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 Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She thought of it between her legs, filling her, rough and too big for her virginal opening, and of that terrible pleasure which had suffused her and wasted her the night before, and she knew she was blushing furiously. "Now go to the stand in the corner," he said, "and bring back the basin with water in it." She almost scurried across the floor. Several times in the Inn he had told her to move fast, and though she had hated it at first, she now did it instinctively. She brought the basin in both hands and set it down. There was a cloth in the water. "Wring out the cloth tightly," he said, "and bathe me quickly." She did as she was told at once, staring in amazement at his sex, its length, its hardness, and the tip of it with its tiny opening. She had been so sore from it yesterday, yet that pleasure had paralyzed her. Never had she guessed at such a secret. "Now, do you know what I want of you?" the Prince said gently. His had lovingly stroked her cheek, lifting her hair back. She ached to look at him. She wished so much he would command her to look into his eyes. It terrified her, but after the first instant it was so wondrous to her, his expression, that handsome and almost delicate face, and those black eyes that seemed to accept no compromise. "No, my Prince, but whatever it is..." she started. "Yes, darling...you are being very good. I want you to take it in your mouth, stroke it with your tongue and your lips." She was shocked. She had never thought of this. She thought suddenly, cruelly of who she had been, a Princess, and she thought of all her young life before she had fallen asleep, and she almost gave a little whimper. But this was her Prince who was commanding her, not some dreadful person she was being given to as a wife who might have demanded this of her. She closed her eyes and took it into her mouth, feeling its huge size, its hardness. It nudged at the back of her throat, and she pushed up and down on it as the Prince guided her. The taste of it was almost delicious; and it seemed a salty liquid in tiny droplets came out into her mouth, and then she stopped because he had said it was enough. She opened her eyes. "Very good, Beauty, very good," said the Prince. And she could tell he was in pain with his need suddenly. It made her fell proud, and there was in her, even in her helplessness, a sense of power. But he had risen and was guiding her to her feet. And she realized as she straightened her legs that that debilitating pleasure had caught hold of her. She felt for a moment that she couldn't stand, but to disobey him was unthinkable.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  7 I do not know if the pimp’s album may not have been another link in the daisy-chain; but soon after, for my own safety, I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values, of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control. A little money that had come my way after my father’s death (nothing very grand—the Mirana had been sold long before), in addition to my striking if somewhat brutal good looks, allowed me to enter upon my quest with equanimity. After considerable deliberation, my choice fell on the daughter of a Polish doctor: the good man happened to be treating me for spells of dizziness and tachycardia. We played chess: his daughter watched me from behind her easel, and inserted eyes or knuckles borrowed from me into the cubistic trash that accomplished misses then painted instead of lilacs and lambs. Let me repeat with quiet force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap. Had I been a français moyen with a taste for flashy ladies, I might have easily found, among the many crazed beauties that lashed my grim rock, creatures far more fascinating than Valeria. My choice, however, was prompted by considerations whose essence was, as I realized too late, a piteous compromise. All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex. 8 Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. She gave it not because she had divined something about me; it was just her style—and I fell for it. Actually, she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my part, was as naïve as only a pervert can be.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  The others were free to watch and watch they did, and then give permission to offer their instructions. "I had a half dozen masters eager to teach me contemptuously how to satisfy the one whom they supported with their arms as he shut his eyes and enjoyed the warm anxious sucking I afforded. "Of course all of them prolonged it as best they could for fullest satisfaction, and the Queen who sat nearby, her elbows on the arm of her chair watched all this approvingly. "Strange changes occurred in me as I performed my duties. There would be the frenzy of struggling past their paddles. My smarting buttocks, my sore knees, and above all the shame that they could so easily see my face, and my genitals. "But as I took to sucking I found myself lost in contemplating the organ in my mouth, its size, its shape, its taste even and the sour salty taste of the fluids emptied into me. It was the rhythm of the sucking as much as anything else. The voices around me were a chorus that became noise at some point, and an odd feeling of being weak and abject came over me. It was very similar to the moments I'd experienced with my tall stable boy Lord when we had been alone in the garden, and he had made me squat on the table. I felt my excitement even on the surface of my skin then, and so it was now, sucking these various organs and being filled with their seed. I can't explain it. It became pleasurable. It became pleasurable because it was repeated and I was helpless. And it was repeated always as a respite from the paddle, the frenzy of the paddle. My buttocks would throb, but they felt warm; they were tingling, and I was tasting this delicious cock that was pumping its force into me. "I found I liked having so many eyes watch me. But I did not admit this to myself all at once. I felt not liking so much as this weakness again, this limpness of the spirit. I was lost in my suffering, my struggles, my anxiousness to please. "Well, so it would be with each new task that lay before me. I would at first resist with terror; I would cling to the Queen with my heart; then at some point in the midst of unspeakable humiliation, I would be released into some state of calm in which my punishment became sweet to me. "I saw myself as one of these Princes, one of these slaves. When they instructed me in sucking the penis better I listened to them. When they paddled me I received the blow, bent my body in response to it. "Perhaps it's impossible to explain. I was moving towards yielding. "When finally the six Princes were sent away, all of them properly rewarded, the Queen took me into her arms and rewarded me with her kisses.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I took off the white fur and the bustier and the fishnets and went to the bathroom to run the hot water in the shower. My toenails were painted lilac, my previously flaky calloused soles now smooth and soft. I used the toilet and watched a vein throb in my thigh. What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing? It seemed preposterous. Had Reva convinced me to go “enjoy myself” or something just as idiotic? I peed, and when I wiped myself, it was slick. I had recently been aroused, it seemed. Who had aroused me? I remembered nothing. A wave of nausea made me lurch over and regurgitate an acrid globule of phlegm, which I spat into the sink. From the sandy feel of my mouth, I was expecting to see granules of dirt or the grit of a crushed pill speckling my saliva. Instead, it was pink glitter. I opened the medicine cabinet and took two Valiums and two Ativans, guzzled water from the tap. When I righted myself, someone appeared in the mirror as if through a porthole window, and it startled me. My own startled face startled me. Mascara had streaked down my cheeks like a masquerade mask. Remnants of bright pink lipstick stained the outer edges and corners of my lips. I brushed my teeth and tried my best to scrub the makeup off. I looked in the mirror again. Wrinkles in my forehead and lines around my mouth looked like they’d been drawn in pencil. My cheeks were slack. My skin was pale. Something flashed in the gloss of my eyeballs. I got close up to the mirror and looked very carefully. There I was, a tiny dark reflection of myself deep down in my right pupil. Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. “When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears—into the black holes in our eyes.” I couldn’t remember who had said it. I watched my reflection disappear in the steam. • • • IN THE SHOWER, a memory returned from middle school: a cop who visited our seventh grade class to warn us about the dangers of drug use. He hung up a chart depicting every illicit drug in Western civilization and pointed at the little sample pictures one by one—a pile of white powder, cloudy yellow crystals, blue pills, pink pills, yellow pills, black tar. Under each was the drug’s name and nicknames. Heroin: smack, dope, horse, skag, junk, H, hero, white stuff, boy, chiva, black pearl, brown sugar. “This feels like this. That feels like that.” The cop had some kind of disorder that made it hard for him to moderate the volume of his own voice. “Cocaine!

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She knelt obediently, glad her hair concealed her. And then she checked herself in this thought. She was not learning much if that was what she wanted. She wondered if Prince Alexi had been ashamed of his nakedness. He had had large brown eyes and such a beautiful mouth, but he was much to lean to be cherubic. She wondered where he was now, and was he being punished more for his clumsiness? "Very well, your Highness," said the Lord, "but I think you realize that firmness in the beginning is a mercy to the slave, especially when the slave is such a proud and spoilt Princess." Beauty blushed to hear this. The Prince gave a low, gentle laugh. "My Beauty is very like an unstamped coin," said the Prince, "and I wish to draw in the full character. I shall take delight in training her. I wonder if you yourself are attentive to her faults as I am." "Your Highness?" the Lord seemed to stiffen slightly. "You were not yourself so very strict with her in the Great Hall that you prevented her from feasting her eyes on young Prince Alexi. I rather think she enjoyed his punishment as much as her masters and mistresses." Beauty flushed hotly. She had never dreamed that the Prince had observed her in this. "Your Highness, she was only learning what will be expected of her, or so I thought..." the Lord answered very humbly. "It was I who drew her attention to the other slaves so she might profit from their obedient example." "Ah, well," said the Prince wearily and agreeably, "perhaps I am only to enamored of her. After all, she wasn't sent to me as a Tribute, I won her and claimed her myself, and I am too jealous, it seems. Perhaps I seek for some reason to punish her. You're dismissed. Come for her in the morning, if you will, and we shall see." The Lord, obviously worried that he had failed, left the room quickly. Beauty was now alone with the Prince, and the Prince was sitting quietly by the fire looking at her. She was in a great state of agitation; she knew she was blushing as always, and that her breasts were heaving slightly. She rushed forward quite suddenly and pressed her lips to the Prince's boot, and it seemed to move as if it welcomed her kiss, rising slightly as over and over again she kissed it. She was moaning. O, if only he'd give her permission to speak, and when she thought of her fascination with the punished Prince, she blushed all the more. But her Prince had risen. He took her wrist and lifted her and drawing her hands behind her back so that he held them firmly, he spanked both her breasts hard until she cried out, feeling the heavy flesh sway and the sting of his hands on her nipples.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  You should have asked yourself, 'Am I pleasing my Prince? Do the people find me pleasing?'" "Yes, my Prince," Beauty said meekly. "You are mine, Beauty," the Prince said a little more sternly. "And there is no command that you must shrink from obeying ever. If I tell you to please the lowliest vassal in the field, you will strain to obey me perfectly. He is your Lord then because I have said so. All those to whom I offer you are your Lords." "Yes, my Prince," she said, but she was in great distress. He stroked her breasts, pinching them firmly now and then, and kissed her until he could feel her body struggling against him, and feel her nipples growing hard. It seemed she wanted to speak. "What is it, Beauty?" "Pleasing you, my Prince, pleasing you..." she whispered, as though her thoughts had spread into a delirium. "Yes, pleasing me, that is your life now. How many of those in the world know such clarity, such simplicity? You please me and I shall always tell you exactly how to please me." "Yes, my Prince," she sighed. But she was crying again. "I will treasure you all the more for it. The girl I found in the castle room was nothing to me such as you are now, my devoted Princess." But the Prince was not entirely satisfied with the way in which he was instructing Beauty. He told her when they reached another town at nightfall that he was going to strip a little more dignity away from her to make it easier for her. And while the townspeople pressed their faces to the leaded glass windows of the Inn, the Prince had Beauty wait on his table. On her hands and knees she hurried across the rough boards of the Inn floor to fetch his plate from the kitchen. And though she was allowed to walk back with it, she was again on all fours to fetch his flagon. The soldiers devoured their supper, throwing silent glances at her by the light of the fire. She wiped the table for the Prince and when a morsel of food spilled from his plate to the floor, he commanded Beauty to eat it. With tears spilling from her eyes, Beauty obeyed, and then he gathered her, still on her knees, into his arms and rewarded her with dozens of wet and loving kisses. Obediently she put her arms around his neck. But this little morsel spilling had given him an idea. He ordered her to quickly fetch a plate from the kitchen again, and then told her to lay it on the floor at his feet. He put food for her there from his plate, and told her to lift her heavy hair behind her shoulders and eat it only with her mouth. "You are my kitten," he laughed gaily.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It seems a small thing as I say it. But to me it was unspeakably shameful, to have to swing my hips and rotate them, to put all my strength and spirit into this seemingly vulgar display of my buttocks. And yet she commanded. 'Bend your knees deeper, I want to see a dance,' she said with a loud wallop of her strap. 'Bend your knees and move those hips more to the side, more to the left!' her voice rose angrily. 'You resist me, Prince Alexi, you don't amuse!' she said, and rained her smacking wallops on me as I strove to obey. 'Move!' she cried out. She was triumphing. All my composure was truly lost. She knew it. "'So you dare reserve yourself in the presence of the Queen and her Court,' she scolded me, and then with both her hands she pulled my hips this way and that, making a greater rotation. I could endure it no longer. There was but one way to best her and that was to twist in this shameful position more wildly even than she guided me. And shaking with choked sobs, I obeyed her. There was immediate applause as I did this dance, my buttocks twisted from side to side and up and down, my knees bending deeply, my back arched, my chin resting painfully on the stool so all could see the tears coursing down my face, and my obvious destruction of spirit. "'Yes, Princess,' I struggled to articulate in my supplicating voice, and I obeyed with all my strength putting on such a good performance that the applause continued. "'That's good, Prince Alexi, very good,' she said. 'Spread your legs wider apart, wider and move your hips even more!' I obeyed at once. I was now snapping my hips, and I was overcome with the greatest shame I had known since I had been captured and brought to the castle. Not even the first stripping by the soldiers in the field, not even being thrown over the Captain's saddle, nor the raping in the kitchen compared to the degradation I knew now, because I performed all this gracelessly and obsequiously. "Finally, she was finished with my little display. The Lords and Ladies were talking among themselves, commenting, talking of all manner of things as they always do at such things, but the murmur was full of a certain restlessness, which meant their passions were aroused, and I did not have to look up to see they were all looking at the central circle no matter how they might have feigned boredom. Princess Lynette now ordered me to turn slowly, keeping my chin in the center of the stool, but moving my legs in a circle, all the while swinging my buttocks, so that all the Court might see this display of obedience equally.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Here Beauty saw a lovely red-haired Princess with her legs held apart by two Pages who with their hands massaged that little nodule between her legs. Her hips rose and fell; it was clear she could not control her own movement. She begged to be allowed peace, and just as her face flushed and it seemed she could not control herself, she was let alone, legs held apart so that she groaned miserably. Another very lovely girl was being spanked and stroked at the same time by a Page who used his left hand between her legs to work her. And to Beauty's horror several were mounted on phalluses against the wall on which they worked themselves with wild contortions while the Pages in attendance wielded merciless paddles. "You see each slave receives simple instructions. She is to work herself on the phallus until she achieves satisfaction. Only then will the paddling cease, no matter how sore she is. She soon learns to think of the paddle and pleasure as one in the same, and soon learns to achieve her pleasure in spite of the paddle. Or on command, I should say. Of course she shall seldom be allowed such satisfaction by her masters and mistresses." Beauty gazed at the row of struggling bodies. The girls' hands were bound over their heads, their feet below. They had little room for moving on the leather phalluses. They twisted, trying to undulate as best they could, the inevitable tears spilling down their faces. Beauty felt pity for them, yet she so craved the phallus. She knew with deep shame it would not have taken her long to please the Page paddling her. As she watched the nearest Princess, a girl with red ringlets, she saw her finally achieve her goal, her face blood red, her whole body gone to violent quivering. The Page spanked her all the harder. She went limp finally as though too weary to feel shame, and the Page gave her a gentle approving pat and left her. Everywhere Beauty looked she saw some form of training. Here a young girl with hands clasped above her head was being taught to kneel still while her private parts were stroked and not to put her hands down to cover herself. Another was being forced to feed her breasts to the Page who suckled them, holding them for him while yet another examined her. Lessons in control, lessons in pain and pleasure. The voices of the Pages were some of them stern, some of them tender, the dull whacking of the paddle everywhere. And there were the inevitable spread-eagled girls being now and then tormented to awaken them and teach them what they could feel if they did not know it. "But for our little Beauty such lessons are not necessary," Lord Gregory said. "She is too accomplished as it is.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "But she was quite determined. She picked up the paddle again quickly enough, pressed me down again on her lap, and commenced the loud and forceful spanking. I was soon moaning loudly behind my clenched teeth. I had no pride, none of that dignity you still display unless it was completely without my knowledge. Finally she said that my buttocks were now a perfect color. "She hated having to punish me further she so admired the color she had achieved, but she must know my limits. "'Are you sorry you were such a disobedient little Prince?' she asked me. 'Very sorry, your Highness,' I answered through my tears. But she continued with her spanking. I could not prevent tightening my buttocks and moving as if somehow it would lessen the pain, and I could hear her laughter as though this quite delighted her. "I was sobbing as frantically as any young Princess when she at last finished, and forced me back on my knees, ordering me to come about and kneel facing her. "She wiped my face, blotted my eyes, and gave me a generous kiss with a great deal of sweet flattery. I would be her valet, she said, the master of her wardrobe. I alone would dress her, and brush her hair, and otherwise attend her. I would have much to learn, but she would instruct me herself. I should be very pure. "Of course, that night I thought I had endured the worst, the abuse of common soldiers on my way to the castle, the frightful abuse in the kitchen. I had been thoroughly humbled by a coarse stable boy, and was now her abject pleasure slave with a soul that belonged to her with all the parts of my body totally. But I was very foolish in this. Much worse was to come." Prince Alexi paused and looked down at Beauty who lay with her head against his chest. She struggled to conceal her feelings. She did not truly know what she felt except that the story had aroused her. She could envision each humiliation Alexi described, and though her fear was aroused, so was her passion. "It has been much easier for me," she said meekly, but this is not what she wanted to say. "I'm not sure that is true," said Alexi. "You see, after the rough treatment of the kitchen when I became something less than an animal to my captors, I was liberated at once into being the Queen's obedient slave. You have had no such immediate liberation," he said. "And this is what is meant by yielding," she murmured. "And I must come to it through a different path." "Unless...unless you do something to be vilely punished," said Alexi, "but that might take too much courage. And it might be unnecessary, for your dignity is being stripped away from you just a little already."

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Yet he knew how to soften my barriers and so there we were, me not having said no, part of me wanting it and so we did it. He left town and I became preoccupied—maybe even obsessed, as I had predicted I might—ignoring the signs, and seeing only how good he was on paper, the Yale graduate who spoke several languages and looked amazing in uniform, the kind of man I’d been taught I could never have. As we began to correspond, he told me over email that he’d just broken up with a Chinese girlfriend before coming back to America, and that he liked Asian girls in general. I flirted in my messages, almost like I was preprogrammed; I indulged in the game of prospective girlfriend, even though the part of my brain still engaged in self-preservation knew that he only wanted to fuck me because he hadn’t gotten to. Maybe I wanted to believe that if I let him fuck me, then it wouldn’t be true that he didn’t respect me. I was too weak to say no anyway, and no objective court would consider me raped just because I’d wanted to say no, nor would I want one to hold him to account—even if there were moments when I asked myself if it was okay to feel raped even if I wasn’t. Instead of giving in to that thought, I volunteered to visit Paul in DC and we planned out dates and touristy things to do, like going to the White House and the Lincoln monument. But after I arrived, he made a move to fuck me every time we were about to go out. Sunday morning, I was in his bedroom facing his bed, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows onto his balcony, knowing I had to be at work the next morning but determined to visit a museum with Paul, to be part of a couple and not a dirty fling. We hadn’t left his apartment in days, and his white sheets were a moist amalgam of our sweat and fluids. I willed my mind to be pleased with itself, to enjoy feeling naughty as I put on earrings to finish my outfit—a black silk blouse, a long deep violet skirt with hundreds of tiny pleats by a well-known designer, which I sold to a consignment shop after the trip even though it was my favorite.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And the Price could see that the King would not raise his eyes to see his naked daughter, Beauty. �I will take Beauty to serve,� said the Prince. �She is mine now.� He took out his long silver knife and, cutting the hot, succulent pork, he laid several pieces on his own plate. The servants all about him vied with one another to place other dishes near him. Beauty sat with her hands over her breasts again; her cheeks were moist with tears, and she was trembling slightly. �Ass you wish,� said the King. �I am in your debt.� �You have your life and your Kingdom now,� said the Prince. �And I have your daughter. I will spend the night here. And tomorrow set out to make her my Princess across the mountains.� He had placed some fruit on his plate, and other hot morsels of cooked food, and now he snapped his fingers gently and in a whisper told Beauty to come around the table to him. He could see her shame before the servants. But he brushed her hand away from her sex. �Never cover yourself like that again,� he said. He spoke these words almost tenderly, as he lifted her hair back from her face. �Yes, my Prince,� she whispered. She had a lovely little voice. �But it�s so difficult.� "Of course it is," he smiled. "But for me you'll do it." And now he took her and placed her on his lap, cradling her in his left arm. "Kiss me," he said, and feeling her warm mouth on his again, he felt his desire rising too soon for his taste, but he decided he could savor this slight torment. "You may go," he said to the King. "Tell your servants to have my horse ready in the morning. I won't need a horse for Beauty. My soldiers you've found, no doubt, at your gates," and the Prince laughed. "They were afraid to come in with me. Tell them to be ready at dawn, and then you can say goodbye to your daughter, Beauty." The King glanced up very quickly to accept the Prince's commands and with unfailing courtesy he backed out of the doorway. The Prince turned his full attention to Beauty. Lifting a napkin he wiped at her tears. She kept her hands obediently on her thighs, exposing her sex, and he observed that she did not try to hide her stiff little pink nipples with her arms and he approved of this. "Now don't be frightened," he said to her softly, feeding a little on her trembling mouth again, and then slapping her breasts so they shivered lightly. "I could be old and ugly." "Ah, but then I could feel sorry for you," she said in a sweet, tremulous voice. He laughed. "I'm going to punish you for that," he said to her tenderly. "But now and then just a little very ladylike impertinence is amusing."

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  IT’S A CONUNDRUM: IF YOU SURVIVE, THEN IT—THAT, THE trauma—can’t have been that bad. Being dead is the only way to prove it was. It really was bad. It was terrible. It was so awful there was no way I could survive. What did this child die of? Shame, mainly. And narrative necessity. IF YOU SURVIVE, YOU HAVE TO PROVE IT WAS THAT BAD; OR else, they think you are. Surviving is some kind of sin, like floating up off the dunking stool like a witch. You have to be permanently écorchée, heart-on-sleeve, offering up organs and body parts like a medieval female saint. WHAT IF THERE’S NOT ENOUGH TO PUT ON DISPLAY? IF THE stories are incoherent, flashes? As any medic would find, there are parts of me missing. THERE ARE THE PARTS MANY PEOPLE HAVE MISSING: THE WISDOM teeth they had to break my (clenched) jaw to remove; the ova I (struggle to) shed (despite the cysts); the small scars of worrying at blemishes and picking at scabs. There are the more unusual absences, the ones that make good party stories: feel this bald patch, hard and shiny, the size of a penny—that’s where the obstetrician used a cable to restart my heart. It stopped while I was in the birth canal. The cable pulled my hair out by the roots. But I survived. AND THERE ARE PARTS IT’S HARDER TO TALK ABOUT, OR harder to see. A litany. Because no medic did see, when I presented at the emergency room and the family doctor’s office with repeated broken toes and fingers, with rashes and smashed teeth; with anorexia at age six; with what were called growing pains in my legs (although I never got any taller) so bad I couldn’t walk upstairs to my bedroom; with a third-degree burn I didn’t even feel myself sustaining on the iron. That wasn’t true; I did feel it. It felt good. It felt ice-cool on a summer day. It felt like being able to feel. AFTER THE MEMORIES OF SEXUAL ABUSE RETURNED, WHEN I was legally (if not emotionally) an adult, I also spent months in excruciating, sleepless pain as what appeared to be repetitive strain injury in my writing hand—a pain that appeared the first time I tried to write about the abuse: coincidence or correlate?—was finally traced to fused vertebrae in my neck. I’d never been in a serious car crash or fallen off a wall. My grandmother—my father’s mother—was the first family member to hold me after I was born and after I’d spent a month in an incubator. She dropped me on my head. It’s like a story you tell at parties that seems funny at the time. Or the funny story of how there was so much violence in my childhood that nearly dying at birth and being dropped on my head shortly thereafter seemed worth only a shrug—a matter of course.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And the woman despised her! The Queen massaged her flesh, prodding it, testing it as if for thickness, softness, resilience. She tested Beauty's thighs in the same manner, and then pushed Beauty's knees so far apart and high on the bed that Beauty's hips rose and she felt she was squatting, sprawled apart, over the coverlet, her sex protruding, hanging down, her buttocks surely split so that she resembled a ripe fruit. The Queen's hand was under her sex as if weighing it, feeling the roundness and heaviness of the lips, pinching them. "Arch your back," said the Queen, "and lift your buttocks, little cat, little cat in heat." Beauty obeyed, her eyes flooded with tears of shame. She was trembling violently as she took a deep breath, and against her will felt the Queen's fingers commanding her passion, squeezing the flame so it burned hotter. Surely Beauty's pubic lips were swelling, their juices flowing, no matter how bitterly she struggled against it! She did not want to give anything to this wicked woman, this witch of a Queen. To the Prince she would yield; to Lord Gregory, to nameless and faceless Lords and Ladies who showered her with compliments, but to this woman who despised her...! But the Queen had sat back on the bed beside Beauty, and hastily she gathered up Beauty as if she were a floppy doll and threw her over her lap, her face away from Prince Alexi, her buttocks surely still exposed to his scrutiny. Beauty gave an open-mouthed moan, her breasts rubbed against the coverlet, her sex throbbing against the Queen's thigh. It was as if she were some toy in the Queen's hands. Yes, it was exactly like being a toy, only she was alive, she breathed, she suffered. She could imagine how she appeared to Prince Alexi. The Queen lifted her hair. She ran a finger down Beauty's back to the tip of her spine. "All the rituals," the Queen said in a low voice, "the Bridle Path, the stakes in the garden, the wheels, and then the Hunts in the Maze, and all the other clever games devised for my pleasure, but do I ever know a slave until I have this intimacy with the slave, the intimacy of the slave over my lap ready for punishment? Tell me, Alexi. Shall I spank her with my hand only to sustain this intimacy? Feel her stinging flesh, its warmth, as I watch it change color? Shall I use the silver-back mirror, or one of a dozen paddles that are all excellent for the purpose? What do you prefer, Alexi, when you are over my lap? What is it you hope for even as you are crying?" "You may hurt your hand if you spank her that way," came Prince Alexi's calm answer. "May I get you the silver mirror?" "Ah, but you do not answer my question," the Queen said. "And do get me the mirror.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "She ordered me to stand up, spread my legs and then place my hands flat on the floor before her. I did so, my buttocks facing the Queen and the Grand Duke, a position which again, even in the midst of this, reminded me of my nakedness. "She put aside her paddle, and picked her favorite toy then, the leather strap, and gave my legs a heavy strapping on both thighs and calves, letting the leather curl about me, and ordered me to move forward a few inches so that I might place my chin upon a high stool there. My hands must go behind my back, my back must be arched. I did as I was told and stood, spread-legged, bent at the waist, my face tipped up for all to see my miserable expression. "As you can imagine my buttocks hung free in the air, and she commenced to shower them with compliments. 'Very pretty hips, Prince Alexi, very pretty buttocks, tough and round and muscular, and very pretty indeed when you squirm to escape my strap and my paddle.' She illustrated all this as I did with her strap, and I was crying softly now between my moans. "It was then she gave a command which surprised me. 'But the Court wants to see you display your buttocks. They want to see you move them,' she said. 'Not merely to escape the punishment you so richly deserve and richly need, but to see some real show of humility.' I didn't know what she meant. She spanked me hard as if I meant to be stubborn, while I answered through my tears, 'Yes, my Princess.' 'But you do not obey!' she cried out. She had commenced what she really wanted, and as soon as she said this, I began to sob in spite of myself. What could I say to her? 'I want to see your buttocks move, Prince,' she said. 'I want to see them dance, while your feet remain still.' I heard the Queen laugh. And suddenly overcome with shame and fear, I knew the seemingly small thing she wanted of me was too much for me. I move my hips, I moved them from side to side as she spanked me and my chest shook with another sob that I could scarce keep quiet. "'No, Prince, nothing so simple as that, a real dance for the Court,' she said, 'your reddened and punished buttocks must do something besides sleep under my blows!' and she placed her hands on my hips then and slowly moved them not only from side to side, but down and around and up, so that I had to bend my knees. She rotated them.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  As Carol considered my question, she flushed slightly and got a distasteful expression on her face. “I think it was because of my mom. It was so disgusting when she got drunk. And she always ended up in a weak position, usually crying in her room. I figured alcohol would do the same thing to me. See, I didn’t want to look like her, think like her, or be like her. But I might as well get it all off my chest. I became something else. I figured either you’re a victim or you’re the winner. You take advantage or someone else takes advantage. I didn’t want to be a victim so I became the class bully. I was a real wiseass, always cracking jokes and making fun of people. I was the leader of a band of girls—all of us from really disturbed families—and we targeted people we could torment.” Carol saw my involuntary reaction to her words and looked down at her hands. “I’m really ashamed of it now but I remember how thrilling it was to be able to reduce some person to tears. I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life for what we did to one poor fat girl who we drove out of the school.” Her expression of shame then turned to excitement. “We also loved to shoplift. That was the best. We’d go in a group to a store and someone would make a disturbance and when the authorities went to see what happened we’d take expensive cosmetics and other things that looked good. Once, we even took some cameras. I remember the feeling—my stomach would be all knotted with fear and I’d be light-headed and almost dizzy because I felt so exhilarated. We were almost caught several times. Getting out and running fast even made it better. I didn’t need the camera. I never needed or even wanted anything that we stole. What was important was the excitement.” “Did your folks find out?” “Never. I knew I was there on sufferance and I was very careful. That’s probably another reason I didn’t do the things they were watching for. One wrong move and I’d be out. They kicked my brother out of the house when he was seventeen. They found him smoking pot in his bedroom and that was it.” “Did you have lots of boyfriends in high school?”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  This torture, which was mental more than physical, went on for some time. Then one night Stanbridge had been to the public house and came in very late. Talk had died out, and it felt as if most people were asleep. He came over to my bed & put his hand down under the blankets. I shrank away, but he reached for me, and felt me fiercely. He was a wiry, humourless, red-headed boy. Then he got into the bed too, though he was fully clothed, & still had his shoes on: their hard leather soles scraped my feet. He was very heavy & strict, though he had some sense of the danger, & kept on saying ‘Sh’ to me, though I had not dared to say a word. He made me bite on a handkerchief while he buggered me. I cannot remember much about it except that I cried and cried, in a soundless, wretched way, & the hot pain of it, & an agonised guilt, as if it had all been my fault, about blood on the sheets—though no one ever said anything about it. Later it became obvious to me that other men in the dormitory had known about it. I was deeply aware that it was not a thing that could be appealed against. Also after that the teasing stopped, & I was shown a companionable respect. And we all learnt, when the Second Master himself came to the dormitory late at night a few weeks later, that Stanbridge’s brother had been killed in France: Stanbridge himself became clouded about & supported by the decent & entirely artificial respect that we young gentlemen accorded to the bereaved. Every week brought news of the deaths on the battlefields, often of Wykehamists who were fresh in the memories of dons & boys, & many of whom had been lavishly adored. Things did not pick up with Strong until the next term, when he had me as his valet. I put up a slight resistance to this idea, because there was something unnatural in being sweated. In the holidays I had servants of my own, so it seemed absurd to become a paid lackey in the term. Yet Strong was very businesslike & pleasant in his proposal. Although he was a College man he had, I now knew, the reputation of not being very bright. I should say what he looked like: solidly built, with a wide, square face, cleft chin, square nose, dark, deep-set eyes, a heavy beard for a schoolboy, & thick, curly hair that was almost black. His father was a banker, not a country person, but he had lived mostly with his mother near Fordingbridge. He had rather bandy legs, & walked on the outside edges of his feet. I did not particularly need the money I got from being his valet but all the men who were valets agreed that the money was why they did it.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  But when I called to apologize and make another appointment, she was back to normal. “See you Thursday,” she said. “Toodle-oo.” Halfway through the month, my Internet use began to rise even more. I woke up with my laptop screen filled with AOL chat-room conversations with strangers in places like Tampa and Spokane and Park City, Utah. In my waking hours, I rarely thought of sex, but in my medicated blackouts, I guess my lusts arose. I scrolled through the transcripts. They were surprisingly polite. “How are you?” “I’m fine, thanks, how are you? Horny much?” It went on from there. I was relieved I never gave anyone my real name. My AOL screen name was “Whoopigirlberg2000.” “Call me Whoopi.” “Call me Reva,” I once wrote. The photos men sent of their genitals were all banal, semierect, nonthreatening. “Your turn,” they’d write. Usually I changed the subject. “What’s your favorite movie?” Then one day I woke up to discover that I had dug out my digital camera and sent a bunch of strangers snapshots of my asshole, my nipple, the inside of my mouth. I’d written messages saying that I’d like it if they came and “tied me up” and “held me hostage” and “slurped my pussy like a plate of spaghetti.” And there were numbers in my cell phone log I didn’t recognize. So I made up a rule that whenever I took my pills, which was roughly every eight hours, I’d put my computer in the closet and power down my phone, seal it with packing tape in a Tupperware container, and stick the container in the back of a high kitchen cabinet. But then I woke up with the unopened Tupperware next to me on the pillow. The next night, the phone was on the window ledge, next to a dozen half-smoked cigarettes stubbed out on an Alanis Morissette CD case. “Why are you killing yourself?” Reva asked, seeing the butts in the trash can when she came over uninvited a few days later. Reva’s mother’s cancer had started in her lungs. “My smoking has nothing to do with you or your mother. My mother’s dead, too, you know,” I added. By this point, Reva’s mother was in hospice care, in and out of consciousness. I was tired of hearing about it. It brought back too many memories. Plus, I knew she’d expect me to go to her mother’s funeral. I really didn’t want to do that. “My mom’s not dead yet,” Reva said. I didn’t tell Reva about my Internet proclivities. But I did ask her to change my AOL password to something I could never guess. “Just some random letters and numbers.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Think of how useful the concept of “Liget” could be in Western culture. When military cadets train in the art of war, a small percentage of them reportedly develop a feeling of pleasure in killing. They do not seek to kill to feel pleasure; they are not psychopaths. But when they do kill, they experience pleasure. Their stories of combat often depict intense feelings of pleasure from the thrill of the hunt, or from a job well-done with comrades-in-arms. In Western culture, however, killing with pleasure is considered terrible and shameful; it is difficult to empathize with or muster compassion for those who have experienced this feeling. So consider this: what if we taught the concept and the word liget to cadets, including a set of social rules for when liget is appropriate to feel? We could embed this emotion concept in our broader cultural context of values and norms, just like we did with schadenfreude. The concept might even allow servicepeople to flexibly cultivate the experience of liget when needed for their military duties. New emotion concepts like liget could broaden their emotional granularity, improving their unit’s cohesion and their job performance, all the while protecting mental health for these members of our armed forces, both in battle and when they come home from deployment.18 I realize I’m saying something provocative: that each of us needs an emotion concept before we can experience or perceive that emotion. This definitely doesn’t match common sense or everyday experience; emotions feel so built-in. But if emotions are constructed by prediction, and you can predict only with the concepts you possess, well . . . there you have it. … The emotions that you experience so effortlessly, and which feel built-in, most likely were also known in your parents’ generation, and their parents’ as well. The classical view explains this progression by proposing that emotions—separate from emotion concepts—are built into the nervous system through evolution. I have an evolutionary story to tell as well, but it’s about social reality, and it doesn’t require emotion fingerprints in the nervous system. Emotion concepts like “Fear,” “Anger,” and “Happiness” are passed down from one generation to the next. This occurs not merely because we propagate our genes but because those genes allow each generation to wire the brains of the next one. Infants grow minds full of concepts as they learn the mores and values of their culture. This process goes by many names: Brain development. Language development. Socialization.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  He put an unpeeled banana in my mouth, warning me that if I took it out he’d know, and he’d punish me emotionally. “Okay, master,” I mumbled sarcastically. “Keep it in there,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen. I didn’t think it was very funny, but I played along. Back then, I interpreted Trevor’s sadism as a satire of actual sadism. His little games were so silly. So I just knelt there with the banana in my mouth, breathing through my nose. I could hear him on the phone making a reservation for two for dinner that night at Kurumazushi. After twenty minutes he came back in, took the banana out of my mouth. “My sister’s in town so you have to leave,” he said, and put his flaccid penis in my mouth. When he wasn’t hard after a few minutes, he got angry. “What are you even doing here? I don’t have time for this.” He ushered me out. “The doorman will hail you a cab,” he said to me, like I was some one-night stand, some cheap prostitute, like somebody he didn’t know at all. Anal sex came up with Trevor only once. It was my idea. I told him I wanted to prove that I wasn’t uptight—a complaint he gave because at some point I’d hesitated to give him a blow job while he sat on the toilet. We tried once on a night we’d both had a lot to drink, but he lost his erection as he tried to wedge it in. Then all of a sudden he got up and went into the shower, saying nothing to me. Maybe I should have felt vindicated by his failure, but instead I just felt rejected. I followed him to the bathroom. “Is it because I smell?” I asked him through the shower curtain. “What’s wrong? What did I do?” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “You just left without saying anything.” “There was shit all over my dick, okay?” he said angrily. But that was impossible. He hadn’t even penetrated me. I knew he was lying. But I still apologized. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you mad?” “I can’t have this conversation with you right now. I’m tired and I’m not in the mood to deal with your drama.” He was nearly yelling. “I just want to get some sleep. Jesus!” I called him the next day and asked if he was free that weekend, but he said he’d already found a woman who wasn’t going to “pull pranks for attention.” A few nights later, I got drunk and called up Rite Aid and ordered a case of sexual lubricant to be delivered to him at his office the next morning. He sent me a note at the gallery by messenger in response. “Don’t ever do that again,” it said. We got back together a few weeks later.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Had a happy holiday?” “It was all right.” “Did Santa bring you something nice this year?” “This fur coat,” I told her. “Family time can put a strain on the mentally deranged.” She clucked her tongue as though out of pity. Why? She licked a finger and leafed slowly through the pages in my folder, too slowly. Maddening. “The blind leading the blind,” she said wistfully. “The expression has been misused for centuries. It isn’t about ignorance at all. It’s about intuition—the sixth sense, which is the psychic sense. How else could the blind lead? The answer to this question has more to do with science than you might think. Ever seen doctors try to revive someone whose heart has stopped? People don’t understand electroshock. It’s not like sitting in the electric chair. The shocker. Psychiatry has come a long way, into the spiritual realm. Into energies. There are deniers, certainly, but they all work for big oil. Now tell me about your most recent dreams.” “I don’t know. I always forget them. And I’m not sleeping at all, I don’t think.” “We don’t forget things, OK? We just choose to ignore them. Can you accept responsibility for your memory lapse and move on?” “Yes.” “Now let me ask you a technical question. Do you have any heroes?” “I guess Whoopi Goldberg is my hero.” “A family friend?” “She took care of me after my mother died,” I said. Who hadn’t heard of Whoopi Goldberg? “And how did your mother die? Was it sudden? Was it violent?” I had answered this question half a dozen times by now. “I killed her,” I said then. Dr. Tuttle smirked and adjusted her glasses. “How did you achieve that, metaphorically speaking?” I racked my mind. “I crushed oxycodone into her vodka.” “That would do it,” Dr. Tuttle said, scribbling maniacally with a ballpoint pen to get the ink flowing. I couldn’t watch. Dr. Tuttle had never been so irritating. I closed my eyes. It was true that my father had kept a white marble mortar and pestle in his study—an antique. I tried to imagine taking a leftover bottle of his oxycodone and crushing the pills in there. I could see my hands grinding, then spooning the white powder into one of my mother’s frosty bottles of Belvedere. I swirled it around. “Now sit still for a minute,” Dr. Tuttle said, dismissing my confession. I opened my eyes. “I’m going to assess your personality shift. I notice today that your face is slightly off center. Has anyone pointed that out to you? Your whole face,” she held out her pen and squinted, measuring me, “is at approximately negative ten degrees. That’s counterclockwise to me, but clockwise to you when you go home and look in the mirror. A very minor slant. Really only a trained eye could pick it up. But it’s a significant deviation from when we started your treatment. So it makes sense that you’re having extra trouble sleeping now.