Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  29 The Manner of Jesus’s Death • If the Resurrection of Jesus was the good news, his death seemed problematic to both Gentiles and Jews, appearing to disqualify him as a source of divine life for others. • In 1 Corinthians 1:18–25, Paul acknowledges that the “message of the cross,” which was for Christians the “power of salvation,” appeared to Greeks as foolishness and to Jews as a stumbling block. • In antiquity, the manner of death was proof of the quality of a life, and Jesus’s violent death by legal execution disqualified him as a source of divine life for both sides of the cultural world. o Paul says that the “Greeks seek wisdom,” meaning that a great soldier or sage could join the gods—but crucifixion, the most shameful of all deaths and one used mainly for slaves, could appear only “foolish.” o Paul further says that “Jews seek signs,” meaning signs that Jesus was a genuine messiah for the Jews, but Jesus did nothing to make things better for the Jews; he did not restore the kingdom, the Temple, or the Law. In Jewish terms, he was a failed messiah. o The manner of Jesus’s life was that of a sinner; worse, his manner of death was one cursed by God, for “cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree” (Deut. 21:23). Crucifixion was the most shameful of all deaths, used mainly for slaves and rebels against the Roman order; the fact that Jesus died in this manner disqualified him as a source of divine life for both Greeks and Jews. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Although she did almost all of the talking, that conversation with his girlfriend was the most emotionally direct the two had ever had. “The last time I ever said anything emotional to someone was . . . I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was with her. But actually it might have been the last time I talked to you.” Cole and I had been catching up on FaceTime. He was midway through his freshman year in college, and I was checking in to see how he’d resolved the conflict between his personal values and those of the culture in which he found himself. Most of his classmates were male, as he’d expected, and there was a lot of what passed for friendly ribbing: giving each other “love taps” on the back of the head; blocking one another’s paths, then pretending to pick a fight; grabbing each other’s asses; pretending to lean in for a kiss. Giving someone a hard time, Cole said, was always “easy humor,” but it could slide into something more troubling pretty quickly. When one of his dorm mates joked to another, “I’m going to piss on you in your sleep,” for example, the other boy shot back, “If you do, I’ll fucking rape you.” For better or worse, Cole said, that sort of comment no longer jarred him. Although he had been adamantly against the epithet “fag” when we met, Cole found himself using that more, too, reasoning, as other boys did, that it was “the equivalent of ‘You suck’ or ‘You’re lame.’” Yet at least one of his friends had revealed himself to be legitimately homophobic, asserting that being gay was un-American (“I didn’t know that about him until after we became friends,” Cole hastened to add). And Cole had not met a single openly LGBTQ+ student at the school. He certainly wouldn’t want to be out in this environment if he were gay. Nor, he said, would he want to be Asian—the two Asian American boys in his dorm were ostracized, treated like foreigners; both were miserable. I pointed out, gently, that being able to silently disapprove of others’ bigotry or homophobia was a luxury conferred by his own race and sexuality; he’d once told me he hoped to be “braver than that.” Cole nodded. “I do feel kind of like a cop-out for letting all the little things slide,” he said. “It’s a cop-out to not fight the good fight. But, you know, there was that thing I tried sophomore year. . . . It just didn’t work. I could try to be a social justice warrior here, but I don’t think anyone would listen to me. And I’d have no friends.”

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Debbie’s new husband, standing beside her in the picture, is a wizened, gray-haired man, almost four times as old as she is. “I got pregnant soon after that,” she says, “but I miscarried the baby. I was told it was because I had violated the Law of Chastity by having sex during my pregnancy. Ray blamed me for it, and made me feel wicked.” This double bind left Debbie reeling. “Ray would almost never talk to me,” she says. “He would ignore me for days on end. The only time he paid attention to me was when we had sex. It got so if I didn’t have a penis in me I didn’t think I was loved. And I was just a child when I was forced to deal with all of this! I was made to feel like a whore, a person with no worth beyond my vagina and my womb. Around town, I became the butt of mean jokes.” Ray Blackmore died of leukemia in 1974, after nineteen-year-old Debbie had been married to him for a little over three years and had given birth to his daughter. Soon thereafter Debbie was ordered, against her wishes, to marry Sam Ralston—one of Bountiful’s founding patriarchs, a violent, fifty-four-year-old sociopath who already had four wives. After giving birth to two of Ralston’s children and enduring years of cruelty at his hands, she became desperate enough to run away to the only refuge she could think of: her father’s home. The next time Prophet LeRoy Johnson—Uncle Roy—was in Canada, however, he commanded Debbie to return to Sam Ralston. “I begged him not to make me do it,” she says, “but he told me that when they married me to Sam they did it because they hoped it would encourage him in the priesthood and help him feel better toward my father. I was shocked, realizing for the first time that my marriage to Sam was something the men wanted me to do, not God.” Debbie dutifully returned to Ralston, whereupon he told her, she says, “that I was an evil woman and he would make me pay for my wickedness.” Debbie grew depressed, and increasingly self-destructive. Her father became so alarmed by her deteriorating condition that he clandestinely rescued Debbie and her children from Ralston’s home, installed them in his own household, and convinced Uncle Roy to “release” her from the marriage. But the failure of her second marriage reinforced the opinion in Bountiful that she was a dull-witted, disobedient nuisance, more trouble to the community than she was worth. “I began taking pills,” she says, “lots of pills: sleeping pills, painkillers, tranquilizers.” When Debbie sought solace from her father, he simply quoted scripture, telling her, “You must have a broken heart and a contrite spirit to know God.” In 1980, one night not long after this bit of advice, she was weeping and semicomatose from her medications when her father came into her bedroom and began to comfort her.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  He said/she said is why so many victims (or survivors, if you prefer that terminology) don’t come forward. All too often, what “he said” matters more, so we just swallow the truth. We swallow it, and more often than not, that truth turns rancid. It spreads through the body like an infection. It becomes depression or addiction or obsession or some other physical manifestation of the silence of what she would have said, needed to say, couldn’t say. With every day that went by, I hated myself more. I disgusted myself more. I couldn’t get away from him. I couldn’t get away from what those boys did. I could smell them and feel their mouths and their tongues and their hands and their rough bodies and their cruel skin. I couldn’t stop hearing the terrible things they said to me. Their voices were with me, constantly. Hating myself became as natural as breathing. Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing. 12There is a before and an after. In the after I was broken, shattered and silent. I was numb. I was terrified. I carried this secret and knew, in my soul, that what those boys did to me had to stay secret. I couldn’t share the shame and humiliation of it. I was disgusting because I had allowed disgusting things to be done to me. I was not a girl. I was less than human. I was no longer a good girl and I was going to hell. I was twelve, and suddenly, I was no longer a child. I no longer felt free or happy or safe. I became more and more withdrawn. If I had a saving grace, it was that we moved all the time for my father’s job, and the summer after I was raped we moved to a new state where I could have my name again and no one knew I was the girl in the woods. I still had no friends and I did not try to make friends, because how could we possibly have anything in common? I did not dare subject what I had become to the children around me. I read, obsessively. When I read on the school bus, my classmates teased me. Sometimes, they took my book from me and threw it back and forth as I flailed, helplessly, just trying to get that book back into my hands. When I read, I could forget. I could be anywhere in the world except in the eighth grade, lonely and holding tightly to my secret. I often say that reading and writing saved my life. I mean that quite literally.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I am not comfortable in my body. Nearly everything physical is difficult. When I move around, I feel every extra pound I am carrying. I have no stamina. When I walk for long periods of time, my thighs and calves ache. My feet ache. My lower back aches. More often than not, I am in some kind of physical pain. Every morning, I am so stiff I contemplate just spending the duration of the day in bed. I have a pinched nerve, and so if I stand for too long, my right leg goes numb and then I sort of lurch about until the feeling returns. When it’s hot, I sweat profusely, mostly from my head, and then I feel self-conscious and find myself constantly wiping the sweat from my face. Rivulets of sweat spring forth between my breasts and pool at the base of my spine. My shirt gets damp and sweat stains begin seeping through the fabric. I feel like people are staring at me sweating and judging me for having an unruly body that perspires so wantonly, that dares to reveal the costs of its exertion. There are things I want to do with my body but cannot. If I am with friends, I cannot keep up, so I am constantly thinking up excuses to explain why I am walking slower than they are, as if they don’t already know. Sometimes, they pretend not to know, and sometimes, it seems like they are genuinely that oblivious to how different bodies move and take up space as they look back at me and suggest we do impossible things like go to an amusement park or walk a mile up a hill to a stadium or go hiking to an overlook with a great view. My body is a cage. My body is a cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years. 8In writing about my body, maybe I should study this flesh, the abundance of it, as a crime scene. I should examine this corporeal effect to determine the cause. I don’t want to think of my body as a crime scene. I don’t want to think of my body as something gone horribly wrong, something that should be cordoned off and investigated. Is my body a crime scene when I already know I am the perpetrator, or at least one of the perpetrators? Or should I see myself as the victim of the crime that took place in my body?

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

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

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Women and girls are required to wear long dresses, even while swimming. Boys and men wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts. Both genders must wear sacred long underwear beneath their clothing at all times, even on sweltering summer days. According to the Law of Chastity, sexual intercourse is officially forbidden even between husband and wife unless the woman is ovulating. Gravel crunching beneath its tires, Debbie’s car rounds a bend, and the house where she grew up suddenly comes into view, moldering at the edge of a soggy hillside bearded in ferns and evergreen forest. It’s been many years since she’s been back here. “See where that car is parked off to the side there?” Debbie says, pointing to an old vehicle rusting beneath a graceful canopy of red cedars. “When I was six, that’s where Renny Blackmore * took me. Said he was going to teach me how to drive.” Instead of giving Debbie a driving lesson, Renny (one of Winston’s teenage brothers) sexually assaulted her. “Yechh,” she recalls, grimacing. “Thinking about what he did to me in that car still gives me a creepy feeling.” In spite of—or, more likely, precisely because of—the atmosphere of sexual repression in Bountiful, incest and other disturbing behaviors are rampant, although the abuse goes conspicuously unacknowledged. Debbie remembers older boys taking girls as young as four into a big white barn behind the school to play “cows and bulls” among the hay bales. A boy who would grow up to become a prominent member of the church leadership raped one of Debbie’s friends when he was twelve and the girl was seven. When Debbie was four, she says, Winston’s fourteen-year-old brother, Andrew Blackmore, * jammed “a stick up my vagina and left it in there for a while, telling me to lie very still and not to move.” Before Debbie’s father died, in 1998, he built a much larger second home just above the modest building where Debbie was raised: a barnlike, white clapboard house with fourteen bathrooms and fifteen bedrooms where some fifty people reside. These days the household is presided over by Memory Blackmore—“Mother Mem”—and her forty-one-year-old son, Jimmy Oler, Debbie’s half brother. Neither of them is home at the moment, but a half dozen teenage girls are juggling babies on their hips in the huge downstairs living room; they are the wives of Jimmy and some of the other Bountiful men. Among these girls is a giggling, gap-toothed kid who looks like she belongs in elementary school—but happens to be immensely pregnant. At the top of the stairs is a long hallway plastered with snapshots of Debbie’s extended family. Debbie herself appears in several of the photos. One of them shows her as a smiling teenager in a pink, frilly, ankle-length dress. It was taken at her wedding to Ray Blackmore, when she was only a year older than the pregnant fourteen-year-old downstairs.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “And I’m just supposed to know who Jeff is? So she gets all snotty: ‘Who the fuck do you think he is, Cherie? He’s the guy I’ve been living with the past couple months.’ I thought I would throw the phone at the wall. ‘Norm is there, watching Rosie,’ Cookie says. ‘He’s twelve—practically a young man now!’ ” “Oh crap,” I say. “Did they see her get arrested?” “That’s what I asked her,” Cherie says. “Cookie tells me, ‘Nope,’ all dismissive. ‘They busted me in the pub parking lot. See, I went to meet Jeff so we could talk it out, but he set me up. Next thing I know, I’m in cuffs.’ ” Cherie explains that the cops had social services track down the kids, who were staying in a motel. I march to Addie’s kitchen phone. “I’m calling Ms. Harvey.” When she answers, she explains: “The cops decided Norman is old enough to watch Roseanne while Cookie is incarcerated for assault and battery.” “Wait, Ms. Harvey, let me get this straight: Cookie is arrested for trying to beat up her boyfriend—in jail for the weekend—and our little brother is watching Rosie by himself?” “Regina, I’m just telling you what the police told me.” “Who’s paying for the room? What if they get kicked out? Then what?” “Well, in that case they would be homeless and we would place them in another home. But until then, the authorities have decided that they’re both safe and secure. Besides, now that your mother’s bailed out, she’ll probably be back with them in a few hours.” Camille and I have devised a plan: The only way we can watch out for Rosie and Norm is to convince Cookie that all’s forgiven and we still want her in our lives. “She’s a lunatic,” Cherie says. “You sure you want to go through with this cockamamy plan?” With Daisy Duck and Goofy ball caps in a bag as souvenirs, we wait at the motel room’s outside entrance until Cookie answers with a cigarette between her fingers like some Hollywood vixen. “Well well well,” she says, holding the door as though she has to consider letting us in. “Just like always, you two come crawling back.” Camille occupies Rosie and Norm while I sit down on the bed, across from where Cookie’s seated at the motel room’s desk. Without looking at me, she says, “I see you’re starting to come into your own. Shocker with those little tits, nobody’s knocked you up yet.” “I didn’t come here to be the butt of any insults,” I answer. “I really want to work this out.” “Well, don’t try to buy me with any sweet talk. You ratted me out to every official in Suffolk County when all I’ve ever done was work hard to give you kids a good life.” “Ratted you out?” In the background Camille turns on the TV for Rosie and Norm.

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

  A Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye The first Cracker President should have been a mixture of Jimmy and Billy [Carter] . . . Billy’s hoo-Lord-what-the-hell-get-out-the-way attitude heaving up under Jimmy’s prudent righteousness—or Jimmy’s idealism heaving up under Billy’s sense of human limitations—and forming a nice-and-awful compound like life in Georgia. —Roy Blount Jr., Crackers (1980) s identity politics rose as a force for good in the last decades of the twentieth century, authenticity was to be achieved by registering, and then heeding, the voices of previously marginalized Americans. Whites could no longer speak for people of color. Men could no long speak for women. The New Left, civil rights, and Black Power movements of the 1960s had helped to jump- start the second-wave feminist movement, yet identity politics was not the possession of the left alone. Richard Nixon rode into office in 1968 by claiming to represent the interests of the “Silent Majority” of Americans who saw themselves as hardworking, middle American homeowners dutifully paying their taxes and demanding little of the federal government. 1 One could argue that identity has always been a part of politics, that aspiring people adopt identities the same way that they change their style of dress. Yet this is only part of the story. Some people can choose an identity, but many more have an identity chosen for them. White trash folks never took on that name for themselves, nor did the rural poor describe their plight in recognition of having been cast out of society as “waste people,” “rubbish,” or “clay-eaters.” As we have seen, Union soldiers and Lincoln Republicans embraced the intended insult of “mudsill” when it was hurled at them from across the Mason-Dixon Line. But that was because they possessed the cultural power to shape political discourse. The dispossessed had no such power. Eventually, self-identified “white trash” who had come up in the world began defending their depressed class background as a distinct (and perversely noble) heritage. Before the end of the 1980s, “white trash” was rebranded as an ethnic identity, with its own readily identifiable cultural forms: food, speech patterns, tastes, and, for some, nostalgic memories. If immigrants had foreign origins to

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

  I do not know how to speak about this, exactly, because I think to lament over and over the dehumanization of Black women, as a white woman, so too adds to that dehumanization. But: the white girl can play the hooker, depict herself in art, gain the cultural capital, and lose little in the process. Objectification and simple sexism are not all that bad. Black women have had and continue to have a much more complicated relationship with visibility foisted upon them, to great material consequence. In 1991 at the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo, commodities-trader-turned-art-star Jeff Koons debuted Made in Heaven, a series of works depicting Koons in sexual positions with Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller (stage name Cicciolina). Though neither spoke the other’s language, the two married shortly after producing the works. Photographs printed on canvas, along with marble and glass sculptures, depicted the couple in softcore Kama Sutra poses alongside more explicit visuals. Dirty Ejaculation showed Koons ejaculating between Staller’s open legs. At the time, reviewers focused on the distinction between artwork and pornography: novelist and critic Jim Lewis wrote, “[the work is] not … pornographic … because an art work becomes prurient only when it ceases to be a representation of desire and instead becomes the impetus for it … These works would be very much diminished if they provided occasions for arousal. They don’t, and they’re not intended to.” Koons himself made the distinction less absolute, telling Vanity Fair the pieces were “advertising for a porno film I’m going to make with Cicciolina,” that, with respect to sex acts, would include “everything.” In the same interview, he praised his wife as an artist in her own right, explaining, “Ilona uses her body in the way another artist uses a paintbrush or a chisel. She uses her genitalia. And she communicates a very precise language with her genitalia.” In 1997 Koons sold Ilona On Top on auction at Sotheby’s for $140,000, later selling other pieces of the series for close to a million.

• From Like Family

  Everyone in the living room was laughing but transfixed, reminding me of the time at the bus stop when the Abels were having their pigs slaughtered. As our bus pulled up, the hog had just been split from neck to crotch. Strung up by her back hooves, she swung like a pendulum. Her entrails swam into a huge barrel. The bus waited, doors open, red lights flashing to stop traffic, but we just stood there. We were frozen with watching. The driver was too. “Ugh, that’s disgusting!” kids cried, craning for a clearer view, pushing at the windows. The morning after the party, I woke up late. My teeth felt thick and knitted. Walking into Bub and Hilde’s room, I saw the waterbed was rumpled, sheets everywhere. On Hilde’s dresser, the Vaseline jar was open and the shape of a hard dick was pressed into the jelly. Someone had fucked the Vaseline! And then what? I thought of a woman in the movie, on her knees with her butt in the air—the way babies sometimes rock themselves to sleep. Then I thought of our new neighbor, Jacy Curry, sloshing around on my parents’ bed with a boy, any boy, petroleum rubbing off of him onto the blue plastic mattress. [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] JACY’S LEGS BEGAN AT her ears. They were as pale as her scuffed Keds, but she got away with it. “A tan would age me,” she said, tossing her fine chin. She was fifteen. When I looked at my own legs, skim milk curdling at the knees, I knew I would pay and pay later for thighs tawny or butter-colored now. Now required a currency that mostly vexed me. Unfortunately Jacy had come to live with the Swenson family for several months—her solution to the problem of her mother’s sudden transfer to Kansas City—and so I submitted to daily reminders of her desirability. Not only was Jacy beautiful, she got to live at the Swensons’, in her own room, like she belonged there. Valerie’s husband, Dean, had recently left her for one of the waitresses at the restaurant they co-owned—a shock to everyone but the waitress. Craig and Ross, the two oldest sons, had moved into apartments of their own, and though their rooms were quickly filled with Teresa and Jacy, the house felt, to Valerie, like a drawer upturned and shaken. She was most like herself when it was filled with long legs and voices, and we were only too happy to oblige. Once the newness of being at the Lindberghs’ with Bub, Hilde and Tina gone wore off, we found we were happier spending our nights at the Swensons’. We’d camp on the lawn in sleeping bags until the sun and heavy dew would force us into the living room, where we’d sleep until eleven, our heads under the coffee table. That was the summer we were obsessed with The Rocky Horror Picture Show album.

• From Like Family

  There were still frizzles of it over his ears and in spots along his forehead and the back of his neck, like tufts remaining after a carpet has been ripped out. Keith watched us expectantly as we approached the bed, and the eyes were his own, wide and sky blue inside the char of his face. “Hey you,” I said, and found myself talking through a wad of my own hair. Without thinking, I had pulled a section around in front of my mouth. I laughed nervously and dropped my hands. “How’s it going?” “Sucky. How does it look like it’s going?” The words were hard, but his voice wasn’t. “Where’s Terry?” “Teresa,” I corrected him. “No one has called her Terry since we were kids.” “She’s too good now, huh? Miss Prissy Pants.” One heavily bandaged arm pawed the sheet. “No, that’s not it. She just doesn’t like Terry.” I walked over to the window, where the view was all parking lot. It looked like a board game, one where you could roll dice and maybe end up on the free space. “Uh-huh. Where is she?” “At home, studying,” Penny piped up, speaking for the first time. “She wanted to come but had this really big test.” “Yeah,” I added, “big,” but I was thinking, Who knew Penny was such a great liar? “She planning to go to college?” The machine to his left chirped twice and quieted. “I didn’t go to college. Guess I wasn’t smart enough.” Part of me wanted to say, “Of course you’re smart enough. You can do anything.” Part of me was having trouble breathing. Under the hospital sheet, Keith’s feet were split and shot, the color of charcoal. (I’m a trampin’, trampin’, we sang in Granny’s car. Would they take him to heaven now, or anywhere, those feet?) Penny and I stayed for twenty minutes or so, long enough to tell him how we were doing in school, about our dogs and the big sailboat in the backyard. It must have sounded to Keith like we were doing okay, better than okay, because he broke in, saying, “Swimming pools. Movie stars.” “What?” “You know, the Beverly Hillbillies. From the theme song.” “It’s not like that at all,” I said, my hands in my hair again. “Yeah, right.” I spent the next few minutes sputtering, my face hot, trying to tell Keith he’d gotten it all wrong, that we weren’t rich or brainiacs or anything, but it didn’t matter. He was convinced that we thought we were better than our family. That we didn’t have room for them in our new life. The thing is, he was right. We said good-bye, patted what seemed to be a safe part of the sheet and got back on the elevator. I pushed Lobby and looked up. We sank like a dirigible.

• From Like Family

  We were inventing it. We squirmed and panted, fully clothed, in the furrows of the orchard near my house. I’d come home smelling of almonds, soft earth burned into the back of my skirt. This went on and on. When we finally did it on the sofa in his family’s living room, I was so surprised to actually find him between my legs, I couldn’t muster the sense not to scream. He pressed a cushion against my mouth, stopping it like a bottle. From that time on, Mark and I were a sexual catastrophe. If he was ready, I was crying; if I was ready, he was feeling guilty and ashamed, saying, “No, we shouldn’t. It’s not right.” I knew it happened other ways for other girls. There was a whole continuum, from Amber guarding her cherry like it was gold-plated to Jacy throwing it at anyone in pants, to Tina, who had been trying to woo a boyfriend with sex since eighth grade. There was a lean black boy in Tina’s class at Clark named Stanley Vargas. Stanley had a fantastic orange-tipped Afro that he liked to comb with a giant pick while leaning against the lockers watching the “talent” walk by. He whistled at Tina one day as she headed to our bus, and that was it; she would have Stanley if she had to tackle him first. They were a hot item for exactly four days, wearing each other’s dark hickies like badges, and then Stanley had to be moving on. Nothing Tina could do could change his mind, not wearing a sequined tube top and short shorts, not flirting loudly with his friends, not offering to go “behind the bleachers” with him, which meant various kinds of wrestling on the big blue mats that were stored there, at the back of the gym. Tina’s virginity seemed not to carry any significance for her. She dispensed with it as quickly as possible and with as little ceremony as possible when she was fourteen, with Pete Berringer, who was twelve at the time. This happened in the back of our camper, headed toward some sailing event while both sets of parents sat up in the cab, singing cheerfully along to Kenny Rogers: Oh, Ru-u-by, don’t take your love to town. Tina didn’t even have a crush on Pete; she just wanted to know what it felt like. And once she knew, she wanted to feel it again, with boys who mattered. This only became difficult when Tina wanted the boys who were beautiful. She was just average, like the rest of us. Thick through the neck and arms, Tina could bench-press a hundred pounds, which impressed the boys in the weight room, but not the way she wanted. Her hair was never right (probably because she let Hilde and Noreen cut and perm it), her eyes were small and squinty, and her lips were so thin she couldn’t wear lip gloss without it crawling toward her nose.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  I wanted you to have your own life, apart from fear—even apart from me. I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next. I think of your grandmother calling me and noting how you were growing tall and would one day try to “test me.” And I said to her that I would regard that day, should it come, as the total failure of fatherhood because if all I had over you were my hands, then I really had nothing at all. But, forgive me, son, I knew what she meant and when you were younger I thought the same. And I am now ashamed of the thought, ashamed of my fear, of the generational chains I tried to clasp onto your wrists. We are entering our last years together, and I wish I had been softer with you. Your mother had to teach me how to love you—how to kiss you and tell you I love you every night. Even now it does not feel a wholly natural act so much as it feels like ritual. And that is because I am wounded. That is because I am tied to old ways, which I learned in a hard house. It was a loving house even as it was besieged by its country, but it was hard. Even in Paris, I could not shake the old ways, the instinct to watch my back at every pass, and always be ready to go. A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day out in the crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked to a wine shop. Outside the wine shop there was seating. We sat and drank a bottle of red. We were served heaping piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this dinner? Did people do this? I had not even known how to imagine it. And more, was this all some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me? My friend paid. I thanked him. But when we left I made sure he walked out first. He wanted to show me one of those old buildings that seem to be around every corner in that city. And the entire time he was leading me, I was sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley, where some dudes would be waiting to strip me of…what, exactly? But my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonne soirée, and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  That night, Nate slept over at Kyle’s. By then he was completely sober, though Kyle was still stoned. He peppered Nate with questions about Nicole’s body and what, precisely, the two of them had done. “I tried not to answer too specifically,” Nate said. “I’d just say, ‘Yeah, man, it was dope. I feel great. It was totally awesome.’” They looked through Nicole’s Instagram feed and talked about how “great her tits were.” “Dude! You hit that!” Kyle said. “Great job!” Kyle’s enthusiasm lifted Nate’s spirits: he hadn’t enjoyed the hookup, but at least it hadn’t been a disaster. Or so he thought. By Monday morning, Nicole had spread the word around school that Nate was “bad” at hooking up: that he’d bit her lip, that he didn’t know how to “finger” a girl. That his nails were ragged. Maybe she was trying to preserve her own reputation—to avoid being teased for hooking up with an “L.” Or maybe she just thought the story was a juicy one. “The stereotype is that guys go into gory detail,” Nate said, “but a lot of times it’s the other way around. Guys will brag, but they’re not so specific. Maybe they’d say, ‘I fingered her,’ or maybe they wouldn’t even say what they did, just that ‘we hooked up’ and leave it at that. But girls? They’ll go into every detail with their friends. What his penis looked like. Every single thing that they did. How it felt. It’s like the opposite of what you think.” Nate said he felt “completely emasculated,” so shamed that he told his mom he was sick and stayed home from school the next day. “I was basically crying,” he said. “I was like, ‘Shit! I fucked up!’”

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

  White girls love to feel sorry for ourselves—to focus on arenas in which we feel denigrated or unrecognized, and to reclaim those arenas loudly. White feminists make a formal politic of it; the rest of us merely do it when it’s convenient. In her 2016 essay “Closing the Loop,” artist, critic, and curator Aria Dean critiques the ubiquitous selfie feminism of the early to mid-2010s, championed and lauded by largely young, white, cis, women artists and critics for “the control afforded through the act of self-imaging [that] is invaluable; nothing less, in fact, than the primary feminist tool for resistance.” The movement traded on, in Dean’s biting and accurate estimation, “a basic-bitch politic of visibility,” whereby white girls allegedly “reclaimed” digital spaces from their male counterparts, photographing themselves rather than existing as the subjects of photographs, and showcasing aspects of cis girlhood deemed distasteful by the Male Gaze or Instagram—depending on who you were asking—body hair and period blood chief among them. This is a way of becoming Manet and Olympia both; it is also a way to refuse to see the Black maid at all. The epigraph to Dean’s piece, it turns out, comes from conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady’s seminal 1992 work of criticism, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in which O’Grady writes that Laura, the model Manet used to paint Olympia’s maid, is “the most famous example … of what Judith Wilson calls ‘the legions of black servants who loom in the shadows of European and European-American aristocratic portraiture.’” She describes the approximation of Laura in the painting as Jezebel and Mammy, prostitute and female eunuch, the two-in-one. When we’re through with her inexhaustibly comforting breast, we can use her ceaselessly open cunt. And best of all, she is not a real person, only a robotic servant … Laura’s place is outside what can be conceived of as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West’s construct of the female body, for the “femininity” of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight. Thus only the white body remains as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze. Laura is not legible as a woman, not even the conditional womanhood gifted by objectification. And yet, white feminists continue to abhor the Male Gaze, as though a homogenous army of Men is gazing at a homogenous army of Women, all sexualized and objectified in the same manner.

• From How to Be a Great Lover (1999)

  I thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t crazy about sex. I loved the romance part of it—the kissing, hugging, and snuggling—but the actual mechanics of sexual contact were always something for me to get through. Now I can see that I had mistaken my lack of knowledge for a lack of interest. Once I learned how to give the man I love this intense pleasure, our whole relationship changed. I am a willing participant in our sex life. It’s really powerful. When I say powerful, I don’t mean that I have power over him (although he insists that I do), I’m referring to a newfound closeness we have in every area. We are four years into our relationship, a time when many couples complain about a waning sense of lust. Our lust factor is at an all-time high and shows no signs of diminishing in the near future. Part of my point here is that sexual intercourse makes up a very small portion of the entire sexual experience. As I said earlier, intercourse is something for which we are biologically programmed, and it is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to our sexuality. But foreplay, what we do with and for our lover before intercourse, not only creates the foundation but also determines the quality of the sexual interlude. In the fifteen plus years that I have consciously listened to both women and men, the most significant lesson I have learned is this: the key to fabulous sex is in the foreplay. This is the time when our skills and know-how have the most dramatic impact. And when it comes to foreplay, sexual proficiency begins with the hands. Hands are miraculous purveyors of pleasure. With more than 72,000 nerve endings, they can create, elicit, and transfer sexual stimulation in many powerful, exciting ways. Our sense of touch is truly one of our most powerful and amazing forms of sexual expression. Beyond that, you won’t get AIDS by giving your man a hand job. Why? First, because your unbroken skin is your body’s greatest protection against any infection and that includes sexually transmitted diseases. To check if you have an invisible cut or abrasion on your skin, simply run a slice of lemon or a cotton ball dipped in vinegar over the area. Trust me, you’ll know in a hot second if you do. Second, you will not get pregnant from a hand job. You could, however, with one of the techniques I’m going to show you, give him the best orgasm he’s ever had in his life. POSITIONING YOURSELF

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

  Schneemann both resents and appreciates the fervor surrounding Site; initially, Morris’s performance eclipsed her own performances and films, which often dealt with, from her perspective, her own naked body’s involvement in the labor of art-making. Her work was derided as both too pornographic, the nudity gratuitous—as in her 1963 series Eye Body, in which she photographed herself nude, painted, with props, to which critics said, “If you want to paint, put your clothes back on”—and not pornographic enough—as in the 1969 screening of her revelatory sex film Fuses, which, according to the New York Times, disappointed “male critics” who hoped it would be more hardcore. Fuses captured Schneemann and her partner, James Tenney, having sex in their bed in the home they shared, from the point of view of their cat, Kitch, shot over a period of “a year or two.” Schneemann said of her intention behind making the piece, “I needed to see if I could re-proportion the structures that were being given to me as hierarchical aesthetic factors. Pop art produced mechanized female bodies and I wanted to show something different from that deadness and slickness.” At the time, the aesthetic hierarchy ranked work made by men using naked women’s bodies significantly higher than work made by women using those same bodies. The women’s work was lesser, in no small part because women artists were so maligned in the industry, period. Schneemann said she’d “been told from the earliest times that [painting] was pointless and that I should stop. At Bard my best painting professor said, ‘Don’t set your heart on art, you’re only a girl.’” Bryan-Wilson writes that Site’s “display of female flesh alongside Morris’s heavy lifting … puts into dialogue sex work and artistic process … propos[ing] both its artists … as laborers, even as Schneemann’s only work is to appear as an object.” Indeed, Morris’s Site brought two people involved in Manet’s painting to life, the art worker and the sex worker, interrogating the labor of object-making and objecthood. Yet there are three people involved in this painting, three people working, not two. The Black maid holding flowers is equal in Manet’s painting to a curtain or a prop, made out to be less important than even the bouquet she holds. She is disregarded by both white male artist and white female prostitute alike. The differential between the artist-man and the prostitute-woman is based on the greater differential of race, as these positions are born from a social order dependent on slavery and racial servitude. Manet’s painting was created in 1863, not even two decades after the abolition of slavery in France.

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

  John Steinbeck, the famed author of The Grapes of Wrath, wrote one of the most revealing appraisals of Clement’s keynote address. He adjudged that the governor had a future, whether it was in “statesmanship or musical comedy”; he saw the Democrat as part “old country boy” and part Elvis, with a dash of Billy Graham and Liberace as well. As Steinbeck put it, Clement’s voice had the “frayed piercing painfulness of a square dance fiddle,” and “in his most impassioned and rehearsed moments, . . . a refined bump and grind.” While the author thought Clement would shake up the party in a good way, at the same time he was suggesting that the “corn-shucker” style was a regional taste that might not be so easily cultivated elsewhere. 74 Steinbeck identified the crux of the southern politician problem: was the governor merely a rabble-rousing entertainer, or could he truly speak for the whole nation? Reflecting on his bright moment from the perspective of 1964, Clement said he knew that people were cheering his speech, but he was just as sure that some in the audience were laughing at him. That year, the Texan Horace Busby, a special assistant to President Johnson, told Bill Moyers that LBJ, with his southern drawl, should in effect be the anti-Clement when he delivered his nomination acceptance speech. “Forensics should be modern, untinged with an old fashioned style,” Busby said. “Alliteration should be minimized.” 75 The Tennessee governor with the Elvis-like movements did not win the vice presidential nomination in 1956. Second place on the ticket went instead to Senator Estes Kefauver, another Tennessean, but one who expressed a somewhat softer hillbilly persona—after all, he had earned a Yale degree. Back in 1948, Kefauver had worn a coonskin cap when he ran for office, after his opponent called him a sneaky “pet coon” who was flirting with communism. In 1956, Kefauver was meant to add to the presidential ticket what one reporter aptly referred to as the “calculated common touch”—the point being that there was nothing authentic about Kefauver’s pose. He was a “spurious hillbilly,” a cheap ploy to offset presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s lack of popular appeal. The Illinoisan was called an “egghead,” a bore. Stevenson and Kefauver lost, of course. 76 Meanwhile, Clement hosted Elvis at the governor’s mansion, and in 1958 did the performer a good turn by speaking before a Senate Communications committee in defense of hillbilly music and rock and roll. Vance Packard, author of the bestselling Hidden Persuaders, was testifying before the committee, insisting that mountain music was polluting the national taste. An outraged

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  After the beating was over and the berating stopped, though, it was easy. I just turned off the flow of tears and stared out the window. Or I went back to reading a Baby-Sitters Club book. I put it all behind me and moved on. Once, after a severe beating, I had a harder time—my breath came in quick hiccups and I couldn't slow it down enough to get air into my lungs. In retrospect, this was probably a panic attack. But I remember watching myself with a strange bemusement. This is so weird, I thought. What's happening? How funny! But what was I supposed to do with those feelings? Catalog them? Sit there thinking about them all day long? Tell them to my mommy and expect sympathy? Please. My feelings didn't matter. They were pointless.