Contempt

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 Sexual Politics (1970)

  Yet all this well-intentioned puritanism dissolves before the reader’s observation of the callowness with which Paul treats both Miriam and Clara. The first girl is, like Paul himself, a bright youngster restless within the narrow limitations of her class and anxious to escape it through the learning which has freed Paul. Less privileged than he, enjoying no support in a home where she is bullied by her brothers and taught the most lethal variety of Christian resignation by her mother, she retains some rebellious hope despite her far more discouraging circumstances. Having no one else to turn to, she asks Paul, whom she has worshiped as her senior and superior, to help her eke out an education. The scenes of his condescension are some of the most remarkable instances of sexual sadism disguised as masculine pedagogy which literature affords until Ionesco’s memorable Lesson. Paul has grandly offered to teach her French and mathematics. We are told that Miriam’s “eyes dilated. She mistrusted him as a teacher.”58 Well she might, in view of what follows. Paul is explaining simple equations to her: “Do you see?” she looked up at him, her eyes wide with the half-laugh that comes of fear. “Don’t you?” he cried…It made his blood boil to see her there, as it were, at his mercy, her mouth open, her eyes dilated with laughter that was afraid, apologetic, ashamed. Then Edgar came along with two buckets of milk. “Hello!” he said. “What are you doing?” “Algebra,” replied Paul. “Algebra!” repeated Edgar curiously. Then he passed on with a laugh.59 Paul is roused by the mixture of tears and beauty; Miriam is beautiful to him when she suffers and cringes: “She was ruddy and beautiful. Yet her soul seemed to be intensely supplicating. The algebra-book she closed, shrinking, knowing he was angered.”60

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Since the model on which such attitudes are formed comes from the past, functionalism has a nostalgic Savor under its impersonal exterior. Perhaps this is nowhere more quaintly evident than in Talcott Parsons’ functionalist evocation of “youth culture” as student life in some golden past when all was varsity prom and varsity football.206 One can often discern some faintly glamorized version of the social scientist’s own childhood in the comfortable middle class. The orientation is small town and Middle West, a world of some twenty years back, before the dangers and innovations of the present ever occurred to the investigator. One sees it echoed in the media’s bland portraits of comfort, in the children’s texts illustrated with blond and bourgeois parents, prosperously equipped with an automobile and a house of their own, neatly divided into breadwinner in business suit and housewife beaming behind her apron. Each of the social disciplines contributed to re-establishing and then maintaining a reactionary status quo in sexual politics, each through its own method of reasoning: anthropologists might study cross-cultural divisions of labor and ascribe them to a fundamental biological source, while sociologists, in announcing they merely recorded social phenomena, gradually came to ratify them by noting that nonconformist behavior is in fact deviant and produces “problems.” The psychologist, in deploring individual maladjustment to social and sexual role, finally came to justify both as inherent psychological nature, fundamental to the species and biological in essence. Later this point of view acquired sufficient confidence to go on the offensive. The habit of discovering and deploring instances of feminine dominance grew obsessive. It became eminently fashionable to regard sexual identity, especially for the male, as so crucial to ego development that any frustration of the demands of masculine prerogative would result in considerable psychic damage, described either as neurosis or homosexuality. In its extreme forms, this attitude insists it is therapeutic necessity, somehow an issue of social health, that male supremacy continue unchallenged. I have chosen two examples of the type of thinking representative of these attitudes. One is a study entitled “A Cross-cultural Survey of Some Sex Differences in Socialization,” by Berry, Bacon, and Child, whose orientation is comparative cultural anthropology, and another called “Family Structure and Sex Role Learning by Children,” by Orville G. Brim Jr., whose point of view derives from social psychology.207 Both shall be analyzed at length so that their logic may be fully explored; their representative character will be established by short quotations affirming their position from comparable sources.208 Both articles were published in reputable professional journals (the first in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and The American Anthropologist; the second in Sociometry) before their inclusion in a popular and influential college textbook, Selected Studies in Marriage and the Family, edited by Winch, McGinnis and Barringer, regarded as reputable and widely used in many kinds of social science courses.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  This position has much to recommend in it, but perhaps it is not quite invidious enough. Freud finally concluded with evident gratification that here again the answer should lie in the facile and well worn but seemingly irrefutable business of organic constitution. Women have contributed little to civilization; it follows that they are incapable of contributing at all. For civilization is made through sublimation, and “women, as the true guardians of the race, are endowed with the power of sublimation only in a limited degree.”128 Moreover, as Freud emphasized, the female since she is not required, as is the male, to conceal and transcend her Oedipal complex for fear of castration (she has been through this surgery once and nothing worse can befall her) fails to develop sufficient super ego.129 Man makes his contribution to civilization through sublimation and the development of a strong super ego goaded on by fear of castration—as a result of possessing a penis—and the fear of losing it. Never having had a penis and so, unafraid to lose it, the female has far less super ego than the male. This is why, Freud explains, she is largely without moral sense, inclined to be less ethically rigorous, has little perception of justice, submits easily to the necessities of life, is more subject to emotional bias in judgment, and contributes nothing to high culture. Again her inferiority-real now and not childishly imagined—is the result of her lack of a penis. With a penis, one might have acquired moral understanding and contribute to human progress, art, and civilization. In fact, it appears that girls who believe in the superiority of the penis, are—by all Freud’s “proof,” entirely correct. Civilization, we are informed, is created through sublimation, or, in a more recondite Freudian phrase “instinctual renunciation,” and again, this is the result of development which, due to her psychological history and physiological constitution the female is, for want of a penis, incapable of achieving. One of Freud’s happiest thoughts along this line is an entertaining specimen of his logical processes, and a particularly quaint instance of his unflagging enthusiasm for glorifying the inestimable male organ. Speculating on how man discovered fire, Freud concludes that it was the result of “instinctual renunciation” of the impulse to extinguish the fire by urinating on it. It must be perfectly clear to all that the female could not discover fire because she could not renounce the impulse to urinate on it, lacking as she docs the only adequate organ of long-distance urination. Here one has an extreme and pristine case of how, anatomically, woman is disqualified from contributing to the advancement of knowledge.130

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Has there ever existed a rowdy scoundrel more worthy of public indignation! What is he but a leprous Jew who, born of a slut and a soldier in the world's meanest stews, dared fob himself off for the spokesman of him who, they say, created the universe! With such lofty pretensions, you will have to admit, Therese, at least a few credentials are necessary. But what are those of this ridiculous Ambassador? What is he going to do to prove his mission? Is the earth's face going to be changed? are the plagues which beset it going to be annihilated? is the sun going to shine upon it by night as well as by day? vices will soil it no more? Are we going to see happiness reign at last?... Not at all; it is through hocus-pocus, antic capers, and puns... (The Marquis de Bievre never made one quite as clever as the Nazarene's to his disciple: "Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I will build my Church"; and they tell Us that witty language is one of our century's innovations!) ...that God's envoy announces himself to the world; it is in the elegant society of manual laborers, artisans, and streetwalkers that Heaven's minister comes to manifest his grandeur; it is by drunken carousing with these, bedding with those, that God's friend, God himself, comes to bend the toughened sinner to his laws; it is by inventing nothing for his farces but what can satisfy either his lewdness or his gourmand's guts that the knavish fellow demonstrates his mission; however all that may be, he makes his fortune; a few beef-witted satellites gravitate toward the villain; a sect is formed; this crowd's dogmas manage to seduce some Jews; slaves of the Roman power, they joyfully embrace a religion which, ridding them of their shackles, makes them subject to none but a metaphysical tyranny. Their motives become evident, their indocility unveils itself, the seditious louts are arrested; their captain perishes, but of a death doubtless much too merciful for his species of crime, and through an unpardonable lapse of intelligence, this uncouth boor's disciples are allowed to disperse instead of being slaughtered cheek to jowl with their leader. Fanaticism gets minds in its grip, women shriek, fools scrape and scuffle, imbeciles believe, and lo! the most contemptible of beings, the most maladroit quacksalver, the clumsiest impostor ever to have made his entrance, there he is: behold! God, there's God's little boy, his papa's peer; and now all his dreams are consecrated I and now all his epigrams are become dogmas! and all his blunders mysteries! His fabulous father's breast opens to receive him and that Creator, once upon a time simple, of a sudden becomes compound, triple, to humor his son, this lad so worthy of his greatness; but does that sacred God stick at that?

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Even amongst ourselves, Madame, I dare add; how can you lull yourself into believing you can maintain concord amongst ourselves when you counsel each to heed nothing but his own self-interest? Would you have any just complaints to make against the one of us who wanted to cut the throats of the others, who did so in order to monopolize for himself what has been shared by his colleagues? Why, 'tis a splendid panegyric to Virtue, to prove its necessity in even a criminal society... to prove for a certainty that this society would disintegrate in a trice were it not sustained by Virtue!" "Your objections, Therese," said Coeur-de-fer, "not the theses Dubois has been expounding, are sophistries; our criminal fraternities are not by any means sustained by Virtue; rather by self-interest, egoism, selfishness; this eulogy of Virtue, which you have fabricated out of a false hypothesis, miscarries; it is not at all owing to virtuousness that, believing myself, let us suppose, the strongest of the band, I do not use a dagger on my comrades in order to appropriate their shares, it is because, thereupon finding myself all alone, I would deprive myself of the means which assure me the fortune I expect to have with their help; similarly, this is the single motive which restrains them from lifting their arms against me. Now this motive, as you, Therese, perfectly well observe, is purely selfish, and has not even the least appearance of virtue; he who wishes to struggle alone against society's interests must, you say, expect to perish; will he not much more certainly perish if, to enable him to exist therein, he has nothing but his misery and is abandoned by others ?

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter. Misogynist literature, the primary vehicle of masculine hostility, is both an hortatory and comic genre. Of all artistic forms in patriarchy it is the most frankly propagandistic. Its aim is to reinforce both sexual factions in their status. Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance literature in the West has each had a large element of misogyny.52 Nor is the East without a strong tradition here, notably in the Confucian strain which held sway in Japan as well as China. The Western tradition was indeed moderated somewhat by the introduction of courtly love. But the old diatribes and attacks were coterminous with the new idealization of woman. In the case of Petrarch, Boccaecio, and some others, one can find both attitudes fully expressed, presumably as evidence of different moods, a courtly pose adopted for the ephemeral needs of the vernacular, a grave animosity for sober and eternal Latin.53 As courtly love was transformed to romantic love, literary misogyny grew somewhat out of fashion. In some places in the eighteenth century it declined into ridicule and exhortative satire. In the nineteenth century its more acrimonious forms almost disappeared in English. Its resurrection in twentieth-century attitudes and literature is the result of a resentment over patriarchal reform, aided by the growing permissiveness in expression which has taken place at an increasing rate in the last fifty years. Since the abatement of censorship, masculine hostility (psychological or physical) in specifically sexual contexts has become far more apparent. Yet as masculine hostility has been fairly continuous, one deals here probably less with a matter of increase than with a new frankness in expressing hostility in specifically sexual contexts. It is a matter of release and freedom to express what was once forbidden expression outside of pornography or other “underground” productions, such as those of De Sade. As one recalls both the euphemism and the idealism of descriptions of coitus in the Romantic poets (Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes), or the Victorian novelists (Hardy, for example) and contrasts it with Miller or William Burroughs, one has an idea of how contemporary literature has absorbed not only the truthful explicitness of pornography, but its anti-social character as well. Since this tendency to hurt or insult has been given free expression, it has become far easier to assess sexual antagonism in the male.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Sensitive to the contemporary interest in animal societies, Erikson introduces the baboon. Like our author himself, the baboons Washburn and de Vere photographed in their famous study appeared to be chivalrous, “the greatest warriors display a chivalry” which protects the weak female with her ‘lesser fighting equipment.”202 Here Erikson invokes Freud’s phrase about the “rock bottom of sexual differentiation”203 inferring that evidence of infrahuman species confirms traditional notions of sexually differentiated roles. The author proceeds to generalize from primate evidence and the length of mammalian gestation to justify the seclusion of women (“limited circle of activities”) and their subordinate position (“less resistance to control”).204 But as a pacifist, Erikson has just committed a fatal error: baboon society is built on war, he believes, and human society is said to hold certain traits constant in its evolutionary descent from primate life. It is just as likely then that war is as inherent and inevitable as the psycho-sexual behavior he insists upon and therefore, that female co-operation in the hope of peace can affect it no more than can the efforts of female baboons. This scheme of secluded motherhood guarded by aggressive and predatory male “chivalry” is very close to Ruskin’s. In urging woman’s participation in the larger social and political life, yet insisting she stay within her traditional domestic sphere and passive temperament (or insisting that such is innate) Erikson has defeated his own purpose. The female continues to be socially ineffective because confined by a menial, domestic or bioreproductive role, while the male who does control every avenue of public efficacy, continues (and is authorized to continue) to exercise the aggression defined as his nature. If human sexual temperament is inherent, there is really very little hope for us.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The plaza was mostly empty, except for the dozen or so protesters with their cardboard NO TERFS and TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS signs who jeered and shouted at her as she hurried past them down the steps. She grinned and threw them a salute. Two Legion soldiers in secondhand riot gear stood by the hall’s plate-glass front doors, one leaning against a concrete bulkhead, the other lighting a cigarette from the butt of her last. “Nice,” chuckled the taller of the two, a black girl with island chains of vitiligo on her cheek, her hands, and across the bridge of her nose. Her name was Kari or Karin, Ramona thought. Something with a K. Inside, the building was, if anything, more forbidding than its facade suggested. Light fell through skylights set into the ceiling at regular intervals, creating a grid of dusty illumination sharply demarcated by lines of shadow. Bare concrete steps rose toward reception and the elevator banks and offices beyond it. Ramona thought that it had probably bustled in its heyday, the shouts and whispered conversations of its hundreds of loud, rude Massachusetts civil servants ringing from its unforgiving walls. Now it was almost empty, just like the rest of the world. Major Molly Lang was waiting for her by the stairs. Molly was a broad, stocky dyke somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties—“A lady never tells” was her unchanging reply when asked—with leathery skin and close-cropped silver hair. She said she’d been a cop for twenty years before T-Day, but Ramona had never quite believed that. There was something inexplicably “career postal carrier” about her. Maybe her quick, confident stride, or the orthopedic sleeve she always wore on her left knee. “Hey, Molly,” she said. “How’s it hanging?” Molly grabbed her face so quickly that all she could do was yelp and slap ineffectually at the shorter woman’s strong, thick arms. Hard, squinty blue eyes magnified by scratched bifocals bored into hers. “You going up to the boss like this?” “What the fuck are you talking about?” She pushed against Molly’s shoulders, but couldn’t break her grip. She hated being held like this. Hated it. “Stop fucking around and let me go!” “Stupid,” Molly sighed, though not without affection. “Your eyes. You look like a roadie coming off a three-day bender. How much ganja you smoke?” Ramona wrenched herself free of Molly’s clutches, staggering a little and doing her best to ignore the curious stares of the few Legion personnel and Boston council staff dispersed around the cavernous entryway. “It was just a spliff. And no one calls it ganja anymore, grandma. ” She brushed dust off her jacket. “Do you have fuckin’ eye drops or did you just want to break my balls?”

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  While the first half of Sons and Lovers is perfectly realized, the second part is deeply flawed by Lawrence’s overparticipation in Paul’s endless scheming to disentangle himself from the persons who have helped him most. Lawrence is so ambivalent here that he is far from being clear, or perhaps even honest, and he offers us two contrary reasons for Paul’s rejection of Miriam. One is that she will “put him in her pocket.” And the other, totally contradictory, is the puzzling excuse that in their last interview, she failed him by not seizing upon him and claiming him as her mate and property. It would seem that for reasons of his own, Lawrence has chosen to confuse the sensitive and intelligent young woman who was Jessie Chambers65 with the tired old lily of another age’s literary convention. The same discrepancy is noticeable in his portrait of Clara,66 who is really two people, the rebellious feminist and political activist whom Paul accuses of penis envy and even man-hating, and who tempts him the more for being a harder conquest, and, at a later stage, the sensuous rose, who by the end of the novel is changed once again—now beyond recognition-into a “loose woman” whom Paul nonchalantly disposes of when he has exhausted her sexual utility. Returning her to her husband, Paul even finds it convenient to enter into one of Lawrence’s Blutbruderschaft bonds with Baxter Dawes, arranging an assignation in the country where Clara, meek as a sheep, is delivered over to the man she hated and left years before. The text makes it clear that Dawes had beat and deceived his wife. Yet, with a consummate emotional manipulation, Paul manages to impose his own version of her marriage on Clara, finally bringing her to say that its failure was her fault. Paul, formerly her pupil in sexuality, now imagines he has relieved Clara of what he smugly describes as the “femme incomprise” quality which had driven her to the errors of feminism. We are given to understand that through the sexual instruction of this novice, Clara was granted feminine “fulfillment.” Paul is now pleased to make a gift of Clara to her former owner fancying, that as the latter has degenerated through illness and poverty (Paul has had Dawes fired) he ought to be glad of salvaging such a brotherly castoff. Even before it provides Paul with sexual gratification, the affair offers considerable opportunities for the pleasure of bullying: “Here, I say, you seem to forget I’m your boss. It just occurs to me.” “And what does that mean?” she asked coolly. “It means I’ve got a right to boss you.” “Is there anything you want to complain about?” “Oh, I say, you needn’t be nasty,” he said angrily. “I don’t know what you want,” she said, continuing her task. “I want you to treat me nicely and respectfully.” “Call you ‘sir,’ perhaps?” she asked quietly. “Yes, call me ‘sir.’ I should love it.”67

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The lines of influence which psychoanalysis will exercise over sexual politics are set; generations of practitioners will follow, reputable or ridiculous. Yet more effective even than penis envy is the school’s tendency toward a pseudoscientific unification of the cultural definition of masculinity and femininity with the genetic reality of male and female. Dressing the thing up in jargon—“passivity,” “low libido,” “masochism,” “narcissism,” “undeveloped super ego”—one gives the old myth of feminine “nature” a new respectability. Now it can be said scientifically that women are inherently subservient, and males dominant, more strongly sexed and therefore entitled to sexually subjugate the female, who enjoys her oppression and deserves it, for she is by her very nature, vain, stupid, and hardly better than barbarian, if she is human at all. Once this bigotry has acquired the cachet of science, the counterrevolution may proceed pretty smoothly. Sex, like race, is something one cannot really change. It is a sign of a rather superior female to wish herself out of such a case, seeing and aspiring to the virtues of the ruling group. But it is futile to hope to escape one’s birth caste. Aspiration on the part of the truly incapacitated only forbodes frustration. And, after all, psychoanalysis promised fulfillment in passivity and masochism, and greater fulfillment, indeed, the very meaning of woman’s life lay in reproduction, and there alone. Then too, in venal hands, psychoanalysis could not only discredit the revolution and turn it back, but give work, make money, sell itself and consumerism as well.135 Some Post-Freudians In general, Freudian psychology would posit an irreducible human nature, an essential and universal human psychology; the Oedipus complex should develop in matriarchal or communal society as well as in patriarchal; penis envy in a sexually egalitarian as well as in a male-supremacist culture. Its tendency is to view each personality as the result not of individual choices or social conditions, nor as the interaction of the two, but as the product of a childhood biography imposed upon inherent constitution by parental behavior. Finally, having misapprehended the physiological data it claims to be based on, it imagines sexual temperament to be the function of biology (masculine is active, feminine is passive) and genetics (the activity and passivity of the sperm and ova). Having done all this, it concludes that sexual status, role, and temperament are fixed entities-that culture is based upon anatomy, and must, therefore, be destiny.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In few cases, or none, was it ever an affair of moment to those in power enacting measures for their protection, that women have beneficial conditions so that they might enjoy or profit from meaningful work; still less were they concerned with equality between the sexes, least of all in the matter of wages. About all the chivalrous reform which was finally accomplished there was a frequently patronizing air of concessions made to the physically inferior. Women and children are generally lumped together in Parliamentary blue books: both had the status of minors. Louis Brandeis’ famous “Oregon Brier’ which won a decisive victory for protective legislation in America is based on the smug assumption that “women are fundamentally weaker than men in all that makes for endurance, in muscular strength, in nervous energy, in the power of persistent application and attention.37…History discloses the fact that woman has always been dependent on man…Differentiated by these matters from the other sex, she is properly placed in a class by herself, and sustained even when like legislation is not necessary for men and could not be sustained. It is impossible to close one’s eyes to the fact that she still looks to her brother and depends on him.”38 English and American studies of the period cannot help but persuade one that women workers were habitually rescued for what amounted to the wrong reasons. Yet the fact remains that the sexual revolution began to accomplish a great deal for women economically. Despite the dreadful hardships of exploitative and discriminatory employment, they attained through it a measure of that economic, social, and psychological independence which is the sine qua non of freedom. POLEMICAL MILL VERSUS RUSKIN Had the older, cynical expressions of male supremacy continued to carry much weight, a first phase of sexual revolution might never have taken place. Instead, the struggle was carried out between two opposing camps, rational and chivalrous, each of them claiming to have at heart the best interests of both sexes and the larger benefit of society. Just as it was enlightening to contrast the chivalrous attitude with the reality of women’s economic and legal situation—the result of such paternalism—it should be quite as revealing to compare two of the central documents of sexual politics in the Victorian period-Mill’s Subjection of Women, and Ruskin’s “Of Queen’s Gardens.”39 Compressed within these two statements is nearly the whole range and possibility of Victorian thought on the subject.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Therefore, it is in no wise necessary to give pleasures in order to receive them; the happy or unhappy situation of the victim of our debauch is, therefore, absolutely as one from the point of view of our senses, there is never any question of the state in which his heart or mind may be; it matters not one whit, the object may be pleased by what you do to it, the object may suffer, it may love or detest you: all these considerations are nullified immediately it is only a question of your sensation. Women, I concede, may establish contrary theories, but women, who are nothing but machines designed for voluptuousness, who ought to be nothing but the targets of lust, are untrustworthy authorities whenever one has got to construct an authentic doctrine upon this kind of pleasure. Is there a single reasonable man who is eager to have a whore partake of his joy? And, however, are there not millions of men who amuse themselves hugely with these creatures? Well, there you have that many individuals convinced of what I am urging, who unhesitatingly put it into practice, and who scorn those who use good principles to legitimate their deeds, those ridiculous fools, the world is stuffed to overflowing with them, who go and come, who do this and that, who eat, who digest, without ever sensing a thing. "Having proven that solitary pleasures are as delicious as any others and much more likely to delight, it becomes perfectly clear that this enjoyment, taken in independence of the object we employ, is not merely of a nature very remote from what could be pleasurable to that object, but is even found to be inimical to that object's pleasure: what is more, it may become an imposed suffering, a vexation, or a torture, and the only thing that results from this abuse is a very certain increase of pleasure for the despot who does the tormenting or vexing; let us attempt to demonstrate this.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She sat down, and enjoyed my embarrassment—for actually I was even more afraid of her now in the full light of day. A delightful expression of contempt hovered about her upper lip. “You look at love, and especially woman,” she began, “as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.” “You don’t share it?” “I do not share it,” she said quickly and decisively, shaking her head, so that her curls flew up like red flames. “The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks—pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan. ‘Doest thou imagine long the goddess of love took counsel When in Ida’s grove she was pleased with the hero Anchises?’ “These lines from Goethe’s Roman Elegy have always delighted me. “In nature there is only the love of the heroic age, ‘when gods and goddesses loved.’ At that time ‘desire followed the glance, enjoyment desire.’ All else is factitious, affected, a lie. Christianity, whose cruel emblem, the cross, has always had for me an element of the monstrous, brought something alien and hostile into nature and its innocent instincts. “The battle of the spirit with the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not care to have a share in it.” “Yes, Mount Olympus would be the place for you, madame,” I replied, “but we moderns can no longer support the antique serenity, least of all in love. The idea of sharing a woman, even if it were an Aspasia, with another revolts us. We are jealous as is our God. For example, we have made a term abuse out of the name of the glorious Phryne. “We prefer one of Holbein’s meagre, pallid virgins, which is wholly ours to an antique Venus, no matter how divinely beautiful she is, but who loves Anchises to-day, Paris to-morrow, Adonis the day after. And if nature triumphs in us so that we give our whole glowing, passionate devotion to such a woman, her serene joy of life appears to us as something demonic and cruel, and we read into our happiness a sin which we must expiate.”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Upon all this I have principles to which, Therese, I adhere faithfully; poverty is part of the natural order; by creating men of dissimilar strength, Nature has convinced us of her desire that inequality be preserved even in those modifications our culture might bring to Nature's laws. To relieve indigence is to violate the established order, to imperil it, it is to enter into revolt against that which Nature has decreed, it is to undermine the equilibrium that is fundamental to her sublimest arrangements; it is to strive to erect an equality very perilous to society, it is to encourage indolence and flatter drones, it is to teach the poor to rob the rich man when the latter is pleased to refuse the former alms, for it's a dangerous habit, and gratuities encourage it." "Oh, Monsieur, how harsh these principles are! Would you speak thus had you not always been wealthy?" "Who knows, Therese? everyone has a right to his opinion, that's mine, and I'll not change it. They complain about beggars in France: if they wished to be rid of them, the thing could soon be done; hang seven or eight thousand of 'em and the infamous breed will vanish overnight. The Body Politic should be governed by the same rules that apply to the Body Physical. Would a man devoured by vermin allow them to feed upon him out of sympathy? In our gardens do we not uproot the parasitic plant which harms useful vegetation? Why then should one choose to act otherwise in this case?" "But Religion," I expostulated, "benevolence, Monsieur, humanity..." "... are the chopping blocks of all who pretend to happiness," said Roland; "if I have consolidated my own, it is only upon the debris of all those infamous prejudices of mankind; 'tis by mocking laws human and divine; 'tis by constantly sacrificing the weak when I find them in my path, 'tis by abusing the public's good faith; 'tis by ruining the poor and stealing from the rich I have arrived at the summit of that precipice whereupon sits the temple sacred to the divinity I adore; why not imitate me?

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  8. Mendicants: Francis of Assisi and Louis of Toulouse Louis as a Friar and Bishop The war with Aragon ended in 1295, but the princes’ lives were thrown into upheaval by a series of family events. Their eldest brother, Charles Martel, heir to the throne, died from the plague that year, making Louis the heir. However, Louis renounced his claim. As soon as he was freed from captivity in October 1295, he went directly to Rome, and in December of the same year, before Boniface VIII, he was made a subdeacon. By May, he’d been made a deacon and ordained a priest. However, his father and brother Robert, now heir to the throne, exerted great pressure on him to accept a prestigious office as an ecclesiastic. That winter, he was made bishop of Toulouse against his will. Louis bargained with the pope: He would only accept the bishopric if he could take his vows as a Franciscan first. Instead of going directly to his diocese, he traveled to the Franciscan convent in Paris, where he served the other friars. By the spring of 1297, he had reached Toulouse but was soon off again. He was certainly in no hurry to execute his duties as bishop. Like Francis, Louis practiced an Louis made his extreme and physically taxing distaste for high rank asceticism. He ate simply or rejected food altogether and very clear, refusing insisted on traveling on foot or to appear in bishops’ by mule. He also instructed his robes and instead officials to examine the bishopric’s revenues, spend only on absolutely dressing as a simple necessary expenses, and give all Franciscan friar. other income as alms. He was still so unhappy as bishop that after only six months in the role, he resolved to travel to Rome and request that he be freed from his bishopric. He died en route on August 19 in his father’s castle at Brignoles and was buried in Marseilles. Charles II, eager for Angevin expansion, promoted the relatively new dynasty partly through advancement of the family saints. Within 3 years, the family appointed a procurator to campaign for Louis’s canonization. 61

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  And what thinking being, upon knowing a woman to her depths, will not cry with Euripides: 'That one amongst the Gods who brought women into the world may boast of having produced the worst of all creatures and the most afflicting to man.' If then it is demonstrated that the two sexes do not at all sort agreeably with each other and that there is not one well-founded grievance of the one which could not equally and immediately be voiced by the other, it is therefore false, from this moment, to say that Nature created them for their reciprocal happiness. She may have permitted them the desire to attain each other's vicinity in order to conjugate in the interests of propagation, but in no wise in order to form attachments with the design of discovering a mutual felicity. The weaker therefore having no right to mouth complaints with the object of wresting pity from the stronger and no longer being able to raise the objection that the stronger depends for his happiness upon her, the weaker, I say, has no alternative but to submit; and as, despite the difficulty of achieving that bilateral happiness, it is natural that individuals of both sexes labor at nothing but to procure it for themselves, the weaker must reconcile herself to distilling from her submissiveness the only dose of happiness she can possibly hope to cull, and the stronger must strive after his by whatever oppressive methods he is pleased to employ, since it is proven that the mighty's sole happiness is yielded him by the exercise of his strong faculties, by, that is to say, the most thorough-going tyranny; thus, that happiness the two sexes cannot find with each other they will find, one in blind obedience, the other in the most energetic expression of his domination.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  According to Scott the nurse exclaimed, “He beat up his PC!” Karen de la Carriere was also a young intern at Saint Hill, and she was directed to join the others in the internship room. “ They told us that David Miscavige had struck his PC,” she recalled. “He had been removed from his internship, and we were not to rumor-monger or gossip about it. We were supposed to just bury it.”1 David was not done with Scientology, however. At fifteen, he went Clear in his present life. On his sixteenth birthday in 1976, “ sickened by the declining moral situation in schools illustrated by rampant drug use,” he dropped out of tenth grade and formally joined the Sea Org. He began his service in Clearwater; less than a year later, he was transferred to the Commodore’s Messengers in California, where once again he quickly captured the attention of the church hierarchy with his energy and commitment. He rose to the position of Chief Cinematographer at the age of seventeen. After the skit that made such a poor impression on Hubbard, David redeemed himself in the founder’s eyes by renovating one of his houses and ridding it of fiberglass, which Hubbard said he was allergic to. David Miscavige filled a spot in Hubbard’s plans that once might have been occupied by Quentin, although Miscavige displayed a passion and focus that Quentin never really possessed. He was tough, tireless, and doctrinaire. Despite David’s youth, Hubbard promoted him to Action Chief, the person in charge of making sure that Hubbard’s directives were strictly and remorselessly carried out. He ran missions around the world to perform operations that local orgs were unable to do themselves—at least, not to Hubbard’s satisfaction.2 [image file=Image00010.jpg] HUBBARD FINISHED WRITING his thousand-page opus, Battlefield Earth , in 1980. ( Mitt Romney would name it as his favorite novel.) Hubbard hoped to have the book made into a major motion picture, so the executive director of the church, Bill Franks, approached Travolta about producing and starring in it. Travolta was excited about the prospect. Suddenly Franks got a call from Miscavige saying, “ Get me John Travolta. I want to meet that guy!” Miscavige began wining and dining the star. “He just moved in and took over Travolta,” Franks recalled. But he says that privately Miscavige was telling him, “The guy is a faggot. We’re going to out him.” Fleeing subpoenas from three grand juries, and pursued by forty-eight lawsuits, all naming the founder, Hubbard slipped away from public view on Valentine’s Day 1980, in a white Dodge van, with velvet curtains and a daybed. It had been customized by John Brousseau, a Sea Org member who took care of all of Hubbard’s vehicles. The elaborate escape plan involved ditching the Dodge for an orange Ford. In the meantime, Brousseau purchased another Dodge van for Hubbard, identical to the first. He then cut the original one into pieces and took them to the dump.

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

  1. These miracles have a much lower moral tone than those of the Bible, while in some cases they far exceed them in outward pomp, and make a stronger appeal to our faculty of belief. Many of the monkish miracles are not so much supernatural and above reason, as they are unnatural and against reason, attributing even to wild beasts of the desert, panthers and hyenas, with which the misanthropic hermits lived on confidential terms, moral feelings and states, repentance and conversion913 of which no trace appears in the New Testament.914 2. They serve not to confirm the Christian faith in general, but for the most part to support the ascetic life, the magical virtue of the sacrament, the veneration of saints and relics, and other superstitious practices, which are evidently of later origin, and are more or less offensive to the healthy evangelical mind.915 3. The further they are removed from the apostolic age, the more numerous they are, and in the fourth century alone there are more miracles than in all the three preceding centuries together, while the reason for them, as against the power of the heathen world, was less. 4. The church fathers, with all the worthiness of their character in other respects, confessedly lacked a highly cultivated sense of truth, and allowed a certain justification of falsehood ad majorem Dei gloriam, or fraus pia, under the misnomer of policy or accommodation;916 with the solitary exception of Augustine, who, in advance of his age, rightly condemned falsehood in every form. 5. Several church fathers like Augustine, Martin of Tours, and Gregory I., themselves concede that in their time extensive frauds with the relics of saints were already practised; and this is confirmed by the fact that there were not rarely numerous copies of the same relics, all of which claimed to be genuine. 6. The Nicene miracles met with doubt and contradiction even among contemporaries, and Sulpitius Severus makes the important admission that the miracles of St. Martin were better known and more firmly believed in foreign countries than in his own.917 7. Church fathers, like Chrysostom and Augustine, contradict themselves in a measure, in sometimes paying homage to the prevailing faith in miracles, especially in their discourses on the festivals of the martyrs, and in soberer moments, and in the calm exposition of the Scriptures, maintaining that miracles, at least in the Biblical sense, had long since ceased.918

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

  Calvin was the first to take up the pen against these decisions. He subjected them to a searching criticism. He admits, in the introduction, that a Council might be of great use and restore the peace of Christendom, provided it be truly, oecumenical, impartial, and free. But he denies that the Council of Trent had these essential characteristics. The Greek and the Evangelical Churches were not represented at all. It was a purely Roman Council, and under the control of the pope, who was himself the chief offender, and far more disposed to perpetuate abuses than to abolish them. The members, only about forty, mostly Italians, were not distinguished for learning or piety, but were a set of wrangling monks and canonists and minions of the pope. They gave merely a nod of assent to the living oracle of the Vatican, and then issued the decrees as responses of the Holy Spirit., As soon as a decree is framed," he says, "couriers flee off to Rome, and beg pardon and peace at the feet of their idol. The holy father hands over what the couriers have brought to his private advisers for examination. They curtail, add, and change as they please. The couriers return, and a sederunt is appointed. The notary reads over what no one dares to disapprove, and the asses shake their ears in assent. Behold the oracle which imposes religious obligations on the whole world .... The proclamation of the Council is entitled to no more weight than the cry of an auctioneer." Calvin dissects the decrees with his usual polemic skill. He first states them in the words of the Council, and then gives the antidote. He exposes the errors of the Vulgate, which the Council put on a par with the original Hebrew and Greek originals, and defends the supremacy of the Scriptures and the doctrine of justification by faith. He wrote this work in two or three months, under constant interruption, while Chemnitz took ten years to complete his. He submitted the manuscript to Farel, who was delighted with it. He published also a French edition in a more popular form. Cochlaeus prepared, with much personal bitterness, a refutation of Calvin (1548), and was answered by Des Gallars,882 and Beza, who numbers Cochlaeus among the monsters of the animal kingdom.883 After the close of the Council of Trent, Martin Chemnitz, the leading divine of the Lutheran Church after the death of Melanchthon, wrote his more elaborate Examen Concilii Tridentini (1565–1573; second ed. 1585), which was for a long time a standard work in the Roman controversy. § 121. Against the German Interim. 1549. Interim Adultero-Germanum: Cui adjecta est vera Christianae pacificationis et ecclesiae reformandae ratio, per Joannem Calvinum. Cavete a fermento Pharisaeorum, 1549. Opera, VII. 541–674.—It was reprinted in Germany, and translated into French (1549) and Italian (1561). See Henry, II. 369 sqq.; III. Beilage, 211 sq.; Dyer, 232 sq.

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

  What value, however, one must ask, has such a Christianity, when, instead of bringing man nearer to God, it only fixes the chasm between God and man?"1348 Arianism was a religious political war against the spirit of the Christian revelation by the spirit of the world, which, after having persecuted the church three hundred years from without, sought under the Christian name to reduce her by degrading Christ to the category of the temporal and the created, and Christianity to the level of natural religion. It substituted for a truly divine Redeemer, a created demigod, an elevated Hercules. Arianism proceeded from human reason, Athanasianism from divine revelation; and each used the other source of knowledge as a subordinate and tributary factor. The former was deistic and rationalistic, the latter theistic and supernaturalistic, in spirit and effect. The one made reasonableness, the other agreement with Scripture, the criterion of truth. In the one the intellectual interest, in the other the moral and religious, was the motive principle. Yet Athanasius was at the same time a much deeper and abler thinker than Arius, who dealt in barren deductions of reason and dialectic formulas.1349 In close connection with this stood another distinction. Arianism associated itself with the secular political power and the court party; it represented the imperio-papal principle, and the time of its prevalence under Constantius was an uninterrupted season of the most arbitrary and violent encroachments of the state upon the rights of the church. Athanasius, on the contrary, who was so often deposed by the emperor, and who uttered himself so boldly respecting Constantius, is the personal representative not only of orthodoxy, but also of the independence of the church with reference to the secular power, and in this respect a precursor of Gregory VII. in his contest with the German imperialism. While Arianism bent to the changing politics of the court party, and fell into diverse schools and sects the moment it lost the imperial support, the Nicene faith, like its great champion Athanasius, remained under all outward changes of fortune true to itself, and made its mighty advance only by legitimate growth outward from within. Athanasius makes no distinction at all between the various shades of Arians and Semi-Arians, but throws them all into the same category of enemies of the catholic faith.1350 § 124. Arianism. The doctrine of the Arians, or Eusebians, Aëtians, Eunomians, as they were called after their later leaders, or Exukontians, Heteroousiasts, and Anomoeans, as they were named from their characteristic terms, is in substance as follows: The Father alone is God; therefore he alone is unbegotten, eternal, wise, good, and unchangeable, and he is separated by an infinite chasm from the world. He cannot create the world directly, but only through an agent, the Logos. The Son of God is pre-existent,1351 before all creatures, and above all creatures,