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.

Page 215 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Book smarts won’t necessarily help in those fight-or-flight moments, especially, perhaps, for girls. “I talk to a hundred girls a month who are superassertive, feminist, who can correct their teachers about the symbolism of a novel in class,” she said. “Then they’re at a party and some dude’s hand is on their leg—or between their legs—and they feel like duct tape is over their mouths. They literally can’t say, ‘Can you move your hand?’ Superassertive, but not in that situation, because they’re using a different part of themselves. And then there’s regret and shame. And that’s just because we need to practice.” Once again, the room has fallen silent, the kind of hush that occurs when a teacher has truly touched a nerve. Denison asked for a volunteer, and Jackson, a lanky boy in a Chicago Bulls T-shirt, stood up. “People talk about ‘assertive’ all the time,” Denison said. “And ‘aggressive’ and ‘passive-aggressive.’ Those are ways to think about how we react in the real world, especially when we are uncomfortable.” She pulled out her cell phone. “So, let’s say I borrowed Jackson’s phone and said I’d have it back in a day. But it’s been three days. Also, I’ve cracked the screen. Now I’m going to return it to him, and he’s going to show us what a passive response would be.” She sauntered over and dumped the device in his hand. “Thanks for the phone, Jackson. It’s awesome.” She casually gestured to the imaginary crack, adding, “There’s just, like, that little thing here.” “No problem,” Jackson said. “Really?” Denison took a step toward him. “Can I borrow it again, then?” “No, um . . .” She took another step. “Oh. Well, do you have a car?” “Yeah, it’s over there.” “Can I have the keys?” Jackson pretended to toss them to her, and the scene was over. Denison turned to the class. “So his fallback was ‘I’m uncomfortable, this is unpleasant, I want it to end, and agreeing with her is the fastest way.’ But did you see how when I stepped forward and he backed away I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got this. I do not have to be accountable in any way. I can take advantage.’ So the bummer of that response is ‘Am I going to come back?’ Oh, hell yeah. He’s got a Post-it on his forehead with a bull’s-eye now. But if he could get to a place of thinking, ‘How do I feel right now? What do I think? And what do I want to have happen?’ Maybe it would be worth thirty seconds of doing something different so that this obnoxious girl will not come back.” A thin boy in a red-and-white striped shirt raised his hand. “So what exactly is an aggressive fallback?” “Pushing back against someone before they can go after you,” another boy said. “Or saying someone’s an asshole.” “Or, like, yelling back if your parents start yelling at you,” said one of the girls.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Over the next hour or so, they discussed their feelings about virginity (“In our group, we didn’t like the connotation of ‘clean’ and ‘pure,’” said one of the girls) and abstinence (comments on that had included “sad,” “a choice,” and “anal”). A boy wearing a basketball jersey sparked a cacophony of responses to the question, “But what is abstinence anyway? Is it doing anything but intercourse or is it no contact at all, or what?” The group presenting on sex and alcohol initially suggested, sanctimoniously, that mixing the two was a bad idea. But when Denison asked who knew someone who had hooked up sober, not a single hand went up. Not one. “I’m hearing more and more that nobody gets sexual with someone unless they’re in an altered state,” she said. “And that can really feed into that regret factor.” “I think in some ways it’s easier, though,” a girl said. “You can be like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking. I was drinking.’” “That’s what I call a setup,” Denison responded. “Especially for girls: if you’re a prude for setting limits and you’re a slut if you decide to have sex, then you’re screwed no matter what. At least if you get drunk, you can say, ‘Well, yeah, I didn’t know what I was doing.’ So it’s a way to not be accountable. And you have to have some empathy around that. It’s pretty seductive to be able to have an out of some kind if you’re going to be shamed or feel regret either way. So what are you supposed to do? We have to look at that more closely. We’ll be talking more about that next time.” In the final moments, as she did every session, Denison answered anonymous questions. Here is a smattering from the classes I observed: What if I pee during intercourse? How do you get STDs from oral sex? Is it true that when girls come, they can squirt fluid halfway across the room? How big is a normal penis? How many calories are in sperm? Does your hymen always break when you lose your virginity? Do you need lube to give a hand job? How can I make anal sex feel better to my partner?

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Despite those risks, hypersexualization is ubiquitous, so visible as to be nearly invisible: it is the water in which girls swim, the air they breathe. Whatever else they might be—athletes, artists, scientists, musicians, newscasters, politicians—they learn that they must, as a female, first and foremost project sex appeal. Consider a report released by Princeton University in 2011 exploring the drop over the previous decade in public leadership positions held by female students. Among the reasons these über-elite young women gave for avoiding such roles was that being qualified was not enough. They needed to be “smart, driven, involved in many different activities (as are men), and, in addition, they are supposed to be pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly.” Or, as one alumna put it, women had to “do everything, do it well, and look ‘hot’ while doing it.” A 2013 study at Boston College, meanwhile, found that female students were graduating with lower self-esteem than when they entered the school (boys’ self-esteem rose). They, too, in part blamed “the pressure to look or dress a certain way.” A sophomore in a survey at Duke that reached similar conclusions called the phenomenon “effortless perfection,” the “expectation that one would be smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular, and that all this would happen without visible effort.” No wonder they faltered. “Hot,” as journalist Ariel Levy wrote in her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, is different from “beautiful” or “attractive.” It is a commercialized, one-dimensional, infinitely replicated, and, frankly, unimaginative vision of sexiness, one that, when applied to women, can be reduced to two words: “fuckable and saleable.” Levy says that “hotness” is specifically women’s work, and nowhere was that more evident than on the 2015 Vanity Fair cover featuring Caitlyn Jenner, née Bruce. To announce her physical transition from male to female, the sixty-five-year-old appeared in a corset (from a store called Trashy Lingerie), breasts overflowing, lips glossed like an ingénue’s. That image was often juxtaposed in the press with a picture of her as Bruce, hair lank with sweat, arms raised in triumph after winning Olympic gold. As a man, he used his body; as a woman, she displayed it. Certainly, it’s no revelation that girls are held to a punishingly narrow, often surgically or digitally enhanced ideal of “sexy,” and then labeled as “sluts” when they pursue it. What has changed is this: whereas earlier generations of media-literate, feminist-identified women saw their objectification as something to protest, today’s often see it as a personal choice, something that can be taken on intentionally as an expression rather than an imposition of sexuality. And why wouldn’t they, if “hot” has been portrayed as compulsory, a prerequisite to a woman’s relevance, strength, and independence?

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Most of the young women I met had shaved or waxed their pubic hair, all of it, since they were about fourteen. When I asked them why, the girls would initially say it wasn’t something they’d ever questioned: they already shaved their legs and armpits, and they’d seen older girls who were bare, so it seemed the thing to do. They said hairlessness made them feel “cleaner” (mistakenly, as it turns out. Though it diminishes the risk of pubic lice, clear cutting creates a festive-sounding “happy culture” for most other STDs: without the shield of protective hair, for instance, the labia can become carpeted with genital warts). As with self-objectification, girls considered depilation a personal choice, something done “for oneself,” for comfort, hygiene, practicality. Invariably, though, they would bring up another motivation: avoiding humiliation. Consider the trajectory of comments by Alexis, a sixteen-year-old at a public high school in Northern California. “I didn’t really think about it,” she began. “One friend had an older sister who was doing it, so she started, and then we all did it. It was like a chain reaction. “But then, I also heard these guys in class one day talking about a girl. Her shorts were low cut and when she’d raised her arms, her shirt had lifted up, and they were like, ‘I could see pubic hair! Man, it was so gross!’” Girls are already self-conscious about their (typically unnamed) pubic region; it doesn’t take much to stoke that insecurity. Ruby, in Chicago, was one of the girls who said shaving made her feel “clean,” especially during her period. But she, too, added, “I remember these boys telling stories about this girl who ‘got around.’ And guys would go down there to finger her, or whatever, and there would be hair, and they were appalled. So I just . . . I mean, guys act like they would be disgusted by it.” Herbenick said that in her college town, chalkboard displays outside local salons offered sales on “back-to-school waxes” in the fall; April brought similar specials on spring break Brazilians. “That’s a pretty public reminder that you better look a certain way,” she said. A few years ago, she had a female student confide that she’d started shaving after a boy announced—during one of Herbenick’s class discussions—that he’d never seen pubic hair on a woman in real life, and if he came across it on a hookup partner, he’d walk out the door.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  Behold, he is in the vineyard of Naboth, where he has gone to take possession of it. 19 “You shall speak to him, saying, ‘Thus says the LORD : “Have you murdered and also taken possession [of the victim’s property]?” ’ And you shall speak to him, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord: “In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will lick up your blood as well.” ’ ” 20 Ahab said to Elijah, “Have you found me, O my enemy?” And he answered, “I have found you, because you have sold yourself to do evil in the sight of the LORD . 21 “Behold [says the LORD ], I am bringing evil (catastrophe) on you, and will utterly sweep you away, and will cut off from Ahab every male, both bond and free in Israel; 22 and I will make your house (descendants) like that of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha the son of Ahijah, for provoking Me to anger and making Israel sin. 23 “The LORD also spoke in regard to Jezebel, saying, ‘The dogs will eat [the body of] Jezebel in the district of Jezreel.’ 24 “The dogs will eat anyone belonging to Ahab who dies in the city, and the birds of the air will eat anyone who dies in the field.” [1 Kin 14:11 ; 16:4 ] 25 There certainly was no one like Ahab who sold himself to do evil in the sight of the LORD , because Jezebel his wife incited him. 26 He acted very repulsively in following idols, in accordance with everything the Amorites had done, whom the LORD expelled [from the land] before the sons of Israel. 27 Now when Ahab heard these words [of Elijah], he tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and fasted, and he lay in sackcloth and went about dejectedly (mourning). 28 Then the word of the LORD came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying, 29 “Do you see how Ahab has humbled himself before Me? Because he has humbled himself before Me, I will not bring the evil (catastrophe) in his lifetime, but in his son’s days I will bring evil upon his house.” 1 Kings 22 Ahab’s Third Campaign against Aram 1 A RAM (SYRIA) and Israel continued without war for three years. 2 In the third year Jehoshaphat king of Judah came down to the a king of Israel.

• From Vox (1992)

  “Why don’t you give them to Jill?” she asked. “Oh, a million reasons. But that’s not quite the end. I hung up from making the order and instantly I got hard again, naturally, and I thought for a second, and I hit the redial button, and a different woman answered, with a much lower and smarter voice, with some name like Vulva, and I said, ‘Vulva, I have what may sound like an unorthodox question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. But what I’m curious about is, well, of the men who order from your catalog, do you think some of them are in a subtle or maybe not-so-subtle way obscene phone callers?’ She laughed and she said, ‘That’s a good question.’ And then there was a long pause, a very long pause. I said, ‘Hello?’ And right there I knew I’d blown it—I knew the tone of my hello, that slight reediness in my voice that betrayed sexual tension, blew away the potential rapport I might have had with Vulva. See, I’d sounded quite confident when I actually asked her the question.” “What did she say?” “She just said, in a more official voice, but still a friendly voice, ‘I don’t think I’m going to answer your question.’ And I said, ‘Fine, I understand, okay, sure.’ And she said ‘Bye.’ Not ‘Good-bye,’ you notice—still the slight vestige of amused intimacy there. If she’d said ‘Good-bye’ I would have felt absolutely crushed.” “What did you do then?” “I sat up and ordered a pizza and read the paper. So you see, I’m not an obscene phone caller, really. I can’t smother an orgasm.” “Ho ho. I can,” she said. “Can you? Well, I mean I can physically do it.” “ I know what you mean.” There was a pause. “I hear ice cubes,” he said. “Diet Coke.” “Ah. Tell me more things. Tell me about the room you’re in. Tell me the chain of events that led up to your calling this number.”

• From Vox (1992)

  18 flipping through the catalog, and I made a last valiant attempt to stroke myself off, because the idea of her look ing carefully at those pictures of women in those tiny weightless panties, with the darkness of pubic hair visible right there through the material, at the very same time I was looking at those same cuppable curves of pubic hair on my end, should have been enough to make me shoot instantly, but I don't know, she sounded so well- meaning, and I knew that there was a very good chance that she would not like to know that I was there trying to ... I mean, she didn't want to work at a job where men called her and ordered a few items of merchandise just so they could . . . right? That wasn't what she'd had in mind at all in taking the job, or possibly wasn't, at least, so even when she said, finally, 'Well, the nadja pants ride a little lower on the hip,' which is a statement that any normal jacker-offer should be able to come to easily, because what does it imply? It implies her own hip, it implies that the nadja panties have ridden her own hip. But even then I could not achieve and maintain. So I said, 'Oh well, no, thanks, I'll see how the tights go over and then order the minimes later.' And a week afterward, I was the owner of a pair of tights. I still have them, unopened. Give me your address and I'll be glad to for ward them to you." "Why don't you give them to Jill?" she asked. "Oh, a million reasons. But that's not quite the end. I hung up from making the order and instantly I got hard

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Ideally, queer teens wouldn’t need to resort to trolling gay chat rooms for information or acceptance. At the same time, the Internet has provided an unprecedented pathway to normalizing and embracing sexual identity. Lizzy offered a glimmer of how that might begin, as did the young woman who’d found online support for her asexuality. But it was nineteen-year-old Amber, at a college hundreds of miles from Lizzy’s, who best illustrated the potential (and a little of the weirdness) of our hyperconnected world. After introducing ourselves in the chilly hotel lobby, we headed up to my room; Amber settled into a wingback chair under a circle of lamplight and began to tell me how, even while keeping up the appearance of the straight, popular girl her parents expected her to be, she was secretly working through something else online, something she didn’t always understand, building a second identity that, in the end, proved the most real of all. Playing the Straight Girl The first time Amber misrepresented herself online, she was just nine years old, doing exactly the sort of thing parents fear: chatting with strangers on a gaming site. “People would try to start these sexual conversations with me,” she said. “I don’t even know if I really knew what sex was. I was just a naïve kid.” Eventually her parents wondered why she was spending so much time on the computer and checked her history. When they discovered what she’d been doing they instantly forbade her, indefinitely, from going online. Amber didn’t mind the punishment so much as her parents’ horrified reaction. “I felt like I’d been doing something really, really bad,” she recalled. “I was a wreck. I didn’t touch a keyboard again for a year.” When she did, though, she got into Second Life and The Sims, virtual worlds in which users, represented by onscreen avatars, can once again interact with one another. Whether on the Internet or a PlayStation, Amber always chose to be male. “I didn’t think anything of it,” she explained. “It was just what I liked. I would make my boy avatar, then go on these websites and talk to girls, tell them they were pretty or whatever a fifth-grader would say. I never really questioned it. I honestly didn’t even know what the word gay meant. Nobody talked about it: not my parents, not my school. Which is weird because it’s not like I grew up in the middle of nowhere: we lived near a big university. I went to a high school of three thousand students. But no one said anything. So I never questioned my sexuality.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Abstinence vows do have some impact, particularly among younger teens: according to sociologists Peter Bearman of Columbia University and Hannah Brückner of Yale, fifteen- and sixteen-year-old pledgers delay intercourse about eighteen months beyond their peers (though that’s decidedly not “until marriage”) and have fewer sexual partners. But the effect vanishes if more than 30 percent of those in a given community want in. Pledging has to feel special, like membership in an exclusive club. Hence, I suppose, the lure of abstinence swag: the rings, T-shirts, notebooks, wristbands, gimme caps, and other gewgaws that declare, “Don’t Drink and Park,” or “Keep Calm and Stay Pure,” or simply, “True Love Waits.” So maybe it does, but not indefinitely and not for everything. Male pledgers are four times more likely to have anal sex than other young people, and pledgers of both sexes are six times more likely to engage in oral sex. What’s more, by age eighteen, their resolve begins to crack; by their twenties, over 80 percent of pledgers either deny or have forgotten that they ever pledged at all. The only lesson that sticks is that they remain less likely to use contraception and drastically less likely to protect against disease. Having heard Pam Stenzel warn repeatedly that condoms are useless against infections and that taking birth control pills will leave a girl “sterile or dead,” I guess I’m not surprised. Still, it’s interesting that young adults retain the unsafe-sex messages of abstinence education even as they jettison the rest. The upshot is that pledgers have the same rates of STDs and pregnancy as the general population, even though they begin intercourse later and report fewer sexual partners overall. Nor is marriage fully protective: female pledgers married younger than other women, but even those who had never previously had intercourse (about 12 percent) tested positive for STDs at the same rates as married nonpledgers. Folks such as Wilson and Stenzel like to say that waiting for your one true partner will make sex not only holier but hotter. The chemicals your brain releases during sex, they explain, will bond you to that one person, training you, Pavlov-style, to feel aroused and sensual whenever you are together. It’s a romantic notion, but, again, it does not appear to be true. A 2014 study of young evangelical Christian men offered a more objective glimpse into the post-abstinent marriage bed. It turned out the men couldn’t shake the idea that sex was “beastly” after the prohibition against it was lifted. They were surprised to find themselves still beset by temptation: pornography, masturbation, other women. What’s more, back when they were single, they had the support of other abstinent men. Once wed, they found that talking to friends about sexual problems was considered a betrayal of one’s wife, and they had no idea how to communicate with their spouses directly.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  In her mating season who can restrain her? No males seeking her need to weary themselves; In her month they will find her [looking for them]. 25 “[Cease your mad running after idols to] Keep your feet from becoming bare And your throat from becoming dry; But you said, ‘It is hopeless! For I have loved strangers and foreign gods, And I will walk after them.’ 26 “As the thief is shamed when he is caught, So the house of Israel is shamed— They, their kings, their leaders, Their priests, and their prophets— 27 Who say to a tree, ‘You are my father,’ And to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’ For they have turned their backs to Me, And not their faces; But in the time of their trouble they will say, ‘Arise [O LORD ] and save us.’ 28 “But where are your gods Which you made for yourself? Let them get up, if they can save you In the time of your trouble! For [as many as] the number of your cities Are your gods, O Judah. [Why do not your many man-made idols run to help you?] 29 “Why do you complain and contend with Me? You have all rebelled (transgressed) against Me,” says the LORD . 30 “In vain I have punished your people [with the consequences of their disobedience]; They received no insight from correction [and refused to change]. Your [own] sword has devoured your prophets Like a destroying lion. 31 “O generation [that you are], consider and regard carefully the word of the LORD . Have I been a wilderness to Israel [like a land without food], A land of thick and deep darkness [like a path without light]? Why do My people say, ‘We [have broken loose and we] are free to roam [at will]; We will no longer come to You’? 32 “Can a virgin forget [to wear] her ornaments, Or a bride her attire [that identifies her as a married woman]? Yet My people have forgotten Me Days without number. 33 “How well you prepare your path To seek and obtain [adulterous] love! Even the most wicked of women Have learned [indecent] ways from you. 34 “Also on your skirts is found The lifeblood of the innocent poor; You did not find them breaking in [a house]. But in spite of all these things [your disobedience, your love of idolatry, your lack of compassion]— 35 Yet you keep saying, ‘I am innocent; Surely His anger has turned away from me.’ Behold (listen very carefully), I will bring you to judgment and will plead my case against you Because you say, ‘I have not sinned.’ 36 “Why do you go around and wander so much Changing your way? Also, you will be shamed by Egypt As you were shamed by Assyria.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Women’s feelings about their genitals have been directly linked to their enjoyment of sex. College women in one study who were uncomfortable with their genitalia were not only less sexually satisfied and had fewer orgasms than others but were more likely to engage in risky behavior. (Boys were the opposite: those who felt positively about their penises were more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior.) Another study, of more than four hundred undergraduates, found that early engagement in fellatio led to feelings of inferiority and low self-worth among girls; by contrast, cunnilingus at the same young age was associated with greater self-awareness, sexual openness, and assertiveness. Young women who feel confident masturbating during sex, meanwhile, more than double their odds of orgasm in either hookups or relationships. So how young girls feel about “down there” matters. It matters a lot. The Psychological Clitoridectomy Sex is probably not the first thing that jumps to mind when you think about Indiana. But it happens that the state university in Bloomington is home to the Kinsey Institute, a center of research on sexual health founded by biologist Alfred Kinsey. I flew there one icy winter afternoon to meet Debby Herbenick, an associate professor at IU’s School of Public Health. Herbenick, who is also a sex columnist and the author of books such as Sex Made Easy, was the very picture of the modern sexpert: in her late thirties, with long, dark hair and cocker spaniel eyes, and dressed in a chic houndstooth minidress with over-the-knee boots. Her own research is in an area called genital self-image: how people feel about their private parts. Over the past few years, she said, young women’s genital self-image has been under siege, with more pressure on them than ever to see their vulvas as unacceptable in their natural state: “They need to shave them, decorate them, or otherwise groom before sex,” she said. “There’s this real sense of shame as a girl if you don’t have your genitals prepared, a real sense that there is a possibility someone will judge them.”

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  8 “Nevertheless they will become his slaves, so that they may know [the difference between] My service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries.” Plunder Impoverishes Judah 9 So Shishak king of Egypt went up against Jerusalem; he took the treasures of the house of the LORD and the treasures of the king’s house (palace). He took everything. He even took the shields of gold which Solomon had made. 10 In their place King Rehoboam made shields of bronze and entrusted them to the care of the officers of the guard who guarded the door of the king’s house. 11 And whenever the king entered the house of the LORD , the guards came and carried the shields and then brought them back into the guards’ room. 12 When Rehoboam humbled himself, the wrath of the LORD turned away from him, so as not to destroy him completely; and also conditions were good in Judah. 13 So King Rehoboam established himself in Jerusalem and reigned. Rehoboam was forty-one years old when he began to reign, and he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city in which the LORD had chosen from all the tribes of Israel to put His Name. And his mother was Naamah the Ammonitess. 14 He did evil because he did not set his heart to seek and worship and honor the LORD . 15 Now the acts of Rehoboam, from the first to the last, are they not written in the records of Shemaiah the prophet and of Iddo the seer, according to genealogical enrollment? There were wars between Rehoboam [of Judah] and Jeroboam [of Israel] continually. 16 And Rehoboam slept with his fathers [in death] and was buried in the City of David; and Abijah his son became king in his place. 2 Chronicles 13 Abijah Succeeds Rehoboam 1 I N THE eighteenth year of King Jeroboam, Abijah became king over Judah. 2 He reigned three years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Micaiah the daughter of Uriel of Gibeah. A nd there was war between Abijah and Jeroboam [of Israel]. 3 Abijah began the battle with an army of brave soldiers, 400,000 chosen men. Jeroboam drew up in battle formation against him with 800,000 chosen men, valiant men. Civil War 4 Then Abijah stood on Mount Zemaraim, which is in the hill country of Ephraim, and said, “Listen to me, Jeroboam and all Israel: 5 “Do you not know that the LORD God of Israel, gave rule over Israel forever to David and to his sons by a covenant of a salt [a permanent pact, extending to each generation of Israel]?

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  hearing in the courts. The beautiful little tract "On the Testimony of the Soul," (6 chapters) is a supplement to the Apologeticus, and furnishes one of the strongest positive arguments for Christianity. Here the human soul is called to bear witness to the one true God: it springs from God, it longs for God; its purer and nobler instincts and aspirations, if not diverted and perverted by selfish and sinful passions, tend upwards and heavenwards, and find rest and peace only in God. There is, we may say, a pre-established harmony between the soul and the Christian religion; they are made for each other; the human soul is constitutionally Christian. And this testimony is universal, for as God is everywhere, so the human soul is everywhere. But its testimony turns against itself if not heeded. "Every soul," he concludes, "is a culprit as well as a witness: in the measure that it testifies for truth, the guilt of error lies on it; and on the day of judgment it will stand before the court of God, without a word to say. Thou proclaimedst God, O soul, but thou didst not seek to know Him; evil spirits were detested by thee, and yet they were the objects of thy adoration; the punishments of hell were foreseen by thee, but no care was taken to avoid them; thou hadst a savor of Christianity, and withal wert the persecutor of Christians." 2. His polemic works are occupied chiefly with the refutation of the Gnostics. Here belongs first of all his thoroughly catholic tract." On the Prescription of Heretics."1531 It is of a general character and lays down the fundamental principle of the church in dealing with heresy. Tertullian cuts off all errors and neologies at the outset from the right of legal contest and appeal to the holy Scriptures, because these belong only to the catholic church as the legitimate heir and guardian of Christianity. Irenaeus had used the same argument, but Tertullian gave it a legal or forensic form. The same argument, however, turns also against his own secession; for the difference between heretics and schismatics is really only relative, at least in Cyprian’s view. Tertullian afterwards asserted, in contradiction with this book, that in religious matters not custom nor long possession, but truth alone, was to be consulted. Among the heretics, he attacked chiefly the Valentinian Gnostics, and Marcion. The work against Marcion (A. D. 208) is his largest, and the only one in which he indicates the date of composition, namely the 15th year of the reign of Septimius Severus (A. D. 208).1532 He wrote three works against this famous heretic; the first he set aside as imperfect, the second was stolen from him and published with many blunders before it was finished. In the new work (in five books), he elaborately defends the unity of God, the Creator of all, the integrity of the Scriptures, and the harmony of the Old and New Testaments.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  Because you have rejected the word of the LORD , He also has rejected d you as king.” 24 Then Saul said to Samuel, “I have sinned; for I have transgressed the command of the LORD and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. 25 “Now, please, pardon my sin and return with me, so that I may worship the LORD .” 26 But Samuel said to Saul, “I will not return with you; for you have rejected the word of the LORD , and the LORD has rejected you from being king over Israel.” 27 As Samuel turned to go [away], Saul grabbed the hem of his robe [to stop him], and it tore. 28 So Samuel said to him, “The LORD has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today and has given it to your neighbor, who is better than you. 29 “Also the Splendor and Glory and Eminence of Israel will not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man that He should change His mind.” 30 Saul said, “I have sinned; but please honor me now before the elders of my people and before Israel, and go back with me, so that I may worship the LORD your God.” 31 So Samuel went back following Saul, and Saul worshiped the LORD . 32 Then Samuel said, “Bring me Agag, the king of the Amalekites.” And Agag came to him e cheerfully. And Agag said, “Surely the bitterness of death has come to an end.” 33 Samuel said, “As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.” And Samuel cut Agag in pieces before the LORD in Gilgal. 34 Then Samuel went to Ramah, but Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul. 35 Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, for Samuel grieved over Saul. And the LORD regretted that He had made Saul king over Israel. 1 Samuel 16 Samuel Goes to Bethlehem 1 T he LORD said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve for Saul, when I have rejected him as king over Israel? a Fill your horn with oil and go; I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have chosen a king for Myself among his sons.” 2 But Samuel said, “How can I go? When Saul hears about it , he will kill me.” And the LORD said, “Take a heifer from the herd with you and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.’ 3 “You shall invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do [after that]; and you shall anoint for Me the one whom I designate.” 4 So Samuel did what the LORD said, and came to Bethlehem.

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  The Women of Brewster Place opens, not unlike Sula, with a genealogy of the community: Brewster Place, with its conception as "the bastard child of several clandestine meetings" between city officials in a smoke-filled room.' Its conception was as illegitimate as the individuals, especially its third generation of residents (blacks), were presumed to be. The first character to which readers are exposed is Mattie Michael, with her deep Tennessee southern roots and a respectable livelihood steeped in devout Christianity. Her experience is marked by a fundamentalist-like rigidity concerning sexuality, based on a religious moral code dictating that sex be "saved" until marriage. "Saved" is the operative word, as it evokes the religious sensibility, as well as rhetoric, that characterizes those who abide by the religious dogma, biblical and institutional, and would be "saved": meaning they would enjoy the pleasures of heaven versus their counterparts, "sinners," who would putatively have a less fortune fate. Mattie's story, her "genesis" and point of unravel, occurs when she, while intending to preserve her sexuality and "save herself" for marriage, gives into carnal pleasures when she accompanies Butch Fuller, a young attractive, agnostic womanizer, to cut sugarcane and pick herbs. The scene/venue is rife with sexual symbolism: the cane, metaphoric phallic symbols, and the herbs are representative of a "naturalness"-the organic bounty and productive/generative aspect of nature-emblematic of the naturalness of sex that, otherwise, in the religious tradition is repressed and associated with sin (unless it is within the sanctioned confines of marriage). While with Butch-and with absolutely no knowledge of sex and deeply grounded in religion, including its dogmatic restrictions governing fornication/sexuality-she feels, for the first time, certain "disquieting stirrings at the base of her stomach": "new feelings" that consume her to the point she "felt she had somehow drifted too far into strange waters and if she didn't turn around soon, she would completely forget in which direction the shore lay-or worse, not even care" (14-15). Having suppressed the sexual, Mattie is unaware of the power of the erotic and her very own sexuality, having been the only child within her deeply devout (respectable) two-parent Christian household, where no discourse on sex existed as it was considered outside religious dialogue or the sanctified church. Caught in a religious and sociosexual conundrum, she succumbs to her carnal pleasures, swept away by Butch's charm, sensuous nature, and virility. After their sexual intimacy in the herb patch, she becomes pregnant (the reproductive capacity of sex), later giving birth to a son she fittingly names Basil. When she refuses to disclose his paternity, it causes an upheaval and beating that accounts for her eventual departure from her parents' home.

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  Mattie heads to North Carolina, secures a job, and never marries, choosing instead to raise her son alone; and her sexual life is nonexistent by her own choice and inclination. Based on textual inferences, her single sexual encounter with Butch, in which she begets their son, Basil, is her only sexual experience. As a single mother with a child, Mattie's status and subject position are questioned and difficult to negotiate, as is especially evident in her attempts to secure housing. She must confront and navigate her way around interlocking apparatuses: her race, gender, and sexuality concomitantly. Denied housing by white landlords because of her race, she fares no better in the "neatly manicured black neighborhoods," emblematic of a black respectability, in which her gender/sexual status-as an unmarried woman with a child born out of wedlock-marked her as "unacceptable." Moreover, it constitutes an explicit and visible breach of the classical black female script, those culturally prescribed mandates governing "acceptable" black womanhood. As mentioned, it is constituted by black women's expected racial loyalty and solidarity, sexual fidelity to black men, self-abnegation, and the idealization of marriage and motherhood. While she does not violate the script entirely, she does transgress its tenets pertaining to the regulation of black women's sexuality through black men, as well as overstep its mandates governing marriage. Issues of legitimacy, or lack thereof-her being a single mother-take shape in the queries of those she meets, "Where's your husband?" to which her response would invariably incite a disapproving, "`This is a respectable place!"' (30). As a subject with exterior visible evidence, a child, that she has transgressed the behavioral and sociosexual strictures for women, Mattie is denied far more than housing. "Unmarried persons are punished" and are "denied sexual citizenship" by "society for their `transgressions"'; and, "as sexual subjects, rather than sexual citizens, African Americans have historically been punished and victimized for asserting their sexual independence and seeking control over their own bodies."' Mattie, consequently, is unable to secure housing; and she eventually takes up residence in the private home of Eva Turner, a five-time widowed woman who is raising her granddaughter (Louciela, who is Basil's age) after the child's parents ran off. Unlike those who discriminated against Mattie, "Miss Eva" is nonjudgmental regarding Mattie's breach of the "politics of respectability" and mother-out-of-wedlock status, yet, paradoxically, she later scrutinizes Mattie on the basis of her sexual disposition: "'Tain't natural, just 'tain't natural." [...] "What I'm talkin' 'bout is that I ain't hear you mention no man involved in all them exciting goings-on in your life-church and children and work. It ain't natural for a young woman like you to live that way. I can't remember the last time no man come by to take you out." [.. .I "Ain't you ever had no needs in that direction? No young woman wants an empty bed, year in and year out." (36-37)

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  An acquaintance who worked down the hall had stopped in to confide in me about her new boyfriend, and I’d wanted half a dozen times to say, “Yes, that’s right. That’s just the way it is with me and my guy.” But I didn’t dare. I knew I had to hide my sexuality from most people, even though I was so proud of Sean, so pleased when we walked down the street bumping shoulders. I couldn’t remember exactly why we had to be ashamed. “Hello, Bunny? This is Lou.” There was a pause over the phone, and my visitor mimed a farewell kiss and left me, pulling my door shut behind her. “Lou! How are you? How was your trip to Chicago?” “… ” “Did you meet Ava’s parents?” Silence. “They must have met yours, huh? A big family pow-wow?” Silence. I decided I would keep fooling around until I hit paydirt. “It must have been gruesome.” Despite the silence, I flew blind into: “I don’t know why you went out there. Seeing your own parents is bad enough …” But what if the trip was a success? I let a long therapeutic silence spread itself out between us. Lou whistled. “That’s Miles Davis’s ‘Funny Valentine.’ ” “Oh?” “My … funny … val …” Starting all over again, I said softly, with exactly the endearing, breathy, formal but tender lilt Lou could give the phrase, as though he’d just coined it, “How nice to hear your voice. ” “Thank you, Bunny.… They were terrible people.” “Ava’s parents?” “Do you know what her mother said to me?” “No, what?” “She asked me if there were any other children. ‘Are there any siblings?’ I said I had a brother who’d committed suicide. She said, ‘I don’t know whether I can accept that.’ ” “How appalling.” “I’m not sure I can accept her daughter as my wife.” “How was the trip otherwise?” “Fine except I went blind in one eye, got so doubled over with anxiety I couldn’t eat or walk, was knocked over by a taxi after I heard my drunken father lecture me about what perverted creatures out of hell my brother and I had been as children.” “Oh no! Always such a mistake to leave New York.” “Ava, can I have some nice soup?” Ava made some remark and Lou muttered, “Ava’s soup burned. This apartment is a dump. We haven’t had heat in a month. Stupid spic super. Today I was held at the office and then I was half an hour late for my shrink. So I rushed over on my bike and had my hour, now fifteen minutes, and then I asked the nigger elevator operator if I could use the john in the building but—” “Do you have to use those pejorative—” I said.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I felt I owed nothing to anyone. My only job was to dodge out of the crossfire. Homosexuality did not constitute a society, just a malady, although unlike many other maladies it was a shameful one—a venereal disease. Could one be loyal to syphilis? And yet syphilis was not a desire one pursued; once contracted, it left nothing else to be done. But a homosexual could be condemned precisely because he persisted in practicing his vice. If I despised homosexuals, I distrusted everyone else. Of course heterosexuals had to be placated and amused. When I was with them, I memorized their reticences and enthusiasms, the subjects they would guffaw over and those they ignored, embarrassed. But I felt not at all attached to any other human being. This distrust was confirmed when I returned to school by a series of arrests of homosexuals in the toilets. A professor of engineering, and the administrator in charge of “in-plant feeding” (the cafeteria), and four students were nabbed. Their names but not their pictures were published in the town and school newspapers. I knew one of the students, Jeremy, a tall fat boy with red cheeks, redder lips, ears as neat and protuberant as the handles on a pre-Columbian jar, and a gross soprano voice which he’d suddenly unsheathe, dazzling and flexible as a saw in sunlight. He’d be in his stall, a clucking, roosting hen, and suddenly that falsetto, loud and upsetting, would flash forth. “It was entrapment,” he told me. “There was a guy—I should have suspected something. His shoes, no queen would be caught dead in such clodhoppers, spoil her frock, her line, don’t you know. He showed me this big old thing hard, I mean it was hard, you can’t fake that, she was an excited gal, and then, don’t you know, the next thing somehow I felt myself being drawn against my will, and before you could say wunderbar! I was bending over this bratwurst when he opened his palm and there, Fräulein Ding, there—” and Jeremy drew a deep breath, raised his hand, pursed his lips like an overly animated children’s entertainer creating suspense “—there was a cop’s badge.” “How horrible! What did you do?” “At first I just drew myself up and thought, If I act like a perfect lady nothing truly untoward will happen to me. I lifted an eyebrow, threw my scarf around my neck, and turned to march out head high, but the next thing I knew he’d slapped this rather gauche ID bracelet around my wrist which cunningly enough was attached to a matching bracelet on his wrist. For a moment I thought we were going steady.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  I made a note to myself to check that suicide figure: it wasn’t wrong; it came from a 2003 study by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The link between sex and suicide, though, could hardly be called causal. Girls, for instance, are also more likely than boys to be bullied and stigmatized for sexual activity, which in itself puts them at risk of depression and suicide. So it may be the shaming of sexually active teens rather than sex itself that is the problem. It may also be that teens who are already depressed are more likely to engage in and subsequently regret sexual activity. Or it may be that teens’ expectations of sex are media-driven and unrealistic; or that having first intercourse specifically while drunk puts a child at greater risk. Whatever the case, Brittan’s job was to go into local public and private schools and, like Pam Stenzel, give students her version of the facts of life. “Whatever they choose after that is up to them,” she told me. “But by the time I got done”—she winked and gave me a playful nudge with her elbow—“they couldn’t say no one told them.” EARLIER THAT DAY, I had stopped by the country club to chat with some of the previous ball attendees, who return each year to help with the festivities. Several of them wore sweatshirts bearing the initials S.W.A.T., for “Sisters Walking Accountable Together,” a club formed to support girls in vows of chastity. I had changed my own shirt three times before heading out the door. A loose-fitting scoop-necked sweater over a tank top suddenly seemed too revealing, especially since the sweater tended to slide around and show a bra strap. A cardigan over the same tank also seemed potentially immodest. I settled on a boat neck pullover, hoping it wouldn’t be seen as too tight. These are not, I hasten to say, my typical thoughts as I dress in the morning, but somehow the Purity Ball’s emphasis on “modesty” and “purity” made me feel more conscious of how my body and self-presentation might be judged by others than I had been since I was a teen. In the daylight, the ballroom was relentlessly beige, its view a winter-drab golf course under a sodden sky. Several girls were tying pink tulle bows to chairs. Haylee, a high school senior, dressed in sweatpants and a S.W.A.T. sweatshirt, stood back to survey the effect, hands on her hips, brow furrowed. “I think it might be a little too ‘Sweet Sixteen,’” she said. “But that’s how old the girls are!” another girl countered.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The post-op artist insisted on having not only his sex changed on his documents (a whim that the game Dutch officials were willing to oblige) but also his rebirthday (refused). In the painter’s eyes, a lengthening pendulous age, not mere pudenda, had been the culprit; he had considered the surgery to be a renaissance. When he met his mother afterward, he could scarcely remember her. He chose as a husband an old friend of the family who’d agreed to marry him once he’d become a she. Her desire to have a child sent her back to have a second operation, from which she never recovered. The shorter and shorter journal entries, the indefinitely extended vacation of the performing surgeon, the patient’s horrible pain—all led to the suspension dots of the conclusion, three bloody drops on a snowy page. I was summoned to my army physical. With all these pale, tattooed boys I stripped and bent over, dressed and filled out forms. Here and there in the crowd I heard an arresting accent or saw eyes flashing with defiance; these anomalies were assembled at the end of the day in the psychiatrist’s office. He was almost deaf. Perhaps to be spiteful he’d moved his desk out of his office into the center of the waiting room. I heard each deviant shout the details of his problem. I had checked the box “homosexual tendencies” (the army recognized nothing more definite), but the doctor pretended he couldn’t see why I’d been referred to him. “Here, here!” I shouted, pointing. “Where? What? Oh. Homosexual. Tendencies. Have you tried psychiatric treatment?” “Yes,” I shouted. “And?” “Useless. No. Good.” “Are you the active partner or the passive partner?” I’d never thought in these terms before. Did “active” mean the one who sucked (the “girl”) or the one who fucked (the “boy”)? I couldn’t sort it out but I decided “passive” sounded less curable. “What?” Face crimson I shouted, “Passive!” I was medically disqualified from the army. The idea that my place would be taken by someone else, perhaps even a gay man too nervous to admit to his “tendencies,” didn’t trouble me in the least. A belief in morality is based on a belief in the group. I distrusted everyone. Hawthorne’s dim view of human nature confirmed mine, although I did not believe in Original Sin, only sin, far too common to be original. Of course I pretended to entertain normal scruples; I didn’t want people to look down on me. Maria found a job in textbook publishing and moved to her own apartment on the Upper West Side. The smell of cat urine slowly faded, and only cat’s hairs on the one pair of slacks I never wore (too snug, for some reason) and the clawed ravening of the upholstery up the back of a chair remained as reminders of her presence—those and the improvements (the electric can opener in a kitchen with only two plates, the coffeepot, the framed drawing of me reading).