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

  On November 3, 1600, Marie de Medici was welcomed into the port of Marseilles as queen of France. The bride was rather long in the tooth at the advanced age of twenty-six, and inclined toward heaviness. She boasted a sterling virtue, a queenly bearing, and a calm temperament. The French people approved of her dignified appearance. Her heaviness made her appear queenly in her thick, jewel-encrusted robes. Her lethargy seemed regal. One duchess wrote of the new queen, “Marie de Medici has large eyes, a full round face…. Her skin is dark but clear…. she is inclined to be a little heavy. There is a great kindness in her face but,” she added darkly, recalling the beauty of the king’s dead mistress, “there is nothing that even approaches Gabrielle d’Estrées.”50 “I have been deceived! She is not beautiful!” the groom grumbled to a friend after meeting Marie.51 Henri IV had been duped by the old portrait trick and was expecting a slender beauty with elegant features, not this heavy woman with a flat farmer’s face. He managed to fulfill his dynastic duties, however, and made Marie pregnant on his honeymoon. Soon after, Henri left Marie—to attend to urgent state business, he said—and visited Henriette, whom he also made pregnant. When Marie made her official entrance into Paris alone, she was surprised at the lack of pomp. Worse, when she arrived at the Louvre she found the queen’s apartments dark and empty. The king had forgotten to arrange for her furniture. Conniving Henriette badgered Henri into having her presented to the queen as soon as possible, as such a presentation would raise Henriette’s prestige at court. Ladies had to be presented by a noblewoman of good standing, and the unfortunate duchesse de Nemours was given the job, knowing the new queen would never forgive her. Trembling, the duchess introduced Henriette. Though Marie’s French was not yet perfect, she had already heard the name and its unpleasant associations. Henri, with his soldier’s frankness, added brusquely, “This is my mistress who now wishes to be your servant.”52 This statement only poured salt on the wound of the poor bride clutching to the last vestiges of her dignity. Simmering with resentment at the interloper, Henriette bowed to the queen, but not low enough, so Henri shoved her head down farther. She showed great distaste when kissing the hem of Marie’s gown. The Tuscan ambassador, in his report to Marie’s uncle, the grand duke, reported every detail of the historic event. He wrote proudly of Marie’s royal composure, “The Queen received her in the usual manner and treated her thus throughout the evening without showing any displeasure.”53

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

  But George, a man of habit, did not dismiss his mistress. Then in 1729 Henrietta’s husband, having been estranged from his wife for fifteen years, decided he could no longer live with his humiliation and ordered her back to her conjugal duties. He obtained a warrant from the lord chief justice permitting him to seize her wherever and whenever she should be found. Hearing this, Henrietta hid in the palace day and night. The queen, alarmed that the king no longer wanted Henrietta and Henrietta’s husband did, intrigued to keep her in the palace. If Henrietta should go, George would feel required to select another official mistress, and the next one might not be so tractable. When the brutish Mr. Howard—often angry, rarely sober—accosted the queen’s carriage and threatened to pluck out his wife, Caroline knew something must be done. One suggestion was to bribe Howard with twelve hundred pounds a year to leave his wife in peace, to which the queen remarked she found it a bit hard to not only keep her husband’s “trulls under my roof, but pay them, too.”18 George gallantly stepped in and paid the twelve hundred pounds a year, which was undoubtedly what Mr. Howard had hoped for in making such a fuss. As Lord Hervey reported, Mr. Howard was required to sign a document for Henrietta swearing that “for the future to give her as little trouble in the capacity of husband as he had ever given her pleasure. And so this affair ended, the King paying 1200 pounds a year for the possession of what he did not want to enjoy, and Mr. Howard receiving them, for relinquishing what he would have been sorry to keep.”19 By 1734, George was snubbing Henrietta for her friendships with several prominent men, including the poet Alexander Pope, whose sarcastic political verses were critical of the king. When Caroline spoke to George about his rude treatment of Henrietta, he angrily replied, “What the devil did you mean by trying to make an old, dull, deaf, peevish beast stay and plague me when I had so good an opportunity of getting rid of her!”20 And so ended a relationship of twenty years. The old, dull, deaf, and peevish beast suddenly found herself a widow and soon remarried. When the queen informed him of the marriage, George laughed that “my old mistress has married that old rake George Berkeley, and I am very glad of it. I would not make such a gift to my friends, and when my enemies rob me, please God it will always be in this manner.”21 Not a very gallant way to bid farewell to a lover of such long standing, but Henrietta was well rid of him and had the last laugh. She enjoyed a very happy marriage with that old rake George Berkeley, who was, in fact, a dozen years younger than his blushing bride. Henrietta survived her second husband by twenty years, living in comfort in the country.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For a moment we floundered together inelegantly; she let out a burst of nervous laughter, more jarring than her first thin shriek of fear.At last she gave a wriggle; there was - monstrously distinct in the sudden silence, and horribly incriminating - a kind of sucking sound; then she was free. She stood at the side of the bed, the dildo bobbing before her. One of the ladies at Diana’s side said, ‘She has a prick, after all!’ And Diana answered: ‘That prick is mine. These little sluts have stolen it!’Her voice was thick - with drunkenness, perhaps; but also, I think, with shock. I looked again at the wide and spilling box, that she was so vain and jealous of, and felt a worm of satisfaction wriggle within me.And I remembered, too, another room, a room I thought that I had carefully forgotten - a room where it was I who stood speechless at the door, while my sweetheart shivered and blushed beside her lover. And the sight of Diana, in my old place, made me smile.It was the smile, I think, which deranged her at last. ‘Maria,’ she said - for Maria was with her, too, along with Dickie and Evelyn: perhaps they had all come to the bedroom to retrieve a dirty book - ‘Maria, get Mrs Hooper. I want Nancy’s things brought here: she is leaving. And a dress for Blake. They are both going back to the gutter, where I got them from.’ Her voice was cold; as she took a step towards me, however, it grew warmer. ‘You little slut!’ she said. ‘You little trollop! You whore, you harlot, you strumpet, you bitch!’ But they were words that she had used on me a thousand times before, in lust or passion; and now, said in hate, they were curiously devoid of any sting.Beside me, however, Zena had begun to shake. As she did so, the dildo bobbed; and when Diana caught the motion she gave a roar: ‘Take that thing from your hips!’ At once, Zena fumbled with the straps; her fingers jumped so that she could barely grasp the buckles, and I stepped to help her. All the time we worked, Diana hurled abuses at her - she was a half-wit, a street-whore, a common little frigstress. The ladies at the door looked on, and laughed. One of them - it might have been Evelyn - nodded to the trunk, and called: ‘Use the strap on her, Diana!’ Diana curled her lip.‘They will strap her well enough, at the reformatory,’ she said; ‘when she returns there.’At that, Zena fell to her knees and began to cry. Diana gave a sneer, and drew her foot away so that the tears should not fall upon her sandal.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  All eyes had been upon us as we made our entrance; all eyes were on us still, as we headed for the exit. I heard Miss Bruce return to her seat, and someone call, ‘Quite right, Vanessa!’ But another lady held my gaze as I passed her, and winked; and from a table near the door a woman rose to say to Diana that she hoped that Miss King’s trousers had not been too desperately singed... The trousers were rather spoiled; back at Felicity Place, Diana had me walk and bend before Maria and Evelyn and Dickie, in order to decide it. She said she would order me another pair, just the same. ‘What a find, Diana!’ said Maria, as Evelyn patted the cloth. She said it as she might say it about a statue or a clock that Diana had picked up for a song in some grim market. She didn’t care whether I overheard or not. Why should it matter that I did? She meant it, she meant it! There was admiration in her eyes. And being admired, by tasteful ladies - well, I knew it wasn’t being loved. But it was something. And I was good at it. Who would ever have thought I should be so good at it! ‘Take off your shirt, Nancy,’ said Diana then, ‘and let the ladies see your linen.’ I did so, and Maria cried again, ‘What a find!’ Chapter 3 I wish, for sensation’s sake, I could say that my parents heard one word of Kitty’s proposal and forbade me, absolutely, to refer to it again; that when I pressed the matter, they cursed and shouted; that my mother wept, my father struck me; that I was obliged, in the end, to climb from a window at dawn, with my clothes in a rag at the end of a stick, and a streaming face, and a note pinned to my pillow saying Do not try to follow me ... But if I said these things, I would be lying. My parents were reasonable, not passionate, people. They loved me, and they feared for me; the idea of allowing their youngest daughter to travel in the care of an actress and a music-hall manager to the grimmest, wickedest city in England was, they knew, a mad one, that no sane parent should entertain for longer than a second. But because they loved me so, they could not bear to have me grieve.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Not an ugly pussy, but a bigger pussy than mine, a different, mousy pussy, and as she sat slumped, spread and slutty, he sucks on her clit, her obvious, swollen, big red clit. She is uninvolved, shameless. I am watching this secretly from behind a door. He knows I’m watching and spreads her pussy more and more so I can see her clit. She doesn’t know I’m watching. As her clit stands out, like a small erect cock, proud, flagrant, and hungry, I come. Conquest of the other woman is my orgasm, my pleasure. The other woman is my whore—the whore in me. Then he fucks my pussy and then my ass. My clit runneth over. THE BANANA The memory of humiliation is the bleeding scar of reliving it. . . . Humiliation, I believe, is not just another experience in our life, like, say, an embarrassment. It is a formative experience. It forms the way we view ourselves as humiliated persons. —AVISHAI MARGALIT Funny—well, not really—how I began to lose the ability to receive pleasure directly from A-Man but had to siphon it through another woman, his other woman. So sexy in bed, so catastrophic out of bed. And thus I erected yet another Freudian triangle as I fantasized pulling her into bed with us so I could control what I couldn’t control. What I could never control: my dignity in the face of someone I adore. Losing it was the first thing I ever learned to fear; the cause of all my fear. My Waterloo in love. I am four years old. I am a very thin and little girl. So thin and little that my mother actually takes me to the doctor to make sure I’m healthy. After examining me, he allays my mother’s fears with one statement that quickly becomes family lore. “She is just ‘tin’ child!” he declares, in his thick German accent. He suggests I be given more exercise to stimulate my tiny appetite. So I am sent to my first ballet class. After school one day, a short while later, I ask my mother for a banana. (I now don’t remember particularly liking bananas—I liked fish sticks and macaroni with ketchup—but on this particular day I wanted a banana.) The request is refused on two counts. One: we don’t eat between meals in this house. Two: you won’t eat your dinner if you eat a banana now. But I am headstrong in my desire and beg so hard that I am finally handed a large, bright yellow banana. It is longer than my face. Victory. I go to the landing at the top of our staircase and look out the little picture window with my banana in hand. I peel down the top an inch or two and take a couple of bites. And stop. That’s all I want.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She liked to limit the numbers who gazed at me, she said; she said she feared that like a photograph I might fade, from too much handling. When I say display, of course, I mean it: it was part of Diana’s mystery, to make real the words that other people said in metaphor or jest. I had posed for Maria and Dickie and Evelyn in my trousers with the scorch-mark and my underthings of silk. When they came a second time, with another lady, Diana had me pose for them again in a different suit. After that, it became a kind of sport with her, to put me in a new costume and have me walk before her guests, or among them, filling glasses, lighting cigarettes. Once she dressed me as a footman, in breeches and a powdered wig. It was the costume I had worn for Cinderella, more or less - though my breeches at the Brit had not been so snug, nor so large at the groin. The freak with the breeches inspired her further. She grew tired of gentlemen’s suits; she took to displaying me in masquerade - had me set up, behind a little velvet curtain in the drawing-room. This would happen about once a week. Ladies would come for dinner and I would eat with them, in trousers; but while they lingered over their coffee and the trimming of their fags I would leave them, and slip up to my room to change my gear. By the time they made their way into the drawing-room I would be behind the curtain, striking some pose; and when she was ready, Diana would pull a tasselled cord and uncover me. I might be Perseus, with a curved sword and a head of the Medusa, and sandals with straps that were buckled at the knee. I might be Cupid, with wings and a bow. I was once St Sebastian, tied to a stump - I remember what a job it was to fasten the arrows so they would not droop. Then, another night I was an Amazon. I carried the Cupid’s bow, but this time had one breast uncovered; Diana rouged the nipple. Next week - she said I had shown one, I might as well show both - I was the French Marianne, with a Phyrgian cap and a flag. The week after that I was Salome: I had the Medusa head again, but on a plate, and with a beard stuck on it; and while the ladies clapped I danced down to my drawers. And the week after that - well, that week I was Hermaphroditus. I wore a crown of laurel, a layer of silver greasepaint - and nothing else save, strapped to my hips, Diana’s Monsieur Dildo. The ladies gasped to see him. That made him quiver. And as the quiver did its usual work on me, I thought of Kitty.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Didn’t you have her from a prison or a home? You know what the women get up to in prison, don’t you? I should think they must frot until their parts are the size of mushrooms!’ Diana turned her eyes from me, and drew on her pink-tipped fag; and then she smiled. ‘Mrs Hooper!’ she called. ‘Where is Blake?’ ‘She is in the kitchen, ma’am,’ answered the housekeeper from her station at the bowl of wine. ‘She is loading her tray.’ ‘Go and fetch her.’ ‘Yes ma’am.’ Mrs Hooper went. The ladies looked at one another, and then at Diana. She stood very calm and steady beside the bust of cold Antinous; but when she raised her glass to her lip, I saw that her hand was trembling slightly. I shifted from one foot to the other, my briefly flaring lust all faded. In a moment, Mrs Hooper had returned, with Zena. When Diana called to her, Zena walked blinkingly into the centre of the room. The ladies parted to let her pass, then stepped together again at the back of her. Diana said, ‘We have been wondering about you, Blake.’ Zena blinked again. ‘Ma’am?’ ‘We have been wondering about your time at the reformatory.’ Now Zena coloured. ‘We have been wondering how you filled your hours. We thought there must be some little occupation, to which you turned your idle fingers, in your solitary cell.’ Zena hesitated. Then she said, ‘Please, m’m, do you mean, sewing bags?’ At that, the ladies gave a roar of laughter, which made Zena flinch, and blush worse than ever, and put a hand to her throat. Diana said, very slowly, ‘No, child, I did not mean sewing bags. I meant, that we thought you must have turned frigstress, in your little cell. That you must have frigged yourself until your cunt was sore. That you must have frigged yourself so long and so hard, you frigged yourself a cock. We think you must have a cock, Blake, in your drawers. We want you to lift your skirt, and let us see it!’ Now the ladies laughed again. Zena looked at them, and then at Diana. ‘Please, m’m,’ she said, beginning to shake, ’I don’t know what you mean!’ Diana stepped towards her. ‘I think you do,’ she said. She had picked up the book that Dickie had given her, and now she opened it, and held it oppressively close to Zena’s face, so that Zena flinched again. ‘We have been reading a book full of stories of girls like you,’ she said. ‘And now, what are you suggesting? That the doctor who wrote this book - this book that Miss Reynolds gave me, for my birthday - is a fool?’ ‘No, m’m!’ ‘Well then. The doctor says you have a cock. Come along, lift your skirts! Good gracious, girl, we only want to look at you — !’

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Let's omit nothing; and let's have the eight other women stand around us to supply our wants and to excite them." A circle is formed immediately, I am placed in its center and there, for more than two hours, I am inspected, considered, handled by those four monks, who, one after the other, pronounce either encomiums or criticisms. You will permit me, Madame, our lovely prisoner said with a blush, to conceal a part of the obscene details of this odious ritual; allow your imagination to figure all that debauch can dictate to villains in such instances; allow it to see them move to and fro between my companions and me, comparing, confronting, contrasting, airing opinions, and indeed it still will not have but a faint idea of what was done in those initial orgies, very mild, to be sure, when matched against all the horrors I was soon to experience. "Let's to it," says Severino, whose prodigiously exalted desires will brook no further restraint and who in this dreadful state gives the impression of a tiger about to devour its prey, "let each of us advance to take his favorite pleasure." And placing me upon a couch in the posture expected by his execrable projects and causing me to be held by two of his monks, the infamous man attempts to satisfy himself in that criminal and perverse fashion which makes us to resemble none but the sex we do not possess while degrading the one we have; but either the shameless creature is too strongly proportioned, or Nature revolts in me at the mere suspicion of these pleasures; Severino cannot overcome the obstacles; he presents himself, and he is repulsed immediately.... He spreads, he presses, thrusts, tears, all his efforts are in vain; in his fury the monster lashes out against the altar at which he cannot speak his prayers; he strikes it, he pinches it, he bites it; these brutalities are succeeded by renewed challenges; the chastened flesh yields, the gate cedes, the ram bursts through; terrible screams rise from my throat; the entire mass is swifty engulfed, and darting its venom the next moment, robbed then of its strength, the snake gives ground before the movements I make to expel it, and Severino weeps with rage. Never in my life have I suffered so much. Clement steps forward; he is armed with a cat-o'-nine-tails; his perfidious designs glitter in his eyes.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  Then John saw that she wanted him, that she was offering herself, but instead of being stirred, he recoiled. “Martha! Oh, Martha!” he said, “what an animal you are, you are truly the daughter of a whore. Yes, in the orphanage everybody said it, that you were the daughter of a whore.” Martha’s blood rushed to her face. “And you,” she said, “you are impotent, a monk, you’re like a woman, you’re not a man. Your father is a man.” And she rushed out of his room. Now the image of John ceased to torment her. She wanted to efface it from her body and her blood. It was she who waited that night for everyone to fall asleep so she could unlock the door to Pierre’s room, and it was she who came to his bed, silently offering her now cool and abandoned body to him. Pierre knew that she was free of John, that she was his now, by the way she came into his bed. What joy to feel the soft youthful body sliding against his body. Summer nights he slept naked. Martha had dropped her kimono and was naked too. Immediately his desire sprang up and she felt the hardness of it against her belly. Her diffuse feelings were now concentrated in only one part of her body. She found herself making gestures she had never learned, found her hand surrounding his penis, found herself gluing her body to his, found her mouth yielding to the many kinds of kisses Pierre could give. She gave herself in a frenzy, and Pierre was aroused to his greatest feats. Every night was an orgy. Her body became supple and knowing. The tie between them was so strong that it was difficult for them to pretend otherwise during the day. If she looked at him, it was as if he had touched her between the legs. Sometimes in the dark hall they embraced. He pressed her against the wall. At the entrance there was a big dark closet full of coats and snow shoes. No one ever entered there in the summer. Martha hid there and Pierre came in. Lying over the coats, in the small space, enclosed, secret, they abandoned themselves.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She laughed again, while I marvelled. Then she leaned with her napkin to wipe a splash of gravy from my cheek. We had been served cutlets and sweetbreads, all very fine. I ate steadily, as I had eaten at breakfast. Diana, however, did more drinking than eating, and more smoking than drinking; and more watching, even, than smoking. After the exchange about the servants, we fell silent: I found that many of the things I said produced a kind of twitching at her lips and brow, as if my words - sensible enough to my ears - amused her; so at last I said no more, and neither did she, until the only sounds were the low hiss of the gas-jets, the steady ticking of the clock upon the mantel, and the clink of my knife and fork against my plate. I thought involuntarily of those merry dinners in the Green Street parlour, with Grace and Mrs Milne. I thought of the supper I might be having with Florence, in the Judd Street public. But then I finished my meal, and Diana threw me one of her pink cigarettes; and when I had grown giddy on that, she came to me and kissed me. And then I remembered that it was hardly for table-talk that I had been engaged. That night our love-making was more leisurely than it had been before - almost, indeed, tender. Yet she surprised me by seizing my shoulder as I lay on the edge of sleep - my body delightfully sated and my arms and legs entwined with hers - and rousing me to wakefulness. The day had been a day of lessons for me; now came the last of all. ‘You may go, Nancy,’ she said, in exactly the tone I had heard her use on her maid and Mrs Hooper. ‘I wish to sleep alone tonight.’ It was the first time she had spoken to me as a servant, and her words drove the lingering warmth of slumber quite from my limbs. Yet I took my leave, uncomplaining, and made my way to the pale room along the hall, where my own cold bed awaited. I liked her kisses, I liked her gifts still more; and if, to keep them, I must obey her - well, so be it.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I should love -’ I sat up. ‘Zena, I should love to see you in Diana’s dildo!’ ‘That thing? She’s made you filthy! I should die with shame, before I ever tried such a thing!’ Her lashes fluttered. I said, ‘You are blushing! You’ve fancied it, haven’t you? You’ve fancied a bit of that kind of sport - don’t tell me you haven’t!’ ‘Really, a girl like me!’ But she was redder than ever, and would not gaze at me. I caught hold of her hand, and pulled her up. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You have got me all hot for it. Diana will never know.’ ‘Oh!’ I pulled her to the door, then peered into the corridor outside. The music and laughter from downstairs was fainter, but still loud and rather furious. Zena fell against me, and put her arms around my waist; then we staggered together, quite naked, and with our hands before our faces to stop ourselves from laughing, to Diana’s little parlour. Here, it was the work of a moment to open the bureau’s secret drawer, then take the key to the rosewood trunk, and open that. Zena looked on, all the time casting fearful glances towards the door. When she saw the dildo, however, she coloured again, but seemed unable to tear her eyes from it. I felt a drunken surge of power and pride. ‘Stand up,’ I said — I sounded almost like Diana. ‘Stand up, and fasten the buckles.’ When she had done that, I led her to the looking-glass. I winced, to see my face all red and swollen, and still with crumbs of blood caught in its creases; but the sight of Zena - gazing at herself with the dildo jutting from her, placing a hand upon the shaft of it, and swallowing, to feel the motion of the leather - proved more distracting than the bruise. At last I turned her and placed my hands upon her shoulders, and nudged the head of the dildo between my thighs. If my quim had had a tongue, it could not have been more eloquent; and if Zena’s quim had had one, it would now have licked its lips. She gave a cry. We stumbled to the bed and fell, crosswise, upon the satin. My head hung from it - the blood rushed to my cheek and made it ache - but now Zena had the shaft inside me and, as she began to wriggle and thrust, I found myself compelled to lift my mouth and kiss her. As I did so, I heard a noise, quite distinct, above the shuddering of the bed-posts and the pounding of the pulse inside my ears. I let my head fall, and opened my eyes. The door of the room was open, and it was full of ladies’ faces. And the face, pale with fury, at the centre of them all, was Diana’s.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  IF BIJOU thought that the Basque had taken her home to have her all to himself, she was soon to be disillusioned. The Basque used her as a model almost continuously, but in the evenings he always had his artist friends for dinner, and Bijou was then the cook. After dinner he would make her lie on the bed in the studio while he talked with his friends. He merely kept her at his side and fondled her. His friends could not help watching them. His hand would mechanically circle over her ripe breasts. Bijou would not move. She would fall into a languid pose. The Basque would touch the material of her dress as if it were her skin. Her dresses always molded her body tightly. His hand would appraise and pat and caress, then circle over the belly, then suddenly tickle her to make her squirm. He would open her dress, take out one breast and say to his friends, “Did you ever see such a breast? Look!” They looked. One was smoking, one was sketching Bijou, the other was talking, but they looked. Against the black dress the breast, so perfect in its contours, had the color of old ivory marble. The Basque pinched the nipples, which reddened. Then he would close the dress again. He would feel along the legs until he touched the prominence of the garters. “Isn’t it too tight for you? Let’s see. Has it left a mark?” He would lift the skirt and carefully remove the garter. As Bijou lifted her leg to him the men could see the smooth gleaming lines of her thighs above the stocking. Then she covered herself again and the Basque would continue to fondle her. Bijou’s eyes would blur as if she were drunk. But because she was now like the Basque’s wife and in the company of the Basque’s friends, each time he exposed her she fought to cover herself again, hiding away each new secret in the black folds of her dress. She stretched her legs. She kicked off her shoes. The erotic light that shone from her eyes, a light that her heavy eyelashes could not shade sufficiently, traversed the bodies of the men like fire. On nights like this she knew the Basque was not intent on giving her pleasure but on torturing her. He would not be satisfied until the faces of his friends were altered, decomposed. He would pull the zipper on the side of her dress and slip in his hand. “You are not wearing panties today, Bijou.” They could see his hand under the dress, caressing the belly and descending towards the legs. Then he would stop and withdraw his hand. They watched his hand coming out of the black dress and closing the zipper again.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He was with two gents: I raised my brows, he rolled his eyes. Then he saw who it was I sat with - It was Diana and Maria - and he stared. I gave a shrug, he looked thoughtful - then rolled his eyes again, as much as to say, What a business! To all these places, as I have said, I went clad as a boy — indeed, the only time I ever dressed as a girl, now, was for our visits to the Cavendish. This was the single spot in the city at which Diana might have put me in trousers and not cared who knew it; but after Miss Bruce’s complaint they introduced a new rule, and ever after I was taken there in skirts - Diana having something made up for me, I forget the cut and colour of it now. At the club I would sit and drink and smoke, and be flirted with by Maria, and eyed by other ladies, while Diana met friends or wrote letters. She did this very often, for she was known - I suppose I might have guessed it, in a way - as a philanthropist, and ladies courted her for schemes. She gave money to certain charities. She sent books to girls in prisons. She was involved in the producing of a magazine for the Suffrage, named Shafts. She attended to all this, with me at her side. If I leaned to pick up a paper or a list and idly read it, she would take the sheet away, as if gazing too hard at too many words might tire me. In the end, I would settle on the cartoons in Punch. These, then, were my public appearances. There were not too many of them - I am describing here a period that lasted about a year. Diana kept me close, for the most part, and displayed me at home. She liked to limit the numbers who gazed at me, she said; she said she feared that like a photograph I might fade, from too much handling. When I say display, of course, I mean it: it was part of Diana’s mystery, to make real the words that other people said in metaphor or jest. I had posed for Maria and Dickie and Evelyn in my trousers with the scorch-mark and my underthings of silk. When they came a second time, with another lady, Diana had me pose for them again in a different suit. After that, it became a kind of sport with her, to put me in a new costume and have me walk before her guests, or among them, filling glasses, lighting cigarettes. Once she dressed me as a footman, in breeches and a powdered wig. It was the costume I had worn for Cinderella, more or less - though my breeches at the Brit had not been so snug, nor so large at the groin. The freak with the breeches inspired her further.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘Here comes the flood!’ So he took up the axe beside him, and cut the rope that held his tub to the beams of the ceiling. Then, as the children say, all fall down. In a moment the tub plummeted to the floor. I could put it another way. He had no time to sell the bread and ale on board. He was on the floorboards, passed out. He was dead to the world. When they realized what had happened Alison and Nicholas went out into the street calling ‘Havoc!’ and ‘Harrow!’ to wake their neighbours. And then the good people ran out of their houses to take a look at the carpenter spread out on the floor. He had broken his arm in the fall, and was generally in a sad condition. Slowly he recovered from his faint. He tried to stand up, but it did him no good. Before he could say a word Nicholas and Alison assured the crowd that he had gone mad. They said that he had become so obsessed with Noah and the Flood that he had gone out especially to buy three tubs; when these vessels were hanging from the roof, he had urged them to join him up there for the sake of company. Then all the neighbours began to laugh at him. He was not only mad. He was a fool. They looked up at the two tubs still dangling from the roof, and laughed even harder. It was a joke. The carpenter tried to explain what had happened, but no one was in the mood to listen to him. The testimony of Nicholas and Alison was so convincing that the whole town now treated him as little more than a lunatic. Everyone agreed about that. So there we are. That is how the young scholar got to fuck the young wife, despite all the carpenter’s precautions. How Absolon kissed her arse. How Nicholas had a sore bum. And that, pilgrims, is the end of my story. God save us all! Then the Miller fell off his horse. Heere endeth the Millere his tale [image file=images/ackr_9781101155639_oeb_004_r1.jpg] The Reeve’s Prologue The prologe of the Reves Tale When everyone had finished laughing at the lewd tale of Absolon and Nicholas, they all interpreted it in different ways. There is more than one way to peel an apple. But the main response was laughter. No one took offence at it - apart from the Reeve, Oswald. He was a carpenter himself, you see, and he suffered just the tiniest bit of resentment. So he grumbled and complained under his breath.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Califia goes on to say that this incident made him aware of the double standard that exists in the way transsexuals are often viewed. For example, when we presume a person to be cissexual, we generally accept their overall perceived gender as natural and authentic, while disregarding any minor discrepancies in their gender appearance. However, upon discovering or suspecting that a person is transsexual, we often actively (and rather compulsively) search for evidence of their assigned sex in their personality, expressions, and physical bodies. I have experienced this firsthand during the countless occasions when I have come out to people as transsexual. Upon learning of my trans status, most people get this distinctive “look” in their eyes, as if they are suddenly seeing me differently—searching for clues of the boy that I used to be and projecting different meanings onto my body. I call this process ungendering, as it is an attempt to undo a trans person’s gender by privileging incongruities and discrepancies in their gendered appearance that would normally be overlooked or dismissed if they were presumed to be cissexual. The only purpose that ungendering serves is to privilege cissexual genders, while delegitimizing the genders of transsexuals and other gender-variant people. Moving Beyond “Bio Boys” and “Genetic Girls” The first step we must take toward dismantling cissexual privilege is to purge those words and concepts from our vocabularies that foster the idea that cissexual genders are inherently more authentic than those of transsexuals. A good place to start is with the common tendency to refer to cissexuals as “genetic” or “biological” males and females. Despite its frequent occurrence, the use of the word “genetic” seems particularly strange to me, since we are unable to readily see other people’s sex chromosomes. In fact, since so few people ever have their chromosomes examined, one could argue that the vast majority of people have a genetic sex that has yet to be determined. In the rare cases where people do have their chromosomes checked out (such as sex testing at the Olympics or in infertility clinics), a person’s genetic sex not matching their assigned sex occurs far more often than most people would ever fathom.3

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  It was a disgusting low-class habit, and the nurse should have consulted her before encouraging me in such vulgar behavior. She said she was going to give that woman a piece of her mind, by golly. “After all,” Mom said, “I am your mother, and I should have a say in how you’re raised.” • • • “Do you guys miss me?” I asked my older sister, Lori, during one visit. “Not really,” she said. “Too much has been happening.” “Like what?” “Just the normal stuff.” “Lori may not miss you, honey bunch, but I sure do,” Dad said. “You shouldn’t be in this antiseptic joint.” He sat down on my bed and started telling me the story about the time Lori got stung by a poisonous scorpion. I’d heard it a dozen times, but I still liked the way Dad told it. Mom and Dad were out exploring in the desert when Lori, who was four, turned over a rock and the scorpion hiding under it stung her leg. She had gone into convulsions, and her body had become stiff and wet with sweat. But Dad didn’t trust hospitals, so he took her to a Navajo witch doctor who cut open the wound and put a dark brown paste on it and said some chants and pretty soon Lori was as good as new. “Your mother should have taken you to that witch doctor the day you got burned,” Dad said, “not to these heads-up-their-asses med-school quacks.” • • • The next time they visited, Brian’s head was wrapped in a dirty white bandage with dried bloodstains. Mom said he had fallen off the back of the couch and cracked his head open on the floor, but she and Dad had decided not to take him to the hospital. “There was blood everywhere,” Mom said, “but one kid in the hospital at a time is enough.” “Besides,” Dad said, “Brian’s head is so hard, I think the floor took more damage than he did.” Brian thought that was hilarious and just laughed and laughed. Mom told me she had entered my name in a raffle at a fair, and I’d won a helicopter ride. I was thrilled. I had never been in a helicopter or a plane. “When do I get to go on the ride?” I asked. “Oh, we already did that,” Mom said. “It was fun.” Then Dad got into an argument with the doctor. It started because Dad thought I shouldn’t be wearing bandages. “Burns need to breathe,” he told the doctor. The doctor said bandages were necessary to prevent infection. Dad stared at the doctor. “To hell with infection,” he said. He told the doctor that I was going to be scarred for life because of him, but, by God, I wasn’t the only one who was going to walk out of there scarred. Dad pulled back his fist as if to hit the doctor, who raised his hands and backed away.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  But let us not forget Herculine’s relation to the laugh which seems to appear twice, first in the fear of being laughed at (23) and later as a laugh of scorn that s/he directs against the doctor, for whom s/he loses respect after he fails to tell the appropriate authorities of the natural irregularity that has been revealed to him (71). For Herculine, then, laughter appears to designate either humiliation or scorn, two positions unambiguously related to a damning law, subjected to it either as its instrument or object. Herculine does not fall outside the jurisdiction of that law; even h/er exile is understood on the model of punishment. On the very first page, s/he reports that h/er “place was not marked out [pas marquée] in this world that shunned me.” And s/he articulates the early sense of abjection that is later enacted first as a devoted daughter or lover to be likened to a “dog” or a “slave” and then finally in a full and fatal form as s/he is expelled and expels h/erself from the domain of all human beings. From this presuicidal isolation, s/he claims to soar above both sexes, but h/er anger is most fully directed against men, whose “title” s/he sought to usurp in h/er intimacy with Sara and whom s/he now indicts without restraint as those who somehow forbid h/er the possibility of love.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So the two scholars ran up and down the fen, trying to catch hold of their horse. They called out, ‘Stay! Stay!’ and ‘Here, boy! Here!’ And they called out to each other, ‘Wait! Go back a bit!’ and ‘Whistle to him. Gan on.’ However hard they tried, the animal always managed to elude them. He was fast. It was not until nightfall, in fact, that they managed to catch him in a ditch. The horse was exhausted. And so were they. They were weary, and wet from the rain. ‘I divn’t believe it,’ John said. ‘Everyone’ll be laughin’ at us now. Our corn’ll be gone. We’re both ringin’ wet. We’ve both been made to look like cocks. The master’ll rip the shit out of us. So will the scholars. And, as it happens, so will the miller. You just wait and see.’ So they walked back to the mill, leading their horse along the way. The miller was sitting by the fire. It was pitch black outside now, and they could travel no further. So they asked him to provide them with food and lodging for the night. They offered to pay, of course. ‘If there be any room in my poor dwelling,’ the miller said, ‘then you shall have it. My house is small but you scholars know how to argue and dispute. You can prove anything with your rhetoric. See if you can prove that twenty square feet of space equals a square mile.’ ‘Well, Simkin,’ John replied, ‘that’s a fair comment. I divn’t kna’ how to answer you. There’s a sayin’ up north - that a man has only two options. He can tek things as he finds them, or bring things of his own. But to be honest with you, Simkin, we’re knackered and hungry. We need food and drink. Bring us some bread and meat - or anythin’ - and we’re happy to pay for them. Look. I’ve got silver here. I kna’ that the hawk will not fly to an empty hand.’ So the miller sent his daughter into town to buy bread and beer. He roasted them a goose, too. And he made sure that the horse was tethered so that it would not escape again. Then he made up a bed for them in his own chamber, complete with clean sheets and blankets. It was only ten feet away from his own bed, but where else could John and Alan lie? There was no other room available. But this is the interesting point - the bed of his daughter was also in the same chamber. So the miller and his guests ate and drank and talked and drank, until about midnight. Then they went up to their beds. The miller himself was by this time very drunk; his bald head was as red as a beetroot. And then at the next moment he had gone pale, as if he were about to vomit.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “You can fix it, can’t you?” I asked. “Of course,” he said. “If I had the proper tools.” We’d have to temporarily postpone our expedition to the Grand Canyon, he told us. Our first priority now was to head back to Phoenix so he could get his hands on the right tools. “How?” Lori asked. Hitchhiking was one option, Dad said. But it might be hard finding a car with enough room to accommodate four kids and two adults. Since we were all so athletic, and since none of us were whiners, walking home would be no problem. “It’s almost eighty miles,” Lori said. “That’s right,” Dad said. If we covered three miles an hour for eight hours a day, we could make it in three days. We had to leave everything behind except Maureen’s lavender blanket and the canteens. That included Mom’s fruitwood archery set. Since Mom was attached to that archery set, which her father had given her, Dad had Brian and me hide it in an irrigation ditch. We could come back and retrieve it later. Dad carried Maureen. To keep our spirits up, he called out hup, two, three, four, but Mom and Lori refused to march along in step. Eventually, Dad gave up, and it was quiet except for the sound of our feet crunching on the sand and rocks and the wind whipping off the desert. After walking for what seemed like a couple of hours, we reached a motel billboard that we had passed only a minute or so before the car broke down. The occasional car whizzed by, and Dad stuck out his thumb, but none of them stopped. Around midday, a big blue Buick with gleaming chrome bumpers slowed down and pulled onto the shoulder in front of us. A lady with a beauty-parlor hairdo rolled down the window. “You poor people!” she exclaimed. “Are you okay?” She asked us where we were going, and when we told her Phoenix, she offered us a ride. The air-conditioning in the Buick was so cold that goose bumps popped up on my arms and legs. The lady had Lori and me pass around Coca-Colas and sandwiches from a cooler in the foot well. Dad said he wasn’t hungry. The lady kept talking about how her daughter had been driving down the highway and had seen us and, when she got to the lady’s house, had told her about this poor family walking along the side of the road. “And I said to her, I said to my daughter, ‘Why, I can’t leave those poor people out there.’ I told my daughter, ‘Those poor kids must be dying of thirst, poor things.’” “We’re not poor,” I said. She had used that word one too many times. “Of course you’re not,” the lady quickly replied. “I didn’t mean it that way.” But I could tell that she had. The lady grew quiet, and for the rest of the trip, no one said much.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Oh my dear!” she exclaims now, fluffing out her “rair,” “here I am talking all about my Sex life, and we have not been Properly Introduced!... Im Miss Destiny, dear—and let me hasten to tell you before you hear it wrong from othuh sources that I am famous even in Los gay Angeles—why, I went to this straight party in High Drag (and I mean High , honey—gown, stockings, ostrich plumes in my flaming rair), and—” “An you know who she was dancing with?” Chuck interrupted. “The Vice, my dear,” Miss Destiny said flatly, glowering at Chuck. “An she was busted, man—for ah mas—mask—...” “Masquerading, dear.... But how was I to know the repressed queer was the vice squad—tell me?...” And she goes on breathlessly conjuring up the Extravagant Scene.... (Oh shes dancing like Cinderella at the magic ball in this Other World shes longingly invading, and her prince-charming turns out to be: the vice squad. And oh Miss Destiny gathers her skirts and tries to run like in the fairytale, but the vice grabs her roughly and off she goes in a very real coach to the glasshouse, the feathers trembling now nervously. Miss Destiny insists she is a real woman leave her alone. (But oh, oh! how can she hide That Thing between his legs which should belong there only when it is somebody else’s?)... All lonesome tears and Humiliation, Miss Destiny ends up in the sex tank: a wayward Cinderella ....) “Now, honey,” she says with real indignation, “I can see them bustin me for Impersonating a man—but a woman!— really! ...” And you will notice that Miss Destiny like all the other swinging queens in the world considers herself every bit a Lady. “But nevuh mind,” she went on, “I learned things in the countyfawm I didnt know before—like how to make eyeshadow out of spit and bluejeans—and oh my dear the kites I flew!—I mean to say, no one can say I didnt send my share of invitations out!... Of course, I do have to go regularly to the county psychiatrist (thats a mind doctor, dears)—to be (would you believe it? this is what they actually told me:) ‘cured’! Well! One more session with him, and I’ll have him on the couch!—but now—” turning her attention to me full-blast, because, you will understand, Miss Destiny scouts at night among the drifting youngmen, and at the same time you can tell shes out to bug Chuck: and when she asked me would I go to the flix with her now (“across the street, where it is Divine but you mustnt be seen there too often,” she explains, “because they will think youre free trade—...”), Chuck said: “It would not do you no good, Destinée, they will not let you in the men’s head.” “Miss Destiny, Mister Chuck,” she corrects him airily.