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 Etched in Sand (2013)

  surprised, we’ll say, when she responded to one of my ads asking for day care for her three girls. The first morning, she shows up with little Cherie and Camille by her side, and she hands me this sweet baby girl—you had just turned a year old. And she says to me, ‘I’ll be back after work.’ So after about ten days of bringing you girls, Cookie appears on my stoop . . . and I’m just staring at this suitcase she’s carrying. ‘It just has some of the girls’ toys,’ she says. ‘It’ll keep them occupied during the day.’ That Cookie, I’ll never forget it: She smiled and told me, ‘Have a great day!’ Then as she’s waltzing toward her car, she calls over her shoulder, ‘Oh, by the way, Regina is Pauly’s baby!’ “With you in my arms, I’m standing on the porch calling out to her: ‘Cookie, wait!’ But she ignores me and just pulls out of the driveway. I remember wondering how she could be so detached from these kids, you know? These three beautiful little girls. After she left, I went inside and opened the suitcase, and what did I find? Not toys. Oh, no. I found clothes . . . and cockroaches.” I look away. “She’s disgusting.” “I slammed the case closed and put it out at the curb. Then for the next eight hours I fumed, ready to lay into her when she returned that evening. But even by the time Frank got home, you girls were still here. She never returned. I told Frank, ‘You call Pauly and your mother,’ and immediately they both came over. As soon as Paul walked in, he saw your two sisters and said, ‘What the hell are these girls doing here?’ Then he looked to his mother, who was holding you in her arms. She said, ‘Paul, this child is your baby.’ Pauly turns to me and says, ‘Get rid of these kids!’ Then he turned around and left the house.” So all the years as a child, when I wondered whether my father existed, he knew I existed. “But you didn’t get rid of us?” “No. We ignored Paul—the whole family did. There was a right thing to do, to take responsibility for you . . . and he refused to do it. And, so, soon the weeks turned into months and the months turned into a year, and nobody knew where Cookie went. We finally turned to Suffolk County social services and asked them to just give us food stamps to cover the costs of our food. And instead of helping us, what does social services do? They demand we turn you girls over to the county for placement in an orphanage or foster home.” She rubs her temples, then places one hand, resting on her wrist, on the table. “Frank resisted.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  could get down their pants at the grocery store, the only thing I couldn’t stomach was liver. Norm looked at his plate, then mine. He tilted his body so our shoulders almost touched and whispered, “We’ve gone hungry most of our lives. No big deal if we don’t eat it.” While the other kids silently forked in the gray, slimy sheets of meat, Norm and I picked at the teaspoonful of peas on our plates. Becky had cut-up apple, American cheese slices, and eight chicken nuggets with ketchup on her plate. I guess she didn’t eat liver either. Mr. Callahan, our foster father, ate with his head tilted toward his plate, as if no one else was at the table. His skin was the same color and texture as the meat he put in his mouth. His hair looked wet and shiny, the color of steel cables. Mrs. Callahan and Becky chatted in louder than normal voices. It was as if they thought we needed a lesson in dinner conversation and they were going to provide it by example. I couldn’t focus on what they said because I was too enraptured by the way Becky’s lips flopped loosely as she spoke; and the way the nooks of Mrs. Callahan’s teeth had food crammed into them like putty. Every few minutes, she stuck her finger in her mouth, cleared out the gunk, licked it off her finger and swallowed. When it was clear that Norm and I weren’t eating the liver, Becky tapped her mother on her bony elbow and nodded her salad-bowl head toward us. Mrs. Callahan slammed her fist on the table and said, “You two are disrespectin’ me! Go to your room.” Mr. Callahan continued to eat as if no outburst had occurred. Becky grinned, her face flushing pink as she watched us leave. When the other kids returned to the bunkroom, there was a stiff-edged silence. I wondered if Becky or Mrs. Callahan was waiting outside the door, trying to catch one of us saying something bad about them. Finally Jason broke the news, smiling as if he was taking joy in the message: “Mrs. Callahan says that you don’t get any meals for a whole week and you better eat everything you can at school ’cause that’s all your getting.” Norm and I both laughed. After going without food, or with very little food on the weekends, school lunches were a banquet to us. We’d been living on free school lunches for years. This was something so normal for us, it didn’t even register as a punishment. Jason looked bewildered. He grinned bigger and then he said, “AND—” We looked at him silently. “A-a-a-a-and what?” Brian asked. “And, you have bucket duty for the week, too,” Jason said. “S-s-s-sorry,” Brian said.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Hermogenes took my arm to help me go up again to the open air; it was almost a joy to be above ground once more, to catch sight of the cold blue sky between two slabs of tawny rock. The remainder of the voyage was brief. At Alexandria the empress re-embarked for Rome. DISCIPLINA AUGUSTA I returned to Greece by the land route. The journey was long. I had reason to think that this would be my last official tour in the Orient, and I was the more anxious, therefore, to see everything for myself. Antioch, where I stopped for some weeks, appeared to me under a new light; I was less impressed than before by the spell of its theaters and festivals, by the delights of the pleasure gardens of Daphne, and by the brilliant color in its passing crowds. I was increasingly aware of the eternal frivolity of the populace, mocking and malicious like the people of Alexandria, and of the stupidity of their so-called intellectual activities; likewise of the vulgar display of luxury on the part of the rich. Hardly one of these leading citizens grasped in its entirety my program for public works and reforms in Asia; they were satisfied to profit by them for their city, and above all for themselves. For a short time I considered advancing Smyrna or Pergamum to the detriment of the arrogant Syrian capital, but the faults of Antioch are those inherent in any metropolis; no great city can escape them. My disgust with urban life made me apply myself even more, if possible, to agrarian reform; I put the finishing touches to the long and complex reorganization of the imperial domains in Asia Minor; the peasants were the better off for it, and the State, too. Crossing Thrace, I went to revisit Hadrianopolis, where veterans of the Dacian and Sarmatian campaigns had settled in great numbers, attracted by land grants and reductions in taxes. The same plan was to be put into operation in Antinoöpolis. I had long since made comparable exemptions everywhere for doctors and professors in the hope of favoring the survival and development of a serious, well-educated middle class. I know the deficiences of this class, but only through it does a State endure. Athens remained the stop of my choice; I marveled that its beauty depended so little upon memories, whether my own or those of history; that city seemed new with each new day. I stayed this time with Arrian. He had been initiated like me at Eleusis, so was accordingly adopted by one of the great priestly families of Attica, the Kerykes, as I had been by the family of the Eumolpides. He had married into the Kerykes family; his wife was a proud and elegant young Athenian. The two of them gave me every care.

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

  In the peaceful middle de cades of the second century, a Greek speaker of Samaritan origin settled in Rome. He had, by his own account, passed through the hands of Stoics and Aristotelians, Pythagoreans and Platonists, during the course of his studies. He was impressed by the Platonic doctrine of an eternal soul. But this seeker, Justin, was unconvinced until he found Christian philosophy. Following baptism, he became a Christian teacher and the fi rst of the apologists whose work survives. Justin studiously maintained the persona and trappings of a phi los o pher. His two apologies and his Dialogue with Trypho are usually mined as evidence for the gradual accommodation of Christian theology with Platonic metaphysics. But they are at least as interesting as statements of a second- century sexual ideology that parted quite as much from Plato as from the regnant norms of imperial society. For Justin the conversion to Christianity meant leaving behind a life of entrenched sexual indulgence. “Th ose who once reveled in fornica- tions now cleave to chastity alone.” Th e sexual propriety of the Christians was one of the chief recommendations for the new religion, and it stood in sharp contrast to the patterns of sexual conduct not just allowed but institutionalized in the ancient Mediterranean. “We see that nearly all of them are led into prostitution, not only the girls but also the males. In the way T H E W I L L A N D T H E WO R L D  that those of old are said to have reared herds of sheep and cattle, goats and grazing horses, in these times children are reared, but for shameful use. So too an abundance of women, she- men, and ineff ably wicked ones are set up for this sort of pollution. And you receive income, revenue, and taxes from those whom you ought to cast out of your civilization.” Th e centrality of prostitution stood as a stain on the oikoumenē, the hard- won civilization of the Roman Empire. Justin’s apology provides an important witness to Christian self-presentation in the middle of the second century. Th e Christians had created a way of life indiff erent to the lures of plea sure. “It is our principle either to marry for the purpose of rearing children or to abstain from marriage and live in complete continence.” Justin does not off er a strictly Pauline justifi cation for marriage as a safeguard against sexual pollution. Instead, marriage is justifi ed as a procreative project. In part Justin is appealing to the broadly accepted purpose of marriage in the ancient world. Marriage was understood, and structured, above all as a procreative relationship.

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

  To the audience that Lactantius was ad- dressing, the brothel presented an especially diabolical source of tempta- tion, because it removed all material impediments to the fulfi llment of de- sire. Still the dev il was not fi nished 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 main- stream 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.  It is highly telling that the passages of the Divine Institutes devoted to libido are followed immediately by the pre sen ta tion of Christian notions of penance. A rigorous sexual morality, if it is genuinely ambitious, will have mechanisms ready for the contingency of errant behavior. “Let no one des- ert or despair of himself if, overtaken by passion, driven by lust, deceived by error, or coerced by violence, he has fallen down the path of injustice.” Just a few years later, after the conversion of Constantine, Lactantius issued an abbreviated second edition of the Divine Institutes. Indulgence is given an even wider berth. “But in fact all of these things are diffi cult for man, nor in this state of frailty can any be without stain. Th erefore the ultimate cure is that we may take refuge in penance.” Th e distance traveled from the time of Paul— who counseled in such searing, urgent words that sinners should be cast from the midst of the Christian assembly— is mea sured by the tri- umph of pragmatism over puritanism in the church’s management of sexual sin. Th e elaboration of a penitential discipline that could regulate the errors of the fl esh is a sure sign of Christianity’s coming- of- age as a mass move- ment. Th e famous canons of Elvira, one of the earliest Christian synods, are almost precisely contemporary with the Divine Institutes.

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

  In earlier phases of Roman history, enormous social prejudice in combination with rigid stratifi cation of rank and citizenship allowed the state to stare past the inconsequential lives be- neath its fi eld of vision. Christianity carried with it a sense of “the people” not only as a civic category but as the human collective itself. Th is solidar- ity, in the fi eld of sexual regulation, had unintended and at times violent consequences. Th e remarkable sexual persecution of 390 was further enabled by a very real sense of sexual deviance as a contaminatio. Th e conception of grave sex- ual crime as a sort of pollution made it an acute public worry. John Chryso- stom spoke of same- sex eros as a “grievous and incurable disease,” and even  FROM SHAME TO SIN more consequentially as a “plague harsher than all other plagues.” Th e 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. “Th ose who do these things are worthy of death, and not only those who do them, but also those who consent. For assent is participation. . . . Th erefore 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. Th us, this vice, this contamination of a life without decency is not allowed by one whose soul is thinking of God. Th ere 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 per for mance. But to remain quiet or to take amusement at the report of such things, when they should be condemned, amounts to assenting to them.”  Th ese are the words of a Christian theologian, writing in Rome, in the years just before the constitution of Th eodosius I. Th e linguistic overlap was not circumstantial. Only a few years after the law of Th eodosius, in Rufi - nus’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 judg- ment 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 fl agitious deeds?”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I again went through what we had already seen, to the point of revulsion, during the Dacian campaigns. Our enemies burned their prisoners alive; we began to slaughter ours, for lack of means to transport them to slave markets in Rome or Asia. The stakes of our palisades bristled with severed heads. The enemy tortured their hostages; several of my friends perished in this way. One of them dragged himself on his bleeding limbs as far as the camp; he had been so disfigured that I was never able, thereafter, to recall his former aspect. The winter took its toll of victims; groups of horsemen caught in the ice or carried off by the river floods, the sick racked by cough, groaning feebly in their tents, wounded men with frozen extremities. Some admirable spirits gathered round me; this small, closely bound company whose devotion I held had the highest form of virtue, and the only one in which I still believe, namely, the firm determination to be of service. A Sarmatian fugitive whom I had made my interpreter risked his life to return to his people, there to foment revolts or treason; I succeeded in coming to an understanding with this tribe, and from that time on its men fought to protect our advance posts. A few bold strokes, imprudent in themselves but skillfully contrived, demonstrated to the enemy the absurdity of attacking the Roman State. One of the Sarmatian chieftains followed the example of Decebalus: he was found dead in his tent of felt; beside him lay his wives, who had been strangled, and a horrible bundle which contained the bodies of their children. That day my disgust for waste and futility extended to the barbarian losses themselves; I regretted these dead whom Rome might have absorbed and employed one day as allies against hordes more savage still. Our scattered attackers disappeared as they had come, into that obscure region from which no doubt many another storm will break forth. The war had not ended. I was obliged to take it up again and finish it some months after my accession. Order reigned for the moment, at least, on that frontier. I returned to Rome covered with honors. But I had aged. My first consulate proved also to be a year of campaign, but this time the struggle was secret, though incessant, and was waged on behalf of peace. It was not, however, a struggle carried on alone. Before my return a change of attitude parallel to my own had taken place in Licinius Sura, Attianus, and Turbo alike, as if in spite of the severe censorship which I exercised over my letters these friends had already understood, and were either following me or had gone on ahead.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Initiations into strange or secret cults (practices tolerated rather than approved, and which the legislator in me regarded with distrust) appealed at that moment of life when dance leaves us reeling and song ends in outcry. In Samothrace I had been initiated into the Mysteries of the Cabiri, ancient and obscene rites as sacred as flesh and blood; at the Cave of Trophonius milk-fed serpents glided about my ankles; the Thracian feasts of Orpheus taught me savage brotherhood rites. The statesman who had imposed severe penalties upon all forms of mutilation now consented to attend the orgies of Cybele: I witnessed the hideous whirling of bleeding dancers; fascinated as a kid in presence of a snake, my young companion watched with terror these men who were electing to answer the demands of age and of sex with a response as final as that of death itself, and perhaps more dreadful. But the height of horror was reached during a stay in Palmyra, where the Arab merchant, Meles Agrippa, entertained us for three weeks in the lap of splendid and barbaric luxury. One day in the midst of the drinking, this Meles, who was a high official in the Mithraic cult but who took somewhat lightly his priestly duties, proposed to Antinous that he share in the blood baptism. The youth knew that I had formerly been inducted in a ceremony of the same kind; he offered himself with fervor as a candidate. I saw no reason to object to this fantasy; only a minimum of purificatory rites and abstinence was required. I agreed to serve myself as sponsor, together with Marcus Ulpius Castoras, my secretary for the Arabian language. We descended into the sacred cave at the appointed hour; the Bithynian lay down to receive the bloody aspersion. But when I saw his body, streaked with red, emerging from the ditch, his hair matted with sticky mud and his face spattered with stains which could not be washed away but had to be left to wear off themselves, I felt only disgust and abhorrence for all such subterranean and sinister cults. Some days later I forbade access to the black Mithraeum for all troops stationed at Emesa. Warnings there were: like Mark Antony before his last battle I heard receding into the night the music of the change of guard as the protecting gods withdrew. ... I heard, but paid no heed. My assurance was like that of a horseman whom some talisman protects from every fall. At Samosata an assembly of lesser kings of the Orient was held under my auspices; during the mountain hunts, Abgar himself, king of Osro�ne, taught me the art of falconry; great beats engineered like scenes on a stage drove whole herds of antelope into nets of purple. Antinous was given two panthers for this chase; he had to pull back with all his strength to hold them in as they strained at their heavy yoke of gold.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  A man frustrated was weeping over himself. Ideas jarred upon each other; words ground on without meaning; voices rasped and buzzed like locusts in the desert or flies on a dung pile; our ships with sails swelling out like doves' breasts were carriers for intrigue and lies; on the human countenance stupidity reigned. Death, in its aspect of weakness or decay, came to the surface everywhere: the bad spot on a fruit, some imperceptible rent at the edge of a hanging, a carrion body on the shore, the pustules of a face, the mark of scourges on a bargeman's back. My hands seemed always somewhat soiled. At the hour of the bath, as I extended my legs for the slaves to shave, I looked with disgust upon this solid body, this almost indestructible machine which absorbed food, walked, and managed to sleep, and would, I knew, reaccustom itself one day or another to the routines of love. I could no longer bear the presence of any but those few servants who remembered the departed one; in their way they had loved him. My sorrow found an echo in the rather foolish mourning of a masseur, or of the old negro who tended the lamps. But their grief did not keep them from laughing softly amongst themselves as they took the evening air along the river bank. One morning as I leaned on the taffrail I noticed a slave at work in the quarters reserved for the kitchens; he was cleaning one of those chickens which Egypt hatches by the thousands in its dirty incubators; he gathered the slimy entrails into his hands and threw them into the water. I had barely time to turn away to vomit. At our stop in Philae, during a reception offered us by the governor, a child of three met with an accident: son of a Nubian porter and dark as bronze, he had crept into the balconies to watch the dancing, and fell from that height. They did the best they could to hide the whole thing; the porter held back his sobs for fear of disturbing his master's guests, and was led out with the body through the kitchen doors; in spite of such precautions I caught a glimpse of his shoulders rising and falling convulsively, as under the blows of a whip.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Stuffing themselves on certain feast days has always been the ambition, joy, and natural pride of the poor. At army festivities I liked the aroma of roasted meats and the noisy scraping of kettles, and it pleased me to see that the army banquets (or what passes for a banquet in camp) were just what they always should be, a gay and hearty contrast to the deprivations of working days. I could stand well enough the smell of fried foods in the public squares at the Saturnalia, but the banquets of Rome filled me with such repugnance and boredom that if at times I have expected to die in the course of an exploration or a military expedition I have said to myself, by way of consolation, that at least I should not have to live through another dinner! Do not do me the injustice to take me for a mere ascetic; an operation which is performed two or three times a day, and the purpose of which is to sustain life, surely merits all our care. To eat a fruit is to welcome into oneself a fair living object, which is alien to us but is nourished and protected like us by the earth; it is to consume a sacrifice wherein we sustain ourselves at the expense of things. I have never bitten into a chunk of army bread without marveling that this coarse and heavy concoction can transform itself into blood and warmth, and perhaps into courage. Alas, why does my mind, even in its best days, never possess but a particle of the assimilative powers of the body? It was in Rome, during the long official repasts, that I began to think of the relatively recent origins of our riches, and of this nation of thrifty farmers and frugal soldiers formerly fed upon garlic and barley now suddenly enabled by our conquests to luxuriate in the culinary arts of Asia, bolting down those complicated viands with the greed of hungry peasants. We Romans cram ourselves with ortolans, drown in sauce, and poison ourselves with spice. An Apicius glories in the succession of courses and the sequence of sweet or sour, heavy or dainty foods which make up the exquisite order of his banquets; these dishes would perhaps be tolerable if each were served separately, and consumed for its own sake, learnedly savored by an expert whose taste and appetite are both unspoiled. But presented pell-mell, in the midst of everyday vulgar profusion, they confound a man's palate and confuse his stomach with a detestable mixture of flavors, odors, and substances in which the true values are lost and the unique qualities disappear. My poor Lucius used to amuse himself by concocting delicacies for me; his pheasant pasties with their skillful blending of ham and spice bore witness to an art which is as exacting as that of a musician or painter, but I could not help regretting the unadulterated flesh of the fine bird.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  from the plate. “Cookie and Pauly dated,” Julia says. “God, I remember my first impression of Cookie: her striking dark eyes, white skin like milk, and those two adorable little girls. Pauly dated a lot of girls after he and Carol divorced, but he wouldn’t bring them all around here,” she says. “But sure enough, he brought your mom a few times. Pauly has another daughter, you know, from his marriage to Carol. So you have another sister, and two nieces—I think they still live in Alaska.” “How did we end up here?” She stays silent a moment, then reaches out for my hand. “Frank—that was my husband, Paul’s older brother. He died ten years ago. See, Frank already had three kids from his first marriage but his wife died giving birth to the third, God rest her soul. Then we had three more, and Frank worked full-time to support us all. But, you know, for a family of eight, we needed more income. So I watched other people’s kids while they worked. Parents brought their children to me either by references or they’d find me in the Pennysaver ads.” I look at her hand, still on mine. With carefully chosen words, Julia explains she hadn’t seen Cookie for over a year and a half after she and Paul stopped dating. “So I was . . . surprised, we’ll say, when she responded to one of my ads asking for day care for her three girls. The first morning, she shows up with little Cherie and Camille by her side, and she hands me this sweet baby girl—you had just turned a year old. And she says to me, ‘I’ll be back after work.’ So after about ten days of bringing you girls, Cookie appears on my stoop . . . and I’m just staring at this suitcase she’s carrying. ‘It just has some of the girls’ toys,’ she says. ‘It’ll keep them occupied during the day.’ That Cookie, I’ll never forget it: She smiled and told me, ‘Have a great day!’ Then as she’s waltzing toward her car, she calls over her shoulder, ‘Oh, by the way, Regina is Pauly’s baby!’ “With you in my arms, I’m standing on the porch calling out to her: ‘Cookie, wait!’ But she ignores me and just pulls out of the driveway. I remember wondering how she could be so detached from these kids, you know? These three beautiful little girls. After she left, I went inside and opened the suitcase, and what did I find? Not toys. Oh, no. I found clothes . . . and cockroaches.” I look away. “She’s disgusting.” “I slammed the case closed and put it out at the curb. Then for the next eight hours I fumed, ready to lay into her when she returned that evening. But even by the time Frank got home, you girls were still here. She never returned. I told Frank, ‘You call Pauly and your mother,’ and immediately they both came over. As soon as Paul walked in, he saw your two sisters and said, ‘What the hell are

• 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)

  C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H  cence, this law of sin which abides in our members,” was an intractable symptom of human nature. Concupsicence was “not to be imputed to marriage, but only to be tolerated within marriage.” Procreative sex alone was not to be reckoned a sin, but even the act of procreation, in the postlapsar-ian world, required the mobilization of dangerous forces beyond man’s complete control. “Conjugal intercourse which is had with procreative intention is not in itself a sin, because a righ teous will leads the spirit which follows, and does not follow the lead of bodily plea sure; human choice is in this case not led by mastering sin, when the attack of sin is rightly redirected for the purpose of procreation.” Augustine was led to articulate a model of procreationist sex that was, momentously, far more specifi c than anything that had preceded it. Certainly Clement of Alexandria, the most important early exponent of procreationism, had avoided backing himself into the corners where Augustine fi nds himself. Augustine provided a pessimistic reading of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Sex within marriage was indeed a safeguard against “damnable crimes, that is fornication and adultery.” But conjugal sex that served “an overpowering concupiscence” was allowed only by way of concession. Th e Apostle had allowed that marriage could act as a mitigating factor in the commission of sexual sin. Marriage transformed sexual acts performed out of desire into “venial sins.” What is at stake in Augustine’s pessimism, in the largest sense, is the ability of the church to absorb society. Th e impossibility of human perfec- tion was the necessary adjunct to a vision of the church as an embracing institution, impure in its present form. Unlike Pelagius or Julian, Augustine was willing to accept that the church was far from a perfect body of holy men and women, standing apart from the world. Th e church was a collec-

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

  The star of this Christian Symposium is Thecla, the semilegendary traveling companion of Paul, who makes an effective mouthpiece for the sexual teaching of her apostolic mentor. Behind the imagery and mystical hierarchy of a Platonic cosmos, the ideological framework on which the Symposium rests is thoroughly Pauline. The compressed words of Paul in his first epistle to the Christians of Corinth determine the boundaries between the ideal, the permissible, and the forbidden throughout the dialogue. 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 pleasure. If virginity is a marvelous foretaste of salvation, Methodius holds, then what store could be set in the corporeal agitations of sex? The sleep of Adam during the creation of Eve prefigured 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 liquefied bone and implanted by the vital organ into the living field of the wife. In the loving embraces of his wife, a man was overcome by “generative impulses.” The gravest danger of the sex drive was, in fact, that it impelled a “yearning for offspring.”2

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  The next morning, I opened the closet door with one hand, pinching my nose shut with the other. While keeping my body as far away as possible, I reached in and grabbed the metal handle of the blue plastic bucket. Like a tight-rope walker, I went slow and steady to avoid sloshing. Out of the bunkroom, then down the stairs like a bride: foot out, feet together, foot out, feet together. Becky and Mrs. Callahan didn’t want the bucket carried through the kitchen so I went out the front door, through the junk car yard, around to the weedy side yard, past the stand-alone garage, past the corrugated metal junk shed (which Brian said was full of broken furniture), and into the dirt backyard to the poop hole, which was the size of a manhole cover and as deep as cellar stairs. I stood as far from the hole as possible, turned my face away so I wouldn’t have to see what I’d been carrying, and upended the bucket. A shovel stood, dug into the dirt nearby. I picked up the shovel, almost as tall as I, and shoveled in a few mounds of dirt. On the way back to the house, I stopped by the shed where the hose was. The bucket was rinsed clean before being returned to the bedroom. After doing this for a few days, I realized that if the bucket had just held pee, things might have been easier. But one of our bunkmates was a night-pooper. Norm suspected Jason, as Charlie was a sound sleeper and had to be poked awake each morning, Hannah seemed too shy to ever poop in a bucket, and Brian shook so much there was little chance he’d be able to poop in a bucket without pooping on the floor. One night, Norm asked the dark room: “What happens when the poop hole fills up?” “It’s an old w-w-w-well,” Brian said. “They’d probably make us dig another poop hole,” Charlie said. “Yeah,” Norm said. “Then after a few years, the whole yard would be one giant poop hole.” We all laughed at the idea of slumpy Becky, flat-footed Mrs. Callahan, and liver-faced Mr. Callahan living at the crest of a giant poop hole. There was one nice thing that happened our first week at the Callahans’. Each day when we got home from school, Norm and I found food hidden under our pillows: bits of pancake, a handful of cereal, and one half an orange each. We gobbled it up quickly before the floating eyes and ears bobbed into our room and caught us. Like what you just read? Click here to buy Girl Unbroken.

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

  Although the bishops of this period recognized the place of prostitution in secular society and rejected it, they were slow to articulate an alternative social vision, and the residues of more ancient thought occasionally seeped into Christian discourse. Greeks and Romans had long held the idea that prostitution was a social necessity. It is not hard to find expressions of the idea that prostitution was like a safety valve, a safe outlet for male sexual energies. In his early tract On Order, Augustine provided the most lucid statement of prostitution’s necessity that has survived from antiquity. “What could claim to be more filthy and more worthless, more full of shame and defilement, than prostitutes and pimps and other infections of this kind? But take whores out of human affairs, and you will overturn everything because of lusts. Put them in the place of matrons, and you will ruin honor with fallenness and disgrace.” Augustine was no stranger to the world of procured sex, though he was more familiar with the sophisticated side of the flesh trade. He spent over a decade with one concubine, and when forced to dismiss her, by his engagement to a ten-year-old girl of the Roman gentry, he quickly “procured another” companion in the interim. So he had a robust appreciation for the forces that prostitution held in check. If prostitutes were to be removed from society, not just the honor of free women, “everything” would be thrown into confusion.48 Prostitution for Augustine was a necessary evil. The social order had to make such compromises, to allow virtue to flourish. “[Pimps and prostitutes] represent the most impure part of mankind by their habits and the most vile condition in the laws of order. Are there not in the bodies of living things certain parts that, if you tried to consider only these, you couldn’t stand it? Nevertheless, the order of nature did not wish for things that are necessary to be lacking, but neither did it allow them, as they are dishonorable, to be conspicuous. Still, these imperfections, by holding their place, concede the better part to their superiors.” Matrons enjoyed their place in society because prostitutes deflected dangerous lusts away from honorable women. An unfortunate passage, with a long future, it was no more than the meeting point of Augustinian pessimism and perfectly traditional ideology.49

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Even the most fleeting of sociosexual fashion trends can deeply influence human sexual desire and mating behavior. Some years ago, an anonymous man wrote a piece for the gossip blog Gawker about a sexual encounter he had had a few years earlier with a woman who, at the time of his report, was running for high political office as a Tea Party Republican. Several months after they had first met, he said, she and another acquaintance showed up at his apartment on Halloween night to invite him out to party. They all went to a bar and drank excessively, and then he and the future candidate returned to his apartment and ended up in his bed. What seemed like a predictable progression, however, came to an unexpected and sudden halt. As the kiss-and-tell blogger wrote, “When her underwear came off, I immediately noticed that the waxing trend had completely passed her by. Obviously that was a big turnoff, and I quickly lost interest.” Even more unexpected to me than my sudden feelings of sympathy for the right-wing politician was my shock at the man’s assumption that his particular sexual preferences were universally shared and approved of by his audience. Even though the anonymous tattler recognized that selective removal of pubic hair is a “trend,” he still felt it “obvious” that any woman who wasn’t a slave to this particular fashion would be a “turnoff” to any sexually well-adjusted man such as himself. This anecdote is not just about the cultural variability of sexual taste, however. It also serves as another refutation of evolutionary psychology’s contention that men are shaped by natural selection to be universally sexually profligate. In fact, men are quite sexually picky, and the form of their pickiness is greatly influenced by their cultural environments. — The reason that I’ve gone into some detail about differing cultural norms of beauty is that they have the potential to feed back upon biological, or genetic, evolution. When culture assumes a causal role in evolutionary processes, we call this a top-down effect. One of the most striking examples of the top-down effect of human culture on genetics is the evolution of lactose tolerance in adults, which allows some to eat dairy products. Lactose is a special sugar found only in mammalian milk. All baby mammals digest lactose with the enzyme lactase, but mammals stop making lactase when they are weaned. However, during the last twelve to fifteen thousand years, various groups of humans domesticated sheep, cows, goats, and horses, and the ensuing widespread availability of milk—a rich, new source of calories and protein for adults—resulted in natural selection for genetic changes that produce the adult capacity to digest lactose in many populations of humans. Thus, the cultural practice of dairy herding exerted a top-down effect on human genetic evolution. In short, culture can shape biology.

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

  Of all the early Christians, Clement is most sensitively estranged from the civic fabric of the Roman Empire. This was a dizzying vantage from which to view the world. There is something of Dio Chrysostom’s alienated perspective in Clement’s lofty pronouncements. “Such complete lasciviousness has poured over the cities that it has become the law.” Like Dio, Clement located the essence of the ancient sexual economy in the institution of venal sex. “Women are prostituted in brothels, selling the violation of their flesh for pleasure, and boys are led to reject their nature, taking on the role of women.” Clement had the pulse of imperial sexual culture. No matter what any moralist said, “the whores are proof of what is actually done.” Indulgence was not a matter of abuse or excess; it was embedded in the order of society. “The wise men of the laws allow this. They let them sin with the protection of law. They call unspeakable acts of pleasure 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 discomfort, but he is one of the most striking observers of the realities of the Roman slave trade. The sale of sex was anything but marginal. “The whole earth is filled with fornication and disorder.” This 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.55 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 occupying 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 affection or cheery romantic patriotism of the culture that surrounded him. Clement’s sexual 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.

• 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)

  epistle to the Christians of Corinth determine the boundaries between the ideal, the permissible, and the forbidden throughout the dialogue. 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, Methodius 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 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 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 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. 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 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  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N 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. In their alertness to the perils of fornication, the virgins at this symposium reveal the infl uence 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 dev il,” 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.