Guilt

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 In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as EquivocationIn Dorothy Allison’s short story “Violence Against Women Begins at Home,” a group of lesbian friends gathers for a drink and they discuss a bit of community gossip: a pair of women recently broke into another woman’s house and trashed it, smashing glass and dishes and destroying her art, which they deemed pornographic. They spray-painted the story’s eponymous phrase on her wall. The friends debate police involvement and intragroup conflict mediation; but toward the end of the story, as they are parting ways, the problem crystallizes into a single, telling exchange: “Look, do you think maybe we could hold a rent party for Jackie, get her some money to fix her place back up?” Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.” “Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say. “Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else. Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest. The queer community has long used the rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse. Which is not to say that activists and academics didn’t try. When the conversation about queer domestic abuse took hold in the early 1980s, activists gave out fact sheets at conferences and festivals to dispel myths about queer abuse.45 Scholars distributed questionnaires to get a sense of the scope of the problem.46 Fierce debates were waged in the pages of queer periodicals. But some lesbians tried to restrict the definition of abuse to men’s actions. Butches might abuse their femmes, but only because of their adopted masculinity. Abusers were using “male privilege.” (To borrow lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu’s phrase, they were guilty of “[smuggling patriarchy] into lesbian utopia.”) Some argued that consensual S&M was part of the problem. Women who were women did not abuse their girlfriends; proper lesbians would never do such a thing.47 There was also the narrative that it was, simply, complicated. The burden of the pressure of straight society! Lesbians abuse each other!

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  As a therapist, I seek to make each partner more fluent in the language of the other. Laura’s experience has robbed her of the capacity to recognize the body’s vocabulary. Like many women, she battles the age-old repressions of female sexuality that have trapped women in passivity and made us dependent on men to seduce and initiate us into sexuality. Economic and professional independence notwithstanding, Laura remains sexually dependent. She leaves it to Mitch to figure out what she wants. Together, we explore the tortuous conflicts between desire and denial, wanting and not having, gratification and repression. I invite Laura to engage with her fantasies, to own her wanting, and to take responsibility for her sexual fulfillment. I steer her attention to her physical self, and challenge her to break through the vigilance, the guilt, and the disavowal that surround her sexuality. Can she look her mother straight in the eye and still maintain a sense of herself as a sensual being? Can she indulge in her own eroticism and declare the “nice girl” officially void? When I suggest to Mitch and Laura that they’re trapped in a language with too little imagination, an alphabet too limited to contain their erotic life, Mitch bursts into tears. “I’m not angry,” he says of all the times that his frustration has led to mean, hurtful words; “I’m heartbroken.” I ask Laura to just hold him and I leave the room for a few minutes to give them the chance to connect through the purity of physical touch. When I return, they’re practically falling off opposite ends of the couch, a yawning gulf between them. When I ask what happened, they immediately backslide to the tried and true mutual blame that got them here in the first place. “I tried, but he…” “I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t…” I realize that my intervention was more an expression of my own hope than any intention on their part. They weren’t ready. Realizing the futility of any more talk, in the months that followed I tried several different approaches, most of which relied on physical interactions rather than verbal ones. I had them lead each other around the room, trying out different arrangements of leaders and followers: cooperation, resistance, and passivity. I had them fall backward into each other’s waiting arms. I had them stand face-to-face and push against each other with their open hands. I had them mirror each other’s movements. The conversations that followed the games became gradually more revealing, less critical, and even more playful. By giving a physical but nonsexual representation to their emotional impasse, they were able to see their patterns of resistance. “I can let him get close,” Laura admits, “but not too close. I trust him, but only so much. I always hold back, don’t I?”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  “So this wasn’t an exit affair. Maybe more like a stabilizer, where the third person helps keep the other two in place?” “I don’t know. Maybe. The point is that I didn’t think. I just did it. I followed my gut, and now I feel like shit.” Unpacking the Affair On some level, I think Doug would like me to confirm that indeed he has done something terribly wrong. He has betrayed his vows, a moral offense in black and white. But wholesale condemnation too easily distracts us from the real issues behind his behavior. I prefer a morally neutral stance that leaves us free to explore the meaning of the affair rather than the ethics of it. Once Doug understands the motives that drove him into Naomi’s arms, he’ll be able to draw his own conclusions, both about what he did and about what he wants to do henceforth. People stray for many reasons—tainted love, revenge, unfulfilled longings, plain old lust. At times an affair is a quest for intensity, or a rebellion against the confines of matrimony. Transgression is an aphrodisiac, and sometimes secrets are a source of autonomy, or a backlash against lack of privacy. What could be more titillating than a whispered phone call in the bathroom? Finally, the harried mom can feel like a woman again; her lover knows nothing about the broken Lego set or the plumber who failed to show up for the second time. An illicit liaison can be catastrophic, but it can also be a liberation, a source of strength, a healing. Frequently it is all these things at once. When the intimacy is gone, when we no longer talk, when we haven’t been touched in years, we are more vulnerable to the kindness of strangers. When the kids are young and needy, extramarital appreciation can feel like a tonic. When they’re older and gone, empty nesters may seek replenishment elsewhere. If our health fails us, or if we’ve just been visited by death, we may experience outbursts of dissatisfaction, a cry for something better. Some affairs are acts of resistance; others happen when we offer no resistance at all. Straying can sound an alarm for the marriage, signaling an urgent need to pay attention. Or it can be the death knell that follows a relationship’s last, gasping breath. I question the widespread view that infidelity is always a symptom of deeper problems in a relationship. Affairs are motivated by myriad forces; not all of them are directly related to flaws in the marriage. As it happens, plenty of adulterers are reasonably content in their relationships. So was Doug. But he wanted more. He couldn’t articulate what it was exactly, only that it had something to do with more frequent sex.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  As we unravel what sparked Doug’s affair with Naomi, it becomes clear to me why he chose not to fight for her but instead to stay with his wife. Zoë is terra firma. At the same time, her ability to keep things in perspective gives her a certain ease; it’s not hard for her to sleep through the night, or to get up in the morning. Zoë doesn’t seek passion. She is rarely swept away. With Naomi, Doug may have found the single missing piece, but with Zoë he has the rest of the puzzle. Doug and I discuss how his ideal of marriage holds up to the reality of his own particular union. He wants heat and warmth in the same place. He wants the kitchen table to be an altar of carnal merging at night, and a sunny breakfast nook for pancakes with the kids the next morning. But Doug will probably never experience with Zoë the same intensity he has had with Naomi. Affairs have their own brand of passion. Secrecy, torment, guilt, transgression, danger, risk, and jealousy are highly combustible, a Molotov cocktail, an erotic explosion far too threatening in a home with children. As Doug becomes clearer about what he can reasonably expect from his marriage, a new set of questions arises. What are his options now that he has chosen to stay? Can he recognize his desires without having to act on them? Will he continue to negotiate monogamy privately, without Zoë’s knowledge, as is typical in affairs; or might he opt for a more open discussion of the sexual boundaries around their marriage? Must he disclose the affair in order to reconnect with his wife? What can he do with his guilt? The answers change every day. Last week, it seemed as if he would never be able to look her in the eye unless he came clean. Today, it seems that the most loving thing he can do is to keep his mess to himself. “Do I break her heart just to ease my conscience? Sometimes I think she’s known all along, and the only reason she hasn’t left me is because I’ve kept my mouth shut. At least this way she gets to hold on to her dignity.” Most American couples therapists believe that affairs must be disclosed if intimacy is to be rebuilt. This idea goes hand in hand with our model of intimate love, which celebrates transparency—having no secrets, telling no lies, sharing everything. In fact, some people condemn the deception even more than the transgression: “It’s not that you cheated, it’s that you lied to me!” To the American way of thinking, respect is bound up with honesty, and honesty is essential to personal responsibility. Hiding, dissimulation, and other forms of deception amount to disrespect. You lie only to those beneath you—children, constituents, employees.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  In 2009, she moved to Austin, Texas, and became an ER doctor at the hospital where she worked for the next twelve years. This, too, was a job she loved. People have the idea that an ER doctor is running around pumping people’s chests, constantly doing crazy life-and-death stuff. Of course, there is some of that, but, as Olstyn Martinez describes it, the essence of the job is more about the daily challenge of dealing with the wear of seeing humanity at its loneliest and most heartbreaking. For example, on one shift in 2021, her first patient was a ninety-year-old woman brought in from a nursing home. She was so ill that she wasn’t verbal and Dr. Olstyn Martinez couldn’t get ahold of any family to help her figure out what was wrong. In the next room, a woman in her sixties complained that someone was trying to poison her because every hit off her crack pipe gave her palpitations. She vehemently denied the possibility that the crack was the problem, since she had been smoking it for twenty years. It was both emotionally challenging and engrossing work. But inside the ER community, handling the hard aspects of the job is what makes ER doctors special. As Olstyn Martinez put it, “One of the underlying themes of emergency medicine is, if you’re not full-on suffering and in the trenches and digging yourself out of patients, you’re [a wimp].” At the start, the benefits of her career clearly outweighed the costs. The satisfactions included saving lives, serving the community, being a highly skilled and effective problem solver, and being part of the community of ER doctors handling the exposure to so many raw, trying situations. An additional benefit of working in the ER was that it provided Olstyn Martinez with a needed work-life separation. She had scheduled shifts and when they ended, she could attend to the rest of her life. Whether it was going to the gym or taking her dog to the vet, she had space away from her job. This became especially important with the births of her two daughters in 2014 and 2017. But then, her circumstances changed. In addition to her ER shifts, Dr. Olstyn Martinez became the hospital’s director of emergency and trauma services in 2015 and, in 2020, senior director

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  We commonly believe that the closer we feel to someone, the easier it will be to shed our inhibitions. But that’s only half the story. Intimacy does nurture desire, but sexual pleasure also demands separateness. Erotic excitement requires that we be able to step out of the intimate bond for a moment, turn toward ourselves, and focus on our own mounting sensations. We need to be able to be momentarily selfish in order to be erotically connected. Our ability to step away from our loved ones while trusting their steadfastness is forged in the security of our childhood bonds. The more we trust, the farther we are able to venture. When infants play peek a boo, the distance they can bear is only as far as the breadth of their fingers. What powers the game is the realization that, even when I don’t see you, you continue to exist. Older children play hide-and-seek, secure in the knowledge that someone will eventually come looking. The thrill of hiding is followed by the relief of being found. Erotic intimacy is an adult version of hide-and-seek. As when we were children, the stronger the connection the braver we are about stretching it. We know our beloved will be waiting for our return, will not punish our selfish pursuits, and in fact may even applaud them. In his book Arousal, Michael Bader links the idea of selfishness to the concept of sexual ruthlessness, which he defines as “the quality of desire that enables a person to surrender to the full force of his or her own rhythms of pleasure and excitement without guilt, worry, or shame of any kind.” Bader’s explanation emphasizes the importance of differentiation—the capacity to hold on to oneself in the presence of another. Without that ability, we become like James, who can’t get out of Stella’s head long enough to experience his own fervor. The rawness of our desire can feel mean, bestial, even unloving. Eros can feel predatory, a voracious grab. Whatever guilt we feel about taking—whatever shame we feel about our wantonness, our passion, our indecency—is intensified in the primitive vulnerability of sex. We bring to our intimate erotic encounters a lifetime of injunctions against selfishness in the context of love, the specifics of which are detailed in our erotic blueprint. In addition to the family legacy, we also carry a cultural legacy. We are socialized to control ourselves, to restrain our impulses, to tame the animal within. So as dutiful citizens and spouses we edit ourselves and mask our ravenous appetites and conceal our fleeting need to objectify the one we love.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  What emerges in our conversations is that James was keenly attuned to his mother’s moods, and she was often lonely and sad. She didn’t like noise, didn’t like messes, and got agitated when he and his sister were too boisterous. She was a good mother, but very tightly wound. “I always found it difficult to handle the specifications of her needs. She needed seventy-two things lined up to be OK.” James’s mother relied on him for support, company, and conversation. (She referred to his father as simply the Paycheck.) “When I was older and wanted to do things with my friends, I knew she was disappointed. She’d say, ‘Have a good time’ in a way that made it very hard for me to have a good time.” James grew up torn between his desire not to displease his mother and his need to lead his own life. “Getting a scholarship to Stanford, clear across the country, was the best thing that could have happened to me. She couldn’t deny me that opportunity. I left, but I took a lot of guilt with me.” The first time James set eyes on Stella, she was a vision. “Everything about her was graceful, vibrant, colorful. Here was a woman who was not afraid to stand out. She was all light.” Stella was the antithesis of James’s mother, and for the first time he was able to love a woman and not feel burdened with responsibility and guilt. In fact, Stella regularly rejected his attempts to be overly accommodating, explaining that they made her feel smothered. He laughs when he recounts how anxious he used to feel when he wanted to do something that didn’t include her—he was always afraid of disappointing her. He had a way of asking, “Do you mind?” that drove her crazy. Finally she snapped, “Look, I’m not your mother. You don’t have to ask my permission.” Stella has taught James, largely through example, that you can be close to someone—intimate, caring, secure—without feeling sacrificed in the process. In asserting her independence, Stella has communicated over and over that she’s not fragile, and that her well-being does not depend exclusively on him. The price of love does not have to be personal obliteration. In many ways, James and Stella have an enviable marriage. They enjoy each other. He still makes her laugh out loud, and she is the fiercest but most trusted critic of his graphic design work and, as he would add, “everything else, too.” Stella, clear about where she stands, says, “Even when I hate his guts I’ve never been bored. The day I’m bored I’m out of here.” In the thirty-one years they’ve been together they’ve raised four children, renovated two houses, suffered the loss of all four of their parents, survived Stella’s breast cancer, and toasted the birth of their first grandchild. This is the bright side of their story.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  When I ask James if he ever experiences anxiety-free sex, he answers, “Only when I masturbate.” This is important, since it confirms for me that he has no organic difficulty and that, genitally speaking, he can perform just fine. In solitary sex James can attend to himself without the pressure of another’s demands. The women who populate his fantasy life are lascivious, sexually alluring, and in no way vulnerable. He need not fear that his selfishness might hurt them, and he can delight in his excitement guilt-free. This is a freedom he never reaches with his wife, and that realization leads us to the cause of his erotic block. James doesn’t know how to enjoy himself sexually in the presence of the woman he loves. Unable to reconcile pleasing himself and pleasing Stella at the same time, he ends up pleasing neither. Even though emotionally and intellectually he is able to maintain a strong sense of himself with his wife—he hates her taste in music, refuses to wear Italian suits, and defied her by voting Republican one year—this self-possession breaks down in the sexual encounter. He fears that if he surrenders to his own concupiscence and forgets Stella, even for a moment, she will be unforgivably hurt. Though James is not aware of this, his erotic blueprint is riddled with marks left by his relationship with his unhappy mother. When it comes to sex with Stella, he is right back to the setup he had in his childhood: he has to make an impossible choice between attending to himself and securing closeness. The guilt he felt as a child about being selfish has been transformed into sexual inhibition. Perhaps this is why James experiences his wife’s desire as a demand rather than an invitation, it is an obligation, not a seduction. Eroticism has shifted into the realm of duty, and is weighted down with pressure, guilt, and worry—all proven antiaphrodisiacs. Rekindling Desire James and Stella are stumped. Their sex problem has been chalked up to lousy chemistry, and they think it is as permanent and irreversible as an amputated leg. For years James has been stuck in a narrative of helplessness that goes something like this: “Our problem has to be coming from somewhere; it has to be somebody’s fault, and if it’s not my fault, then whose fault is it? Must be Stella’s. Let’s blame her.” Reinterpreting James’s lack of desire, I locate it firmly in the reverberations of his childhood. He begins to have some compassion for himself. At the same time, I challenge him to take responsibility for it in the present. Together, we disentangle self-blame and responsibility, and map out courses of action. This brings him big relief. For Stella, this new line of attribution is a small step toward restoring her sense of self-esteem.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  This would be less of an issue if our erotic imagination were better behaved, more in line with our public persona. In our internal erotic geography, we all have places that are dear to us. Chances are that at least some of them are places we must sneak into, eluding the watchdog of our conscience. The man who relishes making tender love to his wife has no need for concealment—ditto the woman who fantasizes about a dozen roses from her lover strewn over her bed. Nothing about their romantic aspirations is cause for discomfort or guilt. We should all be so lucky. An imagination peopled with little ladies and gentlemen, so considerate and polite, would easily slip by our internal board of ethics. But the erotic mind is rarely so docile. What turns us on often collides with our preferred self-image, or with our moral and ideological convictions. Ergo the feminist who longs to be dominated; the survivor of sexual abuse who infuses her personal erotics with her traumatic experiences; the husband who fantasizes about the au pair (the stripper, the masseuse, the porn star) in order to boost his enjoyment with his wife; the mother who finds the skin-to-skin contact with her baby sensuous and, yes, erotic; the wife who masturbates to images of hot sex with the psychopathic boyfriend she knew she was never going to marry; the lover who needs to think about the hunk he spotted at the gym in order to get off with his boyfriend. We think that there must be something wrong with us for having such prurient thoughts—that this kind of fantasy doesn’t belong in the erotic life of the happily married woman, that domination and objectification have no legitimate place in the mind of an upstanding husband and father. The greater our discomfort with the content of our erotic imagination, the greater the guilt and shame we feel, and the more powerful our internal censors. Ralph has been living with Sharon for fifteen years. By all accounts they are a very happy pair. But soon after they got together, Ralph found himself fantasizing every time they made love: his beloved Sharon kept getting replaced by a seventeen-year-old vixen in a darkened movie theater. For Ralph, his inner life is like a tribal war: the tender lover on one side and the lecherous groper on the other. He confessed one day, “This doesn’t sit right with me. I would never touch a seventeen-year-old. I see myself as a decent person, and I can’t connect the dots. There’s no way I can admit this to Sharon. I can hardly admit it to myself.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Philip feels guilty because he can’t be more erotically involved with his wife. When I ask him for a sexual image that includes her, he conjures up a picture of the two of them kissing romantically in the sunset. He adds that he has difficulty, now, imagining Jackie in a passionate, erotic way. He tells her openly, “I just can’t see you in my mind as a sexual woman, and I feel bad about it, but it’s the truth.” Philip yearns for ardor with Jackie, but he believes that the tug-of-war within himself won’t allow it. He dreads the rough edge of his desire within the bonds of holy matrimony, and is embarrassed by his need for objectified sex. To his thinking, love is no place for these wanton inclinations. “You Don’t Do That with Your Wife” Many of my patients are afraid to express their intense sexual excitement with the one they love and respect. Philip is not alone in hiding his lack of desire behind the decency alibi. You may recognize some of these comments: “I can’t imagine him saying what I want to hear. He’d wonder what happened to his wife.” “I don’t even want to think about, let alone talk about, what I was into before we met.” “I can’t do that with my wife.” Domestic eroticism is wrapped in a veil of appropriateness. When Philip tells me that Jackie would never go for this stuff, I ask him, “And the stuff is what exactly?” I am prepared for a long list of hard-core kink, and I am surprised when he reveals the basic menu of his sexual imagination. “I’m not one for subtleties. I like the blatant stuff. I like toys, lingerie, porn, a lot of graphic talk. Straightforward, honest fucking.” “All of which you and Jackie enjoyed before the ring?” I ask. “Yeah.” He shrugs. “And now Jackie won’t go for it? Or you won’t go for it with her? I don’t get a sense that she’s changed all that much. But I wonder to what extent you feel that this is not stuff you do with your wife. You seem to believe that it’s wrong to objectify someone you love.” “Are you saying it’s not?” he asks. “I’m saying it doesn’t have to be. You know, a lot of couples play with objectification as a way to superimpose otherness on a partner who’s become too familiar. It is often dismissed as lacking intimacy, but I think that when both of you are into it, it’s another kind of closeness. You have to trust people a lot to let yourself forget them.”

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  There was a layer of loose .22 rounds on the bottom of the box under shells of bigger caliber, dropped there by the handful the way men drop pennies on their dressers at night. I took some and put them in a hiding place of my own. With these I started loading up the rifle. Hammer cocked, a round in the chamber, finger resting lightly on the trigger, I drew a bead on whoever walked by—women pushing strollers, children, garbage collectors laughing and calling to each other, anyone—and as they passed under my window I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and at their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe. But over time the innocence I laughed at began to irritate me. It was a peculiar kind of irritation. I saw it years later in men I served with, and felt it myself, when unarmed Vietnamese civilians talked back to us while we were herding them around. Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it. One afternoon I pulled the trigger. I had been aiming at two old people, a man and a woman, who walked so slowly that by the time they turned the comer at the bottom of the hill my little store of self-control was exhausted. I had to shoot. I looked up and down the street. It was empty. Nothing moved but a pair of squirrels chasing each other back and forth on the telephone wires. I followed one in my sights. Finally it stopped for a moment and I fired. The squirrel dropped straight into the road. I pulled back into the shadows and waited for something to happen, sure that someone must have heard the shot or seen the squirrel fall. But the sound that was so loud to me probably seemed to our neighbors no more than the bang of a cupboard slammed shut. After a while I sneaked a glance into the street. The squirrel hadn’t moved. It looked like a scarf someone had dropped. When my mother got home from work I told her there was a dead squirrel in the street. Like me, she was an animal lover. She took a cellophane bag off a loaf of bread and we went outside and looked at the squirrel. “Poor little thing,” she said. She stuck her hand in the wrapper and picked up the squirrel, then pulled the bag inside out away from her hand. We buried it behind our building under a cross made of popsicle sticks, and I blubbered the whole time. I blubbered again in bed that night. At last I got out of bed and knelt down and did an imitation of somebody praying, and then I did an imitation of somebody receiving divine reassurance and inspiration. I stopped crying.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me. Go to this page. Breakfast. You scramble some eggs, make some toast. She eats mechanically and leaves the plate on the table. “Clean that up,” she says as she goes to the bedroom to get dressed. If you do as you are told, go to this page. If you tell her to do it herself, go to this page. If you stare mutely at the dirty plate, and all you can think about is Clara Barton, the feminist icon of your youth who had to teach herself how to be a nurse and endured abuse from men telling her what to do at every turn, and you remember being so angry and running to your parents and asking them if women still got told what was right or proper, and your mom said “Yes” and your dad said “No,” and you, for the first time, had an inkling of how complicated and terrible the world was, go to this page. As you’re washing the dishes, you think to yourself: Maybe I could tie my arm down somehow? Maybe put a tack on my forehead? Maybe I should be a better person? Go to this page. You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. Did you think that by flipping through this chapter linearly you’d find some kind of relief? Don’t you get it? All of this shit already happened, and you can’t make it not happen, no matter what you do. Do you want a picture of a fawn? Will that help? Okay. Here’s a fawn. She is small and dappled and loose-legged. She hears a sound, freezes, and then bolts. She knows what to do. She knows there’s somewhere safer she can be. Go to this page.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  What emerges in our conversations is that James was keenly attuned to his mother’s moods, and she was often lonely and sad. She didn’t like noise, didn’t like messes, and got agitated when he and his sister were too boisterous. She was a good mother, but very tightly wound. “I always found it difficult to handle the specifications of her needs. She needed seventy-two things lined up to be OK.” James’s mother relied on him for support, company, and conversation. (She referred to his father as simply the Paycheck.) “When I was older and wanted to do things with my friends, I knew she was disappointed. She’d say, ‘Have a good time’ in a way that made it very hard for me to have a good time.” James grew up torn between his desire not to displease his mother and his need to lead his own life. “Getting a scholarship to Stanford, clear across the country, was the best thing that could have happened to me. She couldn’t deny me that opportunity. I left, but I took a lot of guilt with me.” The first time James set eyes on Stella, she was a vision. “Everything about her was graceful, vibrant, colorful. Here was a woman who was not afraid to stand out. She was all light.” Stella was the antithesis of James’s mother, and for the first time he was able to love a woman and not feel burdened with responsibility and guilt. In fact, Stella regularly rejected his attempts to be overly accommodating, explaining that they made her feel smothered. He laughs when he recounts how anxious he used to feel when he wanted to do something that didn’t include her—he was always afraid of disappointing her. He had a way of asking, “Do you mind?” that drove her crazy. Finally she snapped, “Look, I’m not your mother. You don’t have to ask my permission.” Stella has taught James, largely through example, that you can be close to someone—intimate, caring, secure—without feeling sacrificed in the process. In asserting her independence, Stella has communicated over and over that she’s not fragile, and that her well-being does not depend exclusively on him. The price of love does not have to be personal obliteration. In many ways, James and Stella have an enviable marriage. They enjoy each other. He still makes her laugh out loud, and she is the fiercest but most trusted critic of his graphic design work and, as he would add, “everything else, too.” Stella, clear about where she stands, says, “Even when I hate his guts I’ve never been bored. The day I’m bored I’m out of here.” In the thirty-one years they’ve been together they’ve raised four children, renovated two houses, suffered the loss of all four of their parents, survived Stella’s breast cancer, and toasted the birth of their first grandchild. This is the bright side of their story.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  He picked up a stick and prodded the ground with it, then asked me if I wanted to make my mother unhappy. I said no. “You don’t?” I shook my head. “Well, that’s what you’re doing.” I said nothing. “All right, then. Do you want to make her happy?” “Sure.” “Good. That’s something. That’s one thing you want. Right?” When I agreed, he said, “But you’re making her unhappy, aren’t you?” “I guess.” “No guessing to it, Jack. You are.” He looked over at me. “So why don’t you stop? Why don’t you just stop?” I didn’t answer right away, for fear of seeming merely agreeable. I wanted to appear to give his question some serious thought. “All right,” I said. “I’ll try.” He threw down the stick. He was still watching me, and I knew that he understood what had happened here; that he had not “reached me” at all, because I was not available to be reached. I was in hiding. I had left a dummy in my place to look sorry and make promises, but I was nowhere in the neighborhood and Father Karl knew it. Still, we didn’t leave right away. We sat gazing out across the water. The river was swollen with runoff. More brown than green, it chuckled and hissed along the bank. Farther from shore it seethed among mossy boulders and the snarled roots of trees caught between them. From under the changing surface sounds of the river came a deep steady sigh that never changed, and grew louder as you listened to it until it was the only sound you heard. Birds skimmed the water. New leaves glinted on the aspens along the bank. It was spring. We were both caught in it for a moment, forgetful of our separate designs. We were with each other the way kindred animals are with each other. Then we stirred, and remembered ourselves. Father Karl delivered some final admonition, and I said I would do better, and we walked back to the store. That weekend Mr. Bolger told me that he had spoken to the Welches and that they had refused my help. “They wouldn’t have you,” he said, and let me know by the gravity of his expression that this was the ultimate punishment, a punishment far worse than doing hard time on their farm. He actually succeeded in making me feel disappointed. But I got over it. The sheriff came to the house one night and told the Bolgers that Chuck was about to be charged with statutory rape. Huff and Psycho were also named in the complaint. The girl was in my class at Concrete High—one of a pack of hysterically miserable girls who ran around in tight clothes, plastered their faces with makeup, chainsmoked and talked in class and did their best to catch the attention of boys who would be sure to use them badly. Somebody had knocked her up.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  After my mother finished her bath she lay down and read, then fixed us dinner and read some more. She turned in early. Answers kept coming to me in the dark, proofs of my blamelessness that I knew to be false but could not stop myself from devising. Dwight drove down that weekend. They spent a lot of time together, and finally my mother told me that Dwight was urging a proposal which she felt bound to consider. He proposed that after Christmas I move up to Chinook and live with him and go to school there. If things worked out, if I made a real effort and got along with him and his kids, she would quit her job and accept his offer of marriage. She did not try to make any of this sound like great news. Instead she spoke as if she saw in this plan a duty which she would be selfish not to acknowledge. But first she wanted my approval. I thought I had no choice, so I gave it. A Whole New Deal____ Dwight drove in a sullen reverie. When I spoke he answered curtly or not at all. Now and then his expression changed, and he grunted as if to claim some point of argument. He kept a Camel burning on his lower lip. Just the other side of Concrete he pulled the car hard to the left and hit a beaver that was crossing the road. Dwight said he had swerved to miss the beaver, but that wasn’t true. He had gone out of his way to run over it. He stopped the car on the shoulder of the road and backed up to where the beaver lay. We got out and looked at it. I saw no blood. The beaver was on its back with its eyes open and its curved yellow teeth bared. Dwight prodded it with his foot. “Dead,” he said. It was dead all right. “Pick it up,” Dwight told me. He opened the trunk of the car and said, “Pick it up. We’ll skin the sucker out when we get home.” I wanted to do what Dwight expected me to do, but I couldn’t. I stood where I was and stared at the beaver. Dwight came up beside me. “That pelt’s worth fifty dollars, bare minimum.” He added, “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the damned thing.” “No sir.” “Then pick it up.” He watched me. “It’s dead, for Christ’s sake. It’s just meat. Are you afraid of hamburger? Look.” He bent down and gripped the tail in one hand and lifted the beaver off the ground. He tried to make this appear effortless but I could see he was surprised and strained by the beaver’s weight. A stream of blood ran out of its nose, then stopped. A few drops fell on Dwight’s shoes before he jerked the body away.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  In order not to upset her any further, Philip tried to be as different from his father as possible. He became what he calls an asexual wunderkind. “I was intensely moralistic and judgmental,” Philip said ruefully. “On the surface I was the nice, safe guy girls went out with because they knew they could trust me not to take advantage of them; but underneath I was all over the place, and I hated myself for it.” As an adolescent, Philip developed a compelling secret taste for pornography. When he became older, and actual sex became an option, he looked for women he could pick up on the fly for brief, inconsequential one-night stands. “Somehow, those rigid morals just fueled my obsession to break the rules.” For Philip, defiance of ordinary decency was the key to his inner system of arousal. Sex, objectification, and transgression became one. Ironically, by segregating his sexuality outside the boundaries of his relationship with Jackie, Phillip hopes to protect her from the dangers of his desire. Needless to say, Jackie was very disturbed by the loss of intensity in their sex life. Never very confident about her own magnetism, she, too, had been amazed by Philip’s attraction to her. When it dwindled, she assumed he’d simply lost interest, and that this was to be expected. Growing up with a brother who was in and out of psychiatric institutions, she was accustomed to keeping her own needs to a minimum. She had learned not to impose herself and instead to take what she could get. While Philip seeks affirmation on the outside, Jackie’s self-affirmation rests solely on him and his response to her. She highlights a common way women order their sexuality, in that she makes him, and his desire for her, the centerpiece of her sexual identity. In the early days, when Philip was all over her, she blossomed. There was no issue. She felt open, daring, sexy, and wanted. Today, a good student of her own childhood, she avoids putting herself out there for fear of rejection. When she does get up the courage to make advances, Philip feels pressure to be responsive and to take care of her. “Whenever Jackie comes on to me, I’m paralyzed,” he confides. “Which heightens Jackie’s insecurity,” I add. Arguably, male desire runs the gamut between two extremes: those who plead for their partner to come on to them, thereby confirming their desirability; and those who balk when their mate initiates, fearful that their passivity isn’t adequately masculine. Forever unsure of their power as Mom’s little ward, the come-on averse walk a fine line between boyhood and manhood. Predictably, Philip takes Jackie’s overtures as needy demands rather than tempting invitations.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Word Problem Okay, so, there’s this woman, and she lives in Iowa City, and then she moves to Bloomington, Indiana, 408 miles away. And her girlfriend, who loves her very much, agrees to do the whole long-distance thing. She doesn’t even pause, it’s what she would call a no-brainer. (The pun is lost on her, in the moment.) She spends the entire second year of her graduate school experience shuttling back and forth to Bloomington. She does it gladly. In one trip, she can listen to 75 percent of an audiobook. If she is driving at sixty-five miles per hour, and the average length of an audiobook is ten hours, how many months will it take for her to realize she has wasted half of her MFA program driving to her girlfriend’s house to be yelled at for five days? How many months will it take her to come to terms with the fact that she functionally did this to herself? III And because you are of a kind, the house knows you. When you cry out, the lights flicker, ghostly blue and ragged. When she says you are shut off, the light switches nod their white tiny heads. Tiles creak yes beneath her edicts—something bad must have happened to make you this way, the way where you don’t want her. But the windows rattle, disagree. In their honeyed, blindless light, they see it—something bad is happening. —Leah Horlick, “Ghost House”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  will. Soon he began to question her love for him. He continually withdrew from her during his bouts of depression. When she became pregnant, he suddenly developed some mysterious ailment that prevented him from being with her. Without warning he could become quite cold. Feeling unloved and neglected, she began an affair with the famous composer Richard Wagner, who was a friend and colleague of von Bülow’s. Cosima had the feeling that von Bülow had unconsciously encouraged their affair. When she eventually left von Bülow to live with Wagner, von Bülow bombarded her with letters, blaming himself for what had happened; he was unworthy of her love. He would then go on about the bad turn in his career, his various illnesses, his suicidal tendencies. Although he criticized himself, she could not help but feel guilty and depressed for somehow being responsible. Recounting all of his woes seemed like his subtle way of wounding her. She compared each letter to “a sword twisted in my heart.” And they kept coming, year after year, until he remarried and repeated the same pattern with his new wife. These types often have a secret need to wound others, encouraging behavior such as betrayal or criticism that will feed their depression. They will also sabotage themselves if they experience any kind of success, feeling deep down that they don’t deserve it. They will develop blocks in their work, or take criticism to mean they should not continue with their career. Depressive types can often attract people to them, because of their sensitive nature; they stimulate the desire to want to help them. But like von Bülow, they will start to criticize and wound the ones who wish to help, then withdraw again. This push and pull causes confusion, but once under their spell it is hard to disengage from them without feeling guilty. They have a gift for making other people feel depressed in their presence. This gives them more fuel to feed off. Most of us have depressive tendencies and moments. The best way to handle them is to be aware of their necessity—they are our body’s and mind’s way of compelling us to slow down, to lower our energies and withdraw. Depressive cycles can serve positive purposes. The solution is to realize their usefulness and temporary quality. The depression you feel today will not be with you in a week, and you can ride it out. If possible, find ways to elevate your energy level, which will physically help lift you out of the mood. The best way to handle recurrent depression is to channel your energies into work, especially the arts. You are used to withdrawing and being alone; use such time to tap into your unconscious. Externalize your unusual sensitivity and your dark feelings into the work itself. Never try to lift up depressive people by preaching to them about the wonderfulness of life. Instead, it is best to go along with their

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  134 Lecture 31: Twain’s Huckleberry Finn never played the trick. He says that he humbled himself to Jim, for which he has never been sorry. In Chapter 16, when Jim tells Huck that he plans on buying or stealing his wife and children out of slavery, Huck is appalled, and he decides to turn Jim in. As Huck is leaving in the canoe to do so, Jim calls out to him that Huck is the only real friend he has ever had, and Huck is suddenly not sure whether he wants to turn him in or not. When he has a chance to turn Jim in, he de À ects it and then asks himself if he would feel better if he had done the “right” thing. He decides that he would not, and since he is probably damned anyway, from here on he will simply take the easiest way out, not worrying about the morality of his decisions. This is a great moment in the novel: Huck’s conscience, trained by shore society, tells him that slaves are property and that it is his duty to turn Jim in. Huck believes that helping Jim is wrong, but he does it anyway, transcending his training and—at this point in the novel—suggesting that a good heart can defeat a diseased conscience. The next section of the novel, written two years later, is in part a satire on shore society. This is the point of the episode in which Huck spends time with the Grangerfords, involved in a feud with the Shepherdsons. It continues in the scenes in which two con-men, calling themselves the King and the Duke, commandeer the raft and thus keep it heading south. They spend their time exploiting the religious sentimentalism, the greed, and the craving for social approval on shore. In doing so, they highlight what Henry Nash Smith calls “the community of saints” (Huck and Jim) aboard the raft. Perhaps the greatest moment in American literature happens in Chapter 31, when the King and the Duke have turned Jim over to the authorities for the bounty on runaway slaves. If Huck is to stick by Jim, he will have to defy the law, not just evade it, as he would have to have done in Chapter 16. At ¿ rst, he decides to turn Jim in but then, in a magni¿ cent moment, chooses to defy the law—and hence go to hell, as he really believes he will—to help Jim escape, suggesting that people can outgrow their training and still listen to their pure hearts. This is the beginning of many American stories, including Hemingway’s stories about Nick Adams, in which young people leave home

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Growing up in a staunchly middle-class black neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) had a pleasant and carefree childhood. His father, Martin Sr., was the pastor of the large and thriving Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, so the Kings were relatively well off. His parents were loving and devoted to their children. Home life was stable and comfortable and included Grandmother King, who doted on young Martin Jr. He had a wide circle of friends. The few encounters he had with racism outside the neighborhood marred this idyllic childhood but left him relatively unscathed. Martin Jr., however, was exceptionally sensitive to the feelings of those around him. And as he got older, he sensed something from his father that began to trigger some inner tension and discomfort. His father was a strict disciplinarian who set solid boundaries of behavior for the three King children. When Martin Jr. misbehaved in any way, his father whipped him, telling the boy this was the only way to turn him into a real man. The whippings continued until he was fifteen. Once his father caught Martin Jr. at a church social dancing with a girl, and his scolding of the boy in front of his friends was so vehement, Martin Jr. strove to never repeat the experience by causing his father’s displeasure. But none of this discipline came with the slightest hint of hostility. Martin Sr.’s affection for his son was too real and palpable for the boy to feel anything but guilt for disappointing him. And such feelings of guilt were all the more stressful for Martin Jr. because of the high hopes the father placed on his son. As a boy, Martin Jr. displayed an unusual way with words; he could talk his friends into almost anything, and his eloquence was quite precocious. He was certainly bright. A plan formed in Martin Sr.’s mind that his elder son would follow in his father’s footsteps— attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, becoming ordained as a minister, serving as copastor at Ebenezer, and then eventually inheriting the father’s position, just as Martin Sr. had inherited it from his father-in-law. Sometimes the father shared this plan, but more than anything else the boy could feel the weight of his father’s expectations in the prideful way he looked at him and treated him. And it made him anxious. He deeply admired his father—he was a man of very high principle. But Martin Jr. could not avoid sensing the growing differences between them in taste and temperament. The son was more easygoing. He loved attending parties, wearing nice clothes, dating girls, and dancing. As he got older, he developed a pronounced serious and introspective side and was drawn to books and learning. It was almost as if there were two people inside of him —one social, the other solitary and reflective. His father, on the other hand, was not complicated at all. When it came to religion, Martin Jr. had his doubts. His father’s