It challenges assumptions about what it means to be a Muslim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patriarch with several wives and dozens of children. There are dysfunctional families in Islamic tradition, he says, prophets without father figures and revered holy men who led “effeminate” lifestyles. Most controversially, he challenges homophobia in Islam. “Homosexuality is not incompatible with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The important thing is to link it with living a good life and creating a good society.”

Later in the article, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16th-century Punjab, there lived a Sufi  saint and poet called Shah Hussain who is greatly venerated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pilgrims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore district even today, but some people want to rewrite history, saying the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the presence of “antinomian Sufis in the Indian subcontinent — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the conservatives who disagree with him use–that of God’s decision to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhabitants–he says the story “is really about [God’s] disapproval of the rape of young boys that was happening in the place,” which is very different from saying that God disapproves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the complexities of what Islam has to say about homosexuality, but I do know that scholarship like this, which at the very least highlights the degree to which ideas about masculinity, manhood and male sexuality are contested ideological territory, showing that the traditional view is only one of the possibilities that exist, is very, very important.

Sitting on my bed with her back against the wall, my lover—who’s come to visit during my first year of graduate school—tells me that she’s at last made her decision: she’s going to study fine art. I should be happy for her, but I’m suddenly listening from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leaving her mouth no longer coalesce into meaningful units. There is a moment of blankness, and then, as if someone else has taken control of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself getting up from the chair where I’ve been sitting, putting one hand around my lover’s throat, holding her against the wall, and slapping her face back and forth with my other hand until she is senseless and bloody. I see myself screaming in her ear, letting her drop to the floor, and kicking her in the stomach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.

Unaware that I’ve stopped hearing what she has to say, my lover continues talking, gesturing to emphasize the importance of her words, imploring me with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the violence in my mind begins again. Realizing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bathroom. Locking the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. I wait till I feel certain the vision will not return, and I flush the toilet and go back to the bedroom where, thankfully, my lover notices it’s time for me to go to class. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, knowing that I need some time alone to sort out what has just happened, tell her I have work to do in the library and therefore won’t be back until just before we’re supposed to go out for dinner.

The afternoon sun is warm on my face, and so I decide to walk to class instead of taking the bus. After a couple of blocks, however, again from out of nowhere, I see once more the images of myself doing violence to the woman I love, and again it is as if some outside force has taken control of my brain and forced me to watch. Nearly paralyzed with fear and guilt, I find a bench and sit down. There’s no way I want to chance having this vision start again while I’m in class, so I go straight to the library instead. My idea, as I settle into one of the chairs on the second floor, is to write out what I’m feeling, a strategy that has helped me figure things out in the past. When I put my pen to the page, however, what comes out of me is the beginning of a poem:

I want a bearded man, shirtless,
in faded jeans, to come one barefoot night
and take me in his mouth.

Like the violence I saw in my head, the words seem to come from someone other than myself, but the shock of recognition I feel when I read them–not only did I write them; on some level, I meant them–is in direct contrast to the sense of alienation I experienced while waiting in my bathroom to make sure that when I went back to where my lover was waiting for me I would not do to her what I’d seen myself doing. I also realize I am suddenly calm, as if I have found what writing was supposed to help me look for, and I am certain–I don’t know how I know this, but I know this–that in these lines lies the key to understanding why that vision of violence came to me.

This certainty, however, does not take me very far, because no matter how I try to connect what I’ve written to what I saw–and I wish I still had the pages I filled up trying to do that–I end up thinking about Brian and how we became friends in our senior year of high school. We were watching a teammate strike out as he tried too hard to hit the ball over the fence during a gym-class softball game. “I don’t get it,” Brian said to no one in particular, shaking his head from side to side as the other boy slammed the bat to the ground and stormed off the field. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?” I asked.

We’d been standing next to each other through most of the class, but he looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “What’s the big deal? I mean, it’s not like the guy’s going to fail for striking out.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.”

Brian’s face lit up for a moment, but then, just as quickly, his eyes narrowed. “Yeah, but at least you can hit the ball,” he said. He was not much of an athlete.

“So I can hit the ball. So what?”

And with that question we were friends; and we quickly became best friends. Sadly, though, what I remember most clearly about our friendship is the day it began to end. “You’re just different,” he told me sitting in my room. “I’ve never met anyone like you, and they can’t accept that.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you before either,” I responded, not even bothering to ask him who they were.

“But they’re saying we’re closer than we should be, that we’re not, you know, normal.”

“So? Who cares what they have to say?”

Brian looked so grateful when I said those words that I thought he was going to cry, and his eyes did start to grow big with a feeling that welled up in him, but then he looked away and almost whispered, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are closer than we should be.”

I tried to convince him that he was wrong, but it didn’t work, and from that day on–at least as I recall–he started bringing female friends along whenever we went out, and college applications, yearbook committees, and other graduation-related work suddenly kept him so busy that he didn’t have enough time to see me. The summer after graduation, while I was working at a sleep-away camp in Massachusetts, we wrote letters, but when I came home, he was gone, off to his freshman year at Cornell University. I probably had his phone number and address at school, but I don’t think I ever used them, and I don’t remember receiving either mail or phone calls from him. We did try once to reconnect during the winter break of our freshman year, meeting for a drink at one of the where bars we’d hung out when we were still close. If I remember correctly, he brought his girlfriend, a dark woman who sat silently in her corner of the booth while Brian and I struggled to find things to say to each other. The conversation is lost to me now, but I can still feel the finality of our good-byes, neither of us even pretending that we’d try to see each other again.

At the end of that academic year, while I waited on line to register for my sophomore classes, I met the woman who’d sat next to me in twelfth-grade English. “Whatever happened to your friend Brian?” she asked, making what I thought was going to be small talk to pass the time.

“He’s at Cornell,” I answered, “but I haven’t heard from him in a long while.”

“You know,” she said, “everyone thought you two were gay.”

“I know.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

With cinematic timing my turn to register came next, and I gave her a small, silent wave as I walked to the registrar’s window. My answer, though, has haunted me ever since, not because it was dishonest–I was responding to what she probably wanted to know, which was whether or not Brian and I had had sex–but because if Brian and I did not love each other, we were certainly on the verge of it, or at least I was on the verge of loving him. Answering my former classmate with that unadorned no betrayed that love, and so the moment in which I answered her is a moment I often wish that I could have back, as I still sometimes wish I could have back that moment when Brian decided “they” were right and we were wrong. Not because I think there was anything I could have done to change his mind, and not because I think the answer I wish I’d had the presence of mind to give my former classmate–we did not have sex, but we did love each other–would have made much of a difference to her, but because envisioning how those situations might have turned out differently makes a difference to me, is a gesture of defiance I never want to stop making against what “they” stood, and continue to stand, for.

My lover and I did not go out to dinner that night; we talked instead. She was the one person in my life with whom I had been, with whom I could be, completely honest, and so even though I wanted to, I did not know how to withhold from her what had been going on inside me. I told her what I had seen myself doing to her–though in less detail than I have described here–and how scared I was because I had no idea where the vision had come from, because it had never occurred to me that such violence might be in me; and I am, again, as I write this now, more than twenty five years later, as I am every time I tell this story, awestruck, literally awestruck, by the strength and compassion, by the depth and breadth of the love that my lover showed me that night. It is still hard for me to believe that she did not immediately leave for home when I told her what had been going on inside my head, that she was able to sit alone with me in my bedroom, knowing what I had seen, and feel safe talking with me–and I know she felt safe because she told me so–and we talked until I don’t remember what hour of the morning, but nothing we said brought me any closer to understanding what might have triggered the visions I had seen.

I wish I could remember everything we said to each other that night, because the only thing I do remember, and I have no idea what we were saying that led up to this, is yelling the words I hate you! as loud as I could and then laughing with hysterical relief as I continued to yell them; and in all the seven years this woman and I were together–at least five of which were still to come, and they were seven good years–I don’t think I ever loved her more than I did at that moment. As soon as the first I hate you! left my mouth, I knew she was not the person to whom I was speaking–I had no idea to whom I was speaking–and I don’t know if she believed me when I told her that, but she nonetheless stayed in that room while I yelled those words at her, and when I was done, and I might have been crying, she held me, and we slept; and in the morning when we woke up, I could feel that something in me had been resolved, some tension dissipated.

I started seeing a therapist on campus to try to puzzle out where those violent visions came from and how they were connected to the homoerotic lines that I wrote, but the only thing I learned from that experience was how important it is to find a therapist you can trust. I don’t remember where precisely my lack of trust came from, but it was deep enough that it would be years before I was willing to enter therapy again. Fortunately for me, the second time around was a good deal more successful than the first. I started to understand not only how enraged I was at the world–the reasons for which will unfold over the course of this series of posts–but also how thoroughly I had hidden that rage from myself. As I revisited with my therapist the episode I have described above, I began to be able to point to things in the relationship with my lover that made me angry, in particular the fact that she refused to tell her parents about us because they would not approve of her being with someone who wasn’t Catholic and also the way she saw “us” as a secret haven to which she could escape from the rest of her life; and I could see how each of those angers might have touched the rage I’d been feeling without even realizing I was feeling it, though clearly the violence I’d seen myself doing to her was both wrong on its face and way out of proportion to whatever problems I had with our relationship.

To put it another way, that I should not have hit my lover is something we take for granted; yet taking that for granted very neatly elides the fact that we live in a culture where an awful lot of men with rage not so different from mine do hit their lovers. More to the point, it is a culture where the ubiquitousness of this violence, and of images of this violence, cannot help but shape the forms of expression available to men who feel such rage. To take for granted that I should not have hit my lover, in other words, not to ask why a vision of beating my lover to a pulp was the form my rage took, is also to take for granted that the violence I saw myself doing to her was somehow in the normal order of things. It is to accept that such violence is how men’s rage will, as a matter of course, express itself; and so it is to leave intact the social and cultural structures that normalize men’s violence against women.

Similarly, while there may be any number of therapeutic explanations for the lines of homoerotic poetry that I wrote–perhaps, for example, the bearded, shirtless man was me, and the poem was my way of telling myself that I needed to learn self-love– to see the explicit homosexuality in those lines as merely personal, as being solely a reflection of my psychological state at the time, is to avoid the questions about male heterosexual and gender identity that I think they raise, especially because of the circumstances under which I wrote them.

I’d be lying, for example, if I claimed not to have wondered if writing the poem was my unconscious mind’s way of telling me that I was really gay and that my vision had been as violent as it was because what I wanted, what I needed, was to break out of the “heterosexual prison” I had not realized my relationship with my lover had become. Yet not only did writing those lines not awaken in me a previously hidden and compelling desire for men; not only has the trajectory of my life since then in no way suggested that the poem was, or ought to have been, the beginning of my coming out; writing those lines, as I suggested above, calmed me, gave me a perspective–though I was in no way able to articulate it at the time–that enabled me to go back and talk to my lover, which ultimately strengthened our relationship and my desire for her. In other words, despite the the fact that every social script I know says this should not have been the case, the process of acknowledging my own homoeroticism that writing those lines of poetry began affirmed rather than threatened my sense of myself as heterosexual.

We all know the social scripts I am talking about. A core tenet of conventional heterosexuality, after all, is that a man’s heterosexual feelings should cancel out completely the possibility of any homoeroticism he might otherwise have within him. Or to put it another way, conventional heterosexuality requires of a man the active policing of his own desire so as to eliminate from within himself all traces of homoerotic possibility. Either way, within this framework, to fail to erase one’s own homoeroticism is to fail as a man. Homophobia, in other words, is not simply the fear and hatred of homosexuals; it is also a categorical imperative of conventional manhood. As such, it enjoins heterosexual men to define our sexuality negatively, as what it is not, rather than through an assertion of what it is, and it is that assertion that I guess I have been trying to explore in the two decades since I began writing seriously about masculinity, manhood and male sexuality, though this is the first time I have been able to say it with such clarity.

To examine the violence within myself, in other words, is to examine what it has meant for me, what it means for me, to be a man, not because men are inherently violent or because manhood and masculinity are names for a pathology of violence with which all men are infected, but because I have in my life experienced manhood and masculinity, gender and sexuality, as connected to and through violence; and I am talking here not only about the violence that was done to me in order to make me a man, or in the name of proving manhood–mine or someone else’s–but also about what should have been the unthinkable violence that I saw myself doing to a woman I loved. I am more than grateful for whatever it was in me that kept me from acting out the vision I saw, but I still had that vision; it was as much a part of me–as a memory it still is as much a part of me–as it would have been had I actually punched my lover in the face. Not to examine it, not to pursue that examination wherever it might lead, therefore, is not only to betray the love and compassion my lover showed me when I told her what I’d seen myself doing to her; it is also to betray the humanity I chose when I chose not to hit her.

“Yup,” she answered, smiling.

“Do you know how unnecessary and painful the operation is?”

Same smile, same answer, “Yup.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because I will not have my son looking like a freak! I’ve been with guys who weren’t circumcised, and they were, well, disgusting.” She shook her head and wrinkled her nose at the memory. “They told me stories about what it was like to be different in the locker room. I just don’t want my son to have to go through that.”

“What if the knife slips?”

Back to the original smile, “It won’t. It almost never does.”

I asked her if she’d ever actually seen a circumcision. She said no, and so I asked if she planned to be present when her son was cut. Given how strongly she felt, I suggested, it seemed to be only right that she should be, if only so she could answer any questions her son might have when he got older. She closed her eyes and raised her palms between us to ward off the image I’d just conjured, “I, I, I couldn’t. There’s no way I’d be able to let them do it.”

“But then why have it done at all?”

“Look, my son will be circumcised!” Her tone made it clear the conversation was over. “He will have a normal penis and a normal sex life, and I will thank you in the future to mind your own business.”

///

I remember how shocked I was–I was a college freshman–when my friend Pierre turned around in the locker room after a basketball game and displayed an organ hanging between his legs that looked more to me like an elephant’s trunk than a man’s sexual apparatus. I’d never seen an uncircumcised penis before. Well, no, strictly speaking, that’s not true. I know now that at least some of the men in the heterosexual pornography I’d watched were uncircumcised, but since I only ever saw those penises when they were erect, the skin the women on the screen would occasionally pull up and down over the glans of those organs appeared to me in my ignorance to be skin no different than what I had left over after my circumcision (which was almost non-existent); I just assumed that, for whatever reason, those men had more of it. So I guess the accurate thing to say is that I’d never seen an uncircumcised penis that was not erect, and my first response to seeing Pierre’s was that it looked feminine, effeminate. Or maybe emasculated is a more precise term. Either way, what I felt was a mixture of pity and disgust.

I went back to my room and thought hard about my reaction. Pierre was a good friend and it troubled me that I should be repulsed by his body. It took a while, but I finally realized that what made Pierre’s penis seem so alien to me was not merely the covering his foreskin provided; it was that his foreskin made it impossible for me to picture Pierre’s penis erect. Not that I thought he didn’t have erections; I knew he had a girlfriend with whom he was having sex. Rather, I couldn’t imagine what Pierre’s erect penis looked like, couldn’t fathom the mechanism by which the foreskin moved out of the way, making it possible for him to enter a woman’s vagina and experience the pleasures of sex, including orgasm and ejaculation, that depend upon an exposed glans. It was this inability to envision Pierre penetrating a woman or ejaculating that made his penis seem to me somehow less than masculine than mine–because, of course, I assumed that my penis, cut as it was, was the way a penis was supposed to be.

Ironically, in cultures that practice circumcision as an adolescent rite of passage, removing the foreskin is often equated with removing the last vestige of maternal, meaning feminine, influence. Not to have it removed, even to flinch while it is being removed—signifying fear and the inability to withstand pain—is to reveal oneself as clinging to the feminine, unwilling to separate from one’s mother, and therefore unworthy of manhood. Since we in the United States circumcise our boys as infants–and I am talking here about routine medical circumcisions, not the Jewish ritual of brit milah, which needs to be discussed in a different context–questions of fear and the inability to withstand pain are irrelevant, but I think that the image of a covered glans as less than masculine is nonetheless very present in our cultural imagination. Or, to put it more precisely, I think that the routine medical circumcision of infant boys makes their bodies congruent with our culture’s ideal of masculinity as clean, hard, always ready for action, and always, implicitly if not explicitly, on the offensive.

To start, circumcision quite literally turns a boy’s penis inside out, making what is essentially an internal part of his body, the glans, an external one, and since the exposed glans is what first enters a woman during vaginal intercourse, it is hard not to read the circumcised penis as a penis always prepared, if not completely ready at any given moment in time, to penetrate–representing in the flesh the patriarchal heterosexual norm that values a man’s “getting it in her” over almost every other aspect of sex. Moreover, the cleaner and dryer penis that circumcision creates has neither the odor nor the taste associated with the lubricating discharges of both its uncircumcised counterpart and women’s genitalia. Just like the adolescent rite-of-passage circumcisions that I mentioned above, in other words, the routine medical circumcision performed on boys here in the US removes from an infant’s penis that which makes it similar to a vagina–except that, because we circumcise our boys when they are infants, a cut penis will feel to those boys as they grow up as if it were the penis with which they were born, providing the illusion of a biological proof that patriarchy’s gender dichotomies–embodied in the dry, clean and therefore “civilized” penis versus the wet, messy and therefore “savage” vagina–are indeed “natural,” inhering in male and female bodies and not constructed through the processes of cultural production.

Once these boys understand that they were circumcised, of course, the cat–so to speak–ought to be out of the bag, but the idea that a circumcised penis is the normal, natural and therefore healthy penis, is given the weight of medical authority not only through doctor’s promoting the procedure’s ostensible health benefits (which I will discuss in more detail elsewhere), but also through the medical images that shape our understanding of what our bodies ought to look like. In many of those images, at least here in the United States, the foreskin is either entirely absent or, if it is present, not labeled. Here are two online examples:

• Shands HealthCare is a private, not-for-profit organization affiliated with the University of Florida. The A.D.A.M. Multimedia Health Encyclopedia on its website includes this image of the male reproductive system in which the glans is exposed and in which the foreskin is not even labeled. (To my eye, it’s ambiguous whether the bunched skin at the base of the glans is supposed to be the foreskin or not.)
• Visible Productions, a Colorado-based multimedia communications company, which boasts, according to its website, the “world’s most extensive library of 3D digital models [of the human body]” based on data from the Visible Human Project. Do a keyword search on “penis” and you get nine results, none of which show an intact penis. Searches on “foreskin” and “prepuce” return no results.

In Five Bodies, John O’Neill writes that the “operation of political and economic power does not aim simply to control passive bodies or to restrain the body politic, but to produce docile bodies” (italics in original), bodies which accept the truths of power as self-evident and not in need of examination, motivating the people inhabiting those bodies to govern themselves in congruence with those truths. Routine infant male circumcision is a perfect example. By performing the operation on infants whose gender identities have not yet formed, medicine recreates as physically embodied medical facts a set of male dominant cultural beliefs about masculinity—always ready for sex, dry, clean, civilized—and then teaches us that these are the benchmarks against which we need to measure men’s genital and sexual health. To argue this, however, is not to argue that circumcision causes male dominant sexual behavior in men; nor is it to predict that cultures which medically circumcise will be inherently more male dominant than those which don’t. Rather, it is to suggest that those cultures which do medically circumcise infant boys have chosen that procedure as one of the ways they give men bodies in which patriarchal masculinity and male dominant behavior feel natural.

Clearly, then, ending the routine circumcision of infant boys will not bring patriarchy to its knees, but pulling at the threads by which the procedure is woven into our cultural fabric as necessary, or at least desirable, does reveal some of the more insidious ways in which patriarchy itself is woven into men’s bodies as the natural state of things; and once that weave is revealed as precisely not natural, we can start to imagine not just a different kind of pattern, but even a different way to use the loom on which the fabric is woven. Think objectively for a moment. Leave aside, if you can, the medical justifications and rationalizations, the mythical content and historical imperatives we are taught to impose on the practice of medical circumcision, and think simply in terms of actual events. A boy is born. Sometime between his entrance into the world and his first two weeks of life, he is taken away from his mother, strapped down with full physical restraint in a room full of strangers, and his foreskin, a sensitive, functional and still developing part of his body is pulled away from the head of his penis and amputated–sometimes with and sometimes without anesthesia. He has given no consent, has no awareness of the medical and/or cultural considerations that motivate the procedure, and he has little or no recourse, once the surgery has been performed, to change what has been done to him. There is no way to predict what effect his circumcision will have on him, but that is not the question we ought to be asking ourselves. Rather, we ought to be asking why we as a culture so despise the body with which he was born that we need so radically and so painfully to alter it, and then we need to be asking if that is the kind of society we really want to be.

Works Cited

O’Neill, John. Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985 (The link takes you to the revised edition.)

a wretched transgressor [who] sinks into a miserable fatuity, and finally becomes a confirmed and degraded idiot, whose deeply sunken and vacant, glossy eye, and livid shrivelled [sic] countenance, and ulcerous, toothless gums, and fetid breath, and feeble broken voice, and emaciated and dwarfish and crooked body, and almost hairless head—covered perhaps with suppurating blisters and running sores—denote a premature old age, a blighted body—and a ruined soul! (Quoted in Kimmel)

Graham, who was one of the most popular and successful of the non-medical writers on this subject, believed the male body was simply not equipped to handle “the convulsive paroxysms attending venereal indulgence”—read: ejaculation—and so even married men, whose sexual activity with their wives was certainly beyond the moral reproach usually associated with masturbation, had to be very careful not to overindulge–which for Graham meant more than once a month. Otherwise, they risked

Languor, lassitude, muscular relaxation, general debility and heaviness, depression of spirits, loss of appetite, indigestion, faintness and sinking at the pit of the stomach, increased susceptibilities of the skin and lungs to all the atmospheric changes, feebleness of circulation, chilliness, head-ache, melancholy, hypochondria, hysterics, feebleness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weakness of the lungs, nervous cough, pulmonary consumption, disorders of the liver and kidneys, urinary difficulties, disorders of the genital organs, weakness of the brain, loss of memory, epilepsy, insanity, apoplexy—and extreme feebleness and early death of offspring.… (Quoted in Kimmel)

Graham recommended dietary measures, specifically his crackers, to combat men’s temptation to pleasure. J. H. Kellogg, whose flakes were also originally developed and marketed as an anaphrodisiac, didn’t stop with food. In Plain Facts for Old and Young, published in 1888, Kellogg recommended a series of home remedies for masturbation, including bandaging a boy’s penis, covering it with a cage and tying the boy’s hands at night when he went to sleep. For particularly difficult cases, Kellogg recommended circumcision “without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if connected with the idea of punishment” (Quoted in Kimmel). Nor was Kellogg the only expert to suggest that pain was the best countermeasure to male masturbation. Other writers seemed to compete with each other to see who could come up with the cruelest form of intervention. Recommendations included applying leeches, punching a hole in the foreskin and inserting a metal ring, cutting the foreskin with jagged-edge scissors and applying a hot iron to a boy’s genitals.

Clearly male sexual pleasure for its own sake was threatening to nineteenth century US culture. In Manhood in America, from which I have pulled the above quotes from Graham and Kellogg, Michael Kimmel locates this threat in the crisis of masculine identity caused by the rapid industrialization of American society.

[T]o middle-class American men the mid-nineteenth century world often felt like it was spinning out of control, rushing headlong towards an industrial future. For a young man seeking his fortune in such a free and mobile society, identity was no longer fixed, and there was no firm patriarchal lineage to ground a secure sense of himself as a man.… “Sons [here Kimmel is quoting Charles Sellers’ book The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846] had to compete for elusive manhood in the market rather than grow into secure manhood by replicating fathers. Where many could never attain the self-made manhood of success, middle class masculinity pushed egotism to extremes of aggression, calculation, self-control and unremitting effort.”

Sexual pleasure undermined a man’s ability to compete in this marketplace of manhood in two ways: First, as Graham, Kellogg and others made clear, such pleasure constituted unadulterated self-indulgence, a characteristic precisely antithetical to the kind of man a self-made man was supposed to be. Second, the expenditure of sperm—and the thinkers of the nineteenth century saw ejaculation quite explicitly as a form of spending—was a waste of energy that a man could have, and should have, been putting to more productive uses elsewhere.

This view of male sexual pleasure as dangerous and pathological was formally medicalized in 1870 when Dr. Lewis Sayre, the nation’s leading orthopedic surgeon, and a future president of the American Medical Association, was called in to consult in the case of a boy who was “unable to walk without assistance or stand erect, his knees being flexed at about an angle of 45 degrees” (Gollaher). Sayre had been asked to perform a tenotomy, an operation which would sever the child’s hamstring tendons, but, after examining the boy, Sayre concluded that the patient’s legs were paralyzed, not contracted, and so a different form of treatment was called for. Because he could not immediately discern the cause of the paralysis, Sayre decided to test the boy’s reflexes using electrical current as a way of helping him refine his diagnosis. When the boy’s nurse warned him not to apply the current too close to her ward’s genitals, which were very sore, Sayre discovered that the child was suffering from a severe case of phimosis, an overly tight foreskin. When the nurse explained that the condition often caused the boy to have painful erections, Sayre had a flash of insight:

As excessive venery is a fruitful source of physical prostration and nervous exhaustion, sometimes producing paralysis, I was disposed to look upon this case in the same light, and recommended circumcision as a means of relieving the irritated and imprisoned penis. (Quoted in Gollaher)

The operation was performed; the boy experienced a nearly miraculous recovery; and the industry of male circumcision in the United States was born. In the decades that followed, circumcision was touted—at first by Sayre, but then, with the exception of a few dissenters, by the medical profession as a whole—as a cure for everything from asthma to epilepsy, but what is most remarkable about this procedure is that even though every proposed medical justification for it turned out to be either profoundly questionable or completely false, removal of the male foreskin developed nonetheless into the preventive medicine it is still used as today in the routine medical circumcision of infant boys.

What it is precisely that circumcision is supposed to prevent has changed over time. In 1896, a book called All About Baby recommended the procedure for baby boys to prevent masturbation and the medical and moral problems associated with that practice. Other authorities advocated circumcision as a hedge against the possibility of impotence later in life (Gollaher). More properly medical rationales have included the prevention of urinary tract infections, cancer of the penis, cancer of the cervix in women and the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV–this last one is, for now, supported by solid scientific evidence, but no one that I am aware of seriously promotes the procedure as routine preventive health care for all infant boys. Perhaps more to the point, while there are certainly solid medical reasons for performing male circumcisions on adult men, few if any of those reasons apply to newborn boys, meaning that, as David L. Gollaher puts it in his book Circumcision, “the questions about circumcision are about the future: Does it yield longer life, less disease or disability? Does it improve function? Does it alleviate fear or anxiety?And if it does confer benefit, does the benefit outweigh the harm?” The practice of circumcising infant boys, in other words, is more about the kind of body the medical profession believes men ought to have than it is about a direct and immediate threat to the life or well-being of the boys who will grow up to be those men.

Indeed, the routine circumcision of infant males became enshrined in the United States less because there was persuasive evidence of the procedure’s benefits than because powerful voices within the medical profession managed to convince their colleagues and the public at large that the foreskin itself was pathological. Chief among these voices in the late nineteenth century was Peter Charles Remondino’s. A widely published and influential physician and public health official, Remondino published in 1891 a book called History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present: Moral and Physical Reasons for Its Performance. In it he wrote:

The prepuce seems to exercise a malign influence in the most distant and apparently unconnected manner; where, like some of the evil genii or sprites in the Arabian tales, it can reach from afar the object of its malignity, striking him down unawares in the most unaccountable manner; making him a victim to all manner of ills, sufferings, and tribulations; unfitting him for marriage or the cares of business, making him miserable and an object of continual scolding and punishment in childhood, through its worriments and nocturnal enuresis [involuntary urination]; later on, beginning to affect him with all kinds of physical distortions and ailments, nocturnal pollutions, and other conditions calculated to weaken him physically, mentally, and morally; to land him, perchance, in jail or even in a lunatic asylum. Man’s whole life is subject to the capricious dispensations and whims of this Job’s-comforts-dispensing enemy of man. (Quoted in Gollaher)

Note the shift in focus. While people like Graham and Kellogg had seen circumcision as a kind of punishment for masturbation, a view in which the masturbator and not his foreskin was the problem, Remondino saw the foreskin itself as pathological, as if the male body were born diseased; and while no one seriously believes anymore that the foreskin is the root of all evil in men, it’s hard not to see Remondino’s rhetoric as one root of the idea that a healthy foreskin, a normal part of the body with which a boy is born, is not merely disposable, removable, like the flip top on a can, but also so potentially harmful that doctors are willing to perform an operation to save boys from its perceived dangers that would otherwise seem to violate a central tenet of the medical profession: not to do surgery on an otherwise healthy patient. Were the foreskin understood as the organ of sexual sensation that it is, however–not unlike the clitoris, in that, while it may not be necessary for sexual intercourse, it is certainly more than simply desirable for the pleasures it provides–one wonders if we would so easily see its removal as no big deal and celebrate instead the marginal and doubtful health benefits that ostensibly result from its absence. (Please note: I am not suggesting that the foreskin and the clitoris have some kind of one-to-one correspondence, either sexually or physiologically, just that there may be a similarity in function.)

The foreskin of an adult human male represents 50% to 80% of the penile skin. (Details about the foreskin in this and the following paragraphs are taken from “The Prepuce,” by C. J. Cold and J. R. Taylor and “A Preliminary Poll of Men Circumcised in Infancy of Childhood,” by Tim Hammond.) Unfolded, it would measure between twenty and thirty square inches. The glans penis of an intact man is only a few cell layers thick. The skin is smooth, red, and glistening, just like the inside of the mouth. The glans of a circumcised penis, on the other hand, is up to ten times thicker than its uncircumcised counterpart, the result of a process called keratinization. Keratin, a tough, insoluble protein which the body produces in response to friction or pressure, is the primary material in hair, nails, and the outermost layer of skin. Its formation on the head of a circumcised penis, while necessary to compensate for the loss of the foreskin’s protective covering—imagine what your tongue would feel like if you didn’t have cheeks or your eyes without eyelids—significantly dulls what a man will be able to feel through the head of his penis. In addition, circumcision excises the tremendous sexual sensitivity that is located in the foreskin itself, including:

• The frenar band, a ridge of skin between the inner and outer foreskin, which is the primary erogenous zone on the intact male body
• The frenulum, the highly sensitive piece of skin that anchors the foreskin to the underside of the glans
• Fine touch receptors called Meissner’s corpuscles, of which there are thousands
• Branches of the dorsal nerve
• 10,000 to 20,000 specialized erotogenic nerve endings

All of this and more is lost to a man whose foreskin has been amputated, leaving him only with whatever sensory capacity is left in his circumcision scar—and for some the scar has no such capacity, while for others it becomes a site of pain—and with what he can feel through the nerves in the head of his penis, covered as they are by the layers of keratin mentioned above. These nerves are mostly “protopathic,” meaning they can sense only sensations that are poorly localized, like pressure, pain, certain kinds of physical contact and temperature, and so what one author has called “the subtle pleasures of genital foreplay” exist outside the realm of experience to which a circumcised man has access. Indeed, the only part of the body with less protopathic sensitivity than the glans penis is the heel of the foot. This reduction in sensitivity does not mean that circumcised men have no choice but to lead less satisfying sex lives than uncircumcised men—sexual satisfaction, after all, is a product of far more than physical sensation; and circumcised men are still capable of orgasm and all other kinds of sexual sensation and play—but it does mean that, whatever else it represents as a medical procedure or cultural ritual, the routine circumcision of infant boys, the most common form of surgery performed in the United States, is by definition an expression of indifference at best, if not downright hostility, to male sexual pleasure, rooting the procedure firmly in the nineteenth century beliefs and attitudes of Sylvester Graham and those who thought like him.

Drawing, or at least exploring the possibility of, a connection between the contemporary medical practice of routine infant male circumcision and the fears about male sexual pleasure that concerned people in 19th century United States is not to suggest that we are somehow still mired in obsolete ideas about masturbation or some such thing. Rather it is to ask a question about the relationships between and among the male body, our cultural definition(s) of and prescriptions for a healthy (specifically sexually healthy) male body and how those definitions and prescriptions structure what it means for a man to have sexual pleasure. Take, for example, the terms western medicine uses to define the four stages of erection: latent, tumescent, full erection, and rigid erection. The hierarchical progression from one stage to the next suggests that the process of male sexual arousal is primarily the process of building an erection or, perhaps more accurately, of how an erection builds itself; more, the hierarchy embedded in those terms devalues the experience of earlier stages, latency for example, in comparison to later stages, like full or rigid erection. Thinking about male sexual arousal in these hierarchical terms also carries the implication that something is wrong if one does not reach the final stage, rigid erection, and such thinking fits very neatly with the idea that the final and only true evidence and experience of fully realized male sexual pleasure is ejaculation, a value expressed most nakedly (so to speak) in pornography’s cum shot. Finally, since you don’t need a foreskin to ejaculate, this hierarchical, goal-based model of male sexual pleasure makes it very easy to see the foreskin as expendable, which in turn makes it easy to reason that the expendability of the foreskin is the natural state of the male body, despite the fact that the male body in its natural state possesses a foreskin.

Yet latency, tumescence, full-erection and rigid-erection are not the only ways in which male sexual arousal can be described.The Taoists, for example, as Mantak Chia and Douglas Arava explain in The Multi-Orgasmic Man, talked about four levels of “attainment:” firmness, swelling, hardness and heat, terms that are not only not inherently hierarchical, but that also, at least for me, describe the interior experience of sexual arousal much more accurately. I know what firmness feels like, for example, while I can’t say the same for latency; and the qualitative difference between hardness and heat is much truer to what I feel than the quantitative difference between a full and a rigid erection. Moreover, along with these different terms of description comes a very different idea about the nature of male sexual pleasure. Firmness, swelling, hardness and heat are sensations that can be experienced in their own right, and, as stages of male arousal, each one brings with it its own, very specific pleasures, if you are willing to take the time to pay attention and cultivate them. Indeed, for the Taoists, the goal of male sexual pleasure is not ejaculation per se, but rather the cultivation and harnessing of these pleasures, and the recycling of sexual energy throughout the body, leading to a series of whole-body, non-ejaculatory orgasms, an idea which seems at first–at least it did so to me–not merely counterintuitive, but physiologically impossible.

Yet male orgasm and ejaculation are separable phenomena, as Alfred Kinsey showed in the 1940s and as William Hartmann and Marilyn Fithian confirmed in their book, Any Man Can: The Multiple Orgasmic Technique for Every Loving Man. Hartmann and Fithian reported on a study they conducted of thirty three men who claimed they could have two or more orgasms without losing an erection. The men were monitored for pelvic contractions and increased heart rate—two clear indicators of orgasm—and the results showed the average number of orgasms among the men was four. The maximum was sixteen! More to the point, the arousal charts for these men were identical to those of multi-orgasmic women, suggesting that the traditional Western model of male arousal—which builds to the single peak of ejaculation and then falls off into a stage when another erection is impossible—has at least as much to do with how men are socialized to experience sexual pleasure as with the capacity or predisposition of our bodies for a given kind of sensation.

The techniques that make multiple male orgasm possible are based on an understanding of male sexual response that incorporates into a system the erotic possibilities of male physiology that are usually treated as “pleasant detours” along the road to the “main event” and not as either significant sources of pleasure in their own right or necessary contributing factors to a man’s capacity for multiple orgasm. Through these techniques, a man’s nipples, anus, perineum, testicles, scrotal sac, even his breathing all become in their own way as important as his penis in his ability fully to experience his body’s capacity for orgasm. These methods will work for both circumcised and uncircumcised men, and so I am not trying to argue that we ought to stop circumcising boys just so that they can experience multiple orgasms when they become men (though I do think we ought to stop routinely circumcising infant boys); rather, I would like to suggest that a view of male pleasure that does not focus so exclusively on ejaculation, that values all of the erotic possibilities of a man’s body, including those of the foreskin, will make the  logic by which we now so blithely amputate the foreskins of healthy infant boys far less compelling than it now can be. Or, to put it another way, when you change someone’s definition, experience and expectations of sexual pleasure and satisfaction, you change, or at least potentially change, the politics of sexuality as well, and when it comes to male sexuality that is a possibility worth exploring further.

Works Cited

Chia, Mantak, and Arava, Douglas Abrams. The Multi-Orgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

Cold CJ, Taylor JR. “The prepuce.” BJU (British Journal of Urology) Int 1999;83 Suppl. 1:34–44.

Gollaher, David L. “From Ritual to Science: The Medical Transformation of Circumcision in America,” Journal of Social History, vol. 28 no. 1 (Fall 1994): 5–36

Gollaher, D. Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery. New York: Basic Books, 2001

Hammond, T. A Preliminary Poll of Men Circumcised in Infancy or ChildhoodBJU International (83, Suppl. 1),  p. 85–92, January, 1999 (British Journal of Urology)

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press 1995

Like a pack of dogs that has been thrown a single piece of meat, the group surrounds me in a tight circle, while I stand there not moving, body pointing me into the air above the middle of the room, wishing I could vanish, that it would vanish, but no matter how much I will it, the damned thing will not go down.

“What are you, a homo!?”

“Other guys’ dicks must turn him on!”

“Wanna suck mine, queer!?”

The taunts continue for what seems like hours, though it is probably only a few minutes, and then the head counselor comes in and ushers us all out to the pool. I can’t believe he didn’t hear what the other boys were saying, but he acts as if he didn’t, barely looking at me as he shows me where the boys in my group have spread their towels.

Later that evening, while I’m getting ready for bed, I stand naked before the full-length mirror inside my door and tuck my penis out of sight between my legs. I’m not trying to imagine myself as a girl, but I am intrigued by the possibility of a body that does not have erections.

///

When I was a teenager, I read in Penthouse magazine a letter–I think it was in Xavier Hollander’s “Happy Hooker” column–in which a woman described how she and a friend took revenge on a man who’d tried to rape the friend. The writer of the letter arranged to meet the man at a disco, invited him to her apartment, and seduced him into being tied, spread-eagled, to her bed. Then the woman’s friend, who’d been waiting in another room, came in, and the two women teased the man sexually until he was begging them for release. In response, the women took out a razor and shaving cream, telling him that, if he ejaculated while they rubbed his penis, they would shave all the hair from his body. The letter went on to describe in great detail first the man’s pleading with them not to do it and then his efforts to keep himself from coming while the women took turns masturbating him. Finally, of course, he came, and the women shaved him, threatening to slice off his testicles if he didn’t lay still.

Now, of course, I understand not only that the letter might have been, that it most probably was, a complete fabrication, even that it might even have been written by a man, but also, assuming for the sake of argument that the events it relates actually happened, the fact that is was published in Penthouse means that its sole purpose was to feed, to shape and even to create the desires and fantasies of the boys and men like me who read the magazine. At the time, though, I read the letter naively, assuming it to be true–why, after all, would someone publish a letter that wasn’t?–and so it was clear to me that it described a rape. The woman who ostensibly wrote it didn’t present what she and her friend did to the man as anything else—except to make clear that it was motivated by revenge—and she never implied that he enjoyed it. Nonetheless, my sexual imagination was drawn to the story. For months, for years afterward, I fantasized about women tying me to a bed and creating in my flesh an arousal so all-encompassing that I too would be willing to beg for release. Yet no matter how hard I tried to imagine a conclusion other than the one in the letter, I always ended up the victim of some version of the revenge the writer and her friend took, and what I remember most about this now is how fully this ending short-circuited the fantasy, and when I say “fully short-circuited,” I mean fully and completely. If I was masturbating, I found it very hard to continue; if I was simply daydreaming, I’d have to stop and think of something else, not because I felt and was trying to avoid, or deny, the guilty, shameful pleasure that often accompanies “forbidden fantasies,” but rather because I was scared. I simply did not trust the women I imagined not to turn into the women described in the letter. More than that, though, I identified with their victim’s experience of having the pleasures of his body turned against him, and the knowledge that I could be shamed just as he had been shamed taught me only one thing: my body was always the potential weapon of my own defeat.

///

We’re sitting in a circle in a remedial composition class that I’m teaching. The students are reading aloud and commenting on fables they’ve written over the weekend. The prose is awkward and ungrammatical, though I am impressed with the imaginative effort some of my students have made. There’s a modernized version of Little Red Riding Hood, set in an upper class neighborhood with the most sought-after senior boy in the local high school taking the part of the wolf. There’s also a gender-reversed Sleeping Beauty, in which Princess Charming turns out to be the homeless woman who sleeps in the park. I’m about to move on to the next part of the lesson when Walter, who’d announced when we began that he wasn’t going to read what he’d written, asks whether I’d like to hear his story. Of course I say yes.

Walter’s narrative takes place in the future and involves a very powerful drug dealer whose organization has been infiltrated by a top female narcotics agent posing as a prostitute. When the dealer’s lover, who also works for him as a prostitute, learns that the operation has been compromised, she tells him immediately. Armed with this information, the dealer exposes the spy and has her tortured slowly and painfully to death. To express his gratitude, he takes his lover to bed, giving her, in Walter’s words, “the literal fuck of her life, pounding away until she was no longer breathing.” The story ends with a description of the lavish funeral the dealer gives her.

When Walter finishes reading, he looks around the circle with a sarcastic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent, no one except me willing to meet his eyes, and I’m hoping that one of his peers will be the first to speak, condemning what he’s written not in the voice of authority—which my voice would inevitably be—but in the voice of his own community. A minute passes before I realize that his classmates don’t intend to respond, and so I call on a few students by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say that the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they think it’s not even worth responding to. Yet it has to be responded to, and so I ask Walter if he really believes that fucking a woman to death could be an expression of gratitude.

“Of course,” he says, “For the woman it’s the ultimate fulfillment, and for the man it’s the ultimate proof.”

“Of what?”

“Of manhood,” he responds, “Women would take tickets and stand in line to be with a man powerful enough to fuck them like that.” He says these words with a conviction I at first can’t think how to argue with, but then I wonder aloud if he would include his girlfriend or his future wife in that line of women.

“I’m not talking,” he says, “about doing this to someone I love. I’m talking about the pieces of trash you can pick up at the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hookers who do it for money, women who are asking for it.”

“Why,” I ask, “do they deserve to be murdered?”

“They’re whores,” he responds, “No one cares about them.”

I take a different tack, asking him if he’s ever killed anything other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he realizes that he’s talking about using his own body, his penis specifically, as a murder weapon and that the murder he says he would like to commit is not simply one in which his victim dies in his arms, but is also one in which he would feel against his own flesh the internal process of her dying.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

Trying again, I go back to what he said about not wanting to fuck to death a woman he loves and ask if he makes a distinction between the sex he would have for pleasure with that woman and the power he says he would like to experience of using sex to kill. Walter looks at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. “Power,” he says, “is pleasure.”

Class ends. As I’m putting my papers in my briefcase, Walter steps up to my desk. “Now that everyone else is gone,” he says, his voice full of conspiratorial camaraderie, “be honest. Wouldn’t it feel great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your buddies later and tell them you’d killed her with your dick?”

“No,” is all I can think to say.

“Sure, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to–I was in my thirties–but when you were younger, when you were an undergraduate, wasn’t fucking something you did so you could share it with your buddies, and impress them, and wouldn’t they have worshipped you if you told them you’d fucked someone to death?”

I decide that monosyllabic answers are the best way to deal with this line of questioning. “No,” I tell him again.

Walter waits a few seconds for me to say more. When I don’t, he mutters something under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathetic and excuse. Then he walks out, and it’s the last I see or hear of him until I get my final roster with a W for withdrawal next to his name. Of course there are many reasons why he might have had to withdraw from the class, but it’s hard for me not to think he did so because I wasn’t “man enough” to be his teacher.

///

In an episode of the long-and-deservedly-defunct TV series She-Wolf Of London, a very old man is brought into the hospital dying of unknown causes. The doctor on duty believes the old man is either senile or insane because he keeps insisting he is actually twenty-seven years old and that he was turned into an old man by a woman. As the doctor leaves, he orders a nurse to give the old man a sedative. Once the nurse and the old man are alone, however, she unzips her uniform to reveal black-lace lingerie, and the old man recognizes her as the woman who has aged him—one of what the viewers will later learn is a group of succubae who have opened an escort service in England’s capital city. As the old man looks on in helpless terror, the succubus begins to climb into the hospital bed where he is laying. As she does so, she reminds him in the voice of a predator enjoying the powerlessness of its prey that all he has to do is not want her and he will be able to live. All he has to do, in other words, is not have an erection and she will not be able to fuck him to death.

So, since I don’t want what I think is worth keeping to disappear into my filing cabinet forever, I have decided that I will start a series called Fragments from Evolving Manhood made up of just what the title says, though the posts may be edited if I think it is necessary. I decided to make this the first one because it is Passover, a holiday that, broadly speaking, is (or should be) about social justice but that is also about what it means to be Jewish in a world where being Jewish can get you killed.

***

A Full-Throated Protest Against Existence and the World

As a Jewish man, like it or not, my identity within the Jewish community as both a man and a Jew is defined by the fact of my circumcision. Even though I am Jewish first because my mother is Jewish, at least according to the tradition accepted by most of the Jewish communities in the world, I entered God’s covenant with Abraham, became fully a member of my own people, only after my foreskin was removed, and for the first fifteen or so years of my life, I romanticized the moment of that cutting. Imagining a bloodless ceremony saturated with self-conscious majesty, I saw my boy’s body wrapped warmly and securely in a blanket, held peacefully at ease in the lap of my Uncle Max, smiling drunk on the wine-soaked cloth I’d been given to suck on to dull the (as it was explained to me by my grandmother) very small pain I would feel. Prayers were uttered over my flesh, and after the cutting was done, my membership in the covenant, not to mention into the community of Jewish manhood, was celebrated with food and drink. I pictured myself being passed lovingly among the guests, cuddled and coddled as they talked about the man I would grow up to be.

When I turned sixteen, however, I witnessed an actual brit milah, or circumcision ceremony. The house was full of people. I could see in the room beyond the room where I mingled with the other guests the feast that had been laid out for after the cutting. People were chatting, joking, shaking hands with old friends, and making new acquaintances, but when the mohel—the man who performs Jewish circumcisions—arrived, the atmosphere became immediately serious. As he shook hands with the boy’s father and with those other men who would participate in the ceremony, the women left and the room grew quiet. The boy, bundled tightly in a blanket, was brought in and placed in the hands of the man who had been chosen for the honor of holding the child while the preliminary prayers were recited. Then, the boy was given to the sandek, the man upon whom had been bestowed the privilege of holding the infant in his lap when the cutting was actually done. My view was blocked as the older men crowded around so they could see, but I knew when the cut came because that little boy howled. A full-throated protest against existence and the world, his scream filled my ears, the room, the entire house with his pain.

The men smiled and laughed as if they did not hear the child’s voice. Above his wailing, they shouted mazel tov!—congratulations!—and shook hands with each other and with those who had participated in the ceremony. Some of them even began to sing. The boy’s screaming did not stop. I was taken to meet the child’s father. He smiled at me proudly, gripping my hand and, as his still shrieking son was carried from the room, steered me into the dining area where people were beginning to eat. This was not the peaceful ceremony I had imagined. This was hypocrisy, the sanctification and celebration through denial of the pain of the boy who’d just been cut, and also of the pain I had felt, and of the pain of every man in that house. I felt mocked, betrayed, and tremendously angry, but I had no words to express what I was feeling. Even now, having rejected circumcision in my own family, it’s hard to dismiss the ritual merely as the patriarchal marking that, at its roots, it is. Because whatever else that ritual might be, the history of the oppression of the Jews has made it also a sign of defiance, a bodily affirmation of Jewish (male) identity and Jewish (male) worth in the face of enormous persecution.

I put the word male in parentheses in the last sentence because, while circumcision marks only men and is therefore problematic from the point of view of gender equality within the Jewish tradition, I do not want to deny the courage that it took for Jewish mothers to continue to allow their sons to be circumcised, or for Jewish women to continue to value circumcision as a religious ritual, a physical mark and as a metaphor for the relationship between the Jews and their god at times when forcing a man to pull down his pants was one way that anti-semites would identify appropriate targets for their hatred and violence. In Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, for example, Yaffa Eliach tells a story that, whether it is completely true or only an embellished version of the truth, illustrates precisely what I mean. In the midst of a “children’s Aktion,” a massacre of Jewish children, the tale goes, a Jewish woman demanded of a Nazi soldier, “Give me [your] pocket knife!”

She bent down and picked up something…a bundle of rags on the ground near the sawdust. She unwrapped the bundle. Amidst the rags on a snow-white pillow was a newborn babe, asleep. With a steady hand she opened the pocket knife and circumcised the baby. In a clear, intense voice she recited the blessing of the circumcision. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us by thy commandments and hast commanded us to perform the circumcision.”

She straightened her back, looked up to the heavens, and said, “God of the Universe, you have given me a healthy child. I am returning to you a wholesome, kosher Jew.” She walked over to the German, gave him back his blood-stained knife, and handed him her baby on his snow-white pillow. (152)

I am that boy; that boy was me. Had I been alive during the time of the Nazis, they would have tried to kill me precisely for being “wholesome and kosher.” Yet while the violence that mother did to her son absolutely pales in comparison to the violence the Nazi intended to do to him, the story nonetheless omits the boy’s pain, glosses over the blood that must have stained the pillow, the mother’s hands and the German’s knife. It is that blood which haunts me, for my circumcision is my connection to that mother’s courage, to the courage of the men who circumcised and were circumcised at a time when a cut penis could have gotten them killed. Yet that blood is also about the making of men, and as long as the making of men requires such bloodshed, manhood will continue to require the spilling of blood as its proof.

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.

Her experience—how she came to be the confessor and healer of the men who abused her—is the one that the father talks about in the lines I quoted above, and it is also her experience that he uses to frame the tale in the first place:

The father replied, “Beware of lust, for lust
has made you very drunk. When a man locks
his heart in pursuit of sexual pleasure, he’ll pay
until the last penny of his being is gone.
A woman, however, whose conduct is like a man’s,
does not know such lust. I will tell you of one
who became in God’s court a leader of men
after she was left without her husband.”

It is, in other words, the woman from whom the father wants his son to learn. For in fending off the men who tried to rape her outright—most of whom die when God answers her prayers and saves her from them—and in refusing the men whose desire was not initially violent, who could have “comforted” her in her husband’s absence, the woman’s love and desire for her husband become a deeply spiritual love and desire for God that moves her to choose the life of a religious recluse. So pure is her devotion that God grants her the power of healing, which is why the men stricken with paralysis must seek her out. In the end, the woman is reunited with her husband, but she chooses to remain a recluse, making clear that she has left the world of her marriage, of merely carnal love, behind.

Nowhere, however—and here is another detail the son overlooks when he accuses his father of wanting to do away with sex—does the story suggest that the newly healed men should similarly disavow their sexual desire, even though it was their desire that got them into so much trouble. Rather, the story is an exhortation for the son to behave “like a man” in response to his own sexual feelings, the irony being, of course, that the character who models this behavior is a woman. In other words, while the depiction of sexuality in “The Tale of Marjuma” is entirely conventional—male heterosexuality is “active;” female heterosexuality is “passive”—there is an element of gender bending, implying that Attar does not see the sexual characteristics he is exploring as exclusively the purview of either men or women, though it does seem clear that he defines them as either male or female. Indeed, by the time this first “Discourse” between father and son is over, Attar has reframed the son’s desire for a beautiful woman as the desire for his own purified soul, suggesting that, in the realm of the spirit, a wholeness that embodies both male and female should be the goal.

Each of the “Discourses” in Ilahi-Nama plays with conventional expectations in similar ways. The magic the second son desires to master, for example, is reframed as the ability to turn the devil he carries in himself into a Muslim. Solomon’s ring, which the fourth son covets, becomes the capacity for being content with what one has. In each case, the frame story and the tales told within it command attention both for the sophistication of Attar’s narrative technique and the depths at which he is able to reveal the workings of the social and spiritual values at stake in the  sons’ desires. Whether or not one shares Attar’s spirituality, in other words, there is a lot to learn from what he wrote, not only about Iran’s history and culture, and about the possibilities of narrative, but also about ourselves and how we make meaning in the world—all of which makes a new translation of this little-known work both desirable and necessary.

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 naive. 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 naive 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.

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.

That “more or less,” of course, is important. Sometimes I was the one who initiated the sex we had, and sometimes she was; and I honestly don’t remember how many times “sometimes” actually means, but I am sure it was not a lot, at least not relative to how often we’d been fucking before we had this conversation. I also remember nothing of what we said to each other after these instances of “falling off the wagon,” though I am pretty sure that neither of us reproached the other. I do remember, though, that after each of those times I would tell myself it was the last one, and that I was disappointed in myself when that proved not to be the case.

Eventually–I don’t remember how much time passed exactly–my girlfriend told me she’d decided that if she got pregnant she would have an abortion, and we started having intercourse regularly again. Years later, however, in the fourth or fifth year of our relationship, in one of those let’s-talk-about-our-history-together conversations, she told me that she’d lied to me, that she’d always known she would not have an abortion if she got pregnant, and that she’d thought my plan had been to withhold intercourse as a way of pressuring her into having sex with no strings attached. She’d only said she would have an abortion, she explained, because she’d been convinced I was going to leave her if she did not eventually give me what she thought I wanted. She then went on to tell me that she’d realized a while back that she’d been wrong, that I had in fact been sincere in everything I told her, even if I had not always practiced what I’d been preaching. Indeed, given my behavior (I was not then, and I am not now, particularly proud of the “more or less” at the end of the paragraph before last) it’s hard to blame her for thinking the way she did. It didn’t, and doesn’t matter that I was not the only one who initiated the fucking we did when we were supposed to be abstaining. Every time I allowed it to happen, I was acting like the manipulative hypocrite she initially thought I was.

My girlfriend was right about one thing, though. I really wanted to mean what I said when I told her that it was more important to me not to put our relationship unnecessarily at risk than it was for me to have intercourse with her, and I really wanted to mean it when I said that stepping back from the fucking we were doing would not diminish either the pleasure or the meaningfulness of the sex we had. I was not a man who saw fucking as a way of accumulating notches on my belt; I did not, or at least I thought I did not, feel the connection between fucking and manhood that so many of my friends seemed to feel, whether they were out getting laid as often as they could or involved in a serious relationship. Sex, I thought I believed, was simply sex, a way of touching, of giving and taking pleasure in my own body and the body of my lover; and while genital fucking might be one aspect of that pleasure, it certainly wasn’t the only, or even the main way in which that pleasure could be shared. This, at least, was what I wanted my perspective on sex to be. Yet it very clearly was not, for I had been perfectly willing to put at risk a relationship I thought might develop into a real future so that I could fuck the woman I was in that relationship with. It didn’t matter who initiated it or that it was always consensual. It didn’t matter that when we did fuck it was a very rare exception to the rule of abstinence I had wanted us to follow; and , perhaps most important, in these terms, it didn’t matter that I wore a condom each and every time we did it.

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.

At that point, I began to wonder if she’d told me the truth about her own virginity. When I asked her, she said that she’d lied about being a virgin because she knew that just like every other guy I would want to think I was her first. She’d lost her virginity a couple of years earlier, she told me, when two guys from the neighborhood got her drunk and fucked her a couple of times each in a single night. Knowing what I know now about rape and sexual assault, I realize she might very well have been telling me the truth. At the time, though, I was so angry, not because she wasn’t a virgin–I didn’t give a shit about that–but because she’d lied to me, that I didn’t believe her. Her story felt more like either a play for my sympathy or an attempt to claim a kind of moral authority of suffering that would her put beyond critique. In any event, we broke up.

In the years that followed, I told this story to people that I knew and their reaction was surprisingly similar to my ex-girlfriend’s. Not only could they not fathom that I hadn’t wanted to have sex–one girl that I told soon after it happened kept congratulating me no matter how many times I told her that I did not feel congratulations were in order–but they found what I said about being confused and overwhelmed by the sensation to be unbelievable, and they accused me of trying to rationalize away my own responsibility. (Remarkably, there are people my own age who have that same response now, as if they really believe a boy of sixteen, whose entire experience of intercourse to that point consisted of pictures that he saw in magazines, would respond to a woman’s slipping his penis inside her with the composure of someone who’d been having sex for some time.) When I was in my junior year of college, though–which would make it around 1983–I told my story to a woman who looked at me when I was finished and said, “She date-raped you.”

Largely because the idea of a woman raping a man was so alien to me, I did not want to call what had happened rape, but this woman kept insisting: just because I didn’t say no didn’t mean I said yes; my girlfriend had not respected my boundaries; she had taken advantage of my ignorance and inexperience; and, to top it all off, she’d tried to blame it all on me. Eventually, I began to see things the way my friend on campus was telling me I should see them, and I started to think of myself as a date-rape survivor, which fit very neatly into another part of what was going on inside me: I was just beginning to accept, and to accept that I needed to come to terms with, the fact that I’d been sexually abused twice when I was a kid. So seeing what happened when I lost my virginity as date rape, recognizing that a woman could exploit me sexually no differently than a man, felt to me exactly right.

It took a long time before I started to question whether that woman in college was right to characterize my first sexual experience as date rape, and what motivated my reconsideration were the questions people asked me when they read what I’d been writing about the experience. They wanted to know why I didn’t make more explicit the implicit characterization of my girlfriend as a predator. That seemed right to me. If she’d raped me, then she was a predator and not to call her one was not only to be dishonest with myself; it was to collaborate in my own victimization. Yet every time I tried to write it that way, I failed. Because the truth that she was not a predator. Yes, she violated my boundaries; yes, she was manipulative and deceiving; but I don’t think she was trying to prey on me. Certainly, she was not a threat to me in the way that the men who molested me were, and so I could not honestly say that I’d survived my experience with her in the way that I had very obviously survived my experience with those men. Rather, I think my girlfriend was struggling, at least in part, with the question of how to be sexual with me, to show me her desire, to give me the benefit of her sexual experience, in a way that would not make her look “loose and easy;” and she wanted also, I think, to be respectful of what she understood to be the typical adolescent male stance towards sex. So she “gave me” what she was sure I really wanted, saving me from the embarrassment of admitting that I didn’t know what I was doing.

That she was clumsy in trying to navigate her way through all these issues is clear, and the result was that my trust and my boundaries were violated. At no time, however, did I feel that I was to her a conquest of any sort, not as the stereotypical notch on her bedpost, not as a victim on whom she’d chosen to prey; and so to suggest that what she did was at all analogous to what the men who molested me did, or what men do who rape women, or what female abusers do to their male victims, seems to me to misrepresent all of those experiences. It fails to distinguish between out-and-out predation and what happens when the social script you are used to following, that you have been taught you are supposed to follow, goes awry.

I sometimes wish I could talk again with the woman from my college who convinced me I was date-raped, not just because I would like to tell her that I think she did me a disservice, but because I would be interested to know if, like me, she sees thing differently today than she did back then.