If the habit of active penetration does create the conditions for a scene of wearisome repetition, then there's something to be said for men...to begin by exploring the uncertainties that follow any act of strategic withdrawal.

  

[P]ornography succeeds when it takes you away from yourself.

1.
In the heterosexual pornographic video Secrets, there is a woman-on-woman scene-both the women are white-in which one of the performers, wearing a suit and tie, uses a large purple dildo to play the role of a man. This "male" woman handles her false organ precisely the way a physiologically male performer would handle his real one. She holds the synthetic appendage so it emerges from the unzipped fly of her pants, strokes it while she performs oral sex on her partner and even has her partner fellate it. All of this activity, within the constraints of the genre's heterosexism, is captured by the camera in a way that highlights the gender-bending aspect of the sex-play in which the women are engaged. All signs of playfulness disappear, however, in the seriousness with which the camera takes the simulated cum shot. There is-just as there would be if a man were involved-a close up of the dildo being aimed at the vagina of the "female" woman. Then the "male" woman's hand "masturbates" the rubber organ until it "ejaculates," appearing to emit a white, semen-like fluid, which in reality is released from the "male" woman's palm. The "male" woman rubs the tip of the dildo gently against the "female" woman's besmeared genitals, just the way a man would if he were playing in the scene; there are some brief and perhaps uncharacteristic moments of the women kissing and cuddling afterwards, with the "female" woman on top; and then the film moves on to the next scenario, which involves a man who has paid a prostitute to act out a fantasy in which she is a virgin bride and he is her husband.

Now consider a very different woman-on-woman scene. Imagine the women use a dildo that squirts and that, rather than giving us a simulated cum shot, the camera shows the "male" woman taking the dildo out of the harness she is wearing and squirting the fake semen all over her partner. In this scene, though, what comes out of the dildo is fruit juice, or maybe wine, and when the partner wrestles the fake penis from the first woman's hands and squirts it back, the women fall on each other, laughing out loud and licking the fluid from each other's skin. Then the camera cuts to the next scene in which they pass the dildo back and forth between them, like the toy it really is, giggling at the air that comes out when they squeeze its fully-drained testicles, and then putting it aside to nestle in each other's arms as they fall into a tender post-lovemaking slumber.

A scene like this, in which two women treat a surrogate penis with such profound lack of respect for the power and control a penis is supposed to represent would never make it into a video like Secrets. After all, a penis that can be tossed aside, even one that has clearly been made to be tossed aside, cannot help but suggest that men can be tossed aside just as easily. It is ironic therefore that the fake cum shot in Secrets makes precisely that point, presenting the male viewer for whom the movie was made not only with the conventional image of the dildo as a less-than-desirable substitute for the man it stands in for, but also with a more subtle representation that suggests a flesh-and-blood dildo is all the male body really is. 

In terms of how male performers are treated within the pornographic industry, the analogy is entirely apt. The man responsible for having sex in a given scene either "has wood" or he doesn't. If he doesn't, he becomes by definition a financial liability, since the time it takes him to become wooden-or the time he wastes in trying-is time for which everyone and everything else on the set still needs to be paid. More to the point, though, since mainstream heterosexual pornography sells based on the name, image and ostensible pleasure experienced by the female performer, the male performer's primary function is to make her performance possible. He is her straight man, her foil, or as Susan Faludi puts it in her essay "The Money Shot" her "appendage, the object of the object."¹ 

Another scene: A white woman's mouth in the act of swallowing a white man's penis fills the screen of my TV. Almost directly in the center of the picture, the shape of his organ glides back and forth against the inside of her left cheek. Panning back, the camera shows her kneeling on all fours in front of him, her lips engulfing and expelling his genitals as if she were the only movable part of a well-oiled machine.

"Does that feel good?" She looks up at him with a lust-filled and mischievous grin.

"You suck a mean cock, Cherry." His voice is a nearly emotionless monotone.

In response, "Cherry" gazes worshipfully at his erection, sucks air hungrily through her teeth and moans with the pleasure of pleasuring him, with the joy of being able to take him in her mouth.
The movie is called Inside Christy Canyon² - a compilation of that porn star's "hottest" scenes-and from the way the camera frames the points of oral-genital contact, as if the penises Christy Canyon takes into her mouth belonged to men whose bodies ended just above the waist, I know that I am supposed to imagine those organs as mine, that my hand is supposed to acquire the shape of Christy Canyon's lips, and that the orgasm to which her movie is intended to inspire me to bring myself is supposed to become the orgasm to which she has brought me.

Yet neither my pleasure nor the pleasure of the men who stand in with Christy Canyon for me seems to be at the center of what the movie is about. Instead, the film focuses on her, recording in its minutiae each of her responses to the sex she is having. In contrast to her partners, who show about as much passion as they would if they were changing a flat tire or lifting heavy boxes, Christy Canyon moans and screams. Her arms and legs flail with pleasure, and when she is fucking, she grabs at her partner to pull him further inside herself. Even when her partner ejaculates, at the moment when his body and his pleasure should logically occupy the movie's foreground, the camera shows his penis as an almost disembodied organ, with Christy Canyon dominating the frame, grinding, panting, moaning beneath his ejaculation as if it were her own. I'm reminded of the movie scenes in which idol worshippers work themselves into an ecstasy, hoping vainly to elicit some sign of life from the stone or wooden figure that is their god. In Christy Canyon's case, though, the worship works. God speaks. The phallus ejaculates.

The cum-shot is supposed to represent the pinnacle and proof of male heterosexual pleasure. Except for my prior knowledge of the physical fact, however, I detect little pleasure in it and find even less pleasure in watching it. A man thrusts into a woman, or a woman takes a man's penis into her body. Presumably he is full of desire for her, full of whatever having sex with her feels like, but only when the "magic moment" arrives, only after he has pulled his penis out of her so we can know that his ejaculation is real, does the camera allow us to see and/or hear the moan or scream or grunt that reveals he has felt something. Till that moment, everything sexual the movie is supposed to help me experience is directed away from any physical or emotional identification I might feel with him and towards the woman with whom he is performing. When I watch her take his penis into her mouth or vagina, I am supposed to feel like I have access to what it feels like to her to have been entered. More concretely, I am supposed to use that knowledge to create for myself the sensation that I, not the man on the screen, am the one who has entered her. 

If her movie succeeds, in other words, Christy Canyon and I will have traded places. I will have become the worshipper trying to breathe some kind of life into the inanimate body of the film that is all I have of her flesh, while she will have become my goddess, the inscrutable object before which I must finally know that I am alone, holding in my hand the proof and the residue of my own mundane humanity.

Consider now, by way of contrast, the body of the man in Slavesex 10, a video imported from Germany, which opens with him, nude except for a leather harness, being let out of a cage. The woman who frees him is dressed in the black leather costume of a dominatrix, and she has him lick her boot while she reads a book. When a second woman appears, she and the first woman tie the man to an x-shaped cross fixed to the wall, and the rest of the film is given over to the sexual pain the two women inflict on him. Together, they weave needles through the skin around his nipples and attach clothespins to each aureole. Then they clip onto the nipples themselves alligator clamps that are fastened to either end of a chain. One of the women slaps and kicks at the man's testicles and then the other straps a leather ring around his scrotum. The women hang weights from this ring, stretching his scrotal sac till his testicles are hanging what looks like six inches away from his body. Then the man's mistresses wrap one end of a thin piece of string around the head of the man's penis, and they make him hold the other end between his teeth while they swing the weights hung from his scrotum and pull the chain attached to the clamps on his nipples. Finally, the women remove the apparatus of pain from the man's body, release him from the cross and leave him, sprawled face down on the floor, to recover from what he has suffered.

S&M is a culture with its own rules, its own configurations of desire and eroticism and its own perspective on heterosexual norms. People who engage in S&M often argue that their sex play allows them to step out of stereotypical gender roles, that the exchange of power brought about through the bondage and the pain, the dominance and submission, allows them to turn those roles inside out and upside down, revealing in the process selves that are far more flexible and interesting than the rigid and stratified personae we are culturally expected to adopt. In an essay called "Fantasy, fetish and the Goddess," Diana Vesta characterizes a man's choice for the kind of submission portrayed in Slavesex 10 as a choice for healing. The men who come to her wanting to be her slaves, she says, are looking for a kind of balance, a way breaking down within themselves the "barriers and imbalances [that patriarchy has created] within our world."³ Journeying into the "uncharted paths and ways"⁴ of willing sexual slavery, she argues, is the only way for them to counteract the patriarchal dominance they are trying to escape.

Following this logic, the pain and humiliation the man in Slavesex 10 has chosen to suffer should be seen as offering him avenues of self-exploration that would be obscured by an erection and its traditionally corresponding sexual script. As I watch Slavesex 10, however, all of my reading, all of my desire to be fair to different points of view, all of it, is rendered null and void, for I cannot help but experience the agony of the man on the screen before me as a betrayal. "Why?!" I want to scream in his face, to take his testicles in my hand and squeeze, just as his mistresses might, to prove-to him? to myself?-that he deserves what they're doing to him, "Why do you let them hurt you?! Why don't you fight back? What kind of a man are you anyway?!"

The question itself is a betrayal, insisting on an almost essentialized difference between him and myself, for it suggests that I would do differently, that, tied to a wall, at the mercy of two women intent on causing me extreme pain, I would find some way to transcend what they forced me to feel and then use that transcendence to escape, or perhaps turn the tables and make the women submit to me.
So what am I not seeing? Or, more accurately, what do I see that nonetheless fails to resonate the way it undoubtedly would for someone who practices S&M? The leather costumes that all three participants wear, for example, the cage, the cross on the wall, the fact that the man licks his mistress' boots, even the ritualized nature of the pain the women inflict on him-they do what they do, after all, in a very particular order and with what appears to be carefully orchestrated timing-all of these, I assume, function for an audience that knows how to read them as cues that the pain and humiliation they are watching, for all three of the people on the screen, has a meaning beyond itself. This larger context is what creates the "leeway for play," the possibilities of "intersubjective give-and-take" that Linda Williams argues in her book Hard Core must be present in even the most rigidly defined and restrictive S&M scenario if the bottom is to be able to feel the power of his or her pleasure. "There can be no pleasure...without power."⁵

Diana Vesta gives some examples of how that power is negotiated when she describes her initial contact and first session with a prospective male slave. She commands him, for example "to send...two lists-things he would like to try and things he would never try (at least not at this time)." These lists, she points out, will change over time as they explore his limits, searching for his "true submissive level." She tells him that she is his teacher, that he "will be tested in ways that [he] never dreamed possible," that she is "not a sadist," that she "will not give [him] something for which [he] do[es] not have a disposition, and that she will "always respect [his] limits."6 During their first session, she asks him, "Will you suffer for me, slave?" He answers, "Goddess, I will suffer for you. Goddess, I will give you everything!" Then again, "[S]lave...will you spill blood for me?" And again his answer, "Goddess, I will spill blood for you!" 

The message here is twofold. First the potential slave is told that his desires matter and that he is expected to take responsibility for them; second, it is made clear to him that he must be willing to go beyond his comfort zone in pursuit of the lessons he has asked Vesta to teach him. Since she is writing from the dominant point of view, we do not have access to what the man thinks and feels, but given the terms of their relationship as she states them, it is logical to conclude that his pleasure lies in large part in seeing how much he can take, how much he is willing to learn to be able to endure for the sake of the submission to which and the woman to whom he has committed himself. What makes his pain and humiliation meaningful, in other words, and therefore possible sources of pleasure, is that they are referred to something other than what is happening in the interior of his flesh, just like the cum shot, the pleasure of which is expressed not in what the man on the screen felt in his own body up to and including the point of his ejaculation, but rather in what it means for him to ejaculate onto the body of a woman. This more or less absolute yoking in heterosexual pornography of male sexual pleasure to a woman's presence has a moral fervor, an intellectual certainty, that lends to its portrayal the kind of weight we usually attribute to religious or scientific pronouncements about what it means to live in the bodies we are born to inhabit.

This is the body you have been given. These are the instructions for this body's proper use. Go forth into the world and use this body to be the man it is meant for you to be. 
 

2.
You won't believe me. I know you won't. I didn't want to believe it myself, but I couldn't deny what my eyes were telling me: My penis was gone! Really! Gone! I'd just come home from breaking up with my girlfriend, and I was undressing to take a shower before dinner when I reached down to touch myself and felt...nothing!

Do you understand?

Nothing!

My brain could not at first decipher what the tips of my fingers were telling me, but when I looked down I saw that between my legs where my penis should have been the skin was as smooth and as hairless as the top of my head. I stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom cupping my crotch like a shy girl forced to strip naked in front of strangers, praying that my eyes were playing tricks on me, that when I removed my hands and looked again my penis would be there. 

I removed my hands and looked again. My penis was not there.

Not knowing what else to do, and since I was not about to call on one of my friends and say, "Hey, let's go out for a drink. I need to talk," I put my clothes back on and went across town to a bar where I didn't think anyone would know me. I ordered a beer and sat by myself in a corner booth, making sure to avoid eye contact with anyone who happened to look my way.

"Mind if I sit down?" The inquisitive eyes of a pretty, red-haired woman were suddenly too close for me to avoid.

Great, I thought, I have no penis and a woman is trying to pick me up. Just what I need. 

There was an openness in the way she looked at me, though, a kindness in her eyes that persuaded me not to refuse. I nodded my head.

"You look like you could use someone to talk to." She slid into the seat opposite me. 

"I guess, but it's something I don't think you'd understand." 

"What do you mean?" 

Not knowing what to say in response, I looked down at the table. 

She tilted her head and leaned forward, trying to catch my eye, "You know, there's not much I haven't seen or heard, so I doubt that whatever's bothering you will shock or offend me."

"Oh, this'll shock you."

"Try me."

I don't know why, but I suddenly wanted desperately to tell her. I just didn't know how, and so we went back and forth a few times-her encouraging me to open up; me insisting it'd be pointless-while a list of all the different things I could say ran through my head, each one sounding more absurd than the next. "My penis has disappeared" made it sound like the damned thing had sprouted legs and walked away; "I've lost my penis" was so ridiculous I actually smiled just thinking about it; and "my penis is gone" should've been the title of a very bad parody of a very bad love song.

"I don't have a penis anymore," I finally told her.

As I expected, she burst out laughing. "No, seriously..." she said, but then I guess she read on my face how serious I was. Her eyes darkened and her lips tightened into a thin colorless line. "You'd better show me." She said this with such authority that without giving it a second thought I nodded my head and followed her to an upstairs apartment she said she was renting from the bar's owner.

When I took my pants down, her face remained expressionless for a few seconds. "Tell me everything you've done in the past three days or so," she commanded, and I did, and when I got to the part about breaking up with my girlfriend, the woman stopped me and nodded her head. "Now I understand. The woman you were seeing is a witch and she has taken your penis as revenge for breaking up with her. The only way you can get your organ back is to persuade her to return it to you."

A witch! Now at least I knew what I was dealing with. I went to the church to talk to my priest. He didn't want to believe me at first either-who could blame him?-but when I took my pants down and repeated what the woman in the bar had told me, he gave me his blessing. 

The next day, I went back to the house of the woman I'd just broken up with and knocked on the door. She came out onto the porch so she wouldn't have to invite me in.

"I want you to give me my penis back." I kept my voice low and steady so she would understand how serious I was.

"What are you talking about?" For her part, she was trying hard to sound innocent.

"You know very well what I'm talking about!"

Before she could go back inside, I twisted a rope that I'd brought for this purpose around her neck, screaming over and over again into her ear, "Give it back! Give it back or I'll kill you!"

She kept protesting that she had no idea what I was talking about, but when her eyes started to bulge, she nodded her head and mouthed the word OK. After I loosened the rope enough for her to catch her breath, she reached between my legs and stroked me. It was truly magical! I knew without having to look or touch that my organ had been restored to me. 

I walked away without looking back, leaving the rope around the woman's neck as a reminder of what I would do to her if she tried to harm me in any way again.
 

•

Imagine that someone has told you this story and asked you to believe it.

•

Now imagine actually believing it, not only because you believe in witches, but because you hear the story from the priest who was the narrator's confessor, and you cannot imagine a priest lying about such serious matters. After all, he knows that if you ever learn her name and find out where she lives, the woman in question could be, no, would be-you make a note to yourself to see if you can locate her-hunted down like an animal and burned at the stake. You're at war with Satan himself, and you need to be as merciless as he is. It may not be women's fault that they are frail creatures, easily swayed by the promises of power and pleasure the Devil uses to seduce them, but they are still responsible for their choices: A woman who becomes a witch dedicates her life to the destruction of Christ's kingdom, forfeiting the soul that God in His infinite wisdom and mercy gave her when she was conceived. Such a woman deserves to die.

You believe this, are committed to it, would give your own life in defense of it, and this is why you want to leave no room for doubt in the minds of the people for whom you are now writing that a witch can indeed remove a man's penis from his body. Well, not exactly remove it, but you'll get into the fine points of that distinction later, for an image of the Witches' Sabbat distracts you momentarily from your work. The writhing bodies. The moans of carnal pleasure. The Devil in all his various incarnations moving from woman to woman, taking each one in a different position, and they kiss his erection, and they kneel between each other's legs.... You take a deep breath. Satan is devious, knows your weaknesses too, and it's only because your will is strong that you're able to wrench your attention back to the world-saving importance of what you're writing. 

And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who...collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? [A] certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to a parish priest.⁷

Of course witches don't really remove men's penises. That would mean the Devil had the power to alter permanently the structure of God's world, and there's no way God would allow His nemesis to become that strong. Rather, men who believe their penises have been taken from them have fallen under the influence of a glamour, or spell, that makes it appear their genitals are gone. For the Devil's strength is ultimately nothing more than the power to deceive, which is why Satan can in no way enter the mind or body of any man, nor has the power to penetrate into the thoughts of anybody, unless such a person has first become destitute of all holy thoughts, and is quite bereft and denuded of spiritual contemplation.⁸ The men who fall prey to penis-removing glamours, in other words - most commonly...adulterers and fornicators⁹ - deserve their unmanning, though you suppose their condition is to be pitied rather than reviled, for only the very few among us are truly without sin.

You don't know, there is no way you can know, that the book you're writing - what will become, when it is first published in 1486, The Malleus Maleficarum - is destined to be for nearly three centuries the Inquisition's authoritative text on the theory, identification, interrogation, torture and execution of witches. Nor are you aware that what you're writing will change irrevocably the way witches are seen and hunted, transforming witchcraft from a crime against your god committed more or less equally by men and women, and by relatively few people at that, into an almost exclusively female transgression.¹⁰ Nearly 100,000 women will be burned at the stake as witches by the time the influence of your text has waned in the mid-1700s, and at least twice as many more will have had their lives ruined by the accusation.¹¹ There's no way you can know this, but you'd be proud of it. Women, no, witches, no, women, witches-what's the difference?-those treacherous, devious, evil, seductive, nearly irresistible creatures deserve every moment of agony they suffer, whether on the rack or burning at the stake. Each moment of pain, each lick of each flame on their sinful skin brings closer the fulfillment of God's divine plan, and so the more of them you can burn off the face of the earth the better off the earth will be.

You put down your pen and look out the window, your thoughts having turned for the moment to the Jews, especially the Jewish doctors whose black arts are not so different from witches' glamours,¹² and you wonder again if excluding the Jews from The Malleus was a good idea. Granted, as Sprenger pointed out when you first argued about this, the Jews are not witches, but they are in league with Satan, and Satan uses them, and they share-you've read recently the work of Thomas de Cantimpré, and it is pure and noble and blessed, and he has it on the authority of St. Augustine that the Jews share with women, with witches, the curse visited upon Eve for her disobedience in the paradise of Eden that would have been ours if not for her. Just like Eve and her daughters, Jewish men bleed monthly, for they too rejected Christ. Augustine calls it a mark of Cain, and it is why, this mark, it is why the Jews drink the blood of Christian children. They think it will cure them. They are wrong, though, as the Jews are always wrong, mistaking Christiano sanguine, the blood of a Christian, for the one thing that would truly end their suffering, Christi sanguine, the blood of Christ, taken in Holy Communion.¹³

Ah, well, Sprenger is right. The Jews are not witches, and so even though this connection between witches and Jews intrigues you, you decide you must leave it for someone else to tackle. Over the centuries, many try, but it will be five hundred years before someone reveals the feminine corruption of the Jews as comprehensively as you have done for witches:

The true conception of the State is foreign to the Jew, because he, like the woman, is wanting in personality; his failure to grasp the idea of true society is due to his lack of free intelligible ego. Like women, Jews tend to adhere together, but they do not associate as free independent individuals mutually respecting each other's individuality.

As there is no real dignity in women, so what is meant by the word "gentleman" does not exist amongst the Jews. The genuine Jew fails in this innate good breeding by which alone individuals honour [sic] their own individuality and respect that of others. There is no Jewish nobility, and this is the more surprising as Jewish pedigrees can be traced back for thousands of years.¹⁴

In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not distinct from one another.¹⁵

It would be easy to understand why the family (in its biological not its legal sense) plays a larger role amongst the Jews than amongst any other people....The family, in this biological sense, is feminine and maternal in its origin, and has no relation to the State or to society.¹⁶

The fact that no woman in the world represents the idea of the wife so completely as the Jewish woman (and not only in the eyes of the Jews) still further supports the comparison between Jews and women. In the case of the Aryans, the metaphysical qualities of the male are part of his sexual attraction for the woman, and so, in a fashion, she puts on an appearance of these. The Jew, on the other hand, has no transcendental quality, and in the shaping and moulding of the wife leaves the natural tendencies of the female nature a more unhampered sphere; and the Jewish woman, accordingly, plays the part required of her, as house-mother or odalisque, as Cybele or Cyprian, in the fullest way.

The congruity between Jews and women further reveals itself in the extreme adaptability of the Jews, in their great talent for journalism, the "nobility" of their minds, their lack of deeply-rooted and original ideas, in fact the mode in which, like women, because they are nothing in themselves, they can become everything. The Jew is an individual, not an individuality; he is in constant close relation with the lower life, and has no share in the higher metaphysical life.¹⁷ 

And so on and so on, until the fundamental difference between the Jew and the woman. Neither believe in themselves; but the woman believes in others, in her husband, her lover, or her children, or in love itself; she has a center of gravity, although it is outside her own being. The Jew believes in nothing, within him or without him....The woman believes in the man, in the man outside her, or in the man from whom she takes her inspiration [Jesus], and in this fashion can take herself in earnest. The Jew takes nothing seriously; he is frivolous and jests about anything, about the Christian's Christianity, the Jew's baptism.¹⁸

The Jew, in other words, is an even more debased woman than a woman is.
 

•
 

The Jew's baptism. A Jewish joke: In the years before Vatican II, when Catholics were still prohibited from eating meat on Fridays, a Jewish man named Yankel converted to Catholicism. From that moment on, he insisted on being called only Jacob.

Jacob was a devout churchgoer, active in his parish and well-liked and respected by those who knew him. Still, Jacob was a new Catholic and old habits do die hard. So one Friday the parish priest decided to stop by Jacob's apartment, just to make sure. As he walked up the stairs to Jacob's floor, the priest could smell that someone was cooking pot roast. As he approached Jacob's door, the smell got stronger, and when he knocked and Jacob appeared in the doorway, the priest's worst fears were confirmed. The odor filling the hallway came from Jacob's apartment.

"Jacob," the priest tried to be circumspect, "you do realize it's Friday, don't you?"

"Of course, Father. Would you like to stay for dinner?"

"I'd love to stay, but it is Friday, you know, and we're not supposed to eat meat."

"Oh, don't worry, Father," Jacob's voice was warm and reassuring, "I'm not serving meat."

At this obvious lie, the priest got angry. "What do you mean you're not serving meat! I can smell the pot roast!"

"Really, Father, don't worry. It's not pot roast."

The priest pushed past Jacob into the kitchen. Sure enough, there, in the oven, was a pot roast. "Look," he was pointing directly at the meat. "How can you tell me this is not a pot roast?"

"Well, Father, last Sunday I brought some holy water home from the church, and today, before I started to cook, I sprinkled some of the water on the meat and I said, 'In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, you're no longer a pot roast. You're a poached salmon.'"
 

•
 

The book was called Sex and Character, and it was brilliant - all the critics on both sides of the Atlantic said so. Otto Weininger, the author, was a German Jew who converted when he received his doctorate. By arguing that Jewish men are essentially degenerate women - this is Sander Gilman's line of reasoning in Jewish Self-Hatred - Weininger hoped to prove that he had left his former Jewish self behind for good, but it didn't work. Weininger the Jew haunts the pages of Sex and Character the way the voice of any unwanted self haunts the person who tries to disown it. We are always, inescapably, at every moment of who we are, all of who we are, and to disavow that wholeness is to turn the part of ourselves we have rejected into a ghost.
 

•
 

The Jew's baptism. I wish I could remember which rebbe it was who first explained to me that Jews cannot convert-or, more precisely, that Jewish law does not recognize as valid any conversion ritual to which a Jew might choose to submit. You could live the rest of your life in strict, definitively non-Jewish adherence to the principles of your new faith, adopting whatever label of identification that faith required, but, according to this rebbe, there was ultimately nothing you could do to wipe away the fact of your Jewishness. "When the day of judgment finally arrives," I remember him telling my class, "God will judge these men and women as Jews, and it will be as Jews that they enter or are prohibited from entering olam haba, the world to come." 

The underlying Jewish reality of my existence, in other words - and I believed this, because in those days I believed almost everything about being Jewish that my rebbes told me - could not be changed. What it meant for me to be a Jew was as permanently written into the foundation of my my Yiddishe neshama, my Jewish soul, as the fact of my circumcision had been permanently written into my body, because even though most of my non-Jewish friends were also circumcised, mine was different. My circumcision had been performed in the name of God - this is my grandmother talking, though I don't remember why she felt the need to explain it to me - was proof of the covenant God had made with Abraham, of my inclusion in and obligation to fulfill that covenant. I could change about myself anything I wanted to; I could even become a woman - this is me; my grandmother would never have allowed such a thing to enter her mind - but I could never escape the fact that a divine cut had been made in my flesh, that the mark of God's chosen people had once been visible on my flesh.

Given the frequency with which Jews were forced to convert to Christianity throughout much of European history - and as far as I know it was in Europe that the notion of the unconvertible Jew first took shape - it's understandable that the rabbis who shaped Jewish law might see becoming a Christian as something one might do to survive, but not as an act one would choose willingly to perform. Indeed, the idea that there was such a thing as an immutable Jewish soul could be understood as a form of resistance, a way of drawing a line that the Christians could not cross under any circumstances. It's ironic, therefore, that the medieval church also conceived of the Jewish soul as immutable, except that the church thought the impossibility of a fully valid Jewish conversion resulted from shortcomings with which the Jews were born and which could never fully be overcome. 

Remember "the blood of Christ" versus "the blood of a Christian"? According to de Cantimpré, the mistake was made by a Jewish prophet who didn't understand Latin well enough to get it right. No, more than didn't. Couldn't. Who couldn't get it right because he was incapable, as all Jews were understood to be incapable, of commanding any language other than their own. In de Cantimpré's time, this language was Hebrew, the tongue in which the Jews read and interpreted their holy texts, and it was in the nature of Hebrew, and therefore in the nature of the Jewish soul that perceived the world through Hebrew, that the Jews could not see, for example, the many prefigurations of Christ's coming that their texts. To put it another way, the Jews had a limited and essentially false view of the world because they spoke Hebrew, and they spoke Hebrew because they had a limited and false view of the world. The Jews' very existence, in other words, was based on false pretenses, and so even when a Jew claimed to have converted out of real conviction, the assumption among his new coreligionists was that he or she was most probably lying.

Since Jews in the middle ages could be condemned to burn at the stake for even the tiniest perceived slight against Christianity - and a false conversion was an offense neither tiny nor imaginary - Jews who converted had a vested interest in putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their own disavowed Jewishness. So, in the 1500s, when the converted Jew Johannes Pfefferkorn wrote a series of pamphlets attacking the Jews, he had first to convince his Christian readers of the validity and value of his own conversion. "My dearest Christians," he wrote, "you should understand and appreciate the great value and bounty that the Jews will bring to the Christian Church.... Much as a hungry bear who has broken open a beehive will not be driven away because of the attraction of the sweets, so, too, will it occur with the Jews. When they taste the honey, they will say, This is a feast above all feasts, and I believe, as true as it is within me, that all of the worldly feasts are not to be compared with one who has understood the Old Testament in the light of the New."¹⁹ 

Pfefferkorn wrote in vain. Victor of Karben, a rabbi who converted to Christianity and became a priest, and who was a contemporary of Pfefferkorn, summed up where converts like him fit into his new religious community's world view: "And thus, says the Psalmist, one spends the entire day like a poor dog that has spent its day running and returns home at night hungry. For there are many uncharitable and ignorant Christians who will not give to you but will rather show you from their doors with mockery, saying, 'Look, there goes a baptized Jew.' And then others answer, 'Yes, anything that is done for you is a waste. You will never become a good Christian.'....And [still others say] with satisfaction, 'Though you may act like a Christian, you are still a Jew at heart.'"²⁰

You are still a Jew at heart. The cycle is vicious, because if Jews can never change, then conversion and its accompanying salvation are categorical impossibilities. And yet if you are a Jew who's converted not only do the Jews have to be able to change, but they also have to be, at the same time, so radically and irreconcilably different that your becoming a Christian negates entirely the Jew you once were. Otherwise, how can you prove that your conversion is real? Or maybe your conversion was a lie after all, the result of a Jewish deceitfulness within yourself of which you had no knowledge. And yet you know how you feel. You know the joy you experienced when you were baptized. How could that have been false? And yet and yet and yet and yet, and yet again. The cycle is vicious, and it forms the core of all self-hatred - in this case Jewish self-hatred - and there is, ultimately, no way out of it. 
 

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Notes
1 Susan Faludi, "The Money Shot," The New Yorker, October 30 1995, 66.
2 Unfortunately I do not have full bibliographical information about this video; it was stolen from my apartment before I'd written the information down. I have tried to find it on the Internet, but the only Christy Canyon compilation available, Deep Inside Christy Canyon (Vivid Video), contains different footage.
3 Dianna Vesta, "Fantasy, Fetish, and the Goddess," in Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice, ed. Mark Thompson (Boston: Alyson Publications, Inc., 1991), 275.
4 Ibid., 273.
5 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 227.
6 Vesta, "Fantasy, Fetish, and the Goddess," 267-68.
7 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (New York: Dover, 1971) 121. The story with which I began this section is my own blending of two other penis-stealing narratives in The Malleus.
8 Ibid. 120.
9 Ibid. 60.
10 Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994) 172.
11 Ibid. 23.
12 Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) 37.
13 Ibid. 74-75.
14 Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, trans. Authorized Translation (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1906) 188.
15 Ibid. 189.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid. 195.
18 Ibid. 196.
19 Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews 36.
20 Ibid. 40-41.