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 My People (2022)

  In an article from South Africa entitled “From Trayvon Martin to Andries Tatane: Cognitive Dissonance and the Black Male Body,” the writer Gillian Schutte reports what I have heard from many other South Africans—that the Trayvon Martin case has resonance there and that there is “shock and anger” over the not-guilty verdict. “We commiserate about our own black sons and how unsafe they would be in the United States,” Schutte writes. But then she goes to cite instances when black men and boys in South Africa have recently met fates parallel to Trayvon Martin’s—including the case of Andries Tatane, who was “beaten by police and shot in the chest at close range with rubber bullets.” Continuing, Schutte writes, “And somehow in all of this we fail to make the connection with the continued violence towards the black male body in South Africa.” Schutte asks the question that many people in the United States—black and white—are also asking: When is this going to change? How much longer must we watch young black boys and men die? And the questions come as the world—almost as one—prays for the man who was once warned not to go running in a suburb, Nelson Mandela. Statements from his African National Congress party ask everyone to reflect on his life, and say that this day “most importantly . . . provides an opportunity to emulate this life well lived.” These are appropriate words for the South African nation, including the ANC, which many believe sometimes sends mixed signals about its commitment to those ideals. But they also resonate for those living in the United States in troubled times like these. In a few days, another case will be heard, in Wisconsin, involving a white man killing an unarmed black thirteen-year-old, in which three of four black people in the jury pool have been removed by the defense. One of my nieces wrote to me saying that she was so angry about the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case and asking me, “Auntie, what can I do?” She is of the age that South Africans call “born frees”—those born long after Nelson Mandela went to prison. I will tell her to honor his birthday today and channel her anger by studying (maybe anew or reviewing) his history and that of the people in this country who fought and made sacrifices for freedom. And maybe she and her generation (and members of mine who need reminding) will come away understanding that it takes more than a few days of protest and momentary righteous anger to redress wrongs. I will write and ask my niece: how long are you prepared to fight for what’s right?

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Abortion was the first wedge, but other reactionary attitudes which had persisted soon began to reassert themselves. Revolutionary legislation had thrown out the old Tsarist paragraph penalizing homosexuality; and in March 1934, after fifteen years, it was reintroduced, with penalties of from three to eight years. It is an interesting insight into reawakened patriarchal sentiment to observe that in Russia, as elsewhere, homosexuality is recognized and punished only between males; homosexuality between females is presumed to be unthinkable or nonexistent.44 There were mass arrests of homosexuals and widespread persecution, together with propaganda campaigns to the effect that homosexuality was “decadent,” “oriental,” “bourgeois,” and even “fascist” (guilt through association with the Nazi Mӓnnerbünde). One very real problem facing the Soviet Union was whether it could, through a revolutionary education, set up a new psychic structure in its members to replace that of patriarchy. And here it failed signally. After a period of experimentation, it gradually instituted its own moralistic, inhibiting ideology, a new authoritarian structure, stressing its own kind of attitudes toward the sexes and sexuality, and its own standard of the masculine as the ideal and the norm, by continual adulation of militaristic achievements and the exploits of revolutionaries. Education was again antisexual; every effort was made to hamper, divert, and thwart the sexuality of the young. Asceticism began to reassert itself as the ideal in schools and among the Pioneers (youth groups). Progressive schools such as Vera Schmidt’s kindergarten, an experiment in raising children without sexual guilt or inhibition, was closed at the behest of “the authorities” in educational theory. The youth communes (Komsomol) floundered for economic and psychological reasons, turned authoritarian,45 and finally failed and were discontinued after 1932. Their efforts to establish a model communal life are studies in the psychic incapacity of family-produced youth to establish a collective life style; they lacked housing conducive to privacy or order, and vacillated dizzily between the sexual climate of the harem and that of the convent. The powers of an oppressive sexual ethic triumphantly reasserted themselves in this statement of the Commissar for Public Health to students: Comrades, you have come to the universities and technical institutes for your studies. That is the main goal of your life. And as all your impulses and attitudes are subordinated to this goal, as you must deny yourself many enjoyments because they might interfere with your main goal, that of studying and becoming collaborators in the reconstruction of the state, so you must subordinate all other aspects of your existence to this goal. The state is as yet too poor to take over the support of you and the education of the children. Therefore, our advice to you is: Abstinence!46 Despite the obvious alternative of contraception, this admonition became standard official advice in the Soviet Union as it was elsewhere during the era of reaction.

• From The Art of Memoir

  enterprise. Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being. If the reader intuits some deception or kink in the writer’s psyche that he can’t admit to, it erodes the scribbler’s authority. This drives a reader from the page, putting the writer in competition with Chubby Hubby ice cream and the TV remote—tough contests to win. However you charm people in the world, you should do so on the page. A lot of great writers rebuke charm, and I don’t mean the word to conjure a snake charmer pulling off a trick with a poor dumb animal whose fangs have been torn out. Too many writers relate to their readers that way, which results in some dull, hermetic books written just to satisfy the artist’s preening ego. Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By “charm,” I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You’ll need both sides of yourself—the beautiful and the beastly—to hold a reader’s attention. Sadly, without a writer’s dark side on view—the pettiness and vanity and schemes—pages give off the whiff of bullshit. People may like you because you’re warm, but you can also be quick to anger or too intense. Your gift for charm and confidence hides a gift for scheming and deceit. You’re withdrawn and deep but also slightly scornful of others. A memoirist must cop to it all, which means routing out the natural ways you try to masquerade as somebody else—nicer, smarter, faster, funnier. All the good lines can’t be the memoirist’s. Richard Wright’s Black Boy, published in pre–civil rights America, seems to shun charm and speak with a bitterness he paid dear for. That refusal to pander forms the core of his talent—a ruthless, unblinking gaze that reports to us with often barely tamped-down fury. It was Wright who started the American memoir craze of the last century with the publication of Black Boy in 1945. (The book gushed out of him in 1943.) He was followed closely by other smash hits: Thomas Merton’s Seven-Storey Mountain (1948), Vladimir Nabokov’s

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Mustapha: The French were pretty annoyed about our fucking their whores. Warda: Did they let you do anything else? They didn’t. So? Here what do you fuck? Us.90 It is Said’s very hatred of his own situation, not so much exacerbated, as summed up in his wife (who is his unrelenting malheur, his unique misfortune, the contemptible odor that follows him like a shadow from trouble to jail to a life of total alienation) which becomes the fuse of the revolution. Said’s strange discontent is potential political dynamite. But if Said becomes somewhat miraculously (in view of his determined apolitical nature) not only the model, but the “flag” of the revolution, its spirit and activity comes from a group of old village hags still more lowly than he. This is appropriate in Genet’s scheme, a revolutionary politics whereby bottom dog should bark loudest. To the Arab male groaning under foreign occupation, the women present a longer and more complete history of colonial resentment: Ommu: For a thousand years we women have put up with being your dish rags…but for a hundred years, you’ve been dish rags: thanks to you the boots of those gentlemen have been a hundred thousand shining suns…91 It is old Kadidja who screams out the first words of insurrection at a sedate Moslem civil gathering from which she is officially excluded: The Dignitary (wearing a fez and a blue, western-style suit with many decorations. Into the wings): Remain quiet. Everyone must be dignified. No children here. Nor women. Kadidja: Without women what would you be? A spot on your father’s pants that three flies would have drunk up. The Dignitary: Go away, Kadidja. This isn’t the day. Kadidja (furiously): It is! They accuse us and threaten us, and you want us to be prudent. And docile. And humble. And submissive. And ladylike. And honey-tongued. And sweet as pie. And silk veil. And fine cigarette. And nice kiss and soft spoken. And gentle dust on their red pumps!…I won’t! (She stamps her heel.) This is my town here. My bed is here. I was fucked fourteen times here and gave birth to fourteen Arabs. I won’t go.92 And against the bumptious inanity of the landowner Sir Harold, it is Kadidja who cries out her people’s first challenge—“I say that your force is powerless against our hatred.”93 In retaliation Kadidja is calmly shot down by the whites, whereupon (since The Screens is a surrealist dream play, its characters popping in and out of life in the most disconcerting way) her ghost begins the revolution.

• From My People (2022)

  (Her office indicated to me that she did not want to talk about any aspect of her life while the Pistorius trial is going on.) Her life may help inform her actions on the bench in other ways, particularly as it relates to domestic abuse, rape, and the murder of women. (Statistics from the International Criminal Police Organization, released in 2009, indicate that a woman is raped in South Africa every seventeen seconds.) In one case before her, Masipa handed down a 252-year prison sentence to a man who raped three women in the course of home burglaries; in another, she gave a life sentence to a policeman who shot and killed his estranged wife in an argument over their divorce settlement. (“You deserve to go to jail for life because you are not a protector. You are a killer,” Masipa told him.) Her perspective could prove crucial in the Pistorius case, in which the prosecution has told a story of a man, quick to anger and reckless with guns, shooting his girlfriend after a quarrel, while the defense has drawn a picture of a boyfriend who loved Steenkamp and so would never hurt her, and tragically mistook her for an intruder. Both might see something in a comment that Masipa made, according to South Africa’s CTVNews, in the rape case: “The worst, in my view, is that he attacked and raped the victims in the sanctity of their own homes, where they thought they were safe.” In reaching her verdict, Masipa will have the help of two legal assessors whom she selected, who sit with her on the bench daily. But the focus, as the defense reaches the end of its case in the next few days, will be on her alone. South Africa and the rest of the world is now awaiting the message Masipa will send this time, in her judgment of Oscar Pistorius. Unlimited VisibilityThe New Yorker SEPTEMBER 17, 1966 One day last week, we called on Constance Baker Motley, the tall, attractive borough president of Manhattan, a few days before she was sworn in as the first woman judge of the United States District Court in this area and the first Negro woman Federal District judge in the country. (There are only two other women federal judges.) We saw Mrs. Motley in her office, on the twentieth floor of the Municipal Building, to which she had just returned after attending the swearing-in ceremony for another new Federal District judge, in the United States Courthouse, across the street. “I’m a little winded,” she told us as she walked in, still out of breath. “But I was happy to see that the ceremony is only about five minutes long. Also, it’s a relief to know that I won’t have to make a speech.” Before becoming New York’s first woman borough president, Mrs.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  I had been serious at Oxford, won first class honors and had been consecrated to the profession. Then I fell in love with sculpture and threw it all away, as my colleagues put it, when I resigned my first teaching post to come to New York to spend a year in a freezing studio on the Bowery, and headed for two years in Japan, living on nothing, sculpting a lot. When I came home the only employment for which I qualified was file-clerking, which I did, and teaching English, which I could not go on doing without a doctoral degree. By now I was living with the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura; he was getting a dollar and a half an hour in the sweatshops of display. One of us had to do better: that meant resigning myself to the doctoral program in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia in order to continue devotedly teaching my students at Barnard. I had finished the coursework, passed the language and qualifying examinations, and outlined a thesis. Then came the Columbia strike. I was both a student and a teacher as well as a committed feminist, a protestor against the war in Vietnam, and a pacifist (the strike revolved around secret government research at Columbia), so I took the students’ part, asking for amnesty for the strikers in order that they would not be expelled. The strike transformed Columbia, made it wonderful for a time: ideas came alive, faculty debates were high drama, principles were at issue. The academy asserted itself, drew away from government and business, existed for a while on its own terms. Intellectual values became as real as I remembered them at Oxford; more than that, they grew into the movielike scenario of revolutionary change. Everything came together—the radical agenda of the youth movement, the New Left and civil rights, the radical new feminist politics we were inventing downtown—all confronting the university’s president and trustees, their compromising connections with big money and military research. Their power finally asserted itself on that terrible night the police were given the run of the campus to beat and bludgeon the university’s own young undergraduate students. I was there that night and saw it, staying on deliberately past the danger point when the big iron gates closed us in with riot police, to witness whatever harm might come to them—our kids. There were very few faculty members who stayed; a handful of them were young and untenured and vulnerable. The strike was in May; Nixon was elected in November; Barnard fired me before Christmas. In the whirlwind I heard that the other instructors, young men from Columbia, were gone too.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  As leader of the conservative movement between 1923 and 1936, Zalkind developed a theory of “conservation of energy” very like Freud’s theory of libido; energy taken from the socialist effort through sexuality is energy stolen from the revolution and the proletariat.34 Trotsky, op. cit., p. 145.35 Geiger quoted in discussion in Brown, The Role and Status of Women in the Soviet Union, op. cit., p. 51; and Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia, op. cit., p. 58.36 Where crèches were built on some scale after 1936 and 1944 their function was to raise population and release women for Stalin’s factories. By this time the ideal of sexual freedom and the emancipation of women with which the revolution had begun and still gave lip service had ceased to matter.37 Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 346.38 Accounts of the use of contraception in the twenties and thirties vary. In Soviet Journey (1935) Louis Fischer reported a widespread use, but Geiger denies this and stresses the government’s fear of sponsoring a rigorous drive for contraception. In view of the misery the lack of it caused this appears little short of criminal.39 Examined in Geiger, op. cit., and elsewhere.40 Quoted in Reich, The Sexual Revolution, op. cit., p. 206. The speaker is Stroganov.41 Quoted in Reich, op. cit., p. 199.42 This phenomenon may also be observed today in America where students and other young women neglect contraception, unconsciously willing pregnancy to occur, the “punishment” courted for repressed “guilt.”43 Geiger’s phrase, op. cit., p. 100.44 Only in Sweden have the laws been equalized. Homosexual acts between consenting adults, men or women, are not illegal. Homosexual assault and the seduction of minors are legal offenses in both sexes.45 It is interesting that Makarenko, author of the chief codi!1cation of the new state-oriented authoritarian family first distinguished himself as leader of a particularly ascetic and militaristic Komsomol established under the auspices of the Soviet Secret Political Police for delinquent boys. Makarenko had great contempt for libertarian child-centered theories of the twenties; with his rise to eminence progressives had been defeated and the new party line supported traditional educational methods and discipline. At times it is hard to know if sexual counterrevolution betrayed the women or the youth more bitterly in Russia. See Makarenko, A Book for Parents (1937, published in 1940).46 Quoted in Reich, The Sexual Revolution, pp. 189–90.47 With the “Thaw” the situation began to improve; in 1954–55 the right of abortion was restored and in 1964–65 bastardy ceased to be registered. In 1964 the distinguished social philosopher Strumilin raised new discussion by the suggestion of a kibbutzlike collective education very reminiscent of early Soviet hopes. A return to Marxist principles in this area might possibly be in the offing.48 “In delegating to you a certain measure of societal authority the Soviet State demands from you the correct upbringing of its future citizens.” Anton S.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  TraitPertains primarily to instrumental (I) or Expressive (E) roleTrait is congruent (+) or incongruent (−) characteristic of role1 TenacityI+2 AggressivenessI+3 CuriosityI+4 AmbitionI+5 PlanfulnessI+6 Dawdling and procrastinatingI−7 ResponsiblenessI+8 OriginalityI+9 CompetitivenessI+10 Wavering in decisionI−11 Self-confidenceI+12 AngerE−13 QuarrelsomenessE−14 RevengefulnessE−15 TeasingE−16 ExtrapunitivenessE−17 Insistence on rightsE−18 ExhibitionismE−19 Uncooperativeness with groupE−20 AffectionatenessE+21 ObedienceE+22 Upset by defeatE−23 Responds to sympathy and approval from adultsE+24 JealousyE−25 Speedy recovery from emotional disturbanceE+26 CheerfulnessE+27 KindnessE+28 Friendliness to adultsE+29 Friendliness to childrenE+30 NegativismE−31 TattlingE−Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness. There are a host of what would be termed “nutritive” feminine functions implicit here which it appears the male has ascribed to the female because he disregards their value and utility in himself, preferring they exist in his opposite only that they may cater to his needs. Such a table is a fairly startling revelation of the approved relationship between the sexes and a more accurate index of cultural values than one is generally able to come at. If the Chicago school children who were tested for its efficacy were to live up to the demands of its opprobrious “roles,” one could find no more convincing proof of the powers of negative behavioral engineering on childhood. But somehow the machinery has failed to get very creditable results.233 The expected docility is sometimes present-girls are, as they are expected to be, “obedient”—such indeed is the “congruent characteristic” of their “role,” obligingly stated in the right-hand column. But they are also given to anger, jealousy, a desire to revenge themselves, a refusal to co-operate, and perhaps most distressing of all, an “insistence on their rights.” To arrive at the political implications of the table, one has only to exchange its categories with other political classes. Were one to substitute black and white for male and female, one would have a perfect picture of both the expectation and the assumed conditions of a racist society. The obedience and good nature white expects from black would be accounted for, as well as white’s dismay to find it accompanied with vengefulness, anger, and a refusal to co-operate. The same holds true of aristocrat and peasant; the former typically fancying himself an intellectual governor and seeing in the latter a warm and jovial servant, but one, alas, given to surliness, petty dodges, “tattling,” and frequent insubordination. The table just as adequately reflects the good and evil of capitalist ethics; superiority and intellect on the side of the winning team and greedy spite on the other.

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

  They are, he has found, chiefly motivated by the desire to escape a stifling sense of insignificance and pointlessness in secular nation-states that struggle to absorb foreign minorities. They seek to fulfill the age-old dream of military glory and believe that by dying a heroic death, they will give their lives meaning as local heroes. 102 In these cases, suffice it to say, what we call “Islamic terrorism” has been transformed from a political cause—inflamed with pious exhortations contrary to Islamic teachings—into a violent expression out of youthful rage. They may claim to be acting in the name of Islam, but when an untalented beginner claims to be playing a Beethoven sonata, we hear only cacophony. One of Bin Laden’s objectives had been to draw Muslims all over the world to his vision of jihad. Though he did become a charismatic folk hero to some—a kind of Saudi Che—in this central mission he ultimately failed. Between 2001 and 2007, a Gallup poll conducted in thirty-five predominantly Muslim countries found that only 7 percent of respondents thought the 9/11 attacks were “completely justified”; for these people, the reasons were entirely political. As for the 93 percent who condemned the attacks, they quoted Quranic verses to show that the killing of innocent people could have no place in Islam. 103 One might well wonder how much more unanimously opposed to terror the Muslim world might have become, but for the course the United States and its allies took in the wake of 9/11. At a time when even in Tehran there were demonstrations of solidarity with America, the Bush and Blair coalition lashed out with its own violent rejoinder, a drive that would culminate in the tragically misbegotten Iraq invasion of 2003. Its most decisive result was to present the world with a new set of images of Muslim suffering in which the West was not only implicated but for which it was, this time, directly responsible. When considering the tenacity of al-Qaeda, it is well to remember that such images of Muslim suffering, more than any expansive theory of jihad, were what had drawn so many young Muslims to the camps of Peshawar in the first instance. We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God, but we cannot claim the high moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands of civilians who die in our wars as “collateral damage.” Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our hearts. Nothing shows this more clearly than a remark of Madeleine Albright’s when she was still Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations. She later retracted it, but among people all around the world, it has never been forgotten.

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

  He patronized the Roman aristocracy when it suited him, but his sympathies really lay with the man in the street, and he decided to create a power base by wooing the disaffected townsfolk through their beloved monks. He could see the point of destroying the pagan temples; his empress, Aelia Flacilla, had already distinguished herself in Rome by leading a crowd of noblewomen to attack pagan shrines. In 388 Theodosius gave the monks the go-ahead, and they fell on the village shrines of Syria like a plague; with the connivance of the local bishop, they also destroyed a synagogue at Callinicum on the Euphrates. The pagan orator Libanius urged the emperor to prosecute this “black-robed tribe” who were guilty of latrocinium (“robbery and violence”), describing the “utter desolation” that followed their vicious attacks on the temples “with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet.” The pagan priests had no option but to “keep quiet or die.” 79 The monks became the symbolic vanguard of violent Christianization. The mere sound of their chanting was enough to make the governor of Antioch adjourn his court and flee the city. Even though there were no boskoi on Minorca, the leader of the Jewish community there dreamed in 418 that his synagogue was in ruins and its site occupied by psalm-singing monks. A few weeks later the synagogue was in fact destroyed—though not by monks but by fanatic local Christians. 80 Some bishops opposed this vandalism, but not consistently. Because Roman law protected Jewish property, Theodosius ordered the bishop who had instigated the burning of the Callinicum synagogue to pay for its repair. But Ambrose (339–97), bishop of Milan, forced him to rescind this decree, since rebuilding the synagogue would be as humiliating to the true faith as Julian’s attempt to restore the Jewish temple. 81 The Christianization of the empire was now, increasingly, equated with the destruction of these iconic buildings. In 391, after Theodosius had permitted Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, to occupy the temple of Dionysius, the bishop pillaged all the temples in the city and paraded the looted treasure in an insulting display. 82 In response, the pagans of Alexandria barricaded themselves into the magnificent temple of Serapis with some Christian hostages, whom they forced to reenact the trauma of Diocletian’s persecution: These they forced to offer sacrifice on the altars where fire was kindled; those who refused they put to death with new and refined tortures, fastening some to gibbets and breaking the legs of others and pitching them into the caverns which a careworn antiquity had built to receive the blood of sacrifices and the other impurities of the temple. 83 When the pagan leader thought he heard monks singing in some distant part of the shrine, he knew they were doomed.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The proceedings were, from the outset, very tumultuous, and the theological fanaticism of the two parties broke out at times in full blaze, till the laymen present were compelled to remind the bishops of their clerical dignity.1623 When Theodoret, of Cyrus, was introduced, the Orientals greeted him with enthusiasm, while the Egyptians cried: "Cast out the Jew, the enemy of God, the blasphemer of Christ!" The others retorted, with equal passion: "Cast out the murderer Dioscurus! Who is there that knows not his crimes?" The feeling against Nestorius was so strong, that Theodoret could only quiet the council by resolving (in the eighth session) to utter the anathema against his old friend, and against all who did not call Mary "mother of God," and who divided the one Christ into two sons. But the abhorrence of Eutyches and the Council of Robbers was still stronger, and was favored by the court. Under these influences most of the Egyptians soon went over to the left, and confessed their error, some excusing themselves by the violent measures brought to bear upon them at the Robber Synod. The records of that Synod, and of the previous one at Constantinople (in 448), with other official documents, were read by the secretaries, but were continually interrupted by incidental debates, acclamations, and imprecations, in utter opposition to all our modern conceptions of parliamentary decorum, though experience is continually presenting us with fresh examples of the uncontrollable vehemence of human passions in excited assemblies. So early as the close of the first session the decisions of the Robber Synod had been annulled, the martyr Flavian declared orthodox, and Dioscurus of Alexandria, Juvenal of Jerusalem, and other chiefs of Eutychianism, deposed. The Orientals exclaimed: "Many years to the Senate! Holy God, holy mighty, holy immortal God, have mercy upon us. Many years to the emperors! The impious must always be overthrown! Dioscurus, the murderer [of Flavian], Christ has deposed! This is a righteous judgment, a righteous senate, a righteous council!" Dioscurus was in a subsequent session three times cited in vain to defend himself against various charges of avarice, injustice, adultery, and other vices, and divested of all spiritual functions; while the five other deposed bishops acknowledged their error, and were readmitted into the council. At the second session, on the 10th of October, Dioscurus having already departed, the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan symbol, two letters of Cyril (but not his anathemas), and the famous Epistola Dogmatica of Leo to Flavian, were read before the council amid loud applause—the bishops exclaiming: "That is the faith of the fathers! That is the faith of the apostles! So we all believe! So the orthodox believe Anathema to him who believes otherwise! Through Leo, Peter has thus spoken. Even so did Cyril teach! That is the true faith."1624

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

  “I turned toward her. She had fallen on the long easy chair, and, covering her face at the spot where I had struck her, she looked at me. Her features exhibited fear and hatred toward me, her enemy, such as the rat exhibits when one lifts the rat-trap. At least, I saw nothing in her but that fear and hatred, the fear and hatred which love for another had provoked. Perhaps I still should have restrained myself, and should not have gone to the last extremity, if she had maintained silence. But suddenly she began to speak; she grasped my hand that held the dagger. “‘Come to your senses! What are you doing? What is the matter with you? Nothing has happened, nothing, nothing! I swear it to you!’ “I might have delayed longer, but these last words, from which I inferred the contrary of what they affirmed,—that is, that everything had happened,—these words called for a reply. And the reply must correspond to the condition into which I had lashed myself, and which was increasing and must continue to increase. Rage has its laws. “‘Do not lie, wretch. Do not lie!’ I roared. “With my left hand I seized her hands. She disengaged herself. Then, without dropping my dagger, I seized her by the throat, forced her to the floor, and began to strangle her. With her two hands she clutched mine, tearing them from her throat, stifling. Then I struck her a blow with the dagger, in the left side, between the lower ribs. “When people say that they do not remember what they do in a fit of fury, they talk nonsense. It is false. I remember everything. “I did not lose my consciousness for a single moment. The more I lashed myself to fury, the clearer my mind became, and I could not help seeing what I did. I cannot say that I knew in advance what I would do, but at the moment when I acted, and it seems to me even a little before, I knew what I was doing, as if to make it possible to repent, and to be able to say later that I could have stopped. “I knew that I struck the blow between the ribs, and that the dagger entered. “At the second when I did it, I knew that I was performing a horrible act, such as I had never performed,—an act that would have frightful consequences. My thought was as quick as lightning, and the deed followed immediately. The act, to my inner sense, had an extraordinary clearness. I perceived the resistance of the corset and then something else, and then the sinking of the knife into a soft substance. She clutched at the dagger with her hands, and cut herself with it, but could not restrain the blow.

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

  “No, madam, that cannot end. As she, Eve, the woman, was taken from man’s ribs, so she will remain unto the end of the world,” said the old man, shaking his head so triumphantly and so severely that the clerk, deciding that the victory was on his side, burst into a loud laugh. “Yes, you men think so,” replied the lady, without surrendering, and turning toward us. “You have given yourself liberty. As for woman, you wish to keep her in the seraglio. To you, everything is permissible. Is it not so?” “Oh, man,—that’s another affair.” “Then, according to you, to man everything is permissible?” “No one gives him this permission; only, if the man behaves badly outside, the family is not increased thereby; but the woman, the wife, is a fragile vessel,” continued the merchant, severely. His tone of authority evidently subjugated his hearers. Even the lady felt crushed, but she did not surrender. “Yes, but you will admit, I think, that woman is a human being, and has feelings like her husband. What should she do if she does not love her husband?” “If she does not love him!” repeated the old man, stormily, and knitting his brows; “why, she will be made to love him.” This unexpected argument pleased the clerk, and he uttered a murmur of approbation. “Oh, no, she will not be forced,” said the lady. “Where there is no love, one cannot be obliged to love in spite of herself.” “And if the wife deceives her husband, what is to be done?” said the lawyer. “That should not happen,” said the old man. “He must have his eyes about him.” “And if it does happen, all the same? You will admit that it does happen?” “It happens among the upper classes, not among us,” answered the old man. “And if any husband is found who is such a fool as not to rule his wife, he will not have robbed her. But no scandal, nevertheless. Love or not, but do not disturb the household. Every husband can govern his wife. He has the necessary power. It is only the imbecile who does not succeed in doing so.” Everybody was silent. The clerk moved, advanced, and, not wishing to lag behind the others in the conversation, began with his eternal smile:

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Vaginal sensitivity in coitus for the adult female, in my opinion, is thus largely based on the existence, and more or less unconscious, acceptation of the child’s immense masochistic beating fantasies. In coitus, the woman, in effect, is subjected to a sort of beating by the man’s penis. She receives its blows and often, even, loves their violence. This sensitivity must be a deep and truly vaginal sensitivity to the blows of the penis.142 Against women who might raise objection against this transformation of “adult” sexuality into a punitive activity, the analyst is armed with invincible arguments: “Women who show…an aversion to men’s brutal games may be suspect of masculine protest and excessive bisexuality. Such women may very well be clitoroidal.”143 When a woman protests so energetically against her masochism, her passivity, and her femininity, it is because the makeup against which she protests is already overdetermined, owing to constitutionally preponderant bisexuality. But for that, she would perfectly and without any great conflict have accepted the feminine masochism essential to her sex.144 It is carefully stipulated that the penis should not touch the clitoris during proper coitus,145 as such an event would only encourage immaturity and an unbecoming disregard for the selfless surrender prescribed as true feminine response to a grave and somewhat pompous ritual of pain. In texts of this nature the Freudian triad of passivity, narcissism, and masochism are given elaborate explication and application. There is a surprising resemblance between this view of sexuality and that prescribed for the Victorian wife-each knows she must submit and endure, but the woman who has benefited from psychoanalysis has been taught that she must do so without withholding her will: As we know in sexual intercourse, as in life, man is the actor, woman the passive one, the receiver, the acted upon. There is a tremendous surging physical ecstasy in the yielding itself, in the feeling of being the passive instrument of another person, of being stretched out supinely beneath him, taken up will-lessly by his passion as leaves are swept before a wind.146 Helene Deutsch established her reputation in the psychoanalytic world through studies of masochism and has written a two-volume work on female sexuality generally accepted as the definitive statement of “true femininity”: In the light of psychoanalysis, the sexual act assumes an immense, dramatic, and profoundly cathartic significance for the woman—but only this under the condition that it is experienced in a feminine, dynamic way and is not transformed into an act of erotic play or sexual “equality.”147 Carefully avoiding the twin hazards of egalitarianism and delight, sexual politics during the era of counterrevolution began in bed; having established its doctrine of female subjection there, it confidently applied it to the rest of life.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The part women were assigned to play in Hitler’s Germany was to be one strictly confined to utter dedication to motherhood and the family,8 and yet (here there is perhaps less inherent contradiction than one might suppose) women were to make up the factory population which serviced and produced the German war machine, at least at the outset, and until their numbers were augmented with slave labor from Eastern Europe. By 1935 the National Labor Service Law of July 26 obliged members of both sexes to participate in state labor, which by 1940, few women could escape. For all the thundering propaganda about marriage, holy motherhood and home, the number of employed women, even working mothers, increased under Nazi rule from 1933 onward.9 This in itself is hardly surprising, for the population of women employees all over the world increased during this period, and one would expect such an increase following upon the opening of higher education to women. But in Nazi Germany, a government decree10 stipulated that women be held to a quota of one in ten university students; women constituted only one third of high school students. This is a far lower ratio than one would have expected in view of the rapid strides of feminism in Germany; it is far lower than in England and America. What does make Germany unique among Western states at this period was its reversal of the feminist thrust into the professions and the higher economic and social positions. The actual purpose of Nazi ideology was not, as stated, to return women to the home, but to “take women out of professions and put them into low-paid occupations.”11 Speaking at a meeting of the Nazi medical panel in December 1934, Dr. Wagner, the appointed leader of the medical profession, cried out before a mixed audience, “We will strangle higher education for women.”12 The dissenting feminist voices still heard within the new order were silenced one by one, Dr. Thimm, Anna Pappritz, and Sophie Rogge-Borner. When the new regime had taken over, German women were forbidden to sit as judges; in 1936 they were forbidden to hold office in the courts. There were thirty women in the Reichstag when the Nazis came to power; they were apparently not “the right kind,” for by 1938 there were none. One gathers some insight into Nazi emotions below the chivalrous eulogies of motherhood in the jeer which a National Socialist member called out to a Social Democrat who regretted the death of her son in World War I: “For that you she-goats were made.”13

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  We have women working in the foundries, stripped to the waist, if you please, because of the heat. Yet the Senator says nothing about these women losing their charm…Of course you know the reason they are employed in foundries is that they are cheaper and work longer hours than men. Women in the laundries, for instance, stand for thirteen or fourteen hours in the terrible steam and heat with their hands in hot starch. Surely these women won’t lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round. There is no harder contest than the contest for bread, let me tell you that.8 Wanda Neff’s scholarly and informative study of Victorian working women has documented the effects of benign masculine protection in England. As in America women generally suffered from longer hours, duller tasks, more noxious working conditions, and lower wages than men in every trade. Parliamentary Blue Books, Kay-Shuttleworth’s reports, and Engels’ Conditions of the Working Class in England all present appalling descriptions of the outrages English women endured in the industrial revolution while the doctrine of manly guardianship was gravely proclaimed. Neff prints the personal testimony of a “drawer” in the coal mines of Little-Bolton–the reader’s attention is directed toward the position this woman occupies in relation to her connubial master as well as to the abuses perpetrated on her by her employers:9 I have a belt around my waist and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet. The road is very steep, and we have to hold by a rope, and when there is no rope, by anything we can catch hold of…The pit is very wet where I work, and the water comes over our clogs always, and I have seen it up to my thighs: it rains in at the roof terribly: my clothes are wet through almost all day long. I never was ill in my life but when I was lying-in. My cousin looks after my children in the daytime. I am very tired when I get home at night; I fall asleep sometimes before I get washed. I am not so strong as I was, and cannot stand my work so well as I used to do. I have drawn till I have had the skin off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family way. My feller [husband] has beaten me many a time for not being ready. I were not used to it at first, and he had little patience. I have known many a man beat his drawer.10

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  At the Congress of Kiev in 1932 abortion was decried for innumerable reasons, all of which came down to authoritarian state interest in forcing women to bear children, explained as population policy (the birth rate had boomed after the revolution and now a slight decline was interpreted as catastrophic). There was much cant about “preserving the race,” “humanity dying out,” “morality collapsing,” and so forth. The other prevailing rationale was based on an equally authoritarian distaste over the fact women now enjoyed the control of their bodies; functionaries fussed that women were no longer ashamed of abortion and now “considered it their legal right.”40 Dr. Koroliov urged his colleagues that “criminal abortion is a sign of immorality which finds support in the legalization of abortion…It prevents motherhood…Its intention is not that of helping the mother or society; it has nothing to do with the protection of maternal health.”41 The effect here is to force motherhood on the unwilling as a social obligation, to deny that sexuality may be removed from procreation, and to create a negative attitude toward sexuality itself under the guise of pious concern over women and babies. The last was hardly necessary, so great was the shame and distaste for sexuality in Soviet women, a legacy from prerevolutionary attitudes, that the same congress could affirm that 60–70 per cent of women were incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure. Despite legalization it had taken ten years to stamp out the underground trade in abortions and the excessive or abusive resort to abortion was the result of so negative an attitude toward sexuality that women felt guilty in using contraception.42 Despite strong public objection, Stalin’s Second Five Year Plan in 1936 outlawed abortion in first pregnancies. This is often said to be the last occasion on which Stalin consulted public opinion. In 1944 all legal abortion was abolished, with two-year prison terms for persons who aided a woman in securing it. Acute observers perceived that the rationalization for the repeal of the right to legal abortion as a desire to protect the health of the mother was a hypocrisy which “obviously camouflaged”43 the desire for a rise in the birth rate as the result of war preparations. “We have need of people” Soltz proclaimed, oblivious to the number of homeless children, the housing shortage and harried involuntary mothers. Just as in Nazi Germany, the mood had changed to one which dictated large population growth in an increasingly militarized society.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Having attacked sexual reform and put their opposition on the defensive with the charge of penis envy and an ingenious interpretation of history, Lundberg and Farnham bring on their more insidious “soft line.” This is a glorification of “femininity,” the family, female submission, and above all, motherhood. To do so requires nothing more elaborate than the forensic equipment which served Ruskin, but at times there is a curious tone of “female chauvinism” about many of their pronouncements. At its positive moments, however The Lost Sex only rewrites a “Queen’s Gardens” doctrine of separate spheres. One grows appalled at how monotonous polemic in this area can be. Employing a tactic that was to become a reactionary classic, the authors insist that the sexual revolution must have been error for so many women are still imperfectly happy; witness how they suffer from “conflicts,” from “problems.” Under the guise of solicitude, such comforters end by punishing the sufferer of these vague and convenient symptoms still further. If woman is “maladjusted” the fault lies in herself rather than in the social situation to which she is exhorted to adjust by assuming her unchangeable constitutional passivity.170 Accusation poses as diagnosis, prescription as description. Much of the book might also pass for a parody of D. H. Lawrence (were it not so abominably written) for the whole is so steeped in Lawrentian attitudes that it has the air of pastiche. It continuously advises us to turn our backs on the machine and the “brave new facade of modemity”171 and return to the old instinctual ways, never actually defined, yet always asserted to be better. About midway through this enormous and empty book, one realizes that the authors have begun to exude confidence that the danger is passing, the revolution has been thwarted, and the “bringing in line” may proceed in less venomous tones. There are still recurrent attacks and condemnations of “castrators” who fail to comply or object to the notion of obedience to male authority,172 but, on the whole, the authors come to prefer the method of positive injunction; feminine subordination is phrased as “supporting” “manliness” in its “wishes for domination.”173 At times one even detects a note of petition. All male activity, maleness, perhaps patriarchy itself, depend upon penile erection: “Here it is that mastery and domination, the central capacity of the man’s sexual nature must meet acceptance or fail.”174 To achieve erection, the male must be master. More recently, advocates of this notion of physiology have termed this the “cichlid effect,” a theory of human sexuality modeled on the reactions of a prehistoric fish whom Konrad Lorenz examined to conclude that male cichlids failed to find the courage to mate unless the female of their species responded with “awe.” How one measures “awe” in a fish is a question perhaps better left unanswered, but the implications of this notion that the female’s awe of the male is physically necessary to sexual intercourse are surely transparent enough if applied to men and women.175

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  If new ideological support were to come to the patriarchal social order, its sex roles and its differentiated temperaments of masculine and feminine, it could not come from religion, although the decades in question did sec a religious revival, particularly in the prestigious and influential quarters of literature and the university. T. S. Eliot’s piety and the sanctity of the fashionable neo-orthodoxy at Oxford and in the New Criticism could scarcely serve as a lifeboat for an entire society any more than could the wholesale defection of literary and critical minds from rationality into the caverns of myth. The new formulation of old attitudes had to come from science and particularly from the emerging social sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology—the most useful and authoritative branches of social control and manipulation. To be unassailable, there should be some connection, however dubious, with the more readily validated sciences of biology, mathematics, and medicine. To fill the needs of conservative societies and a population too reluctant or too perplexed to carry out revolutionary changes in social life, even to the drastic modification of basic units such as the family, a number of new prophets arrived upon the scene to clothe the old doctrine of the separate spheres in the fashionable language of science. The most influential of these was Sigmund Freud, beyond question the strongest individual counterrevolutionary force in the ideology of sexual politics during the period. Although popular in England and on the continent in Lawrence’s time, the prestige of Freud’s sexual theories did not arrive at, still less maintain, such complete ascendancy there as they achieved in the United States. In America, the influence of Freud is almost incalculable, and America, in many ways the first center of the sexual revolution, appears to have need of him. Although generally accepted as a prototype of the liberal urge toward sexual freedom, and a signal contributor toward softening traditional puritanical inhibitions upon sexuality, the effect of Freud’s work, that of his followers, and still more that of his popularizers, was to rationalize the invidious relationship between the sexes, to ratify traditional roles, and to validate temperamental differences. By an irony nearly tragic, the discoveries of a great pioneer, whose theories of the unconscious and of infant sexuality were major contributions to human understanding, were in time invoked to sponsor a point of view essentially conservative. And as regards the sexual revolution’s goal of liberating female humanity from its traditional subordination, the Freudian position came to be pressed into the service of a strongly counterrevolutionary attitude. Although the most unfortunate effects of vulgar Freudianism far exceeded the intentions of Freud himself, its anti-feminism was not without foundation in Freud’s own work.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In contemporary terminology, the basic division of temperamental trait is marshaled along the line of “aggression is male” and “passivity is female.” All other temperamental traits are somehow-often with the most dexterous ingenuity-aligned to correspond. If aggressiveness is the trait of the master class, docility must be the corresponding trait of a subject group. The usual hope of such line of reasoning is that “nature,” by some impossible outside chance, might still be depended upon to rationalize the patriarchal system. An important consideration to be remembered here is that in patriarchy, the function of norm is unthinkingly delegated to the male-were it not, one might as plausibly speak of “feminine” behavior as active, and “masculine” behavior as hyperactive or hyperaggressive. Here it might be added, by way of a coda, that data from physical sciences has recently been enlisted again to support sociological arguments, such as those of Lionel Tiger19 who seeks a genetic justification of patriarchy by proposing a “bonding instinct” in males which assures their political and social control of human society. One sees the implication of such a theory by applying its premise to any ruling group. Tiger’s thesis appears to be a misrepresentation of the work of Lorenz and other students of animal behavior. Since his evidence of inherent trait is patriarchal history and organization, his pretensions to physical evidence are both specious and circular. One can only advance genetic evidence when one has genetic (rather than historical) evidence to advance. As many authorities dismiss the possibility of instincts (complex inherent behavioral patterns) in humans altogether, admitting only reflexes and drives (far simpler neural responses),20 the prospects of a “bonding instinct” appear particularly forlorn. Should one regard sex in humans as a drive, it is still necessary to point out that the enormous area of our lives, both in early “socialization” and in adult experience, labeled “sexual behavior,” is almost entirely the product of learning. So much is this the case that even the act of coitus itself is the product of a long series of learned responses-responses to the patterns and attitudes, even as to the object of sexual choice, which are set up for us by our social environment. The arbitrary character of patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role has little effect upon their power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories “masculine” and “feminine” imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us. Under their aegis each personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed but complementary personality and range of activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In the matter of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer; it is probable that no other system has ever exercised such a complete control over its subjects. III SOCIOLOGICAL