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 Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Kellogg’s Guide to Child Abuse In 1879, Mark Twain gave a speech in which he observed, “Of all the forms of intercourse, [masturbation] has the least to recommend it. As an amusement,” he said, “it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there’s no money in it.”12 Funny guy, Mark Twain. But there was a seriousness in his humor, as well as courage. As Twain spoke, much of Western culture was waging a bizarre, centuries-long war against any hint of childhood sexuality, including masturbation. The merciless campaign against masturbation was just one aspect of the West’s long struggle against the “sinful” yearnings within human sexuality. We’ve discussed the so-called witches burned alive for daring to assert or even suggest their eroticism, and doctors like Isaac Baker Brown, who justified barbaric, dangerous surgery as a cure for nascent nymphomania. These were not exceptional cases, as Twain knew. Following the advice of such prominent “experts” as John Harvey Kellogg, many parents of Twain’s day subjected their children to brutal physical and mental abuse to stamp out any sign of sexuality. Otherwise reasonable, if confused, people ardently believed that masturbation truly was “the destroying element of civilized society,” in the words of the New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal. Though widely considered to be one of the leading sex educators of his day, Kellogg proudly claimed never to have had intercourse with his wife in over four decades of marriage. But he did require a handsome male orderly to give him an enema every morning—an indulgence his famously high-fiber breakfasts should have made unnecessary. As John Money explains in his study of pseudoscientific anti-sex crusaders, The Destroying Angel, Kellogg would probably be diagnosed as a klismaphile today. Klismaphilia is “an anomaly of sexual and erotic functioning traceable to childhood, in which an enema substitutes for regular sexual intercourse. For the klismaphile,” writes Money, “putting the penis in the vagina is experienced as hard work, dangerous, and possibly as repulsive.” As a medical doctor, Kellogg claimed the moral authority to instruct parents on the proper sexual education of their children. If you’re unfamiliar with the writings of Kellogg and others like him, their gloating disdain for basic human eroticism is chilling and unmistakable. In his best-selling Plain Facts for Old and Young (written on his sexless honeymoon in 1888), Kellogg offered parents guidance for dealing with their sons’ natural erotic self-exploration in a section entitled “Treatment for Self-Abuse and its Effects.” “A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys,” he wrote, “is circumcision.” He stipulated that, “The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment…. [emphasis added]”

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

  Affect, on the other hand, transforms interoceptive sensation into something about you, with your particular strengths and faults. Now the sensations are personal—they reside inside your affective niche. When you feel wretched, the world seems like an awful place. People are judging you. Wars are raging. The polar ice caps are melting. You are suffering. Most of us devote a lot of time to relieving suffering. We often eat for pleasure or to soothe ourselves, rather than for the nutrients. I think drug addiction is often a misguided attempt to relieve the suffering from a body budget that’s chronically out of whack.28 It’s tricky to distinguish discomfort and suffering in the moment. Are you feeling irritated or just having caffeine withdrawal? If you are a woman, you probably have ambiguous physical symptoms related to your menstrual cycle or during menopause, and you may categorize the sensations as having emotional meaning when they do not. I remember in 2010 when my whole lab was moving from one university to another, including twenty researchers and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. Everything seemed to be going wrong, plus I was about to leave for a two-week trip. Somehow I was holding myself together, extinguishing each fire as it ignited . . . and then my laptop died. I sank to the floor in the middle of my kitchen and started sobbing. At just that moment, my husband walked in, noticed my state, and asked innocently, “Are you premenstrual?” Oh. My. God. I lashed out at him, the goddamn sexist pig and how dare he be so smug when I’m barely holding my life together?? My fury shocked us both. And three days later, I discovered that he was right. With practice, you can learn to deconstruct an affective feeling into its mere physical sensations, rather than letting those sensations be a filter through which you view the world. You can dissolve anxiety into a fast-beating heart. Once you can deconstruct into physical sensations, then you can recategorize them in some other way, using your rich set of concepts. Perhaps that pounding in your chest is not anxiety but anticipation, or even excitement. Look around right now and find an object to focus on. Try recategorizing it not as a three-dimensional visual object but as the individual pieces of differently colored light that your perception is constructed from. Tough, isn’t it? Nevertheless, you can train yourself to do it. Pick the shiniest part of the object and try tracing its outlines with your eye. With a lot of practice, you can learn how to deconstruct objects like this. Great artists like Rembrandt could do it and realistically render objects in paint on a canvas. In a similar manner, you can deconstruct your emotions.

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

  Your control network, you may recall, constantly shapes the course of your predictions and prediction error to help select among multiple actions, whether you experience yourself as in control or not. This network can only work with the concepts that you’ve got. So the question of responsibility becomes, Are you responsible for your concepts? Not all of them, certainly. When you’re a baby, you can’t choose the concepts that other people put into your head. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts that ultimately drive your actions, whether they feel willful or not. So “responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change your concepts.2 As a real-world example, pick any extended conflict in the world: Israelis versus Palestinians, Hutus versus Tutsis, Bosnians versus Serbs, Sunni versus Shia. Climbing out on a limb here, I’d like to suggest that no living member of these groups is at fault for the anger that they feel toward each other, since the conflicts in question began many generations ago. But each individual today does bear some responsibility for continuing the conflict, because it’s possible for each person to change their concepts and therefore their behavior. No particular conflict is predetermined by evolution. Conflicts persist due to social circumstances that wire the brains of the individuals who participate. Someone must take responsibility to change these circumstances and concepts. Who’s going to do it, if not the people themselves? To make this point, a scientific study provides some preliminary hope. Researchers trained a group of Israelis to think about various negative events, such as Palestinians’ launching rockets and the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, and recategorize them as less negative. The trainees were not only less angry afterward but they showed greater support for policies leading to more peaceful and conciliatory resolutions, such as providing aid to Palestinians, as well as less support for aggressive tactics toward Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Surrounding the recent Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, this training in recategorization led people to support giving up security control over neighborhoods in East Jerusalem in exchange for full peace, and to show less support for restrictive policies like prohibiting Palestinians from using the Israeli medical system. These latter changes persisted for five months after training.3

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Every time the pendulum swings, love shifts to hate. So they must orchestrate everything carefully. Their absences cannot be too long, their bouts of anger must be quickly followed by smiles. Coquettes can keep their victims emotionally entrapped for a long time, but over months or years the dynamic can begin to prove tiresome. Jiang Qing, later known as Madame Mao, used coquettish skills to capture the heart of Mao Tse-tung, but after ten years the quarreling, the tears and the coolness became intensely irritating, and once irritation proved stronger than love, Mao was able to detach. Josephine, a more brilliant Coquette, was able to adapt, by spending a whole year without playing coy or withdrawing from Napoleon. Timing is everything. On the other hand, though, the Coquette stirs up powerful emotions, and breakups often prove temporary. The Coquette is addictive: after the failure of the social plan Mao called the Great Leap Forward, Madame Mao was able to reestablish her power over her devastated husband. The Cold Coquette can stimulate a particularly deep hatred. Valerie Solanas was a young woman who fell under Andy Warhol's spell. She had written a play that amused him, and she was given the impression he might turn it into a film. She imagined becoming a celebrity. She also got involved in the feminist movement, and when, in June 1968, it dawned on her that Warhol was toying with her, she directed her growing rage at men on him and shot him three times, nearly killing him. Cold Coquettes may stimulate feelings that are not so much erotic as intellectual, less passion and more fascination. The hatred they can stir up is all the more insidious and dangerous, for it may not be counterbalanced by a deep love. They must realize the limits of the game, and the disturbing effects they can have on less stable people. Charm is seduction without sex. Charmers are consummate manipulators, masking their cleverness by creating a mood of pleasure and comfort. Their method is simple: they deflect attention from themselves and focus it on their target. They understand your spirit, feel your pain, adapt to your moods. In the presence of a Charmer you feel better about yourself. Charmers do not argue or fight, complain, or pester—w hat could be more seductive? By drawing you in with their indulgence they make you dependent on them, and their power grows. Learn to cast the Charmer's spell by aiming at people's primary weaknesses: vanity and self-esteem. The Art of Charm

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Kellogg’s Guide to Child Abuse The Curse of Calvin Coolidge The Perils of Monotomy (Monogamy + Monotony) A Few More Reasons I Need Somebody New (Just Like You) 22. Confronting the Sky Together Everybody Out of the Closet The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon Authors’ Note Acknowledgments Notes References and Suggested Further Reading Searchable Terms P.S. Insights, Interviews & More… Praise Credits Copyright About the Publisher PREFACE A Primate Meets His Match (A note from one of the authors) Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above. KATHARINE HEPBURN, as Miss Rose Sayer, in The African Queen One muggy afternoon in 1988, some local men were selling peanuts at the entrance to the botanical gardens in Penang, Malaysia. I’d come with my girlfriend, Ana, to walk off a big lunch. Sensing our confusion, the men explained that the peanuts weren’t for us, but to feed irresistibly cute baby monkeys like those we hadn’t yet noticed rolling around on the grass nearby. We bought a few bags. We soon came to a little guy hanging by his tail right over the path. His oh-so-human eyes focused imploringly on the bag of nuts in Ana’s hand. We were standing there cooing like teenage girls in a kitten shop when the underbrush exploded in a sudden simian strike. A full-grown monkey flashed past me, bounced off Ana, and was gone—along with the nuts. Ana’s hand was bleeding where he’d scratched her. We were stunned, trembling, silent. There’d been no time to scream. After a few minutes, when the adrenaline had finally begun to ebb, my fear curdled into loathing. I felt betrayed in a way I never had before. Along with our nuts went precious assumptions about the purity of nature, of evil as a uniquely human affliction. A line had been crossed. I wasn’t just angry; I was philosophically offended. I felt something changing inside me. My chest seemed to swell, my shoulders to broaden. My arms felt stronger; my eyesight sharpened. I felt like Popeye after a can of spinach. I glared into the underbrush like the heavyweight primate I now knew myself to be. I’d take no more abuse from these lightweights. I’d been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I’d seen on TV as a kid. Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you’ll find you’re facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNiro–like scowl, “What the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me?” Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest.

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

  Constitution, Eighth Amendment. [back] 63. telomeres and potentially their lifespan: Guarneri-White 2014. verbal aggression and physical threats: Wikipedia, s.v. “Suicide of Phoebe Prince,” last modified January 30, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Phoebe_Prince . playground in a legal context: Matters surrounding bullying are made more complicated by the fact that our culture models bullying as normative; see heam.info/bully-1 . [back] 64. reported involvement with electronic bullying: During a two-month period in 2005, using a nationally representative sample of over seven thousand children from grades six to ten (Wang et al. 2009). [back] 65. contaminating its warehouse with feces: Monyak 2015. “distress and mental anguish”: The lawyer arguing the case asked the jury to send corporate America a message; see heam.info/atlanta-1 . consequently so does compensation: Note that the large majority of civil cases reach a settlement out of court; see heam.info/harm-2 . [back] 66. which is far more variable: How do you quantify suffering in dollars? See heam.info/harm-3 . [back] 67. withdrawal from an addictive drug: Fisher et al. 2010. [back] 68. a defendant than others will: Zaki et al. 2008. this synchrony and cultivate empathy: Schumann et al. 2014. [back] 69. deep dividing lines in nature: Even biological sex is not a natural kind; for informative discussions, see Dreger 1998, and Dreger et al. 2005. See also Dreger 2015. [back] 70. (self-reports are not necessarily valid): One useful approach during voir dire can be adapted from the research of U.S. attorney Dan Kahan; see heam.info/kahan-1 . [back] 71. guilt was true or false: I am not implying that objective evidence is error-free, nor that it is completely free of human judgment. consistency produces a just outcome: Judges and lawyers must have realized that consistency does not always deliver justice, meaning that there will be some false positives (innocent people who are convicted). Thinking about the implication—that some sacrifices must be made for the good of the system—is worrisome, even alarming. Who said The Hunger Games was complete fiction? [back] 72. to hand out maximum sentences: Pillsbury 1989, 705n155. [back] 73. influences you were pickled in: This wonderful phrase comes from my friend and colleague Judith Edersheim, codirector of the Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital. an unarmed African American civilian: Fachner et al. 2015, 27–30. the symbols of your culture: As another example: a Confederate battle flag, which symbolizes racism to many people, flying atop a statehouse building and even appearing as part of a couple of state flags; see heam.info/flag-1 . [back ] 12.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The airport looked scrubbed and gleaming. I thought of the level of disorder, dirt, and chaos New Yorkers get used to. The return to Europe was always something of a shock. The streets seemed unnaturally clean. The parks seemed unnaturally full of unvandalized benches, fountains, and rose bushes. The public flowerbeds seemed unnaturally tidy. Even the outdoor telephones worked. The customs officials glanced at our suitcases, and in less than twenty minutes we were boarding a bus which had been booked for us by the Vienna Academy of Psychiatry. We boarded with the naive hope of making it to our hotel in a few minutes and going to sleep. We didn’t know that the bus would snake through the streets of Vienna and stop at seven hotels before coming to ours almost three hours later. Getting to the hotel was like one of those dreams where you have to get somewhere before something terrible happens but, inexplicably, your car keeps breaking down or going backward. Anyway I was dazed and angry and everything seemed to irritate me that morning. It was partly the panic I always felt at being back in Germany. I lived longer in Heidelberg than in any city except New York, so Germany (and Austria, too) was a kind of second home to me. I spoke the language comfortably—more comfortably than any of the languages I had studied in school—and I was familiar with the foods, the wines, the brand names, the closing times of shops, the clothes, the popular music, the slang expressions, the mannerisms.... All as if I had spent my childhood in Germany, or as if my parents were German. But I was born in 1942 and if my parents had been German—not American—Jews, I would have been born (and probably would have died) in a concentration camp—despite my blond hair, blue eyes, and Polish peasant nose. I could never forget that either. Germany was like a stepmother: utterly familiar, utterly despised. More despised, in fact, for being so familiar. I looked out the bus window at the red-cheeked old ladies in their “sensible” beige shoes and lumpy Tyrolean hats. I looked at their lumpy legs and lumpy asses. I hated them. I looked at an advertising poster which read SEI GUT ZU DEINEM MAGEN (Be Good to Your Stomach), and I hated the Germans for always thinking about their damned stomachs, their Gesundheit—as if they had invented health, hygiene, and hypochondria. I hated their fanatical obsession with the illusion of cleanliness. Illusion, mind you, because Germans are really not clean. The lacy white curtains, the quilts hanging out the windows to air, the housewives who scrub the sidewalks in front of their houses, and the storekeepers who scrub their front windows are all part of a carefully contrived facade to intimidate foreigners with Germany’s aggressive wholesomeness. But just go into any German toilet and you’ll find a fixture unlike any other in the world.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  A. Antidepressants are the most prescribed drug in the United States, with 118 million prescriptions written in 2005 alone. One of the most prominent side effects of these drugs is the dampening of libido, so maybe the whole issue will just fade away—chemical castration. If not, there’s always Viagra, with well over a billion tablets doled out in the decade since it was introduced in 1998. But Viagra creates blood flow, not desire. Now men can fake sexual interest too. Progress? B. It’s not the same, is it? And isn’t there something humiliating (not to say emasculating) about sneaking off at night to look at porn on your computer? This course often leads to serious anger and resentment that can destroy a relationship. 3. Serial monogamy: divorce and start over. This option seems to be the “honest” approach recommended by most experts—including many relationship counselors. A. Serial monogamy is a symptomatic response to the issues posed by the conflict between what society dictates and what biology demands. It solves nothing in terms of snowballing male (and thus, female) sexual frustration in long-term sexually monogamous relationships. B. Though often presented as the honorable response to the conundrum, the serial monogamy cop-out has led directly to the current epidemic of broken homes and single-parent families. How is it “adult” to inflict emotional trauma on our children because we’re unable to face the truth about sex? Susan Squire, author of I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage, asks: “Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?”34 A man who pursues long-term happiness by leaving behind a string of hurt, embittered women and emotionally wounded children is little more than a dog chasing tail—his own. And if you’re a woman whose husband is “cheating,” your options are no better: pretend you don’t notice what’s going on, go out and have your own revenge affair (even if you don’t feel like it), or destroy your own family and marriage by calling in the lawyers. These are all losing scenarios. Even the term we use to describe this betrayal of self and family, “cheating,” echoes the standard narrative of human sexuality in its implication that marriage is a game that one player can win at the expense of the other. The woman who “tricks” a man into supporting children he thinks are his has, according to this model, cheated—and won. Another big winner, according to the standard narrative, is the “baby-daddy” who manages to impregnate a string of women who then raise his children while he’s already on to his next conquest. But in any true partnership—married or not—cheating cannot lead to any sort of victory. It’s win-win or everybody loses. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Confronting the Sky Together

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Frans de Waal could have been referring to any of the previously mentioned Amazonian societies when he wrote that the male “has no idea which copulations may result in conception and which may not. Almost any [child] growing up in the group could be his…. If one had to design a social system in which fatherhood remained obscure, one could hardly do a better job than Mother Nature did with [this] society.”17 Though de Waal’s words are applicable to any of the many societies who engage in ritualized extra-pair sex, he was, in fact, writing of the bonobo, thus underscoring the sexual continuity linking the three most closely related apes: chimps, bonobos, and their conflicted human cousins. In light of the hypersexuality of humans, chimps, and bonobos, one wonders why so many insist that female sexual exclusivity has been an integral part of human evolutionary development for over a million years. In addition to all the direct evidence presented here, the circumstantial case against the narrative is overwhelming. For starters, recall that the total number of monogamous primate species that live in large social groups is precisely zero—unless you insist on counting humans as the one and only example of such a beast. The few monogamous primates that do exist (out of hundreds of species) all live in the treetops. Primates aside, only 3 percent of mammals and one in ten thousand invertebrate species can be considered sexually monogamous. Adultery has been documented in every ostensibly monogamous human society ever studied, and is a leading cause of divorce all over the world today. But even in the latest editions of his classic book The Naked Ape, the same Desmond Morris who observed soccer players happily sharing their lovers still insists that “among humans sexual behavior occurs almost exclusively in a pair-bonded state,” and that “adultery reflects an imperfection in the pair-bonding mechanism.”18 That’s a major minor “imperfection.” As we write these words, CNN reports that six adulterers are being stoned to death in Iran. Before the hypocritical sinners throw the first stones, the male adulterers will be buried up to their waists. In a sickening gesture toward chivalry, the women will be buried to their necks, presumably to bring a quicker death to these women who dared consider their bodies their own. Such brutal execution of sexual transgressors is anything but an oddity, historically speaking. “Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism each share a fundamental concern over the punishment for a woman’s sexual freedom,” says Eric Michael Johnson. “Whereas any ‘man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife [both] the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death,’ (Leviticus 20:10) but any unmarried woman who has sexual relations with an unmarried man shall be brought ‘to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die’ (Deuteronomy 22:21).”19

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I was seized with pity for him. “You’ll have to make up a better story than that.” The best defense is a good offense, I thought. The Wife of Bath’s advice to lecherous wives: always accuse your husband first. “Where the hell did you disappear to with Marie Winkleman?” He gave me a black look: “We were right there in the next room watching you practically fuck on the dance floor. Then you took off...” “You were right there?” “Right behind the partition, sitting at a table.” “I didn’t even see a partition.” “You didn’t see anything,” he said. “I thought you’d left. We drove around for hours searching for you. Then we came back. We kept getting lost.” “I’ll bet.” He cleared his throat in the nervous way he had. It was a low death rattle sort of sound. But muted. I hated it worse than anything else about our marriage. It was the theme song of all our worst moments together. We ate breakfast without speaking. I waited, half-cringing, for the blows to fall, but Bennett did not accuse me further. His boiled egg rattled against the cup. His spoon clanked in the coffee. In the deathly silence between us, every sound and every motion seemed exaggerated as if in a movie close-up. His slicing off the top of the skull of his egg could be an Andy Warhol epic. Egg, it would be called. Six hours of a man’s hand amputating the top of an egg’s head. Slow motion. His silence was so strange now, I thought, because there had been times when he’d blasted me about little failures: my failure to make him coffee on time in the morning, my failure to do some errand, my failure to point out a road sign when we were lost in a foreign city. But now: nothing. He just kept clearing his throat nervously and peering into the open head of his egg. His cough was his only protestation. That cough took me back to one of the worst of our bad times together. The first Christmas we were married. We were in Paris. Bennett was hideously depressed and had been almost from the first week we were married. He hated the army. He hated Germany. He hated Paris. He hated me, it seemed, as if I were responsible for these things and more. Glaciers of grievances which extended far, far beneath the surface of the sea. Throughout the whole long drive from Heidelberg to Paris, Bennett said almost not a word to me. Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  EIGHTEEN Blood Weddings or Sic Transit The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women. —D. H. Lawrence I awakened at noon to find the blood welling up between my legs. If I parted my thighs even a little, the blood would gush down and stain through to the mattress. Foggy and half-dazed as I was, I knew to keep my legs together. I wanted to get up to search for a Tampax, but it was hard to get out of that sagging bed without parting my legs at least a little. I stood suddenly and blackish-red rivulets began to inch their way down the inside of my thighs. A dark spot of blood glistened on the floor. I ran to my suitcase leaving a trail of glistening spots. I felt that heavy and familiar pull in my lower belly. “Fuck,” I said, fumbling for my glasses so I could see to rummage for a Tampax. But I couldn’t even find my goddamned glasses. I thrust my hand into my suitcase and began feeling around. In exasperation, I started tossing the clothes out onto the floor. “Damn it to hell,” I screamed. The floor was beginning to look like the aftermath of a car wreck. How was I ever going to clean up all that blood? I wasn’t. I was going to beat it out of Paris before the management got wise. What a bunch of useless junk I had in my suitcase. I could use my poems as sanitary napkins, couldn’t I? Charming symbolism. But unfortunately not very absorbent. Ah—what’s this? One of Bennett’s T-shirts. I folded it into a sort of diaper and dug up one (only one!) safety pin to keep it on me—after a fashion. How was I going to get out of Paris wearing a diaper? I’d just have to walk knock-kneed. Everyone would think I had to pee. Oh God—crime definitely does not pay. Here I had been wondering if my penalty for running off with Adrian was going to be a whole pregnancy of not knowing what color the baby was going to be and instead I’m the one in diapers. Why can’t my suffering at least be dignified? When other writers suffer it’s epic or cosmic or avant-garde, but when I suffer it’s slapstick. I hobble out to the hall in my trench coat holding my knees together to keep my diaper in place.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  This apparent need to punish female sexual desire as something evil, dangerous, and pathological is not limited to medieval times or remote Mayan villages. Recent estimates by the World Health Organization suggest that more than 100 million girls and women are living with the consequences of genital mutilation. The Force Required to Suppress It A fire is never sated by any amount of logs, nor the ocean by rivers that flow into it; death cannot be sated by all the creatures in the world, nor a fair-eyed woman by any amount of men. THE KAMA SUTRA Before the war on drugs, the war on terror, or the war on cancer, there was the war on female sexual desire. It’s a war that has been raging far longer than any other, and its victims number well into the billions by now. Like the others, it’s a war that can never be won, as the declared enemy is a force of nature. We may as well declare war on the cycles of the moon. There is a pathetic futility animating the centuries-long insistence—against overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that the human female is indifferent to the insistent urgings of libido. Recall the medical authorities in the antebellum South who assured plantation owners that slaves trying to break out of their chains were not human beings deserving of freedom and dignity, but sufferers of Drapetomania, a medical disorder best cured with a good lashing. And who can forget the “well-intentioned” Inquisition that forced Galileo to disown truths as obvious to him as they were offensive to minds calcified by power and doctrine? In this ongoing struggle between what is and what many post-agricultural patriarchal societies insist must be, women who have dared to renounce the credo of the coy female are still spat upon, insulted, divorced, separated from their children, banished, burned as witches, pathologized as hysterics, buried to their necks in desert sand, and stoned to death. They and their children—those “sons and daughters of bitches”—are still sacrificed to the perverse, conflicted gods of ignorance, shame, and fear. If psychiatrist Mary Jane Sherfey was correct when she wrote, “The strength of the drive determines the force required to suppress it” (an observation downright Newtonian in its irrefutable simplicity), then what are we to make of the force brought to bear on the suppression of female libido?11 CHAPTER NINETEEN When Girls Go Wild Female Copulatory Vocalization Here’s a question we ask the audience every time we give a public presentation: If you’ve ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex (and who hasn’t?), which partner was louder? The answer we get every time, every place—from men, women, straight, gay, American, French, Japanese, and Brazilians—is always the same. Hands down. No question about it. Not even close. We don’t have to tell you because you already know, don’t you? Yes, the “meek,” “demure,” “coy” sex is the source of the high-decibel moaning, groaning, and calling out to the good Lord above, neighbors be damned.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Even the outdoor telephones worked. The customs officials glanced at our suitcases, and in less than twenty minutes we were boarding a bus which had been booked for us by the Vienna Academy of Psychiatry. We boarded with the naive hope of making it to our hotel in a few minutes and going to sleep. We didn’t know that the bus would snake through the streets of Vienna and stop at seven hotels before coming to ours almost three hours later. Getting to the hotel was like one of those dreams where you have to get somewhere before something terrible happens but, inexplicably, your car keeps breaking down or going backward. Anyway I was dazed and angry and everything seemed to irritate me that morning. It was partly the panic I always felt at being back in Germany. I lived longer in Heidelberg than in any city except New York, so Germany (and Austria, too) was a kind of second home to me. I spoke the language comfortably—more comfortably than any of the languages I had studied in school—and I was familiar with the foods, the wines, the brand names, the closing times of shops, the clothes, the popular music, the slang expressions, the mannerisms…. All as if I had spent my childhood in Germany, or as if my parents were German. But I was born in 1942 and if my parents had been German—not American—Jews, I would have been born (and probably would have died) in a concentration camp—despite my blond hair, blue eyes, and Polish peasant nose. I could never forget that either. Germany was like a stepmother: utterly familiar, utterly despised. More despised, in fact, for being so familiar. I looked out the bus window at the red-cheeked old ladies in their “sensible” beige shoes and lumpy Tyrolean hats. I looked at their lumpy legs and lumpy asses. I hated them. I looked at an advertising poster which read SEI GUT ZU DEINEM MAGEN (Be Good to Your Stomach), and I hated the Germans for always thinking about their damned stomachs, their Gesundheit —as if they had invented health, hygiene, and hypochondria. I hated their fanatical obsession with the illusion of cleanliness. Illusion, mind you, because Germans are really not clean. The lacy white curtains, the quilts hanging out the windows to air, the housewives who scrub the sidewalks in front of their houses, and the storekeepers who scrub their front windows are all part of a carefully contrived facade to intimidate foreigners with Germany’s aggressive wholesomeness. But just go into any German toilet and you’ll find a fixture unlike any other in the world. It has a cute little porcelain platform for the shit to fall on so you can inspect it before it whirls off into the watery abyss, and there is, in fact, no water in the toilet until you flush it. As a result German toilets have the strongest shit smell of any toilets anywhere.

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

  You can even work yourself up deliberately into a frothing anger. Accused mass murderer Dylann Roof, who shot nine people in a Bible study meeting in South Carolina in June 2015, appeared to cultivate his anger toward African Americans deliberately for many months before the day he walked into that church. Roof said that he almost didn’t go through with his plan because everyone was so nice to him, and he appeared to work himself up to the heinous deed in the meeting, uttering repeated phrases like “I have to do it” and “You have to go.” So, overall, moments of emotion are not synonymous with moments that you’re out of control.8 Anger is a population of diverse instances, not a single automatic reaction in the true sense of the phrase. The same holds for every other category of emotion, cognition, perception, and other type of mental event. It might seem like your brain has a quick, intuitive process and a slower, deliberative one, and that the former is more emotional and the latter more rational, but this idea is not defensible on neuroscience or behavioral grounds. Sometimes your control network plays a large role in the construction process, and other times its role is less, but it is always involved, and the latter times are not necessarily emotional.9 Why does the fiction of the two-system brain survive, beyond the usual reason of essentialism? Because most psychology experiments unwittingly perpetuate this fiction. In real life, your brain predicts nonstop, with each brain state dependent on those that came before. Laboratory experiments break this dependency. Test subjects view images or listen to sounds presented in random order, responding after each one, say, by pressing a button. Such experiments disrupt the brain’s natural process of prediction. And the results come out looking like the subject’s brain makes a rapid, automatic response, followed by a controlled choice about 150 milliseconds later, as if the two responses came from distinct systems in the brain.10 The illusion of a two-system brain is a byproduct of a century-old, flawed experimental design, and our laws maintain the illusion.* The legal system, with its essentialized view of the mind and brain, mixes up volition—whether your brain actually played a role in controlling your behavior—and awareness of volition—whether you experience having a choice. Neuroscience has quite a bit to say about this distinction. If you sit in a chair with your legs bent, toes not touching the floor, and tap your knee just below your kneecap, the bottom half of your leg gives a little kick. Hold your hand to a flame and your arm recoils. Present a puff of air to your cornea and you blink. Each of these examples is a reflex: sensation leading directly to motion. Reflexes in your peripheral nervous system have sensory neurons wired directly to motor neurons. We call the resulting actions “involuntary” because there is one, and only one, specific behavior for a specific sensory stimulation due to the direct wiring.11

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We went back and forth like that for a while, both of us shouting. I was hating myself for sounding so damned much like some sort of tract and for being forced into simplemindedly polarized positions. I knew I was neglecting the subtleties. I knew that there were other analysts—my German analyst, for instance—who didn’t pull this misogynous routine. But I was also hating Kolner for his narrowness and for wasting my time and money with warmed-over clichés about woman’s place. Who needed that? You could get that out of a fortune cookie. And it didn’t cost $40 for fifty minutes either. “If you really feel that way about me, I don’t know why you don’t quit right now,” Kolner spat out. “Why stick around and take this shit from me?” That was Kolner exactly. When he felt he’d been attacked, he became nasty and threw in a four-letter word to show how hip he was. “Typical small-man complex,” I muttered. “What was that?” “Oh nothing.” “Come on, I want to hear it. I can take it.” Big brave analyst. “I was just thinking, Dr. Kolner, that you have what is known in psychiatric literature as a ‘small-man complex.’ You get feisty and start hurling four-letter words around when somebody points out that you aren’t God Almighty. I know it must be tough on you to be only five foot four—but supposedly you were analyzed and that should make it easier to bear.” “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me,” Kolner snarled. He had regressed all the way to second grade. He thought he was being very witty. “Look—why is it that you can throw stale clichés at me—and I’m supposed to be grateful for your superior insight and even pay you for it—but if I do the same to you—which surely is my right, given all the bread I push in your direction—then you get furious and start talking like some spiteful seven year old.” “I simply said you ought to quit if you feel that way about me. Leave. Walk out. Slam the door. Tell me to go to hell.” “And admit that the past two years and the thousands of dollars that have passed between us have been a total loss? I mean maybe you can write it off that way—but I have a somewhat greater stake in deluding myself that something positive went on here.” “You can work it all out with your next analyst,” Kolner said. “You can figure out what went wrong from your point of view….”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  That only leaves Chloe Camille, born in 1948 and six years my junior. The baby of the family. Chloe with her sharp wit, sharp tongue, and utter lassitude about doing anything with it. Plump, beautiful Chloe, with her brown hair and blue eyes and perfect skin. With the only really gorgeous set of knockers in a fairly flat-chested family. Chloe, of course, married a Jew. Not a domestic Jew, but an import. (Nobody in the family would stoop to marrying the boy next door.) Chloe’s husband, Abel, is an Israeli of German-Jewish ancestry. (Members of his family once owned the gambling casino at Baden-Baden.) And Abel, of course, went into my father’s tzatzka business. To a business dominated by former Catskill Mountain comedians, he brought lessons learned at the Wharton School. My parents rebelled at first and then virtually adopted him as everyone got richer. Abel and Chloe had one son, Adam, who was blond and blue-eyed and obviously the favorite grandchild. At Christmas reunions, when the whole family regrouped at my parents’ apartment, Adam looked like the sole Aryan in a playground of Third World children. So I was the only sister ohne kinder, and I was never allowed to forget it. When Pierre and Randy last visited New York with their brood, it was just during the time my first book was being published. In the midst of one of our usual noisy fights (about something unmemorably idiotic), Randy called my poetry “masturbatory and exhibitionistic” and reproached me with my “sterility.” “You act as if writing is the most important thing in the world!” she screamed. I was trying to be rational and calm and well-analyzed about my family that week so I was painfully withholding the explosion I felt coming. “Randy,” I pleaded, “I have to think writing is the most important thing in the world in order to go on doing it, but nothing says that you have to share my obsession, so why should I have to share yours?” “Well I won’t have you putting me and my husband and my children in your filthy writing—do you hear me? I’ll kill you if you mention me in any way at all. And if I don’t kill you myself, then Pierre will. Do you understand?”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  began taking advantage of local arguments and animosities in selecting my informants…. traveling to other villages to check the genealogies, picking villages that were on strained terms with the people about whom I wanted information. I would then return to my base camp and check with local informants the accuracy of the new information. If the informants became angry when I mentioned the new names I acquired from the unfriendly group, I was almost certain that the information was accurate…. I occasionally hit a name that put the informant into a rage, such as that of a dead brother or sister that other informants had not reported.32 To recap: Our hero swashbuckles into Yanomami lands, bringing machetes, axes, and shotguns he presents to a few select groups, thereby creating disruptive power imbalances between groups. He detects and aggravates preexisting tensions between communities by goading them to disrespect each other’s honored ancestors and dead loved ones. Inflaming the situation further, Chagnon reports the offenses he’s provoked, using the resulting rage to confirm the validity of his genealogical data. Having thus inflicted and salted the Yanomami’s wounds, Chagnon sallies forth to seduce the American public with tales of derring-do among the vicious and violent “savages.” The word anthro has entered the vocabulary of the Yanomami. It signifies “a powerful nonhuman with deeply disturbed tendencies and wild eccentricities.”33 Since 1995, Chagnon has been legally barred from returning to the lands of the Yanomami. When anthropologist Leslie Sponsel lived among the Yanomami in the mid-1970s, he saw no warfare, just one physical fight, and heard a few loud marital disputes. “To my surprise,” writes Sponsel, “people in [my] village and three neighboring villages were simply nothing like ‘the fierce people’ described by Chagnon.” Sponsel had brought along a copy of Chagnon’s book, with its photos of fighting Yanomami warriors, as a way to explain the sort of work he was doing. “Although some of the men were absorbed by the pictures,” he writes, “I was asked not to show them to children as they provided examples of undesirable behavior. These Yanomami,” Sponsel concluded, “did not value fierceness in any positive way.”34 For his part, in over a decade living among them, Good witnessed a single outbreak of war. He cut his association with Chagnon eventually, having concluded the emphasis on Yanomami violence was “contrived and distorted.” Good later wrote that Chagnon’s book had “blown the subject out of any sane proportion,” arguing that “what he had done was tantamount to saying that New Yorkers are muggers and murderers.” The Desperate Search for Hippie Hypocrisy and Bonobo Brutality

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

  In a construction view of human nature, every human action involves three types of responsibility, not two. The first is traditional: your behavior in the moment. You pull the trigger. You grab the money and run. (The legal system names this behavior actus reus, the harmful action.) The second type of responsibility involves your specific predictions that brought about the unlawful act (known as mens rea, the guilty mind). Your behavior is not caused in a single moment; it is always driven by prediction. When you steal money from an open cash register, you are an agent in the moment, but the ultimate cause of your behavior also includes concepts like “Cash Register,” “Money,” “Ownership,” and “Stealing.” Each of these concepts is associated with a large and diverse population of instances in your brain, and based on them, you issued predictions that led to your action. Now, if other people with similar concepts in the same situation (i.e., the reasonable person) would also steal the cash, well, you might be less culpable for your actions. However, they may well have left the cash untouched, in which case your responsibility is greater. The third type of responsibility relates to the content within your conceptual system, separately from how your brain uses that system to predict when breaking the law. A brain does not compute a mind in a vacuum. Every human being is the sum of his or her concepts, which become the predictions that drive behavior. The concepts in your head are not purely a matter of personal choice. Your predictions come from the cultural influences you were pickled in. When a European American police officer shoots an unarmed African American civilian, and the officer honestly saw a gun in the civilian’s hands due to affective realism, the event has roots in something outside the moment. Even if the officer were overtly racist, his actions were partly caused by his concepts, formed by a lifetime of experience, which includes American stereotypes about race. The victim’s concepts and actions are likewise informed by a lifetime of experience, which includes American stereotypes of cops. All of your predictions are shaped not just by direct experience but also indirectly by television, movies, friends, and the symbols of your culture. While it’s exciting to escape into a world of urban crime in a movie, or to retreat from the stress of the day by watching an hour or two of a police drama on TV, routine depictions of police conflicts have a cost. They fine-tune our predictions about the danger posed by people of certain ethnicities or socioeconomic status. Your mind is not only a function of your brain but also of the other brains in your culture.73

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

  When I explain to people in the legal profession that anger has no biological fingerprint, they often assume I am claiming emotions don’t exist. That’s not at all the case. Of course anger exists. You just can’t point to a spot in a defendant’s brain, face, or EKG, and say, “Look, anger is right here,” let alone draw legal conclusions. The legal system’s second assumption behind the heat-of-passion defense is that “cognitive control” in the brain is synonymous with rational thought, deliberate actions, and free will. For you to be considered culpable, it is not enough that you performed a harmful action (known by the legal term actus reus). You also had to mean it. You caused harm of your own free will with a guilty mind (mens rea). Emotions, on the other hand, are seen as rapid, automatically triggered reactions spewing from your ancient, inner beast. The human mind is considered a battleground for reason and emotion, so when you fail to exercise sufficient cognitive discipline, emotions are said to burst forth to hijack your behavior. They interfere with your choice of action, and therefore make you less culpable. This narrative of emotion as the primitive part of human nature, to be controlled by the more advanced and uniquely human rational parts, is the “triune brain” myth (chapter 4) whose roots go all the way back to Plato. The distinction between emotion and cognition hinges on their alleged separation in the brain, with one regulating the other. Your emotional amygdala spies an open cash register, but then, as the story goes, you rationally consider your likelihood of jail time, which causes your prefrontal cortex to slam on the brakes and stop your arm from dipping into the drawer. But as you’ve learned by now, thinking and feeling are not distinct in the brain. Your desire for easy cash and your decision to pass it up are both constructed across your entire brain by interacting networks. Whenever you carry out an action—whether it feels automatic, like recognizing an object as a gun, or more deliberate, like aiming one—your brain is always a whirlwind of parallel predictions that compete with one another to determine your actions and your experience. At different times, you have different experiences of agency. Emotion sometimes can feel uncontrollable, like a burst of anger that arrives without warning, but you can also act in anger with intent, methodically plotting someone’s demise. In addition, non-emotions like memories or ideas can pop into your head unbidden. And yet we never hear of defendants who commit murder “in a fit of thinking.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon. Actually I daresay it was nothing but middle-class Russian courtesy (with an oriental tang, perhaps) that had prompted the good colonel ( Maximovich! his name suddenly taxies back to me), a very formal person as they all are, to muffle his private need in decorous silence so as not to underscore the small size of his host’s domicile with the rush of a gross cascade on top of his own hushed trickle. But this did not enter my mind at the moment, as groaning with rage I ransacked the kitchen for something better than a broom. Then, canceling my search, I dashed out of the house with the heroic decision of attacking him barefisted; despite my natural vigor, I am no pugilist, while the short but broad-shouldered Maximovich seemed made of pig iron. The void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife’s departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box, may have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology ; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with good photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works. The one to which I am restricted these days, despite my lawyer’s favors, is a good example of the inane eclecticism governing the selection of books in prison libraries. They have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set, N.