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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Those laws decreed against banditry are null if they are not extended to apply to the powerful bandit; that the law inspire any dread in the miserable is impossible, for the sword is the miserable man's only resource." "And do you believe," I broke in, "that in another world Celestial Justice does not await him whom crime has not affrighted in this one?" "I believe," this dangerous woman answered, "that if there were a God there would be less evil on earth; I believe that since evil exists, these disorders are either expressly ordained by this God, and there you have a barbarous fellow, or he is incapable of preventing them and right away you have a feeble God; in either case, an abominable being, a being whose lightning I should defy and whose laws contemn. Ah, Therese I is not atheism preferable to the one and the other of these extremes? that's my doctrine, dear lass, it's been mine since childhood and I'll surely not renounce it while I live." "You make me shudder, Madame," I said, getting to my feet; "will you pardon me? for I am unable to listen any longer to your sophistries and blasphemies." "One moment, Therese," said Dubois, holding me back, "if I cannot conquer your reason, I may at least captivate your heart. I have need of you, do not refuse me your aid; here are a thousand louis: they will be yours as soon as the blow is struck." Heedless of all but my penchant for doing good, I immediately asked Dubois what was involved so as to forestall, if 'twere possible, the crime she was getting ready to commit. "Here it is," she said: "have you noticed that young tradesman from Lyon who has been taking his meals here for the past four or five days?" "Who? Dubreuil?" "Precisely." "Well?" "He is in love with you, he told me so in confidence, your modest and gentle air pleases him infinitely, he adores your candor, your virtue enchants him; this romantic fellow has eight hundred thousand francs in gold or paper, it's all in a little coffer he keeps near his bed; let me give the man to understand you consent to hear him, whether that be true or not; for, does it matter? I'll get him to propose you a drive, you'll take a carriage out of the town, I'll persuade him he will advance matters with you during your promenade; you'll amuse him, you'll keep him away as long as possible, meanwhile I'll rob him, but I'll not flee; his belongings will reach Turin before I quit Grenoble, we will employ all imaginable art to dissuade him from settling his eyes upon us, we'll pretend to assist his searches; however, my departure will be announced, he'll not be surprised thereby, you'll follow me, and the thousand louis will be counted out to you immediately we get to the Piedmont."

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

  Everything is visible from a closet in my room which adjoins the one where he concludes his business; let's go there without making any noise, and above all be careful not to say a word both about what I am telling you and about what you are going to witness." It was a matter of such great importance to familiarize myself with the customs of this person who had offered me asylum, that I felt I could neglect nothing which might discover them to me; I follow hard upon Rosalie's heels, she situates me near a partition, through cracks between its ill-joined boards one can view everything going on in the neighboring room. Hardly have we taken up our post when Rodin enters, leading a fourteen-year-old girl, blond and as pretty as Love; the poor creature is sobbing away, all too unhappily aware of what awaits her; she comes in with moans and cries; she throws herself down before her implacable instructor, she entreats him to spare her, but his very inexorability fires the first sparks of the unbending Rodin's pleasure, his heart is already aglow, and his savage glances spring alive with an inner light.... "Why, no, no," he cries, "not for one minute, this happens far too frequently, Julie, I repent my forbearance and leniency, their sole result has been repeated misconduct on your part, but could the gravity of this most recent example of it possibly allow me to show clemency, even supposing I wished to? A note passed to a boy upon entering the classroom!" "Sir, I protest to you, I did not -" "Ah I but I saw it, my dear, I saw it." "Don't believe a word of it," Rosalie whispered to me, "these are trifles he invents by way of pretext; that little creature is an angel, it is because she resists him he treats her harshly." Meanwhile, Rodin, greatly aroused, had seized the little girl's hands, tied them to a ring fitted high upon a pillar standing in the middle of the punishment room. Julie is without any defense... any save the lovely face languishingly turned toward her executioner, her superb hair in disarray, and the tears which inundate the most beautiful face in the world, the sweetest... the most interesting. Rodin dwells upon the picture, is fired by it, he covers those supplicating eyes with a blindfold, approaches his mouth and dares kiss them, Julie sees nothing more, now able to proceed as he wishes, Rodin removes the veils of modesty, her blouse is unbuttoned, her stays untied, she is naked to the waist and yet further below.... What whiteness! What beauty! These are roses strewn upon lilies by the Graces' very hands... what being is so heartless, so cruel as to condemn to torture charms so fresh... so poignant? What is the monster that can seek pleasure in the depths of tears and suffering and woe?

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

  Would it have been through the voice of a contemptible bandit he would have shown how it were necessary to serve him? Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him? Sovereign mover of the stars and the heart of man, may he not instruct us by employing the one or convince us by graving himself in the other? Let him, one of these days, upon the Sun indite the law, writ out in letters of fire, the law as he wants us to understand it, in the version that pleases him; then from one end of the universe to the other, all mankind will read it, will behold it at once, and thereafter will be guilty if they obey it not. But to indicate his desires nowhere but in some unknown corner of Asia; to select for witnesses the craftiest and most visionary of people, for alter ego the meanest artisan, the most absurd, him of the greatest rascality; to frame his doctrine so confusedly it is impossible to make it out; to limit knowledge of it to a small group of individuals; to leave the others in error and to punish them for remaining there.... Why, no, Therese, no, these atrocities are not what we want for our guidance; I should prefer to die a thousand deaths rather than believe them. When atheism will wish for martyrs, let it designate them; my blood is ready to be shed. Let us detest these horrors, Therese; let the most steadfast outrages cement the scorn which is patently their due.... My eyes were barely open when I began to loathe these coarse reveries; very early I made it a law unto myself to trample them in the dust, I took oath to return to them never more; if you would be happy, imitate me; as do I, hate, abjure, profane the foul object of this dreadful cult; and this cult too, created for illusion, made like him to be reviled by everyone who pretends to wisdom."

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The very brutality with which he handles the language of sex; the iconographic four-letter words, soiled by centuries of prurience and shame, is an indication of Miller’s certainty of how really filthy all this is. His defense against censorship is incontrovertible—“there was no other idiom possible” to express the “obscenity” he wished to convey.58 His diction is, quite as he claims, a “technical device”59 depending on the associations of dirt, violence, and scorn, in which a sexually distressed culture has steeped the words which also denominate the sexual organs and the sexual act. Miller is completely opposed to dissipating the extrasexual connotations of such diction, but wishes to preserve its force as “magical terms”60 whose power is immanent in their quality of mana and taboo. Under this sacramental cloak a truly obscene ruthlessness toward other human beings is passed over unnoticed, or even defended. “Obscenity” is analogous to the “uses of the miraculous in the Masters,” Miller announces pretentiously.61 He and the censor have linguistic and sexual attitudes in common: ritual use of the “obscene” is, of course, pointless, unless agreement exists that the sexual is, in fact, obscene.62 Furthermore, as Miller reminds us again and again, obscenity is a form of violence, a manner of conveying male hostility, both toward the female (who is sex) and toward sexuality itself (which is her fault). Yet, for all his disgust, indeed because of it, Miller must return over and over to the ordure; steel himself again and again by confronting what his own imagination (powerfully assisted by his cultural heritage and experience) has made horrible. The egotism called manhood requires such proof of courage. This is reality, Miller would persuade us: cunt stinks, as Curley says, and cunt is sex. With regard to the male anatomy, things are very different, since “prick” is power. While urinating in a pissoir or even emptying the garbage, Miller may be smitten with a painful awareness of his own noble destiny. In the “Land of Fuck” the “spermatozoon reigns supreme.” God is the “summation of all the spermatozoa.” Miller himself is divine: “My name? Why just call me God.”63 Actually, he’s even a bit more than this—“something beyond God Almighty…. I am a man. That seems to me sufficient.”64 Probably, but just in case, it is safer to develop a theology and know one’s catechism: “Before me always the image of the body, our triune god of penis and testicles. On the right, God the Father; on the left and hanging a little lower, God the Son! and between them and above them, the Holy Ghost. I can never forget that this holy trinity is man-made.”65

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  He took pleasure in degrading her. I could scarcely blame him for it, she was such a prim, priggish bitch in her street clothes. You’d swear she didn’t own a cunt the way she carried herself in the street. Naturally, when he got her alone, he made her pay for her highfallutin’ ways. He went at it cold-bloodedly. “Fish it out!” he’d say, opening his fly a little. “Fish it out with your tongue!”…once she got the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her. Sometimes he’d stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a wheelbarrow. Or else he’d do it dog fashion, and while she groaned and squirmed he’d nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the smoke between her legs. Once he played her a dirty trick doing it that way. He had worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself. Anyway, after he had almost polished the ass off her with his back-scuttling he pulled out for a second, as though to cool his cock off…and shoved a big long carrot up her twat.52 One recalls Shapiro’s enthusiasm for the “overpowering mysteries of love and copulation.” Even the orgies which Miller presents to us as lessons in a free and happy sensuality, far removed from the constraints of American puritanism, are really only authoritarian arrangements where male will is given absolute license. One of these events takes place at Ulric’s studio. But the brilliant surface of the occasion is marred by the hero’s cupidity in wishing to enjoy both women, though insanely anxious that Ulric stay away from his own Mara. Here, just as in legendary suburbia, the women take no active part in the arrangements whereby they are swapped. Usually Miller and his friends are magnanimous; they offer each other some “cunt” whenever they can, an offer casually made in front of the property herself. Several unforeseen occurrences trouble the moment’s serenity. Ulric’s “blind date,” because mulatto, is “rather difficult to handle, at least in the preliminary stages.”53 Moreover, she begins to menstruate: “What’s a little blood between bouts?” Ulric giggles, alarmed enough to rush to the bathroom and scrub himself “assiduously,” unable to cover a primitive fright which infects the whole gang—Miller himself takes twenty pages to fret over the possibility that contact with menstrual discharge has given him “the syph.” In their omnipotence, Miller and his cohorts can do anything to women whose only revenge is venereal disease—a major reason for the continual masculine anxiety on this score.

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

  "The perfume of that over-heated atmosphere, the sound of smothered sighs, the groans of pleasure, the smack of eager kisses expressing the never-satiated lust of youth, made my brain reel, whilst my blood was parched by the sight of those ever-changing lascivious attitudes, expressing the most maddening paroxysm of debauchery, which tried to soothe itself or to invent a more thrilling and intenser sensuality, or sickening and fainting away under their excess of feeling, whilst milky sperm and ruby drops of blood dappled their naked thighs." "It must have been a rapturous sight." "Yes, but just then it seemed to me as if I were in some rank jungle, where everything that is beautiful brings about instant death; where gorgeous, venomous snakes cluster together and look like bunches of variegated flowers, where sweet blossoms are ever dropping wells of fiery poison. "Here, likewise, everything pleased the eye and galled the blood; here the silvery streaks on the dark-green satin, and there the argentine tracery on the smooth, prasinous leaves of the water-lilies were only the slimy trail—here of man's creative power, there of some loathsome reptile. "'But look there,' said I to Teleny; 'there are also women.' "'No,' replied he, 'women are never admitted to our revels.' "'But look at that couple there. See that naked man with his hand under the skirts of the girl clasped against him.' "'Both are men.' "'What! also that one with the reddish-auburn hair and brilliant complexion? Why, is it not Viscount de Pontgrimaud's mistress?' "'Yes, the Venus d'Ille, as she is generally called; and the Viscount is down there in a corner, but the Venus d'Ille is a man!' "I stared astonished. What I had taken for a woman looked, indeed, like a beautiful bronze figure, as smooth and polished as a Japanese cast à cire perdue, with an enamelled Parisian cocotte's head. "Whatever the sex of this strange being was, he or she had on a tight-fitting dress of a changing colour—gold in the light, dark green in the shade—silk gloves and stockings of the same tint as the satin of the dress, fitting so tightly on the rounded arms and most beautifully-shaped legs that these limbs looked as even and as hard as those of a bronze statue. "'And that other one there, with black ringlets, accroche-cœurs, in a dark blue velvet tea-gown, with bare arms and shoulders, is that lovely woman a man, too?' "'Yes, he is an Italian and a Marquis, as you can see by the crest on his fan. He belongs, moreover, to one of the oldest families of Rome. But look there. Briancourt has been repeatedly making signs to us to go down. Let us go.' "'No, no!' said I, clinging to Teleny; 'let us rather go away.' "Still, that sight had so heated my blood that, like Lot's wife, I stood there, gloating upon it.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  If a positive attitude toward heterosexual love is not quite, in Seignebos’ famous dictum, the invention of the twelfth century, it can still claim to be a novelty. Most patriarchies go to great length to exclude love as a basis of mate selection. Modem patriarchies tend to do so through class, ethnic, and religious factors. Western classical thought was prone to see in heterosexual love either a fatal stroke of ill luck bound to end in tragedy, or a contemptible and brutish consorting with inferiors. Medieval opinion was firm in its conviction that love was sinful if sexual, and sex sinful if loving. Primitive society practices its misogyny in terms of taboo and mana which evolve into explanatory myth. In historical cultures, this is transformed into ethical, then literary, and in the modern period, scientific rationalizations for the sexual politic. Myth is, of course, a felicitous advance in the level of propaganda, since it so often bases its arguments on ethics or theories of origins. The two leading myths of Western culture are the classical tale of Pandora’s box and the Biblical story of the Fall. In both cases earlier mana concepts of feminine evil have passed through a final literary phase to become highly influential ethical justifications of things as they are. Pandora appears to be a discredited version of a Mediterranean fertility goddess, for in Hesiod’s Theogony she wears a wreath of flowers and a sculptured diadem in which are carved all the creatures of land and sea.63 Hesiod ascribes to her the introduction of sexuality which puts an end to the golden age when “the races of men had been living on earth free from all evils, free from laborious work, and free from all wearing sickness.”64 Pandora was the origin of “the damnable race of women—a plague which men must live with.”65 The introduction of what are seen to be the evils of the male human condition came through the introduction of the female and what is said to be her unique product, sexuality. In Works and Days Hesiod elaborates on Pandora and what she represents—a perilous temptation with “the mind of a bitch and a thievish nature,” full of “the cruelty of desire and longings that wear out the body,” “lies and cunning words and a deceitful soul,” a snare sent by Zeus to be “the ruin of men.”66

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  However attractive our current popular image of Henry Miller the liberated man may appear, it is very far from being the truth. Actually, Miller is a compendium of American sexual neuroses, and his value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in having had the honesty to express and dramatize them. There is a kind of culturally cathartic release in Miller’s writing, but it is really a result of the fact that he first gave voice to the unutterable. This is no easy matter of four-letter words; they had been printed already in a variety of places. What Miller did articulate was the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence, and the sense of filth with which our culture, or more specifically, its masculine sensibility, surrounds sexuality. And women too; for somehow it is women upon whom this onerous burden of sexuality falls. There is plenty of evidence that Miller himself is fleetingly conscious of these things, and his “naive, sexual heroics” would be far better if, as one critic suggests, they had been carried all the way to “self-parody.”8 But the major flaw in his oeuvre—too close an identification with the persona, “Henry Miller”—always operates insidiously against the likelihood of persuading us that Miller the man is any wiser than Miller the character.9 And with this Miller; though one has every reason to doubt the strict veracity of those sexual exploits he so laboriously chronicles in the first person, though one has every reason to suspect that much of this “fucking” is sheer fantasy-there is never reason to question the sincerity of the emotion which infuses such accounts; their exploitative character; their air of juvenile egotism. Miller’s genuine originality consists in revealing and recording a group of related sexual attitudes which, despite their enormous prevalence and power, had never (or never so explicitly) been given literary expression before. Of course, these attitudes are no more the whole truth than chivalry, or courtly, or romantic love were—but Miller’s attitudes do constitute a kind of cultural data heretofore carefully concealed beneath our traditional sanctities. Nor is it irrelevant that the sociological type Miller’s impressions represent is that of a brutalized adolescence. The sympathy they elicit is hardly confined to that group but strikes a chord of identification in men of all ages and classes, and constituting an unofficial masculine version of both sexuality and the female which-however it appears to be at variance with them—is still vitally dependent on the official pieties of love: mother, wife, virgin, and matron. The anxiety and contempt which Miller registers toward the female sex is at least as important and generally felt as the more diplomatic or “respectful” version presented to us in conventional writing.10 In fact, to hear Miller bragging of having “broken down” a “piece of tail” is as bracing as the sound of honest bigotry in a redneck after hours of Senator Eastland’s unctuous paternalism.

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

  The Shang, a nomadic hunting people from northern Iran, seized control of the great plain from the Huai Valley to modern Shantung in about 1600 BCE.9 The first Shang cities may have been founded by the masters of the guilds that pioneered the manufacture of the bronze weapons, war chariots, and the magnificent vessels that the Shang used in their sacrifices. The Shang were men of war. They developed a typical agrarian system, but their economy was still heavily subsidized by hunting and plunder, and they did not establish a centralized state. Their kingdom consisted of a series of small towns, each governed by a representative of the royal family and surrounded by massive ramparts of packed earth to guard against flooding and attack. Each town was designed as a replica of the cosmos, its four walls oriented to the compass directions. The local lord and his warrior aristocracy lived in the royal palace, served by retainers—craftsmen, chariot builders, makers of bows and arrows, blacksmiths, metalworkers, potters, and scribes—who dwelled in the south of the city. This was a rigorously segmented society. The king was at the apex of the social pyramid; next in rank were the princes who ruled the cities, and the barons who lived on revenues from the rural territories; the shi, the ordinary warriors, were the lowest-ranking members of the nobility. Religion pervaded Shang political life and endorsed its oppressive system. Because they were not part of their culture, the aristocrats regarded their peasants as an inferior species that was scarcely human. The sage kings had created civilization by driving the animals away from human habitations; the peasants therefore never set foot in the Shang towns and lived quite separately from the nobility in subterranean dwelling pits in the countryside. Meriting no more regard than the Yellow Emperor had shown toward Chi You’s horde, they led brutally miserable lives. In the spring the men moved out of the village and took up permanent residence in huts in the fields. During this season of work, they had no contact with their wives and daughters, except when the women brought out their meals. After the harvest, the men moved back home, sealed up their dwellings, and stayed indoors for the whole of the winter. This was their period of rest, but now the women began their season of labor—weaving, spinning, and wine making. The peasants had their own religious rites and festivals, traces of which have been preserved in the Confucian classic The Book of Songs.10 They could be conscripted in the military campaigns of the aristocracy and are described lamenting so loudly when they were dragged away from their fields that they were gagged during the march. They did not take part in the actual fighting—that was the privilege of the aristocracy—but acted as valets, servants, and carriers and looked after the horses; still, they were strictly segregated from the nobility, marching and camping separately.11

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

  The mouth was his favorite temple, the shrine where he liked best to offer, and while he was in the pursuit of those choice pleasures, he would keep a second woman active: she warmed him with the lash. This man's character was quite as cunning, quite as wicked as that of the others; in whatever shape or aspect vice could exhibit itself, certain it was immediately to find a spectator in this infernal household. You will understand it more easily, Madame, if I explain how the society was organized. Prodigious funds had been poured by the Order into this obscene institution, it had been in existence for above a century, and had always been inhabited by the four richest monks, the most powerful in the Order's hierarchy, they of the highest birth and of a libertinage of sufficient moment to require burial in this obscure retreat, the disclosure of whose secret was well provided against as my further explanations will cause you to see in the sequel; but let us return to the portraits. The eight girls who were present at the supper were so much separated by age I cannot describe them collectively, but only one by one; that they were so unlike with respect to their years astonished me I will speak first of the youngest and continue in order. This youngest one of the girls was scarcely ten: pretty but irregular features, a look of humiliation because of her fate, an air of sorrow and trepidation. The second was fifteen: the same trouble written over her countenance, a quality of modesty degraded, but a bewitching face, of considerable interest all in all. The third was twenty: pretty as a picture, the loveliest blond hair; fine, regular, gentle features; she appeared less restive, more broken to the saddle. The fourth was thirty: she was one of the most beautiful women imaginable; candor, quality, decency in her bearing, and all a gentle spirit's virtues. The fifth was a girl of thirty-six, six months pregnant; dark- haired, very lively, with beautiful eyes, but having, so it seemed to me, lost all remorse, all decency, all restraint. The sixth was of the same age: a tall creature of grandiose proportions, a true giantess, fair of face but whose figure was already ruined in excess flesh; when I first saw her she was naked, and I was readily able to notice that not one part of her body was unstamped by signs of the brutality of those villains whose pleasures her unlucky star had fated her to serve.

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

  "I was not left to wonder long, for the cantinière did to her friend what she had done to her. Thereupon two other whores came and knelt down before the backsides that were thus held open for them, put their tongues in the little black holes of the anuses, and began to lick them, to the pleasure of the active and passive prostitutes, and to that of all the lookers-on. "Moreover, the kneeling women, thrusting their forefingers between the legs of the standing strumpets and on the lower extremity of the lips, began to rub vigorously. "The consumptive girl thus masturbated, kissed, rubbed, and licked, began to writhe furiously, to pant, to sob and to scream with joy, delight, and almost pain, until half fainting. "'Aïe, là, là, assez, aïe, c'est fait,' followed by cries, screams, monosyllables, and utterances of keen delight and unbearable pleasure. "'Now it is my turn,' said the cantinière, and stretching herself on the low couch, she opened her legs widely so that the two thick dark lips gaped widely, and disclosed a clitoris which in its erection was of such a size, that in my ignorance I concluded this woman to be an hermaphrodite. "Her friend the other gougnotte,—this was the first time I had heard the expression—though hardly recovered, went and placed her head between the cantinière's legs, lips against lips, and her tongue on the stiff, red, moist, and wagging clitoris, she too being in such a position that her own middle parts were in the reach of the other whore's mouth. "They wriggled and moved, they rubbed and bumped each other, and their dishevelled hair spread itself not only on the couch but also on the floor; they clasped each other, thrust their fingers into the holes of the other's backside, squeezed the nipples of their breasts, and dug their nails into the fleshy parts of their bodies, for in their erotic fury they were like two wild Mænads, and only smothered their cries in the fury of their kisses. "Though their lust seemed to grow ever stronger, still it did not overcome them, and the fat and tough old strumpet in her eagerness to enjoy was now pressing down her lover's head with both her hands and with all her might, as if she were actually trying to get it all in her womb. "The sight was really loathsome, and I turned my head aside so as not to see it, but the view that offered itself all around was, if anything, more disgusting.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Nearly all patriarchies enforce taboos against women touching ritual objects (those of war or religion) or food. In ancient and preliterate societies women are generally not permitted to eat with men. Women eat apart today in a great number of cultures, chiefly those of the Near and Far East. Some of the inspiration of such custom appears to lie in fears of contamination, probably sexual in origin. In their function of domestic servants, females are forced to prepare food, yet at the same time may be liable to spread their contagion through it. A similar situation obtains with blacks in the United States. They are considered filthy and infectious, yet as domestics they are forced to prepare food for their queasy superiors. In both cases the dilemma is generally solved in a deplorably illogical fashion by segregating the act of eating itself, while cooking is carried on out of sight by the very group who would infect the table. With an admirable consistency, some Hindu males do not permit their wives to touch their food at all. In nearly every patriarchal group it is expected that the dominant male will eat first or eat better, and even where the sexes feed together, the male shall be served by the female.55 All patriarchies have hedged virginity and defloration in elaborate rites and interdictions. Among preliterates virginity presents an interesting problem in ambivalence. On the one hand, it is, as in every patriarchy, a mysterious good because a sign of property received intact. On the other hand, it represents an unknown evil associated with the mana of blood and terrifyingly “other.” So auspicious is the event of defloration that in many tribes the owner-groom is willing to relinquish breaking the seal of his new possession to a stronger or older personality who can neutralize the attendant dangers.56 Fears of defloration appear to originate in a fear of the alien sexuality of the female. Although any physical suffering endured in defloration must be on the part of the female (and most societies cause her-bodily and mentally—to suffer anguish), the social interest, institutionalized in patriarchal ritual and custom, is exclusively on the side of the male’s property interest, prestige, or (among preliterates) hazard. Patriarchal myth typically posits a golden age before the arrival of women, while its social practices permit males to be relieved of female company. Sexual segregation is so prevalent in patriarchy that one encounters evidence of it everywhere. Nearly every powerful circle in contemporary patriarchy is a men’s group. But men form groups of their own on every level. Women’s groups are typically auxiliary in character, imitative of male efforts and methods on a generally trivial or ephemeral plane. They rarely operate without recourse to male authority, church or religious groups appealing to the superior authority of a cleric, political groups to male legislators, etc.

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

  "For all answer the Spahi threw himself face upwards on the ledge of the couch, with his bum uplifted towards us. Then two men went and sat on either side, so that he might rest his legs on their shoulders, after which he took hold of his buttocks, which were as voluminous as those of a fat old harlot's, and opened them with his two hands. As he did so, we not only had a full view of the dark parting line, of the brown halo and the hair, but also of the thousand wrinkles, crests—or gill-like appendages—and swellings all around the hole, and judging by them and by the excessive dilatation of the anus, and the laxity of the sphincter, we could understand that what he had said was no boast. "'Who will have the goodness to moisten and lubricate the edges a little?' "Many seemed anxious to give themselves that pleasure, but it was allotted to one who had modestly introduced himself as a maître de langues, 'although with my proficiency'—he added—'I might well call myself professor in the noble art.' He was indeed a man who bore the weight of a great name, not only of old lineage—never sullied by any plebeian blood—but also famous in war, statemanship, in literature and in science. He went on his knees before that mass of flesh, usually called an arse, pointed his tongue like a lance-head, and darted it in the hole as far as it could go, then, flattening it out like a spatula, he began spreading the spittle all around most dexterously. "'Now,' said he, with the pride of an artist who has just finished his work, 'my task is done.' "Another person had taken the bottle, and had rubbed it over with the grease of a pâte de foie gras, then he began to press it in. At first it did not seem to be able to enter; but the Spahi, stretching the edges with his fingers, and the operator turning and manipulating the bottle, and pressing it slowly and steadily, it at last began to slide in. "'Aie, aie!' said the Spahi, biting his lips; 'it is a tight fit, but it's in at last.' "'Am I hurting you?' "'It did pain a little, but now it's all over;' and he began to groan with pleasure. "All the wrinkles and swellings had disappeared, and the flesh of the edges was now clasping the bottle tightly.

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

  The position was so arranged I could still provide Jerome with a mouth; Clement fitted himself between my hands, I was constrained to arouse him; all the priestesses surrounded this frightful group; each lent an actor what she knew was apt to stir him most profoundly; however, it was I supported them all, the entire weight bore down upon me alone; Severino gives the signal, the other three follow close after him and there I am a second time infamously defiled by the proofs of those blackguards' disgusting luxury. "Well," cries the superior, "that should be adequate for the first day; we must now have her remark that her comrades are no better treated than she." I am placed upon an elevated armchair and from there I am compelled to witness those other horrors which are to terminate the orgies. The monks stand in queue; all the sisters file before them and receive whiplashes from each; next, they are obliged to excite their torturers with their mouths while the latter torment and shower invectives upon them. The youngest, she of ten, is placed upon a divan and each monk steps forward to expose her to the torture of his choice; near her is the girl of fifteen; it is with her each monk, after having meted out punishment, takes his pleasure; she is the butt; the eldest woman is obliged to stay in close attendance upon the monk presently performing, in order to be of service to him either in this operation or in the act which concludes it. Severino uses only his hands to molest what is offered him and speeds to engulf himself in the sanctuary of his whole delight and which she whom they have posted nearby presents to him; armed with a handful of nettles, the eldest woman retaliates upon him for what he has a moment ago done to the child; 'tis in the depths of painful titillations the libertine's transports are born.... Consult him; will he confess to cruelty? But he has done nothing he does not endure in his turn. Clement lightly pinches the little girl's flesh; the enjoyment offered within is beyond his capabilities, but he is treated as he has dealt with the girl, and at the feet of the idol he leaves the incense he lacks the strength to fling into its sanctuary. Antonin entertains himself by kneading the fleshier parts of the victim's body; fired by her convulsive struggling, he precipitates himself into the district offered to his chosen pleasures. In his turn he is mauled, beaten, and ecstasy is the fruit of his torments. Old Jerome employs his teeth only, but each bite leaves a wound whence blood leaps instantly forth; after receiving a dozen, the target tenders him her open mouth; therein his fury is appeased while he is himself bitten quite as severely as he did bite. The saintly fathers drink and recover their strength.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The feeling that woman’s sexual functions are impure is both world-wide and persistent. One sees evidence of it everywhere in literature, in myth, in primitive and civilized life. It is striking how the notion persists today. The event of menstruation, for example, is a largely clandestine affair, and the psycho-social effect of the stigma attached must have great effect on the female ego. There is a large anthropological literature on menstrual taboo; the practice of isolating offenders in huts at the edge of the village occurs throughout the primitive world. Contemporary slang denominates menstruation as “the curse.” There is considerable evidence that such discomfort as women suffer during their period is often likely to be psychosomatic, rather than physiological, cultural rather than biological, in origin. That this may also be true to some extent of labor and delivery is attested to by the recent experiment with “painless childbirth.” Patriarchal circumstances and beliefs seem to have the effect of poisoning the female’s own sense of physical self until it often truly becomes the burden it is said to be. Primitive peoples explain the phenomenon of the female’s genitals in terms of a wound, sometimes reasoning that she was visited by a bird or snake and mutilated into her present condition. Once she was wounded, now she bleeds. Contemporary slang for the vagina is “gash.” The Freudian description of the female genitals is in terms of a “castrated” condition. The uneasiness and disgust female genitals arouse in patriarchal societies is attested to through religious, cultural, and literary proscription. In preliterate groups fear is also a factor, as in the belief in a castrating vagina dentata. The penis, badge of the male’s superior status in both preliterate and civilized patriarchies, is given the most crucial significance, the subject both of endless boasting and endless anxiety.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  When Paul’s ambition inspires his escape from identical circumstances it will be upon the necks of the women whom he has used, who have constituted his steppingstones up into the middle class. For Paul kills or discards the women who have been of use to him. Freud, another Oedipal son, and a specialist in such affairs, predicted that “he who is a favorite of the mother becomes a ‘conqueror.’ “38 Paul is to be just that. By adolescence, he has grown pompous enough under the influence of maternal encouragement to proclaim himself full of a “divine discontent”39 superior to any experience Mrs. Morel might understand. And when his mother has ceased to be of service, he quietly murders her. When she takes an unseasonably long time to die of cancer, he dilutes the milk she has been prescribed to drink: “‘I don’t want her to eat…1 wish she’d die’…And he would put some water with it so that it would not nourish her.”40 By a nice irony the son is murdering her who gave him life, so that he may have a bit more for himself: he who once was fed upon her milk now waters what he gives her to be rid of her. Motherhood, of the all-absorbing variety, is a dangerous vocation. When his first plan doesn’t work, he tries morphine poisoning: “That evening he got all the morphia pills there were, and took them downstairs. Carefully, he crushed them to powder.”41 This too goes into the milk, and when it doesn’t take hold at once, he considers stifling her with the bedclothes. A young man who takes such liberties must be sustained by a powerful faith. Paul is upheld by several—the Nietzschean creed that the artist is beyond morality; another which he shares with his mother that he is an anointed child (at his birth she has the dream of Joseph and all the sheaves in the field bow to her paragon); and a faith in male supremacy which he has imbibed from his father and enlarged upon himself. Grown to man’s estate, Paul is fervid in this piety, but Paul the child is very ambivalent. Despite the ritual observances of this cult which Paul witnessed on pay night42 and in his father’s feckless irresponsibility toward family obligations, he was as yet too young to see much in them beyond the injustices of those who hold rank over him as they did over his mother. Seeing that his father’s drinking takes bread from his young mouth, he identifies with women and children and is at first unenthusiastic about masculine prerogative. When a crony comes to call for his father, Paul’s vision makes us aware of the man’s insolence: “Jerry entered unasked, and stood by the kitchen doorway…stood there coolly asserting the rights of men and husbands.”43

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

  Seizing now one of the rods, I stood over him, and according to his direction, gave him in one breath, ten lashes with much good-will, and the utmost nerve and vigour of arm that I could put to them, so as to make those fleshy orbs quiver again under them; whilst he himself seemed no more concerned, or to mind them, than a lobster would a flea-bite. In the mean time, I view intently the effect of them, which to me at last appeared surprisingly cruel: every lash had skimmed the surface of those white cliffs, which they deeply reddened, and lapping round the side of the furthermost from me, cut specially, into the dimple of it, such livid weals, as the blood either spun out from, or stood in large drops on; and, from some of the cuts, I picked out even the splinters of the rod that had stuck in the skin. Nor was this raw work to be wondered at, considering the greenness of the twigs and the severity of the infliction, whilst the whole surface of the skin was so smooth-stretched over the hard and firm pulp of flesh that filled it, as to yield no play, or elusive swagging under the stroke: which thereby took place the more plump, and cut into the quick.

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

  Frightful cries, terrifying blasphemies, shouts characterize its spurtings, and the monk, enervated, turns me over to Jerome. "I will be no more of a threat to your virtue than Clement was," said this libertine as he caressed the blood-spattered altar at which Clement had just sacrificed, "but I should indeed like to kiss the furrows where the plow passed; I too am worthy to open them, and should like to pay them my modest respects; but I should like even more," went on the old satyr, inserting a finger where Severino had lodged himself, "I should like to have the hen lay, and 'twould be most agreeable to devour its egg... does one exist? Why, yes indeed, by God!... Oh, my dear, dear little girl! how very soft..." His mouth takes the place of his finger... I am told what I have to do, full of disgust I do it. In my situation, alas, am I permitted to refuse? The infamous one is delighted... he swallows, then, forcing me to kneel before him, he glues himself to me in this position; his ignominious passion is appeased in a fashion that cannot justify any complaint on my part. While he acts thus, the fat woman flogs him, another puts herself directly above his mouth and acquits herself of the same task I have just been obliged to execute.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  But then, as abruptly as an arrest, a thin high constipated smell (a smell which spoke of rocks and grease and the sewer-damp of wet stones in poor European alleys) came needling its way out of her. She was hungry, like a lean rat she was hungry, and it could have spoiled my pleasure except that there was something intoxicating in the sheer narrow pitch of the smell, so strong, so stubborn, so private, it was a smell which could be mellowed only by the gift of furs and gems.22 Although her patron, Rojack is almost too repelled to continue: “it could have spoiled my pleasure.” Then he decides that even this unworthy creature can serve him in some way: “I had a desire suddenly to skip the sea and mine the earth, a pure prong of desire to bugger, there was canny hard-packed evil in that butt, that I knew.’23 It is at this point that the first word is spoken; the servant resists the will of her master. But Ruta’s “verboten” makes little impression on Rojack. He has convinced himself that her essence lies in her rectum and that it is a quality which might be convenient to him. As a newly arrived homicide, he is in immediate need of a bit of that canny lower-class self-preservation Ruta is presumed to contain. For if nothing else, she has the invaluable “knowledge of a city rat.” Furthermore, Rojack regards himself in the light of a moralist in search of wisdom and Ruta’s anus can teach him about evil. How evil resides in her bowels or why Ruta has a greater share of it than her master may appear difficult to explain, but many uncanny things are possible with our author. In most of Mailer’s fiction sexuality has such a mystical and metaphysical import that genitals acquire definite personalities. Ruta’s “box,” as Rojack refers to it, has very little to offer; nothing resides therein but “cold gasses from the womb and a storehouse of disappointments.”24 In An American Dream female sexuality is depersonalized to the point of being a matter of class or a matter of nature. Ruta behaves like a guttersnipe, Deborah, the former Mrs. Rojack, like a cruel duchess. Cherry, the mistress Rojack later wins, has the virtues of nature, unavailable to poor Ruta, and excelling those of the privileged female (Deborah) who is now too dangerously insubordinate to stay alive. As the hero and a male, Rojack, of course, transcends any such typology.

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

  Within four months the merchandise is sold successively to about one hundred buyers; some are content with the rose, others more fastidious or more depraved (for the question has not yet been decided) wish to bring to full flower the bud that grows adjacently. After each bout, Duvergier makes a few tailor's readjustments and for four months it is always the pristine fruits the rascal puts on the block. Finally, at the end of this harassing novitiate, Juliette obtains a lay sister's patents; from this moment onward, she is a recognized girl of the house; thereafter she is to share in its profits and losses. Another apprenticeship; if in the first school, aside from a few extravagances, Juliette served Nature, she altogether ignores Nature's laws in the second, where a complete shambles is made of what she once had of moral behavior; the triumph she obtains in vice totally degrades her soul; she feels that, having been born for crime, she must at least commit it grandly and give over languishing in a subaltern's role, which, although entailing the same misconduct, although abasing her equally, brings her a slighter, a much slighter profit.