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.

Page 127 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Imagine the Roman soldiers, battle-hardened yet battle-weary, trying to police a small overheated nation with ridiculous beliefs and ambitions, in which sporadic terrorism hinted at an insatiable desire for revolt and independence. We who know about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib should not find it impossible to imagine something of the mind-set of an execution squad outside Jerusalem. Nor should we find it difficult to suppose that, in a world where raw emotion and raw religion got horribly mixed up, all sorts of meanings might be given to an event of this kind. The Romans, then, didn’t invent crucifixion. (Some have suggested that it was practiced in ancient Carthage; certainly it predates the rise and the imperial brutality of Rome.) But they quickly made it their own, and it became the “death of choice” for two categories of undesirables in particular: slaves and rebels—and of course especially slaves who were also rebels or rebel leaders whom the Romans wanted to display as no better than slaves. Having mentioned Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ , we might note another spectacular historical movie, Spartacus . The real-life Spartacus, who led a major slave revolt, met his end about a hundred years before Jesus. Many died in the final battle, but six thousand of his followers were crucified all along the 130 or so miles of the Appian Way from Rome to Capua (inland from Naples), making it roughly one cross every forty yards (Appian, Civil Wars 1.120). Crucifying people beside busy roads or by the entrance to a city was of course designed to make a statement and issue a warning. People with business on those highways would walk past these terrible spectacles every day, and we may presume that many slaves who might have toyed with the idea of running away or joining the revolt would look, shudder, and decide that even their present miserable life was better than that. No doubt the authorities would often tell themselves that this was the only language such people understood. And, though there is evidence of friends or relatives taking away a corpse for burial, the more usual outcome was that the remains would stay there for several days and nights, becoming food for vultures and vermin, until (as with Jezebel in 2 Kings 9:21–37) there was nothing much left to bury. Nobody who had witnessed such a horror would be likely to regard such a death as “noble.” The point was emphasized by the harsh and degrading physical treatment that preceded crucifixion itself. The routine whipping and scourging were designed partly to weaken the victim and prevent a struggle, but also as part of the total public humiliation. Two particular details about Roman crucifixions are of special interest to us in this book.

• From Story of O (1954)

  When they untied the young woman, she staggered and almost fainted, draped in her red cape. Before returning her to the cell she was to occupy, they sat her down in an armchair near the fire and outlined for her the rules and regulations she was to follow during her stay in the château and later in her daily life after she had left it (which did not mean regaining her freedom, however). Then they rang. The two young women who had first received her came in, bearing the clothes she was to wear during her stay and tokens by which those who had been hosts at the château before her arrival and those who would be after she had left, might recognize her. Her outfit was similar to theirs: a long dress with a full skirt, worn over a sturdy whalebone bodice gathered tightly at the waist, and over a stiffly starched linen petticoat. The low-cut neck scarcely concealed the breasts which, raised by the constricting bodice, were only lightly veiled by the network of lace. The petticoat was white, as was the lace, and the dress and bodice were a sea-green satin. When O was dressed and resettled in her chair beside the fire, her pallor accentuated by the color of the dress, the two young women, who had not uttered a word, prepared to leave. One of the four friends seized one of them as she passed, made a sign for the other to wait, and brought the girl he had stopped back toward O. He turned her around and, holding her by the waist with one hand, lifted her skirt with the other, in order to demonstrate to O, he said, the practical advantages of the costume and show how well designed it was. He added that all one needed to keep the skirts raised was a simple belt, which made everything that lay beneath readily available. In fact, they often had the girls go about in the château or the park either like this, or with their skirts tucked up in front, waist high. They had the young woman show O how she would have to keep her skirt: rolled up several turns (like a lock of hair rolled in a curler) and secured tightly by a belt, either directly in front, to expose the belly, or in the middle of the back, to leave the buttocks free. In either case, skirt and petticoat fell diagonally away in large, cascading folds of intermingled material. Like O, the young woman’s backside bore fresh welts from the riding crop. She left the room. Here is the speech they then delivered to O:

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. ” (12:7–9) We italicized “weakness” and “flesh” there in 2 Corinthians 12:7–9 to link it with those same words italicized above in Galatians 4:13. We think, therefore, that Paul had some recurrent illness that may have precipitated or accompanied ecstatic experience. But what was that humbling illness? Our answer depends on another, earlier book by William Mitchell Ramsay, his St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen . He combined Galatians 4:13 with 2 Corinthians 12:7 and proposed that Paul’s recurring illness “was a species of chronic malaria fever,” which tends to recur in very distressing and prostrating paroxysms, whenever one’s energies are taxed for a great effort. Such an attack is for the time absolutely incapacitating: the sufferer can only lie and feel himself a shaking and helpless weakling, when he ought to be at work. He feels a contempt and loathing for self, and believes that others feel equal contempt and loathing.2 He adds, as collaborating evidence for his diagnosis, that Paul’s phrase “a stake in the flesh”—that is his translation of skolops —“is the peculiar headache which accompanies the paroxysms [of chronic malarial fever]: within my experience several persons, innocent of Pauline theorizing, have described it as ‘like a red-hot bar thrust through the forehead.’”3 We propose, following Ramsay, that Paul had contracted malaria during his youth at Tarsus from a climate that easily produced the chills and fevers, the uncontrollable shivering and profuse sweating, the severe headache, nausea, and vomiting of chronic malarial fever. The “thorn or stake in the flesh” may have been Tarsus’s most permanent mark on Paul. Only Luke’s Acts gives us that important information about Tarsus as Paul’s birthplace. But the Luke of the two-volume work that tradition calls the Gospel According to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles is not the same “Luke” mentioned by Paul in Philemon 24 or by post-Pauline writers in Colossians 4:14 (“the beloved physician”) and 2 Timothy 4:11. Furthermore, there is no persuasive evidence that this Luke of the two-volume gospel knows any of the Pauline letters—or, if he does, that he agrees with their theology. This Luke is writing two generations after Paul, at a different time and place, for a different audience and situation, with a different purpose and intention; although he knows exactly what he intends to do at the end of the first century, it is not what Paul intended to do in its middle. But, in any case, in spite of the fact that only Luke records that Paul’s life began in Tarsus, both Luke and Paul emphasize how it was changed forever by a transformative vision of Christ at Damascus, that great and ancient city brought under Roman control by Pompey in the first century BCE.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Like many girls of her generation (she’s in her early fifties) she grew up believing that she could be smart or pretty, but not both. The only comments about her looks she remembers from her father were about her developing breasts. And her mother’s twisted caution was that she was lucky not to be too pretty, since boys want only one thing. As an adult, she wears concealing clothes—turtlenecks even in the summer—and feels demeaned by compliments about her looks. For her, sexuality evokes fear; she’s never been able to enjoy the raptures of her body. For Mitch, on the other hand, sex is a place where he feels utterly free, uninhibited, and at peace. It wasn’t always this way. He was a late bloomer, gawky and not particularly athletic. But he had two things that made his adolescence hopeful: he was a good dancer and he genuinely liked girls. At eighteen he fell in love with Hillary, a college senior with considerable expertise, and his initiation into the voluptuousness of sex was magnificent. Sadly, in his marriage he’s come to feel awful about something he’d always experienced with confidence and joy. Meanwhile, Laura has come to feel completely deficient, ungenerous, and guilty. I encourage Mitch and Laura to listen to each other with greater empathy. Mitch begins to understand that Laura’s alienation from her body has nothing to do with him. This eases his sense of rejection and his anguish about being unable to please her. While it is clear to Mitch that his desire is rooted in love, he needs to help Laura trust the sincerity of his interest in her. Far from seeking a selfish discharge, he longs for union. For her part, Laura learns something equally crucial about Mitch—that when the language of words fails him, as it invariably does in the realm of emotion, he communicates with his body. She’d always felt that Mitch’s “itch for the horizontal” had little to do with her; it was just raw physical release. As she hears him, she sees that Mitch needs physicality to voice his tenderness, his yearning to connect. Only in sex does he feel emotionally safe. By limiting him to her own nonphysical language, to the exclusion of his sensual language, Laura has stifled his ability to “speak” to her. She blinds herself to her husband as he really is, and at the same time reinforces the very behaviors she rails against. When Mitch is reduced to using a truncated language of words, the romantic lover disappears and the bully emerges. Mitch and Laura exemplify two extremes on the mind-body continuum. Couples are often configured on opposite sides of this divide. There are those for whom the body is like a prison in which they feel confined, self-conscious, and self-critical. The body is an inhibited site, awkward and tense.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  He was lying with his white, muscular arms folded, exposing his lightly tanned chest to the breeze, and steadily chewing his lower lip as though teasing it with his white teeth. The self-styled invalids had begun to gather in the shade of a tree beside the pool, and I had no difficulty in drawing near him. Sitting beside him, I measured his slim waist with my eye and gazed at his gently breathing abdomen. As I did so I recalled a line from Whitman : The young men float on their backs—their white bellies bulge to the sun . . . But now again I said not a word. I was ashamed of my own thin chest, of my bony, pallid arms. . . . In September, 1944, the year before the end of the war, I graduated from the school I had attended ever since childhood and entered a certain university. Given no other choice by my father, I entered the Law Department. But I was not greatly annoyed by this as I was convinced that I would soon be called into the army and would die in battle, and that my family also would mercifully be killed in the air raids, leaving not a single survivor.As was the common practice in those days, I borrowed a university uniform from an upperclassman who was going to war just when I was matriculating, promising to return it to his family when I myself should be called up. I put on the uniform and began going to classes. The air raids were becoming more frequent. I was uncommonly afraid of them, and yet at the same time I somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with a sweet expectation. As I have remarked several times, the future was a heavy burden for me. From the very beginning, life had oppressed me with a heavy sense of duty. Even though I was clearly incapable of performing this duty, life still nagged at me for my dereliction. Thus I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders. I sensuously accepted the creed of death that was popular during the war. I thought that if by any chance I should attain "glorious death in battle" (how ill it would have become me!), this would be a truly ironical end for my life, and I could laugh sarcastically at it forever from the grave. . . . And when the sirens sounded, that same me would dash for the air-raid shelters faster than anyone. . . . I heard the sound of a piano, clumsily played.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Mordekhai (colloquially, I was called Mridakh) signified my share in the Jewish tradition. It had been the formidable name of a glorious Maccabee and also of my grandfather, a feeble old man who never forgot the terrors of the ghetto. Call yourself Peter or John, and by simply changing your clothes you can change your apparent status in society. But in this country, Mridakh is as obstinately revealing as if one shouted out: “I’m a Jew!” More precisely: “My home is in the ghetto,” “my legal status is native African,” “I come from an Oriental background,” “I’m poor.” But I had learned to reject these four classifications. It would be easy to reproach me for this, and I have not failed to blame myself. But how is it possible not to be ashamed of one’s condition when one has experienced scorn, mockery, or sympathy for it since childhood? I had learned to interpret smiles, to understand whispers, to read the thoughts of others in their eyes, to reconstruct the reasoning behind a casual phrase or a chance word. When anyone speaks about me, I feel provoked in advance: my hair stands up on end and I am ready to bite. One can, of course, ultimately learn to accept anything at the cost of an enormous effort and a vast weariness. But, before this happens, one resists and hates oneself; or else, to defy the scorn of others, one asserts one’s own ugliness and even exaggerates it so as to grin and bear it. At the lycée, I very quickly got into the habit of dropping “Mordekhai” from my lesson headings, and before long I forgot the name as if I had shed it like an old skin. Yet it dragged on behind me, holding fast. It was brought back to my attention by all official notices and summonses, by everything that came from beyond the narrow frame of daily routine. When commencement-time came, on the day diplomas were to be awarded, I knew I would be one of the triumphant scholars; in the midst of a nervous crowd, I waited undisturbed, certain of success. When the usher climbed onto a chair, my name was the first to be called out; in the tense silence, the exact order of my legal status was re-established: “Alexandre, Mordekhai, Benillouche!” I didn’t move. Surprised by the silence, the crowd looked around for the happy candidate, astonished to hear no explosion of joy, no throwing of notebooks into the air; no one was surrounded or kissed by a delighted family. (I never cared to have my parents present at the public events of my life, so they hadn’t been told when the diplomas were to be awarded.) I merely smiled to those of my schoolmates who congratulated me with a look; and I was soon forgotten because everyone was concerned with his own fate.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  To Magda, my dear daughter, on her seventeenth birthday, in the hope that this message is neither too late nor too early. It is time for you to know the answers to the important questions in your life. Where have we come from? Why have you been uprooted so many times? Who and where is your father? Why have I sent you away and not kept you with me? The family history, which I write here, is something you must know and must pass on to your daughters. I grew up in Ujepest, a few miles outside Budapest. My father, Janos, your grandfather, worked as a machinist in a large plant that assembled buses. When I was seventeen I moved to Budapest. I had several reasons. For one thing, Budapest offered better jobs for a young woman. But the main reason, and I am ashamed to tell you this about your own family, is that my father was like an animal, preying on his own child. He made repeated advances to me when I was too young to defend myself and finally despoiled me when I was thirteen. My mother knew about this but pretended not to know and refused to defend me. In Budapest I moved in with my Uncle Laszlo, my father’s brother, and Aunt Juliska, who arranged a position for me to assist her in the house where she worked as a cook. I learned to cook and to bake and, a few years later, took Aunt Juliska’s place when she became sick with consumption. When Aunt Juliska died the next year, Uncle Laszlo behaved like my father and demanded that I take Aunt Juliska’s place beside him in bed. I couldn’t endure that and so moved out on my own. Everywhere men were predatory—like animals. Everyone, the other servants, the delivery boy, the butcher, made lewd comments and leered and tried to touch me whenever I passed. Even the master tried to put his hand under my skirts . I moved to 23 Vaci Ut in the center of Budapest near the Danube, and there, for the next ten years, I lived alone. Men leered and groped me wherever I went, and I protected myself by pulling my world in around me, making it smaller and smaller. I stayed unmarried and lived my small, happy life with my cat, Cica. And then a monster, Mr. Kovacs, moved into the upstairs flat and with him his cat, Merges. Merges means “rageful” in Hungarian [Artemis drew the name out with a Magyar intonation— Mare -gesh], and that beast was well named. He was a vicious, hideous, black-and-white cat direct from hell and he terrorized my poor Cica. Over and over Cica returned home cut and bleeding. She lost an eye to infection; one of her ears was half torn off. And Kovacs terrorized me.

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

  “I push myself to consume content that involves people of color, because I feel like otherwise the translation in my body, regardless of my personal narrative, is that I start to question my own identity and how people are perceiving the attractiveness of me as a Black woman,” she said. “I’m very intentional about seeking movies and TV in general. I make sure that I consume a lot of content that has people of color, so I’m always providing myself with the additional representation that normative society is erasing.” One thirty-one-year-old cis gay man I spoke with, who I’ll call Bill, discovered porn in third grade by googling “boobs.” He credits porn with helping him figure out his sexuality. With no gay people in his family and actively homophobic friends, he said it may not have occurred to him that he was gay had he not found gay porn—it was his only exposure to other people like him. “I accidentally stumbled upon gay porn in middle school and my reaction was to be like, ‘That’s terrible.’ And then I thought, maybe not,” he said. “Porn helped me figure out my sexuality faster than I would have. But it didn’t help me come to terms with it faster.” Bill recalls feeling insecure about the ripped, chiseled porn stars, who taught him that a “hot” body didn’t look anything like his. He eventually got over that, and now easily separates the fantasy of porn from the kind of sex he actually likes (“in real life I gravitate toward more realistic bodies.”) But the fact remains that porn was his sexual education. “It’s very difficult imagining a world without porn,” he said. “How would I even know about things?” Social media is another powerful vessel for “false images”—images, like Bill’s ripped, chiseled porn stars—that tell us we are unworthy of pleasure, that other people are having better and more sex, that our desires are weird or wrong. Increasingly, our sexualities develop in conversation with social media. Regardless of our upbringings, we internalize the norms and taboos that populate our feeds, which shape the way we see the world and ourselves. Scholars of gender have suggested that social media pushes us to perform gender and sexual identity as “coherent, stable, and fixed entities,” preventing us from “being open to the dynamic and diverse ways genders and sexual identities are lived in everyday life.”12 This pressure to perform extends beyond gender and sexual identity: whether we’re posting thirst traps or highlight reels of romantic relationships, we are performing the versions of our identities most likely to elicit likes—a dynamic that can further cement the disconnect from our truest, most authentic sexual selves. “We’re always driven by and reacting to external stimuli—others’ needs, others’ perceptions—and social media is a cesspool where all of that is at the forefront,” Hailey Magee, a life coach who specializes in codependency, told me. “We developed a disconnected relationship from ourselves.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Actually, there was another reason that made it unpleasant for me to stay at home. The children there didn’t have enough to eat and were growing up all bones, with big heads and long knotty legs. My little cousins, however, unlike my brothers and sisters, were all soft and flabby, rather too fat, with the unhealthy fat one gets from eating too many starches. They seemed to suffer from a dyspeptic appetite and they constantly asked for food. Nothing was more unbearable for me than the exasperated voice of my widowed aunt grumbling all day long after her children: “May the Red Death carry you off! You’re eating too much! I’ve nothing left to give you!” All this made me feel ashamed of the luxurious diet I enjoyed at school, and I tried to ignore the guilt-feelings I felt. Most of my joys were indeed spoiled for me in this manner, though I had learned to drive out of my mind all disquieting thoughts. At least, I had a room where I could live protected from all this, so I moved all my belongings and my books there. For a while I even thought I would be able to build myself, within the sphere of philosophy, a sort of private garden, fenced off with little columns on which would be placed the busts of Aristotle and Plato, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. Of course, I no longer wanted to live alone, but it was good too to have a place where I could withdraw and feel at peace with myself. It was in this period that I began to keep a diary, which contributed not a little toward giving me a taste for certain other adventures. At least it seems significant to me that I adopted this habit of careful written introspection exactly at the time when I had decided to abandon my reclusion and face the outside world.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  It’s as if this stream of questions replaces a more thoughtful and authentically interested inquiry. When the impulse to share becomes obligatory, when personal boundaries are no longer respected, when only the shared space of togetherness is acknowledged and private space is denied, fusion replaces intimacy and possession co-opts love. It is also the kiss of death for sex. Deprived of enigma, intimacy becomes cruel when it excludes any possibility of discovery. Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek. Bodies Speak, Too If one consequence of the supremacy of talk is that it leaves men at a disadvantage, another is that it leaves women trapped in repressed sexuality. It denies the expressive capacity of the female body, and this idea troubles me. Favoring speech as the primary pathway to intimacy reinforces the notion that women’s sexual desire is legitimate only when it is embedded in relatedness—only through love can female carnality be redeemed. Historically, women’s sexuality and intellect have never been integrated. Women’s bodies were controlled, and their sexuality was contained, in order to avert their corrupting impact on men’s virtue. Femininity, associated with purity, sacrifice, and frailty, was a characteristic of the morally successful woman. Her evil twin, the succubus (whore, slut, concubine, witch) was the earthy, sensual, and frankly lusty woman who had traded respectability for sexual exuberance. Vigorous sexuality was the exclusive domain of men. Women have continuously sought to disentangle themselves from the patriarchal split between virtue and lust, and are still fighting this injustice. When we privilege speech and underplay the body, we collude in keeping women confined. Bilingual Intimacy When it comes to letting the body speak, Mitch and Laura are at opposite ends of the spectrum. They’ve reduced their sexual selves to stereotypes. Laura describes Mitch as the classic sex-obsessed man, demanding his rights regardless of how she feels. “The only time he really wants to get close to me is when he wants sex, and he wants it all the time,” she says resentfully. Laura, who is strong-willed and sometimes domineering in their everyday interactions, is seen by Mitch as a sexually inhibited woman who repeatedly rejects his advances from some unfathomable feelings of disgust or contempt. “She acts as if I were some sort of crude animal, and shrinks away from me every time I touch her—it makes me feel like shit,” he says, sounding bitter. For Laura, sex is the sum of all the cultural and familial restrictions she absorbed as a child; her body is a gathering place of multiple taboos and anxieties.

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

  A growing body of research shows that sex education is more effective at promoting health when it’s pleasure-inclusive.12 When mortified parents or health teachers teach us about sex, however, they usually fail to point out that sex is supposed to feel good. At school, talking points stick to the risks of sexual activity, like STIs and unwanted pregnancy. If we’re jackpot lucky, and find ourselves in a classroom that acknowledges birth control, we’re given the opportunity to roll a condom atop a banana dick. But even in more progressive classrooms, pleasure rarely comes up. The genitalia on worksheets tend not to have significance beyond reproduction or dick insertion. The gender-essentialist framing of sex ed, which often begins with a division of the boys and the girls to teach half-baked lessons on wet dreams and menstruation, leaves us entirely on our own to figure out pleasurable, affirming sex in a culture stacked to deprive us of it. So, porn becomes our sex ed. Our idiot friends become our sex ed. Racy teen soaps become our sex ed. Maybe it makes sense that the middle school gym teachers of America don’t want to teach adolescents about the benefits of jacking off, or that most clitoris-having people can only orgasm from clitoral stimulation, rather than penetrative sex. And it makes sense that parents of adolescents might feel odd about their kids getting this information at school. Insidious social discomfort with sexuality is nothing new, going back at least two millennia, though popping off with the Puritans and, then, the Victorians. Harmful and/or wrong information about sex may not be new, but it has grown exponentially more impactful: the media we stare at throughout the day, whether TikTok or Pornhub or hour seventy of a Sister Wives binge, has amplified our exposure to toxic messaging. Laurie Mintz, a professor of human sexuality at the University of Florida and author of Becoming Cliterate, suspects that millennials and Generation Zers are the most sexually misinformed generations of all time, given the unprecedented accessibility of misinformation. “They have more false images than we ever did,” Mintz told me. “I’m not against porn, but the problem with it is when it is widely available and sexual education is not, and lessons in porn literacy are not.” One example, Mintz said, is “socializing women that if it’s good for him, it’s good for [her].” Sex ed has not sufficiently leveled up to counter these messages. We’re outnumbered. “At best, the girls are told about their period. At worst: ‘Stay a virgin, or you’re going to die,’” said Mintz. “The only message and models they have for sex are women who have fast and fabulous orgasms with, you know, two minutes of warm-up. When they try that, it’s not only unpleasant, but it hurts. And instead of thinking, ‘Ooh, I better go get some information,’ they say, ‘Something’s wrong with me,’ and suffer in silence. They’re so indoctrinated with the false images.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One day I asked for permission to give a report on the poet Alfred de Vigny and it was granted to me. I admired Vigny’s disillusioned but haughty manliness, his noncompliance. And, of course, I had a weakness for the somber, for his grandiose sadness. Above all, I was violent in my will to show and affirm what I was. I took possession of the chair with aggressive satisfaction. Then, fixing my eyes on my audience, I began to speak, half-ironically but deeply moved, without any notes, without any aid, in fact, but from the poems I quoted. I was sure enough of myself to speak without a written text, but I wanted above all to prove that one could do an excellent job while speaking the language of the street. Unfortunately, my irreverence carried me away, as always, so that I soon slipped into slang. The teacher suspected an intention to provoke but was held back by my brutal sincerity; in spite of the outraged class, he allowed me to talk twenty minutes longer than the allotted time. I could indeed see his wrinkled brow, the start of a gesture of anger, and the agitation of the whole class; but I couldn’t stop, could only continue my role in the inarticulate tragedy I had begun. The other kids were burning with impatience, waiting for the climax, and approving in advance the inevitable punishment to be meted out to me by the all-powerful teacher. When I was at last silent, the teacher was still completely perplexed. He hesitated in the utter silence of the class and, wishing to be just, not to hurt me excessively but still to sanction my impertinence and avenge his own irritation, he said: “Your report has been most odd. I can add very little to what you’ve said about Vigny. But, in order to speak without notes, which in itself should merit approval, you’ve allowed yourself to slip into the language of a street urchin.” I could take it as I pleased. But I saw that the class was satisfied with the insult; they looked at one another, sneered, and repeated: “the language of a street urchin.” So I chose to be deeply hurt and, besides, the teacher’s reproach had cut deeper than I myself realized. Despite my efforts and my superior airs, I knew that what he said was true and, far worse, that I couldn’t expect to speak anything but the language of an urchin. So, because he had hit my sorest point, I could only hate him. Returning to my seat, I looked down into my notebook and did not raise my eyes again in that room until the end of the hour.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She hadn’t raised her voice, she didn’t promise me any spanking to be administered by my father, she didn’t even strike me, hurting her own hands, as she generally did, and suffering more than I. She was a primitive and unsophisticated woman who had never learned to count or to speak a word that was foreign to her native dialect; but she knew quite miraculously that she had to make me understand a drama of which I too was destined to be a victim — the very drama of Fraji’s life. My wickedness was caused by my ignorance: instead of scolding me, she explained my mistake to me. “There’s nothing degrading about wearing someone else’s old clothes. Nearly all your shirts and pants belonged to the son of Uncle Binhas before belonging to you. Look at this one, for instance: I made it out of an old one that came from Uncle Elias. You too, Kalla, and even I, we all wear old clothes.” Unhappy and estranged, I tried for a while to find my footing again: “But the son of Uncle Binhas is my cousin, and...” Why didn’t she stop at that? Instead, she grew impatient, felt that too much kindness might fail to have the right effect, and added: “Would you be pleased if, one day, in front of everybody, Uncle Elias asked you to give back his pants that you’re wearing? Or if Uncle Binhas pointed out to all the urchins in the street that you’re wearing his son’s shirt?” “He’ll never say it, they’ll never say it,” I stammered. “They’re my uncle and my cousin...” “But it’s the same thing,” she concluded, “We’re poor too, we’re all like Fraji Choulam!” So I was poor, like Fraji Choulam! But Mother already regretted what she said and wanted to draw a moral conclusion. She now added, clumsily and contradicting herself: “There’s no reason to be ashamed of being poor and it’s a sin to make fun of the poor.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  He became what he calls an asexual wunderkind. “I was intensely moralistic and judgmental,” Philip said ruefully. “On the surface I was the nice, safe guy girls went out with because they knew they could trust me not to take advantage of them; but underneath I was all over the place, and I hated myself for it.” As an adolescent, Philip developed a compelling secret taste for pornography. When he became older, and actual sex became an option, he looked for women he could pick up on the fly for brief, inconsequential one-night stands. “Somehow, those rigid morals just fueled my obsession to break the rules.” For Philip, defiance of ordinary decency was the key to his inner system of arousal. Sex, objectification, and transgression became one. Ironically, by segregating his sexuality outside the boundaries of his relationship with Jackie, Phillip hopes to protect her from the dangers of his desire. Needless to say, Jackie was very disturbed by the loss of intensity in their sex life. Never very confident about her own magnetism, she, too, had been amazed by Philip’s attraction to her. When it dwindled, she assumed he’d simply lost interest, and that this was to be expected. Growing up with a brother who was in and out of psychiatric institutions, she was accustomed to keeping her own needs to a minimum. She had learned not to impose herself and instead to take what she could get. While Philip seeks affirmation on the outside, Jackie’s self-affirmation rests solely on him and his response to her. She highlights a common way women order their sexuality, in that she makes him, and his desire for her, the centerpiece of her sexual identity. In the early days, when Philip was all over her, she blossomed. There was no issue. She felt open, daring, sexy, and wanted. Today, a good student of her own childhood, she avoids putting herself out there for fear of rejection. When she does get up the courage to make advances, Philip feels pressure to be responsive and to take care of her. “Whenever Jackie comes on to me, I’m paralyzed,” he confides. “Which heightens Jackie’s insecurity,” I add. Arguably, male desire runs the gamut between two extremes: those who plead for their partner to come on to them, thereby confirming their desirability; and those who balk when their mate initiates, fearful that their passivity isn’t adequately masculine. Forever unsure of their power as Mom’s little ward, the come-on averse walk a fine line between boyhood and manhood. Predictably, Philip takes Jackie’s overtures as needy demands rather than tempting invitations. Philip feels guilty because he can’t be more erotically involved with his wife. When I ask him for a sexual image that includes her, he conjures up a picture of the two of them kissing romantically in the sunset. He adds that he has difficulty, now, imagining Jackie in a passionate, erotic way.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  In order not to upset her any further, Philip tried to be as different from his father as possible. He became what he calls an asexual wunderkind. “I was intensely moralistic and judgmental,” Philip said ruefully. “On the surface I was the nice, safe guy girls went out with because they knew they could trust me not to take advantage of them; but underneath I was all over the place, and I hated myself for it.” As an adolescent, Philip developed a compelling secret taste for pornography. When he became older, and actual sex became an option, he looked for women he could pick up on the fly for brief, inconsequential one-night stands. “Somehow, those rigid morals just fueled my obsession to break the rules.” For Philip, defiance of ordinary decency was the key to his inner system of arousal. Sex, objectification, and transgression became one. Ironically, by segregating his sexuality outside the boundaries of his relationship with Jackie, Phillip hopes to protect her from the dangers of his desire. Needless to say, Jackie was very disturbed by the loss of intensity in their sex life. Never very confident about her own magnetism, she, too, had been amazed by Philip’s attraction to her. When it dwindled, she assumed he’d simply lost interest, and that this was to be expected. Growing up with a brother who was in and out of psychiatric institutions, she was accustomed to keeping her own needs to a minimum. She had learned not to impose herself and instead to take what she could get. While Philip seeks affirmation on the outside, Jackie’s self-affirmation rests solely on him and his response to her. She highlights a common way women order their sexuality, in that she makes him, and his desire for her, the centerpiece of her sexual identity. In the early days, when Philip was all over her, she blossomed. There was no issue. She felt open, daring, sexy, and wanted. Today, a good student of her own childhood, she avoids putting herself out there for fear of rejection. When she does get up the courage to make advances, Philip feels pressure to be responsive and to take care of her. “Whenever Jackie comes on to me, I’m paralyzed,” he confides. “Which heightens Jackie’s insecurity,” I add. Arguably, male desire runs the gamut between two extremes: those who plead for their partner to come on to them, thereby confirming their desirability; and those who balk when their mate initiates, fearful that their passivity isn’t adequately masculine. Forever unsure of their power as Mom’s little ward, the come-on averse walk a fine line between boyhood and manhood. Predictably, Philip takes Jackie’s overtures as needy demands rather than tempting invitations.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Things haven’t been helped by the tendency in some quarters first to regard the Bible as a book of “moral examples” and then to express shock and alarm when a significant number of the stories, particularly but not exclusively in the Old Testament, display various characters behaving extremely badly. The book of Judges provides several examples (Jephthah and his daughter, for a start), but there are many others. Often it seems to be the women who come off worst: a daughter killed, a concubine raped and murdered, a slave girl treated as a substitute wife and then sent packing with her child. In fact, of course, the Bible was not written as a collection of “moral examples” in the first place. The stories are regularly told in quite a sophisticated way, nudging alert readers into seeing serious and complex underlying patterns and narratives that warn against simplistic readings and that, indeed, encourage them to draw conclusions beyond anything stated on the surface of the text. But this both does and doesn’t help. People naturally ask: Does the Bible justify violence? And, in particular: Is the death of Jesus a supreme example of the God of the Bible using violence—violence, it seems, against his own son!—as a way of achieving his purposes? (I once heard that argument made explicitly in the 1970s by some who wanted to use violence to oppose South African apartheid; they were saying, in effect, if God could do it, so can we.) Even supposing those purposes are ultimately loving and aimed at rescuing people, is this an appropriate way for the one true God to behave? These questions come to a head when some preachers and teachers present the meaning of the cross in relation to punishment. Here we have to be careful. There are many ways of talking about the “punishment of sin” and how that might relate to the event of Jesus’s death. At least one of those ways is clearly taught in the Bible, but it means something significantly different from what many people suppose—many, that is, of those who teach it and many who oppose it. But another way in which the cross has been interpreted in connection with “punishment” has been very popular in some quarters. In this view, God hates sinners so much that he is determined to punish them, but Jesus more or less happens to get in the way and take the death blow on their behalf, so they are somehow spared. It would (I think) be difficult to find a work of serious theology in any tradition that puts the matter as baldly as that.

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

  This is the central tension of the faked orgasm, of the drive to please rather than communicate. It obscures or defers a problem (the sex being “enough already”) that can be addressed only by a real reckoning with your partner and yourself. But for many people, still, decades after the Faked Orgasm Discourse hit the popular consciousness, faking an orgasm is easier, safer, and more accessible than initiating a conversation about what isn’t working, even when we’re in committed relationships with people we love and trust. Most women who fake orgasms do so, using hooks’s language, “as a way to please,” an evolutionary phenomenon called “altruistic deceit.”4 (Many types of trout fake orgasms, too.) A 2019 study found that heterosexual women were more likely to fake orgasms if they believed that their orgasm “was necessary for men’s sexual gratification.”5 This is a common belief, because that’s the message so many of us internalize from mainstream porn and gender roles in general: sex is for other people’s benefit. When you believe this, communication becomes moot. What are you worthy of asking for? “It’s such a huge part of patriarchy, to make your male partner feel like a man, and the responsibility of that is placed on women,” Gabrielle Alexa Noel, the author and sex educator, told me. “When you understand masculinity as being able to make me wet and ‘come’”—rather than the actual biological machinations of what getting someone wet is—“it’s hard to distance yourself from that.” Noel first learned that sex would be for her partner and not for her in … church. “I remember being very, very young in church and the pastor suggesting during services that wives need to pleasure their husbands,” she said. “And I was looking around like, ‘I don’t think I should be here. This is church?’ That made it hard for me to not lie about orgasming when I wanted sex to be over, especially when having sex I didn’t even want to have in the first place.” Faking is what happens when communication doesn’t feel possible. The phenomenon has been studied among heterosexual men, who fake during penis-in-vagina sex, too. One study of men aged eighteen to twenty-nine who say they’ve faked orgasms admitted doing it one out of every four sexual encounters.6 (Another study comparing hetero men and women found 30 percent of male participants faked orgasms, compared with 67 percent of female participants.)7 Noel, who is bisexual and polyamorous, started dating women in her late twenties and eventually unlearned the narrow view of sex that made faking orgasms feel compulsory.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I think he’s beautiful, he treats me like a queen, and I don’t want to have sex with him. He gets frustrated when I reject him day after day, and I don’t like the fact that I’m so indifferent to sex. I’d like to think it happened when I got pregnant with our daughter, but to be honest I was kind of relieved to have an excuse. ‘I’m pregnant’ turned into ‘I just had a baby’ turned into ‘I’m nursing’ turned into ‘I need my sleep.’ Truthfully, as you know, it’s been a problem from the beginning.” “Shall we take the plunge?” “I’m tired of avoiding it, of waiting for something to change. I can’t swap Nico for a new model. I make it work with him or I shrivel up.” Maria grew up in a working-class family, the daughter of a policeman and a substitute teacher. Religion was central, and she attended all-girl Catholic schools through high school. “We never talked about sex at home. My grandma had ten kids and never knew women could have orgasms. Can you imagine? I haven’t seen my mother naked since I was three. I’ve never seen my father naked. I’m the youngest of five, and each of us rebelled in our own way—though my brothers never had to face the injunctions reserved for the girls.” Maria sheds light on the pervasive all-or-nothing, feast or famine sexual culture in America. “I was seventeen when I lost my virginity; and for Catholic girls, once you’ve slept with one person you might as well sleep with the whole town—and, frankly, most of us did.” she tells me. “I know it sounds archaic, but it really was like that where I grew up. Staten Island is like a nature preserve for endangered Catholics. The message was clear: sex is a sin unless you’re married.” “Right. Like the old adage, ‘Sex is dirty; save it for someone you love,’” I say. Maria moved away, went to college, became a casting agent, and today lives in a world vastly different from that of her childhood. But all this intellectual broadening has not succeeded in dismantling the prohibitions: carnal lust is sinful, and especially for women. Despite twenty years of brief encounters, seasonal relationships, and steady boyfriends, the vestigial messages cling obstinately to the sinews of her body with a subcutaneous tenacity. Acting liberated doesn’t necessarily mean being liberated. When she was still single, Maria could circumvent her latent sexual uneasiness. It was easier to be uninhibited when she had less invested emotionally. But once she chose to live within the geographic limitations of a family, the murmurs of her past began to echo. “Once every six months or so I’ll bring it up with Nico. I’ll say, ‘Nico, our sex life sucks. We need to do something about it. I want you to read this book.’ But he doesn’t want to read a book.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For Dylan, a retail manager in his twenties, emotional security feels altogether impossible, with or without sexual excitement. His mother, who died when he was twelve, was the emotional linchpin of their family. When his eyes filled with tears at her funeral, his father said to him, “I hope you’re not going to fall apart on me.” In order to stay close to his father he had to excise his entire emotional life. He explains, “All feelings were a sign of weakness in our house.” The minute Dylan has feelings for someone he lashes out at himself with self-loathing, hoping to control his unbearable vulnerability. His solution? Twice a week he goes to the clubs to pick up men he will never know and who—more important—will never know him. In anonymous sex there are no feelings, and Dylan is protected from repeating the humiliations of his childhood. At the same time he gets to experience the delicious thrill of being wanted, being chosen by many at once. One aspect of the erotic blueprint that illustrates the irrationality of our desire is that what excites us most often arises from our childhood hurts and frustrations. The sex therapist Jack Morin explains that the erotic imagination is ingenious in undoing, transforming, and redressing the traumas of the past. In other words, the experiences that caused us the most pain in childhood sometimes become the greatest sources of pleasure and excitement later on. Let’s take a look at Melinda. Her father is a philanderer. And while she empathizes with her mother’s despair, she also doesn’t want to be like her mother: broken, miserable, bereft. Instead she has become the seductress, the opposite of the abandoned wife. Melinda sets out to best men at their own game. Desire is stoked by unavailability in Melinda’s mind, and once she’s seduced a man he is instantly less attractive. In order to reconfirm her own power she must set her sights on the next man, and the next, and the next. If there is no obstacle to clear, she has no way to gauge her value. Almost nothing is more exciting than conquering a powerful, aloof man; but the ultimate thrill is in dumping him—sure proof that she has avenged the past. In heartlessly dismissing these men, Melinda seeks to confirm that, unlike her mother, she is strong and independent, the one calling the shots, making the choices, picking up or discarding lovers as suits her fancy. Of course, by ruthlessly purging vulnerability from her life, she perversely ends up just as lonely and unloved as her mother.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  appreciate his sacrifice in taking on a divorced woman with a kid, let alone a kid like me, a liar, a thief, a sissy. If my mother argued back he accused her of being disloyal; if she did not argue he became apoplectic with the sound of his own voice. Nothing could stop him but the sight of the Marblemount tavern. He pulled into the parking lot and jammed on the brakes, skidding through the loose gravel. He got out, stuck his head back inside, pronounced some final judgment on us and slammed the door. My mother sat with Pearl and me for a while, stony-faced, watching the tavern. She never cried. Finally she got out of the car and went inside herself. I WAS A liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn’t help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions failed to persuade. I was also a thief. Dwight’s reason for calling me one was trivial, based on my having taken his hunting knife without permission. My thefts were real. I’d begun by stealing candy from the rooms of newspaper subscribers who lived in the bachelors’ quarters. Most of these men kept candy around. I fell into the habit of taking a piece here, a piece there. Then I stole money from them. At first I took only small change, to buy Cokes and ice cream, but later I stole fifty-cent pieces and even dollar bills. I stashed the money in an ammunition box under one of the barracks. My idea was to steal enough to run away. I was ready to do anything to get clear of Dwight. I even thought of killing him, shooting him down some night while he was picking on my mother. I not only carried newspapers, I read them, and reading them had taught me that you can kill a man and get away with it. You just had to appear in the right role, like Cheryl Crane when she stabbed Johnny Stampanato to death for threatening Lana Turner. Sometimes I took the Winchester down when I heard Dwight start in on my mother, but his abuse was more boring than dangerous. She didn’t respect him. She looked down on him. He was doing just fine until we came along. Who did she think she was? Mainly I wanted to shoot him just to quiet him down. Dwight wasn’t wrong when he called me a liar and a thief, but these accusations did not hurt me, because I did not see myself that way. Only one of his charges had stinging power—that I was a sissy. My best friend was a thoroughbred sissy, and because of our friendship I worried that others might think the same of me. To put myself in the clear I habitually mocked Arthur,