Confusion

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 What My Bones Know (2022)

  “Fine, that could be true,” Eleanor conceded, looking annoyingly skeptical. “But we still need to find something disturbing. So let’s try something else. Can you remember the first time you experienced the abuse?” “Um…well, no. I was so young. I kind of remember when I was five years old, maybe younger…my mom hit me with a hanger, and then afterward, she actually apologized to me. The only time I can ever remember her apologizing for hitting me.” “How disturbing is that memory?” “A one? A two? It’s not very specific. Maybe I shouldn’t even be trying to work through this abuse stuff. I don’t know that any of the hitting is actually that disturbing. Maybe I should be trying to work through more, like, abandonment stuff. I do have serious abandonment issues. Or this feeling of failure that I always carry…” Another skeptical look. Eleanor said gently, “I think that, generally, earlier is better. First traumas can be more formative. But this is guided by you. Whatever you think is best. When you think of the moment of the first abandonment—when your mother first left you—on a scale of one to ten—” I slumped on her couch and threw my head back exaggeratedly. “Ugh. A one.” “Well, it looks like we’re running out of time,” Eleanor said. “Give it some thought this week. What memories are actually upsetting to think about? If you want to bring in an example that you really want to work through, we can spend the entire next session using the buzzers to process it.” — In my later research about EMDR and therapy, I learned that you can start anywhere with EMDR, that you can process any memory you’d like to take a deeper look at, even recent ones. It’s not just about finding the most traumatic memory you can possibly dredge up. In fact, some might argue that starting C-PTSD treatment by diving into the back of your closet and chasing out your scariest, most deeply buried skeleton is a terrible idea. You could find a murderous clown in the storm drain of your life, and he could start haunting your everyday existence. You could dig up something that triggers you badly and makes your symptoms worse or is so unpleasant to look at that you just quit therapy and never come back. That’s why many trauma therapists try to set up a strong framework of coping mechanisms before people launch into their foundational traumas. So if you find Pennywise in the cellar of your brain, you can have some solid techniques for how to handle him.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  But I didn’t know that when I started working with Eleanor. At the time, as I walked out of her office into a sea of Brooks Brothers suits, I thought, How the hell am I going to find this thing? I thought my panic attacks at work were disturbing. I thought one of my best friends dumping me the previous year was pretty disturbing, too. But my childhood abuse was old hat. Still, perhaps there were less-cited abusive moments somewhere in my skull, the B sides of my trauma history. Perhaps these would hurt. On the train ride home, my brain fumbled through traumatic events like a hand in a junk drawer, pulling out a stapler, then a fly swatter. What about the time with the Playmobils? Nah, that was a three at most. The time in Malaysia about my homework? That time at Girl Scouts? If I was disturbed, my mind should race and my heart should pump. When my boyfriend says mm-hmm in a way where I know he’s irritated at me for talking nonstop, I can feel my brain pushing down on the gas. Given that, maybe it was a little weird that I wasn’t getting any reaction to reliving the most violent moments in my life. On the train, I closed my eyes and pictured knives and burns and canes. Then I opened my eyes and did a body scan. Hunky-fuckin’-dory. If anything, I was just kinda hungry. I fumbled for an explanation. Maybe I didn’t remember any of these events thoroughly enough to be disturbed by them? When I thought about each event, I could remember moments, feelings, and images, sometimes I could remember how long things lasted. But I only remembered a few sentences from what were often hours-long beatings. I remembered my mother’s hands, her body, but I didn’t remember her face. I couldn’t remember what she looked like without makeup. I couldn’t remember what she looked like when she cried. Maybe, in order to go back to one specific memory and make it detailed enough to be disturbing, I needed to retrigger myself. And I knew exactly how to do it. CHAPTER 17 [image file=image_rsrc3E3.jpg] Ifirst watched Mommie Dearest when I was fourteen, channel surfing on the couch. As the movie went on, I crept onto the floor…and then farther back, into the hallway…and then up the steps, until I was watching it from around a corner. Afterward, I had to lie in bed for a while because what I saw onscreen so precisely mirrored my own life. My mother had been gone for a few months at this point, but when I saw that film, she was back. Faye Dunaway, a white actress from a different era, had eerily channeled my mother’s words, her expressions, her ghostly white cream masks. I hid under my covers shivering until my body understood that my mother had not actually returned.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  It was two fingers wide, two fingers deep, and marbled with yellow and green.Pam and I threaded our way through the crowd. We never missed a chance to look at the scar. Randall stepped from behind a rear corner of the platform where he hung out with the tent crew and walked with us to the front. Brother Terrell acknowledged each of us with a quick hug and we huddled there beside him as people came forward. Randall was seven years old and not afraid of anything. He laid his fingers in the scar as he always did. Later, I would ask him for the hundredth time what it felt like, and he would tell me that it was as slick and hard as the devil’s backbone. As much as I longed to run my fingers down the length of the scar, I could not bring myself to touch it. I stared at it for as long as I could, trying to peer past the outraged skin into the empty cavern of Brother Terrell’s calf. There was something there or something not there that I needed to understand, but I did not know and could not have articulated the nature of that something.Brother Terrell picked up the microphone that hung around his neck and spoke directly into it. “The doctors said I’d never walk without crutches, that I’d be a cripple for the rest of my life.“Then one day when I was nine years old, Jesus stood in my room. He said, ‘David, get up. Walk.’ I reached for my crutches. He said, ‘Not with those.’ ”Brother Terrell leapt from the chair and people scattered like the jacks Pam and I threw between services. “When Jesus heals you, praise God, you don’t need no crutches. You don’t need no bone. You don’t need nothin’ but faith to take that first step.”The words flew from his mouth with the ferocity of hornets and we rushed before them to our sections and seats. It wasn’t so much what he said, but how he said it. Every word uttered with such urgency that I half expected the world to end before he finished his sentence.He prowled in front of the audience now, swishing the microphone cord when he turned so that it trailed him like a living thing. His pant cuff fell a bit as he walked, but I could still see the naked glow of that pale patch of skin.His words slowed and lulled the crowd into believing the storm had passed. “My mama had faith. She believed.”Then he crammed the microphone into his mouth again and the veins on his neck popped up. “You got to have faith. You got to hold on. You can’t lie there on your cot and die!”His voice grew louder with each sentence. “You got to get up. Get uuuuuuup. Get uuuuuuup!”He went hoarse each time he screamed “get up.” The ministers on the platform stood. Mama stood and clapped her hands and amened.“Yes. That’s right.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  But can scientific research make sex good again? And is genital response the crucial data, the vital information? Brooke Magnanti, in The Sex Myth, writes that there is a difference between ‘what women report is turning them on and what is actually getting their bodies to respond’. We may think we know ‘what turns people on, but the data are giving researchers a very different picture’. For Magnanti, one’s sexuality is located in one’s physiological, genital responses, and it remains for the mind, the self, the person, simply to follow. Alain de Botton, similarly, has written that lubricating vaginas and tumescent penises are ‘unambiguous agents of sincerity’, precisely because they are automatic, and thus not fakable. But what is automatic is simply a response, nothing more – and a physiological response is not capable of being sincere; only people are. Physiological arousal doesn’t tell us anything straightforward about sexual desires; it doesn’t even tell us anything straightforward about arousal. [image file=image_rsrcNP.jpg] Why do we take genital arousal as a stand-in for pleasure and desire? In part because arousal – lubrication – is important in order for sex to be subjectively pleasurable at all; the decline of lubrication around and after meno-pause is a frequently cited cause of distress in women. What’s more, heterosexual women themselves may emphasize wetness because of men’s tendency to rush to penetrative sex before a woman is ‘ready’ for what is consistently framed as the main act. Wetness, then, can stand in for good sex; can be a clue that ‘foreplay’ has taken place, that sex has gone at a woman’s pace, not just a man’s. Because genital arousal is conducive to pleasure and helps reduce discomfort, we have tended to treat it as the very same thing as a subjective sense of pleasure – particularly given the heterosexual focus of so much sex research and advice. There are other reasons for a focus on genital arousal. It is notoriously difficult to get at what people really do or feel in research; we routinely lie about, or underestimate, or fail to adequately judge any number of phenomena: how many hours we sleep, how much alcohol we consume, what our level of bias is. Individuals are unreliable and often ashamed, especially when it comes to talking about sex – they can be uncomfortable about what they enjoy, and want to be seen as normal. This makes self-report woefully undependable in social and psychological research. A reliance on ‘hard’ physiological data is an appealing solution to this human incapacity to accurately self-observe, and it is a solution that has a powerful historical pedigree.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  EMDR therapy is referred to as “processing,” and in EMDR circles, specialists stress that processing does not mean talking. Talking gives us knowledge about why we are the way we are, but that knowledge isn’t enough. Processing, on the other hand, allows us to truly come to terms with our trauma and resolve it—to rewrite the memories in our brains with a healthier narrative. This seemed abstract to me, and I didn’t really know what it meant. But it sure sounded good. Nobody is exactly sure why EMDR works, which makes it easy to discredit. One theory is that EMDR mimics the way the brain processes memories during REM sleep. Other research suggests that these eye movements tax our short-term memory, dimming the painful vibrancy of past experiences and making them easier to revisit with a sense of clarity. Whether or not either of these theories is true, many studies keep showing real results: Somehow, this weird process is surprisingly effective in helping patients recover from trauma. In the years since Shapiro invented EMDR, technology has improved beyond the finger-waving. There are now EMDR light units that kind of look like the scrolling LED light-up signs advertising beer at corner stores. And for people like me—people who feel more comfortable keeping their eyes closed throughout the EMDR process—there are now little machines that hook up to vibrating bullets that you hold in your hands, with headphones that play sounds in one ear, then the other. In her Manhattan office, Eleanor handed me an EMDR machine with buzzers and headphones. It would play a noise in my left ear, while buzzing a vibrator in my left hand—then play a noise in my right ear and buzz my right. This wasn’t hypnosis, she emphasized. I’d be in full control of my faculties and could stop or change course whenever I wanted to. Then she pulled out a worksheet that consisted of a series of questions, and as we went through each one, she marked down my answers with an eaten-up pencil. “Have you ever found yourself in a place with no memory of how you got there?” “No,” I responded. “Have you ever found yourself dressed in clothes with no idea how they got on you?” “No.” “Have you ever felt like you were able to watch yourself at a distance, as if you were watching a movie of your life?” I knew what Eleanor was trying to do. She was trying to figure out how dissociated I was. When I was first diagnosed with C-PTSD, though many symptoms were familiar to me—depression, aggression, yadda yadda—I was relieved to find a couple of symptoms that did not resonate. Mainly those of dissociation. “Dissociation is common with complex PTSD,” I’d read. “Dissociation can manifest as flashbacks, out-of-body experiences, trances, amnesia, and episodes of time loss.”[2] I was somewhat unobservant, sure, with a tendency to trip on the edge of carpets a lot, but the word “dissociated” seemed strong to me.

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

  high priest Onias, obtained the high priesthood by bribing the king, and proceeded to build a gymnasium and introduce the Greek way of life in Jerusalem. (The word helle¯nismos , “Hellenism,” is used here for the first time to refer to the Greek way of life.) His innovations were greeted with enthusiasm by some people. Some priests, we are told, neglected the service of the temple in their eagerness for athletic contexts. Then a man named Menelaus, who was not of the high priestly family, outbid Jason and became high priest. Menelaus also contrived to have the legitimate high priest, Onias, murdered. When Antiochus Epiphanes invaded Egypt for the second time (in 168 B.C.E.), Jason attempted unsuccessfully to stage a coup. When the king heard of fighting in Jerusalem, he thought that the city was in revolt and sent in the troops. Shortly after this he took measures to suppress the Jewish religion. According to 2 Maccabees, the temple became a place where prostitutes had intercourse with Gentiles and Jews were compelled to celebrate a festival in honor of the Greek god Dionysus. The account of these events in 2 Maccabees is generally more satisfactory than that of 1 Maccabees. It becomes clear that the king’s actions were not entirely unprovoked but were a response to what he perceived as rebellion on the part of the Jews. Nonetheless, the attempt to suppress the Jewish religion is extraordinary in antiquity and remains extremely puzzling. Some scholars suspect that the persecution may have been the idea of Menelaus, as a way of crushing the opposition of traditional Jews. All the ancient accounts, however, place the responsibility on the king. It may be, as some ancient authors suggest, that the king regarded the Jewish religion as barbaric. It was certainly highly distinctive in the ancient world, in its insistence on monotheism and rejection of idolatry. On this account, the king would have been trying to make it like a Greek cult, in effect, to “normalize” it. But his actions are still hard to explain. There was no precedent in the Greek world for an attempt to suppress a cult in this manner. Better precedents, in fact, can be found in the biblical tradition, notably in the reform of King Josiah (2 Kings 22–23), which suppressed the cults of the Israelite high places. In placing so much emphasis on the Hellenistic reform, 2 Maccabees represents the basic conflict as one between Hellenism and Judaism. Yet it should be noted that on any account the “reforms” of Jason and the building of the gymnasium encountered no significant opposition. It was only when the king attempted to suppress the traditional forms of Jewish worship that a revolt broke out. The essential conflict, then, was not over broad cultural issues but over the freedom of the Jewish people to practice their traditional religion as they saw fit.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  requirement of wisdom already seen in Proverbs. Jesus also uses the language of wisdom in his teaching moments, some of which sound as though they could easily have come right out of the book of Proverbs. For example, he speaks of wise builders who build their houses on solid rock and foolish builders who build their houses on the sand (Matt. 7:24– 27). The difference between the two is whether they put Jesus’s words into action. Wisdom in Proverbs too is all about listening to wise teaching and acting upon it. Jesus is not about teaching “correct thinking,” but realigning minds, hearts, and motivations to act well, to live in harmony with the kingdom of heaven. Wisdom language really pops up frequently. As a boy, Jesus was filled with wisdom and increased in wisdom (Luke 2:40, 52). Not only Jesus’s teachings, but his miracles are chalked up to wisdom as well: What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! (Mark 6:2). Even his simple act of roaming about the countryside and proclaiming the kingdom is like Woman Wisdom in Proverbs crying out in public places: Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.” (Prov. 1:20–23) Following Jesus’s teachings is following the path of wisdom—it is your actions, what you say and do to others, not maintaining a hard-line doctrinal stance or turning faith into an intellectual abstraction. And just like Proverbs, Jesus’s teachings are long on casting a vision, but short on scripted details. We have to figure it out every bit as much as we have to work out whether to answer or not answer a fool (Prov. 26:4–5). Following the Sage of Sages takes wisdom and produces wisdom.

• From Between Us

  Immigrants learn emotions when others create opportunities for them to feel “the right” emotions, when others eagerly categorize emotional episodes in terms of those “right” emotions, or when others model how to feel the “right” emotions in similar situations. As with socialization of emotions in young children, socialization later in life is outside-in. As we have seen before, this does not mean that the emotions are any less real. During my years in the United States, “feeling good about myself” American-style increasingly became part of me, and I think that what this means is that after many iterations of looking at myself and my achievements as important, worth noticing, and worth being singled out for, I did start seeing them as such. It was more than acting; it was doing emotions in the right way, truly incorporating the concept of “feeling good about myself.” Rather than being socialized early in life once and for all, we keep changing and adjusting to new social—and cultural—challenges. New Concepts As a student of emotions, still in the Netherlands, I remember that the word “distress” confused me. The term was often used in English-language psychological research on emotion, and I understood distress was not a happy state, but I had trouble pinpointing its meaning. Was “distress” closer to the Dutch angst (“anxious/afraid”), or closer to the Dutch verdriet/wanhoop (“sadness/despair”)? At the time I surely did not know distress as an emotion. After having spent considerable time in the United States, I now no longer draw a blank when the word is used. I know both when distress is felt, and what the experience of distress can feel like. Distress has become an “emotion” to me. Sofia, an English-Greek bilingual speaker who had lived in Cyprus for over seven years, reported something similar for the Greek word stenahoria—literally, “constricted space.” Stenahoria does not have a linguistic equivalent in English. Sofia knew approximately when stenahoria was used. But despite knowing the word, and some of the conditions under which it was used, Sofia has real trouble describing the emotion behind stenahoria. The word was “used by old people” only, never by her Greek husband. Sofia had not been part of the cultural episodes or interactions that could have fully furnished the Greek word stenahoria with its meaning. Learning to speak a language is learning not only new words, but also acquiring new emotions. The process can be slow, and research confirms that immigrants learn the words in a new language before they learn the associated emotions.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Some readers have asked whether Gender Trouble seeks to expand the realm of gender possibilities for a reason. They ask, for what purpose are such new configurations of gender devised, and how ought we to judge among them? The question often involves a prior premise, namely, that the text does not address the normative or prescriptive dimension of feminist thought. “Normative” clearly has at least two meanings in this critical encounter, since the word is one I use often, mainly to describe the mundane violence performed by certain kinds of gender ideals. I usually use “normative” in a way that is synonymous with “pertaining to the norms that govern gender.” But the term “normative” also pertains to ethical justification, how it is established, and what concrete consequences proceed thereform. One critical question posed of Gender Trouble has been: how do we proceed to make judgments on how gender is to be lived on the basis of the theoretical descriptions offered here? It is not possible to oppose the “normative” forms of gender without at the same time subscribing to a certain normative view of how the gendered world ought to be. I want to suggest, however, that the positive normative vision of this text, such as it is, does not and cannot take the form of a prescription: “subvert gender in the way that I say, and life will be good.” Those who make such prescriptions or who are willing to decide between subversive and unsubversive expressions of gender, base their judgments on a description. Gender appears in this or that form, and then a normative judgment is made about those appearances and on the basis of what appears. But what conditions the domain of appearance for gender itself? We may be tempted to make the following distinction: a descriptive account of gender includes considerations of what makes gender intelligible, an inquiry into its conditions of possibility, whereas a normative account seeks to answer the question of which expressions of gender are acceptable, and which are not, supplying persuasive reasons to distinguish between such expressions in this way. The question, however, of what qualifies as “gender” is itself already a question that attests to a pervasively normative operation of power, a fugitive operation of “what will be the case” under the rubric of “what is the case.” Thus, the very description of the field of gender is in no sense prior to, or separable from, the question of its normative operation.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Scholars who favored abrogation argued that when Muslims were still a vulnerable minority in Mecca, God told them to avoid fighting and confrontation.31 However, after the hijrah, when they had achieved a degree of power, God gave them permission to fight—but only in self-defense.32 As they grew stronger, some of these restrictions were lifted,33 and finally, when the Prophet returned in triumph to Mecca, Muslims were told to wage war against non-Muslims wherever and whenever they could.34 God had therefore been preparing Muslims gradually for their global conquests, tempering his instructions to their circumstances. Modern researchers have noted, though, that the early exegetes did not always agree about which revelation should be attached to which particular “occasion” or which verse abrogated which. The American scholar Reuven Firestone has suggested that the conflicting verses instead expressed the views of different groups within the ummah during the Prophet’s life and after.35 It would not be surprising if there were disagreements and factions in the early ummah. Like the Christians, Muslims would interpret their revelation in radically divergent ways and, like any other faith, Islam developed in response to changing circumstances. The Quran seems aware that some Muslims would not be happy to hear that God had encouraged fighting: “Fighting has been ordained for you, though it is hateful to you.”36 Once the ummah had started to engage in warfare, it seems that one group, which was strong enough to warrant extensive rebuttal, consistently refused to take part: Believers, why, when it is said to you, “Go and fight in God’s cause,” do you feel weighed down to the ground? Do you prefer this world to the world to come? How small is the enjoyment of this world compared with the life to come! If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place.37 The Quran calls these people “laggers” and “liars,” and Muhammad was reproved for allowing them to “stay at home” during campaigns.38 They are accused of apathy and cowardice and are equated with the kufar, the enemies of Islam.39 Yet this group could point to the many verses in the Quran that instruct Muslims not to retaliate but to “forgive and forbear,” responding to aggression with mercy, patience, and courtesy.40 At other times, the Quran looks forward confidently to a final reconciliation: “Let there be no argument between us and you—God will gather us together and to Him we shall return.”41 The impressive consistency of this irenic theme throughout the Quran, Firestone believes, must reflect a strong tendency that survived in the ummah for some time—perhaps until the ninth century.42

• From A History of God (1993)

  Clement’s theology left crucial questions unanswered. How could a mere man have been the Logos or divine reason? What exactly did it mean to say that Jesus had been divine? Was the Logos the same as the “Son of God,” and what did this Jewish title mean in the Hellenic world? How could an impassible God have suffered in Jesus? How could Christians believe that he had been a divine being and yet, at the same time, insist that there was only one God? Christians were becoming increasingly aware of these problems during the third century. In the early years of the century in Rome, one Sabellius, a rather shadowy figure, had suggested that the biblical terms “Father,” “Son” and “Spirit” could be compared to the masks (personae) worn by actors to assume a dramatic role and to make their voices audible to the audience. The One God had thus donned different personae when dealing with the world. Sabellius attracted some disciples, but most Christians were distressed by his theory: it suggested that the impassible God had in some sense suffered when playing the role of the Son, an idea that they found quite unacceptable. Yet when Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch from 260 to 272, had suggested that Jesus had simply been a man, in whom the Word and Wisdom of God had dwelt as in a temple, this was considered equally unorthodox. Paul’s theology was condemned at a synod at Antioch in 264, though he managed to hold on to his see with the support of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. It was clearly going to be very difficult to find a way of accommodating the Christian conviction that Jesus had been divine with the equally strong belief that God was One. When Clement had left Alexandria in 202 to become a priest in the service of the Bishop of Jerusalem, his place at the catechetical school was taken by his brilliant young pupil Origen, who was about twenty years old at the time. As a youth Origen had been passionately convinced that martyrdom was the way to heaven. His father, Leonides, had died in the arena four years earlier, and Origen had tried to join him. His mother, however, saved him by hiding his clothes. Origen had started by believing that the Christian life meant turning against the world, but he later abjured this position and developed a form of Christian Platonism. Instead of seeing an impassible gulf between God and the world, which could only be bridged by the radical dislocation of martyrdom, Origen developed a theology that stressed the continuity of God with the world. His was a spirituality of light, optimism and joy. Step by step, a Christian could ascend the chain of being until he reached God, his natural element and home.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  JEROME. As much as to say; It is of My will, and of the Father’s will, that I should die for the salvation of men; you considering only your own will would not that the grain of wheat should fall into the ground, that it may bring forth much fruit; therefore as you speak what is opposed to My will, you ought to be called My adversary. For Satan is interpreted ‘adverse’ or ‘contrary.’ ORIGEN. Yet the words in which Peter and those in which Satan are rebuked, are not, as is commonly thought, the same; to Peter it is said, Get thee behind me, Satan; that is, follow me, thou that art contrary to my will; to the Devil it is said, Go thy way, Satan, understanding not ‘behind me,’ but ‘into everlasting fire.’ He said therefore to Peter, Get thee behind me, as to one who through ignorance was ceasing to walk after Christ. And He called him Satan, as one, who through ignorance had somewhat contrary to God. But he is blessed to whom Christ turns, even though He turn in order to rebuke him. But why said He to Peter, Thou art an offence unto me, (Ps. 119:165.) when in the Psalm it is said, Great peace have they that love thy law, and there is no offence to them? It must be answered, that not only is Jesus not offended, but neither is any man who is perfect in the love of God; and yet he who does or speaks any thing of the nature of an offence, may be an offence even to one who is incapable of being offended. Or he may hold every disciple that sinneth as an offence, as Paul speaks, Who is offended, and I burn not?. (2 Cor. 11:29.) 16:24–2524. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 25. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  I asked Sam whether her mother had explained to her about periods and reproduction. She nodded. What about masturbation? She laughed. “No,” she said. The location of her clitoris? She laughed again. What about orgasm? She shook her head. “My parents are liberal,” she said. “And they’ll talk about sex generally, or joke about it. We’ll watch South Park or talk about the disfigurement of girls in the Middle East. But when it comes to me, it’s a little more iffy. Then it’s more like a conservative household, where we don’t talk directly. If I approached them, they’d be open to discussing it, but it’s hard for them to bring up and it’s hard for me to bring up.” Like most of the girls I met, Sam was both curious about sex and resourceful, so she did her own research on the subject, looking up on the Internet whatever she didn’t know—through Google searches such as “how to give a blow job,” or by checking out porn (“just to see how things fit together,” she said). And, of course, she learned from doing. “Freshman year in high school was when everything became a reality,” she recalled. “Sex, drinking, all of that. That’s when you weren’t just watching it on TV anymore. But we weren’t really partying yet. It was mostly for appearance. Like, you’d go to some park on the weekend and take a shot and sort of pretend you were drunk. And you’d hook up with some guy and maybe go to second or third base.”

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  Still seeking to defend my fellow men, I then wondered: could the purpose of widely sharing meat and honey be to smooth out hunting yields by means of reciprocal altruism? That is, I expect to kill a giraffe only every twenty-ninth day, and so does each of my hunter friends, but we all go off in different directions, and each of us is likely to kill his giraffe on a different day. If successful hunters agree to share meat with each other and their families, all of them will often have full bellies. By that interpretation, hunters should prefer to share their catch with the best other hunters, from whom they are most likely to receive meat some other day in return. In reality, though, successful Aché and Hadza hunters share their catch with anyone around, whether he’s a good or hopeless hunter. That raises the question of why an Aché or Hadza man bothers to hunt at all, since he can claim a share of meat even if he never bags anything himself. Conversely, why should he hunt when any animal that he kills will be shared widely? Why doesn’t he just gather nuts and rats, which he can bring to his family and would not have to share with anyone else? There must be some ignoble motive for male hunting that I was overlooking in my efforts to find a noble motive. As another possible noble motive, I thought that widespread sharing of meat helps the hunter’s whole tribe, which is likely to flourish or perish together. It’s not enough to concentrate on nourishing your own family if the rest of your tribe is starving and can’t fend off an attack by tribal enemies. This possible motive, though, returns us to the original paradox: the best way for the whole Aché tribe to become well nourished is for everybody to humble themselves by pounding good old reliable palm starch and collecting fruit or insect larvae. The men shouldn’t waste their time gambling on the occasional peccary. In a last effort to detect family values in men’s hunting, I reflected on hunting’s relevance to the role of men as protectors. The males of many territorial animal species, such as songbirds, lions, and chimpanzees, spend much time patrolling their territories. Such patrols serve multiple purposes: to detect and expel intruding rival males from adjacent territories; to observe whether adjacent territories are in turn ripe for intrusion; to detect predators that could endanger the male’s mate and offspring; and to monitor seasonal changes in abundance of foods and other resources. Similarly, at the same time as human hunters are looking for game, they too are attentive to potential dangers and opportunities for the rest of the tribe. In addition, hunting provides a chance to practice the fighting skills that men employ in defending their tribe against enemies.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Even so, she described how, at age thirteen, she slipped into a bedroom with her best friend’s older brother, a ninth-grader on whom she’d had a longtime crush. Although she had never kissed a boy, never held hands, never had a boyfriend, somehow—she doesn’t remember the details—she ended up going down on him. Afterward, he never mentioned the incident again, so neither did she. Her subsequent sexual experiences, a handful of casual hookups, haven’t been much different. “It’s always the same unspoken sequence,” she said. “You make out, then he feels you up, then you give him head, and that’s it. I think girls aren’t taught to express their wants. We’re these docile creatures that just learn to please.” “Wait a minute,” I countered. “Didn’t you just tell me about all the strong women role models in your family, about how you were loud and have a big personality and didn’t take shit?” “I know,” she said. “I think I didn’t realize . . .” She paused, trying to reconcile the contradiction. “I guess no one ever told me that the strong female image also applies to sex.” Discussions of sexual assault and consistent, enthusiastic consent are, thankfully, becoming more common on college and some high school campuses, yet if teens think of fellatio as not-sex (or not “anything”), if it’s thought of as an entitlement or considered an appeasement, then both girls’ right to say no and boys’ obligation to respect that are compromised, and the lines between consent and coercion and assault risk becoming blurred. “You know,” Anna mused, “in some ways giving head is a bigger deal than sex. Because it doesn’t necessarily do anything for me. So it’s like doing the person a favor because you love and care about them. And if it’s someone you’re dating, there’s an expectation that he’ll reciprocate. But in hookups, guys are typically really douchey about it. And there’s pressure for the girl to do it. So it’s about how comfortable you are resisting that pressure or not. It gets awkward to keep resisting.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Christina and Ethan were together for about six months. She never regretted losing her virginity with him, but once they broke up, she wondered, what now? “Am I going to be a person who only sleeps with people if I’m in a serious relationship? Do I want to make a rule that I’ll go on a certain amount of dates with someone before I sleep with him? And if I do sleep with another person, that would bring my number to two. Do I care about that number?” The “number” was a common source of concern among girls. Even those who felt that virginity was a vestige of another time wondered how many sexual partners was too many. (The “number,” like virginity itself, included only intercourse—no one counted boys with whom, say, they’d had oral sex.) Losing their virginity in itself may not have tainted them, but was it possible to go too far? The stigma of the slut, the girl who was overly and overtly sexual, who allowed herself to be used, still held: their character could still be compromised, for themselves as well as others, by their sexual activity. “I guess I would feel icky if my number started to climb into the double digits,” Brooke admitted. She glanced over at Christina, who was counting on her fingers, silently enumerating Brooke’s lovers. “Stop that!” she snapped, laughing, and then grew serious. “I feel that sex is important. I don’t want to have sex with people who don’t mean something to me. And I’m not old enough yet to have had that many partners who do mean something.” Caitlin shook her head and pushed impatiently at her glasses. “I kind of don’t feel that way,” she said. “I feel like I could have sex with someone and it could mean nothing. I remember the first person I had sex with after the guy I’d been with for three years. It was so surprising that it could feel . . . emotionally light, just fun and relaxed and easy. “And what is that, anyway, to ‘mean something’?” she continued. “Does it mean you have to love the person? Could it be about an out-of-body experience? Could it just be that this person was a good person and I appreciated how generous they were? Isn’t that meaningful?” Brooke shrugged, picking at her nail polish. “Maybe it’s my own self-consciousness. For me, saying no is so hard under any circumstances, even to a favor for a friend. So I can see myself accidentally letting things escalate with someone I didn’t want them to escalate with, and that wouldn’t feel good to me. But I guess if I was turned on by someone who I wasn’t into emotionally . . . I can’t really imagine it, but that would be okay.”

• From Escape (2007)

  Another woman became upset when she heard this. She started accusing us of not following the prophet’s will. It had become illegal to say the word fun. Warren Jeffs had banished that word from all use. So if we were being silly or lighthearted in any way, we could be reported as being in rebellion to the prophet. This kind of tension was new to me. I’d never been to a coffee at Linda’s where women censored themselves or criticized something another woman said. These clandestine get-togethers were the one place we could really be ourselves and talk openly. I was very confused. When I said something negative about Warren, my cousin Jayne kicked me under the table. I looked at her as if to say, What’s your problem? Jayne just put her finger up to her mouth. I was at a complete loss. The woman who was upset about the reference to Jim Jones left. We all concluded that those who were upset about the “drinking the punch” comment had already taken a few swigs. After she did, the conversation became more freewheeling. I learned about secret tapings that had been going on. Men would be called into Warren’s office and asked their views on a religious topic or issue. He’d then play a taped conversation in which they’d talked about the same issue, usually in a cell phone conversation. If there was a disparity between what the man said and what Jeffs had preached to believers, he’d be put on notice that he had to get in harmony with the prophet. (Men had also begun reporting on one another to Warren to try to get in his good graces so they wouldn’t be kicked out of the community.) I also learned about how Warren had bugged the meetinghouse of a rival FLDS bishop in Canada. None of us felt comfortable with any of this, but we were not going to bring it up with our husbands because it could get us in trouble if word got around that we were questioning Warren. Someone else talked about a woman we all knew who was caught having an affair with a young boy after her husband was given a new wife. Because of the affair, she was told that she had committed a sin unto death. Despite the fact her husband had been taken from her, she was still considered his property and he would rule her destiny in the afterlife. Because of her adultery, she was condemned to be a servant to him and his wives in heaven for all eternity. Warren banished her to her uncle’s home, where she lived, in effect, under house arrest. She was not allowed to be a mother to her children and could only see them on short, supervised visits if her husband gave his approval. There could never be forgiveness for her in this life. She was condemned to die the second death and her soul would be destroyed forever.

• From Three Women (2019)

  On the one hand, Maggie is confused as to why he shouldn’t be talking to her. After all she has lots of friends and many of them are boys and she talks to them a lot and it doesn’t mean anything. She gets along with boys in a way she doesn’t with girls. On the other hand, she knows what he means. He means, Don’t make me do this, why are we doing this, we can’t do this, I love my wife, my kids. But she feels, already, his hands down her pants. She says okay because he is the authority figure. He’s older and smarter and if he says they shouldn’t be talking—even though he is the one initiating the conversation—then they probably shouldn’t be talking. Maggie is aware of a boundary, unclear though it might be, and she doesn’t want to be the one to cross it first. It doesn’t even occur to her to cross it. She is a kid, she is not his equal. So for him to say, Hey, we shouldn’t be talking, made a part of her feel she was being castigated, feel she had done something wrong even though she was mostly confused. All she’d done was answer his questions. At the same time, it becomes abundantly clear that something has been building for quite a while. Since freshman year, there has been a steady accumulation. Every conversation they had at his desk. Every time he said, Great job. Every time she wore a cute shirt, and he wore a new tie. Every piece of advice. Every couplet of banter. Every text about debate. Every time some other kid said something stupid and she sneered and he smiled. Every drunk mom, every drunk dad, every nagging wife. Something has been growing. The next day Maggie goes snowboarding. She plays with the children. She leaves her phone in the cabin and, because she’s a kid herself, everything in the phone is out of sight, out of mind. By the time she gets back there are fifteen messages, all of them from Knodel. Like a weird poem. Each text is some iteration of, Hey, everything okay? Are you upset? Tell me what you’re thinking. Hello? It seemed he was scared she might have been mad, or freaked out, about their conversation last night. Maybe even—God forbid—she had been creeped out. She writes back, I’m not mad, I was snowboarding all day. He says, Okay, cool. She doesn’t reply. He says, We will talk more when you are back from break.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  The Unity of the Church 75 both churches; but without it, our own church is torn asunder, as you can see, and yours will undoubtedly not find peace either." Despite the prominence of the doctrine of the Eu- charist in the theology of the Hussites, they would probably have agreed with one of their opponents who said that "the entire schism between us" dealt with the relation between the commandment of Christ and the commandment of the church, especially as this was manifest in the denial of the chalice to the laity. Underlying this issue, in turn, was the question of the nature of the church and of its unity, as well as of its authority. For Hus defined the "church" spo- ken of in the words of Christ to Peter, "I will build my church," not as the church of Rome, but as "the gathering of the predestined." The definition itself, whose immediate source was Wycliffe, had come from Augustine and had been in use throughout the Middle Ages; but now it became a means for discriminating between "a physical understanding of the church" characteristic of the papal doctrine and an understand- ing of "the holy church as the bride of Christ, the congregation of the elect of God," which was the only accurate definition of the church. It meant that the predestined continued to belong to the true church in spite of "a temporary exclusion from the church," and therefore that membership in the true church was ultimately unknown even to its members. Thus it was one thing to be "in the church [in ecclesia]" by virtue of external affiliation, quite another thing to be "of the church [de ecclesia]" as a true and elect member. To the adversaries of the Hussites, such distinctions between two churches and two kinds of membership, "as though you were of the second kind even though you are not of the first," seemed to be a heretical denial of the "one church" confessed in the creed, even though it was correct to identify "this body of the church," with which Christ existed in cosmic harmony, as "con- sisting only of the predestined." It was an error for Hus to declare "that only the church containing the predestined and morally upright is the universal church to which obedience is due, and not the Roman [church], for which 'teacher of others' is a misnomer." For while it was true that the predestinate were the ones who

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

  is not the infallible, inerrant book it was once thought to be (and is still thought to be by some), in what way is it reliable, or even serviceable at all? This crisis reaches far beyond questions of historicity and reaches most fundamentally to questions of divine revelation and ethical teaching. But historical questions have played an especially important part in bringing it on. In the modern world, there is often a tendency to equate truth with historical fact. This tendency may be naïve and unsophisticated, but it is widespread and we cannot ignore it. If we are to arrive at a more sophisticated conception of biblical truth, we must first clarify the complex ways in which these books relate to history. CHRONOLOGY Approximate dates implied in Bible for early history: Modern chronology: 4000 B.C.E. Creation (Scientists estimate the age of the earth is 4.5 billion years.) 2400 Flood 2401 2100 Abraham The historical value of the stories of the patriarchs is uncertain. Modern scholars have often proposed a date of 1800 B.C.E. for Abraham. 1875 Descent into Egypt 1445 Exodus 1250 B.C.E. (approx.) Exodus from Egypt (disputed). 1250–1000 Emergence of Israel in the highlands of Canaan. 1000 David 1000–960 (approx.) King David. Beginning of monarchy in Jerusalem (disputed). 960–922 (approx.) King Solomon. Building of Jerusalem temple (disputed). (From 922 on, the implied biblical dates are generally compatible with those of modern scholarship.) 922 Division of kingdom: Israel in the north, Judah in the south. 722/721 Destruction of Samaria, capital of Israel, by the Assyrians. End of kingdom of Israel. 621 Reform of Jerusalem cult by King Josiah. Promulgation of “the book of the law” (some form of