If you haven’t already, I urge you to read Part 1 and Part 2. (If you haven’t read Part 2, or haven’t read it in a while, you might want to read it before read­ing Part 3, if only because the last para­graph of Part 2 feeds very specif­i­cally into what Part 3 is about. I will also say that Part 3, more so than either 1 or 2, con­tains mate­r­ial that some peo­ple might find dis­turb­ing and/or trig­ger­ing. The issues raised by that mate­r­ial are resolved not in Part 3 itself, but later in the essay. I ask, there­fore, for your patience in that regard, and I also ask that you be patient if my response(s) to com­ments about that mate­r­ial ask you to wait until I get to those later parts of the essay.)

Part 3

Sit­ting on my bed with her back against the wall, Beth – who’s come to visit dur­ing my first year of grad­u­ate school – is telling me some­thing that I wish I could remem­ber. Indeed, in the first drafts of this essay, includ­ing the one that was pub­lished online, I wrote this pas­sage as if I did remem­ber. I had her telling me that she’d decided to study fine art, a deci­sion I’m pretty sure she actu­ally made around the time that what I am about tell you took place; and it may have been that her deci­sion was what we were talk­ing about. Beth had been strug­gling with how to give what she con­sid­ered legit­i­mate and pur­pose­ful expres­sion to the cre­ativ­ity that was in her for some time, but the fact is that I don’t remem­ber and to let you think that I do would be to cre­ate, if not a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion – because jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, while it was the first word that came to mind, is wrong for what I want to say – than a log­i­cal expla­na­tion for some­thing that I have in been try­ing unsuc­cess­fully to explain to myself for more than 20 years.

So, Beth is sit­ting on my bed and talk­ing, but I am sud­denly lis­ten­ing from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leav­ing her mouth no longer coa­lesce into mean­ing­ful units. There is a moment of blank­ness and then, as if some­one else has taken con­trol of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself get­ting up from the chair when I’ve been sit­ting, putting one hand around Beth’s throat, hold­ing her against the wall, and with my other hand slap­ping her back and forth until she is sense­less and bloody. I see myself scream­ing in her ear, let­ting her drop to the floor and kick­ing her in the stom­ach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.

Unaware that I’ve stopped hear­ing what she has to say, Beth con­tin­ues talk­ing, ges­tur­ing to empha­size the impor­tance of her words, implor­ing with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the vio­lence in my mind begins again. Real­iz­ing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bath­room. Lock­ing the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. When I’m sure the impulse to lash out has passed, I flush the toi­let and go back to the bed­room where, thank­fully, Beth notices it’s time for me to go to class, and she tells me she’ll fin­ish later. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, know­ing I will need some time alone to try to sort out what has just hap­pened, tell her that I have work to do in the library and there­fore won’t be back until just before we’re sup­posed to go out for dinner.

The after­noon sun is warm on my face, so I decide to walk to class instead of tak­ing the bus. Beth’s deci­sion to become an artist should make me happy. (I know I just wrote that I am not sure this deci­sion is what we were talk­ing about, but it was an issue in our rela­tion­ship at the time, and since I’ve men­tioned it, I don’t want to leave it hang­ing with­out at least some expla­na­tion.) Not only does it mean that she’s choos­ing to do what she really wants to do, but it also holds out the promise of a res­o­lu­tion to a ten­sion between us that I had given up being able to do any­thing about. More than once, Beth has told me she’s afraid I will become more com­mit­ted to my writ­ing than to her. Now that she has her own art to com­mit to, I’m hop­ing she’ll begin to see that the two com­mit­ments need not be mutu­ally exclusive.

I’m start­ing to feel a lit­tle bet­ter, more in con­trol of myself, but I begin to real­ize that I will never be able to sit through class. I need some­where quiet, where I can sit by myself and really think about what hap­pened this morning.

I head to the library.

My idea as I set­tle into one of the chairs on the sec­ond floor is to  write out what I’m feel­ing in a let­ter to myself, a strat­egy I’ve used before when I don’t know what’s going on inside me. As soon as I put my pen to the page, though, what comes out does not begin Dear Richard. Instead, it is the begin­ning of a poem:

 I want a bearded man, shirt­less, in faded jeans,

to come one bare­foot night and take me in his mouth.

I don’t know where the words come from, but the shock of recog­ni­tion when I read them is imme­di­ate and fright­en­ing, and I know there is a clar­ity in them that I am not fully able to see. Star­ing at the page, unable to write another word, I won­der if I’m try­ing to tell myself that I’m gay and that the prob­lem I have with Beth is that I should be going out with a boy instead. I remem­ber Brian and how we became friends in our senior year of high school, watch­ing a team­mate strike out try­ing too hard to hit the ball over the fence dur­ing a gym-class soft­ball game.

“I don’t get it,” Brian said to no one in par­tic­u­lar, shak­ing his head from side to side as the other boy slammed his bat to the ground, threat­ened to beat the shit out of the pitcher, and stormed off the field as if he’d failed to make a team he’d ded­i­cated his life to mak­ing. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?” I asked.

We’d been stand­ing next to each other through most of the class, but Brian looked at me as if he were see­ing me for the first time. “What’s the big deal? I mean, it’s not like he’s going to fail for strik­ing out.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Brian’s face lit up as if he were vis­it­ing from another coun­try and had at last found some­one who could speak his lan­guage. Then his eyes nar­rowed a lit­tle, “Yeah, but at least you can hit the ball.” It was a test; he was not much of an athlete.

“So I can hit the ball,” I responded. “So what?”

And we were friends; and we quickly became best friends. Sadly, though, what I remem­ber most about our friend­ship is the day it began to end. “You’re just dif­fer­ent,” he told me. We  were sit­ting in my room. “I’ve never met any­one like you, and they just can’t accept that.”

“I’ve never met any­one like you before either,” I said, not even both­er­ing to ask him who they were.

“But they’re say­ing we’re closer than we should be, that we’re not, you know, normal.”

“So? When has either of us ever really cared about what they have to say?”

Brian looked so grate­ful for these words that I thought he was going to cry, and his eyes did start to grow big with a feel­ing that welled up in him, but then he looked away and almost whis­pered, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are closer than we should be.”

I tried to con­vince him that he was wrong, but it didn’t work. He started – or at least in mem­ory, he started bring­ing female friends along when­ever we went out, and – again, as I remem­ber it – col­lege appli­ca­tions, year­book com­mit­tee meet­ings and other graduation-related work sud­denly kept him so busy that he had less and less time to see me. The sum­mer after grad­u­a­tion, while I was work­ing at a sleep-away camp in Mass­a­chu­setts
, we wrote let­ters, but when I came home, he was gone, off to his fresh­man year at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity. I prob­a­bly had his phone num­ber and address, but I don’t think I ever used them, and I don’t remem­ber receiv­ing either mail or phone calls from him. We did try once to recon­nect dur­ing the win­ter break of our fresh­man year, meet­ing for a drink at one of the bars we’d hung out at when we were still close. He brought his girl­friend, a dark woman I remem­ber sit­ting silently in the cor­ner of the booth while Brian and I strug­gled to find things to say to each other. The con­ver­sa­tion is lost to me now, but I can still feel the final­ity of our good-byes, nei­ther of us even pre­tend­ing we’d try to see each other again.

At the end of the aca­d­e­mic year, while I waited on line to reg­is­ter for my sopho­more classes, I met the woman who’d sat next to me in twelfth-grade Eng­lish. “What­ever hap­pened to your friend Brian?” she asked.

“He’s at Cor­nell,” I answered, “but I haven’t heard from him in a while.”

“You know,” she said, “every­one thought the two of you were gay.”

“I know.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

With cin­e­matic tim­ing my turn to reg­is­ter came next, and I gave her a small, silent wave as I walked to the registrar’s win­dow. I have con­tin­ued through­out all these years, how­ever, to won­der about my answer. It was the answer I think Brian would have wanted me to give, and I gave it with­out a sec­ond thought. Despite its lit­eral truth, how­ever, or, rather, its truth given that what the woman prob­a­bly wanted to know was whether Brian and I had been hav­ing sex, the word “no” has felt dis­hon­est to me for a long time, as if what I had done was to deny the emo­tional con­tent of our friend­ship, not char­ac­ter­ize its phys­i­cal nature.

When I think about Brian now, I often wish to have back that moment when he decided “they” were right and we were wrong. Not because I think I could have done any­thing dif­fer­ently to change his mind, but because envi­sion­ing how things might have been dif­fer­ent is a ges­ture of defi­ance I wish I had made a long time ago, a way to begin fig­ur­ing out the answer I ought to have given to the woman from my Eng­lish class, and of under­stand­ing why I responded with a homo­erotic poem to the vio­lence I imag­ined years later doing to Beth. We ended up not going to din­ner that night. After I wrote those two lines, I felt bet­ter, calmer, more at peace with myself, and so I was able to tell her about the vision my imag­i­na­tion had con­jured for me. We spent the night try­ing to fig­ure out where in our rela­tion­ship my anger came from, but our only suc­cess – at least from my point of view, since it left me bent over, laugh­ing with hys­ter­i­cal relief – was that I found the courage to scream what I was really feel­ing, and they were words I regret even now, “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

Beth, of course, was hor­ri­fied and deeply, deeply hurt, but instead of break­ing up with me, or at least putting some dis­tance between us while I tried to fig­ure out where my rage was com­ing from, she stayed with me for the rest of the week­end, a deci­sion I can only describe as coura­geous and lov­ing, and we talked and talked our way into the feel­ing that we could stay together, which we did for five more years. I was immensely grate­ful to her for that, though I don’t think I ever expressed that grat­i­tude sufficiently.

What dis­turbed me at the time – aside from the con­tent of what I imag­ined – and what con­tin­ues to haunt me when­ever I think about it, is that I didn’t even know I was so angry. There were ten­sions in my rela­tion­ship with Beth, as there are in any rela­tion­ship, but noth­ing of a mag­ni­tude, or at least noth­ing I expe­ri­enced as of a mag­ni­tude, that cor­re­sponded even a lit­tle to the vio­lence I’d imag­ined myself doing. Even now, more than two decades later – and in all that time I’ve had noth­ing even remotely resem­bling the expe­ri­ence I’ve just described – I find myself won­der­ing what I don’t know about the sub­ter­ranean work­ings of my psy­che. I am an angry man – though I am now a much less angry man than I was when I first wrote this essay – and I know that much of my anger is sex­ual, and if there is any­thing that being a man is sup­posed to give you license to do, and I am talk­ing here about deeply held cul­tural val­ues, not the laws of any given coun­try, or the eth­i­cal or moral prin­ci­ples taught by reli­gion, it is to take your sex­ual anger out on the bod­ies of oth­ers, usu­ally women, and to do so with rel­a­tive impun­tiy. I have, as you will see, good rea­son to be angry. Part of what writ­ing and rewrit­ing this essay has been about, for me, has been learn­ing to stop being afraid of my anger and, there­fore, of myself.

To read Part 1, go here.

You have to won­der what kind of research he did and how he did it. Did he inter­view women? Cre­ate a list of all the pos­si­bil­i­ties he could imag­ine and ask them to check off on a list “all descrip­tions that apply?” Did he talk to men, get them to nar­rate their sex­ual philoso­phies and techniques? Did he observe what he wrote about first­hand, some­how get per­mis­sion to stand behind a wall con­structed so that he could spy on the cou­ples who had agreed to be his infor­mants? Or did he just make it all up? It’s impos­si­ble to know, but when Sheikh Nezawi wrote The Per­fumed Gar­den in the six­teenth cen­tury – it was trans­lated into Eng­lish by Richard Bur­ton in 1886 – he devoted an entire chap­ter to “The Divers Names of the Vir­ile Mem­ber.” Some are self-explanatory, like Gen­er­a­tive Organ, Hairy One or Bald-Head. At least one, The Pigeon, is inter­est­ing as a metaphor because of the way it fem­i­nizes the penis: “It is so called because, after hav­ing been swollen and at the moment when it is return­ing to its state of repose, [this kind of penis] resem­bles a pigeon set­tling on its eggs” (54). In most cases, how­ever, Sheikh Nezawi treats the male gen­i­tals synech­do­ci­cally, mak­ing it clear that, in describ­ing cer­tain kinds of penises, he is also describ­ing the men to whom they are attached. Here, for exam­ple is The Creeper:

This name has been given to the penis because, when it gets between a woman’s thighs and sees a plump vulva, it starts to creep on her legs and pubis, then, approach­ing the entrance, it con­tin­ues to creep until it has taken pos­ses­sion. When com­fort­ably installed, it pen­e­trates com­pletely and ejac­u­lates. (59)

And here is The Knocker

It is thus named because, when it arrives at the door of the vulva, it gives a light knock; if the vulva replies and opens the door, it enters; but if it gets no reply, it knocks again until suc­cess­ful. By knock­ing at the door we refer to the rub­bing of the penis on the vulva until it becomes moist. The pro­duc­tion of this mois­ture is what is called open­ing the door. (59)

My son will soon be nine years old. Espe­cially dur­ing the first years of his life, when he began to learn the names for the parts of his body – though I am aware the ques­tion is rel­e­vant even now – I thought a lot about how the way we talk about our gen­i­tals in this cul­ture expresses and, in part, cre­ates the way we feel as a cul­ture not just about the male body, but also about sex and the peo­ple we have sex with. Never before had I been con­fronted on a daily basis with the real­iza­tion that some­one else’s under­stand­ing of who he was, of what it might mean for him to live in his own body, hung quite lit­er­ally on my every word.

When he was two, for exam­ple, my wife would tell me sto­ries about how he occa­sion­ally got erec­tions when she washed his penis in the bath. “I don’t like it like this,” she told he would say, start­ing to cry. “I want it to be soft,” and he would try to push his penis down, which of course did not have the result he desired.

One night, I hap­pened to be home when this hap­pened, and I walked into the bath­room to find my wife crouch­ing at the edge of the tub, talk­ing to our son in a very sooth­ing voice, while he sat with the water run­ning behind him, breath­ing the last gasp­ing breaths of what had obvi­ously been a two-year-old’s very heavy cry. When my wife explained that he was cry­ing because he’d had an erec­tion, I leaned over the edge of the tub, took our son’s face in my hands and said, “Some­times my dool gets hard when I don’t want it to. I just wait and it gets soft again. You do the same thing. Don’t get upset. Just wait and it will go back to being soft.”

My son’s eyes widened with a feel­ing so big it left him speech­less. I kissed his cheek and walked out, back to what­ever it was that I’d been doing. Later, my wife told me that after I’d left the room, he’d turned to her and said, in Per­sian, which is her native lan­guage and was his dom­i­nant lan­guage at the time, “Maman, dooleh baba sefteh!” (Mom, Dad’s penis gets hard!) We puz­zled briefly over what, specif­i­cally, he might have meant, and I tried to remem­ber if, when I was a boy, any of my adult male rel­a­tives had talked to me about my own body in a sim­i­lar way, offer­ing them­selves as a reflec­tion of my bio­log­i­cal male­ness and the stance I might take towards it. I don’t think any­one ever did, but I did recall a moment when I was no older than six or eight in which I caught a glimpse of what I might have learned if some­one had.

My father and I were in the locker room get­ting ready to leave the beach. His back was to me and he was talk­ing about some­thing I couldn’t lis­ten to because he was naked. My eyes wan­dered among the whorls of black fur that ran from the nape of his neck, along his shoul­ders and arms, down is back and into the dark cleft of his but­tocks. When he turned around, I could see where the hair of his back met the hair of his front in the bush between his legs. His penis hung like a pen­du­lum, swing­ing slowly between his thighs when he walked, and I won­dered if it got hard like mine did, if he played with it like I’d begun to do. I wanted to run and throw my arms around him, to pass through his skin and know what it would mean to live with such size. I was hun­gry with the pre­science that his body would some­day be mine, that my body was his in the making.

Con­tinue read­ing →

“My Daughter’s Vagina” is the title of an essay I wrote about five years ago that was pub­lished online here but that I have never really felt com­fort­able with as a fin­ished piece. Not too long ago, I came up with the idea of seri­al­iz­ing the essay on my blog as I revised it, and so here I am. I orig­i­nally had in mind that I wanted say a few things about the nature of the essay, but I think that, for the most part, it’s bet­ter that I just let the piece speak for itself. I will say that “My Daughter’s Vagina” is long, around 27,000 words, and so I will have to ask for your patience in let­ting the piece unfold at the pace that I am able to set for revis­ing it; and I will also say that the goal of the piece is not to argue any par­tic­u­lar posi­tion, but rather to raise ques­tions about gen­der, sex and sex­u­al­ity and explore them from within my own expe­ri­ence as a man in this cul­ture. The nar­ra­tives in the essay are deeply per­sonal and very reveal­ing, and do not always show me in the kind­est of lights. I hope you will under­stand, there­fore, that while I am per­fectly com­fort­able read­ing and dis­cussing good faith cri­tiques of how I under­stand my expe­ri­ence in the essay, I am not going to tol­er­ate any com­ments that even remotely resem­ble per­sonal attacks on me or on any­one else who chooses to com­ment. Other than that, I am, for now, going to leave the com­ments sec­tion open to all com­ers. So, here goes:

My Daughter’s Vagina, Part 1

The first time a woman opened her legs long enough that I could look for more than the few sec­onds it took to bend to her with lips and tongue, or to climb up blind into her and start mov­ing, I crouched between her thighs to get as close as I could, and I remem­ber even now how the words began to list them­selves in my head: pussy, beaver, twat, slit, fur, love mus­cle, muff, quim, cab­bage, snatch, box…and all of them but one felt inad­e­quate; and that was the one I wanted most not to use, not even to think, the one I’d come to under­stand as degrad­ing of my lover by its very exis­tence; and yet, some­how, no other word but cunt cap­tured in my imag­i­na­tion the wet and hairy wild­ness, the pun­gent and disheveled and untamed and multi-shaded pink and red and brown and flesh-colored and even deep vio­let beauty of what I was look­ing at. I’d seen pic­tures of course, plenty of them, had dis­cov­ered as a young teenager that I grew hard at the sight of them, but those images of care­fully coiffed, some­times com­pletely shaven, metic­u­lously arranged spec­i­mens of female gen­i­talia were, I sud­denly understood, so obvi­ously com­posed, so clearly intended as arti­fice, that I felt, look­ing at my lover, as if I were see­ing a cunt for the first time.

The more I stared, the more uncom­fort­able she became. “What are you look­ing at? Is some­thing wrong down there?”

And when I didn’t respond right away, “Answer me!”

“You’re beau­ti­ful,” I answered, and I know it sounds like some­thing out of a romance novel, but the words came in a whis­per, and I looked up at her and I smiled, and then I tried in every­thing I did next with fin­gers and my lips and my tongue to make sure she knew I meant what I’d said; and when she asked me to fuck her, her words, not mine, tears – but how do I write this with­out sound­ing like I’m brag­ging? How do I make you see that this mem­ory, even more than it makes me feel good about myself (which of course it does), hum­bles me and fills me with awe and grat­i­tude – tears were fill­ing her eyes. It was, she explained as we lay together after­ward, the first time a man had told her she was beau­ti­ful “down there,” much less made love to her in a way that con­vinced her he really meant it.

“And all those other times,” I won­dered to myself. “What had I meant then? What had she under­stood my mean­ing to be?”

///

The fun­da­men­tally alien uni­verse that a woman’s expe­ri­ence of sex is to me. That mine is to her. So fully do we roman­ti­cize het­ero­sex­ual love­mak­ing as a com­mu­nion of souls, a syn­the­siz­ing of oppo­sites, the ful­fill­ment and expres­sion of our deep­est emo­tional needs, that it’s easy to for­get just how inac­ces­si­ble the inte­rior land­scapes of male and female sex­ual embod­i­ment are to each other. Or, per­haps more to the point, how strongly this roman­ti­ciza­tion invites our for­get­ful­ness, encour­ages, even man­dates that we refuse to see just how deeply, when it comes to sex, phys­i­cal dif­fer­ences divide us.

When I began this essay, I was teach­ing an inde­pen­dent study project in cre­ative non­fic­tion with two women, each of whom wanted to write about gen­der and sex­u­al­ity, explor­ing specif­i­cally the mean­ing and con­se­quences of the child­hood sex­ual abuse she had sur­vived. One of the books I asked them to read was Andrea Dworkin’s Inter­course, which is too often, and inac­cu­rately, under­stood as argu­ing that het­ero­sex­ual sex is by its nature – man pen­e­trat­ing, woman pen­e­trated – a tool of the patri­archy and there­fore exists almost solely to demean and exploit women. Given the way Dworkin writes, this is not a dif­fi­cult mis­read­ing to come to, espe­cially for col­lege sopho­mores who are encoun­ter­ing her ideas for the first time, and so when my stu­dents asked me whether Inter­course should indeed be read that way, I sug­gested we dis­cuss the fol­low­ing quote from the sec­tion called Occupation/Collaboration: “The polit­i­cal mean­ing of inter­course for women is the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion of fem­i­nism and free­dom: can an occu­pied peo­ple – phys­i­cally occu­pied inside, inter­nally invaded – be free […]?”

Easy to mis­in­ter­pret and dis­miss – after all, how can a woman who will­ingly has inter­course be under­stood as hav­ing been occu­pied and invaded, with all the con­no­ta­tions those words carry of war­fare and colonization? – Dworkin’s ques­tion is less about any given woman’s per­sonal expe­ri­ence of inter­course than it is about the nature of female iden­tity. For while a clear dis­tinc­tion exists in most people’s imag­i­na­tion between a woman’s expe­ri­ence of rape and her expe­ri­ence of the kind of inter­course to which the term love­mak­ing is meant to refer, focus­ing on that dis­tinc­tion tends to obscure the fact that het­ero­sex­ual inter­course is also gen­er­ally under­stood in our cul­ture – per­haps along with men­stru­a­tion – to be the defin­ing moment of female­ness and wom­an­hood. More to the point, and this is what I under­stand the crux of Dworkin’s ques­tion to be, if a woman can­not be under­stood to exist fully as a woman until her body has been “phys­i­cally occu­pied inside, inter­nally invaded” by a man, then it doesn’t really mat­ter how ten­der and/or lov­ing and/or intensely plea­sur­able inter­course is for her. The free­dom of her body was already com­pro­mised, by def­i­n­i­tion, not merely before she had sex, but even before she was born. If, in other words, inter­course is what makes a woman a woman, or, per­haps more pre­cisely, if what makes a woman a woman in patri­ar­chal cul­ture is her capac­ity for being gen­i­tally pen­e­trated – which means inter­course is both an expres­sion and con­fir­ma­tion of her gen­der – then the ques­tion arises whether the dif­fer­ence between the kind of inter­course most peo­ple describe as love­mak­ing and the kind we call rape can accu­rately be described as one of kind. Maybe, Dworkin is ask­ing, this dif­fer­ence is more prop­erly described as one of degree, since in each case a woman is ful­fill­ing the man­date of her socially pre­scribed gen­der identity.

I’d come to class pre­pared with ref­er­ences to pas­sages in my stu­dents’ own essays that helped to demon­strate the valid­ity of Dworkin’s ques­tion, but some­thing in their eyes told they’d already got­ten it and that to say more than what I have para­phrased above would have been both super­flu­ous and self-serving. For now mat­ter how impor­tant I thought Dworkin’s ques­tion was, it would never mean the same thing to me as it did to them, and so I fell silent, let­ting the room fill with the gap of oth­er­ness that had opened between us; and it was in this silence, watch­ing the faces of these two women who had placed their trust in me both as a teacher and, given what they wanted to write about, as a man, that my imag­i­na­tion made the leap that was the start­ing point of this essay: Had I lived a dif­fer­ent life – that of my par­ents, for exam­ple, who mar­ried when they were in their very early twen­ties – one of those two women was young enough that she could’ve been my daugh­ter. I don’t mean that I felt fatherly towards her, or that she saw me as a father fig­ure, but this abrupt aware­ness of the age dif­fer­ence between us brought me back to a con­ver­sa­tion my wife and I had been hav­ing about whether or not to con­ceive a sec­ond child. I thought about how, if that still-hypothetical off­spring turned out to be a girl, she would grow up – I would have to raise her – in a world where the valid­ity of Dworkin’s ques­tion inhered, inescapably, in the fact of her body. I thought about how I would, from the first moments of her life, face this daugh­ter across the same ter­rain of dif­fer­ence that was sep­a­rat­ing me from my stu­dents, and I thought about how, pre­cisely because she would be my daugh­ter, that silence would not be an option.

“And so what,” I almost asked myself out lout, “what will I say to her?”

 Cross-posted at Alas.

Toy Sol­diers responded to my post on male sur­vivors of child sex­ual abuse. I have been try­ing to post a com­ment there, but some­thing keeps swal­low­ing it. The com­ment may be in mod­er­a­tion, I don’t know; or it may be the Inter­net grem­lins, dis­tant cousins of those crea­tures that make socks dis­ap­pear into the alter­na­tive uni­verse inside our dry­ers, but – because my time con­straints are pretty tight right now – rather than wait to see if the com­ments even­tu­ally appear, I am going to post the com­ment here on my blog and link back both to him and my ini­tial post.

Ini­tially, in his response, he quoted me at length, but quite selec­tively. When I pointed this out to him here, and also the fact that he elided an issue we both agree one, i.e., that fem­i­nism is not the place where male sur­vivors of sex­ual vio­lence can expect to talk about our expe­ri­ence on our own terms, he edited his orig­i­nal post and then, in the com­ments, made the fol­low­ing statement:

while we agree that fem­i­nism is inad­e­quate for male-focused dis­cus­sions, you still ana­lyzed the male expe­ri­ence from a fem­i­nist per­spec­tive. This struck me as counter-productive and slightly con­tra­dic­tory because you agree that fem­i­nism approaches the male expe­ri­ence from a skewed position.

The com­ment I wanted to make in response to this follows:

I’m not sure this is entirely accu­rate: I don’t think I ana­lyzed the male <i>experience</i> of sex­ual abuse at all. Rather what I did was point out ways that I think fem­i­nism allows us to think struc­turally about male sur­vivors and male per­pe­tra­tors – you are, of course, cor­rect that I did not address the ques­tion of female per­pe­tra­tors at all, and I should have made it more clear that it was some­thing I intended to come back to – because I think that being able to think struc­turally is nec­es­sary for being able to think polit­i­cally. This is a point I made in my response to curiousgyrl’s com­ment in the sen­tence after the sec­tion you put in bold­face. You may not accept the fem­i­nist analy­sis which char­ac­ter­izes our cul­ture as a patriarchal/male dom­i­nant one, but that argu­ment – since I do accept the fem­i­nist posi­tion – is quite dif­fer­ent from argu­ing that I sub­jected the male expe­ri­ence of sex­ual abuse/violence to a fem­i­nist analysis.

To be more spe­cific, and also to point out a care­less­ness of lan­guage on my part, here is the part of the quote that you put in boldface:

On the other hand, when a boy or man is raped, the rape inter­rupts his sta­tus as a sex­ual sub­ject; it turns him into some­thing he is not sup­posed to be in a male dom­i­nant cul­ture. Part of talk­ing about men’s expe­ri­ence of sex­ual abuse on its own terms, it seems to me, has to include the tak­ing apart of this aspect of the expe­ri­ence; and I do not see how we can talk about this with­out com­ing to the con­clu­sion that male sex­ual sub­jec­tiv­ity in a male dom­i­nant cul­ture is built on the denial of pre­cisely the vul­ner­a­bil­ity that abusers exploit.

First, the care­less­ness: The sec­ond use of the word “expe­ri­ence” in the part of the quote I put in bold­face should have read “phe­nom­e­non,” to refer to abuse as a phe­nom­e­non (I will, when I have the chance, cor­rect this in the orig­i­nal post), because I did not mean to imply that the inte­rior expe­ri­ence of all men who are abused is that their sta­tus as men has been inter­rupted. Indeed, that is an intel­lec­tu­al­iza­tion of the expe­ri­ence that one can make only after the fact and it is, of course, for the indi­vid­ual sur­vivor to decide if that descrip­tion fits his expe­ri­ence. Sec­ond, the speci­ficity: Unless you dis­agree with me that, in gen­eral, men are still social­ized to be the sex­ual aggressors/initiators; that we are, in gen­eral, not sup­posed to think of our­selves as the objects of sex­ual desire/activity in the way that women are – i.e., we are not sup­posed to be sex­u­ally pen­e­trated (though that is only one, extreme exam­ple); and that fol­low­ing this social script is, gen­er­ally, what we are expected to do in order to be rec­og­nized as “real” men, then it seems to be pretty obvi­ous that, on a struc­tural level, rape or some other form of sex­ual assault vio­lates not only the body of the man who has been assaulted, but also the social script of man­hood that he is expected to fol­low. This does not mean he expe­ri­ences it this way, and it does not mean that he should be made to shoe­horn his expe­ri­ence into this way of think­ing about things. What think­ing about things this way makes room for is a way of talk­ing about how the rape/sexual abuse of boys/men fits into the power hier­ar­chy of mas­culin­ity; it allows us to say some­thing about the per­pe­tra­tors (and I think this true for male <i>and</i> female per­pe­tra­tors) and the social and cul­tural dynamic that is at work in the abuse they com­mit. It allows us, in other words, to politi­cize the nature of the abuse itself.

Now, you may dis­agree with my analy­sis of mas­culin­ity; I am not try­ing to per­suade you to accept a fem­i­nist view of the world. All I am try­ing to do here is illus­trate that I was not try­ing to impose a pre­de­ter­mined ide­o­log­i­cal frame­work on the expe­ri­ence of sur­vivors. I called my post on Alas “a begin­ning,” and that is pre­cisely what it is. In sub­se­quent posts, I intend to talk quite a bit more specif­i­cally about the ways in which fem­i­nism is not only inad­e­quate, but also inhos­pitable when it comes to try­ing to talk about male sur­vivor expe­ri­ences.

This post is cross-posted at Alas, A Blog. I have not edited it at all.

I am going to repeat myself about this a lit­tle fur­ther down, but let me say up front that this post is in response to the com­ments in this open thread for male sur­vivors of sex­ual abuse/violence started by Abyss2Hope. First, though, since this is my first post on Alas, and since my com­ments in var­i­ous posts here will not nec­es­sar­ily pro­vide ade­quate con­text to what I want to write about and why I take the approach to it that I do, let me offer a brief intro­duc­tion: I am a poet and writer and a pro­fes­sor in the Eng­lish Depart­ment at a large com­mu­nity col­lege in New York City, where I have been teach­ing com­po­si­tion, cre­ative writ­ing and lit­er­a­ture for the last sev­en­teen years. I tend to struc­ture the con­tent of my classes such that, even if the top­ics them­selves are not explic­itly fem­i­nist — such as the course in Mid­dle East­ern lit­er­a­ture I am teach­ing this semes­ter — I can make fem­i­nist analy­sis a part of how I teach them. Indeed, fem­i­nism has been cen­tral to the way I under­stand the world since my late teens-early twen­ties, when read­ing Adri­enne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence was the only thing that con­vinced me I wasn’t crazy (a few years later it was Andrea Dworkin’s Inter­course). I will have more to say about that fur­ther on in this post. For now, let me just say that I have been writ­ing and pub­lish­ing about issues of man­hood and mas­culin­ity from a fem­i­nist per­spec­tive since 1988, when the first of two essays I wrote on women’s repro­duc­tive rights was pub­lished in Chang­ing Men Mag­a­zine. Since then, I have pub­lished pieces in more than a few other jour­nals, includ­ing this one in Salon​.com that might have turn out to have some rel­e­vance to this dis­cus­sion. If you are inter­ested in see­ing more of my work, you can find excerpts on my web­site. You can also visit my own blog, where this will be cross-posted.

My point in pro­vid­ing these links is not pri­mar­ily to hawk my own writ­ing — though I will, of course, be very happy to have more read­ers —but rather to give you the oppor­tu­nity, should you be inter­ested, (and I guess this is also the aca­d­e­mic in me) to see what I write here in the con­text of a body of work and a per­spec­tive I have been devel­op­ing for more than half my life. My expe­ri­ence here on Alas, espe­cially in threads where the intent of the orig­i­nal post is to expose male priv­i­lege as fully as pos­si­ble, par­tic­u­larly as that priv­i­lege is expressed through rape and other forms of vio­lence against women, is that the sub­stance of the ideas orig­i­nally put forth too often gets lost, as com­menters shoot from the hip in ways that either inten­tion­ally derail con­ver­sa­tions or do so because peo­ple are more con­cerned with their own per­sonal agen­das than with actu­ally read­ing what oth­ers have to say. (Anec­do­tally, and this is also a point I will return to later on, it seems to me that while men more than women are guilty of these derail­ments, it is not only MRA’s and other anti-feminists/critics of fem­i­nism who do this. I had my head quite rightly handed to me in a thread about women and rape that I com­pletely derailed because I got defen­sive about some­thing I shouldn’t have got­ten defen­sive about.)

While I have no illu­sion that this post will be any dif­fer­ent — though I cer­tainly hope that it is — the issues that arise when male sur­vivors of sex­ual vio­lence con­front fem­i­nism, either as an ide­ol­ogy put forth in books or in the bod­ies of fem­i­nist women and men, still need to be talked about. These issues are com­plex — which is why I have called this post “A Beginning” — and, indica­tive of this com­plex­ity, per­haps, is the fact that while I have already declared my bias in favor of a fem­i­nist analy­sis of things, I do not belive that fem­i­nist dis­course is a place where male sur­vivors ought to expect either to speak or to be heard in a way that places our expe­ri­ence at the cen­ter of what­ever is being dis­cussed. Indeed, the post you are read­ing has its ori­gins in a com­ment I made to Daran in Abyss2Hope’s Anatomy Of A False Rape Accu­sa­tion — Part 2. Daran, in a com­ment that he has since acknowl­edged was rooted in a mis­read­ing of a com­ment by Q Grrl, made the fol­low­ing statement:

The com­plaint isn’t just that fem­i­nists talk solely of male on female rape, but also that male rape sur­vivors are excluded from services.

Later on, he restated this con­cern in this way:

I still find [Qgrrl’s] char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of those who advo­cate for the admis­sion of male rape vic­tims to the dis­course as “wankers” who “whine” to be offen­sive. “Respect” is not a one-way street.

I am not inter­ested here in res­ur­rect­ing either Daran’s mis­read­ing of Qgrrl or the dis­cus­sion that fol­lowed it. I have quoted these state­ments by Daran because I think they say quite suc­cinctly what he and other men see a short­com­ing of fem­i­nist dis­course about sex­ual vio­lence, i.e., that it does not, by defin­tion and even by design, make room within itself for a space that can ade­quately account for the expe­ri­ence of male sur­vivors. I think this con­cern has valid­ity, though I dis­agree with the ways in which Daran pur­sues it — at least as far as I have been able to tell in the short time I have been read­ing him — and so my response to him read, in part:

You know, Daran, as a man who was sex­u­ally abused when I was a child, I have quite a lot of sym­pa­thy for a posi­tion that is crit­i­cal of the way in which men are often left out of the sexual-assault dis­course, fem­i­nist or oth­er­wise. When I was in my late teens and early 20s and just begin­ning to come to aware­ness of what had been done to me, no one, and I mean no one, was talk­ing about the fact that boys were sex­u­ally abuse; peo­ple were just begin­ning to acknowl­edge pub­licly the degree to which it hap­pened to girls […] I would love, there­fore, the oppor­tu­nity to be part of a con­ver­sa­tion among men about what it means to be a male sur­vivor of rape and other forms of sex­ual assault that takes as its start­ing point not the fact that fem­i­nism does not include men in its dis­course, which is where you inevitably start these dis­cus­sions, but rather our expe­ri­ence of men of being sex­u­ally vio­lated (and, yes, also of hav­ing our expe­ri­ences dis­missed, etc. and so on).

In response to this com­ment, A2H started an Open Thread For Male Sur­vivors of Sex­ual Vio­lence, nam­ing me as mod­er­a­tor and assert­ing that while the prob­lem of “male sur­vivors of sex­ual abuse/assault being left out of the sexual-assault dis­course” is

a real prob­lem that mer­its atten­tion[, it] too often […] gets men­tioned as a way to attack efforts to fight sex­ual vio­lence directed at girls and women or as an excuse to attack fem­i­nism or fem­i­nists. That exploits male vic­tims and they deserve better.

Toy Sol­dier found this a less than invit­ing intro­duc­tion, assert­ing in another com­ment that A2H’s words were “antag­o­nis­tic, accusatory and inac­cu­rate.” Ulti­mately, despite the fact that I posted two or three com­ments try­ing to start a dis­cus­sion of ideas around male sur­vivors and fem­i­nism, and at least one or two oth­ers, includ­ing Jake Squid, tried to move the con­ver­sa­tion away from what Amp rightly called “a lot of mutual sus­pi­cion and dis­like here, on both sides,” the thread devolved onto the topic of what it would take for male sur­vivors who have had neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences with fem­i­nists on Alas and else­where to feel safe post­ing here. Ulti­mately, it became clear that the roots of the open thread for male sur­vivros in A2H’s thread on false rape accu­sa­tions, cou­pled with the fact that Alas is an explic­itly fem­i­nist blog, was a prob­lem for at least some of the peo­ple who might oth­er­wise want to join this dis­cus­sion. Hence, this post, which will, I hope, give the dis­cus­sion a fresh start.

I do not want to deny or triv­i­al­ize what it feels like for male sur­vivors who have had their expe­ri­ences of abuse dis­missed, denied or triv­i­al­ized by women or men speak­ing in the name of fem­i­nism. I have had that expe­ri­ence as well, and, as any­one who has sur­vived an assault of any kind must know, to have that expe­ri­ence denied is to be forced to relive the shame and iso­la­tion of the orig­i­nal assault. How­ever, some­one who speaks in the name of fem­i­nism does not rep­re­sent all of fem­i­nism, even if what they are say­ing can legit­i­mately be called fem­i­nist, and it is with feminism that I want to start, not feminists, because if this dis­cus­sion were to start with a focus on what fem­i­nists have said and done or not said and not done when it comes to male sur­vivors of sex­ual abuse, we would end up right where we ended up in the thread started by Abyss2Hope, with a whole lot of sus­pi­cion and mis­trust, and we will have gone essen­tially nowhere.

I was around 19 when I first started to name as sex­ual abuse what I had expe­ri­enced at the hands of two dif­fer­ent men at two dif­fer­ent times of my child­hood, and one of the things that enabled me to name that expe­ri­ence was read­ing the essay “Cary­atid: Two Columns,” in On Lies, Secrets and Silence. I remem­ber dis­tinctly being at sum­mer camp, sit­ting on my bed dur­ing my day off and read­ing and reread­ing the fol­low­ing passage:

[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.

I don’t know why, but those words pushed a but­ton some­where in me, and I began to ask — in fact, I actu­ally heard a voice in my head ask­ing — ”But what about me? What about what hap­pened to me?”

Yet even as suc­ces­sive read­ings of that essay, along with the other pieces in Rich’s book, offered me a way to begin to name my own expe­ri­ence, it also iden­ti­fied me as a man with the same power and priv­i­lege that the men who abused me had used to abuse me:

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.” The mes­sage was clear. What­ever else might have been true about who I was, I was also, by def­i­n­i­tion, the enemy, and I did not know how to speak at one and the same time as both a sur­vivor of male sex­ual vio­lence and some­one who par­tic­i­pated in it. I don’t know why this para­dox did not lead me to reject fem­i­nism out­right, except to say that read­ing fem­i­nist writ­ers like Rich con­vinced me that fem­i­nism, more than any other ide­ol­ogy I had encoun­tered, pointed to a way of liv­ing my life that was anti­thet­i­cal to the way the men who abused me were obvi­ously liv­ing theirs.

Nonethe­less, the para­dox was silenc­ing, so silenc­ing, in fact, that a few years later — and this was after I’d started telling peo­ple I’d been abused — in a train­ing ses­sion at a dif­fer­ent when day camp, when the male ses­sion leader told us he was going to use “she” as the generic pro­noun refer­ring to kids who might choose to tell us they’d been sex­u­ally abused, I found myself unable to con­front him about the way that choice ren­dered me and my expe­ri­ence, not to men­tion the expe­ri­ences of the other men and, per­haps more impor­tantly, the boys at the camp who’d had the same expe­ri­ence, invis­i­ble. Yes, part of why I didn’t speak up had to do both with the very pub­lic nature of the forum I’d be speak­ing in and the adver­sar­ial nature of what I’d be say­ing, but I also couldn’t speak up because I didn’t have the words, the con­cep­tual vocab­u­lary not only to say “This isn’t fair,” but also to point out that boys’ expe­ri­ence of abuse, my expe­ri­ence of abuse, needed to be under­stood on its own terms and not as a per­haps anomolous sub­set of the expe­ri­ence of girls; and one rea­son I did not have that vocab­u­lary was that it was not to be found in the fem­i­nism I’d been read­ing. (To be fair, no one else had that vocab­u­lary either. At that time, and I am talk­ing here about more than 20 years ago, barely any­one but fem­i­nists was will­ing to acknowl­edge that sex­ual abuse hap­pened to girls; no one had even really con­sid­ered — at least as far as I know — that it was hap­pen­ing to boys as well.)

It was not until a cou­ple of years later, when I was in grad­u­ate school, that my per­cep­tion of the lack of such a vocab­u­lary became the need to develop one. It started when a female friend of mine per­suaded me that I should think of what hap­pened when I lost my vir­gin­ity as an instance of date rape. I have writ­ten about that expe­ri­ence here, on my blog, and so I am not going to retell the whole story. What is most rel­e­vant here is that, as I came to under­stand that my friend was wrong, that the girl with whom I had sex for the first time had not raped me (and if you want to know more about that, you need to go read the post on my blog), I also began to artic­u­late dis­tinc­tions between the ways in which fem­i­nism was help­ful to me as a sur­vival of child sex­ual abuse and the ways in which it could not be and, more impor­tantly, was unrea­son­able for me to expect it to be. Some of these, in no par­tic­u­lar order, include:

1. Women, not men, are the sub­jects of fem­i­nist dis­course; and men, when men are part of that dis­course, are the objects of its analy­sis. This is not merely the log­i­cal result of the fact that most fem­i­nists are women; it is a delib­er­ate polit­i­cal stance intended to sub­vert and ulti­mately elim­i­nate patriarchy/male dom­i­nance. As such, whether you accept a fem­i­nist analy­sis or not, it is point­less to ask fem­i­nist dis­course to admit men’s sub­jec­tiv­ity on an equal foot­ing with women’s — and equal foot­ing is what would be required if one were to try to turn fem­i­nism into a forum for deal­ing with the expe­ri­ence of male sur­vivors of sex­ual abuse/violence. Stephen Heath’s essay “Male Fem­i­nism,” in Men In Fem­i­nism, does a great job of artic­u­lat­ing the prob­lem of male sub­jec­tiv­ity within fem­i­nism, but with­out a spe­cific ref­er­ence to sex­ual abuse. (I should also be clear that when I talk about peo­ple who do not accept a fem­i­nist analy­sis, I am not talk­ing about peo­ple who believe that fem­i­nism is itself an oppres­sive ide­ol­ogy the pur­pose of which is to sub­ju­gate men, or any of the myr­iad vari­a­tions on that theme that run through the var­i­ous strands of con­ser­v­a­tive dis­course out there. I am think­ing of peo­ple who believe there are other forms of polit­i­cal analy­sis that ade­quately account for the kinds of gen­der imbal­ances that fem­i­nism addresses and that seek the change of those imbal­ances in the direc­tion of greater equality.)

2. At the same time, how­ever, fem­i­nism names the struc­tures — polit­i­cal, socioe­co­nomic, cul­tural and even psy­cho­log­i­cal — that nor­mal­ize the kind of power hier­ar­chy that leads to the sex­ual abuse and exploita­tion of both boys/men and women/girls. Broadly speak­ing, fem­i­nism gath­ers these struc­tures under the label patri­archy or male dom­i­nance. Curi­ous­gyrl gets at this point in a com­ment where she points out that “men sys­tem­at­i­cally rape male chil­dren and other men [because of the] way that male dom­i­nance works; there [are] not only ben­e­fits for exer­cis­ing male dom­i­nance but con­se­quences for refus­ing or being unable to do so.” I real­ize that her for­mu­la­tion very neatly elides the fact that there are also female abusers. What I will say about female abusers for now is this: the boys/men they abuse are also suf­fer­ing the con­se­quences “of refus­ing or being unable” to exer­cise male dom­i­nance. In other words, even if female abusers do not neatly fit the fem­i­nist par­a­digm of the dom­i­nant and abu­sive male, boys and men who have been abused by women still suf­fer their abuse within a male dom­i­nant con­text, and it is fem­i­nism that first named that con­text for what it is. Still, the phe­nom­e­non that curi­ous­gyrl points out is a struc­tural one; it does not get at male sur­vivors’ inte­rior expe­ri­ence, and it is that expe­ri­ence I am hop­ing this post will moti­vate peo­ple to discuss.

3. Fem­i­nism, more than any other socio-cultural/political form of analy­sis, artic­u­lates the dif­fer­ent posi­tions boys/men and girls/women occupy vis-a-vis sex­ual vio­lence. When a girl or woman is raped, the rape enacts, con­firms, affirms her sta­tus in a male dom­i­nant soci­ety as a sex­ual object; it makes explicit that part of the social script for what it means to be a woman that says a woman exists to be used sex­u­ally by men. On the other hand, when a boy or man is raped, the rape inter­rupts his sta­tus as a sex­ual sub­ject; it turns him into some­thing he is not sup­posed to be in a male dom­i­nant cul­ture. Part of talk­ing about men’s expe­ri­ence of sex­ual abuse on its own terms, it seems to me, has to include the tak­ing apart of this aspect of the expe­ri­ence; and I do not see how we can talk about this with­out com­ing to the con­clu­sion that male sex­ual sub­jec­tiv­ity in a male dom­i­nant cul­ture is built on the denial of pre­cisely the vul­ner­a­bil­ity that abusers exploit. This con­clu­sion, car­ried to its log­i­cal polit­i­cal and socio-cultural ends, is a quin­tes­sen­tially fem­i­nist insight.

Some things about the dis­cus­sion and moderation:

1. This thread is open to any­one who has some­thing sub­stan­tive and con­struc­tive to add to a dis­cus­sion of fem­i­nism and male sur­vivors of sex­ual abuse/violence. My title includes the world “child” in paren­the­ses because child sex­ual abuse is what I expe­ri­enced, and so, for me, a cen­tral moti­va­tion in tak­ing the time to write this post is some­thing I said in this com­ment:

[G]iven the num­ber of boys who are sex­u­ally abused – sta­tis­tics I have seen range from 1 in 5 to 1 in 7 – the prob­lem of the sex­ual abuse of boys can­not be framed, sim­ply, as the indi­vid­ual prob­lems of those boys who have been assaulted. The prob­lem needs to be politicized [….]

2. Daran argues that the result of the exclu­sion of male sur­vivor expe­ri­ences from fem­i­nist dis­course has mate­r­ial con­se­quences in that male sur­vivors are some­times refused ser­vices because they are men and that orga­ni­za­tions which would serve men are either refused or have a hard time get­ting fund­ing. This is a seri­ous issue, but I do not think this thread is the place to have it What I want to talk about here are the ways in which we talk about male sur­vivors’ expe­ri­ences, the ways in which we con­cep­tu­al­ize it, because those things will form the foun­da­tion of how we argue for ser­vices and funding.

Okay, I guess that’s it for now. Let’s see where this dis­cus­sion takes us.

When my teacher read to us the poem her chal­lenge inspired, she wanted us to hear the poet’s fail­ure to write the flower of flesh he was try­ing to cel­e­brate as the body part of an actual woman. He gave us instead, dis­em­bod­ied and clin­i­cal, a porn-flick close-up decked out in metaphors—the gates of par­adise, pink like a rabbit’s eye—he hoped would make it new or be made new by it. I saw an inept under­cover agent, Jacque Clouseau or Maxwell Smart, wear­ing the poorly tai­lored cloth­ing with which he has dis­guised him­self as the woman he thinks he needs to be to infil­trate the party at the enemy’s man­sion, where he’s been sent to destroy the inevitably phal­lic device the bad guys have hid­den some­where on the grounds and that they plan to use to con­quer the world. The mas­ter vil­lain knows as soon as he sees “her” that she is the man he must elim­i­nate to guar­an­tee his plan’s suc­cess but decides to have some fun first, pre­tend­ing to be seduced (and seduc­tion, we know as well, is what the good guy is only pre­tend­ing to do), until he has no more time for games and defrocks our hero, forc­ing him to stand, care­fully guarded and cring­ing in his boxer shorts, where he will have to watch as the civ­i­liza­tion he was sent to save is brought to an end.

We all know what hap­pens next: the good-girl-gone-bad our hero met in a pre­vi­ous scene and, how­ever improb­a­bly, caused to love him, shoots one of the guards in the back, giv­ing the new love of her life the chance he needs, also improb­a­bly, to save the day, which of course means sav­ing her as well in a last minute fist­fight that has to include at least two moments in which he almost dies the hideous death that we know awaits his rival,

and we know as well the next scene the movie moves us to
will find our hero and the woman he has saved
alone in the world of the script,
and we know a moment in that scene will come,
whether the cam­era shows it to us or not,
when they will be naked, as we are naked,
and when he kneels to her, as I kneel now to you,
my face between your parted thighs,
and as he bends, as I am bend­ing,
to put his lips to hers, he will see,
if he allows him­self to see,
the par­tic­u­lar shape her body gives
to the idea of cunt, not the gates of par­adise,
but the damp dis­ar­ray of labia and hair,
or if she’s shaved, the prob­a­bil­ity of stub­ble,
and in either case the smegma gath­ered in the folds of her
he has to open, as I am open­ing you,
run­ning the fin­ger you’ve made slick with your tongue
along the con­tours of what,
when you ask me what I’m look­ing at down there,
I always say is you, just you,

because it is the daily bod­ies our lovers bring to us
of piss and sweat that we have to love first,
of pim­ples and the scent of a lived day,
of blood and bits of toi­let paper, the prickly heat
you know is not con­ta­gious
but looks like it should be—that
is what we have to love
if we want the body inside a lover’s body
to reveal itself.

I’ve never told you this: once, rest­ing my head on your inner thigh so I could look at you, because I like to look at you, I saw her. She took the form of the woman in the sketch in that book of erotic art you asked me just last week to put into stor­age so our son wouldn’t acci­den­tally open it. (I agree: he is still too young.) The cen­ter of the frame opens into a lov­ingly and minutely ren­dered vagina, except but the artist has drawn the cli­toral hood as the hood of a cloak, and the labia minora as the cloak’s fab­ric held open by a female fig­ure who is at once guardian of and entrance to the gen­i­tal vestibule of her coun­ter­part, the rest of whose body we can­not see.

The woman inside a woman, I thought,
and I thought that day
as her image dis­solved back into you
that hers were the lips I’d been kiss­ing,
hers, when I slipped into you,
were the arms that embraced me,
and I remem­ber star­ing once like that
at my Dan­ish lover’s cunt.
                   You can­not see them, she told me.

See what? I asked.

The scars where his knife sliced into me.
I was, he said, a piece of meat on his plate.

And writ­ing these lines I’m think­ing now
what woman doesn’t know
it’s only luck and cir­cum­stance
between her and scars like that?
And I’m think­ing of my friend from work
who wrote in her last email
that sui­cide was stalk­ing her,
just like the man she thought was going to love her
into a life she’d feel alive liv­ing
had been stalk­ing her; and when he’d had enough
of fuck­ing her, he pulled her head back by the hair
and told her he was going to shoot into her mouth
and if she let one drop of him spill
he’d kill her, whore that she was,
and who would miss her anyway?

The last time I saw her, we stood hug­ging in the restaurant’s lobby
the way we’d been wait­ing fif­teen years to hug,
and I knew the woman in my arms
was the woman that bas­tard had raped,
but she was also the woman who risked
the moment he stared off into what­ever god­for­saken dis­tance
his ejac­u­la­tion opened for him
to spit him out, and he never knew;
the woman who sent por­traits of who she is
because of what her rapist did to her
to a local poetry impre­sario,
who gave her time to share them with an audi­ence,
who then, at the bar where they all went after­wards for a drink,
pulled her aside. After read­ing your poems, he said,
I was hard all night.

(When I tell this story face-to-face, I give his name.
Here, you’ll under­stand, it’s wiser if I don’t.)

When we let each other go,
I kissed my friend’s open palm,
and she said, I love you, laugh­ing
that I couldn’t wrap my tongue
around more of an answer
than a stam­mered Me too!

You don’t have to say any­thing, she smiled,
step­ping towards her car,
which was parked right out front,
but the truth is I do love her, and I wish
I’d had the pres­ence of mind to say so.

Am I not beau­ti­ful enough? she asked.
I almost put my hand on hers. No,
you are com­pelling.
                            Is it because I’m Black?
Because I’m Hait­ian?
                                No!
                                      Then tell me why
just this once, you won’t come with me.
Name the hotel! No one will ever know!
I pointed out again that we were mar­ried
to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. As if I hadn’t spo­ken,
she asked if I liked sex with my wife,
if I made sure my wife was wet before I entered her.
I tried to stop the con­ver­sa­tion there,
but speak­ing over me, my for­mer stu­dent explained,
I’m always dry when my hus­band fucks me.
I hoped, with you, to find out what the other way is like.
I don’t remem­ber who said what next,
though she did leave my office alone.
What comes to me now is her courage
and the ques­tion of what she saw
in what she saw of me when I taught her class
that she believed I could be the lover
her husband’s fail­ings had revealed to her that she needed,
and was it cow­ardice to push her away?

Because my world now holds another for­mer stu­dent,
who in my lec­tures on trans­for­ma­tional gram­mar
(move any­thing any­where, every­thing else
is con­straint), found proof — she told me this
after our last day of class, sit­ting on the bench
that is no longer there, on the grass
just out­side the build­ing where my office is — proof
that fuck­ing me (though “fuck” was not the word she used)
would free a self in her she could not name,
that was cring­ing, she knew, chained and starv­ing
some­where in the ruined city her life had become,

and is it wrong that because she asked me to
I have kissed her mouth
and held her pierced tongue between my lips,
and found with my fin­gers as she lay cra­dled in my lap
the spot as far inside of her as I could reach
that drew from her the moan that means
in each of us when who we are is touched
in our fun­da­men­tal naked­ness, that love has been made?
Because if the silence she wears between her legs—
she will nei­ther let me see it nor name it in my pres­ence—
is indeed the lock that impris­ons her
deep and tight inside her­self,
who am I to say I do not have in me
the key she says she knows I do?
Because what else is there to be faith­ful to
except the reach­ing out with words or flesh
to help another’s human being fill with knowl­edge of itself?

–—

And the woman in whom the rapist in
Israel sheathed his knife:
He told her he was going to to leave it there,
her hands bound behind her back,
her thighs tied shut against its falling out,
in that drainage ditch along the moun­tain road
where he promised she would bleed to death
in one unstop­pable and rag­less men­stru­a­tion,
and since he’d already done to her
every­thing he’d nar­rated before­hand,
she had no rea­son to doubt him,
except some­one pulling over to pee scared him off,
and so he didn’t fin­ish truss­ing her up,
and he left her mouth ungagged,
and she was able to call for help — this woman,
who curled her body against mine,
as if to warm her­self against the win­ter cold
he left her to die in, how is it not grace, how
in a poem like this do I not tell you
that when she pulled away
the last bit of cloth­ing veil­ing my erec­tion,
she stared in a silence ema­nat­ing from some­where in her
that I would never see, until, from every angle she could find
she bent to exam­ine me, her face
expres­sion­less, her eyes — except for one
side-long glance in the direc­tion of mine—
never leav­ing the object of her atten­tion,
and I felt I was an alien to her,
a Mar­t­ian cap­tive whose phys­i­ol­ogy she had to com­pre­hend,
but then she smiled, It’s like
see­ing one again for the first time. Maybe
because you are the first man I have told.
Then she whis­pered, It’s beau­ti­ful,
and kissed me there, and strad­dled my hips,
guid­ing me slowly into a curve in her
I’d never felt in any other lover,
and the image that comes to me now,
remem­ber­ing this for you,
is of a trav­eler walk­ing a path
in the pitch black dark of a moon­less night,
and even though the path is dif­fer­ent each time he walks it,
he can’t get lost: he accepts
that the end it will lead him to
is always the end he is sup­posed to reach.

The end she even­tu­ally reached was in Den­mark,
where the man who wanted to marry her
before her trip to the
Holy Land still did.
She told me this on the phone from the air­port,
a last minute call to let me know
the fight we’d had three nights before
was not the rea­son I hadn’t heard from her,
and that she hadn’t meant the things she said
when she left me sit­ting with two plates
of uneaten prime ribs to pay for
and a bot­tle of the expen­sive French wine
I can’t remem­ber the name of
that she insisted we had to drink
to toast the six months we’d been lovers.

My uterus has colo­nial ambi­tions, she’d said,
mak­ing light of the endometrio­sis
that some­times made sex painful for her.
Preg­nancy, her doc­tors said, would cure her,
which is what sci­ence thought at the time,
and she wanted me to be the one to help her heal.
Oth­er­wise, the surgery she’d have to have
would mur­der her fer­til­ity, chang­ing what she felt in sex
who-knew-how. A lot to lose
for a woman in her twen­ties,
but it wasn’t her loss I was think­ing of
when I said no, or even the loss
our son or daugh­ter might have felt
because they didn’t know the man
whose genes they car­ried. I’d learned too well
that only a man who had no self-respect
would give his body to a child’s mak­ing
if he did not have in him that child’s father.
So it didn’t mat­ter when she promised
that the cure she was ask­ing me to help her make real
in the body of a child would be a child
who’d never know I’d ever lived.
I could not see the mak­ing of that body
as the giv­ing she wanted it to be for me,
because I could not see the life
that would grow our boy or girl
into the man or woman
whose name would always be a blank for me,
who might never know why he or she was born,
as a gift in its own right, and so we fought,
and I accepted her apol­ogy, though now I’m think­ing
she was not wrong to call me self­ish,
or any of the other names she screamed at me that night,
and I’m won­der­ing if my answer would be dif­fer­ent today.
I want to say yes, but I just don’t know.

This really is:

Tak­ing the stand for the first time this week in [his] rape trial, Mr. Zuma cast him­self as the embod­i­ment of a tra­di­tional Zulu male, with all the priv­i­leges that patri­ar­chal Zulu tra­di­tions bestow on men. Mr. Zuma, who turns 64 this week, said his accuser, a 31-year-old anti-AIDS advo­cate, had sig­naled a desire to have sex with him by wear­ing a knee-length skirt to his house and sit­ting with legs crossed, reveal­ing her thigh.

Indeed, he said, he was actu­ally oblig­ated to have sex. His accuser was aroused, he said, and “in the Zulu cul­ture, you can­not just leave a woman if she is ready.” To deny her sex, he said, would have been tan­ta­mount to rape.

Such argu­ments have stirred a storm here, not because he insists that his accuser wanted sex — he-said, she-said argu­ments are not unheard of in rape tri­als world­wide — but because he has clothed them in what he depicts as African mores about sex and male primacy.

This from an arti­cle in the April 10 New York Times about the tes­ti­mony that Jacob G. Zuma gave at his rape trial. Zuma earned his stripes in the African National Con­gress, spend­ing 10 years in prison dur­ing the 1960s and 1970s when he was con­victed of try­ing over­throw the white-ruled gov­ern­ment, and many see his appeal to “African mores about sex and male pri­macy” as — as the arti­cle puts it — “a polit­i­cal Hail Mary […] aimed at sal­vaging the pub­lic career of a man accused of cor­rup­tion and sex crimes.” Indeed, it seems he has politi­cized the trial itself by tes­ti­fy­ing entirely in Zulu, even though he is flu­ent in Eng­lish, neces­si­tat­ing that his tes­ti­mony be trans­lated for the pros­e­cu­tors, who did not speak Zulu.

Zuma’s account of his encounter with the woman who has accused him is inconsistent:

Police reports indi­cate that Mr. Zuma ini­tially said the encounter occurred in the guest room. But he has since tes­ti­fied that the woman came to his bed­room, climbed into his bed and asked for a mas­sage, and that he con­cluded that she wanted sex, although he knew that she was H.I.V. pos­i­tive and that nei­ther had a condom.

The woman’s account is as follows:

The woman, who is H.I.V. pos­i­tive, says she was sleep­ing overnight in a guest room in Mr. Zuma’s flat when he came to the room, offered her a mas­sage, then raped her when she declined. She has said she did not resist because she was too shocked to respond.

There are many, many rea­sons to believe the woman here, not the least of which is the fact that I find it hard to believe that she, an HIV pos­i­tive AIDS activist, would have con­sented to sex with­out a con­dom. (Zuma’s rea­son­ing as to why he did not use a con­dom — “he was con­vinced that his chance of con­tract­ing H.I.V. was small and that he took a shower after sex to min­i­mize the risk” — is not only ridicu­lous on its face, sug­gest­ing that he is ratio­nal­iz­ing after the fact, but also quite fright­en­ing, since he was at one point the gov­ern­ment offi­cial respon­si­ble for women’s rights and anti-AIDS efforts.) What is remark­able about the he-said-she-said nature of this sit­u­a­tion, as is clear from the quote with which I started this post, is the way in which Zuma has been able to politi­cize it. In South Africa, the arti­cle points out

[…] by far the most West­ern of African nations, the accord between centuries-old cul­tures and newer, more Euro­pean notions of sci­ence and law [includ­ing a con­sti­tu­tion that is, accord­ing to an author­ity the arti­cle quotes else­where, “one of the world’s most enlight­ened”] has been both uneasy and unspo­ken. Mr. Zuma has laid it bare, effec­tively argu­ing that he is being per­se­cuted for his cul­tural beliefs.

I don’t know enough about South African cul­tural pol­i­tics to say any­thing more about the specifics of how this plays out in that coun­try, nor can I say any­thing about the man’s claims regard­ing sex­ual mores in Zulu cul­ture, but that last sen­tence, writ­ten by reporter Michael Wines, sent chills down my spine. If any­one ever needed con­crete proof that women’s bod­ies are the con­tested ter­ri­tory on which male dom­i­nant cul­tural and polit­i­cal strug­gles are staged, here it is. Per­haps more to the point, if any­one ever doubted that het­ero­sex­ual inter­course is one of the pri­mary build­ing blocks of patri­ar­chal, male dom­i­nant cul­ture, mak­ing rape a particularly-shaped one-of-those-blocks, here it is as well. Indeed, Zuma’s naked appeal to patri­ar­chal cul­tural norms and notions of male and female het­ero­sex­u­al­ity might make his case a won­der­ful teach­ing tool — it’s hard for me not to think in terms of the classroom.

Finally, and I will have to end here, Zuma’s argu­ment and his strat­egy is not so dif­fer­ent from the var­i­ous groups in this coun­try who are try­ing to val­i­date and val­orize tra­di­tional patri­ar­chal val­ues of fam­ily, sex, reli­gion and cul­ture. It’s not sur­pris­ing to me that the back­lash has a global com­po­nent, but it is the first time I have seen the argu­ment for it made so openly and nakedly.