"He went for his gun, but he didn’t get that far. She closed her eyes for a moment, listened for the music that came from his mind and body. The jangling, dissonant noise of alarm, the throbbing percussion of mortal fear, every part of his body shifting into fight or flight mode. The underlying notes spoke to his personality. His love of his family, his fear that he was about to leave them behind, anger towards her, a momentary anxiety that he was overreacting. She grasped this in the fraction of a second.
Reaching for that mortal fear, she wrenched it. When that wasn’t quite enough, she pulled at it and twisted it until everything else was squeezed into the far edges.
He screamed, throwing himself as far away from her as he could get, his weapon falling between the seats."
-Worm, Chapter 11.g
The most surreal element of I Spit on Your Grave was the manner in which Jennifer drew out each murder, preferring a sensual, sadistic approach even when she had her assailants at gunpoint. If she wanted to, Jennifer could have quickly taken each of the men out with her handgun. Instead, she takes the time to seduce and to manipulate each of them, seeming to relish in their fear and powerlessness before taking each of them out in a painful and graphic manner. One could argue that these men could have put up a fight if she confronted them directly, but her engagement with the Ex-marine shows that to be untrue. Rather, I think that the sensual of destruction of these men is more of a thematic choice, exploring why men fear the Castrating Woman so much. The answer resides in the intimacy that love and sex requires of a person, with such intimate acts demanding that a person open themself up to another in a rather extreme way. This act of opening and the fear that somebody might exploit it is what I believe the be the core of many sex-driven fears and is the reason why Jennifer was written as taking a gradual, erotic approach to her murders.
It's pretty much impossible to do anything sexual without breaking down some sort of barrier around the self. Engaging in penetration requires the removal of one's pants, after all, while no kiss or caress is even half as enjoyable when done through clothing. In order to get the most of a sexual experience or even a romantic one, you have to strip down, taking off the layers which insulate you from the outside world. This disrobing is mental as well as physical, as intercourse means understanding that your partner can experience your unprotected body and all of the vulnerability that comes with it. Even if the target of your sexuality is unwatching or unwilling (as was the case with Jennifer), the act of penetration inherently exposes the penetrator to their target. There are no boundaries between two people involved in a sexual act, no defenses against judgement or against revelation that one can keep up.
It is for this reason that the danger of women so often emerges in sensual acts, in the Vagina Dentata. Men are intensely afraid to let their vulnerabilities seep out into the world, oftentimes regulating their actions and thoughts so as never to appear weak or vulnerable. Only in sexual scenarios, where exposure is mandated, does a man strip everything off to reveal his brittle core. At that moment of pleasure or dominance, the naked man is at his most vulnerable, as he possesses none of the armaments or the defenses which typically insulate him from the world. Hence, intimacy is perhaps the most intensely dangerous atmosphere a man can envision. We've seen it countless times in history and folklore as powerful men were betrayed by their lovers, and the fear of sharing their fate lives on in the mind of most every man.
I Spit on Your Grave takes full advantage of this sense of vulnerability, creating a sensual mood with each of Jennifer's murders and delivering the killing/castrating blow in the moment of climax. Intimate, sexual scenes are transformed into moments of slaughter, seeming to validate the male audience's fear that vulnerability from a sexual encounter will be exploited. More than any fear about the mother or strange projection about the phallus, I feel that the nakedness of intimacy is the well from which the nightmares of castration are drawn. To be sexually intimate is immensely desirable, but to accomplish such a feat requires the sundering of every shell which one has built up to protect himself from the outside world.
I personally believe that this fear is more cultural in origin than biological, a product of how boys/men are raised rather than some inherent character of their psychology. So often, we are taught to hide our true selves from the world, to build up facades and disguises so that we never come off as weak to our fellows. As a result, we are educated to fear the very idea of intimacy and openness, leading to any mandate of revelation (such as in a sexual engagement) to be constructed as frightful. If we could allow men to express their feelings more freely, to end the overwhelming burdens of judgement and expectation which lead them to bottle up all emotions not tied to anger or conquest, then maybe the Vagina Dentata (and all of the fears and atrocities stemming from them) could be blunted.
