Now that I’ve knocked Pharyngula a few times, I guess I’ll do a post favoring some good ol’ enlightenment rationalism, based on this study from the BBC.

An oft-touted example of mind over matter is the efficacy of optimism in aiding cancer cures. A good outlook is supposed to equal a cure. “How brave and corageous she was,” we hear of those who pull through. “She struggled and she overcame.”

Sometimes nastier stories drift in of assumptions that people who died from cancer somehow sinned in succumbing. They gave up. They were weak. They failed to fight. They didn’t want to live. They weren’t strong enough.

My mom had such an anecdote a few years ago, to describe the way that her hairdresser’s husband had died. “[My hairdresser] says he gave up, and died a week after that. What a shame. It’s too bad he gave up.”

The appeal of such a narrative is obvious — it gives us a sense that we control our own fates. It gives us a tool — optomism — to hold against insurmountable odds. If we can be positive and uplifting enough, we have a chance against illness. It’s only those who give up that die.

Optomism as medical cure is a secular replacement for prayer as medical cure. For some religious people, it’s a way to talk about the power of prayer in language that’s acceptable to the ears of people who don’t believe in the efficacy of appealing to god for intervention. For areligious people — like my mother — it can be a replacement for prayer, a way of capturing the sense of control that we gain from something like prayer, and applying it to a (mostly) materialist view of the universe.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually work.

The power of the mind has been overestimated when it comes to fighting cancer, US scientists say.
They said they found that a patient’s positive or negative emotional state had no direct bearing on cancer survival or disease progression.

They do suggest that cancer patients continue with therapy and working toward a positive attitude — but they suggest it so that cancer patients can be happier, not as a life-saving measure. From the article, “Lead author Dr James Coyne said: “If cancer patients want psychotherapy or to be in a support group, they should be given the opportunity. There can be lots of emotional and social benefits. But they should not seek such experiences solely on the expectation that they are extending their lives.”

Of course, on one hand, it’s depressing to discover that we can’t cure ourselves through sheer cheerful bloodymindedness. It’s hard to acknowledge that we don’t have control over these things, that our outcomes are determined by factors we can’t affect.

I am reminded of the debates about rape, in which people will go to great lengths to blame the victim. We understand why many men do it, but I’ve always found it insightful when feminists observe that one reason many women will do it, too, is because women want to convince themselves that they have the power not to be raped. That if they are not sluts, that if they don’t drink at the wrong time, or trust the wrong person, or go out at night, or wear a short skirt, they can eliminate the possibility of being attacked.

We know it’s not true with rape, and now we know it’s not true with cancer either: you can’t force yourself to be safe, or be cured. But the silver lining in both situations is the same. If we accept that optimism and ineffective safety measures are not the protection that we want to claim, then we can stop blaming the victim. We can stop suggesting that women invite their own rapes, and we can stop suggesting that people invite their deaths because they don’t try hard enough to maintain a sunny disposition.

Julia Frater, of Cancer Research UK, said: “People with cancer can feel under pressure to cope well with their disease and treatment and to stay on top of things. They are often urged to feel positive.

“These results should reassure them that if they don’t feel like this, it’s okay. Many people do feel worried or low following a diagnosis and this isn’t likely to affect the outcome of their treatment.”

From Melissa at Shakesville:

So there’s this judge. Her name—her name—is Teresa Carr Deni, and she’s a municipal judge in the Philadelphia Municipal Court. And recently, a defendant in her courtroom was accused of raping a prostitute at gunpoint—and inviting three of his friends to rape her, too. It might even have been more, except that when a fifth man arrived and was offered a turn, he asked why the girl was crying and declined to rape her while she wept and his friend pointed a gun at her, instead deciding to help her get dressed and leave.

The thing is, Judge Deni dropped all sex and assault charges at alleged gun-wielding gang-rapist Dominique Gindraw’s preliminary hearing. She decided he should be held on armed robbery for “theft of services.” Not only can prostitutes not be raped, according to Judge Deni, but calling what happened to the 20-year-old victim rape “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”

Words fail me, but the title of Skemono’s post — “Prostitutes aren’t people, after all” — seems to sum it up. But it’s worth mentioning that after being let go by the judge, this man raped another woman (also a prostitute, raped in the same manner) four days later.

But later today I’m still going to try to write a letter: Mike in the comments at Feministe posted a link to the Complaint form for the Pennsylvania Jucidial Conduct Board.

Or you can contact Judge Deni’s office directly (curtsy to Rotten Word).

Echidne writes:

The case also makes me wonder what all the sins are that we collectively assign prostitutes. There is an assumption that prostitutes have somehow consented to be abused and perhaps even murdered and that therefore the society is not responsible for awarding them the same protection other citizens deserve.

See also posts at Group News Blog, Reclusive Leftist, Lawyers Guns and Money, Young Philly Politics, Quizlaw, Anonymous Law Student, Angry Grrl, and Vomit Comet.

From Inside Higher Ed:

While enrolled at Eastern Illinois, Manges says she saw a private counselor off campus to deal with her diagnosis of PTSD — a result of the sexual abuse she experienced from 1999 through 2000, when someone she knew not only abused her but also collected money from other men who did the same.

She was sitting in French history class September 5 when she could feel a flashback coming. Trying to leave but unable to exit the room in time, she collapsed before reaching the hallway.

“I don’t remember what happened because I was disassociating, but what witnesses said, what my professor said, is that I started sobbing uncontrollably, shouting, screaming. I was unresponsive; I was just lying on the floor,” Manges says. […]

In a letter to Manges dated September 17, Eastern Illinois’ assistant director of judicial affairs writes that given Manges’ admission that she violated the two code of conduct standards prohibiting disruptive behavior during the September 5 “incident” (in other words, the in-class flashback), and “the seriousness with which the board viewed this incident, it is their recommendation that you be suspended from the university, effective immediately, for a minimum of an academic year through the Spring Semester, 2008, during which you would be prohibited from being on the campus without prior permission of the vice president for student affairs.” […]

While what Manges says happened at Eastern Illinois may not be common, nor are such experiences uncommon, says Karen Bower, a senior staff attorney at the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. Bower says she routinely (more than once a month) gets calls from students who are forced to leave college for mental health reasons. […]

“We have urged that schools not use disciplinary action for behavior that’s a result of mental illness,” Bower says — echoing Professor Smith’s sentiment that a judicial board hearing didn’t seem like an appropriate venue for addressing his student’s situation. […]

“I think they think it’s objective, but discrimination based on conduct that’s the result of disability is the same as discrimination based on disability,” Bower says. “The use of the disciplinary system as a whole is really a way of removing students from an environment instead of finding out what kinds of supports and services they need to stay in school and be successful.”

When I was in high school, I knew a 19 year old girl named Christina who had lived a sheltered life. Her elder brother died on a plane flight to Mexico when he was 19, so her parents kept her very close to home. She wasn’t allowed to go out late, and she’d never had a date.

Christina was something of a genius. She graduated from high school at 16, and by 19 she was in her final year of college.

At this time, she met a man.

He was 35. He was a sadist. Her parents were frightened of him. They forbade her to continue seeing him. She pretended to agree, but snuck out and continued seeing him anyway. When they caught her, they gave her an ultimatum, hoping to force her to choose them over him.

Instead, she dropped out of school and moved with him to another state where she knew no one.

He forbade her from contacting myself and our group of friends. A youth pastor who was friendly with us repeatedly offered her a safe house; he was the first to be banned from speaking to her. I lost contact quickly. We’d never been close.

Rumors trickled in from the single friend of ours who was still in contact with her. They snuck phone calls when her abuser was at work. They were careful to make sure the contact wasn’t discovered.

He had given her a collar, which she was to wear at all times. When he came home from work, she was to present herself naked for his inspection, on all fours and acting like a dog until he gave her permission to be upright and human again. He would examine her body, and then examine the house. If everything was not as he preferred, he would beat her.

My friend told me, “I asked her to stop telling me about it. He bashes her head into the sink, over and over again. She won’t stop it. She won’t let me help her. I can’t bear to hear her anymore.”

I saw Christina once after the abuse started, when she stumbled back to her home state for a brief vacation, after which she returned to her abuser. She was pained, and tired. Before, she had been mercurial and childish. Now, she flashed between moments of intense childlike pouting, and a kind of hard-used suffering when she would suddenly become still and talk about her life in a halting, labored tone.

I don’t know what happened to her after that. I’ve long since lost the last thread that tied us together. I very much hope that she is alive and safe.

They called their relationship BDSM.

Tonight, I spent some time talking to Myca about BDSM. As he’s mentioned here, he’s a practitioner. He and I have been chatting about the subject, and he’s been kind enough to let me interview him — with some interesting results that I hope to put up on the blog sometime when I feel like I can process the subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

(This guest post is reprinted from Daisy’s Dead Air with Daisy’s kind permission.)

Left: Pfc. LaVena Johnson, photo from Essence

From the blog BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS comes a case that I have heard NOTHING about, which is pretty amazing, news-hound that I am.

Thus, the fact that I didn’t know, makes me instantly suspicious.

Private First Class LaVena Johnson, died near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005. The first woman soldier from Missouri to die while serving in Iraq, she was only nineteen years old.

Dr. John Johnson, Lavena’s father, was initially told by an Army representative, that his daughter “died of self-inflicted, noncombat injuries,” but initially added that it was not a suicide. The subsequent Army investigation reversed this finding and declared LaVena’s death a suicide, a finding refuted by the soldier’s family. In an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dr. Johnson pointed to indications that his daughter had endured a physical struggle before she died - two loose front teeth, a “busted lip” that had to be reconstructed by the funeral home - suggesting that “someone might have punched her in the mouth.”

KMOV (St Louis) eventually aired a story which revealed details not previously made public: Parents question their daughter’s mysterious death in Iraq.

News 4’s Matt Sczesny took a close look at the evidence gathered by the military and asks the question, “was it murder or suicide?”

Among the thousands of graves at Jefferson Barracks cemetery there are stories of bravery, heroism, and proud service.

Among the thousands is the grave of Private Lavena Johnson, whose story is clouded in mystery and according to her parents, marred by murder and cover-up.

Lavena’s father, Dr. John Johnson, has waged his own personal crusade to find out what really happened to his daughter in Iraq on July 19, 2005.

The army ruled her death a suicide, the victim of a gunshot wound to the head.

In documents and autopsy photos obtained by the Johnson family and shared with News 4, more questions are raised than answered.

One strange fact was that Lavena was apparently abused, physically, and the autopsy didn’t address the physical trauma to her body.

Military documents also show no apparent indication of suicide, her company commander wrote that Johnson was clearly happy and healthy physically and emotionally, something her mother knew by a phone conversation the day before she died.

Johnson’s parents also question how their daughter at 5’1”, could handle a 40 inch M-16 to kill herself while sitting.

In fact, a military laboratory even concluded that based on a gunshot residue test, Johnson may not have even handled the weapon.

Additionally, Johnson’s military debit card was never found, even though she used it two hours before her death to buy candy.

No bullet was ever found where she died, and a trail of blood is seen in photos outside the tent. Even stranger, it appears as if someone tried to set her body on fire.

So if it wasn’t a suicide as the Army maintains, then how did Lavena Johnson die?

Based on the autopsy photos, her father believes that she was raped.

The military is unconvinced and consider the case closed.

A Pentagon spokesman says that the case was investigated thoroughly and that there is no evidence to reopen.

News 4 tried for weeks to get the Army to say more about the death of Private Johnson, but they’re only response is that the investigation is closed.

Certainly the documents military investigators have gathered seem to say a lot more.

Johnson’s father is now trying to have her body exhumed at Jefferson Barracks to have an independent autopsy performed.”

From BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS:

[Official]documents provided elements of another scenario altogether:

* Indications of physical abuse that went unremarked by the autopsy
* The absence of psychological indicators of suicidal thoughts; indeed, testimony that LaVena was happy and healthy prior to her death
* Indications, via residue tests, that LaVena may not even have handled the weapon that killed her
* A blood trail outside the tent where Lavena’s body was found
* Indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire

The Army has resisted calls by Dr. Johnson and by KMOV to reopen its investigation.

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! Why haven’t we heard about LaVena?

… it takes moral outrage, family vocalization, and community involvement to the government, to bring to bear upon the Army to find the truth, to tell the truth, to honor the men and women who put on the uniform to serve their country, says alot about the callousness of this country which saw fit to send these young women and men into a war with a country which has done no aggression against America. No huge outcry has yet come to bear in the case of LaVena. There are no loud chorus of voices demanding that the military be held accountable for their actions, or lack thereof in the mishandling of this young woman’s case. Anyone, and everyone, can and should, speak for her. It may seem that the comparision between the cases of LaVena Johnson and Pat Tillman may seem unrelated, but both cases are the same. In both cases, the death of a young soldier in a dangerous place, in an unjustly declared rogue war, was not explained to the families they left behind, the families that gave them up to go halfway around the world to fight a war for oil, to put their lives on the line for those of us here in America. The Army should not be so cold and heartless in how it disregards its soldiers. It is not too much to ask that the Army take into consideration all evidence of this young woman’s death. (The attempt to set her body on fire; the trail of blood found outside of her living area.) That her family has many unanswered questions surrounding her death, and the inept handling of Lavena’s case (judging by the evidence left at the scene of her death )by the military, speaks volumes to military injustice in how it treats, or rather, mistreats its soldiers.

Please do not let this young soldier’s death be in vain. She took it upon herself to serve her country, with honor. Let her be honored by not letting her story fall into silence.

1. Sign the online petition to the Armed Services Committees in Congress asking them to direct the Army to reinvestigate the death of LaVena Johnson.

2. Find your Senator or Representative on the Armed Services Committees list and contact them directly about LaVena. (Thanks to the blogsite, http://www.lavenajohnson.com for outstanding work to keep Lavena in the public’s mind.)

3. For background on Lavena Johnson, please view the KMOV-TV news report from 02.21.07.

Please do your part, and again, thanks so much to BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS for truth-telling in this matter!

BRING THEM HOME NOW!

I’m not going to return to substantive blogging, but I’m going to experiment with doing occasional link posts, and posts that are composed entirely of quotes. Like this post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Update: Some students at CCSU have started their own blog–Take Back the Recorder– in opposition to the paper’s editorial staff. Go show them your support.

Last February we heard the story of a college newspaper in Connecticut that printed an article saying “rape is a magical experience” and “rape only hurts if you fight back.” The author claims he was trying to satirize rape, which he clearly did not achieve. ¹ Well it looks like this bunch is at it again and more emboldened than ever since they managed to survive their last go round. This time, among other offensive diatribes, the Central Connecticut State University newspaper has published a cartoon about urinating on a 14 year old Latina, who is locked in a closet.²

I found out about this debacle from a comment left in the thread on the West Virginia rape and torture case over at Feministing. A commenter named prof/activist provided a link to the PDF copy of the paper. The offending cartoon can be found in its original context if you scroll to page 16, the final page of the PDF file. The cartoon consists of two figures one triangular and the other square. The triangle says that his urine smells like honey after he eats certain cereals, and the square asks if it tastes like urine. Then the triangle says, he doesn’t know he’ll have to ask the Latina girl tied up in the closet. Then, it jumps to the final frame where the square says, “Tell Juanita I said Hola.” The cartoon also has a sentence printed under it that says, “The Recorder Does Not Support the Kidnapping of (and Subsequent Urinating on) Children of Any Age.” I was going to repost the cartoon here, but it’s not worth the bandwidth. You can open the PDF file above to read it.

Students and faculty members, disgusted by the paper’s racist and sexist reputation, protested the cartoon on Friday. The story was covered in the local paper and it received national attention. Here’s a quote from the AP article in the New York Times:

The university’s president vowed on Friday to cut off advertising in the paper, and its critics have planned a protest on Monday on campus to push for reforms, including the ouster of the paper’s editor, Mark Rowan.

“We believe the climate here at Central is one that fosters this kind of behavior,” said Francisco Donis, a psychology professor and president of the university’s Latin American Association, “so we want more systematic changes to create a welcoming environment for everyone to feel safe and secure.”

About 5 percent of the 9,600 undergraduates are Hispanic, according to university figures. The campus is in New Britain, a racially diverse city of 71,000 about 12 miles southwest of Hartford.

Mr. Rowan, 21, was the editor in February, when the newspaper was criticized for publishing a satirical opinion piece titled “Rape Only Hurts if You Fight It.” The satire called sexual assault a “magical experience” that benefits “ugly women.”

The author of the article lost his position at the paper and apologized, but Mr. Rowan was allowed to retain his post.

The university created a task force that recommended providing more training for its student journalists, buying libel insurance and creating a student-run alternative paper or Web site.

Mr. Rowan, who is set to graduate in December, said lingering anger over that controversy was adding to outrage over the cartoon. He said he did not know if he would be asked to resign.

Rowan and his cronies have caused enough trouble for the University, ushering the school into the national spotlight on two separate occasions. It seems clear that Rowan lacks the ability to judge the quality and appropriateness of the paper’s content. Both pieces in question were not only offensive, but they also were of poor quality. Petroski’s rape article didn’t succeed at being satire, and this cartoon didn’t succeed at being funny. In fact, only a person like Ted Bundy would find either of these articles amusing, which makes me wonder if there are some sociopaths running this paper.

Mr. Rowan has shown poor judgment, and has allowed the student newspaper become a bottom feeder with little journalistic integrity. Right now Mr. Rowan holds two journalism related positions. He’s an editor of the CCSU student paper, and he has an internship with the Hartford Advocate, but at the rate he’s going he may never have another position in journalism. How is he going to explain these gaffes to potential employers? Who would want to hire someone, who routinely brings negative attention to their publication? He hasn’t learned his lesson, and that’s going to come back to haunt him in the future. A good editor thinks about getting the story, and getting quality material, not just pushing his political agenda and publishing anything that comes across the desk.

I know the retorts that the student editors will have–We have free speech. We didn’t mean to offend. Lighten up, it’s just a cartoon. You’re being too sensitive. I hear these arguments every time someone engages in offensive behavior like this. Rather than taking responsibility, they try to deflect the criticism by condemning the condemners. At this point, it’s pretty clear, that the University needs to step in and revamp the paper. If the student editors are unwilling to do this themselves, it is incumbent upon the University administration and the majority of students to oust the paper’s editors. This surely doesn’t represent the school, its administrators, and the vast majority of its students.

1. If you want to see real rape satire, go here to Marcella’s site. (back)
2. The writers and editors clearly haven’t learned their lesson. While scrolling through the electronic copy of the paper I found an article written by Justin Kloczko. The primary purpose of the article is to taunt a local reporter who is leaving the New Britain Herald to write for the Hartford Business Journal. The taunts and insults are directed at this reporter because he was one of the people who brought the February rape article to light. The article appears next to a picture that says “Crotch Shots, Nipple Slips, Cellulite Legs! The Recorder is not looking for the above, but is looking for dedicated photographers to cover local and campus events. Contact us at ccsurecorder@gmail.com and make us forget that Britney picture.” (back)

Update: I wrote this post this afternoon before the announcement that prosecutors will not bring hate crimes charges in this case.  I’ll make a more detailed update tomorrow. 

So I guess that some of the people in the West Virginia case have long histories of violence, including killing people. Check this out from the New York Times:

The Brewster family and their trailer has a history of violent crime, the police said.

Mr. Brewster killed his stepfather there when he was 12, the authorities said, and served time at a juvenile correction facility.

In July 1994, Mrs. Brewster shot and killed an 84-year-old woman she was looking after, also in the trailer, according to court records.

Mrs. Brewster, who was charged with first-degree murder, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served six years at a state correctional facility. She was paroled in 2000.

In 2005, two men got into a fight outside the trailer, the police said, ending with a fatal stabbing.

In January, the police were again called to the trailer, where they found a man who had been slashed across his abdomen; the man survived, according to court documents, and Mr. Brewster was a witness in that case.

Also being held in the case of the young woman were Danny J. Combs, 20, who was charged with sexual assault and malicious wounding; George A. Messer, 27, who was charged with assault during the commission of a felony and battery; Karen Burton, 46, who was charged with malicious wounding, battery and assault during the commission of a felony; and her daughter, Alisha Burton, 23, who was charged with assault during the commission of a felony and battery. The four were being held in $100,000 bond each.

The Brewsters were being held pending bond hearings.

The authorities said they were still deciding whether to file additional charges, of hate crimes, against the defendants.

“The whole family is shocked,” a sister of the victim said.

Relatives said the victim has mild learning disabilities but graduated from high school. The relatives would not comment on whether the victim was living at home or had a job.

It would seem to me that the fact that the victim has learning disabilities also makes the release of her name more suspect, and if you watch this video, it does not appear that the victim is in any shape to consent to have her name released to the whole world.

On a side note, clearly these people are dangerous, violent, and disgusting, but they didn’t do this because the are Appalachians, rural whites, or poor whites. They did this because they are criminals, thugs, and racists, so I will not be accepting any comments or commentary like these:

Hillbilly Hell in West Virginia

West Virginia: No Thanks

Mama! Mama! Look At The White Trash!

Six Held In Rape, Stabbing of Woman in WV

Despicable Deeds

I know plenty of hill folks and poor whites, and the vast majority are not at all like these wackos.

Update: The AP, in a rather suspect move, is reporting the victim’s name, which will not be appearing on this site.  They are saying they have permission; however, to me it feels like they are taking advantage of this young woman, who will likely get a bunch of hate mail and death threats from white supremacists.

I’m not sure that I can find words to adequately describe the brutality of this crime.  You can read more details below.  Here’s the initial report:

Authorities are investigating whether a woman who was tortured in a southern West Virginia home for more than a week may have been lured there by a man she met on the Internet.Police were still looking for two people they suspect drove the 23-year-old Charleston woman about 50 miles to the Big Creek home where she was abused, said Logan County Chief Deputy V.K. Dingess.There, according to police, she was beaten, sexually assaulted and humiliated.Logan County Prosecutor Brian Abraham said police are investigating the possible Internet connection into what some are calling one of the most shocking crimes in the county’s recent history.In 30 years of law enforcement, Logan County Sheriff W.E. Hunter said he’s never seen anything like this.It’s “something that would have come out of a horror movie,” he said Tuesday.

Deputies were interviewing the victim Tuesday morning and are scheduled to meet later in the day to discuss the case with Abraham, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office. The officials may decide then whether to file hate crimes charges.

Bill Crowley, spokesman for the FBI in Pittsburgh, confirmed that the agency is looking into possible civil rights violations.

Six Logan County residents, including a mother and son and a mother and daughter, remained in custody Tuesday on $100,000 bonds each. They are charged in the weeklong kidnapping and abuse of the woman.

All six are white. The victim, who was being treated Tuesday at the Charleston Area Medical Center General Hospital, is black.

“Every one of these people who were arrested are no strangers to law enforcement,” Hunter said.

Deputies found the woman Saturday after going to the home in Big Creek to investigate an anonymous tip from someone who had witnessed the abuse, Sgt. Sonya Porter said Tuesday.

One of the suspects, Frankie Brewster, was sitting on the front porch and told deputies she was alone, but moments later the victim limped toward the door, her arms outstretched, saying, “Help me,” the sheriff’s department said in a news release.

Besides being sexually assaulted, the victim had been stabbed four times in the left leg and beaten, Porter said. Both of her eyes were black and blue. The woman’s wounds were inflicted at least a week ago, deputies said.

During her capture, the victim was forced to eat rat and dog feces and drink from the toilet, according to the criminal complaint filed in magistrate court. The woman also had been choked with a cable cord and her hair cut, it alleges.

One of those arrested, Karen Burton, is accused of cutting the woman’s ankle with a knife. She used the N-word in telling the woman she was victimized because she is black, according to the criminal complaint.

Deputies say the woman was also doused with hot water while being sexually assaulted.

“We have all been praying and asking the Lord to take us through this,” the victim’s mother told The Charleston Gazette on Monday. “It’s hard to deal with it. We are very angry. … She will be scarred for a long time.

“She wakes up in the middle of the night screaming, ’Mommy,”’ the mother said. “What’s really bad is that we don’t know everything they did to her. She is crying all the time.” 

Some evidence suggests that the crime was racially motivated.  We’ll have to watch the details as they come out. 

I’m going to retell a story I’ve written about before. A few years back some friends of mine dragged me to a feminist meeting at the house of a woman I didn’t know, although I realised when I got there that I’d seen her around.

Her face was all bruised, she had a broken nose and a black eye. She said it had happened in a play-fight with her boyfriend and that he didn’t know his own strength. She hadn’t left the house since it happened. She wanted to spend the meeting talking about men’s violence against women.

I don’t know about the other women at that meeting, but I knew, with absolute certainty, that there was no play-fight, that it hadn’t been an accident. Everything she did, and said, told me that her relationship was abusive.

I didn’t say anything. None of us said anything. It was a feminist meeting and none of us said anything.

I tried, I wanted to, I spent the evening searching for words and couldn’t find them. Gaps in the conversation came and went, and I left, having said nothing. I knew I was doing the wrong thing, that my silence was wrong, as I was doing it.

What I could have said, what I should have said, was really simple: “Just so you know, I don’t think he should treat you like that. If you ever need anything you can give me a call, here’s my number.”

Please don’t make my mistake. Practice a phrase in your head, have the words ready, use them.

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 getting up from the chair when I’ve been sitting, putting one hand around Beth’s throat, holding her against the wall, and with my other hand slapping her back and forth until she is senseless and bloody. I see myself screaming in her ear, letting her drop to the floor and kicking her in the stomach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.

Unaware that I’ve stopped hearing what she has to say, Beth continues talking, gesturing to emphasize the importance of her words, imploring with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the violence in my mind begins again. Realizing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bathroom. Locking the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. When I’m sure the impulse to lash out has passed, I flush the toilet and go back to the bedroom where, thankfully, Beth notices it’s time for me to go to class, and she tells me she’ll finish later. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, knowing I will need some time alone to try to sort out what has just happened, tell her that I have work to do in the library and therefore won’t be back until just before we’re supposed to go out for dinner.

The afternoon sun is warm on my face, so I decide to walk to class instead of taking the bus. Beth’s decision to become an artist should make me happy. (I know I just wrote that I am not sure this decision is what we were talking about, but it was an issue in our relationship at the time, and since I’ve mentioned it, I don’t want to leave it hanging without at least some explanation.) Not only does it mean that she’s choosing to do what she really wants to do, but it also holds out the promise of a resolution to a tension between us that I had given up being able to do anything about. More than once, Beth has told me she’s afraid I will become more committed to my writing than to her. Now that she has her own art to commit to, I’m hoping she’ll begin to see that the two commitments need not be mutually exclusive.

I’m starting to feel a little better, more in control of myself, but I begin to realize that I will never be able to sit through class. I need somewhere quiet, where I can sit by myself and really think about what happened this morning.

I head to the library.

My idea as I settle into one of the chairs on the second floor is to  write out what I’m feeling in a letter to myself, a strategy I’ve used before when I don’t know what’s going on inside me. As soon as I put my pen to the page, though, what comes out does not begin Dear Richard. Instead, it is the beginning of a poem:

 I want a bearded man, shirtless, in faded jeans,

to come one barefoot night and take me in his mouth.

I don’t know where the words come from, but the shock of recognition when I read them is immediate and frightening, and I know there is a clarity in them that I am not fully able to see. Staring at the page, unable to write another word, I wonder if I’m trying to tell myself that I’m gay and that the problem I have with Beth is that I should be going out with a boy instead. I remember Brian and how we became friends in our senior year of high school, watching a teammate strike out trying too hard to hit the ball over the fence during a gym-class softball game.

“I don’t get it,” Brian said to no one in particular, shaking his head from side to side as the other boy slammed his bat to the ground, threatened to beat the shit out of the pitcher, and stormed off the field as if he’d failed to make a team he’d dedicated his life to making. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?” I asked.

We’d been standing next to each other through most of the class, but Brian looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “What’s the big deal? I mean, it’s not like he’s going to fail for striking out.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Brian’s face lit up as if he were visiting from another country and had at last found someone who could speak his language. Then his eyes narrowed a little, “Yeah, but at least you can hit the ball.” It was a test; he was not much of an athlete.

“So I can hit the ball,” I responded. “So what?”

And we were friends; and we quickly became best friends. Sadly, though, what I remember most about our friendship is the day it began to end. “You’re just different,” he told me. We  were sitting in my room. “I’ve never met anyone like you, and they just can’t accept that.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you before either,” I said, not even bothering to ask him who they were.

“But they’re saying we’re closer than we should be, that we’re not, you know, normal.”

“So? When has either of us ever really cared about what they have to say?”

Brian looked so grateful for these words that I thought he was going to cry, and his eyes did start to grow big with a feeling that welled up in him, but then he looked away and almost whispered, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are closer than we should be.”

I tried to convince him that he was wrong, but it didn’t work. He started–or at least in memory, he started bringing female friends along whenever we went out, and–again, as I remember it–college applications, yearbook committee meetings and other graduation-related work suddenly kept him so busy that he had less and less time to see me. The summer after graduation, while I was working at a sleep-away camp in Massachusetts, we wrote letters, but when I came home, he was gone, off to his freshman year at Cornell University. I probably had his phone number and address, but I don’t think I ever used them, and I don’t remember receiving either mail or phone calls from him. We did try once to reconnect during the winter break of our freshman year, meeting for a drink at one of the bars we’d hung out at when we were still close. He brought his girlfriend, a dark woman I remember sitting silently in the corner of the booth while Brian and I struggled to find things to say to each other. The conversation is lost to me now, but I can still feel the finality of our good-byes, neither of us even pretending we’d try to see each other again.

At the end of the academic year, while I waited on line to register for my sophomore classes, I met the woman who’d sat next to me in twelfth-grade English. “Whatever happened to your friend Brian?” she asked.

“He’s at Cornell,” I answered, “but I haven’t heard from him in a while.”

“You know,” she said, “everyone thought the two of you were gay.”

“I know.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

With cinematic timing my turn to register came next, and I gave her a small, silent wave as I walked to the registrar’s window. I have continued throughout all these years, however, to wonder about my answer. It was the answer I think Brian would have wanted me to give, and I gave it without a second thought. Despite its literal truth, however, or, rather, its truth given that what the woman probably wanted to know was whether Brian and I had been having sex, the word “no” has felt dishonest to me for a long time, as if what I had done was to deny the emotional content of our friendship, not characterize its physical nature.

When I think about Brian now, I often wish to have back that moment when he decided “they” were right and we were wrong. Not because I think I could have done anything differently to change his mind, but because envisioning how things might have been different is a gesture of defiance I wish I had made a long time ago, a way to begin figuring out the answer I ought to have given to the woman from my English class, and of understanding why I responded with a homoerotic poem to the violence I imagined years later doing to Beth. We ended up not going to dinner that night. After I wrote those two lines, I felt better, calmer, more at peace with myself, and so I was able to tell her about the vision my imagination had conjured for me. We spent the night trying to figure out where in our relationship my anger came from, but our only success–at least from my point of view, since it left me bent over, laughing with hysterical relief–was that I found the courage to scream what I was really feeling, and they were words I regret even now, “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

Beth, of course, was horrified and deeply, deeply hurt, but instead of breaking up with me, or at least putting some distance between us while I tried to figure out where my rage was coming from, she stayed with me for the rest of the weekend, a decision I can only describe as courageous and loving, and we talked and talked our way into the feeling that we could stay together, which we did for five more years. I was immensely grateful to her for that, though I don’t think I ever expressed that gratitude sufficiently.

What disturbed me at the time–aside from the content of what I imagined–and what continues to haunt me whenever I think about it, is that I didn’t even know I was so angry. There were tensions in my relationship with Beth, as there are in any relationship, but nothing of a magnitude, or at least nothing I experienced as of a magnitude, that corresponded even a little to the violence I’d imagined myself doing. Even now, more than two decades later–and in all that time I’ve had nothing even remotely resembling the experience I’ve just described–I find myself wondering what I don’t know about the subterranean workings of my psyche. I am an angry man–though I am now a much less angry man than I was when I first wrote this essay–and I know that much of my anger is sexual, and if there is anything that being a man is supposed to give you license to do, and I am talking here about deeply held cultural values, not the laws of any given country, or the ethical or moral principles taught by religion, it is to take your sexual anger out on the bodies of others, usually women, and to do so with relative impunity. I have, as you will see, good reason to be angry. Part of what writing and rewriting this essay has been about, for me, has been learning to stop being afraid of my anger and, therefore, of myself.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

There’s a really interesting post at Feministe on tensions between feminist attitudes towards violence against women and a radical (or liberal, or progressive) analysis of the prison system. It’s certainly been a tension I’ve felt as I’ve cheered some men being locked-up (Brad Shipton and John Dewar) and despaired when others were let free (Clint Rickards). Bean quotes from Daniel Lazare’s discussion of Marie Gottschalk’s book:

Gottschalk’s assault on ’70s feminism is sure to raise the most eyebrows. She argues that the women’s movement helped facilitate the carceral state by promoting a punitive approach to sexual violence that was unmitigated by any larger political considerations. This single-minded focus led to what The Prison and the Gallows describes as unsavory coalitions with tough-on-crime types. In the State of Washington, women’s groups successfully marketed rape reform as a law-and-order issue so that, when the measure finally passed in 1975, it was “in part by riding on the coattails of a new death penalty statute.”

I don’t think any coalition between anti-rape activism and law-and-order types is necessary, but I don’t think it’s the responsibility of anti-rape activists to make sure our work doesn’t get co-opted.

I was listening to the radio today and heard that the supreme court had allowed the appeal of a man who had murdered his wife and one of the reasons was because the judge in the case had wrongly said that the defence of provocation isn’t available if someone had decided to kill someone else. I said to myself “Jeez didn’t the judge know that a defence of provocation is always available when a man kills his sexual partner?” (for full details the supreme court decision is available in pdf

The hate the provocation defence - I am sick of hearing ‘the bitch asked for it’. But here’s the thing - ultimately I don’t want Laxman Rajamani to be in jail. I don’t believe in jail. I don’t think the threat of jail stops men being violent against women. I think violent men who go into jail almost all come out more violent. I don’t think the protection that while in jail violent men are mostly only going to be violent to other men is enough for a system that churns out men more violent than they go in.

So when I argue that the provocation defence should be scrapped, or talk about the defences that should not be available to rapists, I’m not arguing that because I think these men should be in prison. I’m arguing against these defences because I think they do real damage to women, either individually as witnesses in trials, or collectively as rape myths and women-as-property is all throughout the court and media.

I think feminists need to continue standing up against our court system, and the way it values women’s words and women’s lives, but we need to do so from a stand-point that the current justice system offers abused women almost nothing.¹

The article bean quoted seemed to run together non-state actions against rapists, with the war on crime:

In Berkeley, antirape activists picketed an accused rapist’s home. In East Lansing in 1973, they “reportedly scrawled Rapist on a suspect’s car, spray-painted the word across a front porch and made warning telephone calls late at night.”

To which I say “Awesome”. I believe that the most powerful women have against rapists isn’t prison or the state (which will not act in our interests), but naming.

Edited: I realised that I needed to signal that my friend was joking when talking about Brad Shipton. Particularly outside NZ, where people don’t know who Brad Shipton is, and what he represents. I also know that lynching has quite differnet political meaning in America. I should have made clear that it was a joke earlier, sorry.

1. In my original version of this post I included this sentence: “As a friend joked, when I talked about this tension: “The correct political position is that they should let Brad Shipton out of jail so we can lynch him.” One of the dangers of writing on the internet is that words can have very different historical and political meaning in different places. I know enough about American history that I shouldn’t have included that sentence. (back)

To read Part 1, go here.

You have to wonder what kind of research he did and how he did it. Did he interview women? Create a list of all the possibilities he could imagine and ask them to check off on a list “all descriptions that apply?” Did he talk to men, get them to narrate their sexual philosophies and techniques? Did he observe what he wrote about firsthand, somehow get permission to stand behind a wall constructed so that he could spy on the couples who had agreed to be his informants? Or did he just make it all up? It’s impossible to know, but when Sheikh Nezawi wrote The Perfumed Garden in the sixteenth century–it was translated into English by Richard Burton in 1886–he devoted an entire chapter to “The Divers Names of the Virile Member.” Some are self-explanatory, like Generative Organ, Hairy One or Bald-Head. At least one, The Pigeon, is interesting as a metaphor because of the way it feminizes the penis: “It is so called because, after having been swollen and at the moment when it is returning to its state of repose, [this kind of penis] resembles a pigeon settling on its eggs” (54). In most cases, however, Sheikh Nezawi treats the male genitals synechdocically, making it clear that, in describing certain kinds of penises, he is also describing the men to whom they are attached. Here, for example is The Creeper:

This name has been given to the penis because, when it gets between a woman’s thighs and sees a plump vulva, it starts to creep on her legs and pubis, then, approaching the entrance, it continues to creep until it has taken possession. When comfortably installed, it penetrates completely and ejaculates. (59)

And here is The Knocker

It is thus named because, when it arrives at the door of the vulva, it gives a light knock; if the vulva replies and opens the door, it enters; but if it gets no reply, it knocks again until successful. By knocking at the door we refer to the rubbing of the penis on the vulva until it becomes moist. The production of this moisture is what is called opening the door. (59)

My son will soon be nine years old. Especially during the first years of his life, when he began to learn the names for the parts of his body–though I am aware the question is relevant even now–I thought a lot about how the way we talk about our genitals in this culture expresses and, in part, creates the way we feel as a culture not just about the male body, but also about sex and the people we have sex with. Never before had I been confronted on a daily basis with the realization that someone else’s understanding of who he was, of what it might mean for him to live in his own body, hung quite literally on my every word.

When he was two, for example, my wife would tell me stories about how he occasionally got erections when she washed his penis in the bath. “I don’t like it like this,” she told he would say, starting to cry. “I want it to be soft,” and he would try to push his penis down, which of course did not have the result he desired.

One night, I happened to be home when this happened, and I walked into the bathroom to find my wife crouching at the edge of the tub, talking to our son in a very soothing voice, while he sat with the water running behind him, breathing the last gasping breaths of what had obviously been a two-year-old’s very heavy cry. When my wife explained that he was crying because he’d had an erection, I leaned over the edge of the tub, took our son’s face in my hands and said, “Sometimes my dool gets hard when I don’t want it to. I just wait and it gets soft again. You do the same thing. Don’t get upset. Just wait and it will go back to being soft.”

My son’s eyes widened with a feeling so big it left him speechless. I kissed his cheek and walked out, back to whatever it was that I’d been doing. Later, my wife told me that after I’d left the room, he’d turned to her and said, in Persian, which is her native language and was his dominant language at the time, “Maman, dooleh baba sefteh!” (Mom, Dad’s penis gets hard!) We puzzled briefly over what, specifically, he might have meant, and I tried to remember if, when I was a boy, any of my adult male relatives had talked to me about my own body in a similar way, offering themselves as a reflection of my biological maleness and the stance I might take towards it. I don’t think anyone ever did, but I did recall a moment when I was no older than six or eight in which I caught a glimpse of what I might have learned if someone had.

My father and I were in the locker room getting ready to leave the beach. His back was to me and he was talking about something I couldn’t listen to because he was naked. My eyes wandered among the whorls of black fur that ran from the nape of his neck, along his shoulders and arms, down is back and into the dark cleft of his buttocks. When he turned around, I could see where the hair of his back met the hair of his front in the bush between his legs. His penis hung like a pendulum, swinging slowly between his thighs when he walked, and I wondered if it got hard like mine did, if he played with it like I’d begun to do. I wanted to run and throw my arms around him, to pass through his skin and know what it would mean to live with such size. I was hungry with the prescience that his body would someday be mine, that my body was his in the making.

Read the rest of this entry »

“My Daughter’s Vagina” is the title of an essay I wrote about five years ago that was published online here but that I have never really felt comfortable with as a finished piece. Not too long ago, I came up with the idea of serializing the essay on my blog as I revised it, and so here I am. I originally had in mind that I wanted say a few things about the nature of the essay, but I think that, for the most part, it’s better that I just let the piece speak for itself. I will say that “My Daughter’s Vagina” is long, around 27,000 words, and so I will have to ask for your patience in letting the piece unfold at the pace that I am able to set for revising it; and I will also say that the goal of the piece is not to argue any particular position, but rather to raise questions about gender, sex and sexuality and explore them from within my own experience as a man in this culture. The narratives in the essay are deeply personal and very revealing, and do not always show me in the kindest of lights. I hope you will understand, therefore, that while I am perfectly comfortable reading and discussing good faith critiques of how I understand my experience in the essay, I am not going to tolerate any comments that even remotely resemble personal attacks on me or on anyone else who chooses to comment. Other than that, I am, for now, going to leave the comments section open to all comers. So, here goes:

My Daughter’s Vagina, Part 1

The first time a woman opened her legs long enough that I could look for more than the few seconds it took to bend to her with lips and tongue, or to climb up blind into her and start moving, I crouched between her thighs to get as close as I could, and I remember even now how the words began to list themselves in my head: pussy, beaver, twat, slit, fur, love muscle, muff, quim, cabbage, snatch, box…and all of them but one felt inadequate; and that was the one I wanted most not to use, not even to think, the one I’d come to understand as degrading of my lover by its very existence; and yet, somehow, no other word but cunt captured in my imagination the wet and hairy wildness, the pungent and disheveled and untamed and multi-shaded pink and red and brown and flesh-colored and even deep violet beauty of what I was looking at. I’d seen pictures of course, plenty of them, had discovered as a young teenager that I grew hard at the sight of them, but those images of carefully coiffed, sometimes completely shaven, meticulously arranged specimens of female genitalia were, I suddenly understood, so obviously composed, so clearly intended as artifice, that I felt, looking at my lover, as if I were seeing a cunt for the first time.

The more I stared, the more uncomfortable she became. “What are you looking at? Is something wrong down there?”

And when I didn’t respond right away, “Answer me!”

“You’re beautiful,” I answered, and I know it sounds like something out of a romance novel, but the words came in a whisper, and I looked up at her and I smiled, and then I tried in everything I did next with fingers and my lips and my tongue to make sure she knew I meant what I’d said; and when she asked me to fuck her, her words, not mine, tears–but how do I write this without sounding like I’m bragging? How do I make you see that this memory, even more than it makes me feel good about myself (which of course it does), humbles me and fills me with awe and gratitude–tears were filling her eyes. It was, she explained as we lay together afterward, the first time a man had told her she was beautiful “down there,” much less made love to her in a way that convinced her he really meant it.

“And all those other times,” I wondered to myself. “What had I meant then? What had she understood my meaning to be?”

///

The fundamentally alien universe that a woman’s experience of sex is to me. That mine is to her. So fully do we romanticize heterosexual lovemaking as a communion of souls, a synthesizing of opposites, the fulfillment and expression of our deepest emotional needs, that it’s easy to forget just how inaccessible the interior landscapes of male and female sexual embodiment are to each other. Or, perhaps more to the point, how strongly this romanticization invites our forgetfulness, encourages, even mandates that we refuse to see just how deeply, when it comes to sex, physical differences divide us.

When I began this essay, I was teaching an independent study project in creative nonfiction with two women, each of whom wanted to write about gender and sexuality, exploring specifically the meaning and consequences of the childhood sexual abuse she had survived. One of the books I asked them to read was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, which is too often, and inaccurately, understood as arguing that heterosexual sex is by its nature–man penetrating, woman penetrated–a tool of the patriarchy and therefore exists almost solely to demean and exploit women. Given the way Dworkin writes, this is not a difficult misreading to come to, especially for college sophomores who are encountering her ideas for the first time, and so when my students asked me whether Intercourse should indeed be read that way, I suggested we discuss the following quote from the section called Occupation/Collaboration: “The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people–physically occupied inside, internally invaded–be free […]?”

Easy to misinterpret and dismiss–after all, how can a woman who willingly has intercourse be understood as having been occupied and invaded, with all the connotations those words carry of warfare and colonization?–Dworkin’s question is less about any given woman’s personal experience of intercourse than it is about the nature of female identity. For while a clear distinction exists in most people’s imagination between a woman’s experience of rape and her experience of the kind of intercourse to which the term lovemaking is meant to refer, focusing on that distinction tends to obscure the fact that heterosexual intercourse is also generally understood in our culture–perhaps along with menstruation–to be the defining moment of femaleness and womanhood. More to the point, and this is what I understand the crux of Dworkin’s question to be, if a woman cannot be understood to exist fully as a woman until her body has been “physically occupied inside, internally invaded” by a man, then it doesn’t really matter how tender and/or loving and/or intensely pleasurable intercourse is for her. The freedom of her body was already compromised, by definition, not merely before she had sex, but even before she was born. If, in other words, intercourse is what makes a woman a woman, or, perhaps more precisely, if what makes a woman a woman in patriarchal culture is her capacity for being genitally penetrated–which means intercourse is both an expression and confirmation of her gender–then the question arises whether the difference between the kind of intercourse most people describe as lovemaking and the kind we call rape can accurately be described as one of kind. Maybe, Dworkin is asking, this difference is more properly described as one of degree, since in each case a woman is fulfilling the mandate of her socially prescribed gender identity.

I’d come to class prepared with references to passages in my students’ own essays that helped to demonstrate the validity of Dworkin’s question, but something in their eyes told they’d already gotten it and that to say more than what I have paraphrased above would have been both superfluous and self-serving. For now matter how important I thought Dworkin’s question was, it would never mean the same thing to me as it did to them, and so I fell silent, letting the room fill with the gap of otherness that had opened between us; and it was in this silence, watching the faces of these two women who had placed their trust in me both as a teacher and, given what they wanted to write about, as a man, that my imagination made the leap that was the starting point of this essay: Had I lived a different life–that of my parents, for example, who married when they were in their very early twenties–one of those two women was young enough that she could’ve been my daughter. I don’t mean that I felt fatherly towards her, or that she saw me as a father figure, but this abrupt awareness of the age difference between us brought me back to a conversation my wife and I had been having about whether or not to conceive a second child. I thought about how, if that still-hypothetical offspring turned out to be a girl, she would grow up–I would have to raise her–in a world where the validity of Dworkin’s question inhered, inescapably, in the fact of her body. I thought about how I would, from the first moments of her life, face this daughter across the same terrain of difference that was separating me from my students, and I thought about how, precisely because she would be my daughter, that silence would not be an option.

“And so what,” I almost asked myself out lout, “what will I say to her?”

 Cross-posted at It’s All Connected.