Anxiety

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 Another Country (1962)

  A sound of singing and guitar-playing came from the center of the park; idly, they walked toward it; they each seemed to be waiting and fearing the resolution of their evening. There was a great crowd gathered in the small fountain; this crowd broke down, upon examination, into several small crowds, each surrounding one, two, or three singers. The singers, male and female, wore blue jeans and long hair and had more zest than talent. Yet, there was something very winning, very moving, about their unscrubbed, unlined faces, and their blankly shining, infantile eyes, and their untried, unhypocritical voices. They sang as though, by singing, they could bring about the codification and the immortality of innocence. Their listeners were of another circle, aimless, empty, and corrupt, and stood packed together in the stone fountain merely in order to be comforted or inflamed by the touch and the odor of human flesh. And the policemen, in the lamplight, circled around them all. Ida and Vivaldo walked together, Eric and Ellis walked together: but all of them were far from one another. Eric felt, dimly, that he ought to make some attempt to talk to the man beside him, but he had no desire to talk to him; he wanted to leave, and he was afraid to leave. Ida and Vivaldo had also been silent. Now, as they walked from group to singing group, intermittently, through romanticized Western ballads and toothless Negro spirituals, he heard their voices. And he knew that Ellis was listening, too. This knowledge forced him, finally, to speak to Ellis. He heard Ida. “—–sweetie, don’t be like that.” “Will you stop calling me sweetie? That’s what you call every miserable cock sucker who comes sniffing around your ass.” “ Must you talk that way?” “Look, don’t you pull any of that lady bullshit on me.” “—–you talk. I’ll never understand white people, never, never, never! How can you talk that way? How can you expect anyone else to respect you if you don’t respect yourselves?” “ Oh . Why the fuck did I ever get tied up with a house nigger? And I am not white people! ” “—–I warn you, I warn you!” “—– you’re the one who starts it! You always start it!” “—–I knew you would be jealous. That’s why!” “You picked a fine way to keep me from being—jealous, baby.” “Can’t we talk about it later? Why do you alway have to spoil everything?” “Oh, sure, sure, I’m the one who spoils everything, all right!” Eric said, to Ellis, “Do you think any of these singers have a future on TV?” “On daytime TV maybe,” Ellis said, and laughed. “You’re a hard man,” said Eric. “I’m just realistic,” Ellis said. “I figure everybody’s out for himself, to make a buck, whether he says so or not.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  She had us perpetually over a barrel. In the case of Michael’s marriage, all she had to do was wait him out and not back down, knowing that eventually he would fold and do her bidding because he was fully committed to his spiritual path, to the God she had sold him and to not giving in to ego positions. Normally, Michael was my bedrock of support and encouragement. He helped me understand the way the world worked in ways I never would have figured out on my own. So I was sad and bereft during this time because he was not as available to me as usual. He was dealing with his own problems, and I was left to figure out for myself why I was filled with such anxiety most of the time. Anytime I was able to discuss this with him, he simply told me what anyone in the group would have: “Be in your heart. Don’t be afraid of The Truth,” etc. Coincidentally, that was exactly what I was telling him with regard to his impending marriage. We were both at war with ourselves: each trying to convince ourselves that doing something that felt wrong was actually right and that if our instinct told us we were uncomfortable or disagreed with God’s guidance, our instinct was wrong. Limori was raising the temperature with both of us to see how far we would go for her. She would be successful with Michael and a little less successful with me. After two and a half months of living in Limori’s house, during an informal chat with her and Alice one evening I was given a new name. This was surprising to me because I was still deep in the struggle with my feelings of utter failure about living in God’s presence and not being able to relax. Limori said that God said I was to be called Chaye Kaley (pronounced cha-ee ka-lay) from now on. I was surprised but also thrilled by this development. I felt it was another momentous step in my evolution into a true spiritual warrior. By carrying a name that God had given me and living under God’s roof I felt I would really be making a statement to the world about who I was and what mattered to me. And once again I thought, “Now I will really belong somewhere and feel at home in myself.” I made plans to change my name legally to this new moniker, but this spiritual carrot was dangled and then, just as quickly, pulled away. A few days after I was given the name Limori said that God had asked me to hold off legally changing it until the New Year. Limori, Alice and Susan spent Christmas that year in Hawaii. The night before they left I gave them each a gift to take with them to open on Christmas Day, but I was nervous and self-conscious as I did it and Limori’s hawk-like stare didn’t help.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  “Yeah,” Emmett agreed. “They are really trying to make themselves look better. But, you know, some of them—like, you Google SAE and the first thing that comes up is how they’ll never have a black man there.” That’s true: the University of Oklahoma chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the country’s largest fraternity, made national news in 2015 when its members were caught on video belting out a racist ditty; “black man” is a euphemism for the word they actually used. It turned out they had learned the song on a leadership cruise (the lyrics of another version promote violence against women). In 2016, a brother at Yale’s SAE chapter was accused of chanting “white girls only” while screening guests for a party and only admitting blond women (racism and misogyny tend to coexist: over just a few weeks in 2014, other campuses’ members of that fraternity, colloquially known as “Sexual Assault Expected,” were named in rape allegations at Emory, Iowa State, and Johns Hopkins, and at an off-campus house at Loyola Marymount). SAE is not unique. Also in 2016, a notebook belonging to the North Carolina State chapter of Pi Kappa Phi surfaced, containing such lines as “That tree is so perfect for lynching,” “If she’s hot enough she doesn’t need a pulse,” and “It will be short and painful, just like when I rape you.” During one week in April 2018, two separate frats at Cal Poly were suspended for racist incidents, and at Syracuse University, brothers at Theta Tau were caught on video during a “roast” making racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic comments as well as simulating the sexual assault of a disabled person. A frat at Xavier and Emmett’s university had been suspended two years before, after members shouted racial epithets and threw beer bottles at two black female students walking past their house. At a certain point, one has to wonder whether the issue here is a “few bad apples” or, as sociologist Matthew Hughey, who studies the role of race in fraternities, has said, “more of a rotten orchard.” “I do go to the parties sometimes, though,” Emmett said, reiterating that, as a black guy, he was automatically considered the coolest dude in the room. “But I don’t really like drinking with those people. Or [doing] anything else with them. Sometimes I’ll get really bad anxiety at those parties because . . . You just feel eerie. Anything can go wrong. And if it does, you’re screwed. Because if you’re the only black kid at the party, then you’re the only black kid at the party, you know what I’m saying? So if the party is shut down by cops, they’ll be asking, ‘Why are you here?’ and they won’t think that you actually go to this school. Or what if I accidentally break something? When you’re participating in extracurricular activities with people you don’t trust, it just doesn’t make for a really good time.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Just because some young men now draw the line at referring to someone who is openly gay as a “fag” doesn’t mean such boys (or those who have traits that read as “gay”) are suddenly safe. If anything, gay boys were more conscious of the rules of manhood than their straight peers—they had to be. In fact, I began to joke that the gay boys I interviewed were like spies in the house of hypermasculinity. Mateo, seventeen, attended the same Boston-area high school as Cole, also on a scholarship, but the two could not have presented more differently. Mateo was slim and tan (his father was Salvadoran), with an animated expression and a tendency to wave his arms extravagantly as he spoke. Where Cole sat straight and still, Mateo crossed his legs at the knee and swung his foot, propping his chin on one hand. This was Mateo’s second private high school; the oldest of six children, he had been identified as academically gifted and encouraged by an eighth-grade teacher to apply to an all-boys’ prep school for his freshman year. When he arrived on campus, he discovered that his classmates were nearly all white, all athletic, all affluent, and, as far as he could tell, all straight. Mateo—Latinx and gay, the son of a janitor—was none of those things. He felt immediately conscious of how he held himself, how he sat, and especially of the pitch of his voice. He tried lowering it, but that felt unnatural, so he avoided conversation entirely. He changed the way he walked as well, so as not to be targeted as “girly.” “One of my only friends there was gay, too,” he said, “and he was out. He got destroyed.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  “Mm-hmm,” Nicole said, pulling him forward and flipping on the light. Her bed was shoved into a corner next to a window. Outside, a group of kids were smoking weed on a deck. No question: they could definitely see in. Nate panicked. He was already nervous, already afraid that he didn’t know what he was doing, already aware that everyone upstairs was going to want to hear the details, but now it seemed like people might actually watch them. This was all starting to seem like a terrible mistake, but there was no way to back out. He got through the inevitable, awkward moments where you actually have to talk to your partner, then, finally, they started kissing. In his anxiety, Nate bit Nicole’s lip. Hard. “I totally messed up,” he said. “And I was thinking, Oh God! What do I do now?” But he kept going. He took off her shirt and undid her bra. He took off his own shirt. Then she took off her pants. “And that,” he said, “was the first time I ever saw a vagina. I did not know what to do with it.” He recalled that his friends had said girls go crazy if you stick your fingers up there and make the “come here” motion, so he tried it, but Nicole just lay there, unmoving. “Guys will call girls like that a ‘fish,’” Nate said. “Like a dead fish. So I guess if I talked in those terms, maybe that’s what I’d say happened.” He didn’t ask what might feel better to her, though, because that would be admitting ignorance, and he wasn’t about to do that. After a few more agonizing minutes, Nicole said, “I have to go see what’s going on upstairs,” got dressed, and left, Nate trailing behind. They rejoined the party and immediately went their separate ways. One of Nate’s friends high-fived him and slapped him on the back. Another handed him a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and Nate took a long slug. A boy who had hooked up with Nicole at a different party fist-bumped him. “Yo, bro!” he said, “We’re Eskimo brothers!” “And the whole time,” Nate said, “I’m thinking, Holy Fuck! I don’t think that went very well. But I guess it was experience. So . . . good for me!” Then he heard a senior, a guy Nate considered kind of a friend, loudly ask Nicole, “Why would you hook up with Nate?” She giggled. “Oh, I was drunk!” she said. “I was so drunk!” They were calling him an “L.” “I’m sorry, man,” one of Nate’s friends said, shaking his head. Nate brushed it off. “No, it’s okay, don’t worry about it.” He went back to the couch and pretended to be drunk to avoid further conversation.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Which brought us back to the subject of that all-important post-hookup text. According to sociologist Lisa Wade’s research, partners are expected to be less friendly after a hookup than they were before, at least for a while, as the last step toward affirming that requisite meaninglessness. Girls used to tell me that the first person who admitted to “catching feelings”—a phrase that makes affection sound like an STD—“loses.” But that creates a predicament for the over half of both men and women who say they’d like their hookups to turn into something more. “You meet someone for the first time, hang out with them the whole night, and potentially end up hooking up with them,” said one of a group of fraternity brothers I talked to at a Midwestern college. “Then the next day you’re walking down the street and it’s like . . .” He looked up as if spotting someone he knew, then quickly averted his gaze. “There’s no eye contact. It’s very much like, ‘I’m not saying hi. We’re just going to move past each other.’ Like, ‘We’re not actually friends. It was just this thing that happened at a party.’ I hate it.” I asked him, in that case, what kept him from breaking protocol. “There’s this sense of—I don’t know, maybe weakness? You’re trying to play it cool. Like”—he switched to the laconic “bro” voice I’d heard so often—“‘Oh yeah, it’s cool. Whatever.’ I mean, I don’t know if she was into it or if she’s trying to move on; she doesn’t know if I’m into it or if I’m trying to move on. And because of that question mark, you don’t want to make yourself vulnerable and get shut down for it and then be like, ‘Oh, you idiot. It was a party! You should’ve realized it was a one-time thing!’ So you just play it safe and don’t say anything.” “Even if that means you miss the opportunity for something more?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. “Even if it means you miss the opportunity for something more.” Back in California, Caleb echoed those sentiments. “I hate texting girls. It’s more anxiety-provoking than the actual hookup. There’s this whole game you play with the timing. How long do you wait to send the first text? How long do you wait to reply?” It’s all fraught with layers of meaning, with projecting the right balance between casual and clingy. “And after you get over the timing, you have to worry about the actual content,” he continued. “What you say, yeah, but also using ‘you’ versus ‘u’ or purposely misspelling a word, like ‘wanna’ instead of ‘want to.’ And then, you’re Snapping back and forth with someone and they suddenly take twenty minutes to respond—” “Then you have to take twenty-five,” Ellie interrupted.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  More commonly, though, boys brushed off their unwanted encounters. A college sophomore who faked “whiskey dick” to avoid sex with a girl who’d talked her way into his bed chalked that up to “a learning experience.” Another college sophomore felt slightly “weird” after discovering he’d had intercourse with a stranger—a girl with a reputation for “getting guys really drunk on purpose”—after blacking out at a frat party; his takeaway was that he should drink less. To better understand this phenomenon, sociologist Jessie Ford interviewed forty straight male and forty straight female college students who’d had experiences along a continuum from unwanted sex—defined as sex they chose to continue but believe they could have stopped—to assault; she also interviewed an additional thirty-five LGBTQ+ students. About a quarter of the men described situations in which they’d been too incapacitated to refuse. But most had succumbed to something subtler: a voice in their heads that said, assuming that a girl was neither too drunk nor too “ugly” (both of which were socially acceptable excuses to refuse), guys should always be “down to fuck.” Rejecting someone’s advances would be awkward, unmanly, “gay.” Some feared being rude. “They thought saying no to a blow job would hurt a girl’s feelings,” Ford said, “or it would make them look stupid or weird. It seemed easier to just go along with it than to end things.” That’s remarkably similar logic to that of the girls I’ve interviewed who would go down on guys without wanting to, especially during a hookup. They, too, were exquisitely tuned to gender expectations—the potential to be called a bitch or a prude—and feared seeming impolite if they expressed a direct “no.” They, too, would rather feel violated than risk humiliating or disappointing a partner. (Though, notably, girls’ physical gratification is not a factor in either scenario.)

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Part of what intrigued me about transgender boys, and why I wanted to be sure to include them in this book, was that they provided a unique perspective on masculinity. Devon, much like cisgender gay boys, talked about learning to walk, stand, and sit “like a guy”; take up more physical space than women; use fewer hand gestures; plant his feet and squelch the tendency to give nonverbal conversational prompts (women tend to nod or repeat an encouraging “uh-huh”—men do not); and master the art of the bro shake (there are YouTube guides for that). Unlike cisgender gay boys, however, he also spent years going through the world in a female-presenting body—a “hot” one, at that—with the inevitable exposure to critique, harassment, the ever-present threat of assault. Every trans boy I met commented on how it felt to cast off that hypervisibility. Long after his surgery, Devon would tense on the street when he heard a catcall, only to realize it was aimed at someone else. Hutch, another trans boy who was Korean American, remarked that as an Asian woman he felt on edge from puberty onward: fetishized, harassed on the street and in school hallways. During a gap year abroad, he was raped. “Now that I’m perceived as male, I don’t experience any of that,” he said. “My gender is still racialized, because Asian men are typically viewed as effeminate and less desirable, but even so, as a man, you’re able to go through life and not fear that your body will be violated—I mean, yes, there are male survivors, but it’s less commonplace, less incessant. That’s one of the starkest contrasts. “The other thing,” Hutch added, “is because of my experience of being trans and being a survivor of assault, I think I’m much more aware of the importance of consent in any kind of sexual encounter, especially now that I have male privilege. I wish sometimes I could have a conversation with men about the way they treat women. I’d still like to know how they justify it.” Once he was on the men’s college swim team, Devon suddenly had that opportunity. Even at his elite, liberal university, the “locker room banter” could sometimes be hard to hear, and like other boys I met, he wasn’t sure how to respond to it. Maybe the fact that he was trans made his position more precarious, but maybe not: recall how Cole described his quandary on the crew team in high school, or Ethan, who transferred colleges rather than confront other lacrosse players. Early in his first semester, Devon, too, wanted to quit. He called his parents during a team event that happened to be held a few hours away from their home and asked them to pick him up. “Joining the team was a terrible decision,” he told them. They urged him to hang in there a little longer. “Just try,” they said.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I would listen, bemused by this fantasy. For Dr. Piet, the religious life was like the secret gardens or lost domains of literature. He saw serene processions of beautiful nuns gliding down sunlit cloisters, and imagined the convent as an enclave of sisterly peace and concord. Seductive as the religious life had undoubtedly been, he would tell me sternly, I had been running away from my true problems and responsibilities. Indeed, he clung to this idyllic vision so persistently when I tried to interject a little reality into the discussion that I sometimes wondered what psychological significance this fiction held for him. True, we had been shielded from some of the uncomfortable realities of the outside world, but anybody who entered a convent simply to escape unpleasantness would not have lasted a month, let alone seven years. Furthermore, it was not really accurate to say that I had been running away. The core of most of our problems is our own self, and in the religious life I had been forced to confront this self for twenty-four hours a day 365 days a year. You have far more opportunities to escape from self-knowledge in secular life. It is very easy to change the subject, pick up the telephone, turn on the television, or pour a stiff drink. None of these options was available in the convent, and as a result we very quickly came to a most uncomfortable perception of our own limitations. But Dr. Piet was my only chance. Without him I could be condemned to a lifetime of these uncanny eruptions of horror, each one of which made the darkness encroach a little more. I felt as though I were standing on a beach with my back to a cliff, watching the tide creep up the shore a little closer . . . and then a little closer still. So I went back to Dr. Piet, telling myself that I couldn’t expect a miracle overnight. What did I know about psychiatry and the mystery of the human mind? If I persevered I might well find that everything suddenly fell into place. But then I would be overtaken by a queasy sense of déjà vu. This was exactly the sort of reasoning that I had used in the convent, and look where it had got me. It was a hot, sticky day in July 1970. The room in the Examination Schools that had been set aside for the viva voce examination seemed to echo to our footsteps as the four of us trooped in and sat in a miserable little huddle against the wall. I looked hopelessly at the members of the board of examiners, who were sitting around three sides of a large table in the big bay window—sixteen dons in full academic dress, gazing at us expressionlessly. Opposite them was a lonely chair for the candidate, and the ten question papers of the final examinations that we had sat some six weeks earlier.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Xavier didn’t necessarily dispute that the two boys engaged in misconduct. His question is whether they would still be at the school—whether they would have been given lighter punishments and second chances—if they had been white and wealthy with powerful parents who paid full tuition (or if the girls they harmed had not been all of those things). He doesn’t know the answer, nor do I—though, he pointed out, no white boy was expelled for sexual misconduct during his seven years there. On a college level, while no national statistics break down accused perpetrators by race, there’s some evidence that black men at predominantly white institutions—as well as foreign students from Africa and Asia—are disproportionately reported for sexual assault and more likely than others to have those charges referred to formal hearings. (Meanwhile, women of color are both more likely to be assaulted than white women and less likely to report it; they are also less likely to be believed when they do.) It’s hard to know fully what to make of those statistics, and they are easily distorted by those who want to roll back progress in addressing campus rape, people who may be less concerned with reducing implicit bias than upholding the status quo. It may be that white girls are more willing to recognize and name misconduct by boys of color, and feel more confident that they will be believed if they report it. For Xavier, though, the imbalance triggers the specter of the black brute who rapes “pure” white women. History is, after all, replete with black men who were publicly lynched by white mobs for supposedly sullying white women’s virtue. The torture and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, accused (as it happens, falsely) of whistling at a white woman, helped spark the civil rights movement of the 1960s. As recently as 2015, when white nationalist Dylann Roof massacred nine African American churchgoers in South Carolina, he reportedly said, “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.” In 2018, white supremacist speakers at a Washington, DC, rally referred to the “interracial rape of white women” as one of a litany of alleged civil rights violations against Caucasians.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Thanks, thanks,” I kept saying, wiping the sweat from my face as we worked together to cram Monster into the trunk. We got it in eventually, and I climbed into the back seat with the dog and the man. The dog was a husky, blue-eyed and gorgeous, standing on the tiny floor in front of the seat. The man was lean and about the same age as the woman, his dark hair woven into a thin braid. He wore a black leather vest without a shirt underneath and a red bandanna tied biker-style over the top of his head. “Hi,” I murmured in his direction as I searched uselessly for the seat belt that was crammed irretrievably into the fold of the seat, my eyes skimming his tattoos: a spiked metal ball on the end of a chain on one arm and the top half of a bare-breasted woman with her head thrown back in either pain or ecstasy on the other; a Latin word I didn’t know the meaning of scrawled across his tan chest. When I gave up on finding the seat belt, the husky leaned over and licked my knee avidly with his soft and strangely cool tongue. “That dog’s got some motherfucking good taste in women,” said the man. “His name’s Stevie Ray,” he added. Instantly the dog stopped licking me, closed his mouth up tight, and looked at me with his icy black-rimmed eyes, as if he knew he’d been introduced and wanted to be polite. “I’m Spider. You already met Louise—she goes by Lou.” “Hi!” Lou said, meeting my eyes for a second in the rearview mirror. “And this here’s my brother Dave,” he said, gesturing to the man in the passenger seat. “Hi,” I said. “How about you? You got a name?” Dave turned to ask. “Oh yeah—sorry. I’m Cheryl.” I smiled, though I felt a blurry uncertainty about having accepted this particular ride. There was nothing to do about it now. We were already on our way, the hot wind blowing my hair. I petted Stevie Ray while assessing Spider in my peripheral vision. “Thanks for picking me up,” I said to conceal my unease. “Hey, no problem, sister,” Spider said. On his middle finger, he wore a square turquoise ring. “We’ve all been on the road before. We all know what it’s like. I hitched last week and motherfuck if I couldn’t get a ride to save my life, so that’s why when I saw you I told Lou to stop. Mother-fucking karma, you know?” “Yeah,” I said, reaching up to tuck my hair behind my ears. It felt as coarse and dry as straw. “What you doing out on the road anyway?” Lou asked from the front.

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

  Carol Queen is a petite woman with little black-rimmed eyeglasses. She wears red hot pants and high-necked black velvet dresses, like a hallucination of Alice in Wonderland all grown up. She is one of the full-time employees of Good Vibrations, and a sex educator. Carol told me: “One of the most important things we do here is role-model comfort about sex. We can hang out here, and feel comfortable in the room, and we wouldn’t have to know a damned thing about silicone dildos. Just being here and saying, ‘Come and look at the butt-plugs!’ is enough. People can’t believe someone just said that to them, as though you were saying, ‘Hey, come look at the zucchinis!’ ” When I laughed, she added, “And then we tell people that if they don’t know what size dildo they want, to go to Safeway and buy five zucchinis, and try them.” Carol offered to shadow me as I worked in the store for a day, trying out the other side. There was a new employee starting training that day, so I simply tagged along, at first just watching and listening, feeling nervous and ignorant. I didn’t want to blush, not there. When people came in, I tried to guess which part of the store they would go to, and I was always wrong. (Where people go first is sometimes a feint, like a fox making extra tracks to throw off the scent.) Many headed to the nearest shelf of books and stood there, shyly glancing around. Women seemed more willing to be approached by a clerk, and women were more sure of what they wanted, sometimes in considerable detail. Laura Miller, who now works on the administrative side of the business, says of the customers: “There’s the know-it-alls who come in with their friends to show off how much they know, and they can’t stop giggling. But I remember explaining to one woman, who just sort of knew she had a clitoris, how it worked. She said, ‘It’s amazing that women ever have intercourse if it’s not really what gives them an orgasm,’ and I said, ‘Yes!’ She was suddenly realizing that it’s not about the pole in the hole, necessarily. I sold that woman a vibrator. She walked out the door and I thought, ‘Her life has changed.’ ” “When I hear all these stories about brutal men with their rapacious sexuality, I’m, like, ‘Where are they?’ I find that when I tell men where I work, they’re terrified. I’ve been told that I make men feel inadequate, that I scare them away. If I don’t tell men where I work, it’s not because I’m afraid that they’re going to grab at me. I’m afraid they’re going to be afraid of me.”

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

  Japan, which has outlawed the depiction of pubic hair, even on news photos of corpses, is awash with nudity and live sex shows. As Nicholas Bornoff points out, looking up skirts is both a real and metaphorical preoccupation in a country with no elbow room, no leisure time, no privacy, intense segregation of the sexes, and a history replete with sex, violence, and extraordinary inventiveness. Understanding the nuances and motives of Japanese sexual behavior is a daunting task even for a seasoned westerner, and for many Japanese. The apparent contradictions are, I suspect, more like layers than anything else, fitting quite neatly together if one only understands the code. And contradiction is certainly part of the code. Japan interests me to the extent that it is different from everything I know, alarms me with its sudden similarities. Japanese men, who disdain women in ways impossible for a western woman to tolerate, revere female genitalia, femaleness itself, with a reverential passion that most American men would find embarrassing at best. Japanese men are fixated on mother images, passive women, whores, and virgins. They have little, if any, public embarrassment about things sexual. Their historical erotica is perhaps the most beautiful of all time; part of their current erotica, the manga comics, has a hero called Rape Man. These visitors around me are, if anything, getting less of a show here than they can find at home. Live sex shows in Japan sometimes include sex or an attempt at sex between an audience member and the actress. But one of the central events is often a kind of communal gynecology. The women allow the men to examine their genitals briefly, carefully, with magnifying glasses, flashlights, sometimes dildos, and sometimes their latex-covered fingers. Yet whether it is the foreignness of the place, the plethora of large white women, the absence of alcohol, or a combination of these things, they seem subdued and nervous. They huddle, the way Jeannie and I do, and maybe for the same reasons. Later, we waited in the crowd for the next shower show to end. Men everywhere, men all around us; along the balconies, stony-faced men in booths, men in chairs against the wall, and lined up by the steps down to the tables. As we sidled our way down the steps, the men parted for us, stepped aside, stopped talking. I felt less audience than performer for a moment; I felt more like a participant in this hitherto unknown group act.

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

  In San Francisco, near the Mission District, is a store called Good Vibrations, founded several years ago by Joani Blank and owned and run by women ever since. The store is spacious and well lit, with sheer white curtains hiding the windows. The big front room is painted a soothing light blue. There is a lot of space between the displays of sex toys, books, and movies so people can browse without feeling crowded. All the products, which are also available by mail order, are out on shelves, open to the touch. There is a popular “museum” of antique vibrators. The electrical toys are plugged in to outlets, and accompanied by descriptive brochures and explanatory signs. In the back, there’s a discreet vibrator testing room with a locking door. Vibrators are the only new sex toy in the world, the only thing that hasn’t been around since the farthest veils of ancient history, but they are the easiest one to talk about, to discuss. There’s something hygienic about a vibrator, since it can (unlike the anal beads or penis sleeves) have uses other than orgasm. Vibrators are mechanical, machines in a world of machines. And vibrators make female orgasm as quick, easy, reproducible, and simple as any male orgasm, ever. They are machines of revolution. The writer Susie Bright worked at Good Vibrations for a time; one thing she learned, she says now, is that having orgasms encourages the having of orgasms. The notion that women will become “addicted” to orgasms, especially the quick and easy ones offered by vibrators, offends her. “There’s a tremendous fear of liking sex too much,” she adds, noting that having difficulty coming has always been the number-one problem women brought to the clerks at Good Vibrations. Several years ago I met some of the women who work at Good Vibrations. I had been testing the waters of my own anxiety about pornography and the kind of in-your-face sex stores women have traditionally avoided as much as possible. I had come to feel relatively comfortable with both. But I wondered how far that ease extended, what it felt like to live with other people’s sex lives all the time. What it felt like not only to buy a vibrator, but to sell them.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  But who am I kidding? This book may already be doing wrong. I’ve heard many people speak with pity about children whose parents wrote about them when they were young. Perhaps the stories of Iggy’s origins are not mine alone, and thus not mine alone to tell. Perhaps my temporal proximity to his infancy has led me into a false sense of ownership over his life and body, a sense that is already fading, now that he weighs two pounds more than the heaviest baby ever born, and I no longer have the visceral sense, when beholding him, that he ever could have emerged from me. The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time. If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one’s undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I love her very much? What is good is always being destroyed: one of Winnicott’s main axioms. I considered writing Iggy a letter before he was born, but while I talked to him a lot in utero, I stalled out when it came to writing anything down. Writing to him felt akin to giving him a name: an act of love, surely, but also one of irrevocable classification, interpellation. (Perhaps this is why Iggy is named Iggy: if territorialization is inevitable, why not perform it with a little irreverence? “Iggy: Not a good choice unless you’re planning for a rock star or the class clown,” one baby names website warned.) The baby wasn’t separate from me, so what use would it be to write to him as if he were off at sea? No need to rehash Linda Hamilton in the final scenes of The Terminator, recording an audiotape for her unborn son, the future leader of the human resistance, before she sets off toward Mexico in her beater jeep, storm clouds gathering on the horizon. If you want an original relation to the mother/son dyad, you must turn (however sadly!) away from the seduction of messianic fantasy. And if your baby boy is going to be white, you must become curious about what will happen if you raise him as just another human animal, no more or less worthy than any other. This is a deflation, but not a dismissal. It is also a new possibility.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “You know more than I do,” Rufus said, sardonically. “What do you want—when you get together with a girl?” “What do I want?” “Yeah, what do you want?” “Well,” said Vivaldo, fighting panic, trying to smile, “I just want to get laid, man.” But he stared at Rufus, feeling terrible things stir inside him. “Yeah?” And Rufus looked at him curiously, as though he were thinking, So that’s the way white boys make it. “Is that all?” “Well”—he looked down—“I want the chick to love me. I want to make her love me. I want to be loved.” There was silence. Then Rufus asked, “Has it ever happened?” “No,” said Vivaldo, thinking of Catholic girls, and whores, “I guess not.” “How do you make it happen?” Rufus whispered. “What do you do?” He looked over at Vivaldo. He half-smiled. “What do you do?” “What do you mean, what do I do?” He tried to smile; but he knew what Rufus meant. “You just do it like you was told?” He tugged at Vivaldo’s sleeve; his voice dropped. “That white chick—Jane—of yours—she ever give you a blow job?” Oh, Rufus, he wanted to cry, stop this crap! and he felt tears well up behind his eyes. At the same time his heart lunged in terror and he felt the blood leave his face. “I haven’t had a chick that great,” he said, briefly, thinking again of the dreadful Catholic girls with whom he had grown up, of his sister and his mother and father. He tried to force his mind back through the beds he had been in—his mind grew as blank as a wall. “Except,” he said, suddenly, “with whores,” and felt in the silence that then fell that murder was sitting on the bed beside them. He stared at Rufus. Rufus laughed. He lay back on the bed and laughed until tears began running from the corners of his eyes. It was the worst laugh Vivaldo had ever heard and he wanted to shake Rufus or slap him, anything to make him stop. But he did nothing; he lit a cigarette; the palms of his hands were wet. Rufus choked, sputtered, and sat up. He turned his agonized face to Vivaldo for an instant. Then: “Whores!” he shouted and began to laugh again. “What’s so funny?” Vivaldo asked, quietly. “If you don’t see it, I can’t tell you,” Rufus said. He had stopped laughing, was very sober and still. “Everybody’s on the A train—you take it uptown, I take it downtown—it’s crazy.” Then, again, he looked at Vivaldo with hatred. He said, “Me and Leona—she’s the greatest lay I ever had. Ain’t nothing we don’t do.” “Crazy,” said Vivaldo. He crushed out his cigarette on the floor. He was beginning to be angry. At the same time he wanted to laugh.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He hurried down the stairs into the streets, hurrying home to Ida. She would say, “My God, Vivaldo, where’ve you been? I’ve been calling this house all night long to let you know I had to go and sit in with some fellows in Jersey City. I keep telling you we better get an answering service, but you never hear anything I say!” 3 On a Saturday in early March, Vivaldo stood at his window and watched the morning rise. The wind blew through the empty streets with a kind of dispirited moan; had been blowing all night long, while Vivaldo sat at his worktable, struggling with a chapter which was not going well. He was terribly weary—he had worked in the bookstore all day and then come downtown to do a moving job—but this was not the reason for his paralysis. He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about but they themselves did not move. He put words in their mouths which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced. With the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted to seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people: he begged them to surrender up to him their privacy. And they refused—without, for all their ugly intransigence, showing the faintest desire to leave him. They were waiting for him to find the key, press the nerve, tell the truth. Then , they seemed to be complaining, they would give him all he wished for and much more than he was now willing to imagine. All night long, in an increasing rage and helplessness, he had walked from his worktable to his window and back again. He made himself coffee, he smoked cigarettes, he looked at the clock—and the night wore on, but his chapter didn’t and he kept feeling that he ought to get some sleep because today, for the first time in several weeks, he was seeing Ida. This was her Saturday off, but she was having a cup of coffee with one of her girl friends in the restaurant where she worked. He was to meet her there, and then they were to visit Richard and Cass. Richard’s novel was about to be published, and it promised to be very successful. Vivaldo, to his confusion and relief, had not found it very remarkable. But he had not had the courage to say this to Richard or to admit to himself that he would never have read the novel if Richard had not written it.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Flush with joy in our house on the hill, we were startled by some deep shadows. Your mother, whom I’d met but once, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Your son’s custody remained unsettled, and the specter of a homophobic or transphobic judge deciding his fate, our family’s fate, turned our days tornado green. You knocked yourself out to make him feel happy and held, set up a slide for him in our concrete sliver of a backyard, a baby pool in the front, a Lego station by the wall heater, a swing hanging from the studs in his bedroom. We read books all together before bed, then I would leave to give you two some alone time, listen to your soft voice singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” night after night from behind the closed door. I read in one of my stepparenting guides that one should take stock of the developing bonds in a new family not every day or every month or every year, but every seven years. (Such a time frame struck me then as ludicrous; now, seven years later, as wise and luminous.) Your inability to live in your skin was reaching its peak, your neck and back pulsing with pain all day, all night, from your torso (and hence, your lungs) having been constricted for almost thirty years. You tried to stay wrapped even while sleeping, but by morning the floor was always littered with doctored sports bras, strips of dirty fabric—“smashers,” you called them. I just want you to feel free, I said in anger disguised as compassion, compassion disguised as anger. Don’t you get it yet? you yelled back. I will never feel as free as you do, I will never feel as at home in the world, I will never feel as at home in my own skin. That’s just the way it is, and always will be. Well then I feel really sorry for you, I said. Or maybe, Fine, but don’t take me down with you. We knew something, maybe everything, was about to give. We hoped it wouldn’t be us.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Unfortunately, so-called comprehensive sex ed is not necessarily much better, focused solely on averting disaster: avoiding pregnancy and preventing disease. Fewer than half of high schools and only a fifth of middle schools teach all of the sixteen topics the Centers for Disease Control considers to be essential, such as creating and sustaining respectful relationships; understanding the influence of media, peers, and family; and developing communication and sexual decision-making skills. Note that list does not include understanding consent; only ten states require that, if taught at all, sex education include any discussion of the issue. One of them is California, but in my local high school that has meant a single class period conducted in ninth grade by an outside educator; when I asked a group of my daughter’s friends about its content a year later, none could remember any specifics. We have arrived at this precarious state because the forces that want to ban positive, thorough sexuality education—among them parents who place ideology over their children’s health—are typically more vocal than its supporters. That may reflect, in part, an ambivalence even among progressives, a lingering belief that talking to teenagers about sex gives them license to engage (and, conversely, that if we avoid the topic, they will somehow not find out about it). That, it should be obvious by now, is a myth: decades of research have made clear that talking to children about sex does not reduce the age at which they start. Our teens are in urgent need of high-quality human development courses. Until those exist, relying on school sex education is a risky bet. And that means unless caring adults step up—parents, physicians, youth advocates, faith leaders, coaches—the default educator will be the media; it is impossible for me to believe that we would be so cavalier, so indifferent to any other aspect of children’s development that was so integral to their safety, futures, and well-being.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  In many ways, then (with the possible exception of vomiting after oral sex), Emmett’s hookups were like those of many guys his age who were into the party scene. But then our conversation started to turn. “You know the term ‘designated driver,’ right?” he asked. “My black friends basically have a ‘designated watch-out person.’ Like, I’ve seen white boys dragging a girl around a party—not dragging her by the hair or anything, but not allowing her to do anything or really talk to anyone. And that is misconduct. If we did that . . . Or when a white girl says, ‘Back off,’ and the guy doesn’t? I’ve seen that plenty of times with white boys. But if that same thing were to happen with one of my friends—I mean, most of us would just back off when she asked, but if someone was really under the influence and just didn’t know what was going on—we have someone there to watch out. To keep him from doing something he’s going to regret or maybe doing something illegal, or even getting with someone that he wouldn’t want to get with sober.” That might seem a good idea for anyone, really (and some college frats and sororities designate “sober monitors” precisely for that reason), but black guys in white worlds knew that for them the stakes for crossing a line would be higher and the bar for unacceptable behavior lower. The qualities projected onto them by white peers—greater physicality, sexuality, a latent potential for violence—could quickly turn from desirable to dangerous, from cool to predatory. As one boy of color I spoke with said, “That’s why my mom’s going to drill it into my head: you cannot trust white women.” Not the “Typical Asian Guy” During high school, back in Northern California, Spencer didn’t think much about race. The child of Korean immigrants, he went to a school in an affluent suburb with a sizable Asian American population, so he never felt unusual or different—his identity was grounded less in ethnicity than in being a baseball player, an artist, generally well liked. “My closest friends were mostly Asian,” he said, “but I had a lot of friends in high school, and other groups were much more mixed.” Things had changed since he started college in the Midwest. “I used to find it easier to talk to girls, hook up with girls, but in college it’s . . . Honestly, I don’t know. I just find it a lot more difficult.”