Read this post; it’s scary. Here’s an excerpt:

The prosecution tried to get me to say that most people who fantasize are sick, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that people’s fantasies indicate what they want to do in real life, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that Mr. Jones’ calls and emails were typical grooming behavior. I pointed out the fundamental flaws in their reasoning: he had met “Missy” in a chatroom for adults, not for fans of Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers. And after a thousand emails and phone calls, he never said anything like, “Let’s meet. We’ll have a great time. When are you free? I’ll send you money for a bus ticket.”

There were plenty of questions about me: my campaign against the concept of “sex addiction”; my observations that America is panicked over highly distorted estimates of how many predators troll for kids online (I quoted scientific studies, including the latest one from Harvard); whether or not I believed it was OK for adults and 14-year-olds to have sex (which I wouldn’t answer, not wanting to obscure the fact that there was no 14-year-old in this case), and many, many more. That’s how I spent yesterday afternoon.

This morning, the jury gave their verdict. Afterwards, in private conversations, they told Mr. Jones’ lawyer that I was clearly an expert, warm and persuasive, and that they had learned a great deal from me about psychology and sexuality. They said they were troubled by the flaws I had pointed out in the prosecution’s case, and they laughed at the D.A.’s inability to rattle or insult me. Several said if they were ever in trouble, they hoped they’d be represented in court as well as Mr. Jones had been.

But they found him guilty. They were afraid to believe him.

They say women won’t want you, that you’ll not
forgive us, ever, especially me, and that
the Jews who’ve died for what it means to be cut
will have died in vain because we left you complete.

And I know I can’t not burden you with that.
You have to, have to, resonate with what
your body would have meant to all that hate,
and you will—but sitting here alone tonight,

my amputated life aching anew,
I’m grateful for all that’s merely whole in you.

Marcia is a perceptive reader and wonderful interviewer and her questions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the conversation was about the poem called “Working The Dotted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girlfriend and I had sex, and she was a virgin. What I liked best about Marcia’s reading of this piece was her noticing my mother’s presence in the poem and how that started me talking about something I often encounter but have never given much serious thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncomfortable with their mother’s sexuality, and I don’t understand it. Or, to be more accurate, while I understand intellectually, I don’t get it emotionally. As well, they often it profoundly disturbing that I am not made uncomfortable not just by the idea of my mother as a sexual being, but by the fact that, when I was growing up, I knew–that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she certainly did not rub it in my face either)–that she had sexual relationships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occasionally go to bars, or dancing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick someone up herself, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it seemed to me perfectly natural. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other single 30-year-old women did when they socialized? My mother has been a single woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expected her not to have one or to keep it hidden from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was growing up, and it never seemed strange to me or wrong or awkward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was having sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awkward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is something I want to write about, something I had never really thought to write about until Marcia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Working The Dotted Line

I don’t remember what vacation
I was home for, or how Beth
managed to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apartment to ourselves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s hanging crystals
scattering the afternoon sunlight
in small rainbows that shimmied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretching
nervous along the length
of the daybed’s mattress,
and my fingers tracing
the ridges of her ribs
as she tugged at my erection.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first condom,
and I’d forgotten to read the directions,
so I stood there growing soft,
squinting at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I needed to learn
was on the inside.
I ripped the cardboard open
and sat reading on the bed’s edge,
thumbing the foil-packed
lubricated circle,
trying to visualize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dotted line,
our protection, like a goldfish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slipped from my grasp
and landed under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I picked it up,
it was covered with the dust
and small particles of dirt
that settle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was kneeling hard
between Beth’s open legs.
She raised herself on her elbows,
smiling that the second skin
we needed to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the instructions called
the reservoir tip—I thought
of the dams holding water back
in the mountains near where she lived
and what would happen if they broke—
her smile disappeared
and bunching the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lifted
her butt onto the pillow
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and climbed up onto her,
trying with one hand
to be graceful and accurate
and with the other
to balance over her
without falling.
At her first grimace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clamped shut and then
staring wide, her voice
a whisper through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I entered her again, trying
from the tightness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out anyway,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nosing downward
towards her navel,
and I placed my palms
against her cheeks,
I cannot hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve chosen you!

And since I wanted so much to be her choice,
I kissed her eyelids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hollow of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giving way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
holding her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a single motion I breathed through
like I was lifting heavy boxes.
She screamed into the muscle
just above my collar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said nothing afterwards.
We didn’t cuddle
or smile at each other as we dressed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My wordlessness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wanted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.

I first learned about the baseball-diamond-as-metaphor-for-sex in 8th grade, because the big question was whether or not, at someone’s bar mitzvah to which I had not been invited, Robert “got to second” with Sharon over or under the shirt. “Over or under,” of course, was a huge question, one that my classmates pondered at great length, wondering why she would let him get that far, how cool it was that he could get her to let him get that far; or maybe he didn’t have to do all that much persuading, maybe underneath the “good girl” image that Sharon so carefully cultivated was a whole other person that those of us who knew her only in school had never met; and did this make her a “slut,” and how, precisely, did getting that far, did her letting him get that far, obligate him to her in terms of commitment; and what the hell–some people were smart enough to ask–did commitment mean in ninth grade anyway?

I could not imagine why what Robert and Sharon did or did not do with each other was anyone else’s business, nor did I think that the question of when a girl stepped over the line and became a “slut” was anything other than stupid, but I was new to the school, though, which meant no one thought my opinion mattered very much, and so I was almost never included in these conversations. Still, I do remember one time that I spoke up, asking–in response to I don’t remember what–some far-less-articulate version of the following questions: The whole point of touching a girl’s breasts is to bring her pleasure, right? What is wrong with Sharon wanting that pleasure or with Robert wanting to give it to her? And why are we talking about it like Robert was running bases and Sharon was playing (ineffective) defense? You make it sound like sex is a competition that the girl has to pretend to lose, just a little bit at a time, in order for both people to get what they want.

I was not naive. I knew that boys did in fact put “notches on their bedposts” depending on how far they got with any particular girl, and I understood that girls who went too far put that hard-to-pin-down thing called their reputation at great risk. I knew these things, however, as facts, and while I accepted them as information I needed to know about how the world worked, I did not really understand them, and, more to the point, I did not like them. Anyway, no one said anything when I was finished talking. All I have is a picture of my classmates’ faces turned towards me in a momentary, non-comprehending stare, and then they turned back towards each other and continued talking in the terms that were relevant to them.

The second talking-about-sex moment that I remember from yeshiva happened when I was in 9th. The boys in my class were scheduled to take a trip to the very famous Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey. I don’t remember why I didn’t go, but I was the only boy in my grade in school that day, and so, since our religious classes were all canceled–it would not have occurred to the administration to send me to class with the girls–I spent the morning shooting hoops in the gym. (The day was split: religious classes in the morning, secular classes in the afternoon.) After lunch, the girls and I decided we would cut classes for the rest of the day. After all, how much teaching would go on with more than half the class missing? So we went out to the back of the school, where one of the girls pulled out a copy of the Ann Landers sex test that had recently been published in one of the local newspapers. (What looks like the version of the test that the girls and I were talking about, can, if you’re willing to wade through some religious self-righteousness, be found here.)

We cut our first period class, which might have been math, talking and laughing about what was, for most of us at the time, the entirely theoretical nature of the items on the test; and we were doing absolutely nothing that would have been considered inappropriate anywhere other than an orthodox yeshiva, where the simple fact of our being alone together was cause for concern. Because of what could happen–remember Rabbi W’s worries over co-ed dancing–if we lost control of ourselves. Because of how, even though we were doing nothing but talking, it would look to an outsider that we are alone together in the first place. Then, just as second period English was about to begin, one of the girls who had gone inside to use the bathroom came running out to tell us that the boys were had returned. Apparently, they had stopped to get a blessing from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, one of the most important rabbis of the 20th century. He gave them the blessing, they got back in their bus to go to Lakewood, and the bus broke down, forcing them to return to school. We ran into the building, rushed upstairs and, remarkably, made it to second period English on time, though it was only a few minutes into Mrs. Lynch’s lesson before Rabbi S burst into the classroom, pointed one by one to each of the girls and said, “You! Out!”

When he did not point to me, I thought perhaps I had escaped detection, but he came back a few minutes later, flung the door open with the same law-enforcement air about him, pointed to me and said, “You too!”

We were suspended, the girls and I, not only for cutting class, and not only because the idea of one boy and twelve girls hanging out alone in the back of the school was unseemly, but also, and to some administrators most importantly, because we had been talking about sex. When we were told that, before we’d be allowed back into class, our parents would have to come in to speak personally with Rabbi S, who was only available in the afternoons, I had to ask if my mother, since she worked, could come in the morning to speak with Rabbi F, the dean of the school. You would have thought that speaking to the Dean would be more serious than speaking to the principal of secular studies, but when my mother came in, all Rabbi F said was, “Mrs. Louras [her name from her second marriage], Richard is a real mensch, a wonderful boy. He made a terrible mistake, but we’re sure he’ll never do it again.” That was it. He and my mother exchanged some pleasantries, told me to go back to my class, and wished her a good rest of the day. My mother, who couldn’t imagine why they were making such a big deal out of the whole situation, collapsed laughing against the wall just outside the school entrance. “Remind me,” she said, “Why were you suspended again?” (To be fair, it’s not that my mother did not think I should be punished for cutting class, but she could not imagine that I was being suspended for a first offense or that the “real” problem, as it had been explained to her, was that I’d been alone with the girls and that we were talking about sex.)

I find it hard to believe that Rabbi F did not say more because he did not know why I had been suspended; nor do I think he did not consider my “offense” a very serious one. Most likely, he was just uncomfortable talking about such things with a woman, especially a woman like my mother, who in her jeans and one-button-too-many-undone button down shirt, her long denim frock coat and her afro, did not at all fit the image of the nice, middle-class Jewish mother with whom he was used to dealing. He never said anything else about the incident to me, either, but an incident that sticks in my head as somehow connected this episode took place later that year. Rabbi F pulled me aside one day while my class was in the library and, speaking very softly, indicated with this chin a new girl in the class whose boyfriend everyone knew was not Jewish. (Indeed, it had been the boyfriend who encouraged her to go to yeshiva so she could learn about her heritage.) He said something about her being a very nice girl, and attractive, and how it was a shame that she was dating a non-Jewish boy. Maybe–and I wish I could remember the exact words he used, because I remember thinking even at the time how absolutely precious his phrasing was–I could get friendly with her, not too friendly, mind you, but friendly enough that she would see just how much Jewish boys had to offer her. I refused, of course, and I think this may be the first time I am telling this story to anyone.

Years after I left the yeshiva, I found out that I had had, among my classmates, a mostly undeserved reputation for having a great deal more experience with sex and drugs than I actually did. Partly this reputation came from the fact that I did indeed know more about sex and drugs than my classmates, and people just assumed that if I knew about it, I must have done it. The truth is, though, that I just happened at the time to have a group of friends at home–the kind my classmates’ parents would probably keep their kids away from–who spoke openly about the drugs they did and the sex they had. By the time I was in eleventh grade, however, when the next conversation about sex that I want to tell you about happened, this reputation of mine was at least a little more deserved. I’d had sex for the first time and been foolish enough to tell one of my classmates, and I had come to school on the day that we took club pictures for our yearbook with a clearly visible hickey on my neck. I don’t remember, frankly, if I knew the hickey was there when I got dressed, but I do remember being a little embarrassed when someone pointed out to me that I might have thought to wear a turtle neck shirt or asked my mother to cover it up with makeup. Anyway, in 11th grade a group of girls cornered me in the hall one day during lunch, or maybe it was recess, and asked, without irony, “Richard, what’s a clitoris?” I knew the answer, though I’d never seen a clitoris at that point in anything but a photograph. (I’d had sex but had not actually looked much at my girlfriend’s vagina.) Still, I didn’t like being put on the spot. So I told them to go look it up. They did, and for some reason I have never understood felt it necessary the next day to report back to me what they’d learned: “It’s what your husband chews on when you do sixty-nine.”

I remember thinking, “Chews on?”

I had no real experience at that point in my life with giving oral sex, but I did know from my reading, and I had done some very extensive and eclectic reading, that her clitoris was not something a woman was likely to want a sexual partner literally to chew on. I don’t remember if I said anything in response, or if they tried to push the conversation further, though now that I am thinking about it, there was one other moment of informal sex education that I received in the yeshiva. For about two weeks, in 8th grade, I “went out” with one of the girls in my class. Not that we did much actual “going” anywhere. We lived too far apart for that. Rather, “going out” was a status; we were a couple; and when I told one of my friends at home that I had a girlfriend, his first question was, “Does she have big tits?”

In truth, I had no idea how big a girl’s breasts had to be to qualify as “big tits,” and I have no memory of whether this girl’s breasts were particularly large or not; but I knew that I liked the way her body looked–though I had only seen it clothed–and I knew that saying yes would score me points in the value system of the friend who asked, even though I did not quite understand why the size of my girlfriend’s breasts mattered so much to him (the same way I did not quite understand the whole system of sex-as-baseball) but I wanted to score those points, and so I said yes, she did have “big tits.”

That night, when I was on the phone with my girlfriend, I told her what I had said. The anger with which she responded shocked me, and when I think back now to how naive I was–it really never occurred to me that she would think I had done anything other than say something nice about her to one of my friends–I cringe. She broke up with me a week later, saying that she’d only said yes when I asked her out so as not to hurt my feelings.

///

I am trying to remember what else I knew and did not know about sex at that time in my life. I think I knew what condoms were, and birth control pills, but I truly do not know when, or how, or by whom that knowledge was given to me; and I know I did not learn about diaphragms or IUDs at least until I was in college. Not that the eclectic reading I mentioned above was intended to educate me about such things or that I really understood the need for that kind of sex education in the first place. Most of what I read came from my mother’s collection of literary pornography (lots of Victorian erotica, the Marquis de Sade, the purported diary of one of Catherine the Great’s maids), where little if any concern was given to whether or not the female characters got pregnant; and, if they did, the pregnancy was so clearly part of the pornography that the question of how one might have prevented in never even entered into the picture.

The sexual “reading” that I really valued, however, were hardcore magazines like Puritan and Prude. The pictures in Penthouse, Playboy, Oui and other magazines that focused pretty much exclusively on the bodies of women quite frankly bored me. I wanted to see men and women actually putting tongues and fingers and penises and whatever else they chose to use in and on each other. More specifically, I wanted to understand in detail both what the men in those pictures did with their erections when they had sex with women and what the women did when they had sex with men. It would be years before I understood how profoundly limited, and limiting, the repertoire of behaviors contained in those photographs was, and it would be even longer before I understood that no matter how much I wanted to see a mutuality of desire and purpose in the people they depicted, those images–even when they contained that mutuality of desire and purpose–were part of a social system that degraded women sexually and relegated them to the status of fuckable objects.

There’s no mystery to why the hardcore porn of the time did not depict condom-use, just as there’s no mystery to why so much mainstream hardcore porn does not depict it now. I’d like to focus on one possible reason, though: introduce a condom into a scene and it makes visible a sexual boundary the man cannot cross; it breaks, in other words, the illusion of unfettered sex and of men’s unrestricted sexual access to women that mainstream hardcore heterosexual porn is supposed to depict. Ironically, however, what I learned about contraception–and remember I learned it when safe sex was primarily about birth control–relegated women to the status of fuckable objects no differently than pornography, though it did so in a far more subtle way, since it seemed to have at its core precisely the opposite belief. Indeed, the version of male heterosexual responsibility that I grew up with appeared to be focused entirely on respecting the integrity of a woman’s sexual boundaries. That focus was contained in two imperatives: make sure you do not commit rape and make sure that she does not get pregnant. Each of these imperatives, of course, is one that men need to internalize, and there is a value in their bottom-line logic that I want neither to denigrate nor deny. The fact is that too many men continue to commit rape that they think is not rape because they think they are entitled to the women they fuck; and too many men continue to abandon the women with whom they conceive children, as well as those children, because the corresponding responsibilities interfere with that sense of entitlement. Nonetheless, “do not rape her” and “do not get her pregnant,” at least in the bottom-line versions I am talking about here, place the boundaries of male heterosexuality not within men but at the outer edge of women’s skin, and so they don’t essentially change the men-fuck-women-get-fucked equation that is at the core of male dominant heterosexual thinking.

Interestingly enough, especially given that I started out by talking about my days in yeshiva, the idea that women’s sexuality is what establishes the boundaries of men’s sexuality is expressed, among other places, in Jewish law. As Rachel Biale writes in Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History, and Their Relevance for Today, “The ‘quiet,’ introverted sexuality of the woman circumscribes the active, extroverted sexuality of the man. It becomes the center and regulating mechanism” of heterosexual relationships (146). “The active, extroverted sexuality of the man,” of course, is on the one hand nothing more than the male half of the traditional view of sexuality that portrays men as active and women as passive; but it is also a euphemistic way of referring to what Adrienne Rich meant when she talked about the idea of the penis-with-a-life-of-its-own in her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,” the belief that male sexual desire is somehow beyond the control of the man experiencing it, especially, but not only, if he has an erection. In the context of Jewish law, that penis gets “tamed”–or perhaps “domesticated” is a better term–through guidelines and requirements that direct a husband’s sexuality towards his wife–because in a religious context, of course, marital sex is the only legitimate sex–requiring him to be attentive to her needs and desires, while at the same time ensuring that there is enough sex for him to be satisfied. The religious obligation, however, is for him to satisfy her; she bears no corresponding onus–except that she not refuse him unreasonably. The assumption here seems to be that a husband will satisfy his own sexual desires and needs, by definition, in the process of satisfying his wife’s. His desires and needs, in other words, are so simple and straightforward that they do not require any special attention. Since he is the one who is going to seek sex out–and, implicitly, since his physical satisfaction is so easy to accomplish and confirm–as long as he gets the sex he seeks, he will be happy.

In general, the bottom line version of “do not rape her” that I mentioned above shares this assumption, using a focus on the needs and desires of women–this time, the very basic question of whether a woman wants to have sex in the first place–to rein in men’s more “active” and “extroverted” sexuality. Things may be different now, but the “do not rape her” education that I received when I was younger, and I am thinking here specifically of the anti-rape education I received in college, asked me nothing about my own desires and needs. No one, for example, wanted to know if there were circumstances under which I might not want to have sex or if I had ever thought more deeply about my desire for sex than she-turns-me-0n-it-feels-good-so-I-want-it. Granted, these questions can all too easily become ways of not talking about not raping women; they open the door to the kinds of tit-for-tat accusations that not only derail meaningful discussion about rape–See! Men also have sex when we don’t want to, but we don’t go around crying rape every time it happens–but not to ask them is ultimately to impoverish any conversation we might have about men’s relationship to our own bodies, about the connection between our sexuality and our fertility (because not wanting to conceive a child should be as unproblematic a reason for a man not to fuck as it is for a woman) and about our own sexual pleasure. Because not asking those questions, and the many questions like them that could be asked, leaves in place both the centrality of genital fucking as an expression of heterosexual manhood and the notion that ejaculating inside a woman is the ultimate and only truly meaningful expression and experience available to us of male heterosexuality.

It did not occur to me that there might be more to pre-AIDS male heterosexual responsibility than simply keeping a barrier between my semen and the body of the woman in whom I would otherwise have left it until I was having sex regularly with a woman I thought I was falling in love with–we were each in our early 20s and using only condoms–and I realized I did not know what she would do, or even what she thought she would do, if she became pregnant. Condoms, after all, do fail. I was as certain as I could be that I did not want to become a father, but I was also certain that the ultimate choice of what to do if she did become pregnant was hers. So, if a condom did fail, it suddenly occurred to me, and she decided not to have an abortion, I would be a father whether I wanted to or not. I knew I’d do my best to live up to the responsibilities that fatherhood would bring with it, but I did not think my relationship with that woman would survive. Not only would I have resented her for having made the decision that made me a father, but I did not yet know if the love I was beginning to feel for her was, as they say, a love that would last, and having to be parents to a child–forget whether or not we would have, or could have, gotten married–was not the circumstance under which I wanted to find out.

I will not retell here the story of what happened when I tried to talk to my girlfriend about my concerns, except to say that I was completely unprepared for her to tell me she had no idea what she would do if she got pregnant. It wasn’t that I expected her to know with 100% certainty what action she would take, or that I was looking for some kind of contractual agreement that would insulate me if she at first said she would have an abortion and then changed her mind; nor was I thinking that the only answer acceptable to me was the one I hoped she would give, i.e., that she would have an abortion. What I wanted, first and foremost, was that we should talk, openly and honestly, and then, once each of us knew where the other stood, we could make a decision about what we should do in response. It had never entered my mind, though, that the person who would be pregnant if pregnancy happened would even think about starting to have sex without some sense of what she would do.

Given that my girlfriend had not thought about this, or at the very least was unwilling to tell me what she thought about this, I did not see how we could continue having sex, or, to be more precise, how I could continue having sex, knowing first that our fucking put me at risk of becoming an unwilling father and, second, that if I did become an unwilling father, it would probably mean the end of our relationship. I’d been very happy with the sex we were having before we started fucking; I assumed my girlfriend felt the same way; and I saw nothing wrong with rolling things back to our pre-intercourse days until we were able to talk about this. I wanted to be with her, plain and simple, and that desire far outweighed for me the pleasures of putting my latex-covered penis in her vagina. So, more or less–at my insistence, not hers–we stopped fucking.

That “more or less,” of course, is important. Sometimes I was the one who initiated the sex we had, and sometimes she was; and I honestly don’t remember how many times “sometimes” actually means, but I am sure it was not a lot, at least not relative to how often we’d been fucking before we had this conversation. I also remember nothing of what we said to each other after these instances of “falling off the wagon,” though I am pretty sure that neither of us reproached the other. I do remember, though, that after each of those times I would tell myself it was the last one, and that I was disappointed in myself when that proved not to be the case.

Eventually–I don’t remember how much time passed exactly–my girlfriend told me she’d decided that if she got pregnant she would have an abortion, and we started having intercourse regularly again. Years later, however, in the fourth or fifth year of our relationship, in one of those let’s-talk-about-our-history-together conversations, she told me that she’d lied to me, that she’d always known she would not have an abortion if she got pregnant, and that she’d thought my plan had been to withhold intercourse as a way of pressuring her into having sex with no strings attached. She’d only said she would have an abortion, she explained, because she’d been convinced I was going to leave her if she did not eventually give me what she thought I wanted. She then went on to tell me that she’d realized a while back that she’d been wrong, that I had in fact been sincere in everything I told her, even if I had not always practiced what I’d been preaching. Indeed, given my behavior (I was not then, and I am not now, particularly proud of the “more or less” at the end of the paragraph before last) it’s hard to blame her for thinking the way she did. It didn’t, and doesn’t matter that I was not the only one who initiated the fucking we did when we were supposed to be abstaining. Every time I allowed it to happen, I was acting like the manipulative hypocrite she initially thought I was.

My girlfriend was right about one thing, though. I really wanted to mean what I said when I told her that it was more important to me not to put our relationship unnecessarily at risk than it was for me to have intercourse with her, and I really wanted to mean it when I said that stepping back from the fucking we were doing would not diminish either the pleasure or the meaningfulness of the sex we had. I was not a man who saw fucking as a way of accumulating notches on my belt; I did not, or at least I thought I did not, feel the connection between fucking and manhood that so many of my friends seemed to feel, whether they were out getting laid as often as they could or involved in a serious relationship. Sex, I thought I believed, was simply sex, a way of touching, of giving and taking pleasure in my own body and the body of my lover; and while genital fucking might be one aspect of that pleasure, it certainly wasn’t the only, or even the main way in which that pleasure could be shared. This, at least, was what I wanted my perspective on sex to be. Yet it very clearly was not, for I had been perfectly willing to put at risk a relationship I thought might develop into a real future so that I could fuck the woman I was in that relationship with. It didn’t matter who initiated it or that it was always consensual. It didn’t matter that when we did fuck it was a very rare exception to the rule of abstinence I had wanted us to follow; and , perhaps most important, in these terms, it didn’t matter that I wore a condom each and every time we did it.

I lost my virginity when I was sixteen with the eighteen-year-old girl who lived on the first floor of the building next to my grandmother’s. As soon as our relationship started to become physical—and this was my first sexual relationship ever—I asked her if she was a virgin. She told me yes. I told her I was as well and that I wanted to stay that way. My position had nothing to do with morals. I knew myself, and I knew that I was not ready for the level of intimacy or the risk of unwanted pregnancy that intercourse represented. She told me that she felt the same way, and so our physical relationship consisted of all the things you can do without losing your virginity. One time, however, as she was making love to me, she climbed on top of me, and by the time I understood what was happening, I was inside her and both the power of the physical sensation, which was overwhelming, and my own confusion, which was overwhelming as well, made it impossible for me to find a place within myself from which to tell her to stop or to push her off me.

I did not like how empty I felt when we were finished, and I told her so. I had thought–assuming we’d decided that we wanted to be each other’s first–that we would plan the loss of our virginities, and so I figured that the sex had happened because we’d each, separately, gotten carried away in the moment. I knew that nothing in the way I’d behaved would have signified to her anything other than my enthusiastic participation, so I was not trying to accuse her of anything. Still, I was disappointed that my first experience of intercourse was one I had not wanted to take place. I told her this as well, assuming that since she too was a virgin, she would at least understand how I felt, even if she did not feel quite the same way. What I wanted, in other words, was to talk about what had happened, to make sense of it in a way that would bridge the gap that, to me at least, had opened between us. My friend, however, responded in a way that shut that possibility down pretty much completely. If I hadn’t wanted to have sex, she told me, I should have told her to stop. Besides, who did I think I was kidding? I was no different from any other guy. The only reason I’d said I didn’t want to have sex was that I was afraid I wouldn’t know how to do it right.

At that point, I began to wonder if she’d told me the truth about her own virginity. When I asked her, she said that she’d lied about being a virgin because she knew that just like every other guy I would want to think I was her first. She’d lost her virginity a couple of years earlier, she told me, when two guys from the neighborhood got her drunk and fucked her a couple of times each in a single night. Knowing what I know now about rape and sexual assault, I realize she might very well have been telling me the truth. At the time, though, I was so angry, not because she wasn’t a virgin–I didn’t give a shit about that–but because she’d lied to me, that I didn’t believe her. Her story felt more like either a play for my sympathy or an attempt to claim a kind of moral authority of suffering that would her put beyond critique. In any event, we broke up.

In the years that followed, I told this story to people that I knew and their reaction was surprisingly similar to my ex-girlfriend’s. Not only could they not fathom that I hadn’t wanted to have sex–one girl that I told soon after it happened kept congratulating me no matter how many times I told her that I did not feel congratulations were in order–but they found what I said about being confused and overwhelmed by the sensation to be unbelievable, and they accused me of trying to rationalize away my own responsibility. (Remarkably, there are people my own age who have that same response now, as if they really believe a boy of sixteen, whose entire experience of intercourse to that point consisted of pictures that he saw in magazines, would respond to a woman’s slipping his penis inside her with the composure of someone who’d been having sex for some time.) When I was in my junior year of college, though–which would make it around 1983–I told my story to a woman who looked at me when I was finished and said, “She date-raped you.”

Largely because the idea of a woman raping a man was so alien to me, I did not want to call what had happened rape, but this woman kept insisting: just because I didn’t say no didn’t mean I said yes; my girlfriend had not respected my boundaries; she had taken advantage of my ignorance and inexperience; and, to top it all off, she’d tried to blame it all on me. Eventually, I began to see things the way my friend on campus was telling me I should see them, and I started to think of myself as a date-rape survivor, which fit very neatly into another part of what was going on inside me: I was just beginning to accept, and to accept that I needed to come to terms with, the fact that I’d been sexually abused twice when I was a kid. So seeing what happened when I lost my virginity as date rape, recognizing that a woman could exploit me sexually no differently than a man, felt to me exactly right.

It took a long time before I started to question whether that woman in college was right to characterize my first sexual experience as date rape, and what motivated my reconsideration were the questions people asked me when they read what I’d been writing about the experience. They wanted to know why I didn’t make more explicit the implicit characterization of my girlfriend as a predator. That seemed right to me. If she’d raped me, then she was a predator and not to call her one was not only to be dishonest with myself; it was to collaborate in my own victimization. Yet every time I tried to write it that way, I failed. Because the truth that she was not a predator. Yes, she violated my boundaries; yes, she was manipulative and deceiving; but I don’t think she was trying to prey on me. Certainly, she was not a threat to me in the way that the men who molested me were, and so I could not honestly say that I’d survived my experience with her in the way that I had very obviously survived my experience with those men. Rather, I think my girlfriend was struggling, at least in part, with the question of how to be sexual with me, to show me her desire, to give me the benefit of her sexual experience, in a way that would not make her look “loose and easy;” and she wanted also, I think, to be respectful of what she understood to be the typical adolescent male stance towards sex. So she “gave me” what she was sure I really wanted, saving me from the embarrassment of admitting that I didn’t know what I was doing.

That she was clumsy in trying to navigate her way through all these issues is clear, and the result was that my trust and my boundaries were violated. At no time, however, did I feel that I was to her a conquest of any sort, not as the stereotypical notch on her bedpost, not as a victim on whom she’d chosen to prey; and so to suggest that what she did was at all analogous to what the men who molested me did, or what men and women who rape and/or otherwise sexually abuse their victims do, seems to me to misrepresent all of those experiences. It fails to distinguish between out-and-out predation and what happens when the social script you are used to following, that you have been taught you are supposed to follow, goes awry.

I sometimes wish I could talk again with the woman from my college who convinced me I was date-raped, not just because I would like to tell her that I think she did me a disservice, but because I would be interested to know if, like me, she sees thing differently today than she did back then.