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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  Petersburg Times headlined, “Gloria’s Beauty Belies Her Purpose.”9 It took me a few years to figure out this sudden change in response to the same person. I was being measured against the expectation that any feminist had to be unattractive in a conventional sense—and then described in contrast to that stereotype. The subtext was: If you could get a man, why would you need equal pay? This grew into an accusation that I was listened to only because of how I looked, and a corollary that the media had created me. Though I’d been a freelance writer all my professional life without being told that my appearance was the reason I got published, it now became the explanation for everything, no matter how hard I worked. Never mind that the opposite was sometimes the case, as when my literary agent had sent me to an editor at a major national magazine, who dismissed me by saying, “We don’t want a pretty girl—we want a writer.” The idea that whatever I had accomplished was all about looks would remain a biased and hurtful accusation even into my old age. Fortunately, traveling and speaking took me to audiences full of down-home common sense. When a reporter raised the question of my looks as more important than anything I could possibly have to say, for example, an older woman rose in the audience. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said to me comfortingly, “it’s important for someone who could play the game—and win—to say: ‘The game isn’t worth shit.’ ” I also learned from my speaking partners. When we were in the South especially, some man in the audience might assume that a black woman and a white woman traveling together must be lesbians. Florynce Kennedy modeled the perfect response: “Are you my alternative?” If someone called me a lesbian—in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians—I learned just to say, “Thank you.” It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh. I also came to appreciate this two-way understanding that happens only when we’re all in the same space. It gradually made me less reluctant to go out on my own. Nervousness might still return, like malaria, but mostly I’d learned that audiences turn into partners if you just listen to them as much as you talk. After I joined with a group of writers and editors to start Ms. magazine, I was traveling not only for stories, but also to sell ads to reluctant makers of cars who were convinced that men made that buying decision; to explain to makers of women’s products why Ms. didn’t publish fashion, beauty, or cooking articles that praised and promoted the products of advertisers; and to persuade newsstand dealers to carry a new kind of women’s magazine whose cover looked nothing like the others.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “What makes you think so?” he asked, stopping short. “It’s just as it was at Countess Paul’s, sir. They gave the baby medicine, and it turned out that the baby was simply hungry: the nurse had no milk, sir.” Alexey Alexandrovitch pondered, and after standing still a few seconds he went in at the other door. The baby was lying with its head thrown back, stiffening itself in the nurse’s arms, and would not take the plump breast offered it; and it never ceased screaming in spite of the double hushing of the wet-nurse and the other nurse, who was bending over her. “Still no better?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch. “She’s very restless,” answered the nurse in a whisper. “Miss Edwarde says that perhaps the wet-nurse has no milk,” he said. “I think so too, Alexey Alexandrovitch.” “Then why didn’t you say so?” “Who’s one to say it to? Anna Arkadyevna still ill....” said the nurse discontentedly. The nurse was an old servant of the family. And in her simple words there seemed to Alexey Alexandrovitch an allusion to his position. The baby screamed louder than ever, struggling and sobbing. The nurse, with a gesture of despair, went to it, took it from the wet-nurse’s arms, and began walking up and down, rocking it. “You must ask the doctor to examine the wet-nurse,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch. The smartly dressed and healthy-looking nurse, frightened at the idea of losing her place, muttered something to herself, and covering her bosom, smiled contemptuously at the idea of doubts being cast on her abundance of milk. In that smile, too, Alexey Alexandrovitch saw a sneer at his position. “Luckless child!” said the nurse, hushing the baby, and still walking up and down with it. Alexey Alexandrovitch sat down, and with a despondent and suffering face watched the nurse walking to and fro. When the child at last was still, and had been put in a deep bed, and the nurse, after smoothing the little pillow, had left her, Alexey Alexandrovitch got up, and walking awkwardly on tiptoe, approached the baby. For a minute he was still, and with the same despondent face gazed at the baby; but all at once a smile, that moved his hair and the skin of his forehead, came out on his face, and he went as softly out of the room. In the dining-room he rang the bell, and told the servant who came in to send again for the doctor. He felt vexed with his wife for not being anxious about this exquisite baby, and in this vexed humor he had no wish to go to her; he had no wish, either, to see Princess Betsy. But his wife might wonder why he did not go to her as usual; and so, overcoming his disinclination, he went towards the bedroom. As he walked over the soft rug towards the door, he could not help overhearing a conversation he did not want to hear.

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

  Because instead, at times, I wished he’d hit me so I’d have an ironclad justification to find a curb and kick him to it, to say it. Because there are some things I have to say only to know I don’t mean them. Because I could still get weak-kneed around him. Because I was more afraid to go untouched. Because “Girls are cruelest to themselves,” writes Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay.” Because I didn’t, and so he didn’t. Because he didn’t want to hear it. Because then we’d have to discuss it, and if we discussed it, then we’d have to discuss everything else—rape culture, masculinity, gender inequality, femininity, patriarchy, complicity—and who wants to get into that? Because women who get hurt or humiliated on a smaller scale in broad daylight, persistently, is non-news, or non-newsworthy. Because amid pandemic, most are voiceless. Because sidelining women’s stories/voices/visages, and also glorifying—thus neutralizing—their suffering, are not only prerequisites to sexual violence against women, but also ensure that sexual violence isn’t seen as sexual violence but as totally normal, sanctioned behavior. Because saying it out loud wasn’t even The Solution. Because we didn’t even say, It’s over. We allowed postgraduation distance to do its work, or I should say he emailed me confessing that he’d cheated five times with four different women while we were together and I’d worried I might’ve had syphilis. Because life can be this way, unexplained by sad songs. Because his now-wife would say he’s a Good Guy, with a human heart, who doesn’t even watch rom-coms or read about libertarianism. Because when a third gynecologist asked me when I’d given birth, and when I went pale and told her no, stop, truly, I’d never been pregnant, and when she said that my cervix was shredded and looked like I had—even then, when the pain was not just inexperience or theatrics; when acknowledgment imposed proof of force (and proof was somehow necessary), even after Fucking eureka, even with the truth inflicted, what was there to say? Because the doctor said to herself, “Wow,” and didn’t offer much beyond the explanation that the tear he tore continued to rip the more he had sex with me, and as she finished the exam, she said, “You’ll feel some more pressure,” but I didn’t feel anything, not for two years. Because I wasn’t sure when I went from thinking I was having sex to thinking I was being had sex with. Because love and sex left me as my entertainment said and I’d hoped it would: passion shattered. Because worst-case scenario is murder. Oh, because it wasn’t that bad.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Grace laughs. It is of course a ridiculous sentiment. And anyway, if you looked at it hard enough, they were the same in a way. That way being that they wanted men. All the times Grace and Davis used to run to this man after being chased by the dog from down the road. Or the way they’d been chased by goats when they’d visited their cousins farther out in the country. Or the way they’d hidden their faces when they met their great-grandparents, skin like polished wood and ancient-looking, hunched forward under their shawls, smelling like astringent creams. When she was younger and sleeping upstairs, Grace had sometimes felt a pressure on her chest or on her shoulders, holding her down, doing nothing else but that, pressing her against the bed until she was perfectly flat. She had tried to scream, to holler for someone to come and help her, but the weight on her chest had prevented it. She’d lie there all night, frozen, stuck inside her body, unable to do anything to get free. When she told Big Davis about it, he said, What made them made you, didn’t it? They don’t mean you no harm. As if some common origin could negate terror of the unknown. Because we were all made of the same fearsome stuff, nothing in the world could scare you if you looked it in the eye and saw the part of it that was yourself. It was nonsensical in the way that only wisdom could be, Grace thought. Old men and their little stories. “What made you made him,” Grace replies. “You have bigger problems, little lady, than what your brother and me have between us. Mind your business.” Grace hums. Enid stares at her hard. Now who’s trouble? she can almost hear. It’s true that, growing up, Grace had been the one they watched like a hawk. Her grandmother used to say that boys made babies and girls brought them home, dropped them like kittens at the doorstep, and then who had to raise them but the parents or the grandparents? Nothing her grandmother hated more than the sight of a loose girl, which was to say every girl. When Grace was little, she was the one whose hair they combed all Sunday morning and the one they dressed in the stiff white polyester dress with a ruffle collar before church. She didn’t get to run through the woods that cut along by the cemetery. She didn’t get to crouch by the pews and play cars before the service started. No. Grace had to behave.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  12 Leslie Feinberg “Brian says you're a girl, but I think you're a sissy boy,” one of them said. I didn’t speak. “Well, what are your” he mocked me. I flapped my arms, “Caw, caw!” I laughed. One of the boys knocked the jar filled with pollywogs from my hand and it smashed on the gravel. I kicked and bit them but they held me and tied my hands behind my back with a piece of clothesline. “Let’s see how you tinkle,” one of the boys said as he knocked me down and two of the others struggled to pull off my pants and my underpants. I was filled with horror. I couldn’t make them stop. The shame of being half-naked before them—the important half—took all the steam out of me. They pushed and carried me to old Mrs. Jefferson’s house and locked me in the coal bin. It was dark in the bin. The coal was sharp and cut like knives. It hurt too much to lie still, but the more I moved the worse I made the wounds. I was afraid I’d never get out. It took hours before I heard Mrs. Jefferson in the kitchen. I don’t know what she thought when she heard all the thumping and kicking in her coal bin. But when she opened the little trap door on the coal bin and I squirmed out onto her kitchen floor, she looked scared enough to fall down dead. There I stood, covered with coal soot and blood, tied up and half-naked in her kitchen. She mumbled curses under her breath as she untied me and sent me home wrapped in a towel. I had to walk a block and knock on my parents’ door before I found refuge. They were really angry when they saw me. I never understood why. My father spanked me over and over again until my mother restrained his arm with a whisper and her hand. A week later I caught up with one of the boys from the Scabbie gang. He made the mistake of wandering alone too near our house. I made a muscle and told him to feel it. Then I punched him in the nose. He ran away crying; I felt great, for the first time in days. My mother called me into our house for dinner. “Who was that boy you were playing with?” I shrugged. “You were showing him your muscle?” I froze, wondering how much she had seen. She smiled. “Sometimes it’s better to let boys think they’re stronger,” she told me. I figured she was just plain crazy if she really believed that. The phone rang, “T’ll get it,’ my father called out. It was the parent of the kid whose nose I bloodied; I could tell by the way my father glowered at me as he listened.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  The teacher narrowed her eyes at me. “What kind of name is that? Is it short for Jessica?” I shook my head. “No, ma’am.” “Jess,” she repeated. “That’s not a girl’s name.” I dropped my head. Kids around me covered their mouths with their hands to stifle their giggles. Miss Sanders glared at them until they fell silent. “Ts that a Jewish name?” she asked. I nodded, hoping that she was finished. She was not. “Class, Jess is from the Jewish persuasion. Jess, tell the class where you’re from.” I squirmed in my seat. “The desert.” “What? Speak up, Jess.” “T’m from the desert.” I could see the kids mugging and rolling their eyes at each other. “What desert? What state?” She pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. I froze with fear. I didn’t know. “The desert,” I shrugged. Miss Sanders grew visibly impatient. “What made your family decide to come to Buffalo?” How should I know? Did she think parents told six-year-old kids why they made huge decisions that would impact on their lives? “We drove,” I said. Miss Sanders shook her head. I hadn’t made a very good first impression. Sirens screamed. It was the Wednesday morning air raid drill. We crouched down under our desks and covered our heads with our arms. We were warned to treat The Bomb like strangers: don’t make eye contact. If you can’t see The Bomb, it can’t see you. There was no bomb—this was only practice for the real thing. But I was saved by the siren. I was sorry we’d moved from the warmth of the desert to this cold, cold city. Nothing could have prepared me for getting out of bed on a winter morning in an unheated apartment in Buffalo. Even warming our clothes in the oven before we put them Stone Butch Blues 9 on didn’t help much. After all, we still had to take our pajamas off first. Outside the cold was so fierce that the wind carved up my nose and sliced into my brain. Tears froze in my eyes. My sister Rachel was still a toddler. I just remember a round snowsuit swaddled with scarves and mittens and hat. No kid, just clothes. Even when I was bundled up in the dead of winter, with only a couple of inches of my face peeking out from my snowsuit hood and scarf, adults would stop me and ask, “Are you a boy or a girl?” I'd drop my eyes in shame, never questioning their right to ask. During the summer there wasn’t much to do in the projects, but there was plenty of time to do it. The projects, former Army barracks, now housed the military-contracted aircraft workers and their families. All our fathers went to work in the same plant; all our mothers stayed home.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And as he thus spake, a Demon smote him with his lash, and said: “Away! pander, there are no women here to coin.” I rejoined my Escort; then, with a few steps, we came to where a cliff proceeded from the bank. This we very easily ascended; and, turning to the right upon its jagged ridge, we quitted those eternal circles. When we reached the part where it yawns beneath to leave a passage for the scourged, my Guide said: “Stay, and let the look strike on thee of these other ill-born spirits, whose faces thou hast not yet seen, for they have gone along with us.” From the ancient bridge we viewed the train, who were coming towards us, on the other side, chased likewise by the scourge. The kind Master, without my asking, said to me: “Look at that great soul who comes, and seems to shed no tear for pain: what a regal aspect he yet retains! That is Jason,5 who, by courage and by counsel, bereft the Colchians of the ram. He passed, by the isle of Lemnos, after the bold merciless women had given all their males to death. There, with tokens and fair words, did he deceive the young Hypsipyle, who had before deceived all the rest. He left her there pregnant and forlorn: such guilt condemns him to such torment; and also for Medea vengeance is taken. With him go all who practise the like deceit; and let this suffice to know respecting the first valley, and those whom it devours.” We had already come to where the narrow pathway crosses the second bank, and makes of it a buttress for another arch. Here we heard people whining in the other chasm, and puffing with mouth and nostrils, and knocking on themselves with their palms. The banks were crusted over with a mould from the vapour below, which concretes upon them, which did battle with the eyes and with the nose. The bottom is so deep, that we could see it nowhere without mounting to the ridge of the arch, where the cliff stands highest. We got upon it; and thence in the ditch beneath, I saw a people dipped in excrement, that seemed as it had flowed from human privies. And whilst I was searching with my eyes, down amongst it, I beheld one with a head so smeared in filth, that it did not appear whether he was layman or clerk. He bawled to me: “Why are thou so eager in gazing at me, more than the others in their nastiness?” And I to him: “Because, if I rightly recollect, I have seen thee before with thy hair dry; and thou art Alessio Interminei6 of Lucca: therefore do I eye thee more than all the rest.” And he then, beating his pate: “Down to this, the flatteries wherewith my tongue was never weary have sunk me!

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

  My score is low compared to some and high compared to others. The harder the lesson, the higher the points. Some girls would kill for my score. This is why I don’t talk about my score. I got off easy. I legitimately think, “I got off easy.” I didn’t get raped, my dad didn’t finger me, my cousin didn’t make me suck his dick, nobody ass-fucked me while I was passed out at a frat party. I got fondled, at best. Not that bad, right? Lucky, right? Right. Exactly. This is what I’m saying. I got off easy. Why even write this essay? Until I became a seasoned adult, I thought this was a normal part of growing up as a girl. Weird shit with boys/men happens to you. Look at all the times it happened to me so, obviously, it’s just how it is in life, like flat tires, running out of gas, getting a traffic ticket, spraining an ankle, etc. It’s fucked up, but it happens and you just deal with it. Move on. But as I matured and met other women, looked back on my life, I realized it’s not normal. It’s the exception. It’s not “what you get” for being a girl. It’s what you get for not having vigilant parents. It’s what you get for not knowing how to defend yourself. It’s what you get for being young, innocent, and scared. It’s what you get when you are unsupervised and stupid. Most of all, it’s what you get when men decide to take it from you, regardless of what you want. If all these boys, these men, had chosen to treat me as more than “thing,” my scorecard would be empty right now. None of this was supposed to happen. Didn’t have to happen. I wasn’t supposed to have a score. None of us were. FloccinaucinihilipilificationSo MayerI SURVIVED. Raped children are supposed to die. What would the culture of the individual white cisgender male straight genius do without us? We are the predicate of their sentences, material for their dispassionate dissections. We are supposed to die prettily and vacantly so our rage doesn’t tear down all their certificates and awards and case files, trash their analysis and ram their face in the privilege that allows them to side with our abusers in silencing and killing us. “He has sometimes likened his style of writing to that of a medic performing a post-mortem on a raped child—whose job is to analyse the injuries, not to give vent to the rage that is felt.” —SUSIE MACKENZIE ON J. G. BALLARD, GUARDIAN, SEPT. 6TH, 2003 If Ballard’s is the model for the experimental, political novel, how is the (un)dead raped child supposed to write, even if she survives? Perform a postmortem on herself. Give vent to the rage that is felt. They are incompossible, apparently. It’s one or the other, science or howling. It’s easier to play dead.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Nolan complained about his dad after the fact. He said he loved me, Nolan said. They don’t give a shit. It gets on Milton’s nerves. Nolan wouldn’t enjoy being treated like an animal circling his parents’ love like a too-small enclosure. Milton would just like a little elbow room. On the night Nolan got popped, the same cop delivered Milton home in the back of the cruiser, but didn’t turn the lights on. Instead, he sent Milton out into the cool night on unsteady legs, tipsy and a little queasy. His parents looked at him as though from a precipice and shook their heads. No, that’s it, Milton. No more chances. How many times was that already since spring? Four? Five? No, Nolan wouldn’t like it one bit, parents whose love had a long, reproachful memory. Idaho had materialized as a vague threat in September, and that threat had grown ever more solid until they came into his room a few days before and laid it all out for him. His father had put the pamphlet in his hand. Milton had taken it, though he couldn’t meet their gazes. His room smelled damp on that day. Outside, he could hear music from a few houses over. Maybe it was best that he got some time away. That he spent some time on his own, learning how to be a man on his own terms. To see what the world would hold for him if he kept on this way. But Milton had wanted to ask them, What way? Because he drank? Because he smoked? Because he ran with Nolan and Tate and Abe? Because he’d stopped going to church? Because he stopped praying? He had sat clenching the slick, laminated pamphlet, its cover featuring a tough-looking boy with a white line down his face, on one side smirking, sneering, mean, and on the other a stern, hard gaze. But Milton couldn’t tell which was meant to be the before and which was supposed to be the after. He’d stared at the pamphlet, thinking, What’s so wrong with me? They said they’d write him letters when he went—or his mom had, anyway. His dad said nothing except that he expected him to do something with this chance, not to piss it away. Fucking Idaho. “Come on,” Nolan says. Milton squares his shoulders. He hasn’t told Nolan about Idaho or the camp yet, but soon he’ll have to. After Thanksgiving break they’ll have finals, and then Christmas vacation, and then it’s Idaho. He shoves his hands in his pockets. He can hear how pathetic he will sound if he’s like I have to tell you something or There’s something I gotta say. Like he’s about to ask Nolan to prom or to the fucking movies. There’s no way to get into it that isn’t dramatic or stupid. It’s all like showing off or making a scene. He can’t get it out and downplay it at the same time.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Search, wretched one, around thy seacoasts by the shores, and then gaze in thy bosom, if any part of thee enjoy peace. What avails it that Justinian should refit thy bridle if the saddle is empty?8 But for that the shame were less. Ah people, that shouldst be obedient, and let Cæsar sit in the saddle, if well thou understandest what God writeth to thee! See how this beast hath grown vicious, for not being corrected by the spurs, since thou hast put thy hand to the bridle.9 O German Albert,10 that dost forsake her who is become wanton and savage, and that oughtest to bestride her saddlebow, may just judgment fall from the stars upon thy blood, and be it strange and manifest, so that thy successor may have fear thereof: for thou and thy father, held back yonder by covetousness, have suffered that the garden of the empire be laid waste. Come and see Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi,11 thou man without care: those already sad, and these in dread. Come, cruel one, come, and see the oppression of thy nobles and tend their sores, and thou shalt see Santafior12 how secure it is. Come and see thy Rome that weepeth widowed and alone, and day and night doth cry: “Caesar mine, wherefore dost thou not companion me?” Come and see how thy people love one another; and if no pity for us move thee, come and shame thee for thy fame. And if it be permitted me, O highest Jove, who on earth for us wast crucified, are thy just eyes turned elsewhither; or is it preparation which thou art making in the depths of thy counsel, for some good end wholly cut off from our vision? For the cities of Italy are all full of tyrants, and every clown that comes to play the partisan becomes a Marcellus.13 O my Florence, thou indeed mayst rejoice at this digression which touches thee not, thanks to thy people that reasons so well. Many have justice in their hearts, but slowly it is let fly, for it comes not without counsel to the bow; but thy people hath it ever on its lips. Many refuse the public burdens; but thy people answers eagerly without call, and cries out: “I bend me to the charge.” Now make thee glad, for thou hast good reason: thou rich, thou at peace, thou so wise. If I speak sooth, the facts do not conceal it. Athens and Lacedemon, that framed the laws of old and were so grown in civil arts, gave a mere hint at well living beside thee, who dost make such subtle provision, that to mid-November reaches not what thou in October spinnest. How often in the time which thou rememberest, laws, coinage, offices, and customs hast thou changed, and renewed thy members! And if thou well bethink thee, and see clear, thou shalt behold thee like unto that sick one, who can find no rest upon the down, but by turning about shuns her pain.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  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. "My own sobs were deafening to me.

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

  It wasn’t even just whether I was pretty or thin; it was that I wasn’t sexy. When I managed to land my first part in a big movie, I was given a ThighMaster as a welcome present and told to squeeze it between my legs at least a hundred times a day. A director of photography told me he couldn’t shoot me “looking like that” when I walked on set one day. He said it in front of the whole crew. I was too wide, I guess, in the skirt they had given me to wear. A few years later, I was told point-blank that my career was moving slowly because “nobody wants to fuck you.” There was something about me, sexually, that wasn’t selling. It was a challenge for me starting out, but it seems almost impossible for young women now. I do volunteer work in film and theater with teenage students at a public school in New York. The kids are gifted and, in my junior class, we recently completed a performance of Shakespeare scenes for the rest of the theater department. I asked four sixteen-year-old actors with real acting chops and courage what they’d experienced trying to make the leap to professional work: Kai, Michelle, Layla, and Jo. Kai, who played Lady Macbeth, told me she was thirteen when she first got a call from an agent, and they told her father to leave the room: “Then they asked me how tall I was and for my weight and that I should put my weight on my résumé,” she said. “They asked me for my cup size. They told me to turn around and then told me ‘Work on your sex appeal.’” At fifteen, she was asked if she would feel comfortable “humping a table” in the audition room and her mother was asked if she would be “comfortable” with Kai working in only a bra and panties. She explained that she’s now sent to auditions in the “slut category” and was told to diet down to a size 4 because her agent would not re-sign her contract if she were above that size. So, Kai said, she understands that “body size comes first”: it doesn’t matter that she can handle Lady Macbeth at sixteen, because she will be playing thin and overly sexualized characters if she wants to get work. Layla, who chose to play Iago in a scene from Othello, also told me that casting people have been “typing” her: “It’s my boob size, butt size, skin tone. I get cast as the hairdresser and not the pretty sorority girl.” Michelle, who played Lady Anne in Richard III and also sings, overheard a director saying, “I was so distracted by her boobs I couldn’t hear her voice” after an audition. For some roles, she said, “I’m too busty. I’m too curvy.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Even on days when it was just her and Davis waiting to be collected by their parents, Grace would look up and see her grandmother and aunts looking out at her through the window. Their hard faces. Their mean, tight expressions. Never Davis, who tore a hole in his uniform shirt and sometimes got his new shoes caked in mud. They never watched him that way. But for Grace, if she sweated through the neck of her shirt or got a smudge, her grandmother would pull it off her rough and say she didn’t appreciate things enough. That she’d be just like her mammy, dropping babies she couldn’t look after. One time, at a family picnic, a boy cousin, tall and beige like her, had kissed Grace on the mouth. She didn’t ask him to. She didn’t want him to. But he did just the same, and Grace recoiled. Before she knew what was happening, though, before she could get her mind around what had just been done to her, she felt a hard, fierce tug at her arm and turned around just in time to get slapped by her grandmother. She called her whorish and fast. Grace wept and tried to say that she hadn’t wanted it, but her grandmother pulled her into the house and locked her in the room upstairs. It wasn’t until she was in college that she felt she had some control over her own body. But even then, her grandmother called in the middle of the night. She called the dorm phone, not her cell, to make sure that Grace was in her own bed. Grace had once had to run clear across campus when she realized that it was ten thirty and her grandmother would be calling any minute. Grace sprinted over slick grass and hurdled stone benches, running beneath the high, fragrant trees. She could hear the phone ringing down the hall by the time she got to her floor, sucking in air, her chest burning. And she’d picked up the phone, only to hear her grandmother’s cold voice, the crackle of her disappointment: You been out with them boys. But she hadn’t been out with boys. She had been out with her friends. The girls from her floor. Who taught her to wear skirts and how to flirt. Who showed her how to bum cigarettes and how to burn the ends of her braids to seal them. The girls who taught her how to dance, how to enjoy herself, the swing of her hips and the sun on her stomach and thighs. Those girls had taken her in and showed her real love and kindness. Not watched her. She misses them now, powerfully. Dreka, Tierra, Amina, Asha, Brytt. She misses them and she misses that period in her life when everything seemed to fly open and she could breathe again. When she felt the strength in her arms and legs. She felt powerful. Alive.

• From Escape (2007)

  But some of the teachers loved the nusses. They practiced perfect penmanship and were diligent A-plus students. The teachers who loved the nusses looked at me as if I had a righteousness deficiency. Thankfully, my cousin Lee Ann was in several classes with me, and some of my teachers remembered me from the private school I’d attended before. By the end of the first week, I realized that for the first time I was embarrassed to be a woman. The nusses sickened me. I knew that I lived in a culture where a baby girl was of less value to her parents than a baby boy, but I’d never thought of myself as “less than.” But when I saw the nusses prancing and cavorting through school I felt ashamed and humiliated. Couldn’t they see that they were acting like perfect idiots? Then something snapped inside me. The nusses did not represent women, only fools. Why should I feel disgraced? I knew in my heart that there was nothing wrong with being a woman. I wanted to roar like a woman. I knew that would never be allowed, but that didn’t stop me from being proud of myself. I was a woman, not a fake! I grabbed Shannon and Jayne and asked them to meet me Friday after school. I could barely contain myself. “These girls are driving me crazy. Why do they act like this?” Jayne and Shannon started laughing. “All right, all right,” I demanded, “you two have got to let me in on the joke.” Shannon whispered two words in my ear: “Fascinating Womanhood.” I pushed Shannon away and loudly said, “What?” Jayne’s voice was very matter-of-fact. “It’s a book called Fascinating Womanhood. It’s all about how to manipulate men.” “But what does that have to do with being an idiot?” I asked. “Everything,” they said. “You have to read the book. It’s a scream.” I tracked down a copy and spent the entire weekend reading it. I was stunned. It was a self-help book about how a woman in a monogamous relationship could manipulate and control her husband. The first few chapters were all about why a man loved a woman who could make him feel like a manly man. Men didn’t love women who intimidated them. That I could see—no one wants to be made to feel inferior. But the farther I got into the book, the more I could see how it was the nusses’ playbook. Fascinating Womanhood was the script that the nusses were following. But what was so surreal was that we didn’t even have that many boys in our school. What were they thinking? There were descriptions about how to pout perfectly when your husband tells you no. The book explained how to stand, how to pucker in anger, and how to stomp your foot in an adorable and feminine way.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I don’t remember when this started, I was maybe four or five, but I had learned to do this sexual service for my grandfather. He used to say that I should have been his granddaughter. Maybe he felt strange about doing this with a boy— my mother began dressing me in girl’s clothes and calling me a girl’s name. When I went to school, I wore boy clothes, but I didn’t have friends. I learned right away that ours was the family other families told their kids not to play with. As soon as I was old enough to run away, I lied about my age, and joined the Navy. I felt safer than I ever had at home. Getting out was the first thing that saved me. By the time I came back home and rented a room in town, there was a women’s center where groups talked about a lot of things, including sexual abuse in childhood. I had no idea this had happened to anyone else. The therapist there explained that once women started talking to each other, they discovered that this happened a lot, especially but not only to girls. When survivors needed help but couldn’t afford therapy, this therapist helped them form a group—and I joined; it was six women and me. I discovered it wasn’t my fault. But when people in the town knew we were telling family secrets, even the women’s center had to turn the therapist out. Still, she kept on meeting with us on our own. But what really saved me was what you felt. I had dressed and lived as a girl until I was about eight, so I never felt I was a man like my grandfather. As my therapist put it, I never identified with the aggressor. If I had, I might have become an abuser myself. It’s terrible to be a victim, and to believe sex is the only thing you’re worth—without help, girls grow up to keep believing that. But some boys start abusing other people because that’s a way of being a man. That means guilt, being afraid you’ll get arrested if you tell the truth, cutting off all empathy—everything that makes it harder to get out. I wouldn’t say I was lucky—but it would have been worse if I thought I had to control and abuse other people. He is telling me his story to say thank you. Because the women’s movement was born of women talking to each other, childhood sexual abuse was revealed to be a fact, not a Freudian fantasy—and children began to be believed. We finish our coffee. He is a rare person—a man who knows what it is to be a woman—and also someone who has ended abuse in one generation. I thank him for surviving—and teaching.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “It’s not yours. You can’t throw something out when it’s not yours.” Charles turned toward him and pushed him onto his back. Then sat on Lionel’s stomach. He held the ruler over his head, out of Lionel’s reach. “Your boyfriend give you this?” “No,” Lionel said. “No.” Lionel closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see Charles mocking him. But then Charles started to drum on the kitchen counter with the ends of the ruler. It was the music he had been humming. Charles squeezed his knees tight to Lionel’s sides. “This isn’t funny,” Lionel said. “It’s not a joke.” He reached up for the ruler, and Charles caught his wrist, held his arm still. His first thought was that Charles was going to tickle him, and he flinched in anticipation for it. The extension of this horrible game. But Charles did not tickle him. No. He did something much worse. He leaned down and looked closely at the keloids. His breath was close on Lionel’s skin, warm, damp. But it was the brightness in his eyes that made Lionel look away. He didn’t want to see Charles seeing him. Lionel tried to pull his arm free, but Charles was stronger than him. They both knew that, and it made Lionel feel more pathetic for struggling as he did. “Don’t,” Lionel said. Charles kissed the keloids, and Lionel almost jumped out of his skin at the shock of it. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Lionel said. “Watch me,” Charles said. He kissed the heel of Lionel’s palm, and then moved down the tributaries of his veins, down the whole length of his arm. Kissing him again and again, until they were face-to-face. It was an ugly, cruel thing to do, Lionel thought. It was as mean a thing as he could have imagined. He couldn’t look at Charles, not after Charles had done what he did. “I wish you hadn’t,” Lionel said. Charles got off him then, and Lionel sat up. Blood had pooled in the back of his head, making him dizzy. He rested his back against the legs of the chair. And he took the pieces of the ruler from Charles. He felt safe with them there. A part of his old life, who he used to be. “Why’d you do it?” Charles asked, and when Lionel did not answer, he added, “It must have hurt like hell.” “You know how sometimes an animal will chew its arm off to get loose if it’s desperate enough?” Lionel turned his arm over and looked down at the scars there. They were mute. Whatever wisdom or clarity they had given him was gone. What he saw was a mass of tissue stitched back together. What he saw was only evidence of his body’s history. And to try to discern old moods, old insights, was just chasing shadows. “Be serious, Lionel.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “You have to call him. He’s afraid of you. But you have to call him.” Big Davis drops the bucket on the counter. Braces himself. “You better worry about yourself.” “Call him,” she says. “And say what?” “Tell him the truth. Tell him you love him,” Grace says. “If he doesn’t know that after all this time, that I love him, then that boy is worse off than you.” Grace sinks low in the chair. Enid is blotting her brow. “Well, that we can agree on,” Grace says. “You need rest,” Enid says. “You overdid it.” “She has a room,” Big Davis says. Enid nods at this, loops Grace’s arm over her shoulder, whispers reassuring things to her about strength and patience and balance. Grace feels embarrassed for her, the way she sometimes feels when she can hear Enid praying in the next room in that tiny apartment of hers. Some things you should get to keep to yourself. • • • Grace sits by her room’s wide window, from which she can see the deep green pond. The old forest rimming the property line. The sleepy fields. The house is full of sounds, night music. Enid sleeps in the adjoining room that had belonged to Davis. When they were little, the two of them would spend a portion of each night passing back and forth, leaving small things for each other. Sometimes, Davis pranked her. Or left frogs under her bed. But that night of the picnic all those years ago, when her grandmother had slapped her and locked her in this very room, Davis had come in from his side. Grace was on the ground sobbing, her face hot from her grandmother’s palm. She’d been banging at the door, begging to be let out. It hadn’t even occurred to her that Davis’s side would be open, but when she looked up, there he was. Her brother. He handed her a small kitten. It looked so young that it might not have even been weaned yet. Its fur was soft gray, and it had a pink tint to it. When she asked Davis why he’d brought it to her, he had only shrugged and said he’d grown bored with it, that he’d found it in the woods and played with it until he got tired of it, and he didn’t want a cat, anyway. All that long summer, she carried the kitten around with her, stroking it and petting it and saying that she loved it. Giving the kitten everything she didn’t have. Until her grandmother got sick of seeing her loving up on the kitten and pulled it from her hands and flung it out the back door. She said that girls had no business holding on to things with all them fleas. And cats would make a girl hot, and Grace was already fast enough. She never saw the kitten again.

• From Querelle (1953)

  I've been around, you don't have to pretend with me. Your brother, now, that's a different story. He's into the girls, he 201 I JEAN GENET doesn't put up with the other stuff. You see I know the scene. But let's not talk about it any more." They had arrived almost at the level of the fortifications, without meeting anybody on their way. Querelle stopped. With the hand holding , the cigarette he touched the detective's shoulder: "Mario." Staring into his eyes, Querelle went on, in a serious tone : "I've lain with Nona, I won't deny that. I just don't want you to get any wrong ideas. I'm not a faggot. I like girls. D'you understand what I'm saying?" "I've got nothing to argue with that. But Nona, or so he says, Nona screwed you in the ass. You can't deny that." "All right, so �e buggered me, but . . . " "But it ain't worth wasting your breath about it. I can figure things out for myself. You don't have to go on and on telling me what an hombre you are. I know that for a fact. If you were some mincing faggot, you would've lost your nerve when we had that fight. But you're not the kind of guy who loses his nerve." He put his hand on Querelle's shoulder and gave him a little shove to start walking again. He was smiling, and so was Querelle. "Listen man, we're old enough to talk. You had your scene with Nona, and that's no crime. The main thing, the way I see it, is that you had a good time, too. Don't tell me you didn't." Querelle wanted to go on defending himself, but his smile · betrayed him. "Sure, I came. But I don't think there's a guy in the world who wouldn't have.'' "See, that's it. You had a good time, and no harm done. I bet Nona spunked like a walrus, too-he's such a hot-blooded guy, and you're damn good-looking." "Nothing special about my looks." 203 I QUE.RELLE "Oh, come on, you and your brother . I beg your pardon! . . But Nona, is he a good lover?" "Come on, �1ario, let's change the subject . . . " But he said that with a smile. The detective kept his hand on Querelle's shoulder, as if leading him to the gallows, gently but irresistibly. "But why not tell me? Or isn't he too good at it?" "\Vhy d'you ask me? Is this how you get your kicks? Or are you planning on trying it yourself?" "And why shouldn't I, if it's good fun? Come on, tell me. How does he go about it?" ''He's pretty good at it. So there. Come on, Mario, you're not trying to get a rise out of me, are you?" "Hell no, we're just talking. Ain't no one here to listen. Did it feel good, to you?" "\Vhy don't you try it!"

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Lionel wanted to laugh at that, being accused of not taking his own suicide seriously enough because he had tried to tell the truth about it. There was no why. No coherent theorem. It had been all gesture, as empty an idiom as the references from the potluck last night. When you tried to explain it, all the meaning went out of it. But Charles was looking at him with the expectation of an answer, and Lionel did not have one. Not a satisfactory one anyway. He felt as unprepared now to answer the question of why as he had when his mother first asked him last year. Why was an anachronism. “You only ask why if you’ve never tried it,” he said. Charles took Lionel’s hand in his own. Lionel saw Charles’s eyes flick to the particular array of scars. The hashwork of them. Nothing systematic or intentional about it. “I think you’re very brave,” Charles said with a degree of sincerity that made Lionel wish he could take back everything he had said. Sincerity was a condescending emotion. People went around calling you brave when you tried to kill yourself and failed. They called you brave when you went limping through your life, as if the very difficulty of it were a sign of moral courage or valor. But there was nothing noble in suffering. There was nothing brilliant or good about the failed endeavor to exit one’s life. There was nothing courageous about the persistence of life, the prolonged project of living. People called you brave for going on because it affirmed their own value system. They considered their own life worth living, and so they considered every life worthy. But it had to be true that life could be discarded when it was no longer of use. It had to be true that a person could ball their life up and throw it out with the trash if they found they had no desire to go on. Some lives, Lionel thought, had to be ordinary or ugly or painful. Ending your life had to be on the table. If you were the one really in control, and you were in it for yourself, then ending your life certainly had to be an option if you wanted it to be. But people called you brave for going on. They called you brave even if you only lingered in the world because you’d lost your real courage at the moment it mattered most. “That’s what people say when they’re uncomfortable,” Lionel said. “What?” “I’m not brave.” “Don’t get worked up,” Charles said. “Man, whatever.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “I give exams for professors. I do entrance exams, too.” Lionel’s appetite shrank to a tiny white heat in the pit of his stomach. He was ashamed of proctoring only when he had to tell other people about it, and only when those people knew that he had once been a graduate student with good brain chemistry. He didn’t think proctoring was bad, but he could see how other people saw him the moment they heard it and how they appraised his life as it was by the metric of what it had once been. “You’re pulling my leg. From math genius to proctor? Is that even a real thing?” “It is,” Lionel said. “It’s what I do.” “How’d that happen?” “I just sort of fell into it,” Lionel said. “Steep fall.” “Not as steep as you’d imagine.” Charles narrowed his eyes but smiled. Lionel felt a crackle of static between them. “Is that your heart’s desire? To proctor?” “Is your heart’s desire to interrogate strangers at a dinner party like a Chekhov character?” “I don’t know what that is,” Charles said dryly, and Lionel snorted. The solidity of the sound startled him. Charles went back to spinning his fork. Lionel resisted the urge to respond, grateful for the opportunity to drop down and out of the conversation. It was clear to him now, in a way that it hadn’t been before, that he and every other graduate student depended on the currency of their university affiliations to get by in conversations. As though academia were a satellite constantly pinging, letting him know who and where he was. It wasn’t until he had come out of that life that he realized he had no real way of relating to people without it. People looked at him differently when he didn’t mention that he’d once been a student or that he had a university affiliation. They looked through him, but the worst part of it was that he sometimes looked through himself in the same way. “You like it?” Charles asked. “It gives me time to think,” Lionel said. “It’s funny. I used to think so fast. Like, sometimes, I felt like I was having six different conversations in my head, all at once. But now it takes me a year just to get to the end of one thought.” “If I were that in my head, I’d kill myself,” Charles said. “Sounds awful. Jesus.”