Category Archives: Violence Against Women

Domestic Violence Has Always Been a Current Running Through My Life

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Three weeks ago, as the stu­dents were fil­ing out of the room at the end of one of my classes, a woman stopped in front of my desk and said some­thing along the lines of, “So I want to write poetry, but I don’t know how to start. Can you help me?”

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

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

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

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

Coitus Inter­rup­tus

1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you still want this?

I never play it.

Throw it out then.

So I did.

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: When Witches Stole Penises 1

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You won’t believe me. I know you won’t. I didn’t want to believe it myself, but I couldn’t deny what my eyes were telling me: My penis was gone! Really! Gone! I’d just come home from break­ing up with my girl­friend, and I was undress­ing to take a shower before din­ner when I reached down to touch myself and felt…nothing!

Do you understand?

Noth­ing!

My brain could not at first deci­pher what the tips of my fin­gers were telling me, but when I looked down I saw that between my legs where my penis should have been the skin was as smooth and as hair­less as the top of my head. I stood in front of the mir­ror in my bed­room cup­ping my crotch like a shy girl forced to strip naked in front of strangers, pray­ing that my eyes were play­ing tricks on me, that when I removed my hands and looked again my penis would be there.

I removed my hands and looked again. My penis was not there.

Not know­ing what else to do, and since I was not about to call on one of my friends and say, “Hey, let’s go out for a drink. I need to talk,” I put my clothes back on and went across town to a bar where I didn’t think any­one would know me. I ordered a beer and sat by myself in a cor­ner booth, mak­ing sure to avoid eye con­tact with any­one who hap­pened to look my way.

“Mind if I sit down?” The inquis­i­tive eyes of a pretty, red-haired woman were sud­denly too close for me to avoid.

Great, I thought, I have no penis and a woman is try­ing to pick me up. Just what I need.

There was an open­ness in the way she looked at me, though, a kind­ness in her eyes that per­suaded me not to refuse. I nod­ded my head.

“You look like you could use some­one to talk to.” She slid into the seat oppo­site me.

“I guess, but it’s some­thing I don’t think you’d understand.”

“What do you mean?”

Not know­ing what to say in response, I looked down at the table.

She tilted her head and leaned for­ward, try­ing to catch my eye, “You know, there’s not much I haven’t seen or heard, so I doubt that whatever’s both­er­ing you will shock or offend me.”

“Oh, this’ll shock you.”

“Try me.”

I don’t know why, but I sud­denly wanted des­per­ately to tell her. I just didn’t know how, and so we went back and forth a few times — her encour­ag­ing me to open up; me insist­ing it’d be point­less — while a list of all the dif­fer­ent things I could say ran through my head, each one sound­ing more absurd than the next. “My penis has dis­ap­peared” made it sound like the damned thing had sprouted legs and walked away; “I’ve lost my penis” was so ridicu­lous I actu­ally smiled just think­ing about it; and “my penis is gone” should’ve been the title of a very bad par­ody of a very bad love song.

“I don’t have a penis any­more,” I finally told her.

As I expected, she burst out laugh­ing. “No, seri­ously…” she said, but then I guess she read on my face how seri­ous I was. Her eyes dark­ened and her lips tight­ened into a thin col­or­less line. “You’d bet­ter show me.” She said this with such author­ity that with­out giv­ing it a sec­ond thought I nod­ded my head and fol­lowed her to an upstairs apart­ment she said she was rent­ing from the bar’s owner.

When I took my pants down, her face remained expres­sion­less for a few sec­onds. “Tell me every­thing you’ve done in the past three days or so,” she com­manded, and I did, and when I got to the part about break­ing up with my girl­friend, the woman stopped me and nod­ded her head. “Now I under­stand. The woman you were see­ing is a witch and she has taken your penis as revenge for break­ing up with her. The only way you can get your organ back is to per­suade her to return it to you.”

A witch! Now at least I knew what I was deal­ing with. I went to the church to talk to my priest. He didn’t want to believe me at first either — who could blame him? — but when I took my pants down and repeated what the woman in the bar had told me, he gave me his blessing.

The next day, I went back to the house of the woman I’d just bro­ken up with and knocked on the door. She came out onto the porch so she wouldn’t have to invite me in.

“I want you to give me my penis back.” I kept my voice low and steady so she would under­stand how seri­ous I was.

“What are you talk­ing about?” For her part, she was try­ing hard to sound innocent.

“You know very well what I’m talk­ing about!”

Before she could go back inside, I twisted a rope that I’d brought for this pur­pose around her neck, scream­ing over and over again into her ear, “Give it back! Give it back or I’ll kill you!”

She kept protest­ing that she had no idea what I was talk­ing about, but when her eyes started to bulge, she nod­ded her head and mouthed the word OK. After I loos­ened the rope enough for her to catch her breath, she reached between my legs and stroked me. It was truly mag­i­cal! I knew with­out hav­ing to look or touch that my organ had been restored to me.

I walked away with­out look­ing back, leav­ing the rope around the woman’s neck as a reminder of what I would do to her if she tried to harm me in any way again.

•

Imag­ine that some­one has told you this story and asked you to believe it.

•

Now imag­ine actu­ally believ­ing it, not only because you believe in witches, but because you hear the story from the priest who was the narrator’s con­fes­sor, and you can­not imag­ine a priest lying about such seri­ous mat­ters. After all, he knows that if you ever learn her name and find out where she lives, the woman in ques­tion could be, no, would be — you make a note to your­self to see if you can locate her — hunted down like an ani­mal and burned at the stake. You’re at war with Satan him­self, and you need to be as mer­ci­less as he is. It may not be women’s fault that they are frail crea­tures, eas­ily swayed by the promises of power and plea­sure the Devil uses to seduce them, but they are still respon­si­ble for their choices: A woman who becomes a witch ded­i­cates her life to the destruc­tion of Christ’s king­dom, for­feit­ing the soul that God in His infi­nite wis­dom and mercy gave her when she was con­ceived. Such a woman deserves to die.

You believe this, are com­mit­ted to it, would give your own life in defense of it, and this is why you want to leave no room for doubt in the minds of the peo­ple for whom you are now writ­ing that a witch can indeed remove a man’s penis from his body. Well, not exactly remove it, but you’ll get into the fine points of that dis­tinc­tion later, for an image of the Witches’ Sab­bat dis­tracts you momen­tar­ily from your work. The writhing bod­ies. The moans of car­nal plea­sure. The Devil in all his var­i­ous incar­na­tions mov­ing from woman to woman, tak­ing each one in a dif­fer­ent posi­tion, and they kiss his erec­tion, and they kneel between each other’s legs.… You take a deep breath. Satan is devi­ous, knows your weak­nesses too, and it’s only because your will is strong that you’re able to wrench your atten­tion back to the world-saving impor­tance of what you’re writing.

And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who…collect male organs in great num­bers, as many as twenty or thirty mem­bers together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move them­selves like liv­ing mem­bers, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a mat­ter of com­mon report? [A] cer­tain man tells that, when he had lost his mem­ber, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a cer­tain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were sev­eral mem­bers. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to a parish priest.1

Of course witches don’t really remove men’s penises. That would mean the Devil had the power to alter per­ma­nently the struc­ture of God’s world, and there’s no way God would allow His neme­sis to become that strong. Rather, men who believe their penises have been taken from them have fallen under the influ­ence of a glam­our, or spell, that makes it appear their gen­i­tals are gone. For the Devil’s strength is ulti­mately noth­ing more than the power to deceive, which is why Satan can in no way enter the mind or body of any man, nor has the power to pen­e­trate into the thoughts of any­body, unless such a per­son has first become des­ti­tute of all holy thoughts, and is quite bereft and denuded of spir­i­tual con­tem­pla­tion.2 The men who fall prey to penis-removing glam­ours, in other words—most commonly…adulterers and for­ni­ca­tors3—deserve their unman­ning, though you sup­pose their con­di­tion is to be pitied rather than reviled, for only the very few among us are truly with­out sin.

You don’t know, there is no way you can know, that the book you’re writ­ing — what will become, when it is first pub­lished in 1486, The Malleus Malefi­carum—is des­tined to be for nearly three cen­turies the Inquisition’s author­i­ta­tive text on the the­ory, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, inter­ro­ga­tion, tor­ture and exe­cu­tion of witches. Nor are you aware that what you’re writ­ing will change irrev­o­ca­bly the way witches are seen and hunted, trans­form­ing witch­craft from a crime against your god com­mit­ted more or less equally by men and women, and by rel­a­tively few peo­ple at that, into an almost exclu­sively female trans­gres­sion.4 Nearly 100,000 women will be burned at the stake as witches by the time the influ­ence of your text has waned in the mid-1700s, and at least twice as many more will have had their lives ruined by the accu­sa­tion.5 There’s no way you can know this, but you’d be proud of it. Women, no, witches, no, women, witches — what’s the difference? — those treach­er­ous, devi­ous, evil, seduc­tive, nearly irre­sistible crea­tures deserve every moment of agony they suf­fer, whether on the rack or burn­ing at the stake. Each moment of pain, each lick of each flame on their sin­ful skin brings closer the ful­fill­ment of God’s divine plan, and so the more of them you can burn off the face of the earth the bet­ter off the earth will be.

You put down your pen and look out the win­dow, your thoughts hav­ing turned for the moment to the Jews, espe­cially the Jew­ish doc­tors whose black arts are not so dif­fer­ent from witches’ glam­ours,6 and you won­der again if exclud­ing the Jews from The Malleus was a good idea. Granted, as Sprenger pointed out when you first argued about this, the Jews are not witches, but they are in league with Satan, and Satan uses them, and they share — you’ve read recently the work of Thomas de Cantim­pré, and it is pure and noble and blessed, and he has it on the author­ity of St. Augus­tine that the Jews share with women, with witches, the curse vis­ited upon Eve for her dis­obe­di­ence in the par­adise of Eden that would have been ours if not for her. Just like Eve and her daugh­ters, Jew­ish men bleed monthly, for they too rejected Christ. Augus­tine calls it a mark of Cain, and it is why, this mark, it is why the Jews drink the blood of Chris­t­ian chil­dren. They think it will cure them. They are wrong, though, as the Jews are always wrong, mis­tak­ing Chris­tiano san­guine, the blood of a Chris­t­ian, for the one thing that would truly end their suf­fer­ing, Christi san­guine, the blood of Christ, taken in Holy Com­mu­nion.7

Ah, well, Sprenger is right. The Jews are not witches, and so even though this con­nec­tion between witches and Jews intrigues you, you decide you must leave it for some­one else to tackle. Over the cen­turies, many try, but it will be five hun­dred years before some­one reveals the fem­i­nine cor­rup­tion of the Jews as com­pre­hen­sively as you have done for witches:

The true con­cep­tion of the State is for­eign to the Jew, because he, like the woman, is want­ing in per­son­al­ity; his fail­ure to grasp the idea of true soci­ety is due to his lack of free intel­li­gi­ble ego. Like women, Jews tend to adhere together, but they do not asso­ciate as free inde­pen­dent indi­vid­u­als mutu­ally respect­ing each other’s individuality.

…

As there is no real dig­nity in women, so what is meant by the word “gen­tle­man” does not exist amongst the Jews. The gen­uine Jew fails in this innate good breed­ing by which alone indi­vid­u­als hon­our [sic] their own indi­vid­u­al­ity and respect that of oth­ers. There is no Jew­ish nobil­ity, and this is the more sur­pris­ing as Jew­ish pedi­grees can be traced back for thou­sands of years.8

…

In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not dis­tinct from one another.9

…

It would be easy to under­stand why the fam­ily (in its bio­log­i­cal not its legal sense) plays a larger role amongst the Jews than amongst any other people.…The fam­ily, in this bio­log­i­cal sense, is fem­i­nine and mater­nal in its ori­gin, and has no rela­tion to the State or to soci­ety.10
…

The fact that no woman in the world rep­re­sents the idea of the wife so com­pletely as the Jew­ish woman (and not only in the eyes of the Jews) still fur­ther sup­ports the com­par­i­son between Jews and women. In the case of the Aryans, the meta­phys­i­cal qual­i­ties of the male are part of his sex­ual attrac­tion for the woman, and so, in a fash­ion, she puts on an appear­ance of these. The Jew, on the other hand, has no tran­scen­den­tal qual­ity, and in the shap­ing and mould­ing of the wife leaves the nat­ural ten­den­cies of the female nature a more unham­pered sphere; and the Jew­ish woman, accord­ingly, plays the part required of her, as house-mother or odal­isque, as Cybele or Cyprian, in the fullest way.

The con­gruity between Jews and women fur­ther reveals itself in the extreme adapt­abil­ity of the Jews, in their great tal­ent for jour­nal­ism, the “nobil­ity” of their minds, their lack of deeply-rooted and orig­i­nal ideas, in fact the mode in which, like women, because they are noth­ing in them­selves, they can become every­thing. The Jew is an indi­vid­ual, not an indi­vid­u­al­ity; he is in con­stant close rela­tion with the lower life, and has no share in the higher meta­phys­i­cal life.11

…

And so on and so on, until the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between the Jew and the woman. Nei­ther believe in them­selves; but the woman believes in oth­ers, in her hus­band, her lover, or her chil­dren, or in love itself; she has a cen­ter of grav­ity, although it is out­side her own being. The Jew believes in noth­ing, within him or with­out him.…The woman believes in the man, in the man out­side her, or in the man from whom she takes her inspi­ra­tion [Jesus], and in this fash­ion can take her­self in earnest. The Jew takes noth­ing seri­ously; he is friv­o­lous and jests about any­thing, about the Christian’s Chris­tian­ity, the Jew’s bap­tism.12

The Jew, in other words, is an even more debased woman than a woman is.

Notes

  1. Hein­rich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Malleus Malefi­carum, trans. Mon­tague Sum­mers (New York: Dover, 1971) 121. The story with which I began this sec­tion is my own blend­ing of two other penis-stealing nar­ra­tives in The Malleus. [↩]
  2. ibid. 120 [↩]
  3. ibid. 60 [↩]
  4. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witch­craze: A New His­tory of the Euro­pean Witch Hunts (San Fran­cisco: Harper­San­Fran­cisco, 1994) 172. [↩]
  5. ibid. 23 [↩]
  6. Sander Gilman, Jew­ish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hid­den Lan­guage of the Jews (Bal­ti­more: The Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1986) 37. [↩]
  7. ibid. 74 – 75 [↩]
  8. Otto Weininger, Sex and Char­ac­ter, trans. Autho­rized Trans­la­tion (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906) 188. [↩]
  9. ibid. 189 [↩]
  10. ibid. [↩]
  11. ibid. 195 [↩]
  12. ibid. 196 [↩]

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 →

There is a “Hitting Girls Is Cool” Group on Facebook

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Check it out.

Here is John Krautzner’s – he’s the cre­ator and self-styled “Alpha Male” on the page – post called “Rea­sons to Hit Girls:”

There are many rea­sons to hit girls. First of all, it keeps those bitches in line. If a girl is mouthing off to you, slug her in the face. This accom­plishes three main goals. First of all, she shut the fuck up. Sec­ondly, she will have more respect for you and your fists of jus­tice. But most impor­tantly, she will learn a valu­able les­son that will keep her in line for years to come.

Another rea­son to hit girls is that it is Nat­ural. That’s right, it is NATURAL to hit girls. God, in his infi­nite knowl­edge wrote into our DNA the instinct to hit women. If you deny this instinct, then you are not a man. If women didn’t get hit by men, they wouldn’t know what to do. They would panic and a lot of peo­ple would die.

More Rea­sons to Hit Girls:

it’s fun and healthy

it’s inex­pen­sive

Chuck Nor­ris does it

it reduces your chance of con­tract­ing HIV by 17%

I want you to

it reduces stress

they like it

The page has been up since 2006, and it’s pos­si­ble that Krautzner has all but for­got­ten about it, but that is no excuse. Appar­ently, there used to be a page called “Hit­ting Women” that was taken down fairly recently. I have logged a protest with Face­book. If you’re on Face­book, you ought to do the same.