Babette’s being dishonest here. I mean, would you pass up the opportunity to get it on with the prettiest thing on the block?
She’s just as much in it as they are — she’s just the only one willing to admit she — ahem — fucked up. She wants everybody else to accompany her in her misery, that’s all. It’s no fun being the only one dragged to the altar to confess, even by one’s own heart. It would be a lot easier to take if we can get other people to go up and throw themselves down, too. And if they won’t come on their own, she can shame them, or at least demonstrate her moral superiority in the face of their blindness or callousness.
Some gay readers were pissed off by Babette’s turn-around, seeing her as the traditional “whore with the heart of gold.” I didn’t get it at the time, but I think I’ve figured it out.
She’s the whore with space panties. She’s the high-steppingest horse in the stable, and she’s pissed off that her trotting style has been despised, if not rejected. The only way she can deal with it is to see it as her own conscious abuse of a client, rather than his being angry about being made to have sex with her as a woman or as a person he wouldn’t have touched on his own. It’s a fine line — but that’s why I called my publishing company A Fine Line Press. It can all get very gray. And shabby.
Madame always remembers what the point of the exercise is. She can add a nice chunk of change to the accounts. Nobody’s been killed; business as usual.
When I first read this story, I didn’t think that Pfirsich was doing anything against his will. It made me think that his homosexuality was at least partly political, a rebellion against German militarism and the culture in which he was raised. His anger at the end is about being played and set up, with an audience to boot, not that he was in any way raped by a dreaded tongue-licking that overcame his will power.
Would he have been angry with anyone if the gang had not shown up outside the door, if he hadnt been forced to realise in a humiliating way that he had been played?
Joe, he was drugged. We do all kinds of stupid things when we’re drugged. And he was raised by a nice middle-class family, who shrugged over the “experiments” of his brother Karl; “Well, Karl’s like that.”
Well, what is he supposed to do? When they’re all right there messing with him? He can’t go off and mourn over his own dis-loyalty. They give him a target. We take any way out we can. The only person he could have targeted would have been himself. The gang kind of asked for it.
We Americans have a peculiar anachronistic idea of the “German military culture” or how it related to the rise of Nazism. WWII really was the last of the big colonial wars — but the only people that remained to be conquered and used as slaves were white. We’re not supposed to do that to white people. ;P