Realization

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 Untrue (2018)

  Is monogamy a privilege or a prison for women? Is it a choice, or does it subvert choice? Is it a luxury or a deprivation? The lesson of the Himba and the omoka child is: it depends. On context. The interlocking, impossible-to-disentangle factors of biology, culture, and environmental circumstances mean sexual and social behaviors will be malleable; gamete production cannot explain or account for much beyond itself. For the Himba, cheating women who have had their hands forced by the choices of others come out on top in the game of reproductive success, while monogamy potentially disadvantages those women who are privileged enough to choose it, along with choosing their own husbands. This may be why, when I asked Brooke Scelza whether doing fieldwork among the Himba and speaking to those women about sex had changed her personal view on monogamy, she nodded. She joked about having two children under the age of four, and her work, and her marriage, and said that in addition to not wanting to hurt her husband, who, like her, lives in a culture that expects monogamy even as it winks about its improbability, she could not imagine adding an affair to the mix. Then she laughed and told me she loved her husband very much and wasn’t implying that were it not for being busy with kids and work, she would be having extra-pair dalliances—she didn’t mean that at all. “It’s more that in our society it’s hard to imagine having the bandwidth for that.” Then she said, with utmost care, “Well, it was. I used to think it was very straightforward. It was hard to understand women who felt differently than I did. Now I see that all of this is very, very complicated.” Scelza’s remarkable achievement, among others, is helping us understand that “going to the far place to get water” or not going there, even in a context where there is comparatively little social censure or judgment about which you choose, is nevertheless a choice with surprising and profound consequences. Chapter Six

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  This book is the condensation of a vast work composed for myself alone. I had taken the habit of writing each night, in almost automatic fashion, the result of those long, self-induced visions whereby I could place myself intimately within another period of time. The merest word, the slightest gesture, the least perceptible implications were noted down; scenes now summed up in a line or two, in the book as it is, passed before me in fullest detail, and as if in slow motion. Added all together, these accounts would have afforded material for a volume of several thousand pages, but each morning I would burn the work of the night before. In such fashion I wrote a great number of decidedly abstruse meditations, and several descriptions bordering on the obscene. He who seeks passionately for truth, or at least for accuracy, is frequently the one best able to perceive, like Pilate, that truth is not absolute or pure. Hence, mingled with his most direct assertions we find hesitations, devi-ousness, and reservations which a more conventional mind would not evince. At certain moments, though very seldom, it has even occurred to me that the emperor was lying. In such cases I had to let him lie, like the rest of us. The utter fatuity of those who say to you, "By 'Hadrian' you mean yourself!" Almost as unsubtle as those who wonder why one should choose a subject so remote in time and in space. The sorcerer who pricks his thumb before he evokes the shades knows well that they will heed his call only because they can lap his blood. He knows, too, or ought to know, that the voices who speak to him are wiser and more worthy of attention than are his own clamorous outcries. It did not take me long to realize that I had embarked upon the life of a very great man. From that time on, still more respect for truth, closer attention, and, on my part, ever more silence. In a sense, every life that is recounted is offered as an example; we write in order to attack or to defend a view of the universe, and to set forth a system of conduct which is our own. It is none the less true, however, that nearly every biographer disqualifies himself by over-idealizing his subject or by deliberate disparagement, by exaggerated stress on certain details or by cautious omission of others. Thus a character is arbitrarily constructed, taking the place of the man to be understood and explained. A human life cannot be graphed, whatever people may say, by two virtual perpendiculars, representing what a man believed himself to be and what he wished to be, plus a flat horizontal for what he actually was; rather, the diagram has to be composed of three curving lines, extended to infinity, ever meeting and ever diverging. Whatever one does, one always rebuilds the monument in his own way.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  A truly unexpected, personal consequence of adopting Darwin’s aesthetic view of life has been the discovery of new insights into the evolutionary impact of sexual coercion and sexual autonomy. When Patricia Brennan first proposed to work with me on the evolution of duck genitalia, I thought to myself, “Well, I’ve never worked on that end of the bird before.” I figured we would learn a lot of interesting anatomy, but I never imagined how the project would grow or that the results would transform my view of evolution so profoundly and raise so many surprising new directions and implications. Of course, it has long been clear that sexual coercion and sexual violence are directly harmful to the well-being of female animals. But the aesthetic perspective allows us to understand that sexual coercion also infringes upon their individual freedom of choice. Once we recognize that coercion undermines individual sexual autonomy, we are led, inexorably, to the discovery that freedom of choice matters to animals. Sexual autonomy is not a mythical and poorly conceived legal concept invented by feminists and liberals. Rather, sexual autonomy is an evolved feature of the societies of many sexual species. As we have learned from ducks and other birds, when sexual autonomy is abridged or disrupted by coercion or violence, mate choice itself can provide the evolutionary leverage to assert and expand the freedom of choice. In the later chapters of the book, I have proposed that the evolutionary struggle for female sexual autonomy played a critical role in the evolution of human sexuality and reproduction and was a critical factor in the evolution of humanity itself. But if this is true, why aren’t the women of the world enjoying the proposed fruits of this evolutionary process—universal fulfillment of sexual and social autonomy? The ongoing existence of rape, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, arranged marriage, honor killings, everyday sexism, economic dependence, and political subservience of women in many human cultures might seem to be direct evidence to falsify this view of human evolutionary history. Are we forced to acknowledge that such behaviors are an inescapable part of “human nature”—a part of our evolutionary legacy that humans will never overcome? I think not, and sexual conflict theory can help us to understand why.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Diamond and Parish have helped articulate a new language for something not so new (if we take the long evolutionary view of things), something confounding to our established and comforting categories. The phenomena of female sexual fluidity and coalition building through sex is not limited to bonobos, or to women in L.A. and Manhattan. It does not only happen in glamorous cities like Berlin and Vienna, or “enlightened” places like San Francisco. In Lesotho, a small country surrounded by South Africa, it is not uncommon for married women with children to have a motsoalle—basically a special female friend and sexual partner. Often these motsoalles are taken by women whose husbands are off doing manual labor for days at a time, but not always. Among the !Kung, it is common for adolescent girls to experiment with one another sexually before marriage. And the mati is a widespread institution among Creole working-class women in the city of Paramaribo, Suriname. Mati are women who have sexual relationships with men and with women, either at the same time or one at a time. While some mati, especially older women who have borne and raised their children, do not have sex with men anymore, younger mati have a variety of arrangements with men, such as marriage, concubinage, or a “visiting” relationship. Women’s relationships with women mostly take the form of visiting relationships, though some female couples and their children live together in one household. In our backyards and far away, female sexual fluidity may seem to suggest that women are uniquely designed for sexual receptivity and sexual pleasure, allowing us to find it, even if only in our minds, with a nearly infinite variety of sexual partners. While we have no hard and fast figures, it’s clear that there are any number of women whose sexual behaviors might contradict their avowed sexual orientation. As for women’s sexual fantasies, daydreams, preferences for pornography, and imaginations, when we consider this whole category of non-behaviors that nonetheless tell us a story about female sexual desire, the numbers of women who think about being with a woman would no doubt shock us—unless we are couples therapists or sex researchers, who tend to take these things in stride, publish academic papers about it, and wait for the rest of the world to catch up. A Boise State University study of 333 women who identified as heterosexual found that 43 percent had “made out with” another woman. In a Glamour survey of more than 1,000 women aged eighteen to forty-four, 47 percent of respondents said they’d been attracted to another woman, and 31 percent had had a sexual experience with another woman. And it’s not limited to women being “gay until graduation.” As Lisa Diamond commented on the study, “We consider it a sign of maturity to figure out who you are sexually…We have this idea that sexuality gets clearer and more defined as time goes on. I’ve seen it’s really the opposite.”

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  What then displaced the self-evidence of this “fleshly” identity for Paul was an experience of “spirit” although that experience never erased or cancelled out in any way the continuing—albeit now limited—truth of such an identity. As long as Paul remained the “flesh and blood” body that he thus far always had been, he was obviously and wholly Ioudaios. In fact, Paul was persuaded that the experience of “spirit” that eventual y displaced this earthly “fleshly” identity that he natural y received from his (Hebrew) mother’s womb—as if the former possibility somehow always had been a constitutive component of his incarnate existence as a “Jew.” Nonetheless, at the point in this incarnate existence when the God who was supposed to have designated Paul’s patently Jewish body for such a purpose “chose … to unveil his son in me” (Gal 1:15– 16) Paul came to know his Jewish flesh differently. While he never denied it as such—to wit, his body’s obvious Jewishness or the fact that Paul like others of his kind plainly was a Hebrew, Israelite, seed of Abraham, Benjaminite, and so on—Paul also claimed simultaneously another identity for himself. This other identity was as someone in whom the fleshly “I” no longer lived. Instead, according to Paul, it was now “Christ [who] lives in me” (Gal 2:20). And this apparently made all the difference (at least to Paul) since it implied that the self-evident truth of his own flesh no longer articulated sufficiently the truth of the world in which Paul now found himself. That truth was an identity beyond or above or in excess of the mundane facts of his own “nature. ”19 18 Even though it is quite clear that both terms “Jew” and “male” could polemical y be subtracted from the social identity of someone who otherwise “obviously” was one or both of them. 19 Lest we think, however, that this extraordinary truth was merely a function of Paul having drifted somehow into the realm of the metaphysical, it is important to remember the correlative claim made 49 Paul’s Earthly Identity 49 What Shall We Say about Al This? This is the point, I think, at which our habitual myopia regarding the historical strangeness or peculiarity or uniqueness (if you want) of our own modern North Atlantic late-capitalist nationalist sense of human identity comes to the fore. At least, we still seem to take it for granted as if it were a self-evident fact that the individual physical body would be the basis for having any sort of social identity at all; as if that material entity somehow were matter-of-factly the obvious framework for defining who a person essential y is. But this is hardly so clear—at least not if Marshall Sahlins’ reading of a wide range of anthropological literature is to be taken into account.20

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  My grandfather’s murder left us with so many questions. Now, decades later, I was starting to understand. In preparing litigation on behalf of the children we were representing, it was clear that these shocking and senseless crimes couldn’t be evaluated honestly without understanding the lives these children had been forced to endure. And, in banning the death penalty for juveniles, the Supreme Court had paid great attention to the emerging body of medical research about adolescent development and brain science and its relevance to juvenile crime and culpability. Contemporary neurological, psychological, and sociological evidence has established that children are impaired by immature judgment, an underdeveloped capacity for self-regulation and responsibility, vulnerability to negative influences and outside pressures, and a lack of control over their own impulses and their environment. Generally considered to encompass ages twelve to eighteen, adolescence is defined by radical transformation, including the obvious and often distressing physical changes associated with puberty (increases in height and weight and sex-related changes) as well as progressive gains in the capacity for reasoned and mature judgment, impulse control, and autonomy. As we later explained to the Court, experts had come to the following conclusion: “A rapid and dramatic increase in dopaminergic activity within the socioemotional system around the time of puberty” drives the young adolescent toward increased sensation-seeking and risk-taking; “this increase in reward seeking precedes the structural maturation of the cognitive control system and its connections to areas of the socioemotional system. A maturational process that is gradual, unfolds over the course of adolescence, and permits more advanced self-regulation and impulse control...The temporal gap between the arousal of the socioemotional system, which is an early adolescent development, and the full maturation of the cognitive control system, which occurs later, creates a period of heightened vulnerability to risk taking during middle adolescence.” These biological and psychosocial developments explain what is obvious to parents, teachers, and any adult who reflects on his or her own teenage years: Young teens lack the maturity, independence, and future orientation that adults have acquired. It seemed odd to have to explain in a court of law something so fundamental about childhood, but the commitment to harsh punishments for children was so intense and reactionary that we had to articulate these basic facts. We argued in court that, relative to that of adults, young teenage judgment is handicapped in nearly every conceivable way: Young adolescents lack life experience and background knowledge to inform their choices; they struggle to generate options and to imagine consequences; and, perhaps for good reason, they lack the necessary self-confidence to make reasoned judgments and stick by them. We argued that neuroscience and new information about brain chemistry help explain the impaired judgment that teens often display.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I paused again to let the meaning of this sink in. “Based on the testimony of Ralph Myers, Walter McMillian was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. As you’re about to hear, the testimony of Ralph Myers was completely false. Again, Your Honor, the testimony of Ralph Myers at trial was completely false.” I took a moment before turning to the bailiff to call Myers to the stand. The courtroom was silent until the deputy opened the door to the holding area and Ralph Myers walked into the courtroom. There was an audible reaction to his presence. Ralph had aged visibly since the last time many of the people in the courtroom had seen him; I could hear murmurs about how his hair had grayed. Dressed in his prison whites, Myers once again appeared small and sad to me as he climbed up onto the witness stand. He looked around the courtroom nervously before raising his hand and swearing an oath to tell the truth. I waited until the courtroom became quiet. Judge Norton was looking at Myers attentively. I walked over to begin my examination. After asking him to state his name for the record and establishing that he had previously appeared in court and testified against Walter McMillian, it was time to get to the heart of things. I walked closer to the witness stand. “Mr. Myers, was the testimony that you gave at Mr. McMillian’s trial true?” I was hoping that the judge couldn’t see I was holding my breath waiting for Ralph to answer. Ralph looked at me coolly but then spoke very clearly and confidently. “Not at all.” There was more murmuring in the courtroom now, but the crowd quickly quieted to hear more. “Not at all,” I repeated before continuing. I wanted Ralph’s recantation to sink in, but I didn’t want to hesitate too long because we needed a lot more. “Did you see Mr. McMillian on the day that Ronda Morrison was murdered?” “Absolutely not.” Ralph looked steady as he spoke. “Did you drive his truck into Monroeville on that day?” “Absolutely not.” “Did you go into Jackson Cleaners when Ronda Morrison was murdered?” “No. Never did.” I didn’t want the court to think that Ralph was robotically denying everything I asked him, so I asked a question that required an affirmative answer. “Now, at Mr. McMillian’s trial, did you give some testimony that there was a white man inside the cleaners when you went inside?” “Yes, I did.” I had gone as long as I dared asking Ralph yes/no questions. “What was that testimony, please?” “As I can recall, the testimony was that I had overheard Walter McMillian saying something to this guy, and I had also recalled saying that I had seen the back part of his head, but that’s just about all I can recall on that.” “Was that testimony true, Mr. Myers?” “No, it wasn’t.” Now the judge leaned in to listen with rapt attention.

• From Untrue (2018)

  For Hrdy, an idea soon began to take form. An infanticidal male “eliminated the offspring of the last choice a female had made,” thereby causing the mother (who was no longer lactating) to resume cycling and to ovulate sooner than she would have had her infant survived, drastically “distorting her options.” In order not to be outbred by competing females, she needed to mate with the male now available, the male who would presumably keep another potentially infanticidal invader at bay, even if that male was her baby’s killer. “All this made sense in light of Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection, that is, males competing with other males for access to matings with the outcome for the loser of not death, but few or no offspring,” as Hrdy told me in an email recalling her fieldwork in Abu. But what about the females? What was motivating them? How might their behavior be adaptive? Once a male had killed her offspring and she cycled again, particularly if the murderous male was guarding her closely from other males, it was in a female’s best interest to mate with him. But she wouldn’t stop there. Once she realized that males were only attacking offspring born to females with whom they had never mated, offspring they could not possibly have sired, Hrdy hypothesized that females might seek to manipulate information available to males about paternity by preemptively mating with potential invaders. Confounding prevailing wisdom that female primates only mate at midcycle, when they are in estrus, Hrdy also realized that these females would solicit copulations from males at times other than midcycle, even when they were already pregnant. She wondered if such situation-dependent estrus behavior could be a preemptive female strategy to counter male infanticidal coercion. Might copulating with multiple males allow the female to “game” paternal certainty and plant a seed of confusion, so to speak? After all, by mating multiply, a female langur was engineering the possibility that these lethal males, potential killers of her infant, had actually sired it. And this, Hrdy realized, would make it less likely that a male would kill the infant that might be his. The only way to fool the males was to mate polyandrously, sometimes even in rapid sequence with numerous partners. Not only was this not “unnatural,” it was beneficial, Hrdy asserted, suggesting that female langurs bred multiply as a form of insurance. Later, Hrdy hypothesized that such mating behavior, which she reframed as “assiduously maternal”—behavior likely to keep her baby alive—and now widely reported for many species of primates, could under other circumstances actually increase the odds that males, even more than one “possible father,” would protect, care for, and even provision her infant. All in all, given the right ecological and social circumstances, mating with multiple males might be very beneficial to females indeed.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I realized that he actually looked nervous. I was confused by the shift in his attitude. I thanked him and walked to the visitation room door with the officer following behind me. He turned to unlock the padlock so that I could go inside. As I started to walk past him to enter, he placed his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, um, I’d like to tell you something.” I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “You know I took ole Avery to court for his hearing and was down there with y’all for those three days. And I, uh, well, I want you to know that I was listening.” He removed his hand from my shoulder and looked past me, as if staring at something behind me. “You know, I— uh, well, I appreciate what you’re doing, I really do. It was kind of difficult for me to be in that courtroom to hear what y’all was talking about. I came up in foster care, you know. I came up in foster care, too.” His face softened. “Man, I didn’t think anybody had it as bad as me. They moved me around like I wasn’t wanted nowhere. I had it pretty rough. But listening to what you was saying about Avery made me realize that there were other people who had it as bad as I did. I guess even worse. I mean, it brought back a lot of memories, sitting in that courtroom.” He reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration that had formed on his brow. I noticed for the first time that he had a Confederate flag tattooed on his arm. “You know, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think it’s good what you’re doing. I got so angry coming up that there were plenty of times when I really wanted to hurt somebody, just because I was angry. I made it to eighteen, joined the military, and you know, I’ve been okay. But sitting in that courtroom brought back memories, and I think I realized how I’m still kind of angry.” I smiled. He continued: “That expert doctor you put up said that some of the damage that’s done to kids in these abusive homes is permanent; that kind of made me worry. You think that’s true?” “Oh, I think we can always do better,” I told him. “The bad things that happen to us don’t define us. It’s just important sometimes that people understand where we’re coming from.” We were both speaking softly to one another. Another officer walked by and stared at us. I went on: “You know, I really appreciate you saying to me what you just said. It means a lot, I really mean that. Sometimes I forget how we all need mitigation at some point.” He looked at me and smiled. “You kept talking about mitigation in that court.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Time, time, endless time on our hands and nothing to fill it but lies. Well, I don’t want to rehearse the whole of my life leading up to the fatal moment—it is too long and too painful. Besides, did my life really lead up to this culminating moment? I doubt it. I think there were innumerable moments when I had the chance to make a beginning, but I lacked the strength and the faith. On the evening in question I deliberately walked out on myself: I walked right out of the old life and into the new. There wasn’t the slightest effort involved. I was thirty then. I had a wife and child and what is called a “responsible” position. These are the facts and facts mean nothing. The truth is my desire was so great it became a reality. At such a moment what a man does is of no great importance, it’s what he is that counts. It’s at such a moment that a man becomes an angel. That is precisely what happened to me: I became an angel . It is not the purity of an angel which is so valuable, as the fact it can fly. An angel can break the pattern anywhere at any moment and find its heaven; it has the power to descend into the lowest matter and to extricate itself at will. The night in question I understood it perfectly. I was pure and inhuman, I was detached, I had wings. I was depossessed of the past and I had no concern about the future. I was beyond ecstasy. When I left the office I folded my wings and hid them beneath my coat. The dance hall was just opposite the side entrance of the theater where I used to sit in the afternoons instead of looking for work. It was a street of theaters and I used to sit there for hours at a time dreaming the most violent dreams. The whole theatrical life of New York was concentrated in that one street, so it seemed. It was Broadway, it was success, fame, glitter, paint, the asbestos curtain and the hole in the curtain. Sitting on the steps of the theater I used to stare at the dance hall opposite, at the string of red lanterns which even in the summer afternoons were lit up. In every window there was a spinning ventilator which seemed to waft the music into the street, where it was broken by the jangled din of traffic. Opposite the other side of the dance hall was a comfort station and here too I used to sit now and then, hoping either to make a woman or make a touch. Above the comfort station, on the street level, was a kiosk with foreign papers and magazines; the very sight of these papers, of the strange languages in which they were printed, was sufficient to dislocate me for the day.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e ancient reader of Achilles Tatius would have noticed a conspicuous absence in the apology for pederasty. Nowhere do we fi nd the soaring, spiritualized defense of an elevated form of mentorship that harnessed the power of erotic attraction for virtuous ends. In part the absence of any such defense is explained by the setting of the debate within an erotic novel, whose generic conventions accept and insist on the frankly sexual nature of human companionship. But in a deeper sense Leucippe and Clitophon is a cipher for attitudes toward pederasty in the Roman Empire. It is telling  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N that Foucault sees pederasty in the novel as “episodic and marginal.” Central to Foucault’s pre sen ta tion of Roman sexual culture is the claim that in the high empire, “refl ection on the love of boys lost some of its intensity, its seriousness, its vitality.” Th e decline of pederasty, or at least its diminished place in the moral economy of sex, is treated as the counterpart of the conjugalization of plea sure. Foucault fi nds in the high empire a “philosophical disinvestment” from the institution of pederasty. Th e claim rests entirely on a comparison with “the lofty formulations of the classical period,” notably Plato’s. If comparison with classical Greece seems inevitable in any discussion of pederasty, such a benchmark is nevertheless bound to lead to a stilted mea sure of Roman sexual culture. Seen in broader perspective, the story of Roman- era pederasty is not its decline but its liveliness. Foucault’s judgments are simply misguided. Th e place of pederasty in Leucippe and Clitophon, which is important enough to frame the fi rst quarter of the novel, helps us to situate contemporary attitudes to pederasty in terms of high imperial culture, rather than in comparison to classical Greece. A heightened and almost impolitic insistence on the physical essence of love, an awareness that the beloved’s consent could not be squared with social honor, and narratives of eros that sought to understand the place of mankind’s sexual instincts within the cosmos: these, rather than disapproval or disinvestment, make up the story of pederasty in the Roman Empire. Th

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Immediately after the coup, Kim Jong Pil founded the KCIA and supervised the building of a political base for the new regime. A February 1963 unevaluated CIA report stated that Kim Jong Pil had “organized” the Unification Church while he was KCIA director and has been using the Unification Church as a “political tool.”17 Journalist Frederick Clarkson, who has written widely about the politics of the Moon organization, adds these insights: Though the Fraser Report noted that “organized” is not to be confused with “founded,” since the Unification Church was “founded” in 1954, the Fraser Report goes on to state that “…there was a great deal of independent corroboration for the suggestion in this and later intelligence reports that Kim Jong Pil and the Moon organization had a mutually supportive relationship, as well as for the statement that Kim used the Unification Church for political purposes.”18 It is remarkable that in the 1970s, and thereafter, so many people were deeply involved with the Moon organization, blindly believing the stories they were told by leaders, knowing almost nothing about its real history. Certainly, if I had learned that the Moon organization, as Congressional investigators called it, was connected with the KCIA, or that in 1967 Moon had forged an organizational link with Yoshi Kodama, a leader of the Yakuza, the Japanese organized crime network,19 I would have never become involved. 20 While the story of the Unification Church’s theology is too involved to detail here, the most important feature of it is the Church’s position that Sun Myung Moon was the new Messiah and that his mission was to establish a new “kingdom” on Earth (he actually died in 2012). Yet, many ex-members, like me, have observed that Moon’s vision of that kingdom was distinctly Korean. During my two-and-a-half-year period in the church, I understood that the highest positions of membership (closest to Moon) were available only to Koreans, with the Japanese coming in second. American members, myself included, were on the third rung of the ladder. Members of the Unification Church believe, as I did, that their donations of time, money, and effort are “saving the world.” What they do not realize is that they are the victims of mind control.21

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Paul’s compromise between libertinism and continence was to reverberate throughout the rest of Christian history. It was a settlement forged in the compressed atmosphere of apocalyptic time. Paul offered a wisdom “not of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.” Like any treaty, it would eventually show the marks of age, strained by the passage of time and subtle realignments in the balance of power. But it laid down the key terms that acted as the starting point for all future negotiations. At the same time, the urgency of the moment left much unsaid. There was much that simply did not need saying. The protocols of feminine respectability—virginity followed by fidelity—were so universal and obvious that their express declaration would have been otiose. Paul’s focus was squarely on the quarrels that had arisen in the church. His letter was an intervention. But it was an intervention that would progressively attain canonical status within the diffuse network of tiny communities who viewed Paul as an authoritative messenger. Almost immediately Christians were scrambling to interpret what Paul meant, both in what he said and what he left unsaid. The prophets of virginity would latch on to the apostle’s own celibacy, and the glaring absence of any enthusiasm for marriage, as sure signs that Paul had not allotted any grace to acts of the flesh. But the authors of the pastoral epistles would come nearer to the spirit of Paul, when they envisioned, in the unfolded expanse of continuous time, the moral viability of orderly Christian households. Paul may well not have endorsed the abrasive patriarchy of the pastoral letters, but their explicit affirmation, against those who would forbid marriage, that “everything created by God is good,” is not alien to his thought. This strain of Paul’s sexual ideology was destined to prevail. But what could not be credibly doubted, by any Christian claiming descent from the Pauline tradition, was the irredeemable depravity of fornication and the need to secede from the moral economy of the Roman sexual order.20 THE NATURAL USE: EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND SAME-SEX LOVE

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Finally, in 1988 she convinced her husband to move the family to California. They were both 30 years old. Gina enrolled her kids in public school and began taking courses at the local community college “My husband initially could not function. He played video games for about 15 hours daily—truly just another way to dissociate,” she said. “He began following Sai Baba (another problematic Indian guru). I didn’t follow anyone. I was too busy working (in retail), taking college classes and raising three children.” The pair eventually divorced. Gina would go on to earn three degrees and currently works as a certified nurse-midwife at a major medical center. “I still didn’t realize it was a cult until 2003, 15 years later. I was 45,” she said. A coworker told her about the work of Margaret Singer. “I had the ah-ha moment—‘Oh shit! I was raised in a cult! My whole family is in a cult! That’s why our lives are so screwed up!’ Only then did I begin searching online for cult information, reading everything I could to self-counsel. I found a therapist who knows about cult recovery.” As a medical professional, she has devoted herself to exposing the ways in which TM can adversely affect a person’s health. She maintains close relationships with other former members and with families who have been adversely affected by TM. She blogs at tmfree.blogspot.com and ginacatena.com and speaks and writes on a volunteer basis to raise awareness of the risks of involvement with TM. Lee Marsh and Jehovah’s Witnesses119 Lee Marsh is a former Jehovah’s Witness, a retired Canadian counselor and is the president of Advocates for Awareness of Watchtower Abuses (aawa.co), a nonprofit group that helps educate the public about the group’s violations of basic human rights, especially toward women and children. When Lee was eight years old, her mother abandoned the family, and Lee was forced to live with her father. Shortly after that, her father began sexually molesting her. The crime was reported to the police when she was 11, and her mother, whom Lee had not seen in three years, was awarded custody. Her mom was then living with relatives and studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses. When Lee was 12, her mom’s common-law husband sexually molested Lee and her teenage aunt. When this was reported to an elder at the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall, the elder advised the family to keep it secret. When it happened again, the elders decided that it should not be reported to the police. Lee’s aunt was sent to live with other family members, while Lee was placed in a foster home for the next three years.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “I completely understand.” An hour or so later the pump starts going again. No one even kicks it. It just starts up by itself. They tell me I am very lucky. * * * The leg heals slowly. I am weak and sick for a long time, but I continue to survive in the Bronx V.A. hospital. There are times I scream and shout and throw things out my door. I get a bath and an enema every four days. I have to watch the pump all the time to make sure it doesn’t stop. I am so tired, so weary. One day the doctor comes and pulls the two plastic tubes out of my leg and puts small bandages over the holes. He and an aide put me on a gurney and strap me down. They are very careful with my leg. I have two hospital canes and am able to push myself and the gurney up and down the hospital ward. It is the first freedom I have had in months and I am very careful not to go too fast. I lie in the hall a lot. I do not talk to anyone. I am very quiet. My mother and father come down to see me every week. I do not even want to talk to them. I do not tell them what I have been thinking about the war and the wound and the hospital—that the whole thing is beginning to go round and round in my head. I am just beginning to see what it all adds up to. It would only hurt them if they knew. I WAS IN VIETNAM when I first heard about the thousands of people protesting the war in the streets of America. I didn’t want to believe it at first—people protesting against us when we were putting our lives on the line for our country. The men in my outfit used to talk about it a lot. How could they do this to us? Many of us would not be coming back and many others would be wounded or maimed. We swore they would pay, the hippies and draftcard burners. They would pay if we ever ran into them. But the hospital had changed all that. It was the end of whatever belief I’d still had in what I’d done in Vietnam. Now I wanted to know what I had lost my legs for, why I and the others had gone at all. But it was still very hard for me to think of speaking out against the war, to think of joining those I’d once called traitors. I settled into my apartment again and went back to classes at the university. It was the spring of 1970. I still wore a tie and sweater every day to school and had a short haircut. I was very sensitive to people looking at me in the wheelchair.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  For the historian, any hermeneutic roundabout that tries to sanitize or soften Paul’s words is liable to obscure the inflection point around which attitudes toward same-sex erotics would be forever altered. It is precisely here. Paul’s originality lay in the violence with which his thought shuttled between and then beyond both Greco-Roman and Jewish strictures to form an unambiguous and all-embracing denunciation of same-sex love. Paul’s overriding sense of gender—rather than age or status—as the prime determinant in the propriety of a sexual act was nurtured by contemporary Jewish attitudes. The very language of “males” and “females” stood apart from the prevailing idiom of “men” and “boys,” “women” and “slaves.” By reducing the sex act down to the most basic constituents of male and female, Paul was able to redescribe the sexual culture surrounding him in transformative terms. Paul’s view of Roman sexual culture captured patterns invisible through the lens of traditional Greco-Roman moralism. One sign of this recategorization, staring the reader squarely in the face, is the equivalence of same-sex love between men and between women. The bare mention of female same-sex desire was rare in the ancient sources, and it places Paul within the nouvelle vague, a broader culture of sexual observation in the Roman Empire that would call unprecedented attention to love between women. But the analogy between male and female same-sex attraction was strikingly novel, and truly momentous.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you willy-nilly. One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you. Nothing of this which I am now recording was known to me at the time that I was going through the great change. Everything I endured was in the nature of a preparation for that moment when, putting on my hat one evening, I walked out of the office, out of my hitherto private life, and sought the woman who was to liberate me from a living death. In the light of this I look back now upon my nocturnal rambles through the streets of New York, the white nights when I walked in my sleep and saw the city in which I was born as one sees things in a mirage. Often it was O’Rourke, the company detective, whom I accompanied through the silent streets. Often the snow was on the ground and the air chill and frosty. And O’Rourke talking interminably about thefts, about murders, about love, about human nature, about the Golden Age. He had a habit, when he was well launched upon a subject, of stopping suddenly in the middle of the street and planting his heavy foot between mine so that I couldn’t budge. And then, seizing the lapel of my coat, he would bring his face to mine and talk into my eyes, each word boring in like the turn of a gimlet. I can see again the two of us standing in the middle of a street at four in the morning, the wind howling, the snow blowing down, and O’Rourke oblivious of everything but the story he had to get off his chest. Always as he talked I remember taking in the surroundings out of the corner of my eye, being aware not of what he was saying but of the two of us standing in Yorkville or on Allen Street or on Broadway. Always it seemed a little crazy to me, the earnestness with which he recounted his banal murder stories in the midst of the greatest muddle of architecture that man had ever created.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  It is tempting, of course, simply to retreat to the position that Clement’s sexual ideology is a hybrid of mixed ancestry. But behind the language of contemporary philosophy, Clement’s sexual ideology is purely Christian; again and again, Platonic concepts of appetition and Stoic attitudes toward desire are held responsible to the logic of Christian tradition. The embroidery of philosophical language obscures the fact that Clement’s achievements were largely exegetical. Clement’s sexual morality had to answer to a body of texts, bewilderingly diverse in origin and intention. For the Old Testament, Clement could make good use of the pioneering syntheses of Philo; for the New Testament, Clement had predecessors, but none who had so completely wrapped together the gospels and the Pauline letters into a single encompassing vision of man’s sexual obligations. Clement’s problem was not how to integrate paideia and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem. Rather, it was how to integrate the commands of Genesis and those of First Corinthians, how to square the Jesus who would speak elliptically about eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven with the Jesus who treated marriage as an indissoluble bond. Having reconciled the multifarious strands jostling for primacy within the Christian tradition, decorating it with beads carefully plucked from the rich jewel box of Greek philosophy was the simple part. Clement’s sexual philosophy is shaped by notions of sin, the flesh, and fornication that were simply alien to the classical intellectual tradition. Where Clement does try to graft his sexual ideology back onto the familiar inheritance of philosophical ethics—especially on the issue of desire—his conceptions differ so radically that on close inspection the fissures remain visible. For Clement, desire was the central problem of sexual ethics. He sought not its use nor its control, but its extirpation. “For Christ always has this remarkable capacity to cut out the very roots of sin. ‘Do not commit adultery’ is but an outgrowth of ‘do not lust.’ Adultery is the fruit of lust, its evil root.” Clement taught an ethic of radical self-transformation. He belongs among the ascetic theologians, but he still inhabited the ancient city; his sexual morality was never overshadowed by the awesome prospect of its imminent vanishment. Within the city, and within marriage, Clement imagined a transcendence of physical desire that within only a few generations would inspire the great experiments of Christian asceticism. Clement envisioned a monasticism avant la lettre, one poised, a little uncertainly, within the oikos and the polis.43

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Clement, more than any other representative of the early church, presented his views in the language of the culture around him. Early Christian sexual morality can sound deceptively familiar. But the familiar echoes belie a radically new sensibility. The few and mostly feeble injunctions against prostitution and same-sex love in Roman culture have been deliberately preserved by Christian authors in search of classical pedigrees, and the pre-Christian dissenters loom larger in retrospect than they did in their own day. Regardless, in no sense should early Christian sexual morality be construed as an offshoot of Roman conservatism. The ideas about sex emanating from the new religion marked a discrete and categorical rupture. For the community of the faithful, the pleasures of the flesh became caught in a cosmic battle between good and evil. New rules, more interesting and less predictable than sometimes argued, formed. Porneia, fornication, went from being a cipher for sexual sin in general to a sign for all sex beyond the marriage bed, and it came to mark the great divide between Christians and the world. Same-sex love, regardless of age, status, or role, was forbidden without qualification and without remorse. Unexpectedly, sexual behavior came to occupy the foreground in the landscape of human morality, in a way that it simply never had in classical culture. “Above all else take thought for chastity; for fornication has been marked out as an exceedingly terrible thing in God’s eyes.”8 The code of sexual rules that came to prevail in the early Christian church was highly distinctive; its moral logic was more innovative still. For the Greeks and Romans, public sexual ideology was an organic expression of a social system. Sexual norms were in harmony with public law, the protocols of marriage, and the patterns of inheritance. Even pagan philosophy tended, at its deepest level, to offer a duty-based sexual ethics that accepted the logic of social reproduction while devaluing pleasure as such. But early Christianity showed itself prepared to abandon the traditional needs and expectations of society, if necessary in the most dramatic fashion. Christianity broke sexual morality free from its social moorings. The indifference toward secular life and the new model of moral agency—centered around an absolutely free individual whose actions bore an eternal and cosmic significance—were covalent propositions. The individual was morally responsible, and moral responsibility required freedom, from the stars and from social expectation alike. The chill severity of Christian sexuality was born not out of a pathological hatred of the body, nor out of a broad public anxiety about the material world. It emerged in an existentially serious culture, propelled to startling conclusions by the remorseless logic of a new moral cosmology. The discovery of the free will was not a circumstantial adjunct of early Christian sexual morality; it was an essential feature, determined by the deep logic of a moral order founded on sin and salvation. FORNICATION: FROM HEBREW TO GREEK

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I looked down at the page and then up again, confused; I don’t see it, I said, what did I miss? He leaned across the table, reaching his arms toward the page so that his upper body rested on the lacquered wood, a peculiarly teenage gesture, I thought, I remembered making it but hadn’t made it for years, and he pressed his finger to the margin of the page. Here, he said, pointing to a line where the single word She appeared, I made it here and it happens several times, the pronouns are all wrong, and even in his half-prone posture I could see that his whole body was tense. Ah, I said, looking up at him from the page, I see, and then he leaned quickly back, as if released by something, and as though after his revelation he wanted to reassert some space between us. I leaned back too, and pushed the pages across to him again; it was clear that they had served their purpose. Those poems we read in class, he said then, I had never seen anything like them, I didn’t know anything like them existed. He was talking about Frank O’Hara, I understood, whose poems had shocked most of my students, as I intended them to. I had never read anything before, he went on, I mean a story or a poem, that seemed like it was about me, that I could have written it. He didn’t look at me as he said this, looking instead at his hands, both of which were on the table in front of him and in one of which a cigarette had shrunk almost to its nub between two fingers. I felt two things as he spoke, first my usual dismay when talking to gay men here, who were more excluded than I had been, growing up in the American south, where at least I had found books that, even if they were always tragic, offered a certain beauty as compensation. But in addition to dismay I felt satisfaction or pride at having provided (as I thought of it) some degree of solace, and maybe this was the bigger part of what I felt. I had gathered him up, I thought, and this sparked a sense of warmth that started in the central pit of me and then radiated out.