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 Boys & Sex (2020)

  Some male artists, as they’ve aged, have expressed passing regret for their earlier attitudes. In January 2018, Jay-Z spoke out in support of the #MeToo movement, despite having used the word “bitch” in 109 of his 217 songs (at that time), building his early brand with lines like “I’m a pimp in every sense of the word, bitch.” Nas, who once penned lyrics about urinating “on bitches who famous” and “putting stitches in they anus” lamented in his song “Daughters” that “God” gets revenge on the “coolest playas and foulest heartbreakers” by making them fathers of “precious little girls.” And on his 2018 single “Violent Crimes,” Kanye West described “niggas” as “savage” “monsters,” “pimps,” and “players” until they have daughters. Then, “Father forgive me,” he wrote, also appealing to a higher power, “I’m scared of the karma.” All three men changed their literal tunes after becoming dads. Certainly, any positive change is commendable, and I’m glad they’ve seen some hazy form of the light, but as culture critic Dara Mathis tweeted about West, “Daughters are not spiritual retribution for your misogyny.” They are neither a form of punishment (among other things, what would that make sons?) nor “tiny spiritual guides sent to newly show you the humanity of girls and women.” Nor did Ye’s hand-wringing ultimately amount to much. Six months after “Violent Crimes” debuted, he dropped “I Love It,” with Lil Pump. In the video, as they repeat “You’re such a fuckin’ ho, I love it,” the two men shuffle down a hall lined with alcoves containing naked, faceless women who have been forced to their knees, their hands behind their backs, presumably bound. The only real difference between that—which was the biggest-ever global hip-hop debut on YouTube—and actual porn is that Kanye’s video was produced by the mainstream Warner Brothers and performed, albeit with more TV-friendly lyrics, on Saturday Night Live. The Body Is a Vulnerable Thing “I’m not going to lie,” Mason said. “I feel kind of like I’m playing catch-up when it comes to where other people are at in terms of their sexual experiences.” Porn did not accelerate Mason’s real-life sexual pursuits. Quite the opposite. He even avoided the simple act of kissing for much of high school, afraid that without “experience” he would do it wrong. Nothing he’d seen on screen prepared him for how awkward real-life encounters could be, or how to navigate them with a partner. He thought he was just supposed to know. Mason’s high school girlfriend performed oral sex on him for the first time when they were seniors largely, he suspects, out of guilt for refusing intercourse (her “no” as he prepared to enter her was so soft he almost didn’t hear it). Since they never talked about it, though, he can’t say for sure. At any rate, he lost his erection during the act, so she stopped and they got dressed in silence. So, I asked Mason, when did you have intercourse for the first time?

• From Action (2014)

  Wow. That definitely sounded like the kind of time-tested profundity that can come only from living off the land and your own salty tears and probably there’s a pickup truck involved. I reckon (okay, I promise this stops here) that you should do what my awesome song tells you, partner (sorry, this really is the last time for real) (more like sexual partner!!! ha-ha) (please don’t go). Obviously, this doesn’t matter as much for one-time flings. If you go skin-to-skin with a girl you meet on vacation or at a party out of town, you don’t need to recite your autobiography before getting down to biz. But if you’re more socially connected to a person, or intend to see them more than once, the time to let them know is as soon as possible. Some people you might want to mess around with are not going to be receptive to the idea that they’re one of the many ships in your various ports, especially when one of those is a yacht (I’m talking about your main squeeze, not the old Amy Rows, here). Don’t try to wheedle anybody into changing their mind. Not everyone is going to have the same attitude toward casual hookups as you do, and that’s their prerogative. Some people might think you’re lying about being non-monogamous to try to get them to help you cheat. (The unfortunate reason for this is that there are horrible deceitful dicks in this world who do exactly that.) It helps to disclose the realities of your relationship clearly as soon as it feels like something’s gonna happen between you. The longer you keep it a secret, the more it’ll seem like you’re being deceptive, because why would you not mention it if you’re not doing anything wrong? You don’t have to give them the WHOLE ENTIRE HISTORY of your relationship and the philosophical reasoning behind your non-monogamy, as I have here! Just say that you’re in an open relationship—even if you don’t like the term, this is the easiest and most direct way to get your point across. Then, if you want, answer any questions they may have about it—although some people are gonna be like, “GREAT, crystal clear on this one, let’s make it happen,” in my experience, they are in the minority. • Be prepared to be criticized. Can I be honest with you for a moment? (Because everything I wrote before this sentence was a series of CRAFTY LIES, PRANKED YA, LIKING SEX IS ACTUALLY BAD!) Even though I’m comfortable with my decisions, I was nervous about admitting to having had non-monogamous relationships, because there is still a giant stigma attached to being a youngish female person who is not willing to conceal the fact that she likes sex and all its related behavioral trappings.

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

  In the video, clearly distraught, Ricky declared his need for revenge and his desire to seek justice for the children. Adjustment Difficulties of Children Leaving CultsGenerally children exit cults when their parents decide to leave. In some instances, children are removed from the group during a custody suit between divorcing parents, one in the cult, the other not. In other cases, children are removed from the group by a government agency due to complaints of child abuse or neglect. And sometimes children manage to get away on their own or perhaps with the help of siblings who left earlier. How a person leaves a cult may influence recovery: Was there an exit counseling? Did the group disperse on the occasion of the death of or abandonment by the leader? Did the young person walk away on her own? Was the whole family excommunicated from the group? Major adjustment problems for children leaving cults typically center on issues of acculturation, lack of self-control, little experience with independent decision making, boredom living in a perceived normal family or situation, distrust of others, conflicting loyalties, developmental arrest, lagging social development, and lack of self-esteem. Alexandra Stein, whose personal account of leaving a cult with her children appears in Chapter 14, has also written about the effects cults can have on the relationship between mothers and children. (See her article in Cultic Studies Journal, vol. 14:1.25) Rosanne Henry's account in Chapter 14 is a poignant story of parents who reclaimed their daughter after leaving her in the care of their cult leader. Ganga was seven when her parents rescued her. Here, in the next section, Rosanne describes the challenges Ganga and the rest of the family encountered. Many of the issues she discusses can help other families who face similar situations of welcoming and integrating someone into the family and mainstream society after time spent in the confines of a cult. Our Child Is Homeby Rosanne Henry Adjusting to a new family and to life outside the cult environment has not been easy for Ganga. Here are some of the issues we have struggled with over the years. Ganga grew up in such a controlled environment that she was out of touch with our culture in many ways. Her primary activity had been traveling around Florida in a Winnebago with teenagers as her nannies. She had never been to Disney World, though she lived only sixty miles away. We took her to amusement parks and zoos, on train rides and picnics in the mountains. It was as though she had lived in a foreign country all of her life. She had a hatred for dolls that soon melted away, and we kept her supplied with Barbies®, water babies, and even Madame Alexanders®. She welcomed most of this because it allowed her to see much more of the world and to be a seven-year-old little girl. We let her explore many things and choose her own activities.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  We must be careful not to write, into our models of sex, phenomena that are in fact social – namely, an assumption that sex is inherently satisfying to men, along with a resignation to sex being, for women, merely a trade-off for something else of value to them. In acknowledging that having sex can bring about other valued effects – connection, intimacy, bonding – we must also be careful not to rule out sex itself as capable of providing these. Why not aim for sex itself as being deeply mutually pleasurable? Why not aim for a culture that embraces and enables women’s sexual pleasure, in all its complexity, and admits the complexity of male desire too? Could we not aim for a wondrous, universal, democratic pleasure detached from gender; a hedonism available to all – for what Sophie Lewis has called a ‘guards-down, polymorphous experimentation’, for everyone? All sexuality is responsive; all sexual desire emerges in a culture which in turn shapes it. Could we take what is important from Basson’s model – the emphasis on the relational, emergent nature of desire – without harnessing it quite so much to a rhetoric of divergent sex drives between men and women? Sexuality is lived, learnt, developed over time, in particular contexts; this is why sex means something to us – it is never pure function, but always rich and burdened with significance. If we want sex to be joyful and fulfilling, it is on sex’s contexts that we should focus our emancipatory energies. 3 On Arousal ‘Women love sex – even more than we do’, claims a pick-up-artist interviewed by sociologist Rachel O’Neill for her book, Seduction. Women may love sex, but they are, pick-up-artists claim, conditioned to police their behaviour – to withhold sex – for fear of being seen as promiscuous. Women make gestural objections before agreeing to have sex (‘token resistance’ in their dreaded parlance), but if a woman goes home with a man, sex is virtually guaranteed: ‘she knows it as much as you do.’ There are ‘a few objections you have to overcome in order to prevent her feeling bad about it.’ If ‘a girl says “no” and she really means it, you respect that… Fortunately, 99 percent of the time she doesn’t really mean it.’ Women’s words are simple untruths, designed to protect their reputations. The task for these men is simply to get to the desire that is always already there, lying in wait. But how do these men know what women really want, given that women themselves are supposedly masking their desire? The answer is: by what women’s bodies do. ‘What girls say they want and what they respond to are just two completely different things’, says one man to O’Neill. ‘Her body is screaming out for sex but she’s determined not to do it’, says another. A woman’s body and her self are disarticulated – and it’s her body that speaks the truth.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Doesn’t your shit look like that?” Obediently, I glanced down at the puffy, water-logged poop that was starting to fray, stringy pieces pulling away and sinking. “No,” I whispered. Mary Sue shoved me back toward where I’d been seated. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” she said. The long shadows of afternoon passed over us. The light grew dim. Afternoon turned to evening. The demonstrators became tired. They excused us, announcing that tomorrow we would return to back-to-basics mode. Our walk to breakfast the next morning became a mandatory silent march. The lack of chatter with just the sounds of our shoes crunching gravel opened my ears to a stillness I’d never noticed before. Hearing a bird call now and then and a whisper of wind rifling through the leaves on the nearby trees, I think I would have enjoyed the silence had it not been a punishment. Instead, I felt stilted and unnatural, not sure how careful I should be in keeping noise out of my movements. All our free time was confiscated in service of back-to-basics. We were told we’d been lazy. Not flushing the toilet had been the last straw. As we marched in the sharp cold of morning, our two long rows were intersected by another group of marchers. The Punk Squad consisted of teens who had been in trouble with the law or sent to Synanon by families who felt they’d lost control of their children. Punks typically had a rabid aversion to Synanon and were notorious for acting out. They were monitored closely, had little freedom and lived a near-constant military lifestyle. Punks wore overalls like we did, but instead of tennis shoes, their feet were clad in sturdy military boots. The Punks marched uniformly through the mists in two parallel lines, breaking the quiet with their military singing, heads erect, eyes forward, arms swinging in unison. Their booted feet struck the ground all at once, defiant to our own silent progression. Together, they sang, “There was a girl who wore a yellow ribbon. She wore it for her sweetheart who lived in Tomales Bay.” “Tomales Bay!” the girl’s voices rang out. The boys’ baritone voices echoed, “Tomales Bay!” “She wore it for her sweetheart who lived in Tomales Bay!” They marched strong and shouted robustly, gazing neither right nor left as if they were a single entity. We children watched until they disappeared down the road, and we continued our own scraggly march. “No talking,” we were reminded as we went into the Commons. First came the milk. I’d learned to drink it big gulps with several seconds’ rest and normal breathing between gulps. Pleased to see pancakes with little tabs of butter instead of eggs, I prepared to tuck into the warm cakes set in front of me. Pancakes had always been my favorite breakfast food and I hadn’t had any since I’d come to Synanon.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  A word most of her classmates had never heard, and certainly never practiced. Yesterday, Daisy had taken her aside to explain the rules for this year’s holiday outing. “Mrs. Osner has imposed a moratorium on crash talk,” Daisy said. “And, Christina…why don’t you wear the sweater set Mrs. Osner gave you for your birthday? I know she’d like to see it on you.” She’d be happy to wear the sweater set. It was beautiful. Mrs. Osner’s gifts always were. As for happy talk, she could do that. Who wanted to talk about the crash, anyway? Who wanted to think that only eight people could be identified by their faces? Only eight. They all needed a break, didn’t they? —THE TRIP FROM ELIZABETH to New York on the train took twenty-three minutes, with one stop in Newark. Christina brought along her knitting. She was making argyle socks for Jack for Christmas. The contrasting colors hung on dangling bobbins, not easy to keep straight on a herky-jerky train. She couldn’t work on them at home, except alone in her bedroom, because everyone knew you knitted argyle socks only for a boyfriend. When she was with the family she worked on the scarf she was knitting for Jack’s younger brother, Mason, or the matching coat for Mason’s dog, Fred. If Mama asked, Who is that for, Christina? she could say it was for Mr. Durkee, her favorite teacher, and Mama would approve. Daisy, who was sitting next to her on the train, leaned over and said, “I love those socks!” “They’re for Jack.” Daisy knew Christina had a boyfriend. She’d met him once, when he’d brought his brother to the office. Christina was proud of Jack. He knew how to shake hands and look a person right in the eye. Plus, he had a great smile without ever having had orthodontia. She couldn’t tell Mama or Baba about Jack because he wasn’t Greek, which was too bad, because she was sure they’d like him. “Lucky Jack!” Daisy said. Then she went back to the book she was reading. Christina couldn’t see the title because Daisy covered her books in oilcloth to keep them clean, the same pattern as the covering on the kitchen table at Christina’s house. This year Natalie brought her friend Miri on the holiday outing, and the two girls sat together in their matching camel-hair coats, yakking away. They seemed so young to Christina, even though she knew they’d be in tenth grade at Battin next year. Had she been that young three years ago? She didn’t think so. Steve was reading that new book The Catcher in the Rye. Christina had no idea what the title meant. Some of the girls at school went on dates to Staten Island, where you could be legally served at eighteen. Some of them had fake IDs. They drank rye-and-ginger ales. Maybe that’s what the title meant. The Catcher in the Rye and Ginger Ale. The idea made her laugh.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  Immediately after orgasm I'd feel like a depraved pervert. And back then I believed a pervert was one of the worst things you could be. But I just. Couldn't. Stop. Each ejaculation became a sickening secret. I agonized that my parents would eventually discover I was a filthy degenerate. So I lied to them. I pushed my mom dad away, but that just made me feel more guilty and alone. It's still embarrassing to admit I masturbate. But why? Because aren't we all masturbators? I'm a masturbator, you're a masturbator, President Obama is a masturbator. Taylor Swift is a masturbator. Oprah! If everybody does it, can it be so bad to feel so good? [Barry] We're asking for perineal stimulation- -Nope, this one first. -Oh, this was first? Okay. [Alex] Meet doctors Barry Komisaruk and Nan Wise. They're the first scientists to ever study the human orgasm with an MRI machine. -The, um, so urethral stimulation, but just put it in about a quarter of an inch into the tip of the urethra and move it around a little bit. It's very, very sensitive. [Alex] Yeah. [Barry] As long as you can feel it, as long as you can feel it clearly. [Alex] And with their help, I'm going to take one small step for sex research and one giant leap for myself. To get over my masturbation shame, I'm gonna jack off in an MRI machine and donate an orgasm to science. -For the prostate stimulation- -Perineum. -Perineum, yeah, okay. This device, bring the tip to, as you say, your taint [laughing] between the scrotum and the anus. For the prostate stimulation, just put it in deeper and forward, and it'll move like that. -All right. -Then you do the freestyle masturbation to orgasm. -Yeah, he's gonna see that. -And then as long as you can feel it, we're probably going to be able to get a recording in the brain and that's the- -I think I can do that. -Okay. -We'll see. [laughs] [Barry] The research I do is on brain activity related to sexual response and orgasm in women and men. In terms of our discoveries, we're the first to show where in the brain orgasm occurs in women. -How do you define an orgasm? -We see an overall activation of all the systems in the brain. In that sense it's similar to a seizure. We haven't come to a final definition yet. [nervous laughter] -All right. -You're ready? -I think so. -You're ready? -Yeah, okay. -Okay, so we have a mask to make. So sex is in the brain, sex is in the mind. It's not necessarily in the genitals. So those two big things reinforced that how you felt about sexuality empowered your response. And also that pleasure is very, very important. ["Nutcracker Suite"] [lighter clicking] [motor roaring] [wet slime noise] [husk ripping] [Shake Weight shaking] [hammer pounding] [tea kettle whistling] [Mission Command] Five, four, three, two, one.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  [image file=image_rsrcNP.jpg] In any case, things are not simple for men, either. On the one hand, their desires emerge into the world embraced, valued and protected. Boys – at least those marked by various forms of privilege (of race and class, for instance) – are born into the world as bundles of desires, and the world readies itself to meet them. And it is not only that heterosexual men’s desires are embraced and encouraged; it is that their entitlement to women’s bodies is framed as natural desire: Brock Turner’s father lamented his son’s sentencing for ‘twenty minutes of action’. (The fact that he framed his son’s sexual assault of an unconscious woman as ‘action’ speaks volumes: assault and sex are interchangeable.) Male heterosexuality may fit more closely with the idea of a biological drive precisely because the conditions for it are ripe; straight men’s desire is encouraged, imagined, represented and catered for at every turn. It is elicited by the culture at large, and the context that enables that desire – the primacy of male orgasm, for example, or the relative safety from sexual assault – also rewards desire, creating the virtuous circle of arousal, desire, and orgasm which is more elusive for women. (Race makes a difference here: black men’s sexuality is fetishized as an animalistic drive, while being subject to greater sanction than white men’s sexuality, particularly when it is seen as encroaching on white women.) So male desire is encouraged, but it is also required. The expectation that men be relentlessly desiring machines is not one to emulate; the relentless pursuit of the horizon of heterosexual masculinity is not something to envy. Requiring that men be permanently up for it, constantly asserting libido and achieving conquest, only sets them up to fail, too. The humiliation in failure is a burden; a man falling short of expectations is subject to violence and shame, as countless men have found at great cost. What’s more, the failure to reach this impossible horizon engenders the very feelings of insecurity and shame from which male violence ensues. Men, after all, hate women so that they don’t have to hate themselves. Men, too, are motivated to pursue sex for non-sexual reasons, just as women are – by a need to assert their masculinity; by the link between erection, ejaculation and power; by the social punishments that follow if they fail. It is not that women have reasons and incentives for sex while men have pure desire; it is that we render men’s non-sexual motivations – their reasons, their incentives – invisible. We leave these uninterrogated, and treat male desire as a biological given, rather than the socially enabled, sanctioned and enforced behaviour that it is.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  That's right, Mike Pence's home state is also home to the world's premier sex research organization. Founded by biologist, Alfred Kinsey, The Kinsey Institute conducted the first in-depth studies of American sexual behavior in the '40s and '50s. The Kinsey Reports revealed that almost all Americans masturbated, premarital sex was common, and homosexuality was normal, upending long held moral and legal codes. Kinsey's impact is so fascinating Liam Neeson played him in a movie. -What's your most common sexual position? -There's more than one? [Alex] I spoke to Kinsey scientist William Yarber, who literally wrote the textbook on human sexuality. I wanted to know why we grow up feeling uncomfortable with sex. -In our culture, the Judeo-Christian ethic is so dominant. The aspect that sex should be, quote, saved for marriage is still powerful. In our country, adolescent sexuality is an oxymoron. A lot of parents would like to wrap their child's sexuality up in a gift and give it to 'em at their wedding reception. I mean, there's a large study done years ago of those who had daughters, this number talked to them about the clitoris. That percent taught them about the clitoris. [Alex] You know, talk about that. How silence is a message. -Well, silence, the message is is that, there's something about shame, you know, some shame about our sexuality. And we rarely use the P word. Pleasure. -And why do we fear the P word? You know, why do we fear pleasure? -There's fear that when young people learn about sexuality, that you know, their sexuality would be out of control. Research indicates that that's wrong. And this goes back to a fundamental concept, I think, of a democracy and the right to know. And what we have in our culture is adults, even by federal law and policy controlling the information about sexuality to young people. So it's important for us to be able to become more comfortable and accepting about our sexuality, not being apologetic about being a sexual being. A developmental thing is if a person, that they feel secure enough and safe enough say, you know, I just masturbated, and boy, it really keeps me going. I really like it. I mean, masturbation is the world's most universal sexual behavior. And in our culture is still has a certain amount of stigma. So what I really try to emphasize is that people should own their own sexuality, that the parents don't own their sexuality. A faith community doesn't own sexuality. Your partner don't own your sexuality. If you own your own sexuality, it's a blessing, it's a gift. You feel comfortable. You don't have to worry about what someone might think. [Alex] I definitely did not grow up thinking my sexuality was a gift. It felt more like a compulsive curse. Masturbation was a nerve wracking, afterschool ritual. I'd make sure the coast was clear, grab some tissue, find whatever images I could, and go to town.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  “The worst thing is the social shame and stigma around it. You feel like you can’t be honest about not wanting to have a deep emotional relationship with someone. A lot of times the sex is better, especially for women, when there isn’t this whole committed relationship wrapped around it. I feel like men are allowed to have one-night stands, but women aren’t because we’re supposed to take care of people all the time. … And honestly, for a lot of women that I know, casual sex is a place where we get to be served and cared for physically.”

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  “Are you lucky to be here?” “Yes.” “Why are you lucky to be Synanon kids?” Silence. “Look how many brothers and sisters you have. Look how many parents you have. On the outside, kids have to live with their biological parents in the nuclear family, but we know here in Synanon that this isn’t good for children. The parents in these families smother their children with their clingy affections. Here you have freedom, you have space, you can breathe. Synanon children are smarter and healthier than children on the outside. “Do you know what this is?” She spread her arms wide. “It’s an experiment, a working experiment. That’s what I mean when I say you are the models for the future. One day everyone will want to come to Synanon. All of you were lucky enough to be the first.” During my time in the school, I came to see other children’s parents as a kind of curiosity, their relationships a concept rather than a reality. Some parents visited now and then, most did not. Some worked as demonstrators, although after a while, it was easy to forget that a demonstrator had a child in the school because the parents did not seem to have any special bond with their offspring. I knew which adults were the parents of which kids, and in most cases there was a strong physical resemblance, but that was where the relationship ended. Adults led completely separate lives from us. One of our many father figures in the school was Don Leitner, who showed up at some point as a demonstrator. Short and stumpy-looking with limbs not quite proportioned with his torso, Don had thin lips that disappeared when he smirked, which was often, and small round eyes set unattractively close together. I hated him. It seemed that whenever Don and I were in the same room, his sole purpose was to publicly humiliate me. My only relief from his malice was Sophie, whom he loved to torture equally. By the time Don started working in the school, I’d grown tired of seminars and lectures that often made no sense. Forced to sit through so many games and talks, I created a detailed fantasy world, to which I’d retreat whenever the need arose. Don immediately spotted that I was not paying attention. The first time he demanded that I recite back to him everything he had said during one of his meetings, I remained silent and miserable, embarrassed that I could remember nothing. “You can’t tell me anything? Why is that?” He waited. I said nothing. “I think you can’t tell me because you’re an idiot. Are you retarded, Celena? Are you a retard?” I felt my body grow hot while he laughed out of the side of his thin lips, the rest of the kids joining in. “I don’t like retards, Celena. Next time you better pay attention.” But I couldn’t. Every time Don spoke, my mind closed.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  “Semi-sustaining” meant that property owners could keep enough chickens to make egg money. They could keep a kitchen garden and can the produce. There was a depression on. The streets in the redesigned subdivision didn’t curve. Still, in the sales brochure for Bonner’s subdivision, young women on horseback smiled. A stucco house with a tile roof showed the taste of those who purchased lots. A gas station, photographed against an absolutely featureless waste, showed that the community was up to date. The golf course clubhouse was called La Casa de Buenos Amigos —The House of Good Friends. [image "Image" file=Image00009.jpg] 133 Emile Kosa, the noted California artist, painted two murals for the patio of the clubhouse. They were reproduced on the clubhouse menu. The two murals are impressions of pre-Yankee California—the sort of picture once called “romance of the ranchos.” The first is a market scene. A señorita carries a basket of tropical fruit on her head. Three mariachi musicians play in the street. A man rides on a donkey. The sky is clear and brilliant. The second mural shows a bull ring. A toreador, waiting to fight his bull, stands in front of a group of men squatting on the ground. Their sombreros make wide shadows. One man is sleeping in the shade of a palm tree. A few men, hands in their pockets, watch the bullfight indifferently. The two murals are gone, either painted over when the clubhouse patio was enclosed in the 1940s, or removed when the golf course was sold to the three developers. 134 In 1950, Time magazine described the construction of the first unit of the 17,500 houses going up on what had been the Clarks’ bean fields. Time described one of the developers, Louis Boyar, as “swarthy” and “shy.” The meaning of “swarthy” was clear. It ended any speculation whether Boyar was a Jew. When the three developers bought the Montana Land Company’s empty fields, the sale included the remaining house lots around the company’s golf course. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Montana Land Company made it very clear in its promotional material that the lots were protected by “restrictions of an all-inclusive nature.” Written into deed covenants, these restrictions prevented the sale of lots to Negroes, Mexicans, and Jews. In 1948, the Supreme Court made racial restrictions in property ownership unenforceable, but covenants—including those against Jews—continued to be written into deeds in Long Beach. Neighboring property owners could still sue for lowering property values if a seller violated the unenforceable racial restrictions. In 1953, the Supreme Court made homeowner lawsuits to enforce racial covenants unconstitutional. 135 Louis Boyar, Mark Taper, and Ben Weingart bought Clark Bonner’s speculative subdivision in 1949. It was a suburb in which they could not live. 136 Clark Bonner had built just three of the curving streets in the subdivision he planned. The streets faced the putting green of the first hole of his golf course.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  In Regina both the power and the vulnerability of the human psyche are clear. Her CET was a stroke of genius through which she nurtured a kernel of self-respect. Unfortunately, because her eroticism revolved around the belief that it was her place to be exploited by men, her heroic attempts at self-affirmation continually brought her back to feeling used for sex and then cast aside. But then, with no conscious idea of what she was doing, she had made a suicidal gesture and thus initiated a series of events that ultimately exposed her inner wound and unlocked the healing power of the truth. WERE YOU ABUSED?As you can see, the most profoundly damaging core beliefs develop in response to severe abuse—emotional, physical, or sexual—as a child or adolescent. For healing to begin, it is necessary to piece together the details of exactly what took place, and then to tell the unvarnished truth to at least one other person. Telling one’s story solidifies its reality. Emotional abuse, such as constant demeaning put-downs, is more easily denied than sexual abuse. I’ve known people who were regularly threatened, chastised, or even severely beaten yet believed that these assaults were merely discipline. Growing up in such an environment makes it difficult to know what “normal” is. Some people try to forget about terrible childhoods and move on. They fail to recognize that to move beyond a trauma they must come to terms with it, which is impossible if the facts remain a blur. Once you know what happened and how it affected your beliefs and expectations, you can claim responsibility for your present choices, repair some of the damage to your self-esteem, and learn how to give yourself the respect and nurturance you deserve. There are, however, potential perils involved in letting out memories of past abuse. As memories grow clearer some people become overwhelmed by depression, fear, rage, or despair. For the first time they feel the full impact of the self-loathing that is a byproduct of their mistreatment. Some even become suicidal. That’s why it’s crucial to have the support of friends and loved ones, and perhaps professional assistance as well. Another danger is that the person may find a paradoxical sense of comfort or meaning in the role of victim. More than a few people cling to the belief that they must remain forever helpless and therefore unwittingly perpetuate their own abuse. They continue to suffer needlessly until they realize that victimization is not an identity to be embraced but a harsh legacy to be recalled and overcome.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Though she got out of performing, the experience remained with her. “It didn’t go away. On a couple of different levels I was bothered by the fact that even though I thought I was perfectly fine to do it—I wasn’t hurting anyone—there was a little voice in me that was feeling some amount of embarrassment and shame over it. I didn’t want to drag that around with me. I’ve always been very analytical by nature. I thought, I have to explore this and find out why this is an issue for me. Why do I have two voices here? I went into therapy with a very bright woman and worked through all of this stuff and I realized that I had to try to separate myself from societal norms and try to judge myself. “I don’t want to feel this way because society tells me to feel this way. I want to judge for myself whether I did something that I should feel bad about. And so I really tried to look at it from a historical perspective. From the cave etchings and drawings and the history of erotic expression and art. Is it bad? And what about modern-day pornography? Is this something bad? Have I done something really terrible? Did I harm my sisters in the movement? “I did come to the conclusion that there really is nothing wrong with performing sexually for other people to enjoy viewing, that it has been done historically, that humans have always been very curious to look at each other and look at sexual, erotic situations. Whether it’s art or just clumsy drawings, I think it’s just human nature.”

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “What have I done?” she asked. He looked like some wild, timid animal that one had done violence to. He looked humiliated, offended, proud, untouchable. She repeated, “What have I done?” She knew that she had done something she ought not to have done. She wanted him to understand that she was innocent. He smiled now, ironically, at her blindness. He said, “You made the gesture of a whore.” A deep shame, a sense of great injury overwhelmed her. The woman in her that had suffered from being forced to act as she did with her other lover, the woman who had been made to betray her real nature so often that it had become a habit, this woman wept now, uncontrollably.

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

  If a subjective eye were on a journey, what a world of contrasts it would see! Like a mountain road interrupted by tunnels, you pass abruptly from darkness into light, and from the light into darkness. Here I am trying to explain that I prefer to keep covered something which it is perfectly acceptable to reveal, when within these same pages I have displayed an intimacy that most people keep secret. It is obvious that, in the same way that psychoanalysis helps you to shed unwanted parts of yourself, when you write a book in the first person the latter becomes the third person. The more I describe my body and my actions, the more I leave myself behind. Who recognises themselves in those magnifying mirrors which show cheeks and noses as vast fissured landscapes?

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

  To show my arse and to see my face. There are few pleasures to equal this double polarisation. The layout of the bathroom is perfect: while the basin offers a perfect gripping point to deaden the shocks to my rear-end, I intermittently catch sight of my harshly lit face in the mirror above it, a face which – quite unlike the lower half of my body, which is totally mobilised – is almost lifeless. The cheeks are hollow and the mouth half open like an automated doll when the mechanism winds down. It could be the face of a dead woman except for my gaze which is intolerably listless. I try both to avoid it by lowering my eyelids and seek it out. That gaze is the anchoring point; it is by seeing its reflection that I establish this certainty: there I am, that is me coming. It is the siphon through which all of me is evacuated: I cannot recognise myself in such a state of release; I reject it with a feeling of shame. That is how pleasure stays on a knife-edge: just as the multiplication of two negative numbers gives a positive number, this pleasure is the product not, as is sometimes said, of an absence from oneself, but of the bringing together of this perceived absence and the feeling of horror that it provokes in a flash of conscience. A particular porn film made quite an impression on me. The man was taking the woman from behind. The camera was facing her so that her face was in the foreground. Thanks to the pressure exerted on her whole body, her face was projected forwards and distorted as things are when they come too close to the lens. You could hear the man’s orders: ‘Look! Look at the camera!’, and the girl looked directly at you, the viewer.

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  Has Janet crossed the line when it comes to sexual integrity? [image file=image_rsrc244.jpg] Kelly’s secret has been eating her alive for over ten years: As a freshman in college, I began dating Sam, an older man who was far more sexually experienced than I was. I fell head over heels in love with him, and within a few months, we were sleeping together. Within a year, we were living together. That was when I stumbled upon his vast array of videos hidden on the top shelf of his closet. I’m embarrassed to say that at the time, I wasn’t offended by his pornography collection, but curious. I began watching the videos with him, just to see what was on them. It wasn’t long until I was asking to watch particular ones while we were having sex together. I don’t understand why, but the ones that really turned me on were the ones that included a threesome (a guy and two girls) or the ones that had just two women together. Even after Sam and I broke up, I asked him if I could keep the couple of videos that were my favorites. I masturbated to them over and over, but when I got married to a Christian man who I knew wouldn’t approve of them, I threw them away. That’s been years ago, but I’ve never been able to get these images out of my mind. Even though my husband is a good lover, I think about all those old scenes when I’m trying to orgasm just because that is what really seems to do it for me. I would never actually want to be with a woman in real life, so I don’t understand why these fantasies are such a big part of my sex life. I’m afraid if my husband knew about them, he’d think he married a lesbian. Has Kelly crossed the line when it comes to sexual integrity? [image file=image_rsrc244.jpg] In her midforties, Caroline confesses that her biggest battle in life has been not to compare herself to others. In the women’s locker room, Caroline finds herself comparing the size of her waist and hips, the firmness of her breasts, and the amount of “cottage cheese” in her thighs with each passerby. “If I am changing clothes in the presence of a larger woman, I feel lean and powerfully pretty. But let a skinny-minny walk in, and I do a double take at the image staring back at me in the mirror and think, Yuck!” Unfortunately this comparison trap not only affects Caroline’s self-esteem, but has carried over into her marriage of sixteen years as well. Although she describes their relationship as “okay,” Caroline also admits:

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  7:3–53. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4. Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? 5. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. AUGUSTINE. (Serm. in Mont. ii. 18.) The Lord having admonished us concerning hasty and unjust judgment; and because that they are most given to rash judgment, who judge concerning things uncertain; and they most readily find fault, who love rather to speak evil and to condemn than to cure and to correct; a fault that springs either from pride or jealousy—therefore He subjoins, Why seest thou the mote in thy brother’s eye, and seest not the beam in thy own eye? JEROME. He speaks of such as though themselves guilty of mortal sin, do not forgive a trivial fault in their brother. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) As if he perhaps have sinned in anger, and you correct him with settled hate. For as great as is the difference between a beam and a mote, so great is the difference between anger and hatred. For hatred is anger become inveterate. It may be if you are angry with a man that you would have him amend, not so if you hate him. CHRYSOSTOM. Many do this, if they see a Monk having a superfluous garment, or a plentiful meal, they break out into bitter accusation, though themselves daily seize and devour, and suffer from excess of drinking. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Otherwise; This is spoken to the doctors. For every sin is either a great or a small sin according to the character of the sinner. If he is a laie, it is small and a mote in comparison of the sin of a priest, which is the beam. HILARY. Otherwise; The sin against the Holy Spirit is to take from God power which has influences, and from Christ substance which is of eternity, through whom as God came to man, so shall man likewise1 come to God. As much greater then as is the beam than the mote, so much greater is the sin against the Holy Spirit than all other sins. As when unbelievers object to others carnal sins, and secrete in themselves the burden of that sin, to wit, that they trust not the promises of God, their minds being blinded as their eye might be by a beam. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. That is, with what face can you charge your brother with sin, when yourself are living in the same or a yet greater sin?

• From The Decameron (1353)

  She accordingly felt as though the world beneath her feet had suddenly been taken away, and fell in a dead faint on the platform of the tower, where she lay for some time before recovering her senses. On coming round, she began to weep and wail in a most heartrending fashion, and realizing all too well that this was the scholar’s handiwork, she repented the wrong she had done, as well as the excessive trust she had placed in someone she had every reason to look upon as her enemy. And whilst she was thus reproaching herself, a considerable time elapsed. Eventually she looked all around her in search of some way to descend, but being unable to find any, she burst once more into tears and thought, bitterly, to herself: ‘Oh, hapless woman, what will your brothers, your kinsfolk, your neighbours, and Florentine people in general have to say, when it is known that you were found in this spot, completely naked? Your fair repute will be seen as merely an empty façade; and if you try to brazen it out by giving some spurious explanation or other, you will be exposed by this accursed scholar, who knows all about your private affairs. Ah, poor wretch, that at one and the same moment you should have lost not only the young man you were foolish enough to love, but your good name into the bargain!’ And her anguish grew to such a pitch that she was almost on the point of hurling herself from the tower to the ground. The sun having now arisen, however, she moved a little closer to the wall on one side of the tower, thinking she might see some youngster driving his sheep in her direction, whom she could send to fetch her maidservant. But as she peeped over the rim, she caught sight of the scholar, who had just woken up after sleeping for a while under a bush. ‘Good morning, madam,’ he said. ‘Have the young ladies arrived yet?’ On hearing these words, the lady burst into tears yet again, and begged him to come inside the tower so that she could speak to him. The scholar very politely granted her request, and the lady, lying face downwards on the floor of the roof in such a way that only her head appeared in the aperture, addressed him, weeping plaintively and saying: