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 «
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.
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 «
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. ↩
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 «
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. ↩
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 «
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.