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.

Page 38 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Yes, I will do anything; spare him." "Let him live," said Coeur-de-fer, "but he has got to join us, that last clause is crucial, I can do nothing if he refuses to comply with it, my comrades would be against me." Surprised, the merchant, understanding nothing of this. consanguinity I was establishing, but observing his life saved if he were to consent to the proposal, saw no cause for a moment's hesitation. He was provided with meat and drink, as the men did not wish to leave the place until daybreak. "Therese," Coeur-de-fer said to me, "I remind you of your promise, but, since I am weary tonight, rest quietly beside Dubois, I will summon you toward dawn and if you are not prompt to come, taking this knave's life will be my revenge for your deceit." "Sleep, Monsieur, sleep well," I replied, "and believe that she whom you have filled with gratitude has no desire but to repay it." However, such was far from my design, for if ever I believed deception permitted, it was certainly upon this occasion. Our rascals, greatly overconfident, kept at their drinking and fell into slumber, leaving me entirely at liberty beside Dubois who, drunk like the others, soon closed her eyes too. Then seizing my opportunity as soon as the bandits surrounding us were overcome with sleep: "Monsieur," I said to the young Lyonnais, "the most atrocious catastrophe has thrown me against my will into the midst of these thieves, I detest both them and the fatal instant that brought me into their company. In truth, I have not the honor to be related to you; I employed the trick to save you and to escape, if you approve it, with you, from out of these scoundrels' clutches; the moment's propitious," I added, "let us be off; I notice your pocketbook, take it back, forget the money, it is in their pockets; we could not recover it without danger: come, Monsieur, let us quit this place. You see what I am doing for you, I put myself into your keeping; take pity on me; above all, be not more cruel than these men; deign to respect my honor, I entrust it to you, it is my unique treasure, they have not ravished it away from me." Chapter 10 It would be difficult to render the declarations of gratitude I had from Saint-Florent.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “I can see that,” he said. I waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t. I was wearing a navy blue jacket over my shirt. I took it off and flung it on the couch. Then I piled my hair on top of my head and tied it into a knot. “So why are you here?” He looked at me then. “I want you to be okay.” Too much. I ran upstairs. I was crazy. I knew that. Normal people didn’t leave conversations right in the middle. Normal people didn’t let strangers sleep on their couch. Two years ago I purchased a stationary bike from an eighty-eight year old widower with pink hair named Delfie. She’d put an ad in the Penny Saver after she’d had hip replacement and couldn’t damn well use it, as she’d said. I’d picked it up the same day I made the call. After all the hassle and tassle of hauling the thing up the stairs, I’d yet to sit on it. I walked over to where it was collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom and climbed on. I had to adjust Delfie’s setting on the padded seat. I pedaled until my legs felt like jelly. I was panting when I climbed off, my bare feet sore from the plastic pedals. I walked on the sides of my feet to my night table. I flipped open the cover of Knotted with my pinkie. For MV I closed it, and went downstairs to see what Isaac was making for dinner. [image file=image20.jpg] Fortune favors the brave. That’s what I repeated to myself as they prepped me for surgery. Except I didn’t say it in English, I said the Latin words: fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat. Mantras sounded better in Latin. Repeat any phrase in the educated fancy-pants language most of the ancient philosophers used, you sounded like a goddamn genius. Repeat the same phrase in English, you sounded like a loon. Who wrote that phrase? A philosopher. I should have remembered his name, but I couldn’t. Nerves, I told myself. I searched for something else to focus on, something that could comfort my decision. I knew that the Bible said something about cutting out your eye if it offended you. I was cutting out my breasts. I thought that this was both my brave move and my offended one. It didn’t matter; most bravery boiled down to nothing more than a strong sense of duty that piggybacked an even stronger sense of crazy. Everything brave was a little bit crazy. I tried to focus on something else so I wouldn’t have to think about how crazy I was. There was a nurse taking my blood.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  More important for the purposes of the match, however, was the fact that Boniadi was an OT V. Her mother was also a Scientologist. In early November 2004, Naz was informed that she had been selected for a special program that was critical to the future of the church, but it was so secret she wouldn’t be allowed to tell anyone, even her mother. Naz was moved immediately into the Celebrity Centre, where she spent a month going through security checks and special auditing programs. She hoped the project had something to do with human rights, which was her special interest, but all she was told was that her participation would end bigotry against Scientology. At one point during the intensive auditing and security checks, Wilhere informed her that she would have to break up with her longtime boyfriend in order for the project to proceed. She refused. She couldn’t understand why her boyfriend posed any kind of problem; indeed, she had personally introduced him to Scientology. Wilhere persisted, asking what it would take for her to break off the romance. Flustered, she responded that she would break up if she knew he had been cheating on her. According to Naz’s friends, the very next day, Wilhere brought in her boyfriend’s confidential auditing files and showed her several instances of his infidelities, which had been circled in red. Naz felt betrayed, but also guilty, because Wilhere blamed her for failing to know and report her boyfriend’s ethical lapses herself; after all, she had audited him on several occasions. Obviously, she had missed his “withhold.” She confronted her boyfriend and he confessed. That was the end of their relationship. 7 Another time, Naz was asked what her “ideal scene for 2-D”—in other words, her dream date—would be. It was eating sushi and going ice- skating. But she wondered why that was important. One of her assignments was to study a bulletin of Hubbard’s titled “The Responsibilities of Leaders.” It is Hubbard’s deconstruction of the lives of the nineteenth-century South American military leader Simón Bolívar and his ferociously protective mistress, a socialite named Manuela Sáenz. Bolívar, Hubbard writes, “was a military commander without peer in history. Why he would fail and die an exile to be later deified is thus of great interest. What mistakes did he make?” Sáenz, his consort, “was a brilliant, beautiful and able woman. She was loyal, devoted, quite comparable to Bolivar, far above the cut of average humanoids. Why then did she live a vilified outcast, receive such violent social rejection and die of poverty and remain unknown to history? What mistakes did she make?” Hubbard’s analysis was that Bolívar knew how to do only one thing brilliantly—to lead men in battle—and therefore he tended to resort to military solutions when diplomacy or politics would better serve. “He was too good at this one thing,” Hubbard observes. “So he never looked to any other skill and he never even dreamed there was any other way.”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I am, MADAM, Yours, etc., etc., etc. THE END OF THE FIRST LETTER LETTER THE SECOND Madam, If I have delayed the sequel of my history, it has been purely to allow myself a little breathing time not without some hopes, that, instead of pressing me to a continuation, you would have acquitted me of the task of pursuing a confession, in the course of which my self-esteem has so many wounds to sustain. I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloyed and tired with uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom, or groundwork being, in the nature of things eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions, with this further inconvenience added to the disgust it creates, that the words Joys, Ardours, Transports, Extasies and the rest of those pathetic terms so congenial to, so received in the Practice of Pleasure, flatten and lose much of their due spirit and energy by the frequency they indispensably recur with, in a narrative of which that Practice professedly composes the whole basis. I must therefore trust to the candour of your judgment, for your allowing for the disadvantage I am necessarily under in that respect; and to your imagination and sensibility, the pleasing taks of repairing it, by their supplements, where my descriptions flag or fail: the one will readily place the pictures I present before your eyes; the other give life to the colours where they are dull, or worn with too frequent handling.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Cole was gone, he seated me near him, when now his face changed upon me, into an expression of the most pleasing sweetness and good humour, the most remarkable for its sudden shift from the other extreme, which I found afterwards, when I knew more of his character, was owing to a habitual state of conflict with, and dislike of himself, for being enslaved to so peculiar a lust, by the fatality of a constitutional ascendant, that rendered him incapable of receiving any pleasure, till he submitted to these extraordinary means of procuring it at the hands of pain, whilst the constancy of this repining consciousness stamped at length that cast of sourness and severity on his features: which was, in fact, very foreign to the natural sweetness of his temper. After a competent preparation by apologies, and encouragement to go through my part with spirit and constancy, he stood up near the fire, whilst I went to fetch the instruments of discipline out of a closet hard by: these were several rods, made each of two or three strong twigs of birch tied together, which he took, handled, and viewed with as much pleasure, as I did with a kind of shuddering presage. Next we took from the side of the room a long broad bench, made easy to lie at length on by a soft cushion in a callico-cover; and everything being now ready, he took his coat and waistcoat off; and at his motion and desire, I unbuttoned his breeches, and rolling up his shirt rather above his waist, tucked it on securely there; when directing naturally my eyes to that humoursone master-movement, in whose favour all these dispositions were making, it seemed almost shrunk into his body, scarce showing its tip above the sprout of hairy curls that clothed those parts, as you may have-seen a wren peeping its head out of the grass. Stooping them to untie his garters, he gave them to me for the use of tying him down to the legs of the bench: a circumstance no farther necessary than, as I suppose, it made part of the humour of the thing, since he prescribed it to himself, amongst the rest of the ceremonial.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The foreign mission work has achieved three great conquests: first, the conversion of the elect remnant of the Jews, and of civilized Greeks and Romans, in the first three centuries; then the conversion of the barbarians of Northern and Western Europe, in the middle ages; and last, the combined efforts of various churches and societies for the conversion of the savage races in America, Africa, and Australia, and the semi-civilized nations of Eastern Asia, in our own time. The whole non-Christian world is now open to missionary labor, except the Mohammedan, which will likewise become accessible at no distant day. The domestic or home mission work embraces the revival of Christian life in corrupt or neglected portions of the church in old countries, the supply of emigrants in new countries with the means of grace, and the labors, among the semi-heathenism populations of large cities. Here we may mention the planting of a purer Christianity among the petrified sects in Bible Lands, the labors of the Gustavus Adolphus Society, and the Inner mission of Germany, the American Home Missionary Societies for the western states and territories, the City Mission Societies in London, New York, and other fast-growing cities. II. The history of Persecution by hostile powers; as by Judaism and Heathenism in the first three centuries, and by Mohammedanism in the middle age. This apparent repression of the church proves a purifying process, brings out the moral heroism of martyrdom, and thus works in the end for the spread and establishment of Christianity. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church."2 There are cases, however, where systematic and persistent persecution has crushed out the church or reduced it to a mere shadow, as in Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, under the despotism of the Moslems. Persecution, like missions, is both foreign and domestic. Besides being assailed from without by the followers of false religions, the church suffers also from intestine wars and violence. Witness the religious wars in France, Holland, and England, the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, all of which grew out of the Protestant Reformation and the Papal Reaction; the crusade against the Albigenses and Waldenses, the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, the massacre of the Huguenots, the dragonnades of Louis XIV., the crushing out of the Reformation in Bohemia, Belgium, and Southern Europe; but also, on the Protestant side, the persecution of Anabaptists, the burning of Servetus in Geneva the penal laws of the reign of Elizabeth against Catholic and Puritan Dissenters, the hanging of witches and Quakers in New England. More Christian blood has been shed by Christians than by heathens and Mohammedans. The persecutions of Christians by Christians form the satanic chapters, the fiendish midnight scenes, in the history of the church. But they show also the gradual progress of the truly Christian spirit of religious toleration and freedom. Persecution exhausted ends in toleration, and toleration is a step to freedom.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I showered again, this time forgoing the Brillo pad for a bar of plain, white, soap with a bird cut delicately into its skin. The bird irritated me, so I scratched it away with my fingernail. My skin, still fresh and pink from the night before, tingled under the hot water. You’re fine, Senna, I told myself. You’re not the only one this has happened to. I dried off, patting my tender skin, and stopped to look at myself in the mirror. I looked different. Though I couldn’t put my finger on how. Maybe less soul. When I was a child my mother would tell me that people lost soul in two ways: someone could take it from you, or you’d surrender it willingly. You’re dead, I thought. My eyes said it was true. I dressed, covering every inch of my body in clothing. I wore so many layers someone would have to cut me out of them to get to my body. Then I walked downstairs, flinching at the discomfort between my legs. I found him in my kitchen sitting on a barstool and reading the paper. He had brewed coffee and was sipping out of my favorite mug. I don’t even get the paper. I hoped he stole it from my neighbors; I hated them. “Hello,” he said, setting his mug down. “I hope you don’t mind.” He gestured to the coffee setup and I shook my head. He got up and poured me a mug. “Milk? Sugar?” “Neither,” I said. I didn’t want coffee but I took it when he handed it to me. He was careful not to touch me, not to get too close. I took a tentative sip and set my mug down. This was awkward. Like the morning after a one night stand when no one knows where to stand and what to say, and where their underwear is. “What type of doctor are you?” “I’m a surgeon.” That’s about as far as I went with questions. He stood up and carried his mug to the sink. I watched him rinse it and place it upside down in the draining rack. “I have to get to the hospital.” I stared at him, unsure why he was telling me this. Were we a team now? Was he coming back? He pulled out another card and set it on the counter. “If you need me.” I looked at the card, plain white card stock with block lettering, then back to his face. “I won’t.”

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I waved him off. “I have to. I can’t live every day in fear, knowing it might come back. This is the only way.” He searched my face, and I knew then that he was the type of man who always considered what someone else was feeling. After a while the tension left his shoulders. He lifted his hands from where they’d been resting on the table, and placed them over mine. I could see the crumbs sticking to his skin. I focused on them so I wouldn’t pull away. He nodded. “I can recommend—” I cut him off for the third time, jerking my hands out from beneath his. “I want you to do the surgery.” He leaned back, put both hands behind his head and stared at me. “You’re an oncologic surgeon. I Googled you.” “Why didn’t you just ask?” “Because I don’t do that. Asking questions is at the forefront of developing relationships.” He cocked his head. “What’s wrong with developing relationships?” “When you get raped, and when you get breast cancer, you have to tell people about it. And then they look at you with sad eyes. Except they’re not really seeing you, they’re seeing your rape or your breast cancer. And I’d rather not be looked at if all people are seeing are the things I do, or the things that happen to me instead of who I am.” He was quiet for a long time. “What about before those things happened to you?” I stared at him. Maybe a little too fiercely, but I didn’t care. If this man wanted to show up in my life, and put his hands over mine, and ask why I didn’t have a best friend—he was going to get it. The full version. “If there was a God,” I said, “I’d say with confidence that he hates me. Because my life is the sum of bad things. The more people you let in, the more bad you let in.” “Well, there you have it,” Isaac said. His eyes weren’t wide; there was no more shock. He was a cucumber. It was the most I’d ever said to him. It was probably the most I’d said to any person in a long time. I pulled my cup up to my mouth and closed my eyes. “All right,” he said, finally. “I’ll do the surgery on one condition.” “What’s that?” “You see a counselor.” I started shaking my head before the words were out of his mouth. “I’ve seen a psychiatrist before. I’m not into it.” “I’m not talking about medicating yourself,” he said. “You need to talk about what happened. A therapist—it’s very different.”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "I only came back to my senses after some weeks. A certain dulness had come over me, and the 'Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse.' Still the idea of self-murder never returned to my mind. Death did not seem to want me. "In the meanwhile, my story, in veiled words, had appeared in every newspaper. It was too dainty a bit of gossip not to spread about at once like wild fire. "Even the letter Teleny had written to me before his suicide—stating that his debts, which had been paid by my mother, had been the cause of his infidelity—had got to be public property. "Then, Heaven having revealed my iniquity, the earth rose against me; for if Society does not ask you to be intrinsically good, it asks you to make a goodly show of morality, and, above all, to avoid scandals. Therefore a famous clergyman—a saintly man—preached at that time an edifying sermon, which began with the following text:— "'His remembrance shall perish from the the earth, and he shall have no name in the street.' "And he ended it, saying,— "'He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of the world.' "Whereupon all Teleny's friends, the Zophars, the Eliphazes, and the Bildads uttered a loud Amen!" "And Briancourt and your mother?" "Oh, I promised to tell you her adventures! I may do so some other time. They are well worth hearing." End of Volume II The Kreutzer Sonata Leo Tolstoy VENUS IN FURS. “Place thy foot upon thy slave, Oh thou, half of hell, half of dreams; Among the shadows, dark and grave, Thy extended body softly gleams.” And—so on. This time I really got beyond the first stanza. At her request I gave her the poem in the evening, keeping no copy. And now as I am writing this down in my diary I can only remember the first stanza. I am filled with a very curious sensation. I don’t believe that I am in love with Wanda; I am sure that at our first meeting, I felt nothing of the lightning-like flashes of passion. But I feel how her extraordinary, really divine beauty is gradually winding magic snares about me. It isn’t any spiritual sympathy which is growing in me; it is a physical subjection, coming on slowly, but for that reason more absolutely. I suffer under it more and more each day, and she—she merely smiles. * * * * * Without any provocation she suddenly said to me to-day: “You interest me. Most men are very commonplace, without verve or poetry. In you there is a certain depth and capacity for enthusiasm and a deep seriousness, which delight me. I might learn to love you.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  There is a difference of opinion about Patrick’s nationality, whether he was of Scotch, or British, or French extraction. He begins his Confession: "I, Patrick, a sinner, the rudest and the least of all the faithful, and the most contemptible with the multitude (Ego Patricius, peccator, rusticissimus et minimus omnium fidelium et contemptibilissimus apud plurimos, or, according to another reading, contemptibilis sum apud plurimos), had for my father Calpornus (or Calphurnius), a deacon (diaconum, or diaconem), the son of Potitus (al. Photius), a presbyter (filium quondam Potiti presbyteri), who lived in the village of Bannavem (or Banaven) of Tabernia; for he had a cottage in the neighborhood where I was captured. I was then about sixteen years old; but I was ignorant of the true God, and was led away into captivity to Hibernia." Bannavem of Tabernia is, perhaps Banavie in Lochaber in Scotland (McLauchlan); others fix the place of his birth in Kilpatrick (i.e. the cell or church of Patrick), near Dunbarton on the Clyde (Ussher, Butler, Maclear); others, somewhere in Britain, and thus explain his epithet "Brito" or "Briton" (Joceline and Skene); still others seek it in Armoric Gaul, in Boulogne (from Bononia), and derive Brito from Brittany (Lanigan, Moore, Killen, De Vinné). He does not state the instrumentality of his conversion. Being the son of a clergyman, he must have received some Christian instruction; but he neglected it till he was made to feel the power of religion in communion with God while in slavery. "After I arrived in Ireland," he says (ch. 6), "every day I fed cattle, and frequently during the day I prayed; more and more the love and fear of God burned, and my faith and my spirit were strengthened, so that in one day I said as many as a hundred prayers, and nearly as many in the night." He represents his call and commission as coming directly from God through a vision, and alludes to no intervening ecclesiastical authority or episcopal consecration. In one of the oldest Irish MSS., the Book of Durrow, he is styled a presbyter. In the Epistle to Coroticus, he appears more churchly and invested with episcopal power and jurisdiction. It begins: "Patricius, peccator indoctus, Hiberione (or Hyberione) constitutus episcopus, certissime reor, a Deo accepi id quod sum: inter barbaras utique gentes proselytus et profuga, ob amorem Dei." (So according to the text of Haddan & Stubbs, p. 314; somewhat different in Migne, Patrol. LIII. 814; and in Ebrard, p. 505.) But the letter does not state where or by whom he was consecrated.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "The guard appeared at the door, and not only ordered, but ignominously turned me out of that carriage, just as if I had been a second Col. Baker. "I was so ashamed of myself, so mortified, that my stomach—which had always been delicate—was actually quite upset by the shock I had received, therefore no sooner had the train started than I began to be, first uncomfortable, then to feel a rumbling pain, and at last a pressing want, so much so that I could hardly sit down on my seat, squeeze as much as I could, and I dared not move for fear of the consequences. "After some time the train stopped for a few minutes, no guard came to open the carriage door, I managed to get up, no guard was to be seen, no place where I could ease myself. I was debating what to do when the train started off. "The only occupant of the carriage was an old gentleman, who—having told me to make myself comfortable, or rather to put myself at my ease—went off to sleep and snored like a top; I might as well have been alone. "I formed several plans for unburdening my stomach, which was growing more unruly every moment, but only one or two seemed to answer; and yet I could not put them into execution, for my lady-love only a few carriages off was every now and then looking out of the window, so it would never have done if, instead of my face, she all at once saw—my full moon. I could not for the same reason use my hat as what the Italians call—a comodina , especially as the wind was blowing strongly towards her. "The train stopped again, but only for three minutes. What could one do in three minutes, especially with a stomach-ache like mine? Another stoppage; two minutes. By dint of squeezing I now felt that I could wait a little longer. The train moved and then once more came to a standstill. Six minutes. Now was my chance, or never. I jumped out. "It was a kind of country station, apparently a junction, and everybody was getting out. "The guard bawled out: 'Les voyageurs pour —— en voiture.' "Where is the lavatory?' I enquired of him. "He wished to shove me into the train. I broke loose, and asked the same question of another official, "'There,' said he, pointing to the water-closet, 'but be quick.' "I ran towards it, I rushed into it without looking where I went. I violently pushed open the door.

• From Between Us

  It reminds you how to behave in the network, but it does not push you out. One reason Didi’s mom shames him in front of the researcher is that Didi’s behavior reflects on his mom. It is his mom’s responsibility to make sure Didi “has shame.” When Didi does show shame, this reflects well on the mom. Shame strengthens the bonds between people, rather than reflecting a potential threat to them. In another study, Fung and her colleague Eva Chian-Hui Chen followed seven middle-class Taiwanese families. The study began when the focal child was two and a half years old, and continued until this child reached age four. A researcher visited the families every six months, and systematically videotaped spontaneous interactions between the family and the child. During the more than a hundred hours of video-recorded family interaction, the researchers identified instances of shame more than three times an hour. In the great majority of cases, the parent marks a transgression, thus trying to provoke shame in the focal child. Taiwanese moms in Fung and Chen’s research often zoomed in on shame-sharing, as in the example below where four- year-old Axin and his two-year-old brother refuse to go to sleep, even after their mother told them it was time for their nap: Mother says, “School master has said that we should follow fixed work and rest routines, otherwise School master will reproach us.” [Both children] wonder if School master will reproach her. Mother answers: “That day, wasn’t School master reproaching . . . me?” Both children ask why. Mother replies, “She said I did not raise you two well, and that I did not have you sleep during nap time, right?” If her children misbehave, it will be the mother who is blamed for not teaching and raising them well. Implicit is the shame-sharing: the child’s shameful behavior reflects badly on their parents and family. Many parents articulate the shame-sharing, saying, “You made your mother lose face” or “such a disobedient child.” But perhaps more important is that, through invoking an authority figure—the schoolmaster in the case of Axin’s mom—the bond between the child and the parent remains intact. It is not the mom rejecting the child, but the child and the mom jointly having to meet external demands. There is a basic alliance between the child and their parents (or relatives). This alliance makes for the wider impact of norm violations, but also means that shame is not nearly as threatening as it is in Western cultures. Shame among the Minangkabau and in Taiwan calls for remedying what is wrong, but it does not challenge the bond between a child and their most important caregivers. Having shame is seen as a virtue: it reveals that you have a sense of social norms, and it will prevent you from violating these norms. Having shame keeps you attentive to how others see you, but in so doing, keeps you from the misconduct that would have led to social exclusion.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I was too tired to over think it. I went upstairs and locked the door to my bedroom. It still didn’t feel safe. Picking up my pillow and blanket, I carried them to my bathroom, locked that door, too, and lay down on the mat. My sleep was that of a woman who had just been raped. [image file=image13.jpg] I woke up and stared at my ceiling. Something was wrong … something … but I couldn’t figure out what it was. A weight pressed down on my chest. The kind that comes when you feel dread, but you can’t quite place your finger on why. Five minutes, twenty minutes, two minutes, seven minutes, an hour. I have no idea how long I lay like that, staring up at the ceiling … not thinking. Then I rolled onto my side and a nurse’s word came back to me: discomfort. Yes, I felt discomforted. Why? Because I was raped. My mind recoiled. I’d once seen a neighbor boy pour salt on a snail. I’d watched in horror as its tiny body disintegrated on the pavement. I’d run home crying, asking my mother why something we seasoned our food with had the power to kill a snail. She’d told me that salt absorbs all of the water that their bodies are made of, so they essentially dry out or suffocate because they can’t breathe. That’s what I felt like. Everything had changed in a day. I didn’t want to acknowledge it, but it was there—between my legs, in my mind … oh God, on my couch. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. I rolled over, reaching for the inhaler in my nightstand and knocking the lamp over. It crashed to the floor as I struggled to sit up. When had I even come back to my bed? I’d gone to sleep in the bathroom, on the floor. A second later, Dr Asterholder came crashing through my bedroom door. He looked from me to the lamp, then back to me again. “Where is it?” he barked. I pointed, and he was across the room in two steps. I watched him rip open the drawer and rummage around until he found it. I grabbed it from his hand, biting down on the spacer and feeling the albuterol fill my lungs a second later. He waited until I’d caught my breath to pick up the lamp. I was embarrassed. Not just about the asthma attack, but about the night before. That I’d let him stay. “Are you all right?” I nodded without looking at him. “From the asthma?” Yes. As if sensing my discomfort, he took leave of my room, closing the door behind him. It jerked into place as if it didn’t sit against the seam so well anymore. I’d locked the door the night before, and he’d managed to get in with a hard shove of his shoulder. That didn’t make me feel very good.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  At this, turning down the clothes, and viewing the field of battle by the glimmer of a dying taper, he saw plainly my thighs, shift, and sheet, all stained with what he readily took for a virgin effusion, proceeding from his last half penetration: convinced, and transported at which, nothing could equal his joy and exultation. The illusion was complete, no other conception entered his head, but that of his having been at work upon an unopened mine; which idea, upon so strong an evidence, redoubled at once his tenderness for me, and his ardour for breaking it wholly up. Kissing me then with the utmost rapture, he comforted me, and begged my pardon for the pain he had put me to: observing withal, that it was only a thing in course; but the worst was certainly past, and that with a little courage and constancy, I should get it once well over, and never after experience any thing but the greatest pleasure. By little and little I suffered myself to be prevailed on, and giving, as it were, up to the point of him, I made my thighs, insensibly spreading them, yield him liberty of access, which improving, he got a little within me, when by a well managed reception I worked the female screw so nicely, that I kept him from the easy mid-channel direction, and by dexterous wreathing and contortions, creating an artificial difficulty of entrance, made him win it inch by inch, with the most laborious struggles, I all the while sorely complaining: till at length, with might and main, winding his way in, he got it completely home, and giving my virginity, as he thought, the coup le grace, furnished me with the cue of setting up a terrible outcry, whilst he, triumphant and like a cock clapping his wings over his down-trod mistress, pursued his pleasure: which presently rose, in virtue of this idea of a complete victory, to a pitch that made me soon sensible of his melting period; whilst I now lay acting the deep wounded, breathless, frightened, undone, no longer maid.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Would not the slightest accident bring us together again? And then—? "I tried to believe that the power he had over me had vanished, and that it was not possible for him to acquire it again. Then, to make assurance doubly sure, I resolved to cut him dead the first time we met. Moreover I was in hopes he would leave the town—for some time at least, if not for ever. "Not long after my return, I was with my mother in a box at the theatre, when all at once the door opened and Teleny appeared in the doorway. "On seeing him I felt myself grow pale and then red, my knees seemed to be giving way, my heart began to beat with such mighty thumps that my breast was ready to burst. For a moment, I felt all my good resolutions give way; then, loathing myself for being so weak, I snatched up my hat, and—scarcely bowing to the young man—I rushed out of the box like a madman, leaving my mother to apologize for my strange behaviour. No sooner was I out than I felt drawn back, and I almost returned to beg his forgiveness. Shame alone prevented me from doing so. "When I re-entered the box, my mother, vexed and astonished, asked me what had made me act in such a boorish way to the musician, whom everybody welcomed and made much of. "'Two months ago, if I remember rightly,' said she, 'there was hardly another pianist like him; and now, because the press has turned against him, he is even below being bowed to.' "'The press is against him?' quoth I, with uplifted eyebrows. "'What! have you not read how bitterly he has been criticized of late?' "'No. I have had other matters to think about than pianists.' "'Well, of late he seems to have been out of sorts. His name has appeared on the bills several times, and then he has not played; whilst at the last concerts he went through his pieces in a most humdrum, lifeless way, so very different from his former brilliant execution.' "I felt as if a hand was griping at my heart within my breast, still I tried to keep my features as indifferent as possible. "'I am sorry for him,' said I, listlessly; 'but then, I daresay the ladies will console him for the taunts of the press, and thus blunt the points of their arrows.'

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Unless it is imperative that you stop what you’re doing right away because of life-threatening consequences (risking arrest, injury to another person, or exposure to AIDS, for example), it’s pointless to attempt such a moratorium until an internal consensus is reached. Until then, the most effective approach is to decide to continue doing whatever you feel compelled to do, and to do it mindfully. Sometimes even a modest increase in consciousness brings people face to face with how their behavior actually makes them feel. For instance, those who are sexually driven often become so “spaced out” that they have little or no awareness of what they’re feeling before and during a compulsive episode. Consciousness typically reveals a host of unpleasant emotions wrapped up in the turn-on, most commonly fear, hatred, sadness, and shame. As these unpleasant feelings are recognized, they serve as push motivators, prompting the person to pause and consider a new path. TAPPING THE POWER OF IMAGINATIONYour journey through the gray zone will yield maximum rewards if you use your mind’s eye to perceive possibilities that don’t yet fully exist. This may be difficult if you’ve learned to trust only what you can verify through reason or the senses. Great discoveries—whether in science, the arts, or personal life—require imaginative leaps in which the discoverer moves beyond typical modes of thought and perception. With a little practice and patience almost anyone can learn to apply the gifts of imagination to erotic transitions. There are two requirements. First, clear some time to imagine. Second, resist the urge to criticize the products of your imagination prematurely. And remember, when judged by normal standards of productivity, imaginative pursuits look suspiciously like play. Those who think they must always be accomplishing something are often reluctant to let their imaginations roam freely. Try this experiment. When you’re not preoccupied or in a hurry (is there such a time?) find a quiet, private place to sit or recline. Allow your breathing to slow as it deepens. With your eyes closed, scan your body from head to toe, allowing each group of muscles to relax. As you inhale, notice sensations of calm and warmth flowing through your nostrils, filling your lungs, and radiating throughout your entire body. Each time you exhale, let tension and worry melt away. Don’t be concerned if you’re easily distracted. Each time your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the soothing rhythm of your breath. Now recall an especially positive and fulfilling sexual experience. Maybe you’ll revisit one of the peaks you’ve remembered before, or perhaps a different memory will surface. Remind yourself that the most satisfying experiences are not necessarily the wildest. Savor the feeling of actually being fulfilled. Linger over the simple details that brought you pleasure. Reexperience how you felt about yourself during and afterward. Vividly reliving experiences of sexual satisfaction helps clarify your goals and strengthens your motivations.

• From Between Us

  And how much did Ellen, a Belgian middle school teacher, understand when Ahmet, her student of Turkish descent, cast his eyes down, and was submissive and polite after she had expressed her suspicion that it was he who had left a mess in the school library? Ellen thought Ahmet’s shameful behaviors confirmed that he had been up to no good. He had to be guilty of something, or he would have responded with indignation, she thinks. Would he not have protested if she had treated him unfairly? But Ahmet’s shame-like behaviors were a way of paying respect to his teacher, rather than a form of penance, as Ellen assumed. Ahmet focused on protecting his relationship with Ellen, rather than asserting his right to be fairly treated (as perhaps a Belgian-majority kid would). Ahmet’s frame of reference was diametrically opposed to Ellen’s, leading to unfortunate inferences on her side that Ahmet was not to be trusted. Ironically, the boy’s emotions had as their sole intention to restore the relationship with the teacher, but this intention was lost in the encounter between different cultures. Coates’s, Didi’s, and Ahmet’s emotions can only be fully understood from the respective roles these emotions play in their contexts. To grasp these emotions, it is not sufficient to know only what to call them; it is necessary to understand what they do in the context that serves as their frame of reference. Even Terry Gross, for many in the U.S. the cultural emblem of empathy, almost failed to grasp what it meant to the young Ta-Nehisi Coates when his teacher shouted at him in front of the class. Her remark that shouting is “something that teachers do,” was the beginning of a suggestion that it was no big deal, and that intense feelings of anger might not be warranted. Maybe so, the adult Coates explains (“I know, you are laughing, it is funny when you have never been in the environment”), unless in your position, in your culture, that shouting takes away the very last thing that you were left with: your dignity. Maybe so, unless physical threats are the only way to regain at least part of your dignity: if you didn’t vehemently respond to your teacher’s shouting, your peers around you would have witnessed you being a pushover. Similarly, anybody assuming that critical parents raise maladjusted children—that shaming a child is unhealthy—would miss the special meaning shame may have in a cultural context in which the relationship between parent and child is interdependent. When Didi feels shame, he likely feels good about himself, because everybody in the relationship feels good. Didi was raised as a perfectly adjusted little boy: adjusted to a cultural context in which the child’s shame helps prevent their mom from losing face.

• From How to Be a Great Lover (1999)

  The other reason for not giving oral sex to their lovers, women tell me, is that besides gagging, they have issues with swallowing. To swallow his semen or not to swallow it has been an ongoing drama for many women, for as long as people have been practicing oral sex. First and foremost, you should know one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt—if you don’t want to swallow, you don’t have to. Not swallowing won’t make you a bad lover, nor will it in any way diffuse the pleasure your lover receives when he orgasms. A man who makes you believe otherwise does not deserve your gift of oral sex. Period. One woman, a sex therapist herself now in her mid-fifties, told me that she always swallowed when performing oral sex with her husband. For some reason, she no longer likes to swallow and doesn’t. It’s up to you, ladies. Whether you want to swallow or not, I think it only fair to tell you that men do find it a turn-on to see a woman swallow their semen. More than that, perhaps, they say that being allowed to ejaculate into a woman’s mouth gives them an overwhelming feeling of acceptance, specialness, and intimacy. For this reason, it would be kinder, should you not want him to come in your mouth, to refrain from using words like “grotesque” and “disgusting” when offering an explanation as to why. Imagine how you would feel if he were to use words to that effect to describe why he didn’t want to taste you. Secret from Lou’s Archives I happen to have my own personal theory as to why the swallowing of semen can be challenging. First, immediately upon ejaculating, semen gels as a natural buffer against the vaginal environment, so it has a texture some women find unpleasant. Second, it is the nature of sperm to travel uphill. The little devils can’t help themselves. Swallowing is a downward action, and these guys are doing everything in their power to go…up. As a form of compromise, many women allow their lovers to ejaculate into their mouths and then let the semen drip out the sides, rather than swallow it. The Seal and The Ring technique, which we’ll discuss further on in the chapter, allows you to use your hand to catch his semen and keep it there, without him even knowing it. From his angle, it will appear as if he came in your mouth. There are plenty of other alternatives as well. One woman, an administrative assistant from San Francisco, said, “Just before he comes, I pull him out of my mouth and rub him alongside my cheek, using my warm and wet hand to keep up the contact.” A male seminar attendee from New York gave me this suggestion: “My wife doesn’t like me to come in her mouth, so right before I orgasm, I lightly tap her, giving her the signal. This way she knows when to pull me out.”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  About that time a very wise woman said to me, “Have you ever told Jonathan that once you used to be afraid, too?” The idea seemed far-out to me at the time, but the next time he came in crying and sweaty from having run away again, I could see that he felt shamed at having failed me, or some image he and I had created in his head of mother/woman. This image of woman being able to handle it all was bolstered by the fact that he lived in a household with three strong women, his lesbian parents and his forthright older sister. At home, for Jonathan, power was clearly female. And because our society teaches us to think in an either/or mode — kill or be killed, dominate or be dominated — this meant that he must either surpass or be lacking. I could see the implications of this line of thought. Consider the two western classic myth/models of mother/son relationships: Jocasta/Oedipus, the son who fucks his mother, and Clytemnestra/Orestes, the son who kills his mother. It all felt connected to me. I sat down on the hallway steps and took Jonathan on my lap and wiped his tears. “Did I ever tell you about how I used to be afraid when I was your age?” I will never forget the look on that little boy’s face as I told him the tale of my glasses and my after-school fights. It was a look of relief and total disbelief, all rolled into one. It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn’t feel, or if he wins. I thought about all this one year later when Beth and Jonathan, ten and nine, were asked by an interviewer how they thought they had been affected by being children of a feminist. Jonathan said that he didn’t think there was too much in feminism for boys, although it certainly was good to be able to cry if he felt like it and not to have to play football if he didn’t want to. I think of this sometimes now when I see him practising for his Brown Belt in Tae Kwon Do.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  We refuse to give up the artificial distances between us, or to examine our real differences for creative exchange. I’m too different for us to communicate. Meaning, I must establish myself as not-you. And the road to anger is paved with our unexpressed fear of each other’s judgment. We have not been allowed to experience each other freely as Black women in america; we come to each other coated in myths, stereotypes, and expectations from the outside, definitions not our own. “You are my reference group, but I have never worked with you.” How are you judging me? As Black as you? Blacker than you? Not Black enough? Whichever, I am going to be found wanting in some way … We are Black women, defined as never-good-enough. I must overcome that by becoming better than you. If I expect enough from myself, then maybe I can become different from what they say we are, different from you. If I become different enough, then maybe I won’t be a “nigger bitch” anymore. If I make you different enough from me, then I won’t need you so much. I will become strong, the best, excel in everything, become the very best because I don’t dare to be anything else. It is my only chance to become good enough to become human. If I am myself, then you cannot accept me. But if you can accept me, that means I am what you would like to be, and then I’m not “the real thing.” But then neither are you. WILL THE REAL BLACK WOMAN PLEASE STAND UP? We cherish our guilty secret, buried under exquisite clothing and expensive makeup and bleaching creams (yes, still!) and hair straighteners masquerading as permanent waves. The killer instinct toward any one of us who deviates from the proscribed cover is precise and deadly. Acting like an insider and feeling like the outsider, preserving our self-rejection as Black women at the same time as we’re getting over — we think. And political work will not save our souls, no matter how correct and necessary that work is. Yet it is true that without political work we cannot hope to survive long enough to effect any change. And self-empowerment is the most deeply political work there is, and the most difficult.