Disgust

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 65 of 90 · 20 per page

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  SusanI’m not sure how to begin. All my life I have been a lesbian in my heart and soul. Since I can remember, I have always cherished the female body. Because of my upbringing in a Christian family, I was told that my thoughts and wants were evil and to ask for forgiveness. I was the perfect child, did what I was told. I graduated from a private Christian school, then went into the world as if nothing could hurt me. At eighteen I lost my virginity to a guy I went to school with my junior year. Even though he was gentle, it was the worst experience I ever had. I felt disgusted, like I was going to get sick. The whole experience was definitely revolting. Later, I met a man and moved in with him. I lived there for one and a half years. I had my child at nineteen, almost twenty. Then I left him. Shortly after, my best friend and I realized we shared the same feelings for women and started the best relationship I have ever had: my first love. Two years later she met a woman and fell in love. Then I got married so that my son would have a father. Now I’m twenty-two, married and pregnant with my second child. I’ve never been so unhappy, but I still love my husband. To keep sane I fantasize about being with a woman when I’m with my husband. Here is one of my fantasies: I stop at a bar to get a drink and the bartender, a blond five-foot-six-beauty with perky sharp breasts that fit tightly against her blouse, asks me if she can help me. Naturally, I say “Yes, I need a cool drink and someone to talk to.” Surprisingly, she obliges both. As we talk it gets so late that everyone goes home and it’s just the two of us. We both explain how we love women and wish to be with them when we can. As she talks, I boldly lean forward and kiss her firm soft lips. She accepts and our tongues meet. It is a kiss that sends electricity throughout my body. Still kissing her, I pull her into my lap and slowly unbutton her blouse. Her pert nipples harden at my touch. This excites me. I kiss her face and whisper how much I want her. I want to learn her secret desires. Placing my mouth on one of her breasts, I slip two fingers under her miniskirt, past her panties, to the treasure. Oh, how wet she feels. I begin to rub lightly on her clit as I suckle her breasts, one then the other. Gently, I lift up her skirt and remove her panties, letting my mouth travel across her belly, down one leg, up it and down the other, never touching the prize, but coming close.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Now for my fantasies and sex since LSD. I should mention that I was a virgin until I was twenty-one. I’d had this strong feeling that “being felt up” or screwing would make me considered to be a whore. I really wanted to be respected. It seemed to me that all guys had this double standard: they wanted me to give in, but if I had, they’d have thought me a whore. Finally, when I was seventeen, a guy forced me to feel him up—he tore off my blouse and played with me—and I did it—jerked him off—but I felt a total disgust and hatred. Then, when I was twenty-one, I met this guy I loved (not my husband) and we took LSD and fucked. It was unlike anything that had ever happened before: I had none of those feelings of “dirtiness.” My mind wasn’t really thinking about the sexual organs; I lost myself in a very tangible, three-dimensional, colorful, blissful something I can’t describe. For the first time I had this strong feeling that this was another human being that I loved—it was a kind of fantasy in that it all went on in my mind. It was what I was thinking more than feeling with my body that made it all so beautiful, and I felt good and not at all paranoid. For the first time I wanted to make love to everything in the universe (very unlike me). After that first trip, whenever I was fucking I’d remember the images in my head when I’d done it the first time, the thoughts of love, of thinking love, and I began to have orgasms. Then I had a bad trip on LSD, and for the next six months I had, maybe, one half an orgasm. After that, I tried thinking my old lewd thoughts: I’d think about the guy who’d once stuck a hose up my cunt, and a wine bottle (pouring in the wine). It wasn’t that I’d enjoyed these things, but thinking about it later made me feel very liberated in the sense of letting go, trying new things, and loving a relative stranger as a human, a man whom I really didn’t like. I didn’t think about him, but the fact that we were doing such weird things, it made me feel better, more relaxed about myself and other people. Once I had a fantasy about hitchhiking, of being picked up by a dirty old man and being raped; I thought that if I made love to him and loved him, then it wouldn’t have to be rape; it was an exciting idea, and I rethought it when I was with other guys; it made me enjoy their fucking more. I really think your book is a good idea, since non-fictional female sexual fantasies and experiences are rarely openly discussed. They are usually only in works of fiction written by men. Thank you. [Letter]

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

  "I jumped back into the cab, and was whirled away to my office through the crowded thoroughfares of the town. "What a jarring bustle there was everywhere! How sordid and meaningless this world appeared! "A garishly-dressed, smirking female was casting lewd glances at a lad, and tempting him to follow her. A one-eyed satyr was ogling a very young girl—a mere child. I thought I knew him. Yes, it was that loathsome school-fellow of mine, Bion, only he looked even more of a pimp than his father used to look. A fat, sleek-headed man was carrying a cantaloup melon, and his mouth seemed to be watering at the prospect of the pleasure he would have in eating it after the soup, with his wife and children. I asked myself if ever man or woman could have kissed that slobbering mouth without feeling sick? "I had during these last three days quite neglected my office, and my manager was ill. I therefore felt it a duty to set to work and do what had to be done. Notwithstanding the sorrow gnawing in my heart, I began answering letters and telegrams, or giving the necessary directions as to how they were to be answered. I worked feverishly, rather like a machine than a man. For a few hours I was quite absorbed in complicated commercial transactions, and although I worked and reckoned clearly, still my friend's face, with his mournful eyes, his voluptuous mouth with its bitter smile, was ever before me, whilst an after-taste of his kiss still lingered on my lips. "The hour for shutting up the office came, and yet not half of my task was done. I saw, as in a dream, the rueful faces of my clerks kept back from their dinners or from their pleasures. They had all somewhere to go to. I was alone, even my mother was away. I therefore bade them go, saying I should remain with the head book-keeper. They did not wait to be told twice; in a twinkling the offices were empty. "As for the accountant, he was a commercial fossil, a kind of living calculating machine; grown so old in the office that all his limbs creaked like rusty hinges every time he moved, so that he hardly ever did move. Nobody had ever seen him anywhere else but on his high stool; he was always at his place before any of the junior clerks came in, he was still there when they went off. Life for him had only one aim—that of making endless additions. "Feeling rather sick, I sent the office boy for a bottle of dry sherry and a box of vanilla-wafers. When the lad returned I told him he could go.

• From The Art of Memoir

  calm, sleepy-looking critter is pulling up grass to eat. As he beats the dusty roots on his knees to get the dirt off, Orwell observes he has a “preoccupied grandmotherly air.” Still, the crowd bullies Orwell into shooting the elephant with a rifle so small he has to fire over and over while the thing gasps and coughs gouts of blood. It’s one of the most personally indicting scenes in memoir I’ve ever come across. When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick—one never does when the shot goes home—but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. . . . [A] mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old. . . . [He] sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. What was happening to Orwell at that time—the schism inside between disgust at his role in the Raj and his fury at the Burmese who hated him for his role—forges the story. As he says near the end, “You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it.” He offers himself no mercy with the ironic end statement that he was glad the animal had killed a coolie for “it put me legally in the right,” adding, “I had done it solely to avoid looking the fool.” Try to think of Orwell writing the story solely as someone sympathetic to the Burmese people, and there’d be no emotional power to what he was telling. He’d come off as someone selfishly defending his own actions. Once the reader identifies a vain or self- serving streak the writer can’t admit to with candor, a level of distrust interferes with that reader’s experience. In almost every literary memoir I know, it’s the internal struggle providing the engine for the tale. Orwell’s powers of description wring emotion from a reader for all players—the animal, the people, and the callow young police officer lost in fear and pride. Yes, the elephant embodies that old-school battle with nature that powered so many great novels, but it also mirrors Orwell’s inner war.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Things go wrong from the start. Back at the loft where Sergius operates a thoroughly improbable indoor school of bullfighting, the girl fails to succumb to that passivity which Mailer myth ordains is the only feminine route to the promised land of orgasm. The narrator deplores the error in grave literary tones: “she had Bed the dominion which was liberty for her.”69 Nature rebukes the upstart by withholding sexual satisfaction; Sergius underlines the lesson by striking her across the face. When her dignity fails to collapse entirely and she answers his arrogance with a stubborn spirit of her own, Sergius is piqued by the challenge and willing to overlook the considerable drain on his business-like sexual economy (customarily loath to “score” twice on the same mark) and is willing to try another bout. At their final match he suffers a momentary defeat through premature ejaculation, a blow to his careerist’s reputation which requires the inflationary services of fellatio, thereby reducing him to what he regards as an inferior (passive, dependent) position. But recovering his resiliency with commendable haste, he imposes anal intercourse upon his opponent, slowly savoring “as the avenger rode down to his hilt” the outrage of pain and humiliation he has inflicted, and grimacing at the reader “she thrashed beneath me like a trapped little animal,” “caught,” “forced,” “wounded,” and so forth.70 Since Mailer’s logic here demands the mortification of the woman as imperative (through a Freudian paradox)71 both to the victory of the male and to her own bliss, it requires only the additional stimulation of Sergius’ rasping racist whisper, “You dirty little Jew,” and a quick switch to “love’s first hole” to bring her over the brink of masochistic womanhood and into the fictive reaches of vaginal orgasm.72 Were it not for the dead-eye perception of her parting shot, “Your whole life is a lie, and you do nothing but run away from the homosexual that is you,”73 Sergius could claim total victory. But the match may be said to end in a draw.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Cunt is scarcely this inspiring: a “crack”; a “gash”; a “wound”; a “slimy hole”;—but really only emptiness, nothingness, zero. This is no less true of Mara than of the run-of-the-mill female, the taxi-dancer Miller dismisses as a “minus sign” of “absolute vacuity.”66 Gazing at his love, the egoist reports he “finds nothing, nothing except my own image wavering in a bottomless well,” admitting at last he is “unable to form the slightest image of her being.”67 In the Tropic of Cancer both Miller and Van Norden explore the frightening enigma of “cunt.” Sickened, even before he begins, by the very sight of this “dead clam,” Van Norden fortifies himself with technology: “I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it…I never in my life looked at cunt so seriously…And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all.”68 Still shaken at the sight, he cannot help exclaiming over the bitter cheat: When you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts of things; you give them an individuality like, which they haven’t got, of course. There’s just a crack there between the legs…It’s an illusion!…It’s so absolutely meaningless…All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing-just a blank…there’s nothing there…nothing at all. It’s disgusting.69 Later on in the book Miller hires a whore himself to have a try at dredging some meaning out of the unfathomable vacuum of the female. Like his fellow investigator, he finds only a “great gulf of nothingness,” an “ugly gash” and “the wound that never heals.”70 But he is determined to do better than his buddy. He is also extremely self-conscious about the artist’s lofty role in the areas of myth and vision. It is not very far from this to “mystery;” so, doing the best he can, Miller converts the “fucked out cunt of a whore” into a grand “riddle,” hoping to convince himself that the planet earth is “but a great sprawling female…in the violet light of the stars.” After all, he reasons, “out of that dark unstitched wound, that sink of abomination,” man is born; part clown; part angel, a thought which leaves him “face to face with the Absolute.” And out of this unworthy “zero” derive the “endless mathematical worlds” of masculine civilization, even the holy writ of Dostoievski. There must, therefore, be something to this “festering obscene horror” after all.71 A false Xavier touching leprosy on a dare, Miller finds it impossible to smother his disgust. There is perhaps a certain unintended irony too, in the fact that Mara, his apotheosis of the eternal and mysterious “female principle,” is also a pathological liar.

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

  Gradually, this girl begins to arouse me and what she does to me Antonin does as well, with both his hands, to two other girls on his left and right. One cannot imagine the language, the obscene speeches by which that debauchee stimulates himself; at last he is in the state he desires, he is led to me, but everyone follows him, moves with him, endeavors to inflame him yet further while he takes his pleasure; his naked hind parts are exposed, Omphale takes possession of them and neglects nothing in order to irritate him: rubbings, kisses, pollutions, she employs them all; completely afire, Antonin leaps toward me.... "I wish to stuff her this time," he says, beside himself.... These moral deviations determine the physical. Antonin, who has the habit of uttering terrible cries during the final instants of drunkenness, emits dreadful ones; everyone surrounds, everyone serves him, everyone labors to enrich his ecstasy, and the libertine attains it in the midst of the most bizarre episodes of luxury and depravation. These groupings were frequent; for when a monk indulged in whatever form of pleasure, all the girls regularly surrounded him in order to fire all his parts' sensations, that voluptuousness might, if one may be forgiven the expression, more surely penetrate into him through every pore. Antonin left, breakfast was brought in; my companions forced me to eat, I did so to please them. We had not quite finished when the superior entered: seeing us still at table, he dispensed us from ceremonies which were to have been identical with those we had just executed for Antonin. "We must give a thought to dressing her," said he, looking at me; and then he opened a wardrobe and threw upon my bed several garments of the color appropriate to my class, and several bundles of linen as well. "Try that on," he said, "and give me what belongs to you." I donned the new clothes and surrendered my old; but, in anticipation of having to give them up, I had, during the night, prudently removed my money from my pockets and had concealed it in my hair. With each article of clothing I took off, Severino's ardent stare fell upon the feature newly exposed, and his hands wandered to it at once. At length, when I was half-naked, the monk seized me, put me in the position favorable to his pleasure, that is to say, in the one exactly opposite to the attitude Antonin had made me assume; I wish to ask him to spare me, but spying the fury already kindled in his eyes, I decide the obedient is the safer way; I take my place, the others form a ring around me, Severino is able to see nothing but a multitude of those obscene altars in which he delights; his hands converge upon mine, his mouth fastens upon it, his eyes devour it... he is at the summit of pleasure.

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

  So do not restrain yourself, flout your laws, a fig for your social conventions and your Gods; listen to me and to none other, and believe that if there exists a crime to be committed against me it is the resistance you oppose, in the forms of stubbornness or casuistries, to what I inspire in you."' "Oh, Just Heaven!" I cried, "you make me shudder! Were there no crimes against Nature, whence would come that insurmountable loathing we experience for certain misdeeds?" "That loathing is not dictated by Nature," the villain replied with feeling, "its one source is in the total lack of habit; does not the same hold true for certain foods? Although they are excellent, is not our repugnance merely caused by our being unaccustomed to them? would you dare say, upon the basis of your prejudices or ignorance, that they are good or bad? If we make the effort, we will soon become convinced and will find they suit our palate; we have a hostility toward medicaments, do we not, although they are salutary; in the same fashion, let us accustom ourselves to evil and it will not be long before we find it charming; this momentary revulsion is certainly a shrewdness, a kind of coquetry on the part of Nature, rather than a warning that the thing outrages her: thus she prepares the pleasures of our triumph; she even manages thus to augment those of the deed itself: better still, Therese, better still: the more the deed seems appalling to us, the more it is in contradiction with our manners and customs, the more it runs headlong against restraints and shatters them, the more it conflicts with social conventions and affronts them, the more it clashes with what we mistake for Nature's laws, then the more, on the contrary, it is useful to this same Nature. It is never but by way of crimes that she regains possession of the rights Virtue incessantly steals away from her. If the crime is slight, if it is at no great variance with Virtue, its weight will be less in re- establishing the balance indispensable to Nature; but the more capital the crime, the more deadly, the more it dresses the scales and the better it offsets the influence of Virtue which, without this, would destroy everything. Let him then cease to be in a fright, he who meditates a crime or he who has just committed one: the vaster his crime, the better it will serve Nature." Chapter 25These frightful theories soon led me to think of Omphale's doubts upon the manner in which we left the terrible house we were in. And it was then I conceived the plans you will see me execute in the sequel. However, to complete my enlightenment I could not prevent myself from putting yet a few more questions to Father Clement.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Lawrence’s cautionary tale for white women has odd assumptions common to the white mind: that the dark peoples of the world are fascinated and arrested by yellow hair, an axiomatic assumption of those white fairy tales like Lord Jim. It is a common white fancy that when one of the blond folk go to the dark peoples the latter are so overawed, they make him god or king, an event highly satisfactory to his vanity. Lawrence makes this old chestnut do service again while punishing the white woman in the process. The following passage works on both assumptions, and while it humiliates the woman, flatters white egocentricity at the same time: There was now absolute silence. She was given a little to drink, then two priests took off her mantle and her tunic, and in her strange pallor she stood there, between the lurid robes of the priests, beyond the pillar of ice, beyond and above the dark-faced people. The throng below gave the low, wild cry. Then the priest turned her round, so she stood with her back to the open world, her long blond hair to the people below. And they cried again.178 The scene is shot in MGM technicolor, the whole story reeks of Hollywood, but it also satisfies voyeurism, a sadistic sort of buggery, and the white dream of being uplifted and proclaimed. One is always struck by the sexual ambiguity in Lawrence. The woman of the fable is bent on going toward death like a bird hypnotized by the eye of a snake. But her fatalism is never explained, save in Lawrence’s obsessive wish to murder her. There is a strange quality about this fatalism: while it is supposed to represent the decline of the West or some other abstraction, the narrative derives its power from a participation on the part of the author himself which appears to derive from perverse needs deep in Lawrence’s own nature. There is as much attention lavished upon the masochistic as upon the sadistic, and one perceives a peculiar relish for the former in the author, a wallowing in the power of the Indian male, his beauty and indifference and cruelty, exerted not only on the silly woman, pis victim, but on Lawrence too. It is the author himself standing fascinated before this silent and darkly beautiful killer, enthralled, aroused, awaiting the sacrificial rape.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Miller has a rather morbid fear of excreta. The only woman whom he actually fails to “fuck” lived in an apartment with a faulty toilet and, in some two-thousand pages, his “most embarrassing moment” (to adopt his own interesting phrase) occurred when it overflowed, a generous amount of his feces along with it. Miller abandons the siege and ducks out, leaving her in charge of his remains. In general, he has irreversibly associated sexuality with the process of waste and elimination, and since his responses to the latter are extraordinarily negative, it is significant that, when he intends to be particularly insulting, he carries on his amours in the “shithouse” as, on one occasion, when he happens upon “an American cunt” in a French rest-room. Standing her “slap up against the wall, he finds he can’t “get it into her.” With his never-failing ingenuity, he next tries sitting on the toilet seat. This won’t do either, so, in a burst of hostility posing as passion, he reports: “I come all over her beautiful gown and she’s sore as hell about it.”72 In the Tropic of Capricorn he repeats the stunt; in Sexus too. It is a performance which nicely combines defecation with orgasm and clarifies the sense of defilement in sexuality which is the puritan bedrock of Miller’s response to women. The unconscious logic appears to be that, since sex defiles the female, females who consent to sexuality deserve to be defiled as completely as possible.73 What he really wants to do is shit on her. The men’s room has schooled Miller in the belief that sex is inescapably dirty. Meditating there upon some graffiti, “the walls crowded with sketches and epithets, all of them jocosely obscene,” he speculates on “what an impression it would make on those swell dames…I wondered if they would carry their tails so high if they could see what was thought of an ass here.”74 Since his mission is to inform “cunt’, just how it’s ridiculed and despised in the men’s house, women perhaps owe Miller some gratitude for letting them know.

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

  "Well, now," Saint-Florent said to his friend, "did I not tell you she had a splendid ass!" "Yes, by God! her behind is sublime," said the jurist who thereupon kissed it; "I've seen damned few buttocks molded like these: why! look ye! solid and fresh at the same time!... how d'ye suppose that fits with such a tempestuous career ?" "Why, it's simply that she's never given herself of her own accord; I told you there's nothing as whimsical as this girl's exploits! She's never been had but by rape" Ä and then he drives his five fingers simultaneously into the peristyle of Love's temple Ä "but she's been had... unfortunately, for it's much too capacious for me: accustomed to virgins, I could never put up with this." Then, swinging me around, he repeated the same ceremony with my behind wherein he found the same flaws. "Ah well, you know our secret," said Cardoville. "And I'll employ it too," replied Saint-Florent; "and you who have no need of the same resource, you, who are content with a factitious activity which, although painful for the woman, nevertheless brings enjoyment of her to perfection, you, I hope, will not have her till I'm done." "Fair enough," Cardoville answered, "while watching you, I'll busy myself with those preludes so cherished by my lechery; I'll play the girl with Julien and La Rose while you masculinize Therese, and, so I think, the one's as good as the other." "Doubtless a thousand times better; for you've no idea how fed up I am with women !... do you suppose I would be capable of enjoying those whores without the help of the auxiliary episodes we both use to add a tart flavor to the business?" Chapter 40With these words, having afforded me clear evidence their state called for more substantial pleasures, the impudicious creatures rose and made me mount upon a large chair, my forearms leaning upon its back, my knees propped upon its arms, and my behind arched so that it was prominently thrust toward them. I was no sooner placed in this attitude than they stepped out of their breeches, tucked up their shirts, and save for their shoes, they thus discovered themselves completely naked from the waist down; they exhibited themselves to me, passed several times to and fro before my eyes, making boastful display of their behinds of which they were overweeningly proud, for, they declared, they had parts far superior to anything I could offer; indeed, each was womanishly made in this region: 'twas especially Cardoville who was possessed of elegant lines and majestic form, snowy white color and enviable plumpness; they whiled away a minute or two polluting themselves in full view of me, but did not ejaculate: about Cardoville, nothing that was not of the most ordinary; as for Saint Florent, 'twas monstrous: I shuddered to think that such was the dart which had immolated me.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In The World of Sex Miller explains that most of his writing on sex was simply an attempt at “self-liberation.”85 What he has furnished us is an excellent guide to his dungeon but it provides no clue to the world into which he was emancipated. Delivered from the Brahmin eminence of his old age, the following pronunciamento is woefully shaky: “Perhaps a cunt, smelly though it may be, is one of the prime symbols for the connection between all things”86—the possibility might exist, but the stench you may be sure of. There are times when Miller seems to catch a glimpse of what chaos is made of human life through the brutality of the sexual ethic he represents: and at one point, profoundly unconscious of patronization, he serves up this staggering naïvete: “No matter how attached I became to a ‘cunt,’ I was more interested in the person who owned it. A cunt doesn’t live a separate independent existence.”87 The impulse to see even women as human beings may occur momentarily—a fleeting urge—but the terrible needs of adolescent narcissism are much greater, the cheap dream of endlessly fucking impersonal matter, mindless tissue endlessly compliant, is so much more compelling. And the thrills of egotism are always there: the high of the con game, the excitement of lying, wheedling, acting, cheating, deliberately degrading, then issuing orders and directing the gull in a performance whose “bestiality” only confirms his detached superiority. All these comforts make up for the disgust of the act itself. Finally, there is the satisfaction of evacuation—a general release of tensions, hostilities, frustrations, even thoughts. “During intercourse they passed out of me, as though I were emptying refuse in a sewer.”88 Americans never underestimate the virtues of indoor plumbing. Miller looks on woman in a surrealist dream and sees “a knot with a mask between her legs” and knows “one crack is as good as another and over every sewer there’s a grating.”89 “Cunt” may be lobotomized earthenware, but “behind every slit”90 is danger, death, the unknown, the exhilarations of the chase, and in Miller’s “genitourinary”91 system, the sexual comfort-station is a pay toilet whose expense is great enough to constitute its own reward. Miller has given voice to certain sentiments which masculine culture had long experienced but always rather carefully suppressed: the yearning to effect a complete depersonalization of woman into cunt, a game-sexuality of cheap exploitation, a childish fantasy of power untroubled by the reality of persons or the complexity of dealing with fellow human beings and, finally, a crude species of evacuation hardly better than anal in character.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  All sadistic pornography tends to find its perfection in murder. Lawrence’s movie priests themselves seem to understand the purpose of the rites and are “naked and in a state of barbaric ecstasy,”196 as they await the moment when the sun, phallic itself, strikes the phallic icicle, and signals the phallic priest to plunge the phallic knife-penetrating the female victim and cutting out her heart—the death fuck.197 With elaborate care, Lawrence has plotted the sexualized landscape to coincide with the sexual scenario—as his victim lies poised and waiting, he works up suspense: Turning to the sky she looked at the yellow sun. It was sinking. The shaft of ice was like a shadow between her and it. And she realized that the yellow rays were filling half the cave though they had not reached the altar where the fire was, at the far end of the funnel shaped cavity. Yes, the rays were creeping round slowly. As they grew ruddier, they penetrated farther. When the red sun was about to sink, he would shine full through the shaft of ice deep into the hollow of the cave to the innermost. She understood now that this was what the men were waiting for…And their ferocity was ready to leap out into a mystic exultance, of triumph…Then the old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice and achieve the power.198 This is a formula for sexual cannibalism: substitute the knife for the penis and penetration, the cave for a womb, and for a bed, a place of execution—and you provide a murder whereby one acquires one’s victim’s power. Lawrence’s demented fantasy has arranged for the male to penetrate the female with the instrument of death so as to steal her mana. As he supposes the dark races envy the white, who in his little legend, have “stolen their sun,” Lawrence himself seems envious, afraid-murderous. The act here at the center of the Lawrentian sexual religion is coitus as killing, its central vignette a picture of human sacrifice performed upon the woman to the greater glory and potency of the male. But because sexual potency could accomplish little upon a corpse, it is painfully obvious that the intention of the fable is purely political. The conversion of human genitals into weapons has led him from sex to war. Probably it is the perversion of sexuality into slaughter, indeed, the story’s very travesty and denial of sexuality, which accounts for its monstrous, even demented air.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Now that the sermon has been delivered, the proceedings may continue: “She felt always in the same relaxed, confused, victimized state…This at length became the only state of consciousness she really recognized, this exquisite sense of bleeding out into the higher beauty and harmony of things.”184 The last phrase is pure gas, but there is no mistaking its intention. Of course, much is made of the masochistic nature of the female, called on to justify any ghastliness perpetrated upon her: “She knew she was a victim, that all this elaborate work upon her was the work of victimizing her. But she did not mind. She wanted it.”185 Of all masculine fantasies, this is perhaps the most revered; not only does it rationalize any atrocity, but even more to the point, it puts such action beyond the moral pale—all these enormities only satisfy her inherent nature.” Freud had provided the scientific justification for sadism; Lawrence was not slow to buy the product. Every effort is made to humiliate her. Since Lawrence’s notion of hubris is a woman who exhibits any self-assurance, she is rewarded for speaking to the Indians who capture her with cuts at the horse she rides, throwing her painfully in the saddle at every step. Later Lawrence has her dismount and crawl. Other details savored are the gratuitous insult of the animal she shares her prison with, “a little female dog,” and her rabbitlike terror as she is carried to her death; “she sat looking out of her litter with her big transfixed blue eyes…the wan markings of her drugged weariness.”186

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In the surfeit of Miller’s perfervid “fucking,” it is surprising how much of sexuality is actually omitted: intimacy, for example, or the aesthetic pleasures of nudity. A very occasional pair of “huge teats” or “haunches” arc poor and infrequent spare parts for the missing erotic form of woman. Save for the genitals—the star performers cock and balls—not a word is wasted on the male body. It is not even bodies who copulate here, let alone persons. Miller’s fantasy drama is sternly restricted to the dissociated adventures of cunt and prick: “The body is hers, but the cunt’s yours. The cunt and the prick, they’re married,” he lectures, after having demonstrated how life has so divorced the couple that “the bodies are going different ways.”24 In so stipulating on a contingent and momentary union, Miller has succeeded in isolating sexuality from the rest of life to an appalling degree. Its participants take on the idiot kinetics of machinery-piston and valve. The perfect Miller “fuck” is a biological event between organs, its hallmark—its utter impersonality. Of course perfect strangers are best, chance passengers on subways molested without the exchange of word or signal. Paradoxically, this attempt to so isolate sex only loads the act with the most negative connotations. Miller has gone beyond even the empty situations one frequently encounters in professional pornography, blue movies, etc., to freight his incidents with cruelty and contempt. While seeming to remove sexuality from any social or personal context into the gray abstraction of “organ grinding.”25 he carefully includes just enough information on the victim to make her activity humiliating and degrading, and his own an assertion of sadistic will.

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

  He assists Severino and in a trice we have displayed to us all the maiden's unadorned charms. Never, without any doubt, was there a fairer skin, never were there more happily modeled forms.... God! the crime of it!... So many beauties, such chaste freshness, so much innocence and daintiness Ä all to become prey to these barbarians! Covered with shame, Octavie knows not where to fly to hide her charms, she finds naught but hungering eyes everywhere about, nothing but brutal hands which sully those treasures; the circle closes around her, and, as did I, she rushes hither and thither; the savage Antonin lacks the strength to resist; a cruel attack determines the homage, and the incense smokes at the goddess' feet. Jerome compares her to our young colleague of sixteen, doubtless the seraglio's prettiest; he places the two altars of his devotion one next to the other. "Ha! what whiteness! what grace!" says he as he fingers Octavie, "but what gentility and freshness may be discerned in this other one: indeed," continues the monk all afire, "I am uncertain"; then imprinting his mouth upon the charms his eyes behold, "Octavie," he cries, "to you the apple, it belongs to none but you, give me the precious fruit of this tree my heart adores.... Ah, yes! yes, one of you, give it me, and I will forever assure beauty's prize to who serves me sooner." Severino observes the time has come to meditate on more serious matters; absolutely in no condition to be kept waiting, he lays hands upon the unlucky child, places her as he desires her to be; not yet being able to have full confidence in Octavie's aid, he calls for Clement to lend him a hand. Octavie weeps and weeps unheeded; fire gleams in the impudicious monk's glance; master of the terrain, one might say he casts about a roving eye only to consider the avenues whereby he may launch the fiercest assault; no ruses, no preparations are employed; will he be able to gather these so charming roses? will he be able to battle past the thorns? Whatever the enormous disproportion between the conquest and the assailant, the latter is not the less in a sweat to give fight; a piercing cry announces victory, but nothing mollifies the enemy's chilly heart; the more the captive implores mercy, the less quarter is granted her, the more vigorously she is pressed; the ill-starred one fences in vain: she is soon transpierced. "Never was laurel with greater difficulty won," says Severino, retreating, "I thought indeed that for the first time in my life I would fall before the gate... ah! 'twas never so narrow, that way, nor so hot; 'tis the God's own Ganymede."

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  While the release of such inhibited emotion, however poisonous, is beyond question advantageous, the very expression of such lavish contempt and disgust, as Miller has unleashed and made fashionable, can come to be an end in itself, eventually harmful, perhaps even malignant. To provide unlimited scope for masculine aggression, although it may finally bring the situation out into the open, will hardly solve the dilemma of our sexual politics. Miller does have something highly important to tell us; his virulent sexism is beyond question an honest contribution to social and psychological understanding which we can hardly afford to ignore. But to confuse this neurotic hostility, this frank abuse, with sanity, is pitiable. To confuse it with freedom were vicious, were it not so very sad.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Yet any attentive reader of Mailer’s fiction is constantly made aware of how explicitly he demonstrates the violence of his characters as springing directly from their stifled homosexuality. The anal rapes Rojack and Sergius perform are simply transferences (accompanied by sadism) of homosexual urges their elaborate masculinity seeks to disguise. In The Naked and the Dead it is made very clear that each homosexual indiscretion with which General Cummings chooses to embarrass young Lieutenant Hearne is followed by a gesture of cruelty. If his scarcely latent desire compels him to search out Hearne and call him to his tent while every officer in the company looks on, Cummings will visit his humiliating dependence on the younger man by throwing a cigarette butt on the floor and commanding Hearne to pick it up. Croft’s violence also arises from a throttled homosexual impulse. All the beauty Tex and D.J. experience on the day they flee from their tainted elders to rove defenseless in the wilds is turned to cruelty when their adolescent affection sours into hatred before the taboo of homosexuality. In an essay on football, Mailer explains that it is the suppressed sexuality in the players’ habitual gesture of bottom slapping (which he traces ingeniously to its origin in homosexual flirtation), plus the act of centering the ball “in the classic pose of sodomy” which “liberates testosterone” and enables the player, by the “prongsmanship and buggery at the seat” of his “root” to carry on and hit hard in the “happy broil.”110

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

  "She welcomed us with many low courtesies and fawning words of endearment, and ushered us into a low and tawdry room, where a flaring petroleum light shed its crude sheen all around. "Some frowsy curtains at the windows, a few old arm-chairs, and a long, battered, and much-stained divan completed the furniture of this room, which had a mixed stench of musk and onions; but, as I was just then gifted with a rather strong imagination, I at times detected—or I thought I did—a smell of carbolic acid and of iodine; albeit the loathsome smell of musk overpowered all other odours. "In this den, several—what shall I call them?—syrens? no, harpies! were crouched or lolled about. "Although I tried to put on a most indifferent, blasé look, still my face must have expressed all the horror I felt. This is then, said I to myself, one of those delightful houses of pleasure, of which I have heard so many glowing tales? "These painted-up Jezebels, cadaverous or bloated, are the Paphian maids, the splendid votaresses of Venus, whose magic charms make the senses thrill with delight, the houris on whose breasts you swoon away and are ravished into paradise. "My friends seeing my utter bewilderment began to laugh at me. I thereupon sat down and tried stupidly to smile. "Three of those creatures at once came up to me, one of them putting her arms round my neck kissed me, and wanted to dart her filthy tongue into my mouth; the others began to handle me most indecently. The more I resisted, the more bent they seemed on making a Laocoon of me." "But why were you singled out as their victim?" "I really do not know, but it must have been because I looked so innocently scared, or because my friends were all laughing at my horror-stricken face. "One of those poor women—a tall dark girl, an Italian, I believe—was evidently in the very last stage of consumption. She was in fact a mere skeleton, and still—had it not been for the mask of chalk and red with which her face was covered—traces of a former beauty might still have been discerned in her; seeing her now, anyone not inured to such sights could not but feel a sense of the deepest pity. "The second was red-haired, gaunt, pockmarked, goggle-eyed and repulsive. "The third: old, short, squat and obese; quite a bladder of fat. She went by the name of the cantinière. "The first was dresssed in grass-green, or prassino; the red-haired strumpet wore a robe which once must have been blue; the old slut was clad in yellow. "All these dresses, however, were stained and very much the worse for wear. Besides, some slimy viscid fluid which had left large spots everywhere, made them seem as if all the snails of Burgundy had been crawling over them. "I managed to get rid of the two younger ones, but I was not so successful with the cantinière.

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

  Two hours passed and then the monk did indeed awake in a prodigious agitation and seized me with such force I thought he was going to strangle me; his respiration was quick and labored, his eyes glittered, he uttered incoherent words which were exclusively blasphemous or libertine expressions; he summoned Armande, called for whips, and started in again with his flogging of us both, but in a yet more vigorous manner than before having gone to sleep. It seemed as if he wished to end matters with me; shrill cries burst from his mouth; to abridge my sufferings, Armande excited him violently, he lost his head entirely, and finally made rigid by the most violent sensations, the monster lost both his ardor and his desires together with smoking floods of semen. Nothing transpired during the rest of the night; upon getting up, the monk was content to touch and examine each of us; and as he was going to say Mass, we returned to the seraglio. The superintendent could not be prevented from desiring me in. the inflamed state she swore I must be in; exhausted I indeed was and, thus weakened, how could I defend myself ? She did all she wished, enough to convince me that even a woman, in such a school, soon losing all the delicacy and restraint native to her sex, could only, after those tyrants' example, become obscene and cruel. Two nights later, I slept with Jerome; I will not describe his horrors to you; they were still more terrifying. What an academy, great God! by week's end I had finally made the circuit, and then Omphale asked me whether it were not true that of them all, Clement was the one about whom I had the most to complain. "Alas!" was my response, "in the midst of a crowd of horrors and messes of filth which now disgust and now revolt, it is very difficult to pronounce upon these villains' individual odiousness; I am mortally weary of them all and would that I were gone from here, whatever be the fate that awaits me."