Category Archives: Sexuality

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Thinking About Pornography 2

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A white woman’s mouth in the act of swal­low­ing a white man’s penis fills the screen of my TV. Almost directly in the cen­ter of the pic­ture, the shape of his organ glides back and forth against the inside of her left cheek. Pan­ning back, the cam­era shows her kneel­ing on all fours in front of him, her lips engulf­ing and expelling his gen­i­tals as if she were the only mov­able part of a well-oiled machine. She looks up at him and asks, with a lust-filled and mis­chie­vous grin, “Does that feel good?”

“You suck a mean cock, Cherry,” he answers, his tone flat, as if he were read­ing her name out of the phone book.

In response, she gazes wor­ship­fully at his erec­tion, sucks air hun­grily through her teeth, and moans with the plea­sure of plea­sur­ing him, with the joy of being able to take him in her mouth; and then the scene changes to a pic­ture of the same woman doing the same thing to a sec­ond man. Then the scene changes again, and again, and again, and each time the woman is with a dif­fer­ent man, and each time the man shows about as much pas­sion as he would if he were lift­ing heavy boxes. His erec­tion sig­ni­fies both his desire and his arousal, but he rarely moves his hips, he makes almost no sound that could be mis­taken for an expres­sion of plea­sure, and, through­out the oral sex she per­forms on him, his face remains more or less emotionless.

From the way the cam­era is aimed at the point of oral-genital con­tact, I know that I am sup­posed to imag­ine the penis on the screen and the per­spec­tive of the lens as mine. I know that my hand is sup­posed to acquire the shape of the woman’s lips, that the orgasm to which this movie — a com­pi­la­tion called “Inside Christy Canyon” — is intended to help me bring myself is sup­posed to become the orgasm to which she has brought me. Yet nei­ther my plea­sure nor the plea­sure of the men who stand in with Christy Canyon for me seems to be at the cen­ter of what the movie is about. Instead, the film focuses on her, minutely tran­scrib­ing each of her responses to the sex she is hav­ing. She moans, she screams, she gyrates her hips. Her arms and legs flail with plea­sure, and when she is fuck­ing, she grabs at her part­ner to pull him fur­ther inside her­self. Even when he orgasms, at the moment when his body and his plea­sure should log­i­cally occupy the movie’s fore­ground, Christy Canyon almost always dom­i­nates the pic­ture, grind­ing, pant­ing, moan­ing beneath the ejac­u­lat­ing penis as if it and the plea­sure it is sup­posed to rep­re­sent were her own. I’m reminded of the stereo­typ­i­cal scenes of idol wor­ship­pers work­ing them­selves into an ecstasy, hop­ing vainly to elicit some sign of life from the stone or wooden fig­ure that is their god. In Christy Canyon’s case, how­ever, the wor­ship works. God speaks. The phal­lus ejaculates.

Yet if the “cum-shot” is sup­posed to rep­re­sent the pin­na­cle and proof of male plea­sure, I find — except for my prior knowl­edge of the phys­i­cal fact — lit­tle male plea­sure in it, and even less plea­sure in watch­ing it. A man thrusts into a woman, or a woman takes a man into her body. He exhibits lit­tle or no sign of the sex­ual plea­sure, the ten­sion towards orgasm, that must be build­ing in his body, but then, when the “magic moment” arrives and he pulls out of his partner’s body so we can see that his orgasm is real, he allows him­self the fur­ther release of a scream or a grunt. Yet I know that I am sup­posed to iden­tify less with what this man feels phys­i­cally than with what he does, or with what is done to him. This is the homo­pho­bia at the core of most main­stream het­ero­sex­ual pornog­ra­phy. When he enters Christy Canyon, I am not sup­posed to imag­ine his inte­rior expe­ri­ence of that fact; rather, I am sup­posed to imag­ine that I have entered her. When she takes him in her mouth, it is not his plea­sure that is sup­posed to arouse me, but rather the fact that she has, metaphor­i­cally, done the same to me. Every­thing sex­ual this movie wants me to feel, in other words, is directed not towards an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the body that is like mine, but into the expe­ri­ence of pos­sess­ing the filmed image of her body. Our roles, in other words, have reversed. I have become the wor­ship­per who, with the sym­pa­thetic magic of my desire, desires to breathe life into the inan­i­mate body of the film that is all I have of her flesh, while she has become the inscrutable object before which I must finally know that I am alone, hold­ing in my hand the proof and the residue of my own mun­dane human­ity.

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Thinking About Pornography 1

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Male dom­i­nance instructs men that our bod­ies are tools. By turn­ing male orgasm into the “cum shot,” het­ero­sex­ual pornog­ra­phy reflects and per­pet­u­ates this image of the male body. Yet it does not have to be that way. Erec­tion, for exam­ple, the grad­ual hard­en­ing of a man’s penis – in the hand or mouth or inside or against or at the sight, sound or smell of the body of his lover, or in his own hand – is the phys­i­cal corol­lary of, a con­crete metaphor for, that man’s capac­ity for trust, some­thing Sharon Olds explores in her poem “The Con­nois­seuse of Slugs:”

When I was a con­nois­seuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
naked jelly of those gold bod­ies,
translu­cent strangers glis­ten­ing along the
stones, slowly, their gelati­nous bod­ies
at my mercy.  Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to noth­ing if they were sprin­kled with salt,
but I was not inter­ested in that.  What I liked
was to draw aside the ivy, breathe the
odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug for­got I was there
and sent its anten­nae up out of its
head, the glim­mer­ing umber horns
ris­ing like tele­scopes, until finally the
sen­si­tive knobs would pop out the
ends, del­i­cate and inti­mate.  Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with plea­sure to see that quiet
mys­tery reen­acted, the slow
ele­gant being com­ing out of hid­ing and
gleam­ing in the dark air, eager and so
trust­ing you could weep.

That trust as a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for sex, as that with­out which sex becomes exploita­tion by def­i­n­i­tion, is what is miss­ing from the male per­for­mances in movies like Inside Christy Canyon.

I want a main­stream het­ero­sex­ual pornog­ra­phy in which this male trust is eroti­cized, in which the places we have not been, I have not been touched, the places it is in the inter­est of male dom­i­nance to keep hid­den, are lifted into the light and brought into knowl­edge. I want a het­ero­sex­ual pornog­ra­phy in which the sen­sa­tions of the penis are not lim­ited by the in and out and up and down that leads to ejac­u­la­tion; in which our avail­abil­ity, my avail­abil­ity to the eyes and hands and mouths of my lover(s) teaches me what it means to be known and desired entirely, only and wholly for myself; in which the touch of sex – because at the level of the body touch is all sex is – cre­ates a space where the embod­ied life of one human being opens to the embod­ied life of another; in which what is made from that open­ing is under­stood to be what the love in mak­ing love is all about.

Constructions of masculinities in Islamic traditions, societies and cultures, with a specific focus on India and Pakistan between the 18th and the 21st century

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This is the title of a PhD the­sis writ­ten by Dr. Aman­ul­lah De Sondy, who has just accepted a posi­tion at Ithaca Col­lege. Accord­ing to Joan McAlpine, who pro­filed Dr. De Sondy for The Sun­day Times, sev­eral lead­ing pub­lish­ers are com­pet­ing to buy the the­sis and pub­lish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should con­sider the title she sug­gested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very inter­ested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It chal­lenges assump­tions about what it means to be a Mus­lim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patri­arch with sev­eral wives and dozens of chil­dren. There are dys­func­tional fam­i­lies in Islamic tra­di­tion, he says, prophets with­out father fig­ures and revered holy men who led “effem­i­nate” lifestyles. Most con­tro­ver­sially, he chal­lenges homo­pho­bia in Islam. “Homo­sex­u­al­ity is not incom­pat­i­ble with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The impor­tant thing is to link it with liv­ing a good life and cre­at­ing a good society.”

Later in the arti­cle, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16th-century Pun­jab, there lived a Sufi  saint and poet called Shah Hus­sain who is greatly ven­er­ated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pil­grims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore dis­trict even today, but some peo­ple want to rewrite his­tory, say­ing the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the pres­ence of “antin­o­mian Sufis in the Indian sub­con­ti­nent  — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the con­ser­v­a­tives who dis­agree with him use – that of God’s deci­sion to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhab­i­tants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] dis­ap­proval of the rape of young boys that was hap­pen­ing in the place,” which is very dif­fer­ent from say­ing that God dis­ap­proves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the com­plex­i­ties of what Islam has to say about homo­sex­u­al­ity, but I do know that schol­ar­ship like this, which at the very least high­lights the degree to which ideas about mas­culin­ity, man­hood and male sex­u­al­ity are con­tested ide­o­log­i­cal ter­ri­tory, show­ing that the tra­di­tional view is only one of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist, is very, very impor­tant.

Two Articles, One About Abortion and One About Women, Gender, Sexuality and Medicine

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First, from The New York Times, The New Abor­tion Providers:

[After Roe vs. Wade,] the clin­ics also truly came to stand alone. In 1973, hos­pi­tals made up 80 per­cent of the country’s abor­tion facil­i­ties. By 1981, how­ever, clin­ics out­num­bered hos­pi­tals, and 15 years later, 90 per­cent of the abor­tions in the U.S. were per­formed at clin­ics. The Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion did not main­tain stan­dards of care for the pro­ce­dure. Hos­pi­tals didn’t shel­ter them in their wings. Being a pro-choice doc­tor came to mean refer­ring your patients to a clinic rather than doing abor­tions in your own office.

This was never the fem­i­nist plan. “The clin­ics’ founders didn’t intend them to become vir­tu­ally the only set­tings for abor­tion ser­vices in many com­mu­ni­ties,” says Car­ole Joffe, a soci­ol­o­gist and author of a his­tory of the era, “Doc­tors of Con­science,” and a new book, “Dis­patches From the Abor­tion Wars.” When the clin­ics became the only place in town to have an abor­tion, they became an easy mark for extrem­ists. As Joffe told me, “The vio­lence was pos­si­ble because the rela­tion­ship of med­i­cine to abor­tion was already ten­u­ous.” The med­ical pro­fes­sion rein­forced the out­sider sta­tus of the clin­ics by not speak­ing out strongly after the first attacks. As abor­tion moved to the mar­gins of med­ical prac­tice, it also dis­ap­peared from res­i­dency pro­grams that pro­duced new doc­tors. In 1995, the num­ber of OB-GYN res­i­den­cies offer­ing abor­tion train­ing fell to a low of 12 percent.

“Under pres­sure and stigma, more doc­tors shun abor­tion,” wrote David Grimes, a lead­ing researcher and abor­tion provider of 38 years, in a widely cited 1992 med­ical jour­nal arti­cle called “Clin­i­cians Who Pro­vide Abor­tions: The Thin­ning Ranks.” In a 1992 sur­vey of OB-GYNs, 59 per­cent of those age 65 and older said that they per­formed abor­tions, com­pared with 28 per­cent of those age 50 and younger. The National Abor­tion Fed­er­a­tion started warn­ing about “the gray­ing of the abor­tion provider.” In the decade after Roe, the num­ber of sites pro­vid­ing abor­tion across the coun­try almost dou­bled from about 1,500 to more than 2,900, accord­ing to the Gutt­macher Insti­tute. But by 2000 the num­ber shrank back to about 1,800 — a decline of 37 per­cent from 1982.

There’s another side of the story, how­ever — a delib­er­ate and con­certed coun­terof­fen­sive that has gone largely unre­marked. Over the last decade, abortion-rights advo­cates have qui­etly worked to reverse the mar­gin­al­iza­tion encour­aged by activists like Ran­dall Terry. Abortion-rights pro­po­nents are fight­ing back on pre­cisely the same turf that Terry demar­cated: the place of abor­tion within main­stream med­i­cine. This abortion-rights cam­paign, led by physi­cians them­selves, is try­ing to recast doc­tors, chang­ing them from a weak link of abor­tion to a strong one. Its lead­ers have built res­i­dency pro­grams and fel­low­ships at uni­ver­sity hos­pi­tals, with the hope that, even­tu­ally, more and more doc­tors will use their train­ing to bring abor­tion into their prac­tices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to inte­grate abor­tion so that it’s a seam­less part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.

Sec­ond, from Newsweek​.com, The Anti-Lesbian Drug:

Genetic engi­neers, move over: the lat­est scheme for cre­at­ing chil­dren to a parent’s spec­i­fi­ca­tions requires no DNA tin­ker­ing, but merely giv­ing mom a steroid while she’s preg­nant, and presto — no chance that her daugh­ters will be les­bians or (worse?) ‘uppity.’

Or so one might guess from the storm brew­ing over the pre­na­tal use of that steroid, called dex­am­etha­sone. In Feb­ru­ary, bioethi­cist Alice Dreger of North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity and two col­leagues blew the whis­tle on the con­tro­ver­sial prac­tice of giv­ing preg­nant women dex­am­etha­sone to keep the female fetuses they are car­ry­ing from devel­op­ing ambigu­ous gen­i­talia. (That can hap­pen to girls who have con­gen­i­tal adrenal hyper­pla­sia (CAH), a genetic dis­or­der in which unusu­ally high pre­na­tal expo­sure to mas­culin­iz­ing hor­mones called andro­gens can cause girls to develop a deep voice, facial hair, and masculine-looking gen­i­talia.) The response Dreger got from physi­cians and sci­en­tists who were out­raged over this unap­proved use of dex­am­etha­sone caused her to dig deeper into the sci­en­tific papers of the researcher who has pro­moted it.

Dreger is one of the women who brought the cli­toral surg­eries per­formed by Dr. Dix Pop­pas to light.

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: The Violence In Me 1

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Seri­ous domestic/intimate part­ner vio­lence trig­ger warn­ing in the first few para­graphs of this post.

Sit­ting on my bed with her back against the wall, my lover — who’s come to visit dur­ing my first year of grad­u­ate school — tells me that she’s at last made her deci­sion: she’s going to study fine art. I should be happy for her, but I’m 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 where I’ve been sit­ting, putting one hand around my lover’s throat, hold­ing her against the wall, and slap­ping her face back and forth with my other hand 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, my lover con­tin­ues talk­ing, ges­tur­ing to empha­size the impor­tance of her words, implor­ing me 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. I wait till I feel cer­tain the vision will not return, and I flush the toi­let and go back to the bed­room where, thank­fully, my lover notices it’s time for me to go to class. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, know­ing that I need some time alone to sort out what has just hap­pened, tell her 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, and so I decide to walk to class instead of tak­ing the bus. After a cou­ple of blocks, how­ever, again from out of nowhere, I see once more the images of myself doing vio­lence to the woman I love, and again it is as if some out­side force has taken con­trol of my brain and forced me to watch. Nearly par­a­lyzed with fear and guilt, I find a bench and sit down. There’s no way I want to chance hav­ing this vision start again while I’m in class, so I go straight to the library instead. My idea, as I set­tle into one of the chairs on the sec­ond floor, is to write out what I’m feel­ing, a strat­egy that has helped me fig­ure things out in the past. When I put my pen to the page, how­ever, what comes out of me 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.

Like the vio­lence I saw in my head, the words seem to come from some­one other than myself, but the shock of recog­ni­tion I feel when I read them – not only did I write them; on some level, I meant them – is in direct con­trast to the sense of alien­ation I expe­ri­enced while wait­ing in my bath­room to make sure that when I went back to where my lover was wait­ing for me I would not do to her what I’d seen myself doing. I also real­ize I am sud­denly calm, as if I have found what writ­ing was sup­posed to help me look for, and I am cer­tain – I don’t know how I know this, but I know this – that in these lines lies the key to under­stand­ing why that vision of vio­lence came to me.

Con­tinue read­ing →

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 4 (More on the Expendability of the Foreskin)

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When a good friend of mine who is not Jew­ish found out that her first child was going to be a boy, I asked her if she intended to have him circumcised.

“Yup,” she answered, smiling.

“Do you know how unnec­es­sary and painful the oper­a­tion is?”

Same smile, same answer, “Yup.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because I will not have my son look­ing like a freak! I’ve been with guys who weren’t cir­cum­cised, and they were, well, dis­gust­ing.” She shook her head and wrin­kled her nose at the mem­ory. “They told me sto­ries about what it was like to be dif­fer­ent in the locker room. I just don’t want my son to have to go through that.”

“What if the knife slips?”

Back to the orig­i­nal smile, “It won’t. It almost never does.”

I asked her if she’d ever actu­ally seen a cir­cum­ci­sion. She said no, and so I asked if she planned to be present when her son was cut. Given how strongly she felt, I sug­gested, it seemed to be only right that she should be, if only so she could answer any ques­tions her son might have when he got older. She closed her eyes and raised her palms between us to ward off the image I’d just con­jured, “I, I, I couldn’t. There’s no way I’d be able to let them do it.”

“But then why have it done at all?”

“Look, my son will be cir­cum­cised!” Her tone made it clear the con­ver­sa­tion was over. “He will have a nor­mal penis and a nor­mal sex life, and I will thank you in the future to mind your own business.”

///

I remem­ber how shocked I was – I was a col­lege fresh­man – when my friend Pierre turned around in the locker room after a bas­ket­ball game and dis­played an organ hang­ing between his legs that looked more to me like an elephant’s trunk than a man’s sex­ual appa­ra­tus. I’d never seen an uncir­cum­cised penis before. Well, no, strictly speak­ing, that’s not true. I know now that at least some of the men in the het­ero­sex­ual pornog­ra­phy I’d watched were uncir­cum­cised, but since I only ever saw those penises when they were erect, the skin the women on the screen would occa­sion­ally pull up and down over the glans of those organs appeared to me in my igno­rance to be skin no dif­fer­ent than what I had left over after my cir­cum­ci­sion (which was almost non-existent); I just assumed that, for what­ever rea­son, those men had more of it. So I guess the accu­rate thing to say is that I’d never seen an uncir­cum­cised penis that was not erect, and my first response to see­ing Pierre’s was that it looked fem­i­nine, effem­i­nate. Or maybe emas­cu­lated is a more pre­cise term. Either way, what I felt was a mix­ture of pity and disgust.

I went back to my room and thought hard about my reac­tion. Pierre was a good friend and it trou­bled me that I should be repulsed by his body. It took a while, but I finally real­ized that what made Pierre’s penis seem so alien to me was not merely the cov­er­ing his fore­skin pro­vided; it was that his fore­skin made it impos­si­ble for me to pic­ture Pierre’s penis erect. Not that I thought he didn’t have erec­tions; I knew he had a girl­friend with whom he was hav­ing sex. Rather, I couldn’t imag­ine what Pierre’s erect penis looked like, couldn’t fathom the mech­a­nism by which the fore­skin moved out of the way, mak­ing it pos­si­ble for him to enter a woman’s vagina and expe­ri­ence the plea­sures of sex, includ­ing orgasm and ejac­u­la­tion, that depend upon an exposed glans. It was this inabil­ity to envi­sion Pierre pen­e­trat­ing a woman or ejac­u­lat­ing that made his penis seem to me some­how less than mas­cu­line than mine – because, of course, I assumed that my penis, cut as it was, was the way a penis was sup­posed to be.

Iron­i­cally, in cul­tures that prac­tice cir­cum­ci­sion as an ado­les­cent rite of pas­sage, remov­ing the fore­skin is often equated with remov­ing the last ves­tige of mater­nal, mean­ing fem­i­nine, influ­ence. Not to have it removed, even to flinch while it is being removed — sig­ni­fy­ing fear and the inabil­ity to with­stand pain — is to reveal one­self as cling­ing to the fem­i­nine, unwill­ing to sep­a­rate from one’s mother, and there­fore unwor­thy of man­hood. Since we in the United States cir­cum­cise our boys as infants – and I am talk­ing here about rou­tine med­ical cir­cum­ci­sions, not the Jew­ish rit­ual of brit milah, which needs to be dis­cussed in a dif­fer­ent con­text – ques­tions of fear and the inabil­ity to with­stand pain are irrel­e­vant, but I think that the image of a cov­ered glans as less than mas­cu­line is nonethe­less very present in our cul­tural imag­i­na­tion. Or, to put it more pre­cisely, I think that the rou­tine med­ical cir­cum­ci­sion of infant boys makes their bod­ies con­gru­ent with our culture’s ideal of mas­culin­ity as clean, hard, always ready for action, and always, implic­itly if not explic­itly, on the offensive.

To start, cir­cum­ci­sion quite lit­er­ally turns a boy’s penis inside out, mak­ing what is essen­tially an inter­nal part of his body, the glans, an exter­nal one, and since the exposed glans is what first enters a woman dur­ing vagi­nal inter­course, it is hard not to read the cir­cum­cised penis as a penis always pre­pared, if not com­pletely ready at any given moment in time, to pen­e­trate – rep­re­sent­ing in the flesh the patri­ar­chal het­ero­sex­ual norm that val­ues a man’s “get­ting it in her” over almost every other aspect of sex. More­over, the cleaner and dryer penis that cir­cum­ci­sion cre­ates has nei­ther the odor nor the taste asso­ci­ated with the lubri­cat­ing dis­charges of both its uncir­cum­cised coun­ter­part and women’s gen­i­talia. Just like the ado­les­cent rite-of-passage cir­cum­ci­sions that I men­tioned above, in other words, the rou­tine med­ical cir­cum­ci­sion per­formed on boys here in the US removes from an infant’s penis that which makes it sim­i­lar to a vagina – except that, because we cir­cum­cise our boys when they are infants, a cut penis will feel to those boys as they grow up as if it were the penis with which they were born, pro­vid­ing the illu­sion of a bio­log­i­cal proof that patriarchy’s gen­der dichotomies – embod­ied in the dry, clean and there­fore “civ­i­lized” penis ver­sus the wet, messy and there­fore “sav­age” vagina – are indeed “nat­ural,” inher­ing in male and female bod­ies and not con­structed through the processes of cul­tural production.

Once these boys under­stand that they were cir­cum­cised, of course, the cat – so to speak – ought to be out of the bag, but the idea that a cir­cum­cised penis is the nor­mal, nat­ural and there­fore healthy penis, is given the weight of med­ical author­ity not only through doctor’s pro­mot­ing the procedure’s osten­si­ble health ben­e­fits (which I will dis­cuss in more detail else­where), but also through the med­ical images that shape our under­stand­ing of what our bod­ies ought to look like. In many of those images, at least here in the United States, the fore­skin is either entirely absent or, if it is present, not labeled. Here are two online examples:

  • Shands Health­Care is a pri­vate, not-for-profit orga­ni­za­tion affil­i­ated with the Uni­ver­sity of Florida. The A.D.A.M. Mul­ti­me­dia Health Ency­clo­pe­dia on its web­site includes this image of the male repro­duc­tive sys­tem in which the glans is exposed and in which the fore­skin is not even labeled. (To my eye, it’s ambigu­ous whether the bunched skin at the base of the glans is sup­posed to be the fore­skin or not.)
  • Vis­i­ble Pro­duc­tions, a Colorado-based mul­ti­me­dia com­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pany, which boasts, accord­ing to its web­site, the “world’s most exten­sive library of 3D dig­i­tal mod­els [of the human body]” based on data from the Vis­i­ble Human Project. Do a key­word search on “penis” and you get nine results, none of which show an intact penis. Searches on “fore­skin” and “pre­puce” return no results.

In Five Bod­ies, John O’Neill writes that the “oper­a­tion of polit­i­cal and eco­nomic power does not aim sim­ply to con­trol pas­sive bod­ies or to restrain the body politic, but to pro­duce docile bod­ies” (ital­ics in orig­i­nal), bod­ies which accept the truths of power as self-evident and not in need of exam­i­na­tion, moti­vat­ing the peo­ple inhab­it­ing those bod­ies to gov­ern them­selves in con­gru­ence with those truths. Rou­tine infant male cir­cum­ci­sion is a per­fect exam­ple. By per­form­ing the oper­a­tion on infants whose gen­der iden­ti­ties have not yet formed, med­i­cine recre­ates as phys­i­cally embod­ied med­ical facts a set of male dom­i­nant cul­tural beliefs about mas­culin­ity — always ready for sex, dry, clean, civ­i­lized — and then teaches us that these are the bench­marks against which we need to mea­sure men’s gen­i­tal and sex­ual health. To argue this, how­ever, is not to argue that cir­cum­ci­sion causes male dom­i­nant sex­ual behav­ior in men; nor is it to pre­dict that cul­tures which med­ically cir­cum­cise will be inher­ently more male dom­i­nant than those which don’t. Rather, it is to sug­gest that those cul­tures which do med­ically cir­cum­cise infant boys have cho­sen that pro­ce­dure as one of the ways they give men bod­ies in which patri­ar­chal mas­culin­ity and male dom­i­nant behav­ior feel natural.

Clearly, then, end­ing the rou­tine cir­cum­ci­sion of infant boys will not bring patri­archy to its knees, but pulling at the threads by which the pro­ce­dure is woven into our cul­tural fab­ric as nec­es­sary, or at least desir­able, does reveal some of the more insid­i­ous ways in which patri­archy itself is woven into men’s bod­ies as the nat­ural state of things; and once that weave is revealed as pre­cisely not nat­ural, we can start to imag­ine not just a dif­fer­ent kind of pat­tern, but even a dif­fer­ent way to use the loom on which the fab­ric is woven. Think objec­tively for a moment. Leave aside, if you can, the med­ical jus­ti­fi­ca­tions and ratio­nal­iza­tions, the myth­i­cal con­tent and his­tor­i­cal imper­a­tives we are taught to impose on the prac­tice of med­ical cir­cum­ci­sion, and think sim­ply in terms of actual events. A boy is born. Some­time between his entrance into the world and his first two weeks of life, he is taken away from his mother, strapped down with full phys­i­cal restraint in a room full of strangers, and his fore­skin, a sen­si­tive, func­tional and still devel­op­ing part of his body is pulled away from the head of his penis and ampu­tated – some­times with and some­times with­out anes­the­sia. He has given no con­sent, has no aware­ness of the med­ical and/or cul­tural con­sid­er­a­tions that moti­vate the pro­ce­dure, and he has lit­tle or no recourse, once the surgery has been per­formed, to change what has been done to him. There is no way to pre­dict what effect his cir­cum­ci­sion will have on him, but that is not the ques­tion we ought to be ask­ing our­selves. Rather, we ought to be ask­ing why we as a cul­ture so despise the body with which he was born that we need so rad­i­cally and so painfully to alter it, and then we need to be ask­ing if that is the kind of soci­ety we really want to be.

Works Cited

O’Neill, John. Five Bod­ies: The Human Shape of Mod­ern Soci­ety. Ithaca: Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity Press 1985 (The link takes you to the revised edi­tion.)

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 3 (Preliminary Notes On the Expendability of the Foreskin)

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In 1834, Sylvester Gra­ham — inven­tor of the cracker that con­tin­ues to bear his name — pub­lished a book called A Lec­ture to Young Men, in which he warned that mas­tur­ba­tion would trans­form a boy who prac­ticed it reg­u­larly into:

a wretched trans­gres­sor [who] sinks into a mis­er­able fatu­ity, and finally becomes a con­firmed and degraded idiot, whose deeply sunken and vacant, glossy eye, and livid shriv­elled [sic] coun­te­nance, and ulcer­ous, tooth­less gums, and fetid breath, and fee­ble bro­ken voice, and ema­ci­ated and dwarfish and crooked body, and almost hair­less head — cov­ered per­haps with sup­pu­rat­ing blis­ters and run­ning sores — denote a pre­ma­ture old age, a blighted body — and a ruined soul! (Quoted in Kimmel)

Gra­ham, who was one of the most pop­u­lar and suc­cess­ful of the non-medical writ­ers on this sub­ject, believed the male body was sim­ply not equipped to han­dle “the con­vul­sive parox­ysms attend­ing vene­real indulgence” — read: ejac­u­la­tion — and so even mar­ried men, whose sex­ual activ­ity with their wives was cer­tainly beyond the moral reproach usu­ally asso­ci­ated with mas­tur­ba­tion, had to be very care­ful not to overindulge – which for Gra­ham meant more than once a month. Oth­er­wise, they risked

Lan­guor, las­si­tude, mus­cu­lar relax­ation, gen­eral debil­ity and heav­i­ness, depres­sion of spir­its, loss of appetite, indi­ges­tion, faint­ness and sink­ing at the pit of the stom­ach, increased sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ties of the skin and lungs to all the atmos­pheric changes, fee­ble­ness of cir­cu­la­tion, chill­i­ness, head-ache, melan­choly, hypochon­dria, hys­ter­ics, fee­ble­ness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weak­ness of the lungs, ner­vous cough, pul­monary con­sump­tion, dis­or­ders of the liver and kid­neys, uri­nary dif­fi­cul­ties, dis­or­ders of the gen­i­tal organs, weak­ness of the brain, loss of mem­ory, epilepsy, insan­ity, apoplexy — and extreme fee­ble­ness and early death of off­spring.… (Quoted in Kimmel)

Gra­ham rec­om­mended dietary mea­sures, specif­i­cally his crack­ers, to com­bat men’s temp­ta­tion to plea­sure. J. H. Kel­logg, whose flakes were also orig­i­nally devel­oped and mar­keted as an anaphro­disiac, didn’t stop with food. In Plain Facts for Old and Young, pub­lished in 1888, Kel­logg rec­om­mended a series of home reme­dies for mas­tur­ba­tion, includ­ing ban­dag­ing a boy’s penis, cov­er­ing it with a cage and tying the boy’s hands at night when he went to sleep. For par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult cases, Kel­logg rec­om­mended cir­cum­ci­sion “with­out admin­is­ter­ing an anaes­thetic, as the brief pain attend­ing the oper­a­tion will have a salu­tary effect upon the mind, espe­cially if con­nected with the idea of pun­ish­ment” (Quoted in Kim­mel). Nor was Kel­logg the only expert to sug­gest that pain was the best coun­ter­mea­sure to male mas­tur­ba­tion. Other writ­ers seemed to com­pete with each other to see who could come up with the cru­elest form of inter­ven­tion. Rec­om­men­da­tions included apply­ing leeches, punch­ing a hole in the fore­skin and insert­ing a metal ring, cut­ting the fore­skin with jagged-edge scis­sors and apply­ing a hot iron to a boy’s genitals.

Con­tinue read­ing →

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 2

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At eleven, I am the youngest of eight boys lined up along one row of lock­ers in the oth­er­wise empty men’s room at the swim­ming pool to which the day camp we are 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 their 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!”

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

“What are you, a homo!?”

“Other guys’ dicks must turn him on!”

“Wanna suck mine, queer!?”

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

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

///

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

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

///

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

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

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

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

“Of what?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I do,” he says.

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

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

“No,” is all I can think to say.

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

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

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

///

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

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 1

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2

What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reser­va­tions about say­ing she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year pro­fes­sor in Intro­duc­tion to Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture had made Whitman’s work cen­tral to the course. When I told her one day as we were walk­ing out of class that I admired her hon­esty, she smiled, said some­thing about how most lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors had more hot air in them than sub­stance, and walked off to wher­ever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sit­ting alone in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next month or so, we met every few days at a table in the back cor­ner of the Rainy Night House Café, where we sat for hours drink­ing tea, eat­ing bagels, and talk­ing. One after­noon, just as we were get­ting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bot­tle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I would come to her room that evening to help her drink it.

She was already sev­eral glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up with the wine, our talk turned to a sub­ject we’d never before dis­cussed, love and rela­tion­ships. We cir­cled the ques­tion of our own bud­ding involve­ment war­ily, let­ting it drop in and out of the con­ver­sa­tion, each of us wait­ing for the other to risk say­ing, or doing, some­thing first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”

“Yes,” I answered, “why?”

She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, “No, I mean do you really like your body?”

“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask if she liked hers as well, she leaned for­ward and asked her ques­tion even more emphat­i­cally, “Are you truly sat­is­fied with every part of your body?”

Con­fused, and begin­ning to feel a lit­tle threat­ened, I allowed a small edge of anger to sharpen my voice, “What are you talk­ing about?”

Maria smiled to her­self, put her hand warmly on my knee, and said, “You know, do you think you mea­sure up physically?”

Finally I under­stood, but what I under­stood only con­fused me more since the chal­lenge implicit in Maria’s words – or at least the chal­lenge I felt to be implicit in Maria’s words (she might not have meant them as a chal­lenge at all) – seemed to shift the basis of what was hap­pen­ing between us from the mutu­al­ity of friend­ship to the adver­sar­ial stance of per­former and critic. I knew that big­ger penises were sup­posed to be bet­ter when it came to hav­ing sex, but I was inex­pe­ri­enced enough that I didn’t really under­stand how “bet­ter” was sup­posed to work. How big did “big” have to be to make a dif­fer­ence, I won­dered, and what pre­cisely was the nature of “bet­ter?” More plea­sure? For whom? These were ques­tions I’d asked myself and been unable to answer every time the sub­ject of penis size and sex came up, and now that Maria had asked me the ques­tion directly, I was speech­less, caught in what felt to me like a damned-if-I-did-damned-if-I-didn’t sit­u­a­tion. Any­thing I said — yes, no, maybe, let’s find out — seemed to me a pick­ing up of the gaunt­let I thought Maria had thrown down, and since I didn’t think I knew enough to com­pete, my first impulse was to remain silent. On the other hand, to say noth­ing was prob­a­bly to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her. So I decided to turn the tables. “I don’t know. Do you mea­sure up?” I asked her.

Maria’s face changed imme­di­ately. The gen­tly mock­ing antic­i­pa­tion with which she’d been wait­ing for my response van­ished, and she searched my face with eyes that were sud­denly sad and deeply sus­pi­cious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was look­ing for and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Some­times,” and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.

Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, try­ing to recap­ture the easy ban­ter from ear­lier in the evening, but she was sud­denly unable to look me in the face, and when I finally stood up to leave, all Maria did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sit­ting. We saw each other on cam­pus a few times after that but never said more than hello, and Maria only had once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to under­stand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.

When I went home at the end of the semes­ter, I told this story to my mother, ask­ing her what Maria’s rea­sons might have been for try­ing to seduce me in the way that she did. My mother’s answer only added to my con­fu­sion. The size of a man’s ego, she explained, could be mea­sured by the size of his penis. To illus­trate her point, she told me a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insis­tent, she grew more and more annoyed until, hav­ing had enough, loudly, so that the peo­ple around them could hear, she told him that unless he had a “base­ball bat” between his legs, she wouldn’t have any­thing to do with him. He, of course, protested that he’d “never had any com­plaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t, well, he knew what to do.

Need­less to say, the man walked away.

It was hard to know how this story answered my ques­tion, so I asked my mother if she thought Maria’s chal­lenge about whether or not I “mea­sured up” had been intended to put me in the same posi­tion as she had put the man in the bar. My mother’s response con­fused me even fur­ther. “Only small men,” she said, “say size doesn’t matter.”

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“Next time,” my mother is laugh­ing — but the smile on her face is a thin line of con­tempt, and when she leans for­ward to tap the pol­ished nail of her right index fin­ger in rhyth­mic empha­sis on the wooden sur­face of the din­ing room table, her eyes smol­der — “Next time, tell your father you don’t have such prob­lems. Tell him you wear a steel jock­strap.” I am six­teen, four or five years younger than I was in the story I told you above, just home from a visit to my father in Man­hat­tan, and I have just shared with my mother his first and only attempt at a father-son talk with me about women and sex. Walk­ing from the restau­rant where he’d taken me for lunch to the sub­way where I would catch the train home, he’d put his arm inti­mately around my shoul­der, leaned his head in towards mine, and asked, “Do you have a girl friend?” I told him no, which was a lie. “Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dat­ing, you’re going to run into sit­u­a­tions you won’t know how to han­dle.” He moved a few steps ahead and turned to face me, search­ing my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talk­ing about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”

“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the sub­ject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my vir­gin­ity, but know­ing that he didn’t know and real­iz­ing how easy it had been to deceive him made me feel supe­rior, and it was this feel­ing of supe­ri­or­ity that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. “What does he think he’s going to teach you, any­way?” she asks, let­ting her smile loosen into a softer, more con­spir­a­to­r­ial grin. “You prob­a­bly know more than he does already.” She laughs again, but some­thing in her tone makes me uneasy, and so, when I laugh with her this time, it’s more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny.

What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel — 4

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To me, the point was obvi­ous. Bas­ing the Jew­ish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own read­ing of the Hebrew Bible was ask­ing the over­whelm­ingly non-Jewish world to accept as objec­tive and incon­tro­vert­ible the truth that Judaism claimed as its own, never mind the impli­ca­tion that the dis­en­fran­chise­ment of the Pales­tini­ans was some­how the will of the monothe­is­tic god. To assert that line of rea­son­ing as an argu­ment for Israel’s right to exist, I sug­gested, was self-defeating at the very least – even if, as a believ­ing Jew, it was a cor­ner­stone of your faith.

“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the col­leagues with whom I was talking.

“An SHJ?”

“A self-hating Jew.”

The other agreed. “My hus­band,” she said, “would say you were an anti­se­mitic Jew.”

I stared at my col­leagues across a sud­den gap of estrange­ment I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I under­stood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revealed myself as a Jew who accepted an anti­se­mitic def­i­n­i­tion of Jew­ish­ness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teach­ers always used it to explain the anti­semitism of non-Jews who were crit­i­cal of Israel: To sug­gest that there might be a per­spec­tive from which Israel’s exis­tence as a Jew­ish state was not self-evidently valid, my rebbes would say, in many dif­fer­ent ways, over and over again, was to sug­gest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a peo­ple ought not even to be.

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