Pride

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.

Page 112 of 174 · 20 per page

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

  “To be a sexual being, a wildly sexual being, is good,” Bense said in a later interview. “This is a divine, ecstatic experience that we are all having here. Not sleazy. These are aspects of ourselves that we are proud of, that we treasure and are sharing with these other people.” Roving sex clubs for men, women, and mixed groups continue in San Francisco today. These clubs aren’t a new society, just new events representing people’s continued willingness to figure out how to be sexual with each other in a way that works. Compared to a man who picks up a new woman at a bar every weekend or a supposedly monogamous partnership riddled with deception, they seem both honest and safe. Bense hosted such parties at his own building until it was shut down after frequent clashes with the city and the police. He opened the parties with blessings and prayers. “I found that when you give people a temple to play in, they deal with each other as if we are all gods.” Bense is not being fatuous; his reach is simply a long one. The same words we use for good and loving sex, words like passion, ecstasy, oneness, are the words of religion. Carol Queen had her first group sex experience at the Jack and Jill Off and now helps organize sex club experiences for women as well as mixed groups. Besides the immediate benefits of good, safe sex with a number of people, there is the broader one of coping in a time of plague. “We are a community coming to terms with a troubling reality in a way that can wind up getting people off.” When people complain about how “exploitive” or “degrading” something like a sex club is (having never been to one), they fail to acknowledge how terrible and exploitive marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family can be for millions of people; how painful and harmful are traditional gender roles for many people; how downright dangerous heterosexual, patriarchal culture is for all women. If radical sexuality works, if sex clubs, underground magazines, anarchic sex shows, and safe-sex education do what they aim to do, then a falling away will happen. Yes, as is feared, a crumbling of boundaries: between male and female, feminine and masculine, top and bottom, gay and straight. The center will not hold. Whether or not the culture that results will be more or less exploitive than the one in which we live is an unknown. All bets are off; anything could happen.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Some might point to the “ton of dirty pictures” as the key to the pornographic formula for success. This only takes you so far, though. There was a great irony about selling porn online: a sprawling riot of every imaginable form of pornography was already available for free, as long as you had the technological know-how to find it. “If you pay for porn, you’ve failed the Internet,” Annalee Newitz said to me. The reality is that nobody—then or now—in the technological know would actually pay for pornographic content. Why would they when they could get it all for free? This is one of the great counterintuitive surprises about the relationship between the Internet and porn: the success and influence of the porn industry was due to more than the material. It was about customer service. It was about making the Internet easier. People who wanted erotic content were more willing to pay for it than they were to learn how to spelunk the depths of Usenet. What people were really paying for was not the product but ease of access. The great accomplishment of the adult industry at this time was to prove that the Internet could deliver that kind of convenience to a paying market. Consider two examples of early commercial success on the Net: Danni and Jenni. Seattle born Danni Ashe—her stage name—became a stripper at age seventeen. She first worked in her native Seattle, but cannily exploited a sideline in magazine modelling and soft-core video to build her profile. She toured nationally, and eventually became a headline draw at strip clubs around the country. A self-described “geek with big breasts,” she could not have been more predisposed to making money on the Internet had she been genetically engineered. In 1994, she was already familiar with the nether regions of the information superhighway. “I ventured onto the Internet and quickly got into the Usenet newsgroups, where I was hearing that my pictures were being posted, and started talking to people,” she told PBS’s Frontline. “I spent several really intense months in the newsgroups, and it was out of those conversations that the idea for Danni’s Hard Drive was born.” Aside from building a brand on the most obvious double entendre in the computing universe, Danni Ashe’s business enterprise became one of the busiest sites on the Internet. When the site launched in 1995, punters paid $19.95 per month for access to soft-core pictures and personal information about Ashe. In its first week, her site had a million hits. For the first two years of its existence, it was the busiest site on the web. In 1997, Ashe had seventeen thousand paying subscribers; that climbed to twenty-five thousand by 1999. In 2001 she was employing forty-five people and turning an $8-million profit annually. She became a dot-com millionaire, not as a result of irrational hype but by selling content.

• From Little Women (1868)

  It was good to see Laurie square his shoulders, and smile with masculine scorn at that insinuation, as he replied, with his "high and mighty" air, "Amy is too well-bred for that, and I am not the sort of man to submit to it. My wife and I respect ourselves and one another too much ever to tyrannize or quarrel." Jo liked that, and thought the new dignity very becoming, but the boy seemed changing very fast into the man, and regret mingled with her pleasure. "I am sure of that. Amy and you never did quarrel as we used to. She is the sun and I the wind, in the fable, and the sun managed the man best, you remember." "She can blow him up as well as shine on him," laughed Laurie. "Such a lecture as I got at Nice! I give you my word it was a deal worse than any of your scoldings, a regular rouser. I'll tell you all about it sometime, she never will, because after telling me that she despised and was ashamed of me, she lost her heart to the despicable party and married the good-for-nothing." "What baseness! Well, if she abuses you, come to me, and I'll defend you." "I look as if I needed it, don't I?" said Laurie, getting up and striking an attitude which suddenly changed from the imposing to the rapturous, as Amy's voice was heard calling, "Where is she? Where's my dear old Jo?" In trooped the whole family, and everyone was hugged and kissed all over again, and after several vain attempts, the three wanderers were set down to be looked at and exulted over. Mr. Laurence, hale and hearty as ever, was quite as much improved as the others by his foreign tour, for the crustiness seemed to be nearly gone, and the old-fashioned courtliness had received a polish which made it kindlier than ever. It was good to see him beam at 'my children', as he called the young pair. It was better still to see Amy pay him the daughterly duty and affection which completely won his old heart, and best of all, to watch Laurie revolve about the two, as if never tired of enjoying the pretty picture they made. The minute she put her eyes upon Amy, Meg became conscious that her own dress hadn't a Parisian air, that young Mrs. Moffat would be entirely eclipsed by young Mrs. Laurence, and that 'her ladyship' was altogether a most elegant and graceful woman. Jo thought, as she watched the pair, "How well they look together! I was right, and Laurie has found the beautiful, accomplished girl who will become his home better than clumsy old Jo, and be a pride, not a torment to him." Mrs.

• From Little Women (1868)

  "Oh, tell us what they are!" cried Meg, who sat beside him. "Here is one." And taking up the hand which lay on the arm of his chair, he pointed to the roughened forefinger, a burn on the back, and two or three little hard spots on the palm. "I remember a time when this hand was white and smooth, and your first care was to keep it so. It was very pretty then, but to me it is much prettier now, for in this seeming blemishes I read a little history. A burnt offering has been made to vanity, this hardened palm has earned something better than blisters, and I'm sure the sewing done by these pricked fingers will last a long time, so much good will went into the stitches. Meg, my dear, I value the womanly skill which keeps home happy more than white hands or fashionable accomplishments. I'm proud to shake this good, industrious little hand, and hope I shall not soon be asked to give it away." If Meg had wanted a reward for hours of patient labor, she received it in the hearty pressure of her father's hand and the approving smile he gave her. "What about Jo? Please say something nice, for she has tried so hard and been so very, very good to me," said Beth in her father's ear. He laughed and looked across at the tall girl who sat opposite, with an unusually mild expression in her face. "In spite of the curly crop, I don't see the 'son Jo' whom I left a year ago," said Mr. March. "I see a young lady who pins her collar straight, laces her boots neatly, and neither whistles, talks slang, nor lies on the rug as she used to do. Her face is rather thin and pale just now, with watching and anxiety, but I like to look at it, for it has grown gentler, and her voice is lower. She doesn't bounce, but moves quietly, and takes care of a certain little person in a motherly way which delights me. I rather miss my wild girl, but if I get a strong, helpful, tenderhearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied. I don't know whether the shearing sobered our black sheep, but I do know that in all Washington I couldn't find anything beautiful enough to be bought with the five- and-twenty dollars my good girl sent me." Jo's keen eyes were rather dim for a minute, and her thin face grew rosy in the firelight as she received her father's praise, feeling that she did deserve a portion of it. "Now, Beth," said Amy, longing for her turn, but ready to wait.

• From Wild (2012)

  I took a drag and blew the smoke from my mouth, remembering how I’d felt more alone than anyone in the whole wide world that morning after Jimmy Carter drove away. Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay.O 12 THIS FARI woke at first light, moving with precision as I broke camp. I could pack up in five minutes now. Every item that had been in that unfathomable heap on the bed in the motel in Mojave that hadn’t already been ditched or burned had its place in or on my pack and I knew exactly where that place was. My hands moved to it on instinct, seeming almost to bypass my brain. Monster was my world, my inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I’d come to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn’t feel myself in contradiction to it the way I had a month before. It wasn’t me against it. We two were one. Bearing Monster’s weight had changed me on the outside too. My legs had become as hard as boulders, their muscles seemingly capable of anything, rippling beneath my thinning flesh in ways they never had. The patches on my hips and shoulders and tailbone that had repeatedly bled and scabbed over in the places where Monster’s straps rubbed my body had finally surrendered, becoming rough and pocked, my flesh morphing into what I can only describe as a cross between tree bark and a dead chicken after it’s been dipped in boiling water and plucked. My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked. My two big toes had never recovered from the beating they took on the merciless descent from Three Lakes to Belden Town. Their nails looked near dead. My pinky toes had been rubbed so raw I wondered if they’d eventually just wear clean away from my feet. What seemed like permanent blisters covered the backs of my heels all the way up to my ankles. But I refused to think of my feet that morning in Old Station. So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless. I covered my wounds with duct tape and 2nd Skin, then I put on my socks and boots and hobbled over to the campground’s spigot to fill up my two bottles with sixty-four ounces of water, which had to last me for fifteen searing miles across Hat Creek Rim.

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

  This was, to put it mildly, an eccentric career option. I was almost the first student of my convent high school to become a nun. Birmingham, my hometown, was a materialistic place, where money was king. Most of my immediate family and friends were nonplussed—even slightly irritated—and I, of course, reveled in the sense of striking out and being just that little bit different. But I may have been more in tune with my times than I realized, since many of my generation, born in the last years or in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, had the same inchoate yearning for transformation. Postwar Britain was not an easy place to grow up. We may have defeated Hitler, but the war had ruined us. Britain was now a second-rate power, and food, clothing, and petrol were strictly rationed well into the 1950s. Because thousands of homes had been destroyed during the blitz, there was a grave housing crisis. Our cities were scarred with desolate bomb sites and filled with towering heaps of rubble. The center of Birmingham was not completely rebuilt until after I left for the convent. After the war, we were in debt to the United States for 3 billion pounds, our empire was dismantled, and though we were fed on a surfeit of films celebrating Britain’s endurance and victory, nobody seemed prepared to look facts in the face and decide what our future role in the world should be. Young Britons, like myself, who came to maturity in this twilight confusion of austerity, repression, nostalgia, frustration, and denial wanted not only a different world but to be changed ourselves. In 1948, 60 percent of British people under thirty wanted to emigrate. We wanted to be somewhere else. Hence (as the music historian Jon Savage explains) the quasi-religious fervor inspired by the rock ’n’ roll records that fell like manna from heaven between 1954 and 1959 on a country that had no tradition of Afro-American music. It seemed to promise a new world. The unabashed rebellion and sexual explosiveness of these records was “so transforming that nobody who heard them could find a language to explain them except in the phrases of the songs themselves, which talked in tongues: ‘A Wop Bop A Loo Bop,’ ‘Be Bop A Lula.’ ” People used to say of a record, “It sent me!” as though they had been magically transported, without any effort of their own, to another place. In the world conjured up by rock ’n’ roll, nobody had to do national service or listen to endless stories about the war. People could reject the self-sacrifice preached by their parents, live intensely, run wild, have sex, consume freely, and “do as much as they could as soon as they could.”1

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  And what did it profit me, that scarce twenty years old, a book of Aristotle, which they call the often Predicaments, falling into my hands (on whose very name I hung, as on something great and divine, so often as my rhetoric master of Carthage, and others, accounted learned, mouthed it with cheeks bursting with pride), I read and understood it unaided? And on my conferring with others, who said that they scarcely understood it with very able tutors, not only orally explaining it, but drawing many things in sand, they could tell me no more of it than I had learned, reading it by myself. And the book appeared to me to speak very clearly of substances, such as “man,” and of their qualities, as the figure of a man, of what sort it is; and stature, how many feet high; and his relationship, whose brother he is; or where placed; or when born; or whether he stands or sits; or be shod or armed; or does, or suffers anything; and all the innumerable things which might be ranged under these nine Predicaments, of which I have given some specimens, or under that chief Predicament of Substance. What did all this further me, seeing it even hindered me? when, imagining whatever was, was comprehended under those often Predicaments, I essayed in such wise to understand, O my God, Thy wonderful and unchangeable Unity also, as if Thou also hadst been subjected to Thine own greatness or beauty; so that (as in bodies) they should exist in Thee, as their subject: whereas Thou Thyself art Thy greatness and beauty; but a body is not great or fair in that it is a body, seeing that, though it were less great or fair, it should notwithstanding be a body. But it was falsehood which of Thee I conceived, not truth, fictions of my misery, not the realities of Thy blessedness. For Thou hadst commanded, and it was done in me, that the earth should bring forth briars and thorns to me, and that in the sweat of my brows I should eat my bread.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Epictetus led from principle and necessity a life of poverty and extreme simplicity, after the model of Diogenes, the arch-Cynic. His only companions were an adopted child with a nurse. His furniture consisted of a bed, a cooking vessel and earthen lamp. Lucian ridicules one of his admirers, who bought the lamp for three thousand drachmas, in the hope of becoming a philosopher by using it. Epictetus discouraged marriage and the procreation of children. Marriage might do well in a "community of wise men," but "in the present state of things," which he compared to "an army in battle array," it is likely to withdraw the philosopher from the service of God.572 This view, as well as the reason assigned, resembles the advice of St. Paul, with the great difference, that the apostle had the highest conception of the institution of marriage as reflecting the mystery of Christ’s union with the church. "Look at me," says Epictetus, "who am without a city, without a house, without possessions, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have no wife, no children, no praetorium, but only the earth and the heavens, and one poor cloak. And what do I want? Am I not without sorrow? Am I not without fear? Am I not free? ... Did I ever blame God or man? ... Who, when he sees me, does not think that he sees his king and master?" His epitaph fitly describes his character: "I was Epictetus, a slave, and maimed in body, and a beggar for poverty, and dear to the immortals." Epictetus, like Socrates, his great exemplar, wrote nothing himself, but he found a Xenophon. His pupil and friend, Flavius Arrianus, of Nicomedia, in Bithynia, the distinguished historian of Alexander the Great, and a soldier and statesman under Hadrian, handed to posterity a report of the oral instructions and familiar conversations (diatribaiv) of his teacher. Only four of the original eight books remain. He also collected his chief maxims in a manual (Enchiridion). His biography of that remarkable man is lost.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  changing humors of the court. Hence even contending parties in the East were accustomed to seek counsel and protection from the Roman chair, and oftentimes gave that see the coveted opportunity to put the weight of its decision into the scale. This occasional practice then formed a welcome basis for a theory of jurisdiction. The Roma locuta est assumed the character of a supreme and final judgment. Rome learned much and forgot nothing. She knew how to turn every circumstances with consummate administrative tact, to her own advantage. Finally, though the Greek church, down to the fourth ecumenical council, was unquestionably the main theatre of church history and the chief seat of theological learning, yet, according to the universal law of history, "Westward the star of empire takes its way," the Latin church, and consequently the Roman patriarchate, already had the future to itself. While the Eastern patriarchates were facilitating by internal quarrels and disorder the conquests of the false prophet, Rome was boldly and victoriously striking westward, and winning the barbarian tribes of Europe to the religion of the cross. § 58. The Latin Patriarch. These advantages of the patriarch of Rome over the patriarch of Constantinople are at the same time the leading causes of the rise of the papacy, which we must now more closely pursue. The papacy is undeniably the result of a long process of history. Centuries were employed in building it, and centuries have already been engaged upon its partial destruction. Lust of honor and of power, and even open fraud,525 have contributed to its development; for human nature lies hidden under episcopal robes, with its steadfast inclination to abuse the power intrusted to it; and the greater the power, the stronger is the temptation, and the worse the abuse. But behind and above these human impulses lay the needs of the church and the plans of Providence, and these are the proper basis for explaining the rise, as well as the subsequent decay, of the papal dominion over the countries and nations of Europe. That Providence which moves the helm of the history of world and church according to an eternal plan, not only prepares in silence and in a secrecy unknown even to themselves the suitable persons for a given work, but also lays in the depths of the past the foundations of mighty institutions, that they may appear thoroughly furnished as soon as the time may demand them. Thus the origin and gradual growth of the Latin patriarchate at Rome looked forward to the middle age, and formed part of the necessary, external outfit of the church for her disciplinary mission among the heathen barbarians.

• From Little Women (1868)

  Remembering the painted boots, she surveyed her white satin slippers with girlish satisfaction, and chasseed down the room, admiring her aristocratic feet all by herself. "My new fan just matches my flowers, my gloves fit to a charm, and the real lace on Aunt's mouchoir gives an air to my whole dress. If I only had a classical nose and mouth I should be perfectly happy," she said, surveying herself with a critical eye and a candle in each hand. In spite of this affliction, she looked unusually gay and graceful as she glided away. She seldom ran—it did not suit her style, she thought, for being tall, the stately and Junoesque was more appropriate than the sportive or piquante. She walked up and down the long saloon while waiting for Laurie, and once arranged herself under the chandelier, which had a good effect upon her hair, then she thought better of it, and went away to the other end of the room, as if ashamed of the girlish desire to have the first view a propitious one. It so happened that she could not have done a better thing, for Laurie came in so quietly she did not hear him, and as she stood at the distant window, with her head half turned and one hand gathering up her dress, the slender, white figure against the red curtains was as effective as a well-placed statue. "Good evening, Diana!" said Laurie, with the look of satisfaction she liked to see in his eyes when they rested on her. "Good evening, Apollo!" she answered, smiling back at him, for he too looked unusually debonair, and the thought of entering the ballroom on the arm of such a personable man caused Amy to pity the four plain Misses Davis from the bottom of her heart. "Here are your flowers. I arranged them myself, remembering that you didn't like what Hannah calls a 'sot-bookay'," said Laurie, handing her a delicate nosegay, in a holder that she had long coveted as she daily passed it in Cardiglia's window. "How kind you are!" she exclaimed gratefully. "If I'd known you were coming I'd have had something ready for you today, though not as pretty as this, I'm afraid." "Thank you. It isn't what it should be, but you have improved it," he added, as she snapped the silver bracelet on her wrist. "Please don't." "I thought you liked that sort of thing." "Not from you, it doesn't sound natural, and I like your old bluntness better." "I'm glad of it," he answered, with a look of relief, then buttoned her gloves for her, and asked if his tie was straight, just as he used to do when they went to parties together at home. The company assembled in the long salle a manger, that evening, was such as one sees nowhere but on the Continent.

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

  Gay men more than any group have taken the taboo of anonymous sex and made it normal, knowing all the while that it remains taboo outside gay male realms. Men who pursue anonymous sex sometimes speak of it as a political act, literally an act of revolution—illegal, anarchic, almost supernaturally distressing to those outside the culture. “Bathhouses are my home away from home,” writes a young man, neatly connecting his comfort there with the distress of those around him. Bathhouses, interstate rest stop bathrooms, public beaches, parks, department store toilet stalls, all form a network of places where succinct sex with strangers is available. Those who frequent them know an etiquette, a lingo, a way of behaving there, and most of all have a sense of the familiar. This is not strange or exotic sex if it’s the kind of sex you do. The exotic is only what other people do. A friend—a therapist—is facing felony charges and a prison term for having sex with a man in the bushes of a park. He broke a rule, big time. The fact that many thousands of men break the same rule every day—including cops, lawyers, and judges—isn’t going to help him. What will my friend learn from a prison term for consensual adult sex? Will he be rehabilitated out of his desires? Will he see the error of his wrong, wrong ways? Politics is personal experience whether we like it or not, a monolith built one increment, one individual, at a time. My friend’s experience is more likely to build a politics of change in him than anything like remorse. Repression always makes revolution more likely, always. If sex is woven throughout our personal experiences, as I believe it is, if sex is part of all we know of love, loss, identity, meaning, hope, and desire, then it’s woven throughout all we can say of politics, communities, and power. Perhaps “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” perhaps not, but a lot of people are going to go down that road either way. In November 1987, Buzz Bense reached out from the San Francisco gay male sex scene with its long history of group sex, and organized the Jack and Jill Off, a group safe-sex experience open to men and women of any sexual preference. The Jack and Jill Off was propelled by a lot of unpredictable changes in the zeitgeist, one of which was the ongoing epidemic of AIDS, forcing people to find new ways to be erotic, to help each other, to be sexually inventive. Another was the gradual loosening of the reins of sexual preference walls, making the presence of men and women in each other’s formally segregated spaces more possible. The rise in female sexual spaces was part of it, too; women had started their own bars, had their own strip shows, their own private clubs. The combined party was meant to be something more like a Bacchanalia than a makeout party.

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

  When I ask Alex to tell me what she likes and doesn’t like about the sex itself, she quickly makes a list: “I love doing couples together. S/M, totally. I will not let a client fuck me in the butt. I do that with friends, and it’s one of the few things I save for friends only. Number one, it’s too dangerous, and number two, it’s just too intimate. And one of my favorite things sexually is being fisted, getting fist-fucked, and a couple of clients ask to do that. I have one regular client who I do it to, rectally, and that’s fine, I love it. He has the whole setup in his house, a sling. But I wouldn’t let a client do that for me, it’s too personal and too close to who I really am. I’ve had clients who want to watch me masturbate, but when they want me to come, too, it’s really tedious, because I generally don’t. I guess I could fake it if I had to. I would love to do women alone, but so far there’ve been only a few who called, and they chickened out. Most of the women who do call are in a couple. I tried advertising in a gay paper, but mostly what I got was gay men curious about trying something with a woman. “When I first started doing this, I was seeing a woman. I’d been involved with her for two and a half years, we were living together, and she was really upset. It was hard for her to understand that this was about business for me and not pleasure, and it wasn’t like fucking other people. We split up for other reasons in the end. There’s a guy I’m seeing now, and I told him right at the outset and he has a really hard time with it. If I’m going to be involved with someone, they’ve got to know. I’m not in the closet about anything. “I think it’s totally ridiculous that it’s illegal. Totally ridiculous that it be regulated at all. Adults have bodies and some of us have money, and if we want to negotiate to use what we’ve got—I just don’t understand why anything between consenting adults should be illegal. What business is it of the government? It’s somebody pushing their morals on me, based on their belief system, which is totally different from mine. Totally ridiculous. “I really believe there are some people who truly, truly love the work, a hundred percent of the time, and there’s nothing they’d rather do. And then there’s some people like me—sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t. I can tolerate it because the money’s good, and I’m not going to make that kind of money anywhere else. And then I think there’s people who just could not handle it at all.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Author: And one of the things I have been told is that companies like Google and Disney will hire from within the adult industry because they think they are ahead of the curve. Hod: Yeah. They think we have little more information on the technology. Hod: The funny part is that our designer definitely did not leverage that this was an adult game when he went on to Call of Duty. We changed some things on our website and on our MySpace page while he was applying for the job because he was concerned that the adult aspect was not going to help him get the job. Author: And this is apparently a big debate: What do you put on your CV when you’re looking for a job outside of the industry? Hod: I would not play up the fact that it was adult. I definitely don’t think that the fact that I made an adult game would wow them. I think that would scare them more than anything else. I would use the information that would wow them, which is that I was the project manager and things like that. In the video game industry there is a big taboo about the adult industry. Author: Someone said you’ve had one negative review so far. But you have to imagine there’s going to be a backlash against this kind of game. Hod: We planned for it. The game was made expecting that backlash to happen. Author: So you’ll benefit from the controversy in some ways— you’ll get publicity that way. Hod: The thing is I could stand behind everything in our game. Everything in our game I could solely stand behind. We’re waiting for the backlash to come. Author: And, I guess, you’ll know you’ve made it big when that happens. Hod: Exactly. Author: So, all the fights, is it men against men? Is it ever men and women fighting?

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Porn sparked one other video revolution, but this one had to do with media production rather than consumption. Traditional filmmaking was—and is—an expensive and highly specialized field. Along with the video players, though, came video cameras, which recorded to tape cassette rather than film. Suddenly, you needed neither Steven Spielberg’s talent nor his money to make your own movies. Sony introduced a home-market camcorder in 1983, and by 1990 it was selling three million of them every year. Not only were camcorders relatively cheap and portable but they also came with automated features that simplified some of the trickier aspects of a shoot. The two most important of these improvements were an autofocus and the ability to adjust for low-light situations—both useful to those who wanted to shoot sex scenes. Porn makers were very adaptable to new and cheaper ways of creating product. Professional pornographers started churning out exponentially more movies for far less money than had been possible with any previous technology. And they were joined by a new force in porn: the amateur. The camcorder meant that couples could record themselves in the privacy of their own bedroom, and never have to worry about the prying eyes at a film processing studio. Conversely, if someone, as many did, wanted other people to see the video, distribution was also easily accomplished with this new technology. One need only look at the number of adult films created in the United States to see how ever-decreasing technological impediments drew in new producers, directors and performers. About a hundred porn features were made in 1976. In 1996, about eight thousand new titles were released. (For 2008, estimates vary, but gravitate toward thirteen thousand. This figure, though, is complicated by the massive repackaging business in which scenes from different movies are mixed and matched, or re-edited for a different hardness of core and released as a new title.) One way and another, the VCR was a technology quite literally made for pornography. All those amateur porn tapes helped foster a shift in the public consciousness as well—it dawned on people that anybody could make a movie. The great democratization that began with amateur pornographic videotapes would reach its zenith (and some would argue its nadir) with websites like YouTube, where neither technology nor talent poses any barrier to moviemaking. So, while porn didn’t determine the winner of the Format War, it did create the initial market without which there might have been nothing to fight over. Porn was responsible for the early adoption of the VCR itself, regardless of whether consumers went with VHS or Beta. This was a power shift. Pornography had always been influential, but with the VCR it came into its own as an economic and technological powerhouse. People who worked in the adult industry at the time were just starting to get a sense of the influence they now wielded.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Despite stellar ratings, erotica repelled rather than attracted national sponsors. That was fine, though; Znaimer was not interested in becoming a porn mogul. He just needed these early UHF adopters to overcome the technological barrier and get used to tuning in on Friday nights. Baby Blue viewers therefore formed the initial market for everything else Citytv had to offer. When significant numbers of people then started watching Citytv during some of the other 166 hours of the week, advertising revenue started to roll in. Pornography was the draw that allowed Znaimer to make money from other sources, and empowered Citytv to change how broadcasters around the world viewed programming, especially for urban audiences. Znaimer broke down the divide between the station and the community it served—the faces on screen were younger, more diverse, and more connected to the lifeblood of the city than anything that had been seen on TV before. He put female journalists into non-traditional roles. News was reported by lone videographers rather than camera crews. This was a major money saver, but it also made the news feel more fresh and raw. He started something called “Speakers’ Corner,” a coin-operated television booth where ordinary citizens could speak their mind for a minute or two. This was a democratization of broadcast television, allowing the videotaped rants, love letters and deep thoughts of any Torontonian to find their way on air. The Citytv model has been imitated and emulated in many parts of the world, with the station’s own brand licensed in Colombia and Spain. Znaimer became a millionaire. He never earned much from erotica, but without it, he never could have made his mainstream fortune. When I asked Znaimer why he thought pornography had this special power to push people toward new media, he looked at me as though I must be a little bit simple. “The ‘why’ is it’s built into our creation, it’s God’s Great Gift, it’s the world’s most interesting subject, it’s fucking,” he said. “Fucking is fun and fucking is forbidden in many cultures, lots of religions seek to control it, and so the social strictures can sometimes be extremely grievous for long periods of time. So, at every stage, as soon as people can make symbols, create pictures, they make pictures of fucking. So, it’s the abiding, fabulous thing. Think of where human life would be if we didn’t eat and we didn’t fuck. The answer is, there is so much cultural confinement of this natural impulse, it has to find expression in art or in some kind of media reproduction. And then, since the history of media is about getting closer and closer to the real thing, the interest in sex and the utility of sex in leading that charge will never be exhausted.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  As so often happens, success finally came through the convergence of several independent paths of research. There was a long rope swing in our back yard. I had been climbing this swing a little higher every day, on the hunch that something unusual might happen when I was able to make it all the way to the knot at the top, which was perhaps thirty feet off the ground. The rope was smooth where we normally held it to swing (sitting on a rolled-up remnant of industrial carpeting tied in place and launching ourselves from a wooden refrigerator crate), but the higher I climbed, the rougher its hempen texture became. Every day I got a little stronger, in my stomach muscles as well as my arms, and I also got better at relieving some of the burden on my arms by winding the rope around one leg and clamping it between the top of one sneaker and the sole of the other. My hands burned more each time. I opened and closed my fists when I was safely back on the ground to make the pain inside them go away. After a week and a half, I finally reached the knot at the top and slapped the finely cracked bark on the load-bearing bough, amazed and even somewhat terrified that I had been able to work my way up so high. I expected, after that conquering slap, to return to earth with new powers, but in fact I had no new powers: I only had fourteen or fifteen excellent oval calluses on my fingers, of which I was very proud. In private I pushed at these calluses while I was thinking. One weekend during this period my father took me to the hardware store. A man we called the Needle Man was in the parking lot. The Needle Man was deaf and dumb; he went around the city selling packets of sewing needles for a living. He was a short, toothless person of about sixty who always wore a baseball cap; there was something wrong with one of his knees, which bent sideways when he put his weight on it. He approached us and went into his silent sales pitch: he flashed the packet of needles, shrugged, looked away, flashed the packet of needles again, licked his thumb and tested the wind direction, smiled, gummed, shrugged, looked away, looked at us. My father gave him a dollar for the needles. The Needle Man nodded and left us. He never showed gratitude. I connected him with Rumpelstiltskin and with Gollum in The Hobbit. We already had five or six packets of needles that we had bought from him, so my father handed this one to me. “Maybe you can think of something to do with them,” he said.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The most elaborate piece of fermational equipment I ever developed was a custom-made piece of machinery I called a Solonoid (with three 0’s). I had it built for me by an MIT undergraduate four or five years ago. I still have it, though it stopped working after a week of Fold-hours. It is very bulky and it made a loud chuffing noise when it was idling, although I’m sure it could be miniaturized and redesigned for quietness. All it did was stretch and unstretch three rubber bands oriented in the x, y, and z directions. I was able to tune the oscillatory frequency of each rubber band by pushing a rheostat on a small mixing board. I had it built simply because I knew one morning, just after I awoke, after many dry Fold-free months, that this design would work. My uncle loaned me fifteen hundred dollars (I told him that it was to take several months off from temping and see if I could get interested in my master’s thesis again), and I put an ad in the MIT student newspaper and interviewed a number of students. I chose the sole woman respondent, naturally. She used three small motors. I told her that I was a post-doc in philosophy working on a monograph about a turn-of-the-century American metaphysician named Matthias Batchelder, who had postulated that three India-rubber bands, when alternately stretched and slackened at a particular frequency in the three Cartesian planes, would insert null placeholders into the stream of Becoming, effectively pausing the universe for all but the operator of the mechanism. Though Batch-elder had written to G. E. Moore, C. S. Pierce, and A. A. Michelson about his ideas, I said (scrambling for plausibility), nobody had exhibited the slightest interest, partly because he lacked institutional affiliation, and partly because he had an off-puttingly contentious personal manner. (I should stress that there was no metaphysician by the name of Batchelder—the rough design for the machine had simply come to me one morning—but for the sake of secrecy I needed to distance myself from it. I “lied like hell” to this young mechanical engineer—I had to, I’m sorry.) She—I’m ashamed to say that I’ve forgotten her name—built the machine in short order, and she did a very nice job of explaining its finer points to me, though I have forgotten them. To keep costs down, she was kind enough to use “takeout” parts ordered through the Jerryco catalog—that is, motors removed from used equipment, copiers and such. “Well, I got it to do what you said you wanted it to do,” she said, in her serious way, as we stood in one of the mechanical-engineering labs (she was getting course credit for this project, it turned out, although she had hidden that fact from me), “but I’ve played with the frequencies and I can’t get it to do anything. The rubber bands look kind of neat when they really get going, though.”

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  Scope: In the circle of Mars, the defining virtue is courage, as that of the sun’s sphere was wisdom. Dante explores his roots: He meets his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, and has an extended discussion about early Florence and his own family. In his discussion with Dante, Cacciaguida, who sees the future as well as the past, presents his pilgrim descendant with the most sustained prediction of his exile from Florence. In this lecture, we see how Dante comes to an understanding of his own vocation as a writer and how he learns that his exile can become an opportunity for prophecy in the very writing of the Commedia. The circle of Mars is the circle for those who lived their lives as warriors, and just as his great-great-grandfather was a crusader and martyr in earlier times, so Dante the pilgrim learns that he is to be a crusader with the pen rather than with the sword and a martyr through his exile. Thus, Dante’s ancestry is linked to his future, and the treatment of intertwined public and private themes continues. Outline I. Dante travels from the circle of the sun to the circle of Mars, which will be the subject of this lecture. A. In Mars, the pilgrim meets his own ancestor, his great-great- grandfather Cacciaguida, who tells Dante about his own ancestry and the early history of Florence; about the present, including the strife that will lead to Dante’s exile; and about the future, giving the poem’s most sustained account of Dante’s exile. B. The poet patterns this meeting after the meeting of Aeneas and his father, Anchises, in the underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid. 1. Cacciaguida quotes directly from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI, lines 684–688, and he does so in Latin, which is highly unusual in the Commedia. 2. At first, Dante does not recognize his ancestor. 3. Similar to the scene in Virgil, in this scene, Cacciaguida gives Dante reasons for his journey and “commissions” him for his return.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  I was using a film camera, a format that is largely forgotten today called Super 16. With Super 16, you can’t record the sound on the film. So, it was too cumbersome to carry a recorder, a camera, a big battery pack and an inverter and also you ran out of money very quickly, because most of them were misses, not hits. I ended up using up a lot of film on a girl who wouldn’t do anything after wasting a ten-minute roll of film. And of course you had to have it developed and printed. So, this became very expensive. When video came along, I checked with the station and it just so happened that a camera like that was available for cash, very quickly and quietly. It was black-and-white, it was reel-to-reel and it was mono-sound, in other words, the lowest technology of video. But it was better than nothing and I quickly found out that it was the opposite of film technology, you spent a lot of money on the video equipment but the tape was very cheap. Whereas with film, the cameras were relatively cheap but you went broke buying film and getting it developed. I never threw out a tape, because I got to tell you this with no conceit: I became so colourful that even the misses were funny. They didn’t just say, “No, I’m not going to do it.” They had all sorts of agonizing, tortured, New York liberal reasons why they couldn’t do it. I am the inventor of modern reality television. I’ll tell you a dirty word: tripod. I never used a tripod, because that wasn’t what I was doing. I would be walking down the street. I would see a celebrity, the celebrity would see me, you know? I had about twelve seconds to get the camera up and running. I never had a chance to set up anything. No tripods, no script, just open the iris to the correct thing, try to look in the viewfinder to make sure you had the right exposure, pull the trigger, and that was the technical end of it. When I would pick up girls, about 50 per cent of the time you’d get a crowd of idiots in the background going, “Don’t do it, girl, he’s a pig, he’s a pervert, stay away from him, girlie, I wouldn’t let him touch me if I were you.” You’d hear this in the background, sometimes they’d jump into the picture and yell and scream because they were nobodies and they wanted to be on TV. So, this was really street theatre, not always a good street theatre either.

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

  Alex is a twenty-five-year-old prostitute. She grew up in the Bronx in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, the eldest daughter of a working-class family. She is a beautiful woman with pale skin, dark hair, a slender, athletic body, and a serene manner. Alex is bisexual. Alex left home at fourteen of her own accord, came to California, began doing telephone sex at nineteen, and became a prostitute at twenty-three. She has a bachelor’s degree in community studies and funded her college tuition largely through sex work. “I’d been thinking about doing this kind of work forever—at least, since I was fourteen years old,” she told me. I interviewed Alex in the near-empty back bedroom of a friend’s apartment in San Francisco. One of the first things she wanted me to know was that she’d given a lot of thought to prostitution before she started. “I was aware of having this sexual power that people wanted, and that I could use it to my advantage to get things I wanted. I was so sick of being poor all my life, and I wasn’t looking forward to a whole life of being poor like my parents and grandparents had been.” Alex works largely out of the contact sheets that are sold cheaply through coin boxes or simply given away free in any urban area. Alex advertises as a “model or escort.” Men call her, and before she’ll meet them she asks them to talk about themselves a little, about their personal lives and work. “I need some form of human connection,” she says, adding that she has “never, ever, not at all” had an abusive or even frightening client. For a time Alex worked for a small “house,” but the madam was busted. She would be scheduled for a three-day stretch, make a lot of money, and then take an extended period of time off work. She liked the schedule, the companionship of other women, and the ease of not having to screen her own clients. “Would you agree to a single relationship?” I asked. “Being ‘kept’?” “Hell, no. I’ve never wanted anyone to own me. I would never be someone’s little wifey. Sure, I’ll be your whore for an hour, and when I leave, I go back to my own life. I’m not stuck with you for the rest of my life! I’d much rather be a whore than a wife.”