Nadia Anjuman, Dalton Conley's "Men's Right To Choose" and Saadi's Bustan

It’s been months since I’ve written anything here, but I have been buried in translating Saadi’s Bustan, a masterpiece of 13th century Iranian literature, a project I have finally—finally!—finished, and I am just now beginning to pick my head up out of that sand to look around and see what I have missed. Actually, calling the Bustan sand is unfair, though the image is accurate for how little I have bothered to keep up with what is going on around me. At the same time, though, it is also true that translating Saadi’s masterpiece brought me precisely back to much of what is happening in the world today. Saadi has an awful lot to say about what it means to run an empire, and since we are, here in the United States, being dragged by our government into the role of imperial rulers, whether we like or not (many would say we are there already), I found it hard not to marvel at how consistently Saadi’s advice to the rulers of his time is advice that George Bush and those who work with and for him ought to take. This, however, is not the particular connection I am interested in making today. It’s too easy.

Instead, I’m thinking about two things that have been in the news recently. One, the death of Afghani poet Nadia Anjuman, which I am embarrassed to say I did not pay enough attention to when it first came out; and, two, Dalton Conley’s op-ed piece in The New York Times on Thursday, December 1, called “A Man’s Right To Choose,” which captured my attention not only because it is a badly reasoned argument for allowing a man, under certain circumstances, to obtain a court order to compel a woman with whom he has conceived a child to carry that child to term against her will, but also because the issue it addresses is one that I wrote about almost twenty years ago in two essays that were published in a magazine called Changing Men. The first article was called “His Sexuality, Her Reproductive Rights;” the second, “Fertility and Virility: A Meditation on Sperm.” (The link will take you to a PDF file that contains both essays. Before I continue, one caveat: I will be quoting from both of these articles and I am going to resist the temptation to revise what I said in 1988 and 1989 to fit my understanding of these issues today. While I still agree with the main points I was trying to make in those essays, there are many things I would now phrase differently.)

What I tried to do in these two pieces was address Conley’s concern about how to “legitimate men’s claims to a role in…reproductive decision-making,” but without doing what he does, which is to trample on women’s reproductive rights in the process. The first essay was my attempt to work through my own sense that the “injustice of men controlling the biology of reproduction will find no remedy in the injustice of women’s control over our emotional investment in having children.” This is precisely the injustice that Conley asserts motivated him to take the position that he does:

“About a decade ago, my girlfriend became pregnant. It wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t exactly unplanned either, in that we obviously knew how biology worked. I desperately wanted to keep the baby, but she wasn’t ready, and there were some minor medical concerns about the fetus, so she decided to terminate the pregnancy against my wishes. What right did I have to stop her? As it turned out, none. It was, indeed, a woman’s right to choose.”

It must have been very painful for Conley to have to give up the fatherhood he was imagining himself into when his girlfriend had that abortion, but to argue that the logical measure to take against such pain is for “a father [who] is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother…[to] be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create” is to argue, ultimately, that heterosexual men do not have to bear any real responsibility for our own sexuality. I know that what I just wrote sounds counterintuitive. Conley, after all, is talking about a man who is willing to take full responsibility for a child he helped to conceive, but think about it like this: One way of defining the notion of taking responsibility for yourself is the ability to draw and live within one’s own boundaries, while at the same time recognizing and respecting the boundaries of others, and since there is no way that what Conley proposes can be construed as anything but both disrespect for a woman’s boundaries and a man’s failure to live within his own, there is no way that what Conley is talking about is heterosexual male responsibility. This is how I put it in “His Sexuality, Her Reproductive Rights:”

“Male heterosexual responsibility should begin with the realization that once we fertilize the egg…what happens thereafter is beyond our control. We need to start with what we can control: the extent and nature of our heterosexual relationships.”

I wonder, for example, whether Conley and his girlfriend had a serious, explicit, nuts-and-bolts conversation before they started having sex about how each of them felt about the possibility of her getting pregnant and the choice she would have to make if she did. His contention that while the pregnancy “wasn’t planned…it wasn’t exactly unplanned either, in that we obviously knew how biology worked” is a pretty strong indication that they did not have such a conversation, since knowing that a given consequence is possible is in no way the same thing as planning for that consequence; it’s not even close to the same thing. Indeed, if Conley really wants to talk about what it means for a man to take responsibility for his own sexual behavior, he ought to begin by acknowledging that the problem he describes might have been avoided if he and his girlfriend had had the kind of conversation I am talking about and made their sexual decisions accordingly, avoiding intercourse, for example, if their ideas about pregnancy and abortion were significantly different enough. More to the point, if this conversation did not take place, he needs to hold himself accountable for that fact.

In “Fertility and Virility,” the second essay I published in Changing Men, I tried to work through not only what that kind of accountability might mean, but also what kinds of reproductive rights men could reasonably claim if we took that accountability and the responsibility I talked about above seriously. The problem, as I phrased it at the time, and Dalton’s op-ed makes abundantly clear that the same problem exists now, was this: “While the existence of male reproductive rights may seem self-evident, most discussion I have heard or read on this topic begins precisely where it should end: after the egg has been fertilized.”

Men do not like to accept the reality that neither the division of labor nor ownership of the means of production in the biological processes of human reproduction is fair—women do more of the work and the bodies in which that work is done are theirs—and nothing is going to change that. A large part of what drives Dalton Conley and men who feel as he does is the anxiety this imbalance produces. They fear women’s full and absolute control of women’s own reproductive lives, because that means that men, or at least it feels like it means that men are left with no control over when and whether we have children.

On one level, of course, if women have full reproductive choice, we don’t and cannot have that kind of control. Whether or not we have children depends on whether or not the women with whom we conceive choose to give birth, and this, for me, is where the distinction between fertility and virility comes in:

“Fertility lies as much in the potential as in the fact of reproduction. Virility lies only in having reproduced. Men, by privileging virility, by investing our sense of sexual [and reproductive] validity in the effect our bodies can have on the bodies of women, have created a situation in which our feelings of sexual [and reproductive] self-worth depend upon the presence of women. Only when they give birth…can we see ourselves as fully sexual, fully human beings.”

Conley distinguishes between fertility and virility as well, though he does so only by implication. Moreover, a careful reading of his essay reveals that it is virility and not fertility he is trying to protect: “And my desire for fatherhood was eventually fulfilled by two wonderful children. But every so often I think back to the fateful decision and frustration boils up.” Conley does not mourn this child-that-might-have-been; nor does he express regret that it was not brought into the world. Rather, he expresses his frustration that he could not compel his girlfriend to give him the child. What he ultimately wanted, in other words, was control, and the control he wanted, and wants, is no different from the control that men have exercised over women’s reproductive lives for centuries, a control that is at the heart of patriarchy and that is central to traditional notions of virility.

Please note: I am not suggesting that Conley should not have been frustrated, nor that he should not continue to feel this frustration even now, all these years later. I cannot imagine, except to mouth the platitude that it must be very painful, what it would be like to want a child, to know that I have already helped to conceive the beginnings of that child-to-be’s life and then, with no appeal possible, to have to accept the fact that, against my wishes, the woman who was carrying the beginnings of that child-to-be’s life chose to end it. Nonetheless, to argue from that pain to a social policy giving men the right to take possession of women’s bodies in the ways that Conley suggests is to argue not for a valuing of men’s fertility, or even of men’s desire for fatherhood—which is what Conley insists his argument is about—but, rather, it is to argue that any given man’s desire to be a father, assuming he is willing to put his money where his mouth is, is tantamount to a legally enforceable edict that he should be made a father. Power, in other words, is what’s at stake here, not fairness, and power is the province of virility, not fertility.

So what would it mean to think through the scenario Conley presents us with in terms of male fertility? In “Fertility and Virility,” I tried to suggest some places where we might begin to answer that question, starting with a serious examination of the social meaning of sperm. When I was growing up, sperm was either something you used to get a girl or woman pregnant or something that you needed to neutralize in order to avoid getting a girl or woman pregnant; the fertility inhering in sperm was not something of value in and of itself. I also wrote that placing male fertility at the center of a discussion of men’s reproductive rights means acknowledging that the male body, just like the female, has a reproductive cycle and that we go through this cycle every time we ejaculate, whether we do so inside a woman’s body or not; and if we want to honor what that cycle means in a way that does not impose itself and take possession of women’s bodies, we need to think about how men can take control of the fact that, biologically speaking, there is no difference for us between erotic and reproductive sex.

One way to take this control would be to demand a form of male birth control that is at least as effective as the pill. (The question of whether or not women would trust us to take it is, for the moment, a separate question; that is a trust that men would have to earn. All I am talking about right now is how men might start to think about the issue of reproductive rights in terms of male fertility, not virility.) Another way of asserting this control would be, as I suggested above, for heterosexual men to make the question of whether our partners agree with us about what should happen if they become pregnant central to whether or not we have intercourse with them. We, in other words, would have to take the responsibility of saying no to intercourse if we were not willing to risk what a disagreement would mean. If you really want to talk about fairness when it comes to reproductive rights, women always have to these kinds of judgments about the possible consequences of intercourse when they are decided whether or not to have sex with a man.

What kinds of policies might flow from this very different way of looking at intercourse for men is something I will not presume to predict, but I would be willing to bet that if Dalton Conley had learned when he was younger to think about reproductive rights in terms of his fertility, what he remembered most about his child-that-might-have-been would be how he’d mourned fit and not how much he resented the fact that he couldn’t control the woman who chose not to carry that pregnancy to term.

This issue of controlling women is what brings me to Nadia Anjuman, the 25-year-old Afghani poet who died after a fight with her husband, Farid. They had been married for 15 months. He admits to slapping her during the fight but vehemently denies killing her. Instead, he insists, she committed suicide, having swallowed poison after he hit her. Farid’s mother has also been arrested in relation to the killing. This article from the Afghan Recover Report gives the fullest account of the story, along with the many questions it raises. Apparently, Farid’s mother wanted him to marry someone else and when he chose to marry Nadia instead, and she moved into his house—which is the custom in Afghanistan—the tension between the two women was intense. Nadia’s mother blames Farid’s mother for the death; the doctor who examined Nadia’s body, Dr. Barakatullah Mohammadi, confirms that there was “bruising around her right eye, but no other signs of an injury that could have caused her death,” which lends support to Farid’s insistence that his blows did not kill her; but Nadia’s family refuses to authorize an autopsy, which means that, in the absence of someone making a full confession, the cause her death will never be known for sure. Two other articles that gives detailed coverage to this story can be found here, in The Australian and here, in The Times..

Nadia Anjuman published one book of poems, Flowers of Smoke, to wide literary acclaim, and she was at work on a second volume of poetry when she died. (The name of her first book, Gule Dudi, has most commonly been translated into English in the press as Dark Flower, but “dud”—pronounced dood—actually means smoke in Persian.) According to both The Australian and The Times, though this is not mentioned in the Afghan Recovery Report, there is some speculation that her family’s shame over Nadia’s writing, which dealt with love and beauty, might have had something to do with why she was allegedly killed. If that is the case, then Nadia’s death would be the result of a kind of honor killing, a term which commonly refers to the murder of a woman by her male relatives because she has sexually dishonored her family.

There it is. Male control of the female body. The female body as the repository of male, and therefore family, honor. The responsibility of upholding that honor in male terms weighing entirely on the shoulders of the woman. The resulting and often horrifyingly circumscribed nature of that woman’s life. The deaths, psychic and literal, of women who cannot survive such circumscription.

Dalton Conley would, no doubt, be horrified at the suggestion that his proposal has anything at all in common with the practice of honor killing. He, after all, is talking about life, the life of a child, nor does he propose that the woman who is forced to carry a pregnancy to term under his proposal, a kind of slavery though it may be (my words, not his), should be anything other than free to live her own life when that term is over; but, again, if you read carefully, I think you will find that the same code of honor that men use to justify honor killings is at work in his proposal. After stating the pro-choice position that the debate about reproductive rights “is really about a woman’s control over her body,” Conley goes on to write, “Hence my lack of rights to have any say in whether my seed comes to fruition.”

Think about that language: my seed. Not “the child we conceived.” Not even “our seeds” or “our combined seed.” Or anything else that would recognize and legitimize her. But my seed. As if her body were nothing more than the soil in which he’d planted it. More to the point, though, the court order he would like men to be able to get is a way to prevent her from killing his seed, from dishonoring him, in other words, in very explicitly sexual terms. Still, Conley is not advocating that such a woman be put to death, but what would happen if she were to die as a result of complications from the pregnancy she was forced to continue? While he obviously would not be guilty of murder in the legal sense, wouldn’t it be the case that she died as a result of actions he took in order to preserve his honor? Would that not be a form of honor killing? Would he be at all liable for her death?

I assume that Conley wrote his op-ed in good faith, by which I mean simply that he was trying to work his way as honestly as he knew how through an extremely difficult issue, but his piece is frightening to me nonetheless because it attempts to promulgate precisely the kinds of values that may have led to Nadia Anjuman’s death. The Bush administration has made it clear in any number of ways that they are eager to return the United States to those values, to a time when men were men and women knew their place. It is part and parcel of the empire building to which Bush and company have committed themselves with so much fervor. We need, and by “we” I mean particularly pro-choice men, to critique Conley’s editorial and others like it as loudly as we can. We need to take responsibility for this because he is presuming to speak for us, and I will end this now, very neatly, by offering you a quote from Saadi’s Bustan which I hope I have lived up to, and sewing up the last loose end in this entry:

Beware the ignoramus
who presumes to speak for ten others! Speak
for yourself instead, once, after much thought,
the way a wise man does. If you let a hundred
arrows fly at once, each one of them
might go wide. Take a single shot instead.
Just make sure you shoot it true!