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“Why did that pain turn out to be so pleasurable?”
JULY 30, 2024
When he broke my heart, I decided to spend some of my savings in a sex shop. ‘Heartbreak’ is a clumsy word, but it does describe quite well that tragic moment when you feel like your chest has been wounded. Torn. Like someone’s taken a knife to your flesh, but instead of blood, air rushes out.
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At the book launch for El corazón de la fiesta, the novelist Gonzalo Torne claimed that he was able to write because he always ‘left home feeling loved’. Shortly afterwards, I stood in front of an image in Calle Valldonzella, in Barcelona’s Raval district, of a pink heart split in two. I looked at it and thought, I can write because I leave home feeling heartbroken. It sounds dramatic, I know. But it’s not really: because a broken heart isn’t sliced open or smashed to pieces. If anything, a broken heart is more like the rasp of sunburnt skin. Like a firm blow to the testicles. Like the maddening clamour of hunger: treat it right, and it will quickly pass.
I don’t know how many times I masturbated in the hours after Antonio announced he had fallen in love with someone else.
Or perhaps a broken heart isn’t like any of those things. Perhaps brokenness is just another state of matter. Emily Dickinson wrote that she was proud of her broken heart. Bad Bunny said: ‘You didn’t break my heart, it was already broken’. So I wonder if the heart’s primary state is actually cracked, stabbed; and if the real work of living – of pleasure, of writing – consists in creating a sort of thick, sticky putty so you can gradually piece it together.
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A few days of not feeling my heart provoked a stampede of blood from my chest to my genitals. Suddenly it was all pumping vigorously downwards. My sex organs throbbed inside me. The epicentre of an earthquake. I don’t know how many times I masturbated in the hours after Antonio announced he had fallen in love with someone else. Nor do I know why I derived such immense pleasure from feeling betrayed. In any case, why does loving someone else have to be a betrayal? And if it isn’t a betrayal, why all the drama about being ‘heartbroken’?
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In Dark Spring, a short novel by the German surrealist Unica Zürn, the protagonist, aged just ten years old, is unable to define her pleasure without associating it with terrible pain. So much so that from a very young age she calls her genitals ‘the wound’.
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Another thing I don’t know is how many times I masturbated while fantasising about the idea that I was no longer the centre of my partner’s desire. Fantasising about the idea that a supposedly ‘harmful’ lack of stability could also make me free again, sensual, voluptuous. Why did that pain turn out to be so pleasurable? How could the feeling that all the skin on my body was tearing be even remotely erotic? Was it the impossibility of doing anything else with my hands, except for touching myself? Perhaps seeing myself naked, exposed, in front of the mirror, gave me some perspective from the damaging idea that my body was detritus, just a bundle of nerves? I touched myself and cried in front of my reflection. I cried and touched myself, letting the questions flow. Perhaps because orgasm has always calmed me. Or perhaps because, despite everything, I was getting further and further away from what I’d always feared being: a jealous skeleton. A deteriorated body. A corpse. A useless piece of meat. Discounted for being ‘broken’ or ‘bitter’. In truth, the fact he no longer thought only of me opened the door to a room I never knew was there. Vacating a space in his desire made me vulnerable again, and that vulnerability cleared new territories for me. What would I cultivate there now? I was upset and indignant, but I consoled myself with the idea of all those new doors opening, all those unknown rooms to wander through, whose furniture I could stretch out on and stain all by myself. As if pain were freedom. As if, now that I was alone, I could be my own lover.
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‘I prefer to think about vulnerability than bravery’, explains the philosopher Paul B. Preciado in an interview on the Spanish TV channel Betevé. ‘I think the thing that’s saved my life is having always been aware of my own fragility’. For Preciado – whose Testo Junkie gave a first-person account of his trans body, examining it under a magnifying glass, piece by piece, offering it up to the reader on a tray, full of wounds – vulnerability is a legitimate position from which to take action and from which to generate beauty and thought. He writes philosophy, he says, for the weak, because to him vulnerability is synonymous with dissidence, and dissidence synonymous with freedom.
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It wasn’t freedom or vulnerability that Unica Zürn was eroticising, though, right up to the end of her life. Her imagination was grappling with something closer to suffering. It was the wound — both the real one, caused by her own brother when he raped her, aged seven, and the metaphorical one, which populated her writing and art — that was to become the sole spur for her creativity, especially after she met the artist Hans Bellmer, her future husband. In the fifties, Zürn and Bellmer fled together from Berlin to Paris, because in German intellectual circles they had come to be considered degenerates. He made life-sized pubescent dolls – Poupée is his most famous work – with horrendous, carved up, hypersexualised bodies, his wife’s curves and especially her genitals being his main inspiration. There was a time when Zürn didn’t mind being known as his ‘muse’, because she was highly conscious of how important her body was in his work. For years, Bellmer not only subdued and forced himself on her, though apparently with her consent; he also encouraged her to write and paint about it. That’s why Zürn, referred to as the ‘devil’ by some of her surrealist colleagues because of her appearance, capitalised on her excessive attachment to sex and her mental illness, turning them into literature. There is, in fact, more scholarly material about Zürn’s mental illness and her recurring stays in Paris’s psychiatric hospitals than about her literature or her visual art. Over the years, her relationship with Bellmer became toxic and harmful. On more than one occasion she tried to leave him, but never managed it, for there was something binding them together: perhaps the same pain on which they had once built their intimacy. That, on top of the torments she knew she would always suffer — apparently when one of her psychiatrists asked her if she thought she would get better one day, she responded happily, resoundingly: ‘no’ — led her to end her life by throwing herself out of the window of the apartment she shared with Bellmer. A suicide, this much is clear, that she had been threatening ever since the final scene in Dark Spring.
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Unica Zürn lived and wrote while bound by the same ropes her husband had used to bind her flesh for his photography sessions — her naked body is one of the first things that appears on my screen whenever I google her name. Even once she was dead, buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, Hans Bellmer arranged for the words ‘My love will follow you into eternity’ to be inscribed on her gravestone. Despite all the young characters she had written, hopeful of finding other ways of loving and being loved, she ended up chained to a passion so exhausting that not even death could stop it.
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Zürn was not the only artist linked to the surrealist movement to tackle the contradictions of female desire. The poet Joyce Mansour, for instance, took inspiration from Charles Baudelaire, according to whom, for women, hell begins in their own bodies. She corrupts this idea in her erotic, dirty, heartrending poetry. In Mansour’s poems, beds smell like cheese, uteruses grow grass, lovers lick each other’s skulls and foetuses swim in black cradles. All this turmoil is reminiscent of the nightmares Zürn narrates, but also of paintings by Leonor Fini — who illustrated The Book of Monelle with images of naked, febrile children — or even photographs by Dora Maar, whose eroticism, in the words of the historian Victoria Combalía, distanced itself from André Breton’s amour fou, but also from Fini’s exhibitionism, for it was ‘direct, no beating about the bush, and, for that reason, subversive’. At the beginning of 2019, at the same time as the Pompidou Centre in Paris was commemorating Maar’s life and art, the sex museum in New York opened the first exhibition of Fini’s work in the United States, under the title Theatre of Desire, 1930–1990. The exhibition’s curator, Lissa Rivera, highlighted the painter’s ability to bring female pleasure to the canvas: an autobiographical, conflicted pleasure, a long way from the submissive representations of women’s bodies that, according to Fini, her male colleagues were forever creating.
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If hell, for women, really does begin in their own bodies, Unica Zürn’s teenage alter ego lived life entirely consumed by flames. Referring to the erotic fantasies of Dark Spring’s protagonist, Zürn wrote: ‘This fear is very important to her. She loves to feel dread and terror. She feels greatly honoured to be the center of these men’s attention. Each of them is armed. They came to kill her. For her, this is a high honour. They are kings, lords, and princes. Suddenly, she hears the deafening sound of an organ. A threatening and woeful music. It is Captain Nemo playing. She tears at her bonds so that they cut deep into her flesh. Her imagination is so strong that she actually feels the pain. It is not always possible to remain conscious to experience this scene up until the point of her death, which takes place by means of a thousand slow and extended knives. She is not allowed to scream or change her facial expression. Gradually a knife drills into her “wound” and turns into the dog’s hot, agile tongue. As she experiences the pleasure of this, an Indian slowly cuts her throat. She can imagine these scenes only in the dark, when she is alone. Nobody is there to rescue her.’[1]
In 1981, the Belgian historians Jean Steners and Anne Van Neck published a comprehensive study of the relationship between freedom and self-pleasure. Or rather, the lack of freedom in western societies when it comes to masturbation. Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror argues that this moral rejection of sex with oneself is driven not only by religious objections, but also by the way medicine and philosophy have portrayed it, turning it into a contemptible act, an inferior means of sexual liberation, an illness, even. Stengers and Van Neck don’t pinpoint the exact moment in history when this rejection began, but their study makes reference to works like Onania (1716) by the theologian Balthasar Bekker – who instead of using the word ‘masturbation’ referred openly to ‘terrible sin’ or ‘self-contamination’ – and L’Onanisme (1760) by Auguste Tissot, a medical treatise that classed onanism as a degenerative disease and laid the foundations of a school of thought that was to last for centuries. In fact, Stengers and Van Neck begin their study with reference to the first edition of the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle by Pierre Larousse, whose entry for masturbation simply says: ‘There is no need to describe here an act that, lamentably, is as well-known as it is shameful’. However, of all the medical trials and informative texts cited by the Belgians, perhaps the most surprising are Le Livre sans titre (1830), where the reader is warned, in simple, lyrical terms, of the ‘fatal consequences of masturbation’, and Hygiène et psychologie du mariage by the doctor Auguste Debray, another ‘self-help’ book, to use today’s terminology, which describes masturbation as ‘one of those sorrows that attacks by stealth and destroys humanity’. For Debray, neither plague nor war nor smallpox nor any of the many similar ills suffered during that era had more disastrous consequences for humanity than this ‘fatal habit’. Masturbation was, he thought, the great destroyer of civilizations, because its unceasing nature means it continues to subdue every new generation that populates the earth.
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I wish the conversations I had about pleasure in the playground of my public school in Almería had been more like the conversations the protagonist of Dark Spring had with her classmates. Zürn’s young female characters chatted about the various elongated objects they had inserted into their vaginas the night before, or which surfaces were best suited for rubbing your pubis against. Meanwhile, when I was seven or eight and that word began to circulate, we simply trembled (the great terror?). In gym class, the boys would make jokes, touching their groins and rubbing their index fingers against the tiny bulge on the front of their tracksuit. ‘Las niñas os hacéis dedillos! You all finger yourselves!’ they’d shout. And we girls would blush, squealing, perhaps because of the sneering way they referred to our intimate parts, or perhaps because for many of us ‘fingering’ suggested a still-distant, unthinkable act, as forbidden as all those sins we didn’t know how to spell. Everything the expression evoked was bad, right down to the diminutive, ‘dedillo’. It suggested something small, ridiculous, narrow, minimising the act of self-love and self-discovery being described. So ‘fingering ourselves’ remained our little secret.
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‘Fingering yourself’, the whisper went round.
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‘Fingering yourself’: a whimsical act.
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‘Fingering yourself’: an insult to your vulva.
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‘Fingering yourself’: a humiliating secret.
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But boys having a wank… oh, that was something else. A wank was synonymous with strength. Tossing yourself off meant attitude. Beating one out could only amount to enormous pleasure. Back then, it was impossible for us girls to imagine that ‘tossing yourself off’ and ‘fingering yourself” were two versions of the same act: the first could be broadcast, the second had to be permanently hidden. So there we were, in the changing rooms after gym class, exchanging glances as we got dressed, scared to mention what our male companions had just shouted at us in the playground. We imagined our male counterparts wandering around naked, free, in the next-door changing rooms, while we covered our Tweetie Pie knickers, scared someone would accuse what was underneath of being unclean. And if we couldn’t even name it, of course we were ashamed to admit in public that sometimes, when we got home, we too would get into positions that allowed us to feel that strange pleasure. All our blushing was accompanied by incomprehension — what was the role of the finger in all this, anyway? I didn’t even know what the boys meant when they talked about fingering. Although, chances are nor did they. For my part, the little I knew about pleasure had nothing to do with the use of my hands, but rather with the stimulation of an indeterminate area between my stomach and my pubis. In my first years of school — just like Zürn’s protagonist, who rubbed her clitoris on the bannister, inserted pointy kitchen utensils inside herself, and enjoyed it when the dog pushed his wet snout between her legs – my orgasms occurred entirely by chance. They occurred in the middle of the night, when my legs were hugging the soft toy I used to sleep with. Or when I was lying on the sofa watching television and my body rubbed against the cushions with pompoms on them. Or even during hide and seek, counting to ten against the wall and trying to press myself right up against it, an unknown force inviting my young hips to push even closer, even closer, even closer to the stippled surface. Once I was able to identify that heat, that attraction, I realised I could provoke it myself. Sometimes it was enough to be underneath the stream of water in the shower, or else to sit a certain way, my legs slightly open, on the desk chair at school. Any involuntary rubbing could turn into magic. And the more magic I felt, the more I wanted to systematise my movements to experience that pleasure more quickly, to control it better. I began training myself. I knew which soft toys were the best ones to rub myself against, but I still had no idea where exactly the tickling sensation came from.
There would be more tears along the way, I thought, there would be orgasms and laughter, I told myself, and in the end, there would be bright faces enjoying a well-deserved rest. Of that, I was sure.
I knew so little about my own body that I would wait until I needed to pee so that I could masturbate. I thought that if my belly was fuller and more bloated I’d feel more pleasure when I pressed against it. I’d drink two or three glasses of water before going to bed and then wait for my stomach to swell up and get hard so I could rub it against the pillow or the teddy bear’s snout. I almost wet myself all over him on several occasions. One day, though — I don’t remember how anymore — I came to understand that the sense of release I was feeling didn’t come from my guts, but rather from a narrower, wetter place I hardly dared explore. It was then that I touched myself, searching, without worrying about staining the purity of my little childlike hand. It was then that I understood the metaphor. If I wanted to feel that tickling sensation properly, if I longed to go that far, the next step was to reach down my hand, stretch out my finger, and start rooting around down there.
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I was only seven or eight, and when I saw myself in my bedroom mirror doing exactly what the boys at school had made fun of us for, I took my hand away, lowered my skirt, pulled up my animal-patterned knickers, knowing that what I wanted was bad. That it was humiliating. And yet the only thing I wanted was to do it again. And then again. And again, forever and ever.
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What is more humiliating: taking about pain, or talking about pleasure?
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I may as well describe the year Antonio broke my heart as the year when I expelled the largest quantity of fluids from my body. I had never cried so much. Nor had I ever masturbated so much, with such regularity, with so much calm, so much enjoyment. I expelled an excess of tears because thinking about plural love, parenting, or solitary pleasure sometimes leads us to imagine scenes we had never imagined for ourselves. Because thinking about your present wellbeing also means rethinking past humiliation — ‘your silence will not protect you’, wrote Audre Lorde, who understood a speech act not only as a shout in public but also a whisper in the ears of the right people. And because preparing the body for the greatest sentimental adventure of all — the one that involves loving yourself — also involves care, warmth, generosity, understanding, and transparency. It’s something that goes beyond anxiety. Beyond the nervous work of writing or confession.
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If we understand writing as flux, as flow, then that was also the year that saw my hands produce the most fluid — sometimes resembling tears, sometimes saliva, sometimes something clotted or curdled, but mostly resembling words: what flowed from my hands made me understand that I could only make good decisions by writing about my vulnerability. There would be more tears along the way, I thought, there would be orgasms and laughter, I told myself, and in the end, there would be bright faces enjoying a well-deserved rest. Of that, I was sure.
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So then, what is more humiliating: rest or effusiveness? A clear account or one that corrupts modesty? Is there a difference? And does the difference matter?
George Bataille: ‘Eros is, above all, the tragic god.’
[1] Translator’s note: quotations from Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring are from Caroline Rupprecht’s translation (Exact Change, 2008).
Caliente © 2021, Luna Miguel. Publishing license granted by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A.U.
✺ Published in “Issue 18: Sports” of The Dial
