An Appeal To Men: Let Us Be Slaves No Longer (Redux)

[In light of the very harrowing tale about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's (alleged?) involvement with prostitutes, I feel compelled to replay a Contratimes essay. The Spitzer story provokes in many of us men the humbling thought that, but for the grace of God, there go many of us -- into the very pits of hell. Sexual addiction is no joke, nor is it victim-less. The pleasures of the flesh are more often than not harbingers of death.

Moreover, witness today the disgusting and prurient media interest in the prostitute involved. The world seeks to exploit her anew. Such sorrow! May God have mercy!- BG]

From February 11, 2006:

I wept last night, several times. You see, I was watching television, which is not usually my habit (particularly on a Friday night), and I found myself weeping as I watched the 2006 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, particularly when the 9-year-old Italian girl sang the Italian national anthem; or when Pavarotti closed the show with transcendence. The pageantry and pyrotechnics were brilliant; and the Peace Dove, formed by white-clad humans scaling a vertical netted wall, was mindblowing (though the dove looked a bit hawkish, if you ask me). But I also wept when I jumped to another program, 20/20, which featured a segment by John Stossel that included film footage of the killing of African elephants. I cannot tell you how this vulgarity slays me. It is an abuse unconscionable. (I am not referring to bona fide hunting of elephants as a vital natural resource by indigenous peoples.)

I am glad for channel-changing remote controls.

__________________

But something else really tore me up last night. Something that caused me to rend my garments; to rend my heart. It is the sort of demonic reality that should set the world afire with outrage. I am referring to slave trading, sexual slave trading. I urge my readers to watch PBS's Frontline documentary Sex Slaves; and I urge you to help fight the abuse of women (and children) in a trade that is, in fact, only a few mouse clicks away from this site. In fact I urge you men, particularly, who, like me, struggle with even the casual visit to porn-sites on the WWW, to at least fight the darkness by refusing to click on a JPEG or MPEG that will cost a woman her soul. For it is all linked: prostitution, pornography, abuse: it is all part of the degradation of womanhood, of personhood, and, perhaps most of all, motherhood.

Men, lest we forget, are also victims of sexual degradation, in myriad ways. Battered women come to men in all forms: many of us are married to them, our wives having been victimized by fathers or brothers or former boyfriends (the worst culprits, usually), or the culture that begs women to throw their virtues to the wind. But we also, as men, know our own exploitation: We are told everyday in advertisements, books, magazines and porno-promos that sex is ALL we really want; that we are nothing but sex objects too, hungry with lust; that THEY know what we really, really need.

My conviction is that we men must stop the demand for the consumption of women by refusing to participate it in any form. Moreover, I believe we men must begin, perhaps in grand over-reaction, to honor women, elevating them if we must, by viewing their bodies, not as playgrounds, but as cathedrals, as sanctuaries, as temples of holy life. We must stop the tyranny, even if that tyranny turns a profit through increased ad revenue, circulation, retail sales, or web-traffic.

I confess that I am guilty. I have looked at photographs (many!) that are indeed indecent, photographs presented in ostensibly up-scale magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, or some such 'proper' website. I apologize to the women that I've exploited, unwittingly perhaps, with each mouse click. I stand ashamed.

But I will fight nonetheless for the souls of women. I cannot express to you the horrors under which many women (and children) are living right now. As one woman said, a former sex slave, she did not know "that there could be places on this earth that could be so evil. ... I kept waiting for one of my clients (pause) to help me. ..." There are women abducted and sent to foreign soil, chained in rooms, serving up to sixteen men a day, sexually, perversely, in abject decadence worse than Dante's lowest tiers of hell. Governments and legal authorities turn blind eyes towards these obscenities; men and women participate in luring and trapping vulnerable girls in schemes that are nothing short of sick.

I weep today, and I pray my tears are not for show, are not in vain. There is no hope for this planet if we do not honor women; if the womb is reduced to a commodity. I beg you to pray for me, and all earnest men, that we will fight, genuinely, for the glory of mother, daughter, sister, wife; that we will honor our wives; that we will heal our women; that we will heal ourselves, by refusing to countenance this evil any longer. Let us stop the evil; humans are not objects for sale.

Men, wake up and repent with me. We are needed.

©Bill Gnade 2006/All Rights Reserved.

[I have written a poem addressing the struggles men face with sexuality and pornography which is available here. Please note that the poem is unflinching in its use of language. I wrote the poem several years ago, and it was presented in workshop at a writers' conference at Colgate University. The leader of the workshop skipped over it for less controversial material. It's not that bad, but it is serious.]

Death At The Diner: A True Story

Yesterday (Friday, Dec. 7) I sat in the corner booth of the Peterborough Diner, my back to the wall. Across from me sat my nephew, David, 28 years old, looking far older than he should. I was finishing my BLT and fries, while David talked between bites of his bacon cheeseburger. We were pretty quiet despite the fact that the diner, one of those old metal railroad car-type dives that dots the American landscape, was nearly filled to capacity. Plates chimed in the dish washing-room out back; diners tapped coffee spoons on the edges of white ceramic mugs. There was chatter at the counter; newspapers crinkled.

The Peterborough Diner is a decent place, as far as it goes. The food is pure grease-and-grill; the menu is cheap and easy, a bi-fold covered in plastic so dirty you want to wash your hands before you eat but, knowing what the bathroom is like, you're convinced such fussiness will not produce the desired effect. For certain, the diner does not evoke images of sterility.

Only a few feet from my left sat John, a thin, wiry and rugged man, about my age, who's the only guy in town who sells and carves gravestones. John had his back to me, propped up as he was on an old, round vinyl-and-metal stool at the end of the counter. To his right, another man sat, a man in his late 50's or so, who I had seen around town many times but did not really know. But I knew his name. Joey.

As I said, I was nearly done with my BLT. My nephew was enjoying his burger and fries. And then I heard John at the counter.

"Joey! Are you OK?!"

Instantly I was up, leaping toward Joey, trying to prevent him from flying backwards off his stool. I tripped and fell, catching myself with my right knee and right hand but still managing to catch Joey with my left hand. I stood up quickly. John was still shouting.

"Joey! Joey! What's wrong, bud?"

John had an awkward hold on Joey, reaching as he was from his seat on the stool. I looked around Joey's rigid body; his lips were distended, drool spilling out of his mouth. His eyes were rolled up in his head. His body was spasmodic. And he was sporadically emitting awful sounds.

Immediately I could tell he was not choking. He had an airway, irregular and spastic as his breathing was. I turned to a waitress.

"Call 911!" I urged.

John kept talking, and I found myself trying to go through a checklist that I could not find. Airway? Pulse? Seizure? How much time? Where's the ambulance? I was suddenly confronted with my own helplessness.

Joey's condition immediately worsened. He gasped, then shrieked eerily. I warned people around me that he might vomit. People moved away in deathly silence. Then Joey exhaled -- a huge exhalation. He did not inhale. I checked for a pulse, but I could not find one. And I looked at his pallor, and it seemed fine. Then, unbelievably Joey exhaled even more than seemed possible. A moment later, a partial inhale, a gulping.

________________________

Just over 7 years ago, my nephew -- who is learning disabled -- was driving his mother, my 44-year-old sister, to the doctor's office when she suffered a heart attack on a lonely stretch of highway. My nephew pulled over, exited the car, and jumped around frantically, waving his arms at the few cars that drove by. No one stopped, so he drove a little further to a farmhouse. He pounded on the door. No one answered. He ran back to the car. He waved. Finally, someone stopped.

My sister never recovered from the massive loss of oxygen her brain suffered that day. Four days later, I would be the one to remove life-support (not the feeding tube) from her. She died in the ICU in the early morning twilight.

__________________________

As Joey struggled to live, I turned to my nephew. Though 28 years old, he looked like an old child. His face was pure panic; he was jammed in the booth and he could not escape. I moved the little I could to give him a pathway out.

"David," I said. "You can go. It's alright to leave!"

He bolted.

The next few minutes were harrowing for me. I was looking at a man's struggle for life, even if his struggle came while unconscious. I could not accept -- at least for Joey -- that his life would end in a diner.

Another man came to our aid. He was calmer than I. I was distracted by this haunting sense that I could not find my mental checklist for first aid. I was only reacting. I wasn't helping. The waitress, on the phone with 911 operators, was asking us questions. We answered, but all rather dumbly. Again I searched for a pulse, but I couldn't find one. Why? Surely if his heart was NOT BEATING, Joey would not be still able to fight this spasmodically.

Suddenly the man next to me said, "He's completely unconscious. Let's lay him on the floor. Hold his head."

I did what I was told. We pulled Joey off of his stool. And then I realized that the reason we had not laid him on the floor sooner was because there was so little room, AND because the floor was filthy. This man can't die on a filthy floor! I said to myself.

Feeling myself utterly helpless, I held Joey's head and prayed for him. This was death, or so it seemed to me. The ugliness that words cannot convey struck me as proof that Joey was dying, his head in my hands. I asked God for a miracle and for mercy. There was nothing but simple desperation in my plea.

When I finished, I kept asking if anyone had found a pulse. ("They said to lay him on his side!" the waitress shouted.) I could hear sirens a couple of blocks away. I checked Joey's arms for medical bracelets. Nothing.

Just as I was about to say that we needed to start chest compressions, I heard a voice.

"Oh, what happened? That's weird."

"Joey! It's John!" shouted John.

The calm man next to me asked a series of questions: "What's your name? where are you? where do you live?"

Joey answered the questions perfectly. He was completely lucid.

"How embarrassing," he said. "Can I stand up?"

"No," I said, still holding his head (it was cold with sweat). "Don't be embarrassed. We are all the same here, Joey; none of us is different. Do you have any history of epilepsy?"

"No, I don't," he calmly answered. "Can I get up now?"

"You stay here, Joey, until the ambulance arrives."

At that, a paramedic walked in, cool as could be. He recognized Joey.

"Joey, bud! What's going on?"

One minute later, Joey walked out of the diner and into the ambulance.

"Your lunches are free today," the waitress said to me and John.

I went and found my nephew.

____________________

Five hours later I received a call from someone who knew Joey and had discovered that I had helped in a time of crisis. It turns out that Joey was rushed to a major hospital for emergency surgery to install a pacemaker. Joey's heart had slowed WAY, WAY down.

But he would be fine.

____________________

Trust me when I say that I was certain I was staring at death in my hands. Death that suddenly opened its eyes, spoke apologetically, and walked out of the diner.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.