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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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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)