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 On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  As he becomes more open to what is going on within him he becomes able to listen to feelings which he has always denied and repressed. He can listen to feelings which have seemed to him so terrible, or so disorganizing, or so abnormal, or so shameful, that he has never been able to recognize their existence in himself. While he is learning to listen to himself he also becomes more acceptant of himself. As he expresses more and more of the hidden and awful aspects of himself, he finds the therapist showing a consistent and unconditional positive regard for him and his feelings. Slowly he moves toward taking the same attitude toward himself, accepting himself as he is, and therefore ready to move forward in the process of becoming. And finally as he listens more accurately to the feelings within, and becomes less evaluative and more acceptant toward himself, he also moves toward greater congruence. He finds it possible to move out from behind the façades he has used, to drop his defensive behaviors, and more openly to be what he truly is. As these changes occur, as he becomes more self-aware, more self-acceptant, less defensive and more open, he finds that he is at last free to change and grow in the directions natural to the human organism. THE PROCESS Now let me put something of this process in factual statements, each statement borne out by empirical research. We know that the client shows movement on each of a number of continua. Starting from wherever he may be on each continuum I will mention, he moves toward the upper end. In regard to feelings and personal meanings, he moves away from a state in which feelings are unrecognized, unowned, unexpressed. He moves toward a flow in which ever-changing feelings are experienced in the moment, knowingly and acceptingly, and may be accurately expressed. The process involves a change in the manner of his experiencing. Initially he is remote from his experiencing. An example would be the intellectualizing person who talks about himself and his feelings in abstractions, leaving you wondering what is actually going on within him. From such remoteness he moves toward an immediacy of experiencing in which he lives openly in his experiencing, and knows that he can turn to it to discover its current meanings. The process involves a loosening of the cognitive maps of experience. From construing experience in rigid ways, which are perceived as external facts, the client moves toward developing changing, loosely held construings of meaning in experience, constructs which are modifiable by each new experience. In general, the evidence shows that the process moves away from fixity, remoteness from feelings and experience, rigidity of self-concept, remoteness from people, impersonality of functioning.

• From Three Women (2019)

  She hated herself for wanting it and then she hated herself for hating herself. She knew there were women out there, like this woman in her car, with terrific pain, terrific malnourishment, and so she had always felt she had a responsibility to succeed, not to squander her opportunities. She’d been a good rider, skater, skier, singer, and model before the age of thirteen. She’d played field hockey and run track. She graduated from one of the best private schools in the country. But even within the spectrum of that relative ease, she had to constantly reassess what kind of woman she was. The right way to be. How sexy, how perfumed. Not to give up too much of oneself, not to give up too little. The perfect amount, or she might be a ghost, fat, disagreeable. What Sloane wanted more than anything else was to like herself. She wanted to sit in the patisserie that day and not think too much about a croissant. She wanted to just eat it. She didn’t want to be distracted with hating herself every moment of the day. There had always been a sense of personal inadequacy if she was not nailing every single thing. She was forty-two, she was going through yet another hormone change, and even just the word hormone sounded like an adult diaper and she wanted Botox but she didn’t want to want it and at the same time if she didn’t get it she would keep hating those lines, that decay, and she wished she had gone to graduate school. How many units, she thought, would she need around her eyes? You have it wrong, Jenny, Sloane said, finding the strength in her own misery. I can only promise you that I care about you. That I am devastated by what you’re feeling, by what I did. Why him? Sloane didn’t know how to answer. She wanted to scream, What the fuck do you want me to say! That Wes is gorgeous. That he has a wonderful body, that he’s great at sex and amazing in every other way, kind and charming and useful. That he could fix a leaking pipe after we were done in bed. Do you want me to fucking say that? Do you want me to tell you the things you already fucking know? Were you trying to hurt me? Jenny asked. Look at your face. You’re so quiet. You just pretend something isn’t in front of your face.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  life of every one of us, but that in her case was exaggerated. As infants, we live in our experience; we trust it. When the baby is hungry, he neither doubts his hunger nor questions whether he should make every effort to get food. Without being in any way conscious of it, he is a self-trusting organism. But at some point, parents or others say to him, in effect, “If you feel that way, I won’t love you.” And so he feels what he should feel, not what he does feel. To this degree, he builds up a self that feels what it should feel, only occasionally seeing frightening glimpses of what his organism, of which the self is a part, is actually experiencing. In Ellen’s case, this process operated in an extreme fashion. In some of the most significant moments of life, she was made to feel that her own experiencing was invalid, erroneous, wrong, and unsound, and that what she should be feeling was something quite different. Unfortunately for her, her love for her parents, especially her father, wa.s so strong that she surrendered her own capacity for trusting her experience and substituted theirs, or his. She gave up being her self. This observation, made by one of her doctors during her last year, is no surprise: “Though as a child she was wholly independent of the opinion of others, she is now completely dependent on what others think.” She no longer has any way of knowing what she feels or what her opinion is. This is the loneliest state of all—an almost complete separation from one’s autonomous organism. What went wrong with her treatment? Here is an intelligent, sensitive young woman, seeking help. The prognosis, by modern standards, would seem very favorable. Why such complete failure? I am sure opinions differ, but I should like to state mine. The greatest weakness in her treatment was that no one involved seems to have related to her as a person—a person worthy of respect, a person capable of autonomous choice, a person whose inner experiencing is a precious resource to be drawn upon and trusted. Rather, she seems to have been dealt with as an object. Her first analyst helps her to see her feelings but not to experience them. This only makes her more of an object to herself and still further estranges her from living in and drawing upon her experience. Wisely, she says that the “analyst can give me discernment, but not healing.” The analyst points out to her that she is an individual with such and such dynamics. She agrees with him, though surely not on the basis of experiencing these dynamic feelings. She is simply following the pattern which has already isolated her—distrusting her own experiencing and trying to believe and feel what she should feel, what the expert tells her she feels. Then comes the comic-tragic argument over her diagnosis, of which she was evidently quite aware. The doctors disagree as to what type of object she is: She

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  only when teased by her companions. She feels an increasing need to live her life in terms of the expectations of others, since her own impulses are unreliable. It is not difficult to see why she begins to despise herself shortly after this time, and even to perceive death as “a glorious woman.” After all, she is an untrustworthy organism, a misleading cluster of experiencings, deserving to be despised. Her diary reports “shadows of doubt and of dread,” which soon translate into a dread of getting fat. Nor is it surprising that she is frightened at the “evil spirits” in her—the unaccepted and denied feelings that haunt her. I am sure this was not the first real estrangement between her self and her underlying feelings, but there seems little doubt but that it was a deeply significant one. It went a long way in destroying her confidence in herself as a being capable of autonomy. Even though her good spirits return, and she has happy periods, she has given up a part of her self and introjected as her own the feelings of her father. During this period she is full of fluctuations. She wants to do something great; she hopes for a social revolution; she works very hard as a student; she establishes reading rooms for children. But at times she is “a timid, earthly worm”; she longs for death and has her tutor reread the sentence, “The good die young.” Occasionally, “life has triumphed again.” She has an “unpleasant affair with a riding teacher.” She has a “breakdown.” She is very overconcerned with her weight. When she is twenty-four, there is another point at which she even more fully loses confidence in herself. Though she still is unsure enough of herself to need her old governess with her, she is nevertheless happy in her studies. “The diary breathes joy of life and sensuality.” She falls in love with a student. This was evidently a deep commitment, judging by its lasting and pervasive qualities. She becomes engaged, but again her parents insist that her experiencing is erroneous. They demand a temporary separation. So to her it must seem that the relationship is not real, is not wise, is better given up. Once more, she distrusts and disregards her own experience and introjects her parents’ feelings. She gives up the relationship and, with it, any trust in herself as capable of wise self-direction. Only the experience of others can be trusted. At this time, she turns to her doctor for help. Had she rebelled at this point, had she possessed the strength to fight for her own experiencing of her own world, she would have been true to her deeper feelings and would, quite literally, have saved her potentially autonomous self. But instead of rebellion there is only a terrible depression and a hatred of her body, which is obviously a totally untrustworthy organism for dealing with life. The extent to which she has surrendered her self is indicated by her terrific

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  Let me paraphrase a number of crucial statements that summarize the feelings and attitudes expressed in the letter. By discussing these statements, I will try to provide a general explanation of personality growth and change. I was losing me. Her own experiences and their meanings were being denied, and she was developing a self that was different from her real experienced self, which was becoming increasingly unknown to her. My experience told me the work I wanted to go into, but my family showed me that I couldn’t trust my own feelings to be right. This phrase shows how a false concept of self is built up. Because she accepted her parents’ meanings as her own experience, she came to distrust her own organismic experience. She could hardly have introjected her parents’ values on this subject had she not had a long previous experience of introjecting their values. As she distrusted more and more of her own experience, her sense of self-worth steadily declined until she had very little use for her own experience or herself. Things went along smoothly for everyone else. What a revealing statement! Of course things were fine for those whom she was trying to please. This pseudoself was just what they wanted. It was only within herself, at some deep and unknown level, that there was a vague uneasiness. I was everything he wanted me to be. Here again she was denying to awareness all her own experiencing—to the point where she no longer really had a self and was trying to be a self wanted by someone else. Finally my organism rebelled and I tried to find me again but I couldn’t, without help. Why did she finally rebel and take a good look at her relationship

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Villeneuve was summoned before the civil court of Vienne on the 16th of March. He kept the judges waiting for two hours (during which he probably destroyed all suspicious papers), and appeared without any show of embarrassment. He affirmed that he had lived long at Vienne, in frequent company with ecclesiastics, without incurring any suspicion for heresy, and had always avoided all cause of offence. His apartments were searched, but nothing was found to incriminate him. On the following day the printing establishment of Arnoullet was searched with no better result. On the return of Arnoullet from a journey he was summoned before the tribunal, but he professed ignorance. Inquisitor Ory now requested Arneys to secure additional proof from his cousin at Geneva. Trie forwarded on the 26th of March several autograph letters of Servetus which, he said, he had great difficulty in obtaining from Calvin (who ought to have absolutely refused). He added some pages from Calvin’s Institutes with the marginal objections of Servetus to infant baptism in his handwriting. Ory, not yet satisfied, despatched a special messenger to Geneva to secure the manuscript of the Restitutio, and proof that Villeneuve was Servetus and Arnoullet his printer. Trie answered at once, on the last of March, that the manuscript of the Restitutio had been at Lausanne for a couple of years (with Viret), that Servetus had been banished from the churches of Germany (Basel and Strassburg) twenty-four years ago, and that Arnoullet and Guéroult were his printers, as he knew from a good source which he would not mention (perhaps Frellon of Lyons). The cardinal of Lyons and the archbishop of Vienne, after consultation with Inquisitor Ory and other ecclesiastics, now gave orders on the 4th of April for the arrest of Villeneuve and Arnoullet. They were confined in separate rooms in the Palais Delphinal. Villeneuve was allowed to keep a servant, and to see his friends. Ory was sent forth, hastened to Vienne, and arrived there the next morning. After dinner Villeneuve, having been sworn on the Holy Gospels, was interrogated as to his name, age, and course of life. In his answers he told some palpable falsehoods to mislead the judges, and to prevent his being identified with Servetus, the heretic. He omitted to mention his residence in Toulouse, where he had been known under his real name, as the books of the University would show. He denied that he had written any other books than those on medicine and geography, although he had corrected many. On being shown some notes he had written on Calvin’s Institutes about infant baptism, he acknowledged at last the authorship of the notes, but added that he must have written them inconsiderately for the purpose of discussion, and he submitted himself entirely to his holy Mother, the Church, from whose teachings he had never wished to differ.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The severest charge against him is blasphemy. Bullinger remarked to a Pole that if Satan himself should come out of hell, he could use no more blasphemous language against the Trinity than this Spaniard; and Peter Martyr, who was present, assented and said that such a living son of the devil ought not to be tolerated anywhere. We cannot even now read some of his sentences against the doctrine of the Trinity without a shudder. Servetus lacked reverence and a decent regard for the most sacred feelings and convictions of those who differed from him. But there was a misunderstanding on both sides. He did not mean to blaspheme the true God in whom he believed himself, but only the three false and imaginary gods, as he wrongly conceived them to be, while to all orthodox Christians they were the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit of the one true, eternal, blessed Godhead. He labored under the fanatical delusion that he was called by Providence to reform the Church and to restore the Christian religion. He deemed himself wiser than all the fathers, schoolmen, and reformers. He supported his delusion by a fanciful interpretation of the last and darkest book of the Bible. Calvin and Farel saw, in his refusal to recant, only the obstinacy of an incorrigible heretic and blasphemer. We must recognize in it the strength of his conviction. He forgave his enemies; he asked the pardon even of Calvin. Why should we not forgive him? He had a deeply religious nature. We must honor his enthusiastic devotion to the Scriptures and to the person of Christ. From the prayers and ejaculations inserted in his book, and from his dying cry for mercy, it is evident that he worshipped Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour.1203 § 157. Calvin’s Defence of the Death Penalty for Heretics. The public sentiment, Catholic and Protestant, as we have seen, approved of the traditional doctrine, that obstinate heretics should be made harmless by death, and continued unchanged down to the close of the seventeenth century.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  She could smell the vomit on his breath, and his eyes were like the bloody foam at the end of a bad shaving episode. She didn’t have time to feel humiliated. His face was raw with sadness. —Dot? she said. May I install him in your bathroom? Won’t be a minute. I’m sorry, I really am. —Not another word, Dot said. It wouldn’t be a party without him. With a lavender cocktail napkin, Dot Halford crouched to wipe up the last of an Irish coffee that Benjamin had taken with him on the way down. Only a small, gluey clump of rug tentacles was left to betray Benjamin Hood’s fall. Mark Boland helped Elena lift him to his feet, at which point Benjamin disdained—in incoherent, alcoholic grunts—any further help. He hurried himself to the bathroom coughing ominously. When Elena turned her attention back to the game, halfheartedly now, guiltily, but also angrily, Neil Conrad and Janey Williams were gone. In fact, Mark Boland seemed to be suddenly on his way out with Dot herself. They had managed to sanctify this bond quietly, on the margins of all the other activity. The game was accelerating, to accomplish its task without further mishap. People were pairing off without even consulting the bowl. Because there were only the four of them left now. Rob Halford and Sari Steele turned to Jim Williams and Elena, who found themselves alone standing together, and smiled. —We didn’t actually put our keys in at all, Rob said. But you won’t spread it around? He guffawed loudly. —It’s my party. And Dot isn’t.… Hey, we’re just going to slip upstairs for a little while. Would you guys like a cup of coffee or something before we go? Jim looked at Elena. Elena was looking back. They sized each other up. The decision, for Elena, was about like buying an expensive household item. A new hi-fi or a new dishwasher. She was valuing Jim strictly on the basis of design stylings. —Rob, we’ll fix it for ourselves, she said. You two go on and get acquainted. We’ll let ourselves out the front door. Then Elena and Jim Williams were alone in the Halfords’ living room. Real holiday carnage marred the earthy and arty look of the premises. There were half-empty beer bottles everywhere, and these were filled with the ends of cigarettes, Virginia Slims, Kents, Larks, Winstons. Disposable plastic cups had been stuffed with the lavender cocktail napkins and scraps of hors d’oeuvres. Elena was stunned by the number of empty liquor bottles at the bar. The cushions from the polyurethane modular-seating unit had been scattered on the floor, near where Benjamin had stretched himself out, and there was a trail of slush and grime leading in from the front door. Wood smoke and cigarettes and pot had gotten into the curtains and upholstery. The room had an outdoorsy stench to it. The last coals hissed and popped in the fireplace.

• From The Principle of Desire (2013)

  She had come to the demo in street clothes, and the cotton maxi dress clung to her body when she passed the club’s cool threshold and encountered the hot, damp night air. It smelled very late-summer-in-Houston, a wash of night-blooming jasmine over the harsher odor of exhaust fumes, underpinned with a whiff of rotting vegetation. Flowers, cars and garbage. Strange that a girl from San Francisco would come to welcome that scent and the accompanying heat as comfortingly familiar. “I’m parked down the block, over there.” Ed pointed as he joined her on the sidewalk. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what Aaron said. I’m sorry he thought it would do him any good to say it. “Let’s go.” She didn’t take his hand. She didn’t feel worthy of taking Ed’s hand just then. She’d forgotten that Ed didn’t know where she lived, so the stuffy silence of the ride ended in her giving him directions. Her house was not far from Aaron’s geographically, and had been built around the same time, but it was miles away in terms of style. A little two-bedroom cottage, literally rose-covered. Not much inside, because she didn’t like clutter and had spent most of her time since coming to Houston either working or spending time with Aaron. He’d suggested she buy the house as an investment, since the land it sat on out-valued the house many times over. It had been a good one, but over the past six months the cottage she’d once thought to sell as a tear-down had somehow become her home. Ed parked in the narrow driveway and hopped out to open her door for her, change jingling in his pockets. His jeans were nearly as baggy as his gym shorts, and had a hole in one knee. Not a fashionable hole, just a rip he’d acquired somewhere and never bothered to mend or patch. When he handed her out of the car, she smelled deodorant and fabric softener on his faded T-shirt, instead of citrusy Atelier cologne. “Can I ask you something?” “Sure.” She unlocked the front door and let him in, locking up behind them and tossing her keys on the demilune table by the door. “Fire away.” “What the hell did he do?” Beth gaped. “You were there. He called you Doughboy. In front of everybody. Regardless of what gets said between consensual partners in scenes, we don’t generally allow name-calling or shaming random members at the club. It’s supposed to be a safe space.” “Um...yeah, I know what he called me. I was there, as you pointed out. Not something I’m gonna forget any time soon, but thanks for reminding me. I meant before that. Why are you here with me, not with him? It’s obvious you still care about him, if you’re willing to stay with him for days and snuggle with him at the club. What did he do?” “He asked me to marry him.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  From the College de la Marche Calvin was transferred to the strictly ecclesiastical College de Montague, in which philosophy and theology were taught under the direction of a learned Spaniard. In February, 1528, Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the order of the Jesuits, entered the same college and studied under the same teacher. The leaders of the two opposite currents in the religious movement of the sixteenth century came very near living under the same roof and sitting at the same table. Calvin showed during this early period already the prominent traits of his character: he was conscientious, studious, silent, retired, animated by a strict sense of duty, and exceedingly religious.396 An uncertain tradition says that his fellow-students called him "the Accusative," on account of his censoriousness.397 NOTES. SLANDEROUS REPORTS ON CALVIN’S YOUTH. Thirteen years after Calvin’s death, Bolsec, his bitter enemy, once a Romanist, then a Protestant, then a Romanist again, wrote a calumnious history of his life (Histoire de la vie, moeurs, actes, doctrine, constance, et mort de Jean Calvin, Lyon, 1577, republished by Louis-François Chastel, Magistrat, Lyon, 1875, pp. 323, with an introduction of xxxi. pp.). He represents Calvin as "a man, above all others who lived in the world, ambitious, impudent, arrogant, cruel, malicious, vindictive, and ignorant"(!) (p. 12). Among other incredible stories he reports that Calvin in his youth was stigmatized (fleur-de-lysé, branded with the national flower of France) at Noyon in punishment of a heinous crime, and then fled from France in disgrace. "Calvin," he says (p. 28 sq.), "pourveu d’une cure et d’une chapelle, fut surprins ou (et) convaincu Du peché de Sodomie, pour lequel il fut en danger de mort par feu, comment est la commune peine de tel peché: mais que l’Evesque de laditte ville [Noyon] par compassion feit moderer laditte peine en une marque de fleur de lys chaude sur l’espaule. Iceluy Calvin confuz de telle vergongne et vitupère, se defit de ses deux bénéfices es mains du curé de Noyon, duquel ayant receu quelque somme d’argent s’en alla vers Allemaigne et Itallie: cherchant son adventure, et passa par la ville de Ferrare, ou il receut quelque aumone de Madame la Duchesse." Bolsec gives as his authority a Mr. Bertelier, secretary of the Council of Geneva, who, he says, was sent to Noyon to make inquiries about the early life of Calvin, and saw the document of his disgrace. But nobody else has seen such a document, and if it had existed at all, it would have been used against him by his enemies. The story is contradicted by all that is authentically known of Calvin, and has been abundantly refuted by Drelincourt, and recently again by Lefranc (p. 48 sqq., 176–182). Kampschulte (I. 224, note 2) declares it unworthy of serious refutation. Nevertheless it has been often repeated by Roman controversialists down to Audin.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  But instead, his erection began to rub against Libbets’s voluptuous ass. He knew what he was doing, but he wasn’t admitting it. He was feeling virtuous. His dick was making its own decisions, ones that involved chiefly sorrow and shame. His dick didn’t give a shit about the community of lost teenagers. It only took a minute or so—he had hiked up her nightgown and was rubbing against her very flesh—before he was teetering on the brink of that fantastic and sorrowful ecstasy. What really gave masturbation its thrill was the possibility of getting caught at it at the moment of orgasm, when you knew that Jimmy Rodale, for example, was going to tell everyone in Manville that you used a nylon soccer jersey to accomplish the deed. Or getting caught by your mother. That cry of release was like no other—I wish I were in love! I’m never gonna be! But Paul was gifted with a sudden moment of insight. He could see that the lovely cheeks of her ass, her coccyx, her knobby lower vertebrae, the breasts he held in his hand, would not bring him the good feeling he wanted. He could see what kind of creep he was. He would be no more there afterward than he was before. He was no sensuous man. And there was no colony on this planet where this kind of activity was rewarded. This insight was nothing more than a jab in the midst of the precipitous movement toward ejaculation. He managed to roll over onto his side, though. To save himself a little heartbreak. —Oh, Libbets, he groaned. And he came. By himself. On himself. On his hand, and on Libbets’s sheets. Instantly, he was out of bed, checking the clock, his heart racing, looking for his clothes. Was he high? Was he a fool? Was he a deviant? He sprinted to the bathroom, where he gave his hands a good washing. He grabbed a flowered towel and rushed with it back to the bed. Libbets slept. He scrubbed at the puddle not a foot from her back. She rolled backward, from the commotion maybe, so that she was only inches away. He whispered apologies. He scorched the fitted sheet with scrubbing friction. It wasn’t going to come out so easily. There were little clots of the stuff. It would just have to dry. He prayed that his semen would not make that journey of eight inches across the sheet and into Libbets’s vagina. He prayed it would fade by morning. He prayed it would be transformed into the flaky and inoffensive crust he knew so well. It was almost eleven. Had Davenport heard? The snoring had stopped. Paul’s life was cheap. He dressed. He looked for his magazines. He was as alone in that apartment as he could be. A world of sleepers kept his secret. How could he sit across from Libbets in M. LeJeune’s French class?

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Of the group gathered around the glass coffee table in the library, six or seven headed for the front hall immediately. For their coats. Those who remained also seemed to be getting ready to leave. They stretched and headed for the bathroom or finished off conversations, though all the while they were intent on that salad bowl in the front hall, that simple, white salad bowl with the keys nestling in it. The range of uncertainties fascinated Elena. They were gathered there, just after eleven, like some convention of toastmasters. All putting a good face on it. Mark Boland, Maria Conrad, Neil Conrad, Sally and Steve Armitage, Alice and Pierce Sawyer, Ernest and Sari Steele, the Boyles, the Gormans, Janey and Jim Williams, the Gadds, Stephan Earle and his wife, Marie, the Fullers, the Buckleys, Chuck Spofford, June Devereaux, Tommy Finletter, Alicia Monroe. Dot and Rob Halford. And the Hoods. Because Elena was a forecaster of difficulties, a seer, she realized the crucial problem of the key party right away. The numbers were uneven. There was an extra guy. And the pickings were pretty slim. Wesley Myers had slipped out suddenly, out some back door. Why had he been there in the first place? Elena couldn’t imagine whom, of the assembled, she could stand. Her husband was still there, though, and statistically she might well choose him. He was close by her now, holding her lightly by the shoulders, swaying from side to side. —Ready to go? Benjamin whispered. I was.… You know, I was thinking I was.… Well, let’s just go, honey. Let’s get out of here. I want to go. I’ve had … enough. Enough of this shit. A defeated look marred his features. In the lines and around the pouches of his face perspiration collected. He grimaced. He wanted help. But Elena didn’t feel up to it. On other occasions, she had put him to bed. She had changed the sheets when, once or twice, he had actually, in the midst of some drunken episode, pissed in them. She had driven him to the station when he was too hung-over to drive. She had called his secretary at Shackley and Schwimmer to explain away his absences. —We’re not going anywhere, she said. Benjamin groaned sullenly. It was an interrogative and preverbal drunken noise. —That’s right, Elena whispered. She waved affably at Janey Williams, who was standing across the living room. —Hi there, Janey. Janey waved back. Without expression. Dot had turned on some racy music to go with the event—theme music from the Tribal Love Rock Musical, Hair . Now she dimmed the living room lights. Those thirty-one betrayers gathered round, as though to stay warm. Elena and Benjamin were crowded in by the Armitages on one side and by Maria and her son, Neil, on the other. Certainly the kid would be the one leftover, right? The remainder?

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Then, somehow, the order became confused. Because there were so many people there who had drunk too much. Because, in the end, it was not a game in which order had much place. So Janey Williams went next. For no good reason. She was simply ready to go and tired of waiting. Elena took note of Benjamin’s agitation. Even in his dull, inebriated state he could see that he would certainly be the selection. He may have wanted to go, or to give the appearance of wanting to go, but now here he was believing in the fates, in chance. The numbers favored him. The record player had turned itself off and the fire in the fireplace had gone out. It was Benjamin’s moment. Dot presented the bowl to Janey, whose delicate hands selected with all the care of a jeweler. Janey knew their keys well enough. The Hoods’ key ring with the horse on it. Janey had looked after the house on a couple of occasions. She could have found their keys with ease. But Janey selected away from Benjamin Hood. She found the keys and purposefully shoved them to one side, Elena imagined, because she wound up instead with … Neil Conrad. The teenager! Jim Williams seemed to peruse an old copy of National Geographic as his wife publicly embraced Maria Conrad’s underage son. Jim Williams, smiling mysteriously to himself. When had he arrived at the party, anyway? But the real drama of the moment was created by Elena’s own husband. In that tight circle, he lumbered forth as if to separate Janey and Neil. For a moment, fisticuffs seemed likely. For a moment, Benjamin threatened the teenager with the flat of his hand. Elena felt shame rise in her like adrenaline. Shouts of Hey, hey, Ben, hang on there a sec , and Benjamin gathered himself up, realizing, even in his drunkenness, the enormity of his foolishness. He backed off. And in backing off he tripped over the coffee table. Here at last was a story with beginning, middle, and end, a story that local scandalmongers could repeat with relish. Benjamin went down heavily, as if it were natural for him to be prone on the Halfords’ shag rug. He settled there resolutely. Elena made no move to help him—she was chilled with dismay—and the Halfords didn’t hurry either. Jim Williams looked up casually from his magazine. Benjamin Hood lay on the floor, muttering. An indistinguishable whisper of complaints about Shackley and Schwimmer, about his past, about New Canaan. Elena paid no more attention than anyone else. Or she tried. But when Benjamin gulped back the first salvo of some intestinal disturbance, Elena felt she had to do something. —C’mon, darling, she said, and she crouched over his back—because he was now kneeling wobbily by the edge of the modular seating unit. Come on, you’ve got to go to the bathroom. Let’s go.

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

  I hosted it there partially because I don’t feel that its [sic] right to just scoop from the community and then run away with the content. Appropriation, even if I’m appropriating from a position of privilege (that I don’t necessarily have in those communities) still felt disingenuous to me. Like i’m running off with your secrets. I wanted to emphasise “I am here with you guys, this is my life, so let’s just play.” Unlike various predecessors, Holloway does not run from the context in which her work was created or might normally be viewed. She is an artist, and also, she is not not a camgirl. I used to fear the impact of making porn in a way I didn’t fear the impact of any other form of sex work. Indeed, in an essay titled “Once You Have Made Pornography,” Lorelei Lee warns, “This job is not forgettable. Once you have done it, anyone who knows you have done it sees a mark on you—believes there is a thing about your personality or life history that is revealed.” If everyone could see my pussy on the internet, what would it say about me? As soon as I was recognized publicly as an artist, my fear waned. I created a context in which any pornography I made could be inflected differently, readymade to be viewed or analyzed through a respectable, institutional lens. I am ashamed that I feel this way, but I do. I decided to shoot self-portraits at the Kew Motor Inn, one of the last remaining hourly motels in New York City. The rooms are themed, ranging from innocuous, syrupy motifs like Love Nest and Fantasia to the more exoticized and offensive Oriental Delight and Arabian Nights. My favorite was New York Skyline. When my friend and I went to scout the location, we checked in behind a client and the escort he’d hired; their presence at such a motel during lunchtime hours, combined with her heels and their thirty-year age gap, gave them away. We got into a room and I stripped down to the lace bodysuit I was wearing, jumping on the bed. She took photos of me, capturing my reflection in the mirrored ceiling. I grabbed her phone to take a selfie, holding it high above my head, my black-clad body and pink tongue popping against the maroon, paisley-printed comforter. A room or two away, we heard exaggerated screams, accompanied by a squeaking bed. This seemed characteristic of a seedy motel: hourly rooms promised cheap, quick access, but no veil through which to pretend what was happening wasn’t happening. The room dripped of fast, sold sex; the knowledge that if you looked closely you’d find traces of those who came here before made it feel like one large effervescent come stain, an atmospheric glow.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  The other pole of the pathology is constituted by unlimited expenditure. This is what the Greeks call gonorrhea and the Latins seminis effusio. Galen defines it thus: “an involuntary discharge of sperm,” or “to be more definite, a continuous discharge of semen without erection of the penis.” Whereas satyriasis attacks the penis, gonorrhea affects the spermatic vessels, paralyzing their “retentive faculty.”9 Aretaeus describes it at length in On the Causes and Signs of Chronic Diseases as the exhaustion of the vital principles, its three effects being a general loss of strength, premature aging, and a feminization of the body. “Young persons, when they suffer from this affection, necessarily become old in constitution, torpid, dull, spiritless, enfeebled, shriveled, inactive, pale whitish, effeminate, loathe their food, and become frigid; they have heaviness of the members, torpidity of the legs, are powerless, and incapable of all exertion. In many cases, this disease is the way to paralysis; for how could the nervous power not suffer when nature has become frigid in regard to the generation of life? For it is the semen, when possessed of vitality, which makes us men, hot, well-braced in limbs, hairy, well-voiced, spirited, strong to think and to act, as the characteristics of men prove. For when the semen is not possessed of its vitality, persons become shriveled, have a sharp tone of voice, lose their hair and their beard, and become effeminate.”10 With gonorrhea it is virility, the life principle, that is lost via the genitals. Hence the traits that are traditionally associated with it. It is a shameful disease—no doubt because it is often induced by a quantitative excess of sexual activity. But it is also shameful in itself because of the appearance of emasculation it produces. It is a disease that leads inevitably to death. Celsus says that in a short time it causes the patient to die of consumption.11 Finally, it is a disease that is perilous not just for the individual but, according to Aretaeus, for his offspring as well.12 2. Beyond the particular sphere of their pathology, sexual acts are placed, by the medicine of the first two centuries, at the junction of a complex pathology. On the one hand, sexual acts are susceptible of being affected, in their unfolding and their satisfactory conclusion, by an abundance of diverse factors: there is the temperament of the individuals; there is the climate, the time of day; there is the food that one has ingested, its quality and amount. The acts are so fragile that the least deviation, the least malaise, risks perturbing them. As Galen says, to experience the sexual pleasures, one ought to be in an exactly medial state, at the zero point, as it were, of all the possible organic variations: “beware of repletion and deficiency,” avoid “fatigue, indigestion, and anything, moreover, which might be suspect in consideration of a person’s health.”13

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  No Janey, though, crouching, in lingerie, waiting. Back in the hall, Hood headed for Mike Williams’s room. He was sure the doorknob would be rigged with home electronic alarms. The apparatus for this alarm would be arranged on the floor just inside the room, rigged with pipe cleaners and roach clips and a nine-volt battery he had lifted from somebody’s automatic garage opener. Mike liked whoopee cushions and rubber dog excrement. He often wore a Nixon mask. And he also had a fondness for the crank telephone call. —Hello, is your refrigerator running? —Why, yes. —Well, I guess it must be, because I just saw it run by my house. HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! —Hello, is this 655-FUCK? —Hello, is this 655-SHIT? Paul had told him all this one night. One of those frail dusks when father and teenaged son share a good laugh over something. Few and far between were these days. Hood found these calls hysterically funny. Perhaps this was the day that Paul told him about his own crank phone calls, and about the bizarre miracle of their own number, 655-4663. The last four digits actually rendered their name. 655-HOOD. Mike’s doorknob released no shock, however. It sent up no electronic squeak. (Alarms were never activated for the real intruders.) The room belonged to Hood, the interloper. Black-light posters and tapestries covered the walls, tapestries that, in light of the dim table lamp Hood switched on, were full of burn holes and unidentifiable stains. A water pipe the size of a barber pole stood in one corner. Janey permitted this behavior? With more time he might have extended the search. No doubt the traditional pornographic magazines were concealed between his mattresses, along with socks crusty with his dried seed. The shame and resourcefulness of the masturbator coming into his craft! No fabric or substance or receptacle was beyond being tested. Mike’s laundry was probably welded together with his semen. Imagine the sheer volume of it at single-sex schools and in penitentiaries. Consider how often the average American male masturbated in 1973. That year there were, say, 100 million American men, two thirds of whom were capable of achieving orgasm. At once a week, that meant approximately 3,432,000,000 ejaculations in the calendar year. At ½ ounce per ejaculation, that’s 1,716,000,000 ounces or 13,406,250 gallons. Larger than a very large oil spill. Where to put all that waste sperm? All across the vast land, in the suburbs, in the rural and forested regions, in inner cities, guys were coming into rags, into sinks, onto their own bodies, outdoors in the alley or upon the earth. How many thought about disposal? He had tried to explain self-abuse to his son once, and this was one of the conversations that did not go well.

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

  He, too, had a virgin daughter, for whom he might fear a similar fate. He abandoned his lustful intentions and told Tarsia to implore future customers with the same sad recital, until she had earned enough to buy her own freedom. A train of suitors follows, and all are so moved by Tarsia’s story that they refrained from impairing her chastity. She endured, inviolate, until she was reunited with her father, who promised Tarsia to the noble prince as a bride (and incited the people of Mytilene to burn the merciless pimp alive). Tarsia’s preservation of her chastity was less elaborately contrived than Anthia’s. She relied on the bare compassion of strangers. But the underlying assumptions about the order of the universe were the same. 7 The inviolability of the heroine’s sexual integrity is the deep premise of the ancient romance. Leucippe was said to have endured “every indignity and outrage against her body, except one.” It went without saying what single disgrace she had been spared. The physical integrity of the female protagonist was the convention, in a genre of conventions. The great literary critic Northup Frye has observed of the genre, that “with romance it is much harder to avoid the feeling of convention, that the story is one of a family of similar stories. Hence in the criticism of romance we are led very quickly from what the individual work says to what the entire convention it belongs to is saying through the work.” The insight is crucial, but it requires an important amendment. Frye simply underestimated the sophistication of some ancient romances. To compare, for example, naive texts like the Ephesian Tale with more artful confections like Leucippe and Clitophon, without recognizing the entirely different literary registers of the texts, is to miss the supreme command of the medium that authors like Achilles Tatius display. The Ephesian Tale and Leucippe and Clitophon use the same set of conventions but use them to vastly different effect. What they share is a generic syntax, out of which the meaning of the individual work is created. 8 The ancient romances are stories of eros, a consuming physical passion that binds two beautiful lovers, a young man and young woman, in mutual attraction. The protagonists are unfailingly of high birth, born into the civic aristocracies of a broadly Hellenic Mediterranean. The stories are set against the backdrop of a physically familiar but temporally irreal Greek past, what Bakhtin called “adventure time.” Eros is the driving force of the story: a force of nature that, unbeckoned, guides human destiny. The novels celebrate eros as a gift of nature; they ponder the stark mystery that replenishing the city with new generations should also be a source of the greatest pleasure. The romances are unhesitantly carnal: eros is the ecstatic joy of bodily friction.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  On Saturday I went to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. First, we had to get in line so we could get some tickets. First we went on the Cave Train ride. It was not so scary. We were going through a time machine when we saw cave men dancing, fishing, washing and fighting bears. Then I went on a Ferris Wheel. It was quite tall so my mom had to go with me on it. Hmm, I thought. I’d better add some excitement. Something to show Mommy how much I loved the adventure she went through all the trouble to take me on. Then I played two frog games. I finished one frog and got a prize! Then I went on a thing called trampoline thing. I did a flip on it! Then I did it again! The lady there said I did it very good. Well I had quite a fun time! To cap it all off, I thought I should draw attention to my saucy little address. I noted: Hey! Did ya know the beginning here is different? I just did that for fun. Love, Stephanie. I looked over everything, and it seemed pretty good. I called my mother over. She sat in her chair and placed the notebook in front of her, holding a red pen. I assumed my proper place—standing at attention to her left, hands folded in front of me—and watched as she began the edit. She dotted my work with fierce red X’s, circles, and strikethroughs. Each progressive pen mark was a punch to the chest, until I was barely breathing. Oh no. I’m so dumb. Oh no. At the end of the entry, my mother sighed. She wrote an assessment at the bottom of the page: There can only be one “first.” You are still writing too much “Then.” Then I went on a ferris wheel. Then I played two frog games. Try to use other words. And I did it well. Very well. Not good! Then she slapped a large grade at the top: C-minus. She turned to me. “The last two entries, I already told you to write then less. I told you to be more interesting. Are you slow? And what are you talking about here at the end, about whatever you did for fun? I don’t get it.” “I’m sorry,” I said, but she was already reaching into her drawer, so I stuck out my hand. She raised the plastic ruler above her head and brought it down on my open palm: thwack. I didn’t cry. If she saw any tears, she’d call me pathetic and do it again. She closed the notebook. “You’ll redo this entry tomorrow.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  A banker was executed for repeated adultery, but he died penitent and praised God for the triumph of justice. A person named Chapuis was imprisoned for four days because he persisted in calling his child Claude (a Roman Catholic saint) instead of Abraham, as the minister wished, and saying that he would sooner keep his son unbaptized for fifteen years.720 Bolsec, Gentilis, and Castellio were expelled from the Republic for heretical opinions. Men and women were burnt for witchcraft. Gruet was beheaded for sedition and atheism. Servetus was burnt for heresy and blasphemy. The last is the most flagrant case which, more than all others combined, has exposed the name of Calvin to abuse and execration; but it should be remembered that he wished to substitute the milder punishment of the sword for the stake, and in this point at least he was in advance of the public opinion and usual practice of his age.721 The official acts of the Council from 1541 to 1559 exhibit a dark chapter of censures, fines, imprisonments, and executions. During the ravages of the pestilence in 1545 more than twenty men and women were burnt alive for witchcraft, and a wicked conspiracy to spread the horrible disease.722 From 1542 to 1546 fifty-eight judgments of death and seventy-six decrees of banishments were passed.723 During the years 1558 and 1559 the cases of various punishments for all sorts of offences amounted to four hundred and fourteen—a very large proportion for a population of 20,000. The enemies of Calvin-Bolsec, Audin, Galiffe (father and son)—make the most of these facts, and, ignoring all the good he has done, condemn the great Reformer as a heartless and cruel tyrant.724 It is impossible to deny that this kind of legislation savors more of the austerity of old heathen Rome and the Levitical code than of the gospel of Christ, and that the actual exercise of discipline was often petty, pedantic, and unnecessarily severe. Calvin was, as he himself confessed, not free from impatience, passion, and anger, which were increased by his physical infirmities; but he was influenced by an honest zeal for the purity of the Church, and not by personal malice. When he was threatened by Perrin and the Favre family with a second expulsion, he wrote to Perrin: "Such threats make no impression upon me. I did not return to Geneva to obtain leisure and profit, nor will it be to my sorrow if I should have to leave it again. It was the welfare and safety of the Church and State that induced me to return."725 He must be judged by the standard of his own, and not of our, age. The most cruel of those laws—against witchcraft, heresy, and blasphemy—were inherited from the Catholic Middle Ages, and continued in force in all countries of Europe, Protestant as well as Roman Catholic, down to the end of the seventeenth century. Tolerance is a modern virtue. We shall return to this subject again in the chapter on Servetus.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  First of all, regarding the causal chain, Cassian underscores the fact that the vices are not independent of each other, even if each of them can be attacked, more specifically, through one of the others.70 A causal vector links them together: it begins with gluttony, which originates with the body and kindles fornication; then this first pair engenders avarice, understood as attachment to earthly goods; which gives rise to rivalries, disputes, and anger; from which is produced the dejection of sadness, which provokes disgust with the whole monastic life and the listlessness of acedia. Such a concatenation assumes that one will never be able to vanquish a vice without triumphing over the one on which it depends. “If we always overcome the earlier ones, the later ones will be checked; and through the extermination of those that lead the way, the rest of our passions will die down without difficulty.”71 At the origin of the others, the gluttony-fornication pair, like “a tall spreading tree,”72 must be uprooted—whence the ascetic importance of fasting as a means of defeating gluttony and cutting off fornication. It’s where the ascetic exercise has its basis, because it is the beginning of the causal chain. The spirit of fornication is also in a singular dialectical position in relation to the last vices listed, and pride in particular. Actually, for Cassian, pride and vainglory don’t belong to the causal chain of the other vices. Far from being engendered by those, they are produced by the victory that one wins over them:73 “carnal” pride toward others through the show that one makes of one’s fasts, one’s chastity, one’s poverty, and the like, and “spiritual” pride that makes one think that this progress is due solely to one’s own merits.74 A vice connected with the defeat of vices, precipitating a fall all the heavier as it comes from on high. And fornication, the most shameful of all the vices, the most humiliating, is the consequence of pride—a punishment but also a temptation, a test that God sends to the presumptuous to remind them that the weakness of the flesh always threatens them if grace does not come to one’s rescue. “Because one has long enjoyed purity of heart and body, as a natural consequence […] deep inside oneself, one glorifies oneself to a certain extent […] but, for one’s good, the Lord acts as if he has abandoned him: the purity that gave him so much assurance begins to be clouded; in the midst of spiritual prosperity, he sees himself falter.”75 In the great cycle of combats, at the moment when the soul no longer has to struggle against itself, the goads of the flesh are felt anew, marking the necessary incompletion of this struggle and threatening it with a perpetual recommencement.