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 The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Which words I had heard that Juno never uttered; but we were forced to go astray in the footsteps of these poetic fictions, and to say in prose much what he expressed in verse. And his speaking was most applauded, in whom the passions of rage and grief were most preeminent, and clothed in the most fitting language, maintaining the dignity of the character. What is it to me, O my true life, my God, that my declamation was applauded above so many of my own age and class? is not all this smoke and wind? and was there nothing else whereon to exercise my wit and tongue? Thy praises, Lord, Thy praises might have stayed the yet tender shoot of my heart by the prop of Thy Scriptures; so had it not trailed away amid these empty trifles, a defiled prey for the fowls of the air. For in more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels. But what marvel that I was thus carried away to vanities, and went out from Thy presence, O my God, when men were set before me as models, who, if in relating some action of theirs, in itself not ill, they committed some barbarism or solecism, being censured, were abashed; but when in rich and adomed and well-ordered discourse they related their own disordered life, being bepraised, they gloried? These things Thou seest, Lord, and holdest Thy peace; long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth. Wilt Thou hold Thy peace for ever? and even now Thou drawest out of this horrible gulf the soul that seeketh Thee, that thirsteth for Thy pleasures, whose heart saith unto Thee, I have sought Thy face; Thy face, Lord, will I seek. For darkened affections is removal from Thee. For it is not by our feet, or change of place, that men leave Thee, or return unto Thee. Or did that Thy younger son look out for horses or chariots, or ships, fly with visible wings, or journey by the motion of his limbs, that he might in a far country waste in riotous living all Thou gavest at his departure? a loving Father, when Thou gavest, and more loving unto him, when he returned empty. So then in lustful, that is, in darkened affections, is the true distance from Thy face.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  This is the fruit of my confessions of what I am, not of what I have been, to confess this, not before Thee only, in a secret exultation with trembling, and a secret sorrow with hope; but in the ears also of the believing sons of men, sharers of my joy, and partners in my mortality, my fellow-citizens, and fellow-pilgrims, who are gone before, or are to follow on, companions of my way. These are Thy servants, my brethren, whom Thou willest to be Thy sons; my masters, whom Thou commandest me to serve, if I would live with Thee, of Thee. But this Thy Word were little did it only command by speaking, and not go before in performing. This then I do in deed and word, this I do under Thy wings; in over great peril, were not my soul subdued unto Thee under Thy wings, and my infirmity known unto Thee. I am a little one, but my Father ever liveth, and my Guardian is sufficient for me. For He is the same who begat me, and defends me: and Thou Thyself art all my good; Thou, Almighty, Who are with me, yea, before I am with Thee. To such then whom Thou commandest me to serve will I discover, not what I have been, but what I now am and what I yet am. But neither do I judge myself. Thus therefore I would be heard. For Thou, Lord, dost judge me: because, although no man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of a man which is in him, yet is there something of man, which neither the spirit of man that is in him, itself knoweth. But Thou, Lord, knowest all of him, Who hast made him. Yet I, though in Thy sight I despise myself, and account myself dust and ashes; yet know I something of Thee, which I know not of myself. And truly, now we see through a glass darkly, not face to face as yet. So long therefore as I be absent from Thee, I am more present with myself than with Thee; and yet know I Thee that Thou art in no ways passible; but I, what temptations I can resist, what I cannot, I know not. And there is hope, because Thou art faithful, Who wilt not suffer us to be tempted above that we are able; but wilt with the temptation also make a way to escape, that we may be able to bear it. I will confess then what I know of myself, I will confess also what I know not of myself. And that because what I do know of myself, I know by Thy shining upon me; and what I know not of myself, so long know I not it, until my darkness be made as the noon-day in Thy countenance.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  I however certainly had no opportunity of enquiring what I wished of that so holy oracle of Thine, his breast, unless the thing might be answered briefly. But those tides in me, to be poured out to him, required his full leisure, and never found it. I heard him indeed every Lord’s day, rightly expounding the Word of truth among the people; and I was more and more convinced that all the knots of those crafty calumnies, which those our deceivers had knit against the Divine Books, could be unravelled. But when I understood withal, that “man created by Thee, after Thine own image,” was not so understood by Thy spiritual sons, whom of the Catholic Mother Thou hast born again through grace, as though they believed and conceived of Thee as bounded by human shape (although what a spiritual substance should be I had not even a faint or shadowy notion); yet, with joy I blushed at having so many years barked not against the Catholic faith, but against the fictions of carnal imaginations. For so rash and impious had I been, that what I ought by enquiring to have learned, I had pronounced on, condemning. For Thou, Most High, and most near; most secret, and most present; Who hast not limbs some larger, some smaller, but art wholly every where, and no where in space, art not of such corporeal shape, yet hast Thou made man after Thine own image; and behold, from head to foot is he contained in space. Ignorant then how this Thy image should subsist, I should have knocked and proposed the doubt, how it was to be believed, not insultingly opposed it, as if believed. Doubt, then, what to hold for certain, the more sharply gnawed my heart, the more ashamed I was, that so long deluded and deceived by the promise of certainties, I had with childish error and vehemence, prated of so many uncertainties. For that they were falsehoods became clear to me later. However I was certain that they were uncertain, and that I had formerly accounted them certain, when with a blind contentiousness, I accused Thy Catholic Church, whom I now discovered, not indeed as yet to teach truly, but at least not to teach that for which I had grievously censured her. So I was confounded, and converted: and I joyed, O my God, that the One Only Church, the body of Thine Only Son (wherein the name of Christ had been put upon me as an infant), had no taste for infantine conceits; nor in her sound doctrine maintained any tenet which should confine Thee, the Creator of all, in space, however great and large, yet bounded every where by the limits of a human form.

• From Another Country (1962)

  You didn’t have that look in your eyes. You just acted like a real sweet boy and maybe, without knowing it, I got to depend on it. Sometimes I’d just see you for a minute or so, we’d just have a cup of coffee or something like that, and I’d run off—but I felt better, I was kind of protected from their eyes and their hands. I was feeling so sick most of the time through there. I didn’t want my father to know what I was doing and I tried not to think about Rufus. That was when I decided that I ought to try to sing, I’d do it for Rufus, and then all the rest wouldn’t matter. I would have settled the score. But I thought I needed somebody to help me, and it was then, just at the time that I —” She stopped and looked down at her hands. “I think I wanted to go to bed with you, not to have an affair with you, but just to go to bed with somebody that I liked. Somebody who wasn’t old, because all those men are old, no matter how young they are. I’d only been to bed with one boy I liked, a boy on our block, but he got religion, and so it all stopped and he got married. And there weren’t any other colored men, I was afraid, because look what happened to them, they got cut down like grass! And I didn’t see any way out, except—finally—you. And Ellis.” Then she stopped. They listened to the rain. He had finished his drink and he picked up hers. She looked down, he had the feeling that she could not look up, and he was afraid to touch her. And the silence stretched; he longed for it to end, and dreaded it; there was nothing he could say. She straightened her shoulders and reached out for a cigarette. He lit it for her. “Richard knows about me and Ellis,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone, “but that’s not why I’m telling you. I’m telling you because I’m trying to bring this whole awful thing to a halt. If that’s possible.” She paused. She said, “Let me have a sip of your drink, please.” “It’s yours,” he said. He gave it to her and poured himself another one. She blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “It’s funny the way things work. If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t think Ellis would ever have got so hung up on me. He saw, better than I did, that I really liked you and that meant that I could really like somebody and so why not him, since he could give me so much more?

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  For over two years, I talked to boys—dozens of boys—from cities and towns across America. Nearly all of them held relatively egalitarian views about girls, at least in the public sphere: they considered their female classmates to be smart and competent; entitled to their place on the sports field and in school leadership; deserving of their admissions to college and of professional opportunities. They all had platonic female friends. That was a huge shift from what you might have seen fifty, forty, maybe even twenty years ago. Yet, when I asked them to describe the ideal guy, those same boys, who were coming of age in the 2000s, appeared to be channeling 1955; their definition of masculinity had barely budged. Emotional detachment. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Athleticism. Wealth (at least someday . . .). Dominance. Aggression. Like the girls I had interviewed a few years before, they were in a constant state of negotiation, trying to live out more modern ideas about gender yet unwilling or unable to let go of the old ones. And, also as with girls, the most insidious aspects of the “ideal” were reinforced or glamorized for them at every turn: on athletic teams, in media, even in the home. Nearly 60 percent of American boys in an international 2017 survey said that their parents (usually their dads) were the primary source of restrictive messages about masculinity. Rob, an eighteen-year-old from New Jersey in his freshman year at a North Carolina college, said his father would tell him to “man up” if he was struggling in school or on the baseball field. “That’s why I never talk to anybody about any problems I’m having,” he said. “Because I always think, If you can’t handle this on your own, then you aren’t a man, you aren’t trying hard enough, you’re being a bitch.” Rob’s roommate, Ely, who grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, got a similar message, though in a subtler form. “My dad wasn’t sexist,” he said. “I didn’t learn ‘toxic’ or homophobic behavior from him. But I certainly learned the emotionally stunted side of masculinity. He never showed emotion: he was more of a sigh-and-walk-away guy than someone who would talk to you about what was going on.”

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Such was the story of Pontitianus; but Thou, O Lord, while he was speaking, didst turn me round towards myself, taking me from behind my back where I had placed me, unwilling to observe myself; and setting me before my face, that I might see how foul I was, how crooked and defiled, bespotted and ulcerous. And I beheld and stood aghast; and whither to flee from myself I found not. And if I sought to turn mine eye from off myself, he went on with his relation, and Thou again didst set me over against myself, and thrustedst me before my eyes, that I might find out mine iniquity, and hate it. I had known it, but made as though I saw it not, winked at it, and forgot it. But now, the more ardently I loved those whose healthful affections I heard of, that they had resigned themselves wholly to Thee to be cured, the more did I abhor myself, when compared with them. For many of my years (some twelve) had now run out with me since my nineteenth, when, upon the reading of Cicero’s Hortensius, I was stirred to an earnest love of wisdom; and still I was deferring to reject mere earthly felicity, and give myself to search out that, whereof not the finding only, but the very search, was to be preferred to the treasures and kingdoms of the world, though already found, and to the pleasures of the body, though spread around me at my will. But I wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, “Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.” For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied, rather than extinguished. And I had wandered through crooked ways in a sacrilegious superstition, not indeed assured thereof, but as preferring it to the others which I did not seek religiously, but opposed maliciously.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He is wheedling, desperate, certain that his patience will triumph. And of course at some point the hawk becomes half-hungry enough to eat, and White stuffs it with food, convinced that all will now be well. And then the hawk hates him, and the strange cycle begins again. ‘ Days of attack and counter-attack,’ was how White described it; ‘a kind of sweeping to and fro across disputed battle fields.’ There is a nightmarish logic to White’s time with the hawk: the logic of a sadist who half-hates his hawk because he hates himself, who wants to hurt it because he loves it, but will not, and insists that it eats so that it will love him. And these twisted logics were met with the simple logic of a wild, fat goshawk that considers this man the most inimical thing on earth. ‘ I had only just escaped from humanity,’ White wrote, ‘and the poor gos had only just been caught by it.’ But he hadn’t escaped, not quite. When you read The Goshawk you’re given to understand that his cottage was miles from anywhere, a remote outpost deep in a wood half a mile from the nearest road. But the cottage was on the Stowe estate; it had been built on one of the old roads laid out as carriage routes to the great house centuries before. They were called the Ridings, and one ran in a shifting river of grass straight past White’s cottage, over the crest of a sheep-cropped hill and down to the doors of the school. The house was rustic, yes: it had an earth-closet and a well, and when White stood with his hawk in the barn he could still see where a Victorian gamekeeper had written of vanished bags of game in pencil on the back of the door. Phesant , it said. Harn . But remote it was not. There was his house, not quite in a wood, sitting on the old and open road to Stowe, like a promise not quite kept, and White in it, like a dog who sits at the very end of his chain, or the sad divorcee who moves out of their partner’s house to live at the bottom of the road. For all his joy in freedom, the schoolmaster had not escaped the bounds of the school , and he’d not escaped schoolmastering either . In Blaine’s book White read that falconry was the art of control over the wildest and proudest of living creatures, and that to train them the falconer must battle their defiance and rebellious attitude.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  I didn’t even know the words for some of what happened in my sexual fantasies, but I was sure of one thing. Liberated women, women who had thrown off the yoke of heterosexism, didn’t even think about what I wanted to do. I wasn’t ashamed of being preoccupied with sex—everyone I knew was preoccupied with sex, one way or the other. And though I was plenty confused by the messy etiquette of the early 1970s, and spent time wondering just how much shifting of partners I should do, that was more a source of embarrassed bumbling than conscious shame. The Amazon and Earth Mother images of 1970s-era feminism did me a world of good, in fact. I felt it was okay to have sex, to be sexual—as long I was sexual in a wholesome, Earth Mother kind of way. I felt a little work-ethic guilt at times, since I’d absorbed the solid lower-middle-class belief that whatever was fun didn’t count as work, and sex, for all its drama, was sometimes quite a lot of fun. But I was also ashamed, simply ashamed of my own unasked-for appetites and shockingly incorrect fantasies, which would not be still, and which seemed to violate the hygienic dogma of sexual equality and Amazon health. Sex is so often examined within marriage and relationship, one could almost imagine that’s the only place sex exists. I want to deliberately examine sex outside the structure of long-term relationships because the psychic experience of sex doesn’t stop at the edge of the relationship even if the physical acts of sex do. In other words, even if I am monogamous for life, my sexuality is promiscuous—roving and polyfidelitous and amoral. If we pretend our sexual feelings always occur (or only rightly can occur) inside the bounds of a commitment, we are lying to ourselves. Even within these bounds, sex takes many forms. In a way, it’s unfortunate that we use this one three-letter word to refer to the incredible range of erotic behavior of which people are capable. Just for myself, I would say the best sex I’ve had and the worst sex I’ve had don’t belong in the same box at all, can’t be discussed with the same vocabulary, described in the same language. It’s not quite fair to talk about sex in any general way at all. Love can coexist with, and join, everything I’m talking about. I’ve learned more about sex through the tunnels of love than otherwise, by far. Sexual passion greatly complicates but also greatly expands the already labyrinthine complications of love itself. With sexual love can come moments of overpowering fulfillment, an almost devastating, a frightening, satiety. But even in a long-term romance there is a world of difference between the desire for the lover’s body and the desire for the lover’s body, and for now, this last is what concerns me.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  For his whole life Joyce was desperate with sexual urging, embarrassed and obsessed by it, bewildered by the addictive power of sin. (What I quote here from his letters are the tame parts.) The fear of sin is never far away. To desire is to live God’s punishment; to be a woman and feel desire is to repeat Eve’s disastrous act. There are times when a sad and empty feeling comes over me as I contemplate sex. I feel not so much that it is degrading or dangerous, but cheap. A sanctimonious voice whispers in my ear: We must transcend ourselves. We must cultivate the higher arts. Why am I not distracted, as I hurriedly cook dinner, by a strain from one of Mozart’s operas instead of—what distracts me? But Mozart’s operas are all about obsession and desire. Why is my mind not filled with the paintings of the masters? Naked women, velvet drapery, Leda and her swan—no help there. The classics—Homer, Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina. No help at all. I suspect even the purveyors of high-toned reprimands, the ones who claim more mature and refined interests, have been on their knees howling at the moon once or twice. I get a lot of interesting stuff in the mail these days, underground miracles of desktop publishing. Some of these magazines are rough and homemade, others slick and witty; most are funny, creepy, smart, and bizarre, and I’m often struck by the sophisticated intelligence in their pages. They are filled with stories of fantasies and fetishes, overwhelming lust, hopeful secret journeys toward understanding. When I get that feeling, that blue-blood nonsense about higher callings, I pick up Slippery When Wet or Taste of Latex or Tit Clamps and feel better. My role models aren’t so much people who are doing anything differently from me, but all the other people trying to figure this damned thing out, bravely walking through their own shame and nonsense. Besides, as one friend points out with a laugh, “Some of the best sex I’ve ever had was cheap, tawdry, and meaningless.” I can hear the chuckles of my role models now, tarty girls in black leather and nasty boys grabbing their crotches. If everything was coated with a seal of approval, some of the fun would go out of it. Let’s get away with something. Degrade me, baby. II [image file=image_rsrc10C.jpg] Arousal6I’m surprised still by my own conservatism, my own rather fussy aversions. Aversion suddenly appears, without warning. I’ve read a lot of explicit sexual material lately, fictional and otherwise. I am frequently aroused and sometimes disturbed. I am disturbed not so much by the acts others perform and dream of performing, but by the consuming intensity of their dreams. I want more safety in my own sexual response, more control over my own reactions. But any judgmental feeling I have about sex tends to be directed toward myself. My whispered words might be, “That’s naughty,” or “That’s bad,” but what I mean is “Pervert.”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  This story is usually told with amusement—at the woman’s predicament, at Shaw’s quick wit. Like a lot of stories about Shaw, this one is probably apocryphal. What if we tell it as a way of establishing not what the lady might be, but Shaw—or any man who finds amusement in the insult? “Sex is the only human activity in which the professional has lower status than the amateur,” wrote Murray Davis. If the lady with whom Shaw sports is a whore, it is his particular relationship to her that makes her one. To be a whore is a shameful thing to most of us, but buying a whore’s services is not. We may chide the john, but we also understand him, excuse him. There’s no excuse for a whore. Even now, there’s no worse insult for a woman than to call her a whore, a slut, an easy lay. And however inarticulately or unconsciously, a lot of people think whores are born, not made. Whorishness is an absolute state; it can’t be cured. And what is a whore? One working woman tells me she has no problem with the word as long as she controls it. “If someone called me a whore, I’d go, ‘Yeah?’ And I know women who will run around and call themselves whores, but if somebody else says it, oh—there’s a charge there.” Daphne, a twenty-year-old prostitute in London, told me privately that she finds it easier to admit she’s a prostitute than to admit how much she likes sex. Because the sex she does enjoy, as well as the sex she doesn’t, is “just work,” she’s not responsible for her own response. After all, both men and women can do prostitute work, but only women can be whores. Women who are good at sex, or say they like fucking and a variety of partners, are generally labeled whores whether they are paid or not; whores, in turn, who say they like their work are far more strongly censured than those who claim to despise it. At least the latter can be saved.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Such accusations would not come as a surprise to many writers, especially to those who have attempted to pay homage, in their writing, to a beloved. Wayne Koestenbaum tells an instructive story on this account: “Some psycho girlfriend of mine (decades ago!) answered a long rhapsodic letter I’d written her with this terse, humiliating rebuff: ‘Next time, write to me.’ That one command, on a tiny slip of paper, tucked into an envelope. I remember thinking, ‘Wasn’t I writing to her? How could I know, when writing to her, that I secretly wasn’t writing to her?’ At that point, Derrida hadn’t yet written The Post Card, so I didn’t know what to do with my befuddled, wounded sense of being a rhapsodic narcissist of a letter-writer weirdly instructed to ‘relate,’ to speak to someone instead of to the nothingness at the end of writing.” The inexpressible may be contained (inexpressibly!) in the expressed, but the older I get, the more fearful I become of this nothingness, this waxing lyrical about those I love the most (Cordelia). I finish a first draft of this book and give it to Harry. He doesn’t have to tell me that he’s read it: when I come home from work, I can see the pile of ruffled pages sticking out of his knapsack, and I can feel his mood, which one might describe as quiet ire. We agree to go out for lunch the next day to talk about it. At lunch he tells me he feels unbeheld—unheld, even. I know this is a terrible feeling. We go through the draft page by page, mechanical pencils in hand, with him suggesting ways I might facet my representation of him, of us. I try to listen, try to focus on his generosity in letting me write about him at all. He is, after all, a very private person, who has told me more than once that being with me is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe light artist. But nothing can substantively quell my inner defense attorney. How can a book be both a free expression and a negotiation? Is it not idle to fault a net for having holes? That’s just an excuse for a crappy net, he might say. But it’s my book, mine! Yes, but the details of my life, of our life together, don’t belong to you alone. OK, but no mind can take the same interest in his neighbor’s me as in his own. The neighbor’s me falls together with all the rest of the things in one foreign mass, against which his own me stands out in startling relief. A writer’s narcissism. But that’s William James’s description of subjectivity itself, not narcissism. Whatever—why can’t you just write something that will bear adequate witness to me, to us, to our happiness? Because I do not yet understand the relationship between writing and happiness, or writing and holding.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I learned this scorn from my own mother; perhaps it laced my milk. I therefore have to be on the alert for a tendency to treat other people’s needs as repulsive. Corollary habit: deriving the bulk of my self-worth from a feeling of hypercompetence, an irrational but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance. You’re a great student because you don’t have any baggage, a teacher once told me, at which moment the subterfuge of my life felt complete. One of the gifts of recognizing oneself in thrall to a substance is the perforation of such subterfuge. In place of an exhausting autonomy, there is the blunt admittance of dependence, and its subsequent relief. I will always aspire to contain my shit as best I can, but I am no longer interested in hiding my dependencies in an effort to appear superior to those who are more visibly undone or aching. Most people decide at some point that it is better … to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one’s being and becoming. I’m glad not to be there right now, but I’m also glad to have been there, to know how it is. Sedgwick was a famous pluralizer, an instinctive maximalist who named and celebrated her predilection for profusion as “fat art.” I celebrate this fat art, even if in practice I am more of a serial minimalist—an employee, however productive, of the condensery. Rather than a philosopher or a pluralizer, I may be more of an empiricist, insofar as my aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). I have never really thought of myself as a “creative person”—writing is my only talent, and writing has always felt more clarifying than creative to me. But in contemplating this definition, I wonder if one might be creative (or queer, or happy, or held) in spite of oneself. That’s enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.) The capaciousness of growing a baby. The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before. The cartilage nub where my ribs used to fit together at the sternum. The little slide in my lower rib cage when I twist right or left that didn’t used to slide. The rearrangement of internal organs, the upward squeezing of the lungs. The dirt that collects on your belly button when it finally pops inside out, revealing its bottom—finite, after all. The husky feeling in my postpartum perineum, the way my breasts filling all at once with milk is like an orgasm but more painful, powerful as a hard rain. While one nipple is getting sucked, the other sometimes sprays forth, unstoppable.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The step between being casually sexually active and getting paid for sex is both quite narrow and very wide. At certain moments there is a bare whisper of difference. Yet the pay, not the sex, is the source of shame for many women, who are insulted at the offer of money, gifts, or support by a lover. “I’ll fuck you,” they reply in essence, “but don’t you dare try to pay me for it!” Taken at face value, this is rather absurd, and so there has to be more at stake, a deeper fear than insult—though the punishments meted out to women who are labeled whores are harsh and often irrevocable. Perhaps women fear that if they ever take money tied to sex, they will be seen as always available, always able to be bought. But prostitutes turn customers down all the time and may feel more in control of their relationships when they hold these purse strings. Women fear being labeled whores if the label is defined by men, because in male terms, the prostitute is outside the pale of male protection. What happens if we—if I, as a woman, and therefore a potential whore every minute of my life—see prostitution in another way, if I move through the looking-glass to the other side? “Part of my idea about getting into the business to begin with was to train men, to teach the men, get my hands on some men and teach them how we want them to be,” says Jackie Daniels. “To work with men around their sexuality, you have to go underground. And prostitution is a very clean relationship.” “My fantasy of it, before I got involved, was that there was this unlimited number of men and they would all want to see me once. And I was just amazed that men wanted to come back. I have people I’ve been seeing for years. I’ve had several boyfriends since, but I still have the same clients. It’s very much like a therapist-patient or doctor-patient relationship. You get to know the person, details about their life, but there’s the same sort of distancing. You sit all day and you listen to people’s emotional problems, and you talk to them and help them process it and do all this emotional work with people. You don’t then go have emotional problems at home. We will probably always need doctors, we will always need counselors, therapists, psychic healers, and advisers in the same way that we will always need prostitutes. These are sex experts, sexual healers.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted? Can it be that words comprise one of the few economies left on earth in which plenitude—surfeit, even—comes at no cost? Recently I received in the mail a literary magazine that featured an interview with Anne Carson in which she answers certain questions—the boring ones? the too personal ones?—with empty brackets [[ ]]. There is something to learn here; I probably would have written a dissertation on each query, prompting the reply I’ve heard countless times in my life: “Really, it’s terrific—it’s just the people upstairs who say we’ve got to trim it back a little.” The sight of Carson’s brackets made me feel instantly ashamed of my compulsion to put my cards more decidedly on the table. But the more I thought about the brackets, the more they bugged me. They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable. Many years ago, Carson gave a lecture at Teachers & Writers in New York City, at which she introduced (to me) the concept of leaving a space empty so that God could rush in. I knew a bit about this concept from my boyfriend at the time, who was big into bonsai. In bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine. But that night Carson made the concept literary. (Act so that there is no use in a center: a piece of Steinian wisdom Carson says she tries to impart to her students.) I had never heard of Carson before that night, but the room was packed and everyone else there clearly had. She gave a real lecture, with a Xeroxed slide list of Edward Hopper paintings and everything. She made being a professorial writer seem like the coolest thing you could ever be. I went home fastened to the concept of leaving the center empty for God. It was like stumbling into a tarot reading or AA meeting and hearing the one thing that will keep you going, in heart or art, for years. Sitting now at my desk in my windowless office, its back wall painted pale blue in commemoration of the sky, I stare at the brackets in the Carson interview and try to enjoy them as markers of that evening from so long ago. But some revelations do not stand. A student came to my office the other day and showed me an op-ed piece his mother had published in the LA Times, in which she describes her turbulent feelings about his transgender identity. “I want to love the man my daughter has become,” the mother announces at the outset, “but floundering in the torrent of her change and my resistance to it, I fear I’ll never make it across my river of anger and sorrow.”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The deepest fear and the greatest censure of the body concerns children. A desperate effort is made to protect childhood innocence by sparing children the sight of nude bodies as long as possible. The irony is that such efforts destroy their real innocence—the simple belief children have that their bodies are lovely gifts. It takes very little—only a few disapproving looks, a few wagged fingers and hurriedly closed books—to convince a child that there is in fact something wrong with the ordinary human body. Someone asks me if I don’t think we’re living in a time of wildly promiscuous sexuality and I remember the recent local uproar over a middle-school art class looking at a slide of Michelangelo’s David. Childhood is a dream we are doomed to awaken from, and we awake into a world of loss, disappointment, and change—and acceptance of loss, of disappointment, and change, joy in change, joy in being awake. Infantile sexuality is a waking dream that exists only as long as the fullness of life is held at bay. The fantasy of oneness dissolves into a world of compartments, borders, rules; oneness is reworked into metaphor and symbol. First children, very young children, wake into their separateness from other people and the nourishing warmth of other bodies. Then they find their own bodies and wake into the consciousness of private pleasure. (Adults believe children are sexless and at the same time vigilantly patrol for signs of masturbation.) There is a wonderful and awful moment for each of us when we practice masturbation as a conscious act—when we know what to do and why we want to do it, and make plans. Though I’d been chastised for my unconscious masturbation when quite young, it was not a sin until I planned and carried it out consciously. And ever afterward, masturbation has been accompanied by a strange, potent mix of emotions: desire, guilt, excitement, shame, fantasy, and, especially, the fear of getting caught. The fear of letting anyone else know I know.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted? Can it be that words comprise one of the few economies left on earth in which plenitude—surfeit, even—comes at no cost? Recently I received in the mail a literary magazine that featured an interview with Anne Carson in which she answers certain questions—the boring ones? the too personal ones?—with empty brackets [[ ]]. There is something to learn here; I probably would have written a dissertation on each query, prompting the reply I’ve heard countless times in my life: “Really, it’s terrific—it’s just the people upstairs who say we’ve got to trim it back a little.” The sight of Carson’s brackets made me feel instantly ashamed of my compulsion to put my cards more decidedly on the table. But the more I thought about the brackets, the more they bugged me. They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable. Many years ago, Carson gave a lecture at Teachers & Writers in New York City, at which she introduced (to me) the concept of leaving a space empty so that God could rush in. I knew a bit about this concept from my boyfriend at the time, who was big into bonsai. In bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine. But that night Carson made the concept literary. (Act so that there is no use in a center: a piece of Steinian wisdom Carson says she tries to impart to her students.) I had never heard of Carson before that night, but the room was packed and everyone else there clearly had. She gave a real lecture, with a Xeroxed slide list of Edward Hopper paintings and everything. She made being a professorial writer seem like the coolest thing you could ever be. I went home fastened to the concept of leaving the center empty for God. It was like stumbling into a tarot reading or AA meeting and hearing the one thing that will keep you going, in heart or art, for years. Sitting now at my desk in my windowless office, its back wall painted pale blue in commemoration of the sky, I stare at the brackets in the Carson interview and try to enjoy them as markers of that evening from so long ago. But some revelations do not stand. A student came to my office the other day and showed me an op-ed piece his mother had published in the LA Times, in which she describes her turbulent feelings about his transgender identity. “I want to love the man my daughter has become,” the mother announces at the outset, “but floundering in the torrent of her change and my resistance to it, I fear I’ll never make it across my river of anger and sorrow.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “And in any case,” he was saying, taking off his glasses and leaning seriously across the desk, “all these symptoms that you’re producing are just a smoke screen. They’re distractions from the real issue: the problems that drove you into the convent in the first place. You’re taking refuge in the dramatic and the exotic because they make you feel important, whereas, in truth, there is nothing very special about your difficulties. They all spring from identity issues, gender problems, and parental conflicts that are very common indeed. Shared by half the population, in fact. But you can’t bear to be so banal. No, you have to turn it all into some kind of Gothic trauma: convents, visions, voices, satanic terror—and now sleepwalking! Anything rather than be ordinary. Because as long as you keep producing these ‘interesting’ psychic states, you are postponing the moment when you have to accept the unwelcome fact that when push comes to shove, you’re not that interesting! You’re just another brainy girl who is having problems accepting her femininity. There is nothing very unusual about that, I’m afraid.” He glanced at the clock. “You see—we’ve wasted nearly the whole of this hour discussing these moments of forgetfulness, which, as usual, you’ve beefed up into something extraordinary, and this has meant that we haven’t been able to talk about what is really going on. It’s a delaying tactic, Karen, an evasion.” I stared back at him. What could I say? Perhaps he was right. There probably was a sense in which I didn’t want to be ordinary. And it was certainly true that I was sick to death of grinding on and on about my early childhood. Perhaps I was warding off yet another discussion of my adolescence, which—Dr. Piet was quite right here—was entirely without interest. He always seemed to be trying to force me to accept his version of events that he had not personally witnessed and his assessment of people whom he had never met. And yes, I could accept that I probably did have gender problems. I could see that my eating disorder had neutralized my body, making it neither male nor female. There probably was a whole lot of unfinished business left over from the convent; I wouldn’t have minded discussing this, but we were never supposed to talk about my years as a nun. That, apparently, was yet another exotic distraction that had nothing to do with the “real” issues.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  It is perhaps not surprising to hear that straight parents of queer boys feel uncomfortable and ill-equipped to broach the topic of sex with their sons; parents of straight boys are flustered by such conversations, and at least in that case they understand the mechanics. Talking about sex with a gay child means directly acknowledging that physical intimacy isn’t solely about reproduction, yet, in truth, that is exactly what teenagers of all sexualities need: ongoing discussion and education that addresses pleasure, mutuality, safety, love, intimacy, and self-discovery. They need to understand the potential to be either the perpetrator or the victim of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. They need to have agency over their bodies. And for all of them, adult denial puts them at risk of physical and emotional trauma. Zane did find what he considers his first real boyfriend, a student at a nearby college, through Tinder, though the relationship took an ugly turn after only a couple of months: the other guy was secretly filming Zane, using their relationship as material for a documentary he was making about his exploits on swipe apps. Other experiences were even more disheartening. There was that “Republican gentleman,” who lived in a swank apartment, had a boyfriend, and treated Zane like “a common street whore,” expecting him to perform oral sex without reciprocation (this was another area where straight girls, who tend to presume sexual inequity, might take note; the gay boys I met found encounters that consistently went one way to be degrading and wouldn’t put up with them for long). Or the guy who showed up at Zane’s apartment, sweaty after a run, declaring that he had exactly eight minutes before he needed to leave to meet some friends.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  The following day, a second senior started talking about “getting back at” a “bitch” who’d dumped him. Cole’s friend spoke up again, but this time Cole stayed silent. “And as this continued to happen,” Cole said, “as I continued to step back and the other sophomore continued to step up, you could tell that the guys on the team stopped liking him as much. And they stopped listening to him, too. It’s almost as if he spent all his social currency trying to get them to stop making sexist comments. And meanwhile, I was sitting there”—Cole thumped his chest—“too afraid to spend any of mine, and I just had buckets left. “I don’t know what to do,” he continued earnestly. “Once I’m in the military, and I’m a part of that culture, I don’t want to have to choose between my own dignity and my relationship with others that I’m serving with. But”—he looked me straight in the eye—“how do I make it so I don’t have to choose?” You’re a Bitch If You Talk About Feelings Lightning Round: Boys, describe the ideal guy! “Reserved. You can’t flaunt your emotions. You have to be strong. Emotionally and physically. If I have issues, if I have something wrong, that’s my problem. I have to deal with it.” —Tristan, eighteen, Los Angeles “You’ve got to look ripped, be tall, have fair skin, talk to a lot of girls. Your basic stuff, pretty much. I don’t fit into it at all, because for one, I’m Latino. And I’m short. And I’m not ripped.” —Marcos, sixteen, Hoboken “Definitely a business major. Involved in Greek life. Graduating and getting a job at Morgan Stanley. Making, like, $250,000 a year. Working eighty hours. I mean, that’s probably the goal.” —Chris, twenty, Raleigh “You have to be smart but also ‘hood,’ or whatever you want to call it. Combine them just right and you’re the perfect black guy.” —Taye, seventeen, Washington, DC “The biggest single determining factor is assertiveness. If I am dominating other people, I am being masculine.” —Ryan, eighteen, San Francisco “Competitive. Definitely competitive.” —Jason, twenty-one, Seattle “Chill. You gotta be chill. Not take things too seriously.” —Zach, twenty, Portland “You can handle yourself, you don’t take disrespect.” —Jaylen, eighteen, Baltimore “If you want to get girls, you’ve got to be mean. You’ve gotta be an asshole.” —James, sixteen, San Jose “Stamina. You want to be able to say, ‘Dude, I fucked her for hours.’” —Michael, eighteen, San Francisco “Sports is a big deal. If you’re good at sports, you’re okay as a guy. And hooking up with a lot of girls, definitely. Commitment is a sign of weakness.” —Oscar, seventeen, Boston “Athletic. You’re at every party, but not partying too much. You’re hooking up with multiple girls, but not every girl. You’re smooth. You’re social. You’ve got game.” —Connor, twenty-one, Philadelphia “Athletic.” “Athletic.” “Athletic. Definitely, athletic.”

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  What then do I confess unto Thee in this kind of temptation, O Lord? What, but that I am delighted with praise, but with truth itself, more than with praise? For were it proposed to me, whether I would, being frenzied in error on all things, be praised by all men, or being consistent and most settled in the truth be blamed by all, I see which I should choose. Yet fain would I that the approbation of another should not even increase my joy for any good in me. Yet I own, it doth increase it, and not so only, but dispraise doth diminish it. And when I am troubled at this my misery, an excuse occurs to me, which of what value it is, Thou God knowest, for it leaves me uncertain. For since Thou hast commanded us not continency alone, that is, from what things to refrain our love, but righteousness also, that is, whereon to bestow it, and hast willed us to love not Thee only, but our neighbour also; often, when pleased with intelligent praise, I seem to myself to be pleased with the proficiency or towardliness of my neighbour, or to be grieved for evil in him, when I hear him dispraise either what he understands not, or is good. For sometimes I am grieved at my own praise, either when those things be praised in me, in which I mislike myself, or even lesser and slight goods are more esteemed than they ought. But again how know I whether I am therefore thus affected, because I would not have him who praiseth me differ from me about myself; not as being influenced by concern for him, but because those same good things which please me in myself, please me more when they please another also? For some how I am not praised when my judgment of myself is not praised; forasmuch as either those things are praised, which displease me; or those more, which please me less. Am I then doubtful of myself in this matter?