{"id":19754,"date":"2015-04-13T16:04:02","date_gmt":"2015-04-13T23:04:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19754"},"modified":"2015-04-13T19:39:01","modified_gmt":"2015-04-14T02:39:01","slug":"thinking-about-barbara-walters-interview-with-vili-and-mary-kay-letourneau-fualaau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19754","title":{"rendered":"Thinking about\u00a0Barbara Walters\u2019 Interview with Vili and Mary Kay Letourneau Fualaau"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Heidi Gutman\u2014ABC\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

I’m giving two readings over the next few weeks, one on April 21st at the\u00a0Risk of Discovery Reading Series<\/a>, and the other on May 2nd as part of the\u00a0New Masculinities Festival 2015<\/a>. The details are below, but I\u2019ve been giving a lot of thought to what these events mean to me and I\u2019d like to share some of that with you.\u00a0April is both National Poetry Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month, a convergence that\u2014as you know if you\u2019ve been reading my posts\u2014fits well with the grant I received from the Queens Council on the Arts to complete my second book of poems,\u00a0Words for What Those Men Have Done.\u00a0<\/em>At the April 21st reading, I will preview some of the poems from this manuscript, and the reading itself will serve as a preview of the larger, more interactive presentation that I will give on a date to be scheduled in September or October. One of my goals with this project is for there to be a conversation in my community about what it means to be a male survivor of sexual violence, and since poetry is one way for people to feel what it\u2019s like to feel something they themselves have not experienced firsthand, I hope this reading helps to make that conversation possible.<\/p>\n

The importance of having this conversation was brought home to me yet again by the interview<\/a>\u00a0Barbara Walters did this past Friday with\u00a0Vili and Mary Kay Letourneau Fualaau.\u00a0In 1997, when she was 34 and Vili was her 13-year-old student, Mary Kay Letourneau was arrested and convicted of child rape,\u00a0ultimately serving seven-and-a-half years in prison, where she gave birth to the couple\u2019s two, now-teenaged daughters.\u00a0I did not see the interview itself, but when I read the\u00a0coverage<\/a>\u00a0it received, especially, but\u00a0not only<\/a>, in the\u00a0pieces<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0appeared<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0lead-up<\/a>\u00a0to the broadcast, I was very disturbed.\u00a0Simply put, much of it seemed to use the couple\u2019s marriage and children to normalize the rape for which Mary Kay was rightfully convicted and to present their story as an against-all-odds tale of happily-ever-after in which the only villain was the society that tried to keep them apart. To be clear, it\u2019s not that the coverage fails to mention Mary Kay’s prison term or that she is a registered sex offender. Those are historical facts it is impossible to deny. Rather, those facts seem to be presented more as obstacles the couple had to overcome than as the legal consequences of a sexual violation, a rhetorical move that almost makes the violation itself disappear.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Time<\/a>, for example, K. C. Blumm phrases it this way:<\/p>\n

The 53-year-old [Mary Kay] \u2013 who spent 89 months in prison for\u00a0child rape<\/strong>\u00a0as a result of her\u00a0relationship<\/strong>\u00a0with her then-student Vili Fualaau in 1996 \u2013 is looking forward to celebrating her\u00a010th wedding anniversary<\/a>\u00a0with Fualaau next month and admitted that as the date approaches she\u2019s been looking back on the events that shaped her life. (Emphasis mine.)<\/em><\/p>\n

I cannot think of another instance in which the words\u00a0rape\u00a0<\/em>(much less\u00a0child rape<\/em>)\u00a0and\u00a0relationship\u00a0<\/em>would be used almost as synonyms, as if, when Letourneau, then in her early to mid-thirties\u00a0\u201cembarked on a sexual relationship\u201d with her barely pubescent twelve-year-old middle school student\u2014again, that\u2019s Blumm\u2019s phrasing\u2014the problem\u00a0was a matter of legal definitions, not the abuse of authority and trust. The language Blumm uses, however, fits very neatly our traditional narratives of manhood and masculinity, in which a boy who is initiated into sex by an older woman is considered \u201clucky\u201d to have met her. More to the point, in popular perception anyway, that\u00a0\u201cluck\u201d precludes any claim he might make not to have wanted the experience or that he was in any way harmed by it. To be a man, in this narrative, is to embrace that kind of\u00a0\u201cluck;\u201d to suggest it wasn\u2019t\u00a0\u201cluck\u201d\u00a0to begin with is to suggest that its recipient is not really a man.<\/p>\n

Vili Fualaau, of course, was not a man when the woman who is now his wife violated him; he was a child, which is why we undertstand her to have raped him by definition. I get it, though.\u00a0The fact that he is no longer a child, that he chose to marry the woman who violated him, that they have been married for ten years, and that they are raising two children to boot makes it hard to know just how to talk about not only who he was when Mary Kay victimized him, but also what the consequences for him actually were. After all, in spite of whatever may have been true back then, they have made a life together now, and\u2014in the absence of any evidence to the contrary\u2014it really isn\u2019t anyone\u2019s place to suggest that this life is somehow tainted or\u00a0\u201cless than\u201d because of their history. Nonetheless, it is telling that Vili’s struggle with alcoholism and depression\u2014\u201cI\u2019m surprised I\u2019m still alive today,\u201d he says.\u00a0\u201cI went through a really dark time\u201d\u2014is also implicitly presented as an obstacle he had to overcome, not as a possible consequence of the way she violated him; and since overcoming obstacles is traditionally what men do to prove themselves, this way of presenting what he says about himself also fits the traditional narrative.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s instructive to imagine how differently the media might have covered this interview if, leaving all other details of the story the same, instead of Mary Kay and Vili, we were talking about\u00a0\u201cMartin\u201d and\u00a0\u201cVivian.\u201d\u00a0Would the narrative have been framed the same way? I doubt it.\u00a0Even for myself, when I do this thought experiment in my own head, I am struck by how much more readily available to me are the language and patterns of thought that foreground\u00a0the abusive nature of my hypothetical \u201cMartin\u2019s” sexual contact with\u00a0\u201cVivian.\u201d Looked at through the lens of the traditional masculinity and manhood narrative, this makes sense. Men in that narrative are supposed to be the actors when it comes to sex, the ones who are always trying to get it, for whom “getting it” is a requirement of being who we are, and of whom my hypothetical Martin, therefore\u2014again, within this narrative\u2014is an example of a guy who needs to learn some self-control. The narrative, in other words, makes it easy to peg him as a perpetrator, since he\u2019s doing what men are “supposed to be doing.\u201d He\u2019s just overstepping the bounds within which he\u2019s supposed to be doing it.<\/p>\n

Culturally, and despite what the law says, our investment in this narrative makes it hard for us to understand female perpetrators like Mary Kay Letourneau as perpetrators, <\/em>perhaps\u00a0especially when they abuse boys and men,\u00a0which in turn can make it difficult to keep in focus the idea that what Mary Kay did to Vili when he was 12 or 13 is essentially no different from incidents of the sexual abuse of boys that everyone agrees is abuse,\u00a0i.e., when there is violence or overt coercion or when, as in my case, the person trying to\u00a0\u201cinitiate\u201d me was a man. (You can read a partial telling of my story\u00a0here<\/a>.) Indeed, it\u2019s worth taking a look at the website\u00a0Female Sex Offenders<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in exploring this idea further. It\u2019s crucal to remember, however, that no matter what the law says,\u00a0this skewed perception of female perpetrators is not going to change until our fundamental understanding of what it means to be a man changes, until we have a narrative of manhood and masculinity that recognizes not just men\u2019s vulnerability and uncertainty, sexual and otherwise, but also our variability\u2014the idea that there is no single correct way to be a man.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I am very excited about participating in the\u00a0New Masculinities Festival<\/a>, one purpose of which is to produce new narratives masculinity and manhood.\u00a0The festival will take place on May 2nd at the\u00a0Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in Manhattan. I don\u2019t yet have full information for the event, but here\u2019s the promotional video for last year\u2019s festival:<\/p>\n