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 The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  ‘LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST’? Mr. Chamberlain had come to get a gift of 35 million pounds from South Africa, and to win the hearts of Englishmen and Boers. So he gave a cold shoulder to the Indian deputation. ‘You know,’ he said ‘that the Imperial Government has little control over self- governing Colonies. Your grievances seem to be genuine. I shall do what I can, if you wish to live in their midst.’ The reply cast a chill over the members of the deputation. I was also disappointed. It was an eye- opener for us all, and I saw that we should start with our work de novo. I explained the situation to my colleagues. As a matter of fact there was nothing wrong about Mr. Chamberlain’s reply. It was well that he did not mince matters. He had brought home to us in a rather gentle way the rule of might being right or the law of the sword. But sword we had none. We scarcely had the nerve and the muscle even to receive sword-cuts. Mr. Chamberlain had given only a short time to the sub- continent. If Shrinagar to Cape Comorin is 1,900 miles, Durban to Capetown is not less than 1,100 miles, and Mr. Chamberlain had to cover the long distance at hurricane speed. From Natal he hastened to the Transvaal. I had to prepare the case for the Indians there as well and submit it to him. But how was I get to Pretoria? Our people there were not in a position to procure the necessary legal facilities for my getting to them in time. The War had reduced the Transvaal to a howling wilderness. There were neither provisions nor clothing available. Empty or

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  School in Ahmedabad. I have an impression that the nephew was satisfied with what I could give him. Unfortunately he died in the prime of youth after a brief illness. The other three of my sons have never been at a public school, though they did get some regular schooling in an improvised school which I started for the children of Satyagrahi parents in South Africa. These experiments were all inadequate. I could not devote to the children all the time I had wanted to give them. My inability to give them enough attention and other unavoidable causes prevented me from providing them with the literary education I had desired, and all my sons have had complaints to make against me in this matter. Whenever they come across an M.A. or a B.A., or even a matriculate, they seem to feel the handicap of a want of school education. Nevertheless I am of opinion that, if I had insisted on their being educated somehow at public schools, they would have been deprived of the training that can be had only at the school of experience, or from constant contact with the parents. I should never have been free, as I am today, from anxiety on their score, and the artificial education that they could have had in England or South Africa, torn from me, would never have taught them the simplicity and the spirit of service that they show in their lives today, while their artificial ways of living might have been a serious handicap in my public work. Therefore, though I have not been able to give them a literary education either to their or to my satisfaction, I am not quite sure, as I look back on my past years, that I have not done my duty by them to the best of my capacity. Nor do I regret not having sent them to public schools. I have always felt that the undesirable traits I see today in my eldest son are an echo of my own undisciplined and unformulated early life. I regard that time as a period of half-baked knowledge and indulgence. It coincided with the most impressionable years of my eldest son, and naturally he has refused to regard it as my time of indulgence and inexperience. He has on

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Mother was carrying her huge belly ever more uneasily, in spite of her fortitude. She never complained, and she expressed only one longing — to ride in the car of one of our neighbors, which was granted to her at once. But one could distinguish in her vague looks a weariness that weighed on her as she concentrated on this unusual pregnancy, almost unable, it seemed, to attend at the same time to outfitting me for my bar mitzvah and preparing for the baby, or the babies, as some women predicted, at the same time. Thus, she attended only to the most urgent things, and set about readying baby clothes. As for me, I had a few ideas of my own about my bar mitzvah outfit, and was quite violent in my demands that they become realities. So the purchases were finally entrusted to my Aunt Rbiqua, my father’s sister, a tall mummified creature, all wrinkles and shortsightedness, as dry as a grasshopper, who had found herself a husband only late in life and had driven him to despair with her total lack of understanding for the sexual act. (The poor man used to complain bitterly: “I’ve worn my knees out...”) Anyhow, this old mole agreed to take me along to choose an artificial silk shirt, a new cap, and a prayer shawl, a taleth; but she never consulted me once and I remained speechless. She held my fingers tight in her hand that was hard as wood and made me trot along beside her too fast, all through the afternoon, while she went with her own head in the air, far above mine, peering at the storewindows with her almost sightless eyes. When I got back home I was tired out, my nerves on edge, full of disappointment and almost ready to weep. All the pleasure that I had hoped to derive from the event was crumbling away bit by bit, and I began to hope desperately that the baby would turn out to be a girl, as girls are not entitled to any ceremony and this would make the whole party mine.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Marian and Kathy and my mother decided to rent a house together. My mother offered to find the house, and so she did. It was the most scabrous eyesore in West Seattle. Paint hung in strips off the sides, the bare wood weathered to a gray, antlerish sheen. The yard was kneehigh in weeds. The sagging eaves had been propped up with long planks, and the front steps were rotted through. To get inside you had to go around to the back door. Behind the house was a partly collapsed barn that little kids liked to sneak into, drawn there by the chance to play with broken glass and rusty tools. My mother took it on the spot. The price was right, next to nothing, and she believed in its possibilities, a word used often by the man who showed it to her. He insisted on meeting us there at night and led us through the house like a thief, describing its good points in a whisper. My mother, listening with narrowed eyes to show that she was shrewd and would not be easily taken in, ended up agreeing with him that the place was just a few steps away from being a real nice home. She signed the contract on the hood of the man’s car while he held a flashlight over the paper. The other houses on the street were small, obsessively groomed Cape Cods and colonials with lawns like putting greens. Ivy grew on the chimneys. Each of the colonials had a black, spread-winged eagle above its door. The people who lived in these houses came outside to watch us move in. They looked very glum. Later on we found out that our house, the original farmhouse in the area, had recently been scheduled for demolition and then spared at the last hour by the cynical manipulations of its owner. Kathy and Marian went mute when they saw it. Shoulders hunched, faces set, they carried their boxes up the walk without looking to right or left. That night they slammed and banged and muttered in their rooms. But in the end my mother wore them down. She gave no sign that she saw any difference between our house and the houses of our neighbors except for a few details that we ourselves, during a spare hour now and then, could easily put right. She helped us picture the house after we had made these repairs. She was so good at making

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  subscribers and to try to recruit new ones. People didn’t like to pay me. Even the honest ones put me off again and again. Then there were the deadbeats. They either told me sob stories about lost checks and doctor bills or turned off the lights and the TV when they heard me coming, then whispered and peered out the blinds until I gave up and left. In the winter my shoes were always wet and my head stuffed up, my nose chapped and red. I was bored crazy. One of my ways of distracting myself was to tally up over and over again, to the last penny, the money I had made. I said, “What happened to it?” My mother shrugged and said, “Beats me.” She was ready for a change of subject. Her tolerance was good for most things, but she had no time for crybabies. Whining turned her to ice. I didn’t stop. “That was my money,” I said. “I know,” she said. “He stole it.” “He probably meant to pay you back. I don’t know. It’s gone. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that. I said I’d pay the school bills.” I pulled a face. “It’s probably a little my fault too.” She said she should have known better than to let Dwight handle the money, she should have insisted on a joint account. But it was a point of pride with him to deal with the finances and she hadn’t wanted to get him all worked up over it. She’d wanted all of us to get along. We finished our Cokes and walked up the street to the car, my mother moving with the buoyancy of someone who has just dropped a burden. When she was worried she wore a pale, tight-lipped mask. Lately it had started to become her own face. Now the mask was gone. She looked young and pretty. The day was warm, the air hazy with cement dust. Logging trucks banged past us through the town, grinding gears and spewing black exhaust. As we walked we made plans. Considered different possibilities. We were ourselves again—restless, scheming, poised for flight. CHUCK CONGRATULATED ME when I told him about the scholarship, but I was careful not to let my happiness show too much. His day of reckoning was at

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One night, I was suddenly shaken and sent, still almost asleep, to finish my night’s rest on the first floor, in Uncle Aroun’s home. Later, these interruptions of my slumber became a familiar occurrence. Whenever my mother was pregnant and I was awakened in the middle of the night, I guessed, though still half asleep, that she was once more being delivered of a child. The next morning, the house was full of busy women, far too many of them wanting to open a closet door or to empty out one and the same basin, in fact all squabbling for the sacred honor of serving a woman just out of childbirth. This time, there had indeed been a girl, but there had also been a boy. On the door of the bedroom, the red announcement had been pinned, decorated with a fish that was intended to protect the young male against the evil eye. My father was beaming as he served drinks of raki to the guests. He held the bottle in his hand as he followed our only glass that went the round of all who were present and had to be filled again and again. To temper the exquisite burning of the liquor, he offered, in his other hand, a plateful of green olives. Birth is a business for grownups, and I couldn’t fully understand their joy. As nobody was paying any attention to me, I pushed the bedroom door open. The heat was terrific, with two earthenware fire baskets full of glowing embers to warm the room. My mother was asleep, bloodlessly pale, her brow glazed with sweat, terrifyingly thin. Seeing her in such a state, I began to doubt the sublime quality of the event. Then I noticed the children. I could see, on the divan, two hideous purplish-red babies, all wrapped in cotton wool and apparently of the same thickness from one end to the other, their faces all wrinkled, like caricatures. They were identical and I couldn’t distinguish the boy, my inescapable partner in the forthcoming feast day. I knew that the newborn child had to be circumcised eight days after birth, so that I could celebrate my bar mitzvah the following Thursday. The next day, I announced this to all my friends. But a new disappointment awaited me on my return from school: as the twins were too weak, the mohel had asked for an additional delay to circumcise the boy. So my bar mitzvah, of course, was delayed too, until the child would be stronger. I would gladly have stuck my finger into the eye of this larval being.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  For years, I’ve advocated to readers, to friends, and to anyone who will listen in line for the Pret A Manger bathroom that the answer to bad sex is communication. Simply communicate! Don’t fake your orgasms. Ask for what you want [image file=image_rsrc1XX.jpg] Now, after years of tedious emotional and scientific research, I’m convinced that it’s not so simple. So, no, I did not speak up. I did not say, “No more nipples,” or “It takes me out of the moment when you keep your newsboy cap on.” I knew I would never see him again, and communicating with a human person—who is alternately fragile and capable of harm—requires a level of effort that doesn’t always feel worth it, when the alternative is simply reclining and waiting, or speeding things up with a fake orgasm, your romantic life already a dazzling web of deceit, so he can ejaculate and you can heat up the pad Thai in your fridge. When the moment to penetrate became obvious—because in a cis-heteronormative society, penetration can feel obvious, inevitable—I performed the requisite choreography. While now you might be thinking, How sad and embarrassing for Maria, as I am, the problem is bigger than my personal poor judgment, as astounding as it may seem. The conceit of this book, and the research supporting it, is that I am not alone in enduring medium bad to very bad sex again and again and again, even though I know better, even though I own good vibrators, even though my therapist is this close to leaving the field because I “don’t want to be helped.” Regrettably for me, my therapist, and the ever-changing cast of characters I date, my reckoning with bad sex has been gradual and humiliating, like most reckonings that sprawl through your twenties and remain unresolved. The realization that sex is meant to be pleasurable, not a method-acted performance of pleasure so gripping even the actor believes it, sunk in far later than I’d like to admit. But I’ll admit it, here, as a public service: my sexual history has been a grand disappointment. In fact, I am joined by a generation—actually, many generations—of sexually active people who are profoundly dissatisfied with their sex lives and aren’t doing much about it, because there are so many other things to take care of, like fighting with health insurance providers and thinking about reading the new Jonathan Franzen. The Bad Sex Problem is especially noteworthy among millennials and Generation Z, who are famously having less sex than generations before them, a phenomenon known as “the sex recession” that’s actually affecting all age groups. Hundreds of young people I’ve spoken to—of myriad genders, sexualities, and relationship statuses—are experiencing quiet burnout in their sex lives. Experts hypothesize that this “recession”—terminology that suggests there is a healthy, correct amount of sex to have—is fueled by antidepressants, social media, ruinous porn use, and the normalization of getting married later or never at all.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  Then there is bad sex among single people, wherein lack of comfort and familiarity is one of the biggest issues. In fact, bad sex with one-off partners is among the most laughably bad, I am devastated to report, and my upstairs neighbor can regrettably corroborate. “I’d say most of the casual, consensual sex I’ve had was in the meh to bad range,” a twenty-eight-year-old cis straight woman told me. “A few common features include jabby fingering, lackluster oral where it feels like they want to do it for points but don’t actually have a technique, and flipping me over every two seconds because they watch a lot of mainstream porn where shots are fifteen seconds long so staying in one position feels too boring.” The party line among sex therapists is that good sex comes with practice and a level of comfort that’s difficult to cultivate with strangers, though many people do—plenty of people in the non-monogamy community told me that casual sex is the most pleasurable for them. If you’re in a relationship, and you do have the perceived advantage of emotional connection, you can easily fall into sexual ruts that feel way too exhausting to climb out of. We’re tired! Did you know that human greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for thousands of deaths each year? There are so many things to worry about. I’m not suggesting we worry about sex—anti-choice political leaders, select youth pastors, and our parents do enough of that for us—but rather, that we consider investing some of our (limited) energy into understanding the root causes of our sexual dissatisfaction so we can feel less of it. CULPRIT 1: ANHEDONIANumerous studies suggest that young people are experiencing growing rates of anhedonia, or the reduced motivation and capacity to feel pleasure, and the pandemic made things considerably worse across all populations.5 The term encapsulates a wide range of deficits in hedonic function, including major disruptions to the neural pathways that enable us to want and like things. Some researchers cite this anhedonic wave as one of the core phenomena fueling the sex recession, as it becomes harder to justify the work of coordinating sex when the experience doesn’t even feel pleasurable. Anhedonia is a principal symptom of many mental health conditions that are spiking in recent years, including substance abuse, major depression, and personality disorders.6 Recent studies show an alarming rise in psychological pain across all age groups, genders, races, and socioeconomic statuses, including a steep rise in clinical anxiety and depression, which share anhedonia as a common clinical feature.7 In one study, the American Psychological Association found the rise in mental health disorders over the past decade to be particularly severe among young adults, with increased use of digital media hypothesized as a driving factor.8

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Even when they were gazing in gratitude on the cross as the effective sign of God’s love, these concerns and the need to consolidate a Reformation in which abuses would not return to a half-taught church remained powerful. In thus giving (as it seems to me) the right answers to the wrong questions, the Reformers failed to challenge the larger heaven-and-hell framework itself (which Eastern theologians challenge to this day) or to think through what new creation and resurrection would actually mean or how they might come about. Of course, the great Reformers had a strong agenda for the reformation of society as well as theology. A good deal of their energies went into the attempts to create new kinds of Christian societies within European cities, like Calvin’s Geneva, and even countries, like Cromwell’s Britain. But the underlying eschatological framework remained in place. I have often reflected that if the Reformers had focused on Ephesians rather than Romans or Galatians, the entire history of Western Europe would have been different. In Ephesians 1:10 the divine purpose is to sum up, in the Messiah, all things in heaven and on earth. Romans 8 makes the same point, but the key passage, 8:18–24, has routinely been bracketed out, since it has been assumed that Paul’s talk in that chapter about “inheritance” and “glorification” is simply a roundabout way of speaking of “going to heaven.” That vision of a nonbodily ultimate “heaven” is a direct legacy of Plato and of those like the philosopher and biographer Plutarch, a younger contemporary of St. Paul, who interpreted Plato for his own day. It is Plutarch, not the New Testament (despite what one sometimes hears!), who suggested that humans in the present life are “exiled” from their true “home” in “heaven.” That vision of the future—an ultimate glory that has left behind the present world of space, time, and matter—sets the context for what, as we shall see, is a basically paganized vision of how one might attain such a future: a transaction in which God’s wrath was poured out against his son rather than against sinful humans. In particular, the churches of the Reformation, including my own, have often not known what to do with Easter itself. Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God’s new creation within the present world order. And with that failure many other things have been lost as well. I have written about this elsewhere, particularly in Surprised by Hope.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The days are surely coming, says YHWH, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says YHWH. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says YHWH: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know YHWH,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says YHWH; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (31:31–34) The “forgiveness of sins” was a huge, life-changing, world-changing reality, long promised and long awaited. It was the fulfillment of Israel’s hopes for restoration, coupled with the sense that when Israel was restored, this would somehow generate a new day for the whole human race. It is startling to reflect on just how diminished the average modern Western Christian vision of “hope,” of “inheritance,” or indeed of “forgiveness” itself has become. We have exchanged the glory of God for a mess of spiritualized, individualistic, and moralistic pottage. And in the middle of it we have radically distorted the meaning of the central gospel message: that, in accordance with the Bible, sins are forgiven through the Messiah’s death. We have domesticated the revolution. Three additional elements in this picture demand our attention. First, Isaiah declared that when Israel’s God returned, he would come back as king. That will conclude the present chapter, leaving the second and third for the following one, which are simply summarized here. The second theme is the belief that the final redemption might be achieved not merely in a context of intense sufferings for the people, but actually by means of that suffering. But throughout it all, third, the overwhelming theme would be that the “forgiveness of sins,” the “end of exile,” and all that went with them would be the dramatic expression of the divine covenant love. Each of these three elements is to be found within the varied pre-Christian expressions of Jewish hope. Each then played a large part in the early Christian understanding of what actually happened on the cross. Together they form the heart of that extraordinary event and of its continuing effects to this day and beyond. Kingdom of God

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  32. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the Publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him. JEROME. Thus much prefaced, the Lord brings forward a parable, to convict them of their irreligion, and shew them that the kingdom of God should be transferred to the Gentiles. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Those who are to be judged in this cause, He applies to as judges, that condemning themselves they might be shewn to be unworthy to be acquitted by any other. It is high confidence of the justness of a cause, that will entrust it to the decision of an adversary. But He veils the allusion to them in a parable, that they might not perceive that they were passing sentence upon themselves; A certain man had two sons. Who is he but God, who created all men, who being by nature Lord of all, yet would rather be loved as a father, than feared as a Lord. The elder son was the Gentile people, the younger the Jews, since from the time of Noah there had been Gentiles. And he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard. To day, i. e. during this age. He spoke with him, not face to face as man, but to his heart as God, instilling understanding through the senses. To work in the vineyard is to do righteousness; for to cultivate the whole thereof, I know not that any one man is sufficient. JEROME. He speaks to the Gentile people first, through their knowledge of the law of nature; Go and work in my vineyard; i. e. What you would not have done to you, that do not you to others. (Tobit 4:16.) He answers haughtily, I will not. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. For the Gentiles from the beginning leaving God and his righteousness, and going over to idols and sins, seem to make answer in their thoughts, We will not do the righteousness of God. JEROME. But when, at the coming of the Saviour, the Gentile people, having done penitence, laboured in God’s vineyard, and atoned by their labour for the obstinacy of their refusal, this is what is said, But afterward he repented, and went. The second son is the Jewish people who made answer to Moses, All that the Lord hath said unto us we will do. (Exod. 24:3.)

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Now that it was no longer necessary to confess one’s status as a pauper in public, I allowed myself to hope again. At noon I asked for permission to put my name down for the summer camp. My mother angrily refused. Was I undernourished? Did I find fault with the quality of my bed? Nowhere can one be happier than at home! The mere thought of wanting to leave my parents proved that I was a selfish son. This accusation of selfishness — I’ll hear it from my mother’s lips until her dying day, and always as a comment on actions that seemed to me to be legitimate enough, in fact necessary as far as my own life is concerned. For all petty crimes, careless hurts, expressions of self-centered forgetfulness, all the peccadillos that weigh on my conscience, she was nevertheless indulgent enough. Here too, her primitive Bedouin mind and heart had unerringly distinguished what was essential from what was accessory. My father didn’t come home at noon for lunch. So we waited until the evening, sulking at each other, my mother as childish about it as I. But my father immediately hit upon the essential argument: it cost nothing. He calculated the price of such a vacation in the mountains if one had to pay for it. The total amount was too big for us to be able to refuse, which would be sheer waste. He probably reckoned also how much he would save while I was away. Anyhow, he decided that I could go there, and my mother, having nothing more to say, began to prepare my kit. It was all quite expensive: I was expected to take with me a number of things we didn’t own, a toothbrush, tooth paste, pajamas, and other items of which we had only a single sample for the whole family: a comb, a towel, a shoeshine kit.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I was astonished—both by her gross misperception of the new cotherapist and by her bitter, condemning tone. Why so harsh, Paula? I thought. Why so uncompassionate, so unchristian? The research grant stipulated that during the first six months of funding I hold a two-day workshop to consult with a panel of six experts in cancer treatment, research design, and statistical analysis. I invited Paula and four other group members to attend as patient consultants. The workshop was pure window dressing, a flagrant waste of time and money. But such is life in the field of federally sponsored contractual research: one simply learns to accommodate these charades. Paula, however, couldn’t accommodate. Calculating the amount of money spent in the two-day meeting (approximately $5,000), she railed at me about the immorality of the workshop: “Think of the help that five thousand dollars could provide for cancer patients!” Paula, I thought, I do love you, but you can be so muddle-headed. “Can’t you see,” I said, “that compromise is necessary? There’s no way that the five thousand dollars can be used for direct patient care. More important, we’ll lose our funding if we don’t follow federal guidelines for a consultation workshop. If we can persevere, complete the research, and demonstrate the value of our approach to dying cancer patients, we will benefit more patients, many more, than could be directly helped by the five thousand dollars. Let’s not be penny-wise and pound-foolish, Paula. Compromise, please,” I pleaded, “this one time.” I could sense her disappointment with me. Shaking her head slowly, she replied, “Compromise once, Irv? No such thing as a single compromise. They breed.” During the workshop the consultants all made the contribution for which they had been recruited (and were well paid). One discussed psychological testing to measure depression, anxiety, modes of coping, locus of control; another talked about health care delivery systems; another about community resources. Paula threw herself fully into the workshop. I assume she felt that with little time left, one doesn’t play a waiting game. She acted the Socratic gadfly to the solemn consultant panel. When, for example, they discussed such objective evaluation indices of maladaptive coping as a patient’s not getting out of bed, not dressing, withdrawing, and crying, Paula argued that for her, each of these activities was at times a stage of incubation that eventually ushered in another stage, sometimes a period of growth. She rejected the experts’ attempts to convince her that when one uses a large enough sample, aggregate scores, and a control group, such considerations can be easily dealt with statistically in the data analysis. Then came the moment when the workshop participants were asked to suggest important antecedent variables, that is, factors that might predict a person’s psychological adjustment to cancer. Dr. Lee, a cancer specialist, wrote these factors on the blackboard as the participants called them out: marital stability, available environmental resources, personality profile, family history. Raising her hand, Paula suggested, “How about courage? And spiritual depth?”

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “Pornography is not sex education, and it should never be looked at that way … and I don’t think the onus of responsibility is on us to educate the public,” said Jacky St. James, a pornography writer and director, in a 2019 NPR feature on the impact of porn. “I think that should be done in the school system and with parents, but certainly it’s not our responsibility. And I don’t think a lot of people are willing to accept that. They want to blame us for everything, and I’m not going to be blamed, because it’s a fantasy—that’s what we’re creating at the end of the day.”10 Wherever you place the blame, the problem remains that fantasies impact our realities. In that same NPR feature, a twenty-six-year-old college student recounted what it was like to have sex for the first time after years of watching porn. It hadn’t even dawned on him that the porn was fantasy, not a true-to-life portrayal, until he became sexually active. He was shocked, for example, that his first sexual experience didn’t last for an hour and a half. A twenty-three-year-old woman named Danielle said, “I don’t really know if my boyfriend has watched porn or not, but I feel like he has brought expectations into the relationship, and sometimes I feel bad because I can’t meet those expectations, so I feel like something’s wrong with me.” Studies show that adolescents’ exposure to porn shapes their attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and relationships well into adulthood. One study (of largely white, largely heterosexual men) found the average age of porn exposure to be 13.3, with the youngest being 5 and the oldest being 26. The younger the male was exposed to porn, “the more likely he was to want power over women later on.” The later the exposure, “the more likely he would want to engage in playboy behavior.”11 Playboy behavior, here, is defined as being sexually promiscuous. There’s a lot to dislike about this study, namely the homogeneity among participants and the gendering of promiscuity, but it helpfully illuminates the power of porn to shape behavior. Of course, there is nothing wrong with sexual promiscuity (I engage in playboy behavior myself), but when we let expectations override our genuine desires, we’re disappointed. We remain unsatisfied. “I think it’s lazy when we blame porn entirely for what people are into, when it’s a reflection of patriarchy and racism and all of those other isms and phobias,” Noel told me. “But, it still feeds it in many ways when you’re only seeing people enjoy pleasure who look a certain way. It almost feels like a message that gets internalized, that you don’t deserve it.” Noel said she is careful to be intentional about her porn consumption.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I applied successfully for a grant enabling me to evaluate the effectiveness of my therapeutic approach to the terminal breast cancer patient. It was a simple, straightforward project. I felt confident that my treatment approach improved the quality of life of the terminally ill patient and that I had only to develop an evaluation component—the administration of questionnaires before members entered the group and at regular intervals thereafter. Notice that I now begin to make more use of the first-person pronoun: “ I decided . . . I applied . . . my treatment approach.” As I look back and sift through the ashes of my relationship with Paula, I suspect that these first-person pronouns foreshadowed the corruption of our love. But as I lived through this period, I was unaware of even the most subtle spoilage. I remember only that Paula filled me with light and that I was her rock, the haven for which she had searched before we two were lucky enough to have found each another. Of one thing I am certain: it was shortly after the funded research officially began that things started to go wrong. First small hairline cracks, then crevices began to appear in our relationship. Perhaps the first clear sign that something was amiss was Paula’s telling me one day that she felt exploited by the research project. I thought this a curious remark because I had tried in every way possible to make her role in the project just what she requested: she interviewed all the new candidates for the groups, all women with metastatic breast cancer, and helped in the construction of the evaluation questionnaires. Furthermore, I had made sure she was well paid—far more than the average research assistant and more than she had requested. A few weeks later, in a disturbing conversation, she told me that she felt overworked and yearned for more time for herself. I felt sympathetic and tried to offer suggestions for reducing her frenetic pace. Shortly afterward I submitted to the National Cancer Institute my written report of the first stage of the research. Though I made sure to put Paula’s name first among the list of the research associates, I soon heard a rumor that she was dissatisfied about the amount of credit she had received. I made the mistake of paying this rumor little heed: it seemed uncharacteristic of Paula. A short time later I introduced Dr. Kingsley into one of the groups as a cotherapist—a young female psychologist who, though inexperienced in working with cancer patients, was extraordinarily intelligent, well intentioned, and dedicated. Soon Paula sought me out. “That woman,” she scolded, “is the coldest, most ungiving person I’ve ever encountered. Not in a thousand years will she be able to help any of the patients.” I was astonished—both by her gross misperception of the new cotherapist and by her bitter, condemning tone. Why so harsh, Paula?

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  I was not mindful of the sensations in my body. Rather, my mind was yanked in a million directions. Even in the years before I had a Chihuahua fully unraveling beside me during sex acts, my mind had no trouble yanking itself to other matters—perhaps to SunChips, or to my eventual death. I should have taken Bucatina’s advice. The man wasn’t attacking me, nor was I in danger of physical harm, but I was having sex for reasons that warranted pause, and was far too preoccupied to enjoy it. This was someone I’d been attempting to stop sleeping with for over a year. A year! The emotional whiplash of our relationship—being friends who had sex when we were bored—did not feel “healthy” or “good,” even though I wanted to feel like I could tolerate breezy sex arrangements like the punk rocker I fancy myself to be. It also became clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy sex, or sink into the moment enough to orgasm, if I didn’t figure out how to get out of my head and back into my body. On a technical level, there was nothing wrong with the sex we were having. But it was bad sex, because I was miserable. That was the last time I had sex for almost a year. The more time that passed, the more it felt like it could be the last time ever, which I knew was Bucatina’s deepest held wish. It has felt remarkable to be writing a book about sex when, for most of the process, I struggled to recall what sex was. But even more remarkable is the way this dry spell helped rehabilitate my relationship with sex. Not only am I now more likely to gravitate toward masturbation when horniness strikes, rather than text someone who chronically disappoints me—giving me the benefits of sex without the pesky agonizing—but I have restructured my standard for having partnered sex, in a way that feels validating and compassionate to both myself and my Chihuahua. This isn’t to say I’m not starved for touch, or that I don’t fantasize about sex with every tall person I pass in the streets, but I feel far more equipped with the tools, vocabulary, and sense of self that are prereqs for pleasurable sexual experiences. Ideally, long periods of sexual reflection are not spurred by a global pandemic, but the circumstances have allowed me to stop and consider my hopes for a sexual partner—something I’d never done before. Can you do these reflections when you’re not in a dry spell? Yes. But I’ve found, as have many sex therapists, that when you take away the pressure of sexual activity, it’s easier to go inward. Here’s a recent checklist of my sexual hopes and dreams, something I’d never have taken the time to do were I not languishing in isolation. I want to feel emotionally safe with my sexual partners.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “It’s almost like there’s a slow-moving, unorganized sex strike of people who can’t find good partners or don’t desire relationships and are just opting out instead,” a twenty-eight-year-old cis straight woman told me. Personally, I like the sound of that—opting out. The fact that people are having less sex doesn’t concern me. So much of sex is horrible! Plus, I strongly disagree that a dip in sexual activity signifies any sort of pathology, when there are perfectly healthy people who desire little sex or, among the asexual community, none at all. What concerns me, rather, is the sex that so many of us are having. Many of the factors likely contributing to this “recession,” like burnout and endemic loneliness, erode not only our capacity for sexual satisfaction, leading some to opt out, but also our capacity to care about satisfaction itself. In my not-too-distant days of faking orgasms to end sex I found tedious, I suspected I could have better sex if I vocalized “what I wanted,” as girl boss culture implores me to. I just didn’t care—about my pleasure, about my satisfaction. And there was no guaranteeing my partner would, either. As much as Laid and Confused is a deep dive into the cultural crisis of bad sex, it’s also a personal investigation: How and why could a sex expert (me) tolerate such consistently dreadful sex? And how come there are so many others suffering in silence alongside me? What are the social, political, and physical barriers to pleasure that block us from leading affirming sexual lives? The barriers are steep. I feel strongly, however, that working to eliminate, or at least minimize, bad sex from our lives is worth adding to the long list of shit we have to do. Because we are worthy of pleasure, and settling for bad sex can send us a different message. “What really strikes me about all this research on the sex recession is that it’s about the quantity of sex millennials are having, not the quality,” Julia Bartz, a New York therapist and author, told me. “If people were having less sex but saying it was more fulfilling, that’d be one thing. But clearly there’s a lot of discontent in this area.”

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  What makes bad sex so bad, or worse than any other bad thing? Is sex a big deal? Is it a deal? Is it more meaningful, more special than other physical interactions, like handshakes or hugs? If you’re religious, your answers to those questions might be yes. If the society you live in is shaped by religious ideals, your answers to those questions might be yes. Those answers—and anyone’s personal relationship with sex—is valid. But can we explain why sex is special without relying on belief systems? Are we—am I—justified in demanding more of sex than we demand of other activities? I get bad haircuts all the time, and yet I’m not moved to write a book about it (though maybe that’s what it will take for my stylist to stop gaslighting me into blunt bobs). The question of sex’s “specialness” stumps legal scholars, too. In the eyes of the law, sexual assault is considered worse than nonsexual physical assault. A sexual violation is considered more damaging than other violations—why? I agree that it is, but exceptionalizing sex can get us into trouble, too. The criminalization of sex work assumes that the exchange of sex is fundamentally different from other exchanges, and this harms sex workers by making it harder for them to organize, migrate, access health resources, and find socioeconomic security. The stigmatization of sex work and this belief that sex is special—more special than gas-pumping or tax-filing or toilet-fixing—marginalizes workers and leaves them more vulnerable to exploitation. Indeed, the law can’t tell us what sex means, nor is it equipped to fully define sexual justice. Therefore, we must collectively imagine a framework for sexual justice that’s bigger than consent, a limiting legal term. Especially when we’re talking about bad sex, which is all I ever talk about. I have spent a lifetime consenting to bad sex; does that mean all is well and good in Marialand? In Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice, Joseph J. Fischel writes, “Bad sex, even if consensual, can be really bad, and usually worse for women: not just uninspired, unenthusiastic, or boring, but unwanted, unpleasant, and painful. That problem cannot be addressed by consent. Worse still, the problem of bad-as-in-really-bad sex is automatically deprioritized by the consent-as-enthusiasm paradigm, which divides sex into the categories [of] awesome and rape and leaves unaccounted and unaddressed all the immiserating sex too many people, typically women, endure.”1

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  Title : Laid and Confused Author: Yagoda, Maria [image "Laid and Confused by Maria Yagoda" file=image_rsrc1XV.jpg] Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page Thank you for buying this St. Martin’s Publishing Group ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. [image file=image_rsrc1XW.jpg] Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. To the platonic loves of my life Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe. —Audre Lorde INTRODUCTIONI am twenty-eight years old and tired, staring dead-eyed at the condom wrapper in the trash as a man works on my nipples. Reclined on my back, chin propped above his head, I count down from one hundred while his tongue scrambles back and forth between my breasts, the idea of Pleasuring Someone inspiring a sort of mania in him. I lose myself in the vision of the trash can, its contents: a letter from the IRS, a clump of hair from my brush, an empty, family-sized bag of tortilla chips I can’t recall eating. Amid this internal spiral I offer small moans of pleasure, arching my back and grabbing his with a credible enthusiasm that surprises even me. I’m not invested in this man, yet I remain committed to curating a pleasurable experience for him. I resign myself to itemizing trash. As a longtime sex columnist, I pride myself on my forward-thinking approach to not just sex, but also consent, communication, and pleasure. Yet there I am, tolerating what struck me as cartoonishly bad sex and doing a familiar calculus of “What is easiest?” Is it easiest to see this through, losing ten-ish minutes of a life I’m not that precious about anyway, and try to glean some validation out of arousing this perfectly pleasant man? Or could I turn this around? Could I say something constructive yet alluring, the way that magazines taught me, something like, “It would be really sexy if you stopped growling”? Could I seductively displace his hands, at present squeezing nail-first into my back, and tack them onto my butt, which was crying out for attention?

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  In this book, I’ll be working with a hybrid of Martin’s and Hardy/Easton’s definitions of sex, but feel free to define it as you please. Like snowflakes and the spots on my Chihuahua’s belly, no two sexual experiences look the same, a truth that complicated my project. How could I speak broadly about sex and the people who have it, when there is so much variation among our lived experiences? Is there anything one can even say about sex that applies to nearly everyone, regardless of sexuality, gender, race, socioeconomic status, ability, and age? It turns out: yes. Emphatically yes. We all live in bodies that are sexualized, and we are all impacted by cis-heteropatriarchy and purity culture. But my research required moving away from an overreliance on academic studies, which have long marginalized LGBTQIA+ people. In keeping with that, and to prioritize precision, I won’t continue the tradition of using the word “woman” as shorthand for cis, heterosexual woman, and “man” as shorthand for cis, heterosexual man. As such, I clarify the sexual and gender identities of people I interview, as they define them and if they felt comfortable sharing that information. I’ll share here that I’m nonbinary and have spent most of my sexual life sleeping with men, but my attraction runs the gender gamut. (My gender identity journey is a whole different book that you’re welcome to buy later; I won’t be excavating that here, because even sex writers can have boundaries.) While including a wide range of gender and sexual identities under an umbrella thesis presented its challenges, I wanted to write a sex book for everyone. Because everyone deserves better sex. 1 THE SEX RECESSION AND ITS HIDDEN PROMISE “Sometimes bad sex becomes habitual and I can’t break the cycle. Even if physically and mentally it’s not enjoyable, on some subconscious level maybe I’m getting something out of it. Vindication? That I’m a ‘manly man’ and can ‘pleasure a woman’? Although if the second part isn’t true then, yeah, why continue?” —twenty-nine-year-old cis straight man I couldn’t tell you the exact moment I realized that sex wasn’t working for me, but I could tell you the era: post-college, pre-self-realization. I remember taking the subway one night from Bushwick to Manhattan to surprise my then-boyfriend, a tall scientist I didn’t particularly care for.