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Issue 2: March 2006.
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Home > Issue 2: March 2006 > Non-Fiction

The Exhibition
by Jessica Huls

The penis is lovely in its proper setting. It’s something, though, that I’ve never given endless thought to. My brothers each have one, and so does my dog. And I suppose that it’s profound that I’m here because of one, but you know, when my junior high guy friends started to talk about theirs as though they were bejeweled scepters that signified rule over a kingdom and a billion dollar pension plan, I just didn’t get it. It doesn’t end with the penis either. The same goes for breasts. They have milk ducts and they get cancer. Significant, but no more so than my lungs. I just want to know why I’ve never had someone desperately want to touch my elbows or my nose or my shins.

Personally, I’ve never been one to snicker for hours after accidentally walking in on a roommate’s boyfriend getting out of the shower. A male friend could probably reveal to me the most painful piercing job possible to no embarrassment of my own. And if I fork over nine dollars to see a movie and the filmmaker has found the need to throw in a full frontal shot of a penis, hey, I’m a willing subject. I’ve submitted my money and myself. It’s when, at that same movie a man sitting a seat or two over from me, without asking, shows me his penis, that everything changes.

...

The days were the ones that were normally unbearably hot. The days where Chicago sucks down the heat and sucks out your breath. But this year the breeze stayed cool all summer. Moving into my third year in a place where I could wander the streets for hours and never run into a recognizable soul, I was beginning to love Chicago. On this particular day, I had stumbled into the fairly trendy Wrigleyville neighborhood where even the boutique sidewalk sales were priced above my reasonable budget. But my explorations that day were fruitful, and I was pleased to have found a brilliant old movie house. The Music Box Theatre stood tall and grand with an old ticket booth, no longer in use, and a vertical electric sign that I could only imagine blazed lustrously into each urban night.

When I asked about the French film about to show, it took me a good few moments to notice that the shaggy haired blonde boy was hitting on me. He said something about a sight for sore eyes. “Oh you like that one?” I asked. “No . . . I like you,” he quietly tittered, only half smiling, as I waited, embarrassed, for my ticket. I wondered why no one ever bothered to look for wedding rings anymore. Maybe I’m silly to think they should care. My husband simply wasn’t there and that was enough of an invitation for this big blonde smirking hormone. “The doors will be open in about fifteen minutes,” he said to the floor, refusing to look at me any longer.

I tiptoed around for a minute or two wondering if the public was allowed entry into the seating area yet. There were a few people lurking around in the shadows of the hallway, but the doors were physically open so I walked through the carved arched entrance. The candelabra lights were dim and the speakers were droning depression era music. The air was old. I knew instantly that I had found treasure. The gold embossed moldings, red satin curtains and plush chairs wrapped the nineteen-thirties all around me. Green faux plants trailed down the walls. On the high, dark blue, cove-lit ceiling there were twinkling stars. And white clouds were being projected towards the back of the ceiling, floating by, just passing through as thousands of people before me had done.

People were now ambling in and taking their seats. I had chosen mine near the front, smack in the middle and a little sequestered. There weren’t many people at this matinee and many of them, like me, were out for a day to themselves.

As the movie began to glitter onto the heavy, red, rising curtain, I sat dreaming of the different people I was going to need to take there. I was chewing over the way they would have to be wowed, when a musky man dripping with shadow turned into my row and sat just one seat away from me. With the theater less-than a third full, I thought it a strange seat for him to take and felt an anxious tug at my chest. I glanced over at him but he turned away from me and shot a look up the aisle over his right shoulder. He must be waiting for someone, I thought, he must not have seen me all scrunched down into my seat. My impulse to move was buried by my own desire to chill out. So I took a deeper than usual breath and dove into the movie.

The Hitchcock-style film was quiet and creeping. When French dribbled out of the speakers, harsh English subtitles flashed across the screen. And I was growing more uncomfortable with the lone man just one seat away. Ten minutes had passed when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the man had a jacket across his lap and was fidgeting underneath it. The instant that it dawned on me that he was masturbating, I snapped my head in his direction to find him waving his wet erect penis into the silver movie light for only me to see. My eyes moved from the exposure to the sickening grin on his face. His eyes, however, were not grinning. They were leering, slightly pained, and extremely invasive. He had won some contention. I was the loser. And worst of all, he knew it. I hit the aisle toward the lobby and didn’t look back. The man, I later figured, had to have skipped out through the exit door right next to the big movie screen. Hadn’t anyone behind me wondered at the commotion?

In the initial thirty minutes after the exhibition, I was only slightly uncomfortable. I had scurried to the back and said to the guys working at the theater, “Um . . . there’s a man with his penis out of his pants.” A nuisance, end of thought. They ran down the alley at the front of the theater attempting to avenge my discomfort, maybe to pin him down, spit in his face, call the police and report this twist on crime. Though these boys were more likely to kindly ask him to keep his pants zipped in their theater, and to please not let it happen again. They didn’t bother the police. The boys just shrugged. Sorry about that, they said with imitation, stomach-churning pity.

The man and his penis had fled the scene and left me alone. Alone to sink back into my movie. But by the time the movie was at its end, my blood was flowing fast, its temperature rising. I was saturated with violation. I was soaking in shame. Shame, not for encountering a random man’s penis, but for not having a large sack of bricks to drop into his lap or freshly squeezed habanero pepper juice. Shame for not standing and screaming out for everyone to hear that he was a sonofabitch.

...

It took about a month until the man and his traveling show didn’t come to mind at least once a day. I occasionally did the old “listen to what happened to me” routine with a friend or small crowd when, more often than I could have dreamed, someone chimed in, “Yeah, I’ve had that happen to me as well. It’s icky isn’t it?” The same manly gesture with slightly different settings. Sarah on a train, Etta in a Laundromat, Meg, both in a park and in a parking lot. How is it that this occurs so often? Is this somehow to be expected as typical male behavior? This I highly doubted. But I was in need of healing so I decided to find out.

I did two things to try to stamp the end of this experience. One, I did a little research. And two, I set out to catch the sneering pervert. I wanted to trap the man who caused me to shudder when passing the theater or just making brownies or driving to class or thinking too much at all. I wanted to trap him, make him explain. I wanted to understand him.

It tends to be that reducing anything to mere psychology or science lets a person exhale a sigh of peace or contentment. But, as I have found, when a man shows his penis in public, science gets messy. As it turns out, we even see exhibitionism in nature. There have been reports of orangutans, chimps, baboons, and the like bending over backwards to point their erected penises in the direction of a female of their given species. This usually leads the female to draw near, study and bestride the penis with little or no effort from the male then or during the rest of the mating process. I was especially disturbed to find that generally the human exhibitionist, most always male, will watch and even follow his victim, often a lone woman, fantasizing about the showing and about her possible positive reaction. My momentary whimsical Paris suddenly became the seedy Bois de Boulogne.

I also found that the majority of male exhibitionists are married and have the same type of education and jobs and intelligence as the average population. Other than loving to show their genitalia to the unassuming stranger, these men actually tend toward social compliance. But the uncomfortably large number of men who make up the exhibitionist population repeatedly perform their show and prefer this to “normal” sexual action. Interestingly, the extremely rare female exhibitionist most always has a quite severe experience of sexual abuse in her past, but most male exhibitionists have no such history. The average sexual deviant tends to start young and to exhibit to the young, usually to females under sixteen. Strangely this is not a permanent “mental illness.” At about age forty, the phallus presentation begins to get old. The exhibitionist tends to quit the hobby cold turkey.

The exhibitionists of the earth make up approximately one third of all caught sex offenders, though most of them also practice other forms of paraphilias (a Greek word meaning “having unusual objects of arousal,” literally, “beyond normal”). Science also calls paraphilias courtship disorders which consists of spying on others having sex, making obscene phone calls, touching strangers inappropriately (often in crowded public places) and can even grow as severe as rape and pedophilia.

In all of my obsessing over the topic, and reading article after article, book after book, I still haven’t found advice for the un-consenting young lady on how to react to such a display. I suppose it’s hard to say when interviewed exhibitionists have declared arousal from a whole slew of responses. Some like you to laugh. Some like you to be scared. Some like you to go bezerk and hurl all sorts of harshness towards them. Some just enjoy watching you high tail it out of the situation.

They dream of the positive response you might offer, but this is only what gets them excited in the first place, while they watch you finger antique bowls at the sidewalk sale and calculate and touch themselves and clench their jaws at your loneliness as you walk, solitary, into a dark movie theater. At this point there’s nothing you can do that won’t bring them to their climax.

I went back to the theater a couple of weeks after the exhibition, with pepper spray and a camera and a whole lot of gall and a couple of friends. We separated on our walk to the theater to make ourselves look like loners and sat far apart from each other in secluded dark areas and watched every unaccompanied man with great, searing suspicion. I couldn’t escape noticing, as my heart beat fast, that I was the one lurking now, seeking a victim, needing the surprise. I didn’t watch a minute of the movie. I dreamt instead. Dreamt of the pleasure I would experience as my forceful foot met an exhibitionist’s ill-prepared testicles.

But he never showed. To my disbelief, I found out from the aloof box office guys that the same man has let loose his pants in that theater several times before it happened to me. But to their knowledge he hadn’t shown again. “Sorry about that” they said? Sorry? What about the wanted poster they should have had up? How about a year’s worth of free movie passes? Where was my complimentary soda? Bastards. Maybe my exhibitionist (oh yes mine) sensed, as I scurried away, that I’d be back. Maybe he found a darker, emptier theater. Maybe he’s evolved to worse. Maybe he simply turned forty and grew tired of it all and gave it up.

Why had I been scared in the middle of a public place? What did I have to lose by using my steel-toed boot? Maybe, in that flashing instant, that man did what I fear he did permanently. He diminished my trust in the rest of them. Maybe the groggy moviegoers wouldn’t have helped me. Maybe they would have dodged my silhouette to keep watch of their nine-dollar movie. Maybe he would have still exited the dark back door, breathed his freedom into the alley, and turned the corner to find another woman who thought she was independent, proud and peaceful.

Other than occasionally wondering about how many men I personally know who just might be capable of showing their penises in public, I have come to quiet some of the sad creature I encountered. Even without revenge, I somehow feel that I have captured him. I’ve made him into a small, sick, unfortunate human whom I only chanced upon momentarily. I can sometimes even imagine thanking him for reminding me that there is far worse that can happen to a woman. And as soon as I notice that I’m justifying his actions, I am furious again. I am more cautious now and more aware, though I shouldn’t have to be. I also imagine that the next encounter I have with an unsolicited penis won’t be as polite. I almost can’t wait.