The Slap’s undesirable desires

Here is a line from The Slap in which Harry (the sheepish husband above) is advised by his lawyer about the possible verdict on a charge against Harry for slapping a boy: ‘Worst-case scenario you get a slap on the wrist because the judge is some femo nazi or raving loony survivor type who sees abuse in everything’. This reference to ‘femo nazis’ is dropped in the TV series. Indeed, it makes an interesting study to examine what’s been cut for the TV version—for instance, any trace of gagging was removed from the above sex scene. Although ratings codes might block a visual portrayal of this, it’s still possible to convey the content; that it was edited out shows that an anxiety exists about the way sexuality is presented in the novel.

However, if one suspects something like violence is occurring in the above scene between Harry and Sandi is one a ‘femo nazi’ and/or loony survivor who sees abuse in everything? To see abuse everywhere is itself a type of violence because such misrecognition is a type of defacement, misreading is too. It’s possible we might misread The Slap if we take its sex scenes to be complicit with perpetuating a pervasively misanthropic and negative understanding of people’s sexuality. There’s a particular kind of misreading that sees abuse in everything, even when it’s not there, and it renders invisible any non-violent sexual agency.

The question is, who’s rendering a non-violent sexuality invisible, Tsiolkas in The Slap or the reader who sees abuse everywhere in it? The Slap might depict everyone to be compulsively drawn towards sexual violence or the loony reader (let’s say he’s me for the argument) might compulsively see all the sex in the novel to be violent, even when it’s not. Both positions in their absoluteness set themselves beyond the limits of non-violent sexuality and see the transgression of those limits everywhere. The loon who sees abuse in everything renders sexuality as always-already violent, while the last line of the above excerpt from The Slap, ‘My cock thanks you’, shows a man dismembering himself, breaking himself into two, the violent side and the caring side. Both dispositions fail to conceive of an alternative to violent sexuality.

The Slap resounds with the premise that ‘this [is] not a time of good men’. Harry, the husband in the above scene, had a father who beat Harry’s mother, but Harry does the same thing to Sandi. Rosie's dad gambled everything away and hangs himself, and Rosie’s husband, Gary, is always drinking beer, at times to oblivion, and ‘is one of those loud-mouthed insecure men who will forever be arguing with the world because the world refuses to lift him in its arms and wipe his arse for him’. Yet, once he thrilled Rosie with a conversation on ‘the challenge of evolutionary psychology on the dogmas of feminism’ and was frank about how he ‘had pimped a girlfriend’.

Now he terrifies her and she cowers in fear of being hit by him. He's not even toilet trained: ‘she found her husband passed out on the lounge-room floor. His stench made her retch; he had shat in his pants’. Connie's father gives his partner HIV and conceals it from his partner who later dies of an AIDS-related illness. He then feels he has failed others miserably and dies of an AIDS-related illness too. The teenager Ali talks like a porn movie, but demonstrates sensitivity and care for Connie, yet there is little narrative attention given to him. Manolis, Hector’s father, is strictly patriarchal and Hector, Aisha’s husband, ‘could not control his passion. His thrustings were almost violent and over time she had allowed herself to slip into fantasies of assault to accommodate his zeal [my emphasis]’.

So, given all this, does The Slap offer anything more than a symptomatic acting-out of sexual violence? If the answer is no, it may mean it mostly offers problematic and potentially dangerous images of women’s sexuality (because women are primarily presented to be paradoxically empowered and abjected through directing and consenting to the violence against themselves) and problematic and dangerous images of men’s sexuality (because men are presented to be confused, willing and directed participants in this empowerment/abjection dynamic). The unusual and striking thing about sexuality in The Slap is that almost every sexual experience involves this same dynamic—the exceptions are spare to non-existent. Such pervasiveness indicates a neurosis in the text about the way in which it is representing sexuality.

Although most sexual experiences in the novel border on violence, it’s ever anxious to show that it’s always consensual. Its formula is ‘violence isn’t violence when it’s consensual’. And this formula is repetitively used to show a gender dynamic and sexual acts that look very similar to those involved in most cases of real sexual violence in this country. The argument isn’t that anyone (real or fictional) should stop these practices if they are what they wish to do (although there’s a debate there) and it’s not about censoring these representations.

Rather, it’s about acknowledging that this novel and to a lesser degree the carefully-edited TV series obsessively repeat scenarios wherein women and men consent to violent sexual practices that are characteristic of a suspect gender order in which men physically and aggressively dominate women. It’s also about acknowledging that this is part of the real commercial draw of the novel. The slapping of the young boy appears like a sleight of hand that fast disappears to reveal a sustained attention on violent sexuality.

Of course The Slap isn’t real, it doesn’t mirror Australian reality. In so many ways it’s starkly unreal, especially in its selectivity in only showing violent sexuality between men and women and, of more concern, in its pervasive anxiety to displace and locate the responsibility for sexual violence from men to women. This is not representative of violence against women in this country, but then The Slap isn’t concerned with violence against women, but violence with and for women.

We can’t expect Australia’s eminent writers to present sanitised norms and constrain them to provide positive images, but this displacement of responsibility for sexual violence from men to women risks reinforcing a dangerous gender order. The pressing question is, why is there such a strong motivation to produce and consume this understanding of women’s and men’s sexuality in today’s Australian fiction? 

It might relate to a cynicism of disheartenment in a literary and television industry beleaguered by transnational competition. But the way forward is not to offer the public critically unaware representations of violence. Worse, to go further and profess you’re candidly examining the hidden sexual lives of Australian men and women just glosses prurience as social critique. The Slap presents a pseudo-transgressive sexuality that is fully codified by standard, problematic and boring pornographic scripts—see Cordelia Fine’s recent essay in The Monthly for more on this.

It’s common to hear that the source of these scripts is the unfiltered Internet, but they are present in unrefined form in some of the most successful early twenty-first-century Australian literary fiction—see also Tim Winton’s Breath. Irrespective of whether The Slap is a distorting mirror or a true mirror reflecting distorted faces, it is a critically unaware presentation of inviable and violent sexualities. If we wish to responsibly examine dangerous experiences such as sexual violence we must avoid using novels and TV shows as fetish objects through which to perform merely symptomatic responses to these experiences.