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

  It can be reasonably assumed that the lamp workshops produced for a market, a market broadly shaped by public culture; other than their ubiquity and durability, there is nothing particularly special about lamps, which in fact reflect artistic styles from other media. What the story of erotic lamps suggests is that the positive valence of eroticism endures across the high empire and recedes only behind the advancing tide of Christianization in later phases of the Roman Empire. 90 If Roman marriage was an erotically charged institution, it is worth noting how firmly the actual practices of the Roman bedroom lay beyond explicit regulation, even among the moralists of the age. The fact is that authors like Plutarch, who goes so far as to advocate orderly sexual habits, retreat into pragmatic discretion before legislating on specific acts. So, notably, did the rabbis, who refrained from heavy-handed interference in the married couple’s sexual life. In turn we are left to glean from a largely barren field. We find in different types of evidence a distinction between the sexual acts to be expected of a wife and those to be expected of a disreputable woman. A magical papyrus casts a spell on a woman in the hopes of achieving “whorish sex,” as though that more or less summarizes a style, or intensity, of amorous encounter. Seneca, among others, counsels men not to love their wives as though they were mistresses. Fellatio is regularly assumed to be the domain of the prostitute. Still, Roman art depicts a wider range of positions and configurations than ever before, and not all of these have to involve paid professionals. Whereas late classical Greek art had tended to focus on the gratification of the man, Roman erotic art takes a far more variable perspective. Scenes of women on top, mulier equitans, focus on the reposed beauty of the woman’s body. If the representation of male fulfillment was still predominant, there was undoubtedly a new visual emphasis in Roman art on the mutual pleasure of the partners. 91 Still, it can only be wondered how well women fared in the bedroom. There was an abiding prejudice against acts that were considered to pollute the mouth. Visual evidence suggests that women could turn to male prostitutes to enjoy exotic pleasures, but this cannot have been an option to many women. There are signs that sometimes the possibilities were even unknown. More often there is simply blind disgust. Galen, who was not a prude, could claim as a matter of fact, “We find cunnilingus even more repulsive than fellatio.” Cultural conventions of male dominance could be a powerful force. Or they could just act to draw a curtain around what really happened in the bedroom. The truth is that there is more discussion about female orgasms in the Roman Empire than ever before, and for a long time after. For Ovid, mutual satisfaction was a vital part of his sexual code.

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

  There is, of course, no reason to doubt that droves of poor women were forced to become prostitutes in the Roman Empire. In an economy with relatively few respectable employments for women and no social safety net, sudden shocks could render women hopelessly vulnerable. But the defining feature of prostitution in the Roman era, which gives Roman prostitution its particular tincture, is the pervasive influence of slavery. 51 Convincing testimony confirms the sinister link between the slave trade and prostitution. The most chilling evidence is an iron slave collar, a typical means of preventing or punishing slave flight, discovered at Bulla Regia in North Africa; found still clasped around the neck of a skeleton, the collar’s inscription reads, “I am a slutty whore; retain me, I have fled Bulla Regia.” A third-century papyrus shows a dispute that arose from the sale of a girl by pimps. The pimp was, presumptively, a man “who buys girls.” Child exposure, a significant input to the Roman slave supply, was presumed to lead “to slavery or to the brothel,” fates that were not distinct. One of the more interesting, if oblique, indices of the role of slavery in the sex industry is that Roman law developed a special covenant allowing masters to sell slaves with the binding restriction that the slave not be prostituted; whether these covenants indicate residual benevolence or the frequency of biological relations between master and slave, they demonstrate the real danger that, for a slave, prostitution lurked in the future. 52 The desire to romanticize venal sex was perduring, and even the erotic art in brothels idealized the sexual encounter between professional and customer. But the critics object. The lingering stench, the atmosphere of violence, the cramped concrete cribs, the systemic abuse: these were the reality of the flesh trade. Disease and chemical dependence surely followed in the wake of such exploitative drudgery. The low price of sex is stunning. Sex seems to have cost maybe two asses in an ordinary town, “about the price of a loaf of bread.” Fellatio cost less. The vile rate of the transaction is also a harrowing indication of the crushing amount of work women had to perform to survive and to profit their owners. The commodification of sex was carried out with all the ruthless efficiency of an industrial operation, the unfree body bearing the pressures of insatiable market demand. In the brothel the prostitute’s body became, little by little, “like a corpse.” 53 The lower-class atmosphere of the brothel lies behind one of the more subtle but important changes in the moral economy of prostitution under the Roman Empire.

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

  46 As blurry as our perception of the slave’s life is, the realities of prostitution are possibly even more obscure. Slaves haphazardly appear in our upper-class sources because they inhabited the same walls, because they inevitably intruded upon the daily affairs of their masters. Prostitutes, by contrast, represented “the most impure part of humankind,” and hence real consideration of their existence has been exiled from all literature with pretension to gentility. When prostitutes do appear in the sources, it is thus usually as a cipher for pure sexual indecency. Like the miserable creature whose unfortunate destiny is lost in the brilliant glare of Leucippe’s invincible sexual modesty, the prostitutes we know are mostly nameless, faceless distortions of an inconceivably brutal existence. But like slaves, prostitutes were in reality ubiquitous, and the sexual economy of the Roman Empire directly depended on the exploitation of their available bodies. 47 Roman policy toward prostitution has been aptly described as a volatile mixture of “toleration and degradation.” Prostitution was legal. It was taxed by the state and broadly supervised by the public officials in charge of keeping urban peace. Far from an institution that festered implacably in shadowy corners, prostitution in the Roman Empire was purposefully conspicuous. It played a well-established role in the sexual order. The idea that prostitution prevented adultery, that the prostitute’s body acted as a safety valve for male lust, was already, by the high empire, very ancient, and it remained a vital notion across Roman history. The very model of ancestral Roman manliness, Cato the Censor, was reputed to have congratulated a young man exiting a brothel for avoiding other men’s wives. Male sexual energy was a definite quantity that had to be expended, somewhere; a nickname for the penis was “the necessity.” Dio Chrysostom, in his Stoic attack on prostitution, admitted that many believed that prostitution deflected desire away from respectable women. Wives belonged to the private sphere, but prostitutes were, like the baths, a public good. Folklore held that after Corinth expelled the legendary beauty Lais, the city was depopulated when the young men turned their attentions to free women and a cycle of honor killings ensued. It is a Christian bishop, though, trained in Roman law, who has left the pithiest description of Roman sexual policy: forbidding adulteries, building brothels. 48 Prostitution was a boom industry under Roman rule. In the densely urbanized and highly monetized economy of the Roman Empire, sex was a most basic and readily available commodity. Girls stalked the streets. Taverns, inns, and baths were notorious dens of venal sex. Brothels “were visible everywhere.” Companions, trained in various forms of entertainment, could be rented for domestic symposia.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  Three kinds of substance came into existence: the It&n.Haer.n.^.x (Harvey • 1 1 1 • i * • • 1 >~ T 1:41-42) material, the psychic, and the spiritual. Corresponding to these were three classes of men, represented by the Iren. Haer, 1.7.5 (Harvey . . At1 1 o 1 *•*-« 1 1:64-65) three sons of Adam—Cain, Abel, and Seth. The truly spiritual men were not in need of salvation, and the material were incapable of it; but the psychic, "those-of- Ev.Ver.x-j.34-35 (Grobei 46) the-middle" as the Gospel of Truth called them, were both vulnerable to the fall and capable of redemption. Their creator, the demiurge, "made heaven without know ing heaven; he formed man in ignorance of man; he iren.H^.1.5.3 (Harvey 1:45) brought earth to light without understanding earth." This was one of the most explicit statements of the Gnostic doctrine that the creation of man—or at least of all men below the level of the fully spiritual Gnostic—was an act of ignorance on the part of a divine being who was less than the Supreme God, and that therefore the crea tion of man and the fall of man ultimately coincided. Frequently this rejection of creation was associated with a revulsion at the processes of human generation and See p. 73 above birth, as it was also in Marcion. Other early Christian Gnostics, such as the Encratites, "preached against marriage, thus setting aside the original creation of God, and indirectly blaming him who made the male and Iren.ffoer.1.28.1 (Harvey r t r . . 1:220) female for the propagation of the human race. Satur- ninus ascribed the origin of marriage and generation to Iren.H^r.1.24.2 (Harvey _ T1 , . . , 1:198) Satan. He also taught that the original man was the creature of the angels rather than of the Supreme God, OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM 88 Iren.Haer. 1.24.1 (Harvey 1:197) Iren.Haer. 1.30.9 (Harvey 1:235) Hipp.Haer.j.24.2 (GCS 26:202-203) Iren.Haer. 1.5.6 (Harvey 1:50-51) but that the Supreme God took pity on man and added the spark of life to what the angels had made; this spark returned to its own after death.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  What in your esteem is the entire disgrace of my God, is in fact the sacrament of man's salvation." Marcion's separation be tween the two gods was taken up into Tertullian's doc trine of the relation between the eternal, invisible Father and the Son, who had become true man in Jesus Christ. But Marcion had not been able to take this way out of the dilemma, for his Jesus Christ had not been true man. The Creator, too, had promised a Christ, who had not yet come; but "the Christ who in the days of Tiberius was, by a previously unknown God, revealed for the salvation of all nations, is a different being from him who was or dained by God the Creator for the restoration of the Jew ish state, and who is yet to con^e." Marcion separated his authentic Christ from the political Messiah of the Jews by "a great and absolute difference." This authentic Christ could not have assumed a material body that participated in the created world, for such a body would have been "stuffed with excrement." A material body and a physi cal birth belonged to the Creator and were unworthy of the true Christ. If he had become a man with a material body, this would have meant the end of divinity. Irenaeus OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM 76 hen.Haer.3.16.1 (Harvey 2:81-82) Tert.Alarc.4.21.11 (CCSL 1:600) Tert.AWc.3.9.1 (CCSL 1:519) Tert.Carn.4.3 (CCSL 2:879) Tert. Marc. 3.18.1 (CCSL 1:531) Tert. Af^nr.i.i 1.8 (CCSL i:453) Tert.Cam.5.1 (CC5X 2:880) TertJWrfrr.4.36.11 (CCSL 1:645) Harnack (i960) 2:262 would seem to have been referring to Marcion (among others) when he attacked certain heretics for teaching that Christ "merely suffered putatively, being naturally impassible." Human nature, or the condition of having a material body and participating in the change and suffering of the creation, was that from which man had to be delivered, but not that by which he would be delivered. It bound man to this world and to the Creator, but Christ came from the true God and therefore could not have been born of a woman. He was revealed full-grown at once. His body was like the bodies assumed by the angels of the Creator when they met with Abraham and Lot, ate, and worked.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  The reply of the apologists to that challenge has also continued to affect the development of Christian doctrine both directly and indirectly. It was at least partly in re sponse to pagan criticism of the stories in the Bible that the Christian apologists, like their Jewish predecessors, took over and adapted the methods and even the vocabu lary of pagan allegorism. Not even the most shocking of biblical narratives could match the crudity and "blasphem ous nonsense" of the Greek myths, in which the gods were depicted as being superhuman not in virtue but in en- The Christian Dispute with Classical Thought 31 Cypr.Donat.8 (CSEL 3:10) Theoph.Autol.1.9 (SC 20:76- 78); Clem.Pr^.2.39.1 (GCS 12:29) Tat.Or.21 (777 4-1:23-24) Tert.Apol.14.6 (CCSL 1:113) R.Grant (1957) 28 ap.Eus.H.e.6.19.8 (CrCS 9:560) Or.Cels.1.42 (GCS 2:92) Arnob.N^.5.33 (CS£L 4:203); Tert.Nat.2.12.17 (CCSL 1:61-62) Tert.^»/w.2o.i (CCSL 2:811) Just. 2 Apol. 10.8 (Goodspeed 86) durance, "not more superior in dominion than in vice." The apologists recited lengthy catalogs of the amorous exploits of the gods, taking care to note that these por nographic details were being quoted from the pagan authors themselves. Those who held to such shameful ac counts of the divine had no right to reproach the Chris tian narrative of "the birth of God in the form of a man. . . . For it is not permissible even to compare our concep tion of God with those who are wallowing in filth and mud." If the myths were true, they should not be admit ted in public; if they were false, they should not be circu lated among religious people. A common way out of this difficulty among sophisticated pagans was allegorical ex egesis. A sophisticated pagan such as Celsus "claims that his own exegesis of ancient writers is in harmony with their intention of handing down the truth in veiled form, to be uncovered by philosophical exegesis, while Jewish and Christian exegesis is merely defensive"; Porphyry accused Origen of misapplying Hellenistic allegory to the Jewish Scriptures. In his reply to Celsus, Origen was will ing to concede at least some validity to the allegorical exegesis of the Homeric poems. Most Christian writers, however, denounced Stoic and other allegory as "the veneer of sophistic disputes by which not the truth but its image and appearance and shadow are always sought after." At one and the same time the apologists cited the pagan philosophers against pagan religion and denounced them for the artificiality of their efforts to square their teachings with Homer and Hesiod. Seneca was "often in agreement with us"; but Socrates was the most important of all, because he had refrained from allegorizing Homer and had banished him. The reason for this importance was that Christ had been "known in part even by Socrates."

• From The Vagina Monologues (1998)

  VAGINA FACT “At a witch trial in 1593, the investigating lawyer (a married man) apparently discovered a clitoris for the first time; [he] identified it as a devil’s teat, sure proof of the witch’s guilt. It was ‘a little lump of flesh, in manner sticking out as if it had been a teat, to the length of half an inch,’ which the gaoler, ‘perceiving at the first sight thereof, meant not to disclose, because it was adjoining to so secret a place which was not decent to be seen. Yet in the end, not willing to conceal so strange a matter,’ he showed it to various bystanders. The bystanders had never seen anything like it. The witch was convicted.” —*The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets*

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Not right away, definitely not.” Her mouth puckered. “But if Frank moves in—” “I live here, too,” I said. “You were just gonna let him move in one day, without even telling me?” “You’re fourteen.” “This is bullshit.” “Hey! Watch it,” she said, tucking her hands into her armpits. “I don’t know why you’re being so rude, but you need to quit it, and fast.” The nearness of my mother’s pleading face, her naked upset—it stoked a biological disgust for her, like when I smelled the bellow of iron in the bathroom and knew she had her period. “This is a nice thing I’m trying to do,” she said, “inviting your friend along. Can I get a break here?” I laughed, but it was dripping with the sickness of betrayal. That’s why she’d wanted to make dinner. It was worse now, because I’d been so easily pleased. “Frank’s an asshole.” Her face flared, but she pushed herself to get calm. “Watch your attitude. This is my life, understand? I’m trying to get just a little bit happy,” she said, “and you need to give me that. Can you give me that?” She deserved her anemic life, its meager, girlish uncertainties. “Fine,” I said. “Fine. Good luck with Frank.” Her eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?” “Forget it.” I could smell the raw meat coming to room temperature, a biting tinge of cold metal. My stomach tightened. “I’m not hungry anymore,” I said, and left her standing in the kitchen. The radio still playing songs about first loves, about dancing by the river, the meat thawed enough so my mother would be forced to cook it, though no one would eat it. —It was easy after that to tell myself that I deserved the money. Russell said that most people were selfish, unable to love, and that seemed true of my mother, and my father, too, tucked away with Tamar in the Portofino Apartments in Palo Alto. So it was a tidy trade, when I thought about it like that. Like the money I was filching, bill by bill, added up to something that could replace what had gone missing. It was too depressing to think it had maybe never been there in the first place. That none of it had—Connie’s friendship. Peter ever feeling anything for me besides annoyance at the obviousness of my kiddish worship. My mother left her purse lying around, like always, and that made the money inside seem less valuable, something she didn’t care enough about to take seriously. Still, it was uncomfortable, poking around in her purse, like the rattly inside of my mother’s brain. The litter was too personal—the wrapper from a butterscotch candy, a mantra card, a pocket mirror. A tube of cream, the color of a Band-Aid, that she patted under her eyes. I pinched a ten, folding it into my shorts. Even if she saw me, I’d just say I was getting groceries—why would she suspect me?

• From The Vagina Monologues (1998)

  My vagina was green, water soft pink fields, cow mooing sun resting sweet boyfriend touching lightly with soft piece of blond straw. There is something between my legs. I do not know what it is. I do not know where it is. I do not touch. Not now. Not anymore. Not since. My vagina was chatty, can't wait, so much, so much saying, words talking, can't quit trying, can't quit saying, oh yes, oh yes. Not since I dream there's a dead animal sewn in down there with thick black fishing line. And the bad dead animal smell cannot be removed. And its throat is slit and it bleeds through all my summer dresses. My vagina. A live wet water village. My vagina my hometown. They invaded it. Butchered it and burned it down. I do not touch now. Do not visit. I live someplace else now.

• From The Vagina Monologues (1998)

  Down there? I haven't been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with Eisenhower. No, no, it's a cellar down there. It's very damp, clammy. You don't want to go down there. Trust me. You'd get sick. Suffocating. Very nauseating. The smell of the clamminess and the mildew and everything. Whew! Smells unbearable. Gets in your clothes. No, there was no accident down there. It didn't blow up or catch on fire or anything. It wasn't so dramatic. I mean…well, never mind. No. Never mind. I can't talk to you about this.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  “Sadly, this isn’t always true. So, when someone is looking to ‘maximize’ their pleasure, it may be to the detriment of their anonymous partner, such as secretly removing the condom during intercourse. Or, for example, I once had someone grab my face tightly with both hands and shout ‘good nigger’ as he orgasmed. These violations would most likely not occur with a known partner but are always a possibility with a stranger.”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  “So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters. But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  At first I found it inexplicable that boys used such violent words in reference to sex. Why would you be proud of being a lousy lover? If they were truly talking about sex in those situations, they might bring up pleasure, connection, finesse: they wouldn’t weaponize it. But the whole point of “locker room banter” is that it’s not actually about sex, and that, I think, is why guys were more ashamed to discuss it as openly with me as topics that were equally explicit. Those (often clearly exaggerated) stories are in truth about power: about asserting masculinity through control of women’s bodies. And that requires—demands—a denial of girls’ humanity. In mixed-sex groups, teenagers may talk about “hooking up” (which is already impersonal—if you want to make them gag, use the phrase “making love”), but when guys are on their own, it can be hard to tell if they’ve engaged in an intimate act or have just returned from a visit to a construction site. They nail, they pound, they bang, they smash, they slam, they hammer. They “hit that,” they “tap that ass,” they “tear her up,” they “destroy” her. The truth is less important than the posturing itself: using symbolic aggression toward women to bond and validate their heterosexuality. Dismissing that as “locker room banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize and abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity. And, in fact, by the time they are in college, athletes are three times more likely than other students to be accused of sexual misconduct or intimate partner violence. That puts such bluster in a different light.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Jill Cook flinched when I mentioned the Venus of Hohle Fels. … “This term”—Venus—“is a piece of the history of sex if you like, which it is high time we dropped,” she said. “The term was not applied to these female figures because people were thinking of the classical Venus figures. It was applied because the heavy breasts and buttocks of these figurines reminded anthropologists of the day about what we now recognize as the terrible story of Saartjie Baartman.” I did not know the story of Saartjie Baartman, also known as the Hottentot Venus, until Jill Cook told it to me. Baartman was born in 1789 in South Africa. She was an orphan and a slave on a Dutch farm near Cape Town until 1810, when the farm owner’s brother, Hendrick Cezar, and a Brit named Alexander Dunlop decided that she should serve a different purpose. Cezar and Dunlop took her to Europe to “exhibit” her. Saartjie’s “exotic” body shape, and the view in white society— perpetuated by her captors—that sex with such a woman was an out-of-this-world animalistic experience, made her fascinating to crowds from all social classes. She was paraded naked in a cage for the elite of Georgian England for a number of years. She was then sold to a Frenchman, who put her on display in Paris—if possible, under even worse conditions. Ultimately Saartjie Baartman died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-five, at which time the French anatomist Georges Cuvier pickled her brain and genitals to keep as novelty research items.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  "If women weigh up their interests and value the intimacy they may get in exchange, they will agree to sex; it's a short step to a requirement that women must provide sex if they are to expect the things they value; if they are to be given the gift or the promise of intimacy. This view of women's sexuality not only tends to legitimate male sexual aggression, but it also further alienates women from their own desire and pleasure."

• From Cultish (2021)

  Most speakers use the idiom without batting an eye, but there are a select few who grasp its gravity. “One of the most vile phrases in the English language” is how seventy-one-year-old Tim Carter describes it. Tim told me this on a long call from San Francisco, talking a mile a minute, as if he couldn’t get his repugnance out fast enough. “People have no idea what they’re even saying.” Decades ago, an old neighbor of Tim’s named Odell Rhodes voiced the same sentiment in an exposé for the *Washington Post*: “The whole ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ saying is so odious . . . so completely wrong.” Teri Buford O’Shea, a sixty-seven-year-old poet who once knew both Tim and Odell, made a similar comment on the phrase: “It makes me shudder.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Gradually they made their way back to the shallows and resumed their games. If they ventured too close, we glared and they backed off. Riding in the back of the truck on the way home, I thought about how happy everyone at the pool seemed. They either didn’t know or didn’t care that they were practically naked and on their way to hell.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Judging from the strident opinions on this subject in magazines and newspapers and foodie Web sites, it would be easy to conclude that it's a class thing: The dining classes, who have always been different (at least until recently) from the cooking class, simply hate to see the backstairs help coming up in the world. In England, Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White, in particular, were singled out as "climbers," stepping up from their "class" in a way that seemed to offend. The speed with which some hurried to declare them "over" as soon as they opened another restaurant was breathtaking. The Famous Chef has no obligation to you, or anyone else, to be present in the restaurant. And you should not expect him or her to be. "You should expect it to be good," says Famous Chef. That's the bottom line. BOTTOMING OUT There is no one less sympathetic to the trials, tribulations, and humiliations of the addict than an ex-junkie. No emergency room triage is more immediate and unforgiving than the way an ex-junkie sizes up a still-in-the grip former colleague. I hear that familiar, whiny tone of voice, I see the pinned, cartoon eyes of the smack user, or the jumpy, twitchy, molar-grinding, gibberish-spewing face of the coke-fiend, and I see a dead man. I'm not listening anymore. If I pay attention at all, it's to make sure they're not rifling through my coat. Cold? Yes. But then, junkies are used to stone-cold logic. Life, for someone whose body, brain, nerves, and cell tissue require (rather than desire) their drug of choice in order to get out of bed in the morning, is actually a very simple matter. You have one job: To get drugs. There's only one thing you have to do each day: Get drugs. One's priorities are always straight. Simply put: Nothing else matters. Those of us who've been addicted to heroin and/or cocaine (and I've been addicted to both) understand that better than anybody. You know, without question, that your best friend in the world will, given the opportunity, steal your drugs or your money or snitch you off to the cops. You know, without question, exactly how low you would be willing to go to get what you need. Chances are, you've been there already. More than once.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

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

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  A few weeks later, after shaving off half my hair to establish I was misunderstood, I met a tall, handsome cruise ship worker at the same club and brought him home to my rental apartment. We sat on the stony stretch of Adriatic that was my backyard; the sea was inky black. He kept asking me if I’d seen Californication, and reciting lines from it that I found inscrutable, as he was translating the Croatian translation back into English. Hooking up with him felt exciting and odd. The make-out was frenetic as we tore off each other’s clothes, knocking over abandoned water glasses left and right. I asked him to get a condom. He refused; he said he could not have sex with a condom, that it was agonizing for him. So we didn’t have sex. We simply laid there on the bed, each of us hoping the other would fold; people had clearly folded to him before. (His jawline could have sliced an apple.) But unprotected sex with a stranger was off-limits to me. He continued trying to convince me to forgo the condom, citing low pregnancy rates. This is when I should have sent him home. After explaining the premise of Californication again, he hoisted himself up from the bed and peed into the sink, looking at me through the mirror as he did it. A few nights later, head throbbing from supermarket wine, I invited him back. For years, retelling these stories to myself and others, I’d recall the first sexual encounter as bad and the second one as good, sexy, and fun—a disturbing testament to the skill with which I cling to scraps of intrigue to fill the void. The first guy was textbook inappropriate, and I was textbook unattracted to him, from the tip of his ponytail to the butt flap of his onesie. He used me as a prop for his satisfaction, and I complied, sustained by novelty and an eagerness to feel something, anything. The second guy was stoic and aggressive in a way that aroused me, despite his rudeness around condoms, which I too quickly brushed aside. In both cases I understood there was a possibility I could be killed and didn’t care; in both cases, I understood I wouldn’t get off and didn’t care. In that era of my life, sex hadn’t been about pleasure. It was a means to feel desired and less alone. And it didn’t even work!