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 Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I tried to keep an open mind. If nothing else, I thought, this woman might give Mom and me an opportunity to get everything in the open. But that first session felt like an ambush. Immediately, the woman began asking why I would scream at my mother and storm off, why I didn’t recognize that she was my mother and that I had to live with her by law. The therapist chronicled “outbursts” that I’d allegedly had, some going back to a time I couldn’t remember—the time I threw a tantrum in a department store as a five- year-old, my fight with another child in school (the school bully, whom I didn’t want to punch but did so at Mamaw’s encouragement), the times I’d run from home to my grandparents’ house because of Mom’s “discipline.” Clearly this woman had developed an impression of me based solely on what Mom had told her. If I didn’t have an anger problem before, I did now. “Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?” I asked. At fourteen, I knew at least a little about professional ethics. “Aren’t you supposed to ask me what I think about things and not just criticize me?” I launched into an hour-long summary of my life to that point. I didn’t tell the whole story, since I knew I had to choose my words carefully: During Mom’s domestic violence case a couple of years earlier, Lindsay and I had let slip some unsavory details about Mom’s parenting, and because it counted as a new revelation of abuse, the family counselor was required to report it to child services. So I didn’t miss the irony of lying to a therapist (to protect Mom) lest I ignite another intervention by the county children’s services. I explained the situation well enough: After an hour, she said simply, “Perhaps we should meet alone.” I saw this woman as an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle placed by Mom —not as someone who might help. I explained only half of my feelings: that I had no interest in putting a forty-five-minute barrier between me and everyone I had ever depended on so I could replant myself with a man I knew would be sent packing. The therapist obviously understood. What I didn’t tell her is that for the first time in my life, I felt trapped. There was no Papaw, and Mamaw—a longtime smoker with the emphysema to prove it—seemed too frail and exhausted to care for a fourteen-year-old boy. My aunt and uncle had two young kids. Lindsay was newly married and had a child of her own. I had nowhere to go. I’d seen chaos and fighting, violence, drugs, and a great deal of instability. But I’d never felt like I had no way out. When the therapist asked me what I’d do, I replied that I would probably go live with my dad.

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

  Th e law refl ects no more than the Christianization of the state, and that is a considerable limit on what exactly it is capable of saying. Th e expression of Christian values in state action could not be neat, because Roman law was an entire institutional order of relationships be- tween state and society, public and private, harmonizing the circulation of property, status, and honor. Coitus was not principally the object of Roman regulation in the classical period, except insofar as it existed within a net- work of social transfers. Hence, classical Roman law embodied specifi c pa- triarchal sexual values, but it regulated sex principally at the moments when sex manifested itself in social transfers, in matters of property, violence, and honor. Christian sexual prejudices could not be simply projected onto Ro- man law, like an image on a blank screen. But in late antiquity, sex itself, by CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND SEX IN THE AGE OF TRIUMPH  degrees and up to certain limits, becomes the object of public regulation. Th e most profound shift may be that in late antiquity it becomes not totally anachronistic or overreaching to talk of sexual policy.  Th e fi rst object of our attention must be the fate of same- sex eros in late antiquity. Given the considerable diversity that prevailed in the high em- pire, the Christian assault on modes of same- sex contact was sudden, violent, and total. Several developments are notable. Under the infl uence of Paul, the discussion of what is “natural” looms large in the period, and even more pro- foundly the conception of “natural” sex is reor ga nized around the gender of the partner rather than the role of the sexual actor; the traditional bifurca- tion of love between males into pederasty and passivity gives way to a mono- lithic conception of unnatural sexual practice. Th e 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 infl uence in public law. Th e classical law had punished violations of free- born boys and imposed civil disabilities on openly passive men. Th e late antique legislative program became progressively more violent and aggres- sive toward practices deemed sexually deviant. Underlying the legal devel- opments is not only blunt hostility, but more subtly a new sense of the popu- lace itself as the framework of sexual regulation and of homosexual acts as a contamination that was a threat to public order. Th e 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.

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

  Th ere is one strikingly important exception to this universal pattern, the fi rst- century Stoic Musonius Rufus. In his discourse on the aphrodisia, he claimed that sex between “males” was as indulgent as adultery, because it was “a provocation against nature.” His classifi cation of sex according to the gender of the partners would have been at home in Christian moralizing. But the comments of Musonius stand alone in the world of Greco- Roman ethics, and even within his own dia- tribe the thought is fl eeting. His opposition to same- sex love occupies ex- actly one line of text.  In late antiquity the discourse of nature was harnessed by movement with a highly motivated opposition to same- sex love. Th e early stirrings of such a concept of nature should not be allowed to obscure the fact that in the late classical world this change in quantity becomes a change in quality. Setting matters. Musonius spoke to a circle of Young Turks, children of the establishment enchanted for a season by the eccentric phi los o pher’s moral authenticity. In late antiquity we are in the basilica, where men and women of startlingly divergent status gathered to receive moral lectures. And rather than the passing glances of an eccentric phi los o pher, we fi nd same- sex love the object of dedicated pastoral ire. Christian preachers like John Chrysos- tom might dilate on the sinfulness of same- sex desire, indiff erent to any distinctions between pederasty, the exploitation of slaves, or even durable forms of companionship. Rooted in Pauline scripture, Chrysostom’s own preaching on same- sex eros is such a spasm of hatred that its logic is not always recoverable. His caustic fourth homily on the Letter to the Romans, possibly a specimen of extemporaneous moralizing, evokes the atmosphere of intense hostility that prevailed in late antique churches. “Look how viv- idly he [Paul] chooses his words. He did not say they desired or lusted after one another, but burned in their longing for each other. Now, is not all de- sire born of greed which fails to adhere to its own limits? For all desire ex- ceeding the laws set down by God is desire for what is strange, and not what has been allowed.” Th e reach of Chrysostom’s claims are startling. Musonius fi xed on same- sex “intercourse” as an act against nature; so would most Christian moralists. But on occasion a sense of illicit, abnormal desire begins to fi nd expression. Pre- Christian ideologies treated sexual de- CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND SEX IN THE AGE OF TRIUMPH  viance, even deviance involving same- sex attraction, as a matter of excessive desire and insuffi cient manliness; there was no “queer desire,” only desire overfl owing its proper bounds.

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

  Some had watched their mothers struggle to make it alone while their fathers enjoyed relative wealth and got away scot-free. Others had been abandoned by their fathers but were also locked in conflict with their mothers. Sex is a way to get even with both parents—to get what their moms couldn’t have (a man), to get what they missed growing up (a man), and to vent their anger and disdain (onto that same man). It’s doubtful the women learn much from these experiences since the men, as they describe them, are mostly indistinguishable. Many of these women show poor judgment in terms of protecting their own health and safety. Sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies are common; abortion left them depressed but was preferable to raising a child with a man they did not want. Young women who follow this path are relatively unsupervised during adolescence and have the abiding sense that they are accountable to no one. There’s no harm in doing whatever feels good at the time, they reason. These are also the girls who were privy from childhood to the many details of their parents’ sexual love affairs and escapades plus accusations and counteraccusations of infidelity during the marriage. They may very well have been stimulated by what they witnessed and overheard. One youngster age eleven told me, “Every time I go to my mom’s parties I get so excited I want to swallow my tongue.” Taking the Leap I REMEMBER AWAITING my interview with Paula six years later, when she was twenty-one, with both anticipation and trepidation. I wasn’t disappointed. Now engaged and living with her fiancé in Seattle, she attracted attention when she walked into the restaurant overlooking Puget Sound where we had agreed to meet. Thin to the point of emaciation, dramatically dressed and heavily made up in black lipstick and nail polish, she chain-smoked and barely picked at her salad. She spoke glowingly of her boyfriend, whom she had met a few months earlier during a dance rave while high on Ecstasy. “What attracted you to him?” I asked. “He was the best-looking guy on the dance floor,” she answered proudly. “I was determined to get him for myself. At two A.M. we were both at the bar. I had a few drinks and we started talking. We ended up in bed and that was that.” Knowing Paula over the years as I had, I ventured another question. “I know you’ve had a lot of boyfriends, Paula. What made Brad different? How did you decide he was the one you’d marry?” This was another time when Paula startled me by the frankness of her reply.

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

  Though on a rocky course for several years, the marriage was functioning (in the children’s eyes) and family life seemed pretty stable. The father made a good living as a dermatologist who worked long hours in a private practice with four other physicians. The mother was furious at her husband, complaining that he was never available, spent zero time with the children, was cold and aloof as a husband and incompetent as a lover. He paid almost no attention to what he called her “yammering.” She was a strikingly beautiful woman who worked part-time in an upscale floral shop making elegant, expensive flower arrangements. The job engaged her artistic streak and enabled her to be at home in the afternoons when the children got home from school. She was a strict, demanding mother. He was an emotionally distant father—when he was around. The parents yelled at one another, barking grievances that made no sense to the children, but there was never any talk of divorce. As the three siblings told me, Sturm und Drang were part of normal family life. The real storm began with the sudden traumatic death of Mrs. James’s mother, who was killed in a highway accident. Mrs. James collapsed with grief. She had depended on her mother for advice, affection, and help in maintaining the social façade of a happy marriage. The death precipitated an agitated depression in Mrs. James, who became increasingly angry at the world and critical of everyone around her. She turned to her husband for solace, love, compassion, and sexual intimacy. He became the chief target of her rage because he did not provide the help she needed. Quarrels that were part of the marriage began to magnify and cascade as the anger took on a life of its own. Soon their life was nothing but a series of arguments, each louder than the next. Dr. James was badly frightened by the intensity of his wife’s needs and withdrew further. Reeling from both losses, she attacked him more and more wildly. Stung by her loud accusations of his failings, he countered with accusations of infidelity, long-standing frigidity, and incompetent mothering. As best I could make out, the final trigger was Dr. James’s departure for a two-day dermatology convention. Consumed by her anger, she impulsively sought legal counsel and filed for divorce. As I looked over the record and searched my memory, I was surer than ever that the James’s quarrels had more passion than content. They were not fighting over infidelity—which was apparently old hat—so much as wanting to hurt each other. Each heatedly denied the other’s accusations. Yet, like so many divorcing couples, they fought savagely, as the children looked on helplessly or ran away and hid.

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

  Older children and adolescents especially want a say in how they spend their vacations—a time they want for pursuing emerging interests and spending summers with friends at home or at camp. Yet we continue to penalize children of divorce by insisting that they spend every summer with one or the other parent so that the calendars of each adult will balance the other and the parents’ legal rights to their children will be protected. There are powerful lessons in these findings. When they reached adulthood, all of the children in this study who had been court ordered or mediated to visit a parent on a schedule that remained rigidly fixed and unmodified were angry at one or both parents. Most were very angry at the parent they had been ordered to visit. All rejected the parent whom they were forced to visit when they got older. They said things like “I don’t care if I ever see him again,” or “We have nothing in common because we never really talked in all those years.” Sometimes they said, “I feel sorry for my father but that’s all I feel.” We have to wonder why the legal system fails to acknowledge the fact that children change or that they should have the right to participate in planning their own lives. Imagine ordering a twelve-year-old to wear the shoes that fit her when she was six. When she complains that the shoes pinch or cries because she limps or whimpers that she can’t walk at all, we ignore her. We turn her objections aside because we must zealously uphold the parents’ right to select their children’s clothes. Unfortunately, returning to court to change such orders is not a real option for most people because it’s emotionally and financially too costly. What’s more, most courts would not hear the child’s voice but instead assume that the parent who speaks on behalf of the child is acting out of anger at the other parent. Essentially there is no place within the court or the mediation system or elsewhere in society for children like Joan or Paula or the thousands of others to make their plea for justice or compassion when they are young. They have no rights. They have no voice. When they reach adulthood, however, the power is all theirs and the parents whom they regarded as bullies when they were minors are rejected in anger and disdain. Is this really what we want? I was presented somewhat unexpectedly with another solution by a father who told me about visiting his eleven-year-old daughter.

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

  Enstice’s conclusion was further discredited by Dr. Werner Spitz, who had authored the medical treatise Enstice had relied on in her forensic pathology training. Dr. Spitz testified for the defense that he would “absolutely not” declare a live birth, let alone a homicide, under the circumstances of this case. With no credible scientific evidence that a crime had occurred, the State introduced inflammatory evidence that Marsha was poor, a prior drug user, and obviously a bad mother for not seeking prenatal care. Police investigators went into her home and took photographs of an unflushed toilet and a beer can on the floor, which were waved in front of the jury as evidence of neglect and bad parenting. Mrs. Colbey consistently maintained during multiple interrogations that the baby was stillborn. She told investigators that her son was born dead and never took a breath, despite her efforts to revive him. Mrs. Colbey rejected the State’s offer of a plea agreement, pursuant to which she would have gone to prison for eighteen years, because she was adamant that she had done nothing wrong. The prosecution of Marsha Colbey eventually caught the attention of the press, which was titillated by another “dangerous mother” story. The crime was sensationalized by the local media, which lauded the police and prosecutor for coming to the aid of a defenseless infant. Demonizing irresponsible mothers had become a media craze by the time Marsha’s trial was scheduled. Tragic narratives of mothers killing their children were national sensations. When Andrea Yates drowned her five children in Texas in 2001, the tragedy became a national story. Susan Smith’s effort to blame random black men for the death of her children in South Carolina before later admitting to murdering them fascinated crime-obsessed Americans. In time, media interest in these kinds of stories grew into a national preoccupation. Time magazine called the prosecution of Casey Anthony, the young Florida mother ultimately acquitted in the death of her two-year-old daughter, the “social media trial of the century” after the story generated nonstop coverage on cable networks. The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental illness, as in the Yates and Smith cases. But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. Despite America’s preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality—much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades.

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

  He paid almost no attention to what he called her “yammering.” She was a strikingly beautiful woman who worked part-time in an upscale floral shop making elegant, expensive flower arrangements. The job engaged her artistic streak and enabled her to be at home in the afternoons when the children got home from school. She was a strict, demanding mother. He was an emotionally distant father—when he was around. The parents yelled at one another, barking grievances that made no sense to the children, but there was never any talk of divorce. As the three siblings told me, Sturm und Drang were part of normal family life. The real storm began with the sudden traumatic death of Mrs. James’s mother, who was killed in a highway accident. Mrs. James collapsed with grief. She had depended on her mother for advice, affection, and help in maintaining the social façade of a happy marriage. The death precipitated an agitated depression in Mrs. James, who became increasingly angry at the world and critical of everyone around her. She turned to her husband for solace, love, compassion, and sexual intimacy. He became the chief target of her rage because he did not provide the help she needed. Quarrels that were part of the marriage began to magnify and cascade as the anger took on a life of its own. Soon their life was nothing but a series of arguments, each louder than the next. Dr. James was badly frightened by the intensity of his wife’s needs and withdrew further. Reeling from both losses, she attacked him more and more wildly. Stung by her loud accusations of his failings, he countered with accusations of infidelity, long-standing frigidity, and incompetent mothering. As best I could make out, the final trigger was Dr. James’s departure for a two-day dermatology convention. Consumed by her anger, she impulsively sought legal counsel and filed for divorce. As I looked over the record and searched my memory, I was surer than ever that the James’s quarrels had more passion than content. They were not fighting over infidelity—which was apparently old hat—so much as wanting to hurt each other. Each heatedly denied the other’s accusations. Yet, like so many divorcing couples, they fought savagely, as the children looked on helplessly or ran away and hid. As happens in many families, there was no disagreement around child custody or visiting. Mrs. James would have done anything to irritate her husband, including making him take the kids—as long as that is what he did not want. Anger Doesn’t End with Divorce THE MARRIAGE WAS dissolved amid rising chaos within the family. The parents’ fury at each other did not subside over the years that followed, although it was never fought out in the courts. This is a familiar situation for those of us who work with divorcing couples. Contrary to what most people think (including attorneys and judges), the vast majority of divorcing parents do not drag their conflicts into the courtroom.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Our recent successes had sapped our discipline: at the advance posts I found something of the gross heedlessness evinced in the feasting at Rome. Certain tribunes gave proof of foolish overconfidence in the face of danger: perilously isolated in a region where the only part we knew well was our former frontier, they were depending for continued victories upon our armament, which I beheld daily diminishing from loss and from wear, and upon reinforcements which I had no hope to see, knowing that all our resources would thereafter be concentrated upon Asia. Another danger began to threaten: four years of official requisitioning had ruined the villages to our rear; from the time of the first Dacian campaigns, for each herd of oxen or flock of sheep so ostentatiously captured from the enemy I had seen innumerable droves of cattle seized from the inhabitants. If that state of things continued, the moment was approaching when our peasant populations, tired of supporting our burdensome military machine, would end by preferring the barbarians. Pillage by our soldiery presented a less important problem, perhaps, but one which was far more conspicuous. My popularity was such that I could risk imposition of the most rigorous restrictions upon the troops; I made current an austerity which I practiced myself, inventing the cult of the Imperial Discipline, which later I succeeded in extending throughout the army. The rash and the ambitious, who were complicating my task, were sent back to Rome; in their stead I summoned technicians, of whom we had too few. It was essential to repair the defensive works which inflated pride over our recent victories had left singularly neglected; I abandoned entirely whatever would have been too costly to maintain. Civil administrators, solidly installed in the disorder which follows every war, were rising by degrees to the level of semi-independent chieftains, capable of all kinds of extortion from our subjects and of every possible treachery toward us. On that score, as well, I could see in the more or less immediate future the beginning of revolts and divisions to come. I do not believe that we can avoid these disasters, any more than we can escape death, but it depends upon us to postpone them for a few centuries. I got rid of incompetent officials; I had the worst executed. I was discovering myself to be inexorable. A humid summer gave way to a misty autumn, and then to a cold winter. I had need of my knowledge of medicine, and needed it first of all to treat myself. That life on the frontiers brought me little by little down to the level of the Sarmatian tribesmen: the philosopher's beard changed to that of the barbarian chieftain.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ORIGEN. (tom. xx. 23.) Note however; this word, liar, is applied to man, as well as to the devil, who begat a lie, as we read in the Psalm, All men are liars. (Ps. 111) If a man is not a liar, he is not an ordinary man, but one of those, to whom it is said, I have said, Ye are Gods. (Ps. 81) When a man speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; but the Holy Spirit speaketh the word of truth and wisdom; as he said below, He shall receive of Mine, and shall shew it unto you. (c. 16:15) AUGUSTINE. (de Quæst. Nov. et Vet. Test. 2, 90) Or thus: The devil is not a singular, but a common name. In whomsoever the works of the devil are found, he is to be called the devil. It is the name of a work, not of a nature. Here then our Lord means by the father of the Jews, Cain; whom they wished to imitate, by killing the Saviour: for he it was who set the first example of murdering a brother. That he spoke a lie of his own, means that no one sins but by his own will. And inasmuch as Cain imitated the devil, and followed his works, the devil is said to be his father. ALCUIN. Our Lord being the truth, and the Son of the true God, spoke the truth; but the Jews, being the sons of the devil, were averse to the truth; and this is why our Lord says, Because I tell you the truth, ye believe not. ORIGEN. (tom. xx. 24.) But how is this said to the Jews who believed on Him? Consider: a man may believe in one sense, not believe in another; e. g. that our Lord was crucified by Pontius Pilate, but not that He was born of the Virgin Mary. In this same way, those whom He is speaking to, believed in Him as a worker of miracles, which they saw Him to be; but did not believe in His doctrines, which were too deep for them. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. liv. s. 3) Ye wish to kill Me then, because ye are enemies of the truth, not that ye have any fault to find in Me: for, which of you convinceth Me of sin? THEOPHYLACT. As if to say: If ye are the sons of God, ye ought to hold sinners in hatred. If ye hate Me, when ye cannot convince Me of sin, it is evident that ye hate Me because of the truth: i. e. because I said I was the Son of God. ORIGEN. (tom. xx. in Joan. s. 25.) A bold speech this; which none could have had the confidence to utter, but he Who did no sin; even our Lord.

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

  apostle’s preaching on sexual chastity is the proximate cause of the most famous scene in apocryphal literature and the most hallowed martyrdom in Christian history (save one). In the Acts of Peter, the “word of purity” that leads to the apostle’s death is abrupt and almost mechanical in its exaggerated predictability. In the Acts of Th omas, the pattern of events is identical, although the drama is more elaborately developed. To the fi gure of Th omas stuck the most exotic legends of the early church. His Acts describe his mission to India, where he converts an aristocratic woman, Mygdonia, to the gospel. He teaches her that “the reputation that comes from your high rank, the authority of this world, and the disgusting intercourse with your husband will avail you not at all if you are without the union of truth . . . for the union that brings the production of children passes away, and is even worthy of contempt.” Her husband, close kin to the king, is predictably befuddled by her newfound commitment to sexual abstention, not to mention the truculence with which she disobeys him. “I am your husband from the time of your virginity, by the gods and by the laws given the right to rule over you.” Th omas is arrested, but his arraignment only provides a platform to spread the message that salvation comes to those who are “delivered from all bodily pleasures.” Th e king’s eff orts backfi re when his own wife, then his son and heir, take up chastity. Th e king has Th omas killed. As a postscript to his martyrdom, we are told that the king and his relative Charisius “tried very much to force their wives” but “could not persuade them to abandon their will.” What ever else may be said of them, the sexual doctrines presented by the heroes of apostolic legend are consistently extreme. Th omas denigrates married intercourse as “fi lthy,” and he leaves no room for ambiguity. In the Acts of Andrew, the apostle’s primary convert, Maximilla, calls sex with her husband a “defi ling intercourse.” When Peter preaches the “word of purity,” it is a gospel of complete continence. Th e Acts of Paul have the great mission- ary coming into the city of Iconium proclaiming, “Blessed are those who refrain from sex altogether, for God will speak to them. Blessed are those who stand in array for something beyond the present cosmos, for they will be pleasing to God.” Here the only Christian apostle whose views we actually know through his own writings, and who was so cautious that he would not upset a single marriage through the unwanted abstinence of a spouse, R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  has been attributed a radical doctrine of chastity capable of overturning entire cities! Th

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  With few exceptions, human evolutionary biology has failed to incorporate the role of female mate choice, sexual conflict, and sexual autonomy into theories about human origins. Furthermore, it is critical to note that the evolution of human social intelligence and cooperation required the transformation of male aggression, male temperament, and the male behavior of infanticide specifically. Therefore, would it not make sense to explore those evolutionary mechanisms that explicitly focus on male violence and on those evolutionary agents who would benefit most from its transformation? In other words, females. — As with many of the fundamental questions concerning the evolution of human sexuality, we find again that the ancient Greeks did have some insight into this problem, which they expressed not in their scientific theories but in the genre of comedy. In Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata (debuted 411 B.C.E.), the Athenian housewife Lysistrata enlists the women of the opposing city states of Athens and Sparta in a joint pledge to abstain from all sexual relations with their husbands and lovers until the men agree to negotiate a peace and put an end to the costly and harmful Peloponnesian War. The women’s sex strike leads to a comic exacerbation of sexual conflict, followed ultimately by the men’s complete capitulation to the women’s terms. Peace is restored to Greece through the women’s organized assertion of their own sexual autonomy. Although the action in Lysistrata is not set in an evolutionary timescale, the play does make a few observations that are evolutionarily relevant. Women are far less tolerant of violence than men. Although more men than women die in this violence, women pay a high price in terms of their reproductive success because of their greater investment than men in raising the sons who die in war and other violence. Like infanticide, the loss of their children in war is a blow to their lifetime reproductive success. Furthermore, the comedy demonstrates that women’s mating decisions can exert a powerful force to counteract the violence of manhood. The sex strike works because all the women of Athens and Sparta agree; it is consensus among women that gives them their strength. Lysistrata’s mechanism to transform men is not merely sexual but explicitly aesthetic. In the drama, the women of Greece hold back from choosing to have sex until men transform themselves to be less aggressive. Lysistrata advises the women of Athens and Sparta that if their husbands force themselves upon them to not fight back and make sure the men enjoy it as little as possible. She proposes that men will soon become bored and will miss the full aesthetic engagement with consensual sex. Thus, the women seek to deny their men the coevolved aesthetic pleasure of sex if they are forced. Last, the women of Athens and Sparta are able to defuse male aggression without creating a costly, aggressive arms race.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The three-minute piece that followed was a tour de force of the tired genre of big-government lament. I never imagined it could be possible to combine quotations from Ronald Reagan (“Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem!”), images of the Twin Towers burning, Barack Obama’s teleprompter, and America’s housing foreclosure and banking crises into an attack on our animal genital coevolution research program, but Fox News managed to accomplish just that. Never one to shy away from any antigovernment cause, Sean Hannity discussed the validity of federal funding of a Yale University study on duck genital evolution with Tucker Carlson and Dennis Kucinich later in the week in a segment titled “D.C. Wasteland.” Our duck penis research did have its strong defenders in the media, among them Chris Hayes on MSNBC, the science writer Carl Zimmer, Mother Jones, the Daily Beast, Time, and PolitiFact. After Patricia Brennan wrote an awesome defense of basic science research and funding for Slate.com, the storm appeared to be over. Eight months later, however, when Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma published his Wastebook for 2013 and included our $385,000 grant as number 78 among the top 100 examples of federal government waste, the irresistible story of Duckpenisgate roared back to life. The New York Post headline read, “Government’s Wasteful Spending Includes $385G Duck Penis Study.” Out of the $30 billion of waste reported in Wastebook, the Post headline focused on the 0.001 percent that went to our study. Somehow, the combination of money, sex, and power—your tax money, duck sex, and Yale’s Ivy League prestige—made the story irresistible. And so it went, as the right-wing news outlets sought new ways to inspire the outrage that in an earlier era was reliably engendered by Ronald Reagan’s Cadillac-driving “Welfare Queen” and the Defense Department’s $700 toilet seats. When repeddling this old story of government profligacy, news programs inevitably mentioned our research with a veneer of sexual titillation. So, when Sean Hannity sarcastically asked Tucker Carlson on Fox News, “Don’t we really need to know about duck genitalia, Tucker Carlson?” his question belied the genuine human fascination with the topic. Like all the other attackers, he ignored the fact that we actually do have a tremendous amount to learn from the study of duck sex. There are important evolutionary findings, and perhaps even some of immediate practical value. If the pharmaceutical industry thought that Viagra was a big deal, just wait until duck developmental biologists unlock the secrets of the stem cells that allow the duck penis to regenerate itself every spring and to get bigger each year (which I think I might have forgotten to mention)!

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

  As happens in many families, there was no disagreement around child custody or visiting. Mrs. James would have done anything to irritate her husband, including making him take the kids—as long as that is what he did not want. Anger Doesn’t End with Divorce T HE MARRIAGE WAS dissolved amid rising chaos within the family. The parents’ fury at each other did not subside over the years that followed, although it was never fought out in the courts. This is a familiar situation for those of us who work with divorcing couples. Contrary to what most people think (including attorneys and judges), the vast majority of divorcing parents do not drag their conflicts into the courtroom. The 10 to 15 percent of couples who do fight in court consume the lion’s share of our attention but they do not represent the norm. 1 Most parents negotiate a divorce settlement, decide on custody arrangements, and go their separate ways. Unfortunately, many of them stay intensely angry with one another. In our study, a third of the couples were fighting at the same high pitch ten years after their divorce was final. Their enduring anger stemmed from continued feelings of hurt and humiliation fueled by new complaints (child support is too burdensome or too little) and jealousy over new, often younger partners. The notion that divorce ends the intense love/hate relationship of the marriage is another myth of our times. Like many divorced people, Karen’s mother frequently called her ex-husband and got into shouting matches. As a result, the children were exposed to the hurt and anger that led to the breakup throughout their growing up years. Millions of children today experience the same unrelenting drama of longing and anger that refuses to die. It is, of course, hard to know how often divorce is precipitated by factors outside the marriage. I have seen a good number of such instances. Indeed, it is one of the common causes—or more precisely, final triggers—of divorce, yet few people seem to recognize its importance. Whenever people are shaken by a serious loss in their lives—be it the termination of a job, death of a parent, serious illness in a child, or any grievous event that can evoke powerful and primitive passions—the bereaved person will turn to their spouse for comfort. If the partner responds with understanding and tenderness, the marriage can be forever enriched. But the tragedy can also split people apart when the bereaved person is deeply disappointed in the partner’s response and feels rejected in his or her hour of greatest need. Grief turns to rage as the two people end up irrationally blaming the other—one for not having empathy, the other for making insatiable demands. The initial loss is soon compounded, anger and accusations take over, and the marriage cascades downward.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. But as speaking not for Himself but for the Holy Spirit, He accordingly rebukes them, saying, Generation of vipers, how can ye being evil speak good things? This is both a rebuke of them, and a proof in their own characters of those things which had been said. As though He had said, So ye being corrupt trees cannot bring forth good fruit. I do not wonder then that you thus speak, for you are ill nourished of ill parentage, and have an evil mind. And observe He said not, How can ye speak good things, seeing ye are a generation of vipers? for these two are not connected together; but He said, How can ye being evil speak good things? He calls them generation of vipers, because they made boast of their forefathers; in order therefore to cut off this their pride, He shuts them out of the race of Abraham, assigning them a parentage corresponding to their characters. RABANUS. Or the words, Generation of vipers, may be taken as signifying children, or imitators of the Devil, because they had wilfully spoken against good works, which is of the Devil, and thence follows, Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. That man speaks out of the abundance of the heart who is not ignorant with what intention his words are uttered; and to declare his meaning more openly He adds, A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth good things. The treasure of the heart is the intention of the thoughts, by which the Judge judges that work which is produced, so that sometimes though the outward work that is shewn seem great, yet because of the carelessness of a cold heart, they receive a little reward from the Lord. CHRYSOSTOM. Herein also He shews His Godhead as knowing the hidden things of the heart; for not for words only, yea but for evil thoughts also they shall receive punishment. For it is the order of nature that the store of the wickedness which abounds within should be poured forth in words through the mouth. Thus when you shall hear any speaking evil, you must infer that his wickedness is more than what his words express; for what is uttered without is but the overflowing of that within; which was a sharp rebuke to them. For if that which was spoken by them were so evil, consider how evil must be the root from whence it sprung. And this happens naturally; for oftentimes the hesitating tongue does not suddenly pour forth all its evil, while the heart, to which none other is privy, begets whatsoever evil it will, without fear; for it has little fear of God. But when the multitude of the evils which are within is increased, the things which had been hidden then burst forth through the mouth. This is that He says, Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

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

  The ecclesiastical campaign against same-sex love was vicious but highly sporadic. By contrast, the struggle against fornication, porneia, was a full-fledged war, which saw the church muster its forces in deliberate array against an ancient style of sexual life. The preaching was endless, the penitential enforcement real. But the sex industry was too entrenched for the Christian state even to compass its repression. Instead, the Christian emperors focused on an aspect of the sex trade whose moral and material significance should not be underestimated: they banned forced prostitution. The brutal exposure of vulnerable women rested on a public indifference so vast that it lay invisibly at the very foundations of the ancient sexual order. As Christianity progressively absorbed society, and could ever less comfortably present itself as a dissent movement apart from the world, it was forced to reckon with the silences in its own sexual program. Because prostitution was at the center of an ancient sexual culture, an order of relationships between state and society built on the concept of shame, the progressive realization of its injustice is a privileged index of Christianization. The aggressive campaign of Justinian against compulsion in the flesh industry marks the end of a distinctly ancient sexual order, one whose distant origins lie at the very beginnings of the archaic Mediterranean city-state and finally crumble in the midst of his rule.16 Chapter 4 follows the Christian revolution in sexual morality through the medium of imaginative literature. The fictional word is an essential complement to the injunctions of the moralists and the dictates of law. Literature is capable of expressing, in a way more intimate than mere commands, the shape of sexual morality, when actually projected onto the furrowed plane of human life. Pagans, Christians, and Jews alike used stories as vehicles to express their deepest beliefs about the relationships between the sexual body, the mechanics of society, and the nature of the cosmos. The Christian transformation of sex can be retraced in the history of literature, which mirrors quite sensitively the passage from a public sexual ideology organized around the imperatives of social reproduction to a mentality founded in ecclesiastical norms. In short, the history of literature recapitulates the passage from shame to sin.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “And I’m just supposed to know who Jeff is? So she gets all snotty: ‘Who the fuck do you think he is, Cherie? He’s the guy I’ve been living with the past couple months.’ I thought I would throw the phone at the wall. ‘Norm is there, watching Rosie,’ Cookie says. ‘He’s twelve—practically a young man now!’ ” “Oh crap,” I say. “Did they see her get arrested?” “That’s what I asked her,” Cherie says. “Cookie tells me, ‘Nope,’ all dismissive. ‘They busted me in the pub parking lot. See, I went to meet Jeff so we could talk it out, but he set me up. Next thing I know, I’m in cuffs.’ ” Cherie explains that the cops had social services track down the kids, who were staying in a motel. I march to Addie’s kitchen phone. “I’m calling Ms. Harvey.” When she answers, she explains: “The cops decided Norman is old enough to watch Roseanne while Cookie is incarcerated for assault and battery.” “Wait, Ms. Harvey, let me get this straight: Cookie is arrested for trying to beat up her boyfriend—in jail for the weekend—and our little brother is watching Rosie by himself?” “Regina, I’m just telling you what the police told me.” “Who’s paying for the room? What if they get kicked out? Then what?” “Well, in that case they would be homeless and we would place them in another home. But until then, the authorities have decided that they’re both safe and secure. Besides, now that your mother’s bailed out, she’ll probably be back with them in a few hours.” Camille and I have devised a plan: The only way we can watch out for Rosie and Norm is to convince Cookie that all’s forgiven and we still want her in our lives. “She’s a lunatic,” Cherie says. “You sure you want to go through with this cockamamy plan?” With Daisy Duck and Goofy ball caps in a bag as souvenirs, we wait at the motel room’s outside entrance until Cookie answers with a cigarette between her fingers like some Hollywood vixen. “Well well well,” she says, holding the door as though she has to consider letting us in. “Just like always, you two come crawling back.” Camille occupies Rosie and Norm while I sit down on the bed, across from where Cookie’s seated at the motel room’s desk. Without looking at me, she says, “I see you’re starting to come into your own. Shocker with those little tits, nobody’s knocked you up yet.” “I didn’t come here to be the butt of any insults,” I answer. “I really want to work this out.” “Well, don’t try to buy me with any sweet talk. You ratted me out to every official in Suffolk County when all I’ve ever done was work hard to give you kids a good life.” “Ratted you out?” In the background Camille turns on the TV for Rosie and Norm.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But it wasn’t quite over. ‘I didn’t say a word, but started the car, and of course just as I did so my bleep went. Then I saw the evening was inevitable in a different way, and the irony was all working overtime in that hideous way it can do. So it was my turn to grope in my breast pocket for my little professional accoutrement. I tried to make something of this with what now seems a fantastic gallantry and said how neither of us was what he seemed. I needn’t have fucking bothered. He changed completely and became all textbook—not actually taken down and used in evidence et cetera, but calling me sir and not giving an inch (as it were) …’ ‘James,’ I had become angry. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything about this for obvious reasons. I have had that man—Colin he’s called, isn’t he?’ He nodded. ‘I picked him up on the Tube, ages ago, just after we’d seen him at the baths. He followed me off the train, almost invited himself back to my place. I fucked him. He fucked me. He’s as queer as—whatever is very, very queer: me, you. He can’t possibly get away with this pretty policeman thing.’ James looked at me very closely. Under no other circumstances could all this have been good news to him. I carried on being angry all day. My tiredness made it harder to resist and as I went into town later I was muttering audibly about people around me, and when they showed signs of offence, deviating abruptly into sarcastic good manners. I was full of outrage at an act in which the brittle shoppers in Liberty’s (where I went to buy socks) and the incurious drifters of Oxford Street (who got in my way) seemed all to be careless conspirators. At the Corry, I did a few ferocious exercises and then flaked out and dropped into the pool with more than usual relief. But even there the slowness and clumsiness of others enraged me, and I was becoming the victim of one of those premature oldsters who bump into one on purpose, just for the muffled charge of contact. I wondered what I would do or say if I saw Colin. Was the whole matter strictly speaking sub judice? Would it have been any service to James to deal angrily, even ironically, with the officer who had charged him?

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  It’s clear I haven’t done a very good job establishing this, but you can’t just come and go as you please.” “What would you prefer I do, Addie? Live as the bastard daughter with no life? No friends, and no future? Counting down the days until I get pushed out of here once the checks stop coming in? I’d rather take control now.” She clenches her fists, fuming, and her chin begins to quiver. “Either you live here, or you don’t; and if you leave, you don’t. Is that clear? And I’d prefer if you don’t challenge me again.” In a total of twenty seconds, Addie Peterman has just reinforced the way I’ve 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.

• 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.