feminist blogs

If you’re a fan of Rumi, this new anthology, on the poetry sections of which I collaborated with primary author John Moyne, is one you will want to get. A Bird In The Garden Of Angels is also a wonderful introduction to Rumi for those new to his work, or those who may know of him but don’t know much about him. Containing essays by Moyne on both Rumi’s life and Sufism, A Bird In The Garden Of Angels is further divided into five sections, one for each of the genres of poetry and prose that Rumi worked in. Some parts of each section have been translated into English for the first time; some of the poems were originally translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks, but appear in this volume in new versions. You can order the book from Mazda Publishers’ website or any online bookstore. (It’s also on sale at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!) If you want to read some samples from the book, visit my website.

Come join Persian Arts Festival as we celebrate the publication of Roger Sedarat’s first book of poems, Dear Regime, which won the 2007 Ohio University Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Dear Regime has been praised by writers such as David Lehman, Kimiko Hahn and Nahid Rachlin, who has written that it is “a stunning collection of poems that vividly captures all aspects of Iranian culture.” Roger Sedarat is a professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

When & Where

Wednesday, 1/16/2008
6:00-8:00 PM
The Bowery Poetry Club (click for location and directions)
308 Bowery @ Bleecker Street
$12 cover buys one drink

Information
www.persianartsfestival.org

To sign up for the open reading, send an email to PAF’s Literary Arts Director, Richard Jeffrey Newman: poetry@persianartsfestival.org

Shab-e She’r at the Bowery Poetry Club will run from 6-8 PM on the third Wednesday of the month through May 2008.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

I watch my wife as she snuggles and kisses and playfully fondles our son’s body–he is two–eliciting from him giggles of delight, and I wonder how he experiences the attention she pays to his penis. Not that there’s even the hint of anything inappropriate in the way she touches him, and not that I have any fear about her crossing the line into inappropriateness, but so much of adult sexuality, especially adult male sexuality, is focused on and in our genitals, and so unthinkingly do we impose the norms and values of adult sexuality on the eroticism of children–which we fear but do not want to admit that we fear–that it’s almost impossible not to see in my wife’s playing with our son the shadow of what it would mean if she did cross the line. As Rosalind Miles suggests in Love, Sex, Death and the Making of the Male, however, appropriateness–which is so often a matter of culture anyway–may be entirely beside the point. A mother’s touch on her son’s genitals, she writes, with the understanding that she’s talking about something other than an act of cleansing or instruction in personal hygiene, “does not merely awaken the male sense of self, but locates it, ensuring that for the rest of his life his penis incorporates his essence and identity: that he is his penis” (38)

I watch my wife and my son, and I think how easy it is to believe that Miles is right. My son plays a game, for example, in which he sits naked on my wife’s face, clearly a strategy for getting his penis as close to her mouth as possible, and there have been times when he has asked openly for her to kiss him there. Then I remember, though, that she also pays a great deal of attention to, and that he asks her regularly to kiss and snuggle, other parts of his body as well–feet, belly, neck, butt, ears, hands and more–and I have to wonder if he actually makes, at any level of his consciousness, the distinction that Miles insists he does between his penis and those other parts of his body.

To be fair, though, Miles is talking about a kind of touching that has a lot more in common with adult lovemaking than the play my wife and son engage in, and about boys older than my son who receive a “stroking, petting or playing with the child’s genitals [that] has the effect of harnessing all his restless energy, focusing it on [his mother or mother figure] and soothing his aggression, irritability or distress” (35). Miles describes this practice under the harem system, when boys sometimes remained in the harem with their mothers until they were as old as twelve, and during the British colonial rule in India, when children were cared for by native female servants known as ayah or amah, and she quotes a Brigadier James Faulder, who recounts how his Nanny Phillips used to “put Peter to bed” that way (36-7)–a practice that, whatever else it may be about, is clearly something other than the simple expression of a parent’s delight in her or his child’s physical presence.

I watch my wife playing with my son, and I envy the uninhibited familiarity they enjoy. For while I kiss and snuggle and fondle him in much the way she does, I generally avoid his penis. Not that I’m squeamish. When it comes to changing his diaper or washing him in the bath, I have no problem handling or otherwise paying attention to his genitals, but the idea of kissing or snuggling or fondling him there inevitably conjures for me the images and feelings of my own sexual abuse, and those feelings bleed over into, or undergird, or intensify–I’m not quite sure how to characterize the structure of this relationship–the cringe I feel in spite of myself of how wrong it would be for me, a man, to be playful like that around his genitals.

I won’t say that the kind of latent homophobia it’s almost impossible not to have in this culture plays no role in this cringe, but when I imagine myself with a daughter, somehow the cringe gets stronger; and while I would like to say I could set this cringe aside, or at least do so more easily, if it weren’t for the way they become entwined with the echoes of my abuse, I am not so sure that is true, because the fear the echoes and the cringe give rise to in me is the same, i.e., that if I were to play with my son the way my wife does it would, by definition, mean I had crossed the line that my abusers–you haven’t heard about the second one yet–crossed with me.

Intellectually, of course, I know this is not the case, that even taking into account the different relationship my wife has with our son’s body because she carried him inside herself, because she pushed him out of herself and into the world, there is no essential difference between my touch and hers, no reason why my touch would cross the line I am talking about just because it comes from me, while her touch does not. Emotionally, however, it’s a different story. One legacy that child sexual abuse often leaves to its survivors is a difficulty in distinguishing between sexualized and non-sexualized touching, both when the touch is received and when the touch is given. Even now, more than thirty years after the old man in my building took me up to his apartment, and more than twenty years after the second man–about whom I will tell you in the next section or two–did what he did to me, recognizing that distinction in the behavior of others towards me, as well as in my own process of deciding whether or not to touch someone, often takes a conscious effort that the people around me, judging by the ease with which they exchange touches of friendship and obviously non-sexualized affection, do not seem to have to make.

Outside of practical necessity, in other words, neither the idea nor the act of touching my son’s genitals is ever innocent for me, is ever simply about my taking joy in his physical presence in the world, about my teaching him to take that joy through the pleasure of my touch; and even when I try to imagine myself as someone who was not sexually abused as a child, and even when I imagine myself with an infant, or one- or two-year-old daughter–to remove the specter of homophobia (though the effect on me of this imagining is not so different from when I do it in terms of my son)–the idea of tickling or gently kissing her vagina, just because she is beautiful, just because I want her to feel from the world that I represent for her that she, all of her, every single inch of her flesh, is beautiful and loved, fills some part of me that I wish I could disown with revulsion; and it is revulsion not because that tickle or that kiss would, by definition, be incest; it is revulsion because the idea that a father should touch his daughter (or his son) in that way triggers the warning system that I have internalized–that I would suspect most of us have–about the dangers of male sexuality. Or, perhaps more accurately, about how potentially dangerous men are because we are sexual.

Not that this warning system exists without reason, and not that it is terribly effective in preventing sexual violence of any kind–though it is perhaps more effective then it was when I was first molested–and not that the warning system itself is not part of the social and cultural structuring of a predatory and violent male sexuality as both normal and natural, but if I can talk for the moment just about how it makes me feel that I can trigger this warning system in myself simply by thinking of my child, if I have given you any sense of the double bind I feel caught in precisely because I have survived the predatory and violent male sexuality I just mentioned, what I would like to tell you is that it makes me deeply, deeply sad. Angry too, but mostly, pervasively, sad. Because it means I am, no, I have been–my son is now nine, and the kind of touching I am talking about here would be now quite inappropriate–reticent with him in ways I wish I had not been; because I do not believe my reticence did not register with him, though I of course have no idea what lesson he took from it.

I do take comfort, though, that my son has the beginnings of the language and the desire to talk about what it means to live in this male flesh we have in common. For in language, at least, I know I can touch him without the corrupting shame of my own abuse; with language I can give him the words and concepts that will help him envision and, I hope, live ways of being male and sexual that are not simply not predatory and violent, but that stand in opposition to violence and predation; because it has been in language, through language, that I have been able to render myself, at last, unashamed.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

It’s funny how memory works. When I wrote before that I could not identify at all with Walter’s fantasy about fucking a woman to death, I was referring to my own inability to imagine myself into, to imagine into myself, whatever went on inside him that resulted in his fantasy. I glossed over completely a sexual experience I had when I was an undergraduate that, while not resembling Walter’s imagined experience in the least, should nonetheless have come immediately to mind. 

I’ll call her Vanessa. We knew each other from I-don’t-remember-which class but I do remember that it was on the pretext of talking about this class that we stepped away from the crowd into an out-of-the-way corner of her dorm lobby, which was where the party was being held. We were both drunk, both relatively new to the college—I as a first semester sophomore; she as a returning older student—and it was she who pointed the corner out, nudging me ahead of her so that I was standing against one wall, while she stood in front of me, leaning against the other wall with her arm, a pose no doubt very familiar to any woman who has had a man come on to her by trying to cordon her off.

I wish I could remember what she said while we stood there, because instead of talking about the class we had in common, she started feeding me such stereotypically male lines that even through the fog my drinking had pulled down around my mind–I was not wasted, but I’d drunk enough that I was happily and absurdly illogical in my thinking and talking–I was amused at how gender-role reversed the situation appeared to be. Then we were making out. In my memory there is no transition, no clear picture of who made the first move, though if you asked me to lay odds, I’d say they were in favor of her having been the one to get things started. Not only had I never been the one to make the first move–this happened not long after my encounter with Maria–but I recall thinking to myself that I was not all that interested in Vanessa physically, except for the fact that she was almost as tall as I was, and once we started kissing, I enjoyed very much being able to do so without bending down.

 

I have been home, laid up with a severe case of gout, and so I have had the time to work on this more than in the recent past. I have been gratified, really gratified, by the responses. Thank you.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

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

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

“Yes,” I answered, more because I couldn’t imagine saying no than because I’d ever really thought about it. “Why?”

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

“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask her how she felt about hers, she leaned forward and asked her question even more emphatically, “You know, are you truly satisfied with every part of your body?”

A small edge of anger sharpened my voice, “What are you talking about?”

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

Finally, I understood, and I felt a little foolish for not having caught on sooner, but it had never occurred to me that a woman might actually ask this question. I had, as I imagine most young men do at one time or another, taken a ruler to my penis to see how big it was; and I would be lying if I said I did not think about how I might compare to other men or wonder if what I had heard about the relationship between penis size and sexual prowess and attractiveness to women were true; but so far the only girlfriend who’d ever seen me completely naked had been Jennifer, and while she had told me a story about a guy she’d been with whose penis had been so small that she laughed when she saw it, something she deeply regretted, she had never said anything to me about how big, or small, I was.

So Maria’s question, once I understood what it meant, not only took me by surprise; it also confused me. Looking back, I can smile thinking that perhaps the question was an honest one that she had asked at precisely the wrong moment. At the time, however, what I felt was a shift in the subtext of what was happening between us from the mutuality of friendship and what might come next to the adversarial stance of performer and critic. Anything I said–yes, no, maybe, let’s find out–felt like it would be a picking up of the gauntlet she’d thrown down, which I wasn’t interested in doing. On the other hand, to say nothing felt like it would be to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her, so I decided to buy time by turning the tables. “I don’t know. Do you measure up?”

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

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

When I went home at the end of the semester, I asked the only woman I could think to ask about what had happened between Maria and myself, my mother. This may seem strange to some people, but I’ve always been able to talk with my mother about sex, and I figured I could count on her to give me a straight answer. I was wrong.

“The size of a man’s ego,” my mother told me after I had finished my story, “can be measured by the size of his penis.” To illustrate her point, she related a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insistent, she grew more and more annoyed until, finally, having had enough, loudly, so that all the people around them could hear, she offered him the following challenge. If he had a “baseball bat” between his legs, she’d be his for the night. If he didn’t, he should just leave her alone. The man protested that he’d “never had any complaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t…enough said.

Needless to say, the man walked away.

“Only small men,” my mother’s one suggested that this was her final word on the subject, “say that size doesn’t matter.”

I don’t remember anything else about that conversation, except that I understood her story to have been a cautionary tale, her point being that I should not become like the man in the bar. How precisely that point related to my failed evening with Maria was unclear, nor, at least as far as I remember, did my mother do anything to try to make it clear. Now, of course, I can see both in my mother’s story itself, and in the fact that she thought it was an appropriate answer to my question about what had happened with Maria, her own anger at men, and I know enough about my mother’s life to know that this anger is justified, more than justified in fact. I did not know this back then, however; nor did I know it five or so year earlier, when I was sixteen, and she and I were sitting after dinner, either Passover or Thanksgiving, at the dining room table in my grandmother’s apartment and I am telling her about the one and only time I remember my father trying to talk to me about sex, which had happened earlier that day.

We were walking from the restaurant where he’d taken me for lunch to the subway where I would catch the train to my grandmother’s. He put his arm around my shoulder, leaned his head in towards mine and asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I told him no, which was a lie.

“Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dating, you’re going to run into situations you won’t know how to handle.” He moved a few steps ahead, turned to face me, searched my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talking about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”

“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the subject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my virginity, but knowing that he didn’t know–even though my first experience of intercourse had not been at all a positive one–and realizing how easy it had been to deceive him, made me feel superior, and it was this feeling of superiority that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. I did not have a good relationship with my father at the time. In fact, I saw him as something of a buffoon, and laughing at his buffoonery–my mother shared this image of him–was one of the ways she and I bonded. This time, however, instead of engendering mutual laughter at my father’s ineptitude, my story opened up a divide between me and my mother that I had never felt before.

“Next time,” my mother was laughing–but the smile on her face was a thin line of contempt, and when she leans forward to tap the polished nail of her right index finger in rhythmic emphasis on the wooden surface of the dining room table, her eyes smolder–”Next time, tell your father you don’t have such problems. Tell him you wear a steel jockstrap. Besides, what does he think he’s going to teach you anyway. You probably know more than he does already.” She laughs again, and I laugh with her, though I am laughing more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny. Something in her tone, something in the meaning of what she said, made me very uneasy, though I could not name what it was.

///

Fast forward about fifteen years or so. I am in my early thirties and sitting with my father in a very fancy steakhouse in New York’s financial district. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other since my brother’s funeral about ten year earlier, and we are seeing each other only because I have sought my father out. I want answers to questions I have had for a very long time about my parents, about myself, about why my father never tried to get in touch with me and more. We talk for a very long time, and I learn a lot that I did not know, but two pieces of what I learned are especially relevant here. First, I learned that my parents got married because my mother was pregnant with me. My father said that he approached her with the idea of getting an abortion, but she said no. I don’t know why she said no, but this was 1961, before Roe v. Wade, and so it may have been simply that she was afraid of the risks involved in getting an illegal abortion. Whatever her reasons, she and my father decided, once abortion had been ruled out, to get married. They didn’t really love each other, and so, especially knowing them as I do now, I did not find it at all surprising when my father told me that my mother decided she wanted a divorce just a couple of years after I was born.

The second thing I learned came in response to my asking why my father thought my mother was still so angry at him, even though they had been divorced for nearly thirty years. I once tried to ask my mother the same question. This is the conversation we had, as I recorded it in my journal later that day. In response to my asking why she was still so angry at my father, my mother said, “I’m not angry at him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I think I’m more angry at myself.”

“Why?”

“For talking myself into marrying him in the first place.”

“Why did you marry him?”

“I though I was in love.”

“You thought?”

“Well, I convinced myself…”

“And?”

“And that’s why I married him.”

“Why’d you get divorced?”

“He bothered me.”

“He bothered you?”

“He annoyed me.”

“In what way?”

“He couldn’t hold up his end of a conversation.”

“What do you mean?”

“He always talked in circles.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he would talk about the same thing over and over again, constantly repeating himself, circling back over the same idea like a vulture waiting to descend on a carcass. Then you’d point him in another direction, and he’d do the same thing with that topic. It was infuriating.”

“What kind of a father was he?” It was a question I’d never asked before.

“I don’t think he was much of a father at all, either before or after the divorce.”

“Okay, but what kind of a father was he?”

My mother paused to think, “Well, he did change your diapers; I have to give him that. And he played with you guys—”

I reminded her that I’d seen the pictures of him feeding me and suggest that, at least as a father, it didn’t sound like he was too bad.

“But I was always the disciplinarian,” she told me, pausing again and sighing, “I guess I just didn’t have much respect for him.”

When I ask my father the same question, he tells me about how, not long after he’d moved out of our apartment–which is ironically just a couple of blocks from where I live now–but before their divorce was final, he called my mother to ask if he could come over and talk, to see if they could work things out. She said okay, but once he got there, everything went wrong. He would not go into the details of what happened, though. All he would say was, “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Even when I pressed him to tell me what he meant, all he would do was repeat those words. “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “And, you know, Richard, your mother was the kind of woman who could goad a guy into it.”

Clearly, in other words, whether it was rape or some other form of assault, my father did some sort of violence to my mother. When he told me that, a lot of things began to fall into place, not only her comment about the steel jockstrap, with its allusion to the idea of a chastity belt, but other things my mother used to say to me as well.

If you look quickly at a picture of my father when he was younger, and if you didn’t already know you were looking at him, you might think you were looking at me. We look that much alike, and the resemblance made my mother very uncomfortable. “Grow your beard,” she started telling me almost as soon as hair appeared on my face, “You remind me too much of your father.” Even when I was well into my late twenties and early thirties, my mother sometimes has difficulty with my clean-shaven appearance. Once she even threatened—her tone was joking of course—to exclude me from a family portrait she was planning unless I grew my beard back. I didn’t; the portrait never materialized.

Now, I of course don’t know if the portrait really never materialized because I didn’t grow my beard back, but it is in my memory a telling coincidence that represents the stance my mother, as a parent and as a woman, took towards me, as a child and as a man (or a boy becoming a man), throughout most of the early years of my life: She did not want me to grow up to be like my father, not only in terms of the character traits she found so objectionable in him, but in terms of my body as well. Once I hit puberty, I was, I was becoming, I would eventually be, physically, sexually, a man, a man who looked very much like his father. She did not want to face me across the gender gap my growing up would inevitably open up between us. A man was what I had no choice but to become, and yet a man was precisely what my mother did not want me to be.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

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

At the center of Walter’s narrative, which takes place far in the future, is a very powerful drug lord whose organization has been infiltrated by a top female narcotics agent posing as a prostitute. When the dealer’s lover, who is also a prostitute in his stable, learns that the operation has been compromised, she tells him immediately. The dealer conceives a plan that uses his lover to expose the spy, who is then tortured slowly to death. To express his gratitude, the dealer takes his lover to be, giving her, in Walter’s words, “the literal fuck of her life, pounding away until she was no longer breathing.” The story ends with a description of the lavish funeral the dealer gives her.

When Walter finishes reading, he looks around the circle with a sarcastic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent; no one except me is willing to meet his eyes, but I am hoping that one of his classmates will speak first, condemning what he’s written not in the voice of authority–which my voice inevitably will be–but in the voice of his peers. A minute passes in silence before it becomes clear that his fellow students don’t intend to respond, and so I call on a few students by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they it’s not worth responding to. To me, though, a response feels absolutely necessary. Walter, like all the other students in the class, is just out of high school. I do not want to let pass what seems to me to be real teachable moment, and so I ask Walter if he really believes that fucking a woman to death could be an expression of gratitude.

“Absolutely,” he says, without a hint of irony in his voice. “For the woman it’s the ultimate fulfillment, and for the man it’s the ultimate proof.”

“Of what?” I ask him.

“Of manhood.” His tone indicates that he’s surprised I even have to ask. “Women would buy tickets and stand in line to be with a man powerful enough to fuck them like that.” He says these words with a conviction I at first can’t think how to counter, but then I wonder aloud if he would include his girlfriend or his future wife in that line of women.

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

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

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

I take a different tack, asking him if he’s ever killed anything other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he realizes that he’s talking about using his own body, his penis specifically, as a murder weapon.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

So I ask if he makes a distinction between the sex he would have for pleasure–presumably with a woman he loves–and the power he says he would like to experience using sex to kill. Walter looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Power,” he says, “is pleasure.”

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

“No,” is all I can think to say.

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

Since it’s even more clear now than it was during class that Walter is less interested in really engaging the ideas he is espousing than in “outing” me as “one of the boys,” I decide that monosyllabic answers are the best way to deal with him. “No,” I say again.

Walter waits a few seconds for me to say more. When I don’t, he mutters something under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathetic and excuse, and he walks out, and that’s the lest I see or hear of him until I get my final roster with a W for withdrawal next to his name.

///

The encounter I have just described took place more than fifteen years ago. In the several years immediately following my discussion with Walter, I often shared what he’d said with my friends and colleagues, male and female, and I always found it interesting that their responses fell, for the most part, along the same lines as my students’ responses did. On the one hand were those who dismissed Walter as “crazy,” whatever they meant by that term (and some suggested that he really ought to be institutionalized), and, on the other hand, there were those who saw him as not worth the energy it would to respond to him in the first place. The ease with which these responses were almost always given, however, always left me a little uncomfortable, because it seemed–and still seems–to me that each of those answers too easily dismisses the question of how Walter came to feel the way he did in favor of a very glib understanding of who he must be based on what he said. Yet it is precisely the question of how that haunted me most, and that I think continues to be something men don’t talk about enough, not because I think answering it lets Walter off the hook, but because the interior experience Walter claimed to have /desire of his own genitals, of my genitals too, as a weapon feels as inaccessible to me as the interior experience of biological femaleness.

///

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

The woman’s letter describes a rape. She didn’t present it as anything else–except to make clear that it was motivated by revenge–and she never implied that the man enjoyed what she and her friend did to him. Nonetheless, my sexual imagination was drawn to the story. For months, for years afterward, I fantasized about women tying me to a bed and creating in my flesh an arousal so all-encompassing that I too would be willing to beg for release. Yet no matter how hard I tried to imagine a conclusion other than the one in the letter, I always ended up the victim of some version of the revenge the writer and her friend took. What I most identified with in this story, I think, what led me always away from the scenario I began with of trust in my imagined lovers and the pleasure they wanted to give me, was the man’s experience of having the pleasures of his body turned against him, for I knew I could be shamed in that way as well, that my body was always the potential source of my own defeat.

///

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

///

The story Walter wrote can be understood as a kind of pre-emptive strike against the fear of women expressed in this scene, as well as in my response to the Penthouse letter I described above. This understanding is not the same thing, however, as knowing how Walter and I–or at least I, since I cannot speak for Walter–came to feel this fear in the first place, and I’m focusing here on the question of how rather than why because it seems to me that why has already been answered, authoritatively and at length, by the women’s movement: Men fear the power of women’s freed, sexual and otherwise, because the power of women’s freedom, sexual and otherwise, represents the undoing of male dominant power and privilege, with the corresponding collapse of the myth of male invulnerability and the manhood men are expected to achieve in order to perpetuate that illusion.

Acknowledging this fear, obviously, is not the same thing as validating the culture of male dominance that produces it. At the same time, however, not to acknowledge the emotional validity to men of that culture’s existence is to miss what I think is a central question that has to be asked, that men have to ask of ourselves, if we want not to learn not to be afraid: When you consider that pain, humiliation and/or subjugation are almost always the consequences for a man who has failed in his manhood, is it any wonder that so many of us strive to use our bodies so that they can never be used against us?

///

A colleague with whom I used to have lunch on a regular basis would occasionally bring her three-year-old son along. Usually, John was a very animated little boy, asking questions, making a mess, and doing in general what three year old boys do to maintain themselves as the focus of attention. On this particular afternoon, however, John sat next to his mother in absolute silence. Both of his hands were bandaged because of a fall he’d taken earlier in the day, and he was still in pain, which made it difficult for him to hold the small pieces his mother cut for him from the pizza we’d just ordered for lunch. From time to time, when the look of frustration on her son’s face became especially acute, my friend would stop our conversation, pick up a small square of food and hold it to his mouth, not continuing with what she’d been saying until he’d chewed and swallowed the whole thing. When we were done, and John stood up so his mother could put his coat on, he held his engauzed palms out to her, silently asking for comfort. My friend squatted in front of her son and asked in a voice filled with empathy, “What’s the matter John? Does it hurt?” When John nodded his head, she stroked his cheek with her fingers and said, “I know sweetie, but you’re a man, right? You can take it.” John set his mouth in a firm, thin line, and he again moved his head up and down. Then his mother helped him slip his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, zipped him up and motioned to me that we were ready to leave.

As we walked out, I thought of all the countless times, and all the different painful and humiliating ways in which I was, in which John would be, in which boys routinely are, asked or told, implicitly or explicitly, by both men and women, boys and girls, “to take it.” I’m not being melodramatic here. I have no doubt that my friend said what she said without even thinking about it, and I don’t want to blow out of proportion this one clearly minor appeal to her son’s incipient manliness. The fact is, however, that she could’ve helped her son understand that we cannot always expect people to comfort us when we are in pain without putting his manhood at stake. Or, more to the point, she could have given him a hug without making any comment at all. (At the time this happened, I did not have a child; now that I do, well can I imagine that she might have been tired of a day’s worth of comforting him, and all she wanted was a little break.) That she did not, that even in a situation as insignificant as this one, John’s manhood became an issue, however small, indicates how deeply and unselfconsciously, perhaps even unwillingly, my friend valued the line separating the men from the boys.

Another example: A good friend told me that when her son was eleven she responded to his failing grades by explaining that when he got older he would have to support a family, just like his father, so he’d better start learning responsibility now. “All his boyish innocence,” she said, ” seemed to drain right out of him. Everything was homework, homework, homework. He doesn’t even play with his toys anymore. I wanted to improve his grades, not turn him into a little man.”

No doubt, and hopefully, as he realized just how far off the adulthood his mother had threatened him with really was, this boy eventually went back to being a kid just like any other kid. Indeed, my point here is not that these two interactions in and of themselves represent some permanent harm done to this boys, but rather that the interactions themselves represent only one small part of the manhood training boys receive and that each boy’s response, even in such relatively minor situations, corresponded perfectly to the manhood ideal: he sucked it up and showed that he could “take it.”

In Love, Sex, Death and the Making of the Male, Rosalind Miles points out that the old saying “boys will be boys” can be read not only as it usually is, a statement of resignation in the face of inevitability, but also as an imperative: Boys will be boys. The degree to which this second reading is the more accurate one becomes fully evident when you look at the consequences of not “being a boy.” Ask any man, and if he’s honest enough to tell you, he will have at least one story, and probably more than one, of how he was hurt when he was a child for not being aggressive enough, athletic enough, stoic enough, sexually objectifying of girls enough, sexually powerful enough, competitive enough, loyal enough to his buddies and so on. The hurt the man tells you about may have been physical, emotional or both; the particular story he tells you may involve something relatively minor, as in the cases of the two boys I just told you about, or something deeply serious and even life threatening, like my friend who was sexually assaulted and raped by boys he’d through were his friends just because he was the weakest and least masculine among them.

Yet despite the radical distance we usually assumes separates a victim/survivor from her or his victimizers, there is one aspect of his rape that my friend and those raped him have in common, that all boys and men in our culture have in common: their ideas of themselves as men–and my friend’s friend’s behavior was nothing if it was not about their ideas of themselves as men–are a direct a result of their confrontation with the violence and aggression considered to be the normal, natural and necessary context in which manhood is formed. None of us can escape this. We may choose to embrace the violence or reject it; we may find some way of accommodating ourselves to it, or we may devote our lives to eliminating it, but there is now way we can avoid confronting it. This confrontation takes place so pervasively throughout our lives–how do I respond to the posturing of the male student who is challenging me about nor accepting his late paper, or to the neighbor whose threatening body language belies the polite tone of his voice as he argues with me about who saw the parking spot first, or to my son’s insistence that he wants a “boy’s only’ birthday party–that the question of how or why boys come to value manhood so highly is dwarfed by the question Miles asks, “[H]ow do they avoid it?” (58)

 

If you’re in New York, or will be Wednesday of next week, come join Persian Arts Festival as we revive the tradition of Shab-e She’r, A Night of Persian Poetry, at the Bowery Poetry Club. Yours truly will be hosting. Our featured reader, acclaimed Iranian American novelist Nahid Rachlin, will read from her new memoir, Persian Girls. An open mic will follow. All are invited to read, in Persian and/or English, either their own work or the work of a favorite Iranian/Persian writer. All work that is read, however, should relate to Iran, Iranians outside of Iran or Iranian/Persian culture. To sign up for the open reading, send an email to PAF’s Literary Arts Director, Richard Jeffrey Newman: poetry@persianartsfestival.org.

When & Where

Wednesday, 12/19/2007
6:00-8:00 PM
The Bowery Poetry Club (click for location and directions)
308 Bowery @ Bleecker Street
$12 cover buys one drink

Information
www.persianartsfestival.org

Shab-e She’r at the Bowery Poetry Club will run from 6-8 PM on the third Wednesday of the month through May 2008.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

The next words I want to give you are not mine:

During the course of the Independent Study work I did on personal essays this semester and when I was in Professor Newman’s advanced composition class last semester, I found my voice, [which] ha[d] been silenced for many years […] Now I find myself in a situation where I want to say what my new voice has been saying for a while now, but I’m a bit afraid. This is all very new to me—sharing my work with an audience, allowing someone other than myself to listen to my words.

The essay that I’m going to read to you is very personal. Writing the essay has helped me come to terms with certain things that have happened to me in my life. What I’m going to say may shock some of you and may even disturb some of you, but I’m in the business of writing the truth.

Cassandra read that passage during the annual Independent Study Colloquium at the college where I teach, a forum in which all students who do independent studies in a given year are required to present their work in order to receive college credit for it. As she spoke, tears came to my eyes. I knew what her essay was about, and I knew how hard it had been for her to write it in the first place, much less gather the courage to read it publicly, and I was deeply moved, the way any teacher would be, to hear a student speak about their work together the way Cassandra had just spoken about ours. I was also crying, however, because in the process of helping Cassandra to find her voice, I’d given voice to something in myself that I too had “silenced for many years,” and it felt good to be letting that silence go.

This part of my story, though, begins not with Cassandra, and not in the independent study we did together, but with Esther, one of Cassandra’s classmates in the Advanced Composition class I’d taught the previous semester. The central question I’d used to frame my syllabus and the assignments I asked my students to do had been What do you care about enough to write about? Esther made what she cared about very clear from the start. She brought her progressive and feminist politics into class discussion without hesitation, and she peppered me in almost every class with questions about writing that bespoke a level of passion and commitment to the craft that few students bring with them to college. It was Esther who first approached me with the idea of doing an independent study. She wanted to be a writer, she said, a writer whose words could change the world–and those were her exact words–and she let me know that, as much as she was looking for instruction, she was looking perhaps even more for a role model. A few weeks later, when she handed me the first draft of the essay that would eventually become the one she read at the Independent Study Colloquium, I had to decide just how much of a role model I was willing to be.

Esther’s essay dealt with the sexual abuse she’d survived as a child and how she had shaped her ideas about motherhood–she had three children–in response to that experience. Like any draft, the piece was full of holes, but because I too am a survivor of child sexual abuse, and because I had struggled for many years, and was in many ways still struggling, to learn how to write about had happened to me, I knew that simply focusing on the mechanics of making the words work and/or providing Esther with model essays by women who had written successfully about this topic, would not be enough. The difficulties Esther was having in saying what she wanted to say were as much emotional and psychological as they were writerly: the shame of revealing what had previously been hidden; the question of whether she really had the courage to make such a revelation; worrying about how her family, especially her mother, would react; worrying whether anyone would even care about what had happened to her; and, most importantly to her, at least in terms of  why she was in my class, wondering whether she was talented enough to write in a way that persuade anyone else that they should care.

This is a bit awkward for me, but people have responded so positively to the “My Daughter’s Vagina” series–which I will get back to as soon as my work schedule permits–that what I want to ask will not seem unjustifiably self-serving.  I have a book of poems out called The Silence Of Men. (The link will take you to the publications page on my web site, from which you can click to read the Foreword to the book by Yusef Komunyakaa and some sample poems.) The poems in the book take on questions of gender, sexuality, sex and masculinity–or at least I think they do–similar to the ones raised in “My Daughter’s Vagina.” In response to this, Elizabeth Wood, the woman who blogs at Sex In The Public Square and who founded the community web site by the same name has offered to feature a review of The Silence Of Men on the Sex In The Public Square web site. It needs to be, however, a review that explicitly takes on the gender and sexuality aspects of the poems, and since those are issues central to this blog, I thought I would put out a call here to see if anyone might be interested in writing this review. I am not looking for a puff-piece about how wonderful the book is; Alas seems to me a place where there might be a reviewer who would be sympathetic to the questions, etc. that I am dealing with, while also giving the book a rigorous and critical read. If anyone is interested, please go to the contact page on my web site and fill out the form so I can send you a copy of the book. (I don’t mind sending out one or two review copies, but please understand that I can’t afford send more than that. The copies come from me, not the publisher.) By way of introducing the book, and perhaps whetting some appetites, I’d like to share with you the title poem. If you’d like to buy the book, it is available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other online bookselling sites, though–if you can afford the extra couple of bucks it’ll cost to pay full price for the book ($16), I would urge you to buy it from the distributor, UPNE, which not only helps promote small, university and other independent presses, but also helps my publisher, CavanKerry Press, a small, New Jersey-based press that is working very hard to publish really beautifully produced and important books of poetry. Anyway, here’s the title poem:

The Silence Of Men

A man I’ve never dreamed before walks
into my apartment and sits in the green
chair where I do my writing. He carries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he places silently on the floor.
The phallus begins to waltz to music
I cannot hear, its scrotum a skirt;
its testicles, legs cut off at the knees.

I want to know why this disfigured
manhood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, deflating
in short spasms like an old man coughing,
spreads itself in a pool of shallow blood.
The silence between us is the silence of men.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

“Are you a virgin?” I”d been trying to ask Jennifer this question almost from the moment our relationship had become physical.

She looked surprised, but not–as I had feared–offended. “Are you?” she asked back.

“Yes.”

“So am I,” she said, “and I want to stay that way.”

“Me too!” I laughed out loud with relief.

Jennifer tilted her head back and looked at me with a gleam in her eye. “Do you trust me”

“Yes,” I said, and she undid the circle my arms made around her, took me by the hand, and led me through the quiet of a midnight snow to the far end of the yard behind the buildings where we lived. We climbed into a large fountain that hadn’t been used in years, the walls of which were high enough that you couldn’t see us once we sat down and, oblivious to the cold, tasted at each other’s lips while the snow continued to fall around us.

Jennifer climbed into my lap and unzipped my jacket. She was two years older than I was, eighteen to my sixteen, but almost half my size, and she fit neatly inside the front of my parks, which I zipped half-way up behind her. We sat like that for a few minutes, letting the heat between us build, and then Beth’s breath, warm and sudden, was in my ear. “Do you trust me?” she whispered.

When I nodded my head, she told me to unzip my jacket. Then she pushed me till I was flat on my back, knelt between my legs, undid my pants, and made love to me, slowly, with her mouth. The pleasure–it was my first time–seemed to fuse my flesh to hers, and for those moments I felt like were both me and we were both her, and I was open and vulnerable, grateful and shy, and I worried that maybe Jennifer hadn’t liked what she saw when she drew me out of myself, but her eyes were tender when she was done, and she held me in her hand, warming me against the cool night air till I grew soft. Then, the smell and taste of me still on her lips, she kissed my mouth and said, “You know, that took a lot of courage.”

“Yes,” I answered, choosing to hear in her words that courage had been required of both of us. She smiled and climbed on top of me. I wrapped my parka around her one more time, and we stayed like that until it was too cold to be outside any longer.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said as we got and kissed goodbye, and, just lie in a movie, I stood in the falling snow and watched her walk back towards her building until the white curtain of flakes closed behind her. Then I too went home to bed.

A month or so later, Jennifer visited me on a night my mother wasn’t home and I was babysitting my two younger sisters. She arrived just minutes after they’d gone to bed, and so we sat in the living room listening to music and talking, waiting until we were sure they were sleeping. Then we moved into my bedroom, where on thing led to our usual other, but this time, after I had made love to her, when Jennifer rolled me onto my back, instead of taking me in her mouth, as she usually did, she climbed on top of me and began to slide her vagina up and down the length of my erection. The warmth and wetness of coming so close to “going all the way” was tantalizing, but I still didn’t want actually to do it, and I assumed, since Jennifer had not told me otherwise, that she still felt the same way as well.

At one point, my hips jerked involuntarily, and since the bed was very narrow, I grabbed Jennifer’s waist to make sure she didn’t fall. In response, she swiveled her own hips and, without warning, the tip of my penis slipped inside her, and all I was was pleasure and flesh, flesh and pleasure, alive to the slightest nuance of her touch, and there was no way I was going to separate from that, and so I moved myself slowly into her.

Much too soon, it was over. Smiling, Jennifer asked me how I felt.

“A little strange,” I said. “It was fun, but I didn’t really want to go that far.”

“Then you should’ve said no!” An edge was creeping into her voice. “You should’ve made me stop.”

“I’m not sure what it was–maybe the tone of her voice; maybe the sudden hardness in her eyes–but as soon as the words left her mouth, I began to suspect she’d lied to me about being a virgin.

“I thought you’d want to think that you were my first,” she said when I got the courage to ask her some minutes later. “That’s what most guys want anyway.” She hadn’t told me the truth, she explained, because she was afraid I’d think she was a slut. The truth: She’d lost her virginity a few years before, when two men she barely knew got her drunk and fucked her several times each in a single night. “And don’t bullshit me! You’re no different from any other guy. You wanted to do that. You’re just not man enough to admit it!”

Given what I know now about rape, it wouldn’t surprise me if Jennifer’s story were indeed true, but at the time I was so angry and so hurt that I couldn’t imagine she was doing anything other than trying to make her deception it something I might accept and forgive. I didn’t care that she wasn’t a virgin. I cared that she hadn’t believed me when I said I wanted to stay one, and I cared that she’d lied to me about herself. I felt manipulated and dirty. How could I trust her after this?

I told Jennifer I didn’t want to see her anymore, and I didn’t care that she didn’t believe me when I said it had nothing to do with her virginity or how she said it had been taken from her. I hoped sincerely that when she left my house that night, she’d be walking out of my life for good. Some months later, though–I don’t remember who called whom–she ended up at my house one afternoon when my mother and sisters weren’t home. We were sitting on my bed talking, trying to find a way to patch things up, and then were were kissing, and then our clothes were off, and it was as if I’d never broken up with her; but then the urge came over me to be inside her again, and I climbed between her legs, clumsy with my own inexperience, and despite the fact that Jennifer tried to help me, what I had expected to be as smooth and effortless as it had been the first time became a struggle that embarrassed me, and I began to loathe myself for wanting her, this girl whom I realized I still didn’t think I could trust, and yet the humiliation of giving up, of not being able to fuck her, of not being able to get back from her what she’d taken from me–and I do not know why I felt that fucking her would accomplish that, but I did–was more than I thought I could bear and so I kept poking and pushing until, at last, I entered her.

I went into Jennifer that afternoon with anger and shame. There was no pleasure in it; it was over almost before it started; and the smile of cynical triumph I saw on her face when I pulled back made me feel like I might never want to have sex again–though of course I have. Sometimes it was great, transcendent even. Other times, it was simply fun; others, mundane; and sometimes it came close to being as bad as it was that last time with Jennifer; and it is a lesson I have learned over and over again that the quality of our erotic relationships, if not of our lives as a whole, often depends on our willingness to roll with the sexual punches thrown our way, hurting, being hurt, forgiving, understanding, learning, hoping, and then, against all odds, making the effort once more to unearth the life-sustaining connection that lies waiting in the bodies of those who offer themselves to us, and that we in turn offer them, using our own bodies to make them welcome.

And so I have a wife and a son. And because sex is also always about so much more, is so much more, than what happens when two people make love, I also have had two female students whose trust in me, if only because of what they were writing about, was sexual by definition. For it matters that I was a man and that they were willing not merely to tell about the abuse they suffered at the hands of men, but also to let me help them find the language with which they could give that experience back to themselves, and to their readers, as something they chose. It matters because, just like sex, teaching and learning are about desire and the fulfillment of desire. It might be true that the trust my students placed in me–and, to be honest, that I placed in them when I decided to share my experiences–inverts the trust that lovers bring to the bed they share, i.e., we trusted each other not to sexualize our relationship. Nonetheless, it is a mistake to think  that our relationship was not of the body. For to help those two women to understand themselves was, by definition, to help them understand how to live in their bodies.