Shame

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

  Or, the Talmud relates, according to an alternative ac- count, he saw pagans cooking food, dipped a fi nger in it, and pretended to eat. In this epilogue, a farrago of all that has preceded, it is the pretense of harlotry, both literal and meta phorical, that has secured his salvation from the Romans. It is possible to fl irt with sin, or rather to be encompassed about by it, and yet to follow the Torah and enter the next life. Th at is the whole message of the tractate Avodah Zarah— how the faithful may endure in the midst of a hostile culture. Th e creative spirits who wove this tale from such varied threads refashioned the symbols of romance— the virgin’s body and the haunt of shame— into a statement about the boundaries between their community and the contaminations of the outside world. Structurally the  FROM SHAME TO SIN Jewish virgin in the brothel is a direct parallel of the girls of early Chris- tian fi ction. But by the time the Talmud was redacted, Christian authors were embarking on even more daring reconfi gurations of these ancient conventions.  FROM SHAME TO SIN: THE PENITENT PROSTITUTES Th e famous actress whose stunning conversion is memorialized in an im- promptu aside of John Chrysostom was not the only woman of her time to seek a repentance that was destined to reverberate in the collective imagina- tion of Christians. Sometime around AD 400, far from the glamours of the Antiochene stage, another woman, Taïsia, made a spiritual turn that was just as stark, if less immediately celebrated. Her story is related with brief but brutal realism in one of the most primitive documents of monastic wis- dom, Th e Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Orphaned in her youth, Taïsia turned her home into a guest house along the fringes of the settled world, in the pioneer country of Egyptian monasticism, at the desert outpost of Sce- tis. Known for her generosity with the brothers, her stores were gradually exhausted, and in desperate seasons she did what many ancient women, faced by the mundane brutalities of a subsistence order, might have done. She profi ted with her body. Th e Sayings add no drama, subtract no shame from this bare fact: “She was led to prostitution.” But the mere act of nar- rating a woman’s passage from respectable poverty to sexual humiliation was an epochal novelty. In nearly a thousand years of the written word, there is little to match the simple authenticity of this humble lapse. More dramatic still, Taïsia was to fi nd an escape from prostitution, no less miraculous than the “devices of virtue” that saved the heroines of romance.

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

  Pelagia inhabited the vibrantly bilingual world of late antique Syria. The legends of the penitent prostitutes passed easily between the interconnected worlds of Greek and Syriac. At least one of the legends of a penitent prostitute, Mary the niece of Abraham, was originally composed in Syriac. The tale of her repentance belonged to a longer cycle of narratives about her uncle, the hermit Abraham of Qidun. The Life of Abraham is an early text, preserved in a manuscript as old as the fifth century. Thus, the legend of Mary is almost exactly contemporary with the spread of the Sayings of the Fathers beyond Egypt and the elaboration of the story of Pelagia. Although her story was written in Syriac, the narrative betrays an intimate familiarity with Greek fiction—indeed, the text depends as much on its inversions of romance as do the lives of Thais and Pelagia. Unsurprisingly, the text was translated into Greek and Latin, and like the other legends of the penitent prostitutes, it was popular across the Mediterranean.65 Mary was an only child, orphaned by her parents and left in the charge of her uncle, Abraham, a monk in a village near Edessa. For the first twenty years of her life she imitated her uncle and lived “like a chaste lamb, like a spotless dove.” Then she became the target of a satanic plot: she was seduced by a devious monk. Having lost her purity, Mary is distraught, but her distress is that of a romantic heroine subjected to the unthinkable. Unchastity is a sort of death. “I am now as good as dead.” Darkened by guilt, she cannot so much as look on her uncle’s face, and she exiles herself, trading her ascetic habits for life in a tavern. Mary is the perfect opposite of the romantic heroine. At the first, slight assault on her virginity, she caves. Rather than being taken to a brothel by force, she deposits herself in a den of ill repute, a self-imposed sentence that represents a willful submission to the rules of romance: the girl without honor belongs in the house of shame.66

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

  speculation on reality is perilous. But there is surely enough testimony from the imperial era to posit the existence of men who openly fl aunted dominant sexual norms. A scientist like Ptolemy set out to explain the patterns of social life around him, and what we have here is not an encyclopedist summoning his marvels into existence. Th ere is, in fact, more evidence for frank sexual dissidence in the Roman Empire than for any other period before early modernity. Ptolemy distinguished between men who kept their behavior private and those who “straightforwardly and openly lack shame.” Th at men indulged in deviant behavior behind closed doors was the inexhaustible stuff of invective. More interesting is the second type, those who self- identifi ed as noncompliant sexual beings. Th is sort, Ptolemy said, occupied a role that was like “that of a vulgar prostitute, exposed to all shame and abuse.” Th e assimilation of the public pathic and the prostitute may well refl ect both material and legal reality. Th ere was certainly a male brothel scene in Rome and presumably in most towns of any scale in the empire. More profoundly, willful sexual submission by a male entailed infamia, literally a lack of respectable reputation, which brought impairment of civil rights. In this atmosphere, it has been suggested, a subculture fl ourished. T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E  Th e notion of a “subculture” may be anachronistic, and it may too easily smooth over the brutal realities of social stratifi cation in a world where slavery and prostitution played a fundamental role in many same- sex pairings. But the most intriguing novelty, by far, is the evidence for male- male marriage in the early empire. If we had only the extravagant reports about Nero or Heliogabulus marrying their favorites, we might ascribe it to conventional senatorial animus, although the extreme and unnecessary level of detail about the ceremonies would be striking. But there is plenty of evidence besides. Th e “adoption” of a young male beloved by his elder lover at the conclusion of the novel Th e Ephesian Tale is not quite a marriage, but it is clearly a happy resolution to parallel the other unions. Th e epigrams of Martial and the satires of Juvenal are insistent. While the mockery and the hostility are unrelenting, the descriptions are without parallel. Martial describes a man, Galla, who had married six or seven cinaedi. In another case he describes a marriage complete with the torch- lit pro cession, a wedding veil, a dowry, and the usual cheers of good luck. Juvenal’s second satire, written sometime in the early second century, is even more compelling.

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

  The pervasiveness of romantic conventions, and the shared symbolic vocabulary of late classical literature, is underscored by the appearance of familiar novelistic tropes in Jewish legend. Like the Christians, the Jews of the Roman Empire developed a body of legend that both drew from and subverted the models of contemporary romance. Like the Christians, the Jews of the Roman Empire liked to imagine their heroes as defiant victims of Roman power. Among these heroes was Rabbi Hanina ben Teradion, a Tanna of the third generation, martyred by the Roman authorities at the apex of Roman hegemony in the second century. He was canonized as one of the Ten Martyrs. The most complete account of his martyrdom is preserved in the tractate Avodah Zarah of the Babylonian Talmud. Avodah Zarah, “foreign worship,” was, simply by virtue of the domain of life it regulated, ideally suited to become a storehouse of rabbinic memory about the interaction between Jews and their idolatrous rulers. According to the tradition, Haninah was sentenced to death, his wife was condemned to exile, and his virgin daughter was assigned to penal prostitution. The Hebrew virgin in the Roman brothel, recounted in the Talmud, wrests us from the dry struggles of halakhic interpretation and thrusts us into the atmosphere of Greek romance. Like Christian romance, the Jewish story takes eternal archetypes of noble innocents and sets them against the concrete historical backdrop of Roman power. This Jewish legend, like Christian apostolic lore, is an indissoluble fusion of history and romance.40 Hanina’s daughter was sent to the “tent of prostitution.” Fortunately the girl had a sister, Beruriah, who could not bear the shame of seeing her kin in the brothel. This is the famous Beruriah, wife of Rabbi Meir, who is only in this passage identified as the daughter of Haninah—part of the Babylonian Talmud’s overarching tendency to create webs of interrelationship among the Tannaim and their families. Beruriah induces her husband to sneak into the brothel to bribe the guard into releasing the girl. Her husband, Rabbi Meir, reckons to himself, “If she has not been subjected to anything wrong, a miracle will be wrought for her, but if she has committed anything wrong, no miracle will happen to her.” If she has not been subjected to violence, then she will be saved. But if she has committed anything wrong, she is then damned to prostitution. It may appear illogical or at least unsatisfying to construe the enslaved girl’s deeds as acts of commission. But this aporia, this surface disjuncture, is resolved at a deeper level of narrative logic, which the redactors of this story have borrowed from the assumptions of romance.41

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She was a blonde who wore short, fuzzy sweaters, and fake gold jewelry around her neck. At her friendliest, she had a whining, abrasive quality that clung to her voice. Now, she could barely say hello. Her stupidly full lips were parted speculatively. “Hi,” I said. “Just a minute.” She noted the awkwardness of my walk, because of the lowered panty hose. I got to the bathroom and wiped myself off. I didn’t feel embarrassed. I felt mechanical. I wanted to get that dumb paralegal out of the office so I could come back to the bathroom and masturbate. Susan completed her errand and left. I masturbated. I retyped the letter. The lawyer sat in his office all day. When my mother picked me up that afternoon, she asked me if I was all right. “Why do you ask?” “I don’t know. You look a little strange.” “I’m as all right as I ever am.” “That doesn’t sound good, honey.” I didn’t answer. My mother moved her hands up and down the steering wheel, squeezing it anxiously. “Maybe you’d like to stop by the French bakery and get some elephant ears,” she said. “I don’t want any elephant ears.” My voice was unexpectedly nasty. It almost made me cry. “All right,” said my mother. — When I lay on my bed to take my nap, my body felt dense and heavy, as though it would be very hard to move again, which was just as well, since I didn’t feel like moving. When Donna banged on my door and yelled “Dinner!” I didn’t answer. She put her head in and asked if I was asleep, and I told her I didn’t feel like eating. I felt so inert, I thought I’d go to sleep, but I couldn’t. I lay awake through the sounds of argument and TV and everybody going to the bathroom. Bedtime came, drawers rasped open and shut, doors slammed, my father eased into sleep with radio mumble. The orange digits on my clock said 1:30. I thought: I should get out of this panty hose and slip. I sat up and looked out into the gray, cold street. The shrubbery on the lawn across the street looked frozen and miserable. I thought about the period of time a year before when I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking that someone was going to break into the house and kill everybody. Eventually that fear went away and I went back to sleeping again. I lay back down without taking off my clothes, and pulled a light blanket tightly around me. Sooner or later, I thought, I would sleep. I would just have to wait. But I didn’t sleep, although I became mentally incoherent for long, ugly stretches of time. Hours went by; the room turned gray.

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

  Th e “sin- ful woman” abused the gifts of sexual love, ruining the “youth” of the city and violating their sanctifi ed bodies. Her sins were heavy, but she was for- given by the grace of Jesus. Like the debtor, she could never repay her debts, but God called only for repentance, which was merely an act “of free will.”  For most of the fourth century it was not Stoic fatalism, gnostic doc- trine, or even vulgar pagan determinism that occasioned Christian preach- ing on free will. Rather, it was that irrepressible enemy: astrology. In the west, Ambrosiaster battled against the lively threat of astral determinism: “Nothing is so contrary to Christian doctrine.” It was in Syria, in the latter half of the fourth century, that the Clementine Recognitions repackaged Bar- daisan’s voluntarism, but without so much allowance for the infl uence of the stars. Christian preachers of the age like Augustine and John Chrysostom regularly attack the lures of astrology. In Constantinople a sermon on the Magi led Chrysostom inexorably into a diatribe against astral determinism. “We are free and masters of our wills. . . . If human aff airs were under the power of their sign, why do you lash your slave in anger? Why do you haul your adulterous wife before the courts? . . . If sins arise by necessity, why do you bear insult harshly?” Only someone who was possessed by a demon lost his “free will” and deserved pity rather than censure. Chrysostom’s sermon dates to around AD 400. He speaks of “free will” with complete innocence, in a fashion not far removed from Justin, Origen, or Methodius. It was still unproblematically a cosmological, antideterminist formulation. Sex, as ever, remained the refl exive paradigm of human freedom. In the middle of the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem could write, in his Catechetical Lec- tures, that the dev il could suggest but not compel fornication, because the soul was self- governing. “If you wish, you will receive the suggestion, and if not, you won’t. For if you committed fornication by necessity, then for what reason has God prepared the hellfi re?” Yet within just a few years, such untroubled absolutisms will come to seem hopelessly naive.  Vivifying the tensions between freedom and determinism in the fourth century was the spread of Manichean beliefs. Th e strongly dualist religion off ered answers to the problem of evil that were seductive in their simplicity,  FROM SHAME TO SIN proposing to solve through myth some of the most impossible theological conundrums of late antiquity.

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

  Fortunately, Hoyt did escape. He experienced PTSD, as many would expect. After about 18 months away from the group, he finally had the clarity to consider a new idea. “I was so convinced when I left Eternal Values that I was evil and cursed—that I had failed Frederick and even mankind. I felt I was doomed to a life of tragedy for betraying the cause. But I finally got to the place where the thought occurred that maybe the way I felt was not just because of me and my endless failings, but perhaps the group I had been involved with had something to do with it,” he said. “For years, people had been saying I was in a cult but I would never believe that. I just couldn’t accept that I would ever do that. I was convinced that things like that didn’t happen to people like me. I would never join a cult.” Desperate to find answers, Hoyt went on to the Internet and discovered an earlier edition of Combating Cult Mind Control. “I bought Steve’s book because it was the bestseller on the subject. But my true intent was to reassure myself that my group wasn’t a cult. Of course, I was wrong. Steve’s book was the first step for me in accepting the truth of what my experience had been. It also gave me the tools and inspiration to move toward the road of recovery.” Once Hoyt was well into his recovery, he went on the offensive and sued Eternal Values and won, thereby effectively ending the group’s existence. He remains active in raising cult awareness and, at times, has assisted me to rescue others from cults or mind control situations. He explains our work together: “We share a common goal of wanting to demystify the overwhelming preconception that cults happen to a particular kind of person or profile—naïve kookoos, weirdos, damaged people from broken families, etc. I don’t fault anyone for that point of view. It was the same one I held, until I went through what I went through. I’m living proof that it is just not accurate. In being open and transparent about my experiences, I also hope to demonstrate to other cult victims that there is no need to hold any shame around the experience. We are all survivors and we should be proud and hold our heads high. “I’m delighted to say I’m working on several film and TV projects to help build awareness of how cults operate and understanding of mind control. Coming forward and telling our stories is one of the greatest gifts we can give to others.” Gretchen Callahan and the Truth Station Some destructive cults are tiny in comparison with organizations such as the Unification Church and Scientology. Yet, small groups can do just as much harm to individuals as big ones.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  But that a person wish to signify this to others arises from three motives. First, in order to humble himself: for just as a man’s mind is uplifted by fine clothes, so is it humbled by lowly apparel. Hence speaking of Achab who “put hair-cloth on his flesh,” the Lord said to Elias: “Hast thou not seen Achab humbled before Me?” (3 Kings 21:29). Secondly, in order to set an example to others; wherefore a gloss on Mat. 3:4, “(John) had his garments of camel’s hair,” says: “He who preaches penance is clothed in the habit of penance.” Thirdly, on account of vainglory; thus Augustine says (cf. OBJ[3]) that “even the weeds of mourning may be a subject of ostentation.” Accordingly in the first two ways it is praiseworthy to wear humble apparel, but in the third way it is sinful. Secondly, coarse and homely attire may be considered as the result of covetousness or negligence, and thus also it is sinful. Reply to Objection 1: Coarseness of attire has not of itself the appearance of evil, indeed it has more the appearance of good, namely of the contempt of worldly glory. Hence it is that wicked persons hide their wickedness under coarse clothing. Hence Augustine says (De Serm. Dom. in Monte ii, 24) that “the sheep should not dislike their clothing for the reason that the wolves sometimes hide themselves under it.” Reply to Objection 2: Jerome is speaking there of the coarse attire that is worn on account of human glory. Reply to Objection 3: According to our Lord’s teaching men should do no deeds of holiness for the sake of show: and this is especially the case when one does something strange. Hence Chrysostom [*Hom. xiii in Matth. in the Opus Imperfectum, falsely ascribed to St. John Chrysostom] says: “While praying a man should do nothing strange, so as to draw the gaze of others, either by shouting or striking his breast, or casting up his hands,” because the very strangeness draws people’s attention to him. Yet blame does not attach to all strange behavior that draws people’s attention, for it may be done well or ill. Hence Augustine says (De Serm. Dom. in Monte ii, 12) that “in the practice of the Christian religion when a man draws attention to himself by unwonted squalor and shabbiness, since he acts thus voluntarily and not of necessity, we can gather from his other deeds whether his behavior is motivated by contempt of excessive dress or by affectation.” Religious, however, would especially seem not to act thus from affectation, since they wear a coarse habit as a sign of their profession whereby they profess contempt of the world. OF THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE (EIGHT ARTICLES)We must now consider the different kinds of religious life, and under this head there are eight points of inquiry: (1) Whether there are different kinds of religious life or only one?

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

  A whole body of legend grew up around the he- roes of Christianity, the apostles. In the apocryphal acts, we fi nd the sexual mechanics of the romance deliberately inverted. Th e ruling Roman order provides the villains, while the apostles, intermediaries of a higher power, furnish the heroes. In these legends, sexual rejection functions as an expres- sion of dissent from the dominant order. By reading the parallel scenes of female endangerment, we glimpse the theological imagination of a move- ment set apart from mainstream society and convinced in its belief in a separate, spiritual order.  In the centuries after Christian triumph, the Christian literary imagina- tion was transformed, as the church itself stood less as an alternative to so- ciety than an institution permeated by the world. Fiction still proved a vital medium for the expression of sexual morality and its relation to life. From Shame to Sin ends with the pop u lar late antique tales of penitent prosti- tutes, stories of fallen women who repent of their sins and pursue spiritual rehabilitation. Th ese lives are antiromances of some literary sophistication. Th e authors of the lives of the penitent prostitutes intentionally evoke the heroines of romance, all the more dramatically to violate the single, central rule of romance: the heroine’s corporal inviolability. Th e genius of this new archetype was that it allowed the authors to create allegories of sin, as a paradigm in which sexual morality has been freed from the requirements of society. Th ese are tales of abundant moral autonomy, which dramatize the severance of sexual morality from its social moorings and place the indi- vidual eternally before the judgment of God. Th e stories of penitent prosti- tutes are the fi ctional analogue to the social and legal program of late antiq- uity, epitomized by the reforms of Justinian. Th e ideological correspondence between law and literature is telling of a deep transformation. Indeed, even as Christian authors perfected their new archetype, of the free sinner  FROM SHAME TO SIN who repented, Justinian attacked coerced prostitution and built a monas- tery to serve as a refuge for reformed prostitutes. It was named, of course, Repentance. Th is book tries to tell the story of the passage across one of the great thresholds in the history of private morality.

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

  All the romances are tales of travel, of movement at sea; the heroine of the romance is moved by the force of necessity, taken captive by pirates against her will. Mary has set sail willingly, and corrupted herself with the crew out of her own lust. She has coerced men into sin. What the heroine of romance suff ered unwillingly as a test of her chastity, for Mary is an event that she engineered and during which her shamelessness reached new depths. Mary is the pirate.  In Jerusalem Mary’s debauchery continues blazing its path. As the pil- grims gather for the feast, Mary hunts fresh prey. She brazenly goes to the Church of the True Cross, and even tries to enter, but she is repelled by ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  some invisible force. Standing in the courtyard of the church, she senses that her own deeds are preventing her entrance. When she looks up, she sees an icon of the Mother of God. She prays to the chaste, pure, and undefi led virgin. “I have heard that the God who became man did so on this account, that he might call sinners to repent. Help me, for I am alone, and I have none to help me.” Mary promises that she will not only abandon her life of shame, she will renounce this world altogether if she can only see the wood of the true cross. Th e Mother of God extends God’s grace upon Mary the prostitute, and she is saved. Whereas Th ais, Pelagia, and the niece of Abra- ham are shepherded to repentance through the guidance of a holy man, Mary of Egypt fi nds unmediated salvation. She falls into sin of her own volition, and she fi nds redemption without an intermediary between her and the archetypal virgin whose name she shared.  When Zosimas fi nds Mary, she has lived alone in the desert for forty- seven years. In that time she has eaten a total of three loaves of bread. She has wrestled with temptations, with the thoughts of fornication that con- stantly pricked the mind of the male monk. For seventeen years, the span of time she lived in wantonness in Alexandria, she suff ered and struggled, as her withering body paid for her crimes. Th en she spent thirty years in as- cetic tranquility. She instructs Zosimas not to repeat her tale while she lives, but to return to Jerusalem and to visit her in a year with the bread and wine of the Eucharist. He comes to her again in the desert and she takes communion. Again she instructs him to return in a year. He begs her to pray, “for the church, for the empire, and for him.” When Zosimas returns the next year, he fi nds Mary, dead, her corpse turned to the east.

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

  Augustine’s response to the challenge of Pelagius and Julian would destroy ancient notions of free will by deliberately posing the radical moral autonomy advocated by his opponents as a threat to the meaning of Christianity’s most sacred rituals. For Augustine, sin was a matter of inheritance, not imitation, or else the ancient practice of infant baptism was senseless. Augustine reinterpreted the Fall, which came to stand as a dark, transmissible stain on human nature, lodged deep within the recalcitrant will. In Augustine’s reimagining, the prelapsarian Adam and Eve were already sexual beings. Sexual reproduction was part of the original, perfect creation. But before their sin, Adam and Eve were capable of perfectly rational sexual acts. After their disobedience, they were punished with a disease befitting their crime: a disobedient will. What was lost in the Garden was the perfect, innocent control over the flesh. “As soon as the first man transgressed the law of God he began to have another law, repugnant to his mind, in his members, and he felt the wickedness of his own disobedience when he found in the disobedience of his own flesh a punishment which he most appropriately deserved.” Adam and Eve, feeling this intractable movement within their flesh, realized their nakedness, experienced shame, and covered themselves. The will itself was dislodged and placed outside man’s complete control, and nothing symbolized so powerfully the defiance of the will like the uncontrollable forces of sexual desire.69

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

  After two years Abraham discov- ers where his niece is hiding. He disguises himself as a soldier, a costume familiar from such rescue operations. Abraham fi nds the tavern and asks the keeper to arrange a conjunction with the “pretty lass” who worked there. When he sees Mary “dolled up and dressed like a prostitute,” he nearly loses his composure, but he maintains his poise. She serves him, caresses him, kisses his neck— one feels to a degree slightly exceeding strict literary neces- sity. As she arouses him, “the smell of asceticism that issued from the blessed man’s body hit her,” but she does not yet recognize her uncle. Th ey dine and prepare for venery. When they retire to a private room, the monk removes his helmet. She sees the face of her uncle and goes stiff with terror. “I cannot bring myself to look upon you, sir, seeing what a shameful thing I have done. How can I pray to God, now that I have befouled myself in this stench and mud?” He convinces her that God will forgive her sin, and she repents. Th ey return to their former life together, in austere holiness, and passersby would come at night to hear her sobbing prayers of penitence.  Th e author of Mary’s story has summoned the atmospherics of romance throughout this tale of sin and redemption. Th e romantic elements are not mere “motifs,” decorative ornaments to impress the author’s erudition upon his audience. Th ey are integral to the meaning of the story and add consid- erably to the psychological drama. Mary is created in the image of a ro- mantic heroine, to accentuate the fact that she experiences the one cata- clysm that cannot befall a romantic heroine. Moreover, the most distinctive element in the story is Mary’s self- relegation to a brothel. Her fl ight is a psychologically compelling reaction to the blunt paralysis of sexual shame. By willfully submitting to the life of prostitution as a penalty for her sex- ual delinquency, Mary is acting under the traditional rules of honor and shame. Her uncle, Abraham, resurrects her from this social death by pre- senting a supervenient logic of sexual morality or ga nized around sin and righ teousness. Th e subgenre culminates in what is indisputably its fi nest expression, the Life of Mary of Egypt.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  pendulum, then kick high into the air, twisting, clearing the bar by inches, falling into the pit on my back, looking at the bar still up there. As I got older Mom would kid me a lot because I wasn’t interested in girls, but I was still dreaming about them all the time. I thought constantly about Joan Marfe, the girl who’d sat next to me in sixth grade, but I was too shy to ever ask her for a date. I’d heard a priest at some kind of church conference warn us how a thing called petting could lead to sin. Kissing was all right, the priest said in a serious voice, but petting or heavy petting almost always led to sex, and sex, he said, was a mortal sin. I remember listening to him that day and promising myself and God I’d try never to get too close to a girl. I wanted to do all the things the guys in the study hall whispered about, but I didn’t want to offend God. I never even went to the senior or junior prom. I just wanted to be a great athlete and a good Catholic and maybe even a priest someday or a major leaguer. In the spring of the year before I graduated I actually wrote a letter to the New York Yankees management telling them I would give anything in the world for a tryout at the stadium. Castiglia’s sister Arlene typed it up for me and for weeks I walked around in a daze waiting for an answer, daydreaming about how Dad and Castiglia would drop me off at the Long Island Railroad station that day and shake my hand and wish me luck. I’d be looking at them, pounding my fist into my new baseball mitt: ‘’I’m gonna make it. Don’t worry about it, Castig. I’m gonna make it.” Then there’d be the great moment after the tryout when one of the coaches would come up to me: “Well, Kovic, you really looked good out there today. We think you’ve got what it takes.” It never happened that way. Even though the letter from the Yankees finally came in the mail and I ran over to Castiglia’s house shouting that I had made the tryouts, I chickened out when the morning came to leave for the station. I decided I didn’t want to go after all. Richie and Bobby Zimmer were all over me for weeks, and I was sorry I’d ever told them anything. I still played after that, but it was different. I was thinking about other things, other things I wanted to be. By that fall it seemed the guys on the block were almost grown up. In the halls at school we still gave each other the old Woodchuck Club signal we had started in sixth grade, sticking our hands under our chins, moving our fingers up and down, shouting, “Woodchuck, woodchuck.” It was crazy but it kept us together. And we went from class to class just waiting for each day to end so we could get back home and play touch football out on the street after our

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They moved on, but from that point, Constance sat uneasily in her chair, no longer feeling like a woman entering a potentially successful phase in her career, happy in love and socially secure. She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn’t so bad. But it had been. She cringed as they walked to the cash register, convinced that everyone was watching them and rolling their eyes. “I’m giving a party the day after tomorrow,” said Franklin as they walked out. “It’s Emily’s birthday. You’ve got to come. And bring your amour.” “Roger and Alice will be there.” “Oh, come on!” “All right, I’ll probably come. Give me your address.” He found a scrap of paper—the folded edge of a torn envelope—and scrawled his address in purple pen while the March wind raised his hair in an elegant, multidirectional headdress. A boy walked by in black leather, his bleached hair shaved into one strip down the center of his skull, painstakingly waxed and sculpted into the shape of a dragon’s back. She felt a pang of affection and reassurance, knowing that kids were still doing the same things they’d been doing for years, tinged with a touch of incredulousness that they hadn’t yet been able to think up anything else. “Here.” Franklin looked at her as he pressed the paper into her hand. “And Connie, I want you to know”—his eyes got that vague yet sincere and noble look they took on when he was about to talk about art or something—“I’ve thought about you a lot in the last year or so. I’ve really wanted to see you.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. Really.” His eyes looked so intensely vague, yet so sincere and so noble, she had the sense that the brown orbs could detach from their centers and wander all over his eyeball, slowly, with a certain majesty, each movement expressing the depth of his sincerity. “You could’ve called me.” “Yeah, I could have. But I was too ashamed.” He dropped his eyes and actually did look sincere for a minute. She cupped his face with her hand and kissed his cheek. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. They squeezed each other’s hands, communicated some sexual comradery and goodwill, and then walked away. Well, she thought, it was good to see Franklin, but she certainly wasn’t going to his party. It would be too depressing. It was strange to realize that the depressing part wouldn’t be her memory of his dizzy seduction attempt—she was never romantically interested in him anyway—but the presence of her ex-friend Alice, the mere mention of whose name had plunged her into a slight rancor. She eyed with disaffection and contempt the neatly hatted and booted, dyed and moisturized strangers marching toward her.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Each time the door opened I saw another monster. And then I came at last to a poor simp who really wanted to improve himself and that broke me down. I felt truly ashamed of myself, of my country, my race, my epoch. I had a devil of a time persuading him not to buy the damned encyclopedia. He asked me innocently what then had brought me to his home—and without a minute’s hesitation I told him an astounding lie, a lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told him I was only pretending to sell the encyclopedia in order to meet people and write about them. That interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopedia. He wanted to know what I would write about him, if I could say. It’s taken me twenty years to answer that question, but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of the City of Bayonne, this is it. . . . I owe you a great deal because after that lie I told you I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter. I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people. And if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something I will invite him in and say “why are you doing this?” And if he says it is because he has to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true . One can starve to death—it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That’s what I want to say, Mr. John Doe. I pass on. Not the stabbing horror of disaster and calamity, I say, but the automatic throwback, the stark panorama of the soul’s atavistic struggle. A bridge in North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. Coming out of lush tobacco fields, low cabins everywhere and the smell of fresh wood burning. The day passed in a thick lake of waving green. Hardly a soul in sight. Then suddenly a clearing and I’m over a big gulch spanned by a rickety wooden bridge. This is the end of the world!

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

  T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E  ery.” A woman’s range of motion remained always defi ned by her position among men. In a world with few informal and fewer formal constraints on domestic violence, the dynamics of physical force always loomed ominously in the background. In the Roman Empire, the norms of female sexuality were static, and even the fi elds of tension that gave women the capacity to maneuver were relatively unchanging. Th e real novelty was the extraordi- nary prosperity of Mediterranean society under Roman rule and a highly articulated class system in which women played an essential role in the maintenance and transmission of an aristocratic and bourgeois ethos. Th e danger of speaking of women’s liberation in the Roman context is that it attributes to antiquity a concept that was intellectually unavailable. We risk misunderstanding the sexual culture of the Roman Mediterranean if we believe that repressive sexual norms were imposed on women by men. Th e relation between life and sexual culture is never so simple. Many women seized on the values of pudicitia and sōphrosynē and promoted them with verve. It would be surprising if it were otherwise. Women made their lives, they fashioned their sense of self- respect, out of traditional norms. Perhaps the most realistic character in Leucippe and Clitophon is Leucippe’s mother, distraught at the prospect of her daughter’s loss of chastity. After lamenting Leucippe’s willingness to surrender her modesty, the mother added, with what has been called “bathetic class consciousness,” that hopefully Leucippe was, at the very least, not sleeping with a slave. Adherence to the old ways ensured a woman’s position in society. Chastity was a badge of honor, separating the Roman matron from the slaves whose bodies she ostentatiously controlled. Th e wealthy Roman woman could stroll through the forum, accompanied by her slaves, and point to the statues of her ances-tors. Sexual liberation was not on the agenda of the woman who had thoroughly appropriated the values that made her what she was. If there was authentic dissent, it surely resided among those whose life condition exposed them to systemic exploitation. Th e high Roman Empire was a genuine slave society, consuming slaves as ferociously as any previous period, and perhaps on a wider, Mediterranean scale. Women accounted for at least half of the slave population, and they bore the brunt of sexual abuse. Without legal or social protection, they were devastatingly vulnerable. Sexual abuse was simply presumptive, and many slave girls probably experienced sexual initiation traumatically early. Th e slave woman’s life course was undiff erentiated by the great threshold between childhood and marriage  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

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

  The recruit must now be built up again as the “new man” or “new woman.” They are given a new purpose in life, and new activities that will solidify their new identity. Cult leaders must be reasonably sure the new cult identity will be strong when the person leaves the immediate cult environment. So the new values and beliefs must be fully internalized by the recruit. Many of the techniques from the first two stages are carried over into the refreezing phase. The first and most important task of the new person is to denigrate their previous sinful self. The worst thing is for the person to act like their old self. The best is for them to act like their new cult self, which is often fully formed within a few months, or even days. During this phase, an individual’s memory becomes distorted, minimizing the good things in the past and maximizing their sins, failings, hurts and guilt. Special talents, interests, hobbies, friends, and family usually must be abandoned—preferably in dramatic public actions—if they compete with commitment to the cause. Confession becomes another way to purge the person’s past and embed them in the cult. During the refreezing phase, the primary method for passing on new information is modeling. New members are paired with older members, who are assigned to show them the ropes. The “spiritual child” is instructed to imitate the “spiritual parent” in all ways. This technique serves several purposes. It keeps the “older” member on their best behavior, while gratifying their ego. At the same time, it whets the new member’s appetite to become a respected model, so they can train junior members of their own. The group now forms the member’s “true” family; any other is considered their outmoded “physical” family. Some cults insist on a very literal transfer of family loyalty. Jim Jones was one of many cult leaders who insisted that his followers call him “Dad.” In my own case, I ceased to be Steve Hassan, son of Milton and Estelle Hassan, and became Steve Hassan, son of Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han, the “True Parents” of all creation. In every waking moment, I was reminded to be a small Sun Myung Moon, the greatest person in human history. As my cult identity was put into place, I wanted to think like him, feel like him and act like him. When faced with a problem, Scientologists are encouraged to ask, “What would Ron (Hubbard) do?” To help refreeze the member’s new identity, some cults give them a new name. Many also change the person’s clothing style, haircut, and whatever else would remind them of their past. As mentioned, members often learn to speak a distinctive jargon or loaded language of the group.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Accepting the money became less troublesome than arguing. She stared at the cash sitting on her dresser after he left and thought: So now it is my real life. Then she got up and put it in her wallet. The next few times she saw him, the cash factor didn’t seem so bad. It even felt perversely glamorous; it made her think of Babette’s friend Natalia, a dark, striking girl who was trying to be an actress. Babette was always telling Stephanie, with a certain awe, how Natalia collected men who bought her clothes and gave her money and drugs. If only Bernard would buy her a dress or something, perhaps it would seem less dubious, but she enjoyed his company, he was sexually pleasant, and she rather relished the novelty of the situation, much as he probably did. She told her friends that she was seeing a married man who “gave her money sometimes.” “Stephanie, that sounds really good for you,” said Sandra. “Sometimes it’s good to have somebody who will just come over to your house and be nice to you.” “I like that,” said Bernard as he held her in his arms. “I’m a person who comes over to your house and is nice to you.” Besides, it had been three weeks since she’d quit Christine’s, and she still hadn’t found a job, so the money was useful to her. Sometimes it was a hundred, sometimes two or even three hundred, depending on nothing but his mood. Her days began to slide together in a passive slur of afternoon movies, galleries and nightclubs. Babette would ask her if she’d started writing and she’d say that she was taking notes, which was true. She was content to drift, confident that her unconscious was unconsciously gathering information. She was having coffee in Soho one afternoon when Jackson walked into the café. He had the same mincing, narrow walk, the same rigid pelvis, the same uptilted chin. He looked at her and she at him. She held her breath. He quickly examined her, from foot to eye, and sat down on the other side of the room without answering her nod. She thought of something Babette had said when Stephanie had told her about her first hooking experience. “Oh, Stephie, don’t you know this is exactly what Jackson said you’d do? How can you fall into that horrible idea he had of you?”

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  What Big Mouth does so well is shine a humorous light on the unspoken so it doesn’t feel so dark anymore, letting us know: Hey, everyone is hugely embarrassing. No one is alone in this. I could have used that growing up. Like most of the country’s sexual education, my curriculum did not cover pleasure, self-generated or otherwise. Sex was a dangerous yet inevitable situation that would befall me because of incorrigible boys. The closest we got to “pleasure” was wet dreams, a thing that happened to boys in the night that I only learned years later was categorically different from peeing. I spoke with one thirty-seven-year-old cis-het mother of three who didn’t begin masturbating until her mid-twenties, after her husband encouraged her to try it. She still doesn’t understand what had blocked her from ever exploring masturbation on her own. “Probably buried Catholic guilt—that I didn’t even know or acknowledge,” she said. (Numerous religions consider masturbation a sin, including Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and many strains of Protestantism.) She’s still somewhat confused by her reticence to masturbate, given that her parents were so open and liberal. “Especially my mom. She would never dream of shaming any of us for that. But it’s so deeply rooted in the culture.” A 2011 study found that young adults’ feelings toward masturbation were shaped by the social stigma and taboo surrounding self-pleasure—nearly all the study’s participants learned about masturbation through the media and their peers, rather than at school or at home. The study acknowledges masturbation “as a strategy to improve sexual health, promote relational intimacy, and reduce unwanted pregnancy, STIs, and HIV transmission” and a key part of healthy sexual development. While men still internalized the stigma of masturbation to some degree, they were far more likely to recognize the benefits of doing it than women, who struggled to accept it as normal or acceptable.2 Then, it makes sense that, as adults, we remain cagey about masturbation. While the shame surrounding it may be gendered—in a way that disproportionately discourages people with vulvas—many men I spoke with had complicated feelings, too, though they reported masturbating regularly. A thirty-year-old cis-het man, who I’ll call Ryan, told me he masturbates almost every day, but doesn’t particularly enjoy it. It feels like a chore. “I’ve been told that masturbation helps your sex life, but personally I haven’t found that,” he said. “It seems stale and a waste of time. I mean, I’ve been masturbating the same way since I was, like, thirteen. What else in my life have I been doing the same way and still find it effective?” Another thirty-year-old cis-het man, who I’ll call Bryan because he’s just like Ryan, echoed this sentiment. He masturbates three or four times a week but wishes it were less. He has no positive feelings about masturbating. He wishes he didn’t have to “rely on self-service” that required “smutty videos.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “I don’t care,” I said. “That lawyer was an asshole.” To everyone’s discomfort, I began to cry. I left the room, and they all watched me stomp up the stairs. The next day at dinner my father said, “Don’t get discouraged because your first job didn’t work out. There’re plenty of other places out there.” “I don’t want to think about another job right now.” There was a disgruntlement all around the table. “Come on now, Debby, you don’t want to throw away everything you worked for in that typing course,” said my father. “I don’t blame her,” said Donna. “I’m sick of working for assholes.” “Oh, shit,” said my father. “If I had quit every job I’ve had on those grounds, you would’ve all starved. Maybe that’s what I should’ve done.” “What happened, Debby?” said my mother. I said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and I left the room again. — After that they may have sensed, with their intuition for the miserable, that something hideous had happened. Because they left the subject alone. I received my last paycheck from the lawyer in the mail. It came with a letter folded around it. It said, “I am so sorry for what happened between us. I have realized what a terrible mistake I made with you. I can only hope that you will understand, and that you will not worsen an already unfortunate situation by discussing it with others. All the best.” As a P.S. he assured me that I could count on him for excellent references. He enclosed a check for three hundred and eighty dollars, a little over two hundred dollars more than he owed me. It occurred to me to tear up the check, or mail it back to the lawyer. But I didn’t do that. Two hundred dollars was worth more then than it is now. Together with the money I had in the bank, it was enough to put a down payment on an apartment and still have some left over. I went upstairs and wrote “380” on the deposit side of my checking account. I didn’t feel like a whore or anything. I felt I was doing the right thing. I looked at the total figure of my balance with satisfaction. Then I went downstairs and asked my mother if she wanted to go get some elephant ears. For the next two weeks, I forgot about the idea of a job and moving out of my parents’ house. I slept through all the morning noise until noon. I got up and ate cold cereal and ran the dishwasher. I watched the gray march of old sitcoms on TV. I worked on crossword puzzles. I lay on my bed in a tangle of quilt and fuzzy blanket and masturbated two, three, four times in a row, always thinking about the thing.