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 Between Us

  Spontaneously, the Turkish interviewees reported that they were “angry”; they did not volunteer “shame.” And yet, there is reason to suspect that it was shame that could explain why the the Turkish interviewees ended the relationships with whomever had insulted them. We did not ask them explicitly if they felt shame, but they spontaneously reported being very concerned with the impact of the event on the respect they, their family, or their ingroup received from others—concerns which in other honor cultures are highly connected with shame. In similar situations, the Dutch interviewees were hardly concerned with their social image. They too reported having been angry, but they painted very different endings. In most of the Dutch episodes, the anger had faded away: respondents had made up with the other person, got over the insult, etc. Shame in honor culture is the awareness that your social image is exposed and threatened. However, as your social image is interconnected with the honor of your family and ingroup, honor attacking situations include close others. There is a ripple effect of shame such that your shame also affects the shame of your relatives and friends whose honor is equally attacked. Psychologist Patricia Rodriguez Mosquera and her colleagues specifically studied family honor; they compared Pakistani college students in Pakistan with white American students from the East Coast. They asked students to remember “a situation in which a member of your family did or said something that devalued your family.” If family honor is shared, argues Mosquera, then every family member must avoid disrespecting the family, everyone is responsible for every other family member’s behavior and must try to keep them from disrespecting or devaluing the family, and every family member is charged with protecting the family from insults and other devaluations inflicted by outsiders. Failing to meet any of those charges exposes you and elicits shame.

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  Hugh stiffened. “This is not about money.” “It is for Charlotte,” the duke said. “It’s always about money for Charlotte.” He looked at her. “Do you know anything about your intended, dear? Did he tell you how he wagered away almost every shilling of the La Coeur funds? He was forced to sell his sister to Remington to bail them out of debt. Why do you think an earl’s daughter married a bastard?” Suddenly Charlotte’s nausea became a very real hazard, and she clutched her stomach in a vain attempt to still its roiling. “Lady Julienne chose Remington of her own accord,” Hugh growled. “She was set to marry a marquess,” Glenmoore continued, digging in deeper, as he relished Charlotte’s obvious distress. “But then Lord Fontaine cast her aside when he realized how far in his pockets Montrose was.” “Lies!” Hugh glanced her way, his face flushed, his fists clenched. Glenmoore arched a brow. “Are you claiming you weren’t nearly destitute from irresponsible gambling?” Hugh’s expression could have been set in stone. “That was long ago.” “Only a few years, I believe.” The duke’s smile was filled with malice. “Regardless, I was on my way to join the rest of the party, and I don’t wish to hold up the proceedings. Congratulations, Montrose. Charlotte. I’ll await your missive detailing where I should direct Charlotte’s pension. Also, since you won’t require the manse anymore, I’ll make arrangements to sell it.” Glenmoore walked away, leaving destruction in his wake. Hugh was so furious for a moment, he could hardly think. When Gwen collided with him on the stairs and blurted that her father had cornered Charlotte, the rage he’d felt had almost overwhelmed him. If he had any doubts earlier about his feelings for his paramour, he didn’t any longer. “You should never have told Glenmoore we were affianced!” Charlotte groaned. “He will mention our engagement to someone just to embarrass you. This is a disaster.” Hugh stepped closer to offer comfort. She was frighteningly pale, her mouth and eyes rimmed with lines of tension. Trying for levity, he placed a hand over his heart and gave an exaggerated sigh. “You know, a man could be irreparably damaged by such a response to his proposal.” She flinched. “We must go down and correct this mistake. Whatever will your family say when they hear of this?” Hugh tapped a finger to his chin. “Congratulations?” he suggested. “You are impossible. Lady Julienne warned me that you were known for being irresponsible and jumping into situations headfirst. I had no notion what she was talking about until now.” She attempted to pass him, and he sidestepped into her path. “Hugh, the guests will gossip if we hold up the meal.”

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  We have only one letter from this correspondent, Maximus, with Augustine’s answer to it, but references in the letters indicate that there was correspondence preceding them, and (probably) following. The tone is one of joshing familiarity on both sides. Maximus asks Augustine not to dazzle him with his customary rhetoric, but to argue seriously: Eager as ever for the joy of hearing from you—for the energy of your words that recently gave me, in all charity, a pleasant pommeling—I am not loath to answer in kind (L 16). Augustine pretends that Maximus must be joking if he thinks that lascivious pagan gods are more admirable than men who died for their faith: Are we engaged in something serious here, or is it time to tell jokes? I cannot judge, from the tone of your letter, whether you prefer wit to pertinency because your arguments are weak or because you are, as usual, so affable. (L 17) Hasn’t Maximus noticed where he lives? How can you forget who you are, an African addressing Africans (we are both in Africa, you know), that you find Phoenician names so despicable? Since Augustine lumped the Berber and Phoenician languages together, he thought his mother’s name was Phoenician—like Dido’s. His own love of his country comes out in this rebuke to Maximus: If the Phoenician language offends you, and you deny (what the most learned admit) that much wisdom survives in Phoenician documents, then you must be ashamed of your birthplace, the cradle of that language. Augustine calls Maximus his elder. Was he a teacher or just an originally revered mentor? He was, at any rate, in a position to say that Augustine was of his religious party (secta). We can gauge from that the depth of Augustine’s seduction by pagan literature, and understand better his later denunciation of those who exposed him to it. He knew what power the pagan poets had—they had, for a while, made him a pagan. Attended only by his pedagogue in Madauros, Augustine was able to get his way, telling lies to pedagogue, teacher, and parents to avoid school and slip off to games in the amphitheater (T 1.30). When he was forced to attend school, he hated the flogging system upheld by parents and universal custom. Despite the lash, he refused to learn Greek—not because he could not, but because he would not learn it this way. He had learned Latin quickly because his “heart was laboring to express itself,” but with Greek his “unfettered inquisitiveness” was checked by “intimidating assignments” (T 1.23). Later he dutifully repented his stubbornness, but his schoolfellows probably admired his proud resistance despite repeated floggings. The lack of Greek severely limited him in later days—though even this he managed to turn into a partial advantage. His deep originality comes in part from his lack of dependence on other traditions. 3. Thagaste: 370–371

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  No wonder, then, that the Manichaean theory of human origins, which had “explained” the sense of helplessness he experienced, had at first attracted Augustine. He identified, too, with the way the Manichaeans interpreted the tendency to sin not simply as human weakness but (as the rabbis had taught of the “evil impulse,” yetser hara’) as an internal energy actively resisting God’s will. When he abandoned Manichaean theology, Augustine admitted he was at a loss to understand the Christian teaching on free will. Later he would claim, of course, that in denying the power of the will he was only repeating what Paul had said long before (“I do not do what I will, but I do the very thing I hate.… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it”; see Romans 7:15–25). Many Christians ever since—including that famous Augustinian monk Martin Luther—would find Augustine’s interpretation of Paul’s words persuasive. Yet such recent scholarly studies as the work of Peter Gorday confirm an impression that Augustine effectively invented this interpretation of Paul’s words, by daring to apply them to the baptized Christian.35 Augustine’s Christian predecessors, including John Chrysostom and Origen, had assumed that Paul’s statements about the will’s incapacity applied only to those who lacked the grace of Christian baptism. Augustine himself acknowledged this and worked hard, he says, to understand the Catholic teaching (in his words) “that free will is the cause of our doing evil.… But I was not able to understand it clearly.” Once he began to recognize the power of his own will, he says, “I knew that I had a will … and when I did either will or nill anything, I was more sure of it, that I and no other did will or nill; and here was the cause of my sin, as I came to perceive.”36 Yet far from relinquishing entirely the role of victim, Augustine says, “But what I did against my will, that I seemed to suffer rather than do. That I considered not to be my fault, but my punishment.”37 Through the agonizing process of his conversion Augustine claims to have discovered that he was bound by conflict within his own will: I was bound, not with another man’s chains, but with my own iron will. The enemy held my will, and, indeed, made a chain of it for me, and constrained me. Because of a perverse will, desire was made; and when I was enslaved to desire [libido] it became habit; and habit not restrained became necessity. By which links … a very hard bondage had me enthralled.38

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

  I also knew that they could not begin to imagine my convent existence. Occasionally one of them would express astonishment if I inadvertently let something slip. “My nuns weren’t a bit like that!” Jane would insist stoutly. “Your lot must have been abnormally strict.” Pat would look even more bewildered, because she and I had lived with exactly the same community, but her perspective, as a secular, was different. “They were so modern and up-to-date, even sophisticated!” she would protest. “They drove cars, were starting to go to the cinema again, and were changing the habit!” Both girls would look at me reproachfully, because I was spoiling a cherished memory. Nobody likes to be told that things were not as they imagined. But I was quite certain that my own order had not been particularly austere, and agreed with Pat that it had been far more enlightened than many. Most nuns had observed these arcane rituals, had kissed the ground, confessed their external faults to one another, and were forbidden to have what were known as “particular friendships,” since all love must be given to God. That was why the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were so necessary. I also knew that, taken out of context, such practices as kissing the floor or reciting the Lord’s Prayer five times with your arms in the form of a cross would seem sensationalist, exaggerated, and histrionic. But in reality they became as normal to us as breathing, a routine part of our lives, sometimes even a little tedious. To speak of these things outside the convent would give a false impression. I had not left the convent because we had to do public penance but because I had failed to find God and had never come within shouting distance of that complete self-surrender which, the great spiritual writers declared, was essential for those who wished to enter into the divine presence. So I did not speak of my old life to anybody, and most people assumed that I had, therefore, simply put the past behind me. Much better out than in,” Miss Griffiths, my Anglo-Saxon tutor, said decisively as we sat in her elegant college rooms drinking sherry one evening. “You look much better out of that habit, my lamb. And you know, however things turn out in the future, I’m certain you made the correct decision. If you come back to me in fifteen years’ time and say, ‘Look, five children and a divorce!’ I shall still say that you were right to leave.”

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Johnny gave himself plenty of structure—magic tricks, performing. But he never felt comfortable being himself. Even Ed McMahon, Johnny’s loyal sidekick for thirty years, said of Johnny, “He was good with ten million people, lousy with ten.” Why didn’t structure work for Johnny? Why did he never transition to the ultimate role: himself? The answer lies in the source of the role. For Johnny Carson, biographers theorize that Johnny’s persona, Johnny Carson the Entertainer, was created to win the approval of a specific person. His mother, Ruth, didn’t like boys; they were dirty and nasty, she said. Her favorite child was her daughter, Catherine. So Johnny’s persona, lore has it, was created to get positive attention from Ruth. If he could just be funny enough, successful enough, famous enough, maybe she would be proud of him. He didn’t do it for himself; he did it for approval that, sadly, turned out to be unattainable. Reportedly, at the height of Johnny’s fame Ruth once watched his Tonight Show monologue in the presence of a New York Times reporter, switched off the TV, and pronounced, “That wasn’t funny.” So here’s the difference between structure that hinders you and structure that’s a stepping-stone to the ultimate role of being yourself: the role should come from within, not from someone else. It can’t come from your impossible-to-please mother, your boss, your current crush, American society, or whoever else. Instead, your role should be chosen and inhabited only by you. Think of it this way: Pretend you are a building. Creating a persona chosen by someone else sets up a false front. Picture an old Wild West town: tumbleweeds rolling by, horses tied to their hitching posts in front of the buildings on Main Street. Looks like a solid settlement, right? But peek behind the imposing fronts and you’d find the buildings were often just canvas tents and a wooden floor, shoddy structures at best. Indeed, the cost and danger of hauling building materials to a town that may or may not survive the boom-and-bust economy of the Old West was prohibitive. But business owners realized they needed to project an image of success and stability to lure in customers. So they poured their resources into erecting impressive false fronts. They attended to the image but neglected the actual building. Playing a role that is chosen for you is like constructing a false front. Your precious resources get poured into the image while the actual building—the real, authentic you—is left wanting. The false front may be impressive or even intimidating, but its intention is to fool, to deceive.1

• From Between Us

  Bottling up your feelings is unhealthy. This notion is so powerful that one of my friends had to convince the social worker of a Dutch adoption agency that he and his wife were suitable parents for adoption, despite the fact they never argued. The social worker could not imagine that, in a healthy marriage, the partners would never be angry at each other—and if they were, at what cost had they been suppressing it? (The couple did end up convincing the agency that they had some minor conflicts and were allowed to adopt their son.) And of course you should cry when you are sad. When one of my friends could not stop crying after she found out her husband had had an affair, she was encouraged to “just let it out, it will be good for you.” The English language is full of reminders: without “letting off steam,” we know that “the pressure could build up,” or “our feelings are pent up inside us.” The notion of “grief work,” introduced in the early twentieth century by Sigmund Freud, is based on a similar idea that inner feelings need to come out and run their natural course. “Grief work” was seen as an indispensable part of recovery after trauma and loss, and consisted of giving way to negative feelings such as anger and sadness. Bottled up, these feelings would start interfering with a person’s well-being and ability to lead a normal life: they might turn up when least desired, and paralyze or interfere with daily life. Freud’s work has been the catalyst for the idea that suppression disrupts the natural flow of emotions, and is somehow harmful to the individual. Freud’s idea that emotions need to run their natural course has received some support from modern psychological research. A 2004 study with around 1,000 U.S. Americans found, for instance, that suppressors (i.e., individuals who did not give their emotions full rein) felt bad about themselves for being inauthentic and had a harder time experiencing closeness to others compared to non-suppressors; relatedly, suppressors had an impoverished social network. The researchers, psychologists Oliver John and James Gross, conclude from their study that suppressors’ outer expression may be discrepant with their feelings, causing them to feel ingenuine or inauthentic. This inauthenticity may lead them to feel bad about themselves as well as alienate them from others in their social environment, to the detriment of close relationships.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  Augustine came to see his own will, then, divided and consequently impotent: “Myself I willed it, and myself I nilled it: it was I myself. I neither willed entirely, nor nilled entirely. Therefore I was in conflict with myself, and … was distracted by my own self.”39 How did he account for such conflict? Augustine insists that, since he suffered much of this “against my own will, … I was not, therefore, the cause of it, but the ‘sin that dwells in me’: from the punishment of that more voluntary sin, because I was a son of Adam.”40 In his earlier writings, as Edward Cranz points out, Augustine expresses views on human freedom and self-government that virtually echo those of his predecessors, such as Chrysostom.41 But in the fourteenth chapter of The City of God Augustine seems intent on proving that, even if Adam once had free will, he himself had never received it. Even in his account of Adam’s case Augustine betrays his own ambivalence or, indeed, outright hostility toward the possibility of human freedom. What earlier apologists had celebrated as God’s greatest gift to humankind—free will, liberty, autonomy, self-government—Augustine characterizes in surprisingly negative terms. Adam had received freedom as his birthright, but nonetheless, as Augustine tells it, the first man “conceived a desire for freedom,”42 and his desire became, in Augustine’s eyes, the root of sin, betraying nothing less than contempt for God. The desire to master one’s will, far from expressing what Origen, Clement, and Chrysostom consider the true nature of rational beings, becomes for Augustine the great and fatal temptation: “The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is personal control over one’s own will” (proprium voluntatis arbitrium).43 Augustine cannot resist reading that desire for self-government as total, obstinate perversity: “The soul, then, delighting in its own freedom to do wickedness, and scorning to serve God … willfully deserted its higher master.”44 Seduced by this desire for autonomy, Adam entered into a “life of cruel and wretched slavery instead of the freedom for which he had conceived a desire.”45 Uncomfortably aware of a contradiction in his argument, Augustine explains that obedience, not autonomy, should have been Adam’s true glory, “since man has been naturally so created that it is advantageous for him to be submissive, but disastrous for him to follow his own will, and not the will of his creator.”46 Admitting that “it does, indeed, seem something of a paradox,”47 Augustine resorts to paradoxical language to describe how God “sought to impress upon this creature, for whom free slavery [libera servitus] was expedient, that he was the Lord.”48 Augustine insists, however, that whatever the constraints upon Adam’s freedom, the first man was more free than any of his progeny, for only the story of Adam’s misuse of free will can account for the contradictions he discovered within himself, his own will caught in perpetual conflict, “much of which I suffered against my own will, rather than did by my will.”49

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

  We agreed not to make the alteration, she in deep discomfort, still wishing somehow to soften the scene. When the article came out, she was barraged. Her in-box filled with hundreds of emails. Oprah asked her to be on her show. “I’ve become the overpowerment lady,” Meana said to me later, when I met with her again in Las Vegas. The alley wall had been central in the reaction to her words. And some of the reaction was vehement. “There was hatred. People said I was part of the machinery that puts women down, that I was inciting men to rape.” Yet there were plenty of other responses. Oprah, as she introduced Meana, voiced her own troubled feelings about the alley but played, at the start of the segment, a taped interview with a perky, middle-of-the-road woman who echoed the allure of Meana’s scenario. And the emails were also full of gratitude. “There were lots of messages from high-powered women thanking me for allowing a discussion of elements of sexuality that don’t fall neatly into an ideological box,” Meana said, relieved. “One woman, in the art world in New York, told me, ‘I could not say what you said without feeling shamed, as though my eroticism made me a willing participant in a patriarchal system.’ ” Still, Meana remained unsettled. All the attention had churned up something submerged, a latent distaste about studying sex at all, a shame about it, a fear of it. “Even we who do this research have internalized the culture’s sexophobia. It was fine when it was just me in my lab, me with my students. But with the spotlight on—no. Suddenly I was asking myself, Why was I studying something so inconsequential? Why couldn’t I be studying depression? Why couldn’t I be studying suicide? I had to stop myself. I had to remind myself, In what way is sex inconsequential?” She paused. “I have no insecurity about my feminism,” she said. “I feel on solid ground. What I said in the article stepped outside what have become the conventional, comfortable ways of talking about female sexuality, the soft ways, the ways that leave everyone feeling good, not anxious. I don’t think what I said was misogynistic. I don’t think it was harmful. Now, do I know whether certain turn-ons excite only because of a social structure that disempowers women? Whether certain fantasies are an eroticization of disempowerment? No, I don’t know. But I do see the world from a feminist perspective. And part of that is wanting women to be able to be who they are sexually.” She sounded almost at ease. She seemed almost to have located solid ground. Yet the footing seemed unsure, as if at any instant it could turn treacherous. The alley was no place to stand.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Such as what’s happening right here, right now, Myrna. Listen hard to what I’m going to say. You’re collecting and hoarding. You’re accumulating information from me, but you’re not giving anything back! I believe you’re trying to relate to me differently now, but I’m not experiencing it as engagement. I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person—it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals.” “You mean I’m not relating because of my whining?” “No, that’s not what I said. Now, Myrna, our time is up today, and we’ve got to stop, but when you play the tape of this session I’d like you to listen carefully to what I just said to you a minute ago about how you’re relating to me. I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever said to you.” After the session Myrna wasted no time putting in the cassette and following Ernest’s instructions. Starting with “I’d say you’d pass all my physical checkpoints,” she listened intently. “But some of the other things we’ve been discussing would give me pause. . . . Listen hard to what I’m going to say. You’re collecting and hoarding. You’re accumulating information . . . but you’re not giving anything back! . . . I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person—it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals. . . . When you play the tape of this session I’d like you to listen carefully to what I just said to you. . . . I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever said to you.” Switching cassettes, Myrna listened to the countertransference dictation again. Certain phrases struck home: “She will not relate to me, and she will not acknowledge that she doesn’t—and insists it’s not relevant anyway. . . . How many goddamn times do I have to explain why it’s important to look at our relationship? . . . Does everything possible to eliminate any shred of closeness between us. Nothing I do is good enough for her. . . . No tenderness . . . too self-focused . . . ungiving.” Perhaps Dr. Lash is right, she thought. I really never have thought about him, his life, his experience. But I can change that. Today. Right now as I drive home. But she couldn’t stay focused for more than a minute or two. To still her mind, she turned to a useful mind-quieting technique she had learned a few years before at a Big Sur meditation weekend (which in most other ways had been a rip-off). Keeping one part of her mind on the highway, with the rest she imagined a broom sweeping out every stray thought that popped in. That done, she concentrated only on her breathing, on the inhalation of cool air and on the exhalation of the air slightly heated in the nest of her lungs.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  But the accusation also operates on a moral level that makes it possible not only to establish the crime, but to compromise the adversary politically and in general. Perhaps Timarchus was not formally a professional prostitute, but he is definitely not one of those respectable men who make no secret of their taste for male loves and who maintain honorable relations with free boys, relations that are valuable to the young partner: Aeschines acknowledges that he is partial to this kind of love. He describes Timarchus as a man who in the course of his youth placed himself and showed himself to everyone, in the inferior and humiliating position of a pleasure object for others; he wanted this role, he sought it, took pleasure in it, and profited from it. And this is what Aeschines would have his audience see as morally and politically incompatible with civic responsibilities and the exercise of political power. A man who has been marked by this role which he was pleased to assume in his youth would not now be able to play, without provoking indignation, the role of a man who is over others in the city, who provides them with friends, counsels them in their decisions, leads them and represents them. What was hard for Athenians to accept—and this is the feeling that Aeschines tries to play upon in the speech against Timarchus—was not that they might be governed by someone who loved boys, or who as a youth was loved by a man; but that they might come under the authority of a leader who once identified with the role of pleasure object for others. It is this feeling, moreover, that Aristophanes had appealed to so often in his comedies; the point of mockery and the thing that was meant to be scandalous were that these orators, these leaders who were followed and loved, these citizens who sought to seduce the people in order to rule over them, such as Cleon or Agyrrhius, were also individuals who had consented and still consented to play the role of passive, obliging objects. And Aristophanes spoke ironically of an Athenian democracy where one’s chances of being heard in the assembly were greater the more one had a taste for pleasures of this sort.7 In the same way and the same spirit, Diogenes made fun of Demosthenes and the morals he had while pretending to be the leader (dēmagōgos) of the Athenian people.8 When one played the role of subordinate partner in the game of pleasure relations, one could not be truly dominant in the game of civic and political activity.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  The behavior of young men thus appears to have been a domain that was especially sensitive to the division between what was shameful and what was proper, between what reflected credit and what brought dishonor. It was this question that preoccupied those who chose to reflect on young men, on the love that was manifested for them and the conduct they needed to exhibit. Pausanias, in Plato’s Symposium, calls attention to the diversity of morals and customs having to do with boys. He points out what is considered “disgraceful” or “good” in Elis, in Sparta, in Thebes, in Ionia or in areas under Persian rule, and lastly, in Athens.6 And Phaedrus recalls the principle that should be one’s guide in the love of young men as well as in life in general: “shame at what is disgraceful and ambition for what is noble; without these feelings neither a state nor an individual can accomplish anything great or fine.”7 But it should be remarked that this question was not confined to a few exacting moralists. A young man’s behavior, his honor and his disgrace were also the object of much social curiosity; people payed attention to this, spoke about it, remembered it. For example, in order to attack Timarchus, Aeschines had no qualms about rehashing the gossip that may have gone round many years previously, when his adversary was still a very young man.8 Moreover, the Erotic Essay shows very well in passing just what sort of distrustful solicitude a boy could quite naturally be subjected to by his entourage; people watched him, spied on him, remarked on his demeanor and his relations; vicious tongues were active around him; spiteful people were ready to blame him if he showed arrogance or conceit, but they were also quick to criticize him if he was too gracious.9 Naturally, one cannot help but think about what the situation of girls in other societies must have been when—the age for marriage being much earlier for women—their premarital conduct became an important moral and social concern, of itself and for their families.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  “When you doubt your own desirability, it is harder to trust Mitch’s desire for you.” I explain. “It’s far easier to locate the fault with him—and, to be fair, he gives you plenty to work with—than it is to face the depth of your own self-doubt.” Mitch, who had been pointing to Laura’s sexual passivity for years, had some realizations of his own. “I guess I’m not too creative, either. When we were doing the exercise, I felt uncomfortable taking the lead. I hate to admit it, but I liked the passive resistance most. I’m unbeatable at that one.” I reminded Mitch that when he met Hillary, his first love, she too took the lead. “You do indeed express yourself with great eloquence in the physical realm, but you’re highly dependent on a powerful interlocutor to make it safe for you. So far, Laura hasn’t been that.” When Mitch and Laura came to me, I was reluctant to take them on. They considered me the therapist of last resort; I was either the third or the fifth (I can’t remember which) they had consulted in more than two decades. For years, they had been trying to talk their way out of their rut. Evidently, it hadn’t worked. Instead they were engaged in a verbal thrust-and-parry, defensive, hostile, and totally fused. They had had plenty of self-disclosure, but it was far from intimate. I knew enough not to limit myself to the habits of the talking cure—talking had become squawking and was going nowhere. The exercises provided an alternative lens to examine their dynamics. The physicalization of their problems gave us a fresh text to read together. It was novel enough to jar them, and to interrupt their entrenchment. They were stretching into new territory. In my work with patients I stress that intimacy isn’t monolithic; nor is it always consistent. It is intermittent, meant to wax and wane even in the best relationships. The family therapist Kaethe Weingarten steers us away from looking at intimacy as a static feature of a relationship; she sees it instead as a quality of interaction that takes place in isolated moments and that exists both within and without long-term commitment. There’s the synchronization of dance partners, the sudden identification between strangers on a plane, the solidarity of witnesses to a catastrophe, the mutual recognition of survivors—of breast cancer, alcoholism, terrorism, divorce. There’s the intimacy between professionals and those they serve—doctor and patient, therapist and client, stripper and regular. While we expect to experience these discrete moments of recognition in ongoing relationships, they are not necessarily bound to any overarching narrative. They can be circumstantial, spontaneous, and without follow-up. Informed by Weingarten’s ideas, I no longer look at relationships as being either intimate or not. Instead, I track each couple’s ability to engage in a series of intimate bids tendered over time.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  A bizarre consequence of this traditional framework is an inexplicable inversion in the rationality of nature. Because animals are denied aesthetic agency, we conclude that animal choices reflect the universal and rational hand of natural selection. But, of course, we understand that humans can be highly irrational when it comes to sex and love. So, because animals lack the cognitive ability to escape from the brute laws of adaptive logic, dumb animals are more rational than we are. Ironically, in this view, human cognitive complexity only provides us with the novel opportunity to be irrational! — Another important implication of an aesthetic view of evolutionary biology concerns the painful history of political and ethical abuse during the twentieth century—eugenics. Eugenics was the scientific theory that maintained that human races, classes, and ethnicities have evolved adaptive differences in genetic, physical, intellectual, and moral quality. Eugenics was also an organized social and political movement to employ this flawed scientific theory to “improve” human populations through the social and legal control of mate choice and reproduction. Because eugenics specifically concerned the evolutionary consequences of mate choice, it remains deeply relevant to human sexual selection and aesthetic evolution. For multiple reasons, evolutionary biologists are uncomfortable discussing eugenics. First, between the 1890s and the 1940s, every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler. Full stop. Few of us are eager to confront this embarrassing, shameful, and sobering truth. Second, eugenics provided a pseudoscientific justification for abuses of human rights at every level—from everyday racism, sexism, and prejudice against the disabled, forced sterilization, imprisonment, and lynching in the United States, to the Nazi-engineered genocide of Jews and Gypsies, and mass murder of the mentally handicapped and homosexuals in Europe. Eugenics is the most egregious example of the destructive misuse of science in all of human history. Science gone bad. Really bad. Last, another uncomfortable truth is that much of the intellectual framework of contemporary evolutionary biology was developed during this enthusiastically eugenic period in our discipline. Most evolutionary biologists would like to believe that eugenics ceased to be an issue in evolutionary biology after World War II, when evolutionary biologists rejected eugenic theories of racial superiority. But the uncomfortable fact is that some core, fundamental commitments of eugenics were “baked into” the intellectual structure of evolutionary biology, and they contributed to the flawed logic of eugenics. Without providing a detailed analysis here, I want to illustrate how aesthetic evolution provides an essential antidote to this poisonous intellectual history.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  The preacher woman was listed as his wife. My mother’s name was not on the list. There is a small tree—I picture it as a skinny, overgrown bush—in the yard of the prison where Brother Terrell served his time. He told my sisters that when he finished his work as a prison janitor, he went to the tree to read his Bible and pray. Since praying and pacing were synonymous for Brother Terrell, he walked around the tree and called out to his God, sometimes in silence and at other times aloud. Did he beg forgiveness and ask for a second chance? Did he call down the wrath of Jehovah upon his enemies? Knowing Brother Terrell, I would bet he did both.My sister Carol met a man who served as chaplain of the prison after her daddy left.He told her that her father had become something of a legend. Five years after his release, the longtime prisoners still talked about the tent preacher, and when they were troubled, many of them visited what had become known as the Prayin’ Tree. Chapter Twenty-oneAFTER SEVERAL FALSE STARTS AND STOPS, I FOUND A PATH THAT LED away from the tent and the Terrellites. I went to college and studied philosophy, literature, and journalism. For a long time I felt like a cardboard cutout of a person, flat and one-dimensional, propped up with a plastic stand, nothing behind me. I watched the students, teachers, employers, friends, and colleagues around me and picked up cues on how to be in the world: Look them in the eye, firm up the handshake, file down the emotion, read good books, wear good shoes, dark colors, the best haircut you can afford. Fake it till you make it. Gradually, the years between me and the tent stacked up until they formed a wall of experience that separated me from my former self. Upon meeting my relatives who remained in the ministry, my husband and friends commented, “I don’t know what to think. They’re so different from you.” The elevenand-a-half-year-old girl who sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the world—the very thing everyone under the tent warned against—had gotten exactly that: the world, in all its messy glory.When casual acquaintances asked where I grew up, or where I came from, as we say in Texas, there was a long and uncomfortable pause. After a moment I might say, “Oh, we moved around,” or “We lived all over,” which led to questions about whether my “stepfather” was in the military. If I felt brave, I laughed and said, “Oh, something like that,” and made a fast getaway. Most times I stammered and shifted my eyes until the conversation limped off in another direction.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  Unfortunately, the car ride was silent. I fretted and peeled my chapped lips until we were home and we’d unloaded the duffel bags from the car. It was then that she exploded. “At breakfast this morning, you corrected the way Lindsay was holding her knife. Do you remember that? You told her to cut her ham differently. In front of her mother! Why did you do that?” she snapped. “It’s not your job to teach people that! You looked like an asshole!” Flummoxed, I replied, “I don’t know—she was holding her knife wrong, like she couldn’t even cut it. I thought I could help?” “Help! Ha!” she barked. “Oh, a lot of help you were. I was so ashamed of you on that trip I couldn’t even stand it. Do you know how competitive you were during Pictionary? You got upset when other people didn’t know what you were drawing, like a big baby. Everyone felt uncomfortable. Everyone was staring at you. I wanted to die watching you. I wanted to say, ‘That is not my daughter.’ ” It felt like I’d sat up quickly in a top bunk and thwacked my head on the ceiling. Now? Really? Of all times, after a mother-daughter bonding trip? “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.” “Of course you didn’t realize. Because you don’t think, do you? You just act without thinking all the time even though I keep telling you, ‘Think.’ No wonder all the kids at school hate you.” “I’m sorry about the Pictionary. And with the knife. I was just like…here, try it this way. I don’t think her mom felt bad. It didn’t seem like she was upset, but…” “Ooh.” My mother’s lips formed a very thin line, and her eyes narrowed. “You think you know better than I do? Now you’re talking back to me?” “I’m just trying to apologize! Please! I’m really sorry. I just thought…maybe after that weekend…I thought maybe things would be okay.” “How can things be okay when you keep making me look bad?” she screeched. I knew none of the other girls in the troop were being screamed at right now. I thought of the ease with which the girls had leaned into their mothers during that song, how they expected to be held. How they expected to be safe. But at the same time, my mother was right—the other kids didn’t like me. They said I was weird and intense. Maybe I had been overly competitive at Pictionary? Had they really been staring at me? How did I not notice that? How could I know when I was screwing up? Was everything I did a mistake? My eyes welled up.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  statisticians.” He told my seminar and me of researchers at the University of Michigan who were generally optimistic about intuitive statistics. I had strong feelings about that claim, which I took personally: I had recently discovered that I was not a good intuitive statistician, and I did not believe that I was worse than others. For a research psychologist, sampling variation is not a curiosity; it is a nuisance and a costly obstacle, which turns the undertaking of every research project into a gamble. Suppose that you wish to confirm the hypothesis that the vocabulary of the average six-year-old girl is larger than the vocabulary of an average boy of the same age. The hypothesis is true in the population; the average vocabulary of girls is indeed larger. Girls and boys vary a great deal, however, and by the luck of the draw you could select a sample in which the difference is inconclusive, or even one in which boys actually score higher. If you are the researcher, this outcome is costly to you because you have wasted time and effort, and failed to confirm a hypothesis that was in fact true. Using a sufficiently large sample is the only way to reduce the risk. Researchers who pick too small a sample leave themselves at the mercy of sampling luck. The risk of error can be estimated for any given sample size by a fairly simple procedure. Traditionally, however, psychologists do not use calculations to decide on a sample size. They use their judgment, which is commonly flawed. An article I had read shortly before the debate with Amos demonstrated the mistake that researchers made (they still do) by a dramatic observation. The author pointed out that psychologists commonly chose samples so small that they exposed themselves to a 50% risk of failing to confirm their true hypotheses! No researcher in his right mind would accept such a risk. A plausible explanation was that psychologists’ decisions about sample size reflected prevalent intuitive misconceptions of the extent of sampling variation. The article shocked me, because it explained some troubles I had had in my own research. Like most research psychologists, I had routinely chosen samples that were too small and had often obtained results that made no sense. Now I knew why: the odd results were actually artifacts of my research method. My mistake was particularly embarrassing because I taught statistics and knew how to compute the sample size that would reduce the risk of failure to an acceptable level. But I had never chosen a sample size by computation. Like my colleagues, I had trusted tradition and my intuition in planning my experiments and had never thought seriously about the issue. When Amos visited the seminar, I had already reached the conclusion that my intuitions were deficient, and in the course of the seminar we quickly agreed that the Michigan optimists were wrong.

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

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

• From Educated (2018)

  He smiled at me from the back of the chapel. A few months before, Richard had written to me. He’d said he was sorry for believing Dad, that he wished he’d done more to help me when I needed it, and that from then on, I could count on his support. We were family, he said. Audrey and Benjamin chose a bench near the back. Audrey had arrived early, when the chapel was empty. She had grabbed my arm and whispered that my refusing to see our father was a grave sin. “He is a great man,” she said. “For the rest of your life you will regret not humbling yourself and following his counsel.” These were the first words my sister had said to me in years, and I had no response to them. Shawn arrived a few minutes before the service, with Emily and Peter and a little girl I had never met. It was the first time I had been in a room with him since the night he’d killed Diego. I was tense, but there was no need. He did not look at me once during the service. My oldest brother, Tony, sat with my parents, his five children fanning out in the pew. Tony had a GED and had built a successful trucking company in Las Vegas, but it hadn’t survived the recession. Now he worked for my parents, as did Shawn and Luke and their wives, as well as Audrey and her husband, Benjamin. Now I thought about it, I realized that all my siblings, except Richard and Tyler, were economically dependent on my parents. My family was splitting down the middle—the three who had left the mountain, and the four who had stayed. The three with doctorates, and the four without high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared, and was growing. —A YEAR WOULD PASS before I would return to Idaho. A few hours before my flight from London, I wrote to my mother—as I always did, as I always will do—to ask if she would see me. Again, her response was swift. She would not, she would never, unless I would see my father. To see me without him, she said, would be to disrespect her husband. For a moment it seemed pointless, this annual pilgrimage to a home that continued to reject me, and I wondered if I should go. Then I received another message, this one from Aunt Angie. She said Grandpa had canceled his plans for the next day, and was refusing even to go to the temple, as he usually did on Wednesdays, because he wanted to be at home in case I came by. To this Angie added: I get to see you in about twelve hours! But who’s counting? * The italicized language in the description of the referenced exchange is paraphrased, not directly quoted.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  Tron adj.m. kind, pious (so, as denoting active practice of 101, kindness, Thes MV De and most, cf. Y32, TPB etc.; >Hup on w 4* RVm who expl. as passive reception of "'8 TON, cf. שָכִיר‎ DS 660.; its use as attribute of God Je 3” ץ‎ 145”, and the context ~ 12’ Mi 7? etc., favour active sense) —ny4'+ot.; TPO Dt33°y89"; Pron 16; pl.OMPON ץ‎ 149"; sf. ‘DM y 50°; ron 18 2°+15 +. kind: a. of man עם ח' תתחסד‎ with the kind thow shewest thyself kind 28 22%=wW 18%. b. of wing of ostrich חַסִירֶה‎ 718 OS Jb 39” zs 4 a kindly pinion? poss. with play on TDN nf. stork (is the ostrich kind like the stork?). 6. of God, only 163 ~145". 2. pious, godly, either as exhibition of ‘duteous love’ toward God (Che°’**), or (in view of rarity of such passages as Ho 6*° Je 2 and their possible ambiguity) because kindness, as prominent in the godly, comes to imply other attributes, and to be a designation of the godly character, piety: @ as adj—T dn לא‎ 3 ₪ nation, not pious,=ungodly 43%. b. elsewh. as subst.: sing., a pious man, the godly ?ו‎ 4* 127 32° 86°, |W Miy?; (thy) pious one(s) +16" (Kt pl.), 1S 2°(Qr pl.) Pr2’, JON איש‎ men of thy pious one Dt 33° (Moses, v. Di; others, the man, thy godly one, i.e. Levi); pl. the pious, godly, those of the people who were faithful, devoted to God’s service, only in Psalter and chiefly, if not entirely, in late Psalms /ו‎ 149'°; his pious ones yy 30° 317 37 859 97 116" 148" 149°; thy pious ones 52" 79° 89” 132° = 2 Ch 6%, 145"; my pious ones W 50°, her (Zion’s) pious wv 132°.—(In 1186082. age, cvvaywy? ’Acidaiar denoted, technically, the party of the pious, who opposed the Hellenization of Judaea, v. I Mace 2” 4 2 Macc 14° and Che? *™: so perhaps y 116” 149'°*.) +. .מ רְְסִידה‎ stork (so called as kind and affectionate to its young)—Ly 11% Dt ז‎ 4% ~ 104" Je 8’ 20 5°. n.pr.m. (Yah is kind) son of‏ חסדִיה1 Zerubbabel 1 Ch 3”.‏ Z2 TOM qa [TD [ח‎ vb. be reproached, ashamed (Aramaism, v. "ל ת‎ Arama. חפל‎ be put to shame, ,מ‎ 150 reproach, revile ; NTBN, Joan shame, reproach, oft. in TS for 7B) ;— only Pi. Jmpf. JIBS Pr 25” lest he reproach thee, expose thee to shame. yu. חסד‎ n.m. shame, reproach, only abs.:—S3 “0 Ly 20” (H) it is ₪ shame (shame- ful thing); לאָמִּים חַטָאת‎ T 4%נעק‎ sin ts a reproach to peoples.