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

  summed up the suburban filtration process as “birds-of-a-feather flocking.” As we have so often seen, the importance of animal stock, and of “breed” generally, remained on the tip of the American tongue when idiomatic distinctions of class identity were being made. 24 In 1951, the Levitts opened their second development, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, after U.S. Steel decided to build its Fairless Works in the area. It attracted steelworkers, as well as a community of construction workers who established a trailer camp. Although little actually separated the two working- class communities—the families were stable and had about the same number of children—the Levittowners felt that their community was a “symbol of middle- class attainment,” while the camp’s residents were labeled “trailer trash.” To expel the trailer families, local officials quickly passed ordinances. Offended local residents dismissed the trailer families as “transients,” saying that they should be “gotten rid of as soon as possible.” One of the arguments marshaled against the trailer enclave will sound familiar: the preservation of property values. The construction workers were deemed trash not because of their class background per se, but because they lived in trailers. It was their homes on wheels that carried the stigma. 25 • • • The trailer occupies an important, if uncertain, place in the American cultural imagination. Representing on the one hand a symbol of untethered freedom, the mobile home simultaneously acquired its reputation as a “tin can,” a small, cheap, confined way of life. When you live in a trailer, you are literally rootless, and privacy disappears. Neighbors see and hear. At their worst, such places have been associated with liberty’s dark side: deviant, dystopian wastelands set on the fringe of the metropolis. Trailers had been controversial since the 1930s. Aside from the sleek streamlined capsules that traverse the open road, these rickety boxes tend to be viewed as eyesores. Almost as soon as they were turned into permanent housing, many were associated with slums built on town dumps. As an object, the trailer is something modern and antimodern, chic and gauche, liberating and suffocating. Unlike the dull but safe middle American suburb, trailer parks contain folks who appear on the way out, not up: retired persons, migrant workers, and the troubled poor. This remains true today.

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

  I have similarly wondered about the feedback-loop relationship between the tradition of funding creative work through sex work, and then the decision to create art publicly about sex work. Is this a capitulation to the kind of writing and art society most likes to extract from women artists? I wonder if there exists a circular internalization of misogyny in this choice: that girls are taught to see their value in sex, so monetize it, thinking they’ve beaten the system—but ultimately their value-through-sex is simply reinforced, so they begin to see their creative value in that vein, too. We might pursue sex work to support an art practice that is allegedly, at first, independent of sex work, but it often becomes inextricably linked to or entirely about it. In other words, by internalizing the idea that all we have to sell is sex, it also happens that what a lot of us end up creating, or creating about, is, in one form or another, sex. moon, though, further critiqued the uneven impact of the demand for authenticity, this time on a Twitter thread: I’m trying to wrap my mind around how fucked up you have to be to be a childless, thin, conventionally attractive student claiming that another sex worker is inauthentic or “posing” because their labor isn’t accessible TO YOU? … Weaponization of identity politics. Hyperfocus on determining authenticity. [Authenticity] as social currency. Social media as performance … For the record, the most prominent & highly followed sex workers who are considered “public figures” on [Twitter] are nonblack women who usually fall into the middle to high income category. Think about that and then ask why an impoverished black SWer/artist has to prove authenticity. moon’s attack on the racist and classist pressures to prove oneself as authentic in order to be seen as a valid discursive contributor, along with their strategic resistance and acquiescence to such pressures on their own terms, is a choreography that disrupts intra-industry demands on poor, part-time, non-professionalized, or non-white sex workers to make their working lives legible to hyper-professionalized, mostly white, high-earning, and full-time sex workers. It also challenges extra-industry demands on these same sex workers to provide trauma porn and autobiographical-erotic fodder to the entertainment industry, the white savior industry, lawmakers, and voyeuristic civilians alike.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  In the jargon of rehab, "bottoming out" is mentioned frequently and annoyingly—often as a prerequisite to treatment. When life is at least as unbearable with drugs as without, when the thought of a fat stack of glassine envelopes or an eight-ball promises only more misery, some people make that hard choice to tally up the betrayals and the wreckage and keep living. It's not easy. Many—if not most—fail. Most times, you really have to do something terribly shameful, experience awfulness in previously unimagined degrees, before you see a life without drugs as a preferred, even necessary option. Jail, in Mr. Downey's case, doesn't seem to have been enough. Maybe Ally McBeal will be. FOOD TERRORISTS Right now, in the streets of Phnom Penh, in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, in scores of Caribbean shantytowns, wherever people are poor and struggling and living with little hope of better lives, you'll also find stray dogs, starved, spavined, limping, and covered with mange. In Southeast Asia, sun bears are hooked up to kidney drips, like living ketchup dispensers, and their bile is drained and collected for traditional Eastern medicine. Rhino horn, bear claw, shark fin—the still living parts of every variety of creature are sought after for their supposedly restorative powers, or as holistic alternatives to Viagra. Thousands upon thousands of unwanted cats and dogs are exterminated every month in American cities, victims of the laziness, irresponsibility, and caprice of a wealthy nation. Yet in San Francisco, our heroic eco-warriors have found a more compelling front line in the struggle against animal cruelty. A supposedly underground group of fanatical animal rights activists has apparently decided that Chef Laurent Manrique's pint-size specialty store, Sonoma Saveurs, must be restrained—by any means necessary—from selling foie gras. To this end, they broke in to the historical adobe structure, spray-painted walls and equipment, destroyed the plumbing with cement, pumped water throughout—thereby damaging two neighboring businesses as well—vandalized Manrique's home, doused his car with acid, and threatened him in phone calls and letters. Most unforgivably, they have sent Manrique a videotape, surreptitiously filmed from his yard, of his wife and two-year-old child in their home, with a letter warning that they were being watched. This is a tactic unworthy of the Mafia. Even the Gambino crime family, to my knowledge, rarely if ever stooped to this. This is the kind of activity favored by Central American death squads and Colombian drug gangs, and it's surprising—no, it's goddamn horrifying—to see it in the touchy-feely heartland of political correctness. But on the other hand, it's illustrative of the utter gutlessness and self-delusion of these yuppified, trustafarian true believers. Arguably complicit—as we all are—in their comfortable T-shirts and leather-free footwear (surely subsidized by the underpaid labor of some faraway dictatorship) they toodle over in their sensibly fuel-efficient cars to Sonoma (not too far from their expensive homes) and destroy the small businesses of victims completely uninvolved in their argument. They terrorize a mother and infant child.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Maybe you were just scared.” “Scared isn’t a good excuse!” she shouted into the couch. “Scared is the excuse everyone has always used!” I didn’t know who “everyone” was, or when “always” was, and as much as I wanted to understand her ambiguities, the slyness was growing annoying. “Why are you upset about this now? ” “It’s not just that. It’s everything. But I told the Colonel in the car.” She sniffled but seemed done with the sobs. “While you were sleeping in the back. And he said he’d never let me out of his sight during pranks. That he couldn’t trust me on my own. And I don’t blame him. I don’t even trust me.” “It took guts to tell him,” I said. “I have guts, just not when it counts. Will you—um,” and she sat up straight and then moved toward me, and I raised my arm as she collapsed into my skinny chest and cried. I felt bad for her, but she’d done it to herself. She didn’t have to rat. “I don’t want to upset you, but maybe you just need to tell us all why you told on Marya. Were you scared of going home or something?” She pulled away from me and gave me a Look of Doom that would have made the Eagle proud, and I felt like she hated me or hated my question or both, and then she looked away, out the window, toward the soccer field, and said, “There’s no home.” “Well, you have a family,” I backpedaled. She’d talked to me about her mom just that morning. How could the girl who told that joke three hours before become a sobbing mess? Still staring at me, she said, “I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything. I still fuck up.” “Okay,” I told her. “It’s okay.” I didn’t even know what she was talking about anymore. One vague notion after another. “Don’t you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.” And there was something to that, truth be told. christmas WE ALL WENT HOME for Christmas break—even purportedly homeless Alaska. I got a nice watch and a new wallet—“grown-up gifts,” my dad called them. But mostly I just studied for those two weeks. Christmas vacation wasn’t really a vacation, on account of how it was our last chance to study for exams, which started the day after we got back. I focused on precalc and biology, the two classes that most deeply threatened my goal of a 3.4 GPA. I wish I could say I was in it for the thrill of learning, but mostly I was in it for the thrill of getting into a worthwhile college. So, yeah, I spent a lot of my time at home studying math and memorizing French vocab, just like I had before Culver Creek.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Stories about drugs and rehabilitation are boring, particularly when it's some Hollywood actor, grinning out from the cover of People magazine, yammering about Clean and Sober and their new project. We've heard it all before. Some people live. Others die. Who survives and who doesn't seems most often to have been determined long before the subject enters treatment—when the junkie in question looks in the mirror one morning and decides that he really, truly wants to live. If there's any question in your mind, before you even walk through the doors of the methadone clinic or rehab facility, about how badly you want to turn things around, and what you're willing to do to accomplish that, then lose my number. The memory of the bitter taste of heroin in the back of my throat, the smell of burning candles, the taste of paint chips mistaken for a pebble of dropped crack, a whiff of urine and stale air from long-ago tenement drug superstores on the Lower East Side all came back when I watched Robert Downey Jr. being hauled off again in handcuffs. And this time, I actually cared a little. "This guy must really hate himself," I thought, reading of cocaine and speed allegedly found in his room. That he is, to my mind, one of the finest actors working in Hollywood, matters not at all. That he's spent some time in jail was, if anything, a recommendation. I'd hoped he'd be cast in one of the film versions of my books, as he seemed to have the perfect resume for the job. My first thought, though, was, "Cocaine and speed!!?" That's not comfortable oblivion! That's pedal to the metal, headed straight into the wall. If there are two faster routes to the dung heap I don't know of them. They can't even be fun anymore. After years of having as much cocaine as you want, you find yourself just chasing that first pleasurable hit, looking to recapture that first pleasant rush. Ally McBeal can't have helped. If I were an actor of Downey's caliber, I can't say I'd be too happy with myself, mugging and lip-locking on that silly, faux-heart-warming exercise in cynicism. I wondered immediately: "The guy's right out of the joint! Who let him work a job where he's going to have damn good reason to hate himself?" People are fragile, very fragile, when they leave rehab. For the first year, it seems like the pleasure centers of the brain have shut down for good, like one's oldest and best love has died. This is not a time to acquire new reasons for shame, fear, regret; you've had plenty of that already. It's time to get away. Far away from old friends, old haunts, old temptations.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Bonner had managed the Montana Land Company for the Clark family members who owned it. He planned the golf course and the residential streets in a subdivision that curved around an artificial lake. I interviewed Clark Bonner’s son when I began writing the city’s history. He told me, “And then, my father sold the land to those three Jews.” 118 Louis Boyar, Mark Taper, and Ben Weingart built the city I live in and where I work. The three men built 17,500 houses in less than three years. Time magazine said in 1950 that it was the biggest housing development in the world. The three men bought the land with a loan from the Prudential Insurance Company, and began building the houses with money from an investment syndicate. The Federal Housing Authority put up more than $100 million in construction loans and mortgage guarantees. With more of Prudential’s money, Weingart began building one of the nation’s most successful suburban shopping centers. It was three times as large as the Northgate shopping center, which opened in 1950 outside Seattle. Weingart’s shopping center was a model for suburban retailing for the next thirty years. Thousands of duplicate shopping centers repeated its level acres of parking lots, pedestrian mall, and the three-hundred-foot setback that separates stores from the highway. That three-hundred-foot distance is what separates a shopping center from Main Street. 119 Ben Weingart grew up a Christian Scientist. His father died in 1892. His mother gave him up, at the age of four, to an orphanage in Atlanta. When he was six, the orphanage loaned him out to pick cotton. A Christian Scientist woman saw him and unofficially adopted him. The woman had a granddaughter crippled by polio. The boy was useful in looking after the girl. The three of them were a family, although the boy kept his parents’ name—Weingarten. He turned this later into Weingart. The woman’s name was Miller. 120 William A. Clark was one of the ten richest men in America. He owned the United Verde copper mine in Arizona and silver mines in Montana. He had been an architect of Montana statehood. In 1899, Clark offered to bring Los Angeles another transcontinental railroad connection. The new line wouldn’t be part of any railroad trust. It would lower the rates for freight, and force the Union Pacific to do the same. City officials in Los Angeles gave Clark the franchise to build a thousand-mile rail line from the city’s port at San Pedro to the Salt Lake City terminus of the Union Pacific. The tracks of Clark’s Terminal Railroad actually went from San Pedro to Pasadena, a distance of about forty miles. Clark sold the railroad to the Union Pacific. Clark’s brother was made a member of the Union Pacific’s board of directors. In 1901, Clark bought the Montana state legislature and became a United States Senator. 121 William A.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Much to Sandra’s surprise, one Friday night Carl whispered just before they drifted off to sleep, “Why don’t you get out the vibrator. Maybe we can use it in the morning.” They both woke up in a sexy mood. Carl requested instructions on vibrator technique, then devised a position in which he could enter her and simultaneously hold the vibrator to her clitoris. She, of course, climaxed explosively, for which she almost felt the need to apologize. But apparently Carl had resolved his rivalry with the vibrator. From that point on a muffled buzzing sound could often be heard in their bedroom. Most people require a minimum of paraphernalia during solo sex—perhaps a little lubricant, a favorite piece of erotica, and a towel or tissues for cleanup. But some masturbatory props can, if discovered, be even more upsetting than Sandra’s vibrator was to Carl. Melody and Herb: Herb’s secret Less than five minutes after she and her husband, Herb, entered my office, Melody was telling her story between sobs. She had arrived home early from an evening meeting and, as always, was looking forward to seeing Herb. She decided to surprise him, so she tiptoed toward the bedroom. There she encountered Herb wearing a lacy nightie he had recently bought for her, feverishly masturbating. What followed might have been comical except that Herb’s secret—that wearing feminine lingerie was a turn-on—threw their tranquil relationship into a crisis. Herb explained that he began eroticizing women’s undergarments as a teenager. He masturbated in the bathroom where his mother and older sister hung their frilly things to dry. At first just the sight of these uniquely female items excited him, but soon the satiny textures captivated him as well. It was exciting to rub against them or put them on. Although you might assume that there was an incestuous element involved, to Herb these were not Mom’s or Sis’s items. They were symbols of his love of femininity. It wasn’t that he felt feminine, but rather he had a desire to be close to the feminine, to revel in its mysteries. Although traditionally feminine in appearance. Melody had little use for frilly garments and often wondered why Herb insisted on giving them to her. Not only did she feel betrayed, she also feared that this secret might be the “tip of the iceberg.” Was he having kinky affairs? Was he gay? Was he a peeping Tom? The man she thought she had known so intimately suddenly seemed a stranger. Luckily, Herb was eager to explain how he developed his unusual interest, how he had often wanted to tell her about it, and how he hoped she might one day come to bed wearing the sexy items he had given her. Nothing was different, he reassured her, except that now she knew that he “masturbated with props.”

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  The JVs pulled it out, 22–19. He tells us, like he always does, that we’ll have a minute of silence before we head out. Schmoozler turns off his James Taylor tape. Jerry and Mike Konigi, who are Buddhists, pray. So do Seeley and Williamson and Smith and Raska, who are what they call “born-again” Christians. I really like that none of the religious guys on the team evangelizes anymore. Coach, who is a Christian, gives a talk at the start of the season about peoples’ rights to their views of life. He had to start doing it in my sophomore year because there got to be so much conflict among born-agains and heads and guys who just wanted to be left alone to wrestle that it wasn’t hardly any fun to come to practice. Once I asked Coach what he prayed about in our minute of silence and he said he thanked God for the gift of life and prayed that nobody got hurt too bad. Sausage, I’m sure, usually spends his silent minute dreaming of at least a hand job after the match. I doubt his thoughts are on his cock this evening, though. He and Kuch are huddled in the corner and Kuch is whispering softly. I know exactly what he’s saying: “Even if my people must eventually pass from the face of the earth, they will live on in whatever men are fierce and strong, so that when women see a man who is proud and brave and vengeful, even if he has a white face, they will cry: ‘That is a Human Being!’ ” I never know what Balldozer is thinking. I really like him, but with his French and Brazilian backgrounds, we have some kind of cultural gap. Schmooz is pillowed upon his warm-up jacket, singing softly, “In my mind I’m gone to Carolina. . . .” I can see his lips move. Otto’s got his feet up on the wall and behind his closed eyes he’s watching films on the ceiling. He’s only thinking of the way to win. Before a wrestling match or a football game Otto becomes cybernetic. Name a move and he tells you the counter. Name a play and he tells you his assignment. “Guy goes for a single leg, I go for a whizzer. Thirty-four-trap: I pull and rip their tackle at the line, then look for the linebacker.” I’m not thinking much of anything. * * * Lewis and Clark is about finished with their exercises. They’re the only team that doesn’t run out on the mat. They walk out real slow, swaying druidically in their black hooded warm-up suits. Their hoods come down so far you can’t see their faces. Mash leads the way. They look like mean lumps of coal, except for Romaine Lewis. He’s tall and slim and his hood won’t fit over his hair. He wears it in dreadlocks and looks like a mean black male Medusa. And L.C. doesn’t shout out their exercises.

• From The Girls (2016)

  We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one-eighteenth of an orgasm. It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as the kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high schools. Every day after school, we’d click seamlessly into the familiar track of the afternoons. Waste the hours at some industrious task: following Vidal Sassoon’s suggestions for raw egg smoothies to strengthen hair or picking at blackheads with the tip of a sterilized sewing needle. The constant project of our girl selves seeming to require odd and precise attentions. As an adult, I wonder at the pure volume of time I wasted. The feast and famine we were taught to expect from the world, the countdowns in magazines that urged us to prepare thirty days in advance for the first day of school. Day 28: Apply a face mask of avocado and honey. Day 14: Test your makeup look in different lights (natural, office, dusk). Back then, I was so attuned to attention. I dressed to provoke love, tugging my neckline lower, settling a wistful stare on my face whenever I went out in public that implied many deep and promising thoughts, should anyone happen to glance over. As a child, I had once been part of a charity dog show and paraded around a pretty collie on a leash, a silk bandanna around its neck. How thrilled I’d been at the sanctioned performance: the way I went up to strangers and let them admire the dog, my smile as indulgent and constant as a salesgirl’s, and how vacant I’d felt when it was over, when no one needed to look at me anymore. I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you—the boys had spent that time becoming themselves. —That day in the park was the first time I saw Suzanne and the others. I’d ridden my bike there, aimed at the smoke streaming from the grill. No one spoke to me except the man pressing burgers into the grates with a bored, wet sizzle. The shadows of the oaks moved over my bare arms, my bike tipped in the grass. When an older boy in a cowboy hat ran into me, I purposefully slowed so he would bump into me again. The kind of flirting Connie might do, practiced as an army maneuver. “What’s wrong with you?” he muttered. I opened my mouth to apologize, but the boy was already walking off. Like he’d known he didn’t need to hear whatever I was going to say. The summer gaped before me—the scatter of days, the march of hours, my mother swanning around the house like a stranger.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Sometimes, however, one partner unwittingly stumbles upon information that is genuinely perplexing or upsetting. I’ve worked with couples of all sexual orientations in which one person discovered a stash of erotic magazines or videos and became distraught by the idea of his or her partner fantasizing about someone else. Some people are mistakenly convinced that masturbation itself is a sign of trouble in their relationships. Believe it or not, I’ve also known more than a few couples who argued about vibrators, particularly their amazing ability to produce multiple orgasms on demand. Many women find the intense vibrations, enhanced by fantasy, to be quite compelling. But some of the partners of these women, male or female, see the machine as threatening because its feats of extended stimulation cannot be duplicated by mere mortals. Carl and Sandra: The plug-in rival Carl didn’t pay much attention when Sandra brought home a vibrator until it became a permanent fixture on her nightstand. A showdown came one morning when Sandra asked Carl if she could use the vibrator on her clitoris while he was inside her. He pulled out immediately and turned away. Later he accused her of preferring sex with “that damn machine.” Sandra tried to explain that she needed a little extra stimulation to climax during intercourse and that the vibrator was helping her to become more easily orgasmic. “I’d still be making love with you,” she assured him. Sandra’s difficulty with orgasms during intercourse, along with Carl’s inability to have intercourse for more than about ten minutes without ejaculating, had brought them to therapy. Logically, you might expect Carl to support any method that could help Sandra reach orgasm. But like many men Carl felt less than adequate because he couldn’t make her come before he did. He made his problem much worse by labeling himself a “premature ejaculator.”8 The pressure on Sandra was unbearable because she hardly ever climaxed during intercourse, no matter how long it lasted. It was a major breakthrough when Carl agreed that Sandra could rub her clitoris as they made love. Precisely because this seemed to be working so well, Sandra thought Carl might accept the vibrator. But because he was so jealous, Sandra put away the vibrator although she continued to enjoy it privately. The subject never came up again until, having made great strides in their communication and comfort with each other, they were almost ready to stop therapy.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I began working through the necessary premedical courses, loading up on chemistry and physics. Reluctant to take a part-time job—it would slow my studies—but unable to afford Palo Alto rent, I found an open window in an empty dormitory and climbed in. After a few weeks of squatting, I was discovered by the caretaker—who happened to be a friend. She provided a key to the room and some useful warnings, like when the high school girls’ cheerleading camps would be coming through. Thinking it wise to avoid becoming a registered sex offender, I’d pack a tent, some books and granola, and head up to Tahoe until it was safe to return. Because the med school application cycle takes eighteen months, I had a free year once my classes were over. Several professors had suggested I pursue a degree in the history and philosophy of science and medicine before deciding to leave academia for good. So I applied for, and was accepted into, the HPS program at Cambridge. I spent the next year in classrooms in the English countryside, where I found myself increasingly often arguing that direct experience of life-and-death questions was essential to generating substantial moral opinions about them. Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them. Stepping back, I realized that I was merely confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action. I finished my degree and headed back to the States. I was going to Yale for medical school. — You would think that the first time you cut up a dead person, you’d feel a bit funny about it. Strangely, though, everything feels normal. The bright lights, stainless steel tables, and bow-tied professors lend an air of propriety. Even so, that first cut, running from the nape of the neck down to the small of the back, is unforgettable. The scalpel is so sharp it doesn’t so much cut the skin as unzip it, revealing the hidden and forbidden sinew beneath, and despite your preparation, you are caught unawares, ashamed and excited. Cadaver dissection is a medical rite of passage and a trespass on the sacrosanct, engendering a legion of feelings: from revulsion, exhilaration, nausea, frustration, and awe to, as time passes, the mere tedium of academic exercise. Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society’s most fundamental taboos, and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito. Eventually, as you complete your assignments by dissecting the median nerve, sawing the pelvis in half, and slicing open the heart, the bathos supersedes: the sacred violation takes on the character of your average college class, replete with pedants, class clowns, and the rest. Cadaver dissection epitomizes, for many, the transformation of the somber, respectful student into the callous, arrogant doctor.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Pay special attention to discrepancies that exist between your conscious attitudes and your deep-seated beliefs. I was recently talking with a woman client about her inability to have orgasms with her boyfriend. At first she expressed a conviction that women are every bit as entitled to sexual pleasure as men. But as our discussion progressed, she recognized within herself inherited beliefs that she didn’t accept consciously at all, such as the idea that she should have “saved” herself for her future husband, or that sexually unrestrained women aren’t respected by men. It’s important to recognize that subconscious beliefs change much more slowly than conscious attitudes. The process of aligning the two takes time if, in fact, they can ever be made to match precisely. When it comes to erotic health, nothing is more important than the interplay of eros and ethics. The hard part is knowing—and acknowledging that you know—how well you’re handling that interplay. Here is one of the best indicators: if you can usually tell in a specific situation when it’s appropriate to clarify and deepen your moral convictions and when it’s better to set them aside, your movement toward greater health is virtually assured. When circumstances call for understanding yourself and others, suspending judgments sharpens your vision. On the other hand, the more you understand, the more you’ll count on your values to translate wisdom into action. DIFFERENTIATING FANTASY FROM ACTIONOne of the beliefs most destructive to emotional well-being is that thinking or feeling something is the same as doing it. This idea runs particularly deep in cultures shaped by Christianity. In the Bible, Jesus says, “But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”2 Jesus is making the point that morality involves more than mere adherence to the letter of a law, but he is also setting a standard that is impossible to attain.3 Many Christian children and adults are encouraged to be painfully aware of “impure thoughts” and in some traditions to confess and pay penance for them. It’s not my intention to refute Christianity except on this one point: thoughts are not the same as actions. We must be clear that humans are simply not equipped to corral every wayward thought and feeling, to make them conform to our ideals, or to banish the ones that don’t. We all know from experience that trying not to think about something is the quickest way to become obsessed by it. In every area of life, it is crucial to differentiate how we behave from all forms of internal experience—thinking, imagining, fantasizing, dreaming, and daydreaming. Making this distinction is particularly essential in erotic life. Those who are most upset when their thoughts and fantasies don’t match each other often become so distracted by guilt and self-criticism that they have trouble making ethical decisions in their real-life behavior—where it truly matters.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I feel myself floating out of my body, much the way I do in moments of crisis with my kids when I've cradled them after falls have broken their bones or bloodied their faces, and I remain preternaturally calm, managing their physical care while not allowing in the repulsion of gushing blood or limbs that seem to be bent in the wrong direction. Silently, I follow him to his bedroom and take my tank top and skirt off, folding them and placing them on his dresser, then lie down in my lacy bra and underwear. […] He goes down on me, and I am gone now: in my mind I am floating in a vast ocean, warm water carrying my body, sun beating down and saturating me. I don't want to be in bed with this man, and the longer I stay here, the more I am disgusted by him – and, more horribly, by myself for being here. Sex has been purely fun and joyous and liberating and toe-curling and energizing and fulfilling and transcendent these past two months, but now the ugly side of it is lashing its forked tongue at me: asymmetry of power, physical vulnerability, fear, mistrust, revulsion. […] Finally, I say that I have to get home to my kids and he strokes my upper thigh up to the curve of my hip and back down again to my waist, asking, "Can I have you one more time before you go?" The wording of his question is spot on, as that's exactly what he's doing: having me. And I am allowing it. "Sure," I say quietly, because now I am so far gone that I suspect I will not return to my body for days. […] I deserve this, I think, to feel breathless and powerless, because I have willingly made myself prostrate and obedient. […] I do not cry as I make my way back along the quiet leafy streets toward the subway, children brushing against me on their scooters, mothers jauntily pushing strollers toward the park to revel in the last hours of the day. I do not call any of my girlfriends to merrily spill the details of my latest sexual conquest. This afternoon of sex – dirty, animalistic, making me feel fragile – I do not want to share. For the first time in my life I feel an emotion that I've never felt before and it takes me some time to recognize: shame.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Mama told me to take them off, but I wouldn’t. She stalked me through the fake-wood-paneled trailer, paraphrasing scripture in Deuteronomy: “It is an abomination for a woman to wear that which pertaineth to a man.” Not just a sin, but an abomination, she stressed. That meant it was something God hated. I reminded her that a few verses down it warns against plowing with an ox and an ass together and allowing men with crushed testicles to enter the assembly of the Lord. She put her face so close to mine I could count the pores on her nose. “And we don’t do those things, do we?” I backed out of slapping range. “How would we know? I don’t see anyone asking the preachers to drop their pants before they step on the platform.” All those long talks about Brother Terrell and their future had begun to shift the balance of power between my mother and me. She relented finally, saying I could wear my filthy old pants to ride horses, but that was it. I walked outside wearing my abomination and climbed on Red Rose, the bag of bones I had spent the last year trying to ride. … Mama threatened to burn them, so I hid whichever pair I wasn’t wearing under my mattress.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  When I first began this journey, I had repressed and suppressed my memories and emotions for more than twelve years. I was unable to organize or understand the issues in my own mind. I was unable to deal with or even acknowledge the level of anger and resentment I felt at my lost innocence, my lost childhood, and the abuse I suffered at the hands of my parents and their various cultic groups. I was unaware of who I was, what my values and standards were, what I believed about God and religion, and what was acceptable behavior within societal norms. I could not make decisions on a day-to-day basis about the simplest of things. I floated above my issues, being quite careful not to stir the dregs in my mind for fear of what might appear. However, being the masterful chameleon I was, to all intents and purposes, I was making it in mainstream society. Nonetheless, if I had been transparent, the entire world would have seen the inner ugliness, the self-doubt, the self-hatred, the shame, and loathsomeness I thought I was. With the help of my therapist (who is rather careful not to push me, not to impose her will, and not to tell me I must do X or Y), slowly I am coming to a kind of understanding about these experiences and, therefore, a measure of peace. I am coming to the realization that I was a victim of a totalitarian and controlling group of people, and that I survived a long-term and organized system of abuse with my strong inner core intact. While I may be damaged, I realize that in spite of (or perhaps even because of) my cultic experiences, I have maintained a strong sense of self that has enabled me to survive and begin to determine my own destiny.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “It was like mental warfare,” reflects Hannah, a former “presenter” at the Christian makeup MLM Younique, on her experience being gaslit by the company. As a college student, Hannah blew $500 on inventory before getting kicked out of the company for failing to meet her sales quota. “If I was in a situation where I didn’t have [my] university, a partner, and other community groups . . . I would have felt so awful about myself. . . . Being told you’re not good enough multiple times a day could ruin some people.”

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  “Alexandra, do you have any questions?” he asked in a scathing voice. […] I was well trained from ten years of over-ruling these kinds of treasonous and dangerous thoughts and feelings. I voiced none of it. […] “No,” I said, quietly, “I don’t have any questions.”

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “Yes, yes, Damian’s not bad to look at, but **I’m afraid he’s dumb as a post.**” Damian’s dick stiffened. He didn’t want to enjoy the part where Stan informed the target that he was just a stupid piece of ass, but he always did. **He reminded himself that his English teacher back in Tennessee had told him he was bright enough for college.** “So it’s a good thing you get to fuck his ass as part of the job,” Stan continued. “Otherwise he’d be no use as an assistant.”

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

  "In winter, it's medium. In summer, though, no matter what I do, it gets dark. In summer, I can't even look at myself. … As a teenager, Ndulu had done what all the girls of her West African city did, what she had begun to learn from her mother before she could talk. Into her hair, to make it less kinky, she slathered a grease that was the pale yellow of custard. 'It wasn't as thick as butter, but it was thick, and it was oilier than butter, and you had to put a lot on. It would drip down the sides of your face in the sun.' … 'I've read The Bluest Eye, … I know how I should be, I know the way it's supposed to go — the whole empowerment thing. In college I wrote essays out the wazoo about everyone being equal and equally beautiful. I don't feel any of that.'"

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

  There are disruptive physical effects, too. Many women whose upbringings were steeped in purity culture report vaginismus, or a physical tightening of the vagina that makes intercourse extremely painful—the condition is often linked to fear or shame surrounding sex.15 Dr. Marlene Well, a psychologist in San Francisco, coined the diagnosis “Religious Trauma Syndrome” to describe the cluster of PTSD-like symptoms “experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination,” including anxiety disorders, depression, and sexual difficulty. PTSD leaves victims with several physical side effects that impair sexual functioning at every stage of intimacy, such as desire, arousal, and orgasm.16 “A big part of purity culture is that my pleasure, especially as a Black woman, is not important,” Adams told me. “What isn’t talked about when we talk about power dynamics of sex and relationships and the messages we get around them, especially for women, nonbinary folks, and trans folks, is that your pleasure and desires are secondary to a person’s power when there is a power dynamic present. A lot of people are conditioned to conform to that norm.” These messages are so ingrained in American culture that you don’t have to be raised in a conservative Christian household to internalize them. My parents didn’t teach me that sex was shameful, or that if I touched a penis its spirit would live inside me forever. But while I’ve never felt ashamed of the casual sex I’ve had, shame is still woven into the fabric of my sexual experiences. What is it, if not shame of pleasure, that would compel me to stop a man giving me oral sex that I was enjoying, because I was nervous about wasting his time? Because I felt frightened that he wasn’t getting enough pleasure? Adams has been struck by the pervasiveness of sexual values she once thought were confined to Christian culture. When I told her I wasn’t raised religiously, she was surprised to learn that I went through many of the same struggles she did: a near paralysis when it came to feeling pleasure with a partner, and a hypervigilance toward that partner’s pleasure. I didn’t need the church to teach me my pleasure mattered less than the men I fucked, even the monsters who faked putting on condoms because it was too dark to notice and I was beer-and-shot tipsy. I still cared about these people having a better time than me! The version of sex that I’d internalized throughout adolescence, when my friend told me (against my will!) that sex was a penis in a vagina, was an activity that wasn’t supposed to feel good for me. The parts that I later learned were for me—oral sex, (controlled!) nipple stuff, and just a sprinkle of penis in vagina—I had to figure out on my own.