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 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.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  • This makes me feel icky. Anal sex, age play, inflicting or enjoying pain or humiliation are taboo. They may also be associated with a history of shame, particularly for survivors of sexual abuse and other trauma. Naturally, you don’t want to do something that makes you feel that horrible coating of shame you’ve worked so hard to be rid of. But on the other hand, investigating (not reenacting) that shame—and the turn-ons that trigger it—can empower you sexually. (See “Facing and Healing Triggers of Sexual Trauma,” below.) Remind yourself that your fulfillment will come from opening, frustration from closing in. That doesn’t mean saying yes to everything; it does mean considering the possibility that you might be OK with something new. Low Libido High Libido One Libido No LibidoYou can have an active sex life even if one or both of you is experiencing diminished libido. Maintaining an erotic exchange is especially challenging when you just don’t feel very sexual. What’s important is that you share sex as a value in your relationship—and are both willing to take action to generate sexual desire. I could fill a chapter with myriad reasons for lost libido: pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause, clinical depression, trauma, grief, illness, medication all can be named as culprits. If you know the specific source of a downward change in your libido, attend to that. (See “Nurture Your Libido” in chapter 2, Desire and Fantasy, and “Sexual Response Over a Lifetime” in chapter 3, Anatomy and Sexual Response.) Don’t use low libido as a free pass—“I’m perimenopausal” is not a reason to opt out of life. Here’s one woman’s can-do response to shifts in her partner’s libido during menopause: First, we discussed it without whining, yelling, or accusing. We talked about how we felt. It was an eye opener for both of us. Second, I bought lube for those limited times when she was in the mood. It’s amazing how it helped. Third, we spoke to our gynecologist. She recommended a limited dosage of testosterone. These days it comes in a patch. Fourth, I stopped pressuring. I was amazed that taking the pressure off her allowed for more touching. Sometimes that touching turned into wonderful sex. Fifth, I read erotica to her every once in a while. (I kept the lube close by.) I’m not saying that we are at the same level that we were when we first met, but things have improved substantially.6 You can commit to regularly scheduled times of intimacy, including physical intimacy which may or may not include sex. Set aside an evening a week, a weekend each month, to focus on each other. Married sex is good sex, too.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  [laughs] -You know, as a Catholic Asian girl growing up, you know, you're told to be modest. I didn't question it. And most people didn't question it. [Alex] So no wonder my family never talked about sex. They had it even worse. The church shamed my grandmother into ignorance about her body and my mom learned modest girls don't ask questions. Well, I think it's time to start asking some questions. For starters, what the fuck, America? -Some of you may become somewhat uncomfortable as parts of this film unfold. But I think if you listen carefully, you will agree that the concepts will contribute to the rearing of a mature person. [warm instrumental music] [Alex] Describe to me what your sex education was like and how well you think it prepared you for sex. -I would say there probably wasn't really much. -I didn't get much sex education throughout high school. -And it was very much abstinence-based. -They just showed you pictures of diseased penises and vagina. -It should be evident the advantages of starting early with explanations to children. [warm instrumental music] [Alex] My first questions were for adolescent psychologist Lisa Medoff. I wanted to know if my upbringing was common, if we're all a little screwed up about sex. So I just sat down with my mom, my grandmother, my dad, and we talked about sex for the first time. It was little uncomfortable, like just trying to get the at like, say the word, like erection for the first time, to talk about, you know, the idea that there wasn't much sexual diversity. And even then when someone comes by, it's very nervous, yeah, to even say the words in public. So I'm wondering, you know, like I feel like it shouldn't be. Like, I feel like I'm crazy. [Lisa] You're definitely not crazy. I think that's what the culture has taught you. [Alex] So would you say then that we do live in a society that wants to repress a lot of sex and sexuality? [Lisa] Oh, absolutely, yes. I think we are a society that is very, very repressed. What we're good at is the external, the superficial, and what that can hide is some of the shame that we have talking one-to-one with partners or with friends about some of the questions we might have, some of our insecurities, some of our desires. [Alex] One thing I do want to get at is, is sexual shame goo? Like, should I feel ashamed about these things? Like, is there a place for it? Is there a healthy level of shame? [Lisa] I'm actually going to turn that question back on you of, do you think that there's a healthy level? Like, what's the purpose of shame? Why did that question occur to you? [Alex] I guess what comes up for me then is like, what if I do have a rape fantasy or like, I don't know, like an incest fantasy or something.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  There she dropped her middle name, Carolyn, in favor of her first name, Betty, and cut her long, stringy hair into a bouncy bob. One broken taboo spawned a host of others: movies, skating rinks, lipstick, slacks, bathing suits, men. The path to perdition is tediously routine for a Holy Roller girl. She went to church, she prayed, but God no longer dropped by. She met my dad in LA, a sinner boy who was everything my grandfather feared. He smoked and drank and indulged a taste for all things fast. Cars. Boats. Women. Mama’s religious beliefs and naïveté cast her as something of an exotic in my dad’s eyes. Her LA nickname, Betty the Body, tells the rest of the story. My dad wooed her with professions of love, promises of repentance, and declarations that she alone could save him. Six weeks after they met, my parents married. Asked why she married a man she hardly knew and one so different from her, my mother’s answer is typical: “I guess I thought I could help him.” The cost of bringing a soul into the fold was never too high.My grandfather’s response to the Las Vegas wedding was to the point: “I guess she had to get married.”I was born a year after my parents married. Still, I’ve always considered their wedding a shotgun marriage of sorts, a trigger-happy God pointing the gun, my mother’s guilt egging it all on. She had come close to the fires of hell one night, parked above Los Angeles in my dad’s car, the windows steamed with lust. They married soon after. The marriage lasted two years, most of which my dad spent scrambling for the door. He made his final exit when my mother told him a second child was on the way.Mama discovered he had another woman and her disgrace was complete.My mother returned to her parents’ house pregnant and prodigal with a toddler in tow. She had rebelled against her father. She had eaten of the tree of good and evil. She had known better. She was practically a divorced woman, and in the rural Pentecostal South that put her perilously close to being a hussy. Pentecostals conceded that divorce might be a necessary evil in extreme cases, but remarriage was condemned little more than legally sanctioned adultery. At twenty-three, my mother’s vision of herself as God’s own girl was lost. She was grateful when her parents allowed her to move into the apartment in the basement of their church. She was grateful when my brother was born healthy, grateful when she found a job, grateful her daddy never said, “I told you so.” She woke early Monday through Friday, dressed for work, dropped my infant brother and me at the babysitter’s, and headed to Whitman Trailers for another day of typing and shorthand.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  I had to get some things before Jimmy came back. I just remembered. Okay? Are my answers good enough? What are you, a special prosecutor or something? And what do you mean about the lingerie? —Never mind, Hood said. —Hey, wait just a second— —I thought when you didn’t turn up that you were hiding somewhere. I thought maybe you— —You what? He began slowly, but then, as Hood re-created the details, he became a sort of erotic revenant. He gulped the last of his drink—his equilibrium was really beginning to fall away, like the first stage of an Apollo rocket. He reveled in the hot flashes, in the indignity of his predicament. —I searched the house. I figured you were hiding, in a merry widow or something, in the closets, or else behind some piece of furniture. I figured you were there. I thought there was more to it than there was. So then I got to the bathroom and I saw the lingerie. I thought that it was part of a trail, a romantic trail or something, or it was a reminder of you. Something to be contemplated, you know, drunk in or something, you know? I was looking around, that’s all. —You need help, Benjamin. That was just out to dry. I was leaving things out to dry. Delicates . What did you do with my clothes? He was flattered by the degradation of his adultery, and as he told the story he felt its shame and joy. He knew he wished to be caught, that it was always the cuckold or the betrayed who was honored by the adulterer. And he was a liar, too, an exaggerator. Hood’s past lies swirled in this next moment of fiction, these past lies fluttered and squirmed in this liar’s chrysalis. He was thinking about padded expense accounts and cheating on exams as he spoke: —I took it, the garter belt, to your dresser and buried it with its compatriots, with the lacy underthings, with the slips and panties and bras and stockings. —Jesus, you are a mess, Benjamin. You’re a case history of hung-up behavior. Where’s your wife? —I don’t know. She was a little upset about the, uh, bowl out front. She ran in ahead of me. Probably in the kitchen. Planning something, some covert activity in the kitchen. He snickered desperately. They moved over to the couch, a Stendig, designed by Ennio Chiggio and arranged in a semicircle with a big apostrophe at the end, where Hood now rested his weary feet. An earnest bunch of locals, dressed in plaid shirts and skirts and jackets, in double-knit trousers, in gray flannel, in velour and polyester, was conglomerated at the end of the couch, the system of islands. Dave Gorman, a fixture at the promiscuous events of New Canaan, was plundering the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.—the Dresden fire-bombing and Ice Nine—in an effort to impress a young and attractive woman beside him.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “Yes.” Anaïs gave Henry her glorious smile. “I forgot to congratulate you on your Supreme Court victory. Your work was recognized as literary. Thirty years after I recognized it.” Henry said, “You’ll be making a mistake, Anaïs, if you cut the sex from your diary. Get your book banned like mine, hmm, hmm. That’s what makes the books sell.” Anaïs rose to leave, and I stood, but Henry set his sights on Rupert. “What about you, Rupert? How are you gonna feel when you read about Anaïs in heat with me?” “That was a long time ago,” Rupert said pleasantly. “Before I met Anaïs.” “Good attitude, Rupert kid, very good. Hmm, hmm. Besides, what do you have to complain about? She married you. I asked her to marry me, did ya know that? She wouldn’t leave Hugo. She never could leave Hugo, doncha know?” “We really have to get going.” Anaïs swept up two of the signed releases and deposited them in her bag. Henry raised his voice. “But what about Hugo, Anaïs? He’s going to know you are a liar when he reads your diary. A liar! Are you going to ask him for a release? Are you finally going to ask him for a divorce?” Oh my God. Henry had said it! I looked at Rupert for his reaction. He must have been zoning out, or maybe he just dismissed whatever Henry said as claptrap, because his eyes remained on Anaïs, concerned only by how upset she appeared. I tried again to derail Henry. “After Tropic of Cancer, which of your novels do you think I should read?” I asked. He ignored me. “Are you going to ask Hugo for a divorce?” he called to Anaïs as she hurried to the door where Rupert was waiting. “Do you want me to talk to him about it?” “I’ll send you the edited pages, Henry,” she trilled as we all exited. “Liar! Liar!” he yelled after us. As soon as we were settled in the T-bird, Rupert screeched onto Ocampo Drive as if wanting to leave Henry Miller in the dust. Anaïs said, “It’s sad that Henry has gone senile. He was always so much older than me.” “He sure is a crazy old coot!” Rupert responded, darting left onto Sunset. I chimed in, “Anaïs, I don’t know how you can stand that man.” She put up a palm, silencing me. “I’m editing the diary and I can’t allow my present feelings about Henry to color how I portrayed him then.” Lowering her hand, she took Rupert’s free hand. “The problem with Henry is that he’s never outgrown his adolescent romanticism. Like with that Hoki girl; he only loves what he cannot have. The moment he gets it, he loses his desire and becomes impotent. He can only perform in the realm of fantasy.”

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  In my own case, until my counselors taught me what the Chinese Communists of the 1950s were doing, I did not truly understand the process of “brainwashing.” Until my counselors were able to show me how other destructive cults, like the Krishnas,177 were structured in the same authoritarian manner as the Unification Church, I had believed that the Moonies were different from any other group. I was also able to show Phil that, as strange as they sounded, some of the Moonies’ beliefs did seem to make sense, if you believed in Moon and therefore the whole doctrine. I made sure to include the Moonies’ view on accidental deaths, so he could see that there were alternative belief systems that offered other explanations. It was also important for him to see that there are other groups which are led by people claiming to be spiritually superior. When I eventually told him that there were over 3000 cult groups, and that if one of them was in fact led by the one legitimate great leader (which I seriously doubted), then the odds that he would have found the right one on the first pick were 3000 to one. Not very good odds. I also showed him that I had been a dedicated cult member, and that I chose to leave the group for the “right” reasons. I wanted to challenge his indoctrination that people who leave do so because they are weak or undisciplined, or want to indulge in materialism. I wanted him to know that I left the Unification Church out of strength and integrity. I came to see objectively what I had been doing. I had devoted myself to a fantasy created in the Moonie indoctrination workshops. I thought I was following the Messiah—the person who would be able to end war, poverty, disease and corruption, and establish a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. I didn’t mind sacrificing myself for these noble causes. I thought that as a member, I was teaching people the ultimate standard of love and truth, and living an exemplary life. Instead, I realized that I had learned to compromise my integrity in the name of God. I realized that the higher I rose in the organization, and the closer I got to Moon, the more obsessed I became. Power had become almost an addiction, and I began making choices based on what would protect and enhance my power, not on what was morally right.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  A day later, though, while Joseph and Hyrum waited for the delivery of horses to carry them west, Joseph received an impassioned letter from Emma urging him to return to Nauvoo. The messenger who delivered the letter told the prophet that many of the Saints believed he had abandoned them out of cowardice: “You always said if the church would stick to you, you would stick to the church; now trouble comes and you are the first to run.” Shamed, Joseph returned to Illinois to face prosecution, fearing the worst. “I am going like a lamb to the slaughter,” he warned those who rowed him back across the river. Joseph and eleven others who were charged with destroying the press surrendered on June 24. As they traveled the twenty-five miles from Nauvoo to Carthage, the roads were lined with Illinois militiamen and other Gentiles who heckled the prophet lustily: “God damn you, Old Joe, we’ve got you now!” “Clear the way and let us see old Joe, the prophet of God. He’s seen the last of Nauvoo. We’ll use him up and kill all the damn Mormons!” In Carthage, the streets were jammed with armed, inebriated, poorly disciplined members of numerous local militias, all screaming for the prophet’s head. Governor Ford, determined to protect Joseph and give him a fair trial, ordered all the militiamen in town to disband except for a single company of Carthage Greys, who were assigned to guard the jail and safeguard the prisoners. Ten of the Mormons in custody posted bail and were allowed to go free, but Joseph and Hyrum, who had been charged with treason in addition to the less serious crimes charged to the other defendants, were incarcerated in the Carthage jail, a two-story structure with yard-thick walls built from red limestone cut from a local quarry. There were just six rooms in the entire building: two locked cells for holding prisoners, plus four rooms (one of which was a cramped attic garret) that served as living quarters for the jailer, his wife, and their seven children. Initially the prophet and his brother were held in the downstairs debtors’ cell, which was well lit and reasonably comfortable. The jailer, George Stigall, was not Mormon, but he was a decent man, and he worried that this downstairs cell, with its large, ground-level windows, might provide insufficient protection from the enraged men outside who wished to harm his prisoners. So the jailer permitted them to bide their time upstairs in his own bedroom, and friendly visitors were given unrestricted access to the Smith brothers. By this means, two guns were smuggled in to them—a six-shot pepperbox revolver and a single-shot pistol. Late on the afternoon of June 27, while Joseph and Hyrum were being visited in their quarters by Apostles John Taylor and Willard Richards, approximately 125 militiamen from the virulently anti-Mormon town of Warsaw assembled outside the jail in the damp summer heat.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Michael’s effect on her had been all the more enthralling because of the way she viewed her own body. At the age of seven, anointed a flower girl for a summer wedding, she had worn a dress of pink flounce and lace trim with a pink sash and a crown of roses and baby’s breath. She couldn’t have been more pleased; the outfit was the prettiest she had ever put on. But when she glimpsed the girl chosen to walk alongside her, who wore the same flounce and trim and sash, and who seemed half Isabel’s size, the spell cast by the fairy-tale clothes floated away, replaced by bewilderment, then despair, that two seven-year-olds in identical gowns could look so far from identical. Ever since, she’d seen herself as encased by a soft excess, sometimes horrifically thick, sometimes subtle. She assaulted this flesh by dieting, or ignored yet never forgot it. And though as an adult she told herself that it had been years since anyone could rightly have called her even chunky, still there was this padding that dismayed her. Under Michael’s stare, she had felt pared away. The sharpness of his eyes had somehow cut her body to a better outline. Eric didn’t have that ability. He was gentle, while Michael had been gentlemanly; he was empathetic, while Michael was at once solicitous and commanding. Michael’s admiration had convinced her of her allure; Eric’s telling her she was beautiful couldn’t quite make it so. The relationship with Michael had ended only because she understood he would never commit to her, never marry her or even live with her, but it didn’t end cleanly at all. Months after breaking things off, she met him for dinner, and afterward, outside, he turned up the collar of her overcoat, hailed her a cab, and five minutes later sent her a text: I’m following you. Soon she was buzzing him into her building. There were lapses like that, lapses and lapses. The end point she had announced to her friends took forever, it seemed, to become fact, until she could no longer bear to confess her failures to them. “I could not part with him,” she said. “I couldn’t get him out of my skull.” Meana was a psychology professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and just before I flew out to meet her, she said that we should start by going together to a Cirque du Soleil show at one of the casinos. So, soon after my plane landed, we sat in a darkened U-shaped theater and began our conversation while a pair of topless, dark-haired women in G-strings dove backward into a giant water-filled champagne glass on stage. The women plunged in from opposite sides of the pool, swam toward each other, and entangled with each other, eel-like. They slid up the walls, arching their spines and dragging their breasts along the glass.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  An analytically oriented critic could have a field day “proving” abnormality in the case of Stephanie (Chapter Four, Seeing and Reading), what with her preoccupation with tribal sexual punishments, Nazi tortures and sexual-organ mutilations. And perhaps such is the case. Yet, if the critic accepts the reality of Stephanie’s fantasy, can he fairly omit or negate the reality of her statement that “although I might be a perverted sadist down deep, it doesn’t seem to show in my daily life; in fact I am a gentle person, so I could afford to laugh, feeling secure in the fact that I have disciplined this part of myself?” So again we have these unanswerable questions. Is a gentle woman who has sadistic fantasies disturbed? Might it not be nature’s wisdom to enable her to handle and discharge negative feelings in dreams and fantasies instead of doing so in her interpersonal relationships? Would she be “healthier” if she were nastier in person and had less violent fantasies? I contend that analytic criticisms of these fantasies do a great disservice to people. By declaring certain fantasies “No-Nos” they reinforce self-rejection. (Your fantasy is as much you as any other part of you.) This is the direct opposite of the therapeutic goal. What is wrong with thoughts which improve one’s sex life? The true masochist is one who avoids thinking “masochistic thoughts” once she has discovered, by accident or design, that such thoughts excite her. There are additional factors to bear in mind in evaluating analytically oriented criticisms of these fantasies. One concerns the fact that psychoanalytic theory has been, by and large, formulated by males. Freud, Sullivan, Adler, Jung, Reich… became the arbiters and interpreters of what woman’s “normal” sexual response should be. Yet, not being women, how could they possibly know on a cellular level what they were talking about? Is it really likely that these men were any more appreciative of what a “normal woman” might dare think than were the lover and former editor whom Nancy Friday mentioned in her opening chapter? Another difficulty in interpreting these fantasies analytically is that the very act of analysis—of labeling (“Sadist, Masochist, Castrator, Oedipal, Self-destructive, Exhibitionistic”)—creates a self-consciousness that is antithetical to the sexual mystique. One of the effects of sex is the self-transcendence that can be obtained by losing one’s “self”—one’s ego—in an act of embrace. To be conscious of self (self-conscious) and transcend self at the same time is an impossibility. Pity the bind that so many analysands are in who seek sexual freedom while being prodded by their analysts to be suspicious of and act analytically toward their erotic impulses.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Casey had decorated their master bath in a style according to their age and means. Lavender shell soaps—they were everywhere, no home without them—occupied a china soap dish. Floral wallpaper, also flecked with lavender, adorned the walls. The soap and the wallpaper and the tissue paper and the hand towels matched. The medicine cabinet yielded precisely the kind of paydirt he had been hoping for. Besides some Preparation H and some perfumed douches, there were several prescriptions: phenobarbital, Valium, Seconal, and an old one, paregoric. The Seconals interested him particularly. Before he could effect the next stage of his plan, however, he unzippered his khakis and took himself in hand. An inevitable part of marijuana intoxication. When Paul felt irritable and forlorn, he noticed he was also especially prone to jerk that thing. He had elaborated a number of complicated masturbation scenarios. He always liked to begin, for example, when the second hand of his watch was precisely at twelve. (There was a small wind-up clock on the sink.) He liked to finish before the second hand made it around twice. He also liked to whack off to pictures of girls he found by randomly flipping through his St. Pete’s yearbook. Once he had arrived at Libbets’s picture through this procedure, and though these yearbook episodes were usually memorable, he found on this occasion that he wilted in his hand. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it with a woman so adorable. He just couldn’t bring himself to that point. He had tried a variety of lubricants. Skin lotions, lip balms, even Stan Sinclair’s jar of QT tanning lotion. This failure turned out to be good luck. It proved that Libbets was appropriate for his worship. So appropriate that he got hard, this time, this day. Shafts of light coursed through his penis. He could feel light in his scrotum, in every millimeter of that downy chicken skin. His ecstasy was religious. This orgasm would be compensation for Paul Hood’s troubles here on earth. Yes, the best orgasms were characterized not by joy—he couldn’t remember a joyful one anyway—but by earthly loss and the desire to fortify himself against it. With this in mind, he was about to tearfully leak a couple of teaspoons of disaffection in the sink. But a knock at the door interrupted him. —Champ, Davenport called from the other side of the door. What the hell is going on in there? We are bored and desire your company. Come on out. Desist from choking that toad, champ. Desist. Paul froze. Did Davenport really— —Just gotta spill in the sink here first, Francis. He giggled wretchedly at his floppy divining rod.—Then I’ll bring out the heavy chemistry. —Okay, but don’t be long about it. If you’re gonna take your pleasures in there we want to know about it. We want to participate. Paul caught his breath. Ran water through his hair. Took a deep breath. Back in the library. Star Trek with American Beauty soundtrack.