Post-Weinstein Facebook posts by Laurie Stone…
October 14 at 3:20pm
I have written a number of times about Andre Glaz, a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s, who had sex with his patients, including me. In the aftermath of my sister’s death, I have written a new piece called “Dear Andre.” People have been wondering on Facebook how predators operate, and I thought this would be a good time to show how it feels from the pov of a target. I was a dime-a-dozen target. These are notes from the piece: Dear André, When you lifted my sweater and said, “Your breasts are fine,” I had already kissed boys and knew the difference. It seemed an old world thing to say, and I felt sorry for you. I was fourteen. Another former patient told me, “André started having sex with me when I was eleven.” She said you had your pick of nine or ten women every night. She called it your “harem.” She said, “André shaped my life.” I said, “Mine, too.” She said you told your patients having sex was part of their treatment. Another woman you had sex with told me this as well. You touched her for the first time when she was four. Her parents knew. You were having sex with her mother, and her husband knew. You were fat, ugly, and unhappy. Before you led me to your bed, you did not explain. The second time you took me there you went further, and I felt something. No one had touched me that way before. I had not touched myself that way. I stopped you from putting your penis inside me. I believe you asked me to touch your penis, and I said, “I’m tired and I want to go to sleep.” I did not sleep. You did not try to overpower me. Perhaps you feared I would make noise. There was not much you feared. You had been a Jew in occupied France and gotten out. I doubt I would have made a sound. It would have felt too dangerous. I don’t know where you slept. The next morning you sounded angry and said, “Don’t tell your mother.” You didn’t need to worry.
October 15 at 1:38pm
Last night I was up late and began to write about sex or a quality I think of as sex. The parts of our lives we control are as important to share as the parts we do not control. Maybe they are the most important parts: I do not remember a time before sexual feelings. I have loved, or desired, or wanted to touch, or wanted to run my tongue over the surface of a body for as long as I have been me. At first I did not have language for this. At first I did not have words, period, but I felt something when certain people came into view. I may have been the last girl in my high school class to have sex. After the first time, I looked in the mirror and thought I saw a change I liked. The condom broke. It was made of sheep intestine. It was supposed to be fancy. The boy I was with was that kind of boy. He squirted soda up my vagina. He had heard it kills sperm. By then the tadpoles had sailed off to wherever they were going. For a month I thought my life was over. There was sex in the way I dressed. I walked around in a buzz. I desired people I passed on the street. The mouth of a man I watched move on the subway. People I met. People I still think about. If I wanted you and had sex with you, I thought I loved you. It could be embarrassing. Maybe it was a kind of love. Who is to say? Who is to say what love is? No one knows. I learned about sex from books and people. At first it was, you want to put your mouth where? Are you kidding me? You want me to put your cock in my mouth? In time I would think about certain cocks all day, and as soon as the male human arrived, I would undo his pants and take his cock in my mouth. I liked smells. I worried about my body. I did not drink or use drugs. I was a mutant for my time and not a good sleeper. It is after 3 am now. I love being alone in the dead of night. There are men I can count on the fingers of one hand where words were unnecessary. I once met a boy who was twenty-two. I was forty-four, and he knew everything. I didn’t know half what he knew at his age. He was a drummer and a lttle fat for my taste. I could have kissed him for the rest of my life. I was once attracted to a man who was not free. I told him we could never have intercourse because I would want to spend three days doing nothing but having sex, and he did not have that kind of time. So we did not have intercourse. We walked around in a blur. We had fights. We took off our clothes. I was out of control. I felt bad about that. He felt bad about that. I think we were glad to be alive this way. He lived across the street, and every time I left my apartment I looked up at his windows. They faced 99th Street. Sometimes he was there, looking out. We waved. It went on for years. He was beautiful. He liked to disagree with me. We had a fight about Madonna once. He told me he didn’t always really disagree. He did it to get a rise out of me and watch. He was smart and ambitious. Younger than me. I didn’t get the ambitiousness, but it worked. He became famous.
October 15 at 12:24pm
People like telling women what to do, what to wear, where to walk, where to sit, how much of their bodies to show in public space, how little of their bodies to show in public space, what their bodies should do in the event they become pregnant, how much they should eat, what they should eat, how much sex they should have, the kinds of sex they should not have, how to feel about themselves as sexual beings, as thinking beings, as moving beings. It’s very popular to tell women these things, or put a gun to their heads, or cut out parts of their bodies that make women happy, or pay them less, or take the bulk of the money they receive from johns. It feels good. It’s addictive. There is a global epidemic of it, I think we can all agree. If women are free to move around as they like, eat what they want, fuck whom they want, say, “Get your fucking hands off me,” or “Get the fuck out of my path as I walk,” or “Shut the fuck up about what I am wearing, whom I am fucking, what I eat,” lots of energy will be freed up! What will happen to all that energy? It will go to caring for rescue animals. It will go to advising het male humans how to get pants that fit right and show the butt or something else worth looking at as you find yourself behind one on a crowded street. It could go to watching TV. TV is great. I watch it a lot, and I feel no impulse to designate seating arrangements for women or buy them wigs. Who’s on board? It’s like going on a team diet. It will be hard at first not interfering with women’s bodies day and night, but I feel confident we can all get the hang of it really soon.