Excitement

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

  Judy Blume could barely wait to get out her response. “The day he called and said he’d like to meet me and talk about the manuscript was the most exciting day of my life,” Blume later told Publishers Weekly. The morning of their appointment, she was so nervous her stomach lurched. She took a pill to try to settle it, which helped, but then the medicine dried out her mouth. Generally, her health had improved since she’d started writing, but a meeting with a real editor was stressful enough to throw her body back into crisis mode. Judy hopped into the car, hoping she wouldn’t have to do too much talking. When she arrived at Prentice Hall, Jackson—who was stylishly dressed and bore more than a slight resemblance to the freshly minted talk-show host Dick Cavett— greeted her warmly. Judy was taken aback by his good looks; he was “a stunningly beautiful man,” she told the New Yorker. He led her to his cramped office, his desk piled high with stacks of manuscripts. Jackson confessed he wasn’t sure about publishing Iggie’s House yet, but he had some questions. The protagonist, for instance —who was Winnie, really? Beyond getting to know the new kids in town, what else did she want? Judy wrote down everything he said. An hour and a half later, she had promised to revise the book for Jackson, in the hopes that Bradbury would give it a home. Books in the swinging sixties were getting bolder. Just as there wasn’t a defined middle grade category yet, there also wasn’t a market around what we now know as young adult books, or reads just for older teenagers. There were books that starred teens, like The Catcher in the Rye, but Salinger’s cantankerous 1951 manifesto was packaged as an adult novel. Then came The Outsiders. Published in 1967, The Outsiders is widely considered to be the first young adult (YA) book. It was written by a teenager named Susan Hinton: her pen name was the gender-ambiguous S. E. Hinton, because her publisher thought no one would believe a girl wrote it. The novel focused on white-on-white grievance in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its protagonist, fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, identifies with the “greasers”: a group of underprivileged and all-but-unsupervised kids who overcompensate for their low social status with style and swagger. The greasers can’t stand the “socs”— snotty rich kids who drive Mustangs and wear madras shirts—and the feeling is mutual. Late at night, the town becomes a war zone, fueled by class resentment.

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

  Chapter Nineteen Allies “Democracy is exhausting.” Pico and Fleshman were successful, but the storm was still coming. By the spring of 1980, book challenges were prevalent enough that another popular children’s book author, Betty Miles, used them as a starting point for a young adult novel. In Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book, eleven-year-old Kate Harris finds herself at the center of a town-wide controversy when she signs up for a new program to read aloud to the students in a first-grade classroom. After meeting one of the boys and hearing him rave about his new pet puppy, Kate carefully chooses a picture book that she hopes will appeal to her pint-sized listeners. The Birthday Dog—a story that Miles invented—is about a little boy named Benjamin who wants a puppy for his birthday. The neighbor’s dog Blackie is pregnant. Just when Blackie is about to give birth, the neighbor calls over Benjamin and his father to watch. Benjamin gets to pick out a puppy from her litter and names it Happy, for making his birthday wish come true. The kids love the book, just as Kate anticipated. They’re particularly excited by the page, and the picture, where Blackie starts popping out her pups. “Just then, Blackie gave a little moan, and her stomach began to ripple,” Kate reads to her rapt audience. “A small, wet shape began to come out of Blackie... She pushed hard again, until all of it was out.” After the story is finished, the kids are bursting with questions. “How did the puppy get in there... inside his mommy,” one child asks Kate, who nervously eyes the teacher to see how she should answer. When the teacher gives her an encouraging

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

  Chapter Seventeen Fame “One day, there’s going to be Judy Blume tampons.” On the night of Friday, January 6, 1978, Judy became TV-movie famous. The screen adaptation of Forever aired on CBS. Set in idyllic San Francisco instead of the East Coast suburbs, the cinematic version otherwise hewed closely to the novel: high school seniors Katherine Danziger and Michael Wagner meet at a party and spend the months leading up to graduation falling head over heels in love. Katherine was played by Stephanie Zimbalist, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Efrem Zimbalist Jr., a sixties-era small-screen star who helmed the detective shows 77 Sunset Strip and The FBI. A then-unknown actor, a Bay Area native named Dean Butler, played Michael. Butler, at the time a handsome, blond twenty-one-year-old, wasn’t familiar with Blume or her books when he got the script. But once Forever was on his radar he picked up a copy of the novel. “The book struck me as incredibly candid,” he said. “I mean, one of the big deals in the book was what Michael’s name for his male anatomy was. I had never seen anything like that at twenty-one.” He approved of the sequence where Katherine went to get a prescription for birth control. “My mother was on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood in the Bay Area. So I was completely in sync with that idea.” He and Zimbalist “felt safe with each other,” Butler said, which was important because the script featured its fair share of love scenes. Unlike Blume’s book, the movie was cautious around its presentation of teen sex and sparing in its language— this was for national television, after all. Butler and Zimbalist’s Michael and

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  At this moment the model emerged with a sheet about her and probably because of my praise Alexander introduced me to Mlle. Jeanne and said I was a distinguished American writer. She nodded to me saucily, flashing white teeth at me, mounted the estrade, threw off the sheet and took up her pose—all in a moment. I was carried off my feet; the more I looked, the more perfections I discovered. For the first time I saw a figure that I could find no fault with. Needless to say I told her so in my best French with a hundred similes. Alexander also I conciliated by begging him to do no more to the sketch but sell it to me and do another. Finally he took four hundred and fifty francs for it and in an hour had made another sketch. My purchase had convinced Mlle. Jeanne that I was a young millionaire and when I asked her if I might accompany her to her home, she consented more than readily. As a matter of fact, I took her for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne and from there to dinner in a private room at the Café Anglais. During the meal I had got to like her: she lived with her mother, Alexander had told me; though by no means prudish, still less virginal, she was not a coureuse. I thought I might risk connection; but when I got her to take off her clothes and began to caress her sex, she drew away and said quite as a matter of course: “Why not faire minette?” When I asked her what she meant, she told me frankly: “We women do not get excited in a moment as you men do; why not kiss and tongue me there for a few minutes, then I shall have enjoyed myself and shall be ready....” I’m afraid I made rather a face for she remarked coolly: “Just as you like, you know. I prefer in a meal the hors d’oeuvres to the pièce de résistance like a good many other women: indeed I often content myself with the hors d’oeuvres and don’t take any more. Surely you understand that a woman goes on getting more and more excited for an hour or two and no man is capable of bringing her to the highest pitch of enjoyment while pleasing himself.” “I’m able”, I said stubbornly, “I can go on all night if you please me, so we should skip appetizers.” “No, no!” she replied, laughing, “let us have a banquet then, but begin with lips and tongue!” The delay, the bandying to and fro of argument and above all, the idea of kissing and tonguing her sex, had brought me to coolness and reason. Was I not just as foolish as Bancroft if I yielded to the—an unknown girl.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “You darling!” I cried, “I don’t believe there will be any consequences; but I want you to go to the basin and use this syringe: I’ll tell you why afterwards.” At once she went over to the basin: “I feel funny, weak”, she said, “as if I were—I can’t describe it—shaky on my legs. I’m glad now I don’t wear drawers in summer: they’d get wet.” Her ablutions completed and the sheet withdrawn and done up in paper, I shot back the bolt and we began our talk. I found her intelligent and kindly but ignorant and ill-read; still she was not prejudiced and was eager to know all about babies and how they were made. I told her what I had told Mrs. Mayhew and something more: how my seed was composed of tens of thousands of infinitesimal tadpole-shaped animalculae—Already in her vagina and womb these infinitely little things had a race: they could move nearly an inch in an hour and the strongest and quickest got up first to where her egg was waiting in the middle of her womb. My little tadpole, the first to arrive, thrust his head into her egg and thus having accomplished his work of impregnation, perished, love and death being twins. The curious thing was that this indescribably small tadpole should be able to transmit all the qualities of all his progenitors in certain proportions; no such miracle was ever imagined by any religious teacher. More curious still the living foetus in the womb passes in nine months through all the chief changes that the human race has gone through in countless aeons of time in its progress from the tadpole to the man. Till the fifth month the foetus is practically a four-legged animal. I told her that it was accepted today that the weeks occupied in the womb in any metamorphosis corresponded exactly to the ages it occupied in reality. Thus it was upright, a two-legged animal, ape and then man in the womb for the last three months and this corresponded nearly to one third of man’s whole existence on this earth. Kate listened enthralled, I thought, till she asked me suddenly: “But what makes one child a boy and another a girl?” “The nearest we’ve come to a law on the matter”, I said, “is contained in the so-called law of contraries: that is, if the man is stronger than the woman, the children will be mostly girls; if the woman is greatly younger or stronger, the progeny will be chiefly boys. This bears out the old English proverb: “Any weakling can make a boy, it takes a man to make a girl.’”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  In five minutes the fight had begun. In ten more it was all over. Nothing could stand against the deadly shooting of the Westerners. In five minutes one or two of the Mexicans had been killed and several wounded; half a dozen horses had gone down; it was perfectly evident that the eight or ten of us were more than a match for the twenty Mexicans, for except Don Luis, none of them seemed to have any stomach for the work, and Luis got a bullet through his arm in the first five minutes. Finally they drew off threatening and yelling and we saw no more of them. After the battle we all adjourned to Locker’s and had a big drink. Nobody took the fight seriously: whipping Greasers was nothing to brag about; but Rossiter thought that a claim should be made against the Mexican Government for raiding United States territory: said he was going to draw up the papers and send them to the State District Attorney at Austin. The proposal was received with whoops and cheers. The idea of punishing the Mexicans for getting shot trying to recapture their own cattle appealed to us Americans as something intensely humorous. All the Texans gave their names solemnly as witnesses, and Rossiter swore he would draw up the document. Years afterwards Bent whom I met by chance, told me that Rossiter had got forty thousand dollars on that claim. Three days later we began to move our cattle eastward to rejoin Reece and Dell. I gave one hundred dollars as a reward to Locker’s two boys who had helped us from start to finish most eagerly. A week or so later we got back to the main camp. Reece and Dell had their herd ready and fat, and after a talk we resolved to go each on his own and join afterwards for the fall and winter on the ranch, if it pleased us. We took three weeks to get our bunch of cattle into condition and so began driving North in July. I spent every night in the saddle and most of the day, even though the accursed fever was shaking me. All went well with us at first: I promised my three lieutenants a third share in the profits and a small wage besides: they were as keen as mustard and did all men could do. As soon as we reached the latitude of the Indian territory our troubles began. One wild night Indians, who wore sheets and had smeared their hands with phosphorus, stampeded the cattle and though the boys did wonders we lost nearly a thousand head and some hundred horses all of them broken in carefully.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  We arrived, if I remember rightly, on a Wednesday and put our cattle and horses in the stockyards near the Michigan Street depot. As I have related, we sold on Thursday and Friday about three-fifths of the cattle. I wanted to sell all, but followed the judgment of the Boss and sold three hundred head and put a little over five thousand dollars in my banking account. On Saturday night the alarm bells began to ring and awoke me. I slipped into my breeches, shirt and boots and a youthful curiosity exciting me, I raced downstairs, got Blue Devil from the stable and rode out to the fire. I was infinitely impressed by the rapidity with which the firemen acted and the marvelous efficiency of the service. Where in England there would have been perhaps half a dozen fire-engines, the Americans sent fifty, but they all found work and did it magnificently. At one o’clock the fire was out and I returned to the hotel through two or three miles of uninjured streets. Of course, I told Reece and Ford all about it the next day. To my astonishment, no one seemed to pay much attention; a fire was so common a thing in the wooden shanties on the outskirts of American towns that nobody cared to listen to my epic. Next night, Sunday, the alarm bell began ringing about eleven o’clock: I was still dressed in my best. I changed into my working clothes, I do not know why, put my belt about me with a revolver in it and again took out the mare and rode to the fire. When still a quarter of a mile away, I realized that this fire was much more serious than that of the previous night: first of all, a gale of wind was blowing right down on the town. Then, when I wondered why there were so few fire-engines, I was told that there were two other fires and the man with whom I talked did not scruple to ascribe them to a plot and determination to burn down the town! “Them damned foreign anarchists are at the bottom of it,” he said, “three fires do not start on the very outskirts of the town with a gale of wind blowing, without some reason.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The sheer numbers and archaeological findspots of erotic-themed lamps, furthermore, militate against the suggestion that these artifacts were anything other than a basic and broadly diffused domestic instrument. Sex—along with mythology, the animal kingdom, and the world of public entertainments—provided one of the most inexhaustible sources of decoration; the standard study of the huge collection of Italian lamps in the British Museum suggests that sex may have provided the very most common theme. The range and inclusiveness of the erotic repertoire suggests that myth, fantasy, and farce were exuberantly mingled. Modern studies conventionally divide the erotic lamps into two classes: Erotes (depictions of Eros) and symplegmata (“embracings”—a sort of learned prudery). This division does not adequately capture the range and meaning of different erotic motifs. The figure of Eros himself, symbol of joy and life, was unfailingly popular; though our eyes may be desensitized to the power of such a mythological commonplace, in Roman culture, where sexual passion was an immanent divine force, the blending of spirituality and sensuality ought not be discounted. The symplegmata lamps present the most varied images. Some are mythological, such as Zeus (qua swan) and Leda. Others are perhaps allegorical, such as the scenes of women with horses (which, maybe, refer to the Ass legend; the scenes of men with donkeys are probably not so easily rescued into decency). Some have a theme that is perhaps comic, perhaps poignant, perhaps mocking: the popular motif of the old man watching a couple perform feats of love. There are some same-sex pairings, and some elaborate sexual positions, but these are all rare. Mostly what the lamps depict is one man and one woman on a bed—sometimes beneath a canopy, sometimes with a lamp in the background—joined in carnal embrace. 89 Of particular interest are the lamp workshops of the Greek world in the high and late empire. The lamps produced in Corinth and Athens have the advantages of being clearly dated, well published, and relatively closely studied (though a detailed study of the iconography, context, and chronology of erotic motifs on ancient lamps is a desideratum). What they reveal is a world of ebullient sensuality, deep into late antiquity. The shop of Pireithos in Athens, which started in the early third century and flourished for over half a century, specialized in sexual themes. Shops that were first established in the fourth century continued to offer their clientele a range of erotica. Only in the later fourth century do the erotic lamps of Athens begin to give way to abstract designs and Christian symbols; just one workshop seems to have produced both erotic and Christian lamps. By the early fifth century, Christian iconography prevails. In the fifth and sixth centuries erotic lamps can still be found, but they are vanishingly rare.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Across the street from Roy’s house was a large, empty field divided by railroad tracks, and it was there that I first identified with the Adam spoken of at the beginning of the Bible, because it was there that I saw my first naked woman. We were playing with our bikes when Roy stumbled across a magazine whose pages were gaudily dressed in colorful type and the stuff of bad advertising. Roy approached the magazine with a stick, and I stood behind him as he flipped the pages from the distance of a twig. We had found a portal, it seemed, into a world of magic and wonder, where creatures exist in the purest form of beauty. I say we found a portal, but it was something more than that; it was as if we were being led through a portal because I sensed in my chest, in the pace of my heart, that I was having an adventure. I felt the way a robber might feel when he draws a gun inside a bank.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  By and by, a message from God inched across the screen: Ron’s inaugural revelation. He received a second revelation on February 25, and a third on the 27th. Upon witnessing his brother receiving revelations from God, Dan was spellbound, and excited. “I never received any revelations when we were in the School of the Prophets,” he explains. “Everyone else in the school did, and I’ve received revelations since then, so now I understand the phenomenon, but I didn’t at that time. So I was fascinated. I’d ask, ‘What is it like?!’ Ron said it was hard to describe, but I remember once he said, ‘It’s like a blanket falls over you, and you can feel the Lord’s thoughts, and you write them down.’ One revelation came to him a single word at a time, and he didn’t even know if it was coherent until he was done receiving it, and then went back and read it. But they didn’t always come that way. Sometimes he’d receive whole phrases at a time.” The revelation Ron received on February 27 was in fact a message from the Lord to Ron’s wife, with Ron simply serving as the conduit. In this commandment God reiterated that the earth would soon be destroyed, and He warned Dianna: Thou are a chosen daughter but My wrath is kindled against thee because of thy rebelliousness against thy husband, and I command thee to repent. Have I not said that it is not good for a man to be alone? I will not suffer My servant Ron to be alone much longer for even now I am preparing someone to take thy place. Nevertheless if thou wilst speedily repent I will greatly bless thee and thy children, otherwise I will remove thee from thy place for I will not suffer that thy children should suffer longer because of thy disobedience. I have heard the prayers of My son Ron and I know his desires, and it is only because of his desires that I have spared thee till now. Harken unto My word for the time is short. I am Alpha and Omega even the beginning and the end and surely I will fulfill all My promises unto My servant Ron. Even so Amen. According to psychiatrist C. Jess Groesbeck, who examined Ron after the murders, as Ron began to understand that Dianna really was going to take their children and leave forever, it slowly “becomes clear that this man is losing the most important thing he’s ever lost in his life. . . . I can’t stress enough how deep this loss was. . . . He feels low, worthless. And his anger and aggression are almost unbounded. . . . He compensates by creating a new but unreal view of himself and the world. He develops an inflated God-like self-image in an effort to avoid the pain and deny the truth of what he really is.” Buttressing Dr.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Uncle Ray took to cleaning his guns on the patio after work, as the ash from the fires sifted a fine powder over everything. He handed me the small gun, a Beretta. It was like a toy in my hand. “Want to shoot?” “Sure,” I said. He never let the boys touch his guns. Starr hated to even look at them, though now the riots were going on, she’d stopped asking him to get rid of them. He took a can of green Rust-Oleum and spray-painted a human figure on a board, and for fun made it carrying a TV. He set it up against an oleander at the far end of the yard. “He’s taking your TV, Astrid. Plug him.”

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

  1. You can nurture your inner exhibitionist. You can perform for an audience of eager voyeurs. 2. You can indulge in sensory overload, watching and hearing others engage in sexual activities—while you’re having sex. 3. You can leave your inhibitions at the door and try sexual activities you’ve only imagined. Nothing like a change of venue to make you feel adventurous. 4. Your body image will get a big boost when you see women of all shapes and sizes being admired erotically. 5. You can scream out your pleasure (or pain) without worrying about your neighbors. 6. You’ll get plenty of encouragement for being a slut. You may even get a round of applause when you come. 7. You can make friends and find sex partners. 8. You can have group sex, and you can have sex with strangers in a safe environment. 9. You can play on good equipment—like a St. Andrew’s cross or sling. You can play with that new 6-foot single-tailed whip you can’t safely swing in your living room. 10. You can enact your favorite public sex fantasy without the risk of encountering cops and queer-bashers. 11. You can have sex without the complications of dating. 12. You can heat up your relationship. Even if you and your partner wish to have sex exclusively with each other, you can enjoy an entirely new erotic environment. At a BDSM party, you’ll find women tied to whipping posts, crosses, bondage tables, racks, and (in standing bondage) to eyebolts in a low ceiling. You’ll hear the crack of single-tailed whips, the smack of paddles on buttocks, and, of course, lots of sighs and screams. You’ll see women practicing safer sex, too. You can learn how to introduce latex and other barriers into a scene. You may see a woman erotically teasing her partner as she slowly slips on a glove or licking a partner’s thighs as she spreads a dental dam over her vulva. You’ll see women lube up condom-covered dildos and butt plugs, and slip gloves over the heads of electric vibrators. Many party hosts post safer-sex rules. They may be as simple as “no exchange of bodily fluid” or quite detailed, specifying when gloves and condoms are to be used. You may find etiquette rules posted as well. Hosts may remind guests to ask before touching and to refrain from interrupting others’ play. Often S/M parties employ dungeon monitors who can help guests with safety concerns. In many communities, safeword has itself become the universal safeword—if you call out “safeword,” folks will come running.

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  New relationshipsThe beginning of a relationship is an intense and memorable time. From your first kiss to the magical moment when you realize that you are in love, new relationships can make even the most composed person’s head spin. Your libido is in overdrive, your senses are supersensitive, and being apart is unbearable. The simplest things—a whispered endearment or shared confidence—have the power to take your breath away, and every moment spent together is precious. However, as the saying goes, the course of true love never did run smooth, and many of the issues confronted by couples at the beginning of their relationship—from lifestyle habits and beliefs to interfamily relations—will set the tone for your future relationship. Communication is especially important during this phase. Long-term relationshipsMarriage and lifelong partnerships are the quintessential monogamous relationships. Most people aspire to obtain lifelong love, though divorce rates show that the journey to “happily ever after” is harder than it might seem. Long-term relationships promise love and companionship, which most people crave in their lives. Most couples also have shared goals, such as having children, and financial commitments. The couple relies on each other in good times and bad, and feels completely comfortable together. Although this stage brings with it familiarity and security, it can also mean the end of passion and excitement, along with emerging worries and doubts. At this stage, couples still have to work hard to preserve the romance in their relationship. Keep your sex life vibrant by trying new positions or techniques, and taking the time to flirt with, seduce, and romance each other. Fantasy, erotica, and sex toys may help to keep it exciting. If work and other commitments mean you can’t spend much time alone or have sex very often, keep your connection close with erotic touches, deep kisses, and loving hugs. Open relationshipsSome people believe that monogamy is unsuited to today’s modern world. In an open relationship, both partners are permitted to sleep with other people. This type of relationship is generally built on the idea that lust cannot be governed and sexuality should be enjoyed and explored. However, it is only fair to be honest about your expectations. If you don’t see a committed relationship in your future, tell your lover. If you one day would like to make the relationship exclusive, be upfront about those hopes, too. Open relationships provide the comfort and companionship of a long-term relationship with the excitement of new love. The “butterflies” stage often lasts longer in an open relationship, as it does in a long-distance relationship. This is because the freedom to sleep around, or the distance, sets up a barrier that prevents a couple from moving on to a more settled relationship. Although many people dabble in open relationships, settling down remains important to most men and women. In the meantime, make sure you both practice safer sex with other partners and promote safer sex by being tested regularly. Always use protection for both intercourse and oral sex.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  I’m going to suggest a few teachers in New York.” “You told my mother?” “Yes, just after Thanksgiving.” Erma Rankin read the look on Natalie’s face. “Oops! I’ll bet she was saving that as a holiday surprise.” “Did you hear that?” Natalie asked Miri in the changing room. “Did you hear what she said?” Miri nodded. “Yes.” “Do you know what this means?” Natalie asked. “It means you have talent.” “Yes,” Natalie said. “But it’s Ruby’s talent. Don’t you see? She’s dancing through me now. She’s living inside me.” “But Miss Rankin said she told your mother at Thanksgiving.” “But she didn’t tell me until today. Because today I was so much better than I was at Thanksgiving.” Even though she swore she wouldn’t, Miri wondered again if she should tell someone about Natalie. But who would she tell and what would she say? She was still thinking about it at the pageant that night, and after, when Rusty took her to Schutt’s, the ice cream parlor on Morris Avenue, for a hot fudge sundae. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00009.jpg] THAT GIRLBy Henry AmmermanDEC. 19 — She was 22, with the longest legs he’d ever seen. “She could dance,” Jimmy Bower said. “She could really dance! That girl was going places.” That girl was Ruby Granik, on her way to dance at the Vag abond Club in Miami when she boarded the ill-fated Miami Airlines C-46 on a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon. The flight had already been delayed two hours and Ruby and the other passengers waited another three before they boarded. “I begged her to wait,” her best friend, Dana Lynley, said, “but she insisted on taking the non-sked. It was less money and money was tight. She hadn’t been paid yet for her last job and she needed to get to Miami. You didn’t win an argument with Ruby. Once she made up her mind there was no going back. That’s how she lived her life.” “I knew her since she was born,” Billy Morrison, owner of Billy’s Tavern and family friend, said. “I served her her first legal drink, a pink lady. I made it weak but it still made her tipsy. Her father was my best friend. There are no words,” he said, visibly shaken. “None.” Her uncle, Fire Captain Victor Szabo, of Elizabeth Engine Company #3, said, “I knew Ruby was on that plane. I knew it and yet when the call came in and my unit sped to the scene of the crash, I had to force myself not to think of her inside that broken pile in the Elizabeth River. I had to do my job. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. My wife and Ruby’s mother are sisters. My wife had gone out to Queens to keep Ruby’s parents company for a few days. We have no children so we thought of Ruby as our daughter, too. We couldn’t have been more proud.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  Instead of heading straight back to the car, my mother took a left and ducked into the diner next door. Time for lunch, she said. My heart was pounding. Lunch? Here? In a restaurant? My parents went out for dinner nearly every Friday night when Holmer returned from his weekly business trips, but we kids rarely got to go. There were too many of us. We usually stayed home with a babysitter, eating Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and french fries that my mother would cook in her deep fryer, the chunks of ice popping as they hit the boiling grease. Inside the diner, I felt like Dorothy wandering the land of Oz. So many new sights and sounds and smells. A fan whirred overhead, blowing the aroma of cherry pie. My mother and I settled into a booth next to the counter, where the waitress gave us each a glass of water and a laminated menu with a thick red leather jacket. I ordered a roast beef sandwich and a Green River, a bright lime-green soda popular in Chicago in those days. I can’t remember what my mother had, likely a BLT, her favorite. All those kids back at school are probably doing arithmetic right now, I thought. Or maybe they are on to reading. In class, we each took turns reading out loud, trying not to laugh as the boy with the stutter pounded his thigh to steady himself so he could spit out the words. If I were there, I’d be sitting in the back of the classroom, where all the fidgety kids went, boys mostly, who jabbed me with protractors and dared me to eat Elmer’s glue. Like this? I’d say as I peeled the dried layers of milky white goo off my palm like a sheath of skin after a day of too much sun. With all the ear infections I’d had as a baby, I usually couldn’t hear the teacher anyway. So while the rest of the class studied Nebuchadnezzar and long division, I passed the time by staring at the clock, holding my breath to see how long I could go before passing out. I wished I could sit still like the other kids. I seemed to be wired differently. When I was especially antsy, Sister Mary David would make me squat next to her at the front of the classroom with my feet in the middle of her enormous army-green metal wastepaper basket and my butt teetering on the sharp rim. It was all I could do to not tip over and spill onto the floor with the rest of the trash in that can. Her metaphor was not lost on me. Is your bottom good and blistered yet, Margaret? the old nun croaked. I flushed with horror that she was discussing my bottom in front of the whole class, especially the boys. But I’m not at school now, I told myself giddily.

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

  SOME NOTES ON METHODOLOGY This book draws from the most up-to-date research on sexual behavior, from the sociological to the neurological. I have also interviewed hundreds of millennials and Gen Zers about their sex lives, both one-on-one and through anonymous online surveys, and I weave in findings from a decade-long career of interviewing experts and laypeople about sex, while drawing from excruciating personal experiences to contextualize my research. The unfortunate thing about the academic study of sex is just how new and cis-heteronormative it is; the study of queer sexual experiences is limited but growing, which is why official statistics cannot and should not be the only data points. What’s more, sex means different things to different people, which complicates the study of it. So I want to be clear about my working definition of “sex”—its meaning is fluid and deeply subjective, and should never be assumed. Among sexuality professionals there is no consensus on the definition of sex. If that’s surprising to you, try to define it yourself, bearing in mind that many people have sex without insertion, orifices, love, or nudity. Is sex any intimate act between two people? Probably not, as that would qualify therapy, asking your stylist for bangs, and passing toilet paper to a stranger. Is kissing sex? Maybe! There’s some intimacy and hotness. In her book The Wheel of Consent, sex therapist and educator Betty Martin defines sex to mean “the presence of your own arousal and the decision to follow it.” I like that. Many sexuality professionals find it more useful to refer to sexual activity or sexual play rather than “sex,” which makes space for all the wonderful, kooky shit people enjoy. The broader the definition, the better; limiting the scope of sex limits the pleasure we can feel. In The Ethical Slut, an iconic treatise on polyamory from Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton, sex is, quite literally, everything: Sex is anything you do or think or imagine that sets the train in motion: a scene in a movie, a person on the street you think is hot, swelling buds of wildflowers, bursting in a meadow, a fragrance that opens your nose, the warm sun on the back of your head. Then, if you want to pursue these gorgeously sexy feelings, you can increase the swelling tension, and your sensual focus, with any kind of thinking or touching or talking that humans can devise: stroking, kissing, biting, pinching, licking, vibrating, not to mention erotic art and dance and hot music and silky stuff next to our skin.2

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  **Lead-in.** Mind and body “at the crucial point”; cold stadium, shared blanket, crowd euphoria—then proximity of an unnamed man behind her. **Erotic core.** In my mind, as in our fucking, I am at the crucial point: …We are at this Baltimore Colt-Minnesota Viking football game, and it is very cold. Four or five of us are huddled under a big glen plaid blanket. Suddenly we jump up to watch Johnny Unitas running toward the goal. As he races down the field, we all turn as a body, wrapped in our blanket, screaming with excitement. Somehow, one of the men—I don’t know who, and in my excitement I can’t look—has gotten himself more closely behind me. I keep cheering, my voice an echo of his, hot on my neck. I can feel his erection through his pants as he signals me with a touch to turn my hips more directly toward him. Unitas is blocked, but all the action, thank God, is still going toward that goal and all of us keep turned to watch. Everyone is going mad. He’s got his cock out now and somehow it’s between my legs; he’s torn a hole in my tights under my short skirt and I yell louder as the touchdown gets nearer now. We are all jumping up and down and I have to lift my leg higher, to the next step on the bleachers, to steady myself; now the man behind me can slip it in more easily. We are all leaping about, thumping one another on the back, and he puts his arm around my shoulders to keep us in rhythm. He’s inside me now, shot straight up through me like a ramrod; my God, it’s like he’s in my throat! “All the way, Johnny! Go, go, run, run!” we scream together, louder than anyone, making them all cheer louder, the two of us leading the excitement like cheerleaders, while inside me I can feel whoever he is growing harder and harder, pushing deeper and higher into me with each jump until the cheering for Unitas becomes the rhythm of our fucking and all around us everyone is on our side, cheering us and the touchdown… it’s hard to separate the two now. It’s Unitas’ last down, everything depends on him; we’re racing madly, almost at our own touchdown. My excitement gets wilder, almost out of control as I scream for Unitas to make it as we do, so that we all go over the line together. And as the man behind me roars, clutching me in a spasm of pleasure, Unitas goes over and I… **Wind-down (immediate).** “Tell me what you are thinking about,” the man I was actually fucking said, his words as charged as the action in my mind. As I’d never stopped to think before doing anything to him in bed (we were that sure of our spontaneity and response), I didn’t stop to edit my thoughts. I told him what I’d been thinking. He got out of bed, put on his pants and went home. **Wind-down (aftermath).** Lying there among the crumpled sheets, so abruptly rejected and confused as to just why, I watched him dress. It was only imaginary, I had tried to explain; I didn’t really want that other man at the football game. He was faceless! A nobody! I’d never even have had those thoughts, much less spoken them out loud, if I hadn’t been so excited, if he, my real lover, hadn’t aroused me to the point where I’d abandoned my whole body, all of me; even my mind. Didn’t he see? He and his wonderful, passionate fucking had brought on these things and they, in turn, were making me more passionate. Why, I tried to smile, he should be proud, happy for both of us…. One of the things I had always admired in my lover was the fact that he was one of the few men who understood that there could be humor and playfulness in bed. But he did not think my football fantasy was either humorous or playful. As I said, he just left.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  **Lead-in.** The fantasy arrives during Ben’s best sessions—when she is most physically open; Ben’s excitement tracks hers; enactment would undo them both. **Voice.** I have this fantasy quite often while Ben is fucking me. In fact, I’d say I have it during our best sessions, when my body is most relaxed and inventive. Ben gets so excited when I’m into this fantasy it’s as though he were having it too. Yet I know if it were to really happen it would scare the hell out of him—and out of me. I don’t think we have any room in our lives for any kind of group scene; it simply wouldn’t fit in; we wouldn’t know how to handle it. But in fantasy, it’s fantastic. The three of us are in the living room, me, Ben, and my friend Helen. Our living room, here at home. Only the windows are larger, big bay windows with large panes and no drapes, no curtains, the way those windows are in the endless little houses all lit up along the endless roads that stretch across the countryside, the people’s lives exposed, like… We have just come in from shopping, the three of us, and as I go into the kitchen to put away the groceries and start dinner, I see Ben help Helen out of her coat. I stand at the sink, watching them behind me reflected in this huge polished window. Ben is standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, on her coat, but she takes his hands quickly and slips them down, cupping them around her breasts, holding them there. They don’t realize that I can see, as their backs are to me. I make little noises with the groceries to reassure them that I am busy putting things away. I run the water in the sink, giving them time to go on. Ben hesitates, letting her press his hands against her breasts. Then she presses back against him, rubbing against his groin. I can feel the rush of excitement that charges Ben, that gets him instantly erect as I can get him, as I so often have by rubbing my bottom against him. I go back into the living room, but first I clear my throat and start talking so they will know I am coming. I walk through the room, telling them I’m going up to have a quick bath, telling Ben to fix Helen a drink and keep her company. But I don’t go upstairs. I stand just outside the door and wait, watching them. Ben sits on the sofa, shy as always, and it is Helen who moves in, kneels in front of him, unzips his fly and takes his penis in her hand, puts it into her mouth. Ben’s hands start to push her away. He looks quickly in the direction I’ve gone. But the pleasure is too much. He sees Helen, sees her lips round his penis, her mouth full of him, her lips bulging around it as though she’s going to swallow it. He reaches for her breasts again and fondles them; they seem to grow in his hands, to swell in size. Until they are as large as mine. Her blond head moves faster and faster, up and down on his penis, pushing her lips back so that Ben can see her teeth, small and white, moving as though she is eating some delicious piece of meat. The tip of it slips farther and farther down into her throat; Ben is practically paralyzed with ecstasy. He falls back against the sofa, his hands reaching for his trouser front, unfastening it altogether so that she can really get at him. He is no longer the Ben I know at all. Helen undoes her blouse, never letting his penis rest, sucking away on it. She takes her breasts in her own hands, and kneads them so that drops of milk gush from them onto Ben’s pubic hairs, soaking them. I move quietly into the room, knowing they won’t stop now, and wanting to watch them more closely. They have forgotten now that I am even in the house. Ben is about to come in her mouth, but he wants the milk even more and he lifts her, drags her onto the sofa, so that he can suck her breasts while his hands undress her, fondle her until she moans for him to put it into her, there on our sofa, their clothes half on, half off, in front of the huge picture window. I shake off my clothes and naked I go over to them. I get on the sofa behind Ben. I want so badly to join them, to give Ben even more pleasure in return for all the pleasure he is giving Helen—who is really part me and part Helen—and suddenly I have this warm wet thing to put into him, a penis, my penis. I press it into him slowly, but all the way in. Ben gasps with excitement, and I feel the same wild sensation as though it really was a part of me going into him, as if it really were my penis. Firmly, quickly, I move it in and out in rhythm with his fucking Helen, whose pleasure I can also feel. Having it both ways, having everything, it is overwhelming. I can’t stand it, it is too much, and I press deeper and deeper into my husband until it seems my penis goes through Ben and into Helen, into me myself, and I die with pleasure.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Lilly and I, we like to use an electric toothbrush. The battery-operated kind, so you don’t have to worry about the electric wires, or plugging it in. [Laugh] Except that’s just what you do—plug it in. You ever go to a doctor or a dentist, and he’s cut his finger, and he wears a little rubber cap on his finger? Like a little condom? Anyway, we use that—we use epoxy glue to glue the toothbrush itself onto the little metal head—otherwise the vibration’ll shake the brush off. Then I use the same glue to put the rubber cap on the brush, so that it covers the bristles. Some of our friends do this, too. It’s like our own “in” joke. “What are you using tonight, Jack?” we say to each other […] Look, you talk to any guy, and the first thing he wants to know, Has he made the girl come? That’s their mark of virility. […] But me and my Ronson, I can make any girl come, every time. It’s simple biology. […] So I know what Lilly’s getting out of it. But there I am all alone in my head, very excited, but still somehow all alone. […] What turns me on is that I’m raping a motorcycle rider. […] And—I can feel it right now—I’m suddenly surprised. He doesn’t have a cock at all. He is a cunt. […] And then he flops over on his back […] and sometimes at this point, Lilly grabs the Ronson out of its holder and shoves it up me and I love it. She suddenly becomes the guy in the motorcycle leather, and I’m just a cunt, just a simple cunt, being fucked by some motorcycle guy, and I love it.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  **Lead-in.** New marriage, stalled mutual sex after an inventive courtship; masturbation skill acquired late; “slam-bam” intercourse pushes her toward one repeatable fantasy as instrument. **Voice.** Although we have been sleeping together regularly for two years, and I have had three short affairs during that time, my husband and I have been married only eight weeks. I thought I was well prepared for all the postmarital disillusionments that young brides are prone to, but one took me by surprise. Prior to our wedding, our sex life had been varied, quite spontaneous and imaginative. Although I had masturbated since puberty; it was only a year ago that I discovered my clitoris and experienced my first orgasm. Since that time, my mate had been only too anxious and willing to make use of that knowledge, and in his consideration, never failed to masturbate me to orgasm either immediately before or during intercourse. Since we have been married, however, our mutual sex life has come to a standstill in relation to the life we had beforehand. Granted, we are now on stricter schedules and he is often too tired, but even on Sunday afternoons (what used to be our spend-one-day-in-bed-fucking day) the most I can expect is an uneventful nap. Now this hasn’t been going on long enough for me to become angry or even frustrated, so I will deal with this myself. All this rambling has been my disorganized way of building up to the subject of fantasies. When my husband does decide to get down to business, it generally becomes a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am affair. Here’s where my imagination comes in. I found that no matter how long I concentrated on achieving an orgasm, he was simply not giving me the time. So gradually I discovered that it was quicker to snap together a mental vision, a situation that would give me a quick dose of eroticism that would carry me through. Second, I discovered after trying several fantasies, that the process was much quicker and more effective if I relied on one fantasy each time. And the more use the fantasy gets, either during intercourse or masturbation, the more vivid and realistic it becomes. This particular fantasy is brief, and I generally repeat it several times in my mind, omitting the finale until I feel the wave of my orgasm. It consists of a room of men, well-dressed, wealthy, and at least middle-aged. One man acts as my husband or guardian—he is anonymous and I never really assigned him any specific relationship to me. He is in command of my actions and seems to be the leader of the men. I appear in this room of men dressed in a lovely summery dress, light and full-skirted. The man tells the men that I am easily embarrassed but am basically an exhibitionist. He tells me to undo the bodice of the dress, leaving my bare breasts exposed. He then has me lie facedown across the coffee table with my breasts hanging freely at one end and my rear at the other. He tells the men that I am aroused by anything icy and wet and suggests that they cup their half-full champagne glasses around my breasts. (When my husband and I were having better days and nights, we often applied ice to one another.) The fantasy goes on as he slips his hand under my dress and underwear and massages my rear. He does not pay any attention at all to my clitoris or vagina, only my rear. He speaks to the other men and tells them what a marvelous white broad ass I have, and would they like to see it? He feels my rear some more and then slowly lifts my dress to expose my butt, still in panties. He rubs it some more, praises it to the men. By this point, my orgasm is beginning to build and when I am ready, I imagine him very slowly peeling my panties down my thighs. If I have not experienced my climax by now, I either repeat the fantasy from the point of the champagne glasses, or else I add to the ending a light spanking. During the spanking, he explains to the men that he enjoys seeing my white cheeks turn pink. This fantasy originated while I masturbated in the bathtub. Now it gets used almost daily, if not in bed with my husband, in the tub with a well-aimed stream of water. I’m curious to know how long this one fantasy will suffice before it becomes boring. I’m beginning to think that just the concept of this fantasy is what turns me on—sort of a reflex action. But as long as it works, it’s keeping our marriage—including our sex life—joyful.