1.

We arrived in Tehran very early in the morning on July 30th at the nearly brand-spanking new Imam Khomeini Airport, where we stood on line to have our visas checked by a very sour-looking woman, who did a double-take when she saw my son’s name on his passport and asked whether he was, in fact, really a boy. Many of the people we met in Iran responded to my son’s long hair in this way. Bazaar vendors, shop owners, people who stopped to talk to us on the street, almost every taxi driver who chatted with us while he drive–all assumed, until we told them otherwise, that my son was a girl. After a while, this assumption seemed odd to me, because while it was not very common to see young men with hair as long as my son wears his, neither was it such a rarity that it attracted stares–at least as far as I could tell. Not that Iran’s very strict and often violently enforced gender guidelines have somehow been widened to make uncontested room for long hair on men. Pictures posted on the web last year (here, here and here) showed members of the Gasht-e Ershad, Iran’s morality police–the name means, literally, something like “Guide towards Enlightenment”–beating young men up for having long hair and other appearance-related offenses. It just struck me that so many of the people we met, who did not seem to bat an eye at long hair on college-aged or older men, found it so remarkable that my son should wear his hair as long as he does. (Here is a video of someone telling the story of his sister’s arrest by the Gasht-e Ershad when he and his family went back to Iran to visit for the first time in 10 years; it’s not about long hair per se, but it will give you a sense of how the Gasht-e Ershad works. I will write in another post about my wife’s experience having to dress appropriately and about my experience/impression of being in a country where women have to cover themselves the way they do in Iran, because while it may be true that men have to be careful of the way they dress and look, the restrictions placed on women are far more stringent, and the consequences if women cross the line can be far more severe).

Imam Khomeini Airport was also where we had our first, very brief and very minor, and thankfully only, taste of how potentially complicated Iranian bureaucracy can be. When the woman checking our visas ran my wife’s information through the system, it popped up that, the last time she had been in Iran, my wife had not paid the airport tax, also called an exit fee, and she was told she would have to pay it before she would be allowed to enter the country. (The Wikipedia article on Khomeini Airport has an explanation of this tax.) Paying the tax, however, turned out to be more complicated than you would think, since the desk to which my wife was first directed turned out not to be the desk where the fee had to be paid. Instead the officers at that desk told my wife she had to go to a bank window somewhere else in the airport, pay the fee and bring back proof of payment for them to clear her records. In reality, I don’t think it took all that long to resolve this issue, but after nearly 14 hours in transit, it seemed to take forever, and while my son and I waited with our luggage for my wife to return from wherever it was in the airport she had been sent, I could not help but think about the horror stories I had read and heard about how difficult the Iranian government’s bureaucracy can be to navigate, especially when more than one office is involved. Eventually, though, my wife appeared, everything in order, and we put our suitcases onto the scanning machine’s conveyor belt, retrieved them at the other end, and walked out to meet the members of my wife’s family who had come to pick us up.

Now that I think about it, though, my wife’s airport tax was the second administrative bullet we had to deal with. The first, far more serious one, which we dodged, was the question asked of my brother-in-law when he went to do his half of the work that applying for my visa required: Why, despite the fact that my wife and I have been married for fifteen years, have we not yet registered our marriage with the Iranian government? As I understand it, marriage registration in Iran is, at least structurally, not so different from obtaining a marriage license here in the States; it’s something you do as a matter of course when you get married. Unlike obtaining a marriage license in the United States, however, because Iran is a theocracy, Iranian marriage registration is not a purely civil matter. Part of what registering does is certify that your marriage is a religiously valid one. I don’t know what this means in practical terms for Iranian Jews, Christians, or the members of any other faith that is practiced in that country, but I do know a little bit about what it means for Muslims because there could have been real consequences for my wife if the question of her marriage came up while she was traveling in Iran and she could not prove that her marriage was registered. Precisely what those consequences might be, I am not sure–I have heard that the authorities could take away her passport and make difficult, if not impossible, to leave Iran–but let me first explain why, despite the fact that my wife has not lived in Iran for almost twenty years, that we were married here in NY and that my wife is a United States citizen, we even had to worry about registering our marriage with a foreign government in the first place.

To begin with, Iran does not consider it a termination of one’s Iranian citizenship when one becomes a citizen of another country. So, in the eyes of the Iranian government, when someone like my wife is in Iran, the fact that she is also a United States citizen is irrelevant when it comes to her liabilities and obligations under Iranian law. The Iranian government will treat her as if she’d never left Iran. When my sister-in-law’s husband, for example, decided some years ago to go back to Iran for the first time since he’d left as a teenager, he had to buy his way out of the military service the Iranian government could still have drafted him into, despite the fact that he had been a US citizen for some time. (Iran has obligatory military service for all men.) Similarly, when my wife’s nephews reach the age when they would have to enlist were they living in Iran, they will probably have to buy out their service as well; since both their parents are Iranian and therefore Iranian citizens, the Iranian government considers the boys to be citizens as well.

When my wife married me, she violated the Islamic prohibition against Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men, a prohibition the Iranian government takes into account on the form one has to use to register a marriage between an Iranian woman and a non-Iranian man: the husband in such a marriage must provide “a certificate of declaration of Islamic faith [...] if the woman is a Muslim.” I got a sense of how seriously some Muslims take this prohibition when a friend told me what happened when she told some religious Muslim friends of hers about my marriage. She wanted to make the point, she said, that it is possible for Jews and Muslims to get along. Her friends, however, reacted by insisting quite seriously that my wife should be stoned. Their argument, according to my friend, was not an emotional one rooted in the way that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is often understood as a proxy for some global, essentialized and therefore inescapable mutual hatred between Jews and Muslims, which is where most of the surprise at the religiously mixed nature of my marriage comes from, but rather a religious one, based on their understanding of the marriage restrictions placed on women within Islam. (A Muslim man, on the other hand, is permitted to marry a non-Muslim woman, as long as she is Christian or Jewish. To be fair, as far as the Iranian government is concerned, it does not matter whether it is the husband or wife who is not Muslim; in each case, the couple must present evidence of having been married within Islam, meaning that the non-Muslim spouse converted. I have heard a couple of different explanations for this double standard, including the fact that religious identity in Islam flows from the father and so his marriage to a non-Muslim does not put the religious legitimacy of his children into question, but whatever other explanations might be offered, it’s hard not to see the double standard as, first and foremost, the result of good ol’ patriarchal values that have been given the veneer of religious legitimacy.)

Please note what I am not saying: I am not saying that my friend’s friends were speaking for all of Islam, that their understanding of Muslim law was correct and can therefore be used as an accurate representation of Muslim beliefs or that what my friend’s friends said represented in any way shape or form the beliefs of any Muslims other than themselves. There are, after all, fanatics within all religious groups, and no one should judge any group by its most extreme members. Imagine, though, if someone who did believe what my friend’s friends believed happened to be the Iranian official who asked to see proof that my wife’s marriage had been registered and she had been unable to provide that proof. (I will leave aside, for the moment, the question of when and why anyone would think to ask in the first place.) I doubt very much that my wife would have been sentenced to stoning, but who knows how that official might have chosen to make life difficult for her, and since Iran is a country where, especially if you are Iranian, you want to do as little as possible to call the authorities’ attention to yourself, my wife and I had decided, when she was pregnant with our son, that it would be better to register our marriage than to chance consequences we could not foresee on some future trip she, or we, might take to her country.

I don’t want to give the impression that the government of Iran makes a concerted effort to police the marriage registrations of mixed couples visiting Iran, because, as far as I know, they don’t, but fully to understand why registering our marriage did not become an issue until my wife became pregnant, you need to recognize that, as long as she could pass as a single woman, no one in an official capacity in Iran would even have thought to ask for her marriage registration, and if they asked if she was married, she could simply have answered no. Thus, in the early years of our marriage, when my wife traveled back to Iran to visit her family, we did not give the issue of registering our marriage a second thought. Once she was pregnant, however, and the possibility of a trip to Iran presented itself–we really thought she was going to go–the fact that our marriage was not registered became a much more pressing issue, since my wife’s body would announce itself as one that, in Iran, needed to be properly married in order to be considered law abiding and legitimate. In other words, my wife’s pregnant belly itself would invite questions about her husband, the father of her child, and since, according to Islam, a wife needs her husband’s permission to travel, we decided it would be prudent for her to have all the proper documents ready just in case someone did ask to see them.

Before we could register our marriage, however, we had to obtain a Muslim marriage certificate, which we did; but because my wife ended up not traveling to Iran at that time, we didn’t take the next step of filing the registration documents with the Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Washington, DC. My wife did travel to Iran with our son after he was born, but we decided to rely on the Muslim marriage certificate as proof that everything was, so to speak, kosher; and, in fact, we didn’t even think about registering our marriage again until I filed my application for a visa so we could travel to Iran to be at my brother-in-law’s wedding this past August. That application took place in two parts: I submitted forms to the Iranian Interests Section here, and my brother-in-law filed papers for me in the appropriate offices in Tehran. The official who reviewed my application there asked my brother-in-law why, especially given the fact that my wife and I have been married for fifteen years, we never registered our marriage. This question touched off a series of phone calls–from my mother-in-law to my wife, from us to the Iranian Interests Section in DC–trying to figure out whether I would be denied a visa on these grounds. As it turned out, though, my visa arrived without a problem and we flew out of John F Kennedy International Airport on July 28th, arriving in Tehran, as I said at the beginning, early in the morning of July 30th. My brother-in-law and his fiancee, my mother-in-law and one of her sisters were at the airport to greet us. After dealing with my wife’s exit fee, we got into the taxis they hired for us and, in what was one of only two completely traffic-free drives through Tehran–the other was also very early in the morning, when we went back to the airport for our flight home–rode the last leg of our journey to the brand new apartment where my brother-in-law lives in the village of Darakeh.

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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

Update: I have decided to take the text of this post down until I have a chance to revise and repost it. The comments I have received–and thank you to all who have posted them–have convinced me that, as I said in comment #19, my words are both conjuring things I do not intend and failing to make distinctions that I do intend, and this weakness in the writing means that what I want to say, the questions I want to ask and explore are not only not getting across, but are being misrepresented. It’s not so much that I think the revision will change the mind of anybody who has posted a critical comment, but that, at least, the criticism will be directed at what I actually mean to say, not the unintended implications of my having said it not as well as I should have. Hopefully, I will have that revision up within the next week or so.

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.

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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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 I hope 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 Jennifer’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 the meaning of 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.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

At eleven, I’m the youngest of eight boys lined up along one row of lockers in the otherwise empty men’s locker room at the swimming pool to which the day camp I am attending takes us every other day. Normally, I’d be changing with boys my own age, but a mix-up back at the camp grounds landed me on the bus with these guys, who are all twelve and thirteen. I turn my back to them to hide the erection that has taken hold of my body and which I am having difficulty fitting into my bathing suit. Despite my best efforts to remain inconspicuous, however, my movements attract the other boys’ attention and one of them sneaks up behind me and looks over my shoulder. “Hey!” his voice  rings out metallically, “look at the size of Newman’s boner!”

The rest of the boys surround me in a tight circle. I stand there unable to move, my body pointing me into the air above the middle of the room, wishing I could vanish, that it would vanish, but no matter how much I will it, the damned thing will not go down.

“What are you, a homo?”

“Other guys’ dicks must turn him on!”

“Wanna suck mine, queer!?”

The taunts continue for what seems like hours, though it is probably only a few minutes, and then the head counselor comes in and ushers us all out to the pool. I can’t believe he didn’t hear what the other boys were saying, but he acts as if he didn’t, barely looking at me as he shows me where the boys in my group have spread their towels.

Later that evening, while I’m getting ready for bed, I stand naked before the full-length mirror inside my door and tuck my penis out of sight between my legs. I’m not trying to imagine myself as a girl, but I am intrigued by the possibility of a body that does not have erections.

///

The first time the old man who lived at the top of the staircase said hello to me, he stopped for a moment as we passed in the courtyard and looked at me as if he’d known me my whole life. I stood there, taking in the warmth of his gaze, wishing as he walked away that I’d said something to make him stay so I could tell him who I was. I was thirteen years old.

Over the next couple of months, a ritual of greeting grew between us. He would smile and say hello first; I would smile, say the same thing back, and then a long silent moment would pass while he looked at me and I stood there, too happily embarrassed to move.

Then, one late summer’s day, after our usual exchange was over, the old man did not keep walking. “When am I going to see you?” he asked.

“Soon!” I answered, figuring he was lonely, like Mrs. Schechtman had been when she lived in the apartment next to his and I used to go sit with her once in a while just to keep her company.

Not too long afterwards, as I was going out to play with my friends, the old man met me at the bottom of the staircase leading to the front door of our building. It’s possible that he’d planned it this way, but I don’t think so; there was no way he could’ve known when I stepped out of my apartment. He was probably just on his way out at the same time I was, and when I reached to turn the knob, he was standing right behind me, holding the door shut with his left forearm. With his right, he maneuvered me face first into the corner near the mailboxes where the door frame met the wall. Covering my body with his own, he ran his hands beneath my shirt and up the legs of my shorts; he groped my chest and belly, squeezed my butt, cupped at my crotch, and all the time, over and over again, he kept asking me that same question, whispering hoarsely into my ear, “When am I going to see you?”

I had no words for what he was doing to me, no training such as young children get now in how to scream no! to scare off an attacker. All I could do was stand there till he was finished. Then I ran. I don’t remember how far or how long or even in which direction, but I ran as if I could leave my skin behind, as if running would turn me into another person. When I finally stopped running, in the small park across the street from the Lutheran Church, where my friends and I sometimes hung out at night, I sat a long time with the knowledge that my running had undone nothing, that my body was still the body he’d touched, and I knew that he would want to touch me again.

I told no one what had happened, and when the old man passed me the next day and said hello, I said hello back the way I always did, pretending not to notice the ironic and conspiratorial twist he added to his smile. A few weeks later, he saw me sitting with my friends in front of our building and asked me to help him upstairs with some packages he had with him. I wanted to say no, but I didn’t know how, not without risking that my refusal would somehow lead my friends to the truth of what he’d done to me. So I took the package he pointed at from his shopping cart–to make it easier, he said, for him to get the cart up the stairs–and followed him to his apartment.

As soon as he’d shut the door of his place behind us, he pushed the cart to the side, took the bag I was holding and dropped it to the floor. The cans at the bottom of the bag landed with a crash that shook the whole apartment.

Snaking his arms around my waist, he undid my belt–all I could do was stand there, frozen to the spot where my feet had stopped moving–and then he unzipped my pants and pushed them down so they fell around my ankles. Then he took me gently by the hand and led me to the couch against the wall, where he sat down. Looking up at me with a wide smile–I have the distinct memory that he’d taken out his two front teeth–his eyes, at what I imagine must have been the fear in mine, grew tender, almost fatherly, “You’ve never had a blowjob before, have you?” When I shook my head no, his voice filled with concern. “But don’t you want me to love you?”

In the silence with which I responded, he took my penis in his hands–I remember thinking that his fingers were like a cage–and he told me how good my penis was, how beautiful and big, and then his own pants were down, I was sitting on the couch, and his own penis, large and purple, hung in front of my face, and his voice came from somewhere above me, urging me to play with it, at least to touch it, and I don’t remember if I did, but I do remember his hand on the back of my neck, and then I see myself walking wordlessly to his front door, unlocking it, closing it behind me, and then I am in my bed, curled in the fetal position, where I stay until my mother calls me for dinner.

The next day, he saw me standing by myself in front of our building and pleaded with me to go upstairs with him again. This time, he promised,would be different. He would move more slowly, be more gentle, but something in me rebelled. I said no, ignoring his further please until he walked away.

He never spoke to me again, and he eventually moved away, and I have no doubt there are other men in this world who had with him when they were boys an experience similar to mine. I remember only once trying to tell someone what he’d done to me. I was sitting outside with my friend Kim when he passed by. He ignored me and nodded hello to her; she nodded in return. When I knew he was out of earshot, I turned to her, tried to fill my voice with everything she’d need to understand what I really meant, and said, “He’s a faggot!”

Kim looked at me in honest confusion, “So what if he’s gay? So what?”

The blank stare I answered her with was as uncomprehending as the silence in which she waited for me to explain myself. I don’t remember being explicitly, actively, homophobic, but everyone knew–or at least I thought everyone knew–that it was only homosexual men who preyed on young boys. Now, of course, I know differently, but to have said anything else at the time would have risked my telling Kim the whole story, and that’s something I would not be ready to do for some time.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read Part 1 and Part 2. (If you haven’t read Part 2, or haven’t read it in a while, you might want to read it before reading Part 3, if only because the last paragraph of Part 2 feeds very specifically into what Part 3 is about. I will also say that Part 3, more so than either 1 or 2, contains material that some people might find disturbing and/or triggering. The issues raised by that material are resolved not in Part 3 itself, but later in the essay. I ask, therefore, for your patience in that regard, and I also ask that you be patient if my response(s) to comments about that material ask you to wait until I get to those later parts of the essay.)

Part 3

Sitting on my bed with her back against the wall, Beth–who’s come to visit during my first year of graduate school–is telling me something that I wish I could remember. Indeed, in the first drafts of this essay, including the one that was published online, I wrote this passage as if I did remember. I had her telling me that she’d decided to study fine art, a decision I’m pretty sure she actually made around the time that what I am about tell you took place; and it may have been that her decision was what we were talking about. Beth had been struggling with how to give what she considered legitimate and purposeful expression to the creativity that was in her for some time, but the fact is that I don’t remember and to let you think that I do would be to create, if not a justification–because justification, while it was the first word that came to mind, is wrong for what I want to say–than a logical explanation for something that I have in been trying unsuccessfully to explain to myself for more than 20 years.

So, Beth is sitting on my bed and talking, but I am suddenly listening from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leaving her mouth no longer coalesce into meaningful units. There is a moment of blankness and then, as if someone else has taken control of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself gett