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.

Page 146 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “I’d like you to keep seeing her … after…” His voice dropped off, and I looked away. “All right.” But I didn’t mean it. He tapped the granite with his fingertip. “All right,” he repeated. “I’ll see you later, Senna.” I started unpacking the groceries. At first I felt nothing. Just boxes of pasta and bags of fruit being shelved … put away. Then I felt something. An itch. It nagged at me, tugging and pulling until I was so frustrated I threw a box of soup crackers across the room. They hit the wall and I stared at the spot where they’d landed, trying to find the sound of my emotion. Sound. I ran to the living room and hit play on Florence Welch. She’d been singing this song to me nonstop for days. Her real voice would be tired by now, but her recorded voice called out to me, unfailing. Strong. How had he known this song, these words, this tormented voice would speak to me? I hated him. I hated him. I hated him. [image file=image19.jpg] I didn’t see Isaac until a few days before the surgery. I saw plenty of Dr. Elgin. I saw her three times a week upon my surgeon’s demand. It was like trying to fit a lifetime’s worth of therapy into six sessions. She commanded me to speak with her eyes and her tinkling bracelets: tell me more, tell me more. Each time I sank into her couch, I sank a little lower in esteem. This was not me. I was spilling my guts, as some people called it; divulging. It was word vomit and Saphira Elgin had her fingers down my throat. I discovered that private things were mostly sour. They sat spoiling in the corners of your heart for so long that by the time you acknowledged them you were dealing with something rancid. And that’s what I did; I threw every rotting thing at her, and she absorbed each one. It seemed that the more Saphira Elgin absorbed of me, the less of me there was. Sometimes I tried to be funny, just so I could hear the dusty way she laughed. She laughed at the inappropriate, sometimes the crass. I liked her so much on some days, and on others I hated her. At the end of every session the dragon would purr the same thing: “Read Nick’s book. It will give you purrrrspective. Closurrrrre.” I would drive home determined, but then I would get to the title page and see For MV, and quickly close the cover. The dedication page was beginning to look worn and touched, rivets of fingerprints on the page.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I held out my hand for the book and he walked it back to me. Opening the cover I flipped to the dedication, touching it softly, running my fingers over the words … then I ripped it out. Hard. I handed the book back to Isaac, with the jagged page clutched in my fist. Stone faced, he left, the soles of his shoes sucking on the hospital floor. Thwuup ... Thwuup … Thwuup. I listened until they disappeared. I folded the page over and over until it was the size of my thumbnail, square upon square upon square. Then I ate it. I was discharged a week later. The nurses told me that normally a double mastectomy patient went home after three days, but Isaac pulled strings to keep me there longer. I didn’t say anything about it as he handed me my prescriptions in a paper bag, folded over twice and stapled. I shoved the bag into my overnight bag, trying to ignore the rattling sound of the pills. Trying to ignore how heavy the bag was in general. I supposed that it was easier for him to keep an eye on me here rather than at my house. He moved surgeries around and took the afternoon off to take me home. It annoyed me, and yet I didn’t know what I’d do without him. What did you say to a man who inserted himself as your caretaker without your permission? Stay away from me, what you’re doing is wrong? Your kindness freaks me out? What the hell do you want from me? I didn’t like being someone’s project, but he had his wits and car, and I was laced with painkillers. I wondered what he did with Nick’s book. Did he toss it in the trash? Put it in his office? Maybe when I got home it would be sitting on my night table like it had never left. A nurse wheeled me through the hospital to the main doors where Isaac had parked his car. He walked slightly ahead of me. I watched his hands, the fat of his palm beneath his thumb. I was looking for traces of the book on his fingers. Stupid. If I wanted Nick’s words, I should have read them. Isaac’s hands were more than Nick’s book. They’d just reached into my body and cut out my cancer. But I couldn’t stop seeing the book in his hands, the way his fingers lifted the corner of the page before he turned it.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Slipping, then, aside the young lad’s shirt, and tucking it up under his clothes behind, he shewed to the open air those globular fleshy eminences that compose the Mount Peasants of Rome, and which now, with all the narrow vale that intersects them, stood displayed and exposed to his attack; nor could I without a shudder behold the dispositions he made for it. First, then, moistening well with spittle his instrument, obviously to make it glib, he pointed, he introduced it, as I could plainly discern, not only from its direction and my losing sight of it, but by the writhing, twisting and soft murmured complaints of the young sufferer; but at length, the first straits of entrance being pretty well go through, every thing seemed to move and go pretty currently on, as on a carpet road, without much rub or resistance; and now, passing one hand round his minions’ hips, he got hold of his red-topped ivory toy, that stood perfectly stiff, and shewed, that if he was like his mother behind, he was like his father before; this he diverted himself with, whilst, with the other he wantoned with his hair, and leaning forward over his back, drew his face, from which the boy shook the loose curls that fell over it, in the posture he stood him in, and brought him towards his, so as to receive a long breathed kiss; after which, renewing his driving, and thus continuing to harass his rear, the height of the fist came on with its usual symptoms, and dismissed the action. The criminal scene they acted, I had the patience to see to an end, purely that I might gather more facts and certainty against them in my design to do their deserts instant justice; and accordingly, when they had re-adjusted themselves; and were preparing to go out, burning as I was with rage and indignation, I jumped down from the chair, in order to raise the house upon them, but with such an unlucky impetuosity, that some nail or ruggedness in the floor caught my foot, and flung me on my face with such violence, that I fell senseless on the ground, and lay there some time before any one came to my relief: so that they, alarmed, I suppose, by the noise of my fall, had more than the necessary time to make a safe retreat. This they effected, as I learnt, with a precipitation nobody could account for, until, when come to myself, and composed enough to speak, I acquainted those of the house with the whole transaction I had been evidence to.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Fired, however, now beyond all bearance of delay, he remounts, and begged of me to have patience, stroking and soothing me to it by all the tenderest endearments and protestations of what he would moreover do for me; at which, feigning to be somewhat softened, and abating of the anger that I had shewn at his hurting me so prodigiously, I suffered him to lay my thighs aside, and make way for a new trial; but I watched the directions and management of his point so well, that no sooner was the orifice in the least open to it, but I gave such a timely jerk as seemed to proceed not from the evasion of his entry, but from the pain his efforts at it put me to: a circumstance too that I did not fail to accompany with proper gestures, sighs and cries of complaint, of which, “that he had hurt me... he killed me... I should die...,” were the most frequent interjections. But now, after repeated attempts, in which he had not made the least impression towards gaining his point, at least for that time, the pleasure rose so fast upon him, that he could not check or delay it, and in the vigour and fury which the approaches of the height of it inspired him, he made one fierce-thrust, that had almost put me by my guard, and lodged it so far that I could feel the warm inspersion just within the exterior orifice, which I had the cruelty not to let him finish there, but threw him out again, not without a most piercing loud exclamation, as if the pain had put me beyond all regard of being overheard. It was then easy to observe that he was more satisfied, more highly pleased with the supposed motives of his baulk of consummation, than he would have-been at the full attainment of it.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “ Until then, they won’t turn around and recognize their responsibilities,” he said. “Okay, fine,” Deborah responded. “Go ahead and declare them. Maybe it’ll get better.” The official then granted Deborah permission to begin upper-level coursework in Clearwater. In August 2006, a formal notice on yellow parchment, called a “goldenrod,” was posted at the Celebrity Centre declaring Deborah’s parents Suppressive Persons, explaining that they had withdrawn the money they had placed on deposit for future coursework and that they had associated with “squirrels”—that is, they received unauthorized Scientology counseling. A month later, Mary Benjamin sent her daughter a letter. “ We tried to do what you asked, Deborah. We worked the whole months of July & Aug. on A-E.” They gave the church back the $2,500 for the courses that they never intended to take. After all that, she continued, a church adjudicator had told them to hand out three hundred copies of L. Ron Hubbard’s booklet “The Way to Happiness” to libraries and to document each exchange with photographs. Her parents had had enough. “If this can’t be resolved, we will have to say Good-Bye to you & James will lose his Grand-Parents,” her mother wrote. “This is ridiculous.” In April 2007, Deborah received a letter from the lawyer who represented her parents, threatening a lawsuit for the right to visit their grandson. Deborah had to hire an attorney. Eventually, the church relented. Deborah was summoned to the Celebrity Centre and shown a statement rescinding the decision, although she wasn’t allowed to have a copy of it. WHILE HE WAS RESEARCHING on the Internet, Haggis came upon a series of articles that had run in the St. Petersburg Times beginning in June 2009, titled “The Truth Rundown.” The paper has maintained a special focus on Scientology, since the church maintains such a commanding presence in Clearwater, which is adjacent to St. Petersburg. Although the paper and the church have frequently been at odds, the only interview that David Miscavige has ever given to a newspaper resulted in a rather flattering profile in the Times in 1998. (Since then, Miscavige has not spoken to the press at all.) In the series, Haggis learned for the first time that several of the top managers of the church had quietly defected—including Marty Rathbun. For several years, the word in the Scientology community was that Rathbun had died of cancer. Mike Rinder, the chief spokesperson, and Tom De Vocht, the former landlord of all the church properties in Clearwater, were also speaking out about the abuses that were taking place inside the top tier of management—mainly at the hands of the church leader. Amy Scobee, who had overseen the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles, pointed out that the reason no one outside of the executive circles knew of the abuse, even other Scientologists like Haggis, was that people were terrified of Miscavige—and not just physically. Their greatest fear was expulsion. “ You don’t have any money. You don’t have job experience.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Even when a degree of modernization was achieved, the European colonial powers managed to snuff it out. Perhaps Muhammad Ali’s greatest achievement had been the creation of the cotton industry, which promised to give Egypt a reliable economic base until Lord Cromer, the first consul-general of Egypt, put a brake on production, since Egyptian cotton damaged British interests. No friend to the emancipation of women—he was a founding member of the Anti-Women’s Suffrage League in London—Cromer also scaled back Ismail’s programs to educate women and blocked them from entering the professions. Every benefaction was less than it seemed. In 1922 the British allowed Egypt a modicum of independence, with a new king, a parliamentary body, and a liberal Western-style constitution, but they retained control of military and foreign policy. Between 1923 and 1930 there were three general elections, each won by the Wafd party, which campaigned for a reduced British presence in Egypt; but each time the British forced the elected government to resign.34 In the same way, Europeans obstructed the development of democracy in Iran, where modernizing clergy and intellectuals had led a successful revolution against the Qajar shah in 1906, demanding constitutional rule and representative government. But almost immediately the Russians helped the shah to close the new parliament (majlis), and during the 1920s, the British routinely rigged elections to prevent the majlis from nationalizing the Iranian oil that fueled their navy.35 The Muslims of the Middle East had therefore experienced the secular rule of the colonial powers as militarily and systemically violent. Things did not improve after they achieved independence in the twentieth century. As the Europeans dismantled their empires and left the region, they ceded power to the precolonial ruling classes, which were so embedded in the old aristocratic ethos that they were incapable of modernization. They were usually deposed in coups organized by reform-minded army officers, who were virtually the only commoners to receive a Western-style education: Reza Khan in Iran (1921), Colonel Adib Shissak in Syria (1949), and Gemal Abd al-Nasser in Egypt (1952). Like Muhammad Ali, these reformers modernized rapidly, superficially, and even more violently than the Europeans. Used to barracks life and the following of orders without question, they cut down opposition ruthlessly and underestimated the complexities of modernization.36 Secularism did not come to their subjects as liberating and irenic. Instead, these secularizing rulers effectually terrorized their subjects by tearing down familiar institutions, so that their world became unrecognizable.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  All Hizbollah leaders still attend philosophy classes to develop their capacity to think critically and independently. As the American civil rights activists did, they work with small groups in the villages to discover how each individual can best contribute to the community: they may set someone up in business or train him for an elite militia. Their goal, reminiscent of the Confucian ideal, is to develop a Shii community in which everybody receives and gives a measure of respect and feels valued and needed. Since the 2006 war with Israel, Hizbollah has concentrated especially on anger management: “We want to turn this anger from a destructive course into something politically useful—building resistance, perhaps—or into some socially constructive activity.” 49 During that war, Hizbollah modeled an alternative solution to the problem of asymmetrical warfare. 50 In preparation for such a contingency, it had constructed deep underground tunnels and bunkers, some forty feet below the surface, where its militias could sit out Israeli air strikes, before emerging to mount a prolonged rocket and missile attack. Hizbollah knew that these could not seriously damage the powerful Israeli war machine, but the long duration and unremitting nature of these missile barrages did affect Israeli morale. Hizbollah’s goal was to force Israel to launch a ground invasion, whereupon the well-trained Hizbollah guerrilla forces, with intimate knowledge of the terrain, could effectively assault Israel’s armored tanks with their shoulder-launched missiles. They had also achieved such a mastery of intelligence and public relations that many Israeli journalists frankly admitted that they preferred Hizbollah’s dispatches to the IDF’s. Their victory in compelling the Israelis to withdraw demonstrated that terrorism need not be the only way to repel a militarily superior enemy. As an inspiration for terrorism, however, nationalism has been far more productive than religion. Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people’s right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations, whether their ideology is religious (the Lebanese Shii) or secular (the PLO). 51 In Israel, however, we have seen a different dynamic of secular nationalism pushing a religious tradition into a more militant direction: its tendency to make the nation-state a supreme value so that its preservation and integrity permit any form of action, however extreme. In May 1980, after the murder of six yeshiva students in Hebron, Gush settlers Menachem Livni and Yehuda Etzion planted bombs in the cars of five Arab mayors, intending not to kill but to mutilate them so that they became living reminders of the consequences of any opposition to Israel. 52 But this operation was only a sideline. In April 1984 the Israeli government revealed the existence of a Jewish underground movement that had plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock in order to bring the Camp David talks to an end.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I look down at the smooth wood tabletop. Pressing down, I carve the line we made deeper. I wriggle the blade around a little bit. It feels good. I do it some more. I add more lines, more curves. My movement becomes more frantic each time the knife meets the table. He must think I’ve gone mad. But even if he does, he doesn’t move. He stands behind my shoulder as if he’s there to supervise my assault. When I’m done I toss the knife away from me. Both hands are pressed against my carvings as I lean over the table. I’m breathing hard, like I’ve just run six miles. I have, emotionally. Isaac reaches down and touches the word I’ve made. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even know what it said until I watched his fingers trace it. Surgeon’s fingers. Drummer’s fingers. HATE “Who do you hate?” he asks. “I don’t know.” I do a short spin into his chest, forgetting that he’s right behind me. He grabs the tops of my arms and clutches me against him. Then he wraps his arm around my head, forcing my face against his chest. The other is circling my back. He holds me and I shake. And I swear … I swear he’s just healed me a little bit. “I still see you, Senna,” he says into my hair. “You can’t ever stop seeing what you recognize as part of yourself.” A week later, Landscape stops playing. I am stepping out of my shallow, lukewarm bath when her voice cuts off in the middle of the chorus. I wrap a towel around myself and dart out of the bathroom to find Isaac. He’s in the kitchen when I come careening around the corner still clutching the towel to my dripping body. We stare at each other for a good two minutes, waiting for it to start up again, thinking there is a kink in the system. But it never comes back. It feels like a relief until the silence kicks in. True, deafening silence. We are so used to the noise, it takes a few days to acclimate to the loss of it. That’s what it’s like to be a prisoner of anything. You want your freedom until you get it, then you feel bare without your chains. I wonder if we ever get out of here, will we feel the loss? It sounds like a joke, but I know how the human mind works. Two days later the power goes. We are in darkness. Not just in the house. November has come. The sun will not rise on Alaska for two months. It’s the ultimate darkness. There is nowhere to find light, except crouched in front of the fire as our logs dwindle. That’s when I know we’re going to die.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In this political message too were the overtones of a holy war. This war of the American nation was directed by God himself. “All of you—all in this generation of our military—have taken up the highest calling of history,” he proclaimed, quoting the Prophet Isaiah: “And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope—a message that is ancient and ever new. To the captives, ‘come out’—and to those in darkness ‘be free.’ ” 90 Use of this biblical verse, which Jesus had quoted to describe his own mission, 91 revealed the messianic streak of the Bush administration. It was ironic that Bush announced the liberation of captives. In October 2003, the media published photographs of U.S. military police abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Saddam’s notorious prison; later, almost identical cruelty was shown to have taken place in British- run prisons. These photographs were a cruder vision of the official U.S. media presentation of the Iraq War. Hooded, naked, writhing on the ground, the Iraqis were depicted as dehumanized, craven, bestial, and utterly dominated by America’s superior power. The cocky stance of the low-ranking GIs implied: “We are high, they are low; we are clean, they are dirty; we are strong and brave, they are weak and cowardly; we are lordly, they are virtually animals; we are God’s chosen, they are estranged from everything divine.” 92 “The photos are us,” the late Susan Sontag declared. Nazis were not the only people to commit atrocities; Americans do so too, “when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion.” 93 Clearly the GIs saw nothing untoward in their behavior and had no fear of punishment. “It was just for fun,” said Private Lynndie England, who had appeared in the photographs walking a prisoner on a leash like a dog. They behaved in this way, the official investigation concluded, “simply because they could.” 94 Within a month of Bush’s carrier speech, Iraq had descended into chaos. Most Iraqis gave no credence to Bush’s exalted rhetoric; instead they were convinced that the United States simply wanted their oil and intended to use their country as a military base from which to defend Israel. They may have been glad to get rid of Saddam, but they did not regard the American and British troops as liberators. “They’re walking over my heart,” said one Baghdad resident. “Liberate us from what?” demanded another. “We have [our own] traditions, morals, customs.” 95 The Iraqi cleric Sheikh Muhammad Bashir complained that if the Americans had brought freedom to the country, it was not for the Iraqis: It is the freedom of occupying soldiers in doing what they like....

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  What horrors you have just uttered in my hearing! Cruel man, were you to be miserable for but two days, you would see these doctrines upon humanity swiftly obliterated from your heart: it is prosperity blinds and hardens you: mightily blase you are before the spectacle of the evils whence you suppose yourself sheltered, and because you hope never to suffer them, you consider you have the right to inflict them; may happiness never come nigh unto me if it can produce this degree of corruption! O Just Heaven! not merely to be content to abuse the misfortunate! To drive audacity and ferocity to the point of increasing it, of prolonging it for the unique gratification of one's desires! What cruelty, Monsieur! the wildest animals do not give us the example of a comparable barbarity." "You are mistaken, Therese, there is no roguery the wolf will not invent to draw the lamb into his clutches: these are natural ruses, while benevolence has nothing to do with Nature: charity is but an appurtenance of the weakness recommended by the slave who would propitiate his master and dispose him to leniency; it never proclaimed itself in man save in two cases: in the event he is weak, or in the event he fears he will become weak; that this alleged virtue is not natural is proven by the fact it is unknown to the man who lives in a state of Nature. The savage expresses his contempt for charity when pitilessly he massacres his brethren from motives of either revenge or cupidity... would he not respect that virtue were it etched in his heart? but never does it appear there, never will it be found wherever men are equal. Civilization, by weeding certain individuals out of society, by establishing rank and class, by giving the rich man a glimpse of the poor, by making the former dread any change of circumstances which might precipitate him into the latter's misery, civilization immediately puts the desire into his head to relieve the poor in order that he may be helped in his turn should he chance to lose his wealth; and thus was benevolence born, the fruit of civilization and fear: hence it is merely a circumstantial virtue, but nowise a sentiment originating in Nature, who never inserted any other desire in us but that of satisfying ourselves at no matter what the price.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  What do you want now? “Dangerous potentialities were slumbering in me, but you were the first to awaken them. If I now take pleasure in torturing you, abusing you, it is your fault; you have made of me what I now am, and now you are even unmanly, weak, and miserable enough to accuse me.” “Yes, I am guilty,” I said, “but haven’t I suffered because of it? Let us put an end now to the cruel game.” “That is my wish, too,” she replied with a curious deceitful look. “Wanda!” I exclaimed violently, “don’t drive me to extremes; you see that I am a man again.” “A fire of straw,” she replied, “which makes a lot of stir for a moment, and goes out as quickly as it flared up. You imagine you can intimidate me, and you only make yourself ridiculous. Had you been the man I first thought you were, serious, reserved, stern, I would have loved you faithfully, and become your wife. Woman demands that she can look up to a man, but one like you who voluntarily places his neck under her foot, she uses as a welcome plaything, only to toss it aside when she is tired of it.” “Try to toss me aside,” I said, jeeringly. “Some toys are dangerous.” “Don’t challenge me,” exclaimed Wanda. Her eyes began to flash, and a flush entered her cheeks. “If you won’t be mine now,” I continued, with a voice stifled with rage, “no one else shall possess you either.” “What play is this from?” she mocked, seizing me by the breast. She was pale with anger at this moment. “Don’t challenge me,” she continued, “I am not cruel, but I don’t know whether I may not become so and whether then there will be any bounds.” “What worse can you do, than to make your lover, your husband?” I exclaimed, more and more enraged. “I might make you his slave,” she replied quickly, “are you not in my power? Haven’t I the agreement? But, of course, you will merely take pleasure in it, if I have you bound, and say to him. “Do with him what you please.” “Woman, are you mad!” I cried. “I am entirely rational,” she said, calmly. “I warn you for the last time. Don’t offer any resistance, one who has gone as far as I have gone might easily go still further. I feel a sort of hatred for you, and would find a real joy in seeing him beat you to death; I am still restraining myself, but—” Scarcely master of myself any longer, I seized her by the wrist and forced her to the ground, so that she lay on her knees before me. “Severin!” she cried. Rage and terror were painted on her face. “I shall kill you if you marry him,” I threatened; the words came hoarsely and dully from my breast. “You are mine, I won’t let you go, I love you too much.”

• From Manhunt (2022)

  We’re going to work for the TERFs.” It took a moment to sink in. While it did, the bus’s front door groaned open past the iron cage someone had welded to its inner frame. A blast of chilly night air—the bus’s windows were painted over, the only light the tube fluorescents built into its ceiling—swept in ahead of a middle-aged redheaded woman with bags under her eyes who seemed to be in the middle of a shouting match with someone standing outside. “… said I’d bring the full eighty, so that’s what I’m bringing!” she hollered back over her shoulder in a thick Down East accent. “These Maryland bitches are hardcore, and I’m not gonna show up saying the dog ate my homework. Take it up with Queen Munchkin, you got such a hard-on.” Hahhhhd-on. The second woman came up into sight as the driver took her seat. That face. The long, straight nose. Blunt honey-blond bangs and gray eyes red-rimmed with crying, pouty little mouth twisted in a snarl of rage. Sylvia’s face. Fuck. “I’ll take the heat with Her Majesty,” Corinne growled, staring straight at Beth down the length of the aisle. “Just give me that thing.” Her hands closed into two trembling, manicured fists. “And a gun.” A crowd waited in the square outside City Hall. It was raining, though only lightly, and Ramona had to fight her way through their packed ranks on her way to the front steps. She’d overslept after coming back to the dorms from Feather’s and woken hungover and feeling greasy to the crackle of Kilroy telling her to come in early. She was already late, and now this. “Will you fucking move it?” she snapped at a clutch of older women in rain slickers, who took one look at her scowl and bloodshot eyes and parted ranks to let her pass. That was when she got her first look at the scene unfolding in the shadow of the hall, that ominous concrete heap. Legion women lined the steps. Molly and her people. More stood in front of them at ground level in the ravine between opposing tiers of cut gray granite, one with an automatic in her hand. Molly. And in front of them, kneeling handcuffed in the rain, were three whores from Feather’s building and one already lying dead, the back of her skull blown in. “No,” Ramona whispered. “Captain?” Karin, trailing after her. She swallowed, gripping the rusted rail set into the stairway. “Nothing.” An acne-spotted Maenad on the steps read from a yellowed pocket notebook as Molly stalked to stand behind the next woman in the kneeling line. “Jason Cohen. One count rape by omission of biological sex, one count preserving a known vector for the estrophaga virus, thirteen counts aiding and abetting in the preservation of such vectors. Last words?” “Fuck you,” she sobbed.

• From Between Us

  Starting with this lively but specific example, Tiedens found time and again that anger was rewarded in the U.S. context. In a study with an unknown politician (played by an actor), American students judged the angry (as compared to sad) politician more competent and worthy of their vote. In another study, she found that angry employees were more likely to be promoted in a tech company. And in yet another study, angry job applicants (again as played by actors) were more likely to be hired, and to be offered both a better job and a better salary than sad job applicants, even if all other qualities were the same. And remember who got the better business deal? The angry person who moves to not accept the deal if they do not get what they see as fair. Voters, managers, job committee members, and business negotiators seem to honor the power moves of the angry individuals (in the polls, in the hierarchy of the company, and at the negotiation table). There is an important caveat, however. Anger will only work if others yield to your claims: when anger is contested, you lose control of the direction in which the relationship changes. Anger may backfire. I referred above to women in the Victorian era. Their role of providing selfless love to their children and spouses was in direct contradiction with claims of entitlement and nonacceptance. A good wife maintained her temper even as her husband lost his, and a good mother loved her children, and was both calm and cheerful. Anger, the opposite, “showed bad character, pure and simple.” Similarly, in many cultures anger is so demonized that even the mildest sign of arousal may be met with disapproval. But in many other cases, anger is negotiated—not always successfully. Let’s start with contemporary examples. Larissa Tiedens’s research had focused on male politicians and male job candidates. But some ten years later, two of her colleagues, Victoria Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann, were struck by the fate of another Clinton. Hillary Clinton was in a bind. As one opinion maker put it: If she seemed angry, she was “a witch and a shrew”; if she did not, she looked “timid and girly.” This observation spurred a series of studies, comparing angry expressions in men and women. In one study, Brescoll and Uhlmann literally replicated Tiedens’s study with job applicants, this time including both male and female job applicants. They replicated her findings for male job applicants who fared better if they expressed anger than not, but not for female job applicants who did not benefit from an angry expression at all. Anger did not successfully claim entitlement for women; there is an emotional glass ceiling. Black Americans suffer the same fate, or worse. The legitimacy of their anger is often challenged, and any anger is held against them. In a 2020 Op-Ed in the New York Times, political scientist Davin Phoenix makes this point precisely:

• From Between Us

  At least part of the way that anger operates in ongoing social interactions depends on its legitimacy, based on general ideas of morality, on the angry person’s social position, age, or gender, and perhaps on the wiggle room perceived by someone else to challenge that legitimacy. Challenged anger may extinguish, legitimized anger will run its course. Woven into the emotion of anger are stories of morality: Is the emotion right or wrong? Who is supposed to have it, and who is not? Who can be their target? These contextualized stories are different across cultures. The Course of Anger Once you see anger as acting between people, there are countless ways of being angry. The way I am angry at my child for not finishing their plate is different from the way I am angry at my human resources department for making a shortsighted decision, and different from the anger I felt at the Trump administration for separating children from their parents at the Mexican border. There are endless variations of anger. But despite this variation within individuals and within cultures, it is also clear that the typical acts of anger differ between cultures (and between different positions within a culture), depending on what it means to be angry. When entitlement, blame, and nonacceptance are legitimate or even warranted, the course of anger will be different than when a stance of anger is seen as “selfish” or “childish.” In the interview study my colleague Mayumi Karasawa and I conducted with American and Japanese college students and adults of the general population (chapter 2), anger seemed to run a very different course in these two cultural contexts. We asked our respondents to tell us about a situation in which they felt “offended or not taken seriously by someone else” as this represents a core theme of anger. Our American respondents were recruited through churches and community centers in North Carolina, where I lived at the time. Jim, who had been accused by a co-worker of making rude sexual remarks, told us that the “young lady” “tried to get attention,” that “she always wanted attention.” He also accused her of being a liar and a cheater: “It turned out that she lies a lot. She was trying to get money out of the store.” When American respondents told us about such situations, they focused on all the bad properties of their offender. Notice that blaming “the young lady” freed Jim himself of any blemish, leaving his self-esteem intact. “She found out that she and another guy were going to be fired. I think that is why she did this. She took it out on me.” Jim was not the only one to tell us about the bad dispositions of their offenders, and the unjustness of their deeds.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Ordinarily, when a Scientologist does something wrong, especially something that might damage the image of the organization, he has to make amends, often in the form of a substantial contribution. But now the situation was reversed, Beghe maintained. He proposed that the church buy some property and lease it to him at a negligible rate. “You guys don’t have any policies to make up the damage, so I’m doing this for your own good—and for mine,” he explained to Davis and others. “Because I don’t have a policy of taking it in the ass.” 4 While talking to Haggis, Beghe was reluctant to use the word “brainwashing”—“whatever the fuck that is”—but he did say that somehow his mind had been taken over. “You have all these thoughts, all these ways of looking at things, that are L. Ron Hubbard’s,” he explained. “You think you’re becoming more you, but within that is an implanted thing, which is You the Scientologist.” Haggis was disturbed by Beghe’s account of what had happened after he left the church. He claimed that none of his Scientology friends would talk to him, his son had been kicked out of school, he was being followed by private investigators and threatened with lawsuits. Perhaps because Haggis had never been as much of a true believer as some members, he didn’t nurse the same sense of betrayal. “I didn’t feel that some worm had buried itself in my ear, and if you plucked it out you would find L. Ron Hubbard and his thought,” he said. But he did feel that he had been cautioned. “TOMMY,” HAGGIS’S LETTER of August 19, 2009, abruptly begins. “As you know, for ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego. Their public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California— rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.” The tone of the letter is both aggrieved and outraged, mixing Haggis’s personal experiences with the results of his one-man investigation into the church. He mentions how Katy Haggis’s friends had turned against her when she came out to them as a lesbian. Katy had told him that another friend of hers had applied to be the assistant for Jenna and Bodhi Elfman, the Scientology acting couple. Lauren Haigney, Tom Cruise’s niece in the Sea Org, had been assigned to vet the applicants.

• From Between Us

  Another example from our interviews illustrates the outside-in emotions well. Chiemi, a twenty-year-old Japanese student who lives with her grandparents, tells us she always tries to be home on time for dinner. Recently though, she has joined an extracurricular activity for which she stays out late a couple of days a week. When she mentions to her grandparents that she will be late that night, they complain that she is “never on time.” Chiemi is annoyed about this exaggeration, but she tries to understand her grandparents: They must be worrying; they surely mean well; they care about her. When the interviewer asks her what she does or tells her grandparents, Chiemi answers she never mentions to them that she is annoyed: How can I say . . . I want to say “I want to have more fun, I want to have fun until late at night.” But at the same time, you know, I know how much they worry about me. So I try not to say anything like that. I just try to laugh it off/smile it away. Chiemi accommodates to her grandparents’ wishes, and starts making even more of an effort to come home early. She plays her role. Sen’s relatives, the Utku Inuit, Hiroto, and Chiemi are all focused outwards, not inwards. When an OURS model of emotions prevails, emotional acting is Situated: individuals accommodate to the social norms, expectations, and roles in their social context. What matters is whether your emotions match up to others’ needs and expectations, whether you fit with the norms, and whether you fulfill your role. In fact, in a large-scale international questionnaire study, psychologist David Matsumoto and his colleagues found emotional suppression to be highest in national cultures that are strong on social order, norms and traditions, and power hierarchy, and lowest in national cultures that prioritize the individual and their feelings. Does this mean that Sen’s relatives, the Utku Inuit, Hiroto, Chiemi, or all the international students in order- and hierarchy-loving countries feel alienated from their feelings? When Sen’s relatives showed no emotion, did they feel unnatural? When the Utku Inuit stayed calm in the face of frustration, did they feel alienated? When Hiroto nodded in the committee, or Chiemi smiled to her grandparents, did they feel phony? Does it make them unhappy to not express their emotions? Does their anger or grief resurface at other, improper times?

• From Going Clear (2013)

  She pleaded with him to undergo marriage counseling at the church. Cruise refused, publicly declaring, “ Nic knows exactly why we are getting a divorce.” This was a decisive moment in Cruise’s relationship with Scientology. Rathbun provided the star with more than two hundred hours of auditing over the next couple of years. From July through Thanksgiving, 2001, Rathbun was with Cruise at the Celebrity Centre frequently, doing auditing rundowns and the PTS/SP (Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons) course. He paired Cruise with another actor, Jason Beghe, to do training drills; for instance, Beghe would think of a hypothetical date, which Cruise had to figure out, using the E-Meter, an exercise Cruise found really frustrating. A young man named Tommy Davis began acting as Rathbun’s assistant. He brought sandwiches and helped out with Cruise’s children, making sure they were receiving church services. Despite his youth, Davis was already a unique figure in the church: He was a second-generation Scientologist, a Sea Org member, and the scion of the Hollywood elite. His mother was Anne Archer, a talented and popular actress who had starred in a number of movies, including Patriot Games and Fatal Attraction , for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She had been a deeply committed Scientologist since she began studying with Milton Katselas at the Beverly Hills Playhouse in her twenties. She had always been proud to associate herself with Scientology in public, speaking at innumerable events on behalf of the church. Her son Tommy embodied the aspiration of the church to establish itself in the Hollywood community; indeed, he was living proof that it had done so. He had known Cruise since he was eighteen years old, so it was natural that he soon became the church’s liaison with the star, reporting directly to Shelly Miscavige. He had a relationship with Cruise similar to the one that Spanky Taylor once enjoyed with John Travolta. Rathbun assigned Davis to sit with Cruise in the parking lot of Home Depot in Hollywood while the star was doing his Tone Scale drills—guessing the emotional state of random people coming out of the store. Cruise then took a break to promote his movie Vanilla Sky . The following February through April 2002, Cruise and Rathbun were once again working together full-time, mostly at Gold Base. Cruise was preparing for his role in The Last Samurai , directed by Ed Zwick, and between sessions with Rathbun he would go into the courtyard to practice his swordplay. Cruise had begun dating the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, and in the fall of 2001 Rathbun began auditing her as well. At the same time, he was still acting as Nicole Kidman’s Ethics Officer in the church, even though she and Cruise were engaged in a bitter divorce proceeding. One of the issues was whether the children would be educated in schools using the Hubbard method, which Kidman opposed. That was another battle she lost.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  God knows I didn’t want to be in love. It was cliché—men and women and their social conformities to celebrate love. Engagement pictures made me want to vomit—especially when they were taken on railroad tracks. I always pictured Thomas the Train rolling over them, his smiley blue face beaded with their blood. I didn’t want to want those things. Love was good enough, without the three-layered almond/fondant wedding cake and the sparkly blood diamonds encased in white gold. Just love. And I loved Nick. Hard. Nick loved wedding cake. He told me so. He also told me that he’d like for us to have one someday. In that moment, my heart rate slowed, my eyes glazed and I saw my entire life flash before my eyes. It was pretty—because it was with Nick. But I hated it. It made me angry that he’d expect me to live that way. The way normal people lived. “I don’t want to get married,” I told him, trying to control my voice. We used to have this game we’d play. As soon as we’d see each other, we’d dialogue the physical description of what the other person looked like. It was a writer’s game. He’d always start with, button nose, limpid eyes, full lips, freckles. Now he was looking at me like he’d never seen me before. “Well, what do you want to do then?” We were sitting on our knees in front of his coffee table, sipping warm sake and eating lo mein with our fingers. “I want to eat with you, and fuck and see things that are beautiful.” “Why can’t we do that after the wedding?” he asked. He licked each of his fingers and then mine, and leaned back against the couch. “Because I respect love too much to get married.” “That’s bitter.” I stared at him. Was he kidding? “I don’t think I’m bitter just because I don’t want the same things you want.” “We can come to a compromise. Be like Persephone and Hades,” he said. I laughed. Too much sake. “You’re not brooding enough to be Hades, and unlike Persephone, I don’t have a mother.” My mouth clamped shut and I started sweating. Nick’s head immediately tilted to the right. I wiped my mouth with a napkin and stood up, grabbing the containers of food and carrying them to the kitchen. He followed me in there. I wanted to kick him off my heels. Nick’s mother was still married to his father. Thirty-five years. And from what I’d seen they were happy, uncomplicated years. Nick was so well balanced it was ridiculous. “Is she dead?” He had to ask twice. “To me.” “Where is she?” “Off being selfish somewhere.” “Aha,” he said. “Do you want dessert?”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She made the same accusation against me, and the dispute broke out. In her words, in the expression of her face, of her eyes, I noticed again the hatred that had so astonished me before. With a brother, friends, my father, I had occasionally quarrelled, but never had there been between us this fierce spite. Some time passed. Our mutual hatred was again concealed beneath an access of sensual desire, and I again consoled myself with the reflection that these scenes were reparable faults. “But when they were repeated a third and a fourth time, I understood that they were not simply faults, but a fatality that must happen again. I was no longer frightened, I was simply astonished that I should be precisely the one to live so uncomfortably with my wife, and that the same thing did not happen in other households. I did not know that in all households the same sudden changes take place, but that all, like myself, imagine that it is a misfortune exclusively reserved for themselves alone, which they carefully conceal as shameful, not only to others, but to themselves, like a bad disease. “That was what happened to me. Begun in the early days, it continued and increased with characteristics of fury that were ever more pronounced. At the bottom of my soul, from the first weeks, I felt that I was in a trap, that I had what I did not expect, and that marriage is not a joy, but a painful trial. Like everybody else, I refused to confess it (I should not have confessed it even now but for the outcome). Now I am astonished to think that I did not see my real situation. It was so easy to perceive it, in view of those quarrels, begun for reasons so trivial that afterwards one could not recall them. “Just as it often happens among gay young people that, in the absence of jokes, they laugh at their own laughter, so we found no reasons for our hatred, and we hated each other because hatred was naturally boiling up in us. More extraordinary still was the absence of causes for reconciliation. “Sometimes words, explanations, or even tears, but sometimes, I remember, after insulting words, there tacitly followed embraces and declarations. Abomination! Why is it that I did not then perceive this baseness?” CHAPTER XIII. “All of us, men and women, are brought up in these aberrations of feeling that we call love.

• From Between Us

  Similarly, the reason that bill collectors get angry is that anger is a pretty effective interpersonal tool for making people back down and do what you (the angry person) want them to do. Dutch psychologist Gerben van Kleef has shown that at the negotiating table, anger gets you the better business deal—certainly much better than showing happiness. Do not get me wrong: people are not always aware that their anger has this effect—they may not knowingly seek anger for its effect—but, more often than not, we are angry in situations where we feel that we are entitled to more than we get, and often, anger makes other people agree with us, or at the very least, submit to our wishes or entitlement. (A personal confession: my husband had the science on his side when he addressed our mortgage banker with irritation; I was acting completely against our financial interests when I smiled at her encouragingly.) The idea that emotions exist between people is not as outlandish as it may seem at first—and it may in fact help each of us to consider what our emotions (want to) achieve in our relationships. What is their effect on other people, or what do we want it to be? Take Martin’s example at the beginning of the chapter. He had just met the last requirement for his master’s in civil engineering: a presentation of his master’s project. Center stage in Martin’s account of his emotion are his own astonishment, relief, and “the good feeling” he had when telling others about his accomplishment. But does the emotion not also live between people? Surely, he makes mention of friends and relatives who were present during his presentation. He told as many as seven people that he had passed his important exam. While none of these people claimed a change in their reputation based on Martin’s success, they acknowledged his social transition by their presence and celebration. Is it possible that these other people felt proud of him? Sure. Is it possible that Martin’s status changed, and that his success opened up new opportunities? Yes, of course. Is it possible that Martin’s inner feelings are strongly related to his changed status in the world? It is not only possible, but likely. Very clearly, then, the social aspects of emotions are downplayed and under-recognized in the MINE model of emotions.