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)

  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 The spare canvas of the Egyptian desert has been replaced by a fictional landscape crowded with meanings.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?”

• 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  Dio’s report is revealing in an unexpected way. Th e uncontrollable surge of adultery cases came from a swiftly imposed imperial crackdown that caught society off guard. But “[when] hardly anyone prosecuted these cases, the emperor himself ceased to meddle.” Adultery was, from its origins, a crime against man, not God, and it never lost this sense in Roman society. Even the mature Christian church of late antiquity will struggle, mostly without success, to break away from this residual belief. Adultery was an act of theft, violation of another man’s legitimate control of female sexuality. It was horrifi c, but principally as an aff ront to society. Adultery was a public crime because the state was charged to maintain good order, not because it was the steward of sexual morality per se. At least in the more developed corridors of the empire, women convicted of adultery were not stoned in fi ts of righ teous vengeance. Rather, a condemned adulteress was forced by law to renounce the stola, the garment of feminine modesty, and don the toga, the traditional dress of the Roman man . . . and the Roman prostitute. Th e strict code of honor and shame was used to scare girls into submission, but it was not as retrograde as many later iterations of the Mediterranean syndrome. It was a disgrace to suff er sexual violation, but Roman society did not blame rape victims. Although sexual crimes were legally formulated in terms of status, at least from the age of Augustus, consent was fundamental. Certain signs of refusal— screams, physical resistance— might be required. Some worried that this allowance opened the fl oodgates by providing a disguise for sin. Lucretia’s extraordinary virtue was revealed by the fact that she had the excuse of violence and refused to tender it. When Leucippe’s mother discovered her daughter on the brink of losing her virginity to Clitophon, she lamented that her daughter was ruined, especially because it was a voluntary encounter: “at least a disaster which comes about through force is not shameful.” When sex with a decent woman was not an open provocation of another man, attitudes might be less exacting. One of the fi nest repre sen ta tions of quiet indulgence occurs at the end of the fi fth book of Leucippe and Clitophon. Th e young “widow” Melite falls passionately in love with Clitophon, yet he artfully avoids physical consummation of their engagement. When Melite’s husband turns up alive, she makes one last eff ort to take Clitophon to bed. Th e seduction scene was the deliberate inverse of Leucippe’s heroic re sis tance against Th ersander, Melite’s husband. Melite’s speech is the cri de coeur of a desperate young wife infatuated with another man. Clitophon’s 

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

  e “lover of boys,” it was conventional to believe, only had to bribe the pedagogue or attendant and entice his beloved with a little gift. Phi los ophers, whose position gave them opportunity, were regularly accused of taking improper liberties with their charges; “in sum all their doctrines are mere words and they are enslaved to plea sure, some cavorting with concubines, others with prostitutes, most of them with boys.” One sign that older patterns endured is the intense refl ection on the protocols of consent. Th e ideal partner was one who knew “the art of assenting and refusing at the same time.” Poets, anyway, could profess to believe that the life cycle still aff orded a brief window of indeterminacy: it was wrong to lure a boy into sin in the years before his moral reason was developed, and twice as shameful once the young man was too old, “but between not yet and nevermore you and I have the now.” Th e impossibility of honorable consent is at the heart of Plutarch’s Erotikos, by any mea sure a crucial document of sexual life in the high empire.  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N Th e Erotikos is a dialogue set within the frame story of a young widow’s ef-forts to lure a handsome young man into marriage. Th e backdrop is essential, for Plutarch construes the woman as a sort of female lover pursuing her beloved according to the rules of classical pederasty. Th e story occasions an extended discussion of the relative merits of marriage and the love of boys. Th e defenders of pederasty give an apology as dramatic as any classical antecedent. True eros, claim its defenders, has nothing to do with women. Marriage is a domestic arrangement, more about keeping accounts and enjoying enervating pleasures between daily squabbling than the soul’s ascent; bonding between males, they argue, is the true way to nurture virtue. Th e “form, complexion, and image of the boy’s beauty” was just a powerful reminder, sent by the gods, of heavenly beauty, a sensible impression of the incorruptible reality. Th e true lover of wisdom experienced a chaste desire and would never indulge in base pleasures. Hence, sex with slaves must be explicitly renounced. “So too it is not gentlemanly or cultivated to lust after slave boys, which is nothing more than physical coitus.” Sex with slaves was so insalubrious that it had nothing more to recommend it than did “sex with women.” Plutarch, in response, defends marriage as an institution capable of gently pacifying the force of physical plea sure; the benevolent authority of the husband might be used to cultivate the same sort of virtuous friendship that the love of boys falsely promises. Th e Erotikos is indeed a grandilo-

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Listen, you never know what a man might do for you some day. Nobody gets anywhere alone. . . .” He was touchy about my independence, what he called my indifference. If I was obliged to ask him for a little dough he was delighted. That gave him a chance to deliver a little sermon on friendship. “So you have to have money, too?” he’d say, with a big satisfied grin spreading all over his face. “So the poet has to eat too? Well, well. . . . It’s lucky you came to me, Henry me boy, because I’m easy with you, I know you, you heartless son of a bitch. Sure, what do you want? I haven’t got very much, but I’ll split it with you. That’s fair enough, isn’t it? Or do you think, you bastard, that maybe I ought to give you it all and go out and borrow something for myself? I suppose you want a good meal, eh? Ham and eggs wouldn’t be good enough, would it? I suppose you’d like me to drive you to the restaurant too, eh? Listen, get up from that chair a minute—I want to put a cushion under your ass. Well, well, so you’re broke! Jesus, you’re always broke—I never remember seeing you with money in your pocket. Listen, don’t you ever feel ashamed of yourself? You talk about those bums I hang out with . . . well listen, mister, those guys never come and bum me for a dime like you do. They’ve got more pride—they’d rather steal it than come and grub it off me. But you , shit, you’re full of highfalutin’ ideas, you want to reform the world and all that crap—you don’t want to work for money, no, not you . . . you expect somebody to hand it to you on a silver platter. Huh! Lucky there’s guys like me around that understand you. You need to get wise to yourself, Henry. You’re dreaming. Everybody wants to eat, don’t you know that? Most people are willing to work for it—they don’t lie in bed all day like you and then suddenly pull on their pants and run to the first friend at hand. Supposing I wasn’t here, what would you have done? Don’t answer . . . I know what you’re going to say. But listen, you can’t go on all your life like that. Sure, you talk fine—it’s a pleasure to listen to you. You’re the only guy I know that I really enjoy talking to, but where’s it going to get you? One of these days they’ll lock you up for vagrancy. You’re just a bum, don’t you know that? You’re not even as good as those other bums you preach about. Where are you when I’m in a jam? You can’t be found. You don’t answer my letters, you don’t answer the telephone, you even hide sometimes when I come to see you.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I underestimated the profession. Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville entertainer, I would have been famous. People would have appreciated me precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have understood that I was not to be understood. That would have been a relief, to say the least. It was always a source of amazement to me how easily people could become riled just listening to me talk. Perhaps my speech was somewhat extravagant, though often it happened when I was holding myself in with main force. The turn of a phrase, the choice of an unfortunate adjective, the facility with which the words came to my lips, the allusions to subjects which were taboo— everything conspired to set me off as an outlaw, as an enemy of society. No matter how well things began sooner or later they smelled me out. If I were modest and humble, for example, then I was too modest, too humble. If I were gay and spontaneous, bold and reckless, then I was too free, too gay. I could never get myself quite au point with the individual I happened to be talking to. If it were not a question of life and death—everything was life and death to me then—if it was merely a question of passing a pleasant evening at the home of some acquaintance, it was the same thing. There were vibrations emanating from me, overtones and undertones, which charged the atmosphere unpleasantly. Perhaps the whole evening they had been amused by my stories, perhaps I had them in stitches, as it often happened, and everything seemed to augur well. But sure as fate something was bound to happen before the evening came to a close, some vibration set loose which made the chandelier ring or which reminded some sensitive soul of the pisspot under the bed. Even while the laughter was still dying off the venom was beginning to make itself felt. “Hope to see you again some time,” they would say, but the wet, limp hand which was extended would belie the words. Persona non grata! Jesus, how clear it seems to me now! No pick and choice possible: I had to take what was to hand and learn to like it. I had to learn to live with the scum, to swim like a sewer rat or be drowned. If you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Connie turned and looked out the narrow window that opened onto an air shaft, a blackened brick wall and a wretched little window smothered in filthy cardboard and the scabrous rag of a dead curtain. The usual fat, dirty pigeons with bleary, beady eyes gathered on the opposite window ledge like unregenerate pimps. When they had first moved here, Constance worked very hard at seeing this view as something other than horribly depressing. “Just look at it,” she’d tell herself. “Don’t make a judgment.” “You have a way, you know, of shoving your vulnerability right into people’s faces. Or something that you call vulnerability, anyway. You sometimes do it immediately upon meeting them. You force people to deal with it.” Deana was speaking excitedly but precisely, her words like clean-cut vanilla-colored chips. “Deana.” “No, listen to me. Don’t be angry with me for saying this; you don’t do it as much as you did. But you used to do it a lot, and it’s kind of strange to be confronted so aggressively with somebody else’s frailty. Some people will want to protect you, as I did, but some people will want to hurt you. Others will be merely afraid of you, for the obvious reason that it reminds them of their own frailty, which sounds a lot like your friend Alice.” Connie drew up her legs and sat with her arms around both knees and looked out the window again. It was true that in the summer the air shaft had an oddly poetic aspect. On days when the apartment air was heavy and stifling as a swamp, noises and smells came floating up it on clouds of heat, lyrical blends of voice and radio scraps, drifting arguments and amorous sighs, the fried shadow of someone’s dinner, a faded microcosm that lilted into their apartment and related them to everyone else in the building. Of course, whether or not this relationship was a pleasant sensation depended largely on one’s frame of mind, as well as on other factors; last summer the apartment below them had been sublet to a boy who would drunkenly imitate their voices when they made love. “Have I upset you?” asked Deana. “No, no.” Connie looked up. “I understand what you’re saying, but that wasn’t the case with Alice. I never acted vulnerable around her. And actually I don’t really agree with you. I may have done that to you because I responded to you sexually, but in general, I don’t.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  A startled look flared in Dara’s eyes; she glanced at Stephanie with disappointment. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” she said shortly. “I doubt you know anyone less at home than me.” They stood silently, Stephanie’s silence a disheartened one. She had thought she was making a penetrating remark that would impress Dara with her perceptiveness; instead she had revealed herself to be a person living in a dreamworld. This was always happening. — The next day at Christine’s, she felt like a person in a dreamworld, specifically a Playboy cartoon dreamworld inhabited by beautiful, moronic prostitutes in short pink negligees lolling about on cushions with white cats while large men in suits smiled at them. It was a strangely pleasant sensation. It had been a slow afternoon, and the women lounged on the couch with their high heels off and their feet up, watching TV and eating heavily salted french fries from damp carry-out containers. Stephanie was talking to Brett, an alert Chinese girl with waist-length hair. Brett had been in “the business” for ten years, since she was seventeen, and she said she was ready to leave. She told story after story about how customers were always trying to take advantage of her, humiliate her or intrude on her sympathies in some grotesque way. “It was just awful,” she said, concluding a particularly obnoxious story. “It was as if he’d done it almost, having to listen to him say it, you know?” She leaned forward for a handful of french fries, stuck some in her mouth and chewed meditatively. “When I was younger I had more energy to fight them off. No matter what they said or did, I could keep them away from my real self. But it gets harder and harder and I don’t know how much longer I can go on. I want to do something else anyway. I’m bored.” The other women began to talk about the terrible things men had done or tried to do, and how they’d thwarted them or gotten them back. There was a tenacious sense of defended pride in the room, which Stephanie felt both distant from and very much a part of. She thought of how pathetic this pride would seem to someone like Sandra, who had once disgustedly described a brief stint as a cocktail waitress as making her feel “like a whore.” The buzzer rang and Bernard the lawyer appeared, hands in his pockets, a sophisticated fellow playing the part, with mild amusement, of the casual businessman about to enjoy himself with a cheap woman. Stephanie smiled at him and sank back into the couch, feeling she was a sophisticated woman playing cheap. Soon they were back in the Shadow Room.

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

  e reign of Constantine is signifi cant, not so much for introduc-ing Christian values into law as for accelerating a new, more aggressive style of imperial lawmaking. Constantine extensively reformed Roman private law, but not in ways that show particularly Christian inspiration. Rather, he was a fi ercely conservative enforcer of traditional Roman values. Constantine, like Augustus, saw himself as the found er of a social order, and like Augustus he carried out a sweeping renovation of the aristocracy, complete with renewed prohibitions on the intermarriage of his aristocracy and women of “humble or low” birth. Like Augustus, too, he simultaneously reformed the adultery statute, which as ever protected decent women while consign-ing vulnerable women, perhaps more than ever, to systematic sexual exploitation. Constantine, for instance, was more explicit and more severe than the classical law in defi ning which women were beyond the pale of public respectability. Women working in taverns, who “served the wines of intemperance,” were rendered “unworthy of notice by the public law” by their “lowness of life.” Th e tenor of Constantine’s rule can be judged from his procedural reforms of the adultery law. Constantine ended the Augustan tradition of public informing, which had pressed public vigilance into the cause of sexual surveillance. Constantine wished to limit eligible in for mants to the woman’s husband or her male relatives. His outlook is informed by a sharper sense of honor and shame, and the patriarchal obligations on men to manage their own womenfolk. Constantine allowed a revealing exception: in cases where a woman, presumably a widow, was having sex with a slave. “If a woman is revealed to be having a hidden liaison with a slave, let her be sentenced to capital punishment, and the reprobate slave sent to the fl ames. And let everyone have the capacity to report this public crime, let it be a full duty to declare it, let even a slave have permission to make an accusation, which if it is true shall bring him freedom, though if it is false, a penalty waits.” It was the fi rst time that a Roman emperor had deigned to created a law to redress the nefarious possibility that a woman might fi nd sexual companionship among her own domestics. What is so interesting about Constantine’s law is not the disapproval of a type of sexual conjunction that had always horrifi ed public opinion. It is the will of the emperor to regulate, directly, the sexual impropriety itself, rather than the secondary eff ects of such a mésalliance. Certainly such willingness played unintentionally into Christian designs. Slaves were ubiquitous in late ancient society, and the C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H  phobia of surreptitious female infi delity spiraled into a general paranoia.

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

  was used to denote both a virtue (self- control) and the possession of sexual respectability. Shame was expressed as aischynē— an act which brought dishonor on the actor, or the emotional experience of moral failure. Aidōs drew closer to the individual’s “sense of shame,” both positively, in the proper respect for others’ opinions that evoked honorable behavior (similar to the Latin pudor), or negatively as the embarrassment that follows upon misconduct. In Greek the more concrete states of honor and dishonor were expressed by timē and atimia, respectively. Th e triumph of Christian sexual morality was, as far as these terms are concerned, linguistically neutral. Th e vocabulary of sin was as familiar to pre- Christian moralities (especially Stoicism) as it was to ecclesiastical authorities. Dio Chrysostom, for instance, could refer to the unlawful violation of women and boys as “sins.” And  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N Christian authors will exuberantly deploy the language, and sanctions, of “shame” in their campaign to repress sin. If the argument suggested by the title, From Shame to Sin, is not about linguistic transformation, neither is it about a shift from external social judgment to an internal, psychologizing morality (such a book might be called From Shame to Guilt). It is true that, by our period, “sin,” in both Latin and Greek, has the full sense of “moral transgression,” with a strong sense of culpability that must necessarily look inward for a blameworthy faculty. But the mistake would be to imagine that the cluster of terms governing the idea of “shame” was somehow exclusively external. Shame, in the Greco-Roman culture of the high empire, shuttled between external judgment and internal aff ect; its very nature lay in the inseparable connection between the two. Robert Kaster’s defi nition of pudor perfectly captures its essence: “a dis plea sure with oneself caused by vulnerability to just criticism of a socially diminishing sort.” In other words, shame was an emotion or emotional state experienced by an individual because of the potentially valid disapproval of the moral community. For instance, a Latin encyclopedist of the high empire recorded a phi los o pher’s defi nition of pudor and aischynē alike as “fear of justifi ed reproach.” Shame, in the Roman Empire, was necessarily an interpersonal concept, dependent on the potential judgment of the moral community. Th e demands of honor and shame also varied in the expectations they placed on the individual, according to the individual’s place within the moral community. Herein lies the internal logic of shame as a moral sanction.

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

  At the same time the state was required to defi ne, or at least establish guidelines allowing judges to defi ne, which women were beyond its pur- view: implicitly slaves and explicitly women who made a profi t with their bodies. By insinuating the state into the traditional networks of violence controlling access to female bodies, the Augustan laws ratifi ed the distinc- tion between women with, and without, sexual honor.  Th e lex Iulia was a momentous success, and one mea sure of its profound infl uence is that it subtly reshaped the vernacular of sexual honor. Th e Au- gustan laws protected the sexual honor of the mater familias, and the word became the Latin term for a woman with an all- encompassing sexual re- spectability, the equivalent of the Greek eleuthera, which had long denoted the married or marriageable woman. “We ought to accept as a mater fa- milias she who has not lived dishonorably. For it is behavior that distin- guishes and separates the mater familias from other women. So it matters not at all whether she is a married woman or a widow, a freeborn or freed woman, since neither marriages nor births make a mater familias, but good morals.” Social status and sexual behavior were inseparably fused, and the mater familias was defi ned by a mode of being, visibly projected in her com- portment and appearance. It was assumed that a mater familias could be distinguished, in the way she dressed, from women without sexual honor, whose “servile” or “whorish” vestments advertised their social condition.  Th e sexual life course of free women was dominated by the imperatives of marriage. In a society that was never freed from the relentless grip of a high- mortality regime, the burden of reproduction weighed heavily on the  FROM SHAME TO SIN female population. Th e demographic explosion of the Roman Empire, which pushed human settlement into every hill and vale, testifi es to a soci- ety that was constitutionally geared for reproduction and technologically incapable of putting brakes on its own fertility. Th e age structure of Greco- Roman marriage was an expression of the need to exploit female reproduc- tive potential to the full, from menarche to menopause. For girls, marriage came early and inexorably. Th e legal age for marriage was twelve. Most girls married in their mid- teens. Th e higher classes may have married off their daughters latest of all, sometime in their late teens. Marriage was universal for women; there were no spinsters in antiquity. In a world where death rates were grievously high and unpredictable, early widowhood was com- mon.

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

  and they “sacrifi ced her in my stead.” Although the drama of this revelation is deliberately heightened by the long delay, Achilles is not simply relishing the art of his own special eff ects. Apparent deaths and failed identifi cations are essential to the Greek romances. Th e decapitated prostitute was Leucippe’s doppelgänger. Leucippe called her an “ill- starred” woman, just as Th ersander called Leucippe an “ill- starred slave” during his crucial misrecogni-tion scene. Leucippe described the prostitute’s substitutional death in the language of animal sacrifi ce; it was a resonant statement in a culture that still very much believed in the mysterious powers of propitiation. While Leucippe’s eleutheria, her freedom and sexual respectability, kept her body inviolate through the most extreme tribulations, fate was not so kind to her opposite, the unfortunate prostitute. Achilles Tatius has transformed mundane social prejudice into high art. Th at there were two fates for women was a fundamental and unchanging tenet of ancient sexual ideologies. Down one path lay promiscuity and  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N shame, personifi ed in the prostitute; down the other lay chastity and honor, personifi ed in the virgin and the matron. Th ese two fates were deeply em- bedded in patterns of social reproduction, loosely codifi ed in public law, and actively reinforced by the social technology of honor and shame. It is an achievement of Leucippe and Clitophon that the story has so openly contemplated the inscrutable economy of fortune, in the stunning contrast between its benefi ciary and its victim. Th e fate of the prostitute seems only more capricious and unjust in a novelistic universe where there is no redemption beyond life, only the prospect of salvation through conjugal eros. In the cosmos created by the author, the prostitute’s grotesque demise serves only to exhibit the good fortune of Leucippe in even greater contrast. Th e norms attaching to male sexual behavior inevitably attract the lion’s share of the attention from historians. It is an obvious and insurmountable fact that our in for mants are almost exclusively male. More subtly, expectations of female sexual behavior can seem uniform and immobile: good girls remain pure until marriage, faithful within marriage. Th e imposition of these limits is as unsurprising as the dawn. Th e eff ort to control female sexu- ality is precultural, a permanent fi xture of sexual competition. Th e regulation of female sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean shared all the predictable features of a patriarchal culture. Nevertheless, the actual mechanics and specifi c infl ections of feminine sexual norms in the pre- Christian world merit closer inspection. Th

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  That helped me to keep up the sad look. I asked to be alone with Luke a few minutes, but Maxie insisted on accompanying me. The others were relieved, I imagine, as they had been conducting the mourners to the bier all afternoon. And like the good Germans they were they didn’t like having their dinner interrupted. As I was looking at Luke, still with that sorrowful expression I had mustered, I became aware of Maxie’s eyes fixed on me inquisitively. I looked up and smiled at him in my usual way. He seemed absolutely nonplussed at this. “Listen, Maxie,” I said, “are you sure they won’t hear us?” He looked still more puzzled and grieved, but nodded reassuringly. “It’s like this, Maxie . . . I came up here purposely to see you . . . to borrow a few bucks. I know it seems lousy but you can imagine how desperate I must be to do a thing like this.” He was shaking his head solemnly as I spit this out, his mouth forming a big O as if he were trying to frighten the spirits away. “Listen, Maxie,” I went on rapidly and trying to keep my voice down sad and low, “this is no time to give me a sermon. If you want to do something for me lend me ten bucks now, right away . . . slip it to me right here while I look at Luke. You know, I really liked Luke. I didn’t mean all that over the telephone. You got me at a bad moment. The wife was tearing her hair out. We’re in a mess, Maxie, and I’m counting on you to do something. Come out with me if you can and I’ll tell you more about it. . . .” Maxie, as I had expected, couldn’t come out with me. He wouldn’t think of deserting them at such a moment. . . . “Well, give it to me now,” I said, almost savagely. “I’ll explain the whole thing to you tomorrow. I’ll have lunch with you downtown.” “Listen, Henry,” says Maxie, fishing around in his pocket, embarrassed at the idea of being caught with a wad in his hand at that moment, “listen,” he said, “I don’t mind giving you the money, but couldn’t you have found another way of reaching me? It isn’t because of Luke . . . it’s. . . .” He began to hem and haw, not knowing really what he wanted to say. “For Christ’s sake,” I muttered, bending over Luke more closely so that if any one walked in on us they would never suspect what I was up to . . . “for Christ’s sake, don’t argue about it now . . . hand it over and be done with it. . . . I’m desperate, do you hear me?”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  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?” “I don’t know. I didn’t give a shit about being interesting and mysterious. I wanted him to love me.” For a second, he looked as though she had said something truly strange. Then his face smoothed over with fatherly tenderness. He stroked her cheek. “You really are a classic,” he said. “You don’t look it, but you are.” Three weeks after she’d started seeing Bernard, a month after she’d left Christine’s, an unexpected thing happened. Someone from a magazine she had interviewed with when she had come to New York three years before called her about a position as an editorial assistant. They had found her résumé and clips from the Evanston college paper in an old file and wanted to know if she was available. It was an architectural journal—not a subject she cared much about, but she remembered the magazine as being well written and beautifully designed. Besides, she was becoming desperate for a job, so she had the interview and was hired two days later. Babette and Sandra seemed to think that it was the most wonderful thing in the world. (Now Sandra no longer had to stretch Stephanie’s connection with the Voice , and could introduce her as “in editorial.”) Stephanie wasn’t sure that it would in fact be a lot better than working at Christine’s; she no longer cared about being a “young professional” for Jackson’s sake. Meanwhile, her odd relationship with Bernard was beginning to trouble her. Their conversation, although they spoke of many things, seemed mostly polite and for the benefit of fantasies they had about each other.

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

  Roman law was inspired by norms of masculinity; it guarded the impenetrability of the Roman youth and debilitated the pathicus. Th e Mosaic law sits across a conceptual divide so vast from the aims of Roman policy, and derives from a juridical regime so alien from the techniques of Roman jurisprudence, that the Christian author of this tract has made the best of a very bad job.  He must have sensed it. For this unfl appable compiler appended a recent enactment of the emperor Th eodosius I, the only contemporary inclusion in his handbook, a decree that, in his judgment, “followed the spirit of the Mosaic Law to the fullest.” In 390, Th eodosius had issued a law declaring, “We cannot allow the city of Rome, the mother of all virtues, any longer to be polluted by the contaminating emasculation of men’s sexual honor, and the rude vigor handed down from the ancient found ers to be depleted by a people weakened in softness, becoming an insult to ages past and present.”  FROM SHAME TO SIN Th e law explicitly punished men who suff ered their bodies to be used like the fl esh of women, but the focus of imperial energy was specifi c and re- vealing. “Having dragged out all— it is embarrassing to say— from the male brothels, let the fl ames of vengeance expiate their crime with the populace watching, so everyone will know that the soul of a man is to be treated by all as an inviolable precinct.” Such fl orid eff usions are characteristic of late im- perial statecraft. But the public incineration of the male prostitutes of Rome is almost totally unaccountable in terms of ordinary Roman policy.  Opinion has been divided about the judgment of the author who in- cluded a copy of this law in his comparison of Mosaic and Roman jurispru- dence. Was the spirit of the Th eodosian constitution, indeed, akin to reli- gious injunctions against same- sex love, or was the compiler overreaching in his eff ort to bend the law into a point of contact between the “spirit of Moses” and the Roman state? In other words, was the Th eodosian mea sure inspired by religious homophobia, or by the immemorial ideals of Roman manhood?