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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Nitrogen gas will begin to flow into the mask. Under these conditions Mr. Smith’s undisputed posttraumatic stress disorder, which no one contests is causing him to persistently vomit, will be at its absolute peak. At the same time, he will experience oxygen deprivation, a known effect of which is vomiting. If Mr. Smith vomits, his executioners will not intervene—they have told us so—even as vomit fills the mask and flows into Mr. Smith’s nose and mouth. Then, at last, Mr. Smith’s body will succumb to the effects of oxygen deprivation, asphyxiation, or both. He will die. The cost, I fear, will be Mr. Smith’s human dignity, and ours. Despite these concerns, the United States Supreme Court once again allowed the execution to proceed. As feared, multiple witnesses to Mr. Smith’s second execution reported that he appeared to suffer terribly. When nitrogen started flowing into the mask, Mr. Smith began to writhe in pain, his body thrashing against the straps that bound him to the gurney. Some media witnesses observed “his whole body and head violently jerking back and forth for several minutes,” followed by “heaving and retching inside the mask.” Mr. Smith clenched his fists and his legs shook. As Mr. Smith gasped for air, his body lifted against the restraints, shaking the gurney several times. Witnesses observed saliva or tears on the inside of the mask. The execution lasted more than thirty minutes; Mr. Smith showed visible signs of distress and pain during much of that time. After he was declared dead, state officials announced that Mr. Smith’s execution was “flawless” and had gone “exactly as planned.” This was contradicted by witnesses and advocates who described it as horrific torture. The execution drew international condemnation from the United Nations, the European Union, faith leaders, and human rights groups. But Alabama almost immediately sought to execute more people using this new method and offered its assistance to other states to do the same. — Since the release of Just Mercy ten years ago, I’ve often been asked whether the administration of justice has improved in America. Mr. Smith’s distressing execution would strongly suggest it has not. But it’s a more complicated question than this tragic event reveals. Over the last ten years, there has been a dramatic decline in the number of executions in the United States and a similar decline in the number of death sentences imposed. Washington, Colorado, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Virginia have all abolished the death penalty in the last decade. Oregon’s governor has commuted the death sentences of everyone on death row in that state.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was apprehensive about going to the Corry too, but after a day of fretting, squalid inactivity, I decided to take the chance. It was Phil and Bill who were the naughty ones and I refused to be cowed by them further. My mood was all torn, and had not been helped by my finding, when I was in the bath, a single dark hair (too dark to be mine) trapped on the soap in a long looped wiggle like Corporal Trim’s flourish with his stick. It wouldn’t just wipe off, and I had to scratch at it and gouge at the soap with a fingernail to get rid of it, all knotted up as I was with revulsion and pathos. It was the most thoughtlessly intimate of all the reminders of Phil in the flat—his trainers, his throw-away razors, his bits of paper—insisting it could hardly be over. The Corry too, of course, was running with the idea of him—but he was nowhere to be seen, and Nigel, who would have noticed, assured me he had not been in the pool. I looked abruptly into the weights room, but Bill’s worried features were not to be made out either. I did, however, run into Charles on my way out. He was sitting in the melancholy cafeteria, looking through the plate-glass windows at the gym-floor below. He was finding it difficult to drink hot coffee from his flimsy plastic beaker. I sat down heavily opposite him. ‘Fascinating athlete, that young man down there,’ he said. I followed his gaze to the shirtless figure dancing at the punchbag. ‘Yes, that’s Maurice. He’s a dream, isn’t he. Not, however, musical.’ ‘Quite so, quite so. I must get him a job.’ ‘I think you’ll find he’s got one already,’ I said with a little fading snigger. Charles was looking at me closely, and I looked down, and then away again to Maurice, cutting and jabbing in wonderful ignorance of his spectators and their quandary. ‘I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I,’ said Charles. I shook my head. ‘You’ve made a mess of things! Dear Charles. I’ve been thinking about this all the time but I still don’t know what to say. But you have not made a mess of anything. Except, of course, that I can’t do the book.’ ‘You could.’ ‘I can’t.’ He followed Maurice again. ‘You’ve no idea of the quite extraordinary, powerful and—my dear—entirely kind conviction of rightness I had when I discovered who you were. It was such a perfect idea; too perfect perhaps to be enacted by decent human beings. Good punching! Marvellous boy! But perhaps, when your grandfather … is dead—and I’m dead—you’ll come round to it.’ ‘All I could write now,’ I said, ‘would be a book about why I couldn’t write the book.’ I shrugged. ‘I suppose there are enough unwritten books of that kind to make that of some interest.’

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Only a little later still, Augustine could describe same- sex love as “against nature” and “without doubt more fl agitious and disgraceful” than even sinful heterosexual conjunctions. Th e linguistic similarities are not just striking incidences of a shared, fi nite vocabulary. Th ey represent a phase of mental rapprochement between traditional and Christian modes of preju- dice, one in which Christian authors gravitated toward a traditional vo- cabulary, even as they infused it with a new spirit. Th e law of 390 was gener- ated out of the same unstable mixture. Th e Christianization of public sexual morality produced new and often unpredictable harmonies, but there is no mistaking the fact that the shrillest notes came from the ecclesiastical side of the choir.  Between the Th eodosian crusade against male prostitution and the reign of Justinian, there are no imperial mea sures bearing on same- sex erotics. CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND SEX IN THE AGE OF TRIUMPH  But in 438 the court of Th eodosius II completed the milestone of legal codifi cation known as the Th eodosian Code. Its editors were empowered to include all “general” laws promulgated since the time of Constantine, cata- logued in orderly fashion, with all extraneous rhetoric excised. From Janu- ary of AD 439, the laws as they stood in the code, in chronological order and whittled down to their legal core, were in force. Both the law of Con- stans and the law of AD 390 were included in the title of the Th eodosian Code on the lex Iulia de adulteriis. Th at classifi cation is remarkably signifi - cant. It reveals the extent to which the umbrella of the lex Iulia had become the utterly dominant locus of sexual regulation. More importantly, it sug- gests the extent to which the editors of the Code wished to maximize the scope of the law against male prostitution. Th anks to the handiwork of the Christian jurist who transmitted the law of Th eodosius in the Collatio, we have a relatively rare opportunity to assess the legal surgery performed by the Th eodosian editors. If the mea sure was originally about male prostitu- tion, then it would be more accurate to describe the editors’ work as a de- capitation. Th ere is no mention of the “male brothels,” only the raving attack on male passivity, to be punished with “the avenging fl ames.” Th e editors of the Code, intelligent Christian jurists who knew precisely what they were doing, made the law of 390 into a blustering prohibition on male passivity itself.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The extant ruminations of Epictetus offer a clear image of the place of sex in the moral economy of Stoicism. Desire was human, and it was inevitable: a man could cut off his penis more easily than his desire. In consequence, the sage had to wean himself of pleasure through reason and self-discipline, but sex was only one category of pleasure and by no means a privileged one. “Learn to use wine with refinement … and to hold back from some little lass or a little flatcake.” Stoicism, at least its more austere side, was no philosophy for young men; a passage surviving in the Stoic Handbook of Epictetus is particularly revealing. “Remain as pure as you can before marriage with regard to sexual pleasures, and insofar as they are engaged in, let them be lawful. Yet do not become oppressive or reproachful toward those who do indulge, and do not hold forth all the time on your own restraint.” It would be harder to craft a statement more alien to the flamboyant renunciations and pellucid interdictions of Christianity.104 The quiet placability of Epictetus in his sexual morality is not far removed from the stance of the latest and most remarkable of the Roman Stoics, Marcus Aurelius. His Stoicism is known through the cheerless if not funereal collection of meditations preserved under the title To Himself. The pessimism of Marcus was not just the by-product of a sickly, world-weary emperor. His obsession with the cosmos was in the mainstream of Stoic thought. Indeed, it was only through the contemplation of the universe, and the place of human life within it, that man’s reason could truly comprehend what a “cheap, contemptible, filthy, perishable, defunct” thing pleasure was. The life of man was a narrow point, crushed in on either side by eternity. Meditation on the cosmos put sex and marriage in true perspective. For Marcus, sex was “a commotion of the innards and a convulsive secretion of mucus.” Marriage was a sign of perishability and meaninglessness: “meditate on the times of Vespasian, see all these things: people marrying, raising children, falling sick and dying, warring, reveling … and yet there is nowhere any trace of that life of theirs. Switch now to the times of Trajan, and again the same things, and that life too has perished.” In time, all the deeds of the body passed away for eternity. Pleasure was an indifferent, not an evil; reason should conquer the false impressions arising from desire. Sexual morality hardly looms over the philosophy of Marcus. He reminds himself, in oblique language, that he had not rushed into sexual activity as a young man. We know, too, that his marriage to Faustina was exceptionally fertile, producing fourteen children, and that after his wife’s death Marcus did what many Roman widowers did for solace, he took a freedwoman as a concubine. As Epictetus would have advised, the Stoic emperor’s indulgences were lawful, and his restraint was not oppressively vaunted.105

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The shift from an apologetic to an imperial mode was halting and not always predictable. In sum, it meant a deeper engagement with society and with the moral entanglements of the sexual agent as a part of society. This shift is detectible already in the Divine Institutes of Lactantius, an apology written against the backdrop of the great persecution but a work that nevertheless points toward the new, imperial sensibility of Christian sexual ethics. Lactantius is intensely aware of the moral agent’s embeddedness in the world. When he turns to consider the libido, “which must be severely repressed, because it does the most severe harm,” it is a faculty tempted and threatened by the habits of the Roman world. The devil had contrived ingenious tests of the moral will and institutionalized them in Roman society. “So that no one would have to abstain from sex with another out of fear of punishment, he established brothels and exposed the sexual modesty of unfortunate women, to the ruin of the men who use them as much as the women who are forced to suffer.” To the audience that Lactantius was addressing, the brothel presented an especially diabolical source of temptation, because it removed all material impediments to the fulfillment of desire. Still the devil was not finished with his tricks. “He also joined males with males and designed unholy coitus in violation of the laws of God and nature.” What most disturbed Lactantius was a shared feature of same-sex eros and prostitution: they were socially acceptable. “Among them these outrages are a light matter, virtually respectable.” Lactantius still spoke, in the apologetic tradition, of depraved sexual habits among “them,” the mainstream non-Christians. But the line between the Christian and the outside world has started to grow decidedly thin, and within only a few generations it will have quietly vanished.3

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  If the Theodosian program can be described as a mix of Christian enthusiasm and novel conceptions of public contamination poured into traditional regulatory channels, it is only in the age of Justinian that a wholly transformed legal order, fully consonant with Christian sexual ideology, can be found. Two regulatory innovations are notable. First, the imponderably ancient distinction between active and passive has unceremoniously vanished as a regulatory paradigm. The Institutes, the textbook of Roman law issued as part of Justinian’s codification, baldly declared that the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis “punished with the sword not only the violators of others’ marriages but also those who dare to carry out their unspeakable libido with males.” Without fuss or detail, Justinian laid down the death penalty for forms of sexual exercise that had been private and permitted since time immemorial. The attribution of the crime to an “unspeakable libido” places the law in the avant-garde of Christian thought, where the notion of a specifically deviant form of desire remained inchoate. Most of all the law represents the fulfillment of a Pauline view of same-sex love in Roman law (though there is not to be found in Justinian’s legislation any awareness of female homoeroticism as a problem capable of regulation). Now the gender of the partners was the primary determinant, capable of activating the punitive machinery of the Roman state. The traditional media of Roman regulation—property transfers, judicial access, public honor—have been fully displaced by a stark willingness to dictate sexual behavior as such.33 The strict criminalization of same-sex love strikes us as a momentous innovation. But Justinian’s regulatory ambitions outreached the technologies of surveillance, and very little in fact is heard of his blanket prohibitions on intercourse between males. Instead it was another aspect of Justinian’s sexual reforms that flared into a massive public operation. In the very first years of his reign, Justinian enacted a law specifically aimed at pederasty. Details of the law, and its application, are preserved only by the historians, principally Procopius and John Malalas. Malalas relates that Justinian arrested two bishops accused of “living badly and bedding males.” He identifies them by name, Isaiah of Rhodes and Alexander from Diospolis in Thrace. Tried by the prefect of Constantinople, Isaiah was “gravely tortured” and sent into exile, while Alexander was relieved of his male organ and paraded through the streets of Constantinople. According to Malalas, their behavior incited Justinian to pass a law that “those discovered in pederasty were to have their penises amputated.” “At that time many men inclined toward males were rounded up and, after their members were cut off, died.” Procopius, whose Secret History is a salacious and highly skewed memoir of Justinian’s reign, describes the affair with patent disgust, as an example of Justinian’s extremism. His account provides two details absent in Malalas—that the charges could be applied retroactively, and that even slaves could make an accusation—which we simply cannot check against other contemporary informants. They are in the spirit of the measure.34

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The remarkable sexual persecution of 390 was further enabled by a very real sense of sexual deviance as a contaminatio. The conception of grave sexual crime as a sort of pollution made it an acute public worry. John Chrysostom spoke of same-sex eros as a “grievous and incurable disease,” and even more consequentially as a “plague harsher than all other plagues.” The pagan Libanius, too, spoke of “love for males” as a disease, so the purchase of this idea extended beyond Christian circles in late antiquity. Christian voices uttered not only the diagnosis but also, more grimly, the need for a drastic cure. “Those who do these things are worthy of death, and not only those who do them, but also those who consent. For assent is participation.… Therefore Moses recalled the wicked deeds of Sodom and Gomorrah, and did not leave their end in silence, but to create fear of this thing to be avoided. Thus, this vice, this contamination of a life without decency is not allowed by one whose soul is thinking of God. There are those, to be sure, who believe that they are not guilty if they do not perform such deeds, even while they assent to their performance. But to remain quiet or to take amusement at the report of such things, when they should be condemned, amounts to assenting to them.”30 These are the words of a Christian theologian, writing in Rome, in the years just before the constitution of Theodosius I. The linguistic overlap was not circumstantial. Only a few years after the law of Theodosius, in Rufinus’s translation of Origen’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the question is posed whether more glory was accrued by those who had abstained from same-sex intercourse under the explicit command of the Mosaic Law or those who had abstained “from this contagion by the judgment of their own mind, not even letting their thoughts approach it. Would you not much prefer the one who, not because held back by the intervention of a law, still kept himself pure from the contamination of such flagitious deeds?” Only a little later still, Augustine could describe same-sex love as “against nature” and “without doubt more flagitious and disgraceful” than even sinful heterosexual conjunctions. The linguistic similarities are not just striking incidences of a shared, finite vocabulary. They represent a phase of mental rapprochement between traditional and Christian modes of prejudice, one in which Christian authors gravitated toward a traditional vocabulary, even as they infused it with a new spirit. The law of 390 was generated out of the same unstable mixture. The Christianization of public sexual morality produced new and often unpredictable harmonies, but there is no mistaking the fact that the shrillest notes came from the ecclesiastical side of the choir.31

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Staines’s hand was on my shoulder. ‘It’s the very last bit, dear,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be the most wonderful film ever. We’ve been doing it for months now—a cast of tens … I thought you’d like to see us polish it off in this sensationally sensational scene.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I hesitated. The backdrop, cracked in places where it had been rolled up, took on an air of redundant charm as the lights were switched on, isolating an area of tawdry small-ness in which the action was clearly to unfold. Aldo grew confidential. ‘Is very old-fashion,’ he explained. ‘I am in another part, in the garden. There I met the young milordo, and we do all sort of thing, and up a ladder too. Now he is on holiday, and the servant is left—just Derek and Raymond and Abdul.’ Aldo fluttered his lashes at me, restoring an illusion of gentility, as if we had been discussing the new vicar, and whether or not he favoured the Series III communion. I couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t wondered what it would be like to make a porn film. I had cast my own on parched, electric mornings after, putting the boys through their paces; but those were unstable little loops, that oxidised and decomposed in the light of day. I wasn’t sure it would be possible to watch these acts, fearing to be aroused, fearing not to be. Charles laid his hand on my forearm. ‘Isn’t our chef a splendid fellow? He’s devoted to me, you know. Utterly devoted.’ The camera had not yet begun to run, but Abdul, seemingly careless of whether or not he started, strolled back on to the set. He wore a sumptuous calf-length fur coat, and, as one saw when he sat back on the bed and it fell open, nothing else. His flat stomach was crossed by the longest scars I had ever seen, as though long ago, and with the crudest means, someone had removed all his insides. With his scarred black skin inside the thick black fur he struck me, who adored him for a moment, like some exquisite game animal, partly skinned and then thrown aside still breathing. I excused myself for the lavatory, tiptoed to the front door; but then slammed it behind me. 11 ‘Sugar?’ ‘I don’t, thank you.’ ‘I rather do these days. I’ve given in.’ Charles discarded the tongs, and shovelled up roughly half a dozen sugar-lumps in his bowed, flat fingers. We sat and sipped as Graham came in again with more hot water, and Charles watched his manservant with confident gratitude. At Skinner’s Lane everything was running like clockwork. ‘I have my own teeth,’ he added. We sat, as before, in the little library, Charles’s den, the only part of the house which did not come under Graham’s orderly care.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Strict procreationism developed amid fi erce internal struggles over the proper reception of the encratic fl ashes that are manifest in the textual artifacts of the early Christian mission. Already in the second century, as an underground religious movement that vaunted the glories of virginity, Christianity harbored within its fold some who came to doubt that sex, even sex within marriage, could fi nd any redemption at all. Indeed, a former student of Justin, Tatian, stood as the most visible representative of this outlook. Most of Tatian’s surviving apology, his Oration to the Greeks, fi ts comfortably within the traditions of second- century apologetics. Th e routine criticisms of Roman society are prominent. “Pederasty, which is condemned by the barbarians, is deemed a privilege among the Romans, who strive to gather herds of boys, like horses at pasture.” Th e mystery cults of the Roman Mediterranean were hiding grounds for “eff eminates and she-men.” (Th is discovery, he relates, was the proximate cause of his rejection of Greco- Roman religion.) Most of this invective could pass for standard Christian fare. Tatian declares himself an enemy of fornication: “I hate fornication.” Yet in one telling passage Tatian casually assimilated “those who marry, those who violate children, and those who commit adultery” in a list of sinners mired in worldly pursuits. Clement of Alexandria accused Tatian of regarding marriage as a form of corruption, of equating marriage and fornication. Tatian, apparently, reserved no grace for conjugal sex. Th ere is much about Tatian that we simply cannot know. To call Tatian the “patriarch of the encratites,” as Jerome would label him, may well be an overstatement, prompted by the need to give heresy a more defi nite form and face than in reality it possessed. Irenaeus and Clement, scourges of heresy, are not always the most informed, accurate, or generous guides to  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N the diversity of early Christian thought. But they furnish indispensable testimony to the landscape of second- century Christianity. To say that Tatian lay outside the bounds of proto- orthodox Christian sexuality should not be doubted, nor even controversial. What is most interesting about Tatian’s encratism is his apparent desire to anchor it in a defensible hermeneutics of Pauline scripture. Marriage was “fornication.” Jerome relates that Tatian regarded several of Paul’s letters as spurious, and Clement takes Tatian to task for his tortured interpretation of the crucial passages in First Corinthians 7. Nowhere in the extant fragments of Tatian’s writings do we fi nd any particularly graphic or gruesome denunciations of sex. (Th e perfectly orthodox Symposium of Methodius actually off ers far more melodra-matic condemnations of the fl esh and its satisfactions.) For Tatian, the allowance of marriage was not a disgusting concession to the body. It was a misreading of Paul, bolstered by the unscrupulous production of fraudulent documentary evidence.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  ey call unspeakable acts of plea sure contentment.” In Alexandria Clement had a disturbing front- row seat to the most brutal machinery of the Roman sexual economy. He could watch the giant slave ships at dock, bringing “fornication like wine or grain,” selling girls wholesale to procurers throughout the empire. Sexual moralism inspires Clement’s dis-comfort, but he is one of the most striking observers of the realities of the Roman slave trade. Th e sale of sex was anything but marginal. “Th e whole earth is fi lled with fornication and disorder.” Th is was something Dio could never have said. Fornication was not just a word; it was a worldview, in which the cosmos, the order of civilized life, appeared to be in the grip of sin. Clement’s thought- world and modes of expression are still shaped by the vital civic backdrop and eclectic philosophical koinē of the high empire, but the logic of his sexual ideology is exclusively Christian— a highly rigid form of Christianity at that. Clement is not a voice of moderation. His attitudes toward sexuality are as rigorist, or more so, as much of what will become orthodoxy after him. Clement fended off encratism by strategically occupy-ing as much of its ground— and appropriating as much of its language— as his interpretation of Paul would allow. Clement’s defense of marriage bears utterly no resemblance to the warm ideals of conjugal aff ection or cheery romantic patriotism of the culture that surrounded him. Clement’s sexual  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N ethic is one of personal transformation and transcendence of desire, but it is still locked into the mold of an ancient way of life. For Clement, this transformation would be marked by a vastly new relationship between the Christian and the minutiae of ordinary social life. In short, the radical discovery of the desert, which would allow the transformational ethic to unfold against the open backdrop of empty space, had not yet happened. Clement’s sexual ideology was in many ways idiosyncratic, most of all in his belief that physical desire could be graciously metamorphosed into a rational will to participate in creation. Th e small but decisive diff erences

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  It displeases me to have some creature think that he can foresee and profit from my desire, automatically adapting himself to what he supposes to be my taste. At such moments the absurd and deformed reflection of myself which a human brain returns to me would almost make me prefer the ascetic's sorry state. If legend does not exaggerate the excesses of Nero and the erudite researches of Tiberius, those two great consumers of pleasure must have had inert senses indeed to put themselves to the expense of so complicated a machinery, and must have held mankind in singular disdain to let themselves in for such mockery and extortion. And nevertheless, if I have virtually given up these too mechanical forms of pleasure, or have never indulged in them at too great length, I owe it more to chance than to impregnable virtue. I could well fall back into such habits in growing old, just as into any kind of confusion or fatigue, but sickness and approaching death will save me from monotonous repetition of the same procedures, like droning through a lesson too long known by rote. Of all the joys which are slowly abandoning me, sleep is one of the most precious, though one of the most common, too. A man who sleeps but little and poorly, propped on many a cushion, has ample time to meditate upon this particular delight. I grant that the most perfect repose is almost necessarily a complement to love, that profound rest which is reflected in two bodies. But what interests me here is the specific mystery of sleep partaken of for itself alone, the inevitable plunge risked each night by the naked man, solitary and unarmed, into an ocean where everything changes, the colors, the densities, and even the rhythm of breathing, and where we meet the dead. What reassures us about sleep is that we do come out of it, and come out of it unchanged, since some mysterious ban keeps us from bringing back with us in their true form even the remnants of our dreams. What also reassures us is that sleep heals us of fatigue, but heals us by the most radical of means in arranging that we cease temporarily to exist. There, as elsewhere, the pleasure and the art consist in conscious surrender to that blissful unconsciousness, and in accepting to be slightly less strong, less light, less heavy and less definite than our waking selves.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  If the planets completely disrupted the proper quantum of passivity, a monster was born. When sun and moon stood together unattended in masculine signs of the zodiac, the soul was made more virile; men would experience natural passions to an extreme degree, and women too would be somewhat manly. If Venus or Mars joined the luminaries in a masculine sign, the eff ects were further intensifi ed. Men became hypermasculine, experiencing natural passions to such a degree that they were unrestrained and even unlawful. Women became monstrously masculine fi gures who played the role of men with other women. (It is worth pausing briefl y to note that Ptolemy is the rare source who even refl ects on lesbianism; a combination of young age at marriage for women, patriarchal regimes of control, especially in the upper classes, and the lack of a richly developed moral discourse about lesbianism created a zone of silence around love between women in the ancient world.) When, by contrast, sun and moon stood together unattended in feminine signs of the zodiac, the individual was dis-proportionately feminized. Women became especially womanly, and men became delicate and eff eminate. If Venus intensifi ed the eff ects, women became lustful and unlawful in their natural passions, while men became “soft,” incapable of having sex with women; they became closet pathics. If T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E  Mars was also in a feminine sign, the man’s shamelessness was fl agrant, like that of a common male prostitute. Th us, the pathic was a creature formed by the stars when a change in the quantities of masculinity and femininity triggered a change in the quality of his whole nature. Th ere was little that was novel in these assumptions. Folk belief had long held that women were underheated and incompletely formed men; moist, clammy, the female body had been contrived by nature to play its role in the continuous regeneration of the species, “born to be penetrated.” For men, too, manliness was a matter of degree, and the insuffi ciently mascu-linized male became damp, soft, in extreme cases an “androgyne.” If a man was womanly in constitution, it was sure to manifest itself in sexual deviance. By the second century a heap of traditional abuses had piled around the ste reo types of sexual deviance, and the social tool kit of the Greco-Roman man taught him how to recognize clandestine sexual malfeasance. Lucian quotes an old saw, that you could sooner conceal fi ve elephants in your armpit than one kinaidos – the monstrous gender deviant of ancient sexual culture. Th

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Not long after the composition of his dispatch to the Corinthians, Paul authored his letter to the church in Rome. Written to a community he was yet to visit in person, the Letter to the Romans is different in character, and grander in vision, than any of his other writings. Like First Corinthians, Romans assumes far more than it explicitly reveals about Paul’s sexual ideology. In this case, though, the visible surface, which juts above the horizon with sudden and unexpected violence, rests on foundations lying submerged in the depths of Paul’s theology. In the thundering introit of the letter, it becomes evident that for Paul the sexual disorder of Roman society was the single most powerful symbol of the world’s alienation from God. Paul draws on the deeply rooted association between idolatry and sexual immorality: sexual fidelity was the corollary of monotheism, while the worship of many gods was, in every way, promiscuous. But in Paul’s hands the association was transfigured into a fearful comment on the human condition. When the nations substituted “images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles” for the “glory of the immortal God,” God “gave them up to dishonorable passions.” Paul was unusual in the degree to which he saw illicit desires as a metonym capable of standing for mankind’s rebellion against monotheism. But the greater surprise that emerges in the first chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans is the specific form of carnal decadence that encapsulated, for the apostle, the total depravity of the heathen world: same-sex love.21 It is worth pausing to take seriously the evidence of Romans as the statement of an earnest, if hostile, observer of Roman society. Moralists who extolled the married pair as the model of natural human sexuality were not inconspicuous in polite Roman circles. But the fervor of a religious enthusiast like Paul reveals how far removed those speculative ideologies were from the experience of sexual culture in the middle of the first century. Same-sex love stood out, incandescently, as a measure of the gulf between Paul’s view of eros and the state of human affairs. Same-sex love served Paul’s theological purposes well. A central proposition of Romans is that God’s “power and deity” are “clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” For Paul, God’s moral will inheres in the order of creation and is manifest in it. Same-sex love was thus, for the apostle, a particularly egregious violation of the natural order. “Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.” For Paul, same-sex attraction symbolized the estrangement of men and women, at the very level of their inmost desires, from nature and from the creator of nature. And it was the creator’s stark decree that “those who do such things deserve to die.”22

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In turn we are left to glean from a largely barren fi eld. We fi nd in diff erent types of evidence a distinction between the sexual acts to be ex- pected of a wife and those to be expected of a disreputable woman. A magi- cal papyrus casts a spell on a woman in the hopes of achieving “whorish sex,” as though that more or less summarizes a style, or intensity, of amo- rous encounter. Seneca, among others, counsels men not to love their wives as though they were mistresses. Fellatio is regularly assumed to be the do- main of the prostitute. Still, Roman art depicts a wider range of positions and confi gurations than ever before, and not all of these have to involve paid professionals. Whereas late classical Greek art had tended to focus on the gratifi cation of the man, Roman erotic art takes a far more variable perspective. Scenes of women on top, mulier equitans, focus on the reposed beauty of the woman’s body. If the repre sen ta tion of male fulfi llment was still predominant, there was undoubtedly a new visual emphasis in Roman art on the mutual plea sure of the partners.  Still, it can only be wondered how well women fared in the bedroom. Th ere was an abiding prejudice against acts that were considered to pollute the mouth. Visual evidence suggests that women could turn to male prosti- tutes to enjoy exotic pleasures, but this cannot have been an option to many women. Th ere are signs that sometimes the possibilities were even unknown. More often there is simply blind disgust. Galen, who was not a prude, could claim as a matter of fact, “We fi nd cunnilingus even more repulsive than fellatio.” Cultural conventions of male dominance could be a powerful force. Or they could just act to draw a curtain around what really happened in the bedroom. Th e truth is that there is more discussion about female or- gasms in the Roman Empire than ever before, and for a long time after. For  FROM SHAME TO SIN Ovid, mutual satisfaction was a vital part of his sexual code. For the author of the Lucianic Amores, it is what recommends heterosexual love. But noth- ing can match Clitophon’s panegyric.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I rolled over and sat up and spoke in a strange tone of voice which I seemed to have invented for the occasion. ‘Look, pal, I’d need more than poppers to take that thing.’ It was all very well to be violated as I had been last night by Abdul, but I did not like the idea of inanimate objects being forced up my delicate inner passages. He turned and walked across the room—angry, hurt, careless, I couldn’t tell—and threw the great plastic phallus into the bathroom. I imagined the maid finding it there when she came to tidy up and turn down the bedclothes. ‘Okay, so you don’t like me that much,’ he said, thickly from inside the leather. ‘I like you very much. It’s just the moving toyshop I can’t be doing with.’ And I decided I had better go, and reached for my jeans. ‘I could whip you,’ he suggested, ‘for what you did to my country in the war.’ He seemed to think this was a final expedient which might really appeal to me; and I had no doubt he could have provided a pretty fearsome lash from one of his many items of luggage. ‘I think that might be to take the sex and politics metaphor a bit too seriously, old chap,’ I said. And I could see the whole thing deteriorating into a scene from some poker-faced left-wing European film. When I was dressed and had my bag again slung over my shoulder Gabriel was wandering around the sitting-room, his huge erection barely flagging, but somehow no longer of interest to me. I stood and looked at him and he grasped and grunted and writhed out of his mask. His hair was moist and standing up, and his clear olive complexion was primed with pink—as it might have been if we had just simply made love. I went over to him and kissed him, but he closed his teeth against me, kept his hands at his sides. I left the room without saying goodbye. Well, it served me right, I thought, as I wandered with a vague sense of direction along uniform carpeted corridors—Phil’s terrain, where he did his job. All this had certainly got me in the mood and now I would be too late to catch him and the uncomplicated solace he could give. Surely hotels must be hotbeds of this kind of carry-on, easy encounters at the bar or unlocking the doors of adjacent rooms.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  tion on ancient prostitution is, fi ttingly, the Sophists at Dinner: an imaginary transcript of a late second- century conversation, set at the table of a Roman aristocrat, where the symposiasts debate the obscurer corners of Attic Greek and the relative merits of hetairai and common prostitutes. Th e fog of erudition is so heavy that we cannot draw any safe conclusions about the real world. In a supremely rich, sexually open, and astonishingly interconnected society that was poised to embrace the power of human beauty (a gorgeous woman off ered “no trivial happiness”), it would be unwise to doubt the existence of the demimondaine. We know that actors and actresses suff ered from legal discrimination, such as the inability to intermarry with the aristocracy, and there was a material connection between the theater and the sex industry. Th e Roman Empire had an insatiable taste for stage per formance, and it is likely that theatrical culture nurtured stars of various talents. Too much amorous literature presumes the existence of the glamorous, in de pen dent prostitute for her to have been a mere fi gment of an overactive cultural memory. But even more than before, her power to en-rapture derived from her rarity. Th e preponderance of the evidence, and all of the evidence that takes us away from fantasy and toward the mundane realities of prostitution, points to the overwhelming connection between the slave trade and the sex trade. Th ere is, of course, no reason to doubt that droves of poor women were forced to become prostitutes in the Roman Empire. In an economy with relatively few respectable employments for women and no social safety net, sudden shocks could render women hopelessly vulnerable. But the defi ning feature of prostitution in the Roman era, which gives Roman prostitution its par tic u lar tincture, is the pervasive infl uence of slavery. Convincing testimony confi rms the sinister link between the slave trade and prostitution. Th e most chilling evidence is an iron slave collar, a typical means of preventing or punishing slave fl ight, discovered at Bulla Regia in North Africa; found still clasped around the neck of a skeleton, the collar’s T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E  inscription reads, “I am a slutty whore; retain me, I have fl ed Bulla Regia.” A third- century papyrus shows a dispute that arose from the sale of a girl by pimps. Th e pimp was, presumptively, a man “who buys girls.” Child exposure, a signifi cant input to the Roman slave supply, was presumed to lead

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e pimp was, presumptively, a man “who buys girls.” Child expo- sure, a signifi cant input to the Roman slave supply, was presumed to lead “to slavery or to the brothel,” fates that were not distinct. One of the more interesting, if oblique, indices of the role of slavery in the sex industry is that Roman law developed a special covenant allowing masters to sell slaves with the binding restriction that the slave not be prostituted; whether these covenants indicate residual benevolence or the frequency of biological rela- tions between master and slave, they demonstrate the real danger that, for a slave, prostitution lurked in the future.  Th e desire to romanticize venal sex was perduring, and even the erotic art in brothels idealized the sexual encounter between professional and customer. But the critics object. Th e lingering stench, the atmosphere of violence, the cramped concrete cribs, the systemic abuse: these were the re- ality of the fl esh trade. Disease and chemical dependence surely followed in the wake of such exploitative drudgery. Th e low price of sex is stunning. Sex seems to have cost maybe two asses in an ordinary town, “about the price of a loaf of bread.” Fellatio cost less. Th e vile rate of the transaction is also a harrowing indication of the crushing amount of work women had to per- form to survive and to profi t their own ers. Th e commodifi cation of sex was carried out with all the ruthless effi ciency of an industrial operation, the unfree body bearing the pressures of insatiable market demand. In the brothel the prostitute’s body became, little by little, “like a corpse.”  Th e lower- class atmosphere of the brothel lies behind one of the more subtle but important changes in the moral economy of prostitution under the Roman Empire. To the respectable classes, prostitution was not im- moral— it was squalid. Th e wealthy had slaves to serve their needs, and it was unnecessary to share sexual receptacles. Prostitution was the poor man’s piece of the slave system. In his City of God, Augustine imagined the simple desires of the ordinary man; after military victory for the Roman army and economic prosperity, he would think, “let public prostitutes abound for any who want to use them, but especially for those who cannot aff ord private ones!” Th e brothel was even patronized by slaves. It raised the disturbing specter of sharing women with men of the lowest ranks. Th e brothel was irredeemably vulgar, and in a carefully and formally stratifi ed society, nothing was more damning.   FROM SHAME TO SIN Given the moral and material centrality of prostitution in Roman soci- ety, it is noteworthy that so little comment was aroused by the problem of how women became prostitutes. In part this silence is explained by the constant infl ux of slaves into the sex trade; slaves were social nonbeings whose exploitation was unremarkable.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The pleasure of the marriage couch was a distraction, an insidiously dangerous one. Like a torrential river, the delights of sex threatened to drag the soul into its raging currents and send it careening down the “rapids of incontinence.” For the virgins of Methodius, pleasure lacked any positive value. Sex could not act as the warm bonding agent it is in Plutarch’s marital counsels, nor could it be celebrated as the mysterious wash of ecstasy vouchsafed for man by nature and nature’s gods. Sex, with its corporal gyrations, was a little putrid. But it was not, in itself, immoral. The virgins of Methodius knew it would be overbold to declare the generation of children sinful, when God himself had installed marriage and reproduction in the order of creation. Besides, marriage produced new generations of martyrs, soldiers of God ready to face the trials of persecution. Marital intercourse, even for these virginal symposiasts, also served another, less exalted purpose: it prevented worse uses of the body. For those too weak to pursue virginity, who smoldered with desire for sex, marriage was a safe harbor to prevent them from crashing on the rocks of fornication, porneia. The logic is distinctly that of Paul. Marital congress was a prophylactic against other, easily obtained satisfactions. In their alertness to the perils of fornication, the virgins at this symposium reveal the influence of a mental world, even a language, that would have been unrecognizable to Plato and his many followers in the Roman Empire. Fornication was one of the “horns of the devil,” by which the evil one would cast down those who lacked self-control. It became for Christians a supremely depraved form of sin, embedded in the institutions and practices of the world around them. Even the virgins of Methodius, in their lofty acclamations of bodily purity, must pause to worry about the pollutions of fornication.3

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The subgenre culminates in what is indisputably its finest expression, the Life of Mary of Egypt. Her story is the latest of the four main examples, having its origins around AD 600. It was destined to become the most popular scion of the family. It is, aesthetically, the most accomplished of the penance narratives, and it is no exaggeration to say that this Life is a real measure of the distance traveled in the passage from a classical to a Christian sexual culture. The Life of Mary of Egypt is, like Leucippe and Clitophon, a quintessential text, a mature and representative expression of a wider culture, filled with its “struggles and harmonies.” Mary’s story is set within the frame narrative of a monk from Jerusalem, Zosimas. This monk experiences an overly satisfied spiritual pride—until he meets Mary. As he treks the desert beyond the River Jordan, he glimpses a “shadowy image of the human body,” a naked woman blackened by the sun who runs from him. It is Mary. Mary of Egypt, when we meet her through the eyes of Zosimas, is a spectral figure. She constantly insists on her sinful nature and prays, in mysterious tongues, toward the east. Zosimas is entranced by her strange sanctity and begs for her story. Much like Achilles Tatius, the author of this Life has contrived to deliver the core of the narrative in the first person and uses the perspective to artful effect: confession as a form of narrative.68 Mary is the consummate antiheroine. “My homeland was Egypt. When I turned twelve, with my parents still alive, I spurned this filial affection and took myself to Alexandria. I am ashamed to recall how I first ruined my virginity, and what an unmitigated and insatiable lust for sex I had.” Her sexual depravity cannot be excused by extenuating circumstances—no orphan is she. Nor can plain moral weakness explain her fall. When she reached the first threshold of sexual maturity—twelve, the legal minimum for marriage—she willingly fled her loving family. And she did so for one purpose, defined with crystalline precision: lust. For seventeen years, she so loved pleasure that she was a blazing inferno of sexual dissolution. “And not for the sake of money, to tell the truth. Often men wanted to pay something and I would not accept. I figured that I could make more men come to me if I made a free gift of my abandonment. Do not think that I refused such emoluments because I was rich. I survived by begging, or sometimes spinning flax. My unslakable passion and boundless desire was to wallow in such foul mire. Such was my life, and my consuming purpose—to rape my nature.”69

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Paul’s passing endorsement of continence as an optimal state, so gently embodied in his own example, has been expanded into a thoroughgoing devaluation of physical plea sure. If virginity is a marvelous foretaste of salvation, Meth- odius holds, then what store could be set in the corporeal agitations of sex? Th e sleep of Adam during the creation of Eve prefi gured the deadening trance perpetually reenacted in the marriage bed: during sex, so one of the virginal interlocutors had heard, the generative element in the husband’s blood was boiled into a sort of liquefi ed bone and implanted by the vital organ into the living fi eld of the wife. In the loving embraces of his wife, a man was overcome by “generative impulses.” Th e gravest danger of the sex drive was, in fact, that it impelled a “yearning for off spring.”  Th e plea sure of the marriage couch was a distraction, an insidiously dan- gerous one. Like a torrential river, the delights of sex threatened to drag the soul into its raging currents and send it careening down the “rapids of in- continence.” For the virgins of Methodius, plea sure lacked any positive value. Sex could not act as the warm bonding agent it is in Plutarch’s mari- tal counsels, nor could it be celebrated as the mysterious wash of ecstasy vouchsafed for man by nature and nature’s gods. Sex, with its corporal gy- rations, was a little putrid. But it was not, in itself, immoral. Th e virgins of Methodius knew it would be overbold to declare the generation of children sinful, when God himself had installed marriage and reproduction in the order of creation. Besides, marriage produced new generations of martyrs, soldiers of God ready to face the trials of persecution. Marital intercourse, even for these virginal symposiasts, also served another, less exalted pur- pose: it prevented worse uses of the body. For those too weak to pursue virginity, who smoldered with desire for sex, marriage was a safe harbor to  FROM SHAME TO SIN prevent them from crashing on the rocks of fornication, porneia. Th e logic is distinctly that of Paul. Marital congress was a prophylactic against other, easily obtained satisfactions.