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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Such an obsession may seem surprising in one who was already deep in meditation upon death, but I do not pretend to be more consistent than others. When confronted by the least stupidity or the commonest petty contriving I was seized with inward fury and wild impatience (nor did I exempt myself from my own disgust). For example, Juvenal, in one of his Satires, was bold enough to attack the actor Paris, whom I liked. I was tired of that pompous, tirading poet; I had little relish for his coarse disdain of the Orient and Greece, or for his affected delight in the so-called simplicity of our forefathers; his mixture of detailed descriptions of vice with virtuous declamation titillates the reader's senses without shaking him from his hypocrisy. As a man of letters, however, he was entitled to certain consideration; I had him summoned to Tibur to tell him myself of his sentence to exile. This scorner of the luxuries and pleasures of Rome would be able hereafter to study provincial life and manners at first hand; his insults to the handsome Paris had drawn the curtain on his own act. Favorinus, towards that same time, settled into his comfortable exile in Chios (where I should have rather liked to dwell myself), whence his biting voice came no longer to my ears. At about this period, too, I ordered a wisdom vendor chased ignominiously from a banquet hall, an ill-washed Cynic who complained of dying of hunger, as if that breed merited anything else. I took great pleasure in seeing the prater packed off, bent double by fear, midst the barking of dogs and the mocking laughter of the pages. Literary and philosophical riff-raff no longer impressed me. The least setback in political affairs exasperated me just as did the slightest inequality in a pavement at the Villa, or the smallest dripping of wax on the marble surface of a table, the merest defect of an object which one would wish to keep free of imperfections and stains. A report from Arrian, recently appointed governor of Cappadocia, cautioned me against Pharasmanes, who was continuing in his small kingdom along the Caspian Sea to play that double game which had cost us dear under Trajan. This petty prince was slyly pushing hordes of barbarian Alani toward our frontiers; his quarrels with Armenia endangered peace in the Orient. When summoned to Rome he refused to come, just as he had already refused to attend the conference at Samosata four years before. By way of excuse he sent me a present of three hundred robes of gold, royal garments which I ordered worn in the arena by criminals loosed to wild beasts. That rash gesture solaced me like the action of one who scratches himself nearly raw.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Because children in most divorcing families are not given explanations of the breakup that make sense to them, their anxiety and confusion increase. Many children like Larry and his sister are told that one parent was drinking, and they have no idea what this means. Or the explanation is provided when the child is engaged in some other activity, like having friends over to play. Or they are told so hurriedly that they have no chance to absorb the message. (Half of the young children in this study first heard about divorce on the day their parents separated.) Some are not told at all. I remember one terrified third grader who learned about his parents’ divorce in the carpool on the way to school. When he entered the classroom, his face was ashen. Although the child was in agony, the teacher waited until school was out to call the father so he could pick up his son and avoid the carpool to his home. Typically children hear a real estate explanation of divorce: “Your mother is going to live here and I am going to live there.” Violence as the cause of the breakup is hardly ever mentioned, even though it is a central issue in many divorces. Mostly mothers assume that the children know and understand the connection because the child saw or overheard the fighting, or the mother feels too ashamed to discuss it with them. Mothers fail to realize that young children do not make the connection. No End to the AngerLARRY’S ANGER AT his mother for the divorce continued throughout elementary school. Every weekend his father visited for three hours, during which time he played chess with Larry, taught Larry the Cyrillic alphabet along with how to insult his mother in Russian, and brushed off his daughter, calling her vulgar names that she fortunately did not understand. Larry and his father talked about their living together, but these conversations never materialized into realistic plans. Larry’s attachment to his father grew even more passionate and intense because of the ever threatening possibility of loss. Once, as Larry and his dad drove past some high-powered electric wires, Larry asked questions about the voltage. After hearing the answers, he turned to his father and said, “Dad, I would grab that dangerous wire for you. Daddy, I would die for you.” This dire declaration of love and willingness to sacrifice his life for his father reflected Larry’s growing sense that his father was slipping away. Their bond grew more fragile as time went on.

• From Untrue (2018)

  As to sexual liberation per se, in spite of all the progress of second-wave feminism and the cultural inroads made by inspiring anthems by icons like Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe, and forthright sex-ed pieces on TeenVogue.com by Gigi Engle that make important information available to women while they make the Right cringe, and the current wave of women in sex tech led by amazons like Bryony Cole, and the trendy yet arguably subversive interest in polyamory among millennials who refuse to buy into mainstream gender binaries and roles, when it comes to sex, women remain, in some sense, fucked. As the authors of the Harvard-UCLA plough study put it succinctly, “Part of the importance of the plough arises through its impact on internal beliefs and values.” We live the plough’s unforgiving legacy every day, an inheritance that, for many of us, has come to feel logical or natural. It is not. Not only is the plough to thank or to blame for our monthly menstrual cycle; in our evolutionary prehistory, anthropologist Beverly Strassmann has found, our fat levels were lower from the constant effort of gathering, and so our cycle was more of a quarterly event. But our understanding that we “belong” to one man at a time if we are heterosexual women, or one person at a time if we are not, is something else we can pin on the plough. So are everyday realities like women being raised to sit with our legs crossed—what is between them is not ours to advertise or act upon, any more than outdoor space is our legacy or right to take up or even inhabit.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  * * * I am extremely grateful to Akashic Books and its publisher, Johnny Temple, for bringing out this new edition of Born on the Fourth of July at such a crucial moment in our nation’s history. For the past two years we have been involved in a tragic and senseless war in Iraq. As of this writing, over 1,500 Americans have died and more than 11,000 have been wounded, while tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, have been killed. I have watched in horror the mirror image of another Vietnam unfolding. So many similarities, so many things said that remind me of that war thirty years ago which left me paralyzed for the rest of my life. Refusing to learn from our experiences in Vietnam, our government continues to pursue a policy of deception, distortion, manipulation, and denial, doing everything it can to hide from the American people their true intentions and agenda in Iraq. The flag-draped caskets of our dead begin their long and sorrowful journeys home hidden from public view, while the Iraqi casualties are not even considered worth counting—some estimate as many as 100,000 have been killed so far. The paraplegics, amputees, burn victims, the blinded and maimed, shocked and stunned, brain damaged and psychologically stressed, now fill our veterans hospitals. Most of them were not even born when I came home wounded to the Bronx V.A. in 1968. The same lifesaving medical-evacuation procedures that kept me alive in Vietnam are bringing home a whole new generation of severely maimed from Iraq. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.), which afflicted so many of us after Vietnam, is just now beginning to appear among soldiers recently returned from the current war. For some, the agony and suffering, the sleepless nights, anxiety attacks, and awful bouts of insomnia, loneliness, alienation, anger, and rage, will last for decades, if not their whole lives. They will be trapped in a permanent nightmare of that war, of killing another man, a child, watching a friend die . . . fighting against an enemy that can never be seen, while at any moment someone—a child, a woman, an old man, anyone —might kill you. These traumas return home with us and we carry them, sometimes hidden, for agonizing decades. They deeply impact our daily lives, and the lives of those closest to us. To kill another human being, to take another life out of this world with one pull of a trigger, is something that never leaves you. It is as if a part of you dies with them. If you choose to keep on living, there may be a healing, and even hope and happiness again—but that scar and memory and sorrow will be with you forever. Some of these veterans are showing up at homeless shelters around our country, while others have begun to courageously speak out against the senselessness and insanity of this war and the leaders who sent them there.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The Romans were not accustomed to blaming rape victims. For centuries the law had recognized the innocence of women subjected to sexual violence. But a primitive sensibility toward physical violation abided in ancient Mediterranean societies; rape was a social, as well as a personal, trauma. Certainly the social rehabilitation of abused bodies was something that was strictly beyond the limits of comfortable discussion. Augustine was deliberately, and brashly, scraping against some of the most primitive strata of belief about a woman’s body. The lust of another, he defiantly claimed, could not “pollute” one’s purity. Intent was all that hung in the scales. A woman whose body was forced into sex “but who offered no consent with her will” kept her chastity intact. With his unfailing instinct for drama, Augustine hailed before the tribunal of sexual justice the legendary Roman matron Lucretia. It was a savvy choice. In a culture that had long valued the moral exemplum, Lucretia was the example of examples. She preferred death over dishonor, and her suicide made her the unquestioned paragon of female honor. Lucretia was such a wrenching case precisely because of the deep tension at the heart of her story: she was innocent in mind, but voluntarily accepted the penalty of death. It was this tension that Augustine unraveled with remorseless zeal. If she was innocent in her will, then she had killed an innocent person. “If she is cleared of adultery, then she becomes guilty of murder. There is absolutely no escape when someone asks, ‘If she was an adulteress, why is she praised? If she was sexually honorable, why did she have to be killed?’ ”60 It is a truism of the Western Civilization classroom that The City of God represents the passage across the threshold from classical to medieval civilization. It is almost accurate. Augustine’s sneering prosecution of Lucretia was a cultural landmark. It represented the high-water mark of a distinctly volitional framework of sexual morality in the ancient church. Augustine could condemn Lucretia with such force because he carried with him a refined Christian model of sin that dissociated sexual behavior from its place in a network of social relationships. The first installment of The City of God represented the apex of Christian free will for another reason, though. It appeared at precisely the same moment when the great Pelagian controversy erupted. In the last two decades of his life, Augustine was engulfed in a doctrinal war over the nature of the human will, the repercussions of which would echo through the centuries, with momentous consequences for the history of sexuality. The Pelagian controversy, which can appear so compressed in its course and circumstantial in its substance, was an affair of such extraordinary moment because it represented Christian sexuality suddenly coming to terms with the newfound social dominance of the church. The hopeful, if naive, notions of free will, native to primitive Christianity, were washed out by the tidal wave of Augustinian pessimism—in the west.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Although Firmicus, like many of his generation, would be swept up by the winds of change and convert to Christianity, his Mathesis evokes a world that is distinctly late classical in its outlook and its familiar cast of sexual types. Like Firmicus, the only extant law of the Constantinian dynasty that approaches the problem of same-sex love is in fact closer to the spirit and motivation of ancient machismo than Christian moralism. An important imperial constitution of AD 342, issued by the chancery of Constantine’s son Constans, is so florid that its precise content has been the object of much speculation. “When a man couples in the manner of a woman, that is, as a woman who will have granted men what they want, when sex has lost its place, when there is a crime it is best not to know, when venus is changed into another form, when love is sought but not seen, we command the laws to rise up and justice to be armed with an avenging sword, so that those infamous persons who are or will be guilty shall be subjected to exquisite penalties.” Questions immediately arise. Does “couple” (nubit) here mean “marry” or does it imply the physical act of copulation? At stake is the precise aim of the law. The law of Constans has sometimes been seen as a reaction against “gay marriage.” But this view is unlikely. Marriage between men, mentioned in a handful of imperial sources, received no legal recognition and entailed no legal effects, so juridically there was no legal marriage to regulate or prohibit. Instead “coupling” has been taken in a purely sexual sense, which is suggested by the parallel clauses of the law. The enactment stands as a grandiloquent, sneering attack on male sexual passivity. The measure of Constans proposes, ominously, “exquisite penalties” where the Sentences of Paul had envisioned a fine. The violent punishment of sexual deviance makes the law something of a landmark, if one obscured by the haze of its bilious rhetoric.27 The author of the comparison between Roman and Mosaic law does not mention this enactment, which he may well not have had at his disposal. It would not have helped his case anyhow, because the law is an inspired defense of old-fashioned virility. The conservative idiom of the law of Constans is the one thing truly beyond dispute. It is about the vir, the man, who abandons his role. The ominous penalties were directed against infames, men whose official reputation was impaired by their sexual deviance. If the language and categories of the law are regarded seriously, its motivation must have been the enforcement of old-fashioned sex roles. The rhetorical flourishes, the judicial savagery, the greater zeal in the direct enforcement of morality are all broadly characteristic of late antique statecraft, and not necessarily tied to religious change. In combination with the traditional hatred of male passivity, these would be sufficient to explain the outburst of Constans.28

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  During the 2004 Democratic Convention, returning soldiers formed a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War, just as we marched in Miami in August of 1972 as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Still others have refused deployment to Iraq, gone to Canada, and begun resisting this immoral and illegal war. For months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, citizens here in the United States and around the world marched and demonstrated in growing opposition to our government’s reckless plan to launch an attack. I proudly participated in protests in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., doing countless interviews and speaking out wherever people would listen to me. Many prominent world leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II, began to raise their voices against the terrible and ill-fated foreign policy. This extraordinary opposition culminated on February, 15, 2003, when more than thirty million citizens in over one hundred nations participated in the most massive demonstration on behalf of peace in the history of the world. Never before had so many human beings come together before a war had even begun to say no to the insanity and madness. Many of us promised ourselves long ago that we would never allow what happened to us in Vietnam to happen again. We had an obligation, a responsibility as citizens, as Americans, as human beings, to raise our voices in protest. We could never forget the hospitals, the intensive care wards, the wounded all around us fighting for their lives, those long and painful years after we came home, those lonely nights. There were lives to save on both sides, young men and women who would be disfigured and maimed, mothers and fathers who would lose their sons and daughters, wives and loved ones who would suffer for decades to come if we did not do everything we could to stop the forward momentum of this madness. We sensed it very early and very quickly. We saw the same destructive patterns reasserting themselves all over again as our leaders spoke of “bad guys” and “evildoers,” “imminent threats” and “mushroom clouds,” attempting to frighten and intimidate the American people into supporting their agenda. The Bush administration seems to have learned some very different lessons than we did from Vietnam. Where we learned of the deep immorality and obscenity of that war, they learned to be even more brutal, more violent and ruthless, i.e., “shock and awe.” Sadly, the war on terror has become a war of terror. Where we learned to be more open and honest, to be more truthful, to expose, to express, to shatter the myths of the past, they seem to have learned the exact opposite—to hide, to censor, to fabricate, to mislead and deceive—to perpetuate those myths.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The anthropologist Holly Dunsworth has written about all the ways Trump got evolution wrong here, from his misapprehension that it was competition rather than cooperation that helped us thrive to his fantasy that human females are “naturally” power-fixated gold diggers. This highly selective version of sexual selection’s role in evolution is one that plays in Trump’s America, and the version of masculinity it suggests—muscular, fearless, and dominant—arguably helped Trump win the election. It did not hurt that his opponent was an “unnaturally” ambitious woman who didn’t know her place (or essence, apparently) and whom Trump suggested he might “lock up.” (“Lock her up is right!” he enthused as supporters in Pennsylvania chanted the phrase.) Like Dr. Storer’s patient Mrs. B. in 1856, women who slipped out of the bounds of the Trumpian Eden, where passive females seek the protection and sperm of active and assertive males, were a threat to be contained and then annihilated. Instead of recommending a borax vaginal wash, the man who is now our president used and continues to use verbal coercive tactics, including, famously—in a phrase that reasserted that essential differences were essential destiny while it echoed William Acton’s preoccupation with menstruation—describing a woman who stepped over the line as having “blood coming out of her wherever.” But as for Bateman’s science—popular, popularized, politicized, and sometimes populist—it wasn’t merely biased by and influential upon its cultural moment. Over the intervening years a number of scientists, many of them women, began to suggest it was also highly questionable in light of how females of many species—including non-human female primates and women—actually behave. The presumptions built upon Bateman’s findings (“Men have sports cars to get lots of women,” “Women just naturally want to stay home with the kids and one man—that’s how it was in caveman times,” “All females need and want an alpha,” “Males naturally want sex more than females do,” and so on) began to fall like so many houses arrogantly, haphazardly erected on quicksand.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The first object of our attention must be the fate of same-sex eros in late antiquity. Given the considerable diversity that prevailed in the high empire, the Christian assault on modes of same-sex contact was sudden, violent, and total. Several developments are notable. Under the influence of Paul, the discussion of what is “natural” looms large in the period, and even more profoundly the conception of “natural” sex is reorganized around the gender of the partner rather than the role of the sexual actor; the traditional bifurcation of love between males into pederasty and passivity gives way to a monolithic conception of unnatural sexual practice. The moral demands of nature displace (or overshadow) the ancient culture of machismo, which is, with a few notable exceptions, strikingly muted in the late antique record as a method of regulating sexual life. Gradually these Christian attitudes had an influence in public law. The classical law had punished violations of freeborn boys and imposed civil disabilities on openly passive men. The late antique legislative program became progressively more violent and aggressive toward practices deemed sexually deviant. Underlying the legal developments is not only blunt hostility, but more subtly a new sense of the populace itself as the framework of sexual regulation and of homosexual acts as a contamination that was a threat to public order. The legal reforms are highly contingent, and incompletely Christian, until the reign of Justinian, who mobilized the state’s energies in a sweeping campaign to eradicate same-sex eros. Regarding the Christianization of marriage, there was much that the church could find congenial in the valorization of marriage in Greco-Roman culture. But the effort to Christianize such a central social institution was inevitably turbulent. The attempted takeover of the institution was not simply the absorption of a preexistent idealism about the relationship between husbands and wives. There were considerable frictions generated by the place of marriage, and conjugal sex, within a broader socio-legal system. The legal and demographic structures of marriage presented formidable obstacles to the Christianization of marriage. Above all, Christian ideals of sexual exclusivity, including male fidelity, were radically discordant with the patterns of life and the expectations of public culture. The war against fornication was fought parish by parish in the late ancient Mediterranean. Fornication, once the property of the impure outside world, was an object of pastoral reform, as sermons, penitential literature, and the deepening ecclesiastical awareness of its social basis make clear. Together with the demand for sexual exclusivity came rigid insistence on the singularity of the marriage relationship, which discouraged divorce and remarriage. The Christianization of marriage was a great revolution, but it was incomplete and uncertain in late antiquity. One measure of this incomplete transition was the inability of late antique Christianity to corral the marriage rite into the church itself. Similarly, the law of marriage is an index not just of change but of the limits of change.

• From Untrue (2018)

  I also wanted to know how things had changed for young women since I had been one. And how those changes were impacting the lives of women across a range of ages, socioeconomic groups, and identities. Even as I write these words, the ground is changing beneath our feet. #MeToo and the backlash against it dramatize, in real time, how much is at stake in narratives about female sexual autonomy. The media, at this writing, continues to frame #MeToo by reducing its human players into two neat categories: women as victims and accusers (they are) and men as either villains (some are) or potentially falsely accused victims themselves. But this simplistic framing leaves out what I understand to be perhaps the most important aspect of what women are saying with their #MeToo stories: men are not allowed to tell women anymore, in words or with deeds, that sex is for men alone to choose to have. Men like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and Charlie Rose curated ecologies where men were entitled to women who were decorative, as a way to disempower those women and empower themselves. Meanwhile, men who do not abide by or who trivialize affirmative consent assert a worldview in which female permission is extra or an obstacle to find a way around. In this mindset, female desire is mere icing on the cake of the real thing: what men want. The practices of these men effectively quash female sexual agency. #MeToo doesn’t. It responds, “I am not an extension of your sexual desires.” Now comes the next wave: women who say, “Sexually harassing me, sexually assaulting me, and not operating within the rules of affirmative consent are no longer options because I refuse to accept what you tell me when you do those things—that sex is not mine to want but yours. I have my own sexual desires and sexual agenda.” As of this writing, saying so may feel at once too dangerous and too complicated—what would happen to women who challenge our facile and reductive media categories and the thinking that subtends them with this defiant assertion? Better, for now, to take cover behind the hulking, protective, and familiar notion that women don’t want It; men do.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Terminology like “glans” aside, men—whose junk develops from the very same embryonic tissue women’s does—are very different in one respect. Their penises are functional, for urinating as well as ejaculating, multitaskers for biology, sensation, and reproduction. Meanwhile, the little bud that stands at attention, the clit we thought we knew, is merely the ticket to the roller-coaster ride and serves no greater or lesser purpose than to make us feel good. The entirety of what is now known as the “female erectile network” (FEN) or “internal clitoris” snakes back nearly to our anus on either side; extends along our labia, which swell with pleasure; and includes our urethral sponge (previously called the G-spot) and something called the perineal sponge too. And women, unlike men, can have orgasm after orgasm. “Women don’t require a refractory period like men do, so we’re able to stay aroused longer and have [subsequent orgasms] with little effort,” says Rachel Carlton Abrams, MD, co-author of The Multi-Orgasmic Woman. Conventional wisdom has it that men come and are done. But female orgasm is, in actual real-life conditions—in beds and showers and the backseats of cars, in dorm rooms and conference rooms and marriages and hookups and trysts—a moody bitch. She is notoriously reticent. And like the clitoris itself, which retracts under its hood when stimulated, female orgasm can be elusive. Her rewards take some know-how, and patience. According to Manhattan psychiatrist and sex therapist Elisabeth Gordon, MD, studies tell us the average time for a woman to orgasm from intercourse after stimulating foreplay ranges from ten to twenty minutes, while for men it is two and a half to eight minutes. “The only hard and fast facts regarding time to orgasm are that there is a range, and women take longer on average, and that it’s faster from self-stimulation.” And it’s not uncommon for women to fear they are taking “too long,” Gordon observes. There is no doubt that this latter fact is at least in part a symptom of a culture-wide failure to tell women that great sex is our right, and that we are entitled to “release” as we have been taught men are. Among heterosexuals, there is a significant “orgasm gap” as well as a sexual entitlement gap: one study found that when it comes to sex with a familiar partner, heterosexual men come a hefty 22 percent more often than women do. (Bisexual women fare no better than straight women, while lesbians come out on top, experiencing orgasm nearly 75 percent of the time during partnered sex.) Another study found that in first-time hookups, straight men have over three orgasms for every orgasm a straight woman has.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  felt since I first set foot on her perfect carpet five years ago—or actually, since I first understood what foster care was. I’m just a Rent-a-Kid. I’m suddenly suspicious that the reason she and any foster parent has given me shelter was to keep the checks coming. Anger boils in me and my words sear my tongue as I tell her what I’ve feared since I met her. “You’ve always been in this for the money!” I yell. “It’s not for the kids, or because you’re some saint! Now that I’m going away, I will get the government’s subsidy—not you. And you can’t stand that, can you? If you were in this for me, if you were really concerned about supporting me, then you would want me back at holidays and breaks. This whole stupid act—you’re not my family! You’re just the people who get paid to act like it. And you know what? I’ve already gotten rid of one mother. Don’t you dare think I won’t do it again.” “Regina, you’re jumping to conclusions,” she says steadily. “We could always discuss some kind of rent arrangement so that you can come back.” In my seasoned insistence to get the last word, I scream in her face, “Don’t worry! This is the last place I’d ever come back to!” During this last half-decade in Addie’s home, I’ve been grateful that she’s provided every necessity a young woman needs and some sense of family so I could feel like a normal kid. At moments I was even distracted from my guilt for failing Rosie and Norm. Addie and Pete have filled that emptiness by being the family who greet me when I walk in the door; for being involved in my life for more than the length of a beating or a heated phone call like the negligent fools who are my biological parents. Addie and Pete have been there so much that sometimes my teachers and my friends and their parents have asked why they never adopted me. Deep down I’ve always been aware that I’m just like the forty thousand other foster kids in America who age out of care every year to end up homeless, incarcerated, addicted, or dead. Transferring to New Paltz is a stepping-stone toward finally creating some presence in the world, to make a living and something of my life. Three weeks later, it’s really time. Camille and Frank host a special farewell dinner for me at their home. Camille squeezes me tight after I put on my coat to leave. “I heard that living away at college is all fun, all the time. Will you promise me something?” I pull away to look at her. “What?” I anticipate a motherly request to be careful. “Forget everything, and for once, just enjoy yourself,” she says into my ear.

• From Untrue (2018)

  These fates were less terrifying than that of the adulterous, vengeful, and ambitiously unsympathetic Clytemnestra as told by Aeschylus in The Oresteia, the 458 BC tragedy and cautionary tale. Clytemnestra repartnered over the course of her husband Agamemnon’s long absence during the Trojan War, rendering her the polar opposite of the faithful, monogamous, and good wife of Odysseus, Penelope. Clytemnestra was enraged that Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods on his battleship in a bid for favorable winds. During his long absence, the text implies, she took solace in her power to rule Argos, and in sex with her illegitimate “husband” Aegisthus. Again, she was no Penelope, who held her ardent suitors at bay by weaving and unweaving at her loom for years. Upon Agamemnon’s return with his lover Cassandra, who crouched and lowed outside, knowing what was to come, Clytemnestra purred her welcome, drew a bath for her husband—and proceeded to ax or stab him to death. But rather than being protected by the ages-old rule of cyclical justice represented by the Furies, who sided with Clytemnestra because she was avenging the murder of her child, she was murdered by her own son, Orestes, at the urging of Apollo. Apollo then successfully argued his case against the Furies, absolving his client of the crime he had committed in Athenian court. There could be no more literal enactment of a new world order that did not tolerate women taking matters—whether sexual or legal—into their own hands. Female power and female privileges like those Clytemnestra represented were extinguished in a number of ways, including through the work of texts like The Oresteia, which flourished in the cultural soil tilled by plough use, enriching it in return. In this emerging new masculinist Order of Things, the death of a girl by her father’s hand not only isn’t a crime; it’s a right.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  We can’t be happy for my freedom while there’s any ounce of possibility that our younger siblings will be forced to suffer with Cookie. I flee from the kitchen and slam my bedroom door. I grab everything I can get my hands on and throw it: the only outlet I’ve ever found effective when I’m in a blind rage. ONE MORNING IN May, Addie and Camille exchange a knowing glance when I come out to the kitchen with stomach pains so bad I think I might throw up. “Maybe you should stay home from school,” Addie says. Camille knocks on the bathroom door just as I’m discovering a spot of blood on my leg. “Honey,” she calls, “why don’t you let me help?” She inconspicuously edges inside the bathroom and shows me how to adhere a maxi pad. “And here’s where Addie keeps our stashes. Always make sure you have extras in your bag . . . especially if you visit Cookie.” “Why?” “Because she doesn’t buy these. She’d rather spend the food stamps on beer and cigarettes. Remember the bloody washcloths she used to leave around the house?” I grimace. “Oh, Camille!” “Yeah. I know. It was gross.” In the kitchen, Addie’s looking through the phone book. “I’m going to make you an appointment at the doctor,” she says. “The doctor? I’m not sick, I just got my period.” “Well, there are precautions certain young women should take when their bodies grow capable of bearing children.” Oh, that’s what this is about: Addie’s afraid she’ll be raising a foster grandchild if she doesn’t get me on the pill. “Birth control helps regulate a woman’s cycle,” she says. I want to tell her to cut the crap. I could teach sex education at my school better than any teacher who actually studied it. At the age of eight, I learned how one gives a blow job thanks to Cookie’s demonstration on one of her boyfriends when she thought we were all asleep. At twelve, I walked into my mother’s bedroom to find a huge pink dildo and a magazine called High Society laying open to a letter from a man detailing his one-night stand with a female gymnast so skilled that when she swung from the chandelier, she landed in a split, directly on his erect penis. Thanks to my mother’s graphic language and her casual displays around the house (like how she would grab Karl between his legs in front of us), when you grow up witness to such sexual behavior, nothing about it is very fascinating. In fact, it shuts out any desire whatsoever. Still, with Addie’s incessant urging, I make a trip to the gynecologist. The county bus system is so infrequent and confusing that I arrive late, alone, and even more stressed out than I’d prepared myself for. When the nurse calls me into the sterile gray room, I follow her instruction to lie on the table.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Simply going public with her day-to-day life was threatening to the order of things—monogamy for women, if not for men—and incited violent threats, mostly to control her if she won’t control herself. Underneath the attacks is a teeming, roiling sense of entitlement, a feeling that something sacred has been disturbed or desecrated and must be returned to rights. “Get herpes and die, slut. Sharia law looks more attractive by the day” is how some have expressed it, their anger a good indication that her “wayward” or “disobedient” behavior is in their minds an affront not only to Jenkins’s husband, and all of civilization, but to the commenters themselves. Jenkins has a calm, even, and open demeanor that’s very much in evidence as we FaceTime one summer afternoon: she is equanimity itself when my nine-year-old and his friend burst noisily onto the scene and I drop my laptop and have to switch rooms, and again when a huge truck near her balcony begins its deafening beep-beep-beep backup routine (like nails on a chalkboard to this high-strung New Yorker). Indeed, Jenkins strikes you as the kind of person who can hear just about anything, at any pitch or frequency, and then proceed to make sense of its underlying meaning with the kind of deep, grounded intelligence and authentic curiosity that set your favorite college professor apart from the rest. She does just this with the very public and often histrionic threats and insults she has received since the publication of What Love Is. “The idea that women are naturally monogamous makes it ‘worse’ when we are ‘unfaithful,’” she observes. “That’s why words like ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ are gendered female, of course.” And at the bottom of all that, she says, here invoking Bertrand Russell, “is an historical vision of women as the reproductive property of men.” But property with a will and volition, I note. “Yes!” Jenkins agrees, really warming to her topic. Because it’s property with a will, “you must control it, and if it’s out of control, if it’s beyond control, it’s extremely dangerous to you personally, and also socially dangerous. It can basically bring down the world.” I thought of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and the persistence of the legacy of the plough, the wide, deep rows it had tilled in the history of women’s lived experience. The “walking sexually transmitted infection” insult—with its implication that women like Jenkins who cross the line are at once polluted and polluting in their very essence, at once abject and contagious, like lepers, but lepers who want to drag you down into the gutter with them and infect you too—expresses this rage and anxiety all at once, while wrapping it up neatly in a container of fantasized control.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  On my way to his office, I decided to give him a chance to explain what was going on, instead of angrily complaining about the insanity of indicting someone for perjury because he had contradicted a State’s witness. I decided to wait until after my meeting before filing my stack of motions. This was my first meeting with anyone associated with Walter’s prosecution, and I didn’t want to begin with an angry accusation. I had allowed myself to believe that the people who had prosecuted Walter were just misguided, possibly incompetent. I knew some of them were bigoted and abusive, but I guess I held out the hope that they could be reoriented. Indicting Darnell was a worrisome signal that they were willing to threaten and intimidate people. The Monroe County courthouse is situated in the heart of downtown Monroeville. I drove into town, parked, and entered the courthouse looking for the district attorney’s office. On my only other trip to the courthouse a month earlier, I had gone to the clerk’s office to pick up files and the staff had asked me where I was from. When I said Montgomery, they launched into a lecture about Monroeville’s prominence as a result of Harper Lee and her famous novel. I remember how the clerk had chatted me up. “Have you read the book? It’s a wonderful story. This is a famous place. They made the old courthouse a museum, and when they made the movie Gregory Peck came here. You should go over there and stand where Mr. Peck stood—I mean, where Atticus Finch stood.” She giggled with excitement, although I imagine she said the same thing to every out-of-town attorney who wandered in. She continued talking enthusiastically about the story until I promised to visit the museum as soon as I could. I refrained from explaining that I was too busy working on the case of an innocent black man the community was trying to execute after a racially biased prosecution. During this trip I was in a different frame of mind. The last thing I was interested in was a fictional story about justice. I walked through the courthouse until I found the district attorney’s office. I announced myself to the secretary, who eyed me suspiciously before directing me into Chapman’s office. He walked over to shake my hand. Chapman started off by saying, “Mr. Stevenson, lots of people want to meet you. I told them you were coming down but decided that just you and I should talk.” It didn’t surprise me that word had gotten around and that people were talking about Walter’s new attorney. I had talked to enough people in the community to know that people would be discussing my efforts on Walter’s behalf. My guess is that Judge Key had already characterized me as misguided and uncooperative simply because I didn’t get off the case, as he had directed.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Chapman had called in the state attorney general’s office to help defend Walter’s conviction, and they’d sent Assistant Attorney General Don Valeska, a longtime prosecutor with a reputation for being intense and combative. Valeska was a white man in his forties whose fit, medium frame suggested someone who stayed active; the glasses he wore added to his serious demeanor. His brother Doug was the district attorney in Houston County, and both men were aggressive and unapologetic in their prosecution of “bad guys.” Michael and I had reached out to Chapman once more before the hearing to see if we could persuade him to reopen the investigation and independently reexamine whether McMillian was guilty. But by now, Chapman and all of the law enforcement officers had grown tired of us. They seemed increasingly hostile whenever they had to deal with us. I had considered reporting to them the bomb threats and death threats we’d received, since they were likely coming from people in Monroe County, but I wasn’t sure anyone in the sheriff’s or D.A.’s office would care. The new judge on the case, Judge Thomas B. Norton Jr., had also grown weary of us. We’d had several pretrial hearings on different motions during which he would sometimes become frustrated because of the bickering between the lawyers. We kept insisting on obtaining all files and evidence the State had in its possession. We had uncovered so much exculpatory evidence that had not been disclosed previously that we were sure there was still more that had not been turned over. The judge finally told us that we were fishing after we’d made our ninth or tenth request for more police and prosecution files. I suspect that Judge Norton had scheduled the final Rule 32 hearing in part because he wanted to get this contentious, complicated case off his docket and out of his court. In the last pretrial appearance, the judge had asked, “How much time will you need to present your evidence, Mr. Stevenson?” “We’d like to reserve a week, your honor.” “A week? You’ve got to be joking. For a Rule 32 hearing? The trial in this case only lasted a day and a half.” “Yes, sir. We believe this is an extraordinary case and there are several witnesses and—” “Three days, Mr.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  conversation. When I want to speak to him I have to fax him or wait for him to call me, so my correspondence is in writing but his is all verbal . . . another strategic move by him and his lawyer to keep the upper hand. Then I finally get a fax back, not from him, but from a Wayne Teller, Paul’s lawyer. I fight to steady the paper in my shaking hands as I read that Paul no longer wants me to contact him and his decision is final. Then to ensure that I never contact him again, his attorney ended the letter by stating if I fail to comply with his request and contact Paul again that I will be admonished for violating Rule 4.2 of the Rules of Professional Conduct. Camille is angrier than I am. “What on earth does Rule 4.2 even mean?” “Rule 4.2 restricts an attorney from ever contacting someone who is represented by counsel. Even though I could be his daughter, I’m also an attorney. He’s threatening to bring charges of professional misconduct against me if I ever directly contact him again.” “So he’s used your achievement against you,” she says. “How unfair, Gi. No good would have come from meeting him anyway.” We both know she’s just trying to comfort me. “What are you going to do now?” “I have to try to find a qualified paternity lawyer in the State of Washington who’s willing to take my case . . . and it won’t be easy. An adult has never successfully sued another adult for paternity before, only minor children have been permitted to sue for DNA. So whoever takes my case must not only be qualified to fight this battle, but also has to really believe in my case.” “I believe in your case,” Camille says. The simplicity of her statement arrests me. In this moment, it’s clear: My sister is the only person who has always stood by me, no matter how extreme the scenario. “You do?” “Yes. You, me, Cherie . . . all we’ve ever wanted is to know who we are. Who we came from. At least Vito and Norman stuck around long enough to see their kids born, but we three have never even seen pictures of our fathers. I know you and I came from two different men, but I want to know the truth for you as much as you do. If Cookie couldn’t help us figure out where we fit in this world, then we have to find out for ourselves.” She’s put it perfectly. From where I get my strength to where I get my eyes, all I want is to know. But searching for the right attorney and convincing him or her to take my case will take some time. In the meantime, Paul will think that this letter has ended our connection forever . . . but I’m not finished. I start by contacting members of the American Academy of Matrimonial

• From Untrue (2018)

  Nearly two hundred fifty years later, Richard von Krafft-Ebing was moved to write a justification of the sexual double standard in Psychopathia Sexualis that would have made a Puritan proud. “The unfaithfulness of the wife, as compared with that of the husband, is morally of a much wider bearing, and should always meet with severer punishment at the hands of the law. The unfaithful wife not only dishonors herself, but also her husband and her family, not to speak of the possible uncertainty of paternity.” Such hypocrisies were baked into us; we still live in the shadow of this belief that a woman cheating on a man is just that much more outrageous and inexcusable. Cacilda Jethá, a psychiatrist and co-author with Christopher Ryan of the game-changing bestseller Sex at Dawn, told me a story that illustrates the intractability of the double standard, its ability to flourish in different ecologies. Over dinner on a fall evening, Jethá—who has a dancer’s bearing, and speaks six languages with what can only be described as animated elegance—recounted how during her early career she undertook a study on HIV and STI transmission and prevention in Marracuene, a southern district of Mozambique. Her work, funded by the World Health Organization in coordination with the government’s health ministry, involved interviewing both men and women about their sexual practices and, not infrequently, their extra-pair involvements. “Once they were engaged,” Jethá told me, “it was common in the region for men to go off and work in mines to earn money for their weddings and married life. During this long period of absence, the women who were engaged to be married often had affairs. It was a known thing. And since there were cultural beliefs that you shouldn’t have sex for two years after a baby was born, during this period it was common for husbands to have sex outside the marriage.” In spite of the relative cultural openness about these practices, Jethá quickly noticed an asymmetry in how her interview participants talked about their infidelities. “The men were much more forthcoming. Much more!” Jethá observed, shaking her head. “Whereas the women were very, very reluctant. You had to ask in many different ways. They were notably more hesitant. Even in an environment where people knew this was happening, they felt they couldn’t say! Whereas men were not hesitant at all. They were almost proud, you could say.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  They finally brought Walter into the courtroom wearing the black suit and white shirt I’d brought him. He looked handsome and fit, like a different man. The deputies didn’t handcuff Walter or shackle him, so he walked into court waving to family and friends. His family had not seen him dressed in anything but his white prison uniform since the trial six years earlier, and many in the crowd gasped when he walked into the courtroom in a suit. For years Walter’s family members and supporters had been confronted with menacing stares and threats of expulsion whenever they expressed some spontaneous opinion during court proceedings, but today the deputies accepted their expressive cheerfulness in silence. The judge took the bench, and I stepped forward to speak. I gave a brief history of the case and informed the court that both the defendant and the State were moving the court to dismiss all charges. The judge quickly granted the motion and asked if there was anything further. All of sudden, I felt strangely agitated. I’d expected to be exuberant. Everyone was in such a good mood. The judge and the prosecutor were suddenly generous and accommodating. It was as if everyone wanted to be sure there were no hard feelings or grudges. Walter was rightfully ecstatic, but I was confused by my suddenly simmering anger. We were about to leave court for the last time, and I started thinking about how much pain and suffering had been inflicted on Walter and his family, the entire community. I thought about how if Judge Robert E. Lee Key hadn’t overridden the jury’s verdict of life imprisonment without parole and imposed the death penalty, which brought the case to our attention, Walter likely would have spent the rest of his life incarcerated and died in a prison cell. I thought about how certain it was that hundreds, maybe thousands of other people were just as innocent as Walter but would never get the help they need. I knew this wasn’t the place or time to make a speech or complain, but I couldn’t stop myself from making one final comment. “Your Honor, I just want to say this before we adjourn. It was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for murder and send him to death row for something he didn’t do and much too hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence. We have serious problems and important work that must be done in this state.” I sat down and the judge pronounced Walter free to go. Just like that he was a free man.