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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  His crutches, his pallet, the earthenware lamp and wooden spoon in its vessel of clay were objects of admiration to me, the simple tools of a pure life. But Epictetus gave up too many things, and I had been quick to observe that nothing was more dangerously easy for me than mere renunciation. This Indian, more logically, was rejecting life itself. There was much to learn from such pure-hearted fanatics, but on the condition of turning the lesson from the meaning originally intended. These sages were trying to rediscover their god above and beyond the ocean of forms, and to reduce him to that quality of the unique, intangible, and incorporeal which he had foregone in the very act of becoming universe. I perceived differently my relations with the divine. I could see myself as seconding the deity in his effort to give form and order to a world, to develop and multiply its convolutions, extensions, and complexities. I was one of the segments of the wheel, an aspect of that unique force caught up in the multiplicity of things; I was eagle and bull, man and swan, phallus and brain all together, a Proteus who is also a Jupiter. And it was at about this time that I began to feel myself divine. Don't misunderstand me: I was still, and more than ever, the same man, fed by the fruits and flesh of earth, and giving back to the soil their unconsumed residue, surrendering to sleep with each revolution of the stars, and nearly beside myself when too long deprived of the warming presence of love. My strength and agility, both of mind and of body, had been carefully maintained by purely human disciplines. What more can I say except that all that was lived as god-like experience? The dangerous experiments of youth were over, and its haste to seize the passing hour. At forty-eight I felt free of impatience, assured of myself, and as near perfection as my nature would permit, in fact, eternal. Please realize that all this was wholly on the plane of the intellect; the delirium, if I must use the term, came later on. I was god, to put it simply, because I was man. The titles of divinity which Greece conferred upon me thereafter served only to proclaim what I had long since ascertained for myself. I even believe that I could have felt myself god had I been thrown into one of Domitian's prisons, or confined to the pits of a mine. If I make bold to such pretensions, it is because the feeling seems to me hardly extraordinary, and in no way unique. Others besides me have felt it, or will do so in time to come.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “We haven’t really figured out how to make democracy work in the schools,” I said, “but that isn’t reason enough to go back to an elitist system like they have here…” (and I gestured briefly to the dark countryside beyond the window) “…after all, America is the first society in history to confront these problems with a heterogeneous population. It isn’t like France or Sweden or Japan….” ’But do you really think increased permissiveness is the answer?” Ah, permissiveness—the puritan’s key word. “I think we have too little genuine permissiveness,” I said, “and too much bureaucratic disorganization masquerading as permissiveness. Real permissiveness, constructive permissiveness is another story altogether.” Thank you, D. H. Lawrence Wing. He looked puzzled. What did I mean? (The wife was rocking the baby and keeping silent. There seemed to be this unspoken agreement between them that she should shut up and let him appear to be the intellectual. It’s easy to be an intellectual with a mute wife.) What did I mean? I meant myself, of course. I meant that genuine permissiveness promotes independence. I meant that I was determined to take my fate in my own hands. I meant that I was going to stop being a schoolgirl. But I didn’t say that. Instead I nattered on about Education and Democracy and all sorts of generalized garbage. This crashingly boring conversation got us half the way to Calais. Then we shut out the light and went to sleep. The conductor awakened us at some ungodly hour to catch a steamer. When we got off the train it was so misty and I was so sleepy that if someone had marched me into the Channel I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to resist. After that I remember dragging my suitcase down endless corridors, trying to sleep in a folding chair on a pitching deck, and waiting on line in the early-morning damp while the immigration officials inspected our papers. I stared at the white cliffs of Dover for two bleary-eyed hours while we lined up waiting to have our passports stamped. Then there was a cement passageway about a mile long which I dragged my suitcase down to get to the train. When the British Railways came to the rescue at last, the train crawled and stopped and stopped and crawled for four hours to Waterloo. The countryside was bleak and filmed with grime. I thought of Blake and Dark Satanic Mills. I knew I was in England by the smell. NINETEENA 19th-Century Ending …Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny. —D. H. Lawrence The hotel was a creaky old Victorian building near St. James’. It had an ancient cage of an elevator which whirred like a cricket gone mad, desolate hallways, and huge pier glasses on every landing. I inquired at the desk for Doctor Wing.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Despite these heady—excuse the expression—distractions, I was determined to return to New York with a manuscript worth publishing. I kept my promise to myself. I returned in 1969 with a book of poems, which over the next year or so metamorphosed into Fruits & Vegetables , my first book, published in 1971. But also in my luggage the seeds of Fear of Flying were germinating. In Heidelberg, I had been working on a novel called The Man Who Murdered Poets. The protagonist was a young madman who goes off to kill his doppelgänger in order to assume his creative powers. Why a novel in the voice of a madman? Clearly I was trying to deal with the trauma of my first marriage in literary terms. Nabokov was my favorite novelist then and I was pursuing a Nabokovian theme. Underneath these motivations lurked a far more important one. I was convinced that no novel from a female point of view could claim the literary cachet I craved. Here is something that seems astonishing in retrospect. In those days women writers hid in plain sight. I remember searching for a critical book on Emily Dickinson in Butler Library at Columbia and finding it in a series of volumes entitled “American Men of Letters.” Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë were read as bloodless classics rather than as flesh-and-blood women. Edith Wharton was regarded as a lesser Henry James. At Barnard from 1959 to 1963, we almost never read women poets or novelists—though the college was and is noted for its encouragement of female excellence, and has produced an astonishing roster of creative writers: Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Hortense Calisher, Belva Plain, Rosellen Brown, Mary Gordon, Anna Quindlen, Edwige Danticat—to name only a few. Despite this record, modern poetry at Barnard in my day meant T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound. Contemporary fiction meant Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. Women writers were confined to the ghetto of popular culture. Only allowed to shine in the genres of mystery, romance and the historical novel, they were even tolerated when they made big money as long as they did not aspire to literature. But if you wanted to be seen as serious, you had to be male. (Yes, there were a few exceptions—like Mary McCarthy—but most of the women who claimed the pen [such an intrusion on the rights of men] concealed themselves in the ladies’ department of popular fiction.) While I was writing poems from a female point of view, I was writing fiction from a male. Poetry, because it was clandestine and largely unread, allowed me to experiment with female honesty.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It isn’t like France or Sweden or Japan....” ’But do you really think increased permissiveness is the answer?” Ah, permissiveness—the puritan’s key word. “I think we have too little genuine permissiveness,” I said, “and too much bureaucratic disorganization masquerading as permissiveness. Real permissiveness, constructive permissiveness is another story altogether.” Thank you, D. H. Lawrence Wing. He looked puzzled. What did I mean? (The wife was rocking the baby and keeping silent. There seemed to be this unspoken agreement between them that she should shut up and let him appear to be the intellectual. It’s easy to be an intellectual with a mute wife.) What did I mean? I meant myself, of course. I meant that genuine permissiveness promotes independence. I meant that I was determined to take my fate in my own hands. I meant that I was going to stop being a schoolgirl. But I didn’t say that. Instead I nattered on about Education and Democracy and all sorts of generalized garbage. This crashingly boring conversation got us half the way to Calais. Then we shut out the light and went to sleep. The conductor awakened us at some ungodly hour to catch a steamer. When we got off the train it was so misty and I was so sleepy that if someone had marched me into the Channel I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to resist. After that I remember dragging my suitcase down endless corridors, trying to sleep in a folding chair on a pitching deck, and waiting on line in the early-morning damp while the immigration officials inspected our papers. I stared at the white cliffs of Dover for two bleary-eyed hours while we lined up waiting to have our passports stamped. Then there was a cement passageway about a mile long which I dragged my suitcase down to get to the train. When the British Railways came to the rescue at last, the train crawled and stopped and stopped and crawled for four hours to Waterloo. The countryside was bleak and filmed with grime. I thought of Blake and Dark Satanic Mills. I knew I was in England by the smell. T NINETEEN A 19th-Century Ending ...Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny. —D. H. Lawrence he hotel was a creaky old Victorian building near St. James’. It had an ancient cage of an elevator which whirred like a cricket gone mad, desolate hallways, and huge pier glasses on every landing. I inquired at the desk for Doctor Wing. “No one here by that name, Madam,” said a long, thin concierge who looked like Bob Cratchit. My heart sank. “Are you sure?” “Here, you can have a look at the register—if you like....” And he passed the book over to me.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Its publisher, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, had given it a healthy first run of about thirty thousand copies, but those sold out immediately upon publication of a rave review by John Updike in the New Yorker. He called the book a “winner” in the first sentence, said it had “class and sass, brightness and bite” in the second, and placed it in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint. An octogeneric Henry Miller declared that there was finally a female Tropic of Cancer. It was these masculine endorsements—the enraged New York Times review, written by Terry Stokes and dripping with misogyny, allegations of whining, and a soupçon of antisemitism seemed to have backfired—that created the frenzy at the scarcity of new, buyable copies as the world awaited Fear of Flying’s second printing. But Holt never gave it a second run—there was a theory that they were having money problems—and so the book remained a critical hit and an object of desperate desire to those who couldn’t get their hands on it. A year later, it was published in paperback, debuting at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. As I write this half a century later, Fear of Flying has sold more than twenty million copies around the world. Fear of Flying was Erica Jong’s first novel, but not her first book. She was a Barnard graduate, with a master’s degree in eighteenth-century English literature, working toward a PhD at Columbia, and had already published two books of poetry to gracious reviews. The novel made her an instant celebrity. She was cast upon the kind of endless book tour that overtakes an author when a publisher is caught short by a book’s success: more than a year of hastily scheduled panels, readings at colleges and bookstores, bookings on late-night TV, where she had to fend off the sexism of the men who wondered why a nice girl like her was writing so blatantly about sex; she had to endure the confrontations and the castigations of the women who blamed her for contributing to the disintegration of the American family. To each of these people, Erica calmly and simply made her case for women being sexual, emotional, intelligent, sentient, existent—she used her book tour to make a case for the woman as human being.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "And I would forbid you all those tears if they weren't so beautiful. Do you want to please me?" "Yes, my Prince," she said. With his foot he pushed her plate several paces away and told her to turn her buttocks to him as she continued her meal. He admired it, realizing the red marks from her spanking had almost healed. With the toe of his leather boot, he nudged at the silken hair he could see between her legs, felt the moist plump lips beneath the hair, and sighed, thinking her so very beautiful. When she had finished her meal, with her lips she pushed the plate back to his chair as he ordered her to do it, and then he wiped her lips himself and fed her some wine from his cup. He watched her long beautiful throat as she swallowed, and kissed her eyelids. "Now listen to me, I want you to learn from this," he said. "Everyone here can see you, all your charms, you're aware of it. But I want you to be very aware of it. Behind you, the townspeople at the windows are admiring you as they did when I brought you through the town. This should make you proud of yourself, not vain, but proud, proud that you have pleased me, and caught their admiration." "Yes, my Prince," she said when he paused. "Now think, you are very naked and very helpless, and you are mine completely." "Yes, my Prince," she cried softly. "That is your life now, and you are to think of nothing else, and regret nothing else. I want that dignity peeled away from you as if it were so many skins of the onion. I don't mean that you should ever be graceless. I mean that you should surrender to me." "Yes, my Prince," she said. The Prince looked up at the Innkeeper who stood at the kitchen door with his wife and his daughter. They came to attention at once. But the Prince looked only at the daughter. She was a young woman, very pretty in her own way, though nothing compared to Beauty. She had black hair and round cheeks, and a very tiny waist, and she dressed as many peasant women did, in a low-cut ruffled shirtwaist, and a short broad skirt that revealed her smart little ankles. She had an innocent face. She was watching Beauty in wonder, her big brown eyes moving anxiously to the Prince and then shyly back to Beauty who knelt at the Prince's feet in the firelight.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  When I was young, for example, it was an insult to be called black. The blacks have now taken over this once pejorative term and made of it a rallying cry and a badge of honor and are teaching their children to be proud that they arc black. It is true that the children are as vari colored-tea, coffee, chocolate, mocha, honey, eggplant coated with red pepper, red pepper dipped in eggplant-as it is possible for a people to be; black people, here, are no more uniformly black than white people are physically white; but TO BE BAPTIZED 4 7 1 the shades of color, which have been used for so long to dis tress and corrupt our minds and set us against each other, now count, at least in principle, for nothing. Black is a tre mendous spiritual condition, one of the greatest challenges anyone alive can face-this is what the blacks are saying. :Nothing is easier, nor, for the guilt-ridden American, more inevitable, than to dismiss this as chauvinism in reverse. But, in this, white Americans are being-it is a part of their fate-inaccurate. To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, fore\'er, one's interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically. White men have killed black men for refusing to say, "Sir": but it was the corroboration of their worth and their power that they wanted, and not the corpse, still less the staining blood. When the black man's mind is no longer controlled by the white man's fantasies, a new balance or what may be described as an unprecedented inequality begins to make itself felt: for the white man no longer knows who he is, whereas the black man knows them both. For if it is difficult to be released from the stigma of blackness, it is clearly at least equally difficult to surmount the delusion of whiteness. And as the black glories in his new found color, which is his at last, and asserts, not always with the very greatest politeness, the unanswerable \'alidity and power of his being-e,·en in the shadow of death-the white is \'ery often affronted and very often made afraid. He has his reasons, after all, not only for being weary of the entire con cept of color, but fearful as to what may be made of this concept once it has fallen, as it were, into the wrong hands.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  What would come later would be only airy remembrances of the thing called love she used to give me. I felt a kind of peace about Reva seeing her off that day. I’d cost her so much dignity, but the bounty she was now shoving into the trunk of the cab seemed to make up for it. I was absolved. She gave me a hug, kissed my cheek. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “I know you can get through this.” When she pulled away, there were tears in her eyes, maybe just from the cold. “I feel like I won the lottery!” She was happy. I watched her through the tinted glass, smiling and waving as she drove off. • • • AT THE BODEGA, I got two coffees and a piece of prepackaged carrot cake, bought all the garbage bags the Egyptians had in stock, then went back upstairs and packed everything up. Every book, every vase, every plate and bowl and fork and knife. All my videos, even the Star Trek collection. I knew I had to do it. The deep sleep I would soon enter required a completely blank canvas if I was to emerge from it renewed. I wanted nothing but white walls, bare floors, lukewarm tap water. I packed up all my tapes and CDs, my laptop, unmelted candles, all my pens and pencils, all my electric cords and rape whistles and Fodor’s guides to places I never went. I called the Jewish Women’s Council Thrift Shop and told them my aunt had died. Two guys came with a van an hour later, lugging the garbage bags four at a time into the hallway and out of my life forever. They took most of the furniture, too, including the coffee table and the bed frame. I got them to carry out the sofa and the armchair and leave them on the curb. The only pieces of furniture I kept were the mattress, the dining table, and a single aluminum folding chair with a cushion whose stained gray linen cover I threw down the trash chute. Ta-ta. What I kept for myself amounted to one set of towels, two sets of sheets, the duvet, three sets of pajamas, three pairs of cotton underpants, three bras, three pairs of socks, a comb for my hair, a box of Tide laundry detergent, a large bottle of Lubriderm moisturizing lotion. I bought a new toothbrush and four months’ worth of toothpaste and Ivory soap and toilet paper at Rite Aid. A four months’ supply of iron supplements, a women’s daily vitamin, aspirin. I bought packages of plastic cups and plates, plastic cutlery.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  But Kennedy stood hatless and coatless to address the nation: "I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world." Over the months to come Kennedy gave innumerable live press confer- ences before the TV cameras, something no previous president had dared. Facing the firing squad of lenses and questions, he was unafraid, speaking coolly and slightly ironically. What was going on behind those eyes, that smile? People wanted to know more about him. The magazines teased its readers with information—photographs of Kennedy with his wife and children, or playing football on the White House lawn, interviews creating a sense of him as a devoted family man, yet one who mingled as an equal with glamorous stars. The images all melted together—the space race, the Peace Corps, Kennedy facing up to the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis just as he had faced up to Truman. After Kennedy was assassinated, Jackie said in an interview that before he went to bed, he would often play the soundtracks to Broadway musicals, and his favorite of these was Camelot, with its lines, "Don't let it be forgot / that once there was a spot / For one brief shining moment / That was known as Camelot." There would be great presidents again, Jackie said, but never "another Camelot." The name "Camelot" seemed to stick, making Kennedy's thousand days in office resonate as myth. Kennedy's seduction of the American public was conscious and calculated. It was also more Hollywood than Washington, which was not surprising: news. By this strategy he made the news like dreams and like the movies—a realm in which images played out scenarios that accorded with the viewer's deepest yearnings. . . . Never appearing in an actual film, but rather turning the television apparatus into his screen, he became the greatest movie star of the twentieth century. —JOHN HELLMANN, THE KENNEDY OBSESSION: THE AMERICAN MYTH OF JFK But we have seen that, considered as a total phenomenon, the history of the stars repeats, in its own proportions, the history of the gods. Before the gods (before the stars) the mythical universe (the screen) was peopled with specters or phantoms endowed with the glamour and magic of the double. • Several of these presences have progressively assumed body and substance, have taken form, amplified, and flowered into gods and goddesses.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Then, a woman, most often married, was able to control the power dynamic between the sexes by withholding her favors until the knight somehow proved his worth assurance of his love, the fruit of which he enjoyed from that time as fully as he could desire. —QUEEN MARGARET OF NAVARRE, THE HEPTAMERON, QUOTED IN THE VICE ANTHOLOGY, EDITED BY RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES A soldier lays siege to cities, a lover to girls' houses, \ The one assaults city gates, the other front doors. \ Love, like war, is a toss-up. The defeated can recover, \ While some you might think invincible collapse; \ So if you've got love written off as an easy option \ You'd better think twice. Love calls \ For guts and initiative. Great Achilles sulks for Briseis— \ Quick, Trojans, smash through the Argive wall! \ Hector went into battle from Andromache's embraces \ Helmeted by his wife. \ Agamemnon himself, the Supremo, was struck into raptures \ At the sight of Cassandra's tumbled hair; \ Even Mars was caught on the job, felt the blacksmith's meshes— \ Heaven's best scandal in years. Then take \ My own case. I was idle, born to leisure en deshabille, \ Mind softened by lazy scribbling in the shade. \ But love for a pretty girl soon drove the sluggard \ To action, made him join up. \And just look at me now—fighting fit, dead keen on night exercises: \ If you want a cure for slackness, fall in love! —OVID, THE AMORES, TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN 332 • The Art of Seduction and the sincerity of his sentiments. He could be sent on a quest, or made to live among lepers, or compete in a possibly fatal joust for her honor. And this he had to do without complaint. Although the days of the trouba- dour are long gone, the pattern remains: a man actually loves to be able to prove himself, to be challenged, to compete, to undergo tests and trials and emerge victorious. He has a masochistic streak; a part of him loves pain. And strangely enough, the more a woman asks for, the worthier she seems. A woman who is easy to get cannot be worth much. Make people compete for your attention, make them prove themselves in some way, and you will find them rising to the challenge. The heat of seduction is raised by such challenges—show me that you really love me. When one person (of either sex) rises to the occasion, often the other per- son is now expected to do the same, and the seduction heightens. By mak- ing people prove themselves, too, you raise your value and cover up your defects.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Your brain, however, is not wired like a reflex. If it were, you’d be at the mercy of the world, like a sea anemone that reflexively stabs whatever fish happens to brush against its tentacles. The anemone’s sensory neurons, which receive input from the world, are directly connected to its motor neurons for movement. It has no volition. A human brain’s sensory and motor neurons, however, communicate through intermediaries, called association neurons, and they endow your nervous system with a remarkable ability: decision-making. When an association neuron receives a signal from a sensory neuron, it has not one possible action but two. It can stimulate or inhibit a motor neuron. Therefore, the same sensory input can yield different outcomes on different occasions. This is the biological basis of choice, that most prized of human possessions. Thanks to association neurons, if a fish brushes against your skin, you can react with indifference, laughter, violence, or anything in between. You might feel like a sea anemone at times, but you have much more control over your harpoon than you might think.12 Your brain’s control network, which helps select your actions, is composed of association neurons. This network is always engaged, actively selecting your actions; you just don’t always feel in control. In other words, your experience of being in control is just that—an experience.13 Here’s where the law is out of sync with science, thanks to the classical view of human nature. The law defines deliberate choice—free will—as whether you feel in control of your thoughts and actions. It fails to distinguish between your ability to choose—the workings of your control network—and your subjective experience of choice. The two are not the same in the brain.14 Scientists are still trying to figure out how the brain creates the experience of having control. But one thing is certain: there is no scientific justification for labeling a “moment without awareness of control” as emotion.15 What does all this mean for the law? Remember that the legal system decides guilt or innocence based on intent—whether someone meant to commit harm. The law should continue to punish based on how intentional harm is, not on whether emotion is involved or whether a person experiences himself as an agent with volition. Emotions are not temporary deviations from rationality. They are not alien forces that invade you without your consent. They are not tsunamis that leave destruction in their wake. They are not even your reactions to the world. They are your constructions of the world. Instances of emotion are no more out of control than thoughts or perceptions or beliefs or memories. The fact is, you construct many perceptions and experiences and you perform many actions, some that you control a lot and some that you don’t. …

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The Mosuo approach to love and sex may well finally be destroyed by the hordes of Han Chinese tourists who threaten to turn Lugu Lake into a theme-park version of Mosuo culture. But the Mosuo’s persistence in the face of decades—if not centuries—of extreme pressure to conform to what many scientists still insist is human nature stands as a proud, undeniable counter-example to the standard narrative. Mosuo woman (Photo: Jim Goodman) Mosuo women (Photo: Sachi Cunningham/www.germancamera.com) On the Inevitability of Patriarchy Despite societies like the Mosuo’s in which women are autonomous and play crucial roles in maintaining social and economic stability, and plentiful evidence from dozens of foraging societies in which females enjoy high status and respect, many scientists rigidly insist that all societies are and always have been patriarchal. In Why Men Rule (originally titled The Inevitability of Patriarchy), sociologist Steven Goldberg provides an example of this absolutist view, writing, “Patriarchy is universal…. Indeed, of all social institutions there is probably none whose universality is so totally agreed upon…. There is not, nor has there ever been, any society that even remotely failed to associate authority and leadership in suprafamilial areas with the male. There are no borderline cases.”13 Strong words. Yet, in 247 pages, Goldberg fails to mention the Mosuo even once. Goldberg does mention the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, but only in an appendix, where he cites two passages from others’ research. The first, dating to 1934, says that men are generally served food before women. From this, Goldberg concludes that males wield superior power in Minangkabau society. This is as logically consistent as concluding that Western societies must be matriarchal because men often hold doors open for women, allowing them to pass first. The second passage Goldberg cites is from a paper co-authored by anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, suggesting that the Minangkabau men have some degree of authority in the application of various aspects of traditional law. Minangkabau woman and girls (Photo: Christopher Ryan)14 There are two big problems with Goldberg’s application of Sanday’s work. First, there is no inherent contradiction between claiming that a society is not patriarchal and yet that men do enjoy various types of authority. This is simply illogical: Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night is not a “yellow painting,” though there is plenty of yellow in it. The second problem with this citation is that Peggy Reeves Sanday, the anthropologist Goldberg cites, has consistently argued that the Minangkabau are matriarchal. In fact, her most recent book about the Minangkabau is called Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy.15

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  See Lolita , [P ART O NE ] c9.1 , [P ART T WO ] c3.1 , c11.1 , c23.1 , and c32.1 ; and patients … had witnessed their own conception , King Sigmund , auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac , and Viennese medicine man . John Ray, Jr. : the first John Ray (1627–1705) was an English naturalist famous for his systems of natural classification. His system of plant classification greatly influenced the development of systematic botany ( Historia plantarium , 1686–1704). He was the first to attempt a definition of what constitutes a species. His system of insects, as set forth in Methodus insectorum (1705) and Historia insectorum (1713), is based on the concept of metamorphosis (see not human, but nymphic ). The reference to Ray is no coincidence (it was first pointed out by Diana Butler, in “Lolita Lepidoptera,” New World Writing 16 [1960], p. 63). Nabokov was a distinguished lepi-dopterist, worked in Lepidoptera as a Research Fellow in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard (1942–1948), and published some twenty papers on the subject. While I was visiting him in 1966, he took from the shelf his copy of Alexander B. Klots’s standard work, A Field Guide to the Butterflies (1951), and, opening it, pointed to the first sentence of the section on “Genus Lycæides Scudder : The Orange Margined Blues,” which reads: “The recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus” (p. 164). “That’s real fame,” said the author of Lolita . “That means more than anything a literary critic could say.” In Speak, Memory (Chapter Six), he writes evocatively of his entomological forays, of the fleeting moments of ecstasy he experiences in catching exquisite and rare butterflies. These emotions are perhaps best summarized in his poem “A Discovery” (1943; from Poems , p. 15), its twentieth line echoing what he said to me more than two decades later: I found it in a legendary land all rocks and lavender and tufted grass, where it was settled on some sodden sand hard by the torrent of a mountain pass. The features it combines mark it as new to science: shape and shade—the special tinge, akin to moonlight, tempering its blue, the dingy underside, the checquered fringe. My needles have teased out its sculptured sex; corroded tissues could no longer hide that priceless mote now dimpling the convex and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  As you find out more about them—their strengths, and more important their weaknesses—you can individualize your attention, appealing to their specific desires and needs, tailoring your flatteries to their insecurities. By adapting to their spirit and empathizing with their woes, you can make them feel bigger and better, validating their sense of self-worth. Make them the star of the show and they will become Birds are taken with pipes that imitate their own voices, and men with those sayings that are most agreeable to their own opinions. —SAMUEL BUTLER Go with the bough, you'll bend it; \ Use brute force, it'll snap. \ Go with the current: that's how to swim across rivers— \ Fighting upstream's no good. \ Go easy with lions or tigers if you aim to tame them; \ The bull gets inured to the plough by slow degrees. . . . \ So, yield if she shows resistance: \ That way you'll win in the end. fust be sure to play \ The part she allots you. Censure the things she censures, \ Endorse her endorsements, echo her every word, \ Pro or con, and laugh whenever she laughs; remember, \ If she weeps, to weep too: take your cue \ From her every expression. Suppose she's playing a board game, \ Then throw the dice carelessly, move \ Your pieces all wrong. . . . \ Don't jib at a slavish task like holding \ Her mirror: 81 82 • The Art of Seduction addicted to you and grow dependent on you. On a mass level, make ges- tures of self-sacrifice (no matter how fake) to show the public that you share their pain and are working in their interest, self-interest being the public form of egotism. Be a source of pleasure. No one wants to hear about your problems and troubles. Listen to your targets' complaints, but more important, distract them from their problems by giving them pleasure. (Do this often enough and they will fall under your spell.) Being lighthearted and fun is always more charming than being serious and critical. An energetic presence is likewise more charming than lethargy, which hints at boredom, an enor- mous social taboo; and elegance and style will usually win out over vul- garity, since most people like to associate themselves with whatever they think elevated and cultured. In politics, provide illusion and myth rather than reality. Instead of asking people to sacrifice for the greater good, talk of grand moral issues. An appeal that makes people feel good will translate into votes and power. Bring antagonism into harmony. The court is a cauldron of resentment and envy, where the sourness of a single brooding Cassius can quickly turn into a conspiracy.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  If people believe you have a plan, that you know where you are going, they will follow you instinctively. The direction does not matter: pick a cause, an ideal, a vision and show that you will not sway from your goal. People will imagine that your confidence comes from something real—just as the ancient Hebrews believed Moses was in communion with God, simply because he showed the outward signs. Purposefulness is doubly charismatic in times of trouble. Since most people hesitate before taking bold action (even when action is what is re- quired), single-minded self-assurance will make you the focus of attention. People will believe in you through the simple force of your character. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power amidst the Depression, much of the public had little faith he could turn things around. But in his first few months in office he displayed such confidence, such decisiveness and clarity And the Lord said to Moses, "Write these words; in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel." And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tables of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. And when Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them; and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses talked with them. And afterward all the people of Israel came near, and he gave them in commandment all that the Lord had spoken with him in Mount Sinai. And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face; but whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the veil off, until he came out; and when he came out, and told the people of Israel what he was commanded, the people of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses's face shone; and Moses would put the veil upon his face again, until he went in to speak with him. —EXODUS 34:27 OLD TESTAMENT The Charismatic • 99 in dealing with the country's many problems, that the public began to see him as their savior, someone with intense charisma. Mystery.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  And as with Casanova, your reputation as one who gives such pleasure will precede you and make your seductions that much The cultivation of the pleasures of the senses was ever my principal aim in life. Knowing that I was personally calcu- lated to please the fair sex, I always strove to make myself agreeable to it. —CASANOVA The Beauty Ideal I n 1730, when Jeanne Poisson was a mere nine years old, a fortune-teller predicted that one day she would be the mistress of Louis XV. The pre- diction was quite ridiculous, since Jeanne came from the middle class, and it was a tradition stretching back for centuries that the king's mistress be chosen from among the nobility. To make matters worse, Jeanne's father was a notorious rake, and her mother had been a courtesan. Fortunately for Jeanne, one of her mother's lovers was a man of great wealth who took a liking to the pretty girl and paid for her education. Jeanne learned to sing, to play the clavichord, to ride with uncommon skill, to act and dance; she was schooled in literature and history as if she were a boy. The playwright Crébillon instructed her in the art of conversation. During the early 1970s, against a turbulent political backdrop that included the fiasco of American involvement in the Vietnam War and the downfall of President Richard Nixon's presidency in the Watergate scandal, a "me generation" sprang to prominence—and [Andy] Warhol was there to hold up its mirror. Unlike the radicalized protesters of the 1960s who wanted to change all the ills of society, the self- absorbed "me" people sought to improve their bodies and to "get in touch" with their own feelings. They cared passionately about their appearance, health, life- style, and bank accounts. Andy catered to their self- centeredness and inflated pride by offering his services as a portraitist. By the end of the decade, he would be internationally recognized as one of the leading portraitists of his era. . . . • Warhol offered his clients an irresistible product: a stylish and flattering portrait by a famous artist who was himself a certified celebrity. Conferring an alluring star presence upon even the most celebrated of faces, he transformed his subjects into glamorous apparitions, presenting their faces as he thought they wanted to be seen and remembered. By filtering his sitters' good features through his silkscreens and exaggerating their vivacity, he enabled them to gain entree to a more mythic and rarefied level of existence. The possession of great wealth and power might do for everyday life, but the commissioning of a portrait by Warhol was a 34 • The Art of Seduction On top of it all, Jeanne was beautiful, and had a charm and grace that set her apart early on. In 1741, she married a man of the lower nobility.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Our actions, gestures, the things we say, all have positive effects on this person; we may not com- pletely understand what we have done right, but this feeling of power is in- toxicating. It gives us confidence, which makes us more seductive. We may also experience this in a social or work setting—one day we are in an ele- vated mood and people seem more responsive, more charmed by us. These moments of power are fleeting, but they resonate in the memory with great intensity. We want them back. Nobody likes to feel awkward or timid or unable to reach people. The siren call of seduction is irresistible because power is irresistible, and nothing will bring you more power in the modern world than the ability to seduce. Repressing the desire to seduce is a kind of No man hath it in his power to over-rule the deceitfulness of a woman. —MARGUERITE OF NAVARRE This important side-track, by which woman succeeded in evading man's strength and establishing herself in power, has not been given due consideration by historians. From the moment when the woman detached herself from the crowd, an individual finished product, offering delights which could not be obtained by force, but only by flattery .... the reign of love's priestesses was inaugurated. It was a development of far-reaching importance in the history of civilization. . . . Only by the circuitous route of the art of love could woman again assert authority, and this she did by asserting herself at the very point at which she would normally be a slave at the man's mercy. She had discovered the might of lust, the secret of the art of love, the daemonic power of a passion artificially aroused and never satiated. The force tints unchained was thenceforth to count among the most tremendous of the world's forces and at moments to have power even over life and death. . . . • The deliberate spell- binding of man's senses was to have a magical effect upon him, opening up an infinitely wider range of sensation and spurring him on as if impelled by an inspired dream. —ALEXANDER VON GLEICHEN- RUSSWURM, THE WORLD'S LURE, TRANSLATED BY HANNAH WALLER xxii • Preface hysterical reaction, revealing your deep-down fascination with the process; you are only making your desires stronger. Some day they will come to the surface. To have such power does not require a total transformation in your character or any kind of physical improvement in your looks. Seduction is a game of psychology, not beauty, and it is within the grasp of any person to become a master at the game. All that is required is that you look at the world differently, through the eyes of a seducer. A seducer does not turn the power off and on—every social and per- sonal interaction is seen as a potential seduction. There is never a moment to waste. This is so for several reasons.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Instead, create your own fashion sense by adapting and altering prevailing styles to make yourself an object of fascination. Do this right and you will be wildly imitated. The Count d'Orsay, a great London dandy of the 1830s and 1840s, was closely watched by fashionable people; one day, caught in a sudden London rainstorm, he bought a paltrok, a kind of heavy, hooded duffle coat, off the back of a Dutch sailor. The paltrok immediately became the coat to wear. Having people imitate you, of course, is a sign of your powers of seduction. The nonconformity of Dandies, however, goes far beyond appearances. It is an attitude toward life that sets them apart; adopt that attitude and a circle of followers will form around you. Dandies are supremely impudent. They don't give a damn about other people, and never try to please. In the court of Louis XIV, the writer La Bruyere noticed that courtiers who tried hard to please were invariably on the way down; nothing was more anti-seductive. As Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote, "Dandies please women by displeasing them." Impudence was fundamental to the appeal of Oscar Wilde. In a Lon- don theater one night, after the first performance of one of Wilde's plays, the ecstatic audience yelled for the author to appear onstage. Wilde made them wait and wait, then finally emerged, smoking a cigarette and wearing an expression of total disdain. "It may be bad manners to appear here smoking, but it is far worse to disturb me when I am smoking," he scolded his fans. The Count d'Orsay was equally impudent. At a London club one night, a Rothschild who was notoriously cheap accidentally dropped a gold coin on the floor, then bent down to look for it. The count immediately whipped out a thousand-franc note (worth much more than the coin), rolled it up, lit it like a candle, and got down on all fours, as if to help light the way in the search. Only a Dandy could get away with such audacity. The insolence of the Rake is tied up with his desire to conquer a woman; he cares for nothing else. The insolence of the Dandy, on the other hand, is aimed at society and its conventions. It is not a woman he cares to conquer but a whole group, an entire social world. And since people are generally oppressed by the obligation of always being polite and self-sacrificing, they are delighted to spend time around a person who disdains such niceties. Dandies are masters of the art of living.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “The matter is quite simple,” I replied. “Even in the most harmonious of households, as ours is, not all decisions are taken by the female partner. There are certain things that the husband is there to decide. I can well imagine the thrill that you, a healthy American gal, must experience at crossing the Atlantic on the same ocean liner with Lady Bumble—or Sam Bumble, the Frozen Meat King, or a Hollywood harlot. And I doubt not that you and I would make a pretty ad for the Traveling Agency when portrayed looking—you, frankly starry-eyed, I, controlling my envious admiration—at the Palace Sentries, or Scarlet Guards, or Beaver Eaters, or whatever they are called. But I happen to be allergic to Europe, including merry old England. As you well know, I have nothing but very sad associations with the Old and rotting World. No colored ads in your magazines will change the situation.” “My darling,” said Charlotte. “I really—” “No, wait a minute. The present matter is only incidental. I am concerned with a general trend. When you wanted me to spend my afternoons sunbathing on the Lake instead of doing my work, I gladly gave in and became a bronzed glamor boy for your sake, instead of remaining a scholar and, well, an educator. When you lead me to bridge and bourbon with the charming Farlows, I meekly follow. No, please, wait. When you decorate your home, I do not interfere with your schemes. When you decide—when you decide all kinds of matters, I may be in complete, or in partial, let us say, disagreement—but I say nothing. I ignore the particular. I cannot ignore the general. I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules. I am not cross. I am not cross at all. Don’t do that. But I am one half of this household, and have a small but distinct voice.” She had come to my side and had fallen on her knees and was slowly, but very vehemently, shaking her head and clawing at my trousers. She said she had never realized. She said I was her ruler and her god. She said Louise had gone, and let us make love right away. She said I must forgive her or she would die. This little incident filled me with considerable elation. I told her quietly that it was a matter not of asking forgiveness, but of changing one’s ways; and I resolved to press my advantage and spend a good deal of time, aloof and moody, working at my book—or at least pretending to work.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Despite its lack of curlicues, the human penis is not without interesting design features. Primate sexuality expert Alan Dixson writes, “In primates which live in family groups consisting of an adult pair plus offspring [such as gibbons] the male usually has a small and relatively unspecialized penis.” Say what you will about the human penis, but it ain’t small or unspecialized. Reproductive biologist Roger Short (real name) writes, “The great size of the erect human penis, in marked contrast to that of the Great Apes, makes one wonder what particular evolutionary forces have been at work.” Geoffrey Miller just comes out and says it: “Adult male humans have the longest, thickest, and most flexible penises of any living primate.”1 So there. Homo sapiens: the great ape with the great penis! The unusual flared glans of the human penis forming the coronal ridge, combined with the repeated thrusting action characteristic of human intercourse—ranging anywhere from ten to five hundred thrusts per romantic interlude—creates a vacuum in the female’s reproductive tract. This vacuum pulls any previously deposited semen away from the ovum, thus aiding the sperm about to be sent into action. But wouldn’t this vacuum action also draw away a man’s own sperm? No, because upon ejaculation, the head of the penis shrinks in size before any loss of tumescence (stiffness) in the shaft, thus neutralizing the suction that might have pulled his own boys back.2 Very clever. Penis Lengths of African Apes (cm) Intrepid researchers have demonstrated this process, known as semen displacement, using artificial semen made of cornstarch (the same recipe used to simulate exaggerated ejaculates in many pornographic films), latex vaginas, and artificial penises in a proper university laboratory setting. Professor Gordon G. Gallup and his team reported that more than 90 percent of the cornstarch mixture was displaced with just a single thrust of their lab penis. “We theorize that as a consequence of competition for paternity, human males evolved uniquely configured penises that function to displace semen from the vagina left by other males,” Gallup told BBC News Online. It bears repeating that the human penis is the longest and thickest of any primate’s—in both absolute and relative terms. And despite all the bad press they get, men last far longer in the saddle than bonobos (fifteen seconds), chimps (seven seconds), or gorillas (sixty seconds), clocking in between four and seven minutes, on average. Average Copulation Duration (seconds) The chimpanzee penis, meanwhile, is a thin, conical appendage without the flared glans of the human member. Nor is sustained thrusting common to chimpanzee or bonobo copulation. (But really, how much sustained anything can you expect in seven seconds?) So while our closest ape cousins may have us beat in the testicles department, they lose to the human penis on size, duration, and cool design features. Furthermore, the average seminal volume in a human ejaculate is about four times that of chimpanzees, bringing the total number of sperm cells per ejaculate within range of the chimp’s.