictionalized it would make poor reading, he writes, "It is hard to see how [it could be] made bearable for the sexually normal reader." But of the rest of his gallery of heterosexual and male homosexual rapists, necrophiliacs, disembowelers, axe murderers, breast eaters, kidney devourers, etc., he displays no queasiness. He honestly believes
they
are of interest to the "sexually normal"-for, writes Colin Wilson, "The sexual act has a close affinity with murder . . . . Murderer and victim are in the same sort of relation as the male penetrating the female."

Jack the Ripper's preeminence as the mythic hero of sexual violence has been strongly challenged in recent years by America's own Boston Strangler (see pages
200
to
206) .
Yet af ter the confes sion of Albert DeSalvo the public reacted with a keen sense of feeling cheated by the anticlimax of it all. When DeSalvo was murdered in prison, newspaper feature writers took the opportunity to rehash the Strangler story in a way that lef t doubts that the real killer of thirteen women had truly been caught. The Boston Strangler's mythic reputation as an unknown Superman of sexual terror who still lurks outside the door at night, I predict, will survive the chunky, dullish persona of Albert DeSalvo in life and in death. Besides a book (a good one) and a movie, he has already been memorialized by Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones in one of their most theatrical numbers, "Midnight Rambler," in which