Richard Jeffrey Newman

I am try­ing to remem­ber the first time I under­stood, really under­stood, that sex was noth­ing but touch, that I wanted the sex I had to be about find­ing ways to touch peo­ple that would leave them feel­ing fully and deeply and irrev­o­ca­bly known inside and out, rec­og­nized, val­i­dated, appre­ci­ated as a human body, a being in a body, a per­son with a phys­i­cal pres­ence, with a stake in mate­r­ial exis­tence that could not be denied; which meant that hav­ing sex was also about learn­ing what I needed to feel touched in that way, about find­ing a vocab­u­lary for it, a gram­mar and a syn­tax, a seman­tics, a lan­guage, in other words, that bespoke who I was and what I wanted/needed and why I wanted/needed it in a way that did not alien­ate me from myself and/or my partner(s); because once I under­stood this, even though I can­not remem­ber when I under­stood this, I under­stood that sex was an ongo­ing explo­ration, a way of know­ing – both a path and a method­ol­ogy – some­thing that did not have a dis­crete begin­ning and end­ing, that inhered in every aspect of my life, not because every­thing is about sex per se, but because sex is, ulti­mately, about every­thing. We bring all of who we are, every­thing we have lived, good and bad, to the bod­ies of the peo­ple we make love with, as they bring all of who they are to us; and I use the phrase “make love with” here because even though the moment when I under­stood that sex was all about touch was also the moment that I fully under­stood that sex was not love, that love was not sex, I do believe that when peo­ple have sex openly and hon­estly, with respect and care and atten­tion, in what­ever com­bi­na­tion, in what­ever roles, with what­ever ancil­lary equip­ment, they are, quite literally, making love, cre­at­ing in this world a space in which one per­son accepts and hon­ors and cel­e­brates the entirely inde­pen­dent, phys­i­cally embod­ied exis­tence of another per­son; and it does not mat­ter if they are in love with each other or not; it does not mat­ter if they know each other’s names or not; or if they will see each other again. What mat­ters is that when they touch each other, they under­stand that they are touch­ing a liv­ing, breath­ing, feel­ing, fully human being, and that even if they don’t know a damned thing about that per­son except that he or she is com­pelling enough to want to have sex with, what mat­ters is that when they touch, they each know that they are also touch­ing the entirety of that person’s life and that they are giv­ing the entirety of their own lives over to that per­son to be touched. I am try­ing to remem­ber the first time I under­stood this, but I can’t.

That’s the title and the title poem of my sec­ond book of poetry, on which I have just put the fin­ish­ing touches and which I will, over the next cou­ple weeks, start shop­ping around to pub­lish­ers. LIke last time – which was in 2004, the year my first book, The Silence of Men, was accepted for pub­li­ca­tion, though it was actu­ally pub­lished in 2006 – I have decided that I will not be sub­mit­ting this man­u­script to any con­tests. Well, maybe one or two, because the prize money is enough to make it worth gam­bling the entry fee, but what I’m really look­ing for is a pub­lisher with whom I can develop a rela­tion­ship, because I know I have more books of poetry in me. If I can­not find a pub­lisher for this man­u­script, I will almost cer­tainly pub­lish it myself, because I believe the poems in it deserve a hearing.

Edited to add: For me, the book’s title, Because Men Only Under­stand Cliches, is so firmly rooted in the cir­cum­stances that inform the title poem, and also in the poem’s – and there­fore the book’s – posi­tion (in my head) as a response to that asser­tion, that it did not occur to me that some peo­ple might read the title as an accu­sa­tion that I was mak­ing against men. Well, I have been shown the error of my ways. Artos, whose com­ment appears below, won­ders whether or not I “real­ize how offen­sive [Because Men Only Under­stand Cliches] is to men who are not mang­i­nas? Kind of like, “Blacks only know fried chicken and water­melon.” I have decided to let his com­ment through pri­mar­ily because it made me smile; it’s the first time I’ve been called a mang­ina on the Inter­net, cer­tainly on my own blog, and that feels like some kind mile­stone. When I told my son about Artos’ com­ment, he said, after he stopped snort­ing with laugh­ter, “Really, what is he, in fifth grade?” This is from the first move­ment of “Because Men Only Under­stand Cliches,” which tells the story of where the title comes from:

Belly like a water­melon
stuffed up the front
of her white cot­ton sum­mer dress,
the preg­nant woman at the cor­ner
turns her back to me to face
the direc­tion she’ll cross the street in,
and what she’s wear­ing
flares from the waist down
in a twirl that set­tles
along the line of her hips
till only the hem that falls
to just above her ankles
is still rip­pling, a flag
wav­ing sur­ren­der
to this late sum­mer day.

My eyes lift to her shoul­ders,
fol­low the con­tour the fab­ric traces
down from the loops
through which her tanned arms emerge
to the curve of her butt cheeks
that bounce lightly as she steps back,
just avoid­ing the taxi pulling up fast
to the curb where she’s standing.

She’s as tall as me or taller,
black hair tied tight in a braid
point­ing like a com­pass
to the small of her back,
and she isn’t wear­ing panties,
her dress not unlike the one
you wore the night we wan­dered the beach
till the board­walk lights were stars
blink­ing at our backs,
and the camp­fires scat­tered across the sand
were the sig­nal flames of a dis­tant town.

The moon over the ocean
cast our shad­ows behind us.
You stood in front of me,
the blue cloth of what you were wear­ing
bunched in the hand I held to steady you
just beneath your breasts, my other hand
find­ing when I reached
that you’d been naked to the breeze
run­ning up your legs, you’d said,
like the water’s warm breath
before it touched its tongue to you.

You gave a throaty laugh
as I pulled you tighter to me,
stroking and pulling and gen­tly
part­ing the fur you let grow in
once the lover who’d kept you shaved was gone;
and you were wet,
though wet does not do jus­tice
to the fruit burst­ing its skin
between your legs.

I kissed the lips you shape your words with,
and in your com­ing — we were sur­prised:
you never come at home
at just the urg­ing of my hands—
you called your plea­sure out to the open sea
for the wind and tide to carry who-knows-where,
and I heard again my teacher
telling the men in my first-year poetry work­shop
that none of us would ever
“write a suc­cess­ful cunt poem,
because when it comes to cunts,
men only under­stand clichés.”

I thought how you have only ever called it
your vagina, then later, while you slept,
tried to list the rhyming words I’d need
to write a son­net, but China, Car­olina, trichina—
a par­a­site you don’t want to catch — and angina
were the best I could do. I listed off-rhymes,
Mon­tana, banana, and then,
in the New Yawk accent you love to mimic,
I heard linah, finah, minah, and recli­nah,
that last one bring­ing me
the woman from the con­fer­ence
who wor­ried that two kids had made her
“roomier down there”
than any man other than the hus­band
she’d been need­ing to leave for years
would want, and so she hadn’t left him.

When I was a teenager and thought I wanted to be a rabbi, I took great com­fort in the fact that the god of the Jew­ish peo­ple did not have a body. It was, of course, con­fus­ing to me that we nonethe­less referred to this god as “he” or “our king” or even as “our father,” as in the prayer “Avinu Malkeinu” (Our Father, Our King), which Jews recite every year on Rosh HaShana and Yom Kip­pur. I wanted so very much to believe in that god, how­ever, and to be good in “his” eyes, that I accepted with­out ques­tion the expla­na­tion I was given: that these ref­er­ences to God’s male­ness were just metaphors of con­ve­nience, that, in fact, the Jew­ish god had nei­ther sex nor gen­der, which was one of the things that made “him” – it did seem wrong to say “it”– so much bet­ter than the gods of poly­the­is­tic traditions.

Whether or not a bod­i­less, omni­scient, omnipo­tent, and there­fore com­pletely tran­scen­dent god is indeed “bet­ter” than other kinds of gods, what­ever “bet­ter” might mean, is no longer clear to me, and it’s been a long time since I was naïve enough to believe any metaphor can ever be, sim­ply, “of con­ve­nience,” but back then that expla­na­tion made sense to me. Or, more accu­rately, it allowed me not to think too care­fully about the ques­tion of God’s gen­der and to focus instead on the hope a gen­der­less god seemed to hold out: that if I fol­lowed “his” rules, I could live my life in a way that ren­dered pretty much irrel­e­vant the mas­culin­ity at which I felt myself to be so mis­er­ably fail­ing. Most espe­cially, I thought, in the eyes of a gen­der­less god, sex would be just sex, for both pro­cre­ation and plea­sure, but with­out all the unnec­es­sary bag­gage that ques­tions of gen­der forced it to carry.

To put it plainly, I was afraid of sex, of my own sex­u­al­ity. As I’ve writ­ten many times before, I was sex­u­ally abused by two dif­fer­ent men at two dif­fer­ent times dur­ing my teens, once quite vio­lently. One of the things that expe­ri­ence made it very dif­fi­cult for me to deal with was the expec­ta­tion that, because I was the man, I had to be the one to make the first move in sex­ual sit­u­a­tions. Since the only kind of “first move” I knew was the kind that my abusers had used with me, when­ever I thought about ini­ti­at­ing sex with some­one, the only thing I could imag­ine myself doing was some­thing like what those men had done, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. If God was indeed gen­der­less, it seemed to me, then per­haps the sex he’d given me, that he’d com­manded me to have — because both repro­duc­tion and sex-for-pleasure (to sat­isfy one’s wife) are reli­gious oblig­a­tions for men in ortho­dox Judaism — might also be gen­der­less, in the sense that it didn’t mat­ter who made the first move, among other things. Per­haps the life this gen­der­less god wanted me to lead would lead me to a dif­fer­ent way of being male and sex­ual than those men had shown me.

I was, of course, wrong about a lot of that think­ing, and, to be hon­est, I haven’t thought about my strug­gle with the ques­tion of God’s gen­der in a very long time, but read­ing Attar’s The Con­fer­ence of the Birds has brought it back to me, not just because the gen­der of Attar’s god is so unam­bigu­ously male, but because the path to one­ness with that god is unam­bigu­ously male as well. Not that there aren’t sufi women, and even women whom the sufis revere as saints, but of those women Attar says, in his Mem­o­ries of God’s Friends: Lives and Say­ings of Sufis, speak­ing specif­i­cally of per­haps the best known female saint, Raba-ye Adaviya, “When a woman is a man on the path of the Lord most high, she can­not be called woman.” In Elahi Nameh, the book of Attar’s that I am cur­rently trans­lat­ing, the first story is about such a woman, and I will write about that story another time. What I am inter­ested in now is how Attar talks about the rela­tion­ship between men and the mas­cu­line nature of the sufi path. Here, for exam­ple, is a story from The Con­fer­ence of the Birds in which the con­nec­tion between a sufi’s man­hood and his spir­i­tual com­mit­ment is used to shame two sufis who just don’t mea­sure up:

One day two dressed as wan­der­ing sufis came
Before the courts to lodge a legal claim.
The judge took them aside. “This can’t be right
For sufis to pro­voke a legal fight,“
He said. “You wear the robes of res­ig­na­tion,
So what have you to do with lit­i­ga­tion?
If you’re the men to pay a lawyer’s fee,
Off with your sufi clothes imme­di­ately!
And if you’re sufis as at first I thought,
It’s igno­rance the brings you to this court.
I’m just a judge, unversed in your affair,
But I’m ashamed to see the clothes you wear;
You should wear women’s veils – that would be less
Dis­hon­est than your present holy dress.” (94)

These two sufis, by bring­ing their dif­fer­ences to court, have demon­strated their invest­ment in the mate­r­ial world, in stan­dards of right and wrong that sufis are sup­posed to aspire to tran­scend. In the judge’s esti­ma­tion, this fem­i­nizes them, and so he tells them it would be bet­ter to hide their male­ness behind women’s cloth­ing than to use the cloth­ing of “high heroic male­ness,” their sufi robes, to hide the lack of man­li­ness their pres­ence in court rep­re­sents. For Attar, in other words, to be a man is to be a man of God. Any­thing else is, at one and the same time, a betrayal of both man­hood and the divine. Yet it is not only insuf­fi­ciently com­mit­ted sufis who fail to live up to the stan­dards of this spir­i­tual mas­culin­ity. Attar’s hoopoe also tells the fol­low­ing story about She­bli, an impor­tant Sufi master:

She­bli would dis­ap­pear at times; no one
In all Bagh­dad could guess where he had gone–
At last they found him where the town enjoys
The sex­ual ser­vices of man and boys,
Sit­ting among the catamites; his eye
Was moist and humid, and his lips bone-dry.
One asked: “What brings you here, to such a place?
Is this where pil­grims come to look for grace?“
He answered: “In the world’s way these you see
Aren’t men or women; so it is with me–
For in the way of Faith I’m nei­ther man
Nor woman, but ambigu­ous cour­te­san–
Unman­li­ness reproaches me, then blame
For my viril­ity fills me with shame.” (93)

She­bli is caught in a spir­i­tual dou­ble bind. On the one hand, the “unman­li­ness” rep­re­sented by his faults and fail­ures stands as a con­stant reproach to him as he walks his path towards God; but on the other hand, his viril­ity – mean­ing his con­scious com­mit­ment to that path – shames him, since the one­ness with God to which he aspires requires that he shed pre­cisely the self-consciousness of that com­mit­ment. This predica­ment gives rise to the ques­tion the hoopoe asks next, “How will you solve love’s secret lore if you – /Not man, not woman – glide between the two?” (94). To be on the path to God, in other words, is by def­i­n­i­tion to make a choice. You’re either on the road or you’re not. If not, then as the judge advises the sufis who came to his court, you are bet­ter off being hon­est and liv­ing in the mate­r­ial world, hid­ing your true, mas­cu­line self, behind the veil that world is, while, if you are like She­bli, caught in the dou­ble bind that com­mit­ting to the path inescapably entails, then you have no choice but to sur­ren­der. Or, as the hoopoe puts it:

If on its path love forces you to yield,
Then do so gladly, throw away your shield;
Resist and you will die, your soul is dead–
To ward off your defeat bow down your head! (94)

When I read these lines, I had to stop and read them again; and then I read them again. How are they not, I asked myself, a descrip­tion of spir­i­tual rape? Writ­ing out of a very dif­fer­ent reli­gious tra­di­tion, John Donne artic­u­lates a sim­i­lar rela­tion­ship with the divine in “Bat­ter My Heart Three Person’d God:”

Bat­ter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Rea­son, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you rav­ish me.

Donne wants des­per­ately to let his god in, but he can’t, and so he asks, demands, really, that his god rav­ish him. I sup­pose that fact, i.e. that Donne asks, is what pre­vents the sce­nario he describes from being an actual spir­i­tual rape, even though it uses rape as a metaphor. Attar, I think, would have rec­og­nized Donne’s dilemma very eas­ily. Indeed, through­out The Con­fer­ence of the Birds Attar writes about all the ways those who travel the path keep their god out, despite the fact that they want des­per­ately to let him in. Yet, whether or not what Donne and Attar describe qual­i­fies as spir­i­tual rape per se, the idea that it is human nature to resist God, mak­ing it nec­es­sary for him to vio­late us so that he can enter us fully — that, in other words, we need to be forced to sur­ren­der to him — sounds an awful lot to me like a spir­i­tu­al­ized and, espe­cially in Attar’s case, homo­eroti­cized ver­sion of rape culture.

Writ­ing that last sen­tence set all kinds of ideas swirling around in my head. It’s not hard to find the misog­yny in the idea that women some­times need to be forced to sur­ren­der them­selves to men in order to real­ize their true, fem­i­nine selves; nor is it dif­fi­cult to see that replac­ing men in that sen­tence with God, when God is under­stood to be male, does not nec­es­sar­ily remove the misog­yny; but what does it mean if that same spir­i­tual act is defined not as hate­ful, but as lov­ing, when God com­mits it against a man? What are the reper­cus­sions for how the men who believe in that god under­stand them­selves spir­i­tu­ally in rela­tion to the divine and eth­i­cally, morally, espe­cially when it comes to ques­tions of love, in rela­tion to other human beings? These seem to me impor­tant ques­tions to ask.

I’ve been read­ing and thor­oughly enjoy­ing a poet too few peo­ple read these days, J. V. Cun­ning­ham. One day, I will write about why I think he’s worth read­ing and learn­ing from, even though the kind of poetry he wrote has been out of fash­ion for a very long time. Today, I’m inter­ested in one of his epi­grams. It’s #16 from Triv­ial, Vul­gar, and Exalted:

And now you’re ready who while she was here
Hung like a flag in a calm. Friend, though you stand
Erect and eager, in your eye a tear,
I will not pity you, or lend a hand.

When I first read these lines, I smiled, as I imag­ine the poem makes most peo­ple with penises smile, but there is also in this poem a deep, deep sad­ness. Indeed, I don’t think I have ever read a more con­cise and pow­er­ful expres­sion of the self-alienation and self-hatred inher­ent in see­ing penile erec­tion as some­thing one “achieves,” as a kind of test one either passes or fails. The emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal expe­ri­ence of the speaker in this poem is one of the best and most per­sua­sive rea­sons I know for leav­ing the tra­di­tional, patri­ar­chal ver­sion of male het­ero­sex­u­al­ity behind.

Do you believe in love at first sight? All-consuming, Romeo-and-Juliet, I-cannot-live-withou-you, I-know-just-by-looking-at-you-that-you-are-all-I-will-ever-need-and-so-I-will-give-up-everything-I-have-ever-held-dear-just-to-be-with-you, I-would-even-die-for-you love? I don’t. I never have. Even when I was young enough that the roman­tic ideal of such a love should have res­onated in me, I actu­ally thought the whole con­cept was kind of ridicu­lous. Attar, how­ever, does believe in it. In my pre­vi­ous post, “An Offi­cer Falls in Love with a Prince,” I gave you an exam­ple from Ilahi Nama of a man who falls in love with another man based on the sec­ond man’s appear­ance. In The Con­fer­ence of the Birds, Sheikh Sam’an, “the first man of his time” (57), falls in love at first sight with a Chris­t­ian woman, though given Attar’s descrip­tion of him, Sam’an is the last per­son you’d think would suc­cumb to the allure of such “for­bid­den fruit:”

Sam’an was once the first man of his time.
What­ever praise can be expressed in rhyme
Belonged to him: for fifty years this sheikh
Kept Mecca’s holy place, and for his sake
Four hun­dred pupils entered learning’s way.
He mor­ti­fied his body night and day,
Knew the­ory, prac­tice, mys­ter­ies of great age,
And fifty times had made the Pil­grim­age.¹
He fasted, prayed, observed all sacred laws–
Aston­ished saints and cler­ics thronged his doors.
He split reli­gious hairs in argu­ment;
His breath revived the sick and impo­tent.
He knew the people’s hearts in joy and grief
And was their liv­ing sym­bol of Belief. (58)

Nonethe­less, Sam’an is haunted by a dream. He sees him­self in Rome, liv­ing in a church, and bow­ing down before an idol – becom­ing, in other words, a Chris­t­ian. He decides that the only way to under­stand this dream is to go to Rome, which he does, accom­pa­nied by four hun­dred schol­ars. The trou­ble that awaits the sheikh, though, takes the form not of a spir­i­tual temp­ta­tion per se to, but of a Chris­t­ian woman so beau­ti­ful that any man who lays eyes on her is ren­dered help­less with love.

They left the Ka’abah² for Rome’s bound­aries,
A gen­tle land­scape of low hills and trees,
Where, infi­nitely love­lier than the view,
There sat a girl, a Chris­t­ian girl who knew
The secrets of her faiths the­ol­ogy.
A fairer child no man could hope to see–
In beauty’s man­sion she was like a sun
That never set – indeed the spoils she won
Were headed by the sun him­self, whose face
Was pale with jeal­ousy and sour dis­grace.
The man about whose heart her ringlets curled
Became a Chris­t­ian and renounced the world;
The man who saw her lips and knew defeat
Embraced the earth before her bonny feet;
And as the breeze passed through her musky hair
The men of Rome watched won­der­ing in despair.
Her eyes spoke promises to those in love,
Their fine brows arched coquet­tishly above–
Those brows sent glanc­ing mes­sages that seemed
To offer every­thing her lovers dreamed.
The pupils of her eyes grew wide and smiled,
And count­less souls were glad to be beguiled;
The face beneath her curls glowed like soft fire;
Her hon­eyed lips pro­voked the world’s desire;
But those who thought to feast there found her eyes
Held pointed dag­gers to pro­tect the prize,
And since she kept her coun­sel no one knew–
Despite the claims of some – what she would do.
Her mouth was tiny as a needle’s eye,
Her breath was quick­en­ing with Jesus’ sigh;
Her chin was dim­pled with a sil­ver well
In which a thou­sand drown­ing Josephs fell;
A glis­ter­ing jewel secured her hair in place,
Which like a veil obscured her lovely face.
The Chris­t­ian turned, the dark veil was removed,
A fire flashed through the old man’s joints – he loved!
One hair con­verted hun­dreds; how could he
Resist that idol’s face shown openly? (58−59)

The rest of the story con­cerns the abject lengths to which Sam’an is will­ing to go to be with this woman and the humil­i­at­ing decep­tions she prac­tices on him in the process, promis­ing her­self if only he will drink wine, tend her pigs, and adopt Chris­tian­ity – he does all three – and even then reject­ing him. In the end, how­ever, with the help of his friends, Sam’an returns to the proper path; and the woman, finally, real­iz­ing the error of her ways, chooses the Sufi path as well. I’m less inter­ested here, though, in how the tale ends than I am in how strongly I was reminded when I read it of some of the things Tim­o­thy Beneke says about men and rape cul­ture in his book Men on Rape: What They Have to Say about Sex­ual Vio­lence, specif­i­cally his dis­cus­sion of how men per­ceive women’s beauty as a weapon. Here are some examples:

She’s a knock­out!
What a bomb­shell!
She’s strik­ingly beau­ti­ful!
That woman is rav­ish­ing!
She’s really stun­ning!
She’s a femme fatale!
She’s dressed to kill! (20, ital­ics in the original)

Granted some of these expres­sions are dated, and some can be used to describe men as well as women–dressed to kill for exam­ple – but Beneke’s cen­tral point, that men expe­ri­ence a woman’s beauty as a weapon she deploys against them is pretty clearly borne out by the metaphor­i­cal lan­guage he cites. More­over, he goes on the argue, refer­ring to the way we metaphor­i­cally define sex as achieve­ment–I want to score some ass, tonight, for exam­ple–“the pres­ence of an attrac­tive woman may result in one’s feel­ing like a fail­ure. One’s self-worth, or “man­hood” may become sub­tly (or not so sub­tly) at issue in her pres­ence. And how does one feel toward some­one who ‘makes one feel like a fail­ure’? Like degrad­ing them in return” (ibid.). By way of illus­tra­tion, Beneke quotes “Jay,” one of the men he inter­viewed for the book:

A lot of times a woman knows that she’s look­ing really good and she’ll use that and flaunt it, and it makes me feel like she’s laugh­ing at me and I feel degraded. I also feel dehu­man­ized, because when I’m being teased I just turn off, I cease to be human…I don’t like the feel­ing that I’m sup­posed to stand there and take it, and not be able to hug her or kiss her; so I just turn off my emo­tions. It’s a feel­ing of humiliation.…If I were actu­ally des­per­ate enough to rape some­body, it would be from want­ing the per­son, but also it would be a very spite­ful thing, just being able to say, “I have power over you and I can do any­thing I want with you,” because really I feel that they have power over me just by their pres­ence. Just the fact that they can come up to me and just melt me and make me feel like dummy makes we want revenge. (20−21, ital­ics in the original)

Now look again at how Attar describes the Chris­t­ian woman’s beauty. The ringlets of her hair ensnare men into giv­ing up the world; her lips, on sight, cause men to sur­ren­der, and just the sight of the breeze pass­ing through her hair causes them to despair. More­over, the “prize” her beauty promises has for pro­tec­tion the dag­gers in her eyes; and while the “sil­ver well/in which a thou­sand drown­ing Josephs fell” is not a weapon per se, to describe her chin in that way is clearly to sug­gest that her beauty is treach­er­ous for men to nav­i­gate. Yet the sheikh’s response is pre­cisely the oppo­site from the one Jay described above. Instead of expe­ri­enc­ing the onslaught of the Chris­t­ian woman’s beauty as some­thing to fight back against, as Jay says that he would do, the sheikh sur­ren­ders to it. Indeed, even when she taunts Sam’an in terms that would cer­tainly raise Jay’s ire and make him want to prove him­self, the sheikh merely goes deeper into his own surrender.

When she says to him, for exam­ple, “For­get flir­ta­tious games, your breath is cold;/Stop chas­ing love, remem­ber you are old./It is a shroud you need, not me!” (64), or later, when she asks him, “What do you want, old man?/Old hyp­ocrite of love, who talks but can/Do noth­ing else?” (65), he does not get angry; he does not sug­gest that, indeed, if only she would give him the chance, he would show just what he could do. Rather, he says

“Com­mand me now; what­ever you decide
I will per­form. I spurned idol­a­try
When sober, but your beauty is to me
An idol for whose sake I’ll gladly burn
My faith’s Koran.” (66)

Finally, though, after she puts him off one more time, he’s had enough, and he chal­lenges her:

Con­sider what, for your sake, I have done–
Then tell me, when shall we two be as one?
Hope for that moment jus­ti­fies my pain;
Have all my trou­bles been endured in vain? (67)

“But you are poor,” she answers him, “and I

Can­not be cheaply won – the price is high;
Bring gold, and sil­ver too, you inno­cent–
Then I might pity your predica­ment;
But you have nei­ther, there­fore go – and take
A beggar’s alms from me; be off, old sheikh!
Be on your trav­els like the sun – alone;
Be manly now and patient, do not groan!” (ibid.)

This last taunt sets in motion the process by which the sheikh returns to the proper path and the Chris­t­ian woman accepts that path as well, but what I want to focus on here is her equa­tion of man­li­ness with patience, with the abil­ity to sur­ren­der to absolute beauty even when ful­fill­ing one’s desire for that beauty is an unat­tain­able dream. One impli­ca­tion of see­ing man­li­ness in this way is that sex­u­al­ized feel­ings of anger, revenge, and spite­ful­ness, such as Jay expressed in Men on Rape, are unmanly, and, indeed, though this is a sub­ject for another post, Attar does sug­gest that those who are con­sumed by lust and there­fore sus­cep­ti­ble to such feel­ings are less than men. Another more-than-implication, how­ever, is that the Sufi path towards God, what it means to desire God, to be one with God, is defined by a par­tic­u­lar vision of male sex­u­al­ity, one that con­ceives of phys­i­cal beauty as a weapon and the expe­ri­ence of that beauty as vio­lence. There is a lot more to say about this, and a lot of ques­tions to ask about how and whether other patri­ar­chal and/or monothe­is­tic reli­gious tra­di­tions, mys­ti­cal and not, fol­low a sim­i­lar logic, but for now, all I can say, is that it makes me deeply, deeply sad.

1. The pil­grim­age to Mecca that all Mus­lims are sup­posed to make at least once in their lives. [↩]
2. A build­ing at the cen­ter of the great Mosque in Mecca. Every­one who makes the pil­grim­age there walks around it seven times. [↩]

I was clean­ing out some files in my office at school the other day, when I found a copy of the intro­duc­tion I gave in the spring of 2001 for two women who were doing an inde­pen­dent study with me in cre­ative writ­ing. The intro­duc­tion was for their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the annual sym­po­sium at my school where stu­dents doing inde­pen­dent stud­ies were required to present their work in order to get credit for the class. I’d met Cheryl and Edith (not their real names) the pre­vi­ous semes­ter when they took Advanced Essay Writ­ing with me, which I taught as a class in writ­ing the per­sonal essay. Each wrote a piece early on about the sex­ual abuse she’d sur­vived as a child, and each had approached me sep­a­rately about the fact that she wanted to be a writer and that the issue of sex­ual abuse was at the core of what she wanted to write about.

Respond­ing to their work in the con­text of their ambi­tion con­fronted me with a seri­ous dilemma. I had already been writ­ing about my own expe­ri­ence of abuse for some time, but I’d also always made sure to keep those details of my life sep­a­rate from my work in the class­room. It wasn’t so much a dis­tinc­tion between per­sonal and pri­vate that I wanted; after all, I was per­form­ing at read­ings and try­ing to pub­lish poems that dealt with my abuse. It was more that I feared allow­ing too much of my own vul­ner­a­bil­ity into the class­room would under­mine my author­ity as a teacher.

Edith’s and Cheryl’s were not the first stu­dent essays I’d read about sex­ual abuse. Indeed, by that point in my teach­ing career, I’d read more than a few essays in which stu­dents talked about their encoun­ters with black­mail, domes­tic vio­lence, alco­holism, and even female gen­i­tal muti­la­tion. Edith and Cheryl, how­ever, were the first who told me they wanted to be writ­ers writ­ing about their issues, that they wanted to claim a pub­lic voice in which to speak not just for its cathar­tic or ther­a­peu­tic value, but also about why what their abusers had done to them should mat­ter to their com­mu­ni­ties – Edith was Latina; Cheryl, Haitian-American – to women as a group, and to soci­ety at large. Even more than writ­ing instruc­tion, talk­ing to each of them quickly made clear, what they wanted was a mentor/role model.

My first response was quin­tes­sen­tially teacher-like. I rec­om­mended books they could read and I talked to each of them about the value of coun­sel­ing in com­ing to terms with their expe­ri­ence, but they wanted more. Edith was espe­cially artic­u­late about this. What she wanted, she said, was some­one she could talk to, some­one of whom she could ask ques­tions face-to-face, some­one who had been through what she was going through, not just the abuse itself, but the desire to go pub­lic, with all its intim­i­dat­ing impli­ca­tions, and come out whole on the other side – pre­cisely what she was afraid she would not be able to do. I asked to take another look at her essay after that con­ver­sa­tion and, as I read it a sec­ond and third time, I ticked off in my mind each moment where I could tell she was hold­ing back, where she was pur­posely not say­ing what she was afraid would split her world so wide open she might never be able to make it whole again, and I decided to come out to her as a fel­low sur­vivor, as just the kind of writer she’d been telling me that she was look­ing for. I wrote a long response to her essay and, when I got the sec­ond draft of Cheryl’s piece, which showed exactly the same kinds of weak­nesses, I did the same for her, open­ing up a whole new level of con­ver­sa­tion with each of them about what it meant to be a writer and what they wanted their writ­ing to accomplish.

For most of the semes­ter, those con­ver­sa­tions were sep­a­rate, but then Edith approached me about the pos­si­bil­ity of doing an inde­pen­dent study in essay writ­ing, since there were no more classes she could take. I sug­gested that she might want to talk to Cheryl as well, say­ing only that Cheryl also wanted to be a writer and that I thought they might have a lot to say to each other. Edith did; Cheryl agreed; they did the required paper­work and our inde­pen­dent study began in Jan­u­ary of 2001. It was a remark­able expe­ri­ence, but I want to write about here is what hap­pened towards the end of that semes­ter when I reminded them that they would have to read at the sym­po­sium some por­tion of the work they’d pro­duced. Frankly, they were ter­ri­fied. The sym­po­sium would be attended not just by independent-study fac­ulty, other stu­dent pre­sen­ters and their guests, but also by the col­lege pres­i­dent, aca­d­e­mic vice pres­i­dent, vice pres­i­dent of stu­dent affairs, and other admin­is­tra­tors. How, they wanted to know, could they pos­si­bly read any of the inti­mate, sex­u­ally explicit, some­times vio­lent pieces they’d writ­ten in front of that audi­ence? What place did their sto­ries have, what right did they have to place their sto­ries, side by side with the schol­arly and aca­d­e­mic work that would be pre­sented by the other independent-study students?

There was no easy way to answer those ques­tions, noth­ing I could say that would make them feel safe, because they were right. Their sto­ries were, at least from a tra­di­tional point of view, the antithe­sis of the schol­ar­ship that other stu­dents would be pre­sent­ing. Not only were my stu­dents’ essays not research essays, but Cheryl’s was about the first time she was able to have an orgasm from pen­e­tra­tive sex, which her abuse had made it very dif­fi­cult to do, and Edith’s was an angry and explicit con­dem­na­tion of the male dom­i­nant het­ero­sex­u­al­ity that gave men per­mis­sion to treat her like an object and of the men in her life who had done so, start­ing with the man who’d sex­u­ally abused her while her mother man­aged not to know about it. Each woman, in other words, had good rea­son to be afraid, and the more we talked about that fear, the more it became clear to me that I had to do some­thing to share its bur­den with them, that this was the moment to be the role model they had asked me to be. So I told them that when I intro­duced them, I would do so by talk­ing a lit­tle bit about myself as a sur­vivor of sex­ual abuse and what being able to work with them had meant to me. This way, any­one at the sym­po­sium who had a prob­lem with the con­tent of their essays would have to come through me first. Here is the text that I read:

Twenty years ago, when I was begin­ning to come to terms with the sex­ual abuse I sur­vived as a teenager, there were no male voices out there that I could use as mod­els in mak­ing sense of what had hap­pened to me; and there was as well much mis­un­der­stand­ing about what it meant to be a man who was once a boy whose body had been sex­u­ally vio­lated. I remem­ber going to the Syra­cuse Uni­ver­sity library when I was in grad­u­ate school, for exam­ple, to see what had been writ­ten about my expe­ri­ence and learn­ing for my trou­bles from a study I remem­ber lit­tle else about that most peo­ple believed boys who’d been sex­u­ally abused by men were most likely to become homo­sex­u­als, as if we had invited and enjoyed the abuse. I felt alone and afraid, and I think one of the rea­sons I became a writer is that the act of my putting my words on the page, their phys­i­cal pres­ence in the world out­side myself, pro­vided at least some reas­sur­ance that my expe­ri­ence was real, that it was impor­tant and that it deserved an audi­ence, even if only an audi­ence of one, myself.

The women who are going to read for you tonight, Cheryl and Edith, were also sex­u­ally abused as chil­dren. They are for­tu­nate enough to have come of age at a time when the silence and fear that once sur­rounded this sub­ject no longer dom­i­nates our pub­lic con­scious­ness. Nonethe­less, writ­ing has been for them a way both of break­ing the iso­la­tion that abusers inevitably impose on their vic­tims and of mak­ing mean­ing, per­sonal and polit­i­cal, out of their expe­ri­ence. I am hon­ored, hum­bled and sim­ply happy that they trusted me enough to help them learn the craft nec­es­sary to speak that mean­ing as com­pellingly as you will hear them speak tonight.

What they read may make you uncom­fort­able. It should. Abuse is ugly, and con­fronting it is never easy. If you look closely, how­ever, and are will­ing to lis­ten, there is beauty to be found in that con­fronta­tion – not the easy and often reac­tionary responses you hear from politi­cians and the media, but the care­fully pol­ished and hard-won moments of hope that let you know heal­ing and trans­for­ma­tion, both per­sonal and col­lec­tive, are possible.

When I fin­ished read­ing it, you could hear a pin drop, and the uncom­fort­able silence con­tin­ued until Edith, who read first, looked up from the last page of her piece, and received a well-deserved stand­ing ova­tion. When Cheryl fin­ished read­ing her essay, the audi­ence stood for her as well, and not a few peo­ple – stu­dents, fac­ulty, admin­is­tra­tion – came over to con­grat­u­late them after­wards. The only one of my col­leagues who said any­thing to me was a guy from the Math depart­ment who com­plained that I’d made a mock­ery of the event by allow­ing my stu­dents to read such inap­pro­pri­ate pieces of work. We argued for a bit, nei­ther per­suad­ing the other, and when he left, I was happy to recede into the back­ground. Nei­ther my deci­sions as the super­vi­sor of the inde­pen­dent study nor the rev­e­la­tions I’d made in my intro­duc­tion were the point of the evening, which was sup­posed to be Cheryl and Edith’s moment to shine, and I was happy and hum­bled and proud that they were indeed shining.

For myself, how­ever, deliv­er­ing that intro­duc­tion was trans­for­ma­tive. It was the first time that I’d pub­licly claimed my iden­tity as a sur­vivor of sex­ual abuse not just for its own sake, but as a legit­i­mate per­spec­tive through which to under­stand and make deci­sions about actions I wanted to take that were not directly con­nected to my own sex­u­al­ity. It was, in other words, the moment I first began to work through what a “pol­i­tics of sur­vivor­ship,” or at least my pol­i­tics of sur­vivor­ship, might look like. And I have Edith and Cheryl to thank for teach­ing me that.

Author’s note: I have changed the title of the post so that the sex abuse scan­dal in the Catholic Church is not included. Even though the major­ity of vic­tims in that scan­dal were boys, as far as I know, girls were also vic­tim­ized, and I don’t the focus of this post inad­ver­tently to erase that fact.

Why boys? It’s a sim­ple enough ques­tion, and it seems to me obvi­ous that we should be ask­ing it, espe­cially since rep­utable sta­tis­tics place the num­ber of boys who will be sex­u­ally abused before the age of six­teen at one in six. Indeed, even if this preva­lence rate were one in eight, or one in twelve, the pop­u­la­tion of boys it rep­re­sented would still be large enough that, if we were talk­ing about almost any other group, one of the first ques­tions we’d ask would be why that group was being sex­u­ally tar­geted in the first place. When we talk about the sex­ual abuse of girls, we ask and answer the cor­re­spond­ing ques­tion–Why girls?–as a mat­ter of course, mostly because the sex­ual abuse of girl “fits” the dom­i­nant het­ero­sex­ual nar­ra­tive of our cul­ture, which says that men exist sex­u­ally to pur­sue women and women exist sex­u­ally to be pur­sued by men. How we under­stand that nar­ra­tive and its rela­tion­ship to the sex­ual abuse of girls will likely dif­fer depend­ing on whether we lean polit­i­cally to the left or the right, iden­tify as fem­i­nist or not, are con­scious or not that girls are also abused by women – as are boys, but more on that later – but those dif­fer­ences do not change the fact that, as a cul­ture, we under­stand girls to be poten­tial tar­gets of abuse in large mea­sure because of the dom­i­nant het­ero­sex­ual narrative.

The sex­ual abuse of boys, on the other hand, and it doesn’t mat­ter whether they are abused by men or women, does not fit that nar­ra­tive. When a boy’s abuser is a woman, for exam­ple, many refuse even to call it abuse¹, under­stand­ing it instead as a for­tu­itous ini­ti­a­tion into sex (which really means into man­hood). In other words, because the idea of a boy being abused by a woman just doesn’t fit our idea of what sex between males and females should be, or our idea of how male het­ero­sex­u­al­ity ought to be embod­ied, we impose those ideas on the abuse, assum­ing that the boy wanted it, that he enjoyed it, maybe even that he had some­how engi­neered it. Indeed, as Keith Alexan­der wrote in his Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle, “When a Boy is Sex­u­ally Abused by a Woman ‘Peo­ple Do Not Often Rec­og­nize the Harm,’” even the law enforce­ment offi­cials to whom such abuse is reported will often tell the boy in so many words that he should con­sider him­self lucky.

Christo­pher Mallios of Aequitas, a District-based sex-crime vic­tim advo­cacy group, said dur­ing his 16 years as a Philadel­phia pros­e­cu­tor he had seen police and pros­e­cu­tors “high-five” teenage boys who had been sex­u­ally assaulted by women, say­ing that the boys were “lucky.”

This rhetor­i­cal sleight of hand, obvi­ously, hides the boy’s expe­ri­ence of being vio­lated behind the veil of what we as a cul­ture want, and what we believe he should want, his expe­ri­ence to have been. In this way, we can reas­sure our­selves that our dom­i­nant het­ero­sex­ual nar­ra­tive remains firmly in place, while mak­ing sure the boy knows that any prob­lem he might have with what the woman did to him is his and his alone. We replace, in other words – or at least we attempt to replace – any sense he has of him­self as hav­ing been abused with the ques­tion of whether or not he will claim the man­hood that the sex he had with his abuser osten­si­bly rep­re­sents. More to the point, if he doesn’t claim that man­hood, it can only mean one thing: he must be gay, and let’s not for­get that there are still places in the United States where even the sus­pi­cion that you are homo­sex­ual can get you killed. For exam­ple, in one of the cases Alexan­der wrote about, the sit­u­a­tion got so bad that the boy and his fam­ily felt they had to relo­cate. Accord­ing to the offi­cial Alexan­der quotes, peo­ple “were teas­ing him, ask­ing if he was a ‘punk’ [homo­sex­ual], and what’s wrong with him and why he didn’t like it.” The stakes, in other words, can be very high for a boy who wants to insist on the truth of his own experience.

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1. In one study, 40% of the men who said they were sex­u­ally abused as chil­dren reported a female per­pe­tra­tor; there is another study, the link to which I have not been able to find, in which that num­ber is some­where around 20%. Whichever num­ber is more accu­rate, it’s still a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age, and the usual caveats that apply to sta­tis­ti­cal research do not change the point I am try­ing to make here, which has more to do with our cul­tural response to boys who have been abused by women than with the preva­lence of such abuse. [↩]

I remem­ber once, when I was in col­lege, talk­ing about love with a man who was a kind of men­tor to me. He was an artist and we were stand­ing in his stu­dio look­ing at some of his recent paint­ings. He’d been telling me over the pre­vi­ous cou­ple of weeks about how unhappy he was in his mar­riage, and it was not hard to read the pain he was in on the can­vases we were look­ing at. Per­haps I asked him why he didn’t just divorce his wife, or maybe he felt like he’d already told me so much that he needed to explain him­self. What­ever his rea­sons, when I com­mented on what I saw as some auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal detail in one of the paint­ings, he said, “You want to know why I don’t divorce her? Because I love her, and by love I mean I still get an erec­tion when I’m near her. It’s like being in a kind of prison.” It was, I thought — and I still think it is — one of the sad­dest things I’ve ever heard, to feel your­self a pris­oner of love because you feel your­self a pris­oner of and in your own body. I did not want – actu­ally, it made me angry to think – that this might be what it meant to be in love, and as I drove home I found myself strug­gling to find a way to tell him that the sur­ren­der of self he seemed to be describ­ing was not love. I couldn’t do it. I could name what I was reject­ing, but I could not artic­u­late an alter­na­tive vision of love that felt right to me. I was too young and too inexperienced.

Read­ing Attar’s The Con­fer­ence of the Birds returned me to this con­ver­sa­tion from so long ago. As I explained in the pre­vi­ous post in this series, Attar’s Con­fer­ence is about the birds’ quest to find the Simorgh, their king, and achieve enlight­en­ment. They take as their guide the hoopoe, who defines their quest explic­itly in terms of love, “Who­ever can evade the Self transcends/This world and as a lover he ascends” (33). A lit­tle later on, the hoopoe restates his def­i­n­i­tion this way:

“A lover,” said the hoopoe, now their guide,
“Is one in whom all thoughts of Self have died;
Those who renounce the Self deserve that name;
Right­eous or sin­ful, they are all the same!” (57)

Once you renounce the Self, in other words, it no longer mat­ters whether you were right­eous or sin­ful. What mat­ters is that you have begun to live, self­lessly, in your love, burn­ing for the union that your beloved – in this case, God – will either grant or not, because the union you seek is not some­thing you can make hap­pen. It is some­thing that God gives to you if and when he chooses. The par­al­lel to my for­mer mentor’s sit­u­a­tion is hard to miss. The love he felt for his wife, embod­ied in the erec­tion he had when he was near her, ren­dered the prob­lems he was hav­ing with her, the anger, the resent­ment, all of it, null and void. Or, to put it another way, in order to ful­fill his love, he had to renounce those feel­ings, give up the self they rep­re­sented, so that he could, lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively, stand there naked and hard, yearn­ing for the (in this case sex­ual) union his beloved could either grant or not. I remem­ber him describ­ing for me how painful it was, how humil­i­at­ing and shame­ful, to set aside who he thought he was, to pre­tend the self his wife and wronged did not even exist, so that he could go to her with the hope – because she might say no – that she would let him into her body. Attar’s hoopoe may be talk­ing about spir­i­tual love, but the pain it describes is remark­ably sim­i­lar to what my men­tor experienced:

Heart’s blood and bit­ter pain belong to love,
And tales of prob­lems no one can remove;
Cup­bearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine—
And if you lack the heart’s rich blood take mine.
Love thrives on inex­tin­guish­able pain,
Which tears the soul, then knits the threads again.
A mote of love exceeds all bounds; it gives
the vital essence to what­ever lives.
But where love thrives, there pain is always found;
Angels alone escape this weary round—
They love with­out that sav­age agony
Which is reserved for vexed human­ity.
Islam and blas­phemy have both been passed
By those who set out on love’s path at last;
Love will direct you to Dame Poverty,
And she will show the way to Blas­phemy.
When nei­ther Blas­phemy nor Faith remain,
The body and the Self have both been slain;
Then the fierce for­ti­tude the Way will ask
Is yours, and you are wor­thy of our task. (57)

Love and pain, the hoopoe says, are insep­a­ra­ble; where you find the first, you will always find the sec­ond. Why? Because giv­ing up the self is painful. It doesn’t mat­ter whether that self is attached to money and com­fort or reli­gious faith. In order to achieve union with God, you have to give it up, and that means strip­ping your­self down to the most fun­da­men­tal level of your being, which the Sufis see — at least as I have come to under­stand it – as the spir­i­tual ver­sion of the lonely and uncer­tain desire for union rep­re­sented by my mentor’s erec­tion. Indeed, it’s not hard not to imag­ine one of these loves as the model for the other, though which you think is which will prob­a­bly depend on whether or not you believe in a god with whom we were all orig­i­nally as one and to whom, in that one­ness, we long to return. If you do, then you prob­a­bly see what my men­tor called love as a pale, lim­ited and lim­it­ing imi­ta­tion of the more authen­tic spir­i­tual love the hoopoe is talk­ing about. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in that kind of god, or in any god at all, then per­haps you see the hoopoe’s spir­i­tual love – indeed, the whole monothe­is­tic idea of return­ing, whole and pure, to our orig­i­nal place with God – as a pro­jec­tion onto the world of our desire to regain the one­ness we all knew with our moth­ers in the womb. Either way, you have still defined love as the desire for an essen­tially unat­tain­able union.

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That mys­ti­cal expe­ri­ence exists out­side of lan­guage is axiomatic, and if it exists out­side of lan­guage, then it also must exist out­side the net­work of power rela­tions, ineluctably embed­ded in lan­guage, that human beings nav­i­gate daily. Indeed, this is some­thing I have been told at dif­fer­ent times of my life by dif­fer­ent spir­i­tual seek­ers. True spir­i­tu­al­ity, they have wanted me to believe, the pur­suit of an ulti­mate, tran­scen­dent level of aware­ness is apo­lit­i­cal by def­i­n­i­tion. What they say makes per­fect sense to me when I think about death, the one, final tran­scen­dent expe­ri­ence that we all share; but when I think about what it would mean to fol­low any of the spir­i­tual paths they have laid out before me, not only was the lan­guage in which they tried to describe the tran­scen­dence that waits for me at the end of it inevitably embed­ded in the power rela­tions of our cul­ture, but there is no escap­ing the fact that – at least in the monothe­is­tic tra­di­tions with which I am most famil­iar – the rela­tion­ship between the indi­vid­ual seeker and that with which he or she wants to achieve one­ness is one of power, and how can that not be political?

Farid al-Din Attar’s The Con­fer­ence of the Birds, trans­lated by Afkham Dar­bandi and Dick Davis, is an alle­gory of spir­i­tual seek­ing, in which an assem­bly of birds sets out in search of the Simorgh, the king of the birds, in order to attain true enlight­en­ment. At their journey’s end, the thirty birds that remain dis­cover that they them­selves are the Simorgh, that the enlight­en­ment they have been seek­ing has always been within them. This moment of rev­e­la­tion turns on a pun that is impos­si­ble in Eng­lish, for Simorgh means thirty (si) birds (morgh):

There in the Simorgh’s radi­ant face they saw
Them­selves, the Simorgh of the world — with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to com­pre­hend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end. (219)

To reach this end, the birds must first travel the very dif­fi­cult path by which they will learn to shed the car­nal, mun­dane, worldly self sep­a­rat­ing them from what they desire. Divided into stages, this jour­ney forms the over­ar­ch­ing nar­ra­tive of the poem, pro­vid­ing the frame which Attar then fills in with illus­tra­tive tales told by the hoopoe, the bird the other birds elect as their guide. The hoopoe defines the jour­ney as one informed by a lover’s desire:

Join me, and when at last we end our quest
Our king will greet you as His hon­oured guest.
How long will you per­sist in blas­phemy?
Escape your self-hood’s vicious tyranny—
Who­ever can evade the Self tran­scends
This world and as a lover he ascends.
Set free your soul; impa­tient of delay,
Step out along our sovereign’s royal Way[.] (33)

All three monothe­is­tic reli­gions — Chris­tian­ity, Judaism, and Islam — enjoin their fol­low­ers to love their god, but this com­mand, as I under­stand it, is quite dif­fer­ent from what the Sufis mean when they say that you should strive to become a lover of God, for they mean not sim­ply that you should love God the way you love your father, for exam­ple, but rather that you should burn with love for God the way you might burn with desire for a human beloved, that the energy you burn with for union with that other per­son is pre­cisely the energy that needs to be trans­formed along the mys­ti­cal path into the pure energy of union with God. Indeed, so strongly did some Sufis con­nect human sex­ual love and desire to the love and desire they aspired to expe­ri­ence in their god that there are sto­ries in which Sufi mas­ters advise those who want to fol­low the path – and in these sto­ries the mas­ter and dis­ci­ple are always men – to try lov­ing a woman first.

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I just shared this on Face­book – via Upwor­thy–but I am also post­ing it here. You should watch. Here’s the copy from Rebecca Eisenberg’s post:

One bil­lion women across the globe will be raped or beaten in their life­times. That’s a really depress­ing sta­tis­tic. So on the 15^th anniver­sary of V-Day, Feb. 14, 2013, the One Bil­lion Ris­ing cam­paign is invit­ing one bil­lion women (and those who love them) to stand up and dance — to DEMAND an end to vio­lence against women. It’s an invi­ta­tion to woman and men to put an end to the sta­tus quo, it’s an act of sol­i­dar­ity, and it’s a refusal to accept vio­lence against women and girls as a given. On Feb. 14, I’ll be danc­ing with a bil­lion other peo­ple. Will you?

Trig­ger Warn­ing: Uh, pretty much all of them in the first minute and a half. Jump to 1:30 for the inspi­ra­tional, won­der­ful, chill-inducing, and empow­er­ing stuff.