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 92 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  In the stone courtyard of the church, Thalia gives Reese a hug, then asks, “Want to hear a joke I thought up during the service?” Reese does. The joke is this: Q: What do you call a remake of a nineties romantic comedy where you cast trans women in all the roles? A: Four Funerals and a Funeral. Another girl, early in transition, wearing a black velvet dress, is standing near them. Reese recognizes her as one of those Twitter girls eager to offer theory-laden takes on gender. The girl has listened in on the joke and shakes her head—insensitive!—staring at them over her black-framed glasses with watery, wounded eyes. Reese pulls rank. “Oh come on.” She points to Thalia. “You know who gave Tammi her first shot? Thalia. Right in the butt. Who are you to say if she can make a joke or not?” “Maybe just not where other mourners can hear it,” the girl sniffs. “Here’s a better idea,” Reese snaps. “Maybe don’t stand around eavesdropping.” “Reese,” says Thalia simply, “it’s fine.” Then to the girl: “Sorry.” The girl bobs a tight acknowledgment, then raises a brow at Reese, waiting for her apology as well. But Reese refuses. She is granite willing the girl to go away. Fuck that girl. Let her go to as many of these things as Reese has been to and see if she doesn’t manage to develop a sense of humor. Eventually, the girl leaves, and almost immediately Reese regrets whatever enmity she made for herself in that unnecessary encounter. She’s lost patience for the baby transes—never a good look on an older girl. A little fountain burbles in the courtyard. It smells pleasantly of algae, and Reese moves closer, drawn by the cool of ionized air. Pennies flash in the pool at the base of the fountain, which seems blasphemous: wishing on coins in a church courtyard, when you could be inside praying for whatever it is that you want. “IT heard this thing’—Thalia holds the back of Reese’s elbow, pulling Reese back to the present—“from Andy, who made arrangements with the funeral home. He went to those two older women who run that family funeral home in Bed-Stuy—those two nice black ladies who did Eve’s funeral. After a few hours of setting things up, one of the two ladies asks him, ‘I’m sorry, but was Tammi a transgender woman?’ And Andy goes, ‘Yeah,’ and they, like, kind of exchange looks. One of them says they’re going to change their plans and will be getting the body from the morgue within the next few hours to bring to their funeral home.” “Why? Why would it matter that she was trans?” “The accident was out on Long Island, and I guess she got transferred to a morgue here. Apparently one where the morgue workers gawk at bodies of trans women—poke and laugh and shit.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  How is it, Reese wonders, that a bunch of New York men wearing flannel and slamming whiskey in a cabin is seen as a sorely needed release of their barely tamed and authentic manliness, but when she, a trans, delights in dolling up, she’s trying too hard? It’s not that Reese thinks her desire to dress up reflects some authentic self. It’s just that, unlike bros, she’s willing to call dress-up time what it is. Meanwhile, this starched woman has practically soaked her panties over the homoerotic escapades of her man upstate. Can you imagine if Reese confided in these women, with the same apparent horniness, about her Truvada birth control regimen? Social disaster! She decides for the ten thousandth time that heterosexual cis people, while willfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other’s genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realize that, like trans women, the activity in which they are indulging is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they'd be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other. Sexy-Smart clinks on a wineglass with a spoon to ask for everyone’s attention, which mercifully averts Reese’s building desire to tender her opinions on gender to someone. “And now, the moment we've been waiting for,” Sexy-Smart says seductively, although, from the way that the women seem content to stay in the kitchen eating snacks, there is no way that anyone has been waiting for this moment. “We can move to the living room for the dOTERRA essential oils demonstration!” Shuffling with the herd into the sunset-drenched living room, Reese and Katrina take a comfortable love seat, and the other women settle in on the couch, chairs, and plush rug, in the way Reese remembered from middle school sleepovers, everyone finding a spot to watch the TV. Only instead of a TV there’s Sexy-Smart handing out brochures, and instead of blankets or pillows, each woman sets beside her a designer leather tote handbag in differing brands but the same essential boxy style, the sort that gets sold at Nordstrom to women who aspire to vacation in the Hamptons. Reese feels entitled to be judgy about boxy tote handbags, because she herself carries at that moment her own boxy Coach tote and her secret self aspires to aspire to vacation in the Hamptons. Sexy-Smart opens a copy of the brochure she has passed out, indicates a blank box, and tells the assembled women to write all of their ailments—both physical and mental—within that square.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “It’s fine,” Reese says. Though she doesn’t like it and so says, “He was coming then he was going, but then he came back again. Pretty clear, right?” She smiles sweetly. Before the Empress can say no, Katrina jumps back in. “He was born a man, and transitioned, then transitioned back.” “So he was cheating on you, Reese, with you, Katrina?” Kathy asks. “No,” says Reese. “We broke up years ago. We dated as women.” “Ah,” says Kathy, clearly not getting it. “So how did you, Reese, get back into the picture?” Before Reese can say anything, Katrina tries again to explain: How she doesn’t want to be a single mother. How Ames had suggested a queer family. How actually, queer families have all these opportunities that she didn’t realize she was missing back when she was married, and that she sensed were missing in her marriage with Danny. That she always had an affinity for queerness, although because it wasn’t cut-and-dry gayness, she had never known what to call it. Oh, is that how it happened? thought Reese. Now she’s spinning it. But even more than spinning it, Katrina seemed to believe it. She’d re-narrativized her divorce. Those amorphous diffusely unhappy reasons she needed to divorce Danny? Now it was that she had recognized, but been unable to name, a need for the possibilities of queer relationships. One of the other women, a cute plump girl, whose doTERRA confession had been irritation and low moods, broke in. “I feel like I get that. Like, you realize when you get married how much the institution changes things. I remember that in the first few months I was married, how often, if I was out by myself, people would be like, ‘Where’s Max?’ and I would want to be like, ‘Max and I have a marriage where we don’t have to account for each other.’ And maybe I even said that a few times, but eventually, it was just easier to be like, ‘He knows I’m out.’ Everyone says that you can make marriage what you want, but sometimes the institution of marriage really wins out. It’d be freeing to just make up your own rules.” This, to Reese, was the straightest, most married thing anyone had ever said. But Katrina says, “Exactly!” The other women are coming around. Reese sees suddenly why Katrina might be so good at her job. In the span of time it takes to consume a few dessert items, Katrina had begun to convince these women of the soundness of child-rearing with transsexuals. The Empress of Dry Cleaning is the one holdout. As everyone else offers their tentative endorsements, she frowns as if the thought pains her, and says, “I just don’t know. I think everyone wants something queer now. It’s like a fad. And a lot of us end up getting hurt.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  He roamed the audience, calling people out and telling them all the details of their mostly invisible maladies. A young man hindered by a lack of confidence in his call to preach would from that day forward possess a new boldness for Christ. A woman suffered from female problems for years. From the top of her head to the soles of her feet, she was now whole. Another woman had lost her family in a car accident and couldn’t stop grieving. God mended her broken heart on the spot.After two or three hours, Brother Terrell made his way back to the front, the music came up, and several men fanned out in front of the platform holding the big white offering buckets I remembered. Only there were more of them. Brother Terrell walked to the back of the platform and turned his back on the audience. When he turned around he was wearing a chef-style apron with pockets, lots of pockets. He nodded to the organist and the music became a low purr. The apron, he told the audience, was for love offerings, personal donations that went to support him and his family. Everything that went into the buckets was spent on the ministry and nothing else. Forty-five minutes later the offering was over and bills spilled out of the buckets and apron pockets. Brother Terrell took off the apron and spoke into the microphone.“The Lord is showing me right now that there are a hundred people here tonight that need to prove God with a hundred dollars. You know who you are. If you stand with this ministry, that loved one who needs healing or deliverance will be taken care of.”About fifty people, mostly women, approached the front and arranged themselves in a semicircle around Brother Terrell, heads bowed. He took the money from each of their hands and prayed with them individually. They stood straight and still, absorbing whatever it was Brother Terrell and God promised. As they walked away, Brother Terrell once again issued his call.“There are fifty more of you out there. God is dealing with you right now. Come on up here and help us take the message of Jesus to hundreds of thousands in India who have never heard his name. We need your support.”Another twenty made their way down the ramp. “I’m not asking for me. I’m asking for God. You better think twice about denying God.”Thirty minutes of coaxing and mild threats yielded a total of about eighty believers willing to part with a hundred dollars. In the end Brother Terrell handed out twenty pledge envelopes addressed to his office in Dallas. The Lord would have to rely on a lick and a promise to get the rest of his ten thousand dollars.As the service wound down, Pam leaned over and asked if I wanted to come back to the motel and spend the night with her. She put her arm around me. “Don’t look so shocked.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “As a yoga instructor, ’m not really versed in the medical chemistry of essential oils,” the yoga instructor explains to the room with an expression that conveys genuine regret for the inadequacy of her career choice. “So I brought my boyfriend to tell you how essential oils really do work. He is a celebrity acupuncturist and uses doTERRA essential oils with his patients.” Prior to that moment, Reese had not realized that the adjective “celebrity” applied to acupuncturists. The yoga instructor steps to stage left of the living room, allowing her boyfriend center stage, in front of the flat-screen TV. “Hi, ladies, my name is Steve. And it’s true: I’m an acupuncturist. I practice traditional Chinese medicine.” He looks at Kathy as he says this, then smiles. “But some people just call me the most satisfying prick in town.” Reese gapes. Just like that, all of his handsomeness has vanished. Reese waits for one of the other women to tell him off. Do you know what would happen if a man walked into a room of queer women and declared his prick satisfying? The prospect was hideous to contemplate. Death by outrage. But instead of sentencing him to die by lethal callout, the assembled women laugh politely. Even Katrina. Steve winds up into his doOTERRA sales pitch, a narrative about how his girlfriend, the gorgeous yoga instructor, had been such a bitch before she started using essential oils. But after she made oils a daily habit, she chilled out and he liked her much better. Reese glances around the room—surely now, the women will rise up! The revolution is now! The revolution is not now. The women listen, or even nod politely, draped docilely around and below him. Steve stands too close to one of the women sitting on the rug, in Reese’s estimation of proper personal space. His crotch—the most satisfying prick in town—bobs at her eye level. He waves his hands as he speaks, and a few times it seems as though he might pat her on the head. The woman at Reese’s feet, she of the eating disorder and low sex drive, takes out a pad of paper and makes notes as Steve speaks; very sincere notes, Reese observes, on which oils, in particular, had made his yoga instructor girlfriend less of a bitch. At the end of his speech, Steve offers to prescribe the proper essential oil for each of the women’s ailments. But with Steve in the room, the women list different problems than those they’d shared earlier. When it’s Katrina’s turn, she smiles, pauses dramatically, then looks around the room at her friends, making eye contact, then asks, “What’s good for pregnancy?” A moment of gasps follows, and Steve responds by pointing at his girlfriend and saying, “Don’t give her any ideas.” Sexy-Smart hides a wince.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina blinks. Wisps of hair have freed themselves from her ponytail and tremble in the light breeze. She swallows before speaking. “Youre, like, actually crazy.” Her tone borders on shock. “Like a sociopath or something. No one could believe you'd ask that. No one will believe it.” She doesn’t sound angry. She sounds as if she’s speaking to herself. “Just think about it.” “What am I, some kind of walking uterus to you? Have you seen pregnant women? Do you think I would choose to go through that just to play a part in giving a baby to your ex-lover? Do you have any respect for my body? Do you value me at all?” Ames tries to calm down, reminding himself how much he really cares about her. “Katrina. Please understand I mean this: I will support you however I can. But you’re not being exploited here. You actually do have the power. You say no, that’s a no. You tell me what to do, and I'll do it. But you’ve asked me for honesty all week—to tell you what I really think would work, and now I have.” Katrina stares at him in a strange wonder. Then with a sudden gesture of her hand she waves back the wonder, tucks away the moment the way you pocket the business card of someone you're sure you'll never call. At just that moment, Ames’s phone rings. It’s Biz Dev. He tilts the screen so she can see. “Take it?” he asks her. “Yeah, you better.” On Thursday, the pet insurance representatives sign a contract to add Web functionality to the app. No one mentions Katrina’s dinner behavior or drunken revelation. Only once does Ames catch Biz Dev scrutinizing him. On a break, Katrina says to him, “Maybe it will be fine? Maybe they just thought I was drunk.” To Ames it feels like wishful thinking, but too many other things crowd out his attention, so he agrees, and slowly begins to indulge in that same line of thought. It will be fine. Those guys don’t care, right? And so what if they do? On the plane ride home, they fly business, sitting beside each other. Katrina rubs his arm in a friendly, distracted way that he can’t make sense of, so he pats her hand in an avuncular manner that immediately dismays him. At LaGuardia, when he asks if she wants to share a cab, she declines. “I need some space. I need you to give me some time to myself. I’ll call when I feel like talking again.”

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Anyway, I thought you guys should know.” “Thanks,” I said curtly, and she stood for a while, looking at us, her mouth opening as if to speak, but the Colonel was staring at her through half-closed eyes, his jaw jutting out and his distaste uncontained. I understood how he felt: I didn’t believe in ghosts who used Morse code to communicate with people they’d never liked. And I disliked the possibility that Alaska would give someone else peace but not me. “God, people like that shouldn’t be allowed to live,” he said after she left. “It was pretty stupid.” “It’s not just stupid, Pudge. I mean, as if Alaska would talk to Holly Moser. God! I can’t stand these fake grievers. Stupid bitch.” I almost told him that Alaska wouldn’t want him to call any woman a bitch, but there was no use fighting with the Colonel. twenty days after IT WAS SUNDAY, and the Colonel and I decided against the cafeteria for dinner, instead walking off campus and across Highway 119 to the Sunny Konvenience Kiosk, where we indulged in a well-balanced meal of two oatmeal cream pies apiece. Seven hundred calories. Enough energy to sustain a man for half a day. We sat on the curb in front of the store, and I finished dinner in four bites. “I’m going to call Jake tomorrow, just so you know. I got his phone number from Takumi.” “Fine,” I said. I heard a bell jangle behind me and turned toward the opening door. “Y’all’s loitering,” said the woman who’d just sold us dinner. “We’re eating,” the Colonel answered. The woman shook her head and ordered, as if to a dog, “Git.” So we walked behind the store and sat by the stinking, fetid Dumpster. “Enough with the fine ’s already, Pudge. That’s ridiculous. I’m going to call Jake, and I’m going to write down everything he says, and then we’re going to sit down together and try and figure out what happened.” “No. You’re on your own with that. I don’t want to know what happened between her and Jake.” The Colonel sighed and pulled a pack of Pudge Fund cigarettes of his jeans pocket. “Why not?” “Because I don’t want to! Do I have provide you with an in-depth analysis of every decision I make?” The Colonel lit the cigarette with a lighter I’d paid for and took a drag. “Whatever. It needs to be figured out, and I need your help to do it, because between the two of us we knew her pretty well. So that’s that.” I stood up and stared down at him sitting smugly, and he blew a thin stream of smoke at my face, and I’d had enough. “I’m tired of following orders, asshole! I’m not going to sit with you and discuss the finer points of her relationship with Jake, goddamn it. I can’t say it any clearer: I don’t want to know about them.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese pauses a moment, then accedes. She'll tell him the truth. Why not? So here it is sketched as quickly as she can: her cowboy, what she knows about his wife, how he’s the same as all the other guys, hiding her away in hole-in-the-wall restaurants, walking a few feet in front of her in public unless she protests, at which point he protests—unconvincingly—that he is ashamed of the affair, not that she is trans. All the shit that Ames already knew because Ames had lived it, both vicariously and on his own. “What about the HIV?” Ames asks. “What?” The question takes Reese aback. “What about it, who cares? I’m on PrEP and he’s undetectable.” “Katrina is freaking out about it. She’s close with Diana. Apparently she feels like she was the one who picked up the pieces when this guy—what’s his name, Garrett or something?— seroconverted. She spent a lot of time up in Diana’s relationship. Katrina was going through her divorce, and Diana went back and forth with her a lot about leaving her own husband. He seroconverted with a trans girl, you know.” “Yeah, I know. Again, so what?” Reese feels a surprising pang at the news that Diana considered a divorce. Then she reminds herself that, even if divorced, her cowboy would never have gotten over himself to be out with a trans woman. “So what,” Ames says, “is that Katrina has spent a lot of time hearing about that couple’s anguish from Diana’s point of view. About some trans girl who ruined her friend’s life. And then when they decided to have a baby, Katrina learned about what it means to wash sperm. About IVF treatments. And then, here’s you, a trans girl he’s cheating with again. Katrina is not taking it well.” “Is she having an AIDS panic or something?” Ames pauses. “Yeah. She wouldn’t call it that. But that’s what it is.” Reese snorts. “How retro.” “That’s what I told her. She was so starry-eyed these past few weeks. This whole idea that what she’d needed her whole life was queerness. And now she’s having the most basic freak-out. Talking how you put yourself and her and the baby at risk.” “At risk of what?” “HIV I guess?” “Can you talk her down?” “T tried. She told me to leave.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  perpetually pale and skinny from months of fasting, had taken to shaving their heads, a look locals associated with Charlie Manson or Hare Krishna devotees, neither of whom were popular in and around Brown County. Some believers applied Old Testament admonishments to modern life and went about their daily business dressed in sackcloth and ashes. One early arrival told a reporter, “You think we look bad? Wait’ll you see the ones coming from behind.” They came from California, the Dakotas, New York, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Florida, and from all across the South. The influx began in 1972. Within a year, Bangs’s population of twelve hundred had almost doubled, and the Terrellites were spreading to surrounding communities. Other Blessed Areas scattered across the South experienced similar growth. The population of rural areas around Fort Payne, Alabama, increased by twenty-eight percent. No one in Bangs could figure out why these people were coming or how long they would stay. Finally they read the explanation in the paper: The Terrellites were there to wait out the apocalypse. They would be there until the end of the world. Meanwhile, they would build a tabernacle. The tent would remain up until the church was finished. This put no one’s mind at ease. Locals blamed Brother Terrell for bringing the first homosexuals, hippies, and blacks to the community. The town of Coleman in nearby Hamilton County saw its black student population increase from sixty to one hundred and twenty within months. Just a few years earlier a sign posted inside the city limits of the Hamilton County seat had read: IF YOU’RE BLACK, DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU IN HAMILTON. Believers were blamed for everything from vandalism to cattle mutilations, but nothing stuck until the death of that little girl I’d read about in the Mexia paper. The sheriff, judge, and district attorney had called for an investigation. Reporters from Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, and the wire services swarmed. An AP story quoted the stepfather of the girl as saying he didn’t just let his stepdaughter die. “I believe it was the will of God, and if he wanted her to die, it didn’t make no difference if I took her to fifty doctors.” Brother Terrell and his followers said the child died because the parents did not have enough faith. Even in my new nonrebellious mode, this explanation was hard to swallow. The girl’s parents had prayed and they had asked Brother Terrell and several of the ministers close to him to pray, and now everyone said the parents didn’t have enough faith. I argued the issue with a friend in the ministry. Jesus had said that faith equal in size to a mustard seed could move mountains. Surely these people had at least that much faith, or they wouldn’t

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  after a large snowstorm, the store raises the price to $20. Please rate this action as: Completely Fair Acceptable Unfair Very Unfair The hardware store behaves appropriately according to the standard economic model: it responds to increased demand by raising its price. The participants in the survey did not agree: 82% rated the action Unfair or Very Unfair. They evidently viewed the pre-blizzard price as a reference point and the raised price as a loss that the store imposes on its customers, not because it must but simply because it can. A basic rule of fairness, we found, is that the exploitation of market power to impose losses on others is unacceptable. The following example illustrates this rule in another context (the dollar values should be adjusted for about 100% inflation since these data were collected in 1984): A small photocopying shop has one employee who has worked there for six months and earns $9 per hour. Business continues to be satisfactory, but a factory in the area has closed and unemployment has increased. Other small shops have now hired reliable workers at $7 an hour to perform jobs similar to those done by the photocopy shop employee. The owner of the shop reduces the employee’s wage to $7. The respondents did not approve: 83% considered the behavior Unfair or Very Unfair. However, a slight variation on the question clarifies the nature of the employer’s obligation. The background scenario of a profitable store in an area of high unemployment is the same, but now the current employee leaves, and the owner decides to pay a replacement $7 an hour. A large majority (73%) considered this action Acceptable. It appears that the employer does not have a moral obligation to pay $9 an hour. The entitlement is personal: the current worker has a right to retain his wage even if market conditions would allow the employer to impose a wage cut. The replacement worker has no entitlement to the previous worker’s reference wage, and the employer is therefore allowed to reduce pay without the risk of being branded unfair. The firm has its own entitlement, which is to retain its current profit. If it

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  DETRANSITION, BABY A NOWMEL TORREY PETERS DETRANSITION, BABY A NOVEL Torrey Peters ONE WORLD NEW YORK Detransition, Baby is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2021 by Torrey Peters All rights reserved. Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. ONE WoRLD and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Hardback ISBN 9780593133378 Ebook ISBN 9780593133392 oneworldlit.com randomhousebooks.com Designed by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook Cover design: Rachel Ake Cover art: Moopsi ep_prh_5.6.0_co_ro Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Dedication Acknowledgments By Torrey Peters About the Author CHAPTER ONE One month after conception T HE QUESTION, FOR Reese: Were married men just desperately attractive to her? Or was the pool of men who were available to her as a trans woman only those who had already locked down a cis wife and could now “explore” with her? The easy answer, the one that all her girls advocated, was to call men dogs. But now, here’s Reese— sneaking around with another handsome, charming, motherfucking cheater. Look at her, wearing a black lace dress and sitting in his parked Beamer, waiting while he goes into a Duane Reade to buy condoms. Then she’s going to let him come over to her apartment, avoid the pointed glare of her roommate, Iris, and have him fuck her right on the trite floral bedspread that the Jast married dude bought her so that her room would seem a little more girly and naughty when he snuck away from his wife.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  There is no possible way to seduce without creating some kind of fantasy and poeticization. Excessive familiarity can destroy crystallization. A charming girl of sixteen was becoming too fond of a handsome young man of the same age, who used to make a practice of passing beneath her window every evening at nightfall. Her mother invited him to spend a week with them in the country. It was a bold remedy, I admit, but the girl was of a romantic disposition, and the young man a trifle dull; within three days she despised him. —STENDHAL, LOVE, TRANSLATED BY GILBERT AND SUZANNE SALE Disarm Through Strategic Weakness and Vulnerability Too much ma- neuvering on your part may raise suspicion. The best way to cover your tracks is to make the other person feel superior and stronger. If you seem to be weak, vulnerable, enthralled by the other person, and unable to control yourself, you will make your actions look more natural, less calculated. Physical weakness—tears, bashfulness, paleness—will help create the ef- fect. To further win trust, exchange honesty for virtue: establish your "sincerity" by confessing some sin on your part—it doesn't have to be real. Sincerity is more important than goodness. Play the victim, then transform your target's sympathy into love. The Victim Strategy T hat sweltering August in the 1770s when the Présidente de Tourvel was visiting the château of her old friend Madame de Rosemonde, leaving her husband at home, she was expecting to be enjoying the peace and quiet of country life more or less on her own. But she loved the simple pleasures, and soon her daily life at the château assumed a comfortable pattern—daily Mass, walks in the country, charitable work in the neighbor- ing villages, card games in the evening. When Madame de Rosemonde's nephew arrived for a visit, then, the Présidente felt uncomfortable—but also curious. The nephew, the Vicomte de Valmont, was the most notorious liber- tine in Paris. He was certainly handsome, but he was not what she had ex- pected: he seemed sad, somewhat downtrodden, and strangest of all, he paid hardly any attention to her. The Présidente was no coquette; she dressed simply, ignored fashions, and loved her husband. Still, she was young and beautiful, and was used to fending off men's attentions. In the back of her mind, she was slightly perturbed that he took so little notice of her. Then, at Mass one day, she caught a glimpse of Valmont apparently lost in prayer. The idea dawned on her that he was in the midst of a period of soul-searching. As soon as word had leaked out that Valmont was at the château, the Présidente had received a letter from a friend warning her against this dan- gerous man. But she thought of herself as the last woman in the world to be vulnerable to him. Besides, he seemed on the verge of repenting his evil past; perhaps she could help move him in that direction.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Bateman’s paper wasn’t just efficacious in the short term, useful in the overarching social effort to guide women from the factories to the kitchen and reestablish the hierarchy between men and women that had been upset by the war’s reorganization of who did what. Over the next decades, it became an urtext of sorts, indisputable evidence that sexual selection acts differentially on males than on females and that only males—reaffirmed to be “pugnacious, courageous, and assertive,” just as Darwin had described them—benefit from multiple mating. “Intra-sexual Competition in Drosophila” has been cited directly more than three thousand times since its publication, according to Google Scholar; historian Donald Dewsbury notes it “became standard fare in textbooks” and lectures in the fields of biology, genetics, and anthropology. Just as important, Bateman’s findings have been presumed universally relevant and generalized to females of other species, including, as Bateman suggested, to humans. In the 1970s, the dashing and controversial Harvard sociobiologist Robert Trivers popularized Bateman all over again, bringing his views to an even wider audience. Trivers refined Bateman’s point by suggesting that a female invests more in offspring both before and after it is born, because fertilization and gestation—often of only one offspring at a time—take place in her body. And because if she is a mammal, she lactates. As a consequence, he argued in his theory of Parental Investment, her maximum reproductive output is limited compared to a male’s. Males, on the other hand, could reproduce pretty much limitlessly, if they were sufficiently caddish. Which, it seemed, was in their best interest. In this view of the “natural order of things,” a female’s one-shot monthly fecundity, energetically costly and risky gestation, and her consequent strategy of comprehensive investment in her young put her fundamentally at odds with males. She wanted quality, not quantity—one great guy with great genes and one or two young at a time to take care of intensively. But males, those comparatively footloose and fancy-free XY scoundrels with their boatloads of quick, inexpensive sperm, would naturally want to spread themselves around, siring as many offspring with as many females as possible. They wanted quantity, not quality in the mating and fathering game. The bottom line, yet again, was that monogamous social behavior and all the qualities presumed to go with it—being demure, choosy, reticent, and retiring—was essentially female behavior. Males, this line of thinking went, were naturally “eager.” Primatologist Sarah Hrdy points out that what has been called “the Bateman paradigm”—the linked notions that males have greater variation of reproductive success than females do; males gain from multiple matings and females do not; males are generally ardent and females retiring; and the implicit presumption that females are more logically and naturally monogamous than males—has influenced entire generations of thinkers. After Trivers put forth his gloss on Bateman, everyone from evolutionary psychologists to biologists to writers for GQ and Maxim, who produced pat article after pat article asserting that “men stray while women stay because of genes,” perpetuated it.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  In the stone courtyard of the church, Thalia gives Reese a hug, then asks, “Want to hear a joke I thought up during the service?” Reese does. The joke is this: Q: What do you call a remake of a nineties romantic comedy where you cast trans women in all the roles? A: Four Funerals and a Funeral. Another girl, early in transition, wearing a black velvet dress, is standing near them. Reese recognizes her as one of those Twitter girls eager to offer theory-laden takes on gender. The girl has listened in on the joke and shakes her head—insensitive!—staring at them over her black-framed glasses with watery, wounded eyes. Reese pulls rank. “Oh come on.” She points to Thalia. “You know who gave Tammi her first shot? Thalia. Right in the butt. Who are you to say if she can make a joke or not?” “Maybe just not where other mourners can hear it,” the girl sniffs. “Here’s a better idea,” Reese snaps. “Maybe don’t stand around eavesdropping.” “Reese,” says Thalia simply, “it’s fine.” Then to the girl: “Sorry.” The girl bobs a tight acknowledgment, then raises a brow at Reese, waiting for her apology as well. But Reese refuses. She is granite willing the girl to go away. Fuck that girl. Let her go to as many of these things as Reese has been to and see if she doesn’t manage to develop a sense of humor. Eventually, the girl leaves, and almost immediately Reese regrets whatever enmity she made for herself in that unnecessary encounter. She’s lost patience for the baby transes—never a good look on an older girl. A little fountain burbles in the courtyard. It smells pleasantly of algae, and Reese moves closer, drawn by the cool of ionized air. Pennies flash in the pool at the base of the fountain, which seems blasphemous: wishing on coins in a church courtyard, when you could be inside praying for whatever it is that you want. “IT heard this thing’—Thalia holds the back of Reese’s elbow, pulling Reese back to the present—“from Andy, who made arrangements with the funeral home. He went to those two older women who run that family funeral home in Bed-Stuy—those two nice black ladies who did Eve’s funeral. After a few hours of setting things up, one of the two ladies asks him, ‘I’m sorry, but was Tammi a transgender woman?’ And Andy goes, ‘Yeah,’ and they, like, kind of exchange looks. One of them says they’re going to change their plans and will be getting the body from the morgue within the next few hours to bring to their funeral home.” “Why? Why would it matter that she was trans?” “The accident was out on Long Island, and I guess she got transferred to a morgue here. Apparently one where the morgue workers gawk at bodies of trans women—poke and laugh and shit.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  How is it, Reese wonders, that a bunch of New York men wearing flannel and slamming whiskey in a cabin is seen as a sorely needed release of their barely tamed and authentic manliness, but when she, a trans, delights in dolling up, she’s trying too hard? It’s not that Reese thinks her desire to dress up reflects some authentic self. It’s just that, unlike bros, she’s willing to call dress-up time what it is. Meanwhile, this starched woman has practically soaked her panties over the homoerotic escapades of her man upstate. Can you imagine if Reese confided in these women, with the same apparent horniness, about her Truvada birth control regimen? Social disaster! She decides for the ten thousandth time that heterosexual cis people, while willfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other’s genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realize that, like trans women, the activity in which they are indulging is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they'd be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other. Sexy-Smart clinks on a wineglass with a spoon to ask for everyone’s attention, which mercifully averts Reese’s building desire to tender her opinions on gender to someone. “And now, the moment we've been waiting for,” Sexy-Smart says seductively, although, from the way that the women seem content to stay in the kitchen eating snacks, there is no way that anyone has been waiting for this moment. “We can move to the living room for the dOTERRA essential oils demonstration!” Shuffling with the herd into the sunset-drenched living room, Reese and Katrina take a comfortable love seat, and the other women settle in on the couch, chairs, and plush rug, in the way Reese remembered from middle school sleepovers, everyone finding a spot to watch the TV. Only instead of a TV there’s Sexy-Smart handing out brochures, and instead of blankets or pillows, each woman sets beside her a designer leather tote handbag in differing brands but the same essential boxy style, the sort that gets sold at Nordstrom to women who aspire to vacation in the Hamptons. Reese feels entitled to be judgy about boxy tote handbags, because she herself carries at that moment her own boxy Coach tote and her secret self aspires to aspire to vacation in the Hamptons. Sexy-Smart opens a copy of the brochure she has passed out, indicates a blank box, and tells the assembled women to write all of their ailments—both physical and mental—within that square.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  His smile is rueful, but he looks vaguely disappointed. “Business is all about people, Miss Steele, and I’m very good at judging people. I know how they tick, what makes them flourish, what doesn’t, what inspires them, and how to incentivize them. I employ an exceptional team, and I reward them well.” He pauses and fixes me with his gray stare. “My belief is to achieve success in any scheme, one has to make oneself master of that scheme, know it inside and out, know every detail. I work hard, very hard to do that. I make decisions based on logic and facts. I have a natural gut instinct that can spot and nurture a good solid idea and good people. The bottom line is it’s always down to good people.” “Maybe you’re just lucky.” This isn’t on Kate’s list—but he’s so arrogant. His eyes flare momentarily in surprise. “I don’t subscribe to luck or chance, Miss Steele. The harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. It really is all about having the right people on your team and directing their energies accordingly. I think it was Harvey Firestone who said ‘The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.’” “You sound like a control freak.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. “Oh, I exercise control in all things, Miss Steele,” he says without a trace of humor in his smile. I look at him, and he holds my gaze steadily, impassive. My heartbeat quickens, and my face flushes again. Why does he have such an unnerving effect on me? His overwhelming good looks maybe? The way his eyes blaze at me? The way he strokes his index finger against his lower lip? I wish he’d stop doing that. “Besides, immense power is acquired by assuring yourself, in your secret reveries, that you were born to control things,” he continues, his voice soft. “Do you feel that you have immense power?” Control freak. “I employ over forty thousand people. That gives me a certain sense of responsibility—power, if you will. If I were to decide I was no longer interested in the telecommunications business and sell, twenty thousand people would struggle to make their mortgage payments after a month or so.” My mouth drops open. I am staggered by his lack of humility. “Don’t you have a board to answer to?” I ask, disgusted. “I own my company. I don’t have to answer to a board.” He raises an eyebrow. Of course, I would know this if I had done some research. But holy crap, he’s arrogant. I change tack. “And do you have any interests outside your work?” “I have varied interests, Miss Steele.” A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “Very varied.” And for some reason, I’m confounded and heated by his steady gaze. His eyes are alight with some wicked thought. “But if you work so hard, what do you do to chill out?”

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  patterned, organized, rich, deep, genuine, sensitive, sophisticated, real, living, concrete, natural, true to life, and understanding.” This is an attitude we can all recognize. When a human competes with a machine, whether it is John Henry a-hammerin’ on the mountain or the chess genius Garry Kasparov facing off against the computer Deep Blue, our sympathies lie with our fellow human. The aversion to algorithms making decisions that affect humans is rooted in the strong preference that many people have for the natural over the synthetic or artificial. Asked whether they would rather eat an organic or a commercially grown apple, most people prefer the “all natural” one. Even after being informed that the two apples taste the same, have identical nutritional value, and are equally healthful, a majority still prefer the organic fruit. Even the producers of beer have found that they can increase sales by putting “All Natural” or “No Preservatives” on the label. The deep resistance to the demystification of expertise is illustrated by the reaction of the European wine community to Ashenfelter’s formula for predicting the price of Bordeaux wines. Ashenfelter’s formula answered a prayer: one might thus have expected that wine lovers everywhere would be grateful to him for demonstrably improving their ability to identify the wines that later would be good. Not so. The response in French wine circles, wrote The New York Times, ranged “somewhere between violent and hysterical.” Ashenfelter reports that one oenophile called his findings “ludicrous and absurd.” Another scoffed, “It is like judging movies without actually seeing them.” The prejudice against algorithms is magnified when the decisions are consequential. Meehl remarked, “I do not quite know how to alleviate the horror some clinicians seem to experience when they envisage a treatable case being denied treatment because a ‘blind, mechanical’ equation misclassifies him.” In contrast, Meehl and other proponents of algorithms have argued strongly that it is unethical to rely on intuitive judgments for important decisions if an algorithm is available that will make fewer mistakes. Their rational argument is compelling, but it runs against a stubborn psychological reality: for most people, the cause of a mistake matters. The story of a child dying because an algorithm made a mistake is more poignant than the story of the same tragedy occurring as a result of human error, and the difference in emotional intensity is readily translated into a moral preference. Fortunately, the hostility to algorithms will probably soften as their role in everyday life continues to expand. Looking for books or music we might enjoy, we appreciate recommendations generated by software. We take it for granted that decisions about credit limits are made without the direct intervention of any

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “Of course.” Christian pushes a button, and the music is caressing me once more. It’s a gentle, slow, sweet, and sure assault on my aural senses. “You like classical music?” I ask, hoping for a rare insight into his personal preferences. “My taste is eclectic, Anastasia, everything from Thomas Tallis to the Kings of Leon. It depends on my mood. You?” “Me, too. Though I don’t know who Thomas Tallis is.” He turns and gives me a quick unreadable look before his eyes are back on the road. “I’ll play it for you sometime. He’s a sixteenth-century British composer. Tudor, church choral music.” Christian grins. “Sounds very esoteric, I know, but it’s also magical.” He presses a button and the Kings of Leon start singing. Hmm, this I know. “Sex on Fire.” How appropriate. The music is interrupted by the sound of a cell phone ringing over the sound system speakers. Christian hits a button on the steering wheel. “Grey,” he snaps. He’s so brusque. A rasping, disembodied voice comes over the speakers. “Mr. Grey, it’s Welch here. I have the information you require.” “Good. Email it to me. Anything to add?” “No, sir.” He presses the button, then the call ceases and the music is back. No goodbye or thanks. I’m so glad that I never seriously entertained the thought of working for him. I shudder at the very idea. He’s just too controlling and cold with his employees. The music cuts off again for the phone. “Grey.” “The NDA has been emailed to you, Mr. Grey.” A woman’s voice. “Good. That’s all, Andrea.” “Good day, sir.” Christian hangs up by pressing a button on the steering wheel. The music is on very briefly when the phone rings again. Holy hell, is this his life—constant nagging phone calls? “Grey,” he snaps. “Hi, Christian, d’you get laid?” Christian sighs. “Hello, Elliot. I’m on speakerphone, and I’m not alone in the car.” “Who’s with you?” Christian rolls his eyes. “Anastasia Steele.” “Hi, Ana!” Ana! “Hello, Elliot.” “Heard a lot about you,” Elliot murmurs huskily. Christian frowns. “Don’t believe a word Kate says.” Elliot laughs. “I’m dropping Anastasia off now.” Christian emphasizes my full name. “Shall I pick you up?” “Sure.” “See you shortly.” Christian hangs up, and the music is back. “Why do you insist on calling me Anastasia?” “Because it’s your name.” “I prefer Ana.” “Do you, now?” We are almost at my apartment. It’s not taken long. “Anastasia,” he muses. I scowl at him, but he ignores my expression. “What happened in the elevator—it won’t happen again. Well, not unless it’s premeditated.” He pulls up outside my apartment. I belatedly realize he’s not asked me where I live—yet he knows. But then he sent the books; of course he knows where I live. What able, cell phone–tracking, helicopter-owning stalker wouldn’t? Why won’t he kiss me again? I pout at the thought. I don’t understand. Honestly, his surname should be Cryptic, not Grey.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They had met when they were college students in Ann Arbor. Both had been involved in brief affairs with the same man, who unfortunately turned out to be an uninteresting swine, something that took each of them an unduly long time to realize. Leisha had been the first; he had met Susan only a month after they broke up. She’d become aware of Leisha at a party given by his roommate, Leisha’s then-current lover. Susan had been standing against a wall in the dark, drinking vodka from a plastic cup and watching this theatrical little creature flap drunkenly around a clearly more sober partner on the dance floor, all elbows, jerking hips and senseless knee-bending dips. Her partner suddenly hoisted her up and solemnly circled the room, holding her aloft over his head like a sacrifice as she squeaked, “Give me a break, Eliot, pulease!” Susan disliked her immediately. She thought: I’m a much better dancer, and, putting her drink on the windowsill, went to demonstrate it. (Much later she learned that Leisha hadn’t thought much of her dancing either. “It was like, okay, what does a girl do when she dances? She rotates her hips and sticks out her breasts a lot and undulates.”) Susan was aware of her intermittently after that—at parties, coffee shops, movies or walking at a distance with her stiff-hipped, mobile-necked poodle walk. She would hear Leisha’s name mentioned in gossip, usually in a tone of amused tolerance and in the context of some blighted romance, with the word “crazy” figuring prominently. Then Susan became friendly with a girl named Alex, who was, coincidentally, sharing a house with Leisha and another girl. Alex didn’t like Leisha either; she and Susan loved to talk about how trivial and fake she was.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I tell him I’m going to introduce him to my family. He wants to run away. I laugh. He can only express his feelings through parody. I discover he hasn’t the strength to love me in opposition to his father, to possess me, take me away. He often weeps because he can’t find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father’s money. Whenever I mention my brothers he’s overcome by this fear, as if unmasked. He thinks my people all expect a proposal of marriage. He knows he’s lost, done for already in my family’s eyes, that for them he can only become more lost, and as a result lose me. He says he went to study at a business school in Paris, he tells the truth at last, says he didn’t do any work and his father stopped his allowance, sent him his return ticket, and he had to leave. This retreat is his tragedy. He didn’t finish the course at the business school. He says he hopes to finish it here by correspondence. The meetings with the family began with the big meals in Cholon. When my mother and brothers come to Saigon I tell him he has to invite them to the expensive Chinese restaurants they don’t know, have never been to before. These evenings are all the same. My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don’t look at him either. They can’t. They’re incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they’d be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society. During these meals my mother’s the only one who speaks, she doesn’t say much, especially the first few times, just a few comments about the dishes as they arrive, the exorbitant price, then silence. He, the first couple of times, plunges in and tries to tell the story of his adventures in Paris, but in vain. It’s as if he hadn’t spoken, as if nobody had heard. His attempt founders in silence. My brothers go on gorging. They gorge as I’ve never seen anyone else gorge, anywhere. He pays. He counts out the money. Puts it in the saucer. Everyone watches. The first time, I remember, he lays out seventy-seven piastres. My mother nearly shrieks with laughter. We get up to leave. No one says thank you. No one ever says thank you for the excellent dinner, or hello, or goodbye, or how are you, no one ever says anything to anyone.