The first time the old man who lived in the apart­ment at the top of the stair­case said hello to me, he stopped for a moment as we passed in the court­yard and smiled as if he’d known me my whole life. The sec­ond time, he did the same thing. By the third or fourth time, a rit­ual of greet­ing had grown between us. When­ever we saw each other, he would smile and say hello first; I would smile, say the same thing back, and then, for a long silent moment, he would fix me with his gaze while I stood there, too hap­pily embar­rassed to move, wish­ing when he walked away that I’d done some­thing, any­thing, to pro­long our conversation.

I think of him as “the old man” because of how young I was when I met him — I was thir­teen — but he was prob­a­bly not much older than the forty-nine-years-old I am now, if that old, and so he was the per­fect age for me to see in him a pos­si­ble sur­ro­gate father. My par­ents had sep­a­rated when I was three; my step­fa­ther had recently left us; and I was des­per­ate for some kind of pater­nal atten­tion and approval. So I was thrilled when the old man one day in late sum­mer did not keep walk­ing after our usual exchange, ask­ing me instead, “When am I going to see you?”

I fig­ured he was lonely, like Mrs. Schecht­man had been when she lived in the apart­ment next to his, and the thought of vis­it­ing with him like I used to visit with her made me happy. “Soon!” I answered.

Not too long after­wards, I was on my way out of our build­ing to meet my friends. The old man hap­pened to be walk­ing down the stair­case lead­ing from his apart­ment to the front door, which we reached at the same time. As I went to turn the knob, he held the door shut with his left fore­arm, maneu­ver­ing me with his right till I stood face first in the cor­ner near the mail­boxes where the door frame met the wall. Cov­er­ing my body with his own, he ran his hands beneath my shirt and up the legs of my shorts; he groped my chest and belly, squeezed my butt, cupped my crotch, and he kept whis­per­ing hoarsely into my ear, over and over again, “When am I going to see you?”

I had no words for what he was doing, no train­ing such as young chil­dren get now in how to scream no! to scare off an attacker. All I could do was stand there till he was fin­ished; and when he was fin­ished, I ran. I don’t remem­ber how far or how long or in which direc­tion, but I ran as if I could leave my skin behind, as if run­ning would turn me into another per­son. When I stopped run­ning, in the small park across the street from the Lutheran Church, I sat a long time with the knowl­edge that my run­ning had undone noth­ing, that my body was still the body he’d touched.

Even if I’d wanted to tell some­one — and I didn’t — I was sure no one would believe me, so I pre­tended noth­ing had hap­pened. When the old man passed me the next day and said hello, I said hello back the way I always did, forc­ing myself not to see the ironic twist he added to his smile. After a cou­ple of more times, our hel­los began to feel nor­mal again, and I told myself that maybe it hadn’t hap­pened. Maybe he was just a lonely old man who liked to say hello, and as long as he stayed on his side of that hello, I felt — or, to be more accu­rate, I con­vinced myself that I was — safe.

Some weeks later, as I sat with my friends in front of our build­ing, the old man came home from food shop­ping and asked me to help him upstairs with the bags in his shop­ping cart. I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t. To do so would almost cer­tainly have raised ques­tions for my friends about why I was being so rude, and the last thing I wanted to do was explain myself to them. So I took the bag he pointed to and fol­lowed him up to his apart­ment, where he opened the door and motioned me in ahead of him. The bag was heavy, so I stepped inside, think­ing I’d leave it by the door and get out as quickly as I could, but he was too fast for me. As soon as the door shut behind him, he pushed the shop­ping cart to the side, took the bag from my arms and dropped it to the floor. The cans at the bot­tom landed with a crash that shook the whole apart­ment. Snaking his arms around my waist, he undid my belt and unzipped my pants, push­ing them down so they fell around my ankles. All I could do was stand there, frozen to the spot where my feet had stopped mov­ing. He took me by the hand and led me to the couch against the wall. He sat down. Look­ing up at me with a wide smile — I have the dis­tinct mem­ory that he’d taken out his two front teeth — his eyes, at what I imag­ine must have been the fear in mine, grew ten­der. “You’ve never had a blowjob before, have you?” When I shook my head no, his voice filled with con­cern. “But don’t you want me to love you?”

In the silence with which I responded, he took my penis in his hands — I remem­ber think­ing his fin­gers were like a cage — and he told me how good it was, how beau­ti­ful and big, and then his own pants were down, and I was sit­ting on the couch, and his penis, large and pur­ple, hung in front of my face. His voice came from some­where above me, urg­ing me to play with it, at least to touch it, and I don’t remem­ber if I did — no, at this point, my mem­ory goes white, like the blank space in a video of which a por­tion has been erased, though I can still feel his hands on the back of my head. Then I see myself walk­ing to the door, unlock­ing it, clos­ing it behind me, and some­how I am next in my bed, curled in the fetal posi­tion, where I stay until my mother calls me for dinner.

The next day, the old man saw me stand­ing by myself in front of our build­ing. He didn’t come close, just stood some dis­tance away and pleaded with me to go upstairs with him again. This time, he promised, would be dif­fer­ent. He would move more slowly, be more gen­tle. I said no, ignor­ing his fur­ther pleas until he left me alone, which he did for the rest of the time he lived in our build­ing. I still nod­ded in recog­ni­tion if I was with some­one when he saw me — I did not want any­one won­der­ing why I didn’t — but oth­er­wise I did my best to ignore him, and he seemed con­tent to ignore me as well. Even­tu­ally, he moved away, and what he’d done to me receded even fur­ther into the silence I’d wrapped it in, and I pulled that silence around me like a pro­tec­tive cloak. No one else ever had to know.

The fab­ric of my silence started to fray when, at nine­teen years old, I read Adri­enne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence. At the time, I was inter­ested in Rich as a poet; I knew noth­ing about her as a fem­i­nist. Indeed, fem­i­nism itself was barely on my radar as some­thing with a sub­stan­tive rel­e­vance to my life, and so I was sur­prised to find myself enthralled and ener­gized by the polit­i­cal and explic­itly woman-centered con­tent of what I was read­ing. Then I came to this pas­sage from “Cary­atid: Two Columns:”

[T]aught to view our bod­ies as our total­ity, our gen­i­tals as our chief source of fas­ci­na­tion and value, many women have become dis­so­ci­ated from their own bodies…viewing them­selves as objects to be pos­sessed by men rather than as the sub­jects of an existence.

As soon as I read those words, a small voice in my head began to speak. “But what about me?” it wanted to know. “What about what hap­pened to me?” I sought out other fem­i­nist texts and read vora­ciously, dis­cov­er­ing in the fem­i­nist analy­sis of men’s sex­ual vio­lence against women a vocab­u­lary for nam­ing what the old man in my build­ing had done to me as the vio­la­tion it was. More impor­tantly, though, being able to name what he did made it pos­si­ble for me to tell oth­ers, and when telling them did not bring the roof of the world crash­ing down around my head, I found the strength I needed to con­front my abuse more fully by going to coun­sel­ing. In a very real sense, then, I owe to fem­i­nism what­ever heal­ing I have achieved.

If I stopped here, even those of you totally opposed to fem­i­nism would prob­a­bly be nod­ding your heads. “Of course you’re a fem­i­nist. It makes per­fect sense.” Yet to stop here would be to reduce fem­i­nism to a kind of self-help ide­ol­ogy, implic­itly deny­ing that fem­i­nism is also a pol­i­tics. More to the point, it would be to gloss over the fact that com­mit­ting myself to those pol­i­tics has been part and par­cel of my healing.

Not too long after I first read Adri­enne Rich’s essay, I was work­ing as a sum­mer camp super­vi­sor in New York’s Hud­son Val­ley. The leader of a train­ing ses­sion we were required to attend told us he would use the word she as the generic pro­noun when dis­cussing how to deal with campers who might choose to tell us that they’d been sex­u­ally abused. Since most abuse hap­pened to girls, he explained, refer­ring to both boys and girls as vic­tims would give us a skewed pic­ture of real­ity, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for us to respond appro­pri­ately. I felt like I’d been punched in the stom­ach. It wasn’t just that he so blithely dis­missed my expe­ri­ence. What he said seemed to imply that the sex­ual abuse of boys and the sex­ual abuse of girls were so rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent in nature that we could not talk about them in the same con­text. If that were true, it called into ques­tion every­thing I thought I’d been learn­ing from fem­i­nism, sug­gest­ing that the strength I’d been draw­ing from that learn­ing was based on a false premise.

My body rebelled at this idea. Each time I tried to tell myself that the ses­sion leader was right — because the weight of his exper­tise made it hard to think he wasn’t — I wanted to crawl out of my skin no dif­fer­ently than I had after the first time the old man in my build­ing touched me. Still, there was no deny­ing that the books I was read­ing said not one word about my expe­ri­ence. Girls and women were abused and exploited in those pages, not boys, and cer­tainly not men. I’d found myself in Rich’s essay, in other words, as well as in the other fem­i­nists texts I was read­ing, through a process of anal­ogy. To take another instance from “Cary­atid: Two Columns,” when Rich wrote about how the val­ues of our cul­ture “equat[e]…manhood…with the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of another’s per­son and the dom­i­na­tion of another’s body,” I under­stood her to be describ­ing, with a chill­ing accu­racy, what the old man in my build­ing had done to me, even though she was talk­ing explic­itly about men’s sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of women.

This anal­ogy only grew stronger as I began to see very pre­cise par­al­lels between the old man’s method of “seduc­ing” me — because that’s what I think he thought he was doing – and the meth­ods for get­ting women into bed that some of my male friends talked about using. I remem­ber, for exam­ple, a dorm room con­ver­sa­tion from when I was an under­grad­u­ate. The “stud” among us – call him Liam – was talk­ing about the kind of women with whom sex­ual suc­cess mat­tered to him the most. These were, he said, the women who resisted, the ones who made him work for it, forc­ing him to prove that he could bend them to his will — I think he actu­ally used those words — because get­ting them to have sex with him made him feel most like a man. As Liam described how he sized such women up, I sud­denly real­ized that the old man in my build­ing had sized me up as well, that he had to have been watch­ing me before the first time he said hello. I was a shy, awk­ward and needy kid, so he gave me the kind of atten­tion that would make me feel noticed and that I would there­fore want more of. Liam talked about this as the “stage of flat­tery.” Then, once the old man could see in me a grow­ing desire for his atten­tion, he must have assumed that I also desired (per­haps with­out real­iz­ing it) every­thing else he wanted to “give” me as well. Accord­ing to Liam, a woman who resisted at this stage really wanted sex but was afraid of being labeled “easy.” She needed to be “taken,” he said, so she could give up her self con­trol with­out feel­ing guilty. Fol­low­ing what I am sure was a sim­i­lar logic, the old man used the force he thought was nec­es­sary to push me past the fear he believed was keep­ing me from express­ing my true desire. How else to explain the ques­tion he asked me before my mem­ory goes blank, “But don’t you want me to love you?”

Iron­i­cally, this par­al­lel between the two men was com­fort­ing. It affirmed for me that there was no rea­son to believe my expe­ri­ence of abuse dif­fered in any essen­tial way from the expe­ri­ence of a girl or woman whom a man had sim­i­larly vio­lated. The ses­sion leader had to have been wrong. Yet there was also no avoid­ing the fact that the fem­i­nists I was read­ing placed me as a man in the same cat­e­gory as the two men I have been talk­ing about. Here, again, from “Cary­atid: Two Columns,” is Adri­enne Rich:

Rape is the ulti­mate out­ward phys­i­cal act of coer­cion and deper­son­al­iza­tion prac­ticed on women by men. Most male readers…would per­haps deny hav­ing gone so far: the hon­est would admit to fan­tasies, urges of lust and hatred, or lust and fear, or to a “harm­less” fas­ci­na­tion with pornog­ra­phy and sadis­tic art.

I was fas­ci­nated by pornog­ra­phy; I had fan­tasies that com­bined lust and fear; and it was impos­si­ble to miss the cyn­i­cal accu­sa­tion in Rich’s use of the word “per­haps.” More tellingly, though, and damn­ingly, I had to admit that when Liam explained what it took for him to feel sex­u­ally like a man, I could not help but mea­sure myself against the stan­dard he set. I didn’t have a girl­friend at the time, and I wasn’t hav­ing sex, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t some­times make me feel inad­e­quate. How­ever, it was only after I met a woman who rejected me because I was not “man enough” in pre­cisely Liam’s terms that I began to under­stand how fully the sex­ual val­ues to which he sub­scribed were also val­ues I had in me, whether I wanted them or not.

I met “Ling” through one of her suit­e­m­ates, “Denise,” who sat next to me in the class I was tak­ing on Shakespeare’s come­dies. The three of us spent an after­noon talk­ing and jok­ing in the library when we were sup­posed to be study­ing, and we hit it off so well that soon I was walk­ing across cam­pus a cou­ple of times a week to hang out with them and “Naomi,” the third woman with whom they lived. Some­times, if I stayed too late, I’d sleep on the couch in their suite and go back to my own dorm in the morn­ing. One such night, Ling and I stayed up talk­ing on that couch. I don’t remem­ber a sin­gle thing we said except for the fact that she told me about her expe­ri­ence emi­grat­ing as a young girl from China to the United States, but I know I felt good as I walked back to my dorm the next morn­ing. I liked Ling a lot, and I hoped that our talk­ing might lead to a roman­tic relationship.

The day after that, I saw Ling on cam­pus walk­ing with Naomi past the library. I called out to them and ran over to say hello. Instead of say­ing hello back, how­ever, they started mock­ing me, call­ing me “lit­tle boy” and “cow­ard.” I couldn’t imag­ine they were doing any­thing other than jok­ing with me, so I started to laugh with them. When I tried to ask Ling how she did on the test she’d had that morn­ing, though, the two women backed away, laugh­ing even harder and hold­ing up their hands to tell me I shouldn’t come any closer. I was con­fused. I called that night, but Denise told me Ling wasn’t there and that it would prob­a­bly be a good idea if I didn’t call again. Ling had been very insulted that not once dur­ing the time we were talk­ing on the couch did I even try to kiss her. I called a cou­ple of more times after that, hop­ing I’d be able to tell Ling how much I really did like her, but the one time I got her on the phone she was so clearly not inter­ested in talk­ing to me that I stopped call­ing. I nei­ther saw nor spoke to her again.

I was heart­bro­ken. More than that, though, I was angry and ashamed. I replayed the whole night over and over in my mind, try­ing to fig­ure out which raised eye­brow or touch on my arm or sig­nif­i­cant gaze I should have under­stood as Ling’s cue that it was time for me to kiss her. I just could not see what she clearly thought should have been obvi­ous. I tried to imag­ine how the night might have gone dif­fer­ently, cre­at­ing a sce­nario in which I leaned over and kissed Ling gen­tly at the edge of her mouth, as if I’d been aim­ing for her cheek and missed. She sat back, looked at me for a long moment, and then, of course, kissed me in return. Each time I played this scene in my head, how­ever, my anger and shame only increased. I still didn’t under­stand how I was sup­posed to have known that Ling wanted me to kiss her. As my sense of inad­e­quacy grew, the sting of Ling’s mock­ery grew as well, and I started to think that maybe I was indeed no bet­ter than the weak, cow­ardly and inef­fec­tual lit­tle boy she and her friend had told me that I was.

Once again, though, my body rebelled, and a nau­sea rose in me. Instead of mak­ing me want to crawl out of my own skin, though, this nau­sea was accom­pa­nied by a rage that pro­pelled me past Ling’s skin and into her body. Now, in the scenes I played in my head, I saw myself “tak­ing her” the way Liam had described “tak­ing” women who were afraid of seem­ing too “easy,” except I didn’t real­ize I was fol­low­ing Liam’s script. Then, once, as I imag­ined myself putting my hands on either side of Ling’s face to hold her still while I kissed her, I had a sense mem­ory of the old man in my build­ing putting his hands on the back of my head to pull my mouth towards him. I was mor­ti­fied. I spent the rest of that day alone, try­ing every­thing I could think of to twist what I had imag­ined into a shape that was not what it was: pre­cisely the kind of rape fan­tasy that Adri­enne Rich had writ­ten about. The fact that Ling might truly have wanted me to “take her” — whatever “tak­ing” might have meant to her — was beside the point. What mat­tered was that I’d imag­ined myself “tak­ing her” out of rage, to prove I was a man, not in response to any­thing I knew about Ling’s actual feel­ings or desires. In Rich’s words, I had “equat[ed my]…manhood…with the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of another’s per­son and the dom­i­na­tion of another’s body.”

I swore I would do every­thing in my power to unlearn that equation.

At the heart of my fem­i­nism, then, is a para­dox. On the one hand, as a sur­vivor of male sex­ual vio­lence, I stand with women against the cul­ture of man­hood which pro­duces that vio­lence and which the vio­lence in turn per­pet­u­ates. On the other hand, as a man, I am — I have no choice but to be — impli­cated in that vio­lence. The chal­lenge with which fem­i­nism con­fronts me is to make sure that I never allow myself to stand on the same side as my abuser. Meet­ing this chal­lenge has not been easy. It is often uncom­fort­able to call other men out on their sex­ism; and it can be sim­i­larly uncom­fort­able when some­one calls me out on mine. Per­haps the most dif­fi­cult thing, how­ever, has been resist­ing the temp­ta­tion to wear my sex­ual abuse as a badge of dif­fer­ence, as if hav­ing been forcibly pen­e­trated by another man — because I am con­vinced that what I can­not fully remem­ber did in fact hap­pen — had some­how emp­tied me of the man­hood I was try­ing to prove in my fan­tasy with Ling, the same man­hood that Liam val­ued so highly and that is at the root of male sex­ual violence.

Because I have been coerced into the posi­tion that this kind of man­hood usu­ally reserves for women, in other words, it is easy to feel that my rela­tion­ship to this man­hood is essen­tially the same as a woman’s. Yet what­ever else may be true about the fact that I was sex­u­ally abused, the social and cul­tural con­text in which that abuse exists does not por­tray either the boy I was or the man I am as a sex­ual object in the way that it per­va­sively por­trays women. Nor am I sub­jected to the daily depre­da­tions of misog­yny and dis­crim­i­na­tion, indi­vid­ual and insti­tu­tional, that women expe­ri­ence because of their sta­tus as sex­ual objects. Finally, because I am a het­ero­sex­ual man, there is no escap­ing the fact that both the plea­sure this objec­ti­fi­ca­tion is designed to deliver and the advan­tages it is sup­posed to con­fer are meant quite explic­itly for me.

It is, in other words, as if there are two voices speak­ing within me: the voice of the man who is try­ing to own up to and change the cul­ture of male sex­ual vio­lence and the voice of the man who, as that culture’s vic­tim, feels like he has noth­ing to own up to. Inte­grat­ing these two voices has been the defin­ing chal­lenge of my life, per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally and cre­atively. I called my first book of poetry The Silence of Men because I was break­ing the silence in my life that had resulted from keep­ing these two voices sep­a­rate. More, I hoped my poems would speak to and for men whose lives were shot through with a sim­i­lar silence. Writ­ing essays like this one also lets each of the men inside me have his say, allow­ing me to speak about what the old man in my build­ing did to me, while still doing jus­tice to the com­plex rela­tion­ship between who I am because of what he did and the man I have been taught I am sup­posed to be.

Fem­i­nism showed me how to con­nect the old man’s inhu­man­ity to the inhu­man­ity of what I have been taught; and fem­i­nism is the only pol­i­tics I can name that explic­itly com­mits itself to a world in which that kind of inhu­man­ity is no longer accept­able. That is why I am a fem­i­nist man.

Cross posted from The Take­back.