Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

The stu­dents in a reme­dial com­po­si­tion class I’m teach­ing dur­ing my sec­ond semes­ter as a col­lege pro­fes­sor are read­ing aloud and com­ment­ing on fables they’ve writ­ten over the week­end. The prose is awk­ward and ungram­mat­i­cal, but I’m impressed with the imag­i­na­tive effort some have made. There’s a mod­ern­ized ver­sion of Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood set in an upper class neigh­bor­hood with the most sought-after senior boy in the local high school tak­ing the part of the wolf. There’s also a gender-reversed Sleep­ing Beauty in which Princess Charm­ing turns out to be the home­less woman who sleeps in the park. I’m about to move on to the next part of the les­son when Wal­ter, who’d announced when we began that he wasn’t going to read, asks if we’d like to hear his story. Yes, I say, of course.

At the cen­ter of Walter’s nar­ra­tive, which takes place far in the future, is a very pow­er­ful drug lord whose orga­ni­za­tion has been infil­trated by a top female nar­cotics agent pos­ing as a pros­ti­tute. When the dealer’s lover, who is also a pros­ti­tute in his sta­ble, learns that the oper­a­tion has been com­pro­mised, she tells him imme­di­ately. The dealer con­ceives a plan that uses his lover to expose the spy, who is then tor­tured slowly to death. To express his grat­i­tude, the dealer takes his lover to be, giv­ing her, in Walter’s words, “the lit­eral fuck of her life, pound­ing away until she was no longer breath­ing.” The story ends with a descrip­tion of the lav­ish funeral the dealer gives her.

When Wal­ter fin­ishes read­ing, he looks around the cir­cle with a sar­cas­tic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent; no one except me is will­ing to meet his eyes, but I am hop­ing that one of his class­mates will speak first, con­demn­ing what he’s writ­ten not in the voice of author­ity – which my voice inevitably will be – but in the voice of his peers. A minute passes in silence before it becomes clear that his fel­low stu­dents don’t intend to respond, and so I call on a few stu­dents by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they it’s not worth respond­ing to. To me, though, a response feels absolutely nec­es­sary. Wal­ter, like all the other stu­dents in the class, is just out of high school. I do not want to let pass what seems to me to be real teach­able moment, and so I ask Wal­ter if he really believes that fuck­ing a woman to death could be an expres­sion of gratitude.

“Absolutely,” he says, with­out a hint of irony in his voice. “For the woman it’s the ulti­mate ful­fill­ment, and for the man it’s the ulti­mate proof.”

“Of what?” I ask him.

“Of man­hood.” His tone indi­cates that he’s sur­prised I even have to ask. “Women would buy tick­ets and stand in line to be with a man pow­er­ful enough to fuck them like that.” He says these words with a con­vic­tion I at first can’t think how to counter, but then I won­der aloud if he would include his girl­friend or his future wife in that line of women.

“I’m not talk­ing,” he says, “about doing this to some­one I love. I’m talk­ing about the pieces of trash you can pick up in the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hook­ers who do it for money. Women who are ask­ing for it.”

“Why do they deserve to be mur­dered?” I ask.

“They’re whores,” he responds. “No one cares about them.”

I take a dif­fer­ent tack, ask­ing him if he’s ever killed any­thing other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he real­izes that he’s talk­ing about using his own body, his penis specif­i­cally, as a mur­der weapon.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

So I ask if he makes a dis­tinc­tion between the sex he would have for plea­sure – pre­sum­ably with a woman he loves – and the power he says he would like to expe­ri­ence using sex to kill. Wal­ter looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Power,” he says, “is pleasure.”

Class ends. As I’m putting my papers in my brief­case, Wal­ter steps up to my desk. “Now that every­one else is gone,” he says, his voice full of con­spir­a­to­r­ial cama­raderie, “come on, be hon­est. Wouldn’t it be great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your bud­dies later and tell them you killed her with your dick?”

“No,” is all I can think to say.

“Sure, okay, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to, but when you were younger, when you were an under­grad­u­ate, wasn’t fuck­ing some­thing you did so you could share it with your bud­dies and impress them, and wouldn’t they have wor­shipped you if you told them you’d fucked some­one to death?”

Since it’s even more clear now than it was dur­ing class that Wal­ter is less inter­ested in really engag­ing the ideas he is espous­ing than in “out­ing” me as “one of the boys,” I decide that mono­syl­labic answers are the best way to deal with him. “No,” I say again.

Wal­ter waits a few sec­onds for me to say more. When I don’t, he mut­ters some­thing under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathetic and excuse, and he walks out, and that’s the lest I see or hear of him until I get my final ros­ter with a W for with­drawal next to his name.

///

The encounter I have just described took place more than fif­teen years ago. In the sev­eral years imme­di­ately fol­low­ing my dis­cus­sion with Wal­ter, I often shared what he’d said with my friends and col­leagues, male and female, and I always found it inter­est­ing that their responses fell, for the most part, along the same lines as my stu­dents’ responses did. On the one hand were those who dis­missed Wal­ter as “crazy,” what­ever they meant by that term (and some sug­gested that he really ought to be insti­tu­tion­al­ized), and, on the other hand, there were those who saw him as not worth the energy it would to respond to him in the first place. The ease with which these responses were almost always given, how­ever, always left me a lit­tle uncom­fort­able, because it seemed – and still seems – to me that each of those answers too eas­ily dis­misses the ques­tion of how Wal­ter came to feel the way he did in favor of a very glib under­stand­ing of who he must be based on what he said. Yet it is pre­cisely the ques­tion of how that haunted me most, and that I think con­tin­ues to be some­thing men don’t talk about enough, not because I think answer­ing it lets Wal­ter off the hook, but because the inte­rior expe­ri­ence Wal­ter claimed to have /desire of his own gen­i­tals, of my gen­i­tals too, as a weapon feels as inac­ces­si­ble to me as the inte­rior expe­ri­ence of bio­log­i­cal femaleness.

///

One of the let­ters from Pent­house mag­a­zine – I think it was from the “Happy Hooker” col­umn – that has stayed with me since I first read it when I was a teenager was writ­ten by a woman who claimed to be describ­ing how she and a friend took revenge on a man who’d tried to rape the friend. The writer of the let­ter arranged to meet the man at a disco, invited him to her apart­ment, and seduced him into being tied spread-eagled to her bed. Then the woman’s friend, who’d been wait­ing in another room, came in, and the two women teased the man sex­u­ally until he was beg­ging them for release. In response, the women took out a razor and shav­ing cream, telling him that if he ejac­u­lated while they rubbed his penis, the would shave all the hair from his body. The let­ter went on to describe in great detail first the man’s plead­ing with them not to do it and then his efforts to keep him­self from com­ing while the women took turns mas­tur­bat­ing him.
Finally, of course, he came, and the women shaved him, threat­en­ing to slice off his tes­ti­cles if he didn’t lay still.

The woman’s let­ter describes a rape. She didn’t present it as any­thing else – except to make clear that it was moti­vated by revenge – and she never implied that the man enjoyed what she and her friend did to him. Nonethe­less, my sex­ual imag­i­na­tion was drawn to the story. For months, for years after­ward, I fan­ta­sized about women tying me to a bed and cre­at­ing in my flesh an arousal so all-encompassing that I too would be will­ing to beg for release. Yet no mat­ter how hard I tried to imag­ine a con­clu­sion other than the one in the let­ter, I always ended up the vic­tim of some ver­sion of the revenge the writer and her friend took. What I most iden­ti­fied with in this story, I think, what led me always away from the sce­nario I began with of trust in my imag­ined lovers and the plea­sure they wanted to give me, was the man’s expe­ri­ence of hav­ing the plea­sures of his body turned against him, for I knew I could be shamed in that way as well, that my body was always the poten­tial source of my own defeat.

///

A sim­i­lar theme is played out in an episode of the long-and-deservedly-defunct TV series She-Wolf of Lon­don. A very old man is brought into the hos­pi­tal dying of unknown causes. The doc­tor on duty believes the old man is either senile or insane because he keeps insist­ing he is actu­ally twenty-seven years old and that he was turned into an old man by a woman. As the doc­tor leaves, he orders a nurse to give the old man a seda­tive. Once the nurse and the old man are alone, how­ever, she unzips her uni­form to reveal black-lace lin­gerie, and the old man rec­og­nizes her as the woman who has aged him – one of what the view­ers will later learn is a group of suc­cubae who have opened an escort ser­vice in England’s cap­i­tal city. As the old man looks on in help­less ter­ror, the suc­cubus begins to climb into his hos­pi­tal bed, and, as she does so, she reminds him in the voice of a preda­tor enjoy­ing the pow­er­less­ness of its prey that all he has to do is not want her and he will be able to live. All he has to do is not have an erec­tion and she will not be able to fuck him to death.

///

The story Wal­ter wrote can be under­stood as a kind of pre-emptive strike against the fear of women expressed in this scene, as well as in my response to the Pent­house let­ter I described above. This under­stand­ing is not the same thing, how­ever, as know­ing how Wal­ter and I – or at least I, since I can­not speak for Wal­ter – came to feel this fear in the first place, and I’m focus­ing here on the ques­tion of how rather than why because it seems to me that why has already been answered, author­i­ta­tively and at length, by the women’s move­ment: Men fear the power of women’s freed, sex­ual and oth­er­wise, because the power of women’s free­dom, sex­ual and oth­er­wise, rep­re­sents the undo­ing of male dom­i­nant power and priv­i­lege, with the cor­re­spond­ing col­lapse of the myth of male invul­ner­a­bil­ity and the man­hood men are expected to achieve in order to per­pet­u­ate that illusion.

Acknowl­edg­ing this fear, obvi­ously, is not the same thing as val­i­dat­ing the cul­ture of male dom­i­nance that pro­duces it. At the same time, how­ever, not to acknowl­edge the emo­tional valid­ity to men of that culture’s exis­tence is to miss what I think is a cen­tral ques­tion that has to be asked, that men have to ask of our­selves, if we want not to learn not to be afraid: When you con­sider that pain, humil­i­a­tion and/or sub­ju­ga­tion are almost always the con­se­quences for a man who has failed in his man­hood, is it any won­der that so many of us strive to use our bod­ies so that they can never be used against us?

///

A col­league with whom I used to have lunch on a reg­u­lar basis would occa­sion­ally bring her three-year-old son along. Usu­ally, John was a very ani­mated lit­tle boy, ask­ing ques­tions, mak­ing a mess, and doing in gen­eral what three year old boys do to main­tain them­selves as the focus of atten­tion. On this par­tic­u­lar after­noon, how­ever, John sat next to his mother in absolute silence. Both of his hands were ban­daged because of a fall he’d taken ear­lier in the day, and he was still in pain, which made it dif­fi­cult for him to hold the small pieces his mother cut for him from the pizza we’d just ordered for lunch. From time to time, when the look of frus­tra­tion on her son’s face became espe­cially acute, my friend would stop our con­ver­sa­tion, pick up a small square of food and hold it to his mouth, not con­tin­u­ing with what she’d been say­ing until he’d chewed and swal­lowed the whole thing. When we were done, and John stood up so his mother could put his coat on, he held his engauzed palms out to her, silently ask­ing for com­fort. My friend squat­ted in front of her son and asked in a voice filled with empa­thy, “What’s the mat­ter John? Does it hurt?” When John nod­ded his head, she stroked his cheek with her fin­gers and said, “I know sweetie, but you’re a man, right? You can take it.” John set his mouth in a firm, thin line, and he again moved his head up and down. Then his mother helped him slip his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, zipped him up and motioned to me that we were ready to leave.

As we walked out, I thought of all the count­less times, and all the dif­fer­ent painful and humil­i­at­ing ways in which I was, in which John would be, in which boys rou­tinely are, asked or told, implic­itly or explic­itly, by both men and women, boys and girls, “to take it.” I’m not being melo­dra­matic here. I have no doubt that my friend said what she said with­out even think­ing about it, and I don’t want to blow out of pro­por­tion this one clearly minor appeal to her son’s incip­i­ent man­li­ness. The fact is, how­ever, that she could’ve helped her son under­stand that we can­not always expect peo­ple to com­fort us when we are in pain with­out putting his man­hood at stake. Or, more to the point, she could have given him a hug with­out mak­ing any com­ment at all. (At the time this hap­pened, I did not have a child; now that I do, well can I imag­ine that she might have been tired of a day’s worth of com­fort­ing him, and all she wanted was a lit­tle break.) That she did not, that even in a sit­u­a­tion as insignif­i­cant as this one, John’s man­hood became an issue, how­ever small, indi­cates how deeply and unself­con­sciously, per­haps even unwill­ingly, my friend val­ued the line sep­a­rat­ing the men from the boys.

Another exam­ple: A good friend told me that when her son was eleven she responded to his fail­ing grades by explain­ing that when he got older he would have to sup­port a fam­ily, just like his father, so he’d bet­ter start learn­ing respon­si­bil­ity now. “All his boy­ish inno­cence,” she said, ” seemed to drain right out of him. Every­thing was home­work, home­work, home­work. He doesn’t even play with his toys any­more. I wanted to improve his grades, not turn him into a lit­tle man.”

No doubt, and hope­fully, as he real­ized just how far off the adult­hood his mother had threat­ened him with really was, this boy even­tu­ally went back to being a kid just like any other kid. Indeed, my point here is not that these two inter­ac­tions in and of them­selves rep­re­sent some per­ma­nent harm done to this boys, but rather that the inter­ac­tions them­selves rep­re­sent only one small part of the man­hood train­ing boys receive and that each boy’s response, even in such rel­a­tively minor sit­u­a­tions, cor­re­sponded per­fectly to the man­hood ideal: he sucked it up and showed that he could “take it.”

In Love, Sex, Death and the Mak­ing of the Male, Ros­alind Miles points out that the old say­ing “boys will be boys” can be read not only as it usu­ally is, a state­ment of res­ig­na­tion in the face of inevitabil­ity, but also as an imper­a­tive: Boys will be boys. The
degree to which this sec­ond read­ing is the more accu­rate one becomes fully evi­dent when you look at the con­se­quences of not “being a boy.” Ask any man, and if he’s hon­est enough to tell you, he will have at least one story, and prob­a­bly more than one, of how he was hurt when he was a child for not being aggres­sive enough, ath­letic enough, stoic enough, sex­u­ally objec­ti­fy­ing of girls enough, sex­u­ally pow­er­ful enough, com­pet­i­tive enough, loyal enough to his bud­dies and so on. The hurt the man tells you about may have been phys­i­cal, emo­tional or both; the par­tic­u­lar story he tells you may involve some­thing rel­a­tively minor, as in the cases of the two boys I just told you about, or some­thing deeply seri­ous and even life threat­en­ing, like my friend who was sex­u­ally assaulted and raped by boys he’d through were his friends just because he was the weak­est and least mas­cu­line among them.

Yet despite the rad­i­cal dis­tance we usu­ally assumes sep­a­rates a victim/survivor from her or his vic­tim­iz­ers, there is one aspect of his rape that my friend and those raped him have in com­mon, that all boys and men in our cul­ture have in com­mon: their ideas of them­selves as men – and my friend’s friend’s behav­ior was noth­ing if it was not about their ideas of them­selves as men – are a direct a result of their con­fronta­tion with the vio­lence and aggres­sion con­sid­ered to be the nor­mal, nat­ural and nec­es­sary con­text in which man­hood is formed. None of us can escape this. We may choose to embrace the vio­lence or reject it; we may find some way of accom­mo­dat­ing our­selves to it, or we may devote our lives to elim­i­nat­ing it, but there is now way we can avoid con­fronting it. This con­fronta­tion takes place so per­va­sively through­out our lives – how do I respond to the pos­tur­ing of the male stu­dent who is chal­leng­ing me about nor accept­ing his late paper, or to the neigh­bor whose threat­en­ing body lan­guage belies the polite tone of his voice as he argues with me about who saw the park­ing spot first, or to my son’s insis­tence that he wants a “boy’s only’ birth­day party – that the ques­tion of how or why boys come to value man­hood so highly is dwarfed by the ques­tion Miles asks, “[H]ow do they avoid it?” (58)