I don't remember how long it was before Beth told me she'd decided she would have an abortion if she got pregnant, but once she did tell me and our lovemaking went back to the way it had been before, I experienced the sex we were having as much more meaningful for having been the result of a fully conscious and conscientious choice.
It was, apparently, a one-sided experience.
Years later, Beth told me she'd thought our conversation in Friendly's had really been about my wanting sex with no strings attached and that I'd been setting the stage to leave her if she didn't give me what I wanted. She didn't believe, however, that I was really "that kind of guy," so she pretended to take some time to think about the question of an unwanted pregnancy—she always knew, she said, that she'd never have an abortion—and then told me what she thought I wanted to hear, hoping time would prove her right about the kind of guy I was.
I still remember the conspiratorial smile on Beth's face when she drew close to me and almost whispered that while she'd had definite second thoughts after the two or three times we'd had intercourse when we were supposed to be abstaining—she'd decided to test me, she said, and I almost failed—I'd obviously turned out to be the "right" kind of guy, since otherwise she'd have already put an end to our relationship.
She was trying to say something that would make me happy, but I felt as if I'd been punched in the stomach, and the wind that was knocked out of me was everything I'd believed about who we were and what we'd meant to each other. I could not erase from my mind the image of this woman making love with me and thinking, each and every time, that I was using her. I could not fathom that she would have dared to let me into her body, allowing me to believe that she trusted me, when in fact she did not.
I don't remember what I said when Beth told me this, or if I said anything. What I do remember is how angry I was, and frustrated, because I didn't know precisely who or what to be angry at. I understood intuitively why Beth would have felt it necessary to test me the way she did, and I was enough in thrall to traditional sexual and gender stereotypes that I couldn't see them as a large part of what I had to reason through to understand more fully what had happened.
The fundamentally alien landscape that a woman's experience of sex is to me.
I try to put myself in Beth's place, imagine that I'm a twenty-year-old woman from a fairly conservative Catholic background. I've just recently started having sex with a Jewish man, a year older than I am, whose background is at least as liberal as mine is not. He says he's falling in love with me, and I think I may be starting to feel the same way about him, or at least I see that I could love him if I wanted to make that happen. Yet here he is telling me he wants to stop having intercourse while we talk about what I think I would do if I become pregnant. He says right up front that he's not yet ready to be a father, so I know what he thinks I should do, and then in almost the same breath, he points out that we can still make love the way we did before. He'd been perfectly satisfied with that, he says, and he thought I was as well—which I was—so why not? He reassures me over and over again that he's not looking for a reason to break up with me. In fact, he wants me to believe our relationship will be stronger when we get through what he keeps referring to as "this process."
When I say it all back to myself like that, I can hear the mixed messages Beth must've been receiving, for I was violating some of the strongest stereotypes we have about heterosexual men, especially young heterosexual men, for whom sex, and specifically intercourse, is supposed to be literally irresistible. As with all stereotypes, this one contains an element of truth, but the irresistibility of sex for men, as any man who's being honest will tell you, is at least as much about status as it is about pleasure. For the sexual penetration of a woman is both a rite of passage into heterosexual manhood and a way of sustaining your manhood status over time. Within this logic, to choose not to penetrate a woman who is willing and even eager to be penetrated is to choose not to be a man.
Whether or not Beth thought this logic through consciously, I imagine it was part of what made it impossible for her to believe I was being honest. Perhaps even more disturbing for her, though, at least within the traditional way of thinking I'm talking about here, was the fact that what I was saying implicitly called into question her decision to let me penetrate her in the first place, and I have chosen my phrasing here very consciously. For within this tradition women are supposed to see sex exclusively in terms of love and marriage and children, or at least about love and the potential for marriage and children, which means that when a woman chooses to allow a man into her body—or, to put it another way, when she chooses the man to whom she will give her body—she has to be careful to choose someone who will respect what sex is supposed to be about for her. Otherwise, she risks becoming, in her own eyes if not the eyes of those who know her, a slut.
A slut is the antithesis of what a traditional "good woman" is supposed to be in much the same way that a man who chooses not to have intercourse with a willing woman is a kind of non-man. The metaphor of the gift is significant here. When Beth "gave herself to me," she entrusted me not simply with what is commonly referred among twenty-year-olds as her "reputation," but also with her own internal sense of who she was as a result of that giving. When I told her I wanted to stop having intercourse with her, in other words, she probably could not help but hear me to be saying that her gift had been "devalued" in my eyes, even though that is not what I meant or what I said.
At twenty—and I'm projecting here, but if Beth was back then anything like many other twenty-year old women I've met over the years, I don't think I'm far off—the internal crisis this "devaluation" threw her into was probably far more real and more immediately frightening than the possibility and consequences of getting pregnant, which explains why preserving her sense of herself as a "good girl," a woman who was not a slut, took precedence over making absolutely sure we did not conceive a child she would've wanted to keep and I would've wanted to abort. As long as we kept having intercourse, no "devaluation" of her gift would have occurred.
In fact, of course, neither Beth nor I were as clear-eyed and calculating as I have made us sound here, and it's possible I have misrepresented Beth entirely—though I have not misrepresented, I don't think, the questions this story raises about the subversive potential of a man setting his own sexual boundaries, especially in relation to reproduction. Those questions, however, are a subject I will leave for another time because what I have just remembered is that Beth was the woman I told you about at the start of this essay, between whose legs I crouched while all the different words for vagina ran through my mind, and I did tell her that she was beautiful there, and she did ask me to fuck her, but there were no tears in her eyes, and what she told me was not that I was the first man who'd ever told her she was beautiful "down there"—though I think I may have been—but rather that she had learned to see herself that way because it was so clearly evident that I meant it when I said it.
The idea that someone could grow up not liking their genitals was new to me and Beth's revelation made me both happy and sad: happy that she was at last beginning to see in herself the beauty I saw in her and sad because it was clear that the pleasure and joy I'd found in our physical relationship had always been already compromised for her. I imagined her wondering as I touched and stroked and kissed her whether I really liked touching and stroking and kissing her there; and I think now of the daughter I do not have, whom I may never have, whose genitals are the title of this essay, of the women, like the women in my independent study, who have been in some sense my surrogate daughters, and I think about the almost unimaginably powerful forces arrayed against them, working to make sure they feel about their genitals precisely as Beth did when I met her; and then I think about the lovers this daughter I have imagined for myself will have—male or female, it doesn't matter—and what I hope is that they will, each and every one of them, see in her genitals the wild and beautiful cunt I saw when I crouched between Beth's legs and couldn't take my eyes off her.
These lovers will perhaps use a word other than cunt, and even more than I hope that they will see the beauty between her legs, what I hope is that it will not be from them that she first learns of that beauty, but rather that her own sense of herself as beautiful will be a gift she gives to them. Today one of my independent study students shared a draft of an essay in which she talks about how masturbation was for her a form of rebellion against her tyrannical and sexually repressive father. As we discussed the piece, my other student, who is about ten years older than the writer, talked about how, when she started to masturbate, she'd thought she was the only one doing it. "I thought so too," was the writer's quiet, almost mumbled response, and then both women dissolved into a laughter of recognition and slightly embarrassed relief. I know I would not be a father whose daughter had to use self-pleasuring as a form of resistance, but I know as well how easy it would be to remain silent as a father on the question of my daughter's pleasure and how deeply this silence would be implicated in the larger cultural silence that makes the title of this essay, "My Daughter's Vagina," so shocking and transgressive. What I do not know, for this daughter I have imagined is not and may be my child, never exist, is how I would make breaking that silence part of the reason for the day-to-day living that is family life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Miles, Rosalind. Love, Sex, Death, and the Making of the Male. New York: Summit Books, 1991.
Nefzawi, Sheikh. The Perfumed Garden. Translated by Richard Burton. Rochester: Park Street Press, 1992.
Check out Richard Jeffrey Newman's web page at http://www.richardjnewman.com/.