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 Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “Dr. Inch doesn’t like you for some reason,” I revealed to Anaïs, but immediately regretted it, realizing that Gore Vidal had probably badmouthed her to Dr. Inch, which was why Inch, in turn, had warned me against Anaïs’s writing. To my surprise, Anaïs shrugged it off. “Minor Inch may not like me but now he fears me, and that is better.” Her statement was so at odds with her feminine delicacy and the sweetness of her ageless face that I did not yet realize how telling it was. Anaïs might not be a great writer or know where to use a colon, but she understood power and had used it to save me. “What can I do to thank you?” I said in all sincerity, forgetting she had caused the problem in the first place. “There may be something,” she said. I became alert with caution. “Renate and I were talking …” Uh-oh. That’s how the two of them had come up with the lecture series scheme. She continued, “You said Dr. Inch is going to have Hugo phone you if he hears from him again.” She smiled slyly. “You’ll have to know what to say if Hugo calls you.” “What do you want me to say?” “Hugo has to believe that I really am booked for a series of lectures at USC and that I’m currently staying with you.” “You mean confirm what it says in the letter.” “Yes, and you may have to tell Hugo that I’m out at the moment.” “You want me to lie to him.” “Lies of love! I’m trying to protect him. You think your brutal honesty that hurts people is better? You just don’t understand, do you?” she retorted. I felt wounded. “You mean that you are still married to Hugo, and that you and Rupert just pretend you are married, but that Hugo still doesn’t know about Rupert?” She looked at the ceiling, as if all that were so obvious. And then it finally hit me as a rush of cold from an opened freezer door. “And the letter was meant for Hugo to see!” “Precisely.” She smiled. “You should have told me that,” I said, indignant that I’d been used in her intrigue without even being asked. “I’m sorry. I’m still learning how much I can trust you.” She reached for my hand. “Since I fell in love with Rupert, I’ve spun myself into a cocoon of lies. I can’t escape now.” I couldn’t resist. “What lies?” She gave me a concerned look. “If I tell you my secrets you’ll have to tell more lies to protect me. I still don’t know if you are willing to do that.” Her blue-green eyes held mine until I answered. “I’ll tell Hugo whatever you want me to say.” I was too ensnared in her maze of intrigue to figure a way out. And too excited by it to want to.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Welch was waiting for mine, and the attitude of his waiting told me that this business was hard on him. It was time to get it over with. But I stayed where I was, watching the Welch boys pull up mud. I could not make myself move or speak. Just to stand there was all I could do. When Chuck realized I wasn’t going to say anything, he murmured good-bye and shook Mr. Welch’s hand. I followed him to the car without looking back. MR. BOLGER KNOCKED on our door when we got home. That small courtesy was full of promise, and when he came in I saw that he was eager to be forgiving. It made me sad, being so close to his pardon and knowing I couldn’t have it. He nodded at us and said, “How did it go?” Chuck didn’t answer. He had not spoken to me since we left the Welch place. I knew he despised me for not apologizing, but I had no way of explaining my feelings to him, or even to myself. I believed that there was no difference between explanations and excuses, and that excuses were unmanly. So were feelings, especially complicated feelings. I didn’t admit to them. I hardly knew I had them. Chuck surrounded himself with silence. We were close to our breaking point. I couldn’t keep up with him in debauchery, and now I had failed him in repentance as well. Mr. Bolger looked at me when he got no answer from Chuck. “Chuck apologized,” I said. “I didn’t.” Mr. Bolger asked Chuck to leave us alone, and sat down on the other bed when Chuck had gone. With a show of patience, he tried to understand why I had not apologized. All I was able to say was that I couldn’t. He asked for more. “I wanted to,” I said. “I just couldn’t.” “You agreed that you owed the Welches an apology.” “Yes sir.” “You promised to apologize, Jack. You gave your word.” I said again that I wanted to but couldn’t. Mr. Bolger lost interest in me then. I saw it in his eyes. He told me that he and Mrs. Bolger had hoped I would be happy with them, happier than I’d apparently been with my stepfather, but it didn’t seem as if I was. All in all, he saw no point in my staying on. He said he would call my mother that night and make arrangements to have her come and get me. I didn’t argue. I knew that his mind was made up. So was mine. I had decided to join the army. MY MOTHER DROVE down the next day. She huddled with the Bolgers for a couple of hours, then took me for a drive. At first she didn’t speak. Her hands were clenched tight on the steering wheel; the muscles of her jaw were tensed. We went down the road a few miles, to a truck stop.

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

  Traditional Puritan-Protestant values continue to implicitly influence the judgments, behaviors, and moral cognition of contemporary Americans—not only among the devout, but also less religious Americans.14 This has seeped into classrooms: the emphasis on sex within marriage and condemnation of promiscuity are two primary characteristics of what is commonly referred to as “purity culture,” or the contemporary evangelical movement to promote abstinence prior to marriage, that has infiltrated society at large, most notably in sex education. Young women are taught that they are responsible not only for their purity, but for that of the men who want to have sex with them, because they cannot help it. Culture writer Char Adams, who is cis and straight, was raised in a conservative Christian household in Philadelphia. The first lessons she learned about sex were terrifying, she recalls, the main one being: if you have sex before marriage, you are bad and going to hell. When she had her first kiss at thirteen, she spiraled into a deep depression. “I shared a part of my body, and so now I’m bad and dirty and going to hell,” she remembered thinking. “That was the crux of my sex education: it’s for people who were married, adult, and not gay.” At the time, the consequences of the kiss felt permanent and devastating. “A teaching that is extremely popular among Black Christians is that when you have sex, a part of that person lives in your body forever,” she told me. “[So] later, if you ever experience anything like anxiety or depression, your mind quickly goes, ‘Oh, it’s because he’s still in me.’ That person’s soul is now tied to yours and you can’t ever get free of it.” Adams suspects that many of these teachings, even after she refuted them, lived on in her body, the way we now know that trauma does. She became sexually active at twenty, but stopped having sex when she was twenty-two, falling into a four-year celibacy. She had realized that even after intellectually unlearning some of the more toxic teachings of the church, she couldn’t fully shake its influence. She hadn’t been having sex that felt safe, fair, and pleasurable. “No matter how long you unlearn these things or make choices to live differently, the messages that we get around sex and pleasure from the moment we are born is that sex is for men and that it is their pleasure experience,” she said. “It is their wheelhouse, they are in control, and everything else is unimportant. We end up ignoring our desire for the sake of pleasing partners.”

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  His manner was weightily sincere, almost tragical. Mr. Welch watched his sons. He did not speak. When Chuck was through, Mr. Welch turned and looked at us, and I could see from the slow and effortful way he moved that the idea of looking at us was misery to him. His cheeks were stubbled and sunken in. He had spots of mud on his face. His brown eyes were blurred, as if he’d been crying or was about to cry. I didn’t need to see the tears in Mr. Welch’s eyes to know that I had brought shame on myself. I knew it when we first drove into the farmyard and I saw the place in the light of day. Everything I saw thereafter forced the knowledge in deeper. These people weren’t making it. They were near the edge, and I had nudged them that much farther along. Not much, but enough to take away some of their margin. Returning the gas didn’t change that. The real harm was in their knowing that someone could come upon them in this state, and pause to do them injury. It had to make them feel small and alone, knowing this—that was the harm we had done. I understood some of this and felt the rest. The Welch farm seemed familiar to me. It wasn’t just the resemblance between their house and the house where I’d lived in Seattle, it was the whole vision, the house, the mud, the stillness, the boys lifting and dropping the post-holer. I recognized it from some idea of failure that had found its perfect enactment here. Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out—a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across a river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts. It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people. I didn’t know the Welches. I had no right to see them this way. I had no right to feel fear or pity or disgust, no right to feel anything but sorry for what I had done. I did feel these things, though. A kind of panic came over me. I couldn’t take a good breath. All I wanted was to get away. Mr. Welch had said something to Chuck, something I could not hear, and Chuck had stepped aside. I understood that his apology had been accepted. Mr.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Affairs are far more serious breaches of monogamy because they involve repeated forbidden meetings and often include more than just sex. Most affairs run their course quickly but others persist for years, sometimes developing into stable secondary relationships. Whereas flirtations and dalliances do not necessarily result from problems in a relationship, ongoing affairs are much more likely to be indicative of trouble. Affairs occur under so many circumstances and for so many reasons that it’s difficult to generalize about them. Studies disagree substantially about the prevalence of affairs, with reported frequencies ranging from 20 to 50 percent of married couples to well over three-quarters of long-term gay male couples. Blumstein and Schwartz mention a number of impressions6 that closely match my observations: • Men are more likely to have affairs than women and, if they do, to have more of them. • When men have affairs they’re usually looking for sexual variety, including opportunities to engage in sexual behaviors they don’t engage in with their partners. • Women who have affairs, especially lesbians, typically develop emotional attachments. • Older women are much less likely than younger ones to have had affairs. • When one partner feels less committed to a relationship than the other, he or she is more likely to have an affair. • Neither religious beliefs nor one’s degree of participation in a church or synagogue has any effect on the likelihood of an affair. Most affairs, even ongoing ones, are never discovered or verified. Unless partners have mutually agreed to allow outside sex under clearly defined conditions, when affairs do come to light they invariably provoke a crisis, sometimes with such a profound sense of betrayal that the partnership is unable to survive it. This isn’t surprising given the fact that affairs are most likely to occur when problems already exist in a relationship. Crises, including those produced by the discovery of an affair, are never pleasant, but neither are they always bad. Some couples use the ordeal of recovering from an affair to reaffirm their commitment. They express feelings and needs they have kept to themselves for years. They also tackle tough questions about where they want the relationship to go. Some begin dating each other again, assuming nothing, as if starting from scratch. Many believe that any dalliance or affair makes a mockery of monogamy. This notion is particularly prevalent in traditional heterosexual marriages in which monogamy is a given and not open to discussion. More than a few spouses passively agree to monogamy because they have no real choice. Many others who voluntarily place a high value on sexual fidelity don’t always behave in accordance with their ideals. In my view, imperfect behavior shouldn’t necessarily invalidate good intentions. When someone claims to be “mostly monogamous,” he or she may be expressing a more genuine commitment to monogamy than someone who passively capitulates to its demands. Beyond monogamy

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

  One day at lunch, a day I didn’t binge-eat old tuna, my friend recounted a date at the movies with the boy who was now her boyfriend, in the middle school sense of the word. At the movies they had made out: French-kissed, to be exact. I tried to catch every single word without showing too much enthusiasm, which might betray my naiveté. The idea of French kissing was shocking to me. We were children! And yet I was envious, even of the casual way she said that his mouth tasted like Cheetos, like it was no big deal, and that he felt her boobs. I feared and loved the way she criticized his big, open-mouth kissing, that my friend was in a position to discern good kissing from bad kissing, while I wondered if anyone would ever like me back. After lunch, I lingered with another friend, still processing that someone in my social circle had done kissing. Decades later, I am still haunted by something I said during this debrief: “At this rate, she’s going to be the first one to lose her virginity.” My tone wasn’t malicious, but in my mental retelling I hear a tinge of judgment, of wide-eyed astonishment that had me assessing how “fast” she was. I had already caught sex anxiety, but how? I didn’t go to church, I watched mainly SpongeBob, and my sex ed so far had just been periods and wet dreams. The deftness with which purity culture and its main talking points—the idea that virginity is something precious to take or lose—shape young minds is haunting, and it haunts me today, that it got to me like that, despite my aggressively secular upbringing. At this rate, she’s going to be the first one to lose her virginity. Why did that feel so noteworthy? I basically didn’t even know what balls were. But I knew sex was trouble. Despite growing up in a fairly progressive household, I never got a sex talk. Like many millennials, my exposure to the concept of puberty was The Care and Keeping of You, an illustrated American Girl book that appeared in my house one day with no explanation. (I’ll never forget the relief I felt reading the page that said it was okay for breasts to be different shapes.) Most of us learn about sex accidentally. In first grade, a classmate asked me if I wanted to know what sex was, I said please no, she said it’s when a boy puts his penis in a girl’s vagina, and I told her to leave me alone. Increasingly, pop culture is reaching us faster and earlier than out-of-line classmates, teaching us about sex through our screens. “At this rate, she’s going to be the first one to lose her virginity.” Where did I learn that?

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

  Lindsay has been trying to practice radical acceptance. “I’m not necessarily fixated on the frequency now, but just how it feels—you know, the quality versus quantity,” she said. “I feel like when you’re trying to just check the box for sex this week, it feels so transactional and gross. It feels like we’re doing it so that we can like tell everyone, ‘We’re okay! We’re still having sex!’ So, it’s just been about trying to take that pressure away.” Most people I’ve interviewed who are unsatisfied with their sex lives cited anxiety about the disconnect between the amount of sex they had and the amount they felt they were supposed to have. They felt their number wasn’t high enough, but didn’t necessarily want to have more, either. While low sexual activity can sometimes be a cause for concern—say, in the case of an otherwise horny person whose new meds eviscerate her sex drive—the preoccupation with prescribed numbers is a recipe for a) shame when you don’t hit them, and b) bad sex when you force yourself to. I welcome the sex recession as a reset—a moment to reconnect with our authentic sexual desires, rather than the ones prescribed to us, that can look like stepping away from sex altogether (at least until we figure out what’s going on). “We’ve entered a minefield of new pressures to appear and act free and empowered, and these pressures to perform are out of sync with—and exacerbate—our own internal disquiet,” writes anthropologist Katherine Rowland in The Pleasure Gap. “The outward display of boldness, sexiness, the eager libertine, may have little relation to the anxiety, self-censorship, and pleasure neglect contained within.” If the claims of a “sex recession” are true, if young people are having less sex than any generation before them, then we’re ideally positioned to harness the power of opting out of sex we don’t want to have and make space for the sex we do. I remember the first time I opted out of sex that would have been bad. I succeeded in this instance and then somehow Eternal Sunshine’d the memory, as I would go on to have bad sex repeatedly for years to come. Figuring out the appropriate way to say no is an ongoing process, and the horrible news is we must do it all on our own, failing repeatedly. The medium news is you get better each time you practice reclaiming your sexual agency.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  We pulled into the Welches’ drive and sat there a moment, silent, before we got out. I had worked on several farms during my summer vacations, picking and haying. These farms were in the upper valley near Marblemount. close but not too close to the river, with good drainage and rich soil. The owners prospered. They had up-to-date equipment, and kept their houses and barns painted. Their yards were grassy, trimmed with flower beds and decorated with birdbaths and wagon wheels and big ceramic squirrels. The Welch farmyard was all mud, a wallow without hogs. Nothing grew there. And nothing moved, no cats, no chickens, no mutts running out to challenge us. The house was small, ash gray and decrepit. Moss grew thickly on the shingle roof. There was no porch, but a tarpaulin had been stretched from one wall to give shelter to a washtub with a mangle and a clothesline that drooped with dull flannel shirts of different sizes, and dismal sheets. Smoke rose from a stovepipe. It was surprising to look up and see that the sky was blue and fresh. Chuck knocked. A woman opened the door and stood in the doorway, a little girl behind her. Both of them were red-haired and thin. The little girl smiled at Chuck. Chuck smiled sadly back at her. “I was surprised,” the woman said. “I have to say I was surprised.” “I’m sorry,” Chuck said. He made the abashed face he’d been wearing in the kitchen that morning. “I wouldn’t have never thought it of you,” she said. She looked at me, then turned back to Chuck. “You say you’re sorry. Well, so am I. So is Mr. Welch. It’s just not what we ever expected.” Mrs. Welch told us where to find her husband. As we slogged through the mud, the fuel cans swinging at our sides, Chuck said, “Shit, shit, shit. . .” Mr. Welch was sitting on a pile of wood, watching Jack and one of the other Welch boys. They were a little ways off, taking turns digging with a post-holer. Mr. Welch was bareheaded. His wispy brown hair floated in the breeze. He had on a new pair of overalls, dark blue and stiff-looking and coated with mud around the ankles. We came up to him and set the cans down. He looked at them, then looked back at his sons. They kept an eye on us as they worked, not with any menace, but just to see what was going to happen. I could hear the post-holer slurping up the mud with the same sound our shoes had made the night before. Chuck waved at them and they both nodded. We looked at them for a time. Then Chuck went to Mr. Welch’s side and began to talk in a low voice, telling him how sorry he was for what we had done. He offered no explanations and did not mention that we had been drinking.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

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

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I kept quiet. So did Chuck. Mr. Bolger waited, but we still said nothing. Then, to spare himself the stupidity of a denial, he told us we’d left a trail anyone could follow. You didn’t even have to follow it—you could see it all the way from here. “How could you do such a thing?” Mrs. Bolger asked. “To the Welches, of all people?” I looked up and saw that Mr. Bolger was studying me. We both looked away when our eyes met. Mrs. Bolger shook with sobs. Mr. Bolger put his hand on her shoulder. “What’s your excuse?” he said to Chuck. Chuck said there wasn’t any excuse. “Jack?” “No excuse, sir.” He looked at each of us. “Were you drinking?” We both admitted we’d been drinking. Mr. Bolger nodded, and I understood that this was in our favor, so great was his faith in the power of alcohol to transform a person. It also worked to our advantage that we ourselves had not suggested drink as a defense but confessed it as a further wrong. That left Mr. Bolger free to make our excuses for us. Chuck and I were ritually abashed, Mr. Bolger ritually angry, but the worst was over and we all knew it. We spent the rest of the morning at the kitchen table, working out a plan of reparation. Chuck and I would return the gasoline, which we had been too tired to pour into his tank. We would apologize to Mr. Welch, and we would give our word not to drink again. No mention was made of the promises we had already broken. We agreed to all of Mr. Bolger’s conditions but one—we would not tell him who had been with us. He harried us for their names, but it was plain to me that this was part of the ceremony, and that he was glad to find us capable at least of loyalty. Anyway, he must have known who the others were. We stood up and shook hands. Mr. Bolger made it clear that he did not want to lord this over us. He wanted to put the whole thing behind him, the sooner the better. Mrs. Bolger did not get up. I could see that she was still feeling the wrong of what we had done, though I did not feel it myself. CHUCK AND I loaded up the cans and drove them over to the Welch farm. It wasn’t that far through the fields, but to get there by car we had to drive up to the main road and then turn off on a winding, unpaved track still muddy from yesterday’s rain. Chuck went fast so we wouldn’t get stuck. The mud pounded against the floor of the car. We passed through scrub pine that opened up here and there to show a house or a clearing with some cows in it. Chuck swore a blue streak the whole way.

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

  Difficulties of Living in Two WorldsThere are four specific areas of concern regarding children born and/or raised in a cult: i. The difficulties experienced by children who live in a cult environment but also have to interact with the world outside 2. Special health and medical problems caused by neglect and abuse 3. The psychological effects of physical, emotional, and sexual trauma 4. The adjustment difficulties encountered after leaving the cult Many children in cults need to interact with the larger society. This happens mostly in the context of going to school. Cult children have to learn to balance a double standard of values, mores, and beliefs in order to function in both segments of their lives. Cults differ from other groups with religious, philosophical, or cultural beliefs and norms. One major difference is that cults impose an us-versus-them mentality that is characterized by isolationism, elitism, secrecy, and a fear of outsiders that can border on paranoia. This places a heavy burden on children interacting with the "evil" outside world. If a group participates in illegal or taboo activities, then children will be additionally burdened by shame and fear. For example, for a time in the Children of God (COG), incest and child and adult prostitution were practiced, though these acts are illegal and highly stigmatized in mainstream society.8 Because they are often forbidden to talk with outsiders about such acts, children in COG and similar groups are at a severe disadvantage when interacting with outsiders. These prohibitions reinforce the isolation, distrust, and fear these children feel. The following account by a young woman who lived with a foot in both worlds, so to speak, illustrates some of these dilemmas and conflicts.9 Shippen D. grew up in a family of practitioners of Ceremonial Magick, based on the writings of Aleister Crowley. Shippen took vows and had a role in her family and in its community of believers (Ordo Templi Orientis); at the same time, she was a typical teenager who performed in an honors youth symphony, wrote plays, and danced in school programs. At some point in her teen years, she began to rebel against her parents and the group: I was taught that magick is about control of oneself, one's circumstances, and of others. It is also about becoming more than human, which in my family meant an ability to strip oneself of the trappings of personality in orderto come to terms with some kind of essence. Ceremonial Magick, as I experienced it, used sex rites and sacrifice, but in very limited, controlled ways. Self-actualization was the focus of most of the disciplines and studies. My parents worked to train me in the meditative arts necessary fora magician and psychic. I remember vividly much of the training and many of the experiences. The most striking part was the sense of being specially endowed with gifts others didn't have, gifts that couldn't be talked about or shared with anyone but my parents.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  I dug my own grave.” “You didn’t have enough time,” Megan says. “It was a sloppy article.” “We’ve all seen errors slip through the net,” Rittenhouse adds. “How bad could it be,” Megan asks. “You got most of it done, didn’t you?” “I really don’t even know,” you say. They’re wondering: Could this happen to me? and you would like to reassure them, tell them it’s just you. They’re trying to imagine themselves in your shoes, but it would be a tough thing to do. Last night Vicky was talking about the ineffability of inner experience. She told you to imagine what it was like to be a bat. Even if you knew what sonar was and how it worked, you could never know what it feels like to have it, or what it feels like to be a small, furry creature hanging upside down from the roof of a cave. She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view—the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can’t imagine what it’s like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you. You want to thank them for their concern, yet you could never truly explain how this fiasco came about. The group disperses. It’s coming up on ten o’clock. You don’t have anything to do. Your hands move around the desk collecting paper clips and pens, rearranging stacks of paper. The Druid sneaks past the door. His eyes meet yours and then he looks away. You feel a touch of heat in the cheeks. His renowned manners have failed him. That is something, at least. Tell your children you were the only man in history snubbed by the Druid. On your desk is a short story that you have been wanting to read. You follow the lines of print across the page, and it’s like driving on ice with bald tires; no traction. You get up and fix yourself a cup of coffee. The others are hunched over their desks. In the quiet you can hear the scratching of pencil lead on paper and the hum of the refrigerator. You go to the window and look down on Forty-fifth Street. Maybe you can spot Clara on her way in and let her have it with a flower pot. Although the pedestrians are indistinct, you can make out a man sitting on the sidewalk playing a guitar. You open the window and stick your head out, but the traffic noise covers the music. Someone taps your hip. Wade is pointing toward the door, where Clara is standing. “I would like to see you in my office immediately.” Wade whispers, “If I were you I would’ve jumped.” From the window to Clara’s office is a very short distance. Much too short. You are there.

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

  The easy abundance of “false images” makes sex ed even more important, and yet it fails us so profoundly. Maya Williams, a queer nonbinary poet and activist, remembers the sex ed in their hometown being “super clinical” and overwhelmingly white. “What was fascinating to me was whenever anatomical graphs were used, regardless of the majority population at the school, it was always a white body being displayed,” they told me. “It was like, ‘Oh, I don’t see myself in this equation. I don’t see Black people engaging in sex.’” I began researching this book with the assumption that sex education had improved over the past several decades. I now realize this was delusional. I tend to assume that, for the most part, the more time that passes, the better things get. While this has been true of my back acne, it has not been true of American sex education. In public school classrooms, children are still exposed to scientifically inaccurate, homophobic, transphobic, racist, and fear-based sex education, if they’re exposed to anything at all. According to the Guttmacher Institute, only seventeen states require sex education content to be medically accurate. What’s more, nineteen states require in-school instruction on the importance of saving yourself for marriage, and twenty-nine states require that abstinence be the focus of the curriculum.13 I now feel enormously grateful that the only thing I can recall from sex ed was getting tossed free deodorant and thick, off-brand pads. Curious about the scope of the American sex ed crisis, I asked my Twitter followers to share the most wrong, most offensive things they were taught about sex in school. The responses were chilling. I’m listing a few here so I don’t have to be alone with them, and to underscore how perfectly reasonable it is that people still have fraught relationships with sexual pleasure. “If you swallow cum a weird cauliflower-looking fungus would grow in your throat and suffocate you to death within days.” “Women don’t actually enjoy sex; they only enjoy the closeness and intimacy.” “At a certain point during sex, men ‘can’t stop and have to keep going’ even if the woman says to stop.” “You might be able to get HIV via enthusiastic French kissing.” “I was told that sex was like chewing gum. And you know what happens to gum? It gets spit on the ground, because no one wants someone else’s chewed-up piece of gum. Which was super cool to hear as a survivor of sexual trauma.” “Sex is binary, and everyone is always labeled correctly at birth.” “I was told that women are like stickers and if you put down a sticker and pull it off, it won’t be as nice when you try to put it down again.” “STIs are death sentences and gay sex is a footnote.” “I had an abusive conservative parent that wouldn’t sign the permission slip allowing me to receive sex education in the first place.” “Nothing. Nothing about my body, nothing about consent, nothing about pregnancy.”

• From Cultish (2021)

  To MLMers, the word “entrepreneur” represents not just a career but a “morally superior way of being in the economy ,” comments Nicole Woolsey Biggart, a UC Davis sociologist and author of Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling Organizations in America . MLMs gaslight you into believing that if you follow their flawless system and don’t succeed, there is simply something wrong with you. “Every willing and hardworking person can be successful in this business . . . a good system always works! ” is a thought-terminating cliché pulled directly from Amway’s handbook. Known for its extreme juxtaposition of motivational buzzwords with dark threats of failure, MLM language conditions you to think that if you’re not swimming in cash, it’s not the company’s fault—it’s yours. You didn’t have enough faith or perseverance to unlock your potential and earn what should’ve been a guarantee. There are countless MLM vision boards all across the web, featuring emotionally manipulative platitudes like “People often fail in MLMs before they ever begin because the approach is from the head, not the heart,” and “I really hate when broke people who don’t work complain about being broke. #billionairemindset.” In an article titled “Top 50 MLM Quotes of All Time,” the website OnlineMLMCommunity.com showcases a litany of misattributed inspirational quotes, including this axiom, falsely associated with Winston Churchill: “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty”—as if the British statesman’s successes had anything to do with direct sales, even if the quote really were his. “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.” In the end, MLMs aren’t in the business of selling start-up ventures to entrepreneurs. Like most destructive “cults,” they’re in the business of selling the transcendent promise of something that doesn’t actually exist. And their commodity isn’t merchandise, it’s rhetoric. For many recruits who never sell a single product, the entire MLM experience consists of committing to a community, proudly calling yourself a consultant, conferencing into team pump-up calls, and attending expensive conventions. The numbers don’t make sense, but the words keep you there anyway. Several months after Becca Manners’s weight loss posts suddenly disappeared from my Facebook feed, I decided to send her a cautiously worded message. I knew I had to tread lightly. Had Becca lost everything and was too embarrassed to admit publicly that she’d been duped? Had the MLM forced her into silence with veiled or explicit threats?

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

  A growing body of research shows that sex education is more effective at promoting health when it’s pleasure-inclusive.12 When mortified parents or health teachers teach us about sex, however, they usually fail to point out that sex is supposed to feel good. At school, talking points stick to the risks of sexual activity, like STIs and unwanted pregnancy. If we’re jackpot lucky, and find ourselves in a classroom that acknowledges birth control, we’re given the opportunity to roll a condom atop a banana dick. But even in more progressive classrooms, pleasure rarely comes up. The genitalia on worksheets tend not to have significance beyond reproduction or dick insertion. The gender-essentialist framing of sex ed, which often begins with a division of the boys and the girls to teach half-baked lessons on wet dreams and menstruation, leaves us entirely on our own to figure out pleasurable, affirming sex in a culture stacked to deprive us of it. So, porn becomes our sex ed. Our idiot friends become our sex ed. Racy teen soaps become our sex ed. Maybe it makes sense that the middle school gym teachers of America don’t want to teach adolescents about the benefits of jacking off, or that most clitoris-having people can only orgasm from clitoral stimulation, rather than penetrative sex. And it makes sense that parents of adolescents might feel odd about their kids getting this information at school. Insidious social discomfort with sexuality is nothing new, going back at least two millennia, though popping off with the Puritans and, then, the Victorians. Harmful and/or wrong information about sex may not be new, but it has grown exponentially more impactful: the media we stare at throughout the day, whether TikTok or Pornhub or hour seventy of a Sister Wives binge, has amplified our exposure to toxic messaging. Laurie Mintz, a professor of human sexuality at the University of Florida and author of Becoming Cliterate, suspects that millennials and Generation Zers are the most sexually misinformed generations of all time, given the unprecedented accessibility of misinformation. “They have more false images than we ever did,” Mintz told me. “I’m not against porn, but the problem with it is when it is widely available and sexual education is not, and lessons in porn literacy are not.” One example, Mintz said, is “socializing women that if it’s good for him, it’s good for [her].” Sex ed has not sufficiently leveled up to counter these messages. We’re outnumbered. “At best, the girls are told about their period. At worst: ‘Stay a virgin, or you’re going to die,’” said Mintz. “The only message and models they have for sex are women who have fast and fabulous orgasms with, you know, two minutes of warm-up. When they try that, it’s not only unpleasant, but it hurts. And instead of thinking, ‘Ooh, I better go get some information,’ they say, ‘Something’s wrong with me,’ and suffer in silence. They’re so indoctrinated with the false images.”

• From The Girls (2016)

  My mother furrowed her brows. “Listen,” she said. “Sal saw you out on Adobe Road this morning. Alone.” I tried to keep my face blank, but I was relieved—it was just one of Sal’s bovine observations. I’d been telling my mother I’d been at Connie’s house. And I was still home some nights, trying to keep the balance in check. “Sal said there’s some very strange people out there,” my mother said. “Some kind of mystic or something, but he sounds”—her face screwed up. Of course—she would love Russell if he lived in a mansion in Marin, had gardenias floating in his pool, and charged rich women fifty dollars for an astrology reading. How transparent she seemed to me then, always on constant guard against anything lesser than, even as she opened the house up to anyone who smiled at her. To Frank and his shiny-buttoned shirts. “I’ve never met him,” I said, my voice impassive. So my mother would know I was lying. The fact of the lie hovered there, and I watched her till for a response. “I just wanted to warn you,” she said. “So you know that this guy is out there. I expect you and Connie to take care of each other, understand?” I could see how badly she wanted to avoid a fight, how she strained for this middle ground. She’d warned me, so she had done what she was supposed to do. It meant she was still my mother. Let her feel this was true—I nodded and she relaxed. My mother’s hair was growing out. She was wearing a new tank top with knit straps, and the skin of her shoulders was loose, showing a tan line from a swimsuit—I had no idea when or where my mother had been swimming. How quickly we’d become strangers to each other, like nervous roommates encountering each other in the halls. “Well,” she said. I saw, for a moment, my old mother, the cast of weary love in her face, but it disappeared when her bracelets made a tinny sound, falling down her arms. “There’s rice and miso in the fridge,” she said, and I made a noise in my throat like I might eat it, but we both knew I wouldn’t. 8The police photos of Mitch’s house make it look cramped and spooky, as if destined for its fate. The fat splintered beams along the ceiling, the stone fireplace, its many levels and hallways, like something in the Escher lithographs Mitch collected from a gallery in Sausalito. The first time I encountered the house, I remember thinking it was as spare and empty as a coastal church. There was very little furniture, the big windows in the shape of chevrons. Herringbone floors, wide and shallow steps. From the front door, you could already see the black plane of bay spreading past the house, the dark, rocky bank. The houseboats knocking peaceably against each other, like cubes of ice.

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

  As I search for labia solutions, the algorithm serves me many science-based resources that assure me crooked-looking labia are no cause for concern, but also an Australian government website10 that suggests taking baths is bad for your labia, and that is what will lodge betwixt my brain folds forever. Even when I’m not actively looking to validate labia insecurities, labia insecurities find me in my own home! Ads for labiaplasty regularly splash on my browser as I labor to read the news or shop for sweaters. (It’s no wonder that the number of people seeking surgery to alter the appearance of their labia has skyrocketed in the past five years. The same is true of ball-enhancing procedures.) Sensitive and easily agitated, I am vulnerable to this kind of messaging about my genitalia, but I’m not as vulnerable as adolescents, who are more likely to internalize these cues long-term, in part because their brains are squishier. What we learn about sex, bodies, and pleasure during our development has a lasting impact on the way we experience sex. Therein lies the problem: sex education in America remains inaccurate or nonexistent, and the other institutions that teach us about sex—like family, church, and mass media—are largely reinforcing cis-heteronormative, puritanical values that marginalize our most vulnerable youth and interfere with their sexual well-being. Too often these institutions stigmatize sexual pleasure, perpetuating messages like: sex is scary; genitals are gross; sex is for men’s pleasure; sex is straight; sex is intercourse; sex is ejaculation; sex is for certain types of bodies (read white, cis, straight, and thin). Around the country, school boards and lawmakers are instituting bans on books dealing with race, gender, and sexuality at an unprecedented pace, and books written by Black and LGBTQIA+ authors are under disproportionate attack.11 As psychotherapist and relationship genius Esther Perel puts it in Mating in Captivity, “[I]t is in messages to children that societies most reveal their values, goals, incentives, prohibitions.” How can you have good, passionate, pleasurable sex when these messages still live inside you, messages that say the sex you are having is wrong, and that you are wrong for having it?

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  And yet, knowing him as I did, I saw all this respectability as a performance, and a strained performance at that. Whatever their virtues, his new friends were dull. To fit in with them he had to hold his tongue and refrain from eccentric behavior. He had to act dull himself, which he wasn’t and could only seem to be by an effort of will that was plain to me if to no one else. The weakest part of his act was the girlfriend, Beth Mathis. Though Beth wasn’t pretty she wasn’t exactly a gorgon either, as you would have thought from the way Arthur treated her. He gripped Beth’s hand as they walked from class to class, but he never talked to her or even looked at her. Instead he stared testily into the faces he passed as if looking for signs of skepticism or amusement. No one seemed to notice, but I did. It troubled me. It seemed so strange that I kept my mouth shut. But I knew he was no citizen and he knew I was no outlaw—that I was not hard, or uncaring of the future, or contemptuous of opinion. I could see him knowing it as he watched me with my outlaw friends. This disbelief of his was vexing to me, as my own ill-concealed disbelief in his respectability must have been vexing to him. I could accept the distance growing between us. I wanted it there, most of the time. But I could not accept that he knew I was not the person I tried so hard to seem. For owning such knowledge there could be no pardon, for either of us, until we both pardoned ourselves for being who we were. I did not have to draw only on my own poisons for inspiration. I had sympathizers and counselors. Some of these boys disliked Arthur, but most of them just wanted to be in on a fight without getting hit. They subjected me to endless pep talks and tutorials and demonstrations of unbeatable combinations they had devised and were willing to let me use. Dwight was in his glory. He cleared the utility room for action and put me back in training. There was no question of dry-gulching Arthur this time around. I needed a strategy. How did Arthur swing, Dwight wanted to know. “Hard,” I told him. “Yeah, but how?” Arthur and I hadn’t had a real fight since that day on the road four years earlier, but we’d gone a few rounds in PE and I’d seen him spar with other boys. “Sort of like this,” I said, moving my arms as Arthur did. “So he windmills,” Dwight said. “He does it a lot faster than that,” I said. “A lot harder, too.” “It doesn’t matter how hard he does it. If he windmills, he’s yours.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Can’t you hurry up?” I hissed at Teddy, and he made a muffled reply, rummaging farther, until he finally pulled out some new-looking bills. He shoved the box back onto the high shelf, breathing hard, while I counted. “Sixty-five,” I said. Neatening the stack, folding it to a more substantial thickness. “Isn’t that enough?” I could tell by his face, the effort of his breathing, that if I demanded more, he would find a way to get it. Part of me almost wanted to. To gorge myself on this new power, see how long I could keep it going. But then Tiki trotted in the doorway, startling us both. The dog panting as he nudged at Teddy’s legs. Even the dog’s tongue was spotted, I saw, the crimped pink freckled with black. “This’ll be fine,” I said, putting the money in my pocket. My damp shorts gave off an itch of chlorine. “So when will I get the stuff?” Teddy said. It took a second to understand the significant look he gave me: the dope I’d promised. I’d almost forgotten that I hadn’t just demanded money. When he saw my expression, he corrected himself. “I mean, no rush. If it takes time or whatever.” “Hard to say.” Tiki was sniffing at my crotch; I pushed his nose away more roughly than I’d meant to, his snout wetting my palm. My desire to get out of the room was suddenly overwhelming. “Pretty soon, probably,” I said, starting to back toward the door. “I’ll bring it over when I get it.” “Oh, yeah,” Teddy said. “Yeah, okay.” —I had the uncomfortable sense, at the front door, that Teddy was the guest and I was the host. The wind chime over the porch rippling a thin song. The sun and trees and blond hills beyond seemed to promise great freedoms, and I could already start to forget what I’d done, washed over by other concerns. The pleasing meaty rectangle of the folded bills in my pocket. When I looked at Teddy’s freckled face, a surge of impulsive, virtuous affection passed through me—he was like a little brother. The gentle way he’d mothered the barn kitten. “I’ll see you,” I said, leaning to kiss him on the cheek. I was congratulating myself for the sweetness of my gesture, the kindness, but then Teddy adjusted his hips, hunching them protectively; when I pulled away, I saw his erection pushing stubbornly against his jeans. 7I could ride my bike most of the way there. Adobe Road empty of cars, except for the occasional motorcycle or horse trailer. If a car passed, it was usually heading to the ranch, and they’d give me a lift, my bicycle half hanging out a window. Girls in shorts and wood sandals and plastic rings from the dispensers outside the Rexall. Boys who kept losing their train of thought, then coming to with a stunned smile, as if returned from cosmic tourism.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Then Miri and her mother and grandmother could move into Natalie’s big red-brick house and Miri and Natalie would be sisters and Miri could start collecting cashmere sweaters like Natalie. Not that Miri didn’t like Natalie’s mother. Mrs. Osner, Corinne, had always been very nice to her. She treated Miri almost like another daughter, which was just one reason this fantasy left Miri feeling ashamed and sick to her stomach. She didn’t want to be a disgusting and immoral person. Fern suddenly appeared in the doorway to Natalie’s room, clutching a toy rabbit dressed in cowboy gear. Fern called him Roy, for Roy Rogers, the singing movie cowboy. Fern was obsessed with Roy Rogers. “Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above…don’t fence me in…” she sang. Fern was wearing flowered flannel pajamas with feet. “Is the party over yet?” she asked. “No,” Miri said. “Does Mrs. Barnes know you’re running around?” Mrs. Barnes took care of Fern and cooked dinner for the family four nights a week. She made dishes Miri had never heard of, dishes with foreign names like boeuf bourguignon and veal marsala. They tasted better than they sounded. “She’s not here tonight,” Fern said. “Mommy and Daddy are here. They’re in the den.” “Oh.” “Roy Rogers has a penis,” Fern said, waggling Roy Rabbit in Miri’s face. “Did you know that?” “Yes,” Miri said. She’d heard it often enough, every time she was at Natalie’s house, but she still wasn’t sure how she was supposed to respond. Fern was just in kindergarten. “I’ve seen two penises,” Fern said. “Daddy’s and Steve’s.” Miri hadn’t seen any penises and she wasn’t in a hurry to, either. “How about I tuck you into bed?” she said to Fern. “Okay.” Miri followed Fern down the hallway to her room, the beige carpet plush under their feet. Fern climbed into bed and Miri pulled the blankets up to her chin. “Roy Rabbit doesn’t have a penis, even though he’s a boy bunny.” Miri wanted to get out of there. She’d had enough penis talk. “Don’t forget to kiss me,” Fern said. Miri dropped a kiss on Fern’s forehead. Her skin was cool and smelled sweet. She returned to the party just as it was breaking up. “Where were you?” Natalie asked. “Upstairs. I had a headache. I guess I fell asleep.” “Are you better now?” Miri nodded. “Who was that boy I was dancing with?” “What boy?” “That boy with the dark hair.” “I didn’t notice. Maybe one of Steve’s friends. He had a card game going in the laundry room and he was supposed to keep his friends away from my party.” MasonSteve was pissed about him dancing with that girl. “She’s my sister’s best friend, asshole, so stay away from her. I didn’t even invite you here.” “Hey,” Phil said to Steve. “Take it easy. I invited him.” “I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to dance,” Mason said. “Nobody told me.” “We’re chaperones,” Steve told him.