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 Another Country (1962)

  He was afraid to go near her, he was afraid to touch her, it was almost as though she had told him that she had been infected with the plague. His arms trembled with his revulsion, and every act of the body seemed unimaginably vile. And yet, at the same time, as he stood helpless and stupid in the kitchen which had abruptly become immortal, or which, in any case, would surely live as long as he lived, and follow him everywhere, his heart began to beat with a newer, stonier anguish, which destroyed the distance called pity and placed him, very nearly, in her body, beside that table, on the dirty floor. The single yellow light beat terribly down on them both. He went to her, resigned and tender and helpless, her sobs seeming to make his belly sore. And, nevertheless, for a moment, he could not touch her, he did not know how. He thought, unwillingly, of all the whores, black whores, with whom he had coupled, and what he had hoped for from them, and he was gripped in a kind of retrospective nausea. What would they see when they looked into each other’s faces again? “Come on, Ida,” he whispered, “come on, Ida. Get up,” and at last he touched her shoulders, trying to force her to rise. She tried to check her sobs, she put both hands on the table. “I’m all right,” she murmured, “give me a handkerchief.” He knelt beside her and thrust his handkerchief, warm and wadded, but fairly clean, into her hand. She blew her nose. He kept his arm around her shoulder. “Stand up,” he said. “Go wash your face. Would you like some coffee?” She nodded her head, Yes, and slowly rose. He rose with her. She kept her head down and moved swiftly, drunkenly, past him, into the bathroom. She locked the door. He had the spinning sensation of having been through all this before. He lit a flame under the coffee pot, making a mental note to break down the bathroom door if she were silent too long, if she were gone too long. But he heard the water running, and, beneath it, the sound of the rain. He ate a pork chop, greedily, with a piece of bread, and drank a glass of milk; for he was trembling, it had to be because of hunger. Otherwise, for the moment, he felt nothing. The coffee pot, now beginning to growl, was real, and the blue fire beneath it and the pork chops in the pan, and the milk which seemed to be turning sour in his belly.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Yes, yes, and again yes! O, let us do some rash thing—for the sheer pleasure of it! Let us do something live and magnificent, even if destructive! Said the mad cobbler: “All things are generated out of the grand mystery, and proceed out of one degree into another. Whatever goes forward in its degree, the same receives no abominate.” Everywhere in all times the same ovarian world announcing itself. Yet also, parallel with these announcements, these prophecies, these gynecological manifestoes, parallel and contemporaneous with them new totem poles, new taboos, new war dances. While into the air so black and beautiful the brothers of man, the poets, the diggers of the future, were spitting their magic lines, in this same time, O profound and perplexing riddle, other men were saying: “Won’t you please come and take a job in our ammunition factory. We promise you the highest wages, the most sanitary and hygienic conditions. The work is so easy that even a child could do it.” And if you had a sister, a wife, a mother, an aunt, as long as she could manipulate her hands, as long as she could prove that she had no bad habits, you were invited to bring her or them along to the ammunition works. If you were shy of soiling your hands they would explain to you very gently and intelligently just how these delicate mechanisms operated, what they did when they exploded, and why you must not waste even your garbage because … et ipso facto e pluribus unum. The thing that impressed me, going the rounds in search of work, was not so much that they made me vomit every day (assuming I had been lucky enough to put something into my gut), but that they always demanded to know if you were of good habits, if you were steady, if you were sober, if you were industrious, if you had ever worked before and if not why not. Even the garbage, which I had gotten the job of collecting for the municipality, was precious to them, the killers. Standing knee-deep in the muck, the lowest of the low, a coolie, an outcast, still I was part of the death racket. I tried reading the Inferno at night, but it was in English and English is no language for a catholic work. “Whatever enters in itself into its self-hood, viz., into its own lubet…” Lubet!

• From Another Country (1962)

  It smelled of thousands of travelers, oceans of piss, tons of bile and vomit and shit. He added his stream to the ocean, holding that most despised part of himself loosely between two fingers of one hand. But I’ve got to stay there so long.… He looked at the horrible history splashed furiously on the walls—telephone numbers, cocks, breasts, balls, cunts, etched into these walls with hatred. Suck my cock. I like to get whipped. I want a hot stiff prick up my ass. Down with Jews. Kill the niggers. I suck cocks. He washed his hands very carefully and dried them on the filthy roller towel and walked out into the bar. The two boys were still at the juke box, the girl with the striped blouse was still talking to her friend. He walked through the bar to the door and into the street. Only then did he reach in his pocket to see what Cass had pushed into his palm. Five dollars. Well, that would take care of him until morning. He would get a room at the Y. He crossed Sheridan Square and walked slowly along West Fourth Street. The bars were beginning to close. People stood before bar doors, trying vainly to get in, or simply delaying going home; and in spite of the cold there were loiterers under street lamps. He felt as removed from them, as he walked slowly along, as he might have felt from a fence, a farmhouse, a tree, seen from a train window: coming closer and closer, the details changing every instant as the eye picked them out; then pressing against the window with the urgency of a messenger or a child; then dropping away, diminishing, vanished, gone forever. That fence is falling down, he might have thought as the train rushed toward it, or That house needs paint, or The tree is dead. In an instant, gone in an instant—it was not his fence, his farmhouse, or his tree. As now, passing, he recognized faces, bodies, postures, and thought. That’s Ruth. Or There’s old Lennie. Son of a bitch is stoned again. It was very silent.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And she gave him again her oddly intimate, rueful smile. “It’s very nice to see, it’s very—enviable. I don’t envy many people. I haven’t found myself envying anyone for a long, long time.” “It’s mighty funny,” he said, “that you should envy me .” He rose from the sofa, and walked to the window. Behind him, beneath the mighty lament of the music, a heavy silence gathered: Cass, also, had something to talk about, but he did not want to know what it was. You can’t trust nobody, you might as well be alone . Staring out over the water, he asked, “What was Rufus like—near the end?” After a moment, he turned and looked at her. “I hadn’t meant to ask you that—but I guess I really want to know.” Her face, despite the softening bangs, grew spare and contemplative. Her lips twisted. “I told you a little of it,” she said, “in my letter. But I didn’t know how you felt by that time and I didn’t see any point in burdening you.” She put out her cigarette and lit another one. “He was very unhappy, as—as you know.” She paused. “Actually, we never got very close to him. Vivaldo knew him better than—than we did, anyway.” He felt a curious throb of jealousy: Vivaldo! “We didn’t see much of him. He became very involved with a Southern girl, a girl from Georgia—–” Found my long lost friend, and I might as well stayed at home! “You didn’t tell me that ,” he said . “No. He wasn’t very nice to her. He beat her up a lot—–” He stared at her, feeling himself grow pale, remembering more than he wanted to remember, feeling his hope and his hope of safety threatened by invincible, unnamed forces within himself. He remembered Rufus’ face, his hands, his body, and his voice, and the constant humiliation. “Beat her up? What for?” “Well—who knows? Because she was Southern, because she was white. I don’t know. Because he was Rufus. It was very ugly. She was a nice girl, maybe a little pathetic—” “Did she like to be beaten up? I mean—did something in her like it, did she like to be—debased?” “No, I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. Well, maybe there’s something in everybody that likes to be debased, but I don’t think life’s that simple. I don’t trust all these formulas.” She paused. “To tell the truth, I think she probably loved Rufus, really loved him, and wanted Rufus to love her.” “How abnormal,” he said, “can you get!” He finished his drink. A very faint, wry amusement crossed her face. “Anyway, their affair dragged on from bad to worse and she was finally committed to an institution—” “You mean, a madhouse?” “Yes.” “Where?” “In the South.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Before ever 1 begin I am disgusted with the efforts of the acknowledged masters. Without the ability or the knowledge to make so much as a portal in the façade of the grand edifice, I criticize and lament the architecture itself. If I were only a tiny brick in the vast cathedral of this antiquated façade I would be infinitely happier; I would have life, the life of the whole structure, even as an infinitesimal part of it. But I am outside, a barbarian who cannot make even a crude sketch, let alone a plan, of the edifice he dreams of inhabiting. I dream a new blazingly magnificent world which collapses as soon as the light is turned on. A world that vanishes but does not die, for I have only to become still again and stare wide-eyed into the darkness and it reappears…. There is then a world in me which is utterly unlike any world I know of. I do not think it is my exclusive property—it is only the angle of my vision which is exclusive in that it is unique. If I talk the language of my unique vision nobody understands; the most colossal edifice may be reared and yet remain invisible. The thought of that haunts me. What good will it do to make an invisible temple? * * * It was in Ulric’s studio not so many months ago that I had finished my first book—the book about the twelve messengers. I used to work in his brother’s room where some short time previously a magazine editor, after reading a few pages of an unfinished story, informed me cold-bloodedly that I hadn’t an ounce of talent, that I didn’t know the first thing about writing—in short that I was a complete flop and the best thing to do, my lad, is to forget it, try to make an honest living. Another nincompoop who had written a highly successful book about Jesus-the-carpenter had told me the same thing. And if rejection slips mean anything there was simple corroboration to support the criticism of these discerning minds. “Who are these shits?” I used to say to Ulric. “Where do they get off to tell me these things? What have they done, except to prove that they know how to make money?” Well, I was talking about Joey and Tony, my little friends. I was lying in the dark, a little twig floating in the Japanese current. I was getting back to simple abracadabra, the straw that makes bricks, the crude sketch, the temple which must take on flesh and blood and make itself manifest to all the world. I got up and put on a soft light.

• From American Swing (2008)

  333 00:16:04,254 --> 00:16:07,257 LARRY REALLY THOUGHT THAT WAS WONDERFUL. 334 00:16:07,257 --> 00:16:10,010 HE WAS SO PROUD OF HIS BUFFET. 335 00:16:10,010 --> 00:16:12,096 BUT THE BUFFET WAS DISGUSTING. 336 00:16:12,096 --> 00:16:15,099 THERE WAS PEOPLE-- ORAL SEX THIS AND THAT-- 337 00:16:15,099 --> 00:16:18,268 ALL CRAZY SEX THINGS. SO WE LEFT THERE. 338 00:16:18,268 --> 00:16:20,938 I SAID I WANT TO GO TO THE ROOM AND EAT MY SANDWICH. 339 00:16:20,938 --> 00:16:23,774 SO WE WENT TO ANOTHER ROOM-- I GUESS THE POOL TABLE-- 340 00:16:23,774 --> 00:16:25,859 AND THEY WERE HAVING SEX ON THE POOL TABLE. 341 00:16:25,859 --> 00:16:27,987 WE USED TO GO BUY PIZZA FOR OURSELVES 342 00:16:27,987 --> 00:16:30,197 AND IT WAS REAL GOOD PIZZA AND WE SAID TO LARRY, 343 00:16:30,197 --> 00:16:32,866 - "IT WOULD BE NICE AFTER THE FOOD'S ALMOST GONE"-- - JUST TO BREAK IT UP. 344 00:16:32,866 --> 00:16:36,412 - ABOUT 1:00 IN THE MORNING. - WHEN YOU START RUNNING OUT OF FOOD 345 00:16:36,412 --> 00:16:38,622 AND PEOPLE COME OUT OF THE ORGY OR THEY'RE DANCING, 346 00:16:38,622 --> 00:16:41,542 SWIMMING-- YOU FEEL LIKE GRABBING SOMETHING. 347 00:16:41,542 --> 00:16:44,128 THEY'RE TIRED OF A BOLOGNA SANDWICH. 348 00:16:44,128 --> 00:16:46,755 I SAID, "HEY, WHY DON'T YOU ORDER 10 PIES?" 349 00:16:47,881 --> 00:16:49,550 "WHY NOT?" 350 00:16:49,550 --> 00:16:51,927 - Woman: YOU WEREN'T HIDING, WERE YOU? - NO. 351 00:16:51,927 --> 00:16:54,346 - DID YOU MEET A NICE GIRL? - NO. 352 00:16:56,181 --> 00:16:58,976 Leo: EVERYTHING WAS OPEN EXCEPT THESE FEW BLACK CUBICLES. 353 00:16:58,976 --> 00:17:01,687 THAT YOU COULD HAVE PRIVATE SEX IF YOU FELT EMBARRASSED 354 00:17:01,687 --> 00:17:04,148 TO BE DOING IT IN FRONT OF THE JAPANESE TOURISTS. 355 00:17:04,148 --> 00:17:06,817 Don: YOU COULD HEAR CONVERSATIONS IN THE ROOM TO THE RIGHT OF YOU, 356 00:17:06,817 --> 00:17:09,236 ON THE LEFT OF YOU. YOU'D HEAR WOMEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT 357 00:17:09,236 --> 00:17:11,655 WHO WAS GOING TO CARPOOL TO HEBREW SCHOOL IN THE MORNING. 358 00:17:11,655 --> 00:17:14,033 WE SPENT SOME VERY VERY HAPPY HOURS 359 00:17:14,033 --> 00:17:17,745 CONTROLLING OUR HYSTERIA 360 00:17:17,745 --> 00:17:20,706 SO THAT PEOPLE INSIDE WOULDN'T KNOW THAT WE WERE LISTENING 361 00:17:20,706 --> 00:17:24,501 TO THE KIND OF FORCED DIALOGUE BETWEEN PEOPLE WHO HAVE JUST MET 362 00:17:24,501 --> 00:17:26,712 IN AN ORGY ROOM. 363 00:17:26,712 --> 00:17:30,424 IT WAS GOOD STUFF. I WISH I'D RECORDED SOME OF IT. 364 00:17:30,424 --> 00:17:33,218 WHEN LARRY SHOWED ME INTO THIS CLOSED CUBICLE 365 00:17:33,218 --> 00:17:35,971 AND THE WOMAN IN THERE WAS HIS WIFE MARY, 366 00:17:35,971 --> 00:17:39,725 HE SEEMED ALMOST EXCITED TO BE ABLE TO INTRODUCE MARY TO THE PRESS: 367 00:17:39,725 --> 00:17:42,603 "HI, MARY, HOW ARE YOU? THIS IS JOHN LEO." 368 00:17:42,603 --> 00:17:46,857 AND AGAIN IT WAS ALMOST THE ENTHUSIASM 369 00:17:46,857 --> 00:17:50,069 OF A KIWANIS EXECUTIVE SHOWING OFF HIS HOME TOWN. 370 00:17:50,069 --> 00:17:52,529 - Larry: WHY REPRESS YOUR DESIRES? - Donahue: WHAT?

• From Another Country (1962)

  The tendrils of shame clutched at them, however they turned, all the dirty words they knew commented on all they did. These words sometimes brought on the climax—joylessly, with loathing, and too soon. The best that he had ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility. In Harlem, however, he had merely dropped his load and marked the spot with silver. It had seemed much simpler for a time. But even simple pleasure, bought and paid for, did not take long to fail—pleasure, as it turned out, was not simple. When, wandering about Harlem, he came across a girl he liked, he could not fail to wish that he had met her somewhere else, under different circumstances. He could not fail to disapprove of her situation and to demand of her more than any girl in such a situation could give. If he did not like her, then he despised her and it was very painful for him to despise a colored girl, it increased his self-contempt. So that, by and by, however pressing may have been the load he carried uptown, he returned home with a greater one, not to be so easily discharged. For several years it had been his fancy that he belonged in those dark streets uptown precisely because the history written in the color of his skin contested his right to be there. He enjoyed this, his right to be being everywhere contested; uptown, his alienation had been made visible and, therefore, almost bearable. It had been his fancy that danger, there, was more real, more open, than danger was downtown and that he, having chosen to run these dangers, was snatching his manhood from the lukewarm waters of mediocrity and testing it in the fire. He had felt more alive in Harlem, for he had moved in a blaze of rage and self-congratulation and sexual excitement, with danger, like a promise, waiting for him everywhere. And, nevertheless, in spite of all this daring, this running of risks, the misadventures which had actually befallen him had been banal indeed and might have befallen him anywhere. His dangerous, overwhelming lust for life had failed to involve him in anything deeper than perhaps half a dozen extremely casual acquaintanceships in about as many bars.

• From Real Life (2020)

  D’autres fois, les volatiles marchaient paresseusement à l’ombre, pleins d’assurance, et se dirigeaient vers les terrains de foot et de pique-nique, tels des gardes-chasses sévères. Mais à cette heure-ci de la soirée, les oies n’étaient pas là, et les mouettes étaient retournées à leurs nids ; Wallace avait la berge pour lui tout seul, sans compter les autres observateurs anonymes. Il leur jeta un bref coup d’œil et se demanda quelle forme prenaient leurs vies, s’ils étaient satisfaits. Ils étaient comme tout le monde, n’importe où : blancs, vêtus de vêtements hideux, trop grands, couverts de coups de soleil, la peau pelée, souriant, avec des grandes bouches élastiques. Les jeunes, élancés et bronzés, riaient en se poussant du coude. Plus loin derrière, la masse des promeneurs s’étalait sur la jetée comme de la mousse. Une vaguelette l’éclaboussa, mouillant le bas de son short. La pierre était visqueuse et fraîche. Un groupe commença à jouer de la musique derrière lui. Leurs instruments lâchèrent un son discordant dans le vrombissement des amplis qui s’allumaient. Wallace entoura ses genoux de ses bras et y posa le menton. Il retira ses chaussures en toile et laissa l’eau du lac lui éclabousser les chevilles. Elle était froide, mais pas aussi froide qu’il s’y attendait et qu’il l’aurait souhaité. Il y avait quelque chose de gras dans cette eau, un élément distinct de l’eau elle-même, comme une seconde peau détachée qui ondoyait sous la surface. Parfois, les accès aux lacs étaient fermés pendant plusieurs jours à cause des algues. Il arrivait qu’elles secrètent des neurotoxines qui pouvaient s’avérer fatales. Ou que l’eau abrite des organismes parasites qui se fixaient sur les nageurs et pompaient toute leur énergie, ou leur donnaient des maladies qui poussaient leurs corps à se disloquer de l’intérieur. L’eau ici pouvait être dangereuse même quand on l’ignorait. Mais il n’y avait pas de pancartes d’avertissement. Ce qui se trouvait dans les profondeurs n’avait pas encore atteint un niveau jugé dangereux pour la population. L’odeur était plus nauséabonde maintenant qu’il était au bord : un remugle d’alcool, puissamment corrosif et chimique. Cela lui rappela l’eau noire qui l’avait dévisagé depuis la bonde de l’évier de ses parents tant d’années auparavant. Noire et ronde, comme une pupille parfaite qui le fixait, avec une odeur rance, comme un aliment périmé. Son père conservait aussi des seaux d’eau plate. Je les garde pour plus tard, expliquait-il quand Wallace tentait de les jeter. Il les gardait comme on garde des vieux habits, des bouteilles, des stylos à bille à court d’encre ou des crayons cassés. Parce qu’on ne sait jamais ce qui peut arriver, ce qui pourrait rendre les déchets indispensables. L’eau dans les seaux était noire comme du goudron parce que des feuilles mortes étaient tombées dedans et s’y étaient décomposées.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  You’d see women in the Laundromat with no makeup, a housedress, bedroom slippers, and a hairdo that’d be appropriate for the Presidential Inauguration. —JOHN WATERS Sigmund Freud said that seeing is “ultimately derived from touching.” Nowhere is Freud’s observation better realized than at the body’s boundary. When journalist Kennedy Fraser spies a woman’s pair of long gloves at a glittering social gathering, they look to her like “steamrollered silk arms”—surfaces so smooth and taut, they mimic perfect skin. But such pleasures pale in comparison to the real thing. Flawless skin is the most universally desired human feature, according to zoologist Desmond Morris, and flowing, healthy hair runs close behind. Skin may be the body’s most aesthetic organ; it is certainly its most pervasive. Thickest on the soles of the feet and thinnest on the eyelids, it weighs six pounds and measures twenty square feet in the average person. Within each inch of skin are sweat glands, oil glands, hairs, blood vessels, and nerve endings through which we shiver, shudder, sweat, blush, and quiver. On the skin’s surface is keratin, the protein that rhinoceros horns and animal claws are made of, and the stuff of human hair, which is just a special form of skin. Skin and hair, so sexy and glorious when healthy, are repellent when not. In his writings on disgust, William Miller observes, “There is nothing quite like skin gone bad; it is in fact the marrings of skin which make up much of the substance of the ugly and monstrous.… Pus, running sores, skin lesions, which were a regular feature of medieval life and helped define the pariah status of lepers and syphilitics, have only recently come to be rare sights in the West.” Hair is alluring, but only on the head. We are disgusted to find so much as a single hair in the center of a mole, on a woman’s chin, or floating in a glass of water. It is said that John Ruskin never consummated his marriage, so appalled was he to find that his wife did not look like the Greek statue he imagined, but came with fleece between her legs. To some, hairy armpits or pubic hair, sprouting at puberty and imbued with pungent odors, disturb. To others, they excite: in the course of their heated affair, Caroline Lamb, the wife of British Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, sent Lord Byron strands of her pubic hair.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And it was worse now, since I’d been with you, than it had ever been before. Before, I used to watch them wriggle and listen to them grunt, and, God, they were so solemn about it, sweating yellow pigs, and so vain, like that sad little piece of meat was making miracles happen, and I guess it was, for them—and I wasn’t touched at all, I just wished I could make them come down lower. Oh, yes, I found out all about white people, that’s what they were like, alone, where only a black girl could see them, and the black girl might as well have been blind as far as they were concerned. Because they knew they were white, baby, and they ruled the world. But now it was different, sometimes when Ellis put his hands on me, it was all I could do not to scream, not to vomit. It had got to me, it had got to me, and I felt that I was being pumped full of— I don’t know what, not poison exactly, but dirt, waste, filth, and I’d never be able to get it out of me, never be able to get that stink out of me. And sometimes, sometimes, sometimes—” She covered her mouth, her tears spilled down over her hand, over the red ring. He could not move. “Oh, Lord Jesus. I’ve done terrible things. Oh, Lord. Sometimes. And then I’d come home to you. He always had that funny little smile when I finally left him, that smile he has, I’ve seen it many times now, when he’s outsmarted somebody who doesn’t know it yet. He can’t help it, that’s him, it was as though he were saying, ‘Now that I’m through with you, have a nice time with Vivaldo. And give him my regards.’ And, funny, funny—I couldn’t hate him. I saw what he was doing, but I couldn’t hate him. I wondered what it felt like, to be like that, not to have any real feelings at all, except to say, Well, now, let’s do this and now let’s do that and now let’s eat and now let’s fuck and now let’s go. And do that all your life. And then I’d come home and look at you. But I’d bring him with me. It was as though I was dirty, and you had to wash me, each time. And I knew you never could, no matter how hard we tried, and I didn’t hate him but I hated you. And I hated me.” “Why didn’t you stop it, Ida? You could have stopped it, you didn’t have to go on with it.” “Stop it and go where? Stop it and do what? No, I thought to myself, Well, you’re in it now, girl, close your eyes and grit your teeth and get through it. It’ll be worth it when it’s over.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She sighed and put one hand to her face. “Oh. I don’t know, I really don’t know what I was thinking. Sometimes I’d leave Ellis and I’d come and find you here—like my dog or my cat, I used to think sometimes, just waiting. And I’d be afraid you’d be here and I’d be afraid you’d gone out, afraid you’d ask me, really ask me where I’d been, and afraid you wouldn’t. Sometimes you’d try, but I could always stop you, I could see in your eyes when you were frightened. I hated that look and I hated me and I hated you. I could see how white men got that look they so often had when they looked at me; somebody had beat the shit out of them, had scared the shit out of them, long ago. And now I was doing it to you. And it made it hard for me when you touched me, especially—” She stopped, picked up her drink, tasted it, set it down. “I couldn’t stand Ellis. You don’t know what it’s like, to have a man’s body over you if you can’t stand that body. And it was worse now, since I’d been with you, than it had ever been before. Before, I used to watch them wriggle and listen to them grunt, and, God, they were so solemn about it, sweating yellow pigs, and so vain, like that sad little piece of meat was making miracles happen, and I guess it was, for them—and I wasn’t touched at all, I just wished I could make them come down lower. Oh, yes, I found out all about white people, that’s what they were like, alone, where only a black girl could see them, and the black girl might as well have been blind as far as they were concerned. Because they knew they were white, baby, and they ruled the world. But now it was different, sometimes when Ellis put his hands on me, it was all I could do not to scream, not to vomit. It had got to me, it had got to me, and I felt that I was being pumped full of—I don’t know what, not poison exactly, but dirt, waste, filth, and I’d never be able to get it out of me, never be able to get that stink out of me. And sometimes, sometimes, sometimes—” She covered her mouth, her tears spilled down over her hand, over the red ring. He could not move. “Oh, Lord Jesus. I’ve done terrible things. Oh, Lord. Sometimes. And then I’d come home to you. He always had that funny little smile when I finally left him, that smile he has, I’ve seen it many times now, when he’s outsmarted somebody who doesn’t know it yet. He can’t help it, that’s him, it was as though he were saying, ‘Now that I’m through with you, have a nice time with Vivaldo. And give him my regards.’ And, funny, funny—I couldn’t hate him. I saw what he was doing, but I couldn’t hate him. I wondered what it felt like, to be like that, not to have any real feelings at all, except to say, Well, now, let’s do this and now let’s do that and now let’s eat and now let’s fuck and now let’s go. And do that all your life. And then I’d come home and look at you. But I’d bring him with me. It was as though I was dirty, and you had to wash me, each time. And I knew you never could, no matter how hard we tried, and I didn’t hate him but I hated you. And I hated me.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  It might as well be now, while you are still fond of me, and I can seduce you into taking me along.” “You’re a great little old seducer,” said Eric, “and that’s the truth.” “Ah,” said Yves, wickedly, “with you it was easy.” Then he looked at Eric gravely. “So it is decided.” It was not a question. “I suppose that I must go and visit my whore of a mother and tell her that she will never see me any more.” And his face darkened and his large mouth grew bitter. His mother had been a bistro waitress when the Germans came to Paris. Yves had then been five years old and his father had vanished so long before that Yves could scarcely remember him. But he remembered watching his mother with the Germans. “She was really a putain . I remember many times sitting in the café, watching her. She did not know I was watching—anyway, old people think that children never see anything. The bar was very long, and it curved. I would always be sitting behind it, at the far end, around the curve. There was a mirror above me and I could see them in the mirror. And I could see them in the zinc of the bar. I remember their uniforms and the shine on their leather boots. They were always extremely correct —not like the Americans who came later. She would always be laughing, and she moved very fast. Someone’s hand was always on her—in her bosom, up her leg. There was always another one at our house, the whole German army, coming all the time. How horrible a people.” And then, as though to give his mother a possible, reluctant justice: “Later, she says that she do it for me, that we would not have eaten otherwise. But I do not believe that. I think she liked that. I think she was always a whore. She always managed everything that way. When the Americans came, she found a very pretty officer. He was very nice to me, I must say—he had a son of his own in the States that he had only seen one time, and he pretended that I was his son, though I was much older than his son would have been. He made me wish that I had a father, one father, especially”—he grinned—“an American father, who liked to buy you things and take you on his shoulder everywhere. I was sorry when he went away. I am sure that it was he who kept her from getting her head shaved, as she deserved. She told all kinds of lies about her work in the Resistance. Quelle horreur! that whole time, it was not very pretty. Many women had their heads shaved, sometimes for nothing, you know? just because they were pretty or someone was jealous or they had refused to sleep with someone.

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  In the 1960s, the invasion of the Beatles singing “Revolution” birthed a greater awareness of the cultural shift in our country. Wearing Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” we gyrated toward sexual liberty and rebellion against authority at breakneck speeds. In the 1970s hippies began shouting, “Make love not war!” and “If it feels good, do it!” became the standard that governed sexual conduct. With the debut of Charlie’s Angels and 10, hairdressers and fitness centers made a fortune from the number of Farrah Fawcett and Bo Derek wannabes. Robert Palmer summarized the epidemic of the 1980s with his song, “Addicted to Love!” and even though Madonna was singing, “Like a Virgin,” she wasn’t teaching women to dress and act like one. The ’90s will go down in history as the decade that Britney Spears graduated from her Mickey Mousketeer hat into leather halter tops and hip-hugger jeans. Now in the twenty-first century, the sexual messages are so numerous that the downward spiral seems to be a big blur. What kinds of things are being communicated to us by society today? I walk through the mall and hope that my daughter can avoid being influenced by the huge display in the Abercrombie & Fitch window—a picture of two girls and a guy in bed together—or the Victoria’s Secret display or the Frederick’s of Hollywood display. Even some of the displays in the JC Penney aisles have become extremely erotic. I drive through downtown Dallas and can’t help but notice the frequent appearance of scantily clad women on billboards, usually for alcohol or “gentlemen’s clubs” (although you’d never meet a gentleman there). I walk through a bookstore, and a graphic cover touting The Joy of Gay Sex catches my eye. No wonder there are men and women turning to sex outside of marriage (with members of the opposite and of the same sex). It’s what society tries to convince us is desirable and acceptable. I rarely see advertisements depicting good, clean, healthy, fun sex within a monogamous marriage relationship. Things have certainly changed. One hundred years ago Christians were upset over the private burlesque shows that traveled from town to town. Today young Christian women stroll down the street with pierced belly buttons glaring below skin-tight cropped tops, completely unaware of the effect they are having on men (or maybe they are aware). In 1939, Gone with the Wind brought gasps as Clark Gable’s famous shocking line, “I don’t give a——!” made headline news. Today, moviemakers intentionally add vulgarity and sexual scenes to their movie just to attract more viewers with a PG-13 or R rating. Pornographic magazines once had to be sought out, found only on the highest bookracks in plain, brown wrappers and sold only to mature patrons. Today if you are old enough to know how to surf the Net, you can usher unlimited pornographic material into your own home via the click of a mouse.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  Freud believed that we fetishize hair not only because of the way it looks and feels but because of the way it smells. “Both the feet and the hair are objects with a strong smell which have been exalted into fetishes after the olfactory sensation has become unpleasurable and abandoned.” What has been abandoned, according to Freud, is “coprophilic pleasure.” In other words, our love of the body’s smells is transferred from the toilet to the toilette and the coiffure. Skin and hair stir visual, tactile, and olfactory sensations and memories; they are polymorphically arousing and primal in their appeal. Naked Desmond Morris called man “the naked ape,” the only one among “one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes” not covered with hair. It begs the question: why do we show bare skin rather than fur? In fact, we are not entirely naked. We have five million hairs on our adult bodies and as many hair follicles as an ape, but most of our body hair is so fine that we look bare skinned. To stay warm, we’ve sheered the fleece, tanned the skin, and captured the fur of other animals—in other words, we’ve invented clothes. We also have a thick layer of fat underneath the skin which, like the blubber of a whale, helps insulate us against the cold. Our cooling system is equally distinctive. When most animals get hot, they pant, they sweat a little in hairless areas such as the pads of their paws, and they fluff their fur. Humans get sweaty all over. Millions of sweat glands called eccrine glands embedded in the skin turn on like sprinklers when the temperature gets hot. When dry air moves across wet skin, the water evaporates and the temperature of the blood in the capillaries cools down. It is an evaporative cooling system that evolved in the African savanna where the temperature is hot, the air is dry, and the landscape is dotted with water sources. By becoming downy rather than furry, we’ve made our bodies a less than desirable home for fleas, lice, mites, and other parasites. Our dogs and cats need to wear flea and tick collars in the heat, not us. Nakedness has erotic advantages, and not just in keeping us parasite-free. Hair offers padding and protection. Strip it away, and the skin is more sensitive and responsive. In areas rich with nerve endings such as the lips, the palms of our hands, the soles of our feet, our nipples, and parts of our genitals, we have no hair at all.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  Historically, female use of face makeup has been unsettling to men but stubbornly unyielding. In ancient Rome, the poet Martial wrote, “You are but a composition of lies. Whilst you were in Rome, your hair was growing on the banks of the Rhine; at night, when you lay aside your silken robes, you lay aside your teeth as well; and two thirds of your person are locked up in boxes for the night.… Thus no man can say, I love you, for you are not what he loves, and no one loves what you are.” Ovid warned, “Your artifice should go unsuspected. Who could help but feel disgust at the thick paint on your face melting and running down onto your breasts? Why do I need to know what gives your skin its whiteness?” Church leaders expressed indignation. St. Jerome wrote, “What makes this purple and white stuffe in the face of a Christian woman, the inflamers of youth, the nourishers of lust, and tokens of an unchaste soule?” Clement of Alexandria declared wig wearers unable to receive the Lord’s blessing because the blessing stayed on the wig and did not penetrate to the person. “For on whom does the presbyter lay his hand? Whom does he bless? Not the woman decked out, but another’s hairs, and through them another head.” A law was passed by the English Parliament in the late eighteenth century which attempted to impose on women the same penalty for adornment as for witchcraft, freeing up the husbands who had married them under such false pretenses. “All women … that shall from and after this act impose upon, seduce or betray into matrimony any of His Majesty’s subjects by the use of scents, paints, cosmetics, washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high heeled shoes, or bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the law now in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanors and that the marriage, upon conviction, shall stand null and void.” The law was unenforceable. In 1711 the British journal The Spectator published a letter from one distressed husband which read, in part, “Sir, … I have a great mind to be rid of my Wife, and hope, when you consider my case, you will be of Opinion I have very just Pretensions to a Divorce … never Man was so enamored as I was of her fair forehead, Neck, and Arms as well as the bright Jet of her Hair, but to my great Astonishment I find they were all the Effects of Art: Her skin is so tarnished with this Practice, that when she first wakes in a Morning, she scarce seems young enough to be the Mother of her whom I carried to Bed the Night before. I shall take the Liberty to part with her by the first Opportunity, unless her Father will make her Portion suitable to her real, not her assumed, Countenance.”

• From Push (1996)

  I say God. Sho me god. Keep going down 124th vaykent lot. i stop. Gon rite bout vaykent lot. uuuuuuugh dog shit dog shit crummel up briks steell fence lifes of trash cancer yr eye multiply ugliness greazee shit garbage cans, rottin cloze PAMPER filthee dope addicks pile up flow ovr uglee I HATE HATE UGLY turn from vaykent lot n is vaykent pepul with kraters like what u see wen you look at spots on the moon, wen you see moon on space movies is holes on it, kraters. thas on dope addicts arms — kraters. Dese not crack addicts like on one-two-six. Dese people on 1-2-4 is HAIRRUN shuters. There eyez is like far away space ships, they don see you, only smell pepul go buy for money. They money dogs. If they sniff money they will try to take it. I guess. Thas whut I always here. I nevr reely had a dope addict hurt me. We hate dope addicts. We, me, norml pepul. I git confuse how i git wif dope addicts. How whut they got I got. I don unnerstan DOPE. Whut I see do not look like fun. it look SAD. It look teef fall out. they have gums not teef, talk funny, walk stupid. WHY? If I stay on 124th to 7th Ave more vaykent lot. Maybee pass nigger wif needle in his arm noddin in the wind. Drops of blood drip down, maybe pass sex sicko wif peniss out, flashlite eyes shine sperms on you. Its a block like a fog wif worms, the pepul worms. I hate em. UGLY. But confuse. Across from bar on Lenox btween 124 n 125 is only zerox shop in Harlm. blak sister and dater own it. when zerox at school break down I cum there git zerox. in shop she got books, cards, blak stuff" I hardley ever have money to buy stuff. I DIE for I steel. Nver will Precious Jones steel (no more) or shute dope. Thas whut tv sho, niggers steel shute dope steel shute dope harlm crime crime. On top bar is Diane Mclntyre's skool. I wood hav liked to go to dancin scool when I was young. Its too late now. I'm eighteen. An Abdul a boy. Boyz don go Only faggit boyz. I don want Abdul to be faggit or dope addict But what I confuse about is this. Itz so uglee dope addicks—dey teef, dey underwater walkin, steelin. Spred AIDS an heptietis. But Rita was one of dese pepul an she is GOOD.Iluvher. When I get to school early sometimes I just sit in front part on the black plastic couch that need tape where it cut and the yellow foam pads show through. School start at 9 o'clock. The secretary get here at 8:00 a.m.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Another odd facet of pornography speaks to the same perpetual desire for more: some consumers of pornography have always seemed to have a penchant for collecting thousands upon thousands of images, magazines or videos. You see this from the start of modern photography, when dealers and collectors were busted in possession of hundreds of thousands of images. In modern times, people fill hard drives with millions of pornographic files. This phenomenon also manifests elsewhere: at that exhibit of ancient Chinese sex relics, the explanatory banners said, “The display has a whole span of five thousand years, showing jade, bronzeware, woodcarving, brick, ceramics and other artifacts of more than 500 pieces and 100 pieces of erotic painting.” There was little information about the individual pieces—their merit seemed to rest in sheer quantity and variety. As though having thirty nearly identical stone phalluses lined up in a display case was somehow superior to exhibiting just one or two examples. Psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, in The Brain That Changes Itself, an examination of a relatively new area of study known as neuroplasticity, recounts having seen many examples of men with porn addictions. “The addictiveness of Internet pornography is not a metaphor. Not all addictions are to drugs or alcohol. People can be seriously addicted to gambling, even to running. All addicts show a loss of control of the activity, compulsively seek it out despite negative consequences, develop tolerance so that they need higher and higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction, and experience withdrawal if they can’t consummate the addictive act.” Pornography addiction is most commonly discussed in the context of the Internet, but that it not the only place it manifests. “I hate what this place has done to me” were the haunting words written on the wall inside a Montreal peep-show booth, and later quoted on a peer support website for young gay men and lesbians by someone who couldn’t seem to stay away. “I’ve been returning to that peep show quite often. I feel as though I’m addicted to it and the free sex. I can’t stand it,” he wrote. “I just hope that soon enough I will gain the courage to come out, to find someone to love, and give up that dreadful peep show.” One characteristic of the addictive nature of pornography sets it apart from other habit-forming products. If an addiction to porn stems from biochemical reactions that demand a steady stream of more and different stimuli in order to satisfy the craving, it creates a demand for innovation. Smokers do not require different flavours, shapes and sizes of cigarettes to satisfy their urges. Cocaine addicts have no need for a “new coke” to keep them interested. Pornography addicts, though, get bored with the existing product easily, which creates a special demand for creativity, both in content and in the means of delivering that content.

• From Push (1996)

  People at retard place say Lil Mongo don't got it. She say that could mean Daddy get AIDS pretty fast from time he first infected to time he die? 'Cause if Lil Mongo don't got it maybe he didn't have it 1983 when she born. Then after she born he go away a long time. So maybe I get it eighty-six, eighty-seven? Counselor say, I'm on top now. I'm young, is got no disease and stuff, not no drug addict. I could live a long time, she say. I ask her what's a long time. She don't say. I think some of the girls at Advancement House know I am ... am positive. I mean wifout trying I know some of they bizness. They never was too friendly; since Mama come wif her news, they even less friendly. But who cares? I'm not tight wif these girls in the house. These bitches got problems, come in room and steal shit. I know I ain' the only one that got it, even though that's how it feels. But I'm probably the only one get it from they daddy. Counselor, Ms Weiss, say she try to find out as much about Daddy for me as she can. How much I want to know? And for what? I tell counselor I can't talk about Daddy now. My clit swell up I think Daddy. Daddy sick me, disgust me, but still he sex me up. I nawshus in my stomach but hot tight in my twat and I think I want it back, the smell of the bedroom, the hurt— he slap my face till it sting and my ears sing separate songs from each other, call me names, pump my pussy in out in out in out awww I come. He bite me hard. A hump! He slam his hips into me HARD. I scream pain he come. He slap my thighs like cowboys do horses on TV. Shiver. Orgasm in me, his body shaking, grab me, call me Fat Mama, Big Hole! You LOVE it! Say you love it! I wanna say I DON'T. I wanna say I'm a chile. But my pussy popping like grease in frying pan. He slam in me again. His dick soft. He start sucking my tittie. I wait for him get off me. Lay there stare at wall till wall is a movie, Wizard ofOz, I can make that one play anytime. Michael Jackson, scarecrow. Then my body take me over again, like shocks after earthquake, shiver me, I come again. My body not mine, I hate it coming. Afterward I go bafroom. I smear shit on my face. Feel good. Don't know why but it do. I never tell nobody about that before. But I would do that. If I go to insect support group what will I hear from other girls.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Elizabeth of Schoenau and Hildegard of Bingen, while they looked upon the monastic life as the highest form of earthly existence, saw much that was far from ideal in the lives of monks and nuns.572 There is a chronique scandaleuse of the convents as dark and repulsive as the chronique scandaleuse of the papacy during the pornocracy, and under the last popes of the Middle Ages. In a letter to Alexander III., asking him to dissolve the abbey of Grestian, the bishop of the diocese, Arnulf, spoke of all kinds of abuses, avarice, quarrelling, murder, profligacy. William of Malmesbury,573 writing in 1125, gives a bad picture of the monks of Canterbury. The convent of Brittany, of which Abaelard was abbot, revealed, as he reports in his autobiography, a rude and shocking state of affairs. Things got rapidly worse after the first fervor of the orders of St. Francis and Dominic was cooled. Teachers at the universities, like William of St. Amour of Paris (d. 1270), had scathing words for the monkish insolence and profligacy of his day, as will appear when we consider the mendicant orders. Did not a bishop during the Avignon captivity of the papacy declare that from personal examination he knew a convent where all the nuns had carnal intercourse with demons? The revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden (d. 1375), approved at the councils of Constance and Basel, reveal the same low condition of monastic virtue. Nicolas of Clemanges (d. 1440) wrote vigorous protests against the decay of the orders, and describes in darkest colors their

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Fourth Lateran forbade priests pronouncing judgments of blood and being present at executions, but at the very same moment, and at the pope’s persistent instigation, crusading armies were drenching the soil of Southern France with the blood of the Albigenses. A writer of the thirteenth century says in part truly, in part speciously, "our pope does not kill nor condemn any one to death, but the law puts to death those whom the pope allows to be put to death, and they kill themselves who do those things which make them guilty of death."1117 The official designation of the Inquisitorial process was the Inquisition of heretical depravity.1118 Its history during the Middle Ages has three main chapters: the persecution of doctrinal heretics down to 1480, the persecution of witches in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Spanish Inquisition organized in 1480.1119 The Inquisition with its penalties had among its ardent advocates the best and most enlightened men of their times, Innocent III., Frederick II., Louis IX., Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas. A parallel is found in the best Roman emperors, who lent themselves to the bloody repression of the early Church. The good king, St. Louis, declared that when a layman heard the faith spoken against, he should draw his sword and thrust it into the offender’s body up to the hilt.1120 The Inquisition was a thoroughly papal institution, wrought out in all its details by the popes of the thirteenth century, beginning with Innocent III. and not ending with Boniface VIII. In his famous manual for the treatment of heresy the Inquisitor, Bernard Guy, a man who in spite of his office elicits our respect,1121 declares that the "office of the Inquisition has its dignity from its origin for it is derived, commissioned, and known to have been instituted by the Apostolic see itself." This was the feeling of the age. Precedent enough there was for severe temporal measures. Constantine banished the Arians and burned their books. Theodosius the Great fixed death as the punishment for heresy. The Priscillianists were executed in 385. The great authority of Augustine was appealed to and his fatal interpretation of the words of the parable "Compel them to come in,"1122 justifying force in the treatment of the Donatists, was made to do service far beyond what that father probably ever intended. From the latter part of the twelfth century, councils advocated the death penalty, popes insisted upon it, and Thomas Aquinas elaborately defended it. Heresy, so the theory and the definitions ran, was a crime the Church could not tolerate. It was Satan’s worst blow. Innocent III. wrote that as treason was punished with death and confiscation of goods, how much more should these punishments be meted out to those who blaspheme God and God’s Son.