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 Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905)

  Touching and Looking.—At least a certain amount of touching is indispensable for a person in order to attain the normal sexual aim. It is also generally known that the touching of the skin of the sexual object causes much pleasure and produces a supply of new excitement. Hence, the lingering at the touching can hardly be considered a perversion if the sexual act is proceeded with. The same holds true in the end with looking which is analogous to touching. The manner in which the libidinous excitement is frequently awakened is by the optical impression, and selection takes account of this circumstance—if this teleological mode of thinking be permitted—by making the sexual object a thing of beauty. The covering of the body, which keeps abreast with civilization, serves to arouse sexual inquisitiveness, which always strives to restore for itself the sexual object by uncovering the hidden parts. This can be turned into the artistic (“sublimation”) if the interest is turned from the genitals to the form of the body.25 The tendency to linger at this intermediary sexual aim of the sexually accentuated looking is found to a certain degree in most normals; indeed it gives them the possibility of directing a certain amount of their libido to a higher artistic aim. On the other hand, the fondness for looking becomes a perversion (a) when it limits itself entirely to the genitals; (b) when it becomes connected with the overcoming of loathing (voyeurs and onlookers at the functions of excretion); and (c) when instead of preparing for the normal sexual aim it suppresses it. The latter, if I may draw conclusions from a single analysis, is in a most pronounced way true of exhibitionists, who expose their genitals so as in turn to bring to view the genitals of others. In the perversion which consists in striving to look and be looked at we are confronted with a very remarkable character which will occupy us even more intensively in the following aberration. The sexual aim is here present in twofold formation, in an active and a passive form. The force which is opposed to the peeping mania and through which it is eventually abolished is shame (like the former loathing). Sadism and Masochism.—The desire to cause pain to the sexual object and its opposite, the most frequent and most significant of all perversions, was designated in its two forms by v. Krafft-Ebing as sadism or the active form, and masochism or the passive form. Other authors prefer the narrower term algolagnia which emphasizes the pleasure in pain and cruelty, whereas the terms selected by v. Krafft-Ebing place the pleasure secured in all kinds of humility and submission in the foreground.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Kellogg’s Guide to Child Abuse In 1879, Mark Twain gave a speech in which he observed, “Of all the forms of intercourse, [masturbation] has the least to recommend it. As an amusement,” he said, “it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there’s no money in it.”12 Funny guy, Mark Twain. But there was a seriousness in his humor, as well as courage. As Twain spoke, much of Western culture was waging a bizarre, centuries-long war against any hint of childhood sexuality, including masturbation. The merciless campaign against masturbation was just one aspect of the West’s long struggle against the “sinful” yearnings within human sexuality. We’ve discussed the so-called witches burned alive for daring to assert or even suggest their eroticism, and doctors like Isaac Baker Brown, who justified barbaric, dangerous surgery as a cure for nascent nymphomania. These were not exceptional cases, as Twain knew. Following the advice of such prominent “experts” as John Harvey Kellogg, many parents of Twain’s day subjected their children to brutal physical and mental abuse to stamp out any sign of sexuality. Otherwise reasonable, if confused, people ardently believed that masturbation truly was “the destroying element of civilized society,” in the words of the New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal. Though widely considered to be one of the leading sex educators of his day, Kellogg proudly claimed never to have had intercourse with his wife in over four decades of marriage. But he did require a handsome male orderly to give him an enema every morning—an indulgence his famously high-fiber breakfasts should have made unnecessary. As John Money explains in his study of pseudoscientific anti-sex crusaders, The Destroying Angel, Kellogg would probably be diagnosed as a klismaphile today. Klismaphilia is “an anomaly of sexual and erotic functioning traceable to childhood, in which an enema substitutes for regular sexual intercourse. For the klismaphile,” writes Money, “putting the penis in the vagina is experienced as hard work, dangerous, and possibly as repulsive.” As a medical doctor, Kellogg claimed the moral authority to instruct parents on the proper sexual education of their children. If you’re unfamiliar with the writings of Kellogg and others like him, their gloating disdain for basic human eroticism is chilling and unmistakable. In his best-selling Plain Facts for Old and Young (written on his sexless honeymoon in 1888), Kellogg offered parents guidance for dealing with their sons’ natural erotic self-exploration in a section entitled “Treatment for Self-Abuse and its Effects.” “A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys,” he wrote, “is circumcision.” He stipulated that, “The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment…. [emphasis added]”

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  The man readily uses the pretext of the Hegelian idea that the male citizen acquires his ethical dignity by transcending himself toward the universal: as a singular individual, he has the right to desire and pleasure. His relations with woman thus lie in a contingent region where morality no longer applies, where conduct is inconsequential. His relations with other men are based on certain values; he is a freedom confronting other freedoms according to laws universally recognized by all; but with woman—she was invented for this reason—he ceases to assume his existence, he abandons himself to the mirage of the in-itself, he situates himself on an inauthentic plane; he is tyrannical, sadistic, violent or puerile, masochistic or querulous; he tries to satisfy his obsessions, his manias; he “relaxes,” he “lets go” in the name of rights he has acquired in his public life. His wife is often surprised—like Thérèse Desqueyroux—by the contrast between the lofty tone of his remarks, of his public conduct, and “his patient inventions in the dark.”* He preaches population growth: but he is clever at not having more children than are convenient for him. He praises chaste and faithful wives: but he invites his neighbor’s wife to commit adultery. We have seen the hypocrisy of men decreeing abortion to be criminal when every year in France a million women are put by men into the situation where they have to abort; very often the husband or lover imposes this solution on them; and often these men tacitly assume that it will be used if necessary. They openly count on the woman to consent to making herself guilty of a crime: her “immorality” is necessary for the harmony of moral society, respected by men. The most flagrant example of this duplicity is man’s attitude to prostitution: it is his demand that creates the offer; I have spoken of the disgusted skepticism with which prostitutes view respectable gentlemen who condemn vice in general but show great indulgence for their personal foibles; they consider girls who make a living with their bodies perverse and debauched, and not the men who use them. An anecdote illustrates this state of mind: at the end of the last century, the police discovered two little girls of twelve or thirteen in a bordello; a trial was held where they testified; they spoke of their clients, who were important gentlemen; one of them opened her mouth to give a name. The judge abruptly stopped her: Do not sully the name of an honest man! A gentleman decorated with the Legion of Honor remains an honest man while deflowering a little girl; he has his weaknesses, but who does not? However, the little girl who has no access to the ethical region of the universal—who is neither judge nor general nor a great French man, nothing but a little girl—gambles her moral value in the contingent region of sexuality: she is perverted, corrupted, depraved, and good only for the reformatory.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The pilgrimage to Jerusalem was forbidden by a synod of Narbonne, 1243, which referred to a recent papal deliverance prohibiting it, that the sacred places might be protected against the infection of heresy. Young women were often excused from wearing the crosses, as it might interfere with their prospects of marriage. According to French law, pregnant women condemned to death, were not executed till after the birth of the child. Local synods in Southern France ordered heretics and their defenders excommunicated every Sunday and that sentence should be pronounced amidst the ringing of bells and with candles extinguished. And as a protection against heresy, the bells were to be rung every evening. Imprisonment for life was ordered by Gregory IX., 1229, for all induced to return to the faith through fear of punishment.1144 The prisons in France were composed of small cells. The expenditures for their erection and enlargement were shared by the bishop and the Inquisitors. French synods spoke of the number sentenced to life-imprisonment as so great that hardly stones enough could be found for the prison buildings.1145 The secular authorities destroyed the heretic’s domicile, confiscated his goods,1146 and pronounced the death penalty. The rules for the division of confiscated property differed in different localities. In Venice, after prolonged negotiations with the pope, it was decided that they should pass to the state.1147 In the rest of Italy they became, in equal parts, the property of the state, the Inquisition, and the curia; and in Southern France, of the state, the Inquisitors, and the bishop. Provision was made for the expenses of the Inquisition out of the spoils of confiscated property. The temptation to plunder became a fruitful ground for spying out alleged heretics. Once accused, they were all but helpless. Synods encouraged arrests by offering a fixed reward to diligent spies. Not satisfied with seeing the death penalty executed upon the living, the Inquisition made war upon the dead, and exhumed the bodies of those found to have died in heresy and burned them.1148 This relentless barbarity reminds us of the words, perhaps improperly ascribed to Charles V. who, standing at Luther’s grave, is reported to have refused to touch the Reformer’s bones, saying, "I war with the living, not with the dead." The council of Verona, 1184, ordered relapsed heretics to be turned over forthwith to the secular authorities.1149 In the period before 1480 the Inquisition claimed most of its victims in Southern France. Douais has given us a list of seventeen Inquisitors-general who served from 1229 to 1329.1150 The sentences pronounced by Bernard de Caux, called the Hammer of the Heretics, 1244–1248 give the names of hundreds who were adjudged to the loss of goods or perpetual imprisonment, or both.1151

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In the thirteenth century, medieval men, fighting for the great prizes, often oscillated unpredictably between gross, barbarous impiety and violence, and the most craven superstition. We have a picture of the wretched Emperor Otto IV, created as a papal puppet, then a renegade and papal victim, dying of dysentery; in his horror of Hell flames, he caused his weak and emaciated body to be ‘vigorously scourged’; but he still clung, gibbering, to the imperial insignia which were also potent relics, radiating spiritual forces – the crucifix-standard presented to Henry II, the crown, the Holy Lance, which had a nail of the True Cross embedded in it, and which had been mended with a silver band by Henry IV, and the goldencased tooth of John the Baptist. But the net effect of the excommunications and counter-excommunications, the hurling of spiritual power into the mundane battle, was to produce a certain confusion in the participants, especially the minor agents or the innocent, who did not know which to fear most – an armed imperialist or a cursing papalist cleric. And then, legitimate spiritual power so often appeared to fail. Thus the anti-imperialist troops of Milan, mysteriously beaten at Cortenuovo by the excommunicate troops of Frederick II, ‘raised their heels against God’ in consequence; they turned the crucifixes upside down in their churches, hurled sewage on the altars, threw out the clergy, and gorged themselves on meat throughout Lent. In an increasing number of ways, the contest appeared to be subversive of the whole natural and moral order. Thus, to devalue the emperor, Innocent III built up the power of the German princes, especially the ecclesiastical ones; they ceased to be one of the chief supports of the central authority and looked, instead, to the selfish advancement of their principalities. Again, other monarchs and powers were brought into papal coalitions, the humbling of the imperial authority being considered to justify any arrangement, however artificial. But then, the theory of papal plenary power meant that all moral or written laws were suspended, inoperative, in the Pope’s case, since he was subject only to heavenly judgment. Thus Gregory IX, who became Pope in 1227, and persecuted heretics, antinomians and deviants with relentless ferocity, said that the moral law did not apply to his anti-imperial campaign: his conduct towards Frederick II could not be judged as immoral or unethical, his methods being unrelated to the standards of conduct common to mankind since they were subject only to God’s estimation of their acceptability. To emphasize the point, in 1239 he produced the relics of the two unassailable guardians of the papal city: ‘the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul’ were carried ‘in solemn procession’ through Rome, and in front of a huge crowd Gregory removed his tiara and placed it on the head of St Peter.1 The Pope was acting on Peter’s instructions – and how could Peter do wrong?

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which, in purer days, it drew its own supply of inspiration. WILLIAM JAMES, THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Most Mormon Fundamentalists share Dan Lafferty’s confidence that Armageddon is imminent. In Colorado City the new prophet, Warren Jeffs, is absolutely sure of it. Although the prophecy of his father, Uncle Rulon, that the world would be swept clean in a hurricane of fire by the year 2000 did not come to pass, the events of September 11, 2001, have renewed Warren’s optimism. In public statements Warren has condemned the bloody work of Islamic terrorists, but he preaches to the faithful in Bountiful and Colorado City that the attacks on New York and Washington were a magnificent portent and a cause for great hope. Excitedly, he tells his followers that the eruption of terrorism against the United States is an unmistakable sign that the End Times are indeed at hand, and very soon now God’s chosen people will be lifted up to experience Eternal Glory. Up in Canada, dozens of photos of the jets exploding into the World Trade Center, clipped from magazines, have been mounted in the halls of the Bountiful school, lest any of the students doubt that the Last Days are upon us. As for the mainline LDS Church, it has always maintained that “the hour is nigh,” and that there will be plagues and desolations before the Second Coming of Christ. Church authorities in Salt Lake have, for a long time now, urged all Mormons to store a year’s worth of food and survival supplies to prepare for this period of privation. But beyond quoting scripture predicting that the world will end seven thousand years after it was created, LDS leaders are circumspect about exactly when the Apocalypse will occur. In the meantime, the church has more than sixty thousand missionaries roaming the globe at any given moment, converting new members at an astounding rate. The respected sociologist Rodney Stark raised eyebrows in 1984 by predicting that there would be 265 million Mormons on the planet by A .D . 2080. After reassessing his calculations in 1998 to reflect more recent growth rates, Stark revised his prediction upward; now he believes that the LDS Church will have close to three hundred million members by the final decades of this century.

• From the social construction of reality (1966)

  This is not too rare, even in civilized societies. For example, the symbolic universe of traditional India assigned a status to the outcastes that was closer to that of animals than to the human status of the upper castes (an operation ultimately legitimated in the theory of karma-samsara , which embraced all beings, human or otherwise), and as recently as the Spanish conquests in America it was possible for the Spaniards to conceive of the Indians as belonging to a different species (this operation being legitimated in a less comprehensive manner by a theory that “proved” that the Indians could not be descended from Adam and Eve). The symbolic universe also orders history. It locates all collective events in a cohesive unity that includes past, present and future. With regard to the past, it establishes a “memory” that is shared by all the individuals socialized within the collectivity. 77 With regard to the future, it establishes a common frame of reference for the projection of individual actions. Thus the symbolic universe links men with their predecessors and their successors in a meaningful totality, 78 serving to transcend the finitude of individual existence and bestowing meaning upon the individual’s death. All the members of a society can now conceive of themselves as belonging to a meaningful universe, which was there before they were born and will be there after they die. The empirical community is transposed onto a cosmic plane and made majestically independent of the vicissitudes of individual existence. 79 As we have already observed, the symbolic universe provides a comprehensive integration of all discrete institutional processes. The entire society now makes sense. Particular institutions and roles are legitimated by locating them in a comprehensively meaningful world. For example, the political order is legitimated by reference to a cosmic order of power and justice, and political roles are legitimated as representations of these cosmic principles. The institution of divine kingship in archaic civilizations is an excellent illustration of the manner in which this kind of ultimate legitimation operates. It is important, however, to understand that the institutional order, like the order of individual biography, is continually threatened by the presence of realities that are meaningless in its terms. The legitimation of the institutional order is also faced with the ongoing necessity of keeping chaos at bay. All social reality is precarious. All societies are constructions in the face of chaos. The constant possibility of anomic terror is actualized whenever the legitimations that obscure the precariousness are threatened or collapse. The dread that accompanies the death of a king, especially if it occurs with sudden violence, expresses this terror.

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

  Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York, 1912), 66, 71– 72. On reducing taxpayers’ burden, an argument used in Indiana, which passed one of the first sterilization laws in 1907, see “Feeble-Minded Women,” Duluth News Tribune, March 12, 1904; Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 259; Kline, Building a Better Race, 49, 53; Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 72 . On morons as needed for manual laborers, see Lewis M. Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 91. This was the argument of Albert Priddy, superintendent of the asylum involved in the Buck v. Bell case; see Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press , 2008), 132. 61 . On the Chamberlain-Kahn Bill passed by Congress in 1918, for detaining suspected prostitutes, see Kristin Luker, “Sex, Social Hygiene, and the State: The Double-Edged Sword of Social Reform,” Theory and Society 27, no. 5 (October 1998): 601–34, esp. 618–23; Christopher Capozzola, “The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America,” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002): 1354–82, esp. 1370–73; Kline, Building a Better Race, 46 – 47; Aine Collier, The Humble Little Condom: A History (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 185, 187. On the draft, see Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class and Power in the Rural South During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 43, 70–71, 73–75. 62 . On the army filled with morons, and calls for intelligence tests for voting, see “Are We Ruled by Morons?,” Current Opinion 72, no. 4 (April 1922): 438–40. For southern poor whites and blacks receiving lower scores, especially those from the Deep South, see M. F. Ashley Montagu, “Intelligence of Northern Negroes and Southern Whites in the First World War,” American Journal of Psychology 58, no. 2 (April 1945): 161–88, esp. 165–67, 185–86; also see Daniel J. Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence: Psychologists and the Military in World War I,” Journal of American History 55, no. 3 (December 1968): 565–81, esp. 576; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 110 ; and James D. Watson, “Genes and Politics,” in Witkowski and Inglis, Davenport’s Dream, 11. 63 . Hookworm was identified as the reason for stunted bodies among World War I draftees; see M. W. Ireland, Albert Love, and Charles Davenport, Defects Found in Drafted Men: Statistical Information Compiled from the Draft Records (Washington, DC, 1919), 34, 265. For clay-eating as a white trash addiction, see (the ironically titled) “They Eat Clay and Grow Fat,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 26, 1895; and “The Clay Eaters,” Fort Worth Register, January 12, 1897. On hookworm and stunted bodies, see Marion Hamilton Carter, “The Vampires of the South,” McClure’s Magazine 33, no. 6

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  According to the NHSLS survey3 of sexual practices, only 29 percent of women come regularly with a partner, but men think that 44 percent of their female partners come regularly. Does this mean that 15 percent of the time women are convincingly faking it? I admit I felt a bit doubtful about a couple of the questionnaires. A few men claimed that they had been with more than thirty women (in one case, fifty), all of whom had had orgasms, every time! Some men claimed that all their lovers came just from intercourse! In my opinion, either some of those women were faking it, or else their men assumed the women were having orgasms because they appeared to be enjoying themselves. In spite of the delightful scene in When Harry Met Sally, when Meg Ryan’s character convincingly fakes an orgasm in a restaurant, most men are sure they would know when a woman is faking it. Let me debunk this myth once and for all: it is easy for a woman to consciously contract her vaginal muscles. If she has any acting skills at all, and any real desire to con her partner, that person, male or female, would very likely walk away from the encounter thinking she had an orgasm. If her partner does get suspicious, it may be because she wants him or her to notice that something is not right. It is hardly surprising that most men really didn’t like knowing or suspecting that a woman was faking it: One woman I was with claimed to have these astronomical orgasms, but I was pretty inexperienced at the time, and when I think back to some of the things I did, I just shake my head. I doubt they really happened. One of my exes told me she had faked orgasm with me. I felt like it was too bad we couldn’t have really tried together to bring her to that experience. I have suspected a woman of faking orgasm because of obvious theatrics or because her physical state suggested that she was not actually in an advanced state of passion. I cannot bear the thought of a woman giving herself to me without finding pleasure in the intimacy of lovemaking. I would much rather that she found pleasure than I. After loving a woman who I felt was faking it, I tend to feel inadequate I suppose. It leaves me empty inside. Once I suspected one of my lovers of faking orgasm, so I simply asked her and after trying to lie she finally admitted it was unusual for her to achieve orgasm, but she still enjoyed the intimacy. I felt as if I had been lied to. Loving is not a game, it is of the heart, of the soul, of the tenderness that wells up inside just from the nearness of your lover. To have her fake an orgasm is hurtful.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Hundreds of voices were shouting over one another in the cafeteria, so that the conversation became mere sound, the rushing of a river over rocks. And as I sat beneath fluorescent cylinders spewing aggressively artificial light, I thought about how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact we were basically identical organisms colonizing a vast and windowless room that smelled of Lysol and lard. I was eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich and drinking a Dr Pepper. To be honest, I find the whole process of masticating plants and animals and then shoving them down my esophagus kind of disgusting, so I was trying not to think about the fact that I was eating, which is a form of thinking about it. Across the table from me, Mychal Turner was scribbling in a yellow-paper notebook. Our lunch table was like a long-running play on Broadway: The cast changed over the years, but the roles never did. Mychal was The Artsy One. He was talking with Daisy Ramirez, who’d played the role of my Best and Most Fearless Friend since elementary school, but I couldn’t follow their conversation over the noise of all the others. What was my part in this play? The Sidekick. I was Daisy’s Friend, or Ms. Holmes’s Daughter. I was somebody’s something. I felt my stomach begin to work on the sandwich, and even over everybody’s talking, I could hear it digesting, all the bacteria chewing the slime of peanut butter—the students inside of me eating at my internal cafeteria. A shiver convulsed through me. “Didn’t you go to camp with him?” Daisy asked me. “With who?” “Davis Pickett,” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “Why?” “Aren’t you listening?” Daisy asked. I am listening , I thought, to the cacophony of my digestive tract . Of course I’d long known that I was playing host to a massive collection of parasitic organisms, but I didn’t much like being reminded of it. By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like a thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth, and it often seems like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and tried to control my breathing. Admittedly, I have some anxiety problems, but I would argue it isn’t irrational to be concerned about the fact that you are a skin-encased bacterial colony. Mychal said, “His dad was about to be arrested for bribery or something, but the night before the raid he disappeared. There’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward out for him.” “And you know his kid,” Daisy said. “Knew him,” I answered. I watched Daisy attack her school-provided rectangular pizza and green beans with a fork.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  I. MONTHERLANT OR THE BREAD OF DISGUST [image file=image_rsrc461.jpg] Montherlant belongs to the long male tradition of adopting the arrogant Manichaeism of Pythagoras. Following Nietzsche, he belives that the Eternal Feminine was exalted only during periods of weakness and that the hero has to rise up against the Magna Mater. As a specialist in heroism, he has undertaken the task of dislodging her. Woman is night, disorder, and immanence. “These convulsive shadows are nothing more than ‘the feminine in its pure state,’ ” he writes about Mme Tolstoy.1 The stupidity and baseness of men today, he thinks, give a positive image of feminine deficiencies: the feminine instinct, feminine intuition, and women’s clairvoyance are spoken about, while their absence of logic, stubborn ignorance, and inability to grasp the real should be denounced; they are neither good observers nor psychologists; they neither know how to see things nor understand human beings; their mystery is a trap, their unfathomable treasures have the depth of nothingness; they have nothing to give man and can only harm him. For Montherlant the mother is the first major enemy; in L’exil (Exile), an early play of his, he depicts a mother who keeps her son from enlisting; in Les Olympiques, the teenager who wants to devote himself to sport is barred by his mother’s fearful egotism; in Les célibataires (The Bachelors) and in Les jeunes filles (The Girls), the mother is vilified. Her crime is to want to keep her son locked up forever in her womb’s depths; she mutilates him to make him her own and thus to fill up the sterile vacuum of her being; she is the worst educator; she cuts the child’s wings; she pulls him back from the heights he aspires to; she turns him into a moron and diminishes him. These reproaches are not without some basis. But it is clear from the explicit criticisms that Montherlant addresses to woman-mother that what he hates in her is his own birth. He thinks he is God; he wants to be God: because he is male, because he is a “superior man,” because he is Montherlant. A god is not engendered; his body, if he has one, is a will molded in hard and disciplined muscles, not in flesh mutely inhabited by life and death; this flesh that he repudiates is perishable, contingent, and vulnerable and is his mother’s fault. “The only part of Achilles’ body that was vulnerable was the part his mother had held.”2 Montherlant never wanted to assume the human condition; what he calls his pride is, from the beginning, a panicked flight from the risks contained in a freedom engaged in the world through flesh; he claims to affirm freedom but to refuse engagement; without ties, without roots, he dreams he is a subjectivity majestically withdrawn upon itself; the memory of his carnal origins disturbs this dream, and he resorts to a familiar process: instead of prevailing over it, he repudiates it.

• From The Romance of Lust: A classic Victorian erotic novel (1873)

  “She gave a scream—though not very loud—and covered her eyes with her hand. I scrambled off her. The doctor, with great politeness, begged her pardon for his intrusion, but hearing what appeared to him an unearthly noise, he had feared she was taken ill. “Here the usual resource of woman—tears—fell plentifully from mamma. The doctor most affectionately begged her to calm herself. “‘My dear madam,’ said he. ‘I do not in any way blame you for this. I am a man of the world, and I know that incest is practised to a far greater extent than is at all imagined, and to prove that it in no way offends me, I may at once tell you that it was my own mother who initiated me into these delightful mysteries. I see that this dear boy looks terribly frightened at my being a witness to the delight he must have had; but to put him at his ease, we may as well inform him that we, too, have indulged in that delicious game. I may add that this is not the first time I have joined in orgies with more than one man or woman, and nothing gives me more pleasure than to embrace one reeking from the arms of another, especially if I have been a witness to the previous encounter. See, my dear madam, how this dear instrument stands stiff in proof of what I say, and to insure my silence dear Harry must not object to my enjoying you after and before him.’ “So saying he dropt off his trousers and jumped into bed. He was met with feeble remonstrances from my mother at doing it before her son: but I assured her that I rather preferred to see her at work, as she knew, than otherwise, especially as she evidently enjoyed it so much. So the doctor forthwith mounted her. There could be no doubt that she enjoyed it equally with him. My cock stood at the sight. I put it into her hand, and she squeezed it lovingly—then stooping I sucked one nipple, and you know how this excites her, and slipped a hand behind the doctor, and after gently tickling his ballocks, acted postillion to his bottom-hole. They ran a most exciting course and died away in mutual raptures. No sooner did he turn off than I jumped up into his place, and in one moment was up to the cods in that overflowing cunt. Mamma feebly expostulated, but the doctor begged her to let him have the pleasure of witnessing the vigour of the youth. I knew that in heart mamma was delighted, for all women especially enjoy having a fresh prick into them immediately after a previous one has been withdrawn.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The unhappy Nestorius was dragged from the stillness of his former cloister, the cloister of Euprepius before the gates of Antioch, in which he had enjoyed four years of repose, from one place of exile to another, first to Arabia, then to Egypt, and was compelled to drink to the dregs the bitter cup of persecution which he himself, in the days of his power, had forced upon the heretics. He endured his suffering with resignation and independence, wrote his life under the significant title of Tragedy,1595 and died after 439, no one knows where nor when. Characteristic of the fanaticism of the times is the statement quoted by Evagrius, 1596 that Nestorius, after having his tongue gnawed by worms in punishment for his blasphemy, passed to the harder torments of eternity. The Monophysite Jacobites are accustomed from year to year to cast stones upon his supposed grave in Upper Egypt and have spread the tradition that it has never been moistened by the rain of heaven, which yet falls upon the evil and the good. The emperor, who had formerly favored him, but was now turned entirely against him, caused all his writings to be burned, and his followers to be named after Simon Magus, and stigmatized as Simonians.1597 The same orthodox zeal turned also upon the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the long deceased teacher of Nestorius and father of his error. Bishop Rabulas of Edessa († 435) pronounced the anathema upon him and interdicted his writings; and though his successor Ibas (436–457) again interested himself in Theodore, and translated several of his writings into Syriac (the ecclesiastical tongue of the Persian church), yet the persecution soon broke out afresh, and the theological school of Edessa where the Antiochian theology had longest maintained its life, and whence the Persian clergy had proceeded, was dissolved by the emperor Zeno in 489. This was the end of Nestorianism in the Roman empire. § 139. The Nestorians. Jos. Sim. Assemani: De Syris Nestorianis, in his Bibliotheca Orientalis. Rom. 1719–1728, fol. tom. iii. P. ii. Ebedjesu (Nestorian metropolitan of Nisibis, † 1318): Liber Margaritae de veritate fidei (a defence of Nestorianism), in Ang. Mai’s Scrip. vet. nova collect. x. ii. 317. Gibbon: Chap. xlvii., near the end. E. Smith and H. G. O. Dwight: Researches in Armenia; with a visit to the Nestorian and Chaldean Christians of Oormiah and Salmas. 2 vols. Bost. 1833. Justin Perkins: A Residence of eight years in Persia. Andover, 1843. Wiltsch: Kirchliche Geographie u. Statistik. Berl. 1846, i. 214 ff. Geo. Percy Badger: The Nestorians and their Rituals. Illustrated (with colored plates), 2 vols. Lond. 1852. H. Newcomb: A Cyclopaedia of Missions. New York, 1856, p. 553 ff. Petermann: Article Nestorianer, in Herzog’s Theol. Encykl. vol. x. (1858), pp. 279–288.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “ They were ten, twelve years old, signing billion-year contracts—and their parents go along with this!” he said of the Sea Org children. “And they work morning, noon and night.… Scrubbing pots, manual labor—that so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me!” AFTER TOM CRUISE ’S BEHAVIOR on Oprah and the Today show, Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, which owns Paramount Studios, chose not to renew Cruise’s deal. “ He turned off all women,” Redstone explained. “He was embarrassing the studio. And he was costing us a lot of money.” Cruise and his longtime producing partner, Paula Wagner, worked out a deal with MGM to resurrect the struggling United Artists studio. Soon after that, Wagner approached Haggis, offering him a very generous deal. He wrote one script for them, a big-budget children’s movie, but the studio was so financially pressed that it couldn’t afford to produce it. In January 2008, just as it seemed that the derision that was directed at Cruise was about to die down, a video was posted on the Internet. It was a taped interview with the star that preceded his acceptance of the Freedom Medal of Valor four years earlier. Wearing a black turtleneck, with the theme music from Mission: Impossible playing in the background, Cruise spoke to Scientologists in language they understood. “ Being a Scientologist, you can look at someone and know absolutely that you can help them,” Cruise said. “So for me it really is KSW, and it’s something that I don’t mince words with that—with anything!—but that policy with me has really gone—phist! ” He made a vigorous gesture. “Boy! There’s a time I went through when I said, you know what, when I read it I just went pooh! That’s it! That’s exactly it!” The video was placed on YouTube and viewed by millions who had no idea what he was talking about. Cruise’s urgency came off as the ravings of a wild-eyed fanatic, but to Scientologists it was a sermon they had heard many times. “KSW” refers to a policy letter that Hubbard wrote in 1965 titled “ Keeping Scientology Working.” In the letter Hubbard reprimanded his followers for straying from the narrow path he had laid out for them. “ When somebody enrols [sic], consider he or she has joined up for the duration of the universe—never permit an ‘open-minded’ approach,” Hubbard writes. “If they’re aboard, they’re here on the same terms as the rest of us—win or die in the attempt.” Hubbard concludes: “The whole agonized future of this planet, every Man, Woman and Child on it, and your own destiny for the next endless trillions of years depend on what you do here and now with and in Scientology.” The church instantly began taking down the video from the Internet, threatening lawsuits because of copyright violations. A loose coalition of Internet hackers who called themselves Anonymous seized on the issue.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  An old English poet expresses the same thought: Oh! Menstruating woman, thou’rt a fiend From whom all nature should be closely screened! These beliefs have been vigorously perpetuated right up to today. In 1878, a member of the British Medical Association wrote in the British Medical Journal: “It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by menstruating women.” He said that he personally knew of two cases of hams spoiling in such circumstances. In the refineries of the North at the beginning of this century, women were prohibited by law from going into the factory when they were afflicted by what the Anglo-Saxons call the “curse” because the sugar turned black. And in Saigon, women are not employed in opium factories: because of their periods, the opium goes bad and becomes bitter. These beliefs survive in many areas of the French countryside. Any cook knows how impossible it is to make mayonnaise if she is indisposed or simply in the presence of another woman who is indisposed. In Anjou, recently, an old gardener who had stocked that year’s cider harvest in the cellar wrote to the master of the house: “Don’t let the young women of the household and their female guests go through the cellar on certain days of the month: they would prevent the cider from fermenting.” When the cook heard about this letter, she shrugged her shoulders. “That never prevented cider from fermenting,” she said, “it is only bad for bacon fat: it cannot be salted in the presence of an indisposed woman; it would rot.”9 Putting this repulsion in the same category as that provoked by blood is most inadequate: more imbued with the mysterious mana that is both life and death than anything else, blood, of course, is in itself a sacred element. But menstrual blood’s baleful powers are more particular. Menstrual blood embodies the essence of femininity, which is why its flow endangers woman herself, whose mana is thus materialized. During the Chaga’s initiation rites, girls are urged to carefully conceal their menstrual blood. “Do not show it to your mother, for she would die! Do not show it to your age-mates, for there may be a wicked one among them, who will take away the cloth with which you have cleaned yourself, and you will be barren in your marriage. Do not show it to a bad woman, who will take the cloth to place it in the top of her hut … with the result that you cannot bear children. Do not throw the cloth on the path or in the bush. A wicked person might do evil things with it. Bury it in the ground. Protect the blood from the gaze of your father, brothers and sisters. It is a sin to let them see it.”10

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  These ways are noted in the handbook Cults and Consequences , which the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles produced.505 Cults are established by strong and charismatic leaders who control power hierarchies and material resources, but communes tend to minimize organizational structure and to deflate or expel power seekers.Cults possess some revealed “word” in the form of a book, manifesto, or doctrine, whereas communes vaguely invoke general commitments to peace and liberation freedoms and a distaste for the parent culture’s establishments.Cults create fortified boundaries, confining their membership in various ways and attacking those who leave as defectors, deserters, or traitors; they recruit sums of money; and they tend to view the outside world with increasing hostility and distrust as the organization ossifies.Jayanti Tamm relates a firsthand account of life in a destructive cult in her book, Cartwheels in a Sari: A Memoir of Growing Up Cult .506 Ms. Tamm became a visiting professor at Queens College in New York, but a New York group, which the guru Sri Chinmoy led, raised her. Her parents had been followers of Chinmoy before Tamm was born. It wasn’t until she was an adult of twenty-five that Tamm left the community to begin a life of her own making outside the group. Eventually her parents also left some seven years later. Tamm describes Sri Chinmoy’s “masterful tactics of manipulation.” The guru’s group included more than one thousand followers, and he once had celebrity admirers, such as musician Carlos Santana, singer Roberta Flack, and Olympian Carl Lewis. Chinmoy died in 2007.507 Tamm offers the unique perspective of someone a destructive cult directly affected. She opines, “Perhaps it is more useful to discern what a religious movement is or what a cult is by comparing its impact upon members’ lives: does it complement or control?”508 Tamm says that cults “are surprisingly similar in their methods…tactics and techniques used to recruit and maintain and disown noncompliant” members; these tactics and techniques seem to be “pulled from a universal handbook.”509 She emphasizes the “absolute and unconditional control”510 destructive cults express. Again, the structure, methodology, and overall tactics Tamm describes can be largely grouped in Lifton’s three general categories or criteria regarding cultic characteristics as follows: The Nature of the Leader Tamm points out, “Cults are fueled by and thrive on control,” which comes from “excessive devotion to the leader and the leader’s vision.” She explains, “The leader’s personal agenda is presented as a universal elixir, one that will eradicate both personal and global moral, ethical and spiritual maladies.”511 According to Tamm the leader is seen as “an agent used to unify a disparate collection of strong individuals.” And he or she possesses “unquestioned, absolute authority over [group] member’s lives.”512 The leader is also made to “seem infallible, to possess the answers, solution, the only route to salvation.”513 The Group Process of Coercive Persuasion and Control Tamm says that Chinmoy isolated and controlled members in his group by fostering a sense of spiritual elitism, which led to social isolation.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  He had rinsed the soap off the brush. Now he brushed the vulva lips, up and down, gently. At first, Bijou contracted herself even more. The men’s heads leaned closer. The Basque, holding her legs against his erection, meticulously brushed the vulva and the tip of the clitoris. Then the men saw that Bijou could no longer contract her buttocks and sex, that as the brush moved, her buttocks rolled a little forwards, the lips of the vulva parted, at first imperceptibly. The nakedness exposed every nuance of her motion. Now the lips parted and exposed a second aura, of a paler shade, then a third, and now Bijou was pushing, pushing as if she would open. Her belly moved in accord, swelling and falling. The Basque leaned more firmly against her writhing legs. “Stop,” begged Bijou, “stop.” The men could see the moisture oozing from her. Then the Basque stopped, not wanting to give her pleasure, reserving that for himself later. BIJOU WAS eager to make a distinction between her life in the whorehouse and her life as the companion and model of an artist. The Basque was intent on making only one little distinction, merely in the matter of actual possession. But he liked to expose her and delight his visitors with the sight of her. He made them assist at her bath. They liked to watch how her breasts floated in the water, how the swelling of her belly could make the water heave, how she raised herself to pass soap between her legs. They liked to dry her wet body. But if any of them tried to see Bijou privately, and possess her, then the Basque became a demon and a man to fear. In revenge for these games, Bijou felt she had a right to go where she wanted. The Basque maintained her in a highly eroticized condition and did not always trouble to satisfy her. Her infidelities started then, but they were done so elusively that the Basque could never catch her. Bijou collected her lovers at the Grande Chaumière, where she posed for the drawing class. On winter days she did not undress quickly and surreptitiously as the other models did, next to the stove near the model’s stand, in view of everybody. Bijou had an art for this.

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

  Charlotte, North Carolina, PTL (“Praise the Lord/Pass the Love”) Television Network that was estimated to reach thirteen million homes; they also opened the highly profitable twenty-three-hundred-acre Heritage USA Christian theme park. Along with Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell and Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) founder Pat Robertson, Bakker had joined leading conservative religious leaders who made an appearance at the Reagan White House in 1984. Three years later, after an FBI investigation (in which the PTL was known as the “Pass-the-Loot Club”), he was convicted of all twenty-four charges of fraud and conspiracy. The judge was so disgusted that he sentenced the unscrupulous pastor to forty-five years in prison. In the end, he served a five- year term. 36 Bakker was described as a “Bible school dropout,” and his story revealed a man who not only fleeced his followers, but led a grossly extravagant life. He owned numerous homes, a 1953 Rolls-Royce, a sleek houseboat, and closets filled with expensive suits. Jim and Tammy Faye had gone from living in a trailer to amassing salaries and bonuses in the millions of dollars. 37 Bakker’s ministry preached the white trash dream of excess. In one 1985 program, he defended the extravagant style of his Christian amusement park hotel: “The newspaper people think we should still be back in the trash. . . . They really think Christians ought to be shabby, tacky, crummy, worthless people because we threaten them when we have things as nice as they have.” In admitting his overindulgences, Bakker crooned, “I’m excessive. Dear Lord, I’m excessive. . . . God is a great God. He deserves my best.” The second-rate hustler was a real-life version of Andy Griffith’s role as Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd . Or as one reporter claimed after watching untold hours of the Bakkers’ show, their prosperity theology and living-room preaching had “the cheesy feel of Petticoat Junction .” 38 Greed was just the backstory. Tammy Faye, who became known for the makeup that oozed down her cheeks as she wept along with her flock, had to be carted off to rehab for an addiction to tranquilizers. Meanwhile, her reverend husband was paying hush money to the church secretary, a young woman he had used sexually seven years earlier. Jessica Hahn told her story to Playboy . And if that kind of exposure was not enough, the same church official who had arranged for Bakker’s motel meeting with Hahn confessed that he had had three separate homosexual encounters with the TV pastor. 39 The tabloid exploitation of the Bakker affair may have augured the official birth of “reality TV.” One can directly trace the unholy line from the out-of-

• From White Oleander (1999)

  She would give me up for him, she would do anything to have him. Just like before, my mother and Barry. “Please, Astrid,” she begged me through the door, but I wouldn’t listen. This sickness would never happen to me. Finally she went to her room, closed the door, and I hated her for crawling after him and hated myself for my disgust, for knowing just how Ron felt. I lay there on my bed, hating all of us, listening to her cry, she’d done nothing but for a week. Twenty-seven names for tears. I heard Leonard Cohen start up, asking if she heard her master sing. The circular repetition of an overwhelming question. I wanted to seal myself up, while I still had something of my own that I hadn’t given to Claire. I had to pull back or I would be torn away, like a scarf closed in a car door. How I despised her weakness. Just like my mother said I would. It repelled me. I would have fought for her, but Claire couldn’t even stand up for herself. I couldn’t save us both. On my desk was the picture of me and the steelhead trout from summer. Ron had it framed. I looked so happy. I should have known it wouldn’t last. Nothing lasts. Didn’t I know that by now? Keep your bags packed, my mother said. And me with less than a year to go, with college dangling before me. But then I remembered how Claire took me to Cal Arts to see if I wanted to apply there, even got me the application. How she made me take honors classes, helped me with the homework, drove me to the museum every Tuesday night. If I had a future at all, it was only because she gave it to me. But then I saw her crawling again, begging, and was repelled afresh. Astrid help me. Astrid pick up the pieces. How could I? I was counting on her too much. I had to start facing that. I read for a while in a book about Kandinsky, tried out some of his ideas about form and tension. How the tension in a line increased as it approached the edge. I tried not to listen as the Leonard Cohen cycled around. She must have fallen asleep by now. Let her sleep it off. I drew until it got dark, then turned on the light and spun the pyramid that hung over my desk, the ridiculous pyramid my mother had sold Claire on. When I closed the Kandinsky book, I couldn’t help noticing the inscription. To Astrid, with all my love, Claire. It went through me like a current, shorting out my childish resentment. If I had anything good, it was only because of Claire. If I could think of myself as worthwhile for a second, it was because Claire made me think so.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  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. 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.