Richard Jeffrey Newman

It speaks for itself. It’s part of the Not Ever campaign.

At eleven, I am the youngest of eight boys lined up along one row of lock­ers in the oth­er­wise empty men’s room at the swim­ming pool to which the day camp we are attend­ing takes us every other day. Nor­mally, I’d be chang­ing with boys my own age, but a mix-up back at the camp grounds landed me on the bus with these guys, who are all twelve and thir­teen. I turn my back to them to hide the erec­tion that has taken hold of my body and which I am hav­ing dif­fi­culty fit­ting into my bathing suit. Despite my best efforts to remain incon­spic­u­ous, how­ever, my move­ments attract their atten­tion and one of them sneaks up behind me and looks over my shoul­der. “Hey,” his voice rings out metal­li­cally, “look at the size of Newman’s boner!”

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.

Unfor­tu­nately, I have not had the time to stay as cur­rent as I would like on the Pope’s alleged com­plic­ity, when he was a car­di­nal, in the Church’s cov­er­ing up and pos­si­bly enabling of the sex­ual abuse of boys by priests in Ger­many and the United States, and so I have not been able to write about it in an informed way. Nei­ther the sex­ual abuse of chil­dren nor its being swept under the rug such that per­pe­tra­tors are able to con­tinue abus­ing chil­dren is unique to the Catholic Church, of course, but, as a sur­vivor of such abuse myself, it is impos­si­ble for me not to iden­tify with the anger con­tained in this car­toon, which I found on Cagle Blogs.

ETA April 2, 2010: As Robert pointed out to me on Alas, the image of the priest on the right con­forms to neg­a­tive stereo­types of both priests and gay men and by post­ing this image with­out com­ment­ing on that fact I implic­itly endorsed that stereo­type. So let me say here that while I con­tinue to iden­tify with the anger in this car­toon, I think it is unfor­tu­nate that the anger found expres­sion in such a stereo­typ­i­cal image. Clearly the same point could have been made with a dif­fer­ent image.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sec­ond talking-about-sex moment that I remem­ber from yeshiva hap­pened when I was in 9^th. 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 20^th 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 11^th 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 8^th grade, I “went out” with one of the girls in my class. Not that we did much actual “going” any­where. We lived too far apart for that. Rather, “going out” was a sta­tus; we were a cou­ple; and when I told one of my friends at home that I had a girl­friend, his first ques­tion was, “Does she have big tits?”

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

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

///

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

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

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

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

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

The first poem I ever pub­lished was cho­sen by my best friend Adri­enne to be included in our 9^th grade year­book. I called it “Alone.”

Alone, always alone,
Star­ing always star­ing,
Out of a win­dow,
Never leav­ing it.
Watch­ing chil­dren,
And remem­ber­ing,
Yes, always remem­ber­ing,
What it was like,
When you were young,
Alone, always alone.

Adri­enne was the yearbook’s lit­er­ary edi­tor, and I still remem­ber the anx­i­ety I felt when she told me she’d cho­sen this poem to pub­lish. Indeed, when I read this poem now, I can still remem­ber how deeply painful the lone­li­ness it describes was to me and the con­vic­tion that I was, some­how, some­where inside myself, as old as the speaker of the poem sounds. I was scared of the respon­si­bil­ity entailed in mak­ing the expe­ri­ence in the poem avail­able to any­one who wanted to read it. They could hold me account­able for what I’d writ­ten, ask me to explain myself, sub­ject my words to a kind of scrutiny I asso­ci­ated with the court­room: Was I telling the truth in this poem or was I lying? I also remem­ber, though, the way that writ­ing the poem seemed to give sub­stance what was going on inside me, mak­ing it real to me in a way that I had never before felt real to myself, and I guess I was also afraid that this real­ity was still too new and vul­ner­a­ble to made public.

Then Adri­enne told me about how the poem made her feel. (Unfor­tu­nately, I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of what she said.) For the first time, some­one I cared about was tak­ing my writ­ing seri­ously as more than the prod­uct of an overly self-indulgent ado­les­cent mind. She thought I had some­thing to say and that helped give me the courage to say it. It’s not that I think I would not have become a writer with­out Adrienne’s sup­port, but it was largely because Adri­enne took my writ­ing seri­ously that I came to dis­cover the mak­ing of poems as a way not only of com­ing to terms with the life dif­fi­cul­ties I faced at the time, but also of cre­at­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties of being that had never before occurred to me.

I needed those pos­si­bil­i­ties of being des­per­ately. I’m always a lit­tle reluc­tant to write about this part of how I became a poet because I still have some resid­ual fear, even after all these years of being a poet, that I will sound either like I should be bar­ing my soul on a TV talk show or like I am trum­pet­ing the ther­a­peu­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties of poetry, and not like some­one for whom becom­ing a poet was, con­cretely, and in ways I am still learn­ing about, a mat­ter of sur­vival. I don’t mean to sound high­fa­lutin. Sim­ply put, writ­ing poetry taught me to believe I had a voice I could call my own, that because I could hear myself in my poems, and because — as I began to show my work to more and more peo­ple like my friend Adri­enne — oth­ers could hear me as well, I was not, in the core of my being, the invis­i­ble boy I thought I was; and I thought I was invis­i­ble largely because of the vio­lence and sex­ual abuse I suf­fered at the time.

Per­haps under­stand­ably, vio­lence and abuse, sex­u­al­ity and gen­der, our  bod­ies and how we live in them, have all become cen­tral con­cerns of my work. I called my first book of poems The Silence Of Men because the silence I had to break in order to write poetry in the first place was the par­tic­u­larly male one that makes it so dif­fi­cult indi­vid­u­ally and cul­tur­ally for men to speak hon­estly about pre­cisely those cen­tral con­cerns. In 2002, I gave a talk in New York City as part of a panel at The Sophia Cen­ter on poetry and spir­i­tu­al­ity in which I spoke more dis­cur­sively about the rela­tion­ship between and among the sex­ual abuse I sur­vived, my writ­ing and my own spir­i­tu­al­ity. I don’t want to repeat here what I have already said in that piece, which is called “The Rec­ti­fi­ca­tion Of Names,” but you can read it here on my blog if you’re interested.

In 1990, I pub­lished a poem in Five Fin­gers Review #8/9 called “To Carve A Shape Through Silence.” It was my first attempt to write about my friend Joey’s sui­cide and to con­nect my grief at his death to how I felt about — or, rather, to try­ing to fig­ure out how I felt about — my father and the fact that he was no longer a part of my life, and then to con­nect those two emo­tional expe­ri­ences to my writ­ing. There are two stro­phes from that poem that have stayed with me, and I sup­pose that, together, they form a kind of ars poet­ica. Here is the first one:

Writ­ing is like that. These lines
on the page, the sound
I imag­ine of my lan­guage
in the hol­low of your ears,
how a sen­tence never dies, but seeps
into us, until,
like soil, we turn it out again,
use­ful and alive.

And here is the sec­ond one:

Learn­ing to write poems
has been eas­ier than lov­ing peo­ple
and harder than count­ing syl­la­ble.
But words grow
and sen­tences shape
time into mean­ing, and learn­ing
to let that hap­pen
has been learn­ing to shape my body
(and I am my body)
into some­where I can live.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Update: I have decided to take the text of this post down until I have a chance to revise and repost it. The com­ments the post has received at Alas have con­vinced me that, as I said in com­ment #19, my words are both con­jur­ing things I do not intend and fail­ing to make dis­tinc­tions that I do intend, and this weak­ness in the writ­ing means that what I want to say, the ques­tions I want to ask and explore are not only not get­ting across, but are being mis­rep­re­sented. It’s not so much that I think the revi­sion will change the mind of any­body who has posted a crit­i­cal com­ment, but that, at least, the crit­i­cism will be directed at what I actu­ally mean to say, not the unin­tended impli­ca­tions of my hav­ing said it not as well as I should have. Hope­fully, I will have that revi­sion up within the next week or so.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

The stu­dents in a reme­dial com­po­si­tion class I’m teach­ing dur­ing my sec­ond semes­ter as a col­lege pro­fes­sor are read­ing aloud and com­ment­ing on fables they’ve writ­ten over the week­end. The prose is awk­ward and ungram­mat­i­cal, but I’m impressed with the imag­i­na­tive effort some 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, asks if we’d like to hear his story. Yes, I say, of course.

At the cen­ter of Walter’s nar­ra­tive, which takes place far in the future, is a very pow­er­ful drug lord whose orga­ni­za­tion has been infil­trated by a top female nar­cotics agent pos­ing as a pros­ti­tute. When the dealer’s lover, who is also a pros­ti­tute in his sta­ble, learns that the oper­a­tion has been com­pro­mised, she tells him imme­di­ately. The dealer con­ceives a plan that uses his lover to expose the spy, who is then tor­tured slowly to death. To express his grat­i­tude, the dealer takes his lover to be, 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 is will­ing to meet his eyes, but I am hop­ing that one of his class­mates will speak first, con­demn­ing what he’s writ­ten not in the voice of author­ity – which my voice inevitably will be – but in the voice of his peers. A minute passes in silence before it becomes clear that his fel­low stu­dents 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 the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they it’s not worth respond­ing to. To me, though, a response feels absolutely nec­es­sary. Wal­ter, like all the other stu­dents in the class, is just out of high school. I do not want to let pass what seems to me to be real teach­able moment, and so I ask Wal­ter if he really believes that fuck­ing a woman to death could be an expres­sion of gratitude.

“Absolutely,” he says, with­out a hint of irony in his voice. “For the woman it’s the ulti­mate ful­fill­ment, and for the man it’s the ulti­mate proof.”

“Of what?” I ask him.

“Of man­hood.” His tone indi­cates that he’s sur­prised I even have to ask. “Women would buy 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 counter, 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 in the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hook­ers who do it for money. Women who are ask­ing for it.”

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

“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.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

So I ask if he makes a dis­tinc­tion between the sex he would have for plea­sure – pre­sum­ably with a woman he loves – and the power he says he would like to expe­ri­ence using sex to kill. Wal­ter looks at me like I’m an idiot. “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, “come on, be hon­est. Wouldn’t it be great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your bud­dies later and tell them you killed her with your dick?”

“No,” is all I can think to say.

“Sure, okay, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to, 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?”

Since it’s even more clear now than it was dur­ing class that Wal­ter is less inter­ested in really engag­ing the ideas he is espous­ing than in “out­ing” me as “one of the boys,” I decide that mono­syl­labic answers are the best way to deal with him. “No,” I say 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, and he walks out, and that’s the lest I see or hear of him until I get my final ros­ter with a W for with­drawal next to his name.

///

The encounter I have just described took place more than fif­teen years ago. In the sev­eral years imme­di­ately fol­low­ing my dis­cus­sion with Wal­ter, I often shared what he’d said with my friends and col­leagues, male and female, and I always found it inter­est­ing that their responses fell, for the most part, along the same lines as my stu­dents’ responses did. On the one hand were those who dis­missed Wal­ter as “crazy,” what­ever they meant by that term (and some sug­gested that he really ought to be insti­tu­tion­al­ized), and, on the other hand, there were those who saw him as not worth the energy it would to respond to him in the first place. The ease with which these responses were almost always given, how­ever, always left me a lit­tle uncom­fort­able, because it seemed – and still seems – to me that each of those answers too eas­ily dis­misses the ques­tion of how Wal­ter came to feel the way he did in favor of a very glib under­stand­ing of who he must be based on what he said. Yet it is pre­cisely the ques­tion of how that haunted me most, and that I think con­tin­ues to be some­thing men don’t talk about enough, not because I think answer­ing it lets Wal­ter off the hook, but because the inte­rior expe­ri­ence Wal­ter claimed to have /desire of his own gen­i­tals, of my gen­i­tals too, as a weapon feels as inac­ces­si­ble to me as the inte­rior expe­ri­ence of bio­log­i­cal femaleness.

///

One of the let­ters from Pent­house mag­a­zine – I think it was from the “Happy Hooker” col­umn – that has stayed with me since I first read it when I was a teenager was writ­ten by a woman who claimed to be describ­ing 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, the 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.

The woman’s let­ter describes a rape. She didn’t present it as any­thing else – except to make clear that it was moti­vated by revenge – and she never implied that the man enjoyed what she and her friend did to him. 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. What I most iden­ti­fied with in this story, I think, what led me always away from the sce­nario I began with of trust in my imag­ined lovers and the plea­sure they wanted to give me, was the man’s expe­ri­ence of hav­ing the plea­sures of his body turned against him, for I knew I could be shamed in that way as well, that my body was always the poten­tial source of my own defeat.

///

A sim­i­lar theme is played out 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 his hos­pi­tal bed, and, 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 is not have an erec­tion and she will not be able to fuck him to death.

///

The story Wal­ter wrote can be under­stood as a kind of pre-emptive strike against the fear of women expressed in this scene, as well as in my response to the Pent­house let­ter I described above. This under­stand­ing is not the same thing, how­ever, as know­ing how Wal­ter and I – or at least I, since I can­not speak for Wal­ter – came to feel this fear in the first place, and I’m focus­ing here on the ques­tion of how rather than why because it seems to me that why has already been answered, author­i­ta­tively and at length, by the women’s move­ment: Men fear the power of women’s freed, sex­ual and oth­er­wise, because the power of women’s free­dom, sex­ual and oth­er­wise, rep­re­sents the undo­ing of male dom­i­nant power and priv­i­lege, with the cor­re­spond­ing col­lapse of the myth of male invul­ner­a­bil­ity and the man­hood men are expected to achieve in order to per­pet­u­ate that illusion.

Acknowl­edg­ing this fear, obvi­ously, is not the same thing as val­i­dat­ing the cul­ture of male dom­i­nance that pro­duces it. At the same time, how­ever, not to acknowl­edge the emo­tional valid­ity to men of that culture’s exis­tence is to miss what I think is a cen­tral ques­tion that has to be asked, that men have to ask of our­selves, if we want not to learn not to be afraid: When you con­sider that pain, humil­i­a­tion and/or sub­ju­ga­tion are almost always the con­se­quences for a man who has failed in his man­hood, is it any won­der that so many of us strive to use our bod­ies so that they can never be used against us?

///

A col­league with whom I used to have lunch on a reg­u­lar basis would occa­sion­ally bring her three-year-old son along. Usu­ally, John was a very ani­mated lit­tle boy, ask­ing ques­tions, mak­ing a mess, and doing in gen­eral what three year old boys do to main­tain them­selves as the focus of atten­tion. On this par­tic­u­lar after­noon, how­ever, John sat next to his mother in absolute silence. Both of his hands were ban­daged because of a fall he’d taken ear­lier in the day, and he was still in pain, which made it dif­fi­cult for him to hold the small pieces his mother cut for him from the pizza we’d just ordered for lunch. From time to time, when the look of frus­tra­tion on her son’s face became espe­cially acute, my friend would stop our con­ver­sa­tion, pick up a small square of food and hold it to his mouth, not con­tin­u­ing with what she’d been say­ing until he’d chewed and swal­lowed the whole thing. When we were done, and John stood up so his mother could put his coat on, he held his engauzed palms out to her, silently ask­ing for com­fort. My friend squat­ted in front of her son and asked in a voice filled with empa­thy, “What’s the mat­ter John? Does it hurt?” When John nod­ded his head, she stroked his cheek with her fin­gers and said, “I know sweetie, but you’re a man, right? You can take it.” John set his mouth in a firm, thin line, and he again moved his head up and down. Then his mother helped him slip his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, zipped him up and motioned to me that we were ready to leave.

As we walked out, I thought of all the count­less times, and all the dif­fer­ent painful and humil­i­at­ing ways in which I was, in which John would be, in which boys rou­tinely are, asked or told, implic­itly or explic­itly, by both men and women, boys and girls, “to take it.” I’m not being melo­dra­matic here. I have no doubt that my friend said what she said with­out even think­ing about it, and I don’t want to blow out of pro­por­tion this one clearly minor appeal to her son’s incip­i­ent man­li­ness. The fact is, how­ever, that she could’ve helped her son under­stand that we can­not always expect peo­ple to com­fort us when we are in pain with­out putting his man­hood at stake. Or, more to the point, she could have given him a hug with­out mak­ing any com­ment at all. (At the time this hap­pened, I did not have a child; now that I do, well can I imag­ine that she might have been tired of a day’s worth of com­fort­ing him, and all she wanted was a lit­tle break.) That she did not, that even in a sit­u­a­tion as insignif­i­cant as this one, John’s man­hood became an issue, how­ever small, indi­cates how deeply and unself­con­sciously, per­haps even unwill­ingly, my friend val­ued the line sep­a­rat­ing the men from the boys.

Another exam­ple: A good friend told me that when her son was eleven she responded to his fail­ing grades by explain­ing that when he got older he would have to sup­port a fam­ily, just like his father, so he’d bet­ter start learn­ing respon­si­bil­ity now. “All his boy­ish inno­cence,” she said, ” seemed to drain right out of him. Every­thing was home­work, home­work, home­work. He doesn’t even play with his toys any­more. I wanted to improve his grades, not turn him into a lit­tle man.”

No doubt, and hope­fully, as he real­ized just how far off the adult­hood his mother had threat­ened him with really was, this boy even­tu­ally went back to being a kid just like any other kid. Indeed, my point here is not that these two inter­ac­tions in and of them­selves rep­re­sent some per­ma­nent harm done to this boys, but rather that the inter­ac­tions them­selves rep­re­sent only one small part of the man­hood train­ing boys receive and that each boy’s response, even in such rel­a­tively minor sit­u­a­tions, cor­re­sponded per­fectly to the man­hood ideal: he sucked it up and showed that he could “take it.”

In Love, Sex, Death and the Mak­ing of the Male, Ros­alind Miles points out that the old say­ing “boys will be boys” can be read not only as it usu­ally is, a state­ment of res­ig­na­tion in the face of inevitabil­ity, but also as an imper­a­tive: Boys will be boys. The
degree to which this sec­ond read­ing is the more accu­rate one becomes fully evi­dent when you look at the con­se­quences of not “being a boy.” Ask any man, and if he’s hon­est enough to tell you, he will have at least one story, and prob­a­bly more than one, of how he was hurt when he was a child for not being aggres­sive enough, ath­letic enough, stoic enough, sex­u­ally objec­ti­fy­ing of girls enough, sex­u­ally pow­er­ful enough, com­pet­i­tive enough, loyal enough to his bud­dies and so on. The hurt the man tells you about may have been phys­i­cal, emo­tional or both; the par­tic­u­lar story he tells you may involve some­thing rel­a­tively minor, as in the cases of the two boys I just told you about, or some­thing deeply seri­ous and even life threat­en­ing, like my friend who was sex­u­ally assaulted and raped by boys he’d through were his friends just because he was the weak­est and least mas­cu­line among them.

Yet despite the rad­i­cal dis­tance we usu­ally assumes sep­a­rates a victim/survivor from her or his vic­tim­iz­ers, there is one aspect of his rape that my friend and those raped him have in com­mon, that all boys and men in our cul­ture have in com­mon: their ideas of them­selves as men – and my friend’s friend’s behav­ior was noth­ing if it was not about their ideas of them­selves as men – are a direct a result of their con­fronta­tion with the vio­lence and aggres­sion con­sid­ered to be the nor­mal, nat­ural and nec­es­sary con­text in which man­hood is formed. None of us can escape this. We may choose to embrace the vio­lence or reject it; we may find some way of accom­mo­dat­ing our­selves to it, or we may devote our lives to elim­i­nat­ing it, but there is now way we can avoid con­fronting it. This con­fronta­tion takes place so per­va­sively through­out our lives – how do I respond to the pos­tur­ing of the male stu­dent who is chal­leng­ing me about nor accept­ing his late paper, or to the neigh­bor whose threat­en­ing body lan­guage belies the polite tone of his voice as he argues with me about who saw the park­ing spot first, or to my son’s insis­tence that he wants a “boy’s only’ birth­day party – that the ques­tion of how or why boys come to value man­hood so highly is dwarfed by the ques­tion Miles asks, “[H]ow do they avoid it?” (58)