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 Blue Nights (2011)

  Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to tell me why I was afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street. Only then did I realize that during the three weeks that had passed between taking the taxi to Lenox Hill, on the fourteenth of June, and receiving the results of the full-body PET scan, on the eighth of July, I had allowed this year’s most deeply blue nights to come and go without my notice. What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring? “Have you ever had a moment where everything in your life just stopped?” This was the way that this question was raised by Kris Jenkins, a three-hundred-and-sixty-pound Jets defensive tackle, after he tore, six plays into his tenth NFL season, both his meniscus and his anterior cruciate ligament. “So fast, but in slow motion? Like all your senses shut down? Like you’re watching yourself?” I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: “I exist very nicely between the words ‘action’ and ‘cut.’ ” And even a third way: “It doesn’t present as pain,” I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer. 28Ifind myself thinking exclusively about Quintana. I need her with me. Behind the house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood in which we lived from the day we left Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton plates until the day we moved into the beach house, a period of some four years, there was a clay tennis court, weeds growing through the cracked clay. I remember watching her weed it, kneeling on fat baby knees, the ragged stuffed animal she addressed as “Bunny Rabbit” at her side. Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in. In a few weeks she will have been dead five years. Five years since the doctor said that the patient had been unable to get enough oxygen through the vent for at least an hour now. Five years since Gerry and I left her in the ICU overlooking the river at New York Cornell. I can now afford to think about her. I no longer cry when I hear her name. I no longer imagine the transporter being called to take her to the morgue after we left the ICU. Yet I still need her with me. In lieu of her presence I leaf through the books on a table in my office, each one a book she gave me.

• From Escape (2007)

  As if these responsibilities weren’t enough, I was told that some of the most precious spirits from the other side were waiting to come to earth as my children. The blessing continued as the patriarch told me that educational opportunities would continue to come my way and that I would end up as a valiant member of God’s chosen. These blessings were contingent on my remaining faithful until the end of my life. In return, I had the promise that I would be lifted up on the last day and protected. After my blessing was over I felt confused. Not many women in the FLDS had ever lived lives that were valued as having an impact on others in their community. My blessing sounded like a destiny I wasn’t really seeking. Merril never asked me about my blessing. I’m sure he assumed it was nothing special. Hawaii: Seven Days but Only Two Nights The moment I heard that Merril was planning a trip to Hawaii I knew there would be trouble in paradise. But I underestimated what an unmitigated disaster it would turn out to be. I was upset when I heard about the trip for the first time at my father’s house. My dad and Merril had become business partners again after my marriage. They’d worked together before on a deal that turned out badly and my father decided he was never going to do business with him again, but after my marriage their partnership accelerated. They were investing in motels, rest homes, and a restaurant or two. They would often travel together to check on their businesses. Six months before, they’d gone to Washington, D.C. Merril took Barbara with him. He usually always traveled with Barbara because she was the love of his life. But now he had three more wives and the pressure was on him to include more than just Barbara on his trips. Merril had an image to protect. In the FLDS culture, a man is supposed to treat each of his wives equally. There’s always favoritism, but in theory a family is supposed to be united behind the husband, who’s called the priesthood head. A woman’s only avenue to God is through her husband. We were raised to believe we could not receive direct revelations from God on our own. Whatever God had to communicate or reveal to a woman could be transmitted only through her husband. This doctrine was unassailable and had been so for generations in the culture I was born into.

• From Escape (2007)

  Merril was furious. “This is not Carolyn’s trip. You, Tammy, are out of order for trying to tell me what I can and cannot do with my family. Carolyn has a right to go with me alone only if that’s what I want her to do. You have a responsibility to be obedient to your husband, but you do not have any right to ask questions!” Cathleen was equally incensed when she found out that one of the tickets was in her name. She called Merril at his office in Page and said she should be the sole wife traveling with him to Hawaii. Cathleen called from a phone in the house that was very public and was talking so loudly we all could hear. She felt entitled to go alone because she had only ever taken short trips with Merril. There was no logic to her argument—she was just angling to get a trip for herself. We all had been married to Merril for about four years. If the trip had been based on seniority, then I should have been the one to go alone because I’d been married to Merril seven months longer than they. By the time Cathleen finished talking to Merril she was in tears and stormed off to her room. I was furious, but I knew confronting Merril would be unproductive. We’d already had several major fights in our marriage and I knew there was no way to reason with him or refuse to acquiesce to whatever he desired. I was in the early stages of my third pregnancy and in the throes of morning sickness so severe I’d vomit several times a day. The thought of getting on an airplane and leaving my children, Arthur and Betty, behind made me feel even worse. Nor would I have any say about their care while I was away. I couldn’t even ask my sister or a friend to watch them. I had to leave them at the mercy of the wives remaining at home. Quiet and resigned, I started making preparations for the trip. I knew I couldn’t miss more than a week of school without making arrangements for my class, so I started doing lesson plans in advance. I bought some fabric and started sewing some lightweight dresses for the trip. Tammy saw me working on my dress and felt threatened. She had a closet full of beautiful clothes but now felt she needed seven new dresses for the trip. She bought fabric and then asked her sisters to make her new dresses.

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

  But I couldn’t forget my body. I could not escape it. I didn’t know how, and the world was always there to remind me. On my first day of teaching, a Monday, I threw up before class because I was terrified, though not of the teaching itself. I would be teaching freshman composition, and while managing a classroom is always a challenge, I felt comfortable imparting onto my students the basics of writing persuasively. What I feared was my appearance and what they would think of me. I worried that if they didn’t like me, they would make fun of me, mocking my weight, and I was not at all sure how to make them like me when I felt so very unlikable, and always had. I worried about stamina and whether I would be able to stand for fifty minutes. I worried about sweating in front of them and how they would judge me for it. I worried about what to wear, because my standard uniform of jeans and T-shirts was too casual and what little dressy clothing I did have would have been way too dressy for the classroom. The good thing about school is that students have been trained, from an early age, to follow the rules. They come to class and generally sit and behave in an orderly fashion. When you tell them to do things, they do those things. I walked into my first classroom, my heart pounding, sweating everywhere, my head ringing with all of my fears and insecurities. I was carrying a big box of Legos because I figured, if nothing else, the students might enjoy playing with toys. At first, they didn’t seem to realize I was their teacher, and I was not sure if they were unsure because of my size, my race, or what I vainly hoped was my youthful appearance. When I stood at the front of the classroom, they hushed, and realized I was the teacher. I took attendance, my legs rubbery with anxiety, and then went into discussing the syllabus, the nature of the class and what would be expected of them—regular attendance, active participation, homework turned in on time, no plagiarism and the like. It was reassuring to have these administrative details to go over with the students, but when I was done discussing the syllabus, I actually had to teach and my anxiety rushed right back through me. At the end of that first class, as the students filed out of the room, I wanted to collapse with relief because I had survived those fifty minutes of being fat in front of twenty-two eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. And then I realized I was going to have to do it all over again, on Wednesday and Friday, week in and week out for the entire semester.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  THE NATURE OF PROVERBIAL WISDOM Perhaps the most fundamental objective of proverbial wisdom is simply to make observations. Several sayings have the character of simple propositional statements. “Anxiety weighs down the human heart, but a good word cheers it up” (Prov 12:25). “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (13:12). “The poor are disliked even by their neighbors, but the rich have many friends” (13:20). “ ‘Bad, bad,’ says the buyer, then goes away and boasts” (20:14). The numerical sayings in chapter 30 are likewise attempts to observe and categorize phenomena. Four things are small but exceedingly wise (ants, badgers, locusts, the lizard). Four are stately in their gait (the lion, the rooster, the he-goat, and the king). This latter kind of observation is related to riddles: Name four things that are small and wise, or what do these four things have in common? How is a king like a rooster? There is, of course, also an element of humor in noting the similarity between his majesty and the farmyard fowl. Observational sayings implicitly appeal to experience. This appeal is only rarely made explicit. Proverbs 24:30-34 is a case in point: “I passed by the field of one who was lazy. . . .” In most cases, these observations were passed on from father to son, or from teacher to student, and accepted on the authority of tradition. We shall find that Qoheleth was exceptional in attempting to verify traditional wisdom for himself. Moreover, observations are often quite tendentious. They may attempt to preempt discussion by stating that something is simply the case, when it may not in fact be so obvious. Perhaps the most blatant example of such a tendentious observation is found in Ps 37:25: “I have been young, and now am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.” Either the psalmist had not looked very far, or he simply assumed that anyone whose children were begging bread was not righteous. Many assertions in Proverbs also are debatable, but express what the author wanted the reader to believe. “Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death” (11:4); “The righteous are delivered from trouble, and the wicked get into it instead” (11:8). “Those who spare the rod hate

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  “I’m very sensitive about porn,” said Alyson Lee, tugging nervously at her dark, purple-streaked hair. Alyson was nineteen, a sophomore at a mid-Atlantic college. She’d grown up in what she called a “culturally conservative” Chinese family in a Los Angeles suburb made up almost entirely of immigrant parents and first-generation kids like her. She studied how Americans are supposed to act and feel, especially about sex and romance, by watching Grey’s Anatomy. “So now,” she said, “I have the very typical, liberal college woman point of view.” One that includes ambivalence about porn. Alyson has had two serious boyfriends—one in her senior year of high school, one as a freshman in college—and both told her the same thing: “Of course I watch porn: every teenage boy does.” “I’m not one of those people who think that porn is wrong and morally terrible and disgusting,” Alyson explained. “But it makes me feel super insecure. Like, am I not good enough? I’m definitely not as hot as a porn star. And I’m not going to do the things porn stars do. Both guys were really reassuring that it wasn’t about me, and I knew logically there was no connection between them watching porn and some flaw of mine. But it stayed in my head.” If, as bell hooks suggested, pop culture portrayals of women beg the question “Who has access to the female body?” the answer may ultimately be found in the ever-broadening influence of porn. That is, after all, the source of the arched backs, the wet open mouths, the ever-expanding breasts and butts, the stripper poles, the twerking, and the simulated sex acts. That is the source of women’s sexuality as a performance for men.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Media has been called a “super peer,” dictating all manner of behavioral “scripts” to young people, including those for sexual encounters: expectations, desires, norms. In one era, they learn that you don’t kiss until the third date; in another, they learn that sex precedes an exclusive relationship. Bryant Paul, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington who studies “scripting theory,” explained, “I’ll ask students, ‘Think about how you learned what to do at your first college party. You’d never been to one, but you knew you were supposed to gather around the keg. You knew that couples would go off to someone’s room.’ And they’ll say, ‘Yeah, from American Pie and all those movies.’ So where are they learning their sexual socialization, especially in terms of more explicit behaviors? You’d be foolish not to think they’re getting ideas from porn. Young people are not tabulae rasae. They have a sense of right and wrong. But if they’re repeatedly exposed to certain themes, they are more likely to pick them up, to internalize them and have them become part of their sexual scripts. So when you see consistent depictions of women with multiple partners and women being used as sex objects for males, and there’s no counterweight argument going on there . . .” He trailed off, leaving the obvious conclusion unspoken. Over 40 percent of children ages ten to seventeen have been exposed to porn online, many accidentally. By college, according to a survey of more than eight hundred students titled “Generation XXX,” 90 percent of men and a third of women had viewed porn during the preceding year. On one hand, the girls I met knew that porn was about as realistic as pro wrestling, but that didn’t stop them from consulting it as a guide. Honestly? It pains me to hear that the scatological fetish video Two Girls, One Cup was, for some, their first exposure to sex. Even if what they watch is utterly vanilla, they’re still learning that women’s sexuality exists for the benefit of men. So it worried me to hear an eleventh-grader confide, “I watch porn because I’m a virgin and I want to figure out how sex works”; or when another high-schooler explained that she “watched it to learn how to give head”; or when a freshman in college told me, “There are some advantages: before watching porn, I didn’t know girls could squirt.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  There is some indication that porn has a liberalizing effect: heterosexual male users, for instance, are more likely than peers to approve of same-sex marriage. On the other hand, they’re also less likely to support affirmative action for women. Among teenage boys, regular porn use has been correlated with seeing sex as purely physical and regarding girls as “play things.” Porn users are also more likely than their peers to measure their masculinity, social status, and self-worth by their ability to score with “hot” women (which may explain that disproportionate pressure girls report to text boys naked photos of themselves as well as the plots of most Seth Rogen films). Male and female college students who report recent porn use have been repeatedly found to be more likely than others to believe “rape myths”: that only strangers commit sexual assault or that the victim “asked for it” by drinking too much or wearing “slutty” clothing or by going to a club alone. Perhaps because it depicts aggression as sexy, porn also seems to desensitize women to potential violence: female porn users are less likely than others to intervene when seeing another woman being threatened or assaulted and are slower to recognize when they’re in danger themselves. Boys (both in high school and college), not surprisingly, use porn more regularly than girls. Slightly less than half of male college students use it weekly; only 3 percent of females do. Given that frequent consumers of porn are more likely to consider its depictions of sex realistic, this can skew expectations in the bedroom. “I do think porn changes how guys view sex,” mused Alyson Lee. “Especially with my first boyfriend. He had no experience. He thought it would happen like in porn, that I’d be ready a lot faster and he could just, you know, pound.” “They think they’re supposed to do this hammer-in-and-out thing and that’s what girls like,” agreed a sophomore at a California college. “They don’t realize, ‘Dude, that does not feel good.’ It’s all they know. It’s what they see. If you’re just hooking up with someone, like a one-time thing or whatever, you just pretend it feels good.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  There has been a lot of anxiety over the past couple of decades about teens and oral sex. Much of it can be traced back to the late 1990s, to a New York Times report that among middle-class teens, oral sex—and by “oral sex,” it meant fellatio—not only was becoming ubiquitous, but that they were engaging in it far earlier and more casually than teens’ busy (read: neglectful) working parents realized. One health educator was quoted as saying, “‘Do you spit or do you swallow?’ is a typical seventh-grade question.” Two years later, the Washington Post covered a parent meeting called by middle school counselors in Arlington, Virginia, a town of “elegant brick homes, leafy sycamores and stone walls”—again, code for white and middle class—to discuss the fellatio craze among thirteen-year-old girls. The reporter linked that incident to a wider regional trend, based largely on “student grapevine”–generated claims of girls who had dropped to their knees during study hall or at the back of a school bus. Girls’ bodies have always been vectors for a society’s larger trepidations about women’s roles. It was likely no coincidence, then, that those early blow job scandals surfaced just as oral sex was making front-page news for another reason: the country was gripped by an obsession with a certain blue Gap frock and a cigar that was by no means just a cigar. President Bill Clinton’s alleged dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern less than half his age, dominated the headlines, sending mortified parents leaping from the couch to twist the radio dial or grab the TV remote when the latest reports aired. Most famously, in January 1998, Clinton testified under oath that “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” A few months later, when DNA from his semen was discovered on the fabled dress that she had squirreled away as a memento of their tryst—and, might I say, ick—he insisted that he had not perjured himself because their relationship involved only oral sex. Suddenly, people across the nation were hotly debating whether mouth-to-genital contact was, indeed, “sex.” If it wasn’t, what exactly was it? And how were Americans supposed to explain the president’s hairsplitting to their children?

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Oral sex had only recently become a standard part of Americans’ erotic repertoire. Historically, both fellatio and cunnilingus were considered more intimate than intercourse, acts to be engaged in only after marriage, if at all. In 1994, just a few years before the Clinton affair broke, Sex in America, the most definitive survey at that time to be released on this country’s sexual practices, found that while only a minority of women over fifty had ever performed fellatio, among women under thirty-five, three quarters had done so. (Most men, whatever their age, said they had been both providers and recipients of oral sex.) The rise in going down among straight couples, the authors wrote, was the biggest sexual change of the twentieth century. By 2014 oral sex was so common as to be unremarkable: as one researcher quipped, the number of Americans who thought Barack Obama was Muslim was larger than those who had never given or received oral sex. But the notion that the practice was aging downward, that among teens it was becoming more common and less meaningful than intercourse, was most definitely a new phenomenon, one that caught not only parents but also researchers off-guard. There was very little hard data to back those early journalistic claims. Oral sex practices of minors had been considered unfundable in academia; even if one could get the money, what parent would allow their child to be questioned on the subject? More generally, there was a presumption among conservative politicians that talking to teens about any form of sex, even in the name of research, was tantamount to handing them an instruction manual. Because of that, vital information about kids’ sexual behaviors, including disease transmission, went virtually unstudied. By 2000 the Clinton presidency was winding down, but the blow job panic had just begun. A new story in the New York Times declared that sixth-graders were now, basically, treating fellatio like a handshake with the mouth. According to one Long Island child psychologist, girls that age would tell him earnestly that they expected to wait until marriage for intercourse, yet had already given head fifty or sixty times. “It’s like a goodnight kiss to them,” he claimed, “how they say good-bye after a date.” The director of the Parenting Institute at New York University, meanwhile, predicted that soon a “substantial” number of kids would be having intercourse by middle school. “It’s already happening,” he told the Times. (That was not true: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in most states rates of intercourse among middle schoolers were dropping.) An article in the now-defunct Talk magazine blamed dual-career “parents who were afraid to parent” for an epidemic of oral sex among seventh-graders—again acting out larger anxieties about women, in this case working mothers, through concerns about unsupervised, wayward girls.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  It was Oprah, however—isn’t it always Oprah?—who sounded the loudest alarm. In 2003 she invited onto her show a reporter for O Magazine who had interviewed fifty girls about their sexual practices. “Hold on to your underwear for this one,” the writer said, before revealing her ultimate stunner: the rainbow party. In this version of Girls Gone Wild, young women barely past their Barbie phase were donning different shades of lipstick, then fellating groups of boys in turns, leaving behind a “rainbow” of makeup on each penis. The girl whose color hit farthest down was declared the “winner.” Well, what parent wouldn’t freak out? Children were having indiscriminate sex (or indiscriminate not-sex) everywhere! Under the table at bar mitzvahs! Behind the monkey bars during recess! No one, least of all Oprah, seemed to question the actual logistics of any of this. Exactly how were girls managing to complete multiple, random sex acts during the school day without an adult’s notice? Were thirteen-year-old boys really up to fifteen public blow jobs in the space of a few hours? Wouldn’t any rainbow effect be rinsed off or at least indelibly smudged by each subsequent partner? A 2004 NBC News/People survey taken shortly after the rainbow party story broke found that, in truth, less than one half of 1 percent of children ages thirteen to sixteen said they’d attended an oral sex party. Although that’s not zero, it’s hardly rampant. So, no, children were not having orgies. That said, the seed from which the “rainbow party” myth sprouted did come from somewhere: oral sex has become relatively commonplace among teens. By the end of ninth grade, nearly one in five children has engaged in oral sex; by age eighteen, about two thirds have, with white and more affluent teens indulging more than others. Pinning that change on Bill Clinton or the sexual revolution or parental permissiveness, however, would be simplistic—and incorrect. Right-wing influence on sex education has played an equal, if not greater role. Federally mandated abstinence-only programs, which began in the early 1980s, not only reinforced that intercourse was the line in the sand of chastity, but also, using the threat of AIDS as justification, hammered home the idea that it might well kill you. Oral sex, then, was the obvious work-around. I doubt, though, that social conservatives would consider it a victory that, across a range of studies, college students who identify as religious are even more likely than others to say oral sex is not “sex,” or that over a third of teenagers included it in their definition of “abstinence” (nearly a quarter included anal sex), or that roughly 70 percent agreed that someone who engages in oral sex is still a virgin.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  I wondered, though: If teens didn’t consider oral sex to be “sex,” how did they perceive it? What did it mean to girls to give or receive oral sex? Did they enjoy it? Tolerate it? Expect it? One evening, shortly after her graduation from a suburban Chicago high school, a young woman named Ruby allowed me to join her and four of her friends for a chat. We met in Ruby’s bedroom, one wall of which she’d painted midnight blue. Leggings, T-shirts, and skirts tumbled out of half-open dresser drawers. The girls sprawled on the floor, across the bed, on a beanbag chair. When I asked about oral sex, a girl named Devon shook her head. “That’s not a thing anymore,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “So what is it, then?” I asked. Devon shrugged. “It’s nothing.” “Well, it’s not that it’s nothing,” added Rachel. “It’s not sex,” Devon countered. “It’s like a step past making out with someone,” said Ruby. “It’s a way of hooking up. A way to have gone farther without it being seen as any big deal.” “And it doesn’t have the repercussions that vaginal sex does,” Rachel added. “You’re not losing your virginity, you can’t get pregnant, you can’t get STDs. So it’s safer.” That, unfortunately, is not entirely true—though, again, because oral sex is ignored by parents and educators, there is a widespread belief among teens that it is risk free. The result is that while their rates of intercourse and pregnancy have dropped over the past thirty years, their rates of sexually transmitted diseases have not. Teens and young adults account for half of all new STD diagnoses annually and the majority among women. The new popularity of oral sex has been linked to rising rates of Type 1 herpes and gonorrhea (a disease that, about a decade ago, researchers thought was on the verge of eradication). Avoiding STDs, though, isn’t really why girls engage in oral sex. The number one reason they do it, according to a study of high schoolers, is to improve their relationships. (Nearly a quarter of girls said this, compared to about 5 percent of boys.) What, though, did “improving a relationship” mean exactly, especially since so many also told me that oral sex, at least where fellatio was concerned, was a way to emotionally distance themselves from their partners, protect against the overinvestment they feared would come with intercourse. For years, psychologists have warned that girls learn to suppress their own feelings in order to avoid conflict, to preserve the peace in friendships and romantic partnerships. Was performing fellatio another version of that? Whether they hoped to attract a boy’s interest, sustain it, or placate him, it seemed their partner’s happiness was their main concern. Boys, incidentally, far and away, said that the number one reason they engaged in oral sex was for physical pleasure.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  In their research on high school girls and oral sex, April Burns, a professor of psychology at City University of New York, and her colleagues found that girls thought of fellatio kind of like homework: a chore to get done, a skill to master, one on which they expected to be evaluated, possibly publicly. As with schoolwork, they worried about failing or performing poorly—earning the equivalent of low marks. Although they took satisfaction in a task well done, the pleasure they described was never physical, never located in their own bodies. They were both dispassionate and nonpassionate about oral sex—socialized, the researchers concluded, to see themselves as “learners” in their encounters rather than “yearners.” The concern with pleasing, as opposed to pleasure, was pervasive among the girls I met, especially among high schoolers, who were just starting sexual experimentation. They often felt, for instance, that once they’d said yes to intercourse with a partner, they could never say no again, whether or not they were “in the mood.” “I remember sort of hating it,” said Lily, now a sophomore at a West Coast public university, about her sexual relationship with a high school boyfriend. “I wanted to please him, but it felt sometimes like we couldn’t have a normal conversation because he was so distracted by wanting to have sex. And I couldn’t really think of a reason to refuse”—not wanting to didn’t seem adequate. “Sometimes I felt like I was just a receptacle for his hormones.” Those media-fueled sex panics tend to prey on parental fears about girls’ promiscuity or victimization; the backlash dismisses both as overblown. Rarely does anyone ask the girls themselves what they think, what they gain from or enjoy about their experiences. Sam mentioned social status. Lily talked about pleasing a boyfriend. Gretchen, a seventeen-year-old classmate of Sam’s, said she enjoyed the thrill, however short-lived, in having power over a boy. “I’ve gone down on four guys now. I don’t even know, really, why I do it.” She paused, chewing contemplatively on her lower lip. “I guess I like that feeling of ‘Ha! You can’t get this from anyone else. I am in control here!’ You knew they really, really wanted it and you could be like, ‘No! No!’ and then they’d be like, ‘Please! Please!’ Because they were so desperate. That part’s kind of fun. But it’s definitely not the physical side of it, because that’s so gross and it really hurts my throat. I mean, it’s sort of fun getting in the rhythm of it. But it’s never fun fun.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Performing oral sex could make girls feel like the more active partner in an encounter. By contrast, they described cunnilingus and intercourse as passive, like something that was being done to them, leaving them vulnerable. Those empowered feelings about fellatio, though, coexisted with their opposites: a lack of control, pressure to comply, the unspoken threat of danger. Sam commented that while her male peers had been warned not to coerce girls into intercourse, pushing for oral was fair game. Because of that, while she had “plenty of guy friends,” she preferred not to be alone with them (which would, it seems, be an obstacle to true friendship). “In my social world, if you’re hanging out alone with a guy, the usual expectation is that you’re going to hook up with him,” she explained. “And if you decide not to, he might try to pressure you. So I’ll hang out with a guy at school, but I would never go to his house or to a movie or do anything that could be construed as more than ‘just friends’ unless I wanted that to happen. It’s not that they’d force themselves on you; it’s that there would be pressure. There would be disappointment. And there might be tension in our relationship if it didn’t happen.” I want to be clear here. Sam was not a pushover, not a meek or mousy girl. She was an honor student, an editor on her school paper, a varsity tennis player. She identified as a feminist and casually bandied about terms such as slut shaming, gender binary, and rape culture. She was applying to top-tier colleges. She was an astute observer of her world. She was also, most definitely, immersed in it. Nearly all the girls I interviewed were bright, assertive, ambitious. If I had been interviewing them about their professional dreams or their attitudes toward leadership or their willingness to compete with boys in the classroom, I might have walked away inspired. A sophomore at an Ivy League college, a lacrosse player whose mother was a partner in a large law firm, bragged to me about the “strong women” in her family. “My grandmother is a firecracker at eighty-eight, and my mom is crazy, and my sister and I are going to be as crazy as they are,” she said. “In my family, you have to have a personality and be loud. That’s how we interact. It’s like a form of feminine power and knowing yourself.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  You won’t read the words ‘flying weight’ in antiquarian falconry books because the old falconers didn’t use scales. They assessed the condition of their hawks by feeling their muscles and breastbones and observing their behaviour with sharp and experienced eyes. This is not an easy thing to do, and it is almost impossible for a novice falconer to grasp the subtleties involved in bringing a hawk into flying condition. White had no weighing machine and no mentor to teach him: he had to learn the old methods the hard way. I know that in one sense the weighing of hawks is a falling-off, a brute measure compared to the intuitive understanding that comes from really knowing your hawk. Still, I would not train a hawk without a set of scales. When I used to fly merlins, tiny falcons with needle talons and frames so voracious and delicate they resemble heated Meissen porcelain, I weighed them three times a day. I fussed interminably over the relative calorific value of quail and chicken and mouse; I could tell you how much weight my hawk would lose in an hour, in two hours, in three. Even an eighth of an ounce would make a difference to how my merlins flew. It is a grosser calculation with a goshawk, because Mabel is huge compared to a merlin. But still it is not easy to judge how much food, and of what kind, will bring her into perfect flying condition. Scraps of paper litter the kitchen table, jotted with weights and question marks. I am convinced I have these calculations pat, and I am out to prove it. At four o’clock we set off for my college cricket pitch and her first calling-off lessons. ‘It’ll be fine Mabel. It’s the long vacation. The place will be deserted. No dogs, no cows, no people. No one will bother us there.’

• From Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

  But Janet has given us what he could: he is too uncertain, divided between a finality that is spontaneous and a mechanism on principle. It is not to him that we look for an exposition of this pure theory of emotional behaviour. We find it in outline among the disciples of Kohler and notably in Lewin1 and Dembo.2 Here is what P. Guillaume writes upon this subject in his Psychologie de la Forme:3 'Let us take the simplest example: we ask a subject to reach for an object placed upon a chair, but without putting a foot outside a circle traced upon the ground: the distances are so calculated as to make the act very difficult or impossible by direct means, but the problem can be resolved by indirect means.... Here, the force directed towards the object takes on a clear, concrete meaning. On the other hand, these problems present an obstacle to the direct execution of the action, an obstacle that may be either material or moral - for instance, a rule one has undertaken to observe. Thus, in our example, the circle that one must not overstep presents, to the perception of the subject, a barrier - from which there emanates a force directly in opposition to the former. The conflict between the two forces sets up a tension in the phenomenal field. If the solution is found, the successful action puts an end to the tension. . . . There is a whole psychology of the act of replacement or substitution, of the ersatz to which the school of Lewin has made an interesting contribution. Its form is very variable; the partial results achieved may help to fix it. Sometimes the subject facilitates the act by freeing himself from some of the imposed conditions of quantity, quality, speed or duration, and even by modifying the nature of his task; in other cases he performs unreal, symbolic actions; one makes an obviously useless gesture in the direction of the act; another describes the action instead of performing it, or imagines chimerical, Active procedures (if only I had . . . one would need . . .) outside the real or imposed conditions for its accomplishment. If acts of substitution are impossible, or do not produce an adequate solution, the tension persists, manifested by a tendency to abandon the problem, to wander away, or to withdraw into one's own thoughts in an attitude of passivity. As we have said, indeed, the subject finds himself subjected to the positive attraction of the end in view and to the negative, repellent influence of the barrier: furthermore, the fact that he has consented to undergo the trial has conferred a negative value upon all the other objects in the field, in the sense that all diversions irrelevant to the task are ipso facto impossible. The subject is thus imprisoned, as it were, in a space fenced in on every side: there is only one positive way out, and that is closed by the specific barrier. This situation corresponds to the diagram below:

• From Confessions

  Now then, O my Helper, hadst Thou loosed me from those fetters: and I sought "whence is evil," and found no way. But Thou sufferedst me not by any fluctuations of thought to be carried away from the Faith whereby I believed Thee both to be, and Thy substance to be unchangeable, and that Thou hast a care of, and wouldest judge men, and that in Christ, Thy Son, Our Lord, and the holy Scriptures, which the authority of Thy Catholic Church pressed upon me, Thou hadst set the way of man's salvation, to that life which is to be after this death. These things being safe and immovably settled in my mind, I sought anxiously "whence was evil?" What were the pangs of my teeming heart, what groans, O my God! yet even there were Thine ears open, and I knew it not; and when in silence I vehemently sought, those silent contritions of my soul were strong cries unto Thy mercy. Thou knewest what I suffered, and no man. For, what was that which was thence through my tongue distilled into the ears of my most familiar friends? Did the whole tumult of my soul, for which neither time nor utterance sufficed, reach them? Yet went up the whole to Thy hearing, all which I roared out from the groanings of my heart; and my desire was before Thee, and the light of mine eyes was not with me: for that was within, I without: nor was that confined to place, but I was intent on things contained in place, but there found I no resting-place, nor did they so receive me, that I could say, "It is enough," "it is well": nor did they yet suffer me to turn back, where it might be well enough with me. For to these things was I superior, but inferior to Thee; and Thou art my true joy when subjected to Thee, and Thou hadst subjected to me what Thou createdst below me. And this was the true temperament, and middle region of my safety, to remain in Thy Image, and by serving Thee, rule the body. But when I rose proudly against Thee, and ran against the Lord with my neck, with the thick bosses of my buckler, even these inferior things were set above me, and pressed me down, and no where was there respite or space of breathing. They met my sight on all sides by heaps and troops, and in thought the images thereof presented themselves unsought, as I would return to Thee, as if they would say unto me, "Whither goest thou, unworthy and defiled?" And these things had grown out of my wound; for Thou "humbledst the proud like one that is wounded," and through my own swelling was I separated from Thee; yea, my pride-swollen face closed up mine eyes.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  As Wolff, Wolf, and a generation of psychosomatic researchers asserted, psychological conflicts are sometimes linked to specific changes in our bodies. One person’s blood pressure may increase when he is forced to discuss the death of his parents, whereas another might respond to the same topic with the beginnings of a migraine headache. A third person may not show any biological changes in response to the death topic but may react selectively to issues surrounding sexuality. That many, perhaps most, illnesses have a psychosomatic component is not surprising. More peculiar is that we rarely see the relationship between psychological events and illness in ourselves. When we do, however, the course of the illness often changes for the better. Why are we blind to many of the psychological precursors to illness? One problem lies in our abilities to perceive cause–effect relationships. When we see something happen, we naturally look for something that preceded the event by no more than a few seconds or, at most, hours. If our car doesn’t start because of a dead battery, we might blame the battery’s demise on last night’s cold weather or our failure to turn off the headlights. It makes no sense to think back to the way we drove the car two weeks ago. Our body is a different story. If we come down with a cold, it probably has nothing to do with last night’s weather or what we had for breakfast. It could be that our immune system was compromised by the breakup of a significant relationship a week or two earlier. Another reason for our inability to see the links between our own psychological issues and illness concerns denial. Virtually all of us have actively avoided thinking about unpleasant experiences. Some issues are so painful that we deceive ourselves into thinking that they don’t exist. Sigmund Freud persuasively argued that we employ an arsenal of defense mechanisms, such as denial, compulsive behaviors, and even dwelling on physical symptoms to screen out anxiety and psychological pain. Wheezing when around parents or headaches in sexual situations can safely be attributed to purely physical causes (e.g., pollen or caffeine). Admitting to personal struggles concerning one’s autonomy or feelings of sexual anxiety is a far less pleasant strategy when less threatening alternative explanations are available.

• From Open (2009)

  AS POWERFUL AS Ivanisevic’s serve is under normal circumstances, today it’s a work of art. He’s acing me left and right, monster serves that the speed gun clocks at 138 miles an hour. But it’s not just the speed, it’s the trajectory. They land at a 75-degree angle. I try not to care. I tell myself that aces happen. Each time he serves a ball past me, I say under my breath that he can’t do that every time. Just walk to the other side and get ready, Andre. The match will be decided on those few second serves. He wins the first set, 7–6. I don’t break him once. I concentrate on not overreacting, on breathing in, breathing out, remaining patient. When the thought crosses my mind that I’m on the verge of losing my fourth slam final, I casually set that thought aside. In the second set Ivanisevic gives me a few freebies, makes a few mistakes, and I break him. I take the second set. Then the third. Which makes me feel almost worse, because once again I’m a set away from a slam. Ivanisevic rises up in the fourth set and destroys me. I’ve made the Croat mad. He loses only a handful of points in the process. Here we go again. I can see tomorrow’s headlines as plain as the racket in my hand. As the fifth set begins I run in place to get the blood flowing and tell myself one thing: You want this. You do not want to lose, not this time. The problem in the last three slams was that you didn’t want them enough, and therefore you didn’t bring it, but this one you want, so this time you need to let Ivanisevic and everyone else in this joint know you want it. At 3–3, I’m serving, break point. I haven’t been able to make a first serve this entire set, but now, mercifully, I make one. He returns it to the center of the court, I hit to his backhand, he hits a chip lob. I have to back up two steps. The overhead is one of the easiest shots you can play. It’s also the epitome of my struggles at slams, because it’s too easy. I don’t like things too easy. It’s there for the taking—will I take it? I swing, hit a textbook overhead, and win the point. I go on to hold serve.

• From Escape (2007)

  A storm had moved into the valley and it was starting to snow on top of the few feet of snow we already had. I called the welfare office and said I had a handicapped child and a toddler and I couldn’t do this in twenty-four hours by myself. I asked for an extension. I was told there was no way. If I didn’t make the deadline, my case would be closed. Then I would have to reapply. I figured it would take months to get my benefits again. The next day I cancelled every appointment I had and headed out into the snowstorm with Bryson, Harrison, and Harrison’s wheelchair to make my rounds. I was still struggling with PTSD. My five-minute plan wasn’t much help on a day like this. Harrison’s immune system was compromised from his hormone therapy. I worried that he would get sick. It was blindingly cold. At each school I had to take the wheelchair out, set it up, settle Harrison into it and bundle him up, and then get Bryson from his car seat. When I got to my brother’s to fax in the paperwork, I was shivering so much my teeth would not stop chattering. When I woke up the next morning I had a hard time breathing. I had a fever and knew I had pneumonia. I couldn’t get out of bed. LuAnne started taking care of Harrison once she realized how seriously sick I was. Betty even started making meals and doing some dishes. For the first time, my kids were worried. By Monday morning, I was still burning up with fever. I was too sick to call anyone and too afraid that if I did, someone might find out about my PTSD. Merril was already accusing me of being mentally ill. I knew that some women who tried to flee polygamy ended up locked into mental institutions and had their children taken away from them. I would risk anything to avoid that fate. I told my children I was too sick to take them to school. I didn’t even have the strength to call and cancel my appointments. Amazingly, Betty and LuAnne started bringing me tea. I was able to sip the tea, but I couldn’t eat. Tuesday morning was no different. But Betty didn’t want to miss any more school. She was worried about keeping her grades up and called Mitzi, the PTA president who had taken Merrilee, Patrick, and Andrew under her wing. Mitzi took the children to school and said she’d do so as long as I needed help. Then she made me a big batch of chicken soup. I tried to sip some every two hours. Mitzi also bought me some over-the-counter medicine and a vaporizer, all of which helped. By the time the weekend was over I knew I was strong enough to take my children back to school.