Disgust

Passages

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

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• From The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2007)

  One comes to the interfaith table not with guilt and not with entitlement, but with humility and interest. The conversation will not be between “church” and “synagogue” but between Ari and Christine, Worthington Wentworth Smyth-Jones-Windsor VIII and Frima-Sarah. Moreover, no tradition is pristine. As a Jew, I am appalled by the sanctioned genocide suggested by passages in Deuteronomy and Joshua. I take no comfort in such passages as Deuteronomy 20:16–18: “But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.” I find horrific the description of holy war in the book of Joshua, where the Israelites, in the taking of the city of Jericho, “devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys” (6:21). I am disgusted by Ezekiel’s misogynistic images: Thus says the Lord God, because your lust was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your whoring with your lovers . . . therefore I will gather all your lovers, with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated; I will gather them against you from all around, and will uncover your nakedness to them, so that they may see all your nakedness. . . . I will deliver you into their hands . . . they shall strip you of your clothes and take your beautiful objects and leave you naked and bare. They shall bring up a mob against you, and they shall stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords. . . . So I will satisfy my fury on you, and my jealousy shall turn away from you; I will be calm, and will be angry no longer. (16:36–42) The rabbinic tradition and subsequent Jewish interpretations of these verses and others denounce the violence. But the texts are still there, just as the history of the relationship between church and synagogue cannot, and should not, be forgotten. The passages and the past should serve as perpetual reminders of the evils that humans perpetrate on each other in the name of religion. Given this history, it should not be surprising that a number of Jews have never read the New Testament (the same can, alas, be said for a number of those who call themselves Christians). I recall one relative asking me years ago, when I was working on my Ph.D. on the Gospel of Matthew at Duke, “Why would you want to read such anti-Semitic stuff?” “Have you ever read it?” I asked.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream. (Amos 4:1, 4–5; 5:21–24) For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6) Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation—I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:10–17) “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:6–8) For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. (Jeremiah 7:5–7) That last example from Jeremiah is particularly striking and can serve as a fitting summary and climax. Here is the context. In the year 609 B.C.E.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  1 [1] vb. feel a loathing (|| form of — קוץ‎ q.v.);— Qal Jmpf. 1 s. N12 DPS ץ‎ 95° I felt a loathing at the generation. Niph. Pf. 2 mpl. 605860. וּנְקטתֶם בַּפָּנִיבֶם‎ Ez 20% ye shall feel loathing against your faces (at yourselves), 0. ב‎ rei, so 36" )72 rei); metapl. (as if from rel,‏ אֶל) 6° pl. consec. O7252 32 Ez‏ 3 (קטט rei, for which Co 3, ‘Krae 2 or by); ‘‏ 5+ על for‏ ;*נקט also 3 fs, 2 ‘52 NYP Jb 10! ‘Qs if from‏ on both forms v. Gresit ora, add) Hithpo'l. 0.‏ (We DPPH); abs.‏ !1397 אֶתְקטָט 2 Impf. 1s.‏ 119%8—Ez 16* v. DP; Jb 8" v. foll.‏ וְאֶתַקוּמְטָה dub. vb. intrans., assumed mng.‏ [קוט]1 break, snap (supposed to be akin to Ar. 5‏ cut, cut off, pare, trim [whence Buhl assumes‏ to account for Dip’ Jb 8%% either as‏ ((קטט / Qal Jmpf. 3 ms. whose hope snappeth; or as‏ cf. Di Bu);‏ ; בִּית 239 ||( n.[m.]=fragile thing‏ “I?‏ קט Bu conj.‏ ,קוּרים prob.erpt.; Du Beer rd.‏ [Aramaism for }? ’?].‏ of foll.; As. ₪076, speak, call, ery‏ /) קו Gee lament), kiilu, speech; Ar. (|) 9) say,‏ word; Eth. PA; sound, voice, and so Aram.‏ 33 > NOP, Ms; Ph. קל‎ voice, so NPun. ,קאל‎ sf. קולא‎ ; SI? 7 voice; NH קול‎ notse, בת קול‎ =0000(, דגב (לל (sts., 0. pref. et suff.,‏ קול sound, voice ;—abs. Sip Gn get age 2%‏ ₪ :"4 ל % 1% ולל) +38 קול estr.‏ ;)°'45 Ju 18*+ , ete. (PP Gn‏ קולף ,2674 ₪ 1 Si‏ TPP Ex 3", etc.); pl. (usu. of thunder)‏ 2 8 קלות , (לוץ (Gi‏ 208 קולת 5 4 +9% Ex‏ קלת 2%45t.;—1. sound: esp. a. of human voice‏ Jos 6” 2K 7; in speech Gn 27” 1 S18 24¥‏ 7B) Ez‏ ק' Jex18*;‏ "צ )37( recognized‏ ;267 pleasant of voice, cf. Ct 21*1* 8%; in sing- —‏ 33° ing Ex 32% 2S 10% Is52°, calling Jug’‏ shouting Ex32" 18 4°° 1 K1* Ezr3”™, rejoicing‏ Joam,‏ ’26 668 ש praise‏ )"33 125 16° = ל Je‏ laughter Je go” weeping Gn 21° 7 2*1 511‏ Bara outery Gn39"" 18 + Je 8",‏ ד Ru‏ | 102% ץ "11 20 27% distress, lament 1695 Ez‏ ved aa קוליה / supplication y 28** 31° 86°; adv. TON ק'‎ with

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And they took it on that day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein he utterly destroyed that day, according to all that he had done to Lachish (Chap. 10). Such is the record, but only part of it. Little wonder the poet E. A. Robinson on reading it exclaimed: “A most bloodthirsty and perilous book for the young. Jehovah is beyond a doubt the worst character in fiction.” We blame the movies and the comics for juvenile delinquency but there is nothing in them to compare with Joshua and his God. To help His “chosen” this God destroyed Egypt and drowned its people; He even drowned “all in whose nostrils was the breath of life.” And we’re supposed to worship him. If so, then we are all devil-worshipers. The Jews firmly believe they are “the chosen people”; what they do not know is that that which chose them is the devil. If the reader cannot accept this, he should read again the book of Joshua. There this Jehovah commanded Joshua to kill thirty-one kings and possibly a million men, women and children. If this be not the devil’s work, what is it? And whom did this killer choose to do His dirty work? Jacob, Joshua, Moses and David, criminals all. Yet they were men “after God’s own heart.” If so, God must be like His men. This is what the Torah is telling us, and only when the Jews realize it will they understand themselves and their tragic history. Now this is not anti-Semitism. The scriptural Jews are but symbols of life and that includes us all. Their ancient priests deceived us but so did their Christian counterparts and for 2,000 years. These see no theistic lesson in Joshua. On the contrary, they use it to show us the rewards of faith in God. He stopped the sun, He divided the sea for His chosen; He sent down manna from heaven for them—and hailstones for their enemies. This is that false security the scriptures offer. On the basis of it fools let serpents sting them to prove their faith, others refuse inoculation and deny their children blood transfusion. Such false faith must be destroyed. A mythical God is a spiritual “Maginot Line”—a comfort when all is well but useless in time of trouble, war, for instance. When that occurs both sides pray to this God, but God is on the side of the heaviest cannon. Here cannon power is God’s aid, and whoever gets there with “the mostest” wins. Now, that aid is El Shaddai’s power, atomic energy, and this is our security today not the God of religion. Lacking any diviner aid some of our preachers tell us that God withdrew from his world after this miraculous age; they must now learn that this miraculous age was mythology’s age, and its God but mythology’s stage equipment.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Every ancient race had its ark, and the sacred things put in it were symbols of the genetic principle. “The ark represents the holy of holies, the consecrated receptacle of life and was one of the most important symbols in the religious ceremonies of the ancients.” “The ark of the Egyptians held the symbols of the Creative forces of life.” “The Jewish ark of the covenant bears a close resemblance to the sacred ark of the Egyptians.” E. E. Goldsmith. These arks are all of historic times, and symbols only, whereas the ark of mythology is the body, and that is the meaning of the statement that the Israelites carried it about with them. And now having conquered Egypt, the “Promised Land” lies before them. But before they can enter it, they must first invade and utterly destroy the six great nations that occupy this “land of milk and honey.” These had “cities great and fenced up to heaven” (Deut. 9:1). Is this fact or just some more mythologized cosmology? In our Premise we said that after the earth was formed some physical elements disintegrated and formed, or would eventually, an aura of six metaphysical elements, likewise “great and fenced up to heaven.” These are the energy substantives of biologic forms, and part of the organism’s work is to absorb, qualify and thus isomerize them. They are thus our servants, and so we find Joshua making them “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Josh. 9:27). Now we are not asserting that this planetary aura was what the Hebrew authors had in mind when writing their account, no more than we had theirs in mind when writing ours—this was perceived later—we point it out only because the parallel is so obvious. At any rate, we hope the barbaric treatment of these unoffending nations was not human. 16. But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: 17. But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord God hath commanded thee (that the Godites may have their land) (Deut. 20). And this, that “meek” man Moses, who said “thou shalt not kill,” did with a vengeance. 32. Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to fight at Jahaz. 33. And the Lord our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. 34. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain: 35. Only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves, and the spoil of the cities, which we took (Deut. 2). If their Judeo-Christian God is as opposed to war as we are told, why did He not stop it here in the beginning?

• From An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845)

  What has been said is sufficient to bring before the mind an historical fact, which indeed does not need evidence. Upon the established religions of Europe the East had renewed her encroachments, and was pouring forth a family of rites which in various ways attracted the attention of the luxurious, the political, the ignorant, the restless, and the remorseful. Armenian, Chaldee, Egyptian, Jew, Syrian, Phrygian, as the case might be, was the designation of the new hierophant; and magic, superstition, barbarism, jugglery, were the names given to his rite by the world. In this company appeared Christianity. When then three well-informed writers call Christianity a superstition and a magical superstition, they were not using words at random, or the language of abuse, but they were describing it in distinct and recognized terms as cognate to those gloomy, secret, odious, disreputable religions which were making so much disturbance up and down the empire. 10. The impression made on the world by circumstances immediately before the rise of Christianity received a sort of confirmation upon its rise, in the appearance of the Gnostic and kindred heresies, which issued from the Church during the second and third centuries. Their resemblance in ritual and constitution to the Oriental religions, sometimes their historical relationship, is undeniable; and certainly it is a singular coincidence, that Christianity should be first called a magical superstition by Suetonius, and then should be found in the intimate company, and seemingly the parent, of a multitude of magical superstitions, if there was nothing in the Religion itself to give rise to such a charge. 11.

• From An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845)

  Place this description before Pliny or Julian; place it before Frederick the Second or Guizot.[208:1] "Apparent diræ facies." Each knows at once, without asking a question, who is meant by it. One object, and only one, absorbs each item of the detail of the delineation. SECTION I. THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST CENTURIES. The _primâ facie_ view of early Christianity, in the eyes of witnesses external to it, is presented to us in the brief but vivid descriptions given by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, the only heathen writers who distinctly mention it for the first hundred and fifty years. Tacitus is led to speak of the Religion, on occasion of the conflagration of Rome, which was popularly imputed to Nero. "To put an end to the report," he says, "he laid the guilt on others, and visited them with the most exquisite punishment, those, namely, who, held in abhorrence for their crimes (_per flagitia invisos_), were popularly called Christians. The author of that profession (_nominis_) was Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, was capitally punished by the Procurator, Pontius Pilate. The deadly superstition (_exitiabilis superstitio_), though checked for a while, broke out afresh; and that, not only throughout Judæa, the original seat of the evil, but through the City also, whither all things atrocious or shocking (_atrocia aut pudenda_) flow together from every quarter and thrive. At first, certain were seized who avowed it; then, on their report, a vast multitude were convicted, not so much of firing the City, as of hatred of mankind (_odio humani generis_)." After describing their tortures, he continues "In consequence, though they were guilty, and deserved most signal punishment, they began to be pitied, as if destroyed not for any public object, but from the barbarity of one man."

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  That first time, he took a phone call in the bathroom, and then peeked out from behind the half-ajar door, mouthing to me with his hand over the mouthpiece, “I just like watching you,” while I stretched and smiled, offering myself up through studied pose to be seen as beatific, natural, relaxed. Our afternoon was peppered by comments like that, observations of what he wanted to be so, not necessarily what strictly was so: “I’m with a hot girl in a hotel room in the middle of the day, drinking champagne, how did I get so lucky”; “Look at us, I’m doing lines off your perfect ass”; “I feel so comfortable with you, like we’ve known each other forever.” It didn’t matter that he wasn’t lucky, he was just rich; it didn’t matter whether or not my ass was perfect, because perfection is in the eye of the beholder; and it didn’t matter that he felt comfortable only because I made sure that he did, receiving every stray thought and confession with warmth, or laughter, or a doe-eyed openness. He talked himself into believing it was all happenstance, fate. The next time, high and glassy-eyed, close to my face, he whispered, “I can trust you, right?” “Yes,” I answered, “of course.” He wanted to open up the world to me, and so I pretended my world had been closed before him. “You have no idea how beautiful you are, do you?” he asked, while undressing me. “No man has ever cared about your pleasure like this, has he,” while he spun his fingers around inside me, an unwieldy carousel of self-validation and drug-addled clumsiness. He brought me to his home that night, under the guise of wanting to show me a book he had there. We took a cab, and he insisted on rolling the windows down even though it was winter, “because of Covid,” which I found absurdly funny—the idea of any kind of risk mitigation while taking a stranger to one’s home that one shares, monogamously, with one’s wife, in a pandemic. In the cab, he used his phone to disable their security cameras. Once at their place, he showed me the book—like an afterthought, or a forethought to rush through as a necessity before getting to what he really wanted to do—and then gave me a tour. His apartment was beautiful; I didn’t like being there. We reached the master bathroom and he pushed me against the mirror, bringing my hand to his belt buckle. I left him for a moment, to find my bag and get a condom out of it, and when I returned, he fucked me over the sink. I noticed his wife’s clothes in the laundry hamper and, after, the books on her side of the bed, and felt not quite guilty but astonished by his betrayal, which I was witness to.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The mediæval clergy were often notoriously immoral, but the people were kept in awe of them because they were the representatives of the Church, and through them alone could the sacraments and the absolution of the Church be obtained. They might not have the spirit of Christ, but they had the ordination of the Church. Churchly correctness took precedence of Christlike goodness. If sin profited the Church, even sin might be holy. The amount of distortion of facts, falsification of history, and forging of documents practised in order to advance the cause of the Church is quite incredible. The sale of indulgences, which finally unfettered the popular protest of the Reformation movement, was merely a glaring instance of prostituting the spiritual welfare of the people to the financial enrichment of the church organization. Christian morality finds its highest dignity and its constant corrective in making the kingdom of God the supreme aim to which all minor aims must contribute and from which they gain their moral quality. The Church substituted itself for the kingdom of God, and thereby put the advancement of a tangible and very human organization in the place of the moral uplifting of humanity. By that substitution the ethical plane of all actions was subtly but terribly lowered. The kingdom of God can never be advanced by cruelty and trickery; the power of the organized Church can be and has been advanced by persecution and forgery. By that substitution the Church could claim all service and absorb all social energies. It has often been said that the Church interposed between the soul of man and God. It also interposed between man and humanity. It magnified what he did for the Church and belittled what he did for humanity. It made its own organization the chief object of social service. The more churchly Christianity is, the more will the Church be the only sphere of really Christian activity. Only those portions of daily life which are related to the Church will be illuminated by the consciousness of serving God. The rest is secular, natural, permissible; it is not religious and holy. The secular calling in the home, the workshop, or the town is left unhallowed by religion and void of that joy and enthusiasm which come through the consciousness that God loves our work. If a man takes his religion seriously, he will then want to devote his life to the Church. The property of the primitive Church was entirely devoted to the needy. The officers of the Church lived by their own labor unless the service of Christ compelled them to forego their earnings. As Christianity became ecclesiastical, the Church made itself the chief recipient and its clergy the chief beneficiaries of Christian giving. If a man helped a friend in need, he did a moral act.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It is responsible for many of the most deadly diseases, especially tuberculosis. It is also responsible for the moral deterioration accompanying the tenement house and the street life of the cities. The ramifications of these demoralizing effects are almost endless. A boy dug a lot of angleworms and kept them in a small amount of earth in a tin can. After some days he returned to the neglected worms and found that most of them had died in their crowding, a few still lived limp and discolored, and maggots infested the rotting mass. Here were organisms taken out of their natural surroundings, in which they would have maintained their cleanliness and health, and crowded to their death. The parable is plain. The values thus created by society and absorbed by individuals are enormous. An eminent and very conservative economist estimates that the unearned increment in Berlin during the last fifty years certainly amounted to $500,000,000 or $750,000,000. Rental values in London increased in 1871–1891 from 24,000,000 pounds to almost 40,000,000, and about 7,150,000 pounds of this was unearned increase. The total of this for twenty years would be equal to the entire estimated wealth of Germany. Owing to the immense growth of our country, and the still more immense growth of our cities, this process has gone on faster in the United States than anywhere else. Successful land speculation has formed the nucleus of very many of our large fortunes. Our cities are poor, unclean, always pressing against the limits of indebtedness, and laying heavy burdens of taxation on the producing classes. At the same time these enormous values pass to individuals who have only contributed a fractional part to their creation. There is a deep-rooted injustice here which must impress any one who reflects upon it and whose judgment is not clouded by profit derived from the system. This does not, however, imply that those who profit by it are morally guilty. They may or may not be. Few as yet recognize any wrong in it. Law and custom sanction it. Even those who see the wrong are scarcely able to withdraw from it. They, too, need land to accomplish anything and must hold it in the established ways. But poison is poison, even if it is supposed to be a necessary food or drink. Slavery once had the sanction of human and divine law.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  The passage is an allegory and deals with the punishment of Jerusalem, not of actual women. But the allegory accepts as its premise that an adulterous woman deserves to be stoned or hacked to pieces, and the vivid imagery may well have contributed to violence against women, promiscuous or not, over the centuries. It may not be fair to characterize Ezekiel as a misogynist. We know too little of his personal life, but he is grief-stricken at the death of his wife, whom he describes as “the delight of my eyes” (24:15-18). It is unfortunate that his use of female imagery is predominantly negative and associates women primarily with promiscuity and impurity. The allegory of chapter 16 is problematic at best, and it suggests deep-seated problems in the kind of priestly theology that informs the prophet’s preaching. The prophet further expresses his disdain for Jerusalem by associating it with Samaria and Sodom (v. 46). The promise that all three cities will be restored (vv. 53-63) is surprising in the context, and we must wonder whether it was originally part of the allegorical oracle. There is a clear allusion to Hosea 2, however, in the promise that “I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth” (Ezek 16:60; cf. Hos 2:15-23). Even the restored Jerusalem, however, will still be tainted by the association with Samaria and Sodom. Female imagery figures again in the oracle in chapter 23 on the two women, Oholah (Samaria) and Oholibah (Jerusalem; the names can be read as “her [own] tent” and “my tent is in her,” respectively, with the implication that YHWH’s residence was in Jerusalem). Again, both cities/women are accused of lusting for Assyrians and Babylonians, which is hardly a fair description of the historical relationships. It is true that both cities were defiled by the foreign armies, but rape rather than lust would be the appropriate metaphor. Yet, according to the prophet, YHWH turned in disgust from them. Unfortunately, men have often turned in disgust from women who were raped, and accused them of “wanting it.” Ezekiel’s accusations against Samaria and Judah are more complex than this. While the guiding metaphor is adultery, in the form of idolatry, there are also charges of human sacrifice and of profaning sanctuary and Sabbaths (23:36-39; note, however, that in 20:25-26 human sacrifice is included among statutes of YHWH that were not good, which he had given Israel “to horrify them”). Yet here again the violence of the punishment (stripping and disfiguring, vv. 25-26) constitutes a dangerous allegory. Whatever Ezekiel’s attitude to actual women may have been, the disgust for the personified Jerusalem that he attributes to YHWH and his sanction of violence against her provides a very unfortunate model for male-female relations. Political Allegories Two other allegories in this section of the book are much less controversial for the modern reader, although they may have been quite controversial in their time.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  They could justly retort the charge on the men of the evangelical school. When the latter deal with public wrongs, they often exhibit a curious unfamiliarity with the forms which sin assumes there, and sometimes reverently bow before one of the devil’s spider-webs, praising it as one of the mighty works of God. Regeneration includes that a man must pass under the domination of the spirit of Christ, so that he will judge of life as Christ would judge of it. That means a revaluation of social values. Things that are now “exalted among men” must become “an abomination” to him because they are built on wrong and misery. Unless a man finds his judgment at least on some fundamental questions in opposition to the current ideas of the age, he is still a child of this world and has not “tasted the powers of the coming age.” He will have to repent and believe if he wants to be a Christian in the full sense of the world. No man can help the people until he is himself free from the spell which the present order has cast over our moral judgment. We have repeatedly pointed out that every social institution weaves a protecting integument of glossy idealization about itself like a colony of tent-caterpillars in an apple tree. For instance, wherever militarism rules, war is idealized by monuments and paintings, poetry and song. The stench of the hospitals and the maggots of the battle-field are passed in silence, and the imagination of the people is filled with waving plumes and the shout of charging columns. A Russian general thought Verestchagin’s pictures ought to be destroyed because they disenchanted the people. If war is ever to be relegated to the limbo of outgrown barbarism, we must shake off its magic. When we comprehend how few wars have ever been fought for the sake of justice or the people; how personal spite, the ambition of military professionals, and the protection of capitalistic ventures are the real moving powers; how the governing classes pour out the blood and wealth of nations for private ends and exude patriotic enthusiasm like a squid secreting ink to hide its retreat—then the mythology of war will no longer bring us to our knees, and we shall fail to get drunk with the rest when martial intoxication sweeps the people off their feet. In the same way we shall have to see through the fictions of capitalism. We are assured that the poor are poor through their own fault; that rent and profits are the just dues of foresight and ability; that the immigrants are the cause of corruption in our city politics; that we cannot compete with foreign countries unless our working class will descend to the wages paid abroad.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  While enforced ignorance and the subsequent mystification of femaleness/femininity is a pervasive phenomenon, it clearly affects different individuals to different extents. Stephen Ducat makes a strong case that those boys who are most fiercely taught to disavow femininity within themselves are the ones who tend to have the most outwardly misogynistic attitudes overall. 6 This makes sense when one considers the fact that enforced ignorance and mystification act to dehumanize those who are female and feminine, thus enabling certain men to sexually objectify, harass, and outright abuse members of those groups without experiencing any feelings of empathy or remorse. On the other hand, those boys who are given the freedom to express their full range of gendered expression, and/ or who are encouraged to listen, respect, and relate to the women in their lives, may avoid the intense enforced ignorance that other males face. Additionally, like any form of childhood socialization, enforced ignorance may be overcome later in life as one gains a greater understanding of women or as one grows more comfortable with feminine expression both within oneself and in others. Crossdresser Development Now that we understand enforced ignorance and the mystification of femaleness/femininity in those who are socialized as male, we can ask what specific effect this has on crossdresser development. The first thing that needs to be said is that those who embrace the crossdresser identity are likely to be a heterogeneous group, encompassing a spectrum of individuals who have a feminine gender expression and/or a female subconscious sex, and who experience those inclinations at varying intensities. This would explain why some crossdressers never transition, while others eventually do, and why some view crossdressing as a way to express a feminine side of their personalities, while others see it as an opportunity to experience themselves as female as much as a male-bodied person possibly can. The idea that crossdressing is often driven by intrinsic inclinations (rather than simply being a phase, hobby, or kink that individuals stumble upon) is supported by the fact that virtually all self-identified crossdressers report that their desire to dress and act feminine/female persists throughout their lives. The fact that males are socialized to view femaleness and femininity as enigmatic and taboo helps explain the very different manifestations of gender expression of MTF and FTM spectrum people. It also offers an explanation as to why some MTF spectrum folks learn to channel their femininity/femaleness into crossdressing, while others openly express their femininity/femaleness from a very early age. As mentioned in previous chapters, most psychiatric explanations for this dichotomy in the MTF spectrum population have centered on presumed differences in sexual orientation and arousal.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Understanding this predator/prey dichotomy is crucial for us to make sense of the way transsexual women are sexualized in our society. Even though many people insist that trans women remain male despite our transitions, we are hardly ever sexualized as “men.” Sure, there have been a handful of movies that depict fictional MTF transsexuals violently preying on women, but such characters are almost always portrayed as “deviant” or “deranged” males rather than as actual trans women. For example, the characters in the movies Dressed to Kill (1980) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) neither live as nor physically transition to female, and their supposed transsexuality is treated simply as a psychosis that drives them to commit violence. In the vast majority of cases, however, the sexualization of trans women casts us in the role of sexual object rather than sexual aggressor. For example, the tranny sex and porn industries, which primarily cater to straight-identified men, overwhelmingly feature trans women as their sexual objects. In contrast, trans men are not objectified by straight-identified men to nearly the same extent; trans male porn (what little of it there is) attracts a predominantly gay male and queer female audience. 2 In my own experience, I have found that the way I’m sexualized as a trans woman is similar to how I’m sexualized when I’m presumed to be a cissexual woman (i.e., I’m sexually objectified rather than seen as an aggressor). Invariably, though, the former is more invasive and debasing. For example, when I am assumed to be cissexual, the sexualizing comments I receive almost always come from random strangers in public. However, if I meet a man in a more social situation (e.g., at a party or a bar), he rarely stoops to blatantly crass, sexualizing comments, even when he is flirting with me. However, in social settings where I am known to be transsexual (e.g., at events where I perform spoken word poetry), men do often blatantly sexualize me: I have had men immediately engage me in conversations about how much they enjoy “she-male” porn, flat-out tell me “I’m turned on by ‘girls like you,’” and explicitly describe the sex acts they have had with other trans women in the past. And numerous times I have received unsolicited emails, presumably from men who found my website during a search using the keyword “transsexual,” in which they describe their sexual fantasies about trans women in gory detail, or ask me graphic questions about my body and sexual activities. These emails are always centered on my transsexual femaleness; I do not receive similar emails from people who presume that I am a cissexual female. Some might suggest that the reason why I experience more hardcore sexualization as a trans woman has to do with the fact that transsexuals are rather rare, thus leading others to view us as exotic. While rareness may contribute to this phenomenon, I don’t believe that it’s a sufficient explanation.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  And the discovery that a family member is intersex is not simply some clever plot twist. It is most often a traumatic situation, resulting in the person being endlessly poked and prodded by doctors, an experience that shrouds individuals and their families in shame and secrecy. For writers who have never had to deal with being transsexual or intersex to lay claim to those experiences, to use them for their own purposes, and to profit from them, is nothing short of exploitation. Fables of the Deconstruction Arguably, nowhere have people felt more entitled to possess and exploit intersex and transsexual experiences and identities than in academia. The ungendering of gender-variant people has been an ongoing practice among sociologists, poststructuralist theorists, and feminists who wish to demonstrate that our notions of gender are socially constructed. One of the earliest examples of this approach is sociologist Harold Garfinkel’s 1967 book Studies in Ethnomethodology, which attempted to elucidate how members of society “produce stable, accountable practical activities, i.e., social structures of everyday activities.” 16 While Garfinkel could have examined how the average person makes sense of their own gendered experiences, he instead focused on someone who didn’t have the privilege of taking their own gender for granted. That person was Agnes, a trans woman who (unbeknownst to Garfinkel) had taken female hormones for a number of years and posed as intersex in the hope of obtaining sex reassignment surgery (during the 1950s in the U.S., such surgeries were regularly carried out on intersex individuals, but not transsexuals). 17 Garfinkel devoted seventy pages to describing Agnes’s attempts to reconcile her female identity and feminine behavior with the fact that she had male genitals. The account is extraordinarily objectifying, and not only with regard to Garfinkel’s descriptions of Agnes’s body (such as, “Her measurements were 38-25-38” and “she was dressed in a tight sweater which marked off her thin shoulders, ample breasts, and narrow waist”). 18 He spends page after page relishing the details of how she managed to “pass” as a woman, highlighting her anxiety around the discrepancy between her anatomy and gender identity, and pointing out what he believed were inconsistencies in her personal history and her claims that she always felt like a girl. The entitled way he picks apart Agnes’s life, graphically chronicling her fears, secrets, embarrassments, and insecurities, shows no regard for her as a person or for the immense difficulty she must have faced in simply trying to survive and make sense of her life as a gender-variant person living in the 1950s.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  (Emphasis mine.) 7 Thus, like his director, Wilkinson shows no respect for his transsexual character’s gender identity. As a result, Roy comes off as excruciatingly mousy and confused, presumably because it never occurred to either Wilkinson or Anderson that a man who wanted to be female could be any other way. For someone who claims to have little interest in making a film about the “adventures of a transgender person,” Anderson sure does fancy her film up in all of the accoutrements of the transsexual transitioning process: The dialogue includes discussions about electrolysis, a play-by-play description of how a vagina is created during MTF sex reassignment surgery, and even talk about what breast size Roy can expect after she goes on hormones. At one point in the movie, close-ups of Roy’s hormone prescriptions—Premarin and Spironolactone—precede an early morning family breakfast scene in which Roy, her wife, and her daughter (who has recently had her first period) all start arguing with each other in an apparent hormone-induced frenzy. (Upon watching that scene, I wasn’t quite sure if I should be more offended as a woman or as a transsexual.) In the end, the most damaging aspect of Normal is that it gives the impression of being a serious film about transsexuality without ever incorporating the perspectives of real-life transsexuals. There are countless other movies that, on the surface, seem to be more demeaning or insulting toward transsexuals, but I find Normal to be more damaging than most. At least the Ace Venturas and South Parks of the world don’t even bother to pretend that they know what they’re talking about when they create transsexual characters. Anderson, on the other hand, did just enough homework about transsexuality to make her film dangerous. She poached and pilfered the transsexual experience without any sense of respect or responsibility for the very people she exploited in the process. Another writer who knows just enough to be dangerous is Jeffrey Eugenides. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex centers on an intersex person named Cal, who is raised female until he discovers his condition during puberty. The book follows Cal as he develops male physical attributes and eventually a male identity. So why did Eugenides set out to write a book about an intersex person? In an interview, he explained that he simply “used a hermaphrodite” (a word most intersex people find stigmatizing) as a metaphor for the confusing changes in identity and sexuality that all people face during adolescence. 8 So, this time, a main character is ungendered to make a larger point about puberty and metamorphosis. Eugenides says he was initially inspired to write Middlesex after reading Herculine Barbin, a real-life account of an intersex person who lived during the nineteenth century, published by French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1978.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  While Anderson seems to believe that stories that center on extra-marital affairs have become passé (both because the premise has been overused by writers and because many people continue to love the person who has cheated on them), she views transsexuality as “ultimate betrayal” that can occur within a marriage. 4 So, in other words, one of the characters, Roy, is ungendered in order to throw a monkey wrench into the couple’s marriage. And transsexuality is no longer a marginalized identity or a grueling issue that real human beings struggle with; it is merely a literary device—a “metaphor” for the “ultimate catastrophe” that can strike a relationship. You would think that Anderson—as a woman and a lesbian—would be aware of the troubling way sexual minorities are portrayed (and their voices silenced) by the media, and that she would, at the very least, make a modest attempt to ensure that her character was respectful of the transsexual experience. Unfortunately, this is not the case. When the interviewer asked her if she drew on any sources when researching the movie, Anderson unabashedly answered that she relied solely on her “imagination,” that she made it up all herself. 5 Unencumbered by any need to have her character reflect reality, Anderson was free to turn Roy into a transsexual caricature. She explained in the interview that she purposely set out to make sure that the audience would not take Roy seriously as a woman. 6 Perhaps this is why Anderson makes no attempt to have any of the other characters come to relate to Roy as female or use female pronouns when addressing her. Roy herself doesn’t seem to protest this fact or assert her female identity at any point; in fact, she is inordinately meek and docile for someone who is in the process of coming out as transsexual. In a pre-movie interview, Tom Wilkinson, who played Roy in the made-for-cable movie, said, “I wanted to retain the kind of innocence about the whole thing that that guy had. He doesn’t know quite what he’s getting into.”

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  curatorial power over libraries to the librarians. “Just as academic judgements should be left to the academics... decisions about the content of library collections should be left to the librarians.” Without that, the decision in Island Trees v. Pico still leaves room for the idea that certain books are too objectively vulgar or offensive or obscene for the eyes of children. Governor Ron DeSantis defends his stance on book removals in precisely this way: “In Florida, pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards,” he says on his official website. In the 1980s, book challenges weren’t coming from government officials like they are now. But in the fall of 1982, one book was effectively banned by the federal government. It was called Show Me!, and it was a Germany-imported sex ed publication that came out in the US in 1975. It billed itself as “A Picture Book of Sex for Children and Parents” and consisted of black-and-white photographs and captions by an American named Will McBride, along with educational passages by European doctor Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt. Covering it for the New York Times, reviewer Linda Wolfe described paging through Show Me! with a mounting and palpable sense of alarm. “The photographs reveal the world of sex through the eyes of two exquisite noble savages of about 5 years of age,” she writes. “We puzzle with them over their bellybuttons and the fact that he has a penis and she a vagina. She turns bottoms-up so he can see close-up what she’s got, and he shows her how he ‘pees’ and ‘poops.’ ” Up until this point, Wolfe says, she still believed the book could be an asset to families. Then, it got weirder. “But soon these children are pondering the sexual behavior of their adolescent siblings. The boy has seen—and we see through his eyes —his teenage brother and a barely pubescent girlfriend having intercourse. The girl has watched her older sister rub her clitoris, and we see that, too.” The prose is tempered but it’s clear that Wolfe is so repulsed by Show Me! that the effect is borderline humorous. “One begins to suspect that the photographer enjoys scaring children,” she writes. “And throughout the book one grand and erroneous impression about sex in our society is conveyed: it is that sex is something which happens in public.” Wolfe was not alone in her impression of Show Me! Although the title was lauded in Germany, even SIECUS hesitated to recommend it. The September 1975 issue of

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The injunction against pederasty has even snuck into the Ten Commandments, between adultery and theft! For Clement, Paul’s condemnation of same-sex love in Romans was a straightforward continuation of the Mosaic law. Clement elaborates on the idea of “natural use” with unsparing literalism. Every orifice, every canal, every protuberance had a natural use, to which it was limited. Procreationism and the naturalization of heterosexuality went hand in hand. 53 Though Clement’s hostility to same-sex eros was inevitable, the specific complexion of his moralism marks him as a man of Hellenic erudition in the Roman Empire. Clement’s erudition could plumb the depths of Greek mythology whenever it provided an opportunity to embarrass; the lusts and escapades of a Zeus or Dionysus were fodder for humiliating recital. Clement’s sensibility of male prostitution as a “disease” would have been comfortable to Dio or Ptolemy, and it is an idea with an ominous ecclesiastical future. For Clement, open love between males was always closely associated with the flesh trade. Clement was an acute, if glowering, social observer. His image of manliness was a unique concoction of Christian ideals and contemporary assumptions, without precedent or successor. Clement took hair as the “mark of manhood.” He describes, in gruesome detail, the hair-plucking shops of Alexandria; the habits of anal and genital depilation symbolized for him the entrenched disorder of civic life. There could be no doubt, he said, that a man who would submit to such violation “by day” played a woman “by night.” The statement is perfectly at home in a culture where manliness was policed by competitive social surveillance. More than any other early Christian, Clement’s understanding of masculinity has absorbed some of the machismo of his world. He thinks of “she-men” as soft voluptuaries, as likely to have sex with women as with men. The Christian was to avoid “all softness and daintiness.” There is no clearer sign of Clement’s cultural horizons than this: he is one of the vanishingly few Christians to use the vernacular term of abuse for a man who monstrously flaunted gender protocols— kinaidos. Clement’s outlook on same-sex love is an unstable mixture of Moses, Paul, and Lucian. 54 Of all the early Christians, Clement is most sensitively estranged from the civic fabric of the Roman Empire. This was a dizzying vantage from which to view the world. There is something of Dio Chrysostom’s alienated perspective in Clement’s lofty pronouncements. “Such complete lasciviousness has poured over the cities that it has become the law.” Like Dio, Clement located the essence of the ancient sexual economy in the institution of venal sex. “Women are prostituted in brothels, selling the violation of their flesh for pleasure, and boys are led to reject their nature, taking on the role of women.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In one of those passages that sent Victorian translators scurrying to the decent obscurity of a learned language, the hyena was taken as a symbol of misused orifices. Various modes of same-sex intercourse are abused, but in a world with only the most primitive technologies of contraception, this tirade was no small infringement on conjugal liberty either. “Sex not intended to produce children is a rape of nature.” 47 This imaginative allegorization was ready to hand in the writings of the idiosyncratic Philo, who did the pioneering work of squaring Plato with Moses. But it is too easy to soften Clement’s radicalism by ascribing it to the influence of Philo or, even more distantly, Plato and the Pythagoreans. Clement shares, or at least deploys, a certain reverence for human seed, but he is never overwhelmed by fears of spermatorrhea. The architecture of his thought is neither Philonic nor Pythagorean. Clement’s procreationism is much closer to that of Athenagoras, and it was born out of the same exegetical tensions. The deepest principle of Clement’s sexual ideology is not procreationism but rather the transcendence of desire. For Clement, Christian marriage had received a special dispensation. “For the others, marriage achieves a concord through the shared experience of pleasure, but for the philosophers [Christians] it leads to a concord according to the Word.” Christian marriage had as little to do with pleasure as possible. “A love of pleasure, even if pursued within marriage, is irregular, unjust, and irrational.” Clement addressed those who argued that marriage, and its tame pleasures of the bed, were according to nature. His endorsement of the view was tepid. “Even if this is true, it is still shameful that man, created by God, should be more uncontrolled than the beasts.” The furthest Clement would go was to admit that “nature, as in the case of food, so in the case of lawful marriage, allots to us what is proper, useful, and seemly, that is, to seek after procreation.” Clement believed that in Christian marriage the couple’s sexual intimacy would be aimed exclusively at procreation, so that it could even escape the nets of desire and pleasure. Marriage according to the Word was no sin because it offered a mysterious exemption from the normal pangs of desire that motivated sex. These sentiments appear most clearly in Clement’s Miscellanies, which transmit his deepest teachings. “With marriage, food, and other things, let us do nothing from desire, but only will those things that are necessary. For we are not children of desire, but of will. And so the man who marries for procreation should practice continence, not even desiring his wife, whom he should love. Procreation should be sought with a reverent and controlled will.” For Clement, proper sex was solemn, cool, ratiocinative.