The Juliette Society(19)

Bad dog.

I look up at him and cry out, pathetically. And it just makes him more angry. My master hates my guts and I feel sad. I feel like I want to curl up and hide in a corner and chew on a nice, tasty bone.



Marcus is talking about the secrets we keep in dreams, about the secrets we keep that threaten to consume us.

I am on all fours on top of the desk with my head resting on my front paws and my ass stuck up in the air as high as it will go. Marcus has two fingers deep in my pussy and his thumb lodged in my asshole, like he’s standing on the highway trying to hitch a ride. I’m wagging my behind and whimpering with pleasure. And all is forgiven.

I am my master’s bitch.

Anna is late to class. Anna walks in and all the men stand to attention. Marcus stands to attention. And Anna is on her knees in front of him. She has her head buried in his crotch. She is sucking in the secret scent that was known only to me. She is lapping at the place where I once was. But I’m not jealous. I’m not worried that I’ve lost his affections to another. I’m happy to share my obsession. Happy to share my master with my best friend.



Marcus is talking about Séverine’s need to annihilate herself through sex. And I am my master’s slave. I will do anything he demands. I will submit to his desires and make them mine. I want to annihilate myself on his sex.

But my master has other ideas. He wants to save Anna for himself. He wants me for all the others.

Marcus is directing all the men in class to form a line. One by one. Two by two. Like the animals in the ark. He directs me to turn around, to face away from class, away from the men who wait in line, standing at attention. He tells me to face the board.

On the board, Marcus has written HEGEMONY.

He tells me to say it out aloud, over and over and over, until the word means nothing, until the word just is. As I do so, he instructs the men to take me. One by one. Two by two. And I’m happy to share myself for my master. If that’s what he wants.



Marcus is talking about the unknowable limits of female desire and I think I understand what he means.

I’m sitting in class and I don’t know who I am, what’s come over me or why.

I’m sitting in the front row, as always.

Dressed for Marcus, as always.

But everything else has changed.

I’ve changed.



Marcus is leaning against his desk talking about erotic hallucinations and the capacity of the human mind to process fervent emotional states into phantasmagoric experiences that feel completely and utterly real, indistinguishable from reality itself.

I’m convinced Marcus is talking about me.

He’s talking to me. And only to me.

How does he know?



Marcus is talking about how film can act as a direct portal to the subconscious. How art can stir our unconscious thoughts and desires, often in ways that seem as fantastic and unreal as art itself. How, in extreme cases, our reactions to art can stimulate physical symptoms. Like the way teenage girls used to lose control of their bowels in the presence of the Beatles. Or how in the thirties they used to say that at the end of a Valentino movie there wasn’t a dry seat left in the house.

He’s talking about Stendhal Syndrome, an actual documented phenomenon whereby people experience high anxiety, fainting and even mild psychosis in the presence of great works of art.

Stendhal Syndrome. Sounds like the kind of thing a chronic hypochondriac would come up with if they were to look up ‘art’ and ‘psychosis’. The way chronic hypochondriacs always look up their symptoms, intentionally fuzzy on the details, in the hope of diagnosing some atrocious, incurable malady – the worse it is, the better to calm their anxiety. Stendhal Syndrome almost sounds as bad as it gets.

And here was I thinking it was just the name of a movie. A horror movie by Dario Argento that I once saw and never forgot – The Stendhal Syndrome – about a young female cop, played by Dario’s daughter, Asia, who while investigating a series of brutal murders, chases her prey into an art gallery and is stopped dead in her tracks by the majesty of the works she finds herself confronted by. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Caravaggio’s Medusa; one work of divine beauty, another of sheer terror.

And she is transfixed. Her field of vision telescopes in, towards the painting, until she can see nothing else. Until she finds herself, not looking in from the outside, but inside the painting looking out.

Like Alice through the looking glass.

I wonder if this movie holds the key to what I’m experiencing. And I realize how silly that sounds, as if anyone looks for answers in a horror movie. Or any movie at all, if it comes to that. As if art is capable of doing anything except raising more questions.