Disgust

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 Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Retching, Borman reached to capture the floating green globules, but there were too many of them, going in too many directions, to corral at once. Even when he caught them, they just split in two or four or eight and made their escape from his flailing hands. A moment later, the odor of the vomit reached Borman’s two crewmates. Overwhelmed, Anders reached for his gas mask. “You’re not supposed to use those!” Lovell said. “To hell with that, I’m using it,” Anders replied. He opened the oxygen supply to maximum, then turned his attention to Borman. From below, he could see a greenish-brown blob, about the size of a golf ball, moving toward him. For a moment, the physicist in him took over, and Anders followed the object with wonder as it oscillated in three dimensions, a movement impossible on Earth, and quivered toward the ceiling. Anders’s instinct was to find a camera and photograph the alien wonder, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away as it rose higher and then, about eighteen inches from his chest, split like the atoms he’d seen in science films, one wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction. Anders thought, That’s Isaac Newton. That’s conservation of momentum. Now one of the pieces was heading toward Lovell, who could do no more than watch it, eyes narrowing as it hit him in the chest and spread like an uncooked egg against the white cloth of his coveralls. Lovell reached for a towelette and tried to wipe the mess away, but his and Anders’s troubles were only starting. Floating toward them from below were spinning blobs of feces, each turning on its own axis. If they had been solid clumps, Lovell and Anders might have had a chance to dodge or capture them, but Borman had diarrhea. Lovell and Anders grabbed as many wipes as they could find and began hunting down the fluttering pieces, netting them like butterflies. For several minutes, the three men worked to clean the cabin. After restoring some order, Lovell and Anders could see that Borman was very sick. The situation, Anders thought, needed to be reported to Houston right away. “Absolutely not,” Borman said. Anders understood his reaction. Borman was a test pilot in his bones; no one with his instincts or credentials would want the world to know

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  for the first time. To this day, the official Chinese attitude to Catholicism is that it is different from ‘Christianity’ – that is, Protestantism – since the two religions arrived at different times in Chinese history. Protestant penetration was made possible by a series of treaties with European powers initiated by the British in 1842, the result of wars presenting a different face of Britain from that so lauded in Lecky’s pronouncement on abolitionism. Simultaneous with that ‘perfectly virtuous’ act was a policy illustrating the selective imperial morality of the British, who made up their trade deficit with China by exporting opium grown in India.The trade grew huge, and it led to a crisis of addiction throughout the Chinese Empire which the imperial authorities desperately tried to contain, chiefly with efforts to prohibit imports and destroy shipments of drugs as they arrived. Britain went to war in 1839 to defend its profits, and its technological superiority ensured military and naval victory. Missionaries arrived in association with this less than perfectly virtuous result, because the Treaty of Nanjing opening the trade once more in 1842 also reversed an imperial prohibition on Christian belief proclaimed a century before. A good many missionaries arrived entangled with the opium trade, sailing above holds stacked with chest on chest of the drug, and generally mission finances were kept afloat by the credit network maintained by the opium merchants – let alone funds which missions received directly from firms connected with the trade (that is, virtually any Western commercial enterprise trading with China).80 For both Chinese people and their government, missionaries became associated with assaults on their fundamental assumptions about the world. The knowledge of military defeat and the social misery caused by the opium trade made ordinary Chinese not only hostile to missionaries but disgusted with their own regime; many remembered that the ruling Qing dynasty, Manchu in origin, was actually as foreign as their British and French tormentors. A contradictory mixture of popular anger and fascination with Western culture fuelled the Taiping Rebellion, which broke out in 1850. Its first ideologue and leader, Hong Xiuquan, had four times failed in that traditionally indispensable key to success in China, the examinations necessary to enter the civil service. In a state of nervous breakdown, he took to reading Christian books, encouraged by a young American missionary. He became convinced that he was chosen by God for leadership, and he preached of his vision and of the redemptive power of Jesus. His movement embodied an incendiary combination of nostalgia for the Ming dynasty, traditional rebellious zeal to end corruption and a mélange of notions from Christian sources, including a drive to social equality – all united by Hong’s continuing visions from God.81 All over the world in mid-century, the

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The second quality that disgusted Casanova was the countess's greed: her coquettish little games were designed only to get the dress—she had no interest in romance. For Casanova, seduction was a lighthearted game that people played for their mutual amusement. In his scheme of things, it was fine if a woman wanted money and gifts as well; he could understand that desire, and he was a generous man. But he also felt that this was a desire a The Anti-Seducer • 143 woman should disguise—she should create the impression that what she was after was pleasure. The person who is obviously angling for money or other material reward can only repel. If that is your intention, if you are looking for something other than pleasure—for money, for power—never show it. The suspicion of an ulterior motive is anti-seductive. Never let anything break the illusion. 6. In 1868, Queen Victoria of England hosted her first private meeting with the country's new prime minister, William Gladstone. She had met him before, and knew his reputation as a moral absolutist, but this was to be a ceremony, an exchange of pleasantries. Gladstone, however, had no patience for such things. At that first meeting he explained to the queen his theory of royalty: the queen, he believed, had to play an exemplary role in England—a role she had lately failed to live up to, for she was overly private. This lecture set a bad tone for the future, and things only got worse: soon Victoria was receiving letters from Gladstone, addressing the subject in even greater depth. Half of them she never bothered to read, and soon she was doing everything she could to avoid contact with the leader of her government; if she had to see him, she made the meeting as brief as possible. To that end, she never allowed him to sit down in her presence, hoping that a man his age would soon tire and leave. For once he got going on a subject dear to his heart, he did not notice your look of disinterest or the tears in your eyes from yawning. His memoranda on even the simplest of issues would have to be translated into plain English for her by a member of her staff. Worst of all, Gladstone argued with her, and his arguments had a way of making her feel stupid. She soon learned to nod her head and appear to agree with whatever abstract point he was trying to make. In a letter to her secretary, referring to herself in the third person, she wrote, "She always felt in [Gladstone's] manner an overbearing obstinacy and imperi-ousness . . . which she never experienced from anyone else, and which she found most disagreeable." Over the years, these feelings hardened into an unwaning hatred.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  cease-fire with the enemy during Tet, the country’s sacred holiday. By sunrise, over 120 population centers and military bases had been assailed by more than 80,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters, an attack now being called the Tet Offensive. For the first time, Americans were able to watch news coverage of combat without government control of images or information, thanks to reporters and cameramen embedded with the troops. The United States was supposed to be on its way to victory—the president and his generals had sworn to it—and yet here was an enemy that had stormed the American embassy and damaged nearly every stronghold in the south. Night after night, the evening news showed graphic footage from the battle; often, 90 percent of the telecast was devoted to the war. One image sank especially deeply into the American psyche. In a still photograph and on film, it showed a North Vietnamese prisoner, hands tied behind his back, being executed by a single pistol shot to the head, delivered from a distance of a few inches by a South Vietnamese national police chief. There had been no charges, no trial, no last words—just the raising of the gun and a single shot to the temple. The photo ran on the front page of nearly every newspaper in America on the first day of February; no one who saw it, or watched the film of the shooting on the evening news, knew that the prisoner himself had executed, in cold blood, an entire family. All that America knew was that this terrible war was more ugly and brutal than they’d imagined, and that the clean and quick ending they had been promised seemed very far away. In Orangeburg, South Carolina, a bowling alley remained one of the few local businesses to refuse service to black patrons, despite civil rights laws prohibiting such discrimination. In early February, black students at South Carolina State University began to protest, first by sitting at the lunch counter at the bowling alley, then by gathering in larger numbers and demonstrating outside. On February 8, a melee broke out during a student rally on the SCSU campus; panicked police fired into the crowd. The gunfire lasted just ten seconds or so, but when it was over, at least thirty people had been shot, and three black teenagers died. One of them, Delano Middleton, was a high school student whose mother worked on campus. At the hospital, Delano told her, “You’ve been a good mama, but I’m going to leave you now.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Conqueror. These types have an unusual amount of energy, which they find difficult to control. They are always on the prowl for people to conquer, obstacles to surmount. You will not always recognize Conquerors by their exterior—they can seem a little shy in social situations and can have a degree of reserve. Look not at their words or appearance but at their 154 • The Art of Seduction actions, in work and in relationships. They love power, and by hook or by crook they get it. Conquerors tend to be emotional, but their emotion only comes out in outbursts, when pushed. In matters of romance, the worst thing you can do with them is lie down and make yourself easy prey; they may take advantage of your weakness, but they will quickly discard you and leave you the worse for wear. You want to give Conquerors a chance to be aggressive, to overcome some resistance or obstacle, before letting them think they have overwhelmed you. You want to give them a good chase. Being a little difficult or moody, using coquetry, will often do the trick. Do not be intimidated by their aggressiveness and energy—that is precisely what you can turn to your advantage. To break them in, keep them charging back and forth like a bull. Eventually they will grow weak and dependent, as Napoleon became the slave of Josephine. The Conqueror is generally male but there are plenty of female Conquerors out there—Lou Andreas-Salomé and Natalie Barney are famous ones. Female Conquerors will succumb to coquetry, though, just as the male ones will. The Exotic Fetishist. Most of us are excited and intrigued by the exotic. What separates Exotic Fetishists from the rest of us is the degree of this interest, which seems to govern all their choices in life. In truth they feel empty inside and have a strong dose of self-loathing. They do not like wherever it is they come from, their social class (usually middle or upper), and their culture because they do not like themselves. These types are easy to recognize. They like to travel; their houses are filled with objets from faraway places; they fetishize the music or art of this or that foreign culture. They often have a strong rebellious streak. Clearly the way to seduce them is to position yourself as exotic—if you do not at least appear to come from a different background or race, or to have some alien aura, you should not even bother. But it is always possible to play up what makes you exotic, to make it a kind of theater for their amusement.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  I didn't respond. Responding would only confirm the facts of what had happened, whereas I wanted to cast them in doubt. After a while Jerome set the coffee mug down and turned onto his side. He wriggled over toward me and rested his head against my shoulder. He lay there breathing. Then, with closed eyes, he moved his head and tunneled under the pillow with me. He started to nuzzle me. He brought his hair across the skin of my neck and after that came the sensitive organs. His eyelashes made butterfly kisses on my chin. His nose snuffled in the hollow of my throat. And then his lips arrived, avid, clumsy. I wanted him off me. At the same time I asked myself if I had brushed my teeth. Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love. For a minute it was tolerable. But soon the duck coat rode up and Jerome's urgency was pressing itself upon me. He was trying to reach 379 up under my shirt again. I didn't have a bra on. After my shower I had gone without it, flushing away the Kleenex. I was done with them. Jerome's hands moved higher. I didn't care. I let him feel me up. For what it was worth. But if I was hoping to disappoint him, it didn't work. He stroked and squeezed while his lower half swished like a crocodile's tail. And then he said an unironic thing. Ferventiy he whispered, "I'm really into you." His lips closed, seeking mine. His tongue entered. The first pene- tration that augured the next. But not now, not this time. "Stop," I said. "What?" "Stop." "Why stop?" "Because." "Because why?" "Because I don't like you like that." He sat up. Like the guy in the old vaudeville skit, the guy in the folding cot that won't stay folded, Jerome flipped straight up, wide awake. Then he jumped off the bed. "Don't be mad at me," I said. "Who says I'm mad?" said Jerome, and left. The rest of the day went slowly. I stayed in my room until I saw Jerome leave the house, carrying his movie camera. I guessed that I was no longer in the cast. The Object's parents returned from their morning tennis foursome. Mrs. Object came up the stairs to the mas- ter bathroom. From my window I saw Mr. Object climb into the backyard hammock with a book. I waited for the shower to turn on and then came down the back stairs and out the kitchen door. I walked down to the bay, feeling melancholy.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "Good night, kyrie? "Good night, kyriaV Before the week was out, all my grandparents' questions about Sourmelina's marriage had been answered. Because of his age, Jimmy Zizmo treated his young bride more like a daughter than a wife. He was always telling her what she could and couldn't do, howling over the price and necklines of her outfits, telling her to go to bed, to get up, to speak, to keep silent. He refused to give her the car keys until she cajoled him with kisses and caresses. His nutritional quackery even led him to monitor her regularity like a doctor, and some of their biggest fights came as a result of his interrogating Lina about her stools. As for sexual relations, they had happened, but not re- cently. For the last five months Lina had complained of imaginary 91 ailments, preferring her husband's herbal cures to his amatory atten- tions. Zizmo, in turn, harbored vaguely yogic beliefs about the men- tal benefits of semen retention, and so was disposed to wait until his wife's vitality returned. The house was sex-segregated like the houses in die patridha, the old country, men in the sala^ women in the kitchen. Two spheres with separate concerns, duties, even— the evo- lutionary biologists might say— thought patterns. Lefty and Desde- mona, accustomed to living in their own house, were forced to adapt to their new landlord's ways. Besides, my grandfather needed a job. In those days there were a lot of car companies to work for. There was Chalmers, Metzger, Brush, Columbia, and Flanders. There was Hupp, Paige, Hudson, Krit, Saxon, Liberty, Rickenbacker, and Dodge. Jimmy Zizmo, however, had connections at Ford. "I'm a supplier," he said. "Of what?" "Assorted fuels." They were in the Packard again, vibrating on thin tires. A light mist was falling. Lefty squinted through the fogged windshield. Lit- tle by little, as they approached along Michigan Avenue, he began to be aware of a monolith looming in the distance, a building like a gi- gantic church organ, pipes running into the sky. There was also a smell: the same smell that would drift upriver, years later, to find me in my bed or in the field hockey goal. Like my own, similarly beaked nose at those times, my grandfather's nose went on alert. His nostrils flared. He inhaled. At first the smell was recognizable, part of the organic realm of bad eggs and manure. But after a few seconds the smell's chemical properties seared his nostrils, and he covered his nose with his handkerchief. Zizmo laughed. "Don't worry. You'll get used to it." "No, I won't." "Do you want to know the secret?" "What?" "Don't breathe." When they reached the factory, Zizmo took him into the Person- nel Department. "How long has he lived in Detroit?" the manager asked. "Six montiis." 92 "Can you verify that?" Zizmo now spoke in a low tone. "I could drop the necessary doc- uments by your house."

• From Middlesex (2002)

  ized now why there was so much trash in the streets: the city didn't pick it up. White landlords let their apartment buildings fall into dis- repair while they continued to raise the rents. One day Desdemona saw a white shop clerk refuse to take change from a Negro customer. "Just leave it on the counter," she said. Didn't want to touch the lady's hand! And in those guilt-ridden days, her mind crammed with Fard's theories, my grandmother started to see his point. There were blue- eyed devils all over town. The Greeks had an old saying, too: "Red beard and blue eyes portend the Devil." My grandmother's eyes were brown, but that didn't make her feel any better. If anybody was a devil it was her. There was nothing she could do to change the way things were. But she could make sure that it didn't happen again. She went to see Dr. Philobosian. "That's a very extreme measure, Desdemona," the doctor told her. "I want to make sure." "But you're still a young woman." "No, Dr. Phil, I'm not," my grandmother said in a weary voice. "I'm eighty-four hundred years old." On November 21, 1932, the Detroit Times ran the following head- line: "Altar Scene of Human Sacrifice." The story followed: "One hundred followers of a negro cult leader, who is held for human sac- rifice on a crude altar in his home, were being rounded up today by police for questioning. The self-styled king of the Order of Islam is Robert Harris, 44, of 1429 Dubois Ave. The victim, whom he ad- mits bludgeoning with a car axle and stabbing with a silver knife through the heart, was James J. Smith, 40, negro roomer in the Har- ris home." This Harris, who came to be known as the "voodoo slayer," had hung around Temple No. 1. Just possibly, he had read Fard's "Lost Found Muslim Lessons No. 1 and 2," including the pas- sage: "ALL MUSLIMS WILL MURDER THE DEVIL BECAUSE THEY KNOW HE IS A SNAKE AND ALSO IF HE BE AL- LOWED TO LIVE, HE WOULD STING SOMEONE ELSE." Harris had then founded his own order. He had gone looking for a (white) devil but, finding one hard to come by in his neighborhood, had settled for a devil closer at hand. Three days later, Fard was arrested. Under interrogation, he in- sisted that he had never commanded anyone to sacrifice a human be- 161 ing. He claimed that he was the "supreme being on earth." (At least, that was what he said during his first interrogation. The second time he was arrested, months later, he "admitted," according to the police, that the Nation of Islam was nothing but "a racket." He had invented the prophecies and the cosmologies "to get all the money he could") Whatever the truth of the matter, the upshot was this: in exchange for having the charges dropped, Fard agreed to leave Detroit once and for all.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  116 Lecture 22: Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front Lecture 22 Boys in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and in the United States were educated to be patriots. The literature that they read, the Greek and Latin that they studied, the history that they studied hammered home this point of the glory of war and the nobility of dying for your country. T he previous lecture examined the concept of duty. The two works used to exemplify this concept were the Funeral Oration of Pericles, delivered at the time of the civil war between Athens and Sparta in 430 B.C., and the Gettysburg Address, which Abraham Lincoln delivered on November 19, 1863, during the Civil War in the United States. Both Pericles and Lincoln told their fellow citizens that their supreme duty was to die for their country. This question of duty is one of utmost importance. Is dying for one’s country the noblest thing that a person can do? The generation that grew up in the years before 1914 was taught that dying for one’s country was indeed noble. Boys were educated to be patriots and were told of the glory of war. Men marched off in August 1914 eager to have a chance to fi ght for their country. They worried that the war would be too short for them to see action. After four wars of World War I, many of those who survived were convinced that the most foolish thing one could do was to die for his country. It can be argued that politicians and poets know nothing of war. Only the combat soldier understands the horror of war. Erich Maria Remarque was such a soldier, in the Kaiser’s army in World War I. His novel was intended simply as a testament to “a generation destroyed by the war, even those of us who escaped its bullets.” Published in 1928, All Quiet on the Western Front is a powerful novel fi lled with characters we care about and written in a forceful, compact German style, reminiscent of a German Hemingway. It is the best novel about war ever written. It portrayed the terrible anonymity of modern war and in fl uenced a generation of European youth, who in England swore “never again to fi ght for king and country.” All Quiet on the

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  In fact, it was Reese who had best named the sex Amy had been having for most of her life. “You learned how to fuck like a crypto- trans,” Reese said. “Cis women take a long time to realize when someone’s doing it, because they often don’t even know the name for what they’re seeing or what it means. Trans women see it right away. It’s how the most awful chasers fuck, because the most awful chasers are repressed trans themselves. Meaning, most of us have fucked that way at one time or another.” The worst part came later that night with Delia. Some part of her performance changed Delia’s estimation of her. She wasn’t just the sweet boy Delia could confide in on the bus home. Amy’s performance had created a fundamental separation between the two of them. Something that hadn’t existed before. Something animal in her. A brute who could take a woman. Delia talked to her differently —like she had more respect for Amy, but also, had to maintain a careful distance. This was a budding man, after all: powerful, dangerous. The person outlined by Delia’s new deference horrified Amy. What did she really want from Delia? She wanted to sit on Delia’s bed, surrounded by all that girl stuff and get her nails painted. She wanted to be cuddled. The thing Delia seemed to newly admire in her was everything that would lose her what she wanted from Delia. She pictured how the sex would have looked to someone watching: her behind Delia, holding a fistful of Delia’s hair, Amy’s hairy thighs thrusting away. The image made her sick. A beast whom women were wise to eye warily. “We can do this again,” Delia said, walking Amy to the corner through her backyard, a route that she chose in case her neighbors reported to her parents that they had seen a boy leaving through the front door while they were out. Amy agreed. She had to agree. That was what she was supposed to do. But Delia and Amy never did it again. Amy’s parents grounded her for embarrassing them at the baseball awards, and by the time they freed her, Delia’s parents had shipped Delia off to Utah or wherever.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese laughs. Of course that would be the case. Same story, different minority: No matter how easily she passed as cis among the cis, passing as cis among other trans women never happened—they had trained their entire lives to see signs of transness, and hope alone dictated that they would detect those signs in Reese. “Great, she and I already have something in common,” Reese says. “We’re both almost cis white ladies.” Ames had had more than a couple of conversations with Katrina about race and Katrina always expressed a sense of dismay about her passing. “Yeah, you two both pass. But I don’t know if she’s as aspirational about it as you are. Almost the opposite: I gather she feels something lost by her passing as a white lady.” “She grew up entirely in Vermont?” “Yeah. But not just Vermont, like, rural, back-to-the-land Vermont. They didn’t even have a TV until she was a teenager.” “Primeval.” “She loves pop culture, the way kids whose parents didn’t let them have sugar love candy.” Katrina’s stories from her early childhood struck Ames as cribbed from a cautionary post-hippie novel. The kind of story where idealistic types end up starving out on a commune somewhere, flower crowns wilting to reveal a grim human nature hidden beneath. In first-generation style, Katrina’s mother, Maya, had staged a twofold rebellion against her immigrant parents. First, Maya insisted upon becoming an artist, and second she met in an art history class, and later insisted upon marrying, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn named Isaac. Before college, Isaac’s Zionist parents sent him to live on a kibbutz in Israel for a year. At eighteen, he volunteered for the Israeli military service, which nearly lost him his U.S. citizenship. Within the year, he found himself participating in the incursions into Lebanon that came to be known as the 1978 Operation Litani, a participation which, to his parents’ great dismay, disillusioned him to Zionism and, in the process, religion in general. He returned home with signs of what might now be called PTSD and convinced that his stint in the promised land made him some kind of farmer. This conviction remained with him throughout his romance with Maya, through his dropping out of college to elope with her, until at last, he spent an inheritance from his maternal grandmother on a tract of land in Vermont. At that point, as close to being a farmer as he’d ever been, he moved his newly pregnant wife away from her disapproving family to a drafty farmhouse on twenty acres of granite hills not far from the border with New Hampshire, promising to convert the back porch into a light-filled art studio for her work.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  rank male stench \ That wrinkles noses. . . . \ I was about to warn you [ women] against rank The Vulgarian. Vulgarians are inattentive to the details that are so impor- goatish armpits \ And tant in seduction. You can see this in their personal appearance—their bristling hair on your legs, \ 136 • The Art of Seduction But I'm not instructing clothes are tasteless by any standard—and in their actions: they do not hillbilly girls from the know that it is sometimes better to control oneself and refuse to give in to Caucasus, \ Or Mysian one's impulses. Vulgarians will blab, saying anything in public. They have river-hoydens— so what need \ To remind you not no sense of timing and are rarely in harmony with your tastes. Indiscretion to let your teeth get all is a sure sign of the Vulgarian (talking to others of your affair, for example); discolored \ Through it may seem impulsive, but its real source is their radical selfishness, their in-neglect, or forget to wash \ Your hands every morning? ability to see themselves as others see them. More than just avoiding Vul-You know how to brighten garians, you must make yourself their opposite—tact, style, and attention to your complexion \ With detail are all basic requirements of a seducer. powder, add rouge to a bloodless face, \ Skillfully block in the crude outline of an eyebrow, \ Stick a Examples of the Anti-Seducer patch on one flawless cheek. \ You don't shrink from lining your eyes with 1. Claudius, the step-grandson of the great Roman emperor Augustus, was dark mascara \ Or a touch considered something of an imbecile as a young man, and was treated badly of Cilician saffron. . . . \ by almost everyone in his family. His nephew Caligula, who became em-But don't let your lover find all those jars and peror in A.D. 37, made it a sport to torture him, making him run around bottles \ On your dressing-the palace at top speed as penance for his stupidity, having soiled sandals table: the best \ Makeup tied to his hands at supper, and so on. As Claudius grew older, he seemed remains unobtrusive. A to become even more slow-witted, and while all of his relatives lived under face so thickly plastered \ With pancake it runs the constant threat of assassination, he was left alone. So it came as a great down your sweaty neck \ Is surprise to everyone, including Claudius himself, that when, in A.D. 41, a bound to create repulsion. cabal of soldiers assassinated Caligula, they also proclaimed Claudius emAnd that goo from unwashed fleeces— \ peror. Having no desire to rule, he delegated most of the governing to Athenian maybe, but my confidantes (a group of freed slaves) and spent his time doing what he loved dear, the smell! — \ That's best: eating, drinking, gambling, and whoring. used for face-cream: avoid it. When you have

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

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

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  A plump man in his early thirties with a week-old beard had leaned in, and was laughing and shaking his head knowingly. Amy waited for someone to say, “Fuck off, chaser.” But no one made eye contact with him. Instead, they made space for him with an air of resigned indulgence. It was as if he were an apparition whom they all could see but no one wanted to acknowledge—not because the haunting frightened them, but because the ghost had a tendency to interpret any attention paid to him as an invitation to once again repeat the embarrassing story of how he’d died practicing auto-erotic asphyxiation. Two obviously straight girls who had clearly dressed up in fishnets for the queer party and were about a decade or so younger than the man, brought him a drink. Yaz, one of the trans women, let her interest flick briefly toward them, but pulled it away when she saw to whom they delivered the drink: an untouchable so pitiable and contagious that even the giddy proximate cleavage of overeager twenty-year-olds had been marked verboten. Finally Amy pulled Reese aside. “Who is that dude?” Reese waved her hand. “Ugh.” “No, tell me. Who?” “T guess he calls himself William now. He detransitioned but still shows up to hang out with trans women occasionally.” “Really?” Amy couldn’t hide her curiosity. “Yeah. I guess he still shows up to group therapy and stuff. He’s...” Reese couldn’t find the word. “It’s just sad.” When William went outside, Amy slunk away to follow him a few moments later. She found him half a block away, smoking a cigarette. “You’re William?” she asked. William was quite drunk. Too drunk to speak in grammatical sentences. But his face lit up at her attention in a way that hurt Amy to examine directly. She watched his cigarette instead of his face. Tried not to notice the soft and pupal quality to his body. Here’s what Amy got from the conversation: He’d lived as a trans woman for seven years. But it was too hard. Too hard. He didn’t pass. He wanted to die. He was still a trans woman. Everybody saw it, no matter what he did, but since he wouldn’t say so, they couldn’t either. He had a good job now. Medical supply distribution. He lived on Staten Island with those two young girls. He drove them to the party tonight and helped them get dressed. He didn’t touch them, don’t worry. He just liked being one of the girls. The cigarette looped in his hands, inscribing arcs of red in the night as he talked. Amy focused on the tip as if it were writing secret messages just for her. The more he spoke, the more Amy understood the polite, unsettling disdain the other trans women had shown him. She wanted to be anywhere but standing there listening to him. Pity teetered on the precipice of disgust.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Speaking of Control “She did not have to struggle to stay on task for hours. She was in a state of flow.” “His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.” “He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense. Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?” “Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak System 2.” 4 The Associative Machine To begin your exploration of the surprising workings of System 1, look at the following words: Bananas Vomit A lot happened to you during the last second or two. You experienced some unpleasant images and memories. Your face twisted slightly in an expression of disgust, and you may have pushed this book imperceptibly farther away. Your heart rate increased, the hair on your arms rose a little, and your sweat glands were activated. In short, you responded to the disgusting word with an attenuated version of how you would react to the actual event. All of this was completely automatic, beyond your control. There was no particular reason to do so, but your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection between the words bananas and vomit, forming a sketchy scenario in which bananas caused the sickness. As a result, you are experiencing a temporary aversion to bananas (don’t worry, it will pass). The state of your memory has changed in other ways: you are now unusually ready to recognize and respond to objects and concepts associated with “vomit,” such as sick, stink, or nausea, and words associated with “bananas,” such as yellow and fruit, and perhaps apple and berries. Vomiting normally occurs in specific contexts, such as hangovers and indigestion. You would also be unusually ready to recognize words associated with other causes of the same unfortunate outcome. Furthermore, your System 1 noticed the fact that the juxtaposition of the two words is uncommon; you probably never encountered it before. You experienced mild surprise. This complex constellation of responses occurred quickly, automatically, and effortlessly. You did not will it and you could not stop it. It was an operation of System 1. The events that took place as a result of your seeing the words

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  them, to throw them away from her, but feared that doing so would attract attention her way, the equivalent of waving a lace-trimmed pink flag. So she stood frozen, apparently transfixed by the panties, hating the image she felt sure she presented. She wanted to apologize. She couldn’t help herself. She stared at the teenage daughter. What was the speed of calculations whirring through that poor girl’s mind? How long would her mother fake-browse before they could escape? “Wigs!” proclaimed the mother, mustering her best cheer. “Fun!” “Wigs,” agreed Jen, setting down the maid’s outfit and extending a white hand in a gesture to the wall. “The ones at the bottom are synthetic, at the top are human hair.” Like the store itself, Jen had transformed in a moment. Her previous secret celebrity had inverted itself. The polarity on her magnetism had switched: She now repelled rather than attracted. To Amy, Jen’s posture now landed with echoes of witches—had she just said “human hair’? Grotesque. As Jen walked back behind the counter into the sunlight streaming through the front window, the witchy aspect grew more pronounced. Amy, who had had Jen’s arms around her, fastening a bra in place, before she realized Jen was trans—could no longer see anything but how trans she was, accompanied by revulsion at every feature she identified: lank dark hair, heavy knuckles, gaunt cheeks, traces of last night’s makeup darkening the circles beneath her eyes. Fear had poisoned Amy’s thoughts. Cruelly and involuntarily, her vision flayed away all the beauty from Jen like sheets of skin peeled from her body. “We have wig caps, if you want to try one,” Jen said. “Mom. Let’s go,” said the daughter. The rack of books behind her were illustrated erotica labeled FORCED WOMANHOOD, their covers decorated with drawings of shemales bound and being whipped. “Yes, okay.” Out darted the daughter, but with the door open, her mother paused. She turned back, her hand resting on the frame. “Your store is fun,” she apologized, not just to Jen, but to everyone. She nodded, almost to herself, and a moment later the overhanging bell announced her departure. Patrick drove too fast on the ride home. The sky had darkened while he and Amy had shopped in the Glamour Boutique. Fat drops of an April storm splatted onto the highway, making the asphalt surface into television static. Amy didn’t trust the Geo to stick to the shiny road, slick with oil and rivulets, especially not when Patrick turned off the interstate and onto the windy state highways that cut over the Holyoke Range. “Tm sorry,” Amy said. “I was in a car accident when I was younger, so I get nervous. Can you slow down?” She hadn’t actually ever been in a car accident, but it seemed socially easier to blame her unease on herself rather than his driving.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina removed her earrings and set them on the nightstand. “Danny and I went to Dartmouth with this couple—Pete and Lia. When they moved to New York from Seattle, they did this thing where they invited other married couples over to watch Cheers and eat pie. The couples were the kind of people who liked rock climbing and called themselves foodies. Everyone but me was very, very white. Watching Cheers was part of their weird hipster irony. We all snorted at the eighties-era sexual politics like we were better than that, like we’d really come so far since then. Pussy-hound Sam Malone and shrill, wannabe-feminist-but-secretly-dick-crazed what’s her name? Oh! I can’t remember what her name was.” “Diane,” said Ames. “Yeah, Diane. I just remember this one night, after I lost the baby, all the men, once the show started, sort of unfurled themselves around their wives, and each wife settled into her respective husband’s arms contentedly. These bonded animal pairs. And suddenly they all looked like apes grooming each other. I was revolted. And Danny, you could see that he was leaning back on the sectional, opening his long arms so that I would place myself in them like all the other good wives. But I wouldn’t do it. I sat stiffly next to him on the couch with a foot of space between us. Our hosts put on Cheers, and we watched men and women say horrible things to each other and we laughed like that wasn’t what we also did. Or do.” “Yeah,” Ames said, nodding. “All through it,” Katrina went on, “Danny kept sneaking me this hurt expression. I’m sure he didn’t know what was worse: what I thought or what all our friends thought. But I didn’t care. There was nothing that could ever have induced me to care about his hurt feelings just then. At that moment I blamed him for ruining me. For making me a psychopath. My thoughts were focused on him like I was psychically stabbing him with them. Over and over I thought the words, If you didn’t annoy me, I wouldn't be glad to have lost the baby. “T don’t think it was fair or even logical, but I understood that I had felt that way for a long time. I had never even dared to think it in words. Just something about the smugness of that situation released it, of having to be his pet lap ape, while pretending we were evolved.” Katrina cut off her own story with a mirthless laugh. “Also, I think it was around then that I found his secret Asian porn collection.” “He had a secret Asian porn collection?” “A bunch on his computer and some DVDs titled Anal Asians or something.” “T dunno,” Ames said. “If I were an Asian woman, and my husband had a collection of Asian porn, maybe I’d be flattered. At least it means he’s attracted to me.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  In fact, it was Reese who had best named the sex Amy had been having for most of her life. “You learned how to fuck like a crypto- trans,” Reese said. “Cis women take a long time to realize when someone’s doing it, because they often don’t even know the name for what they’re seeing or what it means. Trans women see it right away. It’s how the most awful chasers fuck, because the most awful chasers are repressed trans themselves. Meaning, most of us have fucked that way at one time or another.” The worst part came later that night with Delia. Some part of her performance changed Delia’s estimation of her. She wasn’t just the sweet boy Delia could confide in on the bus home. Amy’s performance had created a fundamental separation between the two of them. Something that hadn’t existed before. Something animal in her. A brute who could take a woman. Delia talked to her differently —like she had more respect for Amy, but also, had to maintain a careful distance. This was a budding man, after all: powerful, dangerous. The person outlined by Delia’s new deference horrified Amy. What did she really want from Delia? She wanted to sit on Delia’s bed, surrounded by all that girl stuff and get her nails painted. She wanted to be cuddled. The thing Delia seemed to newly admire in her was everything that would lose her what she wanted from Delia. She pictured how the sex would have looked to someone watching: her behind Delia, holding a fistful of Delia’s hair, Amy’s hairy thighs thrusting away. The image made her sick. A beast whom women were wise to eye warily. “We can do this again,” Delia said, walking Amy to the corner through her backyard, a route that she chose in case her neighbors reported to her parents that they had seen a boy leaving through the front door while they were out. Amy agreed. She had to agree. That was what she was supposed to do. But Delia and Amy never did it again. Amy’s parents grounded her for embarrassing them at the baseball awards, and by the time they freed her, Delia’s parents had shipped Delia off to Utah or wherever.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  You may think that if the victim is to be sacrificed, none of this mat- is the salt, the quality which prevents it front ters. But sometimes your effort to break off the relationship will inadver- becoming stale. tently revive the spell for the other person, causing him or her to cling to Restlessness, jealousy, you tenaciously. No, in either direction—sacrifice, or the integration of the quarrels, making friends again, spitefulness, all are two of you into a couple—you must take disenchantment into account. the food of love. Enchant-There is an art to the post-seduction as well. ing variety? . . . Too Master the following tactics to avoid undesired aftereffects. constant a peace is produc- tive of a deadly ennui. Uniformity kills love, for as soon as the spirit of Fight against inertia. The sense that you are trying less hard is often method mingles in an affair of the heart, the passion enough to disenchant your victims. Reflecting back on what you did dur- disappears, languor super-ing the seduction, they will see you as manipulative: you wanted something venes, weariness begins to then, and so you worked at it, but now you are taking them for granted. wear, and disgust ends the After the first seduction is over, then, show that it isn't really over—that chapter. you want to keep proving yourself, focusing your attention on them, luring — N I N O N D E L ' E N C L O S , LIFE, LETTERS AND EPICUREAN them. That is often enough to keep them enchanted. Fight the tendency to PHILOSOPHY OF NINON DE let things settle into comfort and routine. Stir the pot, even if that means a L'ENCLOS 417 418 • The Art of Seduction Age cannot wither her, nor return to inflicting pain and pulling back. Never rely on your physical custom stale \ Her infinite charms; even beauty loses its appeal with repeated exposure. Only strategy variety: other women cloy \ and effort will fight off inertia. The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry \ Where most she satisfies. — W I L L I A M SHAKESPEARE, Maintain mystery. Familiarity is the death of seduction. If the target A N T O N Y AND CLEOPATRA knows everything about you, the relationship gains a level of comfort but loses the elements of fantasy and anxiety. Without anxiety and a touch of fear, the erotic tension is dissolved. Remember: reality is not seductive. Cry hurrah, and hurrah Keep some dark corners in your character, flout expectations, use absences again, for a splendid to fragment the clinging, possessive pull that allows familiarity to creep in. triumph— \ The quarry I Maintain some mystery or be taken for granted. You will have only yourself sought has fallen into my toils. . . . \ Why hurry, to blame for what follows. young man? Your ship's still in mid-passage, \ And

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  The Submissive will keep herself clean and shaved and/or waxed at all times. The Submissive will visit a beauty salon of the Dominant’s choosing at times to be decided by the Dominant and undergo whatever treatments the Dominant sees fit. All costs will be met by the Dominant. Personal Safety: The Submissive will not drink to excess, smoke, take recreational drugs, or put herself in any unnecessary danger. Personal Qualities: The Submissive will not enter into any sexual relations with anyone other than the Dominant. The Submissive will conduct herself in a respectful and modest manner at all times. She must recognize that her behavior is a direct reflection on the Dominant. She shall be held accountable for any misdeeds, wrongdoings, and misbehavior committed when not in the presence of the Dominant. Failure to comply with any of the above will result in immediate punishment, the nature of which shall be determined by the Dominant. APPENDIX 2 Hard Limits No acts involving fire play. No acts involving urination or defecation and the products thereof. No acts involving needles, knives, cutting, piercing, or blood. No acts involving gynecological medical instruments. No acts involving children or animals. No acts that will leave any permanent marks on the skin. No acts involving breath control. No activity that involves the direct contact of electric current (whether alternating or direct), fire, or flames to the body. APPENDIX 3 Soft Limits To be discussed and agreed between both parties: Does the Submissive consent to: Masturbation Cunnilingus Fellatio Swallowing semen Vaginal intercourse Vaginal fisting Anal intercourse Anal fisting Does the Submissive consent to the use of: Vibrators Butt plugs Dildos Other vaginal/anal toys Does the Submissive consent to: Bondage with rope Bondage with leather cuffs Bondage with handcuffs/shackles/manacles Bondage with tape Bondage with other Does the Submissive consent to be restrained with: Hands bound in front Ankles bound Elbows bound Hands bound behind back Knees bound Wrists bound to ankles Binding to fixed items, furniture, etc. Binding with spreader bar Suspension Does the Submissive consent to be blindfolded? Does the Submissive consent to be gagged? How much pain is the Submissive willing to experience? Where 1 is likes intensely and 5 is dislikes intensely: 1—2—3—4—5 Does the Submissive consent to accept the following forms of pain/punishment/discipline: Spanking Whipping Biting Genital clamps Hot wax Paddling Caning Nipple clamps Ice Other types/methods of pain Holy fuck. I can’t bring myself to even consider the food list. I swallow hard, my mouth dry, and read it again.