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her as an object of enjoyment. Teach her, as she is taught among us, to regard herself as such, and she will always remain an inferior being. ” 29
    Depravity, debauchery, dissoluteness , all connote this exploitation of women, who remain inferior because of it, for pleasure. 
    In telling his story, the killer/husband sets out the preconditions for the murder of his wife, the social and sexual experiences that primed him to kill her. He describes himself as typical of his class: landed, gentry, university educated. Before marriage, he lived ‘“like everybody else in our class’” 30 — meaning the men, the sex class within the social class (the women with whom he had sex were prostitutes and peasants). He had sex with women regularly, avoided making any commitments to any woman, and considered regular sex necessary to his physical health. This general pattern he characterizes as ‘“living dissolutely, ”’ “‘debauchery. ’” 31 At the time, he thought he was moral because “‘I was not a seducer, had no unnatural tastes, and did not make that the chief purpose of my life as many of my associates did... ”’ 32 The debauchery, the dissoluteness, was not physical, not conduct; instead, “‘real debauchery lies precisely in freeing oneself from moral relations with a woman with whom you have physical intimacy. ’” 33 He valued the absence of any moral dimension to sex as freedom. This absence especially signified the inferiority of the woman, because relations with a human on the same level as oneself always have a moral dimension (which does not mean that one is morally good, only that one is morally accountable). Once he worried obsessively because he had not been able to pay a woman with whom he had had sex. He was finally at peace when he found her and paid her. The money repudiated the possibility of any human sameness between him and her; and this put him at ease. It put her in her place as his inferior—the proper closure to sex. It is this superiority, this contemptuous but absolutely normal   and unremarkable arrogance, that he now sees as the essence of sexual depravity, and also as a first step toward killing his wife. Having actually killed, he sees the sex he took for granted as murderous in its diminution of human life—how it made women’s humanity invisible, meaningless; but the prerogatives of both sex and class made the exploitation as invisible as gravity, as certain.
    Long before he had touched a woman, this depravity, this exploitation, was rooted in his mind, a form of torment. He was tormented by “‘woman, not some particular woman but woman as something to be desired, woman, every woman, woman’s nudity... ”’ 34 This impersonal something was at the heart of his desire: objectlike, not human and individual; not someone in particular but a body, perhaps a symbol, a configuration of flesh; something to have. The first time he had sex was “‘something special and pathetic, ”’ “‘I felt sad, so sad that I wanted to cry. ’” 35 He describes the sex following that first experience as addiction, compares having sex with taking morphine or drinking; “‘To be a libertine is a physical condition like that of a morphinist, a drunkard, or a smoker, ”’ 36 he says, particularly locating libertinism in how a man looks at a woman, examines her—the behavior most clearly indicating the deep, internal process of objectification. Because the man is compulsive, because he objectifies, because he exploits and is therefore depraved, relations with women as human beings—what he characterizes as “‘brotherly relations with a woman’” 37 —are impossible. The loss of innocence—the loss of virginity for a man already socialized to exploit—is a real and irreversible corruption of his capacity to love a woman as a human being. When he marries, he is unable to know or to love the woman as an individual. The depravity of being a calloused exploiter is what he