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 The Argonauts (2015)

  Throughout my postpartum delirium, I found myself lazily clicking on articles on my AOL home page (yes, AOL) about how certain celebrities got back into shape or into being sexual after babies. It’s humdrum but relentless: the obsession with who’s pregnant and who’s showing and whose life is transforming due to the imminent arrival of the all-miraculous, all-coveted BABY—all of which flips, in the blink of an eye, into an obsession with how soon all signs of bearing the life-transforming BABY can evaporate, how soon the mother’s career, sex life, weight can be restored, as if nothing ever happened here at all. Who cares what SHE feels like doing? It’s her conjugal duty to get over a massive physical event that has literally rearranged her organs and stretched her parts beyond comprehension and brought her through a life-or-death portal as soon as humanly possible. As in this post by a woman on Marriage Missions, a Christian website that hopes “to help those who are married and those preparing for marriage to be PRO-ACTIVE in helping to save marriage from divorce”: “I felt what I did all day was meet other people’s needs. Whether it was caring for my children, working in ministry, or washing my husband’s clothes, by the end of the day I wanted to be done need-meeting. I wanted my pillow and a magazine. But God prompted me: Are the “needs” you meet for your husband the needs he wants met?’” The answer of course is NO! No less than GOD says she needs to put aside the sanity-producing magazine and pillow and start fucking her husband! Get over yourself and start fucking! God says, get GGG! GGG: Good, Giving, and Game. That’s sex-advice columnist Dan Savage’s acronym, meaning “good in bed,” “giving equal time and equal pleasure,” and “game for anything—within reason.” “If you are expected to be monogamous and have one person be all things sexually for you, then you have to be whores for each other,” Savage says. “You have to be up for anything.” These are solid guidelines to which I have long aspired. But now I think we have a right to our kink and our fatigue, both.

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

  black mistress, even if the black wench wore a white mask. Her stain of impurity would never be tolerated among Washington’s better sort. Another unpoliced critic made a similar argument. Her crude conduct might belong in “every cabin beyond the mountains,” he wrote, but not in the President’s House. 64 Even without the marriage scandal, Rachel Jackson had the look of a lower- class woman. One visitor to the Jacksons’ home in Tennessee thought she might be mistaken for an old washerwoman. Another described her as fat and her skin tanned, which may explain the “black wench” slur. Whiteness was a badge of class privilege denied to poor cracker gals who worked under the sun. Critics laughed at Mrs. Jackson’s backcountry pronunciation; they made fun of her favorite song, “Possum Up a Gum Tree.” She smoked a pipe. Alas, Rachel Jackson succumbed to heart disease shortly before she was meant to accompany her husband to Washington and take up her duties as First Lady. Her death only intensified the incoming president’s hatred for his political enemies. 65 • • • To be sure, even beyond class issues, Jackson’s candidacy changed the nature of democratic politics. One political commentator noted that Jackson’s reign ushered in the “game of brag.” Jacksonians routinely exaggerated their man’s credentials, saying he was not just the “Knight of New Orleans,” the country’s “deliverer,” but also the greatest general in all human history. Another observer concluded that a new kind of “talkative country politician” had arisen, who could speak for hours before having finally “exhausted the fountain of his panegyric on General Jackson.” 66 Bragging had a distinctive class dimension in the 1820s and 1830s. In a satire published in Tennessee, a writer took note of the strange adaptations of the code of chivalry in defense of honor. The story involved a duel between one Kentucky “Knight of the Red Rag” and a “great and mighty Walnut cracker” of Tennessee. The nutcracker gave himself an exalted title: “duke of Wild Cat Cove, little and big Hog Thief Creek, Short Mountain, Big Bore Cave and Cuwell’s Bridge.” So what did this kind of posturing mean? Like certain masters of gangsta rap in the twenty-first century, crackers had to make up for their lowly status by dressing themselves up in a boisterous verbal garb. In the Crockett manner, lying and boasting made up for the absence of class pedigree. This, too, was Andrew Jackson. He used duels, feuds, and oaths to rise in the political pecking order in the young state of Tennessee. 67

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  A second drug, approved in 2019, is an abdominal injection you give yourself an hour or so before sex. In clinical trials, it did not increase sexual frequency, nor did it increase participants’ reported sexual satisfaction. It did increase participants’ scores on a general survey of sexual functioning—a survey developed by the pharmaceutical industry.15 (This drug, too, was not a bonanza. Unsurprisingly.) But the real story behind these drugs isn’t simply that they don’t “work”—that is, they don’t increase spontaneous desire or sexual frequency, except perhaps in a small minority of women. The real story is that even the women for whom the drugs “work” were never broken in the first place. One woman who had a great experience on Flibanserin during the trial phase told Cosmo what her sex life was like before she started the drug.16 She said, “Once I started, it wasn’t an issue. It was getting me started.” Sound familiar? That’s responsive desire. Healthy and normal. Another participant said something similar: “I miss really wanting to have sex. I hate having to ‘wind myself up’ to do it. It makes me feel broken. It takes a really dedicated effort for me to be there physically and mentally.”17 Again and again in mainstream media coverage, research participants were describing intact responsive desire.18 Which is healthy and normal! Their relationships were strong and their health was good—both things had to be true for women to qualify to participate in the drug trial—yet they believed their responsive desire was a disease. And so they felt broken. Of course they felt broken. They were taught the same thing that the rest of us were taught, the same thing even their doctors were taught, about sexual desire: that it “should” be spontaneous. That a person who doesn’t spontaneously just crave sex is diseased. Does feeling diseased and broken activate the accelerator? Are we starting to get the picture, that telling women they’re broken is a great way to break women? The starkest example of this, to me, came during the FDA hearing for Flibanserin. FDA panel member and urologist Dr. Phil Hanno asked why women in the study were having, on average, two to three “satisfying sexual events” (SSEs) per month before the drug trial began.19 If they lacked desire, why were they having any sex? Which… okay, Dr. Hanno. Can I call you Phil? Phil. Sometimes women have sex because they’re bored. Sometimes they have sex because their partners want to have sex and they love their partners, so sure honey, let’s do it. Sometimes it’s to end a fight. Sometimes it’s because they feel so loving they want to express that love, and maybe sex is a way to do that.20 But here is what a presenter from the drugmaker said in response: “Once they engage in activity, it’s pleasurable.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  He rarely fought since joining the tent team, but sometimes his temper got away from him, and he had to pray through at the next altar call. This would be one of those nights. He grabbed the man who held Brother Terrell’s arm.“Now, Dockery, now hold on . . .”As the words left Brother Terrell’s mouth, one of the men took a step toward Dockery, and another landed a punch on Brother Terrell’s jaw. That’s when Dockery went wild. Randall came running with the other tent men and gave us an eyewitness account later that night. He said Dockery punched and kicked and yelled and that it took Brother Gunn, Red, and a couple of others to keep him from killing the man who hit Brother Terrell. Once the tent crew had separated Dockery from the attackers, Brother Gunn, one of the more even-tempered tent men, turned to ask them what they wanted. The largest of the three men shrugged off Red and walked back over to Brother Terrell.“You better git them niggers out from under that tent. I mean clear ’em out.”Brother Terrell spread his good hand in front them, pleading, “Those people came to worship God. I can’t, I won’t, ask ’em to leave.”“It’s on your head, preacher.” The men turned and walked away. One of them lit a cigarette. Dockery started to yell that there was no smoking on the tent grounds, then let it go when Brother Terrell waved him and the others closer.“Look, I got to take the platform. Someone call the law.”Dockery snorted. “Those men probably are the law.”In a tradition that harkened back to the roots of the modern Pentecostal movement, sawdust-trail revivalists had long welcomed blacks and whites under their tents. It all started when the one-eyed son of former slaves, Reverend William Joseph Seymour, founded a storefront church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. After praying for months for an outpouring of the spirit, Reverend Seymour and his followers began to speak in tongues one day in 1906. They kept at it for the next three years. What became known as the Azusa Street Revival drew thousands of blacks and whites and was characterized by the Los Angeles Times as “. . . a disgraceful co-mingling of the races . . .” Holy Roller churches based on the Azusa Street experience sprang up all over the world, with one notable difference: There was no mingling of the races. Tent evangelists such as Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, Jack Coe, and others persevered in interracial worship, but seated blacks and whites in separate sections of their tents when traveling through the South.Not one for half measures, Brother Terrell said others could compromise with the devil, but bless God, he wasn’t afraid to face Satan head-on. “Red, yellow, black, or polka-dotted, we’re all God’s children, and we all sit together under my tent,” he said.Not that we identified with the civil rights movement.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Without a doubt, they are economically independent only within an economically oppressed class; and besides, tasks carried out in a factory do not free them from household chores.1 If they had been able to choose between forty hours of weekly work in a factory or at home, they would undoubtedly have responded quite differently; and they might even accept both jobs eagerly if, as women workers, they would become part of a world that would be their world, that they would proudly and happily participate in building. In today’s work, without even mentioning women who work on the land,2 most working women do not escape the traditional feminine world; neither society nor their husbands give them the help needed to become, in concrete terms, the equals of men. Only those women with political convictions, active in trade unions, who are confident in the future, can give an ethical meaning to the thankless daily labor; but as women deprived of leisure time and inheriting a tradition of submissiveness, it is understandable that they are just beginning to develop their political and social awareness. It is understandable that since they do not receive the moral and social benefits they could legitimately expect in exchange for their work, they simply resign themselves to its constraints. It is also understandable that a shopgirl, an office worker, or a secretary should not want to give up the advantages of having a male to lean on. I have already said that it is an almost irresistible temptation for a young woman to be part of a privileged caste when she can do so simply by surrendering her body; she is doomed to have love affairs because her wages are minimal for the very high standard of living society demands of her; if she settles for what she earns, she will be no more than a pariah: without decent living accommodations or clothes, all amusement and even love will be refused her. Virtuous people preach asceticism to her; in fact, her diet is often as austere as a Carmelite’s; but not everyone can have God as a lover: she needs to please men to succeed in her life as a woman. So she will accept help: her employer cynically counts on this when he pays her a pittance. Sometimes this help will enable her to improve her situation and achieve real independence; but sometimes she will give up her job to become a kept woman. She often does both: she frees herself from her lover through work, and she escapes work thanks to her lover; but then she experiences the double servitude of a job and masculine protection. For the married woman, her salary usually only means extra income; for the “woman who is helped,” it is the man’s protection that seems inessential; but neither woman buys total independence through her own efforts.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  “Let’s, uh, let’s slow down here,” he said, leaning back. He was floundering for once. “I don’t hate you, and if you have that impression…I’m sorry. I am sorry I was mean to you. It’s just that…I have a hard time trusting you because…I’m willing to admit that perhaps I…Well…maybe I created an impression of you when you first got here that you might’ve outgrown. It’s just, you struggled when you first came here. And from the minute you came to this show, you were just so…different…from the rest of the staff.” “Why do you treat other producers better than me?” I asked him straight up. He didn’t even pause. “Because they’re great reporters.” Now it was my turn to recoil. My rage superseded my heartbreak just enough to hold back another round of tears. “I don’t know how I can work for someone who doesn’t respect me,” I managed. “I’m sorry. I quit.” I walked back to my office and stared at it. It was so full of stuff. Vitamins, snacks, clothes, space heaters, blankets—I had truly made work my second home. Now I crammed whatever I could into a large box, and even though it was only two in the afternoon, I took it straight home and crawled into bed. “Different.” I was so different from the rest of the staff. What did that mean? How was I supposed to be? Another boss called me that evening and begged me to come back. Told me my jerk boss had agreed to be nicer and was ready to apologize. I was talented and valuable—he was just a numbskull. Couldn’t I please give them one more chance? So I went to work the next day and the next. But every night, I’d dig through my drawers and fill my purse with my belongings, slowly emptying the office one lipstick at a time. In mid-February, I made myself attend just one more company party, and I spent most of it standing in a corner listening. There they were, once again: the clinking glasses, the bright smiles, joy seeping out of the bar with a butter-yellow glow. The disconnect was painted in vibrant relief. Maybe other people were angry about the state of the world, but in real life, they were laughing about television shows. On Instagram, they were making muffins. They were remembering to call people back. Everyone was…generally okay. If I possessed the anxiety-and-depression combo meal everyone else had, then why was I the only one crying on the subway every morning? Why couldn’t I figure out how to be like everyone else? Why did the dread follow me, leaving a path of destruction everywhere I went? — On February 28, I learned the answer to all of those questions when I called Samantha for our therapy session.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  I embarked on this research in 2018. It’s important to understand that two years later, in 2020, Robert F. Anda, the co–principal investigator of the initial ACE study, came out with an article and a YouTube video stating that ACEs were a relatively crude way of measuring childhood trauma.[6] The scores are remarkably helpful epidemiologically—for people to understand the overall significance of childhood trauma on public health. But Anda underlined that ACEs are not a good measure of an individual’s life span or health outcomes. There is a wide level of variation for each score. For example, a person with an ACE score of 1 who had extremely frequent instances of their trauma might be just as traumatized as someone with a score of 6 who witnessed a broader breadth of events but experienced them on a much rarer basis. As the following chart shows, there is a lot of overlap. Clearly, people with higher scores do face genuinely larger risks. But the scores are not hard-and-fast determinants. [image "Chart: Relationship between hypothetical biomarker for cumulative stress exposure and the ACE score." file=image_rsrc3E8.jpg] ACE scores also don’t account for whether a child had good resources, such as adults who provided them with safe and loving relationships or therapists who taught them to manage their stress better. They don’t account for gender variation, as PTSD manifests differently in men and women. In his article, Anda cautioned that using ACE scores as an individual screening tool has several risks, including that ACEs “may stigmatize or lead to discrimination…generate client anxiety about toxic-stress physiology, or misclassify individual risk.”[7] — I was incredibly relieved to read this in 2020, but in 2018, without any of this context, I felt anxious and stigmatized as hell. I became obsessed with my imminent demise, and like anyone who has been handed a death sentence, I underwent a mini existential crisis. I felt rushed, frightened, and angry—furious. Years of future life had been stolen from me. Years I could have spent hiking Machu Picchu or taking care of grandkids or painting cubist renditions of chickens. And it wasn’t just the ACE score that seemed to tell me my body was shattered and sick. My grief kept growing with every progressive study I read about the biological effects of trauma, all the charts and graphs and diagrams that told me I’d sustained brain damage. Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from those of people who haven’t.[8] Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  I wrote to Samantha telling her my feelings, asking why she hadn’t been more open about C-PTSD. She explained that she had brought it up during our first session—but that was eight years ago. Our first session was so strange and new for me, I’m sure I’d missed that one little word of difference: complex. In terms of why it never again came up, Samantha said that whenever I was in a depressive state, she didn’t want to add to my burden by bringing up the weight of my diagnosis. And whenever I was happy, she didn’t want to cloud my joy. She was protecting me, she insisted, and she saw now that it might have been the wrong decision, even though it was made with love. I thanked her for her explanation and for her help over the years. But as grateful as I was for her love and support, I knew I couldn’t see her anymore. This lack of communication bordered on deception for me. I needed someone new. I knew that a superb therapist could point me in the direction of healing—I’d benefitted so much from Samantha’s help over the years. I knew that in the right therapist’s office, I could feel safe. But I really, really did not want to look for one. Finding a person to declare your craziest, most profound insecurities to is not exactly a picnic. But the bureaucratic idiocy of America’s healthcare system turns what should be a chore into torture. If you’re a middle-class person in America, the dance goes like this: You call your insurance provider to find a meager list of therapists who take your insurance. Most of the people on the list are licensed clinical social workers or licensed mental health counselors. They can be wonderful and very helpful, but they often have less schooling and experience than, say, psychologists and PhDs. After digging deeper, you find that some of these therapists don’t take your insurance after all; others have full client lists. And even if they do have space in the day to treat someone, they might not be interested in treating you. According to one study, a low-income Black person has up to an 80 percent lower chance of receiving a callback for an appointment than a middle-class white person.[2] And even though intellectually, therapists tell you that anger can be a helpful and legitimate emotion in processing trauma, God forbid you actually seem angry on the phone. Several mental health professionals have told me that therapists often avoid rageful clients because they seem threatening or scary. Therapists instead prefer to take on YAVIS—Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful clients.[3] They love an amenable type, someone who is curious about their internal workings and eager to plumb them, someone who’s already read articles in The New Yorker about psychology to familiarize them with the language of metacognition and congruence. Good luck if you’re a regular-ass Joe who’d rather watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  —Jesus Christ, I waited around for more than a half hour, in the dark, in nothing but my boxer shorts, no wait, with the light on, so anybody could have come by and seen me in the window. What’s that all about? What the hell happened? Janey sipped. She set the drink down on the table, beside the vase. —A prior engagement overcame me. —What do you mean? What kind of stuff is this? I mean— —Listen, Benjamin Hood, I have obligations that precede your … from before you showed up in my life. One or two, you know, good-natured encounters, that doesn’t mean I’m … I’m not just some toy for you. When I remembered some chores I wanted to get done before the party, I just did them, that’s all, because I wanted to do them before I saw Jimmy. I just did them. And that’s how it’s going to be. The cat lolled on the chair in front of them. Hood’s face was inches from Janey’s. He mumbled. —I don’t know how to take this. And what do you mean, Jimmy? I thought you said— —How you take it isn’t all that interesting to me, Benjamin. I’m sorry— —I just can’t believe you would be so … The talk stalled. The two of them fell to watching other molecules of conversation cleave and sunder. They circulated. Fragments of sense came and went in the room, evanescent fragments. Sobriety was dwindling. All over the room. The New York Mets and the oil crisis, Watergate and Rod Laver and Billie Jean King, and the unacceptable new rector at the Episcopalian church—all mixed up. No calamity would organize these fragments, no moment of high gossip. Ford had ended the production of the beloved convertible in July of this year. Modular furniture, flared trousers, plaids on plaids. Noise. Janey lit a Virginia Slims and French-inhaled it. —Things aren’t going well for me, Hood said. You know, Elena is very unhappy and the office has become a really desperate situation. Really desperate. I wish you didn’t have to make things hard, Janey. I don’t understand why you have to. I guess I was dumb, but I was sort of counting on you. —I’m not making it anything, she said. The situation just is difficult. And I’ll tell you this, Benjamin, your domestic … your home life is no worse or better than anyone else’s. In my house, we’re living separate lives. Separate floors, separate lives, separate everything. And I don’t go expecting a little afternoon something-or-other to alter that. A couple of hours with you isn’t going to change that. I’m not going to threaten my family, my security, just so that I can listen to your problems at the office, you know? —But why didn’t you just say so? Why couldn’t we talk— —I— —And why did you leave the lingerie out for me? —What lingerie? I went to the store for God’s sake, to Shopwell.

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

  In some ways their thinking was sane and reasonable, but in others it was psychotically inefficient and/or convoluted.18 Researcher Larry Strasburger described people with Antisocial Personality Disorder in this way: These people are impulsive, unable to tolerate frustration and delay, and have problems with trusting. They take a paranoid position or externalize their emotional experience. They have little ability to form a working alliance and a poor capacity for self-observation. Their anger is frightening. Frequently they take flight. Their relations with others are highly problematic. When close to another person they fear engulfment or fusion or loss of self. At the same time, paradoxically, they desire closeness; frustration of their entitled wishes to be nourished, cared for, and assisted often leads to rage. They are capable of a child's primitive fury enacted with an adult's physical capabilities, and action is always in the offing.19 Ultimately, "the psychopath must have what he wants, no matter what the cost to those in his way."" The Master ManipulatorHow might some of this be manifested in a cult leader? Cult leaders have an outstanding ability to charm and win over followers. They beguile and seduce. They enter a room and garner all the attention. They command unwavering allegiance and strict obedience. These are, as Restak writes, "individuals whose narcissism is so extreme and grandiose that they exist in a kind of splendid isolation in which the creation of the grandiose self takes precedence over legal, moral or interpersonal commitments."21 Paranoia may be evident in simple or elaborate delusions of persecution. Highly suspicious, they may feel conspired against, spied on, cheated, or maligned by a person, group, or governmental agency. Any real or suspected unfavorable reaction may be interpreted as a deliberate attack on them or the group (considering the criminal nature of some groups and the antisocial behavior of others, such fears may have a basis in reality). More difficult to evaluate, of course, is whether these leaders' belief in their magical powers, omnipotence, and connection to God (or whatever higher power or belief system they are espousing) is delusional or simply part of the con. Megalomania, or the belief that one is able or entitled to rule the world, is equally challenging to evaluate without psychological testing, although numerous cult leaders state quite readily that their goal is to rule the world. In any case, beneath the surface gloss of intelligence, charm, and professed humility seethes an inner world of rage, depression, and fear. "Trust Bandit" 22 is one way to describe these characters; indeed, it is an apt description of these thieves of our hearts, souls, minds, bodies, and pocketbooks. Given that a significant percentage of current and former cult members have been in more than one cultic group or relationship, learning to recognize the personality style of the Trust Bandit can be a useful antidote to further abuse.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Eric Voelz additionally told the New Yorker , “ The United States has never handed out Purple Hearts with a palm.” He said that ditto marks, which are found on the document provided by the church, do not typically appear on forms of this kind. The font was also suspect, since it was not consistent with the size or style of the times. Voelz had never heard of the “Marine Medal,” and he took issue with the “Br. & Dtch. Vict. Meds.” found on the church document, saying that medals awarded by foreign countries are not listed on a Notice of Separation and that they were unlikely to have been awarded to an American in any case. A few months after this meeting, Davis and Feshbach stopped representing Scientology, even though they continued to be listed as the top spokespeople on the church website. Rumor from former members is that Davis blew but was recovered and once again subjected to sec-checking. Then Feshbach became seriously ill. According to the church, they are on a leave of absence from the Sea Org for medical reasons. They are now living in Texas. When I last spoke to Davis, he said, “I think you should know my allegiances haven’t changed—at all.” He added: “I don’t have to answer your questions anymore.” 1 In my meeting with Isham, he had asserted that Scientology is not a “faith-based religion.” Leaving aside the question of what religion is without faith, I pointed out that in Scientology’s upper levels, there was a cosmology that would have to be accepted on faith. Isham responded that he wasn’t going to discuss the details of OT III, nor had I asked him to. “You understand the only reason it’s confidential is because in the wrong hands it can hurt people,” he told me, evidently referring to Hubbard’s warning that those who are not spiritually prepared to receive the information would die, of pneumonia. 2 The church denies that this ever happened. Davis admits that the briefcase was lost but claims that there were no sex-related videos inside. 3 Davis says he and his wife divorced because of irreconcilable differences and that “it had nothing to do with the organization.” 4 Davis says that he does not recall meeting Shannon, has never scrubbed a Dumpster, and has no need to borrow money. 5 Davis denies that he blew or was in Las Vegas. Noriyuki Matsumaru, who was a finance officer in the Religious Technology Center at the time, told me he was in charge of handling Davis’s punishment when he returned.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  He remembered only that he’d been filled with rage when he saw Mason dancing with Miri. He would have killed Mason if he could have, but he didn’t know why. What made him feel that way? By midafternoon it was snowing pretty hard. At the airport they learned their plane back to Newark had been canceled due to the weather. “This isn’t good,” his father said. “I have to get back. I have a full day tomorrow.” “And I have a test in chemistry,” Steve told him. “Let me see what I can do,” his father said. “Wait here and watch our stuff.” What stuff? Steve wondered. They had no bags, except for one with college scarves for Natalie, who collected them, and another with a little wool hat in Tufts colors, blue and brown, for Fern. His father was gone for half an hour and came back looking pleased, waving around two boarding passes. “Snagged two tickets,” he said. “We board in fifteen minutes.” It wasn’t until they’d taken off and reached their cruising altitude that his father leaned close and said, “You can never tell your mother we flew on a non-sked.” Steve looked at him. Was he kidding? “She’d never forgive me,” his father said. “We’re on a non-sked?” Steve asked. “You didn’t know?” his father said. Steve shook his head. “It’s not a C-46, ” his father said. “I’d never fly with you on a C-46. ” Was that supposed to be reassuring? “Even so, you know how your mother is, so this has to be our secret.” When Steve didn’t say anything, his father gave him a playful punch in the arm. “Man to man. Agreed?” “Sure,” Steve said. “Agreed.” But he couldn’t believe his father had risked his life, the life of his only son, because he had to get back to the office, back to his precious patients. You’d think, after spending night after night trying to identify burned and dismembered corpses, his father would never fly again, let alone take a non-sked. [image "Newark Sunday News" file=Image00017.jpg] [image "Newark Sunday News" file=Image00017.jpg] INSIDE HOLLYWOODBy Virginia McPhersonJAN. 20 — Hollywood is still digging itself out of the muck and mud from the latest West Coast storm disaster—and some marooned movie stars haven’t scooped out yet. Humphrey Bogart waded hip-deep into muddy water on Sunset Boulevard to direct traffic. Hasn’t had so much fun in years. “Couldn’t get home for three days,” he grinned. “Just holed up in the Beverly Hills Hotel bar and stayed spiffed for 72 hours.” Until his spouse Lauren Bacall phoned irately, “You get home tonight, with milk and orange juice for your son…or else!” Bogie got. 12 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] MiriMiri was on her bed, reading her favorite columns in the Sunday paper, when the doorbell rang. She ran down the stairs to answer it.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “What’s all this?” “Hello, Mrs. Ammerman.” The woman held out her hand again. “Frekki Monsky.” Irene’s hand went to her chest. “You have the nerve to show up here, at my house?” “Now, Mrs. Ammerman—” “Don’t you now, Mrs. Ammerman me!” Miri had never heard such anger in her grandmother’s voice. This time Rusty shouted, “Go upstairs, Miri!” “I’m going to get Nana a pill.” “I don’t need a pill,” Irene said. “Yes, you do,” Miri told her. “I can tell.” “Why don’t you invite me in?” Frekki said. “I mean no harm and it’s freezing out here.” “That looks like a warm coat to me,” Rusty said, hugging herself. Miri came back with Irene’s pill, but Irene waved her away. “All right,” Frekki said. “If that’s how it’s going to be…” She pulled a creamy envelope out of her purse. “This is for Miriam. An invitation to lunch and a show at the Paper Mill Playhouse. I hope you’ll be reasonable about this, Rusty. I live in South Orange now. I’m married to a doctor. I’m in a position to be a positive influence in Miriam’s life.” Miri felt sick to her stomach. But at the same time, excited. FrekkiFrekki’s husband, J.J., had a cousin in Elizabeth who owned Strasser Sports. How many times had she brought the boys to their store for their team uniforms, for the expert in athletic shoes, said to be the best in the state, to fit them properly? More than ten years of shopping trips for summer camp, and to make sure they had the best equipment for baseball, basketball, football, never mind the hockey skates, the cleats. They’d built a special closet in the finished basement just for the boys’ athletic equipment. In September, during the annual trek to Elizabeth, Sherry Strasser, the cousin’s wife, invited Frekki to lunch. “Leave the boys at the store and come out with me.” The boys, who were now seventeen and nineteen, were capable of looking after themselves, so she’d accepted Sherry’s invitation to lunch at Dorothy Dennis, a ladies’ tearoom. “We don’t get to see you often enough,” Sherry said. “I know. J.J. and I were just saying the same thing.” After their sandwich plates had been cleared and the tea served, Sherry said, “The store is so busy this time of year I help out as much as I can, and last week I saw a young girl, maybe fifteen, with eyes exactly like your brother’s.” Frekki wasn’t sure how to respond. “She’s friends with the Osner girl. You know the Osners, don’t you? He’s a dentist.” “Yes, I’ve met them at the Club.” “So while the Osner girl and her friend were trying on sneakers I told them they looked so cute together I just had to snap their picture with my new Polaroid camera.” She fished a photo out of her pocketbook and passed it to Frekki. Frekki was surprised, but tried not to show it. “What do you think?” Sherry asked.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  Freud’s followers were both more prescriptive and more certain than he was. Psychoanalysis, in the hands of Karl Abraham, Marie Bonaparte, Karen Horney, and Eduard Hitschmann and Edmund Bergler, depicted natural femininity as involving a desire for vaginal intercourse, domesticity and motherhood. A healthy femininity required vaginal orgasm, while an immature sexuality privileged clitoral pleasure, itself associated with signs of supposed masculinity or refusal of femininity, such as lesbianism, feminist militancy, or the desire to pursue an education or work outside the home. For these neo-Freudians, clitoral repression and vaginal maturation were the bedrock of proper femininity. These accounts of female sexuality have, understandably, provoked intense hostility in the decades since. Their refutation was central to the emerging women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s – a movement gathering energy at the time of Masters and Johnson’s publications, and which harnessed the sexologists’ findings with great enthusiasm. For a while, Masters and Johnson’s sexology, which observed and counted women’s sexual pleasures, yielding statistics of their clitoral orgasms, became one of the key resources in the feminist toolbox. Not all feminists, however, were on board with excitedly declaiming the revolutionary potential of sexual pleasure, or the liberatory significance of the clitoris. Black feminists such as Frances Beal, Linda La Rue, and bell hooks rightly pointed out that white feminists failed to acknowledge the privileges implicit in seeing sexuality as a primary source of identity. Black feminism’s investment in sexual pleasure was, they argued, complicated by the egregious history of sexual and economic exploitation of black women and the experimental use of poor women’s bodies, as in the testing of birth control pills on Puerto Rican women, and the enforced sterilization of black women. Nonetheless, sexology was alluring to feminists such as Anne Koedt and Ti-Grace Atkinson, who saw great emancipatory potential in Masters and Johnson’s work. In Koedt’s ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, a short but hugely influential essay first distributed in mimeographed copies and later widely anthologized, she wrote that if certain sexual positions now defined as ‘standard’ are not mutually conducive to orgasm, they should ‘no longer be defined as standard’. Clitoral orgasm showed that sexual pleasure could be had from either men or women, making heterosexuality ‘not absolute, but an option’. Since men, she wrote, ‘have orgasms essentially by friction with the vagina’, rather than the clitoral area, women have as a result ‘been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men’.

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

  Callousness and Lack of EmpathySociopaths readily take advantage of others, expressing utter contempt for the feelings of others. Someone in distress is not important to them. Although intelligent, perceptive, and quite good at sizing people up, they make no real connections with others. They use their "people skills" to exploit, abuse, and wield power. Sociopathic cult leaders are unable to empathize with the pain of their victims. Cult victims engage in denial about this callousness because it's so difficult to believe that someone they love so much could intentionally hurt them. It therefore becomes easier to rationalize the leader's behavior as necessary for the general or individual good. The alternative for the devotee would be to face the sudden and overwhelming awareness of being victimized, deceived, and used. Such a realization would wound the person's deepest sense of self, so as a means of self-protection, the person denies the abuse. When and if the devotee becomes aware of the exploitation, sometimes it feels as though a tremendous evil has been done. 10. Poor Behavioral Controls and Impulsive NatureLike small children, many sociopaths have difficulty regulating their emotions. Adults who have temper tantrums are frightening to be around. Rage and abuse, alternating with token expressions of love and approval, produce an addictive cycle for both abuser and abused (and a sense of hopelessness in the latter). This dynamic has also been recognized in relation to domestic abuse and the battering of women.29 The sociopathic cult leader acts out with some regularity-often privately, sometimes publicly-usually to the embarrassment and dismay of his followers and other observers. He may act out sexually, aggressively, or criminally, frequently with rage. Who could possibly control someone with no sense of personal boundaries or responsibility, who believes he is all powerful, omniscient, and entitled to every wish or whim? Generally such aberrant behavior is a wellkept secret, known only to a few trusted disciples. The others see only perfection. These tendencies are related to the sociopath's need for stimulation and his inability to tolerate frustration, anxiety, or depression. Often a leader's inconsistent behavior needs to be rationalized by either the leader or the followers in order to maintain internal consistency. This inconsistency is often regarded as divinely inspired and further separates the empowered from the powerless. 11. Early Behavior Problems and Juvenile DelinquencySociopaths frequently have a history of behavioral and academic difficulties. They often get by academically, taking advantage of other students and teachers. Encounters with juvenile authorities are frequent. Equally prevalent are difficulties in peer relationships, developing and keeping friends, self-control, and managing aberrant behaviors, such as stealing, arson, and cruelty to others. 12. Irresponsibility and UnreliabilityNot concerned about the consequences of their behavior, sociopaths leave behind them the wreckage of other people's lives and dreams. They may be totally oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they inflict on others, which they regard as neither their problem nor their responsibility. Sociopathic cult leaders rarely accept blame for their failures or mistakes.

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

  173–84.“The reader’s reaction is laughter—anything from an embarrassed snigger” : Ibid.“In children’s books, since they became a thing at the beginning of the twentieth century” : RS to RB, June 10, 2022.“Dick, he once said to me, ‘We’re writing sugar-coated bitter pills’ ” : PS to RB, May 27, 2022.“anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy” : Edward Labaton, “The Board and the Books,” New York Times , August 29, 1982, sec. 11, p. 22.“Two of the authors banned in Island Trees were among the most important” : Email with Steven Pico, April 19, 2022.“They [the members] did not read the books in their entirety” : Nicole Chavez, “He Took His School to the Supreme Court in the 1980s,” CNN.com , June 25, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/25/us/book-bans-island-trees-union-free-school-district-v-pico/index.html .He did, in fact, get accepted to Haverford College : Lini S. Kadaba, “Standing Up for Freedom,” Haverford.edu , September 20, 2022. https://www.haverford.edu/college-communications/news/standing-freedom . “Until the day I die, I refuse to budge on my position” : Michael Winerip, “L.I. School Board Ends Its Fight to Ban Books,” New York Times , January 31, 1983, sec. B, p. 7.“He was a real nonconformist and he was someone who believed” : Zoom interview with Karen Fleshman, April 3, 2023.“By the time I’m growing up, it’s a big hotbed of the John Birch Society” : Ibid., April 3, 2023.“For Karen, a brave young woman and a real friend” : Ibid., April 3, 2023.“It really gave me confidence the rest of my life” : Ibid., April 3, 2023.Chapter Nineteen Allies“Democracy is exhausting” : Betty Miles, Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book (New York: Avon Books, 1980), p. 140.“Just then, Blackie gave a little moan, and her stomach began to ripple” : Ibid., p. 47.“How did the puppy get in there… inside his mommy” : Ibid., p. 48.“Kids this age can be embarrassingly frank!” : Ibid., pp. 50–51.“it was a crime to spend public funds on smut like that!” : Ibid., p. 89.“You’ve probably heard,” the ringleader tells Kate’s mother : Ibid., p. 115.“I’m Kate Harris,” she announces in front of the board : Ibid., p. 135.“Norma Klein was my first writer friend,” Blume told Terry Gross : “Judy Blume Was Banned from the Beginning but Says ‘It Never Stopped Me from Writing,” Fresh Air , April 24, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/24/1171112806/judy-blume-are-you-there-god-its-me-margaret-forever .“Well, that’s just plain silly!” her father says : Norma Klein, Girls Can Be Anything (New York: Dutton, 1973), no page numbers.“She was a very strong feminist,” said Fleissner : Telephone interview with Jennifer Fleissner, April 3, 2022.“Here is Mother with her Planned Parenthood meetings” : Norma Klein, Hiding (New York: Pocket Books, 1976), p. 15.She describes herself as “the silent, clinging, frightened one” : Ibid., p. 16.“I was afraid of the potential for failure and humiliation” : Ibid., p. 35.“Where are you when we make love?” : Ibid., p. 52.“People say : Take off your mask,” Krii explains : Ibid., p.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  She called them flying rats and said one got caught in her hair once and went crazy clawing at her scalp. But I loved those ugly little bats, the way they darted past, their wings in a furious blur. Dad explained how they had sonar detectors kind of like the ones in nuclear submarines. Brian and I would throw pebbles, hoping the bats would think they were bugs and eat them, and the weight of the pebbles would pull them down and we could keep them as pets, tying a long string to their claw so they could still fly around. I wanted to train one to hang upside down from my finger. But those darn bats were too clever to fall for our trick. The bats were out, swooping and screeching, when we left Midland for Blythe. Earlier that day, Mom had told us that the baby had decided it was big enough to come out soon and join the family. Once we were on the road, Dad and Mom got in a big fight over how many months she’d been pregnant. Mom said she was ten months pregnant. Dad, who had fixed someone’s transmission earlier that day and used the money he’d made to buy a bottle of tequila, said she probably lost track somewhere. “I always carry children longer than most women,” Mom said. “Lori was in my womb for fourteen months.” “Bullshit!” Dad said. “Unless Lori’s part elephant.” “Don’t you make fun of me or my children!” Mom yelled. “Some babies are premature. Mine were all postmature. That’s why they’re so smart. Their brains had longer to develop.” Dad said something about freaks of nature, and Mom called Dad a Mr. Know-It-All Smarty-Pants who refused to believe that she was special. Dad said something about Jesus H. Christ on a goddamn crutch not taking that much time to gestate. Mom got upset at Dad’s blasphemy, reached her foot over to the driver’s side, and stomped on the brake. It was the middle of the night, and Mom bolted out of the car and ran into the darkness. “You crazy bitch!” Dad hollered. “Get your goddamn ass back in this car!” “You make me, Mr. Tough Guy!” she screamed as she ran away. Dad jerked the steering wheel to one side and drove off the road into the desert after her. Lori, Brian, and I braced one another with our arms, like we always did when Dad went on some wild chase that we knew would get bumpy. Dad stuck his head out the window as he drove, hollering at Mom, calling her a “stupid whore” and a “stinking cunt” and ordering her to get back into the car. Mom refused. She was ahead of us, bobbing in and out of the desert brush. Since she never used curse words, she was calling Dad names like “blankety-blank” and “worthless drunk so-and-so.” Dad stopped the car, then jammed down the accelerator and popped the clutch.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  The implications were profound. Men, Koedt suggested, ‘in fact fear the clitoris as a threat to their masculinity’. She was not wrong. Writer and pugnacious man-about-town Norman Mailer, in The Prisoner of Sex, mused on the emerging feminist writings, some of which – such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics – were taking aim at him, and were using Masters and Johnson’s findings. In his characteristically self-mythologizing and florid prose, Mailer admits to a new ‘anger at Woman’s ubiquitous plenitude of orgasms with that plastic prick, that laboratory dildoe, that vibrator!’ He feels, he confesses, ‘something close to nostalgia for the pompous Freudian certainties of the Fifties’ – the certainty that clitoral stimulation, and the inability to achieve orgasm through coitus, was a failing of femininity. Mailer’s hostility towards Masters and Johnson curiously preempted later feminist assessments of their influence. While prominent feminists of the 1970s were allying themselves with the sexologists, Mailer was looking on the duo with a dark scrutiny, an ear to the delusions within the hopes, an ear to the sinister within the clinical, and an ear to what was lost in their approach to sex. ‘America is dominated by a bunch of half-maniacal scientists,’ he wrote, ‘men who don’t know anything about the act of creation.’ He waxes lyrical about the laboratory conditions of this research, and the ‘paralysis of all senses which may have sat on the women, lying there, vagina open, numb as a dead tooth to that inquiry beneath the probe of the investigator’s sterilised eye’. It was not just Mailer who was suspicious of their mechanistic, technologically fixated quantification of sex. Dana Densmore, a member of Cell 16, a feminist group committed to separatism, was critical of sexual liberation; women’s ‘right’ to enjoy their bodies was now, she claimed, becoming a duty. The genital focus of this sexual liberation was a red herring; Masters and Johnson’s findings on women’s capacity for multiple orgasms suggested that a woman’s release was psychological as well as physical. Women seek more than sex; ‘the real thing we seek is closeness, merging, perhaps a kind of oblivion of self.’ This is a theme that, as we’ll see, has recently resurfaced.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  This decision has caused them, on one hand, to destroy all their weapons, which are considered so needful in the Caucasus, thus renouncing the possibility of fighting, and putting themselves at the mercy of every marauder; and, on the other hand, to refuse, under all circumstances, participation in acts of force which may be demanded from them by the government; which means that they must refuse service in the army or wherever else violence is used. The government could not permit so many thousands of people such a desertion of the duties established by law, and a struggle broke out. The government demands compliance with its requirements; the Dukhbors will not obey. The government cannot afford to yield. Not only because this refusal of the Dukhobors to comply with the requirements of government has, from the official standpoint, no legal justification, and is contradictory to the existing time-consecrated order; but such refusals must be discountenanced at once, for the sole reason that, if allowed to ten, to-morrow there will be a thousand, ten thousand, others who wish to escape the burden of the taxes and the conscription. And if this is allowed, there will spring up marauding and chaos instead of order and security; no one's property or life will be safe. Thus reason the authorities; they cannot reason otherwise; and they are not in the least at fault in so reasoning. Even without any such selfish consideration as that these desertions might deprive him of his means of subsistence, now collected from the people by means of compulsion, every official, from the Tsar down to the uryadnik or village police-commissioner, must be deeply indignant with the refusal of some uncivilized, unlettered people to comply with the demands of the government, which are obligatory upon all. "How dare these mere ciphers of people," thinks the official, "deny that which is recognized by every one, that which is consecrated by the law, and is practised everywhere?" As officials, they cannot be shown to be in error for acting as they do. They use force, brute force. And they cannot avoid so doing. In point of fact, how can you, by reasonable and humane means, compel men who profess the Christian religion to join another body of men who are learning how to kill, and practising for that purpose? The deception of deceived people can be maintained by various kinds of stupefactions — by administration of oaths, by theological, philosophical, and judicial sophistries. But as soon as the deception is by some means broken, and people like the Dukhobors, calling things by their right names, say, "We are Christians, and therefore we cannot kill," then the lie is exposed; and to persuade such men by arguments of reason is impossible. The only means of inducing them to obey are blows, "executions," deprivation of shelter, cold and hunger in their families. Just these means are used.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  Then Joe remembers driving down the street and feeling that he wanted to go back to talk to his wife. With Tom’s encouragement, he imagines himself turning to go back and gets a pain in his right arm that is intensifying. As they focus on that sensation, the pain begins to subside. They focus on Joe’s desire to turn around. This time Joe is able to complete the turn in his body and mind and imagines returning home to resolve things with his wife. He tells her that he felt hurt at the party the night before, because she seemed to be ignoring him. She tells him that she just wanted to feel that she could mingle and move about without having to be dependent on him. She explains that it wasn’t anything personal and that she feels quite good about their relationship. Joe feels relieved and has a sense that he has come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of his wife. He also wonders whether or not he would have seen the oncoming car if he had resolved the issues with his wife before getting in the car. At this point, Joe feels relieved. He has some guilt for his part in the accident, even though the other person was clearly at fault for running the stop sign. Tom then asks Joe to describe the details of the road just before he had the accident, even though Joe claims he doesn’t remember what happened. As Joe begins to describe what he can recall, he feels both shoulders tighten and go up. He has a sensation of his body pulling away to the right, followed by the image of a flickering shadow. Tom asks his friend to look at the shadow, and as he does Joe begins to see the yellow color of a car (orienting response). As Joe tries to bring more detail to that image he realizes that he saw a front fender, and then the driver’s face through the windshield of the car. Joe can tell from the look on his face that he is oblivious to the fact that he has just run a stop sig n— the man seems to be lost in thought. Tom asks Joe what he is feeling and he says that he is really angry at the guy and wants to destroy him. Tom encourages Joe to imagine that he is destroying the other car. Joe sees himself getting a big hammer and smashing the other car to smithereens. He is now experiencing increased activation (more than he has before). His hands are trembling and shaking and have turned cold. Tom uses soothing words to support Joe through the process of releasing the energy. After some time, Joe begins to feel his breathing regulate, the tension in his shoulders and jaw relaxes, and the trembling settles. He has a sense of relief and warmth in his hands now. He feels relaxed and alert at the same time.