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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "The guard appeared at the door, and not only ordered, but ignominously turned me out of that carriage, just as if I had been a second Col. Baker. "I was so ashamed of myself, so mortified, that my stomach—which had always been delicate—was actually quite upset by the shock I had received, therefore no sooner had the train started than I began to be, first uncomfortable, then to feel a rumbling pain, and at last a pressing want, so much so that I could hardly sit down on my seat, squeeze as much as I could, and I dared not move for fear of the consequences. "After some time the train stopped for a few minutes, no guard came to open the carriage door, I managed to get up, no guard was to be seen, no place where I could ease myself. I was debating what to do when the train started off. "The only occupant of the carriage was an old gentleman, who—having told me to make myself comfortable, or rather to put myself at my ease—went off to sleep and snored like a top; I might as well have been alone. "I formed several plans for unburdening my stomach, which was growing more unruly every moment, but only one or two seemed to answer; and yet I could not put them into execution, for my lady-love only a few carriages off was every now and then looking out of the window, so it would never have done if, instead of my face, she all at once saw—my full moon. I could not for the same reason use my hat as what the Italians call—a comodina, especially as the wind was blowing strongly towards her. "The train stopped again, but only for three minutes. What could one do in three minutes, especially with a stomach-ache like mine? Another stoppage; two minutes. By dint of squeezing I now felt that I could wait a little longer. The train moved and then once more came to a standstill. Six minutes. Now was my chance, or never. I jumped out. "It was a kind of country station, apparently a junction, and everybody was getting out. "The guard bawled out: 'Les voyageurs pour——en voiture.' "Where is the lavatory?' I enquired of him. "He wished to shove me into the train. I broke loose, and asked the same question of another official, "'There,' said he, pointing to the water-closet, 'but be quick.' "I ran towards it, I rushed into it without looking where I went. I violently pushed open the door. "I heard first a groan of ease and of comfort, followed by a splash and a waterfall, then a screech, and I saw my English damsel, not sitting, but perched upon the closet seat. "The engine whistled, the bell rang, the guard blew his horn, the train was moving.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  In the dark, I pretend it is Jie’s voice saying my husband’s name. It’s her salt in the sweat we make. I am the mattress, the moon, below and above myself. It’s only at the moment of pain that my sister and I individuate. That I’m brought back to my body, reminded it is mine. _ During the week, Ma sews wholesale skirts in the downtown garment district, which I once imagined was an actual city made of garments. Giant scarves for crosswalks, sweaters on all the trees. But no trees here. In Arkansas, I saw rows of cows rigged to machines, their milk pumped like gasoline. We miss the fields fizzing with our piss, the taro we raised behind the church, the rain fucking our mouths full of a sky’s salt. Ma says the factories are worse than farms, where at least a cow could shit whenever it wanted. No bathroom breaks for the ladies. One time Ma pissed herself and got yelled at, so she started bringing jars to keep under the table. It’s hard to aim and run the needle at the same time, but Ma’s always been coordinated. She can drum my sister and me at the same time, each hand keeping a different beat. Ma says we have to learn quick in this city. Jie got robbed at gunpoint her first week here, working the cashier at the electronics store. It was a Chinese boy with half a beard, the left side. The boy spoke a dialect we’d heard only in movies. We wondered what part he was playing. Jie thought about playing dead, splaying on the vinyl floor until he left. Kept wondering why the boy only had the left side of his beard. When the bullet spent itself into the wall behind her, it burrowed there like some nest bird. Ma says, God took a big breath and blew the bullet around your head. Jie says the boy was so stupid, he wouldn’t have been able to shoot the sky. Still, I saw Jie pray that night. She got off the bed and onto her knees, her hair curtaining the bright theater of her teeth. I asked if she was crying. She wiped her nose on my arm and punched me off the bed. On weekends, Ma cleans houses. You’ve never even cleaned your own room. You blame your brother for the stains on the mattress, but I see you pissing in your sleep too, both of you born with so many leaks, a lineage of them. I was washing Ma’s pants in the sink and found notes in the pockets, notes she must have stolen from the houses. Some were written on receipts, on napkins, on pink perfumed cards, on orange peels. I wondered why she took what was worth nothing to us, notes we couldn’t read, addressed to anyone but us. If I asked, I knew she’d strike me into silence. Say I shouldn’t go through other people’s pockets.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  This is what Jie taught me, but please don’t ever learn it: It’s a trick where you hug the hose nozzle in your throat and shotgun the water straight into your belly without swallowing. She said that’s how the people here drink, without needing a mouth, without a way to stop. _ Deeper into my life, I meet a man who says he drove from Texas to LA by himself, back when he’d been in the country for a year and stole a car from outside a Cracker Barrel. He later drove back for his mother, but he couldn’t remember the route he first took, the one where he passed a casino with two stone dragons by the door. He’d won two hands of blackjack and spent it on his first room in the city: a floor above the butcher’s, a building between a church and the restaurant where Ba fried every genre of meat. When the man says he undressed me in the parking lot of a motel, I try to recall myself, the girl I prayed inside, the boy I mistook for an engine. I have no alibi for that night, no other body I could have been in. You know the man. I’m sorry for not saying he’s your father: I wanted you to meet him as I did. I knew his touch before his name. He marries me, but it’s Jie who’s been in my bed the longest: When we shared the mattress, I heard her saddle her wrists every night. Her breath belonging to the back of my neck. She moaned a moat around us both. On our honeymoon in the suburb south of our city, I see my husband’s face in the dark and remember. Jie and I once learned to sound the same. In Arkansas, we used to test Ma by walking to her bedside in the dark, asking, Who am I? Ma always guessed wrong, always named the absent one. We laughed and said she’d never learn to floss apart our voices, tell her daughters apart. One night, when I/Jie went to her bedside and asked who I/she was, Ma took out her fist from under the pillow and punched me/her in the throat, that tender cage where our thirsts perch. She said, You sound different in pain. It’s true: Jie wails like some wounded animal. I go silent, as if the wound is an ear that will eavesdrop on me. In the dark, I pretend it is Jie’s voice saying my husband’s name. It’s her salt in the sweat we make. I am the mattress, the moon, below and above myself.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Suguey. I felt so insecure. I grew up with a Mexican mother who constantly judged me, fat-shamed me, and told me that I would be much more beautiful if I just lost some weight. I constantly struggled with my weight and how I looked in the mirror. I knew that I used food and specifically sugar as a way to cope with my emotional issues, to cope with stress from work. I became codependent on that nurturing feeling. Often I would look into the mirror and experience dysphoria between two people: one who loved my curves, my thighs, and booty, and the other, who was constantly on a mission to lose my belly fat or arm jiggle. It was very hard for me to imagine myself dancing on a pole next to all those women who were very thin and so damn strong! I was like, you want me to do what with what now? Trippin’ … little did I know that I was going to embark on a journey that would teach me how to love and trust myself. amb. What has changed? Suguey. I AM A MOTHERFUCKING QUEEN! And I remembered that that’s always been who I am! Okay, sorry … in all seriousness, I am so completely grateful for this art form. I found so much within myself. A renewed sense of self. A deep appreciation for my body because thick thighs save lives! Am I right? Literally in pole, thick thighs are a plus. I also realized that I was going to need to love my body so hard, harder than I could imagine, so that I could trust it enough to hold myself up in the air. I mean holding your entire body weight while you’re upside down is not an easy feat physically, and it’s an even harder feat mentally, so I had to find this deep synchronicity between my mind, heart, and body for them to all say in unison, “Suguey, we can do this shit.” Also, it would be remiss of me to not mention that I found a sexy beast deep within me! I was able to become acquainted with my most sensual self who loves to booty-shake and dance it out. This was something that I had been in touch with before but hadn’t tapped it in a way that pole helped me to. Constantly I was battling that societal teaching that I was a ho or promiscuous or all the bullshit that womyn are taught to believe when they tap into their sexual beings. I even found myself being, like, I will purposefully post this video of me being my most sensual self so that my tias and cousins and friends will see how many fucks I give.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  CHAPTER 7 Grandma wound up leaving Mother a big pile of money, which didn’t do us a lick of good, though Lord knows we needed it. Daddy’s strike had dragged on till mid-March, pulling us way down in our bill-paying. He managed to keep up with the mortgage and utilities okay, but the grocery and drug bills and other sundries got out from under him. When he picked up his check at the paymaster’s window on Fridays, he cashed it right there. Then he’d drive to Leechfield Pharmacy and go straight up to the pill counter in back to tell Mr. Juarez—kids called him Bugsy, after the cartoon bunny—that he’d come to pay at his bill. I can still see Daddy winking while he said it, at. He’d squint down at his billfold and lick his thumb and make a show of picking out a single crisp five-dollar bill and squaring it up on the counter between them. But that little “at” held back a whole tide of shame. It implied the bill weighed more than Daddy, superseded him in a way. In Jasper County, where he’d been raised, buying on credit was a sure sign of a man overreaching what he was. Even car loans were unheard-of, and folks were known to set down whole laundry sacks stuffed with one-dollar bills when it came time to pick up a new Jeep or tractor. Bugsy knew these things. They mattered to him. He was a kind guy, prone to giving me comic books for free because it tickled him that I read so well. He always acted like he hated to take Daddy’s money when it slid his way. “Heck, Pete. Put that back. We weren’t a-waiting on this,” he’d say, and Daddy would slide the bill closer and tell him to go on and take it. Then Bugsy would shrug out an okay. He’d ring some zeros up on the cash register and slip the bill into the right stack. He kept his accounts in a green book under the counter. He’d haul that out, find Daddy’s name with his thick nicotine-stained finger, and note down the payment. Before we left, Bugsy usually led me to the back office, where he’d draw out his pocket knife to cut the binding cord on the new stack of funny books invariably standing in the corner. I’d sit on his desk and read out loud an entire issue of Superman or Archie , which skill caused him to smile into his coffee mug. Daddy would shake his head at this and say that I didn’t need egging on because I had already gotten too big for my britches as it was. That was the dance we went through with Bugsy on payday. The movements of it were both so exact and so fiercely casual that I never for a minute doubted that this whole money thing was, in fact, not casual at all, but serious as a stone.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The zhongyi says loose anal sphincter says it’s age but I suspect it’s because your father liked to do dirty things to me. He must have knocked loose a beam in my bowels I let him put it in wherever I couldn’t grow another daughter the zhongyi says I’m beginning to lose motor skills I say I never knew how to drive anyway. He laughs says the body is the motor in this situation says I am the driver in this situation I remember how you learned to drive from that ghostboy whose balls you licked you think I didn’t know heard you joking to your sister about planting his balls in the yard to grow us a son but could you find someone to teach me how to drive? I may shit the seat but I won’t hit anything living Remember the time you threw a knife to me no at me it perched on your sister let that be a lesson about intention.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Had any one, but a few instants before, told me that I should have ever known any man but Charles, I would have spit in his face or had I been offered infinitely a greater sum of money than that I saw paid for me, I had spurned the proposal in cold blood. But our virtues and our vices depend too much on our circumstances; unexpectedly beset as I was, betrayed by a mind weakened by a long severe affliction, and stunned with the terrors of a goal, my defeat will appear the more excusable, since I certainly was not present at, or a party in any sense to it. However, as the first enjoyment is decisive, and he was now over the bar, I thought I had no longer a right to refuse the caresses of one that had got that advantage over me, no matter how obtained; conforming myself then to this maxim, I considered myself as so much in his power, that I endured his kisses and embraces without affecting struggles or anger; not that he, as yet, gave me any pleasure, or prevailed over the aversion of my soul, to give myself up to any sensation of that sort; what I suffered, I suffered out of a kind of gratitude, and as a matter of course what had passed. He was, however, so regardful as not to attempt the renewal of those extremities which had thrown me, just before, into such violent agitations; but, now secure of possession, contented himself with bringing me to temper by degrees, and waiting at the hand of time for those fruits of generosity and courtship, which he since often reproached himself with having gathered much too green, when, yielding to the inability to resist him, and overborne by desires, he had wreaked his passion on a mere lifeless, spiritless body, dead to all purpose of joy, since taking none, it ought to be supposed incapable of giving any. This is, however, certain; my heart never thoroughly forgave him the manner in which I had fallen to him, although, in point of interest, I had fallen to him, I had reason to be pleased that he found, in my person, wherewithal to keep him from leaving me as easily as he had had me. The evening was, in the mean time, so far advanced, that the maid came in to lay the cloth for supper, when I understood, with joy, that my landlady, whose sight was present poison to me, was not to be with us. Presently a neat and elegant supper was introduced, and a bottle of Burgundy, with the other necessaries, were set on a dumb-waiter.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I ran my fingers through my flat, shorn locks; the action - and the cigarette that I had just smoked - made me feel wonderfully calm.I said: ‘You can’t tell, can you, that it’s a false one?’Now Alice sat up with the blankets gripped before her. ‘You needn’t look so horrified,’ I said. ‘I told you all, I wrote and told you: I’ve joined the act; I’m not Kitty’s dresser any more. I’m on the stage myself, now, doing what she does. Singing, dancing...’She said, ‘You never wrote it like it was really true. If it was true we would have heard! I don’t believe you.’‘I don’t care whether you believe me or not.’She shook her head. ‘Singing,’ she said. ‘Dancing. That’s a tart’s life. You couldn’t. You wouldn’t...’I said, ‘I do’; and just to show her that I meant it, I lifted my nightie and did a little shuffle across the rug.The dance seemed, like the hair, to frighten her. When she spoke next it was with a show of bitterness - but her voice was thick with rising tears. ‘I suppose you lift your skirts like that, do you? and show your legs, on stage, for all the world to look at!’‘My skirts?’ I laughed. ‘Good heavens, Alice, I don’t wear skirts! I didn’t get my hair cut off to wear a frock. It’s trousers I wear: I wear gentlemen’s suits -!’‘Oh!’ Now she had begun to cry. ‘What a thing to do! What a thing to do, in front of strangers!’I said. ‘You thought it good enough when Kitty did it.’‘Nothing she did was ever good! She took you off, and has made you strange. I don’t know you at all. I wish you’d never gone with her - or never come back!’She lay down, pulled the blankets to her chin, and wept; and since I don’t know a girl who is not moved to tears by the sight of her own sister weeping, I climbed in beside her, and my own eyes began to sting.But when she felt me close she gave a jerk. ‘Get off me!’ she cried, and wriggled away. She said it with such real passion, such horror and grief, I could do nothing but what she asked, and let her lie at the cold edge of the bed. Soon she ceased her shaking, and fell silent; and my own eyes dried, and my face grew hard again. I reached for the lamp, and put it out; then lay on my back and said nothing.The bed, that had been chill, grew warmer. I began at last to wish that Alice would turn, and talk to me. Then I began to wish that Alice was Kitty. Then I began - I couldn’t help it! - to think of all that I would do with her, if she was. The sudden force of my desire unnerved me.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Sonya. I think everyone is exposed to it in different ways. The Taylor women have big boobs, big butts, all that. It was celebrated and regulated. You can be that, but be on a diet so you don’t get too thick. I didn’t develop early, but when I developed, I developed. D cups all of the sudden. I learned then about the body as currency; there is an attention that gets paid to me. While also getting the message that I was inherently flawed as a Black girl, a bald girl—I got traction alopecia in the third grade, bald spots. I got teased mercilessly. I posted the selfie, and that same year I felt like, I am a liar. I tell people to love themselves and then slap on this wig that I don’t dare to be seen without. amb. And how did you learn it was not an apology? Somehow you knew it was true before you could embody it … how? Sonya. My mother, who passed four years ago, was an excellent embodiment of contradiction. She always affirmed this notion that we were phenomenal and beautiful. There were ways she would be in her body that let us know it was okay to be in your body. I have a poem about my mom unbuttoning her pants, and she’d had two C-sections by the time she was seventeen. She had a jiggly, scarred belly, and it taught me it was okay. There was a seed there, and even though other things were sprinkled on top of it, that seed was going to break through eventually. amb. What do you want the legacy of your work to be? Sonya. I want people to see that what we create in the world is a reflection of what is inside of us. We cannot make that in the world that we have not made inside of us. Radical self-love is how we get to a just, equitable, and compassionate world. 102 “Mission, Vision, and History,” The Body Is Not an Apology: Radical Self-Love for Everybody and Every Body, 2018, https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/about-tbinaa/history-mission-and-vision.103 The choir sang out here!On the Pleasures of WardrobeA Conversation with Maori Karmael Holmes Maori Karmael Holmes is a curator, filmmaker, designer, and cultural worker. She is the founder and artistic director of BlackStar Film Festival. In addition to BlackStar, her curatorial projects include Flaherty NYC (2017), KinoWatt (2011–2012), Black Lily Film and Music Festival (2007–2010), among others. As a filmmaker, her work has screened internationally and been broadcast throughout the United States. As a designer, she has collaborated with film and theater directors, including James Avery and Carol Mitchell-Leon. Her previous professional positions include the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Leeway Foundation, and Washington City Paper. Maori studied costume design at the graduate level at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and earned an MFA in film from Temple University. amb. Maori, tell me about your relationship to clothing.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Sami. I first got invested in disability studies and disability rights in college. I was a women’s studies major, and I took an elective course called Women and Disability. At the time I was nineteen and embracing my Black queer womanhood, so I thought I knew all there was to know about oppression. Then that class made me really think about disability as a vector of oppression and a marginalized identity. For the first time in my life, I really had to examine privilege I never knew I had. I remember distinctly thinking, “is this what white people feel like when they find out about white privilege?” I was horrified at how little I knew and how much I benefited from non-disabled privilege. I decided then that if I was going to continue to ask other people to be allies to me and my communities, then I needed to be a non-disabled ally. The more I learned about how ableism often intersects with and undergirds manifestations of other oppressions (like calling women hysterical to discount their competency for voting rights), the more I realized that understanding disability and ability as a major ideology and social system was key to understanding how power functions in the western social and political world. amb. What is most commonly misunderstood about disability? Set us straight. Sami. People think disability means inherent deficit rather than difference, that disability is automatically bad, painful, a worse life. People assume disabled people don’t have lives, especially not sex lives. Part of this stems from disabled people being segregated and isolated for so much of our history—institutions and segregated educational spaces for disabled people existed (and in some ways continue to exist) well into the 1970s. Only now are we beginning to see disabled people who grew up with the American Disabilities Association (ADA) in place, who have had significantly more opportunities and political/social support. People with disabilities are different—from non-disabled people and from each other—and those differences shape how they live in the world, but this different way of living, even as it may negate doing some things, opens up new ways of being and existing that are valuable and important as well. amb. Thank you. And where does BDSM enter your analysis, life, play, work?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Silence played some role in helping us survive to get to this moment.66 But silence will not get us to a place of power over our bodies. And it will not get us the pleasure we want. We need to learn to say some very basic things: No. It has been said before but it’s always relevant: no is a complete sentence. It can be an incredibly uncomfortable complete sentence but be all that needs to be said. We must remember that our socialized aversion to no, particularly in capitalist countries, is strategic for those who aim to hold power over us. If we are made to feel uncomfortable saying no, then we will say yes to anyone and anything that tries to sell us shit. We must remember that we are learning to say no as we recover from patriarchy, capitalism, racism. Practice it: No. Not Now. This is not the right time. It’s too soon or too late. We’re fighting, and this will confuse things. We’re breaking up, and this will regenerate connection in an unhealthy way. I’m not feeling sexual right now. I really have a headache or backache. Or I’m cramping. Or I just had chemo. Or I just helped a friend through grief. I just want to be held. Maybe I’ll want sex in the future, but not right now. I’m not sure why, but not now. Practice it: Not now. I Want [Insert Desire]. I want it slower. Faster. Softer. Harder. Right there. I want more fingers. I want one finger. I want your tongue on me. I want to role play. I want to be tied to the bed. I want a blindfold. I know what I want, my body is responding to you. Yes that. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Practice it: I want. Part of liberating our desires from the rape culture and patriarchy we’re swimming in is reclaiming our right to communicate. We must learn to say, sign, or type the truth in real time about what our bodies actually want and need and what we don’t want. We must become verbose lovers, especially in the realm of consent, feedback, and direction. We must recognize that we were taught silence with threats of physical and emotional violence (beatings, rape, withdrawal, abandonment, gaslighting, etc.), and we will no longer tolerate violence in the decision-making processes of our sensual lives. Hot and Heavy Homework However you communicate, practice saying “no,” “not now,” and “I want.” Practice with friends who are committed to liberating desire. Practice with your lover/s, so you know for sure that you can both/all survive anything that gets said in truth. Practice in the mirror, learn what faces accompany your honesty, learn to respect your true face. Practice, practice, practice liberating the language of your desire.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Half a dozen hands waved and pointed to where the man leaned over the footlights, his whiskers fluttering in the heat.He, now, had started banging on the stage with the heel of his hand. I suppressed an urge to dance up to him and stamp upon his wrist (for, apart from anything else, I thought he was quite capable of seizing my ankle and dragging me into the stalls.) Instead, I took my cue from Kitty. She had hold of my arm, and had pressed it, but her brow was smooth and untroubled. At any moment, I thought, she would slow the song, launch into the man, or call for the door-men to come and remove him.But they, at last, had spotted him, and had begun their advance. He, all unknowing, ranted drunkenly on.‘Call that a song?’ he shouted. ‘Call that a song? I want my shilling back! You hear me? I want my bleeding shilling back!’‘You want your bleeding arse kicked, is what you want!’ answered someone from the pit. Then someone else, a woman, yelled, ‘Stop your row, can’t you? We can’t hear the girls for all your racket.’The man gave a sneer; then he hawked, and spat. ‘Girls?’ he cried. ‘Girls? You call them girls? Why, they’re nothing but a couple of - a couple of toms!’He put the whole force of his voice into it - the word that Kitty had once whispered to me, flinching and shuddering as she said it! It sounded louder at that moment than the blast of a cornet - seemed to bounce from one wall of the hall to another, like a bullet from a sharp-shooter’s act gone wrong.Toms!At the sound of it, the audience gave a great collective flinch. There was a sudden hush; the shouts became mumbles, the shrieks all tailed away. Through the shaft of limelight I saw their faces - a thousand faces, self-conscious and appalled.Even so, the awkwardness might have lasted no longer than a moment; they might have forgotten it at once, and grown noisy and gay again - but for what happened, simultaneous with their silencing, upon the stage.For Kitty had stiffened; and then she had stumbled. We had been dancing with our arms linked. Now her mouth flew open. Now it shut. Now it trembled. Her voice - her lovely, shining, soaring voice - faltered and died. I had never known it happen before. I had seen her sail, quite at her ease, through seas of indifference, squalls of heckling. Now, upon that single, dreadful, drunken cry, she had foundered.I, of course, should have sung all the louder, swept her across the stage, jollied the audience along; but I, of course, was only her shadow. Her sudden silence stopped my throat, and stunned me into immobility, too.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Mai’a. The worst thing is the social shame and stigma around it. You feel like you can’t be honest about not wanting to have a deep emotional relationship with someone. A lot of times the sex is better, especially for women, when there isn’t this whole committed relationship wrapped around it. I feel like men are allowed to have one-night stands, but women aren’t because we’re supposed to take care of people all the time. So, of course, we want this continuous relationship where we are emotionally invested in the other person’s life. And honestly, for a lot of women that I know, casual sex is a place where we get to be served and cared for physically. Like with a one-night stand, I get to say what I want and how I want it. In some ways, I get to be more in control, and if the other person doesn’t want to do that then we can just end it—right there—and I can just walk away. There is no long discussion about the emotional fallout the next morning or all this pleading for me to perform more emotional labor. Holiday. The worst thing is, because there is an element of not knowing each other, it leaves one open to vulnerability and to being harmed, at worst. Or not being seen, validated—all the things good about casual sex, bad casual sex can do the opposite. Gary. The anonymity promotes a lack of accountability. Casual sex, in my experience, is most frequently with strangers. The hope or assumption is that with each encounter there is mutual respect and regard for the other person involved. Sadly, this isn’t always true. So, when someone is looking to “maximize” their pleasure, it may be to the detriment of their anonymous partner, such as secretly removing the condom during intercourse. Or, for example, I once had someone grab my face tightly with both hands and shout “good nigger” as he orgasmed. These violations would most likely not occur with a known partner but are always a possibility with a stranger. Samhita. When men are terrible. Just because it’s casual doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole about it! If I text you after we have sex or want to make plans for the next time, I’m not actually proposing marriage—don’t flatter yourself, honey. Also, sometimes I have casual sex for the wrong reasons—because I am craving closeness and I really need someone to talk to. I will have sex and realize it wasn’t what I wanted or I wasn’t in the right headspace for it.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I was right. It wasn’t a commercial idea then, even though I’m talking about four years ago and not four hundred. People said they wanted to hear from women. What were they thinking? But men didn’t really want to know about some new, possibly threatening, potential in women. It would immediately pose a sexual realignment, some rethinking of the male (superior) position. And we women weren’t yet ready either to share this potential, our common but unspoken knowledge, with one another. What women needed and were waiting for was some kind of yardstick against which to measure ourselves, a sexual rule of thumb equivalent to that with which men have always provided one another. But women were the silent sex. In our desire to please our men, we had placed the sexual constraints and secrecy upon one another which men had thought necessary for their own happiness and freedom. We had imprisoned each other, betrayed our own sex and ourselves. Men had always banded together to give each other fraternal support and encouragement, opening up for themselves the greatest possible avenues for sexual adventure, variety and possibility. Not women. For men, talking about sex, writing and speculating about it, exchanging confidences and asking each other for advice and encouragement about it, had always been socially accepted, and, in fact, a certain amount of boasting about it in the locker room is usually thought to be very much the mark of a man’s man, a fine devil of a fellow. But the same culture that gave men this freedom sternly barred it to women, leaving us sexually mistrustful of each other, forcing us into patterns of deception, shame, and above all, silence. I, myself, would probably never have decided to write this book on women’s erotic fantasies if other women’s voices hadn’t broken that silence, giving me not just that sexual yardstick I was talking about, but also the knowledge that other women might want to hear my ideas as eagerly as I wanted to hear theirs. Suddenly, people were no longer simply saying they wanted to hear from women, now women were actually talking, not waiting to be asked, but sharing their experiences, their desires, thousands of women supporting each other by adding their voices, their names, their presence to the liberating forces that promised women a new shake, something “more.” Oddly enough, I think the naked power cry of Women’s Lib itself was not helpful to a lot of women, certainly not to me in the work that became this book. It put too many women off. The sheer stridency of it, instead of drawing us closer together, drove us into opposing camps; those who were defying men, denying them, drew themselves up in militant ranks against those who were suddenly more afraid than ever that in sounding aggressive they would be risking rejection by their men. If sex is reduced to a test of power, what woman wants to be left all alone, all powerful, playing with herself?

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Eventually, then, I developed a technique to enable all but the shyest women to verbalize their fantasies. For instance, if, as in many cases, the first reaction was, “Who, me? Never!” I’d show them one or two fantasies I’d already collected from more candid women. This would allay anxiety: “I thought my ideas were wild, but I’m not half as far out as that girl.” Or it would arouse a spirit of competition which is never entirely dormant among our sex: “If she thinks that fantasy she gave me to read is so sexy, wait till she reads mine.” In this way, without really working at it too hard, I had put together quite a sizeable, though amateur, collection. After all, everything to date was from women I knew, or from friends of friends who would sometimes phone or write to say they had heard of what I was doing and would like to help by being interviewed themselves. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that if my collection of fantasies was going to be more than just a cross section of my own narrow circle of friends, I would have to reach out further. And so I placed an ad in newspapers and magazines which reached several varied audiences. The ad merely said: FEMALE SEXUAL FANTASIES wanted by serious female researcher. Anonymity guaranteed. Box XYZ. As much as I’d been encouraged by my husband and also by the spirit of the times in which we live, I think it was the letters that came that marked the turning point in my own attitude toward this work. I am no marcher, nor Red-Crosser, but some of the cries for help and sighs of relief in those letters moved me. Again and again they would start, “Thank God, I can tell these thoughts to someone; up till now I’ve never confided mine to a living soul. I have always been ashamed of them, feeling that other people would think them unnatural and consider me a nymphomaniac or a pervert.” I think it fair to say that I began this book out of curiosity—about myself and the odd explosive excitement/anxiety syndrome the subject set up in others; the male smugness of my rejecting lover and that know-it-all editor kept me going; but it became a serious and meaningful effort when I realized what it could mean, not only to all the sometimes lonely, sometimes joyful, usually anonymous women who were writing to me, but to the thousands and thousands who, though they were too embarrassed, isolated, or ashamed to write, might perhaps have the solitary courage to read.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  But even when the force is intended, there is a clear distinction as to whether what is going on is indeed rape, or a pain-for-pain’s-sake number. I would hope that whoever is in charge of the Masochist Wing of our House of Fantasy—he of the mask and heavy hand—would be familiar with the subtleties of his specialty. He must have separate rooms: the first, for the rape fantasists; the second, for the masochists. Otherwise, the “Ouch!” cries from the latter would disturb or distract the rapees, who are more intent on being forced than on feeling pain. For them, any pain felt is merely the cost of fulfilling their desire, a means to their end. For the other women like Sylvia (below), the desire is for pain itself and the pain is everything. Carried to its extreme, as in Amanda’s fantasy, this desire for pain becomes genuinely disturbing and shows to what ends—imagined though they may be—a woman will go to feel something at last, to feel at least something. BarbaraWe have not yet come to the difficult question of people who want to turn their fantasies into real life actualities, but while we are in this room, I think we can appropriately say that Barbara’s fantasy of being spanked or caned is the type my contributors most often feel driven to experiment with. This may sound contradictory, since many of them go on to say that they in fact hate real pain. But as Barbara says, I think the explanation lies in the fact she feels she can make a bargain with the spanker about just how many strokes she will receive, and how hard—and that if the sexual experience should turn out to be more painful in fact than titillating in imagination, the proceedings can be called off at a word.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  From what I’ve told you of our relationship, I suppose you are wondering why I don’t tell him about my domination wish. After all, he will listen to anything I care to tell him about myself or my desires without being shocked (although he never offers up any thoughts of his own). Well, the reason is he spent a year in digs. His landlady was a nymphomaniac. She slept with any man she could lay her hands on, and she seduced him. He was young and inexperienced, and he admits she taught him everything he knows. She used to creep into his room at night, leaving her husband in bed, and make love to him. Her husband knew, but because he couldn’t satisfy her, he was resigned to letting her get satisfaction elsewhere. My boyfriend enjoyed the lovemaking but felt dirty and disgusted with himself afterwards. He has always said how he enjoys our “pure” lovemaking. He loves me and says it makes him feel happy afterward. I felt very inferior when he told me. He made her sound so much sexier. Of course, she had so much more experience than I did. However, whenever I suggest extending our lovemaking, in particular to fellatio, he says he doesn’t want me to do it because he’s sure I won’t like it. He admits he enjoyed it very much when she did it to him, however. He refuses to believe I really want to do it. I have done it with other men and enjoyed it, but he just won’t let me. At least, he will to the point of ejaculation, then he pulls me away. So you see, he has put me on a pedestal in a way. He sees me as pure, clean, and wholesome (even though he knows about the other men) and doesn’t want that image destroyed. My first sexual fantasy occurred soon after puberty. I was about eleven or twelve. At night I would lie in bed and imagine I was walking in the woods. A strange man followed me, and when I started to run away, he caught me and beat me. Every night I would go through varieties on this theme—the man would overpower me—take me away and force me to do things against my will. The sex part was rather hazy. I had no clear ideas on that at that age. By thinking about this before going to sleep, I could make myself dream about it, too. Later the fantasy changed to me being taken away to the East and sold as a slave. There were an infinite number of possibilities to the story, as I was bought and sold by a number of men in succession. Very occasionally I still fantasize about this. My fantasies obviously fall into the “being on exhibition” category in the humiliation sense rather than one of showing off.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  After that blackmail episode I used to lie awake at nights, alone in my bed at home, and imagine that my brothers were creeping through the house toward my room. Every sound in the quiet house was like their footsteps. Often I would imagine the two of them coming for me together. They would get into the bed on either side of me. I remember one night in particular, when I was just past fourteen, when I was lying there, thinking of my oldest brother’s prick—I had, of course, seen it—and imagining it going into me and growing in me. Suddenly I could not seem to control myself, and I was certain that the noise I was making—I was actually whimpering out loud—was bound to wake my parents up. But I put my hand over my mouth—imagining it was my youngest brother, while I masturbated with the other hand—imagining that was my older brother. I seemed to be flogging myself almost into a state of unconsciousness. The more I thought about how wrong the whole act was that I was imagining, the more exciting it became. Even to this day when I’m being fucked—and I’m fifty-one—I imagine one of my brothers standing over me—just as it really happened that time they forced me—while I pretend it is the other one fucking me. The one standing has his prick exposed, and I play with it (while the other is inside me) until he comes all over my face. Then they switch positions and we continue until we are all satisfied. Sometimes I include my brothers’ wives in my fantasies, making it a larger family scene, and I imagine the pleasure my husband could give those women while I’m having it off with their husbands, my darling brothers. But usually it’s just me and the boys. Are you shocked? You shouldn’t be; more of this sort of thing goes on in reality than you imagine. I know. And not just in poor families, as mine was. Brothers and sisters… well, it happens in the best of families. [Conversation] ROOM NUMBER ELEVEN: THE ZOONice friendly doggies are everywhere. Even if you don’t have one, the neighbors do. And Rover is a more perfect gentleman than most: he’ll never look surprised at something you may ask him to do, never make you feel ashamed, and will never, never talk. Is it surprising then that of all animals, dogs star most frequently in female sexual fantasies, and that with good old Rover around the house all the time, dog fantasies are the ones most often acted out in reality?

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I’ve never dared discuss my thoughts with anyone because of being considered indecent. Even now I feel rather shy in writing to you. My first fantasy, I remember, was on the occasion when, as is normal on most evenings, our love play started in front of the fire with me between my husband’s legs fellatiating him. But on this occasion the television was on with the sound turned down, and I suddenly imagined myself doing it to the man on the screen instead of my husband. The thrill I got was trying to imagine whether the man I was watching had a penis to compare with my husband’s. This certainly heightened my eagerness to please hubby, and although he had no idea what I was thinking, he certainly enjoyed my increased intensity because in no time at all he arrived at a delightful climax. The other occasion was inspired by the first: again, with the television on, I was on my knees watching a play when he mounted me from the rear, and while he was thrusting home I was imagining that it was not him but the handsome brute in the play. The effect on me was indescribable and I was putting up such a performance that my husband did, I am sure, suspect something, because he reached over and turned the set off, much to my annoyance. On other occasions, when he sometimes performs cunnilingus on me, I lie back and imagine him to be a young fresh teenage girl (I’ve longed for that to happen). But alas, I never get the chance to meet one, as I cannot get out on my own. He is far too possessive to allow me out. [Letter] GeldaUntil I knew Sam, my current lover, I’d never had a fantasy like this, that is, one that involved me with another woman. Lots of fantasies, but nothing like this. And I’ve never even thought of a woman that way in real life, just wouldn’t ever want a woman sexually. It’s just that ever since Sam told me about her, the girl he used to live with, I can’t help thinking about it, about them together. I know how she changed Sam’s life sexually, made him a better lover. I also know he’s through with her, that he loves me; I am as convinced of it as one could rationally be. But jealousy isn’t rational, is it? And I hate it, jealousy; I hate what it does to people, and I’m not going to let it ruin things for me and Sam. Sometimes I feel that if I ever met that girl I’d scratch her eyes out, at least I’d want to. But in my fantasies it’s all different. This is more or less how they go:

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother laughed and said listen, little anus, the story’s still singeing: The neighbor’s tree, the one that had once carried the monkey, burned down in a night. No one had seen anything or smelled any smoke, but one morning the tree had no torso. There wasn’t even a stump, just a socket in the ground that bled for a month. The same woman who did that, my mother said, threw us into the river. I said, Maybe she thought you were a fire. But I thought of what Ama had said: Maybe it was true that a mean thing could not be made good again. Maybe my tail had been corrupted into something that couldn’t be saved. I’d whipped it against Agong. Ama had walked me with it like a leash. I no longer knew how to hold it, and at night when it tried to cuddle against my leg, I swatted it away, orphaning it to the other side of the bed. After grinding the powder, my mother squatted next to the sofa. She propped up Agong’s head with a pillow and tried opening and closing his mouth with her hands. He won’t swallow, she said. She said she’d tried everything: pinching his nose shut, sugaring the spoon, tickling his throat. Agong, I said. If you don’t swallow, your stomach will get so light it’ll float out of your body. You need to anchor it with something solid. He was listening. He swallowed. I remembered the story of gegu: to cure your father by cutting your own flesh and feeding it to him. I glanced at my mother’s thighs, but they were the same size I remembered. That night I stayed awake to the soundtrack of my father’s voice saying thigh, saying knife, saying father. When I was tired of counting the leaks in our ceiling, I slipped off of the mattress and walked to the pantry, where my mother kept her toes in the cookie tin. The lid popped from its socket soundlessly and I looked inside, knowing already what had been taken. The tin was empty, rinsed clean, my mouth mirrored back at me. I thought of my mother in the kitchen, grinding out powder for hours. The pestle multiplying her toe-bones. To give something a new shape, she’d said. You have to break it. In the morning, Agong seemed familiar with himself, passing the mirror without spitting at his own face inside it. My mother gave him her hand mirror, introducing himself to himself, and Agong nodded. My mother pointed to herself: your daughter. Then at me: your daughter’s daughter. Agong agreed. He ate a frozen waffle with his fingers, the edges laced with ice. He asked if it was snowing outside and we explained it was ash from the wildfires up north.