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 Wild (2012)

  He stared at me blankly, uncomprehending. It was midmorning and hot already, the kind of day that would be scorching by noon. I wondered if he could smell me. I was past the point where I could smell myself. I took a step back and dropped my hitchhiking arm in surrender. When it came to getting a ride, until he left I was screwed. “It’s a National Scenic Trail,” I offered, but he only continued looking at me with a patient expression on his face, his unmarked notebook in his hand. As I explained to him what the PCT was and what I was doing on it, I saw that Jimmy Carter wasn’t bad-looking. I wondered if he had any food in his car. “So if you’re hiking a wilderness trail, what are you doing here?” he asked. I told him about bypassing the deep snow in Lassen Volcanic National Park. “How long have you been out on the road?” “I’ve been on the trail about a month,” I said, and watched as he wrote this down. It occurred to me that maybe I was perhaps a tiny bit of a hobo, given all the time I’d spent hitchhiking and bypassing, but I didn’t think it wise to mention that. “How many nights have you slept with a roof over your head in that month?” he asked. “Three times,” I answered, after thinking about it—one night at Frank and Annette’s and one night each at the motels in Ridgecrest and Sierra City. “Is this all you have?” he asked, nodding to my backpack and ski pole. “Yeah. I mean, I have some things in storage too, but for now this is it.” I put my hand on Monster. It felt like a friend always, but even more so in the company of Jimmy Carter. “Well then, I’d say you’re a hobo!” he said happily, and asked me to spell my first and last names. I did and then wished I hadn’t. “No fucking way!” he exclaimed when he had it all down on the page. “Is that really your name?” “Yeah,” I said, and turned away, as if searching for a car, so he wouldn’t read the hesitation on my face. It was eerily silent until a logging truck came around the bend and roared by, oblivious to my imploring thumb. “So,” Jimmy Carter said after the truck passed, “we could say you’re an actual stray.”

• From Little Women (1868)

  ribbons. For the drops continued to fall, and being a woman as well as a lover, she felt that, though it was too late to save her heart, she might her bonnet. Now she remembered the little umbrella, which she had forgotten to take in her hurry to be off, but regret was unavailing, and nothing could be done but borrow one or submit to a drenching. She looked up at the lowering sky, down at the crimson bow already flecked with black, forward along the muddy street, then one long, lingering look behind, at a certain grimy warehouse, with 'Hoffmann, Swartz, & Co.' over the door, and said to herself, with a sternly reproachful air... "It serves me right! what business had I to put on all my best things and come philandering down here, hoping to see the Professor? Jo, I'm ashamed of you! No, you shall not go there to borrow an umbrella, or find out where he is, from his friends. You shall trudge away, and do your errands in the rain, and if you catch your death and ruin your bonnet, it's no more than you deserve. Now then!" With that she rushed across the street so impetuously that she narrowly escaped annihilation from a passing truck, and precipitated herself into the arms of a stately old gentleman, who said, "I beg pardon, ma'am," and looked mortally offended. Somewhat daunted, Jo righted herself, spread her handkerchief over the devoted ribbons, and putting temptation behind her, hurried on, with increasing dampness about the ankles, and much clashing of umbrellas overhead. The fact that a somewhat dilapidated blue one remained stationary above the unprotected bonnet attracted her attention, and looking up, she saw Mr. Bhaer looking down. "I feel to know the strong-minded lady who goes so bravely under many horse noses, and so fast through much mud. What do you down here, my friend?" "I'm shopping." Mr. Bhaer smiled, as he glanced from the pickle factory on one side to the wholesale hide and leather concern on the other, but he only said politely, "You haf no umbrella. May I go also, and take for you the bundles?" "Yes, thank you." Jo's cheeks were as red as her ribbon, and she wondered what he thought of her, but she didn't care, for in a minute she found herself walking away arm in arm with her Professor, feeling as if the sun had suddenly burst out with

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  “I had an argument with someone at work and I’m sure I was in my ego about it.” I was trying to own up to my responsibility for the way I felt and brush Limori off at the same time. I didn’t feel like being poked and prodded this evening about my “ego positions.” There was a pause, and the room was silent while everyone waited to see what Limori would do (or what she would be guided to do, as we understood it). “Come here,” she said at last. Reluctantly I stood up and walked to where she sat, resplendent in an ivory silk dress with a wide, velveteen belt, a turquoise silk scarf and open-toed high heels. Her blonde hair was poofy around her face at that time, and she wore minimal makeup, although her fingernails were acrylic and she had a French manicure. “Come here,” she said again as I got close to her, and held her arms up as if to embrace me. “Here.” She patted her lap. “Sit on my knee.” I felt ridiculous but I complied, turning my back to her to face the rest of the circle and perching my rear end on one of her knees. She put her arms around my waist, cupping my hands in hers, and had me lean back so that I was resting against her chest. “Now,” she said, “what is your favourite animal?” The question disarmed me because it was so completely not what I expected. “The barn owl,” I replied, not certain it was my favourite animal, but it was what popped into my head. “What do you like about barn owls?” I wasn’t sure, but her question made me search for an answer. “They’re quiet. They have nice eyes. I like their colour and shape.” “Now,” she held me a little tighter and addressed her next question to the group, “can you see the barn owl in Alexandra?” After a short pause in which I felt terribly self-conscious, Karen answered, “Yes, she has beautiful eyes like a barn owl.” “That’s right,” Limori said, “and what else?” I still felt like a fool, one grown woman sitting on another’s knee with the group looking at me, but bubbling up underneath my embarrassment was pleasure. This positive attention from Limori was not unwelcome, and to be singled out by our guru and treated in such a tender way made me feel loved, not only by her, but also by God. “She’s wise,” Gary answered. “That’s right!” Limori’s vocal timbre became deep with approval and I could feel her behind me nodding at Gary, one of her main protégés. She shifted her weight and adjusted me on her knee so that I turned sideways and we could look at one another. “Azeen says that you are to remember that, like the barn owl, you are quiet with your wisdom. It shines out through your eyes.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Across the country in San Francisco, Adam, twenty, a college sophomore who was also openly gay, insisted that he hadn’t been offended by his high school classmates’ use of “that’s so gay” or “fag”: “I wouldn’t think, That person hates gay people,” he said. “My assumption was that he was joking around. That didn’t necessarily make it better, but it didn’t feel threatening.” Maybe. Then again, despite growing up in what is arguably the gay capital of America, Adam, too, at that time, was in the closet. And like Mateo, he was forever monitoring himself—the way he sat, his hand gestures, his vocal inflection—in an attempt to evade detection. “I would practice my facial expressions in the mirror,” he recalled, “especially my ‘sit back and look like “the shit”’ face. Then no one would question me. I was the man. I was a man.” The only time Adam said he “slipped up” was during his first middle school mixer. “I was out there on the dance floor doing my thing, and this other boy came up to me and said I was using my hips too much, I was dancing like a girl. It was horrible to have something that I was naturally inclined to do be brought to my attention as ‘wrong.’ That was exactly the kind of thing that I was trying to avoid at all costs. So from then on, I would watch how other boys danced and do what I saw them doing.” Guys who identified as straight but weren’t athletic, or were involved in the arts, or had a lot of female friends, all risked having their masculinity impugned. What had changed for this generation, though, was that some of them, particularly if they had grown up around LGBTQ+ people, didn’t much care. “I don’t mind when people mistake me for being gay,” said Luke, a high school senior from New York City. “It’s more of an annoyance than anything, because I want people to believe me when I say I’m straight.” The way he described himself did, indeed, tick every stereotypical box—except the only one that counted: an interest in sex with other boys. “I know I’m not a big, masculine guy,” he said. “I’m a very thin person. I like clothing. I care about my appearance in maybe a more delicate way. I’m very in touch with my sensitive side. I like to talk about emotions. So when people think I’m gay”—he shrugged—“it can feel like more of a compliment. Like, ‘Oh, you like the way I dress? Thank you!’”

• From Little Women (1868)

  "Yes, I think she would," returned Laurie gravely. "Don't you like me so?" asked Meg. "No, I don't," was the blunt reply. "Why not?" in an anxious tone. He glanced at her frizzled head, bare shoulders, and fantastically trimmed dress with an expression that abashed her more than his answer, which had not a particle of his usual politeness in it. "I don't like fuss and feathers." That was altogether too much from a lad younger than herself, and Meg walked away, saying petulantly, "You are the rudest boy I ever saw." Feeling very much ruffled, she went and stood at a quiet window to cool her cheeks, for the tight dress gave her an uncomfortably brilliant color. As she stood there, Major Lincoln passed by, and a minute after she heard him saying to his mother... "They are making a fool of that little girl. I wanted you to see her, but they have spoiled her entirely. She's nothing but a doll tonight." "Oh, dear!" sighed Meg. "I wish I'd been sensible and worn my own things, then I should not have disgusted other people, or felt so uncomfortable and ashamed of myself." She leaned her forehead on the cool pane, and stood half hidden by the curtains, never minding that her favorite waltz had begun, till some one touched her, and turning, she saw Laurie, looking penitent, as he said, with his very best bow and his hand out... "Please forgive my rudeness, and come and dance with me." "I'm afraid it will be too disagreeable to you," said Meg, trying to look offended and failing entirely. "Not a bit of it, I'm dying to do it. Come, I'll be good. I don't like your gown, but I do think you are just splendid." And he waved his hands, as if words failed to express his admiration. Meg smiled and relented, and whispered as they stood waiting to catch the time, "Take care my skirt doesn't trip you up. It's the plague of my life and I was a goose to wear it." "Pin it round your neck, and then it will be useful," said Laurie, looking down at the little blue boots, which he evidently approved of. Away they went fleetly and gracefully, for having practiced at home, they were well matched, and the blithe young couple were a pleasant sight to see, as they twirled merrily round and round, feeling more friendly than ever after their small tiff. "Laurie, I want you to do me a favor, will you?" said Meg, as he stood fanning her when her breath gave out, which it did very soon though she would not own why. "Won't I!" said Laurie, with alacrity. "Please don't tell them at home about my dress tonight. They won't understand the joke, and it will worry Mother." "Then why did you do it?" said Laurie's eyes, so plainly that Meg hastily added...

• From Little Women (1868)

  Don't you wish you could give it to me, Laurie?" And she slyly smiled in his disappointed face. "What virtues do you most admire in a man?" asked Sallie. "Courage and honesty." "Now my turn," said Fred, as his hand came last. "Let's give it to him," whispered Laurie to Jo, who nodded and asked at once... "Didn't you cheat at croquet?" "Well, yes, a little bit." "Good! Didn't you take your story out of The Sea Lion? " said Laurie. "Rather." "Don't you think the English nation perfect in every respect?" asked Sallie. "I should be ashamed of myself if I didn't." "He's a true John Bull. Now, Miss Sallie, you shall have a chance without waiting to draw. I'll harrrow up your feelings first by asking if you don't think you are something of a flirt," said Laurie, as Jo nodded to Fred as a sign that peace was declared. "You impertinent boy! Of course I'm not," exclaimed Sallie, with an air that proved the contrary. "What do you hate most?" asked Fred. "Spiders and rice pudding." "What do you like best?" asked Jo. "Dancing and French gloves." "Well, I think Truth is a very silly play. Let's have a sensible game of Authors to refresh our minds," proposed Jo. Ned, Frank, and the little girls joined in this, and while it went on, the three elders sat apart, talking. Miss Kate took out her sketch again, and Margaret watched her, while Mr. Brooke lay on the grass with a book, which he did not read. "How beautifully you do it! I wish I could draw," said Meg, with mingled admiration and regret in her voice. "Why don't you learn? I should think you had taste and talent for it," replied Miss Kate graciously. "I haven't time." "Your mamma prefers other accomplishments, I fancy. So did mine, but I proved to her that I had talent by taking a few lessons privately, and then she was quite willing I should go on. Can't you do the same with your governess?" "I have none." "I forgot young ladies in America go to school more than with us. Very fine schools they are, too, Papa says. You go to a private one, I suppose?" "I don't go at all. I am a governess myself." "Oh, indeed!" said Miss Kate, but she might as well have said, "Dear me, how dreadful!" for her tone implied it, and something in her face made Meg color, and wish she had not been so frank. Mr. Brooke looked up and said quickly, "Young ladies in America love independence as much as their ancestors did, and are admired and respected for supporting themselves." "Oh, yes, of course it's very nice and proper in them to do so.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Bonobos are almost continually sexual with each other. Desmond Morris, in The Naked Ape, claimed that continuous sexual receptivity was a necessary part of human relations, that only the power of sex could bind men to women. Only the need for an available and fertile partner could prevent men from fighting over food and territory and force them instead into protecting women and children from other males. It’s a rather bleak vision. But bonobos and other nonhuman primates present a case for at least one aspect of Morris’s belief—that sexual energy is very near the darkest emotions, and the act of sex is almost magical in its power to create alliances and heal upset. Bonobos are always going at each other one way or another, and the line between sex and aggression, peace and fighting, competition and cooperation, is blurred almost as much with them as with ourselves. Relative to body size, human males have the second-largest genitals of all the primates. Bonobos have the largest. The female vaginal opening and clitoris of the bonobo are frontally placed, as with humans. And most of the time, bonobos have sex face to face, reports Frans de Waal, a primate scientist, in his book Peacemaking Among Primates. Bonobos also have sex in the rear-entry position, while lying beside each other, and even while hanging from ropes. They practice open-mouth kissing and have long-lasting eye contact during sex. There is regular sexual contact between adults and children. Virtually all bonobos masturbate routinely. There is a large amount of homosexuality, both male and female, including mock intercourse and mutual masturbation, fellatio, and group sex in many variations. When a couple is engaged in sex, other bonobos will often surround them, poking, teasing, and chiding the mating couple. The rate of sexual contacts climbs dramatically after a fight. In one of de Waal’s photo sequences of captive bonobos, one dominant male charges another. The second flees, only to crawl back a few moments later. The dominant male hugs him, both grinning nervously. The submissive male then lies flat on his back, his knees drawn up sharply, arms stretched over his head, while the winner rubs the loser’s genitals. This is a routine bonobian event, repeated frequently throughout the day, but captured for us on film it becomes a peculiarly embarrassing display. Bonobos are more dramatically in public with their sexuality than cattle or squirrels or even dogs. Their sexual behavior can’t be excused as the result of just rut and pheromones. Both males and females have orgasms, de Waal believes. “The official line of reasoning is that satisfaction is irrelevant for female primates … I believe that we should never place theory above observable facts. Female primates are equipped with a clitoris, an organ with only one known function.”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Masters and Johnson found that almost all flaccid penises were between 8.5 and 10.5 centimeters long. The smallest one was 6 centimeters long and the largest was 14 centimeters. In erection the smaller penises increased in size the most, almost doubling in length. Is it big enough, long enough, thick enough, hard enough? Men hope for a big one, then women complain about penises that are too large, too thick, too long. In a piece of Victorian pornography, a woman complains about the flaws of a large prick: “a huge Beam requires much Strength to raife it, and more to keep it in a due Pofition, and give it it’s proper Motion … what fignifies a great lubberly Machine, which moves but flowly, and muft be propt like an old Houfe, or fplinte’d like a broken leg to keep it from falling.” What’s a man to do? In Richard Rhodes’ 1992 sexual memoir Making Love, the author describes measuring his penis, and finding it to be 6.5 inches long when engorged. Rhodes was heavily criticized for describing such things, mundane and obvious things that have long been the stuff of novels. He talked about his erotic history explicitly, warts and all, but it was the warts—this measurement, a detailed description of masturbation, certain obsessions—that brought Rhodes a heap of surprisingly mean-spirited criticism. “Embarrassing” was one of the milder complaints; embarrassment and discomfort in response to a book say as much or more about the predilections and preoccupations of reviewers as about the book. I find it hard to believe the male reviewers who castigated Rhodes for measuring his penis have never done so themselves. Rhodes was, at least in part, being punished for saying out loud what is never said, for violating the male contract of phallic inviolability. “Men say their penises have minds of their own,” he writes, “but men are geniuses at avoiding responsibility.” Rhodes captures, too, the unintended erections that plague men throughout their lives, unwieldy flags of arousal. Disobedient erections are almost as disruptive to a man’s self-image as an episode of impotence. (But not quite.) The erection must be respected, above all. In England, sex stores have to lay their dildos flat rather than display them upright. Otherwise they are displaying “erections,” and that’s illegal—not, I think, because most people believe even for a moment that an upright penis will harm anyone. Such a law simply expresses the inarticulate fear that showing the erection, making erections commonplace, takes away the erection’s power.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  There seems to be almost no way in which male and female sexual behavior are treated the same. The difference between a promiscuous woman and a man-about-town is a gulf the size of human history, a cosmos of belief. The same behavior, the exact same acts and words, exhibited by a man has a wholly different meaning when exhibited by a woman. I know this isn’t exactly news, but it keeps on surprising me; even in the latter half of my thirties I keep finding those waggling fingers and averted looks. I do it to myself, judge myself for a moment of aggression, desire, or fantasy that somehow or other I learned to call masculine—and learned specifically to allow in men and not in myself. Sexual acting-out by women in even minor ways is still a great surprise to a lot of people and capable of rousing strong emotions. We all know that cars, beer, and deodorant are sold to men with the promises of seductive women. But how many advertisements have I seen in the last year that tried to sell something to young, feminist-informed women with copy like “You can be smart and sexy!”? What a shocking idea, I think, shaking it off, and then Esquire, that emblem of the adolescent male Zeitgeist, puts out a whole issue on young, feminist-informed women under the tag of “Do Me Feminism.” Do who? Maybe I will do you. And maybe I won’t, and either way I’m a bit of a slut. I became sexually active in the 1970s, a period of casual sexual partners, before AIDS and after the pill. It was a unique time, but not necessarily a fun one. I fell in love with boys and with girls, with men and with women, but generally I slept with men, because sleeping with men was what I knew how to do; it was easy, there were endless opportunities. The etiquette of sexual relations was strange and unknowable. Sometimes it seemed impolite to ask a lover his or her last name. More than once I found myself in bed with either a stranger or a friend, and felt an equal embarrassment.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Cass looked up at them with that smile which was at once chilling and warm. It was warm because it was affectionate; it chilled Rufus because it was amused. “Well, I’m not sure I’m speaking to either of you. You’ve been neglecting us shamefully. Richard has crossed you off his list.” She looked at Leona and smiled. “I’m Cass Silenski.” “This is Leona,” Rufus said, putting one hand on Leona’s shoulder. Cass looked more amused than ever, and at the same time more affectionate. “I’m very happy to meet you.” “I’m glad to meet you,” said Leona. They sat down on the stone rim of the fountain, in the center of which a little water played, enough for small children to wade in. “Give an account of yourselves,” Cass said. “Why haven’t you come to see us?” “Oh,” said Vivaldo, “I’ve been busy. I’ve been working on my novel.” “He’s been working on a novel,” said Cass to Leona, “ever since we’ve known him. Then he was seventeen and now he’s nearly thirty.” “That’s unkind,” said Vivaldo, looking amused at the same time that he looked ashamed and annoyed. “Well, Richard was working on one, too. Then he was twenty-five and now he’s close to forty. So—” She considered Vivaldo a moment. “Only, he’s had a brand-new inspiration and he’s been working on it like a madman. I think that’s one of the reasons he’s been rather hoping you’d come by—he may have wanted to discuss it with you.” “What is this new inspiration?” Vivaldo asked. “Offhand, it sounds unfair.” “Ah!”—she shrugged merrily, and took a deep drag on her cigarette—“I wasn’t consulted, and I’m kept in the dark. You know Richard. He gets up at some predawn hour and goes straight to his study and stays there until it’s time to go to work; comes home, goes straight to his study and stays there until it’s time to go to bed. I hardly ever see him. The children no longer have a father, I no longer have a husband.” She laughed. “He did manage to grunt something the other morning about it’s going very well.” “It certainly sounds as though it’s going well.” Vivaldo looked at Cass enviously. “And you say it’s new?—it’s not the same novel he was working on before?” “I gather not. But I really know nothing about it.” She dragged on her cigarette again, crushed it under her heel, immediately began searching in her bag for another. “Well, I’ll certainly have to come by and check on all this for myself,” said Vivaldo. “At this rate, he’ll be famous before I am.” “Oh, I’ve always known that,” said Cass, and lit another cigarette. Rufus watched the pigeons strutting along the walks and the gangs of adolescents roaming up and down. He wanted to get away from this place and this danger. Leona put her hand on his. He grabbed one of her fingers and held it.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  For all the years I didn’t want to be pregnant—the years I spent harshly deriding “the breeders”—I secretly felt pregnant women were smug in their complaints. Here they were, sitting on top of the cake of the culture, getting all the kudos for doing exactly what women are supposed to do, yet still they felt unsupported and discriminated against. Give me a break! Then, when I wanted to be pregnant but wasn’t, I felt that pregnant women had the cake I wanted, and were busy bitching about the flavor of the icing. I was wrong on all counts—imprisoned, as I was and still am, by my own hopes and fears. I’m not trying to fix that wrong-ness here. I’m just trying to let it hang out. Place me now, like a pregnant cutout doll, at a “prestigious New York university,” giving a talk on my book on cruelty. During the Q&A, a well-known playwright raises his hand and says: I can’t help but notice that you’re with child, which leads me to the question—how did you handle working on all this dark material [sadism, masochism, cruelty, violence, and so on] in your condition? Ah yes, I think, digging a knee into the podium. Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks. As if anyone was missing the spectacle anyway. As if a similar scene didn’t recur at nearly every location of my so-called book tour. As if when I myself see pregnant women in the public sphere, there isn’t a kind of drumming in my mind that threatens to drown out all else: pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, perhaps because the soul (or souls) in utero is pumping out static, static that disrupts our usual perception of an other as a single other. The static of facing not one, but also not two.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I have never felt that way, but I’m an old mom. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration. Sometimes mothers find it alarming to think that what they are doing is so important and in that case it is better not to tell them. It makes them self-conscious and then they do everything less well…. When a mother has a capacity quite simply to be a mother we must never interfere. She will not be able to fight for her rights because she will not understand. As if mothers thought they were performing their ordinary devotions in the wild, then are stunned to look up, and see a peanut-crunching crowd across a moat. Shortly after returning to work after having Iggy, I ran into a superior in the cafeteria. He gallantly purchased me my “vegan comfort meal” and a Naked juice. He asked when my next book would be out; I told him it might take a minute, as I had just had a baby. This sparked a story for him about a colleague he’d once had, a Renaissance studies professor, who allegedly found her newborn so fascinating that for two whole years, her Renaissance research struck her as esoteric and boring. But then, after two years, her interest came back, he said. It came back, he repeated, with a wink. Over time, I have come to suspect that my affection for Bubbles may have less to do with its endorsement of the rule of negative gynecology, and more to do with its ridiculous title, which it shares with Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee. Michael doted on Bubbles. But Michael would also rotate the chimp out of service as it aged, and replace it with a new, younger Bubbles. (Cruelty of the Argo?) When I was growing up, my mother would sometimes tell me to switch the TV channel to a station with a male weatherman. They usually have the more accurate forecast, she’d say. The weather people are reading a script, I would say, rolling my eyes. It’s all the same forecast. It’s just a feeling, she would shrug. Alas, it isn’t just a feeling. Even if women are consulting the same satellites, or reading from the same script: their reports are suspect; the jig is up. In other words, the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural, eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence. Irigaray’s answer to this conundrum?: to destroy … [but] with nuptial tools…. The option left to me, she writes, was to have a fling with the philosophers.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  In 1985 “kerb-crawling” (soliciting women on the street) was made a crime for men in England. The law was purported to be an effort to equalize prosecution and protect women—just as prostitution stings are purported to be here. Laws against “kerb-crawling” and solicitation make any street exchange between any man and any woman potentially criminal. Women who work on the street hate the law, since it makes clients nervous. They feel less rather than more protected, more in danger. They have to make a deal as fast as possible and get out of sight, with no chance to consider uncomfortable signals. Under this law, women are much more likely to get in a man’s car and go with him than bring him to their own working space. The “red light” district, called by a thousand names, has been around almost as long as prostitution. This history, that of the regulation of prostitution, is a history of police tyranny, political duplicity, official abuse, and brutal punishments. Lots of people, including police and judges, don’t believe prostitutes can be raped and are reluctant to pursue any such claim made by them. Prostitutes have long told stories of being raped and even forcibly pimped by cops. The scorn heaped upon prostitutes greatly increases the violence against them. Easily the most dangerous and frustrating aspect of prostitution involves dealing with police. Once labeled a “common prostitute,” as sometimes happens in the United States as well as elsewhere, a woman can be arrested on sight; women tell of being arrested while stepping outside in their bathrobe for the morning paper, or asking directions. Priscilla Alexander, who was codirector of COYOTE before Samantha Miller, points out that an arrest and fine for prostitution easily can result in a lost job and a huge debt, and these are the very things that sometimes push women unwillingly into prostitution. These things also enforce a woman’s dependence on another person, for bail money and protection. Either way, laws against prostitution are laws against powerless women designed to keep them powerless; whether the irony is conscious in legislators’ minds, laws against prostitution also encourage prostitution. “Forced prostitution cannot be addressed until voluntary prostitution is legitimate,” wrote Alexander in a summary of COYOTE’s findings on prostitutes’ lives. “It is difficult to see how anyone benefits from the present system.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  Michael was on top. She dragged him to his feet. Paul rose slowly, looking defiant and ashamed. He was eleven, after all, and Michael was only eight. “What’s all this noise about? ” “He was trying to take my chess set,” Michael said. The box, the board, and broken chessmen were scattered on both beds and all over the room. “I was not,” Paul said, and looked at his mother. “I was only trying to teach him how to play.” “You don’t know how to play,” said Michael; now that his mother was in the room, he sniffed loudly once or twice and began collecting his property. Paul did know how to play—or knew, anyway, that chess was a game with rules that had to be learned. He played with his father from time to time. But he also loved to torment his brother, who preferred to make up stories about his various chessmen as he moved them about. For this, of course, he did not need a partner. Watching Michael manipulate Richard’s old, broken chess set always made Paul very indignant. “Never mind that,” Cass said, “you know that’s Michael’s chess set and he can do whatever he wants with it. Now, come on, wash up, and get your clothes on.” She went into the bathroom to supervise their washing and get them dressed. “Is Daddy up yet?” Paul wanted to know. “No. He’s sleeping. He’s tired.” “Can’t I go in and wake him?” “No. Not this morning. Stand still.” “What about his breakfast?” Michael asked. “He’ll have his breakfast when he gets up,” she said. “We never have breakfast together any more,” said Paul. “Why can’t I go and wake him?” “Because I told you not to,” she said. They walked into the kitchen. “ We can have breakfast together now, but your father needs his sleep.” “He’s always sleeping,” said Paul. “You were out real late last night,” said Michael, shyly. She was a fairly impartial mother, or tried to be; but sometimes Michael’s shy, grave charm moved her as Paul’s more direct, more calculating presence seldom could . “What do you care?” she said, and ruffled his reddish blond hair. “And, anyway, how do you know?” She looked at Paul. “I bet that woman let you stay up until all hours. What time did you go to bed last night?” Her tone, however, had immediately allied them against her. She was their common property; but they had more in common with each other than they had with her. “Not so late,” Paul said, judiciously. He winked at his brother and began to eat his breakfast. She held back a smile. “What time was it, Michael?” “I don’t know,” Michael said, “but it was real early.” “If that woman let you stay up one minute past ten o’clock—” “Oh, it wasn’t that late,” said Paul. She gave up, poured herself another cup of coffee, and watched them eat. Then she remembered Ida’s call.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Hello?” came a voice. Marian looked up to see young Kevin and a girl standing hand in hand a little way off. She supposed the girl was Sylvie, Kevin’s new girlfriend. Kevin was looking recently showered, spruced up and proud of himself, though momentarily puzzled. Marian saw his eyes skip down over her exposed, wet legs. The two of them were wearing matching red-and-white-striped polo shirts. Marian made a quick attempt to pull her dress down and over some of the sex toys next to her. She began watering the tulips with little flips of the showerhead, as if she were conducting a Sousa march. “Hi,” she said. “Pardon me, I was just doing a little watering. Come over. Let me turn this off. I had a plumber rig it up for me. Are you Sylvie?” “Yes, hi,” said Sylvie. Sylvie leaned and shook Marian’s hand. She was a petite, perky, small-breasted girl with long light-brown hair and a pleasant sly sharp-nosed face. Marian liked her immediately. Kevin said, “My mom told me you called, so we thought we’d come over and say hello.” “I just wanted you to see all these tulips,” said Marian. “They turned out well, I think. Thank you for helping me with them.” Kevin nodded. “I like the crinkly ones.” He turned to Sylvie. “Last fall I helped her plant all these.” “They’re really really pretty,” Sylvie agreed. There was an awkward silence. From a distant part of the yard there came an odd hissing sound. Kevin’s gray cat appeared from behind one of the mock oranges. A huge golden chewn-eared stray was on top of her. Kevin’s cat crept forward a few inches and then stopped, and the gold cat, holding Kevin’s cat down and biting her neck quite hard, made tiny jerks of its hindquarters, holding its tail low and fluffed. The two animals, who didn’t seem to like each other much, stared at nothing at all while they fucked. “Oh jeepers,” said Kevin. “You really should have taken her to the vet, Kevin,” said Marian, though she said it gently. “I was planning to.” “I can take a kitten if there are some,” said Sylvie brightly, thinking ahead. “Maybe even two.” Marian smiled at her. “That’s solved, then. Well!” It was time for them to be off. “I’m really glad you two dropped by. It’s very nice to meet you, Sylvie.” “Nice to meet you. But can I ask you something?” said Sylvie. “What are all those?” She pointed to the sex toys laid out on the white linen napkin. Marian’s dress didn’t really hide them effectively. “I don’t know that we should get into that,” said Marian. “Okay, sorry,” said Sylvie. “I kind of know what they are anyway—I mean, it’s obvious, but I just want to know what you’re doing with them out here. Are you planning on burying them or planting them or something?”

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

  A few weeks earlier, I had been invited by the BBC to take part in a new talk show, which would deal in depth with the seven deadly sins. It was billed to me as a serious enterprise, and my publishers were excited by the idea. It would go out live in a prime slot on Saturday evening, and would give me a chance to show that I could talk about other things than being a nun. I would contribute to the very first program, which would focus on lust—presumably because my years of chastity gave me an interesting angle. But already Sin on Saturday was turning out to be very different from anything that we had expected. The cheery Scottish gentleman opposite me was the agent of many of the strippers in the room. He had asked me what my job was and why I was taking part in the program, and I had replied that I had been a nun and was currently unemployed. His eyes brightened; he had leaned across the table in his enthusiasm and asked me the question that I now wanted him to repeat. “Would ye be interested in doing an act called ‘The Stripping Nun’? “No!” he continued vehemently, as I gazed at him, flabbergasted. “I’m quite serious—I think it would go down wonderfully! You’d be great!” I replied that it was not quite the career that I had in mind.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  After this introductory spiel, I read aloud the story that I had written while kneeling next to the woman in the gray-green bathing suit on the Cape. Sitting so close to Miss Spacks in her car, in a silence thicker than any recording studio’s, I started to feel a little style-crampingly self-conscious as I got into the more graphic sections of the text, and my narrator’s voice began to lose authority; finally I had to transfer myself and the tape recorder from Miss Spacks’s car back to my own, where, with a confidence born of distance, I finished reading the rest of it in one take, more or less, without too many flubs. It was good to be making a tape for once, rather than having to transcribe someone else’s. Still, when I was done I was not completely satisfied. The one-hundred-and-ten-minute Memorex tape was not full, for one thing. And I felt ungenerous in offering this brand-new person my old rot. Indeed, I felt unfaithful to her, just as I had felt unfaithful to the Cape Cod woman when I had sprinted down the beach in the Cleft and checked out that girl. The old story had been part of an old seduction, and Adele Junette Spacks, who was unwittingly spending so much time “with” me, deserved something fresh in return, something rash, something more representative of what I was capable of coming up with right at that very moment on the road in her company. I ate lunch on the trunk of my car, thinking kink, kink, kink. Then I got out the Casio, which I had packed in my trunk, and in just twelve straight hours I wrote a second set of adventures for Marian the Librarian. I worked in a few of the sights I had witnessed in the Cape Cod bathroom. Here’s how Part Two went. [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 14TOWARD THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, MARIAN’S SEXUAL INTEREST inexplicably abated. She put all her dildi and appliances in the drawer that had once held David’s sweaters. The last two toys she had ordered—a tiny vibe, teasingly canine in appearance but molded from an impeccably comme il faut piece of pickled okra, and a giant Armande Klockhammer Signature Model—she didn’t even bother to try out before putting them in storage. She felt a mild snobbish contempt for people who devoted so much of their free time to solo sex-play. Her perennial garden, for example, was far more satisfying than a bunch of pastless, futureless orgasms. She read bulb catalogs avidly. After much study she ordered several hundred tulip bulbs from Mack’s. When they arrived, via UPS, she gently deflected the eagerly scrotal leer of her friend John in the brown truck. It felt exciting and strange to be more than a sexual being, to have interests. As she looked over the boxes of bulbs, however, she realized that she would need help cutting the beds and planting them all, so she hired the neighbor kid, Kevin.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When a guy has cause to stare at Harry’s driver’s license or credit card, there comes an odd moment during which their camaraderie as two dudes screeches to a halt. The friendliness can’t evaporate on a dime, however, especially if there has been a longish prior interaction, as one might have over the course of a meal, with a waiter. Recently we were buying pumpkins for Halloween. We’d been given a little red wagon to put our pumpkins in as we traipsed around the field. We’d haggled over the price, we’d ooed and ahed at the life-sized mechanical zombie removing his head. We’d been given freebie minipumpkins for our cute baby. Then, the credit card. The guy paused for a long moment, then said, “This is her card, right?”—pointing at me. I almost felt sorry for him, he was so desperate to normalize the moment. I should have said yes, but I was worried I would open up a new avenue of trouble (never the scofflaw—yet I know I have what it takes to put my body on the line, if and when it comes down to it; this knowledge is a hot red shape inside me). We just froze in the way we freeze until Harry said, “It’s my card.” Long pause, sidelong stare. A shadow of violence usually drifts over the scene. “It’s complicated,” Harry finally said, puncturing the silence. Eventually, the man spoke. “No, actually, it’s not,” he said, handing back the card. “Not complicated at all.” Every other weekend of my pregnant fall—my so-called golden trimester—I traveled alone around the country on behalf of my book The Art of Cruelty. Quickly I realized that I would need to trade in my prideful self-sufficiency for a willingness to ask for help—in lifting my bags in and out of overhead compartments, up and down subway steps, and so on. I received this help, which I recognized as great kindness. On more than one occasion, a service member in the airport literally saluted me as I shuffled past. Their friendliness was nothing short of shocking. You are holding the future; one must be kind to the future (or at least a certain image of the future, which I apparently appeared able to deliver, and our military ready to defend). So this is the seduction of normalcy, I thought as I smiled back, compromised and radiant. But the pregnant body in public is also obscene. It radiates a kind of smug auto eroticism: an intimate relation is going on—one that is visible to others, but that decisively excludes them. Service members may salute, strangers may offer their congratulations or their seats, but this privacy, this bond, can also irritate. It especially irritates the antiabortionists, who would prefer to pry apart the twofer earlier and earlier— twenty-four weeks, twenty weeks, twelve weeks, six weeks … The sooner you can pry the twofer apart, the sooner you can dispense with one constituent of the relationship: the woman with rights.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Eventually Christina and I became friends. A few years ago, she told me the story of a subsequent feminist theory class that threw a kind of coup. They wanted—in keeping with a long feminist tradition—a different kind of pedagogy than that of sitting around a table with an instructor. They were frustrated by the poststructuralist ethos of her teaching, they were tired of dismantling identities, tired of hearing that the most resistance one could muster in a Foucauldian universe was to work the trap one is inevitably in. So they staged a walkout and held class in a private setting, to which they invited Christina as a guest. When people arrived, Christina told me, a student handed everyone an index card and asked them to write “how they identified” on it, then pin it to their lapel. Christina was mortified. Like Butler, she’d spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same, and now, as if in a tier of hell, she was being handed an index card and a Sharpie and being told to squeeze a Homeric epithet onto it. Defeated, she wrote “Lover of Babe.” (Babe was her dog, a mischievous white lab.) As she told me this story, I cringed all over—for the students, mostly, but also because I was remembering how, when I was Christina’s student, we had all wanted her to come out in a more public and coherent fashion, and how frustrated we were that she wouldn’t. (Actually, I wasn’t all that frustrated; I’ve always sympathized with those who refuse to engage with terms or forums that feel like more of a compromise or distortion than an unbidden expression. But I understood why others were frustrated, and I sympathized with them, too.) Her students’ frustration with her reticence about her personal life did not diminish their desire for her, however—sentiments such as “Christina Crosby’s leather pants make me wet” appeared regularly on the cement paths all over campus. Likely her reticence but fed the fire. (Christina admitted to me later that she knew about the chalkings, and that they had pleased her very much.) But as the times changed, Christina changed. She got together with a younger, more activist scholar who is more vocal about queer issues, about being queer. Like most academic feminists, Christina now teaches “gender and sexuality studies” rather than women’s studies. Perhaps most moving to me, she is now writing autobiography—something she never would have dreamed of doing back when she was my mentor.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Ida returned, wearing a coat trimmed with fur, and with her mother’s coat over her arm. “Ah!” cried Rufus, “she’s glamorous!” “She’s beautiful,” said Vivaldo. “Now, if you-all going to make fun of me,” said Ida, “I ain’t going to come with you nowhere.” Mrs. Scott put on her coat and looked critically at her bareheaded daughter. “If she don’t stop being so glamorous, she going to end up with the flu.” She pulled Ida’s collar up higher and buttoned it. “Can’t get nobody in this family to wear a hat,” she said, “and then they wonder why they always full of cold.” Ida made an impatient gesture. “She afraid a hat going to mess up her hair. But she ain’t afraid of the wind doing nothing to it.” They laughed, Ida a little unwillingly, as though she were embarrassed that the joke was being shared with Vivaldo. They walked down the wintry block. Children were playing stickball in the streets, but it was otherwise nearly empty. A couple of boys were standing on a nearby stoop and they greeted Ida and Rufus and Mrs. Scott and looked with interest at Vivaldo; looked at him as though he were a member of an enemy gang, which, indeed, he had been, not very long before. An elderly woman slowly climbed the brownstone steps of a run-down building. A black sign jutted out from the building, saying, in white letters, MOUNT OLIVE APOSTOLIC FAITH CHURCH. “I don’t know where your father done got to,” said Mrs. Scott. “He right around the corner, in Jimmy’s Bar,” said Ida, shortly. “I doubt if he be home by the time I get back.” “Because I know you ain’t intending to be home before four in the morning,” said Mrs. Scott, smiling. “Well, he ain’t going to be home by then,” said Ida, “and you know it well as I do.” A girl came toward them now, narrow-hipped, swift, and rough-looking. She, too, was bareheaded, with short, dirty, broken-off hair. She wore a man’s suede jacket, too large for her, and she held it at the neck with her hand. Vivaldo watched Ida watching the girl approach. “Here come Willa Mae,” said Mrs. Scott, “Poor little thing.” Then the girl stood before them, and she smiled. When she smiled her face was very different. She was very young. “How you-all today?” she asked. “Rufus, I ain’t seen you for the longest time.” “Just fine,” Rufus said. “How you making it?” He held his head very high and his eyes were expressionless. Ida looked down at the ground and held on to her mother. “Oh”—she laughed—“I can’t complain. Wouldn’t do no good nohow.” “You still at the same place?” “Sure. Where you think I’m going to move to?” There was a pause.