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 Action (2014)

  You don’t have to be so healthy that you ooze green-Gaia-vegetable-smoothie juice if you get a paper cut, but you have to care about your bodily well-being at least somewhat. Everyone has their own metric for what makes them feel physically and mentally sound, whether or not it includes the regular ingestion of pulverized salad-liquid. Those considerations are even less universally prescriptive if a person has a long-standing or chronic medical condition—these can include physical diagnoses like fibromyalgia, or mental ones like depression. Whatever you need to do to make yourself feel stable, and maybe even strong: Your first and most pressing responsibility in life, and sex, is to make sure you’re doing those things. I have to pester myself to drink enough water; try not to smoke; take supplements, even though the jury’s out as to whether they do anything besides make me feel falsely virtuous about my commitment to glowing, palpable immortality; chomp my ADHD and anxiety medications because, otherwise, my brain coughs bacterially all over my happiness; get enough protein and maybe lay off the SUGARSUGARSUGAR I mainline if left to my own breakfast devices (today’s morning aliments were a chocolate-chip cookie and a buttercream cupcake—I need a fucking warden). Outside of your regular routine, undertake to get yourself access to mental and/or medical help if and when you need it—in both instances, there are more options than ever out there for low-income and uninsured people now, even if they take a little research. Illness is an insistent and recurring piece of life, no matter how fastidiously we wash the grime from our paws, take our brain-leveling psych-vitamins, or all the other millions of practices by which we try to stave off sickness. That is okay, and none of it discounts us from putting it to a healthy body when we ourselves have one again! But you have to administer to yourself, as you would any other ailing person you love, in order for that to be true. When I choose to neglect my health, others are likely to pick up on that, too. A mess, itself, is not unattractive. But a willful lack of self-regard—the nonverbal demonstration that pantomimes the thought I don’t deserve health—is palpable and troubling. How can a person confidently expect me to provide them physical kindness if I’m unwilling to do that for myself? Don’t beat yourself up if you slip, because that does nothing but make you feel even worse than the condition that cookie-cupcake breakfast combo is tormenting me with at current. If you compound sickness or discomfort with self-loathing, that’s when you’re sunk, and shame doesn’t even come with the consolation of tasting amazing, rendering it entirely useless. Plus, it’s understandable: Cigarettes and candy and being so drunk that you’re pretending to give a presidential address in character as Ronald McDonald are all the absolute best; you were up against Goliath here! Make a different choice next time, and keep shredding along your merry path.

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

  Carter climbing into bed with a racist leader. Here Carter was drawn as a clownish, barefoot redneck—the absurdity exacerbated by his polka-dotted suit. The point was that he was a leopard who could change his spots, manipulating his class identity just enough to satisfy politically conservative voters. The attack was not far from the truth: Carter was okay with alienating black voters in the primary, but in the general election he shifted, toning down his redneck appeal. 19 As a politician, Carter was forced to endure a screening of Deliverance in Atlanta in 1972. He remained wary of its promoters’ claim that the film was good for the state. Indeed, James Dickey and Jimmy Carter were two Georgians who had absolutely nothing in common. Carter was a Baptist and had a teetotaler wife, while Dickey was an outrageous alcoholic and an egomaniac, born to wealth. Haunted by insecurity after a pampered and effeminate youth, Dickey reinvented himself as the child of hillbillies—one of the many lies he told about himself. His North Georgia relatives were actually large landowners, whose past holdings included a considerable number of slaves. 20 Dickey’s novel, published in 1970, was a tortured exploration of lost manhood, an attempt to recover his “inner hillbilly.” On the surface, the novel (and film) is about four men on a canoe trip in Appalachia. When the chubby bachelor Bobby (Ned Beatty) is raped in the movie by one of the mountain men, he is called a “sow” and told by his attacker to “squeal like a pig.” In the psychosexual thriller, the dandified city folk aren’t merely given their comeuppance; they are forced to rediscover their primal instincts. Dickey saw this as a good thing, and his hero ends up a stronger man. In one interview, the novelist admitted that the lure of the backcountry was to him the possibility of one’s becoming a “counter-monster,” behaving as men did who lived in remote parts, “doing whatever you felt compelled to do to survive.” In the novel and film alike, the city men commit two murders, conceal the death of one of their traveling companions, Ronny Cox’s character Drew, and make a pact never to reveal what happened on their ill-fated trip. Rechristened as blood brothers, the surviving trio carry their dark secrets away with them. 21 Drew had to die. He was the only one of the four Atlanta businessmen who showed any compassion for rural people. He reached out to the idiot-savant teenager after their banjo-and-guitar duet. (Lonnie, the character in the novel, was supposed to be an albino.) The film’s message was clear: sympathy was a sign of weakness that city boys had to overcome. Only by resorting to violence and taking a vicarious plunge into the uncensored psyche of the backwoodsman could they recover their feral redneck roots. 22

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

  emotionally stunted poor white men and recognize that everyday burdens fall more heavily on their women. 13 In Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, young Anne “Bone” Boatwright endures physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s second husband, Daddy Glen Waddell. In the town of Greenville, South Carolina, as it is for the Beans of Egypt, Maine, the Boatwrights are despised. Daddy Glen’s festering hatred of Bone comes from deeply lodged feelings of humiliation. He comes from a middle-class family, and he is the one member who never amounted to anything. He is a manual laborer and longs for a home like those of his brothers, one a dentist, the other a lawyer. “Nothing I do goes right,” he grouses. “I put my hand in the honey jar and it comes out shit.” He is jealous of Earle Boatwright’s prowess with women too. Unlike the Beans, though, the Boatwright men tend to be affectionate and protective of the women and children in their extended family. 14 Allison is fascinated by the thin line that separates the stepfather’s family from the mother’s; they might have more money, but they’re shallow and cruel. Her cousins whisper that their car is like “nigger trash.” Like Chute’s Pomerleaus, they feel compelled to snub those below them. It is shame that keeps the class system in place. 15 By the end of the novel, Bone frees herself from Glen, and in the process loses out to him when her psychically damaged mother decides to abandon the family and take off for California with him. In running away, her mother repeats the strategy of crackers a century earlier: to flee and start over somewhere else. Ruminating on her mother’s life—pregnant at fifteen, wed then widowed at seventeen, and married a second time to Glen by twenty-one—Bone wonders whether she herself is equipped to make more sensible decisions. She won’t condemn her mother, because she doesn’t know for certain that she will be able to avoid some of the same mistakes. 16 The lesson here is that the choices people make are both class- and gender- charged. Allison’s story serves as a reminder that many more people—women especially—remain trapped in the poverty into which they are born; it is the exception who becomes, like the author Allison, a successful person capable of understanding the poor without condemning. The American dream is double- edged in that those who are able to carve out their own destiny are also hard- pressed not to condemn those who get stuck between the cracks. As it is with the character Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, an awareness of the routine nature of injustice is most forcefully depicted when it is seen through the eyes of a child.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 102 < Lecture 15  Early Opposition to the Christian Message Clear Animosity ` It is clear, in any event, that the general idea behind the narrative of Acts is right: Christians roused animosity among Jews who rejected their claims. There are two reasons for thinking this is right, even if there is no record from Jews themselves of persecuting Christians in this period. y The fact that Christians became so upset with Jews and lashed out at them for opposing their claims almost certainly shows that Jews did oppose their claims. y More importantly, we have Paul and what he revealed in his own letters. We need to take seriously what Paul explicitly states in his letter to the Galatians. y With some shame, he says that at one point, he was bent on destroying the Church. He does not explain what he means, but his wording suggests physical violence. y Additionally, we know that once Paul became a Christian preacher, he suffered severe corporal punishment from Jewish leaders: Five different times, he received the “forty lashes minus one.” This was apparently a punishment by flogging inflicted in synagogues against troublemaking Jews (2 Corinthians 11:23–25). y In sum, there does appear to have been Jewish opposition to the earliest Christians, and sometimes it turned violent. Pagan Opposition ` Better known than the early Jewish persecutions against Christians is pagan opposition, especially opposition by Roman officials. First, though, it is important to note that Christianity was not seen as threatening in the world at large in the early decades at all. y Even by the end of the 1st century, there were probably only around 7,000–10,000 Christians in an empire of 60 million. y Christianity was not declared illegal at all until the middle of the 3rd century, more than 200 years after Jesus’s death.

• From Jesus and His Jewish Influences (2015)

  4 Lecture 1—Jesus and JudaismJesus and His Jewish Influences ●● The Greek term Ioudaioi, referring to the ancient Jews or Judeans, does not make a distinction between the religion and the geographical location; it encompasses both meanings. The Greek Ioudaioi were basically the descendants of the people of Judah, who worshipped the God of Israel as their patron deity and, by definition, lived according to the laws that the God of Israel had given his people. ●● Those laws are contained in what Jews call the Torah, or the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch. The Greeks and Romans characterized the directives in the Torah as the ancestral laws of the Jews. They viewed them as ancient laws that were given to the Jews by their national deity. ●● Recently, however, some scholars have begun to translate Ioudaioi as meaning only “Judeans.” To some, this is controversial because this translation eliminates the religious aspect of ancient Judaism by emphasizing the geographical origin, and it removes Jews from the historical record. This problem of the translation is particularly acute in relation to the Gospel of John, which uses the term Ioudaioi far more than the other three Gospels combined. ●○ In John, the Ioudaioi figure most prominently as Jesus’s opponents, who created a murderous conspiracy to have Jesus crucified. In John 8:44, they are portrayed as children of the devil, who is the father of lies. ●○ The scholar Adele Reinhartz observes, “The potent association between the Ioudaioi and the devil remains deeply embedded in anti-Semitic discourse to this day. Eliminating the Jews lets the Gospel of John off the hook for its role in the history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.” Chronology of Our Course ●● There is a custom among many Jews of calling a synagogue a temple, but in antiquity, a temple was literally the house of the deity. Only priests entered the temple in order to service the 5Lecture 1—Jesus and JudaismJesus and His Jewish Influences needs of the deity; everyone else stayed outside the temple building and congregated around an altar, where priests offered sacrifices to the deity. By contrast, synagogues, churches, and mosques today are intended to accommodate congregations of people for the purposes of prayer and worship. ●● In this course, we will focus on the temple to the God of Israel, which was located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In fact, there were two successive temples dedicated to the God of Israel. ●○ The First Temple was constructed under Solomon’s reign somewhere around 960 B.C. and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. That timespan represents the First Temple period. In many ways, modern synagogues are the opposite of ancient temples, which were not meant to hold congregations of worshippers.

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

  hierarchy in her adoptive hometown to understand that the reputation of working-class whites hinged on the system of segregation. Permeable racial boundaries would pull down people like her even further. A principal at Central High said that Hazel was known to have been beaten by her father, was emotionally unstable, and was not one of the “leading students” by any measure. As a troubled girl—a bad seed, one might say—she confirmed her dubious class origins by her antics. 44 Benjamin Fine of the New York Times compared Hazel Bryan to one of the frenzied girls who attended Elvis Presley concerts. (Some of the reporters at Central High even egged on the high schoolers to dance rock and roll in the streets.) During the first attempt to usher the black students into the school, a student ran down the hall yelling, à la Paul Revere, “The niggers are coming.” Parents outside began screaming for their children to flee. A group of girls stood at a window, shrieking. Under the direction of teachers, the majority gradually filed out of the building, though some, including Hazel’s best friend, Sammie Dean Parker, later claimed to have leapt from the second-floor window. 45 Two new schools had been built in Little Rock: Horace Mann High for black students, and R. C. Hall High (nicknamed “Cadillac High”) for the wealthy families on the west side of the city. Only Central High, built in the 1920s and catering mostly to working-class families, however, was selected for desegregation. Armis Guthridge of the Capital Citizens’ Council, the lead spokesman for antidesegregation forces, willfully fanned the flames of poor white resentment when he announced that the rich and well-to-do were going to see to it that the “only race-mixing that is going to be done is in the districts where the so-called rednecks live.” “Redneck” was a loaded term, as he well knew. His purpose was to remind the white working class of the city that the school board elites looked down on them. 46 Arkansas governor Orval Faubus also exploited class rift. He distanced himself from the “Cadillac crowd” and constructed himself as the victim of upper-class arrogance. The national media painted him as the “hillbilly” from Greasy Creek, in the Ozarks. Time caught him entertaining visitors as “milk dribbled down his chin”; he could be heard “belching gustily” like a backcountry rube. A large photograph in Life identified as the governor’s “kinfolk” one Taylor Thornberry, a cross-eyed, crazy-looking man in overalls. At a private meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, away from the unfolding drama, President Eisenhower tried to convince Faubus to accept the court-ordered desegregation plan; the southern governor left the meeting angry and humiliated. He later

• From The Wrestler: A Life of Passion and the Pursuit of Greatness (2016)

  I WALKED OFF the mat and immediately made my way to the arena tunnel. I had just lost in the quarterfinals of the 2003 Minnesota state tournament to an unranked wrestler. I was a junior, undefeated in state competition, ranked #1, and a shoo-in for the state finals. I had controlled most of the match; but my opponent never gave up, closed the gap, and sent the match into overtime, and then double-overtime, as he rode me out for the win. I was embarrassed and distraught. After I shook my opponent’s hand at the end of the match, I didn’t even reconnect with my coaches. I simply walked off the mat and headed toward the tunnel – dripping sweat and with my wet singlet plastered to my body. I refused to make eye contact with anyone despite feeling their stares and hearing their whispers as I walked by. I eventually made my way to a dark and secluded corner somewhere in the base of the arena. I sat down, held my legs close to my chest and hung my head in shame. At this point, the tears started coming. My mind was racing. I tried my best to recount the match and what had taken place, but with adrenaline still running through my body, my memory was clouded. Not to mention the fact that I was still caught in a state of disbelief, and disbelief can often create some sort of alternate reality in which you can’t quite figure out what’s going on despite the truth glaring you in the face. In that moment, I wanted to end my wrestling career right then and there. I couldn’t envision any sense of redemption. And even if there was, I didn’t want it. Drowning in my own sorrow sounded much more appealing. After all, the whole point of wrestling each year is to be a state champion. And if I’m not a state champion, what am I? Who am I? What’s the point?

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

  Eventually, a Moonie leader told me that I had created a “bad condition” by going inside for a cold drink; that Satan had tempted me; and that I had failed. He told me that, in my weakness, I had crucified Jesus on the cross one more time. That evening I prayed and repented and tried to quash any memory of what had happened. I never thought of that experience again, until after I was deprogrammed. Now, let’s take a look at another full-scale intervention, this time with a Krishna devotee. Phil and the Hare Krishnas/ Iskcon171 Although most Americans don’t realize it, the Hare Krishna sect, also known as ISKCON or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, is still very much around even though its founder passed away in 1977. Below is an account of my efforts with Phil, who had been a member of the Hare Krishna sect for over three years. Phil had become involved with the group about six months after his twin brother, Tom, was killed in an automobile accident while walking to a neighborhood store. The death hit his family hard, and sent Phil into a severe depression. He seriously contemplated suicide. He received medication and therapy, but nothing seemed to help him. Then one day, while walking downtown, he was approached by a Krishna. Not long afterward, he became a member. I met Phil during one of his infrequent visits to his family, and was introduced as a family counselor who had been working with his parents and his two sisters for many months. I told Phil that I felt I needed to speak with him alone, before I could do any sessions with him and the whole family. I told him that in my view he was a very significant member of the family, and that his participation was badly needed. After introducing myself to him, I suggested we go outside for a walk, so that we could get acquainted. He was dressed in full Krishna clothes, including sandals. I spent the first few minutes explaining my background as a counselor who specialized in communication strategies and family dynamics, and who was committed to helping people grow and enjoy better relationships with their loved ones. He told me that he now went by the name Gorivinda. “So, Gorivinda—Phil (it is best to use the pre-cult name)—would you mind telling me about how you feel toward your family now?” I kept my hands in my pockets and my eyes directed toward the pavement. “I don’t know,” he responded, shrugging his shoulders slightly. “Well, are you happy with your present relationship with your mother? Your father? Your siblings?” He answered, “Things have gotten a lot better since they stopped criticizing my religious commitment.” “How do you feel when you come home for a visit?” I asked, as gently as possible. “To be honest, it’s a bit strange,” he said. I was glad at his response. “What do you mean?” I probed for more information.

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

  Hazel and her family were part of the influx of poor whites into Little Rock after World War II. Her father was a disabled veteran, unable to work; her mother held a job at the Westinghouse plant. They had left the small rural town of Redfield in 1951, when Hazel was ten. Her mother had married at fourteen to a man twice her age. Neither of Hazel’s parents had earned a high school degree, her father having joined the circus. Their Redfield home had had no indoor plumbing and an outdoor privy; the Bryans’ move to the city granted basic amenities that they had not enjoyed before. The house they purchased in Little Rock was in an all-white, working-class neighborhood in the southeastern section of the state capital. 43 Hazel Bryan is the ugly face of white trash in Will Counts’s famous photograph taken on September 4, 1957. Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives The day after the photograph appeared, Hazel Bryan made herself visible once more, telling newsmen positioned outside the school that “whites should have rights, too.” If black students were let into Central High, she declared provocatively, then she would walk out. She knew enough about the social

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Absent other sources, it’s clear that teenagers turn to porn, at least in part, for sex education, even as they claim to know that its content is about as authentic as pro wrestling. Girls in particular consult sexually explicit media for a template of male partners’ expectations, despite being more than twice as likely as boys to be disturbed by its treatment of women. One national survey of teenagers and their parents found that the teens watched significantly more porn, and harder-core porn, than the adults. While more than 56 percent of the boys and 38 percent of the girls had seen pornography (a figure that skews low because it includes very young teens), only a third of their fathers and fewer than a fifth of their mothers had. The boys were at least three times more likely than their dads to have watched videos depicting facial ejaculation, double penetration, BDSM, coercive sex, gang bangs, and rape; the differential between girls and their mothers was generally even higher. I never asked a boy in my interviews whether he watched porn (nor, unlike with girls I interviewed, did I ask whether he had ever masturbated). That would have shot my credibility to hell. Because of course all of them—every single one—had. Instead, my question was when they first saw it. Often, the first exposure was unbidden: older brothers (or older brothers’ friends) spun around a smartphone screen or motioned them over to a computer, either as a manly rite of passage—doing the little guy a favor—or to freak them out. Or maybe a friend sent a link to a video of a naked woman masturbating or a clip of a man shoving his outsize penis down a woman’s throat. Boys typically considered such pranks to be, yes, “hilarious.”

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

  To be sure, breeding remained paramount in considerations of identity. In 1994, one irate journalist insisted that the Georgia politician Newton Leroy Gingrich was no redneck: he was born in Pennsylvania, had no southern accent, had served as a college professor, and got elected to Congress by suburbanites of Atlanta, many of them Yankees. This newsman’s expertise came from the fact that he was “kin to a great many of that breed.” Besides, he chided, “Gingrich wouldn’t last half an hour in a room of genuine rednecks.” You were a dyed-in- the-wool redneck or you weren’t. By this measure, neither Gingrich nor David Duke, the former Klan member who ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991, was a redneck. Duke was disqualified because he loved un-American Nazi salutes. Submitting to plastic surgery to make himself too pretty was also out of character. “No good ole Southern boy would dream of such a thing. It’s unmasculine, un-Southern.” This was the view of Jeffrey Hart, a conservative intellectual from Dartmouth College and former speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Reagan. 4 • • • Redneck was no longer the exclusive province of country singers. It had become part of the cultural lingua franca, a means of sizing up public men, and a strangely mutated gender and class identity. Nor were women silent in this debate. Two prominent female writers earned acclaim in the modern genre of white trash fiction. In the tradition of William Faulkner and James Agee, Dorothy Allison and Carolyn Chute offered unsparing accounts of rural poverty. Allison creatively reconstructed the conditions she knew from her early years in Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), while Chute, a working-class, college-educated writer from Portland, told of trailer trash in rural Maine in her breakout book, The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985). What set these writers apart was that they wrote from within their class, not as outside observers; they were outing themselves, and knew precisely how to describe poor women’s experiences. Class and sexuality remained their dominant themes, and neither sugarcoated her subjects as good ol’ girls. What they showed instead was that women cannot wear “white trash” or “redneck” as a badge of honor. 5 Allison is the better writer. That said, a spare prose may have been intentional for Chute. She captures events as they are happening, offering few insights into the inner life of her white trash subjects. The Beans are a sprawling extended tribe who take over the underbelly of Egypt. They are an assorted lot.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “Sex is a lot better than masturbation and involves actual intimacy instead,” he said. “Masturbation has a role for me in an ideally sexually diversified lifestyle, but it’s a small part.” I asked him if he thought sex with others was more intimate than sex with himself. “I’ve never really considered intimacy something that can happen by oneself. There’s no interpersonal joy that comes from being with myself. I still enjoy it, but I don’t feel closer to myself for having wanked it, you know?” Regardless of how you internalized the message that masturbating is lesser than partnered sex, or even the idea, like Ryan, that it is a tedious exercise, this reluctance blocks us from pleasure. Masturbating is one of the healthiest things we can do for ourselves and our sex lives. And it’s free! Most of the materials we need come complimentary with birth. Self-pleasuring releases feel-good hormones like dopamine and oxytocin, and can help us rehabilitate our understandably fraught relationship with pleasure, reduce stress, and build affirming sexual fantasies.3 Our reluctance to explore self-pleasure robs us of a valuable tool for developing sexual autonomy. Ryan is masturbating, but he doesn’t care for himself the way he cares for sexual partners. Amy Weissfeld, the sex coach, recalls masturbating as a child—“babies are pleasure seekers,” she told me repeatedly—but then dropping it for years. Nothing dramatic happened, but she became busy with other things, and self-pleasure plummeted to the bottom of the to-do list. “I was in a good relationship and I just got busy doing other things. Like, life happened, and it didn’t seem important,” she said. “My partner would say to me, ‘What do you want? What do you like?’ And I’d be like, ‘I don’t know, whatever you’re doing is fine. It’s all good.’ I was dissociated from my body because of all this body shame.” It wasn’t until she expanded her own definition of masturbation into a broader practice of self-pleasure, one that wasn’t so orgasm-obsessed, that she stepped into her sexuality. She began touching herself like she was someone she loved. “What was key to my own sexuality was recognizing, number one, the importance of masturbation, but number two, that masturbation doesn’t have to be rubbing on the clit till I have an orgasm,” she said. “What I try to get people to do is not focus on trying to ejaculate or trying to have an orgasm or trying to perform in some way, but to just experience pleasure in the body. So sometimes, for me, I might just sit there with my hand on my heart for thirty minutes and I meditate. It’s like an erotic meditation. I’m redefining masturbation as self-love.”

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “What book?” “The one Lisbeth gave you.” “This has nothing to do with Lisbeth or books,” Sandy says. Like Bettina Balser, Sandy feels she has to choke her own voice down in order to stomach her marriage. Like Isadora White Wing, Sandy worries that she’ll never know true sexual liberation firsthand. Did Judy relate to these predicaments, too? And if so, what did she do about it? Blume is forthright about one part of her “rebellion,” which overlapped with Isadora Wing’s—her marriage to John left her feeling inept. “He had married this little girl, and he was happy that way,” Blume told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune in 1985. Divorcing him meant she would have to grow up, which wasn’t easy, either. John was cold toward her; the kids were angry. Judy found that the period after her divorce left her more confused and depressed than ever. “Just getting through the day was a real struggle for me,” she writes of that time in Letters to Judy . “I woke up crying every morning and I went to bed crying every night. I wasn’t sure I could cope. I had very little left over for my kids.” She worried a lot, fearing that she’d ruined all their lives. The only thing she didn’t have to stress about was money. Thanks to her career, she wasn’t financially ensnared like Bettina Balser. She wouldn’t have to work as a cocktail waitress— “That’s what divorced women on TV always turn out to be—cocktail waitresses,” Karen muses in It’s Not the End of the World —or transform herself into the sad woman Sandy’s sister, Myra, describes in Wifey . Myra is having a turbulent moment with her wealthy gynecologist husband, Gordon. She doesn’t trust him anymore, but she can’t imagine leaving, either. “If I divorced him, I’d have to give up the house and move to an apartment in Fort Lee, with all the other divorcées,” she whines. She’d have to “eat at Howard Johnson’s instead of Périgord Park, get a job in a department store.” For Myra, who has embraced the upscale suburban lifestyle in ways Sandy cannot bring herself to do, it’s a nonstarter. She’ll have to look past his suspected dalliances (it’s only one, with Sandy incidentally) and stand by him. Judy didn’t have to brave financial ruin to leave John, and so the exes settled into their new routines as co-parents. She had the kids during the school week, in Princeton, and on the weekend they went to John’s, where he would take them out to fancy dinners and plays in the city. “He entertained them lavishly,” Judy later explained, “not to compete with me, but because he didn’t know what else to do. He wanted to show them that he cared.” This went on for a bit, until John realized that he couldn’t sustain paying for expensive outings every time he had his children with him. The big-ticket jaunts abruptly stopped, which disappointed them.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  “For my wives to defy Uncle Rulon and stick with me, even though I was going straight to hell—that was unheard of.” DeLoy’s spouses, and all his children except the three oldest, thus became apostates, too. In Colorado City, the faithful are taught that apostates are more wicked than Gentiles, or even mainline Mormons. * In a sermon preached on July 16, 2000, Bishop Warren Jeffs (Uncle Rulon’s son and heir apparent) emphasized that an apostate “is the most dark person on earth.” Apostates, he explained, have “turned traitor on the priesthood and their own existence, and they are led about by their master: Lucifer. . . . Apostates are literally tools of the devil.” When DeLoy apostatized, relatives who remained in the religion were forbidden to speak to him, his wives, or his apostate children ever again. And although DeLoy had built and paid for his home, the UEP owns all the land within the city limits, including the lot on which DeLoy’s house was built. Uncle Rulon and the UEP have filed a legal action to take possession of DeLoy’s house and are currently trying to evict him from Colorado City. It is no accident that Colorado City is a long way from anywhere. Short Creek, as the town was then known, was settled in the 1920s by a half dozen fundamentalist families wanting to live where they would be free to follow Joseph Smith’s Most Holy Principle without outside interference. The UEP failed to appreciate the extent to which polygamy has periodically stirred public passions, however. By the early 1950s the population of Short Creek had grown to more than four hundred. This so alarmed government officials and the LDS leadership in Salt Lake City that Arizona governor Howard Pyle, with church encouragement and financial backing, concocted an elaborate plan to raid the town and stamp out polygamy. * On July 26, 1953—eight months before DeLoy Bateman was born—some one hundred state police officers, forty county deputies, and dozens of troops from the Arizona National Guard drove into Short Creek in the predawn darkness and arrested 122 polygamous men and women, including DeLoy’s father. The 263 children from these families were declared wards of the state, bussed four hundred miles to Kingman, Arizona, and placed in foster care. In a carefully worded, multipage statement defending the raid, Governor Pyle called it a “momentous police action against insurrection within [Arizona’s] own borders.” He explained, The leaders of this mass violation of so many of our laws have boasted directly to Mohave county officers that their operations have grown so great that the State of Arizona was powerless to interfere. They have been shielded, as you know, by the geographic circumstances of Arizona’s northernmost territory . . . the region beyond the Grand Canyon that is best known as “The Strip.” This is a land of high plateaus, dense forests, great breaks and gorges, rolling arid lands, and intense color . . .

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

  The seductive and materialistic message of prosperity theology. Tammy Faye Bakker on the cover of her album Don’t Give Up . Tammy Faye Bakker, Don’t Give Up (1985) Yet this fairy tale did not have a happy ending. The media storm made the couple appear completely pathetic; Tammy gained little sympathy as a naïve wife. (Her kookiness probably saved her from indictment.) There was something almost gothic in the exaggerated white trash image of Tammy Faye Bakker. She achieved the American dream not because of her beauty, education, or talent, but because of having fashioned a cable TV personality that refused to partake of the fine manners of her social betters. Tammy Faye was the rejection of everything Pat Loud (of An American Family ) and middle-class propriety stood for: emotional restraint, proper diction, subdued dress, and obvious refinement. Nor was she rustic, or the embodiment of old-fashioned yeoman simplicity. She embraced her garish self from head to toe. Her tawdry excess made her beloved among her poor white fans and unredeemable in the eyes of middle America. The irony is that her white trash “roots” were hardly pure, if not wholly contrived. Her fake eyelashes and thick coat of makeup were part of a strange masquerade, consistent with the renegotiation of class identity that came with the expansion of mass media in the 1980s and 1990s. She said she borrowed her style of eyelashes from Lucille Ball . . . and Minnie Mouse. “In terms of broadcast hours,” Roger Ebert claimed, “she lived more of her life on live TV than perhaps anyone else in history.” Her public self appeared a composite of bad clichés—she was no closer to projecting authenticity than The Beverly Hillbillies . Tammy Faye was campy (mostly by accident), and more than anything else a creature of the surreal world of television that she loved. 44 CHAPTER TWELVE Outing Rednecks

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

  municipalities continued to look down on them. In 1962, in an important New Jersey court case, the majority ruled that a rural township could prohibit trailer parks within its limits. Still, the judge who wrote the dissent exposed the dangerous implications of this decision: “Trailer dwellers” had become a class of people, he explained, through which discrimination was tolerated under the vague language of protecting the “general welfare.” For at least this one jurist, inherited social biases had reduced the owners of mobile homes to “footloose, nomadic people,” a group of “migratory paupers.” 34 Retailers and real estate agents once again sought to change public perceptions. Since they could not effectively regulate the quality of mobile home parks in general, they decided to add an upscale version, and turned to advertising more exclusive mobile home communities. To separate the dumpy and dirty trailer slums from five-star dwellings, they rebranded the upscale sites as “resorts.” “Trailer park” became a dirty word. Exchanging his coonskin cap for a Realtor’s jacket, the actor Fess Parker became an investor in and leading promoter of high-end trailer playgrounds. “Carefree living,” Parker boasted, coining a new motto for a new class. In the hands of Sunbelt speculators working hard to attract a lucrative clientele, trailer life was meant to invite comparisons to luxury hotels. Fess Parker’s resort in Santa Barbara offered ocean views, a golf course, and a stock market ticker tape. 35 Davy Crockett’s call of the wild did not completely disappear either. Trailer life updated the once-catchy cry of the open road by declaring freedom from the thirty-year mortgage. In 1957, drawing on a playboy motif, a writer for Trailer Topics magazine promised a well-earned respite from the “well-harnessed Suburban life.” (The story was accompanied by a photograph of a sexy blonde sitting coquettishly on a trailer couch.) Other mobile home dealers promised residents freedom from the suburban rut and the tedious routine of playing “nursemaid to lawns, patios, and plumbing.” 36 In Richard Nixon’s birthplace of Yorba Linda, California, what was called “primordial Nixon country,” a remarkable trailer community went up. (Nixon country meant Republican, conservative, and deeply class conscious.) Lake Park offered a “country club” style of living, replete with man-made lake, swimming pool, landscaped greenery, and gently winding streets; to a New York Times reporter, it was “suburbia in miniature.” The developers, two men from Los Angeles, spent three years trying to find a city hall in Orange County that would allow them to build, and were repeatedly turned down. In order to convince Yorba Linda officials that it was not their intent to impinge upon the class

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Soon, however, she became dimly aware through the narcotic fog that his ministrations had become something more: he was engaging in sexual intercourse with her. She remained passive and made no effort to stop him. Later, she wondered guiltily if she had somehow encouraged his incestuous attentions. In the months that followed, Debbie tried to drown herself in the Goat River, a fast mountain stream that flows past Bountiful, but she failed at that, as well. After she attempted suicide once more, this time with an overdose of sedatives, she was committed to the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital. While she was recovering, an acquaintance named Michael Palmer * came to visit her in the hospital. Palmer—a thirty-eight-year-old long-haul trucker married to two of Winston Blackmore’s sisters—was part of the religion but worked outside of Bountiful. Debbie recalls that during his visit, Palmer “touched me and kissed me. He made me feel beautiful.” When she was released from the hospital, though, the community still thought of her as a difficult, uncontrollable woman, and nobody was sure what should be done with her. Uncle Roy—who was by then ninety-three years old, very ill, and fast fading into senility—came to Canada and asked Debbie if there were any men that she liked. Michael Palmer, she replied. “So the prophet told Michael to marry me,” she explains. “I became Michael’s third wife. At first life with Michael was wonderful. He held me and helped me throw away my pills. When I had my first baby girl by Michael he was happy and actually played with the baby. He encouraged me to have ideas. I loved him.” The marriage was not without difficulties, however. The two women already married to Michael, Marlene and Michelle Blackmore (who happened to be Debbie’s stepdaughters), were intensely jealous of each other, and Debbie’s installation in their home as a new “sister wife” only added to their misery. Sharing Michael proved especially difficult for Michelle, his first wife. On the nights when it was Michael’s turn to sleep with Debbie, Michelle would listen from the room directly below, alternately crying hysterically and straining to hear sounds of passion that would prove to her that Michael preferred Debbie. “I found Michelle this way one night when Michael and I had just finished making love and I went downstairs to check on the children,” says Debbie. “When I saw her, I felt like we were trapped in the middle of a nightmare. I felt violated, but the shame and agony I saw on her face made it impossible for me to even say anything.” At one point Michelle discovered that Michael had had intercourse with Debbie when she was pregnant—a serious violation of the Law of Chastity.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell reached for a towelette and tried to wipe the mess away, but his and Anders’s troubles were only starting. Floating toward them from below were spinning blobs of feces, each turning on its own axis. If they had been solid clumps, Lovell and Anders might have had a chance to dodge or capture them, but Borman had diarrhea. Lovell and Anders grabbed as many wipes as they could find and began hunting down the fluttering pieces, netting them like butterflies. For several minutes, the three men worked to clean the cabin. After restoring some order, Lovell and Anders could see that Borman was very sick. The situation, Anders thought, needed to be reported to Houston right away. “Absolutely not,” Borman said. Anders understood his reaction. Borman was a test pilot in his bones; no one with his instincts or credentials would want the world to know he’d become sick in space. And Anders didn’t blame him—he would have felt the same way himself. But it was more than that to Borman. He didn’t trust NASA’s doctors, especially the agency’s medical director, Charles Berry, whose judgment he questioned and who he believed to be ever itching to make himself part of the story. And it wasn’t just Dr. Berry who worried Borman. Give any NASA doctor a chance to play the hero, he believed, and you were asking for trouble. Borman could imagine it happening now, some medical guy stepping in and canceling the mission “for the good of the crew.” Borman would rather have died than foul up Apollo 8. News of his illness would remain between him and his crew. Lovell agreed. He saw NASA’s doctors in much the way Borman did—eager to become major cogs in the wheel of space exploration. He remembered how he’d been rejected on his first application to the astronaut corps on account of a slightly elevated level of bilirubin, a phony excuse if ever there was one. If Borman was too sick to continue, Lovell thought, he and Anders would feed their commander, watch him, take care of him, and finish the mission. What they couldn’t afford now, as they drew closer to the Moon, was to be ordered by Houston to turn back. Anders wasn’t so sure. What if Borman didn’t get better? What if he got so sick that he and Lovell had to focus entirely on taking care of him, and none of the crew could work? But he could see that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t a request from Borman; it was an order. Lovell and Anders were military men. They understood the chain of command. And Borman, sick and covered in unpleasantness as he was, remained the commander. So nobody said a word to Houston.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Instead, he tossed and turned in his hammock. Borman had never been sick for a minute on the two-week flight of Gemini 7, or even on the “Vomit Comet,” the zero gravity airplane used to acclimate astronauts to weightlessness. Even when flying in violent thunderstorms as an inexperienced fifteen-year-old student of Miss Bobbie Kroll, he’d not experienced so much as a stomachache. Now he swallowed hard in his sleeping bag and tried to push away the nausea, but the waves were building and moving fast toward shore. “I’m sorry, guys,” he called to his crewmates above. And then the vomit came. Retching, Borman reached to capture the floating green globules, but there were too many of them, going in too many directions, to corral at once. Even when he caught them, they just split in two or four or eight and made their escape from his flailing hands. A moment later, the odor of the vomit reached Borman’s two crewmates. Overwhelmed, Anders reached for his gas mask. “You’re not supposed to use those!” Lovell said. “To hell with that, I’m using it,” Anders replied. He opened the oxygen supply to maximum, then turned his attention to Borman. From below, he could see a greenish-brown blob, about the size of a golf ball, moving toward him. For a moment, the physicist in him took over, and Anders followed the object with wonder as it oscillated in three dimensions, a movement impossible on Earth, and quivered toward the ceiling. Anders’s instinct was to find a camera and photograph the alien wonder, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away as it rose higher and then, about eighteen inches from his chest, split like the atoms he’d seen in science films, one wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction. Anders thought, That’s Isaac Newton. That’s conservation of momentum . Now one of the pieces was heading toward Lovell, who could do no more than watch it, eyes narrowing as it hit him in the chest and spread like an uncooked egg against the white cloth of his coveralls.