Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

The stu­dents in a reme­dial com­po­si­tion class I’m teach­ing dur­ing my sec­ond semes­ter as a col­lege pro­fes­sor are read­ing aloud and com­ment­ing on fables they’ve writ­ten over the week­end. The prose is awk­ward and ungram­mat­i­cal, but I’m impressed with the imag­i­na­tive effort some 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, asks if we’d like to hear his story. Yes, I say, of course.

At the cen­ter of Walter’s nar­ra­tive, which takes place far in the future, is a very pow­er­ful drug lord whose orga­ni­za­tion has been infil­trated by a top female nar­cotics agent pos­ing as a pros­ti­tute. When the dealer’s lover, who is also a pros­ti­tute in his sta­ble, learns that the oper­a­tion has been com­pro­mised, she tells him imme­di­ately. The dealer con­ceives a plan that uses his lover to expose the spy, who is then tor­tured slowly to death. To express his grat­i­tude, the dealer takes his lover to be, 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 is will­ing to meet his eyes, but I am hop­ing that one of his class­mates will speak first, con­demn­ing what he’s writ­ten not in the voice of author­ity – which my voice inevitably will be – but in the voice of his peers. A minute passes in silence before it becomes clear that his fel­low stu­dents 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 the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they it’s not worth respond­ing to. To me, though, a response feels absolutely nec­es­sary. Wal­ter, like all the other stu­dents in the class, is just out of high school. I do not want to let pass what seems to me to be real teach­able moment, and so I ask Wal­ter if he really believes that fuck­ing a woman to death could be an expres­sion of gratitude.

“Absolutely,” he says, with­out a hint of irony in his voice. “For the woman it’s the ulti­mate ful­fill­ment, and for the man it’s the ulti­mate proof.”

“Of what?” I ask him.

“Of man­hood.” His tone indi­cates that he’s sur­prised I even have to ask. “Women would buy 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 counter, 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 in the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hook­ers who do it for money. Women who are ask­ing for it.”

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

“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.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

So I ask if he makes a dis­tinc­tion between the sex he would have for plea­sure – pre­sum­ably with a woman he loves – and the power he says he would like to expe­ri­ence using sex to kill. Wal­ter looks at me like I’m an idiot. “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, “come on, be hon­est. Wouldn’t it be great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your bud­dies later and tell them you killed her with your dick?”

“No,” is all I can think to say.

“Sure, okay, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to, 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?”

Since it’s even more clear now than it was dur­ing class that Wal­ter is less inter­ested in really engag­ing the ideas he is espous­ing than in “out­ing” me as “one of the boys,” I decide that mono­syl­labic answers are the best way to deal with him. “No,” I say 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, and he walks out, and that’s the lest I see or hear of him until I get my final ros­ter with a W for with­drawal next to his name.

///

The encounter I have just described took place more than fif­teen years ago. In the sev­eral years imme­di­ately fol­low­ing my dis­cus­sion with Wal­ter, I often shared what he’d said with my friends and col­leagues, male and female, and I always found it inter­est­ing that their responses fell, for the most part, along the same lines as my stu­dents’ responses did. On the one hand were those who dis­missed Wal­ter as “crazy,” what­ever they meant by that term (and some sug­gested that he really ought to be insti­tu­tion­al­ized), and, on the other hand, there were those who saw him as not worth the energy it would to respond to him in the first place. The ease with which these responses were almost always given, how­ever, always left me a lit­tle uncom­fort­able, because it seemed – and still seems – to me that each of those answers too eas­ily dis­misses the ques­tion of how Wal­ter came to feel the way he did in favor of a very glib under­stand­ing of who he must be based on what he said. Yet it is pre­cisely the ques­tion of how that haunted me most, and that I think con­tin­ues to be some­thing men don’t talk about enough, not because I think answer­ing it lets Wal­ter off the hook, but because the inte­rior expe­ri­ence Wal­ter claimed to have /desire of his own gen­i­tals, of my gen­i­tals too, as a weapon feels as inac­ces­si­ble to me as the inte­rior expe­ri­ence of bio­log­i­cal femaleness.

///

One of the let­ters from Pent­house mag­a­zine – I think it was from the “Happy Hooker” col­umn – that has stayed with me since I first read it when I was a teenager was writ­ten by a woman who claimed to be describ­ing 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, the 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.

The woman’s let­ter describes a rape. She didn’t present it as any­thing else – except to make clear that it was moti­vated by revenge – and she never implied that the man enjoyed what she and her friend did to him. 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. What I most iden­ti­fied with in this story, I think, what led me always away from the sce­nario I began with of trust in my imag­ined lovers and the plea­sure they wanted to give me, was the man’s expe­ri­ence of hav­ing the plea­sures of his body turned against him, for I knew I could be shamed in that way as well, that my body was always the poten­tial source of my own defeat.

///

A sim­i­lar theme is played out 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 his hos­pi­tal bed, and, 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 is not have an erec­tion and she will not be able to fuck him to death.

///

The story Wal­ter wrote can be under­stood as a kind of pre-emptive strike against the fear of women expressed in this scene, as well as in my response to the Pent­house let­ter I described above. This under­stand­ing is not the same thing, how­ever, as know­ing how Wal­ter and I – or at least I, since I can­not speak for Wal­ter – came to feel this fear in the first place, and I’m focus­ing here on the ques­tion of how rather than why because it seems to me that why has already been answered, author­i­ta­tively and at length, by the women’s move­ment: Men fear the power of women’s freed, sex­ual and oth­er­wise, because the power of women’s free­dom, sex­ual and oth­er­wise, rep­re­sents the undo­ing of male dom­i­nant power and priv­i­lege, with the cor­re­spond­ing col­lapse of the myth of male invul­ner­a­bil­ity and the man­hood men are expected to achieve in order to per­pet­u­ate that illusion.

Acknowl­edg­ing this fear, obvi­ously, is not the same thing as val­i­dat­ing the cul­ture of male dom­i­nance that pro­duces it. At the same time, how­ever, not to acknowl­edge the emo­tional valid­ity to men of that culture’s exis­tence is to miss what I think is a cen­tral ques­tion that has to be asked, that men have to ask of our­selves, if we want not to learn not to be afraid: When you con­sider that pain, humil­i­a­tion and/or sub­ju­ga­tion are almost always the con­se­quences for a man who has failed in his man­hood, is it any won­der that so many of us strive to use our bod­ies so that they can never be used against us?

///

A col­league with whom I used to have lunch on a reg­u­lar basis would occa­sion­ally bring her three-year-old son along. Usu­ally, John was a very ani­mated lit­tle boy, ask­ing ques­tions, mak­ing a mess, and doing in gen­eral what three year old boys do to main­tain them­selves as the focus of atten­tion. On this par­tic­u­lar after­noon, how­ever, John sat next to his mother in absolute silence. Both of his hands were ban­daged because of a fall he’d taken ear­lier in the day, and he was still in pain, which made it dif­fi­cult for him to hold the small pieces his mother cut for him from the pizza we’d just ordered for lunch. From time to time, when the look of frus­tra­tion on her son’s face became espe­cially acute, my friend would stop our con­ver­sa­tion, pick up a small square of food and hold it to his mouth, not con­tin­u­ing with what she’d been say­ing until he’d chewed and swal­lowed the whole thing. When we were done, and John stood up so his mother could put his coat on, he held his engauzed palms out to her, silently ask­ing for com­fort. My friend squat­ted in front of her son and asked in a voice filled with empa­thy, “What’s the mat­ter John? Does it hurt?” When John nod­ded his head, she stroked his cheek with her fin­gers and said, “I know sweetie, but you’re a man, right? You can take it.” John set his mouth in a firm, thin line, and he again moved his head up and down. Then his mother helped him slip his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, zipped him up and motioned to me that we were ready to leave.

As we walked out, I thought of all the count­less times, and all the dif­fer­ent painful and humil­i­at­ing ways in which I was, in which John would be, in which boys rou­tinely are, asked or told, implic­itly or explic­itly, by both men and women, boys and girls, “to take it.” I’m not being melo­dra­matic here. I have no doubt that my friend said what she said with­out even think­ing about it, and I don’t want to blow out of pro­por­tion this one clearly minor appeal to her son’s incip­i­ent man­li­ness. The fact is, how­ever, that she could’ve helped her son under­stand that we can­not always expect peo­ple to com­fort us when we are in pain with­out putting his man­hood at stake. Or, more to the point, she could have given him a hug with­out mak­ing any com­ment at all. (At the time this hap­pened, I did not have a child; now that I do, well can I imag­ine that she might have been tired of a day’s worth of com­fort­ing him, and all she wanted was a lit­tle break.) That she did not, that even in a sit­u­a­tion as insignif­i­cant as this one, John’s man­hood became an issue, how­ever small, indi­cates how deeply and unself­con­sciously, per­haps even unwill­ingly, my friend val­ued the line sep­a­rat­ing the men from the boys.

Another exam­ple: A good friend told me that when her son was eleven she responded to his fail­ing grades by explain­ing that when he got older he would have to sup­port a fam­ily, just like his father, so he’d bet­ter start learn­ing respon­si­bil­ity now. “All his boy­ish inno­cence,” she said, ” seemed to drain right out of him. Every­thing was home­work, home­work, home­work. He doesn’t even play with his toys any­more. I wanted to improve his grades, not turn him into a lit­tle man.”

No doubt, and hope­fully, as he real­ized just how far off the adult­hood his mother had threat­ened him with really was, this boy even­tu­ally went back to being a kid just like any other kid. Indeed, my point here is not that these two inter­ac­tions in and of them­selves rep­re­sent some per­ma­nent harm done to this boys, but rather that the inter­ac­tions them­selves rep­re­sent only one small part of the man­hood train­ing boys receive and that each boy’s response, even in such rel­a­tively minor sit­u­a­tions, cor­re­sponded per­fectly to the man­hood ideal: he sucked it up and showed that he could “take it.”

In Love, Sex, Death and the Mak­ing of the Male, Ros­alind Miles points out that the old say­ing “boys will be boys” can be read not only as it usu­ally is, a state­ment of res­ig­na­tion in the face of inevitabil­ity, but also as an imper­a­tive: Boys will be boys. The
degree to which this sec­ond read­ing is the more accu­rate one becomes fully evi­dent when you look at the con­se­quences of not “being a boy.” Ask any man, and if he’s hon­est enough to tell you, he will have at least one story, and prob­a­bly more than one, of how he was hurt when he was a child for not being aggres­sive enough, ath­letic enough, stoic enough, sex­u­ally objec­ti­fy­ing of girls enough, sex­u­ally pow­er­ful enough, com­pet­i­tive enough, loyal enough to his bud­dies and so on. The hurt the man tells you about may have been phys­i­cal, emo­tional or both; the par­tic­u­lar story he tells you may involve some­thing rel­a­tively minor, as in the cases of the two boys I just told you about, or some­thing deeply seri­ous and even life threat­en­ing, like my friend who was sex­u­ally assaulted and raped by boys he’d through were his friends just because he was the weak­est and least mas­cu­line among them.

Yet despite the rad­i­cal dis­tance we usu­ally assumes sep­a­rates a victim/survivor from her or his vic­tim­iz­ers, there is one aspect of his rape that my friend and those raped him have in com­mon, that all boys and men in our cul­ture have in com­mon: their ideas of them­selves as men – and my friend’s friend’s behav­ior was noth­ing if it was not about their ideas of them­selves as men – are a direct a result of their con­fronta­tion with the vio­lence and aggres­sion con­sid­ered to be the nor­mal, nat­ural and nec­es­sary con­text in which man­hood is formed. None of us can escape this. We may choose to embrace the vio­lence or reject it; we may find some way of accom­mo­dat­ing our­selves to it, or we may devote our lives to elim­i­nat­ing it, but there is now way we can avoid con­fronting it. This con­fronta­tion takes place so per­va­sively through­out our lives – how do I respond to the pos­tur­ing of the male stu­dent who is chal­leng­ing me about nor accept­ing his late paper, or to the neigh­bor whose threat­en­ing body lan­guage belies the polite tone of his voice as he argues with me about who saw the park­ing spot first, or to my son’s insis­tence that he wants a “boy’s only’ birth­day party – that the ques­tion of how or why boys come to value man­hood so highly is dwarfed by the ques­tion Miles asks, “[H]ow do they avoid it?” (58)

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

The next words I want to give you are not mine:

Dur­ing the course of the Inde­pen­dent Study work I did on per­sonal essays this semes­ter and when I was in Pro­fes­sor Newman’s advanced com­po­si­tion class last semes­ter, I found my voice, [which] ha[d] been silenced for many years […] Now I find myself in a sit­u­a­tion where I want to say what my new voice has been say­ing for a while now, but I’m a bit afraid. This is all very new to me — shar­ing my work with an audi­ence, allow­ing some­one other than myself to lis­ten to my words.

The essay that I’m going to read to you is very per­sonal. Writ­ing the essay has helped me come to terms with cer­tain things that have hap­pened to me in my life. What I’m going to say may shock some of you and may even dis­turb some of you, but I’m in the busi­ness of writ­ing the truth.

Cas­san­dra read that pas­sage dur­ing the annual Inde­pen­dent Study Col­lo­quium at the col­lege where I teach, a forum in which all stu­dents who do inde­pen­dent stud­ies in a given year are required to present their work in order to receive col­lege credit for it. As she spoke, tears came to my eyes. I knew what her essay was about, and I knew how hard it had been for her to write it in the first place, much less gather the courage to read it pub­licly, and I was deeply moved, the way any teacher would be, to hear a stu­dent speak about their work together the way Cas­san­dra had just spo­ken about ours. I was also cry­ing, how­ever, because in the process of help­ing Cas­san­dra to find her voice, I’d given voice to some­thing in myself that I too had “silenced for many years,” and it felt good to be let­ting that silence go.

This part of my story, though, begins not with Cas­san­dra, and not in the inde­pen­dent study we did together, but with Esther, one of Cassandra’s class­mates in the Advanced Com­po­si­tion class I’d taught the pre­vi­ous semes­ter. The cen­tral ques­tion I’d used to frame my syl­labus and the assign­ments I asked my stu­dents to do had been What do you care about enough to write about? Esther made what she cared about very clear from the start. She brought her pro­gres­sive and fem­i­nist pol­i­tics into class dis­cus­sion with­out hes­i­ta­tion, and she pep­pered me in almost every class with ques­tions about writ­ing that bespoke a level of pas­sion and com­mit­ment to the craft that few stu­dents bring with them to col­lege. It was Esther who first approached me with the idea of doing an inde­pen­dent study. She wanted to be a writer, she said, a writer whose words could change the world – and those were her exact words – and she let me know that, as much as she was look­ing for instruc­tion, she was look­ing per­haps even more for a role model. A few weeks later, when she handed me the first draft of the essay that would even­tu­ally become the one she read at the Inde­pen­dent Study Col­lo­quium, I had to decide just how much of a role model I was will­ing to be.

Esther’s essay dealt with the sex­ual abuse she’d sur­vived as a child and how she had shaped her ideas about moth­er­hood – she had three chil­dren – in response to that expe­ri­ence. Like any draft, the piece was full of holes, but because I too am a sur­vivor of child sex­ual abuse, and because I had strug­gled for many years, and was in many ways still strug­gling, to learn how to write about had hap­pened to me, I knew that sim­ply focus­ing on the mechan­ics of mak­ing the words work and/or pro­vid­ing Esther with model essays by women who had writ­ten suc­cess­fully about this topic, would not be enough. The dif­fi­cul­ties Esther was hav­ing in say­ing what she wanted to say were as much emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal as they were writerly: the shame of reveal­ing what had pre­vi­ously been hid­den; the ques­tion of whether she really had the courage to make such a rev­e­la­tion; wor­ry­ing about how her fam­ily, espe­cially her mother, would react; wor­ry­ing whether any­one would even care about what had hap­pened to her; and, most impor­tantly to her, at least in terms of  why she was in my class, won­der­ing whether she was tal­ented enough to write in a way that per­suade any­one else that they should care.

Con­tinue read­ing →

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

At eleven, I’m the youngest of eight boys lined up along one row of lock­ers in the oth­er­wise empty men’s locker room at the swim­ming pool to which the day camp I am attend­ing takes us every other day. Nor­mally, I’d be chang­ing with boys my own age, but a mix-up back at the camp grounds landed me on the bus with these guys, who are all twelve and thir­teen. I turn my back to them to hide the erec­tion that has taken hold of my body and which I am hav­ing dif­fi­culty fit­ting into my bathing suit. Despite my best efforts to remain incon­spic­u­ous, how­ever, my move­ments attract the other boys’ atten­tion and one of them sneaks up behind me and looks over my shoul­der. “Hey!” his voice  rings out metal­li­cally, “look at the size of Newman’s boner!”

The rest of the boys sur­round me in a tight cir­cle. I stand there unable to move, my 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.

///

The first time the old man who lived at the top of the stair­case said hello to me, he stopped for a moment as we passed in the court­yard and looked at me as if he’d known me my whole life. I stood there, tak­ing in the warmth of his gaze, wish­ing as he walked away that I’d said some­thing to make him stay so I could tell him who I was. I was thir­teen years old.

Over the next cou­ple of months, a rit­ual of greet­ing grew between us. He would smile and say hello first; I would smile, say the same thing back, and then a long silent moment would pass while he looked at me and I stood there, too hap­pily embar­rassed to move.

Then, one late summer’s day, after our usual exchange was over, the old man did not keep walk­ing. “When am I going to see you?” he asked.

“Soon!” I answered, fig­ur­ing he was lonely, like Mrs. Schecht­man had been when she lived in the apart­ment next to his and I used to go sit with her once in a while just to keep her company.

Not too long after­wards, as I was going out to play with my friends, the old man met me at the bot­tom of the stair­case lead­ing to the front door of our build­ing. It’s pos­si­ble that he’d planned it this way, but I don’t think so; there was no way he could’ve known when I stepped out of my apart­ment. He was prob­a­bly just on his way out at the same time I was, and when I reached to turn the knob, he was stand­ing right behind me, hold­ing the door shut with his left fore­arm. With his right, he maneu­vered me face first into 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 at my crotch, and all the time, over and over again, he kept ask­ing me that same ques­tion, whis­per­ing hoarsely into my ear, “When am I going to see you?”

I had no words for what he was doing to me, 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. Then I ran. I don’t remem­ber how far or how long or even 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 finally stopped run­ning, in the small park across the street from the Lutheran Church, where my friends and I some­times hung out at night, I sat a long time with the knowl­edge that my run­ning had undone noth­ing, that my body was still the body he’d touched, and I knew that he would want to touch me again.

I told no one what had hap­pened, and when the old man passed me the next day and said hello, I said hello back the way I always did, pre­tend­ing not to notice the ironic and con­spir­a­to­r­ial twist he added to his smile. A few weeks later, he saw me sit­ting with my friends in front of our build­ing and asked me to help him upstairs with some pack­ages he had with him. I wanted to say no, but I didn’t know how, not with­out risk­ing that my refusal would some­how lead my friends to the truth of what he’d done to me. So I took the pack­age he pointed at from his shop­ping cart – to make it eas­ier, he said, for him to get the cart up the stairs – and fol­lowed him to his apartment.

As soon as he’d shut the door of his place behind us, he pushed the cart to the side, took the bag I was hold­ing and dropped it to the floor. The cans at the bot­tom of the bag landed with a crash that shook the whole apartment.

Snaking his arms around my waist, he undid my belt – all I could do was stand there, frozen to the spot where my feet had stopped mov­ing – and then he unzipped my pants and pushed them down so they fell around my ankles. Then he took me gen­tly by the hand and led me to the couch against the wall, where 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, almost fatherly, “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 that his fin­gers were like a cage – and he told me how good my penis was, how beau­ti­ful and big, and then his own pants were down, I was sit­ting on the couch, and his own penis, large and pur­ple, hung in front of my face, and 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, but I do remem­ber his hand on the back of my neck, and then I see myself walk­ing word­lessly to his front door, unlock­ing it, clos­ing it behind me, and then I am in my bed, curled in the fetal posi­tion, where I stay until my mother calls me for dinner.

The next day, he saw me stand­ing by myself in front of our build­ing 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, but some­thing in me rebelled. I said no, ignor­ing his fur­ther please until he walked away.

He never spoke to me again, and he even­tu­ally moved away, and I have no doubt there are other men in this world who had with him when they were boys an expe­ri­ence sim­i­lar to mine. I remem­ber only once try­ing to tell some­one what he’d done to me. I was sit­ting out­side with my friend Kim when he passed by. He ignored me and nod­ded hello to her; she nod­ded in return. When I knew he was out of earshot, I turned to her, tried to fill my voice with every­thing she’d need to under­stand what I really meant, and said, “He’s a faggot!”

Kim looked at me in hon­est con­fu­sion, “So what if he’s gay? So what?”

The blank stare I answered her with was as uncom­pre­hend­ing as the silence in which she waited for me to explain myself. I don’t remem­ber being explic­itly, actively, homo­pho­bic, but every­one knew – or at least I thought every­one knew – that it was only homo­sex­ual men who preyed on young boys. Now, of course, I know dif­fer­ently, but to have said any­thing else at the time would have risked my telling Kim the whole story, and that’s some­thing I would not be ready to do for some time.

Cross-posted on Alas.

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?”

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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.