Dick Move
“It didn’t really have any impact on me,” Payton said, when I asked if he’d felt hated or feared during those years. “I was married to a traditional Kappa Kappa Gamma who wanted a new washing machine and everything.” He was sitting at his computer, working on a software project, and I was interrupting him once again.
“Okay, but in the dream, I was aware of myself as a potential predator. Do men worry about that?”
“What?”
“Do little boys grow up with the same fear of the bad man and how does that affect your own feelings about having a penis?” I asked, certain that this must have some effect on little boys.
“I grew up pre-sexual predator. I had my bus pass, and I knew to stay away from the shabby people and stick to the main boulevards, but I was running around New York City at ten without a care in the world.”
“Really?” This was hard to believe. “I mean, I can name at least a half dozen times when I’ve been confronted by a penis in an inappropriate setting, and in most of those, there were other men around. Like, once there was a man masturbating in the back of a bus in Manhattan…”
“Right, so you have firsthand knowledge. I don’t, but yes, if I did, I’d find it every bit as unpleasant as a woman would, I imagine.”
“So, what if it was a woman. I mean, if you unexpectedly ran across a female flasher or something?”
“Right. I mean, if you’re a guy, and you happen to see a young, attractive woman who is accidentally showing a little more flesh than she realized, you get an adrenaline high… you definitely wouldn’t feel assaulted.” He leaned back in his chair. “But, really, there is something to the surreptitiousness of that which is important. Full-on beaver, that’s not so attractive. You need a little mystery, and the idea that you’re seeing this because of a happy accident.”
“Okay, so if only men can really be bad in this particular way, is it something you worried about when you were young? About not becoming a bad man.”
“No. At least, not when I was coming up. We were taught how to treat a lady.”
How to treat a lady struck me as anachronistic, almost funny, but I love him in part for his gentility and the slight tinge of formality in the way he comports himself.
“Maybe you need to talk to someone younger,” he said, though he’s only a few years older than I am. “Someone more contemporary.”
Not long after the dream, I was called to sit on my county’s Grand Jury. Over two days, we heard a little more than a hundred cases. Six of them involved sexual abuse or assault. Of those six, three of the victims were male children, two were male adults. Only one was female. Five of the perpetrators were male, but one—in a particularly horrifying case of repeated child molestation—was female. These were not the sex crimes that Women’s Studies and years of crime drama TV had lead me to believe existed. I didn’t expect female predators or a preponderance of male victims.
The significance of this is heightened by its coming so soon after the dream. I know that it’s still true that most victims of sexual violence are women and most perpetrators are men. But most is such a problematic word, and I’m bothered by the way it erases the experiences of male victims and genders our understanding of what is dangerous. It turns out there are bad women, and that that sometimes having a penis can put you in danger rather than making you dangerous.
“Didn’t it ever occur to you to try to pee with it,” Payton asked a few nights later during the commercials between episodes of Ax Men, “or at least to masturbate?”
“No,” I said. “It didn’t seem to be about that. For whatever reason, I felt pretty clear in the dream that you’d lent me your penis specifically so that I could go out and have sex with someone else. It also never occurred to me ask you to help me use it.”
“Well, that’s a good thing,” he laughed. “I can see lending it to you, but that’s as far as it goes.”
“The weirdest thing is that the dream made me happy. I wasn’t disappointed. I woke up feeling like everything worked out the way it was supposed to work out.” I tucked my feet under his legs on the sofa for warmth. “I was happy I hadn’t had sex with anyone else.”
He shook his head and ruffled my hair. “It would have been okay, whatever. It was a dream.”
“I know,” I said. And I did, but I was still glad.
