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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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The Slap
Maddie Norris
“I have written many versions of this essay that leave out the slap,” Elvia Wilk writes, “but without the slap there is no story.” Wilk’s essay “Ask Before You Bite” traces the history of live action roleplay (larping) and the ways it can reinforce, reconstitute, or obliterate power dynamics. Larping is “like improvisational theater without an audience.” People inhabit characters, and the game occurs in that experience. Wilk participates, semi-begrudgingly, in a vampire larp, where her character agrees to be slapped in exchange for information. Players negotiate the level of simulation/reality of actions (i.e. do I actually bite you to turn you into a vampire? Kiss you? High-five you?), and in this particular game, on this particular night, both Wilk and her character agree to be hit. At the top of a metal staircase, she kneels before a man, a stranger, her hands pressed together, as if in prayer. He raises his palm and strikes her. “At that moment,” she writes, “I grasped the revelatory potential of all this artifice and performative negotiation.”
The slap is where meaning is made, and yet Wilk not only writes versions of this essay without the slap, she publishes one, too. I’ve taught this piece (with slap) three times to undergraduates, and, unsurprisingly, each time, a significant portion of the discussion revolved around the slap. The moment occurs over halfway through the over-twenty-page essay. Why wait so long to reveal it? Why write versions without it? Why tell us she’s done so? My students asked. Or rather, students in two of my three classes asked. The first time I taught this essay all the students were women; we didn’t ask these questions because we knew the answers.
When I walk into a new classroom, I look around knowing that by the end of the semester, at least one of the women seated before me will have been raped. Sometimes they’ll tell me; sometimes they won’t. One in four women in college is sexually assaulted. I was one in four. For us, consent is not a hypothetical question; it’s a physical reality. But “Ask Before You Bite” is less concerned with what it means to say no and be heard and more interested in what it means to say yes and mean it. It’s easy to see a woman as a victim, harder to see her as human.
So why does Wilk wait to tell us? Why write versions without the slap? Why admit to doing so? Because to say what you want when that want involves violence is shameful. Margo Steines was the first friend I had who spoke about violent sex without embarrassment or bravado. She also happens to be a kick-ass writer. In “A Very Brutal Game,” she writes about the years she spent seeking men who would punch her in the face during sex. It started with an openhand slap: “There was a great crack of deafening blankness; there were stunned moments of temporary blindness and a shuffling stagger that gave way to buckled knees; there was a crumpled girl on a shitty fake Oriental rug with sweat everywhere and salted metal in the mouth and a flat, clean peace that was the best and quietest moment I’d ever experienced.”
In the slap, there’s revelation.
And isn’t that what the best essays do? Early on in my courses, students often reach towards a tidy ending, a bow, they call it, because they haven’t learned yet that a different coming together exists: a sharp point. The slap makes the theoretical collision of an essay material, which is to say, it hurts. “I wanted intensity,” Steines writes, “something fierce enough to puncture the suffocating cocoon of numbness I lived inside.”
Think of Barthes’s punctum, “the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces.” He’s talking about photos, but the punctum exists in writing too. It’s a small hole through which meaning pours. This puncture wound is personal; it pricks the façade and makes us feel. Before Wilk is slapped, the man who will hit her asks if he should take off his leather glove and rings. For me, this is the punctum, those small objects removed with care. I think of it when I come in from the cold and pull off my own leather gloves. The slap is pivotal, but without this quiet moment, to me, it isn’t poignant.
On the experience of being photographed, beheld, Barthes had this to say: “I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parentheses): I am truly becoming a specter.” Try being a woman. We’ve been commodified into objects, but we don’t inhabit those objects, our bodies. We’re all surface. When I was raped, I disassociated, watched it happen from the fan twirling slowly above. All container, nothing contained.
Pain, on the other hand, pins me to my body. Through the wound, in I leak. The body does indeed keep the score, but consider we might not always be losing. Wilk quotes Bessel van der Kolk who says that “achieving any sort of deep intimacy—a close embrace, sleeping with a mate, and sex—requires allowing oneself to experience immobilization without fear.” I don’t think it’s the absence of fear but the absence of harm that’s necessary. Steines’s partner, a martial artist, says “If we’re in a fight, I don’t really want to hurt you…We’ve just decided to play a very brutal game.” To puncture is to let meaning in. It might be painful, but that doesn’t mean it’s harmful.
The last time I had sex, I told him to be rougher. “Tell me if it’s too much,” he said. Soft light buzzed through the closed blinds. Downstairs, his cat meowed. In Jensen McRae’s song “Dead Girl Walking,” she sings, “Hey, will you hit me where it hurts? I won’t feel anything otherwise.” I kissed him and hoped for some kind of rapture.
The word sublime comes from the Latin sublimis, sub meaning up to, limes meaning boundary or perhaps limens meaning threshold. The sublime happens at the edges of our understanding, our control. When asked why she sought out violence in bed, Steines writes, “The real, confounding truth is that I do not have an answer, only observations: in my body, violence has always brought a quickening of the pulse, a fresh tautness to the abdominal muscles, a soft ringing in the ears, the cresting rise in the chest of manic euphoria.” As a writer, I’m drawn to the thing that’s hard to look at, the thing that’s impossible to say. The truth, the sublime, is ineffable. The best essays explode the slap, pause it, slow it down, zoom in, zoom out. The best essays ask what is going on here? Why? They don’t take away the sting but revel in it. “The question is unanswerable,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “which is not to say futile.”
Can there be gentleness in violence? We are deeply vulnerable in another’s hands, always. This intimacy is not just physical; it’s being seen in our wants and needs, a fragile body that in the split second after being hit cannot hide. At the start of each semester, I give my students a prompt from Natalie Goldberg: “Many have had great suffering, most of us, probably. Can you also notice the great tenderness at its edge?” There’s no masking pain. It’s a deeply human experience, and how embarrassing, to choose to be vulnerable. How terribly, terribly human.
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Maddie Norris, author of The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays (UGA Press), earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and, before that, was the Thomas Wolfe Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her essays have won the Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Ninth Letter and been named Notable in Best American Essays 2020 and 2022. Her work can be found in Guernica, Fourth Genre, and Territory, among others. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Davidson College.
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