Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Phallocentric. The trouble with men and also the trouble with women. A friend of mine recently found this in a fortune cookie: the trouble with men is men, the trouble with women, men . Once, just to impress Bennett, I told him about the Hell’s Angels initiation ceremony. The part where the initiate has to go down on his woman while she has her period and while all the other guys watch. Bennett said nothing. “Well, isn’t that interesting?” I nudged. “Isn’t that a gas?” Still nothing. I kept nagging. “Why don’t you buy yourself a little dog,” he finally said, “and train him.” “I ought to report you to the New York Psychoanalytic,” I said. — The medical building of the University of Vienna is columned, cold, cavernous. We trudged up a long flight of steps. Upstairs, dozens of shrinks were milling around the registration desk. An officious Austrian girl in harlequin glasses and a red dirndl was giving everyone trouble about their credentials for registration. She spoke painstakingly schoolbook English. I was positive she must be the wife of one of the Austrian candidates. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five but she smiled with all the smugness of a Frau Doktor. I showed her my letter from Voyeur Magazine, but she wouldn’t let me register. “Why?” “Because we are not authorized to admit Press,” she sneered. “I am so sorry.” “I’ll bet.” I could feel the anger gather inside my head like steam in a pressure cooker. The Nazi bitch, I thought, the goddamned Kraut. Bennett shot me a look which said: calm down. He hates it when I get angry at people in public. But his trying to hold me back only made me more furious. “Look—if you don’t let me in I’ll write about that , too.” I knew that once the meetings got started I could probably walk right in without a badge—so it really didn’t matter. Besides, I scarcely cared all that much about writing the article. I was a spy from the outside world. A spy in the house of analysis. “I’m sure you don’t want me to write about how the analysts are scared of admitting writers to their meetings, do you?” “I’m zo sorry,” the Austrian bitch kept repeating. “But I really haff not got za ausority to admit you….” “Just following orders, I suppose.” “I haff instructions to obey,” she said. “You and Eichmann.” “Pardon?” She hadn’t heard me. Somebody else had. I turned around and saw this blond, shaggy-haired Englishman with a pipe hanging out of his face. “If you’d stop being paranoid for a minute and use charm instead of main force, I’m sure nobody could resist you,” he said.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I could not hope, of course, he would ever leave his correct name and address; but I did hope he might slip on the glaze of his own subtlety, by daring, say, to introduce a richer and more personal shot of color than was strictly necessary, or by revealing too much through a qualitative sum of quantitative parts which revealed too little. In one thing he succeeded: he succeeded in thoroughly enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. With infinite skill, he swayed and staggered, and regained an impossible balance, always leaving me with the sportive hope—if I may use such a term in speaking of betrayal, fury, desolation, horror and hate—that he might give himself away next time. He never did—though coming damn close to it. We all admire the spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I should know. The clues he left did not establish his identity but they reflected his personality, or at least a certain homogenous and striking personality; his genre, his type of humor—at its best at least— the tone of his brain, had affinities with my own. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. He was versed in logodaedaly and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a feminine handwriting. He would change his name but he could not disguise, no matter how he slanted them, his very peculiar t’s, w’s and l’s. Quelquepart Island was one of his favorite residences. He did not use a fountain pen which fact, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a repressed undinist. One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx. His main trait was his passion for tantalization. Goodness, what a tease the poor fellow was! He challenged my scholarship. I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all; and I daresay I missed some elements in that cryptogrammic paper chase. What a shiver of triumph and loathing shook my frail frame when, among the plain innocent names in the hotel recorder, his fiendish conundrum would ejaculate in my face! I noticed that whenever he felt his enigmas were becoming too recondite, even for such a solver as I, he would lure me back with an easy one. “ Arsène Lupin” was obvious to a Frenchman who remembered the detective stories of his youth; and one hardly had to be a Coleridgian to appreciate the trite poke of “ A.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Malcolm X was a Charismatic of Moses' kind: he was a deliverer. The power of this sort of Charismatic comes from his or her expression of dark emotions that have built up over years of oppression. In doing so, the deliv- erer provides an opportunity for the release of bottled-up emotions by other people—of the hostility masked by forced politeness and smiles. De- liverers have to be one of the suffering crowd, only more so: their pain must be exemplary. Malcolm's personal history was an integral part of his charisma. His lesson—that blacks should help themselves, not wait for whites to lift them up—meant a great deal more because of his own years in prison, and because he had followed his own doctrine by educating him- 114 • The Art of Seduction self, lifting himself up from the bottom. The deliverer must be a living ex- ample of personal redemption. The essence of charisma is an overpowering emotion that communi- cates itself in your gestures, In your tone of voice, in subtle signs that are the more powerful for being unspoken. You feel something more deeply than others, and no emotion is more powerful and more capable of creating a charismatic reaction than hatred, particularly if it comes from deep- rooted feelings of oppression. Express what others are afraid to express and they will see great power in you. Say what they want to say but cannot. Never be afraid of going too far. If you represent a release from oppression, you have the leeway to go still farther. Moses spoke of violence, of destroy- ing every last one of his enemies. Language like this brings the oppressed together and makes them feel more alive. This is not, however, something that is uncontrollable on your part. Malcolm X felt rage from early on, but only in prison did he teach himself the art of oratory, and how to channel his emotions. Nothing is more charismatic than the sense that someone is struggling with great emotion rather than simply giving in to it. The Olympian actor. On January 24, 1960 an insurrection broke out in Algeria, then still a French colony. Led by right-wing French soldiers, its purpose was to forestall the proposal of President Charles de Gaulle to grant Algeria the right of self-determination. If necessary, the insurrection- ists would take over Algeria in the name of France. For several tense days, the seventy-year-old de Gaulle maintained a strange silence. Then on January 29, at eight in the evening, he appeared on French national television.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The smile takes longer to fade. As if aging were, above all, rigidity. The setting of the face into prearranged patterns; a faint foreshadowing of the rigidity which comes after death. Oh the chin is still firm enough…but isn’t there a fine, almost invisible chain around the midpoint of the neck? And the breasts are still high, but for how long? And the cunt? That will be the last to go. It will still be going strong when nobody wants the rest of me at all. It’s funny how in spite of my reluctance to get pregnant, I seem to live inside my own cunt. I seem to be involved with all the changes of my body. They never pass unnoticed. I seem to know exactly when I ovulate. In the second week of the cycle, I feel a tiny ping and then a sort of tingling ache in my lower belly. A few days later I’ll often find a tiny spot of blood in the rubber yarmulke of the diaphragm. A bright red smear, the only visible trace of the egg that might have become a baby. I feel a wave of sadness then which is almost indescribable. Sadness and relief. Is it really better never to be born? The diaphragm has become a kind of fetish for me. A holy object, a barrier between my womb and men. Somehow the idea of bearing his baby angers me. Let him bear his own baby! If I have a baby I want it to be all mine. A girl like me, but better. A girl who’ll also be able to have her own babies. It is not having babies in itself which seems unfair, but having babies for men. Babies who get their names. Babies who lock you by means of love to a man you have to please and serve on pain of abandonment. And love, after all, is the strongest lock. The one that chafes hardest and wears longest. And then I would be trapped for good. The hostage of my own feelings and my own child. “Isadora!” But maybe I was already a hostage. The hostage of my fantasies. The hostage of my fears. The hostage of my false definitions. What did it mean to be a woman, anyway? If it meant being what Randy was or what my mother was, then I didn’t want it. If it meant seething resentment and giving lectures on the joys of childbearing, then I didn’t want it. Far better to be an intellectual nun than that. But the intellectual nun was no fun either. She had no juice. And what were the alternatives? Why didn’t someone show me some alternatives?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  One is victimized, economically, in a thousand ways-re nt, for example, or car insurance. Go shopping one day in Har le m-f or anything-and compare Harlem prices and quality with those downtown . The people who have managed to get off this block have only got as far as a more respectable ghetto. This respectable ghetto does not even have the advantages of the disreputable one-f riends, neighbors, a familiar church, and friendly tradesmen; and it is not, moreover, in the nature of any ghetto to remain respectable long. Every Sunday, people who have left the block take the lonely ride back, dragging their increas ingly discontented children with them. They spend the day talking, not always with words, about the trouble they've seen and the trouble-one must watch their eyes as they watch their children-they are only too likely to see. For children do not like ghettos. It takes them nearly no time to discover ex actly why they are there. The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal . And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil-rights commissions are set up. The projects are hideous, of course, there being a law, ap parently respected throughout the world, that popular hous ing shall be as cheerless as a prison. They are lumped all over Harlem, colorless, bleak, high, and revolting. The wide win dows look out on Harlem's invincible and indescribable squalor: the Park Avenue railroad tracks, around which, about fi>rty years ago, the present dark community began; the un rehabilitated houses, bowed down, it would seem, under the great weight of frustration and bitterness they contain; the dark, the ominous schoolhouses from which the child may emerge maimed, blinded, hooked, or enraged for lif e; and the churches, churches, block upon block of churches, niched in FIF TH AV ENUE, UPTOWN 1 75 the walls like cannon in the walls of a fortress. Even if the administration of the projects were not so insanely humiliating (for example: one must report raises in salary to the manage ment, which will then eat up the profit by raising one's rent; the management has the right to know who is staying in your apartment; the management can ask you to leave, at their dis cretion), the projects would still be hated because they are an insult to the meanest intelligence. Harlem got its first private project, Riverton *-which is now, naturally, a slum-about twelve years ago because at that time Negroes were not allowed to live in Stuyvesant Town.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  And that goo from unwashed fleeces— \ Athenian maybe, but my dear, the smell!— \ That's used for face-cream: avoid it. When you have company \ Don't dab stuff on your pimples, don't start cleaning your teeth: \ The result may be attractive, but the process is sickening. . . . —OVID, THE ART OF LOVE, TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN The Anti-Seducer • 137 later, to the amazement of his slaves, he asked why the empress was not joining him for dinner. Nothing is more infuriating than being paid no attention. In the process of seduction, you may have to pull back at times, subjecting your target to moments of doubt. But prolonged inattention will not only break the se- ductive spell, it can create hatred. Claudius was an extreme of this behavior. His insensitivity was created by necessity: in acting like an imbecile, he hid his ambition and protected himself among dangerous competitors. But the insensitivity became second nature. Claudius grew slovenly, and no longer noticed what was going on around him. His inattentiveness had a profound effect on his wife: How, she wondered, can a man, especially a physically unappealing man like Claudius, not notice me, or care about my affairs with other men? But nothing she did seemed to matter to him. Claudius marks the extreme, but the spectrum of inattention is wide. A lot of people pay too little attention to the details, the signals another per- son gives. Their senses are dulled by work, by hardship, by self-absorption. We often see this turning off the seductive charge between two people, no- tably between couples who have been together for years. Carried further, it will stir angry, bitter feelings. Often, the one who has been cheated on by a partner started the dynamic by patterns of inattention. 2. In 1639, a French army besieged and took possession of the Italian city of Turin. Two French officers, the Chevalier (later Count) de Grammont and his friend Matta, decided to turn their attention to the city's beautiful women. The wives of some of Turin's most illustrious men were more than susceptible—their husbands were busy, and kept mistresses of their own. The wives' only requirement was that the suitor play by the rules of gallantry. The chevalier and Matta were quick to find partners, the chevalier choosing the beautiful Mademoiselle de Saint-Germain, who was soon to be betrothed, and Matta offering his services to an older and more experi- enced woman, Madame de Senantes. The chevalier took to wearing green, Matta blue, these being their ladies' favorite colors.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  This finding is problematic for the argument that human war is a “5-million-year habit,” given our ancestors’ low population densities until the post-agricultural population explosion began just a few thousand years ago. Recent research looking at changes in mitochondrial DNA confirms that already low prehistoric global human population levels dropped nearly to extinction at several points (due to climatological catastrophes probably triggered by volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes, and sudden changes in ocean currents). As mentioned previously, the entire world population of Homo sapiens may have dropped to just a few thousand individuals as recently as 74,000 years ago, when the massive Toba eruption severely disrupted world climate. But even with much of the northern hemisphere covered in ice, the world was anything but crowded for our distant ancestors.22 Population demographics have triggered wars in more recent historical times. Ecologist Peter Turchin and anthropologist Andrey Korotayev looked at data from English, Chinese, and Roman history, finding strong statistical correlations between increases in population density and warfare. Their research suggests population growth could account for as much as 90 percent of the variation between historical periods of war and peace.23 Early agriculture’s stores of harvested grain and herds of placid livestock were like boxes of bananas in the jungle. There was now something worth fighting over: more. More land to cultivate. More women to increase population to work the land, raise armies to defend it, and help with the harvest. More slaves for the hard labor of planting, harvesting, and fighting. Failed crops in one area would lead desperate farmers to raid neighbors, who would retaliate, and so on, over and over.24 Freedom (from war) is just another word for nothing to lose—or gain. But neo-Hobbesians ignore this rather straightforward analysis and the data supporting it, insisting that war must be an eternal human drive, all too often resorting to desperate rhetorical tactics like Pinker’s to defend their view. In the fourth chapter of his book Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, for example, Robert Edgerton writes, “Social stratification developed in some small-scale societies that lacked not only bureaucracies and priesthoods but cultivation as well.” Okay, but in support of this assertion about social stratification and brutal rule by elites in “small-scale societies,” he offers fifteen pages of vivid descriptions of, in this order (and leaving nothing out): the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island (a slave-owning, settled, property-accumulating, potlatch-celebrating, complex, hierarchical society); the Aztec Empire (numbering in the millions, with elaborate religious structures, priesthoods, and untold acres of slave-cultivated land around a capital city larger than any in Europe at the time of first contact, featuring sewage systems and lighted streets at night); the Zulu Empire (again, numbering well into the millions, with slavery, intensive agriculture, animal domestication, and continent-wide trade networks); the Asante Empire of present-day Ghana, which, Edgerton tells us, “was incomparably the greatest military power in West Africa.”25

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But Goodall’s impression of relative harmony was to change—not coincidentally, argues Power—precisely when she and her students began giving the chimps hundreds of bananas every day, to entice them to hang around the camp so they could be observed more easily. In the wild, chimps spread out to search for food individually or in small groups. Because the food is scattered throughout the jungle, competition is unusual. But, as Frans de Waal explains, “as soon as humans start providing food, even in the jungle, the peace is quickly disturbed.”16 The mounds of deliciously smelly fruit locked in reinforced concrete boxes opened only for timed, regular feedings altered the chimps’ behavior dramatically. Goodall’s assistants had to keep rebuilding the boxes, as the frustrated apes found endless ways of prying or smashing them open. Ripe fruit that could not be eaten immediately was a new experience for them—one that left the chimps confused and enraged. Imagine telling a room of unruly three-year-olds on Christmas morning (each with the strength of four adult men) that they’ll have to wait an unspecified amount of time to open the piles of presents they can see right there, under the tree. Recalling this period a few years later, Goodall wrote, “The constant feeding was having a marked effect upon the behaviour of the chimps. They were beginning to move about in large groups more often than they had ever done in the old days. They were sleeping near camp and arriving in noisy hordes early in the morning. Worst of all, the adult males were becoming increasingly aggressive…. Not only was there a great deal more fighting than ever before, but many of the chimps were hanging around camp for hours and hours every day [emphasis added].”17 Margaret Power’s doubts concerning Goodall’s provisioning of the chimps have been largely left unaddressed by most primatologists, not just Wrangham.18 Michael Ghiglieri, for example, went to study the chimps in Kibale Forest in nearby Uganda specifically in response to the notion that the intergroup conflict Goodall’s team had witnessed might have been due to the distorting effects of those banana boxes. Ghiglieri writes, “My mission…[was] to find out whether these warlike killings were normal or an artifact of the researchers having provisioned the chimps with food to observe them.”19 But somehow Margaret Power’s name doesn’t even appear in the index of Ghiglieri’s book, published eight years after hers. We lack the space to adequately explore the questions Power raised, or to address subsequent reports of intergroup conflict among some (but not all) unprovisioned chimps in other study areas.20 While we’ve got our doubts about the motivations of Pinker and Chagnon (see below), like Margaret Power, we have none about Jane Goodall’s intentions or scientific integrity. Still, with all due respect to Goodall, Power’s questions deserve consideration by anyone seriously interested in the debate over the possible primate origins of warfare. The Spoils of War

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I said “fine”—and stalked to the telephone. Mona’s mother answered: “Oh yes, she’s in” and retreated with a mother’s neutral laugh of polite pleasure to shout off stage “Roy calling!” and the very next moment Mona rustled up, and forthwith, in a low monotonous not untender voice started berating Roy for something he had said or done and I interrupted her, and presently Mona was saying in her humblest, sexiest contralto, “yes, sir,” “surely, sir,” “I am alone to blame, sir, in this unfortunate business,” (what elocution! what poise!) “honest, I feel very bad about it”—and so on and so forth as those little harlots say. So downstairs I went clearing my throat and holding my heart. Lo was now in the living room, in her favorite overstuffed chair. As she sprawled there, biting at a hangnail and mocking me with her heartless vaporous eyes, and all the time rocking a stool upon which she had placed the heel of an outstretched shoeless foot, I perceived all at once with a sickening qualm how much she had changed since I first met her two years ago. Or had this happened during those last two weeks? Tendresse? Surely that was an exploded myth. She sat right in the focus of my incandescent anger. The fog of all lust had been swept away leaving nothing but this dreadful lucidity. Oh, she had changed! Her complexion was now that of any vulgar untidy highschool girl who applies shared cosmetics with grubby fingers to an unwashed face and does not mind what soiled texture, what pustulate epidermis comes in contact with her skin. Its smooth tender bloom had been so lovely in former days, so bright with tears, when I used to roll, in play, her tousled head on my knee. A coarse flush had now replaced that innocent fluorescence. What was locally known as a “rabbit cold” had painted with flaming pink the edges of her contemptuous nostrils. As in terror I lowered my gaze, it mechanically slid along the underside of her tensely stretched bare thigh—how polished and muscular her legs had grown! She kept her wide-set eyes, clouded-glass gray and slightly bloodshot, fixed upon me, and I saw the stealthy thought showing through them that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose me without getting penalized herself. How wrong I was. How mad I was! Everything about her was of the same exasperating impenetrable order—the strength of her shapely legs, the dirty sole of her white sock, the thick sweater she wore despite the closeness of the room, her wenchy smell, and especially the dead end of her face with its strange flush and freshly made-up lips.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Let’s look closer at it. ” It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning a carpet of sorts upon which stood two figures that looked as if some blast had just worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girl-child of Lolita’s size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a much taller veiled bride, quite perfect and intacta except for the lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels, where the man crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a blond wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication. “Look, Lo,” I said quietly. “Look well. Is not that a rather good symbol of something or other? However”—I went on as we got back in to the car—“I have taken certain precautions. Here (delicately opening the glove compartment), on this pad, I have our boy friend’s car number.” As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of it in my mind were the initial letter and the closing figure as if the whole amphitheatre of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its extreme edges—a capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blond- bearded scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomme de sa canne as he quaffs my manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced upon noticing that the P had acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried shuttle smear of a pencil’s rubber end, and with parts of numbers obliterated or reconstructed in a child’s hand, presented a tangle of barbed wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the state—one adjacent to the state Beardsley was in. I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and, mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the current adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Weird,” said Marty, impressed. “The point is that fantasies are fantasies and you can’t live in ecstasy every day of the year. Even if you slam the door and walk out, even if you fuck everyone in sight, you don’t necessarily get closer to freedom.” Wasn’t I sounding like Bennett? The irony of it! “I wish you’d tell Judy that,” Marty said. “Nobody can tell anyone anything,” I said. — Later, when Adrian and I were in the tent together, I asked him about Judy. “Boring cunt,” he said. “It just lies there and doesn’t even acknowledge your existence.” “How’d she like you?” “How do I know?” “Don’t you care?” “Look—I fucked Judy as one might have coffee after dinner. And not very good coffee at that.” “Then why bother?” “Why not?” “Because if you reduce everything to that level of indifference, everything becomes meaningless. It’s not existentialism, it’s numbness. It just ends by making everything meaningless.” “So?” “So you wind up with the opposite of what you wanted. You wanted intensity, but you get numbness. It’s self-defeating.” “You’re lecturing me,” Adrian said. “You’re right,” I said without apology. — The next morning Judy and Marty were gone. They had packed up and fled in the night like gypsies. “I lied to you last night,” Adrian said. “About what?” “I actually didn’t fuck Judy at all.” “How come?” “Because I didn’t feel like it.” I laughed nastily. “You mean you couldn’t.” “No. That’s not what I mean. I mean I didn’t want to.” “It doesn’t matter at all to me,” I said, “whether you did or didn’t.” “That’s shit.” “That’s what you think.” “You’re just furious because I’m the first man you’ve met that you can’t control, and you can’t put up for long without anyone or anything you can’t control.” “Crap. I just happen to have somewhat higher standards of what I want than you do. I see through your game. I agree with you about spontaneity and existentialism—but this isn’t spontaneity at all—it’s desperation. You said it about me the first day we screwed and now I’ll say it back to you. It’s all desperation and depression masquerading as freedom. It isn’t even pleasurable. It’s pathetic. Even this trip is pathetic.” “You never give anything a chance,” Adrian said. — Later we swam in the pond and dried ourselves in the sun. Adrian stretched out on the grass and squinted up into the sunlight. I lay with my head on his chest smelling the warm odor of his skin. Suddenly a cloud passed in front of the sun and rain began to fall lightly. We didn’t move. The rain cloud passed, leaving us sprinkled with large drops. I could feel them evaporating when the sun came out and shone on our skin again. A daddy longlegs walked over Adrian’s shoulder and through his hair. I sat bolt upright. “What’s wrong?” “Disgusting bug.” “Where?” “Your shoulder.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  And there are costs involved in denying one’s evolved sexual nature, costs paid by individuals, couples, families, and societies every day and every night. They are paid in what E. O. Wilson called “the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our natural predispositions.”2 Whether or not our society’s investment in sexual repression is a net gain or loss is a question for another time. For now, we’ll just suggest that trying to rise above nature is always a risky, exhausting endeavor, often resulting in spectacular collapse. Any attempt to understand who we are, how we got to be this way, and what to do about it must begin by facing up to our evolved human sexual predispositions. Why do so many forces resist our sustained fulfillment? Why is conventional marriage so much damned work? How has the incessant, grinding campaign of socio-scientific insistence upon the naturalness of sexual monogamy combined with a couple thousand years of fire and brimstone failed to rid even the priests, preachers, politicians, and professors of their prohibited desires? To see ourselves as we are, we must begin by acknowledging that of all Earth’s creatures, none is as urgently, creatively, and constantly sexual as Homo sapiens. We don’t claim that men and women experience their eroticism in precisely the same ways, but as Tiresias noted, both women and men find considerable pleasure there. True, it may take most women a bit longer to get the sexual motor running than it does men, but once warmed up, most women are fully capable of leaving any man far behind. No doubt, males tend to be more concerned with a woman’s looks, while most women find a man’s character more compelling than his appearance (within limits, of course). And it’s true that women’s biology gives them a lot more to consider before a roll in the hay. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld sums it up in terms of fire and firemen: “The basic conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To men, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we’re doing we can be ready in two minutes. Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They’re very exciting, but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur.” Perhaps for many women libido is like the hunger of a gourmand. Unlike many men, such women don’t yearn to eat just to stop the hunger. They’re looking for particular satisfactions presented in certain ways. Where most men can and do hunger for sex in the abstract, women report wanting narrative, character, a reason for sex.* In other words, we agree with many of the observations central to evolutionary psychology—it’s the contorted, internally conflicted explanations for these observations that we find problematic.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In the 1960s, anthropologist William Davenport lived among a group of Melanesian islanders who regarded sex as natural and uncomplicated. All the women claimed to be highly orgasmic, with most reporting several orgasms to each of her partner’s one. Nevertheless, reported Davenport, “it is assumed that after a few years of marriage, the husband’s interest in his wife will begin to pale.” Until the recent imposition of colonial laws stopped the practice, these Melanesians avoided monotomy by allowing married men to have young lovers. Rather than being jealous of these concubines, wives regarded them as status symbols, and Davenport claimed that both men and women regarded the loss of this practice the worst result of contact with European culture. “Older men often comment today that without young women to excite them and without the variety once provided by changing concubines, they have become sexually inactive long before their time.”26 Closer to home, William Masters and Virginia Johnson reported that “loss of coital interest engendered by monotony in a sexual relationship is probably the most constant factor in the loss of an aging male’s interest in sexual performance with his partner.” They note that this loss of interest can frequently be reversed if the man has a younger lover—even if the lover is not as attractive or sexually skilled as the man’s wife. Kinsey concurred, writing, “There seems to be no question but that the human male would be promiscuous in his choice of sexual partners throughout the whole of his life if there were no social restrictions.”27 For most men and many women, sexual monogamy leads inexorably to monotomy. It’s important to understand this process has nothing to do with the attractiveness of the long-term partner or the depth and sincerity of the love felt for him or her. Indeed, quoting Symons, “A man’s sexual desire for a woman to whom he is not married is largely the result of her not being his wife.”28 Novelty itself is the attraction. Though they’re unlikely to admit it, the long-term partners of the sexiest Hollywood starlets are subject to the same psychosexual process. Frustrating? Unfair? Infuriating? Humiliating on both sides? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But still, true.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  If something interferes with your ability to choose your actions freely, the law says that you might be less responsible for the harm you caused. Take the case of Gordon Patterson, who caught his wife, Roberta, “in a state of semiundress” with her boyfriend, John Northrup. Patterson shot Northrup twice in the head, killing him. Patterson confessed to the shooting but argued that he was less culpable due to his “extreme emotional disturbance” at the time of the crime. According to U.S. law, Patterson’s sudden burst of rage caused him not to be fully in control of his actions, and he was therefore found guilty of second-degree murder—rather than first-degree murder, which requires premeditation and carries a harsher punishment. In other words, rational killing is considered worse than emotional killing, all other circumstances being equal.4 The U.S. legal system assumes that emotions are part of our supposed animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts, unless we control them with our rational thoughts. Centuries ago, legal minds decided that people, when provoked, sometimes kill because they haven’t “cooled off” yet, and anger erupts unbidden. Anger steams, boils, explodes, and leaves a wake of destruction in its path. Anger makes people unable to conform their actions to the law, and so partially mitigates a person’s responsibility for his actions. The argument is known as a heat-of-passion defense.5 The heat-of-passion defense depends on some familiar assumptions from the classical view of emotion. The first assumption is that there is one universal type of anger, with a specific fingerprint, that justifies such a defense to a charge of murder. It supposedly includes a flushed face, clenched jaw, flared nostrils, and increased heart rate, blood pressure, and perspiration. As you’ve already learned, this alleged fingerprint is merely a Western cultural stereotype that’s not supported by data. On average, people’s heart rates go up when angry, but there’s tremendous variation, and similar increases are also part of the stereotypes for happiness, sadness, and fear. And yet, most killings are not committed in happiness or sadness; and if they were, the law does not consider these emotional episodes to be a mitigating factor.6 What’s more, most instances of anger do not lead to killing. I can state quite definitively that in twenty years of creating anger in my lab, we’ve never seen a test subject kill anybody. We see a far greater repertoire of action: swearing, threatening, pounding the table, leaving the room, crying, trying to resolve whatever conflict they’re having, or even smiling while wishing ill upon their oppressor. So the idea of anger as a trigger for uncontrolled murder is at best questionable.7

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Most of them were carrying expensive cameras, and despite their longish hair, tentative beards, wire-rimmed glasses (and wives dressed with an acceptably middle-class whiff of bohemia: cowhide sandals, Mexican shawls, Village silversmith jewelry), they exuded respectability. The sullen essence of squareness. That was, when I thought about it, what I had against most analysts. They were such unquestioning acceptors of the social order. Their mildly leftist political views, their signing of peace petitions and decorating their offices with prints of Guernica were just camouflage. When it came to the crucial issues: the family, the position of women, the flow of cash from patient to doctor, they were reactionaries. As rigidly self-serving as the Social Darwinists of the Victorian Era. “But women are always the power behind the throne,” my last analyst had said when I tried to explain how dishonest I felt for always using seductiveness to get what I wanted from men. It was just a few weeks before the trip to Vienna that we had our final blow-up. I’d never quite trusted Kolner anyway, but I’d kept on going to see him on the assumption that that was my problem. “But don’t you see,” I shouted from the couch, “that’s just the trouble! Women using sex appeal to manipulate men and suppressing their rage and never being open and honest—” But Dr. Kolner could only see anything which vaguely smacked of Women’s Lib as a neurotic problem. Any protestation against conventional female behavior had to be “phallic” and “aggressive.” We had haggled over these issues for a long time, but it was his “power behind the throne” pitch which finally showed me how I’d been taken. “I don’t believe what you believe,” I yelled, “and I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I’m struggling with? I don’t want to live by the things you live by. I don’t want that kind of life and I don’t see why I should be judged by its standards. I also don’t think you understand a thing about women.” “Maybe you don’t understand what it means to be a woman,” he countered. “Oh God. Now you’re using the final ploy. Don’t you see that men have always defined femininity as a means of keeping women in line? Why should I listen to you about what it means to be a woman? Are you a woman? Why shouldn’t I listen to myself for once? And to other women? I talk to them. They tell me about themselves—and a damned lot of them feel exactly the way I do—even if it doesn’t get the Good Housekeeping Seal of the American Psychoanalytic.”

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Other subsequent research has evoked emotions using a variety of different methods but has not replicated the original physiological differences observed in the 1983 paper. Quite a few studies employ horror movies, tearful chick flicks, and other evocative material to bring on particular emotions, while scientists measure subjects’ heart rate, respiration, and other bodily functions. Many such studies found great variability in physical measurements, meaning no clear pattern of bodily changes that distinguished emotions. In other studies, scientists did find distinguishing patterns, but different studies often found different patterns, even when using exactly the same film clips. In other words, when studies distinguished anger from sadness from fear, they did not always replicate one another, implying that the instances of anger, sadness, and fear cultivated in one study were different from those cultivated in another.25 When faced with a large collection of diverse experiments like this, it’s hard to extract a consistent story. Fortunately, scientists have a technique to analyze all the data together and reach a unified conclusion. It’s called a “meta-analysis.” Scientists comb through large numbers of experiments conducted by different researchers, combining their results statistically. As a simple example, suppose you wanted to check if increased heart rate is part of the bodily fingerprint of happiness. Rather than run your own experiment, you could do a meta-analysis of other experiments that measured heart rate during happiness, even incidentally (e.g., the study could be about the relationship between sex and heart attacks and have nothing centrally to do with emotion). You would search for all the relevant scientific papers, collect the relevant statistics from them, and analyze them en masse to test the hypothesis. Where emotions and the autonomic nervous system are concerned, four significant meta-analyses have been conducted in the last two decades, the largest of which covered more than 220 physiology studies and nearly 22,000 test subjects. None of these four meta-analyses found consistent and specific emotion fingerprints in the body. Instead, the body’s orchestra of internal organs can play many different symphonies during happiness, fear, and the rest.26 You can see this variation easily in an experimental procedure used by laboratories around the world, where test subjects perform a difficult task such as counting backward by thirteen as fast as possible, or speaking about a polarizing topic like abortion or religion, while being ridiculed. As they struggle, the experimenter berates them for poor performance, making critical and even insulting remarks. Do all the test subjects get angry? No, they don’t. More importantly, those who do feel angry show different patterns of bodily changes. Some people fume in anger, but some cry. Others become quiet and cunning. Still others just withdraw. Each behavior (fuming, crying, planning, withdrawing) is supported by a different physiological pattern in the body, a detail long known by physiologists who study the body for its own sake. Even small changes in body posture, like lying back versus leaning forward with arms crossed, can completely alter an angry person’s physiological response.27

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she’s charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an executive’s office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Jane’s school books. Remember? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want them to have wholesome fun together? Wholesome fun? Good Lord! Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease? Welcome, fellow, to this bordello. If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel she’s the daughter of an old ogre . First of all the old ogre drew up a list under “absolutely forbidden” and another under “reluctantly allowed.” Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triple—the next step being of course mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable group in Butler’s Academy for Boys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of fourteen can don her first “formal” (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teen-agers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if “only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.” Lo was enraged by all this—called me a lousy crook and worse—and I would probably have lost my temper had I not soon discovered, to my sweetest relief, that what really angered her was my depriving her not of a specific satisfaction but of a general right.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  She described the dress as a bribe—he would use it to persuade a woman to give in to him. On the contrary, said Casanova, he only gave gifts afterward, as tokens of his appre- ciation. That evening, in a carriage on the way back from the opera, she asked him if a wealthy friend of hers could buy the dress, and when he said no, she was clearly vexed. Sensing her game, Casanova offered to give her the sable dress if she was kind to him. This only made her angry, and they quarreled. Finally Casanova had had enough of the countess's moods: he sold the dress for 15,000 francs to her wealthy friend, who in turn gave it to her, as she had planned all along. But to prove his lack of interest in money, Casanova told the countess he would give her the 15,000 francs, no strings attached. "You are a very bad man," she said, "but you can stay, you amuse me." She resumed her coquettish manner, but Casanova was not fooled. "It is not my fault, madame, if your charms have so little power over me," he told her. "Here are 15,000 francs to console you." He laid the money on a table and walked out, leaving the countess fuming and vowing revenge. When Casanova first met the Spanish lady, two things about her repelled him. First, her pride: rather than engaging in the give-and-take of seduc- tion, she demanded a man's subjugation. Pride can reflect self-assurance, signaling that you will not abase yourself before others. Just as often, though, it stems from an inferiority complex, which demands that others abase themselves before you. Seduction requires an openness to the other person, a willingness to bend and adapt. Excessive pride, without anything to justify it, is highly anti-seductive. The second quality that disgusted Casanova was the countess's greed: her coquettish little games were designed only to get the dress—she had no interest in romance. For Casanova, seduction was a lighthearted game that people played for their mutual amusement. In his scheme of things, it was fine if a woman wanted money and gifts as well; he could understand that desire, and he was a generous man. But he also felt that this was a desire a The Anti-Seducer • 143 woman should disguise—she should create the impression that what she was after was pleasure. The person who is obviously angling for money or other material reward can only repel. If that is your intention, if you are looking for something other than pleasure—for money, for power—never show it. The suspicion of an ulterior motive is anti-seductive. Never let anything break the illusion. 6. In 1868, Queen Victoria of England hosted her first private meeting with the country's new prime minister, William Gladstone.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  In general, children with richer conceptual systems for emotion are poised for greater academic success. In one study conducted by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, schoolchildren were taught to broaden their knowledge and use of emotion words for twenty to thirty minutes per week. The results were improved social behavior and academic performance. Classrooms that employed this educational model were also better organized and were rated by blind observers as having better instructional support for students.22 In contrast, if you don’t talk to a child about his sensations in emotional terms, you can actually hamper his developing conceptual system. After four years of life, children in higher-income homes have seen or heard four million more words than their low-income counterparts, and they have better vocabulary and reading comprehension. Children with the fewest material advantages therefore lag in the social world. A simple intervention, like advising lower-income parents to communicate with their children more, improves the children’s school performance. In the same manner, using more emotion words should improve children’s EI.23 The same principles apply when you give your children feedback about their behavior. Studies show that children in low-income homes hear 125,000 more words of discouragement than praise, while their higher-income counterparts hear 560,000 more words of praise than discouragement, all by age four. That means children from lower-income homes have a more taxed body budget but fewer resources to deal with it.24 We all criticize our kids now and then, but try to make your feedback specific. If your daughter is whining incessantly, instead of yelling “Knock it off,” try something like, “Your whining is irritating me, so stop it. If you are having a problem, use your words.” When your son suddenly smacks your daughter in the head, don’t call him “a bad boy.” (That’s not a concept you want him to develop.) Be specific: “Stop hitting your sister; it hurts her and makes her feel sad. Tell her you are sorry.” The same rule holds for praise: don’t call your daughter “a good girl.” Praise her actions: “You made a good choice not hitting your brother back.” This wording helps children to build more useful concepts. Your tone of voice matters too, since it easily communicates your affect and directly impacts the child’s nervous system.25 By regulating your children’s body budgets effectively, you guide them not only to a richer conceptual system for emotion but also better overall language development, which prepares them for better academic performance in school. … Okay, now you’ve done your best to revamp your lifestyle for a balanced budget, and you’ve beefed up your conceptual system to transform yourself into an emotion expert. You’re still going to have ups and downs. You’ll still have to deal with the compromises demanded by love, the ambiguities of your social life, the insincerity of the workplace, the fickleness of friendships, and your body slowly failing you as you age. What can you do to master your feelings in the moment?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Feu. This time I hit something hard. I hit the back of a black rocking chair, not unlike Dolly Schiller’s—my bullet hit the inside surface of its back whereupon it immediately went into a rocking act, so fast and with such zest that any one coming into the room might have been flabbergasted by the double miracle: that chair rocking in a panic all by itself, and the armchair, where my purple target had just been, now void of all live content. Wiggling his fingers in the air, with a rapid heave of his rump, he flashed into the music room and the next second we were tugging and gasping on both sides of the door which had a key I had overlooked. I won again, and with another abrupt movement Clare the Impredictable sat down before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he made a futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman’s chest near the piano. My next bullet caught him somewhere in the side, and he rose from his chair higher and higher, like old, gray, mad Nijinski, like Old Faithful, like some old nightmare of mine, to a phenomenal altitude, or so it seemed, as he rent the air—still shaking with the rich black music—head thrown back in a howl, hand pressed to his brow, and with his other hand clutching his armpit as if stung by a hornet, down he came on his heels and, again a normal robed man, scurried out into the hall. I see myself following him through the hall, with a kind of double, triple, kangaroo jump, remaining quite straight on straight legs while bouncing up twice in his wake, and then bouncing between him and the front door in a ballet-like stiff bounce, with the purpose of heading him off, since the door was not properly closed.