Shame

Passages

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

Page 238 of 267 · 20 per page

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

  White girls love to feel sorry for ourselves—to focus on arenas in which we feel denigrated or unrecognized, and to reclaim those arenas loudly. White feminists make a formal politic of it; the rest of us merely do it when it’s convenient. In her 2016 essay “Closing the Loop,” artist, critic, and curator Aria Dean critiques the ubiquitous selfie feminism of the early to mid-2010s, championed and lauded by largely young, white, cis, women artists and critics for “the control afforded through the act of self-imaging [that] is invaluable; nothing less, in fact, than the primary feminist tool for resistance.” The movement traded on, in Dean’s biting and accurate estimation, “a basic-bitch politic of visibility,” whereby white girls allegedly “reclaimed” digital spaces from their male counterparts, photographing themselves rather than existing as the subjects of photographs, and showcasing aspects of cis girlhood deemed distasteful by the Male Gaze or Instagram—depending on who you were asking—body hair and period blood chief among them. This is a way of becoming Manet and Olympia both; it is also a way to refuse to see the Black maid at all. The epigraph to Dean’s piece, it turns out, comes from conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady’s seminal 1992 work of criticism, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in which O’Grady writes that Laura, the model Manet used to paint Olympia’s maid, is “the most famous example … of what Judith Wilson calls ‘the legions of black servants who loom in the shadows of European and European-American aristocratic portraiture.’” She describes the approximation of Laura in the painting as Jezebel and Mammy, prostitute and female eunuch, the two-in-one. When we’re through with her inexhaustibly comforting breast, we can use her ceaselessly open cunt. And best of all, she is not a real person, only a robotic servant … Laura’s place is outside what can be conceived of as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West’s construct of the female body, for the “femininity” of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight. Thus only the white body remains as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze. Laura is not legible as a woman, not even the conditional womanhood gifted by objectification. And yet, white feminists continue to abhor the Male Gaze, as though a homogenous army of Men is gazing at a homogenous army of Women, all sexualized and objectified in the same manner.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  That night, Nate slept over at Kyle’s. By then he was completely sober, though Kyle was still stoned. He peppered Nate with questions about Nicole’s body and what, precisely, the two of them had done. “I tried not to answer too specifically,” Nate said. “I’d just say, ‘Yeah, man, it was dope. I feel great. It was totally awesome.’” They looked through Nicole’s Instagram feed and talked about how “great her tits were.” “Dude! You hit that!” Kyle said. “Great job!” Kyle’s enthusiasm lifted Nate’s spirits: he hadn’t enjoyed the hookup, but at least it hadn’t been a disaster. Or so he thought. By Monday morning, Nicole had spread the word around school that Nate was “bad” at hooking up: that he’d bit her lip, that he didn’t know how to “finger” a girl. That his nails were ragged. Maybe she was trying to preserve her own reputation—to avoid being teased for hooking up with an “L.” Or maybe she just thought the story was a juicy one. “The stereotype is that guys go into gory detail,” Nate said, “but a lot of times it’s the other way around. Guys will brag, but they’re not so specific. Maybe they’d say, ‘I fingered her,’ or maybe they wouldn’t even say what they did, just that ‘we hooked up’ and leave it at that. But girls? They’ll go into every detail with their friends. What his penis looked like. Every single thing that they did. How it felt. It’s like the opposite of what you think.” Nate said he felt “completely emasculated,” so shamed that he told his mom he was sick and stayed home from school the next day. “I was basically crying,” he said. “I was like, ‘Shit! I fucked up!’”

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  I wanted you to have your own life, apart from fear—even apart from me. I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next. I think of your grandmother calling me and noting how you were growing tall and would one day try to “test me.” And I said to her that I would regard that day, should it come, as the total failure of fatherhood because if all I had over you were my hands, then I really had nothing at all. But, forgive me, son, I knew what she meant and when you were younger I thought the same. And I am now ashamed of the thought, ashamed of my fear, of the generational chains I tried to clasp onto your wrists. We are entering our last years together, and I wish I had been softer with you. Your mother had to teach me how to love you—how to kiss you and tell you I love you every night. Even now it does not feel a wholly natural act so much as it feels like ritual. And that is because I am wounded. That is because I am tied to old ways, which I learned in a hard house. It was a loving house even as it was besieged by its country, but it was hard. Even in Paris, I could not shake the old ways, the instinct to watch my back at every pass, and always be ready to go. A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day out in the crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked to a wine shop. Outside the wine shop there was seating. We sat and drank a bottle of red. We were served heaping piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this dinner? Did people do this? I had not even known how to imagine it. And more, was this all some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me? My friend paid. I thanked him. But when we left I made sure he walked out first. He wanted to show me one of those old buildings that seem to be around every corner in that city. And the entire time he was leading me, I was sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley, where some dudes would be waiting to strip me of…what, exactly? But my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonne soirée, and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.

• From Like Family

  We were inventing it. We squirmed and panted, fully clothed, in the furrows of the orchard near my house. I’d come home smelling of almonds, soft earth burned into the back of my skirt. This went on and on. When we finally did it on the sofa in his family’s living room, I was so surprised to actually find him between my legs, I couldn’t muster the sense not to scream. He pressed a cushion against my mouth, stopping it like a bottle. From that time on, Mark and I were a sexual catastrophe. If he was ready, I was crying; if I was ready, he was feeling guilty and ashamed, saying, “No, we shouldn’t. It’s not right.” I knew it happened other ways for other girls. There was a whole continuum, from Amber guarding her cherry like it was gold-plated to Jacy throwing it at anyone in pants, to Tina, who had been trying to woo a boyfriend with sex since eighth grade. There was a lean black boy in Tina’s class at Clark named Stanley Vargas. Stanley had a fantastic orange-tipped Afro that he liked to comb with a giant pick while leaning against the lockers watching the “talent” walk by. He whistled at Tina one day as she headed to our bus, and that was it; she would have Stanley if she had to tackle him first. They were a hot item for exactly four days, wearing each other’s dark hickies like badges, and then Stanley had to be moving on. Nothing Tina could do could change his mind, not wearing a sequined tube top and short shorts, not flirting loudly with his friends, not offering to go “behind the bleachers” with him, which meant various kinds of wrestling on the big blue mats that were stored there, at the back of the gym. Tina’s virginity seemed not to carry any significance for her. She dispensed with it as quickly as possible and with as little ceremony as possible when she was fourteen, with Pete Berringer, who was twelve at the time. This happened in the back of our camper, headed toward some sailing event while both sets of parents sat up in the cab, singing cheerfully along to Kenny Rogers: Oh, Ru-u-by, don’t take your love to town. Tina didn’t even have a crush on Pete; she just wanted to know what it felt like. And once she knew, she wanted to feel it again, with boys who mattered. This only became difficult when Tina wanted the boys who were beautiful. She was just average, like the rest of us. Thick through the neck and arms, Tina could bench-press a hundred pounds, which impressed the boys in the weight room, but not the way she wanted. Her hair was never right (probably because she let Hilde and Noreen cut and perm it), her eyes were small and squinty, and her lips were so thin she couldn’t wear lip gloss without it crawling toward her nose.

• From Like Family

  There were still frizzles of it over his ears and in spots along his forehead and the back of his neck, like tufts remaining after a carpet has been ripped out. Keith watched us expectantly as we approached the bed, and the eyes were his own, wide and sky blue inside the char of his face. “Hey you,” I said, and found myself talking through a wad of my own hair. Without thinking, I had pulled a section around in front of my mouth. I laughed nervously and dropped my hands. “How’s it going?” “Sucky. How does it look like it’s going?” The words were hard, but his voice wasn’t. “Where’s Terry?” “Teresa,” I corrected him. “No one has called her Terry since we were kids.” “She’s too good now, huh? Miss Prissy Pants.” One heavily bandaged arm pawed the sheet. “No, that’s not it. She just doesn’t like Terry.” I walked over to the window, where the view was all parking lot. It looked like a board game, one where you could roll dice and maybe end up on the free space. “Uh-huh. Where is she?” “At home, studying,” Penny piped up, speaking for the first time. “She wanted to come but had this really big test.” “Yeah,” I added, “big,” but I was thinking, Who knew Penny was such a great liar? “She planning to go to college?” The machine to his left chirped twice and quieted. “I didn’t go to college. Guess I wasn’t smart enough.” Part of me wanted to say, “Of course you’re smart enough. You can do anything.” Part of me was having trouble breathing. Under the hospital sheet, Keith’s feet were split and shot, the color of charcoal. (I’m a trampin’, trampin’, we sang in Granny’s car. Would they take him to heaven now, or anywhere, those feet?) Penny and I stayed for twenty minutes or so, long enough to tell him how we were doing in school, about our dogs and the big sailboat in the backyard. It must have sounded to Keith like we were doing okay, better than okay, because he broke in, saying, “Swimming pools. Movie stars.” “What?” “You know, the Beverly Hillbillies. From the theme song.” “It’s not like that at all,” I said, my hands in my hair again. “Yeah, right.” I spent the next few minutes sputtering, my face hot, trying to tell Keith he’d gotten it all wrong, that we weren’t rich or brainiacs or anything, but it didn’t matter. He was convinced that we thought we were better than our family. That we didn’t have room for them in our new life. The thing is, he was right. We said good-bye, patted what seemed to be a safe part of the sheet and got back on the elevator. I pushed Lobby and looked up. We sank like a dirigible.

• From Like Family

  Everyone in the living room was laughing but transfixed, reminding me of the time at the bus stop when the Abels were having their pigs slaughtered. As our bus pulled up, the hog had just been split from neck to crotch. Strung up by her back hooves, she swung like a pendulum. Her entrails swam into a huge barrel. The bus waited, doors open, red lights flashing to stop traffic, but we just stood there. We were frozen with watching. The driver was too. “Ugh, that’s disgusting!” kids cried, craning for a clearer view, pushing at the windows. The morning after the party, I woke up late. My teeth felt thick and knitted. Walking into Bub and Hilde’s room, I saw the waterbed was rumpled, sheets everywhere. On Hilde’s dresser, the Vaseline jar was open and the shape of a hard dick was pressed into the jelly. Someone had fucked the Vaseline! And then what? I thought of a woman in the movie, on her knees with her butt in the air—the way babies sometimes rock themselves to sleep. Then I thought of our new neighbor, Jacy Curry, sloshing around on my parents’ bed with a boy, any boy, petroleum rubbing off of him onto the blue plastic mattress. [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] JACY’S LEGS BEGAN AT her ears. They were as pale as her scuffed Keds, but she got away with it. “A tan would age me,” she said, tossing her fine chin. She was fifteen. When I looked at my own legs, skim milk curdling at the knees, I knew I would pay and pay later for thighs tawny or butter-colored now. Now required a currency that mostly vexed me. Unfortunately Jacy had come to live with the Swenson family for several months—her solution to the problem of her mother’s sudden transfer to Kansas City—and so I submitted to daily reminders of her desirability. Not only was Jacy beautiful, she got to live at the Swensons’, in her own room, like she belonged there. Valerie’s husband, Dean, had recently left her for one of the waitresses at the restaurant they co-owned—a shock to everyone but the waitress. Craig and Ross, the two oldest sons, had moved into apartments of their own, and though their rooms were quickly filled with Teresa and Jacy, the house felt, to Valerie, like a drawer upturned and shaken. She was most like herself when it was filled with long legs and voices, and we were only too happy to oblige. Once the newness of being at the Lindberghs’ with Bub, Hilde and Tina gone wore off, we found we were happier spending our nights at the Swensons’. We’d camp on the lawn in sleeping bags until the sun and heavy dew would force us into the living room, where we’d sleep until eleven, our heads under the coffee table. That was the summer we were obsessed with The Rocky Horror Picture Show album.

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

  I do not know how to speak about this, exactly, because I think to lament over and over the dehumanization of Black women, as a white woman, so too adds to that dehumanization. But: the white girl can play the hooker, depict herself in art, gain the cultural capital, and lose little in the process. Objectification and simple sexism are not all that bad. Black women have had and continue to have a much more complicated relationship with visibility foisted upon them, to great material consequence. In 1991 at the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo, commodities-trader-turned-art-star Jeff Koons debuted Made in Heaven, a series of works depicting Koons in sexual positions with Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller (stage name Cicciolina). Though neither spoke the other’s language, the two married shortly after producing the works. Photographs printed on canvas, along with marble and glass sculptures, depicted the couple in softcore Kama Sutra poses alongside more explicit visuals. Dirty Ejaculation showed Koons ejaculating between Staller’s open legs. At the time, reviewers focused on the distinction between artwork and pornography: novelist and critic Jim Lewis wrote, “[the work is] not … pornographic … because an art work becomes prurient only when it ceases to be a representation of desire and instead becomes the impetus for it … These works would be very much diminished if they provided occasions for arousal. They don’t, and they’re not intended to.” Koons himself made the distinction less absolute, telling Vanity Fair the pieces were “advertising for a porno film I’m going to make with Cicciolina,” that, with respect to sex acts, would include “everything.” In the same interview, he praised his wife as an artist in her own right, explaining, “Ilona uses her body in the way another artist uses a paintbrush or a chisel. She uses her genitalia. And she communicates a very precise language with her genitalia.” In 1997 Koons sold Ilona On Top on auction at Sotheby’s for $140,000, later selling other pieces of the series for close to a million.

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

  A Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye The first Cracker President should have been a mixture of Jimmy and Billy [Carter] . . . Billy’s hoo-Lord-what-the-hell-get-out-the-way attitude heaving up under Jimmy’s prudent righteousness—or Jimmy’s idealism heaving up under Billy’s sense of human limitations—and forming a nice-and-awful compound like life in Georgia. —Roy Blount Jr., Crackers (1980) s identity politics rose as a force for good in the last decades of the twentieth century, authenticity was to be achieved by registering, and then heeding, the voices of previously marginalized Americans. Whites could no longer speak for people of color. Men could no long speak for women. The New Left, civil rights, and Black Power movements of the 1960s had helped to jump- start the second-wave feminist movement, yet identity politics was not the possession of the left alone. Richard Nixon rode into office in 1968 by claiming to represent the interests of the “Silent Majority” of Americans who saw themselves as hardworking, middle American homeowners dutifully paying their taxes and demanding little of the federal government. 1 One could argue that identity has always been a part of politics, that aspiring people adopt identities the same way that they change their style of dress. Yet this is only part of the story. Some people can choose an identity, but many more have an identity chosen for them. White trash folks never took on that name for themselves, nor did the rural poor describe their plight in recognition of having been cast out of society as “waste people,” “rubbish,” or “clay-eaters.” As we have seen, Union soldiers and Lincoln Republicans embraced the intended insult of “mudsill” when it was hurled at them from across the Mason-Dixon Line. But that was because they possessed the cultural power to shape political discourse. The dispossessed had no such power. Eventually, self-identified “white trash” who had come up in the world began defending their depressed class background as a distinct (and perversely noble) heritage. Before the end of the 1980s, “white trash” was rebranded as an ethnic identity, with its own readily identifiable cultural forms: food, speech patterns, tastes, and, for some, nostalgic memories. If immigrants had foreign origins to

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “And I’m just supposed to know who Jeff is? So she gets all snotty: ‘Who the fuck do you think he is, Cherie? He’s the guy I’ve been living with the past couple months.’ I thought I would throw the phone at the wall. ‘Norm is there, watching Rosie,’ Cookie says. ‘He’s twelve—practically a young man now!’ ” “Oh crap,” I say. “Did they see her get arrested?” “That’s what I asked her,” Cherie says. “Cookie tells me, ‘Nope,’ all dismissive. ‘They busted me in the pub parking lot. See, I went to meet Jeff so we could talk it out, but he set me up. Next thing I know, I’m in cuffs.’ ” Cherie explains that the cops had social services track down the kids, who were staying in a motel. I march to Addie’s kitchen phone. “I’m calling Ms. Harvey.” When she answers, she explains: “The cops decided Norman is old enough to watch Roseanne while Cookie is incarcerated for assault and battery.” “Wait, Ms. Harvey, let me get this straight: Cookie is arrested for trying to beat up her boyfriend—in jail for the weekend—and our little brother is watching Rosie by himself?” “Regina, I’m just telling you what the police told me.” “Who’s paying for the room? What if they get kicked out? Then what?” “Well, in that case they would be homeless and we would place them in another home. But until then, the authorities have decided that they’re both safe and secure. Besides, now that your mother’s bailed out, she’ll probably be back with them in a few hours.” Camille and I have devised a plan: The only way we can watch out for Rosie and Norm is to convince Cookie that all’s forgiven and we still want her in our lives. “She’s a lunatic,” Cherie says. “You sure you want to go through with this cockamamy plan?” With Daisy Duck and Goofy ball caps in a bag as souvenirs, we wait at the motel room’s outside entrance until Cookie answers with a cigarette between her fingers like some Hollywood vixen. “Well well well,” she says, holding the door as though she has to consider letting us in. “Just like always, you two come crawling back.” Camille occupies Rosie and Norm while I sit down on the bed, across from where Cookie’s seated at the motel room’s desk. Without looking at me, she says, “I see you’re starting to come into your own. Shocker with those little tits, nobody’s knocked you up yet.” “I didn’t come here to be the butt of any insults,” I answer. “I really want to work this out.” “Well, don’t try to buy me with any sweet talk. You ratted me out to every official in Suffolk County when all I’ve ever done was work hard to give you kids a good life.” “Ratted you out?” In the background Camille turns on the TV for Rosie and Norm.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Women and girls are required to wear long dresses, even while swimming. Boys and men wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts. Both genders must wear sacred long underwear beneath their clothing at all times, even on sweltering summer days. According to the Law of Chastity, sexual intercourse is officially forbidden even between husband and wife unless the woman is ovulating. Gravel crunching beneath its tires, Debbie’s car rounds a bend, and the house where she grew up suddenly comes into view, moldering at the edge of a soggy hillside bearded in ferns and evergreen forest. It’s been many years since she’s been back here. “See where that car is parked off to the side there?” Debbie says, pointing to an old vehicle rusting beneath a graceful canopy of red cedars. “When I was six, that’s where Renny Blackmore * took me. Said he was going to teach me how to drive.” Instead of giving Debbie a driving lesson, Renny (one of Winston’s teenage brothers) sexually assaulted her. “Yechh,” she recalls, grimacing. “Thinking about what he did to me in that car still gives me a creepy feeling.” In spite of—or, more likely, precisely because of—the atmosphere of sexual repression in Bountiful, incest and other disturbing behaviors are rampant, although the abuse goes conspicuously unacknowledged. Debbie remembers older boys taking girls as young as four into a big white barn behind the school to play “cows and bulls” among the hay bales. A boy who would grow up to become a prominent member of the church leadership raped one of Debbie’s friends when he was twelve and the girl was seven. When Debbie was four, she says, Winston’s fourteen-year-old brother, Andrew Blackmore, * jammed “a stick up my vagina and left it in there for a while, telling me to lie very still and not to move.” Before Debbie’s father died, in 1998, he built a much larger second home just above the modest building where Debbie was raised: a barnlike, white clapboard house with fourteen bathrooms and fifteen bedrooms where some fifty people reside. These days the household is presided over by Memory Blackmore—“Mother Mem”—and her forty-one-year-old son, Jimmy Oler, Debbie’s half brother. Neither of them is home at the moment, but a half dozen teenage girls are juggling babies on their hips in the huge downstairs living room; they are the wives of Jimmy and some of the other Bountiful men. Among these girls is a giggling, gap-toothed kid who looks like she belongs in elementary school—but happens to be immensely pregnant. At the top of the stairs is a long hallway plastered with snapshots of Debbie’s extended family. Debbie herself appears in several of the photos. One of them shows her as a smiling teenager in a pink, frilly, ankle-length dress. It was taken at her wedding to Ray Blackmore, when she was only a year older than the pregnant fourteen-year-old downstairs.

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

  By 1994, Koons and Staller were embroiled in an acrimonious divorce and custody battle for their toddler, Ludwig. In the proceedings, Koons sought to use Staller’s career as an adult film star against her, telling the court, “To have a family based on Protestant values was important to me.” The New Yorker reported on his damning comments: “He berated her pornographic work as ‘vile’ and ‘vulgar’ … he declared, ‘She’ll do anything to dismantle cultural mores.’” Koons and his attorney thought the court might be swayed by getting “a picture of what’s involved,” promptly turning out the lights to screen clips from Staller’s films, in which she had sex with a snake, had sex with three men at once, and had sex with “a fat man in a field.” Lauding Staller’s films as on par with high art just three years prior, and going on record in a prestige publication that he intended to make hardcore films with her—that, indeed, what he thought about as they posed for photos together was “having anal sex with Ilona”—Koons now pivoted to the long tradition of using a woman’s participation in sex work to render her an unfit mother in the eyes of the law. The court granted him custody. In a 2013 interview with Pharrell Williams on the musician-cum-entrepreneur’s Reserve Channel show ARTST TLK, Jeff Koons describes his relationship to his work as “trying to share … transcendence with the viewer: I believe very much in the beholder’s share … that an artwork is completed in the viewer. The object is just some kind of transponder.” The beholder’s share is a concept coined by Alois Riegl, nineteenth-century art historian of the Vienna School, and subsequently popularized by his disciples Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich; simply, “that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer.” (The beholder’s share might also be a way to describe prostitution: such a relation requires a perceptual involvement of the viewer and could be said to culminate in their involvement.) Koons evokes this idea while reflecting on his decision to create and subsequently destroy much of the Made in Heaven series. He tells Williams, I wanted to make a body of work that would help remove that kind of guilt and shame, and so the intentions of the work are very good. So even though it’s very direct, and some of the images are kind of explicit, there’s a place for adults to look at those type of images, and to be involved with that dialogue.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I am not comfortable in my body. Nearly everything physical is difficult. When I move around, I feel every extra pound I am carrying. I have no stamina. When I walk for long periods of time, my thighs and calves ache. My feet ache. My lower back aches. More often than not, I am in some kind of physical pain. Every morning, I am so stiff I contemplate just spending the duration of the day in bed. I have a pinched nerve, and so if I stand for too long, my right leg goes numb and then I sort of lurch about until the feeling returns. When it’s hot, I sweat profusely, mostly from my head, and then I feel self-conscious and find myself constantly wiping the sweat from my face. Rivulets of sweat spring forth between my breasts and pool at the base of my spine. My shirt gets damp and sweat stains begin seeping through the fabric. I feel like people are staring at me sweating and judging me for having an unruly body that perspires so wantonly, that dares to reveal the costs of its exertion. There are things I want to do with my body but cannot. If I am with friends, I cannot keep up, so I am constantly thinking up excuses to explain why I am walking slower than they are, as if they don’t already know. Sometimes, they pretend not to know, and sometimes, it seems like they are genuinely that oblivious to how different bodies move and take up space as they look back at me and suggest we do impossible things like go to an amusement park or walk a mile up a hill to a stadium or go hiking to an overlook with a great view. My body is a cage. My body is a cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years. 8In writing about my body, maybe I should study this flesh, the abundance of it, as a crime scene. I should examine this corporeal effect to determine the cause. I don’t want to think of my body as a crime scene. I don’t want to think of my body as something gone horribly wrong, something that should be cordoned off and investigated. Is my body a crime scene when I already know I am the perpetrator, or at least one of the perpetrators? Or should I see myself as the victim of the crime that took place in my body?

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  He said/she said is why so many victims (or survivors, if you prefer that terminology) don’t come forward. All too often, what “he said” matters more, so we just swallow the truth. We swallow it, and more often than not, that truth turns rancid. It spreads through the body like an infection. It becomes depression or addiction or obsession or some other physical manifestation of the silence of what she would have said, needed to say, couldn’t say. With every day that went by, I hated myself more. I disgusted myself more. I couldn’t get away from him. I couldn’t get away from what those boys did. I could smell them and feel their mouths and their tongues and their hands and their rough bodies and their cruel skin. I couldn’t stop hearing the terrible things they said to me. Their voices were with me, constantly. Hating myself became as natural as breathing. Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing. 12There is a before and an after. In the after I was broken, shattered and silent. I was numb. I was terrified. I carried this secret and knew, in my soul, that what those boys did to me had to stay secret. I couldn’t share the shame and humiliation of it. I was disgusting because I had allowed disgusting things to be done to me. I was not a girl. I was less than human. I was no longer a good girl and I was going to hell. I was twelve, and suddenly, I was no longer a child. I no longer felt free or happy or safe. I became more and more withdrawn. If I had a saving grace, it was that we moved all the time for my father’s job, and the summer after I was raped we moved to a new state where I could have my name again and no one knew I was the girl in the woods. I still had no friends and I did not try to make friends, because how could we possibly have anything in common? I did not dare subject what I had become to the children around me. I read, obsessively. When I read on the school bus, my classmates teased me. Sometimes, they took my book from me and threw it back and forth as I flailed, helplessly, just trying to get that book back into my hands. When I read, I could forget. I could be anywhere in the world except in the eighth grade, lonely and holding tightly to my secret. I often say that reading and writing saved my life. I mean that quite literally.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Debbie’s new husband, standing beside her in the picture, is a wizened, gray-haired man, almost four times as old as she is. “I got pregnant soon after that,” she says, “but I miscarried the baby. I was told it was because I had violated the Law of Chastity by having sex during my pregnancy. Ray blamed me for it, and made me feel wicked.” This double bind left Debbie reeling. “Ray would almost never talk to me,” she says. “He would ignore me for days on end. The only time he paid attention to me was when we had sex. It got so if I didn’t have a penis in me I didn’t think I was loved. And I was just a child when I was forced to deal with all of this! I was made to feel like a whore, a person with no worth beyond my vagina and my womb. Around town, I became the butt of mean jokes.” Ray Blackmore died of leukemia in 1974, after nineteen-year-old Debbie had been married to him for a little over three years and had given birth to his daughter. Soon thereafter Debbie was ordered, against her wishes, to marry Sam Ralston—one of Bountiful’s founding patriarchs, a violent, fifty-four-year-old sociopath who already had four wives. After giving birth to two of Ralston’s children and enduring years of cruelty at his hands, she became desperate enough to run away to the only refuge she could think of: her father’s home. The next time Prophet LeRoy Johnson—Uncle Roy—was in Canada, however, he commanded Debbie to return to Sam Ralston. “I begged him not to make me do it,” she says, “but he told me that when they married me to Sam they did it because they hoped it would encourage him in the priesthood and help him feel better toward my father. I was shocked, realizing for the first time that my marriage to Sam was something the men wanted me to do, not God.” Debbie dutifully returned to Ralston, whereupon he told her, she says, “that I was an evil woman and he would make me pay for my wickedness.” Debbie grew depressed, and increasingly self-destructive. Her father became so alarmed by her deteriorating condition that he clandestinely rescued Debbie and her children from Ralston’s home, installed them in his own household, and convinced Uncle Roy to “release” her from the marriage. But the failure of her second marriage reinforced the opinion in Bountiful that she was a dull-witted, disobedient nuisance, more trouble to the community than she was worth. “I began taking pills,” she says, “lots of pills: sleeping pills, painkillers, tranquilizers.” When Debbie sought solace from her father, he simply quoted scripture, telling her, “You must have a broken heart and a contrite spirit to know God.” In 1980, one night not long after this bit of advice, she was weeping and semicomatose from her medications when her father came into her bedroom and began to comfort her.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Although she did almost all of the talking, that conversation with his girlfriend was the most emotionally direct the two had ever had. “The last time I ever said anything emotional to someone was . . . I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was with her. But actually it might have been the last time I talked to you.” Cole and I had been catching up on FaceTime. He was midway through his freshman year in college, and I was checking in to see how he’d resolved the conflict between his personal values and those of the culture in which he found himself. Most of his classmates were male, as he’d expected, and there was a lot of what passed for friendly ribbing: giving each other “love taps” on the back of the head; blocking one another’s paths, then pretending to pick a fight; grabbing each other’s asses; pretending to lean in for a kiss. Giving someone a hard time, Cole said, was always “easy humor,” but it could slide into something more troubling pretty quickly. When one of his dorm mates joked to another, “I’m going to piss on you in your sleep,” for example, the other boy shot back, “If you do, I’ll fucking rape you.” For better or worse, Cole said, that sort of comment no longer jarred him. Although he had been adamantly against the epithet “fag” when we met, Cole found himself using that more, too, reasoning, as other boys did, that it was “the equivalent of ‘You suck’ or ‘You’re lame.’” Yet at least one of his friends had revealed himself to be legitimately homophobic, asserting that being gay was un-American (“I didn’t know that about him until after we became friends,” Cole hastened to add). And Cole had not met a single openly LGBTQ+ student at the school. He certainly wouldn’t want to be out in this environment if he were gay. Nor, he said, would he want to be Asian—the two Asian American boys in his dorm were ostracized, treated like foreigners; both were miserable. I pointed out, gently, that being able to silently disapprove of others’ bigotry or homophobia was a luxury conferred by his own race and sexuality; he’d once told me he hoped to be “braver than that.” Cole nodded. “I do feel kind of like a cop-out for letting all the little things slide,” he said. “It’s a cop-out to not fight the good fight. But, you know, there was that thing I tried sophomore year. . . . It just didn’t work. I could try to be a social justice warrior here, but I don’t think anyone would listen to me. And I’d have no friends.”

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  29 The Manner of Jesus’s Death • If the Resurrection of Jesus was the good news, his death seemed problematic to both Gentiles and Jews, appearing to disqualify him as a source of divine life for others. • In 1 Corinthians 1:18–25, Paul acknowledges that the “message of the cross,” which was for Christians the “power of salvation,” appeared to Greeks as foolishness and to Jews as a stumbling block. • In antiquity, the manner of death was proof of the quality of a life, and Jesus’s violent death by legal execution disqualified him as a source of divine life for both sides of the cultural world. o Paul says that the “Greeks seek wisdom,” meaning that a great soldier or sage could join the gods—but crucifixion, the most shameful of all deaths and one used mainly for slaves, could appear only “foolish.” o Paul further says that “Jews seek signs,” meaning signs that Jesus was a genuine messiah for the Jews, but Jesus did nothing to make things better for the Jews; he did not restore the kingdom, the Temple, or the Law. In Jewish terms, he was a failed messiah. o The manner of Jesus’s life was that of a sinner; worse, his manner of death was one cursed by God, for “cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree” (Deut. 21:23). Crucifixion was the most shameful of all deaths, used mainly for slaves and rebels against the Roman order; the fact that Jesus died in this manner disqualified him as a source of divine life for both Greeks and Jews. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Instead, he tossed and turned in his hammock. Borman had never been sick for a minute on the two-week flight of Gemini 7, or even on the “Vomit Comet,” the zero gravity airplane used to acclimate astronauts to weightlessness. Even when flying in violent thunderstorms as an inexperienced fifteen-year-old student of Miss Bobbie Kroll, he’d not experienced so much as a stomachache. Now he swallowed hard in his sleeping bag and tried to push away the nausea, but the waves were building and moving fast toward shore. “I’m sorry, guys,” he called to his crewmates above. And then the vomit came. Retching, Borman reached to capture the floating green globules, but there were too many of them, going in too many directions, to corral at once. Even when he caught them, they just split in two or four or eight and made their escape from his flailing hands. A moment later, the odor of the vomit reached Borman’s two crewmates. Overwhelmed, Anders reached for his gas mask. “You’re not supposed to use those!” Lovell said. “To hell with that, I’m using it,” Anders replied. He opened the oxygen supply to maximum, then turned his attention to Borman. From below, he could see a greenish-brown blob, about the size of a golf ball, moving toward him. For a moment, the physicist in him took over, and Anders followed the object with wonder as it oscillated in three dimensions, a movement impossible on Earth, and quivered toward the ceiling. Anders’s instinct was to find a camera and photograph the alien wonder, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away as it rose higher and then, about eighteen inches from his chest, split like the atoms he’d seen in science films, one wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction. Anders thought, That’s Isaac Newton. That’s conservation of momentum . Now one of the pieces was heading toward Lovell, who could do no more than watch it, eyes narrowing as it hit him in the chest and spread like an uncooked egg against the white cloth of his coveralls.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell reached for a towelette and tried to wipe the mess away, but his and Anders’s troubles were only starting. Floating toward them from below were spinning blobs of feces, each turning on its own axis. If they had been solid clumps, Lovell and Anders might have had a chance to dodge or capture them, but Borman had diarrhea. Lovell and Anders grabbed as many wipes as they could find and began hunting down the fluttering pieces, netting them like butterflies. For several minutes, the three men worked to clean the cabin. After restoring some order, Lovell and Anders could see that Borman was very sick. The situation, Anders thought, needed to be reported to Houston right away. “Absolutely not,” Borman said. Anders understood his reaction. Borman was a test pilot in his bones; no one with his instincts or credentials would want the world to know he’d become sick in space. And Anders didn’t blame him—he would have felt the same way himself. But it was more than that to Borman. He didn’t trust NASA’s doctors, especially the agency’s medical director, Charles Berry, whose judgment he questioned and who he believed to be ever itching to make himself part of the story. And it wasn’t just Dr. Berry who worried Borman. Give any NASA doctor a chance to play the hero, he believed, and you were asking for trouble. Borman could imagine it happening now, some medical guy stepping in and canceling the mission “for the good of the crew.” Borman would rather have died than foul up Apollo 8. News of his illness would remain between him and his crew. Lovell agreed. He saw NASA’s doctors in much the way Borman did—eager to become major cogs in the wheel of space exploration. He remembered how he’d been rejected on his first application to the astronaut corps on account of a slightly elevated level of bilirubin, a phony excuse if ever there was one. If Borman was too sick to continue, Lovell thought, he and Anders would feed their commander, watch him, take care of him, and finish the mission. What they couldn’t afford now, as they drew closer to the Moon, was to be ordered by Houston to turn back. Anders wasn’t so sure. What if Borman didn’t get better? What if he got so sick that he and Lovell had to focus entirely on taking care of him, and none of the crew could work? But he could see that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t a request from Borman; it was an order. Lovell and Anders were military men. They understood the chain of command. And Borman, sick and covered in unpleasantness as he was, remained the commander. So nobody said a word to Houston.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Soon, however, she became dimly aware through the narcotic fog that his ministrations had become something more: he was engaging in sexual intercourse with her. She remained passive and made no effort to stop him. Later, she wondered guiltily if she had somehow encouraged his incestuous attentions. In the months that followed, Debbie tried to drown herself in the Goat River, a fast mountain stream that flows past Bountiful, but she failed at that, as well. After she attempted suicide once more, this time with an overdose of sedatives, she was committed to the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital. While she was recovering, an acquaintance named Michael Palmer * came to visit her in the hospital. Palmer—a thirty-eight-year-old long-haul trucker married to two of Winston Blackmore’s sisters—was part of the religion but worked outside of Bountiful. Debbie recalls that during his visit, Palmer “touched me and kissed me. He made me feel beautiful.” When she was released from the hospital, though, the community still thought of her as a difficult, uncontrollable woman, and nobody was sure what should be done with her. Uncle Roy—who was by then ninety-three years old, very ill, and fast fading into senility—came to Canada and asked Debbie if there were any men that she liked. Michael Palmer, she replied. “So the prophet told Michael to marry me,” she explains. “I became Michael’s third wife. At first life with Michael was wonderful. He held me and helped me throw away my pills. When I had my first baby girl by Michael he was happy and actually played with the baby. He encouraged me to have ideas. I loved him.” The marriage was not without difficulties, however. The two women already married to Michael, Marlene and Michelle Blackmore (who happened to be Debbie’s stepdaughters), were intensely jealous of each other, and Debbie’s installation in their home as a new “sister wife” only added to their misery. Sharing Michael proved especially difficult for Michelle, his first wife. On the nights when it was Michael’s turn to sleep with Debbie, Michelle would listen from the room directly below, alternately crying hysterically and straining to hear sounds of passion that would prove to her that Michael preferred Debbie. “I found Michelle this way one night when Michael and I had just finished making love and I went downstairs to check on the children,” says Debbie. “When I saw her, I felt like we were trapped in the middle of a nightmare. I felt violated, but the shame and agony I saw on her face made it impossible for me to even say anything.” At one point Michelle discovered that Michael had had intercourse with Debbie when she was pregnant—a serious violation of the Law of Chastity.

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

  municipalities continued to look down on them. In 1962, in an important New Jersey court case, the majority ruled that a rural township could prohibit trailer parks within its limits. Still, the judge who wrote the dissent exposed the dangerous implications of this decision: “Trailer dwellers” had become a class of people, he explained, through which discrimination was tolerated under the vague language of protecting the “general welfare.” For at least this one jurist, inherited social biases had reduced the owners of mobile homes to “footloose, nomadic people,” a group of “migratory paupers.” 34 Retailers and real estate agents once again sought to change public perceptions. Since they could not effectively regulate the quality of mobile home parks in general, they decided to add an upscale version, and turned to advertising more exclusive mobile home communities. To separate the dumpy and dirty trailer slums from five-star dwellings, they rebranded the upscale sites as “resorts.” “Trailer park” became a dirty word. Exchanging his coonskin cap for a Realtor’s jacket, the actor Fess Parker became an investor in and leading promoter of high-end trailer playgrounds. “Carefree living,” Parker boasted, coining a new motto for a new class. In the hands of Sunbelt speculators working hard to attract a lucrative clientele, trailer life was meant to invite comparisons to luxury hotels. Fess Parker’s resort in Santa Barbara offered ocean views, a golf course, and a stock market ticker tape. 35 Davy Crockett’s call of the wild did not completely disappear either. Trailer life updated the once-catchy cry of the open road by declaring freedom from the thirty-year mortgage. In 1957, drawing on a playboy motif, a writer for Trailer Topics magazine promised a well-earned respite from the “well-harnessed Suburban life.” (The story was accompanied by a photograph of a sexy blonde sitting coquettishly on a trailer couch.) Other mobile home dealers promised residents freedom from the suburban rut and the tedious routine of playing “nursemaid to lawns, patios, and plumbing.” 36 In Richard Nixon’s birthplace of Yorba Linda, California, what was called “primordial Nixon country,” a remarkable trailer community went up. (Nixon country meant Republican, conservative, and deeply class conscious.) Lake Park offered a “country club” style of living, replete with man-made lake, swimming pool, landscaped greenery, and gently winding streets; to a New York Times reporter, it was “suburbia in miniature.” The developers, two men from Los Angeles, spent three years trying to find a city hall in Orange County that would allow them to build, and were repeatedly turned down. In order to convince Yorba Linda officials that it was not their intent to impinge upon the class