THE UNREGISTERED: Glances Toward and Away

Glance #1

If looks could kill, goes the expression, and in fact they can and do. To glance means to glide off a struck thing, to strike obliquely. We are talking about weapons now: to dart, to shoot, and about light: a blinding shine. Men have a way of glancing at women that lets us know we are already dead. They don’t even need to be a good shot. The flash shoots off. They look at you in the photograph or in the flesh. Makes no difference. It’s a passing glance. But what is it passing for? The smug way that teacher looked at you in your high school library. You have seen this look your whole life, passing through generations of men. His eyes glance over your body, showing you his “appreciation,” then angry for your lack of gratitude. With the same look in his eye, your doctor, now that you are old enough to be alone with one, makes a pass at you. Do people still say that, or does passing mean you are only dying?

Glance #2

As I left my daughter in cabin “Carroll,” at her summer camp for the arts, I wondered, “Did they name all the cabins after pedophilic artists?” I imagined the possible names of other cabins: girls sleeping in Polanski, Allen, Balthus, and Kelly; boys sleeping in Britten, Caravaggio, and Ginsburg. Perhaps my daughter’s cabin isn’t named for Lewis Carroll, but that’s who comes to mind for me, a parent leaving her daughter with strangers in the middle of nowhere. Carroll, the pen name of the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland, had a well-documented erotic fascination with children, photographing over sixty naked six to twelve-year-olds. We do not have any evidence that Carroll acted on his desires, but his reputation activates a primary parental fear.  I could be thankful to this art camp for naming the fear, putting it right there on the door, as a kind of threshold that must be crossed, the gateway to citizenship within patriarchy. Perhaps by looking directly at it, by refusing to look away, I can stave off the danger. Keeping my fears in sight assures me that I won’t be surprised when they materialize. I’ll be ready because on the way home my partner and I listen to a podcast about child abduction and sexual assault in a small Midwestern town. We could listen to anything, but we turn to hearing about Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance in 1989, the case that is responsible for the national sexual offender registry [SOR].  But then, naming the cabin “Carroll” might itself be considered a form of sexual harassment: a threat, a literal sign telling anyone who can read it that a girl’s humanity matters less than her body, that girls are mysterious muses to old men until they are nothing. The forms of sexual harassment and misconduct morph as a girl moves through generational markers, so that it feels each stage of predation grooms us for and normalizes the next. A girl learns to be a vigilant object.

Glance #3

We talk about the celebrities with an uneasy distance, over drinks with friends. These men, the ones we know about, the ones we have dismantled from power because of their misuse of it, have become a ritualistic offering of hope and a false sense of justice. We know it’s not the single incident that matters; it’s not the glance, but death by a thousand glances, a thousand relentless body parts and words. Our fixation on targeting individuals is a copout when it comes at the expense of getting at the root of the problem: men at the center of everything. The SOR extends the logic of weeding out “the bad men.” This list is symbolic because these are not—not by far—the only men. These are only the men who fit the (racist, classist, xenophobic, homophobic) description. These are men who take a fall for the rest. When we out celebrity men, we use the word “fallen” or “take down,” reinstating the hierarchies and power dynamics that created the conditions for their sexual predation in the first place. A few household names have been rebranded as everyday rapists, and it’s not nothing, these outings, but it’s a little like naming camp cabins after offenders or putting their names on a public registry. It’s a mockery of the actual lives women and girls live. Every minute on earth, men sexually harass, badger, bully, abuse, and assault women without consequence. Some moments of assault or harassment surprised me enough to remember, but most wove seamlessly into the fabric of the ordinary. I couldn’t have articulated these moments as violations of my rights because I didn’t think of them as anything particularly unusual. We all have our own personal lists, I guess, but I couldn’t begin to name all the men. Not a single man who has harassed or assaulted me or anyone I know is on that list. How many men is that? How many men not on the registry does it take to make that registry itself an offense? How many men are we talking? How many men are talking? We talk about the numbers of women who get raped every day, every year; we have those numbers, we have the passive voice to help us avoid talking about the unregistered men who harass, abuse, assault, and rape.

Glance #4

A health care worker rapes a woman in a vegetative state, and no one knows about it until she has a baby. She had been in a vegetative state at a private nursing facility for fourteen years. What don’t the headlines say? The word “rape.” They say the woman “had a baby,” in awe and total denial of the violatory crime that created the baby. We neglect, then we can’t look away from the mess we created. We find ourselves, here, even after the case of Larry Nassar held us riveted. If we don’t know what happens when parents are in the room, we are fully blind to what happens when they aren’t. We neglect then we can’t look away from the mess we created, which is too horrifying and implicating to sustain our attention. We settle again into a comfortable neglect. The SOR offers this neglect without a sense of responsibility. The SOR is our monument to disenchantment, marking our willingness to participate in systemic oppression as long as we feel “safe.” Like Trump’s Wall, the Registry is symbolic, which is to say, an empty, evidence-less performance of protection. The most truthful yet benign argument against both is that they don’t work. They are something concrete to point to and say “we are doing all we can.” In this way, symbols tend to syphon off other kinds of protections as they fail to address the complexity of systems. “Safety” is a word that hangs with what we fear, with anything that needs regulation (says patriarchy, says capitalism, says religion) or can participate in the fantasy of control. The OED goes on for thirty pages about “safety” (noun), starting with “salvation of the soul” (French and Spanish) and “rights of sanctuary” (Latin), both a spiritual state and a deliverance. On one hand, children report pedophiles at least seven times on average before adults take them seriously; on the other, a lifetime of alienation and surveillance for those who do harm. On the one hand, most new sex crime is committed by first-time offenders; on the other, most men who have committed sex crimes are not on the list. On all the other hands, why do we think criminalizing men long after they have served time, or even serving time at all, will help women and children?

Glance #5

Each time I read about a celebrity outed for grossly wielding his power in exchange for sex, I involuntarily recall a corresponding memory. Famous bosses don’t act very differently from your and my bosses. For every lime-lit husband, there’s a thousand shadow husbands. Time opens a thought. Then another. These men are undocumented, unnamed, unlocated, unregistered. When I tell people about the stranger who used his hard dick to push me from the Tube platform onto a train, like a very short billy club, then stood on the other side of the closed doors and masturbated as he met my eyes through the window, I sometimes see a disbelief on their faces, as if I were telling them my fantasy instead of my experience. I was eighteen years old, going from my job to my apartment, alone in a foreign country for the first time, on a crowded platform, with so many hips and elbows and bags jostling against me, I didn’t know what it was until I turned around to face the closing doors. I saw him staring directly at me, and I saw everyone around me turn their heads away, as if ashamed for me, as if I had brought him with me, as if they were witnessing something private, as if they were all women who had to constantly negotiate and deflect harassment by looking away and getting on with their lives, pretending not to see it. I anticipate you looking away, too, as you read this; I anticipate your doubt because the averted looks of my fellow passengers taught me how to read the averted looks of my auditors when I tell the story: looking down or away, facing another way, leaving me alone with this stranger and with the story he forced on me. Telling this story years later to a table of writers got me kicked out of sports bar by an offended male waiter. He told us to leave, we asked why. He said that our conversation was inappropriate and that other customers were complaining. What is worse: a woman being acted upon forcibly in public or talking about it in public afterward? What’s worse than being harassed, I learned, is talking explicitly about being harassed.

The train lingered there for a long minute before speeding off. Cell phones did not exist in 1986 so I filmed it with my eyes and I used language to make it into a story. I carry this experience around with me, in every place I go and live, until it becomes almost indistinguishable. It’s just a drop in the bucket: thousands of women have rhyming stories, local variations and regional varieties. I even have other stories like this one. Out of sheer exhaustion, we learn to look away eventually, to pretend we don’t see, to screw our eyes into a distant star, to dig our focus into a stain at our feet.

Glance #6

Think of all the abuse Larry Nassar managed for decades while parents were in the room. Hundreds of girls and women, hundreds of parents, hundreds if not thousands of times. We turn away, or we turn a blind eye, an eye blinded by authority, groomed by authority blindness. It’s the other side of gaslighting. If someone else can destroy my perception of reality by insisting on its inaccuracy, then I can preemptively disbelieve my own experiences and instincts. No parent could believe a man would casually chat with them while finger banging their daughters and feeling them up, all while erect and sometimes panting. Culturally we see doctors as sympathetic figures, who when they “fall,” need therapy instead of as predators who must answer to the law. If the claims cannot be denied, these doctors get a diagnosis. They get a treatment. They come back, meaning most are eventually cleared for practice again. When Nassar’s case broke, it seemed like my small corner of the world, SE Michigan, might be a hotbed of pedophilic pediatricians. Yet the scale of his abuse overwhelms and eclipses strictly regional news, which is littered with smaller scale cases that stay local, perhaps because it embarrasses us, we don’t dig or follow leads and connections. Instead we minimize. In 2011, a resident at University of Michigan Hospital, Stephen Jensen, received a minimum federal sentence for one possession of child pornography. He was undergoing pediatric training at the time. He left his zip drive in a hospital computer, where another resident found it and reported it to the attending physician, but Jensen wasn’t arrested or reprimanded for six months. In what sounds like a classic case of gaslighting, an attorney at the hospital told the resident who found the zip drive that her concerns were “unfounded,” never mind the 90 images and four videos of child porn on that zip drive, left in a public computer in a hospital lounge. This man is so white, so middle class, so professional, so doctorial, so male, that the final word in the media about his case is this: “’A tremendously bright future has been lost,’ Cassar [Jensen’s attorney] said. “He had a lot of potential to do a lot of good. He wanted to study cancer and cancer treatments, and because of the way this thing went down, that might be lost.” The snuffed light of his noble future blinds us to unnarrated pasts; clocks stay set around male empathy and identification. Time brands, burrows, blinks, double-blinks. Memory drips, male doctor by male doctor:

Four Quick Glances:

My general practitioner calls in a nurse before starting my pelvic exam. She stands by the door, eyes fixed straight ahead—looking and not looking. My doctor asks me if there’s anything I want to tell him before he begins. I am a little confused by this novel question, “No, I don’t think so,” I say, “like what would I want to tell you?” My feet are already in stirrups. He peers at me over the sheet, “Like it doesn’t bite or anything, does it?” As he chuckles and I do, too, in a startled and regressive attempt to make him feel less awkward, more comfortable, I catch the nurses eyes rolling.

Winding down my two-year checkup, my otolaryngologist says though my eardrum is “saggy,” it appears to be doing the job. He says that I look young for my age. He says, it’s okay to put my head under water. He says it’s okay to stand on my head and to sneeze. As I’m gathering my things, he implores me to “avoid domestic abuse to the head.” He says blows to the head would not be good. “For my ear,” I say. He says, “Yes, that might damage your ear and we’d have to re-do the surgery.”

A gynecologist tells me that I will have “the most watched breasts in Washtenaw County,” a line he’s clearly used on all the other 1,500 women whose boobs he “cares for.” The line is extra-creepy with its practiced shticky half-laugh, and his young female intern who is standing behind him, as he sits undeniably too close in a chair facing me. Embarrassed for him—the line probably felt different pre-Weinstein—my eyes instinctively dart to hers. I am in the Handmaid’s Tale, then looking at her for comfort or recognition as he delivers his lines between us.

As I sit almost horizontal in the chair, my dentist keeps pulling down my skirt. His hand brushes my thighs over and over again as he literally yanks on my skirt right between my thighs. He does this as he looks in my mouth and again when he takes breaks from looking in my mouth. The most constant thing in the room is his hand yanking at the fabric over my thighs.

Glance #11

In the dark, crowded theater, to get to my seat, I have to crawl over my daughter’s first pediatrician, Howard Weinblatt and his wife. I have popcorn in my hand as I step over his lap to get to the other side and settle in for Blue Jasmine. I had sworn off Woody Allen after he married his ex-wife’s daughter, but we had a babysitter that night and we wanted to see a movie so we settled on a sexual predator’s film about sexual predation (via A Streetcar Named Desire and revenge at Mia Farrow). Years before this and long after we changed doctors, a local mother outed Howard Weinblatt’s attraction to young girls. I was alarmed to see him, almost flaunting his status on the opening night of a Woody Allen film. He had been caught masturbating as he watched his tween neighbor, a patient since birth, undress on at least four occasions. The girl first noticed him watching her undress when she was ten. The mother filmed him watching her daughter undress and masturbating in his dining room window. No surprise that the police found 69 images of suspected child pornography and child sexual exploitation on his computer, as well as a paid credit card subscription to the website Teen Dreams, and a history of visiting various teen- and incest-themed websites. Police used the porn to pressure him into a no contest plea to one count of sexual voyeurism. Another way of saying it is that he took a plea so that he would not have to answer to the child porn. Imagine this man, a short 65-year-old white doctor, who practiced in the same community for over 30 years and volunteered in the local theater. If you Google him, you will find many images of him playing the life-eating maniac R. M. Renfield from Dracula. The character is a study in pathological addiction, where the compulsion to eat insects worsens and grows more deviant, culminating in the compulsion to drink a live person’s blood. The metaphor is there for the taking, and many citizens rushed to imagine that Weinblatt himself must have been suffering from mental illness. That was the only explanation they could fathom. Is lust for children a mental illness? For fifty years it’s been classified that way, yet our criminalization of it overshadows our willingness to treat and manage it. Our country treats all sex offense as a criminalized addiction, impossible to kick. Once a personal erotic script gets written, it can exert an obsessive grip on the imagination. Perhaps though the impulse to protect abusive, threatening men is the more pervasive mental illness. By protecting them, we protect ourselves from knowing what forces an obsessive imagination might exert on a child’s body, especially a body that adult has access to under the guise of healing. We might call this willed ignorance by one of its names: Nassar. Did Weinblatt nassar his patients and their parents? Did anyone investigate his practice after his use of child porn came to light? How did his group practice handle his conviction? After his arrest, as parents of a former patient, we received a short form letter from them saying he no longer worked there and expressing their contrition. Here’s the thing: no one contacted us, or to my knowledge, any of the parents or patients about possible medical sexual misconduct. A couple online comments don’t indicate criminal behavior, but merit examination if not alarm:

Over the last year this man has given me his number to call him with concerns to my daughters high risk health. On numerous occasions he has told me to bring her to his house that he would her to give us a break. I keep replaying every office visit did i leave them alone? He kissed her and I thought nothing of it then. This makes me so sick to my stomach!!!!!!!!! How did he fool us all for so long? He was such an amazing dr–how could he have these demons??

My daughter is now 11 yrs old. Her pediatrician was in that IHA practice that Howard Weinblatt was in back in 2012. He wasn’t her doctor, but I remember he treated her one of the times she had a bladder infection. I was sitting right there when he examined her. I don’t remember anything inappropriate. I do remember when the examination was obviously over, I was the person who told her to pull up her underwear when that should have come from him.

You’d think a pediatrician with child pornography on his computer and a habit of masturbating to his tween patient while watching her undress in her own home might be someone you want to investigate. I found out from the prosecutor’s office that police did investigate possible sexual misconduct with three other children, but they did not authorize those charges. Had Weinblatt not been a white, upper middle class, cis-gendered married man with an advanced degree and a respected member of a powerful community? Things might have gone a little differently.

Glance #12

Carceral logics forces its way into our imaginations at this point, extending the focus on bad actors instead of the structures that enable them. This sort of justice participates in the absolute devotion to knowing, to certitude and privilege, that allows us to turn our backs on selected perpetrators, and not even begin to address the problem. Our current laws around sex offense are false solutions, unevenly applied and rigged toward dehumanizing already marginalized men. There is virtually no reliable evidence that sex offender laws work to reduce sex offender recidivism (despite years and years of effort), and plenty of expert sentiment suggests that these laws may increase sex offender recidivism. The Registry fits easily into #metoo narratives of accountability and the inadequacy of traditional safety mechanisms, yet it paradoxically undermines challenging systems that perpetuate sexual harms, the larger goal of #metoo. Once already vulnerable populations become further criminalized and ostracized, they have very little to lose. The SOR merely stages a sense of security—an empty gesture of justice in the form of public disgrace and exile. As I write this, a sex offender compliance check sweeps through Ypsilanti, not its wealthy, white neighbor, Ann Arbor, where Weinblatt still resides and where Jensen was working at the time of his arrest, and where another pediatric doctor, Mark Hoeltzel, has recently been sentenced to ten years in federal prison for one count of online enticement of a minor. Since 2004, Hoeltzel has a documented history of sexual relationships with minors and young patients, yet only lost his medical license in 2017. Against all odds, these three local white doctors were caught, but all three had the luxury of plea bargains that allowed them to be sentenced for their least serious crime. Our criminal justice system isn’t built to hold middle class white men accountable; they are honorary unregistered men, examples of who mostly escapes oversight, whose crimes and abuses get categorically overlooked and excused.  If we cannot face the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and predation, if we pretend not to see what is right in front of us all the time—these are men you know and love as well as strangers and people you work for and who work for you and who live in your neighborhood and your home and who stand in line with you at the grocery store—there is no way to correct our course.

Glance #13

In the aftermath of Larry Nassar, Michigan has pushed over 30 bills through the House and Senate ostensibly under the familiar rhetoric of safety. Some of the bills—expanding sexual education and requiring schools to keep records about why employees leave—make sense in treating our national problem holistically. Most of the bills, however, focus on punishment instead of prevention. More laws, stricter sentencing guidelines, and higher mandatory minimum sentencing: we slap together reactive legislation that conflates justice and societal security through more imprisonment instead of rethinking and building prevention policies, including rehabilitative approaches. We treat doctors like gods then expect them to even imagine getting caught? We treat white men like god’s gifts and expect that threat of punishment will deter a compulsion?

Several months after they went into effect, these laws didn’t seem to Hoeltzel, whose six felony charges of receiving, possessing, producing, and transferring child porn and obscene materials to a minor were all dropped in a plea agreement.  Though a pretrial sentencing was almost double, he received ten years in December 2018 for one felony count of enticing a minor. Hoeltzel’s first known target came to light in 2006, when parents of an 11-year-old patient discovered two years of “inappropriate and flirtatious” messages from him, many of which compliment her body and call her “sexy,” In one message he invites her out for ice cream. In response, his clinic quietly asked him to take a “boundaries” course without further investigation or reprimand. He returned to his practice weeks later, and over the next eleven years, he left a long trail of sexual harm and predation involving minors and patients, including creating a Facebook account for a fictitious boy, Ryan Gardner, to chat online with multiple minor girls across the country and persuade them to produce pornography for him, which some of them did. He had hundreds of images of child porn on his computer and external drives. After his sentencing, the Department of Homeland Security’s statement is revealing: “The sentencing handed down in this case reflects the serious nature of the crimes committed, which are particularly troubling given the defendant’s role in the community as a physician….This case shows that HSI is committed to investigating child predators regardless of the positions they hold in society.”

Shouldn’t investigation into a child predator with special access to children be a given?  Does Homeland Security Investigations think no one will notice its perpetuation of the obvious and ongoing discrepancies in the way we treat criminals, or people we think are criminals, and who our laws come down on, as long as it gives lips service to protesting those discrepancies? Does this Homeland Security Investigation Special Agent think offering a plea bargain dismissing the most serious charges, releasing him on bond (read: not seeing him as a threat), and under-sentencing a doctor who actively preyed on minors and patients for over a decade is evidence of fair distribution of the law and punishment? If anything, this case is a testament to the inefficacy of the SOR and the ways professional white men evade the vigilant eyes of the law. The constant oversight of white men’s wrongs creates a counter movement to make more laws, to get “tougher” on crime, and extend punishments, but who ultimately pays the price? Who gets over-incarcerated and over-surveilled?

Glance #14

I try to imagine a world where Weinblatt and Hoeltzel might be both held accountable and not shunned, locked away, or put on a registry. I try to imagine Hoeltzel getting the help he needed and getting out of harm’s way fourteen years before he landed in federal prison. I try to imagine a world that does not look away from the white doctor and “overcorrect” as a compensating gesture, the black orderly, or project the repressed memory onto him. I try to imagine a world where there aren’t good guys and bad guys; there’s just one fucked up America, there’s just the double-curse of patriarchy and toxic masculinity, which has normalized sexual misconduct—predation of children and women—for so long it’s sometimes difficult to recognize. We turn away, we look blankly at the floor and wait for the gross guy on the subway to leave. I try to imagine my life without the exhaustion of managing male privilege and power. I try to imagine a world where the SOR is not even imaginable—it’s underestimations not tolerated, its performance not desired, its vengeance not cultivated. I try to imagine a world where “sexual misconduct” doesn’t disguise itself as “routine exam,” where even with a parent in the room, a doctor might digitally penetrate a child while concealing his erection. I try to imagine a world where a pediatrician doesn’t use Facebook to convince 14 year-olds to send him homemade pornography. I try to imagine a world where “sexual misconduct” doesn’t regularly maraud under the term “dating” or “business meeting.” My hand isn’t nervously on the doorknob, wondering if I’m going to be forced back in, while my date, or friend’s father, or boss isn’t strategizing about trying one more time. I try to imagine what a woman who has not been totally habituated to these situations might do. Imagine a world where all the cabins at summer camp, where all the streets in town, where all the civic buildings, where all the towns and all the hospitals in those towns aren’t named after sexual predators. Imagine if sexual offense were treated as a strategy of domestic terrorism, each incident another attack on our foundational institutions. Imagine if we faced our national problem together, not turning away from each other or the unregistered men everywhere daydreaming about their next exploit. We might rally behind children before they come to expect the worse from us. In this, ironically, we might take Weinblatt’s own advice about talking to children after 9/11:

Dr. Howard Weinblatt, a pediatrician in Ann Arbor, Mich., said he told parents that rather than just blurting out everything they knew, they had to use their instincts about how much and what the child really wanted to know. And they must take their child seriously.

”That means stopping what you are doing,” he said, and listening to what the child was saying. He has found that sometimes children, and even teenagers, have surprising misunderstandings.

On Tuesday evening, Dr. Weinblatt said, a 16-year-old girl was at his office for a routine visit. Suddenly, she started talking about the terrorist attacks. ”She said, ‘What’s going to happen to the world now that they blew up the World Trade Center? Now there won’t be any world trade,’ ” he said.

”Imagine how scary that was for that child,” Dr. Weinblatt said. ”But if you had not listened to her and just talked to her about how terrible it was, and that there was such a loss of life, you would have missed it.”

Weinblatt knows about looking and he knows turning away. What he says here offers an uncanny understanding about sexual abuse and harassment, one that doesn’t distract us or overwhelm us with the sexual.  After all, how much is sex a stand in for power—manipulation, deceit, and the psychic violence of being fucked with—in the dynamics of abuse? If we just “talk about how terrible it is,” if we assume our positions as violator and victim, if we insist on clinging to blindly inherited logics of gender, if we focus intently on this or that one case, we miss the big picture, the large-scale connections and systemic enforcements; we miss the chance to see through our own airs; we miss the chance to choke on them and come back transformed. We miss the chance to free ourselves from the tyranny of turning away and its over-compensating consequences, the scramble to legislate, to register, to play-act “safety.”

Sources

Hale II, Victor, “Victim of Larry Nassar Writes Open Letters to Two MSU
Administrators,” MGoBlog, May 3, 2017, comment by Chalky White.

Hicks, Mark, “Ex-UM Doctor Sentenced to Prison in Child Porn Case,” Detroit Free
Press, December 13, 2018.

Higgins, Lee, “Weinblatt in Police Report: ‘I don’t look in people’s windows’,” The Ann
Arbor News, Jan 26, 2012, comment by gracelikerain.

Feldscher, Kyle, “Ann Arbor Pediatrician Howard Weinblatt Must Move as Part of
Peeping Sentence,” The Ann Arbor News March 20, 2012.

Feldscher, “Stephen Jenson to Serve Minimum Sentence for Possession of Child Porn,”
The Ann Arbor News March 22, 2013.

Kolata, Gina, “After the Attacks: The Children; Parents Are Navigating an Emotional
Tightrope Over How Much or How Little to Say, The New York Times, August 17,
2002.

Rubenfire, Adam, “36 Months in Prison for Jenson,” The Michigan Daily, March 21, 2013.

Sourine, Katherina, “Former University Doctor Pleads Guilty to Enticing Minor,” The
Michigan Daily, September 18, 2018.

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Christine Hume is the author of a lyric memoir in three interlinked essays, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2019), as well as three books of poetry. American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan UP, 2018) recently featured her poetry. Her fifth chapbook, a collaboration with Jeff Clark, Question Like a Face (Image Text Ithaca, 2017) was one of Brooklyn Rail’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2017. She teaches at Eastern Michigan University.