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.

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• From Christian Saints

  13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru Martín seems to have been everywhere at once: He distributed food and clothing to the poor, counseled arguing spouses, and raised money. Back at the monastery, he swept floors, changed linens, pulled teeth, tended wounds and fevers in the infirmary, and welcomed those poor souls who came quietly to the back door seeking his care. Martín as a Healer Once word of Martín’s healing skills spread, he was summoned to tend many elite patients in their own households. He proved a shrewd networker, and in later years, he leveraged his relationships with these wealthy and politically connected patrons to gather donations for the infirmary and funds to distribute among the poor. It’s clear that Martín, like many other healers of his day, blended what we would recognize as medical care with prayer and folk remedies that might seem outlandish today. He stitched and bandaged wounds, used wine as a simple anesthetic, and brought his patients comfort in the form of a cup of cool water. He also brewed herbal teas and remedies. He invoked his faith to heal, making the sign of the cross over wounds and assuring patients that God had them in his care. Martín seemed to be able to predict miraculous recoveries, leading people to infer that his healings were divinely assisted. Martín was also famed for his ability to communicate with animals, speaking to them as though they could understand his admonishments. He splinted birds’ broken wings and stitched up wounds for dogs and cats. Martín, who seems to have been quietly subversive throughout his life, was known to be a guerrilla gardener. On his walks outside the city, he sprinkled seeds for healing herbs along the roadside. He wanted the poor people to be able to gather their own simple remedies, to free them from paying steep prices to the apothecaries. 100

• From Banned Books

  7. Allen Ginsberg’s Alarming “Howl” Judge Horn concluded that because “Howl” did have “redeeming social importance” and was unlikely to “deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire,” it was “not obscene .” This was the trial that transformed Allen Ginsberg into a literary superstar and brought the Beat movement into the public eye . After the trial, “Howl” flew off the City Light Bookstore shelves . The poem achieved an iconic status conferred upon only a select group of literary works . However, the trial did not end attempts to censor or ban “Howl,” which had varying success . In 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the obscenity trial, the New York City public radio station WBAI halted a broadcast of the poem because of FCC rules . Ironically, WBAI is the same radio station that took on the FCC in 1973 over the right to air comedian George Carlin’s famous routine featuring “seven dirty words .” The challenge led to a 1978 Supreme Court decision determining whether naughty words can be broadcast and when . Moreover, in the fall of 2019, in response to complaints by some parents and students, the Steamboat Springs, Colorado school district publicly apologized for a teacher who required students to read “Howl .” The “pornography” that particularly offended them was Ginsberg’s graphic descriptions of gay sex . One parent subsequently sued the school district on behalf of his “traumatized” daughter, hiring a lawyer from First Liberty Institute, a religious right organization . Interestingly, the attorney, Jeremy Dys, used the language of #MeToo in condemning “Howl .” Dys is quoted as saying: “In the age of Harvey Weinstein who has used sexual favors to gain control over women, I don’t understand why Steamboat Springs would even come close to permitting that in their school districts here .” However, the Steamboat Springs school district committee ultimately determined that “Howl” “has educational value and merit .” It reached a decision in favor of the poem similar to the one that Judge Horn did in 1957 . READING Gornick, Vivian . “Wild at Heart .” In The Poem That Changed America, edited by Jason Shinder . Farrar Straus, 2006 . Morgan, Bill, and Nancy J . Peters . “Howl” on Trial . City Lights Books, 2006 . 58

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUDBcovfFjM .“I had never heard the word masturbation when I was growing up” : Judy Blume, Letters to Judy, pp. 186–87.“I wrote the truth, what I knew to be the truth” : Judy Blume in conversation with Samantha Bee at an event at the 92nd Street Y on June 2, 2015. Accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7svP4zqCc0 .she casually asks Helen to loan her her “sex book” : Judy Blume, Deenie , p. 176.“I know he was trying to feel me,” she says : Ibid., p. 164.“This time when he kissed me, I concentrated on kissing him back” : Ibid., p. 183.“Maybe that’s why my spine started growing crooked!” : Ibid., p. 105.“It’s very common for girls as well as boys, beginning with adolescence” : Ibid., p. 106.“Family life education was the first time that American educators” : JZ to RB, May 31, 2022.“Those were called the ‘Big Four’ ” : Ibid., May 31, 2022.“Once a young man touched himself in that way” : Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of the Adolescent in the 20th Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 8.“girls who fell prey to self-abuse were clearly aberrant” : Ibid.“For a long time there has been a certain ritual” : Andrew Hacker, “The Pill and Morality,” New York Times , November 21, 1965.“If [the teacher] does that at PS3 down in the Village, she’ll be teacher of the year” : JZ to RB, May 31, 2022.Professor and researcher Michelle Fine was “shocked” : Zoom interview with Michelle Fine, January 6, 2023.“This was about, ‘you’re a victim, bad things will happen’ ” : Ibid., January 6, 2023.“I just think people can’t say no if they can’t say yes” : Ibid., January 6, 2023.“unacknowledged social ambivalence about female sexuality” : Michelle Fine, “Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire,” Harvard Educational Review 58, no. 1 (February 1988): 29–53.“I still go into classrooms where I’ll say the word ‘masturbation’ ” : Zoom interview with Rachel Lotus, November 8, 2023.“I don’t think you’ll talk to any sex educator who doesn’t think that Judy Blume” : Ibid., November 8, 2023.Chapter Ten Virginity“Nice girls didn’t go all the way” : Judy Blume, Letters to Judy , p. 211.She gave Judy book ideas : Lee, Judy Blume’s Story , p. 77. She thought Tony carried the raincoat to cover his face : Box 115 of the Judy Blume Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Accessed April 28, 2022.“In these books, the boys had absolutely no feelings” : Weidt, Presenting Judy Blume , p. 50.“I set out to teach very few things in my books” : Ibid., p. 51.“When I was growing up, we had very firm rules” : Judy Blume, Letters to Judy , pp. 210–11.“years of kissing experience” : Beverly Solochek, “Plotting the Real Teen Scene,” Daily News , September 3, 1976, p. C9.Blume later elaborated in the Independent : William Leith, “Teen Spirit,” The Independent , July 18, 1999, pp. 11–13.

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

  “I like the fact that it’s taboo, frankly. I’ve always liked things that were taboo. I feel sort of rebellious. Sometimes the sex is actually fun and I get off on it. A lot of the time it’s kind of boring. Sometimes there’s an attraction, a kind of chemistry. I like people, making connections with people. I have been so fiercely independent, all my life I’ve just gone my own way, and I love the fact that I can see who I want to see, not see who I don’t want to see, work whenever I like, choose my hours, have total control over how much I charge. “I think people are really hungry for touch, men come to me who are just dying to be touched. Paying any kind of attention to their body is so nice. Sometimes I see it as an extension of a massage, or getting a haircut or a manicure, just having another person take care of you and pamper you. Sometimes I love it and I have a great time and feel like I’ve done something nice for another. I’ve been paid well for it and there’s respect on both sides. Sometimes it’s like the best kind of work I’ve ever done. Sometimes!” She laughs. “I don’t feel like it’s my life’s calling. It’s a means to an end. There’s all kinds of things I want to do, entrepreneurial projects that take a lot of start-up money, and I’m sorry, but I’m not going to come up with that kind of money any other way. To me, feminism is about choices for women, period. I don’t make it a point to hang with women who are against me. I wouldn’t ask for that kind of abuse. I would love to see more options for women, I’d love to find another way to make two hundred dollars an hour, fine. You want to create those options in the world, great. But don’t take away this option.” “What about the conservative feminist idea that sex workers are so oppressed, they don’t even know they’re oppressed, can’t see it?” I ask. “Get a life! I went to school with upper-middle-class self-identified feminist women who would argue with me in class about how prostitution contributed to the oppression of all women and how by participating in sex work I was furthering the oppression of women. Here I was, the only working-class kid in this whole classroom of upper-middle-class kids, and they were all going to tell me how horrible sex work was and how it was against feminism, and blah-blah. And it was, like, ‘Fuck you! Mommy and Daddy are paying for everything. I have nothing. Don’t you dare tell me what I can and can’t do.’ ”

• From American Swing (2008)

  EVERYTHING WAS THE SAME AS IF IT WAS OPEN, EXCEPT THERE WAS NO NUDITY OR NO SEX. IT WAS A BUNCH OF KIDS. THAT'S WHEN WE STARTED UNDERSTANDING WHAT EVERYTHING WAS ABOUT. HE USED TO BE CALLED-- WHAT? KING OF SWING. YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT. HE WAS CALLED KING OF SWING. ♪ AT PLATO'S RETREAT... ♪ LARRY, LET US INTO YOUR HEART A MINUTE. A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE SAYING LARRY LEVENSON, A LOT OF PEOPLE SAY SLEAZE. I HEARD THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH THE OTHER NIGHT. HE TALKED ABOUT TRUTH, SERVICE, SACRIFICE, THE AMERICAN DREAM. AND THEN WE SEE IN THIS COUNTRY A DISINTEGRATION OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY-- THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE REALLY TELLING US. THAT'S WHAT PLATO'S RETREAT - IS ABOUT-- OR MONOGAMY IS DEAD. - OH NO. - Man: NO! - Siegel: I'M SAYING THAT-- Mary: THIS IS A PRESERVATION IN A SENSE, STANLEY. DON'T YOU REALIZE HOW MANY MEN SAY "I'M GOING OUT WITH THE BOYS TONIGHT," - AND THEY CHEAT AND THEY LIE? - THE QUESTION IS WHY AREN'T YOU IN JAIL? WE'RE HERE AT THE NEW YORK AQUARIUM NOW. - ( laughing ) - WATCHING ORCA SHAMU DO HIS THING. LARRY, YOU KNOW, I'VE NEVER REALLY GOTTEN A CHANCE TO TALK TO YOU. WHY DON'T YOU PLAY WITH MY ASS AND TELL ME YOUR PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE? WHOO! - OH MY GOD, HE'S DOING IT. - Bacho: LARRY GOT INVOLVED WITH YOUNGER WOMEN, WANTED TO HANG OUT WITH THESE WOMEN THAT TOOK HIM FOR HIS MONEY-- THE MONEY HE DIDN'T HAVE AND THE DRUGS HE DID HAVE. LARRY WAS BORING BECAUSE HE THOUGHT HIS WHOLE WORLD WAS SEX. HIS WORLD WAS GENITALIA. AGAIN, HE NEVER READ A BOOK. HE NEVER HAD A THOUGHT. IT WAS ALL ABOUT HIM AS A LEGEND. HE REALLY THOUGHT THAT WHEN IT CAME TO SWINGING HE WAS-- EVERYONE LOOKED AT HIM AS "THE KING" LITERALLY. WE GOT PEOPLE FROM FORT LAUDERDALE. WE GOT PEOPLE FROM CALIFORNIA. WE GOT PEOPLE FROM PARIS, FRANCE, COMING TO PLATO'S. THEY FLY IN. WE'RE THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD. OKAY? I THINK IT'S DIFFERENT, BUT I DON'T THINK IT'S IMMORAL. THIS IS THE BIGGEST THING TO HIT NEW YORK CITY SINCE THE WORLD'S FAIR. AND IT IS. Dorfman: THE INTERESTING THING ABOUT LARRY WAS THE GUY WAS GETTING SOCIAL SECURITY CHECKS. HE DIDN'T HAVE ANY MONEY, YET HE WAS ABLE TO BORROW $150,000. WHERE DOES A GUY GET $150,000? Goldstein: HE WAS COLONEL SANDERS AND HE HAD TO DO HIS LITTLE STEP-- STEP-AND-FIX-IT ROUTINE. Donahue: IS IT YOUR VIEW WE'RE GONNA HAVE PLATO'S RETREATS-- IT'S GONNA BE PART OF OSHKOSH, WISCONSIN, TOO SOMEDAY? WITHIN THE NEXT THREE MONTHS THERE WILL BE FOUR MORE PLATO'S RETREATS AROUND THE COUNTRY. LARRY STARTED TO BELIEVE THE BULLSHIT. I BULLSHIT ALL THE TIME WHEN I'M INTERVIEWING. LARRY DID TOO, BUT LARRY EXAGGERATED THE IMPORTANCE. I ALWAYS ARGUED, "IT'S JUST FUCKING." WHAT IS FUCKING? IT'S FRICTION. YOU BELIEVE IN A FREE SOCIETY?

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  “But I’m not promising when that’ll be.” As the girls run in and out of the kitchen to get snacks, Karen and I uncork a bottle of rosé and get to work. She scrolls through photos on my phone, choosing one in which I’m dressed up at a bar mitzvah and looking playful, with a lot of bare skin showing, my face half in and half out of the frame. In the next one she picks, I am dressed in a fitted tank top with my hair pulled back in a messy ponytail and my hand atop a Nutribullet, which I had been demonstrating for Jessica. She likes that I look natural in it. Finally, she clicks on a photo of my profile, my head thrown back in laughter, another bare shoulder shrugging toward the camera, also taken by Jessica. I realize that many of my favorite photos of myself have been taken by Jessica, who always manages to capture me mid-laugh, as if she anticipated it coming and had the camera ready just in time. For the umpteenth time since my marriage went on the fritz, I think to myself: I must have done something right in my life to have dedicated girlfriends like these. Satisfied with the array of photos she’s chosen, she turns to filling out my biographical information. “OK,” she says, typing with fervor. “You’re 48, you live downtown in New York City, you have three children, you graduated from Washington University, you’re a freelancer.” “A freelancer? As in freelance plumber, baker, tutor, doctor, housekeeper, personal shopper, short order cook, life coach, chauffeur, gal Friday, psychologist?” I ask, listing off the roles I fill in my real-life job as stay-home mother, but she’s already typed in “freelancer” and has moved on to the age of the men with whom I hope to match. “Oh, hmmm, I think we should go for broad options, young to old. Some men love a cougar. Why not try, right?” I ask. “OK, 20something?” she asks. “Gross, no, not so young they could be my children. 35 baseline. And up to late 50s.” We move on to location next, and I instruct her that the men have to be close by and thus geographically desirable. “OK, anything else? Religion, race, height preferences?” “No, just normal and nice,” I say. “Those aren’t options here,” she tells me. “Can I please make this live? You look good, it’s a nice profile, you’re going to get tons of hits.” “Hits from all the crazies. Leave it for me to look at later, I need to work up the courage,” I say. “Fine, just don’t wait too long. Your big weekend is coming!” * After I put Georgia to sleep that night, I log into my new Tinder account to review my profile. I study the images as if seeing myself for the first time, trying to evaluate myself as a potential suitor might.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  It has sex, it has violence, it has the relationship between sex and violence. - And that led to one of the most famous and harrowing scenes in motion picture history. Everyone, I think, remembers that Janet Leigh gets stabbed in the shower by Anthony Perkins. She would not do a nude scene, she had a no nudity clause. So they had to get a body double. And so they hired Marli Renfro, who was an actress and a nude model. And because it was not Janet Leigh, Hitchcock had to shoot it in such a way that you couldn't tell who was actually in the shower. Then you have the swinging '60s, as they were called. You had the new handsome president, John F Kennedy after Dwight D. Eisenhower in a rather conservative period. And things opened up quite a bit. Marilyn Monroe was the first actress to prove that nudity does not destroy a career, it can even help a career. Marilyn Monroe was hired to do a film called, "Something's Gotta Give." And it was kind of her comeback film. So she said I need to make a splash, literally in a swimming pool. And then she went in her dressing room and came out with a blue bathrobe, and nothing underneath. And she said nobody looks as good in the nude as I do. The only nudity that survived was a very quick glimpse. She comes to the edge of the pool, and she sits it on the edge of the pool. And the way she seated you cannot even see her rear end. And as she gets up, you can see one breast from the side and her entire rear end. Marilyn had been tardy so much, that they were not that far into the film. And on June eighth, one week after her 36th birthday, she was fired, permanently. She was the biggest star in the world. And if she would do a nude scene, who wouldn't do a nude scene? Probably the foremost Marilyn Monroe imitator, at the time, was Jayne Mansfield. So she made a movie in 1963. It was called, "Promises Promises." - You gotta remember, there was Marilyn Monroe. And then Jayne Mansfield was right behind her as far as popularity. - [Joe] She takes a bubble bath. The bubbles dissipated very quickly, and all of Jayne was on display. - She liked to tease. - [Tommy] Sandy? - Do you want something, honey? - No it's all right. - And she knew this, and this is her stock and trade. - [Joe] Now, the floodgates had been opened. - [Jim] She was the first celebrity, post Hays commission, to do a nude scene here in the United States. - Marilyn Monroe had done it, and Jayne Mansfield had done it.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  Kathleen Turner shocked everyone with some explicit nudity in, "Body Heat," from 1981. And that was all essential to the plot. As her career went on, she was seen in essential nude scenes in, "Romancing the Stone," "Crimes of Passion," "A Breed Apart," and, "War of the Roses." "Tess," provided Nastassja Kinski a lot of acclaim in 1979 with an essential nude scene, although she started much earlier than that in, "Stay as You Are," and, "Boarding School," in 1978. and then her career kind of exploded to feature other important nude scenes like, "Cat People," which is maybe her most popular film. And somebody else whose career you can trace via their nude scenes is Melanie Griffith, who appeared in essential nude scenes in, "Something Wild," "Nobody's Fool," with Paul Newman, "Night Moves," "Body Double," and quite a few other ones. - A distinction needs to be made about attitude when you advise an actress to take a role and take her clothes off. If the representative's, or the producer's, or the studio's thinking is heartless, and not regarding the artist as an artist, then bye, not good. - Kate Winslet was nude in like probably her first 20 movies. - The first time an actress is nude in a film, it's a big deal, she's showing herself, she's vulnerable, she's sensitive, she's emotional. And then it's hard to kind of reconcile her nudity with her mind of a character. - Like there are movies where she did full frontal nudity and everything. And they were quirky, and they were great. And it like really showcased her as an actress, that sort of was comfortable in her own skin and everything. - "Titanic," it was a it was one of the biggest grossing movies ever. And the nudity in that was confined to Kate getting her portrait painted by Leonardo. And it was what we would call tasteful. - And being a movie that families, and everybody were going to see, I think when that moment occurred they figured we were gonna get the traditional 1950s era shot, where we saw the naked back of the woman, and the guy would see it, and that'd be it. But no, we actually saw Kate Winslet's character topless. - "Titanic," was a very very interesting film for us, as far as nudity is concerned, because in our board we had mostly all PG-13s, except for one or two of the fathers. - But it's a beautiful moment, and it's true to the story. And it's actually one of the most important scenes in the movie, because it's the moment where we realized that she's gonna be herself. Surprising that it got through, but it was the right thing.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  From the start he had the hands of the Buddenbrooks quite distinctly: broad, a little too short, but finely articulated; and his nose was exactly that of his father and great-grandfather, although the wings seemed to want to remain even more delicate. The entire long, narrow lower face, however, belonged neither to the Buddenbrooks nor to the Krögers, but to the maternal family - as did, above all, his mouth, which early on - even now - tended to Expression to which later the gaze of his peculiar golden-brown eyes with the bluish shadows more and more adapted... Under the looks of reserved tenderness that his father gave him, under the care with which his mother supervised his clothing and care, adored by his aunt Antonie, presented with riders and spinning tops by the consul and uncle Justus - he began to live, and when his pretty little carriage appeared in the street people looked after him with interest and expectation. But as far as the worthy nanny Madame Decho was concerned, who was initially on duty, it was decided that she would no longer move into the new house, but that Ida Jungmann should move in her place, while the consul would look for other help... Senator Buddenbrook carried out his plans. The purchase of the property in the Fischergrube did not pose any difficulties, and the house in the Breite Straße, which the broker Gosch had angrily declared ready to take over, brought Mr. Stephan Kistenmaker, whose family was growing and who, together with his brother, lived in Rotspohn with good money earned, directly purchasable in itself. Mr. Voigt took over the construction, and soon one could unroll his clean plan in the family circle on Thursdays and see the facade in advance: a magnificent shell with sandstone caryatids that supported the bay window and a flat roof, about which Klothilde remarked in a friendly and drawled manner , that one could drink coffee on it in the afternoon ... Even with regard to the ground floor rooms of the Mengstrasse house, which would now stand empty, Autumn came, gray walls crumbled to rubble, and over spacious cellars, while winter fell and faded again, Thomas Buddenbrook's new house grew. No talking point in town that could have been more engaging! It turned out to be tip top, it turned out to be the most beautiful residential building around and wide! Were there nicer ones in Hamburg?... But it also had to be desperately expensive, and the old consul would certainly not have made such leaps... The neighbors, the townspeople in the gabled houses, lay in the windows, watched the men working on the scaffolding, rejoiced as the building rose and sought to determine the date of the topping-out ceremony. It came up and was committed with all the intricacies.

• From Escape (2007)

  The first fundamentalist prophet claimed his authority through John Taylor, who was considered the third leader of the Mormon Church after Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. It was believed that while John Taylor was in hiding, he was given the keys to the priesthood. As the story goes, he was visited one night by Jesus Christ, who told him that the principle of celestial marriage was to be preserved at all costs. Since there would be opposition to this, the priesthood would have to go into hiding. Christ made it clear to Taylor that the keys to the priesthood were being taken away from the mainstream Mormon Church. Christ told John Taylor that after he died the keys to the priesthood would go to someone other than the next in line in the Mormon Church. They would go to a man who would honor the sacred covenant of celestial marriage and from then on, God would be working only with his most elite children. Even after the manifesto, the Mormon Church allowed members to live in plural marriage as long as a man did not have more than two wives. Anyone who tried to marry more than two ran the risk of excommunication. That changed in the early 1920s, when the Mormons tried to get rid of polygamy altogether and soon began excommunicating anyone who practiced plural marriage. Listening to my grandmother talk, I felt like I was being rocked in a cradle of specialness. Grandma made me feel unique, but not in the traditional way. She taught me that I had been blessed by God with an opportunity to come into a family where generations of women had sacrificed their feelings and given up the things of this world to preserve the work of God and prove worthy of the celestial kingdom of God. I was wide-eyed, thinking of all those women who were now in heaven, reaping the rewards of their earthly sacrifices. I was proud to be part of such an important tradition. As daughters of God, we were bound in a covenant before we came to earth. My grandmother explained that we had pledged to God that we would never do anything to undermine his work and would produce many children. There were thousands of chosen spirits waiting to come to earth. We were the women who would give birth to them. Grandma taught me that my sole purpose on earth was to have as many children as possible. God would reveal the name of the man he wanted me to marry by sending a revelation to the prophet.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  The “us versus them” strategy was also used within the group, as part of its hierarchical structure. At the bottom of the hierarchy was everyone who attended the Wednesday night meditation meetings. Everyone who came to Wednesday night was “special” in God’s eyes and was treated as such, but they weren’t as special as they could be. The next rung up the ladder contained those who had been asked by Limori to join the invitation-only Thursday night circle. This group was smaller than the Wednesday night group, and included only those who were deemed by Spirit to be worthy of this honour. The Thursday night meeting was similar in structure to Wednesday night, with a mix of meditation, discussion and confession. Those in the Thursday group, however, were looked upon by those in the Wednesday group as having additional spiritual merit. I envied my friends Michael, Lisa and Karen, who had been invited to breathe the rarified air of Thursday night. Belonging to this group meant special access to Limori, it seemed to me, because the group was smaller and there seemed to be greater intimacy between her and its members. Needless to say, it became my life’s ambition to be invited to the Thursday night group; I wanted to “belong” at a higher level and I suppose I expected that joining this elite crowd would be the final solution to the self-esteem issues that continued to plague me despite my dedication to meditating. When I finally was invited, I did feel a greater sense of belonging and remember feeling superior to those in the Wednesday night group who had not received the call. The final rungs above the Thursday group in the hierarchy were those who lived at Wolf’s Den, and above them was just Limori herself. Within these broad categories there were also mini-hierarchical steps; those who travelled with Limori when she spent months in Hawaii or Arizona were slightly elevated from those who lived full time at Wolf’s Den. Those in the Thursday night group who were invited to private events at Limori’s home were slightly elevated from those who were not, etc. Kramer and Alstad, in The Guru Papers , describe the hierarchical structure of a cult as providing security, and that was certainly my experience. The further I moved up the ladder, the more secure I felt about my purpose for God and the better I felt about my value as a human being because I belonged to a group that I believed were God’s chosen people. “Since spiritual hierarchies contain ready-made steps for advancement they offer quick access to feeling better through improving. . . Moving up the rungs brings power and respect,” Kramer and Alstad say. “The organization’s hierarchical structure neatly fits the disciples’ psychological need to make progress, and to be able to evaluate themselves (measure their progress) with regard to others.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  The primitive hordes were barely interested in their posterity. Connected to no territory, owning nothing, embodied in nothing stable, they could formulate no concrete idea of permanence; they were unconcerned with survival and did not recognize themselves in their descendants; they did not fear death and did not seek heirs; children were a burden and not of great value for them; the proof is that infanticide has always been frequent in nomadic peoples; and many newborns who are not massacred die for lack of hygiene in a climate of total indifference. So the woman who gives birth does not take pride in her creation; she feels like the passive plaything of obscure forces, and painful childbirth a useless and even bothersome accident. Later, more value was attached to children. But in any case, to give birth and to breast-feed are not activities but natural functions; they do not involve a project, which is why the woman finds no motive there to claim a higher meaning for her existence; she passively submits to her biological destiny. Because housework alone is compatible with the duties of motherhood, she is condemned to domestic labor, which locks her into repetition and immanence; day after day it repeats itself in identical form from century to century; it produces nothing new. Man’s case is radically different. He does not provide for the group in the way worker bees do, by a simple vital process, but rather by acts that transcend his animal condition. Homo faber has been an inventor since the beginning of time: even the stick or the club he armed himself with to knock down fruit from a tree or to slaughter animals is an instrument that expands his grasp of the world; bringing home freshly caught fish is not enough for him: he first has to conquer the seas by constructing dugout canoes; to appropriate the world’s treasures, he annexes the world itself. Through such actions he tests his own power; he posits ends and projects paths to them: he realizes himself as existent. To maintain himself, he creates; he spills over the present and opens up the future. This is the reason fishing and hunting expeditions have a sacred quality. Their success is greeted by celebration and triumph; man recognizes his humanity in them. This pride is still apparent today when he builds a dam, a skyscraper, or an atomic reactor. He has not only worked to preserve the given world: he has burst its borders; he has laid the ground for a new future.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  His activity has another dimension that endows him with supreme dignity: it is often dangerous. If blood were only a food, it would not be worth more than milk: but the hunter is not a butcher: he runs risks in the struggle against wild animals. The warrior risks his own life to raise the prestige of the horde—his clan. This is how he brilliantly proves that life is not the supreme value for man but that it must serve ends far greater than itself. The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills. Here we hold the key to the whole mystery. On a biological level, a species maintains itself only by re-creating itself; but this creation is nothing but a repetition of the same Life in different forms. By transcending Life through Existence, man guarantees the repetition of Life: by this surpassing, he creates values that deny any value to pure repetition. With an animal, the gratuitousness and variety of male activities are useless because no project is involved; what it does is worthless when it is not serving the species; but in serving the species, the human male shapes the face of the earth, creates new instruments, invents and forges the future. Positing himself as sovereign, he encounters the complicity of woman herself: because she herself is also an existent, because transcendence also inhabits her and her project is not repetition but surpassing herself toward another future; she finds the confirmation of masculine claims in the core of her being. She participates with men in festivals that celebrate the success and victories of males. Her misfortune is to have been biologically destined to repeat Life, while in her own eyes Life in itself does not provide her reasons for being, and these reasons are more important than life itself.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  It may happen that in a matrilineal system she has a very high position: but—beware—the presence of a woman chief or a queen at the head of a tribe absolutely does not mean that women are sovereign: the reign of Catherine the Great changed nothing in the fate of Russian peasant women; and they lived no less frequently in a state of abjection. And cases where a woman remains in her clan and her husband makes rapid, even clandestine visits to her are very rare. She almost always goes to live under her husband’s roof: this fact is proof enough of male domination. “Behind the variations in the type of descent,” writes Lévi-Strauss, “the permanence of patrilocal residence attests to the basic asymmetrical relationship between the sexes which is characteristic of human society.” Since she keeps her children with her, the result is that the territorial organization of the tribe does not correspond to its totemic organization: the former is contingent, the latter rigorously constructed; but in practice, the first was the more important because the place where people work and live counts more than their mystical connection. In the more widespread transitional regimes, there are two kinds of rights, one based on religion and the other on the occupation and labor on the land, and they overlap. Though only a secular institution, marriage nevertheless has great social importance, and the conjugal family, though stripped of religious signification, is very alive on a human level. Even within groups where great sexual freedom is found, it is considered conventional for a woman who brings a child into the world to be married; alone with an offspring, she cannot constitute an autonomous group; and her brother’s religious protection does not suffice; a husband’s presence is required. He often has many heavy responsibilities for the children; they do not belong to his clan, but it is nonetheless he who feeds and raises them; between husband and wife, and father and son, bonds of cohabitation, work, common interest, and tenderness are formed. Relations between this secular family and the totemic clan are extremely complex, as the diversity of marriage rites attests. In primitive times, a husband buys a wife from a foreign clan, or at least there is an exchange of goods from one clan to another, the first giving over one of its members and the second delivering cattle, fruits, or work in return. But as husbands take charge of wives and their children, it also happens that they receive remuneration from their brides’ brothers. The balance between mystical and economic realities is an unstable one. Men often have a closer attachment to their sons than to their nephews; it is as a father that a man will choose to affirm himself when such affirmation becomes possible. And this is why every society tends toward a patriarchal form as its development leads man to gain awareness of himself and to impose his will.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Little by little, man mediated his experience, and in his representations, as in his practical existence, the male principle triumphed. Spirit prevailed over Life, transcendence over immanence, technology over magic, and reason over superstition. The devaluation of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity: for she derived her prestige not from her positive value but from man’s weakness; she incarnated disturbing natural mysteries: man escapes her grasp when he frees himself from nature. In passing from stone to bronze, he is able to conquer the land through his work and conquer himself as well. The farmer is subjected to the vagaries of the soil, of germination, and of seasons; he is passive, he beseeches, and he waits: this explains why totem spirits peopled the human world; the peasant endured the whims of these forces that took possession of him. On the contrary, the worker fashions a tool according to his own design; he imposes on it the form that fits his project; facing an inert nature that defies him but that he overcomes, he asserts himself as sovereign will; if he quickens his strokes on the anvil, he quickens the completion of the tool, whereas nothing can hasten the ripening of grain; his responsibility develops with what he makes: his movement, adroit or maladroit, makes it or breaks it; careful, skillful, he brings it to a point of perfection he can be proud of: his success depends not on the favor of the gods but on himself; he challenges his fellow workers, he takes pride in his success; and while he still leaves some place for rituals, applied techniques seem far more important to him; mystical values become secondary, and practical interests take precedence; he is not entirely liberated from the gods, but he distances himself by distancing them from himself; he relegates them to their Olympian heaven and keeps the terrestrial domain for himself; the great Pan begins to fade at the first sound of his hammer, and man’s reign begins. He discovers his power. He finds cause and effect in the relationship between his creating arm and the object of his creation: the seed planted germinates or not, while metal always reacts in the same way to fire, to tempering, and to mechanical treatment; this world of tools can be framed in clear concepts: rational thinking, logic, and mathematics are thus able to emerge. The whole representation of the universe is overturned. Woman’s religion is bound to the reign of agriculture, a reign of irreducible duration, contingencies, chance, anticipation, and mystery; the reign of Homo faber is the reign of time that can be conquered like space, the reign of necessity, project, action, and reason.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Perhaps, however, if productive work had remained at the level of her strength, woman would have achieved the conquest of nature with man; the human species affirmed itself against the gods through male and female individuals; but she could not obtain the benefits of tools for herself. Engels only incompletely explained her decline: it is insufficient to say that the invention of bronze and iron profoundly modified the balance of productive forces and brought about women’s inferiority; this inferiority is not in itself sufficient to account for the oppression she has suffered. What was harmful for her was that, not becoming a labor partner for the worker, she was excluded from the human Mitsein: that woman is weak and has a lower productive capacity does not explain this exclusion; rather, it is because she did not participate in his way of working and thinking and because she remained enslaved to the mysteries of life that the male did not recognize in her an equal; by not accepting her, once she kept in his eyes the dimension of other, man could only become her oppressor. The male will for expansion and domination transformed feminine incapacity into a curse. Man wanted to exhaust the new possibilities opened up by new technology: he called upon a servile workforce, and he reduced his fellow man to slavery. Slave labor being far more efficient than work that woman could supply, she lost the economic role she played within the tribe. And in his relationship with the slave, the master found a far more radical confirmation of his sovereignty than the tempered authority he exercised on woman. Venerated and revered for her fertility, being other than man, and sharing the disquieting character of the other, woman, in a certain way, kept man dependent on her even while she was dependent on him; the reciprocity of the master-slave relationship existed in the present for her, and it was how she escaped slavery. As for the slave, he had no taboo to protect him, being nothing but a servile man, not just different, but inferior: the dialectic of the slave-master relationship will take centuries to be actualized; within the organized patriarchal society, the slave is only a beast of burden with a human face: the master exercises tyrannical authority over him; this exalts his pride: and he turns it against the woman. Everything he wins, he wins against her; the more powerful he becomes, the more she declines. In particular, when he acquires ownership of land,9 he also claims woman as property. Formerly he was possessed by the mana, by the earth: now he has a soul, property; freed from Woman, he now lays claim to a woman and a posterity of his own. He wants the family labor he uses for the benefit of his fields to be totally his, and for this to happen, the workers must belong to him: he subjugates his wife and his children. He must have heirs who will extend his life on earth because he bequeaths them his possessions, and who will give him in turn, beyond the tomb, the necessary honors for the repose of his soul. The cult of the domestic gods is superimposed on the constitution of private property, and the function of heirs is both economic and mystical. Thus, the day agriculture ceases to be an essentially magic operation and becomes creative labor, man finds himself to be a generative force; he lays claim to his children and his crops at the same time.10

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  There is no ideological revolution more important in the primitive period than the one replacing matrilineal descent with agnation; from that time on, the mother is lowered to the rank of wet nurse or servant, and the father’s sovereignty is exalted; he is the one who holds rights and transmits them. Apollo, in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, proclaims these new truths: “The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger she preserves a stranger’s seed, if no god interfere.” It is clear that these affirmations are not the results of scientific discoveries; they are acts of faith. Undoubtedly, the experience of technical cause and effect from which man draws the assurance of his creative powers makes him recognize he is as necessary to procreation as the mother. Idea guided observation; but the latter is restricted to granting the father a role equal to that of the mother: it led to the supposition that, as for nature, the condition for conception was the encounter of sperm and menses; Aristotle’s idea that woman is merely matter, and “the principle of movement which is male in all living beings is better and more divine,” is an idea that expresses a will to power that goes beyond all of what is known. In attributing his posterity exclusively to himself, man frees himself definitively from subjugation by women, and he triumphs over woman in the domination of the world. Doomed to procreation and secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  But woman does more than flatter man’s social vanity; she allows him a more intimate pride; he delights in his domination over her; superimposed on the naturalistic images of the plowshare cutting furrows are more spiritual symbols concerning the wife as a person; the husband “forms” his wife not only erotically but also spiritually and intellectually; he educates her, impresses her, puts his imprint on her. One of the daydreams he enjoys is the impregnation of things by his will, shaping their form, penetrating their substance: the woman is par excellence the “clay in his hands” that passively lets itself be worked and shaped, resistant while yielding, permitting masculine activity to go on. A too-plastic material wears out by its softness; what is precious in woman is that something in her always escapes all embraces; so man is master of a reality that is all the more worthy of being mastered as it surpasses him. She awakens in him a being heretofore ignored whom he recognizes with pride as himself; in their safe marital orgies he discovers the splendor of his animality: he is the Male; and woman, correlatively, the female, but this word sometimes takes on the most flattering implications: the female who broods, who nurses, who licks her young, who defends them, and who risks her life to save them is an example for humans; with emotion, man demands this patience and devotion from his companion; again it is Nature, but imbued with all of the virtues useful to society, family, and the head of the family, virtues he knows how to keep locked in his home. A common desire of children and men is to uncover the secret hidden inside things; but in this, the matter can be deceptive: a doll ripped apart with her stomach outside has no more interiority; the interior of living things is more impenetrable; the female womb is the symbol of immanence, of depth; it delivers its secrets in part as when, for example, pleasure shows on a woman’s face, but it also holds them in; man catches life’s obscure palpitations in his house without the mystery being destroyed by possession. In the human world, woman transposes the female animal’s functions: she maintains life, she reigns over the zones of immanence; she transports the warmth and the intimacy of the womb into the home; she watches over and enlivens the dwelling where the past is kept, where the future is presaged; she engenders the future generation, and she nourishes the children already born; thanks to her, the existence that man expends throughout the world by his work and his activity is re-centered by delving into her immanence: when he comes home at night, he is anchored to the earth; the wife assures the days’ continuity; whatever risks he faces in the outside world, she guarantees the stability of his meals and sleep; she repairs whatever has been damaged or worn out by activity: she prepares the tired worker’s food, she cares for him if he is ill, she mends and washes. And within the conjugal universe that she sets up and perpetuates, she brings in the whole vast world: she lights the fires, puts flowers in vases, and domesticates the emanations of sun, water, and earth. A bourgeois writer cited by Bebel summarizes this ideal in all seriousness as follows: “Man wants not only someone whose heart beats for him, but whose hand wipes his brow, who radiates peace, order, and tranquillity, a silent control over himself and those things he finds when he comes home every day; he wants someone who can spread over everything the indescribable perfume of woman who is the vivifying warmth of home life.”

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  There is one category of women to whom these remarks do not apply because their careers, far from harming the affirmation of their femininity, reinforce it; through artistic expression they seek to go beyond the very given they constitute: actresses, dancers, and singers. For three centuries they have almost been the only ones to possess concrete independence in society, and today they still hold a privileged place in it. In the past, actresses were cursed by the Church: this excessive severity allowed them great freedom of behavior; they are often involved in seduction, and like courtesans they spend much of their days in the company of men: but as they earn their living themselves, finding the meaning of their existence in their work, they escape men’s yoke. Their great advantage is that their professional successes contribute—as for males—to their sexual worth; by realizing themselves as human beings, they accomplish themselves as women: they are not torn between contradictory aspirations; on the contrary, they find in their jobs a justification for their narcissism: clothes, beauty care, and charm are part of their professional duties; a woman infatuated with her image finds great satisfaction in doing something simply by exhibiting what she is; and this exhibition requires sufficient amounts of both artifice and study if it is to be, in Georgette Leblanc’s words, a substitute for action. A great actress will aim even higher: she will go beyond the given in the way she expresses it, she will really be an artist, a creator who gives meaning to her life by lending meaning to the world.

• From Naked Ambition

  - You're one of the world's foremost photographers of women, is this a good job? I'm not trying to play income tax man now, but do you make a good living out of it? - Well, I make a nice living, but the big thing about it for me is I'm married and I have two children. And I can make my own hours, and still indulge in having a career. ♪ In my life ♪ I met a beauty without bounds ♪ - Dad talked about it a lot, how special she was. I remember him always telling me, "Your mom's not like other moms, just being a housewife and sitting around eating Bonbons." "She's working, she's a photographer." - Bunny was the most famous female photographer in America. - Bunny Yeager, is that right? [audience applauding] Miss or Mrs Yeager? - Actually, it's Mrs. Mrs. Yeager, where are you from Mrs. Yeager? - Miami, Florida. - Miami, Florida. Lucky Florida. All right, panel, you all masked up? Let's have a look at everybody here and abouts, except those four good characters over there on the panel know exactly what your line is. [audience gasping] [audience applauding] - One of the factors that really influenced the shape of Bunny's career was how much of an outsider she was. - John, it's all too obvious. Mrs. Yeager is from Miami. She's not sunburned, she's a beautiful blonde. She's obviously a typical American school teacher. One down and nine to go. - She was an outsider because she was a self-taught photographer, she was an outsider because she was a woman. She was an outsider because she lived in Miami, which was not a center of publishing. - Mrs. Yeager, do you deal in services? - [Bunny] Yes, I do. - Mrs. Yeager once was on the other side of the camera, but for the last four years, she's been a photographer. - She was an original, and she epitomized in a sense what Miami Beach was in the '50s and '60s, booming, loose, devil may care, let it all happen. [pleasant music] I had just started radio and I was doing a morning show. And one day the general manager called me in and said, "The all night guy, Al Fox, is sick, would you sit in overnight?" - It's "The Witching Hour," Miami Beach's Midnight Flyer program, we're underway. - He says, "All you do is just play records and talk." - Miami Beach Midnight Flyer- This is not a Bunny Yeager story. But I'm alone in the station and about 3:00 a.m. the phone rings. [phone ringing] And I pick up the phone, "WAHR," and this voice, I can hear it now, said, "I want you." [pleasant music] I'm 22 years old, no woman has ever said, "I want you," to me. I suddenly realized there were other advantages to being on the radio.