Male Sexuality
The male sexuality is necrophiliac. It makes love to the dead, the static, the passive. The whole Parthenon of male affection is reduced to nothing but bodies, corpses, carcass.
Ed Gein was an honest male. Where other men objectified in the mind, he objectified materially. Women reduced to chairs, lamp shades and nipple belts. Woman is reduced to nothing more than furniture. But Woman has always been objectified, from birth until death, so what had changed in the eyes of Gein? For the male sexuality, woman had been furnished from one article into another, a material change. He does not view the woman differently whether alive or dead, because woman to him is an object of service, and rather than viewing them as sexual services, he instead preferred a sofa. The homicidal mind did not, in essence, view woman any differently than how the world had viewed her in the cities, streets, cafes and family homes of America. Woman had always been fashioned into an object and she has paid her life for the sins of others.
But the male sexuality, which is much more contingent on identity than orientation, is not limited in effect to women. Dahmer was another of those honest males, one who proved the contradictions of his male sexuality repeatedly. That he ate his victims can only tell us he was materially efficient if nothing else. The male sexuality demands, under all conditions, that the relations between identity and power, that is to say imbalance, must be upheld. A living lover cannot be subdued or controlled easily, it resists the enactment of power, of an external will, which is so necessary to the identity of the male. Before Dahmer developed the courage to manifest his love for corpses, his mind floated to the use of dolls, a cheap imitation. In his discovery of the doll Dahmer was able to dispense his affections like he had never been able to before, because the object of his affections could not refuse such love, and the inability to accept it was secondary. What the doll offered to Dahmer was a ‘tabula rasa’ of affection, but the doll could not satisfy the male sexuality completely, because having never been a ‘someone’, it could not be dominated, overcome.
Dennis Nilsen was perhaps never more of a romantic than when he laid in bed beside the corpses of his affection. He could not love the living men within his life, they were only bridges that lead to his dead passions. One can note that, in contrast with the way he lovingly embraces his corpses, he was rather cruel towards their living bodies, even going so far as to start fake house-fires to get them to turn their backs. What the corpse offers the male sexuality is the feeling of possession, of ownership. For a male as lonely as Nilsen, and many men are quite lonely, a benefit of the corpse is that it does not run away, it does not escape the boundaries of the male sexuality. When he would go about flushing each limb into his sewage system, he was content that all of his loves would be stored in a safe, static space, just below the foundations of the apartment complex. The male identity requires ownership, an exercise of power, and the sewage functions as merely a trophy room, one which he could not help visiting even during police investigation.
A man has not, could not, love anyone, for he can only love any body. We regard the men discussed above as deranged, deviant, when really they express materially a reality most men undertake in the mind. It is not uncommon to hear a man has killed his spouse, and for as long as the male identity is defined as a relation of power, it could not ever become uncommon. To love a man is to peer into an opaque window.