Richard Jeffrey Newman

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

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

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

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

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

The sec­ond talking-about-sex moment that I remem­ber from yeshiva hap­pened when I was in 9^th. The boys in my class were sched­uled to take a trip to the very famous Lake­wood Yeshiva in New Jer­sey. I don’t remem­ber why I didn’t go, but I was the only boy in my grade in school that day, and so, since our reli­gious classes were all can­celed – it would not have occurred to the admin­is­tra­tion to send me to class with the girls – I spent the morn­ing shoot­ing hoops in the gym. (The day was split: reli­gious classes in the morn­ing, sec­u­lar classes in the after­noon.) After lunch, the girls and I decided we would cut classes for the rest of the day. After all, how much teach­ing would go on with more than half the class miss­ing? So we went out to the back of the school, where one of the girls pulled out a copy of the Ann Lan­ders sex test that had recently been pub­lished in one of the local news­pa­pers. (What looks like the ver­sion of the test that the girls and I were talk­ing about, can, if you’re will­ing to wade through some reli­gious self-righteousness, be found here.)

We cut our first period class, which might have been math, talk­ing and laugh­ing about what was, for most of us at the time, the entirely the­o­ret­i­cal nature of the items on the test; and we were doing absolutely noth­ing that would have been con­sid­ered inap­pro­pri­ate any­where other than an ortho­dox yeshiva, where the sim­ple fact of our being alone together was cause for con­cern. Because of what could hap­pen – remem­ber Rabbi W’s wor­ries over co-ed danc­ing – if we lost con­trol of our­selves. Because of how, even though we were doing noth­ing but talk­ing, it would look to an out­sider that we are alone together in the first place. Then, just as sec­ond period Eng­lish was about to begin, one of the girls who had gone inside to use the bath­room came run­ning out to tell us that the boys were had returned. Appar­ently, they had stopped to get a bless­ing from Rabbi Moshe Fein­stein, one of the most impor­tant rab­bis of the 20^th cen­tury. He gave them the bless­ing, they got back in their bus to go to Lake­wood, and the bus broke down, forc­ing them to return to school. We ran into the build­ing, rushed upstairs and, remark­ably, made it to sec­ond period Eng­lish on time, though it was only a few min­utes into Mrs. Lynch’s les­son before Rabbi S burst into the class­room, pointed one by one to each of the girls and said, “You! Out!”

When he did not point to me, I thought per­haps I had escaped detec­tion, but he came back a few min­utes later, flung the door open with the same law-enforcement air about him, pointed to me and said, “You too!”

We were sus­pended, the girls and I, not only for cut­ting class, and not only because the idea of one boy and twelve girls hang­ing out alone in the back of the school was unseemly, but also, and to some admin­is­tra­tors most impor­tantly, because we had been talk­ing about sex. When we were told that, before we’d be allowed back into class, our par­ents would have to come in to speak per­son­ally with Rabbi S, who was only avail­able in the after­noons, I had to ask if my mother, since she worked, could come in the morn­ing to speak with Rabbi F, the dean of the school. You would have thought that speak­ing to the Dean would be more seri­ous than speak­ing to the prin­ci­pal of sec­u­lar stud­ies, but when my mother came in, all Rabbi F said was, “Mrs. Louras [her name from her sec­ond mar­riage], Richard is a real men­sch, a won­der­ful boy. He made a ter­ri­ble mis­take, but we’re sure he’ll never do it again.” That was it. He and my mother exchanged some pleas­antries, told me to go back to my class, and wished her a good rest of the day. My mother, who couldn’t imag­ine why they were mak­ing such a big deal out of the whole sit­u­a­tion, col­lapsed laugh­ing against the wall just out­side the school entrance. “Remind me,” she said, “Why were you sus­pended again?” (To be fair, it’s not that my mother did not think I should be pun­ished  for cut­ting class, but she could not imag­ine that I was being sus­pended for a first offense or that the “real” prob­lem, as it had been explained to her, was that I’d been alone with the girls and that we were talk­ing about sex.)

I find it hard to believe that Rabbi F did not say more because he did not know why I had been sus­pended; nor do I think he did not con­sider my “offense” a very seri­ous one. Most likely, he was just uncom­fort­able talk­ing about such things with a woman, espe­cially a woman like my mother, who in her jeans and one-button-too-many-undone but­ton down shirt, her long denim frock coat and her afro, did not at all fit the image of the nice, middle-class Jew­ish mother with whom he was used to deal­ing. He never said any­thing else about the inci­dent to me, either, but an inci­dent that sticks in my head as some­how con­nected this episode took place later that year. Rabbi F pulled me aside one day while my class was in the library and, speak­ing very softly, indi­cated with this chin a new girl in the class whose boyfriend every­one knew was not Jew­ish. (Indeed, it had been the boyfriend who encour­aged her to go to yeshiva so she could learn about her her­itage.) He said some­thing about her being a very nice girl, and attrac­tive, and how it was a shame that she was dat­ing a non-Jewish boy. Maybe – and I wish I could remem­ber the exact words he used, because I remem­ber think­ing even at the time how absolutely pre­cious his phras­ing was – I could get friendly with her, not too friendly, mind you, but friendly enough that she would see just how much Jew­ish boys had to offer her. I refused, of course, and I think this may be the first time I am telling this story to anyone.

Years after I left the yeshiva, I found out that I had  had, among my class­mates, a mostly unde­served rep­u­ta­tion for hav­ing a great deal more expe­ri­ence with sex and drugs than I actu­ally did. Partly this rep­u­ta­tion came from the fact that I did indeed know more about sex and drugs than my class­mates, and peo­ple  just assumed that if I knew about it, I must have done it. The truth is, though, that I just hap­pened at the time to have a group of friends at home – the kind my class­mates’ par­ents would prob­a­bly keep their kids away from – who spoke openly about the drugs they did and the sex they had. By the time I was in eleventh grade, how­ever, when the next con­ver­sa­tion about sex that I want to tell you about hap­pened, this rep­u­ta­tion of mine was at least a lit­tle more deserved. I’d had sex for the first time and been fool­ish enough to tell one of my class­mates, and I had come to school on the day that we took club pic­tures for our year­book with a clearly vis­i­ble hickey on my neck. I don’t remem­ber, frankly, if I knew the hickey was there when I got dressed, but I do remem­ber being a lit­tle embar­rassed when some­one pointed out to me that I might have thought to wear a tur­tle neck shirt or asked my mother to cover it up with makeup. Any­way, in 11^th grade a group of girls cor­nered me in the hall one day dur­ing lunch, or maybe it was recess, and asked, with­out irony, “Richard, what’s a cli­toris?” I knew the answer, though I’d never seen a cli­toris at that point in any­thing but a pho­to­graph. (I’d had sex but had not actu­ally looked much at my girlfriend’s vagina.) Still, I didn’t like being put on the spot. So I told them to go look it up. They did, and for some rea­son I have never under­stood felt it nec­es­sary the next day to report back to me what they’d learned: “It’s what your hus­band chews on when you do sixty-nine.”

I remem­ber think­ing, “Chews on?”

I had no real expe­ri­ence at that point in my life with giv­ing oral sex, but I did know from my read­ing, and I had done some very exten­sive and eclec­tic read­ing, that her cli­toris was not some­thing a woman was likely to want a sex­ual part­ner lit­er­ally to chew on. I don’t remem­ber if I said any­thing in response, or if they tried to push the con­ver­sa­tion fur­ther, though now that I am think­ing about it, there was one other moment of infor­mal sex edu­ca­tion that I received in the yeshiva. For about two weeks, in 8^th grade, I “went out” with one of the girls in my class. Not that we did much actual “going” any­where. We lived too far apart for that. Rather, “going out” was a sta­tus; we were a cou­ple; and when I told one of my friends at home that I had a girl­friend, his first ques­tion was, “Does she have big tits?”

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

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

///

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

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

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

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

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