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 White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Class hostility persisted. Many southern suburbanites had no sympathy for the white trash underclass in their section. They drew a sharp class line between the lower-class rednecks and the “upscale rednecks.” Lillian Smith, a Southern novelist and civil rights activist, identified the places where these toxic feelings stewed. Like the blue-collar ethnics in northern cities who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party, marginally middle-class southerners hated the “weak, lazy, good-for-nothing ones who whine all month until the relief check comes in.” Seeing themselves as hardworking and self-reliant, the upwardly mobile sons of white trash parents believed, as Smith put it, that “he is responsible for himself and himself alone.” The same self-made man who looked down on white trash others had conveniently chosen to forget that his own parents escaped the tar-paper shack only with the help of the federal government. But now that he had been lifted to respectability, he would pull up the social ladder behind him. So suburban white animosity toward blacks was repeated in the treatment of poor whites. Smith found that the formerly poor southern white and the upwardly mobile immigrant population had something in common: “What everyone has always wanted in this country, what most came here for, was to get away from all those others who smell bad, are sleeping in a shanty, and are eating fatback and are going to loaf tomorrow because there is no job to go to.” Moving up meant staying ahead of those still trapped in the “poverty ditch.” But rather than help others escape destitution, this new addition to the middle class deeply resented a government that wasted money on the poor. 16 Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia fit this mold. Newly elected as the Senate whip in 1971 by beating the patrician Edward Kennedy, he was, as the New York Times Magazine quoted, the “po white kid that could climb to the seat of the mighty and whip millionaires.” An orphan, a former butcher and grocer who boasted having Lyndon Johnson as his patron, Byrd made his mark by attacking welfare, rioters, and communism. He hired investigators to kick cheaters off the welfare rolls in Washington, DC. Rioters, he declared with marked callousness, deserved to be mowed down, and looters shot on sight “swiftly and mercilessly.” Byrd made himself one of the most hated men in the Senate, where he was compared to Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, and Uriah Heep— the obsequious, greedy, upwardly mobile clerk in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield . After Byrd became whip, one top Senate aide remarked that Democrats would now have to look up at the “pinched Mephistophelian features of a redneck who made good.”

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  Searing and heartbreakingly candid, this provocative collection both reflects the world we live in and offers a call to arms insisting that “not that bad” must no longer be good enough. About the AuthorRoxane Gay is the author of the essay collection Bad Feminist, which was a New York Times bestseller; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has also written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Bookforum, and Salon. Her fiction has also been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2012, The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, and other anthologies. She is the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She lives in Lafayette, Indiana, and sometimes Los Angeles. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com Also by Roxane GayNonfictionBad Feminist FictionDifficult Women An Untamed State Ayiti [image "an image of the cover for Opinions, and text explaining the content" file=image_rsrc28Z.jpg] [image "Bookperk sign-up advertisement" file=image_rsrc290.jpg] Copyright [image file=image_rsrc291.jpg] hunger. Copyright © 2017 by Roxane Gay. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. first edition Cover design by Robin Bilardello Cover photograph © broadcastertr / Getty Images Digital Edition June 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-236260-5 Version 07062018 Print ISBN: 978-0-06-236259-9 About the PublisherAustralia HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd. Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia www.harpercollins.com.au Canada HarperCollins Publishers Ltd Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower 22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor Toronto, ON M5H 4E3, Canada www.harpercollins.ca India HarperCollins India A 75, Sector 57 Noida Uttar Pradesh 201 301 www.harpercollins.co.in New Zealand HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive Rosedale 0632 Auckland, New Zealand www.harpercollins.co.nz United Kingdom HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF, UK www.harpercollins.co.uk United States HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 195 Broadway New York, NY 10007 www.harpercollins.com

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  a land squeezed between the even higher plateaus of Utah and the Grand Canyon of Arizona. The community of Short Creek is 400 miles by the shortest road from the Mohave county seat of Kingman. . . . Massive cliffs rearing north of Short Creek’s little central street provide a natural rock barrier to the north. To the east and west are the sweeping expanses of dry and almost barren plateaus before the forests begin. To the south there is the Grand Canyon. It is in this most isolated of all Arizona communities that this foulest of conspiracies has flourished and expanded in a terrifying geometric progression. Here has been a community entirely dedicated to the warped philosophy that a small handful of greedy and licentious men should have the right and the power to control the destiny of every human soul in the community. Here is a community—many of the women, sadly, right along with the men—unalterably dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become more chattels of this totally lawless enterprise. One day after the raid, the Deseret News, a daily newspaper owned by the LDS Church, editorialized in support of the action: “Utah and Arizona owe a debt of gratitude to Arizona’s Howard Pyle . . . we hope the unfortunate activities at Short Creek will be cleaned up once and for all.” The raid made national headlines; it was even reported on the front page of the New York Times, with the same prominence given to a story announcing the armistice ending the Korean War. But to the dismay of the LDS leadership, most of the press presented the polygamists in a favorable light. Photographs of crying children being torn from their mothers’ arms generated sympathy throughout the nation for the fundamentalists, who protested that they were upstanding, law-abiding Mormons simply trying to exercise their constitutionally protected freedoms. The raid was widely perceived as religious persecution by overly zealous government agencies, and it sparked a great outcry in support of the polygamists. The Arizona Republic, for example, criticized the action as “a misuse of public funds.” In 1954, Governor Pyle was voted out of office, thanks largely to the raid and the egg it left on his face. The arrests and subsequent trials cost taxpayers $600,000, yet by 1956 all the polygamists who had been arrested were out of jail and reunited with their families in Short Creek. Members of the UEP unapologetically resumed living the Principle as taught by Joseph Smith, and the population of the town continued to more than double each decade—a consequence of the community’s giant families and astronomical birth rate. Paradoxically, the Short Creek raid proved to be a huge boon to the FLDS Church.

• From Escape (2007)

  I remember overhearing my mother say to a relative, “I just don’t understand what has gotten into my three daughters. As soon as I am out of bed every morning, they are so bad that no matter how much I warn them, they will just not be quiet until I give them all a spanking. After they have all gotten a spanking, then everything calms down and we can all get on with our day.” When my mother beat me, she would always say she was doing it because she loved me. So I used to wish that she didn’t love me. I was afraid of her, but I would also get angry at her when she hit me. After she beat me she insisted on giving me a hug. I hated that. The hug didn’t make the spanking stop hurting. It didn’t fix anything. I never told my father about the beatings because it was such an accepted part of our culture. What my mother was doing would be considered “good discipline.” My mother saw herself as raising righteous children and felt teaching us obedience was one of her most important responsibilities. Spanking your children was widely seen as the way to reach that goal. It wasn’t considered abuse; it was considered good parenting. Some of the happiest times for me would be when we would have quilting parties at home. The women from the community would spend the day at our house, quilting around a big frame. Stories and gossip were shared, there was a lot of food, and the children all had a chance to play together. Quilting parties were the one time we had breathing room. Once I was playing with dolls with my cousin under the quilt when I heard my aunt Elaine say, “I was so scared the other day. Ray Dee was playing out in the yard with her brothers and sisters. Some people from out of town stopped in front of our house. All of the other children ran into the house screaming, but Ray Dee stayed outside and talked to the out-of-towners.” Aunt Elaine was beside herself that her daughter had spoken with outsiders. We were taught that outsiders were “agents of the devil” who wanted to kidnap us and take us away. They were seen as evil people who wanted to destroy the work of God. If they could get access to the children of God’s chosen, then they would try to hurt or destroy us. Our community was so isolated it was rare that we ever saw anyone from the outside. Most of my cousins only left the community to go shopping with their mothers and had almost no sense of the outside world. I still had memories of our happy lives in Salt Lake City, where we even had a TV. (My parents also had a coffeemaker; coffee was strictly forbidden in the Mormon Church.)

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  The crack spreads, and soon the entire surface is cracked. The view is totally distorted. This is how a person coming out of a destructive cult often sees her life. Then the reconstruction process begins. This process is filled with anger, fear, pain, resentment, and anxiety. It can only be approached with tentative, small, and extremely careful steps. Now the letter E. After perusing both Roget's and Webster's, I have singled out my E-word: endurance. I'm sure I hear a slight chuckle from old Webster as I check the definition: "the ability to withstand hardship, adversity, and stress." I think that endurance can hang on its own with no further explanation. The next letter, C, is a little difficult to work with because there are so many choices, but I decide on the phrase "cut to the chase." If you are unfamiliar with this phrase, it comes from the film industry, describing cutting away from slowpaced activity (or fluff) and into the fast action chase scenes. So, out of the fluff and into the action. I'd like to take a moment to speak of patience. Patience takes on a different perspective after a person has left a destructive, highly controlled group. In some cases, I have more patience now than ever before, particularly with people who have been victimized or traumatized. On the other hand, I have no patience for manipulation, closed-mindedness, ineptness, laziness, lies, or procrastination. What does this have to do with "cut to the chase"? It means that I have patience to a point, then it's "get off your hoo-ha and cut to the chase!" The fourth letter, 0, presents a bit of a dilemma, but I have come up with what I think is an interesting concept: orchestrate. After another consultation with Webster, I find that orchestrate means "to arrange or combine so as to achieve maximum effect." Makes it sound easy, doesn't he? Well, orchestrating my life is what I am trying to do. And within this concept I will add two other 0-words: operate and oppose. To operate with some degree of success in this orchestration definitely requires a positive attitude, along with a hearty sense of humor. I've picked out some of the positive aspects of my group involvement and kept them. Not everythingthat happened in the group needs to be negated, and I've learned that it's okay to take all the time I need to sort this out. Remember, we started with that cracked glass, and until at least part of it is repaired, those positive aspects will not be clearly visible. Along with operate, I also oppose, which means to question. I question authority. I question everything. And I have had to learn that what other people think of me is not as important as what I think of myself. The Vwas easy: values. This word flashes at me as I imagine my mobile growing little by little. Values and priorities have taken on a new meaning-a reevaluation, if you will.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “I’m hearing about all kinds of other books in our schools that I’d object to,” she said, including those that “sympathize with communism, encourage premarital sex or experimenting with drugs, take pro-abortion positions and stress evolution without teaching creationism, too.” George Wilson said that this was exactly why he rallied a team to fight on behalf of Deenie . His opponent’s point of view put her “in the same boat with fascism,” he argued. “If you give them Czechoslovakia, they’ll come back for Poland later.” The ACLU agreed. In December 1985, the Chicago Tribune published a follow-up that included results from a national survey showing an uptick in book challenges across the South, as well as data from affected librarians suggesting that more often than not, these challenges resulted in the books being removed altogether. A spokesperson for the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom added that while book banning efforts in the South tended to be more organized, the problem was bad in the Northeast, too. By then, the Gwinnett school board had agreed to restore Deenie to elementary school libraries, but only if it lived on a restricted shelf that students would have to avoid unless they had written permission from their parents. The ACLU didn’t like that so-called resolution, either. The Gwinnett case dragged on—as we know from recent national elections, Georgia is deeply divided when it comes to politics and its citizens are passionate. In 2006, an evangelical Christian mother of three landed Gwinnett back in the news when she demanded that the school system remove the Harry Potter books from libraries on account of their “evil themes, witchcraft, demonic activity, murder, evil blood sacrifice, spells and teaching children all of this.” The Gwinnett Daily Post covered the situation, noting that “book appeals have been fairly rare in the Gwinnett school system.” The article noted that before the Potter furor, the last challenge had been back in 1997, when some parents fought to remove two books: Ghost Camp by middle grade horror writer R.L. Stine, and Judy Blume’s It’s Not the End of the World . The school board examined these titles and voted to keep them on the shelves. And even the Deenie episode proved that book challenges had a tendency to backfire. In September 1985, a month after Teresa Wilson first set her sights on Deenie , the Associated Press reported that Gwinnett’s bookstores were experiencing an unprecedented run on the novel. “That’s what happens when they start banning books,” Bobbie Setzer, a local bookstore manager, told the AP. “Everyone wants to read them.” It was at least a partial victory for Blume—and by then, she commanded a cavalry. She donated money to the National Coalition Against Censorship in the early 1980s and by spring of 1983, she had joined their advisory council. In June 1984, she received a letter from a board member requesting a more substantial donation and offering a face-to-face meeting with Leanne Katz, NCAC’s executive director.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 100 < Lecture 15  Early Opposition to the Christian Message ` This is almost certainly something that happened in a broad sense. Most Jews found the Christian message unacceptable and opposed those who proclaimed it. But the scale of the persecution in Acts is likely exaggerated, as are the claims that masses of Jews in Jerusalem converted right off the bat. ` The most common reason given for the opposition to the followers of Jesus among the Jewish leaders is that they were jealous of the enormous success the apostles had in attracting followers. That seems unlikely from a historical perspective. ` However, violent Jewish opposition to the Christian message is a central motif of the book. In many ways, the account climaxes in Acts chapter 7, with the stoning of Stephen, the first recorded Christian martyr. Christian and Jewish Tensions ` There is no supporting evidence from any other ancient source for the martyrdom of Stephen, but his death plays an important role in the narrative of Acts and its companion volume Luke. In the first volume, the Gospel narrative of Jesus, it is the Jews, rather than Romans, who are responsible for the death of Jesus. ` Jews rejected the claims of Christians about Jesus. Christians rejected Jews as a result and claimed the Jews murdered their own messiah. ` Later the charges were ramped up. By the end of the 2nd century, there were Christian texts claiming that since Christ was God, Jews committed deicide. ` Certainly no one was claiming that in the 1st century. But with the passing of time, as Christians repeatedly found their message about Jesus rejected by Jews, they began to turn on them and accuse them of being opposed both to their messiah and God himself. This led to two results. y On the ground, in actual history, tensions arose between Jews and Christians. Since Jews were by far the larger and more powerful group, it led to Jewish opposition to the followers of Jesus.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 101 < Lecture 15  Early Opposition to the Christian Message y In the Christian writings, the charges against Jews affected how stories were told about their past, including the accounts of the death of Jesus in the Gospels, where Jewish culpability is heightened over time. Paul’s Involvement ` The other feature of the broader narrative of Acts introduced by the stoning of Stephen is the involvement of Saul, otherwise known as Paul, in the persecution of Christians. He is involved with the stoning of Stephen and is then intent on persecuting Christians on his own, with the authorization of the Jerusalem officials. ` Even though there are some historical problems with the book of Acts, it does appear that there is some truth in this portrayal of Paul. In his own letters Paul talks about trying to “destroy” the church (Galatians 1:13). ` There is also some implausible material. In Acts, Saul is given authority by the high priest in Jerusalem to go off to other cities such as Damascus in Syria to attack Christians and drag them off to jail. However, the Jerusalem high priest had no jurisdiction over Jews in other cities in other parts of the world. The author of Acts appears not to have known that. < 101 <

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 103 < Lecture 15  Early Opposition to the Christian Message y Christians were not generally arrested. Most lived in peace. y We have only one incident of Roman imperial involvement at the highest level in the 1st century, a truly exceptional and widely misunderstood case involving the emperor Nero. ` Even though Christianity was not an illegal religion, there were occasions when Christians aroused the ire of pagans as a meddling and troublemaking group. This ire usually cropped up among neighbors and suspicious others in town. Sometimes the complaints of regular people led low-level administrators to intervene. ` There are instances of this in the book of Acts. A good example comes in Acts 16, in which Paul, on one of his missionary journeys, moves from proclaiming Christ to interfering with a pagan religious activity. y On one of his missionary journeys, Paul and his companions are in the city of Philippi, and there they encounter a slave girl who is possessed by a demon that allows her to predict the future. y She hounds the apostle and publicly maligns him until, after a few days, he deals with the problem by exorcising the demon. But her owners are incensed because they were making a profit off her demon-inspired ability to tell fortunes. y They take the Christians up before the local magistrates to complain that the Christians were causing disturbances and proclaiming customs that were opposed to Roman ways. The magistrate has Paul stripped naked, beaten, and thrown in prison. ` This lecture isn’t saying that the event happened exactly as described. However, it is indicative of the kind of thing that almost certainly happened in general: Christians were seen as opposing pagan cultic practices and therefore as troublemakers, and they were treated accordingly. ` Something broadly similar occurs in Acts 19. y Paul comes to the city of Ephesus and stays some months, doing miracles and preaching.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 116 < Lecture 17  Early Christian Apologists y The true God is the invisible force behind all that is, and he alone should be worshiped. The pagan idols were simply statues with no power and no divine presence. y The apologists also rejected the charge that there were no ancient roots to this Christian view or the Christian traditions. They pointed out that their God was the God of the Old Testament. Jews had worshiped him for many centuries. ` Despite these defenses, Christians continued to be taken to court, as they had in the days of Pliny. They were charged with atheism and sometimes taken off to be executed. This didn’t happen regularly, but it happened enough to cause serious problems for Christians in some times and places. ` The other charge against Christians was that they were involved in wild and licentious activities that threatened the moral fabric of society. The apologists mounted a vigorous defense. y They argued that Christians were the most moral people on the planet, far more moral than the pagans. y In the Christian view, pagan morality could be judged by the pagan gods; the myths were filled with gods committing adultery, having sex with family members, killing those whom they did not like, lying, and on and on. y Christians, on the other hand, had a particularly strict morality: Their religion featured prohibitions on adultery, murder, lying, and so on. ` In addition to defending themselves, the apologists made numerous arguments to show that their faith was true and should be accepted: Ancient prophecies had come true in Jesus, showing the faith was divine. Christians did amazing miracles, proving that God was behind them. The faith was spreading like wildfire, evidence of the divine power behind their message. ` There is no indication that any of these writings convinced any pagans. In fact, we have no solid evidence that they were widely read, if at all, by pagan opponents. < 117 < Lecture 17  Early Christian Apologists ` Most of them are addressed to the emperors themselves with a plea to put an end to the local persecutions that were happening here and there. Almost certainly, though, the actual audiences of these books were fellow Christians. They circulated in the churches, not to convince Christians but to provide them with ammunition to use in their debates with non-Christians who suspected them of atheistic and immoral practices. Reading Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians . Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, chapter 7. Green, Christianity in Ancient Rome . Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them . Questions ¸ What charges were leveled against the Christians by their pagan opponents in the first three centuries, and how did Christians respond? In your judgment, did these charges make sense?

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Byrd referred to people on welfare as “fornicating deadbeats.” He even appeared unsympathetic to children obtaining government assistance: if they were merely hungry, but not starving, they did not merit aid. As a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, Byrd conveniently distinguished welfare recipients in the District of Columbia (mostly black) from the deadbeats of his home state of West Virginia. Thus he made no effort to root out welfare cheaters among the mountain whites; they were his ticket into politics. In his first run for office, he courted the hillbilly crowd by playing fiddle tunes in the backseat of a car as he went from shack to shack. Reenacting the old tale of the Arkansas traveler, he cleverly played both roles in the nineteenth-century drama: the poor white and the ambitious politician. The New York Times declared Byrd to be the “embodiment of poor white power.” He was Lillian Smith’s angry redneck, who had “hacked his way out of the bushes” of poverty. As a symbol of political intolerance, he was as ruthless as they came. 17 • • • At the other end of the spectrum was the Georgian Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat who, when elected in 1970, appeared on the cover of Time as one of the “new southern governors.” Though decades removed from odious southern politicians like James Vardaman and Eugene Talmadge, Carter still had to run a “redneck” campaign in order to win. He could not ignore the example of Alabama governor George Wallace, who could ignite the white man’s rage. To capture the votes of blue-collar and rural voters, Carter painted his equally liberal opponent Carl Sanders as a corporate lawyer out of touch with the average man. Nicknaming Sanders “Cuff Link Carl,” Carter’s staff devised a television commercial with a closed country club door and a voice-over saying, “People like us aren’t invited. We’re too busy working for a living.” Carter’s team circulated the ugliest pictures of their candidate they could find in order to make him look like a poor country boy—in some he was riding a tractor. His money came from the honest trade of peanut farming, and from a warehousing operation—or so the logic went. Jimmy Carter was not one of the “Big Wigs” in Atlanta or Washington. 18 During the runoff election, Sanders’s team went on the offensive, producing flyers with photographs of the run-down homes of the tenants on Carter’s peanut farm. The flyer’s caption played off Carter’s own slogan: “Isn’t it time someone spoke up for these people?” The most damning of the opposition flyers had

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  “Prostitution is much, much, much, much—I can’t tell you how much bigger and how much more underground prostitution is than anybody knows about or seems to have been willing to talk about.” Samantha Miller is thirty-seven years old, a cheerful woman with a master’s degree in counseling. Samantha used to run the National VD Hotline. Now she runs COYOTE, the oldest prostitutes’ union in the United States. (COYOTE stands for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.) I had asked her about the streetwalker, the downtrodden woman so frequently seen in fiction and film, so little heard from. “What you see, what is portrayed in the media, is about ten percent of what’s really going on,” Samantha told me. “And that really down-and-out, do-anything-for money kind is about five percent of the ten percent. That’s what most people think of when they think of prostitution. But these women don’t identify as prostitutes, or only very rarely. They just did this because they had to feed their baby, or whatever.” There are few statistics on prostitution, and COYOTE is one of the only organizations that has attempted to define the scope of the work. COYOTE’s statistics indicate most prostitutes work privately and independently, far outside the view of the public. One problem COYOTE has identified time and again is the universal racism at work in stereotypes of prostitution. Black prostitutes are arrested and convicted far out of proportion to their numbers in the profession; about eighty-five percent of the prostitutes who do jail time are women of color. But racism works both ways; black and Hispanic women are far more likely to be harassed as though they were prostitutes in the first place, as are foreign and working-class women, as black men are far more likely to be presumed to be pimps than white men, though again, what statistics are available show this to be a false presumption. But the most enduring stereotype of the prostitute that Samantha Miller and her coworkers face is the belief that they don’t really want to be prostitutes when they do.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  I’m not trying to demonize a particular behavior, but it’s important to look at young people’s motivations as well as the quality of their experience. A 2014 survey of anal sex among heterosexuals ages sixteen to eighteen found that for boys, porn was a driving factor. They viewed the act not as something to share with a partner, whom they believed would need to be (and could be) coerced into it, but as a form of competition with one another. Their strategies included a “try it and see” approach: inserting their finger or penis into a girl’s rectum without her consent and hoping she’d acquiesce. (The Mindy Project did an entire episode on this, in which the star’s boyfriend claimed, “It slipped.”) One boy said he would simply keep at it until he wore a girl down and she’d “get fed up and let you do it anyway.” Another finding: among heterosexual women, including those who currently watch the same levels of porn, sexual submissiveness and compliance were correlated with the age at which they first started viewing. According to Paul Wright, an associate professor of media at Indiana University who conducted that research, “It suggests that if I’m female and I see porn at a very young age, I see, This is what sex is. So later on, I’m going to initiate that behavior because I think that’s what a guy wants. Or if he wants to do something, I’ll be more likely to just go along with it. If I start viewing when I’m older, I’m more like, ‘Um, this is what people do in porn, not what they do in real life.’ So if a guy is like, ‘Hey! Can I strangle you and come on your face?’ they’re more likely to say, ‘Go to hell.’ That’s our explanation, anyway. We don’t know for sure.” Although Wright has yet to analyze his data on men, he hypothesizes a similar association between age of first porn use and expressions of sexual dominance. His previous coauthored research found associations both in the US and internationally between porn consumption and men’s desire to engage in a range of aggressive behaviors, especially if the men drank regularly before sex. Among male college students, porn use has been correlated with seeing sex as a purely physical experience; regarding girls as “playthings,” objects of conquest rather than people; and measuring virility, social status, and self-worth by the ability to score with “hot” women. College students of both sexes who report recent porn consumption have repeatedly been found to be more likely than others to believe “rape myths”: that only strangers commit sexual assault or that the victim “asked for it” by drinking too much or wearing “slutty” clothing or by going out alone.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  These days, when Sameer tells people his story, they often try to let him off the hook, saying what he did wasn’t really “that bad.” That rankles him. “This is not a competition,” he said. “And also, what do you mean by ‘wasn’t that bad’? Forcing someone to do sexual things against her will, emotionally manipulating her, wasn’t that bad? Perpetuating a culture that makes people feel like they can’t say no or can’t be themselves or makes them feel scared wasn’t that bad? You’re affecting people’s lives. You don’t think it’s that bad? That’s simply not a qualifier I’m willing to accept. “It’s weird, though,” he continued. “Some people are so quick to come to a perpetrator’s aid, to justify his actions and try to make him seem like he’s not a bad guy. Then there’s other folks who are like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? This person is actively garbage, a piece-of-shit monster.’ But there’s not really that middle ground. Going through the restorative justice process and talking with Anwen gave me an opportunity to view it in a different way. The end goal is to view myself as a person who has done bad things, not just as a bad person. That’s a really hard thing to do. I don’t know if I’ll ever quite get there. At the very minimum, the silver lining becomes that you realize what you did was wrong and won’t ever do it again, and maybe you become someone who actively works every day to be a better person. To be a better man.”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The film Pretty Woman is probably the most widely seen modern vision of prostitutes’ lives. Prostitutes dismiss it with a snort, offended by its many pernicious and wrongheaded ideas. One line of dialogue stands out in particular. Richard Gere, defending himself in an argument, says to Julia Roberts, “I never treated you like a prostitute.” She demurs; it’s true. And instead I want her to scream, “How do you ‘treat’ prostitutes?” What does that mean? What demand would he make on her if he were to treat her like a prostitute? What is it in the nature of being a prostitute that allows another standard to be made? The real point of Pretty Woman isn’t, as it sometimes seems, that Julia Roberts’s character is spunky or naive or romantic, or even that she has really long legs, but that she isn’t really a prostitute. She hasn’t got the hard-core whore’s soul. When I rail on, as I sometimes do, about how awful Pretty Woman is, people will say, “It’s just a Cinderella story.” And I wonder why they haven’t figured out yet what a misogynystic story “Cinderella” is. “ ‘Doing sex work is damaging,’ people say. ‘Giving all those blowjobs is damaging, it’s degrading.’ I think society’s attitude toward blowjobs is what’s degrading. Not the actual act,” says Samantha Miller. “My belief, and this is really a hard one for people to take, is that given economic equality for women—all things equal—there would still be women who would choose to do sex work, to call themselves prostitutes, to sell sex for money, however you want to say it.” Prostitution is hard, perhaps impossible, to define. It is as shifting and malleable as sex itself. The ancient Latin name for a prostitute was meretrix—literally, “she who earns.” Over the course of human history definitions have relied not only on the exchange of cash or goods for sex, but the number of men with whom a woman has sex, the percentage of time a woman spends having sex, even the degree of pleasure and lack thereof taken by the woman, this last to distinguish the professional from the merely shameless. World history has given us a great many variations on what we might consider prostitution, including travel companions for nomadic hunters, “temporary” marriages, “hostesses” for tribal guests, promiscuity during religious festivals, “hired” sex not for money but for increased spiritual harmony. In some cultures, a whore is officially any promiscuous, unmarried woman—but there isn’t necessarily anything evil attached to the name. What we may call prostitution might not be seen that way elsewhere or at another time; what another culture or time called prostitution might not seem so to us. According to the Bible, adultery is a form of prostitution. The one thing that is consistent in western history is that any “loose” woman, any “adventuress,” is dangerous and must be controlled.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I’ll have you know: Regina told us that she reached out to you.” Then she shoos me toward the phone in her bedroom so she can listen in on our conversation from the kitchen phone. “Yes, Mr. Accerbi. I’ll get her on the phone now.” I rub my sweaty hands on my Jordaches before I answer the phone. “This is Regina.” My heart pounds. My voice wants to shriek in delight. “Young lady,” he says. “You should know what a disruption you have created in my life.” “Pardon me?” “My wife is sick and has been crying on the couch for days over this. I don’t have a strong heart, and your behavior could very well result in a second heart attack. I don’t know who you are or why you believe what you believe, or even why you wrote such a letter to my family members. You have created an embarrassing situation for all of us and I am sure that you have also upset your foster parents as well.” Now this is personal—he will not get away with trying to manipulate me this way. “Hey Paul,” I dare ask him, “how did you get our phone number or figure out my foster parents’ names?” “It is no concern to you how I found it out,” he says. “I just did.” I know I’ve cornered him. This verbal volleyball is like fighting with Cookie. “Who was here? Was it you?” He falls silent. “So I’ll assume that you drove by the return address that I left you in the letter, saw the Petermans’ names on the mailbox, and looked up their number.” I whisper: “Didn’t you?” It’s in that breath I realize without a doubt that he has to be my father—why else would he be calling me, going to these lengths to find out the names of my foster parents, and our phone number? He ignores my question and says he wants to meet me. “Good, I want to meet you, too . . . but there are rules. Either my foster parents or my social worker have to be present.” “I’m not meeting you with others around.” “Look, I don’t have a choice. I’m a sixteen-year-old girl living under the roof of foster parents, and I have to obey or else I could end up back on the street. Those are the terms. That’s the only way.” “I’ll think about it,” he says. “And I’ll call you tomorrow.” The next day Addie speaks to the social worker who says Paul can meet me at the house in a room separate from the supervision. “Or if he wants to meet outside the home, Pete or I have to be there but we can make it inconspicuous,” Addie says. I skip school as Addie and I plan how we can set up the meeting . . . and record it.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  Although Koresh was arrested and charged with attempted murder, his trial ended in a hung jury and the charges were dropped. While Roden was incarcerated, Koresh took over the group and began using classic thought-reform techniques, such as isolation, sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion through mindless activity and overwork, food deprivation, and phobia induction. He led long hours of indoctrination, sometimes subjecting his followers to fifteen-hour sessions of Bible study. Koresh built up a following of several hundred men, women, and children, including those recruited on his trips to Israel, Australia, England, and other parts of the United States. His grandiose sense of self was well-known. His business card was imprinted "Messiah," and he stated on countless occasions, "If the Bible is true, then I'm Christ." Some believed him. He was able to convince husbands to give up their wives to him, and families to turn over their money and children. By April 19, 1993, there were almost one hundred people who believed in his promise of a heavenly afterlife. Koresh's callousness and lack of empathy were apparent in the treatment of his followers, specifically the children, whom he abused physically, emotionally, and sexually, then held as hostages during the FBI standoff, pawns in his ultimate power play. In the end, there were probably twenty-five children among the followers who died. Koresh's pathological lyingwas directed at media, government forces, and his followers. For example, he repeatedly reneged on promises to surrender and he assured his followers that they would be safe in underground bunkers. His lack of remorse, shame, or guilt was evident over the years as he frequently admitted that he was a sinner without equal. At no time is he known to have shown remorse for the harm inflicted on so many of his followers or for the suffering of their families. Koresh clearly revealed his incapacity for love and sexual instability by bedding and "wedding" all the women in the group, including other men's wives and girls as young as twelve years old. After demanding celibacy from all the men, Koresh must have wallowed in sadistic enjoyment as he was openly sexual with their wives, even though some of these men were his most loyal lieutenants. He displayed a restless need for stimulation in his stockpiling of weapons and ammunition, his irrational outbursts, and his frenzied activity within the compound. Poor behavior controls were evident in his raging at and physical abuse of the children and adults who worshiped him, and in his constantly changing rules about acceptable behavior. His parasitic lifestyle allowed him to live off the earnings of others while he regarded himself as a biblical king, Christ himself. His impulsive nature was apparent in the punishments that rained down on adults and children alike at any perceived disrespect or disobedience. He ruled by whim and fiat; he ruled by terror. His criminal versatility was exhibited throughout his life.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Solution? Simple: I suggest immediately opening up our borders to unrestricted immigration for all Central and South American countries. If the CIA grads don't want to squat in a cellar prep kitchen for the first couple of years of their career, or are too delicate or high-strung or too locked into a self-image that precludes the real work of kitchens and restaurants, then they should just stand back and watch their competition from south of the border take those jobs away for good. Everyone will end up getting what they deserve. It'll be a wake-up call for the home-team cooks and a boon to our industry—and the right thing to do. Perhaps the CIA should start a farm team in Mexico or Panama, like the Yankee organization. And every Mexican and Ecuadoran line cook in New York should get an immediate raise, amnesty from any immigration charges, a real green card—and the thanks of a grateful nation. COUNTER CULTURE For a while, I thought it was just me. After years of eating well, in great restaurants, four hours at Alain Ducasse New York now felt like a year with an ugly mob. Sitting there in my high-backed chair, choking in my tie, oppressed by the dark dining room, the relentlessly hushed formality of it all. . . by the time my waiter pushed over the little cart and invited me to choose from a selection of freaking bottled waters, unironically describing the sources and attributes of each while I squirmed in agony, I felt ready for my head to explode with frustration. At Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, asking simply where I could find a bathroom, I had my napkin whisked away and was escorted to the bathroom with humiliating ceremony (all the way into the stall—where, as I recall with unease, I was also advised how I might find paper and operate a toilet). By the time the waiter had dutifully replaced the refolded napkin on my lap, surely no one in the dining room was left uninformed as to exactly where I'd been and what I'd had to do. There might as well have been a flourish of trumpets announcing "the customer at table seven has an urgent need for a piss!" While it's okay for Ferran Adria to tell me exactly how he wants me to eat each dish ("One bite! All at once!"—he is Ferran Adria, after all), some foam- and agar-agar-crazed wannabe in London or Chicago who tries to tell me how to chew my food is gonna get a pepper mill upside his head—if he even allows pepper near the table anymore. I've had it with the pomposity of it all. Restaurants are supposed to be about the food, aren't they? They're supposed to be . . . well . . . fun.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  A known troublemaker since his teens, he had been arrested for attempted murder, had stockpiled illegal weapons, and had sexually abused children and others. Finally, his own death and that of his followers-whether the fires were accidentally ignited by FBI tanks or deliberately set by cult members-showed his total irresponsibility, to say the least. To a person with this type of antisocial personality disorder, those who follow him are regarded by him as fools, suckers, and dupes. They don't exist as people; they are playthings to be used and abused. The idea of taking responsibility is as foreign to such a person as the ability to feel compassion, empathy, or sympathy, unless he has some ulterior motive in simulating such feelings. Throughout his life, David Koresh displayed a sense of purpose. He also had the ruthless determination to reach his objectives, no matter what the cost to others. It is likely that his behavior suffered a psychotic degeneration under the intense pressure of his last two months under siege by the ATF and FBI. Mental health professionals and cult researchers may continue for some time to question the diagnoses attributed to Koresh, not so much as a matter of scientific debate as an issue of deep social concern. Unmasking the GuruAs you read the fifteen-point checklist and David Koresh's profile, you may notice characteristics that are similar to and explain some of the attributes, atti tudes, and behaviors of your leader. Unmasking or demystifying the leader is an important part of postcult recovery. Becoming familiar with the characteristics of this personality disorder may help you prevent being revictimized. Here are some questions to ask about your experience: • How well did you know your leader? Was it through firsthand knowledge or others' accounts? • What did you feel when you met him? • Did those feelings change during the time you spent in the group or relationship? • Was your leader charismatic, charming, quick-witted, or able to sway a crowd? How did your leader use those qualities to get his way? • Did you believe your leader to have special powers, exalted spirituality, or special knowledge? Do you still believe that? • Did you ever catch your leader lying or faking? Being inconsistent? How did you rationalize what you saw and heard when it was clearly aberrant, irrational, or abusive? • How did your leader rationalize his behavior when it was aberrant, irrational, or abusive? • How many of the fifteen traits listed in the profile did you observe in your leader? • Were there second-level leaders in the group? Did they psychologically resemble the leader or were they devoted disciples blindly following orders? • What do you know of your leader's childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood? Does he fit the pattern? • Were you sexually intimate with your leader? How did that relationship come about and how was it explained or justified?

• From Christian Saints

  12. Saints and the Protestant Reformation Protestant Resistance to Cults The Protestant Reformation represented a significant and long-simmering backlash against Catholic practices and corruption in the Catholic Church. This was set against the backdrop of the 15th century, which had seen an explosion of new saints’ cults. The spiritual economy—the practice by which money, lands, and goods on earth could be exchanged for time off in purgatory—was booming. This was partly due to increased dedication of wealth to the refurbishment of chapels, churches, and shrines. It was also tied to the sale of indulgences, often available to pilgrims or other believers, for a fee. Protestant reformers responded strongly to the cult of the saints as a multitude of practices that they argued were embedded within larger institutional corruption. Some theologians criticized the resources that went to praising the holy dead, pointing out that money could have gone to charities that served the living poor. Pamphlets railed against the social disorder of saints’ feast days, which they complained led to drunkenness, sin, and licentious behavior. The feast days did add some 50 holidays to the annual calendar on which servants and employees did not work, which reformers complained also disrupted industry and the economy. Reformation beliefs varied enormously among regions and among leaders. English Protestantism, governed by the crown in the form of the English Church, tentatively continued to embrace saints—within limits. Martin Luther, too, allowed for the important role they played as exemplars and inspirations of faith. Others, such as John Calvin, railed against saints and their images as idolatrous. 87