Humiliation

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  75Lecture 8—Puritans, Kings, and Theology in Practice in a social covenant that was not limited only to the elect. Williams thought this marriage of church and state ran contrary to the idea that you are saved by grace alone. õThe Puritans banished Williams in 1635, which is why he ended up founding his own church in Rhode Island. The Puritans made being a Baptist illegal and publicly whipped any they apprehended in their colony, so it’s not hard to understand why Baptist churches grew slowly. õThe technical term for Williams’s critique of Puritan ideas of the law is antinomianism. His idea was that since grace, not good works, saves a person, the Puritans had no business compelling a person to follow any rules. This is the extreme conclusion of Martin Luther’s logic. It’s a conclusion that most of the reformers shied away from because they feared its implications for trying to run a peaceful, moral community. õAnother antinomian thorn in the Puritans’ side was a woman named Anne Hutchinson. She was a midwife by profession and passionate about theology. She started hosting mid- week meetings at her home in Boston to discuss sermons further. Word got out that Hutchinson was creeping toward that antinomian heresy, saying that Christians didn’t need to follow the law to be certain of salvation. õHer followers included some of the most prominent men in town, but most were women. One of Hutchinson’s dearest friends was a woman named Mary Dyer. Hutchinson fought her way through a snowstorm to help her through a terrible labor that resulted in the stillbirth of a deformed fetus. Hutchinson likely won the trust of many Boston women by helping them through horrible experiences like this. 76The History of Christianity II õThe town fathers, unfortunately, didn’t like Hutchinson. Beginning in 1637, they put her on trial twice, before both civil and church authorities. They accused her of slandering the colony’s ministers and committing heresy. She had born 15 children and was pregnant again during her trial. She held her own, though: She was really just following the Puritans’ own logic to its ultimate conclusion. õThen she made a mistake. She claimed that the Holy Spirit communicated with her directly. For most Puritans, this was an unacceptable threat to the authority of the Bible, and—just as important—to the authority of the clergy. They ordered her banished.

• From Untrue (2018)

  This dilemma has larger implications and is not limited to the actresses Miller-Young studies. In the new and unregulated world of online dating, more than one African American woman in her late twenties or early thirties told me, swipe right on a white guy and you may well live the same issue of being devalued by the trope of the ho he holds in mind and perpetuates as he taps on his phone or laptop. “You cannot believe the stuff a white guy might presume and say to a black woman who’s on a dating app,” a graduate student at an Ivy League school told me with a shake of her head. “First of all, we need data on how often a white guy will even swipe right on a black woman. Not that often, in my experience and that of my friends. And when he does? There is a good chance it is because he assumes she is a ‘freak’ or ‘kinky’—that she’ll do stuff a white woman wouldn’t.” Hiding behind their online anonymity, these men feel emboldened to let down any veneer of respect or civility, giving free rein to their bias. This young woman reported that she and her peers experienced that not a few white men in the online dating world presume they are into BDSM before asking (“It’s not that I think BDSM is ‘wrong’; I don’t!” she told me. “But the fact that so many white guys presume black women are necessarily into it says something”), ask if they’re into anal sex in a first text exchange, and frequently demand, “Is it true that you like to [fill-in-the-blank]?!” assuming her to be a stand-in for her supposedly sexually “wild” race. In the world of online dating, several young black women told me, white guys treat them as if they’re hypersexual, ever ready, unfeeling, and basically subhuman. This is the special penalty these women are subjected to for daring to want sex and connection and for pursuing it like everyone else does. For Miller-Young, controlling images of black womanhood are something black adult entertainment actresses confront, are subjected to, and exploit in turn. She discourages us from viewing black women in the sex industries as victims and nothing else. They’re social actors as well as performers, she says, working within and against constraints, making a living in a culture and a niche that has devalued their sexuality, and leaving their mark. And counterintuitively, they may sometimes have a degree of agency that African American women on dating apps do not.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Now in His Passion Christ humbled Himself beneath His dignity in four respects. In the first place as to His Passion and death, to which He was not bound; secondly, as to the place, since His body was laid in a sepulchre and His soul in hell; thirdly, as to the shame and mockeries He endured; fourthly, as to His being delivered up to man’s power, as He Himself said to Pilate (Jn. 19:11): “Thou shouldst not have any power against Me, unless it were given thee from above.” And, consequently, He merited a four-fold exaltation from His Passion. First of all, as to His glorious Resurrection: hence it is written (Ps. 138:1): “Thou hast known my sitting down”—that is, the lowliness of My Passion—“and My rising up.” Secondly, as to His ascension into heaven: hence it is written (Eph. 4:9): “Now that He ascended, what is it, but because He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended above all the heavens.” Thirdly, as to the sitting on the right hand of the Father and the showing forth of His Godhead, according to Is. 52:13: “He shall be exalted and extolled, and shall be exceeding high: as many have been astonished at him, so shall His visage be inglorious among men.” Moreover (Phil. 2:8) it is written: “He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross: for which cause also God hath exalted Him, and hath given Him a name which is above all names”—that is to say, so that He shall be hailed as God by all; and all shall pay Him homage as God. And this is expressed in what follows: “That in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.” Fourthly, as to His judiciary power: for it is written (Job 36:17): “Thy cause hath been judged as that of the wicked cause and judgment Thou shalt recover.” Reply to Objection 1: The source of meriting comes of the soul, while the body is the instrument of the meritorious work. And consequently the perfection of Christ’s soul, which was the source of meriting, ought not to be acquired in Him by merit, like the perfection of the body, which was the subject of suffering, and was thereby the instrument of His merit. Reply to Objection 2: Christ by His previous merits did merit exaltation on behalf of His soul, whose will was animated with charity and the other virtues; but in the Passion He merited His exaltation by way of recompense even on behalf of His body: since it is only just that the body, which from charity was subjected to the Passion, should receive recompense in glory.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Eddie had lost both of his legs and he had come home with almost no body left, and no one seemed to care. When they came to where the speakers’ platform had been erected, he watched Eddie push himself out of the back seat, then up on his crutches while the heavy guy helped him with the door. The commander was opening the trunk, bringing the wheelchair to the side of the car. He was lifted out by the heavy guy and he saw the people around him watching, and it bothered him because he didn’t want them to see how badly he had been hurt and how helpless he was, having to be carried out of the car into the chair like a baby. He tried to block out what he was feeling by smiling and waving to the people around him, making jokes about the chair to ease the tension, but it was very difficult being there at all and the more he felt stared at and gawked at like some strange object in a museum, the more difficult it became and the more he wanted to get the hell out of there. He pushed himself to the back of the platform where two strong members of the Legion were waiting to lift him up in the chair. “How do you lift this goddamn thing?” shouted one of the men, suddenly staggering, almost dropping him. He tried to tell them how to lift it properly, the way they had shown him in the hospital, but they wanted to do it their own way and almost dropped him a second time. They finally carried him up the steps of the stage where he was wheeled up front next to Eddie, who sat with his crutches by his side. They sat together watching the big crowd and listening to one speaker after the other, including the mayor and all the town’s dignitaries; each one spoke very beautiful words about sacrifice and patriotism and God , crying out to the crowd to support the boys in the war so that their brave sacrifices would not have to be in vain. And then it was the tall commander’s turn to speak. He walked up to the microphone slowly, measuring his steps carefully, then jutted his head up and looked directly at the crowd. “I believe in America !” shouted the commander, shaking his fist in the air. “And I believe in Americanism !” The crowd was cheering now. “And most of all . . . most of all, I believe in victory for America! ” He was very emotional. Then he shouted that the whole country had to come together and support the boys in the war. He told how he and the boys’ fathers before them had fought in Korea and World War II, and how the whole country had been behind them back then and how they had won a great victory for freedom.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Come on now!” I try to wheel my chair forward, but it will not move. I try again. Suddenly the man with the red hair is leaning over from behind me, grabbing my hands. “You’re under arrest.” Another man whom I recognize from the picket line runs up to help him. “Come on you bastard. You’re going to jail!” I am fighting to keep them from handcuffing me, screaming for the other demonstrators to help me. The redheaded man lifts up the handles of my chair and dumps me into the street. I fall forward on my face, my legs twisted under me. “Get your fucking hands behind you!” The redheaded man jabs his knee into my back. There is a tremendous commotion all around me. Someone is kicking the dead part of my body that can’t feel anymore. People are yelling and screaming and clubs are flying everywhere. “I’m a Vietnam veteran! Don’t you know what you’re doing to me? Oh God, what’s happening.” They are holding my arms. They twist them behind my back, clamp handcuffs around my wrists. “Don’t you understand? My body’s paralyzed. I can’t move my body, I can’t feel my body.” “Get him the fuck out of here!” yells someone. Kicking me and hitting me with their fists, they begin dragging me along. They tear the medals I have won in the war from my chest and throw me back into the chair, my hands still cuffed behind me. I feel myself falling forward because I cannot balance and the redheaded man keeps pushing me back against the chair, yelling and cursing at me to stay put. “I have no stomach muscles, don’t you understand?” “Shut up you sonofabitch!” There are women standing on the sidewalk nearby crying, and all around me people are being beaten and handcuffed. The two men begin dragging me in the chair to an unmarked car on the other side of the street. The redheaded man throws my body into the back seat, my dead limbs flopping underneath me. “Get in there you fucking traitor!” I am feeling hurt all over and I can hardly breathe. I lie bleeding in the back seat as a discussion goes on between the two of them about whether or not they have broken any of my bones. I hear them say they are going to take me to the county jail hospital for x-rays. Something happens to them when I take my clothes off in the admitting room. They stand there looking at me. They see my scars and the rubber catheter tube going into my penis and they begin to think they have made a mistake. I can see the fear in their faces. They have just beaten up a half-dead man, and they know it. They are very careful now, almost polite. They help me put my clothes back on when the doctor is through with me. “I was in Vietnam too,” the redheaded man says, hesitating.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Eddie had lost both of his legs and he had come home with almost no body left, and no one seemed to care. When they came to where the speakers’ platform had been erected, he watched Eddie push himself out of the back seat, then up on his crutches while the heavy guy helped him with the door. The commander was opening the trunk, bringing the wheelchair to the side of the car. He was lifted out by the heavy guy and he saw the people around him watching, and it bothered him because he didn’t want them to see how badly he had been hurt and how helpless he was, having to be carried out of the car into the chair like a baby. He tried to block out what he was feeling by smiling and waving to the people around him, making jokes about the chair to ease the tension, but it was very difficult being there at all and the more he felt stared at and gawked at like some strange object in a museum, the more difficult it became and the more he wanted to get the hell out of there. He pushed himself to the back of the platform where two strong members of the Legion were waiting to lift him up in the chair. “How do you lift this goddamn thing?” shouted one of the men, suddenly staggering, almost dropping him. He tried to tell them how to lift it properly, the way they had shown him in the hospital, but they wanted to do it their own way and almost dropped him a second time. They finally carried him up the steps of the stage where he was wheeled up front next to Eddie, who sat with his crutches by his side. They sat together watching the big crowd and listening to one speaker after the other, including the mayor and all the town’s dignitaries; each one spoke very beautiful words about sacrifice and patriotism and God , crying out to the crowd to support the boys in the war so that their brave sacrifices would not have to be in vain. And then it was the tall commander’s turn to speak. He walked up to the microphone slowly, measuring his steps carefully, then jutted his head up and looked directly at the crowd. “I believe in America !” shouted the commander, shaking his fist in the air. “And I believe in Americanism !” The crowd was cheering now. “And most of all . . . most of all, I believe in victory for America! ” He was very emotional. Then he shouted that the whole country had to come together and support the boys in the war. He told how he and the boys’ fathers before them had fought in Korea and World War II, and how the whole country had been behind them back then and how they had won a great victory for freedom.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  And now he sounded like a little whining three-year-old, he sounded like a little baby, he was just like a little frightened baby. “Are you gonna cry?” screamed the sergeant. “Is that what’s gonna happen? Everybody, I want you to look at this, look over here, people, I want you to see the baby cry!” Everyone looked over to where the fat kid was. “Are those tears?” screamed the sergeant. They were all laughing now, laughing, rocking back and forth on their heels, their hands on their hips. “Cry!” screamed the sergeant. “Cry Cry Cry you little baby! That’s what we want, we want you people to cry like little babies because that’s all you maggots are. You are nothing!” The fat kid was now kneeling on the floor. His whole body was shaking; he had his hands against his face like he was praying. “I don’t want this,” he was saying. “I . . . I want . . . to go home. I want to go home.” He was saying it over and over again now, “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.” He hadn’t even gotten there, it was the first day and he wanted to go home. And as he watched, the drill instructors, having had all the fun they could, slowly stepped back from where the fat boy was kneeling, laughing and scorning him, pitying him and cursing him, running back and forth screaming in the ears of the other young boys, cursing them and jabbing them again and again, until the whole maddening thunderous echo of cursing sounds and raging angry voices began to deafen his ears and turn his head around and around till he wondered who he was and what was happening and what was this place. “He’s not gonna make it, he’s not gonna make it!” screamed the short sergeant, almost dancing in front of them. “He’s not gonna hack it. He’s a baby. He’s nothing but a baby, ladies!” “He can’t even fit into his pants!” screamed the tall sergeant, laughing. “Yeah,” said the southern sergeant. “He’s nothin’ but a goddamned little baby and you know what we do with babies,” he said. “We kick ’em in their fucking asses and send ’em home. You people, you better listen up!” said the southern sergeant. “You are in Parris Island. You are now in Platoon One Hundred Eighty-one. You are in my platoon and if you people wanna be marines, y’all gonna hafta work harder than you have ever worked before in your lives and you are gonna listen to me and you are gonna do everything I tell you to do if you want to get your asses off this island alive and become marines you better listen to me.” It was beginning to get dark on the island. It had been a long day for him. It had seemed like a hundred days, a thousand days! The day had been endless.

• From Untrue (2018)

  In her Nerve.com article “Take My Wife, Please,” Kai Ma provides a great introduction to and overview of what practitioners call “cucking” and “hotwifing.” She observes that a husband who wants to watch his wife have sex with another man or encourages her to “goes against the grain” of the institution of marriage, the ideology of masculinity, and even patriarchy “in a radical way.” Many of these men, according to Ma—who interviewed several and dove into the world of online cuckold life via websites like Chatzy.com and CuckoldPlace.com—are what we might consider “alphas” in their day-to-day lives, hyper-masculine types who enjoy playing a decidedly beta role in their sex lives with their wives. One couple she spent time with, Kurt and Christina, walked her through their sessions with a “bull”—the term for the other man who has sex with the married hotwife—named Claudio, with whom they “played” regularly. Kurt and Christina found Claudio on Craigslist. They had specified that their bull needed to have a penis that was larger than Kurt’s. Kurt, who is a former Army man, gets very turned on when Christina says things like “[Claudio] is hitting spots in me that [you aren’t].” Even more, he loves watching Christina while she actually has sex with Claudio or any of the other bulls they have invited into their bedroom and their relationship, all of whose penises are larger than his. Kurt says that he enjoys that bulls loom large over him, physically and psychologically, making him feel less than in every sense. “This is the one area in life where I can choose to be submissive,” he told Ma. There is a deep and abiding belief in our society that “a real man controls his wife.” Kurt and his cuck confreres relish ceding that control. Many get off on not being the “biggest” man in the room. Men who identify as cucks and like to hotwife may hide to watch the action or observe via video camera. Still others are far away when the sex between their hotwife and the bull takes place but are there for the lead-up. These men enjoy helping their wives get ready for their dates: a man might shave his wife’s legs for her, make the dinner and hotel reservation for her, shop for the sexy outfit she will wear on the date, and buy the condoms she will bring along. Still other men enjoy being told about it after the fact, in great detail. And then there are cucks who enjoy performing oral sex on their “cheating” wives or girlfriends after the fact—this is called “clean up.” “What makes it erotic,” one such man explained, “is that my woman is really enjoying herself [with the bull]. Then she comes back to me and humiliates me by saying, ‘Now it’s your turn to have me. You can taste what the other guy left behind.’” To these men, submitting to female infidelity is delicious.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Do you understand that, ladies?” “Yessir!” “Do it!” shouted the short sergeant. And one hundred and sixty hands reached into the boxes, searching for the black socks and putting them on their feet as quickly as they could. “Grab your trousers!” shouted the sergeant. “These are trousers,” he shouted. “Not pants! Pants are for little girls! Trousers are for marines! Put your trousers on!” he commanded. “Yessir!” they screamed and they grabbed their trousers and then their belts and then their skivvy shirts and jackets and utility caps, until they all stood dressed together inside that hangar. Many of the uniforms didn’t fit. He could feel his cap covering his face, he was almost swimming in it, and his enormous pants hung down below his boots that didn’t fit either. He felt like a ragamuffin doll. He thought he must look like some kind of painter, with his painting cap turned all sideways on his head. He felt so silly. He looked around him and some of the others looked worse than he did. There was one short kid who seemed to have his belt buckle up to his chest and his hat seemed to cover his whole face too. Why, there was a tall guy, to the right of him down at the end, yeah there was a tall guy whose pants were way too short and his shirt, he thought, belonged on the little kid who was swimming in his stuff. There was a fat kid who couldn’t get his pants on at all and the drill instructor was screaming at him, cursing him, and telling him he’d never make it through boot camp alive, he’d never become a marine. They were all crowding around the fat guy, all the drill instructors, there must have been six of them standing all around that fat kid, circling him for the kill with their angry stares and one at a time they’d scream into his ears, laughing at him and cursing him because he couldn’t fit into his pants. He kept looking from the corner of his eye, and all of them, all of them on the other side of the fat kid, they all seemed to be looking the way he was, trying to see what was going to happen next. And now he remembered that kid, he was the same one on the bus after they had landed in Raleigh, he was the same kid that had stood up and boasted on the bus, with both hands on his hips, that his father had won a whole lot of medals in World War II and he’d killed a whole bunch of Germans. Yeah, it was the same kid. The same one who told everyone he wasn’t afraid of anything. Now they had him surrounded so you couldn’t see what was happening, and they were punching him, yeah punching, he could hear that fat kid shout every time they jabbed their tight fists into his gut.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Jezebel’s story and its subsequent rewritings are just one example of how female power was increasingly linked with sexuality and with deception. If women could trick men, men would expose their cheating and their supposed essential duplicity for all the world to see, sometimes literally. This prerogative was one harvested through the work of the plough. In ancient Greece, where the most widely cultivated crop was wheat—the most plough-positive of all crops—adultery was considered a serious crime, with repercussions at the level of couple, family, and the state. The man committing adultery with a married female citizen could be murdered on the spot, with a likely reprieve for his killer; the wife was immediately and automatically divorced. Interestingly, from 470 BC onward, the price for interfering with the transport of grain was also death. Just as meddling with the distribution of grain could lead to famine, a woman’s adultery could result in illegitimate children, the thinking went, and only legitimate children were allowed to become Athenian citizens. Thus it was an offense with social consequences for married female citizens and men other than their husbands to have sex. This meant the transgression had to be “aired” in public, at once atoned for and displayed to the adulterers and the world at large as a matter of concern to all, and the site of rightful intervention. According to Aristotle, adulteresses in the Peloponnese were required to stand in a transparent tunic without a belt in the town’s center for eleven days. This was an explicit assertion that what these women had tried to claim as their own—their naked bodies and sexuality—literally belonged to all who looked. In other areas, adulteresses were paraded around on a donkey with their lovers in a humiliating public display that made it clear that when it came to married women and sex, there was no zone of privacy, no act of self-determination that was not linked to the larger world and its power to determine her fate. As she sowed, so would she reap.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The day of the event, we booked a minibus, loaded it up with our gear, and drove over. Once we arrived we waited in the back of the school’s assembly hall and watched the acts that went onstage before us, different groups took their turns performing, flamenco dancers, Greek dancers, traditional Zulu musicians. Then we were up. We were billed as the Hip Hop Pantsula Dancers—the South African B-Boys. We set up our sound system onstage. I looked out, and the whole hall was nothing but Jewish kids in their yarmulkes, ready to party. I got on the mic. “Are you ready to rock out?!” “Yeahhhhhh!” “Make some noise!” “Yeahhhhhh!” I started playing. The bass was bumping, my crew was dancing, and everyone was having a great time. The teachers, the chaperones, the parents, hundreds of kids—they were all dancing like crazy. Our set was scheduled for fifteen minutes, and at the ten-minute mark came the moment for me to play “Let’s Get Dirty,” bring out my star dancer, and shut shit down. I started the song, the dancers fanned out in their semicircle, and I got on the mic. “Are you guys ready?!” “Yeahhhhhh!” “You guys are not ready! Are you ready?!” “Yeeeaaahhhhhhhh!” “All right! Give it up and make some noise for HIIIIIITTTTLLLLEERRRRRRRRRR!!!” Hitler jumped out to the middle of the circle and started killing it. The guys around him were all chanting, “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!” They had their arms out in front of them, bouncing to the rhythm. “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!” And I was right there on the mic leading them along. “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!” The whole room stopped. No one was dancing. The teachers, the chaperones, the parents, the hundreds of Jewish kids in their yarmulkes—they froze and stared aghast at us up on the stage. I was oblivious. So was Hitler. We kept going. For a good thirty seconds the only sound in the room was the beat of the music and me on the mic yelling, “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Put your hands in the air for Hitler, yo!” A teacher ran up behind me and yanked the plug for my system out of the wall. The hall went dead silent, and she turned on me and she was livid. “How dare you?! This is disgusting! You horrible, disgusting vile creature! How dare you?!”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Well, why? Why don’t you open up a little bit? It would probably help your typing.” It was really not any of his business, I thought. “You should try to talk more. I know I’m your employer and we have a prescribed relationship, but you should feel free to discuss your problems with me.” The idea of discussing my problems with him was preposterous. “It’s hard to think of having that kind of discussion with you,” I said. I hesitated. “You have a strong personality and…when I encounter a personality like that, I tend to step back because I don’t know how to deal with it.” He was clearly pleased with this response, but he said, “You shouldn’t be so shy.” When I thought about this conversation later, it seemed, on the one hand, that this lawyer was just an asshole. On the other, his comments were weirdly moving, and had the effect of making me feel horribly sensitive. No one had ever made such personal comments to me before. The next day I made another mistake. The intimacy of the previous day seemed to make the mistake even more repulsive to him because he got madder than usual. I wanted him to fire me. I would have suggested it, but I was struck silent. I sat and stared at the letter while he yelled. “What’s wrong with you!” “I’m sorry,” I said. He stood quietly for a moment. Then he said, “Come into my office. And bring that letter.” I followed him into his office. “Put that letter on my desk,” he said. I did. “Now bend over so that you are looking directly at it. Put your elbows on the desk and your face very close to the letter.” Shaken and puzzled, I did what he said. “Now read the letter to yourself. Keep reading it over and over again.” I read: “Dear Mr. Garvy: I am very grateful to you for referring…” He began spanking me as I said “referring.” The funny thing was, I wasn’t even surprised. I actually kept reading the letter, although my understanding of it was not very clear. I began crying on it, which blurred the ink. The word “humiliation” came into my mind with such force that it effectively blocked out all other words. Further, I felt that the concept it stood for had actually been a major force in my life for quite a while. He spanked me for about ten minutes, I think. I read the letter only about five times, partly because it rapidly became too wet to be legible. When he stopped he said, “Now straighten up and go type it again.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “You tell me.” “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Her voice was small and pathetic. “Part of it is that you don’t talk when you should, and then you talk too much when you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.” In confusion, she reviewed the various moments they had spent together, trying to classify them in terms of whether or not it had been appropriate to speak, and to rate her performance accordingly. Her confusion increased. Tears floated on her eyes. She curled her body against his. “You’re hurting my feelings,” she said, “but I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose.” He was briefly touched. “Accidental pain,” he said musingly. He took her head in both hands and pushed it between his legs. She opened her mouth compliantly. He had hurt her after all, he reflected. She was confused and exhausted, and at this instant, anyway, she was doing what he wanted her to do. Still, it wasn’t enough. He released her and she moved upward to lie on top of him, resting her head on his shoulder. She spoke dreamily. “I would do anything with you.” “You would not. You would be disgusted.” “Disgusted by what?” “You would be disgusted if I even told you.” She rolled away from him. “It’s probably nothing.” “Have you ever been pissed on?” He gloated as he felt her body tighten. “No.” “Well, that’s what I want to do to you.” “On your grandmother’s rug?” “I want you to drink it. If any got on the rug, you’d clean it up.” “Oh.” “I knew you’d be shocked.” “I’m not. I just never wanted to do it.” “So? That isn’t any good to me.” In fact, she was shocked. Then she was humiliated, and not in the way she had planned. Her seductive puffball cloud deflated with a flaccid hiss, leaving two drunken, bad-tempered, incompetent, malodorous people blinking and uncomfortable on its remains. She stared at the ugly roses with their heads collapsed in a dead wilt and slowly saw what a jerk she’d been. Then she got mad. “Do you like people to piss on you?” she asked. “Yeah. Last month I met this great girl at Billy’s Topless. She pissed in my face for only twenty bucks.” His voice was high-pitched and stupidly aggressive, like some weird kid who would walk up to you on the street and offer to take care of your sexual needs. How, she thought miserably, could she have mistaken this hostile moron for the dark, brooding hero who would crush her like an insect and then talk about life and art? “There’s a lot of other things I’d like to do too,” he said with odd self-righteousness. “But I don’t think you could handle it.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He did feel slightly humiliated by Cecilia’s speedy rise in the company, however, which had left him behind in the same job he’d been doing for three years. “My inner time clock isn’t the same as everyone else’s.” It occurred to him that he’d said that a long time ago to the phantom girl he’d seen on the street. He sat at his desk, looked through yesterday’s mail and then, bracing himself, he got on the phone. He spent a great deal of time calling student film groups and guilds across the country, trying to interest them in Ariel films. He had always been very good at it, but now he had to fend off the idea that it might be depressing. One of the women he currently went out to dinner with also did most of her work on the phone. She had once said to him, in her nervously irritated way, that doing most of her business by phone had begun to seem strange to her. “Think about it,” she said, gripping her noodle-bearing fork in tight, elegant fingers. “All day long you’re in that room by yourself, talking to disembodied voices. Hundreds of ’em during the year. You’re immersed in floating utterances. You don’t know these people, you don’t even know what they look like. There’s no handshake, nothing. Just a pattern of sounds coming out of a plastic thing with holes.” “You’re exaggerating,” he said. “For comic effect.” “Barely. I never should’ve taken this job. I’ve always hated talking on the phone.” Why was he always attracted to these small, dramatic women? He got on the phone and began selling Ariel’s latest release—an American film he disliked and didn’t want to distribute. The plot was ridiculous; he was surprised when it was met with such a friendly critical response. It concerned a young Chinese woman working in a Japanese geisha bar in San Francisco, who is trying to find a relative she has never seen, an uncle who disappeared shortly after a murder that took place during a meeting of an obscure, crackpot Chinese political group. The woman never finds her uncle, although someone keeps leaving photos of him in her path, along with impossible excerpts from the I Ching. It was idiotic, but popular with college students. “It’s not a political film per se, although there is a political element present. It’s more about communal identity and illusion,” he said to buyers. After lunch there was a meeting about several new films under consideration. One of them was based on a novella by a famous South American writer about a child forced into prostitution by her grandmother. Listening to the discussion of the film reminded him again of the girl he had passed on the street that morning.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Putting on the trained seal act all the time made her more inaccessible than if she had been trussed up with iron thongs. She could break down the most “personal” hard on in the world. Break it down with laughter. At the same time it wasn’t quite as humiliating as one might be inclined to imagine. There was something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter. The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence. You could visualize yourself as a dog, or a weasel, or a white rabbit. Love was something on the side, a dish of caviar, say, or a wax heliotrope. You could see the ventriloquist in you talking about caviar or heliotropes, but the real person was always a weasel or a white rabbit. Evelyn was always lying in the cabbage patch with legs spread open offering a bright green leaf to the first comer. But if you made a move to nibble it the whole cabbage patch would explode with laughter, a bright, dewy, vaginal laughter such as Jesus H. Christ and Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant never dreamed of, because if they had the world would not be what it is today and besides there would have been no Kant and no Christ Almighty. The female seldom laughs, but when she does it’s volcanic. When the female laughs the male had better scoot to the cyclone cellar. Nothing will stand up under that vaginating chortle, not even ferroconcrete. The female, when her risibility is once aroused, can laugh down the hyena or the jackal or the wildcat. Now and then one hears it at a lynching bee, for example. It means that the lid is off, that everything goes. It means that she will forage for herself—and watch out that you don’t get your balls cut off! It means that if the pest is coming SHE is coming first, and with huge spiked thongs that will flay the living hide off you. It means that she will lay not only with Tom, Dick and Harry, but with Cholera, Meningitis, Leprosy; it means that she will lay herself down on the altar like a mare in rut and take on all comers, including the Holy Ghost. It means that what it took the poor male, with his logarithmic cunning, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years to build, she will pull down in a night. She will pull it down and pee on it, and nobody will stop her once she starts laughing in earnest. And when I said about Veronica that her laugh would break down the most “personal” hard on imaginable I meant it: she would break down the personal erection and hand you back an impersonal one that was like a red-hot ramrod.

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

  When she is baptized, she reveals that the name by which she was famous throughout Antioch, “Margarito,” “Pearl,” was merely a stage name. In fact her parents had named her Pelagia. Under her true name she is baptized and receives the holy mysteries. As the assembly rejoices, Satan himself appears, glowering at the baptismal party. He berates Nonnos and then Pelagia herself. He takes the guise of a jilted lover, humiliated by Pelagia’s betrayal. Pelagia, whose bridehood is now vouchsafed to Christ, crosses herself and turns away her old companion. He tempts her again, by night, but she resists and confesses her allegiance to her heavenly marriage chamber. The scenes do not generate much compelling spiritual drama, but as a transposition of romantic tropes they are at least clever. Pelagia bequeaths her estate to Nonnos, who instructs the church’s steward, following Mosaic law, not to allow the wages of the prostitute to cross the threshold of the church. Instead the money is distributed directly to orphans and widows. Pelagia manumits her slaves, urging them to free themselves from “slavery to the sin of this world.” The crowds marvel at her very public transformation, and many of her fellow prostitutes are inspired to follow her example.63 Pelagia’s days of public fame are behind her. She takes a hair shirt and woolen robe from Nonnos, and by night, dressed as a man, she leaves the city. No one saw her depart. Three years later the author of the life, Jacob, went to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. Nonnos told him to find a monk named Pelagius, a eunuch. Jacob finds him living in a cell on the Mount of Olives, wasted by asceticism, with cavernous eyes. Jacob does not recognize the shell of skin and bones before him as the once-famous actress. Pelagius has achieved, through gruesome self-mortification, a state beyond biological sex, transcending male or female. When Pelagius dies, crowds gather for the burial of the recluse. Anointing the body, the clergy of Jerusalem realize that Pelagius was a woman. She is buried on the Mount of Olives. Indeed, the sepulture of Pelagia provides a reminder that the stories of penitent prostitutes do not simply belong to a closed world of monastic literature. In the 570s a western pilgrim visiting the holy land reported, among the other sights encountered on his journey, the tomb of Pelagia. Her memory belonged to a vibrant world of popular Christian imagination. Indeed, a tomb of Pelagia can still be visited in Jerusalem today, a numinous site sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. A custom is remembered at the site, by which a curious penitent may try to step through a cramped passage in the tomb, to test whether forgiveness for one’s sins has been granted. The deep symbolism of these folk traditions is almost too perfect: just as the penitent prostitutes replaced the virgins of romance, the tomb of Pelagia has replaced the cave of Pan—and as a test of penance rather than purity.64

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Well, why? Why don’t you open up a little bit? It would probably help your typing.” It was really not any of his business, I thought. “You should try to talk more. I know I’m your employer and we have a prescribed relationship, but you should feel free to discuss your problems with me.” The idea of discussing my problems with him was preposterous. “It’s hard to think of having that kind of discussion with you,” I said. I hesitated. “You have a strong personality and…when I encounter a personality like that, I tend to step back because I don’t know how to deal with it.” He was clearly pleased with this response, but he said, “You shouldn’t be so shy.” When I thought about this conversation later, it seemed, on the one hand, that this lawyer was just an asshole. On the other, his comments were weirdly moving, and had the effect of making me feel horribly sensitive. No one had ever made such personal comments to me before. The next day I made another mistake. The intimacy of the previous day seemed to make the mistake even more repulsive to him because he got madder than usual. I wanted him to fire me. I would have suggested it, but I was struck silent. I sat and stared at the letter while he yelled. “What’s wrong with you!” “I’m sorry,” I said. He stood quietly for a moment. Then he said, “Come into my office. And bring that letter.” I followed him into his office. “Put that letter on my desk,” he said. I did. “Now bend over so that you are looking directly at it. Put your elbows on the desk and your face very close to the letter.” Shaken and puzzled, I did what he said. “Now read the letter to yourself. Keep reading it over and over again.” I read: “Dear Mr. Garvy: I am very grateful to you for referring…” He began spanking me as I said “referring.” The funny thing was, I wasn’t even surprised. I actually kept reading the letter, although my understanding of it was not very clear. I began crying on it, which blurred the ink. The word “humiliation” came into my mind with such force that it effectively blocked out all other words. Further, I felt that the concept it stood for had actually been a major force in my life for quite a while. He spanked me for about ten minutes, I think. I read the letter only about five times, partly because it rapidly became too wet to be legible. When he stopped he said, “Now straighten up and go type it again.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The only way I can describe it is to say that when she got hot and bothered, Evelyn, she put on a ventriloqual act with her cunt. You’d be ready to slip it in when suddenly the dummy between her legs would let out a guffaw. At the same time it would reach out for you and give you a playful little tug and squeeze. It could sing too, this dummy of a cunt. In fact it behaved just like a trained seal. Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus. Putting on the trained seal act all the time made her more inaccessible than if she had been trussed up with iron thongs. She could break down the most “personal” hard on in the world. Break it down with laughter. At the same time it wasn’t quite as humiliating as one might be inclined to imagine. There was something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter. The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence. You could visualize yourself as a dog, or a weasel, or a white rabbit. Love was something on the side, a dish of caviar, say, or a wax heliotrope. You could see the ventriloquist in you talking about caviar or heliotropes, but the real person was always a weasel or a white rabbit. Evelyn was always lying in the cabbage patch with legs spread open offering a bright green leaf to the first comer. But if you made a move to nibble it the whole cabbage patch would explode with laughter, a bright, dewy, vaginal laughter such as Jesus H. Christ and Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant never dreamed of, because if they had the world would not be what it is today and besides there would have been no Kant and no Christ Almighty. The female seldom laughs, but when she does it’s volcanic. When the female laughs the male had better scoot to the cyclone cellar. Nothing will stand up under that vaginating chortle, not even ferroconcrete. The female, when her risibility is once aroused, can laugh down the hyena or the jackal or the wildcat. Now and then one hears it at a lynching bee, for example. It means that the lid is off, that everything goes. It means that she will forage for herself—and watch out that you don’t get your balls cut off! It means that if the pest is coming SHE is coming first, and with huge spiked thongs that will flay the living hide off you. It means that she will lay not only with Tom, Dick and Harry, but with Cholera, Meningitis, Leprosy; it means that she will lay herself down on the altar like a mare in rut and take on all comers, including the Holy Ghost. It means that what it took the poor male, with his logarithmic cunning, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years to build, she will pull down in a night.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He did feel slightly humiliated by Cecilia’s speedy rise in the company, however, which had left him behind in the same job he’d been doing for three years. “My inner time clock isn’t the same as everyone else’s.” It occurred to him that he’d said that a long time ago to the phantom girl he’d seen on the street. He sat at his desk, looked through yesterday’s mail and then, bracing himself, he got on the phone. He spent a great deal of time calling student film groups and guilds across the country, trying to interest them in Ariel films. He had always been very good at it, but now he had to fend off the idea that it might be depressing. One of the women he currently went out to dinner with also did most of her work on the phone. She had once said to him, in her nervously irritated way, that doing most of her business by phone had begun to seem strange to her. “Think about it,” she said, gripping her noodle-bearing fork in tight, elegant fingers. “All day long you’re in that room by yourself, talking to disembodied voices. Hundreds of ’em during the year. You’re immersed in floating utterances. You don’t know these people, you don’t even know what they look like. There’s no handshake, nothing. Just a pattern of sounds coming out of a plastic thing with holes.” “You’re exaggerating,” he said. “For comic effect.” “Barely. I never should’ve taken this job. I’ve always hated talking on the phone.” Why was he always attracted to these small, dramatic women? He got on the phone and began selling Ariel’s latest release—an American film he disliked and didn’t want to distribute. The plot was ridiculous; he was surprised when it was met with such a friendly critical response. It concerned a young Chinese woman working in a Japanese geisha bar in San Francisco, who is trying to find a relative she has never seen, an uncle who disappeared shortly after a murder that took place during a meeting of an obscure, crackpot Chinese political group. The woman never finds her uncle, although someone keeps leaving photos of him in her path, along with impossible excerpts from the I Ching . It was idiotic, but popular with college students. “It’s not a political film per se, although there is a political element present. It’s more about communal identity and illusion,” he said to buyers. After lunch there was a meeting about several new films under consideration. One of them was based on a novella by a famous South American writer about a child forced into prostitution by her grandmother. Listening to the discussion of the film reminded him again of the girl he had passed on the street that morning.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Actually in the bed, its wide featureless face absurdly crowned by a panama hat, lay a full-sized human effigy. It was only the rudimentary dummy that schoolboys make to suggest their sleeping forms in the near-darkness of an abandoned dorm, but in the light of a summer afternoon the bunched-up bedding and clothes of which it consisted were revealed as glaringly offensive. Its lolling pillow of a head was meant not to deceive but to warn. Looped around it, and displayed over the bedcover, was an Old Wykehamist tie, ineptly knotted, which made me remember, for a second, how my mother used to stand behind me at the mirror each morning to knot my tie when I was a little boy. Red rose petals were scattered artistically around, and where the heart of the effigy might have been there was a rust-red stain on the white bedspread that did resemble the colour of long-dried blood. I reached for a little bottle on the bedside table: it was vanilla essence. After we’d looked at it for a bit, I let Charles turn, and sit down on the edge of the bed, and then yanked the doll apart, casting its hat on to an armchair and rolling up the tie. ‘You recognise that tie,’ said Charles, with surprising detachment. I smiled. ‘What a pickle, eh?’ And indeed it was the general state of the room, in which a fight had clearly taken place, that had shocked me when I first entered it. The composition on the bed had been in bizarre, attentive contrast to the slewed pictures, toppled knick-knacks and pillaged drawers of the rest of the room. ‘I can’t take another of these melodramas,’ Charles said. Though I was deeply curious, I felt a strong reluctance to ask Charles what had taken place, or to probe the humiliation he had undergone. I helped him to take off his jacket and shoes, and laid him down on the pillow that had recently imitated his head. As if entranced, he was asleep within seconds. 5The first instalment of Charles’s papers was crammed into an old briefcase. Carrying it on the Underground, I felt like a young schoolmaster, taking home a bag bulging with books and essays. It was heavy, as I lolled in the crowded train, holding it by its charred leather handle, which had been strengthened with black insulating tape and was slightly sticky to the touch.