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 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Far from being the last word on free love, all this bravado belies an underlying unease. I wonder to what extent this kind of hit-and-run sex is actually a defense against sexual discomfort, in much the same way that taboo-ridden avoidance is a defense. It’s the flip side of the coin: same anxiety, different response. They get drunk, have sex, then pretend it never happened. It’s a way of doing it without being in it. It all just happens; no one has to own it. Perhaps these pretend libertines are not nearly as removed from the Puritan legacy as their Saturday night romps would lead us to believe. Their furtive encounters are not exactly a celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. If there wasn’t at least a shred of moral dissonance in their desire for sex, they might not need to get hammered in order to have it. If they were more comfortable with sex, they would actually place themselves in the heart of it and would want to remember it. For Ratu, the excitement born of spontaneity is ensured as long as she changes partners frequently enough. But what will happen to her when she’s left with only one? I may never meet Ratu again, but many of the people who come to see me remind me of her. They have found that their history of sexual nomadism is no help in meeting the challenge of sustaining sexual vitality with one person over time. They view sex before marriage and sex after marriage as entirely different realities. Single sex isn’t supposed to prepare you for committed sex. If anything, it’s seen as the last hurrah before a lifetime of sexual decline. How Important Is Sex Anyway? A healthy sense of erotic entitlement is built on a relaxed, generous, and unencumbered attitude toward the pleasures of the body—something our puritan culture continues to grapple with. I witness the fallout of this ambivalence in my practice every day. Much of my work with couples involves addressing the shame and anxiety that surround people’s sexuality, causing them to want to withdraw from their lovers for fear of being judged and rejected. I give permission, reduce anxiety, normalize fantasies and desires, and challenge the distortions of poor body image. Together we excavate the secrets and the silence that accompanied their sexual upbringing, and confront the cultural and familial messages that block erotic expression. Therapy is a process of expanding sexuality by shedding inhibitions, encouraging physicality, and negotiating boundaries. Couples learn to dance step by step, and it takes as long as it takes.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  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.

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

  There are disruptive physical effects, too. Many women whose upbringings were steeped in purity culture report vaginismus, or a physical tightening of the vagina that makes intercourse extremely painful—the condition is often linked to fear or shame surrounding sex.15 Dr. Marlene Well, a psychologist in San Francisco, coined the diagnosis “Religious Trauma Syndrome” to describe the cluster of PTSD-like symptoms “experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination,” including anxiety disorders, depression, and sexual difficulty. PTSD leaves victims with several physical side effects that impair sexual functioning at every stage of intimacy, such as desire, arousal, and orgasm.16 “A big part of purity culture is that my pleasure, especially as a Black woman, is not important,” Adams told me. “What isn’t talked about when we talk about power dynamics of sex and relationships and the messages we get around them, especially for women, nonbinary folks, and trans folks, is that your pleasure and desires are secondary to a person’s power when there is a power dynamic present. A lot of people are conditioned to conform to that norm.” These messages are so ingrained in American culture that you don’t have to be raised in a conservative Christian household to internalize them. My parents didn’t teach me that sex was shameful, or that if I touched a penis its spirit would live inside me forever. But while I’ve never felt ashamed of the casual sex I’ve had, shame is still woven into the fabric of my sexual experiences. What is it, if not shame of pleasure, that would compel me to stop a man giving me oral sex that I was enjoying, because I was nervous about wasting his time? Because I felt frightened that he wasn’t getting enough pleasure? Adams has been struck by the pervasiveness of sexual values she once thought were confined to Christian culture. When I told her I wasn’t raised religiously, she was surprised to learn that I went through many of the same struggles she did: a near paralysis when it came to feeling pleasure with a partner, and a hypervigilance toward that partner’s pleasure. I didn’t need the church to teach me my pleasure mattered less than the men I fucked, even the monsters who faked putting on condoms because it was too dark to notice and I was beer-and-shot tipsy. I still cared about these people having a better time than me! The version of sex that I’d internalized throughout adolescence, when my friend told me (against my will!) that sex was a penis in a vagina, was an activity that wasn’t supposed to feel good for me. The parts that I later learned were for me—oral sex, (controlled!) nipple stuff, and just a sprinkle of penis in vagina—I had to figure out on my own.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My mother seldom dared to contradict her husband directly and allowed herself to be violent only if my father was being seconded in his views by the rest of us. She accused us of being stupid and wicked, and blasphemous too in daring to disturb the Sabbath peace. My father became surly and silent. He began all solemn feasts with a glass of fig wine. He was then easily angered, and his moods were heralded by these stormy silences. My mother was aware of how heavy the atmosphere had grown and knew she had to act quickly, so she anticipated the hour when the grocery clerk had to be called and said now to Elisa: “Go tell Boubaker to come up and turn off the light! Go on! Hurry up!” Elisa forgot her tears and began snarling instead. She was always the one, it was always Elisa who was sent on errands! Why couldn’t Kalla ever go? Besides, she was cold and sleepy. The raising of Friday night’s ticklish question always delighted me. My ironic joy must have been evident as my father said, in a taunting manner: “Don’t go if you’re cold, Elisa. Mordekhai will turn the light off, since he’s not afraid of committing a sin!” I hadn’t expected this attack. Did he really think I wouldn’t dare? “As you wish,” I said drily. My mother sensed the challenge and wanted to avoid any open conflict between her husband and her son. Brutally, she repeated her order to Elisa; her firm tone put an end to any discussion, and Elisa was so dumfounded that she obeyed without a peep. But the atmosphere was charged, and we finished our chick-peas in a new silence broken only by the rhythmic sound of our chewing. The children were tired and uneasy and didn’t want to play games. Kalla was daydreaming. My mother cleared the table of all but the bread and the salt and covered these with another cloth: signs that the Sabbath was among us. When we were getting ready for bed, my father’s repressed anger was still simmering. In a nasty tone, he now forced the issue: “Why did you let Elisa go?” He thought he’d won. I said nothing, nor did I hesitate very long. I walked over to the switch, turned off the light, and left our flat in utter darkness. The children’s surprised voices became more subdued. No one protested. My parents groped around to find their bed. It took me a long time to fall asleep, and them too, for I heard them whispering. When Boubaker knocked at the door, my mother shouted to him, with some embarrassment, that the light was already out.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I hesitated and was still standing in the doorway when my mother, apparently in complete control of herself, motioned me to go into the next room where the men were gathered. Had her cheeks not been savagely torn with red scratches, I would have sworn that my mother had played no part in my emotion. I passed along the women and went into the next room where the corpse lay on the floor, covered by a somber red cloth while, on either side of it, a candle flickered its yellow light. The same attendance, but more orderly, more silent. The men, my uncles, cousins, aunts’ husbands. This room, where shadows merged, shifted, trembled jerkily at the mercy of the small flames, was also empty of all furniture, sinister. I sat down timidly under everyone’s convergent and reproachful gaze. No one was missing; I had really been the only male in the family to fail at this collective duty. My father looked at me angrily, but was so ashamed of me that he said nothing. Then they began to talk softly; so they had stopped at the sound of our steps. I noticed that most of the men were freshly shaved, and some had obviously just had their hair cut: what an excellent precaution against the month to come when they would no longer be able to go to the barber-shop! They were all, like their wives, dressed in black. The nervousness I had felt gave place to anger. How stupid I was to have turned cold to the roots of my hair, to have allowed myself to be impressed by this parlor game, this collective hypocrisy! From the other room there came the lively chatter of the women, free to talk until the next visitor arrived. On account of the presence of the corpse and their own nature, the men were restrained; though they whispered, they seemed hardly upset. How ridiculous it was, after all, that I had been more deeply upset than they! An interminable ceremony of several hours then began, and to my great fury, I was trapped. There was no way to escape from this room of naked walls, without corners, where everyone watched all the others. And my oral examination had to wait! Whenever a step sounded on the landing, the two gatherings immediately became still. Visitors, wrapped in silence, confused before faces closed in uniform mourning, stuttered their condolences, shook countless hands, and disappeared. I pitied them and felt almost guilty to have participated in their discomfort without feeling more afflicted. My hand was shaken dozens and dozens of times before the hearse finally arrived. The undertakers entered, faceless and insignificant, and we all stood up. When they lifted the limp corpse, it dangled from their arms, and I left the room.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The Second Letter to the Corinthians is utterly different from the first not only in mood, but also in literary style. This appears to be because, as he says in the first chapter, Paul had been utterly crushed by events in Ephesus. He doesn’t say what had happened, but it seems to have been a major threat to life and limb and equally important to the balance of his mind and heart. On top of it all—whatever it was—he has clearly received a message or messages from the church in Corinth of which the tone as well as the content has disturbed him greatly. There seems to be a rival group of teachers there now, and they have poured scorn on Paul and his ministry, his style, his methods, and particularly his suffering. If only he were a real apostle, as they are, none of this would have happened to him! We only see this, of course, through Paul’s response, but it seems from what he says and from how he says it that they were undermining him in particular because he was bringing shame on the church. How could they look up to someone who had been ill-treated in the way he had been? Paul’s answer is to explain to them the way in which his own ministry is shaped by the message of the Messiah and his cross. The letter has many twists and turns—there are jerky passages that look as if Paul was dictating it in bits, perhaps while on the road around northern Greece—but at its heart we find this message: that the true signs of apostolic ministry are to be found in the things that show that the apostle is formed by the Messiah himself, the Messiah whose death overturned all cultural expectations as well as all forms of power. Here we see, as it were, the large-scale exposition of Galatians 2:19–20. Paul has been crucified with the Messiah, and the life he now lives is the Messiah’s own crucified and risen, suffering and glorious life. It is one thing to say, “We don’t proclaim ourselves, but Jesus the Messiah as Lord, and ourselves as your servants because of Jesus” (4:5). Anyone might assent to that in theory, but it is quite another thing to find the meaning of that claim etched painfully into real life:

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

  “Despite their growing popularity and widespread use in various biopsychosocial circumstances, many taboos still seem to exist, as indicated by the paucity of scientific literature on the prevalence, application, and effectiveness of sexual devices for therapeutic use,” declared a 2021 Nature article.2 Many of the cis men I spoke to said they would never own fleshlights, for example, calling them “sleazy” and “like a less good version of the real thing.” The perception seemed to be that owning and using a fleshlight signified a failure to “get” real sex, a deficit that is shameful in a society that constructs masculinity around sexual prowess. (Another roadblock—fleshlights are exceedingly difficult to clean.) I remember, all those years ago, finding my ex-boyfriend’s fleshlight on his bed when I broke into his apartment to surprise him. I remember feeling hurt, like his use of sex toys was some kind of betrayal, unable to conceive of someone having a vibrant, full erotic life outside of partnered contexts. These taboos get in our way. Recent literature suggests that genital vibrators improve sexual satisfaction, both during solo and partnered use, and are effective treatments for erectile dysfunction and anorgasmia.3, 4 While they can’t solve every sexual woe, vibrators and sex tech more broadly are useful tools for exploring our sexualities. If masturbation is the key to better sex, as so many experts suggest, sex toys are the key to better masturbation. If you’re one of the many people who struggles to feel pleasure during sex, these devices make it easier to explore and discover the type of touch you love—to be enjoyed alone, and/or communicated to a partner who, if they can hang, can administer it on you. This is not new information; some of the oldest artifacts in human history are sex toys, which makes our enduring shame all the more shocking. The first suspected sex toy, an eight-inch-long stone dildo, was carved roughly thirty thousand years ago.5 Hallie Lieberman, who wrote Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, notes that dildos decorated Greek vases and Japanese art. “I think it’s important to recognize the history because it gives a more nuanced view—this isn’t a sign of the decline of civilization,” she said in an interview with The Cut. “Dildos have been a part of human culture since the beginning of human culture.”6

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

  As I search for labia solutions, the algorithm serves me many science-based resources that assure me crooked-looking labia are no cause for concern, but also an Australian government website10 that suggests taking baths is bad for your labia, and that is what will lodge betwixt my brain folds forever. Even when I’m not actively looking to validate labia insecurities, labia insecurities find me in my own home! Ads for labiaplasty regularly splash on my browser as I labor to read the news or shop for sweaters. (It’s no wonder that the number of people seeking surgery to alter the appearance of their labia has skyrocketed in the past five years. The same is true of ball-enhancing procedures.) Sensitive and easily agitated, I am vulnerable to this kind of messaging about my genitalia, but I’m not as vulnerable as adolescents, who are more likely to internalize these cues long-term, in part because their brains are squishier. What we learn about sex, bodies, and pleasure during our development has a lasting impact on the way we experience sex. Therein lies the problem: sex education in America remains inaccurate or nonexistent, and the other institutions that teach us about sex—like family, church, and mass media—are largely reinforcing cis-heteronormative, puritanical values that marginalize our most vulnerable youth and interfere with their sexual well-being. Too often these institutions stigmatize sexual pleasure, perpetuating messages like: sex is scary; genitals are gross; sex is for men’s pleasure; sex is straight; sex is intercourse; sex is ejaculation; sex is for certain types of bodies (read white, cis, straight, and thin). Around the country, school boards and lawmakers are instituting bans on books dealing with race, gender, and sexuality at an unprecedented pace, and books written by Black and LGBTQIA+ authors are under disproportionate attack.11 As psychotherapist and relationship genius Esther Perel puts it in Mating in Captivity, “[I]t is in messages to children that societies most reveal their values, goals, incentives, prohibitions.” How can you have good, passionate, pleasurable sex when these messages still live inside you, messages that say the sex you are having is wrong, and that you are wrong for having it?

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

  Zimmerman, Toni Schindler, Kristen E. Holm, Katherine C. Daniels, and Shelley A. Haddock. 2002. “Barriers and Bridges to Intimacy and Mutuality: A Critical Review of Sexual Advice Found in Self-Help Bestsellers.” Contemporary Family Therapy, 24, pp. 289–311. Searchable TermsAdele and Alan, security and erotic vitality and Against Love (Kipnis) aggression. See domination and submission Alan and Adele, security and erotic vitality and Alberoni, Francesco Amanda and Nat, fantasy and Amber, parenthood and anchor and wave, security and Andrew and Serena, intimacy and Anger, excitement and Arlene, fidelity and Arousal (Bader) autonomy fidelity and love and self and others and Bachelard, Gaston Bader, Michael Barthes, Roland Beatrice and John, intimacy and Ben, work ethic and Benjamin, Jessica Bliss (film) Boccio, Frank Jude body-mind continuum Buñuel, Luis Candace and Jimmy, intimacy and Can Love Last? (Mitchell) Carla and Leo, parenthood and Charlene, parenthood and Charles and Rose, security and erotic vitality childhood lessons, about balancing self and others autonomy and James and Stella ruthlessness and selfishness and children. See parenthood Chodorow, Nancy Christine and Ryan, work ethic and comfort love Coral and Jed, domination and cultural values domination and submission and intimacy and parenthood and Puritanism and hedonism and de Beauvoir, Simone democracy in relationships. See domination and submission domination and submission cultural values and Elizabeth and Vito and hate and love and Jed and Coral and Marcus and power and sadomasochism and Dominick and Raoul, intentionality and Doug and Zoë and Naomi, fidelity and Dylan, childhood and desire Eddie and Noriko, intimacy and Elizabeth and Vito, domination and emotional space entrapment, intimacy and Epstein, Mark equality. See domination and submission Eric and Jaxon, fidelity and erotic vitality, security and Adele and Alan and anchor and wave and Charles and Rose and fidelity and need for romantics and realists and uncertainty and Eyes Wide Shut (film) familiarity, intimacy and family influences. See childhood lessons fantasies changing attitudes toward forms of Joni and Ray and lack of communication about Nat and Amanda and sharing of the Third and Feeling Strong (Person) Fiddler on the Roof (film) fidelity autonomy and disclosures of infidelity Doug and Zoë and Naomi and new meanings of reasons for infidelity security and the Third and Fisher, Helen Frank, Katherine Franklin, Benjamin Friday, Nancy Fromm, Erich Gafni, Mordechai Giddens, Anthony goals. See work ethic Godwin, Gail Goldner, Virginia Gopnik, Adam Guillebaud, Jean-Claude hate, love and hedonism, Puritanism and cultural ambivalence about sexuality and Maria and Nico and Ratu and teenage sexuality and “himbos” “hooking up” Hoover, J. Edgar Hot Monogamy (Love) Huizinga, Johan Ian and Marguerite, fidelity and independence economic emotional infidelity. See fidelity intentionality, marriage and intimacy, pitfalls of modern See also intimacy, sexuality and cultural changes and Eddie and Noriko and mind-body continuum and Mitch and Laura and “talk” intimacy and intimacy, sexuality and. See also intimacy, pitfalls of modern entrapment and familiarity and Jimmy and Candace and John and Beatrice and separateness and Jacqueline and Philip, marriage and James and Stella, childhood and

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

  In my practice I aim to create a sex-friendly place, free of judgment and moralizing, where people can talk safely about their sexuality. Simply doing that—and often it is not so simple at all—can have a profound effect. Sex becomes both a way to illuminate conflicts over intimacy and desire, and a way to begin to heal these destructive splits. Together, Joni and I use the text of her fantasies to address critical issues between her and Ray. Dependency and passivity, aggression, and control were all feelings that she disavowed for years, they had been allowed only in the privacy of her mind. By reclaiming them in therapy she was one step closer to liberating them at home. Once Joni was no longer held captive by the shame of her fantasies, she became more relaxed and self-accepting. To her surprise, she was able to approach Ray with all sorts of requests and only a modest amount of trepidation. Conversations ensued in which formidable obstacles were revealed to be nothing more than awkward misunderstandings that, through neglect, had snowballed out of control. For years Ray had assumed that his gentle approach was what Joni wanted. In fact, he thought that was what all women wanted, and he couldn’t figure out why asking “What can I do for you?” warranted such an irritated reply: “Nothing!” He had no way of knowing that, for Joni, being taken care of sexually meant abdicating all responsibility and luxuriating in passive dependency, guilt-free. Their dynamics had become absurd, with her rejection triggering his solicitousness, which in turn triggered more rejection. When Joni invited Ray to be more assertive and self-directed, this was as liberating for him as for her. For the first time, he felt that there was room for a full range of feelings, not just tender ones. Joni was surprised at Ray’s positive response to her own new assertiveness. Even claiming her desire to be passive was an unprecedented act of agency on her part. Like many women, she had internalized the powerful message that bold expressions of female sexuality are whorish, unattractive, selfish, and certainly not part of intimate love. “I was afraid that if I told Ray, ‘Do this, don’t do that, slow down, stay longer, like this, and this, and this,’ it would feel emasculating to him.”

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

  “Sex is a lot better than masturbation and involves actual intimacy instead,” he said. “Masturbation has a role for me in an ideally sexually diversified lifestyle, but it’s a small part.” I asked him if he thought sex with others was more intimate than sex with himself. “I’ve never really considered intimacy something that can happen by oneself. There’s no interpersonal joy that comes from being with myself. I still enjoy it, but I don’t feel closer to myself for having wanked it, you know?” Regardless of how you internalized the message that masturbating is lesser than partnered sex, or even the idea, like Ryan, that it is a tedious exercise, this reluctance blocks us from pleasure. Masturbating is one of the healthiest things we can do for ourselves and our sex lives. And it’s free! Most of the materials we need come complimentary with birth. Self-pleasuring releases feel-good hormones like dopamine and oxytocin, and can help us rehabilitate our understandably fraught relationship with pleasure, reduce stress, and build affirming sexual fantasies.3 Our reluctance to explore self-pleasure robs us of a valuable tool for developing sexual autonomy. Ryan is masturbating, but he doesn’t care for himself the way he cares for sexual partners. Amy Weissfeld, the sex coach, recalls masturbating as a child—“babies are pleasure seekers,” she told me repeatedly—but then dropping it for years. Nothing dramatic happened, but she became busy with other things, and self-pleasure plummeted to the bottom of the to-do list. “I was in a good relationship and I just got busy doing other things. Like, life happened, and it didn’t seem important,” she said. “My partner would say to me, ‘What do you want? What do you like?’ And I’d be like, ‘I don’t know, whatever you’re doing is fine. It’s all good.’ I was dissociated from my body because of all this body shame.” It wasn’t until she expanded her own definition of masturbation into a broader practice of self-pleasure, one that wasn’t so orgasm-obsessed, that she stepped into her sexuality. She began touching herself like she was someone she loved. “What was key to my own sexuality was recognizing, number one, the importance of masturbation, but number two, that masturbation doesn’t have to be rubbing on the clit till I have an orgasm,” she said. “What I try to get people to do is not focus on trying to ejaculate or trying to have an orgasm or trying to perform in some way, but to just experience pleasure in the body. So sometimes, for me, I might just sit there with my hand on my heart for thirty minutes and I meditate. It’s like an erotic meditation. I’m redefining masturbation as self-love.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  As for the middle-class boys who were now my classmates, they had become my equals and my everyday companions. In spite of myself, I respected their new suits that were so elegantly cut, their high-quality school equipment, and their healthy appearance. I even envied them their being able to refer without any hesitation to their parents and their social background. I, on the contrary, always had to be careful and watch my step when it came to admitting anything about myself or my family. If anyone asked me about it, I always said that my father was “in the leather business.” Yes, up to his elbows in leather, I would add mentally. In the same manner, I blew up to unnatural proportions my Uncle Aroun’s business and, in spite of my distaste for him, often boasted about it. About my mother, I avoided speaking as there was nothing much I could find to say about her. Without ever admitting it, I would have been ready to pay dearly for the privilege of being a middle-class boy, born and bred in the leather or grocery business. In spite of the friendships that I made in school, I never really managed to penetrate the social life of my schoolmates. They probably felt that I was too sarcastic and too severe in my judgments, perhaps even rather unpleasant. I was proud and easily hurt, so that I took no steps at all to suggest that they might invite me. I would have had to return any invitations, and it was impossible for me to entertain any guests at home. So it was Henry, who was not one of my classmates in high school, who brought me out socially. He introduced me to a group of scout leaders who were looking for an instructor for the Jewish part of their educational program. As I was still quite undiscriminating in my intellectual appetites and ready for anything, I happened also to attend some Hebrew night classes that had been organized by the Zionists. In an audience from the ghetto, I was thus one of the few high-school boys to have acquired both kinds of culture. The middle-class boys in secondary school were sarcastic about such an amateurish and hit-and-miss manner of teaching, being quite blind to its historical significance. Although their position made it clear that they would one day be the leaders of the community, they had lost all interest in the social problems of its daily life. Because their own future seemed to pose them no problems, they could only be flippant on every political issue, which shocked me deeply.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The Reformers by and large rejected not only the abuses connected with purgatory (selling indulgences and the like), but the doctrine itself. In part this may have been because they saw this teaching being used as a weapon by the clerical elite to maintain social and dogmatic control. But their objections were set out in robustly theological and biblical terms. They insisted that the Christian soul went immediately to heaven after death. (Some tried to combine this with the New Testament’s sense of a time lag before the ultimate new creation, teaching that the soul might in some sense “sleep” in between bodily death and bodily resurrection; but the point, again, was “no purgatory.”) These issues remained unresolved and are not relevant to our present discussion, except as the context for the truly important thing. The rejection of purgatory precipitated a fresh emphasis from a new angle on an interpretation of the cross that echoed, but also differed from, that of Anselm. Catholic apologists for the doctrine of purgatory had insisted that at the point of death the still sinful soul needed two things: further purification and further punishment. (Allowance was made for a small number of saints who would go straight to heaven, but they were assumed to be very much the exception.) The Reformers replied that the purification in question was effected not after death, but by bodily death itself (as in Rom. 6:7, where death pays all debts) and by the Spirit’s present sanctifying work, putting to death the deeds of the body (as in Rom. 8:13). And they insisted, particularly, that postmortem punishment for the still sinful believer was unthinkable, because the punishment had already been inflicted on Jesus himself in the sinner’s place. “So, therefore, there is no condemnation . . . because . . . right there in the flesh, [God] condemned sin” (Rom. 8:1–4). That punishment had already been meted out and could not be repeated. Thus the doctrine known as “penal substitution” (Jesus bearing punishment in the place of his people), though in itself a much older, indeed biblical and patristic, conception, received a new boost and a new spin from the Reformers’ rejection of purgatory. One of the reasons it became such a hallmark of Reformation theology was that it was thus a key part of the polemic against a doctrine that lacked biblical support and had the visible propensity to generate corruption and abuse. (It is noteworthy that leading Roman theologians today, men of the stature of Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, have radically revised the doctrine, so that it bears almost no relation to what their forebears taught in the early sixteenth century.)

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

  The process of internalizing sexual norms begins in childhood, during small moments—of getting yelled at for grinding on a pillow, unknowingly masturbating; of watching movie couples orgasm in sync; of hearing gay slurs on the playground. Our understanding of what sexuality can and should be incubates in our soft kid brains long before we start having sex and even longer before we find ourselves wholeheartedly accepting that sex with our fiancé will never feel great but that he offers other things, like bringing home wine sometimes. The way “good sex” is modeled to us via digital media, like porn and movies— cis-heterosexual penis-vagina sex where the woman is awash in pleasure despite zero clitoral stimulation—is bad sex for most people with vulvas, who are unable to orgasm from penetration alone. And then there’s the extreme, outcome-centric emphasis on erection and penile orgasm—to signal the beginning and end of sex, respectively—that creates undue anxiety and pressure to perform. “Given that in most situations, at least in my experience, I’m running the show, if it’s bad, it’s probably my fault,” one thirty-year-old cis-het man told me. Unlearning reductive, patriarchal sexual norms requires education, exploration, and—because we are dealing with humans—communication. When we are failed by education, exploration and communication become more challenging. We don’t know how to communicate. We’re scared; we’re tired. Our vocabulary for communicating during sex is deeply limited, and when we believe our pleasure matters less, why speak up? Purity culture and cis-heteronormativity pervade popular culture so profoundly that it actually disrupts our sexual development. Messages about what sex is and isn’t live in our bodies long after we believe we’ve unlearned them—messages like “There’s something wrong with me if I can’t orgasm during penetrative sex,” “My job during sex is to make my partner orgasm,” and “I’m a bad, horrible slut for sleeping with so many people.” Even Emily Ratajkowski, a model and author who is arguably one of the hottest people on the planet, is not immune, admitting in a recent TikTok, “Women have internalized the male gaze so much, that when we’re having sex, we’re thinking about how hot or not we are.” These preoccupations aren’t always tethered to specific thoughts, but they can disrupt us before, during, and after sex with unpleasant body sensations, sensations that feel a lot like shame, anxiety, and numbness. Like trauma responses, these sensations bubble up when we least expect it, making it even harder for us to feel pleasure and enjoy sex. Bad sex becomes the norm.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  All this explains Cicero’s statement that everything to do with crucifixion, including the word crux itself, should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes, and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these things, or the endurance of them, but liability to them, the expectation, indeed the very mention of them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man. (In Verrem 16) The horrible personal and physical aspects of crucifixion were matched by the social, communal, and political meaning. This is important not just as the “context” for our understanding of the Jesus’s execution (as though the barbaric practice were just a dark backdrop to a theology produced from somewhere else), but as part of the very stuff of the theology itself. We might already have figured this out from the careful placing of Philippians 2.8b, thanatou de staurou, “even the death of the cross,” at the dead center of the poem that some think antedates Paul himself. As we shall see later, the first half of that poem is a downward journey, down to the lowest place to which a human being could sink with regard to pain or shame, personal fate or public perception. This was precisely the point. Those who crucified people did so because it was the sharpest and nastiest way of asserting their own absolute power and guaranteeing their victim’s absolute degradation. The early Christians did not suppose that Jesus might in principle have died in one of a number of ways (being stoned, killed in battle, assassinated with a dagger in a crowd, or whatever). Reading backward in the light of the subsequent events, they interpreted the crucifixion as part of the strange, dark divine plan in which the shame and horror were part of the intended meaning. Jesus, they believed, had gone to the lowest point possible for a human being, never mind a Jew, never mind one whose followers had hoped he was the coming king. So how had crucifixion come to be used in this way? The early history of the practice is lost in the mists of the pre-Roman world. The first historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, mention the execution of people on poles and trees, though it isn’t always clear whether this was simply hanging or impaling, both of which would have resulted in a much quicker death. Recent scholarly work has surveyed the evidence from the entire ancient world and has stressed that part of the point of crucifixion itself, as opposed to impaling or hanging, was that the victim was often able to see, to speak, to cry out in pain or protest for hours or even days. In some cases it was even possible for a victim to be rescued, to be brought down from the cross in time to recover.

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

  When I was alone in the house I went through everyone’s private things. One day I found in my mother’s bureau a letter from her brother Stephen, who lived in Paris. It was filled with descriptions of the city and the pleasures to be had there. I read it a couple of times, then copied the address from the flimsy blue envelope and put it back in the drawer. That night I wrote my uncle a long letter in which I created a nightmare picture of our life in Chinook. It seemed true enough as I wrote it, but I got carried away. At the end of the letter I pleaded with my uncle to bring my mother and me to Paris. If he would just help us get started, I said, we’d be on our feet in no time. We would find jobs and pay him back whatever we owed. I said I didn’t know how much longer we could hold out—everything depended on him. I plastered an envelope with stamps and mailed it off. I waited a few days for his answer, then forgot about it. MY MOTHER CAUGHT me on the steps one afternoon as I was coming in from my paper route. She said she wanted me to take a walk with her. Not far from the house there was a footbridge over the river, and when we got there she stopped and asked me what in the world I had written to her brother. I said I didn’t remember, exactly. “It must’ve been pretty bad,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How did you get his address?” I told her I’d found the letter on top of her bureau. She shook her head and looked out over the water. “I was just trying to help,” I said. “Read this,” she said, and handed me a blue envelope. Inside was another letter from Uncle Stephen. He expressed his shock and sympathy at the wretchedness of our condition, but explained that he wasn’t able to launch a rescue operation on the scale of the one I had proposed. They didn’t have room

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She stared at me, surprised by the madam, by the thanks, so unusual in that part of town, and by the muffled emotion in my voice. I saw her hesitation and decided to surprise her even more, to overcome her indifference, to discover even the smallest spark of communion so that this meeting would really put an end to my loneliness. “You know... you’re the first woman...” For the first time, she smiled faintly. Then, as she had to open the door, she turned her back on me and let in the violent daylight Bissor was waiting for me with his back to the wall as he eyed a little blonde in pink rayon panties. She was smiling broadly at him, and all her teeth that were mounted on a metal setting turned her mouth into an inhuman machine. “Well, how was it?” asked Bissor. “O.K.,” I answered sadly. It was getting late, and the first wave of customers, all white-collar workers, was closed behind the doors of the more presentable girls. Those that we saw now seemed to be the ugliest. As the narrow alleys had been heated by the sun all through the afternoon, I now began to discover the smell that dominated the reserved quarter. The water streamed from under the closed doors in little spurts and wet our shoes, flowing into a gutter in the middle of the street and forming there a kind of blackish mud which smelled penetratingly of sperm, piss, and sweat. I had noticed none of this when we had arrived. To keep up an artificial enthusiasm, I kept repeating to myself: “It’s the first time I’ve seen a woman naked; it’s a historic moment.” I wanted to feel enriched and more manly. But, I was ashamed; I felt dirty and cheap, as though I had been an accomplice in all this wretchedness and collective scorn. I was disappointed, unsatisfied, and disgusted; all this stuck in my throat and made me want to cry. Fortunately, Bissor was silent. The poor girls without customers sat on their doorsteps and invited us in, with forced smiles and languid looks. I was not even afraid any more. The last ones we saw, the women I had not even dared look at earlier, were hideous and fat, with withered skin and flabby jowls, with oily hair and thick makeup, like eczema scabs. Most of them were collapsed on the stone steps of their doorways to rest their thick, varicose legs. “They’re for the old guys,” Bissor explained. Before we left the district, he made me piss in a corner against a leaning buttressed wall, all damp and sticky with a yellow pool that stank of ammonia at its base. It was necessary, he said, to avoid catching clap.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  There seems to be a rival group of teachers there now, and they have poured scorn on Paul and his ministry, his style, his methods, and particularly his suffering. If only he were a real apostle, as they are, none of this would have happened to him! We only see this, of course, through Paul’s response, but it seems from what he says and from how he says it that they were undermining him in particular because he was bringing shame on the church. How could they look up to someone who had been ill-treated in the way he had been? Paul’s answer is to explain to them the way in which his own ministry is shaped by the message of the Messiah and his cross. The letter has many twists and turns—there are jerky passages that look as if Paul was dictating it in bits, perhaps while on the road around northern Greece—but at its heart we find this message: that the true signs of apostolic ministry are to be found in the things that show that the apostle is formed by the Messiah himself, the Messiah whose death overturned all cultural expectations as well as all forms of power. Here we see, as it were, the large-scale exposition of Galatians 2:19–20. Paul has been crucified with the Messiah, and the life he now lives is the Messiah’s own crucified and risen, suffering and glorious life. It is one thing to say, “We don’t proclaim ourselves, but Jesus the Messiah as Lord, and ourselves as your servants because of Jesus” (4:5). Anyone might assent to that in theory, but it is quite another thing to find the meaning of that claim etched painfully into real life: We have this treasure in earthenware pots, so that the extraordinary quality of the power may belong to God, not to us. We are under all kinds of pressure, but we are not crushed completely; we are at a loss, but not at our wits’ end; we are persecuted, but not abandoned; we are cast down, but not destroyed. We always carry the deadness of Jesus about in the body, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our body.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Minutes earlier the orderlies had removed his body. The first time she met Dr. Lash, she was startled by the antique rolltop desk in his office. It was like her father’s, and often during her long silences she caught herself gazing at it. She never told Dr. Lash about the desk and its secrets, or about her poems, or about the long silence between herself and her father. Ernest also slept poorly that night. Again and again he reviewed his presentation of Myrna to the countertransference study group, which had met a couple of days earlier in a member’s group therapy room on Couch Row, as upper Sacramento Street was often called. Though the seminar had started out leaderless, the discussions had grown so intense and so personally threatening that a few months ago they had hired a consultant, Dr. Fritz Werner, an elderly psychoanalyst who had contributed many astute papers to the psychoanalytic literature on countertransference. Ernest’s account of Myrna had provoked a particularly animated discussion. Though praising him for his willingness to expose himself so candidly to the group, Dr. Werner had also been sharply critical of the therapy, especially the T-shirt comment. “Why so impatient?” Dr. Werner asked as he scraped the bowl of his pipe, filled it with acrid-smelling Balkan Sobranie, tamped it down, and lit it. When first invited he had stipulated that his pipe be part of the deal. “So she repeats herself?” he continued. “So she whines? So she makes impossible requests of you? So she’s critical of you and doesn’t behave like a good, grateful patient? My God, young man, you’ve only seen her for four months! What’s that—a total of fifteen or sixteen sessions? Why, I’m currently seeing a patient who for the entire first year —that’s four times a week, two hundred hours —simply repeated herself. Over and over, the same lament, the same yearning for different parents, different friends, a different face, different body—the same endless pining for what could never be. Eventually she got fed up with listening to herself, fed up with her own repetitive cycle. She herself realized she was squandering not only her analytic hours but her entire life. You can’t fling the truth in your patient’s face: the only real truth is the truth we discover for ourselves. “ Evenly suspended attention, young man,” he said firmly. “That’s what you need to give the patient. Evenly suspended attention; words as true now as when Freud first uttered them. That’s what is required of us—to attend to the patient’s words without preformulations, without bias, without personal reactions limiting our vision. It’s the heart and soul of the entire analytic enterprise.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather, it was mostly Mrs. Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream of gossip about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one with a great deal more, that these women left out. Once started, Mrs. Bolton was better than any book, about the lives of the people. She knew them all so intimately, and had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their affairs, it was wonderful, if just a _trifle_ humiliating to listen to her. At first she had not ventured to "talk Tevershall," as she called it, to Clifford. But once started, it went. Clifford was listening for "material," and he found it in plenty. Connie realised that his so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for personal gossip, clever and apparently detached. Mrs. Bolton, of course, was very warm when she "talked Tevershall." Carried away, in fact. And it was marvellous, the things that happened and that she knew about. She would have run to dozens of volumes. Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the _passional_ secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are _conventionally_ "pure." Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels. Mrs. Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels. "And he was such a _bad_ fellow, and she was such a _nice_ woman." Whereas, as Connie could see even from Mrs. Bolton's gossip, the woman had been merely a mealy-mouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty made a "bad man" of him, and mealy-mouthedness made a "nice woman" of her, in the vicious, conventional channeling of sympathy by Mrs. Bolton.