Richard Jeffrey Newman

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. I have moved this post over from my other blog. (Click for Part One.) This way, when I finally get around to writ­ing Parts 3 and 4, they will all be in the same place. I see each post in this series as one sec­tion of a sin­gle piece of writ­ing, not as a dis­crete essay unto itself. As a result, while each sec­tion may con­tain its own argu­ment, it is not really pos­si­ble to know whether an issue that you feel is impor­tant will or will not be left out of the argu­ment made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. I cer­tainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an inoc­u­la­tion against cri­tique, but given the mod­u­lar nature of post­ing to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find your­self won­der­ing, and com­ment­ing on, why I have not addressed some­thing you feel needs to be addressed. Thanks. Also, to pro­tect the pri­vacy of the indi­vid­u­als involved, some names have been changed and some iden­ti­fy­ing details have been fic­tion­al­ized.] 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.

Tagged consent, female heterosexuality, Gender, male heterosexuality, Masculinity, sexual boundaries, Sexuality

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