The leader of my first graduate poetry workshop—this was 1985—was telling us about a challenge she’d issued to the men in the group of poets she hung out with when she was younger. “None of you,” she said she told them, “will ever write a successful ‘cunt poem,’ because, when it comes to cunts, men only understand clichés.” We all laughed, the three of us who were men perhaps a little uncomfortably, and then she informed us that a poem her challenge had inspired was in the anthology she’d assigned as our text. I read that poem four times when I got home that night, finding it harder to believe with each reading that anyone could have thought it deserved publication. Not only did it rely on precisely the kinds of clichés I understood my teacher to have been talking about, ending, for example, by calling women’s genitals, without irony, “the gates of paradise;” but the entire poem was built on the biggest cliché of all, treating The Vagina it discussed—because I still cannot help but think of the word as capitalized and in italics, even though it never appears in the poem—as nothing more than an object of the poet’s contemplation, like the Grecian urn had been for Keats, as if all the vaginas The Vagina represented were not in reality attached to the living, breathing bodies of actual women.

///

The first thing I did was trash every poem I’d written to that point. Then, once I’d let go of the baggage all that old work represented, the poems that became my first book, The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), began to take shape. At last, I felt like I’d found a language in which I could speak about my body as my own, in which my desires and my fears, my vulnerabilities and regrets, my joys and my failures, were mine and no one else’s to give meaning to. Committing to that language meant committing to a radical honesty about who I was, both as a survivor of child sexual abuse and as a man; it meant rejecting utterly the rhetoric of invisibility with which the man who forced his penis into my mouth had so effectively and for so many years hijacked what I had to say.

That kind of honesty is precisely what is lacking in the clichés my teacher defined as the limits of the male imagination when it comes to writing about women’s genitals. Take, for example, the cliché that ends the “cunt poem” I spoke about at the beginning of this essay, “the gates of paradise.” The dishonesty in this metaphor lies primarily in the way it objectifies women’s bodies, describing not women’s experience of being embodied, and not even men’s experience of women’s bodies as bodies inhabited by women, but rather the particular experience men have of our own bodies when we have sex with women. It praises women’s genitals, in other words, not for being what they are, but for how men can use them, and so, on a cultural level, renders women as invisible and voiceless as I was rendered by the men who used me. To meet my teacher’s challenge, then, to be a male poet who writes a successful “cunt poem,” is not simply to find a non-cliché way of calling women’s genitals “the gates of paradise.” Rather, it is to discover language that will make visible the women whose genitals they are, unwrapping from within a male perspective the layers of misconception and misrepresentation in which they are bound by the sexual objectification of women that is so central to our culture. It is, in other words, a profoundly political endeavor, one that requires a man not only to refuse complicity in the inherent violation that sexually objectifying women is, but also to articulate a way of being a man who sees women as sexual beings that does justice to who they are as human beings.

I don’t want to reveal too many details of her life, for obvious reasons, but I learned a lot more about her in this conversation than I had in the brief discussions we’d had before. She is the youngest child in her family and so finding a suitable husband is an important goal for her parents. Once they do so, they will have fulfilled one of their primary obligations as parents to their daughters and, in fact, my student is not entirely opposed to the idea of marrying a man her parents find for her. She just wants him to be someone she feels compatible with, someone in whom she can find something that attracts her; but the men they bring for her to meet, while they are well established and could take good care of her, in the way that “good care” is defined in her culture, they have all been, she says, not only boring, but really, really (to her taste) ugly. What she wants is the freedom to choose her own husband. She’s pretty clear that her first choice would be a man from the same culture and religion–though she’s not opposed to marrying outside the first group–but she wants him to have at least a little bit of the Americanized identity that she has. (Even there, though, her experience has not been good. She met a guy whom she thought fit the bill, but as soon as the started going out, he started wanting to check her Blackberry to see whom she was calling and who was calling her.)

Adding to the agony of her situation is how isolated she feels. I am the only person, according to her, to whom she has told her entire story–including the married boss she used to respect and who has recently started making passes at her–and she is surprised at herself that she has done so. She doesn’t have a whole lot of trust in Americans’ ability to comprehend much less empathize with her situation, having been burned a couple of times when she tried to talk to her friends, none of whom were able to wrap their heads around the cultural context in which she lives, even though she is living here in the States, and some of whom actually blamed her for not leaving, as if leaving one’s family, especially a family that might disown you for doing so, would ever be a simple thing. On top of that is the fact that telling anyone about her family’s private life violates a very strong cultural taboo that interprets such revelation as one of the worst kinds of disloyalty both because it sullies the family’s honor and reputation in the community and exposes the family to whatever use its enemies (in a social, not a military sense) might make of the information.

One of the reasons she trusts me is that I know something about Islam and about the kind of culture she comes from. (My wife’s culture is similar.) And so she is not worried that I will think she is weird or weak or “bringing it all on herself”–each of which is a reaction she has gotten from other “outsiders” she has tried to tell–and she recognizes that I respect her desire to find a solution that somehow harmonizes with her parents’ (and community’s) religious and cultural expectations, while allowing her the freedom she wants. (Whether or not that is possible, of course, is a whole other question.) And yet, of course, what she needs to do is talk to other people, to know that I not unique in this respect; and especially what she needs is to find a community of women from whom she can draw strength, who will help her to feel less alone in a way that I simply cannot do, because of both my gender and my age. (I am, after all, old enough to be her father.) So I have encouraged her, and I will encourage her again, to register for a women’s studies course; I have given her contact information for South Asian women’s organizations (and I know she has called at least one of them); I have told her about the student women’s group on campus; and I have, of course, told her she is welcome to keep coming to talk to me, but there really isn’t much else that I can (or should) do.

One of the themes she kept weaving through our conversation was that she was thinking of running away, but of doing so in a manner that would leave her parents thinking she was dead. This way, they would be able to mourn her and move on and not have to live with the constant worry for they would feel and the shame of having had a daughter they could not control. It didn’t matter how many times I gently suggested that there might be other ways of leaving that would at least leave open an avenue of return or a channel of communication–that other women in her situation have done it–she kept coming back to the idea that it was better for her parents to think she was dead than to have live with the knowledge and the shame that she was off somewhere, not properly married, living who knew what kind of decadent and depraved American life and so completely lost to them even if she were to show up right then on their doorstep.

It could not, I would not, argue with her anymore. I don’t know her parents and it’s not my place–and, anyway, I am not qualified–to give her advice. All I could think when she left, though, was that I had just witnessed a prime example of compulsory heterosexuality at work, and it really, really, really sucked.

I have wanted to write about that, and I have wanted to write yet one more time about Foreskin Man, which I have posted on before, because I am wide-eyed incredulous at the fact that Matthew Hess was unable to come up with a more imaginative female counterpart for Foreskin Man–because all Supermen need their Supergirls, right?–than Vulva Girl, whose picture I just have to show you:

And here is how Hess describes her:

With the Siri Amulet as he energy source, Vulva Girl harnesses the supernatural powers of flight and psychokinesis to battle female genital mutilation.

As she soars across the jungles of Africa, girls celebrate her victories over the bloodthirsty circumcisers who prey on their fragile innocence. After centuries of suffering, their intactivist superheroine has finally arrived.

As quoted in “Foreskin Man, Meet Vulva Girl,” by Jonah Lowenfeld on JewishJournalism.com, Hess states that his goal in introducing Vulva Girl is to equate

the surgeries performed on boys and girls… I think everyone has met at least one person who believes that circumcising girls should be a crime, but circumcising boys is okay[.] The idea behind Foreskin Man #3 is to expose that double standard and help persuade readers that male and female circumcision are really two sides of the same coin.

That statement, of course, is problematic on its face and it completely obscures all kinds of problems inherent in the character of Vulva Girl, starting with the fact that she is certainly not a girl, and it doesn’t matter to me that calling her Vulva Girl is in the long tradition of Supergirl, Batgirl, Wondergirl or whatever. The names Foreskin Man and Vulva Girl, just placed side by side like that because they work as a team, recapitulates a whole string of patriarchal, sexist notions that do more harm than good, it seems to me, even if they are being deployed in the interests of ending female genital mutilation and routine infant penile circumcision. Not to mention the racism implicit in how she is described: the jungles of Africa? bloodthirsty circumcisers? But even that whole discussion, and it is a discussion worth having, has been crowded out of my head, leaving just enough room to tell you about, first, the trailer for Foreskin Man #3, which begins with the words, “The hate us because we are blond” and needs, I think, no other comment:

And, second, the Foreskin Man Song, the lyrics of which, I am afraid, speak similarly for themselves:

Mmmm ooohhhh

While you’re out saving boys from the knife
I can’t help feeling lonely in my life
I know it’s a calling that must be answered
They’re not the only ones who need to be pampered

I get relief knowing you put cutters away
But a girl still needs time for foreplay
When the doc and mohel are behind bars
Let me help you forget about those scars

Foreskin Man, I need your lovin’ tonight
It’s the only thing that makes me feel right
Foreskin Man, I want that slip and slide
Won’t you please come glide inside?

Foreskin Man, I miss your gentle caress
My body cries for you, I do confess
Foreskin Man, visit my balcony
Being gone this long is a felony

I’ll cheer for you on tonight’s news
When they talk about your latest rescues
And while my heart aches for a rendezvous
I trust you’ll return when my time is due

These lyrics truly left me speechless, and I know this is a terrible segue, but that speechlessness felt to me not so different from the speechlessness I experienced grading papers earlier today. I am not going to quote for you from my students’ work, but suffice it to say that a lot of it did not reach the caliber of this writing; and so I am left feeling utterly depressed. I just checked my grade book and fully 2/3 of one of my freshman composition classes is failing, most of them simply because they have elected not to hand in work that was due. It is, of course, entirely possible that they would be failing even if they had handed in that work, but I have no way of knowing that. What’s even more depressing is that they have all received a warning email from me and not one of them has bothered to come talk to me. And so tomorrow I will not be teaching. I will be telling the students who are not failing that they have the day off so that I can speak one by one with the students who are failing. I am not looking forward to those discussions.

So what exactly does a contemporary relationship between a gay man and a straight man look like? I don’t know. This is a love affair and it looks like this. Every day we email and text back and forth about who we’re sleeping with, how we’re sleeping with them, and if we should continue to do so (in his case it’s just one girl in Paris who he’s in love with). We email poems to one another (this is less gay than it sounds since we’re both poets, which is more gay than it sounds), we have event nights, non-event nights, and date nights where we get together for really expensive drinks we can’t afford and remix Chrissie Hynde with Camus and (oh my god) our feelings.

It’s really worth reading the whole thing.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, and I saw in hardcore pornography a world where I could be safe sexually, one thing that consistently frustrated me was the monolithic way in which the male body, especially the penis, was portrayed. I wanted to learn from porn, to find myself, understand myself in the images I was consuming, and the penis I saw on the screen or in the pages of the magazines I read–always hard, always penetrating or being stroked or sucked–represented such a narrow slice of how I experienced my own body that I would find myself filling in what I saw as the blanks by remembering what it felt like for my penis to get hard. And I would wonder as well how a woman experienced that process, because how the women I wanted to have sex with saw me was as important to me as what I hoped they would allow me to see of themselves. Images such as this one let me see how I am seen, and it makes me feel good to know that someone would take the time to look at me so closely, to know me in such intimate detail.

One last thought: Thirty years ago, when I was a camp counselor, I had a conversation with one of my campers–he was fourteen or fifteen years old–in which he said, “I understand entirely why boys like Playboy. Women’s bodies, after all, are beautiful. I cannot understand, though, why any girl or woman would want to look at Playgirl. Men’s bodies are just so awkward and ugly.” I don’t remember what I said in response, but I do remember the shock of recognition as I realized that, without ever having thought about it consciously, I agreed with him. I didn’t want to agree with him, and I don’t anymore, but I did at the time, which makes me sad. Perhaps if more images of the male body such as this one had been available to us, we might not have seen ourselves in such a negative light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross posted from The Takeback.

Of course, the lie is more comforting than its unmasking, and so the “other woman,” ghoul of married women’s fears, is a horned thing, symbol of failure, delusion, selfishness. The dark angel, she is as necessary to the totem of the ideal wife as the hellfire is to heaven. But is it reasonable, or just an article of faith in the marriage religion, that apostates must all be cynics or manipulators? A woman I know, single, 50-ish and by chance or design long involved with married men, answered the question this way:

“The fact is a lot of us are single and the longer we insist on that the smaller the pool becomes of single interesting men. Now, the boxes lined up conventionally for someone like me are celibacy, computer dating, husband-hunting, broken heart. No thank you. So I see these men, and let’s just say we engage in a free love. I don’t expect them to leave their wives. I want their interest and their care, intimately, mentally, and I offer them the same. They go home to their wives. I don’t know what they say or do about that, and it’s not my business. They love their wives, or need them, or need their families, or need the image of themselves that comes along with twenty-five years of marriage or whatever even if love is dead, and maybe it was never alive in the first place. Or maybe it’s good, but how much can it give? Life demands a lot, you know, and sometimes a person just needs to be weak. Or just needs, wants, a different kind of loving. We act as if comfort were evil—and curiosity, God forbid! For the time I’m with these men I know something deep and loving occurs. Apart from everything else, I am their intimate friend. We’re talking years here. The Dr. Phils of the world would say that I’m a fool. The gay men that I know get it completely. The women mostly I don’t discuss this with. It isn’t perfect, but nothing is. And I’d be lying to say I never want for more. In the pie-in-the-sky there’s always the ‘great love,’ the soul mate and comrade and lover combined. It’s a wish; it happens or it doesn’t, and, let’s face it, most of the time it doesn’t. But we live in a tyranny of the couple. Only single people understand this. And I guess what I resent most is the assumption that there is only way for love, and if you haven’t found it, or if your man ‘strays’ or if you are the one he’s ‘straying’ with, then you’ve failed. I don’t think these guys’ wives have failed any more than I think the men have or I have. The supposed experts on love can hawk all the stuff they want about commitment, denial, avoidance, and people can lap it up and repeat it back to their single friends and their children. But at the end of the day there’re still all these broken marriages, all these broken hearts, all these needs unmet. The rules for love everlasting are a bit like the rules for making it in the opportunity society, where really nothing is equal and nothing is fair.”

Maybe instead of asking whether marriage can be saved, we might think about how love is achieved, and not just couple-love, contract-love, but love in common too?”

–JoAnn Wypijewski, “Can Marriage Be Saved,” The Nation, July 5 2004

A few minutes after they left, laughing and waving and calling out anyigeseyo, goodbye, an old woman wearing traditional Korean clothing passed by. She had a cigarette in her mouth, glasses on her nose and her hair was pulled back into a tight bun. She walked with her hands clasped behind her; and her back was bent, as if she were carrying something heavy; and, as if she were lost in deep contemplation, she took slow, deliberate steps, clearly not in a rush and clearly assuming that people would make way for her. She got about four of those steps past where I was standing and stopped. She lifted her head and I could see that she was muttering something to herself. Then she turned around, her mouth still moving, and walked straight towards where I was standing. She stopped in front of me, looked me up and down, muttering what I thought at first was gibberish, since it sounded like neither Korean nor English, but after fifteen seconds or so, I began to make out words like “tall,” “handsome,” “strong” and then “American.”

She moved a little closer and put her hand on my bare forearm, a gesture to which I had become accustomed from riding the subway. Koreans often have less body hair than white people and so the hair on my arms and on my chest, which was visible if I was wearing an open-necked shirt, was a constant source of fascination. Wherever I went on the train, older Korean women–who, because they live in a culture where age is venerated, can do pretty much what they want–would sit next to me and stroke the hair on my arms, smiling and chatting amiably with me as they did so. This woman, however, when she was finished with my forearm ran her hand up to my bicep and gave a quick squeeze; then she laid her other hand flat against my stomach and moved it down quickly to cup and pat my crotch through my jeans, smiling and nodding her head as if she were evaluating me and was pleased at what she was finding.

This all happened so quickly that I had no time to react, and since she was standing directly in front me, there was no way for me to get away from her without pushing her, and she was so small and so fragile looking, and I did not want to make a scene, so I continued to stand there; and then she was looking up at me, still smiling, and her eyes were bright, without pretense, though they held also an impish mischievousness, and she asked me in a slightly accented English, “Are you American?” Surprised that I was able to understand her, I hesitated for half a second before answering, and she put her hand on my arm and asked again, “Are you an American?”

“Yes,” I said, and she tightened her grip on my arm just a little bit. “Why you here alone? Come with me. Room-cafe around the corner; I will pay for you.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a very thick wad of bills.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I am waiting for a friend.”

“But it’s no good you out here alone,” she insisted, giving another gentle tug on my arm. “Really, I will pay,” and she again showed me the money in her hand.

Room-cafes were just what they sounded like: cafes with private rooms where men went to be “entertained” in ways not so different from the way Mr. Park and I had been entertained in Miari. I knew which room-cafe the old woman was talking about since I’d walked past it many times on my way in and out of the market, though I’d never gone in. It was called Sing-Sing. Once, when I was coming home very late at night, after the cafe had closed, the women who worked there were sitting outside, smoking and chatting–some of them were eating kim bop–when one of them, a tall woman in a tight neon green dress, with nail polish and eyeliner to match, called out to me, “Hey! You like what you see?” Her companions laughed. I smiled and kept walking.

The old woman held up her wad of money one more time. “No,” I answered again. “Maybe next time”–the polite thing to say–“I really need to be here to meet my friend.”

She let go of my arm, but she didn’t walk away. “Are you a soldier?” She sounded just like the woman who’d chased me on Chong-no.

“No, I’m a teacher.”

“A teacher!” The woman’s face lit up as she put her money back in her pocket. “Teach me some English while you wait your friend?” She took my hand and started to walk towards the market. The change in her manner and her tone–she was polite and deferential, in stark contrast to the almost demanding tone she took in her insistence that I let her take me to the room-cafe–also reminded me of the woman who’d chased me on Chong-no, and my curiosity got the better of me, so I let her lead me where she wanted to go. She stopped to point at the different fruits on a stand that we passed–apples, grapes, pears, oranges–and asked me the words for them in English; then we stood in front of a cart on which the merchant had very carefully arranged alarm clocks, blowdryers, hair curlers, electric shavers and other small home appliances. After that, it was a clothing stall, where she asked me the words for pants, shirt, belt and underwear. Finally, she picked up a package of women’s socks. “Will you buy these for me?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, taking them from her. I hadn’t forgotten about the money in her pocket, but I’d started to like her, and I wanted to do something nice for her. I also felt suddenly a little bit like one of those young men in the fairy tales who meets and is tested by the old hag, who is really a witch or sorceress in disguise, who, depending on the story, either rewards the young man’s kindness or punishes his cruelty. So I paid the 1,200 or so won that the socks cost and handed them over to the woman. She turned the package over and over as if she no longer recognized what it was, and I realized that she had expected me to say no. “Do you smoke?” she asked.

“No.”

“Good! Do you drink?”

“Sometimes, but not very much.”

“Good! Come sit here with me.” She pointed to an empty space on the steps in front of a closed store. ” You know, I lived in America. Once. In California. During the war. Soldiers call me mamasan.” She didn’t say which war, but I guessed it was the Korean war, and I knew from the little bit of hanging out I’d done in Itaewon, the part of Seoul where the American army was stationed, that if the soldiers had called her mamasan, it meant she’d been a madame.

We talked a little while longer. She asked me about my life back in the United States, about where I lived and worked in Seoul, about the kinds of Korean foods I liked. She told me she had a daughter with whom she lived and she asked if I would like to have dinner with them that night. By now, I was completely disarmed, and I thought it would be a very interesting experience, and so I said yes. She stood up immediately and started leading me away from the market. I had a brief moment of anxiety when I realized I had no idea where she was taking me, but I set that aside and walked quietly beside her for about five minutes or so, until she looked at me out of the corner of her eye and smiled slyly. “Maybe next time, you and I enjoy in bed together,” she said.

I walked in silence for a few more steps as I tried to decide whether or not she was joking with me and how to respond if she was; but then I realized it didn’t matter. I no longer felt safe going with her to a part of Seoul with which I was unfamiliar and so I decided to “remember” a call I was expecting that night from my mother in America. I needed to be home to get the call, I explained, because my mother and I had some important business to discuss. The old woman looked disappointed. She took out the socks I’d bought for her, removed the cardboard backing from the package and wrote down her phone number. “When you want, you call me. We have dinner. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. We told each other goodbye and I started walking back in the direction from which we’d come. I turned once to look at her again, but the street had become suddenly crowded and I couldn’t see her. I looked at the piece of cardboard. She’d written “dinner” and then a phone number, and then “Love, Mamasan.”

I didn’t want to go back to my apartment right away, so I walked instead to the Lotte World department store. I knew some of the people who’d worked on the indoor amusement park and roller coaster that everyone was talking about, and I’d been meaning to check it out for some time. Since I hate roller coasters, though, I did not ride it. Instead I wandered around the store a bit, until I found on one of the top floors a large fountain around which people were sitting. I bought myself a strawberry ice cream and took a seat at the water’s edge, eating slowly and thinking about the old woman whose phone number I had in my pocket.

I was staring off into space, not looking at anything or anyone in particular, but a woman sitting with her daughter on her lap on the other side of the fountain must have thought I was looking at them because she nodded her head and smiled. I nodded and smiled back, just to be polite, and the woman’s daughter left her lap almost immediately and started walking towards me. When she reached the spot where I was sitting, she climbed without a word into my lap and sat there gazing silently at my face for about ten or fifteen seconds. Then, still without speaking, she reached behind me for the water in the fountain, trusting the arm I raised to keep her from falling. When she sat back down, she opened one of my hands, palm up, and held her fingertips above it, letting the drops she’d gathered drip onto my skin. When the last drops had fallen, she climbed down to return to her mother, never once glancing back in my direction. The mother stood up, took her daughter’s hand, smiled at me, nodding one more time, and then led the girl into the elevator, which carried them down into the rest of their day.

My day took me next to dinner in the restaurant where I first practiced reading hangul, the Korean alphabet, by ordering each time I ate there a different item from the menu that was posted on the wall. Two of my colleagues, Tom and Gavin, were already eating when I walked in. They invited me to join them, which I did, and we decided that we’d meet later that night at the Gilbert Standbar, which was also in the Semaeul Shijang, a few doors down from the room-cafe the old woman had offered to take me to. I arrived at the Gilbert about fifteen minutes late, but my friends were not there, and so I sat by myself at Ms. Park’s station–she insisted on Ms. and not Miss–ordered a beer and some fruit and settled in to wait. My friends never showed up, but that night at the Gilbert turned out to be, in some ways, a fitting ending to a day in which an old woman grabbed my crotch in public and a little girl who was a complete stranger sat in my lap and dripped water on my palm.

A standbar is what we would call today, here in the US, a karaoke bar, though since this was in the late 1980s, before digital technology made karaoke jukeboxes possible, the music to which patrons paid to sing along was live, provided sometimes by an entire band and sometimes by a single keyboard or piano player. As far as I know, the term standbar–I don’t think it’s much in use anymore; a google search turned up practically nothing–comes from the fact that there are bar stations, or “stands,” arranged around the room at which sit the hostesses whose job it is to entertain the customers, who are almost always men. This entertainment includes pouring drinks, serving food, going up on stage to sing when their customers do and dancing blues, slow dancing. The women are also often available for sex–though, as it was explained to me by my Korean friend, if the suggestion for sex comes from the woman, you don’t have to pay for it.

The one or two standbars to which my Korean friends had taken me reminded me of a cross between the more extreme excesses of the disco era and the stereotypically sleazy Asian “girly bars” that are so familiar from the early James Bond movies. The Gilbert, however, was more of a neighborhood place. There were no disco balls or flashing lights; the hostesses dressed very casually–jeans and a button down shirt, for example–as opposed to the tighter, glitzier often more revealing outfits the hostesses wore in other standbars; and there was, in general, a much more laid back atmosphere. In fact, my colleagues and I learned after we’d been going there for a while that it was the place where the men and women who worked at other sex trade establishments came to relax.

This difference, of course, was one of degree not kind. The same things that went on at other standbars went on at the Gilbert, only more quietly and discretely; and, most importantly to me and my friends, no one made a spectacle out of us because we were westerners. The hostesses were not constantly asking us for (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) “private English lessons;” the other patrons were not constantly coming up to us to buy us drinks or practice their English. We were able, in general, just to hang out, drink a few beers and sing a few songs, just like regular customers.

Ms. Park was the hostess at whose station we always sat, and, over time, she and I became friendly. My Korean was better than that of my colleagues, and so I could make very simple conversation, about the weather, for example, or food; about our jobs–she was very funny when describing the men who’d sat at her station whom she didn’t like– and a little bit about my life in the US. She told me very little about herself, though we did talk about books; she liked to read and she was fascinated by the fact that I was a poet. She introduced me once to a man who did not come to the Gilbert regularly, but whom she seemed to know pretty well, telling me he too was a poet. He gave me a copy of one of his books, though I lost it a long time ago, and I cannot now remember his name.

Over time, I began to realize that whenever Ms. Park danced blues with me–just because I would have been perfectly happy not to dance with her did not exempt her from doing her job–she stayed in my arms a few beats longer than the end of the song, which is what happened on this night, but then, she stayed there even longer, gazing at me and grinning a satisfaction she offered to share when she asked if she could come to my apartment after work. I wanted her in that moment as well, and so I said yes. I gave her my address and phone number and we went back to her station. Waiting for us, however, was a thin, balding man in a crumpled gray business suit and thick-framed nerdy glasses. As soon as Ms. Park sat down, he commanded her to fill my glass, not from the bottle of inexpensive beer that I’d ordered, but from the bottle of Chivas that he had in his hand. This kind of behavior was out of character for the Gilbert, as was the fact that he did not ask Ms. Park drink with us, and I was immediately uncomfortable. I looked at Ms. Park, but her face was frozen in her best customer-service smile, betraying nothing of what she might be feeling.

The thin man toasted me as if she weren’t there, waited till my class was empty and then pointed at Ms. Park with a finger that was unusually thick, given how skinny the man was. “Do you like her?” he asked, not deigning even to glance in her direction. Because I knew where the conversation was headed, I did not answer him and told Ms. Park that I wanted more kolbengi. She got up and went into the kitchen, and I tried as hard as I could, while she was gone, to let the thin man know I was not interested in talking to him by focusing my attention on the very drunk, immaculately groomed silver-haired man trying to sing John Denver’s “Country Road” without falling over onto the hostess who was standing under his shoulder to prop him up.

The man with the Chivas bottle did not take the hint, however, and he fell silent as well, sitting with closed eyes until Ms. Park returned with my food. Once she was sitting down again, he leaned over and said quietly in my ear, “Isn’t she pretty? Don’t you like her?” When I still didn’t answer and kept my eyes focused on the silver-haired man, who was now stumbling back to his seat, my uninvited and unwelcome companion put his hand on my arm and said more loudly, “She has beautiful labia.”

Still I said nothing; still I would not look at him.

“Don’t you understand?” He was not quite shouting as he pulled from his pocket a wad of bills almost as thick as the one the old woman had pulled out of her pocket earlier in the day. “Korea is a paradise for men! Here!” He waved the money in my face. “You can have her if you want.”

I realized at this point that I had to say something, but I also understood that whatever I said had to be calculated not to escalate the situation, and so instead of saying what I wanted to say–some version of “Stop talking about her like that and get the fuck away from me!”–I said instead something that would get him to leave me alone, while allowing him to save face, “Maybe next time. Tonight, I am very tired and I just want to drink by myself.”

My words had the desired result. He looked at me, looked for the first time at Ms. Park, gave a snort of disgust and walked back towards his table just as his friends were coming over to pull him away.

For the rest of that night, Ms. Park refused to meet my gaze, but each time I went to the Gilbert after that, and in all the time before I left Seoul, she continued to dance with me the same as always; even as I watched her belly swell gently and then flatten out again over the course of three or so months, she danced with me a little closer and a little longer than the other men; and sometimes I saw flashes of the smile she gave me when she asked if she could come to my apartment, but she never brought that possibility up again, and neither did I. And we talked just as we always had, though she was more revealing about herself than she had been before, telling me often about the man who’d promised to marry her. All he needed, she said, was enough money to buy a place for them to live, and she said he’d told her that he didn’t care if his mother disowned him. She was the woman he wanted.

I have no idea if this man really existed, though I hope he did, and I hope he kept his promise and that Ms. Park was able to stop working at the Gilbert and be, simply, happily, his wife. I hope she has children and that they have brought her great pleasure. I hope all this, but I know the odds are against it being true, that she is more likely to have had a very difficult life; and so right now, as I remember Ms. Park, what I choose to remember is how deeply she smiled when she asked if we could be together, not because of anything having to do with the sex that didn’t happen, but because I could see in that smile that the thought of being with me made her happy and it’s more painful than I want to feel right now to remember her any other way.