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.

Page 84 of 90 · 20 per page

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  SIXSetting an ExampleIn Chapter 4, we saw that despite his parent’s personal unhappiness, Gary was raised by a mother and father who were good parents. They provided love, protection, and a moral compass to their children. Not only were they able to give priority to the children but they were able to work together on their behalf. When one of their sons got into trouble in high school, they went hand in hand to the school counselor for advice. They devised a plan where each took turns waiting up at night for the errant boy until his acting out subsided. Despite their anger and distrust of each other and disappointment in the marriage, they presented their children with a united front. Gary’s parents are like millions of American couples who have serious, hurtful problems with each other but who nevertheless give priority to their children. So we can ask: Did their many problems affect Gary when he went in search of a life mate? Are there residues from their unhappy relationship that Gary brought to his own marriage? Or did their shared commitment to parenting make a more powerful impression? How did the tensions of his parents’ marriage affect Gary’s identity as husband and father? And what is his relationship like today with his parents? Gary had hinted that his parents’ marriage influenced his own. It was time to hear more about his life with Sara. I leaned toward him and said, “Talk to me about your marriage.” “Meeting Sara really turned my life around,” he answered, warming to the change of subject. “But first let me give you the full perspective. I’d graduated from college and spent two years in the Peace Corps. When I got back, I was thinking of going into business with my dad but I wasn’t enthused about it. So I started working for a friend who started a small software business. I was living at that time with Tanya. She was a beautiful and passionate woman. We fell madly in love and things were just great until I got to know her better. I couldn’t believe it. She turned out to be an awful lot like my mother at her worst.” Here Gary gave a reminiscent shudder. “She was possessive and jealous and she was pushing me to get married. I wasn’t ready and after about a year, I wanted out. I learned a lot from that experience. I learned that I wanted a woman who could think for herself and didn’t look to me to be everything for her. And I wanted someone a lot calmer. I didn’t want a playback of my dad’s life.”

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

  to remove vagrants and beggars, to be rid of London’s eyesore population. Those sent on the hazardous voyage to America who survived presented a simple purpose for imperial profiteers: to serve English interests and perish in the process. In that sense, the “first comers,” as they were known before the magical “Pilgrims” took hold, were something less than an inspired lot. Dozens who disembarked from the Mayflower succumbed that first year to starvation and disease linked to vitamin deficiency; scurvy rotted their gums, and they bled from different orifices. By the 1630s, New Englanders reinvented a hierarchical society of “stations,” from ruling elite to household servants. In their number were plenty of poor boys, meant for exploitation. Some were religious, but they were in the minority among the waves of migrants that followed Winthrop’s Arbella. The elites owned Indian and African slaves, but the population they most exploited were their child laborers. Even the church reflected class relations: designated seating affirmed class station. 14 Virginia was even less a place of hope. Here were England’s rowdy and undisciplined, men willing to gamble their lives away but not ready to work for a living. England perceived them as “manure” for a marginal land. All that these idle men understood was a cruel discipline when it was imposed upon them in the manner of the mercenary John Smith, and the last thing they wanted was to work to improve the land. All that would keep the fledgling colony alive was a military-style labor camp meant to protect England’s interests in the country’s ongoing competition with the equally designing Spanish, French, and Dutch governments. That a small fraction of colonists survived the first twenty years of settlement came as no surprise back home—nor did London’s elite much care. The investment was not in people, whose already unrefined habits declined over time, whose rudeness magnified in relation to their brutal encounters with Indians. The colonists were meant to find gold, and to line the pockets of the investor class back in England. The people sent to accomplish this task were by definition expendable. 15 So now we know what happens to our colonial history. It is whitewashed. Though New World settlers were supposed to represent the promise of social mobility, and the Pilgrims generated our hallowed faith in liberty, nineteenth- century Americans paradoxically created a larger-than-life cast of “democratic” royalty. These inheritors founded the first genealogical societies in the 1840s, and by the turn of the twentieth century patriotic organizations with an emphasis on hereditary descent, such as the General Society of Mayflower Descendants and the Order of the Founders and Patriots of America, boasted chapters across

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  While in Spain orthodox intolerance concentrated on Moors and Jews, and then on an amalgamation of Jews, Protestants, foreigners and those of ‘impure blood’, north of the Pyrenees Jews had ceased to be the main object of hatred in the thirteenth century, and attention had focussed on those heretics who fled into mountain areas to escape persecution. Almost imperceptibly, in these remote and backward areas, the heresy-hunt broadened out into the witch-hunt. Witches had not, on the whole, been hunted in the Dark Ages, since belief in their existence tended to be treated as pagan superstition: Charlemagne, in fact, passed laws against the hunting of witches. The position changed in the thirteenth century with the development of the Dominican Inquisition, which tended to create (often for financial reasons) a new category of victims when it ran out of an old one. Thus in the Alps witches were called Waudenses and in the Pyrenees Gazarii or Cathars. When the hunting of heretics and other antinomian groups became endemic in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, witch-hunting began to evolve its own theory and methodology, while at the same time it spread down from the mountain areas to embrace the whole of society. The two leading German Dominican inquisitors, who specialized in witch- hunting, Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprender, compiled a huge dossier based on confessions extracted under torture; in 1484 they used this to persuade Innocent VIII to issue the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, which gave them specially enlarged powers, and two years later they condensed their ‘findings’ into the great witch- encyclopaedia, the Malleus Maleficarum, which became a best-seller. The combination of bull and book internationalized their hunting techniques. Since their forms of questioning put words into the mouths of the victims, which they were compelled by torture to repeat, the patterns of the Malleus appeared to be confirmed by experience all over Christendom. In reality there is no reason to suppose that such a phenomenon as witchcraft ever existed. The myth was on a level with the supposed ritual murders of Christian children, of which the Jews were accused in the twelfth century. Witches simply replaced Jews as objects of fear and hatred, and torture supplied ‘proof’ of their existence and malevolence. Indeed, witch-hunting could not survive, or even become a powerful movement, without torture. The European craze really dates from about 1468, when the papacy first declared witchcraft a crimen exceptum, and made those accused subject to torture. Once torture was authorized, the confessions multiplied, the number of victims and accusations increased, and the

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  doctrine of original sin was thus introduced, all the more un-Christian since it could not be effaced by baptism; the saffron robes worn by the condemned (the great majority of whom were Jews) had to be hung up in churches as a perpetual reproach to their descendants – a law observed until the end of the eighteenth century. The limpieza de sangre system might have disappeared in the sixteenth century under the weight of its own contradictions and cruelties. In fact, the religious struggle not only prolonged its life but immeasurably increased the authority, power and durability of its control-mechanism, the Inquisition. By an almost magical process, Protestantism was simply identified with impure blood, that is with the Jewish taint. Archbishop Siliceo of Toledo expressed the common view in 1547: ‘It is said, and it is considered true, that the principal heretics of Germany, who have destroyed all that nation . . . are descendants of Jews.’ In fact no one had said this outside Spain; and Luther himself was notoriously anti-Semitic. But Spaniards of Jewish descent were duly identified by the Inquisition as Protestants, and burned, and these convictions were taken as proof of an unfounded assumption. By 1556 we find Philip II writing: ‘All the heresies which have occurred in Germany and France have been sown by descendants of Jews, as we have seen and still see daily in Spain.’ Protestantism was thus fitted into the hate-structure of the country, and doctrinal orthodoxy was reinforced by racism. The campaign was directed against foreigners as well as Spanish Jews and intellectuals; in fact after the mass-burning of Protestants in 1559–62, conducted at grandiose ceremonies in front of the king and other members of the royal family, most of the Protestants executed were foreigners, who were assumed to be actively plotting to subvert the State. Many of these were seamen and merchants, chiefly from France, England and the Low Countries; commercial rivalry was thus reinforced by doctrinal hatred, and sea-warfare took on a new ferocity. The process tended to seal off Spain (and her colonies) from the rest of the world. The Spanish Erasmians were wiped out or driven into exile, one of the first victims being Ximenes’s former secretary, Juan de Vergera. The great Spanish pedagogue Juan Luis Vives wrote: ‘We live in such difficult times that it is dangerous either to speak or to be silent.’ As one of Vives’s correspondents, Rodrigo Manrique, put it (from exile): ‘Our country is a land of pride and envy and, you may add, of barbarism; down there one cannot produce any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism. Thus silence has been imposed on the learned.’ The Spanish Index of Prohibited Books was first published in 1551, and progressively

• From Between Us

  Without ever mentioning the emotion words, respondents were coached to produce facial configurations that, to a Western eye, would make them look angry or disgusted (or any of the other “basic” emotions). For disgust, the instruction was: “(a) wrinkle your nose and let it open, (b) pull your lower lip down, and (c) move your tongue forward, but do not stick it out.” Levenson and his colleagues wanted to know: Did a person who looked disgusted also have the associated autonomic arousal of “disgust,” and did they feel disgusted? In the United States, the answer to both of these questions had been “yes”: when trained actors and undergraduate college students looked disgusted, they also felt disgusted, and their autonomic arousal tended to be distinguishable from the pattern associated with different expressions. And was their hypothesis confirmed? The answer is no. Even if we disregard the lower quality of both facial configurations and the physiological data produced in the Minangkabau group, the Minangkabau men did not report any emotions when asked “if any emotions, memories, or physical sensations had occurred during the facial configurations.” As the Levenson team acknowledged, an important reason may have been that “the task [was] missing the critical element for emotional experience as defined by [the Minangkabau] culture, namely the meaningful involvement of another person.” Heider himself had observed in his fieldwork that: “[i]n comparison with Americans, for whom the internal experience of emotion is very important, Minangkabau more commonly emphasize the external aspects of emotion, focusing on the implications of emotion for interpersonal interactions and relationships.” Minankabau emphasized OURS emotions—emotions as relational acts between people. The test in isolation that had worked so well to elicit emotions in American respondents failed to cue emotional experience in the Minangkabau. Physiological and bodily markers may well play a role in Minangkabau emotional experience, but only if socially contextualized or shared. Japanese emotions may be similarly shared with others. Yukiko Uchida, a professor of psychology at Kyoto University, watched the media coverage of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games in Japan and the United States and was struck by a difference in the ways Japanese and American athletes talked about their emotions. When Americans talked about their emotions, they located their emotions inside themselves, but when Japanese talked about their emotions, they often located them in relationships with others. A female soccer player who came back from the Olympics after the team had lost was asked by an interviewer: Now you are back in Japan. How did other people react? And she answered in response: We came back without any medals. But when we arrived at Narita airport, many people told us “you did a good job”! I was so grateful for their encouragement, but at the same time, I really felt sorry we had lost the game. . . . I wished I could have met their expectations.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  The Internet has made porn more prevalent and accessible than at any time in history, especially to teens. As with pop culture, that has spurred an escalation in explicitness, a need to push the boundaries to maintain an easily distracted audience. Mirroring (and raising further questions about) the mainstream culture’s “booty” trend, in one large-scale study of sexual behavior and aggression in best-selling porn, anal sex was depicted in over half of the videos surveyed, always as easy, clean, and pleasurable to women; 41 percent of videos also included “ass to mouth,” in which, immediately after removing his penis from a woman’s anus, he places it in her mouth. Scenes of “bukake” sex (multiple men ejaculating on one woman’s face), “facial abuse” (oral sex aimed at making a woman vomit), triple penetration, and penetration by multiple penises in a single orifice are also on the rise. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that in real life those practices wouldn’t feel good to most women. Watching natural-looking people engaging in sex that is consensual, mutually pleasurable, and realistic may not be harmful—heck, it might be a good idea—but the occasional feminist porn site aside, that is not what the $97 billion global porn industry is shilling. Its producers have only one goal: to get men off hard and fast for profit. The most efficient way to do so appears to be by eroticizing the degradation of women. In the study of behaviors in popular porn, nearly 90 percent of 304 random scenes contained physical aggression toward women, while close to half contained verbal humiliation. The victims nearly always responded neutrally or with pleasure. More insidiously, women would sometimes initially resist abuse, begging their partners to stop; when that didn’t happen, they acquiesced and began to enjoy the activity, regardless of how painful or debasing it was. The reality is, as one eighteen-year-old pursuing a porn career told documentary filmmakers Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, “I’m supposed to be having sex with guys I would never have sex with, and saying things I would never say. There is nothing sexually arousing. You’re just processed meat.”

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  ‘They made it their business to set up the light of nature, under the name of Christ in Men, and to dishonour and cry down the Church, the Scriptures, the present Ministry, and our Worship and Ordinances; and called men to hearken to Christ within them. But withal, they conjoined a Cursed Doctrine of Libertinism, which brought them to an abominable filthiness of Life. They taught . . . that God regardeth not the Actions of the Outward Man, but of the Heart, and that to the Pure all things are Pure (even things forbidden). And so as allowed by God, they spoke most hideous Words of Blasphemy, and many of them committed whoredoms commonly. Insomuch that a Matron of great Note for Godliness and Sobriety, being perverted by them, turned so shameless a Whore, that she was Carted in the streets of London.’ These extremists were prophets or Ranters, who had much in common with the Joachimites or, for that matter, Tertullian. Such elements have always seized the opportunity of a crisis or breakdown in society to promote apocalyptic or extraordinary solutions, whether moral or politico-economic. The English Civil War was just such an occasion. As one orthodox critic put it (1651): ‘It is no new work of Satan to sow Heresies, and breed Heretics, but they never came up so thick as in these latter times. They were wont to peep up by one and one, but now they sprout out by huddles and clusters (like locusts out of the bottomless pit) . . . thronging upon us in swarmes, as the Caterpillars of Aegypt.’ More recently, the specifically Christian element, always the first victim when millenarianism lurches into terror, had tended to recede into the background or disappear altogether. Yet millenarians, from Tertullian on, had nearly always been anti-clerical – a characteristic they share with modern non-Christian prophets and apocalyptics, like Marx, the Paris communards of 1870, Trotskyites, Maoists and other seekers for an illusory perfection in this world. The secular Daniels of the twentieth century have scriptural credentials and their lineage is Christian. This analysis of medieval Christianity thus presents two types of social experiment in moulding society around moral principles – an orthodox experiment and the radical alternative it provoked. Both tend to fail because both, in different ways, are too ambitious; and in the process of trying to fend off failure each type of experiment is liable to betray its Christian principles. One of the great, but perhaps inevitable, tragedies of history was the transformation of the Gregorian reform into an institutional obsession with power; and one of the perpetual, but equally fated, tragedies of history is the progression from millenarianism to the total abandonment of moral values. But Christianity, fortunately, contains more than these two imperfect matrices; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we see the emergence and the struggle for survival of a third force: Christian humanism.

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

  The book of Exodus depicts Egyptian imperialism as an extreme example of systemic oppression. The pharaohs made the Israelites’ lives “unbearable,” compelling them to “work with clay and with brick, all kinds of work in the fields; [forcing] on them every kind of labour.”39 To stem their rising birthrate, Pharaoh even ordered the midwives to kill all Israelite male babies, but the infant Moses was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter and brought up as an Egyptian aristocrat. One day in instinctive revulsion from state tyranny, Moses, a true son of Levi, killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave.40 He had to flee the country, and Yahweh, who had not revealed himself to Moses the Egyptian aristocrat, first spoke to him when he was working as a shepherd in Midian.41 During the Exodus, Yahweh could liberate Israel only by using the same brutal tactics as any imperial power: terrorizing the population, slaughtering their children, and drowning the entire Egyptian army. Peaceful tactics were of no avail against the martial might of the state. Yahweh divided the Sea of Reeds in two so that the Israelites could cross dry shod as effortlessly as Marduk had slit Tiamat, the primal ocean, in half to create heaven and earth; but instead of an ordered universe, he had brought into being a new nation that would provide an alternative to the aggression of imperial rule. Yahweh sealed his pact with Israel on Mount Sinai. The earliest sources, dating from the eighth century BCE, do not mention the Ten Commandments being given to Moses on this occasion. Instead, they depict Moses and the elders of Israel experiencing a theophany on the summit of Sinai during which they “gazed upon God” and shared a sacred meal.42 The stone tablets that Moses received, “written with the finger of God,”43 were probably inscribed with Yahweh’s instructions for the construction and accoutrements of the tent-shrine in which he would dwell with Israel in the wilderness.44 The Ten Commandments would be inserted into the story later by seventh-century reformers, who, as we shall see, were also responsible for some of the most violent passages in the Hebrew Bible.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  both sexes took part. And the pillar of Spanish orthodoxy, the Dominican anti- Semite and rabble-rouser, Saint Vincent Ferrer, led a party of flagellants through Spain, France and Italy, following the instructions of a vision in 1396. Thus there was orthodox flagellation, heretical flagellation, and apparently secret flagellation too. Generally speaking, if both sexes took part, it was permitted. Nearly all unofficial male flagellant movements ended in anti-clericalism, heresy or violence. Then the Inquisition was called in, and executions followed. Christianity also had its orthodox tradition of apostolic poverty, and its theory that the world, in its pristine state, was egalitarian and just, before the irruption of sin produced the rule of the strong and the degradation of the weak. In the later Middle Ages, many millenarian movements launched themselves on crazy careers from these propositions. They took two main forms, some combining both. The first group, usually termed ‘Free Spirits’, were antinomians, of a type St Paul had had to deal with in Greece. They believed themselves to be perfect and above moral norms. The Abbot of St Victor, a fourteenth-century orthodox mystic, wrote of them indignantly: ‘They committed rapes and adulteries and other acts which gave bodily pleasure; and to the women with whom they sinned, and the simple people they deceived, they promised that such sins would not be punished.’ Some taught that women were created to be used by the brothers of the Holy Spirit; a matron, by having intercourse with one of the brethren, could regain her lost virginity; this was linked to their belief that they had rediscovered the precise way in which Adam and Eve had made love. They were often arrested for attempting to seduce respectable middle-class wives; or for eating in taverns and then refusing to pay. ‘They believe that all things are common,’ noted the Bishop of Strasbourg in 1317, ‘whence they conclude that theft is lawful to them.’ These men were often executed, sometimes with hideous cruelty. But many free spirits were not fraudulent or antisocial. In Flanders and the Rhine valley, the orthodox Brethren of the Free Spirit formed one of the largest and most admirable religious movements of the later Middle Ages, running schools and hospitals for the poor, and engaging in a variety of welfare work. Female free spirits, of Beguines, though not exactly nuns since they did not live in convents, worked among the poor in the Rhineland cities – at one time there were 2,000 of them just in Cologne – and were models of piety and orthodoxy. Rome did not like these patterns of religious behaviour, since they did not fit into established categories. So the bishops and the Inquisition kept a close watch, and frequently

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  22:13–21). No such requirements of sexual purity were expected of men. 7) If a man made a vow to God, he had to keep it, but if a woman made a vow, her father or husband had veto powers that could void the vow (Num. 30:1–17). 8) Women were frequently excluded from participating in Temple rituals and festivals due to the “uncleanliness” of their menstruation cycle (Lev. 15:19). 9) Only if a man died without having any sons would his inheritance pass to his daughters (Num. 27:8–9). 10) Women could be taken as war booty (Deut. 21:10–14). 11) A woman who gave birth to a boy was “unclean” for fourteen days, but if she gave birth to a girl, she was unclean for twice as long (Lev. 12:1–5). 12) Men could have multiple sex partners, even to the point of maintaining a harem. Women could only have one sex partner (Lev. 18:18). 13) A husband who suspected his wife of infidelity could have her ingest a bitter elixir before the priest—if she survived, she was faithful; if she was afflicted, she was guilty of adultery (Num. 5:11–31). Men did not need to drink such brews. Probably the most blatant abuse of sexism was the determination of the value of a person dedicated by a vow to God. According to Leviticus 27:1–8, the value of men between the ages of twenty and sixty years was fifty silver shekels, while a woman was only worth thirty. If the men were over sixty years of age, then their worth dropped to fifteen shekels, while the worth of women dropped to ten. One is left questioning if these laws were indeed the will of God or if these were the laws of men who attributed the regulations to God in order to protect their power and privilege within patriarchy. If these regulations came from God, then God stands accused of sexism. It appears that the Bible advocates patriarchal structures. At the very least, it has been used to justify sexism. How can liberation be found in what feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Trible calls these texts of terror? We are told that King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, had three hundred wives and six hundred concubines. Can a biblical case be made for polygamy and concubinage? Of course not—we automatically assume that these particular social structures are not relevant for the modern era. Additionally, we consciously or subconsciously make a distinction between the Bible advocating a particular social structure and the Bible simply describing the social practices of its time. Yet, how do we justify in our own minds the rejection of social structures such as polygamy and concubinage while still advocating the overall foundation of patriarchy? Is patriarchy also a structure that the liberating Good News of Jesus demands that his disciples flatly reject?

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  Now it so happens that, in the NT, aselgeia usually occurs, not alone, but either in lists of sins or in conjunction with other sins. It is instructive to see with what other sins it is most closely connected. (i) Three times (Mark 7.22; Eph. 4.19; II Pet. 2.2) it occurs close to pleonexia. Pleonexia is the unbridled longing to possess more, the uncontrollable desire to possess things which are forbidden and which should not be desired at all. Therefore there is in aselgeia the idea of ‘sheer, shameless greed’. It is the vice of the man who will submit to demean himself and to shame himself in any way in order to possess that which he has set his heart upon. (ii) In four cases (Mark 7.22; II Cor. 12.21; Gal. 5.19; II Pet. 2.18) it is connected with adultery and lust and sexual sin. Therefore in aselgeia there is involved the idea of ‘sheer animal lust’. One has only to walk the streets of any great city to see that kind of aselgeia in terrible action. It is the vice of a man who has no more shame than an animal in the gratification of his physical desires. (iii) In three cases (Gal. 5.19; I Pet. 4.3; Rom. 13.13) it is connected with drunkenness. In particular it is connected with the word kōmoi. Originally a kōmos was a band of friends who accompanied a victor in the games on his way home. They sang their rejoicings and his praises. But the word degenerated until it came to mean a ‘carousal’, a band of drunken revellers, swaying and singing their way through the streets. Therefore aselgeia has in it that ‘sheer self-indulgence’, which is such a slave to its so-called pleasures that it is lost to shame. It is perhaps Josephus who gives us the flavour of the meaning of aselgeia best of all. He couples it with mania, ‘madness’, and he declares that that was the sin of Jezebel when she erected a shrine of Baal in the Holy City, the very city of God. Such an act was a shocking outrage which defied all decency and flaunted all public opinion. Aselgeia is a grim word. It is the wanton insolence that is lost to shame. It is a grim commentary on human nature that a man can be so mastered by sin that in the end he loses even shame. CHARISMATHE GIFT OF GODCharisma basically means ‘a gift’. Outside the NT it is not at all a common word. In classical Greek it is rare. It is not common in the papyri, but there is one suggestive occurrence where a man classifies his property as that which he acquired apo agorasias, ‘by purchase’, and that which he acquired apo charismatos, ‘by gift’. In the NT charisma is a characteristically Pauline word. Altogether it occurs seventeen times, fourteen times in the undoubted Pauline letters, twice in the Pastoral Epistles, and once in I Peter.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It drains and brutalizes the workman who does its work. It hunts the business man with fear of failure, or makes him hard with merciless success. It plays with the loaded dice of false prospectuses and watered stock, and the vaster its operations become, the more do they love the darkness rather than the light. It corrupts all that it touches,—politics, education, the Church. For a profession to be “commercialized” means to be demoralized. The only realms of life in which we are still glad and happy are those in which the laws of commerce are not practised. If they entered the home, even that would be hell. Industry and commerce are good. They serve the needs of men. The men eminent in industry and commerce are good men, with the fine qualities of human nature. But the organization of industry and commerce is such that along with its useful service it carries death, physical and moral. Frederick Denison Maurice, one of the finest minds of England in the Victorian Age, said, “I do not see my way farther than this, Competition is put forth as the law of the universe; that is a lie.” And his friend Charles Kingsley added, “Competition means death; coöperation means life.” Every joint-stock company, trust, or labor union organized, every extension of government interference or government ownership, is a surrender of the competitive principle and a halting step toward coöperation. Practical men take these steps because competition has proved itself suicidal to economic welfare. Christian men have a stouter reason for turning against it, because it slays human character and denies human brotherhood. If money dominates, the ideal cannot dominate. If we serve mammon, we cannot serve the Christ. The undermining of the family We have purposely left to the last what properly comes first in any consideration of social life. The family is the structural cell of the social organism. In it lives the power of propagation and renewal of life. It is the foundation of morality, the chief educational institution, and the source of nearly all the real contentment among men. To create a maximum number of happy families might well be considered the end of all statesmanship. As President Roosevelt recently said, all other questions sink into insignificance when the stability of the family is at stake. The most significant part of that utterance was that such a thing had to be uttered at all. Hard times are always marked by a downward curve in the percentage of marriages. In our country the decline has become chronic for some years past. Men marry late, and when the mating season of youth is once past, many never marry at all.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  Here one might be tempted to see the anticipation of the Christian idea that sexual pleasure is in itself a defilement, which only the lawful form of marriage, with the possibility of procreation, could render acceptable. It is a fact that this passage from Musonius was utilized by Clement of Alexandria in the second book of the Pedagogue.10 However, although Musonius—like most of the ancient moral philosophers, with the exception of the Cynics—does consider the public practice of this type of relation to be reprehensible, it would undoubtedly be a falsification of his doctrine to attribute to him the idea that sexual pleasure is an evil, and that marriage was instituted in order to redeem and regulate the necessary experience of it within a strict framework. If Musonius regards as shameful any sexual intercourse outside marriage, it is not that the latter has been superimposed on the former so as to rid it of its intrinsically wrongful character. It is that, for the reasonable and social human being, the very nature of the sexual act demands that it be inscribed within the matrimonial relation, where it may produce a legitimate progeny. The sexual act, the conjugal tie, offspring, the family, the city, and beyond it, the human community—all this constitutes a series whose elements are connected and in which man’s existence achieves its rational form. To withdraw pleasure from this form, to detach pleasure from the conjugal relation in order to propose other ends for it, is in fact to debase the essential composition of the human being. The defilement is not in the sexual act itself, but in the “debauchery” that would dissociate it from marriage, where it has its natural form and its rational purpose. From this perspective, marriage constitutes for human beings the only legitimate context for sexual union and the experience of the aphrodisia. 2. Given this essential association of sexual relations and sexual pleasure with lawful conjugality, one can understand the new problematization of adultery and the incipient requirement of double sexual fidelity.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  1. However meticulous and complex these regimens of activity may be, we must not exaggerate their relative importance. The place they are allocated is limited in comparison with the other regimens—particularly in comparison with the dietary regimen. When, in the fifth century, Oribasius comes to edit his great collection of medical texts, he will devote four entire books to the qualities, disadvantages, dangers, and virtues of the different possible foods and to the conditions in which one should and should not consume them. He will give only two paragraphs to sexual regimen, citing a text by Rufus, another by Galen. One may think that this limitation reflects, more than anything else, an attitude characteristic of Oribasius and his epoch. But it is a trait manifested by all Greek and Roman medicine to accord much more space to the dietetics of alimentation than to that of sex. For this medicine, the thing that matters is eating and drinking. A whole development—evident in Christian monasticism—will be necessary before the preoccupation with sex will begin to match the preoccupation with food. But alimentary abstentions and fasts will long remain fundamental. And it will be an important moment for the history of ethics in European societies when apprehension about sex and its regimen will significantly outweigh the rigor of alimentary prescriptions. In the Roman epoch, at all events, the regimen of sexual pleasures holds a relatively limited place next to the great alimentary regimen, just as, moreover, these pleasures themselves are associated in moral thought and social ritual with the delights of eating and drinking. The banquet, an occasion shared by gluttony, drunkenness, and love, is a direct testimony of this association; the latter is attested indirectly by the inverse ritual of the philosophical symposium, where the food is always measured, the drunkenness is still capable of truth, and the love is an object of reasonable discourses. 2. In these medical regimens, one sees a certain “pathologization” of the sexual act take shape. But there must be no misunderstanding on this point: the development in question is in no way similar to the one that occurred much later in Western societies, when sexual behavior was perceived as a bearer of unhealthy deviations. In the latter case, it was to be organized as a domain that would have its normal forms and its morbid forms, its specific pathology, its nosography and etiology—to say nothing of its therapeutics. Greco-Roman medicine operates differently. It inscribes the sexual act within a field where it constantly risks being affected and disturbed by alterations in the organism—and where, conversely, it always risks inducing diseases of various kinds, proximate and distant.

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

  Milosevic depicted Serbia as “a fortress, defending European culture and religion” from the Islamic world, and Serbian clerics and academics similarly described their nation as a bulwark against the Asiatic hordes. Another radical Serbian nationalist, Radovan Karadzic, had warned the Bosnian Assembly that if it declared independence, it would lead their nation “into hell” and “make the Muslim people disappear.” But this latent hatred of Islam dated only to the nineteenth century, when Serbian nationalists had created a myth that blended Christianity with a national sentiment based on ethnicity: it cast Prince Lazlo, defeated by the Ottomans in 1389, as a Christ figure; the Turkish sultan as a Christ slayer; and the Slavs who converted to Islam as “Turkified” (isturciti). By adopting a non-Christian religion, they had renounced their Slavic ethnicity and become Orientals; the Serbian nation would not rise again until these aliens were exterminated. Yet so deep-rooted were the habits of coexistence that it took Milosevic three years of relentless propaganda to persuade the Serbs to revive this lethal blend of secular nationalism, religion, and racism. Significantly, the war began with a frantic attempt to expunge the documentary evidence that for centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims had enjoyed a rich coexistence. A month after the Bosnian declaration of independence, Serbian militias destroyed the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, which housed the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in the Balkans, burned down the National Library and National Museum, and targeted all such manuscript collections for destruction. Between them, Serbian and Croat nationalists also destroyed some fourteen hundred mosques, turning the sites into parks and parking lots to erase all memory of the inconvenient past.23 While they were burning the museums, Serbian militias and the heavily armed Yugoslav National Army overran Bosnia, and in the autumn of 1992 the process that Karadzic called “ethnic cleansing” began.24 Milosevic had opened the prisons and recruited petty gangsters into the militias, letting them pillage, rape, burn, and kill with impunity.25 No Muslim was to be spared, and any Bosnian Serb who refused to cooperate must also die. Muslims were herded into concentration camps, and without toilets or other sanitation, filthy, emaciated, and traumatized, they seemed scarcely human either to themselves or to their tormentors. Militia leaders dulled the inhibitions of their troops with alcohol, forcing them to gang-rape, murder, and torture. When Srebrenica, a UN “safe area,” was turned over to the Serb army in the summer of 1995, at least eight thousand men and boys were massacred, and by the autumn the last Muslims were either killed or expelled from the Banja Luka region.26

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  law, he wrote: ‘True, it begins with Us [the empire], but it will end with all the other kings and princes . . . kings, therefore, defend the justice of your own cause in ours.’ Frederick’s arguments directly foreshadowed the development of secularist theory in the next century by Marsilio of Padua, in which, as he argued in his Defensor Pacis , the ambitions of the papacy had become the prime cause of war and the dissolvent of Christian social unity: ‘The singular cause which in the past has produced civil discord in princedoms and communities, and which will soon spread to other states unless checked, is the belief, the desire and the effort by means of which the Roman bishop and his clerical associates, in particular, aim to seize each secular sovereignty and so gain possession of its temporal wealth.’ But Frederick II was before his time in his almost desperate efforts to erect defences, ecclesiastical and secular, against the papal exploitation of spiritual power to conjure up divisive forces within society. The papal victory over the Staufen was total. Frederick II died still at liberty, but thereafter the ‘viper’s brood’ as the popes called it, was exterminated. His son Manfred had been defeated and killed at the battle of Benevento, 1266, and buried without religious ceremony; on the orders of the Pope, Clement IV, what he referred to as ‘the putrid corpse of that pestilential man’ was dug up again, and reburied outside the borders of the Sicilian kingdom, now a papal fief. Conradin, the last emperor, aged sixteen, fell into the Pope’s hand two years later, and (according to one account) Clement remarked, when ordering his death: ‘Vita Conradini, mors Caroli [Charles of Anjou, the papal agent]. Vita Caroli, mors Conradini.’ The boy was executed in Naples. The end of the Staufen was pitiless. Manfred’s daughter Beatrice was kept in prison for eighteen years; his three bastard sons never emerged – one was still alive in 1309, having been in papal custody forty-five years. Of Frederick’s children and grandchildren, ten died by papal violence or in papal dungeons. We must not imagine that the battle between Church and State took place only at the highest level. The popes fought the Staufen not merely as rival claimants to supreme rule, but as the heads of a caste. The clerical challenge to the layman ran right down through society. It is no accident that Gregory VII spoke, and wrote, of laymen with peculiar bitterness. Of course there had been tension between the clerical and secular elements in Christianity since very early times. The exaltation of the clerical caste had always been connected with the development of authority in Church discipline, and orthodoxy in dogma. Montanism, in the second century, had

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

  [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] To understand the Saudi influence, one must reckon with what may seem a contradiction. On the one hand, after the Iranian Revolution, the kingdom had become one of America’s chief regional allies. On the other hand, it subscribed to an extremely reductive form of Islam, which had been developed in the eighteenth century by the Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92). Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had preached a return to the pristine Islam of the Prophet and repudiated such later developments as the Shiah, Sufism, Falsafah, and the jurisprudence (fiqh) on which all other Muslim ulema depended. He was particularly distressed by the popular veneration of holy men and their tombs, which he condemned as idolatry. Even so, Wahhabism was not inherently violent; indeed, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had refused to sanction the wars of his patron, Ibn Saud of Najd, because he was fighting simply for wealth and glory.13 It was only after his retirement that Wahhabis became more aggressive, even to the point of destroying Imam Husain’s shrine in Karbala in 1802 as well as monuments in Arabia connected with Muhammad and his companions. At this time too, the sect insisted that Muslims who did not accept their doctrines were infidels (kufar).14 During the early nineteenth century, Wahhabis incorporated the writings of Ibn Taymiyyah into their canon, and takfir, the practice of declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, which Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself had rejected, became central to their practice.15

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

  On top of imagining stigma as “contagious,” we are also socialized to view sex and stigma as very closely intertwined—this is why the very topic of sex is considered by many to be “dirty” and often evokes shame. Basically, we are taught to view heteronormative sex as a “stigma-contamination” event, in which the man (who is imagined to be the “corrupting” force) “takes” or “defiles” the woman (who is supposedly “corrupted” in the process)—these connotations often persist even when the act is consensual. This stigma-contamination mindset also explains why virgins are imagined to be “innocent” and “pure,” yet one fleeting sexual experience can somehow permanently “spoil” them. And if a woman has “too much” sex, or “too many” partners, some will say she has been “used up” or “ruined.” As I chronicle in Sexed Up, there is a tendency—especially in people who are already apprehensive about sex and sexuality—to view heavily stigmatized groups as “sexually corrupting” and thus constituting a “sexual threat,” particularly to those deemed most “vulnerable”—specifically, women and children. But not just any women and children; only those of the dominant/majority group, who are imagined to be “pure” and “untainted.” This explains why fears of “transgender sexual predators” in women’s restrooms are so pervasive despite numerous studies showing that trans people and trans-inclusion policies pose no such threat, and why accusations of trans people “grooming” and “sexualizing” children resonate with many people despite the fact that child sexual abuse is overwhelmingly perpetrated by cis-hetero men who are family members or close acquaintances of the child in question.37 Many people have pointed out the unmistakable parallels between today’s anti-trans “groomer” claims and those of Anita Bryant’s 1970s “Save Our Children” campaign, in which she smeared homosexuals as “child molesters” who are “recruiting children.” But eerily similar “sexual threats to children” language has been used by white segregationists against Black people and by antisemitic Christians against Jewish people, and more general “sexual predator” accusations have been weaponized against many other minority groups.38 During the late nineteenth-century, caliper-wielding Northern European scientists promoted the theory of “degeneration,” which posited that members of their “race” were at risk of “de-evolving” if they had sexual dalliances with people of color, people with disabilities, or gender and sexual minorities—essentially, any group who was stigmatized in their eyes. While this theory has long been debunked, some on the far right continue to promote it, vilifying minority groups as “degenerates” that supposedly pose an imminent threat to their imagined “purity.”

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Nowhere does the text provide comfort to the abused women or to the reader of the story. Nowhere are we informed of how God viewed these atrocities. No reassuring words demonstrate God's contempt for such actions. The unnamed concubine is neither the first nor the last example that demonstrates how women were reduced to objects within the Hebrew Bible.3 Women like Tamar, the daughter-in-law of Judah; Tamar, the daughter of King David; the unnamed daughter of Jephthah; or the virgins of the town of Midian who were taken as booty on Moses’ order—all provide disturbing narratives of female marginality. Because of patriarchy, a woman who belonged to one man yet was used by another brought shame to the honor of the man who owned her. Hence, to protect his honor, the man confined the woman to the household, where she was secure from dishonoring her husband. By the same token, if her husband's authority was to be challenged by a political or social rival, the best way to announce the challenge publically was to take control of his possessions, specifically his women. This concept is demonstrated in 2 Samuel 15–16. In these passages, David's authority as king was challenged by his son Absalom. Absalom mounted a rebellion that forced David to flee Jerusalem. Upon entering the city, Absalom, on the advice of his counselor Ahithopel, thought of a way in which Absalom could consolidate his power and authority. The solution: he pitched a tent on the palace's housetop, in the sight of all Israel, and raped all of his father's concubines. This was not a sexual act motivated by lust; rather, women were the means by which Absalom could wrestle authority from his father. Absalom literally provided public notice that he had taken his father's place and was now in control of his father's possessions. A survey of the Law clearly shows how patriarchy is anchored in the Bible: 1) If a Hebrew man was sold into slavery, he served for six years, after which time he could leave with no compensation due. Female Hebrew slaves had to be bought back (Ex. 21:1–11). 2) A man who seduced (raped) a virgin had to either marry her or pay her father a fixed sum. Additionally, the victim of the seduction was not the virgin; rather it was her father, and so it was he who received compensation for the “spoiling” of his property (Ex. 22:15–16). 3) The firstborn son (or male animal) was consecrated unto the Lord; not so for the firstborn daughter (Deut. 15:19–23). 4) Three times a year only the menfolk had to present themselves before God during the great national feasts. Women did not have to do so (Ex. 23:14–19). 5) Women could not serve as priests, and priests could only marry virgins (Lev. 21:1–9). 6) A woman's parents had to prove their daughter was a virgin when she climbed into her new husband's bed (Deut.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  After winning the battle, the rest of Israel swore never to give their daughters to the Benjamites as wives. Yet they regretted their oath, for it meant the loss of one of the twelve tribes. In the end, the other tribes of Israel, after great bloodshed, captured four hundred virgins from Jabesh-gilead who were then given as wives to the six hundred surviving Benjamites. The rape of one has now become the rape of four hundred. However, there were not enough virgins to go around, so they instructed the Benjamites to lie in wait in the vineyards of the town of Shiloh, and when their young maidens came to dance during the Lord's feast, the Benjamites were to catch a wife for themselves and take them back to their land. Hence the kidnaping and subsequent rape of these young maidens resolved the honor of the men who swore not to give their possessions (daughters) in marriage to the Benjamites. This story is disturbing for several reasons. First, the Bible is silent about the identity of the concubine. She is remembered only as an unnamed object. As a possession, her name, identity, or story are unimportant. The narrative never reveals her voice or her humanity. Second, the giving of the virgin daughter and the “seasoned” concubine indicates the low station of women. Rape of men by men was considered a vile thing, but rape of women by men was more acceptable. Third, conflicts between men, whether between the old man and the Gibeah townsmen or between the tribes of Israel and the survivors of the tribe of Benjamin, could be resolved through the sacrifice of women. Fourth, rape of the woman was not the crime that defined the wickedness of the Benjamites; rather, their sin was the violation of the Levite's property. Fifth, the Hebrew text does not state whether the concubine was dead or alive after being raped all night. The silence of the text indicates that it really didn't matter if she was alive or dead, for, after all, her owner could dispose of his possession as he chose. Like Christ, her body was broken, and literally given for many. Sixth, the battle that ensued from the rape of one concluded in the offering of four hundred maidens to be raped by the surviving Benjamite soldiers and the taking of two hundred more maidens. Finally, the most disturbing aspect of the narrative is the silence of God.