Howard Stern’s Big . . .

The original photo of the women’s march

When I was sixteen, I appeared on tv for the one and only time in my life. The program was ill-conceived from the start. A group of local high school students gathered to discuss academic and political issues in a roundtable format, with an adult moderator, and accepted questions from people who called in. For reasons I still don’t understand, we were asked to discuss the representation of history in movies. Equally incomprehensibly, this program aired live.

This was on C-SPAN – the network that televises the proceedings of the federal government. This makes for unpleasantly riveting content now, but in the mid-1990s it was reliably dull. Still, it was television, in the age before streaming, and people would flip through their few dozen channels, land on C-SPAN, and actually watch it. 

I was excited to be on C-SPAN. I dutifully watched all the movies – the one I remember best is Quiz Show– and thought about what I would say. I wore a red sweater, thinking it would show up better onscreen. I even put on make-up. I was good at speaking in class, as I would later be good at speaking in seminar. I thought I might also be good at tv. 

The roundtable discussion was fine, though I have no recollection of what I said. What I do remember is the second caller, an older man. “I have a question for Amy,” he said.

I leaned forward, in my red sweater and unfamiliar eyeliner, and smiled.

“What do you think of Howard Stern’s big dick?”

The moderator cut off the call. “This happens,” she said briskly, and moved on. There were other callers and more questions, and the other students must have answered them. I couldn’t speak. Or move. I tried not to cry. Why was it a question for me? He did say Amy, didn’t he? I thought of my mother, who had come with me and was watching from the greenroom. Was it something about the sweater? (Strangely, ever since, I have been fixated on that red sweater.) Was there something else I could have said? 

I’m sure the caller was watching. I’m sure he noticed my misery. 

I wonder if he was jerking off.

I wonder if I should have written that.

I’m not supposed to use the phrase “jerking off,” just like I’m not supposed to talk about a “big dick,” because I’m an academic historian who adheres to the basic conventions of professional politeness, because I’m a respectable married woman with children, and, most importantly, because it seems like an invitation. It’s the verbal equivalent of that pretty smile and red sweater.

My entire professional life, I’ve written about desire and subjugation, and I’ve tried to avoid issuing that invitation. I wrote the world’s least sexy article about adultery and the world’s least sexy book about prostitution. If a man brings up anything related to sex in a professional setting, I issue a practiced blank stare. No, I have never heard that term, it says. No, I do not understand that joke. 

And yet. 

As an assistant professor, I went to a campus interview and found myself alone in an interview with two men who asked me about the depiction of Korean women in Japanese pornography. It was a joke, apparently. By then I was an exhausted mother with better coping strategies. I dramatically looked at my watch. “Congratulations,” I said, “it’s 8:30 in the morning and you’ve already asked the one female job candidate about pornography.” And then I smiled my most non-threatening smile. I knew I was not getting that job.

 Years later, after writing a book and getting tenure, I gave a big lecture at the Freer-Sackler museum and a man came up to the podium to ask a question. He had an unkempt beard. “So,” he asked, as I eyed his dirty sweatshirt, “do you watch Japanese porn?” I turned my back on him and walked away. Later, a graduate student chastised me. “You know, I don’t think he meant to offend you,” he said. 

I’m a professor in your field and you’re aligning yourself with the man in the dirty sweatshirt, I thought. 

By then, I didn’t think it was the green dress I had chosen, or the make-up and the blow-out. Or the jewelry and the wedding ring, all my usual armor. By then, I had read enough feminist theory and criticism to know that any woman speaking in public becomes a target for sexual objectification. But I still felt like the sixteen-year-old in the red sweater. I had seen myself as a professor, an intellectual. How stupid of me. How unrealistic. 

I can do everything possible to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention, to avoid issuing the invitation, to avoid opening the door. But the problem is that misogyny isn’t that polite. It doesn’t wait for an invitation. It will show up anyway, with an unkempt beard, and demand your attention. 

I can politely decline to say the words – “dick,” “jerking off” – and then I will be above reproach. But I will also be unable to explain my own life and the forces that have shaped my scholarship, often without my wanting them to. I think of the vulgar signs at the Women’s March that the National Archives blurred out for the sake of appropriateness. Sometimes, there is no other language.

If I’d known what I know now, that sixteen-year-old would have smiled her biggest, most nonthreatening smile. She would have said, “I think that Howard Stern’s big dick is trying to insert itself where it is unwanted and doesn’t belong.” She would have told that man that he was an asshole. And she would have ripped off her microphone and walked out.