'Secretary'/Secretary
Mary Gaitskill’s short story on which the erotic film is based, is a startling, discomfiting read. But there’s an honesty to its exploration of the sometimes-ugly seeds of arousal.
Usually when I see a film before reading the book or story on which it’s based, the story is torched for me. I can’t get past an image in my head of the lead actors as the protagonists, and whatever slant the director has put on the themes will be hovering around my head like midges, stopping me from forming my own take. But in the case of ‘Secretary’/Secretary, where I saw the erotic film before reading the short story on which it’s based, the story is so different to the film - so shockingly different in some ways - that they can exist as completely different works in my mind.
As with The Butcher, you have to put your gender politics on ice for a second to experience reading the story ‘Secretary’ (I’ll refer to the story in quotes and the film in Italics) as anything approaching an erotic experience. But that is also what gives it an ugly but truthful potency, one which goes beyond the pleasing, soft BDSM romance of the film.
The story was written in the 1980s and originally published as part of Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior collection. Even taking into account very much pre-MeToo office etiquette, it is still a queasy read (and I think deliberately so) in its treatment of a girl’s office-based sexual awakening.
Debby, a young directionless woman who lives a among her brash chaotic family, is looking for a job after graduating secretarial college. She stumbles into a role as a secretary for an unnamed lawyer. He is not a pleasant man. When he first shakes Debby’s hand it is ‘with an indifferent, aggressive snatch.’ But there is something about him that begins to uncoil or reveal something within her: ‘I enjoyed feeling him impose his brainlessly confident sense of existence on me,’ she says. The seeds of domination and erotic subjugation are planted even before he lays a sexual finger on her. ‘On the one hand, this lawyer was just an asshole. On the other his comments were weirdly moving, and had the effect of making me feel horribly sensitive. No one had ever made such personal comments to me before.’
When he begins spanking her for making mistakes in his letters, she cries until her tears ‘blurred the ink’. But later she masturbates. In fact despite her ever-increasing horror at the growing dynamic between them, she masturbates more and more each time he belittles or punishes her. When he orders her to pull up her skirt so that he can masturbate onto her, she can barely get into the bathroom quick enough afterwards to masturbate herself. After she finally quits her job, she spends two weeks masturbating, ‘two, three, four times in a row, always thinking about the thing.’
That Debby quits her job on a fierce whim speaks to how unwelcome the relationship between them has become – she doesn’t want to be in his presence, or power anymore; she is repelled by him, or by what has happened. And yet, when she has the opportunity to ruin his career, she decisively declines. Is it passivity on her part? Apathy? She certainly harbours resentful feelings towards him (she feels an ‘uncomplicated disgust’ at the news he is running for mayor). But through their abusive relationship, Debby has learned something about herself, which is hers to keep even after she has left him far behind. He is irrelevant to her now. She doesn’t care what happens to him, and that is her power.
Like all the best short stories ‘Secretary’’s strength lies in its ambiguity, in its gaps that force you to probe your way in and muddy your fingers on its tangled morals. Debby’s transformation into seeing herself as a sexual being is shot with pain and shame. But she is also able to accept that her encounters with the lawyer give her sexual gratification on her own terms. Unlike the film, the story never allows the BDSM relationship between Debby and the lawyer to be acknowledged consensually, which makes it more discomfiting than the film to accept as a piece of erotica. On the other hand, perhaps this is the very thing that makes it a true piece of BDSM fiction.
These days when callouts for erotic fiction anthologies are listed they usually specify that all sex or sexual behaviour has to be consensual, otherwise a story won’t be accepted. BDSM stories in contemporary erotica tend to depict couples role-playing; they have to, to exist on a level that satisfies our ethical barometers. (Fuck knows what people would make of Georges Bataille if he were a debut author today). But if there can’t be a safe space in fiction to explore the complicated truth and feelings that drive a real BDSM dynamic, where can it be explored? The origins of that type of desire in an individual are usually triggered in the first instance outside an acknowledged sexual contract. People don’t just wander into BDSM; the pull comes from somewhere pre-sexual (or para-sexual) that has awakened the deep desire for domination or subordination.
So where, if not in erotic fiction, can we explore it? Porn? Porn depicts – it does not discuss. Fiction discusses. It roams. It provokes, it explores. Surely if we are to encounter portrayals of discomfiting dynamics for the first time it should be in the nuanced form of fiction, as opposed to the blunt instrument of porn. For you can be sure that the vaults of porn on the internet are full to the brim with depictions of unexplored, unanalysed power-abuses. Which is healthier to discover first?
The film, on the other hand, allows its leads to figure out what’s going on in their power dynamic and apply it consensually to their ongoing relationship. The characters are different: Gyllenhall plays Lee, while James Spader is Mr Gray (I know, I hadn’t noticed it either until I started writing this). We learn early on that Lee finds release and control in damaging her body by self-harming. Lee’s screaming need for control over her body is picked up on by Gray, who receives her subconscious signals and begins giving her fiercer and more meticulous instructions for every part of her life – from what she wears to how many peas she eats at dinner time. There is a surreal reckoning halfway through in which it is made clear that through this display of control Gray cares for Lee. The relationship is shown in the end to go deeper than sex and create a kind of unorthodox romance between the characters.
The film is easier to like, for sure. And easier to surrender to as a piece of erotic art. It is beautiful in a way the story isn’t (Maggie Gyllenhall cosplaying Good Little Secretary in pencil skirts and pussy bow blouses helps). But I don’t know if that makes it necessarily a better piece of erotic art than the story – just a different one. A tamer one (and there is nothing wrong with tame, just as there is nothing wrong with extreme, is there?)
And yet, I also don’t know why but I find the coercive dynamic in The Butcher much easier to swallow than the abusive one in ‘Secretary’. Maybe it is because Reyes gives her heroine more overt autonomy as to when to ignore and when to accept the butcher’s lascivious advances? I suspect however the truth is more personal than that – there are some works you surrender to completely, and others you don’t. Stories are like lovers that way.