Gender isn’t what it used to be. The French remark vive la difference is on the mat and the referee is counting. I see the #MeToo movement in this context. Gender differences are disappearing in importance. Young people are insisting on new variations of gender identification that are perplexing to older people. Power is what counts, and power transcends gender identification. I was raised by a physiologist who taught the alimentary canal to incoming medical students, and he was not delicate about crude references to bodily functions, something his students came to enjoy. Some of that rubbed off on me. As a baby boomer, my mind is very much rooted in the sixties and the sexual revolution when I came of age in the sub-tropics of south Florida and, later, in the mountains west of Pleiku, where I served my country’s imperial fantasies locating Vietnamese for targeting purposes. A half-dozen of my veteran friends just participated in the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre — in My Lai — at times crying together with Vietnamese survivors of the massacre. That year of my young life is forever fresh in my mind. Sex and war. I never put the two together as complementary parts of my life. Currently, sexual relations as revealed in the #MeToo movement makes it feel like we’re playing out the bitter final chapter of the sixties sexual revolution. Make love not war is quaint history; and apocalyptic war is again looming over us.
The idea of collateral damage from the #MeToo movement interests me. Maybe it’s because I was once raked over the coals mercilessly on Facebook by a feminist over a photograph I put up from Rio de Janeiro — one among maybe a hundred — of a woman’s beautiful buttocks; she was dancing in public, being filmed as B-roll for coverage of the upcoming World Cup from Rio. The more I’ve thought about it, the more it feels that at least some of the problem was in that adjective beautiful attached to an intimate part of a woman’s body. We’re told beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I begin to wonder whether my sin was that I beheld that buttocks as beautiful in my man’s mind; the culprit was the “male gaze” itself. A beautiful buttocks is iconic in Brazilian culture. The Greeks used to refer to a well-formed buttocks with the adjective callipygian. Thisbatch of images was the first time I had ever put anything up on Facebook, and the response was so righteous and ad-hominem I wondered, where did this come from? I still don’t get it. For me, the image was cultural, not prurient.
My accuser undertook a web search and she struck gold. One of my TCBH essays still apparently appears on the magazine website of a friend of a friend, who is an erotic photographer. As in the Playboy magazine formula, he wanted his online “magazine” to feature political articles. I figured it would be in a separate section by itself. But, unknown to me, he placed explicit black-and-white images of women taken in Amsterdam all through my essay on US imperialism in the Mideast. I told him to cease-and-desist. But he didn’t comply. I never got it together to track him down to force him to delete the thing. One thing we all learn is that the web never forgets. On my Facebook page, I was indicted, convicted, drawn and quartered before I knew what hit me. As one might say, my balls were royally busted. It was the first and last time I used Facebook seriously. I offered to respectfully discuss the matter, but the offer was never taken up.
“Me and the mate back at the shack.” The writer and wife, Lou Ann.
It may sound defensive, as in: “Some of my best friends are women” — but it’s true. I like and respect women for their minds. I was raised among two brothers, no sisters and an amazing, suffering mother who never complained but probably should have. Thanks to some very smart, incredible women I’m where I am today. One of those women is my wife Lou Ann, who is not shy about letting me know how she feels. For instance, she went all through this essay and said I’d better damn-well say somewhere that women have a “valid” cause when it comes to charges of oppression and sexual misconduct by males throughout history up to and including today. I know of a number of cases where, as a younger woman, she experienced egregious examples of male creepdom and predation. So I’m quite grateful for her and the many wonderful women I know and have known. But, I won’t lie: Like many males, I did get it wrong sometimes as I was misled by the large organ in my head and its subordinate in my pants.
There’s one thing in my past that I am ashamed of vis-a-vis women. That was while serving my country as a 19-year-old soldier in an army that invaded, occupied and ultimately abused millions of Vietnamese people. Sure, many of the Vietnamese were trying to kill us. But we started it; the Vietnamese had never done anything to us. They were our ally in WWII. Metaphorically, the war was like a sexual assault; at least that’s the metaphor I tried to pull off in a 1975 Penthouse story called “Polyorifice Enterprises.” I was in thrall to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 at the time, so I employed his creative amalgam: he mixed the absurdness of his post-war experiences in Madison Avenue advertising with the politics of a bomber base in Sicily during WWII. In my case, it was a job interview that turned out to be a man standing in front of a roomful of applicants selling the wonders of vacuum cleaner sales; I mixed that with the epidemic of prostitution in Vietnam. I replaced the vacuum cleaner guy with a Vietnamese female pimp who recruited the youth of Vietnam to service American soldiers. The tone was dark comic absurdity.
While “in country”, I participated in the epidemic that took over that war-zone like a plague. Prostitution in an imperial warzone goes back to Caesar’s army and before. Think of the Japanese and their “comfort women” throughout Asia, including in Vietnam. I may have exploited and compounded my sins by writing and publishing that short story in Penthouse magazine in January 1975; but, as I see it, that absurd piece of writing was the birth of my disgust for the war itself, which was then on its last immoral legs. In 1985, I became a full-fledged antiwar activist and never looked back. In 2004, I worked as a cameraman with an Academy Award-winning filmmaker on a documentary about the US military and prostitution; we made a crazy 12-hour trip via SUV from Amman, Jordan, into Baghdad, where we were, frankly, so scared of losing our heads we never could locate the rare examples of prostitution in that strict Muslim country. There were rumors of gypsies who tolerated it and vague reports of homosexual prostitution — but nothing like the incredible epidemic in Vietnam. I’ll never forget looking through the viewfinder as I filmed the patriarch of a homeless family living in a bombed out Air Force base and my colleague asking, through an interpreter, a final question: “What would you do if a woman in your family sold her body?” He did not even blink: “We would kill her.” From accounts I’ve read of our young horny warriors on deployment and with the aid of my imagination, having been a horny young man once myself, I imagine there’s a lot of masturbation going on with mobile i-pads and other devices. As for the film my friend has put together, he’s wrapped up in prohibitive licensing issues: commercial branding rights as an instrument of censorship.
My first encounter with a prostitute was when I was fifteen living in rural, truck-farming south Dade Country, Florida. I paid 50-cents to an African American woman for sex in the middle of an avocado grove. She and her sister were housed in the middle of the grove to service migrant pickers, who I worked with summers picking limes in a nearby grove. Hitchhiking home from school, my buddy Jim and I were picked up by these women in a blue and white 55 Ford. The passenger reached back and lifted my books, wondering to her sister, “Which one do you think has a bigger dick?” I was so startled I probably said: “He does!” They had no business cards, but they cheerfully put in a plug for their services. One dark night, two buddies and I ventured into the grove to find their run-down wooden house, what we dubbed The Sugar Shack. I’m not ashamed of this incident at all; it feels as American as many of Huck Finn’s adventures. Both women were wearing flimsy nightgowns. The woman I went with was in her mid twenties, and obviously much more experienced than I was. But what I recall is how gentle and kind she was. I’m not naïve, and I understand she was likely working under a pimp and certainly under the strictures of a racist culture that, then, still had “colored” drinking fountains and separate school systems. But all the black and Hispanic families of pickers I worked with in the lime grove were also working in such a culture, oppressed by the same forces. It’s true, I was a privileged white kid from an educated, middle-class family living in a modest but nice house across the street from a tomato field. Guilty as charged. I would submit before the court that such cross-class sex can have an enlightening effect, that is, it can function somewhat as a means of “seeing” the humanity of those in an oppressed class. I say “can have” — since it’s certainly not always the case. So I’m really not recommending it as a pedagogical method for the comfortable youth of the 21st century. There are other ways to sensitize and educate, such as reading things like the Brazilian Paolo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed about power and how people who have been kicked around and exploited learn.
The early 1960s were a more innocent time. Today, those two women would be susceptible to charges of sexual misconduct for sexually abusing me when they picked me up on Naranja Road and speculated about my dick. Consider the flak received by youth icon grown into adulthood Katy Perry on American Idol for assertively snatching a lip-kiss from a virginal 19-year-old conservative male from Oklahoma. In my 15-year-old mind in 1963 in redneck south Dade County, a visit to The Sugar Shack wasn’t abuse, since all the boys I knew were very open to older women corrupting them. I was a smart, socially-inept kid who loved to fish in the Keys and read a lot of Steinbeck, Hemingway and Graham Greene. In 1965, seven days after graduation, I joined the Army to flee my father and “to see the world.” My commercial intercourse with these women (I did technically have a freebie with the second sister later that night) was a simple human interaction outside the lines of established decorum, something that, alas, helped me grow to like black people and put me on the road to a life of subversion. I will also submit to the court that some of the sex I had with young Vietnamese girls was quite innocent, since, like many GIs, I was a virtual child myself, frankly a quite curious child more eager “to see the world” than to fight a war. It wasn’t John Wayne who made me want to go to war; it was the exoticism and intrigue in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American that made me volunteer for service in Vietnam. Greene, of course, is rolling in his grave.
Because of all this and a 2004 trip to Amsterdam with a former Pennsylvania attorney general and other VIPs to research legal prostitution and marijuana cafes, I’m an unambiguous advocate for legalized prostitution as a liberating act. Here’s my argument: Whether I like it or not — and I don’t — we live in a culture that worships the so-called Free Market, which covers a whole lot of sins. It’s so thoroughly bad that we now have a president and cabinet of billionaire entrepreneurs. Everything in life is commodifiable and there to be financialized. It gets absurd: Stand in front of a urinal and at eye level there’s a video screen selling you insurance; in Korea, there’s buses that shoot out the smell of donuts as the bus approaches a Dunkin Donut shop, which the driver is obligated to point out. More is coming; it’s only limited by the entrepreneurial imagination. The Free Market amounts to gospel. So, if this is the world we must live in, why shouldn’t a person’s body be hers or his to do with as she or he wishes? If women are to be free, they should have the right — if they choose — to commodify their sexual charms and not be afraid of being relegated to a criminal underworld where they’re vulnerable to harassment or worse from the police and the criminal element. I know the reason it’s illegal generally in the US is because puritanical and religious urges tend to trump (no pun intended) the gospel of free-private enterprise. The oldest profession in the world has always been dominated by male oppression; in fact, in the form of police and the military, oppression may be a much older profession. Stormy Daniels is now a very public example of a smart woman able to transcend a rough background by successfully commodifying her sexual allure into a successful career. Certainly this isn’t for everyone; but it should be one’s right.
There is an argument that says modern feminism is dependent on the protections of the state and the rule of law to exist; without the protection of the state, feminism could not flourish. I’m not saying that’s wrong; just that it is the case. A case in point might be Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin back in the 1980s, when they famously allied with right-wing religious fundamentalists in order to outlaw pornography — especially porn on film — as beyond First Amendment protection. Their argument was that film porn was actually a record of an actual, real crime, the sexual domination of women. In the film world, the best acting is seen as documenting real actions and emotions; so there is some basis for their argument. One thing they tried to do was write and encourage ordinances, in MacKinnon’s words, “allowing civil suits for sex discrimination by those who can prove harm through pornography.” It had mixed success as I recall, though MacKinnon remains a highly respected academic. In ancient times and, to some extent today, women were/are protected from rape and sexual abuse by fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. This structure, of course, can be quite repressive. Saudi Arabia is now, we’re told, just getting around to liberating women from this ancient form of male protection. Again, I’m not advocating repression or opposing the rule of law, just pointing out that with the rise of bureaucracy, the protection of women from the abuses of maleness has moved more and more into the political/cultural space and into the criminal justice system with all its shortcomings and hypocrisies. As this process advances and cultural life becomes more sophisticated and complex, women become an identity group and an ideology (feminism) that, given the idea of the battle of the sexes, naturally ends up head-to-head with a counterpart male identity group and ideology — what logically should be called masculinism. This leads to a state of tension and things like backlashes. I submit that is happening with the #MeToo movement in the Trump masculinist backlash moment.
The #MeToo movement is, in my male mind, a briar patch in the eternal battle of the sexes. As the notorious trickster Brer Rabbit used to say: “Whatever you do, don’t throw me in the briar patch.” Brer Rabbit was the creation of Joel Chandler Harris, a white man in racist Georgia during and after the Civil War. Harris was a foundling who ended up working on a plantation where he absorbed the books in the landowner’s library and comfortably associated with Africans in their quarters, where he learned about the trickster Brer Rabbit and his many forest friends. Tricksters, of course, thrive in repressive cultures.
On one level, the #MeToo movement is about calling attention to legitimate, overdue grievances by women about the issues of respect and power vis-a-vis men — what my wife Lou Ann insisted I emphasize. But on another level, it can become fertile ground for vendetta and power grabbing by angry women exploiting the election of a grotesque, Teflon-coated sexual abuser. A significant part of it seems to be over unwelcomed advances by men on women, which raises the question, what if the identical move had been made by Mister Right? To me, Louis C.K.’s masturbation scenes are more pathetic than menacing. Are such provocations evil or are they what Samuel Beckett called “the fleas of life.” After all, life isn’t fair for men, either. Sometimes, as Katie Roiphe puts it, “The rage can at times feel like bloodlust.” A 28-minute video of eight women abused by various powerful males presented by The Cut unintentionally reveals an example of this. I wouldn’t dispute that each of the eight women has a legitimate grievance or has been “damaged.” I get that. But the moderator, Rose McGowan, exhibits a clear vengeful animus toward men. At one point, she interrupts to disagree with an older women who says, “Anger is not enough”; it’s not how the movement should work. No, McGowan says: “Righteous anger propels society forward.” Everything about her seems to radiate this righteous anger; unlike the other women, when it came to men, empathy or proportion seemed missing. She and her career had been hurt, and she was on the warpath. The video is compelling to watch, but not necessarily for the points Ms. McGowen is making. I found her scary. And scaring people doesn’t generally lead to progress; it leads to warfare.
This is the aspect of the movement critiqued by Katie Roiphe in a March Harper’s article titled “The Other Whisper Network: How Twitter feminism is bad for women.” Roiphe was referred to in an article about her in The Cut as “an unapologetic provocateur, perpetually irritating the women’s movement.” She was also positively profiled in the conservative National Review. She seems to thrive on being a lightning rod.
In such a climate, sometimes just saying something that would have not gotten traction in an earlier moment can get a man in very hot water. Saturday Night Live did a skit on this with two couples at a restaurant centered; the point was the things the men were saying. By the end of the skit, the men were terrified to even open their mouths. This kind of struggle can easily devolve into a clash and backlash between the ideological camps of feminism and masculinism. Of course, feminism is, itself, a backlash. Now, there’s a backlash against the backlash. Eventually, it becomes an out-and-out battle played out at the extremes, where we find the pussy grabbers and the ball busters referred to in the title. The former label, of course, is linked with our current TV celebrity president’s well publicized remark. The ball-busters are women like McGowan and others mentioned in Roiphe’s article, such as the creator of what goes by the name The Shitty Media Men List, described as “an anonymously crowd-sourced spreadsheet chronicling sexual misconduct in the publishing world.” You don’t want to get on that list, which like a lot of things in this computerized/digital age, can be pure hell to get off if inclusion is unjust. McGowan refers to “shitty men” almost as an archetype in the video.
“Twitter, especially, has energized the angry extremes of feminism,” writes Roiphe. “in the same way it has energized Trump and his supporters: the loudest, angriest, most simplifying voices are elevated and rendered normal or mainstream.” She writes of a “sense of great, unmanageable anger” and “an alarming lack of proportion.” She quotes a male friend who feels the “presumptive criminalization of all male sexual initiative.” She cites a “sexual harassment story” in New York magazine’s The Cut that hinges on a man sitting too close to a woman in a cab and asking for her phone number. Annoying and obnoxious, maybe — but harassment? A big problem, she writes, is “judging other people before learning (or without bothering to learn) all the facts.” This “invites us to concoct our own opinions and fantasies and speculations based on our own experiences of what someone has done to us, or on our impressions of what men in power do.”
Senator Al Franken, a former TV comedian who would have made an interesting presidential candidate in 2020 against our Reality-TV-Star-In-Chief, chose to resign. Was Franken taken down because he was a liberal male leader and, as such, unwilling to ignore a scandal and tough his way through like President Trump does? In his mock breast grabbing of a sleeping Leeann Tweeden captured in an image, few seemed to consider the context: he was traveling with a notably well-endowed woman to an active war-zone — like the buxomy Raquel Welsh was with the Bob Hope Show I saw in 1966 — for her physical allure before horny US troops. It was no doubt a long, boring flight to and from the war-zone in Afghanistan, and it doesn’t seem surprising things might get silly and punchy on such a trip. The publicizing of the incident feels exploitative and political. Ms Tweeden is a busty model for Fredericks of Hollywood and is seen in photos nearly nude lounging over the hoods of NASCAR racers. Is she really so offended by a comedian’s punchy joking around; or was it a case of, as a woman friendly to the political right, she just didn’t like the guy?
On a natural hillside amphitheater outside Pleiku at the Fourth Division base, Bob Hope arrived in a Huey circling the troops collected below. We could see him waving out the open door. It was so cool, we all cheered. Of course, this was 1966, an earlier military debacle. Hope did the show with Raquel Welsh, her physical attributes emphasized by her skimpy costume. Once on the ground, grinning and swinging his trademark phallic golf club, Hope made one raunchy joke after another about Welsh’s anatomy — as she did “Oh, Bob!” repartee. Welsh even did some one-on-one cavorting with a few young GIs in the crowd — until it became too many and the MPs had to start throwing guys off the stage. Meanwhile, those of my comrades-in-arms who were busy and could not get away for the show were out west toward the Cambodian border, or elsewhere in-country, killing Vietnamese men, women and children by the thousands. But that was OK; they were communists . . . or gooks, zips, slopes and dinks. War is so much messier than sex. Yet, it’s so much more difficult to address politically. I wish we could arrange the critical mass for a #StopWar movement. . . . No. Wait a minute! We have one, and it’s called The Antiwar Movement. See how far it’s gotten.
Then again, back to Al Franken and his alleged butt-patting of female constituents as a US senator. If true, it’s inexcusable. So maybe resigning was the only honorable thing for him to do. Like the last stanza of Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville”: “I know it’s my own damn fault.” The sad fact is, he’s political history.
One of the sadder #MeToo stories is a conflict between two classes of disempowered people. Public Radio icon John Hockenberry, who is wheelchair bound from a high school accident, was accused of bullying women and being over assertive via emails and in person in ways that suggested he was “hitting on” guests and staff. A good friend of mine who is wheelchair bound said he felt Hockenberry was trying to express his manhood as a disabled male. Hockenberry is married and the father of five kids; considering his job and reputation on The Takeaway and other shows, wheelchair or not, he was a powerful man, which ironically was a strike against him, since it makes any weaknesses vis-a-vis women a matter of harassment. I can see the women’s point; they wanted to do their work and found his male neediness (or over-compensation for a disability) annoying and unattractive. After a long and illustrious career, he was ball-busted out of NPR. Sayonara, dude! But, shades of Margaritaville, he seems to have some blame; if nothing else, as a journalist he wasn’t keeping up with the times.
On the other hand, at the recent Women’s March in Philadelphia, a woman in a wheelchair spoke very eloquently to the huge, enthusiastic crowd. She was quite angry and animated in her wheelchair. One of the things she kept coming back to was how she was not seen as a sexual being, which she clearly felt and wanted to be. She got quite graphic about how she could make men “rise” as well as any woman. She seemed offended that males ignored her sexuality and her allure. The crowd loved her and applauded her spirit. So did I. I wanted her to get laid as much as she wanted. But when I think about it, her performance was really quite aggressive, sexually; with great passion, she basically advertised how good she was at blowjobs. What if this spunky woman sent a few too many suggestive emails to some uninterested dude she wanted to have sex with; what if she got a bit playful and grabbed the guy’s cock while he walked by her desk. Would she be run out of her job or office? Like Hockenberry, would they run her out and ruin her career? I really don’t know. It would likely be seen as pathetic. There’s the recently deceased, incredibly disabled Stephen Hawkings, whose life suggests that “manhood” or “womanhood” — whatever those words mean these days — doesn’t depend on walking upright. The same as being a powerful, hard-working and dignified human being doesn’t depend on one’s genitals. Gender fluidity, thus, seems more and more to be the way of the future. But like any change, it’s a minefield.
For some reason, all this makes me think of A.J. Bryant, the 50ish redneck squash farmer in south Dade County whose barn I hung around in as a kid on Saturdays doing odd jobs. I was a young transplant from a suburb outside New York City. A.J. was classic old-school, southern male, a World War Two veteran and a major philanderer. He always wore a virtual uniform of khaki pants, shirt and work boots and was always tinkering with a tractor or something. When the farm work was done, my buddy and I would hang out with A.J. and other men in the barn office; the men would drink Budweisers and we boys would grab an ice-cold six-ounce Coke out of the icebox under the tire calendar featuring a half-naked woman with a come-hither look. A.J. had a number of women on a string that he loved to brag about. Plus, he even openly spoke of a man he’d meet for sex; I remember him saying the guy was so well hung woman couldn’t deal with him. This seems really strange now in 2018, but, then, I never thought of him as “gay” or “queer” or threatening. He was A.J.
I think my father was fleeing something when he moved the family lock-stock-and-barrel into the redneck sticks just north of the Keys, a sub-tropical place full of pine, palmetto and fruit trees — and now and then an eastern diamond back rattlesnake. He’d been a PT boat skipper in the South Pacific, and now he commuted every weekday to lecture in Physiology at the University of Miami Medical School. When the big move happened I was eleven and I found myself having to figure out what this strange place I’d been thrown into was about; I think it actually formed what I see as my journalist/writer character — someone always hanging back and watching, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. A.J. lived a mile down Naranja Road, past avocado and lime groves next door to my friend Jim. I liked A.J., and I think he liked having kids around. His sassy fat wife, Chick, and his retarded sister, Lillian, would make incredible, huge country lunches, while the black man who worked for A.J. — whose name I forget — would eat his lunch on a rough wooded table by the outside kitchen door. The man was easy-going and right out of the old south. A.J. was tough, conservative and a flagrant racist. As for women, he used to say, “When I fuck ‘em, they stay fucked.” He and Chick often had hellacious, name-calling arguments. After high school, I went off to the army and Vietnam. When I got home after a year, my parents told me they had had to put my beloved old dog Sam down, and that Chick had shot A.J. in self-defense eight times with a six-shot revolver. As the great Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “So it goes.”
Finally, how does all this patting, grabbing and jerking off in untied bathrobes jive with the wet-work of the woman known as “Bloody Gina” now nominated to break the glass ceiling at the Central Intelligence Agency? Gina Haspel ran a secret black site in Thailand where, during George W. Bush’s wars, men were regularly tortured with waterboarding and confinement in tiny boxes for long periods of time. Fasting in protest by captives was not permitted, and the CIA operatives under Ms. Haspel stuck food tubes up their assholes — no doubt rudely. Plus, Haspel and her subordinates employed a host of other insidiously devised humiliating procedures. Of course, the men they were torturing were “bad guys” — so it was OK. John Kiriakou, a 14-year veteran of the CIA, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now this: “Gina was always very quick and very willing to use force. . . . [T]here was a group of officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, when I was serving there, who enjoyed using force. Everybody knew that torture didn’t work. . . . Was it moral, and was it ethical, and was it legal? Very clearly no. But Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information.” It’s clear this man found Ms. Haspel repulsive. But, hey, you can’t love everybody in life.
Somehow, as Roiphe and others tell us, a better emphasis on proportion and context would go a long way in the #MeToo movement. Slow down a bit. Facebook and Twitter — or the obsession with them to the detriment of actual thinking — may be altering who we are in a really bad way. Certainly a little more forgiveness and less polarized “gotcha!” vengeance would be a positive consideration. The problem is all this too easily escapes those addicted to i-phones and the insidious power-hungry swarm superficiality of Twitter. Because it does seem to be an addiction. Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell write at the end of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement that, “The only question is how long it will be before our nation buckles under the strains of narcissism.” Think about that quote and the reality of Twitter swarms for a few minutes. It makes me pine for someone like Bernie Sanders to come along and tell us to turn the goddamn things off — jettison all the post-truth fantasizing and get back to real, flesh-and-blood human interaction.
We’re heading into a brave new world, baby. Sci-Fi Cyborg City is coming to a burg near you. So hold on to your pussies and your balls. Our only hope may be that these organs still contain that greatest of all mysteries, the making of children. Maybe they can save us.