Embarrassment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  This takes care of general topics, I guess; now comes a special matter. We are in trouble again.” Pratt paused truculently, then rubbed her index finger under her nostrils with such vigor that her nose performed a kind of war dance. “I’m a frank person,” she said, “but conventions are conventions, and I find it difficult … Let me put it this way … The Walkers, who live in what we call around here the Duke’s Manor, you know the great gray house on the hill—they send their two girls to our school, and we have the niece of President Moore with us, a really gracious child, not to speak of a number of other prominent children. Well, under the circumstances, it is rather a jolt when Dolly, who looks like a little lady, uses words which you as a foreigner probably simply do not know or do not understand. Perhaps it might be better—Would you like me to have Dolly come up here right away to discuss things? No? You see—oh well, let’s have it out. Dolly has written a most obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low-Mexican for urinal with her lipstick on some health pamphlets which Miss Redcock, who is getting married in June, distributed among the girls, and we thought she should stay after hours—another half hour at least. But if you like—” “No,” I said, “I don’t want to interfere with rules. I shall talk to her later. I shall thrash it out.” “Do,” said the woman rising from her chair arm. “And perhaps we can get together again soon, and if things do not improve we might have Dr. Cutler analyze her.” Should I marry Pratt and strangle her? “… And perhaps your family doctor might like to examine her physically—just a routine check-up. She is in Mushroom—the last classroom along that passage.” Beardsley School, it may be explained, copied a famous girls’ school in England by having “traditional” nicknames for its various classrooms: Mushroom, Room-In 8, B-room, Room-BA and so on.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Are you very tired?" he asked her. "Not so tired, my..." "My Lord will do," he said with a smile. "Even the lowliest stable boy is your Lord, Beauty," he said, "and you must always answer respectfully." "Yes, my Lord," she whispered. He was already bathing her, and the warm water washing down her did fell very good to her. He lathered her neck and arms. "Have you just awakened?" "Yes, my Lord," she said. "I see, but you must be tired from your long journey. The first few days slaves are always overexcited. They don't feel their exhaustion, and then after that they begin to sleep for many hours. You'll feel it soon, and there will be an aching in your arms and legs, too. I don't mean from your punishment. I mean only from your fatigue. When that happens I'll massage you and soothe you." His voice was so gentle that Beauty warmed to him at once. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows and there was golden hair on his arms, and his fingers were very sure as he washed her ears and her face, careful not to get the soap in her eyes. "And you have been punished very severely, haven't you?" Beauty blushed. He laughed softly. "Very good, my dear, you are learning already. Never answer such a question as that. It could be taken as a complaint if you did. Any time you are asked if you have been punished too much or suffered too much, or anything of that sort, be clever enough to blush." But even as he spoke almost affectionately, he began washing her breasts just as calmly as he had washed the rest of her, and Beauty's blushes became more painful. She could feel her nipples harden, and she was certain though she could see nothing but the soapy water before her, that he was noticing this, as his hands slowed slightly, and then he pushed at her inner thigh gently. "Spread your legs, dearest," he said. She obeyed, kneeling with her legs farther apart, and then farther as he pushed her. He had become still, and now drying his hand on the towel at his waist, he touched her sex and she felt herself shudder. Her sex was moist and swollen with her desire, and to her horror, his had touched a small hard knot in which much of her craving was accumulated. She drew back involuntarily. "Ah." He withdrew his fingers, and turning called to Lord Gregory. "A very lovely flower, this," he said. "Have you observed?" Beauty was crimson. Her eyes overflowed with tears. It took all her control not to drop her hands to cover her sex as she felt Leon part her legs even wider now and gently touch the moisture there. Lord Gregory gave a soft laugh.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Okay, fine, it’s embarrassing. Maybe even humiliating, if you’re prone to that sort of thing. But 150 years after On the Origin of Species was published, isn’t it time to accept that our ancestors evolved along a sexual trajectory similar to that of our two highly social, very intelligent, closely related primate cousins? With any other question we have about the origins of human behavior, we look to chimps and bonobos for important clues: language, tool use, political alliances, war, reconciliation, altruism…but when it comes to sex, we prudishly turn away from these models to the distantly related, antisocial, low-I.Q. but monogamous gibbon? Really? We’ve pointed out how the agricultural revolution triggered radical social reconfigurations from which we’re still reeling. Perhaps the far-fetched denial of our promiscuous sexual prehistory expresses a legitimate fear of social instability, but insistent demands for a stable social order (based, as we’re often reminded, upon the nuclear family unit) cannot erase the effects of the hundreds of thousands of years that came before our species settled into stable villages. If female chimps and bonobos could talk, do we really think they’d be griping to their hairy girlfriends about prematurely ejaculating males who don’t bring flowers anymore? Probably not, because as we’ve seen, when a female chimp or bonobo is in the mood, she’s likely to be the center of plenty of eager male attention. And the more attention she gets, the more she attracts, because as it turns out, our male primate cousins get turned on by the sight and sound of others of their species having sex. Imagine that. “What Horrid Extravagancies of Minde!” No man (who is but never so little versed in such matters) is ignorant, what grievous symptomes, the Rising, Bearing down and Perversion, and Convulsion of the Wombe do excite; what horrid extravagancies of minde, what Phrensies, Melancholy Distempers, and Outragiousness, the preternatural Diseases of the Womb do induce, as if affected Persons were inchanted…. WILLIAM HARVEY, Anatomical Exercitations concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (1653) Hysteria was one of the first diseases to be described formally. Hippocrates discussed it in the fourth century BCE, and you’ll find it in any medical text covering women’s health written from medieval times until it was removed from the list of recognized medical diagnoses in 1952 (twenty-one years before homosexuality was finally removed). Hysteria was still one of the most diagnosed diseases in the United States and Great Britain as recently as the early twentieth century. You might wonder how physicians treated this chronic condition over the centuries. According to historian Rachel Maines, female patients were routinely massaged to orgasm from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s. Have a seat; the doctor will be right with you….

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Does all this frivolous sex make our species sound “animalistic”? It shouldn’t. The animal world is full of species that have sex only during widely spaced intervals when the female is ovulating. Only two species can do it week in and week out for nonreproductive reasons: one human, the other very humanlike. Sex for pleasure with various partners is therefore more “human” than animal. Strictly reproductive, once-in-a-blue-moon sex is more “animal” than human. In other words, an excessively horny monkey is acting “human,” while a man or woman uninterested in sex more than once or twice a year would be, strictly speaking, “acting like an animal.” Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of upright, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang “rock and roll.” But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock ’n’ roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase “hadn’t meant the name of a music, it meant ‘to fuck.’ ‘Rock,’ by itself, had pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least.” By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys “either didn’t know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew.” Though crusty old Ed Sullivan would have been scandalized to realize what he was saying when he announced this new “rock and roll all the kids are crazy about,” examples of barely concealed sexual reference lurking just below the surface of common American English don’t stop there. Robert Farris Thompson, America’s most prominent historian of African art, says that funky is derived from the Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, meaning “positive sweat” of the sort you get from dancing or having sex, but not working. One’s mojo, which has to be “working” to attract a lover, is Ki-Kongo for “soul.” Boogie comes from mbugi, meaning “devilishly good.” And both jazz and jism likely derive from dinza, the Ki-Kongo word for “to ejaculate.”6 Forget the billions pouring in from porn. Forget all the T&A on TV, in advertising, and in movies. Forget the love songs we sing on the way into relationships and the blues on the way out. Even if we include none of that, the percentage of our lives we human beings spend thinking about, planning, having, and remembering sex is incomparably greater than that of any other creature on the planet. Despite our relatively low reproductive potential (few women have ever had more than a dozen or so children), our species truly can, and does, rock around the clock.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  There were the four of us sharing an inner stateroom near the din of the engines (while our parents had an outer cabin on the Boat Deck) and suddenly I reached womanhood two and a half days out of Le Havre. What to do? Lalah and Chloe (who are sharing one set of bunks) are not supposed to know—being, my mother thinks, too young—so Randy and I engage in some conspiratorial trips to the drugstore for supplies and go sneaking around the cabin looking for places to hide them. Of course I am so delighted with my new toy and my new sense of distinction in the adult world that I change my Kotex no less than twelve times a day, using them up almost faster than we can buy them. And the moment of truth arrives when the steward (a beleaguered Frenchman with a face like Fernandel and a temper like Cardinal Richelieu) finds the toilet stuffed to the top and overflowing. Until then I had not felt particularly oppressed by menstruation. It was only when the steward (who was certainly not thrilled about having to tend a cabin which resembled a girls’ dormitory) started yelling at me that I joined the ranks of potential radicals. “What ave you poot in ze commode?” he shrieked (or something to that effect). And then he made me watch while he pulled out the disintegrating Kotex glob by glob. Is it possible he really didn’t know what it was? Or was he trying to humiliate me? Was it really a language problem? (Comment dit-on Kotex en francais?) Or was it just that he was taking his frustration out on my menarche? I stood there turning red and muttering drugstore, drugstore, which (I am now given to understand) is a French word. Meanwhile, Lalah and Chloe were giggling to beat the band. (They knew it was dirty, even if they didn’t understand all the details. They certainly knew something was wrong or else why would I be running to the bathroom a dozen times a day and why would that scary man be yelling at me?) We steamed toward New York leaving a trail of bloody Kotex for the fishes. In my thirteen-year-old mind, the Ile de France was the most romantic ship in the world because it made a cameo appearance in “These Foolish Things"—that dreamily romantic song (played by my dreamily romantic father on the piano): A tinkling piano in the next apartment Those stumbling words that told you What my heart meant…

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Nothing in the natural world indicates whether a plant is definitively a flower or a weed. Queen Anne’s lace is a flower to Kevin but a weed to his friend. The distinction depends on the perceiver. A rose is usually considered a flower, but it becomes a weed if you discover it in a field of vegetables. A dandelion is often considered a weed, but it transforms into a flower when placed in a bouquet of wildflowers or if it’s a gift from your two-year-old child. Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. They are perceiver-dependent categories. Albert Einstein illustrated this point nicely when he wrote, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”5 Common sense leads us to believe that emotions are real in nature and exist independent of any observer, in the same manner as Higgs bosons and plants. Emotions seem to be present in wiggling eyebrows and wrinkled noses, in sagging shoulders and sweaty palms, in racing hearts and squirts of cortisol, and in silence, screams, and sighs. Science, however, tells us that emotions require a perceiver, just as colors and sounds do. When you experience or perceive emotion, sensory input is transformed into patterns of firing neurons. At the time, if you focus your attention on your body, you experience emotions as if they are happening in your body, just like you experience red color in the apple and sound in the world. If you’re instead focusing attention on the world, you experience faces and voices and bodies as if they express emotion for you to decode. But as we learned in chapter 5, your brain categorizes using emotion concepts to make these sensations meaningful. The result is that you construct instances of happiness, fear, anger, or other emotion categories. Emotions are real, but real in the same manner of the sound of a tree falling, the experience of red, and the distinctions between flowers and weeds. They are all constructed in the brain of a perceiver. You move your facial muscles all the time. Your eyebrows scrunch. Your lips curl. Your nose wrinkles. These actions are perceiver-independent and they help you sample the sensory world. Widening your eyes enhances your peripheral vision, so you can more easily detect objects surrounding you. Narrowing your eyes improves your visual acuity for objects right in front of you. Wrinkling your nose helps to block noxious chemicals. But these movements are not intrinsically emotional.6 Inside your body, your heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing, temperature, and cortisol level fluctuate throughout the day. These changes have physical functions to regulate your body in the world; they are perceiver-independent. They also are not intrinsically emotional.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  And when you make meaning using that concept, your brain again takes into account your entire situation. For example, if you surface from under the ocean waves onto the beach and notice that your swimsuit has fallen off, your brain might construct an instance of “Embarrassment.” Your conceptual system samples instances of embarrassed nakedness from your past, which is more taxing on your body budget than the refreshed nakedness after stepping out of a sauna, or the comfortable nakedness after a passionate afternoon with your lover. Depending on the immediate circumstances, your brain might also sample fully clothed instances of “Embarrassment” where you felt exposed, like answering a question wrongly in class, but not more private embarrassment like forgetting your best friend’s birthday. Your brain samples from your larger conceptual system, as you’ve seen, according to your goal in a given situation. The winning instance guides you to regulate your body budget appropriately. 50 All categorizations are based on probabilities. For example, if you are on vacation in Paris and you perceive a stranger frowning at you in a subway car, you might not have any past experience with that stranger or that subway, and you might not have visited Paris before, but your brain does have past experiences of other frowning people in unfamiliar places. Your brain can then construct a sample of concepts, based on past experience and probability, to use as predictions. Each added piece of context (Are you alone or is the car crowded? Is it a man or a woman? With raised or furrowed eyebrows?) allows your brain to hone the probabilities until it settles on the best-fitting concept that will minimize prediction error. This is categorization with emotion concepts. You aren’t detecting or recognizing emotion in someone’s face. You aren’t recognizing a physiological pattern in your own body. You are predicting and explaining the meaning of those sensations based on probability and experience. This happens each time you hear an emotion word or are faced with an array of sensations. 51 All of this categorization, context, and probability may seem remarkably counterintuitive. When I’m walking through the woods and see a monstrous snake in my path, I certainly don’t say to myself, “Well, I actively predicted that snake from a population of competing concepts, which were constructed from the past and have some degree of similarity to this current set of sensations, thereby creating my perception.” I just “saw a snake.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In any case it is usually only artists, or people with abundant leisure time, who can af- ford to go all the way. The best way to use the Natural character type is in specific situations when a touch of innocence or impishness will help lower your target's defenses. A con man plays dumb to make the other person trust him and feel superior. This kind of feigned naturalness has countless applications in daily life, where nothing is more dangerous than looking smarter than the next person; the Natural pose is the perfect way to disguise your cleverness. But if you are uncontrollably childish and cannot turn it off, you run the risk of seeming pathetic, earning not sympathy but pity and disgust. Similarly, the seductive traits of the Natural work best in one who is still young enough for them to seem natural. They are much harder for an older person to pull off. Cora Pearl did not seem so charming when she was still wearing her pink flouncy dresses in her fifties. The Duke of Buck- ingham, who seduced everyone in the English court in the 1620s (includ- ing the homosexual King James I himself), was wondrously childish in looks and manner; but this became obnoxious and off-putting as he grew older, and he eventually made enough enemies that he ended up being mur- dered. As you age, then, your natural qualities should suggest more the child's open spirit, less an innocence that will no longer convince anyone. The ability to delay satisfaction is the ultimate art of seduction—while waiting, the victim is held in thrall. Coquettes are the grand masters of this game, orchestrating a back-and-forth movement between hope and frustration. They bait with the promise of reward—the hope of physical pleasure, happiness, fame by association, power—all of which, however, proves elusive; yet this only makes their targets pursue them the more. Coquettes seem totally self-sufficient: they do not need you, they seem to say, and their narcissism proves devil- ishly attractive. You want to conquer them but they hold the cards. The strategy of the Coquette is never to offer total satisfaction. Imitate the alternating heat and coolness of the Coquette and you will keep the seduced at your heels. The Hot and Cold Coquette I n the autumn of 1795, Paris was caught up in a strange giddiness. The Reign of Terror that had followed the French Revolution had ended; the sound of the guillotine was gone. The city breathed a collective sigh of re- lief, and gave way to wild parties and endless festivals.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Love is also diminished if a woman realizes that her lover is foolish and undiscerning, or if she sees him going too far in demands of love, giving no thought to his partner's modesty nor wishing to pardon her blushes. A faithful lover ought to choose the harshest pains of love rather than by his demands cause his partner embarrassment, or take pleasure in spurning her modesty; for one who thinks only of the outcome of his own pleasure, and ignores the welfare of his partner, should be called a traitor rather than a lover. • Love also suffers decrease if the woman realizes that her lover is fearful in war, The Anti-Seducer • 135 trait of all, and you cannot allow yourself to give in to it. Most tightwads do not realize they have a problem; they actually imagine that when they give someone some paltry crumb, they are being generous. Take a hard look at yourself—you are probably cheaper than you think. Try giving more freely of both your money and yourself and you will see the seduc- tive potential in selective generosity. Of course you must keep your gener- osity under control. Giving too much can be a sign of desperation, as if you were trying to buy someone. The Bumbler. Bumblers are self-conscious, and their self-consciousness heightens your own. At first you may think they are thinking about you, and so much so that it makes them awkward. In fact they are only thinking of themselves—worrying about how they look, or about the consequences for them of their attempt to seduce you. Their worry is usually contagious: soon you are worrying too, about yourself. Bumblers rarely reach the final stages of a seduction, but if they get that far, they bungle that too. In se- duction, the key weapon is boldness, refusing the target the time to stop and think. Bumblers have no sense of timing. You might find it amusing to try to train or educate them, but if they are still Bumblers past a certain age, the case is probably hopeless—they are incapable of getting outside themselves. The Windbag. The most effective seductions are driven by looks, indirect actions, physical lures. Words have a place, but too much talk will generally break the spell, heightening surface differences and weighing things down. People who talk a lot most often talk about themselves. They have never acquired that inner voice that wonders, Am I boring you? To be a Windbag is to have a deep-rooted selfishness. Never interrupt or argue with these types—that only fuels their windbaggery. At all costs learn to control your own tongue. The Reactor. Reactors are far too sensitive, not to you but to their own egos. They comb your every word and action for signs of a slight to their vanity. If you strategically back off, as you sometimes must in seduction, they will brood and lash out at you.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Okay, fine, it’s embarrassing. Maybe even humiliating, if you’re prone to that sort of thing. But 150 years after On the Origin of Species was published, isn’t it time to accept that our ancestors evolved along a sexual trajectory similar to that of our two highly social, very intelligent, closely related primate cousins? With any other question we have about the origins of human behavior, we look to chimps and bonobos for important clues: language, tool use, political alliances, war, reconciliation, altruism…but when it comes to sex, we prudishly turn away from these models to the distantly related, antisocial, low-I.Q. but monogamous gibbon? Really? We’ve pointed out how the agricultural revolution triggered radical social reconfigurations from which we’re still reeling. Perhaps the far-fetched denial of our promiscuous sexual prehistory expresses a legitimate fear of social instability, but insistent demands for a stable social order (based, as we’re often reminded, upon the nuclear family unit) cannot erase the effects of the hundreds of thousands of years that came before our species settled into stable villages. If female chimps and bonobos could talk, do we really think they’d be griping to their hairy girlfriends about prematurely ejaculating males who don’t bring flowers anymore? Probably not, because as we’ve seen, when a female chimp or bonobo is in the mood, she’s likely to be the center of plenty of eager male attention. And the more attention she gets, the more she attracts, because as it turns out, our male primate cousins get turned on by the sight and sound of others of their species having sex. Imagine that. “What Horrid Extravagancies of Minde!” No man (who is but never so little versed in such matters) is ignorant, what grievous symptomes, the Rising, Bearing down and Perversion, and Convulsion of the Wombe do excite; what horrid extravagancies of minde, what Phrensies, Melancholy Distempers, and Outragiousness, the preternatural Diseases of the Womb do induce, as if affected Persons were inchanted…. WILLIAM HARVEY, Anatomical Exercitations concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (1653) Hysteria was one of the first diseases to be described formally. Hippocrates discussed it in the fourth century BCE, and you’ll find it in any medical text covering women’s health written from medieval times until it was removed from the list of recognized medical diagnoses in 1952 (twenty-one years before homosexuality was finally removed). Hysteria was still one of the most diagnosed diseases in the United States and Great Britain as recently as the early twentieth century. You might wonder how physicians treated this chronic condition over the centuries. According to historian Rachel Maines, female patients were routinely massaged to orgasm from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s. Have a seat; the doctor will be right with you….

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;—a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year! I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a moment of blind impatient passion, and there she was sprawling and sobbing, and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and the atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss; and so we lay, when with one of those jolts that have ended by knocking my poor heart out of its groove, I met the unblinking dark eyes of two strange and beautiful children, faunlet and nymphet, whom their identical flat dark hair and bloodless cheeks proclaimed siblings if not twins. They stood crouching and gaping at us, both in blue play-suits, blending with the mountain blossoms. I plucked at the lap-robe for desperate concealment—and within the same instant, something that looked like a polka-dotted pushball among the undergrowth a few paces away, went into a turning motion which was transformed into the gradually rising figure of a stout lady with a raven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to her bouquet, while staring over her shoulder at us from behind her lovejy carved bluestone children. Now that I have an altogether different mess on my conscience, I know that I am a courageous man, but in those days I was not aware of it, and I remember being surprised by my own coolness. With the quiet murmured order one gives a sweatstained distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast’s flanks pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made Lo get up, and we decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car. Behind it a nifty station wagon was parked, and a handsome Assyrian with a little blue-black beard, un monsieur très bien, in silk shirt and magenta slacks, presumably the corpulent botanist’s husband, was gravely taking the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of the pass. It was well over 10,000 feet and I was quite out of breath; and with a scrunch and a skid we drove off, Lo still struggling with her clothes and swearing at me in language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let alone use.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  There’s compulsive little Dr. Raymond Schrift who is hailing a blond stewardess (named “Nanci”) as if she were a taxi. (I saw Dr. Schrift for one memorable year when I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ living-room couch. He kept insisting that the horse I was dreaming about was my father and that my periods would return if only I would “ackzept being a vohman.”) There’s smiling, bald Dr. Harvey Smucker whom I saw in consultation when my first husband decided he was Jesus Christ and began threatening to walk on the water in Central Park Lake. There’s foppish, hand-tailored Dr. Ernest Klumpner, the supposedly “brilliant theoretician” whose latest book is a psychoanalytic study of John Knox. There’s black-bearded Dr. Stanton Rappoport-Rosen who recently gained notoriety in New York analytic circles when he moved to Denver and branched out into something called “Cross-Country Group Ski-Therapy.” There’s Dr. Arnold Aaronson pretending to play chess on a magnetic board with his new wife (who was his patient until last year), the singer Judy Rose. Both of them are surreptitiously looking around to see who is looking at them—and for one moment, my eyes and Judy Rose’s meet. Judy Rose became famous in the fifties for recording a series of satirical ballads about pseudointellectual life in New York. In a whiny and deliberately unmusical voice, she sang the saga of a Jewish girl who takes courses at the New School, reads the Bible for its prose, discusses Martin Buber in bed, and falls in love with her analyst. She has now become one with the role she created. Besides the analysts, their wives, the crew, and a few poor outnumbered laymen, there were some children of analysts who’d come along for the ride. Their sons were mostly sullen-faced adolescents in bell bottoms and shoulder-length hair who looked at their parents with a degree of cynicism and scorn which was almost palpable. I remembered myself traveling abroad with my parents as a teenager and always trying to pretend they weren’t with me. I tried to lose them in the Louvre! To avoid them in the Uffizi! To moon alone over a Coke in a Paris café and pretend that those loud people at the next table were not—though clearly they were—my parents. (I was pretending, you see, to be a Lost Generation exile with my parents sitting three feet away.) And here I was back in my own past, or in a bad dream or a bad movie: Analyst and Son of Analyst. A planeload of shrinks and my adolescence all around me.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  While some passed the job off to nurses, Maines found that most physicians performed the therapy themselves, though apparently not without some difficulty. Nathaniel Highmore, writing in 1660, noted that it was not an easy technique to learn, being “not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” Whatever challenges male physicians faced in mastering the technique, it seems to have been worth the effort. The Health and Diseases of Women, published in 1873, estimates that about 75 percent of American women were in need of these treatments and that they constituted the single largest market for therapeutic services. Despite Donald Symons’s protestations that “[a]mong all peoples sexual intercourse is understood to be a service or favor that females render to males,” it seems that for centuries, orgasmic release was a service male doctors rendered to women…for a price. Much of this information comes from The Technology of Orgasm, Maines’s book on this “disease” and its treatment through the centuries.1 And what were the symptoms of this “disease”? Unsurprisingly, they were identical to those of sexual frustration and chronic arousal: “anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema, and vaginal lubrication.” This supposed medical treatment for horny, frustrated women was not an isolated aberration confined to ancient history, but just one element in an ancient crusade to pathologize the demands of the female libido—a libido that experts have long insisted hardly exists. The men who provided this lucrative therapy didn’t write about “orgasm” in the medical articles they published on hysteria and its treatment. Rather, they published serious, sober discussion of “vulvular massage” leading to “nervous paroxysm” that brought temporary relief to the patient. These were ideal patients, after all. They didn’t die or recover from their condition. They just kept returning, eager for more treatment sessions. This arrangement might strike some readers as the very definition of “good work if you can get it,” but many physicians apparently felt otherwise. Maines found “no evidence that male physicians enjoyed providing pelvic massage treatments. On the contrary, this male elite sought every opportunity to substitute other devices for their fingers.” What “other devices” does Maines have in mind? See if you can finish this series: Sewing machine Fan Tea kettle Toaster ? Here’s a hint: These are the first five electrical appliances sold directly to American consumers. Give up? The Hamilton Beach Company of Racine, Wisconsin, patented the first home-use vibrator in 1902, thereby making it just the fifth electrical appliance approved for domestic use. By 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes. But before it became an instrument for self-treatment (“All the pleasures of youth…will throb within you,” one suggestive ad promised), vibrators had already been in use for decades in the offices of physicians who’d grown weary of “rubbing their stomachs and patting their heads at the same time.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (The poetry I was raised on!) Somewhere in the song, “The Ile de France with all the gulls around it…” is dreamily mentioned. Little did I know that the gulls would be diving after my bloody Kotex. And little did I know that by the time I got to sail on it, the Ile de France would be much the worse for wear and would rock and roll like an old tub, making nearly all the passengers seasick. The stewards were losing their minds. The dining room was practically empty at every sitting and the room-service bells kept ringing. I see my pudgy thirteen-year-old self clutching my clutch bag full of Kotex on the dipping and weaving decks and bleeding my way all the way home to Manhattan. Ladies and Gentlemen, my menarche. A year and a half later, I was starving myself to death and my periods had stopped dead in their tracks. The cause? Fear of being a woman, as Dr. Schrift put it. Well, why not? OK. I was afraid of being a woman. Not afraid of the blood (I really looked forward to that—at least until I got yelled at for it), but afraid of all the nonsense that went along with it. Like being told that if I had babies, I’d never be an artist, like my mother’s bitterness, like my grandmother’s boring concentration on eating and excreting, like being asked by some dough-faced boy if I planned to be a secretary. A secretary! I was determined never to learn to type. (And I never have. In college Brian typed my papers. Later I pecked with two fingers or paid to have things typed. Oh, it has greatly inconvenienced me and it has cost me ridiculous sums of money—but what are money and inconvenience where principle is concerned? The principle of the thing was: I was not and never would be a typist. Even for myself, no matter how much that would have eased my life.) So, if menstruating meant you had to type, I would stop menstruating! And stop typing! Or both! And I wouldn’t have babies! I would cut off my nose to spite my face. I would literally throw out the baby with the bath water. And that, of course, was another reason I was in Paris. I had cut myself off from everything—family, friends, husband—just to prove I was free. Free as a misfired satellite in outer space. Free as a hijacker parachuting down into Death Valley. I swiped the remains of the roll of toilet paper, stuffed it into my bag, and started back toward my room. But which floor was it on anyway? My mind was blank. All the doors seemed identical. I ran up two flights and blindly headed for the corner door. I flung it open. A fat middle-aged man sat naked on a chair cutting his toenails. He looked up in mild surprise.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And she felt torturously shy as she realized that there were many people in this hall moving about and talking to one another. Now she was told to sit up and back on her heels, with her hands clasped to the back of her neck. "This will always be your position when you are told to rest," Lord Gregory said, "and keep your eyes down." Yet even as she obeyed this command, she could see what the room was. There were deep shelves cut into the walls all along three sides of it, and on these shelves on pallets, slept the many slaves, both male and female. But she could not see Prince Alexi. She did see a beautiful black-haired girl with very plump little buttocks who appeared quite deep asleep, and a blond-haired young man who appeared to be strapped on his back, though she could not tell, and others, all of whom were in a drowsy state, if not dozing. And before her were many tables in a row, and among them pots of steaming water from which came a delicious fragrance. "This is where you will be bathed and groomed always," said Lord Gregory in that same cold voice, "and when the Prince has had quite enough of sleeping with you as though you were his love, you shall sleep here too, and at any time when the Prince has no specific orders for you. Your groom is named Leon. He will care for you in all details, and to him you shall show the same respect and obedience you show to everyone." Beauty saw before her the slender figure of a young man, directly beside Lord Gregory. And as he drew nearer, Lord Gregory snapped his fingers and told her to show her respect. At once Beauty kissed his boots. "To the lowest scullery maid you owe this respect," Lord Gregory said, "and should I ever detect the slightest haughtiness in you, I shall punish you severely. I am not as...shall we say, impressed with you as is your Prince." "Yes, my Lord," Beauty answered respectfully, but she was angry. She felt she had shown no haughtiness. But Leon's voice calmed her immediately. "Come, my dear," he said, gesturing with a pat of his hand against his thigh for her to follow him, and it seemed Lord Gregory disappeared as Leon led her into a brick-lined alcove where a large wooden tub stood steaming. The scent of the herbs was very strong. Leon gestured for her to rise up again, and taking her hands, he lifted them over her head and told her to kneel in the tub. She climbed into it at once and felt the delicious warm water come almost up to her sex. Leon wrapped her hair in a circle on the back of her head and fixed it with several pins.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Isn't she lovely, your Princess?" he said to the tavern girl. "O, yes, your Highness." "Did you talk to her and console her as you were bathing her?" "O, yes, your Highness, I told her how much everyone admired her and how much they wanted to..." "Yes, to see her," the Prince said. There was a pause. Beauty wondered if they were both looking at her, and suddenly she felt herself naked in the sight of both of them. It seemed one or the other she could bear, but both of them staring at her breasts and sex was too much for her. But the Prince embraced her as if seeing that she needed embracing, and gently squeezing her sore flesh, sent another soft shock of shameful pleasure through her. She knew her face was red again. She had always blushed so easily. And were there other ways in which he could tell what his hands did to her? She would cry again if she could not conceal this mounting pleasure. "Down on your knees, my darling," said the Prince with a little snap of his fingers. In a shock Beauty obeyed, seeing the rough floorboards before her. She could see the Prince's black boots, and then the crude leather shoes of the serving girl. "Now, approach your servant and kiss her shoes. Show her how grateful you are for her devotion to you." Beauty didn't stop to think of it. But she felt her tears come again as she obeyed, depositing each kiss on the worn leather of the girl's shoes as gracefully as she could. Above she heard the girl's murmured thanks to the Prince. "Your Highness," the girl said, "it is I who want to kiss my Princess, I beg you." The Prince must have nodded, because the girl fell to her knees, and, stroking Beauty's hair, kissed her upturned face with great reverence. "Now, you see there the posts of the foot of the bed," the Prince said to the girl. Beauty of course knew that the bed had high posts which held a coffered ceiling over it. "Tie your mistress to those posts with her hands and legs quite wide apart so that as I lie down I can look up at her," said the Prince. "Tie her with these satin bands so her skin won't be injured, but tie her very firmly for she must sleep in this position and her weight must not pull her loose." Beauty was stunned.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  [back] 17. represented by the entire brain: Some scientists try to find a compromise between these two views of concepts (that they involve sensory and motor representations versus that they are “abstract,” meaning they are stored without reference to sensory and motor details); see heam.info/dmn-4. movements have increased their firing: Chao and Martin 2000. See Barsalou 2008b for a review. the name of the object (“hammer”): Tucker and Ellis 2004. gripping motion with your hand: Klatzky et al. 1989; Tucker and Ellis 2001. [back] 18. represented throughout the entire brain: For a review, see Barsalou 2009. [back] 19. of neurons for each goal: Further details on this misconception are at heam.info/concepts-20. see nothing of the kind: For a discussion of evidence, see Lebois et al. 2015. [back] 20. can be different each time: Within a concept, there can be several different goals, none of which is core; see heam.info/concepts-21. [back] 21. dark, empty bucket: Years later, I finally forgave myself for this embarrassing error after reading Brian Greene’s 2007 book The Fabric of the Cosmos, whose second chapter is titled “The Universe and the Bucket: Is Space a Human Abstraction or a Physical Entity?” (Greene 2007). “eye of the beholder”: Ibid., 47. [back] 22. “memories” stored in your brain: Schacter 1996. [back] Illustration CreditsFig. 1-1: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 1-2: Photos courtesy of Paul Ekman. Design layout by the author. Fig. 1-3: Photo courtesy of Paul Ekman. Design layout by the author. Fig. 1-4: Photos courtesy of Paul Ekman. Design layout by the author. Fig. 1-5: Photo by Aaron Scott. Fig. 1-6: Portrait of Martin Landau (center) by Howard Schatz from In Character: Actors Acting (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2006). Other photos courtesy of Paul Ekman. Fig. 1-7: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 2-1: Photo courtesy of Richard Enfield. Modification courtesy of Daniel J. Barrett. Fig. 3-1: Photo courtesy of Barton Silverman/New York Times/Redux. Fig. 3-2: Photo courtesy of Paul Ekman. Design layout by the author. Fig. 3-3: Photo courtesy of Paul Ekman. Design layout by the author. Fig. 3-4: Photos courtesy of Paul Ekman. Design layout by the author. Fig. 3-5: Photo courtesy of Debi Roberson. Fig. 4-1: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 4-2: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 4-3: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 4-4: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 4-5: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 4-6: Photo courtesy of Helen Mayberg. Fig. 4-7: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 5-1: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 5-2: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 5-3: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 6-1: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 6-2: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 7-1: Photo courtesy of the author. Fig. 7-2: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 12-1: Photo courtesy of Ann Kring and Angie Hawk. Fig. 12-2: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-1: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-2: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-3: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-4: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-5: Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-6: Illustration by Aaron Scott.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  for her age). She wrote in her diary, "They stared at my sweater as if it were Hermes, accompanied by a gold mine." Hera, Athene, and The revelation was simple but startling. Previously ignored and even Aphrodite delivered the golden apple and Zeus's ridiculed by the other students, Norma Jean now sensed a way to gain at- message: "Paris, since you tention, maybe even power, for she was wildly ambitious. She started to are as handsome as you are smile more, wear makeup, dress differently. And soon she noticed some- wise in affairs of the heart, Zeus commands you to thing equally startling: without her having to say or do anything, boys fell judge which of these passionately in love with her. "My admirers all said the same thing in differ- goddesses is the fairest. " • ent ways," she wrote. "It was my fault, their wanting to kiss me and hug "So be it," sighed Paris. me. Some said it was the way I looked at them—with eyes full of passion. "But first I beg the losers not to be vexed with me. I Others said it was my voice that lured them on. Still others said I gave off am only a human being, vibrations that floored them." liable to make the stupidest 10 • The Art of Seduction mistakes." • The A few years later Marilyn was trying to make it in the film business. goddesses all agreed to Producers would tell her the same thing: she was attractive enough in per-abide by his decision. • son, but her face wasn't pretty enough for the movies. She was getting "Will it be enough to judge them as they are?" work as an extra, and when she was on-screen—even if only for a few sec-Paris asked Hermes, "or onds—the men in the audience would go wild, and the theaters would should they he naked?" • erupt in catcalls. But nobody saw any star quality in this. One day in 1949, "The rules of the contest are for you to decide," only twenty-three at the time and her career at a standstill, Monroe met Hermes answered with a someone at a diner who told her that a producer casting a new Groucho discreet smile. • "In that Marx movie, Love Happy, was looking for an actress for the part of a blond case, will they kindly bombshell who could walk by Groucho in a way that would, in his words, disrobe?" • Hermes told the goddesses to do so, and "arouse my elderly libido and cause smoke to issue from my ears." Talking politely turned his back. • her way into an audition, she improvised this walk. "It's Mae West, Theda Aphrodite was soon ready, Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one," said Groucho after watching her but Athene insisted that she should remove the saunter by. "We shoot the scene tomorrow morning." And so Marilyn cre-famous magic girdle, which

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Did you ever notice any goings-on between Vic and any particular buddy of his?" Seblon gave the reply-cut in half by a frog-in-the-throat that did not go unnoticed by the questioners- : "How exactly does one recognize such affairs?" His own, obviously overstated retort made him blush. His embarrassment grew. To Mario, the strangeness of the officer's replies was only too apparent. Since the Lieutenant's strength lay in his speech-his weakness, too-he now tried to regain the upper hand by this sorely undermined verbal ability. He said : ccHow can I keep track of what the boys do in their own time? Even if that crewman, Vic, got murdered because of some unsavory involvement, I just wouldn't know about it." "Of course not, Lieutenant. But, sometimes one happens to hear something." "You must be joking. I do not eavesdrop on my men. And you better realize that even if some of the young fellows did have dealings with revolting types such as you have in mind, they wouldn't boast about them. I should imagine their meetings arc shruuded in such secrecy . . . " He realized that he wasn't far from singing the praises of 9.Z I JEAN GENET homosexual affairs. He would have liked to keep his mouth shut, but being aware that a sudden silence would appear shange to the inspector, he added, in an offhand manner: "Those disgusting characters are wonderfully organized . . ." That was too much. He himself noticed the ambivalence of the opening statement, with the "wonderfully" striking a note of joyous defiance. The inspectors felt they had had enough. Without being able to distinguish exactly what it was that betrayed him, it seemed to them that his manner of speaking took pleasure in the manners and morals of precisely those elements whom he pretended- to condemn. Their thoughts might have been expressed in cliches like: "He talks about them quite sympathetically, doesn't he?" or ''It doesn't sound like he'd really detest them all that much." In short, he appeared suspect. Fortunately for him, he had an alibi, for he had been on board the night of the crime. When the interview was over, but before the two police officers had left the cabin, the Lieutenant wanted to put on his cloak of navy blue, and then did so with such coquetry-which he at once, and clumsily, corrected -that the total effect was not of just "putting it on," that would have been far too manly, but rather that of "wrapping himself in it" -which, indeed, was the way he thought of it himself. Again, he experienced embarrassment, and he made up his mind (once more ) never to touch a piece of· material again in public. Querelle donated ten francs, when they came round to collect for a wreath for Vic. And now some excerpts, picked at random, from the private diary. This journal can only be a book of prayers.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin was silent, looking at the unknown faces of Oblonsky’s two companions, and especially at the hand of the elegant Grinevitch, which had such long white fingers, such long yellow filbert-shaped nails, and such huge shining studs on the shirt-cuff, that apparently they absorbed all his attention, and allowed him no freedom of thought. Oblonsky noticed this at once, and smiled. “Ah, to be sure, let me introduce you,” he said. “My colleagues: Philip Ivanitch Nikitin, Mihail Stanislavitch Grinevitch”—and turning to Levin—“a district councilor, a modern district councilman, a gymnast who lifts thirteen stone with one hand, a cattle-breeder and sportsman, and my friend, Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, the brother of Sergey Ivanovitch Koznishev.” “Delighted,” said the veteran. “I have the honor of knowing your brother, Sergey Ivanovitch,” said Grinevitch, holding out his slender hand with its long nails. Levin frowned, shook hands coldly, and at once turned to Oblonsky. Though he had a great respect for his half-brother, an author well known to all Russia, he could not endure it when people treated him not as Konstantin Levin, but as the brother of the celebrated Koznishev. “No, I am no longer a district councilor. I have quarreled with them all, and don’t go to the meetings any more,” he said, turning to Oblonsky. “You’ve been quick about it!” said Oblonsky with a smile. “But how? why?” “It’s a long story. I will tell you some time,” said Levin, but he began telling him at once. “Well, to put it shortly, I was convinced that nothing was really done by the district councils, or ever could be,” he began, as though someone had just insulted him. “On one side it’s a plaything; they play at being a parliament, and I’m neither young enough nor old enough to find amusement in playthings; and on the other side” (he stammered) “it’s a means for the coterie of the district to make money. Formerly they had wardships, courts of justice, now they have the district council—not in the form of bribes, but in the form of unearned salary,” he said, as hotly as though someone of those present had opposed his opinion. “Aha! You’re in a new phase again, I see—a conservative,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “However, we can go into that later.” “Yes, later. But I wanted to see you,” said Levin, looking with hatred at Grinevitch’s hand. Stepan Arkadyevitch gave a scarcely perceptible smile. “How was it you used to say you would never wear European dress again?” he said, scanning his new suit, obviously cut by a French tailor. “Ah! I see: a new phase.” Levin suddenly blushed, not as grown men blush, slightly, without being themselves aware of it, but as boys blush, feeling that they are ridiculous through their shyness, and consequently ashamed of it and blushing still more, almost to the point of tears. And it was so strange to see this sensible, manly face in such a childish plight, that Oblonsky left off looking at him.