Koestenbaum - Humiliation : big Ideas : small books

CONTENTS

STRIP SEARCH

THE JIM CROW GAZE

THE STINK OF THE LIVERWURST

I WANT TO BE YOUR BITCH

THE BLOB

FIVE OCLOCK SHADOW

CATHETER (THE QUEEN OF TROY IS QUEEN NO LONGER)

DISGUSTING ALLEGATIONS

FINE JEW LINEN

SHOCK TREATMENT AESTHETICS

EAVESDROPPING ON ELIMINATION

FUGUE #1

STRIP SEARCH

Recently in New York City an arrested man was strip-searchedstandard procedureon Rikers Island. The arraigned man said, I was put into a cage and told to take off my clothes. He was orderedaccording to The New York Times to squat and spread his buttocks. The accused, whod been arrested for possession of marijuana, described the strip search as horrifying: Being a grown man, I was humiliated.

Humiliation means to be made humble. To be made human? Human and humiliation do not share an etymological root, but even in Latin the two words humanus and humiliatio suggestively share a prefix.

Repeatedly I watch clips of Liza Minnelli on YouTube. I want to see her humiliation. And I want to see her survive the grisly experience and turn it into glory.

Being humiliated is an experience, I presume, that you dont wantunless youre a masochist. And then your humiliation isnt dire. Its pleasure. Humiliation, if passed through the masochistic centrifuge, becomes joy, or upliftall emotional dissonances resolved.

An oft-repeated legend: the writer Colette was locked in her room by her husband, Willy, so that shed be forced to produce her Claudine novels. Need I humiliate myself to write this book?

Michael Jacksons father beat him; MGM fed uppers to Judy Garland. The performer must be coerced or brutalized to perform. Beat It and Over the Rainbow reverse the humiliation, or continue it.

Performers spawn performers, an intergenerational saga of distress. Liza (in the eyes of a shame-hungry public) is humiliated by inability to reach her mothers pinnacle, or by inability to reach her own former pinnacle. Past triumphs rise up to humiliate the present self.

To prove that humiliation exists, we dont need to hear from witnesses. Everyone has been humiliated, although the texture of each persons experience differslike Tolstoys unhappy families, each unhappy in its own way.

Imagine a society in which humiliation is essentialas a rite of passage, as a passport to decency and civilization, as a necessary shedding of hubris.

Any writers humiliation I take personally. I dont want poets to be humiliated, writes poet Ruth Padel, about the smear campaign against rival Derek Walcott, accused of sexual harassment. But then the press revealed that shed helped spread the bad word about Walcott, and she, in turn, was disgraced. Retelling this story, I wince: Im tainted by the news I leak.

According to feminist Mary Daly (quoted in Adrienne Richs Of Woman Born ), Many would see abortion as a humiliating procedure. Many would see insemination as a humiliating procedure. Many would see death as a humiliating procedure. Many would see literacy as a humiliating procedure.

I approach this vast subject from a limited anglethe angle of fatigue. I am tired, as any human must be, after a life spent avoiding humiliation and yet standing near its flame, enjoying the sparks, the heat, the paradoxical illumination.

Not merely because I am tired, but because this subject, humiliation, is monstrous, and because it erodes the voice that tries to lay siege to its complexities, I will resign myself, in the fugues that follow, to setting forth an open-ended series of paradoxes and juxtapositions. (I call these excursions fugues not only because I want the rhetorical license offered by invoking counterpoint but because a fugue state is a mentally unbalanced condition of dissociated wandering away from ones own identity.) Some of my fugal juxtapositions are literal and logical, while others are figurative, meant merely to suggest the presence of undercurrents, sympathies, resonances shared between essentially unlike experiences. If there is any reward to be found in this exercise of juxtaposing contraries to detect the occasional gleam of likeness, that dividend lies in the apprehension of a singular prey: the detection of a whimpering beast inside each of us, a beast whose cries are micropitches, too faint for regular notation.

When I see a public figure humiliated, I feel empathy. I imagine: that martyr could be me. Even if the public figure did something wrong, I empathize. Even if Michael Jackson slept with children. Even if Roman Polanski raped a thirteen-year-old. When I see the famous figure brought to trial, even if only trial-by-media, especially if the crime is sexual, Im seized by horror and fascination, by pity, by terror: here again, as if at the Acropolis or the Roman Colosseum, I see the dramatic onset of a familiar scene, an unveiling, a goring, a staining, a stripping away of privilege.

Speaking, Im on displaya pornographic exhibit. Im a centerfold, my legs spread. If someone sees my nude photo on the Internet, then Im humiliated, or else that Web trawler, finding my photo, is humiliated on my behalf.

When I found a students nude photo on the Web, and when I jerked off to that photo (I could be making up this fact), I worried that Id humiliated him. Or perhaps Im humiliating the student by telling you this story now. Lest you wish to prosecute me for my fantasies, please know that the student was in his late twenties and was advertising his sexual services. In the photo, he smiled with what seemed authentic gladness.

After a fight, an eighteen-year-old boy in Florida sends a nude photograph of his underage girlfriend (she is sixteen) to dozens of people, including her parents, according to The New York Times, whose pages I cruise for humiliation. By clipping the news stories, I become a guilty party.

Sexuality, in any of its guises and positions, is potentially humiliating. At least the Transcendental feminist Margaret Fuller thought so. Elizabeth Hardwick, who wrote eloquently about seduced women, quotes a telling passage: when Fullers boyfriend or husband forced her to have sex, she experienced what was to every worthy and womanly feeling so humiliating. And in Harriet Jacobss now-canonical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, the writer reserves the word humiliation for instances of sexual degradation. The fact of being enslaved she doesnt refer to as humiliating. What is humiliating is the sexual body itself, its humors and swellings, its pulsations and emissions. Theorist Julia Kristeva uses the word abject to describe this fetid, wet, organ-centered process.

The Marquis de Sade piles up humiliations, and I aim to do the same. The pleasure some of us get from watching TV or appearing on TV, or the pleasure some of us get from porn, or the pleasure some of us get from disliking sexual criminalsthe pleasure (or call it an emotion more complex than pleasure) some of us get from spectacles of all kinds is connected to what transpires in the torture room.

The Abu Ghraib photos made torture topical. A U.S. Army reservistLynndie England, joined by leering peersposed beside a pyramid of stripped Iraqi men; humiliating them, she turned herself into an internationally maligned object. Her poseher apparent gladnessseemed to epitomize the sportive nature of U.S.-style humiliation: were cheerful decimators. (Whenever I bring up torture, a depressed sense of never being able to sound the depths of this dismal subject assails me.)

Why do people want to appear on reality TV shows in humiliating guises and situations? (Displaying a fat body. Singing badly. Stuttering.) Youd think theyd want to hide their humiliation rather than parade it. Display, evidently, is considered healingsteam released, trauma canceled. The psychoanalytic word abreactive describes what we achieve by undergoing humiliation or by not making a secret of it. Abreaction, according to my trusty Oxford American Dictionary , is the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it. Writing is abreactiveI release the emotion of humiliation by replaying it.