Richard Jeffrey Newman

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The spot is very cle­verly done, but there are all kinds of mes­sa­ges here, both impli­cit and expli­cit, both con­for­ming to gen­der ste­reoty­pes and not, and I am won­de­ring what other peo­ple see and how they feel about it.

Jef­frey Gett­le­man, in this New York Times article, wri­tes about how three Evan­ge­li­cal Chris­tians from the Uni­ted Sta­tes–Scott Lively (click here to read quo­tes from his talk in Uganda), Caleb Lee Brun­didge and Exo­dus Inter­na­tio­nal board mem­ber Don Sch­mie­rer – are now trying to dis­tance them­sel­ves from an event in Uganda at which they spoke about “how to make gay peo­ple straight, how gay men often sodo­mi­zed tee­nage boys and how ‘the gay move­ment is an evil ins­ti­tu­tion’ whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a cul­ture of sexual pro­mis­cuity.’ The rea­son for their back­pe­da­ling is that the event con­tri­bu­ted to the cli­mate that led to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which would make homo­se­xua­lity a capi­tal crime. In a rhe­to­ri­cal move that is remar­kably simi­lar to the ways in which the reli­gious right tries to dis­tance itself from peo­ple who mur­der doc­tors that per­form abor­tions, each of these men or their orga­ni­za­tions has issued sta­te­ments about how their mes­sage is one of love and com­pas­sion, not hatred and vio­lence. Read the article and follow some of the links. Their hypoc­risy speaks for itself.

I do have to share, though, my favo­rite quote from Gettleman’s article. Refe­rring to the Ugan­dan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Sch­mie­rer says, “That’s horri­ble, abso­lu­tely horri­ble. Some of the nicest peo­ple I have ever met are gay peo­ple.” (Makes me won­der if any of them are Black.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wor­king The Dot­ted Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A friend of mine who does not like jazz – espe­cially anything that has a saxophone in it – told me once about a con­ver­sa­tion she and her ex-husband, a serious jazz-lover, had over din­ner with a cou­ple, the male half of which also loved jazz, while the female half felt simi­larly to my friend. This second woman defi­ned her dis­like by saying something along the lines of, “I don’t need to sit and lis­ten to a bunch of men mas­tur­ba­ting,” a refe­rence both to the empha­sis in jazz on the impro­vi­sed solo and to the fact that most jazz musi­cians – or maybe most well-known jazz musi­cians – seem to be men. My friend said she felt an imme­diate click of right­ness when her din­ner guest made this sta­te­ment, which led to a long dis­cus­sion about the com­pa­ri­son bet­ween music and sex, bet­ween impro­vi­sa­tion and solo sex – though, of course, jazz impro­vi­sa­tion is not usually done in soli­tude. I have writ­ten elsewhere about the con­nec­tion I made early on in my own sexual awa­ke­ning bet­ween the orches­tra­ting of sexual plea­sure during love­ma­king and music, but what my friend’s story made me think about was how, say, a cer­tain kind of jazz solo, where the musi­cian explo­res subtle nuan­ces of melody and har­mony, or the various ways in which you can slice up a beat to create dif­fe­rent rhyth­mic tex­tu­res, corres­ponds to the kind of mas­tur­ba­tion in which you use the plea­sure you are giving your­self to explore your­self, either through the fan­ta­sies that arise while you mas­tur­bate or through the dif­fe­rent kinds of awa­re­ness your solo love­ma­king gives you of your own body; and then I thought about how rock solos or blues solos or the large solo con­certs that Keith Jarrett once gave all have an ana­log in mas­tur­ba­tion, from the kind that is just a release of sexual ten­sion to the kind that is an affir­ma­tion in deep sad­ness and/or joy – and/or the entire range of emo­tions it is pos­si­ble to feel during sex, which means pretty much all the emo­tions of which human beings are capa­ble – of the fact that you are alive, which for me is what defi­nes the sound of the blues, to the kind that is large and com­plexly moti­va­ted and that you may never fully understand.

Mas­tur­ba­tion is, as all sex is, a wor­king through of who we are and how we feel about our­sel­ves, of what we wish for, of what we wish to avoid, of the his­tory of our bodies, of everything that makes us human in the capa­city of our bodies to expe­rience that huma­nity; and there is a way in which sex is the crea­tion of a sym­bol of that huma­nity: in the plea­su­res we move through on our way to orgasm, not because orgasm is the only and neces­sary goal of sex – though in mas­tur­ba­tion orgasm usually is the point – but because each orgasm, whether we are cons­cious of it or not, is something to which we have to give mea­ning, and mea­ning requi­res his­tory, not only the spe­ci­fic his­tory of the sen­sa­tions that brought you to this par­ti­cu­lar orgasm, but the lar­ger per­so­nal and cul­tu­ral his­tory that each of those sen­sa­tions taps into. I know I’ve had orgasms that chan­ged me. Some were soli­tary and some were sha­red, but all of them cap­tu­red a truth about myself that I nee­ded to face if I was going to grow, sexually and otherwise.

This sym­bo­lic aspect of sex – which may or may not be an accu­rate way of tal­king about these things, but which makes sense to me – reminds me as well of something I read a long time ago in Suzanne Langer’s book, Fee­ling and Form about how music is the sym­bo­lic repre­sen­ta­tion of the pro­cess of human emo­tion and that it is this sym­bol which the com­po­ser crea­tes on the page and that the per­for­mer plays into exis­tence when he or she per­forms; and so it occurs to me that sex, solo or other­wise, is the pla­ying into exis­tence of that part of our­sel­ves that is wai­ting to become, and some­ti­mes we will unders­tand what we are beco­ming in and through sex, and some­ti­mes sex is what opens us up to the fact that this unders­tan­ding is what we need to find.

So I am won­de­ring: What have peo­ple out there unders­tood? What have they found? Which are the orgasms that have chan­ged you?

Cross pos­ted on Alas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snappy Dance Thea­ter on You­Tube.

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

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