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 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!

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Repugnant, yes. Unusual? Not so much. I live in the Bay Area, a bastion of liberalism, where high school boys in the affluent town of Piedmont were busted in 2012 for engaging in a “fantasy slut league” in which female students were “drafted” and boys earned points for “documented engagement in sexual activities” (the practice had been going on for at least five years when it was discovered, and there have since been quashed attempts to revive it). In 2016, students from several Silicon Valley high schools were caught sharing nudes of female classmates without their consent on a public Dropbox account. And in my own uber-leftie town of Berkeley, two separate groups of high school boys—one in 2014 and the other in 2017—posted pictures of their female friends (or girls who believed themselves to be their friends) on social media accounts with captions detailing the sexual acts the girls would perform. A third group, never identified, ran an Instagram account called “THOTs of Berkeley High” (THOT, a synonym for “slut,” is an acronym for That Ho Over There) where pictures of girls of color, some surreptitiously snapped in school hallways, were posted; again, they were captioned with sexual acts the girls reputedly had performed or would perform.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  When caught out, boys typically claim that they thought they were being “funny,” just joking around. And in a way that makes sense—if, that is, you have been denied full emotional expression, been trained to suppress empathy, and consider cruelty, “ribbing,” or making demeaning sexual comments about women to be forms of bonding. Such “humor” may even, when left unexamined, seem like an extension of the gross-out comedy of childhood: little boys are famous for their fart jokes, booger jokes, poop jokes, barf jokes. It’s how they test boundaries, understand the human body, gain a little social cred with other guys. But, as with sports, their glee in that can both enable and camouflage sexism. The boy who, at age ten, asks his friends the difference between a dead baby and a bowling ball may or may not find it equally uproarious, at sixteen, to share what a woman and a bowling ball have in common (you can Google it). He may or may not post ever-escalating “jokes” about women, or African Americans, or homosexuals, or disabled people on a group Snapchat. He may or may not send “funny” texts to friends about “girls who need to be raped” or think it’s hysterical to surprise a buddy with a meme in which a woman is being gagged by a penis, her mascara mixed with her tears. He may or may not, at eighteen, scrawl the names of his hookups on the wall of his all-male dorm, as part of a yearlong competition to see who can “pull” the most women. Perfectly nice, bright, polite boys I interviewed had done each of those things. How does that happen? A fifteen-year-old on the East Coast who had been among a group of boys at his school suspended for posting over one hundred racist and sexist “jokes” about classmates on a group Finsta (a secondary, or “fake,” Instagram account that is often more authentic than a curated “Rinsta” or “real” account) reflected, “The Finsta connected us and became very competitive. You wanted to make your friends laugh, but when you’re not face-to-face, you can’t tell if you’ll get a reaction or not so you go a little further. You go one step beyond. So it was the combination of competitiveness and that . . . disconnect that triggered it to get worse and worse as time went by.”

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  standing before the cameras, the governor of Arkansas embodied the southern stereotype to a tee. He was a complete caricature of folly and backwardness. A reporter for Time accused him of “manufacturing the myth of violence” and then “whipping up” a mob to make it a reality. 49 Little Rock was the most important domestic news story of 1957. It transformed the Central High neighborhood into a newsroom, attracting reporters from the major newspapers, magazines, and television networks. By the end of September, the number of press people had grown from a handful to 225 highly visible journalists and cameramen. The standoff between the courts and the governor—the “crisis” environment swirling about the school grounds— grabbed the world’s attention. On September 24, when President Eisenhower gave a televised speech announcing that he would send troops to the Arkansas capital, 62 percent of America’s television sets were tuned in. As mobs descended, reporters were themselves targeted for violence. A black journalist, Alex Wilson, was beaten and kicked, the attack recorded on film. A Life photographer was punched in the face and then carried off in a police wagon and charged with disorderly conduct. “Thugs in the crowd” pushed his colleagues, said newsman John Chancellor, and heckled them with nasty slurs. One reporter took the precaution of disguising himself. He rented a pickup truck and wore an old jacket and no tie. For a reporter to go undercover safely, he had to alter his class appearance, passing as a poor white workingman. 50 The media easily slipped into southern stereotypes, depicting the “many in overalls,” “tobacco-chewing white men,” or as one New York Times article highlighted, a “scrawny, rednecked man” yelling insults at the soldiers. Local Arkansas journalists similarly dismissed the demonstrators as “a lot of rednecks.” Unruly women who stood by became “slattern housewives” and “harpies.” One southern reporter said it outright: “Hell, look at them. They’re just poor white trash, mostly.” In Nashville, mob violence erupted that same month, after the integration of an elementary school. There, a Time reporter had a field day trashing the women in the crowd: “vacant-faced women in curlers and loose-hanging blouses,” not to mention a rock-throwing waitress with a tattooed arm. One obnoxious woman yelled to no one in particular with reference to the African American children: “Pull their black curls out!” 51 These were all predictable motifs, serving to distance rabble-rousers from the “normal” good people of Arkansas and Tennessee. Even President Eisenhower, in his televised speech, blamed the violence on “demagogic extremists,” and assumed that the core population of Little Rock was the law-abiding, taxpaying,

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Mexico, quickly unleashing a panic among local residents. Many of the workers were backwoods people, and their trailers were quite unsanitary. Meyer met a fifty-one-year-old man who looked eighty—a clear throwback to the 1840s, when clay-eaters were identified in the same way: old before their time. Townspeople denounced them as “vermin.” The manager of the shipyards told the weary female reporter that unless these people were lifted up, “they will pull the rest of the Nation down.” On to Mobile, where she learned that the illegitimacy rate was high and getting higher, and that a black-market trade in babies existed. By the time she reached Florida, she found the poor whites to be handsome on approach, but strange-looking as soon as they smiled and exposed sets of decaying teeth. Still, they were less repulsive to her than “the subnormal swamp and mountain folk” she had already encountered in Mississippi and Alabama. 29 It was the southern war camps that set the tone, but after the war “trailer trash” became a generic term, no longer regionally specific. They appeared on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and Flint, Michigan, as well as in North Carolina and parts of the upper South. In far-off Arizona, trailer trash doubled as “squatters,” photographed in weedy areas and with outhouses in their front yards. To be displaced and poor was to be white trash. 30 Trailer trash as squatters in Arizona (1950).

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  was displacing an old matriarch and her family who were living on an island in the Tennessee River. The matriarch’s sons were shown as lazy and oafish, unwilling to work or leave the island, and dependent on the black sharecroppers who farmed their fields. The daughter was a bit trampish, more than willing to sleep with the TVA agent because she saw him as her only ticket off the island. A group of surly whites beat up the agent while the local sheriff and his deputy looked on. As in the earlier film, Kazan provoked a news story when he cast real poor whites to play the extras. The “white trash squatters” of the film lived in a place called Gum Hollow, which was an existing shantytown literally situated on the town dump in Cleveland, Tennessee. Community leaders were furious at the appearance of such unappealing men in the movie. Kazan gave in to pressure and reshot the offending scenes, this time hiring what the townspeople referred to as “respectable” unemployed. In this strange episode, proud small-town arbiters of morality refused even to acknowledge the extreme poor. 56 While Kazan’s films reached middle- and upper-brow audiences, another film of the era was geared for drive-ins and became a smash hit in 1961. This was the second incarnation of Poor White Trash, which had first been released under the title Bayou in 1957 and flopped. An aggressive and slick marketing campaign turned this turkey into a hit. Exploiting the new title, the production company placed provocative ads in newspapers: “It exists Today! . . . Poor White Trash.” To entice prurient adults, the cagey promoters warned local communities that no children would be permitted to see the movie. But the film turned out to be less lurid than voyeuristic. Its most fascinating scene featured a massively built poor white Cajun (played by Timothy Carey, an actor from Brooklyn) performing a wild, almost autoerotic dance. Learning his moves from Elvis, the sweaty, shaking giant doubled as a frightening ax-wielding bully from the swamps. Oversexed and violent was the featured poor white, a primal breed. 57 Of all the films that belong to this cultural moment, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) was the most highly regarded, and offered the most damning picture of poor whites. Based on Harper Lee’s bestselling novel, it tells the story of a small southern town in the thirties. The movie highlights the limits of justice in a society where law and order give way to a defunct code of southern honor. A black man, Tom Robinson, is falsely accused of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. Watching the trial, the audience becomes the jury, one might say, forced to choose between the hardworking family man and the pathetic, ill- educated girl. Does race trump class, or does class trump race? This is the choice

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  the audience must make. Robinson represents the worthy, law-abiding blacks in the community. He is honest and honorable. The Ewells are white trash. 58 Viewers never see the Ewells’ dilapidated cabin, which in the novel Harper Lee describes as the “playhouse of an insane child.” Nor do viewers see the white trash family picking through the town dump. Lee’s eugenic allusions are muted in the film, but the viciousness of Mayella’s father, Bob Ewell, is underscored. He spits in the face of Atticus Finch, Robinson’s heroic, morally impeccable defense attorney played by Gregory Peck, and he attempts to murder Finch’s two children. Of course, nothing could be more insidious than child murder. There is only one possible verdict for Bob Ewell. Just as Atticus Finch shoots a “mad dog” in the street, the same fate awaits the vicious, vengeful poor white villain in the film’s denouement. It is not the father who resorts to violence, though; it is his ghostly neighbor, Boo Radley. A social outcast with a troubled past, Radley acts the part of a guardian angel, saving the children on Halloween night. 59 The Ewells may have been caricatures, as the New York Times movie critic directly claimed, but they were familiar ones. Hollywood did not expose the seamy economic conditions of poor whites so much as emphasize their dark inner demons. By the fifties, “redneck” had come to be synonymous with an almost insane bigotry. The actor playing Bob Ewell was scrawny, and one reviewer even called him “degenerate,” suggesting the persistence of the older hereditary correlation between a shriveled body and a contracted mind. Sensationalizing redneck behavior did not just occur on the big screen, however. In Nashville, in 1957, the racist troublemaker at the head of the mob (with an affected southern accent) was a paid agitator from Camden, New Jersey. 60 For filmmakers, the allure of redneck characters was doubled-edged. On the one hand, they were ready-made villains; on the other, they were men without inhibitions. Unrestrained and undomesticated, they stood in sharp contrast to the boxed-in suburbanite and could occasionally be appreciated for their earthy machismo. Sloan Wilson’s male protagonist in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), another novel made into a Hollywood film, starring Gregory Peck, was a pale imitation of the primal Cajun doing his dance to drumbeats. James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, and even Timothy Carey, as poor white trash, were all unreformed Americans, undomestic and unconventional. They planted a wild seed, taunting conformist male spectators who might be itching to break loose. 61

• From Action (2014)

  My distaste is not only about the intense “key party” atmosphere around sex-positive—I also don’t like the term because differentiating a healthy and normal attitude toward sex by bestowing it with a special title reinforces that mindset as marginal while holding up that the “normal” thing is to revile sex, which I earnestly do not think most people do. Despite its faults, “sex-positive” will help you find sex stores, literature, and pornography that make more sense to you than a lot of mainstream kinds, in many cases. You won’t catch it in this book, though—at least not without audible groaning. sex versus gender: Your sex is what a doctor decided based on what they saw between your legs on your zeroth birthday and then wrote a letter on a certificate. Your gender is “male,” “female,” and/or any designation between or outside those roles that you feel most closely matches the person you are in a way that extends to the rest of your body and mind. PART I [image file=image_110.jpg] Age of Consent [image file=image_121.jpg] The number one most essential part of any and all sexual encounters: establishing the often-hazy-seeming-but-actually-pretty-clear parameters of “consensual sex,” which is otherwise known as “sex.” Sexual consent is a direct verbal go-ahead that conveys, “What we’re doing with our bodies is okay with me,” as confirmed before not only sex involving penetration, but so many other kinds of sensual scenarios, too. Consent is an important part of getting down with anybody, of any gender or sexual persuasion, every single time you’re getting down. In fact, it’s probably the most important part: If you’re in a physical situation where the other person disregards that you’ve told them not to touch you in the way they’re touching you, what you’re experiencing isn’t sex (a catchall term I’m using here for “hookups of all stripes”), but sexual assault, and possibly rape. There is a plethora of ways to give and receive consent—and to refuse it. We’ll explore as many of them as we can here today. Is that okay with you? (Look! We’ve already begun. I wish it were always this easy.)

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  “slattern women and gangling men take up the dull business of living.” Warner Brothers made the film both hokey and violent. The film’s technical adviser told the studio to ship in “six coon hounds, 30 corncob pipes, 43 plugs of chewing tobacco,” and over a thousand yards of calico—all to make sure that a very dim portrait of mountain ways was presented. Advance promotion promised a “Gripping Melodrama of Lust and Lash.” The most shocking on-screen moment occurs as Ruth’s father towers over her with an enormous bullwhip. 64 The thirties and forties saw the popularity of Li’l Abner as well as Paul Webb’s cartoon strip The Mountain Boys . Webb’s work was converted into a slapstick film, Kentucky Moonshine (1938), featuring the popular Ritz Brothers comedy team—it was a hillbilly version of The Three Stooges . A trio of New Yorkers disguise themselves as hillbillies, appearing in long, unkempt black beards while wearing tall conical hats and ragged pants (held up by ropes) exposing their dirty bare feet. The Grand Ole Opry radio station got its start in the same decade, and music groups appeared with names like the Beverly Hillbillies. Minnie Pearl, known for her famous hillbilly greeting, “Howdee,” began her career on the Opry in the 1940s, and later became a star of the long- running television series Hee Haw . She was by no means an authentic mountain gal. “Minnie” was born into a wealthy family, was well educated, and crafted a naïve persona that made her vaudeville act a success. The hillbilly “Minnie” was so out of touch with mainstream America that she wore her trademark hat with the price tag still attached. 65 By the forties, then, hillbilly was a stage act, and a kind of catchall name for country folk. Politicians took up the role too, offering a milder version of the theatrics of Mississippi’s “White Chief” James Vardaman and Louisiana’s Huey Long. A sharecropper’s son named Jimmy Davis became Louisiana’s governor in 1944. Though he gamely called himself “just a po’ country boy,” Davis was peculiarly able to straddle class divisions. He was a country crooner, a Hollywood actor (in westerns, of course), and a history professor. As one newspaper observed, the “hillbilly in Long’s Chair” was a new political breed. He didn’t yell, or give long harangues, or wave his arms, or make empty promises. He was, concisely put, a hillbilly with a touch of style. Of course, he was not beyond Hollywood theatrics either, riding a horse up the steps of the state capitol. 66 As distinctive as he was, Jimmy Davis was not the only one of his kind. In 1944, Idaho matched Louisiana by electing the “Singing Cowboy” Glen Taylor to the U.S. Senate. Even earlier, Texas voters were charmed by the hillbilly

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

  I wish participation in late capitalism on no one; it’s a horrifying state of affairs. But if I must participate—and I must, as a person who needs to earn money in order to live—I’ve always found it more interesting to search for modes of scam and subversion while offering myself up wholly to capital’s insidious demands, than to refuse. This is what, in part, drew me to sex work; this is what, in part, drew me to writing about it. A discursive change around sex work occurred in the nineteenth century—a century in which language about work took on more particular and heightened meanings in the face of mass political changes. Chief among them was the abolition of slavery in the United States and Europe, which led to a restructuring of the language that defined labor, servitude, freedom, and incarceration such that an enslaved Black workforce could still legally exist. Previously undefined social and labor roles, now concretized, emerged from these conditions and tortured definitions. Melissa Gira Grant writes that where previously there had been no one word for a woman who sells sex—at the time, whore denoted simply an unrespectable woman or adulterer—now the word prostitute emerged, to be “applied to a much older set of practices, and … to produce a person by transforming a behavior (however occasional) into an identity.” Around the same time, arguably, the figure of the starving artist emerged—a worker identified precisely by his lack of income. Critic William Deresiewicz writes, As traditional beliefs broke down across the 18th and 19th centuries, art inherited the role of faith … As with art, so with artists, the new priests and prophets. It was modernity that gave us the bohemian, the starving artist, and the solitary genius, images respectively of blissful unconventionality, monkish devotion, and spiritual election. Artistic poverty was seen as glamorous, an outward sign of inner purity. The imaginaries call forth a figure defined by either her callous selling of self, or his ascetic refusal to sell. The whore is a woman; the artist is a man; and neither, until the 1970s, is a worker. In her research article “Dirty Commerce: Art Work and Sex Work since the 1970s,” Julia Bryan-Wilson explores the simultaneous movements of art workers and sex workers to gain recognition as workers. She writes, The corralling of these incongruent identities under the sign of work signals the unhinging of previous class positions. It might be that, as the coherence of worker fractured, the category became more available for downward appropriation by the likes of artists (who, due to cultural capital and educational privilege, sit above the working class) as well as aspirational renaming by the (generally understood to be lumpen) prostitute. What makes sex work work is that most people who do it need the money. What makes art work, arguably, not work, is that most people who find themselves able to do it full-time—even find themselves making money at it—do not, in fact, need the money.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  “We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any,” writes Solzhenitsyn. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.” This is the foundation of the Dream—its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works. There is some passing acknowledgment of the bad old days, which, by the way, were not so bad as to have any ongoing effect on our present. The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands. To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of your mind. — The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are. I think of that summer that you may well remember when I loaded you and your cousin Christopher into the back seat of a rented car and pushed out to see what remained of Petersburg, Shirley Plantation, and the Wilderness. I was obsessed with the Civil War because six hundred thousand people had died in it. And yet it had been glossed over in my education, and in popular culture, representations of the war and its reasons seemed obscured. And yet I knew that in 1859 we were enslaved and in 1865 we were not, and what happened to us in those years struck me as having some amount of import. But whenever I visited any of the battlefields, I felt like I was greeted as if I were a nosy accountant conducting an audit and someone was trying to hide the books.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  In order for gross, crude, sexual, or even slapstick humor to be funny to its audience, researchers have found, it has to succeed in two contradictory things: violating morals (that is, it has to be disgusting) while seeming harmless, detached from any true reality; certainly you can’t feel concern or identification with its subject. That a dead baby joke would be a whole lot less funny if you first described in detail how the baby suffered, the grief of the parents, the horror of the funeral. So, in order for boys to believe any of these antics were amusing, they had to systematically ignore the humanity of the girls involved—and that is not harmless at all. At the furthest, most disturbing end of that continuum, “funny” and “hilarious” become a defense against charges of sexual harassment, misconduct, or assault. Consider the boy from Steubenville, Ohio, who was captured on video joking about the repeated violation of an unconscious girl at a party by a group of his friends. “She is so raped,” he said, laughing. “They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson.” When someone off camera suggested that rape wasn’t funny, he retorted, “Rape isn’t funny—it’s hilarious!” One of the boys from Maryville, Missouri, who assaulted the unconscious fourteen-year-old Daisy Coleman, a subject of the Netflix documentary Audrie and Daisy, told police that in the moment he thought what they were doing was “funny.” The high school lacrosse players from an all-male Catholic prep school in Louisville, Kentucky, who circulated pictures of their assault of sixteen-year-old Savannah Dietrich (a case that gained international attention when their lawyers threatened to sue her for tweeting their names after a slap-on-the-wrist sentence) also described their behavior as “funny.” Again, recall that in order for a morally reprehensible act to be seen as a joke, it has to be considered harmless by the perpetrators; they have to resist identification with the subject, ignore pain. Anything less makes you a pussy. “Hilarious” is another way, under pretext of horseplay or group bonding, that boys learn to disregard others’ feelings as well as their own. “Hilarious” is a safe haven, a default position when something is inappropriate, confusing, upsetting, depressing, unnerving, or horrifying; when something is simultaneously sexually explicit and dehumanizing; when it defies their ethics; when it evokes any of the emotions meant to stay safely behind that wall. “Hilarious” offers distance, allowing them to subvert a more compassionate response that could be read as weak, overly sensitive, or otherwise unmasculine. “Hilarious” is particularly troubling as a defense among bystanders—if assault is “hilarious,” they don’t have to take it seriously, they don’t have to respond: there is no problem.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn. It had to be blood. It had to be nails driven through tongue and ears pruned away. “Some disobedience,” wrote a Southern mistress. “Much idleness, sullenness, slovenliness….Used the rod.” It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d…with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization. “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.*

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  “homely” women holding up racist signs: “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Like the Nobel Prize–winning writer William Faulkner, LBJ knew about the debilitating nature of false poor white pride. As president, he never lost sight of how central class and race were to the fractured culture of the South. 83 Johnson’s promises did not convince his critics on either the left or the right. Malcolm X called him the “head of the Cracker Party.” In 1964, Barry Goldwater’s campaign staff put together a fear-filled movie that showcased disturbing scenes of urban violence, pornography, topless girls, and striptease joints. Johnson’s name was never mentioned, but in the middle of the thirty- minute harangue on “American Decay,” a Lincoln Continental comes speeding across the dusty countryside as beer cans are jettisoned from the half-open window. It was a less-than-subtle caricature of LBJ on an aimless escapade along the perimeter of his Texas ranch, thereby reducing the tall Texan to a common redneck. (Jimmy Carter’s ne’er-do-well brother Billy would later say that a redneck threw his beer cans out the window, while a good ol’ boy did not.) Goldwater’s campaign revived the eugenic theme of moral degeneracy, as it turned the sitting president into a symbol of white trash. LBJ’s Lincoln said something. The larger-than-life president plainly indulged a defiant impulse when he drove around his ranch at high speeds while consuming beer from a paper cup. For one Time photographer, he posed behind the wheel and held up a squealing piglet for view. Taunting reporters was an exhibition of his country humor. 84 The car one was seen in registered class in a very special way in the fifties and sixties and defined transgression as well as belonging. Elvis owned several Cadillacs, a Lincoln, and a Rolls-Royce. But when driven by the wrong class of people, the luxury car only exaggerated the underlying discomfort Americans felt about upward mobility. Nothing better captured this anxiety than the specially built padded seat in Elvis’s favorite Cadillac that was reserved for his pet chimpanzee Scatter. The owners of beautiful vehicles were supposed to display breeding that matched the glossy magazine advertisements readers flipped through. A lower- class man did not look right exploiting the fantasy of freedom by leaving the restraints of an imposed class identity in the rearview mirror. That was Elvis and his chimp. That was LBJ too, at least for those stodgy

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  58 Lecture 9: Did the Jews Kill Jesus? The angel would kill every fi rst-born Egyptian in order to persuade the pharaoh to let the children of Israel leave Egypt.  Melito preaches that the lamb was, in fact, Christ, the Lamb of God, whose blood brought about salvation. For Melito, even though Jesus had to die, it was inexcusable that the Jews were responsible for his death; thus, in several passages, Melito accuses the Jews of killing their own messiah: “God has been murdered; the king of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand of Israel.”  The anti-Jewish implications of this claim are both clear and frightening. The history of anti-Semitism is, in part, the history of Christians claiming that God hates the Jews for what they did to his son and that God, therefore, has sanctioned acts of oppression and violence against the Jewish people. The Situation in Jerusalem  All the accounts agree that Jesus was killed in Jerusalem sometime during a Passover feast. To make sense of his death, we need to understand the situation in Jerusalem at the time.  Among the Jews, the power players in Jerusalem were the Sadducees, aristocratic priests who were in charge of worship in the Temple. The Sadducees had close ties with the Romans and believed in cooperating with them in exchange for receiving privileges of worship.  Pontius Pilate was also an obvious power player. He was the Roman governor of Judea between 26 and 36 C.E. As governor, Pilate had the power of life and death, with no possibility of appeal. He was expected to raise taxes for Rome in Judea and keep the peace.  Passover is an annual festival celebrated by Jews to commemorate the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt under Moses. In antiquity, Jews came to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast because part of the celebration involved sacri fi cing a lamb to God,

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  137 Questioning the Old Testament  Paul’s preaching naturally called the status of the Old Testament into question—not for Paul but for Gentiles who had become followers of Jesus. As Gentiles increasingly took over the church from Jews, they questioned the point of retaining the Hebrew Bible.  We know of some groups of Jewish Christians in the 2 nd century, Christians who insisted that followers of Jesus had to follow the Jewish Law. Jesus followed the Jewish Law, ful fi lled the Jewish Law, and taught the Jewish Law; following Jesus meant following the Jewish Law.  Opposing this view was Marcion, who taught that the God of the Old Testament was literally a different God from the God of the New Testament. For that reason, Marcion believed that there were two sets of scripture: one for Jews, the Old Testament, and one for Christians, a canon consisting of 10 letters of Paul and a form of the Gospel of Luke. The Letter of Barnabas  We fi nd yet another view in the writings of an anonymous author from the early 2 nd century traditionally known as Barnabas. The Letter of Barnabas is an important book that almost became part of the orthodox New Testament. Far more anti-Jewish than anything that made it into the New Testament, the letter is meant to explain what the Christians’ relationship to the Old Testament ought to be.  Barnabas’s view is that the Old Testament is a Christian According to Barnabas, when Moses smashed the tablets of the Law given him by God, the covenant was broken; the Jews were no longer God’s people. © Getty Images/Photos.com/Thinkstock.

• From The Wrestler: A Life of Passion and the Pursuit of Greatness (2016)

  What’s interesting is that, during that time in our lives, I was dealing with a similar issue. I merely handled it differently. I began to lose my passion for the sport early on in high school, but more so due to the fact that I struggled to make my way back to the top of the podium after a state championship finish as a freshman. I viewed wrestling as a measuring-stick of self-worth, and with no repeat state championships to my name as a sophomore and junior, I wasn’t getting much out of it. My attitude toward the sport was negative. And so my mindset (at the time) was to make sure I won a state championship as a senior. And after extracting whatever feelings of self-worth I could garner from the accomplishment, I would move on and wrestle in college. What’s more is that I didn’t care about what I could do at the college level or how I could grow in the sport. I only cared about surviving the wrestling seasons and acquiring a college degree in the process. My hatred for the sport developed rapidly, and so it was no surprise that, after injuries and a lack of success on the mat, I quit after my first year in college. In short, my attitude toward wrestling eventually stifled any life I had left in it.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  consciousness of existing residents, they recast the prospective community as a “private club,” highlighting the beautiful environment and ensuring that residents would pay added expenses to maintain their lots. When that was not enough, the developers added one final touch: a five-foot-high wall around the entire complex. As one city administrator observed, “We don’t even know they’re there.” Another local resident, without any apparent shame, admitted, “We call them ‘the people inside the wall,’ and we’re ‘the people outside the wall.’” Was there any better symbol of an undisguised belief in class stratification than the construction of a wall? 37 But the Yorba Linda trailer community hardly fit the typical profile. Further down the scale, of course, were the many low-down trailer parks that dotted the map of America. By 1968, only 13 percent of mobile homeowners held white- collar jobs, and a sizable percentage of those who lived in the poorer trailer parks came from rural, mainly southern areas. Families that could not afford to buy a new trailer were buying or renting depreciated—that is, secondhand, possibly thirdhand––trailers. A new used market emerged, fueling what two sociologists called “Hillbilly Havens” that cropped up on the periphery of cities in the Sunbelt, the Midwest, and elsewhere. Scattered along highways, often near the railroad tracks, run-down trailer parks were barely distinguishable from junkyards. Trailer trash had become America’s untouchables. 38 To make matters worse, poor and working-class trailer communities were believed to be dens of iniquity. The charge actually went back to the World War II “defense centers,” to which prostitutes migrated, in a scattering of whorehouses on wheels. By the fifties, pulp fiction, with such titles as Trailer Tramp and The Trailer Park Girls, told stories of casual sexual encounters and voyeurism. In the parlance of the day, the female trailer tramp “moved from town to town—from man to man.” Alongside such tales was Cracker Girl (1953), soft-porn pulp that titillated readers and capitalized on the thrill of crossing the tracks and getting sex on the lowdown. Tramps and trailer nomadism, like drugs and gambling, identified social disorder on the edge of town. 39 The poor dominated the mobile home picture. In 1969, the thirteen Appalachian states were on the receiving end of 40 percent of mobile home shipments, and, not surprisingly, the cheapest models (under $5,000) headed for the hills. In 1971, New York City approved its first trailer park, after Mayor John Lindsay found support for a policy of housing the homeless in trailers. These were not Bowery bums, but people who were being uprooted as a result of

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Most of their horses and cattle had been driven off by the attackers, but some sixty animals had been killed in the crossfire; the carcasses of these beasts were now putrefying around the Arkansans in the late-summer sun, creating a sickening stench. On the night of September 10, two bold emigrants made a desperate attempt to sneak through the siege lines and summon help. One of them, a nineteen-year-old artist from Tennessee named William Aden, who had joined the Fancher train in Provo just a few weeks earlier, somehow made it out of the meadows and had ridden to within several miles of Cedar City when he came upon a group of men camped beside a spring. Believing them to be another party of Gentile emigrants en route to California, Aden rushed into their midst and blurted out a plea for help. The men, however, were Mormons, not emigrants, and upon hearing young Aden’s appeal they drew their weapons and shot him dead. Isaac Haight’s messenger had arrived in Salt Lake City early that same morning, and promptly turned around to carry Brigham’s reply back to southern Utah. The prophet’s instructions were that the Saints “must not meddle” with the Fancher party. “The Indians,” Brigham wrote, “we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them.” This letter has been intensely pondered by scholars, yet historians remain sharply divided about what Brigham really intended by it. * Whatever its meaning, the missive didn’t arrive in Haight’s hands until September 13, two days after the Mountain Meadows massacre had been carried out. In the absence of word from Brigham Young, Isaac Haight sought guidance from his immediate superior, Colonel William Dame, the thirty-eight-year-old military commander of all the southern Utah militias. Haight rode twenty miles north to the settlement of Parowan, where he woke Dame in the middle of the night to ask him what to do about the besieged Fancher train. Colonel Dame impatiently insisted that Haight needed no further word from Great Salt Lake to take decisive action. “My orders,” Dame declared, “are that the emigrants must be done away with.” This directive was conveyed to John D. Lee at the Mountain Meadow by Major John Higbee of the Nauvoo Legion, a thirty-year-old zealot who arrived on the scene with more than fifty elite militiamen from Cedar City. By the night of September 10, most of the Paiutes had ridden away from the Mountain Meadow in disgust, leaving the Saints with perhaps as few as forty Indian mercenaries. Fearing that they no longer had sufficient manpower to overwhelm the emigrants’ position by force, the Saints decided to end the standoff by means of subterfuge.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Friendship is sweet. Brotherhood is sustaining. But pay attention to the tenor of those all-male groups: under certain circumstances, they can feed aggression, antipathy toward women, and assault. When looking at colleges, inquire about options, aside from Greek life, for nighttime and weekend socializing. Boys who are thinking of joining fraternities should do their due diligence on various houses’ reputations, talking not only to current members, but to unaffiliated students on campus, including girls who’ve attended their parties. Have student publications or local news outlets revealed incidents of sexual misconduct, racial slurs, hazing, hazardous drinking? Is sexual conquest prioritized over female dignity (a freshman at a Southern California college told me he dropped out of his frat after his pledge class was paired with a “lower-tier” sorority, so that, unbeknownst to the girls, the guys could practice their hookup technique before meeting more desirable prospects)? What programming has been put in place to educate about consent, irresponsible drinking, gender inequity, positive sexuality? How are parties made safe and comfortable for everyone, including students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and women (of any ethnicity or orientation)? These are not trivial concerns: as I previously said, fraternity members are more likely than other boys to commit assault—as much as three times more likely, according to some research. It’s unclear whether a given fraternity’s disregard for women and greater tolerance for sexual misconduct is itself enough to transform otherwise nonviolent young men. What does seem to be true, though, is that high school boys who are interested in going Greek already score higher than others on proclivities for sexual aggression as well as belief in certain rape myths, such as that assault only involves physical violence or that inebriation is a reasonable excuse for male misconduct. Fraternity life validates those tendencies, makes them acceptable. That’s an argument not only for ongoing, mandatory educational interventions in frat houses, but for programming geared toward boys long before college.