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 Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  Always allow the privacy of your own room to protect you: always let the Bridegroom play with you within. Do you pray? You speak to the Bridegroom. Do you read? He speaks to you. When sleep overtakes you, he will come from behind and put his hand through the hole of the door, and your heart shall be moved for him.39 Jerome encouraged Eustochium to acknowledge her superiority, as virgin, over all married women, including her own married sister, Blaesilla: “Learn from me a holy arrogance: know that you are better than they are!”40 But the twenty-year-old Blaesilla, some months after her wedding, suddenly found herself a widow and, in her grief, ripe for religious conversion. For thirty days she suffered a high fever, and yet she obeyed Jerome’s program of radical austerity. She slept on the ground, refused food, and devoted herself to penitential prayer. Her friends and relatives, shocked by the change in her, criticized or ridiculed her extreme practices—and her teacher. When she wasted away and died two months later, many people were openly bitter. Jerome reproached Paula in these words: When you were carried fainting out of the funeral procession, whispers such as these were audible in the crowd: “Isn’t this what we often have said? She weeps for her daughter, killed by fasting. She wanted her to marry again so that she might have grandchildren. How long must we refrain from driving these detestable monks out of Rome? Why don’t we stone them or throw them into the Tiber river? They have misled this wretched lady; it is clear that she is not a nun by choice.”41 But Jerome’s critics vehemently blamed him for Blaesilla’s death. His reputation as spiritual director was badly shaken. Still worse, his patron, Pope Damasus, had died several weeks before. Jerome hastily left Rome for the Holy Land, where Blaesilla’s mother and sister, still devoted to their mentor, later joined him. About five years later, a friend traveling from Rome brought to Jerome’s monastic cell in Bethlehem a copy of a writing that challenged the supremacy of asceticism over married life. Its author, Jovinian, himself a celibate Christian monk, argued that celibacy in itself is no holier than marriage and accused certain fanatical Christians of having invented—and then having attributed to Jesus and Paul—this “novel dogma against nature.”42

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  CHAPTER 4Hookups and Hang-UpsHolly, a sophomore at a private East Coast college, volunteered to talk to me for a specific reason. She wanted it known that some college girls, girls such as she, enjoyed the so-called hookup culture. “In books and articles they always say that if a girl sleeps around she’ll get called a slut or that all girls only really want relationships,” she said, sweeping her strawberry blond hair back over one shoulder. “Otherwise, it’s just about how hookup culture is good for guys, and how they feel this sense of accomplishment when they’ve had sex with a number of girls. But I’ll just put it out there: I feel accomplished after I have sex with someone that I wanted to have sex with. Last Thursday morning I woke up and apparently everyone in my sorority house knew I’d had sex because they’d heard the bed squeaking through the ceiling. And everyone goes, ‘Holly! High five! You get it, girl!’ I felt accomplished, just like a boy would. I felt like, ‘I went out, I looked good, I showed myself off, and I got it last night. Good for me.’” What’s Sauce for the Gander As with oral sex in the 1990s, discussions of the current “hookup culture” are fertile ground for good old-fashioned media-induced panics. The take-away from most reports tends to swing extreme: Hookups are terrible for girls! Hookups are liberating for girls! Girls are being victimized! Girls are going wild! Here is what they rarely say: young people are not, in fact, having more sex than they used to—at least, if you define sex by intercourse. The seismic tectonic shift in premarital sexual behavior really took place with the Baby Boom generation, according to Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who, with her colleagues, has conducted the most comprehensive research on college student hookups. That was when the introduction of the Pill, the rise of the women’s movement, and relaxed attitudes about supervision of “coeds” ignited the sexual revolution. Nor did today’s young ’uns invent the concept of casual sex. What has changed, however, among college students and increasingly among high schoolers, is that when relationships do occur, instead of starting with a date, they often begin with noncommitted sexual contact. Rather than being a product of intimacy, then, sex has become its precursor, or sometimes its replacement. That’s what is meant by the term hookup culture. “Casual sex was happening before in college,” said Debby Herbenick at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, “but there wasn’t the sense that it’s what you should be doing. It is now. I have students who say people should be able to have no emotions in sex, and if you can’t, there’s something wrong with you and you’re missing out.”

• From Between Us

  Adults may do the same. Tamalekar, the Ifaluk man who had “adopted” anthropologist Catherine Lutz, tells his family that they should fago a young man who visits from another island. And closer to home, my mentor and friend Hazel Markus told me on many an occasion “You should feel good about yourself!” thus socializing me to have emotions American-style. She encouraged me to enjoy a moment of success, to shine and take my spot. In doing so, her suggestion was to replace my Dutch, hesitant and shy response, which came from my concept of Dutch “success stories” that looked very different from the middle-class American concept. My mom always told me that “acting normal was special enough.” And my grandmother warned me against boasting. Over the years, Hazel’s encouragement and that by other American friends did add to my reservoir of American pride stories, from which I can now take direction. Stories in the World When I tell interested friends, acquaintances, or journalists that I study culture and emotions, they invariably ask me the same question: Which emotions are different? I have never been sure how to answer that question, because it requires backtracking many assumptions. It is a bit like answering the question if Joy or Fear in a similar Japanese movie would have the same colors as in the Pixar movie Inside Out, when you don’t even know if Joy or Fear had been cast. The MINE model of emotions would have it that if you lifted the skull of individuals, metaphorically speaking, you would find the emotion figurines living there. Emotion words should tell us about these figurines. Cultural differences in emotion words could mean that in some cultures people have faulty information about the “actual” emotions. When English lacks a word for amae, U.S. Americans may still be able to feel amae, despite the fact that the language does not correctly encode it. Alternatively, a MINE model of emotions may suggest that differences in emotion lexicons reflect the emotions “living inside” people from different cultures. Following that track of thought, the Ifaluk may have a figurine for fago (love, sadness, compassion), and the Japanese a figurine for amae, which U.S. Americans lack. And Polish speakers may lack a figurine for disgust that English speakers have. But how plausible is this idea of figurines living in our metaphorical skull?

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  As a prophet he speaks the language of prophets. As a reformer he tells the truth as reformers tell it, unvarnished and ungarnished. He spares others as little as he spared himself in his book "My Confession ." He wants others to do as he has done, to subject the lusts and appetites and greeds to the rule of conscience, if the kingdom of God is ever to be established on earth. Opposed by government. Radical in his reform propositions from the first, he attracted attention at once. The world was amazed at the daring of his thought and at the plainness of his speech, and hailed him as a new prophet. The government, however, looked upon him as a revolutionist, and gave him clearly to understand that he would be silenced if he did not change his views and style of writing. Instead of complying with its wish, he became all the more daring in thought and all the plainer in speech. The humblest peasant could understand as clearly as the shrewdest diplomat what he was after. And it was not long before the government was after him. The publication and sale of certain of his books were prohibited. They were read all the more outside of Russia, and by the thousands of copies within Russia. And the more they were read the larger loomed his world-fame, till he became too large for banishment or prison, for fortress or Siberian mine. Challenged government to do its worst. With all the fiery zeal of an ancient Jewish prophet, he challenged the government to do its worst, "to tighten the well-soaped noose about his throat" as it tightened it about the throats of thousands of better men than any that are in the service of the autocrat or of his hirelings, the bureaucrats. Theirs was a government, he said, by might not by right, by gallows and knout, not by law. His political demands. He demanded the abolition of the throne and of capital punishment, the disbanding of the army, and the discontinuance of trial by court-martial. He demanded liberty of speech and freedom of conscience. He demanded the surrender to the people of lands and rights that justly belonged to them, and scathingly he denounced those who wasted in riotousness what had been painfully gotten together with the heart's blood of the laboring-people. He denounced the government for its cruelty toward the Jews, and charged it with having instigated the massacres of them. He held the government responsible for every misfortune that befell the country—war, famine, pestilence, intense poverty, hopeless misery, appalling ignorance. In burning words he charged the slaughter of tens of thousands of husbands and fathers and sons, in the Japanese war, to the greed of the mighty.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But it was with the three aforementioned manifestos that Luther would be most identified during this twelve-month caesura in Rome’s mad hunt; so let us look at each of them in turn. But one other reason Luther was freer than previously to write these three groundbreaking and theologically breathtaking treatises may also have to do with something fairly mundane. During this time, Luther’s monastic practice of saying the daily hours might at last have caught up with his theology. In other words, he stopped doing them altogether. Ten years later, he wrote, Our Lord God pulled me away by force from the canonical hours in 1520, when I was already writing a great deal, and I often saved up my hours for a whole week, and then on Saturday I would do them one after another so that I neither ate nor drank anything for the whole day, and I was so weakened that I couldn’t sleep, so that I had to be given Dr. Esch’s sleeping draught, the effects of which I still feel in my head.*28 He said that eventually he was behind by three full months and the idea of ever catching up so much overwhelmed him that he was finally forced to end this practice he had been doing for fifteen years. So it is entirely possible that the writing of these three treatises brought him to this breaking point or that he had ended this habit before writing them. In any event, it’s clear that abandoning the hours enabled him to be that much more productive. [image file=image_rsrc6KX.jpg] Cranach’s 1520 portrait of Luther. Part of what makes Luther sui generis is the mad unpredictability and speed at which he tossed these three bombs. He made up for lost time and said everything he thought must be said. While his opponents were still choking from the dust of one explosion and then blinking to fathom the damage around them, Luther threw another—of another kind and in an unexpected place—so that they were stymied and flummoxed into paralysis and confusion. Luther’s first major work during this time was his To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. It was published in August 1520, and Melchior Lotter presciently printed no fewer than four thousand copies, a giddily optimistic number in the world of early sixteenth-century publishing. But Lotter’s gamble was well rewarded. Within two weeks, every copy had been sold. Luther emended a second edition slightly, which was printed within the month, and eventually ten editions were printed, making their way from the printing centers of Basel, Strasbourg, Augsburg, and Leipzig out to the wider world.

• From The City of God

  There are those two things, namely, liberty and the desire of human praise, which compelled the Romans to admirable deeds. If, therefore, for the liberty of dying men, and for the desire of human praise which is sought after by mortals, sons could be put to death by a father, what great thing is it, if, for the true liberty which has made us free from the dominion of sin, and death, and the devil,--not through the desire of human praise, but through the earnest desire of freeing men, not from King Tarquin, but from demons and the prince of the demons,--we should, I do not say put to death our sons, but reckon among our sons Christ's poor ones? If, also, another Roman chief, surnamed Torquatus, slew his son, not because he fought against his country, but because, being challenged by an enemy, he through youthful impetuosity fought, though for his country, yet contrary to orders which he his father had given as general; and this he did, notwithstanding that his son was victorious, lest there should be more evil in the example of authority despised, than good in the glory of slaying an enemy;--if, I say, Torquatus acted thus, wherefore should they boast themselves, who, for the laws of a celestial country, despise all earthly good things, which are loved far less than sons? If Furius Camillus, who was condemned by those who envied him, notwithstanding that he had thrown off from the necks of his countrymen the yoke of their most bitter enemies, the Veientes, again delivered his ungrateful country from the Gauls, because he had no other in which he could have better opportunities for living a life of glory;--if Camillus did thus, why should he be extolled as having done some great thing, who, having, it may be, suffered in the church at the hands of carnal enemies most grievous and dishonouring injury, has not betaken himself to heretical enemies, or himself raised some heresy against her, but has rather defended her, as far as he was able, from the most pernicious perversity of heretics, since there is not another church, I say not in which one can live a life of glory, but in which eternal life can be obtained?

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  He never changed his attitude towards the errors and wrongs of the Russian orthodox church. And no one who ever stood and talked with him, face to face, could ever have believed that that modern Prometheus, that stern and fearless personality, that re-incarnation of Mattathias of old, and of his valiant sons, the Maccabees, could ever swerve from a position once taken by him. When upon his death-bed, he was frequently importuned to return as a penitent to the mother-church; he spurned every mention of it. He was still in the possession of his senses, he said, he still knew and believed that twice two equals four, and as long as he knew and believed this so long would he continue to know and to believe that what he had said and written concerning the errors and wrongs of the church was the truth. Never a truer follower of Jesus than he. It is noteworthy, and quite in keeping with the general tenor of the Russian orthodox church, that no cognizance was taken by the church of the many noble things Tolstoy had said and written and done; no cognizance of the self-sacrificing efforts he had made to live the life which Jesus had lived and had enjoined upon his followers; no cognizance of his having conscientiously endeavored to square his life with the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount ; no cognizance of his having brought light to those in darkness and comfort to those in sorrow, of his having consorted and labored with the poor and lightened their burden, of his having thirsted and hungered after righteousness, of his having sought peace and protested against war, and preached the gospel of the wrongfulness of all physical resistance, of his having, though of the oldest nobility, spurned luxury and ease and even money, having regarded these the source of corruption and the root of many of the evils in society. Yet refused Christian burial. Such a person, and one even but half as good as this, should have been entitled to sepulture in the most sacred of Christian cemeteries, and the most eminent of priests should have deemed it a privilege to have been permitted to perform the last rites over his mortal remains. So would it have happened among rational people, but so could it not have happened in Russia. There, because he could not subscribe to doctrines and rites and ceremonies for which he found neither scriptural nor rational warrant, priests felt themselves disgraced, and in danger of eternal damnation, even when their names were associated with that of Tolstoy. Priest objected to his name being associated with Tolstoy's. A striking illustration of this was given, seven years ago, at the university of Dorpat, at the occasion of the celebration of its hundredth anniversary.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  NICOPOLIS ON THE AMBRACIAN GULF. Octavian founded Nicopolis, the “Victory City,” in northwestern Greece immediately after his triumph over Antony and Cleopatra off Cape Actium. It commemorated that victory, provided a place to settle veterans from both Roman armies, and secured the Greek mainland at this very close point to the heel of the Italian peninsula. It facilitated trans-Mediterranean trade and travel, reinvigorated the area’s devastated economy, integrated indigenous Greeks and colonial Romans, and was all paid for from the spoils of battle along with generous (forced?) donations from people like Herod the Great, who had earlier been a friend of the defeated Antony. It even became a museum-like site in Augustus’s own lifetime. Augustus made Nicopolis the chief regional center by moving there the locally popular Actian Games and elevating them to equal prestige with the Olympian Games. That gave the Victory City a double meaning: It attracted the greatest athletes of the world against the backdrop of the greatest victory of all time. Reminders of that victory were everywhere. The prows from Antony’s defeated ships were fastened into a memorial, similar to the Rostra in Rome’s forum, and it became part of an open-air sanctuary to Augustus’s patron deity, Apollo. Built on the hill overlooking the city and its two ports, the battle trophies were jointly dedicated to the sea god Neptune and the war god Mars. Below in the city, Augustus and his imperial descendants were worshiped as divine. Augustus’s new city was fed by an aqueduct that was itself a major technical feat of legionary engineering. It brought abundant freshwater from the source of the river Louros along an almost imperceptible slope whose descent was a mere 250 feet over 30 miles with channels cut through hills and arched bridges over both ravines and rivers. Though, other than the small theater, little inside the city has been fully excavated (much more is promised), baths fed by the aqueduct are among the ruins still visible aboveground. One of them is an Augustan-era complex in the sacred grove between the Apollo sanctuary and the city, the area where the quadrennial Actian Games were held. That bath was a world-class facility with its barrel-vaulted ceilings and domed roofs. The imprints from marble panel inlays on the floor and the peg holes for marble wall sheeting are still visible, along with remnants from mosaic floors. In those pools and baths world-class competitors bathed every four years, including much later in 66 C.E., when the emperor Nero won (or, probably more accurately, was allowed to win) the laurel wreath in the chariot race. In the years in between, the leading citizens, their guests, and maybe even a good deal of the citizenry bathed there in regal style.

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  In most animal species (including humans) the evolutionary significance of male sexual ornamentation is undisputed, because males surely compete for females. However, scientists have raised three objections to the interpretation that women compete for men and have evolved bodily ornaments for that purpose. First, in traditional societies at least 95 percent of women marry. This statistic seems to suggest that virtually any woman can get a husband, and that women have no need to compete. As one woman biologist expressed it to me, “Every garbage can has a lid, and there is usually a bad-looking man for every bad-looking woman.” But that interpretation is belied by all the effort that women consciously put into decoration and surgical modification of their bodies so as to be attractive. In fact, men vary greatly in their genes, in the resources that they control, in their parenting qualities, and in their devotion to their wives. Although virtually any woman can get some man to marry her, only a few women can succeed in getting one of the few high-quality men, for whom women must compete intensely. Every woman knows that, even though some male scientists evidently don’t. A second objection notes that men in traditional societies had no opportunity to choose their spouse, whether on the basis of sexual ornamentation or any other quality. Instead, marriages were arranged by clan relatives, who did the choosing, often with the motive of cementing political alliances. In reality, though, bride prices in traditional societies, such as the New Guinea societies where I work, vary according to a woman’s desirability, the woman’s health and probable mothering qualities being important considerations. That is, although a bridegroom’s views about his bride’s sex appeal may be ignored, his relatives who actually select the bride do not ignore their own views. In addition, men certainly consider a woman’s sex appeal in selecting partners for extramarital sex, which is likely to account for a higher proportion of babies in traditional societies (where husbands don’t get to follow their sexual preferences in selecting their wives) than in modern societies. Furthermore, remarriage following divorce or the death of the first spouse is very common in traditional societies, and men in those societies have more freedom in selecting their second spouse. The remaining objection notes that culturally influenced beauty standards vary with time, and that individual men within the same society differ in their tastes. Skinny women may be out this year but in next year, and some men prefer skinny women every year. However, that fact is no more than noise slightly complicating but not invalidating the main conclusion: that men at all places and times have on the average preferred well-nourished women with beautiful faces. ·····

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  That spectacular nature had an ideological impact. The Roman roads expressed the Roman outlook on the world. They did not meander along the contours of geography, but often cut across or bridged over natural obstacles, displaying the emperor’s ability even to subdue topography and dominate nature, not unlike what was implied with centuriation, the rigidly orthogonal division of land and distribution to veterans. The roads were expansionist, designed for Roman troop movement to the periphery, and built without fear of enemies from beyond that periphery daring to use them against Rome (though, ironically, Paul did). As most roads entered cities, they led under triumphal arches commemorating imperial victories. They were marked with milestones that along with distances and dates always proclaimed IMP. CAESAR DIVI F., “Imperator Caesar, Son of God.” They also served as reference points in Roman spatial imagination. In 20 B.C.E. Augustus set up in the Roman Forum beside Saturn’s temple the Golden Milestone (milliarium aureum), which was the starting point of all the imperial roads and recorded distances from all the empire’s great cities. That milestone made Rome the center of the world, whatever Greeks might say about Delphi or Jews might think about Jerusalem. The expanding road system linked up with ports, many of which were constructed or renovated with the newly invented hydraulic concrete. Made from a volcanic sand mixture, it could be poured into casings, floated out to sea in sections, and submerged with remarkable speed. Ports and their breakwaters went up, and Rome was no longer reliant on the natural harbors and the great coastal cities of old, but could redraw the Mediterranean map with nodal centers serving Roman interests, chiefly legionary paths to the periphery and the importation of luxury items and spices from the East and corn from Egypt. STATUES AND TEMPLES. The second wave of Romanization was not just the peculiarity of the emperor cult, but the panoply of Roman imperial theology. The emperor cult, again? By now you may be tired of that whole subject. It has come up, one way or another, in every section of this book, and it will do so until the very end. If we have overwhelmed you somewhat, we have achieved no more than the cumulative effect of all those imperial images and institutions on city dwellers across the Roman Empire. We do insist, however, that the term “emperor cult” is much too narrow. That was, certainly, the core of Roman imperial theology, but, for example, you could hardly take Christian medieval theology and call it a “Christ cult.” It was that, of course, but only as the center of an entire world of meaning. What we stress throughout this book is not the isolated peculiarity of emperor worship, but the integrated universality of imperial theology.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  The Rabbis maintained the biblical attitude of being especially chosen and set aside by God.8 'I am God for all those who come into the world, neverthe less I have conferred My name particularly on My people Israel. '9 It does not seem necessary here to give extensive documentation of the fact that the Rabbis regarded Israel as elect. 10 The point is obvious and will in any case emerge repeatedly in the study. Nor do I wish to defend the Rabbis against the charge of arrogance. 11 The Rabbis were no more plagued by arrogance than any other people who have held a doctrine of election; indeed, the idea that suffering was entailed in the election (to be discussed below) helps to give quite a non-arrogant tone to Rabbinic thought on election. The idea of being privileged as children of Abraham may have been abused, but abuses were criticized by the Rabbis themselves. Smugness was resisted. 12 But leaving such matters aside, we may tum immediately to Rabbinic explana tions of the election. We have already seen passages in which God's election was thought of as being totally gratuitous, without prior cause in those being elected. But the Rabbis regarded God as reasonable, as the just judge who, while he may temper his judgments with mercy, is neither capricious nor arbitrary. Thus one finds that the Rabbis could not rest content with simply saying that God chose Israel, but inquired why he did so. They wished to explain that it was not 'odd of God to choose the Jews'. There are basically three kinds of answers given by the Rabbis to the question of why God chose Israel. One answer is that God offered the covenant (and the commandments attached to it) to all, but only Israel accepted it. The second answer is that God chose Israel because of some merit found either in the patriarchs or in the exodus generation or on the condition of future obedience. The third answer is really not an answer at all; that is, it does not in fact give a reason 8 See especially B. W. Helfgott, The Doctrine of Election in Tannaitic Literature. He shows that the conception of being the chosen people remained stable during the period, while varying in the precise form of elaboration and degree of emphasis from one Rabbi to another. He reasons that the Christian challenge caused the doctrine to be insisted on in certain ways, especially between 70 and 135 c.e. 9 Mek. Mishpatim 20 (Kaspa 4) (334; III, 185; to 23.17). 10 In addition to Helfgott's study cited above, see especially Schechter, Aspects, pp. 46-56. Cf. also Moore, Judaism I, pp. 398f.; K. Hruby, 'Le concept de Revelation dans la theologie rabbinique', Orient Syrien I 1, 1966, pp. 17-50. 11 See Schechter's comment on Luther, Aspects, p. 5 r n. 3. 12 Cf Marmorstein, Merits, p. 38. 88 Tannaitic Literature [I

• From Between Us

  A critic could object that Levent and Martin do not so much have different emotions, but rather different ways of talking about them. Is it not possible that Levent feels the same as Martin (e.g., enormously relieved, good), but is merely expressing these feelings in a different way? Does Levent talk about his family because this is the way in which Turkish people are supposed to talk about their emotions? How different from the involvement of Levent’s social environment is the role of Martin’s friends and the people he ran into in the weeks and months after his accomplishment? Back in the late ’80s, you will recall from chapter 1, I myself might have been that critic, as I was writing in the margins of my colleagues’ manuscripts: “This is emotion talk, not emotion itself.” And it’s true, many emotional events have both MINE and OURS features. As the accounts of Levent and Martin show, emotional events often involve both a Mental and a Relational component, and as such take place both INside and OUtside the person. Yet, there is a real cultural difference in the locus of emotions as either inside, in feelings, internal sensations, and bodily symptoms, or outside, in actions, the relationships with other people, and the situation. When your culture’s model of emotions is MINE, this means that what counts as an emotion, what is important about the emotion, what will be noticed or remembered, and what is acted upon are internal feelings and bodily sensations. But when your culture’s model of emotions is OURS, then relational acts and situational norms and requirements may count as emotions, they are noticed, remembered, and acted upon. A MINE cultural model translates into a very different way of doing emotions than an OURS cultural model. Anybody who is used to a MINE model will recognize that Levent’s episode of pride is different than what they are used to. Why would we assume that Levent is just talking about his emotions a certain way because of social convention? Could we just as readily imagine Martin really having emotions like Levent, but talking about them the way he does because that is the cultural convention among the Dutch-majority people? Probably not. Here is another example of OURS emotions from one of my Surinamese-Dutch respondents, an artist named Romeo. Romeo is reporting inconsiderate behavior by someone he was close to, a fellow artist. Central to Romeo’s story is that this fellow artist tries to gain status and resources by denying them to him, Romeo. Romeo describes his own feeling as “bad, really unpleasant,” but the core of the emotional episode is happening between people, as a contest of status and of access to resources:

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  triumphalism of the age. For it is important to realize that there were two kinds of triumphalism. As we have seen, there was the populist triumphalism of the reinvigorated papacy, whose new victories in the missionary field were seen as adumbrating an ultimate – if still far distant – reinstallation of Rome as the world centre of a ubiquitous Christian creed; every baptized black and yellow baby was bringing that inevitable day nearer. But there was also, during these decades, a species of Protestant triumphalism, linked closely to the huge industrial paramountcy of the Protestant powers, to their burgeoning economic and political empires, and to the very widespread conviction that Protestant theology and moral teaching were intimately, indeed organically, linked to worldly achievement. The picture we have, then, is of two forms of Christianity struggling, peaceably but persistently, for a world religious supremacy which both believed was inevitable. Nowhere was this conviction more strongly held than in the United States. The American Christian Republic was a gigantic success. It was a success because it was, essentially, Protestant; failure was evidence of moral unworthiness. In the 1870s, Henry Ward Beecher used to tell his congregation in New York: ‘Looking comprehensively through city and town and village and country, the general truth will stand, that no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be his sin. . . . There is enough and to spare thrice over; and if men have not enough, it is owing to the want of provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality and wise saving. This is the general truth.’ And a related general truth was that God’s will was directly related to the destiny of a country where success-breeding virtue was predominant. The dynamic of Protestant triumphalism was American triumphalism. George Bancroft, in his History of the United States (1876 edition) began: ‘It is the object of the present work to explain . . . the steps by which a favouring providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory.’ Was it not, as Jonathan Edwards had termed it, ‘the principal kingdom of the Reformation’? Sooner or later the world would follow suit – it was urged to do so, in 1843, by the American missionary Robert Baird, in his Religion in America, projecting the principal of Protestant voluntarism on to a global frame. History and interventionalist theology were blended to produce a new kind of patriotic millenarianism, as in Leonard Woolsey Bacon’s History of American Christianity (1897): ‘By a prodigy of divine providence, the secret of the ages (that a new world lay beyond the sea) had been kept from

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

  1 As of August 2015, Whipping Girl has been cited or discussed in numerous mainstream publications, including Alternet, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, The Chicago Reader, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Marie Claire, Ms. Magazine, NBC News, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, New Republic, New Statesman, NPR, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, The Telegraph, Time, Variety, Vice, Vogue, and Washington Post.2 Trans people’s involvement in both the gay liberation and queer movements is detailed in Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008), 59–89, 121–153. For demographics regarding trans people and sexual orientation, see Jaime M. Grant, Lisa A. Mottet, Justin Tanis, Jack Harrison, Jody L. Herman, and Mara Keisling, Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (Washington: National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 2011), 28.3 I wrote about my 2003 Camp Trans experience in Julia Serano, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2013), 22–36.4 Julia Serano, On the Outside Looking In: a trans woman’s perspective on feminism and the exclusion of trans women from lesbian and women-only spaces (Oakland, CA: Hot Tranny Action, 2005), accessible online at https://juliaserano.com/outside.html.5 Serano, Excluded, 138–168.6 I discuss how these slogans undermine transsexual perspectives and experiences in Serano, Excluded, 105–108. Many people misattribute these slogans to gender theorist Judith Butler, and thereby misinterpret my writings as a direct critique of their work, which is not actually the case as I explain in Julia Serano, “Julia Serano on Judith Butler,” (http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/09/julia-serano-on-judith-butler.html).7 Specifically, I detail how double standards work in Serano, Excluded, 169–199, and expand on gender entitlement (a concept that I introduce here in Whipping Girl to describe how projecting assumptions and meanings onto other people plays a central role in sexism) in Serano, Excluded, 239–256.8 I have since written multiple follow up essays about the origins and uses of cis terminology—they are compiled in Julia Serano, “Julia Serano’s compendium on cisgender, cissexual, cissexism, cisgenderism, cis privilege, and the cis/trans distinction” (http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/12/julia-seranos-compendium-on-cisgender.html).9 Erica Schwiegershausen, “Wait, Cisgender Wasn’t in the Oxford English Dictionary Already?” New York Magazine, June 25, 2015 (http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/06/wait-cisgender-wasnt-in-the-oed-already.html); Anna Diamond, “Why the Oxford English Dictionary’s Addition of Cisgender Matters,” Slate, June 29, 2015 (http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/06/29/cisgender_oxford_english_dictionary_addition.html).10 Specifically, in my essays “Reclaiming Femininity” (Serano, Excluded, 48–69) and Julia Serano, “Empowering Femininity,” Ms., July 28, 2014 (http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/07/28/empowering-femininity).11 Serano, Excluded, 70–98.12 Trudy Ring, “This Year’s Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival Will Be the Last,” The Advocate, April 21, 2015 (http://www.advocate.com/michfest/2015/04/21/years-michigan-womyns-music-festival-will-be-last).13 Specifically in “Part 3: Pathological Science Revisited,” in Julia Serano, Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism (Oakland: Switch Hitter Press, 2016). In brief, gender dysphoria is a slight improvement over gender identity disorder, although they share many of the same problems—e.g., biased wording of the diagnosis seems to encourage gender-reparative therapies over transitioning, and renders happy and healthy post-transition trans people as “forever diagnosable” with gender dysphoria. Transvestic disorder is a greatly expanded version of transvestic fetishism, as it can now potentially be applied to transgender people of any gender or sexual orientation, as well as to those who have experienced it in the past but not the present.14 Julia Serano, “The Case Against Autogynephilia,” International Journal of Transgenderism 12, no. 3 (2010), 176–187; Julia Serano, “Autogynephilia: A Scientific Review, Feminist Analysis, and Alternative ‘Embodiment Fantasies’ Model,” Sociological Review 68, no. 4 (2020), 763–778; and Julia Serano, “Autogynephilia, Ad Hoc Hypotheses, and Handwaving,” Medium, March 31, 2020 (https://juliaserano.medium.com/autogynephilia-ad-hoc-hypotheses-and-handwaving-cecca4f6563d).15 Julia Serano, “Expanding Trans Media Representation: Why Transgender Actors Should Be Cast in Cisgender Roles,” Medium, May 3, 2016 (https://medium.com/gender-2-0/expanding-trans-media-representation-why-transgender-actors-should-be-cast-in-cisgender-roles-f880cb7bb36e).16 Julia Serano, “Rethinking Sexism: How Trans Women Challenge Feminism,” AlterNet, August 4, 2008 (https://web.archive.org/web/20150214022420/http://www.alternet.org/story/93826/rethinking_sexism%3A_how_trans_women_challenge_feminism).17 Riki Wilchins and Taneika Taylor, 70 under 30: Masculinity and the War on America’s Youth (Washington, DC: Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, 2008); Grant et al., Injustice at Every Turn; National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and HIV-Affected Hate Violence in 2013 (2014 Release Edition)” (https://web.archive.org/web/20150718194541/http://equalitymi.org/files/2013-ncavp-hv.pdf).18 Julia Serano, “Cissexism and Cis Privilege Revisited—Part 1: Who Exactly Does ‘Cis’ Refer To?” (http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/10/cissexism-and-cis-privilege-revisited.html); Julia Serano, “Cissexism and Cis Privilege Revisited—Part 2: Reconciling Disparate Uses of the Cis/Trans Distinction” (http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/11/cissexism-and-cis-privilege-revisited.html).19 I introduce and explain the concept of the Activist Language Merry-Go-Round in Julia Serano, “A Personal History of the ‘T-word’ (and some more general reflections on language and activism)” (http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-personal-history-of-t-word-and-some.html), and discuss the idea further in Julia Serano, “On the ‘activist language merry-go-round,’ Stephen Pinker’s ‘euphemism treadmill,’ and ‘political correctness’ more generally” (http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-activist-language-merry-go-round.html) and Julia Serano, “Regarding Trans* and Transgenderism” (http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/08/regarding-trans-and-transgenderism.html).20 Serano, “A Personal History of the ‘T-word’”; Julia Serano, “History of the Word ‘Transgenderism,’” Medium, March 5, 2023 (https://juliaserano.medium.com/the-history-of-the-word-transgenderism-55fd9bbf65cc).Trans Woman Manifesto

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  our new church members’ – and their barter-stores, which stocked virtually everything, often including guns, never sold dolls. The Catholics, with their multiple statues of saints, seemed to offer an easier bridge to Christianity than the overwhelmingly Low Church Anglicans and Nonconformists. Moreover, the Catholics were not internally divided, for the removal of crown control, and the discipline of the new papacy, made inter-order squabbles of the old kind virtually impossible. As in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Catholics vigorously pursued the policy of creating Christian villages, and of removing converts or prospective converts from what were termed ‘the temptations of tribal life’. They set up scores of very large orphan settlements, and units known as ferme-chapelles, in which groups from the main villages were hived off into farming colonies. Where they failed to compete effectively with the Protestants was in the training of native priests: if the Protestants were slow, the Catholics were positively backward. For most of the nineteenth century their policy on this issue was less enlightened than it had been in sixteenth century Japan. Of course neither side talked in terms of competition. When Lavigerie launched his missions into areas where Protestants were already established, his orders were that the White Fathers must never be nearer than eight to ten kilometers to Protestant mission-stations. But these instructions were widely ignored, as perhaps Lavigerie knew they would be. When he decided to penetrate East Africa he did so in the knowledge that conflict was virtually certain, and despite remonstrances and appeals by R. N. Cust of the CMS. He was also aware that on the upper Nile, and to the south of it, French and British political interests were on the point of contact. In fact in Uganda, where the trouble came to a head, the clash was three-sided since the Moslems had been proselytizing there first, since 1844. The explorers Speke and Grant had arrived in 1862, and impressed King Mutesa of the Baganda: ‘I have not heard a white man tell a lie yet . . . the time they were in Uganda they were very good.’ When H. M. Stanley arrived, he was encouraged by Mutesa to bring missionaries, and he appealed for them in a letter to the Daily Telegraph. The first came in 1877, and within five years were followed by a Catholic mission. Baganda society was in some ways orderly and sophisticated, but royal rule was arbitrary and savage. Mutesa ordered summary executions almost every day, and he had the largest collection of wives on missionary record. As Britain, through the presence of military and naval units to the East, through the operations of the British East Africa Company – which

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On May 2, Eck was chosen to take the freshly composed bull to Pope Leo, who was supposed to append his own statement in a preface. Leo was at this time luxuriating outside fetid Rome at his sumptuously outfitted hunting lodge in Magliana on the Tiber. He spent a great deal of time there, usually hunting boars, and was evidently very taken with the noble sport. He is known to have scandalized the papal master of ceremonies by daring to throw off his constricting papal habit in order that he might caper freely about in full hunting costume.3 History records that the hares and other animals native to that area were often insufficient to fire the imagination of the papal nimrod, so he had animals bred nearby that upon his command were released for the chase. But even these sometimes failed to scale the heights of his ambitions; thus he sometimes had more exotic animals delivered to serve as his quarry too. Once an elderly and infirm leopard was captured and ferried to Magliana, there to meet its merciful end at the terrible snow-white hands of Leo himself. Exsurge Domine, 1520, Aetatis 36And so it was in these halcyon environs, influenced by the imagery of the hunt, that Leo in his Latin preface to the bull now likened Luther to a “wild boar” that had invaded the Lord’s vineyard. Later in the short preface, Luther is magically transformed into a slithering serpent that has invaded the field of the Lord. Whether this shift in pejorative bestial imagery from porcine to serpentine was intentional, or whether everyone was simply disinclined to point it out to the profligate pontiff, can never be known. But it is the mighty first words of Leo’s preface that have given the bull its name, Exsurge Domine, which means “Arise, O Lord.” In what surely must have struck Luther as ironic, perhaps even to the point of cheekiness, Leo also wrote, “Arise, O Paul, who by thy teaching and death hast and dost illumine the Church. Arise, all ye saints, and the whole universal Church, whose interpretation of Scripture has been assailed.”4

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I won a prize. Like she had as a young woman-a story she’d tucked into a shoebox with old photographs and a drawing of a redbird my father made when they first met. My photo was in the paper. The day they took the picture my mother took me to get a haircut. My mother and I went to the 7-Eleven to get the newspaper the day the story was supposed to come out. We sat in the car and stared at the picture of me and read the small story about the “writers” who had won prizes. My mother said I looked like a woman. When I looked at the image of myself I looked … like a woman I’d never met. The story I wrote was about a child who had witnessed a crime in a city park-a pedophile has been stealing and molesting children. The only other witness is a blind man on a bench. The blind man has no children. No wife. Just a gentle man. The child and the blind man have to piece the story together to help catch the pedophile. When called upon by authorities to speak, because she is afraid, the child loses her voice. But she is able to talk to the blind man when they are alone together. Each without a sense, they make a story that saves children. The police find out that before the pedophile defiles the child, he whips them on the bare bottom with a belt. The police are able to catch him when they hear the thwack. In the newspaper the judge of the writing contest remarked on how mature my story content was. My mother and father took me out to dinner at the Brown Derby. We didn’t talk. We ate. It was the first story I ever wrote. About Hair and Skin THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT HAIR AND SKIN. In a beautiful wooden box, I have the hair of people I love. I have my sister’s. My own when I was a kid. My son’s. My dead infant’s almost hair. The hair of my best friend in high school. In college. I have Kathy Acker’s hair. Ken Kesey’s hair. My first husband’s hair. The hair of a longtime woman lover - several different colors of it. My second husband’s hair. My third husband’s hair. The hair of two of the dogs I owned. The hair of cats. The hair of- and this one is kind of random - my high school English teacher - who was over the top Christian - so I have Christian hair. I have Buddhist hair. I have atheist hair. Gay hair, straight hair, the hair of a post-op tranny who used to be a Scientologist. The hair of a white wolf. Seriously. I have my mother’s hair. What? I can’t help it. When I get the chance to own the hair of someone important to me, I leap forward a little too zealously.

• From Wild (2012)

  The kind woman from the BLM brought me back to the trail at a place called Walker Pass the next afternoon. As I watched her drive away, I felt both chastened and slightly more confident than I had nine days before when I’d begun my hike. In the previous days, I’d been charged by a Texas longhorn bull, torn and bruised by falls and mishaps, and had navigated my way down a remote road past a mountain that was soon to be blown up. I’d made it through miles of desert, ascended and descended countless mountains, and gone days without seeing another person. I’d worn my feet raw, chafed my body until it bled, and carried not only myself over miles of rugged wilderness, but also a pack that weighed more than half of what I did. And I’d done it alone. That was worth something, right? I thought as I walked through the rustic campground near Walker Pass and found a place to camp. It was late but still light, June in the last week of spring. I pitched my tent and cooked my first hot meal on the trail on my newly functioning stove—dried beans and rice—and watched the sky’s light fade in a brilliant show of colors over the mountains, feeling like the luckiest person alive. It was fifty-two miles to Kennedy Meadows, sixteen to my first water on the trail. In the morning, I loaded my pack with another full supply of water and crossed Highway 178. The next road that crossed the Sierra Nevada was 150 as-the-crow-flies miles north, near Tuolumne Meadows. I followed the PCT along its rocky, ascendant course in the hot morning sun, catching views of the mountains in all directions, distant and close—the Scodies to the near south, the El Paso Mountains far off to the east, the Dome Land Wilderness to the northwest, which I’d reach in a few days. They all looked the same to me, though each was subtly different. I’d become used to having mountains constantly in sight; my vision had changed over the past week. I’d adjusted to the endless miles-long panoramas; become familiar with the perception that I was walking on the land in the very place where it met the sky. The crest. But mostly I didn’t look up. Step by step, my eyes were on the sandy and pebbly trail, my feet sometimes slipping beneath me as I climbed up and switched back. My pack squeaked annoyingly with each step, the sound still emanating from that spot only a few inches from my ear.

• From Wild (2012)

  But later, alone in my apartment, that blank line stuck in my heart. There was no question that if I divorced Paul, I’d choose a new name for myself. I couldn’t continue to be Cheryl Hyphen-Hyphen, nor could I go back to having the name I had had in high school and be the girl I used to be. So in the months that Paul and I hung in marital limbo, unsure of which direction we’d move in, I pondered the question of my last name, mentally scanning words that sounded good with Cheryl and making lists of characters from novels I admired. Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately, I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine. Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn’t embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before. Cheryl Strayed I wrote repeatedly down a whole page of my journal, like a girl with a crush on a boy she hoped to marry. Only the boy didn’t exist. I was my own boy, planting a root in the very center of my rootlessness. Still, I had my doubts. To pick a word out of the dictionary and proclaim it mine felt a bit fraudulent to me, a bit childish or foolish, not to mention a touch hypocritical. For years I’d privately mocked the peers in my hippy, artsy, lefty circles who’d taken on names they’d invented for themselves. Jennifers and Michelles who became Sequoias and Lunas; Mikes and Jasons who became Oaks and Thistles. I pressed on anyway, confiding in a few friends about my decision, asking them to begin calling me by my new name to help me test it out. I took a road trip and each time I happened across a guest book I signed it Cheryl Strayed, my hand trembling slightly, feeling vaguely guilty, as if I were forging a check.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  He grinds out the most difficult 3–2 victory imaginable, basically riding out Ressler after gaining the lead in the third period, hanging on, denying the Cascade kid a chance to get an escape or late reversal that might swing the balance of the match. It is a good and tenuous victory, almost the film negative of his brother’s pummeling of Moorman. Alex Ressler fights to the final seconds, desperately trying to keep his win streak intact. In the end, Nick is just a little tougher, a little more technically sound. He never does allow himself to be driven into the mat. He takes that 3–2 lead and carries it home, the North-Linn fans roaring their approval as the final, seemingly endless half-minute of wrestling time winds the match to a close. In the end, Nick gets his victory, and Tyler Burkle wraps up a typically smashing day with a pin in the finals at 152, and North-Linn advances eight wrestlers to the district tournament at Midland-Wyoming. The Lynx are announced as the team winners of the sectional meet. Bridgewater stands off to one side, watching his individual champions take the podium to receive their medals, and he is informed that by virtue of winning here, the North-Linn team will host a dual against Belle-Plain on the following Tuesday, with the right to advance to the March state dual tournament on the line. Someone mentions that the basketball team is supposed to play a home game Tuesday night in the gym. For the first time in forever, that team will have to give way to the wrestlers. “Tough,” Bridgewater says with a broad smile. “It had to happen sometime.” It happens out here, on a Saturday that goes from nearly balmy to spitting snow in the span of the six or seven hours that it has taken for North-Linn to work this magic inside the Starmont gym. And some of the day does have a magical feel. Nick’s match, in fact, is the one that produces for him the strangest sensation of the season; even after giving up a reversal to Ressler in the second period, “I never even felt in trouble for one minute,” Nick says, shaking his head at the thought. “It was weird. I felt the whole time like I was going to win, even though I knew how close the score was.” And it is close, as close as the score would make it seem. It is exactly close enough to temper Doug’s praise, though it’s obvious that the father has just experienced something like a state of grace while watching both his sons perform to their capabilities in critical moments. “It’s too early to celebrate—three-two for Nick is too close,” Doug says, watching his sons accept their congratulations. “But he’s got it in his head now that he can do it.” It might just be enough. CHAPTER 13Moving DayThe district tournament format in Iowa is as stark and unforgiving as the landscape itself in February.