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 This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  his hands in front of his mouth and screamed a word I had heard only once, years before, when my father shouted it at a man who had cut him off in traffic. “Yid!” Silver screamed, and again, “Yid!” One day my mother and I went down to Alkai Point to watch a mock naval battle between the Odd Fellows and the Lions Club. This was during Seafair, when the hydroplane races were held. The park overlooked the harbor; we could just make out the figures on the two sailboats throwing water-balloons back and forth and trying to repel each other’s boarding parties. There was a crowd in the park, and whenever one of these boarding parties got thrown back into the water everybody would laugh. My mother was laughing with the rest. She loved to watch men goof around with each other; lifeguards, soldiers in bus stations, fraternity brothers having a car wash. It was a clear day. Hawkers moved through the crowd, selling sun glasses and hats and Seafair souvenirs. Girls were sunning themselves on blankets. The air smelled of coconut oil. Two men holding bottles of beer stood nearby. They kept turning and looking at us. Then one of them walked over, a pair of binoculars swinging from a strap in his hand. He was darkly tanned and wore tennis whites. He had a thin moustache and a crew cut. “Hey, Bub,” he said to me, “want to give these a try?” While he adjusted the strap around my neck and showed me how to focus the lenses, the other man came up and said something to my mother. She answered him, but continued gazing out toward the water with her hand shielding her eyes. I brought the Lions and the Odd Fellows into focus and watched them push each other overboard. They seemed so close I could see their pale bodies and the expressions of fatigue on their faces. Despite the hearty shouts they gave, they climbed the ropes with difficulty and fell back as soon as they met resistance. Each time they hit the water they stayed there a while longer, paddling just enough to keep themselves afloat, looking wearily up at the boats they were supposed to capture. My mother accepted a beer from the man beside her. The one who’d offered me the binoculars sensed my restlessness, maybe even my jealousy. He knelt down beside me and explained the battle as if I were a little kid, but I took the

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

  “Come come,” he said, with a certain sharpness. “Yes, Father.” I bent close to the screen and whispered, “Father, I steal.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What do you steal?” “I steal money, Father. From my mother’s purse when she’s in the shower.” “How long have you been doing this?” I didn’t answer. “Well?” he said. “A week? A year? Two years?” I chose the one in the middle. “A year.” “A year,” he repeated. “That won’t do. You have to stop. Do you intend to stop?” “Yes, Father.” “Honestly, now.” “Honestly, Father.” “All right. Good. What else?” “I’m a backbiter.” “A backbiter?” “I say things about my friends when they’re not around.” “That won’t do either,” he said. “No, Father.” “That certainly won’t do. Your friends will desert you if you persist in this and let me tell you, a life without friends is no life at all.” “Yes, Father.” “Do you sincerely intend to stop?” “Yes, Father.” “Good. Be sure that you do. I tell you this in all seriousness. Anything else?” “I have bad thoughts, Father.” “Yes. Well,” he said, “why don’t we save those for next time. You have enough to work on.” The priest gave me my penance and absolved me. As I left the confessional I heard his own door open and close. Sister James came forward to meet me again, and we waited together as the priest made his way to where we stood. Breathing hoarsely, he steadied himself against a pillar. He laid his other hand on my shoulder. “That was fine,” he said. “Just fine.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You have a fine boy here, Sister James.” She smiled. “So I do, Father. So I do.”

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

  recounted until they became legend. The Time Donny Got Hit in the Wallet. The Time Patrick Had His Shoe Shot Off. A few of the boys came to their senses and dropped out but the rest of us carried on. We did so in a resolutely innocent way, never admitting to ourselves what the real object was: that is, to bring somebody down. Among the trees I achieved absolute vacancy of mind. I had no thought of being hurt or of hurting anyone else, not even as I notched my arrow and pulled it back, intent on some movement in the shadows ahead. I was doing just that one afternoon, drawing my bow, ready to fire as soon as my target showed himself again, when I heard a rustling behind me. I spun around. Sister James had been about to say something. Her mouth was open. She looked at the arrow I was aiming at her, then looked at me. In her presence my thoughtlessness forsook me. I knew exactly what I had been doing. We stood like that for a time. Finally I pointed the arrow at the ground. I unnotched it and started to make some excuse, but she closed her eyes at the sound of my voice and waved her hands as if to shoo away gnats. “Practice is over,” she said. Then she turned and left me there. I WAS SUBJECT to fits of feeling myself unworthy, somehow deeply at fault. It didn’t take much to bring this sensation to life, along with the certainty that everybody but my mother saw through me and did not like what they saw. There was no reason for me to have this feeling. I thought I’d left it back in Florida, together with my fear of fighting and my shyness with girls, but here it was, come to meet me. Sister James had nothing to do with it. She hated talking about sin, and was plainly bored by our obsessive questions about Hell and Purgatory and Limbo. The business with the arrow probably meant nothing to her. To her I was just another boy doing some dumb boyish thing. But I began to feel that she knew all about me, and that a good part of her life was now given over to considering how bad I was. I became furtive around her. I began skipping archery and even some of my catechism classes. There was no immediate way for my mother to find out. We didn’t have a telephone and she never went to church. She thought it was good for me but beside the point for herself, especially now that she was divorced and once again involved with Roy, the man she’d left Florida to get away from. When I could, I ran around with boys from school. But they all came from

• 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 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 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 The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  (1 Cor. 15:5–9) But, of course, if you are “the least of the apostles,” you are still an apostle. And this disagreement over Paul’s apostolic identity derives ultimately from the very different accounts of that inaugural Damascus revelation. THE NABATEAN MISSION Paul told the Galatians that, immediately after his vocational revelation from God and his ecstatic encounter with Christ: “I did not go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus. Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem” (1:17–18). What did Paul do in Arabia for three years? Some scholars suggest that he went to the desert to meditate on and prepare for his missionary vocation. But no prophet acted like that—and certainly not one like Paul. He was called by God and Christ to do something—not to think about doing something. We propose, therefore, that “into Arabia” meant Paul’s immediate obedience to his vocation as Apostle of the Gentiles. It involved, in other words, his first mission—to the Nabatean Arabs, whose capital was at Petra in modern Jordan. Paul passes over this first mission in silence, and Luke never mentions it at all. But as we shall see below, both of them record Paul’s ignominious departure from Damascus at its conclusion. Why was this mission such a disaster? It had nothing to do with theological debates over male circumcision, for example, since Nabatean males were already circumcised. It had to do with very unfortunate timing for a Jewish preacher among Arab listeners. At the end of the 20s, Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, divorced his wife, who was the daughter of Aretas IV, king of the Nabateans, in order to marry the Hasmonean princess Herodias. Aretas, as the insulted father-in-law, first bided his time, then went to war against Antipas in 36 CE and soundly defeated him. Aretas was only saved from severe Roman punishment for disturbing the peace by the death of the emperor Tiberius in March of 37 CE. In other words, at the very time that the Jewish Paul was conducting a mission to convert the Nabateans to Christian Judaism, their king was conducting a war to defeat the Jewish tetrarch Herod Antipas. When, therefore, Aretas acquired Damascus between 37 and 39 CE, Paul’s base for Arabia was now under his control and Paul’s days there were numbered. Paul’s first mission to the Nabatean Gentiles left no traces in our extant texts save, of course, for those Lukan and Pauline versions of his escape from a Damascus controlled by Aretas. We ask you to compare the following two escape accounts very carefully, because they are an absolutely classic example of Paul and Luke having exactly the same information, but very different interpretations. Luke’s version is first, followed by Paul’s: After some time had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him, but their plot became known to Saul.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Moreover, Paul’s letters deal with local matters in these communities, including their questions and conflicts, and so they do not make much sense unless we know the local context in some detail. When we read Paul, we are reading somebody else’s mail—and unless we know the situation being addressed, his letters can be quite opaque. A third reason was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter; namely, passages from letters attributed to Paul endorse slavery, subordinate women, and condemn homosexual behavior. They have been used for much of Christian history to justify systems of oppression. As recently as a hundred and fifty years ago, some Christians used passages from Paul to defend slavery. Howard Thurman, a well-known twentieth-century African American pastor, theologian, and mystic, reported that his mother, a deeply devout Christian, would not read Paul because of the passages on slavery. The subordination of women within the church and society lasted even longer than slavery. Only in the last forty years did most mainline Protestant denominations begin to ordain women as clergy. The Catholic church does not, most conservative Protestant churches do not, and many teach the subordination of wives to husbands. For these positions, passages from Paul’s letters provide the primary justification. And the condemnation of homosexuality continues in many churches. Even within churches in which the attitude toward homosexuality is changing, the change often causes conflict. Thus Paul has been used to support systems of cultural conventions oppressive to more than half of the human race. No wonder slaves, women, gays and lesbians, and those who care about them have often found Paul appalling. In addition, we note a passage from Paul, not mentioned in the Newsweek article, that has been used in a comprehensive way to justify systems of oppression. The full passage is Romans 13:1–7; we quote its well-known opening lines: Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. In the familiar and succinct phrase from an older translation, a portion of the first verse reads, “The powers that be are ordained by God.” For centuries, this passage was used by Christian rulers to legitimate their rule and to demand obedience to it. Ordinary Christians understood it to require political quiescence. We will return to this passage in Chapter 4. For now we note that during World War II, many German Christians used this passage to justify obedience to the Third Reich. Closer to our own time and place, many Christians in this country used it to oppose civil disobedience during the civil rights movement. More recently, a number of well-known evangelical preachers used it to legitimate supporting the American government’s decision to invade Iraq: Christians are to obey their governments, whatever they do.

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

  47 Although the bishops of this period recognized the place of prostitution in secular society and rejected it, they were slow to articulate an alternative social vision, and the residues of more ancient thought occasionally seeped into Christian discourse. Greeks and Romans had long held the idea that prostitution was a social necessity. It is not hard to find expressions of the idea that prostitution was like a safety valve, a safe outlet for male sexual energies. In his early tract On Order, Augustine provided the most lucid statement of prostitution’s necessity that has survived from antiquity. “What could claim to be more filthy and more worthless, more full of shame and defilement, than prostitutes and pimps and other infections of this kind? But take whores out of human affairs, and you will overturn everything because of lusts. Put them in the place of matrons, and you will ruin honor with fallenness and disgrace.” Augustine was no stranger to the world of procured sex, though he was more familiar with the sophisticated side of the flesh trade. He spent over a decade with one concubine, and when forced to dismiss her, by his engagement to a ten-year-old girl of the Roman gentry, he quickly “procured another” companion in the interim. So he had a robust appreciation for the forces that prostitution held in check. If prostitutes were to be removed from society, not just the honor of free women, “everything” would be thrown into confusion. 48 Prostitution for Augustine was a necessary evil. The social order had to make such compromises, to allow virtue to flourish. “[Pimps and prostitutes] represent the most impure part of mankind by their habits and the most vile condition in the laws of order. Are there not in the bodies of living things certain parts that, if you tried to consider only these, you couldn’t stand it? Nevertheless, the order of nature did not wish for things that are necessary to be lacking, but neither did it allow them, as they are dishonorable, to be conspicuous. Still, these imperfections, by holding their place, concede the better part to their superiors.” Matrons enjoyed their place in society because prostitutes deflected dangerous lusts away from honorable women. An unfortunate passage, with a long future, it was no more than the meeting point of Augustinian pessimism and perfectly traditional ideology. 49 If prostitution was an obstacle to Christianization, marriage was an opportunity for reformist ambitions. Chrysostom’s sermons reveal an ecclesiastical ambition to control the rituals of marriage as a means of gaining control over the meaning of marriage. It is telling that, across late antiquity, the ancient deductio in domum, a festive march from the bride’s house to the groom’s, remained the ordinary marriage ritual.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  It is, as a standard Greek lexicon explains, “‘something pointed’ such as a ‘(pointed) stake,’ then something that causes serious annoyances, thorn, splinter, etc., specifically of an injurious foreign body.” Second, Paul makes a connection between his ecstatic (literally, “standing out of the body”) experiences and that “thorn/stake in the flesh.” He begins by describing “visions and revelations of the Lord” when he was “caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body” and was permitted to hear “things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat” (12:1–3). He continues: Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. ” (12:7–9) We italicized “weakness” and “flesh” there in 2 Corinthians 12:7–9 to link it with those same words italicized above in Galatians 4:13. We think, therefore, that Paul had some recurrent illness that may have precipitated or accompanied ecstatic experience. But what was that humbling illness? Our answer depends on another, earlier book by William Mitchell Ramsay, his St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen . He combined Galatians 4:13 with 2 Corinthians 12:7 and proposed that Paul’s recurring illness “was a species of chronic malaria fever,” which tends to recur in very distressing and prostrating paroxysms, whenever one’s energies are taxed for a great effort. Such an attack is for the time absolutely incapacitating: the sufferer can only lie and feel himself a shaking and helpless weakling, when he ought to be at work. He feels a contempt and loathing for self, and believes that others feel equal contempt and loathing. 2 He adds, as collaborating evidence for his diagnosis, that Paul’s phrase “a stake in the flesh”—that is his translation of skolops —“is the peculiar headache which accompanies the paroxysms [of chronic malarial fever]: within my experience several persons, innocent of Pauline theorizing, have described it as ‘like a red-hot bar thrust through the forehead.’” 3 We propose, following Ramsay, that Paul had contracted malaria during his youth at Tarsus from a climate that easily produced the chills and fevers, the uncontrollable shivering and profuse sweating, the severe headache, nausea, and vomiting of chronic malarial fever. The “thorn or stake in the flesh” may have been Tarsus’s most permanent mark on Paul. Only Luke’s Acts gives us that important information about Tarsus as Paul’s birthplace. But the Luke of the two-volume work that tradition calls the Gospel According to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles is not the same “Luke” mentioned by Paul in Philemon 24 or by post-Pauline writers in Colossians 4:14 (“the beloved physician”) and 2 Timothy 4:11.

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

  There was only the city—symbol of sin and civilization—and the ascetic who entered it as an outsider. And unlike the chaste girls of romance whose corporal integrity is miraculously preserved in the brothel, Thais has, quite flagrantly, long since lost her physical purity. 56 When Serapion meets Thais, he sees a bed and out of shame inquires about finding another, less visible place for their assignation. She assures him that the bed is secluded and adds, “If it is God you fear, the one who knows our secrets will see us wherever we go.” The monk is struck and asks if she knows of God. She confesses that she was baptized as a child but she never learned Christian teaching. She fell at the monk’s feet. “I know there is repentance for sinners, but by my wickedness I have exceeded the measure of forgiveness which can be offered.” He assures her that there is salvation, even for her. She gathered her worldly wealth and burned it “in the middle of the city.” Thais symbolizes a society superficially baptized but not reordered to strive for God—a reasonable likeness of the post-Theodosian world. 57 As in the primitive version of the tale, Serapion leads the penitent prostitute to a female monastery. Thais is immured in a small cell with a hole just wide enough for food to be passed in. But in the refined version, the bare details of her enclosure and penance have become a grotesque portrait of human debasement. The cell is dark. Serapion seals it with lead himself. When Thais asks him where she is to discharge her bodily necessities, he answers, “Do what you must in the cell. You have luxuriated in sweet oils and perfumes, now let a fetid stench work its good on you.” She spent three years in darkness, as if in a tomb. Serapion went to Anthony—the father of Egyptian monasticism, who has been invited into this dark spiritual antiromance—to ask about the poor woman. Anthony’s disciple, Paul, dreams of a heavenly bed, attended by three virgins carrying lamps, with a crown upon it. A voice tells him that the bed is for Thais, the whore. Serapion goes to tell her that she is forgiven, and he finds her body so wasted away from penance that her skeleton is visible through her skin. Just days after coming out of her cell, Thais dies. 58 The story of Thais is dominated by its heroine’s debasement.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Maybe you were just scared.” “Scared isn’t a good excuse!” she shouted into the couch. “Scared is the excuse everyone has always used!” I didn’t know who “everyone” was, or when “always” was, and as much as I wanted to understand her ambiguities, the slyness was growing annoying. “Why are you upset about this now? ” “It’s not just that. It’s everything. But I told the Colonel in the car.” She sniffled but seemed done with the sobs. “While you were sleeping in the back. And he said he’d never let me out of his sight during pranks. That he couldn’t trust me on my own. And I don’t blame him. I don’t even trust me.” “It took guts to tell him,” I said. “I have guts, just not when it counts. Will you—um,” and she sat up straight and then moved toward me, and I raised my arm as she collapsed into my skinny chest and cried. I felt bad for her, but she’d done it to herself. She didn’t have to rat. “I don’t want to upset you, but maybe you just need to tell us all why you told on Marya. Were you scared of going home or something?” She pulled away from me and gave me a Look of Doom that would have made the Eagle proud, and I felt like she hated me or hated my question or both, and then she looked away, out the window, toward the soccer field, and said, “There’s no home.” “Well, you have a family,” I backpedaled. She’d talked to me about her mom just that morning. How could the girl who told that joke three hours before become a sobbing mess? Still staring at me, she said, “I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything. I still fuck up.” “Okay,” I told her. “It’s okay.” I didn’t even know what she was talking about anymore. One vague notion after another. “Don’t you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.” And there was something to that, truth be told. christmas WE ALL WENT HOME for Christmas break—even purportedly homeless Alaska. I got a nice watch and a new wallet—“grown-up gifts,” my dad called them. But mostly I just studied for those two weeks. Christmas vacation wasn’t really a vacation, on account of how it was our last chance to study for exams, which started the day after we got back. I focused on precalc and biology, the two classes that most deeply threatened my goal of a 3.4 GPA. I wish I could say I was in it for the thrill of learning, but mostly I was in it for the thrill of getting into a worthwhile college. So, yeah, I spent a lot of my time at home studying math and memorizing French vocab, just like I had before Culver Creek.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  In the jargon of rehab, "bottoming out" is mentioned frequently and annoyingly—often as a prerequisite to treatment. When life is at least as unbearable with drugs as without, when the thought of a fat stack of glassine envelopes or an eight-ball promises only more misery, some people make that hard choice to tally up the betrayals and the wreckage and keep living. It's not easy. Many—if not most—fail. Most times, you really have to do something terribly shameful, experience awfulness in previously unimagined degrees, before you see a life without drugs as a preferred, even necessary option. Jail, in Mr. Downey's case, doesn't seem to have been enough. Maybe Ally McBeal will be. FOOD TERRORISTS Right now, in the streets of Phnom Penh, in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, in scores of Caribbean shantytowns, wherever people are poor and struggling and living with little hope of better lives, you'll also find stray dogs, starved, spavined, limping, and covered with mange. In Southeast Asia, sun bears are hooked up to kidney drips, like living ketchup dispensers, and their bile is drained and collected for traditional Eastern medicine. Rhino horn, bear claw, shark fin—the still living parts of every variety of creature are sought after for their supposedly restorative powers, or as holistic alternatives to Viagra. Thousands upon thousands of unwanted cats and dogs are exterminated every month in American cities, victims of the laziness, irresponsibility, and caprice of a wealthy nation. Yet in San Francisco, our heroic eco-warriors have found a more compelling front line in the struggle against animal cruelty. A supposedly underground group of fanatical animal rights activists has apparently decided that Chef Laurent Manrique's pint-size specialty store, Sonoma Saveurs, must be restrained—by any means necessary—from selling foie gras. To this end, they broke in to the historical adobe structure, spray-painted walls and equipment, destroyed the plumbing with cement, pumped water throughout—thereby damaging two neighboring businesses as well—vandalized Manrique's home, doused his car with acid, and threatened him in phone calls and letters. Most unforgivably, they have sent Manrique a videotape, surreptitiously filmed from his yard, of his wife and two-year-old child in their home, with a letter warning that they were being watched. This is a tactic unworthy of the Mafia. Even the Gambino crime family, to my knowledge, rarely if ever stooped to this. This is the kind of activity favored by Central American death squads and Colombian drug gangs, and it's surprising—no, it's goddamn horrifying—to see it in the touchy-feely heartland of political correctness. But on the other hand, it's illustrative of the utter gutlessness and self-delusion of these yuppified, trustafarian true believers. Arguably complicit—as we all are—in their comfortable T-shirts and leather-free footwear (surely subsidized by the underpaid labor of some faraway dictatorship) they toodle over in their sensibly fuel-efficient cars to Sonoma (not too far from their expensive homes) and destroy the small businesses of victims completely uninvolved in their argument. They terrorize a mother and infant child.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  I have similarly wondered about the feedback-loop relationship between the tradition of funding creative work through sex work, and then the decision to create art publicly about sex work. Is this a capitulation to the kind of writing and art society most likes to extract from women artists? I wonder if there exists a circular internalization of misogyny in this choice: that girls are taught to see their value in sex, so monetize it, thinking they’ve beaten the system—but ultimately their value-through-sex is simply reinforced, so they begin to see their creative value in that vein, too. We might pursue sex work to support an art practice that is allegedly, at first, independent of sex work, but it often becomes inextricably linked to or entirely about it. In other words, by internalizing the idea that all we have to sell is sex, it also happens that what a lot of us end up creating, or creating about, is, in one form or another, sex. moon, though, further critiqued the uneven impact of the demand for authenticity, this time on a Twitter thread: I’m trying to wrap my mind around how fucked up you have to be to be a childless, thin, conventionally attractive student claiming that another sex worker is inauthentic or “posing” because their labor isn’t accessible TO YOU? … Weaponization of identity politics. Hyperfocus on determining authenticity. [Authenticity] as social currency. Social media as performance … For the record, the most prominent & highly followed sex workers who are considered “public figures” on [Twitter] are nonblack women who usually fall into the middle to high income category. Think about that and then ask why an impoverished black SWer/artist has to prove authenticity. moon’s attack on the racist and classist pressures to prove oneself as authentic in order to be seen as a valid discursive contributor, along with their strategic resistance and acquiescence to such pressures on their own terms, is a choreography that disrupts intra-industry demands on poor, part-time, non-professionalized, or non-white sex workers to make their working lives legible to hyper-professionalized, mostly white, high-earning, and full-time sex workers. It also challenges extra-industry demands on these same sex workers to provide trauma porn and autobiographical-erotic fodder to the entertainment industry, the white savior industry, lawmakers, and voyeuristic civilians alike.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  summed up the suburban filtration process as “birds-of-a-feather flocking.” As we have so often seen, the importance of animal stock, and of “breed” generally, remained on the tip of the American tongue when idiomatic distinctions of class identity were being made. 24 In 1951, the Levitts opened their second development, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, after U.S. Steel decided to build its Fairless Works in the area. It attracted steelworkers, as well as a community of construction workers who established a trailer camp. Although little actually separated the two working- class communities—the families were stable and had about the same number of children—the Levittowners felt that their community was a “symbol of middle- class attainment,” while the camp’s residents were labeled “trailer trash.” To expel the trailer families, local officials quickly passed ordinances. Offended local residents dismissed the trailer families as “transients,” saying that they should be “gotten rid of as soon as possible.” One of the arguments marshaled against the trailer enclave will sound familiar: the preservation of property values. The construction workers were deemed trash not because of their class background per se, but because they lived in trailers. It was their homes on wheels that carried the stigma. 25 • • • The trailer occupies an important, if uncertain, place in the American cultural imagination. Representing on the one hand a symbol of untethered freedom, the mobile home simultaneously acquired its reputation as a “tin can,” a small, cheap, confined way of life. When you live in a trailer, you are literally rootless, and privacy disappears. Neighbors see and hear. At their worst, such places have been associated with liberty’s dark side: deviant, dystopian wastelands set on the fringe of the metropolis. Trailers had been controversial since the 1930s. Aside from the sleek streamlined capsules that traverse the open road, these rickety boxes tend to be viewed as eyesores. Almost as soon as they were turned into permanent housing, many were associated with slums built on town dumps. As an object, the trailer is something modern and antimodern, chic and gauche, liberating and suffocating. Unlike the dull but safe middle American suburb, trailer parks contain folks who appear on the way out, not up: retired persons, migrant workers, and the troubled poor. This remains true today.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Despite the protests of her lover, Rita, Theresa requested that she meet with me alone. They were already in couple’s therapy with a woman therapist, working out disagreements about parenting Rita’s daughter from a previous marriage. They also had a variety of other concerns, among them an unwelcome phenomenon known as “lesbian bed death.”9 What little sex they still had was decreasing rapidly after less then two years together. Heated discussions seemed to be getting them nowhere, although they obviously loved each other and had a marvelous closeness and a community of friends. Theresa had recently confided in Rita that fantasies of dominance and submission had always turned her on and how disappointed she was that there appeared to be no room for playing with power in their sexual relationship. She had fully expected Rita to be upset because Rita felt so strongly about equality in all things, including sex. Theresa explained, “I tried to be as diplomatic as possible when I told her I long for the sexy energy when I submit to her or feel her surrender to me. But I wouldn’t dare tell her that I dream of commanding her to get on her knees and lick my pussy, or how much I would love it if she pinned me against the bed with the full weight of her body and called me a slut.” “Why not?” I asked as if I weren’t aware of the controversy dividing lesbians about the relationship between sex and power. “Because dominance and submission is based on heterosexist models that demean women and cheapen sex,” she responded with the most amazing mixture of sarcasm and heartfelt conviction. She was unwilling to discuss this with a woman therapist, especially a lesbian, for fear that she would be scolded. Like her community, she was conflicted and doubted she could risk telling any lesbian about what really turned her on. And because this was the early 1980s, few articulate lesbian voices had yet emerged to call for sexuality to be released from the choking demands of political correctness. Fortunately, the situation has since changed. Although she was outspoken, tough, and assertive, Theresa moved and spoke with feminine grace. One of her complaints about the lesbian community was its insistence that everyone be androgynous—nobody too “butch” or too “femme.” Theresa liked being an outspoken femme and was naturally drawn to butch women like Rita. She found the contrast a turn-on despite worries she was “mimicking heterosexual roles.”10 Lesbians continue to debate the acceptable parameters for sexual fantasy and play, especially within the framework of loving relationships. This question arises for men and women of all sexual orientations: Because so many people are harmed by large and small abuses of power, and because sexualized abuses of power are especially demeaning, is there any room in relationships of mutual respect and caring for sexual power play? The question is particularly difficult for anyone whose fantasies include images of humiliation, or who has been sexually abused.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Thuringer is pointing at the ref and trying to get at him, yelling that the whistle was too fast. Sausage is up and between Coach and his dad, trying to shove his dad off the mat. Both benches are paralyzed, but the L.C. fans hoot and jeer. This kind of stuff doesn’t happen very often. Mr. Thuringer realizes right away what an ass he is—you can see it come over his face. He says something to Sausage and Sausage pats him on the back. Instead of just going back and sitting down, he apologizes to Coach and the ref and then to Mash right there on the mat. I can’t hear what he’s saying because the L.C. fans are yelling so loud. But it’s obvious he’s apologizing. The ref raises Mash’s hand and then Mash goes over and puts his arm around Sausage and talks to him and his dad for a few seconds. Then he sprints back to his bench and they mob him joyfully. We all get up and meet Sausage, who is crying and smiling both. Coach Morgan puts his arm around him and takes him behind the bench to fix his nose. Raska and Mike Konigi win, Seeley gets beat by a point in a great match, Schmoozler tears his guy a couple new assholes but can’t pin him, Williamson loses bad, and Kuch is up 5–0 in the first round when I get up and walk behind the bench to loosen up for my match. Carla got here in time to see Schmooz dig a few furrows across the mat with Steve Munker’s head. Schmooz would drive him to his back and almost have him pinned; then Munkers would bridge way up on the back of his head and scoot off the mat. They’d go back to the referee’s position and the same thing would happen. Schmooz would drive hard at the whistle and Munkers would go to his back. Then he’d bridge and Schmooz would drive and off the mat they’d go. It was like a ritual. The crowd loved it. I’d hate to have to trade scalps with Munkers. The back of his head will be all scabs tomorrow. Carla trots over, pats my arm, smiles big, and tells me good luck. Then she goes back to her seat beside Belle. Belle saves her a seat when Carla comes late from work. A couple maladjusted creeps in the L.C. section yell out how cute it is that I have a girlfriend. They really love it when I begin my rope-skipping. A few of the older men hoot and yell out, “Hey, Sugar Ray!” I hear it all. Kuch is about to pin Rance Prokoff, so I whip the rope faster. I reverse the rope a few times and start to blow the air out hard. If they were not so concerned about their guy being smothered by Kuch’s braid, the L.C. crowd would be on my ass for sure.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  For Reid, “white trash,” “poor whites,” and “niggers” all conveyed the same social stigma. 53 Many of Odum’s respondents claimed that the designation “po’ white trash” derived from black vernacular. According to a Mississippian, when whites of the upper or middle class used it, they qualified it with “as blacks would say.” Odum’s respondents noted that poor whites lived near poor black neighborhoods, and it was virtually impossible to distinguish their dwellings. To some middle-class whites, the slight elevation in status of poor whites over poor blacks was but an empty courtesy. From outside the South, in Cincinnati, one sociologist wrote Odum that mountain whites were called “briar hoppers” and subject to de facto segregation just as urban blacks were. (“Briar hoppers” was a variation on the old English slur of “bogtrotters,” aimed at the Irish.) 54 To Odum’s respondents, the twentieth century had had little effect. Poor whites were still adjudged a breed apart, an ill-defined class halfway between white and black. Under no circumstances did they ever socialize with, let alone marry, respectable whites. To another of Odum’s correspondents they were like a mule to a horse or a hound to a dog; whereas dogs were “respectable,” hounds were “ornery.” As dyed-in-the-wool racists said of all blacks, it was said of white trash that, like the leopard, he could not change his spots. 55 How could educated Americans have denied the effect of such persistent prejudice in distorting the southern class system? The reason is actually rather obvious: a fear of unleashing genuine class upheaval—which even the liberal elite were loath to do—led significant numbers to blame the poor for their own failure. Odum saw differently, and was instrumental in reframing the meaning of rural poverty. He argued that poor whites had a culture—what he called “folkways.” He did not think that they had to remain hapless pawns. Nor did their upward path mean merely imitating the middle class; they could shape a viable existence by drawing on their own folk values, rather than striving to be a lesser version of the white-collar class. The solution for poor folk rested on giving them access to education, allowing them to become self-sufficient. This demanded restructuring the South’s resource management. The region had to develop a more diverse and technologically advanced economy and agricultural system, which in turn would require a more highly skilled population of workers. But transforming every man and woman would be a long uphill battle, of course. One of Odum’s respondents put it bluntly: “No one knows what to do with him.” As long as he appeared stuck, he would remain no less a feature of the static South than the gully and the mule. 56

• From Little Women (1868)

  He did not do much, but he thought a great deal and was conscious of a change of some sort going on in spite of himself. "It's genius simmering, perhaps. I'll let it simmer, and see what comes of it," he said, with a secret suspicion all the while that it wasn't genius, but something far more common. Whatever it was, it simmered to some purpose, for he grew more and more discontented with his desultory life, began to long for some real and earnest work to go at, soul and body, and finally came to the wise conclusion that everyone who loved music was not a composer. Returning from one of Mozart's grand operas, splendidly performed at the Royal Theatre, he looked over his own, played a few of the best parts, sat staring at the busts of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach, who stared benignly back again. Then suddenly he tore up his music sheets, one by one, and as the last fluttered out of his hand, he said soberly to himself... "She is right! Talent isn't genius, and you can't make it so. That music has taken the vanity out of me as Rome took it out of her, and I won't be a humbug any longer. Now what shall I do?" That seemed a hard question to answer, and Laurie began to wish he had to work for his daily bread. Now if ever, occurred an eligible opportunity for 'going to the devil', as he once forcibly expressed it, for he had plenty of money and nothing to do, and Satan is proverbially fond of providing employment for full and idle hands. The poor fellow had temptations enough from without and from within, but he withstood them pretty well, for much as he valued liberty, he valued good faith and confidence more, so his promise to his grandfather, and his desire to be able to look honestly into the eyes of the women who loved him, and say "All's well," kept him safe and steady. Very likely some Mrs. Grundy will observe, "I don't believe it, boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles." I dare say you don't, Mrs. Grundy, but it's true nevertheless. Women work a good many miracles, and I have a persuasion that they may perform even that of raising the standard of manhood by refusing to echo such sayings. Let the boys be boys, the longer the better, and let the young men sow their wild oats if they must. But mothers, sisters, and friends may help to make the crop a small one, and keep many tares from spoiling the harvest, by believing, and showing that they believe, in the possibility of loyalty to the virtues which make men manliest in good women's eyes.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  “I really need help,” the email read. “I feel like a great big loser of a woman because I can’t have an orgasm.” Arriving in my inbox from a total stranger, the long email detailed a personal struggle with a very private issue, one she had not shared with anyone. But she shared it with me, and she was not the first, or the only one. Not being able to have an orgasm, or what she thought was the right kind of orgasm, had pushed her to the point of desperation, made her feel frighteningly alone, like she was a “loser,” that she had somehow let down the sisterhood of all women, and that not only was she doing something wrong, but that she was also likely broken in some way that could never be fixed. Like my email advice seeker, who signed off “Frustrated in Seattle,” many women have a lot riding on orgasm. It goes deeper than self-esteem. It gets to the very heart of what makes many of us feel like women. It validates our personhood in our gender and our bodies. It’s something that represents our power, our true ownership of our bodies. Take this away, or make it feel unattainable or wrong, and you take from a woman one of the things that is truly hers. Withhold it, and we somehow feel like we’re not complete. I think you know what I mean. Growing up, I always had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that there was some orgasm “ideal” that I was not attaining, or should be very, very worried I would not be able to have. While my experience was not as frustrating as “Frustrated,” I knew I was able to have them—by myself. But for some weird reason, I believed that the only “real” way for me to have one was to have it with a partner, and from penis-vagina penetration. Until I read the first edition of Mikaya Heart’s book years ago, I had no idea how this notion had entered my brain. Nor especially how something so absolute and so negative and so personal had taken root so firmly. I don’t remember anyone telling me as a young woman that any kind of orgasm was any more valid than another. Or that I would be incomplete if I did not come in a certain way, with a guy. Yet for some reason I really felt that way, and it wasn’t until I started to ask myself where this idea came from that I realized that it was not a value of my own. It was someone else’s. Let me confess right now that I didn’t know how, where, or when I had allowed my orgasms to be defined (or validated) by someone else. They just were.