Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

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

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

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

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

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

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

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

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

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

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

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

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

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

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

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

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She didn’t answer right away. She didn’t see how this followed her comment about the old lady. “I don’t know.” “I don’t think you’re very sexual,” he said. “You’re not the way I thought you were when I first met you.” She was so hurt by this that she had difficulty answering. Finally, she said, “I can be very sexual or very unsexual depending on who I’m with and in what situation. It has to be the right kind of thing. I’m sort of a cerebral person. I think I respond to things in a cerebral way, mostly.” “That’s what I mean.” She was struck dumb with frustration. She had obviously disappointed him in some fundamental way, which she felt was completely due to misunderstanding. If only she could think of the correct thing to say, she was sure she could clear it up. The blue puffball thing unfurled itself before her with sickening power. It was the same image of him holding her and gazing into her eyes with bone-dislodging intent, thinly veiling the many shattering events that she anticipated between them. The prospect made her disoriented with pleasure. The only problem was, this image seemed to have no connection with what was happening now. She tried to think back to the time they had spent in her apartment, when he had held her and said, “You’re cute.” What had happened between then and now to so disappoint him? She hadn’t yet noticed how much he had disappointed her. He couldn’t tell if he was disappointing her or not. She completely mystified him, especially after her abrupt speech on cerebralism. It was now impossible to even have a clear picture of what he wanted to do to this unglamorous creature, who looked as though she bit her nails and read books at night. Dim, half-formed pictures of his wife, Sharon, Beth and a sixteen-year-old Chinese hooker he’d seen a month before crawled aimlessly over each other. He sat and brooded in a bad-natured and slightly drunken way. She sat next to him, diminished and fretful, with idiot radio songs about sex in her head. — They were staying in his grandmother’s deserted apartment in Washington, D.C. The complex was a series of building blocks seemingly arranged at random, stuck together and painted the least attractive colors available. It was surrounded by bright green grass and a circular driveway, and placed on a quiet highway that led into the city. There was a drive-in bank and an insurance office next to it. It was enveloped in the steady, continuous noise of cars driving by at roughly the same speed. “This is a horrible building,” she said as they traveled up in the elevator.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Stephanie hung up feeling vaguely humiliated. She thought of her job at Christine’s, almost so she could feel worse, but felt strangely comforted instead. This made no sense to her, but she accepted the comfort. She wished that she could tell Sandra about her real job, but she didn’t dare. Perhaps Sandra wouldn’t be shocked, but she would think it was self-destructive and insulting to women. Well, maybe it was. She never got any writing done while she was hooking. Somehow the idea of coming home after a day at Christine’s and sitting down to write was impossible; her thoughts were clotted by the clamoring, demanding ghosts of the men she’d seen that day. She needed to make herself a nourishing meal and sit still and take care of herself, as her mother used to say. Working at Christine’s was a time for making money and resting her brain, she told herself. Writing would come later. She pictured herself in the future, so successful that she could talk about being a hooker without anyone minding. “I didn’t do much writing then,” she’d say to her circle of successful friends as they stood around smiling and holding their drinks. “I spent most of my time just trying to re-form my personality.” And they’d all laugh at this adorable admission of her female vulnerability. The only person she’d ever told was her friend from college, Babette. Babette, who was trying to be an actress, had a whole gaggle of friends from the restaurant where she worked who wore a lot of leather and went en masse to some S&M bar in the West Village on weekends. It didn’t seem as though prostitution would faze Babette, but when Stephanie told her about her first experience three years earlier, she’d said, “Oh, Stephie! How could you do that to yourself? How could you?” Stephanie explained again and again that she didn’t think it was damaging her self-respect, but Babette would not be mollified. Stephanie suspected that Babette’s consternation had little to do with self-respect and a lot to do with Babette’s discomfort at discovering that she was friends with a prostitute instead of a writer. However, Babette was a fragile person who had done too much cocaine, had a breakdown, cut her wrist—shallowly, but still—and now saw a therapist twice a week, so she thought it was best not to speak to her again about subsequent episodes. —

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

  The Life, which Nau dated to the fifth or sixth century, includes a brief prologue laying out the agenda of the story: to help those “who have fallen into the mire of sin and wish to repent.” In the first line we meet the protagonist, who is now the prostitute rather than the monk. “There was in Alexandria a certain maiden named Thais, exceedingly beautiful, with a beauty that in fact surpassed all those who were ever admired for their physical charm.” The spare canvas of the Egyptian desert has been replaced by a fictional landscape crowded with meanings. The supremely beautiful maiden is an artifice of the romantic imagination. Alexandria, the city par excellence, has ousted the “village of Egypt” as the home of the prostitute. And she is given a name: Thais. Nowhere in the manuscripts of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers is the prostitute rescued by Serapion given a name. Indeed, the name Thais is as likely as any other element of the story to be a pure concoction of the hagiographer’s fancy. More profoundly, the tale of desert wisdom could leave the woman nameless, because she was simply an avatar of sin. In the Life, she becomes a character, and symbolic associations will rapidly grow around her.55 The girl’s mother was an unscrupulous and worldly woman who placed her daughter in “the workshop of the devil,” where the beauty of Thais could be “sold to all who wish to violate her shamefully.” Men came from far and wide; they lost all self-control, dissipated their property, even turned to brigandage to subsidize their lust. The hero Serapion heard of this diabolical temptress and hastened to respond. The author of the Life mobilized what is surely one of the least felicitous metaphors in the library of Greek literature: “Like a wise fisherman, ready with a baiting device, he hunts after the lamb to snatch her soul from the maws of the devil.” In the Life it is Serapion’s mission to find her, and he must go to the city to do so. The monk disguises himself in “worldly apparel” and goes to her. In early Christian and Jewish adaptations of the romance, the rescuer invading the brothel must dress as a Roman soldier; in those legends, to pass into the brothel is figuratively to step into the secular world, a world identified with the ruling power. In the age of Serapion, there was no clear-cut divide between the social order and the Christian church. There was only the city—symbol of sin and civilization—and the ascetic who entered it as an outsider. And unlike the chaste girls of romance whose corporal integrity is miraculously preserved in the brothel, Thais has, quite flagrantly, long since lost her physical purity.56

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

  Leaders of different cults have come up with strikingly similar tactics for fostering dependency. They transfer members frequently to new and strange locations, switch their work duties, promote them and then demote them on whims, all to keep them dependent and off balance. Another technique is to assign impossibly high goals, tell members that if they are “pure” they will succeed, and force them to confess their impurity when they inevitably fail. Strict Obedience: Modeling the Leader A new member is often indoctrinated and groomed to give up old thought and behaviors by being paired with an older cult member, who serves as a model for the new member to imitate. In Bible groups, this is sometimes referred to as shepherding or discipling. The newcomer is urged to be this other person. Mid-level leaders are themselves urged to act like their superiors. The cult leader at the top is, of course, the ultimate model. One reason why a group of cultists may strike even a naive outsider as spooky or weird is that everyone has similar odd mannerisms, clothing styles and modes of speech. What the outsider is seeing is the personality of the leader passed down through several layers of modeling.92 Happiness Through Good Performance One of the most attractive qualities of cult life is the sense of community it fosters. The love seems to be unconditional and unlimited at first, and new members are swept away by a honeymoon of praise and attention. But after a few months, as the person becomes more enmeshed, the flattery and attention are turned away, toward newer recruits. Most members continue to believe that the group has the “highest level” of love on earth. However, experientially, the cult member learns that in the group, love is not unconditional, but depends on good performance. Behaviors are controlled through rewards and punishments. Competitions are used to inspire and shame members into being more productive. If things aren’t going well—if there is poor recruitment, or unfavorable media coverage, or defections—it is always individual members’ fault, and their ration of “happiness” will be withheld until the problem is corrected. In some groups, people are required to confess sins in order to be granted “happiness.” If they can’t think of any sins, they are encouraged to make some up. Many people come to believe that they really committed these made-up sins. Real friendships are a liability in cults, and are covertly discouraged by leaders. A cult member’s emotional allegiance should be vertical (up to the leader), not horizontal (toward peers). Friends are dangerous, in part because if one member leaves, they may take others with him. Of course, when anyone does leave the group, the “love” formerly directed to them turns into anger, hatred and ridicule.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She had stiffly explained to Babette that this had nothing to do with Jackson, and she was sure that it didn’t. But it made her feel bad to think of Jackson’s reaction if he ever heard about it. The last time she’d seen him in New York, she had called him. He said they should meet for lunch, but lunch turned out to be a plastic glass of orange juice in a coffee shop while Jackson waited for his laundry to come out of a machine. He didn’t have much time, he said. He was meeting his fiancée’s parents at five. Their forty minutes of conversation were filled with pauses and downward looks. “People in New York are very busy,” he said. “I divide my time sparingly between my work and my social life. I find myself associating primarily with other young professionals.” She told Bernard about seeing Jackson that night, as they sat in a loud bar having BLTs and drinks. “It sounds romantic in a way,” he said. “Silently passing each other in a crowded room.” “It was awful.” “What was so terrible about what happened between the two of you?” She shrugged. “It’s hard to describe. I guess it’s basically that corny thing I talked about. I loved him, I trusted him too much and he turned out to be a dreadful person.” She realized that Bernard was being distracted by a plump blonde with loopy earrings and white go-go boots. She paused until he turned toward her again. “But it was more complicated. He had a lot of power over me. He was bisexual—don’t worry, I test negative—and he was seeing this guy André at the same time that he was seeing me. Sometimes he’d literally get up out of my bed and go be with André. Then he decided André and I should be friends and that we should all go out together.” “Why did you go along with this? Did you like it?” “Yeah, that was part of it. I wanted to be open. I wanted to experience everything. And I loved Jackson, or thought I did. Eventually, I wound up in bed with both of them, and that’s when it got ugly. I freaked out, Jackson decided I was boring and dropped me. That’s it.” Bernard stared at her more intently than he ever had, with a deepening, almost gloating shade of something she couldn’t read in his dark eyes. He clasped her hand under the table and held it tight. “Even after he left Evanston, I felt as if the whole tone of my time there was set by my thing with him. Everybody there knew about the three of us. Everywhere I went I got these looks. Jackson had a lot of friends who weren’t the most compassionate people in the world and…it was painful.” “But didn’t such a complex liaison make you all the more mysterious and interesting to people?”

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

  It would be hard to overestimate the extent to which Christian sexual moralizing, in its first three centuries, was shaped by the boundary between the righteousness of the Christian community and the seething depravity of the vast outside world. Classical paganism’s enduring reputation for sexual decadence has its origins in the biting critique of Christian apologetic literature (with imperial biography supplying ample help). It has seemed easy enough to dismiss Christian accounts of Greco-Roman sexual practice as so much predictable exaggeration in the arms race of sexual invective. In need of shock value, amid a culture desensitized to any but the most unlikely configurations of venereal pleasure, the imagination was free to contrive extravagant forms of sexual villainy. Certainly Tertullian’s countersuit against the Romans qualifies as immoderate. The Christian advocate alleges pervasive sexual irregularity: “With so many acts of adultery, so many shameful violations, so many vessels exposed to public lust both in stalls and in the street, how much mixing of blood, how much commingling within the clan, and thus how much general inducement to incest?” Promiscuity was, he noted, the inexhaustible raw material of low popular entertainments such as mime and comedy. But for Tertullian the decisive evidence for Roman lechery was not to be found in the appetite for vulgar theater. More concretely, it was witnessed in the public courts, including a recent tragedy that was no fiction of the stage but “an affair judged while Fuscianus was prefect of the city.” The shock value of Tertullian’s case against the Romans derives, quite intentionally, from an awful precision of time, place, and circumstance.31 Some years before the prefecture of Fuscianus, which can be dated to AD 187–189, a Roman boy of respectable birth had escaped the clutches of the small staff of attendants who actually did much of what we would consider parenting. He was, like so many others, pulled into the slave trade that lurked in even the most civilized corners of the Roman Empire. After some time he reappeared in Rome, in a slave market. Unwittingly, his own father bought him and “used him in the Greek fashion.” Soon enough the slave was sent to perform chained labor in the fields. There he encountered his old pedagogue and nurse, and a sequence of disastrous recognitions ensued. The slave dealer was interrogated, the truth revealed. The masters were the parents, their slave in fact the son. The parents committed suicide, and the prefect awarded the estate to the poor son, “not so much as an inheritance as a recompense for incestuous violation.” For Tertullian, the case was as clear a statement about the inner nature of Roman sexual culture as could possibly be needed. “The public revelation of such a crime is sufficient proof of what is hidden among you. Nothing happens just once in human affairs. That such a case could come to light even once says it all.”32

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

  Shame was a profoundly social concept, medi- ated always by gender and status. In the sexual life of the Roman Empire, it would be impossible to overstate the decisive infl uence of social position in the determination of sexual boundaries. Slavery, absolutely fundamental to the social and moral order of Roman life, gave sharp meaning to the con- cepts of honor and shame; slavery is an inherently degrading institution, which by its very nature deprives the slave of direct, individual access to social honor. “Slaves had no sense of pudor at all, perhaps because they were not usually conceived as having an interior ethical life, and certainly be- cause they could not suff er social diminution.” Th e free, by contrast, and INTRODUCTION  especially the wellborn, were thought to embody social honor and to ex- hibit a fi nely wrought sense of shame proper to their station in life.  Th e moral expectations inhering in the dynamics of shame were gener- ated by the social order. As a result, the real tension in the moral world of the Romans was not between the internal and the external dimensions of shame, but rather between the subjective and the objective qualities of shame. Honor and shame were both states of mind and states of being— moral qualities and social conditions. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sexual fi eld. Pudicitia, derived from pudor, described the quality of sexual mod- esty. It meant something diff erent in the case of men and women, free per- sons and slaves (for whom it had virtually no meaning). As we will explore in Chapter 1, it implied, simultaneously, both the intentional, mental state of sexual propriety and the objective state of bodily sexual integrity. Sōphrosynē covered a similar range in Greek, diff ering in the case of men and women, and pointing both to a mentally virtuous condition and an objective state. What is notable about the moralizing literature of the Ro- man period is a heightened awareness of this duality.

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

  is rule is a transcription of the older apostolic command against “the violation of children,” paidophthoria, but now it is attached to a penitential regime— in fact, unlike most forms of sexual deviance, this sin is placed explicitly beyond the possibility of return to communion. Nowhere in the canons of Elvira is male sexual passivity or lesbianism compassed. Th e canons of Elvira in fact foreshadow the way that sexual passivity will be so far beyond the pale that it often did not require comment, even in the late antique church. Th e broadening of the penitential regime of the church in late antiquity is a sign of the mainstreaming of the religion. As the church became a sacramental dispenser on a mass scale, it generated a need to manage sinners like never before. Th ough no one will mistake the late antique church for its  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N powerful late medieval successor, the elaboration of rules for the administration of baptism and communion refl ects the nascent infl uence of ecclesiastical structures in private life. Th e Apostolic Constitutions, an important collection of church canons redacted in the later fourth century, refl ect this expansion. Th e Apostolic Constitutions are especially revealing because the collection preserves multiple layers of canonical tradition. In book 7, we fi nd a lightly reworked pre sen ta tion of the primitive Didache, whose bare injunction against the corruption of children has been modestly elaborated. “Do not violate children, for contrary to nature is the evil born at Sodom, which was laid waste by the fi re of God.” A rule deriving from a slightly later tradition uses the “sin of the Sodomites” as a synecdoche for all same-sex intercourse, which is grouped with bestiality as a violation of nature. Th e latest stratum in the Apostolic Constitutions does not just prohibit various sexual practices but addresses how the bishop must react when confronted with sinners seeking entry to the church. “Th e doer of unspeakable deeds, the kinaidos, and the debauched,” along with miscellaneous rogues like magicians and astrologers, might be admitted to baptism, but not at fi rst. Th ey were to be “scrutinized for some time.” Dokimasia, “the Scrutiny,” was the same word once used to describe the ethical inspection of ancient Athenian citizens, but it has now been adopted by the church, which was willing to rely on the moral espionage of rumor in a face- to- face society. Th e church’s sexual expectations were far more strict, and its ambitions of control reached deeper into the soul, than the institutions of the ancient polis had ever imagined. Former sinners were to be watched so carefully because “such evil is so hard to wash out.” Th

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

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