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 When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  Not long after, my ob-gyn rotation ended, and it was immediately on to surgical oncology. Mari, a fellow med student, and I would rotate together. A few weeks in, after a sleepless night, she was assigned to assist in a Whipple, a complex operation that involves rearranging most abdominal organs in an attempt to resect pancreatic cancer, an operation in which a medical student typically stands still—or, at best, retracts—for up to nine hours straight. It’s considered the plum operation to be selected to help with, because of its extreme complexity—only chief residents are allowed to actively participate. But it is grueling, the ultimate test of a general surgeon’s skill. Fifteen minutes after the operation started, I saw Mari in the hallway, crying. The surgeon always begins a Whipple by inserting a small camera through a tiny incision to look for metastases, as widespread cancer renders the operation useless and causes its cancellation. Standing there, waiting in the OR with a nine-hour surgery stretching out before her, Mari had a whisper of a thought: I’m so tired—please God, let there be mets. There were. The patient was sewn back up, the procedure called off. First came relief, then a gnawing, deepening shame. Mari burst out of the OR, where, needing a confessor, she saw me, and I became one. — In the fourth year of medical school, I watched as, one by one, many of my classmates elected to specialize in less demanding areas (radiology or dermatology, for example) and applied for their residencies. Puzzled by this, I gathered data from several elite medical schools and saw that the trends were the same: by the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on “lifestyle” specialties—those with more humane hours, higher salaries, and lower pressures—the idealism of their med school application essays tempered or lost. As graduation neared and we sat down, in a Yale tradition, to rewrite our commencement oath—a melding of the words of Hippocrates, Maimonides, Osler, along with a few other great medical forefathers—several students argued for the removal of language insisting that we place our patients’ interests above our own. (The rest of us didn’t allow this discussion to continue for long. The words stayed. This kind of egotism struck me as antithetical to medicine and, it should be noted, entirely reasonable. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job—not a calling.)

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  A survey of the medicine cabinet. He wanted to see if there was a diaphragm in there at all, to see how deep the slight ran. He wanted evidence. Where would Janey have gone? To the A & P to find something to go with turkey leftovers? To purchase beauty aids in preparation for the Halfords’ party that evening? Maybe she had gone to his house, to rifle his own medicine cabinet? Hood set the bottle of vodka on the speckled, beige, faux-marbleized countertop and poured some more ambrosia. Then he began to peruse the remedies on the other side of that mirror: Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara, Revlon Ultima pancake, Max Factor lipstick (chocolate), Helena Rubinstein Brush-on Peel-off Mask, Kotex tampons, Bonne Bell Ten-O-Six lotion, Clairol Balsam Color (blond, although she frosted her hair), Summer’s Eve disposable douche, Spring Breeze. Valium, Seconal, tetracycline, the first of these in a renewable prescription. No diaphragm case. In a tiny space at one end of the top shelf, Jim Williams apparently kept a few things. The Dry Look, Old Spice deodorant, Noxzema Shave Cream, Water Pik teeth-cleaning system. Vicks VapoRub. It was an L-shaped bathing suite. Hood drained his glass and ducked into the alcove where the toilet and shower were shrouded in darkness. On top of the toilet, Janey had piled Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo, Clairol conditioner, and Tegrin medicated shampoo. She had taken leave of him at this spot. This was where she left behind her evidence. A black lace garter belt and stockings had been draped across these hair-care products. Like some waterfall of loss and eroticism, the stockings swept down over the closed lid of the toilet. Meant for him. Hood marveled at her boldness. And having completely surrendered to an appreciation of her tactics, he decided he still couldn’t forgive her. Her flaws sprang to mind: her stretch marks, the port wine blemish on her left thigh, her lipsticked teeth and inexpertly manicured nails. She had left him in the guest room with his trousers around his ankles. She had sealed him down like a bank vault. He was an empty parade ground, a shuttered theater, an abandoned roadside attraction. Janey had information on him. He liberated the garter belt from where it was anchored by the dark green shampoo bottle, and the stockings from the garter. And then he flung back the shower curtain, hoping one last time to see her there, grinning, shivering, perhaps stretching out one hand to him, the other on the hot water spigot. Realizing, of course, that abandonment titillated him, that he was mildly aroused, that his beleaguered member thrived under bad circumstances, he unzippered anew his flannel slacks and, using the garter belt as a spur to his isolation and arousal—as a dressing gown for his hard-on—in flagrant violation of the precepts of autoerotics as he had explained them to his son, he began to stroke himself.

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

  The most notable adept of this conventual flagellation was Dominicus Loricatus (d. 1060), who got his name from the iron coat he wore next to his skin. He accompanied the repetition of every psalm with a hundred strokes with a lash on his naked back. Three thousand strokes were equivalent to a year’s penance. But Loricatus beat all records and accomplished the exercise of the entire Psalter no less than twenty times in six days, the equivalent of a hundred years of penance. Peter Damiani, to whom we are indebted for our account, relates that the zealous ascetic, after saying nine Psalters in a single day, accompanying them with the required number of lashes, went to his cell to make sure the count was right. Then removing his iron jacket and taking a scourge in each hand, he kept on repeating the Psalter the whole night through till he had finished it the twelfth time and was well into the thirteenth when he stopped. What is your body, exclaimed Damiani, who contented himself with prescribing forty psalms a day for his monks,—"what is your body? Is it not carrion, a mass of corruption, dust, and ashes, and what thanks will the worms give for taking good care of it?"2117 Under the appeals of preachers like Fulke of Neuilly and Anthony of Padua, there were abnormal physical manifestations, and hearers set to work flagellating themselves. The flagellant outbreak of 1259 started at Perugia and spread like an epidemic. All classes, young and old, were seized. With bodies bared to the waist, carrying crosses and banners and singing hymns, newly composed and old, they marched to and fro in the streets, scourging themselves. Priests and monks joined the ranks of the penitents. Remarkable scenes of moral reform took place. Usurers gave up their ill-gotten gains; murderers confessed, and, with swords pointed to their throats, offered themselves up to justice; enemies were reconciled. And as the chatty chronicler, Salimbene, goes on to say, if any would not scourge himself, he was held to be a limb of Satan. And what is more, such persons were soon overtaken with sickness or premature death.2118 Twenty thousand marched from Modena to Bologna. At Reggio, Parma, and other cities, the chief officials joined them. But all were not so favorable, and the Cremona authorities and Manfred forbade their entering their territories. The ardor cooled off quickly in Italy, but it spread beyond the Alps. Twelve hundred Flagellants appeared in Strassburg and the impulse was felt as far as Poland and Bohemia. The German penitents continued their penance thirty-three days in memory of the number of the years of Christ’s life. They chastised themselves and also sang hymns. Here also the enthusiasm subsided as suddenly as it was enkindled. The repetitions of the movement belong to the next period. § 136. Demonology and the Dark Arts.

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

  The rite is performed by the bishop, who is the successor of the Apostles, who uses the words, "I sign thee with the sign of the cross, I confirm thee with the chrism of salvation, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Chrism, or sacred oil, which is the symbol of the Spirit, is applied, and the cross is signed upon the forehead, the most prominent part of the body.1653 It is there shame shows itself when young Christians lack the courage to acknowledge their profession. § 115. The Eucharist. The eucharist, called by the Schoolmen the crown of the sacraments and the sacrament of the altar, was pronounced both a sacrament and a sacrifice. In the elaboration of the doctrine, scholastic theology reached the highest point of its speculation. Albertus Magnus devoted to it a distinct treatise and Thomas Aquinas nearly four hundred columns of his Summa. In practice, the celebration of this sacrament became the chief religious function of the Church.1654 The festival of Corpus Christi, commemorating it, was celebrated with great solemnity. The theory of the transmutation of the elements and the withdrawal of the cup from the laity were among the chief objects of the attacks of the Reformers. The fullest and clearest presentation of the eucharist was made by Thomas Aquinas. He discussed it in every possible aspect. Where Scripture is silent and Augustine uncertain, the Schoolman’s speculative ability, though often put to a severe test, is never at a loss. The Church accepted the doctrines of transubstantiation and the sacrificial meaning of the sacrament, and it fell to the Schoolmen to confirm these doctrines by all the metaphysical weapons at their command. And even where we are forced by the silence or clear meaning of Scripture to regard their discussion as a vain display of intellectual ingenuity, we may still recognize the solemn religious purpose by which they were moved. Who would venture to deny this who has read the devotional hymn of Thomas Aquinas which presents the outgoings of his soul to the sacrificial oblation of the altar? Pange lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium. Sing my tongue the mystery telling.1655 The culminating point in the history of the mediaeval doctrine of the eucharist was the dogmatic definition of transubstantiation by the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. Thenceforth it was heresy to believe anything else. The definition ran that "the body and blood of Christ are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood by divine power."1656 The council did not foist upon the Church a new doctrine. It simply formulated the prevailing belief.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  “I’m afraid,” Hoke told me, “I’m just one of those great big clumsy guys with a little girl inside him who’s dying to get out. The only problem is, she’s basically a lesbian, so there’s just not a whole lot in you she can relate to sexually. That’s why we were both having all those problems.” Now he laughed. “You like things about me I think are just awful! I mean, you actually like it that I still got my foreskin—while I don’t think I could even go to bed with another man who wasn’t circumcised.” “Since I am,” I said, “you’d think we’d be compatible. But I suppose I see what you mean.” Then I told him, “It’s true, I’d hate to see it go. But if that’s the way you feel about it, why don’t you have yourself cut?” “I’m scared—that it would hurt. Once I heard about a grown guy who did it and got all sorts of complications. Besides, my doctor says there’s no reason to.” He laughed again. And a little later, just before I left, Hoke said, “You know, maybe if we’d met when we were kids or something, you could’ve got me to like some of the things about me I just think are big and clumsy and ugly. I mean, they’re all things I was born with. I ain’t never gonna get rid of them. But I think it’s a little late for making me change the way I feel about them now. The reason we couldn’t make it is that I don’t even wanna like the things about me that you think are just great! I mean, I probably don’t need anybody who hates ’em. But for any kind of regular thing, I need a guy who just sort of ignores them, like I do—but wants to put that little girl through all her changes. I mean—what? You’re thirty-six. I’m thirty-eight. What it is, see, is we’re both homosexual. You need somebody the same sex as you. I need somebody the same sex as me. But that’s just not each other.” I shook his hand. We said good-bye (and Hoke did not give me a hug). And I walked out the door—just about sixteen years ago. I’ve seen Hoke, now at one bar, now at another, maybe seven times since. Two of those times, perhaps, we’ve spoken. (“Hey, I don’t see you in the movies any more, Hoke.” (“Naw, I don’t go in there now. They just don’t do it for me any more.”) The last of them, I was among a group of some seven or eight patrons at Stella’s to whom, after mentioning he’d retired from the sewers some years back, Hoke announced he would be starting as the morning bartender at the Full Moon, Wednesdays through Saturdays. “Eight to noon—if you’re around then, drop in and say hello.” So: What did Hoke think about the Times Square renovation?

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

  Finally, communication is how you practice consent. Even if you know what you want, you can’t give (or withhold) consent without communicating it. Tongue-Tied?Sexual communication isn’t just for the chatty and the brave. Anyone can learn how to talk about sex—even a Recovering Shy Person like Carol Queen: When I was (not so very much) younger, the idea of getting up before a crowd and attracting erotic attention would have sent me into a panic. In fact, I couldn’t even imagine doing much of that sort of thing one on one. My idea of talking dirty was “I love you” or—really bold—“Oh, yes!” Since then I’ve been photographed naked, recorded (video and audio) having sex, and performed explicit sex shows. That I’ve done these things is not only evidence of my recovery, they’re part of it.2 Many of our inhibitions about sex talk are cultural. We’re taught what’s appropriate to say aloud and what’s not. Especially for women, the bold expression of sexuality can carry a hefty price tag. Slut and whore may be words you’ve reclaimed as badges of honor, but in the wrong context they can still silence even the most fearless among us. You may be afraid that at the core your sexuality just isn’t good enough. That by putting your desires into words, you’ll expose your basic inadequacy. That people will see how boring you are. Or how perverted. Or how tame. Or simply different. Whether your goal is a career at the peep shows or to be able to tell your lover exactly how you want your breasts touched, you can learn to feel comfortable talking about sex. After all, you had to be taught to choke over those sexual words. You weren’t born that way—think of a 3-year-old, happily reciting her new vocabulary words (“poop!”) and dropping her pants for all the world to see. Here are some suggestions to get you started: • Make a vocabulary list. What words do you feel comfortable using to talk about sex? Is it cunnilingus or oral sex or eating pussy for you? Butt-fucking or anal intercourse? What do you call the parts of your body? • Know yourself. Nothing like information to give you confidence. Now’s a good time to compose your own Yes/No/Maybe list. Take a second look at the “Erotic Play” list in chapter 2, Desire and Fantasy. Which of these activities do you like to engage in? Which might you like to try, perhaps under very specific circumstances? And which are you sure you’re not interested in? Write “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” next to each item. Don’t forget to record the date—when you discover your list a year from now, you may be charmed by your innocence. • Talk to yourself while masturbating. Start with grunts and moans and work up to your own erotic monologues. For an added challenge, record yourself masturbating and talking dirty and then play it back.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I belatedly witnessed a ‘primal scene’. As I walked along the corridor I saw my mother on the threshold of our front door with the friend who used to come and see her when my father was away. They were exchanging a slight kiss, but her eyes were closed and her back was arched. I took it badly. She took the fact that I took it badly badly. Three or four years later I first saw Claude framed in the same doorway. It was June. It was late when we arrived in Dieppe, and found a place on a campsite. We couldn’t see that well to put up the tent. At the time a lot of students took amphetamines to keep them awake so that they could work through the night before an exam. Claude must have taken some so as not to get tired on the journey, and he offered me one. Inside the tent, we didn’t sleep. When he asked me quietly whether he could actually penetrate me, I was trembling. I couldn’t really say if it was because of what was happening or because of what I had swallowed. In any event, I felt thoroughly unsure about my state. A few months earlier I had indulged in some heavy petting with a boy. He had put his prick onto my naked stomach and had come. The next day I had my period. My knowledge of physiology was so hazy that I thought this blood was the blood of the deflowered. Particularly as after that I waited a very long time for my next period (young girls’ cycles are often irregular and can be disrupted by emotional upheavals), and I thought that I was pregnant! I told Claude that I would say yes if he asked me the question again and used my name. He can’t have been expecting that sort of demand and willingly said ‘Catherine’ several times. When he withdrew I was scarcely aware of a fine brown thread along the top of my thigh. The next day we hardly left the tent where there was just room for our two bodies. We lay on top of each other and rolled over, separated from the people next to us by the canvas through which a golden, sandy light filtered. There was a family in a nearby tent. I heard the wife asking irritably: ‘But what the hell are they up to in there? Aren’t they ever going to come out?’ and the man calmly replying: ‘Leave it! They’re tired. They’re resting.’ We did manage to extract ourselves from our lair in order to have something to eat on a little terrace. I was in quite a daze. As we headed back to the tent I noticed that the beach and the campsite which was set slightly back were cut right across by a cliff perpendicular to the sea.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  This is presumably a statue of another deity, that offends the jealous God, YHWH. According to 2 Kgs 21:7, King Manasseh had set up a sculptured image of Asherah in the temple. Josiah had this burned in the Kidron Valley at the time of the Deuteronomic reform, but it is possible that either another statue had been installed or that Ezekiel imagined that it had been restored. The visionary character of the experience is shown by the statement that Ezekiel dug through a wall, something he could hardly have done with impunity in the actual temple. The account vacillates between portraying seventy elders gathered together in one place and assigning them each a chamber. The “loathsome animals” recall the unclean creatures of the dietary laws of Leviticus 11 and suggest the prophet’s priestly preoccupation with impurity. It is noteworthy that the offenders are said to include “Jaazaniah son of Shaphan.” Shaphan had played a prominent role in Josiah’s reform, and his family protected Jeremiah (Jer 26:24; 39:14). Ezekiel may have wished to indicate that idolatry was rampant even among traditional Yahwists, or the reference may indicate some animosity between the Zadokite priesthood and the Deuteronomic reformers. (Note, however, that 11:1 refers to Jaazaniah, son of Azzur. There may have been more than one Jaazaniah, but there is also reason to suspect textual corruption.) Ezekiel observes a number of idolatrous practices. There is no parallel for veneration of loathsome animals in Israel or Judah. “Women weeping for Tammuz” refers to a Mesopotamian ritual that can be traced back to ancient Sumer in the third millennium, where it marked the death and descent into the netherworld of the shepherd-god, Dumuzi. This ritual was observed in the Near East for thousands of years. Whether it was observed in Jerusalem we do not know. Ezekiel would certainly have been familiar with it from Babylon. Worship of the sun was practiced in Judah in the seventh century. Josiah is said to have suppressed it, destroying horses and chariots dedicated to the sun and deposing priests who made offerings to it (2 Kings 23). Whether “putting the branch to their nose” (Ezek 8:17) is a reference to a ritual is much disputed. No such ritual is known. It may be that the text should be emended to read, “putting the branch to my nose”—an idiomatic way of saying, “provoking me.” There is also a reference to “filling the land with violence” in 8:17. Since all the other offenses are cultic, some scholars have thought that this is an insertion. In any case, it is clear that Ezekiel is primarily disturbed by cultic offenses. Whether in fact any of these “abominations” was practiced in Jerusalem in this period, we do not know.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  Then there was the swanky sound-vibration studio in Tribeca where I went to experience a workshop on breathwork. Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist who guided thousands of LSD-laced psychiatric sessions, developed breathwork after the drug was declared illegal in 1968 and he needed an alternative for his patients. His invention, holotropic breathwork, is a fancy term for “hyperventilating until the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your body are so whacked-up that you hallucinate.” Some people report having intensely cathartic experiences afterward, akin to those associated with hallucinogens. I’ve read accounts of people seeing images of dead family members or reliving their deepest traumas and walking away cleansed. I sat in a large square with about a dozen other people, and we breathed in and out rhythmically for about ten minutes. After our instructor told us to resume breathing normally, I had a physical hallucination—like my body was floating off the ground. I savored this strange sensation as someone played a didgeridoo near my head. But I did not have a psychic breakthrough or meet dead people. — I even joined a childhood trauma support group. It was very ad hoc—a small group of friends-of-friends put together by an acquaintance. We didn’t go around and say, “My name is Stephanie, and I’m a survivor of abuse,” but we might as well have. Everyone shared their stories and their day-to-day struggles. There was a lot of crying. And it was hard not to compare my trauma with everyone else’s. My story was not the worst by far. One of the members was explicit about it. When I said I had a boyfriend, they replied, “It must be nice for you that you weren’t sexually assaulted so you can have a healthy romantic relationship. I wish I could have that.” I flushed with guilt and said, “I’m sorry,” because I didn’t know what else to do. But despite our differences, I recognized that all of us exhibited very similar patterns of behavior. I could see myself in all of their struggles, in their outsized reactions, in their sadness and anxiety. Unfortunately, instead of finding kinship in the fact that we all had similar insecurities and struggles, I couldn’t help but silently pathologize them in the same way I’d been pathologizing myself over the past few months. Ah, they won’t answer phone calls from people. Classic case of avoidant attachment disorder. Blaming themselves for someone else’s bad mood even though they did nothing wrong. Anxious attachment, maybe anxious/avoidant—also, warped self-perception! It did not help that of everyone there, I’d gone through the most therapy. I found myself in the awkward position of being an incompetent pseudo-therapist, trying to provide comfort for people and suggesting books and therapies, even though I was decidedly not okay, either. It occurred to me that there is a reason trained, experienced facilitators are always a part of support groups—so nobody in a crisis is expected to take on this role.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  This punishment is not attested elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, except in Ezek 16:37-39, which may be influenced by Hosea (cf. also the story of Susanna 1:32). In biblical law the punishment for adultery is death by stoning (Deut 22:23-24; both Ezekiel and Susanna also envision an ultimate death penalty). In Genesis 38 Judah condemns his daughter-in-law Tamar to be burned for fornicating while she was the widow of one of his sons and promised to another. Whether any of these punishments was actually carried out in ancient Israel we do not know. The punishment of stripping allows the prophet in Hosea 2 to speak metaphorically of the stripping of the land, to make her like a wilderness and turn her into parched land, by destroying the trees and crops that were her clothing. In fact, Israel was laid bare by the Assyrians already in the 730s and again more drastically in the final assault on Samaria (722). The adultery of Israel consisted of worshiping Baal, the Canaanite god, who was widely revered in the northern kingdom of Israel. (Compare the Elijah stories in 1 Kings. A high proportion of Israelite names in the ostraca found in Samaria included the name of Baal.) Baal was attractive because he was a fertility deity, the “rider of the clouds” and bringer of rain. People believed that he was the deity who provided “the grain, the wine, and the oil,” the main benefits people expected from the worship of a god or goddess. Hosea insists to the contrary that YHWH is the deity who provides these goods. (Compare the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, where the conflict initially concerned the power to provide rain.) Bronze relief depicting a mother and her children as refugees from the city of Lachish, besieged by the Assyrian forces of Sennacherib. From the palace of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh; now in the British Museum, London. Hosea differs from Amos in two crucial respects. First, the primary sin of which Israel is accused is not social injustice but idolatry. Hosea is also concerned about social justice, as we shall see, but it plays a secondary role in his prophecy. In contrast, one would not know from the book of Amos that the worship of Baal was a problem in northern Israel at all. The second way in which Hosea differs from Amos is that he vacillates between judgment and oracles of salvation. The prophecy in Hosea 2 ends with an idyllic vision of restoration. The wilderness was, on the one hand, naked land, a place of death and therefore punishment.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Rather, he seems to bear the punishment of the people in the sense that he illustrates and dramatizes it. There is no implication that people are relieved of their guilt simply by looking at Ezekiel. They might be relieved if they were moved by his symbolic action to recognize their condition and repent of their sins. Primarily, the prophet’s action is meant to help them recognize their guilt and their impending punishment. The 390 days and 40 days represent the number of years allotted for the punishment of Israel and Judah. Neither figure was historically accurate. The kingdom of Israel was never restored, and the Babylonian exile lasted more than forty years. Ezekiel is given further instructions about his diet while performing these actions. (That he is allowed to prepare and eat food suggests that he was allowed some freedom of movement.) Two points are significant in this instruction. First, his food is rationed, as it would be in time of siege. Second, he is to prepare it over human dung. The point is to show that the food is unclean. Ezekiel’s reaction is visceral: “Ah L ord God! I have never defiled myself; from my youth up to now. . . .” He is allowed to substitute animal dung, which has been used as fuel in the poorer countries of the Middle East down to modern times. It is not clear that human dung would make the food unclean, but it is unlikely to have been a fuel of choice for a priest like Ezekiel. Lands outside Israel were considered unclean in any case, so the uncleanness was a corollary of exile. What is clear from the exchange between the prophet and the Lord is that for a Zadokite priest like Ezekiel, defilement was a fate worse than death. Ezekiel is given one further symbolic action to perform at this point. He is told to shave his head and his beard with a sword and divide the hair to symbolize the fate of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. One-third would die of pestilence or famine, one-third would fall by the sword, and one-third would be scattered. It has been noted that this fate corresponds to the curses of the covenant, especially as they are formulated in Lev 26:23-33, where the Israelites are threatened with sword, pestilence, famine, and exile if they disobey the laws. (Note especially the motif of eating one’s children in both passages; Ezekiel goes further by saying that children will eat their parents.) The reason for such horrors is that “you have defiled my sanctuary” (Ezek 5:11). The logic of both passages is informed by the use of curses in Near Eastern treaties, especially by the Assyrians.

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

  Dice were played even on the altars of Notre Dame, Paris,1959 and dice-playing is often forbidden to priests in the acts of synods. Wine-drinking to excess was also a fault of the clergy, and Salimbene knew Italian clerics who sold wine and kept taverns.1960 According to Caesar of Heisterbach, wine often flowed at the dedication of churches. A Devonshire priest was accustomed to brew his beer in the church-building. The most famous passage of all is the passage in which Jacob de Vitry describes conditions in Paris. Fornication among clergymen, he says, was considered no sin. Loose women paraded the streets and, as it were by force, drew them to their lodgings. And if they refused, the women pointed the finger at them, crying "Sodomites." Things were so bad and the leprosy so incurable that it was considered honorable to have one or more concubines. In the same building, school was held upstairs and prostitutes lived below. In the upper story masters read and in the lower story loose women plied their trade. In one part of the building women and their procurors disputed and in another part the clergy held forth in their disputations.1961 The Fourth Lateran arraigned bishops for spending the nights in revelry and wantonness. The archbishopric of Rouen was occupied for 113 years by three prelates of scandalous fame. Two of them were bastards of the ducal house and all rivalled or excelled the barons round about in turbulence and license. A notorious case in high places was that of the papal legate, Cardinal John of Crema. He held a council which forbade priests and the lower clergy to have wives or concubines; but, sent to the bishop of Durham to remonstrate with him over the debauchery which ruled in his palace, the cardinal himself yielded to a woman whom the bishop provided. The bishop regarded it as a jest when he pointed out the cardinal in the act of fornication. Marriage and concubinage continued to be practised by the clergy in spite of the Hildebrandian legislation. Innocent III. agreed with Hildebrand that a priest with a family is divided in his affections and cannot give to God and the Church his full allegiance in time and thought.1962 Writers, like Salimbene and Caesar of Heisterbach, were severe on married priests. According to the Fourth Lateran, bishops not only violated the canons of the Church themselves by committing the "crime of the flesh," as Gregory VII. called it, but winked at their violation by priests for a money-compensation. A common saying among priests was, si non caste, caute; that is, "if not chaste, at least cautious." In this way Paul’s words were misinterpreted when he said, "If they cannot contain, let them marry." Bonaventura, who knew the facts, declared "that very many of the clergy are notoriously unchaste, keeping concubines in their houses and elsewhere or notoriously sinning here and there with many persons."1963

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

  Concupiscence then is no more a merely corporeal thing than the biblical savrx, but has its seat in the soul, without which no lust arises. We must, therefore, suppose a conflict in the soul itself, a lower, earthly, self-seeking instinct, and a higher, god-like impulse. This is the generic sense of concupiscentia: the struggle of the collective sensual and psychical desires against the god-like spirit. But Augustine frequently employs the word, as other corresponding terms are used, in the narrower sense of unlawful sexual desire. This appeared immediately after the fall, in the shame of our first parents, which was not for their nakedness itself, since this was nothing new to them, but for the lusting of the body; for something, therefore, in and of itself good (the body’s, own enjoyment, as it were), but now unlawfully rising, through the discord between body and soul. But would there then have been propagation without the fall? Unquestionably; but it would have left the dominion of reason over the sensual desire undisturbed. Propagation would have been the act of a pure will and chaste love, and would have had no more shame about it than the scattering of seed upon the maternal bosom of the earth. But now lust rules the spirit; and Augustine in his earlier years had had bitter experience of its tyranny. To this element of sin in the act of procreation he ascribes the pains of childbirth, which in fact appear in Genesis as a consequence of the fall, and as a curse from God. Had man remained pure, "the ripe fruit would have descended from the maternal womb without labor or pain of the woman, as the fruit descends from the tree."1810 6.Physical death, with its retinue of diseases and bodily pains. Adam was indeed created mortal, that is, capable of death, but not subject to death. By a natural development the possibility of dying would have been overcome by the power of immortality; the body would have been gradually spiritualized and clothed with glory, without a violent transition or even the weakness of old age. But now man is fallen under the bitter necessity of death. Because the spirit forsook God willingly, it must now forsake the body unwillingly. With profound discernment Augustine shows that not only the actual severance of soul and body, but the whole life of sinful man is a continual dying. Even with the pains of birth and the first cry of the child does death begin. The threatening of the Lord, therefore: "In the day ye eat thereof, ye shall die," began at once to be fulfilled. For though our first parents lived many years afterwards, they immediately began to grow old and to die. Life is an unceasing march towards death, and "to no one is it granted, even for a little, to stand still, or to go more slowly, but all are constrained to go with equal pace, and no one is impelled differently from others.

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

  The social or ecclesiastical principle of Protestantism is the general priesthood of believers, in distinction from the special priesthood which stands mediating between Christ and the laity. The Roman church is an exclusive hierarchy, and assigns to the laity the position of passive obedience. The bishops are the teaching and ruling church; they alone constitute a council or synod, and have the exclusive power of legislation and administration. Laymen have no voice in spiritual matters, they can not even read the Bible without the permission of the priest, who holds the keys of heaven and hell. In the New Testament every believer is called a saint, a priest, and a king. "All Christians," says Luther, "are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone. As St. Paul says, we are all one body, though each member does its own work, to serve the others. This is because we have one baptism, alike; one gospel, one faith, and are all Christians for baptism, gospel and faith, these alone make spiritual and Christian people." And again: "It is faith that makes men priests, faith that unites them to Christ, and gives them the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, whereby they become filled with all holy grace and heavenly power. The inward anointing—this oil, better than any that ever came from the horn of bishop or pope—gives them not the name only, but the nature, the purity, the power of priests; and this anointing have all they received who are believers in Christ." This principle, consistently carried out, raises the laity to active co-operation in the government and administration of the church; it gives them a voice and vote in the election of the pastor; it makes every member of the congregation useful, according to his peculiar gift, for the general good. This principle is the source of religious and civil liberty which flourishes most in Protestant countries. Religious liberty is the mother of civil liberty. The universal priesthood of Christians leads legitimately to the universal kingship of free, self-governing citizens, whether under a monarchy or under a republic. The good effect of this principle showed itself in the spread of Bible knowledge among the laity, in popular hymnody and congregational singing, in the institution of lay-eldership, and in the pious zeal of the magistrates for moral reform and general education. But it was also shamefully perverted and abused by the secular rulers who seized the control of religion, made themselves bishops and popes in their dominion, robbed the churches and convents, and often defied all discipline by their own immoral conduct. . Philip of Hesse, and Henry VIII. of England, are conspicuous examples of Protestant popes who disgraced the cause of the Reformation. Erastianism and Territorialism whose motto is: cujus regio, ejus religio, are perversions rather than legitimate developments of lay-priesthood.

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

  As to his descent from the white Lea family of North Carolina, Haley completely invented a villainous cracker character named Tom Lea, who raped Kunta Kinte’s daughter, Kizzy (Haley’s alleged direct ancestor), and betrayed his own mulatto son, “Chicken George,” by selling off his family. This could not have occurred, because the historical Thomas Lea was already dead by that time. And Lea was not in fact Haley’s “po’ cracker,” but a prosperous landowner with sixteen thousand acres and numerous slaves; some of his relatives held prestigious political offices. The class element in Roots was, in this way, as wrong on the American side as on the African. Nor was there a shred of evidence that Haley’s lost Gambian ancestors were of an elite bloodline, and Toby/Kunte Kinte a breed and a class above the African American field hands who did the most backbreaking labor in the U.S. South. Yet for Haley, Kunta Kinte in America had to be fashioned as a man who honored the memory of his proud African ancestors; and in spite of his enslaved condition, he and his family had to set themselves apart from their low- class cracker relatives. 6 Let us be clear, then. Besides being a fabrication of his family’s history, Haley’s book applied a kind of logic that was downright conservative. He construed himself as one of an African nobility, and he held that ancestry said a lot about what a person could become—and pass on. Roots was too good to be true, which was why Haley, who pitched his story to the networks before he had even written it, was eventually exposed as a hoaxer and a hustler. 7 Haley’s Roots demonstrated how easy it was to invent a pedigree. Fictional family trees were all the rage. James A. Michener, arguably the most popular of twentieth-century historical fiction writers, produced a primarily white version of Roots in his novel Chesapeake (1978). Michener followed several families of varying class backgrounds and tied their destinies to a landscape dotted with geese and blue herons. The white trash lineage he covers originates with one Timothy Turlock, whom Michener describes as “small, quick, sly, dirty of dress and habit,” and the father of “six bastards.” After an undistinguished life in England, Turlock was unceremoniously dumped on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the 1600s, and lived in a swamp. 8 Multiple generations later, little had changed for the Turlock clan. Amos Turlock was a toothless crank living in a trailer in the 1970s. As one reviewer put it, “feral marshlanders” anchored the entire narrative. The Turlocks remained one with their terrain. Amos surrounded his trailer with tacky statuary of Santa and the Seven Dwarfs; he derived the greatest pleasure in finding his way around

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Always practical, Hood secured the door as he worked. Must we always imagine a woman to accomplish the deed? It was less hurtful to women and their history to imagine them this way than to violate and oppress them. Hood recognized and was proud of his own technique—above all he wished to hurt as few people as possible. Yes, he himself had eliminated the problem of representation entirely. In the fifties, back in Hartford, Conn., where his father’s insurance business had temporarily been located, and where Hood’s testes had first erupted, he had been able to ejaculate simply over the word bosom. He had also managed to fashion an orifice for himself out of a pliable old feather pillow. The pillow took him all the way to college, where the abundance of breasts lingered in his imagination like some divinely inspired thought, like the perfection of harmony and meter. But then he had fallen on hard times. In the company of the marriage neither breast nor ass nor the vesuvian moisture of down below on its own moved him. The contemplation of body parts was no more fascinating than a grocery list. At last, in his early thirties, only true pornography would do it. Solitary orgasms were like sneezes or yawns. He imagined women in hot pants and leather goods. He kept Playboy around. (In this month’s issue there was a first- rate short story by Tennessee Williams.) He imagined devices. His cheeks flushed. What a blessing when oblivion descended on these exercises. Masturbation was a falling sickness, with the emphasis, these days, on the sickness part. But at least he didn’t have to think. At least he was granted a moment without Benjamin Paul Hood and his fiscal responsibilities, without the lawn, the boat, the dog, the medical bills, credit card and utility bills, without the situation in the Mideast and in Indochina, without Kissinger and Ehrlichman or Jaworski or that Harvard asshole, Archibald Cox. Just a little peace. He groaned dully as he issued forth, firing with unusual range and payload onto the shag throw rug, as well as onto the garter belt itself. With the soiled garment, he swabbed and dabbed at the spot on the rug where he had splattered. Sighing, he refixed his trousers. Sighing, he unlocked the door. Where to stow the evidence? The garter belt was an empty snakeskin, a stately and somber artifact of his failure, a sort of Shroud of Turin. In the hall, with it balled in his fist, he turned first left and then right. Like a ghost, he ventured into Janey and Jim’s bedroom and gazed sadly upon the pacific waters of their waterbed. He thought to set it right upon their pillow, but he couldn’t do it. Scruples.

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

  The Epistle to Coroticus is much shorter, and not so generally accepted. Both documents were first printed in 1656, then in 1668 in the Acta Sanctorum, also in Migne’s Patrologia (Vol. 53), in Miss Cusack’s Life of St. Patrick, in the work of Ebrard (l.c. 482 sqq.), and in Haddan & Stubbs, Councils (Vol. II., P. II., 296 sqq.). There is a difference of opinion about Patrick’s nationality, whether he was of Scotch, or British, or French extraction. He begins his Confession: "I, Patrick, a sinner, the rudest and the least of all the faithful, and the most contemptible with the multitude (Ego Patricius, peccator, rusticissimus et minimus omnium fidelium et contemptibilissimus apud plurimos, or, according to another reading, contemptibilis sum apud plurimos), had for my father Calpornus (or Calphurnius), a deacon (diaconum, or diaconem), the son of Potitus (al. Photius), a presbyter (filium quondam Potiti presbyteri), who lived in the village of Bannavem (or Banaven) of Tabernia; for he had a cottage in the neighborhood where I was captured. I was then about sixteen years old; but I was ignorant of the true God, and was led away into captivity to Hibernia." Bannavem of Tabernia is, perhaps Banavie in Lochaber in Scotland (McLauchlan); others fix the place of his birth in Kilpatrick (i.e. the cell or church of Patrick), near Dunbarton on the Clyde (Ussher, Butler, Maclear); others, somewhere in Britain, and thus explain his epithet "Brito" or "Briton" (Joceline and Skene); still others seek it in Armoric Gaul, in Boulogne (from Bononia), and derive Brito from Brittany (Lanigan, Moore, Killen, De Vinné). He does not state the instrumentality of his conversion. Being the son of a clergyman, he must have received some Christian instruction; but he neglected it till he was made to feel the power of religion in communion with God while in slavery. "After I arrived in Ireland," he says (ch. 6), "every day I fed cattle, and frequently during the day I prayed; more and more the love and fear of God burned, and my faith and my spirit were strengthened, so that in one day I said as many as a hundred prayers, and nearly as many in the night." He represents his call and commission as coming directly from God through a vision, and alludes to no intervening ecclesiastical authority or episcopal consecration. In one of the oldest Irish MSS., the Book of Durrow, he is styled a presbyter. In the Epistle to Coroticus, he appears more churchly and invested with episcopal power and jurisdiction. It begins: "Patricius, peccator indoctus, Hiberione (or Hyberione) constitutus episcopus, certissime reor, a Deo accepi id quod sum: inter barbaras utique gentes proselytus et profuga, ob amorem Dei." (So according to the text of Haddan & Stubbs, p. 314; somewhat different in Migne, Patrol. LIII. 814; and in Ebrard, p. 505.) But the letter does not state where or by whom he was consecrated.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Hood banged the back of her head on the rearview mirror as he was swinging her around and trying to carry her to that tiny storage area behind the front seats. He was close to tears now, though he was determined to go through with it. —Take them down, she said, take down your trousers. I want to see you in full. If it’s going to be like this. She worked the zipper herself. She didn’t require his help. He remembered her kneeling across him. His suit pants coiled around his ankles like shackles, around his cordovans. His tie was loosened, his shirt unbuttoned, the tails of his shirt flapping around in the midst of their efforts. It was cold in the car, he could see his breath. —Get on board, he said. C’mon. He had never spoken during the act before. The words sounded to him like an impropriety. They were like an ethnic slur. They were like talking about money in public. She sat on his impoverished penis. Hood thought of Elena, of course. How could he not? And of Paul and Wendy and how they would feel when they found out. The look of inconsolable shame and remorse with which they would greet him. Something led Hood these days into degradation. There was some tug, some mournful and beckoning melody he followed. In fact, Melody turned out to be the girl’s name, and she was better at it than his wife. She was fortissimo—ff, when scored. What was upsetting about Melody was what was good. He thought about prostitutes and group sex and transvestites and sadomasochism and he could see the lure of the alien, the lure of the barbarous sexual act. As she rocked, she banged her head again. On the ceiling. He came. All the life went out of him. And then the moment turned. Really. For a second everything smelled sad and good. Like after a heavy rain. He held her in his arms. Melody from the office, whom he would have to see again right after the family ski trip to the Berkshires, right after he saw his dad, his lonely dad, right after he relaxed for a week. He would have to see her and he wouldn’t know what to say. He would forget he had been happy right then, for a moment. —Should we get a drink? He hoped she would decline. He was a little scared. —You have to go back to your wife, fool, she said quietly. You’ll be folded up on some lane divider if you have another drink. —I can make my own decisions— —Well, I don’t want another drink with you. Even if I do appreciate the company. They didn’t talk anymore after that. He dropped her off at her apartment. The trip home was an adventure into the northern wastes. He drove erratically, despondently, dangerously. He sped, tailgated. Back at his house, in the master bedroom, he splashed water on his penis.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  Yet young women in this period were, argued McRobbie, ‘able to come forward on condition that feminism fades away’. And the young women being spotlit in popular culture were, of course, of a certain kind: white and Western. It’s no accident that there was only one woman of colour in the Spice Girls, and that her moniker was the troublingly racist ‘Scary’. It’s also no accident that in a supposedly charming display of the girls’ cheeky assertiveness in the ‘Wannabe’ video, they fluff the hair of a homeless man and steal his cap. In this period, the presentation of girls as economically powerful and socially successful worked to draw a contrast between a supposedly gender-progressive Western world and a traditional, oppressive ‘other’ (usually represented by the image of the veiled Muslim woman). It’s no coincidence that the reformulation of consent as affirmative and enthusiastic took root in this postfeminist decade. Postfeminism insisted on sexual assertiveness and sex-positivity – on a gleeful pleasure taken in seeing oneself as an object of desire, and in asserting oneself as a subject of desire. A woman who failed to declare her desire noisily and defiantly was falling short in her personhood. She was harking back to a fusty, frigid feminism, rather than moving forward towards the sexually empowered ideal subject of the period, in which a gung-ho enthusiasm about sex was a marker of success, pride and power. In this era of post-feminism, the utterly reasonable claim that women should be afforded sexual freedom – that they should be able to declare their desire loudly, to be perverse and lustful and up-for-it – slid into the more dubious insistence that women are and must be so. And something of this insistence – that in the name of sexual equality, women must hold their end up and be assertive, declamatory, unashamed – found its way into the affirmative and enthusiastic consent initiatives. Critics then and now – Katie Roiphe and Laura Kipnis among them – have worried about the sexual timidity and fear conjured within consent culture. I’m arguing instead that the current consent rhetoric has taken something from post-feminism’s positioning of sexual uncertainty and fear as abject – from its framing of sexual hesitation as belonging to history. To be a contemporary and empowered sexual subject in consent culture, one has to be able to speak one’s desires out loud with confidence. Silence does not belong with us here; it belongs to the past and to the abject female subject of yore.

• From The Vagina Bible (2019)

  Women’s pubic hair is typically not depicted in ancient Western sculptures or works of art—artwork almost exclusively produced by men. This absence isn’t because these artists didn’t know how to render hair—the women almost always have exquisitely detailed hair on their head. Ancient Greek sculptures often show pubic hair for men as well as anatomically detailed penises (albeit on the small side, as sexuality was at odds with intellect and a great brain was the ideal), but the statues of women never have labia or pubic hair, but a mound. Whether the absence of pubic hair in Western art was due to the fact that this was a beauty ideal, showing pubic hair was improper or scandalous, or because of the association with lice (although you also get lice in your head hair) is not known. The first depiction of female pubic hair in Western art wasn’t until Goya’s The Naked Maja in the late 19th century, and this was apparently outrageous even though just a few wisps are barely visible. Visible pubic hair was often the definition of public nudity, so burlesque and erotic dancers removed their pubic hair as a way to show more skin. There is also the almost ubiquitous absence of female pubic hair in women’s magazines, lingerie and bathing suit advertisements, movies, and mainstream pornography. It isn’t known whether this culture of hairlessness is a result of market pressures to cater to a strong male preference, a carryover from previous beliefs that pubic hair is risqué, celebrity endorsements (e.g., pubic hair laser removal being featured on an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians), or the fact that the internet allows us to see more images of naked bodies. Pubic hair and “cleanliness” With this history of pubic hair removal across multiple cultures, it is easy to see how both women and men have come to think of pubic hair as “dirty.” Medicine has not, until recently, been helpful in dispelling this myth. For years, doctors insisted that women be shaved before vaginal deliveries in the name of “cleanliness.” The vulva has been exposed to blood, feces, urine, and seminal fluid long before the ability to remove hair or wash with soap existed. If the absence of pubic hair was beneficial, bacteria-wise, then we simply wouldn’t have it. Pubic hair removal is a cause of injury—over 50 percent of women who have removed pubic hair report at least one complication such as lacerations, burns, rashes, and infections. Almost 4 percent saw a health care provider for the injury. Of all genital injuries in the emergency department, 3 percent are due to pubic hair removal. Surgical intervention related to a grooming injury, including draining an abscess or stitches, is not uncommon. Injuries are more commonly reported by women who remove all of their pubic hair.