Impressions on Iron Gates Chapter Seven

Two shock troopers, a woman, a baby

The seventh chapter of the book is a little puzzling. It is meant to continue the situation in which the field marshal left two shock troopers, a woman they were all harassing, and the baby that the field marshal killed with a bayonet and kicked dead to the floor after sampling some of the blood running from the huge gash.

Now, the woman has been further psychologically tortured by one of the shock troopers forcing her to watch while the other plays games with her baby’s cadaver. He squeezes and makes it spurt more blood. They insult her, they menace her. They want to play a game of terror.

We are told they lay bare her breasts and slap them. They molest her with her clothes still on. One of them walks away and selects a thin branch to be used as an instrument of punishment. Her ball gag I taken off and put back on.

The author goes back again and again to her mental anguish, to her image reflected in the goggles of the shock troopers. It is possible the author even wants to save her. But he knows that is not what happens typically when soldiers around the world, soldiers such as these, are in this situation. An emaciated woman of a downtrodden people will usually get the worse and most prolonged deaths.

Ask the Vietnamese at the hands of the Americans. Ask the Germans at the hands of the Soviets.  Ask the Chinese at the hands of the Japanese. And the reader can surely name many, many more.

And so, the chapter breaks off…

The decision to leave this chapter is telling. The books contain a lot of gore, and enough detail to tell you how much goes on. But the only explicit and extended scenes of torture and suffering are inflicted on MALE characters.

When it comes to the necessary female and infant suffering, necessary in that the story must tell of these truths for they reflect how our reality operates, and how widespread sexual trafficking and abuse networks truly are, and how they are most probably sanctioned and run by those in power, enough is detailed to show the depravity of those involved, but no more.

Often, too, the emphasis in such scenes depicted in Iron Gates that involve female suffering, especially when it comes to children, is entirely on their thought and emotional process. Also, and this should be the center of attention here, the story will ultimately detail how such abuse and early traumatic twists and turns the psychology of the subject into something conventionally considered inhuman. The danger exists consistently that this person becomes a creature of aggression and sadism.

Little by little the tyranny of the organization is revealed to be matriarch-run and to have an exclusively female paranormal development unit at its center. This has led certain speculators in the underground to guess that the writer behind Iron Gates is a leftist woman. At any rate it has been posited that Iron Gates is, at heart, an extremist feminist work desiring a cruel world ultimately ruled by women, in a fiction that shows men as complete animals.

So much is true about the work in question. There is not a single man with a conscience here. And the only characters in the book who have a mind of their own are the females. Whether they live or suffer their worst possible fate, it is the females who are shown to reflect, to feel, to stop, and to even change their fates.

The males, even when they are in power, like the field marshal or the lieutenant, even the commander, who sits as the supreme paranoid and psychopathic leader of the organization, are merely animals completely enslaved to their base instincts. We have also not yet unveiled the true topmost predator of the organization, who is revealed much later as explicitly superior and in control of the commander.