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 History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  Was this due to modesty? Possibly. For, as much as we like to credit the Greeks with a great liberty of morals, the representation of sexual acts that they suggest in their written works—and even in their erotic literature—seems to have been characterized by a good deal of reserve,* despite the impression one gets from the entertainments they staged or from certain iconographic representations that have been rediscovered.3 In any case, one does sense that Xenophon, Aristotle, and later Plutarch would not have thought it decent to dispense the sort of presumptive and pragmatic advice on sexual relations with one’s lawful wife that the Christian authors lavishly distributed on the subject of conjugal pleasures. They were not prepared, as the directors of conscience would be, to regulate the process of demands and refusals, of first caresses, of the modalities of union, of the pleasures one experienced and the conclusion they should properly be given. But there was a positive reason for this attitude that we may perceive retrospectively as “reticence” or “reserve.” It was due to their conception of the aphrodisia, to the kind of questioning they directed to them, which was not oriented in the least toward the search for their profound nature, their canonical forms, or their secret potential.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Dot wore a blue-and-gray crocheted sweater over a thin crepe de chine blouse, pants of gray flannel, black velvet beret. No makeup. She was petite; there was something Katharine Ross–cherubic, unthreatening, wholesome about her. She appeared both willing and unsullied in the brute arena of erotic love. She seemed to take no notice of how her guests, the Hoods, were turned out, and she couldn’t have seen the traces of a recent disagreement in their eager hellos. —Ben, Elena! Wonderful! Wonderful. So wonderful to see you. She swallowed the last of the celery canoe. With an adolescent sexual pout, Dot kissed the air near Ben’s ear and crushed Elena in a manic hug. Then she seized the simple, white salad bowl that had been sitting on the table in the front hall. It was sinister in its simplicity. She thrust it at them. —Would you care to play? The enormity of the bowl took a moment to dawn on Ben. At first, he thought it was a joke, a joke with a visual gag—Did you hear the one about Spiro Agnew’s accountant? HA! HA! HA! HA! What did Mary Jo Kopechne’s mom say to Jack Ruby? HA! HA! HA! HA!—at which he might laugh agreeably without any comprehension of the punch line. But when he examined the contents of the bowl, he understood. Swimming there like uncataloged water bugs were a dozen or more sets of house keys. They chimed agreeably as Dorothy shifted herself from one pump to the other, and their sundry key rings—a yellow slab of plastic with the word MOM embossed on it in red, a Caucasian troll doll with magenta hair, a miniature can of Löwenbraü beer—caught the light like flea-market prizes. Dorothy examined Ben and Elena—Ben could feel this. She watched their faces set the way a dentist searches for the repressed shudder of discomfort. —Strictly volunteer, of course. You can put your coats right in the library if you like. —Oh, damn, Elena said, smiling herself. Oh, I’ve left the— —You’ve— —In the car, Elena said. —Oh, yeah, Ben said. Yeah, we’ll be right back, Dot. Just as soon as the Hoods had arrived, they were gone. Cramped in the front seat of the Firebird, windshield fogged, defroster on high, in silence. Parked in the driveway. Surrounded by the wheels of the neighborhood—Cadillac Eldorados, BMW 2002s, and then an AMC Matador, a Plymouth Duster. Beetles, Beetles, and more Beetles, that design created with slave labor. Cars creeping into the Halfords’ turnaround and then thinking better of it, thinking better of getting stuck in the bad weather to come, creeping out through the slush and onto Valley Road to park up on the embankment. The low chortle of expensive engines idling lazily. A little history. The key party came into existence several years before, in a more freewheeling environment. This is one hypothesis. It came of age with hippie erotica and bohemian orgies in cramped apartments owned by poorly groomed professors.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I feel good about myself as a sexual partner. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I don’t like the idea of getting turned on by strangers. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I don’t want to risk becoming reliant on porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable using porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] My life is too busy to include doing porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I would not want to offend or emotionally hurt an intimate partner by using porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] It is important to me to be honest with others. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] Porn is contrary to how I think about sex. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I enjoy creating sexual fantasies on my own. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I enjoy masturbation more when it does not involve porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] Porn leaves me feeling sexually dissatisfied. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] My best sexual experiences have been with someone I cared about. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I enjoy being fully present during sex. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I don’t want to risk getting caught using porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I dislike the porn industry and do not want to support it. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I do not like how I feel when I use porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I have effective ways of dealing with life stresses that don’t involve porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I do not like having an orgasm while watching or reading porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I prefer using porn with a partner rather than alone. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I value being truthful and open with people I love. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] Porn does not belong in homes or workplaces. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I think children should be protected from exposure to porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I think of porn as an “adolescent” sexual activity. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I find porn overstimulating. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] I have better things to do than look at porn. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] The older I get, the less interested in porn I have become. [image file=image_rsrc359.jpg] Total score You may want to repeat this exercise every six months to reevaluate the factors that help prevent you from becoming overly attached to porn. GETTING DEEPER INTO PORN Now that we’ve discussed the factors that can slow down or break up a relationship with porn, let’s turn and look at those that could increase our involvement with porn. Corey, a thirty-four-year-old computer analyst whom we heard from in the previous chapters, became increasingly involved with pornography after his early childhood use. Like Jack, Corey grew up in a small, rural community and didn’t get into porn heavily until after he left home. But, as you will see, that’s where the similarity ends. Corey’s upbringing and involvements with porn were quite different than Jack’s, and as a result of the many accelerating factors Corey had present in his life, he ended up with a much more involved relationship with porn that caused serious problems in his life. COREY’S STORY

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  And it helped the vacuum-cleaner business move units. The seating unit had come to replace the couch in the vanguard of living room accommodations. A minimalist vocabulary was evident in these ingenious designs, reflecting the influence of simple, primal iconography in sculpture and architecture. Single-color stylings decorated sleek, curvaceous, cornerless shapes. The modular pieces of these seating units could be easily moved and rearranged in a variety of amoebic configurations. The traditional couch—and with it the loveseat, the divan, and the chaise longue—was in eclipse. The new seating units were often fashioned from polyurethane foam, a cheap, easy-to-manufacture, artificial filling. The Furniture Council of the Society of the Plastics Industry even presented a Poly Award for the groundbreaking adaptation of polymers. In 1973 it went to Donald A. Geddes, editor of American Furniture Design , who was named Polymer Man of the Year. Benjamin Hood reflected on fashion only briefly upon taking his wife’s hand—noticing in passing her ring and the raw, red crevices that surrounded it. She needed lotion. Passing across the Halfords’ threshold, into the foyer with its large standing sculpture—a melted I-beam twisted into a sort of anguished helix—catching a glimpse of the clustering and valent neighbors arranged in the corridor, Hood realized the truth of the matter: his ascot was no longer in fashion. In fact, sweaters , furry and dense and of Netherlandish origin, were numerous in the front hall at Dorothy and Robert Halford’s. There were a few old tweed jackets, but no ascots. Had Hood been in a mind to comfort himself, he might have approved of his ample shirt collar, spread wide on the wings of his lapels. But how had he managed to get out the door wearing the ascot? How had he let himself? Hood didn’t wear three-inch cork heels or white loafers. And he didn’t wear his hair long or wear double-breasted suits or pleated pants. His gesture toward what he saw as a more flamboyant presentation had been these ascots, fashioned of a silk he liked to feel against his neck, against spots irritated by his Wilkinson double-bonded razor. But these ascots were no longer appropriate. Only months before, Benjamin Hood had lived in the certainty that his dress was in accord with the prevailing climatic conditions. But now, just as quickly, he was solitary in his garb. He dressed poorly. He disgraced himself. His wife looked fine, in her slacks and Hush Puppies, but he disgraced her company. Of women’s fashion at the Halfords’, Hood might have noticed ankle-length skirts, dignified and elegant, though there were also skirts at the knee and the midcalf. Here, too, sweaters were the accessory of choice, reflecting a polyphony of styles—sweaters of cashmere, mohair, and shetland. Sweaters, sweaters, sweaters. Sweaters, and pearls. Dorothy Halford overtook them in the foyer. With a free hand, she waved a little celery canoe at them. It was loaded down with an aqua-colored dip.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (1976)

  At the level of discourses and their domains, however, practically the opposite phenomenon occurred. There was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex—specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward. Here I am thinking not so much of the probable increase in “illicit” discourses, that is, discourses of infraction that crudely named sex by way of insult or mockery of the new code of decency; the tightening up of the rules of decorum likely did produce, as a countereffect, a valorization and intensification of indecent speech. But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail. Consider the evolution of the Catholic pastoral and the sacrament of penance after the Council of Trent. Little by little, the nakedness of the questions formulated by the confession manuals of the Middle Ages, and a good number of those still in use in the seventeenth century, was veiled. One avoided entering into that degree of detail which some authors, such as Sanchez or Tamburini, had for a long time believed indispensable for the confession to be complete: description of the respective positions of the partners, the postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise moment of pleasure—an entire painstaking review of the sexual act in its very unfolding. Discretion was advised, with increasing emphasis. The greatest reserve was counseled when dealing with sins against purity: “This matter is similar to pitch, for, however one might handle it, even to cast it far from oneself, it sticks nonetheless, and always soils.”1 And later, Alfonso de’ Liguori prescribed starting—and possibly going no further, especially when dealing with children—with questions that were “roundabout and vague.”2

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  If I see a man’s eyes alighting – even just for half a second – on the place where I deduce that my bra is straining the buttons of my blouse, or more usually, if I am talking to someone whose eyes fixed on me are apparently following a train of thought unrelated to the one I am informing him about, I always take refuge in exactly the same modest behaviour as in that first examination by the grandfather. For the same reason you won’t find any low cut or tight-fitting dresses in my wardrobe. This modesty extends even to those around me. If I were sitting on a sofa in someone’s sitting room next to a woman in very revealing clothes, I would instinctively pull down the hem of my own skirt and hunch over my breasts. In this sort of situation, my discomfiture derives as much from the impression that, by association, it is my own anatomy that she is revealing, as from my tendency – described earlier – to break down the barriers of sexual contact from the word go; by adjusting my clothes, I am stopping myself from burying my hands between the two half exposed breasts and revealing them in their entirety. And yet I myself wore no underwear at all for many years. I can’t remember why I gave up using it. It was definitely not to follow the feminists who wanted us all to burn our bras, because I never adhered to that philosophy, but it was perhaps in the same spirit of rejecting accessories of seduction. Obviously, the results could have the opposite of the desired effect, breasts which can be seen moving freely under clothes are just as tantalising – although, more ‘naturally’ – as those shown off to best effect by a bra. I could at least feel free from any suspicion of having a battle plan for my conquests. I passed up on knickers in the same way. For how many years was I compelled, for reasons of hygiene, to clean the crotch of my trousers every evening, when it would have been much quicker to put a pair of knickers in the washing machine? I just thought it was much simpler to slip all my other clothes on. This tendency was dictated to me by a minimalist, almost functionalist principle: the principle according to which a free body need not weigh itself down with ornamentation, as long as it is ready without the need for any preliminaries, no shedding of lace or manipulating of hooks. To recap, I don’t like it when a man undresses me with his gaze but, once you get down to undressing for real, then in might as well be in one swift move.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Which I am now, because I could work maybe four days a week, but the fifth day I get the runs so bad I’m glued to the bathroom floor.” This was tenable for his part-time gig at Howard Brown but not for the administrative assistant work that used to pay the bills and supply the useless insurance. “But the runs aren’t a disability category, you know? So Asher’s finding me this junior litigator, I guess? And here’s what he has to prove at this hearing. He has to show that I can’t do any unskilled sedentary labor in the national economy. Like, the entire nation. And the fucking examples they use! You want to hear the examples?” Yale was exhausted just listening to Katsu, but sure, he wanted to hear. A drag queen passed on stilts in an elaborate Statue of Liberty costume, all green sparkles and gauze. “I shit you not. Nut sorter . That’s not a euphemism, by the way. Bowling ball polisher. Also not a euphemism! Silverware wrapper. Like, sitting there wrapping silverware in napkins. Everyone wants their spoons handled by a guy with the AIDS runs, right? Wafer topper. I don’t even know what that means. The last one—for real—is fishhook inspector in Alaska . They don’t care that I can’t get to Alaska and I could never get this job. They care that it’s a job in the national economy . So yeah, my survival now depends on my proving I can’t top wafers.” Here came a bunch of guys in leather, a poster that read “Bound Up With Pride!” Some kind of garden club followed. “But I’m gonna get in on whatever clinical trials I can, meantime.” “And Asher’s helping,” Yale said. “Yeah. Asher. He can sort my nuts whenever he wants, am I right?” Yale felt his face catch fire. “Oh come on, you’d let him polish your bowling balls!” Yale attempted a noncommittal laugh. And here, ridiculously, before he could properly recover, was Asher’s AFC float. Here was Asher, waving like a politician. Yale waved, but he didn’t catch Asher’s eye. Three guys on unicycles came next, cutoffs and denim vests. A series of aldermen and state senators in convertibles, most looking pained. The Out Loud float. A red flatbed truck. Yale took a small step back so Katsu couldn’t see his face, so he didn’t have to worry what his eyes and mouth were doing. Posterboard signs all over it: “Fight Out Loud for Safer Sex!” and “Out Loud Says / Cover Your Head!” Six beautiful shirtless men—Yale didn’t recognize them, except for Dwight the copy editor—angling cucumbers from their crotches, slowly rolling rubbers onto them. Peeling them off, doing it again. Opening new packets with their teeth, milking the crowd for cheers. From the side of the truck, Gloria and Rafael threw rubbers from a bucket. He couldn’t see Charlie. And then suddenly he could. He had shaved his beard.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  The rich, he said, would never be as rich as they are nor the poor as poor if the latter were scattered as farmers over the land. It is their congregating in large numbers in the cities, he said, that makes possible the extensive industries and commercial enterprises which enslave them, and which build up the great fortunes of the rich. Belittled his own novels. "Have you read my book What To Do ?" he suddenly asked me. I was obliged to answer "No." I have read it since, and several times, and profitably, too, but, though I had read quite a number of his books before I met him, it was exceedingly embarrassing to be questioned concerning the particular book which I had not read. Not to appear altogether ignorant of his writings, I proceeded to tell him that I had read his "War and Peace," "Anna Karénina," etc., etc., and started telling him how much I admired them, when, with an impatient look and gesture, he interrupted me, saying "These works are all chaff, chaff, play-toys, amusing gilded youth and idle women. It is my serious writings which I want the world to read. I have ceased publishing novels because readers do not know the meaning of them. They look for entertainment and not instruction, and even though I write only for the uplift of man, for the purification of society, they, like the hawk, seek out only the carrion. They neither recognize themselves under the fictitious name I adopt, nor do they see their share in the wrongs and vices and injustices depicted, neither do they perceive that it is for their co-operation that the novelist appeals when he pleads for the kingdom of heaven on earth." Spoke of his book What To Do . Returning to his book What To Do , he said, "even if you have not read it, you have read the Prophets, and having read them, you know my teachings. The book is an appeal for pity for the submerged, for justice for the wronged, for liberation of the oppressed and persecuted, and for the application of the only remedy—a return to the simple life and labor on the soil. As our subsistence comes from the soil so can justice and right and happiness come from it alone. Help can never come from wealth, for wealth is the creator of poverty and inequality and injustice. It can not come from the government for that exists largely for the purpose of keeping up inequality and injustice. It cannot come from the church, for she fears the Czar more than she fears God. It cannot even come from the schools which tend to train a class of people who think themselves too good for manual labor." Saw solution of Jewish problem only in agriculture.

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  Now that you know more about having constructive conversations, it’s time to talk about sex. If you’d prefer having a root canal than talking openly about sex, you’re not alone. In the years I’ve been a marriage therapist, it never ceases to amaze me how many people avoid talking about this intimate subject. I’ve told you before that I’ve seen couples who’ve been married for decades, and the thought of discussing their sexual preferences sends shivers up their spines. They don’t share what they like about sex. They don’t talk about their disappointments. They don’t offer instructions or coach each other. And they don’t give feedback when their spouses hit the spot. Some people don’t even get louder or moan when their spouses are “getting warmer.” They never share their fantasies. People shy away from discussing sex for lots of different reasons. Many are embarrassed, even mortified. It feels far too personal. No one taught us to talk about sex when we were kids. Although sex education is an integral part of most children’s education these days, that’s not so for many of us who are now adults. When we were kids, schools thought talking about the birds and the bees was our parents’ responsibility. But who taught our parents? Certainly not their parents. So for the vast majority of people, the word on sex was mum. Another reason couples don’t discuss sex is that we have this crazy notion that our spouses are just supposed to know what pleases us. We shouldn’t have to talk about having good sex; it should just happen. But good sex doesn’t just happen. Since no two people are alike, no single formula works for everybody. What one person finds arousing and exciting is a pure turn-off to another. If you want your spouse to know how you feel and what you enjoy, you have to tell him or her. Leave mind reading to the soothsayers. But perhaps you don’t feel comfortable guiding your spouse because you’re afraid you’ll hurt his or her feelings. If you continue to keep your sexual turn-ons a secret, you’ll be miserable, and your marriage will falter. But there’s no bigger hurt than hearing your spouse say, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you anymore.” If you don’t keep your passion alive, it will be hard to stay in love over the long haul. So, don’t hold back. But use the tips you’ll learn in this chapter. They’ll really help.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  All the papers were unsigned, and it was a point of honor not to peep at the handwriting; but, despite this, we almost always guessed the author, either by the style, by his self-consciousness, or else by the strained indifference of his expression. When I was a boy, and for the first time wrote a set of French verses for the letter-box, I was so shy when they were read that I hid under the table, and sat there the whole evening until I was pulled out by force. For a long time after, I wrote no more, and was always fonder of hearing other people's compositions read than my own. All the events of our life at Yasnaya Polyana found their echo in one way or another in the letter-box, and no one was spared, not even the grown-ups. All our secrets, all our love-affairs, all the incidents of our complicated life were revealed in the letter-box, and both household and visitors were good-humoredly made fun of. Unfortunately, much of the correspondence has been lost, but bits of it have been preserved by some of us in copies or in memory. I cannot recall everything interesting that there was in it, but here are a few of the more interesting things from the period of the eighties. THE LETTER-BOXTable of ContentsTHE old fogy continues his questions. Why, when women or old men enter the room, does every well-bred person not only offer them a seat, but give them up his own? Why do they make Ushakof or some Servian officer who comes to pay a visit necessarily stay to tea or dinner? Why is it considered wrong to let an older person or a woman help you on with your overcoat? And why are all these charming rules considered obligatory toward others, when every day ordinary people come, and we not only do not ask them to sit down or to stop to dinner or spend the night or render them any service, but would look on it as the height of impropriety? Where do those people end to whom we are under these obligations? By what characteristics are the one sort distinguished from the others? And are not all these rules of politeness bad, if they do not extend to all sorts of people? And is not what we call politeness an illusion, and a very ugly illusion? LYOFF TOLSTOY. Question: Which is the most "beastly plague," a cattle-plague case for a farmer, or the ablative case for a school-boy? LYOFF TOLSTOY. Answers are requested to the following questions: Why do Ustyusha, Masha, Alyona, Peter, etc., have to bake, boil, sweep, empty slops, wait at table, while the gentry have only to eat, gobble, quarrel, make slops, and eat again? LYOFF TOLSTOY. My Aunt Tanya, when she was in a bad temper because the coffee-pot had been spilt or because she had been beaten at croquet, was in the habit of sending every one to the devil.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Amos and I set out to examine whether I was the only fool or a member of a majority of fools, by testing whether researchers selected for mathematical expertise would make similar mistakes. We developed a questionnaire that described realistic research situations, including replications of successful experiments. It asked the researchers to choose sample sizes, to assess the risks of failure to which their decisions exposed them, and to provide advice to hypothetical graduate students planning their research. Amos collected the responses of a group of sophisticated participants (including authors of two statistical textbooks) at a meeting of the Society of Mathematical Psychology. The results were straightforward: I was not the only fool. Every one of the mistakes I had made was shared by a large majority of our respondents. It was evident that even the experts paid insufficient attention to sample size. Amos and I called our first joint article “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers.” We explained, tongue-in-cheek, that “intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well.” We also included a strongly worded recommendation that researchers regard their “statistical intuitions with proper suspicion and replace impression formation by computation whenever possible.” A Bias of Confidence Over Doubt In a telephone poll of 300 seniors, 60% support the president. If you had to summarize the message of this sentence in exactly three words, what would they be? Almost certainly you would choose “elderly support president.” These words provide the gist of the story. The omitted details of the poll, that it was done on the phone with a sample of 300, are of no interest in themselves; they provide background information that attracts little attention. Your summary would be the same if the sample size had been different. Of course, a completely absurd number would draw your attention (“a telephone poll of 6 [or 60 million] elderly voters…”). Unless you are a professional, however, you may not react very differently to a sample of 150 and to a sample of 3,000. That is the meaning of the statement that “people are not adequately sensitive to sample size.” The message about the poll contains information of two kinds: the story and the source of the story. Naturally, you focus on the story rather than on the reliability of the results. When the reliability is obviously low, however, the

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  Diamond combs through theories on the biological roots of sexual orientation, studies of genetics and of prenatal hormone exposure. Though no one yet agrees on a clear biological basis for sexual orientation, she notes that female homosexuality seems to have different paths of causation from male homosexuality. If this is so, it makes sense, then, that same-sex sexuality would unfold differently for women and men over their lifespans—and not only because of biology, but because women and men encounter wildly differing social and cultural contexts as their sexuality develops.49 Among those who are not heterosexual, Diamond found few features of development that were not differentiated by gender. It’s common in studies of sexual orientation for gay men to report feeling “different” in childhood, as well as having early attractions to other men. But in Diamond’s study, fewer non-heterosexual women recall similar experiences. Women also show greater variability in the age at which they notice same-sex attractions, question their sexuality, pursue sex with other women, and first identify as non-heterosexual. And not all women are equally fluid. The same way that women might have different baseline orientations, Diamond found them differently sensitive to situations that could lead to attraction,50 differently impacted by outside factors that could, depending on one’s disposition, speed up or slow down the expression of fluidity.51 In addition to the passages I’d sent to Matthew, I texted a barrage of Diamond quotes to a gay male friend. I knew he felt he was born gay, but he’d been sympathetic to my experience. This reinforces an idea that I have, he wrote back, which is that sexuality and gender are highly individualistic in many ways. We try to make everyone who is “queer” fit some idea of what we think that means. But queerness should really make us realize that the common thread is only that we are all unique. And our sexuality is personal and specific, and it can evolve, just as we do in non-sexual ways. Whatever a person makes of Diamond’s binary read on gender, her findings feel necessary. Rigorous data about female sexuality is still rare, and young women need and deserve accurate information. “Many of the women in this study,” Diamond writes, “expressed embarrassment when explaining changes in their sexual feelings, relationships, or identities because they had internalized the prevailing cultural message that such experiences were highly atypical.”52 Many non-heterosexual women end up feeling “doubly deviant, their experiences reflecting neither mainstream societal expectations nor perceived norms of ‘typical’ gay experience.”53

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  Among the Kaitish and the Warramunga, a man of this totem is not allowed to drink water freely; he may not take it up himself; he may receive it only from the hands of a third party who must belong to the phratry of which he is not a member. [376] The complexity of this procedure and the embarrassment which results from it are still another proof that access to the sacred thing is not free. This same rule is applied in certain central tribes every time that the totem is eaten, whether from necessity or any other cause. It should also be added that when this formality is not possible, that is, when a man is alone or with members of his own phratry only, he may, on necessity, do without an intermediary. It is clear that the prohibition is susceptible of various moderations. Nevertheless, it rests upon ideas so strongly ingrained in the mind that it frequently survives its original cause for being. We have seen that in all probability, the different clans of a phratry are only subdivisions of one original clan which has been dismembered. So there was a time when all the clans, being welded together, had the same totem; consequently, wherever the souvenir of this common origin is not completely effaced, each clan continues to feel itself united to the others and to consider that their totems are not completely foreign to it. For this reason an individual may not eat freely of the totems held by the different clans of the phratry of which he is a member; he may touch them only if the forbidden plant or animal is given him by a member of the other phratry. [377] Another survival of the same sort is the one concerning the maternal totem. There are strong reasons for believing that at first, the totem was transmitted in the uterine line. Therefore, wherever descent in the paternal line has been introduced, this probably took place only after a long period, during which the opposite principle was applied and the child had the totem of his mother along with all the restrictions attached to it. Now in certain tribes where the child inherits the paternal totem to-day, some of the interdictions which originally protected the totem of his mother still survive: he cannot eat it freely. [378] In the present state of affairs, however, there is no longer anything corresponding to this prohibition. To this prohibition of eating is frequently added that of killing the totem, or picking it, when it is a plant. [379] However, here also there are exceptions and tolerations.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  If a high ideal is working well for you in other areas—in Josh’s case, high standards for his restaurant—you’re fine. This is the nontoxic version of perfectionism called positive striving. As opposed to feeling like a failure after inevitably falling short of perfectionistic standards, positive striving involves high but not unattainable standards, plus the striver feels satisfied and happy when those standards are reached (insert Snoopy-style happy dance here). * * * Eventually, Rosie was showing up to activities sponsored by her program and even initiated a few get-togethers. But she skipped out on anything that wasn’t a movie or dinner. No pub crawls—there might be darts or pool involved. No bowling. And she would rather have died than gone to karaoke. She had worked her way into the periphery of grad school social life, but because she was afraid of making a fool of herself she hadn’t ventured to the center. “I didn’t want to be the idiot,” she said. “I thought meeting people was like a laser maze: one screw-up and alarms would go off all around me.” This belief isn’t new. In the mid-1960s, the psychologist Elliot Aronson tested it in one of my favorite studies of all time. “This is a study about impression formation,” participants were told. “You’ll be listening to a tape recording of a student trying out for the College Quiz Bowl team.” The participant was randomly assigned to listen to one of four tapes. Each tape consisted of the “contestant” answering fifty quiz questions and then talking a bit about himself and his background. The difference? On one tape, the contestant is solid. He answers most of the questions correctly. In another tape, the contestant flounders, answering fewer than a third of the questions correctly. But here’s where it gets more interesting: The third and fourth tapes are identical to the first two, except for the very end. There is a sudden clatter, the scraping of a chair, and you hear the contestant exclaim, “Oh my goodness, I’ve spilled coffee all over my new suit!” After listening to their assigned tape, participants were asked about their impressions of the contestant. Who was best liked and most respected? The same contestant wins every time: the competent guy who ends up wearing his coffee. Usually, we assume making mistakes is bad. We go to great lengths to avoid screwing up. But assuming we’re generally solid and competent, it actually works the other way. 1 The blunder has the magical effect of enhancing the attractiveness of the competent contestant. Why? Aronson and his colleagues conclude that the coffee incident made the contestant more human, more approachable. He’s still impressive but no longer intimidating. It takes him from being superhuman to human, and therefore more attractive. We like people more when they’re imperfect. This is why self-deprecation is so charming and why celebrities who trip on the red carpet come away looking adorable. No one likes feeling embarrassed, but evolution has us covered.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  I got this technique (as well as the following picture) from a team at King’s College London and the University of Oxford. Take a look. On the left is this gentleman’s worst moment during a conversation. He remembers feeling anxious, turning his attention inward, and was sure his face looked weird. On the right, he reported focusing outward, feeling much less anxious, and that he wasn’t thinking at all about his face. What’s the difference in how he looks? Exactly nothing. The only difference was in how he felt. Not only did his face not look weird, but also his feelings weren’t even visible. But sometimes people watch their videos and notice they do look weird. In the same study, the King’s College and Oxford team describes two clients they worked with. One man was worried his colleagues might see his hand shaking while he was drinking a beer, so he turned his back to them each time he took a sip. He thought this was a great way to hide his anxiety until he saw himself on video. He realized it looked odd to turn around with every sip and may have conveyed to everyone at the bar that he wasn’t interested in them when the exact opposite was the truth. A woman the team worked with was worried she’d seem stupid, so she ran through a pre-prepared list of topics when she talked with people and mentally monitored how she thought she was coming across. This made her feel better inside. On video, however, she looked like she was giving a lecture rather than listening to what others were saying and responding accordingly. Again, the exact opposite of what she intended. She experimented with listening and just saying what came into her head, which on video, she was pleased to discover, came across as being open and friendly. Bingo. By the same token, if you see something you don’t like—you talk too fast, make no eye contact, wring your hands incessantly—don’t panic. All of these are safety behaviors—they’re what you’re doing to try to save yourself and make yourself less anxious. Remember letting go of the life preserver that keeps you underwater? Once you identify your safety behaviors, you can let them go. * * * The next time Mei gave a presentation to her group, she asked Yaser to record her with his phone. He emailed it to her, and after locking her office door, she watched it peeking through her fingers, as if it were a horror movie. At first, she cringed. It was so hard to watch herself on camera. Does my hair really look like that? I say “um” so often! she thought. But then she remembered what she was supposed to be looking for. She had predicted that she would look like a nervous wreck, a babbling idiot, an anxious freak. She thought she would fidget, move jerkily, spout incoherence.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  But it’s also the key to busting the how I feel is how I look myth. So how to do this? Look no further than the phone in your pocket. A tried-and-true method to replace your imaginary mind’s eye movie is to make an actual movie. Have someone you trust make a video of you having a conversation, giving a presentation, or doing whatever it is that sends you into social anxiety. I know, I know: “But I hate watching myself! I hate it even more than listening to my own voice on voicemail!” You may hate this, but the payoff is huge. You can finally see yourself as others see you. Once you make the video, before you watch, ask yourself what exactly you think you’ll see. Close your eyes and form a vivid, internal movie of how you think you will look. Will you spout random, incoherent words? Tremble like a Shake Weight? If we ask Mei, she might say, I’ll look stupid, which means I’ll pause a lot, jump from topic to topic, say “um” every few words, and have an expression on my face straight out of Dumb and Dumber. Then gather your courage and hit “play.” For the first few seconds, you will have a visceral reaction—“Is that what I look like?” Everyone experiences this—it’s totally normal. But then watch as if you were watching a stranger. Watch as objectively as possible and ask if your fears came true. Does this person look stupid? Does this person jump from topic to topic? How many times did this person pause? Taking a neutral perspective allows you to see and hear yourself for real. Chances are that bits of visible anxiety leak out here and there, but not nearly as much as you think. How you feel inside and how you appear outside don’t match. Then watch again and take a look at the other people in the video—your conversation partner, your audience. Find a point in which you remember feeling a surge of anxiety—a mistake, a pause, a point where your mind went blank. Then ask yourself, Do other people seem to have noticed? Are the other people reacting as if there was a big mistake? If a stranger walked in would they think one of these people looked really odd? (Probably not.) If it’s a conversation, compare each side. Is the other person pausing and tripping over their words at all? (Probably a little—welcome to the human race.) But more important, welcome to evidence that how you feel isn’t how you look. When I’m watching videos with a client in my office, sometimes I’ll take a screen shot of the moment they felt worst—self-absorbed and brimming with anxiety. Then we’ll take another from a moment they felt pretty good—attention focused outward, feeling calmer. We’ll put the screen shots side by side.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  She called her mother and told her the story. Instead of being horrified, she thought it was hysterical, and Winnie realized she had a good story to tell at work the next day. Now, you certainly don’t have to cope by sharing with your mother—you can cope in any healthy way that works for you. But Winnie discovered something: practice gone wrong is often great fodder for conversation. Everyone loves embarrassing stories; it humanizes you, shows you have a sense of humor, and you might even get an embarrassing story in return. And guess what? That’s part of how closeness develops, which I’ll cover in depth in chapter 16. So make your Challenge List. Then talk your way through with Replace and Embrace. Give yourself some structure—play a role that you choose. Be brave for the time it takes to get over the summit. Take on your challenges, a little at a time. And leave your life preservers at home. The mountain is all downhill from there. Slide down the hill and into your life. The more you practice, the easier it gets. Finally, remember the confidence myth. You don’t gain confidence in a vacuum and then go off and conquer the world. Instead, you learn to be confident, to have courage, to get over anxiety, to live your life authentically, by doing challenging things. And an authentic life includes some rejection, some awkwardness, and some embarrassment. But guess what? It also includes deep satisfaction in your accomplishments, even when they don’t turn out exactly as you pictured them. And with ongoing practice, you’ll find it also includes many Moments and even some elation. By practicing, you’ll learn that even if bad stuff happens, you can keep moving forward, keep being brave. You can handle it. But don’t take it from me; take it from Jia, who said to me: “It was surprising how easy it was to get a yes. I realized how many opportunities I missed because I was afraid of people rejecting me, but I was just rejecting myself.” He paused. I’ve learned to recognize that pause in client after client, as well as in myself. It was The Moment. Then with wonder in his voice he said, “The world is a lot nicer than I thought.” PART 4 Busting the Myths of Social Anxiety 11 How (and Why) to Turn Your Attention Inside Out Wah-wah, wah. Wah wah wah wah. Wah wah. To Diego, the medical resident sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher. She was reviewing with him how to perform a testicular exam while their alarmed-looking patient looked on, but Diego was too busy trying to look calm and doctor-like to hear much of what she said.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Self-compassion is about creating that same sort of supportive, kind, encouraging environment from which you can gather the courage to choose wisely. In short, self-compassion is the opposite of self-judgment. Self-judgment looks for what is vulnerable inside us and pounces, whereas self-compassion looks for what is human and meets it with understanding, graciousness, appreciation, and encouragement. According to Dr. Neff, self-compassion has three components: mindfulness, self-kindness, and an awareness that we are all in this together, or what she calls our common humanity. The first, mindfulness, you’ve undoubtedly heard of, but like ozone or gluten, the precise definition can be hard to pin down. Therefore, let’s start with a quick and dirty crash course. While challenging our thoughts (“How bad would that really be? What are the odds? How would I cope?”) requires climbing into the ring for a few rounds with our negative musings, mindfulness calmly watches from outside the ropes. Mindfulness, simply, is paying attention to the present moment on purpose, without judgment. In her book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, Dr. Neff presents the best explanation of mindfulness I’ve come across thus far. Picture yourself in a movie theater, she writes. A movie is playing on the screen, and you’re wrapped up in the story. You jump when the bad guy attacks, bite your nails as the forces battle, gasp as plot twists are revealed. But then, the person next to you sneezes. The reverie is broken. Suddenly, you are back in your seat with your popcorn, and you remember, Oh, I’m watching a movie. In other words, mindfulness is not your actual thoughts or experience. Rather, it is a method for watching your thoughts and experience. It is the realization: Oh, I’m thinking X, I’m hearing Y, I notice Z. What’s more, you can choose where you direct your attention. You can watch your thoughts, your breath, or the snaps, crackles, and pops of your own body. Just as you watch the image projected on the movie screen, you watch your thoughts or sensations float and dart across the field of your consciousness. Using this technique, you can watch your anxious thoughts without getting tangled in them. For example, bring to mind a memory of a recent humiliating moment. Now think to yourself, I really screwed that one up big-time. You probably feel some embarrassment, guilt, or shame. Now shift things a little and think to yourself, I’m having the thought that I really screwed that one up big-time. It’s subtle, but different. With the second example, there is distance, there is awareness. Just as when our fellow moviegoer sneezes, our attention shifts from being absorbed in the movie as if it were reality to being aware of the movie as not reality. And guess what? Just as the movie isn’t reality, neither are our thoughts. That’s a little freaky, huh?

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Embarrassment is thought to have evolved as a non-verbal apology and gesture of appeasement—plus it actually fosters trust. People who are more “embarrassable” are nicer, more trustworthy, and more generous. Remember: social anxiety is a package deal. * * * Slowly, Vivian learned to go easier on herself, both online and in real life, and as she relaxed her own standards she became more forgiving of others. When Anna invited her and some colleagues to an overly loud restaurant with a serious lack of parking, she let it go rather than complain to the group. Rather than steering the conversation with white knuckles, she tried listening and following the natural flow and found, to her amazement, that she enjoyed herself more. Previously, Vivian felt she had been walking an acceptable social line thin as a tightrope, but as she continued to soften, to her relief, she found the line to be wide and forgiving. And Rosie? She gathered all her courage and showed up at a bar with pool tables. She reluctantly joined in, hoping no one would notice if she skipped a turn or two. But to her surprise, a lot of other people sucked, too, and those who were skilled didn’t care that she wasn’t. She didn’t have to buy into the myth; she didn’t have to perform perfectly. It wasn’t even about the pool. Emboldened, a few weekends later she went bowling, threw gutter ball after gutter ball, ended up with a low double-digit score, but had a great time. How many people cared about her bowling score? Exactly zero. But how many people, for the first time, felt happy just being her (imperfect) self? Exactly one: Rosie. 14 Why You Don’t Have a Social Skills Problem (You Heard That Right) Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem so. —FRANÇOIS VI, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, MAXIMS, 1665 The high cinder-block walls of the brand-new boxing gym were brightened with murals—one wall with a huge logo of the gym, another with the painted likenesses of local boxing champions. Industrial shelving was neatly stacked with physioballs, jump ropes, and boxing gloves of every color. Around the two regulation-sized rings, punching bags hung from the ceiling, waiting to be pummeled. It was a perfectly equipped gym. There was only one problem— it was empty. That is, except for the owner, Derrick. Derrick came to see me after the gym opened, asking me to put him through a social skills boot camp. And given Derrick’s profession, he didn’t take the term “boot camp” lightly. Derrick’s father, a local fighting legend back in the day, had owned another boxing gym south of town for the past twenty years. Derrick, who had just turned thirty, described the original gym: “There are world-class fighters training next to students, blue-collar guys, corporate execs, soccer moms, and street punks. It’s basically the United Nations of boxing.”

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  It is striking, I think, that this is my first memory, and not, say, feeding my little brother’s popcorn to the ducks at the local lake or the knock-on-doors- equals-candy revelation of my first time trick-or-treating. Instead, my anxious brain decides to remember feeling humiliated by a friendly teacher and amused classmates after an innocent snooze. It goes on from there. In first grade, I remember going to bed with a stomachache and a gnawing feeling “that I was forgetting something,” not having the vocabulary to label feeling overwhelmed by a busy classroom day in and day out. In third grade, I knew my multiplication tables by heart but put off reciting them to my teacher until I was the very last in the class to do so. Middle school—that perfect storm of profound self-consciousness and desperation for peer acceptance—was the deepest pit in social anxiety hell, but that’s no surprise. In high school, I came into my own with a solid circle of friends and some leadership roles, but then came the shock of college. While other students attended the infamous Naked Party and argued with intellectual luminaries in seminars, I avoided eye contact at fully clothed parties and raised my hand a single-digit number of times in four years. However, over many years and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, something slowly changed. Today, not only can I speak in a meeting; I can also lead one. I host a mean dinner party, lecture to a room full of students with confidence, and actually look forward to dancing at wedding receptions. Alongside my clients, I have done all sorts of embarrassing things in the name of social anxiety practice: asked for lemongrass in a hardware store, deliberately spilled my coffee in a crowded Starbucks, asked for directions and walked the opposite way. When I disclose my anxious past, I get incredulous looks—“I never would have guessed!” “But you’re so comfortable.” Today, I can say wholeheartedly I am comfortable in my own skin, even if it wasn’t always this way, and I know you can, too. How did I get there? And how can you get there? I’ll share all the answers with you in the pages ahead. I still have my moments, to be sure. I do my fair share of public speaking, but my tears well up—sometimes very subtly, sometimes overtly—whenever I have to speak to more than a handful of people at a time. I’ve learned to think of this as the anxiety leaking out. I blubbered my way through my grandmother’s eulogy, which you could argue was appropriate. I was sad to be sure, but I was mostly terrified of all the eyes on me. But I also got misty during my master’s thesis defense. Appropriate? Not so much. My Achilles’ heel is being on camera. I subtly lean out of the scene when my kids record a video on my phone. I hate FaceTime.