In case you haven’t noticed, my blogging has been lighter than usual since October. Well the main reason for that has been because I’m pregnant. I told my co-bloggers, so they wouldn’t think I was abandoning the site..

Now that I’m in just out of month 4, I’m finally happy to report that my life doesn’t revolve around the fear of throwing up on strangers. :) For a while, from months 2-4, I was battling morning sickness, and the usual first trimester sleepiness. I’m still concerned about a few things like the fact that at almost 19 weeks I weigh the same as I did when I got pregnant. In fact, one of the most fascinating things about pregnancy is the way it has altered my eating habits and my metabolism. When I was in the throws of morning sickness, for some unknown reason the more unhealthy the food the more likely it was to stay down. I’ve never eaten so many McDonald’s Big Mac’s in my life. What’s even funnier is the fact that I ate that kind of food and lost 6 pounds. I felt like I couldn’t possibly eat enough food to maintain my weight, and I was even more shocked when I read that I was supposed to eat 2600 calories a day (300 extra calories per fetus). I’ve always been a person who loves eating and food, and by medical standards I’m in the overweight category, but suddenly, I didn’t want to eat, and these two little fetuses were performing liposuction on my thighs and butt. My husband kept joking about the fact that I had the incredible shrinking booty, which he thought was bad and my mother and brother thought was great. (Now, there’s a cultural difference if there ever was one–West African ideas about booty beauty and White American ideas about booty beauty.) Fortunately, I’ve gained my 6 pounds back, but I seem to be stuck right at the same weight. I promise I’ll write more about this since it really seems to be the one issue that is bothering me the most–I keep wondering how I’m going to gain 30 lbs in 20 weeks.¹

Of course, I’m going to write about the pregnancy because there are so many juicy issues. The gender issues are obvious, but other issues like body image (which I alluded to above), medicalization, racism, and the rampant classism/materialism that surrounds birth and children. I already have some good stories to tell already, so be prepared. Plus, when the little ones are born, I’ll even have some baby blogging to do.

1. For those who don’t know the weight gain recommendation for twins is higher, but doctors also seem to be all over the place in terms of what they suggest. My OBGYN suggested a 44lb weight gain for a woman of my height who is of average weight. Since I’m overweight, she suggested 30-35 lbs. (back)

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)

We have your son.We are destroying his ability for social
interaction and driving him into a life of complete isolation. It’s up to
you now…Asperger’s Syndrome

The NYU Child Study Center has a new public education campaign designed to create awareness of psychiatric disorders. Ads appearing in magazines and on NYC billboards and kiosks are mock ransom notes signed by specific psychiatric disorders: ADHD, Asperger’s Syndrome, autism, bulimia, depression and OCD. Here’s the ad for bulimia (Description: Cut and paste words from magazine text form a ransom note: “We have your daughter. We are forcing her to throw up after every meal she eats. It’s only going to get worse. –Bulimia” Below the note the ad says, “Don’t let a psychiatric disorder take your child” and gives info for the NYU Child Study Center.):

Text for the other ads reads:

We have your son. We will make sure he will no longer be able to care for himself or interact socially as long as he lives. This is only the beginning…Autism.

We are in possession of your son. We are making him squirm and fidget until he is a detriment to himself and those around him. Ignore this and your kid will pay…ADHD

We have taken your son. We have imprisoned him in a maze of darkness with no hope of ever getting out. Do nothing and see what happens…Depression

We have your daughter. We are making her wash her hands until they are raw, everyday. This is only the beginning…OCD

The NYU Child Study Center, celebrating its tenth year and the relaunch of its public information website AboutOurKids.org, says:

The idea behind the “Ransom Notes” is that, all too often, untreated psychiatric disorders are holding our children hostage. These disorders rob children of the ability to learn, make and keep friends and enjoy life.

“Ransom Notes” may be shocking to some, but so are the statistics: suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people ages 15 to 24, and serious emotional problems affect one out of 10 young people, most of whom do not get help. The strong response to this campaign is evidence that our approach is working. We understand the challenges faced by individuals with these disorders and their families. We hope to both generate a national dialogue that will end the stigma surrounding childhood psychiatric disorders and advance the science, giving children the help they need and deserve. We want this campaign to be a wake up call. Please join the dialogue.

And people are joining the dialogue. The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN) has gathered 14 other disability rights organizations and issued a joint letter (.pdf file) calling for withdrawal of the ad campaign. (There’s also a petition for anyone to sign in support of the ASAN joint letter and appeal.) In part, the letter reads:

While the “Ransom Notes” campaign was no doubt a well-intentioned effort to increase awareness and thus support for the disabilities it describes, the means through which it attempts this have the opposite effect. When a child with ADHD is described as “a detriment to himself and those around him,” it hurts the efforts of individuals, parents and families to ensure inclusion and equal access throughout society for people with disabilities. When individuals with diagnoses of autism and Asperger’s Syndrome are told that their capacities for social interaction and independent living are completely destroyed, it hurts their efforts for respect, inclusion, and necessary supports by spreading misleading and inaccurate information about these neurologies. While it is true that there are many difficulties associated with the disabilities you describe, individuals with those diagnostic categories do succeed – not necessarily by becoming indistinguishable from their non-disabled peers – but by finding ways to maximize their unique abilities and potential on their own terms.

Individuals with disabilities are not replacements for normal children that are stolen away by the disability in question. They are whole people, deserving of the same rights, respect, and dignity afforded their peers. Too often, the idea that children with disabilities are less than human lies at the heart of horrific crimes committed against them.

The letter also notes that the ad campaign supports the idea that people with these psychiatric disorders — note that autism and Asperger’s Syndrome are labeled psychiatric disorders here — may be dangerous to others around them.

Does anyone else’s mind jump to Columbine-type scenarios when they see “children” and “hostage” linked? Mine did.

h/t to Stephen Drake at Not Dead Yet

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

Melissa MacEwan has a remarkable post up documenting sixty-five examples of “gag gifts” which represent disembodied breasts. There are popsicles shaped like breasts (as above), pillows shaped like breasts, pasifiers shaped like breasts, frying pans made to make breast eggs, cake pans made to make breast cakes, soap breasts, slipper breasts, earmuff breasts, pasta breasts, candle breasts, mug breasts, and more.

Melissa writes:

I can, quite genuinely, understand why people look at one—or maybe even two, or three—of these items and dismiss them as “just a joke.” If I wrote a post about just a frying pan that turns eggs into boobs, I’m certain even some truly feminist women and men would defend it as just a bit of harmless kitsch. It’s just a joke; what’s the big deal? I get that; I really do.

Which is why I went for critical mass.

It isn’t just one “boob novelty” (or, as they tend to be called, “boobie novelty”). It’s sixty-five. If I hadn’t totally run out of steam, I probably could have included sixty-five more. And these things aren’t relegated to adult stores and websites—ads for the Jingle Jugs are being run on radio and TV during ballgames, and many of these items can be found in regular old party stores and gag shops like Spencer’s Gifts, which has franchises in every bloody mall in America. The “Stress Chest,” “Beer Boob,” and “Boobie Fuzzy Dice” are all sold at Spencer’s, right alongside Harry Potter action figures.

The ether is permeated with boob novelties (which is to say nothing of vagina novelties, women’s ass novelties, the women-as-toilets products, etc.), and while each on its own may not be such a terrible thing, the combined effect is having turned disembodied women’s body parts into just so much cultural detritus to be consumed or ignored. No rational person can argue that makes no difference to how women are viewed, as a group and as individuals, by men and by themselves. And that isn’t a laughing matter.

All of which I agree with.

I do disagree with her slightly here:

some readers may correctly note that one can increasingly find “penis popsicles” and the like, it is a false equivalence. In truth, the amplification of disembodied penis novelties serves merely to suggest a perniciously inaccurate illusion of equality… It’s a step forward only in a race to the bottom, and there is little to be gained by treating service to the lowest common denominator as a favorable equalizer.

She adds that “objectifying the body parts of either sex is exploitative.”

I don’t agree that disembodied body parts are inherently, in and of themselves, a problem. Disembodied hands, for instance, as in this mechanical construction that plays classical music:

Are really not problematic. Clearly, the mechanical hand is not comparable to the disembodied breasts — and that’s because there are different social meanings that construct disembodied hands, just as the social meanings that surround disembodied breasts are different from the social meanings that surround disembodied penises. Where disembodied breast novelties are problematic en masse, a disembodied hand, eye, or foot is not exploitative.

And neither does a disembodied breast have to be. In comments at Shakesville, Portly Dyke writes, “Even the stretch to find these items humorous means we all have to go back to 5th or 6th grade,” and I don’t think that’s true. I know highly intelligent, mature adults who think fart jokes are the funniest thing that ever happened. Senses of humor differer. Personally, I can imagine sex positive contexts in which a disembodied breast or penis would be genuinely funny, genuinely fun, and genuinely harmless.

But as Melissa MacEwan points out — that context is not the bulk of America, and particularly not given the ubiquity and social construction of the critical mass she has represented.

I urge you to go over and read her whole post. Not only is the whole list of items overwhelming to see in total, but she has a lot more smart comments about them.

UPDATE: Many of the images in Melissa’s post have been removed by Photobucket. As Melissa notes in comments, “That’s fairly ironic, given that they were images of fake breasts fashioned into various novelty items that are supposed to be “fun” and not offensive.”

This is absolutely shattering.

In short, the situation is that a Florida woman, in order to deal with her 13 year old daughter ‘having sex with older men’, shaves her head and forcibly pierces her genitals, so as to make sex more painful for her daughter. The problem is (or at least, one of many many problem is) that the ‘older man’ she was having sex with was her mother’s 30 year old boyfriend . . . and rather than deal with this as ‘oh god, my boyfriend committed a horrible criminal violation on my daughter,’ she apparently dealt with it as, ‘my slutty daughter is trying to take my man.’

The prosecutor, fairly reasonably (IMHO) pushed for a greater crime than child abuse, and the jury acquitted.

Or, as La Lubu put it in comments:

Shit, damn, motherfucker. Lemme see if I got this straight—

1. Boyfriend rapes 13-year old daughter.
2. Mom does not call police on boyfriend; mom blames daughter.
3. Mom has daughter’s head shaved, in the hopes that boyfriend will find daughter too ugly to fuck.
4. Boyfriend continues to rape daughter. For years.
5. Mom has friend “pierce” daughter’s genitalia, in such a way that it will make it even more painful for the daughter when mom’s boyfriend rapes her again.
6. “Piercing” gets infected.
7. Child protection finally called in.
8. Piercer goes to jail.
9. Mom put on trial for the piercing, but not for allowing the rapes? WTF, Chuck?
10. Mom acquitted.
11. Finally, an arrest warrant is put out for mom’s rapist boyfriend.

Christ, this poor girl. This makes me very angry. My fists are clenching and I am seeing red. I want to break something. As other people mention in coments, possibly the worst part is that now it’s likely that the daughter will be sent back to live with her mother.

Her mother who blamed her for her own rape. Her mother who shaved her head. Her mother who violated her. Her mother who held her down as a needle was pushed through her genitals. Her fucking mother.

A while back, in one of our discussions of Male Circumcision, I made the point that I consider nonconsensual and elective alteration of another person’s genitals is unacceptable, period, whether you’re the parent or not. As chance would have it, at the time, I compared circumcision to piercing your child’s genitals against their will. There were some people who argued that nonconsensually piercing your kid’s genitals is actually no big deal.

I wonder where those people are now, and I hope they’re ashamed.

Here’s my stab at creating a different kind of feminist BDSM discussion.

Anyone want to post their happy BDSM stories? Actually, can we broaden that to happy kink stories? Happy stories of the joys of non-mainstream sexuality — asexuals so pleased they’re purring, enduring polyamorous relationships full of steamy sex and fantastic folks, glorious golden showers. No criticism! No sociological analysis! No worries or tragedies! Just happy, kinky romance and fucking.

Ridiculously silly stories okay, too. Feel free to relate any gaffs you can laugh about.

UPDATE: Feel free to sock puppet, if it would make you more comfortable.

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.”

[Bumped by Amp because I think this is a really good post, but it appeared over the weekend when we have fewer readers.]

On October 3 (oy, I take a long time to write posts), Shakespeare’s Sister wrote a post about an offensive ad for playtex, which uses the bodies of fat women and women of color to create an impression of being woman-friendly while in fact marketing what Melissa MacEwan calls “the new misogyny.”

Here, take a gander at the ad itself:

Here’s an excerpted transcript of the salient bit (taken from Melissa):

“What do I call them?”

“Boobs, breasts, knockers…”

“Are you asking me if I have a nickname for them?”

“It’s a guy thing to name parts of your body!”

“Betty and Jane.”

“Titties! Boobies!”

…

“I’ve been asked to shake the moneymakers on the subway a few times.”

“Back up for a second,” writes Melissa. “I’ve been asked to shake the moneymakers on the subway a few times?! Giggle giggle ha ha. And that’s exactly how smoothly and coolly the new misogyny can minimize the seriousness of sexual harassment.”

In this ad, Playtex is expecting fat women and women of color to be so awed by their inclusion that they don’t notice the misogyny inherent in the way that they are included. Melissa’s not falling for it. She writes:

Of course I want to see more images of fat women and women of color (and disabled women and dwarf women and birthmarked women and tattooed women and women of every shape, size, color, age, and circumstance). But I’ll be damned if I want their presence used as a diversionary tactic while my skull is pounded with messages like “Breasts are toys!” and “Sexual harassment is flattering!” by companies who then expect me to genuflect in desperate gratitude because this something is ostensibly better than the nothing of the status quo.

This reminds me of another item that recently showed up in the feminist blogosphere, a photograph of recording artist Beth Ditto posing naked for the cover of a magazine. The Feministe article on this photograph seemed relatively uncritical, although they noted some assinine questions that a reporter, trying to pit one woman against another, asked Beth Ditto about Kate Moss. Twisty of I Blame the Patriarchy, on the other hand, was more critical. She laughs at the idea that sexy pictures of fat women are transgressive.

1. Porn isn’t transgressive; it’s de rigueur. No one in Western culture has drawn a porn-free breath in decades. This means it’s the norm.

2. Pictures of naked women empower nobody but the men who pimp’em out and the voyeurs who consume’em. A woman may elect to reap the benefits of her capitulation to her oppressor, and she can even call it “empowerment” when she does it, but that doesn’t mean she’s not full of shit, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s doing any other women the least bit of good.

3. Dude Nation is already well aware that fat women exist. And I guaran-fucking-tee that they’ll continue to hate fat women just as much as they hate skinny ones, no matter which pop star shows up weighing how much on what magazine cover.

Girls, the dominant pornsick culture is crapping on you. Get hip to this: the ability to titillate men is not a high moral purpose. Being sexually manipulative is not a high moral purpose. Posing naked on the cover of NME isn’t empowering, its emposeuring.

I agree with both Twisty and Melissa on this. We as feminists should be deeply skeptical of a culture that offers absolution to fat women by granting them a shadow of the objectification which plagues skinny women.

Fat women and skinny women are played agaisnt each other abominably in this debate. It’s a hideous catch 22, which I realized several months ago when chatting with a gorgeous friend of mine who is routinely trailed by cars when she walks down the street, misogynists leaning out the window to hoot at her body and offer propositions. When she told me this, half my brain went, “Assholes.” The other half went, “That never happens to me and this is a sign of my failure and inferiority.”

Either way, women lose. We lose when we’re harrassed. We lose when we’re not harrassed. We’re objects of sex, or we’re objects of disgust. Either way, our sexuality is framed around the imagined desires of a “default” male. Allowing fat women to be sexually objectified is far from ideal — it is not a radical movement that will lead toward women’s equality.

But there’s another analysis I want to bring into this, and that’s a fat rights analysis. As a fat woman, I can say that the damage done to my psyche through years of being told I’m revolting is really, really bad. In a fatphobic society, a society that’s more afraid of women’s fat than men’s, I, as a fat woman, suffer more than a thin woman who is otherwise situated like I am.

I share most of the disadvantages that thin women have in this society. Like thin women, I still need to fear for my safety late at night. I am still a potential target of hate and violence. Simultaneously, I am culturally denied the ability to view myself in one of the primary (and problematic, and limiting) roles of acceptable, western-constructed female sexuality and identity.

Twisty suggests that access to sexual objectification for fat women and women of color is no benefit at all, but only an admission into a club full of misogyny and problems. This is true, on one level, but I think that it’s important to look at the ways in which the axis of being fat affects women’s lives.

One thing that’s missing from Twisty’s analysis (or perhaps is implied in point 3, but not expanded on as much as I’d like) is that fat women are *already* objectified. We are objectified as objects of revulsion or disinterest. We are taught to view ourselves as repellant. Others are taught to view us this way, too.

Being treated like an object for collection, an object for consumption — something beautiful and desirable — sucks, because it involves being treated like an object. However, being treated like a treasured object is still better than being treated like an object to be thrown away.

Melissa’s position is closer to mine, and I think her emphasis is right on. We shouldn’t allow the fat woman’s or brown woman’s body to distract us from seeing how despicable a naturalization of sexual harrassment is. Still, if fat women and brown women growingly have access to being able to move out of the molds in which patriarchy has placed them, that will make our lives more liveable in some (limited) ways, even if that change is expressed in reprehensible and misogynist ways.

Ideally, everyone would be treated as fully human. However, while fat women are more oppressed than thin women, changes which alter our status will benefit us — even while they play into the misogyny that oppresses all women, fat and thin.

Feminist author and martial artist, Nancy Jane Moore, has started a blog on blogspot to help women discuss ways to defend themselves.

Here’s her release:

As some of you know, I’m working on a book on self defense. My goal is to welcome people to the concept that they can learn to take care of themselves, instead of to frighten them into studying self defense by listing all the dangers out there. I’d like to convince people — and particularly women — that self defense skills aren’t restricted to superheroes and that everyone can learn enough to protect themselves.

To help educate people (and to help sell the book), I’ve started a blog: Taking Care of Ourselves at blogspot.

This seems sort of like the Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog, to me: a need that had been discussed for a while, and is just now being met. I hope that Nancy Jane Moore finds an audience and support for her concept.

–

UPDATE: Nomen points out another blog with a similar theme. Thanks, Nomen!

I’ve never believed the hype about indymedia (for good reason). I think that if you take a space and make it equally open to all then you don’t get utopia; you get a replication of all the existing power imbalances in society (although in this particular case there are more chickens).

But even with this analysis I was shocked to see this article on the newswire. Well not the article itself - that’s a standard rant about how drug prohibition is bad, but the image that accompanied it was astonishingly awful. It was a stereotypically sexy white woman, wearing a bikini and the tagline was “Marijuana: No Hangover, No Violence, No Carbs” I’m not even going to comment on the image itself - I’m sure anyone who reads this blog can guess my reaction, what I want to talk about in this post is what happened next.

So this sexist, objectifying image is posted to the indymedia news wire, and a whole lot of women (and a man) speak up and say “please take this down it’s sexist and objectifying”. The indymedia collective responds:

the ed collective is discussing this. if you want to email the editorial collective: imc-aotearoa-ed(at)lists.indymedia.org

solidarity

Call me easily pissed off, but how can the editorial collective sign off ’solidarity’ when they won’t show any solidarity? Solidarity would mean taking that picture down, or taking it off the news-wire, or giving a fuck about the way women are treated as objects.

What is indymedia about, what is it trying to build, if an image whose only meaning is to make women feel shitty about themselves is acceptable? You can’t change society for the better without women, but apparently Aotearoa indymedia has other priorities.

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.

There’s a good article in the NY Times on the growing and vibrant anti-Female Genital Cutting¹ movement in Egypt in the Times. (Curtsy: Feministe and Sly Civilian).

Previous “Alas” posts on FGC: 1 2 3 and 4.

From the Times article:

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1. AKA Female Circumcision, Female Genital Surgery, AKA Female Genital Mutilation or FGM. (back)

I’m a little hesitant to post this, because — although Campos never actually blames white women for the obsession with weight loss (in fact, Campos describes it as something done to white women — he describes anti-fat “neuroses” as something “middle- and upper-class American white women… are taught from a very early age”), h