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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The struggle goes on against brutal misuse of judiciary power: I have had to reprimand the governor of Cilicia who took it into his head to execute under torture the cattle thieves in his province, as if simple death were not enough to punish a man and dispose of him. Both the State and the municipalities were abusing their power to condemn men to forced labor in order to procure workers at no cost; I have prohibited that practice not only with regard to free men but for forced labor of slaves as well; it is important, however, to watch sharply lest this detestable system re-establish itself under other names. In certain parts of the territory of ancient Carthage child sacrifice still prevails, so means must be devised to forbid the priests of Baal the pleasure of feeding their fires. In Asia Minor the rights of heirs of the Seleucids have been shamefully disregarded by our civil tribunals, ever prejudiced against the former kings; I have repaired that long-standing injustice. In Greece the trial of Herod Atticus still goes on. Phlegon's dispatch box, with his erasers of pumice stone and his sticks of red wax, will be with me to the end. As in the days of my felicity, people believe me to be a god; they continue to give me that appellation even though they are offering sacrifices to the heavens for the restoration [Hadrian 284a.jpg] Inscription in Honor of Hadrian as Archon of Athens Athens, Theatre of Dionysus [Hadrian 284bc.jpg] Hadrian�s Address to the Troops at Lambaesis Algiers, St�phane Gsell Museum Inscription of Fraternity of Diana and Antinous at Lanuvium Rome, National Museum [Hadrian 284d.jpg] Hieroglyphic Insert Recording Funeral Ceremonies of Antinous Rome, Obelisk of the Pincio of the Imperial Health. I have already told you the reasons for which such a belief, salutary for them, seems to me not absurd. A blind old woman has come on foot from Pannonia, having undertaken that exhausting journey in order to ask me to touch her eyes; she has recovered her sight under my hands, as her fervor had led her to expect; her faith in the emperor-god explains this miracle. Other prodigies have occurred, and invalids say that they have seen me in their dreams, as the pilgrims to Epidaurus have visions of �sculapius; they claim that they have awakened cured, or at least improved. I do not smile at the contrast between my powers as a thaumaturge and my own illness; I accept these new privileges with gravity. The old blind woman who made her way to the emperor from the depths of a barbarian province has become for me what the slave of Tarragona had formerly been, namely, a symbol of the populations of the empire whom I have both ruled and served.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets. Instead of uniting for peace they turned on one another, committing acts of unbelievable savagery. Massive riots broke out. Thousands of people were killed. Necklacing was common. That’s where people would hold someone down and put a rubber tire over his torso, pinning his arms. Then they’d douse him with petrol and set him on fire and burn him alive. The ANC did it to Inkatha. Inkatha did it to the ANC. I saw one of those charred bodies on the side of the road one day on my way to school. In the evenings my mom and I would turn on our little black-and-white TV and watch the news. A dozen people killed. Fifty people killed. A hundred people killed.

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

  Chrysostom speaks of same-sex eros as a pathology. “All passions are without honor, but especially the madness for males. The soul suffers more in the disgrace of these sins than the body does in disease.” The books of the philosophers are “full of this disease.” But tellingly, for Chrysostom, same-sex love is not only a disease whose origins lie in deviant desires of the soul. “Do not think, because you have heard him say ‘they burned,’ that this is a disease of desire only. In fact it comes more from their state of dissolution, which kindled their lust.” Chrysostom’s etiology of same-sex love, then, is complex. It does not rest purely on an improper kind of lust, nor an excessive amount of it, but a virulent synthesis of the two. He compares the man who enjoys same-sex love with a person who is titillated by smearing himself with sewage and running naked through the streets: strange desire and lack of control combine to produce the deviant. In Chrysostom’s harangues, there is no sense that sexual deviance is inborn, but it could certainly become physiologically embedded. If a virgin was sentenced to sexual debasement with animals, he said, but then came to enjoy it, she was lamentably in thrall to a “disease.” In other words, Chrysostom’s sexual pathology imagines an escalating feedback loop between act and desire, body and soul. “With this sin, the soul is ruined by the body. Whatever sin you might name, you can utter none equal to this in lawlessness. If those who suffer from it realized their sin, they would accept ten thousand deaths rather than suffer it.”18 Just as important as the incipient pathology of desire is the primary term that has, quietly, dropped out of the equation in the late antique sources: masculinity. Dio Chrysostom, for example, compared “androgyny” to a progressive disease that gradually wasted a man’s nature, leaving him effeminate in manner and sexual predilection. Pre-Christian concepts of erotic misuse were embedded in a well-established order of thought about manliness. Gender deviance and sexual deviance were an ideological pair, their causes and effects—and outward signs—deeply intermeshed. The Christian moralists have excised the concern with gender deviance to focus on sexual deviance. And their moral anxieties are inserted within a different scale of values, one more fundamentally concerned about sin and salvation than secular honor.19

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

  A DISEASE NOT JUST OF DESIRE: SAME-SEX EROS IN LATE ANTIQUITYIn the waning years of the fourth century, an anonymous Christian lawyer assembled a small handbook juxtaposing Mosaic and Roman law, with the evident purpose of emphasizing the commonalities between them. Although the governance of sex presented inauspicious prospects for such a comparison, the author was not deterred. He presented the Levitical prohibition on same-sex coupling (in an Old Latin translation), which dictated the death penalty for both partners when “a man lies with a man as with a woman.” On the Roman side of the ledger, matters were far less clear. The author of the compilation could cite two rules preserved in the late legal collection known as the Sentences of Paul. “Anyone who will have corrupted a free male against his will is to suffer capital punishment. Anyone who will have submitted, of his own volition, to shameful and impure violation, will be deprived of half his property.” The Sentences of Paul, composed around AD 300, accurately reflected the foundations of classical law, which still prevailed when the author wrote his comparison of Mosaic and Roman law in the 390s. The violation of free boys was fearsomely punished, and sexual passivity incurred severe public penalties. Roman law was inspired by norms of masculinity; it guarded the impenetrability of the Roman youth and debilitated the pathicus. The Mosaic law sits across a conceptual divide so vast from the aims of Roman policy, and derives from a juridical regime so alien from the techniques of Roman jurisprudence, that the Christian author of this tract has made the best of a very bad job.8 He must have sensed it. For this unflappable compiler appended a recent enactment of the emperor Theodosius I, the only contemporary inclusion in his handbook, a decree that, in his judgment, “followed the spirit of the Mosaic Law to the fullest.” In 390, Theodosius had issued a law declaring, “We cannot allow the city of Rome, the mother of all virtues, any longer to be polluted by the contaminating emasculation of men’s sexual honor, and the rude vigor handed down from the ancient founders to be depleted by a people weakened in softness, becoming an insult to ages past and present.” The law explicitly punished men who suffered their bodies to be used like the flesh of women, but the focus of imperial energy was specific and revealing. “Having dragged out all—it is embarrassing to say—from the male brothels, let the flames of vengeance expiate their crime with the populace watching, so everyone will know that the soul of a man is to be treated by all as an inviolable precinct.” Such florid effusions are characteristic of late imperial statecraft. But the public incineration of the male prostitutes of Rome is almost totally unaccountable in terms of ordinary Roman policy.9

• From Untrue (2018)

  Meanwhile, in a study of gay men into cuckolding that Ley undertook with Dan Savage and Justin Lehmiller, the researchers discovered that the lifestyle is also popular with gay men in the age of marriage equality. It may be that, once gay men can get married, they are increasingly interested in being cucks and hot husbands. “It seems that when your relationship is codified and legalized, it is more erotic to cuckold within it, because it becomes more taboo,” Ley explained. As one of the straight couples he interviewed put it, “For the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence…there has to be a fence…If there’s no fence it’s all just grass.” Marriage creates a fence or line to cross. For some of us, crossing that line is a sin; for others, it is a fetish, a transgression with tremendous erotic charge. On many cuck websites, including MySlutWife.com and Blacked Wives.com, it’s evident that race often plays a disquieting role in the cuckold and hotwife lifestyle. There is an almost overwhelming fixation on “Mandingos,” or well-endowed black men. One might argue that in these scenarios everyone is getting something out of it. But if hotwifing is radical in the agency it gives women, who seemingly have free rein to fuck with abandon, it is reactionary in its reliance on and reification of stereotypes—of the “hypersexual” black man and the “BBC,” or big black cock. One bull told Kai Ma he refuses to respond to white couples’ ads because they have “rigid” and stereotypical and just plain racist criteria. “To some of these people, a black guy is necessarily a corn-row-wearing thug or a basketball player…the big black Mandingo.” Sighing, he mentioned an ad that said, “We want you to look like Usher.” “The typical bull on Craigslist is not going to look like Allen Iverson or Usher, so get over your stereotype and deal with it.”

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

  e preamble of Justinian’s law provides remarkable insight into the state of aff airs in sixth- century Constantinople. Justinian found that some pimps “went around the provinces and many places deceiving pitiful young girls, promising them food and clothing.” Th ey brought these girls to the capital, where they were kept in miserable conditions. “Th e pimps off er them out to the perversion of any who wish and take the entire fi lthy profi t that comes from prostituting the girls. Th e pimps have even made the girls sign written agreements stipulating that they will fulfi ll the impious and unholy ser vice for the pimps as long as the pimps see fi t.” Girls as young as ten were being forced into prostitution, and if anyone wanted to redeem one of the victims, the pimps extorted enormous sums. When Justinian went to examine the world of prostitution in sixth- century Constantinople, he found the ancient slave trade in every regard, except the state’s approval. Pimps were using classic means of obtaining slaves: defrauding the young and kidnapping them. Th e young age of the girls brought into prostitution is suggestive of the sheer violence of the system. Kept in squalid brothels, given none of the profi ts and only enough to survive, the young women were victims of the sort of forcible prostitution that had been illegal for a century. Th e law of Justinian showed par tic u lar dis plea sure for the fact that many pimps papered their activities with the trappings of legality. Pimps used written agreements with the prostitutes and “even sought securities for some of the women.” Justinian recognized that the contracts between pimps and prostitutes were intrinsically coercive and little more than an eff ort to lend a modicum of legality and legitimacy to their practice: it is even possible that pimps extracted consent waivers in response to the legislation of Th eodosius II and Leo that forbade coercive pimping and then pimping altogether. Justinian’s remedy was the most sweeping action yet undertaken by the Roman state. Th e law prohibited anyone from “leading women into perversion by guile, deceit, or coercion.” Justinian decreed even further that “there will henceforth be no allowance given to pimping, keeping women in brothels, off ering women for public perversion, or traffi cking such women by any other means.” Th e emperor came down hard on the sex trade. He was specifi c and exhaustive. Whereas the law of Leo had, in terse language, enjoined “let no one be a pimp,” Justinian’s law forbade pimping, brothel- keeping, prostituting, or any other means of acting as a vendor of sex. For both Th eodosius II and Justinian, the two great Christian codifi ers of the law, prostitution was a par tic u lar fi xation. Under Justinian, prostitution  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

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

  It is worth considering why Justinian’s crusade against pederasty has left traces in the historical record, whereas the criminalization of same-sex love enters the annals of jurisprudence with scarcely a whimper. In part the answer may lie in the continuing vitality of pederastic practices. In the fourth century, Libanius and John Chrysostom speak, with disgust, of pederasty as a lively contemporary institution. But they are perhaps the last observers to do so, and it is hard to imagine that pederasty—for so long legally confined to the bodies of slaves, now relentlessly attacked by ecclesiastical hectoring—had much of its old public acceptance, much less open advocacy, by the time of Justinian. But in a world that expected sexual attraction toward smooth bodies, that sequestered its women, and that nourished institutions like the schools and monasteries where male companionship was fostered, it was not an unlikely occurrence. The intense violence of Justinian’s campaign reflects both the importance of pederasty as a social practice and its flagrant offensiveness to a Christian emperor, for whom it was an insufferable blazon of errant, bygone cultures. The spectacular mutilation mandated by the law presages the more lurid strains of the Byzantine penal code, and it testifies to the belief that terror could go where surveillance might not. According to Malalas, the strategy worked. “And a great fear followed among those diseased with lust for males.”35

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

  The backsliding believer in love with his stepmother was symptomatic of deeper and more complex antagonisms at Corinth. Paul was faced with an intellectually armored libertine wing within the incipient church. Some of the Corinthians were claiming that the emancipatory message of the gospel freed the body from petty moral demands: “All things are lawful for me.” Paul’s response was both sharp and ranging. The body, he insisted, was not made for fornication. The believer’s body was a “member of Christ,” and the member of Christ could not be made “a member of a prostitute.” Paul’s libertine interlocutors espoused a traditional upper-class attitude toward the male body, whose desires were to be balanced by vigilant control but not self-denial. Paul’s response betrays an acute sensitivity to bodily purity. The sexual machinery of the body was something to be protected from contamination, not simply kept in proper balance. Coition was anything but a vacuous physical act without effects beyond the circulation of heat and moisture. “He who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her.” Paul’s demand was simple: “flee fornication.” The stakes were pitched deliberately high, and in an idiom of Mediterranean piety that gentile converts would immediately understand. “The fornicator sins into his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” Fornication was an act of pollution in the sacred space of the Christian body.18 Paul’s reflections on fornication, like a stone on the river bottom that suddenly catches the light, reveals the unexpected depths of the term’s meaning. Fornication was not just a marker of ethnic differentiation, providing a template of sexual rules setting God’s faithful apart from the heathens. Paul’s understanding of fornication made the body into a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine. When Paul heightened the term’s meaning, he also foreshadowed a certain narrowing of the term porneia and its scope in gentile Christianity. The specter of sexual lassitude presented by the libertine faction immediately suggested not the establishment of a free love commune but the traditionally harmless and “lawful” outlet for male sexual energies: prostitution. The availability of dishonored women traced the profoundly different foundations of sexual morality in the outside world. It was almost inevitable that fornication would come to identify, ever more narrowly, the types of extramarital sexual license entrenched in gentile society, centered on bodies without access to sexual honor. In First Corinthians, Paul has set his sights not on heavy petting gone too far among young innocents in the congregation, nor on carnal bohemianism. Far more consequentially, Paul intended to dam the traditional canals long approved as spillways for the inevitable sexual heats of young men in the ancient world. Christian porneia would recast the harmless sexual novitiate that was an unobjectionable part of sexual life in antiquity as an unambiguous sin, a transgression against the will of God, echoing in eternity.

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

  Convincing testimony confirms the sinister link between the slave trade and prostitution. The most chilling evidence is an iron slave collar, a typical means of preventing or punishing slave flight, discovered at Bulla Regia in North Africa; found still clasped around the neck of a skeleton, the collar’s inscription reads, “I am a slutty whore; retain me, I have fled Bulla Regia.” A third-century papyrus shows a dispute that arose from the sale of a girl by pimps. The pimp was, presumptively, a man “who buys girls.” Child exposure, a significant 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 relations between master and slave, they demonstrate the real danger that, for a slave, prostitution lurked in the future.52 The 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. The lingering stench, the atmosphere of violence, the cramped concrete cribs, the systemic abuse: these were the reality of the flesh trade. Disease and chemical dependence surely followed in the wake of such exploitative drudgery. The 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. The vile rate of the transaction is also a harrowing indication of the crushing amount of work women had to perform to survive and to profit their owners. The commodification of sex was carried out with all the ruthless efficiency 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.”53 The 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 immoral—it was squalid. The 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 afford private ones!” The brothel was even patronized by slaves. It raised the disturbing specter of sharing women with men of the lowest ranks. The brothel was irredeemably vulgar, and in a carefully and formally stratified society, nothing was more damning.54

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

  Documents like Chrysostom’s sermons provide some of the grittiest and most authentic reflections on the dynamics of power within the ancient marriage relationship. He claimed that “there is nothing more shameful than a fornicating husband.” He bolstered his condemnation, though, with an uncomfortable depiction of the mundane conflicts within the household. “Do you want to know just how awful it is? Think of what life is like for those who suspect their wives. Food and drink become repulsive. An insidious poison seems to suffuse the whole table. Countless evils fill the house, like ruin, and they flee the home. There is no sleep, no gentle night, no commerce of lovers, no rays of sunshine. They will actually think the light is a torment, not only when the wife is seen to be an adulteress, but even once there is the slightest suspicion. So, realize that your wife suffers these very things when she hears or suspects that you have given yourself over to some whore.” In Chrysostom’s sermons, we see how the notion of sex as a cosmic battleground came to settle within the domestic squabbles of marriage. “If dread of hell doesn’t restrain you, then fear their black magic. When you deprive yourself of God’s help through your debauchery, and denude yourself of assistance from above, the whore will seize you more brazenly. Hatching plots against you and calling on her familiar demons with amulets devised for it, she will gain control over your well-being, making you a risible shame before all who live in the city.” How far removed John is from the lofty pronouncements of a Clement of Alexandria is evident in the fact that public shame could be invoked as a check on the fornication of Christian men.43 The dire insistence on sexual exclusivity grated against the most entrenched habits of sexual life in the Roman Mediterranean. More subtle but no less consequential in its challenge to mainstream habits was the Christian opposition to divorce and remarriage. For the Christians, marriage was not only the exclusive legitimate venue for erotic experience, it was a unique bond that could not be dissolved by civil law. The Romans had one of the most liberal regimes of divorce in human history; legally, divorce could be obtained unilaterally, without cause, by either party, without cumbersome procedural obstacles; the strict separation of spousal property, and the prohibition of gifts between the husband and wife, abetted easy separation. This image must be qualified by an appreciation for the hard realities faced by the majority of families who lived along the edges of subsistence; divorce was the prerogative of the well-to-do. Nevertheless it was a discreet reserve of feminine power in Roman society. But the stark commands of Christian scripture ensured that the church would universalize a strict opposition to divorce and erode this wellspring of women’s clout.44

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

  The notion of “Greek love” is misleading on two counts. In the first place, practices and attitudes varied across the Greek world, and classical Athenian culture was hardly standard. Even in Athens, pederasty could not be washed of its aristocratic connotations, and the law was ambiguous enough that the adult partner might find himself liable for criminal violation. It is an even greater error, though, to insinuate that Greek love was not an indigenous Roman practice. This charge goes back to late republican moralists, who, in chauvinistic terms, decried the effects of underlying social change as the by-product of Hellenization. In reality, Greek and Roman codes of sexual behavior shared profound structural similarities: a sexual act was composed of an active and a passive partner, and masculinity required the insertive role. Roman pederasty was distinct in small but decisive ways. The Romans had an absolute abhorrence for the violation of freeborn boys; the body of the Roman man was impenetrable, and there was no twilight of indeterminacy between boyhood and manhood. This prohibition was backed by the fearsome power of public law. The severity of the rule eliminated the zone of ambiguity that had proven such fertile ground in the Greek philosophical tradition for celebrating the mentorship of the lover and beloved.11 The great chasm separating Roman pederastic practice from earlier models was the omnipresence of slaves. Classical Greece had seen an unprecedented expansion of the slave trade, which laid the institutional and commercial foundations for the Roman slave system. Slaves, already in Greek culture, were subjected to untrammeled sexual abuse. But the Romans built one of history’s most enduring and extensive slave systems, and the ownership of slaves would gradually shape virtually every social institution in Roman life, including pederasty. The laws deflected lust away from the freeborn body, and slaves provided a ready outlet. In Roman pederasty, elaborate courtship before the act was replaced by the master’s authority, and intentional obscurity about the nature of the act gave way to a coarse simplicity about the physical mechanics of pleasure. The most striking physical artifact of Roman pederasty, the Warren Cup, simultaneously celebrates love between males and explores the dependence of the practice on the institution of slavery. A silver goblet of the early first century, the Warren Cup juxtaposes two panels. On one side a young master, wearing a wreath, penetrates an even younger slave. On the reverse, the two figures are many years older. The slave lowers himself onto the master, who is again wearing a wreath. But this time another slave, a small boy, peeks through the door, observing the scene. Though opinions differ, the most compelling interpretation of the cup suggests that the same couple is depicted on both sides; on the reverse, the master’s sexual partner has outgrown his role, and the younger slave watching the scene is catching a glimpse of his future life course. In the Roman context, the moral economy of pederasty was recentered around the bare fact of dominance.12

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

  Paul’s response was both sharp and ranging. Th e body, he insisted, was not made for fornication. Th e believer’s body was a “member of Christ,” and the member of Christ could not be made “a member of a prostitute.” Paul’s libertine interlocutors espoused a traditional upper- class attitude toward the male body, whose desires were to be balanced by vigilant control but not self- denial. Paul’s response betrays an acute sensitivity to bodily purity. Th e sexual machinery of the body was something to be protected from contamination, not simply kept in proper balance. Coition was anything but a vacu-ous physical act without eff ects beyond the circulation of heat and moisture. “He who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her.” Paul’s demand was simple: “fl ee fornication.” Th e stakes were pitched deliberately high, and in an idiom of Mediterranean piety that gentile converts would immediately understand. “Th e fornicator sins into his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” Fornication was an act of pollution in the sacred space of the Christian body. Paul’s refl ections on fornication, like a stone on the river bottom that suddenly catches the light, reveals the unexpected depths of the term’s meaning. Fornication was not just a marker of ethnic diff erentiation, providing a  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N template of sexual rules setting God’s faithful apart from the heathens. Paul’s understanding of fornication made the body into a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine. When Paul heightened the term’s meaning, he also foreshadowed a certain narrowing of the term porneia and its scope in gentile Christianity. Th e specter of sexual lassitude presented by the libertine faction immediately suggested not the establishment of a free love commune but the traditionally harmless and “lawful” outlet for male sexual energies: prostitution. Th e availability of dishonored women traced the profoundly diff erent foundations of sexual morality in the outside world. It was almost inevitable that fornication would come to identify, ever more narrowly, the types of extramarital sexual license entrenched in gentile society, centered on bodies without access to sexual honor. In First Corinthians, Paul has set his sights not on heavy petting gone too far among young innocents in the congregation, nor on carnal bohemianism. Far more consequentially, Paul intended to dam the traditional canals long approved as spillways for the inevitable sexual heats of young men in the ancient world. Christian porneia would recast the harmless sexual novitiate that was an unobjectionable part of sexual life in antiquity as an unambiguous sin, a transgression against the will of God, echoing in eternity.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The doctor hands the corpsman a syringe, they are laughing as the corpsman drives the syringe into the pilot’s chest like a knife. They are talking about the Green Bay Packers and the corpsman is driving his fist into the black man’s chest again and again until the black pilot’s body begins to bloat up, until it doesn’t look like a body at all anymore. His face is all puffy like a balloon and saliva rolls slowly from the sides of his mouth. He keeps staring at the ceiling and saying nothing. “The machine! The machine!” screams the doctor, now climbing on top of the bed, taking the corpsman’s place. “Turn on the machine!” screams the doctor. He grabs a long suction cup that is attached to the machine and places it carefully against the black man’s chest. The black man’s body jumps up from the bed almost arcing into the air from each bolt of electricity, jolting and arcing, bloating up more and more. “I’ll bet on the Packers,” says the corpsman. “Green Bay doesn’t have a chance,” the doctor says, laughing. The nurse is smiling now, making fun of both the doctor and the corpsman. “I don’t understand football,” she says. They are pulling the sheet over the head of the black man and strapping him onto the gurney. He is taken out of the ward. The Korean civilian is still screaming and there is a baby now at the end of the ward. The nurse says it has been napalmed by our own jets. I cannot see the baby but it screams all the time like the Korean and the young man without any legs I had met in the ambulance. I can hear a radio. It is the Armed Forces radio. The corpsman is telling the baby to shut the hell up and there is a young kid with half his head blown away. They have brought him in and put him where the black pilot has just died, right next to me. He has thick bandages wrapped all around his head till I can hardly see his face at all. He is like a vegetable—a nineteen-year-old vegetable, thrashing his arms back and forth, babbling and pissing in his clean white sheets. “Quit pissin’ in your sheets!” screams the corpsman. But the nineteen-year-old kid who doesn’t have any brains anymore makes the corpsman very angry. He just keeps pissing in the sheets and crying like a little baby. There is a Green Beret sergeant calling for his mother. Every night now I hear him. He has spinal meningitis. He will be dead before this evening is over. The Korean civilian does not moan anymore. He does not wave his one arm and two fingers above his head. He is dead and they have taken him away too. There is a nun who comes through the ward now with apples for the wounded and rosary beads. She is very pleasant and smiles at all of the wounded.

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

  Encratism was less a coherent movement than a recurrent tendency within a dispersed religious mission whose praises of virginity and devaluation of sex, at all times, threatened to choke out any remaining air for marriage. The true position of encratism in the early Christian centuries is reflected in its haphazard appearance in the diffuse body of legend known as the apocryphal acts. Sex is uniformly devalued throughout the stories of apostolic wandering, and encratic ideas surface forcefully in some of the texts (especially the Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Thomas, which may have originated in Tatian’s Syriac milieu). Nevertheless, the complete renunciation of sex in the apocryphal literature functioned symbolically, as a dramatic gesture of withdrawal from the fallen order of this world. Continence, in the acts, is like martyrdom: a trait admired in heroes as an especially stark rejection of secular values. As in the formal apologetic literature, the attitude toward sex in the apocryphal acts is strongly colored by the urge to distinguish Christian life, with its commitment to an invisible order, from the corrupt structures of Roman society. The apocryphal acts have rightly been called an “open text,” a sprawling, amorphous body of memories, constantly reshaped by Christian communities. The place of sex in the acts—generally devalued, at times veering toward strict renunciation, but above all deeply symbolic of the relationship between Christians and the world—reflects some of the formless energy of sexual austerity in a radical movement that was only gradually brought under the control of an orderly church. The institutional church, too, lodged its authority in the very apostles who so fired the Christian imagination, but in the place of the raw enthusiasm that animates apostolic legend, the church came to offer a disciplined and definite interpretation of the textual artifacts of the apostolic generation. That hermeneutic project was a collective effort, but nowhere is it more in evidence than in the literary output of that scourge of encratism, Clement of Alexandria.40

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The only way I can describe it is to say that when she got hot and bothered, Evelyn, she put on a ventriloqual act with her cunt. You’d be ready to slip it in when suddenly the dummy between her legs would let out a guffaw. At the same time it would reach out for you and give you a playful little tug and squeeze. It could sing too, this dummy of a cunt. In fact it behaved just like a trained seal. Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus. Putting on the trained seal act all the time made her more inaccessible than if she had been trussed up with iron thongs. She could break down the most “personal” hard on in the world. Break it down with laughter. At the same time it wasn’t quite as humiliating as one might be inclined to imagine. There was something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter. The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence. You could visualize yourself as a dog, or a weasel, or a white rabbit. Love was something on the side, a dish of caviar, say, or a wax heliotrope. You could see the ventriloquist in you talking about caviar or heliotropes, but the real person was always a weasel or a white rabbit. Evelyn was always lying in the cabbage patch with legs spread open offering a bright green leaf to the first comer. But if you made a move to nibble it the whole cabbage patch would explode with laughter, a bright, dewy, vaginal laughter such as Jesus H. Christ and Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant never dreamed of, because if they had the world would not be what it is today and besides there would have been no Kant and no Christ Almighty. The female seldom laughs, but when she does it’s volcanic. When the female laughs the male had better scoot to the cyclone cellar. Nothing will stand up under that vaginating chortle, not even ferroconcrete. The female, when her risibility is once aroused, can laugh down the hyena or the jackal or the wildcat. Now and then one hears it at a lynching bee, for example. It means that the lid is off, that everything goes. It means that she will forage for herself—and watch out that you don’t get your balls cut off! It means that if the pest is coming SHE is coming first, and with huge spiked thongs that will flay the living hide off you. It means that she will lay not only with Tom, Dick and Harry, but with Cholera, Meningitis, Leprosy; it means that she will lay herself down on the altar like a mare in rut and take on all comers, including the Holy Ghost. It means that what it took the poor male, with his logarithmic cunning, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years to build, she will pull down in a night.

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

  The broadening of the penitential regime of the church in late antiquity is a sign of the mainstreaming of the religion. As the church became a sacramental dispenser on a mass scale, it generated a need to manage sinners like never before. Though no one will mistake the late antique church for its powerful late medieval successor, the elaboration of rules for the administration of baptism and communion reflects the nascent influence of ecclesiastical structures in private life. The Apostolic Constitutions, an important collection of church canons redacted in the later fourth century, reflect this expansion. The Apostolic Constitutions are especially revealing because the collection preserves multiple layers of canonical tradition. In book 7, we find a lightly reworked presentation of the primitive Didache, whose bare injunction against the corruption of children has been modestly elaborated. “Do not violate children, for contrary to nature is the evil born at Sodom, which was laid waste by the fire of God.” A rule deriving from a slightly later tradition uses the “sin of the Sodomites” as a synecdoche for all same-sex intercourse, which is grouped with bestiality as a violation of nature. The latest stratum in the Apostolic Constitutions does not just prohibit various sexual practices but addresses how the bishop must react when confronted with sinners seeking entry to the church. “The doer of unspeakable deeds, the kinaidos, and the debauched,” along with miscellaneous rogues like magicians and astrologers, might be admitted to baptism, but not at first. They were to be “scrutinized for some time.” Dokimasia, “the Scrutiny,” was the same word once used to describe the ethical inspection of ancient Athenian citizens, but it has now been adopted by the church, which was willing to rely on the moral espionage of rumor in a face-to-face society. The church’s sexual expectations were far more strict, and its ambitions of control reached deeper into the soul, than the institutions of the ancient polis had ever imagined. Former sinners were to be watched so carefully because “such evil is so hard to wash out.”13

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The doctor hands the corpsman a syringe, they are laughing as the corpsman drives the syringe into the pilot’s chest like a knife. They are talking about the Green Bay Packers and the corpsman is driving his fist into the black man’s chest again and again until the black pilot’s body begins to bloat up, until it doesn’t look like a body at all anymore. His face is all puffy like a balloon and saliva rolls slowly from the sides of his mouth. He keeps staring at the ceiling and saying nothing. “The machine! The machine!” screams the doctor, now climbing on top of the bed, taking the corpsman’s place. “Turn on the machine!” screams the doctor. He grabs a long suction cup that is attached to the machine and places it carefully against the black man’s chest. The black man’s body jumps up from the bed almost arcing into the air from each bolt of electricity, jolting and arcing, bloating up more and more. “I’ll bet on the Packers,” says the corpsman. “Green Bay doesn’t have a chance,” the doctor says, laughing. The nurse is smiling now, making fun of both the doctor and the corpsman. “I don’t understand football,” she says. They are pulling the sheet over the head of the black man and strapping him onto the gurney. He is taken out of the ward. The Korean civilian is still screaming and there is a baby now at the end of the ward. The nurse says it has been napalmed by our own jets. I cannot see the baby but it screams all the time like the Korean and the young man without any legs I had met in the ambulance. I can hear a radio. It is the Armed Forces radio. The corpsman is telling the baby to shut the hell up and there is a young kid with half his head blown away. They have brought him in and put him where the black pilot has just died, right next to me. He has thick bandages wrapped all around his head till I can hardly see his face at all. He is like a vegetable—a nineteen-year-old vegetable, thrashing his arms back and forth, babbling and pissing in his clean white sheets. “Quit pissin’ in your sheets!” screams the corpsman. But the nineteen-year-old kid who doesn’t have any brains anymore makes the corpsman very angry. He just keeps pissing in the sheets and crying like a little baby. There is a Green Beret sergeant calling for his mother. Every night now I hear him. He has spinal meningitis. He will be dead before this evening is over. The Korean civilian does not moan anymore. He does not wave his one arm and two fingers above his head. He is dead and they have taken him away too. There is a nun who comes through the ward now with apples for the wounded and rosary beads. She is very pleasant and smiles at all of the wounded.

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

  The preamble of Justinian’s law provides remarkable insight into the state of affairs in sixth-century Constantinople. Justinian found that some pimps “went around the provinces and many places deceiving pitiful young girls, promising them food and clothing.” They brought these girls to the capital, where they were kept in miserable conditions. “The pimps offer them out to the perversion of any who wish and take the entire filthy profit that comes from prostituting the girls. The pimps have even made the girls sign written agreements stipulating that they will fulfill the impious and unholy service for the pimps as long as the pimps see fit.” Girls as young as ten were being forced into prostitution, and if anyone wanted to redeem one of the victims, the pimps extorted enormous sums. When Justinian went to examine the world of prostitution in sixth-century Constantinople, he found the ancient slave trade in every regard, except the state’s approval. Pimps were using classic means of obtaining slaves: defrauding the young and kidnapping them. The young age of the girls brought into prostitution is suggestive of the sheer violence of the system. Kept in squalid brothels, given none of the profits and only enough to survive, the young women were victims of the sort of forcible prostitution that had been illegal for a century.83 The law of Justinian showed particular displeasure for the fact that many pimps papered their activities with the trappings of legality. Pimps used written agreements with the prostitutes and “even sought securities for some of the women.” Justinian recognized that the contracts between pimps and prostitutes were intrinsically coercive and little more than an effort to lend a modicum of legality and legitimacy to their practice: it is even possible that pimps extracted consent waivers in response to the legislation of Theodosius II and Leo that forbade coercive pimping and then pimping altogether. Justinian’s remedy was the most sweeping action yet undertaken by the Roman state. The law prohibited anyone from “leading women into perversion by guile, deceit, or coercion.” Justinian decreed even further that “there will henceforth be no allowance given to pimping, keeping women in brothels, offering women for public perversion, or trafficking such women by any other means.” The emperor came down hard on the sex trade. He was specific and exhaustive. Whereas the law of Leo had, in terse language, enjoined “let no one be a pimp,” Justinian’s law forbade pimping, brothel-keeping, prostituting, or any other means of acting as a vendor of sex.84

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

  durability, there is nothing particularly special about lamps, which in fact refl ect artistic styles from other media. What the story of erotic lamps suggests is that the positive valence of eroticism endures across the high empire and recedes only behind the advancing tide of Christianization in later phases of the Roman Empire. If Roman marriage was an erotically charged institution, it is worth noting how fi rmly the actual practices of the Roman bedroom lay beyond explicit regulation, even among the moralists of the age. Th e fact is that authors like Plutarch, who goes so far as to advocate orderly sexual habits, retreat into pragmatic discretion before legislating on specifi c acts. So, notably, did the rabbis, who refrained from heavy- handed interference in the married couple’s sexual life. 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 expected of a wife and those to be expected of a disreputable woman. A magical 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 amorous encounter. Seneca, among others, counsels men not to love their wives as though they were mistresses. Fellatio is regularly assumed to be the domain 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 prostitutes 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 orgasms in the Roman Empire than ever before, and for a long time after. For  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

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

  Th e slave dealer was interrogated, the truth revealed. Th e masters were the parents, their slave in fact the son. Th e parents committed suicide, and the prefect awarded the estate to the poor son, “not so much as an inheritance as a recompense for incestuous violation.” For Tertullian, the case was as clear a statement about the inner nature of Roman sexual culture as could possibly be needed. “Th e public revelation of such a crime is suffi cient proof of what is hidden among you. Nothing happens just once in human aff airs. Th at such a case could come to light even once says it all.”  Although it is not altogether impossible that this ghastly case was ripped from the headlines, the chance of unwitting incest in Roman society was, pace Tertullian, vanishingly remote. What is signifi cant about Tertullian’s apology is the overriding awareness that the vast gulf between Christian standards and contemporary sexual practice was shaped by an expansive slave trade and a fl ourishing sex industry. Th e important comparandum, for an apologist of the second century, was not Platonic or Stoic sexual ideology but public sexual culture. Tertullian’s diatribe is shaped by its stark attribu- tion of a sexual profi le to two groups, “we” and “you.” It is easy enough to  FROM SHAME TO SIN accuse Tertullian of selecting his enemies wisely, in order to place the op- position in the worst possible light. But he has understood the foundations of Roman sexual culture rather accurately, and his case should not be too lightly dismissed as the salacious concoction of a zealot. Tertullian’s address belongs to an important class of early Christian literature, apologetics. Apologetic literature marked the coming- of- age of Christianity as a self- aware movement within the pluralist landscape of Roman intellectual life. Christian apologies were part of a broader culture of public address, often aimed at the awesome fi gure of the emperor himself. We need not believe that most, or any, Christian speeches reached the ears of the prince, to rec- ognize how powerfully the context of the offi cial audience shaped the self- projection of the religion. Indeed, apology was not just a category of litera- ture but also a stance, a style of perception and pre sen ta tion. Th e apologetic literature of the second century was not only a crucial bridge between the compositions of the New Testament and the oeuvre of Clement— the great- est of the apologists. It off ers us a chance to witness the development of or- thodox Christian sexuality as a moral ideology that set Christians apart from the world.  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.