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 Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “No excuses!” He sounds stern but I can see a smile twitching at the corner of his full lips. “I’m sure that you know better than to disobey me. We'll see about your punishment later.” He settles back in the chair, crossing one leg over the other. “Right now, I want to see you in your corset.” I carefully extract the gorgeous black satin garment from its tissue paper wrapping. My master looks relaxed, but I know he’s not missing any detail as I pull my jersey over my head and attack the buttons at my waist. Of course ’m not wearing a bra. My nipples feel hot, as if illuminated by a spotlight. They seem to scream “Look at me, see how stiff I am.” My rayon skirt pools around my ankles and then I’m naked in front of him for the first time in nearly two decades. His eyes widen but he doesn’t say a word. “Why don’t you close your eyes while I put it on? It’s rather an awkward process. And I want you to get the full effect.” “You can’t hide anything from me, Sarah,” he says, but still, he turns to look out the window while I struggle with the clasps and laces. Reunion 337 My fingers don’t work at all, I’m so nervous. I know he’s getting impatient, yet I can’t seem to reach the last hooks. I suck in my stomach, worried that I’ve gained weight and I won’t be able to fasten the thing, but, finally, I manage. The boned curves press into my flesh. I move a bit stiffly, my breathing shallow so that I don’t burst open the hooks. The corset elevates and separates my breasts; they spill lushly over the top of the garment. Meanwhile, I can feel my bare buttocks bulbing out behind. “Okay — [’'m ready.” My master leans forward, eager, his smile baring sharp white teeth. “Very nice. Come over here.” Stumbling a bit in my high heels, I circle the bed and stand in front of him. “Very nice indeed. Walk around for me, Sarah. Let’s see more of your tits and your ass.” His mocking, lecherous tone thrills me. I’m terribly embarrassed, but I love showing off for him, and he knows it. My pussy swells and moistens. My nipples harden further, so painfully sensitive that one touch might send me into orgasm! He doesn’t touch me, though. He just watches, while I strut back and forth in front of him, swinging my hips. I notice the seaweed scent, rising from between my dampened thighs. I’m close enough to him. I know he can smell it too. I don’t dare to look at his face. Instead I hold my head high as he taught me, imagining that I’m wearing the collar he once promised me.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent’ (1 Tim. 2.11–12). Here theological constructions combined with masculine convention, to the point of fearing social embarrassment. Given Graeco-Roman attitudes to the place of women in public life, Church leaders feared the sniggers of Mediterranean men at the incongruity and presumed ineffectiveness of female preaching: ‘they will deride and mock, instead of praising the word of doctrine’, as the third-century Didascalia Apostolorum put it, anticipating Dr Samuel Johnson’s ungallant remarks about dogs walking on their hind legs. [37] Such an attitude was in the course of time inevitably going to restrict the role of female deacons in the Catholic hierarchy of the local ministry. In the same way that widows were told to keep their opinions to themselves while doing circumscribed good works, those deacons who were women were increasingly confined in their duties strictly to matters involving women and children, where it might be indecorous or unconventional for men to exercise ministry – baptism in particular, which involved the candidate disrobing before entering the waters, but also much pastoral visiting. [38] Some historians do argue that rather than suffering a diminution in role, a female diaconate was promoted in the second and third centuries to curb the influence of formally enrolled widows in a Church, but this seems less plausible; at the very least, it does not take enough account of the New Testament evidence of common terminology applied to male and female deacons, especially at Rom. 16.1. [39] In a contest between itinerant and local ministry, visiting itinerants were at an increasing disadvantage by the turn of the first and second centuries. Even if they were suitably male, they might bring with them any variety of doctrine, perhaps of a gnostic nature, which the resident leadership would feel their duty to listen to and evaluate for their flock. A tract known as Didachē (‘Teaching’) has been recovered from obscurity in the last 150 years; in the early Church, it occasionally sneaked into the canon of the New Testament and is probably contemporary with its last layers. The Didachē encourages the testing of prophets who might turn up in a community, with limits on the length of time they should be given entertainment, and it also reminds its readers that the local ministry should be honoured just as much as itinerants: ‘despise them not: for these are they which are honoured of you with the prophets and teachers.’ [40] This rivalry among Christian authorities is also represented in the last texts that did permanently make it into the New Testament during the early second century.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  If they were to gather as an ekklēsia , it would have to be in a generously sized house, hosted by someone with the appropriate resources. The household was female space more than it was male; and it could indeed be headed by a woman, particularly if she were a widow. All this puzzled and embarrassed later generations of Christians, who would have to face the fact that the courtesies in Paul’s letters include greetings to a great many women, some clearly in positions of authority alongside men, and even given the same titles. Phoebe is one of these: Paul refers to her as a diakonos (in the Greek male form) of the assembly in Cenchreae, a little port near Corinth. Modern translations relegating her office or function to a specialized role of ‘deaconess’ tell us more about the translator than about the original text. [9] Most notorious and cavalier is the subsequent Christian treatment of the lady Junia in Rome, whom Paul describes as ‘of note among the apostles’ (Rom. 16.7), alongside another ‘apostle’ with the male name Andronicus. In later recopying of biblical manuscripts, Junia’s name was frequently changed to a male form, or simply treated (without any justification) as a man’s name. Early biblical commentators and liturgists, led by the highly respected fourth-century preaching Bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom, were honourably prepared to acknowledge Junia’s surprising femininity, but the thirteenth century saw a sudden turn in the writings of the Western theologian Giles of Rome, which was only rectified during the twentieth century. [10] In all this we should see Paul as being descriptive rather than prescriptive; he was working within the situation he found. It is noticeable that, unlike the Gospel writers some decades later, he does not number any women among those who first bore witness to the risen Christ (1 Cor. 15.5–6). His own opinions on the place of women are revealed in 1 Cor. 11.2–16, where he creates a layered hierarchy of comparisons by gender: ‘the head of every man is Christ, the head of every woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.’ [11] One notices that Paul’s hierarchical definition is innocent of the next four centuries of furious theological battles that would determine the Church’s affirmation of co-equality of Father, Son and Holy Spirit within the Trinity, but it also bases its structure on a family model already prominent in the thought of Jesus, who so frequently referred to God as his Father (above, Chapter 4). And in traditional Jewish fashion, it also reaffirms that a woman’s nature is not fully in the image of God, unlike a man’s, and that she is dependent on her relationship to a man to define her relationship to God. Assessing this central assertion of Paul on gender hierarchy is made more difficult by the nature of the texts that survive from his correspondence with the Corinthians: they are now presented as two letters but have possibly been stitched together from more.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Philosophes were as embarrassed as their Reformation precursors by the acceptance of such activity by admired Classical authors, and their suggestions for modifying existing treatment of same-sex activity usually extended no further than reducing it from a criminal

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  First, recall the seventh step and remind yourself yet again of how little we know. People often pontificate about foreign affairs from a position of dangerous ignorance. The media are not always reliable: some newspapers or television channels have political or social agendas that slant their coverage of world events. The same is often true of politicians. In Britain during the buildup to the Iraq war, the government told the public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he could use to attack British bases in Cyprus at forty minutes’ notice. Later it transpired that this was not the case. Many of the people who believed in the war were unaware that Western governments had supported and armed Saddam for years and therefore bore a measure of responsibility for the suffering he had inflicted on his people. The effort of getting to know one another demands sound information and a willingness to question received ideas. We may not have Socrates to goad us into self-knowledge and an appreciation of the profundity of our ignorance, but we can make a serious effort to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge. If you belong to a reading discussion group, you could use it to study books and articles that challenge some preconceived notions and discuss your reactions. Again, we begin with ourselves. We often have a myopic view of the history of our own country or religious tradition and criticize others for behavior of which “we” have been guilty in the past or even continue to be in the present. After the atrocities of September 11, 2001, I was often taken aback by the way some Christians berated the violence and intolerance they attributed to Islam, showing not only an embarrassing ignorance of Muslim history but a surprising blindness to the crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and wars of religion that had scarred their own faith. I often felt that alongside programs titled “Understanding Islam” there should be a parallel course called “Understanding Christianity.” There was also a worrying lack of awareness about Western behavior during the colonial era, which had contributed to some of our current problems. A double standard, albeit unintended, violates our integrity and damages our credibility. In a global society, conflict is rarely the fault of only one party. All participants in a conflict have sown bad karma in the past, and we are all now reaping the results.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Boldest of all, even through the filter of Latin, is her especial devotion to one feast of the Church’s year, the Circumcision of the infant Jesus, innocent of the Catholic anti-Semitism then developing. ‘About a hundred times’ at the Mass of that feast day, she would feel a sweetness on her tongue, and described herself as swallowing the foreskin (‘prepuce’) of Christ. [56] Such figures as Adelheid and Agnes may seem outliers among mystics, but as respected a figure as Catherine of Siena, a Dominican contemporary of Adelheid, is celebrated for envisioning her own mystical marriage to Christ: as a wedding ring she used that same sacred prepuce of Agnes’s devotion. Sometimes such exuberant female constructions sound suspiciously as if they were testing out the embarrassment thresholds of senior male clergy. It is noticeable how few women achieved official recognition as saints in the two centuries after 1300. Catherine was exceptional in making it through against some sturdy resistance from Roman cardinals, aided by campanilismo from her fellow Sienese Pope Pius II in 1461; nevertheless, papal recognition that she had authentically borne stigmata like the charismatic St Francis had to wait till the seventeenth century. [57] The canonization of her fellow visionary Bridget of Sweden, who had the advantage of an aristocratic background and of having successfully founded a new religious Order, began remarkably swiftly in 1391, within two decades of Bridget’s death, but it became enmired in political controversy and had to be twice repeated.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Queens went on endowing monasteries for women in the tenth century, but no longer did their abbesses rule over men as well, and generally religious life for women was much diminished, with far fewer and less well-endowed foundations than for monks. [42] The radical change was symbolized when Æthelthryth/Etheldreda’s monastery at Ely was refounded in 970 after Viking destruction. Now it became an all-male monastic community, and so it remained thereafter, with the unspoken historical embarrassment that its flourishing and profitable pilgrimage cult was focused on royal holy women of previous centuries. Later monks in the magnificently rebuilt Romanesque Ely Cathedral even balanced that inescapable femininity by carefully creating a shrine to seven worthy Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian males from more recent times, so that pilgrims might pay them devotion before they made their way onwards to the main attraction of Etheldreda’s grave. [43]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  time, but may still have existed then, despite not being mentioned in New Testament texts and themselves making no allusion to anything resembling early Christianity. Their literature indicates that some men among them adopted community celibacy; this was very rare in Judaism, and there is no evidence of it surviving from Qumran in parallel among the first few generations of Christians. So it is difficult to see any relationship between Jesus and the Qumran or Essene development from the Jewish mainstream, or to judge whether his ideas were at all influenced by theirs. [36] Jesus’s prohibition on divorce caused serious embarrassment to his early followers, many of whom clearly wanted continuing provision for divorce. That remains the case, for instance among divorced Evangelical Protestants who would otherwise be very anxious to know what Jesus would do. The Gospel of Matthew already modifies the blanket prohibition of divorce to be found in Mark and Luke, to provide an exception in the case of a wife’s unfaithfulness. [37] Even before that intervention, which was made some six or seven decades after Jesus’s death, his early interpreter Paul of Tarsus had taken it upon himself to provide two different exceptions to Jesus’s universal prohibition. These remarkable testimonies to Paul’s independence of thought occur in his densely constructed disquisition on marriage regulation now forming Chapter 7 of the first Epistle to the Corinthians: a fertile text indeed for Christian views of marriage, and one to which we will frequently return. [38] Paul specifically says that these exceptions were his idea, not the Lord’s: he concedes that a wife might choose to separate from her husband, while a non- Christian husband might repudiate his Christian wife. Indeed, Paul’s very contradiction of Jesus is a testimony to the authenticity of Jesus’s original saying about divorce in its stark form; it is also a rare reference in Paul’s writings to what Jesus actually said, rather than to what Paul thought Jesus signified to faith. In contrast to their neuroses about divorce, Christians did not have nearly so much problem in following the Lord on monogamy. One good reason for that was that monogamy was already the exclusive marriage custom in Greek and Roman society, into which Mediterranean Christianity proceeded to expand, regardless of what Jews continued to believe and practise in relation to marriage. One should remember that the early Church came to ignore other major elements of Jesus’s authentic pronouncements – for instance the shockingly cavalier ‘leave the dead to bury their own dead’ (Matt. 8.22), or his promise of imminent return. Monogamy might have been treated in the same fashion had there not been a powerful social impulse in the Roman Empire for Christians to stick with Jesus on this matter. [39] That still left Jesus’s followers with a biblical conundrum. Making monogamy the Christian norm left subsequent theologians having to explain away the polygyny of the Hebrew patriarchs; they have never fully succeeded.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Supposedly it was defeated by the dramatic intervention of Paphnutius, an avowedly celibate Egyptian bishop and heroic survivor of persecution, ‘roaring at the top of his voice’ that his choice of continence should not be arbitrarily imposed by others. This story comes from a century later, in the writings of the Church historian Socrates of Constantinople, and may itself be a fiction that was part of an ongoing and unresolved argument. [41] At one extreme of that debate was a logical extension of the newly emerging role of the Church within Roman imperial structures: encouragement of clerical dynasties. It was a natural assumption among the Roman upper classes that son should follow father in the same honourable position. In 349 that led the Emperor Constantius II to propose legislation that the Christian priesthood should become a hereditary caste, like some levels of imperial officialdom. Although this met too much opposition from bishops to become a reality, the idea, and versions of it in practice, did not die away, as we will see in different settings and centuries. [42] At the other extreme was the effort of Bishop Eustathius of Sebaste in Armenia, who allegedly encouraged people to boycott liturgies performed by married priests; Eustathius faced condemnation at a Synod at Gangra in Asia Minor around 340, and his historian admirer Sozomen later sought to excuse him, clearly embarrassed. [43] Between these two polarities was the effort of Ambrose of Milan to make ordination the moment to separate sexual activity from marriage, so that clergy previously could ‘have had sons, [but] not continue to have sons’. [44] This concession was not so authoritative as to prevent bishops having wives and more children, as mindful as any other Roman paterfamilias of their dynastic duties. Thus, Ambrose’s contemporary the wealthy and cultured Synesius of Cyrene in Libya was not going to resort to subterfuge. He made it clear to the Patriarch of Alexandria that he would only become Bishop of the Libyan city of Ptolemais if it did not interfere with his marriage; his prayers would continue to include his firm wish ‘to have virtuous children’. He was not alone. [45] Far to the west, one contrasts a continuing and repeated hard line from Spanish bishops against clerical marriage generally with gravestones dateable to the fifth and sixth centuries in the western fringe of the former Roman Britannia, what is now north Wales: one specifically refers to a bishop’s wife, and another to a cleric’s wife, which emphasizes that she was ‘a most holy woman’. [46] Generally, no doubt, as the decades rolled on in a marriage, most senior clergy and their wives were reasonably content to leave sex behind, and in the life and practice of the Church that joint decision was not something that required public discussion.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The young French humanist Théodore de Bèze (Beza), future colleague and successor of John Calvin in Geneva, got his fingers burned by including among his elegant attempts at classical Latin verse a poem debating in Ovidian fashion the relative merits of his male and female lovers, and deciding in favour of the young man: later Catholic enemies did not let him forget this indiscretion. [96] From the fifteenth century, a better acquaintance with classical texts had brought to the West a rediscovery of most of the works of Plato, which, among other homoerotic revelations, disconcertingly revealed the same-sex relations of Socrates with some of his students, previously censored from the available literature. Since Socrates was so widely praised in early Christian Greek writings, with his execution seen as a prefiguring of Christian martyrdom, this was an embarrassment. Not, however, for one Sienese humanist, Antonio Vignali, who was inspired by classical precedent in 1525 to publish La Cazzaria

• From The Decameron (1353)

  few pieces of coal, which they had found lying in a corner of the room. They then closed the lid, and, leaving everything just as they had found it, they made off, undetected, with the feather, chortling with glee, and waited to see what Friar Cipolla, on finding the coals instead of the feather, would have to say for himself. When mass was over, the simple folk who were in the church, having heard that they would be seeing the feather of the Angel Gabriel after nones, had returned to their homes and passed the news on to all their friends and neighbours. And after they had eaten their midday meal, they thronged the citadel in such vast numbers, all agog to see the feather, that they scarcely had sufficient room to move their limbs. Having eaten a hearty breakfast and taken a short siesta, Friar Cipolla arose shortly after nones, and on perceiving that a great multitude of peasants had come to see the feather, he sent word to Guccio Imbratta that he was to come up to the citadel, bringing with him the bells and the saddle-bags. So Guccio tore himself away from the kitchen and from Nuta, and made his way up at a leisurely pace. His body was swollen up like a balloon with all the water he had been drinking, and so he arrived there puffing and panting; but having, in accordance with Friar Cipolla’s instructions, taken up his stance in the church doorway, he began to ring the bells with great gusto. When the entire populace was assembled in front of the church, Friar Cipolla began to preach his sermon, never suspecting for a moment that any of his things had been tampered with. He harangued his audience at great length, carefully stressing what was required of them, and on reaching the point where he was to display the Angel Gabriel’s feather, he first recited the Confiteor 11 and caused two torches to be lit; then, throwing back the cowl from his head, he carefully unwound the taffeta and drew forth the casket, which, after a few words in praise and commendation of the Angel Gabriel and his relic, he proceeded to open. When he saw that it was full of coal, Guccio Balena was the last person he suspected of playing him such a trick, for he knew him to be incapable of rising to such heights of ingenuity. Nor did he even blame the man for being so careless as to allow others to do it, but inwardly cursed his own stupidity in entrusting his things to Guccio’s care, knowing full well, as he did, that he was negligent, disobedient, careless and witless.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Even after Wesley’s death, the Wesleyan Connexion had to cope with the public- relations disaster of the popular female itinerant preacher Jane Davison, who in 1794 was unmasked as a man when one of her/his young lady devotees became pregnant. [50] Georgian satirists naturally had a field day with all this, and, in the manner of William Hogarth’s bitingly grotesque satirical cartoon Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, created a collage of Evangelical irrationality and general sexual licence that was grossly exaggerated, but carried with it a powerful message that Evangelical revival betrayed everything that decorous Enlightenment Protestantism stood for. In the wider world around embattled Evangelicals, there were even more profound reasons to pull up the drawbridge against anything new. In the 1790s, a global crisis was unleashed in France, bringing fundamental and irreversible transformation to the institutions of Western Christendom. The trauma has made it easy for Christians over subsequent centuries to view those changes as a fundamental challenge to the whole Christian enterprise. 24. William Hogarth’s print Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism (1762) is often described as an attack on Methodism, but it satirizes all irrational religion; it is set in a parish church with three-decker pulpit, whose occupant is revealed as tonsured and so a secret Papist using the rhetoric of Protestant fanaticism. At the front of the besotted congregation Mary Toft, ‘The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder’, gives birth to her leporine brood.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  63. P. Caraman, Ignatius Loyola: A biography of the founder of the Jesuits (New York, 1990), provides details not otherwise referenced below. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63 64. For further comment, see MacCulloch, Christianity, 661–2; on prostitute rescue work embarrassment, O. Hufton, ‘Altruism and reciprocity: the early Jesuits and their female patrons’, Renaissance Studies 15 (2001), 328–53, at 333. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64 65. Hufton, ‘Altruism and reciprocity’, 336, 340–41. The surviving son of this marriage, inheriting his father’s title of Duke of Parma, played a crucial role in the Counter-Reformation in the Netherlands as Governor of the Habsburg possessions for twenty-one years. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65 66. J. W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 306–7. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66 67. On the Society and Protestantism, ibid., 274–5, 278; on education, ibid., ch. 6. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67 68. Caraman, Ignatius Loyola, 135–7; Hufton, ‘Altruism and reciprocity’, 337. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68 69. A good account of Ward is provided by P. Harriss, ‘Mary Ward in her own writings’, Recusant History 30 (2010), 229–39; I am also indebted to my conversations about Ward with Gemma Simmonds. On Stackpole and Limerick, see B. McShane, ‘Negotiating religious change and conflict: female religious communities in early modern Ireland, c.1530–c.1641’, British Catholic History 33 (2017), 357– 82, at 370. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69 70. Q. Mazzonis, Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St Ursula (1474–1540) (Washington, DC, 2007). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70 71. See commentary and text of one late medieval version of the legend in K. A. Winstead (ed.), Chaste Passions: Medieval English virgin martyr legends (Ithaca, NY and London, 2000), 164–8. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71 72. For an introduction to the Ursulines, see Evangelisti, Nuns, chs. 6 and 7. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72 73. O. Hufton, ‘The widow’s mite and other strategies: funding the Catholic Reformation’, TRHS 6th ser. 8 (1998), 117–37, at 134–6. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73 74. On the Daughters of Charity, founded by Louise de Marillac and the priest Vincent de Paul, see Evangelisti, Nuns, 224–30. For further examples of similar work also involving Canada, see E. Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in seventeenth century France (Montreal, 1990), esp. chs. 4, 5. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74 75. K. Liebreich, Fallen Order: A history (London, 2004), from which the outline of this story is taken. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75 76. Ibid., 75. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76 77. Ibid., 8, 78, 213–14. The Piarists were of course not unique as a religious Order in which sexual abuse took place; what was exceptional was the way in which they were so quickly and thoroughly subverted by abusers. For a study of cases of abuse and sexual misdemeanour in the pre-1773 Society of Jesus across the world, see U. L. Lehner, Inszenierte Keuschheit: Sexualdelikte in der Gesellschaft Jesu im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin and Boston, Mass., 2024).

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘There isn’t any lemon and you know it!’ bawled Roger. ‘Here, give me my tea or I’ll spoil your hair ribbon.’ He grabbed at his cup and nearly upset it. ‘Oh, oh!’ shrilled Violet, ‘My dress!’ They settled down to the meal at last, but Stephen observed that Roger was watching; every mouthful she ate she could feel him watching, so that she grew self-conscious. She was hungry, not having eaten much luncheon, but now she could not enjoy her cake; Roger himself was stuffing like a grampus, but his eyes never left her face. Then Roger, the slow-witted in his dealings with Stephen, all but choked in the throes of a great inspiration. ‘I say, you,’ he began, with his mouth very full, ‘what about a certain young lady out hunting? What about a fat leg on each side of her horse like a monkey on a stick, and everybody laughing!’ ‘They were not!’ exclaimed Stephen, growing suddenly red. ‘Oh, yes, but they were, though!’ mocked Roger. Now had Stephen been wise she would have let the thing drop, for no fun is derived from a one-sided contest, but at eight years old one is not always wise, and moreover her pride had been stung to the quick. She said: ‘I’d like to see you get the brush; why you can’t stick on just riding round the paddock! I’ve seen you fall off jumping nothing but a hurdle; I’d like to see you out hunting!’ Roger swallowed some more cake; there was now no great hurry; he had thrown his sprat and had landed his mackerel. He had very much feared that she might not be drawn—it was not always easy to draw Stephen. ‘Well now, listen,’ he drawled, ‘and I’ll tell you something. You thought they admired you squatting on your pony; you thought you were being very grand, I’ll bet, with your new riding breeches and your black velvet cap; you thought they’d suppose that you looked like a boy, just because you were trying to be one. As a matter of fact, if you really want to know, they were busting their sides; why, my father said so. He was laughing all the time at your looking so funny on that rotten old pony that’s as fat as a porpoise. Why, he only gave you the brush for fun, because you were such a small kid—he said so. He said: “I gave Stephen Gordon the brush because I thought she might cry if I didn’t.” ’ ‘You’re a liar,’ breathed Stephen, who had turned very pale. ‘Oh, am I? Well, you ask father.’ ‘Do stop—’ whimpered Violet, beginning to cry; ‘you’re horrid, you’re spoiling my party.’

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  I’m not really clear on how we got me out of my jeans. My thong, Elle just pushed aside. It was mostly useless by now anyway; I could smell myself in the steamy confines of the car. “My little firebomb,” Elle whispered as her fingers sought my wetness. “You are just insatiable.” I couldn’t form a coherent answer. She buried two fingers in my folds, pressed them up into me. I clamped down on them, desperate for release. The combination of thrusting fingers and the thumb she had pressed against my clit and her mouth clamped on my aching nipple was overwhelming. So many sensations, driving me further to the edge. I crashed over into orgasm, grinding myself against her hand. I clutched the headrest with one hand and pounded against the car’s ceiling with the other. “Fuck, yes!” And that’s when a bright light shone in the window and a strident male voice said, “All right, kids, let’s break it up in there.” It was the voice rather than the light that caught my attention, largely because my bare ass was facing the window, giving the officer a fine view. I pulled my bra up, and tumbled sideways into the driver’s seat, my feet still tangled in my jeans. The action revealed Elle’s breasts in all their glory. She yanked the edges of the cardigan together, but not before the cop outside got a nice eyeful. Shit. Cop. I’d been caught making out in a car before. Even caught by a cop. But never with a cop herself. Never when one of my partner’s coworkers, essentially, was watching. Crap. I reached behind my seat and flailed around for my shirt. “Jesus, MacIntyre.” Elle’s voice sounded annoyed rather than embarrassed. She rolled down the window a little farther and glared up at him. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” “Tudor, is that really you?” “Yes, it’s me,” she said, trying to button her sweater in the dark. (Lucky her. Even with the missing button. My shirt had apparently been sucked into a black hole.) “I thought you had the night off.” “Nah, I’m trying to get in as much overtime as I can before the baby comes.” He chuckled. “Lucky me. Wait ’til I tell—” “You’re not going to tell anyone, MacIntyre. The word will get back to Debbie that you saw me naked, and she’s got pregnant-woman hormones right now….” His face fell. “Damn, you’re right. Oh well.” As he turned to go, he added a “Hey, Destiny,” in my direction. In silence, as if we were both holding our breaths, we listened to his car door slam and the motor rev to life. “Elle, I’m so sorry…” To my amazement, she busted out laughing. “It’s all right,” she said when she could finally talk over the wild whoops and guffaws. “Did you see his face?”

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Until I saw a sushi chef hanging a fishing line off the far end of the putting green, I was staying away from the sushi bar, thank you very much. Ironically, considering they are surrounded by water, ships—even luxury ships—are seldom good places to enjoy fresh seafood. At sea for days at a time, they are provisioned at ports with varying concepts of refrigeration and resupply. The bacalao and salt fish of earlier times has been replaced by frozen fish on larger vessels. It may not be "the very best," but it's safe. When Nancy and I were summoned to meet with the safety officer, in the ship's cinema/theater, and told him that I'd be doing a lot of cooking in the apartment, he explained—among other useful things, like how to inflate our life vests—that at the first signs of smoke, our kitchen would automatically seal itself up Bond-villain-like behind sliding fire doors that would emerge from tasteful concealment in the walls. Overhead sprinklers would discharge, and an alarm would notify the bridge. I instantly made a mental note to avoid making any dish requiring deglazing, or likely to create a lot of smoke. The safety officer seemed like a nice man. But I did not want to see him again in his pajamas wielding a fire extinguisher, an "I told you so" look on his face, in the middle of the night while holding a scorched pan or a burned bagel. That would be embarrassing. This consideration, and the fact that all the ranges were electric (there was, of course, no gas on board) were major factors in determining my menu and provision list. I'm a gas guy all the way, having worked exclusively with direct, immediately responsive flame my whole professional life. Because my only experience with electric stoves before my kitchen on The World had been in college—one of those hideous slide-out range tops with ancient coils that stank of old food and burning circuitry as it slowly, slowly came up to heat—I had nothing but bad memories and low expectations now. So I figured: Assume the worst. Start slow and keep it simple. Steak and potatoes. Pan-seared entrecote, perhaps, with a baked potato. I needn't have worried. Our kitchen was larger and better equipped than most New York City apartment kitchens. The four-burner Schott range heated up very nicely, the burner glowing fiercely deep beneath sexy-looking black ceramic, and was surprisingly responsive to every twiddle of the dial. Though the chef had kindly offered to "thaw out anything" from a vast walk-in freezer containing every conceivable cut of meat, poultry, fish, and game, my entrecotes were in fact faux-filets (sirloin), but I wasn't bothered. They were nicely marbled and of good quality (if recently frozen) and seared up nicely in one of the thoughtfully provided nonstick pans, forming a lovely crust studded with brown sea salt and crushed black pepper. Any worries about smoke faded with the efficient whirring of the overhead stovetop range hood.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  9 For example, the public visibility and activity of Christianity is limited within the highly restrictive political context of China. Chinese Christians have adapted to this context by using social media apps such Weixin and Weibo to develop a sense of community and provide religious teaching and news through regular online publications. 10 As noted earlier in this chapter, an important function of a community of belief is to affirm the plausibility of these beliefs, especially in the case of a ‘cognitive minority’ – a group whose view of the world does not conform to, or deviates from, those that are taken for granted in the wider culture. Confronted with a culture which is, or is perceived to be, antagonistic to certain beliefs, communities of faith provide a context within which these beliefs are treated as both normal and significant, rather than being seen as weird. No apology is required for holding them within these communities, nor are they seen as embarrassing. Berger’s sociological analysis highlights the importance of ‘plausibility structures’ that are embedded within a trustworthy community. ‘The plausibility, in the sense of what people find credible, of views of reality depends upon the social support these receive. Put more simply, we obtain our notions about the world originally from other human beings, and these notions continue to be plausible to us in a very large measure because others continue to affirm them.’ 11 Berger points out that communities of belief often hold to forms of ‘deviant knowledge’ that are out of tune with the mainstream of the wider culture. Yet this perception of ‘deviance’ is historically situated, determined by the dominant ideologies of a particular age and location. What is ‘deviant’ today might have been acceptable or even normal in the past, and may become so again. An atheist might feel they belong to a ‘cognitive minority’ in the United States, which is largely Christian; yet Christians felt they belonged to a ‘cognitive minority’ in the Soviet Union for much of its history. No community of belief is intrinsically a ‘cognitive minority’ or ‘deviant’; it may become so, however, on account of its changing social context, rather than its fundamental beliefs. Communities of Belief as Places of Reflection A second significant role of communities of faith is that they are places of reflection , in which beliefs are incubated and enabled to grow and mature within a supportive environment. The community of belief sustains and catalyses a process of learning about the intellectual and social world that these beliefs create. It is about exploring the landscape of faith, and learning to inhabit this new set of perspectives and relationships. To believe is to occupy the same physical landscape as everyone else, but to see it and experience it in a new and distinctive manner.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  1. Saints and the People Who Make Them of us have experienced. Some lived with the chaos and upheaval of alcoholic parents, and some just had normal teen angst. Not all saints were pure and well behaved from birth. Saints had problems, sometimes major ones. Empress Cunegunda struggled with infertility during her marriage. Saint Catherine of Genoa and Saint Godelieve were victims of domestic abuse. But saints also had petty problems and little embarrassments, such as Saint Bartholomew, who was so embarrassed by his birth name, Tostig, that he changed it to William to escape the teasing from his schoolmates. So how do saints get from these very real people to the idealized figures that we put on pedestals? Every story that’s told many times changes in subtle ways with each retelling. It’s a common misconception that by reading historical documents, we can have a direct understanding of the people of the ancient past. No story is transmitted directly to us from the past; it is told, translated, and mediated by the person who wrote it down. And in telling the story, they change it—they embroider, explain, liven it up a bit, and make it more useful for their audience. Saints’ stories are no exception. In many cases, clerics were entrusted with crafting a narrative to make a person look especially saintlike, which meant making them fit the mold of other holy people. Scholarship on saints is full of examples of writers who lifted language from one well-known saint’s hagiography and plugged it into the account of another holy person’s life so that their sanctity would seem more familiar to the audience. 6 1. Saints and the People Who Make Them And ordinary people might look at a story with some familiar outlines—such as a virtuous defender of children who was unjustly killed for it—and overlook the fact that they were, in fact, talking about a dog and not a person. This means that to know the saints, we must know the people who are telling us their story and what they need from it. So, as we go through this course, the hope is that you’ll see how questions about historical sources help us to strip away these layers of storytelling and get down to the saint—the person—beneath. Reading Peterson, Janine Larmon. Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century. Reissue ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 7

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  time, but may still have existed then, despite not being mentioned in New Testament texts and themselves making no allusion to anything resembling early Christianity. Their literature indicates that some men among them adopted community celibacy; this was very rare in Judaism, and there is no evidence of it surviving from Qumran in parallel among the first few generations of Christians. So it is difficult to see any relationship between Jesus and the Qumran or Essene development from the Jewish mainstream, or to judge whether his ideas were at all influenced by theirs. [36] Jesus’s prohibition on divorce caused serious embarrassment to his early followers, many of whom clearly wanted continuing provision for divorce. That remains the case, for instance among divorced Evangelical Protestants who would otherwise be very anxious to know what Jesus would do. The Gospel of Matthew already modifies the blanket prohibition of divorce to be found in Mark and Luke, to provide an exception in the case of a wife’s unfaithfulness. [37] Even before that intervention, which was made some six or seven decades after Jesus’s death, his early interpreter Paul of Tarsus had taken it upon himself to provide two different exceptions to Jesus’s universal prohibition. These remarkable testimonies to Paul’s independence of thought occur in his densely constructed disquisition on marriage regulation now forming Chapter 7 of the first Epistle to the Corinthians: a fertile text indeed for Christian views of marriage, and one to which we will frequently return. [38] Paul specifically says that these exceptions were his idea, not the Lord’s: he concedes that a wife might choose to separate from her husband, while a non- Christian husband might repudiate his Christian wife. Indeed, Paul’s very contradiction of Jesus is a testimony to the authenticity of Jesus’s original saying about divorce in its stark form; it is also a rare reference in Paul’s writings to what Jesus actually said, rather than to what Paul thought Jesus signified to faith. In contrast to their neuroses about divorce, Christians did not have nearly so much problem in following the Lord on monogamy. One good reason for that was that monogamy was already the exclusive marriage custom in Greek and Roman society, into which Mediterranean Christianity proceeded to expand, regardless of what Jews continued to believe and practise in relation to marriage. One should remember that the early Church came to ignore other major elements of Jesus’s authentic pronouncements – for instance the shockingly cavalier ‘leave the dead to bury their own dead’ (Matt. 8.22), or his promise of imminent return. Monogamy might have been treated in the same fashion had there not been a powerful social impulse in the Roman Empire for Christians to stick with Jesus on this matter. [39] That still left Jesus’s followers with a biblical conundrum. Making monogamy the Christian norm left subsequent theologians having to explain away the polygyny of the Hebrew patriarchs; they have never fully succeeded.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  He was really embarrassed.” “He was embarrassed? It’s not like his ass was on display for the world to see.” She laughed again. “I don’t know about that. It’s one thing to be ogling seminaked strangers; it’s another to realize you were ogling your coworker and her girlfriend.” I gave up on the search for my shirt (a bra doesn’t show any more than a bikini top, right?) and started the car. Before we got very far, Elle was laughing again. “You should have seen his face, Des. His eyes were like dinner plates. I think he’d been watching awhile before he turned on the flashlight...and then saw the one person on the force who can consistently best him at target practice.” This time I managed to laugh as well. I hadn’t been so embarrassed since I was in junior high school and Julia Ruiz discovered I had pictures of actresses in my locker instead of boy-band members, but it was pretty damn funny. And as I was laughing, something dawned on me. The way I was squirming wasn’t just from embarrassment. Some little part of me was turned on, not so much by what actually happened as by images running through my head. I wasn’t quite sure how to broach the subject, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to say something. I finally choked out, “Too bad it was MacIntyre.” “If someone had to catch us, he’s perfect. He’s a good guy, and he’s so scared of doing anything to upset Debbie right now that he’ll keep it quiet.” “Yeah, but he’s still a guy. A man catching us is just embarrassing. A woman catching us and watching for a while—that might have been hot.” My voice kind of trailed off at the last bit. Elle made a funny choking noise. “What?” “I said it might have been hot.” I looked away, focusing completely on the road, not quite able to meet her eyes after that admission. “Hm. Sounds like somebody’s a bit of an exhibitionist...” I couldn’t tell from the tone of her voice whether that was a good thing or not. We hadn’t been together long enough for sharing our wilder fantasies to come easily. Had I found a limit? I figured the answer out pretty quickly, though, when I felt her hand brush my nipple. “So, my darling Destiny likes the idea of a stranger watching her getting off?” she said, still chuckling a bit, but in a throaty, sexy way now. I arched my back, pushing my breast toward her palm. “I guess so. Bit of a surprise for me, too,” I admitted. “Really?”