Shame

Passages

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

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• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  He could do the crossword puzzle and correspond with his accountant. The phone never stirred in his office. He knew the trouble that lay ahead. But he hadn’t told his wife, hadn’t sought the counsel of his friends, hadn’t considered the future. He couldn’t say it out loud. He knew what was coming. While crosshatching his face each morning with the Wilkinson double-bonded, Hood swore that he would never live life like George Clair, at the expense of others, if he ever worked again—after that pink slip turned up in his In box. He would be a benevolent supervisor, a friend and confidante to working men and women, no matter how insignificant their positions. Then he would arrive late at the office and shout down his secretary, Madeleine, for failing to make his coffee light enough. Get your ass down there and get another cup! He was digging his own grave and holding it like a pearl inside of him. —Clair, George Clair, he said, overfilling his glass, plucking a single ice cube from the silver ice bucket. What a surprise. —Benjie! Firmly they clasped one another’s hands. Clair’s expression was inoffensive and slyly confused. Smile lines skirted the planes of his face. —What the hell has you here in New Canaan? —Well, it’s the funniest thing, Benjamin. I’ve been talking with some investors—a little outside venture, you understand, between you and me—about a scheme to manufacture a new Styrofoam packaging. It’s little S-shaped Styrofoam pieces that can help keep an item free from trauma during shipping. Really miraculous. Really remarkable. Delicate stuff, stuff that can get tossed around by the shippers, still arrives intact. It’s just going nationwide, the way I see it, nationwide. Anyway, it turns out one of the principal thinkers behind the whole project is your neighbor Jim Williams. How about that! Clair hoisted his glass a couple of inches. Benjamin was almost certain: Clair drank club soda and pretended it was gin and tonic. The blood rose in Hood’s face. That Clair and Jim Williams were bedfellows now augured some consolidation of bad energy in the universe. It was evidence of an order that chilled his bones. Either a paranoid assumption about the world was correct and it was filled with plots by human souls, occasionally selfish, occasionally generous human souls—plots that they pursued compulsively, recklessly, without regard for those they might harm—or else there was a force that ordered human society, ordered even the coexistence of plots and meaninglessness, that located oil under Arab countries and dust under Israel, that parched Bangladesh and froze the Baffin Bay, that raised up Richard Nixon from Checkers to dash him at the Watergate Hotel—while he realized the largest margin of victory in a presidential election in decades. Either way, Hood detested George Clair. Detested him. He was the truest suburban phony: without culture, without native character, who was compelled here and there only by expedience.

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

  Gretchen Wilson rejected Barbie as an unreal middle-class symbol—candidate Palin’s wardrobe bingeing was her Barbie moment. Her Eliza Doolittle grand entrance came during the televised debate with Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. As the nation waited to see what she looked like and how she performed, Palin came onstage in a little black dress, wearing heels and pearls, and winked at the camera. From the neck down she looked like a Washington socialite, but the wink faintly suggested a gum-chewing waitress at a small-town diner. Embodying these two extremes, the fetching hockey mom image ultimately lost out to what McCain staffers identified as both “hillbilly” and “prima donna.” She was a female Lonesome Rhodes—full of spit and spittle, and full of herself. 38 Steve Brodner’s caricature of Sarah Palin as the celebrity-seeking hillbilly, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2009 . New Yorker, December 7, 2009 Sex formed a meaningful subtext throughout Palin’s time of national exposure. In terms of trash talk, daughter Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy was handled rather differently from Bill Clinton’s legendary philandering. Bloggers muddied the waters by spreading rumors about Sarah’s Down syndrome child, Trig: “Was he really Bristol’s?” they asked. A tale of baby swapping was meant to suggest a new twist on the backwoods immorality of inbred illegitimacy. Recall that it was Bill Clinton’s mother, Virginia, whose pedigree most troubled the critics. The legacy held: the rhetoric supporting eugenics (and the sterilization laws that followed) mainly targeted women as tainted breeders. 39 Sarah Palin’s Fargo esque accent made her tortured speech patterns sound even worse. Former TV talk show host Dick Cavett wrote a scathing satirical piece in which he dubbed her a “serial syntax killer” whose high school English department deserved to be draped in black. He wanted to know how her swooning fans, who adored her for being a “mom like me,” or were impressed to see her shooting wolves, could explain how any of those traits would help her to govern. We had been down this road before as citizens and voters. “Honest Abe” Lincoln was called an ape, a mudsill, and Kentucky white trash. Andrew Jackson was a rude, ill-tempered cracker. (And like Palin, his grammar was nothing to brag about.) The question loomed: At what point does commonness cease to be an asset, as a viable form of populism, and become a liability for a political actor? And should anyone be shocked when voters are swept up in an “almost Elvis-sized following,” as Cavett said Palin’s supporters were? When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win. 40 By the time of the 2008 election, Americans had been given a thorough taste of the new medium of reality TV, in which instant celebrity could produce a national idol out of a nobody. In The Swan, working-class women were being altered through plastic surgery and breast implants to look like, say, a more modest, suburban Dolly Parton. While American

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  So you can imagine how weird it was for me. I was mixed but not colored—colored by complexion but not by culture. Because of that I was seen as a colored person who didn’t want to be colored. In Eden Park, I encountered two types of colored people. Some colored people hated me because of my blackness. My hair was curly and I was proud of my Afro. I spoke African languages and loved speaking them. People would hear me speaking Xhosa or Zulu and they’d say, “Wat is jy? ’n Boesman?” “What are you, a Bushman?” Why are you trying to be black? Why do you speak that click-click language? Look at your light skin. You’re almost there and you’re throwing it away. Other colored people hated me because of my whiteness. Even though I identified as being black, I had a white father. I went to an English private school. I’d learned to get along with white people at church. I could speak perfect English, and I barely spoke Afrikaans, the language colored people were supposed to speak. So colored people thought that I thought I was better than them. They would mock my accent, like I was putting on airs. “Dink jy, jy is grênd?” “You think you’re high class?”—uppity, people would say in America. Even when I thought I was liked, I wasn’t. One year I got a brand-new bike during the summer holidays. My cousin Mlungisi and I were taking turns riding around the block. I was riding up our street when this cute colored girl came out to the road and stopped me. She smiled and waved to me sweetly. “Hey,” she said, “can I ride your bike?” I was completely shocked. Oh, wow, I thought, I made a friend. “Yeah, of course,” I said. I got off and she got on and rode about twenty or thirty feet. Some random older kid came running up to the street, she stopped and got off, and he climbed on and rode away. I was so happy that a girl had spoken to me that it didn’t fully sink in that they’d stolen my bicycle. I ran back home, smiling and skipping along. My cousin asked where the bicycle was. I told him. “Trevor, you’ve been robbed,” he said. “Why didn’t you chase them?” “I thought they were being nice. I thought I’d made a friend.” Mlungisi was older, my protector. He ran off and found the kids, and thirty minutes later he came back with my bike.

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

  What I did know was food, so I ate because I understood that I could take up more space. I could become more solid, stronger, safer. I understood, from the way I saw people stare at fat people, from the way I stared at fat people, that too much weight was undesirable. If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away. At least, I hoped I could keep more hurt away because in the after, I knew too much about hurt. I knew too much about hurt, but I didn’t know how much more a girl could suffer until I did. But. This is what I did. This is the body I made. I am corpulent—rolls of brown flesh, arms and thighs and belly. The fat eventually had nowhere to go, so it created its own paths around my body. I am riven with stretch marks, pockets of cellulite on my massive thighs. The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe. I needed to feel like a fortress, impermeable. I did not want anything or anyone to touch me. I did this to myself. This is my fault and my responsibility. This is what I tell myself, though I should not bear the responsibility for this body alone. 7This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far. It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is. I wish I did not see my body as something for which I should apologize or provide explanation. I’m a feminist and I believe in doing away with the rigid beauty standards that force women to conform to unrealistic ideals. I believe we should have broader definitions of beauty that include diverse body types. I believe it is so important for women to feel comfortable in their bodies, without wanting to change every single thing about their bodies to find that comfort. I (want to) believe my worth as a human being does not reside in my size or appearance. I know, having grown up in a culture that is generally toxic to women and constantly trying to discipline women’s bodies, that it is important to resist unreasonable standards for how my body or any body should look. What I know and what I feel are two very different things. Feeling comfortable in my body isn’t entirely about beauty standards. It is not entirely about ideals. It’s about how I feel in my skin and bones, from one day to the next.

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

  As Lifton says, the language also reinforces the sense of separation of the group from the outside world. I can vividly recall the puzzled looks on the faces of newcomers to our group as those of us who had been indoctrinated for years spoke in a shorthand that was so ingrained and closed it became almost impossible for anyone new to gain entry into our world. Yet if and when someone did persevere and begin to understand the language we spoke, that new understanding became a huge part of their beginning to feel like a member of the community. As I’ve been writing this memoir, I have been swapping stories and reminiscences about the group with a woman named Gayle, who is also an ex-member of Limori’s cult. Gayle left the group in the mid-1990s, after living with Limori and some of her other followers at Wolf’s Den Fishing Lodge for a few years. She and I became reacquainted in the early part of this century when I tracked her down using that ubiquitous tool, the Google search engine. Gayle and I often find ourselves stumbling across a particular word and will burst out laughing with the shared knowledge and discomfort that the meaning of the word used to hold. Words as simple as energy , ego or truth or a phrase like Being in your heart were so laden with years and years of meaning and spiritual context that Gayle and I have remarked to each other on several occasions that we couldn’t use them, even in a non-spiritual context, for years after leaving the group. To this day, when anyone uses the term the truth in my vicinity, a small part of me recoils in painful reminiscence. The Truth was one of Limori’s most powerful weapons. Only she had ultimate access to it, and she wielded it with immense power. She and Alice repeatedly explained in the first couple of years I knew them that The Truth (I put both words in capital letters because the phrase held so much significance) was the ultimate tool that could be used to thwart the forces of evil or darkness in the universe. The motto of Limori’s group became “Love, Light and Truth.” We were told that the Dark (the negative or evil forces in the universe) wanted love and light but they were afraid of The Truth; therefore, a servant of God would always be looking inside herself for The Truth. Sounds harmless enough. The catch was that Limori was the only person with knowledge of The Truth. The phrase quickly became, for me, another thought-terminating cliché.

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

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

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

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

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

  The need or desire to understand our place in the universe most often led to reading – everything from Paramahansa Yogananda to Carlos Castaneda, Shirley MacLaine and Black Elk, to the teachings of Buddha and the channelled work of Emanuel, and back again. At times, in a Wednesday night meeting, someone would bring up an idea they’d been reading about and contemplating and ask Limori for Azeen’s explanation of the topic. The answer would invariably come back, usually laced with gentle humour, agreeing with some of what the referenced author said, but also, ever-so-subtly, undermining the author’s authority and the veracity of their message, and implying once again that it was only Limori herself who knew The Truth. Later, when we were more enthralled and more closely tied to her, she might say, “Azeen says that Yogananda’s message has been twisted somewhat and that what he really meant was . . .“ Or she would even tune into the teacher (Jesus, Buddha, etc.) himself and bring his message directly to us. The underlying implication was that if you want the real truth, you cannot trust even the books that a spiritual teacher has written; you must hear The Truth from the source itself, and Limori was the one person who could connect with these wise masters and give us the message they intended. With “us” you got The Truth; with “them” you could never be sure. Additionally, to create a stronger feeling in the group of “us versus them,” those among us who had partners or spouses who did not attend the group would very quickly find that person thrown into a light of suspicion. The messages would begin subtly and at once build up the group member’s perceived standing in God’s eyes, while at the same time implying (or stating) that the non-attending partner was deficient in some way. For example, a group member might share a dream with Limori that had seemed spiritually significant. Limori would respond by affirming what the member thought and then, with a wink and a smile, say something like, “But your husband wouldn’t understand such an advanced concept, would he?” Her tone would be kind and jovial, but the message would be crystal clear. The group member was advancing rapidly toward spiritual enlightenment, but unfortunately her spouse was not quite as special and not able to keep up. The group member would eventually be told they were “being held back spiritually” by their spouse. And when someone’s spouse came into question by Limori, and she began to really lean on the group member to consider leaving the marriage, she always had a trump card to play: “Do you choose God or do you choose your spouse?” What a conundrum for the serious spiritual student! It was the very choice Michael would be required to make several years down the road, both in his marriage and later in his relationship with me.

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

  We must remove these hooks from inside you so that they cannot be used in such a way. Bring everything into the light and it will no longer have a hold on you.” We were given three hours. There was to be no talking among us, but we could go anywhere on the property. I wrote earnestly, searching every nook, cranny and memory inside me and dragging up whatever I could think of that was shameful or secret. As did everyone else, it seemed: all around the grounds, on lawn chairs by the water and on porches and at kitchen tables, we wrote until our wrists ached. After lunch, as we settled back into our seats around the living room, I felt that I could see pride and relief on everyone’s faces. Some chagrin too, but mostly pride. Limori asked us how the experience was, and a few of us chimed up with explanations of what the exercise had been like. She listened and nodded sagely, as always, and then dropped the bomb. “Now, you will all read out loud to the group what you have written.” “What?!” Amber exclaimed. “I didn’t know we would be sharing this information.” Her face was deeply flushed and she moved restlessly in her seat, eyes wide and shocked. “I know,” Limori said. “I didn’t say earlier that you would be sharing what you’ve written but Azeen says that in order to completely clear out the shadows from within you, each of you must do exactly that.” More of us shifted in our seats and squirmed with discomfort. “Who wants to go first?” Limori looked around the room, her eyes passing over each one of us until one brave soul volunteered to do what each of us was dreading. And so the afternoon passed. And then we continued for the duration of the following day. It took up to an hour (sometimes more) for each person to read aloud what they’d written and then have Limori/Azeen respond to what had been shared. We confessed to everything from shoplifting chocolate bars as a seven-year-old to adultery and more. Lisa told us of a child she’d given up for adoption when she was a teenager and an abortion she’d had in her early twenties, events that even her husband didn’t know about. Norman, whose wife Nelly was also a member of the group but not there among us at the workshop, volunteered that he’d insisted on having anal intercourse with his wife. I am a fairly private person so the experience of listening to everyone’s deepest, darkest secrets hour after hour was agonizing. When it was my turn to read what I’d written, my secrets and shameful events paled in comparison to those of some of the others in the group; I wasn’t perfect by any means, just young. I hadn’t had as much time or inclination to accumulate secrets, though I still flushed to my roots while I read what I had written.

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

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

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  And yet Evil needs Good, matter needs the idea, and night needs light. Man knows that to satisfy his desires, to perpetuate his existence, woman is indispensable to him; he has to integrate her in society: as long as she submits to the order established by males, she is cleansed of her original stain. This idea is forcefully expressed in the Laws of Manu: “Whatever be the qualities of the man with whom a woman is united according to the law, such qualities even she assumes, like a river united with the ocean, and she is admitted after death to the same celestial paradise.” The Bible too praises the “virtuous woman.” Christianity, in spite of its loathing of the flesh, respects the devoted virgin and the chaste and docile wife. Within a religious group, woman can even hold an important religious position: Brahmani in India and Flaminica in Rome are as holy as their husbands; in a couple, the man is dominant, but both male and female principles remain essential to the childbearing function, to life, and to the social order. This very ambivalence of the Other, of the Female, will be reflected in the rest of her history; until our times she will be subordinated to men’s will. But this will is ambiguous: by total annexation, woman will be lowered to the rank of a thing; of course, man attempts to cover with his own dignity what he conquers and possesses; in his eyes the Other retains some of her primitive magic; one of the problems he will seek to solve is how to make his wife both a servant and a companion; his attitude will evolve throughout the centuries, and this will also entail an evolution in woman’s destiny.11 1. “Hail, Earth, mother of all men, may you be fertile in the arms of God and filled with fruits for the use of man,” says an old Anglo-Saxon incantation. 2. For the Bhantas of India, or in Uganda, a sterile woman is considered dangerous for gardens. In Nicobar, it is believed that the harvest will be better if it is brought in by a pregnant woman. In Borneo, seeds are chosen and preserved by women. “One seems to feel in women a natural affinity with the seeds that are said by the women to be in a state of pregnancy. Sometimes women will spend the night in the rice fields during its growth period” (Hose and MacDougall). In India of yore, naked women pushed the plow through the field at night. Indians along the Orinoco left the sowing and planting to women because “women knew how to conceive seed and bear children, so the seeds and roots planted by them bore fruit far more abundantly than if they had been planted by male hands” (Frazer). Many similar examples can be found in Frazer.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Inasmuch as the woman wants to be woman, her independent status produces an inferiority complex; inversely, her femininity leads her to doubt her professional opportunities. This is a most important point. A study showed that fourteen-year-old girls believed: “Boys are better; they find it easier to work.” The girl is convinced that she has limited capacities. Because parents and teachers accept that the girl’s level is lower than the boy’s, students readily accept it too; and in truth, in spite of the fact that the curricula are identical, girls’ intellectual growth in secondary schools is given less importance. With few exceptions, the students in a female philosophy class overall have a markedly lower achievement level than a class of boys: many female students do not intend to continue their studies, they work superficially, and others suffer from a lack of competitiveness. As long as the exams are fairly easy, their inadequacy will not be noticed too much; but when serious competitive exams are in question, the female student will become aware of her weaknesses; she will attribute them to the unjust curse of femaleness and not to the mediocrity of her education; resigning herself to this inequality, she exacerbates it; she persuades herself that her chances of success are related to her patience and assiduity; she decides to use her strength sparingly: this is a bad calculation. Above all, in studies and professions requiring a degree of inventiveness, originality, and some small discoveries, a utilitarian attitude is disastrous; conversations, reading outside the syllabus, or a walk that allows the mind to wander freely can be far more profitable even for the translation of a Greek text than the dreary compilation of complex syntaxes. Crushed by respect for those in authority and the weight of erudition, her vision blocked by blinkers, the overly conscientious female student kills her critical sense and even her intelligence. Her methodical determination gives rise to tension and ennui: in classes where female secondary school students prepare for the Sèvres examination, there is a stifling atmosphere that discourages even slightly spirited individuality. Having created her own jail, the female examination candidate wants nothing more than to escape from it; as soon as she closes her books, she thinks about any other subject. She does not experience those rich moments where study and amusement merge, where adventures of the mind acquire living warmth. Overwhelmed by the thanklessness of her chores, she feels less and less able to carry them out. I remember a female student doing the agrégation who said, at the time when there was a coed competitive exam in philosophy: “Boys can succeed in one or two years; we need at least four.” Another—who was recommended a book on Kant, a writer on the curriculum—commented: “This book is too difficult: it’s for Normalians!”* She seemed to think that women could take easier exams; beaten before even trying, she was in effect giving all chances of success to the men.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Because of this defeatist attitude, the woman easily settles for a mediocre success; she does not dare to aim higher. Starting out in her job with a superficial education, she very quickly curtails her ambitions. She often considers the very fact of earning her own living a great enough feat; like so many others, she could have entrusted her future to a man; to continue to want her independence she needs to take pride in her effort, but it exhausts her. It seems to her she has done enough just in choosing to do something. “That’s not so bad for a woman,” she thinks. A woman in an unusual profession said: “If I were a man, I would feel obliged to be in the top rank; but I am the only woman in France holding such a position: that’s enough for me.” There is prudence in her modesty. In trying to go further, the woman is afraid of failing miserably. She is bothered, and rightly so, by the idea that no one has confidence in her. In general, the superior caste is hostile to the parvenus of the inferior caste: whites will not go to see a black doctor, nor men a woman doctor; but individuals from the lower caste, imbued with the feeling of their generic inferiority and often full of resentment of someone who has prevailed over destiny, will also prefer to turn to the masters; in particular, most women, steeped in the adoration of the male, avidly seek him in the doctor, lawyer, office manager. Neither men nor women like working under a woman’s orders. Even if her superiors appreciate her, they will always be somewhat condescending; to be a woman is, if not a defect, at least a peculiarity. The woman must ceaselessly earn a confidence not initially granted to her: at the outset she is suspect; she has to prove herself. If she is any good, she will, people say. But worth is not a given essence: it is the result of a favorable development. Feeling a negative judgment weighing on one rarely helps one to overcome it. The initial inferiority complex most usually leads to the defensive reaction of an exaggerated affectation of authority. Most women doctors, for example, have too much or too little. If they are natural, they are not intimidating, because their life as a whole disposes them more to seduce than to command; the patient who likes to be dominated will be disappointed by advice simply given; conscious of this, the woman doctor uses a low voice, a decisive tone, but then she does not have the cheerful simplicity that is so seductive in the confident doctor. The man is used to being imposing; his clients believe in his competence; he can let himself go: he is sure to impress. The woman does not inspire the same feeling of security; she stiffens, exaggerates, overdoes it. In business, in the office, she is scrupulous, a stickler, and easily aggressive.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  But these rare advantages also conceal traps: instead of integrating her narcissistic indulgence and the sexual freedom she enjoys into her artistic life, the actress often falls into self-worship or seduction; I have already spoken of these pseudo-artists who seek only “to make a name for themselves” in the cinema or theater by representing capital to exploit in a man’s arms; the comfort of masculine support is very tempting compared with the risks of a career and the harshness any real work involves. The desire for a feminine destiny—a husband, a home, children—and the spell of love are not always easily reconcilable with the desire to succeed. But above all, the admiration she feels for herself limits the actress’s talent in many cases; she deludes herself as to the value of her mere presence to the extent that serious work seems useless to her; more than anything else, she prefers to place herself in the limelight and sacrifices the character she is interpreting to ham acting; she, like others, does not have the generosity to forget herself, which keeps her from going beyond herself: rare are the Rachels or the Duses who overcome this risk and who make of their person the instrument of their art instead of seeing in art a servant of their self. In her private life, though, the ham will exaggerate all her narcissistic defects: she will appear vain, touchy, and a phony; she will treat the whole world as a stage. [image file=image_rsrc45Z.jpg] Today the expressive arts are not the only ones open to women: many try their hand at creative activities. Woman’s situation encourages her to seek salvation in literature and in art. Living on the margin of the masculine world, she does not grasp it in its universal guise but through a particular vision; for her it is not a group of implements and concepts but a source of feelings and emotions; she is interested in the qualities of things inasmuch as they are gratuitous and secret; taking on a negative attitude, one of refusal, she does not lose herself in the real: she protests against it, with words; she looks for the image of her soul in nature, she abandons herself to her reveries, she wants to reach her being: she is doomed to failure; she can only recover it in the realm of imagination. So as not to allow an inner life that does not serve any purpose to sink into nothingness, so as to assert herself against the given that she endures in revolt, so as to create a world other than the one in which she cannot succeed in reaching herself, she needs to express herself. Thus it is well-known that she is talkative and a scribbler; she pours out her feelings in conversations, letters, and diaries. If she is at all ambitious, she will be writing her memoirs, transposing her biography into a novel, breathing her feelings into poems. She enjoys vast leisure time that favors these activities.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  They have always considered themselves as givens; they believe their worth comes from an inner grace, and they do not imagine that value can be acquired; to seduce, they know only how to display themselves: their charm works or does not work, they have no grasp on its success or failure; they suppose that in a similar way, to express oneself, one need only show what one is; instead of constituting their work by a thoughtful effort, they put their confidence in spontaneity; writing or smiling is all one to them: they try their luck, success will come or will not. Sure of themselves, they reckon that the book or painting will be successful without effort; timid, they are discouraged by the least criticism; they do not know that error can open the road to progress, they take it for an irreparable catastrophe, like a malformation. This is why they often overreact, which is harmful to themselves: they become irritated and discouraged when recognizing their errors rather than drawing valuable lessons from them. Unfortunately, spontaneity is not as simple as it appears: the paradox of the commonplace—as Paulhan explains in Les fleurs de Tarbes (The Flowers of Tarbes)—is that it is nothing more than the immediate translation of the subjective impression. Thus, when the woman produces the image she creates without taking others into account, she thinks she is most unusual, but she is merely reinventing a banal cliché; if she is told, she is surprised and vexed and throws down her pen; she is not aware that the public reads with its own eyes and its own mind and that a brand-new epithet can awaken in it many old memories; of course, it is a precious gift to be able to dig down into oneself and bring up vibrant impressions to the surface of language; one admires Colette for a spontaneity not found in any male writer; but—although these two terms seem to contradict each other—hers is a thoughtful spontaneity: she refuses some of its contributions and accepts others as she sees fit; the amateur, rather than seizing words as an interindividual relation, an appeal to the other, sees in them the direct revelation of her feelings; editing or crossing out for her means repudiating a part of self; she does not want to sacrifice anything both because she delights in what she is and because she hopes not to become other. Her sterile vanity comes from the fact that she cherishes herself without daring to construct herself.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Thus, very few of the legions of women who attempt to dabble in literature and art persevere; those who overcome this first obstacle very often remain divided between their narcissism and an inferiority complex. Not being able to forget oneself is a failure that will weigh on them more heavily than in any other career; if their essential goal is an abstract self-affirmation, the formal satisfaction of success, they will not abandon themselves to the contemplation of the world: they will be incapable of creating it anew. Marie Bashkirtseff decided to paint because she wanted to become famous; the obsession with glory comes between her and reality; she does not really like to paint: art is merely a means; it is not her ambitious and empty dreams that will reveal to her the meaning of a color or face. Instead of giving herself generously to the work she undertakes, the woman all too often considers it a simple ornament of her life; books and paintings are only an inessential intermediary allowing her to exhibit this essential reality publicly: her own person. Thus it is her person that is the main—sometimes only—subject that interests her: Mme Vigée-Lebrun does not tire of putting her smiling maternity on her canvases. Even if she speaks of general themes, the woman writer will still speak of herself: one cannot read such and such theater reviews without being informed of the size and corpulence of their author, the color of her hair, and the peculiarities of her personality. Of course, the self is not always detestable. Few books are as fascinating as certain confessions: but they have to be sincere, and the author has to have something to confess. Instead of enriching the woman, her narcissism impoverishes her; involved in nothing but self-contemplation, she eliminates herself; even the love she bestows on herself becomes stereotyped: she does not discover in her writings her authentic experience but an imaginary idol constructed from clichés. She cannot be criticized for projecting herself in her novels as Benjamin Constant and Stendhal did: but unfortunately, she sees her story too often as a silly fairy tale; the young girl hides the brutal and frightening reality from herself with good doses of fantasizing: it is a pity that once she is an adult, she still buries the world, its characters, and herself in the fogginess of poetry. When the truth emerges from this travesty, there are sometimes charming successes, but next to Dusty Answer* or The Constant Nymph, how many bland and dull escapist novels there are!

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  CHAPTER 11 [image file=image_rsrc3E3.jpg] “Do you want to know your diagnosis?” Samantha had asked brightly, her face glowing like a moon on my screen. And when she said “complex PTSD,” she tossed it off so casually that I just shrugged in response—oh, okay. She wouldn’t have waited eight years if it was that important, right? How bad could it be? So after our session, I googled it. I clicked on the Wikipedia page, then the Veterans Affairs website, and saw the list of symptoms: People with complex PTSD have trouble holding down jobs and maintaining relationships. People with complex PTSD are needy. People with complex PTSD see threats everywhere and are aggressive. They are more likely to be alcoholics, addicts, violent, impulsive, unpredictable. Most of these symptoms rang true for me. But it was the hyper-specific ones that freaked me out, like the idea that C-PTSD patients spend their lives in “relentless search for a savior.” How could they have known about that? Somehow, this Wikipedia entry called it. Every time I met someone new who seemed wise and stable and kind, I wondered if they might be the answer to things, if they might be the new best friend who’d finally crack the code, the one who would make me feel loved. I thought this was a weird but very personal trait of mine. And this whole time it had been a medical symptom. More than symptoms, these felt like accusations. The scientists and doctors might as well have written, People with complex PTSD are awful human beings. Okay. But now you know, I tried to tell myself. Knowing is good. Now you can fix things. Healing always begins with a diagnosis. But then again, so does dying. Oh God. My fingers frantically jumped across the computer keys: “True story” + “complex ptsd.” I’ll find a story, I thought. I find stories for things like this all day. “Celebrities with complex ptsd.” I wanted to know I wasn’t alone. “I healed from complex ptsd.” I wanted to know I was fixable. “Complex ptsd” + “happy now.” I wanted to see women like me who could hold down jobs and cook dinner and didn’t screw up their kids, women who adopt old incontinent dogs and have nice husbands and subscriptions to Real Simple, women who have survived catastrophe and morphed themselves into something selfless and lovable. But there were no results for celebrities with complex PTSD. At least none that I could find. Instead, the internet told me about Barbra Streisand, who apparently has PTSD from forgetting the lyrics to a song in the middle of a show. The “true story” avenue didn’t fare much better. I found pleas from people struggling with C-PTSD on message boards, begging for solutions to their pain. There were only two results for “I healed from complex PTSD.” One was a broken link, and the other was a line in a weird old poetry blog.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  In other words, complex trauma created a consistent set of defensive traits—of personality quirks—within its victims. And these were uniquely terrible even within the PTSD community. It seemed to suggest we had our own culture. Americans are individualist. Chinese people are oriented toward the good of the collective. The French are romantic and love cheese. And people with C-PTSD are drama queen self-saboteurs who are impossible to love. I questioned whether this dark reading of the material was simply my “self-loathing” brain placing a dark lens across these scientific studies. But then again, there was that one book that described victims of early childhood trauma as “a burden to themselves and others” and “a minefield many would prefer to avoid.” How could I read these words about myself and not be pounded by shame? How could I not want to protect everyone from the burden of these noxious traits? This was the most disorienting and upsetting idea that emerged from my reading: the idea that C-PTSD was baked into my personality, that I didn’t know where my PTSD stopped and I began. If C-PTSD was a series of personality traits, then was everything about my personality toxic? Was everything about my history toxic? And would I have to throw it all away? My diagnosis called into question everything I loved—from ginseng abalone soup to talking a whole lot at parties to doodling during meetings. I couldn’t tell which parts were pathologically problematic and which were fine as they were. I had already tried to wipe away everything my mother gave me. Her specialty was biscotti, which I refuse to eat now. I pluck yellow roses out of my bouquets because they were her favorite flower. I removed her sayings from my vocabulary. But then I’d come across a picture of her and see that I have her hands. Her shoulders. Erasing C-PTSD from myself seemed as impossible as swapping out my collarbones. In order to heal, would I really have to throw away everything that made me who I was? I searched the books for an answer to these questions. The books were full of how to not be a person with trauma. They listed in great detail all of our faults and failings. But to my question of how to be a person…solutions were relegated to a mere ten, maybe thirty pages in the back of the book. There’d be one happy story about an abused, underdeveloped child getting the right kind of treatment, developing resiliency, and eventually performing at the same level as his peers. It was so often a kid. Kids’ brains are more flexible and recover more quickly, the books insisted. Adults—not so much. Maybe try yoga, the books said. Some of them, like The Body Keeps the Score, suggested a number of mysterious and expensive therapies, such as EMDR and neurofeedback, but even then, van der Kolk cautioned that they were effective only a small percentage of the time.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  [bell ringing] [seal calling] [bird droppings splatting] [soft instrumental music] [woman moaning] [man moaning] [fingers squeaking on window] [Alex] Hi, I'm Alex. I'm a science and health reporter who grew up in the 90s and was raised on a steady diet of Gushers, Salt-N-Pepa, and just saying no to- [Woman] Oh God, oh yes, yes, yes! [Alex] To keep me abstinent, my school exposed me to image upon image of untreated sexually transmitted infections as well as the miracle of birth. [woman screaming] Brutal, I know. Please accept these puppies as a visual palette cleanser. These tactics scared the literal fuck out of me. I believed sex outside of marriage would ruin me in the eyes of my family and society. And in America, this idea was reinforced everywhere. [TV] What if I want to have sex before I get married? -Well, I guess you just have to be prepared to die. -Are you a scorned woman? -The homosexual act in itself is devalued and degrading in itself. -You consent to go to his apartment the first date, you are consenting to sex. -Abstinence for young people is the only certain way to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases. [applauding] -Don't you think that diminishes the Office of the President a little bit, talking about condoms? -It makes her a slut, right? -No more sex education. That is the conclusion after a Fremont School Board meeting. [Alex] So, what happens to a country raised to fear sex? In the United States, teenagers have the highest pregnancy rate in the developed world. Over 700,000 queer people have endured conversion therapy, and 75% of people don't report when they've been raped or sexually assaulted. [child singing] -Personally, it's why for years I was terrified of one simple truth. So terrified that I considered taking my own life. That truth? I love dick. I love the way they look, the way they feel, the way they taste. Is this making you uncomfortable? I get it, I mean, it made me so uncomfortable, I considered suicide. And while I've mostly come to terms with being gay, there's plenty of other sexual shame I can't let go of and I really want to. I want to stop lying to my doctor about my sex life because it's awkward. I want to stop compulsively clearing my browser history because it feels dirty. I want to stop sabotaging relationships because it's hard to be honest and vulnerable about sex. I want to start being honest and vulnerable with myself. So at 36 years old, I'm finally going to take responsibility and confront my fears head on. I know exactly where to start, a crucial step on every adult's path to self-actualization, blame my mommy and my daddy. All right, okay, so you can look at me. [Dad] Are you dressed for this? Shouldn't you dress a little better? [Alex] That would be my dad, Bill. [laughs] You don't like what I'm wearing? -I mean, this what you're gonna look?

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Myself, I was just checking out about Alger Hiss and Checkers. —You’re gonna leave the seeds in there? Paul said. In the binding like that? —All will be revealed, baby. When the student is ready, the master will appear. Libbets circulated nervously around the living room. Paul wondered if the two of them, Libbets and Davenport, had already collaborated in some afternoon sexual experiment. Even Libbets, in her secure and privately educated skull must have known how Davenport fucked him up. —Flame on, he said. —Huh? Libbets said. —Awesome sleet and rain, Paul said. Far out. Let’s do some reef. Neither sleet nor rain will stay this courier. What’s on the idiot box? —Lost in Space , Libbets said. Star Trek at seven. —Moisture, moisture, Davenport said from his station. Moooiiiistuuuuure. It was from this episode, this Lost in Space episode. —Yeah, yeah, Paul said. Or remember that one where there were the guys with glittering, plastic bowlers. Zachary Smith was … Davenport rolled a joint as carefully as if it were bomb disposal. —Howdy, there, he said. You, young knight. Can you check on the mead? Can you sally forth and secure us some more mead? —In the pantry, Libbets said. She pointed. Paul trudged disconsolately out into the foyer, past the living room where a portrait of the Caseys—Libbets was the youngest of the six, seated in her father’s lap—occupied most of a wall. He stood in the dark. —No, that way, Libbets said, leaning out into the hall, slumped against the doorjamb. Take a right, through there. —Just looking, Paul said. Got my “just looking” button on. The pantry was long, empty, spotless. The banality of this kind of housekeeping made Paul uncomfortable. The place begged for the release of cockroaches or lab rats. It begged for finger-painted floors, tie-dyed curtains, for graffiti and noise pollution. Paul was a third term, an unwelcome geometrical element. Davenport hadn’t even greeted him. And supernumerary was a feeling he knew as well as he knew that parched baby blue of Connecticut summer skies. Blundering in the kitchen, he felt sure that it would always be this way, this blunt little diorama of a life with its cessation of miracles would never change—except that it would get worse. Davenport wasn’t satisfied with his own charm. He wanted to inhabit his friends, to neutralize them. He wanted Paul’s socks and Paul’s records and Paul’s homework assignments and even Paul’s nuclear family with its 2.2 children and its five basic food groups and its pristine genetics. They were the best of friends, Davenport and Paul. This was what friendship was like. Paul formulated his plan. He removed the cold six-pack of Heinekens from the refrigerator. He trudged out of the kitchen. —Frankie opens them with his teeth, Libbets giggled, back in the library. This wasn’t news. It was part of Davenport’s arsenal of entertainments. Paul had tried the same trick on a couple of occasions, with painful results.