Trans­la­ting Clas­si­cal Per­sian Poetry: Farid al-Din Attar’s “Ilahi-Nama”

December 28th, 2009 § 1

One of eight major works that can reliably be asc­ri­bed to Attar, Ilahi-Nama (Book of God or, some­ti­mes, Divine Book) has, accor­ding to Encyc­lo­pe­dia Ira­nica, been trans­la­ted once into English, by John A. Boyle in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani in 1961. Four of Attar’s eight works—Ilahi-Nama is part of this sub­set — are mys­ti­cal narra­ti­ves, each one dea­ling with a dif­fe­rent aspect of Sufi thought and expe­rience. Ilahi-Nama’s sub­ject is zuhd, or asce­ti­cism, which Sufis unders­tand to mean a dis­ci­pli­ned stance of detach­ment and indif­fe­rence towards one’s desi­res so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the inte­rior world of human emo­tion dif­fe­ren­tia­tes Ilahi-Nama from the other of Attar’s poems with which it is often com­pa­red, Man­teq al-tayr (Con­fe­rence of the Birds), his best known work in English. The two poems are simi­lar in form (they are each frame sto­ries) and mes­sage (the key to enligh­ten­ment exists within each human being, not in the exter­nal world), but the fra­ming narra­tive of Man­teq al-tayr, an alle­gory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essen­tially a cri­ti­que of people’s need to find a mas­ter who will lead them on the path to true unders­tan­ding. Ilahi-Nama, on the other hand, is about lear­ning to mas­ter oneself.

The fra­ming narra­tive of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daugh­ter of the king of the peris (fae­ries); the second wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desi­res Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the sec­rets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son covets the ring Solo­mon used to con­trol demons; and the sixth son wants to mas­ter alchemy. As each son gives his ans­wer, the father tells sto­ries to illus­trate, first, how sha­llow and mate­ria­lis­tic the son is for wan­ting what he wants and, second, how the son should unders­tand his desire so he can use it on the path to enligh­ten­ment. None of the sons, howe­ver, accept their father’s les­sons at face value, arguing that he has misun­ders­tood their desi­res and that the les­sons he wants them to learn, the­re­fore, are mis­gui­ded. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Mar­juma,” for exam­ple — about a beau­ti­ful and righ­teous woman who, after her hus­band lea­ves on pil­gri­mage to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so over­come with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at nothing to have her — the son accu­ses his father of wan­ting to eli­mi­nate sex. “God for­bid[!]” the father replies, explai­ning that “The Tale of Mar­juma” illus­tra­tes how sex, pro­perly com­prehen­ded and ente­red into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achie­ves apotheo­sis,
sex gives birth to a love without limits;
and when this love is pushed by pas­sion to the edge
of its strength, spi­ri­tual love emer­ges; and when
spi­ri­tual love can grow no further, your soul
will vanish into the Beloved’s end­less­ness. (My translation)

Given that the sur­face of the narra­tive in “The Tale of Mar­juma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depra­ved and debauched men get their comeup­pance than one about the spi­ri­tual nature of sexua­lity, the son’s mis­rea­ding of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a rea­ding, howe­ver, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to pos­sess the woman give in to their desi­res without a strug­gle. They are, in other words, neither evil nor merely sla­ves to their desi­res; they are human and fla­wed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and willing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has punished them with a paraly­sis from which — in an irony that is at the core of the story’s mea­ning — they can be hea­led only by con­fes­sing to the woman everything they did to her. » Read the rest of this entry «

Richard Jef­frey New­man on The Power of Poetry

November 8th, 2009 § 0

This past Satur­day, my collea­gue and friend Mar­cia McNair inter­vie­wed me about my book of poems, The Silence Of Men, on her Blog­Talk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.

Mar­cia is a per­cep­tive rea­der and won­der­ful inter­vie­wer and her ques­tions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favo­rite part of the con­ver­sa­tion was about the poem called “Wor­king The Dot­ted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girl­friend and I had sex, and she was a vir­gin. What I liked best about Marcia’s rea­ding of this piece was her noti­cing my mother’s pre­sence in the poem and how that star­ted me tal­king about something I often encoun­ter but have never given much serious thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncom­for­ta­ble with their mother’s sexua­lity, and I don’t unders­tand it. Or, to be more accu­rate, while I unders­tand inte­llec­tually, I don’t get it emo­tio­nally. As well, they often it pro­foundly dis­tur­bing that I am not made uncom­for­ta­ble not just by the idea of my mother as a sexual being, but by the fact that, when I was gro­wing up, I knew – that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she cer­tainly did not rub it in my face either) – that she had sexual rela­tionships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occa­sio­nally go to bars, or dan­cing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick someone up her­self, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it see­med to me per­fectly natu­ral. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other sin­gle 30-year-old women did when they socia­li­zed? My mother has been a sin­gle woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expec­ted her not to have one or to keep it hid­den from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was gro­wing up, and it never see­med strange to me or wrong or awk­ward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was having sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awk­ward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is something I want to write about, something I had never really thought to write about until Mar­cia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Wor­king The Dot­ted Line

I don’t remem­ber what vaca­tion
I was home for, or how Beth
mana­ged to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apart­ment to our­sel­ves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s han­ging crys­tals
scat­te­ring the after­noon sun­light
in small rain­bows that shim­mied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretching
ner­vous along the length
of the daybed’s mat­tress,
and my fin­gers tra­cing
the rid­ges of her ribs
as she tug­ged at my erec­tion.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first con­dom,
and I’d for­got­ten to read the direc­tions,
so I stood there gro­wing soft,
squin­ting at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I nee­ded to learn
was on the inside.
I rip­ped the card­board open
and sat rea­ding on the bed’s edge,
thum­bing the foil-packed
lubri­ca­ted circle,
trying to visua­lize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dot­ted line,
our pro­tec­tion, like a gold­fish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slip­ped from my grasp
and lan­ded under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I pic­ked it up,
it was cove­red with the dust
and small par­tic­les of dirt
that settle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was knee­ling hard
bet­ween Beth’s open legs.
She rai­sed her­self on her elbows,
smi­ling that the second skin
we nee­ded to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the ins­truc­tions called
the reser­voir tip — I thought
of the dams hol­ding water back
in the moun­tains near where she lived
and what would hap­pen if they broke—
her smile disap­pea­red
and bunching the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lif­ted
her butt onto the pillow
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and clim­bed up onto her,
trying with one hand
to be gra­ce­ful and accu­rate
and with the other
to balance over her
without falling.
At her first gri­mace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clam­ped shut and then
sta­ring wide, her voice
a whis­per through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I ente­red her again, trying
from the tight­ness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out any­way,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nosing down­ward
towards her navel,
and I pla­ced my palms
against her cheeks,
I can­not hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve cho­sen you!

And since I wan­ted so much to be her choice,
I kis­sed her eye­lids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hollow of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giving way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
hol­ding her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a sin­gle motion I breathed through
like I was lif­ting heavy boxes.
She screa­med into the muscle
just above my collar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said nothing after­wards.
We didn’t cuddle
or smile at each other as we dres­sed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My word­less­ness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wan­ted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.

Thin­king About Con­doms for the First Time in a Long Time — 2

November 1st, 2009 § 0

Where I lived in the early 1970s, sixth grade was when boys got to see the movie – or maybe it was a narra­ted film strip with line dra­wings – about erec­tions, noc­tur­nal emis­sions, mens­trual periods and such (girls got to see it in fifth grade).1 Seventh grade, if I remem­ber correctly, was when they star­ted teaching about sex itself, which I assume would have inc­lu­ded a dis­cus­sion of birth con­trol, though I am not sure, since a paper­work mix-up pla­ced me in the health class that did not inc­lude sex edu­ca­tion. So I know I did not learn about birth con­trol there; nor, I am equally sure, did I learn about it in the yeshiva I star­ted atten­ding when I was in eighth grade, where the only classroom-based “sex edu­ca­tion” I remem­ber recei­ving was in Rabbi W’s all-boy gemara class. He would preach at us week after week about the evils of co-ed dan­cing – it was the sea­son of sweet 16 par­ties for the girls – and explain how it ine­vi­tably lead to unwan­ted tee­nage preg­nancy. (The boys and girls watch each other dan­cing, you see, and then they want to slow dance, and so they are touching each other, and then one thing leads to another and, soo­ner or later they find some­place dark, and before you know it, her belly is big and both their lives are rui­ned.) My class­ma­tes and I tal­ked about sex, of course, but since none of us were even thin­king about actually having it, what we tal­ked about ten­ded to be theo­re­ti­cal and had little do with prac­ti­ca­li­ties like pre­ven­ting an unwan­ted preg­nancy. Three inci­dents of such tal­king stand out in my memory, from 8th, 9th and 10th gra­des respectively.

I first lear­ned about the baseball-diamond-as-metaphor-for-sex in 8th grade, because the big ques­tion was whether or not, at someone’s bar mitz­vah to which I had not been invi­ted, Robert “got to second” with Sha­ron over or under the shirt. “Over or under,” of course, was a huge ques­tion, one that my class­ma­tes pon­de­red at great length, won­de­ring why she would let him get that far, how cool it was that he could get her to let him get that far; or maybe he didn’t have to do all that much per­sua­ding, maybe under­neath the “good girl” image that Sha­ron so care­fully cul­ti­va­ted was a whole other per­son that those of us who knew her only in school had never met; and did this make her a “slut,” and how, pre­ci­sely, did get­ting that far, did her let­ting him get that far, obli­gate him to her in terms of com­mit­ment; and what the hell – some peo­ple were smart enough to ask – did com­mit­ment mean in ninth grade anyway?

I could not ima­gine why what Robert and Sha­ron did or did not do with each other was anyone else’s busi­ness, nor did I think that the ques­tion of when a girl step­ped over the line and became a “slut” was anything other than stu­pid, but I was new to the school, though, which meant no one thought my opi­nion mat­te­red very much, and so I was almost never inc­lu­ded in these con­ver­sa­tions. Still, I do remem­ber one time that I spoke up, asking – in res­ponse to I don’t remem­ber what – some far-less-articulate ver­sion of the follo­wing ques­tions: The whole point of touching a girl’s breasts is to bring her plea­sure, right? What is wrong with Sha­ron wan­ting that plea­sure or with Robert wan­ting to give it to her? And why are we tal­king about it like Robert was run­ning bases and Sha­ron was pla­ying (inef­fec­tive) defense? You make it sound like sex is a com­pe­ti­tion that the girl has to pre­tend to lose, just a little bit at a time, in order for both peo­ple to get what they want.

I was not naïve. I knew that boys did in fact put “notches on their bed­posts” depen­ding on how far they got with any par­ti­cu­lar girl, and I unders­tood that girls who went too far put that hard-to-pin-down thing called their repu­ta­tion at great risk. I knew these things, howe­ver, as facts, and while I accep­ted them as infor­ma­tion I nee­ded to know about how the world wor­ked, I did not really unders­tand them, and, more to the point, I did not like them. Any­way, no one said anything when I was finished tal­king. All I have is a pic­ture of my class­ma­tes’ faces tur­ned towards me in a momen­tary, non-comprehending stare, and then they tur­ned back towards each other and con­ti­nued tal­king in the terms that were rele­vant to them. » Read the rest of this entry «

  1. I have moved this post over from my other blog. (Click for Part One.) This way, when I finally get around to wri­ting Parts 3 and 4, they will all be in the same place. I see each post in this series as one sec­tion of a sin­gle piece of wri­ting, not as a disc­rete essay unto itself. As a result, while each sec­tion may con­tain its own argu­ment, it is not really pos­si­ble to know whether an issue that you feel is impor­tant will or will not be left out of the argu­ment made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. I cer­tainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an ino­cu­la­tion against cri­ti­que, but given the modu­lar nature of pos­ting to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find your­self won­de­ring, and com­men­ting on, why I have not addres­sed something you feel needs to be addres­sed. Thanks. Also, to pro­tect the pri­vacy of the indi­vi­duals invol­ved, some names have been chan­ged and some iden­tif­ying details have been fic­tio­na­li­zed.

Thin­king About Con­doms for the First Time in a Long Time — 1

October 27th, 2009 § 3

Recent events in my life1 have star­ted me thin­king deeply, for the first time in many years, about con­doms and what it means to use them. Not that I have fai­led to take con­doms seriously. I have worn them when I nee­ded to, refu­sed to have inter­course when they were not avai­la­ble, and I have a ten-year-old son who knows what con­doms are and why, all else being equal, ever­yone who has sex should use them. I am, though, also old enough to remem­ber (and boy does it feel strange to use that expres­sion) when safe sex was pretty much exc­lu­si­vely about birth con­trol. I might have lear­ned that using con­doms would help keep me from catching or trans­mit­ting gonorrhea or syphi­lis, the only two STDs I knew about at the time, but I’m not sure. Ins­tead, the focus in my sexual edu­ca­tion when I reached puberty was on the need for a young cou­ple plan­ning to have non-procreational sex to do everything they could to pre­vent the woman from beco­ming preg­nant, and that meant, for men, being willing to wear a con­dom unless the woman was on the pill, using a diaph­ragm or had an IUD.

It did not occur to me that there might be more to pre-AIDS male hete­ro­se­xual res­pon­si­bi­lity than simply kee­ping a barrier bet­ween my semen and the body of the woman in whom I would other­wise have left it until I was having sex regu­larly with a woman I thought I was falling in love with – we were each in our early 20s and using only con­doms – and I rea­li­zed I did not know what she would do, or even what she thought she would do, if she became preg­nant. Con­doms, after all, do fail. I was as cer­tain as I could be that I did not want to become a father, but I was also cer­tain that the ulti­mate choice of what to do if she did become preg­nant was hers. So, if a con­dom did fail, it sud­denly occu­rred to me, and she deci­ded not to have an abor­tion, I would be a father whether I wan­ted to or not. I knew I’d do my best to live up to the res­pon­si­bi­li­ties that fatherhood would bring with it, but I did not think my rela­tionship with that woman would sur­vive. Not only would I have resen­ted her for having made the deci­sion that made me a father, but I did not yet know if the love I was begin­ning to feel for her was, as they say, a love that would last, and having to be parents to a child – for­get whether or not we would have, or could have, got­ten married – was not the cir­cums­tance under which I wan­ted to find out.

I will not retell here the story of what hap­pe­ned when I tried to talk to my girl­friend about my con­cerns, except to say that I was com­ple­tely unpre­pa­red for her to tell me she had no idea what she would do if she got preg­nant. It wasn’t that I expec­ted her to know with 100% cer­tainty what action she would take, or that I was loo­king for some kind of con­trac­tual agree­ment that would insu­late me if she at first said she would have an abor­tion and then chan­ged her mind; nor was I thin­king that the only ans­wer accep­ta­ble to me was the one I hoped she would give, i.e., that she would have an abor­tion. What I wan­ted, first and fore­most, was that we should talk, openly and honestly, and then, once each of us knew where the other stood, we could make a deci­sion about what we should do in res­ponse. It had never ente­red my mind, though, that the per­son who would be preg­nant if preg­nancy hap­pe­ned would even think about star­ting to have sex without some sense of what she would do.

Given that my girl­friend had not thought about this, or at the very least was unwi­lling to tell me what she thought about this, I did not see how we could con­ti­nue having sex, or, to be more pre­cise, how I could con­ti­nue having sex, kno­wing first that our fuc­king put me at risk of beco­ming an unwi­lling father and, second, that if I did become an unwi­lling father, it would pro­bably mean the end of our rela­tionship. I’d been very happy with the sex we were having before we star­ted fuc­king; I assu­med my girl­friend felt the same way; and I saw nothing wrong with rolling things back to our pre-intercourse days until we were able to talk about this. I wan­ted to be with her, plain and sim­ple, and that desire far out­weighed for me the plea­su­res of put­ting my latex-covered penis in her vagina. So, more or less – at my insis­tence, not hers – we stop­ped fuc­king. » Read the rest of this entry «

  1. I have moved this post over from my other blog, and I will even­tually move Part 2 here as well. This way, when I finally get around to wri­ting Parts 3 and 4, they will all be in the same place. I see each post in this series as one sec­tion of a sin­gle piece of wri­ting, not as a disc­rete essay unto itself. As a result, while each sec­tion may con­tain its own argu­ment, it is not really pos­si­ble to know whether an issue that you feel is impor­tant will or will not be left out of the argu­ment made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. I cer­tainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an ino­cu­la­tion against cri­ti­que, but given the modu­lar nature of pos­ting to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find your­self won­de­ring, and com­men­ting on, why I have not addres­sed something you feel needs to be addres­sed. Thanks. Also, to pro­tect the pri­vacy of the indi­vi­duals invol­ved, some names have been chan­ged and some iden­tif­ying details have been fic­tio­na­li­zed.

Repost: A Per­so­nal Story About Rape

September 25th, 2009 § 2

I ori­gi­nally pos­ted this in res­ponse to a con­ver­sa­tion about rape that was hap­pe­ning over at Alas, A Blog about rape, spe­ci­fi­cally about why some women have a hard time recog­ni­zing rape as rape. Something about that con­ver­sa­tion – I don’t remem­ber what, and I don’t really feel the need to go back and read through the entire thread – made me think of the first time I had sex and how coming to terms with that expe­rience rai­sed for me some really inte­res­ting ques­tions that, while abso­lu­tely derai­ling in a thread about women and rape, were nonethe­less impor­tant to think about. This has been, con­sis­tently, the most popu­lar post on the older ver­sion of It’s All Con­nec­ted, and so I am repos­ting it, with some small edits, here.

I lost my vir­gi­nity when I was six­teen with the eighteen-year-old girl who lived on the first floor of the buil­ding next to my grandmother’s. As soon as our rela­tionship star­ted to become phy­si­cal — and this was my first sexual rela­tionship ever — I asked her if she was a vir­gin. She told me yes. I told her I was as well and that I wan­ted to stay that way. My posi­tion had nothing to do with morals. I knew myself, and I knew that I was not ready for the level of inti­macy or the risk of unwan­ted preg­nancy that inter­course repre­sen­ted. She told me that she felt the same way, and so our phy­si­cal rela­tionship con­sis­ted of all the things you can do without losing your vir­gi­nity. One time, howe­ver, as she was making love to me, she clim­bed on top of me, and by the time I unders­tood what was hap­pe­ning, I was inside her and both the power of the phy­si­cal sen­sa­tion, which was overwhel­ming, and my own con­fu­sion, which was overwhel­ming as well, made it impos­si­ble for me to find a place within myself from which to tell her to stop or to push her off me.

I did not like how empty I felt when we were finished, and I told her so. I had thought – assu­ming we’d deci­ded that we wan­ted to be each other’s first – that we would plan the loss of our vir­gi­ni­ties, and so I figu­red that the sex had hap­pe­ned because we’d each, sepa­ra­tely, got­ten carried away in the moment. I knew that nothing in the way I’d beha­ved would have sig­ni­fied to her anything other than my enthu­sias­tic par­ti­ci­pa­tion, so I was not trying to accuse her of anything. Still, I was disap­poin­ted that my first expe­rience of inter­course was one I had not wan­ted to take place. I told her this as well, assu­ming that since she too was a vir­gin, she would at least unders­tand how I felt, even if she did not feel quite the same way. What I wan­ted, in other words, was to talk about what had hap­pe­ned, to make sense of it in a way that would bridge the gap that, to me at least, had ope­ned bet­ween us. My friend, howe­ver, res­pon­ded in a way that shut that pos­si­bi­lity down pretty much com­ple­tely. If I hadn’t wan­ted to have sex, she told me, I should have told her to stop. Besi­des, who did I think I was kid­ding? I was no dif­fe­rent from any other guy. The only rea­son I’d said I didn’t want to have sex was that I was afraid I wouldn’t know how to do it right. » Read the rest of this entry «

Snappy Dance Theater’s Vagina (The Dance): This Is Really Beautiful

August 10th, 2009 § 0

Snappy Dance Thea­ter on You­Tube.

They have disa­bled embed­ding and so you need to click through to see the video.

Teaching And The Need To Speak Out About Sexual Abuse

April 18th, 2009 § 2

I was not plan­ning to start pos­ting again until I could begin in ear­nest the series I want to do on clas­si­cal Ira­nian lite­ra­ture – and inte­rrup­tion after inte­rrup­tion after inte­rrup­tion has kept me from get­ting to the point where I am ready to do that – but something hap­pe­ned this week rela­ting to a for­mer stu­dents of mine that I need to write about. It is actually quite urgent, pro­bably not to anyone who reads this blog, but cer­tainly to the woman whose mes­sage is at the root of this post, and it makes a point that can­not be made strongly or fre­quently enough: We, espe­cially but not only those of us who have sur­vi­ved sexual abuse of any kind and are strong enough to do so, need, need, need, need, need to speak up loudly and often about the rea­li­ties of that abuse and how it has sha­ped our lives (because, whether we rea­lize it or not, it sha­pes the lives even of those of us who have not been abu­sed, either because we know someone who has or because it sha­pes the cul­ture in which we live.) You may have seen this post in which I put up a You­Tube video of an inter­view I gave to Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val, an orga­ni­za­tion on whose advi­sory board I sit. In the inter­view, I talk about the rela­tionship bet­ween my expe­rience of child sexual abuse and the fact that I became a poet. The subs­tance of what I said there is not impor­tant here. What is impor­tant is that watching this video moved a for­mer stu­dent of mine to send me a mes­sage in which she told me – and the tone of the mes­sage sug­gests that I am the first per­son she has told – that she was sodo­mi­zed a cou­ple of years ago and had been trying to deal with it by pre­ten­ding it didn\‘t hap­pen. Even more impor­tantly, though, and more urgently, she said that she sus­pects her three-year-old daugh­ter is being sexually abu­sed at the girl\‘s father\‘s house and that she [my for­mer stu­dent] freaks out just thin­king about the pos­si­bi­lity. As I read the mes­sage, it soun­ded to me like she was saying this frea­king out keeps her from acting on what she intuits, which is scary, because even if it turns out she is wrong – and there was no indi­ca­tion in the mes­sage that she has any vin­dic­ti­ve­ness towards the girl\‘s father that would lead her to make a false accu­sa­tion (my point being that she might be wrong in good faith) – she needs to tell some­body, first to make sure that her daugh­ter is safe and, second, to alle­viate her own anxie­ties (and maybe unders­tand, if she is wrong, what trig­ge­red her unfoun­ded sus­pi­cions in the first place).

I res­pon­ded in all the pre­dic­ta­ble ways – than­king her for her trust, ack­now­le­ding the cou­rage it took for her to speak out, and encou­ra­ging her to get in touch with someone about her daughter\‘s sita­tion, though since I was run­ning out the door, I couldn\‘t take the time to look up cri­sis hot­li­nes or other phone num­bers – and I am hoping to hear back from her, but what her mes­sage made me think about was, as I said above, just how impor­tant it is for us as a society to talk openly about the rea­lity of sexual abuse. More, though, it made me think about how impor­tant it is to talk about that rea­lity not just in con­texts where sexual abuse is the topic – i.e., talk shows, con­fe­ren­ces, semi­nars, etc. that are set aside for the spe­ci­fic pur­pose of addres­sing sexual abuse – but also, simply, merely, in the con­texts of our daily lives, because abuse is always already part of our daily lives. Because you never know who is lis­te­ning and how impor­tant your words might be to them.

I am remem­be­ring as I write this something that I have writ­ten about before, that I was not even thin­king about when I star­ted, but that is worth tal­king about here: An inde­pen­dent study I did five or seven years ago with two women who told me they wan­ted spe­ci­fi­cally to work on per­so­nal essays that dealt with the sexual abuse they had expe­rien­ced when they were girls. They were both in a crea­tive non­fic­tion class I was teaching and one had writ­ten an essay about her abuse that, while obviously cathar­tic for her, wor­ked neither as a public docu­ment of per­so­nal tes­ti­mony nor as art, and it was art she was trying to create. The pro­blems in the essay were indi­ca­tive of the dif­fi­cul­ties abuse sur­vi­vors have spea­king out about their expe­rience. Under nor­mal class­room cir­cums­tan­ces, I handle this by direc­ting the stu­dent to some exam­ples of wri­ters who had dealt with simi­lar topics; I might have a kind of \“the­ra­peu­tic\” con­ver­sa­tion (and I put that word in quo­tes because I do not mean that I would try to do the­rapy) to explore whether or not the stu­dent was really willing and able to delve into the topic at the depth and level of com­ple­xity it requi­red. (I do, after all, have to assign a grade to the work my stu­dents hand me, and the last thing I would want is to give a low grade to an essay in which someone is strug­gling to come to terms with, or even just to name, the sexual abuse they\‘d sur­vi­ved because they were not yet able to write about the expe­rience at the college level.) If the ans­wer is no, then I offer the stu­dent the chance to write about something else; if the ans­wer is yes, then I try to get them to arti­cu­late some of the dif­fi­cul­ties they were having in wri­ting the paper as a means of tal­king about how to deal with them in wri­terly terms; and I always encou­rage such stu­dents, if they are not in the­rapy, to seek counseling.

The woman in my crea­tive non­fic­tion class, howe­ver, was not simply ful­fi­lling an assign­ment I had given. She wan­ted to be a wri­ter and she told me quite expli­citly that she saw me as a role model, and so I was faced with the deci­sion of whether to share with her my own expe­rience of trying to write crea­ti­vely, to make art, out of the fact that I had sur­vi­ved child sexual abuse. For rea­sons that are not so rele­vant here, I deci­ded to do so. Then, when a second woman in the class also began to write about her expe­rience of child sexual abuse, and she told me that she too wan­ted to be a wri­ter, and she was a dam­ned good wri­ter, when the first woman approached me about doing an inde­pen­dent study, I sug­ges­ted that the two of them might work together. The story of that inde­pen­dent study is really quite remar­ka­ble, but the part of it that is rele­vant here is this: At the end of the semes­ter, all inde­pen­dent study stu­dents at my college are requi­red to pre­sent their work at a collo­quium; if they don\‘t, they don\‘t get cre­dit. As the day of the collo­quium drew near, my stu­dents grew inc­rea­singly ner­vous, for all of the pre­dic­ta­ble rea­sons, but one that stood out was their con­cern that the faculty and admi­nis­tra­tors pre­sent would think the sub­ject of their work inap­pro­priate for an aca­de­mic con­text. So I told my stu­dents that I would intro­duce them by tal­king about my own expe­rience of abuse and how mea­ning­ful it had been to me to be for them the kind of mentor/role model that just was not avai­la­ble to me in the 1980s when I star­ted to talk about my own abuse. At that time, peo­ple were just star­ting to recog­nize the sexual abuse of girls. No one, as fas as I know, as tal­king in any subs­tan­tive way – or at least was being given a forum to talk in any subs­tan­tive way – about the fact that boys were being sexually abu­sed as well.

And that\‘s what I did: I intro­du­ced those two women by naming myself as a sur­vi­vor of sexual abuse and telling a little bit of my own story. It was a watershed moment in my life and in my career as a teacher. Not that I had any pro­blem tal­king about my abuse, but I had always kept that part of my life sepa­rate from my pro­fes­sio­nal life. It was \“per­so­nal,\” and so I had not really thought much about the degree to which it infor­med my prac­tice as a teacher and a wri­ter, my poli­ti­cal stan­ces in the world, etc. and so on. There is a great deal more to say about what it has meant to me to inte­grate these parts of myself, and I will, I hope write more about that. What I want to say here is simply that, if it were not for that inde­pen­dent study and the women who wor­ked with me that semes­ter, I would never have tal­ked in that inter­view about the rela­tionship bet­ween my abuse and my beco­ming a wri­ter as easily as I did, and I would never have had the chance to encou­rage my for­mer stu­dent to act on her fee­lings about her daughter\‘s situa­tion, and my encou­ra­ge­ment might turn out to be the thing that moves her to act, and we all know what kind of dif­fe­rence that could make in her daughter\‘s life (if she is being abu­sed), and in my for­mer student\‘s life as well.

In Iran, One Young Man’s Pro­test on Inter­na­tio­nal Women’s Day: Death to the Patriarchy

April 1st, 2009 § 2

On March 8th, which was Inter­na­tio­nal Women’s Day, the young man in the two pic­tu­res below could be seen wal­king through the streets of Teh­ran. His tee shirt reads – and excuse my perhaps awk­ward trans­li­te­ra­tion of the Per­sian–Marg bar Mard­sa­lari, which my wife trans­la­tes as “Death to Patriarchy.” That he is wea­ring a hajeb – or, in Per­sian, roo­sari – speaks for itself. As I unders­tand it, he was arres­ted almost imme­dia­tely after the pic­tu­res were taken. I have not been able to find out anything about what has hap­pe­ned to him s

Know Thine Enemy: Fetal Per­sonhood as Metapho­ri­cal Thin­king (Repost)

March 6th, 2009 § 2

Author\‘s Note: This post at Femi­niste – about the Catho­lic Church\‘s excom­mu­ni­ca­tion of the mother of a nine-year-old girl who became preg­nant with twins, appa­rently after having been raped by her step-father, and the doc­tors who per­for­med the abor­tion that ended the girl\‘s preg­nancy – has been roi­ling me since I read it. It did, though, put me in mind of a post of my own, \“Know Thine Enemy: Fetal Per­sonhood as Metapho­ri­cal Thin­king,\” that seems rele­vant to me in thin­king about the reli­gious (impli­cit and expli­cit) oppo­si­tion to lega­li­zed abor­tion. I want to say up front something that I also say very late in the post, i.e. that I am aware that there are pro­gres­sive Catho­lics wor­king very hard and with real inte­grity against the sexism and misogyny in the Church, and my pur­pose in this piece is not to trash Catho­lics or Catho­li­cism. Rather, I am trying to tease out one strand of thin­king that seems to me quite pre­sent in much anti-abortion thin­king and acti­vism, as it rela­tes to Chris­tia­nity. I pos­ted this ori­gi­nally in 2006 and so some of the legis­la­tive news that it refers to is dated. I have not edi­ted the piece much, howe­ver – except to correct a con­fu­sion in the ori­gi­nal bet­ween the imma­cu­late con­cep­tion and the vir­gin birth (and I hope I got it right this time) – because, while the intro­duc­tion is long, I think it is still impor­tant to work through before get­ting to my main argument.

I have wan­ted to write about this for a while, now, ever since I read through the thread called (Very) Basic Eco­no­mics and Abor­tion over at Alas. Since then, though, a num­ber of things have hap­pe­ned: the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case con­cer­ning so-called \“partial-birth abor­tions,\” South Dakota has pas­sed the most res­tric­tive law in the country against abor­tion, Utah has a pro­po­sed law that would eli­mi­nate incest excep­tions in its paren­tal noti­fi­ca­tion law, and I have been in another con­ver­sa­tion, What If Your Mother Was Pro-Choice, on Alas, the ini­tial post of which con­cer­ned a com­mon stra­tegy used by peo­ple who are anti-choice to try to silence those of us who are pro-choice: what would have hap­pe­ned if your mother had cho­sen to have an abor­tion ins­tead of giving birth to you?

At one point the thread became a con­ver­sa­tion about whether the imma­cu­late con­cep­tion was an ins­tance of divine rape or not (start rea­ding here). This was rele­vant because it went to the ques­tion of what it means for women to have real choice in terms of preg­nancy and child­birth — which also means in terms of when and whether and under what con­di­tions to have sex — and, though I don\‘t remem­ber that this point was brought out expli­citly, to the ques­tion of what we model our unders­tan­ding of women\‘s repro­duc­tive choice on. (I have ita­li­ci­zed this because it will become impor­tant later on, towards the end of what I want to say.) What I want to do here is to try to tie all these various things together under the title I have given this post because I think it goes to the heart of unders­tan­ding a rarely arti­cu­la­ted aspect of what is at stake in the anti-choice posi­tion, whether it is arti­cu­la­ted in expli­citly reli­gious terms or not, and because, under the gene­ral stra­tegy of \“know thine enemy,\” I think this is an impor­tant unders­tan­ding to reach. It\‘s going to take a while, and I\‘m going to have to make a num­ber of leaps, to get where I want to go in this, so I hope you will bear with me.

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Thin­king About Con­doms For The First Time In A Very Long Time — 2

March 6th, 2009 § 2

Where I lived in the early 1970s, sixth grade was when boys got to see the movie – or maybe it was a narra­ted film strip with line dra­wings – about erec­tions, noc­tur­nal emis­sions, mens­trual periods and such (girls got to see it in fifth grade). Seventh grade, if I remem­ber correctly, was when they star­ted teaching about sex itself, which I assume would have inc­lu­ded a dis­cus­sion of birth con­trol, though I am not sure, since a paper­work mix-up pla­ced me in the health class that did not inc­lude sex edu­ca­tion. So I know I did not learn about birth con­trol there; nor, I am equally sure, did I learn about it in the yeshiva I star­ted atten­ding when I was in eighth grade, where the only classroom-based “sex edu­ca­tion” I remem­ber recei­ving was in Rabbi W’s all-boy gemara class. He would preach at us week after week about the evils of co-ed dan­cing – it was the sea­son of sweet 16 par­ties for the girls – and explain how it ine­vi­tably lead to unwan­ted tee­nage preg­nancy. (The boys and girls watch each other dan­cing, you see, and then they want to slow dance, and so they are touching each other, and then one thing leads to another and, soo­ner or later they find some­place dark, and before you know it, her belly is big and both their lives are rui­ned.) My class­ma­tes and I tal­ked about sex, of course, but since none of us were even thin­king about actually having it, what we tal­ked about ten­ded to be theo­re­ti­cal and had little do with prac­ti­ca­li­ties like pre­ven­ting an unwan­ted preg­nancy. Three inci­dents of such tal­king stand out in my memory, from 8th, 9th and 10th gra­des respectively.

I first lear­ned about the baseball-diamond-as-metaphor-for-sex in 8th grade, because the big ques­tion was whether or not, at someone’s bar mitz­vah to which I had not been invi­ted, Robert “got to second” with Sha­ron over or under the shirt. “Over or under,” of course, was a huge ques­tion, one that my class­ma­tes pon­de­red at great length, won­de­ring why she would let him get that far, how cool it was that he could get her to let him get that far; or maybe he didn’t have to do all that much per­sua­ding, maybe under­neath the “good girl” image that Sha­ron so care­fully cul­ti­va­ted was a whole other per­son that those of us who knew her only in school had never met; and did this make her a “slut,” and how, pre­ci­sely, did get­ting that far, did her let­ting him get that far, obli­gate him to her in terms of com­mit­ment; and what the hell – some peo­ple were smart enough to ask – did com­mit­ment mean in ninth grade anyway?

I could not ima­gine why what Robert and Sha­ron did or did not do with each other was anyone else’s busi­ness, nor did I think that the ques­tion of when a girl step­ped over the line and became a “slut” was anything other than stu­pid, but I was new to the school, though, which meant no one thought my opi­nion mat­te­red very much, and so I was almost never inc­lu­ded in these con­ver­sa­tions. Still, I do remem­ber one time that I spoke up, asking – in res­ponse to I don’t remem­ber what – some far-less-articulate ver­sion of the follo­wing ques­tions: The whole point of touching a girl’s breasts is to bring her plea­sure, right? What is wrong with Sha­ron wan­ting that plea­sure or with Robert wan­ting to give it to her? And why are we tal­king about it like Robert was run­ning bases and Sha­ron was pla­ying (inef­fec­tive) defense? You make it sound like sex is a com­pe­ti­tion that the girl has to pre­tend to lose, just a little bit at a time, in order for both peo­ple to get what they want.

I was not naïve. I knew that boys did in fact put “notches on their bed­posts” depen­ding on how far they got with any par­ti­cu­lar girl, and I unders­tood that girls who went too far put that hard-to-pin-down thing called their repu­ta­tion at great risk. I knew these things, howe­ver, as facts, and while I accep­ted them as infor­ma­tion I nee­ded to know about how the world wor­ked, I did not really unders­tand them, and, more to the point, I did not like them. Any­way, no one said anything when I was finished tal­king. All I have is a pic­ture of my class­ma­tes’ faces tur­ned towards me in a momen­tary, non-comprehending stare, and then they tur­ned back towards each other and con­ti­nued tal­king in the terms that were rele­vant to them.

The second talking-about-sex moment that I remem­ber from yeshiva hap­pe­ned when I was in 9th. The boys in my class were sche­du­led to take a trip to the very famous Lake­wood Yeshiva in New Jer­sey. I don’t remem­ber why I didn’t go, but I was the only boy in my grade in school that day, and so, since our reli­gious clas­ses were all can­ce­led – it would not have occu­rred to the admi­nis­tra­tion to send me to class with the girls – I spent the mor­ning shoo­ting hoops in the gym. (The day was split: reli­gious clas­ses in the mor­ning, secu­lar clas­ses in the after­noon.) After lunch, the girls and I deci­ded we would cut clas­ses for the rest of the day. After all, how much teaching would go on with more than half the class mis­sing? So we went out to the back of the school, where one of the girls pulled out a copy of the Ann Lan­ders sex test that had recently been published in one of the local news­pa­pers. (What looks like the ver­sion of the test that the girls and I were tal­king about, can, if you’re willing to wade through some reli­gious self-righteousness, be found here.)

We cut our first period class, which might have been math, tal­king and laughing about what was, for most of us at the time, the enti­rely theo­re­ti­cal nature of the items on the test; and we were doing abso­lu­tely nothing that would have been con­si­de­red inap­pro­priate anywhere other than an ortho­dox yeshiva, where the sim­ple fact of our being alone together was cause for con­cern. Because of what could hap­pen – remem­ber Rabbi W’s worries over co-ed dan­cing – if we lost con­trol of our­sel­ves. Because of how, even though we were doing nothing but tal­king, it would look to an outsi­der that we are alone together in the first place. Then, just as second period English was about to begin, one of the girls who had gone inside to use the bath­room came run­ning out to tell us that the boys were had retur­ned. Appa­rently, they had stop­ped to get a bles­sing from Rabbi Moshe Feins­tein, one of the most impor­tant rab­bis of the 20th cen­tury. He gave them the bles­sing, they got back in their bus to go to Lake­wood, and the bus broke down, for­cing them to return to school. We ran into the buil­ding, rushed ups­tairs and, remar­kably, made it to second period English on time, though it was only a few minu­tes into Mrs. Lynch’s les­son before Rabbi S burst into the class­room, poin­ted one by one to each of the girls and said, “You! Out!”

When he did not point to me, I thought perhaps I had esca­ped detec­tion, but he came back a few minu­tes later, flung the door open with the same law-enforcement air about him, poin­ted to me and said, “You too!”

We were sus­pen­ded, the girls and I, not only for cut­ting class, and not only because the idea of one boy and twelve girls han­ging out alone in the back of the school was unseemly, but also, and to some admi­nis­tra­tors most impor­tantly, because we had been tal­king about sex. When we were told that, before we’d be allo­wed back into class, our parents would have to come in to speak per­so­nally with Rabbi S, who was only avai­la­ble in the after­noons, I had to ask if my mother, since she wor­ked, could come in the mor­ning to speak with Rabbi F, the dean of the school. You would have thought that spea­king to the Dean would be more serious than spea­king to the prin­ci­pal of secu­lar stu­dies, but when my mother came in, all Rabbi F said was, “Mrs. Lou­ras [her name from her second marriage], Richard is a real mensch, a won­der­ful boy. He made a terri­ble mis­take, but we’re sure he’ll never do it again.” That was it. He and my mother exchan­ged some plea­san­tries, told me to go back to my class, and wished her a good rest of the day. My mother, who couldn’t ima­gine why they were making such a big deal out of the whole situa­tion, collap­sed laughing against the wall just outside the school entrance. “Remind me,” she said, “Why were you sus­pen­ded again?” (To be fair, it’s not that my mother did not think I should be punished  for cut­ting class, but she could not ima­gine that I was being sus­pen­ded for a first offense or that the “real” pro­blem, as it had been explai­ned to her, was that I’d been alone with the girls and that we were tal­king about sex.)

I find it hard to believe that Rabbi F did not say more because he did not know why I had been sus­pen­ded; nor do I think he did not con­si­der my “offense” a very serious one. Most likely, he was just uncom­for­ta­ble tal­king about such things with a woman, espe­cially a woman like my mother, who in her jeans and one-button-too-many-undone but­ton down shirt, her long denim frock coat and her afro, did not at all fit the image of the nice, middle-class Jewish mother with whom he was used to dea­ling. He never said anything else about the inci­dent to me, either, but an inci­dent that sticks in my head as somehow con­nec­ted this epi­sode took place later that year. Rabbi F pulled me aside one day while my class was in the library and, spea­king very softly, indi­ca­ted with this chin a new girl in the class whose boy­friend ever­yone knew was not Jewish. (Indeed, it had been the boy­friend who encou­ra­ged her to go to yeshiva so she could learn about her heri­tage.) He said something about her being a very nice girl, and attrac­tive, and how it was a shame that she was dating a non-Jewish boy. Maybe – and I wish I could remem­ber the exact words he used, because I remem­ber thin­king even at the time how abso­lu­tely pre­cious his phra­sing was – I could get friendly with her, not too friendly, mind you, but friendly enough that she would see just how much Jewish boys had to offer her. I refu­sed, of course, and I think this may be the first time I am telling this story to anyone.

Years after I left the yeshiva, I found out that I had  had, among my class­ma­tes, a mostly unde­ser­ved repu­ta­tion for having a great deal more expe­rience with sex and drugs than I actually did. Partly this repu­ta­tion came from the fact that I did indeed know more about sex and drugs than my class­ma­tes, and peo­ple  just assu­med that if I knew about it, I must have done it. The truth is, though, that I just hap­pe­ned at the time to have a group of friends at home – the kind my class­ma­tes’ parents would pro­bably keep their kids away from – who spoke openly about the drugs they did and the sex they had. By the time I was in ele­venth grade, howe­ver, when the next con­ver­sa­tion about sex that I want to tell you about hap­pe­ned, this repu­ta­tion of mine was at least a little more deser­ved. I’d had sex for the first time and been foo­lish enough to tell one of my class­ma­tes, and I had come to school on the day that we took club pic­tu­res for our year­book with a clearly visi­ble hic­key on my neck. I don’t remem­ber, frankly, if I knew the hic­key was there when I got dres­sed, but I do remem­ber being a little emba­rras­sed when someone poin­ted out to me that I might have thought to wear a turtle neck shirt or asked my mother to cover it up with makeup. Any­way, in 11th grade a group of girls cor­ne­red me in the hall one day during lunch, or maybe it was recess, and asked, without irony, “Richard, what’s a cli­to­ris?” I knew the ans­wer, though I’d never seen a cli­to­ris at that point in anything but a pho­to­graph. (I’d had sex but had not actually loo­ked much at my girlfriend’s vagina.) Still, I didn’t like being put on the spot. So I told them to go look it up. They did, and for some rea­son I have never unders­tood felt it neces­sary the next day to report back to me what they’d lear­ned: “It’s what your hus­band chews on when you do sixty-nine.”

I remem­ber thin­king, “Chews on?”

I had no real expe­rience at that point in my life with giving oral sex, but I did know from my rea­ding, and I had done some very exten­sive and eclec­tic rea­ding, that her cli­to­ris was not something a woman was likely to want a sexual part­ner lite­rally to chew on. I don’t remem­ber if I said anything in res­ponse, or if they tried to push the con­ver­sa­tion further, though now that I am thin­king about it, there was one other moment of infor­mal sex edu­ca­tion that I recei­ved in the yeshiva. For about two weeks, in 8th grade, I “went out” with one of the girls in my class. Not that we did much actual “going” anywhere. We lived too far apart for that. Rather, “going out” was a sta­tus; we were a cou­ple; and when I told one of my friends at home that I had a girl­friend, his first ques­tion was, “Does she have big tits?”

In truth, I had no idea how big a girl’s breasts had to be to qua­lify as “big tits,” and I have no memory of whether this girl’s breasts were par­ti­cu­larly large or not; but I knew that I liked the way her body loo­ked – though I had only seen it clothed – and I knew that saying yes would score me points in the value sys­tem of the friend who asked, even though I did not quite unders­tand why the size of my girlfriend’s breasts mat­te­red so much to him (the same way I did not quite unders­tand the whole sys­tem of sex-as-baseball) but I wan­ted to score those points, and so I said yes, she did have “big tits.”

That night, when I was on the phone with my girl­friend, I told her what I had said. The anger with which she res­pon­ded shoc­ked me, and when I think back now to how naïve I was – it really never occu­rred to me that she would think I had done anything other than say something nice about her to one of my friends – I cringe. She broke up with me a week later, saying that she’d only said yes when I asked her out so as not to hurt my feelings.

///

I am trying to remem­ber what else I knew and did not know about sex at that time in my life. I think I knew what con­doms were, and birth con­trol pills, but I truly do not know when, or how, or by whom that know­ledge was given to me; and I know I did not learn about diaph­ragms or IUDs at least until I was in college. Not that the eclec­tic rea­ding I men­tio­ned above was inten­ded to edu­cate me about such things or that I really unders­tood the need for that kind of sex edu­ca­tion in the first place. Most of what I read came from my mother’s collec­tion of lite­rary por­no­graphy (lots of Vic­to­rian ero­tica, the Mar­quis de Sade, the pur­por­ted diary of one of Cathe­rine the Great’s maids), where little if any con­cern was given to whether or not the female cha­rac­ters got preg­nant; and, if they did, the preg­nancy was so clearly part of the por­no­graphy that the ques­tion of how one might have pre­ven­ted in never even ente­red into the picture. 

The sexual “rea­ding” that I really valued, howe­ver, were hard­core maga­zi­nes like Puri­tan and Prude. The pic­tu­res in Penthouse, Play­boy, Oui and other maga­zi­nes that focu­sed pretty much exc­lu­si­vely on the bodies of women quite frankly bored me. I wan­ted to see men and women actually put­ting ton­gues and fin­gers and peni­ses and wha­te­ver else they chose to use in and on each other. More spe­ci­fi­cally, I wan­ted to unders­tand in detail both what the men in those pic­tu­res did with their erec­tions when they had sex with women and what the women did when they had sex with men. It would be years before I unders­tood how pro­foundly limi­ted, and limi­ting, the reper­toire of beha­viors con­tai­ned in those pho­to­graphs was, and it would be even lon­ger before I unders­tood that no mat­ter how much I wan­ted to see a mutua­lity of desire and pur­pose in the peo­ple they depic­ted, those ima­ges – even when they con­tai­ned that mutua­lity of desire and pur­pose – were part of a social sys­tem that degra­ded women sexually and rele­ga­ted them to the sta­tus of fuc­ka­ble objects. 

There’s no mys­tery to why the hard­core porn of the time did not depict condom-use, just as there’s no mys­tery to why so much mains­tream hard­core porn does not depict it now. I’d like to focus on one pos­si­ble rea­son, though: intro­duce a con­dom into a scene and it makes visi­ble a sexual boun­dary the man can­not cross; it breaks, in other words, the illu­sion of unfet­te­red sex and of men’s unres­tric­ted sexual access to women that mains­tream hard­core hete­ro­se­xual porn is sup­po­sed to depict. Iro­ni­cally, howe­ver, what I lear­ned about con­tra­cep­tion – and remem­ber I lear­ned it when safe sex was pri­ma­rily about birth con­trol – rele­ga­ted women to the sta­tus of fuc­ka­ble objects no dif­fe­rently than por­no­graphy, though it did so in a far more subtle way, since it see­med to have at its core pre­ci­sely the oppo­site belief. Indeed, the ver­sion of male hete­ro­se­xual res­pon­si­bi­lity that I grew up with appea­red to be focu­sed enti­rely on res­pec­ting the inte­grity of a woman’s sexual boun­da­ries. That focus was con­tai­ned in two impe­ra­ti­ves: make sure you do not com­mit rape and make sure that she does not get preg­nant. Each of these impe­ra­ti­ves, of course, is one that men need to inter­na­lize, and there is a value in their bottom-line logic that I want neither to deni­grate nor deny. The fact is that too many men con­ti­nue to com­mit rape that they think is not rape because they think they are entit­led to the women they fuck; and too many men con­ti­nue to aban­don the women with whom they con­ceive chil­dren, as well as those chil­dren, because the corres­pon­ding res­pon­si­bi­li­ties inter­fere with that sense of entit­le­ment. Nonethe­less, “do not rape her” and “do not get her preg­nant,” at least in the bottom-line ver­sions I am tal­king about here, place the boun­da­ries of male hete­ro­se­xua­lity not within men but at the outer edge of women’s skin, and so they don’t essen­tially change the men-fuck-women-get-fucked equa­tion that is at the core of male domi­nant hete­ro­se­xual thinking.

Inte­res­tingly enough, espe­cially given that I star­ted out by tal­king about my days in yeshiva, the idea that women’s sexua­lity is what esta­blishes the boun­da­ries of men’s sexua­lity is expres­sed, among other pla­ces, in Jewish law. As Rachel Biale wri­tes in Women and Jewish Law: The Essen­tial Texts, Their His­tory, and Their Rele­vance for Today, “The ‘quiet,’ intro­ver­ted sexua­lity of the woman cir­cumsc­ri­bes the active, extro­ver­ted sexua­lity of the man. It beco­mes the cen­ter and regu­la­ting mecha­nism” of hete­ro­se­xual rela­tionships (146). “The active, extro­ver­ted sexua­lity of the man,” of course, is on the one hand nothing more than the male half of the tra­di­tio­nal view of sexua­lity that por­trays men as active and women as pas­sive; but it is also a euphe­mis­tic way of refe­rring to what Adrienne Rich meant when she tal­ked about the idea of the penis-with-a-life-of-its-own in her essay “Com­pul­sory Hete­ro­se­xua­lity and Les­bian Expe­rience,” the belief that male sexual desire is somehow beyond the con­trol of the man expe­rien­cing it, espe­cially, but not only, if he has an erec­tion. In the con­text of Jewish law, that penis gets “tamed” – or perhaps “domes­ti­ca­ted” is a bet­ter term – through gui­de­li­nes and requi­re­ments that direct a husband’s sexua­lity towards his wife – because in a reli­gious con­text, of course, mari­tal sex is the only legi­ti­mate sex – requi­ring him to be atten­tive to her needs and desi­res, while at the same time ensu­ring that there is enough sex for him to be satis­fied. The reli­gious obli­ga­tion, howe­ver, is for him to satisfy her; she bears no corres­pon­ding onus – except that she not refuse him unrea­so­nably. The assump­tion here seems to be that a hus­band will satisfy his own sexual desi­res and needs, by defi­ni­tion, in the pro­cess of satisf­ying his wife’s. His desi­res and needs, in other words, are so sim­ple and straight­for­ward that they do not require any spe­cial atten­tion. Since he is the one who is going to seek sex out – and, impli­citly, since his phy­si­cal satis­fac­tion is so easy to accom­plish and con­firm – as long as he gets the sex he seeks, he will be happy.

In gene­ral, the bot­tom line ver­sion of “do not rape her” that I men­tio­ned above sha­res this assump­tion, using a focus on the needs and desi­res of women – this time, the very basic ques­tion of whether a woman wants to have sex in the first place – to rein in men’s more “active” and “extro­ver­ted” sexua­lity. Things may be dif­fe­rent now, but the “do not rape her” edu­ca­tion that I recei­ved when I was youn­ger, and I am thin­king here spe­ci­fi­cally of the anti-rape edu­ca­tion I recei­ved in college, asked me nothing about my own desi­res and needs. No one, for exam­ple, wan­ted to know if there were cir­cums­tan­ces under which I might not want to have sex or if I had ever thought more deeply about my desire for sex than she-turns-me-0n-it-feels-good-so-I-want-it. Gran­ted, these ques­tions can all too easily become ways of not tal­king about not raping women; they open the door to the kinds of tit-for-tat accu­sa­tions that not only derail mea­ning­ful dis­cus­sion about rape–See! Men also have sex when we don’t want to, but we don’t go around crying rape every time it hap­pens–but not to ask them is ulti­ma­tely to impo­ve­rish any con­ver­sa­tion we might have about men’s rela­tionship to our own bodies, about the con­nec­tion bet­ween our sexua­lity and our fer­ti­lity (because not wan­ting to con­ceive a child should be as unpro­ble­ma­tic a rea­son for a man not to fuck as it is for a woman) and about our own sexual plea­sure. Because not asking those ques­tions, and the many ques­tions like them that could be asked, lea­ves in place both the cen­tra­lity of geni­tal fuc­king as an expres­sion of hete­ro­se­xual manhood and the notion that eja­cu­la­ting inside a woman is the ulti­mate and only truly mea­ning­ful expres­sion and expe­rience avai­la­ble to us of male heterosexuality.

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