I did not know this sonnet until I heard Keb’ Mo’s version on the album When Love Speaks. What the bard had to say about infidelity and the pain of forgiveness, amongst other things, deserves more time than I have to give it here, but you should definitely give a listen to the song: Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXXV.

Just before his mother
pushed him through herself
hard enough to split who she was
wide enough for him to enter the world,
I touched the top of my son’s head;
and after he was born,
the midwife—her name,
I think, was Vivian—
held my wife’s umbilical cord
in a loop for me to cut, which I did,
freeing our new boy’s body
to enter the name
we had waiting for him;
and then Vivian laid him
against the curve of his mother’s body,
giving him to the breast
he would for years
define his world by;
and once that first taste of love
was firmly lodged within him,
she bundled him tight,
placed him in my arms
and, while I sang his welcome
in a far corner of the room,
turned to assist the doctor
sewing up my wife’s
birth-torn flesh.

and if you imagine
that night as a film of my life,
then a thunderclap or dissonant chord
would call the moment to your attention:
layers of meaning packed hard
in the still image you’d carry home
of what it means to me to remember
that where the large oak
we put chairs beneath
for our summer concerts
now spreads its shade,
I played when I was nine
tackle football with Claudia.

In the poem this was originally part of I was writing about an evening when I went down to the garden which sits in the center of the eight-building co-op where I live to walk off some anger. Thunderclouds gathered overhead just a few minutes afterwards and the rain that fell as I made my way around the concrete path that marks the garden’s perimiter felt like small hailstones on my skin. This garden holds a lot of memories for me. My grandparents lived in the building next door to mine for nearly fifty years, and we visited them almost every Sunday from as early as I can remember until I went away to college. When I was a little boy, not much more than five or six, I made friends with a red-haired girl named Claudia who lived in the building across the way. She was–and I find myself wondering if people still use this term–a tomboy, and one of our favorite things to do was play football on what was then a dirt field between the back of her building and the back of my grandparents’. I don’t remember being invited to her house or that she ever came to my grandparents’ place when I was there. Our friendship was the kind that little kids often have; we saw each other when we saw each other; and since she knew I would be there almost every Sunday, she would just head down to the garden to see if I was there; or sometimes I would get there first and wait for her.

Anyway, in the middle of what I thought was going to be my last lap around the garden, a bolt of lightning lit that field up, lush with grass after all these years and with a gorgeous, almost mountainous tree dominating the center. (A couple of summers ago, a hawk made itself at home there.) In that flash, I suddenly remembered the last conversation I had with Claudia. We’d been friends for about five or six years by that time, so we were eleven or twelve. It was Shabbat–I’m not sure why we were visiting my grandparents on a Saturday–and so Claudia and I were both in shul, hanging around outside the sanctuary where the adults were busy praying. She was wearing a pink frilly dress, which surprised me because I’d never before seen her dressed “like a girl,” and she was huddled with a group of girls I didn’t know. I tried a couple of times to talk to her, to get her to come with me to the places in the synagogue where, when we’d met there in years past, on Rosh HaShana for example, we’d spend time together until services were over, but she kept brushing me aside. Finally, I asked her point blank if she wanted to come out to play after lunch. (Neither my family nor hers was strictly observant.) “No,” she told me, “sports and climbing trees are for boys. I’m growing up now, and I am not a boy.” As far as I recall, she and I never spoke to each other again.

The poem ended up being about something else, but this memory still makes me very sad.

The literature involving fathers and daughters runs to nearly one thousand titles. I Googled. The Tempest. King Lear. Emma. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Washington Square. Daughters have a power over fathers, who are usually portrayed as aloof or mad. The father depends on his daughter and he is often isolated with her–the two of them partnered against the world. It is a good choice for writers, this pairing. It may be the ideal male-female relationship in that, with romance out of the picture, the idea of father and daughter has only to do with feelings and thoughts. Unalloyed. Intelligent. A girl may speak the truth to her father, who may speak the truth to her. He anchors her. She anchors him.

Rosenblatt’s book explores his grief at the untimely death of his own daughter, Amy, and this passage, in the form of a short-hand literary analysis, mourns the relationship he had with her–a relationship that, for him, was about a kind of truth-telling that happens between men and women when the possibility of romance does not exist. Rosenblatt’s grief is his own, and I would not presume to suggest that his relationship with his daughter was anything other than what he says it was. His assertion, however, that the father-daughter pairing is a “good choice for writers” because it allows us to deal with issues between the sexes solely in terms of feelings and thoughts, without the messiness of romance, gave me serious pause. It’s not that I think he has mischaracterized the father-daughter relationships in the works that he cites–it’s been long enough since I read any of them that I simply do not remember–but because, in a male dominant culture, and we still live in such a culture whether we like it or not, the father-daughter relationship is never about feelings and thoughts in the abstract. The daughter’s body and how she uses it–in sex, in marriage–and how that use reflects on the father’s body as a man, and on his reputation and the reputation of his family, is always already contested ground.

I doubt most people in the United States see the father-daughter relationship explicitly in these terms any more, though there are subcultures here–think, also, the Christian institution of purity balls–where it is still a father’s duty to manage his daughter’s sexuality until she is appropriately married. In my own life, where fathers have been conspicuously absent, these attitudes have manifested themselves most obviously in the assumptions people make about my relationship with my sisters. Or, more specifically, about what my relationship with my sisters should have been when we were younger. I am thinking specifically of how most people react when I tell them about the time when I was twenty-two and I walked in on my sister, who is six years younger than I am and who should have been in school, in flagrante delicto with her boyfriend. A fully detailed telling of the story is for another time, because it is funny. For now, but suffice it to say that when I finally found the boyfriend, he was hiding in my sister’s closet trying desperately to disappear behind the shirts and other hanging clothes he was pulling around himself. It was very hard not to laugh at him, but I didn’t. I just sent him home, and I will never forget the look of surprised relief and gratitude on his face when he realized that I was not going to beat him up. He even asked me, “You mean you’re not going to beat me up?” When I said no, he said thank you and left.

Most people to whom I have told this story, and it doesn’t seem to matter how old or young they are, have been as surprised as he was that I did not beat him up; and when I have asked them why–since the idea of beating him up never even occurred to me–they always give the same answer. “She was your little sister,” they say. “It was your job to protect her.”

When I ask them what they think she needed protection from, they tell me, “From guys like that.” And when I ask them why I should have assumed my sister’s boyfriend was “like that,” since he was a nice guy whom she’d been seeing for a while, a guy I liked, a guy she clearly trusted, they tell me, “Okay, so maybe you didn’t have to beat him up, but you should at least have put the fear of God into him, just to keep him honest.”

Honest about what? I ask.

“Well,” they say, “you wouldn’t want your sister to get a reputation, would you? You wouldn’t want him, or anyone he told, to think your sister was just giving it away, right?” And then most, but not all, leave the next question unasked: “You wouldn’t want your sister to think it was okay just to give it away, would you?”

Clearly, it was not her boyfriend from whom my sister and her reputation really needed protection.

But there you have it: Because I was her older brother, these people seem to think my sister’s emerging sexuality was my problem, not out of concern for her health and safety–and even then it really wouldn’t have been my problem–but because if I did not keep a watchful eye on her she might have acquired the reputation of or, worse, actually become a “slut.” According to this logic, my responsibility towards my sister is really not so different from the responsibility felt by the fathers and brothers who murder their daughters and sisters in so-called “honor killings”–and, just to be clear, there is nothing honorable about them–because even the hint of female sexual impropriety is a stain on her and her family’s reputation that only her death will remove. (Indeed, I am reminded of the doll I was given buy a lover so that I would remember her when I left South Korea in 1989, after my stint as an English teacher was over. The doll’s dress identified her as a Korean noblewoman, right down to the knife on a belt around her waist, that her real life counterpart was supposed to have used to commit suicide in the event that she was raped.) Granted, no one has ever suggested that in my case the right course of action would have been to kill my sister, but the idea that I should have beaten her boyfriend up is clearly as much about the message it would have sent to her about the need to “keep her legs closed” as it is about the belief that I should have let him know that keeping his life was contingent on his ability to “keep it in his pants.”

A less violent way for me to have gotten this message across to my sister, of course, would have been for me to explain to her that I knew “what guys are like” and that she, therefore, had good reason not to trust her boyfriend’s motives for wanting to be sexual with her, that, in fact, she shouldn’t trust them because, at heart, all guys are “like that.” Leave aside, for the moment, the fact that there really are guys who are “like that” and that it is possible for an older brother to sniff this out about his younger sister’s boyfriend before his younger sister does. Focus instead on where the authority comes from that I, in this script, expect my sister to recognize and accept: the fact that I, too, am a guy, that I know, first-hand, the truth of what I am saying. More to the point, since being “like that” is, in this way of seeing the world, in the very nature of guyhood, being “like that” is part of whom I am too. In protecting my sister from her boyfriend, in other words, I am also protecting her from another version of myself. Or, to put it perhaps more kindly, from a male imperative that I know her boyfriend feels because I have felt it too: the (traditional) male imperative to use women for sex as a way of proving manhood.

There is, in other words, a level of self-hatred involved in the violence I was, according to this logic, supposed to have done to my sister’s boyfriend, as I projected onto him the part of who I am that I would never allow myself to express with my sister. Moreover, there is an irony embedded in this self-hatred, because not to feel it, not to see someone like my sister’s boyfriend as a threat to her, and therefore to myself, is to fail as a man. By way of contrast, consider that if I’d been an older sister, and strong enough to do so, no one would have thought for a moment that beating my younger sister’s boyfriend up simply because he was having sex with her was the thing I ought to have done. As a woman, it simply would not have been my job to police my sister’s sex. As a man, however, within this logic, that was precisely my job and, to the degree that I didn’t do it, it was as a man that I failed. The people who question why I didn’t beat him up know this intuitively. “What kind of a brother (read: man) were you?” they ask. In all honesty, I don’t know how to answer them, not because I don’t have an answer, but because it often feels to me like we are speaking different languages and I don’t know how to translate from mine to theirs.

A great deal of work has been done to expose the sexual double standard for what it is, a way of controlling women’s sexuality, and if you understand the story I have told and people’s reaction to it as being primarily about my relationship with my sister, then it is clearly the double standard that is at stake. On the other hand, if you understand the story as being about my relationship to her boyfriend–man to man, so to speak–which means it is also a story about my relationship with myself, then what is at stake is how that double standard structures men’s internal experience of manhood and masculinity, how it forces on men a division within ourselves between the man we are (traditionally, stereotypically) given permission to be with women who are not our sisters or daughters, etc. and the man whose manhood depends on protecting those women from what that permission means. To be both those men at the same time, in an integrated way, seems to me impossible, making it a quintessential example of self-hatred.

I don’t really have anything more to say about this right now. I just think it’s a starting point for what could be a very interesting discussion.

• It Is What It Is, by my friend Cassandra, about her “round, high, and in your face [butt] — a brazen and rebellious personality that dares anyone, including me, to attempt to silence her. She invites stares, welcomes gropes and revels in praise — she is not one to keep quiet.” Cassandra’s new to blogging, so if you have a chance, go over to LadyCaz and let her know what you think.
• That Dreaded Skirt, also by Cassandra.
• The Best Birth Control in the World is for Men: “The procedure called RISUG in India (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance) takes about 15 minutes with a doctor, is effective after about three days, and lasts for 10 or more years.” But don’t look for it any time soon in the US, since it’s not a big money-maker for the drug companies.
• Could This Male Contraceptive Pill Make A Vas Deferens In The Fight Against HIV?: “To cut right to the chase, it’s affectionately dubbed the “clean sheets” pill due to the fact that it inhibits release of any semen whatsoever…while still permitting the circular muscles to contract.…”
• Evaluating the Adjunct Impact: “Using large samples of community colleges, studies find that as colleges use more part timers, their students are less likely to graduate or transfer to four-year institutions. And another study finds that as part-time use goes up, institutional averages in class participation (for all faculty members) go down.”
• What Adjunct Impact?: Cites studies that contradict the studies cited in the previous article.
• Completion at What Price?: “[T]he debut report…takes on the “completion agenda” and its heavy emphasis on workforce development [at community colleges], a fixation that the report said threatens academic quality and student access, as well as social mobility.
• The Disposable Professor Crisis: “[A]s growing numbers of institutions turn to contingent (or adjunct) faculty to cut costs, while keeping pay as low as possible for the support staff who keep campuses running[,] students suffer… [T]he number of available services are reduced, class sizes increase, and educators are less able to provide direct assistance and mentoring to the students they are there to teach.”
• ‘Dancing Boys’: A Tale of Sexual Exploitation: “The practice of wealthy or prominent Afghans exploiting underage boys as sexual partners who are often dressed up as women to dance at gatherings is on the rise in post-Taliban Afghanistan, according to Afghan human-rights researchers, Western officials and men who participate in the abuse.”
• Poetry, Medium and Message: “Here is a question that has been confounding or even infuriating poets for eons. So what is your poem about?”
• Curried Lamb and Barley Grain: A recipe I made recently that I really, really liked.
• Cinderfellas: The Long Lost Fairy Tales: In these tales, “Cinderella is a woodcutter’s daughter who uses golden slippers to recover her beloved from beyond the moon and the sun.”
• Adrienne Rich’s News in Verse: Katha Pollit on Adrienne Rich’s death.
• Sexting Ice Breakers for English Grad Students: “Maybe we should consider using a rhetorical device; though, to be clear, I am not suggesting that we rely on that rhetorical device every time we cowrite a paper.”
• Ten Reasons Not To Sleep with a Poet: “8. Like other kinds of men, he will never understand the anguish of carrying a phone that does not ring. Unlike other kinds of men, he will seem to fall off the planet for weeks at a time, lost in a place—that goddamned place you know to be a space in his head and not an actual location.”
• Cunt: The History of the C Word: “In fact, the origins of ‘cunt’ can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European ‘cu’, one of the oldest word-sounds in recorded language. ‘Cu’ is an expression quintessentially associated with femininity, and forms the basis of ‘cow’, ‘queen’, and ‘cunt’. The c-word’s second most significant influence is the Latin term ‘cuneus’, meaning ‘wedge’. The Old Dutch ‘kunte’ provides the plosive final consonant.”
• Women Publishers in Iran: Farkhondeh Hajizadeh: “The process of growing censorship has reached a point that even the concept of censor does not apply to it. In a time when we all seem to be living in glass houses and have nothing left to hide, such approaches to book publishing is synonymous to a return to the Middle Ages.”
• Repeat After Me: A review of Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett, in which Everett claims to have found evidence to disprove the Chomskian theory of language universals.
• Do College Professors Work Hard Enough?: A professor-bashing op-ed from the Washington Post that is nonetheless worth reading so that the rebuttals (here, here (the most balanced of them), here, here, here) will all make sense.
• What Do Professors Do All Week?: Introductory post to a series in which one professor logged the time he spent on work-related activities during one seven-day week. It’s worth reading the entire series; the links are at the bottom of the post I am linking to here.
• Why Are You Here?: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on branding, charity, and class in Nigeria’s schools.
• Nathalie Handal — Haiti: Poet Nathalie Handal on education in Haiti one year after the earthquake.

Some time ago, an essay I wrote called “Why I Am a Feminist Man” was published at The Scavenger. The essay was a first pass at illuminating the connection in my life between the sexual abuse I survived when I was a teenager and my embrace of feminism. Well, I have been revising the essay, first because it needed it and, second, because I am hoping to submit for publication in a different venue. “Unlearning the Equation,” the new title of the piece, paraphrases something Adrienne Rich wrote thirty some odd years ago in an essay, “Caryatid: Two Columns,” which was originally published in On Lies, Secrets and Silence:

The equation of manhood—potency—with the objectification of another’s person and the domination of another’s body, is the venereal disease that lives alike in the crimes of Vietnam and the lies of sexual liberation (another creation of the sixties)—as it lives in the imaginations of pornographers, in the fantasies of poets and presidents, professors and policemen, surgeons and salesmen.

Here are a couple of excerpts from “Unlearning the Equation:”

The obvious but also very difficult answer [to the question of why I responded to a woman’s belittling and emasculating rejection of me with a fantasy in which I raped her] is that the structure of rape was already part of what I considered normal behavior between men and women, was in fact the framework through which I understood the meaning of that behavior.… Statements like this one, because of the way they can be read to suggest that men are all inherently and irrevocably rapists, are one source of many men’s discomfort with feminism. Yet women also internalize the structure of rape as part of their sexuality. They live in this culture no differently than we do, so how could they not? Still, no one tries seriously to deduce from this fact, at least not anymore, that women are all therefore inherently and irrevocably victims of rape. Indeed, one of the things contemporary feminism has done for women—and, frankly, for men as well—is to expose just how fully and insidiously the ideology of rape has been a structuring force in female sexuality, making it possible for women to free themselves from that structure. Why would it be any different for men? Why would freedom from the way rape structures how we see the world not be a welcome change for us?

§

I received when I was growing up two very different kinds of instruction in the ideology of rape. First and foremost, the model of masculinity to which I was taught to aspire…insists on the dominant-submissive, active-passive dichotomy that rape embodies as the natural order of all things sexual. Before the old man in my building put his hands on me and forced his penis into my mouth, I knew with absolute certainty which position in that dichotomy I was supposed to occupy. Moreover, I knew at the unconscious level of knowing that is the result of proper socialization that I could take this position more or less for granted. By the time I walked out of the old man’s apartment, however, I knew with a similar level of certainty how wrong I’d been. This realization may not have been conscious at the time, but it has shaped my understanding of the world ever since: when the old man in my building forced his penis into my mouth—because I am certain that what I cannot fully remember did indeed happen—he demonstrated beyond any doubt that everything I’d been taught about the meaning of my gender and my dominant place in the sexual hierarchy of my culture had been a lie.

§

[F]eminism is the only politics I know that explicitly commits itself to…build[ing] a world in which the inhumanity of sexual exploitation, along with every other inhumanity that devolves from it, is no longer acceptable.

Some of the women are sold into the business by their families, Mr. Cortés said. The police came across one case in which Colombian traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back or they would send her sister as a replacement.

Note also where the article mentions a woman whose traffickers tattooed a bar code on her and the amount of money she owed them. Read the whole thing here.

Who am I to deny the value of poems that do that just because they do not meet the literary standards of the moment? What greater honor is there to bestow upon a poet than to say that her or his poems have done that for you? So I am honored, and humbled, that the editors of LoveLifePoems have chosen Light, from my book The Silence of Men, for their Best of the Web collection. I hope you will go and read my poem and then stay to check out some of the work that is published there.