Richard Jeffrey Newman

Fan­tasy On Trial (Again) | CarnalNation

Read this post; it’s scary. Here’s an excerpt:

The pros­e­cu­tion tried to get me to say that most peo­ple who fan­ta­size are sick, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that people’s fan­tasies indi­cate what they want to do in real life, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that Mr. Jones’ calls and emails were typ­i­cal groom­ing behav­ior. I pointed out the fun­da­men­tal flaws in their rea­son­ing: he had met “Missy” in a cha­t­room for adults, not for fans of Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Broth­ers. And after a thou­sand emails and phone calls, he never said any­thing like, “Let’s meet. We’ll have a great time. When are you free? I’ll send you money for a bus ticket.”

There were plenty of ques­tions about me: my cam­paign against the con­cept of “sex addic­tion”; my obser­va­tions that Amer­ica is pan­icked over highly dis­torted esti­mates of how many preda­tors troll for kids online (I quoted sci­en­tific stud­ies, includ­ing the lat­est one from Har­vard); whether or not I believed it was OK for adults and 14-year-olds to have sex (which I wouldn’t answer, not want­ing to obscure the fact that there was no 14-year-old in this case), and many, many more. That’s how I spent yes­ter­day afternoon.

This morn­ing, the jury gave their ver­dict. After­wards, in pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, they told Mr. Jones’ lawyer that I was clearly an expert, warm and per­sua­sive, and that they had learned a great deal from me about psy­chol­ogy and sex­u­al­ity. They said they were trou­bled by the flaws I had pointed out in the prosecution’s case, and they laughed at the D.A.’s inabil­ity to rat­tle or insult me. Sev­eral said if they were ever in trou­ble, they hoped they’d be rep­re­sented in court as well as Mr. Jones had been.

But they found him guilty. They were afraid to believe him.

They say it’s a shame we didn’t do it
when we should have, that prob­a­bly you’ll need it
later in life, when it’s more com­pli­cated,
more painful and, worse, you’ll remem­ber it.

They say women won’t want you, that you’ll not
for­give us, ever, espe­cially me, and that
the Jews who’ve died for what it means to be cut
will have died in vain because we left you complete.

And I know I can’t not bur­den you with that.
You have to, have to, res­onate with what
your body would have meant to all that hate,
and you will — but sit­ting here alone tonight,

my ampu­tated life aching anew,
I’m grate­ful for all that’s merely whole in you.

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.

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 «