Shame

Passages

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

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• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  This is how Peter Farb and George Armelagos summarized commensality at the beginning and end of their book on the anthropology of eating: In all societies, both simple and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships…. Once the anthropologist finds out where, when, and with whom the food is eaten, just about everything else can be inferred about the relations among the society’s members…. To know what, where, how, when, and with whom people eat is to know the character of their society.* Similarly, Lee Edward Klosinski reviewed the significant cross-cultural anthropological and sociological literature on food and eating and concluded: Sharing food is a transaction which involves a series of mutual obligations and which initiates an interconnected complex of mutuality and reciprocity. Also, the ability of food to symbolize these relationships, as well as to define group boundaries, surfaced as one of its unique properties….food exchanges are basic to human interaction. Implicit in them is a series of obligations to give, receive and repay. These transactions involve individuals in matrices of social reciprocity, mutuality and obligation. Also, food exchanges are able to act as symbols of human interaction. Eating is a behavior which symbolizes feelings and relationships, mediates social status and power, and expresses the boundaries of group identity.** What Jesus’ parable advocates, therefore, is an open commensality, an eating together without using table as a miniature map of society’s vertical discriminations and lateral separations. The social challenge of such equal or egalitarian commensality is the parable’s most fundamental danger and most radical threat. It is only a story, of course, but it is one that focuses its egalitarian challenge on society’s miniature mirror, the table, as the place where bodies meet to eat. Since, moreover, Jesus lived out his own parable, the almost predictable counteraccusation to such open commensality would be immediate: Jesus is a glutton, a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners. He makes, in other words, no appropriate distinctions and discriminations. And since women were present, especially unmarried women, the accusation would be that Jesus eats with whores, the standard epithet of denigration for any female outside appropriate male control. All of those terms—tax collectors, sinners, whores—are in this case derogatory terms for those with whom, in the opinion of the name callers, open and free association should be avoided. The Kingdom of God as a process of open commensality, of a nondiscriminating table depicting in miniature a nondiscriminating society, clashes fundamentally with honor and shame, those basic values of ancient Mediterranean culture and society. Most of American society in the twentieth century is used to individualism , with guilt and innocence as sanctions, rather than to groupism , with honor and shame as sanctions.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Beverly snorted. I get mud all over Bobby’s truck flaps, and believe you me, delicious don’t figure in. As insults go, it was weak, but Beverly’s facial expression—like she was smelling something—told me to put poetry right back where I’d drug it out from. Shortly after this, my junior high principal had actually warned me that any girl aiming to be a poet was doomed to become—I shit you not—no more than a common prostitute. And so the fantasy went underground, though in high school I’d still hitchhiked two hours to Houston to buy (coincidentally) Bill Knott’s first book, which gave me the dim hope that somewhere, a solitary madman knew just how I felt. Sitting before a living, nose-blowing Bill Knott made all my writer heroes real. It shot voltage through my own poetic leanings, and inside me, some image of myself as a black-turtleneck-clad poet came creaking back to life. The festival must’ve had fifty or sixty podiums, and behind every one stood a poet with a teaching job and a book to offload. They were real, and their ranks looked open. But how to get there? The small U-shaped bar I tended started to feel like a locked corral I needed to jump out of, but which way other than just not here. At the same conference, an unlikely first teacher showed up—a rusty-handed Mississippian named Etheridge Knight, whose debut book had been written in the pen. He was lumbering and black, with a scraggly mustache and a soul patch under his chin. His jaw was lumpy and uneven, with patches of white skin edged in pink—ragged and tear-shaped, as if acid flung in his face had eaten away his color. He spoke of poetry as an oral art (this was pre-poetry-slam America). Without pages, he half-sang the folk tale of Shine, a porter on the Titanic strong enough to swim to safety. the banker’s daughter ran naked on the deck with her pink tits trembling and her pants roun her neck screaming Shine Shine save poor me and I’ll give you all the pussy a black boy needs— how Shine said now pussy is good and that’s no jive but you got to swim not fuck to stay alive— And Shine swam on Shine swam on— This language both rocked me back and echoed how Daddy talked. I mean, if he thought I was persisting in something I couldn’t get done, he’d say, You keep trying to thread a noodle up that wildcat’s ass; if he thought somebody was poor, He couldn’t buy a piss ant a wrestling jacket. Back in Minneapolis, I took the low-tipping day shift just so I could rathole my notebook by the beer spout and scribble.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  [6] 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 9 For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not, I but the grace of God that is with me. 11 Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe . The whole unit is framed between the terms proclaim and believe as repeated in 15:1 and 11, but it is obvious that Christ’s appearance to Paul himself in 15:8–11 is not part of his received tradition. One must also allow for some redactional organization, whereby Paul concludes with “all the apostles” in 15:7b in order to prepare for himself as “least of the apostles” in 15.9. But granted that, 15:3b–7 is certified as tradition received by Paul (15:3a) and thence received by the Corinthians (15:1b). Within 15:3b–7 I look first at the parallel phrases about death and resurrection in 15:3b+4b and then at the list of appearance in 15:5–7. In 15:3b+4b the twin phrases “died for our sins” and “raised on the third day” are cited as “in accordance with the scriptures.” The phrase “for our sins” connects, as Koester has noted, with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 52–53 (1994a:553): But he was wounded for our sins, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord handed him over for our sins. (Isaiah 53:5–6) As you will recall from Chapter 23, the Common Meal Tradition saw Jesus as the Suffering Servant through its use of the noun “child/servant” (pais ) in Didache 9–10 from Isaiah 52:13 and the verb “handed over” in 1 Corinthians 10–11 from Isaiah 53:6, 12. Since the phrase “handed over for our sins” in 1 Corinthians 15:3b also links with Isaiah 53:5–6, Koester is surely correct to link the Common Meal Tradition and the Suffering Servant. But he goes beyond that general conjunction: “There is strong evidence that Paul knew such a story of Jesus’ suffering and death—not as historical information but as a story that was told ‘according to the scriptures,’ and a story that made Jesus present for the participants in the celebration of the eucharist” (1994b:553, my italics). Did Paul know such a story? First, Koester speaks about the Bible’s “suffering righteous” and of Jesus’ “suffering and death.” I insist that it is never an issue of persecution (by whatever name) but a balanced dyad of persecution-vindication (by whatever names). Paul, therefore, certainly knew that narrative pattern . It is, in fact, the dyadic structure of 1 Corinthians 15:3b+4b, now articulated as death-resurrection.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  What’s your objection to the medication? I’m worried about the side effects. Your addiction? she says. She gives me a watery smile. She finds my addiction droll. That and priapism, I say. Since a raging hard-on is one side effect they’d mentioned from the sleeping pill, I’m throwing her a bone, so to speak, and her face goes all eager. She says, Do you feel there’s something missing from your body? Funny you say that, I say. I do. Some absence. That’s just how I’d describe it. She waits for me to say more, but I can’t think how to elaborate without bursting into lunatic laughter, so I try another tack. The big problem when I came in was my head, I say. If there had been a transplant list, I’d have signed on. Does this head of yours urge you to hurt yourself? she asks. (Is it paranoia that causes me to hear enthusiasm?) I tell her no. I feel like an asshole about the whole thing. I want to get better. I want to work on my marriage and be a better mom. I want to stay sober. Rubbing her hands together again, she asks, Not even any fantasies about suicide? Are you cutting yourself ? I never did that, I say. Never? she says, adding, Most people who set out to hurt themselves rely on self-destructive acts for relief. She sounds disappointed. My relief is that I didn’t hurt myself, I say. My thinking was skewed by years of drinking—there’s your destructive behavior. You’re the one who told me alcohol’s a depressant. Any fantasies about hurting your child? Hurting your husband? she asks, probing like a dentist for a raw nerve. I’ve already done that, I say. You seem upset. I’m in a mental institution. Less than a month after a suicide attempt. Suicidal gesture. (You pick up the distinct lingo your chart needs pretty fast in those hallways.) How are you prepared to manage your life any better? The antidepressants have obviously kicked in— They should’ve kicked in before you arrived. Well, then I’m rested for the first time in years. I ask people for help all the time. All I do is ask for help. I make, like, five calls a day to people in recovery to talk about how I feel. I talk to all the nurses. Yet you think you don’t belong here. I belonged here when I came. Now I’m taking up somebody else’s spot. I wait till the end of the session to show her the Radcliffe letter (though with a shrink I trusted, I’d have gone bounding in like a puppy). She cocks a waxed eyebrow, saying that the treatment team will judge whether I’m able to go to the orientation. She’s concerned that my regular therapist is still out of the country. You’ve been in touch with her. She’ll be back by Labor Day, I say, and I’m on the mend. But you have me, she says.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Whitbread stares into some decades’-old distance, saying, The old man was on a horse again the next morning. Infuriated my mother. People in New York were sending wreaths to the house, and he was galloping across a field. Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you’re born to, which opposes what little I’ve garnered about comportment. I’m bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A’s you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they’ll try—without letup—to break you. Where I come from, house guests have to know you’ve sweated over a stove, for sweat is how care is shown. At the Whitbreads’, preparations are both slapdash and immaculate. You toss some melba toast on a plate next to a fragrant St. André triple-crème cheese, or on Christmas Eve, half a pound of caviar casually flipped into a silver urn. It’s taken me so much effort just to do as medium-shitty as I’ve heretofore done. Just to drop out of college, stay alive, and have my teeth taken care of. I take another sip of port, which slides down as if greased. Warren seems thousands of miles away, and why has he kept all this from me? Here’s Mrs. Whitbread in her dress for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Some polo connection? They’ve stopped explaining why they were various places. Here’s Mr. Whitbread flanked by briefcase-carrying aides, striding confidently up the steps of the Supreme Court. Warren says, I remember sitting behind you, and you pulled out some notecards. You were there? Mr. Whitbread asks. Mrs. Whitbread looks exasperated. Of course, darling. I thought they should experience it. Warren goes on, And your client said, What are you doing? Mr. Whitbread tosses some nuts into his mouth, saying, I suppose I told him I was preparing my argument. And he said, Now? (Working for The Washington Post at the time, Geoffrey Wolff—that frailest of bridges between Warren’s parents and me—later claimed Mr. Whitbread was the only man he ever saw talk down to the Supreme Court.) At dinner, I’d seen my lover’s fine jaw flex as he studied his plate, and I’d felt the liquid warmth of our time together evaporate as he braced himself for his father’s scrutiny. Now I long for some definitive gesture to free him, to throw my port glass into the fireplace and stalk out with a poor kid’s piety, riding off with him in his Mazda into a life with nary a polo divet to stomp. But the house’s disabling comfort saps resolve. And by the time we’re in the library, I’ve begun to breathe in the parents’ gentility. The conversation is so adroit—the nonchalance so juicy—I lap it up as Tiger did our fatty scraps, steel bowls rattling on the kitchen tiles. I want to believe I’m at home with these composed individuals. They’re liberal in their politics, after all.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Maybe I reached for his hand. Maybe I gave him shit for being conventional. My methods for clinging to him were varied and pitiful. Eventually, I needed him badly enough that I said whatever I had to, push him away. Counterphobic, a shrink once called it, meaning I run fast toward any event I suspect might be excruciating. I’m not preppie enough for you, I say. His silence holds as we drive. I amplify my rhetoric and volume. Maybe I should be wearing a kilt with a fucking gold safety pin, I say. He parks the car outside our apartment. As he’s locking up, he says—color blazing high on his flared cheekbones—And you quit your job. With your school loans and your father sick. Are you crazy? This is a buzzword with me, since deep down I know I’m crazy, my chief fear being that everybody’ll find out. So I do the only thing I can think of: I run. I run onto the sidewalk and drop to my knees, sobbing like a banshee. A bratty move, but Warren takes the bait and comes to help me up. Then a few things happen in an order I can’t recall. He asks me please to go inside. I start to vomit in the snow—three cognacs in those days being a heavy dose. A policeman shows up to check out the seedy scene, and from Warren’s arms, I jabber, I’m fine, Officer, just too much to drink. My boyfriend’s taking me home. Back in the apartment, I lie in bed next to him, circled by the night’s chaos as if by gnats. Our fight’s antithetical to Warren’s penchant for order and routine—his alphabetical file folders and meticulously typed drafts, the paper clip always in the same spot. (How like my daddy that was.) If he hates a book on page one, he’ll nonetheless finish it, for he’s made the commitment. And I hope he’ll commit to me that way and be as loath to leave me undone. I lie there pondering his fiscal prickliness, wholly mysterious to me. Back home, nobody had any money, so we swapped the same few bucks back and forth with open hands. (Those without money don’t grasp right off having to discipline yourself against sycophants.) Listening to his even breath, I sense the oppressive weight of my old self inside me pressing to run wild again. My old mother I’m trying to keep in. Snow pecks at the window screens. And then the sound of our upstairs neighbor playing the ukelele—plunka plunka plunka. There is no instrument goofier nor more insidious. The guy can play for hours, and while I can sack out during a train wreck, Warren heaves over and swears. He reaches his arm out and flips on the white noise machine that blocks all sound. It makes a cocoon of rushing noise meant to mimic an air conditioner or waterfall. To me, it sounds like the sucking of a dentist’s drain.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  As you reach adolescence, you begin to take care of the garden on your own. And you may find that your family and culture have planted some beautiful, healthy things that are thriving in a well-tended garden. And you may notice some things you want to change. Maybe the strategies you were taught for cultivating the garden are inefficient, so you need to find different ways of taking care of it so that it will thrive (that’s in chapter 3). Maybe the seeds that were planted were not the kind of thing that will thrive in your particular garden, so you need to find something that’s a better fit for you (that’s in chapters 4 and 5). Some of us get lucky with our land and what gets planted. We have healthy and thriving gardens from the earliest moments of our awareness. And some of us get stuck with some pretty toxic crap in our gardens, and we’re left with the task of uprooting all the junk and replacing it with something healthier, something we choose for ourselves. Your physical body—including your genitals—is one part of the basic hardware of your sexuality, the plot of land. Your brain and your environment are the rest of the hardware, and they’re the subject of chapters 2 and 3. what it is, not what it meansOlivia used her idea about her hormones, her “masculine” genitals, and her high sexual interest as a shield against the cultural criticisms that said she was… well, all kinds of things for which she “ought to be ashamed.” A slut. A nymphomaniac. Trying to “get attention,” “get a man,” or “control people” with her body—none of which were true, but all of which had been flung at her at various times in her life. The world had tried to convince her that her sexuality was toxic, dangerous to both herself and the people around her. She had fought hard against these messages, in defense of her own sexual wellbeing. The shield of “It’s my hormones, so it’s natural” was an important part of that defense. But as she absorbed the idea of “all the same parts, organized in different ways,” she didn’t need the shield anymore. She realized that the shield was actually blocking her off from other people, while “all the same parts” actively connected her with other people—it meant she wasn’t different or separate. She was the same—unique, but still connected in the continuum of human sexuality. This is what science can do for us, if we let it. It offers us an opportunity to lower our defenses and experience the ways that we are all connected.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  This tempting—and wrong—explanation for nonconcordance lines up neatly with various cultural misconceptions about women’s sexuality, like the Moral, Medical, and Media Messages that I described in chapter 5 and like the men-as-default myth. Like: Women have been socially programmed not to admit that they’re actually turned on by certain things (like violent sex or lesbian porn), so when they report their perceived arousal, they’re lying or in denial about their hidden desires, or possibly both. But what their genitals are doing is what’s really true. Daniel Bergner’s What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire begins with a description of nonconcordance research, followed immediately by a description of lie detector research. The conclusion readers are forced to draw is that women are lying—or possibly just in denial—about their arousal. Here’s how Amanda Hess summarized it in her review at Slate.com: “Straight women claimed to respond to straight sex more than they really did; lesbian women claimed to respond to straight sex far less than they really did; nobody admitted a response to the bonobo sex.”16 Note the “claimed” and the “really” and the “admitted.” Of course you know that women’s genitals were just reacting automatically to a sex-related cue—“This is a restaurant”—which has only a passing acquaintance with what a woman “really” likes or wants. Readers of What Do Women Want? didn’t get that lesson, though. They got Lubrication Error #2. Sex-positive feminists embrace the story that women’s bodies could be contradicting the outdated morality-based cultural narratives about women being “less sexual” than men: Look how much our genitals respond to stuff! Look how sexual we really are! Right? That’s an appealing story—as if our bodies are showing us a secret, wildly sexual self that could be into anything if we just gave ourselves the permission that our culture has been denying us for centuries! And after all, women have been subjected to oppressive cultural messages that made it shameful for them to acknowledge and pay affectionate attention to their own sexuality—that’s what chapter 5 was about. In fact this whole book is about paying attention to your own internal experience and trusting your body. And what could be more “trust your body” than “Your genitals are telling you what you like, even when you don’t know it”? Ah. It’s that word “like” that’s the problem. “Like.” Like, liking. But genital response isn’t liking. It’s learning. Your genitals are telling you something, and you can trust them. They’re telling you that something is sex-related, based on their experience of Pavlovian conditioning. “This a restaurant.” But that’s not the same as sexually appealing. Do, absolutely, trust your body. And interpret its signals accurately.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Chapter 4 was about how the context in this moment—your sense of safety in your life and your sense of wholeness in your relationship— affects your sexual pleasure. This chapter is about the large-scale, long-term context—the years of “no” messages—and the deep patterns of thinking and feeling they create, patterns that are reinforced and reiterated over decades of life. These patterns are emphatically not innate, but they were learned early. You began these lessons long before you were capable of thinking critically about whether you wanted them. And just as you learned them, you can unlearn them, if you want to, and replace them with new, healthier patterns that promote confidence, joy, satisfaction, and even ecstasy. We’ll start with three core cultural messages about women’s sexuality that my students grapple with as their established ideas about sex are challenged by the science: the Moral Message (you are evil), the Medical Message (you are diseased), and the Media Message (you are inadequate). Hardly anyone fully buys into any of these messages, but they are there, encroaching on our gardens, and the better we are at seeing them for what they are, the better we’ll be at weeding them out. Then I’ll talk about body self-criticism. This issue is so entrenched in Western culture that most women hardly notice how ubiquitous and how toxic it is. It’s so entrenched, in fact, that many women believe it’s actually important and beneficial. I’ll talk about the research that says otherwise. If the only change you make after reading this book is to reduce your body self-criticism, that alone will revolutionize your sexual wellbeing. Next, I’ll talk about another core emotion, like stress and attachment: disgust. Like body self-criticism, disgust is so entrenched in the sexual culture that it’s difficult to know what our sexual wellbeing would be like without it. But there’s growing evidence that disgust is impairing our sexual wellbeing, much as body self-criticism does, and there are things you can do to weed it out, if you want to. And that’s what I’ll talk about in the last section of this chapter. I’ll describe research-based strategies for creating positive change in both self-criticism and disgust: self-compassion, cognitive dissonance, and basic media literacy. The goal is to help you recognize what you’ve been taught, deliberately or otherwise, in order to help you choose whether to continue believing those things. You may well choose to keep a lot of what you learned—what matters is that you choose it, instead of letting your beliefs about your body and sex be chosen for you by the accident of the culture and family you were born into. When you take the time to notice your unchosen beliefs, and to say yes or no to those beliefs, you empower yourself to have the sexual wellbeing that fits you, custom made.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Every guy, at some point in his life, has the experience of wanting sex, wanting an erection, and the erection just isn’t there. In that moment, the erection (or lack of erection) isn’t a measure of his interest—he might even wake up the very next morning with an erection, when it’s nothing but an inconvenience. Guys sometimes wake up with erections, not because they’re turned on but because they’re waking up out of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and one of the things that happens during REM is “nocturnal penile tumescence.” Erections come and go throughout the sleep cycle, whether or not you’re dreaming about sex. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just an erection. It’s nonconcordant. Most boys, around adolescence, experienced unwanted genital response—sitting at the back of the bus, noticing a teacher’s body, his own ill-fitting pants, or even just general excitement about nonsexual things (driving a car, eating a donut, really anything) can activate the relevant pathways and generate the physiological response in a teenage boy. But genital response is not desire; response isn’t even pleasure. It is simply response. For everyone, regardless of their genitals. Just because a penis responds to a particular idea or sight or story doesn’t mean the person with the penis necessarily likes it or wants it. It just means it activated the relevant pathways—learning. “This is a restaurant.” (Remember: Men’s 50 percent overlap between genital response and arousal is highly statistically significant… but it’s still just 50 percent, and people vary.) Sometimes guys notice their bodies responding to something even when their brains are saying, “That’s Not Okay.” And they feel conflicted, because on the one hand it’s clearly sexual, but on the other hand it’s Not Okay. I’ll give you an example (and feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you’re triggered by sexual-assault-related things). When I was in college, I was hanging out with a group of guy friends, and one of them—I’ll call him Paul—told a story about a buddy of his. At the end of a party, when there were people sleeping or passed out all over the house, Paul found his buddy having sex with a girl who was passed out drunk, unresponsive, and clearly unaware of what was happening. I say “having sex with,” but the technical term is “raping.” And the buddy says, “Hey, you want to try this?” And my friend telling the story says, “Nah. We gotta go.” The reason that’s all he said, Paul told us, rather than, “What are you doing, you douchebag? Get the hell away from her,” was that he felt torn between his gut instinct that what his friend was doing was Seriously Not Okay and the automatic reaction of his body to the sight of sexual intercourse. He got an erection. He was horrified at himself, at the idea that any part of him might interpret this Seriously Not Okay situation as erotic.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  “I started when I was a teenager,” she told me. “I had seen porn on the internet, and I was curious about what I looked like, so I got a mirror and started pulling apart my labia so I could see my clit, and what can I say? It felt good, so I started masturbating.” It’s not the only way she masturbates. She also enjoys the “pulse” spray on her showerhead, she has a small army of vibrators at her command, and she spent several months teaching herself to have “breath” orgasms, coming without touching her body at all. This is the kind of thing women tell you when you’re a sex educator. She also told me that looking at her vulva convinced her that her sexuality was more like a man’s, because her clitoris is comparatively large—“like a baby carrot, almost”—which, she concluded, made her more masculine; it must be bigger because she had more testosterone, which in turn made her a horny lady. I told her, “Actually there’s no evidence of a relationship between an adult woman’s hormone levels, genital shape or size, and sexual desire.” “Are you sure about that?” she asked. “Well, some women have ‘testosterone-dependent’ desire,” I said, pondering, “which means they need a certain very low minimum of T, but that’s not the same as ‘high testosterone.’ And the distance between the clitoris and the urethra predicts how reliably orgasmic a woman is during intercourse, but that’s a whole other thing.1 I’d be fascinated to see a study that directly asked the question, but the available evidence suggests that variation in women’s genital shapes, sizes, and colors doesn’t predict anything in particular about her level of sexual interest.” “Oh,” she said. And that single syllable said to me: “Emily, you have missed the point.” Olivia is a psychology grad student—a former student of mine, an activist around women’s reproductive health issues, and now doing her own research, which is how we got started on this conversation—so I got excited about the opportunity to talk about the science. But with that quiet, “Oh,” I realized that this wasn’t about the science for Olivia. It was about her struggle to embrace her body and her sexuality just as it is, when so much of her culture was trying to convince her there is something wrong with her. So I said, “You know, your clitoris is totally normal. Everyone’s genitals are made of all the same parts, just organized in different ways. The differences don’t necessarily mean anything, they’re just varieties of beautiful and healthy. Actually,” I continued, “that could be the most important thing you’ll ever learn about human sexuality.” “Really?” she asked. “Why?” This chapter is the answer to that question. Medieval anatomists called women’s external genitals the “pudendum,” a word derived from the Latin pudere, meaning “to make ashamed.” Our genitalia were thus named “from the shamefacedness that is in women to have them seen.”2 Wait: What?

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (18:10–13) [A2] Closing frame from Luke: I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted. (18:14) For Luke that is an example parable of how—and how not—to pray. But, indeed, it would work well as such if any precise job descriptions were omitted and it simply said, “Two men went up to the temple to pray. The one, standing by himself, was praying thus:…The other one, standing far off,…” If, however, it is an example parable as interpreted by Luke, was it a challenge parable as intended by Jesus? On the one hand, the Pharisees were—despite that insistent and inaccurate libel of them in the New Testament—close to and revered by the ordinary people. What was wrong, such people might have asked, with thanking God one was not a sinner? The Pharisee does not congratulate himself for his own sanctity, but thanks God for his grace—so what is wrong with that? On the other hand, tax collectors had such a bad reputation that they were often combined—fairly or unfairly—in the cliché expression “tax collectors and sinners,” as in Luke 5:30; 7:34; 15:1–2. How repentant was that tax collector, those same people might have asked? Was he like that Zacchaeus in Luke’s very next chapter? He “was a chief tax collector and was rich,” and he did not simply pray for mercy. When he met Jesus he said: “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much” (19:8). But, once again, it is the traditional “good guy”—the Pharisee—who does badly and the traditional “bad guy”—the tax collector—who does well. That is a challenge to the normal expectations and presuppositions of Jesus’s contemporary fellow Jews—just as in the Good Samaritan challenge parable. That very same process of having traditional cultural expectations turned upside down—so that “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” (Mark 20:31; Matt. 19:30) and “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matt. 23:12; Luke 14:11)—reappears in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. It is provocative, by the way, that Jesus gave the poor man a name, Lazarus, and the rich man none. The opposite might have been culturally expected—either both should have been anonymous or, if one was named, then it should have been the rich man.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  In this third example, the competition is rather between specific leaders, but once again the context is that of a bread-and-fish eucharist. To appreciate its functions we must begin with an earlier scene. In John 18:17–18 and 25–27, at the High Priest’s house, Peter denied Jesus three times in association with a charcoal fire just before dawn: (1) The woman said to Peter, “You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” Now the slaves and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it and warming themselves. Peter also was standing with them and warming himself…. (2) Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. They asked him, “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.” (3) One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” Again Peter denied it, and at that moment the cock crowed. This early triad of denial in John 18:17–18 and 25–27 must be negated by the later triad of confession as Peter is placed in charge in John 21:9–17. And the artificial nature of the confessional triad is emphasized by the fact that there are only two categories for it to handle: lambs and sheep. The scene takes place after the execution of Jesus, when seven of his disciples are fishing on the Sea of Galilee. I will look at John 21:1–8 in the next section; here I concentrate on 21:9–17. When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Once this date had been fixed, Luther could invite others. One of the first letters we have from him is the invitation he extended to his old Eisenach friend Johannes Braun. Luther’s tone in the first paragraph is one of such excessive humility that one can only imagine what Braun thought: Greetings in Christ Jesus, our Lord. I would fear, kindest sir, to disturb your love with my burdensome letters and wishes, if I did not consider (on the basis of your gracious heart which is so generously inclined toward me) the sincere friendship I have experienced in so many ways and favors. Therefore I do not hesitate to write this little letter to you, trusting that in the closeness of our mutual friendship you will listen, and that it might find you easily approachable. What ghastly horror was Luther worming his way forward to reveal? Perhaps he needed money or was in some kind of trouble with the law? Much to Braun’s relief, the whole thing was only an invitation, and to a very happy event indeed. But still, the excessive humility continued: God, who is glorious and holy in all his works, has deigned to exalt me magnificently—a miserable and totally unworthy sinner—by calling me into this supreme ministry, solely on the basis of his bounteous mercy. Therefore I have to fulfill completely the office entrusted to me so that I may be acceptable (as much as dust can be acceptable to God) to such great splendor of divine goodness. When one considers the tone of many of Luther’s future writings, the tone of this particular letter seems nearly impossible. It is true that Luther was always deeply respectful of authority, but this letter gives us a measure of his mind-set at this time. He had been at the monastery for more than a year and was doubtless consumed with his own unworthiness. A postscript to the letter concerning the Schalbe family, with whom he had stayed while in Eisenach, reads, I do not dare to importune or burden those excellent people of the Schalbe Foundation, who certainly have done so much for me. I am sure that it would not befit their social position and prestige to be invited to such an unimportant and humble affair, or to be bothered by the wishes of a monk who is now dead to the world. In addition I am uncertain and somewhat dubious whether an invitation would please or annoy them. Therefore I have decided to be silent; but if there should be an opportunity, I wish you would express my gratitude to them. Farewell.5

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  “It’s like how your fingers feel when you come in from the cold. It hurts for a while, but then they’re warm.” That’s how she described the experience of letting go of the sexuality she thought she was supposed to have and opening up space for the sexuality she did have. “You’d think a middle-aged lesbian would know better than to accept what the world says about how women’s sexuality works. But letting go of all that is hard.” “You’ve got sensitive brakes,” I said, “and you’ve probably had those brakes a lot longer than you’ve had feminist politics.” One last story: Merritt and Carol got married not long after their daughter graduated from high school. That kid—a peer sex educator in her high school, of course—organized a bridal shower for her moms that included, among the more pragmatic gifts of garden store gift cards and new towels, a kit from their daughter containing sparkling cider, scented candles, and massage oil, in a pretty basket with a bow. “I can’t believe my child is giving her parents date night paraphernalia,” Merritt said. “Oh, puh-lease. It’s not like I’m giving you a dildo and a whip!” At this Merritt and Carol, both red faced and laughing, tried to send her to the kitchen to do the dishes. But their daughter continued, “I mean, come on, it’s the twenty-first century. You’re here, you’re queer, you get naked together sometimes because you’re in love with each other. Get used to it.” Which is exactly what she’s been doing ever since, side by side with Carol. nonjudging 5: mourning the “shoulds”For some people, knowing what’s true is enough to set them free from the old, oppressive myths. Other people need to know what’s true and also notice their judgmental feelings about what’s true. When they notice they’ve been harboring judgment about themselves, they can release those attitudes and adopt more neutral or even positive feelings about what’s true. And for some people, it’s not so simple as just releasing those attitudes. They know what’s true. They notice their judgment about what’s true. And their bodies, minds, and hearts seem to cling to that judgment for dear life, refusing to abandon the old ideas and instead embrace what’s true. Why?

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  In the next section, I’ll describe three strategies for making your own choices about what is or isn’t disgusting—they’re the same strategies you use to make your own choices about self-criticism. But the first step is to begin to notice when you experience an involuntary withdrawal from sex-related things, and then try on the possibility that the sight, the smells, the sounds, the stickiness of your own sexual organism are glorious and beautiful parts of being human. Because what if all of that actually is beautiful and glorious? What if your body is cause for celebration? (P.S. It totally is.) Sex-negative culture has trained us to be self-critical and judgmental about our bodies and our sexualities, and it’s interfering with our sexual wellbeing. So let’s get practical. How do we create a bubble of sex positivity for ourselves, where we can explore and celebrate and maximize our own sexual potential? How do we maximize the yum, in a world that tries to convince us we’re yucky? Here are three evidence-based strategies that can genuinely create positive change. maximizing yum… with science! part 1: self-compassionSometimes we cling to our self-criticism. We think to ourselves: “If I stop beating myself up, I’ll get complacent and lazy, and then I’ll never change!” And then we cling to our self-judgments even more tightly—after all, these are moral issues, involving whether you are a good, decent, worthy person or a bad, disgusting, worthless person. We think: “To accept myself as I am would be to accept that I am a flawed, bad, broken person, and to abandon all hope that I could one day be good enough to deserve love.” Remember that beating yourself up is the emotional One Ring equivalent of treating yourself as your own internal lion, experiencing yourself as a threat that needs to be escaped (which is impossible), conquered (which is literally self-destructive), or avoided through shutdown (which is counterproductive, to say the least). And that’s why we need self-compassion. Self-compassion is the opposite of self-criticism and self-judgment. In her book Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind, researcher and educator Kristin Neff describes self- compassion’s three key elements: Self-kindness is our ability to treat ourselves gently and with caring. On the Self Compassion Scale (SCS), a survey used to assess self-compassion, self-kindness is described with items like “When I’m going through a very hard time, I give myself the caring and tenderness I need.” In contrast, its opposite, self-judgment, is assessed with “I’m intolerant and impatient towards those aspects of my personality I don’t like.” Common humanity is viewing our suffering as something that connects us with others, rather than separates us. It’s assessed on the SCS with items like “When I feel inadequate in some way, I try to remind myself that feelings of inadequacy are shared by most people.” Its opposite, isolation, is assessed with “When I fail at something that’s important to me, I tend to feel alone in my failure.”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  When Carol (she of the feminist consciousness-raising group in the ’80s) asked, “How about pleasure? I’d love her to know how to give herself pleasure and to enjoy her body,” that was a tough one for Merritt. It’s not that she didn’t want that, it’s just she… couldn’t… quite… Rare is the American parent who feels comfortable talking to their kid about sexual pleasure—rare but not nonexistent. My favorite story of a sex-positive parent came from a guy who told me that the first time he ejaculated (by rubbing his pelvis against his mattress), he ran to his mom, terrified that he had broken something. “Mom! Mom! All this white stuff came out of my penis while I was rubbing it!” And the mom was amazing. She calmly explained what had happened, that it was normal, and how to deal with it in the future. When I told that story to Merritt and Carol, Carol laughed and said, “I love that mom!” but Merritt turned pale. “If I had been that boy,” she said, “I’d have burned my sheets before I would have told my mother.” Merritt, remember, didn’t grow up in a sex-positive environment. But in America, each generation is rapidly overturning old ideas about social control and sex. She is the first in her family to go to college, and only the second generation to make a living doing something other than farming. And along with the social and economic revolution she represents, she’s also the first out lesbian—and she’s the first in her family to argue with her spouse about how to teach their kid about sexual pleasure. “My parents taught me a lot of valuable things about commitment and loyalty and being a kind and loving person,” she said. “But they also told me that if I had sex outside marriage I’d go to hell, and even now, after almost twenty years of Carol coming home with me for Christmas, they still can’t look her in the eye.” “It sounds like they didn’t mean to teach you shame, but that’s what you learned,” I said. “And when you came out,” Carol said, “you were attacked.” “So no wonder you don’t feel like you can fully trust your own body,” I said. Merritt closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’d never want Julia to feel like there was anything wrong with any part of her body. I am not being a role model for her.” And so, of course, she proceeded to change her entire relationship with her body and to trust herself—to relax into pleasure and swim in the water of life. I’ll describe how in chapter 8. when somebody “yucks” your “yum”Disgust can function as a social emotion—that is, we learn about what aspects of the world (including our own bodies) are disgusting by reading the responses of the people around us. For example, infants will avoid a toy that their adult caregiver looks at with an expression of disgust.19

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  “They were afraid to ask Jesus,” but when “they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, ‘What were you arguing about on the way ?’ But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.” Markan irony again: they were “on the way,” but not “on the Way.” Jesus’s response is that he “sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’” I emphasize that correlation of “servant” with “child.” Do not wrap that “child” in sentimental modernity as sweet or simple, pure or innocent, or even necessarily precious and important. Put it back in its ancient status as a social nobody, as somebody who must first be accepted into the family to be even guaranteed its life. Think of that terrible letter from Hilarion to his wife, Alia, who is pregnant with their child: “If by chance you bear a child, if it is a boy, let it be, if it is a girl, cast it out [to die].” That letter, dated June 18, 1 BCE , was sent from Alexandria up the Nile to distant Oxyrhynchus and was found in that city’s rubbish dumps, where also that child—if a girl—would have ended her life. The third test is in 10:33–45. In every possible way, this third test is the climax of Mark’s triple sequence. It is, as just mentioned, an example of Olrik’s law of three, but here the third time is not success after two failures, but a final and climactic failure. (It is also, in a baseball metaphor, the third strike for the Twelve.) In 10:33–34 the prophecy by Jesus is by far the most detailed and foretells step-by-step what Mark will later describe in detail: We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes [14:10–11], and they will condemn him to death [14:63–64]; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles [15:1]; they will mock him [15:20], and spit upon him [15:19], and flog him [15:15], and kill him [15:24]; and after three days he will rise again [16:6]. Surely, you think, the Twelve will ask about those specific details—if not about execution and resurrection, then certainly about mocking, spitting, flogging. But, once again and climactically, they respond obtusely. This time the reaction comes from James and John, the sons of Zebedee, in 10:35–37. Mark’s sequence of reactions is: Peter in 8:32b, then the Twelve in 9:32–34, and finally James and John in 10:35–37. That is very deliberate.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  You know that I am descended from the most Christian emperors of the noble German nation, the Catholic kings of Spain, the archdukes of Austria, and the dukes of Burgundy, who all were, until death, faithful sons of the Holy Roman Church, and they have always defended the Catholic faith, the sacred ceremonies, decretals, ordinances, and laudable customs, for the honor of God, the propagation of the faith, and the salvation of souls. After their deaths they left, by natural law and heritage, these holy Catholic rites, for us to live and to die following their example. . . . What is true and a great shame and offense to us is that a single monk, going against God, [is] mistaken in his opinion, which is against what all of Christendom has held for over a thousand years to the present. I am therefore determined to use all my kingdoms and possessions, my friends, my body, my blood, my life, and my soul. For it would be a great disgrace for you and me, the noble and greatly renowned German nation, appointed by privilege and singular eminence to be the defenders and protectors of the Catholic faith . . . I declare that I now regret having played so long the proceedings against him and his false doctrines. I am resolved that I will never again hear him talk . . . and to act and proceed against him as against a notorious heretic.2 A number of those in the room were aghast. It seemed that Luther’s fate was sealed. Aleander was especially tickled to hear this and now realized he had been too hasty in condemning the emperor’s relatively kind invitation to Luther to come to Worms. Joachim of Brandenburg, who was probably Luther’s strongest opponent among the seven electors present, reminded the room that they all had agreed that if Luther did not recant, they would proceed against him. Thus, they must go and sign the emperor’s document. On the next day, however, despite initially all declaring themselves to be in full agreement with the emperor, only four of the electors consented to sign. Frederick the Wise declined to do so, as did the elector from the Palatinate region of the Rhine, Ludwig von der Pfalz. Frederick would maintain until his death that Luther had not been given the debate and disputation that he deserved so that he could explain and defend his points, and without this it was all something of a sham and certainly not sufficient to condemn a good man to death. Still, with four electors having signed, the emperor felt he had enough support to proceed with formally declaring Luther an enemy of the empire.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  23 Lather, Rinse, Repeat First you wake in disbelief, then in sadness and grief and when you wake for the last time, the forest you’ve been looking for will turn out to be right in the middle of your chest. —Dean Young, “Side Effects” O ne evening after I’ve dropped off some final files to the big-deal telecom consultant I once worked for, I lounge with him and his wife on their patio under a sprawling oak. In the spirit of farewell to my goofy career as a telecom marketer in business, he takes down a double album cover and begins to roll a joint. We hardly do this—not since grad school—he says, but you deserve a send-off. Ten days without a drink at this point, I say no. His wife has a crystal wineglass in her hand and a winning grin. Sure you don’t want some? she says. The sculpted garden spreads around us, neat as a plate of sushi. She has on a gauzy black dress, and as she takes the joint and tokes it, she drapes her long legs over the garden chair, saying, This is very different from drinking, right? I mean…She trails off into an exhale. I think, It is different. Pot was never my problem—true enough— compared to the all-day bong-blowing, resin-scraping drug dealers I’d lived with—true enough. I view my hand reaching for the joint as if on a movie screen. The sober part of myself is vanished entire. The coal on the burning stick flares as I draw on it, then I hold the sweet smoke as it creeps up my spine to my brain stem, where a tight-closed lotus starts to flower open. Exhaling, I blow away all those creepy people from the church basement. The wind wafts them off into summer dust motes. Later, my friends tuck me in a car, then stand, their arms waving side to side with the liquidy motion of seaweed while I ease off. I roll the window down so my hair streams along the side. The edges of the road have softened, the trees are giant scrambles of green fuzz. Just past the Star Market, right before the road splits to wrap around the local pond, my left blinker clicks on of its own volition, and my car tires cant to cut across the traffic. The vehicle surges into the liquor store parking lot. Ten days clean at this point, I tell myself I’ve straightened out, and a little wine with dinner won’t hurt…. Waking up with the outline of Warren’s back—all I ever see of him—I feel soldered to the bed, with cobwebs yards long grown from head to floor. For an instant I convince myself the binge was an awful dream. Then the tinny taste in my gummed-up mouth floods me with self-loathing. So I find myself in the shit-brown aluminum chair again.