Timo Hännikäinen: Without – Essays

Excerpt from Without

by Timo Hännikäinen

Days of Hell

The psycho-physical effects of long periods of forced celibacy are rarely discussed in the literature. This is no doubt due to the painful and shameful nature of the subject. Ascetics, Roman Catholic priests, and other voluntary or professional celibates can always ennoble their suffering and ease their longing with the thought of what they are striving for. Those who are celibate against their wishes have nothing to give lustre to their fate. Worst of all, they don’t even dare to complain, because — particularly for men — not getting any provokes derision and contempt from people of both sexes.

A sexual drought that lasts for years can be manifest in an anxiety that gradually becomes a tortured feeling in the area of the chest and stomach. This can lead to tenseness in the whole body. The posture often sinks compulsively into a bent posture when walking.

Masturbation can take on a ritualistic quality. For years, I haven’ t been able to go to sleep at night or get up in the morning without jacking off first. Porno videos can become a large expense, because after a little while one tires of using one’s own distant sexual experiences as masturbation material and has need of an industry whose purpose is to continuously produce new fantasies, or rather to continuously equip old fantasies with new faces, bodies, and genitals.

At least as awful as the lack of sex is the lack of simple physical affection and intimacy. Like the sexual deprivation, it feels worst when going to bed or getting up in the morning. Those who live under this hardship are inordinately delighted by the touch of a member of the opposite sex. A while back I went to see my dentist — an attractive woman slightly over thirty. As she scraped the tartar from my teeth, her warm body pressed against my side whenever she bent over me. I’ve always hated having my teeth scraped and poked — I don’t know anyone who enjoys it – but I remember that visit to the dentist as a relaxing, almost euphoric experience.

On hearing of the torment of living in involuntary celibacy, those who have no understanding will say “For God’s sake, just get yourself a woman”. What they don’t realize is that celibacy feeds on itself – it is a vicious cycle. The longer a dry period lasts, the harder it gets to find a partner. A man living without sex is clenched and tense, both physically and psychologically – women can sense it a mile off – and a man in dire need of a woman doesn’t exactly turn them on. Then there’s the fact that he may be overcome by glum discouragement and be unable to even try to find companionship. If the period of celibacy is cut off, the tension can be discharged and the sense of defeat diminished, at which point the new feeling of relaxation can help in finding more copulation partners. But the cycle of deprivation is difficult to break as it continues to lengthen.

Those living in a cycle of deprivation are like people living under a supernatural curse, and many of them become superstitious during this time. I have noticed in myself a tendency to magical thinking during periods of celibacy. When I moved into my present apartment, I bought a new bed, because the old one exacerbated my back pain. When the package arrived from Ikea and I opened it, I noticed that there were two box springs, although I had only ordered one. The clerk had sold me two beds for the price of one. I could have sold one of the beds, but I decided to set it up as a double bed. Some part of my mind thought that owning a double bed would improve my chances of getting a woman guest for the night. I always put clean sheets on the other bed, and before I go out for the evening I usually clear away the books and papers lying on the bedspread. In some odd way I believe that this ritual will improve my luck with women.

When I go out to the pub, I always dither about whether or not to put some condoms in my coat pocket. On the one hand, having condoms with me might make me try too hard to pick someone up, when my chances are generally miserable. On the other hand, leaving them at home would be admitting defeat from the outset. Then again, it might help me to behave in a more relaxed manner if I left the contraceptives at home. Which would be more likely to attract a woman?

These are the typical ponderings of those living through this torment of uncertainty. They are the primitivism of an intelligent person, which can be distinguished from ordinary primitivism by the fact that those who practice it are always trying to provide a rational basis for their behavior. The are one furtive leap from the world of fantasy, where the little details of their decisions can change their whole situation.

One result of a long period of habitual celibacy is that every woman is perceived as a potential companion or sex partner. Even a complete stranger, if she talks to me in a friendly manner, can get me sizing up the possibilities for seduction. The thought of a natural exchange with a woman has gradually become impossible for me. I can only behave in a relaxed, unrestrained manner with women who don’t correspond to my own preferences, or my friends’ wives and girlfriends. With others I either try to make passes at them or treat them with sour indifference because I consider my chances non-existent from the outset. When I see a couple walking hand in hand or making sweet talk, I turn my gaze elsewhere, with just one thought: there’s another woman who didn’t fall in love with me.

Another result that is common but difficult to admit is a pure, raw hatred of women. Rare is the male author of the past few decades who has expressed hatred of women in his work, or analysed it. Finnish poet Pentti Holappa tried something like it in his novel Ystävän muotokuvassa (Portrait of a Friend). William S. Burroughs said in one of his last interviews that he pitied boy children because they would be raised by women and he wished there was some other method. But both of these writers are exceptions because of their homosexuality. Gays nowadays have an unofficial right to chauvinism and sexism by virtue of their official status as the oppressed, like women. The rules of political correctness are loosened in their case.

The longer one lives in forced celibacy, the more the censor of political correctness breaks down. In the end it begins to leak like a sieve, and day by day you notice yourself having ever more murderous thoughts toward the female sex. Every woman begins to seem small-minded, devious, and intellectually deficient.

For the greater part of my sexless student days I wondered why they allowed women in the university at all. How could a single one of those creatures understand anything about essential philosophy, history, theology, or natural science? Women’s only contribution to western thought has been “the woman question”, which has over the centuries become disgusting, an apparatus spinning its wheels that every empty-headed beauty who stumbles into academia starts confusedly fiddling with. Maybe it’s good, I thought, that they’ve established semi-scientific sewing circles like the Women Studies departments to keep the girls from getting underfoot among the serious researchers.

I know that I’ve reached the depths of the distress of celibacy when I start to purposely think up ways to annoy women, anger and offend them. Sometimes it’s surprisingly easy. By cultivating an indifference, a chilly cynicism, I’ve succeeded many times in giving the impression that I am a dreadful man. Alcohol and boredom have made me seek out ever more extreme methods.

I noticed that racism is such a strict taboo for many women that the mere rational appraisal of immigration will often cause them to end a conversation. So I started collecting a wide variety of racist jokes that I found on American neo-nazi websites. Other inflammatory subjects were also easy to find. On my more alcohol-fogged evenings I’ve happened to hint to newly-met, stand-offish women that I’m a rapist just released from prison, or a pedophile who regrets nothing.

All of this grotesque behavior springs from hopelessness, of course. It’s like a curse from the mouth of a dying man, an attack on a dream that I no longer believe I’ll ever achieve. But it’s well known that hopelessness is not the absence of hope but rather its last spasm. Women sometimes have a surprising, blessed way of answering a harsh, cynical provocation with gentle mercy. I don’t believe there are a lot of men who could do it – I know I couldn’t, anyway. But that’s what I secretly hope for from women. If a woman responds to my offensiveness with friendliness and tenderness, it’s as if the anger is immediately squeezed out of me, and I want nothing more than to cry on her shoulder.

But in the main I am treated with an understandable hostility, which can bring me a momentary satisfaction, or with indifference, which is worst of all. It may also be that I invite that very rejection: it indicates that my preconceived ideas about the impossibility of finding a companion are correct, and though the world doesn’t seem any less cruel, it does at least seem comprehensible and controllable. That’s how it goes – afterwards I always feel awful, and my self-hatred often prevents me from getting out of bed before seven in the evening. The loneliness seems more deadly than before when I know that I’m pushing myself deeper into it, driving people away with my grotesque antics.

The side effects I’m describing invariably deepen into a melancholy induced by lack of companionship, and can cause a breakout of depression, particularly if accompanied by heavy drinking. Those who have worked with the clinically depressed know that erotic loneliness and depression often go hand in hand.

My own periods of depression usually start at the end of summer and reach their peak in the autumn. They have recurred over so many years that nowadays I start to fear the coming of autumn as early as July. This is probably unique to the Nordic peoples. With the darkening and cooling of the evenings, the need for a woman becomes frantic, a torment, and the chances of satisfying it seem to grow ever more remote. The company of married or romantically involved friends is no consolation, it is simply a continual reminder of something that you yourself lack.

The worst episode to date occurred in autumn of 2007. It started with insomnia, which I at first attributed to the long periods of summer daylight. I’ve always slept well, more often too much than too little, and during the worst times of my life, sleep has functioned as the last place of refuge from the world. Suddenly this place of safety was lost. I fell asleep quickly when I went to bed, but I would wake up after at most four hours and be unable to fall asleep again as a continual rush of thoughts went through my head.

At the end of July, a gloom descended on me. I was spending a week alone in the countryside at Padasjoki, and as I looked at the dark green of the birch trees and maples and the view of the fields in the summer heat, I felt that the summer, like my life, would soon be past. My life would be ever more narrowly constricted, the desolation of my surroundings would become ever more absolute. There was no rational reason for this feeling: my finances were sound, I had a lively social life and important literary projects in the offing, my essay collection Taantumuksellinen uskontunnustus (Reactionary Credo) was appearing in a couple of months. My network, however, was slowly but inevitably shrinking. I did my translation work mechanically and without any pleasure. I was constantly tired, but I couldn’t get any sleep.

In the fall, I finally went to a doctor for my insomnia. I got a prescription for Zopinox, which improved my sleep to a certain extent. But I was also drinking hard, which disturbed my sleep rhythms so severely that the medication couldn’t bring it back into balance. My anxiety attacks worsened, on some nights almost constituting a panic, and I was afraid that I was losing my mind. There were moments when I felt a need to break my nose, break a finger or slice deeply into my own flesh so that the physical pain could free me from my unbearable psychological distress. I contented myself, however, by seeking temporary relief in alcohol. During the weekend of the Helsinki Book Fair I was drunk nearly every waking hour, sprawling on my bed for a few hours in the early morning in a half-asleep torpor.

That Saturday, when I met R, a colleague of mine from Turku, at a bar on Uudenmaankatu in Helsinki, he asked me straightforwardly, “Are you OK?” “There’s something wrong with my head,” I answered, and almost immediately started to cry. My weeping was accompanied by a violent trembling that I couldn’t control. R said that he had seen this happen before. He said to go to the doctor, that it wasn’t something to play around with. The crying attack cleared the beer and shots of vodka I’d drunk during the day out of my head, and I decided to take his advice. On Sunday morning, my brother drove me to the psychiatric department at Aurora hospital, where the doctor gave me an emergency sedative and a referral to the Itäkeskus psychiatric clinic.

The recovery happened quite quickly. Serotonin medication, weekly therapy discussions, and not drinking liquor lifted my mood to a bearable level within a couple of months. When the gift of sleep was finally returned to me, I started to feel healthy again. The positive-thinker Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote somewhere that if you’re able to sleep, you have no cause for complaint.

But sleep and the doctors couldn’t give me what I really needed: a good lay – long nights between the thighs of some attractive, tender woman. Nothing relieved the tautness of my nerves better than making love – after making love this temple of clay would feel lighter than it had in weeks. I completely understand Pentti Linkola’s demand that there should be a bordello in every health clinic. And since men in Finland are still required to give military or civilian service, why couldn’t all 18 to 30-year old women provide compulsory sexual services in pleasure houses maintained by the government?

But even that would hardly do me any good. I’ve paid for it twice in my life, and both times I’ve ended up finding that it didn’t suit me. I was very nervous both times, and couldn’t keep an erection long enough to get inside. I know that some men get off on the grim, impersonal quality of payed sex, but I’m not one of them. Knowing that it’s all pretend, and the concealed disgust that I feel behind it, bothers me. The most disagreeable thing about it, however, was the complete lack of warmth or tenderness. The whore didn’t even kiss me.

Some people have no use for western prostitution and instead place their hopes in the sex paradise of Thailand or the Caribbean, where they take a more natural attitude toward love for sale. I’ve heard that those living through the end days of communism in Cuba are running rampant with a kind of fin de siècle spirit that includes open sexuality. Supposedly, Cuban women are happy to make love to tourists for a small fee, or even for free. Maybe looking out at the sunset over the Caribbean Sea, sipping a mojito while a coffee-colored girl performs first-rate fellatio on you would be a kind of paradise regained for a Western man.

But I am quite feminine in my sexual habits. The thought of intercourse without any kind of attachment is disagreeable to me. I believe that most people feel this deep down, and that’s why the beautiful dream of sexual liberation remains just a dream. It really only exists in porno movies. Liberation will come only when we break free of love, attachment, dependence, the need for security and commitment. Maybe some parts of humanity, particularly some young people, have already broken free. I myself belong to the old world, and I know that I always will.

I was once in a relationship with a young “free-thinking” woman. For her, sex was a pastime, a form of amusement. She said she really liked sex, in the same tone that some people say they really like chocolate or dancing. She was interested in both men and women and she openly admitted that it made no difference to her who she made love with. She was an outstanding lover, active and experienced. She could be easily aroused by caressing her breasts, kissing her neck, or even just scratching her back, and she was dynamite when she took you in her mouth. She didn’t like to kiss – apparently it was too intimate.

She was not, however, cold or cynical – she often treated me with tenderness and understanding. It was the humane kind of warmth one gives to anyone, just as our lovemaking was lust without infatuation or commitment. Going out with her was nothing more than a friendship that happened to include sex. She didn’t let herself be stung by passion. She was free.

The erotic abundance I had with this woman foundered when I realized that I was falling for her. When she told me she wasn’t interested in me in any serious way, I was so depressed that for a long time I didn’t dare to even approach a woman.

I’ve been in the opposite situation as well. One summer I met a 19-year-old woman and we occasionally slept together or went to a movie. She never interested me in the sense of a courtship, but at the same time she had that childishness and vulgarity that makes all teenage girls so exciting. She wasn’t stingy with the sex, either, which is unusual in itself, and is a noble trait in a woman. I had recently experienced some painful disappointments in my attempts to build a serious, lasting relationship, and, as if by design, circumstances made it suddenly possible to have a purely erotic relationship with her, relaxing intercourse without any commitments. But the enjoyment was ruined when I started to fear that the girl was falling for me. I never found out if she was, but the thought bothered me so much that I stopped calling her, and felt relieved when she didn’t keep in touch, either, disappearing from my life without asking any annoying questions.

I would really like to be able to separate sex from emotion. If I could also conquer my fear of rejection, the gates of paradise would be open to me. I’d jump head first into a world of seduction and casual pleasure. I would gladly take back the demoralization of shyness and a youth consecrated to literature and get myself as many sex partners as I possibly could and reminisce about them later: the budding breasts of silk-skinned Lolitas, middle-aged earth mothers, statuesque Nubians and dark-eyed Asians, sweet blondes and warmly erotic brunettes, all ages, sizes, and breeds. But I’m stuck in the old idea that sex – even casual sex – is bound up with at least some level of emotional attachment.

Would extinguishing the sex drive solve the problem? It’s well-known that a man’s sex drive diminishes hopelessly slowly. Some chemical means for accelerating the diminishment have already been created. In Finland a method known in the United States has been suggested whereby hardened sex offenders – multiple rapists and child molesters – are recommended for chemical castration. A capsule similar to antabuse is placed in the fatty tissue under the skin containing medication that dampens aggressive sexual impulses. Men with prostate cancer are likewise treated with another type of anti-androgen medication.

Maybe the method could be adapted for so-called normal people, as well. An effective “brake” on sexual impulses could be developed and made readily available at the drug store without prescription. With it would come liberation from the torment, resentment, and forced sublimation, and I could voluntarily focus on eating and sleeping, on some simple task like stamp-collecting or catalogue design. I would gradually become lazy and relaxed, like a neutered tomcat. In my case, something like that might be closer to happiness.

Sexually successful men have the gift of youth until death in the form of Viagra, so it would be hardly asking too much to give those left behind the gift of inner peace. Since men like me who have been sexually displaced constitute a serious problem for the health of society, our social and health ministries, the cornerstone of a humanistic society, have good cause to at least investigate the matter.

Translated by Lola Rogers, through a translation grant from FILI: Finnish Literature Exchange.