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.

Page 71 of 253 · 20 per page

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  His pre de ces sor Trajan, the masculine warrior, was “an enthusiast for wine and boys.” Th e sexual culture of the high empire does not parse neatly into eastern and western styles; as with so much else, the pederastic mores of the imperial period fused Greek and Roman elements, and by the second century this synthesis was well established. Th ough the love of boys in the east could always be described in the fashionably anti- quarian language of Platonic eros, in reality Greek pederasty reveals the creeping infl uences of the slave trade and of harder legal norms. Pederasty in imperial Greece was presumptively practiced with unfree partners. Herodes Atticus, the “tongue of the Greeks,” was publicly enamored with his trophimoi, his fosterlings. One, Polydeucion, apparently was free, and Herodes treated him as a son, but the other two, Achilles and Memnon, were manifestly slaves. A recent assertion that they “no doubt acquiesced to his desires, what ever they were,” may well be true, but we must admit that the nature of the relationships between them and Herodes is, in traditional Athenian style, perfectly obscure. Th e verse of Hadrian’s court, as techni- cally accomplished as any poetry in the anthologies, focuses with verve on the beauty of servile wine- pourers. Lucian’s fi ercest satires assume the love of slave boys. In the dream manual of Artemidorus, it was natural and aus- picious to have sex with one’s slaves— male or female.  While the advance of the slave trade tended to align pederastic eros with the master’s power, the law protected freeborn boys in ever starker terms. Violation of a freeborn boy was illegal in Roman law. What is underappre- ciated, though, is the extent to which freeborn boys in the east were gradu- ally fenced off by public force. Dio considered sex with a freeborn boy “an THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  assault” and “an even more lawless violation” than the corruption of women. Th e law “so far exceeds all else in modesty and faith that to it has been vouchsafed the matrimonial bond, the beauty of the virgin, the bloom of boys.” Seduction of freeborn boys became conspicuously dangerous, but the statutory basis of the crime is a little unclear. In the early empire the Romans gave the towns under their sway considerable control over private law, so that the empire was a patchwork of jurisdictions and legal regimes. But Roman rules had an irresistible infl uence. Roman law applied to the growing number of provincials who earned Roman citizenship, and Roman governors played an ever larger role in the resolution of disputes. Th rough what ever channels, Roman offi cials came to preside over the sexual honor of free provincial boys. Lucian reports that the charlatan Peregrinus, having “corrupted a pretty lad,” paid three thousand drachmas to the boy’s par- ents, “who were poor, to avoid being hauled before the governor of Asia.”

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Symmetrical faces are not especially beautiful, because symmetry is bland. Bland is not beautiful, and facial symmetry can be the ultimate in bland. By contrast, asymmetry is actually attractive, in part because it is recognizable. This is why three of the twentieth century’s most glamorous and sexually idolized American women—Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Cindy Crawford—came to fame with prominent, symmetry-defying facial moles. It’s also why the majority of hairstyles—like side parts—create and enhance facial asymmetries. Of course, monstrous asymmetries are unattractive, but so are monstrous symmetries. Think Cyrano de Bergerac. The adaptationist hypothesis that we have evolved a preference for symmetry because it is an indicator of genetic quality is a zombie idea that refuses to die despite all the evidence to the contrary, because people are ideologically committed to believing it. Researchers will go to practically any length to keep the zombie alive, no matter how dubious the kinds of evidence they have to turn to for support. For example, a team of evolutionary psychologists from Rutgers University, including the famous sociobiologist Robert Trivers, published a study of symmetry in 185 Jamaican men and women in Nature (Brown et al. 2005). Their paper claimed that human dancing ability is an indicator of underlying body symmetry, and therefore an honest signal of genetic quality, which is why we have evolved to admire good dancing and to consider it sexy. The paper was featured on the cover of Nature and was covered in newspaper stories and media reports around the world. Unfortunately, the data were too good to be true. Several years after publication, Trivers himself uncovered irregularities in the data set and began to discredit the paper as a fraud perpetrated by one of his co-authors. Ultimately, a full investigation by Rutgers University concluded that there was “clear and convincing evidence” of data fabrication by the postdoc and lead author on the study. The paper was finally retracted by Nature in December 2013. See Reich (2013). humans have evolved bones: An excellent discussion of evolutionary context 1 is presented by Neil Shubin (2008) Your Inner Fish. better body-cooling efficiency: See Bramble and Lieberman (2004) and Lieberman (2013). Elizabeth Grice and colleagues have written: Grice et al. (2009, 1190).

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There was something strained about him, particularly his gaunt, narrow head, hollow-cheeked and with short dark curls. His sunken eyes were a cold blue, made the more striking by his tan; when he turned round I saw that he had shaved off all his pubic hair, which added a kinky and intenser nakedness to his salient, sideways-curving, pink-headed and very large cock. The conversation was not fluent. The youth would pass some bland comment, and James would try to reply with adequate enthusiasm or insouciance. ‘See you,’ said the youth, abruptly turning off his shower and going off to dry. ‘Yes, see you,’ said James, managing to make it seem a careless possibility, though the smile faded off his face in a way that showed it was not spontaneous. He had effectively been put down, as it is impossible to go padding out after someone in simulated sportsman-like ease when they have just said goodbye to you. I crossed over and took my place beside James. ‘Who’s your friend?’ I enquired. He merely gave me a sceptical look. ‘Why don’t you go after him?’ ‘I don’t think I care for him.’ ‘Oh come on! He looked to me as if he quite cared for you—if Dame Tumescence is anything to go by.’ ‘Another time, perhaps.’ He shampooed his receding hair in a listless fashion. ‘I see Miss Manners is having a ball.’ It was one of James’s almanac of nicknames. ‘She is the end, that one,’ I agreed, glancing at the man in question, one of that breed of middle-aged queens whose strategy, as they become uncontestably unattractive, is to cultivate a barging, unsmiling manner, sensitive to imagined infringements of their rights and never getting out of anyone’s way. Like James’s ‘Miss Marple’, a portly man who wore his glasses even in the shower and would blunder round and round the changing-room in his underwear for thirty or forty minutes, his spectacles misting up from the heat of his body, he was one of the odd crew at the Corry who, knowing no one there, existed in a kind of unseemly limbo of paranoia and repression. James, who himself occupied the club in a highly fantastical way, had catalogued many of its members with fantasy names. Some of them confused me—Miss De Meanour and Miss Anthropy were impossible to distinguish, whilst a pair of boneheaded identical twins could be referred to indiscriminately as ‘Biff’. There was no doubt about ‘Miss World’, however, the hilariously vain queen of uncertain years, known to me also as Freddie, who came into the shower now, casting off his towel as if it were the hungrily awaited climax to a striptease. ‘Hullo, Will ,’ he said as he came alongside, his tanned, creased, sinewy body swivelling balletically. He spoke in a carrying, recital manner, as if testing some primitive broadcasting machine. ‘How are you?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  After doing more than justice to bowls of family-hotel trifle we made our slow progress back to the smoking-room. As Percy poured coffee we were joined by Ronald Staines. He was dressed entirely properly, but there was something about the way he inhabited his clothes that was subversive. He seemed to slither around within the beautiful green tweed, the elderly herringbone shirt and chaste silk tie which plumped forward slightly between collar and waistcoat. His wrists were very thin and I saw that he was smaller than his authoritative suiting. He was a man in disguise, but a disguise which his gestures, his over-preserved profile and a Sitwellian taste in rings drew immediate attention to. It was a strikingly two-minded performance, and, though I found him unattractive, just what I was looking for in the present surroundings. ‘Charles, you must introduce me to your guest.’ ‘He’s called William.’ I held out a hand which Staines shook with surprising vigour. ‘We’ve been getting on very well,’ Nantwich added. ‘Don’t fret, my dear, I’m not going to break anything up. Ronald Staines, by the way,’ he said to me. ‘With an “e”.’ He pulled up a chair, not risking to ask if he could join us. ‘And how did you get involved with Charles?’ he asked. ‘Charles has some terrible secret, I’m sure—his success rate with the ragazzi is quite remarkable. He always has some very, very handsome young man in tow.’ I had always been a sucker for this kind of thing, out of vanity, and liked to allow the old their unthreatening admiration. ‘You’re bloody lucky he hasn’t got his camera with him, William,’ said Nantwich. ‘He’d have you stripped off in a moment and covered in baby oil.’ I got the impression of a long-lasting relationship conducted in a bitchy third-person. ‘I have seen photographs of you, though, William,’ Staines recalled. ‘Surely Whitehaven did one, or am I wrong?—little swimming things, and a stripe of shadow covering those dreamy blue eyes? So talented, that young man, though some of his stuff can be a little … strong. Not this one, mind you: I saw it in that New York exhibition—there have been several, I know, but last year, in a kind of abattoir in Soho …’ ‘He’s Beckwith’s grandson,’ said Nantwich, as if to discount the possibility which Staines was outlining. ‘Of course,’ exclaimed Staines in a curiously condescending way; ‘how interesting!’—turning his head aside to suggest a sudden loss of interest. ‘My dear, I’ve done some pieces which will delight you. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if they delighted William as well—I’m certainly delighted myself. They’re a new departure, newish anyway, and rather religious and full of feeling. One’s a kind of sacra conversazione between Saint Sebastian and John the Baptist. The young man who modelled Sebastian was almost in tears when I showed it to him, it’s so lovely.’

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The impossibility of honorable consent is at the heart of Plutarch’s Erotikos, by any measure a crucial document of sexual life in the high empire. The Erotikos is a dialogue set within the frame story of a young widow’s efforts to lure a handsome young man into marriage. The backdrop is essential, for Plutarch construes the woman as a sort of female lover pursuing her beloved according to the rules of classical pederasty. The story occasions an extended discussion of the relative merits of marriage and the love of boys. The defenders of pederasty give an apology as dramatic as any classical antecedent. True eros, claim its defenders, has nothing to do with women. Marriage is a domestic arrangement, more about keeping accounts and enjoying enervating pleasures between daily squabbling than the soul’s ascent; bonding between males, they argue, is the true way to nurture virtue. The “form, complexion, and image of the boy’s beauty” was just a powerful reminder, sent by the gods, of heavenly beauty, a sensible impression of the incorruptible reality. The true lover of wisdom experienced a chaste desire and would never indulge in base pleasures. Hence, sex with slaves must be explicitly renounced. “So too it is not gentlemanly or cultivated to lust after slave boys, which is nothing more than physical coitus.” Sex with slaves was so insalubrious that it had nothing more to recommend it than did “sex with women.”19

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  THE NATURAL USE: EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND SAME-SEX LOVENot long after the composition of his dispatch to the Corinthians, Paul authored his letter to the church in Rome. Written to a community he was yet to visit in person, the Letter to the Romans is different in character, and grander in vision, than any of his other writings. Like First Corinthians, Romans assumes far more than it explicitly reveals about Paul’s sexual ideology. In this case, though, the visible surface, which juts above the horizon with sudden and unexpected violence, rests on foundations lying submerged in the depths of Paul’s theology. In the thundering introit of the letter, it becomes evident that for Paul the sexual disorder of Roman society was the single most powerful symbol of the world’s alienation from God. Paul draws on the deeply rooted association between idolatry and sexual immorality: sexual fidelity was the corollary of monotheism, while the worship of many gods was, in every way, promiscuous. But in Paul’s hands the association was transfigured into a fearful comment on the human condition. When the nations substituted “images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles” for the “glory of the immortal God,” God “gave them up to dishonorable passions.” Paul was unusual in the degree to which he saw illicit desires as a metonym capable of standing for mankind’s rebellion against monotheism. But the greater surprise that emerges in the first chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans is the specific form of carnal decadence that encapsulated, for the apostle, the total depravity of the heathen world: same-sex love.21 It is worth pausing to take seriously the evidence of Romans as the statement of an earnest, if hostile, observer of Roman society. Moralists who extolled the married pair as the model of natural human sexuality were not inconspicuous in polite Roman circles. But the fervor of a religious enthusiast like Paul reveals how far removed those speculative ideologies were from the experience of sexual culture in the middle of the first century. Same-sex love stood out, incandescently, as a measure of the gulf between Paul’s view of eros and the state of human affairs. Same-sex love served Paul’s theological purposes well. A central proposition of Romans is that God’s “power and deity” are “clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” For Paul, God’s moral will inheres in the order of creation and is manifest in it. Same-sex love was thus, for the apostle, a particularly egregious violation of the natural order. “Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.” For Paul, same-sex attraction symbolized the estrangement of men and women, at the very level of their inmost desires, from nature and from the creator of nature. And it was the creator’s stark decree that “those who do such things deserve to die.”22

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Hermogenes took my arm to help me go up again to the open air; it was almost a joy to be above ground once more, to catch sight of the cold blue sky between two slabs of tawny rock. The remainder of the voyage was brief. At Alexandria the empress re-embarked for Rome. DISCIPLINA AUGUSTA I returned to Greece by the land route. The journey was long. I had reason to think that this would be my last official tour in the Orient, and I was the more anxious, therefore, to see everything for myself. Antioch, where I stopped for some weeks, appeared to me under a new light; I was less impressed than before by the spell of its theaters and festivals, by the delights of the pleasure gardens of Daphne, and by the brilliant color in its passing crowds. I was increasingly aware of the eternal frivolity of the populace, mocking and malicious like the people of Alexandria, and of the stupidity of their so-called intellectual activities; likewise of the vulgar display of luxury on the part of the rich. Hardly one of these leading citizens grasped in its entirety my program for public works and reforms in Asia; they were satisfied to profit by them for their city, and above all for themselves. For a short time I considered advancing Smyrna or Pergamum to the detriment of the arrogant Syrian capital, but the faults of Antioch are those inherent in any metropolis; no great city can escape them. My disgust with urban life made me apply myself even more, if possible, to agrarian reform; I put the finishing touches to the long and complex reorganization of the imperial domains in Asia Minor; the peasants were the better off for it, and the State, too. Crossing Thrace, I went to revisit Hadrianopolis, where veterans of the Dacian and Sarmatian campaigns had settled in great numbers, attracted by land grants and reductions in taxes. The same plan was to be put into operation in Antino�polis. I had long since made comparable exemptions everywhere for doctors and professors in the hope of favoring the survival and development of a serious, well-educated middle class. I know the deficiences of this class, but only through it does a State endure. Athens remained the stop of my choice; I marveled that its beauty depended so little upon memories, whether my own or those of history; that city seemed new with each new day. I stayed this time with Arrian. He had been initiated like me at Eleusis, so was accordingly adopted by one of the great priestly families of Attica, the Kerykes, as I had been by the family of the Eumolpides. He had married into the Kerykes family; his wife was a proud and elegant young Athenian. The two of them gave me every care.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  From a reputable sculptor I purchased an entire lot of Venuses, Dianas, and Hermes for Italica, my native city, which I had in mind to modernize and adorn. The priest of the temple of Serapis offered me a service of opaline glass, but I sent it to Servianus, with whom, out of regard for my sister Paulina, I tried to keep passable relations, at least at a distance. Great building projects took shape in the course of all these somewhat tedious rounds. The religions in Alexandria are as varied as the trades; the quality of the product, however, is more doubtful. The Christians especially distinguish themselves there by a multiplication of sects which is, to say the least, useless; two charlatans among them, Valentinus and Basilides, were intriguing against each other, closely watched over by the Roman police. As for the Egyptian populace, the lowest level took advantage of each of their own ritual festivities to throw themselves, cudgel in hand, upon foreigners; the death of the bull Apis provokes more uprisings in that city than an imperial succession in Rome. Fashionable people change gods there as elsewhere they change doctors, and with about as much success. But gold is their only idol: nowhere have I seen more shameless importuning. Grandiose inscriptions were displayed all about to commemorate my benefactions, but my refusal to exempt the inhabitants from a tax which they were quite able to pay soon alienated that rabble from me. The two young men who accompanied me were insulted more than once: Lucius was reproached for his lavish expenditures, which, it must be admitted, were excessive, and Antinous for his obscure origin, on the subject of which ran absurd rumors; both were blamed for the ascendancy which they were supposed to have over me. This last assumption was ridiculous: Lucius, whose judgment in public affairs was surprisingly acute, nevertheless had no political influence whatsoever; Antinous did not aspire to it. The young patrician, knowing the ways of the world, merely laughed at the jibes, but they were cause for suffering to Antinous. The Alexandrian Jews, egged on by their coreligionists in Judaea, did their best to aggravate a situation already bad. The synagogue of Jerusalem delegated Akiba to me, its most venerable member; almost a nonagenarian, and knowing no Greek, he came with the mission of prevailing upon me to abandon projects already under way at Jerusalem. Aided by my interpreters I held several colloquies with him which, on his part, were mere pretext for monologue. In less than an hour I felt able to define his thought exactly, though not subscribing to it; he made no corresponding effort concerning my own.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The word is charged. It scandalizes and titillates. The adult makes it sound grown up and serious, somehow, the territory of those with enough life experience and agency to know better than to do what they are doing. The ess is all crackle and hiss, the long, low whistle of femaleness and dishonesty rubbing against each other, a silk dress against a suit, creating a conceptual commotion. The adulteress has a noirish cast; she has stepped out of a 1950s divorce proceeding, perhaps. She wears seamed stockings. She is no kid, and no angel. And while we may judge her harshly, we have to admit she is anything but boring. In contrast to adulteress and adultery, “monogamy” sounds…well, it literally sounds like monotony. Monogamy also has the ring of something cozy to sit on—“Come on over and join me on the monogamy”—which, after all, it is. Monogamy is our society’s emotional, cultural, and sexual baseline, the place that comforts us. Sexual exclusivity is the turf, we tell ourselves, of the well-adjusted, healthy, and mature. Adultery and the adulteress are a wild swing away from this place we know, this reference point of security and safety. Seen this way, “adulteress” is not just sexy and interesting; it has a taxonomical, diagnostic ring to it, more than a tinge not only of the illicit and immoral but of illness. For good reason. Many psychologists, anthropologists, and scientists have virtually fetishized monogamy and the pair bond over the last several decades, insisting that it is “naturally” the purview of women, even going so far as to assert that the heterosexual dyad is the reason we humans came to rule, where other hominins bit the dust. From the notion promulgated by biologists that a woman’s egg is costly and finicky while sperm are a randy dime a dozen; to primatologists’ long unchallenged presumption (since Darwin) that males who benefit from having more than one partner compete for sexually passive females who seek one great guy; to mental health professionals and social scientists maintaining that human males and females are “wired” or destined or have evolved to do that very same gender-scripted dance—just about everything tells us that for women especially, infidelity is off the map and out of bounds. And yet.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “Won’t you, kids?” “Yes ma’am,” Norm said, and he put his hands on my ears to stop me from shaking my head no . “Becky will show them around,” Mrs. Callahan said and then she shouted into the house, “Becky! Now!” A second later, a freckle-faced, open-mouth-breathing girl a little taller than Norm appeared. She wore small wire-rim glasses and had brown hair cut in the shape of an upside-down salad bowl on her head. When she stood still, her body made the letter S: shoulders slumped forward, back rounded at the top, stomach bulging, butt out. Below all that her legs splayed out wide, feet pointing into a V. “Show ’em around the house,” Mrs. Callahan said, and she walked the social worker to the car, leaving Norm and me with splatter-footed Becky. “C’mon,” Becky said and waddled away with Norm and me following, “Mom said we weren’t getting no more grimy rent-a-kids, but lookee lookee—” Becky looked back at us, as if to make sure we knew that we were the rent-a-kids to which she was referring. We entered the kitchen. Becky said, “This is the kitchen. Obviously.” Norm and I looked at each other, trying not to smirk. “You’re not allowed to touch anything in here. Ever. Unless you get permission from my mom, but she’ll never give you permission so don’t even ask.” Becky picked up a wrapped Twinkie off the counter, opened it, and ate it in three giant bites while Norm and I watched. Becky was still chewing the Twinkie when we followed her into the living room. “Living room,” she said. “Obviously.” Norm squeezed my hand, and I bit my lip so I wouldn’t laugh. “You’re not allowed to go in this room. Ever.” “Obviously,” Norm whispered. Becky didn’t seem to hear and galumphed away and then up the stairs, her feet slapping each step heavily. Norm and I followed quietly. We stopped outside a bathroom with brown and yellow tiles, a sliding shower door, and a toilet that was missing the lid. Norm and I looked at each other, holding back our smiles. We’d had far worse. In fact, as far as bathrooms went, this was one of the better ones. “Bathroom. Obviously.” This time Becky dragged out the word. As if the bathroom were even more obvious than the other rooms. “You and the other rent-a-kids have to keep it clean and you’re only allowed to use it in the day.” “What if we have to go at night?” Norm asked. “Hold it in,” Becky said. “Obviously,” Norm said. “Or use the bucket.” A jagged little smile slipped across Becky’s mouth. “Bucket?” Norm laughed, and I giggled. “You’re not gonna laugh when the door is locked and you hafta smell that bucket,” Becky said. We followed Becky down the hall to a wood-paneled room with four sets of bunk beds and a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. The switch for the light was in the hallway, outside the room.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The Erotikos of Plutarch is a quintessential product of its age in another way; it gives lucid expression to the traditional bifurcation of same-sex eros into two types: pederasty and passivity. For Plutarch, while the love of boys was structurally impossible, the nature of the attraction itself was unexceptional. But the Erotikos was simply giving voice to mainstream attitudes in its pronouncement that “we place men who take pleasure from the passive role in the category of the most wicked and allot them no faith, no honor, no friendship.” Acceptable homoeroticism was strictly limited to the offerings of youth. Desires for adult men flaunted gender norms and incurred broad hatred. Something of its raw viciousness is preserved in surviving invectives, such as those of the satirist Lucian. When a scholar refused to lend Lucian a book, it elicited a torrent of hatred that might seem disproportionate. The ignorant book collector was accused of having two passions: overpriced books and “muscular lads past their prime.” Lucian advised him to keep his nocturnal affairs within the household; just yesterday “a male prostitute came around and told the most shameful stories about you, showing the bite marks to prove it.” When another enemy criticized Lucian’s misuse of a Greek word, his reply included a full-scale assault on this pseudosophist’s manliness. He accused his adversary of being penetrated, and nothing was left to innuendo in Lucian’s account of a revel in Italy, where his adversary had staged an obscene interpretation of the blinding of Polyphemus with a hired prostitute. While it is startling that cultivated men trafficked in such scabrous diatribes, these were products of an agonistic intellectual culture and a public sexual ideology in which codes of masculinity were paramount. The charges differ in eloquence, but not in substance, from many a graffito scrawled by the less genteel inhabitants of Pompeii.21

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The sexual use of slaves is prominent from the very beginnings of Roman literature, and it is simply pervasive across the long tradition of amorous poetry at Rome. Only the idiosyncratic Ovid dissents, and even then as a matter of taste rather than scruple. “I hate amorous endeavors which do not end happily for both alike, and so I am less interested in the love of boys.” The slave system was an entrenched part of Roman society throughout the imperial period. In an empire of some seventy million souls, perhaps seven to ten million were enslaved, a proportion with few parallels in premodern history. The Romans were promiscuous slavers. Rich households teemed with unfree bodies; decurions, equestrians, and senators owned scores, hundreds, in some cases thousands of slaves. The abundance of fungible sex objects in the rich household might turn the anxious paradox of the “brief bloom” into a mere economic inconvenience: we hear of a wealthy master keeping slave boys in the house until their first beard, then relegating them to the farms. Slave ownership was not just the preserve of such super-rich aristocrats, though; the sheer extent of slave owning meant that the mechanics of Roman sexuality were shaped by the presence of unfree bodies across the social spectrum. One in ten families in the empire owned slaves; the number in the towns was probably twice that. The ubiquity of slaves meant pervasive sexual availability. “If your loins are swollen, and there’s some homeborn slave boy or girl around where you can quickly stick it, would you rather burst with tension? Not I—I like an easy lay.” Slaves played something like the part that masturbation has played in most cultures: we learn in a book on dream interpretation that if a man dreams “he is stroking his genitals with his hands, he will obtain a slave or slave-woman.”13

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Musonius had an impact that continued to reverberate in lasting and unexpected ways through the work of his pupils. Musonius inspired the remarkable social thought of Dio Chrysostom, who carried his teacher’s legacy into the world of grand public oratory. Dio’s seventh opus, the “Euboean Oration,” is a unique masterpiece of Greco-Roman rhetoric. The speech vividly narrates an encounter with two peasant families living in the idyllic hinterland of a Greek town. The natural virtue of their rustic life was contrasted, in the second half of the speech, with the vices of the contemporary Greek city. The fact that stares out at us from the speech is the utter centrality of prostitution in the social life of the high Roman Empire. Prostitution was the fixed point in Dio’s roaring diatribe against contemporary society, and on it hung all the ills and disorders of the world. It was an established tenet of Stoic psychology that indulgence was self-reinforcing. Normally, though, these reflections focused on the individual. Dio turned to consider the circulation of pleasure through the social body, and his attention was locked on the vicious spiral of a society geared to deliver sexual satisfaction cheaply and easily. In the thought of Dio, Stoic skepticism toward pleasure is suddenly refracted through a panoramic vision of society.100 Prostitution was, for Dio, symptomatic of civilizational disorder. In the “Euboean Oration,” Dio launched a frontal attack on the timeworn rationalization of prostitution as a safety valve for dangerous sexual energy. Stoic psychology gave Dio a powerful rejoinder to the assumption that male sexual energy was a determinate quantum. The rulers were wrong to think they had discovered “a sexual-restraint drug” in the “open, unlocked brothels” of the city. Dio argued that men would inevitably become bored with the pleasures that could be had “with permission, at a negligible rate,” and turn their amatory energy to the “freeborn women,” locked in inner chambers. Sexual lust was a self-accelerating force, and far from staving off the violation of respectable women, prostitution fueled the desires that would inevitably lead to adulteries. The “open, dishonorable violation,” even of prostitutes, led straight to the corruption of “respectable women and boys.” Once unbridled, sexual lust could ultimately only lead to sexual ruin—the corruption of wives and the submission of sons.101

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  This fanatic did not even suspect any reasoning possible on premises other than those he set forth. I offered his despised people a place among the others in the Roman community; Jerusalem, however, speaking through Akiba, signified its intention of remaining, to the end, the fortress of a race and of a god isolated from human kind. That savage determination was expressed with tiresome deviousness: I had to listen to a long line of argument, subtly deduced step by step, proving Israel's superiority. At the end of eight days even this obstinate negotiator became aware that he was pursuing the wrong course, so he announced his departure. I abhor defeat, even for others, and it moves me the more when the vanquished is an old man. The ignorance of Akiba, and his refusal to accept anything outside his sacred books or his own people, endued him with a kind of narrow innocence. But it was difficult to feel sympathy for this bigot. Longevity seemed to have bereft him of all human suppleness: that gaunt body and dried mind had the locust's hard vigor. It seems that he died a hero later on for the cause of his people, or rather, for his law. Each of us dedicates himself to his own gods. The distractions which Alexandria affords began to wane. Phlegon, who knew the local curiosities everywhere, whether procuress or famous hermaphrodite, proposed to take us to a local magician. This go-between for two worlds, the invisible and our own, lived in Canopus. We went there at night by boat along the torpid waters of the canal, a dismal ride. A silent hostility reigned, as always, between the two young men: the intimacy into which I was forcing them augmented their aversion for each other. Lucius hid this feeling under a mocking condescension; my young Greek enclosed himself in one of his dark moods. I happened to be rather tired; a few days before, on coming back from a race in full sun, I had had a brief fainting fit which only Antinous and the black Euphorion had witnessed. They had been unduly alarmed, and I had forbidden them to disclose the matter. Canopus is no more than a tawdry stage-setting: the magician's house was situated in the most sordid part of that pleasure resort. We disembarked at a tumble-down terrace. The sorceress awaited us inside her house, surrounded by the dubious tools of her trade. She seemed competent; there was nothing of the stage witch about her; she was not even old. Her predictions were sinister. For some time the oracles everywhere had been foretelling annoyances for me of every sort, political troubles, palace intrigues, and serious illness.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Davis tells us she’s posted her number on the pad hanging next to the yellow wall phone in the kitchen, Addie instructs us to make ourselves at home while she prepares dinner. I head back into my bedroom and plop my garbage bag on top of the flowered quilt before it dawns on me that my luggage will dirty the bedding. I take in the delicacy of the patchwork comforter, along with the matching pillowcase covering a cushy pillow. If Addie thinks she’s being generous with all these drawers and the closet space, I’d like to inform her how ridiculous it feels to be finished unpacking in two small armloads. In the bottom of my bag I find my other three possessions: One is a picture of the five of us when Rosie was just a baby, in which we’re all sporting matching T-shirts from Lake Havasu, Arizona. Then there are my two Jesus statues. The first is a plastic Baby Jesus from a Nativity scene. The other is the translucent Lucite head of the adult Jesus on the cross. I hold both my Jesuses and tap my finger against them, pondering which surface is the most polished for their display. I turn when Addie walks in and nods toward my hand. “There’s a church two blocks away, if you’d like to go and observe,” she tells me. “Observe what?” “Your religion,” she says. “You’re Catholic, I take it?” I glance down at my Jesuses. “Not sure. I don’t go to church.” She eyes my figurines and looks back at me, confused. Now I get it. I jump in to clarify my position on God and religion for this clueless woman. “If there was a God, he wouldn’t let bad things happen to little kids.” Again her face moves from softness to a look of horror. “Regina, God does not do bad things to little kids—bad people do!” We look at each other in silence for a moment. I raise my eyebrows, waiting for her to dare say more, before she turns on her heels and huffs down the hall. I’m strategizing the moment I can put Addie in her place when my stomach rumbles from the smells of melted cheese and toast grilled in butter. Camille comes to my room and says it’s time for dinner. “You think I can bring it in here?” I ask her. “I already asked,” she says. “She wants us to eat in the kitchen.” Addie’s husband, Pete, is seated with his back to the wall, facing the room while Addie buzzes around the kitchen, placing plates on the table. We join Addie, Pete, and their foster son, Danny, who’s clearly annoyed we’re here. It’s no accident that the seat I scoot into is the one that’s closest to the front door—anybody pushes my buttons, I’m outta here! As she sends the bowl of steamed broccoli around the table, Addie fills us in on the house rules.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The unexpected outburst at the head of the Letter to the Romans was to prove absolutely decisive for Christian attitudes toward same-sex erotics. It would completely overshadow the even more fleeting and oblique condemnations in the vice lists of the New Testament. These rapid-fire rosters of iniquity regularly included adulterers and fornicators, as well as two types of sexual actors whose crimes are less obvious. Paul provides the first attested use of the term arsenokoitēs. Although it recurs sporadically across the centuries, arsenokoitēs was not destined to become a primary term of the Christian sexual vocabulary. It has perennially befuddled earnest translators. The term itself—“male-bedders”—points, ambiguously, to some form of sexual transgression, as does its placement next to other carnal vices. But as a sensitive observer has pointed out, arsenokoitia is usually located along the border between sexual deviance and economic exploitation. Perhaps the key to unlocking the meaning of the term is recognizing that in the Roman Empire the frontiers between sexual and economic exploitation were hazy and indistinct. The realities of eros, especially same-sex eros, were hopelessly enmeshed in the dynamics of power and status. At the time of Paul’s mission, the sexual use of slave boys and male prostitutes was entrenched in the sexual economy. But Paul was not primarily concerned with the exploitation of vulnerable males, any more than his condemnation of fornication was rooted in sympathy for the prostitute. In a culture without a ready label for men who casually used the bodies of their dependents as sexual receptacles, Paul summoned a portmanteau to fill the lexical gap.25 The figure of the malakos, the “soft one,” also appears in the Pauline vice lists. With malakia, though, Paul was not improvising on the spot but rather drawing from a familiar social typology. The malakos presents us with an ancient bogeyman who has no direct analogue in the modern social repertoire. The essence of malakia was softness, an interior disposition formed of luxuriance, effeminacy, and weakness. Sexual deviance was not the sole mark of softness, but it was a practically inevitable consequence of the inability to impose one’s hard will on the enervating poison of desire. Excessive fondness for bathing, fine food, and soft clothing were characteristic of the malakos, but “above all and with the least self-control” he was possessed by “a sharp and scalding madness for sex, for coition with both women and with men, and even for inexpressible and unknown acts of shame.” The malakos was as likely to surrender to the love of women as to the love of men. The desire underlying the sexual behavior of the malakos was not so much deviant as excessive, a surplus of lust dissolving the steely power over the self that was the surest guarantee of manliness in the ancient Mediterranean.26

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The stern counsels of Musonius Rufus represent one logical outcome of Stoicism’s starting principles. Musonius flourished under Nero and the Flavians, and he was the most respected public philosopher of his generation. A member of the equestrian order, Musonius was a native of Etruria who lived in Rome and conducted his philosophizing in Greek. His words are preserved only third-hand, and assuming they yield an accurate impression, Musonius focused his intellectual energy on the practical implications of Stoic ethics. The famously rigorous sexual prescriptions of Musonius are detailed in a passage titled “On Sexual Pleasures.” Throughout his argument, a dualism between “luxury” and “self-control” guides his logic. The life of luxury led men to lust after excessive and abnormal sexual pleasures with both women and men. The man with sōphrosynē, by contrast, would not compass sexual relations with a prostitute, a slave, or a respectable woman other than his wife. “Anyone who is not craven or evil must reckon that only sex within marriage and for the generation of children is just, for it is lawful. But sexual affairs that have in view the love of pleasure are unjust and unlawful, even within marriage.”98 There is no denying the severity, and the novelty, of such austere prescriptions. Musonius would limit sexual intercourse not merely to marriage, but to procreative endeavors within marriage. The logic of his argument was impeccable, his view of “nature” highly restrictive. Within a system of values that placed no store in pleasure as such, sex had no positive measure. The procreative strictures of Musonius were not a “Pythagorean” code clothed in Stoic language; he was little preoccupied with the problem of wasted seed as a seepage of vital force or lost soul-matter. His conclusions and his logic were authentically Stoic. What is creative about the tantalizing passages of Musonius that survive is an instinct for finding powerful objective correlatives to his moral principles. He spoke with unprecedented clarity of the behavioral rules implied by the devaluation of pleasure. What made Musonius such a sensation was his stunning and provocative ability to legislate a code of personal behavior. His strictures on the use of slaves and prostitutes may have been no more effective than his (far less celebrated) disapproval of shoes, but they are in the same spirit and equally account for the spread of his legend.99

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  For Darwin, the preferences that drove sexual selection were taken for granted—given. Men just prefer smooth women, and that’s that. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, hated the arbitrariness of Darwinian sexual selection. He wanted females to choose males not by whim but on merit…For Darwin, peahens choose peacocks simply because, in their eyes, they are pretty. Fisher’s later mathematics put that Darwinian theory on a sounder mathematical footing. For Wallaceans, peahens choose peacocks not because they are pretty but because their bright feathers are a token of their underlying health and fitness…Darwin did not try to explain female preference, but was content to postulate it to explain male appearance. Wallaceans seek evolutionary explanations of the preferences themselves. Instead of taking Darwin’s aesthetic language as a hypothesis about the evolutionary elaboration of traits and preferences, Dawkins confounds the arbitrariness of Darwinian sexual traits with a perceived ambiguity about his evolutionary mechanism for the origin of preferences. The anti-aesthetic Wallaceans are portrayed as scientifically progressive, while aesthetic Darwinism is portrayed as fuzzy, lazy, and incomplete. Although Dawkins admits Fisher’s more solid theoretical grounding for the arbitrary, he does not entertain any modern Darwinian alternative to the Wallacean solution. Because the Fisherian answers don’t provide the comforting “rhyme and reason” of the neo-Wallacean solutions, they aren’t even entertained as scientific answers. The earliest branch in the phylogeny: Though somewhat out of date in terms of data quality and quantity, the most current phylogeny of the bowerbirds is Kusmierski et al. (1997). The Australopapuan catbirds (Ailuroedus) are not related to the common North American Gray Catbird (Dumetella carolinensis), which is a member of the mockingbird family (Mimidae). nest construction in catbirds: Frith and Frith (2001). It’s a stage set with props: Prior to the late twentieth-century revival of sexual selection theory, bowers were explained with an updated version of Mivart’s idea of sensory stimulus as a form of adaptive physiological coordination between the sexes (see chapter 1). Jock Marshall (1954) proposed that in the absence of a pair bond, the ancestral female bowerbird needed extra sexual stimulus to be induced to copulate and reproduce. Marshall hypothesized that the bower evolved as a male method of reminding females of the sexually stimulating shared, ancestral nest of their evolutionary past. This would induce them to copulate and to build their own nest and continue with reproduction. This idea fails on so many levels that it is probably best left to the historical past, but it does document the intellectual contortions that evolutionary explanation achieved during the twentieth century in the absence of a theory of evolution by mate choice. the females visited between 1 and 8 males: Uy et al. (2001). the Tooth-Billed Bowerbird is a polygynous species: For the natural history of the Tooth-Billed Bowerbird, see Frith and Frith (2004). pioneering work done by Jared Diamond: Diamond (1986). Diamond did experiments: Diamond (1986). Albert Uy repeated these ornament color choice experiments: Uy and Borgia (2000). Jared Diamond established: Diamond (1986).

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The extant ruminations of Epictetus offer a clear image of the place of sex in the moral economy of Stoicism. Desire was human, and it was inevitable: a man could cut off his penis more easily than his desire. In consequence, the sage had to wean himself of pleasure through reason and self-discipline, but sex was only one category of pleasure and by no means a privileged one. “Learn to use wine with refinement … and to hold back from some little lass or a little flatcake.” Stoicism, at least its more austere side, was no philosophy for young men; a passage surviving in the Stoic Handbook of Epictetus is particularly revealing. “Remain as pure as you can before marriage with regard to sexual pleasures, and insofar as they are engaged in, let them be lawful. Yet do not become oppressive or reproachful toward those who do indulge, and do not hold forth all the time on your own restraint.” It would be harder to craft a statement more alien to the flamboyant renunciations and pellucid interdictions of Christianity.104 The quiet placability of Epictetus in his sexual morality is not far removed from the stance of the latest and most remarkable of the Roman Stoics, Marcus Aurelius. His Stoicism is known through the cheerless if not funereal collection of meditations preserved under the title To Himself. The pessimism of Marcus was not just the by-product of a sickly, world-weary emperor. His obsession with the cosmos was in the mainstream of Stoic thought. Indeed, it was only through the contemplation of the universe, and the place of human life within it, that man’s reason could truly comprehend what a “cheap, contemptible, filthy, perishable, defunct” thing pleasure was. The life of man was a narrow point, crushed in on either side by eternity. Meditation on the cosmos put sex and marriage in true perspective. For Marcus, sex was “a commotion of the innards and a convulsive secretion of mucus.” Marriage was a sign of perishability and meaninglessness: “meditate on the times of Vespasian, see all these things: people marrying, raising children, falling sick and dying, warring, reveling … and yet there is nowhere any trace of that life of theirs. Switch now to the times of Trajan, and again the same things, and that life too has perished.” In time, all the deeds of the body passed away for eternity. Pleasure was an indifferent, not an evil; reason should conquer the false impressions arising from desire. Sexual morality hardly looms over the philosophy of Marcus. He reminds himself, in oblique language, that he had not rushed into sexual activity as a young man. We know, too, that his marriage to Faustina was exceptionally fertile, producing fourteen children, and that after his wife’s death Marcus did what many Roman widowers did for solace, he took a freedwoman as a concubine. As Epictetus would have advised, the Stoic emperor’s indulgences were lawful, and his restraint was not oppressively vaunted.105

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  We might fruitfully contrast the sermon of Basil with the novel of Achilles Tatius. Achilles is aware of the ineff able strings of fate that pull human action. He walks us to the precipice and, at least for dramatic eff ect, asks us to contemplate the mysterious dispensation that could make Leucippe free and the prostitute an effi gy of social death. But having stared at the abyss, he retreats, and takes solace in the order of a world that does allow beauty, plea sure, and existential fullness for some. Basil ponders this same mysterious dispensation, but with a conviction of its profound injustice and a confi dent hope for a fi nal redemption in which all moral creatures will receive their due. Th e radicalism of Basil’s discovery is attributable to the stark collision between an ideology of free will and an earnest form of nascent social leadership. It is no accident that Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa, has left the very earliest extant attack on slavery; for Gregory, slavery was an institution unjust to its very foundations, a violation of basic human rationality and moral autonomy. Th e takeover of society by the church opened a brief window for such radically creative social thought. Basil’s idea, if it was fi rst his, was to prove more fertile than Gregory’s attack on slavery. Th e dichotomy between consent and coercion found its way into the Christian mind in the late fourth century. Other Greek pastors picked up the idea of consent, specifi cally in the context of slavery and prostitution. Th e idea was clearly alive in the early fi fth century, when Cyril of Alexandria explained that there were two kinds of prostitutes. “See how some wish to practice shameful pollution willingly and of their own volition while some are accustomed to impress it upon others as though by force. . . . Do not some go into fornication on their own choice, women C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H  and young men voluntarily making wages off selling their youth to the disorderliness of some? Yes. What’s more— some are conquered by shameful profi ts and prostitute out their own slave women, even some of their males to those who wish, and thus the wretched who happen to be sold must turn over a tribute?” Cyril’s argument turns on the same idea, “out of necessity,” to describe the prostitution of slaves, male and female, forced into venal sex. Cyril’s account was, like Basil’s, just as emphatic about the consent of some prostitutes. In his writings, we see the fi gure of the prostitute as a spectacular embodiment of sin gestating in the Christian mind. Th