When I Say Yes E-Book

Carolin Emcke

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 91

Beschreibung

How should we talk about desire, power and equality in the wake of the #Me Too debate? For Carolin Emcke, bestselling author and winner of the German Peace Prize, the debate demonstrates one thing above all: a conversation about abuse and sexuality has emerged that can no longer be stifled. Too many questions remain unanswered: which images and concepts shape our imaginings of desire and revulsion? How is violence exposed and obstructed? How do the norms and structures into which men, women and those in between must fit get constructed? What gets hushed up, and who remains powerless? How can the plurality of desire and sexuality be expressed, without sacrificing their intricacies? By interrogating her own experiences as well as social practices, music and literature, Emcke demonstrates the enduring complexity of the relationship between sexuality and truth.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Front Matter

When I Say Yes

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Begin Reading

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When I Say Yes

Carolin Emcke

Translated by Tony Crawford

polity

Originally published in German as Ja heißt ja und … © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2019

This English edition © Polity Press, 2020

Excerpt from: Enis Maci, Eiscafé Europa: Essays. Originally published in German© Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2018. Reproduced here with kind permission of Suhrkamp Verlag.

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4089-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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This text is based on a stage performance which premiered at the Schaubühne, Berlin, in December 2018.

You and I apart are easier to limit.– Kate Tempest, ‘Tunnel Vision’

Speaking about the nature of writing alwaysincludes speaking about the nature of speaking;it is a bridge to the second person, the third, the other.– Enis Maci, Eiscafé Europa

Acknowledgements

I thank everyone, acquaintances and strangers, who have attended my solo evening Ja heißt ja und … at the Schaubühne in Berlin.

To be able to experience in the theatre what it’s possible to set in motion by speaking about these issues, what is moving, what is disturbing, what is funny – has been both instructive and delightful.

I thank everyone who has told me afterwards, in letters or in conversation, about their own experiences: that has been a precious gift.

And it has changed my writing in this book.

I thank not least the whole team at the Schaubühne, whose generosity, loving attention to detail, and ginger tea have made it all possible.

When I Say Yes

In the beginning is doubt.Before every sentence, every word, there is this threshold: Is that right? How do you know it’s true? It is fair? Besides being true, is it also truthful?

And those are just the doubts about what I might say.

I write as if I were mumbling: softly, more to myself than aloud for others to hear. Thinking, rather, but with a keyboard. Writing makes thinking more precise. It’s intimate. Like whispering. Or like mumbling. Maybe that’s why I always write barefoot. As if, with my feet in shoes, I would only be able to think in conventions.

The moment I imagine an audience, everything dissolves, and immediately I am silenced. Objections step in front of my own ideas and upstage them. To say nothing of the antagonisms, the raging animosities. They scare me; they get under my skin, like poison; I can feel it spreading in my body, all over; feel it paralysing me – my voice, my will, my self.

In the beginning is always doubt.Sometimes I wish I could turn it off. But, if I did, the I of my writing would not be me. It is in writing that I find myself, invent myself.

In my childhood, when there was no way to avoid mentioning the supposedly unmentionable, it was hinted at by a word in dialect. Mitschnacker was a word in Plattdeutsch, the Low German of the flat, northern country, and even children who didn’t know any Plattdeutsch sensed the word’s sinister connotation. ‘Don’t let any mitschnacker get you’: that’s what they said to us on our way out into the world – to school or to the sports field. It indicated the danger, but indirectly. As if the dialect could cushion what it was we had to be warned about. We were not to talk to anyone who tried any mitschnacken – that is, who tried to talk to us and gain our trust. But what would happen if a stranger did talk us into going with them – that was left unspoken.

And we left it unquestioned; we don’t question it even today.

What can happen, what did happen, time and again, what happened to generations of girls and women before us, what still happens to girls and women – not only, but mostly – all over the world, on the way to school, on the way to fetch water, on the way to the pasture, on the way home – what they can do to us: that is not stated. Our mothers and grandmothers before us were informed the same way: without the information. No one told us we could be manipulated, lied to, picked up, picked on, attacked, abducted, in a car, in the bushes, in the woods, in a shack, in a basement; no one said we might be raped, choked, injured and killed. And most certainly no one ever said the danger lay not only outside, among strangers, but also, and most often, close at hand, in our own homes, in our own families.

‘Don’t let any mitschnacker get you.’

That’s a farce. It sounds funny. As if it were merely about someone who talks too much. But what it means is not the talking; it’s the danger of violence after the talking.

It’s these rhetorical disguises that facilitate what they claim to prevent. Incredible: supposedly they’re warning you about something, but what it might be, they don’t say. It’s not just rose-tinting, because that would mean denying there was anything you had to be warned about. It’s leaving unspoken what someone might do to you. As if it were indecent to talk about it – suppressing all mention of it instead of suppressing the act itself.

Thus there is a taboo, not against the criminal act, but against naming it. Right from the start. Thus the convention undermines not the person who perpetrates violence but the people who want to tell us about it. The suppression of speech shifts the onus of justification. It’s the person who wants to speak out about something unmentionable who feels wrong or dirty. That is where the complicity lies.

In order to criticize something, you have to be able, and willing, to imagine it. In order to imagine something, you have to be able to name it. If violence is kept abstract, if there are no concrete words for it or descriptions of it, that keeps it unimaginable, implausible, untouchable.

The bathrobe.I just can’t get over the bathrobe.Everywhere in the #MeToo stories, this bathrobe keeps turning up …Not at the beach on holiday. Not in the bedroom at home. But at a meeting in the office. At a meeting in a hotel. In what purports to be a professional context.

What is this obsession with the bathrobe?

I don’t get it. I really don’t understand it. I simply don’t understand the scene. What’s happening in it. What the point of it is. No one ever explains it. Not in the situation itself, and certainly not after the fact. You have to think it all through yourself. Young women, older women, co-workers, employees, hotel staff, interns; women these men have been working with for some time, or complete strangers; women who expect to see a man in a suit, in jeans, in whatever clothes, but in any case dressed – women are called in, and then:ta-daaaaah,the bathrobe scene.

I picture this in my mind’s eye all the time. The only bathrobes I can imagine are white terry cloth. I have no idea why. And yet guys like that probably wear silk … what do I know? I’ve been hearing these stories so long, it’s interfering with my relationship to my own bathrobe.

Answering the door in a bathrobe – what’s that about? Is it the prologue to an anticipated conquest? Is it an invitation to sex? Is it pride? Look what a fabulous dick I have? Do they honestly believe that? A woman goes to a meeting and, before she knows it, out of the blue, a dick walks up to her? That could be the opening of a joke. Like the psychiatrist jokes people used to tell: ‘So this patient comes in dragging a toothbrush on a string.’ Only this joke starts differently:

‘A dick walks into the office wearing a bathrobe …’Is that supposed to afford pleasure? And, if so, to whom? What kind of pleasure does it give the dick’s owner? Pleasure in humiliation? He’s not exhibiting his naked body, he’s parading his ability to control: his ability to suspend all propriety (in a work context), his ability to dominate, to humiliate, at a whim, whenever he feels like it. If it’s not appropriate to the situation, so much the better; if it goes against all convention, against what’s customary in a meeting, against what ordinarily makes up desire: mutual pleasure and tenderness, passion and devotion to another.

The bathrobe is always out of place.

So far, there is not one story in which the bathrobe turns up in a way that is harmless or appropriate or seductive. No story in which a couple want to throw something on after a night of passion, no