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 Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  There were things I just could not bring myself to do: the film by the (great) director that would require me to shoot a scene in a shirt but no panties, for example. (He was making some kind of statement, I suppose.) I rejected the advice to “date” men that could possibly advance my career. I didn’t go on auditions for films that I felt glorified sex work, that depicted women being sexually abused in a gratuitous way, or that required me to leave my sense of self on the doorstep. (All of these films became huge hits.) But this is the way women are set up in the media. There has been some movement, I suppose, but not much. It’s a frustrating and demoralizing struggle with some moments of triumph in spite of itself. And I still love acting. I still love a good role more than just about anything. Why is the female physical appearance so important in the arts? Sean Penn is the most gifted actor of my generation, and I don’t think he’s gotten Botox. I don’t think Bryan Cranston had butt implants. What is a woman to do? Turn on the TV and you get a good look at rape culture. I have tried to make a career without contributing to it. I’m still trying. It used to be, when I was younger, that there was the “bombshell” role and the role of the less attractive friend. At my age, it’s a little different: there is one major female role available for every five roles available to men my age. There’s the mother role and maybe something a bit more than that. One of my favorite TV roles a couple of years back was that of a rather ruthless lawyer described in the script as “40s,” brilliant and . . . thin. Sometimes the characters I play or could play are described as “still attractive,” in spite of their age—because women my age aren’t usually attractive, or so Hollywood seems to think. The best characters I get to play are the complicated, dark, kind of crazy ones. I love those characters because I can just do my job and not deal with whether or not some producer finds me “sexy” or reasonably attractive for my age—but I’ve had to search for those kinds of roles. My kid has asked me why I love playing deranged characters: the quick answer is “no makeup” followed by “no men.”

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The sales brochure said the new suburb was “the only garbage-free city in the world.” It also was the developers’ promise of twenty elementary schools, thirty-seven playgrounds, and eighteen churches. The sales brochure said the suburb would have “churches of every denomination.” The brochure listed twenty-six. The list of denominations is not alphabetized. Between Presbyterian and Adventist is listed Synagogue . 168 For nearly three years the pace of construction never slowed. The governing board of one church was interested in a building site for a new parish. The board members made a tentative offer to the realty agent, but they had to wait for approval from their congregation. When the congregation agreed to the price, the board members came back to buy the vacant property. They couldn’t find it. New houses already covered the site they had chosen for their church. 169 The Board of Supervisors in Los Angeles forced the three developers to lease their golf course to the county for $125,000 a year. After negotiating the agreement, County Supervisor Herbert Legg suggested that Louis Boyar build a public swimming pool. Supervisor Legg thought the county’s new pool should go next to the golf course clubhouse. The residents around the clubhouse immediately objected. A public swimming pool would “impair play at the golf course.” Supervisor Legg suggested that Boyar build the pool in the county park near my house instead. The pool cost Boyar’s company $150,000 and the two acres of land under it. The park at the edge of my neighborhood is called May-fair Park. The nearby high school is Mayfair High. Supervisor Legg suggested that the county’s new pool in Mayfair Park be named in Boyar’s honor. The Mayfair neighborhood association, however, refused to accept Boyar’s name. The pool is called Mayfair Pool. 170 In 1969, on the fifteenth anniversary of the city he had helped to build, Mark Taper recorded a conversation at city hall. He talked about the early days of my suburb with some of the other men who worked for the incorporation of the city. The city clerk gave him a transcript of the conversation to correct. Taper had spoken about Supervisor Herbert Legg and the $150,000 donation to build the county a swimming pool in Mayfair Park. In making his corrections to the transcript, Taper crossed out the words Legg insisted on $150,000 and wrote over them Legg suggested . 171 The corporation that built the houses and the shopping center dissolved after my suburb became a city in 1954. The three developers divided the company’s assets. Ben Weingart kept the shopping center. Joe Eichenbaum stayed on as manager. Eventually, he controlled the center’s master leases. Mark Taper got the golf course. The new city attorney recommended that the county condemn Taper’s property to keep the course intact when the county’s lease ran out. In 1969, after two months of condemnation proceedings in Superior Court, the county employee retirement fund paid $5,462,860 for Taper’s golf course.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  How would it feel to live in such a world? Well, we all know how it feels to live in this one. Apart from death itself, what causes as much human misery as the ongoing demise of marriage? In 2008, almost 40 percent of the mothers who gave birth in the United States were unmarried. This matters. As reported recently in Time, “On every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration…in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.”3 “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing,” observed German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” Indeed. By insisting upon an ideal vision of marriage founded upon a lifetime of sexual fidelity to one person—a vision most of us eventually learn is highly unrealistic, we invite punishment upon ourselves, upon each other, and upon our children. “The French are much more comfortable with the idea that their affair partner is just that—an affair partner,” writes Pamela Druckerman in her cross-cultural look at infidelity, Lust in Translation. Understanding that love and sex are different things, Druckerman says the French feel less need to “complain about their marriage to legitimize the affair in the first place.” But she found that Americans and British couples seemed to be reading from an entirely different script. “An affair, even a one-night stand, means a marriage is over,” Druckerman observed. “I spoke to women who, on discovering that their husbands had cheated, immediately packed a bag and left, because ‘that’s what you do.’ Not because that’s what they wanted to do—they just thought that was the rule. They didn’t even seem to realize there were other options…. I mean, really, like they’re reading from a script!”4 Psychologist Julian Jaynes described the commingling of terror and exhilaration one experiences upon realizing that things are not as they’d seemed: “There is an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel when, having come up the inside curvature, where we are facing into a firm structure of confident girders, suddenly that structure disappears, and we are thrust out into the sky for the outward curve down.”5 This is the moment too many couples struggle in vain to avoid or ignore—even to the point of choosing bitter divorce and fractured family over the daunting task of confronting the sky together, with all the “confident girders” behind them in the past. The false expectations we hold about ourselves, each other, and human sexuality do us serious, lasting harm. As author and sex advice columnist Dan Savage explains, “The expectation of lifelong monogamy places an incredible strain on a marriage. But our concept of love and marriage has as its foundation not only the expectation of monogamy but the idea that where there’s love, monogamy should be easy and joyful.”6

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  As a bachelor, when he had watched other people’s married life, seen the petty cares, the squabbles, the jealousy, he had only smiled contemptuously in his heart. In his future married life there could be, he was convinced, nothing of that sort; even the external forms, indeed, he fancied, must be utterly unlike the life of others in everything. And all of a sudden, instead of his life with his wife being made on an individual pattern, it was, on the contrary, entirely made up of the pettiest details, which he had so despised before, but which now, by no will of his own, had gained an extraordinary importance that it was useless to contend against. And Levin saw that the organization of all these details was by no means so easy as he had fancied before. Although Levin believed himself to have the most exact conceptions of domestic life, unconsciously, like all men, he pictured domestic life as the happiest enjoyment of love, with nothing to hinder and no petty cares to distract. He ought, as he conceived the position, to do his work, and to find repose from it in the happiness of love. She ought to be beloved, and nothing more. But, like all men, he forgot that she too would want work. And he was surprised that she, his poetic, exquisite Kitty, could, not merely in the first weeks, but even in the first days of their married life, think, remember, and busy herself about tablecloths, and furniture, about mattresses for visitors, about a tray, about the cook, and the dinner, and so on. While they were still engaged, he had been struck by the definiteness with which she had declined the tour abroad and decided to go into the country, as though she knew of something she wanted, and could still think of something outside her love. This had jarred upon him then, and now her trivial cares and anxieties jarred upon him several times. But he saw that this was essential for her. And, loving her as he did, though he did not understand the reason of them, and jeered at these domestic pursuits, he could not help admiring them. He jeered at the way in which she arranged the furniture they had brought from Moscow; rearranged their room; hung up curtains; prepared rooms for visitors; a room for Dolly; saw after an abode for her new maid; ordered dinner of the old cook; came into collision with Agafea Mihalovna, taking from her the charge of the stores. He saw how the old cook smiled, admiring her, and listening to her inexperienced, impossible orders, how mournfully and tenderly Agafea Mihalovna shook her head over the young mistress’s new arrangements. He saw that Kitty was extraordinarily sweet when, laughing and crying, she came to tell him that her maid, Masha, was used to looking upon her as her young lady, and so no one obeyed her. It seemed to him sweet, but strange, and he thought it would have been better without this.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “They say it’s ten years since she has stood on her feet.” “She doesn’t stand up because her legs are too short. She’s a very bad figure.” “Papa, it’s not possible!” cried Kitty. “That’s what wicked tongues say, my darling. And your Varenka catches it too,” he added. “Oh, these invalid ladies!” “Oh, no, papa!” Kitty objected warmly. “Varenka worships her. And then she does so much good! Ask anyone! Everyone knows her and Aline Stahl.” “Perhaps so,” said the prince, squeezing her hand with his elbow; “but it’s better when one does good so that you may ask everyone and no one knows.” Kitty did not answer, not because she had nothing to say, but because she did not care to reveal her secret thoughts even to her father. But, strange to say, although she had so made up her mind not to be influenced by her father’s views, not to let him into her inmost sanctuary, she felt that the heavenly image of Madame Stahl, which she had carried for a whole month in her heart, had vanished, never to return, just as the fantastic figure made up of some clothes thrown down at random vanishes when one sees that it is only some garment lying there. All that was left was a woman with short legs, who lay down because she had a bad figure, and worried patient Varenka for not arranging her rug to her liking. And by no effort of the imagination could Kitty bring back the former Madame Stahl. Chapter 35 The prince communicated his good humor to his own family and his friends, and even to the German landlord in whose rooms the Shtcherbatskys were staying.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy offers a different explanation for the unusual sexual capacity of the human female. She suggests that concealed ovulation and extended receptivity in early hominids may have evolved not to reassure males, but to confuse them. Having noted the tendency of newly enthroned alpha male baboons to kill all the babies of the previous patriarch, Hrdy hypothesized that this aspect of female sexuality may have developed as a way of confusing paternity among various males. The female would have sex with several males so that none of them could be certain of paternity, thus reducing the likelihood that the next alpha male would kill offspring who could be his. So we’ve got Fisher’s “classic theory” proposing that women evolved their special sexiness as a way of keeping one man’s interest, and Hrdy saying it’s all about keeping several guys guessing. Fisher’s theory fits better with the standard model, in which females trade sex for food, protection, and so forth. But this explanation works only if we believe that males—including our “primitive” ancestors—were interested in sex all the time with just one female. This contradicts the premise that males are hell-bent on spreading their seed far and wide, while simultaneously protecting their investment in their primary mate/family. Hrdy’s “seeds of confusion” theory posits that concealed ovulation and constant receptivity would benefit a female who had multiple male partners—by preventing them from killing her offspring and inducing them to defend or otherwise aid her children. Hrdy’s vision of human sexual evolution puts females directly at odds with males, who would presumably view fertile females as “individually recognizable and potentially defensible resource packets” too valuable to share. Either way, as depicted in the standard narrative, human sexual prehistory was characterized by deceit, disappointment, and despair. According to this view, both males and females are, by nature, liars, whores, and cheats. At our most basic levels, we’re told, heterosexual men and women have evolved to trick one another while selfishly pursuing zero-sum, mutually antagonistic genetic agendas—even though this demands the betrayal of the people we claim to love most sincerely. Original sin indeed. CHAPTER FOURThe Ape in the MirrorWhy should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our ‘noble’ traits as well? STEPHEN JAY GOULD ’Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry’d one step farther, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv’d, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both. DAVID HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740)

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The sales brochure said the new suburb was “the only garbage-free city in the world.” It also was the developers’ promise of twenty elementary schools, thirty-seven playgrounds, and eighteen churches. The sales brochure said the suburb would have “churches of every denomination.” The brochure listed twenty-six. The list of denominations is not alphabetized. Between Presbyterian and Adventist is listed Synagogue . 168 For nearly three years the pace of construction never slowed. The governing board of one church was interested in a building site for a new parish. The board members made a tentative offer to the realty agent, but they had to wait for approval from their congregation. When the congregation agreed to the price, the board members came back to buy the vacant property. They couldn’t find it. New houses already covered the site they had chosen for their church. 169 The Board of Supervisors in Los Angeles forced the three developers to lease their golf course to the county for $125,000 a year. After negotiating the agreement, County Supervisor Herbert Legg suggested that Louis Boyar build a public swimming pool. Supervisor Legg thought the county’s new pool should go next to the golf course clubhouse. The residents around the clubhouse immediately objected. A public swimming pool would “impair play at the golf course.” Supervisor Legg suggested that Boyar build the pool in the county park near my house instead. The pool cost Boyar’s company $150,000 and the two acres of land under it. The park at the edge of my neighborhood is called May-fair Park. The nearby high school is Mayfair High. Supervisor Legg suggested that the county’s new pool in Mayfair Park be named in Boyar’s honor. The Mayfair neighborhood association, however, refused to accept Boyar’s name. The pool is called Mayfair Pool. 170 In 1969, on the fifteenth anniversary of the city he had helped to build, Mark Taper recorded a conversation at city hall. He talked about the early days of my suburb with some of the other men who worked for the incorporation of the city. The city clerk gave him a transcript of the conversation to correct. Taper had spoken about Supervisor Herbert Legg and the $150,000 donation to build the county a swimming pool in Mayfair Park. In making his corrections to the transcript, Taper crossed out the words Legg insisted on $150,000 and wrote over them Legg suggested . 171 The corporation that built the houses and the shopping center dissolved after my suburb became a city in 1954. The three developers divided the company’s assets. Ben Weingart kept the shopping center. Joe Eichenbaum stayed on as manager. Eventually, he controlled the center’s master leases. Mark Taper got the golf course. The new city attorney recommended that the county condemn Taper’s property to keep the course intact when the county’s lease ran out. In 1969, after two months of condemnation proceedings in Superior Court, the county employee retirement fund paid $5,462,860 for Taper’s golf course.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  While some passed the job off to nurses, Maines found that most physicians performed the therapy themselves, though apparently not without some difficulty. Nathaniel Highmore, writing in 1660, noted that it was not an easy technique to learn, being “not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” Whatever challenges male physicians faced in mastering the technique, it seems to have been worth the effort. The Health and Diseases of Women, published in 1873, estimates that about 75 percent of American women were in need of these treatments and that they constituted the single largest market for therapeutic services. Despite Donald Symons’s protestations that “[a]mong all peoples sexual intercourse is understood to be a service or favor that females render to males,” it seems that for centuries, orgasmic release was a service male doctors rendered to women…for a price. Much of this information comes from The Technology of Orgasm, Maines’s book on this “disease” and its treatment through the centuries.1 And what were the symptoms of this “disease”? Unsurprisingly, they were identical to those of sexual frustration and chronic arousal: “anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema, and vaginal lubrication.” This supposed medical treatment for horny, frustrated women was not an isolated aberration confined to ancient history, but just one element in an ancient crusade to pathologize the demands of the female libido—a libido that experts have long insisted hardly exists. The men who provided this lucrative therapy didn’t write about “orgasm” in the medical articles they published on hysteria and its treatment. Rather, they published serious, sober discussion of “vulvular massage” leading to “nervous paroxysm” that brought temporary relief to the patient. These were ideal patients, after all. They didn’t die or recover from their condition. They just kept returning, eager for more treatment sessions. This arrangement might strike some readers as the very definition of “good work if you can get it,” but many physicians apparently felt otherwise. Maines found “no evidence that male physicians enjoyed providing pelvic massage treatments. On the contrary, this male elite sought every opportunity to substitute other devices for their fingers.” What “other devices” does Maines have in mind? See if you can finish this series: Sewing machineFanTea kettleToaster?Here’s a hint: These are the first five electrical appliances sold directly to American consumers. Give up? The Hamilton Beach Company of Racine, Wisconsin, patented the first home-use vibrator in 1902, thereby making it just the fifth electrical appliance approved for domestic use. By 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes. But before it became an instrument for self-treatment (“All the pleasures of youth…will throb within you,” one suggestive ad promised), vibrators had already been in use for decades in the offices of physicians who’d grown weary of “rubbing their stomachs and patting their heads at the same time.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Remember how Phil said he felt “high” when he was with his new lover? “Colors were richer, food tasted better.” There’s a reason for this intensification of sensation, but it’s not love. As their testosterone levels decline with age, many men experience a diminishment of energy and libido, an intangible distance from the basic pleasures of life. Most attribute this blurred distance to stress, lack of sleep, or too much responsibility, or they just chalk it up to the passage of time. True enough, but some of this numbing could be due to ebbing testosterone levels. Recall the man who had no testosterone for a while. He felt he’d lost “everything I identify as being me.” His ambition, passion for life, sense of humor…all gone. Until testosterone brought it all back. Without the testosterone, he said, “you have no desire.” Phil thought he was in love. Of course he did. As suggested above, one of the few things that reliably revives a male’s sagging testosterone levels is a novel lover.32 So he felt all the things we associate with love: renewed vitality, a new depth and intensification—a giddy thrill at being alive. How easily we mistake this potent mix of feelings for “love.” But a hormonal response to novelty isn’t love. How many men have mistaken this hormone high for a life-altering spiritual union? How many women have been blindsided by a good man’s seemingly inexplicable betrayal? How many families have been ripped apart because middle-aged men misinterpreted the surge of vitality and energy resulting from a novel sexual partner as love for a soul mate—or convinced themselves they were in love to justify what felt like a life-affirming necessity? And how many of these men then found themselves isolated, shamed, and devastated when the curse of Coolidge returned after a few months or years to reveal that the now-familiar partner was not, in fact, the true source of those feelings after all? No one knows the number, but it’s a big one. This common situation is heavy with tragedy, but one of the most painful aspects may be that many of these men will realize that the woman they left behind was a far better match than the one they left her for. Once the transitory thrill passes, these men are left once again with the realities of what makes a relationship work over the long run: respect, admiration, convergent interests, good conversation, sense of humor, and so on. A marriage built upon sexual passion alone has as much chance of enduring as a house built on winter ice. Only by arriving at a more nuanced understanding of the nature of human sexuality will we learn to make smarter decisions about our long-term commitments. But this understanding requires us to face some uncomfortable facts.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  If we’re “above” nature, it’s only in the sense that a shaky-legged surfer is “above” the ocean. Even if we never slip (and we all do), our inner nature can pull us under at any moment. Those of us raised in the West have been assured that we humans are special, unique among living things, above and beyond the world around us, exempt from the humilities and humiliations that pervade and define animal life. The natural world lies below and beneath us, a cause for shame, disgust, or alarm; something smelly and messy to be hidden behind closed doors, drawn curtains, and minty freshness. Or we overcompensate and imagine nature floating angelically in soft focus up above, innocent, noble, balanced, and wise. Like bonobos and chimps, we are the randy descendents of hypersexual ancestors. At first blush, this may seem an overstatement, but it’s a truth that should have become common knowledge long ago. Conventional notions of monogamous, till-death-do-us-part marriage strain under the dead weight of a false narrative that insists we’re something else. What is the essence of human sexuality and how did it get to be that way? In the following pages, we’ll explain how seismic cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moralizing therapists. Deep conflicts rage at the heart of modern sexuality. Our cultivated ignorance is devastating. The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species’ sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion, and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea of disappointment. And how many of the couples who manage to stay together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sacrificing their eroticism on the altar of three of life’s irreplaceable joys: family stability, companionship, and emotional, if not sexual, intimacy? Are those who innocently aspire to these joys cursed by nature to preside over the slow strangulation of their partner’s libido? The Spanish word esposas means both “wives” and “handcuffs.” In English, some men ruefully joke about the ball and chain. There’s good reason marriage is often depicted and mourned as the beginning of the end of a man’s sexual life. And women fare no better. Who wants to share her life with a man who feels trapped and diminished by his love for her, whose honor marks the limits of his freedom? Who wants to spend her life apologizing for being just one woman?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Here we have crystalline expression of the Flintstonizing that can distort the thinking of even the most informed theorists on the origins of human sexual behavior. We’re confident Dr. Fisher will find that what she calls “fundamental differences” in sexual behavior are not differences at all when she looks at the full breadth of information we cover in following chapters. We’ll show that husband/wife marriage and sexual monogamy are far from universal human behaviors, as she and others have argued. Simply because bonobos raise doubts about the naturalness of human long-term pair bonding, Fisher and most other authorities conclude that they cannot serve as models for human evolution. They begin by assuming that long-term sexual monogamy forms the nucleus of the one and only natural, eternal human family structure and reason backwards from there. Yucatán be damned! I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy! FRANS DE WAAL, Our Inner Ape The weakness of the “killer ape theory” of human origins becomes clear in light of what’s now known about bonobo behavior. Still, de Waal makes a good case that even without the data that became available in the 1970s, the many flaws in the chimp-fortified Hobbesian view eventually would have emerged. He calls attention to the fact that the theory confuses predation with aggression, assumes that tools originated as weapons, and depicts women as “passive objects of male competition.” He calls for a new scenario that “acknowledges and explains the virtual absence of organized warfare among today’s human foragers, their egalitarian tendencies, and generosity with information and resources across groups.”26 By projecting recent post-agricultural preoccupations with female fidelity into their vision of prehistory, many theorists have Flint-stonized their way right into a cul-de-sac. Modern man’s seemingly instinctive impulse to control women’s sexuality is not an intrinsic feature of human nature. It is a response to specific historical socioeconomic conditions—conditions very different from those in which our species evolved. This is key to understanding sexuality in the modern world. De Waal is correct that this hierarchical, aggressive, and territorial behavior is of recent origin for our species. It is, as we’ll see, an adaptation to the social world that arose with agriculture.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Well, ask yourself what might change if everyone knew that women do (or, at least, can, in the right circumstances) enjoy sex as much as men, not to mention nine times more, as Tiresias claimed? What if Darwin was wrong about the sexuality of the human female—led astray by his Victorian bias? What if Victoria’s biggest secret was that men and women are both victims of false propaganda about our true sexual natures and the war between the sexes—still waged today—is a false-flag operation, a diversion from our common enemy? We’re being misled and misinformed by an unfounded yet constantly repeated mantra about the naturalness of wedded bliss, female sexual reticence, and happily-ever-after sexual monogamy—a narrative pitting man against woman in a tragic tango of unrealistic expectations, snowballing frustration, and crushing disappointment. Living under this tyranny of two, as author and media critic Laura Kipnis puts it, we carry the weight of “modern love’s central anxiety,” namely, “the expectation that romance and sexual attraction can last a lifetime of coupled togetherness despite much hard evidence to the contrary.”21 We build our most sacred relationships on the battleground where evolved appetites clash with the romantic mythology of monogamous marriage. As Andrew J. Cherlin recounts in The Marriage-Go-Round, this unresolved conflict between what we are and what many wish we were results in “a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else.” Cherlin’s research shows that “[t]here are more partners in the personal lives of Americans than in the lives of people of any other Western country.”22 But we rarely dare to confront the contradiction at the heart of our mistaken ideal of marriage head-on. And if we do? During a routine discussion of yet another long-married politician caught with his pants down, comedian/social critic Bill Maher asked the guests on his TV show to consider the unspoken reality underlying many of these situations: “When a man’s been married twenty years,” Maher said, “he doesn’t want to have sex, or his wife doesn’t want to have sex with him. Whatever it is. What is the right answer? I mean, I know he’s bad for cheating, but what’s the right answer? Is it—to just suck it up and live the rest of your life passionless, and imagine somebody else when you’re having sex with your wife the three days a year that you have sex?” After an extended, awkward silence, one of Maher’s panelists eventually suggested, “The right answer is to get out of the relationship…. Move on. I mean, you’re an adult.” Another agreed, noting, “Divorce is legal in this country.” The third, normally outspoken journalist P. J. O’Rourke, just looked down at his shoes and said nothing. “Move on?” Really? Is abandonment of one’s family the “adult” option for dealing with the inherent conflict between socially sanctioned romantic ideals and the inconvenient truths of sexual passion?23

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “That it depended on you,” he repeated. “I meant to say ... I meant to say ... I came for this ... to be my wife!” he brought out, not knowing what he was saying; but feeling that the most terrible thing was said, he stopped short and looked at her.... She was breathing heavily, not looking at him. She was feeling ecstasy. Her soul was flooded with happiness. She had never anticipated that the utterance of love would produce such a powerful effect on her. But it lasted only an instant. She remembered Vronsky. She lifted her clear, truthful eyes, and seeing his desperate face, she answered hastily: “That cannot be ... forgive me.” A moment ago, and how close she had been to him, of what importance in his life! And how aloof and remote from him she had become now! “It was bound to be so,” he said, not looking at her. He bowed, and was meaning to retreat. Chapter 14 But at that very moment the princess came in. There was a look of horror on her face when she saw them alone, and their disturbed faces. Levin bowed to her, and said nothing. Kitty did not speak nor lift her eyes. “Thank God, she has refused him,” thought the mother, and her face lighted up with the habitual smile with which she greeted her guests on Thursdays. She sat down and began questioning Levin about his life in the country. He sat down again, waiting for other visitors to arrive, in order to retreat unnoticed. Five minutes later there came in a friend of Kitty’s, married the preceding winter, Countess Nordston. She was a thin, sallow, sickly, and nervous woman, with brilliant black eyes. She was fond of Kitty, and her affection for her showed itself, as the affection of married women for girls always does, in the desire to make a match for Kitty after her own ideal of married happiness; she wanted her to marry Vronsky. Levin she had often met at the Shtcherbatskys’ early in the winter, and she had always disliked him. Her invariable and favorite pursuit, when they met, consisted in making fun of him. “I do like it when he looks down at me from the height of his grandeur, or breaks off his learned conversation with me because I’m a fool, or is condescending to me. I like that so; to see him condescending! I am so glad he can’t bear me,” she used to say of him. She was right, for Levin actually could not bear her, and despised her for what she was proud of and regarded as a fine characteristic—her nervousness, her delicate contempt and indifference for everything coarse and earthly.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She looked fluffy and frolicsome, dressed à la gamine , showed a generous amount of smooth leg, knew how to stress the white of a bare instep by the black of a velvet slipper, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and dirndled, and shook her short curly blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable. After a brief ceremony at the mairie , I took her to the new apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her wear, before I touched her, a girl’s plain nightshirt that I had managed to filch from the linen closet of an orphanage. I derived some fun from that nuptial night and had the idiot in hysterics by sunrise. But reality soon asserted itself. The bleached curl revealed its melanic root; the down turned to prickles on a shaved shin; the mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed it with love, disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the corresponding part in a treasured portrait of her toadlike dead mama; and presently, instead of a pale little gutter girl, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba . This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her only asset was a muted nature which did help to produce an odd sense of comfort in our small squalid flat: two rooms, a hazy view in one window, a brick wall in the other, a tiny kitchen, a shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no whitenecked maiden to stab me. We had quite a few cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir , I working at a rickety table. We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. The grocer opposite had a little daughter whose shadow drove me mad; but with Valeria’s help I did find after all some legal outlets to my fantastic predicament. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu and had most of our meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte where there were wine stains on the table cloth and a good deal of foreign babble. And next door, an art dealer displayed in his cluttered window a splendid, flamboyant, green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American estampe—a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds. These burst. In the summer of 1939 mon oncle d’Amérique died bequeathing me an annual income of a few thousand dollars on condition I came to live in the States and showed some interest in his business. This prospect was most welcome to me.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  From our perspective on the far bank, Helen Fisher, Frans de Waal, and a few others seem to have ventured out onto the bridge that crosses over the rushing stream of unfounded assumptions about human sexuality—but they dare not cross it. Their positions seem, to us, to be compromises that strain against the most parsimonious interpretation of data they know as well as anyone. Confronted with the unignorable fact that human beings sure don’t act like a monogamous species, they make excuses for our “aberrant” (yet perplexingly consistent) behavior. Fisher explains the phenomenon of worldwide marital breakdown by arguing that the pair bond evolved to last only until the infant grows to a child who can keep up with the foraging band without fatherly assistance. For his part, de Waal still argues that the nuclear family is “intrinsically human” and the pair-bond is “the key to the incredible level of cooperation that marks our species.” But he then suggestively concludes that “our success as a species is intimately tied to the abandonment of the bonobo lifestyle and to a tighter control over sexual expressions.”27 “Abandonment?” Since it’s impossible to abandon what one never had, de Waal would presumably agree that hominid sexuality was, at some point, profoundly similar to that of the relaxed, promiscuous bonobo—although he never says so explicitly. Nor has he ventured to say when or why our ancestors abandoned that way of being.28 Table 2: Comparison of Bonobo, Chimp, and Human Socio-sexual Behavior and Infant Development29 Human and bonobo females copulate throughout menstrual cycle, as well as during lactation and pregnancy. Female chimps are sexually active only 25–40 percent of their cycle. [image file=image_rsrc680.jpg] Human and bonobo infants develop much more slowly than chimpanzees, beginning to play with others at about 1.5 years, much later than chimps. [image file=image_rsrc680.jpg] Like humans, female bonobos return to the group immediately after giving birth and copulate within months. They exhibit little fear of infanticide, which has never been observed in bonobos—captive or free-living. [image file=image_rsrc680.jpg] Bonobos and humans enjoy many different copulatory positions, with ventral-ventral (missionary position) appearing to be preferred by bonobo females and rear-entry by males, while chimps prefer rear-entry almost exclusively. [image file=image_rsrc680.jpg] Bonobos and humans often gaze into each other’s eyes when copulating and kiss each other deeply. Chimps do neither. [image file=image_rsrc680.jpg] The vulva is located between the legs and oriented toward the front of the body in humans and bonobos, rather than oriented toward the rear as in chimps and other primates. [image file=image_rsrc680.jpg] Food sharing is highly associated with sexual activity in humans and bonobos, only moderately so in chimps. [image file=image_rsrc680.jpg] There is a high degree of variability in potential sexual combinations in humans and bonobos; homosexual activity is common in both, but rare in chimps.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Had he not insured it sufficiently? I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of me. I saw him scamper away, and my chauffeur shook his head with a soft chuckle. En route, I swore to myself I would not dream of staying in Ramsdale under any circumstance but would fly that very day to the Bermudas or the Bahamas or the Blazes. Possibilities of sweetness on technicolor beaches had been trickling through my spine for some time before, and McCoo’s cousin had, in fact, sharply diverted that train of thought with his well-meaning but as it transpired now absolutely inane suggestion. Speaking of sharp turns: we almost ran over a meddlesome suburban dog (one of those who lie in wait for cars) as we swerved into Lawn Street. A little further, the Haze house, a white-frame horror, appeared, looking dingy and old, more gray than white—the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of shower. I tipped the chauffeur and hoped he would immediately drive away so that I might double back unnoticed to my hotel and bag; but the man merely crossed to the other side of the street where an old lady was calling to him from her porch. What could I do? I pressed the bell button. A colored maid let me in—and left me standing on the mat while she rushed back to the kitchen where something was burning that ought not to burn. The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s “Arlésienne.” A door ajar to the right afforded a glimpse of a living room, with some more Mexican trash in a corner cabinet and a striped sofa along the wall. There was a staircase at the end of the hallway, and as I stood mopping my brow (only now did I realize how hot it had been out-of-doors) and staring, to stare at something, at an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest, there came from the upper landing the contralto voice of Mrs. Haze, who leaning over the banisters inquired melodiously, “Is that Monsieur Humbert?” A bit of cigarette ash dropped from there in addition.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin felt so resolute and serene that no answer, he fancied, could affect him. But he had never dreamed of what Stepan Arkadyevitch replied. “She’s never thought of being married, and isn’t thinking of it; but she’s very ill, and the doctors have sent her abroad. They’re positively afraid she may not live.” “What!” cried Levin. “Very ill? What is wrong with her? How has she...?” While they were saying this, Laska, with ears pricked up, was looking upwards at the sky, and reproachfully at them. “They have chosen a time to talk,” she was thinking. “It’s on the wing.... Here it is, yes, it is. They’ll miss it,” thought Laska. But at that very instant both suddenly heard a shrill whistle which, as it were, smote on their ears, and both suddenly seized their guns and two flashes gleamed, and two bangs sounded at the very same instant. The snipe flying high above instantly folded its wings and fell into a thicket, bending down the delicate shoots. “Splendid! Together!” cried Levin, and he ran with Laska into the thicket to look for the snipe. “Oh, yes, what was it that was unpleasant?” he wondered. “Yes, Kitty’s ill.... Well, it can’t be helped; I’m very sorry,” he thought. “She’s found it! Isn’t she a clever thing?” he said, taking the warm bird from Laska’s mouth and packing it into the almost full game bag. “I’ve got it, Stiva!” he shouted. Chapter 16 On the way home Levin asked all details of Kitty’s illness and the Shtcherbatskys’ plans, and though he would have been ashamed to admit it, he was pleased at what he heard. He was pleased that there was still hope, and still more pleased that she should be suffering who had made him suffer so much. But when Stepan Arkadyevitch began to speak of the causes of Kitty’s illness, and mentioned Vronsky’s name, Levin cut him short. “I have no right whatever to know family matters, and, to tell the truth, no interest in them either.” Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled hardly perceptibly, catching the instantaneous change he knew so well in Levin’s face, which had become as gloomy as it had been bright a minute before. “Have you quite settled about the forest with Ryabinin?” asked Levin. “Yes, it’s settled. The price is magnificent; thirty-eight thousand. Eight straight away, and the rest in six years. I’ve been bothering about it for ever so long. No one would give more.” “Then you’ve as good as given away your forest for nothing,” said Levin gloomily. “How do you mean for nothing?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a good-humored smile, knowing that nothing would be right in Levin’s eyes now. “Because the forest is worth at least a hundred and fifty roubles the acre,” answered Levin.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  clear enough should be to thee the excellence of that other, concerning whom, ere my coming, Thomas was so courteous. But the track which the highest part of its circumference took hath been so abandoned, that there now is mould where once was crust. His household, who marched straight with feet in his footprints, hath turned so round, that the toe striketh on the heel’s imprint; and soon shall sight be had of the harvest of the ill-culture, when the tare shall wail that the chest is reft from it. 21 I well allow that whoso should search leaf after leaf through our volume, might yet find a page where he might read; I am as I was wont; but not from Casale, nor from Acquasparta shall he be, whence come such to our Scripture that the one shirketh, the other draweth it yet tighter. 22 I am the life of Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, who in the great offices did ever place behind the left-hand care. 28 Illuminato and Augustine 24 are here, who were of the first unshod poor brethren, that with the cord made themselves friends to God. Hugh of St. Victor 25 is here with them, and Pietro Mangiadore, and Pietro Ispano, 26 who giveth light below in twelve booklets; Nathan the prophet, the metropolitan Chrysostom, and Anselm, and that Donatus 27 who deigned to set his hand to the first art; Rabanus 28 is here, and there shineth at my side the Calabrian abbot Joachim, 29 dowed with prophetic spirit. To emulous speech of so great paladin moved me the enkindled courtesy of brother Thomas and his well-judged discourse, and moved this company with me.” 1. The horizontal sweep of a millstone is contrasted with the vertical motion of a wheel in Conv. iii. 5. The Apostles are frequently represented in art as working the Divine mill, and it may be under the influence of this association, as well as the direct fascination of the sight of a mill at work, that Dante compares the circling of these lights of the Church to the sweep of a millstone. 2. The reference is general. “Every song and every note produced in the throat or in the tubes of musical instruments is but a faint reflection of the heavenly music.” 3. This passage is often cited to illustrate Dante’s love of packing one simile within another. The two circles of lights were like a double rainbow (Juno’s handmaid = Iris = Rainbow), and one rainbow is like the echo of another, and the nymph Echo was consumed by love as vapours are consumed by the Sun. Note the characteristic combination of Pagan mythology and Hebrew legend. Cf. Gen. ix. 8-17. 4. The Italian presents a difficulty; ultima = the “last” (counting from outside inwards), being used for intima = the “inmost.” 5. The speaker is Bonaventura (1221-1274), known as the Seraphic Doctor. He became General of the Franciscans in 1256. 6. Cf.

• From Querelle (1953)

  She was literally shedding it. First, her shoulders appeared, white and divided from her torso by the narrow straps of velvet or satin holding up her slip and her breasts under all that black lace and a pink bra; then Madame Lysiane stepped out of the dress, ready for the joys of the bed. Very upright on her extremely high and pointed Louis Quinze heels she advanced toward the bed on which Robert was already reclining. She gazed at him, not a thought in her head. Suddenly she turned round, exclaiming : ''Ah!" and headed for her mahogany dressing table. She took off the four rings she wore on her fingers, and then, with motions equaiiy well-rounded, but even more sweeping than befo e, she undid her hair. As the shivers running through a lion's body make desert or jungle vibrate from ground to sky, so her room shook, from the short-pile rug to the last fold of the window curtains, when Madame Lysiane shook her head, her angry mane, her shoulders white as alabaster (or mother-of-pearl ) : proudly she set out, every night, to vanquish the already conquered male. She came back to the bubbling brook under the palm trees where Robert went on smoking, oblivious to everything but the physical aspect of the ceiling. "\Von't you let me in?" Casuaiiy, he flicked aside the comer of the sheet, so that his mistress could join him on the bed. Such lack of gallantry hurt �1adame Lysiane, yet that hurt was one she delighted in every time, because it showed that there still were realms to conquer. She was a courageous, yet vanquished woman. Her physical splendor, the wealth of her breasts and her hair, the total opulence of her body, as it offered itself to men, was, by its very nature (because all opulence is virginal ) , easily conquered and enjoyed. It is not beauty we are talking about, in her case. 180 I JEAN GENET Beauty can be an obstacle more fearsome than barbed wire: it can be pointed and barbed, it can kill at a distance, like a burst of gunfire. The opulence of Madame Lysiane's flesh was the exact form of her innate generosity. Her skin was white and soft. As soon as she had stretched out (Madame Lysiane hated the expression "go to bed," and respecting her sense of propriety we won't use it when discussing her, but hope to say a word or two about the "delicacy" of forbidden words ) , stretched out, she looked around the room. With a slow, circu·

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s efforts to be an attentive father and husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and children. He had bachelor tastes, and it was in accordance with them that he shaped his life. On his return to Moscow he informed his wife with pride that everything was ready, that the house would be a little paradise, and that he advised her most certainly to go. His wife’s staying away in the country was very agreeable to Stepan Arkadyevitch from every point of view: it did the children good, it decreased expenses, and it left him more at liberty. Darya Alexandrovna regarded staying in the country for the summer as essential for the children, especially for the little girl, who had not succeeded in regaining her strength after the scarlatina, and also as a means of escaping the petty humiliations, the little bills owing to the wood-merchant, the fishmonger, the shoemaker, which made her miserable. Besides this, she was pleased to go away to the country because she was dreaming of getting her sister Kitty to stay with her there. Kitty was to be back from abroad in the middle of the summer, and bathing had been prescribed for her. Kitty wrote that no prospect was so alluring as to spend the summer with Dolly at Ergushovo, full of childish associations for both of them. The first days of her existence in the country were very hard for Dolly. She used to stay in the country as a child, and the impression she had retained of it was that the country was a refuge from all the unpleasantness of the town, that life there, though not luxurious—Dolly could easily make up her mind to that—was cheap and comfortable; that there was plenty of everything, everything was cheap, everything could be got, and children were happy. But now coming to the country as the head of a family, she perceived that it was all utterly unlike what she had fancied.