Some readers, responding to The New York Times’s first reports on the case, strongly objected to wording in the articles that, in their view, either underplayed the details or wrongly applied the language of consensual sex to the narrative.

One reader, for example, objected to the phrase “sexual assault,” suggesting it served to make Sandusky’s alleged rape of a 10-year-old boy invisible. Another pointed out that the phrase “having anal sex with” to describe what Sandusky was doing to that boy implied consent on the boy’s part and so also served to make the alleged rape vanish.

Brisbane’s take on all this is worth reading, and I like his conclusion, “When the facts warrant it, journalists should be as specific as possible, they should avoid using the language of consensual sex and, when appropriate, they should call a rape a rape.” What I found most interesting about the article, though, was this:

[Wendy Murphy, an adjunct professor at the New England School of Law] said that in surveying the 50 states, she found “something like 40 different terms to describe the act of rape of a child.”

It’s hard for me to imagine that, but then, as Brisbane points out:

“Rape” is a word in flux. The Times stylebook says to use it to mean “forced intercourse, or intercourse with a child below the age of consent.” In many cases, though, the justice system doesn’t use the word. In the Sandusky case, the charges do not include the word “rape” because he was charged under the statute covering “Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse.”

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.

One of the things I found most interesting about Vasefi’s article is the difference between what her research reveals about women who’ve been accused of murdering their husbands and what the available research says.

In the case of wives who kill their husbands, the available research indicates that two-thirds of cases are motivated by a desire for revenge for the husband being unfaithful.

The survey that Moazzami and Ashouri conducted across 15 provinces of Iran showed that in 58 percent of cases, the women had been unable to get a divorce because their husbands or families would not agree to it, or had children and would have had no means of supporting themselves if they had separated from their spouses.

My own research indicates that many women who resort to violence are themselves victims of abuse, and have been unable to find justice through the legal system.

She points out that many of the women who murder their husbands fit the same profile: they are poor, relatively uneducated, often forced into marriage at an early age to men who are much older than they are, circumstances which combine to make much more difficult for them to get help through the legal system or to find other ways out of their situation. Murder is, for them, “a last act of desperation.”

Akram Mahdavi, one of the women Vasefi interviewed, is in Rajayi Shahr prison under a suspended death sentence for hiring a man to kill her husband, whom her father had forced her to marry–she was 20 and her husband was 75. Her motive? That she’d discovered her husband was sexually abusing her daughter and her attempts at securing a divorce had failed. Yet it’s not that there aren’t people in Iran trying to call attention to the plight of such women. Women’s rights activists have been calling on the government to set up shelters for battered women for years, but the government has always refused, “citing Islamic laws that state it is wrong for a woman to leave home without her husband’s permission.” I confess that reasoning leaves me almost speechless, as it still does all these many years later when I remember the cop who asked me, when I was sixteen and calling for help because my mother’s boyfriend had forced her into her bedroom and locked the door behind them because she’d finally asked him to leave and he didn’t want to,“Are you sure your mother’s in their against her will, son?”

I don’t want to erase the differences between what happened to my mother and what happened to Akram Mahdavi, nor do I want to trivialize the significance of the fact that, in Iran, the reasoning that makes it so difficult for battered women, or women like Mahdavi, who was trying to protect her daughter from abuse, to find justice is couched in an absolutist religious rhetoric–though it’s not as if religion has not been used here in the States to justify treating women, not to mention people of color, as second class citizens–but I find right now the similarities more compelling than the differences. In each case, the woman’s autonomy is understood to be circumscribed by the authority of the man who possesses her sexually. In Islam, the husband must give her permission to leave the sphere of his authority (and, therefore, of his protection) without him¹; in the case of the cop on the phone, his assumption was that I might have mistaken some kind of sexual play, in which my mother was enjoying the force her boyfriend was using to keep her in the room, for a situation in which the boyfriend was unwilling to let my mother go outside the sphere of his authority and in which he might turn–was already turning–violent because she did not obey him. That the authority is legal in the case of Islam and, for want of a better word, cultural in the case of my mother and her boyfriend, does not change the fact that the nature of the authority, a man’s right to rule his women, is the same.

1. One of the oddest experiences I’ve had being married to a Muslim woman who occasionally travels to Iran has been the requirement, imposed by the Iranian government, that I write her a letter giving her my official permission to travel without me.

A question like that is not one you want to give an easy answer to, at least not without hearing a little more of what the person who asks has to say about themselves, why they want to write and perhaps even what they want to write about, so I asked her to wait while I packed up my things and we went to find another room. As we sat down, it was clear that my student was nervous about something and I, of course, assumed it was related to her question about writing poetry. It was, but not in the way I anticipated, and so I am going to skip over most of what we talked about to get to the point. After talking a bit about strategies for starting to write, I suggested to my student that she might want to check out a local reading series run by one of my colleagues. It’s a wonderful, warm, welcoming place for beginners to go, both to hear other people’s work and to begin to share their own, but as soon as I suggested it, my students said, “You know, I barely have enough time to work, go to school and go home. I am in a very difficult situation and I know I won’t get the chance to go.”

Something in her tone of voice told me she was not talking about a merely practical difficulty and so I asked her, “By difficult do you mean dangerous?” She said yes. I don’t want to give any more details, since I don’t want anyone to be able to identify her from what I write here, but suffice it to say that she accepted my invitation to tell me more about her situation, and she is in a marriage that she needs desperately to get out of. Her husband has not physically harmed her yet, but she is afraid of him, and while she didn’t say so explicitly when we talked, I think she believes him capable of killing her if things ever get to that point.

I am doing what I can to help, and if it becomes possible, perhaps I will write more about that, but what I have been thinking about today is how domestic violence has always been a current running through my own life, from the boyfriend who held my mother hostage with a butcher’s cleaver to my mother’s best friend when I was a young teenager, who was found stabbed sixteen times in the chest with a serrated knife, most probably by her boyfriend; from the woman in whose bed I spent the night–no sex was involved–because she was afraid that if her boyfriend came back he might get violent to the woman who lived downstairs from me who screamed like she was dying when the cops showed up at her door because I called them on a night when I was home to hear her boyfriend beating the shit out of her. (He heard me telling the story about that night to a friend of mine through the way-too-thin walls of my apartment and called back that, now that he knew who had called the cops, he was going to make me pay for it. He never did, but it scared me. He was a very big man.) And then, of course, there was my own too-close-for-comfort-brush with being the one on whom someone else might have had to call the cops.

I don’t really have much to say about all this tonight in any analytical sense; it’s just all been coming back to me in waves of feeling and it put me in mind to share this poem, “Coitus Interruptus,” which is from my book called The Silence of Men. There are likely to be all kinds of triggers all over the poem, so if you decide to read it, this has been your trigger warning. The only other thing I will say about this poem is that, with the exception of a few details which I had to alter in order to make the poem work, each of the incidents I tell about in the poem actually happened more or less the way they happen in the poem:

Coitus Interruptus

1.

Naked at the window, my wife calls me
as if someone is dying, and someone
almost is, pinned to the concrete face down
beneath the fists and feet and knees of three

policemen. I’m still hard from before she
jumped out of bed to answer the question
I was willing not to ask when the siren
stopped on our block, but now I’m here, and I see

the man is Black, and how can I not
bear witness? They’ve cuffed him,
but the uniforms continue to crowd our street,
and the blue-and-whites keep coming,

as if called to war, as if the lives
in all these darkened homes
were truly at stake, and that’s the thing—
who can tell from up here?—maybe

we’re watching our salvation
without knowing it. Above our heads,
a voice calls out Fucking pigs!
but the ones who didn’t drag the man

into a waiting car and drive off
refuse the bait. They talk quietly,
gathered beneath the streetlamp
in the pale circle of light

the man was beaten in, and then
a word we cannot hear is given
and the cops wave each other back
to their vehicles, the flash and sparkle

of their driving off
throwing onto the wall of our room
a shadow of the embrace
my wife and I have been clinging to.

When I was sixteen, Tommy
brought to my room before he left
the Simon and Garfunkel tape
I’d put the previous night

back among his things. He placed it
on the bookshelf near the door
he’d slammed shut two days earlier
when he was holding a butcher’s cleaver

to my mother’s life. I wanted
to run after him and smash it at his feet;
I wanted to grab him by the scruff of the neck
and crush it in his face, to dangle him

over the side of our building with one
ankle in my left hand and the Greatest Hits
in my right and ask him
which I should let drop.

But I didn’t, couldn’t really:
he was much too big,
and I was not a fighter,
and one of my best friends right now

lives with her son in the house
where her husband has already hit her
with a cast iron frying pan,
and so there is no reason to believe

she is not at this moment cringing
bruised and bleeding in a corner
of their bedroom, or that she is not,
with her boy and nothing else in her arms,

running the way my mother
didn’t have a chance to run,
and there’s nothing I can do
but look at the clock—Sunday,

11:11 PM—and remind myself
it’s too late to call, that my calls
have caused trouble for her already.
When they pushed Tommy in handcuffs

out the front door, past where my mother sat,
quiet, unmoving, and I did not know
from where inside my own rage and terror
to pull the comfort I should have offered her,

the officer making sure Tommy
didn’t trip or run winked at me, smiling
as if what had happened were suddenly
a secret between us, and this our signal

that everything was okay. I wondered
if his had been the voice, calm
and deep with male authority—Son,
are you sure your mother’s in there

against her will?—that when I called
forced me to find the more-than-yes
I can’t remember the words to
that convinced the cops they had to come.

2.

Sophomore year, walking the road
girdling the campus. Up ahead, a woman’s voice
pleading with a man’s shouting to stop.
A car door slamming, engine revving,

and then wheels digging hard into driveway dirt
that when I got there was a dust cloud
obscuring the blue vehicle’s rear plate.
The woman sprawled on the asphalt,

her black dress spread around her
like an open portal her upper body
emerged from. She pulled
the cloth away from her feet,

which were bleeding, and I drove
to where her spaghetti strap sandals
lay torn and twisted beyond repair.
She left them there. Then to her home,

two rooms in a neighborhood house,
and I helped her onto the bed
that was her only furniture, and filled
a warm-water basin to soak her feet,

and he had not hit her, so there was nothing
to report, but she said she was afraid
and would I sit with her a while.
We talked about her home in Seoul,

the man her parents picked for her
that she ran to America to avoid marrying,
and here she laughed—first trickle
of spring water down a winter mountain—

So instead I take from Egypt! I so stupid!
Then: What you think? Can man and woman
sleep same bed without sex? I said yes.
So, please, tonight, you stay here? Maybe he coming back.

He fear white American like you. I was not a fighter,
but I stayed, and in the morning when I left,
she said kamsahamnida—thank you—
and she bowed low, and she did not

ask my name, nor I hers, and though
I sometimes looked for her on campus,
I never saw her again. Just like Tommy,
whom I forgot to say before was white.

Just like the Black woman who lived downstairs
before I got married, whose cries—Help!
Please! He’s killing me!—and the dead thud
of him, also Black, throwing her

against the wall, and his screaming—
Shut up, bitch! Fucking whore!—filled the space
till I was drowning. The desk sergeant
didn’t ask if I knew beyond a doubt

that she was being beaten,
but when she opened her front door
to the two men he sent, she shrieked
the way women shriek

in bad horror movies
when they know they’re going to die,
and I almost felt sorry for calling.A few weeks later,

a voice on the phone: You know
what’s going on below you, right?
Please, tape a message to the door: “Mr. Peters
has been trying to reach you.” Nothing else.

And whatever you do, don’t sign it.
For a month all was quiet. Then,
coming home early from work
I walked upstairs past people moving furniture

out of her apartment. No one ever
wants to get involved, right? a thin white man
in shorts and a t-shirt whispered bitter
behind me. I kept walking

the way Tommy did when he saw me
trying to catch his eye: head down,
gaze nailed to the floor, and then he was gone,
and the questions I wanted to ask him

never became words. That tape
was all I had, till one day,
cleaning house, my mother
held it up:

Do you still want this?

I never play it.

Throw it out then.

So I did.

One of the effects that sexual abuse often has on those who survive it is make any expression of our own sexuality feel as if we are reenacting the pattern of the abuse we suffered. In me–and I am writing here about the years spanning my mid-teens and early twenties–that feeling had less to do with experiencing sex as a kind of instant replay of my own victimization than with the fear that being sexual in and of itself made me no different from the men who had abused me. Yet I was sexual. No matter how hard I tried I could not make my sexual feelings go away, and so my desire for women, my lust and emotional spontaneity, became repugnant to me, defects of character I needed to repair; and I did try to repair them, to remake myself as a man in complete control of his feelings, sexual and otherwise, because only when I had attained that level of control would I be a man incapable of victimizing others.¹

My efforts, of course, failed, and it was in pornography–not consciously, not deliberately, but nonetheless, I think, inevitably–that I found a way to deal with my failure. For the world of pornography, or at least of the mainstream heterosexual pornography that was available to me at the time, is in many ways very similar to the world into which a sexual abuser indoctrinates the person he or she abuses; it is a world in which everything, every human interaction, whether with another human being or an object, is sexualized. More than that, this sexualization is normal; it is what the people of that world expect from each other and of themselves; and so to feel sexual in that world, to act on those feelings in that world, cannot be defined as abuse. As opposed to my friends, in other words, for whom pornography began as and continued be primarily a kind of instruction manual for how to be sexual in the real world, for me, once I’d been abused, pornography became a place where I could cloister my sexuality, and therefore my shame, shutting it out of the life I lived in the real world as much as I could and creating the illusion that I had put the shame and the abuse behind me.

Not that I hid my interest in pornography. On the contrary, I spoke about it quite openly, insisting that it was possible to engage respectably and intellectually with the topic, even though most of the conversations I tried to start ended with someone accusing me of camouflaging with the respectability I was claiming my real and more prurient interest in the material. They were, of course, correct. As often as I could manage it, I immersed myself in the world that heterosexual pornography offered me: a world of women, semi-clothed or fully naked, open-mouthed and open-legged, waiting to be for me what I wanted them to be, and every detail, page after page, frame after frame, right down to whether or not a woman had goose bumps, spoke to me of sex, of the mysteries contained in her body and in mine, and I imagined I was gleaning the truth of it, though not only did that truth always prove always elusive, but it had also had very little to do with the intellectual pursuit I pretended during the day that my interest in pornography really was.

The picture that changed forever the way I looked at pornography was in a magazine called Puritan, in the bottom right corner of the right hand page. The man was seated on a chair with his legs splayed out in front of him, his face and upper body hidden by the woman, who was sitting with her feet on his thighs, her legs bent at the knees and spread wide so you could see how deeply she’d taken his penis into her. Her head was tilted slightly forward, and her eyes, which were round and moist and oh-so-innocent, were looking directly at the camera. Her lips were full and pouty. I don’t know why, but what I saw in the first moment I looked at that picture was not the sex kitten she was supposed to be, but rather a little girl made to open her legs for the world to see the “slut” she “really” was, and this perception touched my own sexual shame, and I got sick to my stomach, and I started to cry, and I could not bring myself to look at the picture again, even though I kept it in my desk for weeks.

Over time, I came to understand that what I thought I saw on that woman’s face was in part a projection of what I saw in myself, and that it might well have had nothing to do with what she herself was feeling or with what other people looking at the same picture might have seen. I found I couldn’t look at images of people having sex anymore without wondering about the degree to which the interior landscape of the performers’ experiences corresponded to what I thought I saw in their performance. This change in perspective was transforming. I began to see sex not simply as a series of particular acts that I performed with particular people, including myself, but also as a way of knowing, not just a method but, literally, a path into knowledge; and I believed then, though I would not say this now with the same sense of finality, that this path would lead me out of the uncertainty that looking at sexually explicit images made me feel. What I am certain about, though, is that claiming sex as a path into knowledge helped me feel in ways that I never had before that I had a right to the physical presence I inhabited on this planet, precisely the right that the men who abused me had presumed to take away.

1. For a detailed discussion of this double bind and how it works, see Mike Lew, Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse (Harper & Row, 1990) 185–87.

Like a pack of dogs that has been thrown a single piece of meat, the group surrounds me in a tight circle, while I stand there not moving, body pointing me into the air above the middle of the room, wishing I could vanish, that it would vanish, but no matter how much I will it, the damned thing will not go down.

“What are you, a homo!?”

“Other guys’ dicks must turn him on!”

“Wanna suck mine, queer!?”

The taunts continue for what seems like hours, though it is probably only a few minutes, and then the head counselor comes in and ushers us all out to the pool. I can’t believe he didn’t hear what the other boys were saying, but he acts as if he didn’t, barely looking at me as he shows me where the boys in my group have spread their towels.

Later that evening, while I’m getting ready for bed, I stand naked before the full-length mirror inside my door and tuck my penis out of sight between my legs. I’m not trying to imagine myself as a girl, but I am intrigued by the possibility of a body that does not have erections.

///

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

Now, of course, I understand not only that the letter might have been, that it most probably was, a complete fabrication, even that it might even have been written by a man, but also, assuming for the sake of argument that the events it relates actually happened, the fact that is was published in Penthouse means that its sole purpose was to feed, to shape and even to create the desires and fantasies of the boys and men like me who read the magazine. At the time, though, I read the letter naively, assuming it to be true–why, after all, would someone publish a letter that wasn’t?–and so it was clear to me that it described a rape. The woman who ostensibly wrote it didn’t present what she and her friend did to the man as anything else—except to make clear that it was motivated by revenge—and she never implied that he enjoyed it. Nonetheless, my sexual imagination was drawn to the story. For months, for years afterward, I fantasized about women tying me to a bed and creating in my flesh an arousal so all-encompassing that I too would be willing to beg for release. Yet no matter how hard I tried to imagine a conclusion other than the one in the letter, I always ended up the victim of some version of the revenge the writer and her friend took, and what I remember most about this now is how fully this ending short-circuited the fantasy, and when I say “fully short-circuited,” I mean fully and completely. If I was masturbating, I found it very hard to continue; if I was simply daydreaming, I’d have to stop and think of something else, not because I felt and was trying to avoid, or deny, the guilty, shameful pleasure that often accompanies “forbidden fantasies,” but rather because I was scared. I simply did not trust the women I imagined not to turn into the women described in the letter. More than that, though, I identified with their victim’s experience of having the pleasures of his body turned against him, and the knowledge that I could be shamed just as he had been shamed taught me only one thing: my body was always the potential weapon of my own defeat.

///

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

Walter’s narrative takes place in the future and involves a very powerful drug dealer whose organization has been infiltrated by a top female narcotics agent posing as a prostitute. When the dealer’s lover, who also works for him as a prostitute, learns that the operation has been compromised, she tells him immediately. Armed with this information, the dealer exposes the spy and has her tortured slowly and painfully to death. To express his gratitude, he takes his lover to bed, giving her, in Walter’s words, “the literal fuck of her life, pounding away until she was no longer breathing.” The story ends with a description of the lavish funeral the dealer gives her.

When Walter finishes reading, he looks around the circle with a sarcastic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent, no one except me willing to meet his eyes, and I’m hoping that one of his peers will be the first to speak, condemning what he’s written not in the voice of authority—which my voice would inevitably be—but in the voice of his own community. A minute passes before I realize that his classmates don’t intend to respond, and so I call on a few students by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say that the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they think it’s not even worth responding to. Yet it has to be responded to, and so I ask Walter if he really believes that fucking a woman to death could be an expression of gratitude.

“Of course,” he says, “For the woman it’s the ultimate fulfillment, and for the man it’s the ultimate proof.”

“Of what?”

“Of manhood,” he responds, “Women would take tickets and stand in line to be with a man powerful enough to fuck them like that.” He says these words with a conviction I at first can’t think how to argue with, but then I wonder aloud if he would include his girlfriend or his future wife in that line of women.

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

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

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

I take a different tack, asking him if he’s ever killed anything other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he realizes that he’s talking about using his own body, his penis specifically, as a murder weapon and that the murder he says he would like to commit is not simply one in which his victim dies in his arms, but is also one in which he would feel against his own flesh the internal process of her dying.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

Trying again, I go back to what he said about not wanting to fuck to death a woman he loves and ask if he makes a distinction between the sex he would have for pleasure with that woman and the power he says he would like to experience of using sex to kill. Walter looks at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. “Power,” he says, “is pleasure.”

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

“No,” is all I can think to say.

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

I decide that monosyllabic answers are the best way to deal with this line of questioning. “No,” I tell him again.

Walter waits a few seconds for me to say more. When I don’t, he mutters something under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathetic and excuse. Then he walks out, and it’s the last I see or hear of him until I get my final roster with a W for withdrawal next to his name. Of course there are many reasons why he might have had to withdraw from the class, but it’s hard for me not to think he did so because I wasn’t “man enough” to be his teacher.

///

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

ETA April 2, 2010: As Robert pointed out to me on Alas, the image of the priest on the right conforms to negative stereotypes of both priests and gay men and by posting this image without commenting on that fact I implicitly endorsed that stereotype. So let me say here that while I continue to identify with the anger in this cartoon, I think it is unfortunate that the anger found expression in such a stereotypical image. Clearly the same point could have been made with a different image.

The framing narrative of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daughter of the king of the peris (faeries); the second wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desires Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the secrets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son covets the ring Solomon used to control demons; and the sixth son wants to master alchemy. As each son gives his answer, the father tells stories to illustrate, first, how shallow and materialistic the son is for wanting what he wants and, second, how the son should understand his desire so he can use it on the path to enlightenment. None of the sons, however, accept their father’s lessons at face value, arguing that he has misunderstood their desires and that the lessons he wants them to learn, therefore, are misguided. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Marjuma,” for example—about a beautiful and righteous woman who, after her husband leaves on pilgrimage to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so overcome with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at nothing to have her—the son accuses his father of wanting to eliminate sex. “God forbid[!]” the father replies, explaining that “The Tale of Marjuma” illustrates how sex, properly comprehended and entered into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achieves apotheosis,
sex gives birth to a love without limits;
and when this love is pushed by passion to the edge
of its strength, spiritual love emerges; and when
spiritual love can grow no further, your soul
will vanish into the Beloved’s endlessness. (My translation)

Given that the surface of the narrative in “The Tale of Marjuma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depraved and debauched men get their comeuppance than one about the spiritual nature of sexuality, the son’s misreading of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a reading, however, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to possess the woman give in to their desires without a struggle. They are, in other words, neither evil nor merely slaves to their desires; they are human and flawed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and willing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has punished them with a paralysis from which—in an irony that is at the core of the story’s meaning—they can be healed only by confessing to the woman everything they did to her.

Her experience—how she came to be the confessor and healer of the men who abused her—is the one that the father talks about in the lines I quoted above, and it is also her experience that he uses to frame the tale in the first place:

The father replied, “Beware of lust, for lust
has made you very drunk. When a man locks
his heart in pursuit of sexual pleasure, he’ll pay
until the last penny of his being is gone.
A woman, however, whose conduct is like a man’s,
does not know such lust. I will tell you of one
who became in God’s court a leader of men
after she was left without her husband.”

It is, in other words, the woman from whom the father wants his son to learn. For in fending off the men who tried to rape her outright—most of whom die when God answers her prayers and saves her from them—and in refusing the men whose desire was not initially violent, who could have “comforted” her in her husband’s absence, the woman’s love and desire for her husband become a deeply spiritual love and desire for God that moves her to choose the life of a religious recluse. So pure is her devotion that God grants her the power of healing, which is why the men stricken with paralysis must seek her out. In the end, the woman is reunited with her husband, but she chooses to remain a recluse, making clear that she has left the world of her marriage, of merely carnal love, behind.

Nowhere, however—and here is another detail the son overlooks when he accuses his father of wanting to do away with sex—does the story suggest that the newly healed men should similarly disavow their sexual desire, even though it was their desire that got them into so much trouble. Rather, the story is an exhortation for the son to behave “like a man” in response to his own sexual feelings, the irony being, of course, that the character who models this behavior is a woman. In other words, while the depiction of sexuality in “The Tale of Marjuma” is entirely conventional—male heterosexuality is “active;” female heterosexuality is “passive”—there is an element of gender bending, implying that Attar does not see the sexual characteristics he is exploring as exclusively the purview of either men or women, though it does seem clear that he defines them as either male or female. Indeed, by the time this first “Discourse” between father and son is over, Attar has reframed the son’s desire for a beautiful woman as the desire for his own purified soul, suggesting that, in the realm of the spirit, a wholeness that embodies both male and female should be the goal.

Each of the “Discourses” in Ilahi-Nama plays with conventional expectations in similar ways. The magic the second son desires to master, for example, is reframed as the ability to turn the devil he carries in himself into a Muslim. Solomon’s ring, which the fourth son covets, becomes the capacity for being content with what one has. In each case, the frame story and the tales told within it command attention both for the sophistication of Attar’s narrative technique and the depths at which he is able to reveal the workings of the social and spiritual values at stake in the  sons’ desires. Whether or not one shares Attar’s spirituality, in other words, there is a lot to learn from what he wrote, not only about Iran’s history and culture, and about the possibilities of narrative, but also about ourselves and how we make meaning in the world—all of which makes a new translation of this little-known work both desirable and necessary.