Richard Jeffrey Newman

Trig­ger warn­ing for sex­ual violence:

I am a fem­i­nist because fem­i­nism is the only pol­i­tics I know that com­mits itself explic­itly to a world with­out sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion and the per­sonal, cul­tural, socioe­co­nomic and polit­i­cal vio­lence — mostly, but not only against women — that comes from it;

I am a fem­i­nist because it was in fem­i­nism that I first found the lan­guage to name as abuse what the man who lived on the sec­ond floor of my build­ing did to my thirteen-year-old self when he forced his penis into my mouth, pushed my voice back down into my throat and filled me with a silence that made any words I spoke after­wards feel simul­ta­ne­ously untrue and unreal;

I am a fem­i­nist because that silence left me voice­less when the sec­ond man who pre­sumed that my body was his to do with as he pleased did pre­cisely that;

I am a fem­i­nist because, like both those men, I was raised in a cul­ture where men are taught that it is our right sex­u­ally to objec­tify those who are weaker or are per­ceived as “less than” we are, start­ing but not end­ing with women;

I am a fem­i­nist because I do not want that right, because I never want to stand on the same side as my abusers;

I am a fem­i­nist because, if I am hon­est with myself, I can­not deny that I am, as a man, always and already on that side, because to be hon­est with myself is to rec­og­nize the changes that “my side” needs to make;

And so, since fem­i­nism is the only pol­i­tics I know that com­mits itself explic­itly to a world with­out sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion and the per­sonal, cul­tural, socioe­co­nomic and polit­i­cal vio­lence that comes from it — mostly, but not only against women—I am a fem­i­nist.

I don’t remem­ber where I had to go, but I was happy to be tak­ing the sub­way. The route I took is a route I’ve been tak­ing for more than thirty years now, going back to when I was a teenager and I would come on my own to visit my grand­par­ents, who lived in the build­ing next to the one where I live now, or to work at the Jew­ish Cen­ter of Jack­son Heights cater­ing hall, which was owned by Max Weber, a good friend of the fam­ily. He gave me my first job as a bus­boy when I was prob­a­bly younger than was legal, and I con­tin­ued work­ing for him well into my teens, even­tu­ally becom­ing a waiter and (under­age) assis­tant bar­tender. The Jew­ish Cen­ter, which at that time was on 82^nd Street just south of 34^th Avenue, was very famil­iar to me. I went to nurs­ery school there, when Miss Muriel was my teacher, and I took my first Hebrew School classes there; it was where I learned to pray. My grand­par­ents were very active and so a lot of peo­ple knew who I was; I was Bob and Ann’s old­est grandson.

I think I made fifty dol­lars the first night I worked for Max. I remem­ber because my grand­mother was shocked that he had paid me that much, while my mother was thrilled that I now had money I could use to buy some of my own clothes. I don’t remem­ber if that’s what I spent my money on, but I know that our finan­cial sit­u­a­tion was such that it would have been a big help if I had.

Usu­ally, when I had to work late on a Sat­ur­day night, I would sleep at my grandmother’s and go home the next day, and the route I walked to the sub­way always took me past what was then the Earle The­ater on 37^th Road between 73^rd and 74^th Streets. My mother tells me that when she was a kid grow­ing up in Jack­son Heights, the Earle was called the Eagle, and it was an art movie house where she went to see all the lat­est for­eign films. When I was a teenager, though, it was a porn house, and I remem­ber walk­ing past it time and time again wish­ing I had the courage to buy a ticket. I never did, and then, accord­ing to The New York Times, in 1995 — by then it was show­ing gay male porn only — after health inspec­tors shut the Earle down, the the­ater was bought by three Pak­istani busi­ness­men and turned into a venue for the lat­est films to come out of Bol­ly­wood. This was not sur­pris­ing given the “Lit­tle India” that is located on 73^rd and 74^th Streets between 37^th and Roo­sevelt Avenues. I never went to see any of the Bol­ly­wood movies that played there either, and now I’m kind of sorry that I didn’t because the Earle/Eagle has gone out of busi­ness, done in, as I under­stand it, by a film pro­duc­tion strike in Mumbai.

There’s no way to stop change, I know, but this the­ater, even though I never set foot inside, is part of my inter­nal map of Jack­son Heights, part of how my mem­ory struc­tures the mean­ing of this town I live in, and so it makes me sad to know that it’s been replaced by a food court.

Not that there’s any­thing wrong with food courts, but this area is already chock full of Indian restau­rants, Pak­istani restau­rants, Tibetan and Nepalese restau­rants, Desi Hal­lal Chi­nese restau­rants; and right across Roo­sevelt Avenue there is a very good Korean restau­rant next door to a Viet­namese place – not to men­tion the more stan­dard fare: pizza places, Dunkin Donuts and more. So it’s not like there’s a paucity of places for peo­ple to grab a bite to eat, but even if there were, the clos­ing of the Earle removes from the 37^th Road the last land­mark con­nect­ing this place to who I was when I as younger.

Just a cou­ple of store­fronts down from the Earle/Eagle was The Betsy Ross — which was later called The Magic Touch — one of sev­eral gay bars that were in the neigh­bor­hood at the time. (There was also The Love Boat and Billy the Kid, which I vaguely remem­ber walk­ing past at the time, but I have no mem­ory if they were also on 37^th Road or if they were some­where else in the neigh­bor­hood.) I didn’t know this — there was no way I would’ve known this at the time — but 37^th Road was appar­ently known at the time as “Vase­line Alley.” I don’t remem­ber which of the store­fronts to the right of the the­ater was The Betsy Ross, but this is what the block looked like just before the Jack­son Heights Food Court mar­quis went up. (The image is from cin​e​ma​trea​sures​.org and was uploaded there by KenRoe.)

The Betsy Ross was the first gay bar I ever went to; indeed, I think it was the first bar I ever went to period, since I was under­age — I was six­teen; the drink­ing age at the time was eigh­teen — and the peo­ple I hung out with at home just didn’t go to bars.

I ended up there because John — at least I think I remem­ber that was his name — the newly hired bar­tender at the cater­ing hall, whom I’d been assigned to help at the party that night, asked me if I wanted to go. I was ask­ing him what his job was dur­ing the day.

“Well,” he said with a smile, “I used to be a cop, but they kicked me off the force.”

“Why?”

“They had their rea­sons,” was all he would say, though I asked him one or two more times. Then he changed the sub­ject, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What’s her name?”

“Kristin.”

“How long have you been going out?”

“About six months.”

“At six­teen years old,” he responded, “that must seem like an awfully long time.”

I agreed that it did.

When it was time to leave, Michael said, “If you want to talk some more, I know some­where we can go.”

We walked out of the Jew­ish Cen­ter, and he led me to The Betsy Ross, where we took a booth on the far side of the dance floor. I know we started to talk about Beth, and I know that another man joined us in the con­ver­sa­tion, but I don’t remem­ber any­thing from the con­ver­sa­tion. What I do remem­ber is the two men who got up to dance, weav­ing their bod­ies together far more smoothly and erot­i­cally than any I’d ever seen a man and woman dance together. It made me think of water mov­ing into water. John reached across the table and tapped me on the shoul­der, “Richard, you real­ize you’re in a gay bar, right?”

“I do now,” I said.

“And that’s okay?”

“Sure.”

“I knew you’d be cool about it,” he said, and then he reached out and put his palm flat against my right cheek in a touch that was so soft and gen­tle I caught my breath a lit­tle. “I’m not a cop any­more,” he smiled sadly, “because I’m gay and I refused to hide it.”

I don’t remem­ber what I said in response or even if I felt par­tic­u­larly sad or angry for him, though I have no doubt that I thought it was unfair. I was much too inter­ested in watch­ing the dancers, who must’ve seen me star­ing because they waved as they saun­tered by when the dance was fin­ished, and then John raised his glass to them and smiled, and I did too. Then, at some point, I told John and the other man we’d been talk­ing to that I needed to go home. We said good­bye and I don’t think I ever saw either of them again.

I am really happy that The Good Men Project has cho­sen to pub­lish a new of poem of mine called “For My Son, A Kind of Prayer.” Too often, I think sites like that ignore the poten­tial for poetry to speak truth to the cul­tural con­ver­sa­tions we have about all kinds of issues, in this case gen­der, sex­ual vio­lence, het­ero­sex­ual male priv­i­lege and other related issues. At least I hope that’s what this poem does. Here’s the begin­ning – and please be aware that the poem does con­tain graphic descrip­tions of sex­ual vio­lence against both men and women:

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.

In his recently pub­lished book, Kayak Morn­ing, Roger Rosen­blatt writes:

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.

Trig­ger warn­ing for descrip­tions of sex­ual abuse.

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.

I have not posted a Frag­ments of Evolv­ing Man­hood piece on a long while, mostly because my atten­tion has been focused else­where, but I have been work­ing these past cou­ple of weeks on an essay that is pretty impor­tant to me and since it fits in the “Frag­ments” series, I thought I’d share some of it. I’d love to be able to call the essay “The ‘Cunt Poem’ Chal­lenge,” and I will prob­a­bly send it out with that title, but I am bet­ting not a few edi­tors will have a hard time with it. In any event, here is the excerpt. Please be aware as you read that the first para­graph is the intro­duc­tion, which I think you need for con­text, while the sec­ond and third para­graphs are from later on in the essay.

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

///

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

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

It’s been a long time since I’ve read Adri­enne Rich’s essay, Com­pul­sory Het­ero­sex­u­al­ity and Les­bian Exis­tence, but I’ve been think­ing about it a lot lately, mostly because I’ve been talk­ing to the stu­dent in my class from South Asia whose par­ents are try­ing des­per­ately to marry her off. She came to my office yes­ter­day and I ended up talk­ing to her for more than an hour, miss­ing the class I was sup­posed to be teach­ing, because she started using expres­sions like maybe I should just end it all when talk­ing about her anger and frus­tra­tion and rage at feel­ing so utterly help­less in her sit­u­a­tion. When I asked her what she meant, she said she was think­ing of just sur­ren­der­ing to her par­ents and doing what they want her to do, that maybe mar­riage – any mar­riage, to any man – was really the only way she would ever get out from under her par­ents’, but mostly her father’s, rule. Still, I thought it bet­ter to keep her talk­ing than to leave her to go teach my class.

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

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

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

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

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

I have been away from any really sub­stan­tive blog­ging, or work on my other writ­ing projects, since my grand­mother died because I’ve been busy catch­ing up on every­thing that accu­mu­lated on my desk, work-related and oth­er­wise, while I was deal­ing with her death. I had hoped to start doing some writ­ing this past week­end, but we found out on Fri­day that the admin­is­tra­tion at the col­lege where I teach fired all 66 full-time fac­ulty on tem­po­rary lines, which is the equiv­a­lent of almost 10% of full-timers. Nine of those lines have since been restored, but, as you can imag­ine, the news was demor­al­iz­ing in the extreme, and so it will take me till the end of this week – tomor­row, actu­ally – to fin­ish with my grad­ing and all, and I will be able to get back to my own writ­ing next week. Mean­while, I am excited by the fact that the Aus­tralian online pub­li­ca­tion The Scav­enger has cho­sen to repub­lish my essay Why I Am a Fem­i­nist Man, which orig­i­nally came out on The Take­back.

From Why I Love My Straight Boyfriend « Thought Cat­a­log:

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

It’s really worth read­ing the whole thing.

Con­sider your­self warned: the image below the fold is def­i­nitely not safe for work. I found it on Library Vixen’s tum­blr, who must’ve found it on Art​Facts​.net. The paint­ing is called, sim­ply, “Penis;” the artist is named Ellen Alt­fest, and I think it is breath­tak­ingly beautiful.

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

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