Nineteenth-century conventions for courtship have been largely disassembled in the latter half of this century, bending the codes out of shape. People marry later. The emphasis on virginity for women has changed. Single women work and are not expected to give up their jobs once they marry. Men have been digesting a set of new rules that are nevertheless colored by the old ones. People still court each other, after all. They are still looking for Romance of one kind or another — short or long — and each one of them is alone out there reading and misreading the intentions of others. The Antioch Ruling was clearly a response to the chaos of courtship — a way of imposing a structure on what seemed to have collapsed — but ambiguity remains, not just in interpretation but even in desire itself. There are people, and we have all met them, who can’t make up their minds. There are people who say no when they mean yes, and yes when they mean no. There are people who mean exactly what they say when they say it, and then later wish they had said the opposite. There are people who succumb to sexual pressure out of a misplaced desire to please or even out of pity. To pretend ambiguity doesn’t exist in sexual relations is just plain stupid.
And then there are moments of interruption — those walls that block desire. I was absolutely mad about a boy in high school, but there was something about his nose when he kissed me, something about its apparent softness from that angle, that I disliked. To my mind, that nose needed more cartilage. I kept my eyes shut. I know of a woman who fell for a man at a party. She fell hard and fast. They returned to her apartment in an erotic fever, kissing madly, throwing their clothes off, and then she looked across the room and saw his underwear. If I remember correctly, it was some male version of the bikini bottom, and her attraction vanished suddenly, irrevocably. She told the poor man to leave. An explanation was impossible. What was she to say? “I hate your underpants”?
Sexual freedom and eroticism are not identical; in fact, freedom can undermine the erotic, because the no-holds-barred approach is exciting only if you’ve just knocked down the door. And despite the fact that dinner, a movie, and a kiss at the door have taken a beating in recent years, seduction is inevitably a theater of barriers, a playing and replaying of roles, both conscious and unconscious. Sincerity is not at issue here; most of us play in earnest. Through the language of clothes and gesture and through talk itself, we imagine ourselves as the other person will see us, mirroring our own desire in them, and most of what we do is borrowed from a vocabulary of familiar images. This is not a territory of experience that is easy to dissect legally.
Apparently, there is a new law in Minnesota against staring. It has been duly mocked in newspapers all over the world, but according to my sister, it came about because of the increase in the number of construction sites around Minneapolis, and women were weary of walking past them. Most women have experienced these painful, often humiliating excursions in front of an ogling, jeering crowd of men, and I don’t know of anyone who likes them. This event — the construction crew whooping and hooting at a passing woman — is a convention, a thing those guys do in a group and only in a group, to liven up the job, to declare their masculinity to the world safely. It’s the pseudo-sexual invitation. Not a single one of those men expects the woman to say, “Yes, I’m flattered. Take me, now.”
But staring, even staring in this crude from, does not seem criminal to me. “Officer, he’s staring. Arrest him,” has a feeble ring to it. And I say this despite the fact that twice in my life I found myself the object of what would have to be described as aggressive staring. For several years, when I was in high school and then attending college in the same town, a young man I knew only slightly would appear out of nowhere and stare. He did not stare casually. He stared wholeheartedly and with such determination, he made me nervous and uncomfortable, as if he did it to satisfy some deep longing inside him. Without any warning, I would find him stationed outside the restaurant where I worked or outside the student union at my college, his eyes fixed on me. They were enormous pale eyes, ringed with black, that made him look as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. “I’ve been standing here since eight o’clock this morning,” he said to me once at three in the afternoon, “waiting for you.” One night after work he followed me through the streets. I panicked and began to run. He did not pursue me. The problem was that he acted in ways that struck me as unaccountable. He would make abrupt changes in his appearance — suddenly shaving his head, for example. He walked all the way to my parents’ house to deliver a gift, badly packed in a cardboard box. Filled with dread, I opened the box, only to find an ugly but innocent green vase. Not long before I received the vase, this young man’s twin brother had killed himself in a cafe in a nearby town. He had gone there for breakfast and then, after finishing his meal, took out a gun and blew his brains out. I am sure I associated the actions of the twin with the one who survived, am sure that the staring frightened me because I imagined potential violence lurking behind those eyes. The looks he gave me were beyond anything I had ever encountered, but I also honestly believe he meant me no harm. Perhaps in his own way he was in love. I don’t know. But the crux of the story is that I think I brought it on myself without meaning to. Once, when I was in high school, I hugged him.
I worked at a place called the Youth Emergency Service, and the staring boy used to hang out there. I don’t know where he lived or how he managed. He didn’t go to school. He was sad that day, as he probably was most days, and we talked. I have no recollection of that conversation, but I know that in a fit of compassion I hugged him. I am convinced that the whole staring problem hinged on this hug, and to this day when I think of it I am mortified. Acts cannot be retrieved and, sometimes, they last. This is not a simple story. I often wonder if any story is, if you really look at it, but I carry his face around with me and when I think of him and the former me I feel sorry for both of us.
The other staring man was a student of mine at Queens College. I taught freshman English there and an introductory literature class. My teaching was passionate, occasionally histrionic, but I was a young woman on a mission to educate, and sometimes I did. This student was clearly intelligent, although he had profound and jarring diction problems. His papers were written in a gnarled, convoluted style that was meant to be elevated but was often merely wrong. Eventually, I came to recognize that there were signs of schizophrenia in the writing, but that wasn’t until later. I had private sessions with all my students. These meetings were required, and when I met with him, I urged simplicity and hiding his thesaurus forever. The trouble began when he was no longer my student. He would barge into my office unannounced and throw unwanted gifts onto my desk — records, perfume, magazines. He, too, had a penchant for inexplicable transformations, for flannel shirts one day and silky feminine tops the next. On a balmy afternoon in late April, he visited me wearing a fur coat. Another time, I looked up to find him standing in my little graduate-assistant cubicle, his fingers busily unbuttoning his shirt. This story rings with comedy now, but I was aghast. In my best schoolteacher voice, I shouted, “Stop!” He looked terribly hurt and began stamping his foot like a three-year-old, whining my first name, as though he couldn’t believe I had thwarted him. After that, he would park himself outside the classroom where I taught and stare at me. If I looked a little to the right, I would see him in my peripheral vision. The staring unnerved me, and after several days of it, I was scared. When I crossed the campus, he would follow me — an omnipresent ghost I couldn’t shake. Talking to him did no good. Yelling at him did no good. I went to the college police. They were indifferent to my alarm. No, more than that, they were contemptuous. I had no recourse. In time, the student gave up, and my ghost disappeared, never to bother me again. The question is, What does this story exemplify? Would it be called “sexual harassment” now, because of the shirt episode? Was it stalking? What he actually did to me was innocuous. The fear came from the fact that what he did was unpredictable. He did not play by the rules, and once those rules had been broken, I imagined that anything was possible.