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 Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  Masters and Johnson were no self-declared feminists; they located their findings firmly within a traditional framework of heterosexual monogamy and marriage. Nonetheless, they were pushing against past orthodoxies that had hemmed in women’s sexuality. In the first half of the twentieth century, myriad experts advanced a view of women’s sexuality as profoundly – almost metaphysically – different from men’s. From the 1910s especially, a new generation of marriage experts was writing guidance for couples – guidance that emphasized pleasure in the cementing of marital and social bonds. These texts invoked a stark difference in men and women’s sexualities. ‘A man’s sex feelings are easily and quickly aroused, and quickly satisfied,’ wrote Helena Wright in 1930 in The Sex Factor in Marriage, while ‘a woman’s desires, on the contrary are neither quickly aroused nor quickly satisfied’ – and clumsy and traumatic wedding nights could stunt a woman’s sexual potential forever. The role of female pleasure was fragile and dangerous; authors worked hard to find a balance between female sexuality as liberated (and potentially disruptive and unbridled), and as domesticated (and potentially stifled). A wife has ‘the potentiality of a keen sexual appetite’, wrote one sexologist in 1937, which it is the husband’s ‘privilege to arouse and maintain’ with patience and tenderness. A woman’s pleasure had to be elicited by a skilled, attentive husband; he had to coax female desire out carefully, leading his wife through the choppy waters of desire – he the teacher, she the disciple. These books allowed for, indeed celebrated, female sexual pleasure – but they sought to contain it within norms of heterosexuality, femininity and motherhood. Without due care, frigidity and nymphomania were the two potential results. A conservative neo-Freudianism intensified this anxiety about the potential extremes of female sexuality. Freud often figures as the culprit in accounts of this landscape, but he himself did not see heterosexuality as either normal or inevitable. For Freud, reproductive heterosexuality was not a biological inevitability, but a complex developmental process. In both men and women, he argued, heterosexual desire was acquired rather than inborn – and it was acquired with difficulty, as well as always provisionally. Freud’s female sexuality was unstable, and suffused with ambiguity. The difficult transition from clitoral to vaginal sexuality, and the struggle to disengage libidinally from the mother to the father and to men, was not inevitable, nor was it something Freud unequivocally or consistently urged, unlike some of his later followers. In his account of this unstable moment, he represented the girl as standing, for some unsteady time, outside of sexual categories. A young woman exists for a time, as Jane Gerhard puts it in Desiring Revolution, ‘between sexual identities’; neither purely masculine or feminine, neither homosexual or heterosexual, but potentially all at once.

• From The Vagina Bible (2019)

  • BARTHOLIN’S ABSCESS: The Bartholin’s glands are small glands at either side of the lower vestibule (vaginal opening). A gland can get blocked, and the trapped secretions may get infected and cause an abscess—this affects 2 percent of women at some point in their lives. The result is a very painful lump, which can get fairly large—even as big as a Ping-Pong ball. This will be a very tender swelling in the lower labia minora. This needs to be drained. The most common technique involves leaving a small tube in the abscess called a Word catheter for up to four weeks so it can drain while a channel forms, preventing secretions from getting blocked again. The second option is going to the operating room and having surgery to open the gland and prevent recurrence. There are advantages and disadvantages to both techniques. Simply sticking a needle in to drain is not recommended, as the abscess often comes back. • TRAUMA: This can be from sex, from using a sex toy, from riding a bike, or even from hair removal. Even if the skin has not broken, a large, typically painful bruise called a hematoma can form under the skin. Chronic Vulvar Pain When pain is present for a long time, many women worry about cancer, although typically cancer is not painful. If it were, we would identify it at an early stage more often. Cancer of the vulva is only painful once it gets large enough that it starts to ulcerate or grow into nerves. The most common causes of chronic vulvar pain: • Vulvodynia • Muscle spasm (PFMS) • Lichen sclerosus/lichen planus • GSM • Vaginitis • Yeast infections • Nerve injury (typically a one-sided pain, usually with a history of surgery or trauma) BOTTOM LINE • Ingrown hairs can become infected and cause significant pain. • Pain with redness over both sides of the vulva with no breaks in the skin is most commonly yeast, an irritant reaction, or contact dermatitis. • Chronic vulvar pain in the absence of redness or skin changes is typically vulvodynia, muscle spasms, or GSM. • If there are ulcerations, breaks in the skin, and chronic pain, then autoimmune skin conditions must be considered. • The discharge of trichomoniasis and DIV can be very irritating and cause vulvar pain. CHAPTER 43 I Have an Odor THERE ARE AN INCREASING NUMBER of women reporting abnormal genital odor. I am not the only OB/GYN to notice this. There has been no change in causes of genital odor over the past twenty-five years; what has changed is the proliferation of products designed to shame women about the normal smell of their body and tame the female genital tract for some misogynistic ideal. These products come from Big Pharma and are found on drugstore shelves in the form of douches and intimate washes, and they also exist in the realm of Big Natural, with vaginal steaming and vaginal herbal sachet packs, often called pearls.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  Hardest thing is to know where and how to Give of Yourself … and that’s a problem to ponder this summer. Can you earn money writing? You have, in the teenage group, but the competition in the slicks is phenomenal.… The Literary Market seems at once harder and more esthetically rewarding. I AM NOT GOING TO HARVARD SUMMER SCHOOL. I will learn shorthand, typing, and write and read and write and read, and talk to myself about attitudes, see the Aldriches and neighbors, and be nice and friendly and outgoing, and forget my damn ego-centered self in trying to learn and understand about what makes life rich and what is most important. You are an inconsistent and very frightened hypocrite: you wanted time to think, to find out about yourself, your ability to write, and now that you have it: practically 3 months of godawful time, you are paralyzed, shocked, thrown into a nausea, a stasis. You are plunged so deep in your own very private little whirlpool of negativism that you can’t do more than force yourself into a rote where the simplest actions become forbidding and enormous. Your mind is incapable of thinking. If you went to Harvard, all your time would be planned, diagrammed for you—practically the way it will be at Smith next year: and just now that kind of security seems desirable—it is just another way of absolving you of taking responsibility for your own actions and planning, really, although now the issue is so confused it is hard to think which choice would take the most guts: and which kind of guts. Marcia is working and taking a course—you are doing neither: the woman at the vocational office said you should know shorthand: you can now learn it—you won’t have it this good again, baby. You could even take psych at B. U.—if you had the guts to commute … but why blind yourself by taking course after course: when if you are anybody, which you are no doubt not, you should not be bored, but should be able to think, accept, affirm —and not retreat into a masochistic mental hell where jealousy and fear make you want to stop eating. Don’t ignore all the people you could know, shutting yourself up in a numb defensive vacuum; please yank yourself up and don’t spend years gaping in horror at the one time in your life you’ll have a chance to prove your own discipline.… Catch perspective, kid—learn shorthand; study French: THINK CONSTRUCTIVELY —and get some respect for yourself. You always said you could write a Ladies’ Home Journal story if you tried hard. NOW is the time to analyze, to recreate in your own mind —not merely to shovel the hole full of other people and their words. Now is the time to conjure up words and ideas on your own. You are frozen mentally—scared to get going, eager to crawl back to the womb.

• From Bold Move

  What happened to your emotions? [Your Notes] Transforming Anxiety into Power: Shift, Approach, and Align Now that you know how to activate your superpower—your brain—by pausing through the TEB cycle, it is time to put the pieces of the puzzle together so that we can understand how to transform anxiety into power. In the diagram below, I have illustrated the three possible pathways you might go down in response to your brain sensing danger. No matter who we are, once our brain senses danger, it will turn on our amygdala and we will experience some level of discomfort. Biology drives this process without thinking, so this is not where we can intervene (top of the diagram). In case of real danger (left side of the diagram), such as a poisonous snake, your brain will be in full fight, flight, or freeze mode, causing you to act. And once you are safe, your discomfort will go down slowly. If your child just crossed the street in front of an oncoming car, and they are now safe, it will take a while for your heart to return to baseline. In case of true danger, discomfort comes down slowly. Real Danger or a False Alarm? However, sometimes our brain responds the same way, but to perceived danger (middle pathway of the diagram in black). Because biology is in control here, you will have the same symptoms as fight, flight, or freeze. But because we are dealing with perceived danger, I have labeled our fight, flight, or freeze response as the 3 Rs of avoidance (i.e., react, retreat, and remain). Although echoing the same biological cascade, this pathway ends up in avoidance. We will discuss the 3 Rs of avoidance in detail in the subsequent sections of the book, but here is an example to illustrate how each of these responses to perceived threat can end up in avoidance. Imagine that you just got an email late at night from someone who you have had a lot of conflict with, such as your boss, your loved one, your parent, a close friend, or your child. As you look at the email subject line, it reads, “We need to talk, it is urgent.” Immediately, your anxiety increases, and you might respond in one of three possible ways. Some of us are more likely to react (i.e., fight) when we sense discomfort. When you react to avoid, you will do whatever it takes to eliminate the potential threat, which really is your anxiety. So, what does it take to bring anxiety down through reactive avoidance?

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  §1.8. So stated, these points appear harmless enough. Over the last decade and a half, however, a notion of safety has arisen, a notion that runs from safe sex (once it becomes anything more than making sure your partner uses a condom when you are anally penetrated by males of unknown HIV status, whether you are male or female) to safe neighborhoods, safe cities, and committed (i.e., safe) relationships, a notion that currently functions much the way the notion of “security” and “conformity” did in the fifties. As, in the name of “safety,” society dismantles the various institutions that promote interclass communication, attempts to critique the way such institutions functioned in the past to promote their happier sides are often seen as, at best, nostalgia for an outmoded past and, at worst, a pernicious glorification of everything dangerous: unsafe sex, neighborhoods filled with undesirables (read “unsafe characters”), promiscuity, an attack on the family and the stable social structure, and dangerous, noncommitted, “unsafe” relationships—that is, psychologically “dangerous” relations, though the danger is rarely specified in any way other than to suggest its failure to conform to the ideal bourgeois marriage. Such critiques are imperative, however, if we are ever to establish new institutions that will promote similar ends. §2. The linear chain linkage into which the earlier practice of landlord visits with tenants might be said to have degenerated reminds us that the linear chain as an information conduit is a relatively artificial social form. Most social interchanges of information and material occur in various forms of social nets (as opposed to chains). Generally speaking, in a net situation information comes from several directions and crosses various power boundaries, so that various processes—modulating, revisionary, additive, recursive, and corrective (all of them critical, each of them highlighting different aspects)—can compensate for the inevitable reductions that occur along the constitutive chains. Considered as information dispersal processes, nets are far more efficient than chains. Not all nets are, however, the same. Social nets can be of more or less complexity, of greater or lesser density. When the net density is comparatively low, we find ourselves focusing on the contacts between individual net members and often ignoring the net-like structure in which the individual contacts occur. When the net density is high, we find ourselves more likely to focus on the overall network. Starting from the above as the most arbitrary and provisional of observations, I will go on to discuss two modes of social net practice (and the discourses around them that allow them to be visible as such) that I designate as “contact” and “networking.” Like all social practices they make/generate/create/sediment discourses, even as discourses create, individuate, and inform with value the material and social objects that facilitate and form the institutions that both support and contour these practices.

• From The Vagina Bible (2019)

  One day you were fine and then, ouch! Given the number of nerves in the vulva, anything that hurts can be more intensely painful here compared with elsewhere in the body. Also, you can’t rest your vulva, as you do have to empty your bladder regularly. Swelling may be more prominent as the vulva is dependent (meaning lower than your heart), and it’s not as if you can raise your vulva to reduce swelling like you can a sprained ankle. The pain can be generalized, meaning affecting most of the vulva, or really discrete in one location. Yeast infections, irritant reactions, and contact dermatitis typically present as itch, but occasionally they can be pain predominant. See chapters 31 and 35. They are both typically associated with redness of the skin. Common causes of acute vulvar pain include the following: • HERPES: The typical lesion is an ulcer, but it starts as a small bump. It is very painful. The lesions have typically crusted over by 7–10 days. The pain can extend beyond the lesion. The ulcer can become infected, increasing the pain even more. • INGROWN HAIR: This is the result of the hair growing back on itself into the skin. This leads to inflammation and pain. Typically, the hair will work its way out (see chapter 13 for other suggestions). If you are not sure this is infected, contact your provider. • FOLLICULITIS: Inflammation and infection of the hair follicle. The most common cause is pubic hair removal. Your provider may recommend a topical antibiotic depending on the number and the degree of inflammation. • BOILS: Another name for an abscess. The most common cause is an ingrown hair or injury related to hair removal. Typically, a boil starts as a firm nodule that becomes increasingly painful as the infection develops and fills with pus. The surrounding skin may be infected. Warm compresses are fine. If the boil drains on its own that is fine, but do not attempt to drain this yourself; you may introduce more bacteria and worsen the infection. If you have diabetes or a weakened immune system, you should contact your doctor immediately. If your pain seems out of proportion to what you see on your skin, then you should also be seen. If the overlying skin is red, this could mean the infection has spread to your skin, and so you should be seen.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  If I live at home, I will be alone all summer, unless I seek out neighbors. I will be not earning money, and not really spending money. I will have to be cheerful and constructive, and schedule my day much harder than if at Harvard. I will learn about shopping and cooking, and try to make Mother’s vacation happy and good. That in itself would be worthwhile. I will work two hours a day at shorthand, and brush up my typing. I will write for three or four hours Each Day, and read for the same amount of time from a reading list I draw up carefully, so I won’t read hit or miss. I do not want to think that I am staying home because of fear: jealousy of Marcia and Mike, of Sally and Jane in their casual productive job-home. I like to be busy, to work hard, and I would in contrast feel lazy and guilty, as I said. Which shows how weak I am in one way. Face this realistically. I will have to give up my scholarship if I go to Harvard.… The decision is my own. I have to be creatively “existential.” It is damn hard, because I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb.… In the middle of the summer, I will begin reading Joyce, so that I’ll have a bulk read in time to begin thinking about the writing of my theses chapters, right at the beginning of the fall. I Will Not Lie Fallow or Be Lazy. And at home, I will not have the little man in my head mocking: is this worth it, worth it, worth it, this course for $250, while your mother does all the work at home? I must make choices clearly, honestly, without getting sick so I can’t eat, which is in itself a defense mechanism that wants to revert to childhood tactics to get sympathy and avoid responsibility. At home, I must not also begin dreaming up idealistic pictures of summer school, envy of Marcia, who after all has a job to justify her rich summer (and who last summer had a hell of a time). And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. And you are so obsessed by your coming necessity to be independent, to face the great huge man-eating world, that you are paralyzed: your whole body and spirit revolt against having to commit yourself to a particular role, to a particular life which Might Not bring out the Best you have in you. Living takes a very different set of responses and attitudes from this academic hedony … and you have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you. You big baby.

• From Three Women (2019)

  In the car he’s cockier than usual. As a teacher, she decides, he’s far nicer. He’s never entirely tender—even at his warmest, he exudes the pale sweetness of a cashew—but now he is armed and cool. Getting into the car has triggered an acute shift; she goes from feeling half woman and half child to feeling like a toddler. They’re talking and there’s no music on. The roads of Fargo are flung ahead like foreign airstrips. Maggie experiences a distinct feeling of doom. It’s normal, when you’re this close to thrall, to worry over losing it. This is nothing like what she felt for Mateo. With Knodel, it’s this thing that’s been building—has it been building since she was a freshman?—so it’s that much more important because of its history. Also, because of the quality of his person. He’s top-shelf. Being with him, she feels her own stock rise. She visualizes an actual accumulation of wealth. At the same time, she feels that she isn’t good enough. As they pass the new organic market he takes a verbal jab at her. They have always goofed around like this. She reaches across the console and grabs his hand, like, Hey jerk! He snatches his hand away like hers is on fire. He isn’t cold about it. It’s more like she has scared the hell out of him. The only thing that will cool the shamehot is time and distance. The problem is that she doesn’t ever want to get out of the car. They drive around for a half hour. When they approach her neighborhood she tells him so. He says, Oh, where do you live, I want to see. She starts to give directions and he starts to follow them. She enjoys the rare peace of having some semblance of control. Nearly there, he says, No, forget it. I shouldn’t know where you live because I may have the urge to drive by and check on you. She slumps in her seat. Maybe this doesn’t happen physically but on the inside she suffers a degradation. She would have eaten a roach to be able to hold his hand. His distance is captivating and awful. He’s trying to control himself and succeeding, and she feels, acutely, how a loved one’s self-control can be cruel to the other person. The best part of her whole life happens next. He slows to a stop on a quiet street, parks his wife’s car at the curb of a house with no lights on, and just looks at her. He does it for ten seconds, maybe less. In those seconds, every bad thing she has ever thought about herself is erased, and she feels like a supermodel.

• From Wild (2012)

  I did not. I only wanted it to be eleven o’clock so he’d leave with me and I could stop wondering whether I was a babe or a gargoyle and whether he was looking at me or he thought I was looking at him. We still had an hour and a half to go. “So what should we do, afterwards?” he asked. “Have you had dinner?” I told him I had, but that I was up for anything. I didn’t mention I was currently capable of eating approximately four dinners in a row. “I live on an organic farm about fifteen miles from here. It’s pretty cool at night, to walk around. We could go out there and I’ll drive you back when you’re ready.” “Okay,” I said, running my little turquoise-and-silver earring necklace along its delicate chain. I’d opted not to wear my Strayed/Starved necklace, in case Jonathan thought it was the latter. “Actually, I think I’m going to step out for some air,” I said. “But I’ll be back at eleven.” “Rad,” he said, reaching over to give my hand another squeeze before he returned to his station and the band started up. I walked giddily out into the night, the tiny red nylon bag that normally held my stove swinging on its cord from my wrist. I’d ditched most such bags and containers back in Kennedy Meadows, unwilling to carry the extra weight, but this bag I’d held on to, believing the stove needed its protection. I’d changed it into a purse for my days in Ashland, though it smelled faintly of gasoline. The things inside it were all secured in a ziplock bag that served as a very unfancy inner purse—my money, my driver’s license, lip balm and a comb, and the card that the workers at the hostel had given me so I could get Monster and my ski pole and my box of food out of their storage area. “Howdy,” said a man who stood on the sidewalk outside the bar. “You like the band?” he asked in a quiet voice. “Yeah.” I smiled at him politely. He looked to be in his late forties, dressed in jeans and suspenders and a frayed T-shirt. He had a long frizzy beard that went to his chest and a straight rim of graying hair that reached his shoulders from beneath the bald dome on top of his head. “I came down here from the mountains. I like to come and hear music sometimes,” the man said. “I did too. Came down from the mountains, I mean.” “Where do you live?” “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.” “Oh, sure.” He nodded. “The PCT. I’ve been up on it before. My place is in the other direction. I’ve got a tepee up there that I live in about four or five months out of the year.” “You live in a tepee?” I asked.

• From Wild (2012)

  Jonathan and I spotted each other the moment I entered; he waved at me from his unreachable place on a raised platform, working the lights. I got a glass of wine and stood sipping it in what I hoped was an elegant way, listening to the band near the low wall where I’d met Jonathan the night before. They were a fairly famous bluegrass band from the Bay Area. They dedicated a song to Jerry Garcia. The music was good, but I couldn’t focus on it because I was trying so hard to seem content and perfectly at ease, as if I would be at this very club listening to this very band whether Jonathan had invited me to or not, and, most of all, to be neither looking nor not looking at Jonathan, who was looking at me every time I looked at him, which then made me worry that he thought I was always looking at him because what if it was only a coincidence that every time I looked at him he was looking at me and he wasn’t actually looking at me always, but only in the moments that I looked at him, which would compel him to wonder, Why is this woman always looking at me? So then I didn’t look at him for three whole long bluegrass songs, one of which featured an improvisational, seemingly endless fiddle solo until the audience clapped in appreciation and I couldn’t take it anymore and I looked and not only was he looking at me, but he also waved again. I waved back. I turned away and stood extra still and upright, acutely aware of myself as an object of hot and exquisite beauty, feeling Jonathan’s eyes on my 100-percent-muscle ass and thighs, my breasts held high by the sweet bra beneath my slim-fitting shirt, my extra-light hair and bronze skin, my blue eyes made even bluer by the Plum Haze lipstick—a feeling which lasted for about the length of one song, at which point it reversed itself and I realized that I was a hideous beast with tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips and a too-tan, chawed-up face and weather-beaten hair and a lower abdomen that—in spite of all the exercise and deprivation and the backpack strap that for two months had squeezed it into what you’d guess would be oblivion—still had an indisputably rounded shape unless I was lying down or holding it in. In profile, my nose was so prominent a friend had once observed that I was reminiscent of a shark. And my lips—my ludicrous and ostentatious lips! Discreetly, I pressed them to the back of my hand to obliterate the Plum Haze while the music bleated on. There was, thank God, an intermission. Jonathan materialized by my side, squeezing my hand solicitously, saying he was glad I’d come, asking if I wanted another glass of wine.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  It is a time to balance finances, weighty problems, objectives and plans for the future, to decide on relative importances. I am not a wealthy girl; I have a very small amount of money with which to meet next year’s college expenses. The outgo this last month, and the amount spent on clothes ate up just about all of my winnings and prizes. Originally, my biggest satisfaction was that I would not have to get a job this summer and could sit down and write and learn shorthand, a practical skill that I could not afford to go to school to take, and that Mother could teach me in my own backyard … that I could keep up along with typing and thus never be at wits’ end for a job. When I apply for jobs after college, or after graduate school, I will want to know typing and shorthand … my bargaining power will be much better. Then I decided I would go to Harvard Summer School for several reasons: I wanted to take Frank O’Connor’s writing course because I thought that I might be able to sell some of the stories I wrote for it. I also decided to try elementary psychology so the way would be open to take psych courses later, if I wanted to. I could thus combine the practical and the creative. Now the O’Connor course is closed to me.o Yet I still want the chance to write on my own, even if the prospect scares me to death because it means thinking and working on my own. So I would not want to take the full program of study, and thereby lose the main chance to have a “go” at writing for the most auspicious time in years … and probably the only such long time in at least a year. This is the summer where I build up a backlog. O.K., so I’d have to give up my scholarship to summer school, which means paying the same price for one course, which I might not give a damn about in the long run, or might agonize over every time I thought of the money (about $250) going out for it. I would have literally not more than $100 to $200 left at the end of my senior year … a mere pittance. If I went to summer school, I would be meeting new people, no doubt queer people and nice people; I would have the library, and the “activities” and Cambridge. It might be a very nice luxury. Yet, I would be seeing Sally, and Jane, and hearing about their fascinating jobs, and feeling, in spite of myself, guilty as hell: and sourly spending $250 is something that in reality I do not care to do. Either choice I make will have to be followed out with a scheduled program, a creative and very disciplined outlook, or I am not worth the paper this is written on.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  The steps the recovering porn user will take to quit porn;How long and how frequently the recovering porn user will attend any treatment programs;The specific sexual behaviors that will be avoided;What details will be disclosed to the partner regarding thoughts about and/or actual contact with porn;The actions that would constitute a relapse; andThe amount of time following a relapse before it will be disclosed to the partner.Although many intimate partners say they want to be kept informed, it is often difficult for them to listen to setbacks and disappointments that occur during recovery. It helps when an intimate partner has a realistic understanding of the challenges of quitting porn. “I asked Logan to let me know when he has been struggling a lot with thoughts of porn,” Nancy said. “In asking him to be vulnerable with me I have to accept the fact that it might hurt to hear what he has to share. I can’t use what he tells me as a hammer against him, to hurt him back, because that would just dissolve the type of healthy communication I want us to have. Wanting your partner to be honest with you is the best way to go in reestablishing trust, but it’s not always easy or pleasant.” Paula agrees: “As much as I don’t like it, I understand that some amount of relapse is a normal part of recovery. The most important thing for me is whether my husband is being honest, is taking steps to not repeat the slip-up, and is getting better as time goes on.” How conscientiously you communicate as a couple during porn recovery can affect the success of healing your relationship. Many recovering couples employ a twenty-four-hour rule, meaning the recovering porn user has twenty-four hours in which to tell his partner about a relapse. A short wait can provide some time for reflection and input from others, so that the recovering porn user can be better able to discuss his relapse calmly and productively with his partner.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  He could say he’d left the Marina Towers finally, was living in a sublet in Lincoln Park, that the paint was peeling but the place had its own washing machine. Asher said, “Can I get you to the DAGMAR meeting next weekend?” Yale was never clear on DAGMAR’s mission, in part because the R kept changing—Dykes and Gay Men Against Reagan, or the Right, or Republicans, or Repression. Every time you asked it was something different. Yale said, “It’s Rutabagas now, right?” He pressed Asher’s stamp onto his left palm; the slightest trace of red ink came off. “You’ll feel better,” Asher said. “Everyone I know who isn’t political, it’s just because they haven’t tapped into their anger. And once you do, it’ll feel right. Listen, direct action—direct action is the third best feeling in the world.” “What’s the second?” “Peeling off a wet swimsuit.” “Huh.” Yale actually wanted to say yes, but the way he felt around Asher was unsustainable. It wasn’t good for the nervous system. Besides which, what he’d seen of direct action protests involved lying down in the street, pepper spray, getting handcuffed and locked in a paddy wagon—where, in summer, they’d close the doors and turn the heat up. He hadn’t even been able to fight off other boys in his seventh-grade locker room. How was he supposed to hold his own, in front of Asher Glass, against third-generation Chicago cops? He said he’d think about it. He had a lot going on at work, he said. The one place he did see Asher regularly was at support group. Asher would consistently show up half an hour late, loosening his tie. If Yale had managed to keep an open seat next to him—usually by leaving his coat on it casually for a while, and then removing the coat as if he’d just suddenly remembered it was there—Asher would take it, squeeze the back of Yale’s neck as he sat down. Otherwise he’d stand outside the circle, refusing the therapist’s offer to grab him one of the chairs that was still folded against the wall. When Asher talked, it was to make a speech—not to share anything about himself, about his own diagnosis or its aftermath. He’d never acquiesced to the test, but last year his weight had suddenly dropped, his stomach had revolted, and his doctor had insisted on checking his T cells. His count was below one hundred. About once per meeting, he’d go off about the cost of AZT. As if they were the ones responsible, as if they could do anything about it. He’d start yelling that it was the most expensive prescription drug in history. “You think that’s a coincidence? You think that isn’t pure hatred? Ten thousand dollars a year! Ten thousand fucking dollars!” He was never one to break down in tears, never one to sob over lost friends or mortality or survivor guilt.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  “My business? Actually, it’s a little better: I don’t have to keep chasing away the drug dealers. They were so thick on this corner, decent people were afraid to stop!” Ben looked across the street at Richard Basciano’s Show World Center, which opened on Eighth Avenue just above Forty-second Street in 1977. “They should never have put that thing here. They should all be over at the river. They got four thousand guys a day goin’ through that place. The girls who work there basically live off tips. Sure. Who’s the landlord gonna rent to—somebody who can pay a couple of thousand a month, or a thousand bucks a day?” (Actually Show World owns its own building—as well as, till a couple of years ago, most of the Strip’s north face.) “But that’s what’s brought Times Square down!” With its fundamentally heterosexual business, Show World Center is one of the places that may escape the move—so there’ll still be a little color left, a few memories of an older Forty-second Street. [image file=image_rsrc1R4.jpg] On the southwest corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, two young men talk among the passersby. To the picture’s far right, on the corner diagonally across, by the green knobs that indicate the subway entrance, directly below the Coca-Cola sign, the umbrella, out that day, shades Ben’s shoeshine stand. Within the year, the buildings behind it with the gates down before their windows will also be torn down. The building across the street to the right of the picture’s middle for some fifteen years housed a “Gay Strip Show and J/O Club” on the second floor. When, a year after this picture was taken in October 1996, the building was demolished, substantial pieces of its mirrors and mosaics clung to the brick wall for another year, till they too were pulled down, a glittering reminder of the young men who had worked there. I said good-bye and went to wait for my bus—a black gay man, in my midfifties, who’s utilized the sexual outlets of this neighborhood for more than thirty years. What kind of leaps am I going to have to make now between the acceptable and the unacceptable, between the legal and the illegal, to continue having a satisfactory sex life? As my bus came, behind me Ben called out to the woman in a passing couple: “Mmmm! Hey, there, sweetheart . . . !” 1. For details, see the extraordinary volume, Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism, edited by Dangerous Bedfellows (Ephen Glenn Colter, Wayne Hoffman, Eva Pendleton, et al.) (Boston: South End Press, 1996).Part 2. . . Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square RedDecember 1997–April 1998 As long as there is something like experience, it is not entirely mine. —AVITAL RONELL, Finitude’s Score

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  Why don’t we get better health care? In the United States, lack of access to health insurance is a big factor in preventing women from getting adequate health care. Many lesbian and bisexual women as well as transgendered people feel very uncomfortable talking to health-care practitioners about sex. (Many of us feel uncomfortable talking to our lovers about sex.) It doesn’t help that few of us have access to health-care professionals who have any idea what we do sexually. Some lesbians feel uneasy about the mechanics of Pap smears; others think that because they don’t have sex with men, such care is unnecessary—not true. Regular gynecological exams will help you stay on top of the state of your sexual health. Some sexually transmitted conditions don’t produce noticeable symptoms until you’ve got a serious problem. For example, human papillomavirus (HPV), among the most widespread sexually transmitted conditions, has been linked to cervical cancer. A recent study conducted in Seattle found HPV present among lesbians—even those who had never had sex with men.4 A Pap smear can alert you to the presence of abnormal cells caused by HPV, long before cancer develops. However, you will need a complete gynecological exam, including blood work, to determine if you’ve been exposed to HIV or other STDs. Risk-Free_____ Frottage (with clothes) Nipple and breast stimulation (not lactating) Sharing sex toys (with a condom) Genital touching with glove Oral sex with barrier Masturbation (touching only yourself) Voyeurism and exhibitionism Cybersex and phone sex Watching porn Reading erotica Talking dirty Fantasy Safer Sex, PleaseWe hear a lot about safer sex—but what is it, really? Safer sex is the practice of assessing risks and taking precautions that you hope will prevent you from acquiring or transmitting STDs. How do you know if you’re at risk? Well, the greater the number of people with whom you have had unprotected sex, the greater the risk you’ve been exposed to a sexually transmitted disease. Your risk for acquiring an STD increases if you already have an STD, if you’ve used intravenous drugs, or if any of your partners have used intravenous drugs. Finally, some sexual activities are riskier than others. (See “Safer-Sex Guidelines for Lesbian and Bisexual Women,” below.) You may believe that because you’re in a committed monogamous relationship you’re exempt from safer-sex concerns. If that were true, there would be far fewer of us with herpes and HPV. Unfortunately, monogamy is not a foolproof safer-sex strategy. Some STDs can lie dormant for months or even years after exposure, which may be longer than your previous relationship. You could easily transmit an STD you didn’t know you had. And, of course, a commitment to monogamy is no guarantee. Many women have sex outside of their relationships without telling their partners. [image file=image_rsrc645.jpg] Illustration 3. Making a Dental Dam

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

  Or was he a Davidic loyalist who was especially critical of the cult at Bethel because of the separation of the northern kingdom from Jerusalem? There is no doubt that the book was edited in the southern kingdom and presents a Judean perspective in its canonical form. This perspective is clear in the introductory saying in 1:1 (“The L ord roars from Zion . . .”; cf. Joel 3:16) and in the concluding promise that the Lord will raise up “the fallen booth of David” (Amos 9:11-15). It is not at all clear, however, that the eighth-century prophet Amos was promoting Davidic rule, or that he was concerned with the relations between the two kingdoms. He was also critical of “those who are at ease in Zion” (6:1). It might have been more difficult, however, for a man from Tekoa to preach in Jerusalem on the doorstep of the king than in Bethel where he was at some distance from the royal court. The date assigned to Amos raises another intriguing question. Amos prophesied the destruction of the northern kingdom. His prophecy was fulfilled by the Assyrian destruction of Samaria in 722 B.C.E. But the Assyrian threat was not in evidence during the reign of Jeroboam and developed only in the reign of Tiglath-pileser III, whose reign began about the time of Jeroboam’s death. Amos never mentions Assyria in his oracles, but a few passages refer to the punishment of exile, which was typical Assyrian policy (5:5, 27). Of course victors had always taken captives in war, from the earliest time, and had used or sold them as slaves. The innovation of the Assyrians was mass deportation as a way of subduing an area by resettling it. At least some passages in Amos, such as 5:27, seem to envision mass deportation. These oracles are more easily explained if they are dated somewhat later, when Assyria was a threat to Israel. Amos 6:2, which invites comparison of Israel with Calneh, Hamath, and Gath, must be interpreted in light of the Assyrian conquest of these regions in the 730s. Alternatively, the allusions to later events and to the specifically Assyrian practice of mass deportation may have been added later, in the course of the transmission of the book. Tiglath-pileser III, an alabaster bas-relief from the king’s central palace at Nimrud, Mesopotamia, ca 730-727 B.C.E. Now in the British Museum, London. The prophecy of Amos is also dated “two years before the earthquake.” This earthquake is also mentioned in Zech 14:5, but it cannot be dated precisely. That such a precise date is given, however, suggests that the prophetic career of Amos was quite short, perhaps no more than a single season. Alternatively, this date may indicate only the beginning of the prophet’s career.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  A conversation about developmental milestones left Nora in a sweat and her nervous energy made her push her happily squealing daughter higher than ever before, but she had a long conversation. When I saw her next, she said Neil Armstrong’s moon landing quote rang through her head for the rest of that afternoon. When you’re first getting started, expect some false starts. We all get a little weird and desperate when we’re lonely. If you’re out of practice, you become less and less confident that you even know how to talk, much less form full sentences to which another human can respond. Worse, we also start interpreting everyone as threatening, every smile as scornful, every interaction as rejecting. But then we make it worse: we act as if the world is against us, a self-fulfilling prophecy called behavioral confirmation. If Maddy expects no one will talk to her, she won’t say hello. If Nora expects the moms to be judgy instead of friendly, she’ll make a beeline for home, not the playground. But don’t base success on the other person’s response. Don’t base success on how nervous you feel. Base success only on what you do. Did you manage to share a little bit of yourself? Great. The first times are the hardest. Try again, and try again soon—not weeks later. Keep the momentum going. It will get easier, I promise. SHOW THEM THAT YOU LIKE THEM The third part of crafting a friendship, besides repetition and disclosure, is showing others that you like them. People like those who like them. People also like those who take the initiative. In academic terms it’s called prosocial behavior, but more simply, it’s showing someone that you’re pleased to be around them. At its simplest, showing you like someone is being the first to say hi or lighting up with a smile when they say hi to you. Slightly more advanced is unnecessary conversation. I once had a colleague who would stop at every co-worker’s office in the morning to say hi. “Just saying hello,” she always said, or “Just checking in.” She called it doing the rounds. Her efforts were thoughtful and made me like her. Next is taking socializing out of the usual context and into another. For instance, parents from Nora’s daughter’s class, after connecting on the playground, may arrange a playdate, a change of context from schoolyard to home. After racking up those six to eight conversations hanging around after book club, Maddy may invite a book club buddy out for coffee, a change of context from the group to a duo. If you get invited to a get-together—someone from tai chi is having a birthday, a guy from your hip-hop class is having a Super Bowl party—go, even if just for a pop-in. People are touched when you show up to their events, and more important, it moves your friendship to another context and therefore another level.

• From The Vagina Bible (2019)

  The misinformation women are given about their reproductive organs, internet mythology, and the difficulty women face having non-sophomoric discussions about their vulvas and vaginas make accurate communication hard. Another important factor is receiving an incorrect diagnosis. If the first time you have a vulvar itch you are misdiagnosed with a yeast infection, then of course every time you have a vulvar itch you will erroneously think you have yeast. Even a Gynecologist Can Have Trouble Interpreting Signals One night, while I was writing this book, I felt some discomfort in my left labia majora. I thought it must have been my underwear digging in—I had spent three hours sitting at the hair salon and was wearing ill-fitting underwear. I’d meant to throw it away, but you know how that goes. I felt around, far out of my field of vision, and found a lump that hurt. A lot. This, I deduced, was either a bitch of an ingrown hair or an abscess. I got out the mirror and saw redness and swelling. Although it was hard to see, I was sure my initial thoughts about either an ingrown hair or an early infection, given the pain, must be correct. My attempts at removing the supposed ingrown hair were unsuccessful but did result in me traumatizing my skin, further increasing my pain. There are a lot of lessons here. For example, this is why you should never try to dig around your vulva at home. Doctors are the worst at taking good medical advice. The pain worsened, and I imagined myself getting flesh-eating bacteria from my botched attempt at home surgery on an infection. I tried to figure out how this could have happened, and then I remembered the sugaring I did for this book—this was the side that was sugared! I wondered when I died from the resulting blood poisoning, what pithy headlines might appear. The more I worried, the worse the pain. I told myself to snap out of it. I took my temperature (normal, phew), swallowed an acetaminophen, and went to bed. I woke up in a lot of pain. I made it to work and told my colleague I had a vulvar abscess. I mean, I am the expert, so telling her what was wrong seemed appropriate. She looked at my vulva and the look on her face told me she saw something completely unexpected. She brought out the selfie-stick mirror so I could see my own vulva. Clearly, I had an irritant reaction or contact dermatitis (an allergic reaction). I was intensely red, equally on either side. Interestingly, I had no symptoms on the right side. The painful spot? Maybe a small ingrown hair that was amplified by the swelling and irritation from the skin condition, but it really was not clear. I had definitely traumatized my skin. There was no abscess. My colleague admonished me.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Two years after Leo assumed the pontificate, the financial problem was already a serious one. All sorts of measures had to be invented to increase the papal revenues and save the treasury from hopeless bankruptcy. By augmenting the number of the officials of the Tiber—porzionari di ripa — from 141 to 612, 286,000 ducats were secured. The enlargement of the colleges of the cubiculari and scudieri, officials of the Vatican, brought in respectively 90,000 and 112,000 ducats more. From the erection of the order of the Knights of St. Peter,—cavalieri di San Pietro,—with 401 members, the considerable sum of 400,000 ducats was realized, 1,000 ducats from each knight. The sale of indulgences did not yield what it once did, but the revenue from this source was still large.870 The highest ecclesiastical offices were for sale, as in the reign of Alexander. Cardinal Innocent Cibo paid 30,000 ducats or, at; another report went, 40,000, for his hat, and Francesco Armellini bought his for twice that amount.871 The shortages were provided for by resort to the banker and the usurer and to rich cardinals. Loan followed loan. Not only were the tapestries of the Vatican and the silver plate given as securities, but ecclesiastical benefices, the gems of the papal tiara and the rich statues of the saints were put in pawn. Sometimes the pope paid 20 per cent for sums of 10,000 ducats and over.872 It occasions no surprise that Leo’s death was followed by a financial collapse, and a number of cardinals passed into bankruptcy, including Cardinal Pucci, who had lent the pope 150,000 ducats. From the banker, Bernado Bini, Leo had gotten 200,000 ducats. His debts were estimated as high as 800,000 ducats. It was a common joke that Leo squandered three pontificates, the legacy Julius left and the revenues of his successor’s pontificate, as well as the income of his own. For the bankers and all sorts of money dealers the Medicean period was a flourishing time in Rome. No less than 30 Florentines are said to have opened banking institutions in the city, and, at the side of the Fuggers and Welsers, did business with the curia. The Florentines found it to be a good thing to have a Medicean pope, and swarmed about the Vatican as the Spaniards had done in the good days of Calixtus III. and Alexander VI., the Sienese, during the reign of Pius II., and the Ligurians while Sixtus IV. of Savona was pope. They stormed the gates of patronage, as if all the benefices of the Church were intended for them.873

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Vatican was thrown into a panic in 1517 by a conspiracy directed by Cardinal Petrucci of Siena, one of the younger set of cardinals with whom the pope had been intimate. Embittered by Leo’s interference in his brother’s administration of Siena and by the deposition of the duke of Urbino, Petrucci plotted to have the pope poisoned by a physician, Battesta de Vercelli, a specialist on ulcers. The plot was discovered, and Petrucci, who came to Rome on a safe-conduct procured from the pope by the Spanish ambassador, was cast into the Marroco, the deepest dungeon of S. Angelo. On being reminded of the safe-conduct, Leo replied to the ambassador that no one was safe who was a poisoner. Cardinals Sauli and Riario were entrapped and also thrown into the castle-dungeons. Two other cardinals were suspected of being in the plot, but escaped. Petrucci and the physician were strangled to death; Riario and Sauli were pardoned. Riario, who had witnessed the dastardly assassination in the cathedral of Florence 40 years before, was the last prominent representative of the family of Sixtus IV. Torture brought forth the confession that the plotters contemplated making him pope. Leo set the price of the cardinal’s absolution high,—150,000 ducats to be paid in a year, and another 150,000 to be paid by his relatives in case Riario left his palace. He finally secured the pope’s permission to leave Rome, and died, 1521, at Naples. One of the sensational pageants which occurred during Leo’s pontificate was on the arrival of a delegation from Portugal, 1514, to announce to the pope the obedience of its king, Emmanuel. The king sent a large number of presents, among them horses from Persia, a young panther, two leopards and a white elephant. The popular jubilation over the procession of the wild beasts reached its height when the elephant, taking water into his proboscis, spurted it over the onlookers.856 In recognition of the king’s courtesy, the pope vested in Portugal all the lands west of Capes Bojador and Non to the Indies. The Fifth Lateran resumed its sessions in April, 1513, a month after Leo’s election. The council ratified the concordat with France, and at the 8th session, Dec. 19, 1513, solemnly affirmed the doctrine of the soul’s immortality.857 The affirmation was called forth by the scepticism of the Arabic philosophers and the Italian pantheists. A single vote recorded against the decree came from the bishop of Bergamo, who took the ground that it is not the business of theologians to spend their time sitting in judgment upon the theories of philosophers.