This is the title of a PhD thesis written by Dr. Amanullah De Sondy, who has just accepted a position at Ithaca College. According to Joan McAlpine, who profiled Dr. De Sondy for The Sunday Times,several leading publishers are competing to buy the thesis and publish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should consider the title she suggested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very interested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:
It challenges assumptions about what it means to be a Muslim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patriarch with several wives and dozens of children. There are dysfunctional families in Islamic tradition, he says, prophets without father figures and revered holy men who led “effeminate” lifestyles. Most controversially, he challenges homophobia in Islam. “Homosexuality is not incompatible with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The important thing is to link it with living a good life and creating a good society.”
Later in the article, De Sondy is quoted as saying:
“In the 16th-century Punjab, there lived a Sufi saint and poet called Shah Hussain who is greatly venerated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pilgrims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore district even today, but some people want to rewrite history, saying the boy was in fact a girl.”
He also points to the presence of “antinomian Sufis in the Indian subcontinent — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.
In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the conservatives who disagree with him use – that of God’s decision to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhabitants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] disapproval of the rape of young boys that was happening in the place,” which is very different from saying that God disapproves of homosexuality.
I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the complexities of what Islam has to say about homosexuality, but I do know that scholarship like this, which at the very least highlights the degree to which ideas about masculinity, manhood and male sexuality are contested ideological territory, showing that the traditional view is only one of the possibilities that exist, is very, very important.
[After Roe vs. Wade,] the clinics also truly came to stand alone. In 1973, hospitals made up 80 percent of the country’s abortion facilities. By 1981, however, clinics outnumbered hospitals, and 15 years later, 90 percent of the abortions in the U.S. were performed at clinics. The American Medical Association did not maintain standards of care for the procedure. Hospitals didn’t shelter them in their wings. Being a pro-choice doctor came to mean referring your patients to a clinic rather than doing abortions in your own office.
This was never the feminist plan. “The clinics’ founders didn’t intend them to become virtually the only settings for abortion services in many communities,” says Carole Joffe, a sociologist and author of a history of the era, “Doctors of Conscience,” and a new book, “Dispatches From the Abortion Wars.” When the clinics became the only place in town to have an abortion, they became an easy mark for extremists. As Joffe told me, “The violence was possible because the relationship of medicine to abortion was already tenuous.” The medical profession reinforced the outsider status of the clinics by not speaking out strongly after the first attacks. As abortion moved to the margins of medical practice, it also disappeared from residency programs that produced new doctors. In 1995, the number of OB-GYN residencies offering abortion training fell to a low of 12 percent.
“Under pressure and stigma, more doctors shun abortion,” wrote David Grimes, a leading researcher and abortion provider of 38 years, in a widely cited 1992 medical journal article called “Clinicians Who Provide Abortions: The Thinning Ranks.” In a 1992 survey of OB-GYNs, 59 percent of those age 65 and older said that they performed abortions, compared with 28 percent of those age 50 and younger. The National Abortion Federation started warning about “the graying of the abortion provider.” In the decade after Roe, the number of sites providing abortion across the country almost doubled from about 1,500 to more than 2,900, according to the Guttmacher Institute. But by 2000 the number shrank back to about 1,800 — a decline of 37 percent from 1982.
There’s another side of the story, however — a deliberate and concerted counteroffensive that has gone largely unremarked. Over the last decade, abortion-rights advocates have quietly worked to reverse the marginalization encouraged by activists like Randall Terry. Abortion-rights proponents are fighting back on precisely the same turf that Terry demarcated: the place of abortion within mainstream medicine. This abortion-rights campaign, led by physicians themselves, is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one. Its leaders have built residency programs and fellowships at university hospitals, with the hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.
Genetic engineers, move over: the latest scheme for creating children to a parent’s specifications requires no DNA tinkering, but merely giving mom a steroid while she’s pregnant, and presto — no chance that her daughters will be lesbians or (worse?) ‘uppity.’
Or so one might guess from the storm brewing over the prenatal use of that steroid, called dexamethasone. In February, bioethicist Alice Dreger of Northwestern University and two colleagues blew the whistle on the controversial practice of giving pregnant women dexamethasone to keep the female fetuses they are carrying from developing ambiguous genitalia. (That can happen to girls who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disorder in which unusually high prenatal exposure to masculinizing hormones called androgens can cause girls to develop a deep voice, facial hair, and masculine-looking genitalia.) The response Dreger got from physicians and scientists who were outraged over this unapproved use of dexamethasone caused her to dig deeper into the scientific papers of the researcher who has promoted it.
Serious domestic/intimate partner violence trigger warning in the first few paragraphs of this post.
Sitting on my bed with her back against the wall, my lover — who’s come to visit during my first year of graduate school — tells me that she’s at last made her decision: she’s going to study fine art. I should be happy for her, but I’m suddenly listening from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leaving her mouth no longer coalesce into meaningful units. There is a moment of blankness, and then, as if someone else has taken control of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself getting up from the chair where I’ve been sitting, putting one hand around my lover’s throat, holding her against the wall, and slapping her face back and forth with my other hand until she is senseless and bloody. I see myself screaming in her ear, letting her drop to the floor, and kicking her in the stomach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.
Unaware that I’ve stopped hearing what she has to say, my lover continues talking, gesturing to emphasize the importance of her words, imploring me with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the violence in my mind begins again. Realizing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bathroom. Locking the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. I wait till I feel certain the vision will not return, and I flush the toilet and go back to the bedroom where, thankfully, my lover notices it’s time for me to go to class. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, knowing that I need some time alone to sort out what has just happened, tell her I have work to do in the library and therefore won’t be back until just before we’re supposed to go out for dinner.
The afternoon sun is warm on my face, and so I decide to walk to class instead of taking the bus. After a couple of blocks, however, again from out of nowhere, I see once more the images of myself doing violence to the woman I love, and again it is as if some outside force has taken control of my brain and forced me to watch. Nearly paralyzed with fear and guilt, I find a bench and sit down. There’s no way I want to chance having this vision start again while I’m in class, so I go straight to the library instead. My idea, as I settle into one of the chairs on the second floor, is to write out what I’m feeling, a strategy that has helped me figure things out in the past. When I put my pen to the page, however, what comes out of me is the beginning of a poem:
I want a bearded man, shirtless,
in faded jeans, to come one barefoot night
and take me in his mouth.
Like the violence I saw in my head, the words seem to come from someone other than myself, but the shock of recognition I feel when I read them – not only did I write them; on some level, I meant them – is in direct contrast to the sense of alienation I experienced while waiting in my bathroom to make sure that when I went back to where my lover was waiting for me I would not do to her what I’d seen myself doing. I also realize I am suddenly calm, as if I have found what writing was supposed to help me look for, and I am certain – I don’t know how I know this, but I know this – that in these lines lies the key to understanding why that vision of violence came to me.
When a good friend of mine who is not Jewish found out that her first child was going to be a boy, I asked her if she intended to have him circumcised.
“Yup,” she answered, smiling.
“Do you know how unnecessary and painful the operation is?”
Same smile, same answer, “Yup.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because I will not have my son looking like a freak! I’ve been with guys who weren’t circumcised, and they were, well, disgusting.” She shook her head and wrinkled her nose at the memory. “They told me stories about what it was like to be different in the locker room. I just don’t want my son to have to go through that.”
“What if the knife slips?”
Back to the original smile, “It won’t. It almost never does.”
I asked her if she’d ever actually seen a circumcision. She said no, and so I asked if she planned to be present when her son was cut. Given how strongly she felt, I suggested, it seemed to be only right that she should be, if only so she could answer any questions her son might have when he got older. She closed her eyes and raised her palms between us to ward off the image I’d just conjured, “I, I, I couldn’t. There’s no way I’d be able to let them do it.”
“But then why have it done at all?”
“Look, my son will be circumcised!” Her tone made it clear the conversation was over. “He will have a normal penis and a normal sex life, and I will thank you in the future to mind your own business.”
///
I remember how shocked I was – I was a college freshman – when my friend Pierre turned around in the locker room after a basketball game and displayed an organ hanging between his legs that looked more to me like an elephant’s trunk than a man’s sexual apparatus. I’d never seen an uncircumcised penis before. Well, no, strictly speaking, that’s not true. I know now that at least some of the men in the heterosexual pornography I’d watched were uncircumcised, but since I only ever saw those penises when they were erect, the skin the women on the screen would occasionally pull up and down over the glans of those organs appeared to me in my ignorance to be skin no different than what I had left over after my circumcision (which was almost non-existent); I just assumed that, for whatever reason, those men had more of it. So I guess the accurate thing to say is that I’d never seen an uncircumcised penis that was not erect, and my first response to seeing Pierre’s was that it looked feminine, effeminate. Or maybe emasculated is a more precise term. Either way, what I felt was a mixture of pity and disgust.
I went back to my room and thought hard about my reaction. Pierre was a good friend and it troubled me that I should be repulsed by his body. It took a while, but I finally realized that what made Pierre’s penis seem so alien to me was not merely the covering his foreskin provided; it was that his foreskin made it impossible for me to picture Pierre’s penis erect. Not that I thought he didn’t have erections; I knew he had a girlfriend with whom he was having sex. Rather, I couldn’t imagine what Pierre’s erect penis looked like, couldn’t fathom the mechanism by which the foreskin moved out of the way, making it possible for him to enter a woman’s vagina and experience the pleasures of sex, including orgasm and ejaculation, that depend upon an exposed glans. It was this inability to envision Pierre penetrating a woman or ejaculating that made his penis seem to me somehow less than masculine than mine – because, of course, I assumed that my penis, cut as it was, was the way a penis was supposed to be.
Ironically, in cultures that practice circumcision as an adolescent rite of passage, removing the foreskin is often equated with removing the last vestige of maternal, meaning feminine, influence. Not to have it removed, even to flinch while it is being removed — signifying fear and the inability to withstand pain — is to reveal oneself as clinging to the feminine, unwilling to separate from one’s mother, and therefore unworthy of manhood. Since we in the United States circumcise our boys as infants – and I am talking here about routine medical circumcisions, not the Jewish ritual of brit milah, which needs to be discussed in a different context – questions of fear and the inability to withstand pain are irrelevant, but I think that the image of a covered glans as less than masculine is nonetheless very present in our cultural imagination. Or, to put it more precisely, I think that the routine medical circumcision of infant boys makes their bodies congruent with our culture’s ideal of masculinity as clean, hard, always ready for action, and always, implicitly if not explicitly, on the offensive.
To start, circumcision quite literally turns a boy’s penis inside out, making what is essentially an internal part of his body, the glans, an external one, and since the exposed glans is what first enters a woman during vaginal intercourse, it is hard not to read the circumcised penis as a penis always prepared, if not completely ready at any given moment in time, to penetrate – representing in the flesh the patriarchal heterosexual norm that values a man’s “getting it in her” over almost every other aspect of sex. Moreover, the cleaner and dryer penis that circumcision creates has neither the odor nor the taste associated with the lubricating discharges of both its uncircumcised counterpart and women’s genitalia. Just like the adolescent rite-of-passage circumcisions that I mentioned above, in other words, the routine medical circumcision performed on boys here in the US removes from an infant’s penis that which makes it similar to a vagina – except that, because we circumcise our boys when they are infants, a cut penis will feel to those boys as they grow up as if it were the penis with which they were born, providing the illusion of a biological proof that patriarchy’s gender dichotomies – embodied in the dry, clean and therefore “civilized” penis versus the wet, messy and therefore “savage” vagina – are indeed “natural,” inhering in male and female bodies and not constructed through the processes of cultural production.
Once these boys understand that they were circumcised, of course, the cat – so to speak – ought to be out of the bag, but the idea that a circumcised penis is the normal, natural and therefore healthy penis, is given the weight of medical authority not only through doctor’s promoting the procedure’s ostensible health benefits (which I will discuss in more detail elsewhere), but also through the medical images that shape our understanding of what our bodies ought to look like. In many of those images, at least here in the United States, the foreskin is either entirely absent or, if it is present, not labeled. Here are two online examples:
Shands HealthCare is a private, not-for-profit organization affiliated with the University of Florida. The A.D.A.M. Multimedia Health Encyclopedia on its website includes this image of the male reproductive system in which the glans is exposed and in which the foreskin is not even labeled. (To my eye, it’s ambiguous whether the bunched skin at the base of the glans is supposed to be the foreskin or not.)
Visible Productions, a Colorado-based multimedia communications company, which boasts, according to its website, the “world’s most extensive library of 3D digital models [of the human body]” based on data from the Visible Human Project. Do a keyword search on “penis” and you get nine results, none of which show an intact penis. Searches on “foreskin” and “prepuce” return no results.
In Five Bodies, John O’Neill writes that the “operation of political and economic power does not aim simply to control passive bodies or to restrain the body politic, but to produce docile bodies” (italics in original), bodies which accept the truths of power as self-evident and not in need of examination, motivating the people inhabiting those bodies to govern themselves in congruence with those truths. Routine infant male circumcision is a perfect example. By performing the operation on infants whose gender identities have not yet formed, medicine recreates as physically embodied medical facts a set of male dominant cultural beliefs about masculinity — always ready for sex, dry, clean, civilized — and then teaches us that these are the benchmarks against which we need to measure men’s genital and sexual health. To argue this, however, is not to argue that circumcision causes male dominant sexual behavior in men; nor is it to predict that cultures which medically circumcise will be inherently more male dominant than those which don’t. Rather, it is to suggest that those cultures which do medically circumcise infant boys have chosen that procedure as one of the ways they give men bodies in which patriarchal masculinity and male dominant behavior feel natural.
Clearly, then, ending the routine circumcision of infant boys will not bring patriarchy to its knees, but pulling at the threads by which the procedure is woven into our cultural fabric as necessary, or at least desirable, does reveal some of the more insidious ways in which patriarchy itself is woven into men’s bodies as the natural state of things; and once that weave is revealed as precisely not natural, we can start to imagine not just a different kind of pattern, but even a different way to use the loom on which the fabric is woven. Think objectively for a moment. Leave aside, if you can, the medical justifications and rationalizations, the mythical content and historical imperatives we are taught to impose on the practice of medical circumcision, and think simply in terms of actual events. A boy is born. Sometime between his entrance into the world and his first two weeks of life, he is taken away from his mother, strapped down with full physical restraint in a room full of strangers, and his foreskin, a sensitive, functional and still developing part of his body is pulled away from the head of his penis and amputated – sometimes with and sometimes without anesthesia. He has given no consent, has no awareness of the medical and/or cultural considerations that motivate the procedure, and he has little or no recourse, once the surgery has been performed, to change what has been done to him. There is no way to predict what effect his circumcision will have on him, but that is not the question we ought to be asking ourselves. Rather, we ought to be asking why we as a culture so despise the body with which he was born that we need so radically and so painfully to alter it, and then we need to be asking if that is the kind of society we really want to be.
In 1834, Sylvester Graham — inventor of the cracker that continues to bear his name — published a book called A Lecture to Young Men, in which he warned that masturbation would transform a boy who practiced it regularly into:
a wretched transgressor [who] sinks into a miserable fatuity, and finally becomes a confirmed and degraded idiot, whose deeply sunken and vacant, glossy eye, and livid shrivelled [sic] countenance, and ulcerous, toothless gums, and fetid breath, and feeble broken voice, and emaciated and dwarfish and crooked body, and almost hairless head — covered perhaps with suppurating blisters and running sores — denote a premature old age, a blighted body — and a ruined soul! (Quoted in Kimmel)
Graham, who was one of the most popular and successful of the non-medical writers on this subject, believed the male body was simply not equipped to handle “the convulsive paroxysms attending venereal indulgence” — read: ejaculation — and so even married men, whose sexual activity with their wives was certainly beyond the moral reproach usually associated with masturbation, had to be very careful not to overindulge – which for Graham meant more than once a month. Otherwise, they risked
Languor, lassitude, muscular relaxation, general debility and heaviness, depression of spirits, loss of appetite, indigestion, faintness and sinking at the pit of the stomach, increased susceptibilities of the skin and lungs to all the atmospheric changes, feebleness of circulation, chilliness, head-ache, melancholy, hypochondria, hysterics, feebleness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weakness of the lungs, nervous cough, pulmonary consumption, disorders of the liver and kidneys, urinary difficulties, disorders of the genital organs, weakness of the brain, loss of memory, epilepsy, insanity, apoplexy — and extreme feebleness and early death of offspring.… (Quoted in Kimmel)
Graham recommended dietary measures, specifically his crackers, to combat men’s temptation to pleasure. J. H. Kellogg, whose flakes were also originally developed and marketed as an anaphrodisiac, didn’t stop with food. In Plain Facts for Old and Young, published in 1888, Kellogg recommended a series of home remedies for masturbation, including bandaging a boy’s penis, covering it with a cage and tying the boy’s hands at night when he went to sleep. For particularly difficult cases, Kellogg recommended circumcision “without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if connected with the idea of punishment” (Quoted in Kimmel). Nor was Kellogg the only expert to suggest that pain was the best countermeasure to male masturbation. Other writers seemed to compete with each other to see who could come up with the cruelest form of intervention. Recommendations included applying leeches, punching a hole in the foreskin and inserting a metal ring, cutting the foreskin with jagged-edge scissors and applying a hot iron to a boy’s genitals.
At eleven, I am the youngest of eight boys lined up along one row of lockers in the otherwise empty men’s room at the swimming pool to which the day camp we are attending takes us every other day. Normally, I’d be changing with boys my own age, but a mix-up back at the camp grounds landed me on the bus with these guys, who are all twelve and thirteen. I turn my back to them to hide the erection that has taken hold of my body and which I am having difficulty fitting into my bathing suit. Despite my best efforts to remain inconspicuous, however, my movements attract their attention and one of them sneaks up behind me and looks over my shoulder. “Hey,” his voice rings out metallically, “look at the size of Newman’s boner!”
Like a pack of dogs that has been thrown a single piece of meat, the group surrounds me in a tight circle, while I stand there not moving, body pointing me into the air above the middle of the room, wishing I could vanish, that it would vanish, but no matter how much I will it, the damned thing will not go down.
“What are you, a homo!?”
“Other guys’ dicks must turn him on!”
“Wanna suck mine, queer!?”
The taunts continue for what seems like hours, though it is probably only a few minutes, and then the head counselor comes in and ushers us all out to the pool. I can’t believe he didn’t hear what the other boys were saying, but he acts as if he didn’t, barely looking at me as he shows me where the boys in my group have spread their towels.
Later that evening, while I’m getting ready for bed, I stand naked before the full-length mirror inside my door and tuck my penis out of sight between my legs. I’m not trying to imagine myself as a girl, but I am intrigued by the possibility of a body that does not have erections.
///
When I was a teenager, I read in Penthouse magazine a letter – I think it was in Xavier Hollander’s “Happy Hooker” column – in which a woman described how she and a friend took revenge on a man who’d tried to rape the friend. The writer of the letter arranged to meet the man at a disco, invited him to her apartment, and seduced him into being tied, spread-eagled, to her bed. Then the woman’s friend, who’d been waiting in another room, came in, and the two women teased the man sexually until he was begging them for release. In response, the women took out a razor and shaving cream, telling him that, if he ejaculated while they rubbed his penis, they would shave all the hair from his body. The letter went on to describe in great detail first the man’s pleading with them not to do it and then his efforts to keep himself from coming while the women took turns masturbating him. Finally, of course, he came, and the women shaved him, threatening to slice off his testicles if he didn’t lay still.
Now, of course, I understand not only that the letter might have been, that it most probably was, a complete fabrication, even that it might even have been written by a man, but also, assuming for the sake of argument that the events it relates actually happened, the fact that is was published in Penthouse means that its sole purpose was to feed, to shape and even to create the desires and fantasies of the boys and men like me who read the magazine. At the time, though, I read the letter naively, assuming it to be true – why, after all, would someone publish a letter that wasn’t? – and so it was clear to me that it described a rape. The woman who ostensibly wrote it didn’t present what she and her friend did to the man as anything else — except to make clear that it was motivated by revenge — and she never implied that he enjoyed it. Nonetheless, my sexual imagination was drawn to the story. For months, for years afterward, I fantasized about women tying me to a bed and creating in my flesh an arousal so all-encompassing that I too would be willing to beg for release. Yet no matter how hard I tried to imagine a conclusion other than the one in the letter, I always ended up the victim of some version of the revenge the writer and her friend took, and what I remember most about this now is how fully this ending short-circuited the fantasy, and when I say “fully short-circuited,” I mean fully and completely. If I was masturbating, I found it very hard to continue; if I was simply daydreaming, I’d have to stop and think of something else, not because I felt and was trying to avoid, or deny, the guilty, shameful pleasure that often accompanies “forbidden fantasies,” but rather because I was scared. I simply did not trust the women I imagined not to turn into the women described in the letter. More than that, though, I identified with their victim’s experience of having the pleasures of his body turned against him, and the knowledge that I could be shamed just as he had been shamed taught me only one thing: my body was always the potential weapon of my own defeat.
///
We’re sitting in a circle in a remedial composition class that I’m teaching. The students are reading aloud and commenting on fables they’ve written over the weekend. The prose is awkward and ungrammatical, though I am impressed with the imaginative effort some of my students have made. There’s a modernized version of Little Red Riding Hood, set in an upper class neighborhood with the most sought-after senior boy in the local high school taking the part of the wolf. There’s also a gender-reversed Sleeping Beauty, in which Princess Charming turns out to be the homeless woman who sleeps in the park. I’m about to move on to the next part of the lesson when Walter, who’d announced when we began that he wasn’t going to read what he’d written, asks whether I’d like to hear his story. Of course I say yes.
Walter’s narrative takes place in the future and involves a very powerful drug dealer whose organization has been infiltrated by a top female narcotics agent posing as a prostitute. When the dealer’s lover, who also works for him as a prostitute, learns that the operation has been compromised, she tells him immediately. Armed with this information, the dealer exposes the spy and has her tortured slowly and painfully to death. To express his gratitude, he takes his lover to bed, giving her, in Walter’s words, “the literal fuck of her life, pounding away until she was no longer breathing.” The story ends with a description of the lavish funeral the dealer gives her.
When Walter finishes reading, he looks around the circle with a sarcastic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent, no one except me willing to meet his eyes, and I’m hoping that one of his peers will be the first to speak, condemning what he’s written not in the voice of authority — which my voice would inevitably be — but in the voice of his own community. A minute passes before I realize that his classmates don’t intend to respond, and so I call on a few students by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say that the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they think it’s not even worth responding to. Yet it has to be responded to, and so I ask Walter if he really believes that fucking a woman to death could be an expression of gratitude.
“Of course,” he says, “For the woman it’s the ultimate fulfillment, and for the man it’s the ultimate proof.”
“Of what?”
“Of manhood,” he responds, “Women would take tickets and stand in line to be with a man powerful enough to fuck them like that.” He says these words with a conviction I at first can’t think how to argue with, but then I wonder aloud if he would include his girlfriend or his future wife in that line of women.
“I’m not talking,” he says, “about doing this to someone I love. I’m talking about the pieces of trash you can pick up at the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hookers who do it for money, women who are asking for it.”
“Why,” I ask, “do they deserve to be murdered?”
“They’re whores,” he responds, “No one cares about them.”
I take a different tack, asking him if he’s ever killed anything other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he realizes that he’s talking about using his own body, his penis specifically, as a murder weapon and that the murder he says he would like to commit is not simply one in which his victim dies in his arms, but is also one in which he would feel against his own flesh the internal process of her dying.
“Yes, I do,” he says.
Trying again, I go back to what he said about not wanting to fuck to death a woman he loves and ask if he makes a distinction between the sex he would have for pleasure with that woman and the power he says he would like to experience of using sex to kill. Walter looks at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. “Power,” he says, “is pleasure.”
Class ends. As I’m putting my papers in my briefcase, Walter steps up to my desk. “Now that everyone else is gone,” he says, his voice full of conspiratorial camaraderie, “be honest. Wouldn’t it feel great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your buddies later and tell them you’d killed her with your dick?”
“No,” is all I can think to say.
“Sure, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to – I was in my thirties – but when you were younger, when you were an undergraduate, wasn’t fucking something you did so you could share it with your buddies, and impress them, and wouldn’t they have worshipped you if you told them you’d fucked someone to death?”
I decide that monosyllabic answers are the best way to deal with this line of questioning. “No,” I tell him again.
Walter waits a few seconds for me to say more. When I don’t, he mutters something under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathetic and excuse. Then he walks out, and it’s the last I see or hear of him until I get my final roster with a W for withdrawal next to his name. Of course there are many reasons why he might have had to withdraw from the class, but it’s hard for me not to think he did so because I wasn’t “man enough” to be his teacher.
///
In an episode of the long-and-deservedly-defunct TV series She-Wolf Of London, a very old man is brought into the hospital dying of unknown causes. The doctor on duty believes the old man is either senile or insane because he keeps insisting he is actually twenty-seven years old and that he was turned into an old man by a woman. As the doctor leaves, he orders a nurse to give the old man a sedative. Once the nurse and the old man are alone, however, she unzips her uniform to reveal black-lace lingerie, and the old man recognizes her as the woman who has aged him — one of what the viewers will later learn is a group of succubae who have opened an escort service in England’s capital city. As the old man looks on in helpless terror, the succubus begins to climb into the hospital bed where he is laying. As she does so, she reminds him in the voice of a predator enjoying the powerlessness of its prey that all he has to do is not want her and he will be able to live. All he has to do, in other words, is not have an erection and she will not be able to fuck him to death.
What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reservations about saying she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year professor in Introduction to American Literature had made Whitman’s work central to the course. When I told her one day as we were walking out of class that I admired her honesty, she smiled, said something about how most literature professors had more hot air in them than substance, and walked off to wherever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sitting alone in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next month or so, we met every few days at a table in the back corner of the Rainy Night House Café, where we sat for hours drinking tea, eating bagels, and talking. One afternoon, just as we were getting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bottle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I would come to her room that evening to help her drink it.
She was already several glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up with the wine, our talk turned to a subject we’d never before discussed, love and relationships. We circled the question of our own budding involvement warily, letting it drop in and out of the conversation, each of us waiting for the other to risk saying, or doing, something first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”
“Yes,” I answered, “why?”
She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, “No, I mean do you really like your body?”
“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask if she liked hers as well, she leaned forward and asked her question even more emphatically, “Are you truly satisfied with every part of your body?”
Confused, and beginning to feel a little threatened, I allowed a small edge of anger to sharpen my voice, “What are you talking about?”
Maria smiled to herself, put her hand warmly on my knee, and said, “You know, do you think you measure up physically?”
Finally I understood, but what I understood only confused me more since the challenge implicit in Maria’s words – or at least the challenge I felt to be implicit in Maria’s words (she might not have meant them as a challenge at all) – seemed to shift the basis of what was happening between us from the mutuality of friendship to the adversarial stance of performer and critic. I knew that bigger penises were supposed to be better when it came to having sex, but I was inexperienced enough that I didn’t really understand how “better” was supposed to work. How big did “big” have to be to make a difference, I wondered, and what precisely was the nature of “better?” More pleasure? For whom? These were questions I’d asked myself and been unable to answer every time the subject of penis size and sex came up, and now that Maria had asked me the question directly, I was speechless, caught in what felt to me like a damned-if-I-did-damned-if-I-didn’t situation. Anything I said — yes, no, maybe, let’s find out — seemed to me a picking up of the gauntlet I thought Maria had thrown down, and since I didn’t think I knew enough to compete, my first impulse was to remain silent. On the other hand, to say nothing was probably to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her. So I decided to turn the tables. “I don’t know. Do you measure up?” I asked her.
Maria’s face changed immediately. The gently mocking anticipation with which she’d been waiting for my response vanished, and she searched my face with eyes that were suddenly sad and deeply suspicious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was looking for and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Sometimes,” and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.
Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, trying to recapture the easy banter from earlier in the evening, but she was suddenly unable to look me in the face, and when I finally stood up to leave, all Maria did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sitting. We saw each other on campus a few times after that but never said more than hello, and Maria only had once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to understand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.
When I went home at the end of the semester, I told this story to my mother, asking her what Maria’s reasons might have been for trying to seduce me in the way that she did. My mother’s answer only added to my confusion. The size of a man’s ego, she explained, could be measured by the size of his penis. To illustrate her point, she told me a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insistent, she grew more and more annoyed until, having had enough, loudly, so that the people around them could hear, she told him that unless he had a “baseball bat” between his legs, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He, of course, protested that he’d “never had any complaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t, well, he knew what to do.
Needless to say, the man walked away.
It was hard to know how this story answered my question, so I asked my mother if she thought Maria’s challenge about whether or not I “measured up” had been intended to put me in the same position as she had put the man in the bar. My mother’s response confused me even further. “Only small men,” she said, “say size doesn’t matter.”
///
“Next time,” my mother is laughing — but the smile on her face is a thin line of contempt, and when she leans forward to tap the polished nail of her right index finger in rhythmic emphasis on the wooden surface of the dining room table, her eyes smolder — “Next time, tell your father you don’t have such problems. Tell him you wear a steel jockstrap.” I am sixteen, four or five years younger than I was in the story I told you above, just home from a visit to my father in Manhattan, and I have just shared with my mother his first and only attempt at a father-son talk with me about women and sex. Walking from the restaurant where he’d taken me for lunch to the subway where I would catch the train home, he’d put his arm intimately around my shoulder, leaned his head in towards mine, and asked, “Do you have a girl friend?” I told him no, which was a lie. “Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dating, you’re going to run into situations you won’t know how to handle.” He moved a few steps ahead and turned to face me, searching my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talking about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”
“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the subject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my virginity, but knowing that he didn’t know and realizing how easy it had been to deceive him made me feel superior, and it was this feeling of superiority that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. “What does he think he’s going to teach you, anyway?” she asks, letting her smile loosen into a softer, more conspiratorial grin. “You probably know more than he does already.” She laughs again, but something in her tone makes me uneasy, and so, when I laugh with her this time, it’s more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny.
To me, the point was obvious. Basing the Jewish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own reading of the Hebrew Bible was asking the overwhelmingly non-Jewish world to accept as objective and incontrovertible the truth that Judaism claimed as its own, never mind the implication that the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians was somehow the will of the monotheistic god. To assert that line of reasoning as an argument for Israel’s right to exist, I suggested, was self-defeating at the very least – even if, as a believing Jew, it was a cornerstone of your faith.
“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the colleagues with whom I was talking.
“An SHJ?”
“A self-hating Jew.”
The other agreed. “My husband,” she said, “would say you were an antisemitic Jew.”
I stared at my colleagues across a sudden gap of estrangement I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I understood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revealed myself as a Jew who accepted an antisemitic definition of Jewishness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teachers always used it to explain the antisemitism of non-Jews who were critical of Israel: To suggest that there might be a perspective from which Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was not self-evidently valid, my rebbes would say, in many different ways, over and over again, was to suggest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a people ought not even to be.
Tony Judt, a well-known historian, has written an engaging essay called “Girls! Girls! Girls!” for NYRBlog, The New York Review of Books blog, about how our stance towards sexual behavior on (and, by implication, off) campus has changed over the years. I don’t agree with everything he says – and he would probably say it’s because I am a product of my (and his) times – but what he says is thought-provoking. Here are some snippets, which, taken out of context, may lose some of the irony that informs them in the original:
Shortly after I took office [in 1992 as chair of NYU’s History Department], a second-year graduate student came by. A former professional ballerina interested in Eastern Europe, she had been encouraged to work with me. I was not teaching that semester, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door discussion of Hungarian economic reforms, I suggested a course of independent study — beginning the following evening at a local restaurant. A few sessions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the première of Oleanna—David Mamet’s lame dramatization of sexual harassment on a college campus.
How to explain such self-destructive behavior? What delusional universe was mine, to suppose that I alone could pass untouched by the punitive prudery of the hour — that the bell of sexual correctness would not toll for me? I knew my Foucault as well as anyone and was familiar with Firestone, Millett, Brownmiller, Faludi, e tutte quante. To say that the girl had irresistible eyes and that my intentions were…unclear would avail me nothing. My excuse? Please Sir, I’m from the ’60s.
***
[T]he anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined — the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.
Some years later, I was called to the Office of the University Lawyer. Would I serve as a witness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: “she” is really a “he” and is suing the university for failing to take seriously “her” needs as a transvestite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.
So I appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court to explain the complexities of academic harassment to a bemused jury of plumbers and housewives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman — isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The university won the case.
***
Here as in so many other arenas, we have taken the ’60s altogether too seriously. Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it. Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large.
Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”
Full disclosure: One reason this piece engages me as much as it does, is that I have the same response as Judt to the question he poses at the end of his post:
So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?
Except in my case she was a dark-haired and compellingly dark-eyed woman from Iran. And I have made the answer my title.
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.