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 Vagina Bible (2019)

  • IODINE TO SUPPORT THE IMMUNE SYSTEM: Some people (not people whose medical advice I recommend you follow) promote iodine supplements to “support” the immune system and kill bacteria and viruses. Iodine will do neither of these things. It is true we need iodine, but the only part of the body that uses and stores iodine is the thyroid. Most people in Western societies will get more than enough iodine from their diet. The recommended daily intake for a nonpregnant adult is 150 mcg (micrograms) a day—one teaspoon of iodized salt has 400 mcg. Iodine is also found in foods such as eggs, milk, soy milk, saltwater fish, and seaweed. Paradoxically, taking excessive doses of iodine can cause thyroid disease. • JADE EGGS FOR YOUR “YONI”: Popularized by my pal Gwyneth Paltrow. The idea is that you put an egg-shaped jade rock in your vagina, and it puts you in tune with your feminine energy or something. Goop’s feminine energy, from what I saw at one of their *cough* “health conferences,” is hopelessly heteronormative and conforms to the patriarchal ideal. A vagina does not make you a woman, how you feel inside does. Jade eggs were promoted as an ancient secret of Chinese concubines and queens. I researched this and published my data in a peer-reviewed medical journal—they are not. Promoting jade eggs like this is Orientalism, not health care or female empowerment. The only thing ancient about it is the scam. • KAVA, A DIETARY SUPPLEMENT TO ALLEVIATE ANXIETY AND STRESS: Kava is made from Piper methysticum, a plant that is in the pepper family. It is found in supplements to reduce stress and anxiety; however, supplements may not be labeled correctly, and you really have no idea what it is in what, so you could be exposed to kava and not be aware. It can cause severe liver disease as well as heart and eye problems and skin discoloration. Don’t. Take. Kava. Or listen to anyone who suggests it. • LIFTING YOUR ARMS OVER YOUR HEAD WHILE PREGNANT WILL CAUSE THE CORD TO WRAP AROUND YOUR BABY’S NECK: Nope. This isn’t a vagina myth, but OB/GYNs hear it all the time so I thought I would include it. This is just not biologically possible, and if pregnancies were that fragile, we would have died out years ago. I wonder if this myth serves the patriarchal ideal of the “delicate woman” or if it is simply born out of pregnancy fears.

• From The Vagina Bible (2019)

  • MAGNETS NEXT TO YOUR VAGINA FOR HOT FLASHES: Just clip in your underwear and go! Therapeutic magnets are a multibillion dollar industry and there is no evidence they do anything but lighten your wallet. The people who sell them make claims about the autonomic nervous system that sound good, but are medically meaningless—such as “balance.” Medicine is not gymnastics. In addition to the dearth of studies showing that magnets have medicinal value, if magnets worked for anything we would already know because people would be liberated (at least temporarily) from pain and inflammation and hot flashes and whatever else magnet grifters say magnets work for, by an MRI scan, as that is one big-ass magnet. The magnetic field of an MRI is so strong it causes all the axes of your hydrogen protons to line up and yet it offers no respite for hot flashes (or incontinence, or trouble sleeping or, well, you get the point). Researchers have even done MRIs on women who suffer from hot flashes to try to understand how they impact the brain, and no one has reported their therapeutic effects. Sometimes I worry I am going to sprain my neck with my eye rolls writing about these and the “science” *cough, cough* behind them. • ONION APPLIED TOPICALLY FOR WARTS: Applying slices to the warts or making onion juice to apply or sleeping with an onion in your socks for plantar warts on your feet. I mean, don’t! It may shock you to know there are no studies. Just think about it—onions are super cheap and available almost everywhere, so if they worked no one would have warts. • PARSLEY IN THE VAGINA: The sprig. Stuffed up the vagina each night for three to four nights to induce a period. Look, I don’t make this stuff up, I just report on it. Apparently some people—people who are wrong—think it could stimulate uterine contractions. There is no evidence vaginal application of parsley can do that to the uterus, but even if it could that would not make you have a period. Progesterone withdrawal causes a period, not uterine contractions. Please don’t put parsley in your vagina. • RAINBOW DIET: Eating different colored foods will balance your seven chakras and even make you want to wear more colorful clothing. Literally, you will take off your black yoga pants and wear more colorful clothing. I heard that at the Goop “health” expo in New York. It made me look around and wonder if everyone else realized this was bordering on cult indoctrination? I also read it on the Goop website. Maybe it’s not a true old wives’ tale and more a California fusion version, a new old wives’ tale, or essence of old wife. Eat a balanced diet. Wear what makes you happy. Next (definitely No Thank U).

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  They are bystanders to the emotional lives of others, perhaps envious and scornful of feelings they cannot have or understand. In the end, sociopaths are cold, with shallow emotions, and they live in a dark world of their own. Hiding behind the "mask of sanity," the sociopathic cult leader exposes feelings only insofar as they serve an ulterior motive. He can witness or order acts of utter brutality without experiencing a shred of emotion. He casts himself in a role of total control, which he plays to the hilt. What is most promised in cults-peace, joy, enlightenment, love, and security-are goals that are forever out of the leader's reach, and thus also the followers. Because the leader is not genuine, neither are his promises. 7. Incapacity for LoveAlthough he may refer to himself, for example, as the "living embodiment of God's love," the leader is tragically flawed because he is unable to give or receive love. Love substitutes are given instead. A typical example might be the guru's claim that his illness or misfortune (otherwise inconsistent with his enlightened state) is caused by the depth of his compassion for his followers, whereby he takes on their negative karma. Not only are devotees supposed to accept this as proof of his love, but also they are expected to feel guilt for their failings. It becomes impossible for members to disprove this claim once they have accepted the beliefs of the group. The leader's tremendous need to be loved is accompanied by an equally strong disbelief in the love offered by his followers, which results in often unspeakably cruel and harsh testing of his devotees. Unconditional surrender is an absolute requirement. In one cult, for example, the mother of two small children was made to tell them nightly that she loved her leader more than them. Later, as a test of her devotion, she was asked to give up custody of her children in order to be allowed to stay with her leader. The leader's love is never tested; it must be accepted at face value. 8. Need for StimulationThrill-seeking behaviors, often skirting the letter or spirit of the law, are common among sociopaths. Such behavior is sometimes justified as preparation for martyrdom: "I know I don't have long to live; therefore my time on this earth must be lived to the fullest" or "Surely even I am entitled to have fun or sin a little." Commonly, this type of behavior becomes more frequent as the sociopath deteriorates emotionally and psychologically. Cult leaders live on the edge, constantly testing the beliefs of their followers, often with increasingly bizarre behaviors, punishments, and lies. Stimulation can also be had through unexpected, seemingly spontaneous outbursts, which typically take the form of verbal abuse and sometimes physical punishment. The sociopath has a cool indifference to things around him, yet his icy coldness can quickly turn into rages vented on those around him. 9.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Conversely, if a guy invests all his time, energy, and resources in a woman who’s doing the nasty behind his back, he’s at risk of raising another man’s kids—a total loss if his sole purpose in life is getting his own genes into the future. And make no mistake: according to the cold logic of standard evolutionary theory, leaving a genetic legacy is our sole purpose in life. This is why evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly argue that men take a decidedly proprietary view of women’s sexuality: “Men lay claim to particular women as songbirds lay claim to territories, as lions lay claim to a kill, or as people of both sexes lay claim to valuables,” they write. “Having located an individually recognizable and potentially defensible resource packet, the proprietary creature proceeds to advertise and exercise the intention of defending it from rivals.”4 “Baby, I love you like a lion loves his kill.” Surely, a less romantic description of marriage has never been written. As attentive readers may have noted, the standard narrative of heterosexual interaction boils down to prostitution: a woman exchanges her sexual services for access to resources. Maybe mythic resonance explains part of the huge box-office appeal of a film like Pretty Woman, where Richard Gere’s character trades access to his wealth in exchange for what Julia Roberts’s character has to offer (she plays a hooker with a heart of gold, if you missed it). Please note that what she’s got to offer is limited to the aforementioned heart of gold, a smile as big as Texas, a pair of long, lovely legs, and the solemn promise that they’ll open only for him from now on. The genius of Pretty Woman lies in making explicit what’s been implicit in hundreds of films and books. According to this theory, women have evolved to unthinkingly and unashamedly exchange erotic pleasure for access to a man’s wealth, protection, status, and other treasures likely to benefit her and her children. Darwin says your mother’s a whore. Simple as that. Lest you think we’re being flip, we assure you that the bartering of female fertility and fidelity in exchange for goods and services is one of the foundational premises of evolutionary psychology. The Adapted Mind, a book many consider to be the bible of the field, spells out the sex contract very clearly: A man’s sexual attractiveness to women will be a function of traits that were correlated with high mate value in the natural environment…. The crucial question is, What traits would have been correlated with high mate value? Three possible answers are as follows: The willingness and ability of a man to provide for a woman and her children…. The willingness and ability of a man to protect a woman and her children…. The willingness and ability of a man to engage in direct parenting activities.5 Now let’s review some of the most prominent research founded upon these assumptions about men, women, family structure, and prehistoric life.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Bernardo Bertolucci, defending his film Last Tango in Paris against charges of pornography, put it well when he said, “Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the hands of the adult who slaps him.” The demand for a “redeeming” aspect of frankly sexual material puts those who would simply enjoy erotic pleasures on the defensive. For we then have to justify that which should be our birthright. We are told that an absence of erotic censorship would lead to social and cultural decay. But if that is so, why is it that so many members of our cultural aristocracy can and do respond to unadulterated erotic material? The current craze over the movie Deep Throat, which consists of a thin story line to account for endless scenes of fellatio, underscores not only the absurdity of our anti-erotic critics but the absurd conditions that those who enjoy the film must also endure. Throat is an “in” film to see, and as such has been reviewed and commented upon by serious critics. Doctors, lawyers, members of Mayor Lindsay’s administration, jet-setters, and businessmen have been turning on to this movie for months. Yet they still remain productive members of society. And how do they justify their attendance at Throat? By pretending that the film is making a serious social point—that it is commenting on the morals of the day and/or poking fun at our sexual foibles. Serious film critics have gone to court to make this very point. No one seems willing to be quoted outright as saying the simplest truth: “I went in order to turn on.” Throughout Nancy Friday’s commentary, the gentle message is sent to accept these fantasies for what they are—poetic/erotic daydreams that provide enjoyment for the fantasizer. As a mental-health rule, such a message makes eminent sense. Also, Nancy Friday attributes to fantasy the functions of foreplay, excitement, and the allaying of anxiety—thereby allowing excitement to grow. Fantasies can also be used, as she points out, as a rehearsal—a situation worked through in imagination before one actually lives it out. It is also true that fantasy can be used as compensation for a most dreary existence or as an escape—a way of procrastinating or avoiding taking more affirmative action in the outer world. Monica (Chapter Three, The Transformation Room) is a case in point. Described as a short, messy-looking overweight nineteen-year-old who has toyed with the idea of suicide, Monica would rather fantasize herself as her beautiful sister than attend to prettying herself up. Yet, even here, one can say “Why not?” After all, what alternatives are left? You can’t make someone else’s fantasies disappear anyway. And even if you could, would that cause Monica to make herself more attractive? Or would robbing her of a precious daydream make her even more despondent and more unkempt? Rather than discouraging her fantasy, I would prefer to see her live it out.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  In this bloody scene, only one man escaped White’s revulsion: the huntsman, a red-faced, grave and gentlemanly figure who stood by the hounds and blew the mort on his hunting horn, the formal act of parting to commemorate the death of the fox. By some strange alchemy – his closeness to the pack, his expert command of them – the huntsman was not horrible. For White it was a moral magic trick, a way out of his conundrum. By skilfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence. You could be true to yourself. When White dreamed of the hawk his false self was cracking under strain. He felt himself ‘boiling with a strange unrest’; was increasingly out to shock and appal. Colleagues remember him turning up to parties, drunkenly announcing, ‘This party has no racial future. Parties should be like bird sanctuaries, people should come to them to mate.’ He’d decided he hated people. He preferred animals. He was still drinking too much. He’d already turned on his former loves of foxhunting and flying. They were adulterated with death, and snobbery, and the desire to excel, and they were founded on poor motives: the fear of falling and the fear of failing. Gentility was a game he had played, but the reasons for playing it had been wrong. He was putting it aside. ‘I was like that unfortunate man in Thurber who wanted a packing case in which he could conceal himself,’ he wrote, ‘and the solution seemed to lie in splendid isolation.’ He went fishing alone in Belmullet on the west coast of Ireland during the spring vacation. It made him more than ever certain of his course. From Belmullet he resigned his post at Stowe. ‘It needed courage,’ he told Potts, ‘because my analyst has only got me about one quarter of the way. I don’t know what my future is going to be, if I have a future.’ And then, ‘The barmaid is a complete write-off.’ And there was a new terror. It was war. Everyone felt it drawing closer; an almost tangible thing, acrid as sweat after nerves. ‘We all stand in the shadow of a great fear,’ the Oxford historian Denis Brogan had written two months earlier. ‘And if the angel of death is not yet abroad in the land, we can hear the beating of his wings – and see them too, filling our old familiar sky.’ White saw it too, and wrote that the war was the fault of the ‘masters of men, everywhere, who subconsciously thrust others into suffering in order to advance their own powers’.

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

  When Jamestown, the English outpost along the Chesapeake Bay, was finally founded in 1607, the hardships its settlers experienced proved the general flaw in Hakluyt’s blueprint for creating real-life colonies. Defenders of the Virginia Company of London published tracts, sermons, and firsthand accounts, all trying to explain away the many bizarre occurrences that haunted Jamestown. Social mores were nonexistent. Men defecated in public areas within the small garrison. People sat around and starved. Harsh laws were imposed: stealing vegetables and blasphemy were punishable by death. Laborers and their children were virtual commodities, effectively slaves. One man murdered his wife and then ate her. 26 After the miscarriage of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke, Jamestown was christened England’s first infant child. Bidding the English patience with Jamestown, the poet John Donne sermonized in 1622, “Great Creatures lye long in the Wombe.” Jamestown’s was a slow, painful birth, attended by scant confidence in its future. That year, a lopsided Indian attack nearly wiped out the entire population. 27 The pervasive traumas throughout Jamestown’s early years are legend. Before 1625, colonists dropped like flies, 80 percent of the first six thousand dying off. Several different military commanders imposed regimes of forced labor that turned the fledgling settlement into a prison camp. Men drawn to Jamestown dreamt of finding gold, which did little to inspire hard work. Not even starvation awoke them from the dream. A new group arrived in 1611, and described how their predecessors wallowed in “sluggish idlenesse” and “beastiall sloth.” Yet they fared little better. 28 There were few “lusty men” in Virginia, to repeat Hakluyt’s colorful term. It remained difficult to find recruits who would go out and fell trees, build houses, improve the land, fish, and hunt wild game. The men of early Jamestown were predisposed to play cards, to trade with vile sailors, and to rape Indian women. A glassblower was sent to make colored beads—trinkets to sell to the Indians. This was Hakluyt’s idea. But where were the husbandmen needed to raise food? 29 Impracticality, bad decisions, and failed recruitment strategies left the colony with too few ploughmen and husbandmen to tend the fields and feed the cattle that were being shipped from England. Jamestown lost sight of the English creed expressed in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516): that every productive society prized its tillers of the earth. More wrote that in failing to promote husbandry, “no commonwealth could hold out a year.” 30

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  These glimpses of other traditions were intriguing, but I was still convinced that God and I were through. And there were many aspects of Middle Eastern piety that fueled my aversion. The offices of the film company were near Meah Shearim, one of the ultra-Orthodox quarters of Jerusalem, and the placards on the walls there, which equated Zionism with Hitler and which commanded the “daughters of Israel” to dress modestly, repelled me— though my aversion was mild compared to the rage that the ultra-Orthodox inspired in Joel. Still worse was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest place in the Christian world, where the atmosphere was poisoned by the vitriolic hatred of the various sects. Joel explained to me that since the seventeenth century, a local Muslim family had been deputed by the Ottoman authorities to keep the keys to the church and unlock the doors at carefully prescribed intervals, because the Christians kept locking their rivals out. There was nothing comparable to the aura of prayer and spirituality that I had sensed in the al-Aqsa Mosque. On my first visit to the church, a wizened Coptic monk grabbed my arm as I had peered into the marble edifice surrounding Jesus’ tomb, and produced what looked suspiciously like a pack of tarot cards. A polite refusal did not suffice: he was determined to tell my fortune on this holy spot, even if he had to drag me into the tomb with his own hands. Eventually Danny had to swear at him and gesture threateningly before he backed off. No, I wanted nothing to do with any of this. As my stay drew to a close, Joel was beginning to think that we really might have an idea for a good series. We had started to work well together, sitting in small untidy offices, blue with cigarette smoke, drinking Coca-Cola and hammering out an outline. “In the first program of the series, we can alternate between Jesus and Paul,” Joel would suggest. “We zigzag between shots of Tarsus and Israel. Here we have Paul’s childhood in the Jewish Diaspora, and in the meantime”—he cut to a shot of the synagogue in Capernaum—“the other poor bastard is preaching in Galilee.” Again, I had to smile. Would I ever have imagined that I would one day be sitting at midnight in a grubby editing room in Jerusalem with a secularist, chain-smoking Jew, hearing Jesus referred to as a “poor bastard”?

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

  nation’s spleen and liver, draining the “ill humours of the body . . . to breed good bloud.” Others used less delicate imagery. American colonies were “emunctories,” excreting human waste from the body politic. The elder Richard Hakluyt unabashedly called the transportable poor the “offals of our people.” 19 The poor were human waste. Refuse. The sturdy poor, those without physical injuries, elicited outrage over their idleness. But how could vagabonds, who on average migrated some twenty to eighty miles in a month, be called idle? William Harrison, in his popular Description of England (1577), offered an explanation. Idleness was wasted energy. The vagabonds’ constant movement led nowhere. In moving around, they failed (like the Indians) to put down healthy roots and join the settled labor force of servants, tenants, and artisans. Harrison thought of idleness in the same way we might today refer to the idling motor of a car: the motor runs in place; the idle poor were trapped in economic stasis. Waste people, like wastelands, were stagnant; their energy produced nothing of value; they were like festering weeds ruining an idle garden. 20 Wasteland, then, was an eyesore, or what the English called a “sinke hole.” Waste people were analogized to weeds or sickly cattle grazing on a dunghill. But unlike the docile herd, which were carefully bred and contained in fenced enclosures, the poor could become disruptive and disorderly; they occasionally rioted. The cream of society could not be shielded from the public nuisance of the poor, in that they seemed omnipresent at funerals, church services, on highways and byways, in alehouses, and they loitered around Parliament—even at the king’s court. James I was so annoyed with vagrant boys milling around his palace at Newmarket that he wrote the London-based Virginia Company in 1619 asking for its help in removing the offensive population from his sight by shipping them overseas. 21 As masterless men, detached and unproductive, the vagrant poor would acquire colonial masters. For Hakluyt and others, a quasi-military model made sense. It had been used in Ireland. In the New World, whether subduing the Native population or contending with other European nations with colonial ambitions, fortifications would have to be raised, trenches dug, gunpowder produced, and men trained to use bows. Militarization served other crucial purposes. Ex-soldiers formed one of the largest subgroups of English vagrants. Sailors were the vagrants of the sea, and were often drawn into piracy. The style of warfare most common in the sixteenth century involved attacks on nearly impregnable fortifications, and required prolonged sieges and large numbers of

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  It is noteworthy that the Jewish sinners are considered by the pious to have sinned in the same way that heathen sin, and in fact to have been worse (8.14 [13]; cf. 2.11 [9]). The only two types of transgression singled out are sexual transgressions and sins against the sanctity of the Temple. The Jewish sinners committed both incest and adultery. It is not clear what 'oaths' they took 'concerning these things', unless they are being accused of having formed a secret wife-swapping society. Sexual sins are also men tioned in 2.15 (13): the daughters of Jerusalem 'defiled themselves with unnatural intercourse', and the 'profane man' is accused of being sexually promiscuous (4.4-6). Transgression against the sanctity of the Temple and the Temple service is also indicated in 2.3, which we have already quoted. The way in which the sinful Israelites were worse than the heathen seems especially to be in 'profaning' the offerings and in 'defiling' the 'holy things of the Lord', which probably refers to the Temple and its contents; for this is the kind of transgression which the Israelite sinners share with the Gentiles. The Gentiles 'profane' the holy things of the Lord ( 1 .8) and 'defile Jerusalem and the things that had been hallowed to the name of God' (8.26 [22]).43 It would not be correct to call transgressions against the sanc tity of the Temple 'ceremonial' sins. As Buchler has correctly pointed out, the contraction of levitical impurity itself is not a sin.44 The sin in part is in the plunder of the sanctuary (8. 12 [ 11 ]), but the real heinousness of the crime is in the sinners' attitude. They behave as if there is no avenger (ibid.) 43 See n. 41 above. 44 Buchler, Piety, p. 143. 402 Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha [III and wilfully disobey the commandments of God regarding the Temple service. It is not ceremonial fault itself which is condemned, but the attitude that is indicated when the priests wilfully treat the sacrifices as if they were 'common flesh'. Other specific sins of the sinners are harder to itemize. The sinful man is a hypocrite and a 'man pleaser' (4. 1-8 [7 ]). He lies even when he swears an oath (4.4). When the psalmist says that he scatters families and lays waste houses by deceit (4.13,23 [10f., 20]), it is not clear whether the crime is oppression or moral seduction. The latter seems to be indicated by the comparison with the Serpent (4. 11 [9]) and by the statement that with deceit the sinners 'beguiled the souls of the flawless' (akakoi, tamimim) (4.25 [22]).

• From Escape (2007)

  After school I was waiting in the bus line with Linda when I saw the school’s double doors fly open. The principal of the school came running out, chasing his mentally retarded son, Kendall, who was ten. Kendall was screaming and trying to run away from him. His pants were wet with urine. We could all see the wide circle of dampness. The principal caught up with him and grabbed him. He kicked him so hard that Kendall flew off the ground and landed in a heap on the sidewalk. He yelled at Kendall to get up. Kendall started running away again. The principal kept chasing and kicking him. I was so sickened by what had happened to Randi earlier that day that this overwhelmed me. I could not absorb what I was seeing. In the weeks and months ahead, I would see this again and again. Kendall would wet his pants and his father would beat him. Some of the other children on the playground made fun of Kendall for wetting his pants. Others stood still, shocked to witness a father’s brutality and terrified because he was the principal of the school. That day when the school bus pulled up with the same expressionless gum-chewing driver who scared me so much, I said to my sister that I was not getting on his bus, no way. Linda pulled my arm. “Carolyn, you have to get on this bus.” But she wasn’t strong enough to pull me past my determination not to ride home on the school bus. Linda gave up. I told her I would run home. It was about a mile. I thought if I ran fast enough, I could get home before the bus and then maybe Mama wouldn’t spank me. I looked at the bus driver again. I wasn’t riding on his bus, even if it meant getting spanked. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore and then walked until I caught my breath and could start running again. I dashed into the house just as the bus was dropping off my two sisters. Mother was in the kitchen. “I got home before the school bus, Mama,” I said. She said I was silly and asked why I didn’t ride home with Annette and Linda. But I never told her. By now I was in the second grade and I walked to school or ran home for the rest of the year. One day the gum-chewing bus driver hurt Laura’s little sister. When Laura got off the bus she said she hated him and stuck out her tongue. She stopped riding the bus after that and walked with me every day.

• From Escape (2007)

  Tammy and Cathleen were upset because they didn’t get to go with Barbara to watch her give birth to Samson, her twelfth child. It was a well-established tradition in the FLDS that sister wives were supposed to attend one another’s deliveries. It was believed that since all the wives were going to participate in raising the child, they should be at the birth to bond with the baby and support their sister wife. That was the belief; in practice it was something else entirely. I, like Barbara, loathed the idea of turning the birth of my baby into a communal event. Wives were competitive with one another and conniving. Those intense feelings and complicated relationships were not left outside the delivery room door. When I gave birth to Arthur, Ruth was the only one of Merril’s wives present. I hated it. It felt like an invasion of my privacy and she certainly didn’t treat me any better after Arthur was born. I’d had a relatively easy delivery, and afterward Ruth began telling everyone in the family that it would be good for the unmarried daughters to watch me give birth in the future. Women in the FLDS gave birth in the local clinic. Aunt Lydia, the midwife, delivered the babies. A doctor was never present, nor was pain medication ever used. Women were expected to be perfectly silent during childbirth. If a woman screamed or made loud noises she was criticized for being out of control. Sometimes she’d be reprimanded by her husband during her delivery. Tammy and Cathleen felt outright betrayal by being excluded from seeing Barbara give birth. They felt that all six wives should be present at the delivery and chastised me for holding a completely different view and rebelling against our traditions. “Carolyn, you don’t have a right to impose your selfishness onto your baby,” Tammy said. “If you’re excluding the family from the baby’s birth, it’s as if you’re trying to exclude them from the baby’s life.” Cathleen said that Barbara had insisted on being present when she gave birth to her first child and she didn’t understand why she insisted on privacy for her own deliveries. Tammy piped up that Barbara was still upset that I hadn’t allowed her to be present when I had Betty and Arthur. “I didn’t stop her from coming,” I said. “She just didn’t make it to the delivery room on time, so I see no reason for her to be angry.” When Arthur was born, everyone was out of town except Ruth and Barbara. Ruth came, but Barbara was sulking because I’d called my mother instead of her when I went into labor. She refused to come to the clinic at first, and when she did, Arthur had already been born. Betty was born so quickly that only Merril had been there.

• From Escape (2007)

  Loretta was the first of Merril’s daughters to be married off to the prophet, but she was not the last. Paula was next. She was as beautiful as her sister, Loretta. They looked almost like twins. Her wedding gown was princess style, but for the former nuss, this was hardly a fairy-tale wedding. Uncle Rulon was at least sixty years older than she. Her still smile barely hid her despair. She was very disciplined and determined to keep her feelings in check. I kept thinking of that day in school when we joked about having to marry an old man who was a rest-home patient. Rulon Jeffs was sitting in a chair because he wasn’t strong enough to stand. He had a palsy, so when he took her hand in his patriarchal grip the shaking was visible from quite a distance. The marriage was grotesque to me. Merril, of course, had no reason to hide his feelings. He was proud and overjoyed. Merril’s status within the community was enhanced when he married off Loretta to the prophet. But his obsession with power would soon make him want more. Merril was now considered one of the most exalted men in the community since he had married two daughters to Uncle Rulon. I noticed how differently we, as Merril’s wives, were treated in the community. We rarely had to wait in line at the grocery store or at the fabric shop. It was considered a privilege by other families to associate with us. No one wanted to offend Merril or anyone in his family since he now had a firm and direct connection to the prophet. Most people in the community usually only ever saw Uncle Rulon at church. Those who were able to make an appointment to see him usually found the meetings were kept short. There was time to make a tithe, but not to exert any influence. Merril’s inroads into the Jeffs family did not stop with Uncle Rulon. Several of Rulon’s sons started marrying Merril’s daughters. The one who married the most was the favorite son among the prophet’s seventy children, Warren Jeffs. Warren was gaining influence in the community, and often spoke for his father in church when he was too weak to attend. He was on the verge of becoming a rising star with the potential to take over the FLDS when his father died. I think Merril saw it as a shrewd move to marry as many daughters as he could to Warren. Warren was now in his late thirties. His three wives were churning out children; there were now about fifteen. My opinion of Warren had never changed since I had first met him shortly after marrying Merril. I thought he looked like a big nobody but also felt there was something creepy about him.

• From Escape (2007)

  Warren was at least six feet tall, and seemed even taller because he was so thin. He had zero charisma, but was polite and well-mannered and chose his words carefully. Warren was the principal at the private school on his father’s property. What disturbed me most about him were the stories I heard about his brutality. Warren thrived on brutality and seemed to love hurting people. He’d pull some kids out of their classroom and beat them on an almost daily basis. Warren targeted the kids from bad homes whose parents wouldn’t make waves even if their kids told. Warren also taught brutality. One day he brought one of his wives into the auditorium, which was packed with boys. Annette had a long braid that fell past her knees. Warren grabbed the braid and twisted and twisted it until she was on her knees and he was ripping hair from her head. He told the boys that this was how obedient their wives had to be to them. This incident was widely reported in the community because so many of the boys went home and reported what they had seen. Uncle Rulon was also reported to have said that the only thing Warren had ever done to displease him was study books on Hitler. Stories like this were in wide circulation about Warren before he took control of the FLDS. Once he did, though, the stories stopped because people feared his wrath. After Merril’s daughter Paula was married off to Uncle Rulon, he sent her to teach in his school. Paula had a college degree and was a certified high school teacher. She told me that Warren saw her as “contaminated” by worldly education and insisted she bring all her college books to school and throw them in the dumpster. “If you’re going to teach in this school you cannot bring worldly contamination into the classroom.” Paula complied because she had no other choice. The daughters Merril married to the prophet and Warren tended to be the ones he had used to spy on his wives and keep us in line. They eavesdropped outside our doorways and told their father everything they heard. Even after they married, they felt like we were still a threat to them. They’d call home and pump their younger siblings for information. But now they would tell the prophet, instead of Merril, what was going on in our home. This became a huge embarrassment for Merril because on several occasions, the prophet called him in to reprimand him for not having more control over his family. We routinely made the trip to Salt Lake City with Merril for the priesthood meeting on the third weekend of the month. Merril never missed a meeting because he got to drink in the personal time this gave him with Uncle Rulon.

• From Escape (2007)

  After the meeting was over, there would be a pizza party at the home of Rulon’s son, Leroy. Leroy was the one we thought had the greatest likelihood of becoming the next prophet after Uncle Rulon’s death. The first one I went to sent my head spinning. There was pizza, to be sure, but there was also fried chicken and lots of junk food. But people didn’t go for the food, they went for the alcohol. Men sat in the dining room around a large table and the women stayed in the living room. Vans of women would arrive about forty-five minutes before the men. These were the wives of the most respected men in the FLDS, those in the priesthood. Many came carrying babies in their arms. But that didn’t stop them from hitting the beer—not even the nursing mothers. I was disgusted watching women drinking beer and nursing their babies at the same time. They rarely ate because there was a rigid rule in the Jeffs family against becoming obese. When the men arrived, they sat down in the dining room and expected to be served food. I was taking orders for pizza or chicken and bringing them drinks. I went into the living room to see if any of the other wives would be willing to help me, but they were too drunk. After several bottles of beer, they were laughing and preaching the gospel about keeping sweet and loving your sister wives. When they arrived at the party they’d seemed nervous and irritable, but not now. I thought maybe that was why their husbands let them drink. After a few beers, the men’s mood changed, too. Now they started complaining about their wives. Even Uncle Rulon joined in. He started bitching about one of his wives who was obese after having sixteen kids, which he felt was a sign of pure rebellion toward him. The other men jumped in, ranting and raving about their fat wives, too. I was disgusted by what I was seeing. These were the elite in the FLDS. It shocked me to see those who were held in such high esteem within the community exalting in things they all knew were punishable by excommunication. This was something new to add to the list of ugly realities I had seen within the faith I once prized. Tammy’s Failed Rebellion Carolyn, I’m pregnant.” Tammy and I were in the kitchen. I was getting a quick cup of coffee before heading back to school. I was shocked by the news. Was this for real? Tammy had been trying to get pregnant for six years. Fertility drugs hadn’t worked. Her desperation had increased to the point that rarely a day went by that she didn’t say something to me about it. I knew she’d finally abandoned the Clomid and for the last few months had been taking an herbal tincture a friend recommended.

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

  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

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  41 Gray, p. 628, equates the sin of 1.8 with that of 2.3a, and thus implies that the sinners of 1.8 are, like those of 2.3a, Israelites. Winter, p. 959, also takes 1 .8 to refer to Israelites who are worse than heathen, not to Romans who were worse than other Gentiles. So also Buchler, Piety, p. 140; Ryle and James, p. xlvii. This is certainly a possible interpretation, but f incline toward the view that the sinners of Psalm 1 are Romans. Certainly their sin is similar in kind to that of the sinful Jews (insolence, profana tion), but that is one of the author's points. The reference to defiling Jerusalem in 8.26 (22) seems even more clearly to refer to the Romans rather than to Jewish sinners, whom the Romans have already destroyed and led away (8.20-24 [ 18-21 ]). Following that 'defilement', God is said to judge 'the nations' (8.27 [23]). Gray, however, also takes the defilement of8.26 (22) to be that of the Jewish sinners (p. 628). So also Winter, p. 959; Ryle and James, p. xlvii. 42 This is also not certain, since the parallelism could be progressive: he purges Jerusalem of the Gentiles and also casts out (native) sinners. The Psalms of Solomon 401 They wrought confusion, son with mother and father with daughter; They committed adultery, every man with his neighbour's wife. They concluded covenants with one another with an oath touching these things; They plundered the sanctuary of God, as though there was no avenger. They trod the altar of the Lord, (coming straight) from all manner of uncleannesi., And with menstrual blood they defiled the sacrifices, as (though these were) common flesh. They left no sin undone, wherein they surpassed not the heathen. (8.9-14 [9-13]) The psalmist continues that God punished them by bringing war against Jerusalem, as we have already noted. The sinners even collaborated in bringing the invaders into Jerusalem. Pompey turned on them, however, and destroyed the leaders and 'led away their sons and daughters, whom they had begotten in defilement' (8.15-24 [14-21]).

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Any form of ideological exclusivism inevitably leads to social and intellectual tensions, in that it divides the world into in-groups and out-groups – ‘friends and enemies’, ‘good and evil’, ‘us and them’, ‘human and subhuman’, or ‘enlightened and irrational’.32 All these value-laden categorisations provide an impetus to demonise and dehumanise the ‘other’ which can lead to discrimination, hostility and violence. The Nazi ideological recategorisation of certain human communities as Untermenschen (sub-humans) allowed their elimination to be framed as socially therapeutic and morally unproblematic. Violence against women is widespread, with extensive research suggesting that men’s controlling attitudes and behaviour towards women often rest on underlying traditional gender norms – a set of beliefs about the place and roles of men and women in society, such as ideologies of hegemonic masculinity which are internalised as normative by both men and women. This framing ideology leads women to blame themselves for being the victims of violence by men, so that they are less likely to disclose it or seek legal support.33 Overcoming such traditional beliefs and ideologies is not easy, not least on account of the social pressures to conform to dominant local accounts of human identity. It is, however, necessary to challenge certain understandings of being human and the illusions that are employed to sustain them. It is helpful to remember that an ideology is a human construction, not some eternal truth characterised by a mathematical or logical certainty which demands our assent. And what of religion? Surely religion is implicated in the violent history of human culture? Of course it is. But things are more complicated than its critics suggest – not least because religion is not a catch-all. For a start, some secularist critiques of religion are highly selective, presenting religions as a monolithically violent and oppressive reality, and failing to respect its complexity and depth, which makes such generalisations questionable. Michael Shermer, President of the Skeptics Society, made the significant point that while religions were implicated in some human tragedies, such as holy wars, there is clearly a significant positive side to religion that has to be acknowledged: However, for every one of these grand tragedies there are ten thousand acts of personal kindness and social good that go unreported… Religion, like all social institutions of such historical depth and cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil.34

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  The Biggest Loser is an unholy union of capitalism and the weight-loss industrial complex. On the surface, The Biggest Loser is a television show about weight loss, but really, it’s anti-obesity propaganda, offering wish fulfillment for people with unruly, overweight bodies, both on the show and in the viewing audience. The show allows the home viewer to feel motivated without actually doing anything. If the viewer does get motivated, they can participate at home and feel like they are, in some small way, part of the show. Meanwhile, they also have the satisfaction of watching fat people become less fat from one week to the next while competing for $250,000. I watched the first few seasons of The Biggest Loser avidly. The show offered the ultimate fat-girl fantasy—you go to a “ranch” for a few months, and under the pressure of intense personal trainers, dangerously low caloric intake, the manipulations of reality show producers, and the constant surveillance of television cameras, you lose the weight you’ve never been able to lose on your own. During those first few seasons, I often toyed with the idea of auditioning to appear on the show, though, realistically, that could never happen. I’m too shy. I would go through withdrawal from the Internet. I can’t work out without music. If Jillian Michaels screamed at me, I would shut down or cry like a baby or strangle her. At the time, I was a vegetarian and I was concerned because I don’t eat Jennie-O turkey, a product the show shamelessly hawked for years by way of product placement. Appearing on the show simply was not and is not feasible for me. The longer The Biggest Loser has been on the air, however, the more the show has disturbed me. There is the constant shaming of fat people and the medical professionals who take every opportunity to crow about how near death these obese contestants are. There are the trainers, with their undeniably, implausibly perfect bodies, demanding perfection from people who have, for whatever reason, not had a previously healthy relationship with their bodies. There is the spectacle of the contestants pushing themselves in inhuman ways—crying and sweating and vomiting—visibly purging their bodies of weakness. This is not a show about people becoming empowered through fitness, though the show’s slick marketing would have you believe that. The Biggest Loser is a show about fat as an enemy that must be destroyed, a contagion that must be eradicated. This is a show about unruly bodies that must be disciplined by any means necessary, so that through that discipline, the obese might become more acceptable members of society. They might find happiness, which can, according to the show, according to cultural norms, only be found through thinness. When we watch shows like The Biggest Loser and its many imitators, we are practically begging some power beyond ourselves, “Take these all too human bodies, and make what you will of them.”

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  When Jerome set out to refute Jovinian, he went through many of the scriptural passages cited by Jovinian and claimed that they supported opposite conclusions. Jerome was famous—and still is—for his knowledge of the Scriptures, and he undoubtedly knew that Genesis 2 describes the institution of marriage before the fall; but he tendentiously switched the order of verses in order to make it appear that marriage followed sin, and so fell under God’s curse: As for Adam and Eve, we must maintain that before the fall they were virgins in Paradise; but after they sinned, and were cast out of Paradise, they were immediately married. Then we have the passage, “For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”52 Jerome declares that Jesus himself remained “a virgin in the flesh and a monogamist in the spirit,” faithful to his only bride, the church, and adds that “although I know that crowds of matrons will be furious at me, … I will say what the apostle [Paul] has taught me.… indeed in view of the purity of the body of Christ, all sexual intercourse is unclean.”53 In such passages Jerome expresses a loathing for the flesh, the revulsion of a man ashamed of his own past sexual conduct, as he himself admitted. Other advocates of celibacy, however, from Clement to such married Christians as Tertullian in his early years54 and Gregory of Nyssa, express no such revulsion. Indeed, much of the evidence we have surveyed suggests that loathing for the flesh was not, as some have tried to argue, the basis for advocating celibacy, although, in cases like Jerome’s, such responses no doubt intensified the inclination toward celibacy. Then Jerome finally turns to Paul: I will therefore do battle with the whole army of enemies. In the front rank I will set up the apostle Paul, and, since he is the bravest of generals, I will arm him with his own weapons, that is, with his own statements.55 Jovinian had invoked the deutero-Pauline letters, but Jerome draws primarily from what scholars regard as Paul’s genuine letters, and emphasizes 1 Corinthians 7, infusing Paul’s words with vehement hyperbole: If “it is good for a man not to touch a woman,” it is bad to touch one.… [Paul allows marriage only] “because of fornication,” as if one were to say, “it is good to eat the finest wheat flower,” and yet to prevent a starving man from devouring excrement, I may allow him to also eat barley.… the reason why he says “it is better to marry” is that it is worse to burn.… It is as though he said, “it is better to have one eye than to be totally blind; it is better to stand on one foot and support the body with a cane than to crawl upon broken legs.”56