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 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  Between these two categories of forces and beings, the contrast is as complete as possible and even goes into the most radical antagonism. The good and salutary powers repel to a distance these others which deny and contradict them. Therefore the former are forbidden to the latter: any contact between them is considered the worst of profanations. This is the typical form of those interdicts between sacred things of different species, the existence of which we have already pointed out.[1291] Women during menstruation, and especially at its beginning, are impure; so at this moment they are rigorously sequestered; men may have no relations with them.[1292] Bull-roarers and churinga never come near a dead man.[1293] A sacrilegious person is excluded from the society of the faithful; access to the cult is forbidden him. Thus the whole religious life gravitates about two contrary poles between which there is the same opposition as between the pure and the impure, the saint and the sacrilegious, the divine and the diabolic. But while these two aspects of the religious life oppose one another, there is a close kinship between them. In the first place, both have the same relation towards profane beings: these must abstain from all contact with impure things just as from the most holy things. The former are no less forbidden than the latter: they are withdrawn from circulation alike. This shows that they too are sacred. Of course the sentiments inspired by the two are not identical: respect is one thing, disgust and horror another. Yet, if the gestures are to be the same in both cases, the sentiments expressed must not differ in nature. And, in fact, there is a horror in religious respect, especially when it is very intense, while the fear inspired by malign powers is generally not without a certain reverential character. The shades by which these two attitudes are differentiated are even so slight sometimes that it is not always easy to say which state of mind the believers actually happen to be in. Among certain Semitic peoples, pork was forbidden, but it was not always known exactly whether this was because it was a pure or an impure thing[1294] and the same may be said of a very large number of alimentary interdictions.

• From Jesus and His Jewish Influences (2015)

  119Lecture 18—Pontius Pilate: A Roman PrefectJesus and His Jewish Influences Herod Antipas and gave Herod Agrippa I his territories, which included Galilee and Perea. ●● A couple of years later, in 41 A.D., Gaius Caligula was assassinated. And at that point, Herod Agrippa I stepped in and played a significant role in successfully convincing the Roman Senate that Claudius should become the next emperor. In return, Claudius confirmed Herod Agrippa I as king and added Judea, Samaria, and Idumea to his kingdom. ●● At this point, all the former kingdom of Herod the Great was reunited and ruled by his Hasmonean grandson, Herod Agrippa I. As we might imagine, Herod Agrippa I was fantastically popular among the Jewish population. He had Hasmonean blood flowing in his veins. He had stepped in with Gaius Caligula and prevented the Temple of Jerusalem from being converted into a temple for the worship of the Roman emperor. Herod Agrippa I was widely admired despite the fact that he had been raised in Rome, educated in Rome, and was not himself an observant Jew. ●● Christian tradition portrays Herod Agrippa I as a persecutor of the developing church. For example, he had James the son of Zebedee beheaded, and he had Peter arrested. Here is the relevant passage from Acts: “At about that time, King Herod laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the Church. He had John’s brother James beheaded. And when he saw that this gratified the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter too.” ●● In the coming decades, Herod’s death and the division of his kingdom would lead to the outbreak of the First Jewish Revolt against the Romans, culminating with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. 120 Jesus and His Jewish Influences Suggested Reading Schiffman, Texts and Traditions, “Judea under the Procurators,” pp. 395–407. Questions to Consider 1. Who was Herod Antipas, and why did he execute John the Baptist? 2. Who was Herod Agrippa I, and why do later Christian sources portray him as a persecutor of the developing church?

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But woe is thee, thou torrent of human custom! Who shall stand against thee? how long shalt thou not be dried up? how long roll the sons of Eve into that huge and hideous ocean, which even they scarcely overpass who climb the cross? Did not I read in thee of Jove the thunderer and the adulterer? both, doubtless, he could not be; but so the feigned thunder might countenance and pander to real adultery. And now which of our gowned masters lends a sober ear to one who from their own school cries out, “These were Homer’s fictions, transferring things human to the gods; would he had brought down things divine to us!” Yet more truly had he said, “These are indeed his fictions; but attributing a divine nature to wicked men, that crimes might be no longer crimes, and whoso commits them might seem to imitate not abandoned men, but the celestial gods.” And yet, thou hellish torrent, into thee are cast the sons of men with rich rewards, for compassing such learning; and a great solemnity is made of it, when this is going on in the forum, within sight of laws appointing a salary beside the scholar’s payments; and thou lashest thy rocks and roarest, “Hence words are learnt; hence eloquence; most necessary to gain your ends, or maintain opinions.” As if we should have never known such words as “golden shower,” “lap,” “beguile,” “temples of the heavens,” or others in that passage, unless Terence had brought a lewd youth upon the stage, setting up Jupiter as his example of seduction. “Viewing a picture, where the tale was drawn, Of Jove’s descending in a golden shower To Danae’s lap a woman to beguile.” And then mark how he excites himself to lust as by celestial authority: “And what God? Great Jove, Who shakes heaven’s highest temples with his thunder, And I, poor mortal man, not do the same! I did it, and with all my heart I did it.” Not one whit more easily are the words learnt for all this vileness; but by their means the vileness is committed with less shame. Not that I blame the words, being, as it were, choice and precious vessels; but that wine of error which is drunk to us in them by intoxicated teachers; and if we, too, drink not, we are beaten, and have no sober judge to whom we may appeal. Yet, O my God (in whose presence I now without hurt may remember this), all this unhappily I learnt willingly with great delight, and for this was pronounced a hopeful boy. Bear with me, my God, while I say somewhat of my wit, Thy gift, and on what dotages I wasted it. For a task was set me, troublesome enough to my soul, upon terms of praise or shame, and fear of stripes, to speak the words of Juno, as she raged and mourned that she could not “This Trojan prince from Latinum turn.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  That said, when something is both sexual and taboo, such as eroticized violence or extreme degradation, it can trigger a mental process similar to the one that makes you obsessed with polar bears as soon as you’re told not to think about them. “Embedded in the idea ‘Don’t respond to that sexually relevant information,’” Nagoski explained, “is the idea ‘Respond to that sexually relevant information.’” The tension of that contradiction can turbocharge arousal, making something objectionable more exciting than that which is overtly desired. For adolescents, whose brains (not to mention hearts) are still developing and acutely influenced by early exposure, the impact can be significant. While porn isn’t “addictive” in any classical sense, their sexual response can be conditioned, trained to be narrowly and exclusively triggered by its images—even when (or perhaps especially when), like Daniel, they find those images offensive. The answer is not to stop masturbating, Nagoski emphasized, but to do so in a much wider variety of contexts—using one’s imagination, reading sexy books (she suggests romance novels, which have become both more explicit and more realistic about female pleasure) with a romantic partner in the room, using techniques beyond a porn-induced “death grip” on the penis—and learning to differentiate between what is highly arousing and what is actually enjoyable. Most of the boys I talked to had instinctively backed away from the web’s more gonzo options, especially any they felt were “rapey.” Even so, disturbing content—or what would once have passed for disturbing content—can break through. After one boy told me that he liked to look up blow jobs on Tumblr, I checked it out, and somehow ended up with a GIF of a woman fellating a dog. That brief exposure is something I can never unsee, and, truly, I felt it degraded my humanity. “I’d say my exposure to porn has desensitized me to normal or vanilla sex,” a high school senior in San Francisco told me. “But that’s also a function of the access my generation has to the internet in general. Having spent enough time and seen enough gore, I have become utterly indifferent to even the most graphic sex and violence. Nothing in porn is shocking or weird to me. It’s entertainment, like an action movie.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  I don’t know that the kind of elite young men who attended school with Mateo and Cole—those already firmly on the path to power—are more inclined to objectify women, but they are certainly not less so. Over the course of three months in 2016, for instance, sex scandals broke out among athletic communities at three top-tier colleges. October brought news of a “tradition” among the boys of the Harvard soccer team: a “scouting report” in which they rated new recruits to the freshman girls’ team based on their perceived hotness, assigning each a sexual position in addition to the one she held on the field. “Yeah . . . She wants cock,” a guy wrote about one of his female classmates. Another girl was named “the hottest and the most STD-ridden.” A month later, a campus news site at Columbia University obtained racist, sexist, and homophobic screenshots from a wrestling team group chat. They had referred to the school’s female students as “ugly socially awkward cunts” who feel “entitled” (apparently they didn’t have a full grip on that concept). They claimed that they would “run the town of any state school” where “every girl begs for the cock so hard.” (Guys I met at elite colleges, incidentally, regularly disparaged those at state schools—believing, against all evidence, that their exceptional SAT scores and socioeconomic status precluded harassment and assault rather than merely better insulating them from consequences.) In December, it emerged that members of Amherst’s cross-country team had circulated an email that included photographs of eight girls—referred to as “friends of Amherst XC”—accompanied by their supposed sexual histories and penchants. One girl was termed “a walking STD” and of another, the author wrote, “Everyone needs their meatslab.” The email turned out to be one of a series dating back at least two years that included such comments as “Do Asians really have horizontal vaginas?” and “You know the girls at your high school who aren’t that attractive or personable, so no one talks to them? Picture a college with 900 of them and you have our lovely liberal arts institution.” In the spring of 2019, two fraternities at Swarthmore—one of the nation’s most politically progressive campuses—were forced to “voluntarily” disband after student-run publications released hundreds of pages of “minutes” from their house meetings that included, among other things, discussions of a “rape attic” and the acquiring of roofies; “finger-banging” a member’s ten-year-old sister; racist comments about sexual acts with African American and Asian American women; vomiting on women during sex; and admiration for a brother who was known for “creampies coming at you whether you like it or not” (translation: ejaculating into a woman sans condom regardless of whether she consents).

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  The Internet was only part of the story. Non-Internet-based video games had become big business in the late seventies and early eighties. The personal computer had done for video arcades what the VCR had done for cinema—moved the entertainment from public spaces into people’s homes. The two technologies were not completely parallel, though. Videotape created a massive pornographic film industry. Yet no such analogue sprang up for video games. Games with built-in sex were few and far between: whereas the videotape revolution changed both consumption and production, home video-game consoles changed only the consumption. Producing a video game still required skill, expertise and monetary resources—elements that did not lend themselves to massive amounts of low-cost, low-quality pornography. Sex-based games were rarer than movies, but they certainly existed. In October 1982, a company called Mystique released a title for a popular home gaming console called the Atari 2600. The game was Custer’s Revenge. It was the worst of a number of adult games on the market at the time. The player controlled General George Armstrong Custer, who wore nothing but a hat, boots and a huge erection. Custer had to avoid arrows and other projectiles as he crossed the screen to where a naked Native American woman (named Revenge) waited, tied to a post. The object of the game was to repeatedly rape her. Naturally, this game outraged feminists, Native American groups and anyone who found racist sex fantasies to be an objectionable form of entertainment. Custer’s Revenge also happened to have terrible graphics and gameplay even by 1982 standards. Yet eighty thousand copies were sold. (And that is not including a subsequent and marginally modified re-release under the name Westward Ho, and another variation called General Retreat in which the woman fights a barrage of cannonballs to reach the far side of the screen to have sex with the general.) Mystique’s other adult games, such as Bachelor Party and Beat ’Em and Eat ’Em, also sold in the tens of thousands. For what it’s worth, Custer’s Revenge tops the list of the ten most shameful video games of all time at the industry-watching website GameSpy.com. The technological developments that sprang from Mystique’s short-lived adult video-game venture are equally not worth it. In his book Porn and Pong, Damon Brown recounts the only technological advance engendered by such games. It happened when Mystique collapsed and sold the rights to Custer’s Revenge, as well as other equally charming titles, to a company called Game Source. “Under the moniker Playaround, Game Source re-released Custer’s Revenge, Beat ’Em and Eat ’Em and Bachelor Party … Playaround created what it called the ‘double ender,’ a two-in-one cartridge that sounded like it was a two-headed dildo. Playaround’s long cartridges allowed players to buy two of its games for one low price, a marketing ploy imitated by other companies.”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Soft-core leads to hard, and sometimes hard-core leads to soft. Sometimes I feel a surfeit of desire, a topping out, a longing for release. I’ve felt more with dirty movies and books than arousal. A scene: A woman going down on a man, avidly sucking his cock, the man pulling away and shooting come across her face, the woman licking the come off her lips. When I first saw these images I felt a heady mix of disgust and excitement, and confusion at that mix. Porn mixed things up too much. The more I watched pornography, the more layers peeled off my experience of lust, one layer after the other, because I didn’t always like my own response. When something dark and forbidden emerges, I resist it still. My body is sometimes provoked by what my mind reproves. Desire doesn’t always fog vision and confuse thoughts; there is in desire the power to see a new way; desire has a way of enrapturing and elevating the object of desire. We find desire in us for a person we love, no matter what our preconceptions about our preferences; an instantaneous love might rise from the bed in which we have sex. We love in the moment when we see, clearly, into another’s heart, and that can happen all at once, as truly in a moment of sexual touch as in any other. In my more contented moments I think sexual desire can peel away the artificial constructs we place on each other. The ugliness layered on our bodies and hearts is transcended, overridden, by powerful arousal, until true beauty is revealed. By admitting our physical desire for another, we admit our humanity, and in that admission, open the possibility of psychological love. “When I go to bed at night it is a kind of torture for me. I will not write on this page what fills my mind, the very madness of desire,” James Joyce wrote to his beloved Nora. “I see you in a hundred poses, grotesque, shameful, virginal, languorous.… Be beautiful and happy and loving and provoking, full of memories, full of cravings, when we meet.” A few months later he wrote of his deep love for her, his affection, but, he added, “side by side and inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for every secret and shameful part of it, for every odour and act of it.… It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music.”

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Scum, pick that food up off the ground. You’re going to attract mice and raccoons. You’re such a pig. Look at the mess you’ve made. Disgusting! Pick that up.” Lisa got up from her seat, picked up the bits of vegetable and fruit that Limori had lobbed at her and put them in a napkin in her fist. When she sat back down again, Limori launched into her: “What are you doing? Go to the kitchen and throw that stuff out. We don’t leave rotting food lying around. Get going, Scum!” Lisa rose again off the bench and set off down the slight hill to the lodge and into the kitchen, always keeping her eyes downcast. As always happened in these cases, Limori began to mutter to the rest of us about how dark Lisa’s energy was and how wicked she had become. The rest of us were silent, except perhaps for the occasional murmur of assent from Alice. When Lisa returned to the table, the verbal jabs from Limori continued, as they would for the rest of the few days I was visiting. The following day, after continuing to watch the unrelenting workshop that Lisa was going through, the likes of which I had not witnessed before, I sidled up to Lisa in the kitchen in a rare moment when we were alone and asked her if she was okay. I was concerned because of the elevated ferocity of what I was witnessing, but also because Lisa was the only person who had moved to Wolf’s Den after I had come to know her. All the others who lived there at that time, with the exception of Matthew, were people I had never known in Vancouver; they had moved to Wolf’s Den almost immediately after I joined the meditation circle. I had a closer tie to Lisa; she was real to me. I had babysat her children and had been to her house when she and her husband held social events for some members of the group. I had driven up to Wolf’s Den with her for workshops on more than one occasion and, before she moved up there, considered her to be a friend, even though at times I was jealous of her relationship with Limori. She answered my enquiry by saying, “I just want to get through this. I know it will make me spiritually stronger.” It was not until I was writing this book and putting all the pieces together for myself, trying to explain them in a coherent way, that I realized that Alice’s and Lisa’s zombie-like countenances were exactly what Robert Lifton was referring to when he coined the term thought stopping . Lisa and Alice, and the others closest to Limori, have learned to stop thinking for themselves and are suppressing their thoughts and feelings to such a degree that it’s as if they’re not in their bodies any longer.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  Outline I. The ninth circle, the last in the Inferno, is also a place of punishment for fraud. It is a place not of fire but of damned souls frozen in ice. A. Here are portrayed sinners guilty of fraud, but fraud that is more complex than in the eighth bolgia: These sinners have also betrayed a special trust, such as family, or country, or guests, or lord. B. The ultimate examples are to be found in the three mouths of Satan, the betrayers Judas, Cassius, and Brutus, in the last canto of the Inferno. II. At the end of 32, we begin the story of Ugolino and Ruggieri. A. Ugolino is gnawing on the head of Ruggieri. B. Both are encased in ice up to their necks. C. Both are guilty of the sin of betrayal, even though only one of them will speak. D. The story of Ugolino brings together the political and religious controversies in the city of Pisa in the time of Dante. ©2001 The Teaching Company 35 1. Ugolino was the Guelf Podestà, or city manager. 2. Ruggieri was the Ghibelline archbishop. 3. Together, they plotted to betray Pisa and seize power. III. Ugolino narrates a horrible story of betrayal, counter-betrayal, and treachery in Canto 33. A. Ugolino tells how he was captured and, together with his young children, imprisoned in a tower by Ruggieri. B. He describes their slow death by starvation. C. He suggests that to forestall starvation, he ate his children. 1. This is a controversial line for Dante critics. 2. Evidence for the “cannibalistic” reading can be found in the biblical, classical, and contemporary sources that Dante draws on. D. Cannibalism becomes Dante’s way of talking about absolute evil. 1. It can be seen as an inversion of the Christian Eucharist. 2. It is a “logical” conclusion to the inversions that have characterized the Inferno. 3. In Dante’s vision of hell, the punishment is to get what you want when nothing stands in the way of your evil desires. IV. Canto 34 brings the Inferno to a close by continuing the image of cannibalism as the figure for radical evil, the inversion of the good of self-donation (charity) as embodied in the Eucharist. A. The three heads of Satan are a parody of the Christian trinity. B. Three sinners are found in the three mouths of Satan. C. Judas is in the center. D. Brutus and Cassius are on the sides. E. Dante did not know Plutarch’s life of Caesar (on which Shakespeare’s play is based). F. The two ultimate betrayals are of Christ and of the empire. V. Dante climbs out of the Inferno by going “through” Satan. A. At a certain point, he is no longer going down; he has crossed the center of the earth and is climbing up. B. His last image of hell is of Satan’s legs. Satan is upside down. C. Dante emerges and is once more able to see the stars.

• From Little Women (1868)

  Bhaer caught sight of a picture on the hat, and unfolding it, said with great disgust, "I wish these papers did not come in the house. They are not for children to see, nor young people to read. It is not well, and I haf no patience with those who make this harm." Jo glanced at the sheet and saw a pleasing illustration composed of a lunatic, a corpse, a villain, and a viper. She did not like it, but the impulse that made her turn it over was not one of displeasure but fear, because for a minute she fancied the paper was the Volcano. It was not, however, and her panic subsided as she remembered that even if it had been and one of her own tales in it, there would have been no name to betray her. She had betrayed herself, however, by a look and a blush, for though an absent man, the Professor saw a good deal more than people fancied. He knew that Jo wrote, and had met her down among the newspaper offices more than once, but as she never spoke of it, he asked no questions in spite of a strong desire to see her work. Now it occurred to him that she was doing what she was ashamed to own, and it troubled him. He did not say to himself, "It is none of my business. I've no right to say anything," as many people would have done. He only remembered that she was young and poor, a girl far away from mother's love and father's care, and he was moved to help her with an impulse as quick and natural as that which would prompt him to put out his hand to save a baby from a puddle. All this flashed through his mind in a minute, but not a trace of it appeared in his face, and by the time the paper was turned, and Jo's needle threaded, he was ready to say quite naturally, but very gravely... "Yes, you are right to put it from you. I do not think that good young girls should see such things. They are made pleasant to some, but I would more rather give my boys gunpowder to play with than this bad trash." "All may not be bad, only silly, you know, and if there is a demand for it, I don't see any harm in supplying it. Many very respectable people make an honest living out of what are called sensation stories," said Jo, scratching gathers so energetically that a row of little slits followed her pin. "There is a demand for whisky, but I think you and I do not care to sell it. If the respectable people knew what harm they did, they would not feel that the living was honest. They haf no right to put poison in the sugarplum, and let the small ones eat it.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Then, of course, there is hip-hop, which in 2017 became, for the first time, the most popular music genre in the US and attracts the youngest audience. Like porn, video games, and mainstream media, the category is both broad and deep, encompassing Kendrick Lamar as well as Migos; Dope Saint Jude and Nicki Minaj. Historically a crucible of creative social protest, in its most commercially successful, corporate form, it earns billions annually by distorting black masculinity, exploiting black women’s bodies, and degrading female sexuality. “I think music has some of the biggest impact on how guys treat girls,” a high school senior in the Bay Area told me. “In the car, my friends and I listen to all this stuff that’s just ‘fuck that bitch and then quit her’ over and over. When you hear that, like, five, six, ten times a day, it makes it hard to escape having that mind-set.” Tricia Rose, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, refers to the “gangsta-pimp-ho trinity” whose most devoted fans are typically white, suburban boys who may never have personally known an African American. She has written that although hip-hop didn’t invent sexism, nor is it the first musical style to profit from it, its power, imagination, and fusion of materialism with strip-club culture has made misogyny “sexy, visible and funky. . . . And, frankly, if you want to find openly celebrated sexism against black women, there is no richer contemporary source than commercial, mainstream hip-hop.”

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  As Childerhose grew more familiar with online life, Dibbell’s essay, and the question of what, exactly, constitutes virtual rape, became clearer to her. “I understand the sense of being violated, or one’s avatar being violated … but I don’t think it’s rape as we understand it. It’s more like a violation, like getting spit at in your face, that feeling of disgust you get.” Along with emergent sex, virtual worlds were also a place for emergent social intercourse, emergent community building, emergent politics and even emergent legal and economic systems. But it is impossible to tell the story of the advancement of this medium without telling the story of netsex. Every chronicle, memoir and article about MUDS, contemporaneous and retrospective, gives generous space to cybersex. Sex always seems to emerge, in every form imaginable. Along with the heinousness of virtual rape and the intensity of sexy pillow talk came all kinds of liberating experimentation. Online, people who lived straight lives in the real world tried out homosexuality. They explored what it was like to be in non-monogamous relationships, or to have sex with several partners at once. Men existed as women and vice versa. (People also experimented with genders beyond the male/female dichotomy—both, neither and other.) This was especially valuable to people who lived in smaller cities, towns or rural areas, where they might not have access to the kinds of diverse communities found in a major metropolis. Even urbane sophisticates found freedom online to explore parts of themselves that they would never have dared to in real life. And along the way, they created a demand for the kinds of technologies that now are fundamental to mainstream existence. “Honestly, if it weren’t for that article, it would have taken me a lot longer to get online,” Childerhose said. “I certainly wouldn’t have bought a faster computer and modem. Because I didn’t really need it for email, but I needed it for that environment.” In some ways, this is the most difficult aspect of the relationship between sex and technology for many people to accept, especially in our modern age where so much pornography is expressly marketed as nasty, dirty and perverted. Equally incomprehensible to some is the idea that filtering sexuality through a machine can actually increase intimacy and allow people to make emotional, sensual and sexual connections that sometimes exceed, enhance or even take the place of real-life interactions. These kinds of connections are sometimes dismissed as a sort of consolation prize for computer savants who can speak binary but who can’t speak the language of love (or if they can, still can’t find anyone willing to share in the conversation). Suppose this were an accurate picture of who engages in netsex and why. Does that make the participants pathetic? Childerhose, who made no secret of her fulfilling sex life on- and off-line, doesn’t think so.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  I remember also, that when I had settled to enter the lists for a theatrical prize, some wizard asked me what I would give him to win; but I, detesting and abhorring such foul mysteries, answered, “Though the garland were of imperishable gold, I would not suffer a fly to be killed to gain me it. “ For he was to kill some living creatures in his sacrifices, and by those honours to invite the devils to favour me. But this ill also I rejected, not out of a pure love for Thee, O God of my heart; for I knew not how to love Thee, who knew not how to conceive aught beyond a material brightness. And doth not a soul, sighing after such fictions, commit fornication against Thee, trust in things unreal, and feed the wind? Still I would not forsooth have sacrifices offered to devils for me, to whom I was sacrificing myself by that superstition. For what else is it to feed the wind, but to feed them, that is by going astray to become their pleasure and derision? Those impostors then, whom they style Mathematicians, I consulted without scruple; because they seemed to use no sacrifice, nor to pray to any spirit for their divinations: which art, however, Christian and true piety consistently rejects and condemns. For, it is a good thing to confess unto Thee, and to say, Have mercy upon me, heal my soul, for I have sinned against Thee; and not to abuse Thy mercy for a licence to sin, but to remember the Lord’s words, Behold, thou art made whole, sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. All which wholesome advice they labour to destroy, saying, “The cause of thy sin is inevitably determined in heaven”; and “This did Venus, or Saturn, or Mars”: that man, forsooth, flesh and blood, and proud corruption, might be blameless; while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and the stars is to bear the blame. And who is He but our God? the very sweetness and well-spring of righteousness, who renderest to every man according to his works: and a broken and contrite heart wilt Thou not despise.

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

  Divorce is said to have been almost unknown in the ancient days of the Roman republic, and the marriage tie was regarded as indissoluble. A senator was censured for kissing his wife in the presence of their daughter. But the merit of this virtue is greatly diminished if we remember that the husband always had an easy outlet for his sensual passions in the intercourse with slaves and concubines. Nor did it outlast the republic. After the Punic war the increase of wealth and luxury, and the influx of Greek and Oriental licentiousness swept away the stern old Roman virtues. The customary civil and religious rites of marriage were gradually disused; the open community of life between persons of similar rank was taken as sufficient evidence of their nuptials; and marriage, after Augustus, fell to the level of any partnership, which might be dissolved by the abdication of one of the associates. "Passion, interest, or caprice," says Gibbon on the imperial age, "suggested daily, motives for the dissolution of marriage; a word, a sign, a message, a letter, the mandate of a freedman, declared the separation; the most tender of human connections was degraded to a transient society of profit or pleasure."638 Various remedies were tardily adopted as the evil spread, but they proved inefficient, until the spirit of Christianity gained the control of public opinion and improved the Roman legislation, which, however, continued for a long time to fluctuate between the custom of heathenism and the wishes of the church. Another radical evil of heathen family life, which the church had to encounter throughout the whole extent of the Roman Empire, was the absolute tyrannical authority of the parent over the children, extending even to the power of life and death, and placing the adult son of a Roman citizen on a level with the movable things and slaves, "whom the capricious master might alienate or destroy, without being responsible to any earthly tribunal."

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  The woman and the man in the promos for the RealTouch have the kind of polished perkiness one associates with late-night ads for stain removers and egg slicers. Their product costs a little more than the usual easy payment of $19.95. The RealTouch mechanical vagina/anus—which comes with a USB cable and a list of minimum system requirements—goes for $200 U.S. Then again, according to the pitch, it will “revolutionize the way you think about sex.” There follows a lengthy explanation of how to connect the RealTouch to the Desktop Electronics Unit, which connects both to the power outlet and to a computer; how to register online; and where to access the video-on-demand library to download adult films with haptic coding. “RealTouch does all the rest!” About the size of a football and with a slight hourglass shape, the RealTouch is “perfectly weighted for hands-free enjoyment!” Three servomotors, two heaters, moveable bands of a “supple, skin-like material called Versaflex!,” a high-tech orifice and a “lube reservoir” round out the mechanical aspects of this piece of simulation technology. The hardware is only the beginning, though. The real sophistication lies in the software, which automatically captures on-screen motion in a pornographic video and replicates it in the device. The makers of the RealTouch have a growing library of encoded films, allowing the consumer to feel what he sees. The makers are already working on an upgrade that will capture real-time motion for use with haptic webcam services. This is a technology that many people may find repellent (particularly if they watch the instructional video on how to clean the RealTouch, which shows the device being rinsed out in a kitchen sink). Yet the business model is shrewd, building in a high level of customer loyalty: when a buyer acquires a RealTouch, he is committed to getting his value-added pornography from the same source. Haptic technology will not likely be ready for the mainstream for some time. (At least not in any way more sophisticated or intimate than a game controller vibrating when your car crashes into a mountain.) Teledildonics, though, is already providing the proving ground that will demonstrate whether such technology is commercially viable. Which makes it all the odder that in 2009, when Wired magazine convened a team of futurists to peer into their crystal brains and speculate about the next forty years, they did not foresee the advent of teledildonics until 2018. This came as news to engineer Kyle Machulis, who has been creating teledildonic technologies for years. For Machulis and his ilk, teledildonics is an established technology that has already passed through several generations of refinements and added functionality. His cluster of blogs is a kind of clearing house and focal point for a scattered community of experimenters and inventors tinkering with haptic interfaces for sexual Internet-based communication—the exact kind of maverick community from which one might expect to see the next technological leap forward.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  In Flesh in the Ring, a 1960-era Mexican pulp novel, the hero sees a woman wrestler naked for the first time: “The erect clitoris poked from the thick lips like a miniature penis. The hard, long clitoris of the lesbian.” This is old but enduring territory, this land of the demanding, hungry clitoris versus the receptive, accommodating vagina. A clitoral urge was thought to lead directly to lesbianism—to clitorally centered sex. Excision of the clitoris is an old cure for the evil, recommended by the Catholic Church not that long ago. Thomas Laquer, a historian, says the clitoral orgasm was always understood and widely accepted without question until the 1800s, when first William Acton and then Freud came along. Almost every woman finds it far easier to have an orgasm from clitoral stimulation than with penetration—the elusive G-spot notwithstanding. Whether or not a woman had an orgasm wasn’t that important an issue, really; she simply had to be willing to give up the easy route to one. Freud believed mature women moved in their sexuality from the clitoral focus of the little girl rubbing herself to sleep into the vaginal desire for penetration—because penetrate vaginas is what penises, in their turn, are supposed to do. In order to “qualify” as a heterosexual, a woman had to prefer intercourse to any other sexual touch. To be “clitoral” was to be arrested in one’s development—immature, undone, oppositional. To be clitoral was to be disobedient—a spoiled girl wanting another slice of cake. There have always been arguments over whether or not the clitoris is the “female penis,” partly because women have always been depicted as miniature and unfinished versions of men. But no maker of culture ever wanted the clitoris to have independence, metaphorical or otherwise. The clitoris is, like the penis, frequently viewed but rarely seen. Sex-education material proposed for the public schools by members of the Christian Right omit any mention of it all; the anatomical drawings of genitalia in the curriculum leave the clitoris out. I didn’t have a name for it until I started reading dirty books, and looking at paintings by Betty Dodson. My mother never mentioned it, that’s for sure. Like everyone else, I’ve always been alternately fascinated and repelled by the possibility of my parents’ sexual relations, a fascination that changed but didn’t go away when I became sexually active myself. (As a parent, I find myself wondering what happens to a child who hears on the edge of sleep his mother cry out in orgasm.) When my mother and father married, right after World War II, marriage manuals were filled with advice, with the labyrinthine constructions of sexual hygiene for a prosperous generation. They are most remarkable on the subject of the clitoris and the elaborate machinations required to accomplish the officially approved good of orgasm without succumbing to such temptations as the unnamed evil of oral sex.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  My negative reactions to pornography are like my reactions to many things in my world—to fast food and the people who sell it, to cheap trinkets, poorly made toys, and multimillion-dollar children’s films filled with sadistic violence. With porn, there are days when I experience a kind of ennui, a nausea from all that grunting labor, the rankness of the flesh. Sex smothers me sometimes. But I can feel saturated and weary about many things in my life. That reaction is as much a product of who I am as of what I am seeing. Improving pornography for me doesn’t mean refining the hard-core images into a blurry soft focus. Those movies—and there are plenty of them, romantic as can be—are too hygienic for me. They’re not dirty enough. Any amateur psychologist could have a field day explaining why I prefer low-brow, hard-core porn to feminine erotica. I’ve spent enough time trying to explain things to myself: why I prefer this to that. I don’t want anyone else to try. Pornography has to be politically incorrect. If it’s not outside acceptable conventions of family and culture, it’s not porn. Feminists against pornography (as distinct from other antipornography camps) hold the opposite view—that our entire culture is pornographic. To them, pornography is convention, and all our sexual constructions are obscene; sexual materials are necessarily oppressive, limited by the constraints of the culture. Under this construct, I’m a damaged woman, a heretic. Catharine MacKinnon calls women like me “Uncle Toms”; according to Andrea Dworkin and John Stoltenberg, anticensorship feminists are no better than pimps. There is so much wrong with traditional pornography. It just plain disgusts me sometimes, with its juvenile assumptions, boring repetition, lack of depth. But as much as what is wrong with porn, I see what is right: In porn, sex is separated magically from reproduction, marriage, and the heterosexual couple, all of which most feminists would agree have been oppressive to women. In porn, people have many and many different kinds of orgasms, and intercourse is only a part of sex, sometimes a small part. That alone, sex which doesn’t focus on intercourse, is a very important image. Sex in porn is had by people of varying ages and appearances. Porn treats taboos openly and often humorously, emphasizes foreplay and a broad view of what is erotic. If you don’t think this is true, you haven’t seen much porn; these, as much as the come shot, are its icons. And getting rid of the come shot is easy—until more movies are made without it, that’s what the fast-forward button is for. Women like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin have allied themselves with a political camp that is also against reproductive choice, gay rights, and gender equality. Dworkin’s lurid antisex prose reads like arty dime-store pulp to me. She looks down on me and shakes her finger: Bad girl. Mustn’t touch. I’ve heard those words too many times before.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Resentment of menstrual power meant punishment for menstruation. Menstrual blood is considered a kind of witchcraft, and thus quite dangerous, in many cultures—impure, unclean, diseased. Even the supposedly rational mind of western man often finds it hard to grapple with the touch of blood on his penis or hand. New mothers are still frequently isolated after birth, soiled by their fearsome power to make people come out of themselves, by the fact that after the birth, she still continues to bleed. The concept of original sin teaches us that because each baby has to pass out of an impure woman’s body, the very soul is injured in the passage; only baptism can wash the filth of blood away. A few years ago there was a tampon commercial on television in Denmark. A young girl is shown swimming in the ocean, when the water around her turns red. The theme from Jaws plays, and voilà, she’s dinner. Meanwhile another girl, wearing the brand-name tampon, swims by the shark without a glance. Humans are either the only mammal with no visible estrus—no physical signs of fertility—or the only animal to have lost its ability to distinguish it. Individuals can; I know women who find their libido waxing and waning regularly throughout their menstrual cycle; I often feel the painful pinprick of mittelschmerz and know I’ve just ovulated. Both men and women probably respond on a subconscious level to the change in scent and texture of the woman’s vaginal mucus. But the race can no longer tell. Sexual desire has peaks and valleys, some of which are tied to hormone production and monthly cycles, but in daily life sexuality is almost wholly divorced from fertility. The biologist Lynn Margulis believes there were clear advantages for primitive women both in being able to disguise estrus and being able to show a mock estrus. In the first case, if the male doesn’t know when the female is fertile, he has to stick around. He can’t fight for her favors constantly, and he can’t be certain of his parenthood. So he mates frequently and fights less. In the second case, an already pregnant female who can show mock estrus when a new male enters the scene can convince him the new baby is his, to protect rather than kill. Evolution gave human women smooth, nearly hairless skin, swollen breasts and buttocks, and hidden estrus together. Humans look fertile and enticing around the calendar; pregnant women sometimes bleed lightly for a few months after conception. Everything about fertility is camouflaged now. It’s possible to make a case, and several people have, that hidden estrus and constant sexuality are the basis of community, tribe, family, and home. Men had to protect and care for all the females all the time, and cooperation and a settled life made this easier. “All humans alive on Earth today may well have come from the trick loins of females who concealed estrus,” writes Margulis.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  God sent angels to fetch her. But Lilith had already found a crowd of “lascivious demons” with which to copulate and was busy having baby demons. Not only did she not want to return, she pointed out shamelessly that she wasn’t really wife material anymore. Lilith eventually became the queen of demons in Jewish literature, a seductress, succubus, and stealer of babies. She is mother, whore, creator, terror, and sometimes comfort. But she is never wife. “God tried again, and let him watch while he built up a woman’s anatomy: using bones, tissues, muscles, blood and glandular secretions, then covering the whole with skin and adding tufts of hair in places. The sight caused Adam such disgust that … he felt an invincible repugnance.” This woman, sometimes called First Eve, disappeared, no one knows where. Second Eve was made much more hygienically from Adam’s rib, or maybe his now-missing tail. God worked while Adam slept, to spare him the sight. Out of Adam came his femininity, and he was halved and mated all at once. When Eve met the sinewy, penile snake and first tasted the forbidden apple, writes Milton in Paradise Lost, “Earth felt the wound.” She herself felt euphoria, felt for the first time the little death of orgasm. Adam loved her enough that he chose to eat and die with her rather than live forever alone. And yet he calls her “adventrous Eve,” the first of the long line of adventuresses who will ruin men down the ages. “The myth of the Fall licenses man to blame woman for all his ills,” writes Graves and Patai. Certainly Milton saw it that way. After Adam eats, they see each other with new eyes, sexual eyes—eyes of “Fire”—and they make love, thus sealing the guilt. Adam asks Eve to help him figure out how to clothe themselves. Already, she’s sewing. Confronted by God, Eve blames Adam for not being man enough to have restrained her from sin. Adam in turn blames Eve, complaining to God, in essence, You said she was perfect, and look what she did! And God replies, what kind of man are you to listen to a woman?

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Over the eons, our fashions have emphasized and even exaggerated these traits. Men like large breasts because they are signifiers of the ability to reproduce and nourish, to mother the race; they are signifiers, too, of sexual readiness; like so much in arousal, breasts are swellings. The hapless man who goes ga-ga over a young woman in a tight skirt and high heels, a woman whose buttocks protrude with a slight tilt as she walks waveringly down the street, is a man whose old ape mind has taken over. The male body is always ready and the female body constantly signals. We both are and are not still driven by instinct, by the dual nature of sex, by the life of the cave. Don’t ask me why that same teetering, long-legged woman can make me feel a little ga-ga, too, because I don’t know. I think of the double-edged flattery of naming oceans, rivers, and lakes for women when I hear a woman referred to as a “fish.” We smell of the brackish swamp, the wetlands at the edge of the amphibian and mammal worlds; we smell of history. The woman a gay man marries in order to appear straight is a “fishwife.” A 1940s marriage manual devotes considerable attention to the problem of feminine hygiene. Women are cursed with the incurable problem of vaginal secretions, and constant vigilance is required: “If they are allowed to adhere to the vulva for any length of time they become gummy and smelly, like sour cream, and their odour clings to anything that touches it, so tenaciously that washing with ordinary toilet soap and warm water will not remove it; hands must be scrubbed vigorously and linen boiled in order to get rid of it.”