Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  And Thy faithful mercy hovered over me afar. Upon how grievous iniquities consumed I myself, pursuing a sacrilegious curiosity, that having forsaken Thee, it might bring me to the treacherous abyss, and the beguiling service of devils, to whom I sacrificed my evil actions, and in all these things Thou didst scourge me! I dared even, while Thy solemnities were celebrated within the walls of Thy Church, to desire, and to compass a business deserving death for its fruits, for which Thou scourgedst me with grievous punishments, though nothing to my fault, O Thou my exceeding mercy, my God, my refuge from those terrible destroyers, among whom I wandered with a stiff neck, withdrawing further from Thee, loving mine own ways, and not Thine; loving a vagrant liberty. Those studies also, which were accounted commendable, had a view to excelling in the courts of litigation; the more bepraised, the craftier. Such is men’s blindness, glorying even in their blindness. And now I was chief in the rhetoric school, whereat I joyed proudly, and I swelled with arrogancy, though (Lord, Thou knowest) far quieter and altogether removed from the subvertings of those “Subverters” (for this ill-omened and devilish name was the very badge of gallantry) among whom I lived, with a shameless shame that I was not even as they. With them I lived, and was sometimes delighted with their friendship, whose doings I ever did abhor—i.e., their “subvertings,” wherewith they wantonly persecuted the modesty of strangers, which they disturbed by a gratuitous jeering, feeding thereon their malicious birth. Nothing can be liker the very actions of devils than these. What then could they be more truly called than “Subverters”? themselves subverted and altogether perverted first, the deceiving spirits secretly deriding and seducing them, wherein themselves delight to jeer at and deceive others. Among such as these, in that unsettled age of mine, learned I books of eloquence, wherein I desired to be eminent, out of a damnable and vainglorious end, a joy in human vanity. In the ordinary course of study, I fell upon a certain book of Cicero, whose speech almost all admire, not so his heart. This book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called “Hortensius.” But this book altered my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself O Lord; and made me have other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise, that I might return to Thee. For not to sharpen my tongue (which thing I seemed to be purchasing with my mother’s allowances, in that my nineteenth year, my father being dead two years before), not to sharpen my tongue did I employ that book; nor did it infuse into me its style, but its matter.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  O Thou Light, which Tobias saw, when, these eyes closed, he taught his son the way of life; and himself went before with the feet of charity, never swerving. Or which Isaac saw, when his fleshly eyes being heavy and closed by old age, it was vouchsafed him, not knowingly, to bless his sons, but by blessing to know them. Or which Jacob saw, when he also, blind through great age, with illumined heart, in the persons of his sons shed light on the different races of the future people, in them foresignified; and laid his hands, mystically crossed, upon his grandchildren by Joseph, not as their father by his outward eye corrected them, but as himself inwardly discerned. This is the light, it is one, and all are one, who see and love it. But that corporeal light whereof I spake, it seasoneth the life of this world for her blind lovers, with an enticing and dangerous sweetness. But they who know how to praise Thee for it, “O all-creating Lord,” take it up in Thy hymns, and are not taken up with it in their sleep. Such would I be. These seductions of the eyes I resist, lest my feet wherewith I walk upon Thy way be ensnared; and I lift up mine invisible eyes to Thee, that Thou wouldest pluck my feet out of the snare. Thou dost ever and anon pluck them out, for they are ensnared. Thou ceasest not to pluck them out, while I often entangle myself in the snares on all sides laid; because Thou that keepest Israel shalt neither slumber nor sleep.

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

  3) Zwingli, with ten other priests, petitioned the bishop of Constance in Latin (Einsiedeln, July 2, 1522), and the Swiss Diet in German (Zurich, July 13, 1522), to permit the free preaching of the gospel and the marriage of the clergy. He enforces the petition by an incidental confession of the scandalous life of the clergy, including himself (Werke, I. 39): "Euer ehrsam Wysheit hat bisher gesehen das unehrbar schandlich Leben, welches wir leider bisher geführt haben (wir wollen allein von uns selbst geredet haben) mit Frauen, damit wir männiglich übel verärgert und verbösert haben." But this document with eleven signatures (Zwingli’s is the last) is a general confession of clerical immorality in the past, and does not justify Janssen’s inference that Zwingli continued such life at that time. Janssen (Ein zweites Wort an meine Kritiker, p. 47), moreover, mistakes in this petition the Swiss word rüw (Ruhe, rest) for rüwen (Reue, repentance), and makes the petitioners say that they felt "no repentance," instead of "no rest." The document, on the contrary, shows a decided advance of moral sentiment as compared with the lame apology in the letter to Utinger, and deeply deplores the state of clerical immorality. It is rather creditable to the petitioners than otherwise; certainly very honest. 4) In a letter to his five brothers, Sept. 17, 1522, to whom he dedicated a sermon on "the ever pure Virgin Mary, mother of God," Zwingli confesses that he was subject to Hoffahrt, Fressen, Unlauterkeit, and other sins of the flesh (Werke, I. 86). This is his latest confession; but if we read it in connection with the whole letter, it makes the impression that he must have undergone a favorable change about that time, and concluded a regular, though secret, connection with his wife. As to temperance, Bullinger (I. 305) gives him the testimony that he was "very temperate in eating and drinking." 5) Zwingli was openly married in April, 1524, to Anna Reinhart, a respectable widow, and mother of several children, after having lived with her about two years before in secret marriage. But this fact, which Janssen construes into a charge of "unchaste intercourse," was known to his intimate friends; for Myconius, in a letter of July 22, 1522, sends greetings to Zwingli and his wife ("Vale cum uxore quam felicissime et tuis omnibus," Opera, VII. 210; and again: "Vale cum uxore in Christo," p. 253). The same is implied in a letter of Bucer, April 14, 1524 (p. 335; comp. the note of the editors). "The cases," says Mörikofer (I. 211), "were very frequent at that time, even with persons of high position, that secret marriages were not ratified by a religious ceremony till weeks and months afterwards." Before the Council of Trent secret marriages were legitimate and valid. (Can. et Decr. Conc. Trid., Sess. XXIV., Decr. de reform. matrimonii.)

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  His theory is speculative, suggesting that when people migrated to northern Europe they were faced with the problem of keeping up a body temperature that was used to a warmer climate. A mutation that increased the efficiency of the sympathetic nervous system and upped the level of norepinephrine (one of the major neurotransmitters) would have also raised their body temperature and offered a survival advantage. Unfortunately, it would also have left them with a more reactive nervous system and a more timorous temperament. Where does the pigment come in? High levels of norepinephrine can inhibit the production of melanin in the iris and can increase the level of circulating glucosteroids that can inhibit melanin production as well. So blond hair and blue eyes and shyness may be a common biological package. This may help explain the purity and innocence of the standard image of the blonde. Whether it explains the appeal of blondes to men, we can only speculate. Good Hair, Bad Hair When African-American models such as Naomi Campbell or entertainers such as Tina Turner wear blond hair, some people criticize them for trying to look like Caucasians in order to succeed, or accuse them of having internalized a Caucasian standard of beauty. Drag queen RuPaul waves the criticism away: “When I put on a blond wig, I am not selling out my blackness. Wearing a blond wig is not going to make me white. I’m not going to pass as white, and I am not trying to. The truth about the blond wig is so simple. It really pops. I want to create outrageous sensation, and blond hair against brown skin is a gorgeous outrageous combination.” Basketball star Dennis Rodman is not trying to look like a white person any more than his former lover Madonna is trying to erase her Italian ethnic identity when they each bleached their dark hair blond. But hair is a politicized issue for African-American women, and the decision whether to leave hair natural and wear it in an Afro, or dreadlocks or cornrows, or to straighten it is the source of much debate. Until the 1960s, most African-American men and women straightened their hair, and seventy-five percent of African-American women still process their hair with straightening combs and chemical relaxers. Only recently have African-American women had a choice of natural styles if they wanted long hair. Cornrows and dreadlocks were not commonly seen. Now they are so accepted that they’ve crossed over and white blond women cornrow their hair, and young white guys with trust funds wear their hair in dreadlocks; in the ski towns of Colorado where they spend their time, they are known as trustafarians.

• From Little Women (1868)

  I never thought of asking leave, when you have always told me to do as I liked. I never tried it before, and hang me if I ever do again!" added John, with an aggrieved air. "I should hope not! Take him away at once. I can't see him, and there isn't any dinner." "Well, I like that! Where's the beef and vegetables I sent home, and the pudding you promised?" cried John, rushing to the larder. "I hadn't time to cook anything. I meant to dine at Mother's. I'm sorry, but I was so busy," and Meg's tears began again. John was a mild man, but he was human, and after a long day's work to come home tired, hungry, and hopeful, to find a chaotic house, an empty table, and a cross wife was not exactly conducive to repose of mind or manner. He restrained himself however, and the little squall would have blown over, but for one unlucky word. "It's a scrape, I acknowledge, but if you will lend a hand, we'll pull through and have a good time yet. Don't cry, dear, but just exert yourself a bit, and fix us up something to eat. We're both as hungry as hunters, so we shan't mind what it is. Give us the cold meat, and bread and cheese. We won't ask for jelly." He meant it to be a good-natured joke, but that one word sealed his fate. Meg thought it was too cruel to hint about her sad failure, and the last atom of patience vanished as he spoke. "You must get yourself out of the scrape as you can. I'm too used up to 'exert' myself for anyone. It's like a man to propose a bone and vulgar bread and cheese for company. I won't have anything of the sort in my house. Take that Scott up to Mother's, and tell him I'm away, sick, dead, anything. I won't see him, and you two can laugh at me and my jelly as much as you like. You won't have anything else here." and having delivered her defiance all on one breath, Meg cast away her pinafore and precipitately left the field to bemoan herself in her own room. What those two creatures did in her absence, she never knew, but Mr. Scott was not taken 'up to Mother's', and when Meg descended, after they had strolled away together, she found traces of a promiscuous lunch which filled her with horror. Lotty reported that they had eaten "a much, and greatly laughed, and the master bid her throw away all the sweet stuff, and hide the pots." Meg longed to go and tell Mother, but a sense of shame at her own short-comings, of loyalty to John, "who might be cruel, but nobody should know it," restrained her, and after a summary cleaning up, she dressed herself prettily, and sat down to wait for John to come and be forgiven.

• From Little Women (1868)

  For the first time in her life she had been struck, and the disgrace, in her eyes, was as deep as if he had knocked her down. "You will now stand on the platform till recess," said Mr. Davis, resolved to do the thing thoroughly, since he had begun. That was dreadful. It would have been bad enough to go to her seat, and see the pitying faces of her friends, or the satisfied ones of her few enemies, but to face the whole school, with that shame fresh upon her, seemed impossible, and for a second she felt as if she could only drop down where she stood, and break her heart with crying. A bitter sense of wrong and the thought of Jenny Snow helped her to bear it, and, taking the ignominious place, she fixed her eyes on the stove funnel above what now seemed a sea of faces, and stood there, so motionless and white that the girls found it hard to study with that pathetic figure before them. During the fifteen minutes that followed, the proud and sensitive little girl suffered a shame and pain which she never forgot. To others it might seem a ludicrous or trivial affair, but to her it was a hard experience, for during the twelve years of her life she had been governed by love alone, and a blow of that sort had never touched her before. The smart of her hand and the ache of her heart were forgotten in the sting of the thought, "I shall have to tell at home, and they will be so disappointed in me!" The fifteen minutes seemed an hour, but they came to an end at last, and the word 'Recess!' had never seemed so welcome to her before. "You can go, Miss March," said Mr. Davis, looking, as he felt, uncomfortable. He did not soon forget the reproachful glance Amy gave him, as she went, without a word to anyone, straight into the anteroom, snatched her things, and left the place "forever," as she passionately declared to herself. She was in a sad state when she got home, and when the older girls arrived, some time later, an indignation meeting was held at once. Mrs. March did not say much but looked disturbed, and comforted her afflicted little daughter in her tenderest manner. Meg bathed the insulted hand with glycerine and tears, Beth felt that even her beloved kittens would fail as a balm for griefs like this, Jo wrathfully proposed that Mr. Davis be arrested without delay, and Hannah shook her fist at the 'villain' and pounded potatoes for dinner as if she had him under her pestle. No notice was taken of Amy's flight, except by her mates, but the sharp-eyed demoiselles discovered that Mr. Davis was quite benignant in the afternoon, also unusually nervous.

• From Little Women (1868)

  When people do one mean thing they are very likely to do another," observed Jo in a disgusted tone. "Didn't Hayes give you the best out of our gardens? I told him to." "I didn't know that, he forgot, I suppose, and, as your grandpa was poorly, I didn't like to worry him by asking, though I did want some." "Now, Jo, how could you think there was any need of asking? They are just as much yours as mine. Don't we always go halves in everything?" began Laurie, in the tone that always made Jo turn thorny. "Gracious, I hope not! Half of some of your things wouldn't suit me at all. But we mustn't stand philandering here. I've got to help Amy, so you go and make yourself splendid, and if you'll be so very kind as to let Hayes take a few nice flowers up to the Hall, I'll bless you forever." "Couldn't you do it now?" asked Laurie, so suggestively that Jo shut the gate in his face with inhospitable haste, and called through the bars, "Go away, Teddy, I'm busy." Thanks to the conspirators, the tables were turned that night, for Hayes sent up a wilderness of flowers, with a lovely basket arranged in his best manner for a centerpiece. Then the March family turned out en masse, and Jo exerted herself to some purpose, for people not only came, but stayed, laughing at her nonsense, admiring Amy's taste, and apparently enjoying themselves very much. Laurie and his friends gallantly threw themselves into the breach, bought up the bouquets, encamped before the table, and made that corner the liveliest spot in the room. Amy was in her element now, and out of gratitude, if nothing more, was as spritely and gracious as possible, coming to the conclusion, about that time, that virtue was its own reward, after all. Jo behaved herself with exemplary propriety, and when Amy was happily surrounded by her guard of honor, Jo circulated about the Hall, picking up various bits of gossip, which enlightened her upon the subject of the Chester change of base. She reproached herself for her share of the ill feeling and resolved to exonerate Amy as soon as possible. She also discovered what Amy had done about the things in the morning, and considered her a model of magnanimity. As she passed the art table, she glanced over it for her sister's things, but saw no sign of them. "Tucked away out of sight, I dare say," thought Jo, who could forgive her own wrongs, but hotly resented any insult offered her family. "Good evening, Miss Jo. How does Amy get on?" asked May with a conciliatory air, for she wanted to show that she also could be generous. "She has sold everything she had that was worth selling, and now she is enjoying herself.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  He has had time, too, long before he came to Paris, to reflect on the absolute and personally expensive futility of taking any one of his countrymen to task for his status in America, or of hoping to convey to them any of his experience. The American Negro and white do not, therefore, discuss the past, except in considerately guarded snatches. Both are quite willing, and indeed quite wise, to remark instead the considerably overrated impressiveness of the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower has naturally long since ceased to divert the French, who consider that all Negroes arrive from America, trumpet-laden and twinkle-toed, bearing scars so unutterably painful that all of the glories of the French Republic may not suffice to heal them. This indignant generosity poses problems of its own, which, language and custom being what they are, are not so easily averted. The European tends to avoid the really monumental confusion which might result from an attempt to apprehend the relationship of the forty-eight states to one another, clinging instead to such information as is afforded by radio, press, and film, to anecdotes considered to be illustrative of American life, and to the myth that we have ourselves perpetuated. The result, in conversation, is rather like seeing one’s back yard reproduced with extreme fidelity, but in such a perspective that it becomes a place which one has never seen or visited, which never has existed, and which never can exist. The Negro is forced to say “Yes” to many a difficult question, and yet to deny the conclusion to which his answers seem to point. His past, he now realizes, has not been simply a series of ropes and bonfires and humiliations, but something vastly more complex, which, as he thinks painfully, “It was much worse than that,” was also, he irrationally feels, something much better. As it is useless to excoriate his countrymen, it is galling now to be pitied as a victim, to accept this ready sympathy which is limited only by its failure to accept him as an American. He finds himself involved, in another language, in the same old battle: the battle for his own identity. To accept the reality of his being an American becomes a matter involving his integrity and his greatest hopes, for only by accepting this reality can be hope to make articulate to himself or to others the uniqueness of his experience, and to set free the spirit so long anonymous and caged.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  It’s my hurt, my pain, and who are you to take it from me? I don’t need rescuing, I don’t need pity, I don’t need opinions, I need fucking—and maybe a nice little spanking for indulging my anger. I have always embraced David Copperfield’s challenge to be the heroine of my own life. I just always thought it would involve great public deeds or heart-wrenching sacrifices, but no, it’s not like that at all. When I suck his cock and he fucks me in the ass, I am that heroine. It is the deep and sure knowledge that finally, finally, I have really loved a man with no agenda except to love. After my daddy, that is miracle indeed. He has unwound my wound. My ass began life as the tiny pale recipient of Daddy’s angry hand. It was the place of shame, the site of humiliation, the area to hide from The Hand. It received the proof of my shameful badness, my seemingly unavoidable wrongness. I was Bad and I was Punished. And now that same ass—older but wiser—is the coveted arena of a lover’s pleasure where I am naughty and rewarded. And so my ass remains the strongest point of contact with the most important men in my life. It holds my deepest and oldest emotional nerve endings. Is there a direct connection between getting spanked on the bottom, as I was as a child, and my inclination to being anally penetrated? Possibly. If every father who spanked his little girl thought he might be creating a hungry little sodomite, well, that might be a deterrent. Being sodomized now, by choice, reconciles this injury with a scenario of the dominant male and the obedient little girl. Instead of rejection and criticism, I am told, “Good girl, good girl.” The nastier I am and the better I suck his cock, the better I am, until I’m the goodest little girl in the world. I am finally loved. The relief it brings me is profound. I, with my total submission, in fact wield a great healing power: the more I submit the more excited he gets, until I enter the deepest phase of surrender and he comes. He only comes when I’ve given it up. It takes a lot of surrender, discipline, and love to let a man fuck your ass hard enough, long enough, deep enough, and fast enough to shoot. His orgasm is my victory over my lesser self, over the pain of my anger. It fills the hole; I’m finally whole. #162 Owwww! My dad just left after a lovely friendly visit of a week, and three hours later I was doubled over in literal gut-wrenching pain lasting a solid twenty-four hours. Like I’d been punched in the stomach, like I’d rewound in one hour 161 unwinding ass fucks. So the only logical thing to do was go for #162. Jesus, that hurt.

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

  I added that though I liked men very much, and had often been in love, men did not seem to see me as female. They either looked through me with an indifference that is almost comical or saw me as a dear old pal— “one of the boys.” Throughout our relationship, one of my former lovers, who was not English, persistently used the masculine form of the local endearment—as it were, caro instead of cara. Now that I am older, I no longer expect male attention, and as I explained that evening to my gay friends, the problem has been compounded by the fact that I have enjoyed some success and have money, which men of my generation sometimes find difficult. “Sounds good to me!” said our waiter. When I wrote Beginning the World, I did try to chronicle some of my early sorties into the world of love. Writing about these relationships was a lowering experience for me, and the result must have been even more demoralizing for my readers. I see no reason to dwell on these episodes here, because none of them developed into anything significant. Like my failed thesis, they were doors slammed in my face, precluding me from a certain way of life and forcing me into another direction. Just as I was prevented from becoming an academic, so too I have never been able to achieve a normal domestic existence, and this, like my epilepsy, has also ensured that I have remained an outsider in a society in which coupledom is the norm. Nevertheless, I do speculate on the reasons for my lamentable failure with men. It is odd to be so inept at something that most people appear to manage naturally. I have always been reluctant to blame the convent for this since I am the exception rather than the rule: most former nuns seem to find partners quite quickly after leaving the religious life. Even Rebecca, who became so ill in the convent, is now happily married. But we all respond to things in different ways, and it may be that a touch of frost entered my soul during those years. The constant and abrasive rebuffs, which we all experienced as a matter of course during the novitiate, may have made me chronically unconfident of my ability to inspire love. The distrust of my wretched “sensitivity,” which was so carefully cultivated by some of my superiors, and my consequent habit of repressing strong feeling may have left me emotionally impaired.

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

  Will we say, ‘She’s a slave’—who would believe that once they’ve seen her?” The man who buys her immediately perceives her true status. “It is impossible for anybody who is not free by nature to be beautiful.” In the Ephesian Tale, Anthia’s master gives her to a fellow slave, a goatherd, but she manages to convince him to pity her “good birth.” When Leucippe is enslaved in Ephesus, she throws herself at the feet of her mistress, Melite, who instantly recognized, despite her tattered appearance, that the girl was not really a slave. “Even among such travails your beauty proclaims your good birth.” In The Ethiopian Tale, status is such an objective quality that, after a battle, the victors ransom the free captives and keep the slaves in slavery! 11 Because the heroine’s identity partakes in the mysterious essence of her freedom, to lose that freedom would be a sort of death. The romantic heroine must be, volubly, willing to die. Callirhoe would expressly rather be dead than be a slave. Anthia tells the slave about to sell her, “Just kill me yourself.” Slavery, and with it presumptive sexual shame, is a sort of social death. For the heroine to lose her physical purity would be, in effect, to cease to exist. The sentiment receives arch expression in The Ethiopian Tale. The heroine, Charicleia, reflects on her willingness to commit suicide rather than experience defloration. “If it is a death achieved without violation, sweet will be my end … chastity is a glorious winding sheet.” The line between honor and shame, freedom and slavery, chastity and violation, was considered a threshold between life and death. This conception fuels one of the more stunning tropes of the romance, the apparent death and resurrection of the heroine. Clitophon repeatedly believes that Leucippe has suffered a gruesome death, but each time she is “reborn,” in that she reappears in the story unharmed—alive and virginal. 12 Characterization in the romance is based on sharply drawn types. In the social logic that assigns meaning to each role, slavery is encoded as the opposite of the heroine. The logic is often exposed in highly contrived judicial dramas, which are a stock element of the genre. The civil law in the Greek romance is like the backdrop of the urbanized Mediterranean: recognizable, slightly irreal, and bent to suit the author’s purposes as needed. The law is an expression of a sort of universal social grammar. A character in Chariton’s romance, for instance, defended himself against charges of adultery by alleging that Callirhoe was a slave: “The law of adultery does not protect slaves.” The trial scene in Leucippe and Clitophon is an elaborately rendered judicial set piece. The law, especially as it bears on sexual rights and prohibitions, is a cipher for the social system.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Today, to be sure, we know that the Negro is not biologically or mentally inferior; there is no truth in those rumors of his body odor or his incorrigible sexuality; or no more truth than can be easily explained or even defended by the social sciences. Yet, in our most recent war, his blood was segregated as was, for the most part, his person. Up to today we are set at a division, so that he may not marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may he—for the most part—eat at our tables or live in our houses. Moreover, those who do, do so at the grave expense of a double alienation: from their own people, whose fabled attributes they must either deny or, worse, cheapen and bring to market; from us, for we require of them, when we accept them, that they at once cease to be Negroes and yet not fail to remember what being a Negro means—to remember, that is, what it means to us. The threshold of insult is higher or lower, according to the people involved, from the bootblack in Atlanta to the celebrity in New York. One must travel very far, among saints with nothing to gain or outcasts with nothing to lose, to find a place where it does not matter—and perhaps a word or a gesture or simply a silence will testify that it matters even there. For it means something to be a Negro, after all, as it means something to have been born in Ireland or in China, to live where one sees space and sky or to live where one sees nothing but rubble or nothing but high buildings. We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key—could we but find it—to all that we later become. What it means to be a Negro is a good deal more than this essay can discover; what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead, their places taken by a group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed, who are never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton or tobacco field or in any but the most modern of kitchens. There are others who remain, in our odd idiom, “underprivileged”; some are bitter and these come to grief; some are unhappy, but, continually presented with the evidence of a better day soon to come, are speedily becoming less so. Most of them care nothing whatever about race.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I don’t remember anything after that moment, not how I felt, or what happened next—my mother probably washed my hair. But the quest for my lost dignity has become a lifelong obsession, a relentless search for the face beneath the banana. It’s a face I’ve never seen. I was, in effect, erased from my own existence. It was the birth of my shame. And my rage. This unfinished crusade has somehow led me here, to an obsession with an act of voluntary, disciplinary action that restores me to a sanity lost so long ago I can’t remember it. I still love to control my food intake. And I have grown into a “tin” woman. A woman who has learned to embrace her terror of humiliation by choosing and desiring what to many is the ultimate act of humiliation: anal penetration. The weapon has become an instrument of pleasure in my adult world, and I am hell-bent on taking those last few inches of cock down my throat and up my ass. To this day, however, I don’t finish a single banana without pulverizing it first in the blender . Sometimes I wonder if the appeal of being ass-fucked, contrary to appearances, is that you can indulge in the naughty sensation of shitting on a man. When you open your ass enough to be fucked without pain, the sensation achieved, and then enjoyed, is that your bowels are open and you could be shitting on the cock that has been so bold as to enter. As such, perhaps being sodomized could be viewed as my answer to the banana, the ultimate act of revenge. Out of the world of my bedroom, however, I fear that I will always be a little girl with banana dripping off her face, unable to forget that at any moment I am under the threat of humiliation from someone I love. The more I love, the greater the threat. When I am deprived by A-Man’s absence or the possibility of his loss, the threat of real humiliation, unchosen humiliation, lurks nearby like a predator awaiting its prey. The waiting is agony and the perceptions of humiliation multiply like a virus. They become so powerful that I experience them as real and endure the same annihilation of identity my father accomplished wielding a half-peeled piece of fruit. #291 As we approach year three, we approach three hundred ass-fucks. I love symmetry. After eight days without his cock in my ass, I’m ready to be certified. Insane from deprivation. We arrange a Power Hour and a Half. Unusually, I want to talk and I tell him of my pending insanity. I suggest to him that I am fully aware that he is not my answer (though my ass is convinced that he is). He concurs enthusiastically. “I am definitely not the answer,” he says. “I’m the question.” I immediately envisioned his cock entering my little asshole, his question firmly planted in the center of my being.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I don’t remember anything after that moment, not how I felt, or what happened next—my mother probably washed my hair. But the quest for my lost dignity has become a lifelong obsession, a relentless search for the face beneath the banana. It’s a face I’ve never seen. I was, in effect, erased from my own existence. It was the birth of my shame. And my rage. This unfinished crusade has somehow led me here, to an obsession with an act of voluntary, disciplinary action that restores me to a sanity lost so long ago I can’t remember it. I still love to control my food intake. And I have grown into a “tin” woman. A woman who has learned to embrace her terror of humiliation by choosing and desiring what to many is the ultimate act of humiliation: anal penetration. The weapon has become an instrument of pleasure in my adult world, and I am hell-bent on taking those last few inches of cock down my throat and up my ass. To this day, however, I don’t finish a single banana without pulverizing it first in the blender. Sometimes I wonder if the appeal of being ass-fucked, contrary to appearances, is that you can indulge in the naughty sensation of shitting on a man. When you open your ass enough to be fucked without pain, the sensation achieved, and then enjoyed, is that your bowels are open and you could be shitting on the cock that has been so bold as to enter. As such, perhaps being sodomized could be viewed as my answer to the banana, the ultimate act of revenge. Out of the world of my bedroom, however, I fear that I will always be a little girl with banana dripping off her face, unable to forget that at any moment I am under the threat of humiliation from someone I love. The more I love, the greater the threat. When I am deprived by A-Man’s absence or the possibility of his loss, the threat of real humiliation, unchosen humiliation, lurks nearby like a predator awaiting its prey. The waiting is agony and the perceptions of humiliation multiply like a virus. They become so powerful that I experience them as real and endure the same annihilation of identity my father accomplished wielding a half-peeled piece of fruit. #291 As we approach year three, we approach three hundred ass-fucks. I love symmetry. After eight days without his cock in my ass, I’m ready to be certified. Insane from deprivation. We arrange a Power Hour and a Half. Unusually, I want to talk and I tell him of my pending insanity. I suggest to him that I am fully aware that he is not my answer (though my ass is convinced that he is). He concurs enthusiastically. “I am definitely not the answer,” he says. “I’m the question.”

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  But I wanted, just as she had, confirmation. My sadism (to her) and my masochism (to myself) were—perhaps more than at any other point in my life—each struggling for dominance. Her big brown eyes filled with tears and she murmured, “I try not to.” And in that moment, all my desperate attempts to separate myself from her dissolved. Unlike her, I was too proud to admit to jealousy or let her see my grief, but they were both there, like hers. No longer different from me, she was me, and I suddenly recognized what I had been searching for all my life—the face beneath the banana, the face of a little girl crushed and humiliated by love. My tears were rolling down her cheeks. And it was horrid. For weeks afterwards, I was haunted by that reflection of myself that I had never seen before. But then the most astonishing realization gradually entered my consciousness. The brunette was, just as I had been, incapacitated, unable to act on her own behalf; she was not capable—not yet, anyway—of leaving her own pain behind her. But I was no longer incapable. I could make the decision for both of us, I could take action, because now I had the strength to leave the triangle, as I never could before. It was a kind of miracle. What a strange gift this woman gave me, the ability to accomplish what all my spiritual searching, ultimately, could not—the ability to break the chain of pain, right here, right now. Not only for me, but for my fragile four-year-old self. She did, after all, live with me still. It was time to dry her face and take her home. AFTER ACCOUNTING 4/3/3/3/3/3/3/1/2/0/0/0/0/0/2/0/0/0/0/3/2/1/2/1/2/1/1/0/0/0/1/1/2/3/1/2/2/3/1/1/0/0/0/0/0 The above is an accounting of anal penetrations per week for year three. All the zeros represent one of us being out of town. Except the last five. Number 298 was our last. The walls I had so carefully constructed around our love had split wide open. The world was in, and we were over. I sent A- Man away. It was Time. Yes, it was that sudden. That unexpected. Totally unplanned. Time to end the pain, time to end the beauty: they had become inseparable, a sadomasochistic adagio. So the search for the end of my end ended as abruptly as it had begun three years before. A symmetry of sorts. A single, swift, clean cut. No negotiations, no begging, no manipulations, no blame. After #298—it was again a Friday afternoon—it was over with A-Man while it was still hot as a volcano and beautiful as art. Try that for courage. Though for me, it wasn’t courage at all, it was necessity. I never would have had the courage to send him away. Curious how another woman was always the catalyst for him and me: the Pre-Raphaelite had joined us and, now, the mousy brunette separated us. I must have much unfinished business with women, with my mother.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Hours and hours and hours and hours in front of a mirror. As a little girl, as a serious student, and then as a professional adult in both classes and rehearsals, I learned that every arch of the foot, every glance of the eye, every angle of the arm, every turn of the leg, every smile, every grimace, every strain is simultaneously performed and witnessed by one’s self, that nebulous entity called consciousness. One becomes both subject and object. I have calculated that in twenty-five years of dancing I spent approximately eighteen hundred hours performing in front of a live audience—and eighteen thousand hours practicing in front of the huge floor-to-ceiling mirrors that are a principal feature of every dance studio. This relentless and intense daily exposure has an acute effect on one’s so-called self-image. Contrary to popular supposition, it is not narcissism or vanity that is fostered by so much time spent scrutinizing oneself. Quite the opposite. We watch ourselves with eyes trained to be critical, competitive, and comparative. Yes, every now and then, the view is pleasing, beautiful, something worth looking at. But far more often it is the image of an imperfection—of body, of line, of face, of outfit, of movement. Frequently, this single flaw actually seems to obliterate all one’s efforts, even one’s entire existence. The mirror shows the impossibility of perfection. And thus a curious intimacy was born: I was constantly shaping, changing, improving, and restyling myself, while the mirror—cold and constant—sat in judgment, like God. The mirror was now jailer and savior, the source of self-contempt and yet the only source of affirmation. I was humbled before the mighty looking glass with its illusion of three dimensions in two. I submitted completely. While God felt distant, the authority of the mirror over me felt absolute. I eventually realized that, like Dorian Gray, I had relinquished my entire perception of myself to my reflection. The troublesome result of this submission to what I saw—me, but flipped—was that once onstage, where the orchestra pit and black hole of an audience replaced my own image in the mirror, I could not even feel my body move. I existed solely in the mirror; onstage I was my own shadow, a vapor. Only the next morning, back at the barre, could I find myself in the mirror and once again confirm my existence. At the age of twenty-three, while still dancing, I attempted to marry God. It was all very sudden. His father was a minister and he was a believer, and so my searching, frustrated atheist self tried to get religion the only way she could: by marrying into the family. My husband was the first man who reflected back to me an image of myself preferable to the one in the mirror. Thus I quickly transferred my dependence to his point of view. Now I existed, but differently. He adored what he saw and told me all about it; it was a lovely thing.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Funny—well, not really—how I began to lose the ability to receive pleasure directly from A-Man but had to siphon it through another woman, his other woman. So sexy in bed, so catastrophic out of bed. And thus I erected yet another Freudian triangle as I fantasized pulling her into bed with us so I could control what I couldn’t control. What I could never control: my dignity in the face of someone I adore. Losing it was the first thing I ever learned to fear; the cause of all my fear. My Waterloo in love. I am four years old. I am a very thin and little girl. So thin and little that my mother actually takes me to the doctor to make sure I’m healthy. After examining me, he allays my mother’s fears with one statement that quickly becomes family lore. “She is just ‘tin’ child!” he declares, in his thick German accent. He suggests I be given more exercise to stimulate my tiny appetite. So I am sent to my first ballet class. After school one day, a short while later, I ask my mother for a banana. (I now don’t remember particularly liking bananas—I liked fish sticks and macaroni with ketchup—but on this particular day I wanted a banana.) The request is refused on two counts. One: we don’t eat between meals in this house. Two: you won’t eat your dinner if you eat a banana now. But I am headstrong in my desire and beg so hard that I am finally handed a large, bright yellow banana. It is longer than my face. Victory. I go to the landing at the top of our staircase and look out the little picture window with my banana in hand. I peel down the top an inch or two and take a couple of bites. And stop. That’s all I want. My father, having witnessed the battle with my mother in the kitchen, comes up the stairs and tells me I had better finish that banana since I had asked for it. I know my father means what he says. Ten minutes later, he passes me and the banana again on the landing. The few inches of peel are now drooping around the few inches I have eaten, but the rest remains unpeeled, untouched. Again I am warned that I had better eat that damn banana, waste is not allowed in this household: you ask for it, you eat it. Daddy is very serious. But being such headstrong little girl, I just will not eat the rest of that banana. Now comes the lesson. As my mother looks on apprehensively—angry eruptions are frequent in our house—my father comes up to the landing, grabs the banana, pulls off the peel, and squashes it all over my face, rubbing the excess into my hair. As I stand there, frozen, I hear my mother cry out from the bottom of the stairs, “Don’t, don’t, I’ll have to wash her hair!”

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Immediately, however, I was reminded of something even worse: the anxiety of permanence. I had hitched myself to a single flawed human being. What was I thinking? Weekly therapy, where I howled bloody murder, kept me “working” on the “relationship” for more than the usual six weeks. For over a year I tried to be his girlfriend, kicking and screaming every step of the way. I even considered Prozac in this last attempt to be “normal” and “conventional.” Aren’t drugs, after all, how everyone else tolerates monogamy? I hated being the object of a desperate, controlling passion but felt that it was somehow the morally dutiful stance when the man “loved” me. I was finally cured when I found myself in a fetal position on the floor of my bedroom while the Boyfriend put me on hold for a business call. I had humiliated myself beyond recognition. What is wrong with me? The wretched question always beckoning my shame, the shame of the little girl who was deemed “overly sensitive.” But with the Boyfriend I made progress. I stayed long enough to allow the pain to slice right through my mental masochism and discovered the relief on the other side: my sadism. I considered the radical possibility that there might be nothing “wrong” with me. Except perhaps choosing guys who adored me, seduced me, and then couldn’t control their dicks, and therefore had to control me. I’d protest, get upset, and the discussion would be successfully diverted from their penis to my hysteria. Oh, the myriad insecurities, baffling behaviors, addictions, and possessive outbursts that inhabit the man in search of control. There is only one kind of control that really matters. My nice-girl martyrdom over, I turned to its heady antidote, the liberation of tyranny. I would no longer accommodate penis problems—whether they were insecurities about length or width, or issues of control lost and not found. If a damaged dick and his owner threatened to raise their heads in my direction, I would simply move out of their reach, and be on my way. I told the Boyfriend that either we were finished or he could retain me as his mistress—meaning my own mistress. I even wrote down the rules—a parody of a best-selling treatise by a couple of housewives on how to lead a man to the altar. My rules led to slavery instead. THE REAL RULES 1. See each other a maximum of once a week, except in special circumstances and when it’s a mutual decision to do so. A week is defined as Monday through Sunday—hence there can be a Saturday encounter and then a Tuesday encounter but then not until the following Monday, when a new week begins. 2. One encounter is defined as any time spent together with no specific limits on hours, etc.—a late-night horny rendezvous and a weekend away both count equally as one encounter. 3. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on nonmonogamy issue. But when together, completely together—no procurements, flirtations, etc.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Marian asked me to leave them alone. I listened from the living room. My mother argued at first but Marian overwhelmed her. This time, by God, she was going to make my mother see the light. Marian didn’t have all the goods on me, but she had enough to keep her going for a while and she put her heart into it, hitting every note she knew in the song of my malfeasance. It went on and on. I retreated upstairs to the bedroom and waited for my mother, rehearsing answers to the charges Marian had made against me. But when my mother came into the room she said nothing. She sat for a while on the edge of her bed, rubbing her eyes; then, moving slowly, she undressed to her slip and went into the bathroom and drew herself a bath, and lay in the water for a long time as she sometimes did when she got chilled coming home at night in a cold rain. I had my answers ready but there were no questions. After my mother finished her bath she lay down and read, then fixed us dinner and read some more. She turned in early. Answers kept coming to me in the dark, proofs of my blamelessness that I knew to be false but could not stop myself from devising. Dwight drove down that weekend. They spent a lot of time together, and finally my mother told me that Dwight was urging a proposal which she felt bound to consider. He proposed that after Christmas I move up to Chinook and live with him and go to school there. If things worked out, if I made a real effort and got along with him and his kids, she would quit her job and accept his offer of marriage. She did not try to make any of this sound like great news. Instead she spoke as if she saw in this plan a duty which she would be selfish not to acknowledge. But first she wanted my approval. I thought I had no choice, so I gave it. A Whole New Deal____

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

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