Exposure Dread

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 Boys & Sex (2020)

  Men learn too often, subtly or overtly, to prioritize their pleasure over women’s feelings. That may or may not lead to assault, but it does raise ethical questions over how men treat sexual partners, particularly in encounters that skirt the edges of consent. That’s why the accusations against comedian Aziz Ansari in January 2018 caused such a stir. “Grace,” a pseudonymous twenty-two-year-old, claimed that when she went back to Ansari’s apartment after a dinner date, he tried multiple times to initiate sex with her (mostly by repeating, “Where do you want me to fuck you?”). She declined, both physically and verbally, but he persisted. When she explained, “I don’t want to feel forced because then I’ll hate you, and I’d rather not hate you,” he backed off, inviting her to “just chill over here on the couch.” A few minutes later, though, he began playing with her hair, then spun her around and pointed to his crotch, indicating that she should perform oral sex on him. And she did. The encounter continued, him pressing, her reluctantly (and to some, inexplicably) acquiescing; him oblivious to her discomfort, her not wanting to offend. Nothing that happened between them was illegal. Ansari is not a Weinstein or a Cosby. He is not even a Louis C.K., who made female associates watch him masturbate. He was just another overeager guy trying to talk a woman into sex, viewing her limits as a challenge he needed to overcome in order to score. What he did was not unusual and was not, in truth, newsworthy; yet that was the very reason it was news. Because it extended the conversation beyond legality, revealing the most banal and pervasive of power dynamics: that men interpret women’s behavior through the filter of their own wishes. Their claims of “miscommunication,” then, Nicole Bedera concluded in her research on college students, may actually be part of “an expectation that they control both partners’ narratives” about a sexual experience, including about consent.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  National Geographic has always held a fascination for pubescents of both sexes. It certainly fascinated me, but not because of the occasional bare breast or man wearing nothing but a codpiece. The real eroticism of other cultures to this middle-class, small-town white girl was decoration, the exotic world of decoration almost wholly absent from my own world. Tattoos all over the body and on the face, the oddly pleasing geometry of scarring, the elongated earlobes and lips and nostrils, women who wear piles of heavy metal rings around their necks till their collarbones droop like pine boughs under snow. Tattoos, scarification, and body piercing are normal among many people, perhaps among most people. To be untouched and clean-skinned is taboo, then. What and where the marks and holes end up is culturally determined, but getting them seems to be an unquestionably good idea to most societies. Piercing seems to be a way of learning the world doesn’t end where your skin does, that you don’t, that you extend outward and can join and be chained to, bound up with the world, bound to others sewn together in the same way. Americans have their own few and meager methods of binding and belonging. Instead of elaborate body painting, we have lipstick and eyeshadow. (Red lips like red vulva, eyes big and dark in arousal.) We have lingerie, neckties, tight jeans, high heels, anorexia and liposuction. There are about twenty-three “traditional” sexual piercings. You can pierce through all or part of the penis, the frenum (that web between the foreskin and the penile head), the edge of the penis head, the foreskin itself, through the skin between the scrotum and anus, between the scrotum and penis. Women pierce their inner and outer labia, their clitoral hood, and even the clitoris itself if the clitoris is big enough to hold a ring or bar. Piercing often increases sexual pleasure. For a few people the piercing itself may carry an erotic thrill, but for most it’s the finished piercing that counts. Both the pierced and their partners claim sex is better with genital piercings. There is something strange and also serenely common about the whole idea of piercing. Is it any stranger to pierce your nipple than to lift iron weights until your body becomes a new shape altogether? Women in this culture get their breasts sliced open and have two pillows of saline inserted, men pay doctors to withdraw a little fat from their buttocks with a needle and inject it into their forehead wrinkles. Which incision is the oddest one?

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  After three years, his girlfriend, Polly, forgets sometimes as well, except insofar as his female past makes him a comfortable partner. Polly describes her first meeting with Chris as feeling as though she’d “taken a consciousness-expanding drug.” That same night she realized Chris was “prime ‘relationship material,’ ” able to talk to women in a way no man she’d ever met could talk. “When she says she has cramps, I know what it means,” Chris laughs. “Right! We talk about our periods!” Polly laughs uproariously. “He says, ‘When I had my period.’ And then again, there’s times when I forget Chris used to be a woman.” “She asked me once what I did during Vietnam, and I just looked at her.” Chris told me he’d been a kind of “role model” for several men in his men’s support group, men who thought he “had something” they didn’t, who couldn’t believe it when he told them he used to be a woman. (“I was never a woman,” he corrects me. “I had a woman’s body and a woman’s experience.”) “What do people most want to know about you?” I ask. “People want to know: What do your parents think? What do your friends think? Do you date? But what they really want to ask is What does your penis look like?” Transsexuals long to be recognized in ways that cohere with their hidden, internal identity. The first step in becoming a woman is to stop acting like a man. MTF transsexuals must learn the details of how women walk, dance, hold a glass, smooth their clothing, how women talk, and more often, listen, to men. Male-to-female transsexuals are really women in some raw, inchoate way, but they must also become women, join themselves to a mutable, socially constructed and changing state. Some transsexuals change every piece of identification, destroy photographs, edit their past lives to eradicate every marker of the hated gender. Men becoming women bind their clothes and pad their bras; women becoming men bind their breasts flat and pad their crotches. Kate Bornstein resents the need to pass, to be “gendered” at all, but considers it a necessary evil for now. “I don’t want to be beaten up. A lot of gay bashing occurs not because people worry about the kind of sex the person is having, but because the person is violating a gender code. Once I was walking down a badly lit stairway in the subway in Philadelphia. And this guy puts a knife in my stomach and says, ‘Give me your money.’ I just bellowed in this big male voice, and he jumped three feet up the stairs, and he was shaking, and shouting, ‘Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!’ And then he just ran.”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Many gay men are effeminate—meaning they display traits we in this culture consider feminine, subtle and not so subtle hints in posture, voice, gesture. I suspect Aristophanes and his Platonian-era pals, sitting around in robes discussing love and sipping wine, may have seemed effeminate in much the same way. The problem arises in connotation—in our narrow ideas of what constitutes not feminine and masculine, but appropriately male and female. It’s the belief that the male should be unbalanced, should be only male, that has given the queen a bad name. “When I was in high school I didn’t know any gay people at all. I thought I just acted normally,” says Brian, a short and unassuming man with curly red hair and a red beard. “I was in an acting class, and one of the impromptu assignments was that we each had to imitate somebody in the class, and this one guy, who was a really nice guy, got up and imitated me. And he was so queeny! I’d known I was gay for a long time, but I thought I was hiding it so well. It got a big laugh and I thought, Good. I’m proud of myself. And I came out right after that.” “Last year I went to Oklahoma with my mother for a family reunion. As soon as we got there my grandmother asked me to take my earring off. I love my grandmother, so I did it for her. But I was so threatened by these people. I butched it up so much! I thought, we’re only going to be here for two days, I can butch it. I thought they were going to take a hose and squirt me down. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t fool them. Anyway, when I was a child, people would speak of me as a sissy boy before I even knew I was gay.” “Before I knew I was gay.” Lots of people say something along these lines: My mother knew, others knew, before I did. What exactly is seen to tell the tale? I went to an assembly at my daughter’s school today. Each of the primary grades had prepared a song, and marched upon the stage above the parents in neat, well-groomed rows. As I waited for my daughter’s class to sing I was scanning the fresh and nervous faces of the third-grade children, when I saw a child who struck me instantly as gay. I simply had the thought, “That child is gay,” before I was aware of it, without any conscious consideration. I looked again and saw I couldn’t tell if this child, who could not be older than nine, was a girl or a boy. A girl who dressed and stood as a boy? A boy with a particularly loose and feminine bearing? He, she, stood out, was different, because of that ambiguity.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A week later, the phone rang itself red. When I picked up, silence was on the other end. Heat radiated from the receiver, blistering my cheeks, and I had to hold it away from my face. It must have been a fire calling. But then the silence changed, became familiar, and I could imagine the mouth making it: silver-capped teeth uneven as a mountain range, a fog of cigarette smoke twined through the peaks. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t know if he knew it was me, but I hung up after counting to a hundred, let him learn my silence too: Mine was a weapon. Mine was a mercy, too. I gave him a hundred silences to translate into anything: sorry, goodbye, come back, leave, don’t, go, stay. DAUGHTERBack to Ben [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] Ben’s father bought a lot in another town. He wanted to build his own house, with a porch and a yard and a painted-white doghouse—even though, according to Ben, he was allergic to dogs and once sneezed at a beagle so hard his brains fled out of his nose as a flock of moths. The resulting hollowness of his head caused him to sell their car and furniture and buy an empty lot. No one in class believed Ben until the week she came to school with her father’s toolbox, full of nails and screws and other little silver things that looked like ear-bones. We told her that houses weren’t built. They existed like trees, grown in from the street. Ben walked me to the land her father had bought. It was damp and tufted with grass like an old man’s scalp. A fence as high as our foreheads split the lot from the sidewalk. Her father was unraveling the fence, rolling it up like a tongue. The land was concave, sunken in the middle, swallowing two trees that stood in the center of it. Ben’s father began the foundation by renting a bulldozer and carved a hole so deep we joked he was digging himself back to China. I walked an hour west on weekends to visit Ben and her family, who moved into a small shed bordering the hole. Ben’s father built the shed in two weeks, complete with a bunk bed for Ben and her brother, a dining table made of exposed plywood, and a drain in the corner for showering. Instead of a sink, they owned a bucket. Instead of a kitchen, they stacked a wall of tinned tuna and Spam, a tapestry of meats. Instead of a toilet, there was a spade by the door for us to dig our own holes. When it stormed, the tin roof chattered like teeth and the walls italicized themselves. Leaks veined the walls and bled rain. When I described it to my mother—bleached walls, a soil floor covered in prayer rugs, plastic-wrapped holes for windows—she said it sounded like a chicken farm, the kind she used to work for in Arkansas.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I disliked the crusading certainty of Ayatollah Khomeini, yet I was also disturbed by the shrill rhetoric of some of Rushdie’s champions. Did we not believe in the importance of truth and accuracy in our dealings with others? But some London literati who had begun by attacking the ayatollah and the Bradford Muslims very quickly segued into a denunciation of Islam itself, and what they said was dangerously over the top. Muslims were compared to Nazis and told to go back to their countries of origin. Islam was described as a bloodthirsty religion, and the Koran was said to preach a God of vengeance, who ruled by terror and threat. I knew that this was not correct, and could not see how it was acceptable to defend a liberal position by promoting a bigotry that, in view of our recent history, we Europeans could ill afford. On the first anniversary of the fatwa there was yet more media ferment. I had written a short opinion piece in the books section of The Sunday Times, showing that Rushdie’s portrait of “Mahound” corresponded exactly with Islamophobic myths that had first been promoted by the Crusaders. On the day that the essay was published, I looked bleakly through the newspapers. My little contribution seemed a minnow beside the more authoritative articles by the literary heavyweights, and I felt suddenly overcome by a cold, pervasive dread. By failing to live up to our own standards of tolerance and compassion, by assuming that all Muslims were as vengeful as the ayatollah and that their religion was inherently violent and evil, we were laying up a store of trouble for ourselves in the future. Rightly or wrongly, many Muslims throughout the world believed that the West despised them. The tone of these articles would confirm them in their suspicions, and provoke some to extremism. Of course, we must defend the principle of free speech, but after Auschwitz we could not afford to indulge an old crusading prejudice which was manifestly untrue. Rushdie’s portrait of “Mahound” performed an important function in his novel. It was presented as fiction and delusion, as part of the theme of distortion and “monsterization.” But the writers who were denouncing Islam so vehemently in the papers this morning presented their views as hard, incontrovertible fact. Most of their readers would not know the true story of Muhammad, and many would probably accept verbatim this inaccurate depiction of Islam, thus compounding the problem. The trouble was, I said to myself as I sadly returned to the pile of newspapers, there was no accessible life of the Prophet to act as a counternarrative. The traditional Muslim biographies of Muhammad were written in a foreign idiom that could appeal only to a believer from the Arab world or the Indian subcontinent.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Instead of the chaos, violence, and grasping barbarism of the pre-Islamic period in Arabia, there would be spiritual and humane refinement. Repeated actions would lead to the cultivation of a new awareness. The point is that this was not a belief system, but a process. The religious life designed by Muhammad made people act in ways that were supposed to change them forever. Without fully understanding what I was doing, I too had started to behave in a different way. Muhammad had been intended in part as a gift to the Muslim community, but I was astonished by the generosity of their response when the book was published in the autumn of 1991. None of the pessimistic predictions came to pass, and Muslims in Britain and in the United States (where the book appeared the following year) took it to their hearts. But on the international stage, relations with the Muslim world were rapidly deteriorating. Two short weeks after I had delivered the manuscript to the publishers, the United States–led coalition began the air offensive Desert Storm against Iraq. There were rigged elections in Algeria, when, with the tacit approval of the West, the secularist National Liberation Front suppressed FIS, the Islamic party which was set to win in the polls. The result was a hideous civil war. And at about the same time, fighting broke out in Yugoslavia between Serbs and Croats. Once again we would see concentration camps in Europe, but this time the victims were Muslims. We seemed to be heading into a period of great darkness. In the ensuing years, as violence and religious extremism escalated in one region after another, especially in the Middle East, I found myself preoccupied by the problems of the Muslim world and its relationship with the West. No longer did news stories seem remote events that might as well be happening on another planet. The dread that had impelled me to write Muhammad would not go away. I wrote more books—about Islam, Jerusalem, and fundamentalism— because I felt instinctively that we were embarked on a dangerous course, that Muslims and Westerners were increasingly unable to understand each other and were all hurtling toward some nameless horror. Muhammad introduced me to a different world. I began to be invited to interfaith gatherings, and gained a new circle of friends.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  I challenge you to pray this prayer, if you are ready: “Here am I, Lord, send me.” Or, if you’re more of a sports person, go with, “Here am I, Coach, put me in the game.” You have shots to take. Points to score. People to help. A world to love. It’s time get in the game. 4. SEARCH MY HEART. Another prayer that may lead you places you wouldn’t have expected is this one: “Search my heart.” This is an invitation for God to probe your innermost being: your thoughts, your motives, the deepest secrets of your heart. The things you don’t want anyone to know about. The fears you haven’t admitted to yourself. The hopes buried deep in your heart. The dreams you don’t think could ever come to pass. God doesn’t need your permission, of course. He sees it all anyway. That’s why David wrote, “You have searched me, LO R D , and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar” (Psalm 139:1–2). But the same David wrote, Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139:23–24 We don’t pray to give God permission to speak, but rather to acknowledge that we are listening. We need to verbalize the desire for God to know us deeply, authentically, completely. We need to hear ourselves say it. It helps us be ready to respond when He speaks. Because while God won’t be surprised at what He finds in our hearts, we might be. God spoke through Jeremiah, a prophet who spent years trying to get his countrymen to open their eyes to the sin that was destroying them, saying, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). In other words, the human heart is surprisingly good at self-deception. We think we know ourselves intimately, but we often don’t even know how much we don’t know about ourselves. God answered His own question through Jeremiah: “I the LO R D search the heart and examine the mind” (17:10). God sees past the external and gets straight to the heart: our heart. Again, this is not an easy prayer—but it is liberating. Jesus was the one who said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The truth hurts, and it triggers emotions we might not enjoy, but it leads to freedom, which is far more valuable. I encourage you to set aside some time when you pray this. If you are the type who likes writing things down, make sure you have a notebook with you. If you prefer audio notes or something else, that’s great. Find what works for you.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I let myself in and stepped silently up the stairs - horribly mindful of the last time I had crept, noiselessly, through a slumbering house, and all that the creeping had led to. Perhaps it was the memory that made me blunder: for half-way up I put my hand to my head - and my hat went soaring over the banister to land with a thud in the passageway below. I came, cursing, to a halt. I knew I must go down to fetch it; just as I was about to turn and begin my descent, however, I heard the creaking of a door and saw the bobbing glow of a candle.‘Miss Astley -’ It was my landlady’s voice, sounding thin and querulous in the darkness. ‘Miss Astley, is that you?’I didn’t stop to answer her, but hurled myself up the remaining stairs and ran into my room. With the door closed behind me I tore the jacket from my shoulders and the trousers from my legs, and stuffed them, with my shirt and drawers, into the little curtained alcove where I hung my clothes. I found myself a night-gown, and pulled it on; as I fastened the buttons at the throat, however, I heard what I had dreaded to hear: the sound of rapid, heavy footsteps on the stairs, followed by a hammering at my door and Mrs Best’s voice, loud and shrill.‘Miss Astley! Miss Astley! It would oblige me if you would open this door. I have found a peculiar item in the downstairs passage, and believe that you have someone in there as you should not!’‘Mrs Best,’ I answered, ‘what do you mean?’‘You know what I mean, Miss Astley. I am warning you. I have my son with me!’ She caught hold of the door-knob, and shook it. Above our heads there were more footsteps: the baby had been woken by the noise, and begun to cry.I turned the key, and opened the door. Mrs Best, clad in a night-dress and a tartan wrap, pushed past me, into the room. Behind her, in a shirt and nightcap, stood her son. He had a terrible complexion.I turned to the landlady. She was gazing about her in frustration. ‘I know there is a gentleman in here somewhere!’ she cried. She pulled the covers from the bed, then stopped to look beneath it. At last, of course, she headed for the alcove. I darted to stop her, and she curled her lip in satisfaction. ‘Now we’ll have him!’ she said. She reached past me and tweaked the curtain back, then stepped away with a gasp. There were about four suits there, as well as the one that I had just taken off. ‘Why, you little strumpet!’ she cried. ‘I believe you was planning a regular horgy!’‘A horgy? A horgy?’ I folded my arms. ‘They’re bits of mending, Mrs Best.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The great wellspring of their quarrel concerns what the couple both refer to as “the world.” For his part, Willoughby “wanted her simply to be material in his hands for him to mold her, he had no other thought.”179 There is a hitch in the scheme: “he had made the discovery that their minds differed on one or two points and a difference of view in his bride was obnoxious to his repose.”180 Willoughby, who intends to go into Parliament and in the days of the British Empire at its zenith proposes to rule that entity he calls the world, insists that for true lovers there should be an absolute exclusion of the world from their blisses. Translated, this means that the dyadic withdrawal he pretends to recommend for both parties should apply exclusively to his bride; he intends Clara to spend the rest of her days in his home catering to his comfort. It is Ruskin’s irrepressible formula of separate spheres once again. Clara begins to view the prospect as tantamount to undergoing interment alive. Willoughby is a lord. To marry him is to enter into the hierarchal obligations of feudalism. From his birth he has been taught and encouraged to command and he expects to continue when Clara is added to his retinue. When she finally gathers courage to reject him, he refuses to release her from an engagement she informs him in the most lucid terms is unpalatable. How dare she wish to be free of him: “Volatile, unworthy, liberty—my dearest!…you are at liberty within the law, like all good women; I shall control and direct your volatility; and your sense of worthiness must be re-established when we are more intimate; it is timidity. The sense of unworthiness is a guarantee of worthiness ensuing.”181

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  I remember meeting him, too, one bleak winter evening, walking along the rain-swept Corniche, dodging the sudden gushes of salt water from the conduits which lined it. Under the black hat a skull ringing with Smyrna, and the Sporades where his childhood lay. Under the black hat too the haunting illumination of a truth which he afterwards tried to convey to me in an English not the less faultless for having been learned. We had met before, it is true, but glancingly: and would have perhaps passed each other with a nod had not his agitation made him stop me and take my arm. ‘Ah! you can help me!’ he cried, taking me by the arm. ‘Please help me.’ His pale face with its gleaming goat-eyes lowered itself towards mine in the approaching dusk.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said once we’d pulled into the lot. “You’re welcome,” he said, and looked at me. “You sure you’re okay?” “Yes,” I replied with false confidence. “I’ve traveled alone a lot.” I got out with my backpack and two oversized plastic department store bags full of things. I’d meant to take everything from the bags and fit it into my backpack before leaving Portland, but I hadn’t had the time. I’d brought the bags here instead. I’d get everything together in my room. “Good luck,” said the man. I watched him drive away. The hot air tasted like dust, the dry wind whipping my hair into my eyes. The parking lot was a field of tiny white pebbles cemented into place; the motel, a long row of doors and windows shuttered by shabby curtains. I slung my backpack over my shoulders and gathered the bags. It seemed strange to have only these things. I felt suddenly exposed, less exuberant than I had thought I would. I’d spent the past six months imagining this moment, but now that it was here—now that I was only a dozen miles from the PCT itself—it seemed less vivid than it had in my imaginings, as if I were in a dream, my every thought liquid slow, propelled by will rather than instinct. Go inside, I had to tell myself before I could move toward the motel office. Ask for a room. “It’s eighteen dollars,” said the old woman who stood behind the counter. With rude emphasis, she looked past me, out the glass door through which I’d entered moments before. “Unless you’ve got a companion. It’s more for two.” “I don’t have a companion,” I said, and blushed—it was only when I was telling the truth that I felt as if I were lying. “That guy was just dropping me off.” “It’s eighteen dollars for now, then,” she replied, “but if a companion joins you, you’ll have to pay more.” “A companion won’t be joining me,” I said evenly. I pulled a twenty-dollar bill from the pocket of my shorts and slid it across the counter to her. She took my money and handed me two dollars and a card to fill out with a pen attached to a bead chain. “I’m on foot, so I can’t do the car section,” I said, gesturing to the form. I smiled, but she didn’t smile back. “Also—I don’t really have an address. I’m traveling, so I—” “Write down the address you’ll be returning to,” she said. “See, that’s the thing. I’m not sure where I’ll live afterwards because—” “Your folks, then,” she barked. “Wherever home is.”

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  To suppress the recruit's so-called evil or precult personality and lifestyle, the group actively promotes increased participation in group-coordinated activities and in even more mind-altering practices. Either because the group forbids it or because it is an act of self-protection, access to outside information is limited and the new member is discouraged from maintaining precult contacts, most notably with family or close friends. Such contact might expose conflicts between new and old beliefs and upset the still delicate underpinnings necessary to secure adherence to the group. DreadGradually the cult's teachings insinuate a feeling of dread in the recruit that further isolates him and prevents his defection from the group. This is accomplished by increasing dependency on the group through escalated demands, intensified criticism and humiliation, and, in some cases, subtle or overt threats of punishment (physical, spiritual, emotional, or sexual). Even infants and children may be held responsible for the smallest infractions and forced to conform to group demands despite their age. Dread is also intensified once members become even partially dependent on the group or increasingly alienated from their former support network. Many groups use powerful forces of social control, such as threats of excommunication, shunning, and abandonment by the group. If a person is completely estranged from the rest of the world, then staying put in the group appears to be the only option. Members come to dread losing what they consider to be the group's emotional, psychological, and social support, regardless of how controlling or debilitating that support may actually be. Another dread-inducing technique is the induction of phobias. Many cults convey phobic messages such as: "If you leave, you are doomed to countless cycles of incarnation," "You will go crazy or die if you leave the group," "You will be ruined and never find a way to survive," "You are doomed to failure or terrible accidents if you do not obey," "If you leave this church, you are leaving God," "If you leave us, tragic events will occur in the lives of those you love," and so on. Many totalistic groups use phobia induction as a means of control and domination, and it's a rather effective way to keep doubting members from straying. The inevitable internalization of such fears goes quite deep. The Double BindThe effectiveness of a thought-reform program can also be enhanced through use of the "double bind" technique. This emotional cul-de-sac is defined in Merriam-Webster as a "psychological predicament in which a [usually dependent] person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made."15 Often a cult member faces disparagement no matter what he does. The double bind imparts a message of hopelessness: you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Cultic systems of influence and control are typically designed to elicit compliance and obedience. They demand and have an answer. The double bind, however, has no answer. The devotee gets criticized no matter what she does. Here is an example: Jackson D.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I looked at her, and at Cyril — at his flushed and sleeping face, with its delicate lashes and its jutting pink lip. I said, with a kind of creeping dread: ‘And then ... ?’She blinked. ‘And then - well, then she died. She was too slight, the confinement was a hard one; and she died. We couldn’t even find a midwife who would see to her, because she was unmarried - in the end we had to bring a woman in from Islington, someone who didn’t know us, and say that she was Ralph’s wife. The woman called her “Mrs Banner” - imagine that! She was good enough, I suppose, but rather strict. She wouldn’t let us in the room with her; we had to sit down here and listen to the cries, Ralph wringing his hands and weeping all the while. I thought, “Let the baby die, oh, let the baby die, so long as she is safe... !”‘But Cyril did not die, as you see, and Lilian herself seemed well enough, only tired, and the midwife said to let her sleep. We did so - and, when I went to her a little later, I found that she’d begun to bleed. By then, of course, the midwife had gone. Ralph ran for a doctor - but she couldn’t be saved. Her dear, good, generous heart bled quite away -’Her voice failed. I moved to her and squatted beside her, and touched my knuckles to her sleeve; and she acknowledged me kindly, with a slight, distracted smile.‘I wish I’d known,’ I said quietly; inwardly, however, it was as if I had myself by the throat, and was banging my own head against the parlour wall. How could I have been so foolish as not to have guessed it all? There had been the business of the birthday - the anniversary, I realised now, of Lilian’s death. There had been Florence’s strange depressions; her tiredness, her crossness, her brother’s gentle forbearance, her friends’ concern.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  With or without beauty, with or without sexual talents, the successful royal mistress made herself irreplaceable, catering to each of the king’s five senses. She was ready to converse gaily with him when she was tired, make love until all hours when she was ill, cater to his every whim, serve his favorite foods, sympathize when he was cranky, massage his feet, decorate his homes, and raise his illegitimate children—sometimes sired with women other than herself. And all of this must be done cheerfully. Only a few monarchs enjoyed passionate foot-stomping battles with their mistresses. Typically, the royal mistress did not scold, browbeat, or throw jealous tantrums. Sitting on her perch of dignified serenity, she selected her battles carefully, only rarely flapping down with talons bared. In the king’s presence his mistress was never to be tired, ill, complaining, or grief-stricken. She wore a mask of beaming delight over any and all discomforts. When Louis XIV bestowed upon his mistresses and their friends the honor of traveling in his carriage from one palace to the other, it was in actuality a great torment. The duc de Saint-Simon reported, “The expedition would not have covered a quarter of a league before the King would be asking the ladies in his carriage whether they did not care to eat something…. Then they were all obliged to say how hungry they were, put on an air of jollity, and set to with good appetite and willingness, otherwise the King became displeased and would show his resentment openly…. The King liked fresh air and insisted on having all the windows lowered; he would have been extremely displeased had any lady had the temerity to draw one of the curtains to keep out the sun, the wind or the cold. There was no alternative but to pretend not to notice that, nor any other kind of discomfort…. To feel sick was an unforgivable crime.”1 Perhaps worst of all, the ladies were not permitted to mention the needs of nature. During one six-hour ride from Versailles to Fontainebleau, the duchesse de Chevreuse was in such dire need of a chamber pot that she almost collapsed. Fixing a smile upon her face, she never mentioned her agony to the king. Upon reaching Fontainebleau, she raced into the nearest room—which happened to be the chapel—and relieved herself there in the first vessel she found—which happened to be a holy chalice. But the royal mistress’s discomforts did not end there. She was forced to participate in the king’s hobbies whether she liked them or not. Smiling broadly, she rode with him through the cold woods on the hunt and nodded her approval as he cornered and killed screaming animals, then dismembered their bloody carcasses. Laughing gaily, she spent hours in wet fields watching the royal hawks devour little birds. Chuckling merrily, she pretended to relish boring card games until the wee hours of the morning. And then, moaning in feigned ecstasy, she endured unwelcome sex.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She held the silk to her lips, and gazed at me above it. ‘All your promise has come to nothing, after all,’ she said. Then she laughed, and stepped away, and nodded to my trousers - now gaping whitely, of course, at the buttons. ‘Take them off.’ I did so at once, fumbling with my shoes and stockings in my haste. My fag showered me with ash, and I cast it into the grate. ‘And the underthings,’ she went on,‘ - but leave the jacket. That’s good.’ Now I had a heap of discarded clothes at my feet. My jacket ended at my hips; beneath it, in the dim light, my legs looked very white, the triangle of hair between them very dark. The lady watched me all the while, making no move to touch me further. But when I was finished, she went to a drawer in the bureau; and when she turned back to me she held something in her hand. It was a key. ‘In my bedroom,’ she said, nodding towards the second door, ‘you’ll find a trunk, which this will open.’ She handed it to me. It felt very chill upon my overheated palm, and for a moment I merely gazed stupidly at it. Then she clapped her hands: ‘Presto!’ she said again; and this time, she did not smile, and her voice was rather thick. The room next door was smaller than the parlour, but quite as rich, and just as dim and hot. On one side there was a screen, with a commode behind it; on the other stood a japanned press, its surface hard and black and glossy, like a beetle’s back. At the bottom of the bed there was, as she had promised, a trunk: a handsome, antique chest made of some desiccated, perfumed wood - rosewood, I think - with four claw feet and corners of brass, and elaborate carvings on its sides and lid which the dull glow of the fire threw into exaggerated relief. I knelt before it, placed the key in the lock; and felt the shifting, as I turned it, of some deep interior spring. A movement in the corner of the room made me turn my head. There was a cheval-glass there, big as a door, and I saw myself reflected in it: pale and wide-eyed, breathless and curious, but for all that an unlikely Pandora, with my scarlet jacket and my saucy cap, my crop and my bare bare bum. In the room next door all was hushed and still. I turned to the trunk again, and lifted its lid. Inside was a jumble of bottles and scarves, of cords and packets and yellow-bound books. I didn’t pause to gaze upon these objects then, however; indeed, I hardly registered them at all. For on the top of the jumble, on a square of velvet, lay the queerest, lewdest thing I ever saw.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  He raised her skirt and exposed such a luxuriant tuft of curled hair that the three men whistled. She kept her legs tightly closed, her feet against the Basque’s trousers, where he suddenly felt a swarming sensation, like a hundred ants traveling over his sex. He asked the three men to hold her. Bijou squirmed at first and then realized it was less dangerous to lie still, for he was carefully shaving her pubic hair, beginning at the edges, where it lay sparse and shining on her velvety belly. The belly came down in a soft curve there. The Basque lathered, then shaved gently, wiping off the hair and soap with a towel. With her legs tightly closed the men could not see anything but the hair, but as the Basque shaved on and reached the center of the triangle, he exposed a mount, a smooth promontory. The feeling of the cold blade there agitated Bijou. She was half-angry, half-stirred, intent on not showing her sex, but the shaving revealed where the smoothness descended into a fine incurving line. It revealed the bud of the opening, the soft folded flesh that enclosed the clitoris, the tip of the more intensely colored lips. She wanted now to move away but she was afraid of being hurt by the blade. The three men held her and bent down over her to watch. They thought the Basque would stop there. But he ordered her to part her legs. She shook her feet against him, which only excited him more. He said again: “Part your legs. There are some more hairs down there.” She was forced to open them, and he gently began to shave off the hairs, sparse again, delicately curled, on each side of the vulva. And now everything was exposed—the long vertically placed mouth, a second mouth, which opened not like the mouth of the face, but which opened only if she chose to push out a little. But Bijou would not push, and they could see just the two lips, closed, barring the way. The Basque said, “Now she looks like the paintings by that woman, doesn’t she?” But in the paintings, the vulva was open, the lips parted, showing the paler inner layer like the inside of the lips of the mouth. This, Bijou would not show. Once shaved, she had closed her legs again. The Basque said: “I will make you open there.”

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Victoria had turned into the same restless girl she herself had been, counting the hours until she could escape. They might as well write her off now and be done with it. [image file=Image00006.jpg] THE NEXT DAY Tawny approached Vix. “While you’re at it, you might as well marry into it. Then you can take care of your father and me in our old age.” Vix was trying to come up with some smart remark, some remark that might or might not get her face slapped again, when Tawny asked, “What about the brother?” “The brother?” “You know who I mean.” “Sharkey … you mean, Sharkey?” Vix started to laugh. “Why is that funny? He’s not that way, is he?” “What way is that?” she asked, but Tawny wouldn’t say. Sometimes she thought her mother wanted her to fail so she could say, I told you so. I told you you don’t belong in their world . Her father argued with Tawny on her behalf. “A good education opens doors.” “If she wants an education so badly she can go to UNM,” Tawny said. “She doesn’t need Harvard.” “This is a pointless argument!” Vix cried. “Who knows if I’m even going to get in?” But she did get in. And while she was celebrating on her own, keeping her pride and excitement to herself, Lanie celebrated by announcing her pregnancy. AbbyIT’S HER FIRST TRIP to Santa Fe and she’s anxious about meeting Phoebe at graduation. She wears her taupe Armani, a string of pearls, little heels. She’s going for an elegant, understated look. But she sees right away she’s got it all wrong. The other women gathered in the quad at the Mountain Day School are dressed like cowgirls. “At best, Linda Evans in The Big Valley —at worst, Dale Evans as herself.” She wishes Lamb hadn’t dropped her off while he went to park. The Countess rushes to her side. Precious Girl , she cries, taking her arm, leading her to a striking woman in fringed leather, silver and turquoise jewelry, her hair braided. Darlings … the Countess coos, you two really must get to know one another. After all, you’ve had the same husband, you share the same children . Her instinct is to run, but her feet won’t move. She can’t swallow. Phoebe breaks the ice first. What a wicked girl you are! she tells the Countess, who laughs heartily, then excuses herself to greet someone else, as if she’s the hostess at a garden party, leaving her alone with Phoebe, who leans close and says, They don’t call her the Cuntess for nothing! She imagines them in bed together, Phoebe and Lamb, then shuts her eyes tight, trying to erase the picture. She hadn’t expected her to be so exotically beautiful, the long hair, the green eyes. Every male standing in the quad, every straight male, anyway, has his eye on her. And Phoebe knows it. PhoebeWELL, WELL, WELL … isn’t she something!

• From City of Night (1963)

  Suddenly I turned back, away from him, down the hall and the stairs, out the 42nd Street entrance, through the park waiting somehow like a Trap—through the popcorn-crunching leaves, the shadows of the trees grotesque in the faint autumn moon like in a witchstory... the stars hugely unconcerned. And I take the subway back to 34th Street, to that giant spider building I had moved into.... And days later I saw him again, on Times Square, as he crossed the street cockily with a hoodylooking black-haired boy to get into a cab. He glanced at me, turned away quickly. His hat still slouched defiantly to one side. CITY OF NIGHT FROM THE THUNDERING UNDERGROUND—THE MAZE of the New York subways—the world pours into Times Square. Like lost souls emerging from the purgatory of the trains (dark rattling tunnels, smelly pornographic toilets, newsstands futilely splashing the subterranean graydepths with unreal magazine colors), the newyork faces push into the air: spilling into 42nd Street and Broadway—a scattered defeated army. And the world of that street bursts like a rocket into a shattered phosphorescent world. Giant signs—Bigger! Than! Life!—blink off and on. And a great hungry sign groping luridly at the darkness screams: F * A * S * C * I * N * A * T * I * O * N I had been in the islandcity several weeks now, and already I had had two jobs, briefly: each time thinking now I would put down Times Square. But like a possessive lover—or like a powerful drug—it lured me. FASCINATION! I stopped working.... And I returned, dazzled, to this street. The giant sign winked its welcome: FASCINATION! I surrendered to the world of Times Square, and like a hype who needs more and more junk to keep going, I haunted that world not only at night now but in the mornings, the afternoons.... That world of Times Square that I inhabited extends from 42nd Street to about 45th Street, from grimy Eighth Avenue to Bryant Park—where, nightly, shadows cling to the ledges: malehungry looks hidden by the darkness of the night; and occasionally, shadowy figures, first speaking briefly, disappear in pairs behind the statue with its back to the library and come out after a few frantic moments, from opposite directions: intimate nameless strangers joined for one gasping brief space of time. Periodically the newyork cop comes by meanly swinging his stick superiorly, sometimes flashing his light toward the bushes—and the shadows scatter from the ledges, the benches, the trees—walking away aimlessly.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  He’s not sure about working at his father’s firm. Since his father divorced the Babe he’s been having some kind of personal crisis. Gets depressed. Doctor had him on Prozac for a while. Maybe it’s time for him to move on, relocate even. Miami’s hot, in more ways than one. [image file=Image00006.jpg] AFTER A MINUTE Vix slides down in the sand, resting her head against the log. Her eyes close. She floats in and out as Gus and Daniel reminisce, their voices coming from far away, though she can feel their bodies right next to her. “She never could resist those island guys,” Gus says. He’s got it wrong , she thinks. It was only Bru she couldn’t resist . “There we were, horny as hell,” he continues, “and she goes and boffs the one with the ponytail.” Oh, Caitlin … he’s talking about Caitlin . “She’s still gorgeous,” Daniel says. “But jaded now,” Gus tells him. “You think?” Daniel asks. “You can see it in her eyes.” They’re talking right through her, as if she’s not there, as if she’s invisible. Maybe she’s dead and just doesn’t know it. “So this one time,” Gus is saying, “I’m walking by her room and she pulls me in and shuts the door. ‘Gus … would you do my back?’ she says, and she hands me a bottle of suntan lotion. She’s wearing that yellow suit—remember that yellow suit?—and she pulls down the straps … hell, she pulls the whole suit down to her waist. I’m nineteen or something … a kid with hormones.” Vix isn’t sure if she’s going to throw up or not. She tries opening her eyes but that makes everything spin so she quickly shuts them. The Chicago Boys must remember her then because she can feel them looking down at her, making sure it’s safe to continue. Gus says, “The Cough Drop is totally out of it.” Daniel says, “If you tell me you made it with Caitlin and kept it to yourself all these years …” “Not even close,” Gus says. “I got to cup those perfect little tits in my hands for about two seconds, then she says, ‘I want you to use it while I watch.’ ‘Use what?’ I ask her. She says, ‘The whole package …’ ” “The package?” Daniel asks. “The package,” Gus tells him. Vix imagines him jiggling his balls to show Daniel what he means, because the two of them began to laugh. Vix wants to laugh, too. Wants to laugh about how Cassandra counted Vixen’s pubic hairs. Sixteen. You’re so lucky! But she feels herself on the verge of tears instead. “I always thought she’d make something of her life,” Daniel says. “Something important.” A bell clangs announcing dinner, and Gus shakes Vix. “Okay, Cough Drop … time to get up.” He helps her to her feet. “How’re you feeling?