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.

Page 42 of 90 · 20 per page

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  As she returned to writing her stories with a new sense of commitment, Flannery felt another change from within: an increasing awareness of and disgust with the course of life and culture in America in the 1950s. She sensed that people were becoming more and more superficial, obsessed with material things and plagued by boredom, like children. They had become unmoored, soulless, disconnected from the past and from religion, flailing around without any higher sense of purpose. And at the core of these problems was their inability to face their own mortality and the seriousness of it. She expressed some of this in a story inspired by her own illness, called “The Enduring Chill.” The main character is a young man returning home to Georgia, deathly ill. As he gets off the train, his mother, there to meet him, “had given a little cry; she looked aghast. He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn’t kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up.” As she saw it, people were losing their humanity and capable of all kinds of cruelties. They did not seem to care very deeply about one another and felt rather superior to any kind of outsider. If they could only see what she had seen—how our time is so short, how everyone must suffer and die—it would alter their way of life; it would make them grow up; it would melt all their coldness. What her readers needed was their own “bullet in the side” to shake them out of their complacency. She would accomplish this by portraying in as raw a manner as possible the selfishness and brutality lurking below the surface in her characters, who seemed so outwardly pleasant and banal. The one problem Flannery had to confront with her new life was the crushing loneliness of it all. She required the company of people to soothe her, and she depended on the cast of characters she met to supply her endless material for her work. As her fame grew with the publication of Wise Blood and her collections of stories, she could count on the occasional visit to the farm from other writers and fans of her work, and she lived for such moments, putting every ounce of her energy into observing her visitors and plumbing their depths. To fill the gaps between these social encounters, she began a lengthy correspondence with a growing number of friends and fans, writing back to almost anyone who wrote to her. Many of them were quite troubled. There was the young man in the Midwest who felt suicidal and on the verge of madness. There was the brilliant young woman from Georgia, Betty Hester, who felt ashamed for being a lesbian and confided in Flannery, the two of them now regularly

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Now we could spend hours discussing the evils of what happens when a man uses his strength to harm, threaten, or coerce a woman. We could reflect on the horrors of abuse and incest, the tragedy that family members are able to inflict on each other.2 The silence of King David. The list goes on. But notice the next verse: “Then Amnon hated her with intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had loved her.” What an odd thing for the writer to tell us. The last thing you would expect to hear is how Amnon is feeling, let alone that he feels hatred. We understand her repulsion, but his? What is it about rape that provokes such disgust in him? “He hated her more than he had loved her.” What is it that makes Amnon go from one extreme to the other? He gets what he wants and it makes him . . . angry? What is it that turns him so fast? What is it about that line “more than he had loved her” that doesn’t ring true? It’s lust. Lust can drive us to do frightening things. It can own us, it can take up massive amounts of head space, and it can make us miserable. And once in a while, lust may even have something to do with sex. A Tree with a Long Name In the beginning, in the opening pages of the Bible, we find God creating all sorts of trees.3 They’re good for food and pleasing to the eye, and God wants them to be enjoyed. God creates this garden and places people in the middle of it because God wants these people to enjoy it. The word God uses for this is “good.” It’s all good from God’s perspective. But for it truly to be good, it can’t be forced upon these first people. That wouldn’t be good. It has to be their choice. And so there’s a tree in the middle of the garden called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A bit long for the name of a tree, but the idea is that there is another way for these people to live, outside of how God designed things. And if they eat the fruit of this particular tree, they’ll see what that other way is like, a way separated from the life of God. And so we have a man and a woman in a garden, eating a piece of fruit. The text puts it like this: “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye . . . she took some and ate it.”4 We’re told that the fruit engages her senses: she sees she notices she appreciates she takes she eats Her sight, her touch, her senses of smell and taste are all involved. Our senses are incredibly strong.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  A few of them went to inspect it, and they were aghast at what they perceived as its sheer hideousness. One deputy described it as “a monstrous assemblage built of the people’s gold and an excess of flattery.” All agreed that no one would buy such a grotesquerie. They had all of the gold from the coach removed and melted, sending it to the treasury. They dispatched the salvaged bronze to the republic’s foundries to help forge some much-needed cannons. When it came to the painted panels on the doors, with all of their mythological symbols, they found them too weird for anyone’s tastes and promptly had them burned. • • • Interpretation: Let us look momentarily at the prerevolutionary world in France through the eyes of King Louis XVI. Much of what he saw seemed to be the same reality that previous kings had faced. The king was still considered the absolute ruler of France, divinely appointed to lead the nation. The various classes and estates in France remained quite stable; the distinctions among the nobility, the clergy, and the rest of the French people were still largely respected. The commoners enjoyed the relative prosperity that Louis himself had inherited from his grandfather. Yes, there were financial problems, but the great Louis XIV himself had faced such crises, and they had passed. Versailles was still the glittering jewel of Europe, the center of everything civilized. Louis’s beloved queen, Marie Antoinette, hosted the most spectacular parties, which were the envy of all European aristocrats. Louis himself did not care for such amusements, but he had his hunting parties and his other rather pedestrian hobbies that obsessed him. Life at the palace was rather sweet and relatively tranquil. Most important to Louis, the glory and the majesty of France, as embodied in its ceremonies and visual symbols, still carried the same weight as before. Who could help but be impressed by the splendors of Versailles itself, or by the rituals of the Catholic Church? He was the ruler of a great nation, and there was no reason to believe that the monarchy would not continue for as many centuries as it had already lasted. Below the surface of what he saw, however, there were some troubling signs of discontent. Beginning during the reign of Louis XV, writers such as Voltaire and Diderot began to ridicule the church and the monarchy for all of their backward, superstitious beliefs.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  The rest of him is dirt. “Charcoal was locked in the garage all day,” he replies. My mother made fried chicken for dinner, but Brad will only eat food prepared by Chef Boyardee. Across the table from me, Linda pushes a mouthful of potatoes past her teeth and lips until it’s hanging there, making me sick. I will only eat potatoes in the form of french fries, and that’s because I don’t know that french fries are potatoes. I have a weak stomach. The second I open my mouth to complain, she sucks it back in and swallows, touches a napkin to her lips, and goes for a preemptive strike. “Jo Ann is making me sick,” she tells my mother. Everyone stops eating and looks at me. I’m searching my chicken leg for the big rubbery string. If I get that string in my mouth, dinner is over. “I can’t find it,” I say. The fork won’t do what I want it to, and chicken juice is getting on my hands. Quit looking at me . My mother reaches over and takes the chicken leg, drops it on my father’s plate. “Find the string for her,” she tells him shortly. He looks at her, looks at the leg, and finally picks it up. He begins hacking at it amiably, gazing around the table in benign spirits. He’s not paying attention to what he’s supposed to be doing; the leg slips suddenly out of his grasp and, in the ensuing clatter, milk is dumped over and my father’s plate is flooded. “Well, I’ll be,” he says slowly, watching with surprise as his beans and potatoes become islands. A full minute passes while we wait for my mother to do something about it. Eventually she gets up from the table, takes his plate, scrapes it into the dog’s bowl, gets another plate from the cupboard and hurls some food onto it. While she’s doing all this, my father is sitting with his elbows on the table and his face in his hands. By the time she puts the new plate of food down in front of him, he’s asleep. She shoves him and he comes to with a snort. He no longer has the amiable slap-happy look that offends her; now he looks belligerent. She tells him he’s a sorry excuse for a man, which causes him to shrug. “Who do you think you are?” she asks him. She has her face right up in his. “Dean Martin? Because he’s nothing but a lush, too.” My father not only drinks like Dean Martin, but he actually looks like him. They sing alike, too, Dean on TV, and my father when he’s shaving. He can’t help but like Dean Martin, because they have so much in common. Somehow, though, the word lush hits him the wrong way and he guffaws instead of fighting back. My mother quickly corrects herself. “He’s a drunk ,” she says. My father doesn’t like that one bit.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  He’d get something on the spoon, a great gob of potatoes, say, and then open his mouth as wide as it would go, like a bird in a nest getting fed a chewed worm. He had deep creases on either side of his mouth, and as he chewed, gravy would run down the gullies in rivulets, land on the dish towel, and stay there. It was an amazing and horrifying thing to watch. I had a sensitive stomach and sometimes, sitting across from him — eyes carefully averted, fastened on the Aunt Jemima potholder hanging on a hook or on a pan lid with a screw and a block of wood jimmied up for a handle — just hearing him eat could make me gag. I was in the habit of rising from the table and walking around the kitchen every few minutes, breathing through my nose, deeply, to keep from gagging. Then I’d sit back down, pick up two peas with my spoon, and put them in my mouth. This is what my grandma said to me once: “Eat your chicken, why don’t you? And don’t take the skin off, that’s what’s good.” They were trying to make me eat something with skin on it. At my own house, everyone knew enough not to say skin in relation to food. My grandma, when she was cooking dinner, would send me down to the fruit cellar for jars of home-canned stuff. Then when I’d bring them up she’d open the jars and smell the contents thoughtfully; sometimes she’d have me take the jar outside to where Ralph was and have him smell it. He always said the same things: “There ain’t nothing wrong with that , tell her” or he’d bawl toward the house as I was walking back in, “Maw, that’ll be okay if you cook it longer!” Once she served me red raspberries that she’d put up; poured them in a plastic bowl and put cream on them. As I started to dig in I noticed that there were some black things floating around. “Grandma, there’s bugs in this,” I said. She came over and looked into my bowl, head tipped back to see out of the bottoms of her glasses. “Them’re dead,” she told me. “Just push ’em to the side; the berries is okay.” And I did, and the berries were okay. At night we watched one show on TV and then had to go to bed, when it was still a little bit light out. They’d go in their room and my grandma would come out with her nightgown on and her teeth out to tuck me in. I’d be lying stiff as a plank under the bedspread and here she’d come, without her regular clothes on, with her arms and feet exposed, her mouth folded in on itself. “G’night, honey-Jo,” she would lisp, pat me on the shoulder, and turn out the light.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I ask him. “It was weird,” he answered. “The whole physical thing was a little weird. I watched her give birth, twice, and I’ve got to say it was not so great for our sex life.” “I know it’s supposed to be this magical moment, the miracle of life and all that, but no one seems to want to acknowledge the yuck factor,” I reassure him. “It’s not politically correct for a man to admit that watching his wife give birth can be gross. There’s a character in one of Alice Walker’s books, I think it’s Mr. Hal, who watches his partner give birth and is never able to touch her—or any other woman—for the rest of his life. He says he never wants to put someone through that again.” “That’s a little extreme, but yeah. I became different with her, more cautious, not as free. I guess it stopped me from being aggressive or passionate or desiring her in that way—really giving myself to her, or taking her, when normally that’s how we were together. It was definitely a shift.” “Couldn’t do that to the mother of your children?” I ask. “Apparently not,” he answers. “Let’s talk about this whole Madonna/whore business,” I continue. “It has deep psychological roots. A lot of men find it difficult to eroticize the mother of their children. It feels too regressive, too incestuous, too oedipal. What you need to remember is that she’s their mom, not yours. At this point, I recommend anything that can introduce a little healthy objectification. Anything that might distinguish her from ‘the mother.’” Carla had been quiet for much of the session, but the following week I had no doubt she’d been paying attention. Laughing, she told me the story. “I really wanted to let go with Leo. I wanted to give him an involved, prolonged, great blow job. Not just the compulsory head, not just the polite head. But I knew there was this thing with the wife, ‘the mother.’ Would he let me? So I initiated this game and said, ‘You know, we can have a couple of different kinds of sex and you can call it what you will, but if you want this blow job to continue it’s going to cost you.’ I said, ‘A hundred bucks if you want that kind of head. A hundred bucks.’ I thought the money would be fun, but I was really into seeing if Leo could de-role that mother. Well, you don’t pay the mother of your kids for a blow job, do you? You don’t pay your wife for a blow job. It was a lovely experiment, that’s all I’m going to say.” “Maybe you could start taking credit cards. Keep a credit card machine by the bed,” Leo jokes. Carla’s playful erotic intervention has stayed with me for years.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I was old enough to wash myself but we still touched each other; he would ask me to wash his back, which was difficult for him to reach, and then he would wash mine in turn. Though he was often severe and sometimes cruel he was gentle with me there; if the soap ran into my eyes he would rinse them, tilting my face up with his hand, a kind of physical care he seldom undertook. We had stepped out of the water onto the tiles, which could be slick, he reminded me each time, Be careful, he said, and then I approached him, not with any specific intent but perhaps not innocently either, I can’t be sure after so many years, as I can no longer recall whether he was facing me or looking away, though he must have been looking away or he would have stopped me or avoided my touch. Or maybe it’s more true to say I was innocent but not without intent, what was it but an intention that drove me, a bodily intention; I wanted to touch him, not with an outcome in mind but with an ache, perhaps not an intention but an ache, which drove me to him and which he felt, too, when I put my arms around him and pressed my body to his and he felt my erection where it touched him. That was the end of care, he thrust me away without a thought for the slickness of the tiles; and when I looked at his face, which was twisted in disgust, it was as if I saw his true face, his authentic face, not the learned face of fatherhood. He covered himself quickly and left the room, saying nothing, but his look entered me and settled there and has never left, it rooted beneath memory and became my understanding of myself, my understanding and expectation. From that day, all the ease we had enjoyed together was gone. He took away the safety I had felt, the certainty of my bond with my father, the first bond; until that day I hadn’t realized it could be dissolved like any other. And it was as though I lost something of myself as well, as though I became somehow less real as my father withdrew from me, less substantial or less certain of my substance, as though I too were something that might dissolve. It still shows me to myself, that look, I saw it again as I walked among the blokove without thinking of where I walked. The sun was high and already I was dripping with sweat, the page I had been given was a damp ball in my hand. It would be years before my father spoke the words that finally severed the bond between us, but there were no more showers or games.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  195Lecture 20—Christian Missions and Moral Reform CHRISTIANITY AND SLAVERY õKing Afonso had seen the moral perils of European greed early on, even though he was caught up in the slave trade himself. Capturing members of rival tribes and selling them to European slavers was a key means by which he held onto power and kept his rivals in check. õTherefore, it’s all the more remarkable that he pleaded with the authorities in Rome to see how slavery undermined the moral authority of Christianity in Africa. This is what he said: “Merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives ... and so great is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated.” õBut the slave trade only continued to grow. For most average people in West Africa during the 17 th and 18 th centuries, Christianity was seeming less and less like the faith of righteous Africans and more like the evil ideology of white men who shackled them and shipped them thousands of miles to a life of hard labor and violent death. õAn anti-slavery activist named Lourenco da Silva de Mendouca was disturbed by this brutality. He was born in Brazil to an African family, and went to Rome in person in 1684 to beg the pope to intercede. His report on the suffering and death that slavers inf licted on Africans made a big impression on the pope and his advisors. But Rome was no match for the powerful mix of greed and racism that drove the expansion of the slave trade into a thriving global industry. õIn many cases, ministers and missionaries gave a message that told enslaved people to accept their lot in life and serve their masters in good faith, while the masters received praise for rescuing supposed barbarians and saving their souls.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  162 Lecture 38: Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” Lecture 38 Another stunningly original writer of the period was Franz Kafka, whose innovations in narrative technique can be seen in his “The Metamorphosis,” particularly in the way its fantastic premise—a man wakes up to ¿ nd that he has been transformed into a gigantic insect—is treated in sober realistic fashion. I n an era of experimentation in literature, Franz Kafka is particularly innovative in two key ways in “The Metamorphosis.” First, instead of telling his story in the standard structure of exposition, complication, climax, and denouement, Kafka begins with the climax—in the ¿ rst sentence. Everything after that is denouement, or unraveling. Also, the ¿ rst sentence leads the reader into thinking that this is a fantasy, fairy tale, or science ¿ ction, but after that ¿ rst sentence, the narrator treats Gregor’s transformation into an insect in the most literal way possible, forcing the reader to give the story a more or less Realist reading. In the story, Gregor’s family is more annoyed (since he is the breadwinner for his father, mother, and sister) than surprised or horri ¿ ed. For a time they try intermittently to take care of him, but then they get busy with jobs they have gotten to replace the income he is no longer earning. Three times he emerges from his room, each time precipitating a disaster. Gradually, his family abandons him. Then he dies and is swept into a dustpan, and his family goes on a picnic. Kafka makes it dif ¿ cult for readers to give the story an allegorical or metaphoric reading—or to read it as parable—by the prosaic reality of his details. Experienced readers, encountering in a story a man suddenly metamorphosed into an insect, will immediately try to interpret the story in a metaphoric way and conclude that perhaps modern man has become an insect. When Gregor gets the hang of using all his legs, he ¿ nds it exhilarating to climb across the ceiling, perhaps metaphorically ¿ nding pleasure in rising above the drudgery of his old life. Then the narrator tells us that as Gregor climbs along the ceiling, he leaves behind a slimy trail; his room begins to smell terrible. This makes us think that we are perhaps supposed to understand Gregor as a literal insect exuding very real slime.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  47 00:02:03,223 --> 00:02:04,724 [woman screaming] 48 00:02:04,824 --> 00:02:07,160 [Robert] Keith Raniere was branding them like cattle 49 00:02:07,260 --> 00:02:09,562 with the initials "KR." 50 00:02:11,297 --> 00:02:14,634 He just kept going and going, pushing and pushing. 51 00:02:14,734 --> 00:02:16,202 He had to have more. 52 00:02:16,302 --> 00:02:17,437 [cheers and applause] 53 00:02:17,537 --> 00:02:19,305 [Dr. Marie] This could happen to you. 54 00:02:19,405 --> 00:02:23,076 Never think that you are above being deceived 55 00:02:23,176 --> 00:02:24,744 or manipulated. 56 00:02:24,844 --> 00:02:28,214 [Narrator] This is the true story of NXIVM, 57 00:02:28,314 --> 00:02:30,517 the modern-day sex cult. 58 00:02:31,618 --> 00:02:42,562 [music] 59 00:02:43,596 --> 00:02:46,299 [music] 60 00:02:46,399 --> 00:02:47,834 [Narrator] At first glance, 61 00:02:47,934 --> 00:02:49,369 this nondescript house, 62 00:02:49,469 --> 00:02:51,838 tucked away in the suburbs of Albany, New York, 63 00:02:51,938 --> 00:02:54,541 looks like any other home on the block. 64 00:02:56,643 --> 00:02:59,245 But for the select women invited inside, 65 00:02:59,345 --> 00:03:03,016 it's actually the epicenter of a cult... 66 00:03:03,116 --> 00:03:07,620 one whose leader, self-help guru Keith Raniere, 67 00:03:07,720 --> 00:03:09,822 is having his most devoted followers 68 00:03:09,923 --> 00:03:12,492 partake in a secret ritual 69 00:03:12,592 --> 00:03:16,396 marking them as members for life. 70 00:03:16,496 --> 00:03:19,165 The women were told it was like a little tattoo. 71 00:03:19,265 --> 00:03:22,001 But Keith Raniere... 72 00:03:22,101 --> 00:03:24,070 was branding them like cattle. 73 00:03:24,170 --> 00:03:26,039 [woman screaming] 74 00:03:26,139 --> 00:03:30,410 A two-inch, red-hot brand 75 00:03:30,510 --> 00:03:32,278 would be pressed into your body 76 00:03:32,378 --> 00:03:36,349 50 to 100 times over the course of half an hour. 77 00:03:36,449 --> 00:03:37,917 [woman screaming] 78 00:03:38,017 --> 00:03:39,452 There's no anesthesia. 79 00:03:39,552 --> 00:03:43,356 And there's a slow burning in the skin. 80 00:03:43,456 --> 00:03:45,391 Excruciating pain. 81 00:03:45,491 --> 00:03:46,559 [woman screaming] 82 00:03:46,659 --> 00:03:48,261 [Richard] And there's squealing. 83 00:03:48,361 --> 00:03:50,563 Burnt flesh in the air. 84 00:03:50,663 --> 00:03:52,532 [Paige] They're almost always on the hips, 85 00:03:52,632 --> 00:03:56,336 usually very close to the pubic area, 86 00:03:56,436 --> 00:03:58,571 right on the hip bone. 87 00:03:58,671 --> 00:04:00,640 Painful place to get tattoos. 88 00:04:00,740 --> 00:04:02,742 Super painful place to be branded. 89 00:04:04,711 --> 00:04:06,179 [Robert] The women were told it was like 90 00:04:06,279 --> 00:04:08,381 the symbols of nature and wind. 91 00:04:08,481 --> 00:04:12,252 But they are branding the initials "KR." 92 00:04:12,352 --> 00:04:15,288 He is marking these women with his initials. 93 00:04:16,656 --> 00:04:18,291 [Armando] No one wanted to be branded. 94 00:04:18,391 --> 00:04:19,559 But if they quit, 95 00:04:19,659 --> 00:04:22,662 then not only would they lose everything, 96 00:04:22,762 --> 00:04:25,098 they would have no support system. 97 00:04:25,198 --> 00:04:27,300 They're very deep into this group. 98 00:04:27,400 --> 00:04:29,502 There's a ton of stuff they have on you.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  These women were incredibly malnourished and exhausted state, which makes you highly susceptible, 'cause you're hungry and tired. [Rick] The idea of DOS was that this was a group of totally committed women, committed to each other. And they were an empowerment group, which is the antithesis of what they really were-- the sexual slaves of Keith Raniere. [Narrator] And soon, Raniere will take a shocking step to ensure his slaves never leave. [Narrator] For the women of NXIVM's inner sorority, DOS, slavery to their masters and ultimate leader Keith Raniere is about more than sex. To prove their commitment, each member must take part in a secret ritual held at DOS leader Allison Mack's house. Some of the women do not fully understand what's about to take place. [Dr. Lauch] A friend comes to you and says, come with me tonight. There's a little ritual of kind of initiating you into DOS. So on the surface, it seems okay. You go there. You're nervous. Everybody's told to take their clothes off. You're even more nervous. But then you're all extremely vulnerable, 'cause you're not gonna run out the door naked. And you're told that you'll get a tattoo as a symbol of, you know, being part of this. And it so it all sounds very...inconsequential. Very harmless. [Robert] The women were told it was like a little tattoo. But Keith Raniere was branding them like cattle. This was at Keith Raniere's direct order. Keith Raniere is on tape telling Allison Mack how he wants this done. [woman screaming] [Robert] There's no anesthesia. And there's a slow burning in the skin . Excruciating pain. Lauren Salzman described it as, like, hearing women squealing. [woman screaming] [Robert] There's burnt flesh in the air. [woman screaming] [Armando] If they quit, then not only would they lose everything, they would have no support system. They're very deep into this group. There's a ton of stuff they have on you. They have your money. They have your images. If you don't agree with it, all of that's gonna get out. [Paige] They're almost always on the hips, usually very close to the pubic area, right on the hip bone. Painful place to get tattoos. Super painful place to be branded. [Robert] The women were told it was, like, the symbols of nature and wind. But they are branding the initials "KR." He is marking these women with his initials. So you can see, in a situation like that, it's gonna be even harder to leave. [Dr. Joseph] The branding is another example of a psychopath wanting more control. It's not enough to have followers worship you. It's not enough to get them to sleep with you. It's not enough to get their money, to get them to do the things that you want. Now you have to take their flesh.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  [woman screaming] [Richard] And there's squealing. Burnt flesh in the air. [Paige] They're almost always on the hips, usually very close to the pubic area, right on the hip bone. Painful place to get tattoos. Super painful place to be branded. [Robert] The women were told it was like the symbols of nature and wind. But they are branding the initials "KR." He is marking these women with his initials. [Armando] No one wanted to be branded. But if they quit, then not only would they lose everything, they would have no support system. They're very deep into this group. There's a ton of stuff they have on you. They have your money. They have your images. If you don't agree with it, all of that's gonna get out. [Dr. Joseph] It's not enough to have followers worship you. It's not enough to get them to sleep with you. It's not enough to get their money, to get them to do the things that you want. Now you have to take their flesh. [sizzling] [woman groans] [Narrator] Raniere has no idea the brandings will ultimately lead to his downfall, despite his one-time promise of changing the world. Born in Brooklyn in 1960, Raniere demonstrates a remarkable intelligence at a very young age. He says when he was, like, two years old, he was talking in full sentences. [Armando] He could speak three languages before he could even read and write. He was tested early on and... was able to have one of the highest IQ's ever recorded. [Narrator] All that talent quickly goes to Raniere's head. Someone having talent and a high IQ, plus being brought up in a environment where they're praised for being exceptional, that's a really good recipe for these toxic, narcissistic, antisocial leaders who manipulate and use others. [Paige] His father, looking back, had said that after they told Keith he was gifted, he fully believed it. He fully bought his own bullshit. He was Christ incarnate. He was God. No one could tell him otherwise. [Narrator] Some say there's also a darkness to the alleged boy genius. Even as an elementary school child, he had an evil streak. Students that he attended class with feared him. They saw that he was a kind of evil seed. [Narrator] But when it comes to the opposite sex, Raniere is all charm. According to his parents, he constantly had girls around him, and he would kind of isolate them, and then tell them each that they were the one. [Dr. Joseph] He lied to them for fun. He enjoyed fooling them into believing that they were special so that he could manipulate them and sleep with them. And he used that throughout the rest of his life. [Narrator] At just 16, Raniere drops out of high school, and one year later, enrolls full time at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Albany, New York. [Armando] He was a triple major in college.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  One night, when Lot had received unknown visitors, the men of Sodom surrounded his house and banged on the door, crying out, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us that we may abuse and rape them!” But Lot went out to them and said, My brothers, please do not act evilly. See now, I have two daughters who have never known a man. Please let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you see fit. Only do not do a thing to these men, because they have come under the shadow of my roof. (Gen. 19:7–8) In Lot's mind, his daughters were worth far less than the two strangers, only because the strangers were men. There is a similar scenario in Judges 19–21. On his journey home, a Levite, along with his concubine, stopped in the town of Gibeah, which belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. An old man of the town offered hospitality to the Levite and welcomed him to his house. When night fell, the men of the city came banging at his door, demanding that the Levite be sent out so that the townsmen could have their way with him. The old man went out to meet them and, like Lot, offered his virgin daughter and the Levite's concubine as a ransom, insisting that the men of the town do with them whatever they saw fit. They took the concubine, raped her, and left her lying at the door of the house where the Levite slept. The next morning the Levite arose to find his concubine lying on the floor. He placed her on his donkey and continued his journey home. When he arrived at his house, he took a knife and cut her into twelve pieces, sending her dismembered body parts to the borders of Israel. When the rest of Israel saw what occurred, they were outraged at the wickedness of the people of Gibeah, from the tribe of Benjamin, because they had violated the Levite's possession. All of Israel then went to war against the tribe of Benjamin. After winning the battle, the rest of Israel swore never to give their daughters to the Benjamites as wives. Yet they regretted their oath, for it meant the loss of one of the twelve tribes. In the end, the other tribes of Israel, after great bloodshed, captured four hundred virgins from Jabesh-gilead who were then given as wives to the six hundred surviving Benjamites. The rape of one has now become the rape of four hundred. However, there were not enough virgins to go around, so they instructed the Benjamites to lie in wait in the vineyards of the town of Shiloh, and when their young maidens came to dance during the Lord's feast, the Benjamites were to catch a wife for themselves and take them back to their land.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Just like pornography, these disorders have their existential origins in alienation from the living-sensing-feeling body. For disembodied men, images of the female body become titillating, rather than experienced as joyful. They evoke a craven drive, rather than inviting playful flirtation, enjoyment, surrender and deep appreciation. In this way, disembodied men (who tend, by their nature, to be visual) contribute to women’s anorexia because of their disembodied pseudo-need for the “idealized” female body. Hence, women’s bodies become objectified both in the eyes of the other and in their own eyes. Young women who have exchanged their bodily sense for body image are susceptible to seeking breast implants that sever sensation or super “slimness” as in anorexia. In the latter case, they are drawn to identify with grotesque, culturally reinforced, Biafra-like body images , rendering them barely able to sustain life or procreate instead of feeling body sensations. The compulsions of binging and purging (as in bulimia) are a futile attempt to control their body sensations—which are either chaotic and overwhelming or shutdown and numb. Some bulimics report that sex makes them want to vomit and vomiting, for them, is like having an orgasm. In addition, bulimia is an ineffective attempt to rid the body of something that is not-body; something that was forced onto or into the person’s body. For men, it is pornography that fills the void of disembodiment, alienating men from their own sexuality . There are plentiful other disembodying methods, other compulsions. These include the addictions to overwork, sex, drugs, drinking or compulsive eating. All are ways to suppress, numb or control the body—or are, ironically, misdirected attempts to feel it. However, without embracing bodily experience, we are left with an empty shell, a narcissistic image of who we think we are. We are unable to really feel the fullness of ourselves, a fullness formed from a continuous flux of experience. Pornography and eating disorders are two sides of the same coin—disembodiment and objectification. The less the body is experienced as a living entity, the more it becomes an object. The less it is owned, the further it is divorced from anything having to do with one’s core sense of self. A visit to the gym reveals a similar story. Lines of people are robotically pumping iron in an attempt to buff their bodies, but with little internal feeling or awareness of their actions. There is a great deal to be said about the clear benefits of cardiovascular fitness and challenging the power function of muscles. However, there is something beyond endurance and body mechanics. It is the kinesthetic sense, which can be awakened and developed in any movements we make and in the very sensations that prefigure any movement.

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

  Reply to Objection 6: As stated above (ad 5), an uncleanness which was caused by corruption either of mind or of body was expiated by sin-offerings. Now special sacrifices were wont to be offered for the sins of individuals: but since some were neglectful about expiating such sins and uncleannesses; or, through ignorance, failed to offer this expiation; it was laid down that once a year, on the tenth day of the seventh month, a sacrifice of expiation should be offered for the whole people. And because, as the Apostle says (Heb. 7:28), “the Law maketh men priests, who have infirmity,” it behooved the priest first of all to offer a calf for his own sins, in memory of Aaron’s sin in fashioning the molten calf; and besides, to offer a ram for a holocaust, which signified that the priestly sovereignty denoted by the ram, who is the head of the flock, was to be ordained to the glory of God. Then he offered two he-goats for the people: one of which was offered in expiation of the sins of the multitude. For the he-goat is an evil-smelling animal; and from its skin clothes are made having a pungent odor; to signify the stench, uncleanness and the sting of sin. After this he-goat had been immolated, its blood was taken, together with the blood of the calf, into the Holy of Holies, and the entire sanctuary was sprinkled with it; to signify that the tabernacle was cleansed from the uncleanness of the children of Israel. But the corpses of the he-goat and calf which had been offered up for sin had to be burnt, to denote the destruction of sins. They were not, however, burnt on the altar: since none but holocausts were burnt thereon; but it was prescribed that they should be burnt without the camp, in detestation of sin: for this was done whenever sacrifice was offered for a grievous sin, or for the multitude of sins. The other goat was let loose into the wilderness: not indeed to offer it to the demons, whom the Gentiles worshipped in desert places, because it was unlawful to offer aught to them; but in order to point out the effect of the sacrifice which had been offered up. Hence the priest put his hand on its head, while confessing the sins of the children of Israel: as though that goat were to carry them away into the wilderness, where it would be devoured by wild beasts, because it bore the punishment of the people’s sins. And it was said to bear the sins of the people, either because the forgiveness of the people’s sins was signified by its being let loose, or because on its head written lists of sins were fastened.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The sheet is too small to cover me properly. I can see a nurse inserting a needle into my leg—my shin. Suddenly there’s an explosive hissing, gurgling sound—WHOOOOOSH. The center of the dream—the loud whoosh —was immediately clear to me. As a child I was plagued with chronic sinusitis, and every winter my mother took me to Dr. Davis for a sinus draining and flushing. I hated his yellow teeth and his fishy eye, which peered at me though the center of the circular mirror attached to the headband otolaryngologists used to wear. As he inserted a cannula into my sinus foramen, I felt a sharp pain, then heard a deafening whooooosh as the injected saline flushed out my sinus. Looking at the quivering, disgusting mess in the semicircular chrome drainage pan, I thought that some of my brains had been washed out along with the pus and mucus. Just as Freud had suggested, my first dream anticipated layer after layer of years of analytic work: my fears of exposure, of losing my mind, of being brainwashed, of suffering a grievous injury (deflation) to a long, firm body part (depicted as a shinbone). Freud and many subsequent analysts have cautioned against plunging too quickly into the meaning of the first dream lest early interpretation and exposure to unconscious material overwhelm patients and immobilize our dreamweaving homunculus entirely. Such admonishments have seemed to me directed not so much toward increasing the effectiveness of therapy as toward protecting the parochial self-interest of the analytic discipline, and I’ve always resisted them. From the 1940s to the 1960s, a walking-on-eggshells approach to therapy reigned. The precise, delicate phrasing of interventions was the topic of endless arcane debates within analytic institutes. Bombarded with propaganda about the necessity for exquisitely timed and formulated interpretations, novices—full of awe and fear—tiptoed carefully through therapy, stifling their spontaneity—and their effectiveness. I found that such formalism was counter-productive because it interfered with the greater goal of establishing an empathic, authentic relationship to the patient. To me, Freud’s warning not to work on dreams until the therapeutic alliance is firmly established seems strangely inverted: working together on a dream is an excellent way to build the therapeutic alliance. So I plunged right into Irene’s dream. “So you hadn’t read either text,” I began, “ especially not the old one.” “Yes, yes, I expected you to ask about that. Of course , it doesn’t make sense; I know that. But that’s exactly the way it was in the dream.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Vince nods and moves his arm back and forth from his shoulder as though he were sawing a piece of wood in slow motion. In this slow movement, Vince is beginning to explore the inner movement held in check and locked in a bracing pattern. He is now separating two conflicting impulses, one involving reaching out and the other, pulling away in revulsion. (I observe the revulsion as a particular pattern involving the retraction of his lip to one side and the hint of his head slightly turning away.) The trembling increases and decreases again, then settles. Tears flow freely from his eyes. He takes a deep spontaneous breath and then reaches out, fully, in front. “It doesn’t hurt at all!” This concurs with what I have found with chronic pain. There is generally an underlying bracing pattern, and when the bracing pattern resolves, the pain dissolves. Vince opens his eyes and looks at me. Clearly complete with the bottom-up processing, he is now able to form new meanings. He tells me about the following event. About eight months earliero he had gone shopping for his wife. As he came out of the supermarket, he heard a loud crash. Across the street, a car had smashed into a light pole. He dropped his bag and ran to the accident. The driver, a woman, sat motionless in an apparent state of shock. The motor of the car was running, so he reached across her inert body to turn off the ignition, standard procedure to prevent fires or explosion. Just as he started to turn the key he saw a young child in the passenger seat, his head decapitated by an air bag. And then Vince told me why his shoulder got frozen: “I was fine before I saw the kid … I’m used to doing things like that, things that are dangerous … but when I saw the kid, part of me wanted to grab my arm back and turn away … I felt like puking … and the other part just stayed there and did what I had to do … Sometimes it’s really hard to do what you have to do.” “Yes,” I agreed, “it’s hard and you and your buddies keep doing it anyway … Thank you.” “Hmm,” he added when he left, “I guess I have to learn to mind my body.” Vince had learned that mind and body are not separate entities—that he was a whole person. He said he wanted to learn more about himself and came in for three more sessions. He learned how to better handle stressful and conflicting situations and, needless to say, didn’t need the operation.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  And it was mad too for her to admire Carol, who was even thinner. A month ago, when I had been on call and paged because Carol had fainted, I had gotten to the ward just as the nurses were carrying her back to her bed. Her hospital gown had opened, exposing her buttocks, through which the heads of her femurs jutted, all but piercing the skin, reminding me of gruesome photographs of survivors liberated from concentration camps. But there was no point in debating Rosa’s assessment that she was fat. Body-image distortions of anorexic patients run too deep—I had challenged them on that issue too many times in too many groups and knew that was an argument I could not win. Rosa continued with her comparisons. Martin and Dorothy were dealing with far more significant problems than hers: “Sometimes,” she said, “I wish I had something visibly wrong with me, like paralysis. Then I’d feel more legitimate.” That stirred Dorothy into raising her head and making her first (and, as it happened, only) comment in the group: “You want paralyzed legs?” she whispered huskily. “Have mine.” To my great astonishment, Martin rushed in to defend Rosa: “No, no, Dorothy—I got the right name? It is Dorothy, isn’t it? Rosa didn’t mean it like that. I know she didn’t mean that she wanted your legs or mine. Look at my legs. Look at ’em. Just look at ’em. Who in their right mind would want ’em?” With his one good hand Martin ripped away the covering sheet and pointed to his legs. Hideously deformed, they ended in two or three gnarled nubbins. The rest of his toes had entirely rotted away. Neither Dorothy nor any of the other group members looked very long at Martin’s legs. They repelled me too, despite my medical training. “Rosa was just using a figure of speech,” Martin continued. “She only meant she wanted to have a more obvious disease, something you can see. She didn’t mean to minimize our condition. Did you, Rosa? It is Rosa, right?” Martin surprised me. I had allowed his deformity to conceal his acute intelligence. But he was not finished. “Do you mind if I ask you something, Rosa? I don’t mean to be nosy, so you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” “Shoot!” Rosa replied. “But I may not answer it.” “What is your condition? I mean, what’s wrong with you? You’re real skinny, but you don’t look sick. Why are you getting that IV?” he asked, gesturing toward it. “I don’t eat. They feed me with this stuff.” “Don’t eat? They don’t let you eat?” “No, they want me to eat. But I don’t want to.”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The motor of the car was running, so he reached across her inert body to turn off the ignition, standard procedure to prevent fires or explosion. Just as he started to turn the key he saw a young child in the passenger seat, his head decapitated by an air bag. And then Vince told me why his shoulder got frozen: “I was fine before I saw the kid … I’m used to doing things like that, things that are dangerous … but when I saw the kid, part of me wanted to grab my arm back and turn away … I felt like puking … and the other part just stayed there and did what I had to do … Sometimes it’s really hard to do what you have to do.” “Yes,” I agreed, “it’s hard and you and your buddies keep doing it anyway … Thank you.” “Hmm,” he added when he left, “I guess I have to learn to mind my body.” Vince had learned that mind and body are not separate entities—that he was a whole person. He said he wanted to learn more about himself and came in for three more sessions. He learned how to better handle stressful and conflicting situations and, needless to say, didn’t need the operation. When we need to engage in life-saving actions, the amount of charge and adrenaline that floods our bodies is vast. When Vince attempted to save the passenger in the car wreck, there were two simultaneous, but opposing, survival actions: one to do whatever possible to save her life, and the other, to pull away from the horror. In this intense conflict, Vince’s nervous system and muscles locked up; his shoulder froze. In being able to “feel through” and separate out the conflicting impulses , first to reach forward and then to pull away in horror, the vast survival energy, p instead of both acting against itself, was discharged in the waves of shaking sweating and nausea . Enter Dr. Pavlov Ivan Pavlov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for his prodigious work on the conditioned reflex, was thrust into a study of experimental (traumatic) breakdown by a chance event. The great Leningrad flood of 1924 caused the water to rise in his basement laboratory, precipitously close to the level of his caged experimental dogs. This terrified them but left them physically uninjured. When he resumed his experiments, he was startled to find that they had lost their previously acquired conditioned reflexes. While this was of obvious interest to Pavlov, another set of observations altered the future of his investigatory work.

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

  I answer that, Just as in the other sacraments certain things are essential to the sacrament, and if they are omitted there is no sacrament, while certain things belong to the solemnization of the sacrament, and if these be omitted the sacrament is nevertheless validly performed, although it is a sin to omit them; so, too, consent expressed in words of the present between persons lawfully qualified to contract makes a marriage, because these two conditions are essential to the sacrament; while all else belongs to the solemnization of the sacrament, as being done in order that the marriage may be more fittingly performed. Hence if these be omitted it is a true marriage, although the contracting parties sin, unless they have a lawful motive for being excused. [*Clandestine marriages have since been declared invalid by the Council of Trent (sess. xxiv). It must be borne in mind that throughout the treatise on marriage St. Thomas gives the Canon Law of his time.] Reply to Objection 1: The maid is in her father’s power, not as a female slave without power over her own body, but as a daughter, for the purpose of education. Hence, in so far as she is free, she can give herself into another’s power without her father’s consent, even as a son or daughter, since they are free, may enter religion without their parent’s consent. Reply to Objection 2: In penance our act, although essential to the sacrament, does not suffice for producing the proximate effect of the sacrament, namely forgiveness of sins, and consequently it is necessary that the act of the priest intervene in order that the sacrament be perfected. But in matrimony our acts are the sufficient cause for the production of the proximate effect, which is the marriage bond, because whoever has the right to dispose of himself can bind himself to another. Consequently the priest’s blessing is not required for matrimony as being essential to the sacrament. Reply to Objection 3: It is also forbidden to receive baptism otherwise than from a priest, except in a case of necessity. But matrimony is not a necessary sacrament: and consequently the comparison fails. However, clandestine marriages are forbidden on account of the evil results to which they are liable, since it often happens that one of the parties is guilty of fraud in such marriages; frequently, too, they have recourse to other nuptials when they repent of having married in haste; and many other evils result therefrom, besides which there is something disgraceful about them. Reply to Objection 4: Clandestine marriages are not forbidden as though they were contrary to the essentials of marriage, in the same way as the marriages of unlawful persons, who are undue matter for this sacrament; and hence there is no comparison.