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 Like Family

  The best thing about Val was his furniture, nice stuff that matched. He moved in and spent the first weekend arranging and rearranging his things, the throw pillows, the framed prints of Monet’s watery gardens, the ceramic vases filled with cattails. When everything was set and settled, we threw a huge party. Teresa had made the guest list, and because I didn’t know anyone, for the first hour I walked around my own house feeling like a bellhop, carrying bits of overheard conversations from room to room, other people’s talk itching along my fingertips. Most of the minglers were guys who had gone to San Joaquin Memorial with Teresa’s new boyfriend, Marcus. They wore vividly striped cotton shirts with the collars flipped up, carried plastic cups of beer to one another from the keg in the kitchen and said “Hey, man” every five seconds. Apart from me, Teresa and our mutual friend Stephanie, who we’d known since middle school, there were no girls at all at the party until Penny showed up with Amber Swenson and Diane Rodriguez. I realized that even though they were still in high school, they were more like me than anyone else there, both thrilled and embarrassed to be at a grown-up party. No one’s parents would come home. Anything could happen. Ack . The four of us moved in a clot over to the liquor table, all of us in pegged jeans and flats and V-neck sweaters worn backward. We mixed vodka and sour mix right in the red Popov bottle, shook and poured. Within an hour, everything had loosened and blurred; within two, I stood puking in the bushes outside next to Penny, who was also puking, but we agreed, wiping our faces as we came back inside, that it was a great party. The best. Toward the end of the night, I found myself in a serious conversation with Teresa and Stephanie about the sad state of my sex life. I’d had one boyfriend, Mark (on the God squad), and a short dating stint with a guy in my speech class who cheated on me immediately, on New Year’s Eve, when I was home with killer cramps. Two lovers in nineteen years: how embarrassing for me. “See that guy over there?” Teresa tossed her head in the direction of one of the collar-flippers, a shaggy blond with full Mick Jagger lips. Half sitting, half reclining on the stairs with his eyes closed, he held a full cup of beer on the verge of spilling. “That’s Matt,” she said. “He’s really experienced. You should sleep with him.” “Okay,” I said, and did. [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] I HAD MY SISTER back. She’d called me up one day when I still lived with the Lindberghs and asked if I wanted to take in a movie.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “I just knew we were girls and we liked boys.” Loving remembered reading Forever and then sharing it with a close middle school girlfriend, who was a grade below her. “Her parents found out,” Loving said. “And because it was a mature book, basically [her father] came up to my parents’ house and spoke about me lending the book and this and that, because it was very saucy at that time.” New York City elementary school librarian Lauren Harrison had a similar experience. “There was a copy of Forever that was passed around in fifth grade,” recalled Harrison, who was forty-six at the time that we spoke. Like Loving, her parents allowed her to read whatever she wanted; her mother is a librarian, too. But Harrison was aware that the book was tricky stuff for other kids her age. “I didn’t have to hide it,” but her friends did, she said. “I remember just sort of, we’d all whisper and certain pages would fall open,” she added, referring to her crew crowding around the novel and perusing its most descriptive sex scenes. This phenomenon was so widespread that in 1978, the novelist Joyce Maynard—who was also Judy’s friend—did a twenty-column story about it for the New York Times . Maynard went to the “pretty, mostly white, upper-middle-class community” of Bath, Ohio, where Forever was making the rounds among the girls—and making waves among their mothers. Maynard sat down with a group of kids and moms to hear about their experiences of the book. She learned that Heather Benson, then thirteen, had borrowed a friend’s copy on a choir trip, then brought it home, where her mom, Pat Benson, discovered it. Pat knew Blume’s name but hadn’t heard anything about her latest publication and was shocked by what she saw. She stopped short of forbidding Heather from reading it but put it away in a drawer while her daughter thought over their chat. Heather ended up steering clear of the novel—or at least that copy of it. “I know she didn’t [read it],” Pat, who was fifty at the time, told the Times , “because she knew which drawer I put it in and I arranged a strand of hair on the pages and it’s still there—which is the kind of trick you’ve got to know to keep on top of what’s going on.” Another mother, Jan Worrall, described buying a copy of the novel at her daughter’s request and then, after bringing it home and paging through it, returning it to the bookstore. In her interview, she told Maynard that she would have preferred for her daughter Jocelyn, then age eleven, to read “pornography… at least then she’d know that was wrong, instead of having this book about a nice, normal girl who has sex and then it ends and the book’s over.” She felt Blume had dropped the ball when it came to using her platform to mold kids.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Honestly I find it more embarrassing than enraging to read Baudrillard, Žižek, Badiou, and other revered philosophers of the day pontificating on how we might save ourselves from the humanity-annihilating threat of the turkey baster (which no one uses, by the way; the preferred tool is an oral syringe) in order to protect the fate of this endangered “sexed being.” And by sexed, make no mistake: they mean one of two options. Here’s Žižek, describing the type of sexuality that would fit an “evil” world: “In December 2006 the New York City authorities declared that the right to chose one’s gender (and so, if necessary, to have the sex-change operation performed) is one of the inalienable human rights—the ultimate Difference, the ‘transcendental’ difference that grounds the very human identity, thus turns into something open to manipulation…. ‘Masturbathon’ is the ideal form of the sex activity of this trans-gendered subject.” Fatally estranged from the transcendental difference that grounds human identity, the transgendered subject is barely human, condemned forever to “idiotic masturbatory enjoyment” in lieu of the “true love” that renders us human. For, as Žižek holds—in homage to Badiou—“it is love, the encounter of the Two, which ‘transubstantiates’ the idiotic masturbatory enjoyment into an event proper.” These are the voices that pass for radicality in our times. Let us leave them to their love, their event proper. 2011, the summer of our changing bodies. Me, four months pregnant, you six months on T. We pitched out, in our inscrutable hormonal soup, for Fort Lauderdale, to stay for a week at the beachside Sheraton in monsoon season, so that you could have top surgery by a good surgeon and recover. Less than twenty-four hours after we arrived, they were snapping a sterile green hat on your head—a “party hat,” the nice nurse said—and wheeling you away. While you were under the knife, I drank gritty hot chocolate in the waiting room and watched Diana Nyad try to swim from Florida to Cuba. She didn’t make it that time, even in her shark cage. But you did. You emerged four hours later, hilariously zonked from the drugs, trying in vain to play the host while slipping in and out of consciousness, your whole torso more tightly bound than you’ve ever managed yourself, a drain hanging off each side, two pouches that filled up over and over again with blood stuff the color of cherry Kool-Aid.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Pharrell responds, “I think context is everything.” As Koons goes on to describe Staller as having “no guilt about her body … no shame about her body, and so she was able to present that very clearly,” a naked woman walks up to the two and pours them water. She is expressionless. The show airs on safe-for-work channels, so her breasts and pussy are blurred out, much the way escorts sometimes blur their faces on advertising sites, or blur nipples or genitalia on social media platforms like Twitter. (Where once nudity ran free on Twitter, explicit imagery will now get one shadowbanned—hidden from discovery in the search toolbar—if not altogether suspended.) Williams neither looks at nor acknowledges her, while Koons attempts to appear unfazed. He smiles at her, though he seems unable to answer the next question until she walks away. A naked woman serving water appears on multiple episodes of ARTST TLK. I could find little media commentary on what amounts to a tired aesthetic choice, except a Forbes article in which the reporter explains, I’m told (often with a note of dismissive acceptance) that parading a nude female around the set is standard on Pharrell’s chat show, ARTST TLK. ‘Oh, that’s just what he does,’ seems to be the sentiment. But still, it’s a transgressive moment, bait-and-switching the dignified definition of adult with the tawdry one. Without warning, Pharrell jolts us out of heady conversation and drops us into the world of meaningless eye-candy, effectively cheapening the whole interview. The naked, servile woman seems a logical extension of music video girls: props to create a particular atmosphere, that of indulgence and provocation. For the duration of the show, Williams interviewed almost exclusively men. Does meaningless eye candy cheapen the whole interview? One might argue that the interview was relatively cheap to begin with, as in, intellectually bereft—Koons and Williams trading platitudes about transcendence and beauty, engaging in mutual verbal masturbation. But the money in the room is palpable. Exact net worth is difficult to ascertain, but it’s enough to know both artists have bought homes for roughly $30 million. (Google has Williams’s net worth at $200 million, and Koons’s at twice that.) What they are discussing, too, are objects as stand-ins for money, which is the mode in which Koons’s art functions best.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Defecation was even less glamorous. The astronaut started with a collection bag fitted with an adhesive collar. After stripping naked (usually in private at the other end of the command module), he pressed the collar around his hind end until it stuck, then expelled to the best of his ability. In space, clumps didn’t drop from the body. To help that along, NASA had built a narrow pouch into the bag for the astronaut’s finger, which he could use as a scooper to pull things free. Finally, a packet of blue germicide was deposited in the bag, then ruptured and kneaded together with the waste in order to neutralize odors and to kill bacteria that could, over time, generate gases that could cause the package to explode. This bathroom breaks could take as long as an hour. Cleaning was done with a small moist towelette like those handed out at barbecue restaurants. Much as the crew might have liked to fire the sealed bag into space, they could not. Ejecting such a bulky item would require the cabin to be depressurized, possible but risky to the men and the flight. Also, NASA planned to examine the feces (as well as blood and urine) on the crew’s return to Earth, eager to study the effects of deep space flight on the human body. Even as an engineer, Anders knew this fecal collection system would be difficult. Months before Apollo 8, he took home a kit to practice (one didn’t experiment on such a device in the simulators at work). He explained to Valerie that it had to be tested, at least on Earth, while lying down. To that end, he intended to try it in bed. “Not in our bed!” Valerie said. So Anders lay on the carpet and gave it his best. The device did not work well for him. A few days later, he asked the flight surgeon to recommend a low-residue diet he could eat in the days leading up to and during the flight. The less often he had to use the device on the mission, he figured, the better. So far, his plan was working. While Borman and Lovell struggled with the contraption, Anders sat in his seat, doing his work and looking out his window, uncalled by that part of nature, watching the universe go by.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Urinating was a straightforward, if inelegant, process. It began with a kind of open-ended condom for which the astronauts had been fitted during training. (The devices came in small, medium, and large sizes, but astronauts assigned a more scientific nomenclature to the fittings: “extra-large,” “immense,” and “unbelievable.”) Once out of his suit, the crewman would slip on the condom, then belly up to a valve and attach the other end to a bypass valve that, once it was opened, vented out the side of the spacecraft. If the procedure was timed properly, the astronaut could open the valve while urinating and expel the waste into space. If it was not timed properly, he risked exposing his tender parts to vacuum forces. To prevent that, Anders opened the valve too slowly on his first attempt, blowing off the personal end of his condom and sending twinkling golden droplets dancing weightless through the cabin. His timing improved after that, he made sure of it. Even when urine was expelled properly from the spacecraft, the crew couldn’t quite be done worrying about it. Just the tiny force necessary to vent the liquid—which turned to gleaming ice crystals in the sunlit cold of space—could have a profound effect on the spacecraft’s trajectory and would have to be accounted for as the ship continued its journey.

• From The New Naked: The Ultimate Sex Education for Grown-Ups (2014)

  ConcealDark under-eye circles are, unfortunately, genetic, so as embarrassing as this might be for him (because most men would never dream of using this kind of product), show him how to use your own concealer. Convince him to try it by telling him that, as he likely knows already, men who look tired when they’re not due to eye bags are unfairly judged as being tired. No one need ever know that he’s using concealer, once you show him how to blend it in well. If that doesn’t work well, he might want to consult a plastic surgeon to see if the dark circles can be removed. (Ditto with droopy eyelids.) Many men also suffer from rosacea, an incurable and progressive skin condition leading to uncontrollable flushing. (Take a look at the comic movie star of the 1930s, W. C. Fields, for an example of extreme rosacea that also affected his nose.) This warrants a trip to the dermatologist. In the meantime, your man can try using a green-based foundation or primer that will help camouflage some of the redness. Speaking of which, adult acne is a deeply embarrassing problem for a lot of men. While there are effective drugstore products for acne treatment, most are for teenagers, who tend to have much oilier skin. He should see a dermatologist first and discuss treatment options. If His Closet Hasn’t Had an Overhaul Since High School, He Needs a MakeoverWhen I was a resident in medical school, one of my fellow colleagues was a complete slob. He was such a mess that I had no confidence in his ability to make life-and-death decisions. He was working in a hospital, where cleanliness is of real concern and filth can be lethal. Patients never wanted to talk to him. So we all had a talk with him and directed him to the local Laundromat. I’m not saying that a man needs a closet full of designer clothes. He doesn’t. I’ve seen men look incredibly put together wearing nothing more than a crisply pressed white button-down shirt, a sleek leather belt, and a good-fitting pair of jeans. But he needs to look presentable. When I see my patients, I always wear a suit, a nice shirt, and a tie. My shoes are shined. I want them to see that I respect who they are by presenting myself in the best possible way. Other men should do the same. I tell my patients to think of how they dress as part of foreplay. When you get a present all wrapped up in a gorgeous box with a bow, you get excited. It shows that someone cared enough to make that gift extra-special. If you get something covered in crumpled newspaper, or worse, just shoved at you with no ceremony at all, you’re not nearly as likely to be enthusiastic and receptive.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  The typical response to teenage sex in the United States is “Not under my roof.” But in a cross-cultural comparison of families in the US and the Netherlands, Amy Schalet found that by normalizing teen sexuality Dutch parents were able to exert more control over their children’s behavior. That’s not to say it’s a free-for-all over there. Although two-thirds of Dutch teens ages fifteen to seventeen with a steady boy- or girlfriend report that the person was welcome to spend the night in their bedrooms, the Dutch actively discourage promiscuity in their children, teaching that sex should emerge from a loving relationship. Negotiating the ground rules for those sleepovers, while admittedly cringey, provides parents another opportunity to exercise influence, reinforce values, and emphasize the need for protection. Of course, the Dutch work from an advantage: their children begin formal sex education at age four with discussions of basic body awareness—thinking about what feels good and what does not—as well as on the importance of respect for self and others in relation to family or friends. Over the years, along with curricula on anatomy, reproduction, disease prevention, contraception, and abortion, the Dutch openly address masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, orgasm. They also stress the positive aspects of sex and relationships. The results: even when controlling for demographic differences, Dutch teens become sexually active later than Americans, have fewer partners, are more likely to use contraception, and are less likely to say their encounters were “driven by hormones.” They are more likely to say their early sexual activity took place in loving, respectful relationships in which they communicated openly with their partners about what felt good and what didn’t, about what acts they wanted to engage in and what kind of protection they would need. Four out of five Dutch youth in one study said that their first sexual experiences were well timed, within their control, and fun. Eighty-six percent of girls and 93 percent of boys agreed that they and their partner “both were equally eager to have it.” Compare that to the United States, where two-thirds of sexually experienced teenagers said they wished they had waited longer to have intercourse for the first time. Decline Admission to “Dick School”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

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

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Clara gestured for me to answer, but I nodded back, wanting to hear her take on Anaïs. Clara began, probably borrowing from her prepared class on French women writers: “The French like Nin because they have a tradition for her. She follows in a direct line from the French courtesans who were better known for their lovers and literary salons than their own writing. They were professional muses: Marion Delorme, Claudine-Alexandrine Guerin de Tencin, Marie Duplessis, Ninon de l’Enclos.” Clara deferentially flipped a hand to emphasize her ease with these French names. “They were like the Greek hetaera or the Japanese geishas,” she continued, “experts in the arts of pleasing men. They were oppressed because they could only survive by maintaining the pleasure of their male patrons. They could hold power only as long as their sexual appeal lasted, though some of them were able to make it last well into old age thanks to their beauty tricks.” “Do you know any of those tricks?” the provost’s secretary asked. “They were stupid. They used white powder that gave them lead poisoning.” Clara waved away the question. “That’s not the point. The point is they were hardly liberated.” “Well, they were for their time,” I argued. Clara took my opinion seriously. “I suppose you could say that. By being parasites on the nobility they had better lives than servant women or farmer’s wives, but that was a question of class.” I enjoyed batting ideas with Clara; she always came back with a well-reasoned argument, an intellectual muscularity absent in the feminine subjectivity and intuition Anaïs heralded. I countered to Clara, “In some ways the courtesans were better off than we are. They had the leisure to write. Their time wasn’t taken up having children, or working, or managing households.” I realized immediately that Clara would see “leisure to write” as an elitist concern, but the provost’s secretary jumped in: “Sounds like a liberated life to me!” Clara gave her a withering look. “A muse spends her life enabling men’s creativity instead of her own.” “Well, Anaïs Nin isn’t just a muse.” I came to my mentor’s defense. “She’s a diarist and novelist in her own right. Maybe she was a muse to Henry Miller when they were in Paris, but now she’s committed to her own work.” Even as I was saying it, though, I realized it wasn’t true. Anaïs had completely abandoned her diary and novel writing, in favor of playing muse to her fans through her prolific correspondence. Clara was right, as well, that Anaïs was like a courtesan in that everything about her was delicate and feminine—her soft voice, her graceful movements, her painstaking appearance—as if she’d been designed to fulfill men’s fantasies. Clara smirked at my defense of Anaïs. “Oh, that’s right, you know her, don’t you?” “A little.” “You know her?” the provost’s secretary interrupted. “Can you get her to visit our group?”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  After nearly a decade of reporting on teenagers and sex, if I know anything for sure, it’s that parents just have to get over it. I know it’s awkward. I know it’s excruciating. I know it’s unclear how to begin. You may have never even been able to have such conversations with your own spouse or partner. I get that. But this is your chance to do better. Discomfort and embarrassment are not excuses to opt out of parenting (quick tip: talk during physical activity. Or, even better, in the car: you don’t need to look at each other, plus they can’t escape). Despite their eye-rolling, ear-plugging, and other superficial resistance, teenagers consistently say that they do want such information from parents, and that they benefit from it. I know from experience that’s true: boys often told me that our conversations had dramatic, ongoing, sometimes therapeutic impact—and I was a total stranger. So, rather than fixating on how discussing physical and emotional intimacy makes you—and your son—want to sink into the earth, consider the opportunity it creates for a closer relationship, to show him that you are genuinely there for him, to display openness, strength, and perseverance in the face of messy realities. How, after all, will he be able to have those challenging conversations as an adult if you don’t pave the way now? In that spirit, here are a few thoughts to get you started. It’s Not “The Talk” Just as a single “talk” about table manners wouldn’t make your son polite, a single discussion about intimacy won’t ensure good sexual etiquette—particularly since, for parents of sons, the average length of such talks is ten minutes. Parents need to have habitual, brief, often casual conversations that increase in complexity as children grow older. By now it should be abundantly clear that the content of those chats has to range beyond anatomy, reproduction, contraception, and disease protection to encompass what it means to be (and to have) a caring, respectful sexual and romantic partner. An article you happen to read on hookup culture, or the latest swipe apps, or teens sharing nudes can be great discussion fodder. Ask him how it relates to his friend group, what pressures he thinks guys and girls feel in various situations. What are the roles of privacy, vulnerability, intimacy? Whose needs are prioritized? What does coercion or pressure look like? Consent Is Crucial

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  “So first day of summer, I’m in grand old Vine Station with this boy named Justin and we’re at his house watching TV on the couch—and mind you, I’m already dating Jake—actually I’m still dating him, miraculously enough, but Justin is a friend of mine from when I was a kid and so we’re watching TV and literally chatting about the SATs or something, and Justin puts his arm around me and I think, Oh that’s nice, we’ve been friends for so long and this is totally comfortable , and we’re just chatting and then I’m in the middle of a sentence about analogies or something and like a hawk he reaches down and he honks my boob. HONK . A much-too-firm, two- to three-second HONK . And the first thing I thought was Okay, how do I extricate this claw from my boob before it leaves permanent marks? and the second thing I thought was God, I can’t wait to tell Takumi and the Colonel .” The Colonel laughed. I stared, stunned partly by the force of the voice emanating from the petite (but God, curvy) girl and partly by the gigantic stacks of books that lined her walls. Her library filled her bookshelves and then overflowed into waist-high stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly against the walls. If just one of them moved, I thought, the domino effect could engulf the three of us in an asphyxiating mass of literature. “Who’s the guy that’s not laughing at my very funny story?” she asked. “Oh, right. Alaska, this is Pudge. Pudge memorizes people’s last words. Pudge, this is Alaska. She got her boob honked over the summer.” She walked over to me with her hand extended, then made a quick move downward at the last moment and pulled down my shorts. “Those are the biggest shorts in the state of Alabama!” “I like them baggy,” I said, embarrassed, and pulled them up. They had been cool back home in Florida. “So far in our relationship, Pudge, I’ve seen your chicken legs entirely too often,” the Colonel deadpanned. “So, Alaska. Sell us some cigarettes.” And then somehow, the Colonel talked me into paying five dollars for a pack of Marlboro Lights I had no intention of ever smoking. He asked Alaska to join us, but she said, “I have to find Takumi and tell him about The Honk.” She turned to me and asked, “Have you seen him?” I had no idea whether I’d seen Takumi, since I had no idea who he was. I just shook my head. “All right. Meet ya at the lake in a few minutes, then.” The Colonel nodded. — At the edge of the lake, just before the sandy (and, the Colonel told me, fake) beach, we sat down in an Adirondack swing.

• From Action (2014)

  If you live with people other than the ones you’re having sex with, they’re liable to know more of the intricacies of your goings-on than you’d both prefer, and vice versa. However vigilant you think you’re being, there’s always room for surprises here (especially if there’s a meager amount of actual room in your home): It’s possible you’ll be caught in some compromising situation. There are plenty of settings in which you can be witnessed in flagrante delicto. Public sex is the best precisely because of the risk of getting caught… until the rare occasion on which that risk is realized. And if you escape this life without someone interrupting you as you jerk off, it should go in your obituary with the rest of your notable achievements. You could be apprehended in one of these ways when you think no one else is home… and are dead wrong. Or maybe you and your partner are staying in a foreign living space with others for a big event, like a wedding, family reunion, or competitive spell-a-thon, got a little drunk after, and badly misjudged the window of private time you’d have back at the base. In any case: You’ve been caught, and your face is mad red. Regain your composure and maybe even, if you’re a halfway decent actor, pass off your indelicate intertwining as a more chaste entanglement by… • Considering your setting: Is it totally “inappropriate” for you to be boning in this context? Do you know you might harsh someone else’s good time (e.g., are you at a christening or something?). Then maybe don’t take off your clothes, or do so only with extreme caution. I don’t think it’s always bad to have sex in places you shouldn’t, as that will probably make for some of the most memorable sex of your life, but draw the line at having it somewhere that’s actively disrespectful to others (most of the time). • Consider your potential audience: If you find you’re not hurting anyone by being a brazen public-sex-having menace (e.g., a national park ranger is not going to be galled to the gills that you’ve deigned to desecrate a redwood with your grapplings—something no one has ever, ever done before). Many other non-forester people in non-woodland surroundings, if they have senses of humor, will laugh this off, and some might even be like, “Good for you—get yours.” That leans heavily on the age and relationship factors in play here: Your mom, unless she is simultaneously unshakably cool and kind of alarming, boundary-wise, will not duck out like “Soz!” and then text you for the blow-by-blow later on, whereas your best friend might be more inclined in this way.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  This paradox of teaching with no time to learn echoes a famous passage in the Confessions (6.3.3) where Augustine sees Ambrose reading silently and fails to strike up a meaningful conversation with him. Ambrose did not “invent” the practice of silent reading (many think otherwise, but see P. Saenger, Space Between Words [Stanford, 1997]).58. Possidius, Vita 8.59. Augustine reports and tries to defuse the embarrassment at C. Cresc. 3.80.92, C. litt. Pet. 3.19.60. Visits to neighboring cities, including Thubursicu, Cirta, and Thiava (Epp. 38, 43, 44; and cf. Possid. Indic. 6.29) occur almost immediately after Augustine’s ordination.61. We get this image in Conf. 6.6.9: Augustine spots a drunken beggar and observes to his friends that the beggar would achieve happiness more surely and sooner than they.62. Professor Mark Vessey points out to me that there is not much Latin preaching on scripture before Augustine, and it’s not clear just how familiar the sight of a bishop explaining scripture would have been to an African churchgoer first hearing Augustine.63. Ramsay MacMullen, “The Preacher’s Audience,” Journal of Theological Studies 40(1989) 503–11.64. S. Dolbeau 2.2.65. Gr. Chr. 1.1, written in 426.66. Civ. 21.4. At home, Augustine was normally vegetarian (so Possidius Vita 22—meat was only for guests and the sick).67. Ep. 38.168. Gathered in the Latin text with discussion in Vingt-six sermons au peuple d’Afrique (Paris, 2001), Englished as: Augustine, Newly Discovered Sermons, trans. E. Hill (Brooklyn, New York, 1997).69. My interpretations of the Confessions are much more fully presented in my three-volume edition of and commentary on the Confessions (Oxford, 1992; also available in full at www.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/conf).70. Conf. 10.27.38.71. A recently discovered sermon adds vivid detail to the allusion in Conf. 3.3.5: S. Dolbeau 2.5—“I as a lad used to attend vigils when I was a student in this city, and I kept vigil like that, where the women were mixed in and subject to the impudent advances of men, which no doubt on many occasions put the virtue of even chaste people at risk.” Think again how crowded those church buildings were and thus how it made sense for men and women to be separated for the service itself.72. Conf. 8.7.17.73. B. coniug. 5.5 talks about the hypothetical case of a couple who live together, have a child, then separate because the man seeks a better marriage while the woman goes off to live chastely and unmarried—exactly the situation of Augustine and his wife. At that moment (in the 400s) Augustine is harsh enough on himself (calling the man in that case an adulterer) and generous enough to the woman (declining to accuse her of the same sin).74. J. Gaarder, That Same Flower (New York, 1998).75. S.N.C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Mediaeval China (Manchester, U.K., 1985; rev. ed. Tübingen, 1992), is the best history of the sect. Much important research continues.76. Augustine regularly assumes that landowners will take sexual advantage of their slaves: S. 224.3, 152.5.6, 9.2–4, 132.4, 392.2; Io. ev. tr. 4ff; Io. ep. tr.

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

  “There’s a weekend in September when I have the whole weekend free. Maybe you can arrange not to have your kids that weekend and we can do something?” “Sure, great,” he says. “Hang on, let me see which weekend it is,” I say, scrolling through the calendar on my phone. When I give him the dates, he nods but doesn’t note it in his own calendar. “OK, we’ll figure it out,” he says. On the walk back to his car after dinner, I text #3 to tell him I am running late and will head over soon. #4 drives me back to his house, opens the front door and we head inside. I assume I am back inside for a quickie before I head out and I gather my long sundress in my hands and start climbing the staircase. “Oh sweetie, no,” he says, stopping me dead in my tracks. “I’m sorry, but it’s late and I have to be up early.” Luckily I am still facing forward and he is behind me, so he cannot see me wince in embarrassment at my overly forward misstep. His addressing me as “sweetie” is the worst part – condescending, like I’m a child trying to stay up past her bedtime. “Oh, OK, no problem, sorry, I just assumed,” I say, hastily thanking him for dinner before making my exit. Something between us just turned but I cannot figure out what exactly or why, and I’m distracted anyway by trying to assuage myself of the guilt I feel as I set my GPS to guide me the half-hour drive to #3’s house. Am I going to now sleep with #3 too? Is that obligatory? Two men inside me within hours of each other? I don’t feel dirty exactly – I mean, I did shower, after all, using copious amounts of #4’s daughter’s coconut body wash – but I do feel deceitful. I’m “all honesty all the time”, but I certainly can’t tell this kind, gentle man who I’ve been texting all day long for the past few weeks how bottomless I really am, how deep my need is right now that it can’t be met by just one man. What is too much? I wonder. Is this empowering or an indication that I’m unfillable, that the hole inside of me is so vast that I could throw more men into the mix and it would be like tossing Band-Aids at a life-threatening injury? I let myself in through the screen door and find #3 in his kitchen, cleaning up after a late dinner. I sit at the counter and we talk while his cats jump on the counter only to get gently nudged off, over and over again. He tells me about his day and a meeting he had with a client. I feel a twinge of sadness at the feeling of cozy domesticity this scene elicits, two adults catching up at the end of their day.

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

  Hey, has anyone ever told you that you look like that actress, what’s her name?” he asks, eyebrows furrowed as he tries to recall the name. “Sarah Jessica Parker? I get that a lot,” I say. “No, not her,” he says. “Elaine from Seinfeld ?” I ask. “I get that a lot too.” “No, no. I was totally in love with her when I was a teenager. She was in The Karate Kid and Cocktail . Elisabeth Shue!” he calls out, finally remembering. When I shake my head no, he calls over the waiter, asking him, “Doesn’t she look exactly like the actress Elisabeth Shue?” The waiter studies me for a long moment, tilting his head and flicking his eyes from my head down my body. “Nah,” he finally says with indifference, “she just looks like another white girl with curly hair,” and walks away. “Ouch. One man thinks I’m an ’80s film goddess, the other thinks I’m just another white girl,” I say. Scott pays the bill and we head outside to the muggy day. He says he is having such a great time that he doesn’t want the date to end and suggests a walk to the East River. He chivalrously offers to carry my tote bag, which is weighed down with two newspapers and a hefty 620-page hardcover novel that I schlep around for subway reading. The path along the river is wide and mostly empty, giving children and dogs ample room to run. A woman walks in our direction with a large, excited dog that suddenly bounds over to me so that I stop short, startled, and back up a few steps. The dog is more playful than menacing but still, for me, intimidating. The woman does not apologize, if anything scowling at me for not greeting her dog warmly. “See, this is what I hate about women with dogs. You don’t have a dog, do you?” he asks. I shake my head. “She let that dog run right up to you. Not everyone wants a dog getting so close to them, but so many women with dogs just let the dogs lead them,” he says. I explain the origin of my fear, that once I was jogging on a quiet country road and a dog came charging at me. I stood still, but every time I started to edge forward, it would get closer to me, baring its teeth. Finally, I heard a voice down the road and the dog went running, but ever since then, whenever a dog comes at me like that, I get nervous. “But why do you refer specifically to women with dogs?” I ask. “Don’t you think it could just as easily be a man with a dog?” “No,” he says definitively. “Single women with dogs are like mothers with children, they think everyone loves their dogs.” “Wait, how did single women get dragged into this?” I ask.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  And I went, it's a bit cold in here. And they, get your trousers off. Well, the first assistant director, when we did the shot, walked off the movie. He was so outraged. Subversive stuff. This title of being naked the most of any young actor of that period, was thrust upon me. I did not go seeking it. - Any venereal disease? - No sir! - Rats? - No sir! - Lice? - No sir! - Go over there for the bath! - Yes sir! - It was just that I came along at the very moment that the floodgates opened, and they decided to allow nudity in movies. And about bloody time, it was ridiculous. I mean it was sort of the line that was never crossed. When that was breached, holy God it was breached. We all came rushing through. - If you haven't seen a Russ Meyer film, I would say you're in for a treat. His films were his own genre. - He's such a funny guy, he's just like so dry. He's like well, real gruff, like well she's a lot smaller than most of my girls, but maybe the women will be able to relate better. - Vixen is played by Erika Gavin. - Nudity was definitely essential in portraying who this character is. - And she's a nymphomaniac, and all these different people kind of come in, and they meet her. And she wants to have sex with every one of them. It includes her brother. - Remember how you used to wash my back, Judd? And how we used to cuddle in the tub together? - We quit doing that when you turned 12. You said yourself, it wasn't right. - I don't care what I said then, Judd. This is now. - She's just filled with lust. - Like during the scene with myself and Vincene, Russ was down on the floor, give it to her, yeah, pounding the floor like this, like just pounding. He was laying on the floor pounding. And then he goes cut, lunch. I gotta change my shorts. [folk music] - The late '60s, early '70s was when everything really changed. After Woodstock, when everybody was rained on, and was pretty much naked anyway. The floodgates began to open. - In fact, "The Graduate," and, "Easy Rider," kind of opened the door, and all the movies that came before looked so old fashioned in comparison. - Of course American actresses did not like to do nudity. They thought that if they did, their careers would kind of be tainted in some way. - It wasn't whether or not you're gonna do the nudity. It was when you were gonna finally do it. - European actresses don't give a damn. I mean are you kidding, no way. Its just everything's off if it's part of the, the integral part of the script.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  - Yeah, and I love you too. - And I love you too. - And she finally manipulates the pressure off of her on to Cathy Burns's character who's the girl. So it ends up being a shifting of power. It's like filming a fight, when there's a rape scene going on. It's like how are we gonna choreograph this? I especially didn't feel like a pioneer when I'm over a close up of a handheld camera on two two by fours on a slant, with Frank Perry yelling hump harder in my ear through a bull horn. Didn't quite think of myself as a pioneer. I didn't even really think about the nudity when I got the job. Being young, I was willing to do whatever it took to make a great film. People seem to forget we lived in a very different time back then. People didn't ask questions. You're either gonna do something or not. There were no rules. My uncle Alan, about six months later, said to me I took your Aunt Levira to see your film. I look up and there's 20 feet of your ass up on the screen. We used to change those diapers, you know. I was never sexually thought of after I did, "Willard," for about 15 years. I kissed that rat, and that was the end of me kissing any leading ladies for quite a number of years. [calm music] - When Jack Valenti had first created the ratings in the late 1960s, he had not copyrighted or trademarked the X rating. He said, basically, you want to self rate yourself X, without paying us a rating fee, you can go ahead and do that. This seemed like a reasonable solution at the time. But by the early 1970s we had films like, "Deep Throat," coming out that proudly self rated themselves X. Not just X but triple X, and that bragged about it. - Once the the pornographers realized that there was a rating that they could co-opt for themselves, that wasn't copyrighted, and meant adult, they were after all the adult film industry. And so I think they felt that it behooved them to slap the X on their product as well. - By the early to mid '70s there came to be a confusion in a lot of people's minds. What's an X rated movie? Is it hardcore pornography like, "Deep Throat," "The Devil and Miss Jones," "Behind the Green Door?" Or is it a Hollywood adult film like, "Midnight Cowboy," and, "A Clockwork Orange?" ♪ Singing in the rain just singing in the rain ♪ ♪ Just singing in the rain in the rain ♪ - Now there's a few things in, "Clockwork Orange," Just cutting this cat suit, and that was enough to sell that, you didn't need to do anymore. I mean just to say, viddy well little brother, viddy well. I mean, that's all you have to say.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  - [Announcer] "Caged Heat." - Your guess is as good as mine as to how I got that part in, "Caged Heat." We have a violent sorority here. [shirt tearing] And very strong ways of dealing with it. - You can't do this to me. [electricity crackling] [groaning in pain] - I mean yeah, it was rough. For some reason it's like people that go to watch women wrestlers, they love seeing all those shower fights, which is where the nudity would come in. The shower scene was really treacherous, because of the fact that there was no hot water. It was freezing cold, and here we were naked. - "Alice in Wonderland," is the innocent blonde girl who goes into a trippy psychedelic world of talking animals. - Hey wait, I'd like to talk to you. - I can't wait when I'm late. I'm supposed to be at the Queen's party at 3:30. If I'm late it could mean my [mimics cutting] The Queen's a bitch, tootaloo. - And blood thirsty Queens. - You misunderstand me, doll. I don't want to cut off your head. I want you to give me some head. I think that that fantasy world was her journey into sexual discovery. She was a lot like me. She was young, naive, and I could relate to that. Mr. Rabbit, wait for me. - [Mike] And she's incredibly beautiful, incredibly radiant. - I remember when I got the part, I was so excited. Like, oh my gosh, I got my first film. Right, yay. But I didn't have an agent, I didn't have an attorney. I signed a contract, I don't even know what I was signing. I shouldn't be doing this. If I had issues with the nudity when I read the script, I don't remember. It was a role, I was playing a character. And the character needed to be naked. - If it feels good, it is good. Learn to trust yourself. - I grew up in La Mirada, and there was the La Mirada Drive-in. There was a spot where you could see the drive-in movie. - It looks nice. - It's very nice. - Indubitably nice. - And there were other kids there too. And one of the kids was like, I'm gonna bring binoculars next time. I was like, oh genius. And I remember my parents were like, oh what do you want for Christmas? I want a pair of binoculars. - When I was a kid, a teenager, we'd sneak into the drive-in and you'd see an R rated movie. You expected, you demanded nudity. There better be some gratuitous nudity here. Just all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the actress would drop her top. And is it something that would play as well now, as it did back then? Probably not. - And then, "Alice in Wonderland," got an R rated release.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  - She takes nudity, and intimacy, and the messiness of being a young person trying to figure it out. And she looks at it through a couple different angles. - It's strange, you have to tell them exactly what they're doing, where the hands, where they're touching what. Because it's almost like, more than in other scenes, they need the permission to do the things. And then to see a naked guy for the first time, would be quite a freak out for a young girl. But as it turned out, I was not allowed to do that. And they said if you have that shot, you'll get an X rating. When I saw the scene cut together, it did not occur to me like oh that's an X rated scene. To me X rated meant porn. So we had to blow it up. So just like in every other film, you saw a guy who's topless, which is nothing essentially. - I think I came. Didn't you feel it? - Yeah, I guess I did. - So it was cut way down. And they said see, it's better now. Like we improved your scene. And, like thanks a lot. - I don't know if we could make it now. Back then some of the objections might be more from the right wing, kind of conservative Christian side. Now, the objection might be more from the left which is, well, if someone's having sex, someone's being exploited. - I mean distinguishing between essential nudity, and exploitation nudity is really tricky, because sometimes they clash even in the same film. - To me the greatest nude scene in the history of movies is Phoebe Cates in, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." Judge Reinhold then steps into the bathroom, takes a peek out the window at Phoebe Cates in this luminous red bikini. [dramatic music] - Hi Brad. You know how cute I always thought you were. - You know, I feel kind of uncomfortable about the whole thing because I didn't want to be, oh I'm the one that's insisting that she do a topless scene, but it was in the script, and it was a scene that was needed. Because we wanted to show the big disconnect between what the fantasy is, and then the humiliation of it not being that. - Oh, wait just a minute. - And I really told her she had to talk to the producer, Art Linson, who handled it. - Doesn't anybody fucking knock anymore? - I think the scene works, and I think it helps the humor of what happens to Judge Reinhold after that. - [Announcer] What they're teaching in private school isn't private anymore. Especially at the Cherryvale Academy for Girls. - Are are feeling romantic now, my darling? - "Private School," is a classic bawdy farce plot. Three guys dress in drag to sneak into the girls academy.