Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  One cannot but note in passing that the force of this recommendation is to urge that women participate in political power not because such is their human right, but because an extension of their proper feminine sphere into the public domain would be a social good. This is to argue from expediency rather than justice. However, let us meet Erikson on his own chosen ground. One finds it hard not to agree that the conduct of human affairs under male dominance has produced our present predicament (the essay was written under the shadow of the Bomb) and that the temperamental traits Erikson assigns to women would be eminently useful in the conduct of society. What Erikson does not recognize is that the traits of each group are culturally conditioned and depend upon their political relationship, which has been relatively constant throughout history regardless of contemporary crises. Instead, the entire emphasis of his essay, and the whole force of the experiment on which his theory is based, is to convince us that complementary masculine and feminine traits are inherently male and female. Erikson has perceived that much of what we know as masculine in our culture is and must be recognized as progressively antisocial and dangerous even to the preservation of the species, while much of what we know as feminine is directly related to its well-being. The logical recommendation to be made from this does seem to be a synthesis of the two sexual temperaments. Even acknowledging that, under the present circumstances of two sharply divided sexual cultures, we could achieve a human balance only through co-operation of the two groups with their fragmented collective personalities, one must really go further and urge a dissemination to members of each sex of those socially desirable traits previously confined to one or the other while eliminating the bellicosity or excessive passivity useless in either. But to do this is considerably beyond Erikson’s scope, since he believes in the existence of innate sexual temperament and imagines the experiment he relates is proof of it. Erikson is dedicated to the hope of maintaining sexual polarity, its “vital tension,” which might be lost in “too much sameness, equality, and equivalence,”178 yet at the same time he wishes to humanize society: A new balance of Male and Female, of Paternal and Maternal is obviously presaged not only in contemporary changes in the relation of the sexes to each other, but also in the wider awareness which spreads wherever science, technology and genuine self-scrutiny advance.179 Although one is not usually aware that masculine civilization advances through paternal impulse, there is no question in Erikson’s mind that the contribution he would encourage in women should be offered on the authority of motherhood: “The question arises whether such a potential for annihilation as now exists in the world should continue to exist without the representation of the mothers of the species in the councils of image-making and decision.”180

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The cause of suffrage was the focal point of the formal politics of the first phase of the sexual revolution; around it were marshaled other issues such as education, equality before the law, and equal pay. One must recognize the central significance of the franchise in that it aroused the greatest opposition and mobilized the greatest consciousness and effort. Yet in many ways it was the red herring of the revolution—a wasteful drain on the energy of seventy years. Because the opposition was so monolithic and unrelenting, the struggle so long and bitter, the vote took on a disproportionate importance. And when the ballot was won, the feminist movement collapsed in what can only be described as exhaustion.29 The suffrage campaign reminds one of nothing so much as a Bat tire encountered early on a long journey—a Bat which takes so much time, labor, and expense to repair that the journey is dejectedly abandoned. Aileen Kraditor has documented the type of co-option and collusion to which the American suffragists were driven in their desperation to achieve that imperative “next step” which took so long to take that it engulfed the whole movement. The second generation of suffragists were pioneers like the first, but a newer, more conventional breed. Suffrage became respectable, “smart,” even possible, if one were willing to play politics and make the requisite compromises. The compromises were decidedly unpalatable: unsavory understandings with southern racism to win congressional votes from the southern states, a grating irony in a movement whose origins were in abolition. And as the machine-held districts where new immigrant populations were centered voted time and time again against the option of granting suffrage to them, native American women became bitter for a time against the foreign-born.30 If suffrage’s ability to limit a whole social revolution to one issue was a great fault, the bourgeois character of the movement was another. Never, even at the last, was it sufficiently involved with working women, the most exploited group among its numbers. Although the women’s suffrage movement did have moments of solidarity which cut across class lines in a way quite new to American politics, probably never recaptured again until Civil Rights, the hopelessly exploited character of female employment today is proof of its shortcoming in labor organization. Certain nearly inevitable factors contributed to its too frequently middle-class character; generally only women of this class enjoyed the leisure and education necessary for the endless effort the suffrage battle demanded.31

• From My People (2022)

  He was keeping watch over the two dormitories—women to the left, men to the right—and a frying pan of baked beans cooking on a small, portable grill. Since he was not out demonstrating, I asked him why he had come to RC in the first place. “We came because of the lack of association between the black man and the white man. If the system don’t integrate itself, it will segregate itself all over again. Our group was integrated. We had one white fellow from the University of Massachusetts. But he hasn’t been back.” This man, I thought, was probably typical of the majority of RC residents. They wanted things to get better, and felt that they would if people got together. The system didn’t have to come down; it just needed overhauling. Still, the system had created the provincialism and distrust of larger communities that prompted Harry Jackson to remark as I was leaving, “I believe we should keep the people together who came together.” As I walked through Resurrection City, in the distance I could hear the sound of voices coming from the Lincoln Memorial—voices too distant to be understood. After a while, I ran across Leon and JT. Leon said he was on the way to his A-frame. “Why aren’t you out at the demonstration?” I asked. And barely able to keep his eyes open, he replied weakly, “My demonstration was all night last night. Up at the Agriculture Department. And I’ll be there again, all night tonight. That’s why I’ve just got to get some sleep.” A few days later, Jackson and Leon and JT and every other resident of Resurrection City were either arrested (for civil disobedience) or tear-gassed (for convenience) by policemen from the District of Columbia. The structures came down in less than half the time it took to put them up. And Resurrection City was dead. Up on the hill, spokesmen for SCLC said they had achieved some of the goals of the campaign and were making progress toward achieving more. But the people were all—or mostly all—gone. So, in the end, what did Resurrection City do? It certainly made the poor visible. But did it make them effective? Mr. Abernathy would have them believe that it did. And the people who believed him were, by and large, the ones who had come out of the same area that he had come from. An observer once said that Mr. Abernathy lived for the few hours when he could escape back to his church in Atlanta for Sunday services. This was home. Those who came out of that background were the ones who would have stayed in Washington until their leader said the job was done, working diligently all the while. But they, too, would be glad to get back home. The confrontations of rural Negroes, not only with officials and the police but with urban blacks as well, may have engendered in them a bit of cynicism—perhaps even a bit of militancy.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The revolution degenerates to counterrevolution because, lacking a creative alternative, the new order can only ape the old: “If we behave like those of the other side, then we are the other side,” Roger, the most dedicated and intelligent of the rebels predicts, knowing that “instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”64 And so the popular upsurge, unaccompanied by any change of consciousness, can be merely a coup d’état, ending, as coups do, in a fascist junta. Illustrating the basic conventionality of the rebels, Genet again chooses to do it in terms of sexual role, through the conjunction of Chantal and Georgette. Though one is a fighter and the other a revolutionary intellectual, both are restricted to the stereotypic role of nursing the wounded. “That’s a woman’s job,”65 a casualty recites smugly. Chantal’s only alternative is to be a singer or a whore; to entertain or arouse the male. When the cadre raffle her off like cattle auctioneers (twenty ordinary women for Chantal) she performs the role allowed her and in the process helps corrupt the revolution. La Passionara is a figure full of romance, but one woman does not make a revolution, and one of the better tests of an actual revolution (as opposed to rebellion, riot, civil war, nationalist war, etc.) is the degree to which the female population participates. Confusing sex with power in the same manner as their predecessors, the male rebels cease to think, and the uprising turns into an orgy of “shoot and screw,” “one hand on the trigger, the other on the Sy.”66 Of course they fail—“a carnival that goes to the limit is suicide.”67 Having nothing new to say, the insurrectionists fall into traditional follies regarding sex and power, sex and violence. Females are goddesses or packhorses as of old; nurses, bitches or whores, and males the familiar pack of mindless slaughterers, inspired not by freedom but by sexual delusion. A right-wing master politico who survives every rumble, the Envoy puts it neatly: “At first people were fighting against illustrious and illusory tyrants, then for freedom. Tomorrow they’ll be ready to die for Chantal alone.”68 When the whistle blows, guilt and confusion find them at their stations, bowing before the customary notions of law and order represented by three dolls in lace and braid, the establishment’s Justice, Piety, and Valor. Devoid of transforming ideas, they have earned their failure, and the police state closes in upon them, inexorable before Roger’s suicidal gesture of literally castrating himself, a naïve bit of imitative magic, masochist as the maid’s poisoned teacup, since it leaves the Chief of Police intact, sexually impotent as ever, but probably capable of ruling from his tomb with the truly powerful mythic phallus of fear. Caught in the toils of the sexual power game, rebel hope is “screwed” again.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  It is hard to feel very nostalgic for the world that Millett describes, with women’s rights curtailed by law and reflexively compromised by custom. And yet for those among us who care about literature—those of us who came to Millett in part because of literature—there is something poignant in the attention she pays to literary authors, both contemporary and historical. A similar sense of dissonance can be experienced by watching Town Bloody Hall, the 1979 documentary film of a debate about women’s liberation in which Germaine Greer, while referring to Mailer, speaks of “the being I think most privileged in masculine elitist society, namely the masculine artist, the pinnacle of the masculine elite.”7 It has been a long time since the male novelist has been regarded as occupying the pinnacle of any elite beyond the strictly literary. The battleground over which Millett and her peers fought included what would now be regarded as impossibly abstruse high culture: nowadays we concern ourselves with Beyoncé instead of Jean Genet. What remains most striking about the politics of Sexual Politics is the largeness of the vision for the future it outlines: not a society reformed by incremental legislative change, but one radically transformed. Millett’s concern is for freedom, a right she insists upon extending even to her cultural nemeses. Of Henry Miller’s misogynistic descriptions of female sexuality, she writes: “the release of such uninhibited emotion, however poisonous, is beyond question advantageous”—a position that is considerably harder to imagine being defended on college campuses in the age of the trigger warning (313). To read Sexual Politics today—while enjoying many of the advances that have been made on women’s behalf since its writing—is to become aware of the descent of a certain poverty of imagination in the decades that have passed since the radical moment of its inspiration. We may have arrived at a world in which it can be jokingly suggested that the world “feminism” can be banned, however badly such a joke may misfire. But we are as far away as ever from a world in which the word “feminism” has dwindled into obsolescence; a world in which no one—a celebrity or otherwise—need declare herself or himself a feminist because social change has rendered the word meaningless. Whether we are really closer to that eventuality than Millett was, or have moved further away from it, is still an open question. 1 Katy Steinmetz, “Which Word Should Be Banned in 2015?,” Time, November 12, 2014. http://time.com/3576870/worst-words-poll-2014/.2 Roxane Gay, “Ban the Word ‘Feminist’? I Can Think of a Few Others to Get Rid of,” Washington Post, November 14, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ban-the-word-​feminist-i-can-think-of-a-few-others-to-get​-rid-of/2014/11/14/e2f970e4-6b86-11e4-​a31c-77759fc1eacc_story.html.3 The apology from editor Nancy Gibbs is appended to the original article posting. See Steinmetz, “Which Word Should Be Banned in 2015?.”4 “The Liberation of Kate Millett,” Time, August 31, 1970.5 Ibid.6 Ibid.7 Town Bloody Hall, directed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebacker (New York: Pennebacker Hegedus Films, 1979).BIBLIOGRAPHY Works Consulted in Anthropology

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

  We have on this point the testimony of contemporaries and of the acts of the councils themselves. St. Gregory Nazianzen, who, in the judgment of Socrates, was the most devout and eloquent man of his age,635 and who himself, as bishop of Constantinople, presided for a time over the second ecumenical council, had so bitter an observation and experience as even to lose, though without sufficient reason, all confidence in councils, and to call them in his poems "assemblies of cranes and geese." "To tell the truth" thus in 382 (a year after the second ecumenical council, and doubtless including that assembly in his allusion) he answered Procopius, who in the name of the emperor summoned him in vain to a synod—"to tell the truth, I am inclined to shun every collection of bishops, because I have never yet seen that a synod came to a good end, or abated evils instead of increasing them. For in those assemblies (and I do not think I express myself too strongly here) indescribable contentiousness and ambition prevail, and it is easier for one to incur the reproach of wishing to set himself up as judge of the wickedness of others, than to attain any success in putting the wickedness away. Therefore I have withdrawn myself, and have found rest to my soul only in solitude."636 It is true, the contemplative Gregory had an aversion to all public life, and in such views yielded unduly to his personal inclinations. And in any case he is inconsistent; for he elsewhere speaks with great respect of the council of Nice, and was, next to Athanasius, the leading advocate of the Nicene creed. Yet there remains enough in his many unfavorable pictures of the bishops and synods of his time, to dispel all illusions of their immaculate purity. Beausobre correctly observes, that either Gregory the Great must be a slanderer, or the bishops of his day were very remiss. In the fifth century it was no better, but rather worse. At the third general council, at Ephesus, 431, all accounts agree that shameful intrigue, uncharitable lust of condemnation, and coarse violence of conduct were almost as prevalent as in the notorious robber-council of Ephesus in 449; though with the important difference, that the former synod was contending for truth, the latter for error. Even at Chalcedon, the introduction of the renowned expositor and historian Theodoret provoked a scene, which almost involuntarily reminds us of the modern brawls of Greek and Roman monks at the holy sepulchre under the restraining supervision of the Turkish police. His Egyptian opponents shouted with all their might: "The faith is gone! Away with him, this teacher of Nestorius!" His friends replied with equal violence: "They forced us [at the robber-council] by blows to subscribe; away with the Manichaeans, the enemies of Flavian, the enemies of the faith! Away with the murderer Dioscurus? Who does not know his wicked deeds? The Egyptian bishops cried again: Away with the Jew, the adversary of God, and call him not bishop!" To which the oriental bishops answered: "Away with the rioters, away with the murderers! The orthodox man belongs to the council!" At last the imperial commissioners interfered, and put an end to what they justly called an unworthy and useless uproar.637

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The pressures of official suppression cannot account for the counterrevolution. For in most places the sexual revolution collapsed from within and was undermined more through its own imperfections than from hostile forces which combined to crush it. The real causes of the counterrevolution appear to lie in the fact that the sexual revolution had, perhaps necessarily, even inevitably, concentrated on the superstructure of patriarchal policy, changing its legal forms, its more flagrant abuses, altering its formal educational patterns, but leaving the socialization processes of temperament and role differentiation intact. Basic attitudes, values, emotions—all that constituted the psychic structure several millennia of patriarchal society had built up-remained insufficiently affected, if not completely untouched. Moreover, the major institutions of the old tradition, patriarchal marriage and the family, were never or rarely challenged. Only the outer surface of society had been changed; underneath the essential system was preserved undisturbed. Should it receive new sources of support, new ratification, new ideological justifications, it could be mobilized anew. Patriarchy could, as indeed it did, remain in force as a thoroughly efficient political system, a method of social governance, without any visible superstructure beyond the family, simply because it lived on in the mind and heart where it had first rooted itself in the conditioning of its subjects, and from which a few reforms were hardly likely to evict it. Recently, a number of studies have begun to explore the conservative trends that operated between 1930–60, causing a deterioration in the economic and educational status of American women.51 They attribute it to postwar reaction, conservative or anti-Communist animus toward the Soviet or other Socialist experimentation, an economic situation where women are exploited as a reserve labor force, periodically and widely purged from employment, and when reintroduced, confined to its lower reaches, and finally, to the ideology of the “higher domesticity.”52 As such phenomena have, to some degree, already been documented, what shall concern us here are the more diffuse currents of opinion in literature and in scholarship, the intellectual origins and the atmosphere of the counterrevolutionary era.

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

  I was now once more a-drift, and left upon my own hands, by a gentleman whom I certainly did not deserve. And all the letters, arts, friends, entreaties that I employed within the week of grace in my lodging, could never win on him so much as to see me again. He had irrevocably pronounced my doom, and submission to it was my only part. Soon after he married a lady of birth and fortune, to whom, I have heard he proved an irreproachable husband. As for poor Will, he was immediately sent down to the country to his father, who was an easy farmer, where he was not four months before an inn-keepers’ buxom young widow, with a very good stock, both in money and trade, fancied, and perhaps pre-acquainted with his secret excellencies, married him: and I am sure there was, at least, one good foundation for their living happily together. Though I should have been charmed to see him before he went, such measures were taken, by Mr. H....’s orders, that it was impossible; otherwise I should certainly have endeavoured to detain him in town, and would have spared neither offers nor expense to have procured myself the satisfaction of keeping him with me. He had such powerful holds upon my inclinations as were not easily to be shaken off, or replaced; as to my heart, it was quite out of the question: glad, however, I was from my soul, that nothing worse, and as things turned out, nothing better could have happened to him. As to Mr. H..., though views of conveniency made me, at first, exert myself to regain his affection, I was giddy and thoughtless enough to be much easier reconciled to my failure than I ought to have been; but as I never had loved him, and his leaving me gave me a sort of liberty that I had often longed for, I was soon comforted; and flattering myself, that the stock of youth and beauty I was going to trade with, could hardly fail of procuring me a maintenance, I saw myself under the necessity of trying my fortune with them, rather, with pleasure and gaiety, than with the least idea of despondency. In the mean time, several of my acquaintances among the sisterhood, who had soon got wind of my misfortune, flocked to insult me with their malicious consolations. Most of them had long envied me the affluence and splendour I had been maintained in; and though there was scarce one of them that did not at least deserve to be in my case, and would probably, sooner or later, come to it, it was equally easy to remark, even in their affected pity, their secret pleasure at seeing me thus discarded, and their secret grief that it was no worse with me. Unaccountable malice of the human heart! and which is not confined to the class of life they were of.

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

  I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloyed and tired with uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom, or groundwork being, in the nature of things eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions, with this further inconvenience added to the disgust it creates, that the words Joys, Ardours, Transports, Extasies and the rest of those pathetic terms so congenial to, so received in the Practice of Pleasure, flatten and lose much of their due spirit and energy by the frequency they indispensably recur with, in a narrative of which that Practice professedly composes the whole basis. I must therefore trust to the candour of your judgment, for your allowing for the disadvantage I am necessarily under in that respect; and to your imagination and sensibility, the pleasing taks of repairing it, by their supplements, where my descriptions flag or fail: the one will readily place the pictures I present before your eyes; the other give life to the colours where they are dull, or worn with too frequent handling. What you say besides, by way of encouragement concerning the extreme difficulty of continuing so long in one strain, in a mean tempered with taste, between the revoltingness of gross, rank and vulgar expressions, and the ridicule of mincing metaphors and affected circumlocutions, is so sensible, as well as good-natured, that you greatly justify me to myself for my compliance with a curiosity that is to be satisfied so extremely at my expense.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In addition to this, there was no realization that while every practical effort should be made to implement a sexual revolution, the real test would be in changing attitudes. For Soviet leadership had declared the family defunct in a society composed entirely of family members, whose entire psychic processes were formed in the patriarchal family of Tsarist Russia. Women in such a society were loath to relinquish the dependency and security of the family and the domination over children which it accorded them; men were just as reluctant to waive their traditional prerogatives and privileges; everyone talked endlessly about sexual equality, but none, or few, were capable of practicing it. Nearly all were afraid of sexual autonomy and freedom. Moreover, the collective was difficult, if not impossible, to establish in direct proportion to the strength of family feeling and organization. There were, moreover, several ancient errors embedded in the revolutionary mentality: a belief that sexuality is incompatible with social effort and dedication, an assumption that sexuality is antithetical to collective or to cultural achievement (one finds this in Freud too),33 an attitude in which pregnancy and childbirth were continually referred to as “biological infirmities,” and a questionable, even dangerously superficial, presumption that family and marriage are merely economic or material phenomena, capable of solution by economic and institutional methods alone. Even here the Soviets failed miserably. As Trotsky comments icily, “You cannot ‘abolish’ the family, you have to replace it.”34 The communal housekeeping and crèches simply did not materialize. Geiger, who feels the failure to provide these two services was the “fatal flaw” in the revolution’s effort to emancipate women reports that in 1925 only three out of every one hundred children were accommodated outside the home.35 The entire burden of child care and housework was left upon women, frequently alone, as paternal responsibility was so often neglected. Urged into employment such women were in fact only being awarded the responsibility of three occupations to shoulder simultaneously. In the absence of crèches and communal housekeeping, children were often homeless and neglected; juvenile delinquency became a considerable threat. Much of the problem was economic. The government, just recovering from the terrible poverty of the early Soviet years gave its priority to heavy industry and armaments.36 Allowing reaction to replace revolution is simply easier in troubled situations, and by 1936 party official Svetlov could announce that since the state is “temporarily unable to take upon itself family functions” it is forced to “conserve the family.”37

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The chief weakness of the movement’s concentration on suffrage, the factor which helped it to fade, disappear, and even lose ground when the vote was gained, lay in its failure to challenge patriarchal ideology at a sufficiently deep and radical level to break the conditioning processes of status, temperament and role. A reform movement, and especially one which has fixed its attention on so minimal an end as the ballot, the sort of superficial change which legislative reform represents, and which, when it has attained this, becomes incapable even to putting it to use, is hardly likely to propose the sweeping radical changes in society necessary to bring about the completion of a sexual revolution—changes in social attitudes and social structure, in personality and institutions. Marriage was preserved nearly intact despite women’s new legal rights within it, and divorce. The “home” was still creditable enough to be refurbished in gleaming colors in the ensuing period of reaction. Although they felt they had escaped economic dependence as far as “the right to work,” women were not yet able to pursue the question all the way to equal rights in work; nor did they continue to view work as responsibility or a fundamental social contribution. In affluence or before social pressure, they returned to idleness or dependency. The next generation found it easy to exploit women as a “reserve labor force,” bringing them out to the job when it suited a wartime economy, and sending them back to the “home” when it didn’t. Most crucial of all, the whole elaborate processes of sexual “socialization” were left in such good repair that they could be reorganized into newer and more subtle patterns of control. Despite the reform of its legal system and the (finally minor) humiliation to its political pride, the patriarchal mentality reasserted itself with great strength at the end of the first phase. Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might be actually more stable and secure than before. Employment

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He would watch dailies of the film in Clearwater while he was overseeing the handling of the Lisa McPherson case. His critiques would then be typed up and sent to the Scientology representative who was always at Travolta’s side. When the movie was completed, Miscavige called Travolta to congratulate him, saying that LRH would be proud. He predicted it was going to be a blockbuster. McKinstry had been working for a year promoting the movie edition of the book. He traveled across the country with Travolta to push the book in bookstores, malls, and Walmarts. About 750,000 copies were sold. Like many others who have spent time with Travolta, McKinstry came to like him immensely. The actor was devoting a substantial amount of his own time and energy to making the book a success. But when the movie came out, it was a critical and box-office catastrophe. Even at the premiere, Sea Org members had to be bused in to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard to fill the empty seats for as many as three shows a day. For some of them, it was the first movie they had seen in years. “ ‘Battlefield Earth’ may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century,” the New York Times critic observed, in what proved to be a typical review. There were false accusations that the film contained subliminal messages promoting Scientology. Travolta’s career went into a lengthy dark period. Cruise later complained to Miscavige, saying that the movie was terrible for the church’s public image.5 Miscavige responded that it would never have been made if he’d had anything to do with it. McKinstry was dismayed when he went to a screening of the movie and watched people walking out or booing. His wife could see that he was upset and asked what was wrong. “ Why didn’t anyone watch this movie before it was released?” he said. She reported to the church what he had said, and he was ordered to RPF. SHORTLY BEFORE HE RECEIVED Scientology’s top award, Cruise ended his three-year relationship with Penélope Cruz. Shelly Miscavige had been supervising her auditing and helping her through the Purification Rundown. But, like Nicole, Penélope was suspect in the eyes of the church’s leader. She was an independent-minded person and continued to meditate and identify herself as a Buddhist. Cruise traveled with a Scientology delegation to open a magnificent new church in Madrid, where he read his speech to the crowd in halting Spanish. Before the opening, however, he was sitting with his sister Lee Anne, who had become his publicist. Mike Rinder, who was in the room, remembers that Cruise heatedly complained to his sister that no one had been able to find him a new girlfriend. Miscavige walked in, Rinder says, and Cruise made the same complaint to him.6 Miscavige took the hint. “ I want you to look for the prettiest women in the church,” Tom De Vocht remembers Miscavige saying.

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

  But what was yet at least agreeable, as well as more flattering, the love I had inspired him with, bred a deference to me, that was of great service to his health: for having by degrees, and with much pathetic representations brought him to some husbandry of it, and to insure the duration of his pleasures by moderating their use, and correcting those excesses in them he was so addicted to, and which had shattered his constitution and destroyed his powers of life in the very point for which he seemed desirous to live, he was grown more delicate, more temperate, and in course more healthy; his gratitude for which was taking a turn very favourable for my fortune, when once more the caprice of it dashed the cup from my lips. His sister, lady L..., for whom he had a great affection, desiring him to accompany her down to Bath for her health, he could not refuse her such a favour; and accordingly, though he counted on staying away from me no more than a week at farthest, he took his leave of me with an ominous heaviness of heart, and left me a sum far above the state of his fortune, and very inconsistent with the intended shortness of his journey; but it ended in the longest that can be, and is never but once taken: for, arrived at Bath, he was not there two days before he fell into a debauch of drinking with some gentlemen, that threw him into a high fever, and carried him off in four days’ time, never once out of a delirium. Had he been in his senses to make a will, perhaps he might have made favourable mention of me in it. Thus, however, I lost him; and as no condition of life is more subject to revolutions than that of a woman of pleasure, I soon recovered my cheerfulness, and now beheld myself once more struck off the list of kept mistresses, and returned into the bosom of the community, from which I had been in some manner taken.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “He walked right in there and bought it for me, cash!” The people who were drawn to Dianetics were young to middle-aged white-collar Protestants who had a pronounced interest in science fiction. Some were motivated by the prospect of employment in this booming new field. Others were truth seekers, often veterans of other movements and cults that were responding to the dislocations of the era. And then there were those who had heard the legend of the heroic Navy officer who had been blinded and crippled by the war, who had healed himself through Dianetic techniques. Like Hubbard, they sought a cure. Society and science had let them down. Through Dianetics, they hoped to be lifted up, enlightened, restored, and made whole. One of the contradictory features of Dianetics is the fact that Hubbard continually referred to the powers of Clears, but as yet he had not actually produced a single one for inspection. Among other powers, a Clear “ has complete recall of everything which has ever happened to him or anything he has ever studied. He does mental computations such as those of chess, for example, which a normal would do in half an hour, in ten or fifteen seconds.” Such claims presumed that there was already a sizable population of Dianetic graduates with exceptional abilities, and Hubbard’s readers naturally wondered where they were. In August 1950, Hubbard presented the “ World’s First Clear” at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Sonia Bianca, a very nervous physics student from Boston, was brought to the stage. Hubbard claimed that through Dianetics, Bianca had attained “full and perfect recall of every moment of her life.” The audience began peppering her with questions, such as what she had had for breakfast eight years before, or what was on this page of Hubbard’s book, or even elemental formulas in physics, her area of specialty. She was incapable of responding when someone asked the color of Hubbard’s necktie, when he briefly had his back turned to her. It was a very public fiasco. Hubbard would not announce another Clear for sixteen years. One of his disillusioned acolytes later concluded that the concept of clearing was just a gimmick to dramatize the theory of Dianetics. “The fact is that there were never any clears, as he had described them,” Helen O’Brien, Hubbard’s top executive in the United States, wrote. “There were randomly occurring remissions of psychosomatics.” Meanwhile, his bigamous marriage to Sara was careening toward a spectacular conclusion. A month after the Sonia Bianca debacle, Ron and Sara were living at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. He was beating her regularly. “ With or without an argument, there’d be an upsurge of violence,” Sara recalled. “The veins in his forehead would engorge” and he would strike her, “out of the blue.” One time he broke her eardrum. And yet, she stayed with him, a hostage to his needs. “I felt so guilty about the fact that he was so psychologically damaged,” Sara said.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  He stood through the cloud of dust the Impala kicked up. He wore gray slacks and what might have been a shortsleeved white shirt from Sears. I dropped the reins of both animals, prompting Mr. McBride to yell, Don’t leave them horses wet. But I was sprinting toward that tall figure with all the hope of a kid on Christmas morning. I did not, however, skid to a stop in front of my daddy, whose large hands I’d already imagined lifting me light as a ghost to whirl my feet above the dusty stable yard. No, it wasn’t Daddy standing on the passenger side of Mother’s car. It was Hector, the barkeep from the cowboy joint. Mother leaned over the car roof holding out a hand weighed down by a diamond solitaire ring. I stopped in my tracks. Say hello to your new daddy , she said. And I could hear Lecia close the gap behind me, her spurs clanking while I took in Hector’s alligatorlike grin, and Lecia whispered what I was already thinking: Oh shit.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  A screening of his movie would underscore his commitment to the religion at a moment when that seemed in doubt. As the church’s liaison to Travolta, Taylor was the obvious person to make the arrangements. “First of all, I can’t use the phone,” Taylor told the missionaires. “Secondly, I can’t leave the building. Maybe you’d like a Beatles reunion while you’re asking for that.” “We just think you could take care of this,” they replied. Taylor had to figure out a way to get a print of the film from Travolta without having to explain why she had failed to pick him up at the airport and then disappeared from his life for months, without a word. A couple of days later, the missionaires arranged for her to use a pay phone on one of the lower floors of the building. Taylor called Kate Edwards, Travolta’s creative director at the time. “Spanky! Where are you?” Edwards cried. Travolta and his production company had been looking for her frantically. “Honey, I can’t really talk,” Taylor said. She told Edwards that she was in the Los Angeles complex. “I’ve been specially selected to do a program that will help me,” she explained vaguely. She said she had an urgent favor to ask—a print of the film. That was a problem. The movie was being shown around the world and all the prints were out. The only one available was Travolta’s personal copy, but Edwards said she would make the request. “Johnny said if you ever called and needed something, just do it,” Edwards assured her. “You can’t tell John about this call!” Taylor said. “I’m going to have to tell him,” Edwards replied. “I’m going to have to ask him to borrow it.” The next time Taylor was allowed to call, Edwards told her that Travolta had agreed to loan Taylor the print, under one condition: that he could see her. The missionaires conferred with their superiors. They decided that as long as Taylor got the print, she could meet Travolta for dinner on the Sunday night after the screening.1 Travolta followed up by sending flowers, which were delivered to Taylor in RPF. The screening took place on Saturday night in Scientology’s Lebanon Hall. It was a high point for everyone, all the more so because it was followed by a disco dance. Across the country similar dances were taking place, inspired by Travolta’s passionate performance. Taylor wouldn’t be a part of it, however. As soon as the movie was over and the credits were rolling, several Scientology executives, including Yvonne’s former husband, Heber Jentzsch, escorted Taylor to an office and told her to call Travolta and cancel their date for dinner the following night. “I can’t do that!” Taylor said. “There have been all sorts of efforts to recover him, and we can’t let you get in the way of that,” Jentzsch told her.

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

  This enrichment and embellishment of the cultus was, on one hand, a real advance, and unquestionably had a disciplinary and educational power, like the hierarchical organization, for the training of the popular masses. But the gain in outward appearance and splendor was balanced by many a loss in simplicity and spirituality. While the senses and the imagination were entertained and charmed, the heart not rarely returned cold and hungry. Not a few pagan habits and ceremonies, concealed under new names, crept into the church, or were baptized only with water, not with the fire and Spirit of the gospel. It is well known with what peculiar tenacity a people cleave to religious usages; and it could not be expected that they should break off in an instant from the traditions of centuries. Nor, in fact, are things which may have descended from heathenism, to be by any means sweepingly condemned. Both the Jewish cultus and the heathen are based upon those universal religious wants which Christianity must satisfy, and which Christianity alone can truly meet. Finally, the church has adopted hardly a single existing form or ceremony of religion, without at the same time breathing into it a new spirit, and investing it with a high moral import. But the limit of such appropriation it is very hard to fix, and the old nature of Judaism and heathenism which has its point of attachment in the natural heart of man, continually betrayed its tenacious presence. This is conceded and lamented by the most earnest of the church fathers of the Nicene and post-Nicene age, the very persons who are in other respects most deeply involved in the Catholic ideas of cultus.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  binding on everybody. Instead, this religiosity is limited to specific enclaves of social life that may be effectively segregated from the secularized sectors of modern society. The values pertaining to private religiosity are, typically, irrelevant to institutional contexts other than the private sphere. For example, a businessman or politician may faithfully adhere to the religiously legitimated norms of family life, while at the same time conducting his activities in the public sphere without any reference to religious values of any kind. It is not difficult to see that such segregation of religion within the private sphere is quite “functional” for the maintenance of the highly rationalized order of modern economic and political institutions. The fact that this privatization of the religious tradition poses a problem for the theoreticians of the institutions embodying this tradition need not concern us at the moment. The over-all effect of the afore-mentioned “polarization” is very curious. Religion manifests itself as public rhetoric and private virtue. In other words, insofar as religion is common it lacks “reality,” and insofar as it is “real” it lacks commonality. This situation represents a severe rupture of the traditional task of religion, which was precisely the establishment of an integrated set of definitions of reality that could serve as a common universe of meaning for the members of a society. The world-building potency of religion is thus restricted to the construction of subworlds, of fragmented universes of meaning, the plausibility structure of which may in some cases be no larger than the nuclear family. Since the modern family is notoriously fragile as an institution (a trait it shares with all other formations of the private sphere), this means that religion resting on this kind of plausibility structure is of necessity a tenuous construction. Put simply, a “religious preference” can be abandoned as readily as it was first 155

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

  We may well "lament," with Calvin in his letter to Schalling (March, 1557), that those who professed the same gospel of Christ were distracted on the subject of his Last Supper, which should have been the chief bond of union among them.957 The Westphal-Calvin controversy did not concern the fact of the real presence, which was conceded by Calvin in all his previous writings on the subject, but the subordinate questions of the mode of the presence, of the ubiquity of Christ’s body, and the effect of the sacrament on unworthy communicants, whether they received the very body and blood of Christ, or only bread and wine, to their condemnation. Calvin clearly states the points of difference in the preface to his, Second Defence" : — "That I have written reverently of the legitimate use, dignity, and efficacy, of the sacraments, even he himself [Westphal] does not deny. How skilfully or learnedly in his judgment, I care not, since it is enough to be commended for piety by an enemy. The contest remaining with him embraces three articles: "First, he insists that the bread of the Supper is substantially (substantialiter) the body of Christ. Secondly, in order that Christ may exhibit himself present to believers, he insists that his body is immense (immensum), and exists everywhere, though without place (ubique esse, extra locum). Thirdly, he insists that no figure is to be admitted in the words of Christ, whatever agreement there may be as to the thing. Of such importance does he deem it to stick doggedly to the words, that he would sooner see the whole globe convulsed than admit any exposition. "We maintain that the body and blood of Christ are truly offered (vere offerri) to us in the Supper in order to give life to our souls; and we explain, without ambiguity, that our souls are invigorated by this spiritual aliment (spirituali alimento), which is offered to us in the Supper, just as our bodies are nourished by daily bread. Therefore we hold, that in the Supper there is a true partaking (vera participatio) of the flesh and blood of Christ. Should any one raise a dispute as to the word ’substance,’ we assert that Christ, from the substance of his flesh, breathes life into our souls; nay, infuses his own life into us (propriam in nos vitam diffundere), provided always that no transfusion of substance be imagined."958

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  JW: Do you know how hard it is to teach an animal to drum, to keep the same rhythm? SA: [Laughs] So at readings, I’ve been mocking those Native American critics, those fundamentalists, by saying, “I have to speak to all you non-Natives in the crowd that if you do happen to attend a powwow expecting—because of my picture book—to see a bear, a coyote, and a snake drumming, it’s not going to happen. Now, you might see three drummers nicknamed Bear, Coyote, and Snake, but you’re not going to see the actual animals, so I’m sorry for that cultural misrepresentation. I’m sorry if I’ve given you a stereotypical racist example of what could happen at a powwow.” True Diary got some of that also ten years ago, but the culture has changed so dramatically in terms of not just judging non-Native representations of Native-ness, but harshly judging Native representations of ourselves. This is my story, this stuff actually happened to me, and I get judged for telling the story of the real-life decisions I made. JW: I wondered about that, that’s another thing in the last decade, if Native American representations in films and books have changed in some way, or if those battles are still fought in the same way. SA: We’re still underrepresented in every art form. You know, I was in New York recently and doing an interview, we’re in MoMA, that was part of the interview, and I was walking through MoMA, and I said every museum in the country could also be called the Museum That Excludes Native American Thought. That could be the subtitle of every museum in the country. So the fact remains that we are not seen as contemporary. And the sneaky thing about colonialism is that I think far too many indigenous peoples don’t think of themselves as being contemporary. In fact, they all too often romanticize their own past. I think nostalgia is a terminal condition among the indigenous. In writing this book, and now in working on the movie, and in my whole career, I would hope to be indigenous nostalgia’s greatest enemy. I hope that’s on my tombstone. I want that on my tombstone. JW: I want to talk to you about Diary showing up on so many banned books list. And didn’t it finally drop off? SA: It was in the top ten for nine years, but it never made number one. I was always number two. The two books that always kept me out were: Captain Underpants…So one year Captain Underpants was more dangerous than my book. All the conservative book banners of the country decided that Captain Under-pants was more dangerous than True Diary. And then another year it was And Tango Makes Three, which is about the gay penguins in the Bronx Zoo. So apparently, gay penguins and Captain Underpants are more politically dangerous than a reservation Indian boy seeking a better education.