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 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  [image file=image_rsrc2W2.jpg] THE ALTGELD GARDENS PUBLIC housing project sat at Chicago’s southernmost edge: two thousand apartments arranged in a series of two-story brick buildings with army-green doors and grimy mock shutters. Everybody in the area referred to Altgeld as “the Gardens” for short, although it wasn’t until later that I considered the irony of the name, its evocation of something fresh and well tended—a sanctified earth. True, there was a grove of trees just south of the project, and running south and west of that was the Calumet River, where you could sometimes see men flick fishing lines lazily into darkening waters. But the fish that swam those waters were often strangely discolored, with cataract eyes and lumps behind their gills. People ate their catch only if they had to. To the east, on the other side of the expressway, was the Lake Calumet landfill, the largest in the Midwest. And to the north, directly across the street, was the Metropolitan Sanitary District’s sewage treatment plant. The people of Altgeld couldn’t see the plant or the open-air vats that went on for close to a mile; as part of a recent beautification effort, the district maintained a long wall of earth in front of the facility, dotted with hastily planted saplings that refused to grow month after month, like hairs swept across a bald man’s head. But officials could do nothing to hide the smell—a heavy, putrid odor that varied in strength depending on the temperature and the wind’s direction, and seeped through windows no matter how tightly they were shut. The stench, the toxins, the empty, uninhabited landscape. For close to a century, the few square miles surrounding Altgeld had taken in the offal of scores of factories, the price people had paid for their high-wage jobs. Now that the jobs were gone, and those people that could had already left, it seemed only natural to use the land as a dump. A dump—and a place to house poor blacks. Altgeld may have been unique in its physical isolation, but it shared with the city’s other projects a common history: the dreams of reformers to build decent housing for the poor; the politics that had concentrated such housing away from white neighborhoods, and prevented working families from living there; the use of the Chicago Housing Authority—the CHA—as a patronage trough; the subsequent mismanagement and neglect. It wasn’t as bad as Chicago’s high-rise projects yet, the Robert Taylors and Cabrini Greens, with their ink-black stairwells and urine-stained lobbies and random shootings. Altgeld’s occupancy rate held steady at ninety percent, and if you went inside the apartments, you would more often than not find them well-kept, with small touches—a patterned cloth thrown over torn upholstery, an old calendar left hanging on the wall for its tropical beach scenes—that expressed the lingering idea of home.

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

  The secularization of the church appeared most strikingly in the prevalence of mammon worship and luxury compared with the poverty and simplicity of the primitive Christians. The aristocracy of the later empire had a morbid passion for outward display and the sensual enjoyments of wealth, without the taste, the politeness, or the culture of true civilization. The gentlemen measured their fortune by the number of their marble palaces, baths, slaves, and gilded carriages; the ladies indulged in raiment of silk and gold ornamented with secular or religious figures, and in heavy golden necklaces, bracelets, and rings, and went to church in the same flaunting dress as to the theatre.224 Chrysostom addresses a patrician of Antioch: "You count so and so many acres of land, ten or twenty palaces, as many baths, a thousand or two thousand slaves, carriages plated with silver and gold."225 Gregory Nazianzen, who presided for a time in the second ecumenical council of Constantinople in 381, gives us the following picture, evidently rhetorically colored, yet drawn from life, of the luxury of the degenerate civilization of that period: "We repose in splendor on high and sumptuous cushions, upon the most exquisite covers, which one is almost afraid to touch, and are vexed if we but hear the voice of a moaning pauper; our chamber must breathe the odor of flowers, even rare flowers; our table must flow with the most fragrant and costly ointment, so that we become perfectly effeminate. Slaves must stand ready, richly adorned and in order, with waving, maidenlike hair, and faces shorn perfectly smooth, more adorned throughout than is good for lascivious eyes; some, to hold cups both delicately and firmly with the tips of their fingers, others, to fan fresh air upon the head. Our table must bend under the load of dishes, while all the kingdoms of nature, air, water and earth, furnish copious contributions, and there must be almost no room for the artificial products of cook and baker .... The poor man is content with water; but we fill our goblets with wine to drunkenness, nay, immeasurably beyond it. We refuse one wine, another we pronounce excellent when well flavored, over a third we institute philosophical discussions; nay, we count it a pity, if he does not, as a king, add to the domestic wine a foreign also."226 Still more unfavorable are the pictures which, a half century later, the Gallic presbyter, Salvianus, draws of the general moral condition of the Christians in the Roman empire.227

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Instead of helping him remember, the aicao bath gave him diarrhea. We reached into the toilet with a pair of barbecue tongs, picking out fragments of bullets from his shit so that they wouldn’t bruise our pipes. My mother gave him vitamins that made his nipples shrivel and slough their black velvet. Sometimes the vitamins gave him earaches too, and for relief my mother plugged his ears with ice cubes. He’s crying out of his ears, I said, drying the sides of his neck. In the morning before school, I heard my mother in the kitchen, grinding pills with her wooden bowl and pestle. I looked into the bowl and the powder inside was dust-fine, the air choking on chalk. She was sweating, arms flexing as she crushed the shards to sand. I asked her if she’d found a new vitamin to try, and my mother answered by grinding harder, the bowl buzzing in her hands. While she bobbed the pestle up and down, I told Agong the story of the Monkey King, plucking out a strand of his ash-colored hair to demonstrate how the monkey had multiplied himself, each strand growing into a soldier. My mother overheard me and said I shouldn’t give him ideas. So I told him the other monkey myth, the one about my mother’s cousin. The cousin’s boyfriend gave her a monkey when she turned nineteen. He brought it to her in a bamboo cage with a rope bow-tied around it. My mother’s cousin said, I fuck this boy and he gives me a monkey? I’d rather he’d given me syphilis. She gave the monkey away to a neighbor, who tied it in his tree and put a little bell around its neck. The neighborhood boys liked to come around and throw stones at it, pull it down out of the tree and kick it down the street. The monkey turned mean, peeing on your head or ejaculating onto your shoulders, yanking on your hair like a leash when you walked under its tree. It got so mean it jumped down on my mother one time, tried to skin her skull like a tangerine. Parting her hair with her fingers, my mother showed me a bald spot the size of a quarter where the monkey had hooked its claw. Then one month, the monkey disappeared and Ama grew wounds all down her arms and cheeks, her chin skinned so bad that the flute of her jawbone was exposed. Ama freed the monkey? I asked, and my mother said, That’s not the end of the story. The monkey turned up drowned in the river, all battered up, its bones crushed into ellipses. Once an animal gets mean, Ama liked to say, there’s no way to make it good again. You kill what can’t be saved. All of her murders began as mercies.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Perhaps they were acting out the moves they’d seen in pornography. My first job was working at a bookstore, stocking magazines. I learned early to emulate the “naughty” magazines: No matter how I actually felt, I opened my mouth in a wet “O,” furrowed my brow like I was confused, like I could not possibly understand how good it was to be so handled. My job was to just please him/him/him/and him with my existence. The years passed, and I learned how to slap away groping hands and feel how I wanted to be touched, and I learned that I liked a spectrum of genders. There were moments of nipple pleasure with lovers here and there—most of these passed so quickly as to seem an accident. I learned through private explorations of my own body. But that learning took a long time. The general behaviors I witnessed were to ignore and disrespect the power of my nipples. And I learned that nipples get ignored or disrespected in a number of ways. Nipples on those perceived as women cause much kerfuffle on social media and can get us banned or suspended. Nipples shock and awe people when used to breastfeed babies in public. Nipples, and breasts altogether, get handled more often than held, stimulated, pleasured. When they do get touched it’s often a brief cosmetic fiddling on the way to the S.E.X. It amazes me how often I meet people of all genders who don’t understand or feel they can access the potential pleasure of our nipples. Some say they can’t really feel anything there. Some say it emasculates them to feel anything there. I know that nipples work differently for everyone and that some people may not really feel much there. But I suspect that most of us could benefit from more concentrated attention on our nipples. According to a 2011 Journal of Sexual Medicine study, the “sensation from the nipples travels to the same part of the brain as sensations from the vagina, clitoris and cervix.”10 Nipple stimulation “releases the hormone oxytocin,” aka the happy juice. I suspect our ignoring of (or under-attending to) these pleasure points is rooted in a patriarchal rejection of anything associated with women’s bodies. There are a variety of laws that ban the baring of the breast, often with the explanation that the breasts are too sexual for men to witness. We live at the intersection of Hooters and Janet Jackson boob shaming. At the historical intersection of Playboy bunnies and bra burning. Women showing their bodies from the waist up have to fight. Sex becomes a private practice ground for that fight. So much of sex culture is still set by straight cis men and the pornography of pounding into cis and trans women’s mouths and pussies, often in whatever is the most degrading way possible.

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

  But on the other hand, monasticism withdrew from society many useful forces; diffused an indifference for the family life, the civil and military service of the state, and all public practical operations; turned the channels of religion from the world into the desert, and so hastened the decline of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the whole Roman empire. It nourished religious fanaticism, often raised storms of popular agitation, and rushed passionately into the controversies of theological parties; generally, it is true, on the side of orthodoxy, but often, as at the Ephesian "council of robbers," in favor of heresy, and especially in behalf of the crudest superstition. For the simple, divine way of salvation in the gospel, it substituted an arbitrary, eccentric, ostentatious, and pretentious sanctity. It darkened the all-sufficient merits of Christ by the glitter of the over-meritorious works of man. It measured virtue by the quantity of outward exercises instead of the quality of the inward disposition, and disseminated self-righteousness and an anxious, legal, and mechanical religion. It favored the idolatrous veneration of Mary and of saints, the worship of images and relics, and all sorts of superstitious and pious fraud. It circulated a mass of visions and miracles, which, if true, far surpassed the miracles of Christ and the apostles and set all the laws of nature and reason at defiance. The Nicene age is full of the most absurd monks’ fables, and is in this respect not a whit behind the darkest of the middle ages.306 Monasticism lowered the standard of general morality in proportion as it set itself above it and claimed a corresponding higher merit; and it exerted in general a demoralizing influence on the people, who came to consider themselves the profanum vulgus mundi, and to live accordingly. Hence the frequent lamentations, not only of Salvian, but of Chrysostom and of Augustine, over the indifference and laxness of the Christianity of the day; hence to this day the mournful state of things in the southern countries of Europe and America, where monasticism is most prevalent, and sets the extreme of ascetic sanctity in contrast with the profane laity, but where there exists no healthful middle class of morality, no blooming family life, no moral vigor in the masses. In the sixteenth century the monks were the bitterest enemies of the Reformation and of all true progress. And yet the greatest of the reformers was a pupil of the convent, and a child of the monastic system, as the boldest and most free of the apostles had been the strictest of the Pharisees. § 35. Paul of Thebes and St. Anthony. I. Athanasius: Vita S. Antonii (in Greek, Opera, ed. Ben. ii. 793–866). The same in Latin, by Evagrius, in the fourth century. Jerome: Catal. c. 88 (a very brief notice of Anthony); Vita S. Pauli Theb. (Opera, ed. Vallars, ii. p. 1–12). Sozom: H. E. l. i. cap. 13 and 14. Socrat.: H. E. iv. 23, 25.

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

  Imprisonment for life was ordered by Gregory IX., 1229, for all induced to return to the faith through fear of punishment.1144 The prisons in France were composed of small cells. The expenditures for their erection and enlargement were shared by the bishop and the Inquisitors. French synods spoke of the number sentenced to life-imprisonment as so great that hardly stones enough could be found for the prison buildings.1145 The secular authorities destroyed the heretic’s domicile, confiscated his goods,1146 and pronounced the death penalty. The rules for the division of confiscated property differed in different localities. In Venice, after prolonged negotiations with the pope, it was decided that they should pass to the state.1147 In the rest of Italy they became, in equal parts, the property of the state, the Inquisition, and the curia; and in Southern France, of the state, the Inquisitors, and the bishop. Provision was made for the expenses of the Inquisition out of the spoils of confiscated property. The temptation to plunder became a fruitful ground for spying out alleged heretics. Once accused, they were all but helpless. Synods encouraged arrests by offering a fixed reward to diligent spies. Not satisfied with seeing the death penalty executed upon the living, the Inquisition made war upon the dead, and exhumed the bodies of those found to have died in heresy and burned them.1148 This relentless barbarity reminds us of the words, perhaps improperly ascribed to Charles V. who, standing at Luther’s grave, is reported to have refused to touch the Reformer’s bones, saying, "I war with the living, not with the dead." The council of Verona, 1184, ordered relapsed heretics to be turned over forthwith to the secular authorities.1149 In the period before 1480 the Inquisition claimed most of its victims in Southern France. Douais has given us a list of seventeen Inquisitors-general who served from 1229 to 1329.1150 The sentences pronounced by Bernard de Caux, called the Hammer of the Heretics, 1244–1248 give the names of hundreds who were adjudged to the loss of goods or perpetual imprisonment, or both.1151 During the administration of Bernard Guy, as inquisitor of Toulouse, 1306–1323, forty-two persons were burnt to death, sixty-nine bodies were exhumed and burnt, three hundred and seven were imprisoned, and one hundred and forty-three were condemned to wear crosses.1152 A single instance may suffice of a day’s doings by the Inquisition. On May 12, 1234, six young men, twelve men, and eleven women were burnt at Toulouse. In the other parts of France, the Inquisition was not so vigorously prosecuted. It included, as we have seen, the order of the Templars. In 1253 the Dominican provincial of Paris was made the supreme Inquisitor. Among the more grim Inquisitors of France was the Dominican Robert le Petit, known as Le Bougre from his having been a Patarene.1153 Gregory IX. appointed him inquisitor-general, 1233, and declared God had "given him such special grace

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Friendly natives could be absorbed into the colony, but the Utopians felt no qualms about fighting those who resisted them: “The Utopians say that it is perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle or waste yet forbid the use and possession of it to others who, by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it.” 16 There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought. 17 The so-called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. From the outset, however, the philosophy of human rights, still crucial to our modern political discourse, did not apply to all human beings. Because Europe was frequently afflicted by famine and seemed unable to support its growing population, humanists like Thomas More were scandalized by the idea of arable land going to waste. They looked back to Tacitus, an apologist for Roman imperialism, who had been convinced that exiles had every right to secure a place to live, since “what is possessed by none belongs to everyone.” Commenting on this passage, Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), professor of civil law at Oxford, concluded that because “God did not create the world to be empty,” the “the seizure of vacant places” should be “regarded as a law of nature”: And even though such lands belong to the sovereign of that territory ... yet because of that law of nature which abhors a vacuum, they will fall to the lot of those who take them, though the sovereign will retain jurisdiction over them. 18 Gentili also quoted Aristotle’s opinion that some men were natural slaves and that waging war against primitive peoples “who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit,” was as necessary as hunting wild animals. 19 Gentili argued that the Mesoamericans clearly fell into this category because of their abominable lewdness and cannibalism. Where churchmen frequently condemned the violent subjugation of the New World, the Renaissance humanists who were trying to create an alternative to the cruelties committed by people of faith endorsed it. Spain had, however, embarked on a policy that would come to epitomize the fanatical violence inherent in religion. In 1480, with the Ottoman threat at its height, Ferdinand and Isabella had established the Spanish Inquisition.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When our mother found out, she whipped us with a wet sock and asked us to show her the spot, watching us dig them back up. Untrimmed for a week, the toenails had grown six inches long, enamel swords with worms pierced alive on them. She returned the toes to the cookie tin, neutered their nails with a file, and taped the tin shut, saying she would need them later. When I asked her what she needed them for, she said all losses have lifetimes, always longer than we think, and her toes would someday find another source of blood, a new mouth to metabolize them. DAUGHTER Hu Gu Po (III) My mother was ready for work before the sky chose a color to dress in. Her latest job was at the foot spa, where the blacked-out windows were clotted with dust and the sign outside said: THE TREE DIES FROM THE ROOT—THE HUMAN AGES FROM THE FOOT!!!!! I hate feet, she said, buttoning her polo shirt with the logo of a footprint. They look like skinned fish, dead in my hands. I just want to fillet them open and pick out their bones. When I oil a foot, I pretend I’m preparing to fry it alive. She practiced her massages on me, submerging me to the ankles in a bucket of tap water, grating at my callused feet. She said every region of the sole corresponded with an organ inside my body: My head was the big toe, my lungs were my bunions, and my heart was in my heel, so I should watch what I stepped on. Today the hole in my back birthed a sapling: stiff as my brother’s morning wood, a kind of kindling. It was a tail, orange with black bangles, fur tangling in a syrup too thick to be blood and too thin to tar. It tasted of smoke. The tail was the length and width of my forearm, but it ached at the core, the way my bones did when they were outgrowing me and nearly breached skin. It was growing, pulsing like a gone-bad tooth. On the mattress we shared, my brother turned around and saw me wringing my tail like a neck, trying to strangle it with both fists. He laughed so hard his last baby tooth flew out and shot down the ceiling fan. Telling me to stand up, my brother looked at the back of my pants, saying no one would really notice my tail unless they were looking for it, and no one would look at my flat ass even if it was on fire.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "The whores had unbuttoned all the young men's trousers, some were handling their organs, caressing their testicles or licking their backsides; one was kneeling before a young student and greedily sucking his huge and fleshy phallus, another girl was sitting a-straddle on a young man's knees, springing up and coming down again as if she had been in a baby-jumper—evidently running a Paphian race, and (perhaps there were not enough prostitutes, or it was done for the fun of the thing) one woman was being had by two men at the same time, one in front, the other behind. There were also other enormities, but I had not time enough to see everything. "Moreover, many of the young men who were already tipsy when they came here, having drunk champagne, absinthe and beer, began now to feel squeamish, to be quite sick, to hiccough, and finally to throw up. "In the midst of this nauseous scene, the consumptive whore went off into a fit of hysterics, crying and sobbing at the same time, whilst the fat one who was now thoroughly excited, would not allow her to lift up her head; and having got her nose where the tongue had hitherto been, she was rubbing herself against it with all her might, screaming: "'Lick on, lick stronger, don't take away your tongue now that I am about to enjoy it; there, I am finishing, lick on, suck me, bite me.' "But the poor cadaverous wretch in the paroxysm of her delirium had managed to slip away her head. "'Regarde donc quel con,' said Biou, pointing to that mass of quivering flesh amidst the black and froth-covered viscid hair. 'I shall just get my knee into it, and rub her soundly. Now, you'll see!' "He pulled off his trousers, and was about to suit the action to the words, when a slight cough was heard. It was at once followed by a piercing cry; and before we could understand what was the matter, the body of the tough old prostitute was bathed in blood. The cadaverous wretch had in a fit of lubricity broken a blood vessel, and was dying—dying—dead! "'Ah! la sale bougre!' said the ghoul-like woman with the bloodless face. 'It's all over with the slut now, and she owes me …' "I do not remember the sum she mentioned. In the meanwhile, however, the cantinière continued to writhe in her senseless and ungovernable rage, twisting and distorting herself; but at last, feeling the warm blood flow in her womb, and bathe her inflamed parts, she began to pant, to scream, and to leap with delight, for the ejaculation was at length taking place. "Thus it happened that the death-rattle of the one mixed itself up with the panting and gurgling of the other. "In that confusion I slipped away, cured for ever of the temptation of again visiting such a house of nightly entertainment." CHAPTER IV"LET us now go back to our story."

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  I turned from the sick man and entered the invisible cloud of odors that floated around Mother at that time: Shalimar and tobacco and peppermint Life Savers. For some reason, I recall it drifting just above my head, which moved at the level of her hipbone, so I could crane my head up and breathe deeply and draw some of her down into my lungs. She wore a long army-green silk dress and a brown alligator belt from Chanel. She had a long stride and led with her thigh like a fashion model. Her high heels hardly made any noise the way she set her foot down in them. Her head seemed far away from me. Her hair was short and thick and brushed straight back from her face and looked from my height like a lion’s mane. She pushed open some double doors. You could hear somebody crying please please please but in a whispery voice. We passed the room of a surprisingly young woman whose black hair was woven into a big tower. She lay back on a La-Z-Boy recliner, holding a red rubber enema bottle pressed against her jaw, and you could hear organ music from a radio ball game as you walked by. Then we were at Grandma’s room, easing a big silent door open. The really shocking thing about an amputation is how crude it looks. Really, you would think that they could tidy it up, and maybe by now they have. Anybody who has ever had to dismantle a deer with a hunting knife or even fried up a chicken or a rabbit knows how brutal it feels to hack through bone and cartilage. I guess in the operating room at that time they used a small circular saw, but it all amounts to the same thing. Somehow I had expected Grandma’s lopped-off leg to seem more like a doll’s, bloodless and neat. Maybe I expected a bandage on it. They had taken the leg off above the knee, and Grandma’s remaining thigh was propped on a hospital pillow. It looked very interrupted. There were still streaks of black running from the stump end up her thigh in what looked like narrowing rivers. Whether these were from the gas burns or the subsequent blood poisoning, I don’t know. You could see how they’d tried to save enough flesh from the thigh to fold it over the cut bone. Somebody had tried to stitch it all down neatly so it might look as if it had grown that way. But you could tell from the stitching that the edges were randomly folded over in the ragged way you might try to close up a pork roast you were stuffing. The stitches were flat black and pinched at her very white skin. Plus they had slathered some kind of ointment all over the thigh, so the whole thing looked painfully shiny and wet.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Lecia refused to endure this even when I offered to waive the initiation rites and promised she could be my vice president—then president, with myself as Igor. But truly, Antelope suggested such things—secret clubs, demonic rituals. The German market still hung sausage by twine from the ceiling. The first time I pushed open the heavy door that set the huge cowbell overhead banging, I was horrified to look up and find all those fragrant, inert hunks of meat in blood-colored casings swaying over me. They reminded me of some medieval etching I’d seen in one of Mother’s art books—dozens of heretics hung by the Spanish Inquisition. The bodies had swung off this giant scaffolding in some town square and just twirled rotting in the breeze, arms falling off, eyeballs popping out. The guy who owned that market was named Olaf, no less. He ran the place with his twin sister, Anna. They were both about a hundred years old, their arthritic spines seeming to curve them more deeply in on themselves every time you went in. Each cast a shadow like a bulbous question mark on the scuffed and streaky linoleum. They scooped penny candy from drugstore jars and gave out samples of their own garlic cheese spread, which was a Day-Glo orange you never came across in nature. There was stuff on the shelves that had been sitting there since Eisenhower. The cans of bathroom cleaner they sold had faced the sun in their display pyramid for so long that their front labels had faded from lime green to pale lemon. The mouse-print instructions about not eating the stuff could no longer be read. “If swallowed—” each of the cans said, then there was just a wordless scorch mark as warning. At first we stayed across the street from that market in an old stucco resort hotel painted a stale pink. For breakfast and lunch, Anna slapped together sandwiches from greasy salami, and ham with white rivers of fat and gristle running through it. They were huge Dagwood sandwiches. She spiked them together with flat toothpicks. You had to disassemble one entirely for even the smallest bite. Then the white bread itself was so tough and dry I needed the better part of a grape soda to wash down a mouthful. After a while, I skipped the bread entirely and lived on papery salami slices and leaves of iceberg lettuce sopped in mayo. I picked this stuff off other people’s sandwiches along with big mealy tomato rounds. That caused Lecia to swat my hand a lot and say I was fixing to draw back a bloody stump. Nights, we ate in the town’s one steakhouse, a damp ill-lit place specializing in sprawling slabs of prime rib. There were martinis or Gibsons (plural) to start, burgundy with dinner, and finally a cognac that Mother likened to silky fire going down.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In order to control the rising merchant class, the last Ottoman sultans had systematically deported or killed their Greek and Armenian subjects, who constituted about 90 percent of the bourgeoisie. In 1908 the Young Turks, a party of modernizers, deposed Sultan Abdul-Hamid II in a coup. They had absorbed the antireligious positivism of such Western thinkers as Auguste Comte (1798–1857) as well as the new “scientific” racism, an outgrowth of the Age of Reason that came into good use in the Age of Empire. During the First World War, in order to create a purely Turkic state, the Young Turks ordered the deportation and “resettlement” of Armenian Christians from the empire on the pretext that they were conniving with the enemy. This led to the first genocide of the twentieth century, committed not by religious fanatics but by avowed secularists. Over a million Armenians were slaughtered: men and youths were killed where they stood, while women, children, and the elderly were driven into the desert where they were raped, shot, starved, poisoned, suffocated, or burned to death.43 “I came into this world a Turk,” declared the physician Mehmet Resid, the “Executioner Governor.” “Armenian traitors had found a niche for themselves in the bosom of the fatherland; they were dangerous microbes. Isn’t it a duty of a doctor to destroy these microbes?”44 When Atatürk came to power, he completed this racial purge. For centuries Greeks and Turks had dwelled together on both sides of the Aegean. Atatürk now partitioned the region and organized a massive exchange of populations. Greek-speaking Christians living in what is now Turkey were deported to what would become Greece, while Turkish-speaking Muslims living in Greece were sent the other way. For many in the Muslim world, therefore, Western secularism and nationalism would be forever associated with ethnic cleansing, virulent religious intolerance, and a violent destruction of precious Islamic institutions.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "A certain Biou, young in years, but old in craft, who—like an elderly tom-cat—had, at sixteen, already lost an eye in a battle of love, (having got some syphilitic virus into it), proposed to shew us life in the unknown parts of the real Quartier Latin. "'First,' said he, 'I'll take you to a place where we'll spend little and have some jolly fun; it'll just put us 'en train' and from there we'll go to another house, to fire off our pistols, or I should rather say our revolvers, for mine is a seven shot barrel.' "His single eye twinkled with delight, and his trousers were stirred from within as he said this. We all agreed to his proposal, I especially feeling quite glad that I might at first remain only a spectator. I wondered, however, what the sight would be like. "We had an endless drive through the narrow straggling streets, alleys, and by-ways, where painted women appeared in gorgeous dresses at the filthy windows of some wretched houses. "As it was getting late, all the shops were now shut, except the fruiterers, who sold fried fish, mussels, and potatoes. These disgorged an offensive smell of dirt, grease, and hot oil, which mixed itself up with the stench of the gutters and that of the cesspools in the middle of the streets. "In the darkness of the ill-lighted thoroughfares more than one café chantant and beer-house flared with red gas-lights, and as we passed them we felt the puffs of warm, close air reeking with alcohol, tobacco, and sour beer. "All those streets were thronged with a motley crowd. There were tipsy men with scowling, ugly faces, slip-shod vixens, and pale, precociously withered children all tattered and torn, singing obscene songs. "At last we came to a kind of slum, where the carriages stopped before a low, beetling-browed house which seemed to have suffered from water on the brain when a child. It had a crazy look; and being, moreover, painted in yellowish-red, its many excoriations gave it the appearance of having some loathsome, scabby, skin disease. This place of infamous resort seemed to forewarn the visitor of the illness festering within its walls. "We went in at a small door, up a winding, greasy, slippery staircase, lighted by an asthmatic, flickering gas-light. Although I was loth to lay my hand on the bannisters, it was almost impossible to mount those muddy stairs without doing so. "On the first landing we were greeted by a grey-haired old hag, with a bloated yet bloodless face. I really do not know what made her so repulsive to me—perhaps it was her sore and lashless eyes, her mean expression, or her trade—but the fact is, I had never in all my life seen such a ghoul-like creature. Her mouth with its toothless gums and its hanging lips seemed like the sucker of some polypus; it was so foul and slimy.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Within three years they had avenged the Jamestown massacre many times over. Instead of founding their colony on the compassionate principles of the gospel, they had inaugurated a policy of elimination imposed by ruthless military force. Even Purchas was forced to abandon the Bible and rely on the humanists’ aggressive doctrine of human rights when he finally agreed that the Indians deserved their fate because, by resisting English settlement, they had broken the law of nature. 18 More pragmatic considerations were beginning to replace the old piety. The company had not been able to produce the staples England needed, and investors had not seen an adequate return. The only way their colony could function was to cultivate tobacco and sell it at five shillings a pound. Begun as a holy enterprise, Virginia would gradually be secularized not by Locke’s liberal ideology but by pressure of events. The Puritans of Massachusetts had no qualms about killing Indians. They had left England during the Thirty Years’ War, had absorbed the militancy of that fearsome time, and justified their violence by a highly selective reading of the Bible. Ignoring Jesus’s pacifist teachings, they drew on the bellicosity of some of the Hebrew scriptures. “God is an excellent Man of War,” preached Alexander Leighton, and the Bible “the best handbook on war.” Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives “without provocation”—a procedure normally unlawful—because they had not only a natural right to their territory, but “a special Commission from God” to take their land. 19 Already there were signs of the exceptionalist thinking that would in the future often characterize American politics. In 1636 William Bradford described a raid on the Pequot village of Fort Mystic on the Connecticut shore to avenge the murder of an English trader, contemplating the fearsome carnage with lofty complacency: Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them. 20 When the Puritans negotiated the Treaty of Hertford (1638) with the few Pequot survivors, they insisted on the destruction of all Pequot villages and sold the women and children into slavery.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  67 The Templars, however, combined the meekness of monks with military power, and their sole motivation was to kill the enemies of Christ. A Christian, Bernard said, should exult when he saw these “pagans” “scattered,” “cut away,” and “dispersed.” 68 The ideology of these first Western colonies was permeated through and through with religion, but although later Western imperialism was inspired by a more secular ideology, it would often share the ruthlessness and aggressive righteousness of Crusading. The Muslims were stunned by the Crusaders’ violence. By the time they reached Jerusalem, the Franj (“Franks”) had already acquired a fearsome reputation; it was said that they had killed more than a hundred thousand people at Antioch, and that during the siege they had roamed the countryside, wild with hunger, openly vowing to eat the flesh of any Saracen who crossed their path. 69 But Muslims had never experienced anything like the Jerusalem massacre. For over three hundred years they had fought all the great regional powers, but these wars had always been conducted within mutually agreed limits. 70 Muslim sources reported in horror that the Franks did not spare the elderly, the women, or the sick; they even slaughtered devout ulema, “who had left their homelands to live lives of pious seclusion in the holy place.” 71 Despite this appalling beginning, not only was there no major Muslim offensive against the Franks for nearly fifty years, but the Crusaders were accepted as part of the political makeup of the region. The Crusader states fitted neatly into the Seljuk pattern of small, independent tributary states, and when emirs fought one another, they often made alliances with Frankish rulers. 72 For the Turkish commanders, the ideals of classical jihad were dead, and when the Crusaders had arrived, no “volunteers” had rushed to defend the frontiers. No longer poised to resist foreign invasion, the emirs had been lax in their defense of the borders; they were unconcerned about the “infidel” presence, since they were too intent on their campaigns against one another. Even though the Crusading ideal resonated with ahadith that saw jihad as a form of monasticism, the first Muslim chroniclers to record the Crusade completely failed to recognize the Franks’ religious passion and assumed that they were driven simply by material greed. They all realized that the Franks owed their success to their own failure to form a united front, but after the Crusade there was still no serious attempt to band together. For their part, the Franks who stayed in the Holy Land realized that their survival depended on their ability to coexist with their Muslim neighbors and soon lost their rabid prejudice. They assimilated with the local culture and learned to take baths, dress in the Turkish style, and speak the local languages; they even married Muslim women.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  But this document atomizes the mission, dividing it into segments—the “last night,” the journey to the airport, boarding the planes, etc.—so that the unbearable whole is never considered. The terrorists were told to look forward to paradise and back to the time of the Prophet—in fact, to contemplate anything but the atrocity they were committing in the present. 63 Living from one moment to another, their minds were to be diverted from the appalling finale. The prayers themselves are jarring. Like all Muslim discourse, the document begins with the bismallah—“In the Name of God, the most Merciful and most Compassionate”—but it initiates an action devoid of either mercy or compassion. It then segues to a remark that most Muslims, I suspect, would find idolatrous: “In the name of God, of myself, and my family.” 64 The hijacker is told to cut off any feelings of pity for his fellow passengers or fear for his own life and exert an immense effort to put himself into this abnormal mind-set. He must “resist” these impulses, “tame,” “purify,” and “convince” his soul, “incite” it, and “make it understand.” 65 The imitation of Muhammad is central to Islamic piety; by imitating his external behavior, Muslims hope to acquire his interior attitude of total surrender to God. But Ata’s document determinedly steers the terrorists away from their inner world by an almost perverse emphasis on the external. As a result, the devotions seem primitive and superstitious. While packing, they were to whisper Quranic verses into their hands and rub this holiness onto their luggage, box cutters, knives, ID, and passports. Their clothes must fit snugly, like the garments of the Prophet and his companions. When they begin to fight the passengers and crew, as a sign of resolution, each one must “clench his teeth just as the pious forefathers did prior to entering into battle” and “strike in the manner of champions who are not desirous of returning to this world, and shout Allahu akbar! For this shout causes fear in the hearts of the unbelievers.” They must not “become gloomy” but recite Quranic verses while they are fighting, “just as the pious ancestors would compose poetry in the midst of battles to calm their brothers and to cause tranquillity and joy to enter their souls.” 66 To imagine that a possibility of serenity and joy would be possible in such circumstances indicates a truly psychotic inability to relate their faith with the reality of what they were about to do. We find here the kind of magical thinking that we noted in Faraj’s The Neglected Duty. As they went through the security gates of the airport, the hijackers were instructed to recite a verse that was almost “a creedal statement” for radicals. 67 It is found in a Quranic passage about the Battle of Uhud, when the “laggers” urged the more intrepid Muslims to “stay at home.”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  We are sexualized our entire lives: assessed for our desirability according to men and masculine people’s shitty (racist, ableist, classist, fatphobic, sexist) standards, then penalized when we fall short. And we have so little control over how and when nonconsensual sexualization will happen: at work, while meeting our kid’s teacher, or walking down the street to the corner store. At any time, we can be turned into someone’s sex object. We are sexualized as early as infancy, when girls are told to close their legs and be “decent” and some start experiencing sexual abuse. We are sexualized when our employers require that we look good at work so they can sell a product to customers (but not pay us for the extra time, money, and work we put into beauty). Trans femmes are sexualized constantly, shut out of every single employment sector except for the sex industry.41 At home, at work, at school, just walking down the street: all women and femmes can get turned into sexual entertainment for men with or without our consent. People try to shame me for being fat. When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, ‘I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you and this confuses my understanding of masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.’ It is not my job to please them with my body.42 We don’t get all that much choice about men’s sexual domination. Even if we defy it, we still have to respond to it. Men—in particular white, moneyed, cisgender men and the institutions they control—have the resources we need to survive. So if we are never sexual with men (or anyone), we are still forced to be in relation with their sexual desires and expectations. With our safety, social status, and economic survival on the line, our own desires, our own sense of beauty, and our pleasures can become secondary. And if we are poor, working-class, trans feminine, fat, disabled, crazy, or racialized women, our sexualities are subject to even more intense control and violence. Our glorious, complex sexualities get typecast into narrow fantasies like the trailer park slut, the fun fatty, the Jezebel, the “shemale,” the Geisha. Wifely Duty The most likely place we’ll be sexualized, though, is in our partnerships. Consider this quip from the 2011 comedy Bridesmaids: Becca. What are you doing when you’re having sex then? Rita. Thinking about other things and wishing it would stop. You know, sometimes I just wanna watch The Daily Show without him entering me.43

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

  After the time of Ambrose the cross of Christ also, which, with the superscription and the nails, are said to have been miraculously discovered by the empress Helena in 326,867 was included, and subsequently His crown of thorns and His coat, which are preserved, the former, according to the legend, in Paris, and the latter in Treves.868 Relics of the body of Christ cannot be thought of, since He arose without seeing corruption, and ascended to heaven, where, above the reach of idolatry and superstition, He is enthroned at the right hand of the Father. His true relics are the Holy Supper and His living presence in the church to the end of the world. The worship of relics, like the worship of Mary and the saints, began in a sound religious feeling of reverence, of love, and of gratitude, but has swollen to an avalanche, and rushed into all kinds of superstitious and idolatrous excess. "The most glorious thing that the mind conceives," says Goethe, "is always set upon by a throng of more and more foreign matter." As Israel could not sustain the pure elevation of its divinely revealed religion, but lusted after the flesh pots of Egypt and coquetted with sensuous heathenism so it fared also with the ancient church. The worship of relics cannot be derived from Judaism; for the Levitical law strictly prohibited the contact of bodies and bones of the dead as defiling.869 Yet the isolated instance of the bones of the prophet Elisha quickening by their contact a dead man who was cast into his tomb,870 was quoted in behalf of the miraculous power of relics; though it should be observed that even this miracle did not lead the Israelites to do homage to the bones of the prophet nor

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Perhaps they were acting out the moves they’d seen in pornography. My first job was working at a bookstore, stocking magazines. I learned early to emulate the “naughty” magazines: No matter how I actually felt, I opened my mouth in a wet “O,” furrowed my brow like I was confused, like I could not possibly understand how good it was to be so handled. My job was to just please him/him/him/and him with my existence. The years passed, and I learned how to slap away groping hands and feel how I wanted to be touched, and I learned that I liked a spectrum of genders. There were moments of nipple pleasure with lovers here and there—most of these passed so quickly as to seem an accident. I learned through private explorations of my own body. But that learning took a long time. The general behaviors I witnessed were to ignore and disrespect the power of my nipples. And I learned that nipples get ignored or disrespected in a number of ways. Nipples on those perceived as women cause much kerfuffle on social media and can get us banned or suspended. Nipples shock and awe people when used to breastfeed babies in public. Nipples, and breasts altogether, get handled more often than held, stimulated, pleasured. When they do get touched it’s often a brief cosmetic fiddling on the way to the S.E.X. It amazes me how often I meet people of all genders who don’t understand or feel they can access the potential pleasure of our nipples. Some say they can’t really feel anything there. Some say it emasculates them to feel anything there. I know that nipples work differently for everyone and that some people may not really feel much there. But I suspect that most of us could benefit from more concentrated attention on our nipples. According to a 2011 Journal of Sexual Medicine study, the “sensation from the nipples travels to the same part of the brain as sensations from the vagina, clitoris and cervix.”10 Nipple stimulation “releases the hormone oxytocin,” aka the happy juice. I suspect our ignoring of (or under-attending to) these pleasure points is rooted in a patriarchal rejection of anything associated with women’s bodies. There are a variety of laws that ban the baring of the breast, often with the explanation that the breasts are too sexual for men to witness. We live at the intersection of Hooters and Janet Jackson boob shaming. At the historical intersection of Playboy bunnies and bra burning. Women showing their bodies from the waist up have to fight. Sex becomes a private practice ground for that fight. So much of sex culture is still set by straight cis men and the pornography of pounding into cis and trans women’s mouths and pussies, often in whatever is the most degrading way possible.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ma said the woman wasn’t chosen, just stupid as a melon: She should have just tried in the evening, when there was more traffic and less visibility. Jie turned off the TV. Ba was asleep on the sofa in his cook uniform, a hairnet that’s mostly holes, bare feet obscene with blue veins. One time when Ma needed antidiarrheal medicine, Ba spent the money on a beach umbrella he said was wide enough to eat the wind and digest it into flight. He said if we waited for a storm and got under the umbrella and held the handle together, our feet would quit the floor. Ma said she’d beat his ass like a tambourine, but when she saw he’d fallen asleep on the toilet again, she spread a quilt over his body, covering his face like a corpse’s. _ After two hours of the TV broadcast, Jie said she’d started seeing severed heads everywhere. In the bathroom mirror, she thought her head was attached to nothing, rising off her shoulders like steam. When she saw a birthday balloon in the sky, she assumed someone had let go of their head. Ma said, Enough about heads. We ate leftovers from Ba’s restaurant, lemon chicken that tasted like soap, broccoli with sauce- sagged heads. Ba dragged his sleeves through the oyster sauce, a slug-slick trail from plate to lap. Ma pinched him hard on the wrists until he noticed. At the dinner table, Ma asked Ba if he’d remembered to put on his underwear. Ba’s hands shook too much, so Jie and I sat on either side of him and took turns feeding him. Ma asked again if he’d remembered to wear underwear. Ba looked up, eyes unfixed, teeth typing on his lower lip. Jie blew on the spoon. She lifted it to Ba’s lips. Make a mouth, she said. But his tongue was smoke and didn’t know shape. Did you remember to put on your underwear, Ma said again. Ba looked. He’d put his hands down but couldn’t remember where. He stood up from the table and unbuttoned his pants, penis lolling out. It looked like a plucked neck, a bird stunned for slaughter. Ma set down her bowl. She reached across the table and clamped Ba’s penis between her chopsticks, squeezed. Don’t check when you’re at the table, she said. I will cut you off and boil the bone out. Ba trembled, his pants thin from years of scrubbing the stains from his lap, the fabric almost see- through at his crotch. We watched Ma choke his penis with her chopsticks until its tip purpled. Ba’s eyes like the fish’s, lidless. That’s when Jie went into the kitchen for the knife. The wooden handle was sweat-softened, fingerprinted. Ma used it to sliver guavas in the summer, telling us not to swallow the seeds when we’re fertile. How do we know when we’re fertile?