Fear

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 Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And perhaps she should see the Hall of Punishments, how those disobedient slaves are chastised using the very pleasure they have learned to feel here." THE HALL OF PUNISHMENTS AT THE door of the new hall, Lord Gregory signaled one of the busy Pages. "Bring Princess Lizetta here," he said raising his voice slightly. "Sit back on your heels, Beauty, with your hands behind your neck and observe all that's presented for your benefit." The unfortunate Princess Lizetta was apparently just being brought in, and Beauty saw at once that she was gagged but rather simply so. A small cylinder covered with leather and shaped like a dog's bone was forced into her mouth and back so far between her teeth that it was rather like a bit, and apparently she could not have dislodged it with her tongue if she had wanted to. She was crying angrily and kicking, as the Page who held her hands behind her back gestured for yet another Page to take her about the waist and carry her to Lord Gregory. She was placed on her knees right before Beauty, her black hair falling down in front of her face, her dark breasts heaving. "Petulance, my Lord," said the Page rather wearily. "She was to be quarry in the Hunt in the Maze when she refused to give her Lords and Ladies good sport. The usual nonsense." Princess Lizetta tossed her black hair over her shoulder and let out a little contemptuous growl from behind the gag, which astonished Beauty. "Ah, and impudence as well," said Lord Gregory. He reached down and lifted her chin. Her dark eyes evinced nothing but anger as she looked up at him and she turned her head so sharply that she was soon free of him. The page gave her several hard spanks but she showed no contrition. Her little buttocks looked hard in fact. "Double her, for punishment," said Lord Gregory. "I think a real punishment is in order." Princess Lizetta gave several high-pitched groans. They seemed both anger and protest. She seemed not to have bargained for this, and as she was carried ahead of Beauty and Lord Gregory into the Hall of Punishments, the Pages quickly affixed leather cuffs to her wrists and ankles, each cuff with a heavy metal hook imbedded in it. Now she was raised, struggling, to a great low beam that spanned the room, her wrists hung from a hook above her head and then her legs brought straight up in front of her so that her ankles were fixed to the same hook. She was, in fact, bent double.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  AFTER DINNER, KURT TOOK ME BACK TO AN APARTMENT THAT looked like nobody lived there, gave me something to drink, and led me through the living room with its black leather couch and glass coffee table into his bedroom. Closing the door behind him, he showed me the hand weights he kept in a line by the wall, like shoes, and then pushed me toward a desk. I remember his hands always on my body, and even before he pulled the mirror and the razor blade out of the center drawer, I was thinking, This isn’t good. Kurt reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a paper packet—druggie origami—tapping two snowy piles onto the glass. I watched him chopping and scraping, wincing a bit at the sound, a fork on china, nails on a chalkboard, a warning alarm I would fail to heed. Down to the roots of my nerve fibers, I knew the thing to do was get out, but this was to be a night of many college firsts: first restaurant date, first ride in a Porsche, first blow. Kurt rolled a crisp green bill from his wallet and showed me what to do. It burned. And then? Not much. The coke had done nothing more than make my eyes feel really, really wide open. I would be hyperalert for what came next. Which was also almost nothing. He kissed me, and as he did, he pulled me away from the desk and down onto the bed. He was the world’s worst kisser, all probing tongue, like a sea slug trying to move down my throat. I was repulsed, but saved (I know now) by the coke: Kurt couldn’t get it up. He rolled against me, and through the thin fabric of his dress khakis, I could feel him against my thigh, soft as a dinner roll. George Michael sang through the speakers. Rather than pursue what he must have known from experience was a losing game, Kurt sprang from the bed, as if he’d planned it that way, and went to the stereo to turn it up. I will be your father figure. Thirty minutes later, when I asked for a ride back to the dorm, he gave me one without much of a fight. In the Por-sha. The next day, apparently having had more fun than I had, Kurt called to ask if I’d go with him to Shasta Lake, an annual Memorial Day fraternity tradition at the University of Oregon: at least a hundred rented houseboats, each carrying eight or so couples, kegs tapped and flowing, red Solo cups bobbing in the water like buoys. Imagine the drinking and the drugs. Imagine the sleeplessness and the unfinished brains. Imagine the heat, the dehydration, and the food packed by the boy-men hosting this nightmare. Imagine that nobody on the whole boat had the sense to bring sunscreen. Imagine the depth of seething, unmet need—and then imagine the depth of the water.

• From Querelle (1953)

  The insinuating sentence began with a "but" so heavy with hypocrisy that Querelle, whose common approach was a brusque one, was instantly reminded of Lieutenant Seblon and his wily ways, his roundabout approaches. Gil felt the blood draining away from his face. His life, his presence within himself, rushed to his eyes and made them burn, escaped through them to lose itself, to disperse among the dark shadows of the dungeon. He had to hesitate before answering, not with the kind of hesitation where time is gained by cold-blooded reasoning for and against, but out of a feeling close to complete prostration, aggravated by the impression that it would be useless to deny anything, and this, too, locked his jaws. The charge was so serious that he had to make an effort to comprehend it at all. He remained mute, tried to lose himself in a fixed stare, and became so self-conscious of it that he could feel the muscles round his eyes twitching. Unblinking, he pressed his lips together, until they became a thin line. "Well? That sailor. What made you snuff him?" "He didn't do it." As if half asleep Gil listened to Querelle's question and Roger's answer. The sound of their voices didn't bother him at all. He had withdrawn totally into the intensity of his stare, while being aware of its fixity. "Who was it then, if it wasn't him?" Gil turned his head and looked Querelle in the eye. 17% I JEAN GENET "It wasn't me, I swear! I can't tell you who did it, I don't know nothing about it. But I'm telling you, by all that's sacred, I swear I didn't do it." "The papers said they was sure it was you, all right. I'm willing to believe you, but you'd have soine explaining to do if the cops got you. See, they found your cigarette lighter, right by that stiff. Anyhow, you better keep the profile low." Gil resigned himself to the second murder. When the monstrousness o_f his deed had first blurred his vision, he had thought of turning himself in. He had thought that once the police had recognized his innocence of the second crime, they would let him go, so that he could go and hide again because of the first one. He thought they would respect the rules of the game. The insanity of this train of thought soon became apparent to him. Thus, little by little, Gil took the murder of the sailor upon himself. He tried to think of reasons for doing it. Sometimes he wondered who the true murderer might be. He interrogated himself to find our how he had managed to lose his cigarette lighter at the scene of the crime. "I would really like to know who did it. I hadn't even noticed I didn't have that lighter any more."

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Many lesbians had survived everything from family exile to Freudian theory, from remaining closeted in order to keep their jobs to coming out and losing custody of their own children. Besides enduring violence directed at females in general, they faced the added danger of being raped as a punishment, or as a “conversion” to heterosexuality. No lesbian was completely safe, but for those without traditional families, secret communities could mean more safety and a chosen family. On the road, I met couples traveling in RVs and discovered that a national roving group called RV Women provided campgrounds and community. Other gatherings were massive and seasonal—most famously, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. From 1976 to 2015, thousands of women and girls, lesbians and otherwise, came for part or all of the month of August to camp on acres of man-free Michigan forest and experience music groups, visual arts, and sports in safety and freedom. Other secrets were small but permanent, like lesbian retirement communities in Florida, or the Last Perch, a creation of a California couple whose vision went from aging to hospice. In 2001 I discovered an all-female trailer park near Tucson, Arizona. After being let through a double gate with a safety code that changed daily, I found myself on streets named for admired women in history. Suddenly I could imagine living on the corner of Emma Goldman and Gertrude Stein, or following Dorothy Height to Eleanor Roosevelt. At the center of all the neat rows of trailers was a clubhouse where women could gather for everything from book clubs to gambling. Now secrecy has become less necessary for safety, and, at least in some parts of the country, lesbian couples and their children are treated like other families. On the Web there are LGBTQ resort and retirement places for a larger community of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. Yet whether we are born women or become women, many of us still find more safety in each other’s company than in the company of men, and more safety than men find in one another’s company. As long as there is danger, there will be secrets. But most of all, I owe my discovery of the power of secrets to migrant farmworkers. Without them, I would still believe that what I saw of America from my father’s car—or see now from my own wandering path—is all there is to see. I.It is the very end of the 1960s. Scared and in over my head, I am a volunteer flying to California at the request of Cesar Chavez, a man I don’t know. His fledgling union is trying to raise wages for all farmworkers, but the growers have refused even to talk, and Cesar has enlisted public support by calling for a consumer boycott of grapes. In retaliation, agribusiness is using migrants from Mexico to break the strike, and Cesar has organized protest marches from both sides of the border.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "It was small consolation to me that other naked slaves would follow. I was alone by the Queen's coach, and I thought only of pleasing her, and of appearing as she wanted me to appear to others. I held my head up, I contracted my buttocks to hold in the painful phallus. And soon, as we passed before hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers, I thought again, 'I am her servant, her slave, and this is my life. I have no other.' "Perhaps the most excruciating part of the day for me was the villages. You have been through the villages. I had not. The only common people I had seen were in the kitchen. "But this day of military parade was also the opening of the fairs in the villages. The Queen visited each of several, and after that the fair would open. "There was a platform in the center of the square of each, and when the Queen went inside of the house of the Lord of the village to drink a cup of wine with him, I was left on display as she had told me I would be. "But I was not to stand gracefully as I might have hoped. And the villagers knew this, though I didn't. When we reached the first village, the Queen went away, and as soon as my feet hit the platform, a great roar went up from the crowd who knew they were to see something amusing. "I had my head down, glad of the opportunity to move the rigid muscles of my throat and shoulders. And I was quite astonished when Felix removed the phallus from my anus. Of course the crowd cheered at this. I was then made to kneel up, hands behind my neck on a turntable. "Felix operated it with his foot. And telling me to spread my legs wide, he turned the turntable. I was perhaps more afraid in these first few moments than ever before, but never once did the fear rising and trying to escape come to me. I was virtually helpless. Naked, a slave of the Queen, I was in the midst of hundreds of common people who would have overpowered me at once, and cheerfully for all the sport it would have given them. It was then that I realized escape was quite impossible. Any naked Prince or Princess fleeing the castle would have been apprehended by these villagers. They would have given no shelter. "Now Felix commanded me to show to the crowd all my private parts that were in the service of the Queen, and that I was her slave, and her animal. I did not understand these words, which were spoken ceremoniously. So he told me politely enough that I must part the cheeks of my buttocks as I bent over and display for them my open anus. Of course this was a symbolic gesture. It meant I was ever to be violated.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When we began searching for the table with Bennett and the others, we found ourselves suddenly lost in a series of mirrored boxes and partitions which opened into each other. We kept walking into ourselves. As in a dream, none of the faces at the tables belonged to people we knew. We looked hard and with mounting panic. I felt I had been transported to some looking-glass world where, like the Red Queen, I would run and run and only wind up going backward. Bennett was nowhere. In a flash, I knew he had left with Marie and taken her home to bed. I was terrified. I’d finally provoked him into it. That was the end of me. I’d spend the rest of my lonely life husbandless, childless, and neglected. “Let’s go,” Adrian said. “They aren’t here. They’ve taken off.” “Maybe they couldn’t get a table and they’re waiting outside.” “We could look,” he said. But I knew the truth. I was abandoned. Bennett had left for good. At this very moment he was cupping Marie’s huge sallow ass. He was fucking her Freudian mind. On my first trip to Washington at the age of ten, I got separated from my family while touring the FBI Building. I got lost in the FBI Building, of all places. Bureau of Missing Persons. Send out alarm. This was at the absolute height of the McCarthy era and a tight-lipped FBI man was explaining various things about catching communists. I was dawdling before a glass case, dreaming into the fingerprint specimens, when the tour group rounded a corner and disappeared. I wandered about, gazing at my reflection in the exhibition cases and trying to keep down my terror. I would never be found. I was more elusive than the fingerprints of a gloved criminal. I would be diabolically interrogated by crew-cut FBI agents until I confessed that my parents were communists (they had been communists once, in fact) and we would all end our days like the Rosenbergs singing “God Bless America” in our damp cells and anticipating what it would be like to be electrocuted. At that point I began to scream. I screamed until the whole tour group doubled back and found me, right there—in a room full of clues. But now I couldn’t scream. And besides, the rock music was so loud that no one would have heard. I suddenly wanted Bennett as badly as I had wanted Adrian a few minutes before. And Bennett was gone. We left the discotheque and headed for Adrian’s car. A funny thing happened on the way to his pension. Or rather: ten funny things happened. We got lost ten times. And each of those times was unique—not just the same wrong turns over and over. Now that we were stuck with each other for eternity, fucking immediately didn’t seem quite as important. “I’m not going to tell you about all the other men I’ve fucked,” I said, being brave.

• From Querelle (1953)

  lOS I QUERELLE go on believing in his false naivete (while knowing Mario didn't believe in it for one minute) -to uphold the pretense that this was merely a joke, child's play, and looking the copper straight in the eye, Querelle undid the buttons: one, two, three. In a voice that he wanted to sound clear but that was vaguely excited he said: "You were right. Not bad." "You like it.". Querelle withdrew his hand. Still smiling. "I told you, I'm not interested in pricks. No matter what size they are." With one hand still on the sailor's shoulder, Mario thrust his other hand into his pocket and flipped his rod out into the open air. He stood there, legs apart, confronting the sailor who was looking at him and smiling. Quere11e whispered: "Not here. Isn't there some other place?'' Close to his ear, Quere11e heard the quiet noise the saliva was making in the detective's mouth. His moist lips were parting, perhaps in readiness for a kiss, the tongue ready to dart into an ear and to flicker about there .. They heard the s t eam whistle of a night train. Querelle listened to its rumbling, almost breath ing approach. The two men had arrived at the railroad embank ment. It was dark, but the cop's face had to be very close to his own. Again he heard that sharp little noise, now a little hissing and amplified by the freely flowing spittle. It seemed to him ]ike the mysterious preparation for an amorous debauch the likes of which he had never even imagined. He felt a little disquieted by his ability to distinguish such an intimate mani festation of Mario's, to thus perceive his innermost secrets. Even though he had moved his lips, and his tongue inside his mouth, in a completely natural fashion, it appeared to Querelle as if he were smacking his ]ips at the thought of the ensuing orgy. That quiet spittle-noise in Qucrelle's ear was enough to

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As Zapata rides to his destiny, his wife hangs on to his boot, dragging in the dust, imploring him to stay home. Since I couldn’t yet admit to myself that I was more interested in going to sea and the revolution than in staying home as the mother or the wife, I just vowed silently that I would never become an obstacle to any man’s freedom. Even the dictionary defines adventurer as “a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures,” but adventuress is “a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.” When women did travel, they seemed to come to a bad end, from the real Amelia Earhart to the fictional Thelma and Louise. In much of the world to this day, a woman may be disciplined or even killed for dishonoring her family if she leaves her home without a male relative, or her country without a male guardian’s written permission. In Saudi Arabia, women are still forbidden to drive a car, even to the hospital in an emergency, much less for an adventure. During the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring, both female citizens and foreign journalists paid the price of sexual assault for appearing in the public square. As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women’s absence from quest-for-identity novels, “there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.”3 The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.4 However, these journeys have often been unchosen one-way trips in cultures that were patriarchal and patrilocal; that is, women were under male control and also went to live in their husbands’ households. In matrilocal cultures, men joined their wives’ families—in about a third of the world they still do—but with equal status, since those cultures are and almost never were matriarchal. In the face of all the dire and often accurate warnings of danger on the road for women, it took modern feminism to ask the rock-bottom question: Compared to what? Whether by dowry murders in India, honor killings in Egypt, or domestic violence in the United States, records show that women are most likely to be beaten or killed at home and by men they know. Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road. Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey—and to be welcomed when she comes home. —AS YOU WILL SEE, this book is the story not of one or even several trips, but of decades of travel leading out from the hub of home. You might say it’s the story of a modern nomad.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “O my loved Guide, who more than seven 6 times hast restored me to safety, and rescued from deep peril that stood before me, leave me not so undone,” I said, “and if to go farther be denied us, let us retrace our steps together rapidly.” And that Lord, who had led me thither, said to me: “Fear not, for our passage none can take from us: by Such has it been given to us. But thou, wait here for me; and comfort and feed thy wearied spirit with good hope: for I will not forsake thee in the low world.” Thus the gentle Father goes, and leaves me here, and I remain in doubt: for yes and no contend within my head. I could not hear that which was offered to them; but he had not long stood with them, when they all. vying with one another, rushed in

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It was then that I knew I was losing my senses. I was down on my hands and knees, though I was not shackled, and running desperately to hide from their paddles. I struggled to get under the kitchen tables, and everywhere I sought a moment's rest, they sought me out, moving the tables and chairs if need be to get at my buttocks with their paddles. Of course if I tried to rise, they pushed me down. I was desperate. "I found myself scurrying to the Page and kissing his feet just as I had seen Prince Gerald do with the Queen. "But if he told the Queen, it was of no use to me. The next day I was shackled as before, and awaiting the boredom and restlessness of the same mistresses and masters. Sometimes passing me, they stuffed into my anus some bit of food rather than throw it away, carrots, other roots, whatever they thought liken to a penis. I was raped over and over by these things, and had to expel them with great effort. They would not have spared my mouth, I suppose, had they not been commanded to leave me gagged as all such slaves are gagged. "And whenever I caught a glimpse of a Page I found myself pleading with him by all my gestures and manner of groaning. "I had no real thoughts during this time. Perhaps I had begun to think of myself as the half human thing that they thought I was. I don't know. To them I was a disobedient Prince sent to them because I deserved it. Any abuse was their duty. If the flies were bad, they would paint my penis and balls with honey to attract them and think that very clever. "Much as I feared the leather whip handles of the stable boys forced up my anus, I came to look forward to being taken to the cleaner, cooler places in the stable. Those boys at least thought it quite marvelous that they had a real Prince to torment. They rode me quite long and hard, but it was better than the kitchen. "I don't know how long it went on. Every time they unshackled me I was terrified. They soon took to throwing about the refuse on the floor and making me gather it up as they chased me with their paddles. I had lost all sense of the wisdom of merely keeping still, and flustered and in panic I ran this way and that to finish the task as they spanked me. Prince Gerald had never been so frantic. "Of course I thought of him as I found myself doing this. And I thought bitterly, 'He is amusing the Queen in her chambers, and I am here in this filthy place.'

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  They may describe rape as “a very small assault”; gape at bosoms and legs in the front row; encourage the hissing and booing from male colleagues that often follow a female colleague’s classroom remarks on women’s rights; and use “stupid woman” stories or sex jokes that humiliate women to illustrate some legal point….From now on, no man can call himself liberal or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home or in the office. Politics don’t begin in Washington. Politics begin with those who are oppressed right here. I’m so relieved to be finished that I can’t tell whether the applause is approving, disapproving, or just polite. But then something happens that, I will later learn, is unprecedented. A portly man in a tuxedo rises from his table, his face flushed with anger, and protests not the content of what I have said but the very idea that I dare to judge Harvard Law School at all. I don’t know who he is, but I definitely know he’s outraged. When he finally sits down, there is silence in the ballroom—then talk gradually resumes, like an ocean covering a volcano. Later Brenda tells me this was Vernon Countryman, a Harvard Law professor of debtor-creditor relations. I’m unsure whether to be scared or proud of his response, yet something tells me it’s more the latter. He has embodied what women at Harvard Law School are dealing with. Only decades later will that law student in the audience confirm my feeling in the moment. “I remember being shocked that a Harvard Law professor could publicly appear so incoherent and out of control,” Ira Lupu wrote. “His remarks seemed designed to put Steinem in her place as a young woman untutored in the facts and values of the Harvard Law School, rather than to rebut her comments in any rigorous way. The banquet ended with the quietly held yet widespread sense that Countryman had underlined Steinem’s theme of male boorishness and disrespect for women in a way that her words alone could not do.”5 Finally, Lupu solved the mystery of why I was invited in the first place. His belated essay explains that his then wife, Jana Sax, had felt “profound alienation from the principles and methods reflected in her spouse’s legal education.” She suggested me as a speaker, and the president of the Harvard Law Review said yes. We each played a role: a wife, women law students, Brenda, me, even the angry professor. In this way, Harvard Law School gives me a big gift: I worry less about hostile responses. Ultimately, they educate an audience. As the great Flo Kennedy will suggest later when we begin to speak together, “Just pause, let the audience absorb the hostility, then say, ‘I didn’t pay him to say that.’ ” • It’s 1972, and Margaret Sloan and I are traveling to Texas campuses.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It was fixed and she was all the more helpless. She felt herself soften as she thought of it. But her Lord, the gray-eyed one, was speaking: "Now, for your second lesson. You have seen the Princesses who are tributes here. Now look to your right and you shall see the Princes." Beauty looked to the other side of the hall as best she could through the shifting figures about her, and there, on another high ledge, in the ghastly shadow-light of the fire, stood a row of naked young men, all of them in the same position. Their heads were bowed, their hands behind their necks, and they were all of them very handsome to look at, as beautiful each in his own way as the young women on the other side, but their great difference lay in their sex, for their organs were erect and hard to a one, and Beauty could not take her eyes off this sight, for they appeared to her even more vulnerable and subservient. She knew she had made a little noise again, because she felt the Lord's finger on her lips, and she sensed almost from the air itself that she was now being left by the Lords and Ladies. Only one pair of hands remained and these she felt touching the tenderest flesh around her anus. She was so frightened by this -- for almost no one else had touched her there -- that involuntarily she struggled again, only to have the gray-eyed Lord stroke her face again gently. There was a great commotion in the room. Beauty could just catch the aroma of cooking food, and dishes being brought in, and now she saw that most of the Lords and Ladies were seated at the tables, and there was much talking and lifting of cups, and somewhere a group of musicians had begun to play a low rhythmic music. It was full of horns and tambourines and the strumming of thick strings, and Beauty saw that the long file of naked men and women on either side was moving. "But what are they?" she wanted to ask. "To what purpose?" But now she saw the first of them appear amid the crowd, carrying silver pitchers with which they filled the goblets at the table, always bowing when they passed the Queen and the Prince, and she watched them, forgetting herself for the moment, with great absorption.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I thought: what a trick we had pulled, what a miracle not to have been caught. The chorus’s vocals came to an end—and then that pretty riff. Over the next two days, underneath all the blur of medication, fear piled up in me. It started low in my stomach and gradually stacked up to my throat. I don’t remember anything about that period other than the feeling of choking. Then B was discharged from the hospital. As soon as he was gone, I went to the meds nurse, who was young and had a kind voice. “I had sex with him,” I said, “and he has AIDS.” She looked horrified. She made me repeat myself. She asked me where I’d done it, and when, and I told her the answers. “Did you use a condom?” she asked. She was wringing her hands. I noticed she was engaged. The diamond on her ring glittered so many colors—too many colors. The brilliance of it stirred panic in me, the first sharp feeling I’d had in weeks. “Sort of,” I said. I tried to explain, but she was frustrated. I worried B might get in trouble. “What is sort of?” She sounded frantic. I thought: she hates me. “I tried to use one,” I said. It was the truth—I really had tried. HIV test, STD test, pregnancy test, calls to my parents, who showed up. We all met with my doctor, who said that the circumstances transcended matters of confidentiality, and he had examined B’s medical records. “He is HIV negative,” he said. My mother wept with relief, and my father wrapped his arm around her. All eyes turned to me. I felt required to display an emotion. But all I felt was fuzz filling up my skull, like the filter of a clothes dryer accumulating lint, cycle after cycle. “You are not at risk,” said the doctor. “You are HIV negative. But that does not reduce the seriousness of what you’ve done. Do you understand?” I nodded. “We’re going to need you to sign a contract.” I nodded. I’d already signed one promising not to cut myself. Signing my name—I could do that. “And you will reflect on your behavior and the tremendous danger you put yourself in,” he added, “and the suffering you have caused to the people who care about you.” I looked at my parents and they looked away. Their faces showed disgust and anger, and fear, most of all. As though looking at me might provoke me, might incite me, like I was a dangerous animal. There were plenty of kids—those less fortunate than I—whose parents wouldn’t have cared less. My parents left the hospital. I was given a pencil, a legal pad, and a list of questions: Why had I acted out sexually? What consequences could I have experienced? What consequences did my actions have for other people? What patterns of promiscuity do I see in my life? What drives me to be promiscuous?

• From Querelle (1953)

  Mario didn't budge. Querelle neither. The thought of blood that was contained in his words, and the hope contained in them, made his O\vn blood circulate a little freer again. He was hesitant to make a move. He feared, so closely linked he felt himself to Mario by a great number of threads, that a single movement (and the gentlest one might release the most fatal mechanism, as it is clear that all fatality depends on a most tenuous equilibrium ) might set Mario off. They now stood in the middle of a low cloud of fog in which the knife nestled, invisible but certain. Querelle was completely unarmed. With a . voice suddenly gentle, deep, and of a profoundly moving quality, he said to the Prince of the Night and the nea!by Trees : "Listen, Mario, I'm here all alone with you. I can't defend myself . . . " He had spoken Mario's name in a loud voice, and already Querelle felt himself to be bound to him in great gentleness, by an emotion comparable to the one we may experience on hearing the excited voice of a young boy penetrate the thin partition of a hotel room at night, saying: "You dirty bastard, listen, I'm only seventeen!" He put all his hopes in Mario. At 199 I QUERELLE first his words were only a musical phrase, timid, hardly breaking through the silence and the fog, merely a lovely vibration in those two elements; but then it grew stronger, without losing its clarity and simplicity of a catch phrase invented by some ingenious orator trying to bewitch Death itself. Querelle repeated it : " . . . can't defend myself. No way." One. Two. Three. Four. Four seconds floating down the river of silence. "You can do what you want, I don't have a blade. If you get me with that, it's all over. Nothing I can do . . . "

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  The first one is like a spacious motel, with a couple of men sitting at the bar, waiting their turn. My friend goes out to the car to make phone calls, and I talk with a young dark-haired woman in a bikini and the highest heels I’ve ever seen. She, too, accepts my story and tells me her mother ran an illegal brothel in the South; it was where she grew up. The girls looked after her as a child and took the scariest S&M photos off their walls when she was around. Like the dancer in the topless bar, she also has dreams, and goes off to her room to bring back a notebook full of magazine illustrations that she has cut out and pasted into its pages. She confesses that she never went to school past the sixth grade, but she still hopes that her Dream Book will get her hired as a designer. Twice while we’re talking, she goes off briefly with a customer and comes back with breath smelling of disinfectant. In the daytime, she explains, it’s mainly truck drivers who stop for a blowjob. I ask if she feels safe, and she says management puts an alarm button in each room, but the times she’s had a bad guy, she couldn’t get to it. “It’s hard to do anything when they’re on top of you,” she says matter-of-factly. My friend and I drive to another brothel. This one is composed of house trailers parked at regular intervals behind a high chain-link fence. We go into a cement-walled windowless bar and tell our story to a middle-aged guy with a gun tucked under his belt. He seems to believe us, but he is not allowing any of his girls to be interviewed, even though it’s early for many customers and we offer to pay for their time. Instead, we go to a bar and restaurant that’s next door, in desert terms—about a city block away on the other side of the fence. Some big lunch party is going on, but we talk to the woman owner, someone my friend has met before. She says yes, she knows the brothel owner next door, everybody knows him, he pays off local officials, has helped to elect every judge in the state, and scares people off with his ever-present gun. She also sees him buying ramen noodles by the case in town. Knowing that this is what he feeds “his girls” and doubting that he feeds them enough, she, too, buys ramen noodles and throws them over the fence. That way she’s helping the girls in the trailers without making him suspicious. After lunch, we also meet with a local official who testified against the brothel owner with the gun—at considerable risk to herself—only to see him get off with minor probation. She says she would never do it again. It’s night when we arrive back at our hotel on the Strip. Tourist guides are hawking colorful pamphlets.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "It is perhaps the loveliest village of the realm," the Prince went on, "with a stern Lord Mayor and many Inns and taverns that are the favorites of the soldiers. But it is allowed one special privilege that no other village enjoys, and that is to purchase at auction for the warm months those Princes and Princesses in need of dire punishment. Anyone in the village may purchase a slave if he or she has the gold for it." It seemed at this some of the captives could not prevent themselves from imploring the Prince, and with a snap of his fingers he ordered the guards to go to work with their belts and long paddles, causing an immediate uproar. The miserable, desperate slaves huddled together, turning their vulnerable breasts and organs towards their tormentors, as if at all costs they must protect their sore backsides. But the tall, yellow-haired Prince Tristan made no move to protect himself, merely allowing himself to be jostled by the others. His eyes had never left his Lord, but now slowly they turned and fixed upon Beauty. Beauty's heart contracted. She felt a slight dizziness. She stared straight into those unreadable blue eyes while at the same time she thought, "Ah, this is the village." "It is wretched service," Lady Juliana went on, obviously imploring the Prince. "The auction itself takes place as soon as the slaves arrive and you can well suppose that even the beggars and common louts about town are there to witness it. Why, the whole village declares a holiday. And each poor slave is carried off by his or her master not only to degradation and punishment, but miserable labor. Mind you, the crude practical people of the village do not keep even the loveliest Prince or Princess for mere pleasure." Beauty was remembering Alexi's description of his exposure in the villages, the high wooden platform in the marketplace, the crude crowd, and their celebration of his humiliation. She felt her sex secretly ache with desire, and yet she was horrified. "Ah, but for all its roughness and cruelty," said the Prince, now glancing at the inconsolable Lord Stefan who stood still with his back to the unfortunates," it is a sublime punishment. Few slaves can learn from a year in the castle what they can learn from the warm months in the village. And of course, they cannot be really hurt, any more than slaves here. The same strict rules apply: no cutting, no burning, no real wounding. And each week, they are herded to a slaves' hall for bathing and oiling. But when they return to the castle they are more than sweet or meek; they have been reborn with incomparable strength and beauty." "Yes, as Prince Alexi was reborn," Beauty thought, her heart pounding.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She could scarcely think of Alexi at these times, the Prince so frightened her and scrutinized her. And when each day dawned she was brought out in her leather horseshoe boots for Lady Juliana. Beauty was frightened but she was ready. Lady Juliana was a vision of loveliness in her crimson riding dress, and Beauty ran fast on the soft gravel path, the sun often causing her to squint as it flashed in the overhanging trees, and she was weeping when it was finished. Then she and Lady Juliana would be alone together in the garden. Lady Juliana carried a leather strap, but seldom did she use it, and the garden was soothing to Beauty. They would sit down on the grass, Lady Juliana's skirts a wreath of embroidered silk about her, and quite suddenly Lady Juliana might give Beauty a deep kiss that startled Beauty and weakened her. Lady Juliana stroked Beauty all over. She lavished her with kisses and compliments, and when she did beat her with the leather strap, Beauty cried softly with deep moaning breaths and languid sense of abandon. Very soon she was gathering little flowers in her teeth for Lady Juliana, or with great grace kissing the hem of her skirts, or even her white hands, all of these gestures delighting her mistress. "Ah, am I becoming what Alexi wanted me to become," Beauty thought. But most of the time she did not think at all. At meals she took great care to serve the wine gracefully. Yet there came that moment when she spilt the wine, and must take her punishment dangling from the Page's strong grip, scampering afterwards to the Prince's boots to beg silently for forgiveness. The Prince was furious with her, and when he ordered her spanked again, she was scalded with humiliation. That night, he whipped her mercilessly with his belt before taking her. He told her he loathed the slightest imperfection in her. And she was chained to the wall to spend the night in weeping and misery. She dreaded new and frightening punishments. Lady Juliana hinted that Beauty was but a virgin in some respects, that she was being tried very slowly. And Beauty feared Lord Gregory too, who was always watching her. One morning when she stumbled on the Bridle Path, Lady Juliana threatened her with the Hall of Punishments. Beauty fell to her hands and knees at once, kissing Lady Juliana's slippers. And though Lady Juliana relented at once with a smile and a toss of her pretty braids, Lord Gregory, nearby, showed his disapproval.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  He had prodded her on up ahead of him, and she had been crying so fiercely as she saw all about her those shoes and boots from which she dared not look up. "But you are so lovely, Princess, and they will be telling their grandchildren about it," said the tavern girl. "They cannot wait to feast their eyes upon you, and you will not disappoint them, no matter what they have heard. Imagine that, never disappointing anyone..." The girl's voice trailed off as though she were in thought. "O, I wish I could follow you to see it." "But you don't understand," Beauty whispered, unable suddenly to contain herself. "You don't realize..." "Yes, I do," said the girl. "Of course I do...I've seen the Princesses when they come through in their magnificent gowns covered with jewels, and I know how it must feel to be opened to the world as if you were a flower, all of their eyes like fingers prying at you, but you are so...so splendid finally, Princess, and so rare. And you are his Princess, and he has claimed you and all know you are in his power and must do as he commands you. It is no shame to you, Princess. How could it be, with so great a Prince to command you? O, do you think that there aren't women who would give up everything to take your place, if only they had your beauty?" Beauty was startled by this. She thought about it. Women giving up everything, taking her place. It had not occurred to her. She remembered that moment in the forest. But then she remembered being spanked in the Inn, and all of those others watching. She remembered sobbing helplessly, and hating her buttocks propped up in the air, and her legs open, and that paddle coming down again and again. Finally the pain was the least of it. She thought of the crowds on the road. She tried to picture it. It would happen to her tomorrow. She would feel this drenching humiliation, this pain, but all those people would be there to witness her humiliation, to amplify it. The door had opened. The Prince had come into the room. And the little tavern girl jumped up and was bowing to him. "Your Highness," the girl said breathlessly. "You've done your work very well," said the Prince. "It was a great honor, your Highness," said the girl. The Prince came to the bed, and clasping Beauty's right wrist, he drew her up out of the bed and stood her beside it. Obediently, Beauty looked down, and not knowing what to do with her hands, quickly brought them to the back of the neck. She could almost feel the Prince's satisfaction. "Excellent, my darling," he said.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  “Wanna fuck?” I whispered to A. A looked at B, and then at the two doorways to the room we were in. There were no techs visible, but they could be listening. “I dunno,” he said. He looked nervous. “I don’t think so.” Then he turned to B. “Do you wanna fuck her?” “Hell yeah,” said B. “Let’s do this.” I had huge pupils, cottonmouth, hairy legs, greasy hair. A and B had called the way I walked “the Thorazine shuffle,” laughing. “Living dead girl” was a nickname they’d assigned me, a stolen lyric from some other song. I followed B up the carpeted stairs, past the meds window, which was closed and locked between meds times, and into a little bathroom. He switched on the lights. I hadn’t contemplated the literal meaning of the word fuck until he began unzipping his skater-boy jeans. “Fuck” meant his cock—short and thick, already hard—was going to be inside my body. It wouldn’t be at all like the last time I’d fucked, which had been with my boyfriend who was so sweet and always worried about me and had made me a mix CD for the hospital. This time “fuck” meant pain. My pussy was as dry as my mouth. The matter of choice did not occur to me. I was so numb. I was on the ceiling. The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” one of the songs on the mix CD my boyfriend had sent with me, played in my head. B sat down cross-legged on the bathroom floor and I knelt beside him. He took my face in his hands, lowered it down, and I choked. The song’s sweet melody filled my mind. I tried not to breathe through my nose. My heartbeat was so slow. Living dead girl. “Spit on it,” said B. “I can’t,” I said. The meds—I had no saliva. “Okay, get on top,” he said. I was looking for a word, but it was so far away, locked in an ancient memory: a health class in junior high school, the aisle of a drugstore, behind the counter of a bodega. “Condom.” I remembered it as I said it. B sighed, pulled a wallet from his pocket, and removed a Trojan. He tore the blue wrapper, which was worn soft around the edges and showed some tears. The latex inside was brittle and split when he tried to roll it on. At least he hadn’t refused. I got on top. I coached myself through every movement: up, down, up, down. “Here Comes the Sun” was building toward the chorus. B moaned, grabbed my hair, pulled my ear to his lips. “I’ve got AIDS,” he said, in a soft, rough voice. And then those reassuring lyrics arrived: my time in the sunlight was almost here. He came inside me, stood and zipped up, left me to clean myself.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  At last, there would be democratic answers to the classic question: What do women want? I couldn’t think of anyone but Bella who could dream up such a massive series of events, much less have the chutzpah to ask Congress to pay for them. Though I’d campaigned with her in a Manhattan that loved her, a Washington that feared her, and a women’s movement that depended on her, I’d never seen her try anything this huge. Women in every state and territory would be invited to debate and decide such contentious issues as reproductive freedom and abortion, welfare rights, lesbian rights, domestic violence, and the exclusion of domestic workers from labor laws. Her request for $10 million was actually a bargain at twenty-eight cents per adult American woman, but Congress went into shock. It delayed voting until a year after the first state conference was supposed to start; then it slashed the appropriation in half to $5 million. Still, money was approved, and the National Women’s Conference was scheduled for Houston in November 1977. To organize this mammoth undertaking, President Jimmy Carter appointed a new group of IWY commissioners. I was one, which is why I and about three dozen other members of this new commission ended up spending two years crisscrossing the country to help organize fifty-six conferences of two days each. —I CONFESS THAT I was as scared as I had ever been. This organizing challenge was a little like a presidential campaign, with a fraction of the resources. It meant helping to create a representative planning body in each state and territory, including groups that probably had never been together before. I would learn the big difference between protesting other people’s rules and making one’s own—between asking and doing. Our election process for delegates was so open as to be terrifying. Anyone sixteen years old or over could be elected if the result, as a group, represented the state racially and economically. Success can be as disastrous as failure—and it almost was. As if we had tapped some underground spring of desire, women came to conferences in such numbers that they overflowed the campuses and government buildings where our shoestring budget put them. In Vermont, more than a thousand women slogged through ice and snow to create the biggest women’s conference ever seen there. If most hadn’t supplied their own brown-bag lunches and child care, our organizing goose would have been cooked at this first of all the state conferences. In Alaska, an auditorium designed for six hundred had to make way for seven thousand. Fortunately, most of the women good-naturedly sat on the floor. In Albany, the capital of New York State, more than eleven thousand women—four times more than we planned for—lined up outside government buildings in the sweltering July heat, then waited most of the night in an airless basement to cast ballots for delegates and issues.