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 133 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  implication in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. In 1567 she was forced to abdicate the Scottish throne in favor of her infant son, James VI. The following year she escaped imprisonment in Scotland and fled to England, putting herself in the hands of her cousin. Elizabeth had every reason to despise Mary and return her to Scotland. She was the polar opposite of Elizabeth—selfish, flighty, and immoral. She was a fervent Catholic, and around her she would attract all those in England and abroad who wanted to depose Elizabeth and put a Catholic on the throne. She could not be trusted. But to the dismay of Cecil, her councillors, and the English people, Elizabeth allowed Mary to stay in the country under a mild form of house arrest. Politically this seemed to make no sense. It infuriated the Scots and threatened relations between the two countries. As Mary began to secretly conspire against Elizabeth, and calls arose from all sides to have her executed for treason, inexplicably Elizabeth refused to take what appeared to be the rational step. Was it simply a case of one Tudor protecting another? Did she fear the precedent of executing a queen, and what it might mean for her own fate? In any event, it made her look weak and selfish, as if what mattered were protecting a fellow queen. Then, in 1586, Mary became involved with the most audacious plot to have Elizabeth murdered, upon which Mary would have become Queen of England. She had secret backing from the pope and the Spanish, and there was now incontrovertible proof of her involvement in the plot. This outraged the public, who could well imagine the bloody civil war that would have ensued if the plot had gone forward. This time the pressure on Elizabeth was too great—no matter if Mary had been a queen, she had to be executed. But yet again Elizabeth hesitated. A trial convicted Mary, but Elizabeth could not bring herself to sign the death warrant. To Cecil and those in the court who saw her daily, the queen had never appeared so distraught. Finally, in February of the next year, she caved to the pressure and signed the death warrant. Mary was beheaded the next day. The country erupted in celebration; Cecil and his fellow ministers breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no more conspiracies against Elizabeth, which would make the lack of an heir easier to bear. Despite her apparent mishandling of the situation, the English people quickly forgave her. She had proven that she could put the welfare of the country over personal considerations, and her reluctance only made the final decision seem all the more heroic. — King Philip II of Spain had known Elizabeth for many years, having been married to her half-sister, Queen Mary I. When Mary had imprisoned Elizabeth in the Tower of London, Philip had managed to soften her stance and get Elizabeth released. He found the young

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  My brief acquaintance with her started a train of thought that may seem pretty obvious to the reader who knows the ropes. An advertisement in a lewd magazine landed me, one brave day, in the office of a Mlle Edith who began by offering me to choose a kindred soul from a collection of rather formal photographs in a rather soiled album (“Regardez-moi cette belle brune!”). When I pushed the album away and somehow managed to blurt out my criminal craving, she looked as if about to show me the door; however, after asking me what price I was prepared to disburse, she condescended to put me in touch with a person qui pourrait arranger la chose. Next day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provençal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. When I shook my head and tried to shuffle out of the trap, the woman, talking fast, began removing the dingy woolen jersey from the young giantess’ torso; then, seeing my determination to leave, she demanded son argent. A door at the end of the room was opened, and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very swarthy and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed, bowlegged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said he had served in the police, lui, so that I had better do as I was told. I went up to Marie—for that was her stellar name—who by then had quietly transferred her heavy haunches to a stool at the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity dramatizing my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into her indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Then, sobering for a second, the priest added in a low, casual voice, “But you see, my son, homosexuality isn’t just a conflict that needs to be resolved” —his voice picked up these words as though they were nasty bits of refuse—“homosexuality is also a sin.” I think he had no notion how little an effect the word sin had on me. He might just as well have said, “Homosexuality is bad juju.” “But I feel very drawn to other men,” I said. Although something defiant in me forced these words out, I felt myself becoming a freak the moment I spoke. My hair went bleach-blond, my wrist went limp, my rep tie became a lace jabot: I was the simpering queen at the grand piano playing concert versions of last year’s pop tunes for his mother and her bridge club. There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction. “Just because you feel something is no reason to act on it,” the priest said. “Americans hold up their feelings as though they were … dispensations.” He drained off the brandy. “For instance, I’ve taken a vow of chastity and I abide by it.” “What do you do for relief?” He smiled at my impertinence. “Do I masturbate, is that what you’re asking? I don’t. Occasionally there’s a nocturnal emission.” He touched his lips with his fingertips. I wondered if the women of his parish who volunteered their services as housekeepers to the priest treasured those stiffened linen relics of sanctity. The pastoral chat was not turning out. Father Burke was miffed. He was most irritated with the Scotts, who’d misrepresented to him my readiness to leap up into the lap of Mother Church. The priest consulted his pocket watch, then worked a toothpick behind a screening hand, a nicety that seemed to me nearly as repulsive as nocturnal emissions. My stubbornness caused the Scotts to cool considerably. When I dropped in on Rachel the Monday after Thanksgiving, she scarcely looked up from her Imitation of Christ . At last she sighed impatiently, set it aside and said, “I don’t think you should spend quite so much time here. It’s not healthy for you. You should run and play with the other boys. Besides, I’m doing a lot of reading in The Golden Bough for my next poem and I can’t just chew the fat with you for hours and hours and hours.” Tears sprang to my eyes and I hurried away. Recently a new part-time teacher had been added to the staff, a Mr. Beattie, who had been hired to instruct three afternoons a week those students interested in jazz. Beattie himself was a jazz drummer and had even toured with a band; he still held regular jam sessions somewhere downtown on weekends. Chuck told me Beattie was a “character,” his highest accolade.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  It argued that the sexual revolution put too much pressure on adolescents to have sex before they were ready and created shame around virginity, rather than sexual experience, for girls as well as boys. In an unexpected cultural twist, teen and twentysomething virgins were being treated by both their peers and adults like uptight losers. “The new ideology is that sex is good and good sex means orgasm and any body can,” Lee wrote. “The result has been to turn the pleasures of sex into a duty. Along with all this goes the ‘knowledge’ that if you don’t have intercourse, you’ll go crazy—and that virginity is a hang–up.” Lee provided four questions that teenagers could ask themselves to help assess if they were truly prepared for intercourse, including “Is sexual intercourse necessary for the relationship?” and “Have you thought about how this relationship might end?” Reading along in Forever , Katherine gets prickly around the latter. In her mind, her feelings for Michael are permanent—thus the “forever” of it all. Still, she’s open when Diana brings up the article at breakfast the next morning. They have a quick, pleasant conversation in which Katherine—who has already lost her virginity, unbeknownst to her mother—doesn’t feel judged. In Diana, Blume gives readers an example for positive parent-child rapport over a sensitive subject. “Not that I don’t identify with Katherine, but I could see myself as Katherine’s mother,” Blume once said. “And I like her.” She also clearly likes Katherine’s grandmother. Hallie Gross is a lawyer who once had an unsuccessful run for US Congress. At almost seventy, she’s still working, while also dealing with her longtime husband’s deteriorating health and volunteering for Planned Parenthood and NOW. Ever since he had a stroke, Katherine’s grandfather has trouble walking and talking, but you’d never know it from the patient and loving way Hallie treats him. She’s an active feminist who also adores her family; one time, we learn, she drove to her apartment in New York City and back just to grab the exotic spices needed to try out a new recipe. Like Diana, Hallie isn’t afraid to talk about sex. After first meeting Michael, she tells Katherine that “he’s a nice boy,” but she should “be careful.” When Katherine asks her why, Hallie is matter-of-fact. She wants her granddaughter to be mindful of catching a venereal disease or getting pregnant. Katherine, more than a little surprised, tells Hallie that they aren’t even sleeping together. “Yet,” Hallie replies. Hallie makes it her business to educate her granddaughter about sex, too. One afternoon, Katherine arrives home to a package from Hallie and tears into it, thinking it might be an early birthday present. Instead, she finds a quick note and a stack of pamphlets from Planned Parenthood. Katherine is annoyed by Hallie’s presumption and calls her up at work to tell her so. But Hallie doesn’t back down.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “School isn’t as boring as it used to be,” Jill says after the entire class catches on to the game, egged on by a list that Wendy circulates titled “How to have fun with Blubber.” Suggestions include pushing her, tripping her, and telling her she stinks. The kids make Linda say “I am Blubber, the smelly whale of class 206” before she can eat lunch, drink from the water fountain, or use the bathroom. Jill has moments of ambivalence about what’s happening, but there’s no denying she’s on board. For Halloween, she ditches her witch costume of three years running to dress up as a flenser: someone who strips blubber from whale carcasses. She’s proud of the cruel inside joke and annoyed when she doesn’t win the school’s costume contest. Jill eventually gets her comeuppance, not from an authority figure—the fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Minish, has been checked out for months—but from Wendy herself. The class submits Linda to a mock trial after she’s accused of tattling on Jill for pulling a Halloween prank on a grumpy neighbor. Jill isn’t sure Linda’s actually guilty, but she’s enthusiastic until Wendy, who has appointed herself the judge, refuses to assign Linda a lawyer. Jill stands up for her: “If we’re going to do this we’re going to do it right, otherwise it’s not a real trial,” she says. An argument ensues and Wendy turns on her. The next day at school, everything is worse. Linda has teamed up with Wendy, and Jill—freshly dubbed B.B. for Baby Brenner—is the new classroom pariah. Wendy never faces any consequences. Still, Judy was surprised when she heard that Blubber , of all her books, was ruffling feathers. Unlike many of her other novels, Blubber makes zero references to sexuality. The whole thing started in Maryland with a mom named Bonnie Fogel, who called up her daughter’s public school after her seven-year-old, named Sarah, checked Blubber out of the library. As Fogel told the Washington Post , she was half listening as the second grader read aloud from the book at the dinner table, until one line stopped her in her tracks. “That teacher is such a bitch,” Sarah said. Instantly, Fogel asked to see the book and was “shocked” when she spied the offensive word spelled out on the page. B-I-T-C-H . In a book for children?! She flipped ahead and wasn’t reassured. Blubber was brutal. “What’s really shocking is that there is no moral tone to the book,” she told the Post . “There’s no adult or another child at the end who says, ‘This is wrong. This cruelty to others shouldn’t be.’ ” Fogel spoke to the school superintendent, who decided to pull Blubber , along with two other books he’d received negative feedback about, including It’s Not What You’d Expect by Norma Klein.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And that such their subtility might not be perceived, they made him a like paire of eares and nose of wax: wherfore you may see that the poore miser for lucre of a little mony sustained losse of his members. Which when he had said I was greatly astonied, and minding to prove whether his words were true or no, put my hand to my nose, and my nose fell off, and put my hand to my ears and my ears fell off. Wherat all the people wondred greatly, and laughed me to scorne: but I beeing strucken in a cold sweat, crept between their legs for shame and escaped away. So I disfigured returned home againe, and covered the losse of myne ears with my long hair, and glewed this clout to my face to hide my shame. As soon as Bellephoron had told his tale, they which sate at the table replenished with wine, laughed heartily. And while they drank one to another, Byrrhena spake to me and said, from the first foundation of this city we have a custome to celebrate the festivall day of the god Risus, and to-morrow is the feast when as I pray you to bee present, to set out the same more honourably, and I would with all my heart that you could find or devise somewhat of your selfe, that might be in honour of so great a god. To whom I answered, verily cousin I will do as you command me, and right glad would I be, if I might invent any laughing or merry matter to please or satisfy Risus withall. Then I rose from the table and took leave of Byrrhena and departed. And when I came into the first street my torch went out, that with great pain I could scarce get home, by reason it was so dark, for fear of stumbling: and when I was well nigh come unto the dore, behold I saw three men of great stature, heaving and lifting at Milos gates to get in: and when they saw me they were nothing afeard, but assaied with more force to break down the dores whereby they gave mee occasion, and not without cause, to thinke that they were strong theeves. Whereupon I by and by drew out my sword which I carried for that purpose under my cloak, and ran in amongst them, and wounded them in such sort that they fell downe dead before my face. Thus when I had slaine them all, I knocked sweating and breathing at the doore til Fotis let me in. And then full weary with the slaughter of those Theeves, like Hercules when he fought against the king Gerion, I went to my chamber and layd me down to sleep.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Until I was seven my parents, my sister and I lived in a Tudor-style house at the end of a lane in the city where my father remained after the divorce. Our house and three others formed a wooded, almost rural enclave set down in the midst of an old, poor section of the city. I could never quite situate our enclave in the world outside; I remember my astonishment the day I roamed through the hollow behind our place, climbed up the far hill, pushed aside branches—and stared out at a major four-lane thoroughfare I’d been driven down countless times but had never suspected ran so close to our property. Certainly not behind it, of all things. To me the city lay entirely in front of our gates in a dirty, busy antechamber. I consulted with my sister. She was four years older, could read, went to school and knew everything. “Sure, dumbbell,” she said. “Of course it’s behind the house. Where’d you think it was?” She screwed her fingertip into her temple and said, “Duh.” She began to chant a colorless litany of “Dumbbells.” I stopped my ears with my hands and ran, crying, back into the house. My sister had friends she’d met at Miss Laughton’s School for Girls who came home to play with her some afternoons. They all belonged to a club my sister had started. She was the captain. Her success as a leader could be attributed to the methodical way she worked out her ideas: her approach lent an adult, step-by-step orderliness to projects that otherwise might have seemed wild and incomprehensible. One afternoon she ordered each of her team members to steal a belt from her father that night and bring it with her tomorrow. Of course every girl must be clever in stealing and hiding the belt; if caught, she must be even more resourceful in denying the real reason for filching it. The next afternoon the girls gathered in the hollow and presented their booty to my sister, who lashed each girl with her own father’s belt. In one case her zeal left welts, which led to parental questions and eventually exposure of the whole drama. My sister, at that time a tall, taut platinum blonde who didn’t like grown-ups, answered my mother’s furious questions with indignant yeses and noes, lowered eyes and a set jaw. She was afraid of my mother, the interrogation alarmed her, but not for a moment did she feel guilty or question what she had done. She was the queen of her tribe of girls.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Beatrice was twenty-five years old when she died—a period that covers the first of Dante’s four ages. “The first is called Adolescence, that is the growth of life.... Of the first no one doubts, but each wise man agrees that it lasts even to the twenty-fifth year; and up to that time our soul waits for the increase and the embellishment of the body” (Conv. iv. 24). 21. These lines refer to the period of Dante’s life (1290-1300) which has already been touched on in connection with Forese Donati (see Canto xxiii). The first words (as in the following canto) have a very personal ring, and would seem to refer not so much to the donna gentile of the Vita Nuova, § xxxvi (whether allegorically or literally, and whether, in the latter capacity, she be Gemma Donati or another), as to those other, less creditable, infidelities to Beatrice’s memory, of which our poet was undoubtedly guilty at this time, and to which several of his minor poems and Purg. xxiii bear witness. On the other hand they possibly allude to Dante’s temporary indifference to religion, due to his philosophical studies during this period; and may therefore be connected with the donna gentile of the Vita Nuova, who is, in the Conv. ii. 13, identified with Philosophy. 22. in dream. A vision of this kind, and apparently the last, is described in the Vita Nuova, § xl, where Dante tells how his “heart began painfully to repent of the desire by which it had so basely let itself be possessed during so many days, contrary to the constancy of reason. And then, this evil desire being quite gone from me, all my thoughts turned again unto their excellent Beatrice. And I say most truly that from that hour I thought constantly of her with the whole humbled and ashamed heart; the which became often manifest in sighs, that had among them the name of that most gracious creature, and how she departed from us.” 23. See Inf. ii.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Because of the trap that one is inevitably in: a man pulls a woman’s hair—likely he once saw an actor pull an actress’s hair and the actress gasped in pleasure—so he pulls and she gasps; maybe she gasps in pleasure, or in pain, or because she’s seen something, too, or has had a legacy shoved down her throat before she could learn what she desires, or because she wants to be “normal”; but a gasp is a gasp is a gasp, and maybe he thinks it’s kosher to then choke her, so he pulls or chokes and she gasps, in an attempt to experience sexuality and to fulfill the expectation, regardless of if she’s enjoying herself as long as she’s performing enjoyability. Because maybe, eventually, she pulls her own hair, to please him. Because audiences assimilate these oft-interchangeable cinematic and societal scripts, the principles that represent and reflect the ruling ideology, and then echo them, in united agreement, without asking why. Because media have colonized everything from social dynamics to intimate moments. Because media often present intercourse violently and violation as fundamental to its eroticism. Because of our appetite for drama and our desensitization to damage. Because we learn how to have sex from someplace. Because even personal, singular desire is a product of environment. Because my behavior and word choice were a convergence of marketed clichés of how women are supposed to act and sound in sexual scenarios. Because I knew how to say “Yes! Harder!” in a thousand languages, how to moan in eight octaves, how to bend over backward, how to ask for it, how to beg God for it, but not how to say, “No. Stop.” Because instead I told him—using adjectives like slow and soft and deliberate—what I wanted, what I’d learned in Women and Gender Studies courses works for women, which in practice wasn’t a preternatural frenzy but to be kissed and licked crazily, him down on his knees for me and his mouth on my thighs, his hands going all in and around me. Because he could be tender. Because I could be seduced and secure. Because everything could be playful and steamy, and he could get me all the way off with devoted fingers. Because everything I’d learned in Advanced Contemporary Female Sexualities—like that when a woman is turned on, her brain sends messages to the back of the vagina to expand and loosen, and to the cervix and uterus to pull back and lift to high heaven to allow room for the penis (or dildo or whatever your pleasure) readying her for sex, and that this arousal is what thirst is to drinking—seemed as out of reach for real-life application as Chaucer or differential geometry. Because in class I could rattle off the seven erogenous zones at breakneck speed (inner thighs, nipples, nape of the neck, lips, ears, butt, clit), but it was the classic I-can-talk-the-talk-but-not-fuck-the-fuck dilemma. Because I couldn’t talk the talk either.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  My friends—those who have seen me change over the past five years, seen my body alter from the effects of hormones, and seen me get better at doing my makeup and appearing more confident in how I walk through the world—call me fierce, and I hate the word, partly because it’s such a stupid, drag queen cliché, but also because I know just how much it is a lie. There was nothing fierce about the way I screamed in that room, thirteen years ago, when you refused to listen to me telling you I didn’t want your lips around the part of me that I hate to name. There was nothing fierce in my unresponsiveness or in the way I held on to the fact that you did finally stop when I screamed as proof that you hadn’t assaulted me. There was nothing fierce in the way I broke down for the first time sixty-three days ago. Six days ago on the train, I read an article about men who fetishize women with penises. I closed my eyes against the memory, and when I came to, three-quarters of an hour had passed and, although I had not slept and had not dreamed and had not meditated, I could not tell you what my thoughts had been in all that time besides the one: You made me an object. I was not a person to you, in that moment. I was at best a challenge, an unresponsive organ, a stubborn body. Twelve years and six months ago, the first girlfriend I had after what you did told me she liked my solid presence in her bed, and this made me feel sad because I never thought of myself as the strong one. It was always her who had been strong, who had made me feel safe, from the moment at the end of her party when she asked me “May I kiss you inappropriately?” And I asked her why it would be inappropriate, and she said something about her age and the disparity of social capital between us and how asking it might seem like she’d invited me over just to get off with me and I said that I wouldn’t think it inappropriate at all.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Yet in classrooms all across the country, put-upon teachers were stumbling through their school’s health or “family life”—the de rigueur title for sex ed in the 1970s—curriculums. The contents of these classes varied from place to place. Depending on where an educator worked, he or she might be open and informative or tight-lipped and moralizing. They might also be scared of getting fired for saying the wrong thing. Family life education, or FLE, was an approach to sex ed that came out of the 1950s. It tucked all the uncomfortable body stuff into the pocket of a larger, gender normative curriculum about courtship and marriage: chaste dating tips, engagement rituals, even balancing family budgets. Intercourse was a part of that. “Family life education was the first time that American educators actually acknowledged that adults had sex and described it,” Jonathan Zimmerman said. “But they did so with the goal obviously of keeping it within what today we’d call straight marriage.” Any other kinds of sex were treated as depraved and even dangerous. Students were told that premarital sex could result in sickness and unwanted pregnancy, but they weren’t always informed about contraception. In FLE, contraception was considered a lightning rod topic, along with abortion, homosexuality, and masturbation. “Those were called the ‘Big Four,’ ” Zimmerman said, and by the 1960s and early 1970s, they were taught only in districts where parents and school boards were more or less united in their liberal perspectives, such as in New York, New Jersey, and areas of California. Why? Because the Big Four unhook sex from procreation. Masturbation, according to Zimmerman, is so controversial because “it’s explicitly about pleasure. And only that, it’s not about anything else, it’s not procreative.” Historically, kids had been taught that fondling themselves led to all manner of issues, some of which get recited in Deenie . Since the Victorian era, children were told that “self-abuse” was shameful and caused problems ranging from dim-wittedness to full-blown insanity. At its heart, the prohibition against masturbation grew from the emphasis on self-control in late-nineteenth-century American culture, Jeffrey Moran writes in Teaching Sex: The Shaping of the Adolescent in the 20th Century . “Once a young man touched himself in that way, he threatened the entire structure of Victorian character. Self-discipline, social responsibility, character—masturbation symbolically toppled all the pillars.” The idea that a girl might do such a thing was even more outrageous. Early moralists accepted that boys had undeniable sexual urges, and part of the task of becoming a man involved wrestling down the beast. Girls, on the other hand, were assumed to be naturally chaste, and it was a woman’s job to support her man in his ongoing struggle toward virtue. If a young man slipped—whether by touching himself or seeking out sexual intercourse—it was disappointing, but understandable. Young ladies, meanwhile, were given no such freedoms. Within the framework of Victorian morality, “girls who fell prey to self-abuse were clearly aberrant,” Moran writes.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed—an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of a genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller. I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her—after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred—I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever—for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)—and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again—and “oh, no,” Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure—all would be shattered.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  At night she’d take her wedding ring out of her jewelry box where she kept it hidden, pulling on the secret tab that lifted the black velvet false bottom. And even then she kept the real bottom covered in fabric left over from Yaya’s latest sewing project, making dolls for children who’d lost their toys in the crash. She’d lock her bedroom door, slip on the wedding band and wave her hand around in front of the mirror to see how it looked. Then she’d take it off and kiss it goodnight before hiding it again. Her wedding ring. It must be real if she had a wedding ring. Sometimes she’d say Christina McKittrick, just to see how it sounded. She’d caught herself at school, scribbling her married name in her notebook, but she always stopped in time and erased the evidence. After school and on Saturdays she’d hurry to Dr. O’s office. Since she got her period, which she knew could have been a miscarriage, she’d been thinking about seeing a doctor, but she didn’t know any gynecologists, and she certainly wasn’t going to ask her sister to recommend one. Instead, she asked Daisy. She didn’t have to tell Daisy anything more than she needed to see a doctor for lady troubles. “I’m so irregular,” she said. “I don’t want to worry my mother. You know how Greek mothers can be.” She hated lying to Daisy. She wasn’t irregular at all—her periods came every twenty-eight days, like clockwork, until recently. Daisy wrote down the name and phone number of a doctor and Christina set up the appointment herself. Dr. J. J. Strasser had a fancy office in Newark. There were obviously pregnant women in the waiting room, and others who weren’t, or if they were, they weren’t showing yet. Christina twirled her wedding band around on her finger. It was the first time she’d worn it in public. But before it was her turn to see the doctor she chickened out, slipping it into her change purse. Dr. Strasser listened to her story about why she was here. “I didn’t get my period for two months and I’ve always been regular. Then I got it and it was especially heavy, with cramping.” “Get changed and we’ll see what’s going on. Have you had a pelvic exam before, Christina?” “No.” But she knew what was going to happen. He was going to put a speculum into her vagina. She’d read all about it last night. She was scared, but his nurse stood by her side and patted her hand. The speculum was cold and made her shiver, or maybe she shivered because she was scared. “You’re not a virgin,” the doctor told her. “I doubt you’re going to fool anyone into believing you are, but you never know.” “Actually, I’m married,” Christina said. “But nobody knows. We eloped. I was a virgin until then.” Technically, this wasn’t true but she wanted this doctor to like her, to treat her well.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The railings around the various balconies still described crude arabesques in bronze gone green, but the old floors of the balconies had been replaced by rectangular slabs of smoked glass that emitted pale emerald gleams along polished, beveled edges. Walking on this glass gave me vertigo, but once I started reading I’d slump to the cold, translucent blocks and drift on ice floes into dense clouds. The smell of yellowing paper engulfed me. An unglued page slid out of a volume and a corner broke off, shattered—I was destroying public property! Downstairs someone harangued the librarian. Shadowy throngs of invisible operagoers coalesced and sat forward in their see-through finery to look and listen. I was reading the bilingual libretto of La Bohème. The alternating columns of incomprehensible Italian, which I could skip, made the pages speed by, as did the couple’s farewell in the snow, the ecstatic reconciliation, poor little Mimi’s prolonged dying. I glanced up and saw a pair of shoes cross the glass above, silently accompanied by the paling and darkening circle of the rubber end of a cane. The great eye of the library was blurred by tears. Across the street the father of a friend of mine ran a bookstore. As I entered it, I was almost knocked down by two men coming out. One of them touched my shoulder and drew me aside. He had a three days’ growth of beard on his cheeks, shiny wet canines, a rumpled raincoat of a fashionable cut that clung to his hips, and he was saying, “Don’t just rush by without saying hello.” Here he was at last, but now I knew for sure I wasn’t worthy—I was ugly with my sissy ways and the mole he’d find between my shoulder blades. “Do I know you?” I asked. I felt I did, as if we’d traveled for a month in a train compartment knee to knee night after night via the thirty installments of a serial but plotless though highly emotional dream. I smiled, embarrassed by the way I looked. “Sure you know me.” He laughed and his friend, I think, smiled. “No, honestly, what’s your name?” I told him.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Because in Atlas Shrugged, alpha male Francisco d’Anconia tells railroad company VP Dagny Taggart that she sounds happy in her new relationship: “‘But, you see, the measure of the hell you’re able to endure is the measure of your love.’” Because I believed I would’ve died for him, so I would’ve done a lot less than that for him, too. Because there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for love! Because, in our no-pain-no-gain dogma, the cost of something is often mistaken for its value. Because I’d decided that what I felt was probably whatever love is. Because I couldn’t let that love die. Because love rewards the optimistic and punishes those who vocalize their fury. At first we had sex despite my pain; months later, we still did—because women are bred for pain, for giving birth when birth splits us open. Because we learn to live with it; because we learn to live for it. Sontag again: “It is not love which we overvalue, but suffering.” Because rom-coms train us that if we suffer enough, then everything works out. Because I wanted to be a good sport and not make a big deal. Because I sucked it up and powered through. Because when he’d complain his hand hurt doing what I’d wanted him to do, I was busy saying, “Don’t worry about it,” and he didn’t. Because I didn’t want to ruin his experience of me. Because bad sex was on me. Because sex that feels out of one’s control is called “bad sex,” “disappointing sex,” “regrettable sex,” phrases that take on a myriad of meaning that pervert meaning. Because I knew I was being ranked on how good I gave it and how well I took it. Because when I went to a gynecologist, she brought out a medical device that she called a vaginal dilator, and when she lubed it up and inserted the stiff, opaque medical-grade silicone, I went momentarily blind, but I took the smallest one home with me anyway and let the cloudy white thinger lifelessly dangle in me nightly for ten to fifteen minutes while I watched Family Guy or played soft instrumental folk CDs. Because whatever was wrong could be solved, possibly, by starting my last semester in college with a prescription ghost dick. Because the next gynecologist recommended more sex. Because my boyfriend agreed, using the practice-makes-perfect line of this-isn’t-my-problem thinking. Because it seemed, as liberated, educated, nonreligious women, we’re urged to have lots of sex—great sex!, whatever sex!, sex like a straight guy!—but not no-sex. Because it’s now more of a public disgrace and bodily phenomenon to be prude than promiscuous. Because I wanted to be a whore for him. Because unless women become better in bed, we implode. Because I’d remind myself that he was My Boyfriend, my Boyfriend, My boyfriend.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  She doesn’t make the squad, and the next day, her gym teacher asks her to swing by so she can take a closer look at Deenie’s posture. Soon, she’s off to see a specialist about her uneven hips and rounded shoulders. The would-be model gets diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis, a condition that arises most often in pre-teen girls, where their spines start to grow in a curved shape. The doctor says she’ll need to have an operation or get fitted for a cumbersome back brace. With that, Deenie leaves the fold of her mother’s expectations and enters the world of disability. Blume has said that she got the idea for Deenie after a real-life encounter in 1970. One night, she met a woman at a party whose fourteen-year-old daughter was recently diagnosed with scoliosis, and she had to wear a back brace to correct it. “This woman was falling apart,” Blume says in Presenting Judy Blume . Judy then met the daughter and was impressed by her poise and resilience, casting a completely different light than her stressed-out mom. “She was very open about her problem and shared some of her feelings and experiences with me,” Blume later wrote about her. She researched scoliosis and visited a hospital where she observed kids getting fitted for their Milwaukee braces: the restrictive, full-torso support garment that Deenie has to wear. Judy recalled her struggle with eczema and decided to write that into her new book, too. She created a character named Barbara Curtis, the new girl in Deenie’s class who becomes a mirror for Deenie’s eventual self-acceptance. Barbara, like the real-life Judy, has a rash all over her body, which at first Deenie finds “disgusting.” Secretly, Deenie nicknames her the Creeping Crud, and prays she won’t get partnered with her in gym class. But after Deenie starts wearing the brace to school, she looks at Barbara Curtis differently. Barbara is kind to her during her awkward adjustment period with the medical device, helping Deenie tie her shoes when she can’t figure out how to bend down and reach them. “I felt like the world’s biggest jerk,” Deenie admits to the reader at that moment. Later, she introduces Barbara to her friends. “She’s a nice kid,” Deenie says. “I think I must have been really weird to not like her just because of her creeping crud.” For Deenie, opening her mind to the experiences of disabled people within her community allows her to make peace with her new reality, which is that she’ll have to wear the Milwaukee brace for four long years. No matter how she tries to camouflage it, the device—which she needs to keep on almost twenty-four hours a day in order to reroute the growth of her spine—pokes up past the base of her neck and shows through her clothes. Her appearance, which has defined her at home for much of her life, is being compromised. But Deenie is surprisingly spunky.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Then Miri and her mother and grandmother could move into Natalie’s big red-brick house and Miri and Natalie would be sisters and Miri could start collecting cashmere sweaters like Natalie. Not that Miri didn’t like Natalie’s mother. Mrs. Osner, Corinne, had always been very nice to her. She treated Miri almost like another daughter, which was just one reason this fantasy left Miri feeling ashamed and sick to her stomach. She didn’t want to be a disgusting and immoral person. Fern suddenly appeared in the doorway to Natalie’s room, clutching a toy rabbit dressed in cowboy gear. Fern called him Roy, for Roy Rogers, the singing movie cowboy. Fern was obsessed with Roy Rogers. “Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above…don’t fence me in…” she sang. Fern was wearing flowered flannel pajamas with feet. “Is the party over yet?” she asked. “No,” Miri said. “Does Mrs. Barnes know you’re running around?” Mrs. Barnes took care of Fern and cooked dinner for the family four nights a week. She made dishes Miri had never heard of, dishes with foreign names like boeuf bourguignon and veal marsala. They tasted better than they sounded. “She’s not here tonight,” Fern said. “Mommy and Daddy are here. They’re in the den.” “Oh.” “Roy Rogers has a penis,” Fern said, waggling Roy Rabbit in Miri’s face. “Did you know that?” “Yes,” Miri said. She’d heard it often enough, every time she was at Natalie’s house, but she still wasn’t sure how she was supposed to respond. Fern was just in kindergarten. “I’ve seen two penises,” Fern said. “Daddy’s and Steve’s.” Miri hadn’t seen any penises and she wasn’t in a hurry to, either. “How about I tuck you into bed?” she said to Fern. “Okay.” Miri followed Fern down the hallway to her room, the beige carpet plush under their feet. Fern climbed into bed and Miri pulled the blankets up to her chin. “Roy Rabbit doesn’t have a penis, even though he’s a boy bunny.” Miri wanted to get out of there. She’d had enough penis talk. “Don’t forget to kiss me,” Fern said. Miri dropped a kiss on Fern’s forehead. Her skin was cool and smelled sweet. She returned to the party just as it was breaking up. “Where were you?” Natalie asked. “Upstairs. I had a headache. I guess I fell asleep.” “Are you better now?” Miri nodded. “Who was that boy I was dancing with?” “What boy?” “That boy with the dark hair.” “I didn’t notice. Maybe one of Steve’s friends. He had a card game going in the laundry room and he was supposed to keep his friends away from my party.” MasonSteve was pissed about him dancing with that girl. “She’s my sister’s best friend, asshole, so stay away from her. I didn’t even invite you here.” “Hey,” Phil said to Steve. “Take it easy. I invited him.” “I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to dance,” Mason said. “Nobody told me.” “We’re chaperones,” Steve told him.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Leading reasons for this novel’s preeminence in gender politics remain clear: its impenitent candor about sexual activities, its fearless ability to say whatever can be seen or felt whenever two or three disrobe, its very picaresque structure reflecting a less than monogamous model for the way learning takes place, and, of course, the sheer forceful beauty of its coruscated rendering. —And yet, with the hindsight of twenty years, we must admit this book seems an odd one for Gay Liberationists to have made their very bible. While its cultural allusiveness and mordant humor might make its tone seem perfect for the Movement’s uses, the work has one striking drawback: It does not, in fact, concern a youth’s difficult if necessary and finally healthy “coming out.” Though A Boy’s Own Story is still viewed as the classic late-twentieth-century novel of homosexual emergence, we do have a little problem here. Read now, in light of the thousands of lesser works it inadvertently spawned (so much for the myth of gay sterility—see Proust, Wilde, Genet, Tennessee Williams, Warhol, et al.) we note that this book succeeds as fiction precisely in how it fails as a “Come On Out” brochure. It never passed itself off as anything but a novel about a bright, agile, perverse imp. It is, in fact, the story of a child who would do most anything to “stay in.” Not yet fifteen, he seeks medical help, he begs to be sent to boarding school in hopes that male role models there might firm up his resolve to become a husband and father. He shudders at the thought of devolving into yet another aging “gay,” wearing Liberace ruffles, singing show tunes at the family piano for Mom’s delighted bridge club. Instead he falls in love with a girl wonderfully named Helen Paper (making his conquest of her seem all the more theoretical). And when their romance founders on date #1, our hero suffers the tortures of Goethe’s young Werther. In the twenty-first century, we must read this work not as a tract for that painfully titled option “the Gay Life Style” but as an account of the one young man most eager to forswear his homosexuality. And, no, this is not just “a phase,” his rabid denial. The book ends with definitive proof of his adult effectiveness, of his profound ambivalence concerning his unchosen sexuality. That foregone predisposition is visible to everyone else in the book; is visible alas in every line of its own exquisite expression. And here rests the source of much of this work’s humor. But movements, never known to get a joke, simply take what they need, extracting from whatever new work appears the vitality required for current propagandists needs.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I had never been bad before. Of course I’d been intolerably wicked or maybe just sick in sleeping with other boys and men, but those transgressions were secret and solitary. Now at last I, who’d always been considered obedient, even docile, was rubbing shoulders with guys who were about to flunk out, who got drunk and totaled cars, who knocked up girls, who got into fistfights with their dads, who stole motorcycles and went off on joy rides, who had created such chaos at home they’d been banished to Eton. These boys accepted anyone at all so long as he was a smoker and a failure. Here came the hell raisers who sneaked off campus after lights-out, who downed a quart of vodka a day and nodded off in class, who faked medical excuses to get out of gym, who went weeks without showering (“Give us a break”), who jerked off in the back of class to the amazement of their neighbors (“Yuck”), who farted and popped their zits in assembly (“Ee—yuh”), who bought term papers from brains or beat the brains up, who in one case seduced a master’s wife (“Neat”), in another a fat Latvian wash-up girl with greasy braids on the kitchen staff (“Barf”). My favorite smoker was Chuck, a gangly, pimply, popular guy with the gift of gab and the ambition to be a writer like Hemingway. Chuck was rumored to have the biggest dick on campus, but I never got to check it out. He was from a rich family and after listening to his stories of life at home I pieced together a glamorous feature film of two-seater planes, a sheep ranch in Montana, a fishing camp in Canada, a private island off Georgia—though Chuck didn’t give a damn about possessions, all he wanted to do was stuff two fat black whores into his rattletrap Chevy and head south with them and a case of beer and of painful but not quite incapacitating clap and holler curse words at Arkansas cops and pass out from tequila, fatigue and sunburn at a two-bit rodeo in some dusty Texas town before he revived long enough to slip over the border into Tijuana, where he’d find those magic mushrooms or whatever the hell they were and that fabled gal in a straw basket hung on ropes from the ceiling, just her cunt exposed as she’s lowered onto your stiff prong as you lie back and let the big-eyed nine-year-old girl assistant slowly, solemnly spin the basket and fan the flies off your face.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I lay in the tub and let the hot water run until it singed my skin. I wished Mom had saved me the need to learn the why for myself. I wished she’d told me about what some men do. I wished I’d listened. I knew that I was dirty and disobedient and deserved to be punished. I started scratching my inner thigh and inched up slowly. I clawed until I bled. Then I cried quietly into my bloody hands. Each time I peed, the sting reminded me of my crime. I mutilated myself for months after, even after Valentín moved back to Puerto Rico. I never got close enough for him to touch me again. THERE WAS ANOTHER TIME: I WAS ASSAULTED ON A BROOKLYN street when I was visiting my mother, just down the block from where she still lives, I didn’t want to tell her what happened. But I couldn’t get myself together before I saw her: My shirt was ripped, my hair was a mess, my fists were red and swollen. I had his skin underneath my nails. She heard me sobbing in the hallway and came out running, “Que te pasó?” she yelled. I was twenty-four. This ain’t shit compared to what she’d been through. ON A SUMMER DAY WHEN MY DAUGHTER WAS SIX, I WENT TO the playground with a friend so that my daughter could play while we talked and, as happens often with women, we started talking about the things that girls endure. When she confessed that she was molested, I nodded and said, “Me too.” I watched as my daughter ran across the jungle gym and started grappling across the monkey bars. She hadn’t been able to do it just a few months before; she’d sulked as she watched other kids and gotten mad when I had tried to help. “Lemme do it myself,” she’d said, pushing my hands off. She made it a few rungs in and fell. She climbed up, tried again, and fell. I saw her tear up and wipe her eyes roughly. She spent the better part of the afternoon working on getting across those bars. When I asked her about it as we were leaving, she said, “I’m gonna do it, Mommy. Watch.” Sure enough, all these months later, her hands were calloused but she could grapple across all those rungs. She waved at me when she reached the other side. “Look, Mommy! I did it!” We gave her a thumbs-up and kept talking. “How old were you when it happened?” my friend asked. “I was little,” I said. “I was six.” “Vasia’s age?” “Yeah.” I looked over at my daughter, who had moved on to the swings, and that’s when it hit me: I’d been blaming myself for thirty years for what happened to me when I was just six.