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 Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  • Talk about your misgivings. Are you afraid you’ll feel silly wearing a harness and dildo? Approach sex toys in the spirit of learning. “I still have some work to do on my comfort level with strapping it on,” wrote another. “But, you know, practice makes perfect!” Many toys try to do too much, with too little attention to design and engineering—they appeal to impulse rather than your “smart-shopper” savvy. The women of Toys in Babeland describe such toys as “huge, slimy, battery powered monsters [that] will ‘vibro twist’ and ‘corkscrew delight’ their way right into your trash can.” 6 I strap on a thick, 7-inch vibrating jelly dildo. What a godsend! It seems to fit my partner’s needs perfectly and the vibrating soft jelly-like texture feels absolutely fabulous on my clitoris. There are exceptions, of course—including vibrating jelly dildos and vibrating anal probes featuring flexible spines. One such toy is the Flex-O-Pleaser. “Yes, the name is dorkiness incarnate,” say the folks at Blowfish, “but if you’re looking for a vibrator for insertion play, we recommend this one highly.”7 This battery-operated vibrator features a 3-inch cylindrical head on a strong, flexible 5-inch shaft. The whole thing is attached to a 5-inch handle with an adjustable switch. Other vibrating anal probes feature a vertebral column that allows the toy to retain any shape you give it. The Adventurer, featured in Rachel Venning and Claire Cavanah’s Sex Toys 101, ups the ante: not only does the shaft vibrate, it twirls in little circles. A little goes a long way. How to Choose Sex ToysThere are so many toys you can purchase or adapt for your pleasure, you may feel overwhelmed by the possibilities. A quick surf through the websites of retail and mail-order outlets will show a virtually limitless choice of sex toys. You can invent your own toys, making clever use of household items, or search the produce aisle of the grocery store for erotic inspiration. How can you find out what you like? A little window shopping will help, whether you browse on the Web or in person at your local sex toy boutique. Below are some questions to consider as you begin your search, along with suggestions for play and cautions regarding safety. You can purchase the toys and supplies mentioned here from the mail-order and retail outlets listed in the resources section. Do You Like Clitoral Stimulation?My Hitachi Magic Wand sends me into spiraling heights of orgasmic ecstasy! I like the Magic Wand because it’s very fast and it can allow me to reach orgasm in a few minutes. It’s like a quickie, but with a toy. Vibrators provide steady, reliable clitoral stimulation. You can choose from electric vibrators, rechargeable vibrators, battery-operated vibrators, remote-control vibrators, waterproof vibrators you can use in the bathtub, egg-shaped vibrators you can slip inside a harness cuff, and vibrators shaped like rabbits, beavers, and even bears.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “That was kinda creepy, you saying my name like that. **It was like you were praying,**” he said. “Well, I was…um, I dunno, being stupid, I guess.” “Not very articulate for a guy who’s reading a Disraeli biography.”

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Eric was trying to be quiet, mumbling about wanting to cut a branch from the tree. Finally, I got tired of Mr. P’s “huhs?” and “whats?” as Eric danced around the topic. **I leaned over the balcony and hollered, “Eric wants to cut a switch from your poplar tree because he needs to get his ass whipped.”** Eric looked up and gave me a really evil look as Mr. Pulaski laughed and said, “That true, boy?”

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  In August of that year she became aware that four of the other five Lafferty wives were being made miserable by the fundamentalist strictures that Dan had been urging his brothers to adopt, so Dianna pleaded with Ron to have a talk with Dan and his other brothers to “straighten them out.” Ron agreed to pay them a visit. One evening when his five brothers were meeting at their parents’ Provo home to discuss religion and politics, Ron stopped by to join in the discourse—the first time he had ever attended one of these gatherings. His brothers welcomed him warmly, even when he began to read from an essay published by the LDS Church warning of the evils of fundamentalism and admonishing all Saints to obey the teachings of the church’s president and prophet, Spencer W. Kimball. As the evening progressed, Ron asked increasingly pointed questions about Dan’s new beliefs, and he tried as hard as he could to persuade his younger brothers that Dan’s nutty ideas were putting their eternal souls in grave jeopardy. “Ron was embarrassed by me,” Dan remembers. “He was a devout Saint, and he said I was an embarrassment to the Mormon Church. He told me, ‘There’s no place in this church for extremes!’ ” Conceding nothing, Dan fired back, “Well, how about extremely good? All I’m trying to do is be extremely good!” Dan argued with great passion that the LDS Church had taken a wrong turn when it had abandoned polygamy, and that the only way to put it back on a true course was to adopt the sacred tenets advanced in The Peace Maker. Ron tried to refute Dan’s arguments, point by point, by quoting scripture from the Bible and The Book of Mormon. Dan countered with points of his own drawn from the same texts, as well as from the Constitution. “Ron wasn’t at that meeting too awfully long,” as Dan remembers it, “before he stopped trying to convince us we were wrong. ‘What you guys are doing is right,’ he admitted. ‘It’s everyone else who is wrong.’ ” In the space of a few hours, Dan had converted Ron from a dutiful Saint into a fire-breathing Mormon Fundamentalist. Dianna told her friend Penelope Weiss that when Ron returned home late that night, “A totally different man walked in the door.” Having adopted their defiant worldview, Ron became a regular attendee at his brothers’ meetings. He threw away his driver’s license and removed the license plates from his vehicle. And then he quit his job—which greatly heightened Dianna’s concern, because the family was already balanced tenuously on the edge of financial ruin. Ron was in the latter stages of what was, for him, a large construction project: a four-unit apartment complex he had financed with a bank loan and was building himself, after hours, as a business investment.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Modern MLM language is defined by the sort of snappy, uplifting quotes you might find printed in flouncy bridesmaid cursive on Pinterest: “You got this, boss babe”; “Channel your inner #girlboss”; “Build a fempire”; “Be a mompreneur”; “#WFH so you can make money like the SHE-E-O you are without having to leave your kids!!” These phrases work initially to love-bomb potential sellers; then, over time, they become loaded with the weight of the American Dream itself, conditioning followers to believe that “giving up” on the business would mean giving up on your very life’s purpose. In the early days, direct sellers introduced their overpriced, chemical-smelling trinkets in person, hosting at-home product demonstrations called “parties.” But these days, many women choose to kick it new school and parade their goods across social media, as their snarky former classmates cringe-scroll past. My best friend Esther is a twenty-six-year-old Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor who posts a lot about cancer-free living and radiates just the breed of health-conscious positivity many MLMs enjoy exploiting. She gets one or two Instagram DMs a week from different direct sales recruiters trying to seduce her into the flock. “Hey girlboss!!! Love your content!!! You’re such a badass!!! Have you ever thought about turning your cancer journey into a business?!?!” She screenshots them all, sends them to me, and deletes.* As far as I’m concerned, an MLM is to a pyramid scheme as a Starbucks Vanilla Bean Crème Frappuccino is to a straight-up milkshake: One is just a glorified version of the other—an assertion that would scandalize any devoted MLMer. “I would NEVER be involved with a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are ILLEGAL,” they tend to say as their stock defense. This phrase is a thought-terminating cliché, and it’s an amusing one, because if you take the logic even one step further, it becomes obvious that simply saying something is illegal doesn’t mean it’s not real or that you’re not involved. You can’t rob a bank and then, when accused, just say, “I didn’t do it, robbing banks is illegal,” to prove your innocence. In the city of Mobile, Alabama, it’s against the law to throw plastic confett i, but that doesn’t mean plastic confetti doesn’t exist or that people don’t use it. Sometimes citizens of Mobile throw plastic confetti without knowing it’s illegal, and sometimes they know plastic confetti is illegal but use it anyway because they don’t realize the confetti they’re using is made of plastic. Either way, it’s still a thing, and it’s still not cool. Pyramid schemes are indeed outlawed, and for good reason. They have the capacity to cheat people out of a couple hundred dollars or drive them all the way to bankruptcy and despair. They can shatter entire communities, even national economies, like those of Albania and Zimbabwe, which have been decimated by schemes both pyramid and Ponz i. It’s no surprise, then, that pyramid schemes don’t announce themselves as suc h.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Most boys today have no problem with gay people: they’re supportive of LGBTQ+ rights and same sex marriage. At the same time, “fag” is the worst thing they can be called; it has become less a comment on their sexual orientation than a statement about their manhood. “Fag,” according to C.J. Pascoe, a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, is what draws the lines of the “man box,” provides its essential contours. Much like “slut” for girls, its definition is fluid, elusive, which only intensifies its power: “fag” keeps guys perpetually vigilant (though it’s not always clear against what) and shuts down any challenge or objection to the “boy code.” Guys can be called “fag,” Pascoe said, “for literally anything. Like dropping a piece of meat out of a sandwich.” One boy I met was labeled “fag” in middle school because he liked to read (so he stopped). Another worried he’d be deemed a “fag” for not being up on his drug terminology, such as that a “moke” was a bong hit that mixed tobacco with marijuana. “I’m more embarrassed to get something wrong and seem dumb in front of a guy than I am in front of a girl,” he told me. “I don’t know why that is.” Although he didn’t connect the dots himself, “fag” also tacitly regulated Rob, kept him from talking to other guys about losing his girlfriend. Despite its amorphousness, Pascoe found there were certain behaviors that most reliably provoked the epithet: showing emotion, being openly affectionate with other boys, behaving romantically toward a girl (which was seen as heterosexual in the “wrong” way and explained why one high school junior told me that having a girlfriend was “gay”), or appearing in any way incompetent. Recently, Pascoe turned her attention to “no homo,” a phrase that gained traction in the 1990s, sifting through over a thousand tweets, primarily by young men, that included the phrase as a hashtag. Most were about expressing a positive emotion, sometimes as innocuous as “I love chocolate ice cream, #nohomo” or “I loved the movie The Day After Tomorrow, #nohomo.” “A lot of times they were saying things like ‘I miss you’ to a friend or ‘We should hang out soon,’” she said. “Just normal human expressions of joy or connection. But they had to add #nohomo to inoculate themselves against other guys lobbing insults at them, to create a space where they could express those sentiments. So it became not just a homophobic joke, but also a shield that allowed them to be fully human.”

• From Action (2014)

  When it comes to escaping most perplexing quagmires of sexual propriety, like how to contend with unexpected bodily effluvia, noises, behaviors, and getting caught masturbating by your roommate’s new girlfriend Marie (sorry, Marie—this Hitachi is truly thunderous and I didn’t hear you come in), act under one law: Instead of bugging out about your OWN potential humiliation and what this means about your sexual aptitude/worthiness, think about how to put the other person at ease about what is, in the grand context of life, history, and space, a nothing-event that you will have mostly forgotten about in a few weeks expeditiously. What is the gallant thing to do? Communicating that sense of calm and contextual awareness to your intended! Preserving your sense of personal security and confidence is easy when you consider that blights on what really should have resembled swan-sex enjoyed by fat-butted movie starlets on le Francebeach are also enjoyed by those same people, who are, by the way, fictitious. If someone shames you for any natural/unexpected/otherwise potentially mortifying phenomenon occurring from what you’re doing together, kick them to the curb with no compunction: Basic self-worth demands that you shouldn’t be made to feel guilty if the sex you’re having results in unwieldy bodily goings-on. No by-product of sex is repulsive enough to negate the commodities it manufactures: recreational sweetness and connection. And orgasms. If you find yourself actually hurt or otherwise medically dented-up by any kind of sexual contact, locate real medical care. Though you can pull a mental assist using the following list of what to do should your pride be jeopardized, it does not stand in for a health professional. That said, here’s everything you shouldn’t be embarrassed about. Queefing Queefing is the colloquial name for the sound vaginas expel when vacuoles of air are trapped in them and then come out. This usually happens when something is inserted into them, and the likelihood increases if that something is coming from an unusual angle or at a variegated speed. Queefs are normal and inevitable when you’re having interesting vaginal sex, and should be seen as a casual confirmation of that, not a ghastly interruption—or even something worth commenting on at all. Doing so is like admitting, “I have limited experience with etiquette.” Some alternate lines of thinking include… If you’re the queefer: Oh, a sound happened. Who cares? If you’re the bequeefed: Oh, a sound happened. Who cares? You do! Take it as a compliment. To the untrained ear, queefs might not seem harmoanius with the sighs of pleasure you’re more used to classifying as evidence that your work is appreciated, but if you’re smart, you’ll come to hear these as hot. Caught in the Act

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  91 It is not simply missed opportunities that leave him the humiliation of his comfortable house and his regular habits. The opportunities, themselves, appear out of place. He prayed at first to be relieved of his life, and not to know when his prayer would be answered. When it was, he prayed for other people’s plans. 92 I learned about one of the thirty-two names on the city’s Vietnam memorial plaque. All I learned was that the name belonged to the son of a machinist. Even as an old man, in the 1980s, the machinist rode his motorcycle to work on the night shift at Douglas Aircraft. I spoke to him two or three times a year, but not about his son who had died in Vietnam. The old man continued to coach at the park near his house. He volunteered for twenty years to teach eight- and nine-year-old boys how to play baseball. Park sports have been coached by volunteers in my city since 1956. The coaches are often the sons, even the grandsons, of the first volunteers. Each year before he died, the machinist gave me $100 in cash to buy tickets to the city’s annual sports banquet for any coach or player who could not afford to go. 93 The question really was, who could be trusted to buy these small houses? Characteristically, the developers did not bother answering it. The subdivision’s sales manager said in 1951, “We sell happiness in homes.” His salesmen sold 30 to 50 houses a day, and more than 300 during one weekend, when the first unit of the subdivision opened. At one point, salesmen sold 107 houses in an hour. They sold 7,400 houses in less than ten months. Buyers only needed a steady job and the promise they would keep up the payments. 94 Sheetrock panels cover the interior walls of my house. Paint covers the plastered sheetrock. The walls have been painted white for more than thirty years. When my mother left the house to die in the hospital nearby, congestive heart failure had swelled her legs and feet, and made her clumsy. She sat on the edge of her bed and could not dress herself on the day she left. My father was outside, readying the car. I waited in the hallway, at the doorway to my room. At the last moment, she found a new fear. “Don’t come in,” she said to me. “I’m not covered.” She called out to my father, who came to the front door. “He can’t come in, he would see me,” she said to him. My father came back inside to help her dress in a clean nightgown and to keep from me the sight of my mother. I was thirty-one. After my father died, I had the rooms painted white again. [image "Image" file=Image00008.jpg] 95 His religion and living in this suburb have taught him shame. It is a lesson he takes on his daily walk to work.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “I fully thought cis men could pee out of their butts during sex so that they didn’t accidentally pee in a vagina and I didn’t realize how stupid that is until I was like eighteen.” “Boys’ sex drives are like a high-speed train: hard to stop once they get going. Girls’ sex drives are like a cute little bicycle: not that hard to stop and not very fast. It’s the girl’s job to make sure the sex drives don’t take them all the way to sex.” “That ‘homosexuals’ had short, disease-ridden lives, marked by shame, pain, loneliness, and mental illness.” “First-time sex should be painful and female orgasms are somehow elusive, rare, or difficult to achieve.” “You’re supposed to put the dental dam at the back of your mouth before performing fellatio.” “If I masturbate I’ll go blind.” CULPRIT 3: PURITY CULTUREI was a beautiful child but an ugly adolescent. Acne ravaged my body years before my friends’ armpits smelled, and my dry-yet-somehow-greasy curls landed in an equilateral triangle above my shoulders, something I was quick to point out, lest somebody else beat me to it. I was well-liked but not desired; socially fine but not popular. Constant, exacting performances carried me well through middle school, a chaotic home life, and beyond. At the end of school lunch, for attention, I’d goad my friends into betting their pocket change that I couldn’t eat the leftover tuna salad sandwich in the middle of the table, pushed away by someone who’d deemed it inedible. I would perform eating it, theatrically, relishing the visibility. It got laughs. Did I mention I wasn’t beautiful?

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  “You women who set your cap for a preacher better be careful not to end up like Jezebel.” Brother Terrell moved the folding chair aside and began to walk up and down the platform. His steps grew steadier and his voice stronger as he paced. “You women like to fix yourselves up to look good. Even you holiness women.” He dropped the microphone and let it hang from the cord around his neck. With one hand on his hip and the other crooked at the arm so that his hand flapped in the air, he pranced forward on his toes, hips swaying. He pitched his voice to falsetto. “Why, I just want to look nice. Nothing wrong with that.” His voice fell back to its normal timbre. “And you smear on a little more of that tinted chapstick.” Again he mimicked a female voice. “It’s flesh-colored. Nothing wrong with that.” The women who sat around me fidgeted and shifted in their seats. Brother Terrell didn’t mince words. He preached the Word and he preached it like it was a double-edged sword. It hurt sometimes, but they came to hear the truth and that’s what he gave them. Besides, he was really talking about women like Sister Corinne two rows back. She had been looking a little like the world lately, hadn’t she? Brother Terrell dropped the falsetto and laughed. They laughed with him, relieved, a bit more at ease.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I stand paralyzed next to the hotel bed, staring at the closed bathroom door, behind which is the stranger who is about to end my post-marriage virginity. I am completely unsure of what to do with myself. It occurs to me that I have a beast of a strapless bra on – it holds me in place perfectly but with a wide back and four hooks. There's no way he will be able to get it off gracefully and I don't even want to imagine how matronly it will look to him. Then there's my belt! It has a clasp in the middle that you have to twist just so to undo and if he has to tackle that he will surely feel defeated before he even gets to the bra. Game time decision: I quickly remove all of my clothes – all of them, even the thong – and fold them neatly in a pile on the desk next to his motorcycle helmet because even in this moment, incredibly, I am concerned about the thin, delicate fabric of my dress becoming wrinkled. By the time he emerges from the bathroom, I am standing back in the spot where I started a few minutes ago, completely naked. I cannot think of a time in my 47 years when I have ever felt so wholly out of my body, so certain that I do not belong where I am. […] "Is this too much?" I finally break the silence and ask more timidly than I intend to, eyes wide, eyebrows raised – and, I realize, somewhat ridiculously for a woman who has just brazenly undressed for a man she met an hour ago. He matches my look with eyes just as wide and eyebrows equally raised and says, to my great relief, "Definitely not too much," while picking me up like a newlywed and half placing, half tossing me on the bed.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “I’d know you anywhere,” he says, “even with the hair. ” “I’d know you, too, even without it.” He’s not really without it, just has less on his head, more on his face. He laughs. And just like that, she’s fifteen again. Except she’s not. —THEY’RE SEATED at different tables at lunch. She’s with Christina and Jack, Henry and Leah, four others. He’s across the room with Gaby and her handsome husband, their grown children and young grandchildren, and two men who were boys at Janet then, boys who helped rescue the trapped passengers. None of her old crowd is here. Suzanne lives in Seattle, married to a neurosurgeon. Miri tries to see her every year. Robo is divorced and has a gift shop in Westfield. Aside from two years at Boston U, she’s never left New Jersey. Eleanor is a professor of mathematics at Purdue, married to an economist. She hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet and didn’t laugh when, a few years ago, Miri mentioned the possibility. Some things aren’t funny, Eleanor told her. Miri and Mason steal looks at one another through lunch. Miri doesn’t blush the way Rusty does, but she feels her cheeks flush. She drinks two glasses of wine, too fast. It goes straight to her head. You go to my head… She must have sung that line out loud because the woman next to her, a daughter of the Secretary of War who was killed when the second plane crashed, says, “What?” Miri knows she sometimes sings a line from a song out loud when she means to sing it only inside her head. “I was just thinking of an old song,” she says. “Don’t you love the old songs?” “I do,” Miri says. “My daughter finds me hopeless that way.” “Mine finds me hopeless in every way.” “Yes, that, too.” They laugh. “My father was a wonderful person,” she tells Miri. “I’ve never stopped missing him.” “My uncle, Henry Ammerman, wrote about your family,” Miri says. “The young reporter?” the woman asks, eyeing Henry, who is seated on Miri’s other side. “I remember him. I was at the apartment the day he came to talk to my mother.” “Henry talked to everyone after the crashes. Everything I know about writing I learned from him.” “You’re a writer?” “Reporter, now columnist, for the Las Vegas Sun. ” “Las Vegas…” she says, in a tone Miri has heard a million times, as if ordinary people can’t possibly live there. The program begins as dessert is served, plates of cookies and some kind of mousse that Miri pushes away. The mayor introduces Henry Ammerman. Oh, god, it’s going to be in alphabetical order? She’s going to be next? She doesn’t want to go next. Doesn’t want to get up in front of these people at all, especially not in front of Mason. “He was a young reporter for the Daily Post then,” the mayor says. “Today, he’s a prizewinning journalist for The Washington Post.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  After lunch, my friend who suggested the HARD TO GET tattoo invites me to her office, where she offers to Google you on my behalf. She’s going to see if the Internet reveals a preferred pronoun for you, since despite or due to the fact that we’re spending every free moment in bed together and already talking about moving in, I can’t bring myself to ask. Instead I’ve become a quick study in pronoun avoidance. The key is training your ear not to mind hearing a person’s name over and over again. You must learn to take cover in grammatical cul-de-sacs, relax into an orgy of specificity. You must learn to tolerate an instance beyond the Two, precisely at the moment of attempting to represent a partnership—a nuptial, even. Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. This could be what a conversation is—simply the outline of a becoming. Expert as one may become at such a conversation, to this day it remains almost impossible for me to make an airline reservation or negotiate with my human resources department on our behalf without flashes of shame or befuddlement. It’s not really my shame or befuddlement—it’s more like I’m ashamed for (or simply pissed at) the person who keeps making all the wrong presumptions and has to be corrected, but who can’t be corrected because the words are not good enough. How can the words not be good enough? Lovesick on the floor of my friend’s office, I squint up at her as she scrolls through an onslaught of bright information I don’t want to see. I want the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person never need apply. “Look, here’s a quote from John Waters, saying, ‘She’s very handsome.’ So maybe you should use ‘she.’ I mean, it’s John Waters.” That was years ago, I roll my eyes from the floor. Things might have changed. When making your butch-buddy film, By Hook or By Crook, you and your cowriter, Silas Howard, decided that the butch characters would call each other “he” and “him,” but in the outer world of grocery stores and authority figures, people would call them “she” and “her.” The point wasn’t that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters’ preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters “he,” it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn’t just to introduce new words (boi, cisgendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here). One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly. Like when you whisper, You’re just a hole, letting me fill you up. Like when I say husband.

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

  churchgoing people who did not endorse such behavior. If the women in curlers and the waitress boasting her tattoos reminded readers of trailer trash, the rioting rednecks were more like the wild-eyed, off-his-rocker Ernest T. Bass of The Andy Griffith Show . By 1959, the Times Literary Supplement acknowledged that it was the “ugly faces” of “rednecks, crackers, tar-heels, and other poor white trash” that would be forever remembered from Central High. 52 Despite the embarrassment he caused, Orval Faubus did not disappear. Freed from the national media spotlight, he secured reelection in 1958, and went on to serve three more terms. As a governor who refused to lay down his arms, he continued to portray himself as a staunch defender of white people’s democratic right to oppose “forced integration.” Praising his “doggedness,” one southern journalist traced Faubus’s characteristic strength to his Ozark mountain days, when he trudged five miles, dressed in overalls, to a dilapidated school. A hillbilly could get ahead down here. Thus Faubus strategically accepted a loss of support from among the better classes, who resented redneck power in any form. Like Mississippi’s Vardaman and his own state’s Jeff Davis before him, Orval Faubus used the threat of poor white thuggery to stay in power. And it worked. 53 In the same year that Little Rock consumed the news media, Hollywood produced a feature-length film that capitalized on the redneck image. Starring Andy Griffith and directed by Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd was a completely different vehicle for Griffith than his subsequent television role as the friendly sheriff. It was a dark drama that followed “Lonesome Rhodes,” a down-and-out man discovered playing guitar in an Arkansas jail, and traced his rapid rise into the national limelight as a powerful and ruthless TV star. For reviewers, Griffith’s performance was a cross between Huey Long and Elvis Presley—a hollering, singing “redneck gone berserk with power.” 54 The plot of A Face in the Crowd was only a part of its story. The surrounding publicity focused on Kazan’s directing technique. To get Griffith into character, he exploited the actor’s childhood memories of being called white trash. In this way, it was an unusual film, and it offered a two-part message about class. First, it reminded audiences of the danger in elevating a lower-class redneck above his accustomed station and giving him power—for the redneck personality on- screen was a volatile mix of anger, cunning, and megalomania. Second, Kazan’s exploitation of the backstory on Griffith delivered a stern rebuke of southern culture, where the poor were treated like dirt. 55 Kazan tried his hand at another southern story, this time set during the Depression. Wild River (1960) concerned the TVA, as the construction of a dam

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  —MASON IS HOSTING a small reception for Gaby and her family in his hotel suite, at 5 p.m. He invites Miri. She’s the first to arrive and is embarrassed. She’s changed into pants and a sweater, western boots, the cashmere shawl draped over her shoulders. She feels more like herself. She’s flossed, brushed her teeth and gargled with mouthwash. Ever the dentist’s wife. She checks out the room, looks out the window. Anything to avoid sitting down facing him. He can tell she’s uncomfortable and says, “I’m sure the others will be here any minute.” He smiles at her, looking into her eyes. But she quickly looks away. “Do you come to Elizabeth often?” she asks. “Almost never. It’s changed, and not for the better.” “I heard Janet closed.” “In ’62, when the state eliminated orphanages. End of an era. It’s been condemned since the seventies. Kids break in at night to party. Makes me sad.” He offers her a glass of wine. “Just water,” she says. “I read your piece on Longy,” he says, handing her the water glass. She laughs. “I was a senior at college. Sold it to the Las Vegas Sun. A heady experience. They hired me based on that story.” “I like your theory that he never would have hanged himself, that it was a gangland slaying disguised as suicide.” “I still believe that.” “Jack sent other stories, too. The one about the fire at the MGM Grand.” “I don’t really specialize in disaster, but when there’s a disaster, like my uncle Henry, I’m there.” That was the disaster that led Andy into forensic dentistry, but she doesn’t tell that to Mason. “Vegas must be a good place for stories,” Mason says. “If you like weird stories, it’s great.” “Well, I’m proud of you.” Again, he looks into her eyes. Again, she looks away. Gulps down the whole glass of water. She’s saved by a knock on the door. Gaby and her family, and a few minutes later, the boys from Janet. And Phil Stein. “Oh my god,” she says. “You’re Phil Stein, aren’t you?” “I am.” “I loved your mother.” “And she loved you. Never stopped talking about you, even after you moved away.” “Is she…” It’s awkward, asking if a parent is still living. He shakes his head. “She died years ago. Complications of diabetes and a stroke.” “I’m sorry. She was so kind to me.” “She was a good person. I’m still trying to convince my sister of that.” “Mother-daughter relationships can be difficult,” Miri says. “Tell me about it. I gave Mom a dog for her sixtieth birthday. My sister almost killed me. The dog reminded Mom of Fred. Remember Fred?” “We have a dog named Fred,” Miri tells him, “and another called Goldie.” “Goldie . My mother would have loved knowing that.” They both laugh. “Do you have a family?” she asks. “Divorced,” he says. “Like half our generation.” “Sorry.” “But I have two kids.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Then what?” “Suppose she does?” Gus laughs and pulls her closer. The rowdy cousins cheer when the band switches to rock. Abby hands out earplugs to anyone in need. The little children chase each other up and down the lawn. Von has too much to drink and rambles on toasting the bride and groom. Lamb comes to his rescue but Patti leaves in a huff anyway, taking the two little girls with her. Dorset moves in for the kill. She’s been eyeing him ever since the party last night. Late in the afternoon, after the cake has been sliced, after the requisite pictures of bride feeding groom and groom feeding bride, the cousins carry Bru down to the pond and throw him in. When one of them picks up Caitlin and slings her over his shoulder she pounds on his back and cries, “Not in my wedding dress, asshole … it’s an antique!” He puts her down and she steps out of it, leaving it on the grassy bank above the pond. They throw her off the dock wearing just her long ivory slip. Bru catches her in the water. They kiss. He wades out of the pond with her in his arms, as if he’s carrying her over the threshold. The photographer captures the moment. “You’re next, Victoria,” another of the cousins says, sweeping her up and tossing her in from the end of the dock. Then they all jump in, one after the other, the cousins, their wives and girlfriends, most of the young guests and some of the not so young, all in their finery. But not Sharkey, who has taken Wren out in the dinghy, and not Daniel or Gus, who wait for Vix to emerge. “You can’t stay in all day,” Gus calls, laughing. She feels awkward and self-conscious, like an unwilling contestant in a wet T-shirt contest. When she finally comes out, her arms folded across her chest, Gus wraps a beach towel around her. “You always were on the shy side, Cough Drop.” “Are you going to keep calling me Cough Drop?” “What should I call you?” “How about Vix?” “Vix …” he says, trying it out. Upstairs, Caitlin hands her a pair of shorts and a T-shirt so she can get out of her wet clothes. Caitlin has already changed into jeans. She’s zipping up her backpack, preparing to leave for her honeymoon, a camping trip to Maine. “Thanks, Vix … for being here with me.” She looks up at the photo of the two of them at twelve. “Who says a picture isn’t worth a hundred words?” “Thousand,” Vix says. “I think it’s a thousand words.” Caitlin laughs. “We were a great team, weren’t we?” “Yes.” Caitlin hugs her. “I’ll always love you. Promise you’ll always love me?” “You know I will.” And it’s true, Vix thinks, no matter what, she’ll always love Caitlin. Caitlin hoists on her backpack. “Did you ask Bru … about that summer?” “Yes,” she lies.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Like seeing a long-lost friend,” Miri tells her. “Like seeing you.” “I saw your goodbye kiss. I doubt if that’s how you’d say goodbye to me.” Miri feels her face flush. “It didn’t mean anything.” “If you say so.” Change the subject before this escalates, Miri tells herself. “So, Warren Beatty?” “You like that story?” “It grabbed my attention.” “He was great.” “So, it’s true?” “Maybe yes, maybe no.” “We’re back to that?” “Ask me another one, Girl Reporter.” “How did you know Kathy Stein was on that plane?” Natalie pauses for just a moment. “Ruby told me.” “No, really…how did you know?” “Sorry if you don’t like my answer but it’s the truth. Next…” Miri reminds herself not to push it. “Corinne?” “She and her hubby spend winters in Palm Beach, summers on Nantucket. They play golf. I don’t know how they can stand it. But, then, I never understood my mother. I suppose you see a lot of Fern.” “I do. It’s nice for Dr. O.” “You still call him that, after all these years?” “I tried Arthur but it never felt right.” They get their coffees, carry them to a quiet corner, where Miri says, “He’s sick.” “I heard.” “We’re hoping you’ll come to see him.” “I was waiting for his eightieth birthday.” “You probably shouldn’t wait that long.” “August? Are you saying August is too long to wait?” Miri nods. “Shit.” “Yeah.” —ON THE PLANE Miri is seated next to a young girl. “I’m Lily,” she says. “I’m nine. My dad is a pilot.” “Is he flying this plane?” Miri asks, sure that if he is he’ll be extra careful with his daughter on board. “No. He flies to Europe,” she says, kicking the seat in front of her. “I just came back from Portugal. Have you been there?” She doesn’t wait for Miri to tell her she hasn’t been to Portugal. “You should go. They have a lot of tiles there. Do you like tiles?” “Yes.” “Everything is tiled except your toothbrush.” Miri laughs. “You think I’m joking but I’m not,” Lily says. “Are you going to Vegas to gamble?” “No,” Miri tells her. “I live there.” “Me, too. With my mother. My dad lives all over the place. Do you think it’s weird?” Does she mean weird that her parents live in different places? “Vegas,” she says. “Do you think it’s a weird place to live?” “I’ve lived there since I was fifteen. My children grew up there.” “And they turned out okay? Because my dad thinks it’s not a good place to grow up.” “They’re fine.” Well, she thinks, two of them are anyway, but she’s not getting into that. “What were you doing in New Jersey?” Lily asks. “Visiting old friends.” “Was it fun?” Miri thinks before answering. “In a way it was. Yes.” The flight attendant stands at the front of the cabin. “May I have your attention?” She demonstrates the proper way to fasten your seat belt.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  One cringey memory that persists is when our leaders brought out large rolls of paper, which we spread out on the floor. The girls lay down on the paper, and our mothers traced the outlines of our bodies in marker. Then, together, as mother and daughter, we were supposed to draw the changes we'd expect on our bodies. Breasts on our chests. Armpit and pubic hair. I tried to be funny and made stinky green waves coming out of my armpits and a puka-shell choker around my neck, but there was no evading how abominable this entire exercise was. My future boobs didn't have nipples. Neither of us could bear to draw nipples. Just big, hulking, grape-scented, purple U's on my chest. [...] If it hurt her so much for me to grow up, I wouldn't. That moment determined my actions for the next few years: I did not tell her when I got my period and instead stuffed my underwear with toilet paper and hid my stained clothes in the attic. I bound my chest, wore baggy T-shirts, and hunched to keep my developing breasts from showing—even when she slammed her hand between my shoulder blades and snarled that I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

• From Like Family

  Her voice sounded lispy and strange, the s ’s mushed together wetly. I thought it was because she had been crying, but when I asked, Granny had said no, it was because of the stroke she’d had the month before. A stroke? I barely had time to process this when Granny started in about Keith. He’d been in critical condition for several days, but was out of the ICU now and could have a few visitors. It would mean a lot to him, she said, if we girls would go down there. When I got off the phone, Penny and I sat at the kitchen table for a while, feeling stunned and ashamed. How was it that Granny could be so sick without our even knowing it? When was the last time we’d seen her? Or Keith and Tanya? If we were fifteen and sixteen, Tanya must be thirteen already—could that be?—and Keith nineteen. The last time I remembered going over to Vera’s with Granny, Keith had just started eighth grade at Cooper Intermediate. While Granny and Vera did some catching up over weak coffee, we went outside with Tanya’s Chinese jump rope and started playing in the driveway. Keith didn’t join us in the game, of course—he was way too cool for that—but he sat with us, sprawled on the lawn, tugging at tufts of grass. As I waited for my turn, I plopped down next to Keith and started attacking the grass too, building up a little pile of cuttings between my feet. It wasn’t until Keith went to scatter my pile, teasing me, that I noticed his hands. The knuckles were raw and purplish, with nicks and one long scrape on his right ring finger. “What’s that from?” I reached over, happy for an excuse to touch him. “Fight.” He didn’t pull away. “A fight? Someone beat you up?” “Maybe I did the beating up. Did you ever think of that?” “No,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “You wouldn’t. You’re too good.” I went back to my grass nest, raking up the strays. “Good, huh?” The smirk was in his voice as well as on his face. I looked up to see his blue eyes narrowing as he studied me like some two-headed thing in a jar. My blush was tidal, blood moving from my neck to the tips of my ears and back. I couldn’t even look at Keith and so pretended to be very interested, suddenly, in the Chinese jump rope game. Tanya was at the part where she had to leap up and come down on both sides of the elastic, pinning them down, but she missed. “Dang,” she yelped. “Do-overs.” “No way,” Teresa said, stepping out from her side. “My jumps.” Keith stood silently and wandered inside, and we left shortly after that. He came out to the porch with Vera and Tanya, and they all waved us down the street.

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

  Of course, you can use other objects for anal penetration; butt plugs designed especially for that purpose can be acquired from any sex store. They are usually made of plastic or silicone, in a variety of shapes and sizes. Even if you use a condom on them, they should be thoroughly washed after use, with an antibacterial soap. Obviously you can use a dildo or a penis. Never use anything breakable or sharp, and never use anything that does not have a flange to prevent it going all the way up inside the rectum, where you won’t be able to retrieve it. If you get something stuck up inside, you will have to go to the emergency room to have it removed. And that won’t be fun. Once you have inserted something inside the anus, you may want to hold it still, especially if you are a beginner. Sometimes the sensation of moving in and out can make the receiver want to empty his or her bowels. The anal sphincter responds automatically by tightening up, and this can become uncomfortable. Anal fisting (called handballing in some gay male circles) is not something I have ever done, but I know a few women, and a number of men, who do it and love it. I reckon anyone who allows themselves to be anally fisted has perfected the art of relaxation. Whether you are engaging in anal sex or vaginal penetration, you want to try to make sure your bowels are at least fairly empty, in order to ensure comfort for both you and your partner. Intense penetration squashes things around in there, and if you’re trying to prevent yourself from going while you’re trying to come, you will experience some conflict. On the other hand, you might not care what happens. It certainly doesn’t have to matter in a practical sense if you do lose control of your bladder or your bowels. These are, after all, perfectly normal, natural bodily functions, and anything can be cleaned up. But most of us would be mortified with embarrassment in the wake of such an “accident” while we are making love. So visit the restroom before you have sex, or during if you need to. If you’re going to have anal sex, wash around your anus first, and if you feel the need, you can always do an enema to clean out your bowels. Or you can do an enema as part of your play.