Fresh Complaint

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  These ruminations are interrupted by the puling of the boy on the next skull over. “Cemen,” the boy cries out. “Ake cemen.” There’s silence, a few Dawat muttering to themselves in dreams, and then, just like every night, Luce feels the kid’s hand come snaking into his shorts. He grabs it gently by the wrist, fishing for his penlight with his other hand. He switches it on and the pale beam illuminates the boy’s face. He’s resting his cheek on a skull, too (his grandfather’s, to be precise), which is stained a dark orange from years of hair and skin oil. Beneath his kinky hair the boy’s eyes are wide, frightened by the light. He looks a little like a young Jimi Hendrix. His nose is wide and flat, his cheekbones prominent. His full lips have a permanent pout from speaking the explosive Dawat language. “Ake cemen,” he goes again, which is maybe a word. His trapped hand makes another lunge for Luce’s midsection, but Luce redoubles his grip.

  So, then, the other complaints: Having to do fieldwork at his age, for one thing. Getting mail yesterday for the first time in eight weeks, ripping open the soggy packet with excitement only to find, right on the cover of The New England Journal of Medicine, Pappas-Kikuchi’s spurious study. And, more immediately, the kid.

  “Come on now,” Luce says. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Cemen. Ake cemen!”

  “Thanks for the hospitality, but no thanks.”

  The kid turns and looks into the darkness of the hut, and when he turns back the penlight beam shows tears welling in his eyes. He’s scared. He tugs at Luce, bowing his head and pleading. “You ever hear of a thing called professional ethics, kid?” Luce says. The boy stops, looking at him, trying to understand, then starts tugging again.

  The kid’s been after him for three straight weeks. It’s not that he’s in love or anything. Among the many rare characteristics of the Dawat—not the precise biological oddity that has brought Luce and his team to Irian Jaya but a related anthropological one—is that the tribe maintains strict segregation between the sexes. The village is laid out in a dumbbell shape, thinning in the middle with a longhouse at either end. The men and boys sleep in one longhouse; the women and girls in the other. Dawat males consider contact with females highly polluting, and so have organized social structures to limit exposure as much as possible. Dawat men, for instance, go into the women’s longhouse only for the purpose of procreation. They do what they have to do quickly and then leave. According to Randy, the anthropologist who speaks Dawat, the Dawat word for “vagina” translates literally as “that thing which is truly no good.” This, of course, incensed Sally Ward, the endocrinologist who came along to analyze plasma hormone levels, and who has little tolerance for so-called cultural differences and out of sheer disgust and justified anger has been denigrating the field of anthropology to Randy’s face whenever she gets the chance. Which isn’t often because, by tribal law, she has to stay down at the other end of the village. What it’s like over there, Luce has no idea. The Dawat have erected an earthwork between the two areas, a mud wall about five feet high with spears jutting up. Impaled on the spears are oblong green gourds that at first looked refreshingly festive to Luce, like Venetian lanterns, until Randy explained that the gourds are only stand-ins for the human heads of yesteryear. At any rate, you can’t see much over the earthwork, and there’s only a little pathway where the women leave food for the men and through which the men go, once a month, to mount their wives for three and a half minutes.

  As papal as the Dawat appear to be in reserving sex for procreation, they are a hard sell for the local missionaries. They’re not exactly celibate in the Longhouse of Men. Dawat boys live with their mothers until they’re seven years old, at which point they come to live with the men. For the next eight years the boys are coerced into fellating their elders. With the denigration of the vagina in Dawat belief comes the exaltation of the male sexual parts, and especially of semen, which is held to be an elixir of stunning nutritive power. In order to become men, to become warriors, boys must ingest as much semen as possible, and this, nightly, daily, hourly, they do. Their first night in the longhouse, Luce and his assistant, Mort, were taken aback, to say the least, when they saw the sweet little boys going dutifully from man to man as if bobbing for apples. Randy just sat taking notes. After all the men had been satisfied, one of the chieftains, in what no doubt was a show of hospitality, barked something at two boys, who then came over to the American scientists. “That’s OK,” Mort had said to his kid. “I’m good.” Even Luce felt himself breaking out into a sweat. Around the hut, the boys went about their business either cheerfully or with mild resignation, like kids back home doing chores. It impressed upon Luce once again the fact that sexual shame was a social construct, completely relative to culture. Still, his culture was American, specifically Anglo-Irish lapsed Episcopalian, and he refused the Dawat offer graciously, that night and, now, this.

  The irony, however, wasn’t lost on him that he, Dr. Peter Luce, director of the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic, past general secretary of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex (SSSS), champion of the open investigation of human sexual behavior, opponent of prudishness, scourge of inhibition, and crusader for physical delights of all kinds, should find himself, halfway around the world in the erotic jungle, feeling so uptight. In his annual address to the society in 1969, Dr. Luce had reminded the assembled sexologists of the historical conflict between scientific research and common morality. Look at Vesalius, he said. Look at Galileo. Always practical, Luce had advised his listeners to travel to foreign countries where so-called aberrant sexual practices were tolerated and consequently easier to study (sodomy in Holland, for instance, and prostitution in Phuket). He prided himself on his open mind. To him, human sexuality was like a great big Bruegel painting and he loved watching all the action. Luce tried not to make value judgments about the sundry clinically documented paraphilias, and only when they were patently injurious (as with pedophilia and rape) did he object. This tolerance went even further when dealing with another culture. The blow jobs being performed in the Longhouse of Men might upset Luce if they were happening at the YMCA on West Twenty-third Street, but here he feels he has no right to condemn. It doesn’t help his work. He isn’t here as a missionary. Given the local mores, these boys aren’t likely to be warped by their oral duties. They aren’t growing up to be typical heterosexual husbands, anyway. They just move from being givers to being receivers, and everyone’s happy.

  But then why does Luce get so upset every time the kid starts rubbing his feet against his back and making his little mating calls? It might have something to do with the increasingly anxious sound of the calls themselves, not to mention the kid’s worried expression. It may be that if the kid doesn’t pleasure the foreign guests he’s in for some kind of punishment. Luce can’t explain the kid’s fervor any other way. Is white semen believed to possess special power? Unlikely, given the way Luce, Randy, and Mort look these days. They look like hell: greasy-haired, dandruffy. The Dawat probably think that all white men are covered with heat rashes. Luce longs for a shower. He longs to put on his cashmere turtleneck, his ankle boots, and his suede blazer and go out for a whiskey sour. After this trip, the most exotic he wants to get is dinner at Trader Vic’s. And if all goes well, that’s how it’s going to be. Him and a mai tai with a parasol in it, back in Manhattan.

  * * *

  Up until three years ago—until the night Pappas-Kikuchi blindsided him with her fieldwork—Dr. Peter Luce was considered the world’s leading authority on human intersexuality. He was the author of a major sexological work, The Oracular Vulva, which was standard reading in a variety of disciplines ranging from genetics and pediatrics to psychology. He had written a column of the same name for Playboy from August 1969 to December 1973, in which the conceit was that a personified and all-knowing female pudendum answered the queries of male readers with witty and sometimes sibylline responses. Hugh Hefner had come across Peter Luce’s name in the newspaper in an article about a demonst
ration for sexual freedom. Six Columbia students had staged an orgy in a tent on the main green, which the cops broke up, and when he was asked what he thought about such activity on campus, Assistant Professor Peter Luce, thirty-four, had been quoted as saying, “I’m in favor of orgies wherever they happen.” That caught Hef’s eye. Not wanting to replicate Xaviera Hollander’s “Call Me Madam” column in Penthouse, Hefner saw Luce’s column as being devoted to the scientific and historic side of sex. Thus, in her first three issues, the Oracular Vulva delivered disquisitions on the erotic art of the Japanese painter Hiroshi Yamamoto, the epidemiology of syphilis, and the custom of the berdache among the Navajo, all in the ghostly, rambling style that Luce modeled on his aunt Rose Pepperdine, who used to lecture him on the Bible while soaking her feet in the kitchen. The column proved popular, though intelligent queries were always hard to come by, the readership being more interested in the “Playboy Advisor”’s cunnilingus tips or remedies for premature ejaculation. Finally, Hefner told Luce to screw it and write his own questions, which he did.

  Peter Luce had appeared on Phil Donahue in 1987, along with two intersex persons and a transsexual, to discuss both the medical and psychological aspects of these conditions. On that program Phil Donahue said, “Ann Parker was born and raised a girl. You won the Miss Miami Beach Contest in 1968 in good old Dade County, Florida? Boy, wait till they hear this. You lived as a woman to the age of twenty-nine and then you switched to living as a man. He has the anatomical characteristics of both a man and a woman. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”

  He also said, “Here’s what’s not so funny. These live, irreplaceable sons and daughters of God, human beings all, want you to know, among other things, that that’s exactly what they are, human beings.”

  * * *

  Luce’s interest in intersexuality had begun nearly thirty years ago, when he was still a resident at Mount Sinai. A sixteen-year-old girl had come in to be examined. Her name was Felicity Kennington, and his first glimpse of her had inspired some unprofessional thoughts. She was very good-looking, Felicity Kennington, slender and bookish, with glasses, which always killed him.

  Luce examined her with a grave face and concluded, “You’ve got lentigines.”

  “What?” the girl asked, alarmed.

  “Freckles.” He smiled. Felicity Kennington smiled back. Luce remembered that his brother asked him one night, with a lot of suggestive eyebrow movement, if he didn’t sometimes get turned on examining women, and that he’d responded with the old line about how you’re so caught up in your work that you don’t even notice. He had no trouble noticing Felicity Kennington, her pretty face, her pink gums and child-size teeth, her shy white legs that she kept crossing and uncrossing as she sat on the examining table. The thing he didn’t notice was her mother, sitting in the corner of the room.

  “Lissie,” the woman broke in, “tell the doctor about the pain you’ve been having.”

  Felicity blushed, looking down at the floor. “It’s in my—it’s just below my stomach.”

  “What kind of pain?”

  “There’s kinds?”

  “A sharp pain or dull?”

  “Sharp.”

  At that point in his career, Luce had given a total of eight pelvic exams. The one he gave to Felicity Kennington still ranks as one of the most difficult. First, there was the problem of his terrible attraction. He was only twenty-five himself. He was nervous; his heart throbbed. He dropped the speculum and had to go out for another. The way Felicity Kennington turned her face away and bit her lower lip before parting her knees made him literally dizzy. Second, the mother’s watching him the whole time didn’t make it any easier. He’d suggested that she wait outside, but Mrs. Kennington had replied, “I’ll stay here with Lissie, thank you.” Third, and worst of all, was the pain he seemed to cause Felicity Kennington with everything he did. The speculum wasn’t even halfway in before she cried out. Her knees vised, and he had to give up. Next, he tried merely to palpate her genitals but as soon as he pressed she shrieked again. Finally, he had to get Dr. Budekind, a gynecologist, to complete the examination while he looked on, his stomach in knots. The gynecologist looked at Felicity for no more than fifteen seconds, then took Luce across the hall.

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “Undescended testes.”

  “What!”

  “Looks like andrenogenital syndrome. Ever seen one before?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what you’re here to do, right? Learn.”

  “That girl has testes?”

  “We’ll know in a little while.”

  The tissue mass up inside Felicity Kennington’s inguinal canal turned out to be, when they put a sample under the microscope, testicular. At that time—this was in 1961—such a fact designated Felicity Kennington as male. Since the nineteenth century, medicine had been using the same primitive diagnostic criterion of sex formulated by Edwin Klebs way back in 1876. Klebs had maintained that a person’s gonads determined sex. In cases of ambiguous gender, you looked at the gonadal tissue under the microscope. If it was testicular, the person was male; if ovarian, female. But there were problems inherent in this method. And these became clear to Luce when he saw what happened to Felicity Kennington in 1961. Even though she looked like a girl and thought of herself as a girl, because she possessed male gonads Budekind declared her to be a boy. The parents objected. Other doctors were consulted—endocrinologists, urologists, geneticists—but they couldn’t agree, either. Meanwhile, as the medical community vacillated, Felicity began to go through puberty. Her voice deepened. She grew sparse tufts of light brown facial hair. She stopped going to school and soon stopped leaving the house altogether. Luce saw her one last time, when she came in for another consultation. She wore a long dress and a scarf that tied under her chin, covering most of her face. In one nail-bitten hand she carried a copy of Jane Eyre. Luce bumped into her at the drinking fountain. “Water tastes like rust,” she said, looking up at him with no recognition and hurrying away. A week later, with her father’s .45 automatic, she killed herself.

  “Proves she was a boy,” Budekind said in the cafeteria the next day.

  “What do you mean?” said Luce.

  “Boys kill themselves with guns. Statistically. Girls use less violent methods. Sleeping pills, carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  Luce never spoke to Budekind again. His meeting with Felicity Kennington was a watershed moment. From then on, he dedicated himself to making sure that something like that never happened to anyone again. He threw himself into the study of intersex conditions. He read everything available on the subject, which wasn’t much. And the more he studied and the more he read, the more he became convinced that the sacred categories of male and female were, in fact, shams. With certain genetic and hormonal conditions, it was just plain impossible to say what sex some babies were. But humans had historically resisted the obvious conclusion. Confronted with a baby of uncertain sex, the Spartans would leave the infant on a rocky hillside and walk quickly away. Luce’s own forebears, the English, didn’t even like to mention the subject and might never have done so, had the nuisance of enigmatic genitalia not thrown a wrench into the smooth workings of inheritance law. Lord Coke, the great English jurist of the seventeenth century, tried to clear up the matter of who’d get the landed estate by declaring that a person should “be either male or female, and it shall succeed according to the kind of sex which doth prevail.” Of course, he didn’t specify a method for determining which sex did prevail. It took the German Klebs to come along and begin the task. Then, a hundred years later, Peter Luce finished it.

  In 1965, Luce published an article called “Many Roads Lead to Rome: Sexual Concepts of Human Hermaphroditism.” In twenty-five pages, Luce argued that gender is determined by a variety of influences: chromosomal sex; gonadal sex; hormones; internal genital structures; external genitals; and, most important, the sex of rearing. Often a patient’s gonadal sex didn’t deter
mine his or her gender identity. Gender was more like a native tongue. Children learned to speak Male or Female, the way they learned to speak English or French.

  The article made a big splash. Luce could still remember how, in the weeks following its publication, people gave him a new quality of attention: women laughed at his jokes more, made it known they were available, even on a few occasions showed up at his apartment wearing not a hell of a lot; his phone rang more often; the people on the other end were people he didn’t know but who knew him; they had offers and beguilements; they wanted him to review papers, serve on panels, appear at the San Luis Obispo Snail Festival to judge an escargot contest, most snails being, after all, diecious. Within months, pretty much everyone had given up Klebs’s criterion for Luce’s criteria.

  On the strength of this success, Luce was given the opportunity to open a psychohormonal unit at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. In a decade of solid, original research, he made his second great discovery: that gender identity is established very early on in life, at about the age of two. After that, his reputation reached the stratosphere. The funding flowed in, from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the NIH. It was a great time to be a sexologist. The Sexual Revolution had opened a brief window of opportunity for the enterprising sex researcher. It was a matter of national interest, for a few years there, to get to the bottom of the mystery of the female orgasm. Or to plumb the psychological reasons that certain men exhibited themselves on the street. In 1968, Dr. Luce opened the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic, and it soon became the foremost facility in the world for the study and treatment of conditions of ambiguous gender. Luce treated everybody: the web-necked teens with Turner’s syndrome; the leggy beauties with androgen insensitivity; the surly Klinefelter’s cases, who, without exception, either broke the water cooler or tried to punch out a nurse. When a baby was born with ambiguous genitalia, Dr. Luce was called in to discuss the matter with the shocked parents. Luce got transsexuals, too. Everybody came to the clinic; at his disposal Luce had a body of research material—of living, breathing specimens—that no scientist had ever had before.