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 Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Didn’t it, Alice?” Alice looked from the fish to me and then to Limori. “Yes, she’s very angry.” I must have looked like a deer caught in the headlights. I had witnessed others in the group getting blamed for physical events that mysteriously occurred, but this was the first time I had been held responsible for such an occurrence. Limori held my gaze. “You are so angry at being told The Truth about your behaviour that you’ve caused that plate to crack and ruined our dinner.” She huffed out a loud, exasperated sigh, “Alice, turn the oven off. You’ll have to pull that fish and all that glass out of there. We can’t eat the fish, obviously, so you’ll have to think of something else for dinner. You,” she turned to me again, “you need to get over your anger at me and decide what you want.” I hovered uncomfortably in the kitchen while Alice cleaned up the mess in the oven, and then we prepared something else for dinner. I passed the meal in misery, speaking only when spoken to. After dinner I helped Alice clean up and could hear Limori’s and Lisa’s voices in the living room. I was certain they were discussing me and, sure enough, when cleanup was over, I was called to join them. I sat where Limori indicated and she began by saying that I was not committed to God and that I had not been happy since I moved in with her. “Azeen says that I cannot have your energy interfering any longer with the work I am trying to do. You were given an incredible opportunity to change and to increase your level of commitment to God but you have refused to do that.” She repeated her assertion that I had been complaining about her behind her back and refused to believe me when I assured her that I had not. My loyalty to her was stronger than she imagined; I was so devoted to her and her cause that I would not have done or said anything that would have harmed her in any way. She, and all that she represented, was all that I wanted. I wanted to feel comfortable with her and I wanted to be fully committed to her. I was very unhappy with what she was accusing me of, partly because some of it was true and I didn’t want it to be. I had hoped that by living here in her home my level of fear and discomfort would wane and disappear, but that had not happened. She did all the talking; I said almost nothing except to make a few feeble attempts to defend myself. Limori asked Lisa and Alice for confirmation about most of what she said; they tuned in and told her they were getting the same information from Spirit. “You are very angry,” Limori said in conclusion.

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

  By letting go of judgments I hold against myself and my desires, I let go of judgments about the desires and acts of others. I come to see sexual desire as a bell curve onto which each of us falls, with little choice about where we land. The magazine Frighten the Horses, which calls itself a “document of the sexual revolution,” received a letter complaining about images of sadomasochism. She didn’t understand S/M, the letter-writer said. The images made her uncomfortable. The editor, Cris Gutierrez, replied: “Here’s the most important thing for you to understand: you don’t need to understand.” I may in fact be, as I’ve been called, a perverted old cow. But so might we all. Our experience of sex not only can be, but most likely will be, internally as well as externally contradictory. When I talk about sex, and most particularly when I talk about myself, I am struggling to be as honest as I can be. But I’m haunted by the fact that nothing I can say will be complete. I find myself saying different things to different people, at different times, and often what I say sounds forced, inadequate, insincere. Sex is a game, a weapon, a toy, a joy, a trance, an enlightenment, a loss, a hope. I contradict myself, because nothing I say can ever be enough. It’s all true, though—just about everything is true, especially the contradictions. 2One of the most pervasive modern American fears is that of the ordinary human body. We suffer an almost complete physical dysphoria, a cultural illness of physical inadequacy and shame. Fear of the breast and the penis, which everyone either has or has seen, haunts people, as though these items are deformities. Even though the loss of a breast or penis is considered a tragedy, the healthy breast and penis are condemned. They are treated like wounds that represent terrible acts. The book Where’s Waldo? has been banned in many places because of one tiny profile of part of a woman’s breast. Marianne Williamson’s book A Woman’s Worth was turned down by a major distributor because the cover showed a partial profile of the side of a woman’s breast. (The penis is just never seen at all; even male buttocks are big news.) The very possibilities intrinsic to a word, “breast,” the implication of pleasure, are despised. For the most frightened among us—and I count those most angry about such benign sexual images as part of that group—it isn’t sexual behavior that is feared so much as the simple fact that sex exists. That sex might be evoked. Some small image—a breast, a cigar, a blooming flower, a glimpse of shoulder or knee—reminds us of sex, and must also be removed from sight.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  We each assumed the position and meditated while Spirit spoke through her about the mystical and magical events that were changing the universe as a result of our hard work during the previous couple of days. Limori’s guided meditations always had vivid visual images (a bit like the Disney film Fantasia ) of light and dark and the battles supposedly going on in the universe, of which we were told we were an integral part. When the mediation was over that day, Limori scanned the room with her raptor’s eyes and they eventually settled on Victor. “Victor, I noticed you weren’t with the group last night during the evening,” she said. “Nope,” Victor replied. He was always a man of few words. “What did you do?” Limori asked. He explained that he’d gone for a walk after supper and then to his cabin to read. “You didn’t feel like coming back to the lodge to be with the others?” Limori’s tone was not yet accusatory or blaming, but she was not messing around either. “Nope.” “Hmmm. And why do you think that is?” For the next hour, Victor was workshopped. In no uncertain terms, it was impressed upon him that keeping himself separate from the group was an ego position and that when he spent his free time alone he was separating his “energy” from that of the group and that to do so was to keep himself separate from God. It always came back to that. Whatever issue was being pointed out to any one of us, the bottom line was always that we were somehow, and in some way, defying God or rejecting God or not doing enough for God. And it was always as heartbreaking as being told you’d disappointed a parent. I have no idea what this specific workshop experience was like for Victor, but I know that whenever I was workshopped I felt shame (for not doing enough or not doing the right thing for God) and a distinct sense of worthlessness because I’d failed. But I was also always left with a deepening feeling of resolve. I would try harder. I would do better. I would make Limori, and by proxy God, proud of me. I would not let them down again. I would do so well that she and God would never have to take me to task again. I would be the perfect pupil, the perfect servant, the perfect being of light in an increasingly dark world. I believe that this particular feeling of resolve was one of the key elements that kept me in the group, and in Limori’s clutches, for so long. No one wants to be a failure and, most especially, no one wants to disappoint those beings whose approval we crave the most. When we are children, it is our parents whom we need to please.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He stood at the door for a moment, watching the boys and girls, men and women, their wet mouths opening and closing, their faces damp and pale, their hands grim on the glass or the bottle or clutching a sleeve, an elbow, clutching the air. Small flames flared incessantly here and there and they moved through shifting layers of smoke. The cash register rang and rang. One enormous bouncer stood at the door, watching everything, and another moved about, clearing tables and rearranging chairs. Two boys, one Spanish-looking in a red shirt, one Danish-looking in brown, stood at the juke box, talking about Frank Sinatra. Rufus stared at a small blonde girl who was wearing a striped open blouse and a wide skirt with a big leather belt and a bright brass buckle. She wore low shoes and black knee socks. Her blouse was low enough for him to see the beginnings of her breasts; his eye followed the line down to the full nipples, which pushed aggressively forward; his hand encircled her waist, caressed the belly button and slowly forced the thighs apart. She was talking to another girl. She felt his eyes on her and looked his way. Their eyes met. He turned and walked into the head. It smelled of thousands of travelers, oceans of piss, tons of bile and vomit and shit. He added his stream to the ocean, holding that most despised part of himself loosely between two fingers of one hand. But I’ve got to stay there so long.… He looked at the horrible history splashed furiously on the walls—telephone numbers, cocks, breasts, balls, cunts, etched into these walls with hatred. Suck my cock. I like to get whipped. I want a hot stiff prick up my ass. Down with Jews. Kill the niggers. I suck cocks . He washed his hands very carefully and dried them on the filthy roller towel and walked out into the bar. The two boys were still at the juke box, the girl with the striped blouse was still talking to her friend. He walked through the bar to the door and into the street. Only then did he reach in his pocket to see what Cass had pushed into his palm. Five dollars. Well, that would take care of him until morning. He would get a room at the Y.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Her facial expression became stern and serious and she was quiet for a long time. We all waited, well trained in obeying her subtle signals. Finally, she sighed and said, “Nothing has changed since two years ago.” She was gravely disappointed in us and I could feel my twin nemeses of shame and guilt filling my body and my thoughts. “Nothing,” she repeated. “You say that you will work hard and that you love God but in the end, nothing changes. Your egos continue to rule over you and you put God second, then fourth, then nowhere on your priority list. ‘Oh, but my job is important’” – she adopted a mocking tone, pretending to be one of us – “‘and my house is important and all my stuff is important.’ And God falls further and further away from your hearts and your thoughts, until He is nowhere to be found and you are all ego.” She sighed again and shook her head, looking around the circle and meeting each of our eyes. I was left, as ever, feeling that I must try harder and do more, but I was also uncomfortable. A few days after this visit from our guru, I wrote in my journal that I was tired of being told all the time that we were failing. I continued to be disturbed by my guru’s techniques, and it was those cracks appearing in my cult self that would eventually lead to my departure from the group. I constantly felt torn in two. For several years I had lived in a near-constant state of agitation. Something was wrong and somewhere inside me I knew that, but the only place I could find to place the blame for whatever was wrong was with myself. I would then try to convince myself that if only I could learn to stop feeling afraid and agitated, everything would be all right. But my body, my inner sense of wrong and right, would not stop whispering to me that something was seriously amiss. Around and around I went in this circle of denial and self-blame. During the couple of years that Limori was gradually distancing herself from the Vancouver group she had formed, she needed to leave someone in charge of us. That task fell to Gary. He had become our substitute guru and we had developed the habit of turning to him for spiritual advice on matters large and small. He and Limori were very close for a couple of years; he was her local representative, in essence. He was the only person in the group to whom she spoke via telephone; he would then relay messages to us about the spiritual work she was doing and the work that we needed to continue doing. I looked up to Gary, as did the others in the group. I believed that he was the person closest to approaching Limori’s type of “clarity” and, as such, considered him by proxy to have God’s ear.

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

  But this did not work for me. Every morning I resolved that this time I would crack it. This time there would be no distractions. I would kneel as intent upon God as my sisters, none of whom seemed to have my difficulties. I had never before had any problems of concentration. I had always been able to immerse myself in my studies for hours at a time. But to my intense distress, I found that I could not keep my mind on God for two minutes. The whole point of the careful preparation was to prevent this. It was acknowledged that at 6 a.m. we were likely to be less than fully alert and would need help in focusing our thoughts. But as soon as I sank to my knees, my mind either went off at a tangent or scuttled through a maze of pointless worries, fears, or fantasies, or else I was engulfed by the torpor of physical malaise. Like most adolescents, I craved sleep and experienced the 5:30 a.m. call as a violent assault. I often felt queasy with hunger and fatigue, and clung dizzily to the pew in front of me. At 6:30 the clock in the cloister chimed and we could sit down. But this sweet relief gave way to another trial, as I battled against sleep—and was comforted to see that even some of the older nuns listed and slumped in such a way that it was clear that they had succumbed. The minutes crawled by until the sacristan appeared to light the candles on the altar as a welcome signal that Mass was about to begin. At breakfast, an hour later, we were supposed to examine our meditation, going through a ten-point questionnaire: Had I made myself fully conscious of the presence of God? No. Had I made sufficient effort in the composition of place? No. Had all my senses been fully engaged? No. And so on. I didn’t need the fifteen minutes we were supposed to devote to this self-appraisal. I didn’t have to spend any time grading my performance on a scale of one to ten. I was just a big zero.

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

  Meditation was only the first spiritual exercise of the day. Four times daily we chanted our version of the divine office in choir. Twice a day, for fifteen minutes, we examined our conscience, according to Ignatius’s five-point plan: this involved marking off one’s faults and achievements in a little book and counting the number of times we had failed to perform the special task for the week (in Ignatian terminology this was called the “particular examen”). There was half an hour’s spiritual reading, a community exercise during which one of us read aloud and the rest continued our everlasting needlework; half an hour’s silent adoration in the chapel in the early evening; and the private recitation of the rosary. Yet again, I flunked. Throughout my seven years, I hugged to myself the shameful secret that unlike the other sisters, I could not pray—and, we were told, without prayer our religious lives were a complete sham. For several hours a day on every single day of the year, I had to confront and experience my abject failure. In other ways my mind was capable and even gifted, but it seemed allergic to God. This disgrace festered corrosively at the very heart of my life and spilled over into everything, poisoning each activity. How could I possibly be a nun if, when it came right down to it, I seemed completely uninterested in God and God appeared quite indifferent to me? I don’t know quite what I thought should be happening. Certainly I didn’t expect visions and voices. These, we were told, were only for the greatest saints and could be delusions, sent by the devil to make us proud. But all the books that I read about prayer spoke about moments of consolation that punctuated the inevitable periods of dryness. Periodically God would comfort the soul, make it feel that he was near, and enable it to experience the warmth of his presence and love. God would, as it were, woo the soul, offering this periodic breakthrough as a carrot, until the soul outgrew this need and could progress to the next stage of its journey. Gradually the soul would be drawn into the higher states of prayer, into further reaches of silence, and into a mysterious state that lay beyond the reach of thoughts and feeling.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  ALTHOUGH MASON VIEWED more porn and more extreme content than most of the boys I talked to, he was hardly alone. “I don’t consider the porn I watch to be representative of the person I am,” said Daniel, a freshman at an elite Midwestern college. Daniel had a lantern jaw and hipster glasses; he wore a backward baseball cap that he continually adjusted, running a hand over his curly hair. “Like, the whole category of ‘Unwilling’ [women who say no to sex, then change their mind when ‘force fucked’]. It’s very appealing to me even though I know it’s wrong. And I do truly believe it’s wrong. I would never do it. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching it.” Daniel was from Michigan and grew up in a very different family from Mason’s: his parents were happily married, and they identified, at least nominally, as Jewish. His mom, an instructor at a community college, was a feminist. In real life, Daniel was consciously trying to curb his use of the thoughtlessly sexist, homophobic language that had been common in his high school. He also said he considered any form of sexual interaction to have “spiritual significance” and claimed to prize intimacy over “raw sex.” But that’s not what got him off. He’d had three hookups in college; while he could get an erection, he wasn’t able to orgasm in any of them. He’d also found it “a bit of a struggle” to climax during intercourse with his high school girlfriend, with whom he’d been in love. Their sex wasn’t stimulating enough; it wasn’t intense enough—it just wasn’t enough. “I felt like I was never really satisfied,” he said. “There was always more to try. Like, ‘Oh, this is pretty good, she’s letting me do a lot, but we haven’t done this yet, we haven’t done this, done this, done this . . .’” The girl herself, who was a year younger than him, also seemed to have taken her cues from porn. She would writhe and moan when Daniel jackhammered a finger into her vagina. When he told her he wanted to “take a break” from their relationship, she offered up anal sex to change his mind (although that idea could equally have been inspired by mainstream films such as Kingsman, in which the hero’s incentive for saving a Scandinavian princess is her promise that “we can do it in the asshole”). He accepted, but the experience was nothing like what he’d seen on-screen. “It was really difficult,” he recalled, “and it hurt her intensely. She was in pain. That was nothing I wanted to see. It was fucked up. And I felt like shit afterward.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  He paused next to Rufus, looking up and down the street. Rufus did not move, though he wanted to; his mind began to race, painfully, and his empty stomach turned over. Once again, sweat broke out on his forehead. Something in him knew what was about to happen; something in him died in the freezing second before the man walked over to him and said: “It’s cold out here. Wouldn’t you like to come in and have a drink with me?” “I’d rather have a sandwich,” Rufus muttered, and thought You’ve really hit the bottom now . “Well, you can have a sandwich, too. There’s no law that says you can’t.” Rufus looked up and down the street, then looked into the man’s ice-cold, ice-white face. He reminded himself that he knew the score, he’d been around; neither was this the first time during his wanderings that he had consented to the bleakly physical exchange; and yet he felt that he would never be able to endure the touch of this man. They entered the bar and grill. “What kind of sandwich would you like?” “Corned beef,” Rufus whispered, “on rye.” They watched while the meat was hacked off, slammed on bread, and placed on the counter. The man paid and Rufus took his sandwich over to the bar. He felt that everyone in the place knew what was going on, knew that Rufus was peddling his ass. But nobody seemed to care. Nobody looked at them. The noise at the bar continued, the radio continued to blare. The bartender served up a beer for Rufus and a whiskey for the man and rang up the money on the cash register. Rufus tried to turn his mind away from what was happening to him. He wolfed down his sandwich. But the heavy bread, the tepid meat, made him begin to feel nauseous; everything wavered before his eyes for a moment; he sipped his beer, trying to hold the sandwich down. “You were hungry.” Rufus, he thought, you can’t make this scene. There’s no way in the world you can make it. Don’t come on with the man. Just get out of here . “Would you like another sandwich?” The first sandwich was still threatening to come up. The bar stank of stale beer and piss and stale meat and unwashed bodies. Suddenly he felt that he was going to cry. “No, thank you,” he said, “I’m all right now.” The man watched him for a moment. “Then have another beer.” “No, thank you.” But he leaned his head on the bar, trembling. “Hey!” Lights roared around his head, the whole bar lurched, righted itself, faces weaved around him, the music from the radio pounded in his skull. The man’s face was very close to his: hard eyes and a cruel nose and flabby, brutal lips. He smelled the man’s odor. He pulled away. “I’m all right.” “You almost blacked out there for a minute.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  Cass looked about her. The band was out, the stage was empty; but on the dance floor a few couples were dancing to the juke box. She watched one large, ginger-colored boy dancing with a tall, much darker girl. They danced with a concentration at once effortless and tremendous, sometimes very close to one another, sometimes swinging far apart, but always joined, each body making way for, responding to, and commenting on the other. Their faces were impassive. Only the eyes, from time to time, flashed a signal or acknowledged an unexpected nuance. It all seemed so effortless, so simple; they followed the music, which also seemed to follow them; and yet Cass knew that she would never be able to dance that way; never. Never? She watched the girl; then she watched the boy. Part of their ease came from the fact that it was the boy who led—indisputably—and the girl who followed; but it also came, more profoundly, from the fact that the girl was, in no sense, appalled by the boy and did not for an instant hesitate to answer his rudest erotic quiver with her own. It all seemed so effortless, so simple, and yet, when one considered whence it came, it began to be clear that it was not at all simple: on the contrary, it was difficult and delicate, dangerous and deep. And she, Cass, who watched them with such envy (for first she watched the girl, then she watched the boy) began to feel uneasy; but they, oddly, on the gleaming floor, under the light, were at ease. In what sense, and for what reason, and why would it be forever impossible for her to dance as they did? Mr. Barry was saying, “We have been hearing the most wonderful things about your husband, Mrs. Silenski. I’ve read his book, and I must say”—he smiled his cordial smile, everything about him was held within decent bounds—“it’s a very remarkable achievement.” For an instant, Cass said nothing. She sipped her drink and watched his face, which was as smooth as a black jellybean. At first, she was tempted to dismiss the face as empty. But it was not empty; it was only that it was desperately trying to empty itself, decently, inward; an impossibility leading to God alone could guess what backing up of bile. Deep, deep behind the carefully hooded and noncommittal eyes, the jungle howled and lunged and bright dead birds lay scattered. He was like his wife, only he would never be able to step out of his iron corsets. She felt very sorry for him, then she trembled; he hated her; and somehow his hatred was connected with her barely conscious wish to have the ginger-colored boy on the floor make love to her.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  We are taught that we cannot be clear servants of God unless we excavate and clean up any and all emotional baggage and ego positions we have. The benefit of this method for someone like Limori, who was trying to build a community of followers, is that if you’re human you’ve got baggage and an ego. Limori never had to inquire very far into anyone’s business before she stumbled onto an unhealed wound or ego position she could manipulate for her purposes. Remember, we wanted to be clear in order to serve God, and she imprinted us with the idea that the way to do this was to bring forward and deal with all our “issues.” After I’d left the group and begun researching cults, I learned that this type of discussion and feedback from the guru is what Robert J. Lifton calls confession; it is his fourth criteria for thought reform. Sessions in which one confesses to one’s sin are accompanied by patterns of criticism and self-criticism, generally transpiring within small groups with an active and dynamic thrust toward personal change. Confession is an act of self-surrender.7 The “sins” that we were confessing to were the possession of ego positions. My experience was that the type of group confession that Limori ensured we participated in had three specific outcomes, in addition to Lifton’s self-surrender, which bound me to Limori and the others in the group. First, it created in the group a perverse sense of intimacy. We came to know each other’s emotional wounds thoroughly because of these public disclosures. Knowing someone else’s deepest, darkest, most painful wounds usually comes about only after years of being in a relationship with a spouse, partner or therapist. Yet we were forced into that type of intimacy because of these public workshops with our guru. On occasion, those who had just joined the group or just met Limori found themselves forced into this type of confession in only their second or third meeting with her, and in front of the rest of us. The second outcome (and the flip side of the intimacy coin) was that each of us was provided with ammunition with which to measure our own spiritual growth against that of others. For example, I might think to myself, “Lisa still holds onto her attachment to physical possessions and I don’t do that any longer, so I must be further along on my spiritual path than she is.” The third outcome was that the cathartic after-effect of delving deeply into one’s emotional wounds bound me to Limori as though she was my saviour. If you’ve ever been in therapy, you may recognize the feeling of being completely emotionally drained at the end of a therapeutic session. I experience this as a feeling of rawness, as though several layers of my skin have been peeled away. But I simultaneously experience relief and a feeling of safety, because I have been treated with compassion and gentleness.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Sameer attributes some of his attitude to being the “child of two macho cultures,” but his perspective didn’t sound much different from that of a lot of guys I talked to, regardless of ethnicity. Sexual conquest was the measure of his manhood. An evening out wasn’t complete unless he got someone’s number. His persistence made girls so uncomfortable that some female high school classmates avoided him. Once, junior year, he badgered his girlfriend—whom he cared about deeply—until she got out of his car, slammed the door, and walked to a friend’s house. “I knew I’d done something wrong,” he said, “but I didn’t really understand why it was wrong and she didn’t have the words for it. So I was like, ‘Why isn’t she into this? What’s wrong with her?’ That mangled that relationship really quick.” Even after the mandatory consent assembly during orientation at the midsize college he attended in the Pacific Northwest, Sameer thought of rapists as strangers who jumped out of dark alleys; that, or the scumbag who roofied one of his sisters at a holiday party. “So it was like, ‘All right, cool,’” he said. “‘I will be a bystander, and if anybody looks creepy or a girl is uncomfortable, I will be a hero, save the day, do the right thing!’ That’s about all I got from consent education.” Sameer was introduced to Anwen a couple of months later at an off-campus party. She was from a small northwest city, passionate about partner dancing—Lindy Hop, blues, tango. She even made her own skirts, designed to flare out as she spun. A short, slight girl, she was struck by how tall and broad-shouldered Sameer was, dapper in his gray shirt and black tie. He was taken by her eyes, her smile. “I was like, ‘Wow! This person’s gorgeous,’” he said. “‘I’d like to get to know her better.’” She agreed to dance with him as long as they didn’t grind. Sameer claimed to know some swing moves. “She then proceeded to humor me for the next five minutes while I tried,” he recalled.

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

  It’s an odd feeling, to run into someone at a party or reunion, to know I’ve had sex with this person and to know it’s as though it never happened—because sex that doesn’t engage our selves in some way is not really sex at all. There was this touch, that stroke, this exchange of bodily fluids, but no sex. Just bodies. There are also people whose paths I’ve crossed, people who I barely touched in the lightest of casual ways, who nevertheless feel to me as though they’d been my lovers—because between us, however brief, occurred a dance of some kind that couldn’t be denied. Often enough, the sex in a sexual relationship has, over time, come to be not only the least important, but the least interesting part of an erotic and genuine experience. And now and then it’s been the only thing. Someone asked me not long ago if I had an “old woman” role model. Betty Dodson, I replied. In 1974, Dodson, now in her sixties, wrote a book called Liberating Masturbation, and with it women started looking at and touching their genitals in a whole new way. Certainly I did. I was seventeen that year, living in a college dorm and volunteering in a women’s health clinic. We decorated the waiting room with big posters of the flower-vulva paintings Dodson made. I learned to do pelvic exams on other women, learned the beauty and variety of women’s genitalia, held up a lot of mirrors for a lot of other young women so they could, for the first time, see their cervixes. But it took Dodson’s book, her cheerful, unashamed paean to getting off in the privacy of your own room, to get me to look at my own. I couldn’t stop applying the double standard that made me bless the sexual acts done by other people and live with horrible doubts about my own.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Something that I have been carrying around with me, while painful to bring to light, has been examined face on and I have survived the process, leaving me feeling both vulnerable and cleansed. In the non-therapeutic setting that was Limori’s living room, the feeling of raw vulnerability after being workshopped meant that I falsely attributed any feelings of relief to her gifts as a psychic and a servant of God. Limori had no right to stray into this type of emotional and psychological territory with any of us. She was not professionally trained as a psychologist or psychiatrist, nor were we in a therapeutic setting. Yet she brought those elements into the group under the guise of spiritual work. Consequently, I felt that I owed any spiritual growth that I had experienced to her. She repeatedly violated my emotional boundaries and I thanked her for it. Limori also used these weekend workshops (and later the weeklong ones) to reinforce Lifton’s third criterion, the demand for purity. The world becomes sharply divided into the pure and the impure, the absolutely good (the group/ideology) and the absolutely evil (everything outside the group.) One must continuously conform to the group ‘norm.’ Tendencies toward guilt and shame are used as emotional levers for the group’s controlling and manipulative influences.8 The demands for purity and for confession tie in perfectly with each other. By shining the spotlight on any one of us at any time and probing us into confession, Limori was constantly reinforcing in each of us that we were never pure enough. We were continually put in the position of being forced to confess our impurities and then shamed for having them in the first place. If, during the course of an enquiry from Limori, we denied or defended the presence of an ego position or other spiritual failing, this would only be declared an even greater failing than if we’d admitted our fault up front. Not being willing to face The Truth was the ultimate slap in the face to God, to Limori and to our own spiritual growth. So at any moment one could be called out for either having an impurity or failing to see the impurity. It was a never-win situation. And naturally, this strategy worked in Limori’s favour because no one can ever rid themselves of all their ego positions and impurities. We were held in a constant state, as Lifton says, of guilt and shame. Additionally, the promise of attaining any measure of spiritual growth was never fulfilled because we always, always had more ego positions to work through. The carrot of spiritual clarity and attaining Limori’s level of enlightenment was perpetually dangled in front of us but it was always out of reach. One of Limori’s theoretical premises was that we were each developing our spiritual “muscle.” This was one reason given for the need for the weekly meetings and weekend or weeklong spiritual retreats that we attended over the next few years.

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

  In Adam and Eve is everything I have found and fought within myself. Out of their story has come the brutal belief that female sexuality is the enemy of male civilization, and out of it also comes the message of my personal sexual shame, my shame in being a woman. Women awaken and unleash male lust: the beastly, roaring, insatiable lust that is the enemy of empire-builders everywhere, the ultimate distraction. I waken my own desire and pay in kind. What was their sin—sexual knowledge or simple disobedience? It doesn’t matter, really, because all our sexual expressions now have the flavor of disobedience in them, have the scent of shame hidden in them somewhere. Disobedience itself has a kind of sexual frisson. (If we were free of sexual guilt, I imagine celibacy would be a fetish, an expression of radical sexuality, as its original early Christian proponents intended it to be.) Adam is rational, albeit easily swayed; it is Eve who is sly, passionate, untrustworthy, who seduces Adam with a lick and a promise. So, of course, when Eve arrived, our goddesses had to go. She had to become Adam’s daughter instead of “the mother of all living,” she had to be taken out of Adam, when everyone knows all people come out of Eve. In the moment of the world’s most devastating act she is made to seem a capricious and peevish child. She is always, merely, eternally, a woman. Adam is always, apologetically, eternally, the man. A few hundred years after Christ, Augustine wrote that the natural world, fecund and uncontrollable, was a symptom of human disease. He felt the spontaneous nature of desire proved its wickedness, because no rational man would allow such a thing if he could prevent it. That’s what Augustine, and others, wanted people to overcome, the spontaneous fact of desire more than how desire was acted on. God punished Adam with lust, and all people from then on were being punished by parts of their bodies refusing to obey their will. The erection is the body’s betrayer, a Judas, and man the goat. Augustine called for celibacy and self-denial and in almost the same breath called tyranny the normal condition of the uncontrollable human race. Augustine’s own sexual history appears to have been one of furtive frustrations, and reading his later work is like reading the frenzied exhortations of the Puritans and Calvinists, of the Inquisitors, of madmen. He had influence, enormous influence; along with Genesis, the writings of Augustine have shaped most of the Christian view of sex that permeated the culture in which I was born. Sex after Augustine became something unfortunate, best not discussed. Sex was liable to lead one further and further away from God, into the world’s corruption. Since early Christian times, monks have castrated and even killed themselves to avoid the temptation of sex, seeing suicide as a surer route to heaven than desire. Sex was a test, a sin, and a terrible sorrow.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Several items were from Limori herself; she often bestowed gifts of jewellery on the women closest to her. Limori always emphasized that it was God who guided these purchases. From personal experience, I knew that when one received a ring or a necklace from Limori, it came with incredible significance and was treasured as such. On the couple of occasions that I received such gifts I felt so honoured it was as though I had been made a dame of Limori’s spiritual empire. “Well,” Limori said, when she finished looking through everything, “this is all ego.” She lifted a dripping handful of the pieces into the air and let them fall back with a clatter into her lap. “All ego. Azeen says that you are to hand all this junk over to me until you can learn to live without superiority and without comparing yourself to others in God’s flock. I will give it back to you when you’ve earned it; when Azeen says I can.” “Yes, Limori,” Susan said quietly. “You are to live without these flashy trappings and simply learn to be yourself. To be humble and to learn about real value, not the value that comes from this.” She held up a handful of jewellery again and made a sneering, derisive face. “Yes, Limori,” Susan said again. “Alice, pack up all this stuff and get it out of my sight and put it away somewhere.” She looked at Susan, “You, go get dressed. I’m tired of looking at your naked body. Blech.” She made a retching noise and shivered as though spiders were crawling over her skin. Alice carefully began picking up the tangled pile of necklaces and earrings and bracelets from Limori’s lap. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Alice, just scoop it up and get rid of it. I can’t stand it touching me any longer. Ugh, disgusting. I need to wash my hands. And you too,” she said to Alice. “Wash your hands when you’re finished dealing with that . . . junk.” (Washing their hands would cleanse Alice and Limori of any negative energy that may have attached to them from Susan’s jewellery.) Sadly, the only thing out of the ordinary about this workshop was the nudity involved. Otherwise, this type of treatment of people was well known to me at this point and, although I never became entirely comfortable with the level of cruelty that was involved in this type of “spiritual work,” I was familiar with it. I was entirely entrenched in the belief that Limori was working for our best interests and that she only did as God asked. I had stopped asking myself if her methods were justified. I was not comfortable with her methods at all, but I thought my discomfort was my failing, not hers.

• From Little Women (1868)

  I am too stupid to learn," I blundered out, as red as a peony. "Prut! We will make the time, and we fail not to find the sense. At efening I shall gif a little lesson with much gladness, for look you, Mees Marsch, I haf this debt to pay." And he pointed to my work 'Yes,' they say to one another, these so kind ladies, 'he is a stupid old fellow, he will see not what we do, he will never observe that his sock heels go not in holes any more, he will think his buttons grow out new when they fall, and believe that strings make theirselves.' "Ah! But I haf an eye, and I see much. I haf a heart, and I feel thanks for this. Come, a little lesson then and now, or—no more good fairy works for me and mine." Of course I couldn't say anything after that, and as it really is a splendid opportunity, I made the bargain, and we began. I took four lessons, and then I stuck fast in a grammatical bog. The Professor was very patient with me, but it must have been torment to him, and now and then he'd look at me with such an expression of mild despair that it was a toss-up with me whether to laugh or cry. I tried both ways, and when it came to a sniff or utter mortification and woe, he just threw the grammar on to the floor and marched out of the room. I felt myself disgraced and deserted forever, but didn't blame him a particle, and was scrambling my papers together, meaning to rush upstairs and shake myself hard, when in he came, as brisk and beaming as if I'd covered myself in glory. "Now we shall try a new way. You and I will read these pleasant little marchen together, and dig no more in that dry book, that goes in the corner for making us trouble." He spoke so kindly, and opened Hans Anderson's fairy tales so invitingly before me, that I was more ashamed than ever, and went at my lesson in a neck-or-nothing style that seemed to amuse him immensely. I forgot my bashfulness, and pegged away (no other word will express it) with all my might, tumbling over long words, pronouncing according to inspiration of the minute, and doing my very best. When I finished reading my first page, and stopped for breath, he clapped his hands and cried out in his hearty way, "Das ist gut! Now we go well! My turn. I do him in German, gif me your ear." And away he went, rumbling out the words with his strong voice and a relish which was good to see as well as hear.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  For a small but significant group of the boys I met—one that included Mason, the guy with the flip phone—porn use had become a compulsion, one they felt had seriously harmed them. Some had gone deep into the world of fetish videos, unearthing clips of, say, men eating women for erotic pleasure, or the reverse (I am not referring to oral sex here, but cannibalism). Some had, at least for a time, joined the “no fap” movement (“fapping” being vernacular for masturbation), becoming “fapstronauts” who forswore self-love entirely in order to “retrain” their brains. I can’t say whether porn obsession itself was the primary issue for these boys or a preexisting personality trait that found its expression there. What was important, though, and consistent, was that they believed porn had been damaging in ways that no adult had ever discussed with them, and that they had never previously discussed with an adult. The New Sex Ed Mason’s parents never talked to him about sex, sexual ethics, or healthy relationships; that was true of most of the boys I met, but some felt their parents had nonetheless led by example, through the loving, respectful, even playful ways they interacted with each other. That was not the case for Mason. His parents hadn’t slept in the same room since he was in elementary school. At one point, they didn’t speak for an entire year. His father mocked his mother, spoke over her when she talked, ridiculed her opinions. Mason encouraged her to divorce him, but as a devout Catholic, she refused.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Racial slurs have their roots in the white mainstream—the notion of Asian men as less masculine initially took hold during the Yellow Peril panic of the nineteenth century, based on immigrants’ hairstyles and traditional tunics, and was used to justify both the Chinese Exclusion Act and murder—but minority groups can perpetuate them as well. In 2017, on his eponymous talk show, Steve Harvey, who is black, guffawed over a book titled How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men, speculating it would contain only one page that read, “‘Excuse me, do you like Asian men?’ ‘No.’ ‘Thank you.’” He then imagined an equally slim sequel, How to Date a Black Woman, which would consist of “I don’t even like Chinese food, boy. It don’t stay with you no time. I don’t eat what I can’t pronounce.” Eddie Huang, a chef and television host, shot back in a New York Times opinion piece: “[Every] Asian-American man knows what the dominant culture has to say about us. We count good, we bow well, we are technologically proficient, we’re naturally subordinate, our male anatomy is the size of a thumb drive. . . . [There] were times I thoroughly believed that no one wanted anything to do with me. I told myself it was all a lie, but the structural emasculation of Asian men in all forms of media became a self-fulfilling prophecy that produced an actual abhorrence to Asian men in the real world.” And when performers turn those racial tropes on themselves? Comedian Ken Jeong, known for his desexualized roles in The Hangover and Crazy Rich Asians, peppered his 2019 Netflix special with micro-dick jokes and puns on his wife’s last name (which is Ho). Whether he is (as he insists) a fierce satirist or a yellowface minstrel depends, in the end—much like Lil Dicky—more on the impact of his performances than his intent, and that is where the problem lies. I’m not so sure the thirteen-year-olds cracking up at The Hangover Part II get the metatext when Jeong’s character’s penis is mistaken for a shiitake mushroom.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Among the high school boys who confided in me about unwanted sex, there was often an age difference between themselves and their aggressors. The idea of a mature woman initiating a lad into the wonders of the flesh is a well-worn trope, a staple of both porn and mainstream media: the MILF, the stepmom, the teacher. Mrs. Robinson. Stifler’s mom in American Pie. The fantasy can blind us to real-life abuse. When news broke of a Florida teacher having sex with an eighth-grade boy, for instance, one social media wit posted, “This poor boy [is] currently in surgery due to the trauma his wrist has suffered from all of the high fives.” Shortly before he won the presidency, an audio clip surfaced of Donald Trump responding to a similar case of a female teacher molesting a middle school boy with, “He might have put the moves on her. It might have given him confidence, actually.” One of the more heartrending conversations I had was with Alan, a senior at a Boston-area high school. While describing his most recent girlfriend, a classmate whom he said belittled and punched him, he mentioned, almost as an aside, that when he was thirteen, an eighth-grade teacher in her late thirties had coerced him into a seven-month-long sexual relationship. By the time I met Alan, she was serving prison time for child sexual abuse. He, meanwhile, had struggled with alcoholism, self-harm, anxiety, bouts of rage, and other abusive relationships. Would he have had those issues regardless? I can’t say, but they are common enough in the wake of molestation or assault. Alan credits four years of intensive therapy with giving him some hope that he can move forward; he was lucky, he added, to have had access to such care. Our culturally dictated ideas about gender, sex, and desire shape our vision of what assault looks like and who experiences it, sometimes dangerously so: as many as one in six boys will be sexually abused or assaulted before turning eighteen, yet parental concern focuses largely on girls. At its most extreme, sexual abuse of boys by adult men—the scandals in the Catholic Church, at Penn State, at Ohio State, at elite private schools, by celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Kevin Spacey—can remain hidden in plain sight for years, its victims having no language or feeling too ashamed to describe their experience. (While large-scale violation happens to girls as well—USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar and University of Southern California gynecologist George Tyndall each abused hundreds—there is, for better or worse, some collective understanding of the potential risk.)